Dear Perfect Man, (vol.s 1&2)

I want you to look at me as if you've never seen someone so amazing. You can see my soul, all the parts I wanted so desperately to give someone but never did. I want you to revel in my eyes, in their depth, to ask me to let you in. I want you to believe I'm all you'll ever need. Or want.

You need to hold my head, my heart, my hands with one glance. You need to tell me everything I never knew I needed to hear in that one lingering glance. I want you to not be able to be around me without needing to touch me -- some part of me, some soft brush of skin to feel the warmth of our glow. You'll touch my hip, squeeze my shoulder, wrap me up in your hugs, kiss my head and linger on my cheeks.

You won't forget to tell me you care, but you won't drown me in it, either. You'll be sweet even when you're making me laugh. You'll be sweet even when the world's making me cry. You'll remind me why all those lonely tears were worthwhile. All those achingly pillow-muffled sobs in this very room were worth you. Waiting on you made it worthwhile for me.

You'll constantly want to be near me, behold my heart, touch my hair, ask me to dazzle you with words and stories, travel with me, make plans. But you want me to be sad and troubled sometimes, too, and hold my hands when I want to thrash them at the world's inequities and injustices. You'll hold my hands when we go help.

You'll just love me for everything I've come to love about myself. You'll ask me to be better without asking me to change. You'll accept me for all the things I've learned to, struggled to, accept about myself.

And that's how we'll be, in love, happy, but still questioning and challenging each other. Smilling, laughing, poking, giggling. Loving. You and Me.

Still sincerely (& waitingly) yours,
Jen

Extreme Makeover Home Edition makes me cry every single time I watch the ending. All it takes to get those ribbons of tears to curl their way out of my eyes is Ty's first steps into the episode's new house. I just know what sort of sap is coming and I can't handle it.

After getting a quick Home Edition-induced cry out of the way tonight, I flipped over to 60 Minutes only to be frustrated by a story on the Duke rape case. Granted, all I know if it is from the highly biased reporting of major media outlets, but I think the whole situation has done a disservice to the support for women to report rape. It seems to me that this case is a bunch of blown-up baloney, that the guys probably aren't guilty (but again, who am I and what do I know) but because of the craziness that's surrounded the case I can see it being one more point of dissuasion for a woman contemplating reporting rape.

Anyway, this weekend was amazing. I experienced my first ever NFL game -- the Saints' divisional playoff game on Saturday. It's cheesy and trite and cliched now, but the emotion of the city and that Dome was palpable. The people, the team, the city wanted the win for so much more than one more tally on the "W" side. It was about more than marching one step closer to the big dance of pro football (am I allowed to mix my sports like that, calling the superbowl the "big dance"?); instead, the Saints were carrying the hopes and dreams of a people ready to be "recovered" and not still "recovering".

The Saints were representing the perseverance of a city sticking it out through meteorological butchering, government oversight and neglect, and season after season of heart wrenching disappointment. This team was showing us all that you have to keep trying and looking to the future. That pig skin flying around the Dome was the weathered hands of residents putting hammer to nail and the morale of a city that refused to go away.

Even better than the game, though, were the friends I spent it with. I especially enjoyed remembering what it was like to hang out with friends I hadn't seen a while, meeting new people whose laughs made me smile for different reasons than usual these days, and spending QT with a, relatively speaking, old friend who always makes me smile. There's more to be said on the second one there, but it'll have to be saved for ellipticalling and not the whole wide internet world.

Oh! Why is it that every time I'm at Pat O's I end up talking about Poverty with a big "P" and how to save the world? Because it's a guarantee that if you go there with me and we have a hurricane, you're going to have to explain to me your views on global poverty and how you're planning to help. I won't ever forget the one poignant time Tom and I talked for what seemed like hours in front of the water feature about my desire to change the world. It ranks up there on the "defining personal thought moments" with sitting under the stars in the Keys with Jonathan, bawling my eyes out with Jody in his car in Curran parking deck after getting a particularly atrocious score on a hand-drawing for an ME drafting class, and the time my mom told me she didn't know how I was her daughter because I was so emotionally cold. But anyway...

Who dat? Who dat sayin' they gon beat dem SAINTS?!

I've done myself a disservice, not writing about Nigeria right afterwards, assuming that my little scraps of paper would suffice. Let me rustle through them...oh, and I already feel restless again and want to go somewhere. I miss Europe, outdoor hot chocolate, riding underground transportation with friends, blocking out fellow passengers with Coldplay and John Mayer to become complete absorbed in the orange plastic seats with no lumbar support so that it almost seems like I could belong with the rush of green, ages-old foilage outside. The foilage that seems to represent a completely different life, where people value the greenness a little more and appreciate its history and what its presence seems to represent -- the sturdiness of the ages, the robustness of civilizations as stewards, the paucity of humanity.

Oh, and the hope of lands unknown to my wanderlust heart, my optimistic roaming eyes constantly searching for the set of eyes that will catch mine and change everything, the idea that the rest of my life could be just beyond the next scrubby brush along the road, on the other side of that lichen fluffing up from in between the sidewalk cracks. Sometimes -- oh, those few "some" times -- when I'm oblivious I think I could be satisfied with what I have now, forever. But those sometimes are not oftentimes. And I don't want them to be, either.

I want to be the sort of person who naturally wants to give away Saints tickets.

But I digress, back to the hinterland.

I pulled out my note sheets, one white rectangle from the Al Khaleej Palace Hotel in Dubai (on which it looks like I was a captive compulsive notetaker sacrificing words to the Gods of Grammer in fear of running out of room on my ONLY ONE PIECE OF PAPER in all of the modern Arab world); one "Zee Sheer Strip" bandaid package; and one large, placemat-sized church bulletin from Christ Baptist Church in Gbagada, Lagos, Nigeria (message: "With God All Things Are Possible") (Oh, don't forget Prayer Band at 8 this Sunday!)

We can forget notebook #2, the bandaid, because it reads more like a list. This is probably inherent in the natural bandaid shape, the lenght/width ratio of which lends itself to supporting only two-word bullets ("--email Vincent; --malaria pill!; --spray stuff" and on it goes. I wish I remembered what the "spray stuff" referred to; maybe my kill-small-children-with-Deet bug repellent? So on to what the good ol' Al Khaleej has to reminisce (all of which I think is from Nigeria, written on stolen hotel paper).


11/23/06
Why does wealth encourage isolation and fences? To pass into the neighborhood, there's a large metal gate accompanied by menacing signs about needing an entry sticker, proof of residency, and 3 large pineapples. The caked-dirt roads with potholes the size of neighboring countries greet our 1978 Toyota van. I'm pretty sure that this van was once used for human trafficking in California, shipped to [insert stereotypical American College Town here] for a "beat the car up fundraiser!", and finally steam-boated to Ethiopia, used for target practice on the Somalian border, and accidentally dropped off in Nigeria on its way to the oft-visited tourist country of Liberia. Ok, I'm exaggerating a bit. It was probably more like a 1985 Toyota.

The roads were funneled through neatly carved ditches, each about 18" wide. These ditches were multi-purposed, clearly designed for synergistic effect. Part drainage ditch, part trash receptacle, part public restroom. Rising out the backside of the ditches were the thick concrete walls surrounding every single house and apartment complex, with the violence-deterring addition of glass shards poking up from the top of the cement. They would have been pretty, a sun-catching array of colorful broken bottles, except for what their presence implied. This was a nice neighborhood, too, mid- to upper-middle class.

So why, when we have material wealth, why do we feel the need to keep it hidden and eventually ourselves hidden? Why are we so afraid of each other and our potential for evil?

***

There's this dichotomy of advertising here, with an enormous billboard for Hewlett Packard's latest phone-nintendo-ipod-bubblemaker-timemachine posted above a dilapidated, corrogated tin sheeted roof with the week's trash burning in the front yard. Disappointingly enough, consumption seems to be a universal human value even when the only consumption that's really important for the people in that house is probably what the next meal is going to be. There are ads for other technology products passing by as I see traditional tribal markings on the man in the car next to me. There are people swarming the inches between the car "lanes" selling everything from new garage doors to sunglasses to fried plantains (I promise we saw people hawking all of those items, plus a guy carrying a new [huge] tv on his Vespa-equivalent motorbike), intermixed with war victims from nearby countries: teenagers walking with their fists for lack of legs in a country where we didn't see any wheelchairs anywhere, poor mothers with their deformed babies in their laps. And because these sights are so ubiqioutous, I found my heart grow numb very quickly to the mess of humanity strewn on the roadsides. I felt cold, helpless, scared that I could be alive while this sort of suffering still exists when the worst homelessness in America only has to face cold, not machetes.

As we continue to strive to find familiarity in the foreign, when will the foreign become familiar, become important to us, become important enough to change? When will that twelve-year-old in the median with the face of someone who's seen their sister killed strike us to care as we would for an American-looking face? When will there be some subjective American political-economic value placed on that which has no valuation system that can be given by man?

Even as all cities begin to look the same and the world feels smaller, the people still retain their diveristy. Never before have I felt so strongly that my face has betrayed me. I could feel the uncontrollable red warmth spread up through my cheeks when I looked around and saw that I clearly did not belong in some situations, that I wasn't wanted there simply because of the color of my skin and the random brown spots on my nose. I wasn't accepted into this -- something that hadn't felt so foreign, something that gosh! we're all just people trying to dream and reach and love! -- this other world of culture and conversations. In those repeated moments I knew what it was to be black in southern America. In those repeated moments I knew what it was to be [insert every other ethnicity that doesn't look stereotypically 'white', plus gay people!, here] in southern America. And it disgusted me to think that I have ever unintentionally, ignorantly, made anyone feel like that.

I'm also feeling intense disappoint. For so long I genuinely believed that skin color didn't matter (or, rather, shouldn't matter) only to be ostracized by my own. Are there cultural differences highlighted more by color or by national borders? And it's unnerving for this difference to begin to feel normal, to feel acceptable.

***

The snapshot of the country we've seen so far would encourage despair in even the most optimistic UN supporter. But the richness of culture, traditions, joy in life without artificial society-imposed goals and definitions of 'success' beg what a nation is supposed to look like? How do you clean up what's here, for the environment's sake and the health of the people living with 15 million of their closest friends, with the problems so massive and large-scale? How do you ever start? I think Nigeria needs a bubble plot of recommendations.


I'm exhausted, so I'll have to continue my Nigeria recap next time!
Goodnight, world.

Everybody’s got that picture in their mind, the one of how they think their life is supposed to be. It just makes you wonder if I should hold out for my picture a little longer.

The thing about the picture is: how do you look in it? It’s not about who you’re standing next to, or what’s in the background. It’s: are you smiling? Are you good with the choices that you’ve made? Because if you are, it doesn’t matter where you’re standing or who you’re standing next to. It’s a good picture.

I miss Everwood. tear.

Tonight is one of those nights when everything but what I should be doing is capturing my full attention; I watched tv and played with Facebook. But tv can be so educational sometimes, I convinced myself.

Like Ugly Betty. It's got to be popular because everyone must feel like the Ugliest Betty in the world sometimes. I watch the show and feel myself being in a place of invisibility, where people don't really notice you exist because your hair is dull, your face speckled, your chest flat, and your clothes yesterday. I remember those days, and almost feeling warmly, longingly, attached to them. Those formative days when I didn't even bother trying to look nice because I knew it wouldn't make a difference; it couldn't offset the three pounds of "featherweight" glass balanced on the bridge of my nose, or the awkward way I carried my back-breaking backpack, or the unflattering way my oversized t-shirts fell straight down to the middle of my jean shorts, or the poofed-out scrunchies taming my long hair. Would it all still be ok, would I still be so well-adjusted if I hadn't grown out of it, if I hadn't started to see the light at the end of the tunnel illuminating puberty and friends willing to frame me with new fashion and the possibility that the opposite sex *might* be willing to like me? Would it?

I'm glad I don't know, even I still have all the same insecurities of a fifteen-year-old, knobby-knee'd, perennially awkward girl. (Though I never actually had knobby knees. I was blessed with good knees my whole life. I don't think I could have handled that extra blight to bear, knobby knees.) But old age and willing emotion-talkers have comforted me with the commonality of all these frets.

Anyway, I'm smiling in my current picture of life, even if the background is a little blurry from scenes from the whole world being rushed by and the people I'm standing next to are all at varying distances away (it's a panoramic picture). Ok, I'm really only half-smiling, but I don't want to seem ungrateful. I think I need to write to PM again, because he clearly hasn't written back yet, and I'm tired of waiting.

But PM, if you're reading, I'd like to add something while we're at it: you must visit google at least once a day. You must have at least heard of google mail. (It's ubiqioutous! I'm not asking alot here!)

I still need to post my Nigeria thoughts, which are currently stashed safely all over my bedroom floor, small scraps of receipt backs and unused napkins bunched up on horizontal storage spaces.

Goodnight, world!