The Iraq War

The iraq War

I was travelling through Charles de Gaulle airport right after the Iraq war started. This was also the time that the SARS scare was breaking out. My flight had been cancelled, and even though I had confirmed my ticket less than 24 hours prior, the people at Air France did not make an effort to put me on a flight as soon as possible. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting on one of the many flights as they continued to leave the ground, as the hours rolled past, and they kept cancelling my seats on upcoming flights, one after another. I finally went to ask someone why I couldn’t be placed onto one of these flights. The response came curtly, from behind a white medical mask that was a standard issue for all Air France workers at that time, that I did not need an explanation as to why I was being bumped, because I am American, and the reason flights were being re-arranged was because of the Iraq war, for which, by the way, I was personally responsible.

Naturally, I was shocked. And I felt alone and isolated. What did I have to do with the Iraq war? I didn’t vote for this administration. I did not support the war. I had no part in it. Yet, because of it, I felt alone, and scared, and abused. And I imagine, that those feelings that I had, are the same feelings, mine being comparatively on a painfully microscopic scale, that another young woman in Iraq would be feeling at the same moment as me. And I wonder if there is any connection between people in the world who are feeling the same things at the same time. Are we all interrelated, truly? Can the world be thought of as a whole, living being, and we as only some of its constituent parts—like cells or organs that make it up?

Immaturity

Immaturity.
I think that everyone feels immature at times, or at least we all act immature at times. Sometimes we even wish we could be more immature, maybe without recognising that thats what we could really use most. If we catch ourselves being immature it can reminds us that we are not above reproach. Because we're not. No one is.

Obviously from the photos, which were incredibly fun to compose, I thought about Goldilocks as an icon of immaturity. What was that girl thinking? "Oh, I'll just climb into someone else's house and use up their possessions and just make myself at home and feel affronted when things aren't the way I'd have it!" Sounds a bit like foreign policy...

But she is just human, isn't she? And thats where the story can instruct us. She comes off as the baddie, and the bears come off as the goodies. In another light, we can look at the tale of Goldilocks as a reminder that we're going to do things wrong. We might have innocent intentions and we may appear to be goodness embodied, but the choices we make do have consequences, both for ourselves and the lives of others.

Overweight

OVERWEIGHT

I think that feeling overweight is an interesting phenomenon in terms of how your mind and your body are communicating. Some people who are technically well over their ideal body mass index, don’t feel overweight at all, whereas many people within a good weight range for their body size battle constantly with feeling that they are too fat. If you genuinely believe that you look good, then your mental state can override many of your physical signs that contradict your beliefs. And if your mind tells you there is something wrong with your physical body, then you can seem to yourself to be overweight when you’re not.

Global Domination

Global Domination

Global domination sounds like something that you try to do in a video game. And it seems a perfectly reasonable pursuit when the people and places you’re trying to dominate are actually systems of ones and zeros. How different do you think average people seem, thought, especially ones in far off lands, to ones and zeros, in the eyes of some powerful political leaders? At times, it seems as though the difference is merely semiotic.

Hollywood

I did have moments in life when I wanted to run off to Hollywood—to escape from whatever was troubling me, or not going my way, and throw myself on the mercy of the city of dreams. The city of dreams. That’s probably why I never actually went. There are dreams we have that might be more properly labelled goals. They’re the things that we want to do—even if they seem impossible for us—we really want to do them. But I’m not so sure the same holds true for our dreams—do we want them to come true? What would happen if they did? What would we have left when we had fulfilled dreams? Or are they there mostly to provide us with a context with which to appreciate what we have, and to reflect on our actual goals?

McDonalds

Arrogant

Arrogant

It’s a very peculiar feeling being arrogant. Its one of those dispositions, that any time I’m exhibiting it, I’m very aware of it—acting in a distasteful way, and completely aware of it. I think that’s because I’m only really arrogant when I’m feeling really insecure. That’s basic for us humans, when we feel weak we try to make other people feel beneath us.

Love

Love. Someone once told me you can’t hate anyone you don’t love. Emotions are so tied up with one another, and so difficult to sort out. And the more powerful the emotion, the less we have control over which way the feeling can swing. What do you think is the most necessary part of loving someone—is it devotion? Passion? Fear? Longevity of relationship? Trust? I’ve known I’ve loved someone in an instant. With other people, it has taken years to realise how much they mean to me. Sometimes love happens for a blissful moment, and sometimes it endures for a long time. The only way that I can make sense of love is to think of how strong of an effect someone or something has over me.

I fell in love with a tree once. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I came to understand a great deal about my own humanity and life one day when passing by a tree, and realising how long it had been there, thinking about what its world was like, hundreds of years before I was ever there, and how it the world would be without me. You might say that was just a moment of clarity, that could have happened anywhere, brought on by any number of things. And you’d be right. But how is that different from relationships with people? When you meet a person, and spend years with a person, the real marker of the impact they’ve had on you, the real life of loving them, can really be seen in how much it makes you a different, more insightful, more rich and full person. So a tree, one day, helped to instigate a powerful revelation for me that resides with me to this day. I must have fallen in love.

Real Tans

Real tans:
Caspar. As in Caspar, the friendly ghost. This was one of my nicknames in High School, lovingly bestowed upon me because of the colour of my complexion: White, white, white, and unwaveringly unable to get a tan. Needless to say, it came as a surprise to me that the thought of Americans immediately conjured up the idea of suntans.

Where does this idea come from? I think about what images of tanned Americans I’ve seen. The one that arrives most readily to mind is Baywatch and Pamela Anderson. These are iconic images that have been transmitted all around the world: the beautiful blonde woman in a red swimsuit bounding across white sand beaches, equally ready to valiantly save the life of an unfortunate flabby holiday maker as to fall into the arms of another bronzed body wearing matching red shorts.

It’s a short move, when thinking about suntans as an identifying factor of Americans, to thinking about skin colour. My experience is admittedly biased, having come from a multi-racial family, and growing up in the ethnically diverse South, but the American population is undeniably mixed-race. I can’t help but wonder if this ethnic blending would result in more people in the USA having tan skin then in England.

Another obvious point is that many parts of the United States get a lot more sun than England does. And it changes the way we live. I can say, without feeling like I’m being at all reductive, that I love the sun. It has a very strong effect on my mood and on how I spend my days. I never realised how much it affected me until I moved to England. Where I grew up in Georgia, there is a lot of good sun all the time, even in winter. I was unused to the sun deprivation of January and February in England, and completely unaware how much it would affect me.

When I put on the makeup for this photo shoot, I felt the strokes of the brush underneath my eyelids, and I thought of them as the rays of the sun brushing my face.
After the make up was complete, we began assembling a picture. The stage lights, which we had rigged up in a small room, were hot on my face as I pulled myself close to them to get the desired look for the photo. We parted from the room, to take photos in other locations. The responses of people who saw me were mixed with humour and curiosity. I ran into someone I knew who was very surprised at how aged I looked, at how the application of the ‘suntan’ brought out lines on my face and gave the appearance of sun damage.

It struck me as strange how both my personal reactions to the sensations of wearing a “real tan” and those of others were very natural. It was very much like I was wearing the identity of being in the sun and a lifetime in the sun.

Hot Jocks

Hot Jocks
Sometimes, especially here in London, people ask me if I was ever a cheerleader. Because, probably, I’m very energetic and loud and generally helpful to people. And I usually return the question with a look of dismay, saying raspily, do you think I was a cheerleader, in a tone that makes no mistakes in saying that the answer was no. And I wasn’t. But the truth of it is that when I went into highschool, I really really wanted to be a cheerleader, but I was too chicken to try. I was afraid of failure, of trying to be in ‘the scene’ with the hot jocks—even though the school I went to was not a stereotypical Hollywood brat-pack type scene. I still, in some way, felt inferior and intimidated.

The realm of the ‘hot jocks’ could just be a euphemism for the cool crowd, or the in crowd, the lucky ones—a set that exists everywhere, at least in the places where I’ve lived. There is a common misconception that those people who are in the cool crowd in younger years get their comeuppance in later years, and end up working for people who they used to bully. In some situations it might be true. But what tends to happen, is that one set, is just replaced by another. If the little guys get their dues in later years, its generally only to replicate what they were so beleaguered by in their youth.

Sunny Weather

I feel like one of those calculators you'd get when you were in elementary school--the ones with the small square solar panels on them. You could always really use them, at least a little bit, but if they didn't get much light, it was kind of sad to use them: the numbers were so faint and you almost felt bad for asking it to work. And when they were in full sunlight, the numbers showed so bold, they nearly jumped off the screen.

I am sitting here at my kitchen table, on a cold and rainy July day. And I do think: it is warm and sunny 'back home.' Of course its a record breaking summer of rain in England, but days such as this in Georgia are just as likely as hell freezing over.