Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats...

Just as the infamous Danish cartoonists spent too much time in Tivoli on the mosque ride, I spent too much time listening to my parents read _Millions of Cats_ to me. My parents, of course, refute the charge that they are culpable for my cat acquisition problem: they contend that "kitty" was one of my five first words, just after tree and fish; that I started campaigning for my first cat long before I was old enough to listen to that book; that I ought to point a little higher up in the family tree, to my grandmother, who often had seven stray animals in her house. I prefer to blame my parents, though. And the book. Books should be burned.


This is all to say that acquiring Kitten #2 was not my fault; I am a product of my environment. And also, we can blame the guards, who noted that another kitten seemed to be pattering around the outer wall of our compound. Incited by a confluence of extreme boredom and my enthusiasm for Kitten #1, they launched a 24-hour cathunt. Last night they appeared, faces exultant from the thrill of conquest, at our door with the spitting, snarling and scratching spoils of their venture.

Even I think we may need to put a moratorium on the kitten harvest, perhaps settling for feeding feral cats on the porch. I have a few relatives, I believe, who can give me tips on how to set up the outdoor cat buffet.

The Running Machine

After some initial research into gym memberships, we narrowed down the choices: hemmoraging $1000/year at the five-star Serena Hotel; subjecting ourselves to hot dog fumes, lonely marines and onion-style layers of security at the American Club; affiliating our vegetarian, kitten-saving selves with the Islamabad Hunt Club; pretending to work out on the UN Club's lone piece of cardio vascular equipment, a circa 1975 treadmill; or embracing sloth. My bout of culture shock hardly seemed the time to abandon my religious commitment to exercise, and so we set out to buy what Pakistanis call, in both Urdu and English, a running machine.

Sporting goods stores here do not sell running machines. Rather, they occupy nearly all the floor space in duty free shops -- 15-by-30 foot stalls otherwise crammed with imported dishes, luggage, crock pots, electric razors, stick-free cookware, battery-powered eyebrow shapers, and, most excitingly, a motorized bread trimmer called the SeaShrimp. We bought a treadmill after haggling at several of these stores.

A casuality of moving to Pakistan has been the dogs' excercise regimen -- until we taught Kenai to use the running machine. I think she finds it a little annoying, running toward the wall but never hitting it. And really, who doesn't?

Kafka the Kitten?

Today around 1 pm, our guards rang the bell they use to let us know when we have a visitor or mail or when they need more ice. I went outside, and they motioned frantically for me to follow them through the front gate to the grassy area adjacent to their booth. They pointed to a very dirty kitten. I was, of course, overcome with excitement, and so our two guards set about catching it, a fifteen-minute endeavor that involved climbing our neighbor's wall and exultant yelling in Urdu when they were finally successful.

They gave it to me, wrapped in a cloth, only after I promised our dogs wouldn't eat it.

A Triumverate of Existential Angst: Paul, Leonard, and Emily

The day I've been dreading finally came: I woke up, and my first thought was, "I want to go home." I did not feel like getting the guard a bottle of ice water. I did not want to take a cold shower (usually, we have hot water -- just not today). I did not want to think through and then audibly confess to a driver where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. I did not want to wear long, loose-fitting clothing. I did not want to unpack the huge boxes, fresh off a freight plane, cluttering the lobby of our house. I did not want to open a kitchen cabinet to find a 2.5-inch cockroach centered in my wok, his antennae shivering. I did not want to discuss the future of Musharraf. I did not want to work on my Fulbright application. I did not want to arrange meetings with university deans. I did not want to feel like a walking spectacle or a walking symbol (be these designations real or my own fictions).

We have now been here about ten days -- the length of a vacation, really -- and I suspect this is that inevitable moment when my life begins to feel like my own and not one I've assumed or borrowed. My costume has become my clothes. The set has become my house. I do not live on a map, but instead in a city. Here I am, and now I have to find what here is and how I might best occupy it. Change, revelation -- I think they are born of this discomfort, this visceral, peevish, and, frankly, embarrassing resistance.

If you relate to this, I would love to hear about it via comment or email. I promise my next post will be funny, most likely involving a "running machine." And there will be a photo. Now back to wearing my loose, full-length black turtleneck and contorting my face in self-absorbed angst.

If you say it, it will be true

Last night we went to a party, organized by the U.S. Embassy's press attaché, at the home of the chargés d'affaires' (I think this title means he's an interim ambassador). He was not, by the way, recreating 1970s Midwestern suburbia in his rather lovely home.

In the car, on the way back, our driver Ifthikar entertained us with stories of his past clients. The best was that of Bob Smith, a 350-pound oil and gas magnate who had relocated to Islamabad from Texas. You know this glad-hander, and you wish he was not functionally our ambassador: silver-hair; smile that folds his fleshy cheeks over his aviator glasses; Navy blue blazer with a white Polo; khakis belted below the belly with an A&M buckle; $1000-boots a good buddy got him; and most of all that resonant, high-decibel drawl that cuts through the clamor of any cocktail party. So Bob, sitting on his beige sectional recliner sofa with a whiskey in his cup holder, would bellow, "Ifthikar! Ifthikar! Come on in here and sit with me, buddy!" Ifthikar would sit down with him, and Bob would lean in toward him and declare, "Let me tell you something, Ifthikar. You know what? America is the number one country in the world! We are the strongest nation! We. Are. The. Superpower!"

The id strikes back!

After you eat your super-ego, it suddenly feels very important that you get some excercise. No weights for your id-imposed resistance-enhanced abs workout? Use your external hard drive!

The Initiated

I have spent the past two days completely wiped out by an especially virulent breed of food poisoning. According to a Canadian doctor here, I had, within the suite of common expat illnesses, the one that is most unpleasant but has the shortest duration. I think I was the most acutely and violently ill that I've ever been, and so I decided early on in my communion with the toilet that I had already contracted malaria. Fortunately, I have not.

I feel like an old lady, thinking anyone wants to hear the minutia of a pretty banal health issue.

The food poisoning score since the inception of my relationship with Griff:
Griff:3
Emily: 1

Eating your conscience

Actually, this is a picture from a trip to Turkey about a year ago, but I've been dying for a forum to disseminate it. The implications are pretty incredible -- certainly ice cream-eating falls into the jurisdiction of the id, making him a pretty wily guy: he packaged his nemesis in a symbol of the super-ego's failings.

Who knew that the super-ego is green?

Beyond the Bathroom

As much as I prefer assessing our bathrooms, posing in flak jackets, and making dandelion necklaces for my dogs, I feel obligated to offer up the lay of the land here. I am pretty sure, after writing this, that I shouldn't ever write non-fiction. And, I need a disclaimer: In novelty, there is often, if not outright deception, than dangerous over-simplification. In a few months I expect to blanch at this first attempt at an aerial view.

Anyway, with presumption and reduction and bias, here is Islamabad:

In the 1960s, a Greek architectural firm designed Islamabad with the explicit purpose of creating a new capital for Pakistan (the capital had been Karachi). Imposed onto an unrelenting grid, Islamabad makes Greenbelt, Maryland, (a New Deal planned city), seem the organic evolution of meandering antebellum wagon roads. Longitudinal letters and latitudinal numbers organize the city, so that instead of Hell's Kitchen and the Gold Coast and Foggy Bottom, we have F-6 and G-7. Ah, there is romance in this Soviet-style nomenclature. I temper my feeling that I am living on a map and not in a city (this seems like it should be a metaphor for living a representation of a life instead of a life?) by calling our sector, F-8, Fate (F8 if you're txting!).

In general, the recreational, the diplomatic, the governmental, the commercial, and the residential have each been consolidated. Jinnah Park, Islamabad's answer to Central Park, occupies its own sector of jogging tracks, tennis courts, cricket pitches and green cover. The city's architects neatly drew the federal government and the diplomatic enclaves into the eastern sectors. Stores are either in the Blue Area, a commercial district that runs along a major thoroughfare, or confined to markets -- reminiscient of strip malls, but without oceanic parking lots -- imbedded at the heart of each sector. The rest is residential: in many sectors, walled-off mansions line green-canopied roads. The residential areas, in their grace and stateliness, remind me of Embassy Row in Washington, D.C.

Insulated Islamabad -- in its cleanliness, its order, and its affluence -- resembles neither the rest of South Asia nor the Pakistan of the popular American imagination. I’m very excited, when the rest of the country calms down, to visit Lahore, the cultural capital.

It is very hot -- I think it was a very dry 107 F yesterday. We have fans and air conditioning, and so it's not bad -- I'd take this over Siberia any day. We even went running quite comfortably yesterday at dusk.

Below is a picture of our house and a picture of the house across the street:

This is how I look in a flak jacket

Though tight, it turns out the flak jacket does not have the slimming effect of a corset.

Islam and the Danes

En route to Pakistan, we stopped in Copenhagen and spent a day walking around the city. It evoked for me a decaffeinated, Old World Seattle -- one paved in cobble stones and cluttered with bicycles.

This is a ride at Tivoli, a famous amusement park in downtown Copenhagen. Perhaps it was a childhood favorite of the infamous Danish cartoonists; had they played _Grand Theft Auto_ instead, they would no doubt be thugs hijacking Schwinns



Here I am in Copenhagen with Kenai and Seneca.

Peoria, 1975

Greetings from Islamabad! We arrived on Sunday (5/13/07). The dogs and cats have adjusted gracefully. I now own a coffee maker that works on 220 V.

Many of you have written to me with questions about our house, hopefully because you are considering a visit. I know, the drawbacks to such a journey are considerable. First off, it's cliche, vacationing in Pakistan. Your friends might dismiss you as soft bougies. You might feel you squandered your vacation budget on the familiar, that you will leave with only a heightened craving for adventure.

But really, there are exotic elements. Consider, for example, the 1970s midwestern suburban aesthetic of our house. 1975 was 32 years ago. You can never have it back (if you ever had it at all). Unless you come visit.



To the left is one of our four bathrooms. The others are cream with burgundy, cream with rose, and cream with silver.



Above and below are two of our four bedrooms. We choose which bedroom to use based on whether we're feeling more June & Ward Cleaver or more Mike & Carol Brady. (Darrin and Samantha of _Bewitched_ were the first TV couple to ditch the Burt-and-Ernie sleeping arrangements).
















This is our dining room.

















In case you were about to submit a comment asserting that the seat and sofa uphostery are a bone-colored velvet -- a textile atypical of 1970s middle-American decor, I have included an up-close shot.