I followed the next few links and found a video of a Moroccan tv commercial for ‘popular’ music(ie country music), here. That video is so hilarious and representative of Moroccan tv(all two channels that there are!).

peace

anyhow, i promptly replied:

As the president stated in his e-mail to the students, the cross has not been permanently ‘banished’ – it will still be put up during appropriate religious services.

Demanding that it be on display at all times does not foster goodwill amongst the diverse student body that is William and Mary.

I completely agree with the decision to not display the cross when the chapel is not being used for Christian services.

Andrew Whitehead
B.A. Religion, ‘02

peace

chaz is throwing a big one-year-anniversary bash down at his record shop in durham, which i unfortunately won’t be able to attend due to a wedding(which will be an awesome wedding so i certainly won’t be lacking for fun this weekend). i was especially excited to have the chance to speak with gabe face to face finally, after his dodging my attempts at communication for the past two or three months. that’s the funny thing about screwing over a friend – you have mutual friends and you will eventually run into each other again. gabe – let’s just be friends. besides the fact that by us being friends again would mean i get my money back from the brooklyn apartment, it would also mean that we could be friends again, a la the past seven or eight years. and we’ve had more than our fair share of hilarious moments together.

that reminds me of another friend who’s travelling abroad right now. she was saying that i was the only person who she had known for more than three or four years who she still kept up with outside of her family. i was at first shocked, but then it made sense. i’m bad at keeping up with other people in the sense that i’m not much for maintaining constant contact with people. but i do think about and check in with those people that i care about. while i was in morocco i would go months without e-mailing friends back home(though i had the general venue of mog to expound upon my experiences there, as well as other web-based mediums). the second that i see a friend again, whether it’s been weeks or years since i’ve hung out with them, things are fun again. there’s some friends who i e-mail maybe once a year and might not ever see again. that moment of catching up momentarily, however, no matter how removed, is great. thinking about someone and knowing they’re thinking of you too is a small piece of darshan. and now and then, when i run into an old friend again who i’d resigned to message-in-a-bottle status, that usually ends up being a meeting worth remembering.

peace

in other more douchebaggy news, gabe continues to refuse to give me my security deposit from the brooklyn apartment. it’s been almost two months since we moved out now. i understood the delay at first since he was unhappy that i never supported his paint-half-the-walls-shades-of-green plan when we first moved in(and also that he took a three day trip to europe out of the blue right before we moved out). so i figured once he had the money he would send it. but i saw the other day that he stated he was making good money, got a chemical peel, a round of dermabrasion, and a makeover in soho. it now appears that gabe not having the money is not the issue at all, rather that he is just not going to give back my deposit at all. it’s a shame – we have been friends for about seven years and have lived together both a year in college and once again in new york. oh well; my grits are getting cold.

peace

the hole in the floor is easily fixable. i almost cut a piece of salt-treated pine to fit the hole until i realized i could whine to my new management company and make them fix it(which was a fun idea until their carpenter was having extended eye surgeries – a family member commented that my floor might have hit him in the eye). more disturbing, however, is the corrosive substance next to my bedroom window which resides beneath the wall –

me on walkthrough: what’s with the water damage in that corner by the window?

waybright girl: oh, that’s from hurricane katrina, from a year or two ago, you know.

me, in head: lol, noob. i mean liar. my construction experience tells me to think you are dumb.

me on walkthrough: oh ok. so what’s with the hole in the floor, and that bulge in the wall?

needless to say the bulge in the wall popped like a bubonic sore and had to be fixed up, and the hole in the floor is yet to be fixed. but goose and tripp warned me these guys sucked so i was willing to put up with it. and still am. said corrosive material will have to be dealt with, but it’s obvious it’s coming from an apartment or three above me, or maybe even an external issue since it’s on an outside wall. i just have to remember to burn the 30-step ladder lying in the alley beneath my window(WHAT?!). yeah, i forgot how ridiculous richmond could be. having recently watched ‘the departed’(such an entertaining movie) – i guess richmond is a product of me.

peace

the main thing i’m thinkin about in regard to the new apartment is how to outfit it with soccer awesomeness. i need to figure out if and how to get both gol tv(italian and spanish league coverage) and setanta sports(english and french leagues). so far it looks like i’m gonna have to spend a lot to get both. ugh.

peace

this month has flown by in a flash. i’ve been trying to pull a lot of different things together so hopefully this summer will turn out nicely. i got a pair of adidas tunit +F50s from tyghe thanks to his work’s promo department and now have world cup sponsor cleats – they’re incredible. too bad all the soccer fields are far away.

peace

i’m workin again as of this past week. returned to the world of legal temping, the excitement fills the air like gambit charging my face, prepping it to explode. it’s not that bad, and it’s watching money flow into my bank account rather than watching it leave. the two and a half months off were great, and exactly what i needed. now i’m just workin on my gre prep, which i hate – i hate standardized tests. i’m prolly takin that sometime this next week, after which i can send in my application and be done with it all.

chrispy and i are gonna skate in the park later this afternoon, to be followed by yet another friday night fights – it’s been on a three month hiatus, and strangely enough seems to be mimicking my work schedule. the last one i attended was in the last week or two of my employment, and this one is in the first week or two of my return to employment. i’m glad my work habits coincide with muay thai and boxing in a church near columbus circle – there’s something karmicly pleasing about that.

the travel memoirs are close to completed; i completely underestimated how much i was actually going to write, so i’ll have to finish it up over the summer. if my school plans work out then i won’t have to be employed all summer so i can have time to wrap it up.

peace

the title of this post was the title of the film me and gabe saw last night as part of the ifc center and lincoln center’s walter reade theater’s french film festival. i liked it; i was telling gabe after we got out how it reminded me of the european film festival that happened in the fall in Rabat, and how for the two week period you would see every expatriate living in Rabat in one place, out in front of the theater after each film having cigarettes and trying to nonchalantly gawk at how many of themselves there were. cuz you would never see other foreigners around Rabat, not foreigners that actually lived there anyway, tourists sure, but residents? we avoided each other i think.

the gamefly debacle. good lord. three complaint e-mails later and i got a response. they don’t know what happened and didn’t explain – i was left with the impression that the game wasn’t even shipped. by the time they responded to my complaints it had easily been over two weeks of not having a game. they credited my account with nine days for some of the missed time, and re-queued everything. luckily enough, the next two games i had wanted were now under a short wait modifier, so i got the third game which i didn’t even really want at that point. i was tickled pink. i’m not going to cancel yet, but i was PO’d how they slipped in this line into their apology e-mail:

“While we apologize for your specific shipping problem, our customers tell us that our overall delivery performance is very good.”

that’s rich. i have heard nothing but complaints from my friends that have accounts, and several who disliked the performance such that they cancelled. that almost pushed me over the edge to make me cancel right there; i think what kept me from it is wanting to catch them messing things up a second time and being like BOOM. word.

peace

i’ve finally broken into the point of my time in morocco where i began to take journal writing somewhat seriously. it is making the completion of this project so much easier. the combined sources of my posts here on the site from that time, which covered a lot of surface topics and general news, and my journal entries, which were often much more obtuse but given to painting more accurate mental landscapes of any given point in time, are really making things move.

i was talking to andy glynn the other night at the party(it was great fun getting to see you guys by the way), and explaining how greatly i had underestimated the travel memoirs. the first book i wrote over there spanned maybe six months in plot-time. i had conceptualized the morocco book to be about the same length, but hadn’t appreciated the fact that i’m trying to think back and write on two years, four times the amount of mental head-getting-aroundness.

so it’s such a relief getting into more charted waters. it was really frustrating having to think back so hard on the various events of the first year – i often would be out of it for an hour or two after finishing, having to refocus on the here and now.

in other news, gamefly is making me irritable. i’m most likely cancelling my subscription once my next game arrives… whenever that will happen. it took three or four days for them to mark my returned game as received, and it’s been seven days since the next game was marked as shipped. this is ridiculous. i e-mailed them about it. i understand that my two day turnaround on netflix is spoiling me to a degree, but come on. ten+ days to return and receive a new game? i can have two games out a month IF i play each for less than five days.

peace

in taking notes for my next chapter i was looking through some old journal entries and stumbled across this piece on rabat, made me smile so i thought i’d share.

“i feel for it.
yet, i wonder how it is so beautiful, its character, all that makes it up. the people so often piss me off due to the cultural dissonances, and moroccans in general seem lackadaisical when it comes to organizing major civic type things. like commerce, cultural events, sanitation, etc. so how can a city full of people who don’t give a fuck be so beautiful? i always felt like cities reflect the spirit of their inhabitants, that the cities rise up out of the mental collective. so where the fuck did rabat come from? hehe. of course its a big mix of colonial influences, strange cultural mixes all over the place. i wonder if the things i find most beautiful are the moroccan side, the french side, the harmonious mixes, or the aggravated points of conflict.”

peace

still plugging away at the moroccan account, the travel memoirs what-have-you. it’s really interesting actually; i wrote a lot of it when i got back into the country, back in richmond. i could take only so much of being twenty-something and stuck at home in the suburbs with no transportation, however, so i stopped writing and began figuring out how i was gonna move to new york.

so i’ve been in new york over a year and a month now. the first month into the second year i returned to the travel memoirs. weeks later and it’s almost as if i never left off, but at the same time, as i get through writing about each month of my time over there, it’s like a veil lifting from my eyes. which is exciting. it’s also stressful though. in a big way, it’s something that i HAVE to do, which takes the fun out of it sometimes. but once i start writing it all flows.

i knew that while i was over there i was learning a lot about myself, although that wasn’t necessarily the purpose of my travels. i also knew that i would learn more about myself in the years following the experience, that it would take a lot of time for things experienced then to really sink in and mesh with how i saw myself now. writing about it all is helping speed that process up, but i almost feel like i can’t see the end of the tunnel as i’m writing. but i’m determined to get there.

one thing i’ve realized over the past week is that my moroccan diet was incredible; healthy, varied, and oftentimes a very communal experience. i’ve mimicked some of my eating habits here in my efforts to cut costs in the most expensive city in the states. i find i’m hungry fairly often; maybe it’s because when i’m not skin and bones my body requires more energy to get it through the day. hmph.

peace

my first whole month free of work has been tumultuous in more ways than one. i’ve been getting a lot of what i wanted to do done too, though a lot has had to be pushed to the side.

it’s gotten freezing in the past few days. i just got back from buying groceries(i’ll be making the famous macaroni with tuna a la salah again, which makes me smile, and is also fitting since i’m working on finish my rabat memoirs). i decided to go to the nicer key foods on montague somehow remembering they have a bigger selection. which i remembered correctly. what i misremembered was their lack of bottom shelf variety; the other key foods has three or four cheap brands of everything – this one had one. i bought more than i thought i would so one bag didn’t fit in my backpack; the hand that held it was numb when i got back to the apartment(an eight block walk or so).

i am looking forward to the spring; something’s not right when dogs being walked, wearing full-body winter-wear, are shivering so bad they have trouble with their balance.

peace

i love listening to the hearings at work, even though sometimes i have to stifle a ‘you f*%@ing b@st&rd!!’ here and there.

and we zoom in on the hearings now…

mr. ali-to, you are a great man. you have answered lots and lots of questions! your percentage is great. that aside, lemme ask you lots of quick questions to continue to boost your stats!! ::checks random encounter reference table::

ok, mr. ali-to. you pause after your last response and hear me say “mr. ali-to, are you retarded?”.

ali-to tries to answer ‘no’.

ok, roll this and i’ll account for your charisma bonus..erm, penalty.

::ali-to rolls d20, comes up with a 5; a passing cloud of consternation darkens his demeanor as he realizes this is a crap roll::

hmmm, ok. well, obviously, umm. well, you just answered that yes in fact you are retarded. but it’s ok, because you still were able to answer the question even at all!! mark that on our chart, johnson!

::some time passes, and a ‘crat gets to ask some questions::

ok. mr ali-to. i am not happy. i want to know how you feel about ]bleep![. do you think that roe is important, that it should be overturned, that you are a good judge, that the sky is in fact cloudy? well, do you??

::ali-to checks to see if he should roll to try and answer; the dm, erm, chairman seems to be whistling and staring off into the distance::

what’s that? you think you are a solid judge and that yes it appears to be cloudy outside but you can only speak for yourself? you have not answered my…

yes he did! he answered your question!! that counts!! ::publican marks another one on the chart::

we leave our heroes and return to the real world…

peace