Poetic Sundays: Lightning

Okay, after a two-week hiatus, here we go with Poetic Sundays again. Because I need the poetry equivalent of comfort food today, back to my favorite poet, Adam Zagajewski.

Lightning
By Adam Zagajewski

For Adam Michnik

We lived understanding little and craving
knowledge. As plants do, when they grow toward
light, we sought justice
and we found it only in the plants,
in the leaves of the horse chestnut, enormous
as oblivion, in the fern shrubs which swayed
slowly and made no promises.
In silence. In music. In a poem. We sought
justice, confusing it with beauty.
Emotion is governed by strict laws.
We turned our backs on cruelty
and boredom. There's no solution, that much
we knew, there are only fragments, and the fact that
we spoke in complete sentences seemed to us
a strange joke. How easy it was to hate
a policeman. Even his face seemed to us
a part of his uniform. The errors of others
were easy to detect. On a hot day, the river
reflected mountains, clouds. Life then was
round like a balloon when it gets going.
Spruces stood still, filled with shadows
and stillness like the depths of an ocean. Green
eyes, your wet skin,
my lizard. In the evening, mute lightning
flickered in the sky. It was other people's thoughts
burning down safety. One had to
pack in a hurry and go farther,
east or west, mapping out
an escape route.

Translated by Renata Gorczynski from the original in Polish, which is so incredibly beautiful I get a lump in my throat.

Unpleasant news

Just got back from a wonderful vacation but so depressed I don't feel like writing or doing much of anything. The calls for the August A-100 have gone out, and James's clearance renewal still isn't done (after eight months--and he'd already had a clearance before!), so he can't start then as we'd long been planning, which would have set us up to be a perfect Chinese-speaking tandem couple working away in Beijing next year. Isn't it awful when your dreams are crushed? (No melodrama here, huh?) I am very bad at handling disappointment--and more than disappointment, the feeling of having long-held and very well-thought-out plans not work out.

Anyway, it's a long story of stuff that has been stressing me out for months and that I haven't been writing about here, but I guess the moral of the story is a) sorry I haven't been writing much, and b) the State Department giveth and the State Department taketh away.

Under pressure

Oh no! I missed Poetic Sunday--I have to catch up. My poems that I have saved are all on my computer, which IS NOT WORKING GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I want to cry. The screen won't light up... Google tells me this likely means the inverter needs to be replaced? Any techie advice would be much appreciated :) Anyway, I will catch up and put something up soon because I am still completely delighted by the whole Poetic Sunday concept.

So... much... stress. This week is a crazy convergence of insane busy times at work and in my personal life, meaning that I pretty much just want to curl into a ball and hide behind my couch. Or on top of it, since that sounds more comfortable.

Purchases that make me happy: my pretty bright red photo album that I put the rest of our best-of-the best vacation photos in. It is such a cheerful color. Hooray!

Getting excited but also slightly panicky for our trip. Wish hotels in Sri Lanka answered their email.

blargh

Dear Hotel in Sri Lanka,

Please kindly stop jerking us around. Don't say your rate is $100/night but you'll charge us $90 as a special when the internets make it abundantly clear that rooms cost $60/night. Nice try.

Yours sincerely,
Katie

Dear Sushi Chef at Izumi,

While I am tremendously delighted that you have chosen to leave Japan and make your home in Dhaka, please stop putting so much wasabi in your sushi. It is getting excessive.

Hugs,
Katie

Dear James,

If you are horribly ill and worried you have giardia, why are you drinking Scotch? Bad decision.

Love,
Katie

Rules of the road

I am super tired and thought I might take a nap, but then I figured I would just become angry and irrational when I had to wake up. And at this point, I am going out in the next half-hour or so. So no nap for me! You are now treated to my staying-awake ramblings.

Yesterday I was going out to dinner, and my driver cut off a whole long line of cars waiting to make a right turn (for all those back in the States, it's like a left turn at home, in that you have to cross a lane of traffic). So yeah, we totally made the turn way sooner, but it also left me slouched down in my seat, cringing and trying not to make eye contact with anyone in any other cars who might be judging me for allowing my driver to be so horrifically rude.

We expats in Dhaka are always a bit conflicted. On one hand, there are really no rules here, and if you're not a little aggressive, you don't get anywhere. But on the other hand, we are always complaining about how there are no rules here, so when our drivers do something that qualifies them (and you by association) for that special circle of bad driver hell, you feel especially guilty. Unlike everyone else on the road, I imagine.

So there we go, my tortured soul.

Speaking of tortured souls, I am off to a luau shortly. I have to go find something Hawaiian-printed that matches my aura.

May I just say one thing

I can't say I have been following the British election that closely, but hot damn, that Nick Clegg is a good-looking man. He'll always be Prime Minister of my heart...

Okay, that just went too far.

Watched Precious last night. Felt... conflicted. Sort of upbeat... yet horribly depressing... I am confused.

Am getting quite excited about the Sri Lanka trip. Just booked us into a new four-star resort that opens in three days; we check in ten days after it opens. Definitely a risk since we'll be the guinea pigs as they work out the kinks, but hey, it's an adventure. Because when people refer to "adventure travel," they clearly mean testing out new four-star resorts that (gasp!) haven't even been reviewed on TripAdvisor yet.

Okay, off to dinner. Busy bee buzz buzz.

Poetic Sundays: Girls girls girls

Two poems that go together:

Politics

by William Butler Yeats

'In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms.' -Thomas Mann

How can I, that girl standing there,

My attention fix

On Roman or on Russian

Or on Spanish politics?

Yet here's a travelled man that knows

What he talks about,

And there's a politician

That has both read and thought,

And maybe what they say is true

Of war and war's alarms,

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms.

Jenny kiss'd Me

By Leigh Hunt

JENNY kiss'd me when we met,

Jumping from the chair she sat in;

Time, you thief, who love to get

Sweets into your list, put that in!

Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,

Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,

Say I'm growing old, but add,

Jenny kiss'd me.

Bangladeshi medical care: the final frontier

So today I had my first brush with a Bangladeshi hospital--no emergency, but I needed a test that our Embassy Medical Unit couldn't do.

It was amusingly different from an American hospital. First of all, you have to pay up-front--no insurance cards. But then on the other hand, the whole thing only cost $21. I am not sure it's even worth sending to my insurance company.

It was the first time a doctor has ever asked for my visiting card, but hey, everyone asks for your visiting card in Bangladesh. It was also pretty hilarious how there is no undressing in a Bangladeshi hospital, at least if they can help it--they were all about moving around my clothes to show as little skin as possible.

Then the doctor told me they were going to do some extra imaging (that I didn't need or ask for, amusingly) free of charge since it was my first visit. So that really felt like the twilight zone after the U.S. system. As long as the extra stuff doesn't involve needles or hacking off limbs, let's go!

I know, I know, poor baby...

Bangladesh is considered a "hardship" post in the Foreign Service, and some of the difficulties of life here don't take much time to figure out: limited infrastructure, overcrowding, spotty medical care, contaminated water, and so forth. But there are certain elements of life here that do make things somewhat easier, and one of them is the easy availability of inexpensive domestic labor.

But this week, I learned how easy it is to become totally dependent on house staff, and how completely my world can fall apart (okay, that's a bit dramatic, but at least how easily my life can be made less convenient) without them.

My housekeeper is out for probably the duration of my stay here getting a total knee replacement. I am glad she is getting care she needs, but wow, did I quickly realize how used to her I am. Thankfully, I hired someone else part-time in the interim, but it became abundantly clear how little I do around the house when I was showing the new person around and couldn't figure out to turn on the light in the laundry room.

But I'm a woman of the people, I swear.

And today, my driver called in sick, for the first time in almost two years. Gah! There goes my one weekend day to run all my errands. Even worse, I have no clue what to do if he's not back tomorrow. I can take an Embassy car in a pinch; we are allowed to use them for limited personal needs since taxis and auto-rickshaws are off-limits here. But James and his visiting friend need to go to the airport, and his friend is not allowed in an Embassy car, and James is not allowed in a taxi, so you can see how not having a driver gets pretty tricky pretty quickly. And even if I were capable of driving them to the airport (and, um, I'm not... the airport road is utterly terrifying), I will be at work.

So there it is, the circle of dependence that is my life. It is days like today when I just want to be back in New York taking the subway everywhere and living in a shoebox-sized apartment where we could drink (and wash vegetables in) the tap water.

Gah and arrrrr

Gosh golly gee, the week has gotten away from me. We have a house guest--that makes three, count 'em, three suckers... er, excellent friends willing to fly all the way to Bangladesh for a visit. I salute them, I really do.

I am (perhaps as expected) completely falling to pieces over organizing our move out of here. The rest of my Foreign Service career will be a battle between my penchant for boredom, which will encourage me to do the shortest tours possible, and my inability to gracefully handle stress, which will make me want to extend as long as possible to avoid having to move.

However, at the entry level, HR helpfully makes that decision for us, so two years it is. And I am barely holding it together. I have trouble with the whole people expecting me to do work and plan my move at the same time. You know how they say women are better at multi-tasking? I think I missed out on that talent.

This weekend we are being social, returning to Izumi, and planning for next week's social event of the season (at least in my head). Oh, don't worry, it will involve pirates.

Poetic Sundays: Treatise on Emptiness

Little may you know it, faithful blog readers, but one of my great passions in life is Polish poetry from the second half of the 20th century. It is best read in Polish; plus, knowing Polish has the excellent side benefit of getting you off language probation, a condition for tenure in the Foreign Service. Of course, any other language would do the same, but hey, do it for the poetry.

Perhaps my favorite Polish poet of all is Adam Zagajewski--many would consider this an unorthodox choice for a favorite, and trust me, I do love the more orthodox choices as well (Wislawa Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert will certainly appear in future Poetic Sundays). Unfortunately, my very favorite poem of his comes to two pages single-spaced in a Word document, so I thought we'd start smaller today. Shall we?

Treatise on Emptiness

By Adam Zagajewski

In a bookstore I accidentally ended up at the section on Tao, or more precisely, by the Treatise on Emptiness.

I rejoiced, since that day I was perfectly empty.

What an unexpected meeting—the patient finds the doctor,

the doctor doesn’t speak.