89.

So. There I was, in a stranger's house, speaking a foreign language, wearing unfamiliar clothes, and in general trying not to make an ass of myself. The subject of conversation - which I could barely follow, anyway - turned to Indian history. People were debating what point in time, exactly, could be considered the beginning of the Indian Independence Movement.

"A lot of scholars trace the Indian Independence Movement to the Sepoy Mutiny," I said knowledgeably, in "Hindi." (Something like, "Indian Independence Movement vo Sepoy Mutiny se shuru hua) The conversation ground to a halt. For the third time that day (the first being when I tripped on my chuni and nearly brained myself, the second when I refused a second cup of tea) people looked at me as if I were a specimen from another planet.

I couldn't speak to my parents over the phone (no connection) but much later on I told my uncle this story. He started laughing uproariously. "You said that?" he demanded, wiping tears from his eyes. I bristled at the suggestion that I'd done something wrong. "In general," he informed me, "Indian people think 'Sepoy Mutiny' is a denigrating, racist and colonialist term." I gathered that in some academic circles, saying 'sepoy' is akin to using the n-word. "How could I have known that?" I protested.

How, indeed.

After all, I learned this term in IB World History. Shouldn't that count for something? As it turns out, it counts for squat. I still remember the first time I made a mistake like this. I was standing beneath a statue of Cervantes in the middle of Madrid. Our tour guide was talking - in Spanish, because I can't humiliate myself enough in my native tongue - about how Cervantes was one of Spain's greatest heroes.

"Yes, but he was a raving lunatic," I opined. I was repeating, word for word, a remark an English teacher had made to me in years past.

People might suggest that I run into these difficulties because I can't resist the urge to run my mouth, and they'd be right. But on the other hand, what's an education for, if you can't share it with others?

I mean, if someone showed up in my neighborhood and said, casually, that Abraham Lincoln was an illiterate, godless hick, I might be annoyed. (And if you're going to argue any of these points, remember that great story we learned as kids about how Honest Abe taught himself to read and write with a shovel and a piece of coal? How far can a man get with a shovel and a piece of coal? Exactly. Also, he never belonged to any religion. And in 1809, everyone was a hick.) But anyway - I'd be offended to hear it said.

I ran into these difficulties, ultimately, because I was speaking a language I didn't perfectly understand and repeating ideas taught to me by people who had a) never lived in the country b) didn't speak the language c) had no friends who grew up in that country d) had never read an entire book about the country and e) still felt qualified to teach about it.

I still remember my seventh grade Hinduism unit. My well-intentioned teacher taught us numerous fun facts about the religion. Upon later examination of the Gita and Vedas, almost every one of these facts turned out to be wrong.

But I'm making two separate points. The first is that not every word has the same weight everywhere, and this is especially true when dealing with history. And the other is that sometimes, the things we we are taught (particularly about small countries or unfamiliar religions) are just plain incorrect.

By the time I went to Italy, of course, I adopted a mandate I picked up in IB Philosophy: like Socrates, I decided that "all I knew was that I knew nothing." When the conversation around bars turned to great writers of modern Italy, I merely said, "How about that Umberto Eco?" with the best possible accent and a mysterious smile. Soon enough the expats and lit profs in the audience would be going at each other with salad forks. Afterwards the survivors (because believe me, these duels sometimes went to the death) said to me, "God, you're so smart for an American."

"We're a pretty smart people," I replied, and left it at that.

88.

Last night I found out my cousin is engaged. She's my age, and when we were kids she was the one who hung out with me and my sister in Hyderabad, she was the one who talked to cab drivers and tour givers, she was the one who haggled with cotton merchants and jewelry vendors. Thanks to her I got great deals on custom salwar kameezes, and thanks to her I had a friend when I went to India.

She's exactly my age - maybe a month older. Even though plenty of my girlfriends (read: sorority sisters) plan to get married right out of college, my cousin's announcement shook me in a way none of theirs did.

She met the boy through her family. She's probably talked to him for a total of an hour, he's older than she is, and he's a little bit bald. In spite of all this, I know for a fact it's what she wants. I know, also, that she'll be happy (because she's like that).

I dashed off a congratulatory email and then wandered up to my bedroom to try and concentrate on other things. But the truth is this: hearing about her decision made me question all of mine.

Everyone says she's being smart. Girls in our community marry young (20-24). They always have children before they're 30 (a goal many of my classmates claim but I suspect few will meet). My cousin has never traveled more than 50 miles from her hometown, she has an undergraduate degree, she's always lived at home.

But in the eyes of everyone I know, she's making the right choice. She'll get married, she'll get to know her husband for a few years, they'll have children, she'll be satisfied. The truth is that the old ideals of marriage and motherhood hold strong sway for all my relatives: even if she designed clothes for the Queen of England, if she was unmarried, everyone would assume she was unhappy.

All my cousins are getting married. And I wonder, as this happens, if there will come a point when I'll have nothing in common with them. When I'll stop seeing them to avoid inevitable conversations that lead nowhere good. When I'll think they did it right, and like everyone else I know, I should have lived life with a bit more of a plan. I've always been close to my family, and the thought is unpleasant.

But beyond my near-sighted self-pity (which I'll get over in a minute) it is true that it's getting harder to laugh and change the subject when my family members bring this up to me (and they do, a little too often.) I realize this is how most American woman feel, although maybe not when they're as young as me, and I also realize that...well, I'll say this in one breath - moving to Illinois was a bit of a romantic nonstarter for me.

There are a lot of reasons things worked out like this. I don't like living my life according to a predetermined set of rules, and of all the injunctions I disliked, the one I thought the most idiotic and small-minded was the recommendation that young Indians should only marry inside their community. (I won't say "race" since anyone with eyes and an encyclopedia will know that Indians are not, in any biological sense, a "race." Not that anyone is, in a biological sense, a race.) Returning to the main point, if I can belabor it: humans share 99.2 % of their genes with chimps. Considering this, I think we're all well enough off so long as we marry within our species.

I realize not everyone feels this way. But until I went to school, I assumed the only people who didn't feel this way were at least 80 years old, and born to an America before Brown vs. Board of Education.

Was I in for an awakening, or what.

I'll spare everyone the stories of the times I hauled my slack jaw off the floor when classmates casually - casually! - expressed the view that they only want mates of their own religion, class or creed. They must be joking, I thought. And went on my way.

I'll blame my parents for this. In spite of many, many opportunities, they never saw the need to tell me about the narrowness of the wider world. And this is all well and good, and not even a mistake.

By and large, the men I've been involved with at school are either black, Hispanic or South Asian. And when I say "by and large" I mean "exclusively," although this was not true before. The men I've met in bars and clubs - too many of those! - are the same. This was also not true before. Have I changed?

I'll confess something else unfashionable, and probably paranoid: when I meet white guys from the Midwest nowadays, I almost always write them off as not attracted to nonwhite women, unless they visibly demonstrate otherwise. It's self-limiting, I know. And I hate that I do it, even though plenty of other people would say it's not a bad strategy. It's not how I want to live my life.

Race blogger Candace Miller writes "I suspect that deep down many African American women don't believe that non-black men find them attractive." And her comment cuts to the heart of the 'marriage squeeze' question. It relates to the reason I gave up on buying fashion magazines. The international requirements for a model are that she be at least 5'10", an arbitration that means more than 99% of the world's Asian and Latina women will never participate in the industry. I grew tired of flipping through those pages in vain search of someone with my height, shape or coloring. Once, passing through Ohio, I saw a church bulletin board on which was written, "God doesn't believe in atheists." To which I could add, "Fashion magazines do not believe in Asian women." After a while, I started to feel entirely invisible.

Miller says the many African American women don't look outside the race because they're afraid of rejection. I know I am. And I also know that I'll get over this attitude. Leopards can't change their spots, I can't go from believing one thing (that people are similar) to another (people are fundamentally different based on their background.)

In the Bhagavad Gita, the battlefield revelations of Lord Krishna to the archer Arjuna, God identifies many ways in which men and women should be matched to each other. He says they should share their sense of dharma, a word that encompasses everything from service to others to physical health. In the Upanishads it is written, "Your soul is the whole world." Your soul, not your body.

When the Inupiat people of Barrow, Alaska, go out on a whale hunt, they don't ask God for success. They ask for strength for whatever lies ahead. When Arjuna went out to fight the Pandavas, he didn't ask to win. He asked only for justice, whatever that might be.

If all this amounts to, stems from, or relates to a crisis of faith, I want to adopt the attitude of the Inupiat. Unlike my cousin, who is marrying a nice boy of her own community chosen by her family at the age deemed most appropriate for marriage, I don't ask for success, and I don't want my life to be easy.

I only want greater wisdom to understand it, and greater courage (because I'm not proud of the attitude I've adopted here) for when it is not.

87.

I. Corn

It seems as if, nowadays, you can't throw a stick without hitting someone who believes that nonrenewable resource use is going to end the world, possibly in the next few years. I did a paper on this recently, looking at ethanol - which seems to be the Bush administration's answer to the problem, in as much as they have an answer - and using various stats available online and math familiar to fifth graders everywhere found that there's just no possible way there is enough corn on earth for this to make sense.

Which does make me wonder: am I the only one who feels like there are so many fucking elephants in the room as far as the ethanol debate is concerned? Is replacing one ridiculously subsidized resource with another really the solution to this problem? Does anyone else care besides deadbeat economists?

II. Perverts

I know people who are addicted to Facebook, Match.com and MySpace, but I can't get enough of Craiglist.

Every time I go on there I get sucked into hours-long searches that take me, if not closer to a well-paying job, closer to the bizarre heart of humankind. Or so it seems.

I'll usually start out in Writing, go into Talent, hunt through Furniture, and wind up in Personals. Today, I was browsing through Miscellaneous Romance (more miscellaneous than romance) and I realized something: contrary to Hallmark cards the world over, we are not all looking for the same thing. Not even close.

Dispatches from Another Planet

So, according to a scientific study mentioned on my favorite blog, men act less intelligently around blondes. This is yawn yawn yawn, and reminds me of the time a bunch of "researchers" (ie, the cast of Superbad) came out with the findings that women prefer to have sex with men who have large muscles.

Whatever that means for the human race. Perhaps our children - and I say "our" in the loosest sense possible since my genes obviously won't make it - will all be platinum-tressed bodybuilders. Or, the world according to Sweden.

The interesting part of this study comes in the comments, where one reader reveals that as a social science experiment she once dyed her hair blonde and strapped on a pair of massive fake tits in order to go a party. Her "new look" flabbergasted her male friends (probably would've done the same thing to me, honestly). Apparently,

"Some of the guys I knew seemed to be convincing themselves they had somehow simply managed to forget until now that I had double G breasts. That is, after I got them to look at my face and see it was me. Others saw it was me and relaxed, but I think those guys got laid more often."

Ah. So that's how you cure your boyfriend of ogling other women on the street.

The experimenter's ultimate conclusion is that "Women with tits and blonde hair walk on a very different planet."

This may be true, but - and I'm trying my damnedest to be fair about this - is it a planet populated by people they really want to meet? Back when I was a barista, I worked at a Cafe with some incredibly gorgeous women. Incredibly. One, in particular, was so beautiful that it hurt my eyes to look at her.

She was always fending off men's advances, but the sort of men that no sane woman would ever want hitting on her. Not just horny UPS guys, taxicab drivers, bartenders, waiters, etc, but bosses and co-workers and 5o-year-old divorcees with three children and six ex-wives. Arab sheikhs, professional athletes, you get my drift. Once in a while, I was jealous of the fact that she could blink her eyes and some other guy would pop up to take the place of the last one. But most of the time, I realized what an incredibly mixed blessing it was.

Even if I were so lovely, I would not be more happy, or more loved. I know this beyond a shadow of a doubt. Not because I am so happy now, or so loved, but because people are themselves. It's just a fundamental truth. There are no guarantees.

After the Lives of Others

So the final scene in "The Lives of Others" (a beautiful movie one should never watch alone) takes place around 1993, four years after the Berlin Wall came down and three years after German reunification finished.

It's a picture of an interesting moment in history: the complicated one in which Communism for once and for all became a thing of the past. (With the notable exception of China, which grows less communist with every passing year.) But I think it also marks another moment in history.

1993 was four years before "My Best Friend's Wedding," the movie that planted Julia Roberts in the American consciousness. Roberts was the first big movie star of my time. She was the first person whose intrigues and affairs were noteworthy enough to warrant around-the-clock paparazzi attention.

It was four years before said paparazzi allegedly chased Princess Diana to her death.

It was five years before Google, six years before Blogger, and twelve years before YouTube.

In the final scene of "The Lives of Others," a prominent East German author discovers, while researching his own files in the newly-opened state archives, that a sympathetic Stasi officer monitored his house in the years before the Wall fell. Because of the officer's subtle interventions, no one ever learned of the author's subversive activities.

When he realizes that he owes his life and livelihood to a man he has never seen, the author chases down the former Stasi officer, who is now a mailman. But at the last minute, the author can't bring himself to jump out of the car and ask, "why did you do this for me?" As the audience, we never know it either. Instead, the author dedicates his next book to the officer by his Stasi code name, and the officer sees it, and feels thanked.

To someone who hasn't seen the film, my next point might not make sense. But I also think "The Lives of Others" marks one of the last times when the inevitable conclusion to this story would not have been that Oprah read the book and made it part of her book circle, leading Good Morning America to exile its harem of overworked, unpaid interns to the vast Stasi archive, where one of them uncovered the officer's real identity, which led producers to broadcast a special segment on him, therefore ending his anonymity. The public's appetite for the story meant both the author and the officer got booked as special guests on a marathon episode of 60 Minutes that was later excerpted onto YouTube and in which the two bantered back-and-forth about why they did it, how they did it, and whether anyone currently running in the presidential election would have done it. The officer got a multi-million dollar advance for his tell-all novel "Behind Closed Doors: My Life as a Police Subversive" and gained recognition as a blogger and motivational speaker who raked in speakers' fees only a notch below Bill Clinton's.

In other words: the last moment in which the lives of others could still be secret, mysterious and inexplicable.

"I Know It When I See It"

Am I the only person confused by the Tom Ford ads that caused the big pornography stir recently? (Click "enter" at the screen that says "Sexually Explicit Images." And don't pretend this is your first time.)

People say that Ford's ads ripped off YSL's M7 ads. My first thought when I saw the YSL ad was, wow, that must be from the European editions.

After watching Ford's photo montage a few too many times, I've decided it needs a marketing blurb to run beneath, because otherwise it makes no sense. In honor of the fact that the original ad is a form of theft, I've ripped off other, more talented copywriters to humbly suggest these one-liners from the past :

Option 1. Tom Ford for Men. Good to the last drop.

Option 2. Tom Ford. It's everywhere you want to be.

Option 3. It takes a tough man to wear a tender fragrance.

Option 4. Does she...or doesn't she? (In reference to my outstanding question: does that woman actually have sexual organs?)

It is interesting - although not really worthy of note - that when the Ford ads came out, some people were very concerned that they were derogatory towards women. But no matter how many scent-mongers Photoshop perfume bottles over naked men, no one will ever ask the same question. Why is that? Do men have rights? Do I care?

Dangerous keys

The Internet is a great place. It's where I spend most of my time.

So it's no surprise that I found the Shakespeare Quote Generator. In an effort to put off my upcoming exams (and to celebrate the fact that I miraculously solved a price discrimination problem involving not one, not two, but multiple derivatives) I decided to spend some time fiddling with the Bard.

The gist is this: the page substitutes your word or phrase into classical Shakespeare. Here, my attempts to apply a long-dead writer to the vexing issues of the day. (Or, a random mashup of news headlines and iambic pentameter.)

Which yields:"

"Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more. Men were deceivers ever. One foot in Craig's bathroom stall and one on shore, to one thing constant never."

"How now, you secret, black and midnight Osama in Waziristan!"

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have thankless Iranian nukes!"

"Blow, blow, thou winter wind. Thou art not so unkind as a Cowboys Super Bowl bid."

"Falling US Dollar, Falling US Dollar! Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say falling US dollar till it be morrow."

"To be or not to be: that is Senator Vitter's small penis."

I can't really end on a more positive note than that.