deananana

Okay, so Time magazine recently did a profile of a Ghanaian family.  I'll have to admit, I haven't read it all, but it seems to do a fairly good job of actually portraying Africans as human beings, rather than as objects of pity or scorn.   But the reason it caught my eye, was because of a 'letter to the editor' the following week.

Here's the letter:

Your report captured the essence of a continent's conundrum. Delight Deh is the embodiment of the African whose hopes and dreams are incessantly shuttered by the archetypal African Big Man, such as Presidents Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. My prayers go out for Delight. He is full of promise.

Henry Mukasa, SHARON, MASS.

I think that that is the first time I've seen, in print, without discussion, the names Mugabe and Museveni lumped together like that... Museveni has been perceived, weirdly, as this shining point of light in africa. Looks like the tide may be turning against him!  (As every good american knows, it's pretty easy to unethically consolidate power if you do it slowly and gradually (patriot act, anyone?); seems Museveni has learned that lesson too. As long as he isn't killing people or razing entire towns, I doubt most Ugandans will be overly bothered by his slow descent to despot-dom.)

I'm trying to lose weight and yet I just decided to eat a Crunchie chocolate bar, and it was soooooooooooo good. Magically delicious and sooooo worth it.

Also, there's somelittlething on either the waistband of my underwear or of my pants, and it's poking and itching and hurting, but i CANNOT FIND WHAT IT IS, and it is driving me nuts.

i'm addicted. I have this procrastination problem, as already established, and now i have a facebook account. And holy crap, that facebook is like crack.  I love how i'm suddenly back in touch with people i'd thought i'd never hear from again; i love how i'm back in better and more frequent contact with friends i was worried i'd lose touch with; i love how i can totally stalk people....

Today it felt like my face was going to fall off. (This is about the weather now, by the way, not facebook.)  Seriously, now that it doesn't get dark until 6:30, it seems like it should be warmer out. Its terribly confusing.

So I'm home sick, and yet, i'm doing work. Why? Because I didn't get my ass in gear to do it last week. (This really shouldn't surprise anyone who knows me well.)  I'm trying to figure out why i always do this, and I think that I've come up with a reason: I am not motivated by anything. I'm not working towards anything, really. I'm ambitious only in that i worry about my ability to feed myself when I'm 75, and as a single gal, I'll need to have a larger proportion of  my own money saved up to prevent dining on cat food in the golden years. I can't help but feel like i'm just spinning my wheels till it's time to keel over sometime in the 2060s.  (In 2060 i'll be 84!)  And spinning my wheels doesn't seem like a good enough reason for all this stress....

When I arrived in UG, i was a freshly-turned 27 years old, and I felt a certain amount of pity for all the single women in their 30s who seemed to be running away from 'real life'.... but I'm starting to understand... God if you're going to be bored and purposeless in canada, wouldn't it be better to at least be stimulated and purposeless in africa or asia or whatever? At least that way there's plenty of distractions!

gah what an embarrasingly depressing entry! 

God, i'm so sick it's sick. I think I've set a sleeping record for myself this weekend. (Considering that I'm pretty big on sleeping, that's really saying a lot.)  I've calculated that since Friday at 1pm (when I came home early from work) that I have slept a staggering 40 hours over the course of two days and two nights. That's a lot of sleeping, yo'.

It also totally fucks me over because I brought home a crapload of  "must do" work this weekend, and I was too sick to do any of it.

The professor who told me he didn't give extensions on assignments because "when you're in the real world, there's no such thing as an extension" is haunting me. If only he were wrong....

I said i was going to start a blog again, and then I proceeded to not write a single word in it. I feel like a bit of a liar!

Even though I've spent the last year thinking to myself  "ha! that would be a good blog entry, and I'd write it like this", now that I've set out to really do it, I've been a bit paralyzed.   I don't want to turn this into some boring home-based version of my travel blog, and only write about the 'big events' (like the vacation I just took), but I also don't want this to turn into What I Ate for Lunch Today and Boy Am I Tired.  There's a middle ground somewhere, but I'm not sure where it is.

So, to get things off to a start, I'm going to cut and paste something I wrote about a year ago, at three oclock in the morning, while drunk. I'm going to leave in the drunken typos and written slurring too, i think it gives it a certain je ne sais quoi. 

I wrote this fine little story when I got home from a bar one night last winter, because I'd just had a pretty shit ass experience on the TTC (toronto's public transit) while coming home, and I wanted to get the story all out and recorded, before I lost my anger. And then, I let the story sit on my computer for a year, because really, unless you have a blog, what the hell else do you do with a story like this?

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I got on the bus today. It was late, and I was alone, but normally that doesn’t really matter. I’m in downtown Toronto, I’ve spent a fun night with friends, mostnly new, couple old. Its been a night of inclusiveness, of people happy to meet new people, of friedndliness. While I waited, for what seemed like ages and ages, for the Queen street car to come, I briefly chatted with the other girl waiting, bonding, briefly, in the coldness of the wiat, when would it come?

 Queen street car was uneventful, when we arrived at yonge, the driver joyfully announced, “there’s the bus!” . We all run for the bus, collective in our desire to not wait for the next one in the bitter cold, this quick jog across the street is a shared experience. As we pour onto the bus, almost everyone youngish, almost everyone a bit drunkish, as people are at three a.m. in downtown Toronto are, I notice that I am only one of two women getting on at the crowded stop, but relax a bit when I get on and see my relaxed, happy, tipsy busload of people.

 SCORE! I get one of the one-person seats, where I don’t have to sit, squished, next to anyone else.  There’s a two seater right behind me, I don’t notice its occupants at all except for their state of occupancy: I can’t sit there. I sit down, unwind my scarf, I’ve got a long ride up to north york ahead of me. The two guys behind me start talking, I don’t know what they look like. The one, who I can hear is to my right, starts talking about how he “hates chicks”. I tune it out, this is angry drunken talk. Then he shifts gears, “the girl in front of us, I could fuck her.”  They are talking about me, but I pretend I don’t hear them, but I do, and they know that I do. It’s a quiet bus and I’m 6 inches away from their knees.  Again. “this girl in front of us, she’s cute. I could totally fuck her.”

 I ignore. I ignore and ignore and ignore, like it’s an activity. I look for my gum in my purse. I find it, I push a pellet out of its plastic packaging, I chew and chew and chew. Get all the candy coating incorporated into the gumminess. I read the bus ads, but not really, merely pushing my eyes up to wehre the ads are, over the windows, ignoring ignoring ignoring.

 The ignoring makes the woman hater mad. He starts talking about how he can hurt people. How he can kill people. How he could crush someonew’s trachea with his hands. His buddy tells him to shut the fuck up. He replies that isnt’ it cool that he’s scaring the shit out of the girl in front of them, isn’t it fucking cool to have that power over someone? To fucking scare the shit out of people? He could hurt people you  know. I ignore and ignore and ignore.

 Then, he fucking hates jews.  He fucking hates them, funcking hates them. I’m jewish. I look really jewish. I ‘ve always said that the only people who know I’m jewish are other jews and anti-semites, racists. Everyone else figures I’m Italian.  Finally, I turn around, I give a stare, for a second or two, then I turn around again. He knows that I know he’s talking about me. I’M NOT SCARED. I’m not scared.

 I ignore and ignore and ignore.

 I fuckning hate jews. I can fucknign kill people. Blather blather blather. I chew and chew and chew my gum. Look for lip balm in my purse that I know isn’t there. She looked at me you know. She looked at me. Its fucking awesome to scare people. To have that power over them.

 I’ve had enough. Enough enough ENOUGH. I’m not fucking scared. There’s no fucking way I’m letting this fucking pussy think that I am. I turn around, I turn my whole body in my seat. I look at him, I look and I look. “Is there something you’d like to say to me?” I say. His buddy, the one who’s been telling him to shut up, to stop being such an asshole, and what the hell is wrong with you, tries to reassure me “this has nothing to do with you, he’s being an a jerk, don’t worry about it.” Still, I stare at the jerk. “I’ve been listening to the things your saying, like you’ve wanted me too. And you ‘d like fuck me, but I ignored you, so now you’d like to hurt me instead. Is there anything you’d like to say to me? Because I feel a lot of what you’ve said has been for my benefit, and I was wondering if you’d like to say something directly.” I look, I stare, I wait for the response. Its amazing the boldness slight drunkenness  gives you.  I am truly not scared of this guy. I am proud of myself for saying something, for not letting this guy go to bed tonight thinking he’s intimidated some chick alone on the bus. Buddy intervenes.   “This has nothing to do with you, I’m sorry, please, I’m sorry, just..”  I know this has nothing to do with me. “I know this has nothing to do with me, but the words are for my benefit, so is there anthying you’d like to say directly.”

 He apologizes. “I’m not going to hurt you”.  “I know you’re not”. I don’t remember what was said  next, adrenaline is coursing through my body, its fight or flight time, and for some reason, all five foot three of me has chosen fight. FUCKING FIGHT.  “But what the fuck do youhave to say?”  All I know, is eventually I say “I know you’re not going to hurt me, because you’re a fucking pussy.” Buddy puts his head in hands. “You shouldn’t have said that, you shouldn’t have said that, oh no.” I look at buddy, sitting directly behind me. He seems like a good enough guy, suitably offended and pissed off by both the racism and the misogyny.  I look at him, I say, “You’re right, I shouldn’t have said that, I soon as I said it, I knew that I shouldn’t have, I’m switching seats.” Finally, my own words have scared me, they are aggressive enough that I’m afraid of the response that they’ll elicit.

 I  move up the bus, to another seat. I ponder talking to the bus driver prior to my stop, asking him to wait a bit to make sure that jerk-off behind me doesn’t get off too. Before I get a chance to be proactive in a scared way, to diminish my power, Jerk-off come up the bus, sits beside me.  “I’m sorry” he says. He’s really sorry. “Fine”. I continiue staring up the front of the bus. He goes back to his seat.  I continue staring up throught eh front of the bus.  I sit and sit and sit, I stare and stare and stare, my stare being in the opposite direction of the jerk, “no coincidence” there.  Again, he come up, sits beside me. “I’m sorry, I hate women, but it has nothing to do with you, I’m sorry.”  I look at him, my 4 beers and my own anger at a lifetime of men more subtle than him, they give me power, letting  me speak words I’ve wanted to speak for years. “I know you hate women, but that doesn’t mean you can say that shit to the random women on the bus. We’re random women on the bus, we don’t deserve it.” “I know, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.”

 I feel weak, I feel impotent, as I get off the bus and check and make sure he hasn’t gotten off at the same stop as me. I’ve doen nothing except make him apologize. I want words that are just as violent as his. I want I want I want I want I want. I don’t know. I just want him to understand, to understand that I don’t care but that I DO I FUCKING DO, FUCK OFF YOU FUCKER.

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yikes. that's weird to read now that i'm sober and it's a year later, but hey, it's a pretty interesting first posting, at least.

I think that if you could mush together all the little crumbs in my keyboard into a solid mass, you could probably make an entire bagel. 

I'm starting a blog again.