An ordinary topic with rather expansive cultural implications. Or, Why I eat bananas in the morning and preferably at no other time of day.

  It took the simplest trigger last night (it’s amazing when these realizations are just ready to bubble up from within) to realize why I prefer to eat my bananas at the breakfast table.

  The story starts like this, in the middle, a few very brief moments prior to my realization.  A classmate brought our snacks for the evening (a requirement for each student to receive a passing grade in all of my department's classes), and among them were a couple bunches of bananas.

  I looked at the bananas and the other less healthy foods available and hesitated: I don’t want any more junk food today, but I have such mental blocks toward wanting to eat a banana at any other time of day besides at the breakfast table, and even then, preferably sliced into a bowl of cereal or granola.

  But, I said to myself, I’m sick of junk food today and I would rather give my body this banana despite the modestly impreferable hour at which I am receiving the opportunity to eat it.

  So, I grabbed the banana, and still did manage to take some chocolate as well, and took the food over to my seat to start snacking.  I peeled the banana open, pulled off one half of the fruit to save the rest for later.

  When I was handling the peeled flesh of the banana, one of those little stringy pieces that lie somewhere in between peel and flesh draped down off of the flesh and over my index finger.  I noticed this, and into my head rushed a memory from my childhood of my dad’s hand, holding a banana, with a string hanging down from it, as he sliced the fruit into his cereal.  I realized that I had learned about bananas, and about slicing bananas—how to hold the knife and the fruit a certain way so that each slice would push the previous off the blade and straight down into the bowl, all from watching my parents’ hands, in the morning, making breakfasts.  And then I, when I was ready, appropriated the drill, and started peeling my own stringy pieces off the banana flesh because my parents had taught me that we didn’t want to eat that part.  I would peel the banana halfway down, hold the base of the banana still covered in peel with my right hand (I visually reversed every skill I watched and learned since I’m the only left handed person in my family), hold the handle of the paring knife or butter knife in my left upper palm with my four fingers wrapped around it, and then push the back of the blade with the middle of my index finger, making a flicking action pushing the banana’s flesh into the blade with the pad of my thumb until the sharp side of the blade touched it. With each slice I slid the knife further down the fruit until I got about halfway, arriving at the edge of where the peel had been pulled down to, before wrapping the clumsy peel back over the open fruit flesh for somebody else to take the other half and do the same drill over their own fruit bowl.

  To zoom out a bit from the micro, hands-only analysis of cutting one’s breakfast fruit over a bowl, I realized this morning after having this revelation last night, that it is sentimental notions like this: I see my hand holding a banana, with a stringy attachment draping over my finger, and it triggers a memory that brings the warmth of home, family, the breakfast table, and a parents’ hands deftly fulfilling a task that I wished to be able to do myself—It is sentimental notions like this that are the reasons why we come to expect certain material items—here, foods—to be in our lives in specific ways, used for specific purposes in combinations with limited sets of other items.  For me, I expect a banana to represent not just "food", or "fruit", but rather I expect it to represent the warmth of home and a family breakfast table.  So clearly, if I eat the fruit at a time other than in the morning, at breakfast, sliced into a bowl, the banana experience will just not be quite...banana. For me.

 

 This, in turn, led to a memory this morning taking me back to the streets of Java, where this strange foreigner had a dangerous and unhealthy penchant for eating fruit in the morning.

  My first homestay mother told me that if I started my morning with an orange, I would get a stomachache, despite the many years I had been doing just that only one Pacific Ocean away from there.  My 2^nd homestay host was so used to bules that nothing surprised her.  But one morning, when I went out on the streets desperate to find someone who would sell me a mango, I told a neighbor, when she asked me where I was headed, that I was doing exactly that—looking for a mango vendor—and she responded to me: “Kok beli buah pagi-pagi,” the basic translation of this being something like, “How you gonna try to buy fruit in the morning?” And try as I might to will into existence just one single vendor selling buah in the pagi, I did greatly fail!  There were all sorts of sweet rice and sweet potato treats, fried mini egg rolls, chicken noodle soup vendors (for lack of a better translation), but no buah pagi-pagi!

  Having these memories triggered one after another, and juxtaposing them, has allowed me to realize that:

  Maybe a Javanese person really might get a stomachache if they eat buah pagi-pagi.  And maybe for me, a banana might not taste as good, or just might not feel quite right, if I eat it at 7 at night.  But in both places and for both sets of experiences, it is the social practices that we have lived and learned from others, and recreated in our own routines, that make up what feels right to us, and these patterns, organized around material objects and other social beings, become so ingrained in us that they just come to feel like natural facts.  So much so that sometimes—perhaps most times—adherence to or divergence from these norms can have real physical and emotional consequences.

A story in two parts, with no beginning or end.

Two experiences that have formed my ways of being in and thinking about the world, but that I have had difficulty telling people since they happened, perhaps for fear that they would think I was crazy, in the latter, and silly in the former:

1) When I was 9, I was on a trip with my family. It was at a tourism location where tourists from both the US and other nationalities and ethnicities came. As we stood in line waiting to visit the site, I overheard a woman in khaki shorts and a white tank top talking to one of her accompanying family members in French. I’m not sure if I had ever heard another person speak another language in my presence at that time, aside from the French and Spanish numbers that my mom and I would recite together. I listened to her speak—I saw the sounds coming out of her mouth; the different movements of her mouth when the sounds came out, and I became very puzzled. How can she be thinking one thing and saying another? How can she think in English as clearly we all must, but be speaking in French?

Puzzled, I turned to my mom and asked, “Mom, she’s speaking in French, but what language is she thinking in?” “What, honey? I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking.” “Well, she speaks in French, but she still probably thinks in English, right?” “Well honey, no, I don’t think so…”

Really?

Puzzlement ensued, as I couldn’t really fathom that someone could think in another language than English. It seemed reasonable that we all had all these languages that we spoke in the world—which to my awareness at that time largely meant Western European languages—but we all still thought in English. That part clearly couldn’t be different.

2) I studied abroad for the first time in the summer of 2001, with a group of peer undergraduates, in Avignon, France. The experience of living in another language brought me to life like I cannot even explain in words. In hindsight, I see it as 2 straight months of insatiable enthusiasm. My journal shows slightly differently, in terms of occasionally not feeling like studying for classes, and the frustrations that I had with my peers who I often felt were “lazy” because they wanted classes shortened, breaks more often, etc. But more importantly, I expressed in my journal unwavering enthusiasm, through sickness, health, frustration and excitement, for the experiences of living in another language and another place. I was on like an unextinguishable lightbulb for 2 months straight during my time there.

One afternoon or early evening, I was taking a shower, and all of a sudden, in my pondering to myself as I usually do, I consciously watched a thought arise, I watched myself pick a language to express it in, and then I watched my brain transfer that thought, eloquently or not, into words.

For the first time in my life I was experiencing thought’s separation from language—and as I look at it now, I was probably also actually witnessing what I often deem language’s regular insufficiency to express pure, felt thoughts and emotions in life.

Some might say that I was learning how to think in another language—French, of course—when this happened, but I say I was learning more than that. Yes, I was starting to express thought in another language; but no, I argue, my thought stayed constant. Forever changed by personal experiences as I moved forward in life, but that would have happened wherever I was, in however many languages and dialects I might have known—simply, my consistent thought would have traveled a different trajectory.

I didn’t really tell anybody about this language epiphany; I didn’t even write about it in my journal that I kept while I was there. In fact, the first time I ever did tell anybody about this was to a boy I had fallen hopelessly in love with right before I moved to Indonesia, 8 entire years later.

I think also, regardless of its centering specifically around language, it was my first philosophical/experiential entry into the constant study of self, thought, and feeling—how the three come together, split apart, and entirely interexist despite so many cultural and personal attempts to compartmentalize them.

Languages are not separate entities. They are not entities at all.

One day, I was sitting in my Javanese homestay family’s living room with my homestay mother and father, and one of their children. When she spoke to me she spoke in a highly standardized form of “Indonesian” that I could understand quite well. As she told me a story, in this form of Indonesian, she then turned to her husband to confirm a fact in the story. This confirmation included some banter and joking back and forth between them, but I understood none of it. I had the thought and emotion arise in my head: Why did she switch languages when it is clear that that I cannot understand her? If she were thoughtful, wouldn’t she have maintained standardized Indonesian so that I would not be excluded from this part of the conversation? Doesn’t the world revolve around me?

But then, really, think about it. If I were in a three person interaction with say, my mom, a close friend, and myself; if I turned to confirm a fact that related to my daily life with my mother when I was ten, would I speak in a way that made clear to my friend the entire reality I had lived with my mom? There would be such a large base of shared and assumed knowledge between us at that point, that to make it explicit would probably be a hugely cumbersome task to engage in just so that my friend would be able to understand details that really weren’t necessary for her to understand in the first place. So Mom and I would banter back and forth about some silly situation that we were engaged in when I was 10, and then turn back to my friend and explain to her any holes we thought might be missing that she wouldn’t have picked up on, and then continue with our conversation.

So, I’ve started to notice that what we might call ‘switching languages’, only is from the vantage point of political and standardized languages; these have absolutely nothing to do with the way we speak, though.

The Western physical sciences’ approach to languages has long tried to separate languages and look at how they are categorized and systematized within our imagined, and increasingly imaged, brain structures. Under this system, researchers and theoreticians have generally taken idealized notions of things that they call languages, and dissected them in order to make claims of certain structures of language and of speaking language that our brains contain.

Coming from a totally Western-ideology based society and having lived that discourse for most of my life, it’s easy to just believe and not think about something like this. Of course there are languages. There are languages everywhere. People document them, and say that there are over 6000 languages in the world but that most of them are “dying” and will be dead (a la Latin—no longer spoken or used in conversation, at least outside of a classroom) within a very short time period, due to globalization and increasing technologies of widespread communication.

In the monolingualist culture and belief system that I grew up in, languages were separable entities, all study-able within a classroom setting, and if pursued long enough, they became a ticket for traveling to another nation where that idealized system is supposedly spoken in order to use that system ‘for real’.

So, in the mind of a person coming from such a belief system, it’s quite easy to understand languages as separable systems that can be maintained as separate entities, contained and spread wherever such containment and spread needs to take place.

However, reality on the ground really doesn’t speak to this. It’s long been a point of contention among physical and social scientists that language when it is spoken looks and sounds nothing like the languages we read on pages. This fact of the matter ranges awl the weigh frum spelling kunvenshuns to grammar rules to paragraph and article structures. And when we rely on these conventions to represent our linguistic realities in practice and use, our expectations get flipped upside down a bit. Since nobody speaks the way words are most often written on pages, spoken language becomes a point of contention among those affected by systems of education—the people who have spent a whole lot of time interacting through conventional language written on a page, aka, those with equal access to education, and those who have not spent a lot of time with the written word, aka those with less equal access to education. Within such a societal dynamic, anything that diverges from its institutionalized language use becomes considered not just not normal; it’s just plain wrong. And when you use such divergent forms you look, and sound, uneducated. A most stigmatizing label among many social circles.

So, the Western model for analyzing languages abnormalizes the normal. To “mix” two languages is wrong, or ‘it must be confusing’ for the speakers. Their brains must all be mixed up; when, in fact, it is a reality and a matter of fact that people constantly switch and mix and blend and mold these codes because in reality these codes form one single larger language system that lives within every single living person on this earth.

Some of these individualized language systems consist of only one “language”, take your majority monolingual English speaking populations in the US—anywhere they exist, for that matter. However, even the most monolingual person mixes and switches “codes”. Take a shift from a side-conversation at a table held by tonight’s keynote speaker and his wife, to his move up to the podium to tell everybody about the innovative work he has been carrying out in his career. We may not conventionally talk about this as two different “systems” or “languages”, but in all reality they are. If he spoke in a professional tone to his wife, it would first of all be inappropriate; but even if she got past that, she still might not understand most of the words coming out of his mouth, because they would be, for all intents and purposes, a different language, save if they worked in the same field.

As I’ve begun to spend more time among multilingual populations in the world, I’ve begun to realize that the Western method of splitting up languages is so deeply bound to government—to politics—so deeply nationalistic…I’ve heard this and read about it for a long while now, but I haven’t really easily understood what this means (to revisit an idea from my Feb 14 post). This does not even necessarily mean that this is a “flag-waving” type of nationalism—that every time I put my English language coat on I put my British brooch on its lapel for all to see. But what it does mean is that to think about languages is to simply rename political entities using a language tag. Therefore, when we speak English, we’re seeing a bit of its political history (it was born to the political entity, England) and present (English is dubbed the national language of the US). Same with Spanish: it was born when Spain was born, and now, wherever there is a language spoken that is called Spanish, we can bet our bippy that men from Spain went over and spent a lot of time and accumulated a lot of power in those regions, to the domination of the ancestors of the massive populations who now speak localized language varieties that are called Spanish.

But when we interact through language, it is not our language systems leading the charge, but rather our social systems, within which we appropriately apply words structured and chunked in certain socially acceptable ways. When I talk to my advisor in her office I don’t speak like I do with my friends at a pub; when I speak to my friends in Java I might use words that only we together will know; but I can’t use these words, sentences, ideas, tones of interaction, with, say, a friend in Tucson, even though I might talk to her about the exact same notion. These are our language systems: our personal and human relationships in action.

And I think that in a highly monolingual or monocultural society it might be incredibly easy not to see this fact. But the more and more I spend time in places where people speak multiple ‘languages’, I begin to notice…how much they don’t notice. How hyperaware I am of language as it is termed ‘different systems’, and of “languaging”, as in the act of communicating using language. I’m starting to wonder if maybe my “trilingual” friends are actually speaking one single individually internalized system, that they know as their daily ways of living and interacting with people, but that I have long been trained to notice as a “code-switch” from one language structure into another. Because language X doesn’t have that word, this speaker ‘switches into’ language Y; because the speaker wanted to make a certain social or personal or political point by choosing a word from another language. Really, though, the choice to ‘switch’ ‘between languages’, is only a conscious choice for those of us who have spent time learning languages in classroom type atmospheres. For the rest of us who switch between languages, who have grown up in ‘multilingual’ environments, we’re only navigating our one singular self through our one singular, fluid reality. X is the proper word for this interaction, and I’m going to use it regardless of its political status as language; granted, yes, when I use that word it automatically takes on a connotation due to its political status as identified with a certain language; but when I speak that word I am not speaking ‘a political language’. I am performing an interaction with someone with whom I am in a specific type of relationship.

The point, basically, for now, is that in order to be socially conscious, I think we need to rethink our notions of language systems and of how it comes about that people use multiple languages. I would like to assert that the only time people are really ‘switching languages’ is when they are switching into a classroom-learning-based language, where they intentionally and very consciously switch out of one politically defined language and into another. This is a very very rare situation around the globe; yet it is one experienced and endorsed by many of the most politically powerful people in the world.

It is hard for anybody to understand any other way of living language, but it needs to be given a shot so that we can understand how language and the facts of using language actually occur in this world.

A warm, sunny, piggy Sunday in Chicago.

**And consider this another warning for people who don't want to know about meat...**

Well, every trip has to have it. A successful and impromptu trip behind the scenes of food production.

I’ve been with a few friends in Chicago for the past couple of weeks. Luckily, we all like good food and gastro-tourism, and so we’ve not been holding back—on the food nor the drinks, I must say… There have been many things to celebrate, after all.

We’ve done a tiny bites lounge; we’ve done a gourmet Mexican sandwich shop with amazing local beers; a big Texican restaurant with margaritas that give margaritas a reason to exist, and pork belly tacos so good that the rest of the menu had no reason to exist; and then, this Sunday afternoon for brunch we headed down to a pretty locally outstanding Mexican restaurant named Dom Pedro’s.

The place is completely unremarkable from the outside—just another storefront in a largely Mexican-ethnicity neighborhood—named Pilsen, by one of the previous working-class waves in this area of Chicago. On Sundays, this restaurant stands out a bit more than usual, with a couple of the restaurant's employees working drink and trinket stands out front.

When we got to the restaurant, a few people were hanging around outside; one or two people were walking out from the inside to get a breath of fresh air—from the line that once we got inside spoke to the reason for and justification for which we had made our Sunday morning pilgrimage to Chicago’s south side, a place where we otherwise did not fit in.

On Sunday mornings, Dom Pedro limits his menu to just a few dishes: carnitas de puerco, birria de cabra, nopales, menudo, and tacos de cabeza. That’s right: brain tacos.

When we walked in, a carry-out line reached all the way from the front to the back of the restaurant, shaped by bobbing and weaving among the dine-in tables that seated maybe a total of 50 customers—a post-church rush, I imagined, there for a big, special Sunday meal with family.

We put our name on the list and stood in the restaurant to watch all the action--the large pile of 3-foot long chicharrones that to-go purchasers grabbed at will; the quart-sized to-go containers of red menudo continually being filled; table servers moving apace from table to soda-fridge to food-station retrieving for the diners-in; and every five minutes or so a short man walking from the back kitchen to the front of the restaurant holding above his head a 4 foot by 3 foot tray stacked layers high with golden, oil-shiny, freshly fried tortillas folded in half and pinned together at their rounded edges with multiple toothpicks, in order to hold inside their treasure fillings of perfectly seasoned pig brain. The action was hoppin' and our view was perfect.

Now, I don’t know why and how these situations fall in my lap, but here went another one:

One of the cooks up in the front of the restaurant, as we had briefly waited outside the restaurant waiting for everyone in our party to arrive, had caught my eye as I ogled the tacos de cabeza in the front window. He’d smiled at me, and I’d smiled back. Ten minutes later, as we stood inside the restaurant waiting and watching, I peeked my head toward his station to check out what was going on, with the menudo, the tacos, and everything else back there, and we’d just smiled at each other again and shared some friendly chit-chat. He welcomed me to ogle all I wanted. Five minutes later he was handing our group a plate full of those golden-crisp, freshly-fried tacos for us to snack on while we waited. How nice!

So, the tacos tasted basically like awesomely seasoned, green-chile cilantro slightly spicy scrambled eggs inside perfectly crispy fried tortillas. They were dazzling, and I got to add yet another body part to my list of ‘meats and other animal body parts eaten’. We thanked our new friend and shared among ourselves our appreciation for his generosity, and for the stellar, 10-minutes-before-we’d-planned-on-having-it, head taco experience at hand. After waxing poetic, we went back to people-in-action-watching, until some of the members of our party had a ‘drinks on the mind’ light bulb go off in their heads, inspiring an inquiry to the establishment's management as to whether we could bring beer in, followed by a visit to the liquor store three doors down to bring back some Tecate to accompany our impending dining experience. A few minutes after our beer purchaser had returned, we were seated, and one of our Dom Pedro-experienced team members was ordering for us all the goodness that we could fit on one table.

Unfortunately, there was no room for the menudo this day, but it was really not missed as we ended up with a table-top covered with tortilla containers, bowls of pickled jalapenos and freshly cut cilantro and onions, green and red chili hot sauces, fresh lemon wedges, carnitas inclusive of pig ear and skin, red goat birria, and nopales marinated in citrus and vinegar, with carrots, onions, cilantro and general goodness. The servers brought some cups for the beer, and we were off to the races in our festival of flavors and animal fat. The pork and the goat were so perfectly tender that all of the meat literally fell right off the bones when we tried to pick them up, and for those of us inclined to eat even those bones, they were soft enough that we could chew right through them. The pig ear add a semi-chewy saltiness, and the skin a gooey fattiness. When all three were eaten together, wrapped inside a fresh tortilla, it was indeed like a giant, juicy, flavorful pig in your mouth, giving all other meats and ways of cooking them no reason to ever ever exist again, nor have ever existed before. The spicing and seasoning of everything was divine, and we ate in our little pig heaven, beyond each of our bellies' content.

Now, backtracking to before we were seated, our experienced team members had told me as we waited that at some point I should go look through the diamond-shaped window in the door located at the very back of the restaurant to try to get a glimpse of the cooking in action. As we wrapped up our meal and got ready to pay the bill, I made my way back to try to get a closer look.

It just so happened that my friend from the front of the restaurant was just coming out of that back door at that very time.

“What are you looking for now?”

“Oh I just wanted to see the cooking in action.” *smile*

“Well, if you’ve come this far you might as well just go on in.”

….

Okay.

Meet Dom Pedro.

Dom Pedro has been cooking with the three 100-gallon vats of boiling pig fat that I stood before for thirty years now. As I got back there another friend joined me from the table, and we entered into Dom Pedro carnitas q&a for the next 10 minutes. Dom Pedro started explaining to us the pork-cooking process.

Two vats were filled with pure pig lard. The better to cook a taco de cabeza with, my dear. Now we understood why the flavor was so damn good. As he said, frying the tacos in pork fat is what really brings out the flavor.

Indeed.

So, after a day’s worth of frying, the fat is burnt out and drained from the vats into barrels, and eventually picked up by a person who pays Dom Pedro a very small fee so that they can re-process the fat for some other (biofuel?-related) purposes.

In the third vat that we stood before with Dom Pedro, was a whoooooole big bucket of meat and skin cooking in its own juices, on its way to being called carnitas. Dom Pedro was on his fifth batch of the day, and each takes 2-3 hours to cook to perfection. It was only noon. He said he knows how long each batch will take just by looking at the color and texture of the meat.

On the other side of the kitchen were some more pig skins sitting on a countertop cutting board, piled nearly a foot high and three feet long each. If memory serves me, these guys were on their way to becoming chicharrones.

And since we were already here, Dom Pedro decided,

“Well, you’ve already come this far, why don’t I just show you the rest of the process?”

….

Okay.

So back we went, past a barrel of cold pork fat waiting to replace the burnt fat that would be drained off at the end of today, and into the back garage where about 10 large metal barrels of old pork fat waited to be carried off into their biofuel destinies.

We made our way from there to the chilled meat rack—the animals are all butchered right there, Dom Pedro told us—the goats and lamb subject to an electric table saw, and the pigs all carved by hand—maybe dead on arrival, but otherwise all given expert, hands-on, carving luuuuuv. Pig sides hung at the front of the room, goats and lamb in the back. Dom Pedro pointed us through the hanging pigs to show which body parts become which cuts of meat, and explaining that the meat that lies at the spine, in some seasons he cooks and serves in the restaurant as part of the carnitas plates, sometimes he has his front salespeople just add it on to take-away orders as a free pound or two of carnitas. Not a bad lagniappe, if I may say so myself.

We saw the goat and lamb saw on our way out of the butchering area, and as we made our way back up to the frying room, some young family members ran in to give Dom Pedro his Sunday hug. We thanked him copiously for our impromptu butchery and cookery tour, and made our way back out to our party of full foodies.

On our way out, our beer-purchasing team member gifted my friend from the front of the restaurant the rest of our Tecates, and off we went, in thankfulness and over-satiety, into the warmest day that Chicago has had in months. A quick trip to a local Mexican market brought us some dried chili-mango, -papaya, and –pineapple for dessert, as well as a couple of horchata taste tests, before we headed off to into one of the coolest coffee shops I’ve seen in a while for some work and study time…

The journey of a word

There are a few words in my vocabulary that fit only me. My history. Words where the inside joke is mine alone; or words and phrases that I have picked up along the way to keep certain friends and people with me.

I think it’s very interesting to delve into the history of a word, both societally and personally. I watch words get shaped through somebody’s version of history all the time: I read Merriam-Webster write-ups of word histories, and I watch words in my daily life all around me get created, used, reused, dismissed, appropriated, re-appropriated.

But I was just thinking today: What if I wrote something about the history of a word within one body? Obviously, the experiment would have to begin with my own.

So I take the word “dude”.

There are many words that “define me”, I say.

That’s an interesting way of putting it. Define me.

The reason that they define me is because they are a part of my life experience. Of a stance I took toward or with someone, of a friend I made, kept, or shooed away.

And I think it’s interesting to follow a word through my life; one of those words that I define as “me”, and that quite frankly, if I use individually in interaction with others, will no doubt not be heard as felt, intended, or understood by me.

So I don’t always use these words that I carry with me. Some of them are incredibly vulgar. This is what you get when you live with college-aged boys. Some of them are incredibly peaceful. That is what you get when you live with lovely girls. Some of them are quotes that friends have said, accidentally said, made up and did make sense at the time, made up and didn’t.

But I take this word dude. And it’s so interesting to me to think about it.

Dude.

I’d go look it up in the urban dictionary, in Merriam-Webster, in Oxford, to find out how I should expect you to interpret that word when I say it, but that’s not what I’m trying to talk about here. Here, I’m talking about how that word inheres meaning in my life.

Dude.

So the beginning of its life in me is a fuzzy one. I guess you’ve got Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure…so that’s the hippy/pot-smoking use of “dude”.

It went in and out of use throughout my youth, as far as I know.

But my favorite memory of the word “dude” in use is when I witnessed two adolescent males who were neighbors but not really friends at the time interacting over the placement and correct launching of fireworks in the backyard of my home one 4^th of July. I hadn’t really heard either of them use the word “dude” too much, but I had seen both of them a lot in my life. And all of a sudden in the negotiation of correctly setting off the fireworks without killing us all in the process, they started to say “dude” to each other. Maybe something like, “No, dude, you shouldn’t do it that way. It’ll hit the house.” “Dude, maybe you shouldn’t light that one like that.”

Whatever it was, and whatever was actually said, all I could interpret from it was a large amount of machismo coming out of these two boys in order to demonstrate their power over one another through savvy over how one should light a firework.

I thought it was shamefully hilarious, that these two boys whom I had never ever seen use the word dude, all of a sudden called largely on this single word in order to demonstrate their one-upness on each other. Because I found it hilarious, and I believe I already found the word a little silly before then, I decided to go off and start saying “dude” a lot.

At first, my intention was entirely teasing. But already at that point, I don’t believe that I had had a co-witness at that time—someone who could co-co-opt this word with me in order that every time one of us would use it with the other we would directly know that this use of “dude” was in direct reference to and light fun-making of these two macho-striving adolescent boys. So already now, every time I would go to use the word, the only one who would even get that joke was me. And, I mean, that was enough for me by far, just as long as I could tickle myself; however, it could lead to misunderstandings:

L: “Dude, that bunny slope is so huge!”

F: “Dude, huh? What are you now, a hippy?”

I couldn’t very well respond, “Oh no I’m just appropriating in jest a word that was used in front of me recently by two macho-pretending boys trying to one-up each other in a team task of setting off fireworks.” So I guess I just let the friend keep his/her interpretation of it, or said something like, “Oh no I’m just using the word to joke around,” or something like that.

But then, I so enjoyed saying, “Duuuuude!” that it eventually became a part of my repertoire. “Dude! Look at how big that Hummer is!” “Dude! Look at how hot he is!” “Dude! We should go to King’s Island this weekend!”

In the back of my mind I still knew very well why I was using the word “dude”, and why I had started to use the word “dude”. However, I was now not always explicitly using this word in jest directly at those boys, but rather I was using it as a mildly amusing interjection in my own free speech. So now if I got called out for saying it, I might respond something like, “Oh it’s a word that I used to use in jest at these two boys I used to know, but now I, funnily enough, use it as a part of my own vocabulary. Hehe, funny how that happens.”

I still say “dude”. Probably more often when I’m out at bars speaking very loudly with friends about ridiculous subjects. So it’s still got a twist of jest to it.

But no one, except for the people who read this blog, will know the word history of “dude” as it lives within my body. And they will not know that every time I say “dude” I am practically intentionally bringing up that memory of that 4^th of July night in the early 1990s—it had to have been when Vanilla Ice was popular—when I saw two boys trying to one-up each other by a tree in my backyard and I thought to laugh at them because their behavior, and their use of a specific word to achieve that behavior, was so incredibly silly to me.

When I exclaim “Mother Earth!” I am directly seeing my old college roomate standing in our doorway between our kitchen and our living room, or pulling something slightly burnt out of the oven and exclaiming this phrase as a jesting sign of her slight frustration that she just burnt her dinner. When I say, “It’s all good in the chameleon’s dish,” I see two of my best high school friends creating a “modernized” version of Hamlet with me. When I say another phrase that I am not allowed to write here because it is so vulgar, I directly see one of my old male college roommates walking through our kitchen and exclaiming this in surprise.

It’s fun to think of words and how they live through our bodies. It’s through this that words become the life of a person, and not always the reverse—the life of a person being put into words.

Fleeting, ephemeral, ethereal moments of being Here, There, and everywhere in between.

I started to feel the other day a bit of the “place-warped” venom-nectar of I suppose what I should call “reverse culture shock”.

The only things I had really noticed up to that point were the fact that when I’m “here”, “there” really seems to disappear, and 2) USians are really boring drivers.

--With respect to 2: Really! I didn‘t drive over in Indonesia, but I did ride enough to be able to come back and look at this USian driving culture as almost a reflection of some sort of cultural state of paranoid sterility. Seriously, it’s like everybody’s simultaneously carrying a baby that they’re about to drop, so worried that the person next to them will run into them that they maintain this constant huge distance cum paranoid watchful eye out on the people all around them. This results in: I’m on a three lane highway that looks like it could be 6, and yet traffic remains 3 lanes wide (this part I don’t mind so much) and people drive so slow that I get so bored that I forget to step on my gas pedal at all. And the funny thing is, when I take my foot off my gas pedal, it doesn’t make a difference! I might as well just drive in idle all through town!

And I could rant on and on about the odd behaviors of the middle class USian driver, but I think that this is a topic that enough people have discoursed on. And so I return to #1:

When I’m “here”, “there” disappears. Is this a serious case of living in the present that I’ve come down with? What am I experiencing? I haven’t had a lot of downtime, since I got back to the US, in which I might experience many feelings of missing this or that, or of being grateful to no longer experience this or that, or to just sit and savor being back to experiencing X, Y, or Z (except, of course, for the copious amounts of various forms of alcohol that I have taken special care to savor since I have been back in places where there is almost always some at affordable price and accessible reach), because I’ve been continually moving and settling in now for a solid 2 months. But now that I am actually getting to a place of at least geographical stillness—a place where I can actually consider establishing a life where I am, and taking part in communities where I am--I start to feel this: There is nearly NO PLACE for any of the ways that I am, or the ways that I know, “over there”, “over here”.

It’s intangible, ephemeral, fleeting, ethereal—I don’t know if I can state it eloquently. I just can’t feel the same over here as I did over there, and over there I can’t feel the same as I did over here.

I think that maybe a primary layer of what I was feeilng over there was that I was constantly processing something new—whether that be “Wow this food is freaking amazing! or Stop staring at me! or God it is loud out here How can people live like this? or Do I stand closer or farther than this from him? from her? Why is she joking with me? Is that even funny? Is that the sense of humor here?

But the other part of what I’m feeling so far is that “that” place--that way of being--doesn’t exist here. It doesn’t fit here. When I go there, this doesn’t happen—I mean, there’s certainly not a single ounce of place for “my culture” there, but I still feel like I have some sort of continuity of character: I bring Me to the new place, with all of my Americanisms; all my Laurenisms that I’m not sure if I’m allowed to be loud enough to let out while anywhere there (thank my stars for the presence of another USian with whom to test those boundaries-you-know-who-you-are). I carry/embody a culture that at least somebody there knows something about, no matter how caricaturistic it is: "there", there’s at least some picture there of what “here” is; and plus, since I am “here”, it is never gone from me when I’m “there”.

But what about the the “new me”, the “now Me”, now that I’m back “here”? Where does my “there” go when I come back “here”? Does all that investment I put into making myself into something acceptable “there” just disappear? Just go to waste?

Well, it certainly doesn’t go to waste, but when and where will it start pouring out of me?

When and where will I get to those places where I’m not just scraping through the superficies with people about what I’ve gone through, but rather I’m in a place where those superficies become understoods and the contextualized, felt knowledge starts breaking through—can be talked about?

Well I’ve had 2 of those experiences thus far—at least. The 2 at mind right now are 1) When I got back here, and went to see 2 good friends here who spent 2.5 years in Paraguay, one of them said to me: “So how does it feel to be back in a place where there are traffic laws and people obey them, and where there are police, who are doing their jobs…?

And my immediate reaction to her questions was just a “Wow, there’s somebody here who understands!”

2) My second remarkable experience was a few days ago when I walked into an Asian grocery store, actually on a dare to myself that I could just walk in, find the kim chee, and walk out. Well, throughout my beautifully prolonged failure at that attempt, I experienced a feeling where…it was like there were all these bits and pieces of “home”—“that” home: a certain shortly lived yet highly sentimentally valued home indeed—and they were scattered here and there, in and out among different Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Hispanic food stuffs. But I just got these little glimpses of that other home--one of my other homes: When I see the jar of sambal-that-has-nothing-to-do-in-taste-with-Javanese-sambal, these little comforts of joking around and saying the ulek-ulek song as I learn to make sambal with friends come back to me; while I’m walking through the store, having seen evidence of a few products that approximate Javanese ones, I momentarily dream that while I’m there in the store I’ll be lucky enough to find some kencur and therefore NEVER have to worry about not being able to make an accurate version of Javanese peanut sauce again.

So I experience just these little spurts of an entire world that I live in that is not here—and it’s hard to even feel that world for me here—outside of these little zing reminders, where a flavor comes back, or a joke, or something hilarious that happened, or somebody I learned to cook with… All these little memories hide nestled up in me somewhere. And I’m sure they’ll keep coming out when I least expect them to; and when I elicit them on purpose.

Indian food makes me...

...sad to be full.

I'm not gonna lie: I will turn manipulative in order to get Indian food.

And I'm not gonna lie again: my very first thought when I found out I would be coming to Kuala Lumpur had nothing to do with any sort of historical sightseeing tourism; it had everything to do with getting Indian food and flavors into my mouth as soon as possible.

My limited knowledge of Malaysia consists of their status as being a controversial sibling neighbor to Indonesia (in terms of some recent national identity wars--who owns what cultural artifacts; as well as sharing some ocean-territories...both very interesting topics, but not what I'm talking about here. Because food is just more important right now.); their having very similar national languages--different dialects and different language names--(Indonesia has bahasa Indonesia; the dialect here--aka Malaysia's official and national language--is bahasa Melayu.); and that this is a majority Muslim country, where Christian use of the word Allah for God, when using bahasa Melayu has recently been very controversially banned by the country's Muslim leaders; and where there are three major ethnicities: Melayu (mostly native speakers of bahasa Melayu); Tamil (mostly native speakers of Tamil); Chinese (mostly native speakers of multiple dialects of Chinese?)...

The national and official language is bahasa Melayu, the majority ethnicity is Melayu, the majority religion is Islam, and English is a second national language, not an official one, but spoken by many, and recently used, banned, and more or less used, in the national education system.

So when I got here today, and the Melayu ethnicity guy at my hostel's front desk told me, when I asked him how to get to Little India, that if I went to that area there is a food court in the center of it that sells some Melayu specialties, I started to feel a little bad--I've just gotten here to Malaysia, which claims as its national dishes all these Melayu foods...and yet the only thing I even want to think about is lamb, naan, curry, daal, lentils, coriander, cumin, cardamom, asafoetida, ghee, mangoes, lychees....oh. my. god.

So, as I walked out the door of the hostel I held on to that feeling of bad-personness for about 30 seconds, and then I continued my mission straight in the direction of the Indian restaurants.

And thank the good heavens above that I did this.

Not that the Melayu food would've been bad; I'm sure it's to die for.

But I really don't care about much else in this world other than Indian food.

I read a book in college, that my then-boss gave to me just because she thought I'd like it. It was about an Indian woman who lived alone in some city in the US and owned a spice shop there. At least a third of the book was just about the holy, spiritual, earthly, healing, healthy, loving, giving, caring, memory-eliciting, sumptuous, sensuous, delicious importances of Indian mixtures of Indian spices. I could practically feel the little specks of turmeric entering my nostrils as I imagined myself walking into her store and sniffing a little too hard so as to grab onto as much of that beautiful aroma as I could get, given the ecstasy it induces in me.

And in the US--in the places I've lived--there are Indian grocery stores around...but they still don't have that just heavenly earth-bound aroma that the stores that I walked by today, on my way to the Indian restaurants, send out into the streets. I'm surprised they don't make everyone want to become Tamil.

And then on to the restaurant. I don't know if today is just a special day. I mean, the restaurant was still filled with almost only males until about 2/3 of the way through my meal when a Tamil family of both men and women came in to the restaurant; I stuck out...but nothing--I mean nothing, could stop me from living in and living out the pure ecstasy I experienced upon placing those first bites of Indian spices and sauces into my mouth. Ohhhhh, the cumin, the cardamom, the coriander...I am still such an Indian cooking illiterate, with respect to my knowledge of spices and portions and what's good and not, and the right quantities and not, that I probably couldn't have told you anyway if something was wrong with what I ate; and I can't even describe here exactly what spices each dish contained; but ohhh, everything was just right about what I ate. A lamb curry, the fat in the sauce so screamingly visible yet I did not mind at all, because ohhhhhhh, the lamb. And oops! That little blast of an entire cardamom pod that remained in the sauce as I crunched down on it...the bitterness of some little leaves that I imagine are similar to bay leaves in the US...and did I mention...the cumin, the coriander...In another complimentary sauce in whole seed form; in the lamb sauce all ground up into a fine, thick gravy liquid; another side dish red sauce just because it tastes good with all of this stuff; basmati rice...ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh basmati rice! I love you! An eggplant dish with some black mustard seeds, tasting so fresh and clean perhaps? because of coriander?

I'm just clueless and limited to verbally describing this with the names of only 3 or 4 spices, and many, many oooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhs. But my great goodness, I could not have been happier during those fifteen minutes of filling my stomach with some of the best spice mixtures on this planet.

When I left, after watching the few beautiful women I mentioned earlier walk in, wearing some of the finest clothes I have laid eyes on in a long time, and getting to hear the wonderful sound combinations of some Indian music playing on the restaurant's radio in the background, knives chopping, pans frying, lids clanging, dishes washing, and hearing a language--a couple of languages--that I could barely understand get tossed around, I went to pay my bill, and up at the front desk there were these tiny green pyramid-shaped goodies that I knew were little after-meal something-or-others; I asked the man at the cash register what it was and he just said they were sweets for after the meal...and so I bought one. And as I walked out of the restaurant and started opening it up: two fresh green leaves had been shaped into this pyramid structure--perhaps with a 1-inch or less square base--pinned into its current form by whole fresh cloves...on the inside of the leaves I regret to say that my lack of Indian spice literacy once again fails me...but it was a mixture of candied peel of this, maybe some candied caraway seed, some more this, some more that, some SO fresh goodness I don't even know why gum was ever made...

And then as I walked away and knew that I had a presentation to prepare for tomorrow, I didn't care about anything other than walking through the streets of Little India, looking, gawking, staring, with a huge grin on my face and in my body; watching all these different, beautiful people of different, beautiful colors, shapes, sizes, religions, languages, clothings; and starting to move on from one chapter to the next, out of Indonesia and back on the trail of the happy food hunter and traveleress....