78uuu lumière des étoiles

Dusty:Starlight:Culture



What to do?
2004-09-16   11:08 p.m.

Yay, yay, yaaaaaaaay! Welcome to Catherine Patricia, my new NIECE, born September 15, around 5 am. I was able to make it to the hospital in time after Tai Chi, and so got to cuddle her for a few minutes before she got the hiccups at which time I, panic-stricken, gave her back to her dad. I love babies, but am a bit paranoid with the ones that can't yet hold up their heads.

She was "baby-girl" until this afternoon, when Susan and my brother picked out a name. Andrew, my nephew, seems to be adjusting well enough - he even kissed his new little sister last night. I have to wonder, though, whether he thinks this is just a nice baby of someone else's and that when mommy and daddy come back home he will have them all to himself again. A little competition is a good thing, me thinks; Andrew's been spoiled enough with everyone's complete attention for the last two years.

Sweet, lovely, wonderful Gavin sent us an email today - he says Jo'Burg is fine, and no, he wasn't one of the "lucky ones" (as he put it, anyway) who was on strike today. I must say I got bitter and sad when he told us about all the Spring Braais and concerts he's been attending; ironically enough it made me feel homesick. I miss him so much - we all bonded so quickly. I heard from Helen as well; she's now back in the UK and wrote to tell me that she wanted to turn around almost immediately and go right back to Cape Town. What is it about South Africa that's got that pull? I wish I could explain it. It's so alive, so vibrant, so full of color and energy. Democracy is so new that people are happy and excited just to be alive. Just to be able to do something like strike, and demand a better wage. Funny enough, with all that they've been through in the last ten years - the violence, the racism, the fear and segregation - they've become a truly friendly and accepting culture, and lack that arrogant sense of entitlement that seems to be so ubiquitous in the West. Sigh sigh sigh sigh siiiiiiigh.

I already got my Spring semester schedule together, mostly, thanks to the insanely organized and structured new dept. chair. I have also been offered a Winter Session WS course. It only meets for two weeks - but it meets five hours a day (whew!). If I take it, it's an INSANE amount of money for two weeks' work. However, this would mean no Joe and no Belfast at Christmas. HOWEVER, this could mean Peru, China, Chile, or Thailand in the summer, and Joe just might be able to fit into some of those travel plans somehow. Besides, Joe might be coming to New York soon to visit his friend who lives in the East Village. It will be surreal to see him here, since I currently only associate him with Southern Africa (though he lives in Belfast).

In Ghana, we met a man who lives in Essex Fells, NJ, which is a mile or so away from where my mother currently lives. It was strange to meet someone from so close when we were all half way around the world in such an alien environment. But we didn't spend too much time talking to him or getting to know him so I sort of forgot about him. About six months after we got home, I saw him on the main street in my mom's town, in front of the Public Library, and almost got into a car accident because I thought I was hallucinating. For some reason, seeing his face, but in my mom's typical North-Jersey suburban town, and not in dusty, expansive, rural, desolate North Eastern Ghana, was like seeing an Elephant eating a bunch of leaves off a tree on your front lawn or a giraffe crossing the GW Bridge. Don't ask me why - it was perfectly logical that this guy should be where he was that day, but I had to pull over because it confused me so much for a few minutes. I never did get to call out to him. Maybe that was a good thing.

So how will it be if we see Joe? Will we all have the urge to camp out in the back yard? Will we have the urge to start up our Gin-Rummy tournament again? Will we instinctually offer to share deet-based products and sun-block?

Hmmm. I'm still stuck, it seems, my head still out of the country, my body still on the Africa diet. I still can't eat much, and when I weighed myself at the Y yesterday I was down to 140 pounds. A little low for someone who's nearly 6'1", no? I was actually concerned that I might have a weird tape-worm or something, but then when I went to lift weights and couldn't, at least not at the weight I had been lifting all spring and early summer, I realized with much distress that I lost some muscle mass. This weight situation is getting ridiculous, but I don't want to start drinking those crazy high-calorie protein shakes every morning just to gain it back and get the cut I had going before we left. I think I'm just going to have to be patient and get things, like my appetite and my deltoids, back to the way they were the old fashioned way - over time and with repetition.

Steve and my GP might think I'm crazy, but I swear it's the anti-malarials we had to take; last time I took them I also returned skinny, slightly anemic, and sans appetite for weeks after I'd finished my last pill. But Malarone offers a nice alternative to psychotic-episode-inducing Larium. So which would you rather be? Crazy or anemic? What choices! Yes, maybe we'll go to China or Italy next summer - it would be good to give our livers, and my ENTIRE BODY, a break from this third-world/pill-and-shot roller-coaster ride for a couple of years.

It's funny, but I still don't have that sense of "back home", or "back to work", or whatever it is that people feel when they say they're "settling back in". With some concern, I told Steve the other day that this, being back to work, back in NJ, back into that habitual living, feels more like an interruption in my life than some return to normalcy. I explained that it's when I'm traveling that I feel "back home" or "settled in". So what's the big concern with that? My antsy-ness. I just don't want to feel this way my whole life - so ready to go, ready to fly, ready to breathe chaos and disruption in. "Are you bored?" he asked me when I was finished telling him all this. I didn't answer, but because I couldn't. I know it's not exactly that - in fact I know it's not that at all. I'm happy here, not bored; I love my job, and I know I'm lucky to have it, especially at my age. I love our apartment, and I ache when I do not see my family for a week, let alone for months. I love New York City, and wouldn't want to live anywhere else(in this country anyway). It's more like I'm infinitely curious, sometimes desperately so. Sometimes I have dreams that I'm far away, but the university and my ENTIRE FAMILY seem to have come with me somehow.

If I'm a really good girl, could Santa make that happen for me this year? Or the next? Or the one after that?

I really must have done something right in my past life to have been blessed with Steve in this one. When I talk to him about these things I know he completely understands - I know because of the way he looks at me with empathy and familiarity - I know he feels the same way I do, and not because of some attempt to manufacture simpatico with me. It's because we're both like this that we're so drawn to each other, I think, and it's because we're both like this that we'll be able to, and will want to, stay together for the rest of our lives. Maybe it would be a good idea to teach for the DoDEA overseas for a year or two. They're desperate for people in Okinawa, and I might even be able to get an American University appointment in Sicily.

But our parents and grandparents are in us - our logical, hard-working, Immigrant and Blue collar parents and grandparents, our practical, Depression- and New-Deal era parents and grandparents, so we're always thinking of the future - perhaps too much. Will we have jobs to return to? What if the market takes a down-turn again while we're gone? I will always be able to get part-time work at the Uni, but what would become of my full-time contract? Of Steve's? Could we take a leave for a year? But what if we decided not to come back? What would we do with the cats? And who would water Bambi the bamboo? Or Spidey the spider-plant? Or Ruby the Jewel Plant?

I think I'll sleep on this one.

xo,