Asilah Nostalgia

Movie!

Cool: the movie Appaloosa, with Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen and Renee Zellweger, is going to be filmed at our ranch! I SO want to be an extra.

Check out the location: http://www.flickr.com/photos/palovistaranch/

... that's what New Mexico looks like, for all of my dear foreign friends :)

Language Frustrations

Well, I've commenced the epic journey: learning Arabic. It's QUITE difficult, needless to say. The letters still look a bit like cool drawings to me, but they are slowly and vaguely starting to look like they are comprised of different letters, rather than just a stream of waves and dots. Frustratingly, the Arabic I learned in Morocco isn't of much use, seeing as the Moroccan dialect is ONLY spoken there, and no one else can understand it. Modern Standard is quite different. Gah! السلام

Aux memes temps, je dois etudier le francais! C'est frustrant. Mais, c'est important. Les americains ne parlent que l'anglais et pour ca, je suis triste. Il faut connaitre les langues (et les gens) du monde.

America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.
e. e. cummings

Can we argue that moving in the wrong direction is, indeed, better than standing still? Perhaps I should have plowed on ahead through pre-med after all.

Blogging

I'm starting to sort of like the idea of keeping a blog. It's a nice way to share thoughts with friends across the miles, if anyone reads it. Suppose I'll just keep this one plugging along, hopefully updating more regularly (doesn't everyone say that?).

I signed up for a couple of months in Morocco as I’d signed up for most things in my life: unthinkingly, in passing, with a jostle of unhesitating fingers scurrying across the keyboard. A few clicks on expedia.com and I was off. I tend not to agonize over decisions until after the fact. This has proven quite practical (as the decision gets made while life gallops along), but also aggravating, as that clatter of hoofs takes on the hollow sound of The Second Guess. My college selection process was this way as well, now that I think about it. Despite my misgivings, I headed off to the other side of the world to rock a few kasbahs.

Sometimes, in quick intervals between the scream of my cell phone, the roar of the microwave, the mutter of the tv, and the buzz of the radio, I hear Arabic music. It drifts into my room through an open window, or seeps under the crack below the door. I imagine that just beyond the room, men are calling blond women “mes petites princesses” and hoping dumpy tourists will pay exorbitant rates for camel rides. Morocco creeps back into my life sometimes and jostles with the routine. I let my eyes droop into an unattractive, half-lidded state and see men in Kaftans and boys with leather sandals. I see Cute Omelet Guy next to those orange juice carts in a drunken, dusty line. Morocco nestles or nettles itself in … I can’t quite figure out which.

I had a dream in French the other night.

I think I'll study Arabic this year. Perhaps it will be another of those one-click decisions, for better or worse. I can't see how it would fit into THE PLAN, but THE PLAN seems to have become more of a "what NOT to do" strategy. All I’ve learned thus far is that everything I thought I was interested in would doom me to live hand to mouth my whole life. Then, after choosing the road most traveled by in order to avoid being a penniless author, it dawned on me that Pre-Med is also the road most abandoned. The woods on either side of THAT mire are mighty thick, however. Brambles and fights and Africa later, I have no more of a clue as to what to study than the day I drooled on my bib and said “Ga.”

We try.