| Without you here there is less to say - Colin Hays |
[01 Sep 2004|12:38am] |
wow, it's been a long time since i've written in this. i dont like putting my words just out there in public, it's a weird feeling for me.
surprisingly, i've almost completely readapted to life in america. i thought i would really be unhappy back in the states and longing for my life abroad. for the most part i'm great, i love being young in austin. sometimes, a wave of nostalgia will hit me, and i will think how those moments in europe and asia are gone. forever. i'll be back, but of course, i'll be different. sigh, such is growing up. i thought i had adopted a more mature attitude about letting go, but alas, i haven't. other random thoughts:
-we have to choose how we spend our time as we grow up, and sometimes people
change and its not like they arent choosing you but one day you realize your
good friends arent always as close to you anymore
-i mean, this is what growing up is. i mean, im nostalgic but i dont want to be
back there, [i used to long for the past i dont anymore, which is good i guess,
i feel like yeah, a part of me is becoming harder. how do some people not miss
it like i do?]. sigh. im not quite sure what i am saying
-we cant help it but life does get in the way. thats part of the reason im
scared of having this grown up life. because i do want to go back to asia but im afraid that if i get married and have kids ill be content with being a yuppie. and i
need to remember to give back.
-sad about worlds not colliding well and having to partition time off to hang
out with different people or not having enough time for everyone
-i hung out with bharvi and her med school friends at a potluck yesterday night
[i didnt get back to austin till today] and it was so weird seeing her with a
different crowd of people. just weird
-and not like the girls are less fun but we didnt hang out as much as i had
hoped for in houston because yeah the girls are in med school [i really do feel like it's game over after this year. everyone told me to do what i love this year: travelling, hobbies, eating, reading because i wont have time for it later on. so i must live this year up. i thought it would be getting spoiled by doing all of these things but everyone else says its just now or never. so more days of sleeping in without feeling guilty]. its not like oh they are X over me, it really is studying
24/7.
-but it is reassuring to know that i will have friends in med school though. i
feel like bharvi really got lucky with her group of friends, i hope i find a
niche as easily.
-i'm not ready to let go. even with people who have changed and i'm not as close to, i dont want to let go of what they used to mean to me. i dont want to shut that door.
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| more of the hours |
[11 Apr 2004|11:43pm] |
Clarissa recognizes these things but stands apart from them. She feels the presence of her own ghost; the part of her at once most indestructibly alive and least distincet; the part that owns nothing; that observes with wonder and detachment, like a tourist in a museum...They are only choices, one thing and then another, yes or no, and she sees how easily she could slip out of this life - these empty and arbitrary comforts. SHe could simply leave it and return to her other home, where neither Sally nor Richard exists; where there is only the essence of Clarissa, a girl grown into a womean, still full of hope, still capable of anything. It is revealed to her that all her sorrow and loneliness, the whole creaking scaffold of it, stems simply from pretending to live in this apartment among these objects, with kind, nervous Sally, and that if she leaves she'll be happy, or better than happy. She'll be herself. She feels briefly, wonderfully alone, with everything ahead of her.
Then the feeling moves on. It does not collapse; it is not whisked away. It simply moves on..she is not disappointed and more than a little relieved. This is in fact her apartment, her collection of clay pots, her mate, her life. She wants no other. Feeling regular, neither elated nor depressed, simply present as Clarissa Vaughn, a fortunate woman, professionally well regarded, giving a party for a mortally ill artist.
She isn't jealous of Sally, it isn't anything as cheap as that, but she cannot help feeling, in being passed over by Oliver St. Ives, the waning of the world's interest in her and, more powerfully, the embarassing fact that it matters to her even now, as she prepares a party for a man who may be a great artist and may not survive the year. I am trivial, endlessly trivial, she thinks. And yet going uninvited feels in some way like a minor demonstration of the world's ability to get on without her. Being passed over by Oliver (who probably did not consciously exclude her but simply did not think of her at all) resembles death the way a child's shoebox diorama of historic events resembles the event itself. It isn't failure, she tells herself. It isn't failture to be in these rooms, in your skin, cutting the stems of flowers. It isn't failture but it requires more of you, the whole effort does; just being present and grateful; being happy (terrible word). People don't look at you on the street anymore.
You try to hold the moment, jus there, in the kitchen with the flowers. You try to inhabit it, to love it, because it's yours and because waht waits immediately outside these rooms is the hallway..What you are, more than anything, is alive, right here in your kitchen.
That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed like anything could happen, anything at all. It seemed that she could kiss her grave, formidable best friend down by the pond, it seemed that they could sleep together in a strange combination of lust and innocence, and not worry about what, if anything, it meant...It was the house and the weather - the estatic unreality of it all - that helped turn Richard's friendship into a more devouring kind of love, and it was those same elements, really, that brought Clarissa here, to this kitchen in NYC, where she stands, cutting flowers and struggling, with only moderate success, to stop caring that Oliver, the activist and ruined movie star, has not saked her to lunch. It was not betrayal, she had insisted; it was simply an expasion of the possible.
How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she'd returned Richard's kiss, gone off somewhere (where?) with him..Couldn't they have discovered something..larger and stranger than what they'd got? It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and even possibly beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. That's who I am - a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far from love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for youself. You end up just sailing from port to port.
It seemed like the begining of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is forgotten by now; and even the sex, once she and Richard had reached the point, was ardent but awkward, unsatisfying, more kindly than passionate. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a dead patch of grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitos droned in the darkening air. There is still the singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.
Why does he desire nothing, really, beyond what he's already got? He is impenetrable in his ambitions and satisfactions, his love of job and home. This, she reminds herself, is a virtue. It is part of his loveliness; it is good that her husband cannot be touched by emphera; that his happiness depends only on the fact of her, here in the house, living her life, thinking of him. She is loved, she thinks, in more or less the way gifts will be appreciated because they've been given with good intentions, becuase they exist, because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets. She does not want, not at all, to be the strange woman, the pathetic creature, full of quirks and rage, solitary, sulking, tolerated but not loved.
Clarissa leans forward and moves the vase slightly to the left. GOod lord, Louis thinks, she's gone beyond wifeliness. She's become her mother. Clarissa laughs, "Look at me," she says, "An old woman fussing with her roses."
She always surprised you this way, by knowing more than you think she does. Louis wonders if they're calculated, these little demonstrations of self knowledge that pepper Clarissa's wise, hostessy performance. She seems, at times, to have read your thoughts. She disarms you by saying, essentially, I know what you're thinking and I agree, I'm ridiculous, I'm far less than I could have been and I'd like it to be otherwise but I can't seem to help myself. You find that you move, almost against your will, from being irritated with her to consoling her, helping her back into her performance so that she can be comfortable again and you can resume feeling irritated.
Clarissa believed then and she believes today that the dune in Wellfleet will, in some sense, accompany her forever. Whatever else happens, she will always have had that. She will always be standing on a high dune in summer. She will always have been a young and indestructibly healthy, a little hungover, wearing Richard's cotton sweater as he wraps a hand familiarly around her neck and Louis stands slightly apart watching the waves.
She would like to grab Louis and say, You have to age better than this. I can't stand to see you make so much of yourself and then iffer it all to some boy just because he happens to be young and pretty.
She has a golden certainty.
What he remembers with perfect clarity is sitting on a train headed for Madrid, feeling the sort of happiness he imagined spirits must feel, freed of their earthly bodies but still possessed of their essential selves.
She wants to produce something marvelous, something that would be marvelous even to those who dont not love her.
Her party, she thinks, will fail. RIchard will be bored and offended, and rightly so. She is superficial; she cares too much about such things. Her daughter must make jokes about it to her friends.
Clarissa Vaughn is only delueded, neither more nor less than that. She believes that by obeying the rules she can have what men have. She's bought the ticket. It isn't her fault. Still, Mary would like to grap Clarissa's shirtfront and cry out, You honestly believe that if they come to round the deviants, they won't stop at your door, don't you? You really are that foolish. Better to be a frank and open asshole than a well dressed dyke with a respectable job.
Fraud, Clarissa thinks. I know a conquistador when I see one. I know all about making a splash. It isn't hard. If you shout loud enough, for long enough, a crowd will gather to see what the noise is about. You're just as bad as most men, just as aggressive, just that self-aggrandizing, and your hour will come and go.
She is trivial, she is someone who thinks too much about parties...If only Julia can someday forgive her...
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| obsession with The Hours by Michael Cunningham |
[07 Apr 2004|10:31pm] |
We'll hunt for a third tiger now, but like the others this one too will be a form of what I dream, a structur of words, and not the flesh and bone tiger that beyond all myths paces the earth. I know these things quite well, yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me in this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest, and I go on pursuing through the hours another tiger, the beast not found in verse. - JL Borges, The Other Tiger
I have no time to describe my plans. I should say a good deal about The Hours & my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think taht gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment. - Virginia Woolf in her diary Aug 30 1923
Richard told her, thirty years ago, that under her pirate girl veneer lay all the makings of a good suburban wife, and she is now revealed to herself as a meager spirit, too conventional, the cause of much suffering. No wonder her daugter resents her.
Clarissa knows - she can practically see - Walter is, at this moment, working mentally through a series of intricate calibrations regarding her personal significance. Yes, she's the woman in the book, the subject of a much anticipated novel by an almost legandary writer, but the book failed, didnt it? It was curtly reviewed; it slipped silently beneath the waves. She is, Walter decides, like a deposed aristocrat, interesting without being particularly important. She sees him arrive at his decision. She smiles.
You see men like Walter all over Chelsea and the Village, men who insist, at thirty and forty or older, that they have always been chipper and confident, powerful of body; that they've never been strange children, never taunted or despised. Richard argues that etnernally youthful gay men do more harm to the cause than do men who seduce little boys, and yes, it's true that Walter brings no shadow of adult irony or cynicism, nothing remotely profound, to his interest in fame and fashions, the latest resteraunt. Yet it is this greedy innocence that Clarissa appreciates. DOn't we love children, in part, because they live outside the realm of cynicism and irony? Is it so terrible for a man to want more youth, more pleasure?....These days Claissa believes you measure people first by their kindess and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius. She refuses to stop enjoying Walter's shamelss shallowness ... and has actually inspired Richard to wonder out loud if she, Clarissa, isnt more than a little vain and foolish herself.
He seemed to decide early on that Clarissa stands not only for herself but for the gifts and frailties of her entire sex. Richard has always been Clarissa's most rigorous, infuriating companion, her best friend, and if Richard were still himself, untouched by illness, they could be together right now, arguing about Walter and the quest for etneral youth, about how gay men have taken to imitating the boys who tortured them in high school.
Clarissa has become a society wife.
You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for changes.
There is no comfort in the world of objects, and Clarissa fears that art, even the greatest of it, belong stubbornly in the world of objects. Standing in front of the bookstore window, she is visited by an old memory, a tree branch tapping agaisnt a window as, from somehwere else, faint music, the low moan of a jazz band, started up on a phonograph. It is not her first memory or even her second, but this memory more than any other feels urgent and deeply, almost supernaturally comforting...Clarissa would have been about three or four, in a house to which she would never return, about which she retains no recollection except this, utterly disticnt, clearer than some things that happened yesterday: a branch tapping at a window as the sound of horns began; as if the tree, unsettled by wind, had somehow caused the music. It seems that at the moment she beganto inhabit the world; to understand the promises implied by an order larger than human happiness, though it contained human happiness along with every other emotion. The branch adn the music matter more to her than do all the books in the window. She wants for Evan and she wants for herself a book that can carry what that singular memory carries....You want to like her, you struggle to, but hse is finally too despotic in her intellectual and moral intensity..You know she mocks you, privately, for your comforts, your quant notions of lesbian identity. You grow weary for being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; you want to scream at Mary that it doesnt make a difference...
Here is the world, and you live in it, and you are grateful. You try to be grateful.
Mary hovers over the lilies and roses,preparing to be appalled at waht Clarisssa will spend [guilt, guilt, it looks like you never outgrow it]
reading were the only viable way to negotiate the transit from sleep to obligation. she inhalses deeply. it is so beautiful; it is so much more than ... well, than almost anything, really. in another world, she might have spent her whole life reading. but this is the new world, the rescued world - there's not much room for idleness.
with her husband present, she is more nervous but less afraid. she knows how to act. alone with richie, she sometimes feels unmoored - he is so entirely, persuasively himself. he wants what he wants so avidly. he cries mysteriously, makes indecipherable demands, courts her, pleads with her, ignores her. he seems, almost always, to be waitng to see what she will do next...alone with the child, though, she loses direction. she cant always remember how a mother would act.
He wanted too much. Wasn't it just another poetic conceit, Richard's idea of her? It seems definitive; it seems like the one moment at which one possible future ended and a new one begun.
A work of art can continue to surprise; simply because it remains, throughout time, so purely and utterly itself.
Richard alone among Clarissa's acquaintance has no essential interest in famous people. Richard genuinely does not recognize such distinctions. It is, Clarissa thinks, some combination of monumental ego and a kind of savantism. Richard cannot imagine a life more interesting or worthwhile than those being lived by his acquaintances and himself, and for that reason one often feels exalted, expanded, in his presence. He is not one of those egotists who miniaturizes others. He is the opposite kind of egotist, driven by grandiosity rather than greed, and if he insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and profound than you suspsect yourself to be - capable of doing more good and more harm than in the world than you've ever imagined - it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and for a while after you've left him , that he alone sees through to your essence, weighs your true qualities, and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has. It is only after knowing him for some time that you begin to realize you are, to him, an essentially fictional character, one he has invested with nearly limitless capacities for tragedy and comedy not because that is your true nature but because he, Richard, needs to live in a world peopled by extreme and commanding figures. Some have ended their relations with him rather than continue as figures in the epic poem he is alawys composing inside his head, the story of his life and passions; but others enjoy the sense of hyperbole he brings to their lives, have come evev to depend on it, the way they depend on coffee to wake them up in the mornings.
Oh, Mrs. D., the truth is, I'm embarrassed to go to this party. I've failed so terribly. It was just too much for me. I thought I was a bigger figure than I was. Can I tell you an embarrassing secret? I thought I was a genius.
We're middle aged and we're young lovers standing beside a pond. We're everything all at once. Isnt that remarkable?
I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might die.
How is it possible that she feels regret? How can she imagine, even now, that they might have had a life together?
clarissa would have a love; one of those passions that flare up when one is young, ... to refuse the future that's been offered and demand another, far grander and stranger, devised and wholly owned by oneself..
clarissa dallowaywill kill herself over something that seems, on the surface, like very little. her party will fail or her husband will once again refuse to notice some effort seh'd made about her person or their home. the trick will be to render intact the magnitude of clarissa's miniature but very real desperation; to fully convince the reader that, for her, domestic defeats are every bit as devasting as are lost battles to a general.
why is it so difficult to be firm and kind with nelly; to command her respect and her love?
[stopped at page 90]
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| MSF Nobel Award Acceptance Speech Excerpts |
[07 Apr 2004|08:39pm] |
It is the sick, the old and the infirm who cannot escape Grozny. While the dignity of people in crisis is so central to the honor you give today, what you acknowledge in us is our particular response to it.
But also a profound discomfort in knowing that the dignity of the excluded is assaulted daily. These are the forgotten populations in danger, like the street children who struggle each grinding hour to live off the waste of those who are «included» in the social and economic order. These too are the illegal refugees that we work with in Europe, denied political status, and afraid to seek health care, lest this contact leads to their expulsion.
Our action is to help people in situations of crisis. And ours is not a contented action. Bringing medical aid to people in distress is an attempt to defend them against what is aggressive to them as human beings. Humanitarian action is more than simple generosity, simple charity. It aims to build spaces of normalcy in the midst of what is abnormal. More than offering material assistance, we aim to enable individuals to regain their rights and dignity as human beings. As an independent volunteer association, we are committed to bringing direct medical aid to people in need. But we act not in a vacuum, and we speak not into the wind, but with a clear intent to assist, to provoke change, or to reveal injustice. Our action and our voice is an act of indignation, a refusal to accept an active or passive assault on the other.
Silence has long been confused with neutrality, and has been presented as a necessary condition for humanitarian action. From its beginning, MSF was created in opposition to this assumption. We are not sure that words can always save lives, but we know that silence can certainly kill. Over our 28 years we have been – and are today – firmly and irrevocably committed to this ethic of refusal.
Humanitarianism occurs where the political has failed or is in crisis. We act not to assume political responsibility, but firstly to relieve the inhuman suffering of failure. The act must be free of political influence, and the political must recognize its responsibility to ensure that the humanitarian can exist. Humanitarian action requires a framework in which to act.
In conflict, this framework is international humanitarian law. It establishes rights for victims and humanitarian organisations and fixes the responsibility of states to ensure respect of these rights and to sanction their violation as war crimes. Today this framework is clearly dysfuntional. Access to victims of conflict is often refused. Humanitarian assistance is even used as a tool of war by belligerents. And more seriously, we are seeing the militarisation of humanitarian action by the international community.
In this dysfunction, we will speak-out to push the political to assume its inescapable responsibility. Humanitarianism is not a tool to end war or to create peace. It is a citizen's response to political failure. It is an immediate, short term act that cannot erase the long term necessity of political responsibility.
And ours is an ethic of refusal. It will not allow any moral political failure or injustice to be sanitized or cleansed of its meaning.
Language is determinant. It frames the problem and defines response, rights and therefore responsibilities. It defines whether a medical or humanitarian response is adequate. And it defines whether a political response is inadequate. No one calls a rape a complex gynecologic emergency. A rape is a rape, just as a genocide is a genocide. And both are a crime. For MSF, this is the humanitarian act: to seek to relieve suffering, to seek to restore autonomy, to witness to the truth of injustice, and to insist on political responsibility.
The work that MSF chooses does not occur in a vacuum, but in a social order that both includes and excludes, that both affirms and denies, and that both protects and attacks. Our daily work is a struggle, and it is intensely medical, and it is intensely personal. MSF is not a formal institution, and with any luck at all, it never will be. It is a civil society organization, and today civil society has a new global role, a new informal legitimacy that is rooted in its action and in its support from public opinion. It is also rooted in the maturity of its intent, in for example the human rights, the environmental and the humanitarian movements, and of course, the movement for equitable trade. Conflict and violence are not the only subjects of concern. We, as members of civil society, will maintain our role and our power if we remain lucid in our intent and independence.
As civil society we exist relative to the state, to its institutions and its power. We also exist relative to other non-state actors such as the private sector. Ours is not to displace the responsibility of the state. Ours is not to allow a humanitarian alibi to mask the state responsibility to ensure justice and security. And ours is not to be co-managers of misery with the state. If civil society identifies a problem, it is not theirs to provide a solution, but it is theirs to expect that states will translate this into concrete and just solutions. Only the state has the legitimacy and power to do this. Today, a growing injustice confronts us. More than 90% of all death and suffering from infectious diseases occurs in the developing world. Some of the reasons that people die from diseases like AIDS, TB, Sleeping Sickness and other tropical diseases is that life saving essential medicines are either too expensive, are not available because they are not seen as financially viable, or because there is virtually no new research and development for priority tropical diseases. This market failure is our next challenge. The challenge however, is not ours alone. It is also for governments, International Government Institutions, the Pharmaceutical Industry and other NGOs to confront this injustice. What we as a civil society movement demand is change, not charity.
We affirm the independence of the humanitarian from the political, but this is not to polarize the «good» NGO against «bad» governments, or the «virtue» of civil society against the «vice» of political power. Such a polemic is false and dangerous. As with slavery and welfare rights, history has shown that humanitarian preoccupations born in civil society have gained influence until they reach the political agenda. But these convergences should not mask the distinctions that exist between the political and the humanitarian. Humanitarian action takes place in the short term, for limited groups and for limited objectives. This is at the same time both its strength and its limitation. The political can only be conceived in the long term, which itself is the movement of societies. Humanitarian action is by definition universal, or it is not. Humanitarian responsibility has no frontiers. Wherever in the world there is manifest distress, the humanitarian by vocation must respond. By contrast, the political knows borders, and where crisis occurs, political response will vary because historical relations, balance of power, and the interests of one or the other must be considered. The time and space of the humanitarian are not those of the political. These vary in opposing ways, and this is another way to locate the founding principles of humanitarian action: the refusal of all forms of problem solving through sacrifice of the weak and vulnerable. No victim can be intentionally discriminated against, OR neglected to the advantage of another. One life today cannot be measured by its value tomorrow: and the relief of suffering «here», cannot legitimize the abandoning of relief «over there». The limitation of means naturally must mean the making of choice, but the context and the constraints of action do not alter the fundamentals of this humanitarian vision. It is a vision that by definition must ignore political choices.
Today there is a confusion and inherent ambiguity in the development of so-called 'military humanitarian operations'. We must reaffirm with vigor and clarity the principle of an independent civilian humanitarianism. And we must criticize those interventions called «military-humanitarian». Humanitarian action exists only to preserve life, not to eliminate it. Our weapons are our transparency, the clarity of our intentions, as much as our medicines and our surgical instruments. Our weapons cannot be fighter jets and tanks, even if sometimes we think their use may respond to a necessity. We are not the same, we cannot be seen to be the same, and we cannot be made to be the same. Concretely, this is why we refused any funding from NATO member states for our work in Kosovo. And this is why we were critical then and are critical now of the humanitarian discourse of NATO. It is also why on the ground, we can work side by side with the presence of armed forces, but certainly not under their authority.
The debate on the «Droit d'Ingerence» – the right of state intervention for so called humanitarian purposes – is further evidence of this ambiguity. It seeks to put at the level of the humanitarian, the political question of the abuse of power, and to seek a humanitarian legitimacy for a security action through military means. When one mixes the humanitarian with the need for public security, then one inevitably tars the humanitarian with the security brush. It must be recalled that the UN Charter obliges states to intervene sometimes by force to stop threats to international peace and security. There is no need, and indeed a danger, in using a humanitarian justification for this. In Helsinki this weekend governments will sit down to establish the makings of a European army, but to be available for humanitarian purposes. We appeal to governments to go no further down this path of dangerous ambiguity. But we also encourage states to seek ways to enforce public security so that international humanitarian and human rights law can be respected.
Humanitarian action comes with limitations. It cannot be a substitute for political action. In Rwanda, early in the genocide, MSF spoke out to the world to demand that genocide be stopped by the use of force. And, so did the Red Cross. It was however, a cry that met with institutional paralysis; with acquiescence to self-interest, and with a denial of political responsibility to stop a crime that was «never again» to go unchallenged. The genocide was over before the UN Operation Turquoise was launched.
I would like for a moment to acknowledge among our invited guests Chantal Ndagijimana. She lost 40 members of her family in Rwanda's genocide in 1994. Today she is a part of our team in Brussels. She survived the genocide, but like a million others, her mother and father, brothers and sisters did not. And nor did many hundreds of our national staff. I was Head of Mission in Kigali during that time. No words can describe the sheer courage with which they worked. No words can describe the horror that they died in. And no words can describe the deepest sorrow that I and all in MSF will carry always.
I remember what one of my patients said to me in Kigali: «Ummera, Ummera-sha». It is a Rwandan saying that loosely translated, means «courage, courage, my friend – find and let live your courage». It was said to me in Kigali at our hospital, by a woman who was not just attacked with a machete, but her entire body rationally and systematically mutilated. Her ears had been cut off. And her face had been so carefully disfigured, that a pattern was obvious in the slashes. There were hundreds of women, children and men brought to the hospital that day, so many that we had to lay them out on the street. And in many cases, we operated on them then and there, as the gutters around the hospital literally ran red with blood. She was one among many – living an inhuman and simply indescribable suffering. We could do little more for her at that moment than stop the bleeding with a few necessary sutures. We were completely overwhelmed, and she knew that there were so many others. She knew and I knew. She released me from my own inescapable hell. She said to me in the clearest voice I have ever heard «allez, allez ... ummera, ummera-sha» – «go, go... my friend; find and let live your courage».
There are limits to humanitarianism. No doctor can stop a genocide. No humanitarian can stop ethnic cleansing, just as no humanitarian can make war. And no humanitarian can make peace. These are political responsibilities, not humanitarian imperatives. Let me say this very clearly: the humanitarian act is the most apolitical of all acts, but if it actions and its morality are taken seriously, it has the most profound of political implications. And the fight against impunity is one of these implications.
This is exactly what has been affirmed with the creation of the international criminal courts for both the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. It is also what has been affirmed with the adoption of statutes for an International Criminal Court. These are significant steps. But today on the 51th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the court does not yet exist, and the principles have only been ratified by three states in the last year. At this rate it will take 20 years before the court comes into being. Must we wait this long? Whatever the political costs of creating justice for states, MSF can and will testify that the human costs of impunity are impossible to bear.
Only states can impose respect for humanitarian law and that effort cannot be purely symbolic. Srebrenica was apparently a safe haven in which we were present. The UN was also present. It said it would protect. It had Blue Helmets on the ground. And the UN stood silent and present – as the people of Srebrenica were massacred.
After the deadly attempts of UN intervention in Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, which led to the death of thousands. MSF objects to the principle of military intervention which do not stipulate clear frameworks of responsibility and transparency. MSF does not want military forces to show that they can put up refugee tents faster than NGOs. Armies should be at the service of governments and policies which seek to protect the rights of victims.
If UN military operations are to protect civilian populations in the future, going beyond the «mea culpa» excuses of the Secretary General over Srebrenica and Rwanda, there must be a reform of peacekeeping operations in the UN. Member States of the Security Council must be held publicly accountable for the decisions that they do or do not vote for. Their right to veto should be regulated. Member States should be bound to ensure that adequate means are made available to implement the decisions they take.
Yes, humanitarian action has limits. It also has responsibility. It is not only about rules of right conduct and technical performance. It is at first an ethic framed in a morality. The moral intention of the humanitarian act must be confronted with its actual result. And it is here where any form of moral neutrality about what is good must be rejected. The result can be the use of the humanitarian in 1985 to support forced migration in Ethiopia, or the use in 1996 of the humanitarian to support a genocidal regime in the refugee camps of Goma. Abstention is sometimes necessary so that the humanitarian is not used against a population in crisis. More recently, in North Korea, we were the first independent humanitarian organization to gain access in 1995. However, we chose to leave in the fall of 1998. Why? Because we came to the conclusion that our assistance could NOT be given freely and independent of political influence from the state authorities. We found that the most vulnerable were likely to remain so, as food aid is used to support a system that in the first instance creates vulnerability and starvation among millions. Our humanitarian action must be given independently, with a freedom to assess, to deliver and to monitor assistance so that the most vulnerable are assisted first. Aid must not mask the causes of suffering, and it cannot be simply an internal or foreign policy tool that creates rather than counters human suffering. If this is the case, we must confront the dilemma and consider abstention as the least of bad options. As MSF, we constantly call into question the limits and ambiguities of humanitarian action – particularly when it submits in silence to the interests of states and armed forces.
Last week, the United States Congress passed a bill authorizing direct food transfers to the Rebels in South Sudan. This is a misappropriation of the meaning and intent of humanitarian assistance. It makes food a fuel of war. And it is a dereliction of a state's duty to use any and all political means to address a 17 year-long civil war that has left millions dead. Sudan's civil war today is a human misery where millions are displaced and at risk of starvation and disease; where people are bombed, robbed, looted constantly, and even enslaved, while corporate oil interests are protected, where humanitarian space is so severely restricted that it exists only in pockets; and where we and other NGOs and UN Agencies struggle to bring humanitarian assistance and protection. Is food the only political option to curb war? Food aid or humanitarian assistance, if it is to be «humanitarian assistance» – cannot be a tool in state-craft. In this case we must denounce the perfidious use of food that confuses the meaning of humanitarian assistance. If the political masks itself in an ambulance, then it is certain that the ambulance will be fired on. As well, if food is allowed to be used as a weapon of war, then it also legitimates that populations can be starved as a weapon of war.
Independent humanitarianism is a daily struggle to assist and protect. In the vast majority of our projects it is played out away from the media spotlight, and away from the attention of the politically powerful. It is lived most deeply, most intimately in the daily grind of forgotten war and forgotten crisis. Numerous peoples of Africa literally agonise in a continent rich in natural resources and culture. Hundreds of thousands of our contemporaries are forced to leave their lands and their family to search for work, food, to educate their children and to stay alive. Men and women risk their lives to embark on clandestine journeys only to end up in a hellish immigration detention centre, or barely surviving on the periphery of our so called civilised world.
Our volunteers and staff live and work among people whose dignity is violated every day. These volunteers choose freely to use their liberty to make the world a more bearable place. Despite grand debates on world order, the act of humanitarianism comes down to one thing: individual human beings reaching out to their counterparts who find themselves in the most difficult circumstances. One bandage at a time, one suture at a time, one vaccination at a time. And, uniquely for Médecins Sans Frontières, working in around 80 countries, over 20 of which are in conflict, telling the world what they have seen. All this in the hope that the cycles of violence and destruction will not continue endlessly.
For its affirmation of the road MSF has chosen to take: to remain outspoken, passionate and deeply committed to its core principles of volunteerism, impartiality, and its belief that every person deserves both medical assistance and the recognition of his or her humanity. We would like to take this opportunity to state our deepest appreciation to the volunteers and national staff who have made these ambitious ideals a concrete reality, and who have, we believe, brought some peace to the world that has experienced such immense suffering and who are the living reality of MSF.
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| Cold Mountain interview with director Anthony Minghella |
[30 Mar 2004|09:07pm] |
From the South China Morning Post 2/12/04
Cold Mountain is full ofthose moments of delciious frustration when your heart is prevented from sighing, your spirits from soaring, at the last possible second.
compulsive undercutter
When Catherine and Almasy get time alone, it quickly turns sour?
"What do you hate?"
"Ownership."
It all goes very cold.
There are love stories in my film but they're always treated with a sort of ... It's just about reminding myself that there is no free time. Nothing is allowed to exist without the context of a larger rift. In the English Patient, it's the fact that someone is suffering while there's joy. In Cold Mountain, it's the war. I feel myself not allowing my characters or film to luxuriate in any moment.
Cold Mountain is characterised most strongly by intimacy and fragility. I was thinking there was a filament to which they were clinging, which was largely illusory. They don't really know one another, and they feel stupid in some ways because they're clinging to something that might not even exist. The 100 letters mailed off into the ether, become a metaphor for this theoretical love, this symbolic obsession. It's not a love story. It's about people clinging to notions of fidelity and truth in the face of absolutely no evidence. The claim that merges gradually from the movie is that the missing letters - and by extension, language itself - are superflous. The film sentence is not based on speaking, but on the juxtaposition of shots.
I want my films to have some kind of moral gymnamsium in them. I've got to persuade myself that I'm not just telling a story, that there's something worth saying - a struggle worth sharing. He is trying to correct his overdeveloped internal life and undernourished external life. I want to foce myself out of this corseted intellectual life. It was an ongoing dream that played into this very primal anxiety we have about neglect. A fear that we're not paying attention. What was strange was that the dream would not resolve itself during the day. I'm a very guilt ridden person. That's in all of my films - they're very Catholic. I don't fully understand it. But I know there's a lot of struggle with myself just to know how to live better. How to be better.
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| i love hong kong |
[20 Mar 2004|08:22pm] |
all of a sudden, i realized that i am more then halfway done with my study abroad experience here. it took me a while to get used to hong kong, and all the while, time has been passing by. and there are a lot of things that i do appreciate about hong kong. at first, it was just too much of everything for me: too crowded, too busy, too dirty, too smelly. now, i can tolerate those things. but it is a bit too polluted for me. i dont like how the bay is gross with the stuff they have dumped into it.
1) i LOVE the food. love love love it. the egg tarts, the mochi, all the little desserts, the mango sago, all the street food, squid & scallop on a stick, the little pacakged soy bean milk, the apple green tea, the milk tea for less than a dollar, wonton egg noodles, there is so much good food i could go on and on. and the prices for it all, i could eat for days. really, some of the other exchange kids say how they get sick of the food here. maybe because i have grown up eating cantonese food, but i love it.
2) i love walking around the city. before, it tired me out because it is so crowded that i would hate walking around because it's such a fight for sidewalk space. i am still not that used to it, but you tolerate it because you have to. i love central/sheung wan area. my local friends, ray and davis, brought me around the area. and even though i didnt intend to shop, in hk for me, i cant not buy things. but it makes me feel better because the purpose of my trip wasnt just to shop like it is when i go to mong kok, yau mau tai or TST. here, it was just a side excursion from soaking in hk culture. we walked around the dried sea food stalls, crafts/antiques stuff (which is pretty much tourist catered). its very hard to avoid shopping in hk because there is so much to see. sensory overload for sure.
3) there really is more of culture scene than what i first thought. at first, everyone told me what a cosmopolitan city hk is, and it wasnt totally what i expected it to be so i was a bit disappointed. theres a lot of cantopop, cheesy romantic movies stuff but i wanted things with more substance. i did too many comparisons between hk and vienna (which has ballet, opera, etc for standing room ticket prices of 2/3 euros. LOVED it). then, i discovered they have all of these festivals. i saw a few plays/shows through the hk arts festival. then they had a book festival (which i missed because it was during midterms. i know it's my fault for not being able to handle this work life balance thing), and now they have an international film festival where there seems to be like a million movies showing. i cant make up my mind which ones i want to watch. regarding cantopop stuff, i started appreciating that stuff more too. i really like edison chen, i have grown more teeny bopper. and wong kar wai movies ... SOO good. i have a new found appreciation for tony leung. i want to watch many more cantonese movies.
4) it's so interesting reading/hearing about the governments. maybe because i (finally) have started reading the newspapers on a semi-regular basis. the people here are nice. i want to have more local friends. which i also know it's up to me to go out and meet them. i want to explore how they think, but it is so easy to settle into the comfort bubble of the int'l kids and my routine with studying/trying to find a job. and time keeps on ticking. i want my med school buddies to email me back. (a lot of the busienss kids are younger than me and seem to be a bit more sheltered. the med school kids i know are more worldy/western).
5) i love how hk is a mixture of old/new. and city and islands. i went to cheung chau last weekend, and we rode around on bikes. we didnt get to do everything i wanted to do (eat seafood, explore the beaches, there's a bun festival there!) so i must go back. yeah, i am trying to do as many outdoorsy things before the weather turns disgustingly hot/humid like houston. theres hiking and all this nature-y stuff that i didnt really know hk had.
there is so much to do in the city. i dont want to leave hk with regrets about things undone. and i still want to make it to beijing, singapore/malaysia/possibly bangkok again. so many places to travel.
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| Lost in Translation |
[11 Mar 2004|01:03am] |
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He always had an edge – my God, that smirk – but as he settles into middle age, it’s what’s underneath the smirk that counts. And what’s underneath the smirk is utter despair. Bob is bored, dissatisfied. Moreover, he’s jet-lagged and fumbling in an alien culture; when he calls home for comfort, his harried wife just wants to know what color he prefers for the den carpeting. In short, the guy needs a shaking up, and bad. So does Charlotte (Ghost World’s Johansson), a wandering twentysomething stuck at the same Tokyo hotel for a week while her hip, fawning photographer husband (Ribisi) shoots a music video. Charlotte has no career (she lists off the endeavors, like writing and photography, she has tried, then put aside), but plenty of doubts about her marriage. She and Bob, neither able to sleep, bump into each other in the hotel bar, then the pool. Soon, they run around Tokyo together, drinking and singing karaoke into the early-morning hours when a person becomes most vulnerable, and most aching to connect. They do connect, not sexually (although the question hangs in the air throughout), but in a far more profound – and risky – way: when you lay yourself bare to another and ask them to reassure you that you are unique, that the ordinary you is worthy of the extraordinary. And extraordinary their relationship becomes, a yearning, indelible love-affair-that-isn’t. It spans a week, at the most, and consists of no thundering moments of action or clarity. Both actors – Johansson, with her full-lipped, sensual glumness, and Murray, when his face is slack and unfeeling – are too sensitive for much emoting; when they do slide into a fit of expressiveness, a loud laugh or a cockeyed lip that curls into a smile, the effect is startling. (And often very funny: Murray, in particular, has moments of sublime physical comedy.) With Lost in Translation, Coppola shakes loose the dreaminess and self-seriousness of her first feature, the very fine Virgin Suicides. She’s still banging away at the same ideas – what it means to be human and needy – but she does so here with a far more naturalistic, self-effacing approach. She, and her characters, know this isn’t end-of-the-world stuff – without their finding each other, Bob and Charlotte would have been OK. But to hope, to demand, better than OK is also what it means to be human. Lost in Translation is a film about catharsis, the kind that exists outside of movies: the slow reawakening, triggered by the compassion and like-mindedness of another, that everyone craves. Coppola’s film, a lovely, quietly thrilling thing, begins with a man, thick with ragged, wincing despair, looking around and questioning, "Is this all there is?" And by film’s end, the defiant negation: No, there’s so much more.
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| misc random notes |
[10 Mar 2004|02:51pm] |
these are really notes for myself but for some reason on the chinese computers, i cant find the private button. so yeah, please dont read this.
i want to stay abroad. i know its quite immature and unrealistic of me to talk like this. i know i have a wonderful life ahead of me blah blah blah, but this life where we can just focus all this time on just ourselves to figure things out, i love it. i know i will grow out of this selfishness phase (i hope so for my kids' sake) but when will ever feel this free of responsibility?
from amy
Oh yay!! Really, what's a more fabulous life than jetting off to Japan for
the weekend? so glad to hear you enjoyed it... and yeah, that's the only
thing about traveling. Everywhere you go, the destination kind of adheres to
you, and you find yourself missing it as soon as you leave and making plans
to go back someday. Except there's only so much time and with every trip you
take that list of places to go back to only grows longer.
i am enjoying exploring hong kong. i really do like it, it's so different from what i am used to. i feel like i am learning new things all the time, i love that feeling. and today, the weather is beautiful (i appreciate it that much more because i know it will get hot and humid soon), and i kind of just finished a report, times like this i want to stay young forever. when the moment that you are in is so perfect and you realize it is so and that it wont/cant last forever.
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| more about philippines |
[28 Jan 2004|08:49pm] |
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we had a little cottage that was about five feet from the ocean. and it was a really secluded resort; i think we were the only ones on the beach. and the water was clear and you could see the rocks and seaweed at the bottom. and as for snorkeling...once i figured out how to use my mask (i know, it's supposed to be self explanatory but somehow i still mess things up), very cool. the corals and the fish were amazing. i definitely want to do it again.
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| i wish i could have stood where you would've been proud -- dixie chicks |
[28 Jan 2004|01:43am] |
hola mi amigos,
yes, i have decided that you do want to hear from me but of course not about everything because it would just be too much for me to write and yall would get bored. hmmm... what are the main things that i am going through/want to tell you about?
i saw the big buddha, one of the main toursit attractions on sunday since i wanted to see what it was like with all of the chinese new year's festivities. so awesome. it's supposed to be the largest outdoor buddha. v. impressive. and the view from the mountain was gorgeous too. and i went into the temples and prayed. but really, i was thinking about it, and buddhism, like straight buddhism doesnt have all of this praying involved. it really is just living your life as a good person. i have been reading up on buddhism and i think that is the main thing for me to take away. forget everything else - just be a good person, lead a good life, and that is enough.
s00b, you need to suggest to me the good hindu book that jason read and that you love. i want to learn more about different religions.
i go through of course, my sophia ups and downs. still trying to reel those emotions in. one of the books i was reading about buddhism was saying how important it is for the person to be at peace with him/herself so that they can then do good in the world. and how its ok to take an hour or hours for drinking tea (it made me feel better because i really picked that up from europe, just going slow and enjoying time to relax).
i went karoeking in philippines. saw the beaches there. went snorkeling. great fun. just quite depressing to see all the children beggers. makes me wonder what the government/people can do to help them out. i know helping the world starts with yourself then a few peopel then the community, etc etc but yeah, when do the people start to really benefit? egads. makes me more motivated to do something for the good of the people. and makes me realize how interdepedent we all are. i dont know. i want to do something.
there is actually a lot more to hong kong than just shopping. i am banning myself from going to the shopping areas until i have done a more thorough job exploring everything else. hmmm...i think that is it for now.
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| i have to find you, tell you i need you - coldplay |
[08 Jan 2004|02:15pm] |
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i have arrived safely in hong kong. i am really excited about exploring the city, more than just the shopping areas. this semester is different from last semester because then i didnt care much about vienna and wanted to travel to the rest of europe. and i also really enjoyed the international students there and didnt really interact with the locals. here, the school wants to integrate the students and the locals. and most of the exchange students are from north america, specifically california. and i dont think i can travel as much here because it is more expensive and class limits me. hong kong seems like such a vibrant city - more shopping and scenery than cultural things like museums in vienna. i cant stop the comparisons. the exchange kids seem ok. i need to search out some cool ones and of course get to know the locals. i will write more later. i am so behind on everything i feel like. yuck.
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| dixie chick songs i like |
[10 Dec 2003|05:12pm] |
CD: Home
Songs:
Top of the World
I believe in Love
Landslide
CD: Wide open spaces
Songs:
I?ll take care of you
You were mine
Wide open spaces
CD: Fly
Songs:
Ready to run
Cowboy take me away
Without you
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| i loved the hours |
[10 Dec 2003|05:10pm] |
FROM THE BOOK:
You want her to come inside your head for a few days and feel the worries and
sorrows, the nameless fear. You believe ? you know ? that you and Mary Krull
suffer from the same moral sickness, the same quasiness of soul, a nd with one
more turn of the dial, you might have been friends.
FROM A FILM REVIEW:
a modern-day Mrs. Dalloway in the midst of preparing to give a party, a
middle-aged woman existentially unraveling as she questions whether she has
lost that indefinable something essential to human fulfillment. At its core,
the beautifully realized film shows us human beings confronting the prospect of
stolen lives and deciding whether to take action to alter their destinies. They
are all slipping, in one way or another, and must choose whether to catch
themselves midfall or continue in their descent. (In this regard, the film is a
bookend of sorts to the other best film of 2002, About Schmidt.) Along with the
narrative linkages to the novel Mrs. Dalloway, screenwriter David Hare (who
hands down deserves a hundred accolades for this adaptation) and director
Daldry employ a number of other inspired echoes throughout The Hours, all of
which reverberate with a pristine and fluid clarity -- the ringing of an alarm
clock, the early arrival of a guest, a passionate kiss between two women, even
the simple cracking of an egg on the rim of a bowl. What is more astounding is
how the film builds momentum and creates a sense of suspense with each
illuminating resonance, immeasurably enhanced by a Philip Glass score that
under other circumstances might be irritatingly monotonous. The triumvirate of
performances at the heart of this film is simply remarkable. In a prosthetic
nose that renders her unrecognizable, a deglamorized Kidman makes for a
strikingly memorable Woolf. Given that the writer committed suicide by placing
a large stone in her coat pocket before walking into a river and drowning in
1941, it is fitting that Kidman plays her as a woman weighed down by her
literary genius, frustrated by her inability to use that intelligence to save
herself from mental illness. Moore's portrayal of Laura is a trickier
proposition, given the character's potential for cliché and the surface
similarity of the character to her recent turn as another Fifties suburban
housewife in Far From Heaven. But the quiet desperation that we see build
within Moore's increasingly disconnected Laura is painfully real, and it's
obvious to even the staunchest of traditionalists that she is not cut out for
the life that she is living. Of the three actresses, Streep gives the most
subtle and, in many ways, the most meaningful performance as Clarissa, a
contemporary woman who anguishes about whether, in Woolf's words, she has
looked at life in the face and known it. This may be Streep's most reactive
performance yet on film -- in almost every expression, you can see all of it
slowly sinking in. In one amazing scene, Streep ruminates about how the
possibility of happiness grows more elusive as we grow older. For anyone who
has ever pondered the matter, this scene -- and Streep's rendition of it --
will surely hit home. Near-perfect in every way, The Hours is a compelling
meditation on making the most of what we're given in life. For some, it may be
too cerebral a film experience, but for those who blissfully fall into its
finely tuned modulations, The Hours is timeless.
FROM ANOTHER FILM REVIEW:
THE FILM INTERWEAVES what are essentially three miniature movies about three
women who live decades apart and who, despite mourning for something they can?t
quite name, actually have a lust for life?just not for the ones they?re living.
Kidman (with a custom-built nose) plays a suicidal Virginia Woolf, who seems to
want to live only long enough to write ?Mrs. Dalloway.? Moore is a ?50s
housewife, who wants to live only long enough to read it. And Streep plays a
modern-day Manhattanite, who seems to have actually become Mrs. Dalloway and
realizes she?s lost the thread of her life as she plans a party for a friend
with AIDS.
streep: I hope they have the reaction that I did, which is to feel the
sharpness
of experience and, you know, how wonderful living is. Even though we walk
around whining or in despair or in trouble for different reasons, I thought
about just how beautiful it is to love someone and to be in your life. The
day-to-dayness of it. The hours. I mean, that?s what I walked away with. I
thought about how exquisitely this story is poised between despair and hope.
That?s the way a lot of us feel a lot of the time?especially now.
Meryl, this particular story line must have reminded you of ?Kramer vs.
Kramer.?
Streep: I did feel the reverberation of that story, and I felt the same
way: that there are some times where you make a horrifying choice, a terrible
choice, but it?s the best choice. [To Moore] That atmosphere in that house with
the little boy and you. The silence in that house. That suburban landscape. And
that stultifying task ahead of you: your job is to make a cake, also make the
beds, also think about dinner. That?s it. Certain creatures can?t breathe in
that atmosphere. This woman is suicidal. She doesn?t have a choice.
Moore: I said to a reporter today, ?Well, do you want a dead mother or
a
mother who has left?? And the guy said to me, ?Well, it?s all the same, isn?t
it?? And I went, ?O-Kaaaay.? A dead mother, an absent mother?he saw it as
abandonment both ways. So who knows. But that?s the thing about this movie. It
presents lives. As Meryl says, it presents the intensity of life. There doesn?t
have to be a judgment about it. It simply is what it is.
FROM THE BOOK:
Here is a mother both understanding of and unnerved by her son's love for her:
''He knows. He must know. . . . He is devoted, entirely, to the observation and
deciphering of her, because without her there is no world at all. . . . He will
watch her forever. He will always know when something is wrong. He will always
know precisely when and how much she has failed.'' It is only on reflection
that we realize that the mother's fear is also a legacy, a gift to the child,
something he will always know. But reflection is where many of our chances for
happiness lie, in the memory not of what happened but of what was promised.
FROM THE BOOK:
''It had seemed like the beginning of happiness,'' the New York Clarissa thinks
of her early relationship with Richard, ''and Clarissa is still sometimes
shocked, more than 30 years later, to realize that it was happiness. . . .
There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it
seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the
moment, right then. There has been no other.''
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| cowboy take me away - dixie chicks (i miss them and other american things) |
[08 Dec 2003|03:18pm] |
s00b, sorry i act jerkish to you sometimes.
i am at my most unproductive right now. i have loads of work to do and i should do it since i am leaving vienna soon and i want to have time to hang out with the kids before they and i leave but i cant get my mind to focus.
i love italy. i realize i didnt talk much about my trip. gelato was so good. the scenary there is amazing. it makes me realize how lucky i am to be able to see those sights. placs my parents havent seen and feel like they cant because of time/money. i decided i can/will live frugally in order to travel more. sienna was my favorite city. tuscany is gorgeous. ranking of the cities i saw in italy: sienna, florence, venice. and pisa doesnt count because all i saw there was the leaning tower.
top five(six) favorite cities in europe in no order: paris, sienna/brugge (because both offer the small town charm), prague, berlin, vienna
i like all the cities i have been to. all of them offer something unique. maybe all except for bratislava. that is what is so great about europe, there are such different cultures/lifestyles/etc all relatively close to each other.
i will quit going on about how much i love europe. i dont want to grow up yet.
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| Trying to keep up with you, and I don't know if I can do it - REM |
[03 Dec 2003|11:20am] |
ok once i get this out of my system then i wont talk about it or feel bad about making the wrong choice. just my two minutes to complain please. because then i will be super positive and not think about regrets and all this other stuff.
so there are two schools that ut exchanges to hong kong with. only two. and right now, not knowing how cool the kids will be, i feel like i have made the wrong choice. what a terribly pessimistic attitude i know. i will change it once i arrive.
its just that i like where i am so much, and i dont want to leave. and if i do have to leave, i want it to be something that will really be worth it. but i dont know if i will be as lucky a second time, meeting such a good group of kids and not being in class that often so i can travel more. so it's like i need next semester to be super terrific so i wont miss this semester, and yet, at the same time, i dont think it can be as good.
oh, so why i am sad about picking cuhk instead of hkust:
1) hkust starts a whole another month later. that means, i could have done more traveling: spain, croatia, slovenia. and i could have gone to the ball in vienna.
2) the class that i need to take is in cantonese. and it would have been in english at hkust.
3) the kids i know here from hong kong go to hkust and say that cuhk is harder. so that means less traveling during the semester.
4) there are too many american students studying at cuhk.
ok, that's it. i feel better now. i will have a super time in hong kong and meet super kids and travel a lot. and i will be inspired to write an excellent personal statement and find a job in my year off before medical school. right.
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| It's like a dream , no end and no beginning - Madonna |
[20 Nov 2003|12:07pm] |
sometimes i miss having my own computer. aiya.
i am at the airport waiting to go back to vienna from geneva. i cant believe it,
but i miss vienna. switzerland was very relaxing, maybe a bit too relaxing. i spent time with my two cousins and my aunt. and i have to say, my cousin must be money. his wife doenst work and his daughter, lea, takes german, art, flute, ballet and the list goes on lessons. she is so cute. it made me want to have mixed little kids (my cousin's wife is swiss german). i say i want to marry a cantonese guy but really whoever i end up falling in love with. because really how different are chinese from other people? and their apartment was really nice, like wooden floors, and they had this awning that was retractable, which i have never seen before. the view from their window overlooks to a lake and on the other side is france. gorgeous view. and i have to say, i love love love the european lifestyle.
i could go on but i think most of this stuff is only interesting to me. it's strange, i feel like i am learning and doing all these really cool things every day but i dont know how to convey it all to yall. so my trip normally turns into a two sentence i loved so and so.
traveling is great and wonderful, but vienna is home (for
now). and i miss the kids that i hang around with. the enviornment that we are in is so great. even if i stay friends with them, it will never be the same as being in haus erasmus (our dorm) with them. and it was strange, during my switzerland trip, i was thinking what the kids back at the dorm would think of this and what i would have to tell them when i got back, while i normally used to only wonder what you guys would think.
who ever said that you could get tired of doing nothing was lying. i love
traveling, and my few days of classes a week is fine by me. i dont think i
could ever get tired of this. i do want to be a socialite. this is the best
kind of life to have. i dont say i want to be a housewife because after a few
days of hanging out with my cousin's kid when he was sick was enough for me. i cant imagine doing it for forever. which makes me rethink the whole pediatrician thing. i am not bored because i get to talk to other students and learn from them. who needs book learning? i dont want to leave europe and this semester. feeling a lot of clarissa vaughn coming on. no no, life does get better (maybe). i feel like i have reached the top of the exponential curve. sigh. i really am so happy here. i think after my berlin/copenhagen trip, i realized it cant get better than this. and i let go of all of my insecurities and most of my to do list type personality. i hate
having the feeling of what else is out there that i normally have when i travel
and i want to see it all but there is never enough time. ahhhh. but no, i have
to let go of it. the stuff that i have done here has been pretty great and the other stuff that i didnt have time to do couldnt have been that super. at least
not with the time and money that i have to travel. and i say i want to come
back to europe, but really there is so much to see and if i do come back, i
dont know if i will have time to come back to the places i have already been.
i am going to italy next week. yeah, i do have classes and i mostly do homework and go to classes when i am here. so that means the few days i am in vienna are packed
full of school stuff. i have put a moratorium on finding a job. aiya. ok ok no
i love life and yes i love this.
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| New days are strange, is the world insane? - Black eyed peas |
[13 Nov 2003|12:18pm] |
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i love the mix of european and american music on the radio |
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hey s00bster & co,
this update is for yall since i think yall are the only ones that read this. really, i just move past emails. i will just summarize what i have sent out to other people.
i LOVED prague. so much. i wish i could have spent a longer time there. the food was good and cheap. they had all of these quaint little stalls of people selling jewelary and art. beautiful architecture.
and i really like the buddy network for our school. they organized the trip for our school. so nice huh? i feel spoiled soometimes. and traveling in such a big group was fun. there were about 60 of us that went and if you get bored of one group of people, you can always find other people to hang out with. a different kind of fun compared to my berlin/copenhagen trip where there were 4 other people i traveled with. in a car. for 16 hours. traveling brings you a lot closer to people. you find out so much more about them. this friday i am going to switzerland to visit some family. there is almost no time left! egads. and i still want to squeeze in venice and florence somehow. yeah, i cant do all of europe now and i know s00b is going to chastise me for not doing rome but i have to make decisions about where to go and rome i will of course come back to europe to see and it is so far south in italy. i think italy will be my last big trip and the rest of the time i will probably kick it in vienna, bonding with the kids. i really do love my dorm. the other night when i came back from prague, some of the kids were in the kitchen drinking tea and eating cookies. that's what i like to come home to. it's this nice warm welcome, staying up and talking. i love my life.
i think i am learning how to take it easy here. really. no worries. (i hope i am able to live this kind of life when i get back to america. easy for me to say this when i dont feel any real stress).
there is so much for me to do. i still havent been to all the cafes i want to go to. its the little things like lounging in a cafe that i will miss. yikes, i have to go to school. and if i dont write that often it's because i am in a cafe somewhere. enjoying the time i have left here.
love me.
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| the heart is a burning organ - the english patient |
[06 Nov 2003|06:48pm] |
ok so i just realized that my sent mail button doesnt work. and this journal is mainly for subrata's benefit, so i hope he appreciates it. and of course i appreciate the fact that he has gone to all of this trouble setting it all up for me. this is going to mostly be a repeat of what i send out as emails to people.
originally written 10-27-03
yes, i just saw the english patient. and ralph fiennes' character reminds me a lot of the one he played in end of the affair. he has the tormented lover/adulter thing down. this movie didnt hit me quite like end of the affair did, but the cinematography of it was gorgeous. slow start, but i stuck to it. some of the scenes were like "moving poetry" as my cousin likes to say. so, since i liked the movie, i decided to google a little bit about it (of course i have a million other things to do. i could always learn about world events.
dude, ok so my international finance professor was chief debt negotiator for slovenia after yugoslavia broke up into five countries. and they were trying to decide how much slovenia would have to pay and so he met up with some important
people at the international monetary fund and the world bank and the likes. so so cool. i mean, i dont know if i find it cool because i am business or what. no really, it's just cool. to think that your professor has a hand in the reconstruction of a country. because, yeah, everything is related to politics). oh, my point was that i wanted to learn about yugoslavia because really, my knowledge of world events is not so hot. i will google that later. oh, yeah,
back to english patient, i have to read the book i think:
The novel's sensual play of surfaces is particularly affecting in descriptions of lovers. The narrator describes the english patient's memories of his lover:
"Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or a tooth, as if they each could grip character there and during love pull it right off the body of the other" (173). Hana wants to understand who Kip essentially is. The narrator gives us her thoughts: "There isn't a key to him. Everywhere she touches braille doorways. As if organs, the heart, the rows of ribs, can be seen under the skin" (270). The surface of the body is the place where desire gets played out--not just physical desire, but desire for closeness to another person, for intimate knowledge of an identity that is wholly other. As close as Ondaatje's characters get, this desire is always frustrated and can get no deeper than the surface. The narrator even admits that he can't fully understand Hana, that he can't read beyond the surface of his own character.
http://www.cam-and-heather.com/cam_new/academia/ondaatje.html
and from a lecture on The English Patient
English B13, Intro to Fiction
Northwestern University
very cool. ok, i think (gasp) i have run out of things to say.
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[05 Nov 2003|03:31pm] |
vienna wise i just saw swan lake. and it was so awesome. so good. and standing
room tickets were only 3.5 euro. best money i have spent here so far i think.
like i know for the opera in nyc it was good but i felt like it was good
because it was the lincoln opera house. but swan lake was awesome. it was
everything i thought a ballet should be. the costumes, the scenary, the
orchestra, and most of all the performances lived up to my expecations and
more.
i went to bratislava a few weeks ago. and it was fine for a day trip. ate
really
well there for five euros. best meal i have had this trip i think. but we
missed the last train back to vienna, and let me say, bratislava is a scary
scary place to be after 8pm. we were trying to find a place to stay in a youth
hostel, and of course they were booked. i want to know who the heck goes stays
in bratislava? and we were joking around and saying how we would
have to stay at a bar and then go to the palace (because their were guards
there to protect us) until we left on the early morning train since we couldnt
find a place to stay. but then, at the hostel, we met this girl and her
boyfriend . and they let eight of us stay at their
place. for free! get this, her boyfriend works for dell computers. they were
really cool people. some of the very few who spoke english.
for a few days last week, i went to budapest. and that city is gorgeous. the
view from their hill is better than the view of paris from the eiffel tower.
and this view was for free! the best part. budapest was also cheap and of
course i stocked up on pastries there. that is how i try out each city. by the
pastries and gelato. surprisingly, pretty much everyone there speaks good
english, so it was very easy to navigate. i didnt get to do everything i wanted
to do there. there's never enough time. they had a synagoge that is the largest
active one in the world but of course it closes before 5pm. so yeah, didnt get
a chance to hit that up. you know how i love to check off things on my to do
list, but really, i think i am learning that you cant do that with these
cities. all of these sights take time to see and i guess quality is more
important than quantity.
this past weekend, i went to salzburg and then munich. i really enjoyed
salzburg. it's this city in the middle of the hills (really a lot like out of
the
sound of music). and while i was there, they were doing this cheesy rendition
of one of the songs i think it was i am 16 going on 17. anyhow, i have a ton of
pictures. passed by mozart's home. really, no need to pay to look
inside. munich reminded me of america. huge modern fastpaced city.
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