Totally!

How happy we are…

I really loved this movie. In addition to redeeming whatever faith I had lost in Natalie Portman following her flawless role as the incredibly annoying chic in Garden State, V for Vendetta is just all around great. Here’s why:

+ It’s based on a comic book, so all excessive theatrics and unrealistic stunts are excusable, even fun.
+ The whole movie is a complete metaphor for the power of organizing as a political strategy to overthrow the W. administration.
+ Just when you think Natalie is going to retain her nonviolent peaceful protest and somehow fix the conflict of the film without resorting to violence [insert fundamentalist ethical agenda HERE], BOOM! — she changes her mind, and that’s cool.
+ The acting is really good.
+ The focus is on the players behind the scenes of neo-conservative presidential dictatorships, much like Rummy & others. The president is merely a face on a screen, and spin doctoring the media is standard practise understood and acknowleged by the general public.
+ Inciting fear = political propoganda. Also, “terrorist attacks” = plotted within the administration.

There are so many reasons to go see this movie. It’s just pretty cool, minus Natalie’s cheesy socialist speech at the end. Go see it!

I finally published some flash photogalleries of my trip:

INDONESIA

THAILAND

Knock yourself out!

So, this weekend was interesting. We went to a fundraiser for City Life/Vida Urbana Saturday night, led by Steve Meacham, the tenant organizing coordinator, who delivered a moving speech about their ongoing initiaive to collectively bargain contracts with big city developers in lieu of rent control, a tactic that seems to be working. Anyway, it was a nice time, with great homemade hippie food — salad, beans, couscous, cake — all of which I puked up six hours later. Must have been something rotten in the salad. Oh well. Guess I’d better stick to processed foods.

Tonight there’s going to be an immigrant rights rally downtown by City Hall to protest the impending legislation against illegal immigrants in the U.S. It’s at 5p, for anyone in Boston interested.

In dorky tech news, Lifehacker just posted a neat thing about recussitating your unreadable CDs, which I thought was pretty cool.

In political satire news, this cartoon is funny.

In boring personal news, I have yet to organize my life or even unpack fully from my trip, I babysit too much, eat too much, make too many unrealistic plans, and really the only tangible goal of 2006 is going to be applying for fellowships for grad school in 2007. At least I have DD to keep me laughing.

We fought the whole time, and for the rest of the night all I could do was lie in bed, almost crying and unable to eat, but my seventeenth appointment was still kind of awesome, in a cheap-trashy-novel kind of way:

“So, how are the teeth looking?”

“Exactly the same,” I said. Except now, instead of a crossbite, I have an underbite.”

“Whatever. We completely fixed that crossbite.” Doc poked and prodded around my mouth, gloating about his sadistic prowess to his new, attractive assistant: “I’ve made this woman cry so many times, you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Yeah,” I said, “And I see how proud it makes you.”

“Oh please,” Doc snuffed, gesturing to the computer screen with its before photos of my mouth from April 2005. “Look how awful your teeth looked when you showed up here. Those were tears of gratitude, darlin, not of pain.”

“I want so badly to hit you.”

Thus began another twisted appointment at the orthodontist’s. To really smear his smugness all over my face, as it were, Doc proceeded to force a thick METAL wire onto my bottom teeth. “Metal!” I yelled. “You’re breaking our agreement! I never agreed to a metal wire!”

“Oh suck it up!” he said. “This is the only wire that will really turn out your canines and widen your bottom jaw, which will fix that underbite you’re complaining about.”

“I can’t believe you’re so mean to me,” I whispered, barely audibly, his fingers twisted in my mouth.

“Are we whispering now?” he mocked back, his voice a shadow of my own. “Does it make you feel better if we whisper? You enjoy the torture, admit it.”

“I hate you.”

And then we started laughing, because shoving a heavy metal wire into the metal clasps on my back molars hurts like crazy, and sarcasm, sadism, laughter and pain have become the nature of our relationship.

And then he started singing “Sweet Caroline” so I wouldn’t notice how much it hurt, except he couldn’t remember the lyrics so he supplemented words with “daaa daa daaaa”.

“Good times never seemed so good,” I mumbled.
“Good times never seemed so good!” he sang.

“I’d be inclined,” (da da da) “to believe they never would…”

“I’m going to miss you,” he said suddenly.

“Uh huh,” I answered, because what else are you supposed to say to your young, cheeky, married doctor with six months of appointments left until you can eat a hamburger again?

This whole experience is so weird.

So it wasn’t 24 hours of travel after all. It was 42 hours of travel, with five flights (Phuket > Bangkok > Singapore > Frankfurt > NYC > Boston), all of which were ridiculous and uncomfortable and could have been avoided by booking us on the same direct flight we took the first time…but alas, some things always remain difficult.

I slept 20 hours straight when I got home. My colleague and traveling companion M., however, was not as lucky: she has little boys, and had a dinner party to attend, and had a class to teach at Brandeis this morning, followed by conference calls on Gulf Coast relief. Being merely the lowly staff photographer, my professional duties are limited to captioning the 1,214 Asia photos I took (not kidding, that’s how many I took), writing more about Thailand for our human rights blog and generally being incredibly out-of-it.

I’m cold again, not really ready to be here or be awake. I haven’t unpacked or anything. I think I might cut my hair, just to shake things up. I’d like to take a vacation, or go on some retreat where they make you cry for days, just to purify my situation, as P. Diddy would say. Oddly, I felt more adjusted to life up there alone in those airplanes than I do here in my freezing dining room. I guess, in a way, that makes sense.

…except for tomorrow, when I have to leave Thailand and the Burmese people. I don’t know where to start — HRE has been so awesome. HRE president Htoo Chit is going to win the Nobel Prize someday. He’s an amazing man (student activist leader turned 12-year jungle-dwelling guerilla fighter turned human rights CEO) who’s created an incredibly well-functioning development org for other Burmese refugees here in Thailand, and his staff are young and smart and awesome and almost all undocumented. “Ever been to the US?” I asked one of them. “No,” she giggled, and then I realized why she giggled: she can’t leave Thailand. She’s not even supposed to be in Thailand. She doesn’t have a passport, or even a birth certificate. And yet she’s teaching women’s health programs to migrant worker families, and her colleagues are running nurseries, taking care of orphans, adopting other children, and offering us oranges and Fantas and homemade bracelets before we leave. I felt like a total idiot.

Tonight we were invited to a dinner with all the staff and teachers. They played games, acted things out, danced, and sang: did you know “Dust in the wind” was actually first the melody for Burma’s song for democracy? Well, it was and still is. And when they sang it tonight — twice: once because they wanted to, once because we asked them to sing it again — they raised their fists and closed their eyes and wrapped their arms around each other and I realized how powerful and terrible it must be to love your country so much but not be able to return without getting abused or killed. “Are you homesick?” someone asked one of the new staff members, recently arrived from Burma. “Yes,” he said, “But I think we are all homesick, all the time.”

“Htoo Chit should run for office,” I told M. “When Burma is free, he probably will,” she said. And then it hit me how important this whole trip is.

That said, we begin the journey home — four flights in 24 hours — tomorrow afternoon. Thailand, and Burmese, you rock.

We got off plane #3 to find two young girls waiting for us at the Phuket aiport. Turns out they’re both experienced coordinators at HRE Grassroots, the Burmese partner NGO we’ll be working with for the next two days. We jumped in their friend’s suped-up pickup and one of them, whose name I should have written down, started telling us about the issues of Burmese refugee migrant workers as well as she could in English.

And then she put her arm on my leg and her hand on my knee while she was talking. Just, you know, like it was no big deal, like we were sisters. There was something delicate about this unquestioned intimacy which made me want to cry (yeah, I know, it’s a boring recurring theme now) but this time the sentiment stemmed from my sheer love of humanity. (BB, CR, you understand.) We sped along the beautifully-paved Thai backroads which left rural Indonesia literally in the dust, and arrived at this super cute hotel place with a simple wood-based aesthetic I can’t even begin to describe. In short: I love Thailand and I’m not afraid to admit it.

Ok, so I’ve only been here a few hours. I think it’ll continue to be great, though. Tomorrow morning we meet up with the girls again for a long day visiting day care centers and schools and other programs for Burmese migrant workers and their families. The Burmese are so incredibly in trouble in Burma and out of luck here, and there’s so many human rights violations going on I can’t even begin to explain it. Maybe tomorrow.

PS: Weird bugs in Thailand. Something that looks like a flying mini-scorpion! No, I’m not kidding!

I’m in the airport. I’m on a Bangkok stopover between flights from Jakarta, Singapore, and now en route to Phuket. Thai guys have really cool haircuts, that’s for sure, and Bangkok is full of Dairy Queens and weird cell phones and tons of tourists. We’re going to Phuket to meet a new partner org that advocates for the rights of Burmese refugees. Have just gotten used to traveling, just, of course, as its end is in sight. Asia is fascinating, though. I love my life.