Whiner

Watching weather patterns on CNN, after flipping through the channels for what would qualify as 'way too long' when it's something like 78 degrees outside...I don't even know anymore what 78 degrees feels like I am so pale.
I hate going outside here during the day. I absolutely hate it.
I'm not even really in India, in some ways, with this attitude. But I don't see how anyone really ever could be. I cook in the sun now that I've stayed out of it as a rule for over a year.

It's just that I have the same disdain for television that sold my TV years ago for nothing just to get it out of my house. And I've no books at the moment (though I just finished the 500 page GIRLY and will say that it is really such a good story. I related to an aspect of each character, blurred in the tunnel-vision of self recognition but still honestly.
Elizabeth Merrick writes like a real person. That statement seems so simplistic it almost doesn't seem like a compliment, until you realize that so few authors succeed at doing just that.)
It's also hard to go to the bookstores - not the being in them...they're wonderful and quiet, the bigger ones - and even have fabulous non-book things to buy (silver glitter gel stuff and handmade paper bags and pens) - it's just the getting there that is so tortuous.

And this is where I start feeling bad, as if telling the truth about what it's like to live here somehow makes me look bad.
Like I'm whining.

India is an interesting place, in every sense of the word. It's gorgeous in its own way - as is any foreign place. I was just telling Miss Jess the other night, as she contemplated a trip to Mongolia with trepidation, that if someone offered me two tickets ANYwhere....I'd go (of course round trip tickets are an added comfort for those who are freaked out by the idea of something-else) I'd go to Zimbabwe, I'd go to Vietnam, I'd go (two tickets=not without my darling.) I'm the first one waiting in line, ever so patiently, for a visa to Iran.

I would go to Iran tomorrow, if they would just let me in.
I want to see my husband's country-and not just as a foreigner...but as a part of his family, and to find the lens that is me, being American, and work at being aware of it so I can get rid of it. Lenses are never a good thing. Never ever.
Imagine.

There seems to be an idea that Iran is a nation of government...that it HAS no people. That the one person who has a voice loud enough to be heard on the world stage isn't the sum total of the society he governs is the most important truth to know.
This is what must be remembered, when all is said and done: that these are the things our government taught us about global cultures, varying faiths, philosophical ideas - as we watched them disappear, morph into what any third world, occupied, war torn country will look like as it grows into Americanhood. Until it has Coca-cola and copyright law.
Iran isn't families with normal lives who drive their kids to school and sing in the shower and work to make a life, a comfortable life...
Iran is not a neighborhood, or a Kindergarten with a town's generation of babies settling down for story time, it's not a freeway with a thousand human stories all going in a thousand directions.

Instead I see this underlying sentiment in the overall news reports out of the west: "See Iran as a target, be afraid...you see, everyone else is afraid...your neighbors are afraid, here's a study to prove it. Now just be quiet...look, here's something shiny, wanna buy it? Oh, no money? It's OK, we'll extend a line of credit if you'll just sign away your conscious state of being...riiiight...there."

I cannot see one objective argument for the kinds of behavior I am hearing about my country and it's military on a daily basis. And shame on the UK for being a puppet as well.
Do we even know the difference anymore?
Do we know the difference between the 'bad people' and 'Islam'?
There are those words now, like 'jihad' that evoke an immediate reaction in Americans. We are scared, because we don't understand any of what's going on.

I can feel the solid end to all-this-waiting just ahead, and so I'm in between two countries. You know that feeling, when you're getting ready for a trip that you've anticipated for a long time. It's that feeling of passport stamp and airplane and the wonderfully boxed meals on trays with a window seat, and taxi (whatever that may actually BE wherever you end up is another thing) and hostel or hotel or spa or shack on the beach with ocean at your doorstep or glossed museum floor or third world bazaar. It's all the things you know are coming, that you can't possibly imagine even from the pages of a Lonely Planet.
If there were no politics involved with Iran I'd already be there. My country's government is screwing up my personal life right now and it is making grievous decisions on my behalf about an entire nation of people without even once asking what I think.
How loud do I have to be to be heard? Whining from so far away, about so many things today?