Elle Zed

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

2011-10-29T12:09:00.002+07:00

It took thesimplest trigger last night (it’s amazing when these realizations are justready to bubble up from within) to realize why I prefer to eat my bananas atthe breakfast table.

The storystarts like this, in the middle, a few very brief moments prior to myrealization. A classmate broughtour snacks for the evening (a requirement for each student to receive a passinggrade in all of my department's classes), and among them were a couple bunches of bananas.

I looked atthe bananas and the other less healthy foods available and hesitated: I don’twant any more junk food today, but I have such mental blocks toward wanting toeat a banana at any other time of day besides at the breakfast table, and eventhen, preferably sliced into a bowl of cereal or granola.

But, I said tomyself, I’m sick of junk food today and I would rather give my body this bananadespite the modestly impreferable hour at which I am receiving the opportunity toeat it.

So, I grabbedthe 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 offone half of the fruit to save the rest for later.

When I washandling the peeled flesh of the banana, one of those little stringy piecesthat 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 hiscereal. I realized that I hadlearned about bananas, and about slicing bananas—how to hold the knife and thefruit a certain way so that each slice would push the previous off the bladeand straight down into the bowl, all from watching my parents’ hands, in themorning, making breakfasts. Andthen I, when I was ready, appropriated the drill, and started peeling my ownstringy pieces off the banana flesh because my parents had taught me that wedidn’t want to eat that part. Iwould peel the banana halfway down, hold the base of the banana still coveredin peel with my right hand (I visually reversed every skill I watched and learnedsince I’m the only left handed person in my family), hold the handle of theparing knife or butter knife in my left upper palm with my four fingers wrappedaround it, and then push the back of the blade with the middle of my index finger, making a flickingaction 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 thefruit 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 openfruit flesh for somebody else to take the other half and do the same drill overtheir own fruit bowl.

To zoom out abit from the micro, hands-only analysis of cutting one’s breakfast fruit over abowl, I realized this morning after having this revelation last night, that itis sentimental notions like this: I see my hand holding a banana, with astringy attachment draping over my finger, and it triggers a memory that bringsthe warmth of home, family, the breakfast table, and a parents’ hands deftlyfulfilling a task that I wished to be able to do myself—It is sentimentalnotions like this that are the reasons why we come to expect certain materialitems—here, foods—to be in our lives in specific ways, used for specificpurposes 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 adangerous and unhealthy penchant for eating fruit in the morning.

My firsthomestay mother told me that if I started my morning with an orange, I wouldget a stomachache, despite themany years I had been doing just that only one Pacific Ocean away fromthere. My 2^nd homestayhost was so used to bules that nothing surprised her. But one morning, when I went out on the streets desperate tofind someone who would sell me a mango, I told a neighbor, when she asked me where I was headed, that I was doing exactlythat—looking for a mango vendor—and she responded to me: “Kok beli buah pagi-pagi,” the basic translationof 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 thepagi, I did greatly fail! There were all sorts ofsweet rice and sweet potato treats, fried mini egg rolls, chicken noodle soupvendors (for lack of a better translation), but no buah pagi-pagi!

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

Maybe aJavanese person really might get a stomachache if they eat buahpagi-pagi. And maybe for me, abanana might not taste as good, or just might not feel quite right, if I eat itat 7 at night. But in both placesand for both sets of experiences, it is the social practices that we have livedand 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 cometo feel like natural facts. Somuch so that sometimes—perhaps most times—adherence to or divergence from thesenorms can have real physical and emotional consequences.

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

2011-07-27T12:51:00.002+07:00

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.

2011-04-05T05:32:00.001+07:00

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.

2011-04-05T02:50:00.009+07:00

**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

2010-09-12T12:40:00.001+07:00

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.

2010-08-26T14:13:00.003+07:00

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...

2010-06-15T16:39:00.004+07:00

...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....

The Beauty of Divine Inspiration In Human Feminine Form

2010-05-28T08:56:00.003+07:00

What I take from this year:

Responsibility.

I came here to be a researcher, and incidentally a teacher, too. To be honest, I’ve been a teacher since college, but I’ve never identified myself as one. Perhaps in part because I’ve never been taught or trained to be a teacher. When it comes to languages and language learning and linguistics and words and definitions I have always been a helper to my friends and peers; I have friends and peers who have told me that they appreciate my explanations and breakdowns of books and readings and topics we study because I have been able to give them a clear explanation of what the readings themselves explained in a more inside out and upside down way; but that doesn’t mean I’ve been their teacher, definitely not their “elder” or “superior” (in any of our perceptions) in any way shape or form—I’ve just been their friend, their peer, and someone who likes to break things down in other ways, and likes to help and work together with everyone so that we can all understand and build together.

But I’ve never been a teacher. I’ve never desired to be a teacher. I’m not sure I’m completely comfortable being a teacher. I’m comfortable standing in front of a group of students and making them laugh while learning; I’m comfortable standing in front of people and talking to them about second language learners’ acquisition patterns in their second languages; I’m comfortable being really really really really really excited about Bill Labov’s exploration of the use or not of word final [r] among employees in New York City department stores. Just ask my mom. I memorized the entire study the very first time I read it, and I recited the whole thing to her in a 3-mile walk we took together down a semi-nature path out by her neighborhood. (“[Lauren, I’m very happy that makes you happy. You’ve really taken this love of grammar thing much farther than I ever desired to].”

But none of that has ever made me a teacher. It has made me a person on an adventure, discovering the things that I love at every step of the way and sharing my excitement with people, even when they think it’s silly.

But now I’m a semi-teacher. In a lot of my classes this year the students did the co-teaching; but quite frankly I feel like the classes got a bit more positive responses, and a bit more information got conveyed, when I taught a little bit more as well. I can teach; I dunno how good I am at it, but I can teach. And I can win a Crazy Teacher award.

But the part that I wasn’t quite thoughtful about before I came here was that, when I teach—when I take that sort of “leadership”, “mentor”, “conveyor of information” role, I risk becoming a role model.

I should know this. All the most important role models in my life I have known this way. And these are some of the people that have made me so happy, inspired, driven, desiring in life. And they probably know who they are. But I wasn’t ready to become this myself. Well, I kind of was/am. I know I have a lot to give to this world; I also know that I’m just recently letting myself let go of old fears and start to give it. Stop holding myself back and start acknowledging that I do have a wealth of information to share; I do have an interesting personality to share; I do have a lot of character to share. And more importantly, I can be a role model.

I can finally give back.

And as I come to feel this I think of a particular woman role model in my life. I have many role models in this life, but the one that really stuck for me, who probably without knowing it led me on the path to where I am today, is this particular woman. I met her when I was twenty, and she was just right. She inspired me, and she is someone I will stick with, follow, till the day I die. I have plenty of other inspirations in my life, but she, despite our semi-annual conversations and only seeing each other once every 5 years, she is someone I tick for. I don’t know what that means for her, but it means a lot to me and she is someone I am willing to do anything for; a veritable and unintentional guru, but one who I believe in and I know has always believed in me since the day we met.

And now, I remember where I was at that time—the time I met said guru--, and I am reminded of what I was at that time, and what she was at that time, and I think to myself, Maybe it’s happened to me now. Maybe I have become in some way someone’s guru. It’s only scary if I want it to be, and all I have to continue to do is fully honor who and what and why and how and when I am in order to be the person that [this young woman] fully accepts, perhaps in some senses as her guru. I don’t know what the future will bring. I don’t know if I will become someone so big and important in [this young woman]’s life. But I am ready to take on that role—that place in her life, and it feels real; it feels flesh-bound. It doesn’t feel like some cheesy magical movie, and I don’t have to be anything other than what I am. Not a god/-dess, not an anything beyond a natural, sentient, living, moving, breathing, crying, laughing human being.

These are things I’m able to recognize in my chosen guru—she’s really just a real, flesh-bound, feeling and sentient human being with a real human being’s life. And that’s what makes it easier to devote myself to her. I know that I don’t have to be anything special. All I have to be is myself, loving the things and the people that I love, breathing the air that I breathe, and walking the way that I walk; and it is only when I do exactly this—take care of myself and who I am—that I can become something. I can give to this world; I can become something for someone.

And I think that knowing this: knowing that simply what I am might mean so much to somebody—makes me become aware of the importance of slowness, of thoughtfulness, of sensitivity. Of thinking of the words that I’m about to enounce, because it just might be the case that everything I say has a much larger impact than just words thrown around, bounced around and off of a few people, and then their letters broken apart from each other as they dissipate into space and time. Maybe it turns out that everything all of us say takes on a physical presence in the lives of the people we say these things to and at, and maybe because of this it might be a good thing to slow down, to sense what others around me are experiencing and feeling; to be in tune with that and to then make my decisions to state what I think it is best to state at a particular time, to a particular person, in a particular context.

So maybe learning this recently has reminded me to be more sensitive. To be in tune and in harmony with other people. Because if I’m not, maybe I won’t be the person I want me to be, which is somebody who is sensitive, and thoughtful, critical and constructive, and who has lots to give to and receive from this world and the people in her. Maybe that’s what and who I am, and who and what I would like to contribute in this world.

A little piece of me, as embodied in the particular strokes of guitar strings.

2010-05-18T07:34:00.002+07:00

I just had a guitar moment.

I haven’t listened to the Indigo Girls for 9-10 months now. They’re practically a religious practice for me at home, but I decided not to bring them along with me this year. I brought Ani, and she has remained my religious practice over here, but no Indigo Girls. And recently I wanted to listen to them, so I found a decently fast WiFi Internet connection in town this afternoon and downloaded a short 4+ minute video of them singing Closer to Fine, one of the best songs ever written. I didn’t have time to listen to the song then, but then when I got home tonight, had a wonderful home-cooked dinner prepared by my beloved housemate and –hostess, and then sat down to my computer in order to stare at it until I figured out what I wanted to do right now, I remembered that their video was there waiting for me, and so I decided to play it.

I popped it on, and the song started, and there it was: the twang that I have been missing. I didn’t really even know I was missing it until I heard it, and when I did, there it was. Feelings of plainness that I can inflate into.

This is home. This is culture. Culture to me is when I feel so normal it’s almost boring. It’s my “roots”, all it is is my breath. It doesn’t dazzle or sparkle, wear traditional clothes or taste amazing. It doesn’t necessarily win Grammy Awards or take the world by storm. It consists of a twang. The sound created when two women strum on their guitars with picks in some sort of fashion, or maybe their guitars having some sort of cavity, or the strings of some certain quality, that it’s like no other twang I know. It can only be produced by them, and I know it when I hear it. And all it is is my breath. It’s not spectacular; not everyone likes it; some people even hate it. But it gives me such a source of strength. It gives me my baseline. And it is something that I would never give up, even if I had no one else left to share it with in this world.

That is what culture is.

On finding "selfishness" in its Big S and little s senses.

2010-05-15T09:45:00.000+07:00

I read a quote today about selfishness. It said that selfishness is wishing that others acted in the world in the same ways that we do.

What an appropriate quote for someone traveling abroad. Well, it’s an appropriate quote for everyone, but it becomes so blatantly salient for me as I spend time in cultures that are worlds apart and don’t daily encounter each other.

To live in another culture this different from my own is indeed to understand how selfish I might or can be, or sometimes want to be, or sometimes notice myself being; and it is also to understand how deep, subtle, and subconscious certain elements of myself are which, when brought to the surface I learn are #1 totally culturally created elements of myself, and #2 so often so elusively different between me and the people I’m interacting with; nevermind the meta-psychological game that goes on in interactions, where I react, while trying to figure out why I’m reacting, while trying to figure out why people are acting that way in the first place, and why I’m acting a certain way in the first place, too…Whew, I’m tired just thinking about it. But then again, I don’t just do this meta-thinking when I’m in “foreign” spaces, places, cultures, interactions. I do it nearly all the time. And it can be tiring. On the other hand it can be entirely joyful.

So I admit, I overthink interactions in any language, place, space and time. It’s something I’m sometimes working to overcome and sometimes entirely embracing. But at the very least, I give myself credit for overthinking when I’m in states of cultural re-placement because #1 that’s what I’m supposed to do, and #2 that’s what I want to do. I enter situations like this to think; so to throw that away and ignore what is happening/just happened would be a little bit silly.

And thus: My interactions with regard to desire for control, also known as selfishness: when I talk to some people here I feel like the conversation is going so fast that if I try to hold on to any part of control in the situation I might just get dizzy and pass out. People just jump all over me and each other, at peer level, in conversations here—their speed, not necessarily of speech but of turn-taking in dia-/tria-quatra-logue, is so fast compared to what I’m used to/comfortable with; and being that I am a person whose favorite conversational moment ever in my life consists of a moment where I sat alone in a car with my brother and he stopped for a healthy 45 seconds at least, mid-sentence, in order to simultaneously drive and consider his thought, and we just sat in silence and were together, well I’d say that it’s not just culturally shocking for me to occasionally now be in conversations where 5 people at a time finish my sentences for me; it’s also personally shocking. I don’t do fast conversation, and quite frankly here, I suppose partially given a cultural difference in…trains of thought or sequences of logic or thinking through and producing statements or something? nearly every time anyone tries to finish my sentence for me they finish it in a different way than I come anywhere near intending, or they just finish a phrase for me when I’m mid-story and carry it straight on to another topic that is interesting to them about that, but not at all what I was trying to convey. This is not just a language fluency issue with either me or the people I’m sharing conversation with, as it has happened in both Indonesian and English here; it’s more, to me, an at least partially cultural issue, and yet still not one that’s just between “Indonesia” and the “US”, as it happens to me a lot with people from the same and different cultures everywhere that I go.

When I watch young adults and teenagers interact here I see them conversationally help and conversationally make fun of each other before I would have even had the time to think about what to help or make fun of that person about. There is such strong and fast social controlling, censoring, correcting, helping by peers here that it is absolutely astounding. People here seem willing to help people at the snap of a finger, but often to shame them, in peer interactions, just as fast. There are times when I can see that such constant, fast jumping all over each other provides a function that keeps people tight and intimate as a group; I can also see how it limits them into anything that they might ever want to be that is not approved of or expected by the group, and adheres them to a very tight set of cultural actions and interactions, because it seems like for many/most? of them their own egos/senses of identity are so tied into the group’s way of thinking that if they violate one tiny way of being they are condemned to a life of constant torture unless they leave the group, which, as it provides such a tight-knit community, it is not so easy to leave or to resist from within.

I’m not saying I haven’t experienced this in my home culture/s—I have, and that’s part of why I am a part of so many different cultures—I myself only will hang with them until they start limiting me. Food rules, gender rules and roles, sexual expectations and preferences; it’s just not my bag of chips to set limits, and it never has been since I was a child.

So back to conversation and the topic of selfishness. As I’ve said, this does not just apply to me here in this context; it is something that I experience with people from my own culture and from other cultures within my own community contexts all the time. People are constantly “interrupting me”, as I see it; though they may see it as supporting our conversation. And some days I really get put off and I want to control the conversation; when they take my speech from me it is not okay—how dare you “not respect” what I am saying enough for me to finish my damn phrase?! Let me get the words out first! So after my twinge of anger I sometimes try to control the situation in the form of forcing them to hear me by overtalking, sometimes in the form of just quitting and deciding that it’s not important that I be heard today—I can handle my thoughts and emotions myself

But the only way to ruin the conversation in this type of situation is to try to control it; is to not accept the way(s) in which my interlocutors are trying to help the conversation. The problem is, I still don’t know what way is the right way to deal with this. Do I completely accommodate my interlocutors’ norms? When is it their turn to accommodate mine, damn it? Is the slow person always the one who doesn’t get to pick what the conversation rules are? Or is their increased verbosity and interrupting actually their accommodation in their own speech to me in the first place? Regardless of what the answer is—if this is them having changed their speech/interaction patterns that they’re used to with fellow in-group members, in order to accommodate me, or if it’s that they’re insensitive to the ways in which I speak and share ideas and information and therefore they are perhaps placing more importance on their way of acting in a conversation than on the content that is coming out of my mouth (how much of conversation is for new information and how much of it is for ritual? Would they stick more to their style with a focus on the ritual, but stick more to accommodating if they were focused more on the content?), the worst thing I can do is to try to control the situation. There are many ways in which I have tried to deal with these interactional scenarios, with none of them really consisting of directly asking the person if they could stop interrupting me so much. Part of that reason is that that action risks just creating an ego battle of whose way of conversing is right, and I don’t necessarily agree that mine is. I only attest that I get frustrated with different ways of interacting sometimes. And the other part is that I am in a different culture and am the clear minority here, so I need to be doing my best to learn what they’re doing and how first, before I react negatively or positively, or decide whether or not I want to obey that pattern of interacting.

So, when people interrupt me I have tried: #1) Letting them. Once again, maybe what I say is not that important; maybe it’s simply the ritual of conversing. Maybe the conversational style with some people here is to co-build in this way of giving and taking the story. I don’t understand how to do it myself, but…I think others do… #2) Talking over them back. If they’re gonna talk over me then I’m just gonna keep talking and finish my sentence. Either they’ll stop talking again and listen to what I have to say, or they will keep talking until I stop trying to keep talking.

None of it ever works the way I want it to; but if there’s a “way that I want it to work out”, is that not indeed in and of itself the very nature of the selfishness that today’s quote purported? If I walk into a conversation and already expect us as participants to converse in a certain way, then I am already imposing my norms on the situation, and I set myself up for frustration and fatigue based on the fact that when I carry a certain set of expectations that constantly get broken, then every single time I open my mouth and am either given more or less space than I expected in which to speak, every single time I will have my cognitive social primers jolted out of place, and then, trying to keep them in place, get out of line, out of time, out of whack. Frustrated.

However, since it’s impossible to go into any situation without certain sets of expectations—we’re sentient beings: we need to have primers in our minds so as not to exhaust our mental and emotional capacities within the simple, day-to-day routines and interactions of life—I have to find ways of being flexible in consideration of my expectations or desires, and I do need to learn how to live more and more with less and less hopes and expectations. And this is not a bad thing at all.

But it’s not so simple when I’m living in culture 2 (3,4…). It’s always confusing. Every way that everyone interacts with me is not according to my now-since-a-very-long-time-ago “pre-settings” for interhuman interaction. So those expectations, those safe and work-reducing primes I had, perhaps wrongly in the first place, set on automatic, well now they have to be reset; they’re so easy to cling to—they provide my baseline, my comfort levels. But they’re not useful to cling to. They’re useful to be aware of, very very aware of; but they’re not useful to cling to. And coming to realize this more and more in foreign cultures helps me to also be a better conversational interactress in conversations in what I still for some reason call my “home culture/s”.

A Balinese adventure. To be read in chapters. Only you choose where they start and stop.

2010-05-09T13:00:00.003+07:00

I went to Bali last week. I haven’t come back a different person any more so than in that way that every moment we live makes us different people; I did eat, I did pray, and I did love; I met some very fun and amazing and interesting people; and I learned that I’m not very good at wrapping a sari around my body.

I went to Bali at first for a conference and then to escape from my community civilization in Salatiga for a while, and while every every every thing during this trip went well, I think I will just start on Thursday night, the night before the final day of the conference I was attending.

That night, after having spent a couple days and evenings together, my peers and friends at the conference decided to do our own thing for dinner and thereafter; my roommate went off with a friend who she grew up with who now lives in Bali, and I stayed at the conference hotel for a while after presentations were done for the day to download articles, read, and drink some wine. I then went off and sorta splurged on a pretty nice yet simple Italian dinner on a beachside hotel in Sanur—the same area where our conference was being held. After very much enjoying stringy cheese and roasted veggies bedded within a scratch, thin calzone crust that was about the size of a boat, each bite of that boat just as good as the one before it, with a lovely glass of rosé wine, I went on a nice, slow walk along the beachside path just to softly find my way back home.

Now, most people on this beach path were white—not many Indonesian people in this area of the island unless they’re selling or serving—but as I ambled along I started to pass by a single Indonesian guy wearing a tanktop and casual pants, walking along with a fishing pole. Even most Indonesian people in this area at night, unless they’re trying to get you to come to their shop or restaurant, don’t really pay us White folk any mind, a pretty easy conclusion to draw being that it would be really tiring to yell or stare like they do here in Java, given such a large number of us in Bali. But, maybe because I was walking alone and he was walking alone, and maybe because I was overlapping him but very slowly, when I walked by this guy he said, “Hello.” And maybe because I was so slowly passing by him—we were practically walking together already—or maybe it was because I was so happy to have spoiled myself with a nice, quiet, meal on the beachfront, I said, “Selamat malam,” back. And maybe since I answered in bahasa Indonesia—not many of the White people in that area speak Indonesian—he asked me where I was going. I told him I was going back to my hotel after having left my conference down at another hotel, and we just started talking—first, the same ol’ “My you can speak bahasa Indonesia!”, and then eventually I ended up telling him that “Yeah I’m here for this conference for a few days, but then on Friday I’m gonna leave this area and head up north and east to find a more quiet area of Bali.”

“Where are you going?”

“Ohhhhh, probably to Padang Bai.”

“Oh really? I’m going there tomorrow! Come along!”

…. “…. Really?”

“Yeah, I’m going fishing there tomorrow night.”

…. “…. Um…. ….Well here, let’s exchange phone numbers and if you end up going tomorrow just let me know.”

…So we exchanged numbers. I must openly admit here that, if you are one of a few people who do not know this already, I have an unfortunately great mistrust of males, and an even greater mistrust of those who approach me unsolicited. So I exchanged numbers with him—he seemed like a pretty nice guy, I had a pretty good feeling about him—but I wasn’t quite sure what I would do if he did contact me the next day to go up to Padang Bai together.

We then turned and kept walking along the path together. I found out that he works at a local library, and that he has a wife, something that made me feel safe-er. Before he went to his final stopping point he asked me if I’d like to have a drink. I declined and said I’m gonna go rest at my hotel, and he said “No problem at all,” and then he walked onto the beach and I kept along the path, after we agreed that he would contact me tomorrow if/when he ended up going.

To be honest I hadn’t been 100% sure of where I was gonna go after leaving the conference. I’d picked a couple town names based on a website that seemed pretty trustworthy, and I’d gotten advice from friends who kept giving me the names of towns that had more tourists in them after giving me faces of confusion and consternation when I kept insisting to them that I sincerely sincerely sincerely wanted to seek solitude, away from tourists and tourist places—as much as would be possible in Bali. But indeed Padang Bai was one of the top two places on my list.

The next day came and I had not heard from Gede by about 1:00pm, so I figured “Ah maybe it’s a wash.” But then I finally did receive a text from him, to the equivalent of:

“Ma’am, do you still want to go to Padang Bai? If you want to go I’m gonna leave at about 3:00 to avoid the sun.”

…. … “Yes. That would be cool to join along. Do you want to pick me up at the conference hotel or at my hotel?”

“I’ll get you at your hotel. Meet there at 3?”

“Okay.”

“Okay, see you then.”

“Oh! I forgot to tell you, Gede. I have a couple bags with me. Is that a problem on your motorcycle?”

“Not a problem. We’ll just stick one of them up in the front.”

“Well, okay then. Thanks! See you then!”

And that was that. Gede picked me up a bit after 3 at the hotel I’d been staying at, fishing pole in a sac slung around his shoulder, and we put one of my bags in the front, between the steering column and the seat, and I sat on the back with my bookbag strapped on. He’d brought me a helmet, I put it on, and we were off to the races, starting with,

“So, what do you think about the traffic here in Denpasar? Crowded, huh?”

“You obviously haven’t been to Java…”

We took off out of town, in the early onset of rush hour. He said we’d take the city roads, as they’re safer than the bigger roads (keep in mind, an “in-town” road would seem to many of us from the US as pretty rural; it’s only when you get into the business centers of cities that it really looks to be what I have learned to label as “city-ish”.). So we took these quiet, in-town roads, winding and weaving and turning left and right; the sun had reached an angle so that it wasn’t too hot, and a great wind created by the freedom and openness of a motorcycle ride made the journey downright pleasing.

About 30 minutes into our ride we were already outside of Denpasar and just winding through a smaller rural town when Gede noticed one of his friends working at the front entry to his basket/purse shop. Gede said, “Do you mind if we stop and say hi and have a drink for a bit?” So we made a quick u-turn and stopped and talked to his friend Nening for a while. Nening and Gede used to sing in a traditional Balinese music group together, and they’ve known each other for some time. Nening also shared with us a pamphlet about a charity organization he works with in town, and we generally just had an enjoyable chat and some nice cold bottled water to cool us off. They spoke to each other mostly in bahasa Bali, and then to me in bahasa Indonesia. After about 20 minutes we hit the road again with one last wave goodbye, and off were Gede and I back into the Balinese countryside, having motorcycle conversation all along the way, until we hit the town of Gianyar, the town in Bali known to have the best babi guling [pig spit/rotisserie] in all of Bali. Oh to the yeahhhhhhhhhhh. Oh my goodness.

So you go to the warung babi guling and at this one we went to there’s just a full pig sitting in the window of the stand. Roasted from head to toe, and eaten from head to toe. Next to it are some sausages. One seemed like its filling was at least partially egg. It could’ve been tripe, but I think that tripe is more chewy, and I didn’t ask either way. I just enjoyed. The other sausage was dark, nearly a blood sausage darkness, but still meaty. So on one plate we got the meats, and on another rice, and then in a small bowl a little veggie soup with some pork chunks in it—the green veggie in it was the stem of a banana leaf, and the seasoning was quite delish. But my favorite part of this whole meal was: lawar. Lawar is a dry (no broth, I mean) pork n veggie dish that is Bali only. And it makes me want to move there. And the lawar I had on Sunday on my way back through Gianyar made me want to move there even more. Some people might want to move to Bali because they want to follow some of the Hindu religious practices there, some might want to move there because of the tropical climate or the great diving. But if I ever moved to Bali, it would be because of the lawar. Green beans chopped small, some seasonings which are always too complex and/or foreign for me to get my tastebuds around in one—or multiple—goes, and I’ll just skip straight to Sunday’s lawar to describe: the shredded coconuuuut, and the pork faaaaaaaaat oh my god the pork fat. Salting just right, green + coconut + lard + seasonings = enaknyaaaaaaaa [good-theeeeeeeee]. Oh-my-god-I-want-to-go-back-right-now-just-thinking-about-it.

Anyways, back to Friday evening at the end of the first babi guling go-round. Gede and I finished our pig feast, another favorite part being the crispy skin and fat garnish that comes on top of the meat plate—if I had had juuust a little more salt to dab onto those little crispies it would have been high perfection—I know my aunt is drooling reading this right now—and we hopped back on the motorcycle to make our way to Padang Bai; only, Gede wanted to stop and bring some babi guling to one more friend he had along the way.

We hit a quiet, wide highway at this point, and stopped off for a bit to see a freaking gorgeous sunset happening behind us; kept going, passed by an enormous Hindu temple, this one known for its happy bat population in the evenings/nights, and then we made it to his friends’ home. The home was a pretty typical rural sight—a wooden structure with dirt and cement floors; however, this small shack with dirt and cement floors happened to be right on the ocean. The beautiful ocean. With a black sand beach, a couple mountains on different islands in the distance, a few boats out in the water, a whole bunch of traditional style boats resting for the night up on the sand, and a tide to just add that sound of ocean coast peace to one hell of a view. We hung out there for a bit, had a little Balinese coffee, and I just sorta listened to the bahasa Bali roll off of their tongues with one ear, the crashing of the waves with the other. I wouldn’t mind living there.

Off again we went, with a thank you to his friends, and then we made our way into an increasingly rural, dark, cool, natural, natureful area. Gede stopped once more as we got close to Padang Bai at a streetside fish vendor. Just an adult woman and a young girl sitting on the streetside with a wooden box about two feet high, with about 7 6-inch long fish sitting on top of it. Gede bought one—bargained them down from Rp 7000 to 5000—this was gonna become the bait for his late-night squid fishing adventure to come. And then we finally rolled into Padang Bai.

As soon as we got to the water it was still just a bunch of tourist hotels; but at least they were small, not so mewah [posh], and the streets were quiet; there were very few people out and about. Ahhhhhhhhhh the serenity. We just drove past the beachfront places but there was nothing to tell us that one might be better than the next; so we stopped off at the roadside/marina-side for a second while I opened up my laptop to a list of hotels in the area that I’d already gotten from online. I called the Darma hotel and they had a room available, they gave us directions, and Gede took me to the hotel to check it out. They let me see the room first, and it was just fine; I asked them if it was safe here and they said, “Oh yeah, di sini semua aman [at here everything safe].” And I checked in. Rp 80.000/night for a room with a queen size bed and a full bathroom and a sink, breakfast included; not much more you can ask for! Checked in, Gede and I went to grab a drink before he went fishing.

We walked out to a little gravel “plaza” area, to a small restaurant, and decided to order some arak, which is a Balinese…basically palm wine. I think its alcohol content must be somewhere between wine and liquor, and its taste is just…unique. I can’t really describe it but I imagine that it is likenable to cachacas, for those of you who are fans of the Brazilian cane liquor. This comes from the liquid that comes from a flower? that grows on palm trees in Bali. The liquid can be drunk pre-fermentation, and I’ve had it before—it’s pretty yummy; or you can let it sit for a while, and then enjoy, straight, or with honey, or with lemon or lime, or with honey and lime, which really does make it taste like a caipirinha, and quite satisfactorily so.

While we had our arak and chatted about everything and nothing, Gede’s younger brother stopped by after visiting his girlfriend who lived nearby there. He hung for a bit and then took Gede’s fishing pole out to the pier to get a head start. Gede and I sat and chatted some more until I decided I was ready for bed. One more beer and some coconut-flavored crackers, and Gede went off for his nighttime fishing quietude, and I entered my hotel room for some lovely, quiet sleep.

Technically, that night, I set my alarm to get up at about 4:30 so I could go and watch the sunrise on a hill over the bay. And then I woke up at about 4 just because, and I turned my alarm right back off because while the sunrise sounded peachy, sleeping felt peachy keen.

So after a bit more sleep than that 4:30am wake-up call would have gotten me, I got up, broke the fast, and decided it was time for a walk. I’ll skip the sunburn part and just get straight to telling about the walk. Now, as I’d said before, this trip was for going away, and so I did. My desa [village/rural area] radar homed in on the first rural street I could find, and I climbed the Padang Bai hill up to a great look-out over the bay before descending back onto just a single lane paved road lined with some houses, some people doing some small-scale construction, some cows, a bike or two, some kids coming home from school (I still don’t understand school hours here—it was about 10-11 in the morning), and that was about it. I meandered back, just kept going, figuring, I’ll find my way back to the ranch when I need to. Climbed another small hill after a while to encounter a big pura [temple] on my left, and to my right a path. No more road. Just earth. Just a dirt path. Just a quiet, earthy, dirt, homey path. And so I took it. And I went back on the path with no clue where it went, until…until…I started to hear the ocean. Oh the palm leaves led me the rest of the way, I encountered one young man who either wanted me to go to or wondered if I was looking for the “white sand beach”, but no, no I wanted a free walk and the potential of black sand. I’ve seen enough white sand in my life. I asked him if I could keep going on that land towards the sound of the waves and he said sure. So I kept going, and there it was. The sand started, with a run-down boat or two right at the entrance to the beach, and then holy mother of all, a black sand beach with rocks, and waves crashing up against them, and men standing on them and fishing, and small low mountainous islands to look at in the distance, and that was about it. Water, sand, flora, 4 men fishing, and further down the beach a long row of traditional boats. And me, my feet, and my camera.

I walked. And it was quiet. And it was peaceful. And I put my feet in the water, which was pretty tepid, and I picked up beautiful nature-polished stones, stared at the mountains, at the sun, at the crisp blue sky, at the boats—one with a great US flag with a giant semi painted in the middle of it. And I walked.

Eventually I got to a point where I figured I’d better turn around; I could experiment and go farther to see where the beach would take me, but alas, I was wearing no sun lotion, and there was a lot of sun, and my skin hadn’t seen the sun for about 8 months…and I learned later that evening and for the next few days that that is a formula for sunburn. I didn’t learn it for the first time; but I did learn it for the first time in Indonesia.

So, after taking the same path back home to the hotel, I asked the owners about their sign that said I could hire a driver. Ideally, I could have just rented a motorcyle and gone and wandered around on my own and met more random strangers, but in reality, I don’t know how to drive a motorcycle yet L, so I decided to spend the money on a driver for about 4 hours and go see. Now, with a driver you sort of end up getting a fixed tour, but, it helps when you can share a language, talk about some more real things, and not only enjoy what you’re seeing but enjoy some good conversation and company, too. Talk about family, friends, life in Bali, life in Salatiga, life in the US, babi guling, arak. So, I had a good time with the driver, and he was incredibly friendly, and helpful, and informative; even told me where would be the best place to eat dinner later that night. Yeah, he took me to some somewhat touristy places, but #1, it’s Bali—life has become a tourist attraction there—and #2, the places were damn interesting and beautiful! A “floating palace”: one of the homes of one of the last kings of Bali; a multiple pool garden setting where the former royal family of Bali used to go for refreshing—in a lush, quiet hillside setting that was just serenity actualized; and a village that has maintained its traditional structure and layout and customs—that one seemed the most “set up” for tourists to me, but nonetheless it was interesting enough to see what things are like there. Their entire village is set up “traditionally”, so they say, but I had nothing else to compare it to. It seems that the lives of the people in this village consist of making cloths and carvings for tourists, and carrying out their regular set of village religious rituals, raising children, running the village, and roasting babi guling in a pit at the meeting “yard”. That part looked yummy.

Back to the hotel in the evening, I thanked Made for driving me around and we agreed that he would take me back to Gianyar the next day to look for some statues/carvings I wanted to find before heading back to Denpasar to fly out the morning after. Shower and dinner at the hotel followed by a lovely tuna curry at a restaurant that Made had recommdended to me, with an arak caipirinha to drink, and then off to the peer to read more on how to be a yogi.

I went back to the hotel, and I set my alarm for about 4:30am, once again with some sense of a desire to see the sunrise over the bay. And then I woke up at about 4 and turned my alarm off, once again finding the idea of sleep and not running around all over the place much more appealing than getting up.

Having enjoyed another nice night’s sleep, I got up and just had a slow morning. Breakfast, coffee, at the hotel, and then to a small restaurant that had WiFi and more coffee. Hung, read, and WiFi’ed until noon when it was time for Made to take me patung [statue]—and babi guling—hunting.

Babi being the most important goal to achieve, we went to the same street as the babi guling I’d hunted with Gede, enjoyed ourselves some pig, and then we went on to the patung search. Made took me to some pretty fixed shops that are explicitly touristy—most even marked in USD and not in Rupiah, and at prices that are comfortable Indonesian people’s monthly or bi-monthly salaries. But it turns out, if you can speak bahasa Indonesia and chum with the vendors for a while, you can get a hefty, hefty discount…

And then Made finally took me to a taxi area, and the taxi driver took me back down into Denpasar to look for a hotel for the night before I would fly out the next morning.

And this is when I finally went to Kuta.

I have never had any desire to go to Kuta. It’s like the idea of going to Cancun from the US. Why would I do that when I can go get drunk for much cheaper in my own backyard? But alas, a lot of people like it, and when we got to Kuta, it was indeed a lot of people who liked it. Topless guys with 6-packs, street vendors galore, traffic jam traffic jam traffic jam; and yeah there were cheap hotels there, but I wasn’t really in the mood for that atmosphere. So I paid for a bit of a nicer area, finally got a hotel room, went and read over a glass of wine at a restaurant across the street, went dinner hunting and ended up with an average plate of nasi goreng babi [rice fried pig], and then went back to my hotel and Gede came over to share a bottle of Balinese wine that he’d bought as a farewell present for us to try together—As far as I understand, there are vineyards in Bali that have been started by European people. The wine is really not bad at all. I didn’t get the chance to look for some in a shop and compare prices with imports, but for a daily wine it’s really quite nice.

So I enjoyed my final evening in Bali with good wine and conversation with Gede, and then he went his merry way, I went to bed, and really did get up early the next morning, to fly straight to Jakarta, and then taxi straight to government offices and haggle with them in efforts to take care of visa paperwork, then go to government language and education offices, hang out with Australians, eat goat sate and lots of it in all its glorious meat and peanut-saucy goodness, visit more government offices, hang out again with Australians, and then take an overnight train trip accompanied by an Australian, back to home, where I would proceed to sleep. A lot.

Overall, I would say that my trip to Bali + Jakarta was a good one.

Yep, a very good one.

sensational elicitation, via olfactory organs, of childhood memories (commas in place lest there be parsing difficulties)

2010-04-12T19:54:00.001+07:00

When I get to the bottom of my es jeruk, and all that's left is sugar crystals and huge hunks of ice, I remember being a kid, waiting for my mom to finish up her tennis match at the club. While I wait, I go to the club's kitchen, fill a styrofoam cup with ice, pour on top of it either fake or real sugar (they say you shouldn't gain weight, you know), and enjoy a sweet, cold crunch.
This memory makes me happy, so I put my spoon again to the bottom of the liquidless es jeruk glass, and I scoop out another sugary sweet chunk of ice.

ribbit

2010-03-30T08:35:00.002+07:00

Well, you would think that having lived in France, the land of the grenouille, for over a year in total, I would have already gotten this into my system, but hélas I never got the chance while I was there. It's just not a very common food. And here, it's not an everyday meal, and it is pretty expensive, but! Everything must be tried. So!

Last night was yours truly's first adventure in frog feasting. Now, just like we in bahasa Inggris [language English] have one word for an animal (cow, pig) and a word borrowed from français for the food (beef, pork), the Indonesian, or at least the Central Javanese, have a word for frog-the-animal (kodok) and a word for frog-the-food (sweeke/swike, pronounced SWEE-kuh), the latter being a pretty clear leftover from 300 years of Dutch love (of their spices and perhaps sometimes their women).

Last night, Dyah and I went out frog hunting, and thank goodness in this modern era we were able to hunt some down at a warung makan swike [vending place eat frogggg]! We ordered one dish of fried and one dish of kuah [broth], and a plate of rice each.

Mmmmm, mmm mmm mmm mm! The fried one didn't really have much to it--just the back half of a frog dipped in salted flour and fried up to crispy perfection, so that the fried dough and the frog flesh itself could share starring roles. The kuah version consisted of fried slivered garlic and crushed boiled garlic, as well as a sauce called tauco (TOW(like "Ow!"-cho), which is made of basically the mold that grows on tempeh/soy beans if you let them keep fermenting for a while, and a couple of other ingredients that I'm not perfectly clear on. The broth's flavor was super strong--but that's not really a new thing--a lot of sauce flavors might tend to be a bit strong here, but they're usually softened with the rice.

The flesh was somewhere between shrimp and white fish--more firm, or meaty, than a white fish would be, but the flavor wasn't quite shrimpy--more fresh-watery, I guess?

And the great thing about eating here is that people still tend to enjoy knowing that their meat comes from an animal--thus, often, when ordering a chicken leg, I can get it with the foot still attached; when I order any fish it comes in full body; people eat chicken heads, too; and when you order frog, while the skin has been removed, the feet sure haven't! I never knew froggies had 5 toeys. How cute! And delishus! All at the same time.

So! That was a nice return to Indo food testing after having had a fabulous bule [white person] food and wine night with a US couple I'm friends with here--roasted vegetables, balsamic vinaigrette, *homemade* rosemary foccaccia, fudgy brownies, French tartelettes, pasta, *cheese* (the best we can get here)....and good ol' discussions of how foreign we are here and how similar and different we are anywhere. What a good couple of friends.

My belly and mind are happy, satisfied, and constantly provided with something new!

Today's Sightings

2010-03-25T17:09:00.001+07:00

A smoking volcano; rice with its skin/shell still on it drying on tarps in the middle of the road under the sun; a flowing, clean river; a man wearing a traditional farmer hat and carrying a whip to control his plow-pulling bison after they walked home down the street after a long day in the sawah; sawah themselves; durian being sold on the roadside; rambutan in a plastic grocery bag; a traditional Javanese mortar and pestle being used to grind the peanut sauce with natural gula jawa [sugar Java], orange leaves, chilis, and of course peanuts, for my lothek lunch; enthusiastic elementary school English learners; enthusiastic university level English learners and teachers; and multiple computer screens.

You can't run away from yourself, because wherever you run, there you will be**. Or, A story from a not-so-alone travelleress.

2010-03-22T16:17:00.009+07:00

Throughout my living-abroad life, my modus operandi has been one of me putting myself into as many non-English situations as possible. I simply had always thought to myself, before this year, that my goal was to "simply" immerse myself in the language and the culture of the new place I was in. I wasn’t ever in that new foreign place to speak English, to “be American”; I was there to be “not American”. I could go back to “being American” when I went back to “the place of Americans”. As it turns out, it was a little bit easier for me to fake my way through abandoning being American when I was a White USian living in a majority White French culture, as I was in my previous 1-year-abroad go-round. But I have now found that if I live in a nearly 0% White culture, tough shit; I am at once very much “my culture”, and I also am assigned an entirely new definition of what "I am" by the members of the new culture I’m in, whether I want to be or not--and quite frankly my only choice within these new labels is to learn to want to be these labels, and then perhaps to even learn to love to be them (Catch-22 to arise in the reverse culture shock sequel to this story, in which I return to the US to find myself less and less a part of this "same" culture that I am becoming more and more of right now), instead of continually trying to find ways to resist, control, change them.

I, with my idealistic and ridiculistic intentions of “becoming Javanese and/or Indonesian” for a year, live through constant reminders of how different I am here: on the streets based on my physical appearance, and in interpersonal relations in just about every context into which I enter, I am constantly having to figure out who the hell I am and what the hell other people think I am, and in general, what the hell is going on.

And because of this constant confusion, one thing that I’m finding out this year is that I am becoming more and more of “who I am”, which brings us to the paraphrase title that I have assigned to this blog entry: “You can’t run away from yourself, because wherever you run, there you will be.”

In the section of Javanese culture in which I find myself, I have found that for myself personally, I struggle huge amounts to pretend like I can or even want to play by the rules of Javanese culture. Between the ways I was raised by the village, by my family members, and through the choices that I have made in my own experiences, “who I am” is perhaps the exact opposite of nearly every rule in this culture; down to the very genetic fact that I am left-handed and in this culture it is very rude to use your left hand for most things interpersonal or food-related, and up to the fact that few girls play sports, no girls play soccer; people don’t go out walking in nature just for leisure; no nothing takes place in “direct” speech—most questions and uncertainties that person A has toward person X are addressed by person A with persons Y,Z,Q,R,T...—never with person X him-/herself; girls aren’t supposed to be outdoors at night; 20-something boys take over on the basketball court without even inviting the girls to play, during a co-ed event no less, and many of the girls are afraid to stand up to them and say something, and the boys, even though I’m sure there has to be one or two in there who would care to allow the girls to play in that first (decided-by-the-boys, and by-the-girls-complicitly) boys-only round, never speak up and say so—they just don’t look our way at all and start playing their game.

I have no incentive to become Javanese. Everything that it is to be Javanese is the opposite of me, goes very much against my beliefs when it comes to being a woman, being a female in this world, being a superior/inferior/equal, being a guest, being a host, being anything at all. I don’t know how much, while here, I have ever really necessarily tried to be Javanese (like I could much more likely be said to have tried (and perhaps to have mastered ;-) ) being française), and I do know how much my difference is constantly either pointed out by others or is simply incredibly evident within my own mind and experiences. Every thing about the ways that I have lived here has been different from any other experience in my life, and there is no tool or training in the world that could have prepared me for that.

What led me to the title of this blog entry was the following: I’m not so sure how I would have been able to realize how different I am, and the ways in which I am different, and to come to grips with how different I am and this is—I’m not so sure how much more or less confused I would have been--were it not for my interactions with fellow similar-to-same culture members who I have developed very strong friendships with while here.

To preface the following expoundation: I always understood “that” immigrant communities easily form everywhere where there is a group of immigrants to a place. I always understood, theoretically, why immigrant communities form: “because the people in them are from a ‘same’ culture”; a ‘same’ culture which is different from that of the cultures of the place into which the people of said immigrant culture have moved. It’s simple enough, really: I moved to the US, you moved to the US, we look the same, act the same, walk the same, talk the same, so let’s be friends.

However, when I myself have lived abroad, voluntarily and for temporary stints, I have previously had no desire nor intention to create my own community of foreigners; I have, rather, had a desire to join the communities into which I have moved. I never have fully joined them, though, in the ways that I had planned to. I never really became French; this can be proven by the fact that I can count the amount of times I have shared an emotion with someone French in France on less than one hand, if not less than one finger; and that many, many things about France remain novel and incredibly exciting to me. I have a healthy serving of close friends from my experiences there, and the one of them with whom I feel most emotionally able to share with, I communicate with in French and English; and quite frankly when it comes to that time to really express myself, even if it’s just that I need a certain little saying in my first language, there is nothing that keeps me from keeping it in English instead of trying to put it into my non-native French.

So, come back to me being here in Java. With my “foreign” friends here—all of whom live in Anglo countries and only one of whom was not born and raised in an Anglo country—I have had some of the most heart-connecting, soul and brain detoxifying moments that I have ever had in my life. With my Javanese host families I have been through just about everything, from being confused, to finally getting jokes, to taking the risks of asking them why they and their families’ marriage practices are certain ways, to being taken to the hospital by them in the middle of the night, to cooking with and for them and regularly receiving their cooking for me, etc. But nobody ever gets any of what is going on on my side of the picture, or why I think, or act, or react the ways I do--perhaps including myself--until I am with my foreign-and-mostly-Western friends. It’s not nearly as easy to laugh about things, or to even understand that I could or should be, until I get with my bule friends to talk about it. Until I get with them and take the big risky step of “sounding like I’m narrow minded” by opening my mouth and saying “Oh my god I can’t stand it when…”, or “Oh my god I don’t understand this…”. or “Oh my god why is X like this…” And then, when I start to cringe for the awaited “What are you doing in a foreign country?” scold, instead I get, “Oh my god you feel that way to?!!?” or “Oh my god let me tell you my own story about that,” or “Oh my god the infrastructure really is that bad here,” or, or, or… And it’s at times like that that I not only learn that “I am okay” (from another person’s point of view, and only maybe), but I also learn a little bit more every single time we share together about “Who I and we am and are”.

You can’t run away from yourself, because wherever you run, there you will be. Myself is reflected with everyone with whom I interact, but sometimes it takes time and conversations with people from the places in which I was “made” to allow me to step back together with them and to realize who I and we really are, now that I and we know that I and we are there experiencing something so incredibly different from us, together.

I have learned, by sharing with my fellow bules, about how we walk, how we talk, how we interact, what it means to feel like a fish in water, a fish entirely out of water, and a fish within some water within a tank that is filled mostly with not-water. And it is this third option that has given me such “cultural relief”, and such true learning of what it truly means to form a community of immigrants from a similar-to-shared cultural background within a place. Such sharing and shared recognition has enabled me to realize that not only is it okay to be me and express myself within a certain place, or any place for that matter, but quite frankly it is often not even a choice.

**When I was in middle school I made a set of 2-sided, neon-posterboard background posters that I hung from my bedroom ceiling. The posters consisted of quotes that I'd retyped and printed out, and magazine images that I'd cut out, of all of the stars I most admired and drew inspiration from at that time. When I made the posters, Janet Jackson's album If had recently been released. Out of the whole album I pulled out one quote and glued it onto one of my posters: "You can't run away from your pain, because wherever you run, there you will be." That quote has been with me throughout my life since that time, and it serves me as a constant reminder and a severe waker-upper at times. I found its adaptation into this entry's title to be very appropriate to the discussion.

My new warm blanket: the desa.

2010-03-16T11:07:00.004+07:00

I live in a small town in Central Java. The biggest university in this town is known for its ability to attract Indonesian people from all over the country, and even to attract a few foreign students and teachers. There is a large and growing Chinese-Indonesian population in this town. There is also an International School that hosts students and their families who come from multiple nations (Digression: A friend just informed me that Indonesian kids are not permitted to enter this school. They may only be admitted if they have an Indonesian mother and a foreign father. If the vice is versa, you’re still too Indonesian to be allowed in…).
So technically I live in a very diverse area. But I think my idea of diversity just doesn’t really fit this word once it’s transferred to a context like the one I find myself in now. To me, I guess my definition of diversity prior to living here was what I had made up in my own head from my own life in Western countries. I have lived in some pretty majority-White places; but one thing that I have never ever experienced in my life is being surprised to see someone whose skin and body shape and size looked a little different than those in the majority population, or noticing them being surprised to see me. So this is how it was until I got here. I didn’t ever ever in my life have to face the idea that if I would go somewhere, if I would walk out of my house, or sometimes even if I would stay in the house in which I live, I would be the different one. So noticeable that only those who have known me for a decent amount of time, or who are truly used to seeing foreign people here, do not comment and stare at me when I walk by them. Those used to seeing me, or to seeing foreign people in general, just share a typical friendly Javanese greeting with me, asking me where I’m going, and then we both go on our merry ways.
The rest of the time, however, I range from feeling just fine and not “called after”; to becoming the laughing stock of a group of people sitting together on the streetside; to being badgered to buy food or other goods that someone is selling; to receiving a friendly “let’s welcome the stranger” greeting; to people holding up their babies’ hands to get them to practice waving at me, the foreigner; to having groups of kids who cannot control a single ounce of their excitement at seeing a foreigner yell at me at least until I’m out of sight: Hey mister!!!!!! Londo londo!!!!! How!are!you! Good evening! Bule bule! Miss! Miiiiiiiiss!
So this is the street culture that I have learned to exist in over the past seven months. When I’m tired, I’m not quite sure I want to walk out that door in the morning, and for the rest of the time, I just walk down the street, greet those that either I feel like greeting or who I feel safe greeting, or who seem like they are greeting me genuinely enough for me to want to respond to them. More and more I practice giving my own smile to people, since I receive so many while walking down the streets here; and sometimes I receive a smile back, sometimes a blank stare, sometimes a grumpy frown. So that part’s not so different from my home town(s).
Today, however, I got on a small local public transportation vehicle the route of which goes pretttty far to the outskirts of Salatiga. The mini-bus/-van got filllllllllllllled to the brim; and when I was sitting in it waiting to leave the center of town, a pair of bapak [men] stared at me, looking directly at me while I was looking directly at them, having absolutely no problem carrying on a conversation that was clearly about me, while I was looking at them looking at me and talking about me. (I still don’t understand why they can’t just tanya langsung [ask directly]. Maybe I really do need to start saying: Pak mau tanya apa tentang saya? [Sir want ask what about me?] Maybe that would be the polite thing to do; or at least maybe it would help me feel like I had more control over the situation. However, when I do finally get up the gall to ask questions like that, the people staring at and talking about me often just laugh and consult with each other about the situation for the next hour. I often wonder if they ever really intend to respond, or if they really are consulting with each other to come up with a team response to offer me.) A couple of people in the angkot looked at me, a little girl stared, and none of us interacted with one another this time (sometimes people ask me a question or two, but mostly we just have staring parties. Sometimes I want to ask them questions when they stare at me like that, to make us both more comfortable, and sometimes I do; but I really think that I am the only one who is uncomfortable in these situations in the first place.). The bus filled more tightly packed than I have ever experienced before, and we headed out of the center of town, only to welcome a couple more people into space-I-did-not-know-existed as we got farther out into the desa. A few men hung out of the side entrance door of the angkot, kids mushed into the middle aisle, and it was an all-around squeezy love fest.
But something in today’s angkot ride made me so much more comfortable than I have ever felt on an angkot ride before. People stopped staring at me, and what with all the mushing, they started in on a friendly conversation among themselves; all in uninterrupted Javanese; not a word of Indonesian spoken, and if they talked about me, which I think I did notice them doing once or twice, they at least made it subtle, not full of jokes and laughs about how I wouldn’t understand or how I looked, or what I must be doing here—it was like, when they were talking about me, at least they were politely talking about me (this all being from my perspective of the matter, of course.). But for most of the time, they just shared what seemed like to me a moment of community; of being people of the same town, who all share a common lifestyle to an extent and can just share about how the rain is coming down right now—the simple stuff of day-to-day, shared community life. They all smiled and laughed and joked together, and they did most of it in bahasa Jawa kromo, the “polite”/formal way of interacting among adults who aren’t necessarily close.
And the feeling I got out of being a part of this bus ride, not participating in this in-group community member conversation that I was witnessing, the thing that I enjoyed was that I could watch their daily lives go on—I could witness something “normal” here without my presence “breaking” its normalcy.

Why did it feel so comfortable?
I often feel like, when I walk down the streets in town, in terms of language I am a freaking English magnet. When I walk by people, the little iron flecks of English language they have ever learned—and if not English language then the labels that they have learned and chosen to apply to people who look like me—come flying out of their mouths and onto my skin. I break every situation of normalcy that there ever ever was in this town. Just because of the ways I look and walk.
But today, on the bus, it was not that I fit in, but perhaps exactly the opposite of this: that I fit “all the way out”; they didn’t mind me there, nor did they pay me any mind. If I had asked them something I am sure that they would have been happy to answer me and enter into a conversation with me; but I didn’t, and they didn’t, either. I imagined that if I had landed down in a community of theirs, where there was no “English language”, where there was very, very little foreign traffic, then if that had been the situation, I would have been able to have been immersed in and welcomed into “their” community, with no need for being accommodated to, with no people assuming I couldn’t speak their language and then being so surprised when they hear me use one of the languages that are spoken here that they laugh so loud and for so long with their friends, in some kind of what looks through my eyes like weird embarrassed awkward laughter, that they still don’t talk to me because by the time the 5 minutes they have taken for that laugh with friends are up I’m already gone or no longer interested in waiting for a conversation to ensue. I feel like with these people today, there wasn’t that laughter, and that laughter couldn’t have happened, perhaps because within their communities there really is no common foreign outsider; fewer "assumed" characteristics about such foreign outsiders; no English language; there’s even very little Indonesian; and the little exposure they have to the former (English) might come only through their TVs in brief catch phrases, exposure to the latter (Indonesian) coming through the medium of their TVs, maybe newspapers, and from their needs to sell at the pasar [market].
I guess, at that moment today, I just felt the comfort of not bothering a group of people’s daily lives for once. And it felt like a warm, cozy blanket that I could sleep in forever.

Kesopanan [Politeness].

2009-12-30T17:12:00.010+07:00

Among the magical things that you will never figure out while you are here in your one-year holiday spa treatment of cultural infusion at megaspeed rate with little understanding of most of the language variations spoken in front of you is: politeness.

Politeness is one of the most variable things in the world. While there are the semi-universals: don’t hit….uh, don’t kill…I guess I can’t think of much else that’s really truly shared across humanity; and quite frankly I don’t dare generalize anything that widely other than, perhaps, that we are genetically born with (hopefully) lungs and are (hopefully) supposed to use them to breathe.

I try my own best to be as polite as possible here. I know the rules that Indonesian-arrivers-from-among-the-people-I-came-here-the-first-time-with were given: just simple things like When you go into someone’s house when stopping by, don’t sit till they tell you to sit, don’t drink till they tell you to drink, don’t eat till they tell you to eat. But when they do tell you to sit, drink, or eat, please do it. And do it a lot. It is how you show them that you appreciate what they have offered you.

If you eat at someone’s home, finish what is on your plate. Don’t make your host think that you don’t like what they have prepared for you.

Don’t stand with your hand on your hip. It could be taken as aggressive, or just plain rude.

These are maybe the “Culture with a big C” rules. The stereotypes, that are safer to follow than not when you first get here, but that can be found to be quite variable among people with that thing I keep coming back to (see “On the Culturo-Psychologically Created Nature of Taste, Food Combination Discretion and Satiety”, section “Am I a caricature or is this Real?” below), cultural membership/ownership.

But once I got here, there were a whole lot more new politeness rules to figure out than just these general guidelines above. Here--or anywhere not in one's 'mother culture(s)'--life is entirely interactionally different. What happens at the moment at which I come across someone on the streets, in their own home/someone else's, whom I know/don’t, who is male/female, who is older/younger, who wears a jilbab/doesn’t, who is a foreigner/is not, who is Javanese/from another island in Indonesia…

Lean in Together

As I was walking along a street this afternoon, giving the brain as much of a respite as it gets in a foreign land, I engaged in a routine interaction where I came across a woman perhaps in her early 40s, short (relative to me? or relative to Javanese people? Definitely relative to me. I think she may have qualified as average-to-short as per local sizeness.), with short black hair, jeans and a horizontal pastel-striped t-shirt on. She was packing something into the back of her car with a person who I assumed to be her husband. As she saw me pass by and go to say hi with my slight Javanese bow she smiled, made a slight verbal gesture ("o yaaa"), and with a brief giggle bowed her head slightly forward and the front of her chest in and down, slightly toward the ground and slightly toward me.

What made this specific encounter today special was that I at that moment had the clarity of mind to realize that we should lean in together. I always understand here that we bow a little bit when we see each other (but we don't bow to everyone; as far as I understand, it is for people we are specifically showing respect to—elders, co-adults at times, depending on the context), but it’s hard to understand why we bow. And so if I bow my chest down a bit it rarely feels like a genuine connection-making gesture for me--I'm just playing the role of what a Javanese person does; but with that move itself I'm not actually greeting him/her with any feeling similar to that with which s/he might be greeting me.

My first internal reaction when someone bows or lowers their head when they greet me is often: “Would you stop doing that?!?! We’re peers!” or “Would you stop doing that just because I’m a foreigner?!!?” (this is from my pretend imaginatory ideal that I can magically drop down in the middle of this group of people and subtly just poof! become one of them!, and from the fact that the ridiculosity of this ideal is constantly shoved in my face as I stand out like a sore thumb here and many people here are happy to stare and comment at sore thumbs). My next reaction, when I'm in a good head space, is: "I really appreciate that you're showing me respect. I hope that I can show enough back to you." I generally bow back--or even am the first to bow--in any case; I just don’t really know--like know, deep down on a personally/sensationally meaningful level--what that bow really means.

But today, I felt it: when I and this "ibu" greeted each other on the street, as strangers and fellow ibu, or adult women, we leaned in together. We did it to sincerely show each other that we were sharing this space, and this life, and that we welcome and respect one another as residents/cohabitants here.

So,

A simple greeting on the streeet. Simple enough to learn, right?

Well, it has taken me long enough, and the rules of interactional politeness get way stickier.

So, to begin with, the easy stuff:

--Students greet me with many, many student-of-foreign-language-familiarness variations on “ma’am”: (Mam, Ma’am, Mom…), or with Miss, or Miss Laurent, or when I tell them for the 5^th time that Laurent is a French male and I am a female from the US, perhaps with French cultural heritage but nonetheless not French and not a male, Miss Lauren. They will never greet me as just “Lauren”, no matter how much I offer it to them, because even though we are supposedly in an “intercultural” department, what with it being a place where we teach and learn a foreign language and attempt to learn about foreign cultures and attempt to share our differences, we are still in Indonesia, and on the island of Java, where in general youngers do not call olders, and students do not call teachers, by their name only. Understandable, fine, we’re on “your turf”, so you can call me whatever you want.

Except Laurent.

--Don’t use your left hand. It’s really impolite. I have noticed, to this date, one left-handed born-and-raised-in-Java person here so far. I am left-handed, and will not be switching my hands in order to place a fork in the right hand and a spoon in the left just to follow suit, since both hands at that point are being used to hold utensils anyway; and I won’t write or throw things (when does that happen around here? Unfortunately for my softball teammates, my throwing arm may be a bit out of shape when I get back to you!) with my right hand; but when I eat touching the food directly with my hand, I will use my right hand only, a shift from my occasional tendency to use my left hand in certain hand-eating contexts in the US, unless certain people slap me on the hand for doing so you-know-who-you-are; and when I shake hands I will certainly always use my right hand. One time I caught myself doing something so natural to me when somebody stuck his right hand out to shake mine: my right hand was very full of stuff, and so I immediately went to turn my left hand sideways toward his right and shake it ‘as best I could’ considering the load I was carrying—and then right as our hands came close to meeting I realized “Oh no! I can’t do that here!” Too late to withdraw as our hands already touched, but a semi-embarrassed attempt to clear the right hand and re-offer it was made, though it was too late as he had already moved on, same smile on his face.

It’s at times like this that I really hope the clumsy foreigner card gets me out of the situation as polite-but-still-learning!

Then there are the more confusing cases:

--What does it mean when you giggle and turn away?

Answer: I have no clue.

--Why, when I ask a classroom full of people a question, that is perhaps not so clear or perhaps the students are not quite able to answer, are there multiple seconds of silence, followed by whispers among each other, with hands covering mouth, that slowly build, to murmur level, and then to low-to-medium conversation level, and then just keep going, as some who are not co-constructing or talking about what they’re gonna do later on that day just stare at me as I sit there and wait for someone to just say something to me!!!

(Potential or Asserted) Answers:

Some people say that it’s because students are taught to listen and not speak directly to the teacher in a class, definitely not look him/her in the eye.

Other students say that it’s because of “the cultural harmony thing”: when one person raises his/her hand to answer a question, this is seen as arrogant, not just fitting in.

Other people tell me that it’s just because students are lazy, didn't do the reading, or too shy to answer my question directly, etc, etc.

--And, perhaps for one young adult male interacting with me in a pick-up game of basketball, his most salient moment of cultural-know-how-based interactional improvisation: What do you, as a young adult male having grown up on the island of Java, do, when during a co-ed basketball game in which you are playing with your peers and with one person whom you and your peers consider a teacher/faculty member and not just another peer, you knock that ‘teacher’ down to the ground? This is odd because you have knocked down someone who is both a girl and who you treat as your elder/superior…do you reach down to her--with your right hand of course—and yank her by the arm and hoist her up just like you do with your ‘buddies’ (that is not the Javanese nor the Indonesian term for it)? Well, (as I with my very foreign eyes interpret his thought process) women are supposed to be treated more gently than that, and elders are supposed to be treated more respectfully than just a simple hoist, not that you should ever have been in a situation where you would/could knock one of them down in the first place. You’re not sure if she’s hurt, or if you should just let her get up by herself, or if you should perhaps stop everything, drop your basketball, and gently grab her at the hand and the waist to make sure she gets up alright…

When all else fails, a simple confused and apologetic look will do as you immediately leave the situation with a slight smile on your face and continue to play on—of course, once you know she is okay.

---

I don’t understand any of the cultural roles I’m supposed to play here. And when in a foreign context that is this foreign, with my hopes and dreams of ‘having all these people fooled into thinking I was really born and raised a Javanese woman!’ being constantly assaulted and then dashed (or perhaps body-slammed, a nice, big un- or dis-graceful Macho Man Randy Savage socking it to those poor little ‘ethnic-/racial-disguise’ hopes and dreams)—and me always helping to assault and dash them as I at times can’t and at times won’t change the way that I walk (much taller, and a bit faster if walking on my own); the fact that I wear sunglasses (the reason asserted here for which anyone wears sunglasses is that it’s gaya [cool/pretending to look rich], not because it has anything to do with saving your eyeballs’ innards); aaaaaand, the fact that the occasional argyle shirt shows up among my clothing choices….—it often feels like a magical game of pretend rules of kesopanan that I’m playing-while-trying-to-figure-it-all-out anyways, only the consequences of each move and thought in the game are much more socially…consequential! It’s like a virtual life game, only where my avatar is myself, and the game, my co-characters, and all of our feelings within it, keep floating somewhere between silly and real.

But it’s those moments of learning, like the little one I had today—those moments when all of a sudden, “Ah! that interaction felt genuine! I did it right! I bowed right and made a Javanese interaction!” It’s those moments when I start to lay myself under the cultural blanket. Begin to feel what it’s really like in here. What makes a person feel warm, welcome, cared for, appreciated. These are the precious (and most encouraging!) moments of learning how to “be” another culture.

And I had an ever-so-small one of those today.

On the state of teaching World Englishes

2009-12-04T18:17:00.013+07:00

In the field in which I have situated myself, I = a social linguist; a social scientist aspiring; an English language teacher; and a teacher, through the English language, of Linguistics and Sociolinguistics.

In the field of English Language Education in non-English L1 (first/primary language) countries (just about every country in the world by now is an “English speaking country”; it’s just a matter of whether or not that English spoken is as a first (US, AUS, UK, CAN) or a second (Singapore, India, Philippines, Malaysia) or a foreign (Indonesia, France, Japan, China…) language), there is much trending toward the Globalization of English: Who does English belong to? Everybody.

My students—some of them—will say this when I ask them who English belongs to, but I can never be certain if they really believe it. Whenever they hear or read a version of Malaysian English, or Singapore English, they laugh hysterically. And whenever I ask them “what type of English” they aim to speak, I would say that about 95% of them say they aim to speak US and/or UK English. I have had one student respond that she wanted to learn Australian English because it is more challenging for her to understand; and one other student responded that he wanted to learn “Spain English” because he once saw Antonio Banderas in the film Once Upon A Time in Mexico, and he thought that the way Antonio sounded was really cool. I also specifically asked my students today: "If there developed an Indonesian English, just like there is a Singapore English, an India English, etc, would you rather learn US/UK English still, or learn Indonesian English?” The response I got: not Indonesian English. Why? The student who spoke up said that she was afraid that nobody would understand her if she spoke it, and some of her classmates nodded their heads in agreement with her. It seems to me, though, that it is the case that the speakers of the many dialects of bahasa Indonesia understand each other for the most part, and that the speakers of the many dialects of English understand each other…for the most part…

So in what way is English Globalizing?

Another pertinent question, for those of us who believe in the democratization of English: Today, as I taught my students about the idea of “Discourse Competence”, “Communicative Competence”—the ability to organize and understand groupings of sounds, words, phrases and sentences into conversational communications, as well as the interactional (both verbal and non-verbal) norms that are enacted in any speech interaction--I tried to raise the question: If English is globalizing—if it is everybody’s language—then how can we teach discursive competence in some globalized form of English? Where is the target competence that I teach? Do I honor my own way of interacting with people? Loud, abrasive, direct, making eye contact, standing up big and tall, letting myself be seen; do I truly globalize and democratize English--or at least have students "make English their own"--by having them transfer their own L1 discourse competences into their English L2? Or do I search for some Global English Culture, which I have not yet been able to locate outside of perhaps International Business norms, or something like that...

One main problem I have in confronting this issue is the fact that many students in my teaching context here come from a background where it is not okay to speak in class. And I can’t very well even try to teach or encourage any sort of new oral or interactional competencies--no matter what its culture is--if my students will not open their mouths. So do I still just continue to honor their own cultural expertise as "listeners to the 'teacher in an authority position'”? Do I force them to talk, which is sometimes successful and at other times like squeeeeeezing the teats of a cow's empty bladder—painful for both of us--? Or do I try to find some sort of hybridized interactional norm, where you can still, from my point of view, whisper out loud when answering a question in a class (Are people who live in a culture where people speak, in a classroom environment, incredibly quietly, aurally trained to have superhuman listening skills such that they can actually hear what comes out of these people's mouths?!?!), as long as you’re still speaking English out loud and practicing/demonstrating critical thought?

If my learners plan on learning a standardized US form of English, are they also completely planning on changing their cultural wardrobe every time they open their mouths in English, from their own cultural competence clothing into another outfit that looks much like mine? Students—who often let their elders call the shots, at least in the classroom—won’t even honor my declaration that they may just call me Lauren, and not Miss Lauren, Ma’am, etc, etc.; so I really don’t think that when they speak English they’re planning on changing into the many other different cultural norms of the US speakers of English, ie that they see on TV allll the time.

But, as always, I continue to digress. My main question here is: How do I teach communicative competence in a Target Language that is purported to not have a “Target Culture” anymore? What is the Target Culture of a Global English? Is it the same as my students’ Target Dialect of English? Standardized USian? Is it their own L1 culture? Many of these students plan on being local/hometown English teachers, so do they even necessarily “need” the cultural competence necessary to travel and interact with foreigners through the English language medium?

But what about the other students? Those who don't want to be English teachers? I suppose that this is where the field(s) of English for Specific Purposes come(s) in…Maybe at some point we would need to separate out the English learners/English courses, into those who plan on using English for business/import-export situations; those who plan on using English for homeland tourism industry; those who plan on becoming English teachers; those who plan on traveling…abroad…and these students do get separated out as they advanced on to post-graduate degrees such as those of Tourism or International Business.

As it stands now, however, in an undergraduate English Department in Southeast Asia, the evidence I see of the globalization--as in, perhaps, "globalized sense of ownership"--of English resides only in the fact that people widely recognize that it is used in almost all corners of the world, and that people who travel all over the world use English the most. It seems to me, though, that if English were already "globally owned", then African English literature courses would sit side by side with US and British ones, as well as Indian English literature, which I am sure that there is a ton of. As it stands now, the students here put on for their annual drama performance last year Antigone; and this year’s drama performance will be of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I saw a student-written play the other day that was “inspired by Sweeney Todd” and stories like it. It took place at a restaurant with round tables with vases of flowers in the middle of them, and the story was about independent career women fighting with each other. I have not yet encountered this type of dining atmosphere in the dining places I have been to in this country but for one or two spots, and other than those maybe such an atmosphere will only be found in the most expensive restaurants in Jakarta; the same place where I would expect to encounter such career women.

As for the professors in my department, those who have studied or taught abroad have mostly, to my knowledge, frequented the US—maybe one or two to Australia. And teachers have come here to this department from both the US and Australia—I have not yet heard of a British teacher, or someone from any other country where English is used, teaching here.

So who does English belong to? And who are the English Departments of higher education around the world giving it to? Are we opening students’ eyes to “The Globe”, in all its splendid diversity, colors and brilliance? Are we helping our students to open the door that everyone touts the English language to be the key to opening? Or are we instead continuing to help them open a door that only leads to “The Globe Theatre”, and the US’s modern-day versions of it?

An essay on processing.

2009-11-30T14:02:00.002+07:00

**Disclaimer: If thou likest not discussions of the deaths of animals, I hereby warn thou that the content of the message herebelow may cause great discomfort.

The way that I know if a child is really hurt or not when s/he starts crying is: there is a long pause between the pain stimulus and the onset of the child’s roaring cries. I myself experience this too in my daily life: if I ever truly physically injure myself, it takes a good few seconds for that owie to actually start hurting; if I ever taste something, it takes at least thirty seconds for me to understand the full spectrum of flavors in my mouth and olfactory senses; and if I ever experience something that truly leaves a lasting impression, I won’t realize it until long after the initial event has passed.

If I may analogize this to today’s entry, in which I Process an Impressionable Event.

I wrote a couple months ago about Lebaran and Idul Fitri, a very important Muslim holiday. Well, this past Friday was another hugely important Muslim holiday called Idul Adha, or Hari Kurban, a day of prayer followed by the sacrifice and offering [korban] of many, many goats and cows, the meat of which is subsequently given to orang kurang mampu [people less able/having] in the surrounding areas of each neighborhood/masjid. I learned that orang lebih mampu [people more able/having] purchase the animals to be slaughtered, and they get a portion of the meat themselves, but most of it goes to other community members who are more in need.

So, Friday was the actual religious holiday, Idul Adha, but as I learned on Saturday, when I attended the ceremonial sacrifice of the animals purchased for slaughter, according to scripture the animals are allowed to be killed as long as it is within three days of Idul Adha. Thus, the killing was allowed to take place Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. And since, at this masjid, there was not actually enough time on Friday to sacrifice all the animals since the people there spend most of that day in prayer, they held their killing ceremony on Saturday.

I had slept in a little bit that day, and when I got up Dyah had just gotten home from the market and, having driven by the masjid on her way back into the neighborhood, she had seen that the event was underway. So, after cleaning up and getting ready to embrace the day I quickly grabbed my camera and marched on over to the masjid, just three tiny streets away from our house.

I arrived at the end of the street to see that the it was blocked off for mobil [cars], but still open for pedestrians and motor [-cycles]. Turning the corner onto the small street I saw two white cows tied to small trees on opposite sides of the street, and a small crowd of mostly males gathered about 100 feet (I keep my USian measurement system in tow) beyond them. In the middle of said group of people lay, with its back facing toward me, the body of another white cow. A few men knelt around it, right hands gripping small carving knives, cutting back and forth, pulling the skin apart from the meat inside what had just unbecome cow and become beef in a matter of thirty grueling and prayer-filled seconds.

It wasn’t much of a big deal for me to see this newly become food source lying there on the ground, on top of a small clear tarp, being carved through so that all of its parts could be sacrificed for the nourishment of others (seriously, all. One of Salatiga's specialty foods is dried cow lung). I asked some of the bapak-bapak [adult men] around me a little bit about the event, how many animals would be killed, etc. They told me that this was an all-day event, and that while the cows were being killed out front here on the road, the goats were being killed in the back of the masjid, and, “Please! Go check it out!”

So, first of all, that morning I entered the grounds of a masjid for the first time. I’ve never been quite sure how to approach entering a masjid around here, as I have tended to read Islamic religious practice like so much more of a ‘private’, ‘quiet’, or ‘closed’ practice than Christian practice tends to be; and to judge myself as a much less discrete and more foreign presence in a place of Islamic prayer as opposed to Christian. I can at least be mistaken for a Christian person, but I feel like in a masjid I might just be seen as something like an imposing tourist. But I was made more than welcome to enter this place, and so I walked on in and was ushered to the back, past a few goats who were tied up and waiting for their turns at the chopping block, and on to the small yard area where the goat sacrifice was taking place.

As I entered the yard, two young adult males were lifting a kambing [goat]-freshly-become-food, hind-legs first, up toward two thick string ties that were hanging from horizontal wooden posts about 8 feet above the ground. The men tied his hind legs separately, just above the goat’s hooves to hang him up there, and the first thing the first carver removed was its external reproductive organs, before other men began carving the animal, belly first, into food for all. I walked around the area, looking at the three different groups of people responsible for carving the meat once it was removed from the bones of the animal. There were two long tables facing each other, one at the entry side of the small backyard, and one at the far side, facing me. At both of these tables sat about 3 to 4 women, each with her own carving knife and round wooden carving block sitting in front of her and atop the table. On top of these blocks sat either wet and red signs that carving had very recently taken place, or freshly carved meat itself, waiting to be dropped into its appropriate basket according to which part of the animal the flesh had been carved from.

To the right of the back table of women as I walked in, sat another group of men doing some carving of their own. Perhaps they were in charge of the ciruan [innards], as I’m not sure I saw any of the women chopping those up. Whatever they were chopping, upon a glance over in their direction I saw one man apparently taking advantage of his job as butcher, by directly eating one of the best parts (this is what any good chef does, of course—eat all the good parts in the kitchen, and give the rest to the guests. For more information on this, please see my upcoming essay: "Why (some) women still choose to remain in the kitchen when it comes to cooking turkey at Thanksgiving". ;-P) of the animal before they went to the distribution table. He took some white thick stringy part of the flesh of either a cow or a goat, and dropped it straight into his mouth, just like I might do with a long piece of spaghetti pulled directly out of the colander and eaten before any actual plating begins.

Turning away from the goat sushi section, it was time for another billy goat gruff to be dikorbankan [sacrificed]. Perhaps it was at this point that I realized that I have never in my life seen an animal be killed. As a budding biologist in my childhood creek-crawling days, I did perform some brain pithing and dissection of my own on small crustaceans, fish and amphibians, but perhaps for some reason it is easier for me to consider pithing something that has never actually demonstrated ‘fleshliness’ to me, nor ever necessarily smiled at me (to my awareness).

The goat was much easier to kill than the cow sacrifice I would watch later. Just three men were needed here, with no need for ropes to tie feet together, nor a bamboo shoot to slide between the animal’s legs, as the men out front were using with the cows. The goat didn’t really resist; he didn’t demonstrate to me any evidence that he knew he was about to die. While one man held his hind legs and another held his front legs, one more man held the goat’s head as they all three lay him down onto his side. As the goat’s neck was placed over the cutting block—a long flat piece of wood that lay over a hole in the earth—a fourth man carrying a long knife came up behind the animal’s head. The man assumed a gentle, relaxed stance, legs spread about shoulder width apart with the left staggered a bit in front of the right. Bending at the knees in order to crouch a few inches down, he leaned over the hole; over the animal’s neck. His lips started moving with the slightest sound coming out. As I watched the sounds reach down into the back of his mouth and his throat I realized that Arabic language, in the form of a Muslim prayer, was coming out. Upon the termination of this prayer he would then be allowed to end the life of this goat in grace and in thankfulness for what it was about to provide for the lives of others.

This is where the “processing” analogy comes back into my story: As I watched the goat be killed, Yeah, I stepped back when the blood started to spray so far out of its neck that it was still about to land on my shoes at the good 5 or more foot distance that I had already positioned myself away from the cutting; and Yeah, I noticed the little girl behind me stop drinking her juice and start to vomit a little bit. But there was something so ‘realistic’, or perhaps either uneventful or nonchalant about it that, as I stood there having a conversation with the man next to me as all this other stuff happened surrounding us, it just, perhaps due to the collective attitude and energy of the people surrounding me at that time and place, felt like another…day’s event; a thing that happens.

The hard part over, the killing was done. After the blood drained a little bit more from the animal’s neck, the men carried him over to the next station, where they hung him just like the previous goat. By this point he perhaps had already ceased to look like living flesh to me, and had already begun to look like…the meat I might see at any local market; though he was still fully covered in fur. A few convulsions as the goat hung there made me question whether or not he was animal yet or already meat, and then, officially, the goat was dead.

I stayed to watch the carving process begin, and after a couple of minutes there I went back out to the front. I was probably planning to leave at this point, but there were some people to talk to there, and it turned out that the men responsible for the slaughter were bringing the next cow up to the chopping block. For some reason it was important to me that I see the difference between killing a cow and a goat, so I stayed for the event.

Now, I said before that the goat did not appear to me to necessarily be aware that he was about to die. Perhaps this was just me and my own perception, not quite being aware or prepared to see the death of that animal; or perhaps I wasn’t looking for any foresight in the animal’s eyes that first time. But with the cow, as they pulled her up to another tree to which they would tie the leash that she had around her neck in order to be able to trap her legs with another rope, I thought maybe I could see something in her face and body posture; a calm yet scared awareness of what was about to happen to her. As slobber hung from the sides of her mouth, about three men tied her up to the tree and she defecated before us all. Cows, horses and other farm animals always do this, so, not necessarily a sign that she was scared. Additionally, the only clues I could take from the people around me concerning what I was ‘supposed to’ think about how the cow was reacting were what I perceived as self-presentations of nonchalance, normalcy. Just another hari raya [day celebrate]. The kids were coming home from school and just prancing around in their Saturday school uniforms; one of the men who had gone inside brought back out a crate of drinks—bottled water and warm, sweet, delicious tea—and they offered me a drink for while I was joining this event with them. I took the tea but for some reason, while this event may have been ‘normal’ for the people surrounding me, I wanted to be ingesting not even tea for when the killing of the cow would actually take place; so as they gathered the cow up to then be put down, I myself put down my tea (just about the only type of ‘putting down’ I am willing to perform at this stage in my life). There was just something about ingesting something, or even nonchalantly taking in a sip of tea while I was watching an animal be sacrificed that just, to me, felt at the very least awkward, if not just gross.

To sacrifice a cow takes much more effort than to do so with a goat. This cow, not even all that big compared to what I’m used to seeing in the US, still required a healthy eight men, after her legs had already been tied down, to pull her over to the cutting area. These men received much more resistance from the cow than the others had from the goat, though still not a violent amount. They pulled the cow over to the wooden board atop a hole that they had dug right on the side of a building facing the masjid. The hole was in a soil area that, aside from where it had been dug, held decorative foliage to line the neighborhood street. The same man who had cut the goat’s neck was now here, and another young man read a scripted statement from a piece of paper he was holding. Then, standing over the back of the cow’s head, the ‘sacrificer’ began the same quiet utterance of prayer that he had recited over the goat before he carefully leaned down and, left hand holding the skin of the neck, cut into the flesh with the knife in his right hand.

I turned my head a bit on this one; some of the bapak-bapak around me chuckled about that; and I had already made sure when they lay the cow over the hole that I would be standing far enough away not to have anything spray near me.

And then it was done. They let the blood drain into the hole a little bit before dragging the animal over to the transparent plastic tarp on which they had been carving the other cow when I had arrived earlier.

I stayed a bit longer, and as this cow approached the state that the last cow had been in when I had arrived, I decided that I had come full circle and it was time to leave.

As I walked away, the images in my memory, instead of fading, became more vivid, more dense; more flesh-like. The sensations that I feel from watching this event, just like that long onset between impact and impression that I described at the beginning of this essay, continue to shift and change.

I walked home to be welcomed by the three dogs of the house, and their fur and flesh looked nearly identical to that of the goats who had been sacrificed; all of this making flesh seem at once so solid, yet so easily breakable.

I later wondered to myself about my reaction to, or my continued processing of the event: if I had seen this on a farm in Pennsylvania, would I have had the same reaction as I did here--to seeing a cow killed in the middle of a small paved neighborhood street, at a masjid? Would I process it post facto in the same way, or would I just leave it behind as Yes, just another day, and just another event?

Today, I walked by a field that smelled of cows, and the smell and the images from yesterday’s pengorbanan [sacrifice] at the masjid wafted back into my thoughts.

The impression that this event has carved into me is not a positive or negative one; it just is, shifting and changing, as certain parts of it become more salient and others become less. But it certainly seeps into the crevasses and corners of my transitions between traveling mind and immediate sensation. It reforms me, my body, and my memory, arriving during those quiet, downtime moments when I least expect to think about it again.

A Yogi's Path: through the streets of Indonesia

2009-11-15T21:28:00.005+07:00

Yesterday afternoon began the musim hujan. I only say that last night it began because, perhaps because it was my first time out and about walking in it. Additionally, I got to witness its onset firsthand, sitting alone in my office. So I was not in a classroom, I was not in my house—I was on the 5^th floor of a building, and thus above most of Salatiga and either above or at an even level with many of the tree tops. Thus, when the yellow skies set in and the wind started blowing so hard that I thought an airplane must be flying nearby overhead—and perhaps around the building over and over again—and when the trees started bowing forward to the force of the wind, letting it comb the hair on their backs up toward their necks such that they might ripple forward and press their noses toward the Earth in hormat and humility; I was then able to declare—perhaps better stated this way: It is not necessarily the case that musim hujan itself has started, but rather: My own experience of musim hujan is now underway!

I had been planning to go see my old homestay ‘brother’, who is a first year high schooler this year, play in an intramural soccer game against the 3^rd year high schoolers. I kept telling myself I should go; however, the longer I watched the skies outside my 5^th floor window, the yellower the skies became, each change in shade confirming for me that the wind and rain would be the winning team of this evening’s game, and it would win uncontested due to its natural ability to trump all activities human.

As the winds raged--it was not quite raining yet--I decided to go home.

Now, I have a beautiful, big white umbrella with the label of my university here written on it in lovely blue lettering, and I would have been proud to have that brolly take me home; but more immediately to my memory I had a small hunter-green and dark blue plaid payung [umbrella] waiting for me in the depths of my multi-pocketed bookbag.

(After today’s (a day later) rummaging through there to try to find a small recording device, I might summon you all to envision my bookbag as Mary Poppins’ on the day she arrived at Jane and Michael’s house and started unpacking her belongings in her upstairs apartment with the children watching. Only this time, the woman unpacking and rummaging through her bag was a much less prim and proper Lauren, wearing much more scraggly clothes—loose fitting jeans and a yellow-and-white patterned Columbia shirt; and this time this woman who was dressed much less prim and properly, and who was speaking not her first language primly, properly, and elegantly, but rather her non-first language in a much less coherent and much more kasar [crass] manner; getting ready to leave and not just having arrived; and being watched not by 2 children who she was about to take care of, but rather one woman who takes care of her…anyway. Think of this situation as the inverse of Mary Poppins—all the black colors are pulled into the white spaces as the white spaces flow over into where the black used to be. I digress.)

So, I left my 5^th floor amazing view figuring, well, since I can’t go to the game, and I’m a bit tired right now so I’m not right into working right away, maybe I will go home and get in a great, cozyfying session of rain-soundtracked yoga, take a little rest, and come back to the workdesk in the early evening, refreshed and rejuvenated. Having so decided, I walked down the 10 flights of stairs (5 floors) and out the front door of Gedung [building] F. However, when I got out the front doorway, which is all still sheltered, I looked to my left and to my right at the non-sheltered areas of campus only to see that in the time it had taken me to descend from lantai [floor] 5 to lantai [floor] 1 the rain—no, the torrent—had welcomed itself, unhesitatingly, onto campus. I started to dig my umbrella from my inverse-of-Mary-Poppins bag, thinking to myself, Why I think that the umbrella for which I search is intended for a sprinkle. Not a precipitatory event where it is raining anvils and barge storage crates. But, since the elevator was dead and I had already taken a few hikes up and down the stairs of Gedung F that day, I decided to myself, Eh, what the hay, I love the rain anyway. As long as this umbrella keeps my bookbag and all my precious belongings therewithin safe, then I will gladly soak the rest of my body.

Perhaps the thoughts that I have just described were actually more post hoc than pre, for the entry into the downpour with my wardrobe's ensuant transition from a .5 lb pair of medium brown pants to a sagging, drooling 30lb pair of dark brown slop hanging from my lower body, accompanied by the collecting of water down the back of my shirt and around to the front as the umbrella offshoot drained straight down my back, is always a tumultuous and an emotional one. Before I entered the downpour I had no idea what I had signed myself up for (this is generally my modus operandi anyway ;-P), and I went through, in the next five minutes, many a questioning of whether or not I had chosen the right path, with an ultimate and finalized decision that I love playing in the rain, and I wish I could stay here even longer.

So, about 5 minutes after my departure from Gedung F, I had made it about half-way home and was soaked to the skin and beyond, with the only dry thing left on me a part of the top of my head and the main section of my bookbag. At this time, as I trundled through the streets, I learned that I was newly experiencing Salatiga, the sungai [river]. Within these 5 minutes of pouring rain and heaving winds, trees had fallen, streets were awash, and I was beginning to experience the transition from trundling into a pleasureful trouncing around throughout them.

The last time I ‘swam’ so freely in a street-become-ocean was in Ohio, when I was probably about 10 years old. There is no greater joy than wearing one’s everyday clothes, walking out into a downpour, and simply splashing about as the rain gods douse her with a cleansing so pure that it can only come straight from Mother Nature Herself. Had I not had a laptop and documents to protect, the umbrella would have been thrown away from its position above my head much in the way that Burt in Mary Poppins might do, and long before I ever had to go on my Mary Poppins digression in this latest digest.

Arriving home, I stripped myself of my shoes and my umbrella at the front door, opened the house, and hurriedly tiptoed into my room, attempting (quite unsuccessfully so) to drop as little water on the floor as I could. I ran into my room, stood on my floormat, and emptied my bookbag of all its belongings as quickly as possible. Precious, MaryPoppins bookbag that it is, apparently most of my most important belongings were buried deep enough in there that they all survived the flood. However, by placing my bookbag straight onto my bed, the bed itself became the rain’s new victim.

I stripped myself of my wet clothes, yearning to just go out and play a little while longer in the rain, but deciding instead to just make sure everything was dry, hang my clothes up to drip out all their water all over my bedroom floor, and start a yummy yoga session.

A friend here says that you have not experienced her version of Indonesia until you have, during a downpour, curled up in a sweatshirt, with a hot cup of coffee and some gorengan [fried snacks], while watching TV.

I say that you have not experienced my version of Indonesia until you have, trounced through a torrential downpour in pure joy and smile-filled elation, hurriedly tiptoed through your home dripping wet, quickly changed into yoga clothes, and cuddled up onto your cozy blue yoga mat for a yummy yoga session devoted to surrendering to the sounds of rain outside your windows and on your rooftop.

The authoress humbly offers an entry where she asserts her opinion and beliefs, right or not.

2009-11-09T07:59:00.005+07:00

I recently had a really beautiful experience. I was sitting at the edge of the campus soccer field, writing an e-mail to a good friend, and a girl--visibly from not-Java; turns out she's from Sumba--sat down next to me. I figured she was just interested to talk to me, seeing me sitting alone (not normal here, for one to sit alone--even when accompanied by a computer! Imagine that!). She started asking me where I was from, and then said that when she first entered college she had wanted to study German, but she didn't get a scholarship for it, and now it's not useful and she would rather improve her English anyway. I thought to myself, Oh I know where this girl is headed: Straight to asking me if I would spend time speaking English with her. It turned out that I was wrongly judging her, as she didn't ask me if I would sit down and speak English with her sometime to practice.

Instead, she asked me what church I go to.

**Important nation-and-religion contextualization digression**:

Here on the island of Java, in the country of Indonesia, the demographic questions that generally get tossed around when you meet people here are a little different from where I come from. People will likely ask you (as in me, a White, USian, 28 year old female) a combination of the following (they don’t all have to be in the same conversation): How old are you? (“28, Bu.”); Whoa! How is it that you can speak bahasa Indonesia so well? (“Imersi [immersion], Bu.”); Are you married yet? (**note the yet; and I am only allowed to respond “belum [not yet], Bu”. If I ever say, “Tidak” [No], that...well, that is just not an option. It implies No-and-will-not, whereas “Not yet,” of course, implies, No-and-I-promise-I will!!!).

And finally: What religion are you? or, since I am generally assumed to be Christian or Catholic: What church do you go to?

National agama [religion] background:

In Indonesia, somewhat in opposition to the US (a 'semi-laic' country--and in perfect opposition to laic countries such as France), religion must entirely be linked with one’s national/“official” identity. The Indonesian constitution of 1945 declared as the first of its five principles in establishing and unifiying a state (Pancasila: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancasila_(politics), that all have the right to believe in "the one and only God" (Tuhan Yang Maha Esa). With regard to religious policy in Indonesia, it is claimed that the official policy toward religion is indeed “freedom of religion”; however, in this context “freedom of religion” means that everybody must have a God. And, here, God is only found in institutional religions--specifically in six of them: Christianity (large populations in Eastern Indonesia), Catholicism, Islam (large populations in Western/Central Indonesia), Hinduism (large population on Bali), Buddhism (I gather most of these people are ethnically Chinese-Indonesian), and Confucianism. Every citizen in Indonesia (supposedly) has a government-issued identity card, and on everyone’s card they must register not only themselves, their names, etc, but their religion. It has to be one of the above-listed six available choices. I have heard some people say that people who do not align with one of these religions ‘don’t have religion’, and I have met one and heard that many more believe, that when you tell someone you do not practice a religion, you are in fact an atheist. I have also heard very often the term ‘orang Muslim/Kristen KTP’ [identity card Muslim], meaning a person who puts a religion down on their identity card but practices it either not at all or informally; and I have also heard one person say, when responding to the question, But what if you don’t believe in any of those religions?: “Well, you just put one down on the card anyway.”

**End important nation-and-religion contextualization digression.**

So, back to the questions What religion are you/do you practice? or Which church do you go to?

My two choices when somebody asks me one of these questions are:

1) I practice X religion.;

2) Saya tidak beragama. [I do not practice religion.]

It is of course the case with the second choice, which is the one I almost uncategorically choose, that I risk:

a) confusing someone (Just like, “Why on Earth would you eat plain mie????” Here it becomes: “Why on Earth would you not have a religion?!?!”);

b) (worst-case scenario and not one I have had to deal with yet) turning said asker off (What type of person would not beragama?? or Only atheists tidak beragama. (Being in the category of 'worst-case scenario' this, of course, assumes on the part of the hearer a negative perception of a person who declares him-/herself an atheist); or simply

c) having to explain myself, which I very very very gladly do every time I even begin to mention to someone the fact that I do not beragama.

I generally prepare myself with the script:

In the US, people don’t have to practice a religion. In fact, it is not permitted, by law/the Constitution, for religion and government to be combined. So, some of us practice religion and go to church, masjid, temple, etc; some of us practice religion and do not go to church, masjid, temple, etc; some of us do not practice religion but still believe in a form of ‘god’/’spirit/universe energy’/’Higher Power’/Tuhan Yang Maha Esa--practicing ‘spirituality’ but not religion; some of us do not believe in god, etc.

Subsequent to this, if the conversation continues (I’ve never gotten an overtly negative reaction from any of this), I and my interlocutor generally come to the agreement that:

Here in Indonesia, everyone “has a religion”, but people generally look to appreciate each other, they openly socialize among religions, and what they look for in people is whether or not they are generally and genuinely good people; and in the US, not everyone has a religion, but what is important for us (me, standing as representative in some ways) is that people are generally and genuinely good people.

I do not ignore, of course, that there are, in both countries, plenty of cases of extremism, ignorance and divisiveness, as well.

But today, when my new acquaintance received the response, “I don’t beragama,” to her question, “What church do you go to?” it got a bit of an odd or surprised look, ensued by a genuinely long explanation of her faith in God, how she arrived at this belief, and why I should be this way, too.

Here, I majorly paraphrase and abbreviate our discussion, having forgotten many details—or at least the order of them all—since:

She started simply with her basic philosophy of how important surrender to God and a focus on non-materiality is. I responded, “That’s great. I agree with you as long as you’re not telling me this is inherent in only one religion.” She said, “No no no no no! This is not about religion! It doesn’t matter if you are Muslim, Buddhist, whatever, as long as you believe in keselamatan [salvation] and the unimportance of material things! For instance, you shouldn’t be going for a PhD just for the degree. People shouldn’t seek out money just to get rich. I am seeking out a bachelor’s degree but not because of the title it will give me.” I said, “Okay, then I agree with you.”

….Pause...

“But! Let me tell you this! Before I gave up the material life, and was baptized and reborn, in the name of Yesus Kristus [Jesus Christ] I was sickly,”…asthma, other illnesses…“But after I gave myself to keselamatan and was then baptized under His name I have ever since been perfectly healthy. I rarely eat, I feel happy all the time...” “All fine,” I responded. “I believe that spiritual surrender can lead to health and rebirth, too, and thus, all fine.”

… … Pause...

“Okay…but…Do you know where the first man existed?” I probably said at this point something like, “Well it depends on who you’re talkin’ to, hon’…” And she said, “The first man was in Eden.”

Thought response: “Oh really? And this has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with spirituality, ma’am?”

And so I said to her, “Sure, if you’re reading the Bible. Have you read any of the other major religious books, and are you aware that they ALL profess the same, deep-down philosophical principles of life and humanity—keselamatan and surrender of materiality—but in very different words, because of the fact that they were written in very different times and very different places, by very different people?”

“Oh really?”

“Yes. And it is for this reason that I will continue to agree with the principles and the philosophy that you are sharing with me. However, if you want me to call this “God” essence “Yesus Kristus”, and if you want me to find this information on Enlightenment in Al Kitab [the Bible], then here: You go read the following: The Tao, the Baghavad Gita, the Qur’an, the Talmud.”

“The what? What are they called again? The Bagha—what?”

“The Baghavad Gita. It’s the Hindu ‘Bible’.

“Furthermore, the Qur’an, the Talmud, and the Bible were written by basically the same group of people who had minor disagreements on historical facts and certain beliefs, and so they separated and wrote three separate books on the exact same thing and the exact same people, and all formed their different sects of the exact same religion.”

“Oh, so you’re saying that these books came from the same people…”

“Yes. So if you want to keep telling me that I can only find this keselamatan of which you speak in Yesus Kristus, I am telling you that I have found just the same thing in life of which you speak, but I call it a different name and I feel it a different way. So if you want to keep having this conversation with me, you can go read these books, and then come back and talk to me. They all say the same thing, but they use different words and come from different times, places, and peoples.”

She actually subsequently wrote down a few of the names of the books I told her about—this was to my surprise, to be honest. I was honestly also surprised to hear her say that she knew nothing about the history of the Bible or the interconnections among Judaism, Islam and Christianity (why, I don’t know. A naïve hopefulness, I assume.), and a little bit surprised that she had never heard of some of the texts of the Eastern-rooted religions.

But in the end I was very happy that I had taken the time to listen to this girl share her beliefs with me and put my beliefs up for question, and I am happy that I shared some of my beliefs with her, and put hers up for question.

In the end, my conversation with this girl really highlighted and brought to life for me the following, same principle that I claim above to have found as common ground whenever I have had conversations about religion with people I’ve met here in Java. Unfortunately (in my most humble of opinions), this girl seemed to think that what I claim to be a common, humanistic and/or spiritual belief can only be found in one book, and under one name (though that name is still translated from language to language); but it seems to me that we all really deep down, whether we practice a religion, or spirituality, or not, believe, in our sanest moments, that the most important things in life are to place more importance on genuinely sharing our lives and ourselves with our fellow humans and other life forms, and to be generally and genuinely good people, seeking to love and unify instead of divide and conquer.

We may live in countries where:

a) (Indonesia, freedom of religion as long as you have one of 6) all people have to have a religion/institutionalized spirituality form a part of their “official” identity; or

b) (US, separation of church and state, semi-laic) we are free to practice or not whatever spiritual/religious practices we may deem necessary to our lives, as long as we don’t let that affect our “official” identity or actions; or

c) (France, laic state--no form or representation of religion shall be permitted in any public space) in countries where our spiritual beliefs may not-at-all-never enter into our “official” identity.

However, despite all of these rules and regulations floating in a constant atmospherizing stream over our heads, engendering among citizens of states and practitioners of religions, beliefs about what religion really is/what purposes it serves, it seems to be the case that: some of us believe in surrendering to a Higher Power, whatever we may call it and however it may manifest itself to us; and we may honor this Higher Power by creating community with whomever it makes us feel “right”, or good, to do so. Furthermore, it turns out that despite laicity, separation of church and state, or freedom to choose from among required religions, once we look and talk beyond each of these labels we all become the same again, and we all expect the same things from each other: hormat [respect], community, goodness, and giving.

On the Culturo-Psychologically Created Nature of Taste, Food Combination Discretion and Satiety

2009-10-20T19:52:00.003+07:00

Am I a caricature or is this Real?

I feel like there is an issue of assumed cultural non/-ownership, non-/membership, non-/expertise that comes up with my food eating and ordering experiences here…among other experiences.... I officially decided this today after a friend I was lunching with ordered a bowl of foods with no rice. While I did not intently watch the ibu of the warung who was serving us as she reacted to this and honored my comrade’s wishes, I honestly felt like--based on many prior experiences with food-eating differences here--if I had said that to the ibu I would have been interrogated at least once to make sure that I really meant “Jangan pakai nasi.” [don’t use rice]. After all, one of the most commonly shared peribahasa [saying] here is, “Kalau belum makan nasi, belum makan” [If not-yet eat rice, not-yet eat].

A better, most caricaturesque example: The other weekend while my hosts Dyah and Iwan were gone, I woke up at about 10 in the morning, and after taking a shower I wanted to just eat something smaller/lighter/quick & easy since I was to rendezvous for lunch with my old homestay family at noon. I really had a nafsu makan mie [taste for/desire eat noodles (a specific kind of noodle—basically like a thicker version of a ramen noodle)], plain, maybe with just a little kuah [broth], so I decided to hop on down the street and grab said food selection from a nearby vendor.

I walked down the street to the mie bakso [noodle meatball] vendor and asked for just some mie. The wife of the vending couple was so so bingung [confused] at my request, and so I practiced my best bahasa Indonesia to explain, “Yeah, I just want some plain mie to go.” She looked past me to some friends sitting across the street, and beside her to some vendor friends at the next stand over, and started laaaaughing and talking to them in bahasa Jawa, as the husband asked me how much I wanted and went ahead and served me the mie in a plastic to-go bag. The wife just kept looking past me by me behind me and laaaaughed there with her friends, saying, in some semi-directed sense toward me: “Untuk apa? [For what???]” Her husband asked me if I wanted kuah and I said, "Ok juuuuust a little," and so he went and started filling another plastic bag with kuah—an amount of kuah that I consider enough for about five servings of soup! but maybe to him that was, indeed, just a lil’ bit.

The wife asked me more than once, “(Tidak) mau pakai ini?” pointing to the large bakso; then “(Tidak) mau pakai ini?” pointing to the small bakso. I continued to just say “No,” and the more she insisted on asking me if I wanted this or that with it, the more I changed from “No,” or “no thank you” to “mie saja”…“mie saja”..“No seriously, bu mie saja,” [mie only, mie only, No seriously, ma'am, mie saja] in order to try to convey to her that indeed I was serious that I just wanted mie to take home. “Untuk apa, itu????”

--I swear to god that if I had gone to a store or a local warung and purchased just one packet of Indomie, or another packaged dried 3-minute-boil instant noodle package, I would get no odd reaction at all other than the regular "Dari mana??" [Where are you from?]. At the most it would be: You only want one? Because, of course, we all believe that nobody eats alone here.--

But now, at the bakso vendor, when this was a vendor of a dish called “bakso”, or “mie bakso”, it was as if the individual parts of the dish could no longer be sold separately and still be understood to have individual taste or value in and of themselves. It is almost as if, even though in the vendor’s cart/food prep area/box place the elements of the mie bakso are kept separate, they are no longer considered separate; as though once they enter into that place in the bakso cart, they unbecome mie, and bakso, and bawang goreng [garlic fry], and kuah, and a couple of vegetables. They all rebecome, once together in that space, “mie bakso”, inseparably. And if someone—perhaps especially a foreigner/White person/non-member...—should come and request that a certain ingredient be exited from the box without being accompanied by its team members…it is as if this simply becomes unimaginable. I swear to god, if Dyah, my hostess and a local, had gone up there and asked these vendors for this exact same thing, such caricaturesque questioning and misunderstanding would and could not have taken place!

On the nature of mie:

I promise there are different foods that use mie, and I herebelow argue that my request for plain mie should not have seemed so bizarre. There is mie goreng, which, even though everybody here holds to the famous peribahasa [saying] stated above and repeated here for the sake of pure enjoyment, “Kalau belum makan nasi, belum makan” [If not-yet eat rice, not-yet eat] …I promise that this rule is—only subconsciously—forgotten when people go eat mie goreng [noodles fried], mie bakso, mie ayam. Maybe, our culturally confused mini-sleuth hypothesizes, this is because some of these dishes use kuah. Maybe, just maybe, when there is kuah the rice rule is erased. But! this still does not work for mie goreng. I’m allowed to have a plate of mie goreng, just like I’m allowed to have a plate of nasi goreng, and nobody will think twice; in fact, this will officially (read: in culturally tacit fashion) be considered a full meal. Maybe a light meal at times—a breakfast meal using last night’s leftover rice or mie, a late night meal or snack after spending the evening out and about with friends—but nonetheless it will be a meal. I can also order at certain places kwetiauw, which is, in all (Lauren’s) truth: mie. Mie, a noodle, with a slightly flatter shape and a slightly different texture. Perhaps, at most, a flour noodle instead of an egg noodle. It is eaten with different ingredients on it than if one were to order mie goreng. But most importantly, perhaps, in my opinion, it has a name and thus a cultural association that comes from Chinese instead of Indonesian or Javanese. And I’m sure that if I were to put bakso on top of it some local who walked around the corner to come upon myself eating kwetiauw with bakso on top of it would be flabbergasted and bingung sekali [confused very], because as yet I have only seen kwetiauw served with ground meat on top, maybe ground chicken instead of the beef that bakso are made of, with some different spicing, and often served with pangsit goreng—wontons deep fried and filled with the exact same diced meat that is served atop the kwetiauw.

Such are the subtleties that one must learn to decipher in a foreign food culture where things are really so different that they all start to look the same. If I dare put a sweet sambal used for rujak—a snack or dessert-time chopped fruit selection—near rice, I will be laughed at by 9 and 14 year old boys. If I dare order mie saja from a bakso cart, I will confuse someone to the point of her letting me name the price I want to pay for it because she has just never seen this happen before. Most people around here see my skin and double their prices!! They don't ask me to name them!

Hm. Light bulb: Next time I walk up to a becak driver I should, like, ask him if I can ride on the bicycle seat while he pushes or something, so that I can get him to let me name a price, too! I’ll finally find a way for White people to get a bargain in this country!! I’m golden!

But, lest we create misunderstanding without putting it all in perspective,

The tables, turned:

I was talking to my friend today after lunch, as we were sharing different words for tofu and tempeh between Indonesian and English, and I explained to her that most of the time in the US, tofu and tempeh are often considered vegetarian foods—so, from what I am accustomed to in the US, it would be rare to see a dish with tofu in it that also had meat in it, and vice versa. In Indonesia this is most certainly not the case. I explained to my friend that recently I went to a warung ayam kampung (“free range chicken restaurant”), where they served me my ayam bakar [chicken roasted] with 1 biji tahu [piece tofu] and 1 biji tempeh [piece tempeh]. As I tasted the tempeh, I noticed that the outside of it tasted a whooole lot like ayam goreng [chicken fried]! And I realized that what was jarring to my taste buds was that here was a piece of tempeh fried using the same oil that was used to fry the chicken there! Usually, at the house (here) when we eat tempeh, it is not fried directly in fresh oil, nor is it fried in non-meat tainted oil...but this one had been fried directly in chicken frying oil. (Shout-out to the Florida connection: ) Much like a Checkers' french fry, only they use a cow instead of a chicken. So, the chicken-oil fried tempeh was mighty fine to the tastebuds, but I was so unaccustomed to having what was in the USian part of my brain a “vegetarian” food cooked in meat-cooking oil that it simply stood out to me!

So, here’s how the way I am confusing all of the people here might be reversed in the US. If someone were to walk around over there frying tempeh and tofu in oil used for frying meats, or in pork, chicken or beef fat in the US, I feel like a certain few might turn and say, "Well who do you expect to eat that?" (Well actually, first they might say, "Why are you walking and cooking at the same time?" And then they would ask about the meat fat.) Combinations, which seem so inherently natural to some, to an outsider seem all the same, all different, or completely un-/remarkable.

And to turn the tables using a mie-specific analogy: would I ever be able to, in the contexts I'm familiar with in the US, get away with serving spaghetti sauce atop egg noodles??? I think not! Egg noodles are for casseroles! For chicken and noodles! To be served in casserole form swimming amidst a pool of yummy, fatty gravy, with small fresh kernels of corn plucked from the farm just that day, and salty slow-cooked chicken chunks! Or to be served plain with butter, or in a kugel or something! But! with spaghetti sauce??! Uh, noooo. All things considered, however--and unfortunately for the brain security of the insider--the noodles might just taste, look or seem the same to an outsider. And besides, did you know that most ("Italianate") pastas have eggs in them anyway? But they are certainly not egg noodles!

One time I cooked some leftover rice and topped it with leftover homemade spaghetti sauce that had been used for eggplant parmesan. The friend whose home I was at, not a person used to eating rice with spaghetti sauce, told me I was a very weird person for doing this.

…

First off, I own weird.

What’s more, I put zaatar combined with some of the best-tasting-in-the-world fresh-pressed Provence olive oil in my Cream of Wheat, ladies and gentlemen. And guess what? It tastes goooood.

And thus ends the beginning of what will become my book-length essay, entitled On the Culturo-Psychologically Created Nature of Taste, Food Combination Discretion, and Satiety.

The drinksnack.

2009-10-14T19:19:00.003+07:00

The, drinksnack.
Welcome to Asia I’m not going to single out Indonesia but I’m not going to include any other place, the hoommmme, of the drinksnack.
The drinksnack. What is the drinksnack?
The drinksnack. Tea. With milk. Too simple. Add sugar. Needs more.
Needs chunk, needs bite. Needs color, needs fun, needs: fruit, gelatin, sugar, seasoning, ginger, leaves, herbs. Wedang. Needs heat. Needs fun. Needs: rumput laut. Sea grass. That’s what it needs, dikasi lagi gelatin supaya kuat di dalam air panasnya. Dikasi kekuatan. Jahe. What can we do without jahe? What can we be?
Nothing. Nothing atall, mate.
So let’s drink to the fruitsnack. Let’s fruit to the drinksnack.

Ronde: my reason for living. On my first day of return to the great kota kecil of Salatiga, I went directly to the best ronde shop in town. Terkenal, even, for their ronde. Ronde: tepung beras dicampurkan dengan air, terus dikasi gula merah di dalamnya, rolled into balls in the palm of the hand, and direbus seperti itu supaya texturnya like a nice, cozy dumpling ball, except this dumpling ball is gooey, filled with red sugar sweetness so tender it makes me smiiiiiiiile from straight down inside, and blanketed by a smooth and barely viscous liquid that is to sunshine as water is to rain.
Liquidnya filled lagi with bahan lain: gelatin cubes, today green or pink. The gelatin here is thick, tough. Not your wimpy jello jiggler that falls off the spoon or melts into liquid. No this gelatin mould can stand up to wetness, fall down to no one but the acid of one’s stomach after it has been pleasingly gulped down with wedang jahe, warm ginger liquid, so good to my stomach, more betta to my soul. Add lagi, Mbak, add lagi. Okay, I add fresh palm fruit so it will float atop the hot, sweet and slightly viscosity, add a chew, a bite, a fresh new flavor to my otherwise boring drole. Drool. I drool over this viscous liquid day and night I add kacang rebus, kan. And when I do they soften into a feminine bean, revealing their light, reveling in the light of being not a nut, no, no, not a nut because a Nut would
hold strong in a situation like this. This is not a job for a nut. We need something soft and liquidy, almost giving and supple, like a kacang, like a kacang tanah. So we add our boiled peanuts and we eat—drink—eat--…to our success. To our success in making a successful drink. Snack. drinksnack.

My first day to Salatiga. Makan siang: gado-gado. Di sini, gado2 is made with fresh vegetables: mung beans, shredded cabbage; and with some lontong. Long rice batons, let us call them. Much like the ones seen in a track meet race, except the inside is packed and sticky rice, and the outside is a banana leaf. After the rice is cooked
once, it is packed into this leaf longways, packed in, real tight, cornered off at the edges and locked in with the stick
of….something…the stick of….maybe a sate stick. Aku lupa. Wrapped at the corners like a gift. Sealed with hopefully the kiss of a soul and tangibly the stick of a spear. A tiny wooden spear. This is steamed.
When it comes out the lontong has a green outside. It’s green, and the banana leaf gives the rice a green flavor. One time I said to a friend that hemp seed butter tastes like nut—sunflower seed perhaps—mixed in with green, earthy grassiness. She said Yuck. I said, God made this food. This lontong greenness takes on a similar
taste, just lovely, natural, Earthly. Get inside it and taste the flavor. Breathe it in in all senses of the word.
Gado-gado is then made with a sauce. The sauce is a beautiful peanut sauce, that of sate fame as well, and if I could list all the ingredients that there are in sauce gado2, well, then, my house would never be empty of it. Kacang tanah, gula, jahe? bawang? ….I’ll have to check that out. Also served with hard-boiled eggs.
So, the platter comes out with a section of fresh mung beans. A section of fresh, shredded cabbage. A section of fresh boiled rice vermicelli, a section of telur rebus, and a section of cross-sectioned lontong. I place some on my plate, in the amount that I want of each.

I like a lot of vegetables, so I go big on the greens and medium on the lontong slices even though every time I see them I want to eat them all up. I want even more so to take one straight in its package, unwrap one end, and eat it like a stick, a stick of large, long, gooey rice.
Anyways.
I then spoon the saus kacang onto my gado2 mixture, I say a prayer over my food to thank the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, and the shining stars for blessing this food with nourishment, energy, love and sunshine. I take my spoon, my sendok, in my right hand maybe, and my fork in the left, but then I switch them because really I like to eat
with a spoon. When I eat meat that is straight off the bone or not cut so well into tiny pieces I will switch hands again. I will put my spoon in my right hand and my fork in my left, and my spoon will act as my knife, and my fork will pick at and pull at my meat from the bone, held steady by the tongue-tip edge of my spoon. I will shred
the flesh of the beast I am about to indulge in, I will stick my fork tines in it, and I will bring it to my mouth, anticipating with every millimeter approaching, how good, moist, fresh and flavorful that meat is and really will be in my mouth.

But I digress again.

With my sendok in my left hand I now use my fork in my right to ensure that the ingredients, which I am shoveling on a minute scale, all pull and heave themselves up, one leg at a time, like little white-colored men wearing Pamplona bull-running belts and climbing up a stucco wall—I think they might even be wearing red scarves, and some of them the black ‘Spaniard’ hat. Beret.—, who need a boost in the butt, a little boost, to get them up and over the top of that spoon wall. Onto my bed-spoon so that the shredded cabbage will not just fall right back off, especially those pieces that are smothered in gado2, because they get heavy and once they get stuck on the lip of that spoon, who knows what will come next. They might not ever get anywhere were it not for the help of that fork in the right hand.
So this is how I eat my gado2. One might have noticed that I did not mention adding of any telur rebus to my mixture. I do not like telur rebus, no matter what language they are in. There is one time that I like them, and that is with my gudeg.
So mari let us now discuss my gudeg.
Gudeg. I have been chasing gudeg since I got here, and every time I see it I want to climb all over it, almost in it if I could, but I can’t really fit in the bowl and it would be some sort of odd combination of playing in a funballs caged ballroom and playing mudwrassling and being in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. For this reason I do not climb in the nangka.
Gudeg is made out of: nangka muda: tiny ginger—no, that is not what this is, but I really like ginger, so I am thinking about it write/right now. Nangka muda, young jackfruit, belum ripe, dengan apa? Dengan…I, have, no, clue.

It’s purple in color, a dark purple.
It’s a stew that has soaked up all its liquid.
The most important part, the star of the dark purple gameshow, is named nangka muda. And it is. Fucking awesome. Texturnya: artichoke.
This is the artichoke of the fruit world. The artichoke of the fruit world? So is jackfruit really a vegetable or a fruit? Aku kurang tahu. Maybe another one of those tomato-like land mysteries that I will never find out until I just eat the darn thing. Maybe if I want fruit later, then it was a vegetable. Maybe if I want a vegetable later, then it was a fruit. Or maybe it just does its own thing by pleasing the tongue and that is it.

It brings texture and flavor to life, this nangka muda in this gudeg, by being deceptively savorily sweet. It has that spiky finish to it like an artichoke, like it’s trying to menace me at the same time that I eat it. It’s trying to menace me but then once I get it in my mouth it welcomes me with this sweet, soft caress of loving nangka muda.
Already ripe enough to take care of me. Still not ripe enough to be that young childish fruit that it will become. The one who needs caring for, as if it ages backwards like a Mork or a Dork of Cork.

Though he didn’t age backwards. He just rhymes and he was short, like the nangka muda becomes when it becomes a “fruit”. Ripe, but short.

No sweet caress there.

The importance of spinal stability when riding a motorbike, and how this relates to riding horses,

2009-10-09T21:22:00.000+07:00

only without an explanation lesson from any trail guide person.

By Lauren Zentz

If there is a special talent to the “Indonesian everyperson”, I must say it is the developed skill, that when observed seems likely to have developed much like a first language; entirely unconsciously yet so deftly and adroitly that those who employ this natal skill seem as though they are executing an action requiring no effort whatsoever as they sit atop their motorcycles. The specific skill to which I myself may speak more experientially: that of riding passenger on the back of the motorcycle. It will not be my place here to discuss the abdominal aptitude, ability nor fluidly flowing flexibility of the motorcycle driver, as I myself have not yet required any development of this specific skill set; however, when I—based on my own observations as I sit perched atop the rear end of the motor’s thoraxal tailbody—consider the maneuvering the driver must do, occasionally with feet to sort of pedal through narrow juncture between car and curb, car and car, other motorbike and curb; I feel that the motor driver must also have quite the developed set of V1 (1st vehicle, analogous to L1: 1st language) skills.
As for the passenger riding on the back of the body of this type of motorvehicle, here is what I, as indicated in this week’s entry title, have decided: mounting a motorcycle, though much lower to the ground and having foot rests instead of official stirrups, per se (though if I ever buy a motorcycle (ha) I am deciding right now that mine will indeed have a set of stirrups, and every time I slow down to round a curve, I will indeed holler, “Whoa, Nelly!” creating myself as, for all who wish to take notice, the world’s very first, real urban cowgirl.), is entirely like mounting a trail riding horse. I say trail riding horse because the ride consists of much more of the starting-stopping, mountain-climb lean forward, hill-descend lean back, as opposed to your run of the mill equestrian-style ride…and in addition, when one as passenger adds her backpack into the mix, she must adjust her posture all over again. Tuck the lower back a bit further into the saddle, relax yet stay steady, liquefy the lower spine into fluid movement at one with the black leather padded seat atop which she sits; so as not to fall off with some sudden jerk forward when either starting out from a stoplight (when it is paid deference), or coming out of a brief traffic jam-inspired hillside halt. Such jerking, starting and stopping most certainly merits the trail horse-riding “lean forward on the incline, backward on the decline” philosophy, which, in my situation, will eventually come to be called V2 (or 2nd vehicle) skill and practice. Perhaps, since acquired at my adult age, my V2 will never quite equal my dubbular V1 abilities (as I am both able to drive a mobil and ride a bicycle in native-like fashion--of course, my bicycle falling-off record of recent years may merit bicycle skill recategorisation or demotion away from V1 status).
In conclusion and as described by yours truly, the urban motorcycle-cade of Indonesian transportative existence is indeed much like the rural, mountainous rocky hill-climb of at least my horsy trail-riding yesteryear. In order to urbanly ride on the back of a motorcyle in Indonesia, one must sink the lower spine down into the body of the rolling beast below him or her; one must not tense the lower back muscles. It simply remains to flow like liquid sitting atop this sturdy (on most occasions) metal and plexiglass equus; lean forward and back as incline and grade merit, and please do adjust when wearing a heavy backpack.
Next week’s lesson will be all about simultaneously riding side-saddle while eating an ice cream bar and wearing a skirt.

Happy Lebaran!

2009-10-09T21:20:00.001+07:00

The days preceding Lebaran are ramai sekali! [crowded/full of people very]. On the island of Java there is even a word for traveling this time of year: mudik, or pulang kampung [return-home village]. At the end of Ramadhan, as Muslim people finish up their fasting month, adult family members who now work in big cities like Jakarta, Surabaya, Semarang, all come home to their family abodes, where their parents still live, in the smaller towns of the island. Christian, Muslim, etc alike, all pulang at this time of year to be with their families. Prices for travel tickets of any sort at least double in price, and the highways leaving the big cities are soooo incredibly packed that a regularly expected 11 hour trip from Jakarta to Salatiga can turn into a 24 hour trip (I could tell people that they don’t need to wait until Lebaran to have a long and annoying journey from Jakarta to Salatiga—I have a number I could give them for a great travel company that could give them the long and dangerous ride of their life any day of the year!).
Saturday night, Ramadhan ended, and after the voices projected from the masjids (mosques) alllllll over town for quite some time—the regular 6pm-ish call to prayer with an added end to Ramadhan prayer this night—many, many, many Muslim people hit the streets, parading on foot, in the open back of a truck, or on their motorcycles; some with drums, some just joining in the parades, some lighting fireworks (there have been fireworks every single night since Ramadhan began—just the small type of fireworks that you light at home; not big displays). Families gathered at homes and began cooking for the next day’s feasting. I’m sure they also had a nice meal that night as well, as upon that 6pm call to prayer fasting is officially over each night of Ramadhan.
Yesterday morning, I went to Dyah’s house with her and Iwan (reminder, these are my homestay hosts), to celebrate Lebaran with Dyah’s family. I got up at just before 8 and got ready to go while Dyah and Iwan went around to their neighbors’ houses and shared Lebaran greetings. This is interesting because Iwan and Dyah are in fact Catholic, but their neighbors are mostly Muslim, and these are the people they’re going around to greet. It’s like…well I guess, from my point of view, it’s maybe like Jewish people in the US being invited to people’s Christmas parties, and going and happily wishing them all a Merry Christmas. It seems that Lebaran here is just as much a part of at least Javanese-Indonesian culture as is Christmas in the US. It’s just ubiquitous and unavoidable; and so, people of minority groups tend to participate in the activities.
Once Dyah and Iwan got back to the house, Iwan grabbed his camera and the three of us hit the road—well, Dyah and I on her motorcycle, and Iwan on his. The morning air was so so fresh as the wind blew all over us while we rode/drove across town to Dyah’s house. The streets were so calm that morning, with some people walking over to friends’/neighbors’/families’ homes, and very, very few cars on the road. Just a morning of clean, fresh air under a clear, blue sky as we made our way over to see the family. Once we got to Dyah’s parents’ house, all her siblings were there and they had just started the here-Muslim tradition where elders—in this case Dyah’s mom and dad—give their blessings to each…younger…individually. The parents sat on a bench seat in the middle of the common room, and each child in their own turn kneeled before, going right to left, first their father and then their mother. The parents gave their blessings and love to each one. What a warm experience, for me to try to stay sidelined from, but watch and inevitably feel, as the family love and emotion warmed the room and the tears dropped from just about everyone’s eyes. Just a warm and loving family moment.
After the blessings were given/received, the tears wiped away, and the smiles had all returned to everyone’s faces, we wandered about for a while as some people went back and forth putting all the last minute food preparations out on the table, and the 4 grand-/kids continued to play video games together. We then each, at our own leisure, ambled over to the food table to fill our own bowls.

**And now I shall digress for this year’s first random food digest (haha, digest).**
For this meal, we started with a base of ketupat—this is a specially steamed rice that families get together and cook the night before Lebaran. This style of rice preparation can actually be found in certain places/with certain dishes year round, but for this one, rice is loaded to halfway full in these square/rectangular coconut leaf, hand-assembled packages using ½ yellow (young) and ½ green (mature) leaves, to end up making a checkerboard pattern. Usually, year-round, only green coconut leaves are used, so that the package looks weaved but not checkered. The ketupat packages are then steamed for about 4 hours until the inside turns into soft, packed cubes of yummy yummy white rice (sidenote: I am apparently the only person in Indonesia who enjoys eating white rice just by itself. I wish I could convince people here of the joys and flavors inherent in the kagillion different types of rice that exist in this world. There is a long road ahead in convincing the Indonesian people I have met of this. However, I don’t mind that when I eat white rice by itself some people here tell me that I am eating like a sakti.).
So, the ketupat rice is served by cutting it into cubes/slices, and then for this occasion the family had a giant, circular, lazy-susan-like tray with a giant circular bowl in the middle that held the ketupat cubes. The surrounding trays carried the grand selection of meat and vegetable dishes with which to top the ketupat. Starting with the grand attraction—this one had been talked up for some time because a few weeks ago I had mentioned my love for it, completely intending another dish but remembering the wrong word for it--opor ayam: chicken stewed in coconut milk and spices, including turmeric, so the sauce is yeller; then, semur--meatballs that were the most similar to an American/European meatball that I have yet to see here. Usually, meatballs, called bakso, are ground into near liquid form, with tepung tapioca (tapioca flour), bawang putih [garlic], and maybe one or two more spices already added in. Their texture when cooked is much tighter –a full ball—than a Western meatball, which is more…crumbly, looser, and textured when cooked. These meatballs were served in a sweet/savory sauce with tomatoes in it, colored a dark purple or brown. Next, the most Indian-food reminiscent (based on my US experiences with Indian food thus far) dish I have had since I got here--but maybe by looks only could it almost be mistaken for mattar paneer? : This dish was made up of the cutest little brown beans I have ever seen in my entire, dear 28 years of life, and small cubes of hard-boiled egg whites. This dish as well was stewed with a coconut milk base, and a fabulous array of seasonings therewithin. I could definitely get used to that one. Next, some mie goreng [noodle(s) fried], with some garlic…and some other seasoning in it—I did not get the chance to ask what it was, but I don’t usually taste it in mie goreng here—that gave a coolness of breath in the aftertaste much like a eucalyptus leaf might...But since there was no sort of actual strong eucalyptus burn or flavor in there, I’m not sure that that’s the right herb to be mentioning… Whatever it was, it was uuueeeenak [really freaking good in Central Javanese Indonesian dialect slang]. Next, liver rendang. Now, I have never had liver rendang before, but I have had beef rendang, and maaaaybe chicken rendang. I’m so obsessed with the beef one that really all other foods could disappear from the earth when I eat it, were it not the case that I have a very strong attachment to vegetables. This is a dish traditionally from the island of Padang, but people from Padang have circulated apparently all throughout Indonesia, opening up tons of restaurants along the way; and so Padang and rendang are just everywhere-Indonesia food now (As my friend Frances called it the other night: Indonesian fast-food. Hm. I might respond to that with: Maybe if you take away the negative reputation and food preparation models of fast food restaurants). And when rendang is good, it is goooooooood. Beef slow-cooked in, yes, another coconut milk base (don’t worry—not all Indonesian foods/stews are coconut milk-based; it just seems that that was the day’s theme, whether they intended it to be or not. To be.), with garlic, lemongrass, the here-version of shallots (much smaller—the same size as a garlic clove), and a spice mix of at least 10 different beautiful spices. So, take this liver rendang. It’s really kind of like having a rendang pate; so: the best flavors of Indonesia combined with the best flavors of France. I accept. It was pretty delish, but definitely could only be taken in small portions.
Now, dessert is not quite the big deal that it is in dunia barat [world west], but there are often sweet drinks with fun fruits and gelatinous materials in them to have after meals! They’re always served in a punch bowl and you just go and help yourself, partially eating some of it with a short-handled teaspoon/US baby spoon (for those of you who know my ice cream eating habits, you already know how ecstatic I am about the culturally ratified method of eating this food-drink—which I have previously coined the drinksnack (Zentz, 2009, unpublished)). These drinksnacks tend to have a liquid base of water with a cherry syrup that is just ubiquitous in this region, and then the most common fruit to be tossed in is blewah, which looks on the outside like a northern fall squash, similar almost to an acorn squash but more color-stained; but the inside tastes almost exactly like canteloupe. The first time I saw the outside of the inside that I was eating, I was floored! How could this be a canteloupe if it looks like a squash?!!? Unbelievable, the fruits of this Mother Earth, and how she tricks us, messes with us, confuses us, and yet pleases us through appearance and flavor and texture! This is often accompanied with a gelatinous agar-agar and coconut mixture that comes in tiny cubes and different colors; more tiny cubes, a dark, dark shade of green, that are actually jellied sea-grass/-weed; and then this drinksnack, for this special occasion, also had totally fun mini-gumball-looking gelatinous balls, rather flavorless but the texture was just too fun to describe--But I will try: It’s kind of like jumping into a funball tent at Chuck E Cheese’s, except here the funball tent jumps into your mouth instead. More fun than fun can be, really--; and then, finally, this day’s special, special treat, was that lidah buaya [tongue crocodile = aloe vera!!!] was tossed in there! And this stuff is so incredibly awesome! It is clear in color, with little visible strands of…xylem/phloem-like material?...stringing through it, and to put it in one’s mouth…it tends to disappear as soon as you chew it, simply releasing the most mouth-refreshing burst of air directly into one’s mouth.
So, a mixture like that, a kingdom of textures and flavors, is one sweet and royal way of ending a delishius meal, is it not.
**End food digression.**

After the meal, we all just sat around a bit, chatted, hung out, you know, just acted like family—well, they did; I was the guest J . After a while, and after they tossed a few more snacks and flavors at me just to make sure I was truly full, well-fed and loved, we headed off to the cemetery to visit passed loved ones. This is an event where the family could all expect to see friends and neighbors there at the cemetery, as on this first day of Lebaran everyone makes their way to the kuburan [cemetery] to spread flowers and !!Thai basil!! (as we know it in the US), as well as their thoughts and prayers, over family members’ graves. The family gathered around each grave for a bit, said their own silent prayers in between laughing, chatting, and enjoying being together, and after about an hour we left.
As I had some work to do, I parted with the family for the rest of the afternoon, and then joined them at night for more eating of the same dishes, as well as watching them get dressed up in nice white linens and laugh through an entire photo session with Iwan. What a great way to end the night.
Today the family is going even more kampung [rural village], as they head outside of Salatiga to spend the day with more family members.
It’s been a great holiday!
And as they say here for Lebaran: Mohon ma’af lahir dan batin [please sorry birth and soul]—just a way of saying to all something like ‘Please forgive my trespasses’, type thing…

A Confederacy of Dunces, part two

2009-09-26T09:57:00.001+07:00

I was going to edit this, either the story or who I would send it to: there are people on this list with whom I associate professionally, familially, young people who maybe have parents who don't want them to see all my swear words. But then I thought, I'm pretty sure my sister has made sure her children know I swear a lot, the rest of us are all adults here pretty much, and really, we all like a good story.

So here it is, A Confederacy of Dunces, part two.

I am the newest resident of Salatiga again, having arrived yesterday at noon after an amazing ride with a loco 'travel' (sorta like smaller/private bus transportation) driver and his companion. First, he picked me up 2 and a half hours late--that part no big deal so far; travel is known for being late. However, a part of the understanding was that he was late because he was picking other people up. Kesalahan pertama [wrong first]. Turns out I was the only one who had ordered a ride in that direction (Salatiga) for that time, so they had not been picking anybody up. They were just a combination of: lost, late, and stuck in traffic, which is a bit extra right now because it was dusk on the first Friday of Ramadhan (sp. used here). So, already picked up at about 8:30 instead of 6pm.

Next, like 3 hours of traffic jam on the toll road highways of Jakarta--. Oh, and I must comment that 30 minutes into the ride we had already taken our first istirahad (rest)/toilet break.

I have never seen traffic like that which I saw Friday in Jakarta. First, in North Jakarta, I went to melihat-lihat sedikit [see-see a little] in the late morning, and even on the bus, which has a special lane, getting up there, once we got into the North Jakarta area it was silly jammed. Which bode interestingly for my pending return to Central/South Jakarta to do the red-tape pickup rounds.

So, I got out of the bus in North Jakarta and immediately understood why, besides the cultural non-tendency to go running or walking outdoors, nobody would ever do such a thing to their bodies because of the endless clouds of exhaust that one must walk through. Lots of sepedah motor [bike motor] drivers wear face masks, and some even gloves, for this reason. So, I walked around in that air for about an hour, saw Sunda Kelapa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunda_Kelapa), the old Jakarta port, and its surroundings, and then had to get back to the bus to go erranding.

I got to the busway already a little later than I had planned, got up to the platform where a crowd had already gathered to await the next bus...and then the crowd kept gathering as buses, when they did finally show up, failed to stop and open their doors to pick us up. They were obviously doing somethingthey needed to be doing, but...after about 3-4 buses passed to do this, I said, I don't have time for this right now. Walked backward (not literally) through the by now large crowd, down out of the station and back out to pick up a taxi. And sit in traffic in that. But, he got me to my destination in a timely fashion.

So, I apparently digress. Back to one crazy night of travel.

Two to three hours in Jakarta traffic jams, and then we get out of the town and stop for another istirahad. At this point I think I had already fallen asleep a bit in the back, so I just got out and stretched my legs and was ready to go after a bit. The driver then asked me to pay him the agreed upon fee: 210.000 Rp (sekitar [about] 10.000 Rp = $1). And at this point he said something to me about how we stop in Semarang (about 1-1.5 hours away from Salatiga, and there I'll need to pick up another travel at that point to be taken to my house in Salatiga. Given the agreed upon travel arrangements--that I will be taken by this company/driver (the original understanding was that this bus and driver would take me--my hotel, which was fabulous otherwise in all their services, had made the arrangement for me) directly to my home--I assumed that he meant that another car from the travel company for whom he was driving would be there to pick me up and take me with another group of people who needed to go to Salatiga, Semarang being the local capital and thus a good transit place.

So with payment taken care of, we drove on. While on the highway my driver was driving in a very odd way. I certainly wasn't expecting any sort of USian driving style, but he was ‘off’ even for an Indonesian style: slowing down and drifting to the left a bit, then when cars would come around speeding up and going really really fast, dodging and weaving through them, honking at them when they honked at him, etc. Then, when traffic would clear, slowing and drifting, still to the left usually, and very very slow. I kept trying to watch him because it sort of looked like his head was dragging. So I was trying to see if he was falling asleep, or texting, or if this was just his posture.

Then, we just pull over onto the highway shoulder. Okay, either we've been drifting to the left because we now have a flat tire on the left side, or he has to pee, or...smoke? or...wtf?

So he gets back in.

And keeps driving the same way.

Well, since he has been going fast in the crowded parts of the drive, and since he was aware enough right now to get out and do whatever he did, he must be fine and that's just his style.

So, I try to just let go, figuring, Well, whether I'm awake or asleep, watching the driver or not, if we’re going to die we'll die. Tempted to ask him what's going on, I’m first a bit linguistically hesitant, clinging on to one of the last shy bones in my body, because I do really have a lot of trouble understanding this guy when he talks—so when he answers me will I even be able to participate in the conversation I have just begun?... I further justify this by creating the feeling in myself that every time I do get ready to ask him what the hell he is doing it seems like we're okay, and every time I don't it seems like maybe he is out of control actually. So I just lie down in the back, cover myself with blankets, practice letting go of some sort of control that I do not really but might want to have, and eventually fall asleep.

Next blurry wake-up we have pulled over so that he can sleep a bit.

I'm thinking, most travel drivers do not do this. This I'm pretty sure I know. So now I have a driver that has basically just started his overnight drive, and can't stay awake. Great. We're never going to get there. But oh well, I'm here now and I will get there, so get a good night's sleep. Since he apparently is. haha.

Eventually we get onto non-highway roads, and those are hilarious because most of them are in less-than-smooth shape, but he barrels through nonetheless, so now, sleeping in the back seat, I am also being catapulted on and off the seat cushions. Amazingly, I did sleep straight through from like 3am to 8 something, and did a good bit of sleeping before that, too. This must be an attestation to my level of fatigue at that time.

So then we're driving along in the late morning, and eventually the woman who is accompanying the driver (I had originally thought this was team driving, having been surprised to see a woman driver. I should have known that she was just accompanying to keep him awake. Or something, like to also sleep while he drove.), while he is out doing something, tells me that to get to Salatiga I have to pay 200.000 Rp more. I try to bargain with them, saying, to myself, Wait, 210.000 for a 10 hour drive, and 200.000 for a 2 hour drive? Fuuuuuuck you!

However, with limited language, and their awareness of that fact and of my Westernness, which of course means I have more money...I am only able to get them down to 150.000. The conversation goes something like the following: I tell them that the arrangement we have agreed upon is that they will be taking me, for that original price, all the way to Salatiga, to my house there. The woman defers to the man, telling me he’s the one in charge of money—after she has asked me for it in the first place—and the driver just grunts and says something along the lines of "That's not enough to get us there--to get enough gas to get us there." And then I say to myself, Fuuuuuuuck you.

They tell me they can drop me off in Semarang as agreed upon and I can seek out a bus or something to get me to Salatiga, but I consider all my bags, my fatigue, my desire to get to my destination eventually, and I just say (more or less, in bahasa Indonesia), "Oh fuck it, just take me there."

This is one of those moments when having a very nascent form of a second language makes me wish I could find the way to express my anger/frustration/independence/boldness like I can in my first language. But how can I say "Fuck you I know you're gouging me because you're a dickwad" in Indonesian? I do not know yet. I wish I could say it in Javanese. The language they actually speak with each other.

But I can't, so I agree to pay, and on we go.

We finally get to town, and the driver doesn't know where my street is, but he's like the only person I've ever met here who doesn't just immediately stop and ask someone. He might have once, but I couldn't tell if he was just getting out to do whatever he did every time we stopped, or if he was inquiring with somebody.

So I tell him a general vicinity, and he starts driving that way, toward campus. And then he and another guy in a truck bigger than our van decided to turn a corner at the same time, and of course get stuck and are nearly touching each other. And they decide to have a yelling fight in Javanese like I have never seen before yet here. But here's where it gets better. My driver gets so pissed in a matter of 15 seconds of yelling to each other that each one's penis is bigger than the other's, my driver gets so pissed, that he quickly reaches back to a padded cushion right behind the front bench (where the driver and navigator seat are) of the van, pulls up the cushion, and pulls out what looks to me to be a small rifle wrapped in newspaper. What the fuck!?!?

So then, as his comrade struggles with him and fights him to pull the gun out of his hands, I quickly proceed to open my car door and descend from the $!%$%! vehicle!!! If it goes any farther than this I'm just gonna make his shit face drop me and my shit right there and then, and NO PAYMENT! because this is fuuuuuuucked up! But, she pulls the gun away from him and we drive off into the Salatiga morning.

What. the. fuck.

And then we finally got to my house, I paid him his fucking money, and they left, my hostess knowing very well as well that I had just gotten played big time, and later Iwan, my host, remarking that that van did not have a company logo on the side of it and that most travel companies do.

I'm tempted to call the hotel and at least tell them that this company that they think they're calling and doing good business with for their clients is a bunch of liiiiiiiiiaaaaars. But, I don't know how much good it would do. Given that hotel, I think potentially a lot, because it was a really good hotel. But I'm not sure..

Anyways. I have arrived safe and sound (safe because as we can see none of those potential dangers resulted in my death) in Salatiga, at the home of my gracious hosts, and as I began writing this I thought about editing who I would send it to. But the story’s just too good.

I walked into a party in Jakarta!

2009-09-26T09:51:00.001+07:00

Well on August 17th, the date when I seem to have arrived in Jakarta, I emerged from the cocoon of my time-warp, 36-or-48-hour-depending-on-how-many-different-time-zones-you-look-at (yes that is one adjective), marvelous airflight journey into the sun, having ridden backwards yet landed forward in time, only to be reminded (after losing time and space one must be reminded of things when she lands her two feet back on the ground) that said day was the national holiday of Indonesia. Thus, no rest for the weary, LZ drops her bags in her hotel room, smooths out the tangles of her hair, changes shoes from sitting travel to marching travel, and marches herself straight into the center of all Hari Ulang Tahun [day renew year] festivities (all of a sudden I feel like I'm in an Indonesian chapter of A Confederacy of Dunces).

My hotel is not too far from the collection of government buildings which line the wide streets bordering a multi-block square containing the national monument, and so I headed that way into streets lined with city buildings decorated in red and white, with big signs to greet the nation's 64th bday.

I must admit that while I had planned on walking in the direction of the national monument, Monas, I had not paid attention to the fact that the street I was walking on was the street of the president's house (I really only glanced at the map, as I thoroughly believe in having no use for them). So as I walked down the road and saw the increasing numbers of machine-gun armed military men on the inside of the Monas grounds, and of 'civilians' (people presumably not armed and ready to kill) on the outside of the grounds, I simply wondered what was going on. In a few hundred feet I found out: the official ceremony of Hari Ulang Tahun Indonesia ke-64 [day renew year Indonesia th-64] had just begun in front of the president's house, and people were gathered outside the grounds to try to catch a glimpse of what was going on. The palace grounds were enclosed by temporary bleachers filled with onlookers, so the crowds that I was among were just standing outside hearing and seeing what we could. The members of the military who were not standing guard (quite frankly those men on guard could have been special police forces) were gathered at the edge of the Monas grounds to line up in procession from there to the palace.

So, that's where I got to hang out on my first afternoon in Indonesia this year: bobbing and weaving my way in and out of crowds, getting as close as I could to places I wasn't allowed to enter, getting talked to by a few police and military guards on duty who--some--were temporarily more interested in me than their jobs, listening to and watching military bands and processions as well as traditional regional songs and dances from different parts of this incredibly diverse country, watching the sun set on the national monument, and beginning to feel the bottom fall out as meaning and truth begin to shed themselves in this nascent state of fluency.

A great way to start the year.

Now if I could just get the government office members here to better demonstrate to me what it means to start a year in 'great' fashion, for their version of this game is, I believe, pure torture.

Ever since Tuesday morning I have been on a magical scavenger hunt for people who might offer me the next clue that will get me one step further toward the ultimate goal that is not necessarily one of 'getting all my paperwork done', but maybe rather one of 'when can I leave Jakarta already?!?!?!?' It's fine, I like it here, but really, a homestay is cheaper than a home-tel.

In the meantime, I spent Tuesday getting not much further than Monas on any sort of tourism duty because when I walked by there in the afternoon after knocking on all the bureaucracy doors I could knock on for the day, the national holiday festivities continued with an amazing parade which brought in groups from every region of the country with presentations of their traditional ceremonial songs and dances, figures, makeup, clothing, et cetera. Not to be missed, so I hung out there for a bit until getting a call from a friend of a friend, who has friends where I'm going, who now will become my friends (quelle assumption!) in Salatiga. I had dinner with him in the MOST EXPENSIVE MALL IN ALL OF INDONESIA, where the food is not the most expensive, thank god. The rest of the place is every single famous designer name that pops into your head, plus five more. Yes, five.

Next, we have Wednesday. On Wednesday I went from one kantor [office] (for word origin see contact with Dutch language and colonists) to another, hopping from one side of the city to the next. The benefit gained is that I got to see a lot of different parts of Jakarta. One of my bus lines actually did take me by (as in, ride by and notice the Ritz, but no need to stop and say hello) the Ritz and Marriott location, which were just bombed about a month ago. Apparently the buildings were renovated just about as quickly as the destruction tore everything apart...

I was actually having dinner with a friend that night, and she asked me what American people thought of the bombings. I hadn't really reflected on general thoughts distributed among USians who were aware of the event, so I kinda just threw out the impression that I did have of what people were thinking: "Another Muslim country, another terrorist bombing..." She pointed out, though, that interestingly this bombing actually was committed by a/few Malaysian people, with the reason understood to be that this country is not Muslim enough. Here, there are 5 official religions (Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian). Citizens' official religions actually have to be on their identity cards; whereas, Malaysia is officially, governmentally, a Muslim country. Just an interesting note to ponder on.

One more tidbit from our conversation--we were walking around Monas at dusk, and there was a huge black line of smoke floating across the top of the monument. She pointed out that a building was burning down, which sounded like that really sucked. And, of course, it did, but, the building was actually burning down due to a purposeful act of arson. She explained that around here, when buildings get old, the people who own the property are unable to sell it so instead they set it on fire and collect money...I guess from investors who are more willing to pay for land that they won't have to tear anything down on, or something? There are too many details to forget, but that is one that I have successfully forgotten.

And with that, I leave you all, and I hopefully leave Jakarta soon. The plan so far is to get to Salatiga early-early Saturday morning and spend the weekend there before going back up to Semarang, the regional capital, to play the regional version of the Red Tape Scavenger hunt all. over. again. from the beginning.

It's kind of like a version of "The Song that Never Ends". And now that you have visions of Sharon Lewis and Lambchop the sock puppet singing that song over and over again in your heads, I really go.

Here are a few pix.

Gedung Hari Nasional 1

National Holiday decorations.

Gedung Hari Raya

National Holiday decorations.

Gedung Hari Raya

National Holiday decorations.

Walk of Presidents

National Holiday Procession

Monas to the Istana Presiden.

National Holiday Procession

Monas to the Istana Presiden.

National Holiday Procession

Military band headed from Monas to Prez's house.

La Casa del Presidente

The main event.

First Indo Sunset

Out in front of the Istana Presiden looking toward the west.

Monas at dusk

The sun sets on Hari National ke-64.

paradeJawa

Javanese portion of the parade

Jakarta masjid deco

fence outside Masjid Sunda Kelapa, with banyan growth all up in it

istana presiden hangover

after the after-party--bleacher take-dow on the 20th, after festivities on the 17th

istana presiden hangover 2

after the after-party--bleacher take-dow on the 20th, after festivities on the 17th