A package arrived for me yesterday: a brand new Nikon d5000 and a new lens- my mother’s birthday present to me. I figured that there were only two possible explanations:

1. My mother is possibly the best person I know, with the patience of the Buddha himself.

2. My mother is insane.

I have a terrible track record with electronics. During the first month of my freshman year, I managed to break my macbook (which was supposed to be practically invincible) to the point of almost-no-return; my first point-and-shoot camera had broken only a few months beforehand, and the Nikon d3000 (our family’s first dslr) only lasted two years in my hands before both the camera body and the camera lens were rendered useless- which was a better fate than the 18-185 mm lens on that school camera, whose attachments I somehow managed to break during a class trip to Istanbul. Oh, and did I mention that I recently lost my smartphone? 

Suffice to say that no person in their right mind would ever allow me near any expensive electronic item again. I wouldn’t allow myself near any electronics again. In fact, the only thing I haven’t managed to break or lose yet is the brick of a nokia phone that I’ve had since the 9th grade. Since it’s worth about $5 at the most, I’m sure I’ll have it forever. Meanwhile, I’m becoming increasingly worried about my macbook pro, my ipod touch, and now this d5000. (Thankfully, I’ve already inflicted minor injuries on the first two- A broken shift key and a faulty wifi connection, respectively- so I’m hoping that the gods of electronics will accept these as representative sacrifices, and it will be a while yet before I have my lifelines torn away from me. 

As always, there were no lectures or long pieces of advice from my mother- upon taking out the beautiful new camera, she only told me to “be careful”, and left it at that. I’m not sure whether she feels that it’s unnecessary to add to the enormous load of guilt I drag around on a daily basis, or if she’s just resigned herself to the fact of my incompetence.

Or perhaps it really is for the reason she gave: that she likes to see the pictures I take when I’m abroad- that she likes to see how I see the world. After I left for school in Abu Dhabi, it became a ritual for us all to gather in front of the television whenever I came home, and watch slideshow after slideshow of my pictures. I’d point out friends and classmates, explain this or that dish, or try to remember little snippets of information about the Hagia Sofia or the British fort in Bombay. My dad was always the most interested in the food pictures, while my mother would remember everything from my half-invented history lessons to the names of my various classmates. I was always proud to show them the places I had been- but I always felt some regret that I couldn’t take them with. It would always end, inevitably, with my promising to take them there, someday soon. I remember telling my dad that I’d take him to Turkey when he got better, and how he smiled, benevolently, as if he believed me. 

And maybe that’s what always surprises me about parents- the way they believe in their children despite repeated evidence that to do so is completely irrational. I see my new camera as my mother’s declaration of faith in me; not because I’ve earned it, but because that’s what she does: believes, again and again, that this time will be the time I get it right. Because even though I’ve messed up every time before, this might be the one time I don’t. Much as I try to understand, this level of patience always eludes me; but I guess we all need this kind of faith- a faith that can only come from love, and from blindness. To make use of an overused metaphor, we all fell countless times before we took our first steps- if we went by evidence alone, we might declare that our children have failed at bipedalism, quite early on in life. 

Perhaps my metaphor doesn’t quite hold up; but that’s ok, because it’s neither the last terrible metaphor I’ll use, nor an indication that I will never, one day, come upon one that actually works. Regardless, our propensity for faith- in all sense of the term- is one of the things I love most about humans. And if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again, but expecting different results, then I suppose Samuel Beckett is right, and we really “are all born insane.” For my part, I hope we stay that way. 

This last week has seen my classmates packed onto planes and off to the various corners of the world. Their packing woes, their last-chance celebrations, their home-bound excitement and their melancholy departures have filled my facebook feed. I picture waves of color and crying and nostalgia pouring out of Sama, leaving it stark and half-empty in the Abu Dhabi heat. All of these people saying goodbye to a place we have, for the most part, come to call home; all of the first thoughts of the summer on how they’ve changed, on what they’ve left behind in the city. I suppose it’s prompting me to think about my last sights of the city. In a way, they’ve been in the back of my mind since I’ve left; and perhaps these sentences have been writing and rewriting themselves since January. Still, it’s a struggle to allow them to materialize. 

I’m sitting at my desk, and my room is frozen in middle school- it never made the transition to high school when I did. A charcoal drawing from 7th grade is still pinned on my corkboard, as are all of the fliers from my middle school plays, pictures from kindergarten in Austria, a letter from a friend penned in German, dated 2006, and an old Pearls Before Swine comic so faded it’s turning yellow like old newspapers tend to do.

And then there are the pencils. I have at least one hundred (I am not exaggerating) old pens, pencils, colored pencils, crayons, more colored pencils… and so on in mugs and boxes on my desk. They’re all half-used, or have dulled tips, or terrible erasers. But I refuse to throw them out because they’ll be as useless thrown out as they are on my desk. And I’m quite certain that at some point, I will have need of one of these orphaned writing utensils. I don’t demand perfection of any thing I use, but somehow I continue to believe that a hundred imperfections will eventually cancel each other out and become useful to me. 

“Every night in my dreams”, he told me, “ I’m always fighting someone; but I always lose. There is not a single time when I have won. I’ll pick up a baseball bat and start slamming it into the guy’s face, and it’ll be terrible and gory, but I never defeat him. He always comes out of it fine.In my daydreams, I always win every fight. But at night, not one.”

So I told him about waking with anticipation, how I’d have dreams filled with lavish buffets and beautiful dresses- dreams spent waiting for someone I love to come back, or composing a symphony in a quiet room. Dreams that always ended right before I took the first bite, or wrote the French horn solo, or saw the person I’d been waiting for.I’d wake up with that profound sense of disappointment that comes with knowing the thing you have been waiting for was never going to come. 

A post reminded me of this article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/magazine/my-life-as-an-undocumented-immigrant.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Imagine not having the documents that identify you as a part of a nation-state. These forms of allegiance define us so wholly in the panoptic system that without them, we barely exist. Think about the peoples that have tried for sovereignty and have failed to gain it- do they also exist in this limbo?

I stumbled upon a scattering of quicktime files today, movies from Mumbai and Istanbul and Taipei, and taken from my laptop or downloaded from his. It’s curious to me that these are not the moments I remember most clearly at any point in time. Maybe I haven’t recorded the most important scenes? Or maybe I forget more easily when I’ve made a digital copy of what I see.

Reminded today of one of my favorite artists:

http://little-people.blogspot.com/

I love Slinkachu’s whimsical little voyagers. They appear in unlikely places amidst trash and rats and muddy puddles, yet somehow seem to fit beautifully into their environment.