all play and no work

living alone means making up your own rules. or to live without them when you want. I took time off from whiling it away to being at the local duck-pond while the sun was high up and the cold wind confused one's sense of the sun's warmth. it was a week-day, so it was pretty empty, but being fort worth that's quite usual even over the weekends. I saw two old men feeding the ducks and geese (and swans?); some even venturing close enough to them to eat out of one's hands. in fact they were the third pair of ppl I saw feeding the ducks just today. and yes, a couple of the cutie pies (not the old men, the ducks) put up a clowning show for me, literally for me, cos they came up real close to me and kept 'duck'ing into the water and playing away.

next time, I'll stop to buy a loaf of bread before heading out to see my hungry friends.

another harsh winter for parts of the country, especially after long spells of unreasonable warm weather. but I'm away from it all, and do feel kinda good about that most of the time. so its not the weather. its not even the end of the winter vacation because that usually lasts only the first week into the semester. this is worrying then. lately a strange feeling has been gripping me, over and over again, pretty often. and whenever I try to express it to myself or try to have a conversation with myself about it, you know "a talk", so that my inner self knows I don't approve, I keep formulating the word 'angst'. yeah, just that. the talk doesn't even begin. only my mind and my tongue (in my mind) collude together to produce this word and present it to me.

today is probably the second or third day this has happened. and of course, the first day, I dutifully looked it up even though I had more than a sense of what it meant. I was curious to know how it had found me. so looking it up again now, Merriam-Webster defines it as "a strong feeling of being worried or nervous; a feeling of anxiety about your life or situation". Now mark those words, its not just any feeling of worry or anxiety, it is a strong feeling and about not something trivial but about your life or as they say it about your situation. so seeing it spelled out like that made me even worse. at the same time, it was kind of shocking to realize how well some words describe the prick or stab or dead heavy weight of the emotion they so innocuously seem to simply name. angst is not just worry or anxiety or nervousness, it is - angst. nothing else can quite substitute for it alone.

and apparently there isn't an adverb associated with it. its kinda threatening in its exclusivity of use in the language. you cannot be angst-..., you can only feel (deep) angst. and from one victim to another (if you've ever known it) you know when it has found you. it lies there on the tip of your tongue, as a cloud in your mind, as a stone in your heart, as something that makes you shiver and sweat and tremble and lay inert all at the same time.

what is it in my life right now that brought it. I guess its the dread of my current days becoming my unforeseen future. they say being an educator is in many ways a service to society. and I used to think that's what my life lacked in a way, that I'd been too selfish and luxurious in my life choices so far, and that I needed to give back, to relate with people. but the last few days I have found myself thinking "I need to do something for myself, I need to do something for the pleasure it gives me in doing it, in creating, in struggling. and to hell with the world and its people." I haven't even seen a movie alone in months now. I've been waiting to find the time to go see Jackson Pollock's black paintings at the ongoing rare exhibition at the Dallas museum of art. its even been a month since I had my favorite pizza or ate at that Salvadorean place or went exploring the Southside.

this is my first time managing a heavy course load of teaching. and I wonder if this model dilutes the quality because it treats us like laborforce and treats students like the quantity of output. not just that, now labor needs to adjust to the (free) time zone of students who work full time. it leaves us not only tired but limited to our schedules and isolated because everyone is slave to their schedule and has time for nothing else. there are colleagues I haven't seen at all since this semester started just because our schedules don't coincide and neither can ever be found here at any other time than when scheduled to be here. what are we doing to that dream of education as the savior? where are we headed?

(a future post someday on the hyper-commercialization of education).

travel, cars, and coming back home

From a one day trip to DC only to visit an embassy for a visa application, to a weekend trip abroad for a conference and sightseeing, to simply visiting hubby or with him visiting his brother, travelling is quite an event in my life. even though it comes quite often these years. I do enjoy it, even the annoying bits like the cleaning up my apartment before I travel and those crazy early morning flights for which I've devised a convenient plan : bathe the night before - wake up in the middle of night - pee and brush teeth and wash face - sleep in the cab and at the boarding gate and in the plane - wake up fresh at landing with the entire day before me at my destination. but I do not like the feeling of coming back home, despite the fact that my home is beautiful and lovely in every way. its not just the coming back home that's in that feeling I'm talking about. sometimes its coming back to strenuous teaching, sometime to exciting work (when I was still doing my PhD) which has been ignored because it did not find the ambience for it, sometimes to the heat in texas, sometimes to just a busy monday night around the corner. there's apprehension, fear, excitement, loneliness, and often an unexplained panic, in coming back home. of getting back to whatever the travel had earlier been a much-longed break from.

these last two episodes of travel though - lisbon, and right now los angeles - have had a new feeling in that scramble of 'coming back emotions'. probably because these two were kinda luxurious trips in some way that I never earlier could afford (not just in terms of money). and I have myself changed a lot compared to my younger self, and I look for different things, and travel around differently. plus, airbnb has changed travel completely for me. there's no comparison between staying at a hotel in a new city and renting a lil studio or an apartment and feeling like you live there, even if very briefly.

there's more to it though, why though I don't know. these last two trips, maybe some more too, on the coming back, give me a strong epiphany-like thought/feeling that my life back home is so outlandish, so removed from the ground realities of basic life. as if my education is so much inflated, so much more than what's needed or what exists in the real world outside. so superfluous. so pretentious. and hollow? I loved every bit of my higher education. but when I travel lately, I feel its futility, or maybe that's not really the word. its more like "who cares"?

los angeles was the result of weeks of deliberation. having parents visit is not all honey and roses. travelling with them even less predictable. plus my parents are like chalk and cheese, and I wanted a place that would have something for those two poles. 4 nights and 5 days may not feel like a long vacation in a gigantic city like LA, but it felt like home. probably because the one bedroom apartment was old and homely, with creaking wooden floors, a bright white and blue kitchen with a desirable kitchen table in one side, lil portable heaters, grapefruit trees in the front garden, a painted wooden staircase, and a narrow sidewalk-sized-but-steep-like-hell sudden driveway into which driving my lil rented car made me feel like I was pushing my way into a lil garden path while poinsettia and ferns brushed the car from both sides. oh yes, this was the first time in my life that I rented a car at the airport in a new city and drove around and returned it at the airport. and was I amazed at how cheap doing that is. I guess the apartment alone couldn't have made me feel as at home as I did with the car. by the time I left LA, I had a basic map of the famous streets in my head and just two days in the city I was already driving around without live navigation talking to me.

but of course, the first hour in that strange car I felt like an alien. the rental agency gave me the keys and I didn't know how to remove the thing from their driveway. papa and I both struggled to get the boot open (yeah I still don't know what they call the 'boot' in this country), panicking cos we couldn't figure out where the switch was, and me panicking and getting even more hassled cos he was interfering and panicking rather than leaving it to me. and although we somehow got it open, with papa shouting a "khul gaya" with jubilance, much to the amazed amusement of the agents nearby, we didn't know how we had opened it, and it took me a park-somewhere-and-google-nissanversa-openboot to figure it out. plus the seat was way too far for these petite legs of mine and I had to park-again-by-roadside to fix that and to raise the seat and bring the seat back ahead, etc. etc. to start communicating with the lil thing.

but there's something about cars, especially cars when you are in this car country (no wonder 'car talk' was so famous here). they say one unique thing about the US is that you can get into a car and drive away, away into the horizon, wherever you want. and that you can't quite do the same anywhere else with the same abandon. but more importantly, and anywhere in the world, a car is very different from any other durable consumer good. it becomes you and you become it. especially when you own it, but sometimes and a lil bit even when you rent it. my own car back here at home is a leased new Ford hatchback that now, after four and a half months, feels like my baby, like an extension of my own limbs, and in short, when I'm in it like I don't know where my body ends and the car begins. I feel every slightest rattle in its air conditioning, every knock in its boot when the waiting-to-be-given-for-framing poster rolls around in the boot; and it responds to the gentlest of touches of my feet and palms.

this rental though was much older, its break and accelerator both much used and needing a heavier push. all of that first drive in it and in the city, I kept feeling misplaced. the lanes in the city felt (and probably were) much narrower, the traffic was of course much heavier, left turns without protected green arrows felt like impossible feats to achieve with cars zooming on continuously. and something kept beeping intermittently (I later figured out it was my phone sounding off whenever I exceeded speed limits). but slowly the car and I both grew on each other. the second night in the city, after driving around in circles around Korea-town, not knowing where and how to park in that crowded neighborhood, I actually took the lil silver body back into Franklin village and through the narrow driveway to its lil parking spot by the apartment and uber-ed back into Korea-town. but the third and fourth day I felt more adopted by it, I parked it on a street, we picnicked inside it for two lunches - once cos it was raining horses and elephants and we had to exit the highway and even abandon our national park adventure, and the second time cos we had checked out and were on the road with our luggage for the remaining day (plus Venice beach did not look like a place where I wanted to leave all our luggage in our abandoned car), and of course drove out of the city and east into small towns in CA with rain that flash-flooded mercilessly. in fact on that rainy day, we chose to spend almost all waking hours in the car, cos it was better to drive and go places than sit home crying about the weather.

the city was a treat with the freedom of wheels. we drove to the Getty, to Griffith observatory, to Beverly hills and Santa Monica & Venice beaches, to K-town, and to foggy downtown. and also to find the best taco hole-in-the-wall in LA. it made me wonder why I don't rent cars when I visit any city in this country. I probably will from now on. we even witnessed a car crash, just in front of us. hopefully no one was hurt bad, but a car door did fly into the air and its owner careened off kinda losing control. I didn't know whether to admire it or be shocked but I guess I did both before heartlessly driving on, like others around us. LA is more like that. here in Fort Worth, people would probably stop. but I guess you can tell that even by the amount of honking in LA; until LA, I had almost forgotten cars had horns that could be sounded.

but its ok for a city to honk if it more than compensates for it with its colorful graffiti (for that I wish I weren't driving so much and could have clicked some more), with its culinary and cultural variety, with its little-so-and-so-country neighborhoods, with its hills and palms and strange trees and amazing shapes n sizes of cacti, and its beaches, and flowers (even in the winter) and history and people who walk around as if they've just stepped out of some sixtys-show. and its viewpoints.

someday, when I've traveled around enough, I will do a post on the viewpoints around the world. the Portuguese word for a viewpoint is #miradouro which literally translates as "come look far" or something. I love the word and the idea. and the views.

'looking down upon' Beverly hills from the Getty center