but whatever. this is me, gushing and momentarily in full love-fest about the way the Web just lies there, and lets creative, intelligent folk do wonderful things with her:
* in paper - The Doorbells of Florence
* and online - andrewlos' photos
(note that Blork does a goodish intro, though i disagree with his i-have-to-wait-until-flicktion-is-forgotten lament -- write the stories Ed!)
and if i'm so many days behind the curve of "new media newness" -- again, whatever. i am in a city where the power goes out roughly four times a day (for the uninitiated, the local euphemism is "load-shedding" -- which, together with "meatless-days" would make a perfect password-pair for the Have-You-Ever-Been-To-Pakistan Club). the outside temperature is 39° (and -- as with this afternoon's powercut -- the outside is often hot-on-the-heels of the inside). and the concept of time is so irrelevant that i can only explain it by pointing out (as a cousin did), how there is only one word for "tomorrow"...
...and "yesterday".
some days, love-festing about the Web is all i've got.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Lalazar, Karachi]
[monday 21 may 2007 at 14:26:09] [¶]
tonight, for the first time, i have my own room.
the bed is even wonkier than the one in my parents' bedroom. the sheets look just as suspicious. the roach-and-gecko potential (a feature of any enclosed space, anywhere in Pakistan -- whether house, hotel or apartment) is probably higher here than it is in my parents' long-lived-in suite. at least i have remembered to light a candle (the room, having just been "famigated" -- as Khalid from reception gushingly put it, may have less roach-and-gecko potential than i am darkly imagining, but it sure doesn't smell like rosewater). so when (not if), the power goes out during the night, i will at least have something to look at until the hotel generator kicks in...
there is a part of me (a small part), that is wondering whether i should just go back to the cot bed i've been stuck with so far, and sleep away the rest of this summer (and whatever else comes after it) within four feet of my snoring mother and father. at night, they will keep the TV on till they fall asleep (my father watching Seinfeld re-runs, and the cricket friendlies in Dubai; after that, my mother watching -- inexplicably to all of us -- the Bengali film channel...). and in the oh-so-early morning, the five phone lines (in that room alone) will play loud, urgent, land-without-voicemail havoc with my head. at eleven (which, if you've been kept up late by North American work-timings, cricket matches and Bengali lovesongs, as well as seven-o-clock calls from cancer-curious relatives in unsympathetic time zones, is still *way* too early to want to wake up), "housekeeping" appears in the form of a small-and-smiling, Punjabi-speaking man named Younus: i get out of my bed so he can make it.
like i said, this part that's wondering -- it's a small part of me.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Lalazar, Karachi]
[friday 18 may 2007 at 00:53:20] [¶]
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- you have no idea what Twitter is.
- you've gotten used to tracking your day on a whiteboard. in ten-minute increments.
- someone has to remind you who Nancy Pelosi is (and all you can think about, is that Pelosi means hairy ones, in Italian).
- you're so far behind on blogging that it actually affects your site-visitor statistics.
- you find yourself looking forward to trans-continental air-travel because finally, you'll have a few hours of nice, quiet, alone-time.
- you have to start every email and phone conversation with "in case you've been wondering where i've been...".
- you're changing the time zone on your pc more often than you're changing your lenses.
- it's fifteen days into the month, and you have not written a thing. not for the blog. not for your sanity. not even for Neruda.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Lalazar, Karachi]
[wednesday 16 may 2007 at 00:05:22] [¶]
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