Holy Jelebis!!!

This professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder quoted and cited something I’d written in her latest journal article.

I’m *so* chuffed.

I’ve been referenced by friends and colleagues before but this is a first, and feels so frigging good!

When you write about obscure, interstitial correlations, it's nice to know it was useful to someone :)

Back to work on that dissertation...

"We hope to show everyone there's a different way"

Michael Sfard compares this Israeli-Palestinian couple to Romeo and Juliet.

I wonder how they met, what he said to her that made him human and then special, why he didn't just recede as just another speck in Israel's vastness of ethnic otherness...

I wonder how it feels to be married for two years and still have to fight for the right to live together, to wait for the state to respect and recognize your union, to apologize and explain yourself in social situations.

She says, "We hope to show everyone there's a different way." I'd like to say to her, Congratulations. I'd like to say, Yes, thank you for showing us that there is a different way.

In the year that i spent in Jerusalem at the end of the century, to my outsider's eyes, social connections seemed overly polarized--the Jewish friends that i made at Hebrew University had no Palestinian friends and remembered very little to nothing of the Arabic they learned in school; my doctor and the people i shared bus seats with and talked to on the street were Arabic and had extensive familial (and hence mostly ethnically homogenous) relationships as well.

Both sides claimed to be fond of India--the Palestinians because they still remembered Arafat and Indira Gandhi and India's decision, as a newly independent state itself, not to be a signatory to the formation of a zionist Israeli state in 1948; the Israelis enjoyed pointing out India's long history of Jewish non persecution and having recently discovered that they shared common enemies with an India under the BJP were entering into all sorts of trade and military agreements.

And in situations where politics didn't come up, their fondness for India and me by extension was that much less complicated--they just sang songs from Hindi movies to me :).

Birthday presence

Yeah, yeah, yeah--i know i just celebrated my birthday for the 11th time this year already, but i'd really really really like to see the Stratford production of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream that's performed in seven Indian languages, one of them being English.

Right here on this side of the pond and also very exciting is John Castro's inaugural work for the Hipgnosis Theater Company--Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. It's on between June 15 - July 2, Thursdays - Sundays, at 8pm at the Flamboyan Theatre at the Clemente Soto Velez Center (107 Suffolk St, between Rivington and Delancey).

For tickets: order via SmartTix over the phone (212-868-4444) or online(http://www.smarttix.com/show.aspx?showCode=MEA0 ).

M4M must easily be the Bard's sexiest play--in the sense that it brings up premarital sex [a.k.a. fornication], pregnancy, sexual blackmail and sexual bribery--all the good stuff, my true love though is Much Ado it's seriously sexy in that supremely crush-like way...

While i'm being all homesick--

Here's my favorite story about homesickness.

Rabindranath Tagore is, for lack of a better word, awesome.

They made a movie of the Kabuliwallah story--and i've never seen it, but this song from the movie was a staple on the radio when i was a kid so that now too far away from home and farther still from childhood, it's guaranteed to make me misty.

Sare Jahaan se Accha

Have to say that I loved the Indian Embassy in NYC (right across the street from the Central Park Zoo) with the Pakistani Embassy just two streets away ‘cos despite our spats we’re all bhai-bhai, right? The first five minutes inside I sat on my plastic chair and beamed--it had an Indian-kitchen smell to it and I could hear at least seven conversations in five different languages--four of which I grew up speaking.

And also, it came to me why Indians are all affronted when there are security searches or rules against carrying food inside administrative buildings--I guess it’s because as a people we tend to be easy-going about things like that--there certainly was no metal detector when I carried my dripping strawberry popsicle into the passport renewal room… the best part was that after I was through with that, I had five offers to share snacks brought from home (masala chips, Krackjack [it's not what you're thinking], Hide n’Seek, idlis, and those Lays potato crisps). Ek dum sweet.

Making Up is Hard to Do

I don't typically sport "makeup." When I have a modeling gig, I get to leave that stuff to the professionals and usually it's such a scramble getting to NYC or some unheard of place in New Jersey or wherever on time and it's so awesome to have someone touching my face that I max out the bliss by sneaking in a li'l shuteye. So I don't know the tricks—left to my own devices, my hair's curly the way I like it only if the weather is just humid enough and my skin's dewy only if I've been hitting the water bottle. Otherwise I look the way I do in my passport pic.

But two cute preschoolers offered me a makeover last week--and since the offer was for imaginary shimmery pink lipstick and lots of mustaches on my eyes, it certainly would seem that my time had come. So I stopped by at the M.A.C. counter today where they didn’t have my exact shade and I ended up having half my face done done in a lighter color and the other half in a darker shade—it was a pretty radical look, but that’s how I looked when I took the train home.

I wish I lived back in the day when all they had was B&W photography…

CONTENT

If that belly was filled with baby
Instead of full of food
Would she feel less guilty
Be in a better mood?


(I just came from www.stephanieklein.com)