Why do we teach our kids that 'snitching' is bad, when it is the same thing often as 'whistleblowing'? Why do we call it 'snitching' with such a negative connotation to it? When does our teaching evolve into the Blue Code and also the idea that 'boys don't tell on their mates' even when they cross a 'crime' line? Why don't we teach our kids the nuances important and help them build an intuition they can trust and then give them the courage to act upon it. 

I saw Armaggeddon Time on the flight to amrika this time. And here have been wondering how to talk and listen to my lil nephew about difficult questions, many of which even he tends to avoid or says he has 'already forgotten'; that last were his words to my asking him about his note of 'bad things my classmates did when the teacher went to the bathroom'.

Sex is a waste of time when time is in short supply. With some ppl I crave conversations, even though that is also limiting. 

Margaret Mead had an affair with a colleague 20 years her senior, he was also a student of Papa Franz. While she was married to a third person, and while she was falling in love with Ruth Benedict, also a student of Papa and his teaching assistant then. 

woke up this morning a lil late. sleep has been erratic these last couple weeks. found a brutal full frontal red ants attack on the kitchen bin and all over the kitchen rug. we hadn't even thrown mango peels in there, but he had cooked fish last evening, I know the ants here to be non vegetarian, they love fish oil. just last week I was nostalgic about the ants; this year has been different, they were so far very few and very late in the season, and out of the wall opposite their usual annual.

spent the next couple hours or so cleaning up. washing the ants down, wiping every surface. he took the rug and trash out and away. I mopped the kitchen floor and walls, and then plugged any holes in the walls with the tile fixer pour cement thing.

had that can't live here feeling for the umpteenth time. called mom who is unwell. and finally sat down for breakfast at 11:30. 

and then noticed the usual late morning flameback woodpecker visit on the peepul outside the guestroom window, which is my summer breakfast reading spot. the red headed golden backed guy traipsed flauntingly up and down the tree for a long time. I put aside reading about Margaret Mead's childhood, gasped and smiled and tried unsuccessfully to click it yet again. and then a lil female sunbird swung on a wire just out the window a while.

such is the balance in life in the Aravallis, the pain and pleasure, the awe and angst of living in human houses at the edge of the jungle.

I dreamt of both of them. One night of seeing him in different places in probably multiple intersecting dreams, and then him disappearing in each. This was after they declined our invitation. And then this morning I dreamed of her after seeing why they had declined: she couldnt make it, was to travel and had a visiting sibling. In this more coherent lifelike dream, of sheltering in some home of hers, changing bedsheets and she telling us it was the wrong sheet, there were lots of people at some large Langar lunch of sorts, and I was swimming in her tiny L-shaped garden pool free like a fish, and when I got out her guard tried to talk to me, lecherous; I found some beautiful taps and buckets of water and plants in some of them, and then a broken bottle which when I showed her turned to harmless translucent soft plastic bits. 

I have discovered Wim Wenders on MUBI. Perfect days, Alice in the cities ("When you drive through America something happens to you"), and then will watch Paris, TX with him; had been searching for that one for years. I feel a strange nostalgia when I watch 70s amrika in movies, although I wasn't even born then.

sometimes laziness comes over me like destiny. I've been reading and watching stuff more than anything else this summer so far. and thinking and dreaming. we did also have some younger colleagues home one evening. some women and their spouses. I realized that day that ppl didn't take Linda Goodman setiously because barely anyone had really read her, "from cover to cover" as a spouse specified, most people barely just skimmed their own zodiac pages and who they would pair best with, no one but me thought of her as a poet and a lyrical writer. and then I found a fan club of her poetry online.