My, What Strange Teeth You Have

Twenty-three may not be a groundbreaking age in most people's terms--I could already legally threaten my life and health in almost any way I wanted--but it means a lot to me. Twenty-three marks six years since seventeen, and, therefore, disproves my dentist's prophecy that I would lose all my teeth within five years.

This dentist was neither the first nor the last to foretell the doom of my teeth. Once, a dental hygienist simply refused to believe that I was biting down. When I informed her, through clenched teeth, that I was, her eyes widened slightly and she said, in a voice halfway between nervousness and disbelief, “I think the dentist should see this.” When the dentist saw this, he simply burst out laughing, and called for an audience. With the entire office staff gathered around me, he declared to my mother, loudly and with wide gestures that almost knocked over the receptionist, “Mrs. [P], your daughter’s bite would make a rabbi go cross-eyed!”

Maybe if you look at my teeth cross-eyed, they'd look normal; with 20-20 vision, they're certainly not. Dental schools should hire me as a case study; I have a malocclusion that is simultaneously Class I, II, and III, and no one knows why. At various times in the past three years, while trying to explain my teeth’s post-orthodontia game of musical chairs, dentists have told me that I am a mouth-breather, a tongue-thruster, and that I swallow like an infant. Plus, I have a square face with no chin, and excess vertical height, although whether the surgeon meant in my face or just in general was ambiguous. Fixing the problem is as hard as diagnosing it: the four or five oral surgeons I've visited have each had a different suggestion (braces, surgery, braces and surgery) and a different prediction of success (guaranteed, doubtful, 50%). I once watched a jaw surgeon—a licensed professional, mind you--spend twenty minutes trying to figure out how my teeth work. He had plastic molds, and he moved them up and down, left and right, the look of perplexity on his face growing every minute. At last, he looked up, deeply serious, and simply shook his head at me, making soft, “tsk, tsk” tongue clicks. He looked so disappointed that I felt guilty, as if it were my fault.

It's not my fault, though: I wore braces for three years in middle school, including an agonizing two weeks during which my jaw was rubber-banded shut, and I wore my retainer every single night for another four, until, finally, a dentist told me to just throw it away, already. I am mildly, slightly, okay, fine, totally and utterly obsessed with my teeth. I brush and floss and rinse with mouthwash at least daily. I see a dentist regularly. And, most obsessive of all, since that day six years ago, I count down the time until all my teeth fall out. I wake up every morning and run my tongue over my teeth, checking for loose or absent ones (currently: all present, three loose) and verifying their current position (currently: contact between 9 and 24, 14 and 19; not bad--but weren't 3 and 30 touching yesterday?). Yes, most people got over that in fifth grade. Other people have stress dreams in which their teeth move and crumble; this is my stress reality. Nearly everyone close to me has, at some point, received a stressed-out, weepy late-night phone call about how embarrassed I'd be to get dentures in college.

But now, with my last birthday, it's been more than five years, and I have still all my teeth, down even to my stubborn baby molar. Their underlying form may be crooked, but they look straight, and, what's more, they work perfectly fine. (I mean, I rarely chew on my right side, because the teeth don't make contact, but, really, that's not so bad. I don't really like to chew food anyway.) Plus, I've relaxed somewhat about the possibility of losing them. If they go, they go, and at least I won't have to suffer through thirty seconds of Listerine every morning. And besides, though I dreaded dentures in college, "dentures in grad school" would be a great title for my autobiography.

Another Year Older

Just before my 16th birthday, my family moved to Belmont, MA. On my actual birthday, we closed on our new house, and so I spent my sweet sixteen supervising a moving crew while my parents took my younger brother to the hospital, where they were told he would need open-heart surgery. I knew no one in the Boston area then, and so the only person apart from my immediate family who wished me a happy birthday was a burly and surly moving guy, who grunted “happy birthday” and then told me that being sixteen sucked. At least he said happy birthday.

Just before my 20th birthday, my family moved to India. Though they had been in Utah with me for much of the summer, they needed to close on their new house on my birthday, and so left the States a mere four or five days before my birthday. On my actual birthday, I sat through four hours of Arabic class, and probably did as many crossword puzzles to stave off boredom. I probably spent the rest of the playing dominoes, where I'm sure my friends wished me a happy birthday.

Just before my 21st birthday, my family, who, again, had been in Utah with me most of the summer, left for India again. On my actual birthday, I sat through class, work, a meeting with a professor, and a long line at the DMV, where I chirpily informed everyone around me that I was turning 21, in the hopes that they’d tell me happy birthday.

Just before my 22nd birthday, I arrived in Indonesia, jet-lagged, confused, and alone. On my actual birthday, I sat through eight hours of TESOL training, wondering why those in education theory don’t wake up every morning, look in the mirror, and ask, “When did all the intelligent parts of you die?” Having been there only two days, I knew nobody, and so spent the evening running on the treadmill and reading Virginia Woolf, though not at the same time. Because I was twelve hours ahead, I didn't hear from anyone until the next day, but at least I got lots of birthday greetings then. Better late than never, right?

Today is my 23rd birthday. Just before my birthday, a few days ago, my family moved to Belmont, MA. On my actual birthday, they are closing on their new house. (History repeats itself.) I have just moved to California, and I know nobody here. (By now, that’s practically tradition.) I have no solid plans; I’ll maybe do something fun in San Francisco, maybe get myself a library card, maybe move into a new apartment, and maybe spend the day lying on the couch with a book. All of those options sound pleasant, and all of them sound far better than intensive Arabic, the DMV, or TESOL training. Now all I need for the day to be complete is people saying happy birthday to me. (Hint, hint.)

Happy birthday to me!

The Results Are In

The people have spoken, but I have not listened. (Well, except for the subtitle.) I don't know if everyone recognized the Auden reference and hated it, or if it just passed unnoticed, but I, at least, think that the line from "Musee des Beaux Arts" best captures both my own somewhat untidy tendencies and the typically trivial, dogs-go-on-with-their-doggy-life nature of my blog. I do the reverent, passionate waiting in private; here, on the internet, you'll only find me skating on a pond at the edge of the wood.

Metaphorically, of course. "On a pond" implies a distinct lack of handrails for me to grip as I ice skate, and I'm sure I don't like that idea.

Do these things happen to other people too?

Having finished the search for housing—a story I’ll tell later—I’ve been searching for cheap furniture small enough to fit into my future space. My aunt’s best friend’s son was moving out, so she sent me down to his apartment to scavenge his desk and, possibly, bed. (I feel like such a vulture.)

After determining that both the desk and bed were too large for my place, at least if I want to move around, I said goodbye and headed out, only realizing once he had shut the door behind me that I had no idea how to leave his apartment building.

Luckily, there were lighted EXIT signs, so, like any rational person, I followed those, only to find that they spat me out into a locked parking lot. I looked around the gate for an open button of some kind, but found nothing. Shrugging my shoulders, I turned around to the door I came from, only to find that, of course, it was locked.

Crap. I wandered around the back of the parking lot into an open courtyard, only to find that all the doors there were locked too. There was a set of stairs, though, leading to a balcony off the first-floor apartments, so I went to try the doors up there.

Again, no luck: all the doors were locked, and my situation was increasing in awkwardness, as to reach those doors I had to pass by not only a couple loudly having sex in their first-floor bedroom, but also an Indian woman standing at her sliding door and suspiciously watching me pass. Oh, and did I mention that the setup required me to walk by her door three times? Yep. I’m sure she was delighted.

(But not as delighted as the girl having sex, at least by the sound of it.)

I wonder if, at this point, I should just call the guy whose furniture I was seeing. Does the embarrassment of having to ask a stranger to come get me outweigh the embarrassment of being late for FHE because I was locked inside an apartment complex? I decide that yes, it does, and I look around the courtyard for another means of escape. There’s a small storage area in back, and I scramble up onto a pile of cinderblocks, thinking maybe I can escape over the fence. Unfortunately, that path would only drop me down into the locked courtyard next door. I return to the courtyard to find the Indian woman standing outside now, openly staring at me.

“Excuse me,” I say. “I’m trapped inside this apartment complex and need a way out. Can I walk through your apartment to get back inside the building and use the doors from in there?"

She stares at me. “I…no…speak…English,” she says.

Just my luck. I ask a few more questions and find she’s not even a north Indian; she’s a Telugu speaker from Andra Pradesh. I test out her Indian language education anyway: “Kya ap hindi bol sakte hain?” Can you speak Hindi?

Her eyes widen and she nods, eagerly. I’ve forgotten most of my Hindi but can still understand some; her English production is poor but she has some comprehension. In the next few minutes, we manage, with her speaking Hindi and me speaking English pantomime, to communicate a few basic facts: I’m trapped in this apartment building and would like a way out. She’s just visiting her sister in America for a few months. I would like to walk through her apartment. Not into! Through! She would like to guard her sister’s apartment well. Not into! Not through! I would like to know if she has keys to any of these doors. Her sister, who is the building manager, has all the keys and will be home in an hour. An hour? I can’t wait that long! Well, then, she says, call your friend.

I sigh and dial the phone, knowing that this has only been made more embarrassing by the fact that I left the guy’s apartment roughly twenty minutes ago. I don’t know whether I am disappointed or elated when he doesn’t pick up.

So then I’m really stuck. FHE has started ten minutes before, and I’m looking at waiting another hour for the building manager to return. I eye the fence surrounding the courtyard, which is only seven or eight feet high, and I decide that maybe I can scale it and jump down on the other side. I find a plastic chair, set it up in front of the fence, and am standing on it contemplating how best to hop the fence when a large white van pulls up and Building Manager Sister steps out. She wants to be polite, I can tell, but her face clearly asks, What the hell is this white girl doing on my fence?

I explain the situation to her, hopefully clearly enough that she can fill her sister in later, and she tells me where the emergency exit button is in the garage, hidden in a dark corner I never would have spotted on my own. Oh. Problem solved. I press the button and walk free, arriving at FHE just in time, unfortunately, for kickball. At least I had a good story to tell while trying to avoid my turn to kick.

The Name of the Prose

It has been pointed out to me that "Upon the Islands of the Sea" is no longer an appropriate blog title. And then it has been pointed out to me that since the Book of Mormon and D&C are referring to the American continents as much as to actual islands, it's still an appropriate blog name. And then it has been pointed out to me that my friends think far too hard about trivial things.

I'm just kidding. That last one didn't take any pointing out.

So I'm trying to think of a new blog title, but, since any creative or decision-making ability I once had seems to have abandoned me, possibly in protest over my rotting my brains out on High School Musical and the Ensign, I put the decision to you all, my loyal readership. Pick a name from my shortlist or invent your own, I don't care, just pick me something appropriate. Go on, use those overthinking skills.

(Oh, and bonus points if you can identify the poems some of these titles come from. And I have a favorite, but I won't tell you which one. Just remember that you may not be voting in a perfect democracy.)

a rock, not an island
a hundred visions and revisions
go west, young woman
deep down things
some untidy spot
like a coastal shelf
my sweet old et cetera
profanation of our joys

Ikea'd

I’ve spent the last few days doing nothing at my parents’ rented condo in Mountain View, mainly to take a break from all the nothing I was doing at my uncle’s house in Piedmont. (Forty-five percent of me loves spending entire days refreshing the Craigslist rentals page; the sane fifty-five really wishes school would hurry up and start already.) Yesterday’s program of activities included a long swim, dinner at Google, and a pint of ice cream while watching TV. Today’s program included a long walk through a county park, dinner at a sushi restaurant, and a pint of ice cream while watching TV.

(Side note: what is TV coming to these days? My parents and I stumbled upon a program that followed real estate assessors doing their jobs at various houses and provided pre-commercial break dramatic tension with questions like “Will their equity offset their expenses?” We nearly died laughing. And then we actually stuck around through the commercials to find out. I guess I should ask what my family is coming to nowadays.)

(Oh, and their equity didn’t offset their expenses. It so rarely does.)

Before watching TV—okay, full disclosure, maybe it was sometime in between episodes of Really Gross Medical Surgeries on Live TV and Boring Reality Show #784—my parents and I went out to, as they put it, “pre-shop” for their new home in the Boston area. They didn’t want to buy furniture, just to fondle it. So we spent about a half hour in Crate and Barrel, my mom and I still dressed in the T-shirts and sweat pants we had worn on our walk that morning, and entertained ourselves by sitting on the couches and reading the display books, picking up random kitchen equipment—a tiny scale, an adjustable measuring spoon, a $5.95 cake tester—and chucking throw blankets at each other. (Hey, we were just following directions.) We are among this nation’s elite, you know. Take a minute and think about that.

And then we went to Ikea. I haven’t been there since I was a kid, and it was a revelation to me that stores like that exist. I wandered through, wide-eyed and excited by all the cheap bookshelves filled with Swedish-language books and the neat computer desks that transform into cabinets. (Take that, Michael Bay!) I was turning the pages of a translated Stephen Fry book when my parents called to tell me they had already left the store, and then, suddenly, my carefree walk through fantasy living rooms had turned into a kind of cruel endurance maze in a Scandinavian modern style furniture warehouse roughly the size of Rhode Island. I couldn’t find the door I had come in, and the other door was on the floor below, after about a half-mile (I’m not kidding; I timed it) of affordable home accessories, and then upon exiting through that door all I could find was a parking lot exit, which took walking from parking area 2A down to parking area 2V, easily another half-mile, by which point my parents had called three times to laugh at me, and then lost patience and simply driven over to pick me up.

I’m not sure what the moral of this story is, or even why I’m telling it, but there are a few salient points that stand out: there are a lot of low-cost utilitarian home products in this world, and also a few high-cost useless ones; time spent watching TV with my parents beats time spent alone teaching myself to program computers to guess the number; I have absolutely no sense of direction, though that should come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever driven with me; and I have a lot fewer interesting things to blog about now that I live in the First World. I mean, I could live-blog each refreshing of the Craigslist page, but, hey, watching TV is so much easier. Besides, that way I might actually learn what “equity” means.

Californians Anonymous

Hi, my name is Petra, and I’m a moveaholic. I haven’t lived in the same house for more than two years since I was 13. I went to six different schools before graduating high school. I’m just now starting on my tenth city of residence in only 22 years.

Some of this isn’t my fault: my mom is also a natural nomad and instilled the habit in us early with the dinnertime game of “Where In The World (Should We Move)?” (The final answer was almost always Addis Ababa. I think my parents just enjoyed saying the name.)

But some of it is my fault, I'll admit. Moving keeps me from stagnating: from growing bored, of course, but more than that, from staying the same. I love the potential inherent in every move. Each new place is a rebirth of sorts, offering an opportunity for reinvention and change. When I move, I’m totally anonymous and anything is possible. As I packed up my things for California, I thought to myself, this time I can be someone who can talk to strangers. Someone who likes to write. Someone who rides a bike. Someone who has hobbies outside of school. Someoen who isn't so relentlessly stingy. Someone who can wear high heels without falling over. Someone responsible enough to have a checking and a savings account.

So here I am in California, transforming away. In the six days I’ve been here, I’ve gotten stuck in traffic on a freeway, eaten overpriced Sicilian food whose ingredients I didn’t even recognize, experienced an earthquake, walked a perfectly groomed poodle through some of the priciest real estate in the Bay Area, and typed this blog entry on a Mac. I think, all in all, I've reinvented myself so well they should just go ahead and give me California residency right now. I haven't yet changed so much that I wouldn't appreciate the cheaper tuition.

A Gift From the Ganges

For my dad’s 48th birthday, we got him a dead body. And not just any dead body, either—we got him a saffron-wrapped, floating, Sadhu corpse. You can’t beat that.

We were in Varanasi, the Hindu holy city on the Ganges, taking a walk along the banks of the river to observe the sights, sounds, and (unfortunately) smells of the city. (The smell guaranteed that I didn’t try taking a dip in the river, as tradition dictates. You’ll see why in a minute.) It was almost dusk, and the city's population was hanging out at the river, bathing, swimming, washing clothes, and chatting. Upstream, a cremation ground was in full 24-hour operation, with about six or seven saffron-wrapped bodies being burned. We watched the cremations from a small boat which floated about twenty feet away from the process: bodies carried down to the river, thrown on a pyre, and consumed by flames. The male mourners watched solemnly from a few feet away, while the female mourners, barred from treading on holy ground, stood on the banks of the river and wept. After a few minutes, the chief mourner, wrapped in white, his head completely shorn, stepped towards the small heap of ashes, extracted the ribs and pelvis—the parts that don’t burn, apparently—and threw them into the river. (And thus we see why I thought about burning the clothes I was wearing. Can you believe they bathe in it?) Then, without looking back at the ashes, the chief mourner threw a jug of water on the pyre to kill the fire and all the mourners slowly walked away.

It—the ceremony, the burning, the whole entire cremation ground—was part poignant, part disgusting, part admirable, and part eerie. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I doubt I ever will again. We sailed back in total silence, broken only by my dad saying, slowly, “Well, at least you kids will never think the temple is weird.”

But back to the floating corpse. The river doesn’t flow quickly, and the body was drifting dangerously close to the bank, slowing down and acquiring river detritus as it went. We watched it float for a few minutes, wondering what to do, when a group of Muslim young men, newly bathed and dressed in spotless white, killing time until the evening prayer by playing cricket, spotted the corpse and shouted something. All together, at least seven or eight of them, they grabbed a forty-foot pole, neatly placed near the pavement we were standing on, walked down to the river, and poked the body back out into the middle of the river where the current could catch it again. Then they put the pole back in the place clearly designed for it, and, without any fuss at all, went back to their cricket game, the corpse rescue all in an evening’s work.

And who says Muslims and Hindus can’t get along? For the sake of my father's birthday, at least, religious cooperation is easy.

No Frigate Like One

Like Katya, I keep a booklist. She's posted before about her list, and really, I have nothing more to add about the theory of such a list: it's fun to see the reading phases I've gone through, and useful when trying to recommend, or even remember, books I've read.

It's also useful, of course, when trying to prove how desperately underemployed I was this past year in Indonesia. Days are long when you work fifteen hours a week--even with countless hours devoted to language study, practice, and research, pirated DVDs, travelling, and texting the SLO, I had time to read. A lot.

See for yourself:

A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf

Lord of the Barnyard, Tristan Egolf

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
The Mighty and the Almighty, Madeleine Albright
Culture Shock Indonesia, Cathie Draine and Barbara Hall
Semester Pertama di Malory Towers (First Term at Malory Towers), Enid Blyton
Kelas Dua di Malory Towers (Second Form at Malory Towers), Enid Blyton
The Girl Who Invented Romance, Caroline B. Cooney
The Witches, Roald Dahl
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos
Gilead, Marilyn Robinson
Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, John de Graaf, David Wann & Thomas H. Naylor

Kelas Tiga di Malory Towers (Third Year at Malory Towers), Enid Blyton

Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift

Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman

The Turn of the Screw, Henry James

Best American Essays of the Century, ed. Joyce Carol Oates

Deep River, Shusako Endo
The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
Mulai Malapekata (The Bad Beginning), Lemony Snicket
Kelas Empat di Malory Towers (Upper Fourth at Malory Towers), Enid Blyton
Kelas Lima di Malory Towers (In the Fifth at Malory Towers), Enid Blyton
The Collected Short Stories, Nikolai Gogol
Arab and Jew, David K. Shipler

Shopaholic Ties the Knot, Sophie Kinsella

The Woman In the Dunes, Kobo Abe

Kokoro, Soseki Natsume
Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
Orlando, Virginia Woolf
Akhir Satu Cinta (The End of the Affair), Graham Greene
Gio, Jangan Cari Pacar Berjilbab!, Chris Oetoyo
The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
Semester Terakhir di Malory Towers (Last Term at Malory Towers), Enid Blyton
Wonderful Fool, Shusako Endo
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins
America: The Book, John Stewart

Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl

Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horwitz

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark

A Hat Full of Sky, Terry Pratchett

Out, Natsuo Kirino

Spring Snow, Yukio MIshima

Made in America, Bill Bryson

A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch

The End, Lemony Snicket

A Million Little Pieces, James Frey
Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, Amy Krouse Rosenthal
The Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby
Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton
Lies my Teacher Told Me, James Loewen
A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
Ludmilla's Broken English, DBC Pierre
Manhattan Monologues, Louis Auchincloss
Clear Light of Day, Anita Desai
The Know-It-All, A.J. Jacobs
The Piano Teacher, Elfriede Jelinek
The Accidental, Ali Smith
Confessions of Love, Uno Chiyo
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskell
The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl
Family Matters, Rohinton Mistry
The Master Butchers Singing Club, Louise Erdrich
The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom
Culture Shock: Indonesia, Cathie Draine and Barbara Hall
We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light John Baxter
The Final Martyrs, Shusako Endo
Appointment in Samarra, John O'Hara
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata
Hard Times, Charles Dickens
Some Prefer Nettles, Junichiro Tanizaki
The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh
Confessions of a Mask, Yukio Mishima
Monumen, Nh. Dini
Three Men on the Bummell, Jerome K. Jerome
The Europeans, Henry James
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
After the Banquet, Yukio Mishima
What Went Wrong, Bernard Lewis
Six Easy Pieces, Richard Feynmann
Perempuan di Titik Nol, Nawal Al-Sadawi, trans. Mochtar Lubis
Mereka Bilang, Saya Monyet, Djenar Maesa Ayu
Saman, Ayu Utami
Raumanen, Marianne Katoppo
Sepuluh Anak Negro (Ten Little Indians), Agatha Christie
Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman
He's Just Not That Into You, Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo
Aib (Disgrace), J.M. Coetzee
Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia, Benedict Anderson
Bali, Putu Wijaya
Dua Dunia, Nh Dini

The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz

Cerita Pendek Tentang Cerita Cinta Pendek (Short Stories about Short Love Stories), Djenar Maesa Ayu

Write Away, Elizabeth George

No Touch Monkey, and Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late, Ayun Halliday

The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout

Full House, Janet Evanovich and Charlotte Hughes

The Rocky Road to Romance, Janet Evanovich
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, Yukio Mishima
Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Booty Nomad, Scott Mebus
Vampires of Venice Beach, Jennifer Colt
Snow, Orhan Pamuk
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, Anne Lamott
The Sportswriter, Richard Ford
The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers
Home, Manju Kapur
The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, Steven Sherrill
The Bell, Iris Murdoch
The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
Such a Long Journey, Rohinton Mistry
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
What Came Before He Shot Her, Elizabeth George
The Good Good Pig, Sy Montgomery
Fermat's Last Theorem, Simon Singh
And Then, Nastume Soseki
Arthur and George, Julian Barnes
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Runaway Horses, Yukio Mishima
Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra
The Famished Road, Ben Okri
The Lady and the Unicorn, Tracy Chevalier
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
The Suffrage of Elvira, V.S. Naipaul
Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion, V.S. Naipaul
A Flag on the Island, V.S. Naipaul
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco
Villette, Charlotte Bronte

So if you ever need a book recommendation, you know who to ask.

An Educational Weekend

Things I Learned from Quakers This Weekend

1. ...
2. ...
3. We are like a grove of aspen trees, connected through tangled and deep roots.
4. ...
5. The modern global warming discussion lacks heart.
6. Join the journal. Oh, and join some committees too.
7. ...
8. One hour of total silence can actually be quite pleasant.

Things I Learned From Scientologists This Weekend

1. What's true depends on who you are.
2. Therefore I can't tell you what Scientologists believe because it's just my truth, and might not be yours.
3. But L. Ron Hubbard's truth is true for everyone.
4. And you can buy this book, or this DVD, or this book-and-DVD set, if you want to know more.
5. Scientology is a religion, as determined by over 65 court cases.
6. No, I'm not trained to tell you what this religion believes. But you can buy a book.
7. Psychiatry is an "industry of death."
8. And if you pay $17.99 for a DVD, it might tell you why.

Things I learned from Mormons This Weekend

1. Meeting Jesus will be just like appearing in High School Musical 2.
2. Testimonies will have the opportunity to be strengthened.
3. I don't really know what I'm going to say...
4. I know the Church is true.
5. Vague reference to trials.
6. Stops due to emotion.
7. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
8. Bingo!

Things I learned from Alea and Melyngoch This Weekend

1. I haven't lost my Boggle skills.
2. Or my anagrams skills.
3. Ice and salt can, in fact, burn you.
4. References to George Fox and his "shaggy shaggy locks" never get old.
5. Melyngoch and I need to have a "how long can you hold your hand in ice water" rematch. Beating Alea was just too easy.
6. Never sell a rodeo cowboy an insurance policy.
7. Dude got trivia'd.
8. Being Melyngoch's social coordinator is fun.

The Customs Saga, or It's a Long Story

The Duke and I walked up to the immigrations desk at the Indira Gandhi International Airport with smiles on our faces: we were leaving India! And going to America! Where there are no cats! The officer on duty, portly and bearded, glanced at my passport briefly, in the manner of bored immigrations officers everywhere, before stamping it. As he looked at The Duke’s passport, frowned, and started flipped pages, my stomach sank. I knew it wasn’t a good sign.

It wasn’t. Remember when my brothers had passport trouble trying to come to Indonesia? They had new passports issued when they returned to Delhi--new passports, entirely blank of, say, an Indian visa or entry stamp.

“Where is his Indian visa?” the officer asked.

Calmly, I explained the situation in detail, showing the passport’s date of issue, a mere month before, and place of issue, the U.S. Embassy in Delhi. I told him that the family was moving, never to return to India, and his old passport was packed away somewhere, probably winging its way towards America.

The officer stared at me. “He needs an Indian visa,” he said, shortly.

I stared back. Had he been listening at all? “He doesn’t have one in this passport.” I repeated my explanation.

“Where is his old passport?”

I repeated myself all over again.

The officer thought for a moment. “He needs an Indian visa.”

I thought about explaining yet again and went with the more sensible option instead. “Is there a supervisor I can talk to?”

So that is how The Duke and I found ourselves in a back room of the immigrations department, arguing with yet another portly, bearded, and utterly bored Indian immigrations officer.

“He needs an Indian visa,” the supervisor told me.

I sighed, and began the story again: “He’s been living here in Delhi. His new passport was issued at the U.S. Embassy here. His old passport is—"

Holding up one hand, the supervisor interrupted me. “Listen to me. Listen to me! He needs an Indian visa!”

“Yes, yes, I know. But he doesn’t have one in this passport, and our plane leaves in an hour. Is there anything I can do?”

“Listen to me. Listen to me! He needs an Indian visa!”

I think I can be excused for snapping a little bit here: “No, you listen to me. He does. Not. Have. His. Indian. Visa. In. This. Passport. What can we do so our flight does not leave without us?”

The supervisor thought for a moment. “You can show me his old passport with his Indian visa.”

I bit down, hard, to suppress the scream rising in my throat. “Maybe there’s another solution?” I ventured, after a moment or two of deep breathing. “Maybe there’s a…a fee he can pay.” I crossed my fingers and hoped my hint would be taken. “You know, like a fine, for the trouble we’ve caused the customs department. What do you think? $100?”

“He needs an Indian visa.”

I gave up on subtlety. “I have $200 cash in my wallet. I’ll give it to you right now this second if you’ll stamp his passport.”

Bribery in India is a fine art, an elaborate negotiation of power and status, one that I had clearly just mistaken for a mere exchanging of cash. The supervisor looked at me disdainfully and came back with, “Listen to me. Listen to me. He needs an Indian visa. Otherwise we don’t know whether he’s in the country legally.”

I wondered, shouldn’t the fact that he’s in the country now prove that he, at one point at least, had an Indian visa? As I did, inspiration struck. “Fine,” I nearly snarled. “Let’s pretend he doesn’t have an Indian visa. Let’s pretend he is here illegally. Deport him!” My shouting and wild arm motions were attracting attention now. “Just deport him! He’s a criminal! He’s got no visa! Throw him out of your country! We’re never coming back here anyway, we promise. So just deport him!”

The supervisor would have none of this. “No, no,” he said. “Listen to me. If he were here illegally, we would not deport him. We would put him in jail. He needs an Indian visa.”

“Jail?!” I shouted. “So because he’s here using your resources illegally, you’re going to keep him here illegally? That doesn’t make any sense!” I was nearly hyperventilating now, crazy with the thought of The Duke not allowed to leave India and/or in jail. (I'm not sure which is worse.)

After about fifteen more minutes—I kid you not—of lobbing back and forth “He needs an Indian visa” and “He doesn’t have an Indian visa in this passport”, during which the supervisor told me to listen to him at least six more times, and also suggested, in response to my agonized “what can I do?”, that I simply leave The Duke behind, at which point I pondered whether the jail cell that would likely be mine after punching a customs official would at least be next to The Duke’s, the supervisor conceded that perhaps, perhaps, a photocopy of The Duke’s Indian visa would suffice.

With that news, I sprinted to the airport’s only pay phone, only to learn that a. The Duke didn’t know our father’s cell phone number and b. there is no 411 in Delhi. Nearly panicked, I finally found the number to my family’s hotel at the airport’s information desk, and, upon hearing my dad’s voice, burst into tears.

“Dad,” I sobbed into the phone, “they won’t let us leave! We’re going to be trapped in this hot, chaotic, nonsensical, utterly godforsaken country forever!”

My dad instantly agreed to drive the photocopy to the airport. With only about forty minutes to our flight, the twenty-minute drive would mean cutting it close. I went back to the Singapore air desk to tell them about our predicament and extract a promise that the plane would not leave without us.

The employee at the Singapore desk was very solicitous, promising that of course the flight wouldn’t leave without us, if he could, um, if I didn’t mind, please, take our baggage tags.

I knew what that meant and, luckily, managed to snatch them back from his hand just in time. I argued with him for a few minutes about whether or not I should relinquish my baggage tags, and thus my guarantee of getting on the plane, and was just in the middle of clarifying, loudly, that “a customer who has just paid five THOUSAND dollars for a seat on the plane should not be left behind because a set of IDIOTIC immigrations officers from YOUR COUNTRY, SIR cannot solve a SIMPLE problem, which would be PERFECTLY EASY if they, like every OTHER nation in the 21st century, had computerized records at customs OR even a basic attitude of CUSTOMER SERVICE” when a man in an expensive suit walked up behind me and called me by name.

This man, as far as I’m concerned, was a hero, but really he was an employee from the exclusive hotel where my family had stayed the night before; his job was greeting arriving customers, and, occasionally, rescuing departing customers. Smoothly, calmly, he pried The Duke’s passport—but not his baggage tags—from my grip and marched off to sweet-talk the supervisor. When my dad arrived, photocopy in tow, the suited man retreated into the backroom and, after fifteen minutes of heaven-only-knows-what, during which my dad and I played keepaway with the Singapore Airlines employees trying to grab my baggage tags, the suited man emerged, with a surly supervisor agreeing that yes, maybe we could leave India.

Triumphant, and mentally taking back everything I said about customer service—the bit about computerized records still stands--The Duke and I went back to the original officer, who, still bored and barely looking at the passport, glanced over at his boss and stamped the necessary documents. Trying to be good winners, we thanked him graciously and were turning to go when he stopped us.

“When will you return to India again?” he asked.

The Duke and I stared in disbelief. I knew he hadn’t been listening. All our resolve to be good winners flew out the window. “Never!” we shouted, nearly in unison, sprinting down the hallway behind the Singapore Airlines employees, waving our baggage tags and laughing with the joy of our soon-to-be freedom from Indian bureaucracy, and also cats. “Never!”

***

No saga is complete without an epilogue. A mere hour later, my mom and Klement arrived at the airport, where they, too, spent nearly two hours fighting with immigrations officers over the exact same dilemma, just this time with Klement’s passport. (Listen to me, people. Listen to me! Computerized records.) A mere five hours later, The Duke and I arrived in Singapore, ready to begin backpacking across Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia. A mere nine days later, The Duke and I landed in San Francisco, where the immigrations officer on duty glanced through our passports, gave us an entry stamp and, looking up briefly, said, “Welcome home.” And a mere nine days and one second later, I cried.

The Martian in My Meal

Most of the food I ate in Cambodia and Vietnam was delicious. I loved Vietnamese pho, or noodles (though I didn't love my inability to pronounce the word, which is something like "fuh" but high and possibly falling tone), I loved Vietnamese beef dishes (strange since I usually avoid anything beef in the States), and I ate a tomato and chicken and pineapple soup in Cambodia that destroyed my desire to eat anything else ever again, ever (which might be a good basis for a dieting company).

There was one notable exception to the rule, though. At a small noodle stand in Cambodia, where I had ordered a seemingly harmless bowl of chicken noodle soup, I found an alien in my noodles.

Now, before you think I'm needlessly exaggerating for the sake of the story, like how I claim that the Three Nephites once rescued me and Alea from being lost near Sandy, and how the "alien" was probably just a squid, take a look.


What the heck is that thing? Now imagine you find that in your soup. What's worse, it was buried under the noodles, so that I had eaten about 2/3 of the bowl by the time I stumbled upon the extraterrestrial at the bottom.

What did I do about it, you may ask? Well, I'm no Sigourney Weaver: I shrieked. Then I fished it out of my soup and took a picture. Then I finished the noodles. Hey, touring Cambodia makes a girl hungry.

Whose Fault Is This?

In the past three days, I've been in India, Singapore, Malaysia, and Cambodia. Somewhere in those three days, I've picked up a nasty cold, which has, strangely enough, spread to my eye; in addition to a runny nose, cough, and persistent headache, I now have a symptom I've never experienced before: I can't see out of my right eye because it's covered in pus. The poor Duke has already suffered in-detail descriptions and displays of this probable pink eye, which I find strangely fascinating as well as disgusting, but now, upon realizing that I have a whole wide audience upon which to inflict my pain, I will tell you all this: I can see, and feel, the pus filming over my eyeball and congealing in the corners. When I wipe it away, it looks, and feels, just like snot--watery, greenish-yellow lumps. It's like my eye noticed that my nose was running and wanted to join the fun. It is so. freaking. disgusting. And, let me tell you, wonders of the world are slightly less, well, wondrous, when you have to keep blowing your eye so you can actually see them.

I blame India. I usually do.

Stranded in Singapore

I left Indonesia on Sunday, with possibly the worst flight schedule ever: an hour-long flight to Jakarta, a four-hour layover in Jakarta, and hour-and-a-half-long flight to Singapore, a thirty-hour layover in Singapore, and a five-and-a-half-hour flight to Delhi.

(No, come to think of it, I've had much worse flight schedules. A certain eight-hour layover in Charles de Gaulle springs to mind. Or maybe the ten-hour layover in Taipei. Or what about that time I scheduled a flight through O'Hare in the winter?)

In any case, my long-distance travels went smoothly, and, unusually, I didn't cry once, not even when Garuda Indonesia made me pay overweight baggage fees, not even when Singapore Airlines made me pay overweight baggage fees, not even when Jet Airways made me unpack and repack my carry-on and throw away my special SPF 45 facial sunscreen, by far the most expensive cosmetic item I own. (Okay, so I teared up a little bit as I begged, but it did no good.) And, luckily for me, nowhere in all this baggage paying and inspection did anyone think to weigh my backpack; had they even picked up they would have noticed that it was at least forty pounds, far over the standard carry-on weight limit.


My layover in Singapore, far from the being the utter waste of time I had anticipated and grumped about, was the highlight of the past week, if not month: Singapore is such an utter contrast from Indonesia that it seems almost eerie it's only a few hundred miles away. I wandered around the city in a daze, utterly awed at the, to me, amazing features of the city: it had crosswalks! And street signs! And maps! And sidewalks! And bus stops! And a Metro! And DRINKING FOUNTAINS! And a LIBRARY! And PEANUT BUTTER M&MS!!!!!


Phew. I'm getting all wide-eyed and excited again. I barely slept during this day in Singapore; half of that was the paint fumes and mattress coils in my hostel dormitory, both of which prevented me from really settling in, but the other half was the sheer high of being in a city that stayed awake past eleven p.m. I don't think I'd enjoy a longer stay in Singapore--in fact, I know I wouldn't; of all my trips there in high school, every time I stayed past three days or so the novelty wore off, and instead of appreciating the cleanliness and organization, I started fearing the obsessively perfectionist culture and dictatorial government that makes it so--but my twenty-four hours in efficiency and order made an ideal oasis between states of chaos, especially if by "oasis" I mean "tantalizing preview of things to come." Just think--two short weeks and several terrible flight schedules from now, I can eat all the peanut butter M&Ms I want, refreshing myself from public drinking fountains while crossing the street, in a crosswalk, on my way to a library. I can't wait.

A Conversation

Fellow English Teacher: Where do you usually get your hair cut in Semarang?

Petra: Well, I tried once at the Johnny Andrean salon in the mall, but I didn't like the cut. So since then I've gotten it cut by my mom, and in Bali.

FET: How often do you cut it?

Petra: I try to cut it every month and a half, maybe two months if I'm lazy.

FET: How long has it been since you cut it?

Petra: I guess about two months now.

FET: When are you going to cut it again?

Petra: Well, I might as well wait until next week when I'll be in India again, so my mom can cut it. She did a great job last time.

FET: So you're going to wait for longer than two months?

Petra: Yes, alas. I've been wanting to cut it for the last two weeks or so, though.

FET: Yes, you should have cut it two weeks ago. It looks very messy.

So that's what she was leading up to. Yes, folks, my colleagues are just that subtle. And just that kind.

Picture This

I went to the mall yesterday to print photos. (The news here, of course, is the printing of photos: I go to, or at least walk through, the mall a minimum of two times and maximum of, oh, six or seven times a day, including Sundays, and therefore nearly any story of this past year could begin with "I went to the mall yesterday." Lest you think I'm reverting to that brief phase in sixth grade when I thought the mall was a cool place to hang out, let me remind you that not only is the mall within seven minutes, on foot, of my house, it also includes the gym, the internet cafe, the bookstores, the grocery store, and the shortest, and most air-conditioned, path to church.)

This photo-printing booth in the mall has a display of photos they've printed. Most of those on display are high schoolers taking what the SLO and I refer to as "Asian pictures": cutesy poses, usually involving Churchhill's V sign, though with much less gravitas; cutesy stickers to accessorize the picture, mostly hearts, stars, teddy bears, and SpongeBob SquarePants; and cutesy backdrops, including everything from the pineapple under the sea to flowers to stars to beaches to, somewhat incongruously, Piet Mondrian paintings. (By the way, if you haven't seen my face superimposed on a Piet Mondrian painting, you haven't lived.)

In the midst of all that Asianness, one picture, front and center, caught my eye: the portrait my family took back in December, which I printed at this booth a few months back. I always suspected that having a white person around was good for business; now my suspicions are confirmed. Family, if you're reading this, forget all your plans for next year. Let's all stay in Asia and go into advertising!

Days of My Life

The day in Indonesia is divided into four parts: pagi or morning, siang, or mid-afternoon, sore, or late afternoon, and malam, or night. It may seem strange, to anyone unfamiliar with the tropics, to make such distinctions, but once you've been here you see the necessity. Morning is like morning everywhere, with day dawns breaking left and right, and the city beginning to stir around six a.m. Much as I complain, I like this time of day: with the sun not yet fully up, the air is still relatively cool, cool enough for the old Chinese man down the street to sit outside on his wicker chair, sarong hiked to his knees, and slowly, with dignity, nod his head at everyone who passes, and the hordes of freshly-bathed schoolchildren in freshly-ironed uniforms--red for elementary school, blue for middle school, and grey for high school--add an energy to the start of the day, an eager brightness that is gone a few hours later, as pressed clothes and spirits begin to droop in the tropical heat.

The heat really hits around ten, the time siang begins--this, then, is the "mad dogs and Englishmen" phase of the day, when everyone, meaning, mostly, me, is sluggish and sweaty and sleepy, wanting only to go home and nap under a fan. The less said about siang in this hot city, the better.

Sore is my absolute favorite, lasting from three-ish to sunset at six, which seems like a confusing and arbitrary chunk of time to the Western mind, at least until said mind experiences it, and then it's obvious and natural--of course those hours are different. Sore is bookended by calls to prayer, and something changes in the air during the three o'clock call, some slight shift in the temperature and the light which makes everyone start greeting each other with selamat sore instead of selamat siang, and which brings the old Chinese man out again, ready to greet the neighbors as they head home. Sore is cool again, almost cool enough to be pleasant, and as the sky darkens the bats come out, swooping low overhead, and, if you live in a neighborhood like mine, the muezzin keeps up a steady stream of goodness-knows-what from the mosque's loudspeakers, filling those hours between the calls with preaching and reading from the Qur'an and, as far as I can tell, trying to clear his throat. (I know Arabic sounds kind of like coughing, but, really, not that much.) Some people find the noise of the calls distracting and invasive, but I love it: the sound of Allahu akbar! echoing through the city stirs something in me, something deeply spiritual that I can't quite describe, and not even the fact that my local muezzin sounds exactly like Tom Waits can destroy the feeling.

For all this extended-evening period, night comes on fast. By the time the sunset prayer has ended, sunset, too, has ended; the night is as dark at six p.m. as at eleven p.m. It's rather disconcerting, this sudden sunset, like someone turned off a lamp; I find myself, every so often, going into a building just before six and coming out, a few minutes later, to wonder if, perhaps, my clock is broken and I spent more time inside than I thought. Malam is relaxed and quiet: by nine p.m., if not earlier, everyone is at home, watching T.V. or just hanging around on their porches, chatting peaceably, swatting mosquitoes, and waiting for bedtime and therefore the next morning. Early to bed and early to rise, they say; they must have been Indonesians.

I won't miss this emphasis on pagi-pagi, early morning, over malam-malam, late at night, but I've grown used to, and fond of, these four-part days. More especially, I'll miss sore, the bustle and the bats and the breeze, the projected invitations to come to prayer, to come to success. I'll never again, alas, settle for a simple English "evening."

Making a Difference

Miss Hannah: “So, what do you think about adoption?”

Student: “It’s bad.”

Miss Hannah: “Really? Why?”

Student: “Ummmmm...”

Miss Hannah: “What about if the child’s natural parents are dead? Isn’t it better for the child to be adopted?”

Student: “Yes, I guess so.”

Miss Hannah: “And what about if the couple can’t have children themselves? Wouldn’t it be better for them to adopt a child who needs it than be childless forever?”

Student: “Yes, I guess so.”

Miss Hannah: “And what about if the child’s natural parents were abusive or unable to take care of the child properly? Wouldn’t it be better for it to have parents who loved it and treated it right?”

Student: “Yes, I guess so.”

Miss Hannah: “And what about if the mother were an unwed teenager? Wouldn’t it be better for the child to be adopted by an older couple more capable of raising the child?"

Student: “Yes, I guess so.”

Miss Hannah: “So now what do you think of adoption? Isn’t it a valid option, in some situations?

Students: “Yes, I guess so.”

Miss Hannah: Would you ever adopt a child?”

Student: “No!”

Miss Hannah: “Why not?”

Student: “Because it’s bad.”

New Slang

Rolfo says that only I would get a pick-me-up out of learning new slang; I contend that if everyone knew what slang usage I was referring to, they, too, would find it almost unspeakably cool.

I stumbled across the construction in question on a t-shirt in Yogya; I was so enchanted by the words that I bought the t-shirt. (Because, really, isn’t cool slang worth a dollar?) It says, in so many words, saya ndak suka situ mbaca-baca tulisan ini. Kalo situ pengin mbeli aja sendiri, or, in translation, “I don’t like you reading this writing. If you want to, buy one yourself.”

Clever enough. The whole thing is very informal language: ndak is the central Javan adaptation of tidak, or “no”; kalo and pengin reflect recent vowel shifts in their spelling; mbaca-baca and mbeli are significant in that they use the Javanese verbal prefix N-, an assimilating nasal, instead of the more formal Indonesian meN-; aja is an informal version of saja, having, as is common in spoken Indonesian, dropped the initial s.

But all that is old slang, at least to me. The thing that really caught my eye was the word I translated as "you": situ. It's not technically a personal pronoun at all, but a term of spatial deixis. It means, literally, "there." So, again, "I don't like there reading this writing. If there wants to, buy one thereself."

Neat, huh? I mean, personal pronouns are a type of deixis, but spatial and social deixis are typically not so interchangeable. (Does anyone know another language that does this?) Apparently, though—and I’ve done my reading now—using “here” and “there” for “I” and “you” is becoming common in Indonesian youth language. Those crazy Indonesian youth! Here finds their language fascinating. Doesn't there?

For Spacious Skies

U.S. States My Students Guessed Were the Largest

In The Order That They Guessed Them

Canada
Mexico
Los Angeles
Virginia
Brazil
California
George W. Bush
Alaska

Spring Break Numero Tres

Spring break the third was occasioned by the Big Scary National Test that all twelfth graders must take to graduate. While my seniors, along with their other teachers, suffered and sweated and stressed, I waved goodbye and headed off for a week at the beach.

My life is good.

I have no amusing adventures to relate about this week of vacation because, frankly, I had no adventures. Quite the opposite: I did absolutely nothing. The SLO and I rented a $4 hotel room in the Kuta beach area, and then proceeded to spend the week doing what one does at a beach. For the SLO, blessed with wonderfully tannable skin, this involved lying on the beach. For me, blessed, or perhaps cursed, with Northern European ancestry, this involved lying on the beach, fully sunscreened and covered in several sarongs, looking therefore ready to enjoy the beaches in, say, Saudi Arabia. This also involved getting tired of the sun and heading away from the beach to browse in used bookstores, purchase books in used bookstores, read the books purchased in used bookstores, and return the books purchased and read, which, of course, began the cycle again. I blew a lot of money on paperbacks.

My life is really good.

Oh, and of course no trip to the beach would be complete without a hideous sunburn; the burn this time, on my back and shoulders and right arm and leg, was so bad that I’m still peeling, three weeks later. Those of you who have seen the pictures can agree: I have lowered my skin cancer onset age to, probably, 25.

My life, at least for the next three years, is good. Thank heaven for spring breaks.

Q&A

Questions My Students Asked Me, When Told They Could Ask Anything

What do you think of Indonesia?
How do you buy a gun in America?
Do you like Led Zeppelin?
Will Seung-Hui Cho's body be buried in America or sent back to Korea?
Why is your face so red?
"Sunburn"? What does that mean?
Do you have a boyfriend?
Do you really drink baby's blood in your church?
What Indonesian foods do you like?
When a woman has an abortion, doesn't she regret it?
Who would win in a fight: American rappers or the Japanese yakuza?

Here She Is, Miss(?) Central Java

You do two or two-and-a-half years in Java in which all you do is live with the people, write down everything, and try to figure out what the hell is going on...
-Clifford Geertz

Indonesia never ceases to amaze, surprise, and confuse me. Just when I think I'm getting the hang of things, slipping into a comfortable and understood routine, or, as Geertz put it, figuring out what the hell is going on, I find myself, along with a former fashion model, the director of tourism for Central Java, a professor at a local university, and a hairdresser, watching transsexuals strut down a runway, and taking notes on their beauty, dress, walk, poise, breasts, and overall worthiness to become Miss She-male Central Java 2007.


Somehow, in this fairly conservative Muslim country, where men and women generally don't hold hands or even hug in public, where drinking is rare and only for Christians, where immodesty is nearly unheard of, waria*, or male-to-female transwomen/transsexuals/transvestites, are generally accepted and, sometimes, even encouraged--this beauty pageant, for instance, was not a shabby back-alley affair, but set up and funded by the regional government, and hosted in the building of the city's Insitute for Women. Although these pageants have been protested by several conservative Islamic groups, the current Miss Waria Indonesia is a high-profile figure, who works with AIDS-awareness campaigns and writes confessional books, including her bestseller Jangan Lihat Kelaminku, or "Don't Look At My Genitals." And it's not like religion was absent from the evening, either--those of the judges and staff who were Christian gathered in the VIP room for a quick prayer before starting; during the pageant's introduction, we were greeted with the blessings of Allah called down on our heads; and one of the contestants, my personal favorite, was even wearing a headscarf and modest evening wear, like any good conservative Muslim girl should.


The pageant itself was pretty much par for the course: the contestants strutted down a runway in revealing clothing, using feathers and fans to flirt at the spectators; the judges argued in the back room about who looked more like a woman, #23 or #64--or, rather, who looked more like a hot woman; and the audience suffered through several loud, melodramatic, slightly off-key musical numbers, complete with backup dancers and fog machine. The audience was almost entirely other waria, growing drunker and more boisterous by the minute, although there were a few groups of friends and family, including young children, and at least one beamingly proud mother, an ancient, hunched-over woman in Javanese traditional dress who, every time her child was on stage, turned around to grin and tell us, "I'm so proud of my girl."


That granny may call them "girls," but, frankly, it was not always immediately evident; they were not, on the whole, as convincing as Thailand's famous lady-boys. Indonesians are usually small, but these girls were not: most, if not all, were taller than me, which is nearly impossible for women and rare even for men. Most also had broad shoulders and strong collarbones showing through their strappy evening gowns; the tiny former fashion model next to me kept making a tsk, tsk noise as she noted this, and I know she eliminated at least one contestant based on her bicep definition. I myself was far more likely to strike out candidates when I noticed their leg hair; I mean, come on: if I feel obliged to shave before wearing a skirt to school, it's only fair that a contestant bothers to shave before entering a beauty pageant. If you want to be a woman, you have to suffer for beauty like one. Oh, and also? With the length of some of those skirts, I had a hard time following the advice given in the title of Miss Waria Indonesia's book. I can now testify that most of the audience and contestants were not, technically speaking, girls.


Not so for the actual winner, though, or so the rumor went. My vote was cast, of course, for the one in the headscarf--how could I resist such delicious irony?--but the other judges shot me down and chose the prettiest instead. Typical. Shallow and unfair and utterly typical. But then again, before I start getting angry, I take comfort in the thought that at least there was one thing about the evening that didn't confuse me.


*This is a tricky one to translate. Waria is a blended neologism, a combination of wanita (woman) and pria (man); hence, in the actual construction of the word, it's closest to the English "she-male," which is the word I chose above. However, "she-male" is often derogatory in English, while waria is the polite, non-derogatory form. Unfortunately for the translator, the other possibilities in English--transwomen, transsexual, transvestite, as listed--are far more technical, and therefore limiting, than waria. The waria community as a whole is diverse, with some just transvestites, who look and act like men in day-to-day life**, and others transwomen, dressing and identifying as women, and others still transsexuals, actually undergoing surgery to become women, and the term itself encompasses all these variations of sexual identity. To spare myself, and my readers, the intricacies and political implications of these terms, I will use the Indonesian waria, or, if it must be translated, the English "she-male," though with the caveat that I don't mean it offensively, and have only chosen it for its relative simplicity and similarity, in origin and structure, to the Indonesian term.

**I asked one kind waria, who spoke excellent English, whether I should, when speaking to waria, use Pak, mister, or Ibu, Mrs. She said, "It depends on whether I'm wearing lipstick." Such a flexible gender identity, wouldn't you say?

In Da (Indo) Club

I found about the concert through the radio station where the SLO and I do our biweekly English program; there was a giant poster hanging on the wall and, after noticing that one of my favorite Indonesian pop songtresses would be performing, I wrote down the time and date and location and decided to go.

So that is how, on a Saturday night, at eight p.m., the advertised starting time, the SLO and I found ourselves wandering around the sixth-floor parking lot of the local mall, searching for evidence of a concert about to start, or, indeed, any sign of human life at all. When we finally found the cafe entrance, tucked away behind a huge “NO PARKING” sign and the bright red van parked in front of it, the eager, friendly, polite, bleached, pierced, Mohawked employees, after enthusiastically shouting SELAMAT PAGI, good morning, at us, and igoring my rather feeble and confused protest that wasn’t pagi, morning, but malam, night, told us that the concert would begin sebentar lagi, or in just a second. So we found ourselves some steps to sit on and began critiquing the short skirts and three-inch heels of the girls who arrived after us.

By ten p.m., we realized that, like dummies, like fools, like total Indonesia neophytes, we had been duped. Concerts, apparently, are not like movies, which start ten minutes early, but like meetings, bus departures, and, indeed, everything else in Indonesia: they start when they start. Indonesians call this jam karet, or “rubber time,” as “just a second” gets stretched into ten minutes, thirty minutes, an hour, two hours, never. But we’ve learned, this year, the fine art of hurrying up to wait, so we were content to use our time to not only speculate what would happen if the girl in front of us bent over in a skirt like that, but also to drop 100-rupiah coins off the side of the building to see what, or who, we could hit, wander onto the seventh floor and into a group of teenage boys, post-birthday party, who were eager to show us what, exactly, they were doing, or maybe just wanted to do, in the elevator, and, of course, grow increasingly more annoyed with the employees’ constant shouts of SELAMAT PAGI. ("But...but...but..." I wanted to say, "it’s not morning! Stop it! I don’t understand!")

Around eleven p.m., finally, the show started. The first singer, Rio Febrian, was fairly uninteresting, musically, but was one of the most performance-happy lead singers I’ve seen in a long time. He strutted and preened and emoted and mugged for the many cell-phone cameras shoved at him, all with a giant grin that said, “Look at me! I’m a real rock star! Don’t you just adore me?” I usually frequent indie concerts, at which the lead singer looks far more likely to break down and cry, whether over the indignity of performance or the cruelty of society and/or women, it's unclear, so the contrast was somewhat, well, adorable. I thought about throwing my panties on stage to show my adoration, but was too pressed in by the crowd to even breathe deeply, not to mention strip and toss.

Perhaps the crowd was just drunker by the time the second singer, Bunga Citra Lestari, arrived, or perhaps she is more popular, but as she skipped onto the stage in a tube top and tiny miniskirt, suddenly the audience surged forward and I had elbows in my stomach and back and a camera resting on my head. (Note to the man standing behind me: I know my head may make a good stable platform, and maybe you thought I wouldn’t notice, but, please! I can feel that.) Her set, like her skirt, was short but sufficient; she danced around rather awkwardly, smiled a lot, sang her two or three popular songs, as well as a few American ones, invited a flamboyantly gay man to join her in a romantic duet, and, in my favorite moment of the evening, looked momentarily nonplussed and faltered in her singing as she looked into the crowd to see a tall white girl mouthing the words to her hit song. (This seems impressive on my part until you consider that those words were “Apa kabarmu? Kabarku baik-baik saja,” or “How are you? I am fine.”)

As Bunga took her final curtseys and pranced off stage, a strong techno beat began and one of the employees climbed up to the stage to shout, one more time, SELAMAT PAGI! (By this time, though, it technically was morning, so I felt less annoyed.) Taking this as their cue, all the other employees jumped onto the tables and bar and began dancing; the other concert-goers followed suit, as the SLO and I stood, mouths agape in amazement and amusement. Could this really be Indonesia, all this drunken dancing, all this hip-swivelling, booty-shaking, bumping and grinding? Or, more to the point, could this really be Semarang? Nice, innocent, conservative, Muslim-majority Semarang? And ha! Does that guy in the loafers really call that dancing?

Figuring we couldn’t embarrass ourselves more than the guy in the loafers, we shrugged off our shock and joined in, though still giggling at some of the dance-floor of drunk Chinese-Indonesian men. So now I can say, with perfect honesty, if you ever get to chance to visit this particular cafe, the tempat party, or party place, of Semarang, do. You’ll have a pagi to remember.

The Proof Is In the Picture

Remember when I said (or, okay, wrote) that traffic in Indonesia is dangerous?


This lovely sign, all brightly colored and cheerful, keeps track of the number of accidents happening in the immediate vicinity. (How immediate, I must admit, I am not sure. I hope it's larger than the one intersection where it was posted, though.) In any case, in the month of February 2007, there were 14 incidents, with five people dead, 12 heavily injured, and 13 lightly injured. Oh, and this all cost roughly 6 million rupiah, or about $600.

IF YOU DON'T WANT TO FOLLOW, BE ORDERLY IN TRAFFIC.

Yeah. Or get out of Indonesia.

Spring Break Part Deux

The second of my vacation times began not so auspiciously, on a Saturday night, when, after teaching church English class and piano lessons, but before midnight, the appointed time to pick up my mother and brothers from the airport, the phone rang. It was a number I didn’t recognize, which is almost unfailingly a bad sign. Usually on the other end is someone who, having gotten my number from goodness knows where, wants me to help them learn English, or teach English, or recite English, or, barring all that, cheerfully butcher English. In this case, it was my father, calling to tell me that, due to visa issues, my mom and brothers were detained in Singapore, unable to enter Indonesia. They would visit the embassy first thing Monday morning and hopefully arrive on the midnight flight that night, but, until then, I should proceed with my routine as usual, going to church and school without family in tow, and the cereal I bought, the mattresses laid on my floor, and the Indonesian food cooked by the maids would have to all go untouched.

Oh, who am I kidding? I ate the cold cereal myself as soon as I hung up the phone.

I’m not going to go into detail about the precise nature of the visa issues, as, first, they’re rather boring, and, second, I’m not the sort of daughter who would take advantage of a public platform such as a blog to proclaim her own and her mother's silly mistakes to all the world--except, of course, when I am--so suffice it to say that they were simple problems and, with some smiles and patience and souvenirs given, two-handed, to custom officials, my mother and brothers arrived safely, and still on a high from their unexpected boon of a Singapore vacation.

Semarang couldn’t quite offer them the same level of Westernized sophistication as Singapore—no Border’s Books, no midnight movie showings, no coin-operated public toilets—but what my city and I had to offer was, I hope, enjoyable in its own way: a trip to my school, to be mobbed by excited teachers and alternatingly excited and shy fifteen year olds; a trip to Yogyakarta, to sample street food, ride on motorbikes, visit Borobudur, and watch a wayang kulit performance; and a trip to Jakarta, to visit our old house, hospital, and haunts, eat at Wendy’s, and commemorate Good Friday in an eighteenth-century Anglican church, decorated with tombstones of sea captains who died of typhoid, while, outside, a solemn darkness veiled the sky and a tropical rain fell.

So. It wasn't the SPRING BREAK! that my mom had been so eagerly anticipating--no beaches, no spas, no flashing people--but it was still a vacation to remember. Thank you, Mom and The Duke and Klement, for coming, and thank you, U.S. Consulate in Singapore, for allowing them to come. My life, at least, is better for having seen my mother holding onto her hat on the back of a motorbike, The Duke performing songs on his guitar for my eleventh-grade classes, and Klement sneaking around Borobudur trying to get his head, and just his head, into our photos. Indonesia will never be the same.

Mormon New Year

To celebrate April 6, the date of both the Church's founding and Jesus' birthday, and therefore an important day in the Mormon ecclesiastical calendar--if, that is, we had one--the branch in Semarang gathered together for a small commemorative activity. The program was fairly standard, as Church things go: we sang some hymns, heard a "spiritual thought," and watched various "spontaneous performances," meaning, mostly, listening to our district president sing love songs from the 1940s.

After the closing hymn, one sister brought an Indonesian dish, yellow rice shaped into a tall cone, that's used for special occasions like births, deaths, marriages, and circucisions. Standing around the yellow rice cone, we sang "Happy Birthday" to the Church, and the branch president invited the "oldest" member of the branch--the one who had been a member the longest--to cut the yellow rice cone and eat the first serving. Before we ate, we all held up our plates of yellow rice and said, by way of a toast, "Endure to the end!"

Why can't all church activities be like that?

Maid To Order

At first thought, living in a house with eight servants seems wonderful. It struck me as such at first, too—that, plus the appellation “Miss Hannah,” made me feel so very antebellum South that I caught myself longing for hoop skirts and handsome moustached suitors. Sometimes, it’s true, having servants is great. I’ve never been much of a cook, and, after several months of doing so in Egypt, I have no particular desire to hang my own laundry on the line to dry. For the most part, though, I’d trade them, yes, all nine of them, for, like, ten minutes of privacy.

They’re nice and all, I'm sure, "nice" only goes so far when it means putting up with the constant presence of ten people intent on, from my perspective, bothering me. I couldn't possibly detail everything that has ever bothered me about the servants--we'd be here all day as I complained about how sometimes they lock me out and I'm stuck standing on the street in the rain for thirty minutes at eleven P.M.--so we'll just do the biggies.

First, while their constant confusion between “foreign” and “stupid” may be amusing, and fodder for some good blog entries, it does get tiresome. They delight in pointing out the obvious to me, until I feel just the tiniest bit like pointing out to them that I am, in fact, seven or eight years older than them, and, what’s more, perfectly capable of intuiting that yes, that mouse poop on the counter means it is dirty. They also can't seem to believe I can do things alone: yes, it’s been a long, hard battle, but after twenty two years on this planet, I am also capable of toasting bread, boiling water, and peeling oranges by myself.

Second, they clean my room. What am I complaining about? you may wonder, especially if you are my mother. I’ve never been the neatest person in the world, and the room probably needs the cleaning.

Sure it does: tile floors do get dirty surprisingly quickly. I wouldn’t mind having someone swipe a mop over them once a week or so. But the maids do far more than that—they feel the need to tidy. Since I generally do keep my room fairly neat, they indulge their clenaing urges by moving things, rather than actually neatening them. Every few days, I come home to find the door to my room wide open, with the stack of books I had left on the bed suddenly moved to the desk, while the papers that were on the desk are moved to the bed. They mix piles of paper—tenth grade homework wantonly shuffled in with twelfth grade homework—and frequently they change the setup of the room as I liked it. Sometimes I think the next time I come home to find the air conditioning temperature reset, the curtains closed, and my shampoo bottles moved, I’m going to scream. Or throw things. Now that would be a reason for my shampoo bottles to be in disarray.

Third, and finally, the kicker: food. Indonesia is still a scarcity culture—the thin are poor and malnourished, the rich are fat and happy. Having food to offer is not only a sign of generosity and good host behavior, it’s a sign of social status, and, as such, is hugely important. Everywhere I go, I’m dogged by people offering food—at friends’ houses, at school, even after church. I understand the reasons. I know they’re just being nice. That’s fine.

It’s not fine, though, when it’s at home, my one supposed place of refuge. Yet every time I come home, the first thing I hear is a maid saying, “Have you already eaten?” They’ve even given up on hello, just going straight to the food issue. Worse still, there are four, sometimes five maids, and they all feel it necessary to check on my eating habits, which means walking from the front door to my bedroom means running a gauntlet of “sudah makan?”s. Worse still, they don’t believe me when I say that I have, and so then I have to endure an interview, every day, without fail, about what I’ve eaten: what? When? How much? I don’t know why they even bother asking, because their conclusion from the interview is always the same: I must be hungry. I must eat more. I must try the chicken, the fish, and the vegetables. I’ve taken, lately, to sneaking food into my room just so that I have some privacy about what I eat and when—if I eat in the dining room, there’s always at least one maid hovering over me urging me to add more. They also, in desparation to please, knock on my door every hour or so to bring me a plate of snacks. Sweet? Yes. Kind? Yes. Utterly invasive of my personal space and decisions? Yes.

This all drives me insane, in case you can't tell. My eating habits aren’t exactly the greatest, but at least they’re my own; moreover, I resent the implication that I cannot, by this point, figure out when I’m hungry and when I want to eat. I mean, anyone who knows me well knows that I cannot, in fact, figure out when I’m hungry and when I want to eat, but, by golly, it’s my right to suffer hunger headaches and nausea if I want to!

We’ve come to an uneasy peace, though, these past seven months, all of us learning to compromise. They’ve stopped hiding the toaster in the mornings, their initial strategy for keeping me helpless, though they do still hang around and watch me spread the jam on the bread, checking that I’m doing it to my own specifications—"Are you sure you don’t want apricot? Or chocolate? Why aren’t you using butter?" I’ve stopped offending them by rinsing my own dishes. I still put them in the sink, though, which, judging by their faces when I do, causes them endless amounts of pain. They clean my room, but they don’t move stuff off the bed, and I’ve learned to grin and bear it when I come home to find it all in stacks. As for the food, well, that’s still a battleground, though now it's more like a Battle of Cheat Mountain than a Gettysburg. harder. I’ve basically just learned to lie to their faces with deliberately vague answers: “Have you already eaten?” “Yes.” “Really?” “Yes.” “What?” “Food.” “Where?” “Not here.” It may not be terribly polite on my end, but, hey, it’s a compromise: by definition, everyone’s unhappy.

I never thought I’d say it, but I’m looking forward to not having servants anymore. And if I have to eat my words as soon as I get back to the States, well, no problem—at least that way, I won’t be lying when I claim I’ve already eaten.