y lo arrastran hasta su propia muerte

where would i be but in abuja to learn about the tidal wave incident. we were sure that the aunties would worry that the tidal waves could somehow make their way to hausaland and affect us. personally, i am opposed to the tidal waves. the idea was to see the country. set out early morning on the 26th from Lagos. it is discouraged to drive at night, the aunties say because of armed robbers, but i think the greater concern is the poor condition of some of the roads. you can't see the holes in the road with enough warning to slow down. franco was going to do the driving. we drove down to one of the big highways that also serves as a market and parked. franco got out and brought back a phone card and a police officer who introduced himself as fester. he was a smiling guy. surya let him have the front seat so the three of us were very cosy in the back. like magic, we made it through every single one of the thirty or so police roadblocks without having to do so much as slow down so they could recognize his uniform. there are roadblocks i imagine at an average of every ten kilometers, though some closer together than others. three or four police pick a spot on the road, but three or so boughs from nearby trees and lay them across the road staggered so you have to drive around them, then just stand there smiling with their big guns. sometimes they have tires to prop up the branches and make them look nicer. at night they light fires ahead. truckers stopping at the side also build fires ahead of their trucks or in the daytimes lay leafy branches along the roads. fester got out at abuja and we stayed with an uncle recently imported from india, still hadn't learned to speak pigeon. he took us out to a nice chinese restaurant and kept offering me cigarettes. his car wouldn't start on the way out and we took a cab. surya saved him from getting ripped off. people get more use out of the roads than anywhere else i've seen. you can see trucks full of yams, cassava, eggs, oranges, plantains, bananas, cows with their necks broken so they can be contorted and stacked on top of eachother but still alive so their meat will arrive fresh at the festival, and dogs packed in wire cages. franco told me that young dogs have sweet meat. we met an oga at the park who told us that guinea fowl also have sweet meat, and the meat of humans is so sweet that if a lion kills a human it must be killed because it will never again be satisfied with antelope meat. another sweet meat is that of the grass cutter. some guy was holding one up on the highways. highways are not also used for transportation but for markets. villagers close to the highway can earn money by selling fruit, yams, and dried meat to travelers. best pick a railroad track or somewhere where cars will slow down, then you want to chase the car holding up your grapes close to the window just long enough so the car might stop if they want it.
cattle herders have to cross highways on occasion. on this bridge in ogun state the herders are now able to cross rivers.
i bought a fresh kola nut from some kids at a gas station. i took the green one because they told me it would give me more power. it gave me power to read all of the economist that arun left behind. after the chinese restaurant we went for a drive around. we wanted to see the legislative chambers, so we started driving down a road towards what we thought was a government house. we ran into a road block and found three very well dressed nigerians with guns, who informed us that we were heading towards president obasanjo's villa. the best-dressed one, who turned out to be drunk, extracted a bribe of five indian rupees from the uncle and told us where we could find some nice sightseeing. he wanted to go with us, but his colleagues reminded him that he was on duty. uncle gave him his business card in case he wanted to buy some electronics, and we got a drunk-dial from him about ten minutes later. we stayed at the national park for a night. we went to a safari in the morning and saw about seven water buffalos and some bushpigs. franco told me they done chop our money and we didn't see anything so we headed back yesterday. without fester the roadblocks were more difficult to negotiate, but we only actually paid a bribe one time. if they ask for a bribe, you tell them god bless you or that the weather is great and they let you go, but this one seemed that he would not go away empty-handed. franco stopped to chop at one place and all the girls selling soft drinks crowded around the car to look at us like we are animals in the zoo. surya told them they could all marry me if they were lucky, but that he himself would be a bad person. when i go marry i go beat a body. they giggled and kept staring. we stopped a bit later to get plantains, and two of the girls made me take their picture. they were shocked to see it come up on the display screen and rushed to show their mother. they asked if they could have the picture, not understanding the idea of an LCD screen. i said i'll bring them a copy next time i come.

at one place they had a checkpoint to check that a body has all the necessary permits to be driving, but this one was manned by area boys with 2x4's with many nails driven through them. we were driving and the boys threw the board nail out and franco stop and one ran up to the car. 'how now' franco yells. the boy pulls out a blue thing maybe it is a badge and looks at the windshield stickers. the board gets pulled back and we can go. from jos to abuja the country side was on fire. fields were getting burned after a straw harvest and many dry areas had caught on. the moon was bloody red and bloated, dim. fires off on the horizon and the air is thick with smoke. my nose was burning. chewing the kola nut made me ambitious but all i was doing was reading the economist so i alternately decided my direction in life should be a chinese go player, a bhutanese villager, an italian financier, an academic of graffiti, a decronstructionist media critic, a children's television writer, a cell phone mogul, a choson refugee camp worker, a nigerian newspaperman, a haitian pro-aristide rebel, a mexican dietician. when the kola nut wore off i was back to square one. dude, did you eat the whole thing? arun asked. well franco ate the whole thing too. in fact he may have eaten two of them. well he had driven about thirty five hours in four days so he needed it.

....

i have an incomplete list of words i have heard enough in the swamy household:
definitely.ideally.experience.unique.get an idea.perfect.auntie.
it reminds me of the part in the calvino book where the girl has this machine that dissects books by listing the words by the frequency with which they appear. the tyranny of the aunties is giving aroon difficulty in coming to jos with us. indians have so many aunties and all an auntie really is is someone your parents or your mother likes to gossip and make chatter with. there are about eighteen aunties and uncles rolling up here every day and mary gives them trays with water and smallchop and they ask me what i think of nigeria and they ask surya for his sister's impressions on her employment and he says the same thing with the same smile and the same inflection in his voice. i have a set of about three expressions i change around depending on my mood. one is to say i like it and grin and that i hope to see more. the other is to say that there are large lizards here and it amuses me to watch them. the third is to say i liked to watch a goslow one fond day a week ago and the auntie or the uncle will say unique experience to me. surya will grin and affirm that this is in fact a unique experience. everyone seems encouraged to hear that there has been something to stimulate my mental development. the new thing is to give me a mobile with all black and white geometrical shapes because babies are colorblind or something like that. anyhow aroon's parents found out he was going to take a road trip this was the biggest thing on the auntie talk show circuit and soon there were about fourty eight stories of highway thieves and now he is in trouble. mrs. swamy has prepared a first aid kit for us which contains, amongst other things, cipro and valium.

ak's get to spraying

we have christmas carols here, more than my family would play. americans get only a morbid pleasure from carols. the CFO of the fishead operation is here

agujas del reloj

this building used to be the pakistani embassy workers residence and now it is all indian expatriate families. there is a 20-year-old liberian-nigerian girl who works as a maid for one of the families named patience. she said she works to pay for her school, 5000 naira (~$35) per month. she is in the eleventh grade now. she got braids in her hair so that it won't get all tough, she claims. interestingly, she has a friend also named patience with the same hair style, who had come to visit her last night. she said she is planning to get a degree as an artist then a lawyer, at which point she will have a job with a high salary, 30,000 naira, she estimates, then she will be able to pay me a visit in the united states. niyi came for a visit the same night. the guards sent him up through the servants' entrance, being a young nigerian who was not a professor or tutor. we went to a chinese restaurant and surya's mom told me to tell our waiter the line i had learned in yoruba, and i shook my head profusely, until i realized that i had in fact learned two lines, the other meaning i want food (as opposed to 'i beat you'). mo fe jeun. he shook my hand and this won our table a 10% discount. that and surya's pidgin. he later asked where i was from and i say united states.
"united states. number one.
-i suppose, number one economy
-number one in everything. how is life in america?
-i suppose it is good. we always have electricity and water.
-you always have food too. food is cheap?
-yes. some food is cheap, some is not.
-more privilege, more choice.
-is life easy? do you have to work hard?
-we work hard, but we have more privileges
-number one"

cadillacs and patty melts and monte carlos

corruption:
we drove around with franco one night in the old peugeot and there were police checkpoints. they just looked in the car and waved us on. seemed harmless enough. then we went out later with aroon in the mercedes E-class daddy moto and we get to the checkpoint and the cop puts up a grin and rubs his fingers together like so and says "money money!" aroon gave the first one 50 naira and he said come on so he upped it to 200. (about $1.25) the sad thing is he gave the guy that watched our car while we were in the club 20 naira. after passing through seven checkpoints it became clear that not everyone could be bribed. there are some people that drive carts down the sides of the roads wit plastic jugs full of kerosene or gasoline, plastic bottles full of kindling for wood stoves. mister tanny told us that obusanjo put about 720 million USD into getting the countries oil refineries into shape so they wouldn't have to import petrol, but no one knows where the money went. he said about one third of the oil extracted is sold by the european and american companies-shell, chevron, total-the other two thirds is given to the nigerian government. no one can say where it goes. there is an oil mafia that controls exports, bribing government officials so that a tanker may be sold to italian and russian mafias, to haliburton. a young coast guard officer got himself into trouble one time because he stopped a tanker that was leaving the port without identifying itself, as he was ordered to do, but this tanker had a deal with the navy that there would be a window in time where no one would patrol. the officer was summoned to abuja for some reason, and the tanker took off then. then he was reprimanded for getting away. all of the officers under him were given pitifully small sums ($150 - $500) to follow the oil ministry line and discredit the officer. mister tanny said that every major business that wants to set up has to make regular bribes to the electrical company, the telephone company, the police, etc. to see that they are allowed to operate. it is not possible that any multinational here is clean, he says, because it is impossible to operate without being corrupt. Jerry Rawlins, past president of ghana, cleaned up politics in the counrtry by having 120 or so corrupt officials murdered and replacing them. he stopped allowing ghanaens to leave the country and forced people to work on farms. he personally went to some farms and started digging to motivate people to do it. there were many refugees from ghana in nigeria during his time, who feared they would be murdered. rawlins stole a nice chunk of money on his way out. ghana's government is now considered one of the cleaner ones in africa, with public services and infrastructure than can be relied upon. most will admit that this would not have been possible without rawlins' oppression. mister tanny said that he would rather have one rawlins in nigerian politics than a million obasanjo's. but to do something like that in nigeria would require killing about 6000 people at least, a genocide. one of obasanjo's early ideas was to stop nigeria's rampant importation in order to encourage local industry. he later admitted that there was only so much he could do to beg customs to stop smuggling.

La cosidad es ese desagradable sentimiento de que alli donde termina nuestra presuncion empieza nuestro castigo...Oliveira es patologicamente sensible a la imposicion de lo que lo rodea, del mundo en que se vive, de lo que le ha tocado en suerte...-Rayuela

"cosidad is that disagreeable sentiment that where our presumption ends so begins our punishemnt...Oliveira is pathologically sensible to the imposition of all that draws him in, of the world that he lives in, of all the ways luck has touched him..."

platinum addition

mary got out of jail. if someone is arrested for fighting they just make them sit down at the police station until someone shows up to bribe the police then you're out. mary says she was just throwing a stone. we got up and went to the market. there was a go-slow stretching about two miles on the other side of the road on the way out there. this market had mostly wooden carvings and vegetables, and there were proper stalls. some guys hissed for me to come with a furtive look and showed me their finest erotic wooden sculptures and made sure i didn't need any weed. two boys named frank and steven saw me in the car as we drove up and when i got out they introduced themselves and said they were there as my guides for the market. steven says he likes science and studies at school during the week. we played a game with a bouncing ball and this poor lebanese woman ended up getting soaked with filthy vegetable water but she was too terrified to complain. frank pointed at this old man with a cane and a traditional yoruba outfit and told me he was nigeria's ronaldo, though he didn't know how to play soccer on the way back we hit the goslow as expected. franco followed several cars over the median and drove in the opposing lane where the traffic was lighter. surya's mom was telling franco he was going to be in big trouble and he had better turn around right now. when she saw that we were going way past all those other suckers she changed her mind and told him to keep going. we had a good peugeot so it could jump the median but several other cars got stuck and people had to get out to push them back, so this started a goslow on the other side of the road. some other drivers tried to continue on the opposing side by attaching green leaves to their hoods, as is done in the case of a riot to show a car not involved in the riot please don't burn it. the police weren't fooled so they would issue a beating to drivers doing this then let them go on their wrong ways. the first verb i learned in yoruba was to beat. mo na e. i beat you. at some point there was a freshly killed capybara hung up on the side of the road, which no one could explain. franco said it's called a grasscutter here. we've got tickets for i want your wife

she done come back with knife

i did pushups 30 of them and this made me fall asleep and i woke up at six thirty or so with my body aching and i think i must have malaria or dengue fever or sleeping sickness or typhoid or tuberculosis, but i realize my muscles ache because i never do pushups. this time i turned the jet lag backwards so i'm like an old person and there would be no way to get back to sleep so i had morning tea with surya's mom, and we talked about the dollar drop and pension systems. i spent the morning reading rayuela. it's good to do nothing but drink tea and read. i watched mary make breakfast. when i smelled something new i ran in and asked her what she had put in. from Rayuela: ...es decir que en todo acto habia la admision de una carencia, de algo no hecho todavia y que era posible hacer, la protesta tacita frente a la continua evidencia de la falta, de la merma, de la parvedad del presente. Creer que la accion podia colmar, o que la suma de las acciones podia realmente equivaler a una vida digna de este nombre, era una ilusion de moralista. i maintained myself like this drinking tea, reading on the couch, saying a few words when various morning-time visitors came in for mrs. swamy. johana the hausa chinese food expert came over and it is arranged he will cook food for us on monday and show us how to make spring rolls. his wife left him and she keeps calling him because she regrets it. then surya's mom takes out all of the children's toys she has because i mentioned in passing that i wanted to play backgammon, and i played with this italian architecture set until i felt weak and feverish then i tore apart my structure because it gave me no more pleasure and i fell into the jet lag sleep. i kept turning my head but i couldn't get up until i figured out where i was or what time it was and then i saw surya in the room and i realized i would be able to get up. it was dark then and i drank more tea and ate some reheated thai food from the icelandic dinner meeting and started reading again. we have a four hour window where there is internet access in this houose, so surya and i take turns in that time. we got a call saying mary was in jail and went down the guard house to ask ibrahim what happened. he said mary fought with some guy and she went back to get a knife or a broken bottle and the police came and took her away. she was kind enough to leave us dinner in the microwave before leaving. doctor falola has asked for all of the recorded works of a certain artist, so i have to bring that with the roasted snails. niyi says he will go to benin city. maybe i will be awake soon.

horrible, horrible freedom

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FL18Ak04.html

Entry to and exit from the city will be restricted. According to Sattler, only five roads into the city will remain open. The rest will be blocked by "sand berms" - read mountains of earth that will make them impassible. Checkpoints will be established at each of the five entry points, manned by US troops, and everyone entering will be "photographed, fingerprinted and have iris scans taken before being issued ID cards". Though Sattler reassured American reporters that the process would only take 10 minutes, the implication is that entry to and exit from the city will depend solely on valid identification cards properly proffered, a system akin to the pass-card system used during the apartheid era in South Africa.

Fallujans are to wear their universal identity cards in plain sight at all times. The ID cards will, according to Dahr Jamail's information, be made into badges that contain the individual's home address. This sort of system has no purpose except to allow for the monitoring of everyone in the city, so that ongoing US patrols can quickly determine whether someone is not a registered citizen or is suspiciously far from their home neighborhood.

No private automobiles will be allowed inside the city. This is a "precaution against car bombs", which Sattler called "the deadliest weapons in the insurgent arsenal". As a district is opened to repopulation, the returning residents will be forced to park their cars outside the city and will be bused to their homes. How they will get around afterward has not been announced. How they will transport reconstruction materials to rebuild their devastated property is also a mystery.

Only those Fallujans cleared through US intelligence vettings will be allowed to work on the reconstruction of the city. Since Fallujah is currently devastated and almost all employment will, at least temporarily, derive from whatever reconstruction aid the US provides, this means that the Americans plan to retain a life-and-death grip on the city. Only those deemed by them to be non-insurgents (based on notoriously faulty US intelligence) will be able to support themselves or their families.

Those engaged in reconstruction work - that is, those who are working at all - in the city may be organized into "work brigades". The best information indicates that these will be military-style battalions commanded by the US or Iraqi armed forces. Here, as in other parts of the plan, the motive is clearly to maintain strict surveillance over males of military age, all of whom will be considered potential insurgents.

make you chop

make you chop make you chop wake up you sleep all day says mary. i lost the battle to jet lag yesterday when i was at the point of beating it, i had a five hour nap, got roused up to take a walk and then i couldn't sleep the entire night until about 7am. i used my hours of insomnia to worry about what it would be like to have a life full of hours of insomnia, and i finished the last 100 pages of el amor en los tiempos del colera about the guy who waits 53 years for the woman he wanted. mary roused me up and made me eat some semolina with a spicy tomato sauce, bitter tea and then i went back to sleep. they know i take my tea with no garnish. we went to UNILAG to see mister tanny defend his master's thesis. we got there half an hour late and he was sitting out in an open air pavilion with cracked and diesel smoke blackened cement that surrounds all sides and the grass grows through the cracks that reveal dirt, and religious grafiti covers the cracks that reveal classrooms, las cuales don't have all their windows or the windows won't shutter but why do it since there is no air conditioning and rarely any electricity. we talk to some undergraduate students doing some calculus and physics homework with pencils and no calculators, using logarithm tables. mister tanny somehow has no access to a DLP projector or a laser pointer or a microphone to defend his thesis, so we go over his thin sheets of posterboard and meticulously drawn portraits on graph paper that have a synopsis of all he has learned about vibrations on thin plates.

the air is so dusty. the words i want your wife the latest smash hit of the nigerian box office is stenciled on highway dividers and shop fa‡ades throughout proper lagos. we listen to a radio commercial about this orgasmic chocolate cake and a woman called mademoiselle but anglicized cannot contain herself upon tasting it. it's an expat's french confiterie in victoria island, theodore chauffers us into this market set up over railroad tracks where trains still run and you just clear out when they come. we hopped out and bought some books about yoruba amidst the hawkers with fish, plantain, cassava, ginger, cell phone SIM cards, bottles of coke and copies of bill clinton's autobiography. there are some icelandic businessmen with their wives coming over for cocktails tonight. surya and i have to shave and put collars on but the deal's off unless we get black label. doctor falola dropped me the name of a man who will show us around ibadan and ile ife, who will give me a package of roasted snails to bring back for him. remember to roast them, or customs will seize them.

go slow

we expected some delays but we didn't get any, so we had some seven hours in new york city. we went to chinatown for lunch and saw a movie in this very tall building. surya looked out the window and said corporate life would change him and he's not sure he would like himself after the change. all of television's stars were lit up in neon on the side of the building. on the plane i got to watch a japanese comedy and they gave me wine with each meal. a solid 25cl bottle with each meal. the only problem is they didn't serve pork. on the dubai-lagos flight i learned to play backgammon now i itch to play backgammon. the airline treats like a lonely grandmother who fattens you for lack of anything else to do. also surya's mother and the maid mary. they'll fatten us worse than any airline. mary will teach us yoruba if we eat all the food she cooks and the little boy rohan will teach us bengali if we keep giving him pieces of chocolate. on the drive from the airport i learned that public electrical services are not that reliable. an electric pole fell over as we were driving past us. fortunately it fell on top of the car on the other side of its hood. i wish we would have told the drivers on the other side of the road in some way that that was the primary cause of the goslow that day. we went to this upscale shopping mall to eat some suya. some young people were hanging around this mostrador pegado por papeles de un rave del estrella reggae que no me acuerdo el nombre. por otros razones que nos dijeron para comprar un boleto, la chiva dijo que ey, voces gostam das meninas, nao? le cogio surya por la mano, la miro, y dijo que ey vc gosta de finger, nao? tuvimos que decirles que ibamos a regresar amanha cuando tuveriamos dinero. but it doesn't come cheap to fly the reggae star out to lagos and have him perform. when i have few things to do i can make myself read and i never have to get up to pace around and think about all that is pendinente for me. like i said the electrical power this post would not be possible without the constant interference from the APC uninterruptible power supply that every computer owner must have. we were in the supermarket and the lights went out, but the generator kicked in for the frozen section. they plan ahead like that.

no caminho do bem

i like sociology classes. i can write a term paper which is mostly summaries of magazine articles and i get a 90 along with the comment that it totally lacked any theory. i am negotiating the safe passage of my guayaveras from panama. tomorrow is the last piece of classwork i will have to do. blow it off? oh si.
we have like a pound of butter that needs to get eaten in the next two days. also a pound of bacon. i think it's time for a batch of my famous bacon and butter stew. i think i think i think i think and he thought so hard.

vem moça

the ageless lorenzo came over for some wine and told us how the famous drunkard we once knew nearly died after falling from a third-story railing. they had removed the vertical safety bars in order to throw a couch off that was too heavy to lift comfortably. it was decided to put the bars back on after the fall.
tata is gone from austin after two days of roasted meat and rum to commemorate his departure. duylinh explained to me some post-breakup conventions which turned out to be little more than gleamings from sex and the city. nigeria is supposed to have dust storms in the winter months

& grill

i turned it all in. so what of it? we drank rum and vodka and ate roasted meat (pork ribs, chicken, shrimp) with our hands. galen and i took off when we realized that the turkey would take five more hours to cook and there was no other form of meat. my professor bought me several beers. i won a darts game. i like darts now.

drake when is this guy going to be in dubai? i'll be there the night of the twelfth. i need someone to take me out on the city from 12am to 5am

methanol

i sent those two guys off to bind our report. it's about 160 pages long. it's due in an hour. the professor says he will go out to posse east with the class and pay for the first few pitchers of beer, but i think no one is going save me. we'll get expensive beer and some burgers. so i turn in reports on chicana sexuality and methanol production on consecutive days. my next project will be to steal the trade secrets of various restaurant franchises

someone get me a bank account in euro's

The disappearing dollar
Dec 2nd 2004
From The Economist print edition


How long can it remain the world's most important reserve currency?

THE dollar has been the leading international currency for as long as most people can remember. But its dominant role can no longer be taken for granted. If America keeps on spending and borrowing at its present pace, the dollar will eventually lose its mighty status in international finance. And that would hurt: the privilege of being able to print the world's reserve currency, a privilege which is now at risk, allows America to borrow cheaply, and thus to spend much more than it earns, on far better terms than are available to others. Imagine you could write cheques that were accepted as payment but never cashed. That is what it amounts to. If you had been granted that ability, you might take care to hang on to it. America is taking no such care, and may come to regret it.

revista fem

i have encountered this. gentlemen may use this to discourage wives or girlfriends from spending a long time at shopping places:

"Las conductas histericas atribuidas a las mujeres les hacen verlas como seres irracionales y caprichosos, lo cual sigue siendo fomentado en muchas ocasiones y un ejemplo claro de esto es la controvertida campaĂąa publicitaria de una conocida tienda departamental, que se aferra a la imagen de la mujer frivola, consumista e irracional, ademas de resultar ofensivo para las mujeres (y tambien para los hombres) que no tienen el nivel economico para adquirir los productos"
revista fem v.27 i.247 p.6
the hysterical conduct attributed to women makes them seem like irrational and capricious beings continues being fomented in many ocasions. a clear example es the controversial publicity campaign of a well-known department sotre, which promotes the image of the frivolous, consumption-driven and irrational woman, resulting in an offense to women (and also men) that do not have the economic level to aquire the products.

women, by making me wait outside of this changing room you are only perpetuating hurtful stereotypes to yourselves.

revista fem

though i met with the professor twice early in the semester to discuss my project, it seems that it will be due in 19.5 hours and i have done little more than print out a series or articles from revista fem. now the excitement. i will read a series of these to assess the state of mexican feminism through my readings of its vanguard feminist publication. let's start here:

El Nacimiento de fem

1975

Y un dĂ­a sucediĂł. Dos mujeres conversaban en un camiĂłn, iban de Uruapan a Morelia, a dar una conferencia sobre la situaciĂłn de las mujeres. Esas dos mujeres eran AlaĂ­de Foppa y Margarita GarcĂ­a Flores, las dos consideraron necesaria la existencia de una revista con perspectiva feminista, filosofĂ­a, tendencia, movimiento, utopĂ­a, realidad y convicciĂłn que marcaba sus vidas.

Al poco tiempo, cada una, invitĂł a diversas feministas como Marta Lamas, Elena Urrutia, Carmen Lugo, Lourdes Arizpe, Marta Acevedo, Elena Poniatowska, entre otras. Todas se reunĂ­an a discutir el perfil y el contenido de esa futura publicaciĂłn. Fue asĂ­ como en la colonia Florida, en el estudio de la casa de Foppa fem naciĂł.