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Music Recommendations for Specific Situations

• when you are crammed in a taxi-brousse with 14 other people driving through rural Madagascar on your way home from a national park, stacked like a twisted Tetris piece against your friends, awake after three sleeping pills (12x your normal dose), at 2 am (though it was supposed to leave at 9am, you didn’t leave until 8 pm), curled for warmth in a seat made for a Malagasy person (approximately .6-.8 your height), afraid of crashing as you speed through U-bends driving through the mountains, for 8 hours, the only one awake and watching your breath crystallize, watching (for about 2 hours) a giant brush fire consume (and approach the road), holding your breath and trying to find another sleeping pill and wishing like hell for sleep or relief, or even death, you think, would be better than this, because at least then you can stretch your legs:

Fleet Foxes (they will not ease the pain, they will not comfort, but they will match)

• when you are sleeping on the top bunk in a bungalow with three of your friends but you wake up in the middle of the night to strange noises, nature noises (if you are a girl from the urban and suburban, very foreign) from lemurs and frogs and chameleons (do chameleons make noise?) and geckos (geckos make noise) and night herons and falcons, and your bungalow is close (~10 meters) to a lake with 180 crocodiles, some approaching 6 meters long, and the room and the night are the same (pitch, inky black, where you cannot see your hand in front of your face, and when you try, you hit your mosquito net and realize you forgot to take doxycycline that night), and you are not afraid, not quite, but very awake and alert and feel like you are so far not from home (though you are) but from anything, you are in the middle of nowhere as far as the entire globe is concerned:

Dashboard Confessional (instantly, forgotten high school feelings rush through your veins like morphine and they are so familiar you can’t hear anything else)

• when you have just stepped into a Western grocery store in an Other country, where everything costs five to ten times more than it does at the local market, but where you can buy Nutella! and bread! (for the Malagasy eat rice three times a day, a pound a day, and eschew bread as almost colonial) and water that doesn’t need to be boiled! and you will buy all those things and more, and you have just passed a giant political demonstration on the side of the road and you are afraid, for two months ago a giant political demonstration burned down the store you are in, but you compromise: security for bread, 7 loaves of bread that you cannot multiply and that go stale in a day; and anyway, you are so happy to see a familiar world (even if it is all in French) that you just might cry:

Timbaland ft. Nelly Furtado - Promiscuous Girl (though you had no say in what the overhead plays, it is playing for you and you start laughing because this was Your Song a few summers back and now, a world away, here it is again)

I am starting to love it here.

"Don't Drink and Commit Adultery"

As part of our community integration, we have been accepting every invitation offered. I spent three hours today at a place titled “Don’t Drink and Commit Adultery”. Three hours. Also I only speak five words of Malagasy. I almost actually went crazy. I am also not sure if committing adultery is fine as long as one does not drink first.

SHOUT-OUT FROM RURAL MADAGASCAR.

This is Rwanda.

Green hills, blue doorways and windowsills, potatoes-rice-bananas, red termite dirt, franglais, being stared at for my skin color, staring in turn at other white people, smiles, confusing Kinyarwandan for French, 560 francs to a dollar, showering in a bucket, mosquito nets, malaria-pill sunburn, more potatoes/rice/bananas, every meal potato-rice-bananas, wishing for salt shakers, Coke made with real sugar in 30 cl bottles, returning the bottle, Primus beer, riding mototaxis while holding my breath.

We worked for two days at a school. The children took my picture, shrieked when I said Real Madrid was mon equipe favori, and asked, “are you loving your president Obama?” Yes, I said, and they shrieked again. They recorded me standing, sitting, talking, and gave me bracelets made of paper. It was being a Westerner in a rural area where these students had not even been to Kigali, had seen very few white people. I felt, feel, unduly honored.

Rwanda is brushing your teeth with bottled water, haggling with mototaxi drivers, cool and dry and so beautifully hilly. It’s seeing purple and white banners that commemorate, solemnly, with an ill-feelng in the pit of you stomach, massacre sites from the great scar of 1994. It is no longer wondering what he, she, they were doing 15 years ago, because the country is now more than that, because it is vibrant and alive but always conscious of the past and always vigilant of the future (and its neighbors). It is pedestrian dirt and terrifying traffic circles and wishing to be less prominent and feeling home in the expat cafe and marveling at the giant 24-hour supermarket and paying 500 francs for an Egyptian Coke but 1500 for a Coke Zero.

I will come back here. This country makes me think I can be poetic, profound, but I can’t and I know that. It is beautiful and I will come back.

new blogggg

Pills I'm Bringing Abroad

• Doxycycline (anti-malarial antibiotic, I start taking it tomorrow)
• Cipro (just-in-case antibiotic, also protection from anthrax)
• Trazodone (mild, prescription sleep aid)
• Ativan (short-acting benzodiazepine, gifted unto me by my dad)
• Aleve, Advil, generic pepto-bismol pills

A criticism of Obama's speech that we probably won't see

natface:

complicatedshoes:

National women’s groups slam Obama for tepid remarks regarding women’s rights in Arab nations.

If only…

Where were the anti-stoning as punishment for being raped comments? Or is that just another negative stereotype with no basis in reality? Right.

The stoning happened in Somalia, which doesn’t quite have a, um, rule of law right now. Not that, like, Saudi is particularly good at women’s rights, but they aren’t as extreme as stoning.

Should I exercise so much that my period stops?

nutritionista:

Reader Nora writes:

I was recently told that if a woman exercises enough, she will stop menstruating. I can understand that but I have a diseased called endometriosis which is an obscure term for “really painful cramps” (not really but that’s a major problem amongst other things). Someone just advised me to start exercising so much that I no long have a period to bypass the monthly cramps. Somehow I don’t feel like this is a really healthy thing to do, maybe I’m wrong. I just wanted to hear your take on it. Too much exercise or seemingly valid advice?

I just got this question and had to answer it right away. It might seem ridiculous to some of you, but if it’s a misconception that’s out there, let’s put it to rest. Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor and not qualified to give medical advice. But I do know one thing: The person who told you that overexercising causes some women to stop menstruating is absolutely right. However, it’s extremely dangerous and should be avoided at all costs! Overexercising to the point of ceasing menstruation is called exercise amenorrhea…

I’m really surprised that this answer didn’t mention that amemorrhea is also one of the diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa. It’s also part of the female athlete triad, along with bone weakness (including stress fractures, osteopenia (early stages of osteoperosis), and osteoperosis), and disordered eating.