e-Bomb, the fire cracker in a small package. e-Bomb, the philosopher. e-Bomb, the late bloomer staging her own life revolution. e-Bomb, the history watcher. e-Bomb, the lover. e-Bomb, the friend. Welcome to My World. Here's my story.
In this strangely self-serving world, sometimes it's hard to find instances where you can be selfless without being taken advantage of. I am glad that I had the opportunity to be safely selfless. Thank you.
June 17, 2008
The Web Time Forgot
By ALEX WRIGHT
Correction Appended
MONS, Belgium — On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology's lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.
In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or "electric telescopes," as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a "réseau," which might be translated as "network" — or arguably, "web."
Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where "anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation."
Although Otlet's proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today's Web. "This was a Steampunk version of hypertext," said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.
Otlet's vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. "The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century," Mr. Kelly said. "It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions."
Today, Otlet and his work have been largely forgotten, even in his native Belgium. Although Otlet enjoyed considerable fame during his lifetime, his legacy fell victim to a series of historical misfortunes — not least of which involved the Nazis marching into Belgium and destroying much of his life's work.
But in recent years, a small group of researchers has begun to resurrect Otlet's reputation, republishing some of his writing and raising money to establish the museum and archive in Mons.
As the Mundaneum museum prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary on Thursday, the curators are planning to release part of the original collection onto the present-day Web. That event will not only be a kind of posthumous vindication for Otlet, but it will also provide an opportunity to re-evaluate his place in Web history. Was the Mundaneum (mun-da-NAY-um) just a historical curiosity — a technological road not taken — or can his vision shed useful light on the Web as we know it?
Although Otlet spent his entire working life in the age before computers, he possessed remarkable foresight into the possibilities of electronic media. Paradoxically, his vision of a paperless future stemmed from a lifelong fascination with printed books.
Otlet, born in 1868, did not set foot in a schoolroom until age 12. His mother died when he was 3; his father was a successful entrepreneur who made a fortune selling trams all over the world. The senior Otlet kept his son out of school, out of a conviction that classrooms stifled children's natural abilities. Left at home with his tutors and with few friends, the young Otlet lived the life of a solitary bookworm.
When he finally entered secondary school, he made straight for the library. "I could lock myself into the library and peruse the catalog, which for me was a miracle," he later wrote. Soon after entering school, Otlet took on the role of school librarian.
In the years that followed, Otlet never really left the library. Though his father pushed him into law school, he soon left the bar to return to his first love, books. In 1895, he met a kindred spirit in the future Nobel Prize winner Henri La Fontaine, who joined him in planning to create a master bibliography of all the world's published knowledge.
Even in 1895, such a project marked an act of colossal intellectual hubris. The two men set out to collect data on every book ever published, along with a vast collection of magazine and journal articles, photographs, posters and all kinds of ephemera — like pamphlets — that libraries typically ignored. Using 3 by 5 index cards (then the state of the art in storage technology), they went on to create a vast paper database with more than 12 million individual entries.
Otlet and LaFontaine eventually persuaded the Belgian government to support their project, proposing to build a "city of knowledge" that would bolster the government's bid to become host of the League of Nations. The government granted them space in a government building, where Otlet expanded the operation. He hired more staff, and established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the world to submit a query via mail or telegraph — a kind of analog search engine. Inquiries poured in from all over the world, more than 1,500 a year, on topics as diverse as boomerangs and Bulgarian finance.
As the Mundaneum evolved, it began to choke on the sheer volume of paper. Otlet started sketching ideas for new technologies to manage the information overload. At one point he posited a kind of paper-based computer, rigged with wheels and spokes that would move documents around on the surface of a desk. Eventually, however, Otlet realized the ultimate answer involved scrapping paper altogether.
Since there was no such thing as electronic data storage in the 1920s, Otlet had to invent it. He started writing at length about the possibility of electronic media storage, culminating in a 1934 book, "Monde," where he laid out his vision of a "mechanical, collective brain" that would house all the world's information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network.
Tragically, just as Otlet's vision began to crystallize, the Mundaneum fell on hard times. In 1934, the Belgian government lost interest in the project after losing its bid for the League of Nations headquarters. Otlet moved it to a smaller space, and after financial struggles had to close it to the public.
A handful of staff members kept working on the project, but the dream ended when the Nazis marched through Belgium in 1940. The Germans cleared out the original Mundaneum site to make way for an exhibit of Third Reich art, destroying thousands of boxes filled with index cards. Otlet died in 1944, a broken and soon-to-be-forgotten man.
After Otlet's death, what survived of the original Mundaneum was left to languish in an old anatomy building of the Free University in the Parc Leopold until 1968, when a young graduate student named W. Boyd Rayward picked up the paper trail. Having read some of Otlet's work, he traveled to the abandoned office in Brussels, where he discovered a mausoleumlike room full of books and mounds of paper covered in cobwebs.
Mr. Rayward has since helped lead a resurgence of interest in Otlet's work, a movement that eventually fueled enough interest to prompt development of the Mundaneum museum in Mons.
Today, the new Mundaneum reveals tantalizing glimpses of a Web that might have been. Long rows of catalog drawers hold millions of Otlet's index cards, pointing the way into a back-room archive brimming with books, posters, photos, newspaper clippings and all kinds of other artifacts. A team of full-time archivists have managed to catalog less than 10 percent of the collection.
The archive's sheer sprawl reveals both the possibilities and the limits of Otlet's original vision. Otlet envisioned a team of professional catalogers analyzing every piece of incoming information, a philosophy that runs counter to the bottom-up ethos of the Web.
"I think Otlet would have felt lost with the Internet," said his biographer, Françoise Levie. Even with a small army of professional librarians, the original Mundaneum could never have accommodated the sheer volume of information produced on the Web today.
"I don't think it could have scaled up," Mr. Rayward said. "It couldn't even scale up to meet the demands of the paper-based world he was living in."
Those limitations notwithstanding, Otlet's version of hypertext held a few important advantages over today's Web. For one thing, he saw a smarter kind of hyperlink. Whereas links on the Web today serve as a kind of mute bond between documents, Otlet envisioned links that carried meaning by, for example, annotating if particular documents agreed or disagreed with each other. That facility is notably lacking in the dumb logic of modern hyperlinks.
Otlet also saw the possibilities of social networks, of letting users "participate, applaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus." While he very likely would have been flummoxed by the anything-goes environment of Facebook or MySpace, Otlet saw some of the more productive aspects of social networking — the ability to trade messages, participate in discussions and work together to collect and organize documents.
Some scholars believe Otlet also foresaw something like the Semantic Web, the emerging framework for subject-centric computing that has been gaining traction among computer scientists like Mr. Berners-Lee. Like the Semantic Web, the Mundaneum aspired not just to draw static links between documents, but also to map out conceptual relationships between facts and ideas. "The Semantic Web is rather Otlet-ish," said Michael Buckland, a professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.
Critics of the Semantic Web say it relies too heavily on expert programmers to create ontologies (formalized descriptions of concepts and relationships) that will let computers exchange data with one another more easily. The Semantic Web "may be useful, but it is bound to fail," Dr. Buckland said, adding, "It doesn't scale because nobody will provide enough labor to build it."
The same criticism could have been leveled against the Mundaneum. Just as Otlet's vision required a group of trained catalogers to classify the world's knowledge, so the Semantic Web hinges on an elite class of programmers to formulate descriptions for a potentially vast range of information. For those who advocate such labor-intensive data schemes, the fate of the Mundaneum may offer a cautionary tale.
The curators of today's Mundaneum hope the museum avoids its predecessor's fate. Although the museum has consistently managed to secure financing, it struggles to attract visitors.
"The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum," said the lead archivist, Stéphanie Manfroid. "People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It's like, would you rather go see the latest 'Star Wars' movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?"
Striving to broaden its appeal, the museum stages regular exhibits of posters, photographs and contemporary art. And while only a trickle of tourists make their way to the little museum in Mons, the town may yet find its way onto the technological history map. Later this year, a new corporate citizen plans to open a data center on the edge of town: Google.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 19, 2008
An article on Tuesday about a museum in Belgium devoted to the Mundaneum, an early concept of a worldwide information and communication network, misstated the year the Nazis marched on Belgium. It was 1940, not 1939.
I suppose that people should only live as long as God wills them to live. But how do you explain the free will that, again, God bestowed on us? Why is it OK when we can put our favorite pets down out of love for them when they are sick and in pain, but not our beloved family members?
Why is it that people have the right to alter their lives in other ways -- even sex changes -- but they can alter just one last thing that they should be able to?
Really, the whole point is we are afraid of our own mortality, especially when we're totally healthy. It's so easy for healthy, normal people to judge and disallow those that are nearing the end, in pain, to deal with mortality in their own way. How do we know that it's wrong when we're not in that same situation? Let's change the situation a little bit. How would one comment on a soldier, who committed suicide when under siege, under the threat of being captured and tortured? Most people would call him or her valiant. But how is that so different from a person who is under siege from cancer or other deadly diseases? What is it -- is it because, with diseases and deaths by way of non-human causes, we can't find a clear and definite good vs. evil that we're so accustomed to?
When I read the following article, yes, I flinched, too. So morbid so openly. It's a strange sensation when your mind and body reacts to different things. Mind: I agree with assisted suicide ... death with dignity. Body: OMG! This is so ... "wrong," but it shouldn't be!
I feel that we, as a collective society, needs to be thinking about what death is about. What does mortality mean to mortals? Something to evade? Something to fear? But we can't always run away from it -- and we've always known it. So how should we face it?
The following is what lengths some people reach to do exactly what our natural survival instinct tells us not to do (and you're right; they do have some GREAT reason to make defying survival instinct seem attractive):
July 21, 2008
In Tijuana, a Market for Death in a Bottle
By MARC LACEY
TIJUANA, Mexico — "Cocaine?" a hustler working Tijuana's seedy Avenida Revolución called out on a recent night, his voice not the least bit muted.
"How about girls?"
When neither offering elicited the desired response, he tried another: "Cuban cigars?"
He could have continued for quite a bit longer reciting from Tijuana's extensive menu of contraband. One product from this border town, though, trumps all others in terms of shock value: death in a bottle, a liquid more potent than even the strongest tequila.
The drug, pentobarbital, literally takes a person's breath away. It can kill by putting people to sleep, and it is tightly regulated in most countries. But aging and ailing people seeking a quick and painless way to end their lives say there is no easier place on earth than Mexico to obtain pentobarbital, a barbiturate commonly known as Nembutal.
Once widely available as a sleep aid, it is now used mostly to anesthetize animals during surgery and to euthanize them. Small bottles of its concentrated liquid form, enough to kill, can be found not on the shelves of the many discount pharmacies in Tijuana but in its pet shops, which sell a wide variety of animals, as well as medications and other supplies for them.
"It is Mexico where Nembutal is most readily available," says "The Peaceful Pill Handbook," a book that lays out methods to end one's life. Co-written by Philip Nitschke, founder of Exit International, an Australian group that helps people who want to end their lives early, the book is banned in Australia and New Zealand. In the United States, though, it is only a few mouse clicks away online.
The book, as well as seminars that Mr. Nitschke offers, lays out strategies for dying. The most trouble-free and painless form of suicide, he contends, is to buy Mexican pentobarbital, which goes by brand names like Sedal-Vet, Sedalphorte and Barbithal.
Those in search of the drug, so-called death tourists, scout out the veterinary pharmacies that abound in Tijuana. The shelves are fully stocked with tick medication for dogs, vitamins for horses and an array of bottles and boxes that make little sense to anyone but a veterinarian.
Mr. Nitschke's book, however, provides glossy photos of the many versions of pentobarbital that are most suitable for suicide. Buying pentobarbital can be as easy as showing the pictures to a clerk and paying as little as $30 for a dose.
Pet shop clerks throughout Tijuana acknowledge that foreigners regularly inquire about the drug. "We've probably had 100 people come in asking for the drug in the last couple years," said Pepe Velazquez, a veterinarian and owner of El Toro pharmacy.
Until El Norte, a regional newspaper, published an article recently that detailed how easy it was to buy pentobarbital — and how foreigners intended to use it — many store owners and clerks said they assumed the customers were using the drug to end the lives of their animals.
"We didn't have any idea what they were doing," said a sales clerk at a pet shop called California. "It's for animals. Everything here is for animals. We thought they were giving it to their animals."
It turns out that they were buying it for human consumption. Mr. Nitschke estimates that 300 members of his group, most of them from Australia but some from the United States and Europe, have bought the drug in Mexico in recent years. Some save it for when their health fails to the point that they no longer wish to live. In a few instances, buyers took the drug while in Mexico.
"To witness it, it looks as peaceful as can be," Mr. Nitschke said of death by pentobarbital. "I usually recommend that they take it with their favorite drink since it has a bitter taste. I've never seen anyone finish their whiskey or Champagne. There isn't enough time to give a speech. You go to sleep and then you die."
But now that word is out that the drug is being used for human consumption, local authorities are seeking to clamp down on unauthorized purchases. Shops are now supposed to sell the drug only to licensed veterinarians who present a prescription.
Don Flounders, 78, has mesothelioma, a rare and deadly form of cancer usually linked to asbestos exposure. He had no problem getting pentobarbital when he traveled from Australia to Los Angeles in January and then crossed the border to Tijuana.
"I went into the first shop that was advertised as being a vet, and I showed the photo and they handed it over," he said in a telephone interview from Australia. Getting it home was more of a challenge. It is illegal to bring pentobarbital into the United States, and Exit International says United States customs officers have seized the drug from at least three of its members. The group says no members have been caught with the drug by Australian customs officers.
But once he was home, Mr. Flounders, who advocates for euthanasia, talked to a television news crew about his purchase. He was filmed taking a bottle to a friend, Angie Belecciu, 56, who is dying of cancer and who helped to finance his trip to Mexico.
Both of their houses were later searched by the Australian Federal Police. Assisted suicide is illegal in Australia.
"It was an affront," Mr. Flounders said of the raid. "I'm 78, and my wife is 85. I've got this incurable disease, and when four very big policemen came marching up the front steps it was very disconcerting."
Neither Mr. Flounders nor Ms. Belecciu has used the pentobarbital, and charges have not been filed against either of them.
Another Australian who bought the drug in Mexico, Caren Jenning, was convicted in June of accessory to manslaughter because a friend, Graeme Wylie, who had advanced Alzheimer's disease and had long expressed a desire to end his life, used it to commit suicide two years ago.
Also convicted of manslaughter in the case was Shirley Justins, Mr. Wylie's partner, who opened a bottle of Nembutal purchased by Ms. Jenning and told him that if he took it he would die.
"The whole issue was whether this man had the mental capacity at the time he took the drug to end his life," said Sam Macedone, Ms. Jenning's lawyer. The court was apparently swayed by the prosecution's argument that Mr. Wylie had such severe dementia that he was unable to make an informed decision to take his life.
Ms. Jenning has cancer, Mr. Macedone said. She faces up to 25 years in prison but probably has less than a year to live, he said. If he lodges an appeal, Mr. Macedone said, it will probably not be resolved until after her death.
He said it was terribly sad "that we put someone like this through all that when all she did was help a friend get where he wanted to go."
Assisted suicide has emerged as an issue in Mexico, where the Senate voted in April to allow doctors to withdraw life-sustaining medicines from some patients but not to actively take steps to cause death. Euthanasia is also strongly opposed by the Catholic Church.
"It's awful to me," Mr. Velazquez, the Tijuana veterinarian and pharmacy owner, said of euthanasia. "I think people should live as long as God decides."
All the publicity over the unauthorized use of pentobarbital has made it somewhat harder to find along Mexico's northern border. "Oh, no, we don't have that," said a clerk at El Grano de Oro, the answer given by workers approached at six veterinary shops in Tijuana's tourist zone on a recent afternoon.
At the seventh shop, however, just a few blocks off Avenida Revolución, the clerk said the drug was in stock. She reached up to a shelf behind her and pulled down a box of Sedalphorte, one of the brands Mr. Nitschke recommends. The package bore photos of a dog and a cat and said in bold letters that it could be sold only with a prescription.
Asked if she would sell it, the clerk gave a confused look. "Of course," she said, ringing up a bottle for $45.
Just a note:
Went on Facebook today and realized that my acquaintances and friends are getting engaged, hitched, and forming families at a frighteningly high rate. So I suppose this is what people do in their mid-20s, huh? You stop toiling in the dating game and settle down. Or the more candy-appealing version of the story is you fall in love with your soulmate.
Boy, do I have a lot of catching up to do. haha!
What's in my bones?
What am I made of?
Stuff of strength.
Stuff of magic and light.
Stuff of the stars and the moon.
I am made of stuff of giving
for you
for you.
Whenever there is me,
there is you.
I glow in your darkness.
I sooth in your pain.
I rain in your drought.
Lean on me.
I am your bearer of hope.
With Love.
BBC News
"Rwandan genocide suspect 'held'"
"Still Divided"
"Return to Nyarubuye"
I am reading about Rwanda again. One of the latest headlines today is that some 4000 killers of the Rwandan genocide 14 years ago are allowed entry back into the country. This moment of history, this Rwandan genocide of 1994, lasted for a brief but long 100 days. During this time 800,000 people were reported dead -- murdered. This is not counting all the mutilated people, raped, and brutalized in other ways. Rwanda, a luscious, beautiful African country ... so violent, ugly a past. (But I suppose we all have our skeletons ...)
I still remember hearing about the genocide as a child ... 11 years old in Hong Kong. I knew something evil was going on. The way those killers moved when filmed on TV ... something wasn't quite right. Evil was there.
When I was in the second year of college, I revisited the Rwanda genocide, but this time, more than just an impression -- I read and researched. I remember being entranced by what I read. The feelings of anger, sadness, pity, self-righteousness, fear, the yearning for justice, and, mostly, the confusion of wondering what justice is were like hard alcohol -- both intoxicating and hard to digest. Stories like Marie's peaked my interest, but repulsed me because it riddled me with The Question: Marie was caught and used as a sex slave and was raped over 100 times before she realized she was infected with AIDS and was pregnant. The infant boy eventually died of AIDS, and she is now in the last stages of the disease. Marie wonders why this happened to her -- she considers herself a good person. I don't doubt it. I wonder, too, why it happened to her and her fellow countrymen. And I wonder What's Next? O, Afrika ....
Is this the Universe's plan to use the victims as instruments to teach all the rest of us a lesson? But what an expensive, costly and cruel way to teach! No, there must be some other explanation, ... right? It makes life more than just a bit gloomy to accept that, as a vessel of the Universe, we can all end up just like Marie ... with no realistic hope that there will be positive widespread impact on the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Marie's world, after so many violent blows, is rotting to an end .... My mind and heart screams out, "No! If this is to teach me something, then this is just too excessive! I am sure there are other ways for me to learn without the blood of these people washing away the entire country. (bodies of these Rwandans floated down the river to its neighboring countries.)"
I will always mourn for these people, and all people that died -- wasted away -- in similar fashion. Their spirits will forever haunt me.
I'm excited tinged with a not-so-innocent sense of triumph to see that you are starting to like me more than you could help.
Even though I appreciate the companionship, you make me feel cold and lonely even with your body heat warming my skin. This is not the relationship I have in mind.
I can't stay for long.
How do you measure time? By days? By months? By years? By the things you've done? By the intensity of the feeling you get upon realizing you're getting old? By the coming and passing of people in your life? By the glow and demise of stars? By the shaping of rocks and mountains? Is what we experience as passage time really time itself, or is it just us facing birth, life and death -- and the urgency of time is just an extension of our fear of mortality and unknown? Or is there really a difference? When did we learn that time, each minute and second, is precious? Remember, we didn't know anything about that and death as small children (Aeva comes to mind). Time only became relevant when we understood finality. So in that sense, haven't we been counting our minutes according to how much time we have left until we pass on? What would happen if we count our time according to how long we're been living since birth -- would we look at the world differently -- or better?
How would we really know?
Today, I appreciate Father Universe for giving me sunshine, blue skies, comfort, hope and opportunities. I appreciate the knowingness of spirit, the clarity of mind and strength of heart, and the usefulness of body to realize the future at hand, to wonder about the passage of time and life, and to place faith in the timelessness of the Universe.
She is a shapeshifter, who cannot stop shifting shapes. The shifting mechanism sputters and coughs involuntarily as it engages, trying to find its first gear -- the base, the original.
The nurturing mother, the seductive siren, the fiery warrior, the spoiled princess, the elegant lady, the logical planner ... are all shapes. But who remains inside as the core?
Shapes continue to shift.
Today, I read, "Any human being is a star within a body."
You are a star within a body.
So glow and brighten up the world like you are meant to do.
June 11, 2008
Scorpions for Breakfast and Snails for Dinner
By MATTHEW FORNEY
IN Beijing, where my family lives, I once returned home from a restaurant with a doggy bag full of deep-fried scorpions. The next morning, I poured them instead of imported raisin bran into my 11-year-old son's cereal bowl. I wanted to freak him out. The scorpions were black and an inch long, with dagger tails.
"Scorpions!" shrieked my son, Roy. "Awesome!"
I had to stop him from chomping them all then and there, like popcorn. Then an idea struck him. "Dad, can I take them to school as a snack?"
This is what eating is like in my household. My children eat anything. My 9-year-old daughter reaches for second helpings of spinach, and when we eat out I have to stop her brother, now 13, from showing off the weird things he'll consume by ordering goat testicles. Think of a child staging a sit-in at his suburban dinner table because there's a fleck of dried parsley on his breaded fish finger, and you have imagined everything my children are not.
So when I read of American parents who hide spinach in brownie mix and serve it for dessert ("Your kids will never guess," Parents magazine promised), it spurs me to offer advice to my compatriots back home.
First, however, a bit of background. Both Roy and Alice were born and raised here in China, where people eat anything. I've seen animal markets in the southern city of Guangzhou where vendors sell live porcupines, pangolins, badgers, crocodiles, cobras and civet cats, all destined for the tips of chopsticks in the city's costlier restaurants. My wife, who is Italian, makes sure olives and strong cheeses reach our table every day, even in China. Roy and Alice never faced the snare of microwave pizzas, Cheez Whiz or spaghetti from a can.
"Hey, Dad," Roy asked me, "is it true that when you were a kid, you didn't know Parmesan was cheese? You thought it was just something that shook out of a green canister? Like sprinkles for spaghetti?" He could listen to that story every night. Yes, I tell him. It's true. I thought cheese was the color of a traffic cone, each slice individually wrapped in plastic. Even with an adolescent's natural conservatism — he still eats more pork chops than pork lips — Roy is a more adventurous eater than I am.
As for Alice, she says her favorite meal is Sichuanese snails and her favorite snack is Tibetan yak jerky in wrappers with the ends twisted, the way peppermints are wrapped. I suspect that behind this statement lies some gustatory one-upmanship with her brother; she also wants the crust chopped off her bread. Still, when I offered her an imported banana-flavored granola bar, her nose twitched, and she requested "dried beans or seaweed."
I asked my wife if we deserve credit for rearing such adventurous eaters. Not we, she said. According to Paola, our kids started off right because she breast-fed them, which "opened their taste buds." I'm not sure that's scientific. It's possible Italians are so haughty about their cuisine that they think even their breast milk is superior.
But Paola also said that in poor countries like China, people learn to eat what's available or they starve. Fussiness never enters the picture. (As I write this, a crew of construction workers who migrated from distant villages is squatting outside my window eating a lunch of rice and boiled cabbage. No meat. These men toil all day on what I would consider a starvation diet.)
Paola knows something about how poor regions dine. One of our favorite dinner-table stories is how, as a child, Paola refused to eat trout skins. Her father had caught the fish that morning, and Paola sat at the table with the untouched skins on her plate from lunchtime until bedtime, when her father threatened to kill her. Paola totally understood. "He was hungry when he was young," she said. "He prayed for trout skins."
We didn't raise our kids poor, thank goodness. We did, however, send them to a Chinese nursery school that fed them a daily lunch of zhou, a rice porridge with various seasonings: pickled turnips, flakes of dough sticks, green or red beans, sesame paste, or something called hot prickly mustard tubers. Roy and Alice ate it with perfect manners. It was only after they grew older and we sent them to the French school in Beijing that they started chewing with their mouths open and slopping their food on the table.
If you're not lucky enough to raise your children in China with an Italian mom, you could always try bribery. Roy's realization that it was cool to enjoy foods that his cousins in Indiana would never even sniff began with raw fish. He liked it, to his surprise, only after I paid him a buck to try a slice of salmon. The steps from there to pig ears, cow lung, camel feet and squid tentacles were as smooth as an uncooked oyster.
Or else, when the spinach brownie emerges from the oven, you could try cauliflower in the vanilla icing.
I SWEAR!
I have the best friends in the world. I also have the best family in the world ... well, not ALWAYS optimal, but you know, they are the best I'm ever gonna have, and they are the ones that helped shape me. Since I love me, I love them, too.
So thanks, Brian and Mark and all my friends who have offered to help me with my move! Even though I may not need your help, you still have an open invitation to my place. THANK YOU!!
Ricky! I have such an awesome cousin! I had such a fantastic time with you this weekend! Ok, sorry to mooch off of you this weekend. I feel bad!! But I promise I'll hit you back when I can! I LOVE YOU, BIG COZ!! And HAPPY BIRTHDAY!! (oh, and you have fabulously sweet friends.)
June 11, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Obama on the Nile
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Cairo
This column will probably get Barack Obama in trouble, but that's not my problem. I cannot tell a lie: Many Egyptians and other Arab Muslims really like him and hope that he wins the presidency.
I have had a chance to observe several U.S. elections from abroad, but it has been unusually revealing to be in Egypt as Barack Hussein Obama became the Democrats' nominee for president of the United States.
While Obama, who was raised a Christian, is constantly assuring Americans that he is not a Muslim, Egyptians are amazed, excited and agog that America might elect a black man whose father's family was of Muslim heritage. They don't really understand Obama's family tree, but what they do know is that if America — despite being attacked by Muslim militants on 9/11 — were to elect as its president some guy with the middle name "Hussein," it would mark a sea change in America-Muslim world relations.
Every interview seems to end with the person I was interviewing asking me: "Now, can I ask you a question? Obama? Do you think they will let him win?" (It's always "let him win" not just "win.")
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Democrats' nomination of Obama as their candidate for president has done more to improve America's image abroad — an image dented by the Iraq war, President Bush's invocation of a post-9/11 "crusade," Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the xenophobic opposition to Dubai Ports World managing U.S. harbors — than the entire Bush public diplomacy effort for seven years.
Of course, Egyptians still have their grievances with America, and will in the future no matter who is president — and we've got a few grievances with them, too. But every once in a while, America does something so radical, so out of the ordinary — something that old, encrusted, traditional societies like those in the Middle East could simply never imagine — that it revives America's revolutionary "brand" overseas in a way that no diplomat could have designed or planned.
I just had dinner at a Nile-side restaurant with two Egyptian officials and a businessman, and one of them quoted one of his children as asking: "Could something like this ever happen in Egypt?" And the answer from everyone at the table was, of course, "no." It couldn't happen anywhere in this region. Could a Copt become president of Egypt? Not a chance. Could a Shiite become the leader of Saudi Arabia? Not in a hundred years. A Bahai president of Iran? In your dreams. Here, the past always buries the future, not the other way around.
These Egyptian officials were particularly excited about Obama's nomination because it might mean that being labeled a "pro-American" reformer is no longer an insult here, as it has been in recent years. As one U.S. diplomat put it to me: Obama's demeanor suggests to foreigners that he would not only listen to what they have to say but might even take it into account. They anticipate that a U.S. president who spent part of his life looking at America from the outside in — as John McCain did while a P.O.W. in Vietnam — will be much more attuned to global trends.
My colleague Michael Slackman, The Times's bureau chief in Cairo, told me about a recent encounter he had with a worker at Cairo's famed Blue Mosque: "Gamal Abdul Halem was sitting on a green carpet. When he saw we were Americans, he said: 'Hillary-Obama tied?' in thick, broken English. He told me that he lived in the Nile Delta, traveling two hours one way everyday to get to work, and still he found time to keep up with the race. He didn't have anything to say bad about Hillary but felt that Obama would be much better because he is dark-skinned, like him, and because he has Muslim heritage. 'For me and my family and friends, we want Obama,' he said. 'We all like what he is saying.' "
Yes, all of this Obama-mania is excessive and will inevitably be punctured should he win the presidency and start making tough calls or big mistakes. For now, though, what it reveals is how much many foreigners, after all the acrimony of the Bush years, still hunger for the "idea of America" — this open, optimistic, and, indeed, revolutionary, place so radically different from their own societies.
In his history of 19th-century America, "What Hath God Wrought," Daniel Walker Howe quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson as telling a meeting of the Mercantile Library Association in 1844 that "America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations."
That's the America that got swallowed by the war on terrorism. And it's the America that many people want back. I have no idea whether Obama will win in November. Whether he does or doesn't, though, the mere fact of his nomination has done something very important. We've surprised ourselves and surprised the world and, in so doing, reminded everyone that we are still a country of new beginnings.
I think we all yearn to find a home for our hearts. Sometimes, home is somewhere foreign, somewhere you have never seen or heard of, an offshoot of a beaten path. Sometimes, home is where you started off, a journey that loops back to the beginning.
The journey is long and treacherous. Yes, it is meant to be long and treacherous. You will learn to love and embrace what the hardship means when you realize that it is to teach you how to appreciate your home when it's time for you to rest your heart.
So, for now, sturdy up your heart. You will at times feel like it should be time already, time to be home, but keep hanging on. The realization of homecoming will set in after you sit down in a cushy chair, put your feet up, and feel like that's where you belong.
So keep going ... keep going ... keep going.
Your voice is your own, I can't protect it
You'll have to sing
A verse no one has ever known
Don't be afraid
Cause no one ever sings alone
Your way will never be too much for me
Your ideas have always been your own
And this moment keeps on moving
We were never meant to hold on
~ "Adrift" by Jack Johnson
It's true.
We all need our own anthems.
We all need to sing our own songs that tell our stories entirely of our own.
But that's what's beautiful about it all:
All songs are all different, but they're all different parts of the same song, melodies and harmonies of each other.
City Tree by Dan S, inspired by stiletto.love.
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