Daysleeping

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, sa...

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 als...

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 d...

I started this entry in mid-December, and though I keep coming back to it and being unsatisfied, I’m just going to finish it, wonky or not.  It begins like this:  I moved to Singapore six months ago. We’ve been here six months, almost seven now, and I keep thinking about that milestone. It’s been half a year, and I’ve always thought I can handle any situation, for at least a year.  So far, living in Singapore hasn’t been a situation to be endured, at all.  I have a sweet life, here—it’s a good place with lots to explore and kind people.  I’ve been so, so lucky to find lots to look forward to each day.  And there are lots of crabs for me to eat and really excellent spicy stuff to put on everything and the fruit occasionally makes me a little delirious with absolute bliss. A few weeks ago when we were returning from Vietnam, as the plane broke through the clouds, I saw a sprinkling of lovely, fat cargo ships in the Singapore Strait and my heart gave ...

My last night in Hong Kong, I ventured out by myself to do a little shopping and look for adventure, because, really, there's only so much walking you can do with two children along before they revolt.  It was only late afternoon, but the light was dimming and shops were closing, and the buzz of the city was fading just a little.  Walking alone always makes me all kinds of introspective, and I knew I was going to want to tell you about Hong Kong, not just what we did and the things I saw, but how it felt. Hong Kong feels full of stories.  It feels deliciously full of ghosts, as if even on the emptiest street you are jostled by the force of the desires and rages and joys and tedium of all the lives that have passed the same spot.  It feels like a fire that has burned down to hot blue coals but you've just put a fresh log on and it's about to spark up into a nice fresh flame.  The city smells like that, too, like sulfur and new pine logs in an old stone h...

It's been a long time since I lived in winter, much less autumn.  I'm used to summer temperatures lasting through October and popping up again in December, I've thought for a long time that the breezy, sunshiny perfection of coastal Texas in January makes up for its swampy summer, and you know I've been enjoying Singapore's fragrant, heavy air and the cool breath of the sea in the shade even on the hottest days.  There's something in me that wants the leaves to change and fall, though, and the nights to cool, and the days to shorten and grow dark, little by little.  I feel like it's a cultural thing and a human thing, that we acknowledge the dying of the year and our own mortality, that we offer gratitude for abundance while preparing ourselves for scarcity. I'm not finding Autumn here in the enduring greenery and the unchanging days, and I'm glad that I'll be traveling soon to a place where I can get a much needed dose of fiery leaves and c...

This isn't the first time I've driven on the left, exactly.  A long time ago a friend of a friend in Liverpool asked me to drive his car home from a night out, as he'd observed me nursing the single pint my narrow pocketbook would allow while he'd had considerably more.  Here's the thing: his car also had a manual transmission.  I BELIEVE, firmly, that I can drive a stick when I'm not behind the wheel of such a vehicle--it's my inherent megalomania coming into play.  This is not a belief that's necessarily based in reality.  My siblings may yet grow a little pale when crossing a certain bit of road where they faced death as I stalled out repeatedly in heavy traffic.  That one night in Liverpool, I did get my friend's friend's car back to his house without major damage.  I'm pretty distractible, in general, and on the road that night I discovered that it's not a good idea to have ANY distractions when you're trying to concentrate...