Morning Ritual, Part II: {grimace}

Morning Ritual, Part III: {plot}

Morning Ritual, Part IV: Lure in…

Morning Ritual, Part V: Closer…

Morning Ritual, Part VI: ATTACK!!

Looking at her face, he knew he had lost. A tiny part of him recognized the truth of Fatima’s words, but a bigger part of him sought to quash it. He could not face it. Already fear and guilt clawed at him, his insides writhing with self-loathing. Abruptly, he departed, leaving her to her fate.

He wandered the empty, moonlit streets of Corinth in a daze. His heart beat wildly, but his mind felt thick and dull. He wandered for what seemed like hours, though he had no sense of time. But then, he came upon the Altar of Ares, god of courage, and wondered vaguely if that was where he aimed to go all along.

He stood, gazing up at the statue of the proud, muscular god. He felt something break inside him, and tears streamed down his face. He let out a mighty bellow. Clenching his face, he cursed the god. “Curse you Ares! Curse you! Why did you abandon me? Why did you give so much to my father? How could you give so much to the father and neglect the son? Curse you!” he screamed.

Pulling a sharp blade from his tunic belt, [he*] screamed and slashed his wrists multiple times. Sharp piercing pain shot up his arms, but it was nothing compared to the deep pain he felt inside. He fell to his knees, watching the dark crimson blood stream from his hands down onto the white marble. He dipped a finger into his own blood and slowly scrawled letters across the marble. He cried then, feeling his strength ebb away from him. He cried, until everything faded to black.

*character name omitted so as to not give anything away

This week’s challenge: Repentance
The goal of Tell It To Me Tuesdays is to encourage you to stretch your writing wings just a little bit further. Write anything of your choice related to the theme “repentance”, fiction or nonfiction and link it up in the comments section below! Please do stop by and spread the love to other participants.

Next week: Instead of Tell It To Me Tuesday, I’m going to try something different. Check back in next week!

I miss them already.

Anyway, that was my weekend. Hope you all have a lovely Monday!

Twelve days until a new phase in my life begins.

It feels like I shall emerge from a cocoon.

Light dances in the periphery of my vision,

like shy and happy moonbeams,

slowly spreading in and illuminating where

it once was dark.

But now we’re back. And this returning feels like a marker to me, because from here on out, it is about to become insane. Every weekend from here until October is planned out, and most of the weekends in October have tentative ones soon to be firmed up. In November, we move to Thailand. In the time in between, I’ll be trying to meet a Sept. 10 deadline for my dissertation, finalizing a manuscript before a conference at the end of September, getting a storage unit, packing to move out of Santa Barbara by Oct. 1, sorting between things to bring/leave behind/set aside in case needed, visiting a friend in Florida, getting my passport, and trying real hard not to lose my sanity. Once we move to Thailand…find a place to live, meet up with new colleagues…and then…who knows?

This is the start of something big. And I will document every.single.day. of it. I may not post every single day, cuz you know. Busy. But I will at the very least take a photo to show you my journey. (Figuring out days when we fly to Thailand might be complicated because you lose a day in flight…but whatever, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.)

So here we go. Day One.

This is just one of the piles of stuff cluttering up our shoebox apartment right now (mostly books I had to move out of my office on campus). We came home to our stuffed-to-the-brim shoebox that, for some unknown reason seeing as how we cleaned before we left, now smells distinctly of mold and I can’t find the source. And that’s annoying because a) I do not want us to get sick from it, and b) well, you know, ew.

This is not a pretty picture. But it is truth. It is our life right now, and it perfectly describes where my head and my heart are. I hope over the course of this journey, the pictures will get lighter, brighter, cleaner and prettier so that at the end of 365 days I will have a very different picture to show you.

Are you excited? I am.

P.S. I won’t be posting daily photos on my blog, only the ones I want to share or say something about. However, my daily photos will be up on flickr. If you’re joining in the 365 Project or want to follow my postings on flickr, you can find my photostream here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jadekeller/

I have a colleague, whom I know others avoid talking to because, well…he’s extreme. Not just extreme, but also incendiary. He enjoys provocation. He’s self-aggrandizing and tries to use huge post-modernist words to sound smart, but usually ends up just obfuscating his leaps in logic. I know this about him, but I’ve always maintained a degree of tolerance, respect, even bemused affection for him, because, you know, at least he’s earnest. And usually I don’t take the bait when he’s being incendiary and provocative because I know it never ends well. He’s always too busy trying to prove he’s right to ever listen to what truth might lie on the other side, and he doesn’t care who he offends in the meantime.

But this time, when he said that America’s institution of marriage was a sham, I had to put a few words in. Except, it’s never just a few words and pretty soon we were into it. Only later, through the course of the argument it started to become clear that he didn’t think committing lifelong to someone was a sham, only having state involvement in it was. He doesn’t believe in signing a legal document about it and he rails against the state’s incentive structure privileging married couples over nonmarried couples. He wondered why the state should be involved at all.

I was willing to grant that he had a valid point in there, though I still argued there are important reasons to want state protection for marriages. (The argument really isn’t important here though and I’m not seeking validation for my side of it.) But his point did make me start looking into the history of marriage and how states ever got involved in the first place. And I thought, maybe this is my bigger picture moment. Engaging with him might make me learn something here. So I waded through material about patriarchy and the historical economic motivations for marriage and the split between church and state and Europe…and I waded…and then…I just. didn’t. care. I stopped.

And after that point, he lost what semblance of respect he had maintained in the conversation and just became flat out insulting, so I stopped responding. But it stuck with me. And I couldn’t figure out why it stuck with me. I didn’t care about proving myself right. I knew better than to be really hurt by his insults because that’s just how he is. I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to learn from this exchange. Tolerance is hard maybe? I just didn’t know.

But then I realized something. He’s just a kid. His arguments may be more eloquent and better considered than those who just say legal marriage is nothing more than the signing of a document. But he has never known what it is to totally subsume himself for something greater. (Or if he has, he must have gotten burned in the process, and that explains why he upholds individual freedom above any other possible value.) There is a profoundly important difference between making promises to your lover in private and getting up in front of everyone you know and love and declaring your commitment. There is a difference when you love someone so much, you’re willing to declare your commitment in a legally binding way. That process transforms you. And no amount of armchair theorizing can tell you how that process changes you until you experience it. A marriage is still prone to weaknesses and no legal stature can totally inoculate it from danger. But the ceremony and tradition links you to all those who have come before you.

And I found I just truly did not care that the state is involved, even if it means we’re pawns in some scheme larger than what we can see. So what if, historically, marriage supported patriarchy? My marriage does not. I don’t have to change the institution of marriage by opting out. I can change it by living it the way we want to, every single day. I’m reminded of a quote by Barbara Kingsolver (bear with me, it’s a little long):

“But his kind will always lose in the end. I know this, and now I know why. Whether it’s wife or nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still, and their stake moves underneath them….Even a language won’t stand still. A territory is only possessed for a moment in time. They stake everything on that moment, posing for photographs while planting the flag, casting themselves in bronze. Washington crossing the Delaware. The capture of Okinawa. They’re desperate to hang on.

But they can’t. Even before the flagpole begins to peel and splinter, the ground underneath arches and slides forward into its own new destiny. It may bear the marks of boots on its back, but those marks become the possessions of the land. What does Okinawa remember of its fall? Forbidden to make engines of war, Japan made automobiles instead, and won the world. It all moves on.”
– The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver, p. 384.

It all moves on. The state has been involved in marriage for centuries, but the institution of marriage has changed over that time without the state having much say about it. Whereas once marriage might have been a primarily financial consideration to ensure progeny, entered into by a man of at least 30 years of age and a woman under 18, now we marry for love, usually between equals. In the last century alone it has changed. Who knows what it will be a century from now? What matters is the will of the people in it. And we can theorize all we want about the social and political implications, but it all moves on, and people will make of it what they want from it. And that is our power.

I realized that, and I slept soundly. And into my dreams, I did not bring in this argument. I dreamt of different things and lovely things. And when I woke, I kissed my husband good morning.

It strikes me that time really does move in cycles, that what you give out comes back to you, what you once took you eventually must return.

Last Saturday, I went out to drinks with my older brother and some good friends, and during the course of the evening, my friend asked my brother what it was like for him moving to the U.S. when he was just eleven years old. He talked about how hard life was in Mississippi at the time because he was a tiny little, dark-skinned Asian boy in a land full of racist white boys who picked on him and his sister every day. And almost every day he would get into fights and nearly get expelled for trying to stand up for himself or his sister. But, he said, when I came along, life changed. He and our sister could not wait to get home to see me and revel in this new person in their lives. They fed me, bathed me, clothed me, and played with me. Protected me.

Things got better when we moved to California too, and my brother proclaimed he would pay any price to stay here. And as I grew up, I felt that love every day, even though my siblings aren’t the type to say “I love you” directly.

And now we are older and my brother is in trouble, and this time it is he who came to me for help. This time, I was the one protecting him. I also went to visit my sister today, and then found myself giving her advice. This time, I was the one guiding her.

It makes me feel whole, now that I can finally give back what once was given to me. Isn’t it funny, how taking makes you feel like there is a piece of you that has gone missing, a place that is empty, but giving fills you up? In balance, of course. Only giving will drain you too, eventually.

My mother has long played the role of matriarch in our family. She is the one to whom everyone turns. She is the center, the teacher, the judge, the advocate, and the comfort. I sense that one day, I may be asked to be the one to fill her shoes. This is my training. Going to Thailand and living there for a time will also give me tools.

In Thai culture, there is very definite and clear class system. Not only in society, but also within the family. A hierarchy that is not challenged, but is always respected. So equality in some ways is a foreign concept. However, there is also a strong expectation that pu yai (the big person) will take care of pu noi (the little person). For example, if a group goes out to a business lunch, the person of the highest status will always foot the bill. No one else would dare offer to pay because that is not seen as politeness, but rather a challenge to the other person’s authority. Elders take care of the younger. And when the elders cannot take care of themselves, the younger eventually become the family elders and reciprocate. In some ways, elders begin to return to childhood as age sometimes strips them of their faculties.

And so the cycle goes.

This Week’s Challenge: Origins
Link it up in the comments below!

Next Week’s Challenge: Repentance

Sometimes you have to run away to find yourself. How can I tell you, without sounding crazy, that my husband and I want life in Asia to be a challenge? We know some of it will be incredible and amazing. How can it not, in a land where orchids grow like weeds? But we also know (and hope) some of it will push us to the brink. Because sometimes, it is only when we are stripped of everything that we find out who we really are.

We love our life here, but we know we have become too comfortable and too complacent. We need to be nudged out of our ruts, we need to be disoriented, in order to recommit to what is truly worthwhile in life. When we become too attached to things, we stop living. Life becomes less about breathing and experiencing, and more about just existing in between one item on the to-do list and the next.

There is a saying in Thai: “Dai yahng, sia yahng.” Which roughly translates to: “To achieve, you must sacrifice.” I have wishes for us. Wishes for a stronger spiritual connection to deeper truths kept locked so deep the bearer doesn’t even know they’re there. Wishes those truths be found, and forgiven, and the openness leads to art. I have wishes for a new perspective that brings a fresh vocabulary with which the world might be newly expressed. I can only imagine what sacrifices we might be asked to make.

In the meantime, the identity shift is coming on subtle and shy. It is coming in cravings for fruit and heat. It is coming in the shift of desires: from cakes and chocolate to coconut and lime. I put away the cheese and pull out the cardamom. I trade in the neutral colors and instead revel in the azure and gold.

This is part of Madeline Bea’s Sunday Creative project.

5 {reasons} I’m glad it’s Friday
* Friends visiting this weekend
* Got my work done this week so I can actually catch a break.
* More pool time!
* It’s a Friday in SUMMER
* I need a drink and I’m pretty sure Fridays are made for drinks

5 {frustrations} this week
* I got sick
* I got my hubby sick (though secretly I think it’s a friend who got us both sick, but I’m not naming names)
* I thought I messed up something big in my research this week.
* I thought I fixed it so it was even better than before. But then after making all the relevant changes, discovered I was wrong, and had to go back to just plain fixed.
* I didn’t quite work as fast as I wanted because I wasted so much time (see previous two points).

5 {things} I accomplished today
* Finished editing my dissertation
* Submitted my dissertation to my committee for review (fingers crossed it finally passes muster!)
* Went to the grocery store and the bank and cleaned house
* Shipped my first sold photo print
* Did not (totally) lose my mind

5 {things} I’m looking forward to this weekend
* Friends visiting
* Playing with my nieces in the pool
* Eating at my sister’s restaurant (mmm…kobe on the grill…)
* Cream soda and frozen yogurt
* Sleeping in

5 {things} I need to do next week
* Get wedding rings cleaned and checked
* Stock up on beauty supplies (i.e. facial toner)
* Watch more of season 5 of Lost
* Get some quality reading time in while hubby is away
* Tidy up my bibliography and appendix

All right. That’s it for me. Do you all have any fun weekend plans? Hope it’s a fabulous one!

Love,
Jade