This is the start, the start of somethin' good ...

Ok, ok. My first post. Here's what's what:












I started last fall, fall 2007, to write my first book. It's what I've started to call a semi-autobiographical, travelogue, self-help book. But I hope it's not as dull as it sounds.

What I'm going to do is post a bit of it every day or so, chapter by chapter. Once I run out of "book," I'll just keep writing.

Perhaps you can give me some feedback or, if you work for the book publishing industry and see a glimmer of potential in me, give me a call or email. Really! Please do. I have plenty of other ideas and lots of energy. Plus, I'm a fast typist.

The book's working title was: The Birds and The B

It's subtitle: Autobiographical Sketch, Mini Travelogue, Cultural Commentary, & A Calculus of Life

Things you should now: Unable to escape my past work in scholarly book production, the "book," now blog, was footnoted. Now it will be endnoted, meaning, there will be note numbers in the text that direct you to the endnotes at the end of each chapter. There, you'll find more info on a given topic and/or links elsewhere.

That said, enjoy this journey into ONE THIRD (a random jaunt through 30 years of me). Send me your thoughts and let's get published!

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If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading or do things worth the writing.

--Benjamin Franklin 1

To know someone with whom you can feel there is understanding in spite of distances or thoughts unexpressed … that can make this life a garden. --Goethe 2

1. Introduction, Washington, DC
This is the beginning. The beginning of something. Of a dream to write and to express myself. To do something I’ve always said and known I should. To share with others what I’ve lived, seen, and thought. Not in a preachy way but in a communal, sharing way. Questioning myself alone and in the company of intangible others. Of coming together. As I might misquote and possibly misattribute Eleanor Roosevelt, I hope this book enables us both to “Learn from the mistakes of others [because] [y]ou can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” 3

That said, let’s jump in. What is this book/blog and what is this section an introduction to? This book/blog is about me and my life and stories, primarily over the last 14 years (since I headed off to college). It’s a microcosm of a limited space/place/scope/reach but hopefully, in it, you can find something that strikes a chord with your spirit and struggles, a nugget that might move or anger you, surprise or amuse you. A tidbit you can empathize with or wonder about. It’s about how we know what we know and how we’ve arrived to where we are now and potentially we’re going tomorrow. It’s a hodgepodge about love and friends and dissatisfaction and restlessness and confusion. It’s about life.

My name is Meg and I’m a 31-year-old woman. I live in Washington, DC, the United States, with my boyfriend of two + years and a fierce duo of well-fed cats. I hail from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 4 originally, and most of my family still lives in that eastern pocket of the Keystone State and no, we’re not Quakers or Amish (although the latter do make some scrumptious baked goods). I have two kind, steady parents and an older brother who’s married to a sweet woman. They have two lovely little girls. Too good to be true? You decide …

I work as a senior researcher at a magazine. I’m educated as a cultural anthropologist, concentrating in international development while in graduate school here in DC and in biological anthropology and Spanish while an undergrad at UPenn, down Philly way. I exercise almost daily. I drink and party too much. I love my friends and the surprises they bring to me, that we happily share. I savor being free and silly although such moments tragically take up a paltry fraction of my “real” life that feels like it’s becoming more and more mundane and “work-a-day” as the weeks and months of my third decade flutter past.


I enjoy music and movies. I love being outside. While I may curse it when I’m seemingly stuck infinitely in its trying throes, I love working out and challenging myself both physically and mentally. I teach English to immigrant adults and I work as a pet sitter for a local agency, cruising my hybrid bike (½ road, ½ mountain) about this swamp cum-town, stopping in to clients’ apartments and condos to refresh the water, refill the kibble bowl, and scoop the poop of the city’s felines and her occasional pup. I like decorating and feel myself drawn to bright colored art glass. I like to watch glassblowers at work. 5 I’d like to try my clumsy hand at that dance of heat and breath sometime.

I have traveled since I was young: going along with my parents and brother on camping excursions during my formative summers. I was lucky, my parents were teachers and thus had time to spend with my brother and me during our summers off. I remember standing on The Maid of the Mist, beneath Niagara Falls, smacked by the mammoth fall’s pins-and-needles spray. In 1985, we crossed the country in our white Chevy Celebrity wagon, towing our Coleman pop-up trailer close behind.

My brother’s navy and white Adidas sneakers stunk so horribly we kept them in the spare tire we had roped to our roof as we cruised the sprawling prairies and crept through ominous wild fires. We saw the Grand Canyon and I befriended a stray cat in Anaheim, California, and a Billy goat along our ascent to Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills. We drank prune juice before tucking in for the night to keep ourselves regular (well, this wasn’t truly voluntary, if you know what I mean). We met kids along the way and spent seemingly endless summer nights playing tag in the campground, around the fire, at times traipsing, at others charging through the shadowy, smoky woods.

From that first six-week trip across the continent 6 and back, I flew to the Old World for the first time in 1989; I was 12. My family and I went on a whirlwind tour of “mainstream” Europe: England, France, Switzerland, and Germany. We went on a packaged deal on which I was the youngest, my brother next, and then my dad in the sequence of youngest to oldest. From the limited idea that trip provided me of Europe and the world beyond what was familiar to me, you can imagine how passionately I wanted to return and see more and experience things that were more “real.” But more on that later or, rather, I hope that these developments unfurl naturally as the text continues and my fingers tighten (carpal tunnel stalking) from all the typing.

But beyond the quotidian, I want to do something in my life that has meaning and that transcends me. Something that helps others, that reaches them, that allows me to step beyond the confines of myself. Should I become a teacher? Can I write? If I can tell a story, what of it? What story should I tell? What can I learn? Where can I travel to and how can I share things that keep me going, that help me scrape myself out of bed each morning? How did I get here and where am I going and am I writing just so I don’t forget or to really get somewhere new, happily taking you with me, if you’ll oblige?

I’ve felt the impermanence of many things in my life recently. I read somewhere 7 that when you falter to the end of the line, to the point at which you ask yourself “Is this really all there is?,” it’s not as foreboding a juncture as it initially seems but rather a point at which you’re not in the hopeless, proverbial dumps so much as asking yourself the wrong question(s) about life. Instead of trying to definitely determine if this (“this” being the grind, routine, your commute, bills, sit ups, doing the laundry, etc.) is truly all there is and immediately thereafter throwing oneself off the cliff or out the window or however you decide to “end it all,” stop and find a new question, a new reason, a new MO, and new raison d’être. Mine is to keep on, endure, write, and maybe start a family. Who knows?

Welcome to The Birds and The B (my book within my blog). Perhaps what you read in these pages will help us both formulate new questions and give us direction and hope. And, ultimately and ideally, a new courage, a (re)new(ed) sense of purpose will extend, radiate beyond us into the neighborhood and community and people next to us, down the street, across town, across the Atlantic pond, to Africa, to Asia. I don’t mean to be too self-indulgent or self-serving; real change comes from within. Our world needs fixing. Its injustices and tragedies are numerous and daunting. Maybe we can do something about that. If even just one thing. One or two or three.

Back to the book/blog: Here’s a not very elegant enumeration of the things I’ll talk about in this book/blog, hopefully it will pique your interest and get you going. Grab a little hazelnut joe and lay back. The following is not in any sort of sequential order but listed as things are associating themselves right now in my sandwich-deprived brain (it’s well past lunch time), which, looking back over how things are coming out, seems to be a poor woman’s psychoanalysis (we shouldn’t pay too much attention to what idea follows which other or should we?):


Cats (Begbie and Andy, especially)
Anthropology
Gorillas
Orang utans
Louis Leaky
Bronislow Malinowski
The George Washington University
Flamenco
The Roma (Gypsies)
The Inquisition
Spain
Marginalization and marginality
Identity
The Holocaust
Latinos
Urban life
Sudan
Belarus
Archaeology
September 11, events the day of and six years since
Memory
The meaning of friendship
Boredom
Love
Hope
Children
Family
The National Zoo
Conservation
Uganda
Rwanda
The Democratic Republic of the Congo
Pet sitting
Books (big category, I know)
Sexuality
Exercise
Three Marathons
Death
Joy
Visa problems
Uzbekistan
Evil Eye
Pit Toilets
Wounds
Incontinence
Parties
Woody Allen
Philadelphia
University of Pennsylvania
El Salvador
Romania
Poland
Washington, DC
Peace Corps
First contact of Europeans and the people of the Americas
Disease
Cotlow Fund Grants
The everyday
Boredom
Sunshine
Ethnography
My birthday
Nongovernmental organizations
Teaching English
Research
Compassion
CPR and AED Training
NGOs
International Development
Neocolonialism
Racism
Classism
Sexism
Pregnancy


I intend this to be a new style of book/blog, of nonfiction, and as I’m hoping to do something relatively unique in these pages e-mail me and tell me what you think: weaver.meg@gmail.com.

When I say I’m trying to sculpt a book/blog that’s an itsy bit unique/dare I say (okay, I will) revolutionary (#?!*^), I mean I hope it’s interactive, almost a living thing, conceived as it’s been, in the blog/vlog/texting/youtube/hyperconnected/myspace era that we (like it or not) currently inhabit. Something different for and to each and every reader.

I hope to include hyperlinks to sites and wikis that you can head over to if you want to learn more about something I mention. If you want to book yourself a double at the Hotel Mascagni in Rome or learn more about Stalinist purges in the emerald forests of Belarus, check ‘em out, by all means, and then tell me more, email me what you found and what you think, your spin, your impressions.

Please let this book take you where you want to go. Let’s use our lives to affect others positively in terms of knowledge and experience. Again, I don’t know much myself. I know little things. I don’t mean, not in the least, to be preachy. Granted, I like to read and have had the luck to go to a bunch of places but I’m just a girl, as Gwen Stefani might have said (or she did say that, right?).

This book/blog is pop and multidimensional. There’s no wall between you and me. I talk to you directly as I’m doing right now. I want to know what you think.

Through this book/blog, also, I hope you can share in my hunger for knowledge. Let’s transcend the everyday and learn something new that might amuse or inform us, show us something we never thought about before. Also, in all of its many footnotes and urls, it’s a snapshot of the Web at this point in time. My methodology is simple: I pretty much google the things, people, and events I discuss and whichever links come up that I think are pretty solid and easy to get to the heart of, I list here. Take (and) leave what you want.

I’ve been moved by the writing of Dave Eggers 8 and Jonathan Safran Foer. 9 The self-indulgence, sarcasm, and frenetic nature of their works inspire me and compel me to pause and wonder if perhaps people (myself included) are ready for this kind of writing. At times fragmentary, doubling back on its self. Recursive discursive. Playful. Playing.

Okay, as this is the jumping-off point, the steep bridge from the intro into the heart of this work, I want to say that while the book/blog is about me and the life I’ve had up until now, the sweet age of 31 (!), I hope that the book is simply an impressionistic reflection of one person’s life that helps you better understand your own.

I hope you laugh and are entertained and perhaps take something away from this book that helps you make a positive difference in your life and the lives of those around you.

Thanks!
Me
April 11, 2008
Washington, DC

ENDNOTES, Chapter 1
1. A link to a biographical timeline of Franklin’s life: http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/info/timeline.htm. Be sure to check out why he became a vegetarian in 1722.

2. When I googled this Goethe quote in its entirety, I hit Gretchen’s blog (http://gretsblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/what-i-did-on-my-summer-vacation.html). She’s a mom of three kids. Interesting. Here’s a link to biographical info on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832.

3. Here’s some info about Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a Roosevelt before she married one; she’s Teddy’s niece and Franklin’s wife, of course. Funny historical wrinkle. Advocate for civil rights, responsible for much of the leadership that brought about the Universal Declaration of Humans Rights and the United Nations as we know them today. We owe a lot to this woman.

4. Here’s wikipedia on my hometown: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethlehem%2C_Pennsylvania. We lived outside of the “city” itself in a little neighborhood in Saucon Valley called “The Terrace,” so named as it was once a potato farm and was terraced into a bunch of different levels. The following url is a link to the city’s own website: http://www.bethlehem-pa.gov/. Its downtown is pretty, with a handful of colonial stone buildings from the time of the city’s founders and first settlers, the Moravians from what is today the Czech Republic. Christmastime is a special time in the city as it was founded on Christmas Eve 1741. Also, in the summer, the city hosts Musikfest, a week-long, overpriced but popular music festival that fills the city with an eclectic mix in a myriad of tented and open-air venues.

5. Check out this video on this studio’s site: http://www.keilaglassworks.com/index.html. They’re located in Orlando. I’ve never been but happened upon them in the course my fact-checking duties at work.

6. Random aside: If you ask a U.S.-born chap or gal how many continents there are in the world, they’ll say seven and rapidly list them: North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Antarctica, and Australia. One day, I don’t know why, my boyfriend and I were chatting about the continents (we’re a fun couple, really! Not too nerdy) and he insisted that there are only six. He’s from El Salvador, Central America, and he had been taught that “America” was one mighty continent that included both North and South America. Interesting! This might point to why many Latin Americans (gente from both Central and South America) dislike when we “Americans” (i.e., U.S.-born folks) use “Americans” to refer only to us and not to include people from Central and South America. I respect this distinction and try to use “United States” and not “America” when naming my country. Immigration (particularly of Latinos to the United States) further clouds this issue but that’s an entirely different super-sized can of worms that I don’t have the guts to crank open at this time. Another thing to take away from this is how our education sculpts us and how things we thought were universally understood in a certain way often tend not to be as pervasive as we once thought, whether or not these are random pieces of knowledge or “truths.” Subjectivity and relatively reign supreme, I say!

7. I’m ashamed to say I might have read this in Oprah, or O, or whatever Oprah Winfrey’s magazine is called. It’s probably for a bit older demographic than myself, women with children and careers but I enjoy it. I am bothered, however, by Oprah always featuring herself on the cover. There are so many other beautiful people and animals and things in this world. Who’s her art director?

8. A link to an excerpted New Yorker interview with Eggers on McSweeney’s: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/interview/readers_de.html. Of Eggers’s work, I’ve read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and You Shall Know Our Velocity. I remember reading the first on the steps of the forgotten West End Library here in DC, January 2006, while bored out of my gourd while on a lunch break from my two-month stint as a copyeditor at a liberal mag. I read the second work listed here while recovering from my lost-in-translation nose piercing experience in Poznan, Poland, July 2004, after inhaling a faux Turkish meal and a tall amber beer bedazzled, as is summertime custom in Poland, with raspberry syrup.

9. This is Foer’s own Web site: http://www.theprojectmuseum.com/. I’m not really sure what this is all about. Here’s some bio stuff about him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Safran_Foer. He’s younger than me! Reading briefly in wikipedia, I learned that his work is pretty polarizing. Some find it innovative and genius, others, pretentious and gimmicky.

















Me digitally ... Top, at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, hot July '07; that's a bag of gratis genuine Virginia peanuts. Below, me at a party (and yes, I have a big tattoo and yes, it hurt).