Tahini Tuna
I ate a whole tuna steak out of a can like Nour and I would do in the Bait-Al_Talibat(the girl's dorms) I covered it with Virginia Crespo's tomato diced small, green pepper, and Lebanese Tahini. Not one of us in this apartment like the same food. Joe, Jackson, and I eat separately to be most happy with our food choices. I curled into the black beanbag, a gaudy nefertiti gold printed unstuffed-ottoman ontop of it in a a vinyl paradise against my legs. I ate and discussed the implications of becoming a new character.
I was making up a new character for D&D in order to psychologically stretch myself beyond old fears of improv acting, and I was attempting to circumvent my fears being translated as indifference for role-playing. "This is really hard for me!" my paralysed inner child screams. Who am I? How can I pretend to be someone else? I decided that role-playing has to be based upon true desires of the soul. But this is harder than it sounds.
How easy it is to imagine that what I desire is articulable! Curled in the black bean bag with my metal dish of tuna, watching the boys look at me expectantly, I decided I'd prefer to be the part of me that wants to be agressive, challenging, and chose a Bard who injures with sharp words, who chants poetry about old warriors to make allies feel strong like Pericle's funeral oration, and who uses a technique called "Fast Friends" that gets people to become confused about their alliances. Enemies think they are my friend when they are not and this is to their detriment. Finally manipulative obessesive scorpio-tendencies could come out safely. With the first drink that night I became more capable of imagining how biting she could be.
Any role-playing has got to have some psychic importance to my real self-development. And any self-development was going to come at a price. This new character enjoys being at taverns. This was important. I could see that role-playing a person who is angry and hurt somehow was going to help me 'explore', but needed delicacy. She had suffered from indifference and that was going to arm her with mental lashes for enemies.
Importance is the antithesis of indifference. The enemies of such a cruel bard as I was creating in the imaginary world, would be the goblins of the mythical world.
Breakfast
The next morning I made "Aunt Sophie's Eggs" which is named after no aunt of mine. The desire just to make them got me out of my cozy bed. I don't usually get excited about frying butter in late summer. I hadn't been able to sleep last night. The revelation that people sometimes don't give a shit about how you feel had me up late last night. Indifference is many-splendored as far as I am concerned.
There is the indifference a mother can feel about making breakfast in the morning. This is ordinary. There is the feeling that no matter how hard I try to play D&D well, it will come off as indifference because I have to role-play something I want to be, and that is at least psychologically hard to discover, if not transcendental to become aloud. This is a mis-interpreted indifference. It wishes to evolve like a pokeman( Rilo into Lucario or Catapi into Cascoon and so on.....)I require diligence to evolve.
And then there is the indifference of my 'friend' ( I always use real names), whose crystalline will does not apply to Zanex or wandering the streets of Alexandria until sunrise laughing at me because I can peel two vagrant adolescent beachcombers off me with curt gender-specific arabic, or to helping me apply Occams's Razor to the most important questions of life, while watching the sun turn the sea from wine-dark to light jade, but which allows him to disappear to the margins of Facebook in permanent do-not-reply status. How many times has that sea dried up, leaving us Italian salt-rock caves?
It compounded my head last night that I had been drinking, "white Athenians" Ouza aperatif liquor brought back from Emmanual's wedding in Greece mixed with half&half cold coffee and vanilla. I played Youtube videos of music and taught myself the chords of Mazzy Star's Fade into you and refilled my blue tumbler again and again.
Indifference was edged out slowly, as the unmoving memories turned sepia-stagnant pink in my depths. At 4:52, the Cream-of-Wheat kitten was still eating my toes and the feeling of being ignored had magnified to a metastrophic horror. What if everything I know is not real? what if I only imagined that we were friends?
Earlier that night I had had the distinct sensation that Joe had answered the phone in the middle of my sentence. "So...." he had said, and flipped open the phone. I felt a shock as though this was clearly rude. Of course he had never done anything like that. It felt like indifference when really he had only experienced a pause in my speech as though, an opening for his decision to answer the phone. Indifference was clanging like a ship's bell leaving, like the sound of a train pulling out, like the feeling of a plane pulling up off the run-way. It was taking all my attention left over from peeling the cat off of my face.
The drinks had only made it hard to sleep and left me dehydrated and uncomfortable in our soft bed. I got up and went online. I saw, "the doctor" had accepted my friendship. Matt was another student in Alexandria who I talked to three times. I remembered sitting next to him in the Pearl in Smoohah, a newspaper between us, translating a difficult article about factions in Lebanon, the thread of friendship between us linked incredibly finitely to that moment and hardly consisted in friendship, unlike that between Daniel and I.
That night,Daniel had come in with bean sandwiches for the group a few minutes later and sat across the table with his Al-Kitab opened, smoking, looking at us for a few minutes before he slid behind a pillar and put his ear buds in; Not indiferrence at that point, simply doing his best to study for exams the next day. In memory, the new friend on facebook was only a link to feeling loss. I had to overcome this nicotine-addiction to feeling betrayed by the end of summer school.
On facebook that morning, as the other sleepless green dots were rising on the lower left, I saw also that my mother was in town. She hadn't called to say hello, or even to excitedly say anything about my new engagement. I was miffed ontop of injured in my pride. I drank a cup of water, a cup of grape juice, washed my face with Ayurvedic soup, and my nose-ring with saline. I brushed my teeth and lay back down. I cried softly in the way that you can with her chest aching, clenching, and then breathing deeply. It was a true letting-go, of my mother, of my friend and our good times together. It was three or four of these Mohammedean squeezes which rendered truth unto my mind. I am loved by some, and others do not love me as they say. I yawned a deep aching yawn that released me finally. I turned into the warm embrace of my prometido(promised one.) Love is not so indifferent to entreaties. He curled around me lovingly.
Molletes Sencillos
After I served up the Aunt Sofia's eggs( toast with circles cut out with eggs fried inside the circles),I made myself a version of bread smeared with black bean paste toasted with cheese. Molletes are like french bread pizza in Mexico, and like Egypt, there is no red sauce for pizza. The Mollete is made on a rounded bit of french bread with a layer of bean and a heavy dose of Queso Fresco or Queso Oaxaqueña. I made mine with cheddar and cheap Italian bread. I listened to NPR explaining how 10,000 people dressed up for Michael Jackson's birthday yesterday, and met up in celebration of his birthday wearing fedoras, leather, and bloody dresses doing the moonwalk.
My mother called. Joe pointed to the phone emphatically. When she finished explaining how she finally got a hold of me on Joe's phone, she explained who she was going and what she was going to be gifting to them. This was all to say that she did not have anything much for me. I didn't have anything to say except, "that's fine." She asked me if her trip had feasibility. I checked Google maps to see how long it was to her destination in PA and tried to break it down for her so that she could see that it would be possible to see each of her daughters for a few minutes, and my son.
"I look to you and I see nothing
I look to you to see the truth.
You live your life, you go in shadow
you'll come apart, and you'll go black
some kind of night inside your darkness
colors your eyes with whats not there
Fade, Into you
I think It's strange you never knew"
-Mazzy Star
