Visit me in North Carolina!

I have received an overwhelming number of email queries from the more tasteless among you regarding what time of year I would recommend a weekend trip to Durham, North Carolina, to tour the key sites involved in the infamous Duke University lacrosse team legal fiasco. As a City of Medicine native, would I recommend photographing the lacrosse team’s shabby gray house against the vast blue of a Southern June afternoon or the flame-colored explosion of autumn leaves? Since the relevant courtroom is open to tourists only when court isn’t in session, when do I anticipate low caseloads at Durham’s city courthouse? Do I recommend a trip just after the high school lacrosse season ends, as this is when lacrosse sticks, perfect props for a photograph, might be the least expensive at Play-It-Again Sports? Do I know when the team of preservationists and cultural historians plans to open to the public a replication of Mike Nifong’s office at the time he first heard of the allegations over the phone?

I apologize for my inability to respond personally to your queries; you will have to settle for a thoughtful, albeit untailored, response. The answer is now! Why? Because I will be in Durham to give you a special tour infused with the knowledge and perspective of a local who was not even living in North Carolina during the events and their fallout! Free of charge! I’ll even throw in a special Local Haunts Tour with trips to the Bojangles where all the cool kids buy sweet tea on the way to Riverside High School; the Target that now sits on the former site of South Square Mall, where I sometimes hung out and acted sullen; and, weather permitting, the statue of a seated James B. Duke, who allegedly stands every time a virgin walks by (we’ll walk by together and then argue about who ruined the experiment!). Lodging and lunch are included.

["What the hell is going on?" you ask. "This isn't The Llama Blog unless you're in Islamabad! What am I reading? Help!" Ah, gentle reader, do not despair! I will be back in Islamabad soon enough. But for the next two weeks or so I am in North Carolina to see a doctor at Duke. If you were somehow planning on coming this way, I'd love to see you!

I am on the plane as I write this, and I am surrounded – surrounded! – by rich, over-indulged, loud, demanding, squirming children between the ages of 5 and 12. It’s all worth it, though, because every time a male flight attendant makes eye contact with me and asks me what I want to drink in an effortless, unaffected manner, I spend several exhilarating minutes reveling in what’s it’s like not to be treated like some stupid, incabable, best-ignored sub-human thing.]

Revving up American Identity

You must first understand this: Our house is bugged. Our cell phones are tapped. Men with antennae-studded cars sometimes sit in front of our house. Though opaque, lined curtains cover every window in our house, when the guards need something (an almost hourly occurrence), they somehow know to knock on the window of the room we occupy. Griff’s translator and our housekeeper are usually inside. The second we step outside our front gates, we are zoo animals in a moving cage – people stare incessantly. Usually, if we have to go somewhere, our driver takes us. We live perpetually in a reality television show that will never be aired: someone is always listening or watching or both.

When I don’t feel too mired in an Orwellian dystopia, I buoy myself by imagining an episode of Real World Islamabad. The best part of the show takes place in a dim ISI control room shaped like a narrow rectangle; here work the poor souls assigned to listening to every word we speak and write. A huge dinosaur of a computer with blinking green and red lights and a punch card reader covers the entire length of one long wall. The opposite wall is a one-way mirror; one the other side stand ISI middle managers and, of course, the television crews (how meta is this?!?). Garbage pails overflow with empty Jolt cans and aspirin vials and Mentos wrappers. Ten young men in uniform (two for each source: email, car recordings, house recordings, my cell phone, and Griff’s cell phone) sit in uncomfortable office chairs facing the hot and very loud computer. The eight responsible for audio surveillance wear enormous head phones plugged into the computer. The two others sit by a shoot, through which tumble copious dot matrix print-outs of our emails. At the end of the day, each ISI agent formulates a report of his findings – meaning, of course, that from five primary sources come ten secondary sources that will each require review by at least two more people, who will no doubt need to document their findings. The main sources of drama in this part of the show are the moments when one of the ISI agents falls asleep and one of the middle managers bangs on the glass.

But when this experiment with mental quasi-escapism provides little relief, the time comes for an exercise in denial. And so, at night, when there’s very little traffic, Griff and I wrest the car keys from our (reluctant) driver and brave the left-side drive. Though it is impossible that our car isn’t bugged, it is possible to imagine it is not – maybe because we are moving, because no one else is in the car, because no one is rapping on the windows, because we feel like we are together in a small space with confines that we control. We turn up the music and sing loudly; we make strange noises and faces; we say incredibly obnoxious things; we laugh. It is the only time we ever feel like we are alone together, even though we aren’t, really.

We look forward to these car rides more than our destinations. The twenty-minute drive to the gym, once seen as a liability, is now an incentive to work out. “Forgetting” the map and getting lost on the way to a friends house is a relished experience. Somehow we've become more American than we ever were, ignoring our blackening carbon footprints in favor of that illusion of freedom, that Janice Joplin "nothing left to lose," known as the open road.

Koh Phangan (an island) and Bangkok

Unless you're Ansel Adams, I generally feel you shouldn't impose your landscape shots on other people. To do so is only marginally better than copiously documenting your ability to follow a recipe on your blog. But I want to convey, once (and badly -- I know I am a terrible photographer), that Thailand is a magic place sublimely over-saturated with color.






Maybe, at the Sapphire Restaurant, if you don't want a Coke, you'd like a Cock or Cock Light.

Regrettably, we did not take the Snoop Dogg tour of the island Koh Phangan. I could never decide if Snoop was a play on the word sloop -- it seems unlikely.



I dedicate this shot to Pakistan.




In Bangkok before we left:

I never got around to calling Pot Head, unfortunately.





Here we are in a park in Bangkok.


On our last night in Thailand we went to a sprawling, five-story shopping mall. I'm in the frequent habit of deriding consumer culture, but after three months in Islamabad, I walked through the crowded, florescent-lit halls and sustained trembles of appreciation for Adam Smith.

In Pakistan, I have only seen women's undergarments on sale in one place, Chen One Department Store. There, next to the women's changing closet, was a door with a sign that says, "Ladies Only. Very Private." I looked inside, of course, and found pairs of white, polyester, waist-high, decidedly-not-French-cut granny panties; laceless beige slips; and one black, opaque, knee-length, sleeveless nightgown that provided more coverage than a conservative cocktail dress.

The mall in Bangkok, in contrast, has a glut of lingerie stores that all fell between Vicky S and Fredericks of Hollywood. The Larry Flint fare must be elsewhere. I thought this poster, on one store window, was especially funny. I was imagining that you could walk in and say the appropriate food name (if you can't read them, the labels say cranberries, oranges, peaches, lemons, papayas, cucumbers, and sweet potatoes), and then someone would bring you corresponding selections from the Peach Line or the Sweet Potato Line or whatever. I didn't go in to find out, though, because I liked imagining that process too much to discover it only exists in my head.


Griff has a Dairy Queen Green Tea Blizzard.

Ronny bids us farewell, Thai style.

Bangkok and Ko Samui

The Shanghai Inn's bathroom was so fabulous that it had a birdcage with fake birds!

This is the rave room.

Pink taxis!

Griff, on the island Ko Samui, demonstrating what he would do if he found a snake.

Detox

At the Islamabad airport, before I departed for Bangkok, I got frisked in two curtained-off "ladies' screening" stations because if men and women walked through the same metal detector we might contaminate each other with electro-magnetic particles. I filled out three forms that asked obsessively for my "husband's/father's name," and each time I wrote Griff's name (sorry Dad) only because I like imagining the poor soul who reads the immigration cards trying to figure out how my last name isn't the same as Griff's. And as Griff and I boarded the bus that would take us from the terminal gate to the plane, the driver said to me, "Excuse me! Madame! You must sit on the lady's seat!" He pointed to a single chair separated, as though a quarantine, from the rows of benches. I turned and watched Griff walk away from me and sit down. I looked again at the lady's seat. My right fist tightened into a white ball, and I quickly grabbed my right wrist to be sure I would not throw a punch at the driver. As I lowered myself into my seat, I reminded myself that I was on my way to Thailand, that I would have deliverance if I could just get myself on the God damn plane without committing my first assault.

This is how I was, teetering on the edge, primed to go from pleasant to ballistic at Ferrari speed, when we touched down in Thailand. At the airport, all the conveyer belts and departure/arrival screens worked. The place was not crawling with 19-year-old boys in uniforms with semi-automatic weapons. Women accounted for half of the crowds. No one stared at me. I felt as though I was in shock.

When we walked into our fabulous Asian Art Deco hotel room, which has purple walls and red doors and colored paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling, I felt hopped up on e at a rave. The colors, the vibrancy, and the creativity all mesmerized me as though I were a prisoner who had just emerged from solitary confinement. Finally, I wrested myself from the pulsating kaleidoscope, to go for a walk. As we exited the hotel lobby, the doorman looked at me, put his hands together, as though in prayer, and bowed his head. My first reaction was that I wanted to drop kick him. What I saw, fresh from Islamabad, was the Thai version of the gender bullshit that prevents nearly all Pakistani men from shaking my hand. But before my rage surged beyond my control, he bowed to Griff, who had the sense to bow back. And I realized suddenly that I had just been incredibly rude to this man in that I had refrained from exchanging his greeting – just as, in Pakistan, I’m supposed to refrain from making eye contact with men. I bowed, and he laughed, and I, though uneasy with expressing unmitigated delight in public, laughed too.

When we wandered into a coffee shop, I noticed people all around me laughing. I was certain, at first, that they were laughing at me, and I hurriedly checked to see if my fly was unzipped or it I had a piece of lettuce wedged between my teeth. I couldn’t find anything wrong, and just as I considered leaving, I realized that the people around me were not only laughing about something completely unrelated to me, but also that they weren’t even thinking about me. I was nowhere in their minds, and with this revelation came the most profound sense of deliverance. I was free.

And I felt free, too, walking around outside. No one stared at me. If I wanted to put my hair in a ponytail, I could simply lift up my arms and do just that – I did not have to wait until I got home or contort myself strangely to avoid the dire event that my shirt might ride up to reveal a sliver of skin. I wanted to thank every maniacal taxi driver who sped past me instead of slowing down with his head hanging out the window to watch the apparently fascinating spectacle of a Western woman perambulating. If I accidentally brushed up against a man, I said excuse me, and neither of us thought anything of any meaning had occurred. As I spoke to Griff, I felt a lightness, a foreign sense of abandon, that I struggled to diagnose. And then I realized I felt liberated because I wasn’t worried that the room was bugged or that ISI agents were listening to me.

Near the end of the day, a motorcade with a member of the monarchy drove by us, and my first thought was that I had better skedaddle to avoid the cross fire of an assassination attempt. And then I noticed that there was only one security officer on the sidewalk with a gun. And that none of the people in the cars had guns trained on the crowds. And that the onlookers were cheering and smiling. Because this was something akin to a parade, and I, finally, was in no way part of the spectacle.

Coco Chanel's universal influence: the Pakistani version of the little black dress

Shalwar Kamiz pants usage #37

Q: Is it possible to use my Shalwar Kamiz pants to look like Henry VIII, but without the cod piece? Can this be documented without the help of an assistant?


A: Yes.