baccara, or, who the hell is that?

Down some infernal internet rabbit hole this afternoon, I ended up on the Wikipedia page listing the best-selling songs of all time. Three of the rarified top group, which have sold more than 15 million copies, are Christmas songs. Bing Crosby's got two: "White Christmas" and "Silent Night." Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" is eleventh, with 16 million copies sold. The others in that group are all instantly recognizable. "Candle in the Wind," that sort of thing. But I did a double take on number nine: "Yes Sir, I Can Boogie," by Baccara. Didn't ring a bell. So I looked it up on YouTube thinking it would be something I knew but not by name.

Two things:

1. It is a terrible song. 
2. I'd never heard it before. 

What? How is it possible that I had never in my life heard even a snatch of the ninth-best-selling single ever? The other songs on the list are, again, ubiquitous. Part of the fabric of existence, as impossible to avoid as the golden arches. "My Heart Will Go On" plays in muzak form in the lobby of my office building every single day. But I made it to 32 without ever hearing "Yes Sir, I Can Boogie." 

traveling

My friend Andrew made a post in his training journal about being excited to use racing as an excuse to travel in 2019. He said he's never been on a plane and only left Florida twice. Got me thinking about traveling and about how much I take for granted my own experience of it. When Linc came to visit last year, he hadn't been overseas in a few years, since he visited Alex in South Korea. He was nervous about arriving in a strange country and extremely relieved that SRB and I were waiting for him outside the terminal. M&D went to England four years (?) ago and haven't been overseas since. They are coming in April and they'll stop in Istanbul on the way for a couple of days, an adventure they would not likely be planning if I hadn't decided to live 7,000 miles away.

Meanwhile, I've built my life around traveling. SRB is even more extreme: apart from living in Pakistan, her mother, father, sister, and brothers all live in different countries (South Africa, France, Australia, UK), and as she becomes part of my family that's another country altogether (US, obviously). If we stay together over the long term, even if we settle down somewhere and leave the field we're in, which requires international travel, we'll still have to fly long distances to visit family.

One of the reasons I was interested in international development as a field coming out of college was that I wanted to get paid to travel and eventually live overseas again. I was less than a year removed from living in Chile when I got my first job and itching to see new places. Eleven years later, that mission is well and truly accomplished. I'll finish 2018 having flown nearly 90,000 miles and having been to ten countries (^ = my first time there):

1. Pakistan
2. USA
3. Tajikistan
4. Portugal^
5. UK
6. Singapore
7. Malaysia^
8. South Africa^
9. Botswana^
10. Namibia^

Pretty cool. I've been incredibly lucky.  

stuart: a life backwards

It's not often that a book can make me gasp out loud involuntarily. Stuart: a life backwards is moving, funny, sad, extraordinary. I'm quite sure I've never read anything like it before. The high-wire act Masters pulls off of telling the biography of a personal friend, with himself as an omnipresent but not intrusive character, is a real feat of storytelling. He makes himself a foil for Stuart without getting cute or cynical or maudlin. And Stuart. Stuart! What a person. And what a portrait. Baffling, hilarious, thoughtful, violent, wise, generous, self-destructive to an unbearable degree. The parallels with Jack are obvious, although so are the dissimilarities.

And the revelation in the epilogue is just, well, gasp-inducing. 

oops a daisy

Today I learned that the big boss has seen and registered my name. Not that big boss, think bigger. Yeah, that one. The one whose name is the other name on my business card. And, through absolutely no fault of my own, not in a good way. Sigh.

Seems that he was recently reading a mission report for a trip I went on. I write these as a matter of routine whenever a senior foreign dignitary goes to visit our programs. Ambassadors and the like. Because I went on this trip (not sure which one it was), my name and title are on it. Again, routine. But this time, seems he circled my name and title, wrote, "Who is this?" and was displeased when he found out that I'm a 31-year-old American. He has a thing about titles. I kind of knew that already but it had never applied to me personally so it was always just something to shake my head about. The leadership defended me, apparently, as they must because my position in the organization is their responsibility. This is not a big deal, really. But it means that they had to spend time and energy defending my existence to the man our organization is named after. And therefore, one of the feelings triggered by my name now among the top leadership is discomfort and irritation.

Not great, Bob.

This information came to me from my old boss, JT. She is in town, along with a big delegation of our global program people. We had a good long talk this morning about a couple of things, one of which was frank information from her about the narrative that has developed around me in the absence of active input on my part or, really, awareness that such a narrative existed. It's not super negative or anything, but she had some really good advice about people to cultivate who I have not been cultivating. And about how to more actively inform the story about me. Basically, we talked about the internal political game and how I could be playing it better.

Ultimately, it may not matter. I'm planning to leave next year, do my master's, and try my hand in some other company. But her input is a really good reality check about where I stand. And some of the advice is universally practical in a big bureaucracy: if the higher-ups think sunny thoughts when you come up, it doesn't matter very much how good a job you're actually doing. Don't complain overmuch about intractable problems. Acknowledge them, park them to one side, and describe what you're doing to address problems you can do something about. Actually, that's practical advice for life in general, in a bureaucracy or anywhere.

Much to absorb and reflect on this weekend.

dream - murder most foul

Recently I had a dream that I was with a couple of friends - not real people, just dream characters - and we were crashing at one guy's house. Then the main guy I was with poisoned someone to death and I was right there so he made me help him dismember the body and put it in bags. The other guy was asleep. I was terrified, but mostly of him, so I went along. He poured us gin and tonics at one point.

Later, I met up with M&D in the post office in downtown Takoma Park. I was freaking out but keeping my cool externally. We went to an outdoor concert in a wooded area. I had to poop, so I went off in search of a bathroom. There was none; the toilet was inside an old beat-up couch sitting out in the open but far enough from the stage area to be obscured by trees. Nothing to stop anyone just walking up to you, though. But the urge was bad, so I flipped back one of the cushions to reveal a toilet seat. Then I woke up.

biography

In an interview I read a couple of years ago, Hilary Mantel describes reading as a writer as being partly about constantly tracking how the story is told. In other words, she couldn't help but pay close attention to what was being done to her by the author on the other end of her interaction with whatever book she was reading. I have moments like that, but they're mainly flashes of wonder: stepping outside John McPhee's description of taking a walk in Alaska while his compatriots readied their canoes for a river journey and thinking, "How in the hell is he making this incredibly mundane experience so compelling?"

New resolution is to pay closer attention to that, not just from a prose standpoint but from a structure standpoint. Might even start taking notes sometimes. Other resolution is to start reading more great biographies. I am seized by the idea of writing a biography of Jack, as I was this summer by my dream/vision of him as a 46-year-old with a teenaged daughter. That ran aground, as I've said before, on the need to make sure such a projection is true to who he was, that the intervening decades grow organically from the point where in this universe he ended his life. And so the more I thought about that, the more I realized that I needed to grapple with and understand and face his life. What a life he lived, what a life we all lived around him. But it's very difficult to know where to start. The most I have is snatches of this and that, a kind of haphazard list of Things To Talk About.

• How he died, when, where
• His itinerantness
• The joys of our suburban childhood, brotherhood
• The puzzlement we all felt at his early and persistent pessimism
• Laughing at him when he got angry because he was so cute
• Playing "bang" and "sock wars" in the backyard and in the addition just after it was finished and before we had any furniture. 
• Tickling him and Lincoln until they couldn't take it anymore, the "ultimate punishment"
• Drumming
• His drive to practice anything he wanted to be good at: dribbling, popping wheelies, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4
• His athleticism
• The inadequacy of our mental healthcare system, and the competence and compassion of some of the people working it
• Mom and Dad's (especially Mom's) relentless advocacy for and support to him
• Heroin, cocaine, meth, and the drug crisis
• Lincoln's moving and profound acknowledgement, during the memorial service in May, of Jack's shame at his own inability to meet the expectations of a capitalist, patriarchal society
• Words: poetry, rap, Scrabble
• That brief moment after his coma, before he'd been prescribed new psych meds, when he was detoxed from any and all chemicals and as lucid and clear and happy as I ever saw him, ripping through One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Hobbit
• Jail and juvie
• Scars and physical brokenness, the toll that years of mental illness and drug abuse and losing control of himself took on his body
• His dignity, his despair

And so on.

Right now I'm reading Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, by Joshua Freeman, and Home Fire, by Kamila Shamsie. Also The Island of Doctor Moreau, out loud with SRB. Once those are done, time to start in on some biographies. 

Also, time to start doing a bit of research on oral history techniques. And, well, research.

opioids

At a party last night a friend mentioned that she'd been listening to a German podcast (she is German) about the American opioid crisis, and how fascinated she was by it. So much of the attention in the media, including the German media, apparently, is on the role of OxyContin and its like. My friend mentioned the Sacklers, for example: their company's role in perpetrating the crisis is unforgivable. There are so many stories about people getting injured or having surgery, getting addicted to the painkillers their doctor prescribed, and eventually shifting to heroin because it's cheap and easy to get. It's a compelling story: hardworking ordinary people as victims of a conspiracy of greedy corporations and doctors gone wrong.

Not everyone who ends up addicted to narcotics took that path, of course. 

debt-free

Today, exactly nine years and 11 months after I began paying off my student loans, I got an email from Cornerstone Education Loan Services. Subject line: "Congratulations! Your Loan(s) Has Been Paid In Full!"

When I graduated in May 2018, I got a six-month grace period before I had to start making payments. By November I'd been in my first full-time job for five months, making not very much but living at home. So when the loan service provider -- it was a different one then, no recollection of the name -- emailed me that it was time to start making payments, I entered into their online form an automatic monthly payment amount that would set me free in ten years.

Since then, I have been continuously employed (except briefly, by choice, in the months before moving to Pakistan), with increasing responsibilities and concurrently increasing salaries. I lucked into an extraordinarily cheap apartment in DC in 2009 and lived there for seven years, meaning hundreds of dollars a month that most of my friends were spending on rent was going into my savings account or 401k. I'm a somewhat cautious and non-impulsive spender, although I've taken some big trips and bought some splurge-y things over the past ten years. And every month, without my thinking much about it, a portion of my salary has gone straight to paying down my student loans. Until today.

There's an exercise called the unpacking the privilege backpack, created in the late 1980s by a feminist scholar named Peggy McIntosh as a way to critically examine the power she gained from being white in a racist society. In reflecting on my newly debt-free status, I re-read the essay she wrote about it. We used something akin to that activity in City at Peace, standing in a line and physically stepping forward and back as we decided whether each statement of systematically conferred (i.e. unearned) power, or lack thereof, applied to us.

I am white and benefit from the conferred power of that fact. Same goes for my cisgendered maleness, my heterosexuality, my native fluency in English, my American citizenship. And my economic status. Most people in the US think they're middle class and I was no different, but looking back I think we were in the top income quintile, at least when I graduated from high school. In any case, my income now places me in the upper quintile of salary earners in the US. My net worth is a little behind that, but relative to other people under 35 I'm way out in front. My income and wealth status are amplified in Pakistan by an order of magnitude or more: in the news recently has been the fact that less than one percent of Pakistanis earn a formal salary to pay taxes on.

Whatever hard work I've put in, whatever good planning I've done, is built on a foundation of unearned economic advantage. Systems of power and oppression are inextricably intertwined: In the City at Peace version of unpacking the privilege backpack, I ended up standing way out in front of most of my peers.

McIntosh concludes the essay about the privilege backpack this way: "Though systematic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching me, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base."

In one way today is a happy day: there are systems of unaccountable financial power and oppression far greater than me or any individual person, and I am free from being beholden to them. That is something to celebrate and be grateful for. But it's also a day for reflecting on McIntosh's challenge. What am I doing with my consciousness of my own power to erode the foundations on which it's built? What am I doing with my arbitrarily-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base? Not nothing, but not enough. Must to do more, and more consistently. 

on prs and goal setting

One of my big goals for 2018 is to run under 20:00 in a 5k race. I've chosen to live in a country of 200 million people in which not a single formal, chip-timed public road race has been organized in the two years I've lived here. When I did two timed races in May, in the US and UK, I hit 20:40-20:50. A little research shows no races in any of the places SRB and I will be in southern Africa in November, and I won't be home again until Christmastime. So meeting my goal officially may have to wait until next year. Such is life.

However, that doesn't mean I can't keep pushing myself and training now. A good intermediate goal on the way to a sub-20 5k is a sub-12 3k. I read somewhere that a 3k time trial (i.e. a run done alone, rather than in live competition with others) is a good gauge of 5k race fitness. Well, this evening I warmed up and then ran 3 km in 11:48. Feeling very happy about that right now. Good capper to what was kind of a shitty week at work.

a sick child

Last weekend I went to a cafe to do some work and attend a meeting of the Desi Writers' Lounge writing club. I'd gone to DWL's book club meetings before -- quite regularly, actually, until they moved the meeting time up to when I'm still at work. But after starting this summer to write creatively for the first time in many years (doggerel sonnets and limericks to counteract boredom excepted), I'd lost the big mo. SRB encouraged me to go and see if it kick-started me. I didn't find the group until an hour after the meeting had started because apparently the format is an hour of silent work, followed by an hour of discussion. But when they started talking, I put away the proposal I was writing and introduced myself to the group.

My foray into creative writing started with a waking dream of Jack at 46, in a car with his teenaged daughter, fleeing something or someone. As I fleshed the story out, his stand-in character ended up living in Richmond, VA, in a US that's been effectively divided along the Potomac. The coast line has receded with rising sea levels and most everything east of Richmond is a kind of marshy archipelago regularly buffeted by formerly rare mega-storms. The southern US has become a kind of libertarian hell, in which the government is no longer able to provide services or do much of anything. Stand-in has been sober for 15 years, since the birth of his daughter flipped a switch that he'd been unable to flip on his own. He's twenty-years estranged from his family after doing something terrible and being overcome by shame. During a hurricane, while hunkering down in a shelter with his daughter, she goes wandering at night and accidentally sees the leader of the gang to which they belong killing another member of the gang. He notices that he's being watched but can't catch a clear glimpse of her as she flees back to her dad. The story opens with them two of them stowed away behind the false back of a trailer being towed toward the Potomac and an uncertain meeting with his parents.

The story started to unfold in reverse order. But I didn't get very far before, as I said, losing steam. One of the reasons for that is because I was fixated on the protagonist as being a real stand-in for Jack. That means thinking really deeply about what he might have been like as a middle-aged man, which means thinking really deeply about what he was like as a young man. How to create a character that is faithful to him? He would still be mentally ill, but would he have figured out how to adjust his own pH so it was a little closer to the water he swam in, to extend SRB's metaphor? There were other difficulties, not least with the world building, which turns out to be hard to do credibly (surprise!). For example, he's in a gang. Why is he in a gang? How big is it? What does it do? Inventing a political economy that makes sense is hard. Also, what the hell do I know about 15 year old girls?

Anyway the biggest challenge was imagining future Jack, writing his biography. And eventually that led me back to an idea that Mom had talked about for years: co-writing a book with Jack about living with mental illness. Not sure how much they ever developed it but I gathered that it would kind of a join memoir. And then I thought, what about writing a biography of Jack? A memoir of our family as five and then four? The struggle of, as Linc spoke about during the memorial service, a kid who was devalued and cast aside by society because he couldn't be economically productive? Who suffered because of the horrible lack of services for people with his degree of mental illness, and whose parents suffered through years and years of trying to find those services? I need to read Stuart: A Life Backwards.

I read this piece today, by a father writing about what it's like to have a very sick son, who stopped writing abruptly when his son died and only published the essay, unfinished, more than a year later. And I watched a lecture recently by a guy named DJ Jaffe, about how society fails the seriously mentally ill. That guy keeps dubious company politically but the lecture was provocative and resonated with the struggle M&D and Jack had finding places that could take care of him, where he could take care of himself and thrive, and where other people could be safe from him because he was, frankly, dangerous at times. It reminded me that the most lucid and animated that I ever saw Jack after eighth grade was in the locked psych ward at Georgetown, after he'd come out of a coma. Other psych wards were awful and that one wasn't sunshine and roses, but he was safe there.

Something to talk to the fam about. 

absence

I've written a few posts since the last one but left them all unpublished. One is about labor, class, and economic power, and the difference between making a five-figure salary in the US and making a five-figure salary in Pakistan. Another is about calling out colleagues for making jokes that contribute to oppression. Those are difficult topics to write about thoughtfully and sensitively, and the former in particular is one that makes me uncomfortable in ways that I'm still working out. So for one reason or another I haven't felt comfortable putting them out there. Not sure whether that'll change.

Tonight I'm back to reading Faiz Ahmed Faiz, so here's Baran Farooqi's translation of "View (2)":

Road, shadows, trees, houses and doors, edges of the sky dome

Upon the terrace, the moon bared her breast, gently

As someone loosens the strings of her dress, slowly

Under the edge of the sky dome, the still blue Nile of shadows

Forming an indigo lake

In the lake floated ever so quietly the bubble of a leaf

Floated a moment, moved away, burst, softly

Very softly, the cool color of wine, very light

Poured into my glass, slowly

The wine glass and the wine, the wine jar, the roses of your hands

Like the pattern of a distant dream

Formed on its own and faded, gradually

My heart repeated some word of love, softly

You said, "Softly."

The moon bent down and said

"Yet more softly."

guests

We had people over a couple of times last week. On Thursday we had the fifth Salon Slolab, the silly name we have given to dinners where we invite a group of 4-6 people to come over and eat with us. They have been a learning experience food and planning wise (we've alternated kitchen captaincy and both had big successes and times when we did not, ah, prepare enough food). Funny that despite a lifetime of going to dinners at adults' houses, it takes hosting to realize that actually it is nice to have multiple courses and doesn't feel quite right if there's only one. The dinners have all been really fun and lovely and each one different from the others. They've also felt faintly ridiculous, a little like adult-couple cosplay. But hey, SRB and I are an adult couple.

On Friday AF -- SRB's former roommate, back in town to apply for his visa to the States so he can join his girlfriend in NYC -- and a few other friends came over after a concert at FACE, the local arts nonprofit. AF has been recording music and he played us a couple of finished tracks, which was cool. One of the guys who came over was a huge rock star here in the 90s. I've met him a bunch of times, he's around and a nice and interesting guy. (His second act has been to create an animation studio whose flagship is a children's TV show about a schoolteacher in Pakistan who dons a burqa to disguise herself as she fights bad guys.) SRB had a friend from high school visiting in April, one thing led to another, and now she's planning to stay for the foreseeable future. She's a travel writer/vlogger so I guess Pakistan's as good a place as any to be, and apparently unfazed by the 23-year age difference.

Anyway they were over, and AF was clearly chuffed to play him the songs and get notes. And just as clearly, he was into the music and the role of veteran musician offering advice: got up to leave the circle of conversation and get closer to the speaker so he could really listen. It was cool to witness and something I couldn't imagine in the States: the equivalent of Alanis Morisette or Eddie Vedder happening to be over at my house in a group of 7 or 8 people, drinking a whiskey and soda helping a friend who's just starting to commit to music. 

faiz and the importance of poetry

The greatest Urdu poet of the 20th century, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, was a committed communist and agnostic who spent time in prison for his activism in the years after Partition and eventually fled Pakistan altogether. A little while ago I picked up a copy of The Colors of my Heart, a collection of his poetry translated and published recently by a professor at the National Islamic University in India. No surprise: He wrote beautifully about the struggle against oppression, and also about compassion and love both romantic and not.

I've been thinking about Jack again a lot over the last couple of days. Today I woke up feeling slightly sick, and while I had to rally to go to a meeting in the office for a few hours, it was a temporary rally. Two words come to mind: malaise and melancholy. So this evening, while Steph goes to a party I was looking forward to but am definitely not up for, I've been reading Faiz.

"My Companion, My Friend"

If I was sure, my companion, my friend
If I was sure the weariness in your heart
The sadness in your eyes and the burning in your breast
Can be dispelled by my comforting words, my love
Were my words of solace a medic which
could bring back to life your desolate and extinguished mind
Wishing away the stain of humiliation from your forehead
and cure your ailing youth
If I was sure, my companion, my friend

Day through night, morning through evening
I would spending whiling away your pain
Singing to you light, melodious songs
Of spring, gardens and waterfalls
Of sunrise, of the moon and the planets
I would tell you tales of beauty and love
I'd tell you how
Unresponsive bodies of proud, snow-moulded women
Melt under the heat of passionate hands
How the stable contours of a familiar face
Change shape in an instant
How the crystal-bright visage of a beloved
Flushes red with a sip of the ruby red wine
How the rose branch offers itself to the flower-picker
How the night's mansion becomes fragrant
I would sing to you, go on singing for you
Weaving songs for you, always around you
But my songs are not the cure for your grief
Melodies may not be surgeons, though they
can be friends and sympathizers
Songs may not be lancets, though
They can be a salve for pain at least
There's no help for your affliction but the knife
And that cruel blood-letter is not in my power
Not in any earthly being's power
Except you yourself, you, only you

on writing, on bodies, on home

Lying in bed one morning a while back, I had a kind of half-waking dream. Jack was in his 40s, with a daughter, and they were in a car, on the run from some threat. It was the first time I'd had a real vision of Jack as an older man. There he was, wrinkled, with a salt-and-pepper goatee. A fifteen-year-old daughter in the passenger's seat, scared but full of love for him, trusting and not trusting him. Middle-aged Jack would still be sick, but maybe he'd be mellowed out a bit, maybe he'd be sober, maybe having a kid would have snapped him to in a way no other circumstance could.

In the weeks following that dream I wasn't able to get it out of my head. Much like in the days after we cleaned out his apartment I had a kind of loop playing: Jack on the balcony on his broken lawn chair, staring blankly at the frigid sunset and ashing his cigarettes into the empty Coke bottle on the ground. Jack five minutes later, scribbling furiously in his notebook. Jack frying an egg on the stove. Jack half-lying on his bed, looking at the wall, smoking. All the time thinking about death, about killing himself. Arguing with himself about it. But the loop is just images, no voiceover or even much sound.

So I've started writing about the dream. Playing it out. I googled some tips on writing a novel and have been following one of the sites I found. For a couple of weeks I kept to writing every day. That fell off in the last ten days but not altogether and this morning I wrote a chapter, the first chapter I've ever written. It ends with a fictionalized version of Jack and his daughter escaping in the false back of a refrigerated trailer. Heading toward Silver Spring, home.

**************

Friday marked six months since Jack died. I was thinking about it a lot on Thursday night. For some reason I kept coming back to his body, his physical presence. Get to a certain age and everyone is banged up in one way or other. I've had arthritis in my feet for nearly ten years. There's something screwy with my right knee that acts up sometimes when I try to run fast. I get migraines once in a while. But Jack had more than his share. His reconstructed left leg, which pained him at all times and especially when the weather was bad. His face, which had been bashed in years ago in an incident none of us will ever know. The crooked ring finger on his left hand, broken in the southern Utah winter when he was a teenager and then left to heal in a banana shape because he couldn't get his gloves on over the splint. (Pretty fucked up of the program that he was in at the time not to take better care of him, in retrospect. Get him a mitten at least.) His collapsed veins. The burn scars on his wrists and torso. The marks left over here and there from the worst case of chicken pox our pediatrician had ever seen.

But his body wasn't only an assemblage of scars. He had beautiful eyes, long lashes. Strong, straight white teeth that flashed when he laughed. Long legs and arms over which he had preternatural control even after drugs and disuse slowed him down. He only had to learn how to do something once before he could do it gracefully.

On Friday morning I'd forgotten. It's been a long few weeks at work and at home, too: SRB has been going through a dip; story for another time. So I went to work and plowed through the day. Budget details and logistics have a way of occupying the mind when they're pressing, and they were yesterday. But in the middle of part two of the proposal budget meeting I was having yesterday, Mom texted our family WhatsApp group to remind us of the significance of the day and to say she was planning to have a moment of silence around 1:50 PM, his time of death. It brought me up short. How had I forgotten? I did not outwardly react but inwardly I all of a sudden felt heavy and that I badly wanted to be alone and quiet. But we had to finish this conversation yesterday, time marches on. And my boss kept asking me to follow up on this logistic thing that shouldn't even be my responsibility. As a side note, I'm actually curious why he asked me to deal with it in this particular way rather than doing it himself. Involved dealing with other CEOs and I have to coax them with his implicit backing, whereas if he called them himself he'd have been able to get a straight answer right away. I'd ask him eventually but I think he'd interpret the question as a desire to avoid responsibility on my part.

Anyway, I finally managed to leave work a little early. Samson and Shamshad, our cleaner and cook, were here, so I went into the bedroom, closed the door, lay on my back, and put on "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" twice through, and then "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" three times. In the middle of the third one, SRB came home. Without a word, she came onto the bed and lay down on her side next to me, left arm on my chest and left leg across mine. I cried until the song was over and then cried a little more in the quiet.

That song is so much about bodies, about the physicality of being alive and being in love. And in it, love is home and home is love.

Home, that's where I want to be, pick me up and turn me round.
I feel numb, born with a weak heart, I guess I must be having fun.
The less we say about it the better, make it up as we go along.
Feet on the ground, head in the sky, it's okay, I know nothing's wrong.
Nothing.

Hi-yah! I got plenty of time.
Hi-yah! You got light in your eyes.
And you're standing here beside me.
I love the passing of time.
Never for money, always for love.
Cover up and say goodnight, say goodnight.

Home, it's where I want to be but I guess I'm already there.
I come home, she lifted up her wings. I guess that this must be the place.
I can't tell one from another, did I find you or you find me?
There was a time before we born. If someone asks, this is where I'll be.
Where I'll be.

Hi-yah! We drift in and out.
Hi-yah! Sing into my mouth.
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view.
I'm just an animal looking for a home and
Share the space for a minute or two.

And you love me till my heart stops. Love me till I'm dead.
Eyes that light up, eyes look through you. Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head, I got ooooooh, oooh ooh ooh.

I am not the first person to find that song indescribably powerful. I've listened to it hundreds of times, maybe thousands, since I was a teenager. It means something different to me now than it did when I was 18, or 23, or 29.

Jack left his body six months ago. His body came home for the last time as ash. His scars exist only in photographs and in our memories of them. And his pain lives only in the echoes it left in our imaginations. In our pain.

more found poetry

This time from a different poster on the forum where I log my workouts. As with previous entries, I've only changed punctuation and line breaks:

I wish, I mean, I hope

no

those word is not strong enough.

I must regroup myself now, now 

that half of 2018 is gone. I must

pick up the pace and finish
2018 in a strong way.

This is a message to myself

on 180608, a Friday afternoon

where I slacking/recovering from

my exam 2 days after finishing it.

It will be raining for the next 7 days or so.

on failure and being bad at my job

I've known for some time that I am not a very good manager. Not awful but not good. Haven't got much training for it and almost no organizational support in the management skills side of things, but I also don't confront those weaknesses as much as I should. In the week since I got back from being away my boss has been expressing his displeasure with those aspects of my performance more openly than before. That is unpleasant on the one hand, especially when done in front of other people,* but on the other it's kind of a relief, and today he finally called me into his office to have a discussion in which he actually gave me some direction about how to manage my team and concrete suggestions for how to do that. He's a delegator, and in some ways a really good one. He empowers his senior staff to make decisions, improvise, do what they think is best, and only steps in when asked or when he sees an urgent need. In other ways not so good: He sometimes doesn't communicate as clearly as he thinks he has, and he probably waits to long to micromanage or offer advice or support when people aren't performing as well as they could or should (hello).

Now, there are other parts of my job that I am good at.* I am a good writer and editor. I'm confident and lead meetings well regardless of audience or purpose, I'm quick to grasp new concepts and read a room, I'm knowledgeable enough about a range of topics to be credible talking to different kinds of people. I can think through problems to solutions clearly a lot of the time, which helps when designing a project. All of those traits make me good at writing proposals. However, being good at writing proposals doesn't always translate to winning lots of proposals. Since I moved to Pakistan, my success rate has been very poor. I have led the development and submission of many proposals that I am proud of, that were worthy of funding, but that did not win. The latest blow came today, one that my colleagues in Canada and I all worked really hard on and felt good about. No dice.

What I'm saying is, when even the parts of my job that I like, that I feel good at, and that ultimately are the measure of my success, aren't panning out, then the parts of my job that I dislike and feel bad at just loom so much larger.

Rough week.

*This only happened during a meeting in which he was calling a bunch of people out.
**NB: There are other things I'm not great at, like event planning (in that case mostly because I fucking hate event planning). Asking for help when I need it, which is a serious flaw that I intermittently overcome. The list goes on.

anthony bourdain

I'm not going to write a full eulogy here or anything but I'm sad about Anthony Bourdain's suicide. Reading about it has made me reflect on a particular angle of Jack's: the impossibility of knowing someone else's internal life, even when they are in extremis. Apparently Bourdain was with a friend, working on an episode of his show, until evening, when he went back to his room and did whatever he did to kill himself. Similarly, Jack was in a supportive place, in the office of and talking with the staff at the program that he was part of in Manchester, until he just up and walked out to his death.

It's hard - not to say impossible - for me to imagine the degree of internal suffering that someone must feel who takes their own life. And not just the degree but the persistence, the unshakeableness of suffering. Surely there must be some acute surge at the end but of the suicides I'm familiar with the suffering was long-term. So it must have been with Bourdain. My heart aches for Eric Ripert, the friend he was with at the end, who could not have had any idea what his dear friend was about to do. Maybe Bourdain seemed a little down, or tired, but by the accounts I've read there was nothing out of the ordinary.

And that's the bit that's getting to me today. The obvious truth that we cannot ever really know what's going on inside someone else's head, that in some deep way we are only ourselves and can never be someone else. That the insight of the anonymous painter of "Landscape with Fall of Icarus," which Auden put so beautifully into words, applies to us all every second of every day. When Icarus is someone close to us, we may fly to the source of the splash, we may feel anguish at the boy falling out of the sky. But most of the time we are the ploughman, the sailors on the expensive delicate ship. And even when we're Daedalus, off-frame, we can't follow Icarus down. We have no choice but to keep flying, wishing we could have entered Icarus's mind and kept him steady but knowing that that was impossible, that we'd done our best and it was not enough.

This analogy may have gotten slightly tortured but I don't care.  

memorial

Here is the transcript of the remarks I gave at Jack's memorial service a month ago:

Freshman year of college I read a book called Word Freak, by a guy named Stefan Fatsis, and fell in love with the weird characters who make up the world elite of competitive Scrabble. I started playing the game almost every day, mainly with my friend Gabby. At Christmas, or maybe it was Thanksgiving, I brought my enthusiasm home. I don’t remember the first game I played against Jack but I know that he surprised me, and himself, with how well he did. By the following summer we were evenly matched, and pretty soon after that I could barely hold my own against him. He was a prodigy, and he was a hard worker. He started studying word lists, going to tournaments. He must have been no more than 15 when he scored 600 for the first time. Mom and Dad bought him a chess timer so we could play proper competitive games: 25 minutes total per person. He eventually met Stefan Fatsis at the Scrabble Club in Chevy Chase DC. It was humbling to go to the Club with him: I’m not a terrible player but the top players treated him differently from me. And when he was playing he was all-in, fully concentrated on the board, his letters, the possibilities and constraints of what was right in front of him. Wherever he lived, it was always news when he found someone who could play with him and keep up, because we knew that in those moments of playing he was at peace.

Wherever he lived. Jack lived, as you’ve heard and can see in the program, in many different places after he first left home. Looking at Mom’s records, I counted 56 moves in the 12.5 years between the end of eighth grade, when he went to his first wilderness program, and his death. Those moves happened for lots of different reasons, rarely happy ones: kicked out because he got in a fight; in the hospital for an extended stay because of an overdose or a terrible injury; a recovery program coming to its end with no clear plan for what would happen next.

Jack was like a glacial erratic, a rock dislodged from its native stratum and carried far away. Then carried again and again with the push and retreat of the crushing river of ice that ground him down: his mental illness, his drug abuse, the world to which he was both exquisitely sensitive and utterly blind. Jack, the glacial erratic, unable to control his course, worried and uncomfortable and angry and depressed about the forces pushing him around, and wishing all the time more than anything to be home.

His last move, to an apartment in Manchester, the first and last place he lived on his own, was the most hopeful move he ever made. But in the end it was a home for the same poisons, internal and external, that dogged him for much of his life. In that apartment for the first time, mere hours after we pushed his body into the cremation oven, I saw that he had the National Geographic map of Afghanistan and Pakistan on his wall; the same map that I have in my office in Islamabad. Looking at it, I wept, realizing in the way that’s only possible when we’re learning something about ourselves, that he had told other people about me, was proud of me. “My brother lives in Pakistan.” I wept because I also wander far from home, but by choice, deeply secure in the knowledge that home is a safe place for me to return to whenever I wish, and because wandering was something he hated and home a place where he longed to be but was not safe. And because I had dreamt of his visiting me in Pakistan, learning what the words on the map meant first-hand, laughing with me and Lincoln and Mom and Dad on the crazy mountain roads of Hunza, sharing a quiet moment of awe in the staggering presence of the Karakoram Mountains. And I wept because I was proud of him, too: proud of his talent at Scrabble; of his poetry; of his paintings and drawings; of his youthful athletic skill; of his struggle to keep it together underneath that river of ice.

He’ll never visit me in Pakistan. I’ll never hear him rap again, or finish the two open games we’ve still got going on the Scrabble app. I’ll never again be able to tell him how proud I am to have had him as a brother. But I’m glad, grateful, that I told him last summer, the last time I touched him alive, that I bragged about him, and that I loved him. I love him still. 

awami workers' party

SRB recently read a collection of papers about bonded labor in Pakistan. It made me wonder where the labor movement is in Pakistan. There just doesn't seem to be a popular or populist Left at all here. Populism in mainstream politics is entirely the domain of religious parties (MMA and even PTI to an extent) and nationalists (e.g. the Baloch and Pathan movements). Trade unions are just not a thing. Enter the Awami Workers' Party, which formed in 2012 as the synthesis of a few different socialist parties. I just read its manifesto, which is explicitly revolutionary, pro-women, federalist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.

Like actual Left parties in the US, its representation in elected government bodies is zero.

Also, finally listened to Janelle Monae's new record "Dirty Computer." It rules. Prince would be proud. Speaking of which, I'm now listening to "Prince." Which also rules. It's interesting how similar "Sexy Dancer" is to some Talking Heads stuff from the same era. I wonder what Byrne and Prince thought of each other. 

lincoln in the bardo

Holy shit.

commercially important persons

Some notes I took (lightly edited) while in the CIP lounge in Dushanbe airport waiting to leave for Dubai at 4 AM:

• Been watching this Russian TV show for 20 minutes and have no idea what's happening or even what kind of show it is. A game show? A talk show? The TV reflected in the window is showing MMA, which I don't enjoy much but which is at least easy to understand.
• "Partner" and "roaming" are direct loan words to Tajik, transliterated into Cyrillic on the wall-sized cell phone ad across the room from me.
• Daler booking us space in the CIP lounge: a kindness that kind of backfired because it's uncomfortable and they took our passports and there's no clear indication of where or when we check in. 
• The check-in lady, without asking, put one of Farah's bags with mine, and somehow also one of Farah's bags with Jasmin's. Farah had to go get her to redo it. Shockingly incompetent and rude, I'm not sure I've ever seen a more incompetent person working in an airport.

Coda: The check-in lady used code numbers on the tags that were not recognizable to the system in Dubai. I'm not even sure how that's possible, but it meant that it took more than an hour for them to find Farah's second bag and that I had to check at the counter and also the gate to make sure mine had made it through. It did, but with half my clothes somehow stained yellow. Like, urine yellow. They didn't stink but if they're permanently stained then Emirates and Fly Dubai are gonna get a strongly-worded email. 

running

Today I ran 14.53 km, or just over 9 miles, with nine 60-second bursts at ~3:30/km pace (5:38/mile) sprinkled throughout. That is the farthest I've ever run, certainly farther than we ever went for cross country practice in high school (come to think of it, that might be why Blair was never very good at cross country). This represents progress. I'm excited about the two 5K races I've signed up for while I'm on my trip next month. My knees are a little achey, but that makes sense given the distance.

Heading to Tajikistan tonight for the first time since late 2015. Transit time in each direction is the same as getting home, even though a direct flight would be three hours at most. That's what you get for flying from one crappy airport to another, I guess. Whining aside, it'll be nice to see some people up there. I'm looking forward to it. Back in almost exactly a week. 

dreaming about jack

Last night I had a dream about Jack. Warning: it was not a nice dream. Certain readers may want to avoid or pick a judicious time to read it.

M, D, Linc, and I were in the basement of our next door neighbors' house, and we knew that Jack was in the neighborhood and on a killing spree. We could hear distant gunshots. That basement has a lot of windows so we knew we weren't safe and had to run but we were hemming and hawing about picking the right time to do it. Eventually we all fled and I ended up in a smaller basement room in a nearby house (not one from real life). This one had smoked windows and an old door with a couple of deadbolts.

We could hear Jack getting closer, looking for us. After a few minutes he was outside the door and tried to open it. He shouted, "I know you're in there! Let me in!" and started trying to break down the door. We watched the deadbolts shake against the impacts. I decided that I would try to ambush him if he got through the door, so I positioned myself to the side of it.

When he did break through the whole door came with him and he ended up on the ground. I was on him right away, with my arm around his throat from behind. He flailed around and dropped his gun and I got him on the ground. I tried to bang his head on the ground but resisted and somehow he twisted around so we were facing each other with him on his back and me kneeling over him with my hands on his throat. He was a smaller, younger version of himself -- maybe mid-teens -- although in the dream I didn't notice that. He was struggling, red-faced and crying as I tried to keep enough pressure on his throat to make him pass out.

"Why are you doing this?" he choked out, and I said, through my own tears, "You know why."

At last he passed out, and I woke up.

the upstairs wife

Farida Zakaria's memoir-by-proxy of her aunt's experience of being relegated to the role of second wife a few years into her marriage, and of major events in Pakistan's history from the perspective of its women. The structure of the book doesn't quite work, switching back and forth between vignettes from her family and narration of events that were happening around them at about the same time. But I liked the book all the same. Zakaria's a good writer and it was an education for me to read what plural marriage can look like in the context of middle-class (eventually wealthy) Muslim Indians-cum-Pakistanis. That's a world I'm aware of, that's around me all the time -- all of my Pakistani colleagues and friends are educated and middle-to-upper class -- but one that I'm still very much outside of.

And I always appreciate a narrative that's told so conscientiously, deliberately from women's point of view. Even when Zakaria is talking about something men are doing, she talks about women.

Now I've got to find another light book to keep me company while I work my way through Debt: the First 5000 Years. Which, interestingly enough, has just got around to describing the dawn of Judeo-Christian patriarchy.

pilgrim

Mom put together a list of the places Jack stayed more than ten days after the end of eighth grade. By my count he moved 56 times in the 12.5 years between then and his death, or an average of once every three months and 22 days. 

therapy

Just had my first session with a therapist, via Skype. After emailing a bunch of people in MD, this guy was one of a few who got back to me and the first I could make an appointment with. I liked him, will speak to him again next week and stop casting the net for the time being. I feel good for having done it at all, now let's see how the relationship develops. 

monal

There's a huge restaurant in the Margallas overlooking Islamabad, called Monal. They have pretty good barbecue and other stuff but it's not great and it's a pain to get to: half an hour up a very steep, winding road and nearly as long to descend because you have to be careful. So I basically only go there for work dinners, when we're hosting a big group. Last night was one such night. But unlike my previous trips up there, this one came a day after very heavy rain. Heavy rain leads to clear air.

Islamabad was sparkling. Monal looks down on a huge swath of the city, from Rawal Lake in the east to the motorway in the west. Ordinarily the view fades into dusty haze around the Serena, 10-12 km away. But last night we could see all the way to the Attock oil refinery on the other side of Rawalpindi, a tiny orange flame burning 40 km away on the horizon. We could see the seven massive lights along the runway of Bhutto airport and watch planes taking off and landing. Nice evening. 

good weekend

SRB and I were very busy this weekend.

1. Hosted friends for the first time on Friday evening
2. Bought a bunch of plants -- cane palms, table palms, bougainvillea, monsteria, a money plant, and some tiny succulents -- and arranged them on the patio and inside. The two tall palms are still at the top of the stairs because they are heavy and there's no way we can get them down here ourselves. Need a wheelbarrow. And SRB is fit but she's 5'6" and a woman: Need another man
3. Talked to M&D&Linc (mainly me, but her a little at the end), including first substantial convo about Jack's memorial. It was good to start that dialogue
4. Didn't go to a big party last night because we were drinking wine and having a nice time and at some point looked at each other and just said, nah
5. Started to hang pictures
6. Ran twice
7. Bought a bunch of other house necessities, including various buckets and bins for us to start composting
8. Finished Democracy, Sustainable Development, and Peace: New Perspectives on South Asia, which was meh except for 2-3 essays toward the back, and really only one of those actually taught me something new. Standard liberal stuff I deal with all day in my professional life. Did serve as a reminder that I know a lot about my profession, which I suppose is worth something
9. Finally saw Black Panther, which ruled

Monday off to a productive start as well. One of my team members did a good job on a new task that I coached her through and that's gratifying. Our final living room chair was delivered, so the house is continuing to feel more and more like a place where people live. I emailed five or six therapists in MD who say they do tele-therapy. SRB is nearly done with her big consultancy, just waiting for one or two final inputs. 

things will be better tomorrow

Wrote out a long-ish entry on an unpleasant interaction I had with SRB this morning, self-flagellating but also trying to figure out why I acted the way I did and why she acted the way she did. It's too personal to share in full. We'll be okay, it seems that these kinds of fights are just going to happen for us from time to time because we approach the world and each other differently. The last one I remember was last fall, maybe early October. I'll try to do better next time.

On another, somewhat related note, I heard back from the tele-therapy practice recommended by an acquaintance here. They recommended one of their therapists, who wrote to me to schedule an appointment. She's in Illinois, so the times she suggested were not practical for me. When I told her that I was in Pakistan, she said that her license only permits her to treat patients in Illinois. Ah, so. I asked if she knew of anyone else in the practice who was more flexible or whether she knew of other online resources I could try. Let's see.

condolences

Today is Jack's birthday. He would have been 27. I took the day off from work to grieve and to spare myself interacting with anyone other than SRB and maybe a shopkeeper or two. One unusual part of the grief I feel in the aftermath of Jack's death is the need to be alone, to shut myself off from conversation. In normal times I don't mind being alone, but I draw energy from being with people. There is something deeply private about grief, though, and something tiring about people constantly sharing condolences. My grief is especially acute today, and my lack of tolerance for, well, anything.

This morning I talked to Mom, Dad, Linc and Linc's friend K for a little while. Other than Mom, they seemed drained. Linc spent four hours yesterday going through Jack's phone, a chore I can scarcely imagine doing. I'm grateful to him for doing it.

And I just finished, finally, going through the cards that Dad scanned and emailed to me, from friends and family. In the days after he died I wrote that there will be no new memories. I was wrong about that, other people's memories of him have poured into our lives. Some of them are in these cards. I took a few notes along the way, which I'll copy here:

• The first one to break me down was from Teresa Smith. So many of the cards say more or less the same things, but I didn't even have to read past her name to start crying. What a dear person she is. And holy cow what beautiful handwriting. 
• I have no recollection of the woman who says her first boyfriend was Jack. Her note was really sweet, I thought. 
• I'm grateful to Maryanne and Michael for writing a special note to Linc and me. 
• Brandon's card is beautiful and moving. "He could never make sense of life on this planet, in this form...and so he has taken another." True.
• I lost it a bit after reading Eyal's card.
• I really disagree with the Bill Coffin sermon, that we shouldn't say that sudden deaths are "the will of God." I'm not sure I believe in any kind of god at all, but if I do it's something like the god of Job, who wills everything into being and unbeing. The god of my understanding doesn't choose sides, doesn't consider some deaths natural and others against its will. If there is a god, it absolutely does go around with its fingers on triggers, its fists around knives, and its force in gravity and in every molecular bond holding together the concrete that ended Jack's life, the snow that caused Coffin's son to crash his car. Any other god is a lesser god, one too much like us, not worth venerating or even contemplating. To paraphrase Spinoza: If triangles could speak, they would say that God is eminently triangular. Bill Coffin is a triangle, and me too, and his god sounds an awful lot like a triangle, and I'm trying to embrace a god or something beyond my understanding that doesn't have our shape at all. 
• The mourner's kaddish is alright with me

The other reason I wanted to take the day off was to give myself time and space to confront Jack's death and my grief. I've written before about how easy it is for me to compartmentalize and put away things I don't want to think about. Mom said on a call the other day, in a different context, that one of my characteristics is a knack for being present. It's true that I have low anticipatory anxiety and that I let go quickly, for the most part, when plans don't turn out the way I thought they would. Those are things I like about myself. But a downside is that I don't readily allow myself to be present with my suffering. Jack died nearly two months ago. Today the sun is shining, birds are singing, I have lots of work to do, there are books to read and people to talk to and things to learn and trips to plan and a house to move out of and another to move into. 

But Jack is gone and I am deeply, deeply sad that I will never see him, hold him, laugh with him, play Scrabble with him, hear him rhyme, eat his cooking, be irritated with him or worried about him ever again. I must confront that pain, or else seal off a part of myself that I don't want sealed. 

A care package finally arrived today from a group of friends. They sent Cracklin' Oat Bran, peanut butter cups, confetti cake and frosting, a New Yorker and an Economist, and some books of poetry, and a sweet card. It must have been in the mail for weeks and I had to pay $55 in customs charges because Pakistan is a ridiculous country. I don't pay any income tax so actually I shouldn't complain too vociferously when they get me on things like that. Anyway I'm very excited about the COB. Must purchase some milk today.

Now it's lunchtime. SRB and I have some pad thai and some cabbage-carrot-beetroot-parsnip-onion salad to polish off, which is good. This afternoon I'll start packing and maybe make a trip over to the new place, to spread out the move. We'll hire a truck and a couple of guys on Saturday to do the furniture. 

Jack's dearest friend is going to be with the fam today in Silver Spring, which I'm glad about. I'll call tomorrow morning to be with everyone for a little while. 

pizza

A married couple that I'm friends with here run a private pre-K and elementary school. They're lovely, great people, one Pakistani-American and the other French, and once in a while they host a pizza party at their school. J, the husband, built a full-on brick pizza oven in the backyard and has a yeast culture that he keeps going. They get real semolina flour and make excellent dough in the afternoon, ask people to bring a couple of toppings each (SRB and I were tasked last night to bring Nutella and strawberries for dessert pizza), and then set up an assembly line where people take turns rolling out the dough, assembling their pizzas, and sticking them in the oven. J supervises by hollering at people to get out of the way and upbraiding the crowd for not keeping the pizzas coming fast enough. The result is quite possibly the only good pizza in all of Pakistan, certainly better than any restaurant I've been to or heard of in Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi, or anywhere else.

It's a beautiful day here again today. SRB is sleeping, I was watching Olympic giant slalom until a few minutes ago when I got bored because the live feed was showing the lower competitors. I'm sure it's very exciting for random guy X that he's competing in the Olympics and finishing 36th or 45th or whatever but there's not so much drama as a spectator. Turns out my interest in watching skiing on TV extends to maybe the 10th-best person in the world and not beyond. Good to know.

Once she wakes up I think the plan is to go for a nice long slow run around the diplomatic enclave and perhaps see a Black Panther matinee. Skype with M&D and Linc later.

rain

It is raining like absolute gangbusters right now. It sprinkled last night and was drizzling this morning and once the workday got underway the heavens opened. Earlier there was hail and a thunderstorm, now it's just a steady downpour. The last 18 month or so have seen a moderate drought -- the reservoir behind the dam that powers most of Islamabad and Rawalpindi was dangerously low last summer and fall -- so here's hoping we get a bit more of the same in the weeks to come. Rain on the window is in the fire in the hearth range of soothing sounds, too. Will need to figure out what to do about running until it warms up a little, though. 

communism for kids

Really wanted to like this. Bought it on a whim because it seemed like such a good, fun idea. But the execution of the "for kids" part reads like someone who has a pretty strong sense of what they're talking about rambling as they try to work out a good metaphor to explain it as they go. Nothing inherently wrong with that, it's a perfectly fine way to have a conversation with someone. But it really doesn't work in a book. The scenarios Adamczak describes as she spins out the metaphor she settles on are unclear and clumsy and fail to make her point. She herself sounds very convinced, though, which is nice for her.

And then of course the "for kids" part is just a cover for her to give a turgid if passionate rant in the second half that seems like it was lifted from a zine she maybe co-published. Blah blah blah jargonese blah blah blah.

Oh well. 

hm

Had a perfectly nice Sunday going. Went to sleep at a reasonable hour last night, woke up around 8:30, picked up omelette parathas and dal channa from Ravi, ate on the terrace at SRB's place. Talked to Gabby, brought up potential plans to meet up in Europe this summer. Came back to my house for lunch, took a nap, talked to SRB's dad (it's his birthday today). Then back to SRB's to play pool and find our vocal ranges on her housemate's keyboard. Then she started playing songs and I picked up her guitar and fussed around with it a bit, and she came over and showed me a couple of chords.

And suddenly I was restless and wanted to run, and then just as suddenly I felt very sad and enervated. Crying is not something I do much of, even when I want to (see earlier post), but I had a bit of that heavy chest, tight throat feeling that sometimes precedes crying. I left to run but came home and sat on the couch instead. Still sitting here, an hour later. People are coming over to the other house later to jam and hang out and for whatever reason all of a sudden I just want to be alone. Very strange feeling. Not pleasant. I think running would make me feel better but I can't stand up.

***

Yesterday evening before going out to dinner with SRB and a couple of friends who just got engaged and are leaving soon, I talked with Dad for a while. It was the first time we've spoken one on one since I got back to Pakistan and an intense and moving conversation. It's a remarkable coincidence that we each lost our youngest brother in our 30s, although the circumstances of Tom's and Jack's lives and deaths were very different. It's also quite amazing that his parents lost a beloved dog a month after Tom's death, just as we lost Sherlock within weeks of Jack's.

***

Strange.

***

Update: Went for the longest run of my life, 11.01 km (6.84 miles for those counting at home). Nice and easy, right at 5:00/km pace with a couple of stops for major road crossings. I feel much, much better. Very glad to have done that. Now will stretch and perhaps order a cheeseburger and some curly fries. 

dream

A couple of nights ago I had a dream. I was in a park on a sunny day, joining a meeting of colleagues from Geneva who were sitting at a long picnic table. We had a nice time, doing whatever work-related thing we needed to do, and then parting ways as the sun went down. People dispersed but my old boss Jo and our colleague Staci ended up sitting on some small bleachers with a railing along the bottom. I stood against the railing and we talked a bit, and Jo said something about being gentle. For whatever reason, the word "gentle" in the dream made me think of Jack and I started to cry. Not sobbing, just letting tears pour quietly down my face, turning toward my arm, which was braced against the railing. I woke up and without thinking checked my cheeks to see if they were wet.

Since soon after Jack's death, once we started talking about having a memorial service in the spring, I had it in mind to recite one of his poems or raps as a tribute to him. Over the last couple of days I've had a different thought. So much of his rapping at least was about pain and fear and drugs. Even his triumphant moments were about survival and overcoming really dark experiences. Those were part of his life -- a bigger part than for most people -- but he had joy and happiness and contentment and generosity, too. I want to focus on that. Lots more time to ponder and reflect, of course. 

super bowl

Steph finally convinced me to get a pedicure this weekend, my first ever. It was nice, I suppose. Something to do once in a blue moon on a lazy weekend day. But now I have purple toenails, and that makes me think of Jack, who went through a passionate nail-painting phase nearly 20 years ago. I honestly don't remember if he ever painted my nails, although my guess is he did. Either way, men or boys wearing nail polish outside a greater expression of gender fluidity always makes me think of him. So my cis self is enjoying the sparkly bright color and also getting a little twinge every time I take my socks off and look at my feet.

Talked to Linc for a good while on Friday night. It was the first time we'd spoke on the phone since I got back to Pakistan and it was good to check in. Fingers crossed for him in this many-stepped-but-actually-not-all-that-lengthy-when-I-think-about-how-long-it-just-took-me-to-hire-one-person job application he's got going on. Fingers crossed for SRB in her application to the Australian High Commission, too.

Speaking of SRB, we started looking at places to move in together. Her lease is up in March and I'm living month-to-month: my lease ended in November and my landlord hasn't made a fuss about me signing a new one. She first suggested it last year and I resisted, but something recently flipped and now it feels good to be trying to find a space to be in together. My place is nice and cozy and funky but it's also small and dim. Might as well try out a bigger place while I'm still living somewhere I can afford it! Most of the places we've looked at this weekend were kind of eh, but a couple in the fanciest neighborhood are promising. One's a basement but recently renovated and nicely designed. Another is an "upper portion," as they call it here, otherwise known as an apartment that starts on the second floor. We're split on which of the two we like better -- she's into the basement because of the newness and niceness, I'm into the latter because it's spacious, surrounded by green, and full of light. But the one I like really is a bit shabby and the kitchen is cramped and kind of tucked away, which is a bummer. We'll revisit them both at evening prayers, when you get a sense of (1) what it's like with less direct sunlight and (2) how loud the azan (call to prayer) is. Azan volume is critical because the first one is pre-dawn and if it's loud it can wake you up every day. We checked one place out this afternoon from which you could practically read the brand name on the speakers on the minaret. Hard pass.

No urgency there because her housemates have both found other options and if we don't find a place we really like she can move in with me for a little while or vice versa. Her current place is okay but it's enormous; we'd have lots of unused space. Good balcony and garden though.

It's Kashmir Day here, a federal holiday, perfectly timed to coincide with Super Bowl SunMonday. So I was up at 4 AM, making coffee and then driving over to a friend of a friend's place to watch the game in the wee hours. SRB stayed asleep until around halftime and then joined. This friend of a friend is an American diplomat so has access to bacon, and our mutual friend made pancakes with chopped up strawberries and bananas on top. Most delicious. Plus the game was outstanding, a real barnstormer featuring the most yards ever gained in a single game in the history of the NFL, and also the first team to gain 600 yards and lose in the history of the NFL, and the team that lost is the team I wanted to lose. Fly Eagles, fly. My fandom feels truly liberated now, in the FreeDarko sense of no longer caring about any one team but only rooting for the games to be entertaining, the players skilled, the narratives compelling. This Super Bowl delivered.

Two short naps and a bunch of reading and apartment visiting later, the sun's going down. SRB is working on her macroeconomics course, I'm writing this post, we'll go for a run some time in the near future. Back to work tomorrow.

perfume: the story of a murderer

Gripping, unique thriller about a man with the world's greatest nose, a bloodhound on steroids, who is consumed by scents and indifferent to everything else. But he himself gives off no odor and is thus off-putting or unnoticeable to people he meets. He becomes obsessed by the scent of virginal young women, and a couple of them in particular, and sets out to create a scent that captures their essence. This involves him becoming a master perfumer, a hermit, an even greater master perfumer, and then a serial killer.

It's a really good tale and the writing is wonderfully rich. The original language is German but it doesn't feel like much was lost in translation. A huge proportion of the imagery is, unsurprisingly, given over to the odors that make up the protagonist's day-to-day existence. I've never encountered anything like that. I was seized by the desire to read it after Diane Ackerman refers to it in A Natural History of the Senses. It did not disappoint.

In related news, a writer in the UK started a prize for thrillers and mystery fiction that do not involve violence against women. The one disappointing thing about Perfume is the boringness of young virgins as the object of desire ne plus ultra. Looking forward to seeing the Staunch Prize shortlist later this year.

january quick book reflections

The Wrong Enemy, by Carlotta Gall, comes out of her nearly 15 years of reporting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, much of that time as Kabul bureau chief for the New York Times. Focuses on Pakistan's longtime support for the Taliban and other destabilizing forces in Afghanistan and how Pakistan's intelligence and military establishment perpetuates the war tearing up its neighbor to ensure that there's no stable non-client state on the border opposite India. The Afghan Taliban are, as Gall paints it, basically dependent on Pakistan for their survival and have even been directed strategically by Pakistan at various points. This has had terrible implications not just for Afghans but for Pakistanis as well, as the vicious religious intolerance and misogyny of the Taliban has spread and spawned. Nothing, from a macro level, that I didn't already know, but Gall has stories to tell and she's a good writer. Three stars

Other Minds, by Peter Godfrey-Smith, is a look at how consciousness seems to (may?) have evolved in cephalopods, which split off from the evolutionary branch that produced both vertebrates and arthropods more than 600 million years ago. That utter independence of evolution -- they in the sea, with dispersed nervous systems and nearly shapeless bodies; us on land, with giant brains, two legs, and opposable thumbs -- prompts a pretty serious need to reflect on our own specialness and on the nature of consciousness. SRB got me this as a gift: good gift, that sort of thing is catnip to me. The book ended up being okay: enlightening about a topic I knew little about but somehow less revelatory or mind-blowing than I hoped. Not its fault that my expectations were so high but there you go. 3.5 stars.

A Natural History of the Senses, by Diane Ackerman, is sui generis. What is there to say? I loved the first three-fifths and then by the time she got to hearing and especially sight I was kind of ready for it to be over. She has much more interesting things to say about smell, touch, and taste than about the two senses that we're most conscious of. It's a tour-de-force of voluptuous, sensuous writing by a person who is deeply in touch with her own senses. Four stars and by golly I've never read anything like it. 

books read 2018

1. The Wrong Enemy, by Carlotta Gall
2. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith
3. A Natural History of the Senses, by Diane Ackerman

emotional quotient, part 1

Talked with Mom for half an hour or so last night. It was nice to have a spontaneous conversation; usually we have to plan days in advance because of the time difference. But I've got her and Dad using WhatsApp now and she was working from home so a mid-morning (her time) call was actually doable. SRB was with me on the couch here, as well, and one of the things we talked about was grief counseling. SRB had a longtime yoga client who's a therapist -- not a common profession in this mental-healthcare-starved country -- and had previously suggested reaching out to her. And we'd talked even before Jack died about seeking therapy. It's something I've thought about kind of idly for a couple of years at least but never done anything about.

One of the things I am trying to do in the aftermath of Jack's death is take more rigorous emotional care of myself. My general tendency is to move through life without huge emotional amplitude. Usually this is a good thing: I handle stressful situations well and am happy and content most of the time. But there are times when I wonder what it costs me to be so even.

A memory: When my maternal grandfather died, in 2002, his funeral was held at the church down the road from where and my step-grandmother lived. I sat right behind my Mom's older brother, himself a pretty emotionally contained person. He sobbed loudly, rocking back and forth. Everyone, it seemed, was crying: my brothers, my parents, my relatives, my grandfather's friends. Except me. I looked around and felt that I should be crying, wished that I would cry. But my body did not want to. No tears, no sobs, no quivering chin. It felt like something was wrong with me: was I less sad than everyone else? What did that mean, if so? Did I love my grandfather less than I should have? What was I missing, and missing out on, by not sharing in the outward expressions of grief?

A more recent memory: A few weeks ago, we went into the morgue at the hospital where Jack's body ended up. The security guard who led us there and unlocked the door to the pathology wing explained that he wasn't in too bad shape, a little bruising around the face. I felt nervous, holding back tears as we walked. And I was not prepared for the sight that greeted us: Jack's mouth was open, and his eyes open and vacantly turned upward. The rest of his body was still covered up by the white body bag. I went into convulsive sobs, felt lightheaded, gasped for air, moaned. Lincoln keened in a way I had never heard before. Mom and Dad also sobbed uncontrollably. At some point I couldn't stand and so I knelt and put my head in my hands. The others came over and hugged me or put their hands on me.

We spent what felt like a long time in the wing but can't have been more than 30 or 40 minutes. I couldn't bear to be in the room that whole time so I spent a few stretches in the hallway, on a chair that the guard kindly brought.

It was one of the most horrible experiences of my life. And yet in weeping together, touching each other, the four of us were able to support each other in our individual grief and shock. That shared experience took place over and over the next day and the days after that. So in a way I was relieved to be overwhelmed.

Now, three weeks after finding out that Jack was dead, I'm trying to gauge how closely I've returned to my normal baseline. I'm worried the answer is "too closely." I am sad, even overcome at times. But threw myself back into work immediately, have not wept since I left the States, have not confronted the things Jack left behind: His raps, the photographs of him I have in my house, his Facebook page. The journals and art at Mom and Dad's. To some degree I've slipped right back into the compartmentalization that comes so naturally to me. But I am trying to resist it, trying to let the wound heal slowly rather than slapping some super glue in there, wrapping it up in tape, and injecting the affected area with novocaine. 

i don't know what to title this post

This blog's namesake died last Friday night, released from this life -- to borrow a phrase I used earlier in the month in a different context -- by a vet after my parents (and the vet) decided he was suffering too much to go on. We all had a list of preferred nicknames for Sherlock the yorkiepoo, but mine were mostly variants on Mister Suss. The origin is unclear, I assume I (or maybe someone else in the family) said it one day in his puppyhood while speaking to him in the babytalk voice that's so natural to use even with adult pets.

The context I used the phrase in earlier was in drafting a death notice for my youngest brother. He killed himself on 6 January, by jumping off a parking deck in the town where he lived. It took the coroner a few days to find out who he was because he wasn't carrying any ID. My other brother called me at 7 AM the following Wednesday; I'd returned to Islamabad from the Christmas holidays on the 3rd, so it was his Tuesday night. I ignored the first call, but when he called back right away I knew even before picking up that Jack had died.

That day and the next I cried a lot, talked to Linc and M&D, to my best friend, and to SRB most of all, who was wonderfully patient and present through my disoriented sadness. Early-early Friday morning I flew to Boston and then drove up to NH to be with the rest of the fam (my aunt Becca, who lives outside Boston, very kindly gave me a lift; one of the odd side effects of unexpected grief is that people jump to help and you end up in some unexpected conversations -- I'm sure that was by an order of magnitude the longest unbroken time I've ever spent with her and it was great to just chat).

Being with the family was essential because the weekend in NH was horrible. Seeing J's body, dealing with his apartment, talking to the staff and other people at the place where he was living: all incomprehensibly painful. But going through the shock and early grief together helped to make it more bearable. We drove down to M&D's house on Sunday evening, via Linc's, and then spent the rest of the week together there.

And now I'm back in Islamabad, far, far away from home again. Having to have the "I'm so sorry" conversation multiple, sometimes what feels like dozens of times a day while trying to catch up on work and deal with high-profile (for us) visitors.

What strikes me most as I write this is the continued unreality of Jack's death. We spent time with his body, first in the hospital and then in the funeral home before he was cremated. We wailed and wept together many times; I cried more that Wednesday and Thursday than I had cumulatively in my adult life, and then smashed that record to smithereens on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Deep, body crying was a new experience for me, the kind where you have trouble breathing. When we got his ashes the next day they were still warm, and I rode back to Mom and Dad's house with them in a sealed box between my feet.

But Linc and I both had the experience the week after Jack died of feeling like he had just gone off the radar again. He'd done it plenty of times before, and it was always scary but rarely dominated my attention. It became routine. So his being out of touch now, at a gut level, feels like it could just be that again. I know it's not, and I get waves of awareness of his death and my sadness at my -- our -- loss. But a lot of the time in the first three-plus weeks after finding out that he'd died my brain just seemed to tell me that he'll be back.

I started writing this last night and am poking along on it at work today to give myself breaks from the excruciatingly detailed (but useful, so that's okay) feedback we got from Canada on an early childhood development proposal that we're behind on. This morning, perhaps because I said something dumb last night and then didn't follow up on it well and so SRB is angry with me and I'm frustrated with myself, and also I barely slept for reasons only partly explainable by stressing over that interaction, I'm feeling the sadness about Jack more physically and "real-ly" than average.

While lying awake in bed last night I started imagining, on a loop, his last hours in his apartment: journaling, smoking cigarettes, looking out the window, rubbing his hands over his face, thinking about the parking deck. Alone. Those images are following me around today. They're almost cinematic, like a movie montage, edited unconsciously to efficiently tell the story my brain invented to explain or empathize or describe his death. I have no way of knowing, now, how close they hew to reality. One day I'll read Jack's journals and talk to M&D about their conversations with his circle in NH and maybe they will shed some light. In the meantime, I'm stuck in that neatly edited, profoundly sad loop.

Incidentally, there was a study of nuns that found those who in their youth wrote more complex sentences were less likely to develop dementia in old age. If the paragraph before the last one is any indication, I am never going to develop dementia. Mandatory remedial camp for devotees of sub-clauses and parenthetical asides, maybe.

SRB asked me the other night whether I felt like I had enough space to grieve and the answer, frankly, is no. Too much to do. I may take a day off this week or next to be with myself a little bit. Now back to work. 

new year

It's easy, when making resolutions, to make too many. Or maybe that's the wrong way of looking at it. Maybe it's too hard to prioritize. Come to think of it, "Prioritization, that is your weakness," were words that came out of my boss's mouth during my annual review last month. So, here is a list of resolutions for 2018, some of which I will achieve and others of which are aspirational. And some of which I will not focus on and others that I will. For now, an undifferentiated list, which I will grow over the next couple of days and then sort into tiers:

• run under 20:00 for 5km
• learn to sing well enough to harmonize reliably with SRB
• learn three songs on the ukulele
• learn a three-card-trick routine well enough to perform it spontaneously
• complete the Coursera MOOC on guitar for beginners
• read 30 books, of which 15+ are by women and 10+ are by people of color
• make one domestic trip outside Islamabad per month
• rejoin the book club
• hire two people for my team at work
• travel to four new countries
• take the GRE
• be a better manager
• come up with a more useful way to say "better manager" than "better manager"
• complete the Khunjerab Pass 10K
• heal shoulder
• be more proactive about nurturing friendships old and new; more Skype calls to the States and more casual group activities in Pakistan

old year

2017 was a whirlwind. My first calendar year spent outside the US since 2006-2007. Beginning and growth of a serious relationship with a woman I love. A job that has taught me a lot and challenged me an order of magnitude more than any other I've had. Lots and lots (and lots) of new friends and acquaintances. A trip to eastern Europe with M&D, and a trip to the Himalayas with Linc. Flying to NH for an afternoon to see Jack in July. Joining a book club for the first time ever. Much more that I won't even begin to try to capture here because otherwise I'll be at my computer all night.

Books completed in 2017 (five most memorable in bold):
1. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie
2. A Perfect Spy, by John Le Carre
3. LaRose, by Louise Erdrich
4. What the Dead Know, by Laura Lippman
5. Blindness, by Jose Saramago
6. Uprooted, by Naomi Novik
7. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
8. Doughnut Economics, by Kate Raworth
9. The City and the City, by China Mieville
10. What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, by Leslie Arimah
11. Sister Outside, by Audre Lorde
12. Norse Mythology, by Neil Gaiman
13. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, by Alice Dreger
14. Prussian Blue, by Philip Kerr
15. What If?, by Randall Munroe
16. The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
17. Would Everybody Please Stop?, by Jenny Allen
18. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, by Mohsin Hamid
19. The Butcher Bird, by SD Sykes
20. A Legacy of Spies, by John Le Carre
21. The Struggle for Pakistan, by Ayesha Jalal
22. The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern
23. Mostly Harmless, by Douglas Adams
24. The Last Mughal, by Will Dalrymple
25. La Belle Sauvage, by Philip Pullman

I read 80% of Carlotta Gall's The Wrong Enemy in December but didn't finish until the plane ride home after New Year's, so it counts for 2018.

Doughnut Economics should be required reading for high school students across the US. Capitalist obsession with growth is doom, but there need to be good, simple, appealing alternatives to the simple, appealing metaphors we use now. It's easy to despair at the triumph of right-wing and centrist narratives and much harder to posit some reasonable alternatives. Raworth does. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex is a stunning history of the science of sex, gender, and sexuality. Deeply enriched my understanding of the degree to which biological sex, and not just gender, is itself socially constructed. The Underground Railroad was the best novel I read this year. The Struggle for Pakistan is well-researched, informative, and the worst-written professionally published book I've ever read. Yes, including The Da Vinci Code. The Last Mughal, by contrast, is astoundingly well-researched and also gripping. We helped Dalrymple organize a family vacation this year to the north so he could write about it for the Financial Times, so I happened to be on a couple of email chains with him. Didn't get a chance to meet him, but if I ever do I'll be able to creep him out by memorizing his passport number (you know, if I felt like it). He is a fantastic writer.