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. 

31, a prime number

The invitation to my birthday party last weekend began: 

One-and-a-half score and one years ago, my parents brought forth on this planet a new birth of person, conceived in Tennessee, and dedicated to the proposition that punning on the Gettysburg address is the best way to announce a birthday party.

 Come to think of it, I've never checked about the Tennessee bit, just assumed it based on timeline.

At any rate, it turned out to be the party of the night last Saturday for the smallish scene here, especially once the Marine Ball ended at 11:30. (American embassy parties are the lamest.) That made me happy. There were only a few crashers, most of whom were welcome. The two who weren't ended up being the hardest people to kick out, surprise surprise, but I finally managed to around 4:00.

SRB had gone to bed earlier and Linc was still in town so he and I went back to my place and slept until past noon on Sunday. After going out for a big brunch we headed over to the party house and commenced to cleaning. SRB was in a terrible mood for reasons that she would not disclose, which happens sometimes and is always a treat. Also the floors were in rough shape -- college party rough. Much trash, much sweeping, two passes with the mop. Then Linc and I went on our merry way, to watch a terrific kung fu movie (Iron Monkey) and eat popcorn and, eventually, dinner.

After that I went back over to pick SRB up and take a few minutes to talk about why she'd been upset earlier. Was good to do that. Back at my house we watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, to complete the kung fu theme of the day.

On my actual birthday, I just had a couple of friends over to SRB and AF's place, along with Lincoln. We ordered some food and drank some wine, including a bottle that I'd been lusting after since Santiago days, which I bought earlier this year after finding it by chance in some duty free. It's called Montes Folly, and it made a big global splash when it debuted 10+ years ago. Needless to say, it was much too expensive for study-abroad-me to afford. But by golly I can afford it now. It was delicious, thankfully. Then we played a lovely round of Dixit, in which I finished last and Linc won. AF gave Linc a high-five afterward, reminding us that on his birthday a little while ago we played Scrabble and I whipped him. Karma, I suppose.

Home stretch to the holidays commences now. I won't have a Thanksgiving dinner again this year: don't hang out with many Americans, so I'm not invited to any, and it goes without saying that Thursday's not a day off for us. But that's okay. SRB and I can have a Jewish-Christmas Thanksgiving, ordering Chinese and watching a movie.

She's in Peshawar tonight, so I'll take the opportunity to run some errands and perhaps do a bit of Christmas shopping. Been makin' a list.

running

After hurting my shoulder in August I dropped off on the gymnastics training that I'd started in April. Managed to achieve a few things in the few months I dedicated to it, as SRB pointed out to me yesterday: decent cartwheels, inconsistent but achievable handstands, front levers. Failed at kip-ups, which I think is likely to stay that way because of shoulder mobility and a mental block. Eventually I'd like to get those, a standing backflip, and a human flag. 

In the meantime, though, she encouraged me to start running again. And to start getting up early to exercise. After easing very gradually into that, I've been seized by the desire for new goals. Running goals. So I've set my sights on the following:

1. A sub-23:00 5k by end of 2017
2. A sub-21:00 5k by spring 2018
3. A sub-20:00 5k by summer 2018, which would beat my PR from the one season of cross country I ran in high school. Don't think I ever ran faster than 20:30.
4. Completing the 10k at the Khunjerab Pass Marathon next July, which finishes at 15,400 feet.

SRB said she'd be down to join for the latter. Will require a few weekend trips for trekking/running at altitude next spring, so that we're not completely unprepared. When we drove up there last August even walking around made me slightly lightheaded.

It's also time to start taking shoulder rehab seriously, and then doing overhead work and pull ups and such again. Too fun, I miss it.

sexual harassment and male privilege

Many of my woman friends have been posting "me too" on social media, as part of a push to make people aware of how common sexual harassment and abuse are. This brought to mind an experience I've had of sexual abuse. (Trigger warning: this story is, obviously, about sexual abuse. Skip the bit between the asterisks if you'd rather not read it.)

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A few years ago, on a bus in DC, a woman groped me off and on for about 15 minutes, while repeatedly telling me that she wanted to "fuck the shit out of" me, talking about her sex life with her boyfriend, and speculating about the size of my penis. The friend I was with and the other people on the bus laughed the whole time, and I've told that story for laughs in the years since. She was so over the top, it was hard to believe it was happening. Even I was laughing, although not as hard as my friend or the high school girls nearby. I outweighed her by at least 50 pounds, but, more than that, because I'm a man I haven't had to live my life in fear that an unwelcome advance might lead to something worse. So I was free to let the situation play out without worry. I wouldn't say it was a comfortable experience, but she would have had to have a knife or a gun to make me afraid. Eventually, we got off at the same stop she did, walked to our destination, and went about our evening.

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It goes without saying that if I were a woman, and my harasser a man, that story would be horrifying.

I've told it with that moral appended many times, and always get a sage nod in return about male privilege. But on thinking about it again today, it occurs to me that the only gender role that needs to flip for it to be scary is hers. If a man did that to me I would be terrified. The essence of patriarchy is an imbalance of power at a societal level, in which men as a group enjoy a dominant position over women. But it also plays out every day in personal interactions in which individual men, informed by the social expectation that they should dominate, impose themselves violently on other individual people.

The violence of men like Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Clarence Thomas can't be divorced from the violence of men like Dylann Roof, George Zimmerman, and Stephen Paddock. Male violence is the greatest threat to human security everywhere in the world. I'm reminded of the adage that many men's fear of equality reveals their subconscious knowledge of how shittily they treat women: calls for "equality" would mean women get to act more like men and they'd make men act more like women and wouldn't that be awful. The poverty of imagination of people like this is sad.

That, in turn, reminds me of another phrase with the ring of an adage, coined by recent MacArthur awardee Nikole Hannah-Jones: "True equality requires a surrendering of advantage." Words to live by.

A final aside: If the woman had been visibly larger and stronger than I am, I'd have been scared, too, although not as much as if she'd been a man. But I'm a pretty fit 31-year-old; the number of women who fit that description is small enough to ignore, let alone the minuscule share of that group who are disposed toward sexual abuse. Physical strength is part of the power imbalance between women and men. But it's not as important as the psychosocial part. 

independence day

Some disorganized thoughts on Pakistan's 70th anniversary of independence, framed by the ongoing events in Charlottesville:

Pakistan is still deeply shaped by its history as a British colony. The government is modeled on a parliamentary system. The legal framework often still includes laws that were enacted under the Raj, including the constitution, which is based in part on the Government of India Act of 1935. And white supremacy, in the form that the writer Sara'o Maozac called "white idolatry" in an essay that should be more widely read than it is, is a daily fact of life here. When SRB and I were at the Khunjerab Pass last week, around a dozen young men asked if I would take a selfie with them over the course of 20 minutes. They don't know me or who I am, I am (obviously) not a famous person. But I'm white, and so, as SRB put it, they "spotted one!" Seeing a white person is exciting. My foreign friends of color here do not have that experience. This jibes with Maozac's description of going to Ghana as a young African-American man and being bewildered at the attitude of young Ghanaians, who were thrilled to be around his white classmates but didn't have the time of day for him.

White idolatry is present in the US, too, although in a different way. For example, white people getting cast to play characters of color in movies. Tilda Swinton as the Tibetan teacher of Doctor Strange comes to mind, or Emma Stone playing a quarter-Chinese, quarter-Hawaiian person from that movie "Aloha." But no black or Chinese or American Indian stranger has ever asked me to take a selfie with them in the States. It's an uncomfortable experience, especially when the person reacts negatively when refused (I almost always refuse selfies). And I wonder if it's akin, in some way, to the experience people of color have in the West when they're the only one in a room full of white people. Slight tangent: it occurred to me that we had a moment like that with Linc at the beach this summer, when we were talking about anarchism. He said, Listen, I'm not an expert on anarchist theory. But we were all expecting him to be a representative of this group we don't know much about or have much experience of. Interesting parallel.

Pakistan is also deeply shaped by Partition, the creation of separate states for Hindus and Muslims out of the Raj that resulted in a massive human tragedy and ultimately the dominance of the military in Pakistani politics. There have been times in the last 70 years when 90% of Pakistan's state budget went to defense. Antipathy toward India drives nationalism here, as I saw first-hand at the Wagah border crossing last November. And much of the violent trouble Pakistan finds itself in is exacerbated by the inability of it and India to make peace with each other. The neocolonialist adventures we've been on in Afghanistan for the last 15 (!) years ran right into the teeth of Pakistan's use of proxies all over the region to counter India's influence. That use goes back to the founding, long before 9/11 or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

But US involvement in Afghanistan and our bombing of Pakistan mean that many people here are furious with us, and that we make a good boogeyman. And that means there are places here I cannot go because to do so would endanger my life. There are spaces in the US that are closed off to me, and rightly so in many cases, but the worst that would happen to me in them is some social awkwardness. Here my employer prohibits me from driving to or through certain places, for my own safety.

I need to take a break from writing, so in conclusion, Pakistan Zindabad.

low visibility

Bit of an airport adventure this morning. SRB and I woke up bright and early to see if we could get her on the PIA flight to Gilgit. There's a music festival and conference up in Passu this weekend, in the upper Hunza valley, that's being hosted by my colleagues. She's friends with the festival organizers and they invited her to play. But their plan for getting there -- four buses driving through the night, including through some iffy territory security-wise -- made her uncomfortable. Rightly so: I'm not allowed to travel through there by road without a really good reason and plenty of advance notice and clearance from our security.

So our admin manager spent hours yesterday trying to get us both on the PIA flight. Managed to get me a seat but not her, but then it turned out a helicopter mission was going up with plenty of extra seats. She's not allowed on the heli but I'm cleared to go anytime if there's a spot. So we woke up at 5 AM, made some coffee, got to the airport, and went straight to the ticket counter. The flight was booked but we asked if she could buy a standby ticket. The guy said sure, I'd brought enough cash to pay for it (about $100 for a foreigner ticket), and so she ended up taking off. Miraculous.

Unfortunately, the helicopter got up over the Margallas an hour later and turned right back around. Visibility over there was terrible, not more than a couple hundred meters and then everything was lost in the haze. Ordinarily we'd have waited to see if it would clear up but no dice: the haze only gets worse before it gets better and the pilot was worried that by the time it cleared up enough to fly over Abbottabad and into the mountains it'd be dicey in Gilgit. Disappointed!

On the plus side, SRB made it just fine and one of our drivers met her at the airport and took her to the Serena for breakfast before departing for Passu. Not sure if anyone else was riding with her but I wouldn't be surprised if so; apparently it's going to be a big event. She's never been up north before, so even if I have to stew down here for another day I'm glad she's getting to see Gilgit and Hunza. With any luck I'll join her tomorrow.

karachi

Six years after I first visited Karachi, I'm back. Flew in last night with LNT for a 1.5-day workshop, hosted by the Sindh government, on off-grid energy with a special focus on solar. Our colleagues who work on habitat have been doing little trials on solar power for individual households and small communities for 6-7 years, and so we were invited to participate. My colleague RB gave a presentation today and then spoke on a panel in the afternoon and acquitted himself very well, which was a relief. Always nerve-wracking to see someone talking about our work to a room full of people who are not just unfamiliar with us, but who might give us funding or help us out in other ways if they get a good first impression. And public speaking is hard. RB has a weird, slow style, but he comes across as very knowledgeable and he has interesting stuff to say. For example, most of the speakers were from the government or the private sector; RB was one of only two from the nonprofit/civil society sector. And, probably not coincidentally, he was one of the few people who focused on the need to engage communities and addressed the lived experience of poor people who are being approached by this and that outsider trying to get them to adopt (and pay for) a new technology.

Some credit for that goes, if I may so so rather immodestly, to me. We had breakfast this morning as a little team and after hearing RB's thoughts about what he wanted to focus on, I encouraged him to consider that our main difference in a meeting like that is our credibility as a community-centered institution. We're not out to make a buck or get votes. We're out to help poor people's quality of life improve, full stop.

Karachi is enormous, people here think that when the ongoing census is completed it'll claim the title as world's most populous city, with possibly north of 30 million residents. I'm confined to a small part of it on this trip, given that I'm at a conference in the hotel I'm staying in, and that I'm a relatively rich person who basically only knows other relatively rich people. Last night I connected with a friend from Islamabad's brother, who's the marketing director for a big consumer product company. They had a product launch last night and he invited me to come along. It was at a yacht club on the water and there were lots of models and actors and TV presenters and producers and the like there. Chatted with a bunch of them, mainly very nice. And friend's brother was a good host, introducing me to people and checking in on me periodically even though it was a work event for him. Much more relaxed experience than the similar event I went to in Lahore last November, in part I'm sure because I've been here longer now and am a lot more self-assured.

Marketing is, well, let's just say it's not for me. I am, in a way, in sales -- business development and resource mobilization are just jargony ways of saying sales -- but at least I don't have to pretend (or perhaps convince myself to genuinely believe) that my inexpensive retail product is changing lives. Nothing like a room full of people taking a TV ad extremely seriously to remind one that advertising is ludicrous.

family planning

An opportunity that came up right before I left and on which there was some actual movement during the past few weeks has to do with family planning. Had a fascinating meeting yesterday with some colleagues who run health clinics and community health services to talk about what we're going to propose and why. Among other things, I learned that injectable contraceptives are more popular in Pakistan than in most other places -- they're expensive and have to be re-upped every three months, so not exactly a convenient option -- because they're basically undetectable. You get a little pinprick from the shot but otherwise there's no way for a husband or mother-in-law to know that you've chosen to be unable to get pregnant.

Negative attitudes toward family planning and women's choice are the main reason FP in Pakistan sucks so much. Contraceptive use is low, fertility is high, there are around a million illegal abortions in the country each year (holy shit). In snooping around the internet today to learn more, I came across a study that found MTV's teen pregnancy shows contributed to a 5+% drop in the teen pregnancy rate in the US a few years ago. That is amazing. Idea for a show on Pakistani TV: a series on couples including young brides who get pregnant and then have a hard time with it, men and women both. 

back in the saddle

No rest for the weary. Especially when the weary are jet-lagged and have girlfriends who are also jet-lagged but somehow on a different schedule.

Vacation was wonderful, if pretty tiring over the first two weeks. The beach was very relaxing and it's hard to believe that I was in NC just a few days ago. Will leave it at that for now.

Work has been hectic since I got back, mainly because there were a number of things that came up while I was away that turned out to be due or need decisions by this week, and that no one did much on in my absence. Once we get them all out of the way, though, there should be time to deal with a few important longer-term tasks: finishing development of the five-year unit strategy, starting work on a new resource mobilization plan, putting the screws on AI to approve the gender strategy (which I finished a while ago now).

Also, hiring new staff. Got two slots to fill on my team, one of which has already been advertised: a monitoring and evaluation/management information systems person. Hoping to start reviewing candidates the week after next. AI told me to hire one at a time, so the partnerships and communications person will have to wait.

Had a call this morning with my counterpart at our university in Karachi. They are a behemoth and hundreds of miles away, so they're hard to get a grip on and often are off doing their own thing without talking to us. We met earlier this year when he passed through ISB and we'd communicated a bit by email; he made a good impression throughout and the call this morning reinforced that. Seems like a really nice guy, and a pro. Hurray for more decent, competent colleagues.

Looks like I'll be down in Karachi the first week of August, for a workshop hosted by the Sindh government about off-grid energy (i.e. electricity provision for people who are far away from major power sources -- mainly solar). Then LNT and I will stick around for a couple of days so I can finally, finally visit the U. Looking forward to it.

As I mentioned at the top, sleep has been a bit whacked out this week but if history is any indicator I should be back on schedule tonight. Planning to meet some people at the French Club for a drink after work, which should be nice. Many people have been out of town so it'll be fun to catch up on the various adventures. It's supposed to rain a bunch this weekend so perhaps ideal conditions for a game afternoon/evening. Definitely want to play Dixit again, the game Mom got for SRB. 

on the shooting yesterday in alexandria

Murder and attempted murder are wrong, period. Terrorism is wrong. Hodgkinson terrorized people yesterday, some of whom were just walking their fucking dog and minding their own business. Fuck him. I'm glad nobody died apart from him.

The fact that Hodgkinson was a Sanders supporter just shows that, while the right wing is *much* more violent than the left in its rhetoric and actions, white male violence transcends politics. It comes from the left, right, and center. It comes in many forms, from this attempted murder of other white men to the murder of and assault on the people of Flint by Rick Snyder and company. It is, without a doubt, the greatest threat to the safety of people across the US.

Yesterday, a GOP representative said, without apparent irony, “I can only hope that the Democrats do tone down the rhetoric. The rhetoric has been outrageous – the finger-pointing, just the tone and the angst and the anger directed at Donald Trump, his supporters. Really, then, you know, some people react to things like that. They get angry as well. And then you fuel the fires."

Earlier this year, Steve Scalise said, of the Muslim ban, "It’s very prudent to say, 'Let’s be careful about who comes into our country to make sure that they’re not terrorists.'"

Those two are part of a machine that relies on racist fearmongering and incitement to violence as a core part of its political strategy, and that has the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of many people as policy goals.

And GOP politicians, including Scalise with his A+ NRA rating, deliberately make assaults like this likelier. It's ironic that yesterday's shooting fell just after the one-year anniversary of the Pulse attack. In the aftermath of that horror, Scalise tweeted about his prayers going out to the families of the victims, and I replied that his prayers were as empty as the barrel of a gun that's been unloaded into the bodies of innocent people. Some random person found my tweet and liked it yesterday. It's still true, even now that someone put a bullet in his hip.

So it's hard not to blame these particular victims, in part. Being brought face-to-face with the consequences of their policies seems a bit like comeuppance. Seems like the fear they must have felt was, in some way, well-earned. This is what happens when you steal and steal and steal from people and also make it easier to buy a gun than to get birth control. 

the murder of roger ackroyd

More enjoyable than other Christie I've read. Will still go to bat for Arthur Conan Doyle ten times out of ten. 

foreign aid

Cross-posted from Facebook:

Yes, global poverty is the product of a grossly unequal, exploitative, and violent economic and political system. Yes, foreign aid is itself a product and, to some extent (although to a lesser extent than is sometimes claimed IMHBABO), agent of that system. The world would be a better place if wealth were distributed more equally, and if governments were less corrupt and more able to deliver essential services (not least our own, for that matter). The struggle for systemic change is necessary and good.

But people need light to read by and to not be inhaling smoke all winter right now. I'm glad to work for a foreign-aid-supported organization, born in Pakistan more than 100 years ago, that brings people light that they and the environment around them can afford, that engineers community-owned water infrastructure that lasts for decades, that founds universities, that preserves traditional music-making. In short, an organization that tries (and succeeds!) to improve people's quality of life right now, and next year, and the year after that, and the decade after that.

lynching and the moab

My friend Timmy wrote the other day to ask what Pakistanis were saying about the gigantic bomb that the US just dropped on a few dozen Daesh fighters in eastern Afghanistan. Not an unreasonable question: Pakistan's fate is tied up with Afghanistan's and the target was pretty close to the border. But the answer is, Not much. An article about the hit was on the (online) front page of the big English-language papers, but nobody mentioned it at work except me, to a colleague who hadn't heard about it. By the afternoon, the story had moved down the front page in favor of stories about the lynching, late last week, of a student at a university about two hours from Islamabad.

That, people are talking about.

The attack was shocking: the young man, who had been accused of blasphemy, was attacked by a crowd of fellow-students, beaten, shot, and then beaten some more in death until the police were able to recover his body. The mob demanded the return of his body so they could burn it, but were not successful in getting it back. And there is video. Like the proliferation of videos of police assaults on black people in the US, the video seems to have snapped some otherwise complacent people to attention.

Pakistan has a fraught relationship with Islamic extremism. The government has long used extremist militias as a foreign-policy tool in its efforts to maintain power in the region, in particular with respect to Kashmir and to Afghanistan. Blasphemy is not just illegal here, it's punishable by death. But most Pakistanis I interact with -- devout Muslims no more or less than indifferent ones or proud atheists -- are horrified by mob violence and have no patience for extremism. People are cynical about the government's use of religion: an op/ed writer in one of the major papers, Dawn, observed that the initial government reaction to this recent lynching was to promise to root out blasphemers, in addition to arresting some suspects. To the op/ed writer, the message that sends is clear: Yeah, yeah, don't go around murdering each other in broad daylight, we'll make a big show of justice, but [wink, nudge] we all know who the real criminals are.

Now, a few days later, the head of the party that runs KPK, the province where the lynching happened, said, "Whoever planned his murder and whoever participated in it will be punished and made an example of for future generations. Even if the culprits are found to be from PTI [his party], they will be punished. We will not discriminate along party lines in pursuing this case. The entire country saw. Even animals don't behave this way. We will take this as a lesson and make sure no one ever misuses the blasphemy law again to murder people again."

That is a pretty revealing statement, sentence by sentence. It reveals a conceptualization of justice that's "medieval" in the European sense -- punishment as an example to others, rather than the modern concept of rehabilitation and imprisonment away from the public eye (basically the only theorist I've read on that subject is Foucault, so take that observation with a grain of salt). It clearly acknowledges that people believe political parties treat their own members differently when they are in power. It dehumanizes the attackers, drawing a line around them that separates/insulates the speaker from their actions. And it doesn't question the legitimacy of the blasphemy law at all, it accepts that such a thing should exist.

Lynching has become a hot topic in India, as well, with mobs killing mostly Muslim butchers who have been accused of slaughtering and selling cows.

No conclusion here, just observations.

neuromancer

Liked it just fine as a thriller. Made me curious to learn more about his vision and its impact; in the Kindle edition there's a postscript, written by another sci-fi author, about how influential Gibson was on the early development of the internet. Haven't finished that, partly because the author waxes a bit too rhapsodic for my taste. 35 years is long enough to make pretty much any kind of futurism seem quaint, but thinking about his vision of cyberspace as a metaphor is still compelling and relevant. Pretty amazing in that sense.