trans-pacific transit, tatuaje y todo lo demás
31.3.06
26.3.06
pockets
wow. nothing pushes the permanent liquid stomach button like the loss of money and dehli food. so i am becoming a friend to the attendents of the ladies', for a few rupees each deposit they push wads of toilet paper in my hands after i wash them, and don't curse me.
the door has a card queen on it, for women. you could say the queen on a deck of cards, as its traditionally drawn, is almost wearing a hijab. why do we call them hijabs, instead of say, wimples? right. because we forget that constant head cover only passed about seventy years ago. these ladies are friendlier and cleaner than those who greeted me in arrivals 2 months ago, or maybe we are just becoming more familiar with eachother. one of them is absolutely beautiful, the other is typically older and roly poly, and atypically spotted with that depigmentation disease, leaving her arms mottled and her paunch the same color as my mountain blonde grandmother's. she is readjusting her sari one of the times i go in; i have several, and the petticoat, and the choli, but noone has shown me how to put one on, so i stand there transfixed as she tucks and folds and shakes and tucks. another woman exits the latrine and rearranges her sari in front of the mirror, working right to left to lift the fold from the middle and into the security of the petticoat, in a process which herhaps most closely resembles the way that japanese schoolgirls fold and tuck their uniform skirts into micro minis and hide the excess beneath their oversized sailor midi blouses. a stewardess for india airlines asks me almost confrontationally, why i am watching, and i explain, perhaps over enthusiatically, that i have some saris but that i haven't the faintest idea how to wear them, and i had tried to arrange them several times and found myself tangled in all six meters of silk etc, and unlike in japan, i don't have the luxury of someone's mother wrapping me tight into a kimono, because here i'm a tourist, not a potential bride, and she dutifully translated, perhaps not convinced that i was just not staring because i was impolite.
i am trying not to eat because this pushes the button. i am trying to to think of more than one thing at once because if i do i start to cry, but if i don't i feel that, there is something to be said for the fact that india maintains an airport that has a restaurant where one can smoke, a, dubiously gracious, and has jovial military officers asking me why i am not married and saying : i am weapons expert, or india very cheap, or what do you do, and well they listened and gave me a cup of chai in the morning afternoon, and then i ahd a very strange encounter with some isrealis. admitting that you are jewish and have visited other countries and have no intention of visiting isreal anytime soon, even to nihilistic dudes smoking across the subcontinent with tanga style pants hanging out of designer jeans is akin to admitting to a middle aged indian man that you have been travelling around india with a friend, who is gendered. but not like that it all; the first produces bafflement, tinged with relief that at least you weren't born to parents so daft as to let you travel alone, and the second, cynically resentful disapointment. people in india mistake me for isreali almost as much as they mistake me for german or french. the isrealis extracted a ten minute life story from me very quickly, we were in the sun. they asked me to teach them words in english they didn't know. i taught them sagacious cacauphony and arid. and i explained that by dint of the fact that the man who had just proposed to me, again, who i am loathe to call my boyfriend, even though i love him and i see the neat apartment with the lines of straw and the records and the beautiful lanky black haired children falling into the openlegged piles on the floor, i don't necessarily see myself in the picture, decided to go home suddenly because his father is dying of cancer so in my rush to get out of india i hadn't remebered to acount for the absurdity of military time and the flight i thought was leaving at 2 in the afternoon actually had left in the morning, and here i am, jobless, homeless, boyfriends on three different continents and out 800 bucks. i keep on glancing back at all the my suitcases piled on the cart, thinking about how nice it would be to quit smoking but that the beyond the smoke, that would mean giving up the potential for confessionals outside of airports and on train platforms
the airport is all blue and yellow and beige, like airports, like if you added all the colors together and then scraped away the solidity you would have something resembling a sky. the asian stewardesses are so glamorous and vanaguard, like in the fifties, with tarted up representations of their national costumes in suit form to remind the men what they are really working for, like sorority sisters, but traveling! ahem gasp! with jobs. i am pushing my cart back and forth back and forth. taking up temporary residence in permanent day time waiting room. never any real windows in airports. because they are really after all, permanant military installations, with , everyone is herded prodded, reminded of the possibility of trouble, of order, all the lights dissapearing into lines of bluish gold, all the lines and stamps and no hint of air. like you are already on the ship. in the barracks. with rations at regular hours.
time is a man with many arms. the blue and white wall has the world drawn in clouds with five clocks.
the restaurant has blinking christmas lights, just like the lower east side indian joints with competing brothers and middling sauces.
i don't know if i lost my appetite because of the loss of 800 dollars to alitalia, or because i simply can't eat, with the same usual force that simply can't not eat or.
love and thinking of studying japanese. confusion is on the outside as much as in.
the door has a card queen on it, for women. you could say the queen on a deck of cards, as its traditionally drawn, is almost wearing a hijab. why do we call them hijabs, instead of say, wimples? right. because we forget that constant head cover only passed about seventy years ago. these ladies are friendlier and cleaner than those who greeted me in arrivals 2 months ago, or maybe we are just becoming more familiar with eachother. one of them is absolutely beautiful, the other is typically older and roly poly, and atypically spotted with that depigmentation disease, leaving her arms mottled and her paunch the same color as my mountain blonde grandmother's. she is readjusting her sari one of the times i go in; i have several, and the petticoat, and the choli, but noone has shown me how to put one on, so i stand there transfixed as she tucks and folds and shakes and tucks. another woman exits the latrine and rearranges her sari in front of the mirror, working right to left to lift the fold from the middle and into the security of the petticoat, in a process which herhaps most closely resembles the way that japanese schoolgirls fold and tuck their uniform skirts into micro minis and hide the excess beneath their oversized sailor midi blouses. a stewardess for india airlines asks me almost confrontationally, why i am watching, and i explain, perhaps over enthusiatically, that i have some saris but that i haven't the faintest idea how to wear them, and i had tried to arrange them several times and found myself tangled in all six meters of silk etc, and unlike in japan, i don't have the luxury of someone's mother wrapping me tight into a kimono, because here i'm a tourist, not a potential bride, and she dutifully translated, perhaps not convinced that i was just not staring because i was impolite.
i am trying not to eat because this pushes the button. i am trying to to think of more than one thing at once because if i do i start to cry, but if i don't i feel that, there is something to be said for the fact that india maintains an airport that has a restaurant where one can smoke, a, dubiously gracious, and has jovial military officers asking me why i am not married and saying : i am weapons expert, or india very cheap, or what do you do, and well they listened and gave me a cup of chai in the morning afternoon, and then i ahd a very strange encounter with some isrealis. admitting that you are jewish and have visited other countries and have no intention of visiting isreal anytime soon, even to nihilistic dudes smoking across the subcontinent with tanga style pants hanging out of designer jeans is akin to admitting to a middle aged indian man that you have been travelling around india with a friend, who is gendered. but not like that it all; the first produces bafflement, tinged with relief that at least you weren't born to parents so daft as to let you travel alone, and the second, cynically resentful disapointment. people in india mistake me for isreali almost as much as they mistake me for german or french. the isrealis extracted a ten minute life story from me very quickly, we were in the sun. they asked me to teach them words in english they didn't know. i taught them sagacious cacauphony and arid. and i explained that by dint of the fact that the man who had just proposed to me, again, who i am loathe to call my boyfriend, even though i love him and i see the neat apartment with the lines of straw and the records and the beautiful lanky black haired children falling into the openlegged piles on the floor, i don't necessarily see myself in the picture, decided to go home suddenly because his father is dying of cancer so in my rush to get out of india i hadn't remebered to acount for the absurdity of military time and the flight i thought was leaving at 2 in the afternoon actually had left in the morning, and here i am, jobless, homeless, boyfriends on three different continents and out 800 bucks. i keep on glancing back at all the my suitcases piled on the cart, thinking about how nice it would be to quit smoking but that the beyond the smoke, that would mean giving up the potential for confessionals outside of airports and on train platforms
the airport is all blue and yellow and beige, like airports, like if you added all the colors together and then scraped away the solidity you would have something resembling a sky. the asian stewardesses are so glamorous and vanaguard, like in the fifties, with tarted up representations of their national costumes in suit form to remind the men what they are really working for, like sorority sisters, but traveling! ahem gasp! with jobs. i am pushing my cart back and forth back and forth. taking up temporary residence in permanent day time waiting room. never any real windows in airports. because they are really after all, permanant military installations, with , everyone is herded prodded, reminded of the possibility of trouble, of order, all the lights dissapearing into lines of bluish gold, all the lines and stamps and no hint of air. like you are already on the ship. in the barracks. with rations at regular hours.
time is a man with many arms. the blue and white wall has the world drawn in clouds with five clocks.
the restaurant has blinking christmas lights, just like the lower east side indian joints with competing brothers and middling sauces.
i don't know if i lost my appetite because of the loss of 800 dollars to alitalia, or because i simply can't eat, with the same usual force that simply can't not eat or.
love and thinking of studying japanese. confusion is on the outside as much as in.
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