clouds and umbrellas really aren't that different: clouds sing lullabies to owls & umbrellas are paperweights for people. i know it seems unrelated, really- i do, but children, canaries and cartographers have convinced me otherwise. of course, other wise women have settled for much less, but i can't give up the ghost of whimsy tendencies. i have to say it's the most colorful haunting. my sister and i are going on a wild hunt for olive pits in an old city in gaza. my parents left the pits as children in soils they were told to say goodbye to & the names they burned on wooden doors are romantically exhausting trails left behind. it is their legacy. how small is that? regardless, isn't there such a magnetism there for us- girls who live to love our family and find , tell, save, bury, and set secrets free?


sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

I'm trying to read this book and it's such a marvel(l)ous one, even you know it is. We've read it so many times. But, my eyes are so tired and the words look too beautiful. I kept seeing them and now I can't stop looking at them. Each letter reminds me of a curve or angle in this city from the skylines, streets or roofs. I think it happens enough, but she probably would say its happened 2 or 3 too many times. My memory is so foggy. I'm not quite sure what is mine or how much I've given up or gained. 2 is my favorite even number and of course we live with 3's everyday, but it is the weirdest kind of pressure to endure and I feel it specifically on this one bone in the middle of my chest. It feels lighter when I float in the dead sea. I live in this city with certain people by the lake in a delicate house and there are certain beautiful things that only they can see. Especially in light of my little sister who is so innocent but not at all naive, I can't help but see transparent scales and feel fleetingly balanced. JD Salinger has started to live in a nook in the nape of my neck. Though he is brilliantly cloudy, he is the kind of gentleman who wears a hat and an overcoat too often- I would say. & When Franny wrote back to Lane, she did so in illustrated sorts of ways. I totally love her to pieces.

& then there is everything else & no one else and that is the most magnetic place for a girl to find herself. boots feel heavy on the first day of winter, but curls like snails shells do not. i am flying south for winter and even when it does make me nervous to walk alongside a war, i know its necessary. somewhere in the aftermath is a house that could have been an olive-y home had the history not fallen in the pieces it did. thanks for the best advice, though/ i feel wildly strong. "keep your eyes open, the room will spin less. sit still and listen to what's going on around you, you have to stay present. don't cross your legs. if you do, you won't feel as much and even though it kind of hurts, it's better to feel it, it means you're awake and you're ok." i gave blood weeks ago and the nurse kept repeating these lines. in a way, it was clinical, but in a 3:02 AM space, it is more like prose.

sincerely,

expatriette in tunis.

polish your craft, fold it once and give it to people who have a certain look about them. those were his guidelines, but not his rules. i immediately liked that i was only going to talk to him once and it was a perfect 30 minute city block. i felt like the best version of myself: especially considering all the green, orange and purple things i was about to buy and roast and puree to eat with an eel. i made a sauce that tasted like fresh grass and it reminded me of recess and playing cat's cradle with our backs up against the school's bricks. other little girls who had big hair and soft voices are at the heart of this memory.

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

i'm studying for cell biology and writing a paper about T.S. eliot and my brain is very blurred and i think einstein's dreams were born on playgrounds like this. the thoughts floating in my brain now are bouncing between signal pathways, non-covalent bonds, hyacinth girls, fortune tellers and memory and desire. also, today i was both impulsive and indecisive and bought too many cupcakes at the little glass shoppe and shared them with the strangers in my class. we all had a salty caramel and champagne moment and it was so light and lazy.

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

a young girl writes to her pet bird:

I'm sorry for my dramatic flair. I didn't mean to yell, it's just that I've been breathing crowded air and I terribly needed a release. I trust you. I know its awful and exhausting when I let go, but you're the only one I'd let see me like that. I love you and I'm jealous of your wings.

Tunis

I miss the street all the time,
salty sea breeze and rain.

jasmine, jazz man wails

"fall in love my fallen love."
ironed on and cobble stoned in,

strangers danced,

longing for each other

in desert places.

Sometimes pressing buttons will cause people, places and things to chase after you & race to meet you. I am a girl whose nicknames are longer than my real name and who sees the world through olive-tinted glasses. Someone once said that while most people live in their country, my country lives inside me and I think for this reason I like to push these buttons often. This morning I swayed in the hallway while waiting for the elevator, I never have to wait too long, but time is relative and I'm never in a rush. I swayed to the melody of the humming that waved out of my vibrating lips. In that moment, i experienced the sounds as if it was something happening to me, rather than something i had created. That extra-sensory perception of the way i breathe and move triggers memories of my mom. her fingers would crawl along with her anxiety up the steering wheel on the stressful mornings when she'd tiredly drive us to school. It was a synapse where her wrists intersected with her memories and her fingers with her feelings and the result was a swivel of her small hands that showed me more about how she felt and experienced the world than any other action she shouted or word she made. i thought about her until the elevator came.

p.s. I would like to write a short story about a man who is the only documented case of an adult who outgrew his/her autism. I have a feeling he might miss the way he used to see the world and the singularity of his perception. He might spend the rest of his life trying to find a new way to see the world, through kaleidoscopes, telescopes and the glass his girlfriend makes.

I also thought it would be important to write a story about things that were accidentally dropped but ended up in places of purpose and the bird who couldn't find her purpose because she never quite let herself fall.

sincerely,

chicago deel.

this morning i woke up and i was twenty and for the first time, i felt younger. surprisingly, it wasn't the coffee i drank with the old drifted friends and the puzzling way we fit together timelessly over the course of all the little stretching withering things. it was reaching into my glove compartment and pulling out pieces of my childhood. this is what happens when i rock into a lull between work and school and i wake up in a bed covered in clothes i don't want anymore. i bought a new perfume that fits the exact direction i moved in, i just need my life to catch up. can a person outgrow their sentiment? i feel like i have and that i need to buy new clothes. i just want something that fits. 

Sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

it was their play and their story and i know that, but the more time that passes since i saw it, the more it interacts and interweaves with my life and the more i grow to love it and i'm guessing i changed a lot of it as a result of poor interpretation and an active imagination. thats it. they were a couple who had escaped from the world and deeply wanted and maybe in most ways needed to be alone and together. they were seen as mental or unfit and misunderstood by others so they bought a house for free in the forest and there they expected to be alone and together. during the summer, the sun will seep in through the cracks of the shutters and shine onto the walls & they dreamt of making shadows of animals that would live with them. cats, dogs and dinosaurs, of course. in autumn, the wind will seep in & their shadows and their animals will dance and love and sway. in the winter, it will rain and drown all the shadows & the old wind will make new bubbles which will float to the top and when they burst, they will breathe the autumn wind again. and for them, it will be exactly the kind of nostalgic new beginning that their spring needed. at their best, their thoughts took them through the seasons, but at their worst, she told him "please get out of my brain, you don't have a right to go there. those thoughts aren't for you. i can't think with you in there. you've broken my thoughts and now i have to pick them up. so please be quiet." he told her "there's no use. once thoughts break, you cant put them back together. their defective. just return them and make new ones. & besides i cant be quiet. so i can figure out my thoughts, i need to talk and hear them out loud. i need to hang them on ropes in front of me and let them be shaped by the birds chirps, and the rain and your eyes. you can't just cut the ropes, ok?" she understood, but she folded her napkin and turned away from him. she realized they could never think and live and breathe like they do when they're alone and be together. they were away from the world, but not their thoughts and that was three. in the end, they stayed together, and apologized to their thoughts for not being alone. afterwards, all i wanted to do was draw and write and dance. there really was a creative energy that sparked there between all of us and i decided to save new wind in old jars and breathe more often. 

Sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

when i woke up this morning the goat whose baaaahh's are usually overwhelmed by construction and the cafe next door's music were loud and the only sound i heard. he seems sick and i think when i leave the house, i'll try and check on him. im also going to a gallery opening by my house on saturday and plan to love it. today i have a lot to do and more to think about which especially takes a lot of time. i just cant get out of bed. i think i have been bit by a tse tse fly and also hit by cupid's arrow except the combination of the two has created an interesting result. there is a story behind this, but the explanation is complicated for my pre 10 AM words. the result is me loving moments & cabs and having a disenchanted feeling about non-platonic romances. on days that i feel at all lonely are the days i need to stay away from people the most but on most days i feel this flapping wingless independence and seeing people is the loveliest because i also feel so nice about the person im taking home & that is myself. 

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

she took every form of public and private transportation possible. she thought about the sign on the side of the brick store and came back later to take a picture. "do you take pictures of us everyday?" she didn't, but she should and would soon. especially since the guy at the camera store told her to stop by anytime- she could take pictures of new memories with old cameras and someone else's film and it would all compound into a base that supports the structure of her brain. she made some new nice stranger friends at the bus stop only because it was raining and they were pressed up against her shoulder as she kindly asked the forward stranger boy not to proceed with his plans of talking to her, no she doesn't want you to have her phone number and yes she understood. she felt pessimistic about the world but very optimistic about where she stood. the 3 hearts that together with hers formed a square over coffee was the playground that her brain bounced in. it was recess and class and lunchtime all in the same timeplace; she learns the most from who she plays with here and she likes that very much. today, she also felt very out of her body and that gave her more courage but less power and that was that. later, & this wasn't so much whimsical as much as it was a red herring, but the rainbow was the first one she'd ever seen and it faded the second she noticed it. 

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

i miss the lamb at chak wak park, but nothing else about that place. but the peacock was regal and i did feel nurtured by him in a court 5 kind of way. he would have sparkled with the glassiest of our chandeliers and mama would have fun chasing him as if he were a robot vacuum, i know she would, i just don't miss him. he made me miss too much. & OK, really today everything is so free and flipping through the layers is more like ruffling the all the feathers and i would like it if the story would billow out from under the pages over my hair and around my ears in an illustrated kind of way. jenna is here now and she is sleeping on the floor next to me, but i've been up since the zainab rooster crowed for no breakfast, more cartoons and a lollipop. she plopped on to my bed and wanted me to be a duck and sometimes im not in the mood and thats ok, so i drew her a fish and showed her a duck and it was enough. it would have been enough if we just went to passover seder last night at SIT, it was a lovely tradition to live and fake the rituals of, the food was tended to and labored over and in many ways loved over again. I am glad we went to the cafe afterwards though so we could relive some of our tunisian tales and laugh and tickle and tea, of course. today, we will start with the sun and move on to the water with the steam; we'll jump into the wind and yet again end on top of the hill. this is tunisia. i do love seeing it through the eyes of a visitor, even when they are grumps like stuffed eels, but also when they are silly like jennas. Oh! & i would say my demeanor ought to change if i am ever going to get my eggs into a basket and take them to a new a city, but i kind of like the juggling and toppling and wavering right here. I know we might call that a careless kind purposeless, but i'd swear it wasn't. it is a situation where different people will take you to different places and in those places you find 5's, kuwaits, cherries and beige flowers and they are all things to some degree that wouldn't make as much sense without each other. it is an ambiguously complex kind of life and kind of "like like." not barsha barsha, not deema deema, just shwyea shwyea.

and i know today i woke up feeling empty under my ribcage and light all around, but i was thirsty and hungry and after i ate some olive oil and fig jam i felt much lesss compact and heartier in a could be a happy hefty kind of way.

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

5 words. live tunisian heavy metal scene.

done & done. 

i never thought id be so giggly and light as a part of an audience for such a band. but, i loved it. i am loving more often here than i have in a long time. it makes little sense since i am away from most of the people and the places i readily love. sometimes, i feel very affectionate towards little things and strangers and dirt roads and wooden doors and iron fences and of course towards children and innocent faces and warm hearts. people are very loud here very often and it makes me feel like being very quiet and listening to all the sounds. right now though, it is very quiet in my house and i miss the noise and feel like being very loud. my mom is especially making me jealous, because i miss her and because she is dancing and singing and im watching her through metal and glass. thank you ichat. ichat, youchat, we all chat. some of us, across oceans and some of us are so very fortunate to whisper into each others ears, but i do enjoy new media and the digital age because when i can't do the much preferred latter, i have metal and glass that end up meaning much more than their material value and that is sort of art in a way. im rambling, but whats a girl to do after a night of tunisian metal? mmm, ok. lara is arriving in 16 hours. isn't that the gravy of being part of an eel family?

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

i passed by a woman today who smelled heavily of black licorice, fennel and anise seeds. she had many lines on her face from all the faces she seems to have made too many times. i thought they were beautiful, though in many ways im afraid of getting too too much older and so i guess part of me thought they were very ugly. and you know, we've talked about the heavy police presence in tunisia many times, but for the first time i felt it very strongly today and i didnt know if it made me nervous or tranquil. as a foreigner, it makes me feel the latter, but it does remind me of hierarchies and power and hierarchies of power and that all makes me feel nervous. i think i'm very good at expressing being nervous, surprised and excited. being nervously excited to be surprised, but having to pretend to be qool comes up often, but i think im quite good at that too. you might not agree, since im often making the certain faces that give me certain lines on my face, clutching your arm and/or fidgeting with your fingers. last night, i was in kairouan, which is the tunisian tinsel town. it was all lit up and full of saints and stars. we walked around a medina that was far past its closing time, ate sandwiches that weren't meant to be made and saw a light show that wasn't meant for us. i know that's vague and doesn't make much sense, but it was what happened. i walked along side a ram from the bus stop to my house today and felt more like an aries than ever. he was both a saint and a star. it was after i volunteered for the first time at the association for profoundly autistic and handicapped children. it wasn't as i had imagined, but i was very happy to have a friend with me to make eye contact with across the room when i felt the sadness that you would expect to feel in that situation. it was important for me to be there, if for nothing else than my extra set of hands kept clay out of one kids mouth and on my sweater.  next time i will wear a t-shirt.

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

i thought about drinking the sea today. i was at the foot of the hill by my house going on a jog when all i wanted was water. my lack of dinars inspired thoughts of a pink straw. i wanted to drink the sea and blow bubbles into it. i had forgotten it was salty and when i remembered, i started to dream about a saltwater film on bronzed skin. today is the prophet's birthday and we ate a lot of doughy puddings in crystal glasses which we scooped up with our fingers. they were covered in honey, sugar, lard and olive oil. one was brown and deceivingly looked like chocolate pudding, the other was white and stretchy like pizza dough. i wasn't fond of either and i went back to eating my favorite geometric treats, makroud. later in the afternoon tomorrow, i'm going into kairouan and hoping to stumble upon some sufi celebrations. its strange to be in the cities here. reading faces comes more naturally than reading the streets signs or ads. mostly its because there are very few words in arabic i recognize without mentally reading each letter and stringing together the sounds, so i always have the choice of whether or not to read billboards, posters and street signs. sometimes i get lazy about the streets & my brain is too busy. thats probably why i get lost so often. 

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

i've felt like walking and writing so much today, certainly not at the same time & i certainly did not feel like bowling and eating too many chickpeas, but it's what i did anyway because it's what our very nice arabic instructor had planned for us. maybe she did it to become our friend and introduce us to her friends or maybe it was all a quiz about conversational dialect in practice...i'm still not sure, but it was very nice of her either way. i bowled the lowest score out of anyone (a respectable 30), but a silly new friend reminded me that barack obama is a terrible bowler, so i was enthusiastic and optimistic about what the numbers meant. we went to a cafe to drink mint tea and smoke mint hookah after and there was a moment where i felt very yellow. im not sure if i can describe to you what that feels like, but holden caufield knows because he has felt it and he has seen people who looked like they felt it and when i read that in catcher in the rye, i didn't quite understand it until i did, but thats how most things are here. I also met a friend earlier today in front of porte de france and we found ourselves a spot to lunch and catch up far into the winding muddy roads of the medina. it was raining on and off and i kept wishing i hadn't left my umbrella in the cab yesterday or my rain boots in chicago. im terrible at packing and i'm worse at dressing myself. i'm always one layer short of feeling warm, one accessory heavy of looking effortless and one practical grippy pair of shoes away from not slipping and sliding all over the slick cobblestone-d steep streets of the towns on the coast of the mediterranean sea. 

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

oh! and she is very perceptive. if a book is in my hand that she hasnt seen me reading from before, or a trinket is on my desk that wasn't there before, she always asks what it is and touches it and sometimes throws it to see how far it will go...she is curious and curiously capable of getting away with most anything. 

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

yesterday while my 3 year old host sister was running around a house that wasn't ours & while we drank juice and ate patisseries that were cradled in our neighbor's nicest plates and glasses, i looked at her and thought, she is who has inspired me the most since i've been here. zainab always figures out what she wants & she does it. she isn't afraid to change her mind, to sleep at the dinner table or while standing up, to tell you directly what she needs or dance in your lap. she is always painting. she loves to create new things, embellish old things and the wind makes her laugh. she is wildly generous. she once had a single piece of an orange-flavored hard candy and she tried breaking it in two with her baby teeth and puckered smile, just so she could offer me some. it broke into a 1/8 & 7/8 sort of division and she offered me the big one. pink jordanian almonds kill her, really she just loves them, but that's just her. & us? we have all of the books we've read & conversations we've had to shape this intellect and this filter and this process... all of which we put between ourselves and what we want to be and what we want to do and only the intellect is relevant in that system. intellect helps refine and challenge what you want, what you think you want, who you are, who you think you are, etc. but the filter and the process, they're just middle men. of course, i continue to be inspired by wisdom & intellect-- really just downright attracted to them, but zainab's lack of filter and lack of process has been something i've been craving but didn't even know it until she danced in my lap.  

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

the background noises in my life are the biggest change between my chicago life and my life in tunis. the kinds of birds chirps, the sounds of engines, the speed of people's steps, the ubiquitous call to prayer, the music playing in cars that drive by and even the sound of my own thoughts here are all just so different. the language of my dreams is slowly changing. i'm drawn to different aesthetics and the scent of almond blossoms is following me from the groves we passed on our drive through the south of tunisia. yesterday when i took off my jeans, they left perfect imprints of squares and circles from the pockets and the 3 dinar coins inside the right one. this probably means im eating too many deep fried, date filled, honey soaked rhombuses called makrouds. its a small trade off, really. we do walk an awful lot here and sometimes i jog, but most times when i try i just end up standing in front of the sea. the streets of tunis are really cosmopolitan, colorful and alive. most of the people who strut down them wear a lot of black. when we went to the south of tunisia, the landscape was a very specifically windblown antiqued sandy tan, with olive toned shrubbery and delicate hues of yellow and white flowered the rocky formations, but the people who walked those mountain roads and lived in the desert towns wore the most saturated red, pink, blue, purple and floral fabrics. the dichotomy was electric and beautiful. this is mostly a pretty easy place to live. i don't feel overwhelmed or crowded, but that doesn't make it any less complex or interesting. my host family continues to be charming, charismatic and warm. I start volunteering at a wednesday morning arts & crafts workshop with autistic children next week and my african drumming lessons are so much fun...anyone in the chicagoland/505 area wanna start a middle eastern percussion ensemble? 

Sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

Bus Stops, Politics with the Debbabi's and Hairstyles by Zainab.

I've been so busy lately that I haven't had the time to write an entry for a week, which is a year of updates in study abroad time, but since I don't find too much value in sweeping generalizations of what I'm living, feeling and experiencing, I'll just type whatever comes to mind and hope it somehow documents what I'm living for Court 5 and associates: 

My days are mostly punctuated with three things, bus rides, politics with the debbabi's and hairstyles by Zainab. I live in La Marsa, a large suburb of Tunis, and I take the bus daily to Sidi Bou Said, the suburb where I have class. The bus rides are probably my most real and genuine interaction so far with the pulse of urban life in Tunis, which i mean to say its my most frequent contact with a wide range of Tunisians- students, laborers, shopkeepers, shoppers, etc, etc. The bus is always late and always crowded, but no one seems to mind either of those "problems." This is because time does not exist in Tunisia and neither does personal space...two concepts I'm growing to appreciate more and more everyday. My host family doesn't have a clock in the house and a class that was supposed to start at 10 started at 11:20 today and we all just drank mint tea, orange juice and water until everyone got there, which I couldn't love anymore. In terms of personal space, I will say it's mildly off-putting at first when you don't have your 1-foot radius of space, as a security matter, at first. But, in general, it just feels very human and the general understanding of hospitality and affection among strangers here is much stronger than in the states. An illustrative example from the bus stop: While walking up to the crowded bus stop on a rainy morning, I saw an empty chair under the awning, which totally excited me in a way only something like that can, and as I was about to sit down, I felt hands on my back from the women on either side of the chair. When I turned around expecting to find a small child or an imaginary friend, the women were pointing to a puddle and started drying it with their newspapers. That is the Tunisia that I have seen and am living so far, and maybe it's because I'm still heavy into the first weeks euphoria that I'm only seeing the good things that I want to see...but it's as real as anything and I'm as happy as can be. 

After class, I go back to La Marsa to a very charismatic, intellectual, elegant and dynamic host family. They are originally from Niger, but have lived in Tunisia for generations and have more relatives than I have acquaintances and some of their extended family also took students from my program, so many of my friends are also my "cousins." My immediate family is a Mom, a Dad, A 17 year old sister, 13 year old brother and 3 year old sister. We have dinner together every night, which always inevitably turns into cross-cultural exchange and socio-politico comparisons between "Al-Gharb w' Afrikeea Al- Shamaleea ( The West and North Africa.) Today, our conclusions were that Eqypt is the mother of the world, Obama is the president of the world ( not because people love him, but because America's actions affect the entire world, a fact that was said with disdain and rightfully so) and iron and irony have too different of meanings to be one letter apart ( my 13 year old brother had an english test today). After dinner, we sit in the living room and Zainab, my 3 year old sister, does my hair, which hurts a lot, but she loves it and I can't say no to her since she marches around the house spritzing herself with parfum speaking french/arabic while her two little pigtails stick straight up. 

I can't write this entry without mentioning how happy I am to be with the other students in the program. I just feel very lucky to get the next 4 months to get to know them while getting into all sorts of good trouble wandering through the winding roads of the markets here, eating street food, drinking tea, getting colds, getting better and speaking french/arabic/english. 

Also, Lara is planning a trip to Tunis and Tunis is planning quite the trip for Lara. Hope you are readyyyy!

Sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

2-2-09

time of day: non-existent

place: somewhere over the atlantic ocean.

The first thing I want to do when I get to the hotel is shower; I haven't been sleeping on the plane at all and I know I'm going to be exhausted when I get into Tunis, so the kind of refreshing shower that substitutes a night of sleep is in order. I guess I could've been looking forward to sleep, but that's a cardinal expatriette sin on a first day of travel... what's better than a new city by the sea through the lens of hazy eyes? But, since I'm in between Toronto and Paris as I write this, I have a long time before I should think about that. A more pressing and relevant matter comes off the Toronto front. One, never fly transit through Toronto again. Flying transit requires about 8 more steps there, each which happen to be on opposite sides of the airport, I barely made my flight...Two, amidst being flustered and a little dazed from being in transit, when I sat down at my gate to board the second leg of my trip with 5 minutes to spare, a guy came and sat down next to me and we paid little attention to each other- he was reading something, I was talking to some friends whose voices I knew I'd miss, etc. etc. But by the time I had boarded the plane, I had convinced myself that guy was my close (emotionally- but far, globally) friend. For some reason, my instinct was to tell the New Jerseyian turned Parisian man next to me my whole thought process, "How could we have sat next to each other and not recognized each other? Do humans really have such tunnel vision that they only see what the expect to see?" I went on for 10 minutes to him about the non-story (since, i now believe it wasn't)...Anyhow, the man soon after moved when the seatbelt sign was switched off, "Maybe there's more legroom on the other side?" he said politely. The plane was empty and he really could've used more legroom....and even though his move ironically gave me more legroom, I was  the kind of embarrassed  I used to feel in middle school. Rambling to a total stranger-not a good way to start my new chic life in Tunis. You can take the rambler away from loyola, but you can't take the ramble out of the girl? (<--- clearly since i just relayed this story via the webtron) I couldn't pay much attention to it since Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 was on and the Coke I ordered- since I caught Jenna's craving from yesterday, had just gotten here.  

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

P.S. I'm here now and after 2 layovers, I can say confidently, don't wear leather boots without a zipper to the airport- I know they look chic for travel, but it's very un-chic to fumble with them at security for 10 minutes. Eeks. 

Coming Soon, Posts Will Start February 1st.