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Maybe We Could Talk In The
Shower




 
Monday, October 18, 2004  
This weekend was memorable in the regard that I forgot most of it. I gave myself a three day weekend by accident by drinking too much at 80's night and not waking up in time for class on Friday. Whoops. (on a side note, I think its very rude when you sneeze and nobody says "Bless you")

Friday night Adriana and I FINALLY got to hang out just us. We contemplated going to the movies, but then we just sat around and watched TV. What fun it was.

Saturday was VooDoo Fest. Tom got me free tickets ( he was supposed to get me free back stage passes, but reneged at the last minute. Next time Mike D, next time) I caught the tail end of Sonic Youth, The Pixies, and the first portion of the Beastie Boys. Tom gave his friend Eric the only back stage pass, so he had to keep bringing us free beer and SoCo at our whimsy. I had a good time, though I won't go into detail about the time restraints enforced on me by outside entities. Besides it was free. I miss Bradley's birthday party (sorry Brad), but managed to somehow get Adriana to my house and we got to hang out AGAIN! WOOO! I also smoked pot for the first time in like a million years, and played scrabble.

Sunday I had to work, but not too early. Adriana made a bangin lunch/breakfast for us and then we were off. At work there was all this left over food from some event or another, and I was instructed to eat as much of it as possible. Not one to take the responsibilities of my job lightly I proceeded to house a platter of chicken salad sandwiches. BILL LIMA came home! With Greg by his side, they trekked across this great land of our and made it back to this sinful sauna I call home. Casey and Caitlyn went back to North Carolina today, so we had to see them off right. Couple that with a welcome back Bill evening, Casey's birthday, and Greg's first night in New Orleans and you can see that we were morally obligated to get drunk last night.

Alcohol is fun.



7:16 AM |

Wednesday, October 13, 2004  
I heard he was coming on the 15, then the 20th, now the 16th he assures me. I miss the big lug, and Adriana does too whether she freely admits it or not. He is DRIVING down here, which I am a little worried about. Bill Lima driving solo for 1400 plus miles. He might cash in his chips and decide to live in Virginia or something.

I am SOOOOOOOOOOO excited for thanksgiving. SO SO SO. Its kind of sad because it's so far away. But as my dad (and I'm sure yours too) always said "It'll be here before you know it" I catch myself saying things like that. Daddyisms. Is it because I am getting older and realize the truth of what he says/said, or has he brainwashed me? I think it might more be that his phrases are shorter and more to the point than anything I could come up with on my own, and also they resound in my soul, making remember what it was like to be home. Where is home now?, I often wonder. It is found I think most frequently in the smell of wood burning stoves, mixed with fallen leaves, apple trees, and the crisp (but not bitter) chill of the fall. Also it is in my mom's lasagna and in the sound of her trying not to sound worried in her phone messages. It is in the sage advice of my father coupled with his inescapable bearhugs. It is in the giddiness of my sister, and the softhearted teasing of my brother. It is in the laughter of every single one of my friends. My dad sold our house this past winter. I wasn't there to see it go, but its just as well. When I visit this time around for the holidays, it will be my first that hasn't taken place in that house in over 18 years. The first 5 or so were in our old house in Johnston, but I don't even remember those. So it is as my own home I face the world. Like the turtle I carry my home on my back, a rag tag assemblage of memories in assorted colors, sounds, and smells, no one building could fit them anymore anyhow. In this way it is true that you can't go home again, because you can never leave.

7:13 AM |

Friday, October 01, 2004  
I am so exhausted. Really. This week was the longest one in my whole life I think. I was working doubles and extra half shifts and coming in on my day off, while failing test after test. I am so tired. I have only been home like 4 times this week I think. I can smell my feet while sitting in this chair. Thats so gross. Also people keep audibly sucking snot through their noses and into their throats all around me.
The weather is turning beautiful, and this weekend there is so much I want to do. But I think I may just end up sleeping and trying to quickly distance myself from this week. Sleep is like time travel, except you only get to go into the future.

8:30 AM |

 

The first sound Zahara Abdulkarim heard when she woke that last morning in her village was the drone of warplanes circling overhead. Then came gunshots and screams and the sickening crash of bombs ripping through her neighbors' mud-and-thatch huts, gouging craters into the dry earth. When Abdulkarim, 25, ran outside, she was confronted by two men in military uniform, one wielding a knife, the other a whip.

They were members, she says, of the Arab militia known as the Janjaweed, which over the past 18 months has slaughtered tens of thousands of black Africans like Abdulkarim across the western Sudanese region of Darfur. Another man, rifle in hand, was standing over her husband's body while others set fire to her home. Two of the intruders, she says, grabbed her and forced her to the ground. With her husband's body a few yards away, the men took turns raping her. They called her a dog and a donkey. "This year, there's no God except us," Abdulkarim says they told her. "We are your god now." When they were finished, one of the men drew his knife and slashed deep across Abdulkarim's left thigh, a few inches above her knee. The scar would mark her as a slave, they told her, or brand her like one of their camels. By nightfall, says Abdulkarim, more than 100 women in the town of Ablieh had been raped and dozens of people killed, including two of her sons, four of her in-laws and her husband. The only survivors in her compound were Abdulkarim and her son Mohammed, 6. "They also wanted to kill me, but when they saw I was pregnant, they released me and let me live," she says. That was eight months ago. Sheltering in a refugee camp in neighboring Chad, Abdulkarim, her baby Mustafa playing in her lap, says she will never go home.

For Darfurians like Melkha Musa Haroun, the horrors they have witnessed will never fade. After an attack last year she fled with her four children and spent eight months hiding from the Janjaweed, walking from village to village until she found refuge in a camp. Now, one year later, she recalls watching Janjaweed fighters on a rampage deciding whom to kill. A fighter unwrapped swaddling cloth and rolled a newborn baby onto the dirt. The baby was a girl, so they left her. Then the Janjaweed spotted a 1-year-old boy and decided he was a future enemy. In front of a group of onlookers, a man tossed the boy into the air as another took aim and shot him dead. "It was the worse thing I ever saw," Haroun says softly, casting her eyes downward as she hugs her baby tightly to her breast.

The war in Darfur, say government insiders and opposition figures, is a proxy battle for power in Khartoum. "This is a war that the rebels want to fight inside villages," says El Tijani Fedail, Sudan's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs."In very rare situations we may bomb and kill civilians. If the Americans do it, they call it collateral damage, don't they?"



7:18 AM |

 
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