Getting the hell out of Dodge

In Islamabad there are no clubs of the dance, billiards, or music variety. There are no cinemas. There are no bowling lanes or mini-golf courses. There are no stages, no amphitheaters, no pavilions, no coliseums. There is one museum, accessible only by private tour -- until now, I didn't realize how much, for me, the appeal of a museum comes with anonymously drifting from cold room to cold room, all attention on the art and none on me. And for all the lack of formal public performance, I live on constant display. With so much staring, there comes an exhaustion from prolonged consciousness, a fatigue born of being too aware of oneself, too present in the physical reality of the moment for too long.

These circumstances breed a desperate desire for escape -- a hunger so fierce it overrides personal qualities I had previously considered the immutable building blocks of my sense of self:

Case Study #1
In the U.S., my criteria for deigning a film worthy of my time included an enthusiastic-bordering-on-orgasmic review by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, the approval of select friends, the disapproval of other select friends, and, for the final round, at least two hours spent agonizing over movie theater schedules and asking whether I really wanted to potentially waste three hours of my life on a movie that might fail to find a place among timeless cinema classics. Fearing recognition as the type-A, fussy, uptight individual I am, I previously kept the movie-selection process closed. Now you know why I have somehow never seen a movie with you but I have accompanied you on countless four-hour walks.

And yet, did I go to Illusions, the Tower Records of illegally copied DVDs, and buy 15 pirated movies for $1.20 each? Yes. Did those movies include Bring It On 2, Dirty Dancing Havana Nights, and the Indiana Jones trilogy? Yes. Did I greedily devour Dirty Dancing Havana Nights, a remake of Dirty Dancing set in a highly sanitized version of 1950s Cuba? Yes. Did I watch while lounging on the couch downing masala-flavored potato chips? No,I ran on the treadmill. But I've only been here 8 weeks.

Case Study #2
As a child, my father took me to enough Civil War battlefields that I developed a blanket intolerance for ruins, fields with historically important mini-craters, and forts. I harbor a special hatred for Fort Macon, which I came to boycott my sitting by myself in our maroon Honda Accord and writing poems with lines like, "There is no place so hellaciously hot as Fort Macon/ with broken fortress walls on which you could fry bacon."

And yet today, I could not say yes fast enough when my friend asked me if I wanted to LEAVE ISLAMABAD to visit Taxila, a town about an hour away. We drove, Gillian Welch blasting, to several fields with piles of gray rocks left behind by one Alexander the Great, among others. It is true that I did not appreciate the rocks in the way my father would have, but they were still very exciting, being gray and hot and from a far off time.