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Showing posts from 2010
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Confessions of a Retired Pet Sitter I don’t think I’ve mentioned any of this yet but until last year, I had basically 2.5 paid jobs. One, the main one, is at National Geographic. The second one at which I thanklessly toiled (a little dramatic? perhaps) for three years, was pet sitting. I worked for an agency that takes care of animals (mostly cats but also dogs, fish, exotic birds, your random, demanding hermit crab, etc.) in people’s homes while they’re out of town. I started working for the agency that shall remain nameless due to legal concerns (the privacy of our clients but of course) while in graduate school. I had initially hired the agency to take care of my own two cats, Begbie and Andy. I had found out about the agency just by looking for such a service online; through the Washington City Paper ’s classifieds. I was impressed when one of the pet sitters, a woman I will mysteriously call “Sally,” came by our apartment one evening to get
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My One & Only Ethnography The title of my one and only ethnography is: “Passionate Performance or Contrived Commodity?: Ethnicity and Nationalism through the Lens of Andalucian Flamenco.” Flamenco, Spain, and I bang into each other a bunch of times in my life, it seems. There are, after all, lots of apparent as well as invisible convergences in life, right? Or is it better to call them coincidences? Take, for example, the interrelated yet uncanny facts that 1) I studied abroad while in college at the University of Sevilla in Spain, and, 2) that during the summer of 2005, I went back to conduct my first (and probably only) ethnography. Then, 3) when I prepped for my interviews at National Geographic, I picked up a copy of Traveler magazine from Books A Million, a bookstore flanking Dupont Circle, and in it found a short piece about Sevilla and what there is that’s “authentic” to see and experience there. And the circle continues ‘round and ‘round, don’t it? For those non-anthro dor
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Kurapaty, Belarus: Site of Stalinist Purges, 1937-1941 Truth be told, I didn’t know the name of this place of mass murder until I did a little research. To me, the name of the place doesn’t matter too much. The name, Kurapaty, however, does matter to those who were killed there, those who will never return from there, and the families they left behind. I am not going to present you with a comprehensive nor historical look into the forests of Kurapaty here. I’ll just tell you how I came to know this place, what I saw when I was there, and what remains in my mind about the place ten + years out. As you know, dear reader, I was in Belarus the summer between my third and last years at UPenn. After our month in the field, excavating a Bronze-age archaeological site near the village of Snydin in southern Belarus, we (me, Alyssa, and Emily; the three American girls) were wasting time in Minsk while our group’s American leader, Walt, “took care of business.” One day we headed to Kurapaty by bu
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Getting Home After the shock of being stuck in Belarus began to sink into my mind, I knew I would have to figure out a way to get myself home. I wallowed a bit in mild self-pity, looking through the tiny photo album I had with me of shots of home, family, friends, and pets. I was supposed to be seeing them at that very moment, not just staring wistfully at representations of them. It was tough. Max and Alecia’s family had a rickety rotary phone in their apartment that intermittently allowed you to call out of the country and even overseas. Max told me I should call my family so they would know I wasn’t coming home. I didn’t have any money to reimburse them for the call but they didn’t seem to mind and I was too desperate to think much about it. I excitedly called Pennsylvania and my dad picked up. His voice sounded thrilled to catch me on the other end. He exclaimed, “Oh, are you in Ireland now?” Our original flight plan included a few hours’ layover in Shannon. “No,” I countered grave
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Leaving Belarus After the dig and time languishing in Minsk while Walt took care of some “personal business,” the day finally came for us to leave Belarus. My time in Belarus had been tough. I was pooped from traveling, my indulgent year in Spain had taken its toll, and I missed my ex. The conditions were tolerable but not what I was used to. Our excavation team was comprised of Walt; me; two other female American college students; half a dozen Belarussian college students; a Belarussian archaeologist who used to sneak cigarettes beneath the pines behind the schoolhouse in which we slept; Oleg, another archaeologist; his young son, Gleb (which means “bread” in Russian); and various others. We all lived in the school, sleeping on the worn wooden floorboards. There was no running water so, yea, we retrieved our mildly radioactive water from the well, swam when it wasn’t too chilly in the cedar-tinted waters of the Pripyats river, and hurriedly “visited” the buggy outhouse behind the scho
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Intro to Belarus Here are some facts: Belarus is a former Soviet nation state to the east of Poland and to the west of Russia. During World War II, it was literally bulldozed through by the Germans and then the Russians and the Germans again. During all of this bloodletting, one out of every four Belarussians died. I went to Belarus in July 1996 after traveling around Western Europe with my ex for over a month. He and I parted in Rome. He was going to linger in the Eternal City a bit longer before heading state-side. I flew from Rome to Vienna, Austria, to Minsk, Belarus. Why would anyone trade a few more days at the lush Hotel Mascagni in Rome, gobbling up the Coliseum and the Vatican, feasts of pizza and insalata caprese and hearty red wine for Minsk, Belarus? That’s a sensible question. But just the sort of thing I would do and relish. I was, please keep in mind, just 20 years old. I was an aspiring anthropologist/Spanish major and had never done any anthropological/archaeological
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9/11 into September 12th, 2001: The Williamsburg Bridge, Tiny's Giant Sandwich Shop, and Jogging in Gritty Air I left off recalling 9/11 with my ex and his companion hurrying to the buildings that morning, thinking they could help in a situation they never imagined would be so horrific. They were dusted in the destruction of the day and soon after, parted ways. My ex headed back to our apartment and met me there. As I said before, we had no preconceived disaster action plan or anything along those lines (Who did in those days? Who thought such a thing could possibly happen?) but we both instinctively got ourselves back to the apartment. We had a television but no cable and somehow were able to catch the signal from a local Spanish-language TV station that was showing the planes slamming into the buildings over and over again. Our apartment on Attorney Street must have been built as a tenement, cheaply, hastily constructed multi-story housing for last century’s herds of European im
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One Third on the iPad? Could One Third make a great iPad book? It is, after all, a blog - novel. It's interactive, irreverent. How do I publish One Third as an iPad book? I'm excited by the idea but intimidated by the amount of work most probably involved. Anyone out there to help me?
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Processing Charles Mann & Jared Diamond I’m particularly interested in the Americas before they were the Americas, that is, before the Europeans arrived and took over and pretty much ruined everything, either enslaved, murdered, raped (or all three) most of the people living in the Americas at the time. There’s a book I read a bit ago, 1491 , about this very momentous period. In it, the author, Charles Mann, a science journalist, claims that past accountings of the number of people living in the Americas before the Europeans laid anchor has been off by millions. In fact, the American cities of Tenotchilcán and others were home to more people in their day than the European gems of Paris and London. In the year 1491, the world population was roughly 500 million of whom at least 100 million lived in the New World. This is a lot more people than we were told about when we were in grade school. A whole lot more. The book goes on to explore who they were, what happened to them, and why
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12. This Morning I ran into Jennie, a ginger-haired young woman who works at the same company I do (should it remain nameless? have I already let its name slip?), this morning while parking our bikes. She sports a bright pink helmet, one of those not meant for cyclists but for skateboarders. It serves its purpose just the same, I bet, and helps her out by making her flashy (and, for those safety-conscious readers out there, quite visible) on the street. We headed into the hall to wait for the elevators to suck us out of level P1 when we spotted what at first looked like a cockroach on the brown tiled floor. She nudged it with her sandal. She asked me, “Is that what I think it is?” I responded, “Looks like a cross between a multivitamin and a button from my ankle-length mauve winter coat from the mid-'80s.” She then told me about a woman in her department who died two days before while eating out. Some sort of violent food allergy. Here's her story (I’m not mentioning this to b
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9/11 Six Years On, Part Two On September 11th, 2001, I didn’t yet have a cell phone but remember many of those around me trying earnestly to call friends and family both in the city and beyond. Someone must have gotten through, if only for a bit, and heard from his mother that a plane went down somewhere in Pennsylvania. I remember he said “somewhere in Pennsylvania” as though it was some distant, insignificant land. I guess it was and is to many but to me, that’s where my family lives after all. “What?” I barked. “What’s happening in Pennsylvania?” He knew little more than nothing. I was more worried. Watching the towers—smoking and smoldering—collapse was unbelievable. The scene resembled a video of an old building or theater or warehouse being imploded to make way for gentrification. It didn’t seem real; it was especially unreal as I kept reminding myself “There are people in those buildings!” Those buildings are collapsing on the people inside. It was unbelievable. After the tow
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9/11 Six Years On (post written September 11, 2007) Six years. Six years. I can’t believe it’s been six years since the attacks. Wow. Seems so long ago and yet the memories remain stark and immediate. Yesterday, September 11, 2007, wasn’t a sparkling early fall day as it was that day six years ago. It was overcast and for that, I was relieved. Gray and humid. Sticky and gloomy. At the end of the day, however, the sun did indeed break through the clouds and there was a spectacular sky of deep oranges, glowing pinks, and ruby reds. Perhaps that was the most striking part of the day for me. Otherwise, 9/11's almost becoming just another day. Has it? If this section is contradictory, I apologize but think such back and forth is due to the ambivalence I feel about the day now. It’s an uncomfortable commingling of a “let’s move on” attitude with a “lest we forget” fear-inspired reverence. I read somewhere that 9/11 is our generation’s Pearl Harbor. The parallels are easy to draw: bot