tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60378764350860474432024-03-05T08:23:40.319-08:00One ThirdONE THIRD, the blog, is ever evolving. It had been the spot where I post pieces of my first book but it's becoming more of a true blog, a running, rambling commentary on life as a mom (to kids, human & four-legged), digital communications specialist, runner, gardener, volunteer, wife, friend, & traveler.
Welcome & Enjoy!Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.comBlogger42125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-81214231140761789532013-09-11T08:37:00.000-07:002013-09-11T08:37:06.663-07:00Twelve Years On ... <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I've always loved this time of year: sun's still strong during the day, nights begin to take on a pleasant chill. Things feel more orderly, predictable as kids are back at school, schedules are set, football's constantly on TV. Leaves start to yellow, some languorously dance down to the ground. Twelve years ago, I worked in book publishing in New York's famed Flatiron Building (second floor, Fifth Avenue side). The day began bright and clear, not nearly as humid as today. It was Election Day in New York and the birthday of one of my dearest childhood friends. <br />
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These things were on my mind as I hurried up the side stairs to my office, maybe 15 minutes before nine. I logged into my computer, started to check email and then wondered why it was so quiet. I had headed into the building from the south, from the Broadway side; after all, the Flatiron, like one old grouchy traffic cop, divides Fifth Avenue from Broadway at 23rd Street. The devastation of the day was behind me; not so, for my many colleagues unfurling from the subway. They saw smoke straight down Fifth Avenue and paused, puzzled. That was the beginning of a very bad day and now, 12 years on, so much has changed while all has pretty much stayed the same. <br />
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I've been reading the remembrances of folks online today. A former colleague at National Geographic who's teaching at Boston College pointed out on her Facebook feed that today's college students were in third grade when 9/11 happened, third grade! For me, the devastation of that day prompted me to quit my job in New York, join the Peace Corps, teach English for a time in Uzbekistan, return early to Washington, D.C., go to grad school, work at a think tank, then National Geographic, travel to Hawaii and the south of France, and now, here I find myself working for myself, on projects for NG and others.<br />
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Here I find myself hoping the adoption of three kids from foster care for which we've waited so long to actually happen. And I wonder how this all fits into the spark, the plan, the grand idea that knocked me out of my path, my security of a real job-job, out into the unknown and uncertain. And, it seems, these are pieces meant to fit somehow into the quilt that is my life. There are jagged edges, disappointments, failures, retreats. There are some patches that are oblong, circular, some are even torn but they'll fit together, sewn carefully and with joy, joy felt due to simply still being alive. Watching the yellow jackets spin about, sucking up pollen from the now-pink sedum plants in the back yard. Day after day, monitoring the cherry tomatoes, which I started from seed, get plump and redder and redder. Walking my goofy dogs too often, greeting kids in the neighborhood.<br />
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For me, I think back to the horror of this day, 12 years on. Every year. I mourn the people I didn't know who died. I empathize with the grieving families they left behind. I feel thankful I am still alive, to struggle on, to hope, to try, to live. </div>
Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-11252264161909448222011-10-17T12:56:00.000-07:002011-10-17T13:07:48.450-07:00Studying Flamenco in Sevilla, Spain<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglhp64CI5UvmgMDcfCTHOPjsI1WenCtdlDSHxOeiJH7M1GA8WjsUwdmd2mo5w37oP8Gmc_vG_yqFdg8UAM8fdy1-n_k8M2sdPDmoXlgKCTfuR77Vo-Q28VdpgEVqY0JiA4MBVNZEzzyvLs/s1600/barbie+flamenco.jpeg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglhp64CI5UvmgMDcfCTHOPjsI1WenCtdlDSHxOeiJH7M1GA8WjsUwdmd2mo5w37oP8Gmc_vG_yqFdg8UAM8fdy1-n_k8M2sdPDmoXlgKCTfuR77Vo-Q28VdpgEVqY0JiA4MBVNZEzzyvLs/s320/barbie+flamenco.jpeg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5664555100322265250" /></a><br /> <!--[if !mso]> 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priority="37" name="Bibliography"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-;font-size:10.0pt;color:black;">Jumping back to my Cotlow which, as I detailed above, couldn’t in reality be about conservation and primates: I went online and found an abstract of my project that I wrote on GW’s Anthropology website. Here goes:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black;">Flamenco has emerged as a product of the dialectic confrontation between Gypsy and non-Gypsy societies in Andalusia. This project addresses how flamenco works to undergird Spanish and Gypsy identity; how flamenco performers consciously/unconsciously conceptualize it/its origins; how Spanish society comes to terms with a performance culture that intensely appropriates and may even co-opt the cultural traditions of its much-maligned "other." It investigates whether there is a distinction — from emic (the performers) and etic (the tourists) perspectives — between flamenco puro and that which is performed in the commercialized venues.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal">Reading over that abstract again after five years, it sounds so gosh-darn dry?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-;font-size:10.0pt;color:black;"><o:p> </o:p></span>The flamenco idea came about after Dr. Miller said, “Meg, these primate projects are great but not feasible.” Next, she asked, “Where have you been before where you speak the language where you could study something that interests you?”</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-;font-size:10.0pt;color:black;"><o:p> </o:p></span>Good question, right? Hm, where have I been before where I could study something that interests me, where I can speak the language so I can hit the ground running, so to speak?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="mso-bidi-;font-size:10.0pt;color:black;">Spain. Spain. Spain.</span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">As an anthropologist I tend to be more interested in topics than regions. I'm not sure if this is normally the case. I know a lot of anthropologists who study Andean folklore or who only really care about female infanticide in India, not elsewhere. Or who only concern themselves with HIV/AIDS risk in Central America and not in Africa or the former Soviet Union. Many would rightly counter, “well, Meg, these are parallel problems the world over & to counter them properly and with any hope of success, we need to do so locally.” Micro, not macro. Yea, I get it and I agree but for some reason, my interests have trended more the broadly topical and not the strictly regional.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">I like to examine how, let’s say for example, racial difference and inequality plays out in the Brazilian shanty towns studied by former Peace Corps volunteer and medical anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes as much as I do down the block from me at Safeway. Maybe I have ADHD or am impatient and can’t concentrate. Perhaps I drink too much caffeine (or red wine at night). Who knows, but I feel that while being micro is important, we as social scientists also need to look up, lift our eyes from the local and see the trends and parallels binding us as humans throughout the world, in our struggles and our triumphs. That’s how we can better understand our human family and work to help those who need help to help themselves.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The flamenco study fit this rubric in that it as an art form and southern Spain as a locale were places in which difference and discrimination are at play. What I mean is that flamenco is often claimed by the “mainstream” Spanish as an “authentic” “Spanish” art form. Is it?</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Where did it come from? While doing research for my grant proposal, I read that flamenco is a complex interplay of Spanish, Jewish, Roma (Gypsy), and Moorish (Muslim) dance and musical traditions. Think American Jazz and you get a partial picture.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Flamenco, particularly dance which is what I focused on, is a hodge podge of styles and influences. It’s a relatively young art form and, as it’s more and more packaged and polished to be sold, it’s more and more codified.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">If you talk to people in southern Spain, however, <i>sevillanas</i>, not flamenco is the “true” dance of the region. Flamenco is the tourists’ dance. Not that tourists usually or actually perform it, but it’s a dance form done for them. Marketed for them. Presented to and for them.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">My study was to see flamenco in southern Spain, specifically Sevilla, and investigate how it was packaged and sold. How is the flamenco performed in a free venue different from a theater where tickets costs 40 euro a pop?</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Who’s performing flamenco? Roma? Spanish women and men? How do the tourists consume it? What do they think about it? What prior knowledge do they bring to it?</p> <p class="MsoNormal">And, when talking to the performers and to “regular” Spanish people on the streets, how do they understand its origin as an art form? If the books and scholars are right and flamenco indeed has rich and diverse roots, mixing the Jewish with the Roma and the Muslim with the Christian and nationalistic Spanish, do Spanish people acknowledge this complex intermingling? Do they admit that the origins of one of their most famous art forms and markers of Spanish identity (second to only bullfighting, perhaps) comes from the people they expelled five centuries ago (the Jews and the Muslims) and those they denigrate and marginalize currently (the Roma)?</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The study was not so much about the content as it was about the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">context</i> of flamenco dance performance. I did, however, take some flamenco lessons and this was not to become anything close to a performer of it myself but to see who took these lessons (mostly foreigners, primarily from Taiwan and Hong Kong, amazingly enough) and who taught them (typically older dancers, from southern Spain) and what their interactions were (usually limited due to lack of a common language; I was often a translator) as well as to get to know some flamenco performers personally.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The Guadalquivir River cuts through Sevilla. On one side, there’s the old town, el Barrio Santa Cruz [neighborhood of the Holy Cross], the Jewish Quarter, and the hulking cathedral that used to be a mosque when the town was under Moorish rule for close to 700 years. There’s a gorgeous Moorish palace, El Alcazár, flush with orange blossoms, bubbling fountains, and striking Mudejár architecture and adornment.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">On the other side of the Guadalquivir, there are the more working-class, often less touristed neighborhoods of Los Remedios, where my ex lived in a students’ dormitory after being kicked out of his host family’s digs, and Triana, the traditional birthplace of flamenco and home, supposedly, to several well-known flamenco dynasties, mostly of Gypsy origin. Calle Betis [Betis Street] transverses both Los Remedios and Triana; many upscale shops dot the street, solidifying the transformation of this side of the river from rough and tumble to well to do.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Although Triana has gone through a gentrification of sorts, it is still known for its flamenco and its schools. Before deciding which school I would attend, I visited my host mother, Ana, on Avión Cuatro Vientos [Street of the Four Winds].</p> <div style="mso-element:footnote-list"><br /><div style="mso-element:footnote" id="ftn2"> </div> </div> <!--EndFragment-->Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-32150704831146871742011-08-01T06:00:00.000-07:002011-08-01T10:45:42.977-07:00Monkey Business & Development<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOz0pUKTc3WLaflSHf1B0YBGhJPGHrO3rLntcU__4IM87kVpWA7HJhXadCteQXSum8TCuxl7XB7C8tb-sWFzoZbyPaJuyY-42pfbctQiN73vRMvESPR7m3GrMGfVw4jKZFG-tIVDGRR8RI/s1600/Bonnie.png"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 191px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOz0pUKTc3WLaflSHf1B0YBGhJPGHrO3rLntcU__4IM87kVpWA7HJhXadCteQXSum8TCuxl7XB7C8tb-sWFzoZbyPaJuyY-42pfbctQiN73vRMvESPR7m3GrMGfVw4jKZFG-tIVDGRR8RI/s200/Bonnie.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635945099279715106" border="0" /></a><br /><!--StartFragment--><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">When I first heard of GW's Cotlow grant program, I thought, I have to apply. I guess even then I had the idea of possibly aspiring to get my PhD and thought this was a natural step: Get a small-scale grant, do something of my own creation; a solid first step.</span><div style="border-width: medium medium 3pt; border-style: none none dotted;"> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; border: medium none; padding: 0in;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >I felt the pressure as I was supported by the university's Anthropology department on a fellowship. This meant that my tuition was paid for and I was given a monthly stipend. I worked, of course, for the department as a teaching assistant and I loved it. For four semesters, I was a graduate teaching assistant for a large undergraduate course, Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; border: medium none; padding: 0in;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >As I was funded by the department (which meant that they believed in my abilities as there were only three other TAs similarly supported by the department), I felt I needed to nail the Cotlow. But, the question nagged at me, what to study? Throughout my academic training, sometimes I’ve been at a loss in terms of what to research and write about. It’s funny: I feel I have so many ideas but sometimes, especially when the pressure’s on, they frustratingly don’t surface but instead remain scattered in the gray matter of my brain.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; border: medium none; padding: 0in;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >The Cotlow was no different. As the deadlines approached, I went to see the professor in charge of the program, the very same professor I TA'ed for. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “do I detect the pungent scent of a little favoritism at work here?” And, no, I can answer back honestly and instantaneously. The Cotlow program was administered by the professor with whom I worked closely but there was also a committee of professors who actually sat down together, looked over the students’ proposals, and decided on who was to get what to do which sort of anthropological investigation.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; border: medium none; padding: 0in;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >One fine early winter afternoon I sat with my professor in her office, housed, as it was in one of the three old townhouses the department occupied on G Street. Her office was lucky enough to have the front window, looking out onto G Street. It was one of those gray-white days when the sun is so slight, it’s hard to discern if it’s early morning or mid-day. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; border: medium none; padding: 0in;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >We sat down, amidst her African and Asian brica braca, and discussed what would be best for me to research and propose to study. At this time, I had been volunteering for almost two years as an exhibit interpreter at the Smithsonian National Zoo. As an exhibit interpreter at the Great Ape House, I greeted visitors and explained a bit about the natural history of gorillas, orang utans, lemurs, and gibbons. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; border: medium none; padding: 0in;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >The zoo was home to lowland mountain gorillas: Mopie and Kigali, Mandara and tiny Kojo, Baraka and Kwame. Of the orangs, however, Bonnie was my favorite. She was a little chubby and was born in 1976 like yours truly. She seemed to key into visitors; her keeper once told me that she thought Bonnie had a preference for red-headed humans. Bonnie often sauntered about her enclosure like a regular old human biped, waddling, a little choppy but with an idiosyncratic rhythm and a certain pride in her movements.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; border: medium none; padding: 0in;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >Through this experience, I learned a lot about great apes, especially their precarious status in the natural world, in their home environments in the mountains of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and, for the orangs, in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Sumatra and Borneo.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; border: medium none; padding: 0in;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >At the zoo, I interacted with a varied swath of people: kids, the elderly, the overeducated, the unlettered. Some people would challenge me on evolution, belief in god(s), while others would ask who in a fantasy ultimate-fighting contest between a gorilla and a lion would win such an absurd contest. Other folks, upon seeing the orangs, would mention some Clint Eastwood movie I haven’t seen in which he wrestles an orang.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; border: medium none; padding: 0in;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >Others would call the gorillas “monkeys” which, I have to admit, made my skin crawl. I did my best, however, to be polite and informative and to tailor the information I provided to the people with whom I was speaking. Teens seemed to be the most disturbed by seeing the animals in what can be pretty grim, concrete enclosures. Perhaps they saw something of the confinement they themselves were fighting in the animals’ situation.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; border: medium none; padding: 0in;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >A unique feature of the zoo is its O Line, a series of towers connected by wires over which the orangs travel from the Great Ape House to the Think Tank, another zoo building in which they're sometimes housed. What’s amazing about the O Line is that it cuts across the zoo, even the zoo’s main visitor thoroughfare, Olmstead Walk, right over the heads of the visitors. The orangs are natural climbers in their home environments. For them, traveling the O Line is truly child’s play.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; border: medium none; padding: 0in;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >One of the jobs of the volunteers, however, is to monitor the orangs when they’re out on the O Line. No, not to be sure they don’t fall (which they won’t if they’re healthy and spry) but to be sure that if they do some “business” while out on the line (which inevitably happens because, after all, if you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go), the “business” doesn’t plummet down onto the heads of the visitors below, mouth agape in amazement. Crowd control can be tough at times.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >There’s so much to tell about the primates. But I mentioned them as I wanted to explain my ethnographic project on flamenco of all things. Back on course, getting back on course. Back to that drab mid-winter afternoon in my professor's office: She asked me perkily, “So, what do you want to do your Cotlow on?” I had thought about this, obviously, and wanted to study orang utans in Sumatra and Borneo, particularly the “eco” tourism trade and how such an industry (and the tourists it brings with it) affects the animals, many of them in the process of being “rehabilitated” to the wild after being trafficked by the illicit pet trade that permeates many pockets of the world.<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >Quite an ambitious project for a grant program that typically doles out less than $2,000 a pop, my professor commented. That’s a cool idea but way too ambitious. What do I know about Indonesia? Had I ever been there? Do I speak the language? How much does it cost just to fly there? <o:p></o:p>It was too much. What about doing a similar project but studying mountain gorillas in Rwanda or Uganda or Burundi or DRC? Nope, similarly too complicated, too involved, and too damn expensive.<o:p></o:p> I was at a loss. I wanted to study these animals and still do. I guess my interest in primates was piqued as a child. How can we not look at them and see so much of ourselves gazing back? <o:p></o:p>I wanted to be like Jane Goodall.</span><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" > Why couldn’t I have met Louis Leakey all of those many years ago and inspired him to advocate (and garner funding) on my behalf? Why couldn’t I be the next Birute Gladikas, living amongst and protecting Asia’s only great ape, the orang? Don’t really want to be like Dian Fossey,</span><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6037876435086047443&postID=3215070483114687174#_ftn2" name="_ftnref" title=""></a><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" > of course, as she was brutally murdered by apparently we still don’t know who for her work protecting the mountain gorillas. Remember Digit? <o:p></o:p><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >Fossey was incredibly close to Digit, a male silverback. He was found butchered on New Year’s Day 1978 with his head, heart, hands, and feet chopped off and missing.<o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Georgia;color:black;" > Fossey once wrote to L. Leakey of Digit and other gorillas in his troupe: "I just about burst open with happiness every time I get within 1 or 2 feet of them." Fossey and Digit would sit close; he would embrace her. They passed many hours together. <o:p></o:p> After his murder, Fossey dangerously transformed herself from scientist to ardent conservationist. Some say (and I might agree) that she strayed too far from the professional and the scientific (the objective) and her connections with the gorillas of the Virunga volcanoes became too deeply personal.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >She loved the gorillas. They were her family. After Digit and another male named Uncle Bert were murdered by poachers, she raised a cash bounty on the poachers’ heads. Dian herself was found dead at Karisoe on December 26, 1985.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >But a Goodall or Gladikas I haven’t become. That’s okay, I guess. I thought I could get closer to what they do without being a primatologist myself by studying how conserving such endangered animals can help them while, simultaneously, not hinder an area’s (nor the people who live there) development.<o:p></o:p><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >Concentrating on international development while in graduate school, I researched how reserves such as Parc de Volcans, straddling Uganda, Rwanda, and DRC, is not an inherent good. The animal lover and nascent conservationist within me disagrees with my critical/skeptical self in that despite how such a park most probably benefits the animals within it, it does <i style="">not</i> help the humans beyond (and restricted by) its borders.<o:p></o:p> Regarding many such parks, their boundaries and restrictions hamper the development of the people who live near it—they can’t enter the forest to gather wood or hunt; they can’t utilize its treasure trove of natural resources. Animal conservationists would say “good, that’s how it should be” but in my mind, prioritizing gorillas’ lives over those of humans seems like a zero-sum game. <o:p></o:p><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >Do we have to choose between improving the lives of humans and protecting gorillas’ natural habitat and their very lives? Is gorillas’ extinction inevitable? In the 50 years? Or the next century? know, I usually consider myself an optimist but I think their extinction in the wild is a foregone conclusion. Why? Why can’t we intervene and protect them? Why can’t we create reserves in which they can live the lives they’re meant to have? Why can’t we keep the people who need access to the preserves’ trees and natural resources out? <o:p></o:p><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >But those people are also just trying to survive. Those people are also just clinging to fraying threads. They’re on the margins and they’re suffering. It’s easy for us in the Western, privileged, obese industrialized worlds of the United States and Europe and Canada to want to protect the gorillas (and we should) but we can’t forget about the people who are their neighbors. <o:p></o:p>Let’s not demonize those who sneak into the forest and pilfer lumber. I bet, if those people had the luxuries and excesses and choices we have, they won’t do what they’re doing either. <o:p></o:p><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >That’s what ecotourism might offer. If the local people, those closest to the gorillas, see that foreigners come to see the gorillas and that they happily pay a fat U.S. dollar or Euro (and then some) to do so, they will do their damnedest to protect them.<o:p></o:p> One of a plethora of problems, however, in this scenario, of course, is that a sickening percentage of the revenue generated by ecotourism doesn’t go or get to the local people.<o:p></o:p> It goes to big airline conglomerates and to the U.S.- or European-based travel companies and booking agencies that plan and execute such “adventures.”<o:p></o:p><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >I’d love to be involved in a multinational and multilateral development project in the volcanic mountains of Africa or the steamy jungles of Borneo and Sumatra that changes the equation and pays dividends to the local people, something that’s sustainable and in which the local people are invested. Gorillas and orangs are for us all to enjoy. They’re part of nature’s marvels and mystery. Let’s pay those closest to them to protect them, not someone in a cubicle in London or downtown DC.<o:p></o:p> This all takes a lot of coordination. Green/eco/sustainable tourism is a big business and a rapidly emerging trend. My initial Cotlow idea was to explore it, to experience it firsthand, and see where it works and doesn’t and why.<o:p></o:p><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >I had read some things about what it’s like to go on a gorilla trek. Many of the parks, recognizing that the animals are their best resource, develop and enforce a series of regulations in terms of who can visit them and how best and least intrusively to go about it.<o:p></o:p> For example, the groups of paying foreigners who want to see the gorillas are kept small in number. If anyone is sick, they’re not allowed to enter the forest as many diseases that pester humans readily jump from us to our third-closest relatives (chimps and bonobos being our second-closest relatives). <o:p></o:p>The visitors are only allowed within so many feet of the gorillas. While many of the groups of gorillas visited by the groups of tourists are acclimated to humans, they are still wild animals and a male silverback will not hesitate to charge if he feels his harem and offspring are threatened by the humans. <o:p></o:p><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;color:black;" >The fees to see the gorillas in the mist are as steep as the mountains the coveted animals inhabit, as they should be. The visit is short, time-wise. Going to see the gorillas in their natural habitat is a very pricey venture. That’s good. People will pay. Law of supply and demand. The sad thing in this transaction, however, is that the local people who are most essential to being part of this complicated arrangement can never afford the fees to go and see the gorillas.<o:p></o:p> How can a person feel invested and want to protect a marvelous thing they haven’t yet seen first-hand because they can’t afford it? Conservation in the abstract is just that, inherently tenuous and short-lived.<o:p></o:p></span></p></div> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style=";font-family:Georgia;color:black;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <!--EndFragment-->Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-10617657405384521262011-07-29T10:03:00.000-07:002011-07-29T10:06:55.196-07:00South of France Photos, June 2011<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibca7pffjjBJ84RsHrNo2jsM376jk4ZZDLe3rP5WloYXL6zUtjxtcmmoP0Vz0pPH85M6Md5DAKIQA_d6cpO99jutaNKRxJCw581t0Kewry98hP7316NV866v3L4JIViO_FDpnX4NQ8ymeh/s1600/125.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 134px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibca7pffjjBJ84RsHrNo2jsM376jk4ZZDLe3rP5WloYXL6zUtjxtcmmoP0Vz0pPH85M6Md5DAKIQA_d6cpO99jutaNKRxJCw581t0Kewry98hP7316NV866v3L4JIViO_FDpnX4NQ8ymeh/s200/125.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634821374496547746" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVja8-AlCCiliewx1LubWEPhHciEb4q0MWmL7HafBQy0qngal_xst75KdTgsg-k4VpTKyNzskHKl0o01FxUn3QEW8Hsrzwv0Lw7Mq49x-Tl0_Fwb7fbQRpclgTlsvJZoEX6lF3KBJrJA9b/s1600/167.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 134px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVja8-AlCCiliewx1LubWEPhHciEb4q0MWmL7HafBQy0qngal_xst75KdTgsg-k4VpTKyNzskHKl0o01FxUn3QEW8Hsrzwv0Lw7Mq49x-Tl0_Fwb7fbQRpclgTlsvJZoEX6lF3KBJrJA9b/s200/167.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634821369891791570" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgStctNdnoMSkwYJREZT1wTyyNZTqtcihfihIEGXAUi6P0sgi7WXW9subjKRIDlnA8jmpNjXeHBf7MOUzz7YgTboNUbR7HB-7-LgXl1RghVZequqYFSm9BO1YOmJxibnhZm66AqAwX2gscx/s1600/243.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 134px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgStctNdnoMSkwYJREZT1wTyyNZTqtcihfihIEGXAUi6P0sgi7WXW9subjKRIDlnA8jmpNjXeHBf7MOUzz7YgTboNUbR7HB-7-LgXl1RghVZequqYFSm9BO1YOmJxibnhZm66AqAwX2gscx/s200/243.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634821367887999138" border="0" /></a>Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-33490140748344843842010-07-14T18:00:00.000-07:002011-02-05T04:12:09.016-08:00<span class=" transl_class" title="Click to correct" id="0"></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtd6W_J51DIzOryEk1jSLTNk6Jw6fBcxuG-RlR9GvL3LAcg1-MtuA6JTZwzKhqyrq0wgfgom6SZ7RnRFmtCJPMJ5VSnHDuwQFlaMeD4PAoyuHlQbeQs8lw5AoMd-MPybo5RIJp-zb6vBpx/s1600/begbie+on+desk.png"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 183px; height: 272px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtd6W_J51DIzOryEk1jSLTNk6Jw6fBcxuG-RlR9GvL3LAcg1-MtuA6JTZwzKhqyrq0wgfgom6SZ7RnRFmtCJPMJ5VSnHDuwQFlaMeD4PAoyuHlQbeQs8lw5AoMd-MPybo5RIJp-zb6vBpx/s200/begbie+on+desk.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5493852245476642242" border="0">Confessions of a Retired Pet Sitter</a><br /> <meta name="Title" content=""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <link rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/mweaver/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0clip_filelist.xml"> <link rel="Edit-Time-Data" href="file://localhost/Users/mweaver/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0clip_editdata.mso"> <!--[if !mso]> <style> v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} </style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:documentproperties> <o:template>Normal.dotm</o:Template> <o:revision>0</o:Revision> <o:totaltime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:pages>1</o:Pages> <o:words>1824</o:Words> <o:characters>10401</o:Characters> <o:company>NGS</o:Company> <o:lines>86</o:Lines> <o:paragraphs>20</o:Paragraphs> <o:characterswithspaces>12773</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:version>12.0</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:drawinggridhorizontalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:drawinggridverticalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:dontautofitconstrainedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Georgia; panose-1:2 4 5 2 5 4 5 2 3 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Lucida Grande"; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} p.MsoFootnoteText, li.MsoFootnoteText, div.MsoFootnoteText {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-link:"Footnote Text Char"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} span.MsoFootnoteReference {mso-style-noshow:yes; vertical-align:super;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; color:purple; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} span.FootnoteTextChar {mso-style-name:"Footnote Text Char"; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-locked:yes; mso-style-link:"Footnote Text"; mso-ansi-font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia">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.<o:p></o:p></font> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>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. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"> I had found out about the agency just by looking for such a service online; through the <i style="">Washington City Paper</i>’s classifieds.</font><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6037876435086047443#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" title=""><font class="MsoFootnoteReference"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black"><font style=""><!--[endif]--></font></font></font></a><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"> I was impressed when one of the pet sitters, a woman I will mysteriously call “Sally,” came by our apartment one evening to get the lay of the land and meet the “monsters” before I headed off for a weekend away. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>Upon entering the apartment, she knelt down to greet Begbie. Her voice was saccharine and her lips pursed. A person less obsessed with animals would have gagged but I ate it all up. That’s the kind of love my buddy needs when I’m not around to give him the best.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>Over time, we moved up the street and adopted a second cat. All this time, the agency did their best. Reliable, a little expensive (but, hey, what animal lover isn’t going to go all out to take care of their best buds?), quintessentially professional.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>When I came home from Spain after the ethnography, there was a note from the new pet sitter whom I’ll call “Jenny.” Leaving what we call a “farewell letter” on company letterhead is our agency’s signature. It’s a great way to connect with the clients, as they return home, and to fill them in on all that transpired while they were away. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>Even bad behavior pretty much must be couched in platitudes, such as: “Teddy is full of energy” is code for “Teddy was running around the apartment, knocking things over like a banshee. I couldn’t control him.” Or, another example, “Dolly gave me little love bites when I petted her” translates to, if we’re being honest (which we aren’t), “Dolly, crazy b*tch, bit my hand while I tried to give her a little affection.” It’s always something.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>But, on the occasion of my homecoming from Spain, our sitter, “Jenny,” left a note praising my boys (which in their case, but of course, is of the most sincere nature) and asking if I was in graduate school. As a pet sitter now myself, it’s amazing the things you can deduce about a person simply by inhabiting their space(s).<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>“Jenny” suggested I consider working for the agency part-time, complementing my schoolwork and responsibilities as a teaching assistant at the university. Her somewhat random comment struck a chord in me as I was pretty preoccupied about money after a month and a half in the heat of Spain. The next evening I called the owner of the agency and the rest is seemingly ancient history. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>I wonder how many pet sitting jobs I’ve done since my first, which I didn’t do alone but with another pet sitter, just to be sure I knew what was what. Just this past Thanksgiving holiday, I had eight jobs a day, that’s 15 cats; holidays are especially busy for us. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>Now it’s been three+ years and, boy, the stories I could tell. <o:p></o:p>When you’re in “the zone” pet sitting, working efficiently, scooping poop, refreshing water bowls, dolling out kibble and wet food and drugs, as needed and appropriate (of course!), you sometimes fail to notice certain things, fixtures in a room, lights on or off, pjs on the floor, etc. that you notice on subsequent visits. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>My most persistent and annoying fear as a pet sitter, beyond an animal dying on my watch or escaping into the car-saturated unknown outside the door is that I’ll be going to a house or an apartment each day when I’m not supposed to or I’ll be walking in on someone doing something I don’t want to see, something I’m pretty sure they’re not eager to share either. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>That’s why a pair of pj bottoms tossed thoughtlessly on the bedroom floor gets me guessing, my stomach churning. What if “Jane,” my client, has come home early? What if I have my days wrong and am not even supposed to be here?<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>Laugh as you must but my fears have been realized, several times. One early December Saturday morning I was pet sitting for a tall lesbian librarian who happened to live just down the hall from me in the very same apartment building by the zoo. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>I had had a late night the evening (and subsequent early am) preceding and was a little hung over, I admit (but not impaired, mind you), as I headed off to take care of her two kitties. As we lived in the same apartment building on the very same floor, I headed out in my bed apparel. I call what I was wearing “bed apparel” as I don’t have proper pjs (my mom’s on it for an Xmas gift this year, no worries).<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>“Bed apparel” varies in its composition depending on how conscientious I’ve been about doing laundry. Might be a cotton summer skirt, very wrinkled and brightly colored, or wide-cuffed pants I wear to paint,</font><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6037876435086047443#_ftn2" name="_ftnref" title=""><font class="MsoFootnoteReference"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black"><font style=""><!--[endif]--></font></font></font></a><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"> stains and all.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>This particular mid-morning, I’m not sure what I was wearing but it was sufficient and modest, certainly, although it was surely, also, mismatched. <o:p></o:p>That said, I trotted down the hall to the lesbian librarian’s place. Normally, her two cats are right there, perched on the door’s threshold as I arrive. This morning, however, neither were anywhere around.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>I called out to them. They were both older kitties, fat, a little too full of dander, and on meds. No response.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>“Hmm, that’s odd that they’re not here at the door nor in the living room,” I thought to my lonesome. “I hope they’re okay.”<o:p></o:p> I continued into the galley kitchen, checking for the note and check this particular client consistently remembered to leave for me. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>“No note! Hmm …” This client had always been very thorough and helpful in the notes she’d leave me, a habit essential with cats on various meds at different doses for a slew of precarious medical conditions.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>After scanning the kitchen and what a realtor will sugarcoat as the “breakfast nook,” I heard something stir in the bedroom, on the opposite side of the apartment.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>I headed to the bedroom to noticed the door three quarters of the way shut. That was odd, too. <br /></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"> Normally the client left the bedroom door open so to remind me to feed the flightless African gray parrot incarcerated in his white wire cage close to her king-sized bed.<o:p></o:p> As I stared at the open door, I noticed one of the pair of tubby tabbies waddle out of the bedroom to greet me. Then, I noticed the librarian shoot out of bed, in the half light of that December morning. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>“Laura!?” I quacked. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>“Meg?” she mustered.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>“I -I-I- I thought I was supposed to start today,” I ventured, a pinch of statement sprinkling 99 percent question.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>“Oh shit! I forgot to call and tell you guys my trip fell through,” she confessed.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>“Oh, okay. That’s okay,” I murmured as I backtracked out of the too-intimate space of her bedroom.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>“I’m gonna get going now,” I instructed.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>I reeled down the hall, through the living room, past the chunky tabby, petting him lightly as I whizzed by. Out the door, down the hall, back to the surety of my own apartment. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>As I stood frozen in the safety of my own space, my cats gazed up at me, confused. Suddenly aware of myself and my panicked reaction to what had just transpired, I noticed my ticker racing. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>Wow, the librarian in the bed really got me going. I was startled. I snatched the phone and called the owner of the pet-sitting agency, my big boss. She chuckled and empathized as I told her my shocking tale. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>“Happens all the time,” she concurred. “And each time it happens, it’s never any less startling. Do I have some stories for you! Wanna meet up for a beer and I’ll tell you some?”<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>The owner of the agency I worked for started the company some 20 years ago when the notion of paying an absolute stranger $23+ dollars a day to look in on your kitty was lunacy. I’ll call her Cheryl. Cheryl’s a character. She’s sweet and sassy. She’s probably just a bit past 50. I admire her independence and grit; starting and building her own company, doing something she loves, working with and caring for animals. Plus, she volunteers at the zoo, at the elephant house.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>Taking her up on her offer, we met for drinks one evening, over in Roslyn, a DC suburb across the mighty Potomac River in northern Virginia. I biked, she drove, and we shared two pints each of light imported beer.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>In her 20 years in the “biz,” so to speak, she’s seen a lot and, as owner of her own pet-sitting agency, her employees expand her experience of the bizarre, sometimes nearly catastrophic, and always unbelievably awkward.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>After grabbing our stools at the bar, she began her litany: There was the dog named Phuket who escaped from the fenced-in yard. When the frazzled pet sitter scoured the neighborhood, calling his name, longing to find him and bring him safely home, she didn’t realize Phuket, a resort island in Thailand</font><a style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6037876435086047443#_ftn3" name="_ftnref" title=""><font class="MsoFootnoteReference"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black"><font style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><!--[endif]--></font></font></font></a><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"> for which the dog was named, wasn’t pronounced “Fuck-it.”<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>So there our poor damsel was, meandering through the alleys and byways of this small suburban village, desperately crying out, “Fuck-it, come here, God damn it!” over and over again. I wonder why no one came to her aid in her search.</font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"> And a final pet tale to round out this section: I was taking care of Oliver and Annie, a nice feline pair. Oliver’s a dark brown and black tabby whose tabbiness glimmers in batches on his white fur. Annie’s a gray and white long-haired kitty, soft and oh-so shy. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>Their owner is a busy. She’s probably about my age if not a bit younger. A young lawyer, single woman. I met her only once when she initially signed up with our agency. She seemed hurried and impatient but her cats were sweet.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>Her work often took her overseas to argue cases, that’s what I deduce (again, it really is amazing what you can learn about a person by the things they own and the spaces they inhabit). In her note to me, she mentioned that Ollie wasn’t eating as much as normal and that’s why she’d switched to wet food, an attempt to get him eating. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>Ollie’s a heavy guy, always eager for “Greenie’s,” cat treats. I hadn’t seen him since the new year; this latest visit was at the end of February. At first blush, he’d looked to me as though he’d lost weight. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>After a few visits, I became more and more concerned about him and his lack of appetite. Whenever a human or an animal stops eating and loses weight, something’s not right: either psychologically as in the case of anorexics or physically, as most cancers cause their victims to lose their appetites and also significant amounts of weight.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>I emailed Ollie’s owner about half way through my scheduled visits. I told her I was very worried about him and didn’t think he was eating at all. The situation quickly escalated into a medical emergency that ended with me taking him to the vet (with the help of my husband and his Corolla, Jorgito, of course) one Wednesday evening. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>Ollie up being diagnosed with fatty liver disease, which can pretty quickly kill a cat. Apparently, he’d stopped eating and was severely dehydrated. His owner came home early because of his medical emergency and he returned home and began eating normally after being force fed with a tube down his nose at the vet. He’s even regained some weight.<o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>It was a tough call, though, to determine how severe the situation was and, once we were at the vet, to decide what the next course of action should be as he’s not my cat and it’s not my credit card on file. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>Of course, I approached the situation as though he were my cat and even roped my husband into driving me to Ollie’s condo to force him into his cat carrier and cruise up to the Friendship Hospital for Animals. It was scary but, returning home that night after getting a parking ticket and Ulises and I bickering a bit through our fatigue and stress, I felt a deep satisfaction in seeing my boys. They are healthy and satisfied. Well cared for. Begbie’s a bit of a pain, waking me up every night in the middle of the night, once, twice, thrice for first, second, and so-on breakfasts but I love him. <o:p></o:p></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><font style="line-height: 150%;" color="black" face="Georgia"><font style=""> </font>It’s amazing how easily we take our health and that of those we love, animal and human, for granted. It’s important to recognize those moments before that security is imperiled to best appreciate what we have.</font></p><div style=""><div style="" id="ftn"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><font style="" face="Georgia" size="10pt"><br /><o:p></o:p></font></p> </div> </div> <!--EndFragment--> Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-59704142432058739732010-06-05T06:00:00.000-07:002010-06-05T06:00:01.756-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-9ubSFsVL0f6gpOZFW7sQuG7JzXRN5hOogW6CHeozA-G1-IeY5ZNW5R5j9j6CDF8VU2keVdS0UqzelGemePbz7hU_xh69r1X76E1YqR_grpBRjZHc9zTX5aLBafns5Hg481XemPJ-lFn1/s1600/bodega+sevilla.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 151px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-9ubSFsVL0f6gpOZFW7sQuG7JzXRN5hOogW6CHeozA-G1-IeY5ZNW5R5j9j6CDF8VU2keVdS0UqzelGemePbz7hU_xh69r1X76E1YqR_grpBRjZHc9zTX5aLBafns5Hg481XemPJ-lFn1/s200/bodega+sevilla.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5472715305172231826" border="0" /></a><br />My One & Only Ethnography<br /><br />The title of my one and only ethnography is: “Passionate Performance or Contrived Commodity?: Ethnicity and Nationalism through the Lens of Andalucian Flamenco.”<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Traveler</span> 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?<br /><br />For those non-anthro dorks out there, an ethnography is Anthropology’s signature product. It literally means, from the Latin (right?), “writing culture.” It requires the anthropologist (or student) to get themselves out into “the field” and study something. Study it intently, in depth, with critical, keen eyes.<br /><br />Take extensive notes on it and, after returning from the wilds, write it all down or type it all up, depending on which method you choose.<br /><br />Traditionally and still typically (this is something that jars my bones and annoys me a lot about anthropology and its elitist and ironically close-minded tendencies … but more of that later) anthropologists study “the other,” the dark, “primitive” “one on the margins” and “the field” is far away from home, usually a place infested with scary bugs and nasty diseases. Worms in the rivers, monsters in the shadows, mites in the bed.<br /><br />When you choose to study something in the “first” world (as I did) and not a topic the studying of which will likely get you killed or sick, other anthropologists deign acknowledge your work. In fact, for her project, a fellow GW grad school student of mine studied how gentrification patterns in DC are affecting low-income African Americans. The department was in inner turmoil when deliberating whether or not to offer her the grant as many faculty members thought her topic was not “anthropological” enough. What nonsense!<br /><br />Yea, surely, her topic strays from the traditional, signature anthropological topics à la Malinowski and Mead, Sapir and Boas, Dobzhansky and the Leakeys, but it deals with people. Anthropology is, after all, the study of people, is it not?<br /><br />So, as I mentioned just before during the summer of 2005, before my last semester at graduate school, I headed to Sevilla, Spain, to conduct my first and last ethnography.<br /><br />Sevilla is the capital of Andalucia, a southern region in Spain. Andalucia is known for its sprawling yet orderly groves of olive trees, dry swaths of tawny soil, Moorish castles and fortifications such as the fragrant El Alcazar in Sevilla and the breath-taking Alhambra in Granada’s snowy Sierra Nevada, and wailing, sorrow-laden flamenco.<br /><br />Some time ago GW’s Anthropology department was bequeathed a relatively large amount of money from an alumnus. The department wormed the money away, into a bank account and promptly forgot about it.<br /><br />Once it was finally “remembered,” the money had grown to be a pretty nice amount. Each year, the department awards five to seven grants to both undergrad and grad students to design, plan, and executive anthropological fieldwork of their own.<br /><br />I cobbled together a proposal and one March morning, checked my department mailbox to learn I had been awarded $1,600 to conduct my ethnography of flamenco dance performance.Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-57736938548630534602010-06-01T06:00:00.000-07:002010-06-01T06:00:10.672-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMOhEqf7mFy30ZPVqFYVXDhNHOoPXcewsXkkh7DrpQ1cyje8A_f2SRiU60UpmhtHi_XmyxFZe_p2jkl5zRIHH_-VDhD9lXsHjDJiyHY-faZTKe-x322TvTZ4t_bIGb4tLdvm0ZJr9pjKRJ/s1600/Kurapaty.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 139px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMOhEqf7mFy30ZPVqFYVXDhNHOoPXcewsXkkh7DrpQ1cyje8A_f2SRiU60UpmhtHi_XmyxFZe_p2jkl5zRIHH_-VDhD9lXsHjDJiyHY-faZTKe-x322TvTZ4t_bIGb4tLdvm0ZJr9pjKRJ/s200/Kurapaty.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5472707545747286642" /></a><br /><br />Kurapaty, Belarus: Site of Stalinist Purges, 1937-1941<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />One day we headed to Kurapaty by bus although I don’t know if I ever knew its name while in Belarus. It was a bit beyond the city, nestled into what seemed to be just another Belarussian village. Spare and empty. Rustic and idyllic.<br /><br />We exited the bus, passed through the solemn town, and walked slowly into the sanctuary of the heavily wooded forest. Evergreen and sweet.<br /><br />A middle-aged male Belarussian archaeologist who had been second in charge of the dig out in Snydin had apparently worked at this site.<br /><br />Until recently, the people in the neighboring village and those in Belarus who had heard of Kurapaty most often thought (because they were told so by Soviet propaganda) that the site was one at which the Nazis executed locals and intellectuals during “the War,” World War II, that is.<br /><br />Oleg had excavated here during the first thaw of glasnost and confirmed his suspicion that Kurapaty certainly was not a site of Nazi cruelty but one of an even-more malicious Soviet brutality. <br /><br />Here beneath the swaying, murmuring pines the Soviets executed thousands of dissidents. The counts of victims range from 30,000 to 220,000 up to 250,000 people; men, women, and children.<br /><br />I don’t recall hearing these figures or these details during this visit. I recall, however, spotting the bench presented by Clinton when he visited the forest the year before. <br /><br />But, beyond all of this, I can still feel the serenity that ironically permeated the space, beneath the trees. It seemed so safe and elemental. It was this contrast between the natural beauty and the human cruelty enacted there that etched the woods in my mind.<br /><br />I gazed heavenward and my body began to move side to side with the pines, languidly. Specks of blue sky and puffy white clouds flicked above, intertwined with the spindly fingers of the trees, reaching. This was the last view, the last thought, the last thing many of those executed here saw.Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-57580719157525409362010-05-29T06:00:00.000-07:002010-05-29T06:00:02.410-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhyfdYimFEiO25K_3h8S3LhQtOacPaIN5mkkRzwbdM_m3IJsum35zF6ANt9uIGVvu0x1gTzq2MSW8njWL_JIB5vvLNsFMfTM1QvE4iZvfzDOsizKId-66DPrQPqTim4IVAaiRWJy2cPBB1/s1600/cheshire-cat-5-445x356.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 160px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhyfdYimFEiO25K_3h8S3LhQtOacPaIN5mkkRzwbdM_m3IJsum35zF6ANt9uIGVvu0x1gTzq2MSW8njWL_JIB5vvLNsFMfTM1QvE4iZvfzDOsizKId-66DPrQPqTim4IVAaiRWJy2cPBB1/s200/cheshire-cat-5-445x356.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5472704391693974514" /></a><br />Getting Home<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />“No,” I countered gravely to my father’s natural assumption. “I’m still here in Belarus ...”<br /><br />You can imagine where the conversation went from there. My father was shocked and panicked. He asked me for the number at the apartment and said he’d work on seeing what he could do on his end and give me a call back the next morning. He told me to hang in there and he’d get me home.<br /><br />The days that I stayed behind in Belarus, in an anxiety-filled limbo, took on their own form and are blurred in my mind. This was all ten years ago, mind you.<br /><br />I can, however, provide you with an impression of those ten days. Max and I stomped around the city, trying to get the paperwork I needed to leave the country. We failed in almost all of our endeavors. At one point, however, we somehow got me a 24-hour exit visa. <br /><br />Excitedly, Max investigated what flights were leaving Minsk in the ensuing 24 hours. There was one to Beijing and one to Moscow. I think that was all. Max was about to book me the flight to Beijing as, in a moment of desperation, I had told him I wanted to just get the hell out of Belarus, no matter where. <br /><br />I know, I know what you’re thinking: What was so horrible in Belarus that I was rude and so intent on leaving as soon as I possibly could? Was I being tortured or abused? No. Was there food? Was I eating? Yea, there was a little bit of food; I was eating but not much. <br /><br />For their family of four (all adults) plus me, there were four red-skinned boiled potatoes and slivers of black bread for supper. We topped this off with some weak chai [tea]. I couldn’t supplement their food budget and thus, ate sparingly.<br /><br />No, things were not so bad (despite hunger constantly murmuring in my belly) and, in a very real way, I feel ashamed, looking back, at my desperation to leave. But, after a month there, the delay, a year in Spain, etc., I was very ready to go home, savor the remaining days of summer break, and start my last year at UPenn so to go on to bigger and better, a.k.a. “real life.”<br /><br />As Max interpreted my frustration literally, I almost had a one-way ticket to Beijing until I figured out what was going on and told him I was speaking in hyperbole and truly only really wanted to go West. Drop me in Switzerland or Germany or Italy, I pleaded, but not any farther east.<br /><br />After foregoing the flight to Beijing, we found out there was a train leaving that night to Warsaw. It would cross the Belarussian – Polish border at 11:45 pm. My 24-hour exit visa, of course, would expire that night at midnight. <br /><br />To travel from Minsk to Warsaw by train, the rail cars must switch chassis as the rail lines in Belarus and those in Poland are of a different gauge. My luck, I anticipated, would be to encounter a delay at the border and get stuck, once again with an expired exit visa without the compassion of Max and Alecia’s family or the luck of meeting their somewhat shady cousin at the airport.<br /><br />With all this in mind, I passed on the train to Poland and decided we should try to get a visa with a larger exit window so I would have more choice in how I would leave the country.<br /><br />Relatively early on in this quest, Max and I went to the U.S. embassy, seeking their help. It was an ordeal for us to even enter the embassy, with my U.S. passport in hand. The first five or six people I ran into as we tried to gain access to the embassy did not speak English and when Max spoke to them in Belarussian, trying to explain our predicament, they responded arrogantly in Russian. <br /><br />Finally, we were permitted into the embassy and I spotted an American-looking woman behind a plexi-glass shielded counter.<br /><br />She was on the phone as we approached. She glanced. A broad smile emerged on her lips. She exclaimed, “Are you Meg?”<br /><br />Wow, I thought. “Yes, I am. How do you know that?” I fired back.<br /><br />“Because I’m on the phone with your dad at this very moment,” she replied.<br /><br />My father and I had reached the same woman, Pat, simultaneously. She was pretty high up in the embassy hierarchy and seemed genuinely concerned about my predicament.<br /><br />She instructed me, however, that although she could offer me a place to stay and some money for food, she could do very little to help me get an exit visa. I had, she digressed, after all, broken Belarussian law. When in a foreign land, a traveler is subject to the laws of that country.<br /><br />I told Pat I had not intended to break the law and had done so accidentally. She nodded and replied that she knew that and so did the Belarussian government but laws are laws.<br /><br />Defeated, Max and I sulked out of the embassy, back to the subway, back to the bleak suburbs and the family’s concrete-block apartment. Block after block of these Soviet-era buildings house most of Minsk. They’re hard to differentiate. I noticed the same structures (I say “structures” as I find it hard to refer to such constructed spaces as “architecture” because they lack any sort of artistry or beauty of any kind) when I moved to the dilapidated Tashkent suburb of Sergali when in Uzbekistan for the Peace Corps.<br /><br />In fact, one evening (pardon my digression to Central Asia), I headed back to my new family’s flat in Sergali and huffed and puffed up five flights before I realized I was in the wrong building all together. I could only differentiate my new flat from all the other concrete monsters jammed together by the graffiti at the very top of the stairwell; that’s a long way to go to make sure you’re in the right building.<br /><br />But, back to Belarus: I knew it was best to stay with Max and Alecia’s family, despite the lack of food and tight quarters. They cared for me as if I was a member of their family. I didn’t want to be put up in a random flat in Minsk by the embassy as little as I wanted to try my luck at crossing the Belarussian – Polish border fifteen strokes to midnight. <br /><br />The days passed. I shared the one bed with Alecia while Max and his parents slept on the living room floor. They insisted that this be the arrangement. I spent hours in a marshy park near the apartment. Jogging and walking and staring into the still water.<br /><br />Finally, one Saturday morning, Max’s mother, the pediatrician and also a member of the local government, took us to the magistrate’s office. <br /><br />After waiting awhile in a dim hallway as people churned in and out of his office, we were summoned in. Max’s mom gestured that I follow her and Max tugged my arm and whispered “Look sad!” into my cheek.<br /><br />Once inside the high-ceiling yet drab office, Max’s mother spoke excitedly, with passion. The official looked me up and down and said something directed to me that sounded a lot like “scientist.” Max’s mom looked to me, as if instructing me to agree, to which I nodded.<br /><br />Max told me later that the official was asking if I was a scientist, trying to discern why I was in his country. A scientist? A scientist! I guess I was in a way but I was really just a child, a student, a punk kid. But, things in the former Soviet Union take on such Orwellian nonsense that it all made sense.<br /><br />The official issued me a puke green sheet of paper and a tubby woman stamped my passport. I had an exit visa for the next week. A week! Seven full days!<br /><br />Max, his mom, and I kept our utter joy deep in our pockets until we had exited the building and disappeared from the official’s view behind a lush evergreen.<br /><br />Then, we turned to each other and grinned like Cheshire cats, elated.<br /><br />In the days that followed, we were able to get me back on that same flight from Minsk to Shannon I was booked on three weeks prior. <br /><br />The evening before I left (for the second time), about a dozen of people I met while in Minsk, friends of Max and Alecia and their folks, and archaeologists who were on the dig with us in Snydin, came to the apartment to wish me well. <br /><br />We drank sweet orange soda and munched beet salads and salty breads. It was a feast. We listened to the Beatles and chuckled late into the night.<br /><br />The next morning, Max accompanied me to the airport. He stood close behind me as I waited my turn to approach customs. We weren’t going to take any risks this time. <br /><br />I was nervous, so afraid the stamp and the green sheet of paper wouldn’t suffice or would have somehow become bad or maybe I was blacklisted or, using anachronistic post-9/11 terminology, I was on a “no-fly” list because of my prior visa transgression.<br /><br />After a short wait, I was summoned by the customs official, a clean-shaven handsome youngster with wide-set amethyst eyes who inspected my papers, glanced askew at my face, and motioned me through. I was in and leaving Max. He looked happy for me but it was a bittersweet moment for both of us.<br /><br />In him, his family, and circle of friends, I had been blessed with an inherently good group of people. They looked out for me as though they had known me and my family our entire lives. They knew me just over a month but took me easily into their care.<br /><br />They had little but shared everything. They embraced me like a sister, a daughter, a true friend. To this day, I warmly remember their affection and love. I think that in a country as difficult as Belarus, such connections and community must be how people get by. <br /><br />I once asked Max why he and his family don’t leave Belarus. He said it’s precisely because things are so bad that they must stay and do their damnedest to make things better. <br /><br />As a family of intellectuals, they would have freedom and affluence if they could relocate to Western Europe or the United States. But they won’t and I admire their conviction to honor their country by staying and working each day to speak their own language and not Russian, the language of the conqueror; to speak up and stand for education and free speech and openness even as such courageous acts condemn them to slivers of black bread and tepid tea.Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-82081032630910943112010-05-25T06:00:00.000-07:002010-05-25T06:00:03.082-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc7WyOJ5ZvBaHAMCFdn3CF-1jN0yf_5JfM08vI7xsnZmcwZ7SGMeHNCqEC43AyX1Hb2Oy8tEHB-6TDsqdTLI67tLY47kPlevqD0JfIWMjwmRak_AC7HTzFqnHnHd6oHeFSy995U_VDNbhE/s1600/with+max%27s+family"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 146px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc7WyOJ5ZvBaHAMCFdn3CF-1jN0yf_5JfM08vI7xsnZmcwZ7SGMeHNCqEC43AyX1Hb2Oy8tEHB-6TDsqdTLI67tLY47kPlevqD0JfIWMjwmRak_AC7HTzFqnHnHd6oHeFSy995U_VDNbhE/s200/with+max%27s+family" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5472697725302848642" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiABjLNeiyZXz08FOd8VjroP_cYWjntkUf9_MdQUN5ByXr2oJ80gBw3OwfXwPcZUZrpKr2AvgXPU3EXwDX11SMaI8l0gCOEwXfSzn4PbIHJnfGxi7b4tp4G0RC2HN1zOMNcVh8z3lMu6dMu/s1600/belarus+family"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 146px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiABjLNeiyZXz08FOd8VjroP_cYWjntkUf9_MdQUN5ByXr2oJ80gBw3OwfXwPcZUZrpKr2AvgXPU3EXwDX11SMaI8l0gCOEwXfSzn4PbIHJnfGxi7b4tp4G0RC2HN1zOMNcVh8z3lMu6dMu/s200/belarus+family" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5472697718766942946" /></a><br />Leaving Belarus<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 school, that is until the local drunks knocked down part of its wall. <br /><br />Back in Minsk, excitedly on the cusp of getting home after a year abroad, we apparently had to wait for Walt to take care of business we somehow all thought had less to do with academics or archaeology or cultural exchange than with women and sex. <br /><br />At the airport that August morning, I spent the last of my rubles on some bootlegged pop albums, one a pretty brilliant Bjork remix that I still enjoy. We passed along through customs and I was stopped. Walt, Alyssa, and Emily proceeded without me until the girls realized I was having some real trouble. <br /><br />I didn’t see Walt ever again after he passed me in that customs line. Alyssa turned back, surmised that I was in trouble, and called ahead to Walt, asking that he return to see what was happening. He didn’t. Through Alyssa, he passed me the equivalent of $5USD. They were gone. <br /><br />I pause right now to comment that the last time I told this story was at a pizza/birthday luncheon with some former colleagues at the think tank. The think tank I worked at for a year and a half specialized in human migration. Illegal or, as we said there so to de-stigmatize the concept, “unauthorized” immigration is a sizzling topic in U.S. politics these days. That particular day we were at the California Pizza Kitchen, enjoying a much-needed break of more than ten minutes from the office. <br /><br />The issue of “the unauthorized” immigrant population came up. Discussion of going places without a visa naturally followed. I chirped, “I was nearly arrested in Belarus for overstaying my visa.” Normally, I’m not so forthcoming with “work friends”; I must have been bored with the conversation or frustrated by the fact that during our breaks we talk about precisely the same things that we do while confined in the office. Maybe I wanted to change the course of the conversation or talk or get some attention. Regardless, that’s how I normally bring up the topic. It’s kind of funny and certainly good cocktail party fare.<br /><br />Yes, so I was taken away by two burly men in Siberian camouflage (white, gray, and black) because I had overstayed my visa and was thus barred from leaving the country. Is this the opposite of what happens in the United States? If you overstay your visa here and get caught doing something wrong, you get kicked out, right? They (CIS, the former INS or is it ICE?; the DHS acronyms befuddle me) don’t keep you but try to get rid of you. Not so, apparently, in Belarus, seen by some as a puppet regime of Russia’s Putin or Medvedev, Lukashenko at its helm.<br /><br />The camouflaged airport bouncers led me into a room that seemed to be the airport police’s headquarters or something along those lines. I sat still on a stiff wooden bench. After awhile, a man dressed in “civilian” clothes entered the room and sat to my right.<br /><br />He spoke to me in German. I realized that they had no one at the airport who could speak English and they must have mustered this man up from somewhere. I don’t know how we communicated but we did, me, primarily through my tears. <br /><br />He told me I was in a lot of trouble and that I had broken the law. I would need to write and sign a confession (I kid you not!) and then I would be sent back to Minsk (the airport was about 30 kilometers from the city center). <br /><br />The police handed me a blank sheet of paper. I could have written any sort of nonsense but, being the typically chaste daughter of two respectable Pennsylvanian school teachers, I did as I was told and wrote that I had inadvertently overstayed my visa and that I was very sorry.<br /><br />Once this was finished, I continued to cry. I wonder if I would do the same now. That’s an open question. I fished Max’s phone number out of my bag. Max was the younger brother of Alecia, a woman who had accompanied us on our dig in the countryside.<br /><br />Max himself hadn’t gone on the dig that summer but he’d been kind enough to show us (me and the two other U.S. college girls) around Minsk both before and after the dig. He was studying archaeology himself, much like his sister and their father who was a professor of archaeology at the state-run university in Minsk.<br /><br />I had Max’s email and mailing address as we had enjoyed each other’s company during our visit and had promised to stay in touch. As I retrieved Max’s number, the man who spoke German to me noticed what I was doing and peered at the small, already worn slip of paper. <br /><br />He asked, “Was ist das? [What is that?]” I told him it’s the contact information of my friend, Max, in Minsk. He looked more closely and joyfully proclaimed, “Ich Kenne diesen Mann! Er ist mein Vetter! [I know this man! He is my cousin!]”<br /><br />I was shocked. My lips broke into a smile. Was this true? Could this be? I didn’t know what to do. <br /><br />The man said he would call Max and his family and tell them what had happened to me. But first, he needed to finish his shift. I had very little up my sleeve in terms of options so I followed him to the airport’s little café and had some grainy yet forceful Turkish coffee and a stale sandwich. <br /><br />The man who spoke German to me worked at the airport, doing something with tickets, I’m not sure I ever really knew what he did.<br /><br />After a few hours, I had calmed down and resolved to face my fate. The man called Max and Alecia and told me that he would take me to them in a few hours.<br /><br />Alecia was at work and couldn’t get to the designated stop along side the road for a bit. First, said the man who was looking more and more by the minute to be my savoir, we would go and get his car and pass the time at an Austrian truckers’ bar.<br /><br />Yes! An Austrian truckers’ bar. Didn’t know such a thing existed? Well, think again, my friends. We exited the airport and headed into the parking lot toward his car. I followed his lead. <br /><br />As we got close to the car, he told me to duck behind it, quickly. It was a Soviet-era Lado or something similarly tinny looking. The police were patrolling the parking lot and apparently, the man did not have the proper plates for his car.<br /><br />After the police moved on, we got into the car. On the passenger’s seat, again I kid you not and all stereotypes aside, there was a big bottle of vodka. The man sensed that I had paused, spotted the bottle, and gingerly tossed it into the back seat as if it were a stray magazine or extra pair of gloves thoughtlessly left on the seat. <br /><br />Off we drove, in a very choppy manner, to the Austrian truckers’ bar. Many readers may be stunned at this point. Perhaps you think you won’t keep reading; how stupid could I be to get into a car with a man I didn’t know. A man ducking and hiding from the police. A man with a hefty bottle of vodka on the front seat. I felt, in my own defense, that I had little choice. I had next to nothing in terms of money, didn’t know the language, and felt defeated. I had excitedly anticipated my trip home after close to 12 months away. <br /><br />Looking back, I should have tried to head back to Minsk and Max and his family on my own. If I had, however, I won’t have gone to an Austrian truckers’ bar and you wouldn’t be chuckling at my stupidity.<br /><br />These ideas sputtered through my mind, I admit, while this was all happening. What if this man wanted to rape me or kill me or abduct me? I had come to the comfortable conclusion that if he tried any of the above, I would throw myself out of the moving car and tumble along the roadside, red pack or not. <br /><br />But nothing shady happened. After a trio of beers with the bearded bikers, we cruised the highway a bit longer and I spotted Alecia’s bright blonde hair blowing in the breeze like the standard of an army coming to reinforce my dwindling, wounded troops. <br /><br />Max was there, too. He bought me a banana, a luxury in Belarus, to make me feel better and he had braided some lanky weeds together into a pretty pattern; I kept this token with me until it splintered to nothing several years later.<br /><br />We thanked the man and I headed off with Alecia and Max back to the one-bedroom flat they shared with their parents. <br /><br />As we returned to the flat, Alecia’s mom, a pediatrician, embraced me. She couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak her language but in the warm, full clasp of her arms, she communicated a heap of motherly love. It transcendent.Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-6736407139794342662010-05-22T06:00:00.000-07:002010-05-22T06:00:04.414-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipIhCVO2xMKvPhRIucSZU3RX3hltMWq0W75AFHgWaSwCWEJE4T49D8T40DrmxItHKLVQNt4hyFf_pPbMvSmjwukKhf2MBqOCPTomVMML8VrEsSLY4_gWfW0Z8E94UQV_zNoubRMpbz2pJ9/s1600/Monument+to+Chernobyl+victimes.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 225px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipIhCVO2xMKvPhRIucSZU3RX3hltMWq0W75AFHgWaSwCWEJE4T49D8T40DrmxItHKLVQNt4hyFf_pPbMvSmjwukKhf2MBqOCPTomVMML8VrEsSLY4_gWfW0Z8E94UQV_zNoubRMpbz2pJ9/s320/Monument+to+Chernobyl+victimes.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5472688107504484738" /></a><br /><br />Intro to Belarus<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />I was an aspiring anthropologist/Spanish major and had never done any anthropological/archaeological field work. I think we need to pause for a moment, to vindicate myself to my fellow anthropologists out there. Yes, I’m educated as a cultural anthropologist, not as an archaeologist or paleoanthropologist. For those of you not up to your eyelashes in bones and theories of cultural relativity, cultural anthropologists do work in “the field” but not literally in the dirt. We don’t dig up bones and pottery shards from medieval or Bronze Age or colonial middens. We go to “the field” and watch people, real living, eating, breathing people. <br /><br />Nonetheless, I went on an archaeological dig in Belarus despite the fact I eventually developed more into a cultural anthropologist. At this time in my education, however, I was much more interested in paleoanthropology (studying our/humanity’s ancestors: Lucy [Australopithecus afarensis], Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo sapiens neanderthalis, etc.) than archaeology.<br /><br />My father thought it would be a good idea for me to get my hands dirty so after nibbling stinky cheese in Paris, enjoying Woody Allen’s filmed hilarity while high in Amsterdam, glimpsing turquoise rivers swirling through the Swiss Alps, I went to Belarus after my year in Sevilla, Spain. <br /><br />I was in shock as soon as I got off the plane in Minsk and ducked into what I thought was a bathroom, which the tiny room turned out to be, despite all indications to the contrary. No toilet paper, no toilet, just a perfect circle in the ground and grooved slots on either side of the orb on which to position yourself while you squatted or hovered or whatever maneuver you could muster to get the job done. <br /><br />At the time, this was all quite new to me. Not that I’m now a full-fledged world traveler but since this first experience with—what are they called?, Turkish toilets?—I’m much better and more tolerant of all things “bathroom.” Gosh, as an anthropologist, me of all people should be sensitive to other ways of doing things and be keenly aware that not all people around the world are as spoiled or prissy as we are. I recognize and acknowledge that but I was still freaked out. <br /><br />I had my big red pack, filled with the clothes I’d been traveling with for the past month, washing them in hotel sinks and tubs from Brighton, England, to Milan, Florence, and Venice. <br /><br />I waited in line to clear customs. The tag of my shirt must have been sticking out as the person behind me in line, brushed my neck to adjust it for me. That gave me quite a scare.<br /><br />A fellow teacher and acquaintance of my dad’s, let’s call him Walt Turner, had organized the dig I had come all the way to Belarus for. He taught in the same public school district as both of my parents, leading their middle and high school’s programs for gifted students. He was also associated with my dad’s alma mater, Muhlenberg College. <br /><br />Walt Turner, though what’s to follow will cast him in a less than favorable light, was an interesting man, having done a slew of extraordinary things. He had worked for the U.S. government in some undisclosed capacity that had him living in northern China at the height of the Cold War. Also, Christa McAuliffe, who perished in the Challenger disaster with all its crew on January 23, 1986, had hedged him out of the running for her spot in the NASA teacher in space program. <br /><br />Walt was a man of at least 60. I wonder now, as I write this, over ten years hence, if he’s still ticking. Although he’s American, he wore Speedos. Although he’s less than attractive, he had plenty of what my parents diplomatically called “lady friends.” His daughter ice skated furiously. I think she was pretty good in her own right. He was the leader of this excavation and he was supposed to meet me at the Minsk airport.<br /><br />At this time, I spoke only English and Spanish. I knew a spattering of German words, mainly niceties and greetings, but nothing else. I remember getting off of the plane expecting to see him. Minutes elapsed into hours. I kept revisiting the instructions as to where we were to meet in my mind, wondering if I could have gotten something wrong. I seemed to be where I needed to be. <br /><br />It was dim outside the airport. I kept close inside, fearing that if I wandered too far, that would be the exact moment I would miss him and his crew.<br /><br />Finally, he arrived and we headed to an apartment in Minsk. There’s so much to this experience but I’ll keep to the most salient details. <br /><br />The site of the dig was in the hay fields bordering the village of Snydin in southern Belarus, not far from the Ukrainian border (it’s so tiny I’ve failed to find a map with it on it). We were so close to Ukraine that we needed to check the well water each morning for radiation, due to the fall out from Chernobyl. <br /><br />In fact, sixty percent of Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout landed in Belarus. When I finally did get to Ireland after the dig on my way back to the States, I stayed at a quaint B&B in Shannon run by a sweet middle-age Polish woman and her Irish husband. During my first and only morning there, after a run around the block a few times, she sat with me while I ate my yogurt and had a cup of coffee. She asked where I was coming from and whatnot.<br /><br />I told her I had been in Belarus for a month and a half. She gasped. She was from the region and was more familiar with the horrors of Chernobyl than most other people, I reckoned. <br /><br />She also told me that Shannon hosts kids from Belarus each summer to provide them a break from their surroundings, akin to innercity, fresh-air kids in the United States. Studies have shown, she asserted, that one summer away from the fallout adds years to the children’s lives and frees them, if for only a blissful two or three months, from the detrimental effects that persist in this struggling pocket of the second world. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji2AzOtUXKY50S-VW1q566X5Zs8XaL1m9q1QPnV84eYcgjWlAAx_PO35tl_w0Z4aA129OPAVfJBl418z1Nr5YGwrnwGJv_GfMqq_7trtos_wXEc5DIRHi4EI1BN5GVH_rfZYnU_nwk7R2N/s1600/Belarus+Map.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 263px; height: 281px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji2AzOtUXKY50S-VW1q566X5Zs8XaL1m9q1QPnV84eYcgjWlAAx_PO35tl_w0Z4aA129OPAVfJBl418z1Nr5YGwrnwGJv_GfMqq_7trtos_wXEc5DIRHi4EI1BN5GVH_rfZYnU_nwk7R2N/s320/Belarus+Map.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5472687936622744242" /></a>Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-43073172248717124132010-05-19T06:00:00.000-07:002010-05-19T06:00:08.164-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpLH31G1drHUzd4ljdpikifvVsTuDeMS8lWfaS2dq1wiMviYzOT-jm3hntug-fxsNOgUprspGxgg3T3R89WZ2bUV7jZu_dX7kPLBo3Z1BQp0-eDIQJjXm1d2Ws-uDSsOISnTGBVJNeI-kl/s1600/flatiron"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 233px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpLH31G1drHUzd4ljdpikifvVsTuDeMS8lWfaS2dq1wiMviYzOT-jm3hntug-fxsNOgUprspGxgg3T3R89WZ2bUV7jZu_dX7kPLBo3Z1BQp0-eDIQJjXm1d2Ws-uDSsOISnTGBVJNeI-kl/s320/flatiron" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5472683399746257426" /></a><br />9/11 into September 12th, 2001: The Williamsburg Bridge, Tiny's Giant Sandwich Shop, and Jogging in Gritty Air<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 immigrants. We lived on the fifth floor, no elevator.<br /><br />Erin, my co-worker from Kansas who was living in Brooklyn at the time, came home with me. When we evacuated the Flatiron building, all of us were together but, as we filtered downtown, most of my department headed off to the Red Cross or St. Vincent’s hospital in the naive attempt to give blood. <br /><br />I don’t know why Erin decided to stick with me that day. I don’t think she even articulated why she wanted to. Different people react to shock in different ways. <br /><br />She was quiet and stunned. I was a little too, if I can recapture those day’s emotions although I’m not really sure I want to. I think she had the impulse to go to a homey place and hole up and that was what I was aiming to do. We headed downtown together.<br /><br />I remember feeling very vulnerable while we were still out in front of the Flatiron building as the fire trucks, ambulances, police cruisers, and HAZMAT trucks whizzed by. What if something happened up here in Midtown or above? What if some evil terrorist mastermind had rigged crazy explosives to the Empire State building to erupt once all of the emergency personnel fled south? <br /><br />As Erin and I continued our walk downtown, after leaving the others, we passed through Union Square Park, so empty yet so prettily innocent in its final pre-fall glowing green. The trucks and sirens continued to pulse past us. We were heading in the same direction as them and that was disconcerting. <br /><br />Erin and I finally arrived at the apartment, trudged up the five narrow flights of stairs and plopped down in front of the Spanish-language coverage of the day, the planes slamming into the towers over and over again.<br /><br />By this time, it was nearly lunchtime and I think I felt faintly hungry but the desire to eat was somehow mixed with a nausea I thought would stay with me for awhile.<br /><br />After an hour or two of just sitting stoically staring at the TV, we welcomed some neighbors into the apartment as they didn’t have a TV and what we had was better than nothing. During this time my dad got through to us on my ex’s cell phone.<br /><br />I remember talking to my dad: He was calm and his voice strong. He said he knew we would be okay but to stay inside. He feared there would be looting, which, I think, I can proudly say there was very little of, as it turns out. He also suggested we store some water in pots in case our water supply was cut off. <br /><br />My father said he had been home that morning, waiting for the delivery guys to bring the new dining room furniture. This was at what is now our old house, the house my brother and I grew up in, the house we were raised us in. The house Beanie, our first dog who was older than me, a raggedy Wire Haired Fox Terrier, white and brown and black, died in, in the living room, beneath the Christmas tree on December 18, 1987.<br /><br />The delivery guys arrived and were jockeying the big oak pieces into what was a tiny dining room. The morning TV shows must have been on in the background. My dad says he and the delivery guys gradually picked up on some of the coverage and stopped what they were doing to tune in.<br /><br />He knew neither my ex or I were in immediate danger thanks to where we worked but, as many of us thought that day, more bad things could be in the works. <br /><br />Despite his wise warnings, once we heard that the city had opened the bridges to the outer boroughs to foot traffic, we took Erin down the street and over east a few blocks to the Williamsburg Bridge. <br /><br />We had just moved to the apartment on Attorney Street ten days before so we were iffy about where exactly to go to get Erin where she needed to be but we proceeded, calmly, slowly.<br /><br />At the foot of the bridge, we said goodbye to Erin. I have no idea how far after the bridge she had to walk. Probably pretty far. Brooklyn is a big borough. I offered that she stay at our apartment for the night. She declined; she said flatly that she really wanted to go home and just stay there for a long time. <br /><br />As I said before, different people react differently to such things. For me, the thought of going to an empty apartment and passing what promised to be a long night was the last thing I wanted. I wanted to be among people. To see life around me. Hearing my father’s voice was one of the best things that day even though it bleakly spoke of other dangers that still might be on their way. <br /><br />After leaving Erin at the Williamsburg Bridge, my ex and I decided to go to a little sandwich shop near our apartment called Tiny’s Giant Sandwich Shop on Rivington and Norfolk Streets. <br /><br />Most of the shops and store fronts were shut down and shuttered but Tiny’s was open, which is funny because, in the process of Googling just now to resurrect the name of this sandwich joint, I read some critical reviews of the place saying Tiny’s is good for its food but temperamental in terms of if it delivers, to where it does deliver if it decides to do so, and when it chooses to be open. I find it quite ironic that a restaurant that doesn’t steadily stay open was still open on the late afternoon of September 11, 2001.<br /><br />Tiny’s is known for its Big Mack Daddy veggie patty on a brioche bun, topped with fakin’ bacon. (It’s all coming back to me now as a savory “taste memory.”) That Tuesday, however, I think I ordered some sort of fake turkey club (as you’ve probably deduced, Tiny’s specializes in a lot of veggie versions of “classic” deli/comfort fare). The sandwich, according to the menu, comes topped with some sort of alfalfa sprouts. <br /><br />After I ordered, the guy behind the counter sheepishly beckoned me over and apologetically said, “Hey, is it okay if there’re no sprouts on your sandwich? It’s been a tough day and the delivery truck didn’t get through today.” <br /><br />What an odd thing to apologize for and what a very understated way of describing the day. But, in a way, apologizing for the sprouts and stating with no apparent emotion that it’s been a bad day calmed me, steadied me. Maybe his statement affected me because he was the first person to assess the situation verbally to me. To look at the mess we were in and say something about it. <br /><br />Everything that had happened that day had just been stunned silence and a stilted discussion of practical things. Can I get home to my apartment? What about Erin, marching east into Brooklyn? Should we donate blood? Where? What’ll happen next? What’s happening?<br /><br />We got our Tiny’s to go and headed home. We stopped at a mom & pop video store. We rented some sort of saccharine women’s movie; the selection epitomizing my need to puddy over the doubts, questions, and fears of the day’s tragedy with someone else’s fictional woes.<br /><br />I fell asleep watching the movie. Was Holly Hunter in it? I have no idea. I think the phone startled me awake. It was a call from my work, snaking through an ad hoc phone chain our bosses had set up based simply on who had someone else’s phone number. It was Ellen, my co-worker. Ellen worked in Marketing at the publishing house, not in my department but over my years there, we had become good friends. Talk about a driven person. Whew!<br /><br />Ellen lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, and told me about her struggle that day along the West Side highway to get a lift north on some sort of flatbed truck. She was calling from home but the journey had taken her hours and had been taxing. While I was thinking of sprouts, she was forging the Hudson River.<br /><br />She said there would be no work the next day as the police wanted people to stay put and many areas on Manhattan Island south of 14th Street were without power. <br /><br />I can’t remember who I passed this message on to but I did so stoically, no one really exclaiming anything akin to “Fuck! What the hell is happening? Those people were crushed, vaporized, pulverized in those towers! What’s happening? Are we gonna even make it through the night?!?” We just tentatively said good-bye. Calmly. I remember having these phone conversations within our snug bedroom, a room just big enough for our full-sized bed, sun-faded curtains, and some dirty clothes. <br /><br />We had a pretty good-sized window in that room or perhaps it only seemed large relative to the tinyness of the room. I remember staring blankly out the window as I sat listless on the bed, legs intertwined Indian style, not ready to let myself start feeling again. <br /><br />We went to bed unceremoniously that night. Just kind of stopped moving until our eyelids met and formed a soft seal. Our breath slowed to a steady rmmm.<br /><br />The next morning my ex must have woken up before me. I left the bedroom and headed out to our narrow runway of a living room. He had the TV on and was watching Guiliani speak. This was when we still thought people might have survived within the towers. This is when we still hoped there’d be survivors. <br /><br />Guiliani said something simple like, “It’s the next day and we’re still here.” That comforted me as I didn’t know if we’d make it through the night as we drifted off into a dreamless sleep.<br /><br />Living pretty far south but, thankfully much east of the site that became known as Ground Zero, our air was bad but not stifling. My ex and I decided to leave the apartment that Wednesday after eating something and venture to Central Park where the trees and grass would filter the air and insulate us or so we thought.<br /><br />As we walked a few feet north on our street, Attorney, to where it intersects with Houston, we noticed police and barricades. Before we passed the policeman, he asked if we lived on this block. We said yes and he advised, “If I were you, I’d take my ID with me cuz we’re not letting anyone back onto this block who can’t prove they’re supposed to be here.”<br /><br />We headed back to the apartment to fetch some sort of ID. Having just moved in on September 1, we didn’t have the apartment’s address on either of our licenses. In fact, I still had my Pennsylvania ID. In order to connect us with this place, the only thing we had was our lease. ConEd hadn’t even billed us yet.<br /><br />Off we went, IDs and lease in hand. We hadn’t walked too far before we saw a young woman jogging in place as she waited to cross the street. I run for exercise and have run in many places, through tons of storms, in the midst of personal troubles and what not since I was 12 but something about this woman jogging in place, impatient for the light to change, made me cringe.<br /><br />I wasn’t thinking of her personal safety being imperiled by the gritty air nor how her running would prompt her body to gulp in more of it than the rest of us; I just didn’t like how what she was doing was so “everyday,” so run-of-the-mill on a very exceptional day. <br /><br />Many people who were at that place at that moment looked at her askance as I did, I noticed as I swiveled to survey the scene. All of this took place in probably less than a minute but a policeman who was nearby approached her and started speaking to her. She snatched the iPod earbuds out of her ears to hear what the officer was saying. I couldn’t catch all of his words but I could tell that he had told her to stop running because she immediately stopped trotting in place and stood, ashamed and motionless on the sidewalk. <br /><br />He must have cautioned her about the air quality although something in his face and body movements made me think that he too felt that what she was doing wasn’t appropriate. It’s like the anthropologist cum Buddhist monk, Colin Turnbull, who, when studying the Ik in Uganda in the midst of a famine during which many of their people were starving, would take to his VW bus to eat. He was hungry, he wanted to eat, but he was ashamed. Is it the same sort of thing? Is the parallel there? It’s like, me jogging in the sludge in the wooden Belarussian village of Syndin to burn off excess calories that many of the village’s denizens would be thrilled to have. Something’s not right. The contrast is discomforting and borderline grotesque. After this, I did my running for the next few weeks almost exclusively on a treadmill at the old McBurney YMCA on Chelsea’s 23rd Street.Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-49851547008774678332010-04-15T06:00:00.000-07:002010-04-15T06:00:07.395-07:00<span style="font-style:italic;">One Third </span>on the iPad?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHWKo8O41GMJ7HpYqoak186vlf-q7XQ8j98a6lM0P-GyZRGU6-WmHlx3hUeJZEcD_1UuGrWKXLkpne1c1fBsurmR1YqRpF_r873fXefcMQDVuQ3Ag0sd8lywI9XYxVWyLYmYmnxzyXz7-r/s1600/Late+Winter+2010_Trip+to+DR+064.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHWKo8O41GMJ7HpYqoak186vlf-q7XQ8j98a6lM0P-GyZRGU6-WmHlx3hUeJZEcD_1UuGrWKXLkpne1c1fBsurmR1YqRpF_r873fXefcMQDVuQ3Ag0sd8lywI9XYxVWyLYmYmnxzyXz7-r/s320/Late+Winter+2010_Trip+to+DR+064.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5460070707100886114" /></a><br /><br />Could <span style="font-style:italic;">One Third</span> make a great iPad book? It is, after all, a blog - novel. It's interactive, irreverent. <br /><br />How do I publish <span style="font-style:italic;">One Third</span> 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?Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-44098340372271883542010-03-27T06:00:00.000-07:002010-03-27T06:00:04.648-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVLEOgTNqJWsUCfAvjhbrTHczUg-wNkQtM_MxUcaOvQqWUwCKrfJALqCiZxJtG7JebifgQK8c5iDrJo_WZVAAScz5SD_RAIsIHnVbSTlNfMR-auDi6Hvdfi03psbw9wAmZD-yegd5gFmWI/s1600/Mexica.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 251px; height: 182px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVLEOgTNqJWsUCfAvjhbrTHczUg-wNkQtM_MxUcaOvQqWUwCKrfJALqCiZxJtG7JebifgQK8c5iDrJo_WZVAAScz5SD_RAIsIHnVbSTlNfMR-auDi6Hvdfi03psbw9wAmZD-yegd5gFmWI/s320/Mexica.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5452232835022967938" /></a><br /><br /><br />Processing Charles Mann & Jared Diamond<br /><br />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, <span style="font-style:italic;">1491</span>, 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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />The book goes on to explore who they were, what happened to them, and why “traditional” “American” “history” hasn’t heretofore told their “real” story. Sorry for all of the double quotes but much of this is pretty controversial/political albeit, in my assessment, it all rings quite true. <br /><br />The Spanish desecrated the New World. How? Jared Diamond attempts to explain the current power hierarchy and world order through his wicked trio of causative agents: guns, germs, and steel. Much the same scenario unfolded in the New World when the Spanish arrived although germs seemed the most virulent of the three, and ironically the least intentional.<br /><br />The Spanish didn’t realize how protected they were from the diseases they inadvertently carried with them. Years of living with swine and a slew of other domesticated animals will do that for you. <br /><br />The people living in the New World in 1491 had no domesticated animals but the llama and the llama only lived among people in the Andes. The bound between human and llama was certainly nothing like that between human and pig or human and horse. <br /><br />Diseases are clever and highly adaptive creatures. In order to survive, many will cross the human – animal divide and change themselves through mutation to infect and affect humans. This is very much what happened in terms of the germs and diseases of the Europeans. Small pox, for instance, leapt from its original animal hosts to humans. Europeans, living as they did quite intimately with a variety of domesticated animals, either died from such diseases or developed a pretty hardy immunity to them. <br /><br />These mechanisms were not at work in the New World and, thus, when the Europeans arrived their diseases frenetically unfurled themselves on a fresh, defenseless population. <br /><br />An idea from Mann’s work that resonates with me is what have we, as humanity, lost in this “encounter” (what a seemingly benign label for such a horrific historic moment; is “clash” better?) between Old World and New? If the native population declined (like “encounter,” “declined” is similarly offensively bland given what it masks) by 95 percent in the first one hundred years of “contact,” what irreplaceable elements of their history, art, ideas, religion, cosmology, philosophy, and even humor have we lost? <br /><br />Who were these people who built massive pyramids many of which we still don’t know their reason or rhyme or intended use? Who were these people who built such monumental works of gigantic architecture without draft animals or the wheel? Who were these people who predicted lunar eclipses and developed a calendar more accurate than our own? Who domesticated corn, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, coffee, and avocados? Who were these people who traveled through the Bering Strait 20,000 or 14,000 or 7,000 years ago? Or did they come across the Pacific in little reed boats? Or was it a combination of both? What languages are lost? What stories? What have we lost?Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-55480256760345822742010-03-24T07:51:00.000-07:002010-03-24T08:10:33.180-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinQvc-1anqISFLyZlTfQrJ-YxLEekcLu_XRMILjW3NrIRQIZdnp_uzEBTg-CUtCA4upH02-6zp46mGIczWMJlkq558TyIzkKyE58F91QgYqTjYMZVL86cPuH0VtQRbN-vBnRJtS-MNPUJ3/s1600/Sam.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 233px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinQvc-1anqISFLyZlTfQrJ-YxLEekcLu_XRMILjW3NrIRQIZdnp_uzEBTg-CUtCA4upH02-6zp46mGIczWMJlkq558TyIzkKyE58F91QgYqTjYMZVL86cPuH0VtQRbN-vBnRJtS-MNPUJ3/s320/Sam.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5452217912789660210" /></a><br />12. This Morning <br /><br />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.<br /> <br />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.”<br /><br />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 be a depressive downer [especially, nestled as this detail is amidst my 9/11 memories] but I take this as just another indication that we all must work as hard as we can to live our best lives, live each day to its fullest and all of that seemingly cliché nonsense that actually rings quite true). The following is Miss Smith's obituary (again, names have been changed to protect the innocent & the deceased) that was posted on our company's Intranet. Our company’s flags were at half-staff that day in her honor. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />Miss Smith, a familiar face at the company for 31 years, died suddenly after becoming ill at a restaurant. She was XX years old. <br /><br />She was dining with friends, “laughing and having a wonderful time,” when she experienced what appeared to be a food allergy. According to friends, she had trouble breathing and died within minutes. In announcing her death to company staff, her supervisor said she “lived life large.”<br /><br />“She loved good food, good wine, good friends. She was both kind and passionate by nature. She remarked often how much she loved her job and especially the people in our department,” her supervisor said.<br /><br />Her mother was American, her father Peruvian. Her early education was in Peru, and her higher education was at XXXXX University. She was fluent in Spanish and French, very good at Italian and Portuguese, and she spoke a smattering of several other languages. <br /><br />Many of her colleagues relied on her for on-the-spot translations, and she was always willing to help a visitor who did not speak English. <br /><br /></span><br /><br />She seems like an amazing woman. Loyal, loving, passionate. <br /><br />Jenny seemed pretty out of it this morning. She said a bunch of young people from her department went out drinking yesterday to reflect on their deceased co-worker's death and come together in their pain and shock over what happened. She said her co-worker was great and really kept her department together. <br /><br />That was all we had time to say to each other as the elevator darted up and deposited me on the first floor so I could skip into the cafeteria and get my all-important morning coffee. <br /><br />Until I got my coffee, charged across the courtyard to my building, and logged onto our Intranet, I didn’t think again about Jenny and her openness in telling me about her co-worker. Jenny hadn’t mention the dead woman’s name; all told, she and I probably spoke for less than 40 seconds.<br /><br />Amazing how things can pass out of your mind in the trivial to’ing and fro’ing of daily life. For example, after I left Jenny and headed into the cafeteria, I exchanged small talk with other staffers stranded and a bit worried about the lack of coffee and signed up for some learning classes offered by our library. How quickly we lose perspective! How tenuous our holds on what really matters.<br /><br />Thanks to Jenny, the team that maintains our Intranet, and a chat with some of my researching co-workers here in the office, the recently passed on woman came back to my consciousness and, with her, a renewed resolve to do what I can to live a good life. Not just at work or on the treadmill, that stuff is really just the minutia of life. But giving my dog one more hug, my husband one more kiss, sending one more card to my grandmother, calling my mom one extra time each week, if only for five minutes while en route to the grocery store. <br /><br />Life is precious. I want to be loyal to work and friends, loving in all things, and passionate about the journey I’m on. And it’s hard.Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-26532719718283299342010-02-08T06:00:00.000-08:002010-02-08T06:00:02.508-08:009/11 Six Years On, Part Two<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfHCAgjANoCCvL86yb2NmvmNtFNqd7LysFXf-mCxbSw7S8QD_jRcnvQaQcJ1egLlFYzQk0zwGOaWq6Pig3eXhN0AdjVdXnCoe8elzVyxy4IZMYotIUq5NyJq9XQu5dv0Nl5bLP3kld0uhg/s1600-h/chicken+little.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 151px; height: 209px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfHCAgjANoCCvL86yb2NmvmNtFNqd7LysFXf-mCxbSw7S8QD_jRcnvQaQcJ1egLlFYzQk0zwGOaWq6Pig3eXhN0AdjVdXnCoe8elzVyxy4IZMYotIUq5NyJq9XQu5dv0Nl5bLP3kld0uhg/s320/chicken+little.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432224960740095938" /></a><br /><br />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. <br /><br /> 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. <br /><br /> It was unbelievable.<br /><br /> After the towers fell, we all pretty much headed inside. I sat down at my desk, a set of book pages spread out in front of me; I just stared at them. Was I supposed to get back to work? Yes, I guess but how? <br /><br /> I hopped online and tried to go to www.nytimes.com to see the extent of what had happened but there were apparently so many people attempting the same thing that I couldn’t get through. I tried to call my boyfriend at the time, who worked pretty close to the World Trade Center but couldn’t get him on his cell. I tried, also, to call my dad in Pennsylvania just to tell him I was okay and failed. <br /><br /> I continued to sit there, staring at the book pages. I wandered toward the back of the office we, as St. Martin’s Press Scholarly and Reference Division (now called palgrave macmillan) had on the second floor of the Flatiron and noticed that Roxanne and Meredith were listening to the radio. What a great way to get news in times like these, I thought. Like the stunned family huddling ‘round the radio to hear about the attacks on Pearl Harbor, back in the day.<br /><br />But no one, let alone the radio host of whatever station it was, I think it was one of those “all news, all the time” sort of stations, really had a handle on the situation. As I approached Roxanne and Meredith with their radio I heard Meredith exclaim, “Another plane hit the Pentagon!”<br /><br /> That’s when I felt like Chicken Little, the sky is falling, the sky is falling, and really wondered if this was the end of the world. World War III, the apocalypse, sort of thing.<br /><br />Shortly after this, an announcement came down from the high-ups that it was time to evacuate the building. I’m not sure what the rationale behind evacuating all of the city’s office buildings was. Emptying all of the offices while every route in and out of the city was shut down still doesn’t make any sense to me. It just left a ton of people out on the streets as most people who work in NYC, in Manhattan, do not live in Manhattan proper but instead in the neighboring boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx, and the good Garden state of New Jersey, etc. <br /><br /> Out we filed onto the streets. I remember pretty clearly that our department (production editorial) in particular and our division (Scholarly & Reference) in general stuck together. We clung to the patch of sidewalk from which we watched the towers implode before proceeding. For some reason, we collectively headed downtown. At this time I lived on Attorney Street, south of Houston, east of Broadway, on the cusp of Alphabet City and the Lower East Side. I was heading home but our group meandered along with me. <br /><br /> We walked in a loose formation, like zombies marching, catatonic. My boss, Alan, somewhat took control. As most of us hoped against hope, he thought there would be an urgent need for donated blood due to the attacks. He offered to lead us to the nearest Red Cross office to do just that. <br /><br /> Having just begun a new tattoo not more than a handful of days before, I knew I wasn’t eligible to donate but I sloshed along downtown with my group as I was heading in that direction anyway.<br /><br /> I remember that the day before, Monday, September 10, 2001, Amanda had just joined our production editorial team as a production assistant. She had transplanted herself to the City from the Bay area, if I remember correctly. Alan asked me to keep a special eye on her. Can you imagine, new to a city, a job, and within two days, the world shatters and you’re meandering the streets with people you met no more than nine hours before? <br /><br /> She was calm, quiet and it seemed to me that Erin, another member of our team, most needed someone to talk to. She had started in our department five or so before, hailing from Kansas. Their reactions to what was happening were so varied. One, almost not responding; the other nearly panicked. <br /><br /> At about Union Square Park, I left our group as they headed off to see if they could donate blood. Erin stayed with me and I took her to my apartment on Attorney Street. Like the starts of the tattoo on my slimy arm, our apartment was new to us too, having moved in over Labor Day after having lived in the hip gay neighborhood of Chelsea for two years. <br /><br /> My boyfriend and I had never vocalized what we would do and/or what our plan would be in case of an emergency of such a scale but we both headed home. I think he beat me and Erin home that day. He worked much closer to the Towers and, upon hearing the first plane hit, actually headed further downtown, nearer to the Towers to investigate.<br /><br /> Much like Alan’s hopefulness in thinking there would be a lot of survivors who would need heaps of blood, my ex-boyfriend and his work pal thought there would be people they could rescue. What else could we all have thought?<br /><br /> They headed so close to the Towers that my ex saw people flinging themselves out of the burning towers, choosing to hurl themselves to their deaths than be incinerated (f that really is a choice). He has mentioned this sight to me only once and said it flashes in his mind pretty regularly; something that will surely never leave him. <br /><br /> When the first Tower collapsed, my ex and his companion were dusted with the white powdered destruction, not nearly as heavily as those in the thick of things but enough to prompt them to cough and get the hell out of there.Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-35076023437747090802010-02-05T06:00:00.000-08:002010-02-05T06:00:10.184-08:009/11 Six Years On (post written September 11, 2007)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5A8SRTMPIUmF87eEvLwwN9E9bCA1MtLkiwB9Oa13VtQVmdvq4ptinH6_biC0mqvUHNVvrVVHcVbHmEG4pDmssKZHNeug4s18B1LGSB9r_ldNQ8VBix7FYB0W0AgG7Sv2PbVpOVCBHVxSr/s1600-h/Andrea+in+Balloon.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 142px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5A8SRTMPIUmF87eEvLwwN9E9bCA1MtLkiwB9Oa13VtQVmdvq4ptinH6_biC0mqvUHNVvrVVHcVbHmEG4pDmssKZHNeug4s18B1LGSB9r_ldNQ8VBix7FYB0W0AgG7Sv2PbVpOVCBHVxSr/s320/Andrea+in+Balloon.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432220263321594402" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br /> 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. <br /><br /> 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? <br /><br /> 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. <br /><br /> I read somewhere that 9/11 is our generation’s Pearl Harbor. The parallels are easy to draw: both attacks were committed by foreign aggressors on U.S. soil and sea; to many, both were attacks that came swooping into our consciousnesses with really no prior warning; both were attacks that changed how we as a generation of witnesses, as a U.S. people, thereafter function and see the world and our place in it. <br /><br /> Six years. September 11, 1976, is Andrea's (my childhood friend) birthday (that's her in the opening picture on her first hot-air balloon ride in Washington state). Mysteriously enough, her father was born on the actual Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941, the day that will live in infamy. What is it about their family, I wonder? Doomed? No. A bizarre synchronicity? Maybe.<br /> <br /> That day six years ago, as I was heading to work at the publishing house tucked away within the odd Flatiron Building that straddles 23rd Street where Broadway and Fifth Avenue meet, I thought of Andrea. It was a day like any other. Thinking of everyday things. It was also primary election day in New York City. I was thinking to myself: Must head into the office to send a bday e-greeting to Andrea and figure out where I can vote.<br /><br /> Those were my thoughts until Crystal, my co-worker, stumbled into my office. I was there a bit before 9 and wondered where everyone else was. I was checking email and trying to read the NYTimes online. I was about to gobble down my Lemon Zest Luna Bar. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz06b6OGUAr-bJDOOISnjHz872QjQUSoJD0fwSMiS1XH2vWFhp5aak2b1x3kk8lwdRKkn_TDEoHCbsFZh6EQ1N_Ta5hKGGncwIaCo0nAyAEtunhR9TEemOPQ5v4MatCePH_kkE-ROpYirZ/s1600-h/Luna+bar.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 108px; height: 108px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz06b6OGUAr-bJDOOISnjHz872QjQUSoJD0fwSMiS1XH2vWFhp5aak2b1x3kk8lwdRKkn_TDEoHCbsFZh6EQ1N_Ta5hKGGncwIaCo0nAyAEtunhR9TEemOPQ5v4MatCePH_kkE-ROpYirZ/s320/Luna+bar.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432221271216566194" /></a><br /><br />Crystal stammered, “Hey, do you know that a plane hit a building down the street?” “What?” I replied nonchalantly with another question. “Yea,” she said, “that’s why no one else is here right now. They’re all looking at the building.” <br /><br /> I was confused. Crystal used few words but I still didn’t understand what she meant. I recall my mental image of what was happening to include a small, private plane, flown by a pilot and perhaps one assistant, accidentally crashing into a building a few blocks down from where our office was. <br /><br /> My thought processes also included a recollection of what the weather was like. Although I had only been inside the building 15 minutes and although I did have a window those days in my office, I couldn’t remember what the day was like. It leapt back to me and I stated to Crystal but more to myself that it was too nice and clear of a day for a plane to be involved in an accident.<br /><br /> I bet my experience of processing and getting a handle on what was going on was what many people dealt with that morning. Perhaps those more removed by geography from the attacks, had an even tougher time figuring out what was going on.<br /><br /> It somewhat sunk in as Crystal and I headed downstairs to the Fifth Avenue side of the Flatiron. There, our co-workers and the many others who worked at St. Martin’s Press were huddled, speechless. From there, you could careen your eyes straight down Fifth Avenue to the smoking North Tower. <br /><br /> What must have happened was that many, commuting by subway, as they ascended from the station just a half block away, headed toward the office and were facing south. They must have seen the first plane hit the North Tower. Me, heading by foot from the south, I faced north as I entered the office; my innocence extended by direction and fate a handful of minutes more. <br /><br /> We all stood there numb and shocked, a collective blob of disbelief. Transfixed. I saw the second plane hit the South Tower and we watched as the two mammoths, pulverized, disintegrated. <br /><br /> It was warm in the morning sun. I had just started a new tattoo on my left upper arm and shoulder over Labor Day weekend. It had healed for just a few days. I kept it covered with a ¾-sleeve blue cardigan. The tattoo was coated in Bacitracin first aid ointment. It was gooey and uncomfortable as we huddled outside that morning, witnesses to the unthinkable. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0jYXGy7s-OGJUWdJf3sZP18S5kJUy7soAtUzc7sMMTJyQYZlwlwsuLmSDYBMsBKXlg3slU0EzWFRjbMd29G_0ruUwiDpbEVJ96ceF8rdSOaBm_57t_zeJXo3B0ew29BfDgB4niuxkfAFv/s1600-h/Sacred+Body+piercing.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 119px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0jYXGy7s-OGJUWdJf3sZP18S5kJUy7soAtUzc7sMMTJyQYZlwlwsuLmSDYBMsBKXlg3slU0EzWFRjbMd29G_0ruUwiDpbEVJ96ceF8rdSOaBm_57t_zeJXo3B0ew29BfDgB4niuxkfAFv/s320/Sacred+Body+piercing.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432222747334714450" /></a>Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-73789186264614646022010-02-01T06:00:00.000-08:002010-02-01T06:00:04.967-08:00A New Book? <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMsrJWwRiOXc0rxNnryzSa3biujURvWZGbMEIlVWGtV01C5bzzecpoJ7GbGj-uL-MbM0VxTS4hTzCqyCKf8Nm1X9C8lrnBJqAs8ljhdQmdN2jymwVV76Akd1FxQmHN1M0ilJsSdmFLcUxS/s1600-h/Andy+in+Grass.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 233px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMsrJWwRiOXc0rxNnryzSa3biujURvWZGbMEIlVWGtV01C5bzzecpoJ7GbGj-uL-MbM0VxTS4hTzCqyCKf8Nm1X9C8lrnBJqAs8ljhdQmdN2jymwVV76Akd1FxQmHN1M0ilJsSdmFLcUxS/s320/Andy+in+Grass.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432213709992784498" /></a><br /><br />Well, <span style="font-style:italic;">One Third</span>, my first and, as of yet, only book is fine. I'm happy I wrote it and feel mildly satisfied on that front though it a) hasn't been published and b) no one has really read it (but for you dear ones who soldier through snippets of it here on my blog; and for that, many thanks!) to say nothing of it helping me forge ahead in my dream to earn at least a partial living with my words.<br /><br />That all said, I want to start a new book and I need your help. I want to compile stories/recollections of how you met <span style="font-style:italic;">that</span> person in your life. Could be your lover, wife, husband, partner or your best friend, your buddy, your companion. I will call the edited collection of these accounts <span style="font-style:italic;">How We Met</span>.<br /><br />I find the story of how my husband and I met amusing; one of those, how random accounts! When I think of it all, I am amazed by all of the "what ifs" that aligned, the dominoes of chance that fell right where they needed to for it all to work out as it did. I enjoy our story and want to hear yours. <br /><br />Send me your story though I can't pay you. Keep it a manageable size. Allow me to trim/tighten it, if I feel a need to. I'll gather your stories, add my own, introduce them with a poignant preface, and bam, we'll have a book!<br /><br />If you're super ambitious, I'd love love both sides of the story of how you met your person; the husband's tale paired his wife's; the two friends. Ying Yang. We could compare these two sides of the coin to see how perception is such a slippery, fascinating fellow. <br /><br />Send your submissions to weaver.meg@gmail.com by May Day, May 1st, 2010.Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-76890185580123389942010-01-29T08:42:00.000-08:002010-01-29T09:01:07.169-08:0010. "The Sloggers for Sudan Arrive" at National Geographic Headquarters, September 10, 2007 [an old post but still interesting? . . . ]<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf6yY19VK06ZtHotpEWfwyxUTpyyxEkhdBO0V-gHZk3qjk5Xbj6dfWWjOvOebuKSHQPNBnC4z6haZ16Jq6hLGfhvYOfkXrwU8_yTgzheULJxTVv04ri1DeTebdhYhylCdqig5eDxXi5byX/s1600-h/Sloggers.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 251px; height: 154px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf6yY19VK06ZtHotpEWfwyxUTpyyxEkhdBO0V-gHZk3qjk5Xbj6dfWWjOvOebuKSHQPNBnC4z6haZ16Jq6hLGfhvYOfkXrwU8_yTgzheULJxTVv04ri1DeTebdhYhylCdqig5eDxXi5byX/s320/Sloggers.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432205020974690178" /></a><br /><br />On a September afternoon over two years ago, I headed down to the Courtyard to watch the “Sloggers for Sudan” finish their 10-day, 203-mile walk from Frostburg, Maryland, all the way to Headquarters. They’d been "slogging" along the C&O Canal since September 1 <span style="font-style:italic;">without food</span> to raise money for the John Dau Foundation. <br /><br /> John Dau is one of the “lost boys” who was on the run for 16 years (!) in southern Sudan after fleeing the civil strife, violence, and warfare caused for the last 21 years (!!) by the Arab Sudanese government of northern Sudan (Arab Sudan versus “black” Sudan; powerful/oil-rich Sudan versus fragmented/agrarian Sudan). <br /><br /> Enduring the unimaginable, Dau relocated to the United States, learned to read at age 17, and pursued a public policy degree at Syracuse University (my brother’s alma mater). He started his eponymous <a href="http://johndaufoundation.org/">foundation</a> to help others in his homeland because the violence he escaped persists. Specifically, his foundation is dedicated to opening medical clinics in southern Sudan. The foundation opened its first clinic just this past May 2007. <br /><br /> The sloggers were seven in number, three women and four men. My co-workers and I watched them head across M Street, hang a right into the National Geographic Courtyard to a yellow finish line, balloons, applause, and hoots of approval. They looked good. Wearing army fatigues and black tops, caps and heavy hiking boots, they were tattered but strode smoothly into the courtyard.<br /><br /> I can’t imagine not eating for ten days. I admire their commitment to doing something extreme to raise the $25,000 they did for the John Dau Foundation. Apparently there was a slog in 2005 to raise funds for the Afghan Girls Fund (since renamed the <a href="http://www.nationalgeographic.com/donate/afghan-childrens-fund.html">Afghan Children's Fund</a>). <br /><br /> After first learning about the slog I checked the "slog blog" near daily. Maybe my own experiences with the extreme, in my own little way, running three marathons (two to raise money for leukemia/lymphoma research), piqued my interest in what these people were doing. Or, it might also be that they accomplished something exceptional and that’s something I admire. <br /><br /> After a few words from each slogger and an abrupt yet heartfelt speech by John Dau himself, a towering, lean man of 6’8”, the MC weighed each of the sloggers. Most of the men lost up to 25 pounds while the women lost about 13-16 pounds during ten days of no food, just water.<br /><br /> At the onset of the slog, each slogger was given a tea bag to reserve for really tough times when the nontaste of water just wasn’t enough. After the weigh-in and a few more congratulatory hugs, the sloggers charged into the cafeteria to relish whatever luscious fare they surely fantasized about those many days on the road. <br /><br /> Who said “An unexamined is not worth living”? Along those very same lines, an unchallenged, unexceptional life is similarly not worth much, I guess, in my calculus of life. I hope I can keep pushing myself to do things, perhaps not nearly as exceptional as completing a 203-mile slog, all in one piece with smiles to spare, so that my life exceeds the ordinary. I hope I can find a way to challenge myself to help others and to accomplish it all with joy.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Should we organize a slog this spring/summer to benefit the Haitian earthquake survivors?</span>Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-1616139293879965212009-10-02T11:02:00.000-07:002009-10-02T11:29:49.522-07:00<a href="http://www.buybuybaby.com/default.asp?order_num=-1&">Buybuy Baby</a><br /><br />Last night, my husband Ulises and I took what seemed to be the longest way to visit his youngest brother, his girlfriend, and their new baby. We live in Washington, DC, in the northwest quadrant. They are staying at her parents’ house in Germantown, Maryland. I’m scooting to MapQuest this very moment to figure out how many miles separate the two. One moment …<br /><br />Okay, we’re apparently 31.3 miles apart. Not too far. I guess because it was a) after work and b) because we needed to stop off at Buybuy Baby to shop for a breast pump as well as c) withdraw some cash for the new family once we failed to get a breast pump (who knew they were so expensive!? or that they're probably too personal a gift to buy for someone else?) that it seemed to take forever to get there. <br /> <br />Arrive we finally did to be greeted by the family, their pet ferret Deuce, and a yippy dog named Oreo Cookie. My husband's brother lives at his girlfriend's parents' house, nestled in a cute suburban neighborhood, one you can easily get lost in due to the houses all looking pretty much the same, especially in the dark and after whipping around two or three of the neighborhood's comical traffic circles. <br /><br />My husband's brother (who I'm not naming intentionally to protect his privacy) and his girfriend (same thing with her, too) are young, maybe 18. They both seemed happy about the baby and very capable. He glistened with confidence and cheer, the makings of a good father. She rested the baby on her once full belly, tucked in her pink and yellow floral flannel blanket. <br /><br />Watching them, talking to them, grabbing glimpses of the Ultimate Fighting Championship that was on TV, I was so objective. I was polite and witty, little jokes peppered amongst oohs and aahs. I didn’t judge them as many people would or as I think I might have a few years ago. <br /><br />They’re young but in that moment, and that’s all I saw, they were perfect. Calm, cool, collected, if tired. But looking beyond the brushed suede microfiber sofa and the stinky ferret, behind her supportive parents who trickled in and out of the living room, there was fear. Maybe it only emanated from her mom and dad. Her mom seemed quite nice. Strong, dependable, successful in her pocket of the world. Ulises told me she's a teacher.<br /><br />And, if she is indeed a teacher I can probably trace the contours of her fear (due to my parents’ pre-retirement professions). Your 18-year-old daughter got pregnant and is a mom. She’s healthy, the baby’s fine. Good. Phew! No complications but what of her life going forward? Where’s she going? What experiences has she forfeited by having a baby so early?<br /><br />I don’t mean to call the baby a complication or a roadblock but she is in a way. (Am I just saying this because I’ve deferred having a child for so long?) I made it 12 years further on (but in what direction?) than the new mom did. My family and many of my friends would say that’s good and I’m inclined to agree, but is it? What’s next for her? Will she work? Will she get to college? And the baby …? Many studies assert that girls of teen moms are likely to become one themselves.<br /><br />Babies having babies. It’s much more complicated than that. Parents fear it and many people moralize about such scenarios. <br /><br />What did she lose by having a baby so early in her adult life? Is it horrific to think of a baby this way? What about my husband's brother? Will they always have to struggle? Will they always have to live in cute, neat, quiet, hypocritical suburbia with her family? Will they be allowed to grow up? Because that’s what they certainly need but my feeling from that evening was that the baby’s arrival prompted her parents to rejuvenilize her in a way. I know, I know, “juvenilize” is not a word and thus “rejuvenilize” is certainly less of one but you know what I mean.<br /><br />It’s as though many people around her think she strayed, she partied, she met boys, she fucked, and when that all came to its inevitable end without condoms and/or birth control pills, she got knocked up and it’s time to bring her back to the fold because this is plain scary.<br /><br />I don’t mean this as a value judgment on either of them, much less her parents who seem to be doing the best they can with the whole scenario (much better, I might add, than many parents in similar situations who turn their backs harshly on their pregnant kids) nor a judgment of the innocent baby but the whole scenario made me think about them and their futures.<br /><br />That said, I wish them the best.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Postscript</span>: It's been awhile since I wrote what's just above. I've since been to the baby girl's second birthday party. The young couple's still together. My husband's brother has been in and out of various jobs but tries his best. He's working to get a family construction/cleaning business off the ground. Pretty ambitious but he's quite capable. The young mom is working at a department store and the baby, well, she's not a baby any more. She's adorable, happy, and starting to say words here and there.Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-13573818048911222852009-09-30T08:43:00.000-07:002009-09-30T11:14:16.653-07:00Snippet Número 1: Living on the Street<br /><br />Last Thursday a former co-worker and I headed over to <a href="http://www.nstreetvillage.org/">N Street Village</a>, a women's homeless shelter on 14th and N Streets here in our dear city, Washington, DC. We had signed up to help serve lunch in the shelter's cafeteria. I'd attended orientation there but had forgotten how best to get into the cafeteria. So, I rambled into the shelter's courtyard, a pretty big space that's neatly landscaped and lined with tiles. <br /><br />I approached the door and an older woman sitting nearby smoking meekly asked me who I was there to meet. I told her I was there to help serve lunch and she directed me to a blue door on the other side of the courtyard that shoots straight to the cafeteria.<br /><br />About face, I thanked her and headed off. As I retraced my steps through the courtyard, I passed three other women smoking on a bench. They purred, whistled, and shouted at me: "Hey baby! Hey, come over here sweetie! Let me check you out!" And some other things that probably shouldn't be repeated. <br /><br />I ducked into the cafeteria and saw my co-worker and fellow volunteer lunch server. We donned our hair nets and shoved our hands into our powder-lined gloves. Once the volunteer coordinator headed off after instructing us on how to dole out the rice, chicken, salad, and bread (only two pats of butter per person), I confessed my shame to my friend. <br /><br />I started, "You won't believe it but I got heckled on the way over here!"<br /><br />"Where?" she replied, curious, but still focused on prepping the styrofoam plates.<br /><br />"In the courtyard," I answered.<br /><br />"By women?" she asked, incredulous.<br /><br />"Women! Yea!"<br /><br />"Oh boy," she shot back. "Whatcha gonna do if she comes in here for lunch? Are you gonna confront her?"<br /><br />"Aw, no. She was pretty burly." <br /><br /><br />We set to work, engineering an assembly line to best serve the food. Of course, the woman from the courtyard, the most vocal, came into the cafeteria ten minutes into lunch. Stephanie and I were taking turns, serving every other woman. And, as my luck would have it, I was up to serve my "admirer." Looking her straight in the eye, she looked young and pretty, almost sweet, though she was close to six feet tall, I'd reckon. <br /><br />She thanked me three times, with each plop of the serving spoon. Maybe she felt embarrrassed over what she'd done. I don't know. <br /><br />I'd decided to volunteer at the women's shelter as I'd helped out with street outreach through which we served breakfast to the homeless in a park near the State Department and at St. Stephen's Loaves and Fishes, which provides the homeless and hungry a hearty Sunday brunch. I had good experiences with both organizations but my friendliness and openness have been misinterpreted by the men I serve as flirtation or even worse. <br /><br />When I learned of N Street and that it serves only women, I thought, <span style="font-style:italic;">perfecto!</span> I can be as open and chatty as I like and no one will think I'm coming on to them or open to their sexual advances. I guess I was wrong or maybe the woman in the courtyard was just testing me, giving me a hard time. And maybe I need to learn how to better relate (to better help) those less fortunate than myself. <br /><br />I have the luxury to be open and free. Silly even. But many of those individuals served by N Street, D.C. Central Kitchen, and Loaves and Fishes (and tons of similar organizations in the U.S. and elsewhere) have to be more guarded, building up a bristly exterior to make it through days wandering and sleeping on the street.Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-74224157077179503122009-09-30T08:24:00.001-07:002009-09-30T08:42:33.992-07:00To make up for squandered time, here are some photos of our latest adventures.<br /><br />They include hiking in Shenandoah National Park with our latest furry friend, Sam; a May Day March for Immigrant Rights to the White House; camping at Chincoteague Island, Virginia, over Memorial Day; hanging with the family in Cape May, New Jersey; going to the Real Madrid soccer game at FedEx Field.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7k5KQ4Gv_jI-zOw9-qow7JIhdQ7ygs8GyaW41VkLfaGbpletvvr6jLtr7IOwvZAJmsgabmFUI2gD1H4ALh2au0W3aESLgE25HTRLubGIUIjF0-Zz3kXktuy6aak2NaIrlgggQBEuS5M_4/s1600-h/real+madrid.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 233px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7k5KQ4Gv_jI-zOw9-qow7JIhdQ7ygs8GyaW41VkLfaGbpletvvr6jLtr7IOwvZAJmsgabmFUI2gD1H4ALh2au0W3aESLgE25HTRLubGIUIjF0-Zz3kXktuy6aak2NaIrlgggQBEuS5M_4/s320/real+madrid.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387285779514824146" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid8XgVpX31jgN8Zm5KSkabmkDguxnvHtrfk47LPU8yiCVfUzaqS90qfNzMP0vRI4O2NV2Zykx-PSV1dCDSi8cHIKGsedHcZDYN4m0iXc1mvlKsUWlh-VPsv0bZC3DnoxHgzR3Uxaioyhlx/s1600-h/beach.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 233px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid8XgVpX31jgN8Zm5KSkabmkDguxnvHtrfk47LPU8yiCVfUzaqS90qfNzMP0vRI4O2NV2Zykx-PSV1dCDSi8cHIKGsedHcZDYN4m0iXc1mvlKsUWlh-VPsv0bZC3DnoxHgzR3Uxaioyhlx/s320/beach.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387285774778597186" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXGfgAD_b13-3e_wHPHhHe9fCRYCqO-rEpfrpS_F88BzQHHusXX8q-NqEHgWcw7hBu4INXGTQu1r8QObL6_iAbdcxhB7nL0I9Nrxf_VXYbriOvPVaapNtqtWnTsltPG7kolh4HepEz7yQ1/s1600-h/shenandoah.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 233px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXGfgAD_b13-3e_wHPHhHe9fCRYCqO-rEpfrpS_F88BzQHHusXX8q-NqEHgWcw7hBu4INXGTQu1r8QObL6_iAbdcxhB7nL0I9Nrxf_VXYbriOvPVaapNtqtWnTsltPG7kolh4HepEz7yQ1/s320/shenandoah.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387285764592089410" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPxg8365pJXopSwYo7S7kRNVwuakWttlSwdshLV5RIfim5ViAlNuWGttOgbo-plJvndpbBzwbeLjejXwyNYP-zFfVWCL1TnnJs93PKumpYK8PHzL0PtLmeq8aYaYU9uijGef27x-B4lH9n/s1600-h/memorial+day.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 233px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPxg8365pJXopSwYo7S7kRNVwuakWttlSwdshLV5RIfim5ViAlNuWGttOgbo-plJvndpbBzwbeLjejXwyNYP-zFfVWCL1TnnJs93PKumpYK8PHzL0PtLmeq8aYaYU9uijGef27x-B4lH9n/s320/memorial+day.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387285762864976514" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYKLkA5PmMxLIUB2rpwR_VtsWfJWRG9-PWvu36V4Ua5erxM_tnsqvcIxGVYWas1q8leTu6838t8betwCweDgQ-pjClgiWUzPl4Tbxlx-6GlMsy5tSvWE9mkMXUE7I-IQ5U8P_5mdGjC6bw/s1600-h/protest.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 233px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYKLkA5PmMxLIUB2rpwR_VtsWfJWRG9-PWvu36V4Ua5erxM_tnsqvcIxGVYWas1q8leTu6838t8betwCweDgQ-pjClgiWUzPl4Tbxlx-6GlMsy5tSvWE9mkMXUE7I-IQ5U8P_5mdGjC6bw/s320/protest.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387285757408874546" /></a><br />PhotosMeg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-41323717371664221962009-09-30T07:17:00.000-07:002009-09-30T07:37:56.328-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh62aTSA21aXauw_dS5152RNTCJQ0Qg9u4CXn9LtF6qgBuAbC4t9DIV-H1tGg_VLuQt92ftBPS7XEFqraMttCbxtTzKBRvOkdgtAAtOLUB6oIq8xayw9rSDTc1127x4P_wdMpE6PqoWFxyO/s1600-h/tunnel.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 233px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh62aTSA21aXauw_dS5152RNTCJQ0Qg9u4CXn9LtF6qgBuAbC4t9DIV-H1tGg_VLuQt92ftBPS7XEFqraMttCbxtTzKBRvOkdgtAAtOLUB6oIq8xayw9rSDTc1127x4P_wdMpE6PqoWFxyO/s320/tunnel.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387269439451307602" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">En el cambio, la evolución. Evolution is in change/in change, there is evolution. </span><br /><br />Sounds better in Spanish, right? Makes more sense in Spanish, too, right? So it's been six months since I posted (!) Time to get started again. I sent <span style="font-style:italic;">ONE THIRD</span>, the book, to several literary agents and nobody's taken a bite. Should I keep trying? <br /><br />In the meantime, I'll continue to post chapters of it here. I also will add "snippets," accounts of strange/funny things that happen in my daily life that are truthfully more suitable to the blog format. I may even develop my latest kids' book idea, <span style="font-style:italic;">Bad Begbie and the Furry Bunch</span>, on these very pages. Sound good? <br /><br />Re my pseudo epigraph, a friend once said that to me and I found it simple but wise. Then, weeks later, I was half listening to my every-faithful iPod and Chambao, the Spanish flamenco fusion group my pal in Sevilla, Carmen, introduced me to ever so long ago. And, bam, there was the line. Huh, I thought, I assumed Nery had come up with the pithy saying himself. He appropriated it well and said it with conviction. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">En el cambio, la evolución.</span>Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-38028576874498628832009-03-09T11:27:00.000-07:002009-03-09T11:30:21.837-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT8Vu2moz5sz8HpKxuUYWNIJAglxquO5izyQOnb8ZOErQWDE4ZZ06OIWu33IdBs7ZeCDYyod7IXKAF7_TqaV5_QJQ2DVRoA6BZZ9KKTzcU5PdRgkH44g1ybAF8kOeJM1SNi_918fW6ju1A/s1600-h/IMG_0332.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT8Vu2moz5sz8HpKxuUYWNIJAglxquO5izyQOnb8ZOErQWDE4ZZ06OIWu33IdBs7ZeCDYyod7IXKAF7_TqaV5_QJQ2DVRoA6BZZ9KKTzcU5PdRgkH44g1ybAF8kOeJM1SNi_918fW6ju1A/s320/IMG_0332.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5311257020528208786" /></a><br /><br />My Birthday; back in OctoberMeg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-40677929674579767822009-03-09T11:19:00.000-07:002009-03-09T11:27:12.743-07:00A New Year: Three Months In<br /><br />Wow, I haven't posted since December! Sorry! Will get back to posting chunks of ONE THIRD in a jiffy along with some new photos (in a bit). It's been a busy start to a new year as Ulises and I bought our first home. And now we live in the DC suburbs! (eep!; well, to be perfectly honest, we're about 2.67 minutes over the DC - Maryland line; about six miles from my office in downtown DC)<br /><br />We've been busy cleaning, painting, pulling up nasty carpet, weeding, moving, hanging curtains, raking, etc. But we've also had time for some ping pong, thank goodness. <br /><br />Back to ONE THIRD, which I've since finished editing (again) and hope still to get published though the economy isn't in my corner these days (nor in anyone else's for that matter). Perhaps better to soldier on with a new idea?<br /><br />Hmm ...Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6037876435086047443.post-59672617184603577662008-12-15T13:00:00.000-08:002008-12-15T13:33:11.617-08:00The Air Force and Pentagon Memorials, Fall 2008<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9AyPy_rTaNYT28yj6TWKvjBZcZa_NCdam2CPTXr3ObWsEziqUDlc-DnxY4FayMR8o9ARrd_Z6GZsQtZPRKIsFKpFbSpzSJdXiw49gpwLznqwX9bUMtpH53LA8vwbmX5Hh7uy8X-i5F5aI/s1600-h/IMG_0024.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9AyPy_rTaNYT28yj6TWKvjBZcZa_NCdam2CPTXr3ObWsEziqUDlc-DnxY4FayMR8o9ARrd_Z6GZsQtZPRKIsFKpFbSpzSJdXiw49gpwLznqwX9bUMtpH53LA8vwbmX5Hh7uy8X-i5F5aI/s320/IMG_0024.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280124863468066482" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVu73YIPI4gWLdYaBCUTP4tnOsJXIjNEpq4d72NZay6wLLD0UrIYFi91Pz-_PkcAhuJNzMyXx9QIywEC4_smpHxZgglGAORpDTqu6nWp2xllh6TmCkJV9ZxR8OuFbo9OK4ZFObp8K2MM_X/s1600-h/IMG_0003.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVu73YIPI4gWLdYaBCUTP4tnOsJXIjNEpq4d72NZay6wLLD0UrIYFi91Pz-_PkcAhuJNzMyXx9QIywEC4_smpHxZgglGAORpDTqu6nWp2xllh6TmCkJV9ZxR8OuFbo9OK4ZFObp8K2MM_X/s320/IMG_0003.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280124859223790770" /></a>Meg Weaverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00622662776699317466noreply@blogger.com1