the village life

When I was in Bangladesh last fall I had the chance to travel outside of Dhaka, the capital, to the constituency that my aunt, who is a politician, represents -- Chandpur.

Though I have been to Bangladesh close to a dozen times, and traveled outside of Dhaka multiple times, this trip to Chandpur was an eye-opening experience for me because it gave me a glimpse, for the first time, of what life in this part of the world must have been like before the extreme population growth and urbanization of the past few decades. Essentially, it gave me a glimpse of what life must have been like for my Bengali ancestors.

I have about a billion pictures that I would like to post, but these will probably suffice for now. Unfortunately I don't have many pictures of the city itself; most of my pictures are of the river area.

Natural Experiments

One of my all-time favorite books when I was growing up was called My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. It’s a story about a boy named Sam who goes to live alone on a mountain for a while. He ends up living in a hollowed out old tree, hunts his own food, and survives a snowy winter.

Stories were a big part of my childhood, but this one in particular remains engrained in my memory. I don’t quite know why. Maybe it was the sheer uniqueness of the story: there was only one human character present in most of the book (I think we read about his dad when he drops him off in the Catskills). Maybe it was that, with my family often spread out across the globe, missing people I love has long been a theme in my life and, thus, puzzled me greatly in this character: here was somebody who chose to leave behind everybody he loved. Maybe it was the fact that Sam must rely only on himself for survival, something that I have always wondered whether I could do. And maybe it was that I have always harbored (and continue to harbor?) a secret desire to throw off the demands of everybody I know and do the ultimate selfish (unselfish?) act: run away and live in the woods.

Come to think of it, this theme of natural, utterly independent existence is not one that is rare in the books I have read over the years. The Hatchet series, by Gary Paulsen, which follow a boy who survives a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness and is forced to fend for himself, left me breathless. Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer, and the same film with Emile Hirsch, entranced me as well. There are a number of other stories whose names I cannot remember that fascinated me in a similar regard. Apparently, I have a thing for this whole solitary, outdoorsy, action-adventure thing.

It’s truly not just one thing that draws me to these stories. There are many things that sustain my daydream of setting off on my own similar adventure. A desire to see if I could make it on my own, for example, and in all senses of the world. To see if I could make do without others, if I could take care of myself. Also, the desire to be part of nature – really part of it, not just an observer – and to lose myself in it for a while. There is another thing: the desire to throw off all the expectations and burdens of society, to just be, live, exist. That is still the part that draws me in, and infeasible as it is.

But I have also realized that, not only is that option not feasible, it's not what I want. For better or worse, my happiness is tied to the people I care about and there is no distance I can travel to free myself from that.

Even if I could, I am not convinced that I would want to.

just a few...

Winter break inevitably reminds me of all the winter breaks in the past that I have spent curled up with a book on my couch, and winter in general reminds me of all the nights of my childhood that I spent curled up under five quilts wishing I didn't have school the next morning so that I could stay up all night reading. There is something extra delicious about reading in the cold!

Here are some of my favorite fiction books

Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)
Atonement (Ian McEwan)
Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
Gilead (Marilynn Robinson)
The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
Animal Dreams (Barbara Kingsolver)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert M. Pirsig)
Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder)
Unaccustomed Earth (Jhumpa Lahiri)


I really have got to start reading more again! Also, I really could do a whole other post on young adult fiction... and maybe I will. Hmm.

oh, and in the spirit of painting...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uUhAjzNid4

This is a song by a Bangladeshi band. I suck at Bengali, so I can't offer a great translation, but the song's title -- rong -- means color. Actually though, color can mean something more like light. I really just love the idea of giving and taking color, so I thought I'd post the video/lyrics.


Rong
The Watson Brothers


Dress it up beautifully
Get inside my heart

Eyes full of white and black
Why do I say, why do I say
Patience is sweet
After the rain come the colors

You give color, you take color (from me)
June, July, August, September
In my heart the color is always there

Winter, monsoon, late summer, fall
Your affection is late
There’s a lot of obstruction in the way of this love

Sing it beautifully
Color this mind of mine
Get lost in my heart

Inside the house is where I live
Where did you find so many colors

Sing it beautifully
Color up my heart
Get inside my heart
Color me…

our changing times...

Cool article!

A Survey of Mobility: Homo Mobilis (The Economist)

Last night, as I sat in my house simultaneously gchatting, facebook chatting, skyping, texting, and listening to music -- all while painting, or rather, attempting to not spread too much acrylic paint on my keyboard -- I couldn't help but wonder about the impact of all this technology on my life. I've got to say, I have mixed feelings. While I love that I can have a "face to face" conversation with my cousins on the other side of the world, I resent the flakiness that The Economist's article points out; it seems that technology has created a culture of tentative plans that allows us to easily cancel arrangements and choose whatever better options arise at the last moment. It also can make it really difficult to focus in on whatever task or experience is at hand, and sometimes I think it makes it very hard to fully appreciate the current moment. Of course, on the other hand, it enables us to connect with the people, ideas, and causes that we most identify with, and I can't argue that that is anything less than empowering.

Ultimately, this stuff is here to stay... I think we just have to learn to make it work for us!

Rediscoveries

Recently I was discussing with a friend the idea of emergence. He's a bio major, and in that context emergence is the creation of complex systems through relatively simple inputs. Forgive me if that's a terribly un-authentic description, but it really made me think about a theory on art that I developed in high school.

I had developed this idea about what art is, what music is. True art and music were when the sum of individual parts added up to something much greater. A true work of art was something that was more than the sum of pencil scratches on paper and a true piece of music was more than a collection of sounds. And it was, in turn, this greater sum -- these expressions of true beauty -- that were, to my mind, evidence of God. Evidence of the magic that sparkled, waiting to be reveal itself, under the surface of everything on earth.

It has been a long time since I have thought about that idea, mostly because I have spent the past few years with my nose buried in stacks of textbooks and very little of them experiencing the things that brought so much joy to my life when I was younger: art and music. But I find myself seeking out these experiences again, bit by bit. Expressions of beauty, in whatever shape they take, are essential to my life. Not only because of the joy that they bring me, but because they afford me a feeling of wonder towards life and all the possibilities that glimmer, just noticeable under the surface if you look carefully. And what could possibly be more essential to life than that sensation of wonder.

childhood memories

For some reason, this fall has been like a return to childhood. I don't really know why. Maybe it's that this I missed an American, East Coast fall last year, or maybe it's the fact that this is my last "real" fall as a student -- my last fall as a college student, at least. Maybe it's that I've been playing intramural soccer on Sunday afternoons, and it brings me back to after school practices under the weak light of October late afternoons, and all their concomitant orange leaves, shin guards, water breaks, and crisp, fresh air. Or maybe it's that I'm reading all about fractal geometry for my thesis, and it's bringing me back to that other kind of geometry (Euclidian) and the math that I did growing up. (And remembering how much I love math, and how good I was at it, and how different my academic pursuits might have been.) Maybe it's that I'm too tired of reading for school to pick up an actual "grown-up" book and have instead been perusing my monumental junior fiction book collection that still resides in my bedroom. (I'm currently reading "Walk Two Moons" for perhaps the seventh time... I could write a whole other post on that. Maybe I will.)

Whatever the reason or reasons, this fall has been a bit of a trip through my past. I knew that I had changed a lot in the past year, grown up a lot, but I guess I didn't realize how much until I started being able to look back at the person I was growing up, and until I started being interested in doing so. It's fascinating to look back at your life with eyes that now see so much more. It's fascinating to look at geometry for what I thought it was and what I now know it to be. It's fascinating to reread books and marvel and how much I understood and how little I understood. It's fascinating to think about all the assumptions I had about people and the world, and how right they were, and how wrong they were.

I guess you know you're grown up when you can look back at your younger self, and instead of feeling disdain for your mistakes and your naivety, you feel tenderness. I guess you know you're grown up when you feel like your own mother.

I was looking for a fall fling and instead I fell in love with fractals

... having been poking at my thesis, and I'm beginning to wish I were a math major.

roads

going and coming. going. coming. funny how a single picture can take you back, isn't it?

palabras guardadas

De estas palabras cuelgan memorias de vos. De palabras que me dijiste y cosas que hicimos, de tus historias y modismos y tu acento tan único. Y aunque trate de reclamar tu idioma como algo mío, no sé si podré. Es tuyo y cuando lo hablo me siento la persona que fui con vos. Y cuando lo hable en el futuro creo que voy a seguir sintiéndome tuya, tuya y de nadie más

Experiments with Extroversion

Somehow, the more I get out of my own head, the more I feel I can trust myself. Does that make any sense?

IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD.




That is all.

On Writing

So in recent weeks I've had indication that maybe I'm not just writing to a empty void. Maybe? Perhaps? Not that I really was writing for the audience, but a few conversations have left me with the urge to write again. That and, let's be honest, it's been a bit of a rough time for me. This and that, and you know. What I would like to say is that I've been feeling inspired recently - just to live and feel alive - and I think my inspiration to write is coming back with that.

It was especially sparked the other day when, sorting through the mess that is my bedside table, I found this typed sheet of paper, entitled, "What matters in writing?" It was in an old notebook that I had been using to compose lists in. The notebook was from high school, my second-semester English class senior year. It reads as follows:


"Writing forces me to notice things, usually ordinary things, to notice them and give them my attention. Putting things in words - objects, events, experiences, thoughts, emotions - sometimes shows me aspects of the thing in question of which I had not been aware before. In that sense, good writing can make more of something.


Good writing can also lead to the sort of sincerity Cixious describes as 'never speaking from an idea of yourself.' Subjecting my thoughts to the process of precise articulation often shows me what's false in my thinking - which phrases, sentences, and ideas are meant to seduce a reader rather than speak a truth. Hemingway once said that all a writer needs to do is find one true sentence, and then others will follow. It feels better - truer - than anything else I can do by myself, except possibly pray.


I think one can also read from an idea of himself - that is, insincerely - and what I value most in reading is interaction with a text that forces me to read from myself rather than from my idea."


It was my English teacher who wrote this, but I couldn't have agreed more if I wrote it myself. Writing is prayer, writing is therapy. So despite the frustration that it bears, I seem to keep coming back to it. One way or another, I always find myself again at this same place: hunched over a pad of paper, or a laptop, scribbling or typing away furiously and hoping that once the words have been spilled, the world will make a little bit more sense.

love this girl.

http://elisewark.blogspot.com/

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Winter Break Reads

So I´ve done a fair bit of reading this break, thanks to our amazing library system. Here are some standouts.

The Good:
How We Decide (Jonah Lehrer) - I guess I just love reading about psychology. This got me really excited for my seminar on Psychology and Economic Rationality! Only down side - much of this info was old news to me, thanks to intro psych last semester.

The Bad:
Ten Days in the Hills (Jane Smiley) - I love Jane Smiley (A Thousand Acres is one of my favorite books ever), and I liked the idea about a bunch of different characters and a book that deals with the War in Iraq. However, this just read like a mishmash of endless (should have been edited) conversation and the characters felt flimsy under all that talk. I should have picked another one of her books to read.

The Ugly:
Cleaving (Julie Powell) - Woah, TMI! Ok, actually, I really don´t mind TMI, if it´s in the right context. But this book was basically one big, festering, self-centered puddle of whine. And while the sentences were well-written, there didn´t seem to be any message or meaning that was effectively conveyed through most of it. To me, this is the kind of dirty details you write in a journal, but until you´ve gotten your shit together and made some sense out of all of it, you definitely don´t go and PUBLISH it. Seriously cringe-worthy.

Love this poem.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

--Mary Oliver