I’ve been on the fritz for a couple of days, throwing mini strops, mostly silently, like a well-bottled beverage. One little eruption actually took place on Metafilter, where there has been a longrunning pair of threads on the site’s white middleclass American orientation and the moderators having only one solution: applying copious amounts of goodwill. After days or weeks of discussion it emerged that a bunch of white middle-class Americans had been ‘problem-solving’ on a separate channel and this was greeted by the moderators as a starting point for dialogue instead of the frankly disrespectful action it was, however unintentionally. I didn’t have much of a horse in the game before, but this really riled me up: there is only some much naivete that can be excused by goodwill.
Work also caused me to erupt in miniature, like a tabletop volcano, when it became apparent that I will have to re-edit materials I’d already completed because the writers had made errors and the supervising experts hadn’t reviewed them. For the third time on this project. Gah.
And then the world is crumbling of course, literally, but also with disgraceful news out of Pakistan, with the embarrassing politics of the UK and concentration camps plus on-and-off midnight raids in the US.
On the positive end of things, Spanish is going reasonably well. I prefer my teacher from the first week, but the second week’s teacher settled in reasonably well by Friday, I was fairly confident in using my broken Spanish when we were out today, and I came across the Destinos programme which seems like an excellent way to pick up a little more, albeit not as entertaining as the telenovela I watched 20 minutes of.
Oh and speaking of the New York Review of Books (not that I was, but I linked to it), the start of this article gets at Lebanon like anything else I’ve seen:
Beirut—Lebanon is both the center of the world and a dead end. The broken little village of a planet that is sick. Chaotic, polluted, and corrupt beyond belief, this is a country where beauty and human warmth constantly find ways to break through. It is impossible to name that feeling of being assaulted and charmed at the same time. You are in the city center, you stroll down a sidewalk eighteen inches wide, assailed from all sides by the confusion of buildings and traffic, torn between the appeal of the sea and the stench of garbage, and suddenly your gaze is soothed by the play of light on a stone wall, by bougainvilleas cascading from an ancient balcony, by the balcony itself.
What a magical place it is, and how broken.