beirut

A few days ago I came across this blog, Beirut Update, which is written by a young woman in Beirut. She started it when the hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah began. I can only imagine that for her it is a way to vent, to express what she sees that the media cannot, and to give the perspective from an artist's point of view. Since launching it, she has become the receptor of loads of comments, from encouraging ones to hateful ones. Most Americans who post apologize profoundly for the actions, or lack thereof, of the US government, as well as acknowledging that most Americans have no real idea what goes on in that particular region of the Middle East, or the history of it.

I have a very good friend who lives in the UAE, and he tells me about the sorts of things they see on their news coverage. (I should also tell you that, in the UAE at least, they do have CNN, CBS, and BBC in addition to local channels from Jordan, Turkey, etc...) While our news coverage is plastered with the atrocities of the bombs dropping unguided in Israel, his news is plastered with stories of Israeli children kissing bombs before they are sent to kill Lebanese children.

How are we to form opinions of who is right and who is wrong when the media does it for us?

How can there even be a right or wrong when both sides are killing?

Doesn't that lead straight to determining which ideology is right or wrong?

How can you tell someone that the fundamentals of their beliefs are inherently wrong?

Because people do. They fight over the 'rightness' of their particular belief, nevermind that by killing in the name of that belief the action renders the belief invalid in some ways. In all ways. Like hitting your kid to teach them that hitting other children is wrong. No logic. No heart. No belief.

I have a feeling that this time, this conflict will be the catalyst to something bigger. The US has no idea or compassion for warfare fought in the backyard. We are a fat and complacent country with our hands in too many cookie jars. The higher a country is, the harder it will fall when it finally does fall. (Roman Empire ring a bell?)

How many of us will be writing blogs then, with the sound of bombs hitting our neighbor's home, and empty grocery store shelves, nothing to feed our families or pets but canned beans, and the daily routine of living becomes a crap shoot? What would we be saying?

Where would we put the blame?

How can I renounce my citizensip of one country and become a citizen of the world? Somehow, if you are on everybody's side, it seems you can finally have an objective viewpoint......

a packing note

While packing today I came across a shelf full of old spiral notebooks and other writings from as far back as my senior year in high school. While I am happy to report that I did write prolifically, I won't ever be divulging the contents of that writing.

It is too [insert your adjective here].

I have more boxes than I thought possible. It appears that what I lack in furniture I clearly make up in books and other decorative items.

terms

It's been a while between posts, and in keeping this sort of online running dialogue, I wonder at times what is the best stuff to post? Which occurrences during my days warrant rendering here? The other night on the news it was mentioned that the majority of bloggers are under thirty, and most tended to blog about their personal lives. I'm not actually sure what all I am willing to give up here, what I find fit for public consumption, and what would even interest others. Which is sort of comical considering writing is what I do, what I've always wanted.

I stumbled into poetry by accident; a friend suggested I take a workshop and I did. It was an immediate and irrevocable addiction. Poetry makes so much sense that it is hard to recall a time when I didn't revolve my life around it. I'm not a disciplined writer by any means though. I don't have a set time to write, and when I do make time I wind up staring at a blank screen. I write prolifically when I am busy with ten other important things to do. The best lines come to me when I am driving. When I first started workshop I was still working full time as a secretary, doing school part time. I wrote furiously during work hours, managing phone lines and all the other myriad distractions with gusto. It was intoxicating.

I leave in 17 days to begin an MFA program. I am excited at the thought of once again being busy, but this time, on my own turf. No more heinous math courses or dealing with a truly wonderful but hopelessly misguided environmental science professor who wanted to "put the math back in science" (doesn't he know that we major/minor in environmental science precisely to avoid the math?!?!?!), or useless classes that make one want to fall asleep.

I am slowly coming to terms with leaving. I find myself with attachments all over the place though, even new ones, and it is hard to actually envision the morning when I will wake up at an obscenely early hour, and head to the rented truck, and take off. I'll have eight hours to negotiate deals with myself about my mood and give in to the calling I have let so much in my personal life suffer for. And it's fine actually.

At this moment it is everything I need.

Snafus

26 days left! I can barely stand it. The weather has finally turned extremely humid, although I think there is some sort of statute of limitations on how much complaining one can do about 90 degree weather when one's best friend lives in the Middle East, and 90 feels like fall weather.

Packing still going on. It is an odd sort of dance, since I am also sorting through the items that are mine, and the stuff that is my mother's. We went through the books and cd's without bloodshed, but the dvd's are up next and already I can feel the battle brewing. Naturally this also takes more time, because packing involves heated discussions over who bought what and where. My fresher age leads to better memory, but also can lead to wheedling, I have discovered. So far I have scored a Macy Gray cd, Gone With the Wind, and Dune. Also a baking sheet. Small, but important, victories.

I've packed ten boxes of books so far. I still have one bookcase left to go, plus about twenty or so books lying around. (Okay, thirty. Forty. Whatever.) I still do not understand how everyone tells me I should just leave them behind. As though I won't need them! Admittedly, I did go through quite a Stephen King phase. I probably won't be rereading all of those. Or my Michael Crighton phase. (I didn't say I went through extremely literary phases.) And I likely will not be revisiting my Nancy Drew series. But the point is, all those books are important. I remember a really great detail with each book: where it was bought, what was going on when I read it, the impact it had on me. Well, these are memories I guess. And I can't just discard them.

I have run into one tiny snafu. (Besides just catching my wily alpha female dog Gizelle in the pantry, eating the cat food, which required her to maneuver around a baker's rack, over a high back chair, and past an opening to the counter.....grrrrrrrr.) Okay, anyway, my snafu originates with the inability of an entire industry to be able to design a gerbil cage. Seriously people. Gerbils are not hamsters. Gerbils chew plastic. Gerbils chew anything and everything that they can. Why, oh why, are all the cages made of plastic in hideous primary colors? Gerbils also like to dig. Profusely. With gusto. So why are all the cages not made of plastic, made of metal bars that allow all the shavings/bedding to drift ever so carelessly to the floor when the gerbils dig? I may have already mentioned the chewing thing, right? So why the hell are all the glass aquariums sealed with toxic glue??? I am sensing an anti-gerbil barrier in the pet kingdom. I never would have agreed to let my cat have a gerbil if I knew this would be such an issue. All I can say is that it is a damn good thing Yummy (Dakota's gerbil) is cute. Because the little bastard is messy.

optional stop lights

Yesterday, to my extreme horror, I witnessed an act of, well, lawlessness. My mother very kindly offered to drive me to the health department so I can get those required shots for UNCW (apparently a disease free campus), and on the way back, as we were in the left turn lane, despite the clear fact that the light was RED, not green, but RED, for some unknown reason my mother decides to execute a turn. I was horrified. After years of ribbing about her safe driving record (is it considered safe when the driver turns the steering wheel every time they turn their head, regardless of the straightness of the road?????), I finally had caught her in a totally unlawful act. Hehehehe. I was giddy with glee.

I must call my brother.

So, if any of you saw this, I apologize thoroughly for the old woman's bad driving. And don't worry, she'll be punished. She's never going to hear the end of it. Excuse me, have you met my lawbreaking, reckless driving mother?

still reading. will it ever stop?

Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel
by Arthur Golden (a native Chattanoogan no less)
Such an inspiring read. Not that it makes one want to run out and become geisha, but because it inspires one to read deeply and to transcend into another version of the world as it could have been. This is Golden's debut novel and it is a book. None of this potential crap - the man can write. (Still reeling from my encounter with Ms. Parkhurst a few entries ago.)

I haven't really intended this blog to become such a laundry list of books I am reading (rereading Beach Music by Pat Conroy right now for the charm of the South as only he can describe it), but books are so essential and vital and I think that the one thing about college that was lacking was the fact that I had almost no time to read for pleasure. There are so many books I've missed. And to make up for it now is marvelously delicious.

This takes me back to the summers of my youth when school was out and I could openly read without the nagging concern for homework always putting a drop of lemony bitterness in my pleasure. From my earliest memories I can still conjure myself lying in bed with a book in the right hand, my left hand lying across my chest in mock flag salute or stomach depending on how high my head was propped by pillows. The other favorite was to lie on the couch with my legs propped on the sofa arm, feet dangling over the edge, book in both hands. To this day, these are my favorite lounging and reading positions. It is as if they were ingrained in my DNA, the way a spider knows how to spin a web without question.