Daysleeping

Last summer I went back to the first place I ever left.  My family moved from Laramie to Cheyenne, Wyoming when I was 6, and then two years later we lived in Laramie again for a short while before moving to Texas.  We drove away, 21 hours in a car without air conditioning in August, and my baby sister cried every minute of it.   At the beginning of third grade, I stood in front of the class in Dallas and introduced myself to the other children sitting at desks in neat and well-spaced rows.  I told the class I was from Wyoming, and the teacher, lit cigarette in hand (honest, it was the 80s), drawled "Mi-ami?! How excitin!" No, I said.  Wyoming.  The state.  And she looked at me blankly.  So I showed her, on the map pulled down in front of the blackboard behind her--this is Miami.  In Florida.  And way over here is Wyoming.  There are mountains but also the prairie.  And she sent me to the hall for being rude.  I didn't mean to be rude, I just didn't know what to do wit

  The one thing I do regularly, other than eat and sleep, is walk.   It’s good for me, and I enjoy it, but I don’t think I could manage it daily if I didn’t need to take my dog for a long walk every day, rain or shine, to keep her happy and healthy and out of trouble.   We generally like to walk by long flowing bodies of water.   If you’re not from Houston, you’d call these things creeks or rivers, but here I walk every morning by a bayou (said “by-you” by me and almost everyone and “by-oh” by folks who want to let you know their people have been here a long time and Hank Williams, Sr).   There might not be a difference between a river and a bayou, practically, but lots of people think of our bayous as slow-moving and muddy; maybe with swampy vegetation and wildlife, and closer to a coast than not.   If you swam in a bayou, it would be warm as bathwater most of the year and your toes would sink into silty muck at the bottom, cooler and less unpleasant than you’d think.   Buttercup and

I went to Mongolia by myself to ride horses for my 40th birthday.  While I was there, I accidentally set myself on fire, possibly permanently damaged my ankle, pooped in the woods a bunch, cried about beauty a whole lot, and rediscovered a self I'd misplaced for a long time before that.  I wholeheartedly recommend a similar trip to anyone (though I suggest you give the stovepipe some distance, if you do), and this will be the first of a few posts in which I try to tell you about what I did and saw and why I liked it so much. I didn't start out with a grand idea to visit Mongolia because I've always dreamed of it--I honestly didn't know if there was much there to see there, and I was thinking more along the lines of yoga retreats in Bali for my big birthday trip.  Lazy naps in the sun and lots of tropical fruit seemed to be on order for a celebration of one's 40th.  Since my children were born, I'd never gone away without them for more than a long weeke

I’ve wanted to visit Japan for forever.  And I did, over Christmas, as I told you and it was great.  But for Spring Break, we did the Japanese grand tour that I’d really been dreaming of—Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima.  Akihabara, Gion, Mt. Fuji.  Sushi, Ramen, Yakitori.   Leading up to the trip, I crammed, as I do, studying up on Japanese history and literature and music and culture (that’s what I’m calling my bingeing of Japanese reality tv. “Studying”).  And when we got back, we kind of summed up the trip when we found Lost in Translation  on Netflix.   Lost in Translation  is a beautiful movie for lots of reasons, and one of my favorites, but it was apt for this because it is set in Tokyo, and the setting is such a presence.  It’s not a movie that could have taken place anywhere else in the world, I think.  And my favorite, favorite part of the movie is kind of in two parts—the bookends of the movie.  Bill Murray is riding in a taxi, at the beginnning of the movie having just arri

I like that so much of being human is the tension between knowing ourselves to be biological entities and feeling ourselves to be something more--so many of our arguments and pursuits boil down to a debate over the extent to which we are meat machines versus star dust or force spirits or light from a larger light, to borrow the terminology of others.  Wait, don't go!  I know, it's too early for this much thinkiness.  Have a coffee and stay for some pictures of neat stuff, and skip my rambling if you must. Today was Thaipusam--the celebration of the full moon during the month of Thai in the Tamil calendar.   It's my understanding that Thaipusam isn't really celebrated in India anymore, but until not too long ago it was public holiday in Singapore, and it's still a big deal here and in Malaysia.  On the holiday, devotees celebrate the festival by making offerings of milk in thanksgiving, and to truly show their gratitude, they offer themselves as well, sacrif

I have a confession; my first exposure to the culture of Japan was the book Shogun, by James Clavell.  I honestly love his work, great literature or no--he writes books that are close to or more than a thousand pages long, and there are few things that make me as happy as a giant book.  And I do think that he does a reasonably good job of being culturally sensitive and as historically accurate as you can be in a sweeping epic/romance novel, but it remains that I read Shogun for the first time sometime in my early teens, and the extent of my cultural knowledge of Japan for a long time included ritual suicide and taking really hot baths.  I've expanded my knowledge since then, but when we visited Japan for the first time recently, my inner thirteen-year-old demanded that I experience at least one of those. You are in luck, friends, as I'm a walking mishap, and this is the beginning of a moderately entertaining story that involves me making all the mistakes.  It's also the s

I was walking to the MRT station on my way home from getting my hair cut last week, and I smelled the most delicious smell.  I just about dove into traffic to follow my nose to get to the source, and you guys will not believe what it was:  Durian!  Either my new-things bucket is at a manageable level or aliens have taken over my brain, because I smelled a giant pile of the king of stinky fruits and thought that rather than smelling like dead things or an open sewer, they smelled like a lush promise of eye-crossing delight.  I haven't tried them yet, but I'm kind of looking forward to having a chance to.  I'll let you know how it goes.  No, I'm not going to grab a spiky ball as big as my head and attempt to slice into it on my own for many reasons, not the least of which is that durians are expressly forbidden on public transportation.  Because they smell. You can, however, carry as many mangoes as you can fit on your lap. My willingness to try durian got me think