Somebody that I used to know

Somebody that I used to know

Somebody that I used to know.

It’s funny to me that the concept still centers the heart of every other song on the radio. That people are still singing and writing their hearts out about people they used to know.

Because they don’t really exist anymore.

This is the awkwardness of hellos and goodbyes today. I think we have the paradoxes down all wrong. It’s not how many people you can connect to without leaving your bed or changing your dirty pajamas. It’s not about how the person of your profile is so much more [insert adjective] than your ‘real’ self.

This may all be true, but it’s not the point. At least to me, anyway.

The painful paradox of being human and growing up and changing in the age of the Internet is that the more you live, the more your heart splits open. Before, when you lost touch with someone because you moved or you changed or they changed or because things fell apart as they tend to do in this entropic universe, you’d wonder how they were doing, here and then, curiosity or regret or fondness like the gentle patter of a light rain as it falls on the front window of your car. You drive forward, and the patter slips away.

Now, even though you move forward like every person did in the past, you are not just living one continuous line of existence. You occupy as many threads as your curiosity demands. In the past, the curiosity for the others who have come and gone in our lives still existed. But, short of a willful letter or a high school reunion, it remained just that.

Curiosity, coming and going, but always receding nebulously because you only led one life.

Now, our lives split infinitely like cells, like hair fraying, like zippers. Like seams coming undone. You can know that your favorite babysitter from middle school is engaged to an Egyptian investment banker in London even though you have not seen her in seven years, or heard from her in three. You can know that the first person you fell in love with in high school still likes girls who go to elite law schools even though you haven’t seen him in five years. You can know a dear old friend from junior high who you’ve grown apart with increasingly confuses social justice with poor manners.

You can know all of this, these personal facts, but not know them. You evolve in one way, a part from all these people, but yet you are still privy to evolving data that is completely disconnected from the reality of your life.

And there lies the déjà vu. From not knowing someone anymore, but knowing them all the same. That if you were to run into them on the street one day, you would have to feign ignorance to how their lives have been, because your lives veered away from each other, but your data sets didn’t.

Because although your lives did evolve away from each other, they also didn’t. You were still there, peripherally connecting the dots on past friends and acquaintances and lovers, seeing the old them permutate into new formations in the present, deducing what had changed.

This sounds voyeuristic and creepy, like your stalking someone. But you’re not. To know all of this you just need to click on the homepage of your facebook account, and the stream of everyone you used to know floods into your life.

The real struggle of the Internet age is that there are no longer somebody’s we used to know. We know everyone, even when we don’t, even when we’ve changed. There are only the somebody’s we used to know in formality, which makes all we still know about the people who will always be important because of what once was painful.

You could have been that girl who did [insert verb]. In some reality, maybe you did. But in this one, you didn’t. Who knows why? It doesn’t matter. That you didn’t means the possibility that you did exists alongside whatever choice you made.

And yet you must live with the information from all the other lives you might have led.

This is not to say you even regret your choices. Just that I don’t think we were built to know so much. To live in a world without opportunity costs when it comes to the data of love and life and friendship.

I don’t know about you, but I prefer the old fashioned way of missing someone. That kind of missing that comes from one of the many people you once were that exist as layers of an onion peeled inversely into existence. The twelve year old girl who worshipped every move and word of you babysitter who read you gossip magazines and fed you candy and Chinese take-out and took you to get your nails done. The fourteen year old girl whose breathe was taken away by that boy’s puns and his smell of laundry soap.

I prefer to wonder how those people are, to send them love and light, and let them go. Just as they have let me go.

But if you want to fake a semblance of being a part of this day and age, that’s not possible.

I’m writing to you from Jogjakarta, Indonesia where I’m spending my days writing my novel instead of writing my research paper. The people I love most in this world are on the other side of it. Facebook is the only way I can tell them “Good morning,” or “Sweet dreams,” or hear about their (mis)adventures. I don’t have illusions about the costs of keeping in touch. Knowing all these things, seeing their pictures, their faces, what they’re reading, it doesn’t make being here easier. It doesn’t make me happier.

But I guess I’d rather be a little less content but know how my people are doing, what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling.

I hope this is going to be the last extreme detachment of mine from the homeland. Nothing is as extreme as the technology measures taken to keep up with your sister who is living twelve hours behind you and already has a whack schedule. But even when I return, even if I’m living in one state only three hours behind the state of [insert person I love A LOT A LOT A LOT], this is it. This is our now, where you have to juggle a million tracks even when your feet are only walking one.

You will not be invited to the wedding, but the heart of the twelve-year old girl inside you is still waiting to be asked to be a bridesmaid, to see the dress you dreamed up together after watching Sweet Home Alabama for the [insert absurd number]th time.

Because when you see the face of that somebody you used to know, when you see that smile that once meant the whole world and then some, even if it’s only communicated to you now through computer code and pixels, you could swear you still did.  

Mountains

Mountains

Grace can be found in a mango.

Monkeys become squirrels.

Anxiety is hiking up a volcano in the dark.

These are the three things that I know to be true this week.

You probably know by now that I find Wherever you go, there you are to be the truest truth, the core of my life. You might even be sick already of me telling you this over and over again.

But I will continue saying it to you, again and again, anyways.

Because it is still the truest truth, its truths manifest in new ways each time I get up from my bed.

Monkeys become squirrels. They really do. The most exotic, take-your-breath-away things -- the animals, the foods, the dwellings, the outfits, the rituals, the vistas -- those images you see as a child in National Geographic that later inspire you to turn your life upside down, again and again, each time promising never to do it again, but doing it again anyway. And sooner than you can ever imagine monkeys are just squirrels trying to steal your food, no different from the fat squirrels back at school that try to steal your morning muffin. And so you may be climbing a mountain in a tropical jungle in Balinese Hindu costume as monkeys stalk your ascent. But you are still just you.

I thought I already knew this. I thought I had learned it again and again, at 3, at 8, at 10, at 12, at 17, at 19, now at 21. But I seem to never really believe this lesson, forgetting each time, until the moment again when a monkey is as exciting as a squirrel. And perhaps a squirrel has now become even more exciting than a monkey. And you are you.

Despite the fact that animals are just animals, and food is just food, and people are just people, wherever in the world you are, comfort and home still constitute the gravitational forces that govern our orbits.

And our sanity.

I have eaten fried rice, nasi goreng, each day for breakfast and lunch for 8 weeks now. Sometimes I get lucky and get fried noodles instead. It is getting harder for me to eat it now. I have 12 days before I get to cook for myself and eat what I want. 12 days. And just when 12 seems like the biggest number in the world, at dinner tonight, eating noodles (thank God it wasn’t rice) with MSG, Ibu offers me a mango. She has never offered me one before. But now she does, peeling it with her miraculously slender hands. It is my salvation, the lull in the storm of my day of tires popping and ants colonizing my vitamins and anti-Semitic facebook messages from Indonesians who do not like that my religion is listed as Jewish.

God is a ripe mango offered just in the nick of time. Grace is one too. So is salvation, and redemption, and transcendence.

And it turns out that I was wrong. I thought I had explored the unfathomable depths and nooks and crannies of my lifelong struggle with anxiety. I thought no personal experience could manifest my anxiety in a new or shocking way. Stress chests, migraines, teeth crack, jaws clenching, nightmares, every insecurity or bad memory a merry-go-round for my anxiety to reincarnate itself. But climbing Mount Batur, an active volcano here in Bali, at 4 in the dark morning surprised me and proved me wrong, literally taking my breath away. Climbing in the dark, on hands and knees, falling on my butt on jagged volcanic rock and sand, up, up, up, not enough air, panting and heaving chest. Pushing yourself up and up even though you feel like your lungs will split open all the while everything around you is submerged in darkness and there is no scenery for you to engage with to justify your pain.

Anxiety is the physical experience of climbing a volcano in the dark. They are exactly the same, although one is entirely physical and one is entirely psychological. Either way, you have to go up even though there is only pain and no beauty. Either way, there is nothing beautiful to distract you from the pressure in your lungs and your inability to grasp anything. Either way, your lungs feel like an elephant is sitting on them. You do not know what you are striving towards on your cut hands and knees. You cannot see it. But somehow you still know it is better than the only alternatives: going down or being trampled by others in your refusal to move on. And so climbing Mount Batur in the middle of the night feels exactly like having acute anxiety disorder at its worst. I had to remind myself again and again mid-climb that I was in fact studying abroad in Bali, climbing a volcano in the dark, and that the pain in my chest and my inability to make out the world around me was not due to a reemergence of a former clinical disorder, but an actual physical mountain that was no longer just inside my mind.

And so I believe in monkeys, and mountains, and mangos.

I especially believe in mangos.

A Miracle

A Miracle

There are two images from the past week that I must share with you.

The first is of flowers floating in a jungle. The second is of a body on fire.

Deep in the mountains of Bali, farmers grow big, blue, bursting hydrangeas. They cut them three days before bringing them to market and place them in the river behind a log to learn how to live in water. If they just cut them, they die within three days. But if they stay for three days in the tropical mountain jungle river with its incessant flow of oxygen and nutrients, they will live for over a week.

I came across bunches of hydrangeas floating like this in the river in a clearing on the edge of the forest. They were so buoyant and blue and trembled gently with the river’s current. I was covered in mud at the time from falling down five times and sopping wet from swimming and jumping into cool places. The elegant, man-touched bouquets of hydrangeas floating in the river outside the thick jungle were so improbable, but also so beautiful, like a dream where everyone goes to gym class in tuxedos and ball gowns.

In a village in Bali, just as the flowers are being taken out of the river to be brought on a motor scooter by way of a precariously bumpy road to market, a forty-year old priest is being wrapped in white cloth and placed in a wooden box atop a platform carried by many sweaty men all dressed in white. A white and gold bull made of wood and paper is ahead of him, and both will be moved in circles a holy three times.

There will be masses of crowds in white, moving away from the rice paddies down the hill to the clearing by the river across from the trash dump. Eventually the excited and reverent crowd will grow quiet as the technicalities of what comes next become apparent. Men hack away the inside of the cow statue. They try and place the man wrapped in white cloth inside it, but he is too tall for the enclosure, so they hack away some more.  A female relative collapses, unable to endure the expectation that she will not cry in the face of his undoing, thought to slow down the cremation and the departure of his soul. Another woman drops, a domino effect of emotional and physical release.

The funeral pyre is lit with a blowtorch, and the naked body burns, and it turns black and charred, and it falls diagonally, head towards the ground, but no one can do anything about it because it is on fire. Across the river a trash fire has been burning all day, and will continue to burn even after the pyre is gone. Intermittently, there are loud popping noises, which we guess and later learn for sure to be the organs exploding, the testicles and the brain. It is violent, and awful, and I do not think I will ever buy again that death is beautiful, that the hearts and lungs failing us are beautiful. Even though I am supposed to because this society believes in reincarnation and this cremation is supposed to be joyous.

This is where I crash into my cultural fence in an attempt to jump over:

Bunches of blue flowers floating in the river are beautiful; I cannot see the beauty in this, only in that the former remains possible in a world full of the latter.

And that is a miracle.

ps- It is the same with the air outside my room. It always smells of trash burning or of fresh frangipani flowers that have just fallen from the tree. Never both. Never something in between. Only one at a time.

Two Nightgowns

Two Nightgowns

            There is also this.

           

The next night Ibu brought me two nightgowns wrapped in plastic.

One was red and pink and covered in hearts and frills. The other was a traditional batik print. 

She knocked gently on my door, and placed them gently on my bed, not looking me in the eye but smiling when I said thank you, these are beautiful: Terima kasih, Ibu, cantik!

She had not eaten breakfast with me, but she had brought my friends cookies and coffee that afternoon when they had come over for moral support, me wanting to runaway but needing to stay.

In her soft face and her calm fingers and humble grin, I relax into her goodness.

I’m not sure what she and Bapak think now about the Yahudi and the Protocols and who caused this earthquake and that tsunami and the poverty here.

And although I have always been devoted to the world of thoughts, although I think they are the most powerful and important possessions we have in this world, just for a moment, their thoughts no longer matter to me.

They have come back to me, with nightgowns and coffee and cookies.

And that is more than enough for me to stay and sleep the night.

           

Bapak, more distant and gruff and awkward than Ibu, texts me sometime before I leave that he has already told his Quranic group about what I had said and that they are very interested to hear it, that I should come back and come speak to them. (them, a group of Javanese devout Muslim men, me, a Jewish American woman!)

Just as extraordinary is that Bapak does not speak this level of English, so that he must have taken the effort to Google translate, a recent skill, what he wanted to say to me before texting me.

On my last night, they take me to meet the extended family. When the inevitable religion question comes up, they do not hide my Jewishness: Dari Yahudi.

They ask me to take pictures with them and their family anyway.

They ask me to sit beside sister and grandfather and brother-in-law and nephew and permutations of all of the above after being fed more tea, more cookies, more snacks.

On the morning I depart, Bapak says with his eyes to his feet, Ma’af, sorry if we make any mistake.

I smile and try to look him in the eye, Tidak apa apa.

This literary means as “No what what” but means in actuality something closer to “It is nothing.”

It is nothing.

           

But to me, it is everything. 

Saya Yahudi

Saya Yahudi.

I do not know where to begin.

Every possible starting point for this story is both true and false.

There is no right way to tell this story, but it is the most important story I have ever had to tell.

A story so cosmic, and yet so personal, at the same time it makes me feel like I have fallen off the face of the planet.

And perhaps I have.

I will move from the microscopic to the cosmic, the only hope for my sanity lying in a gradual transition of scale that will not further destroy my balance and sense perception.

.

.

.

Here are the few things I knew to be certain before tonight, as of 6 o’ clock this evening, when they were eclipsed:

1) I am an American Jewish woman who has been living with a Muslim Javanese family for a week.

2) In the first ten minutes of my arrival at their home, they asked me about my faith. I lied, saying I believed in God but had no official religion, instructed to do so by my program director who was concerned for my safety.

3) This family has done nothing but feed me and worry about my wellbeing the past week.

4) Two days ago, when I asked a Muslim cleric at an Islamic boarding school why Indonesia doesn’t recognize Judaism, his wife laughed about the destruction of one of Indonesia’s two existing synagogues by the government last year because “it was a waste of space.”

I give her the benefit of the doubt, knowing Indonesians usually laugh not out of cruelty, but in the face of awkward social situations.

.

.

.

Here is what I now know, the immutable paradigm shift, my heart breaking, the world closing and opening, although to attempt to number these instances would be absurd:

My host sister was reading her history book.

I couldn’t resist asking her if Indonesian schools taught the Holocaust.

She said a little.

I asked her what they taught about it.

She said she didn’t remember what it was about, that she would have to look it up.

(And I’m thinking that if you don’t remember a lesson on the genocide of 6 million people less than a hundred years ago, that doesn’t count as teaching.)

.

.

.

I run to my room to get my computer to pull up Google translate.

The whole family is in the kitchen and this is my chance.

After 150 hours of thinking non-stop about the minor but major detail of my Jewishness, I cannot resist this crack in the surface of our usual chats about showering, and food, and school, and my progress or lackthereof in Indonesian language.

I am already lucky in this moment, living in the house of a government worker who can afford the luxuries of wifi and a computer.

With the majority of other Indonesians, this alignment of opportunities would not have been possible, and we would have chatted more about my bathing and sleeping in the few words I know how to speak.

Thus begins 3 of the most painful hours of my life. The closest I have ever come to fighting for survival, with nothing but Google translate and the slowest wifi connection I have ever encountered to aid my uphill battle.

To recount what was said in full is a feat so overwhelming I will not bother to attempt it.

I will have to settle with telling you what is so imprinted on me that I will not be able to sleep if I do not write this here, to you, to this abyss of code and pixel, my friends and family and the strangers far away.

So, Basically, Um…..

What started off as Were you taught that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust? became Some of them were my family became That is why I am an American became I am a Jew.

Saya yahudi. Saya yadudi. Saya yahudi. Saya yahudi. Saya yahudi. Saya yahudi. Saya yahudi. Saya yahudi.

Their faces crackled, shrunk, contorted.

But you said you had no religion, was typed fervently, as was I was told not to tell you I’m Jewish because of anti-Semitism here.

And then the crack in the surface of mundane conversation about tea and crackers and baths split open irreparably, consuming any semblance of order, or sanity.

Saya yahudi.

The voracious typing exchanges between father orating and daughter typing and me typing back and mother listening began and did not stop until it was dark outside, and dinner had passed, and my Javanese dance lesson and the time to bathe had come and gone.

My host father, a kind man who has told me every morning to be careful -- hati-hati -- on the way to school, dictated these words among many others to his typist of a daughter for two hours:

Well, don’t worry. I know that not all Jews are evil. Not you.

You are not like them.

But it’s a real issue the Jews.

Have you read your people’s Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Jewish world domination is a real problem.

Why else do you think Indonesia is poor if not because of the Jews?

Your people control the media and the energy and the government of the USA.

But Bapak, I type back as if my life depends on it, which it does in some way more important than blood and flesh, there are only 6 million of us in the US. We are less than 0.02% of the world’s population. We are educated, yes, but for a group so educated, we have never had a president and no one can imagine when we ever will, there is still so much prejudice.

6 million people is more than enough with all the money and Nobel’s you have.

But Bapak the Protocols were proven as forgery and propaganda 90 years ago. And it led to the murder of 6 million of my people. This is why we Jews support Israel despite our moral qualms because even after 6 million dead, a government official with a degree from Indonesia’s best university believes this document to be the truth, I try to explain.

We discussed it at community meeting last Sunday (after we ate dinner together and you wished me a good sleep, I am now thinking).

And thus begins my descent down to madness, to trying to argue with ignorance, to prove through google translating Wikipedia summaries of 2000 years of Jewish and European history why the Protocols are dangerous, why he should not believe them.

I first attempt to use Indonesia’s Wikipedia to get him a history of anti-Semitism.

Unlike the thousands of words of the English entry, it has five sentences.

(And thus, I’m thinking, why the Internet does not liberate or educate us, but inevitably perpetuates our biases in that the sources we are drawn to only confirm our reality)

I write about my family, and how Holocaust denial in the Muslim world and the widespread belief in anti-Semitic propaganda (i.e. educated upper middle class government workers) scares American Jews into pardoning Israel of its PTSD excessive sins of retribution and force, believing more than ever in the necessity of a backup solution because not much has changed, which justifies and enables more Israeli force, which fuels more anger and anti-Semitism, and so on, and so on, and so on.

I write about how stereotypes of Jews as bankers come out of us being allowed to do that one ‘dirty’ job in Medieval Europe.

I write about how there is a lot to criticize Israel for, but that much of the Muslim world shoots itself in the foot by focusing on paranoid lies as opposed to the condemning truths, pushing the West away.

I write about how really the Jews and the Palestinians were both fucked by the British, who have now conveniently wiped their hands clean of the mess and point anti-Semitic fingers at Israelis from the safety of their academic institutions, blacklisting them for their own destruction, their own guilt, how colonialism of different kinds exported a European millennia of hatred on to the middle east and ran fast and far away, how Palestinians and Israelis, Muslims and Jews, get caught up hating each other when they were fucked over by the same people.

I write about the power of keeping criticism to the truth, about how many Westerners and Jews would respond differently if lies weren’t perpetuated.

I write about all the evidence to the contrary of the protocols.

My host father says he agrees. But then he pulls out a book on how the Star of David is the symbol of Satan, and thus begins round 2 of why this scares me, why this is why I lied, why this is why American Jews give Israel a carte blanche.

He opens a slideshow on how America caused the earthquake in Haiti with submarines, how the tsunami here was a nuclear war crime pulled off by a country which he insists is run by Jews.

I tell him that he overestimates America’s capabilities, that we may have bombs but that we are not God, that we do not control the laws of geology.

I tell him that I understand the paranoia because my country has done horrific things, but that this goes too far.

Have I made it clear that this is a man who has welcomed me into his home, a stranger, a man who told me to be careful this morning, a man who works for his government as a social worker, who has it good here, a man with a degree from the best university?

And so my heart is breaking.

And so my lungs are closing.

I am free, and yet I am not.

I do not have to lie, but I do not think it is in my head that they turn on the TV at dinner instead of attempting to talk to me this time.

Even though he now tells me he understands why the Protocols are scary.

Even though he tells me he sees how they are just the same as the all-Muslims-are-terrorists lies in the US.

Even though he tells me he sees why American Jews are afraid.

Even though he tells me he understands what I mean when I say that it is easier for the government to control you through hatred than the complicated truth that fosters compassion.

Even though he promises he will take this back to his Muslim discussion group.

Even though he passes me the rice.

But I am just one man, he says, and my community is small. And Indonesia is big.

I know, I tell him, but at least you are someone and that is more than nothing.

We eat a very late dinner in the light of the television.

Ibu boils me water to bathe in as usual.

But unlike the seven nights before this one, as I write this to you now so that I won’t be alone in my heart breaking, no one has come to knock on my door, and ask about waking me up, and say goodnight.

Unlike the seven nights before this one, the door to the bathroom and kitchen and the bedroom of Ibu and Bapak is bolted.

I am alone.

It is true I wished earlier this week, never having a minute to myself here, food always being stuffed on my plate against my wishes by Ibu and Bapak, to be left alone in peace.

But not like this.

This is alone-alone, alone in my aloneness, not the quiet camaraderie of being by oneself in a house with people who have your back.

I have learned many things in this void of a night, but this one stands out now as I prepare to face a dark room and my dreams:

Aloneness and peace are not the same thing.

Before in my life, peace and alone meant the same thing. But this is a new kind of alone, in an island on an island in an island on an island, and so on, until the nothingness threatens to crack onto itself.

 I sit here typing, this clattering of keys a pathetic rendering of this ferocious night, thinking that perhaps stories might be able to save humanity, that I should hit the road telling the story of my people to the whole world, not to justify Israel but so that it and we can be understood, so that compassion can be created to tear down the cowardly structures of absolutes and lies, how we need a collective democratic timeline of the conflict starting with Adam, how I want to kick the Brits in the nuts for their hypocrisy and still-infamous anti-Semitism, how many double standards regarding my people there are, how the hateful paranoia about us is the only form of minority prejudice I can think of that is twistedly flattering while fatal while insulting, how the treatment of the conflict insults the intelligence and ability of Arabs as equally capable agents, whether or not Ibu will wake me up tomorrow, whether the subtle differences in body language and eye contact might be in my head, how I hope they are in my head, how I hope I am wrong.

I am no longer just a girl in a house of a kind stranger telling me to be careful each morning on the way to school.

And perhaps I never was.

EDW: Excessive Display of Wealth

I am sitting on my bed of my Balinese homestay.

My homestay cousin, Ayu, sits crossed-legged on the other end of the bed, listening to my ipod.

Her phone has broken, and thus her access to Justin Bieber and Avril Lavigne has been paused.

She works as a waitress in the nearby tourist town, speaking phrases of broken English she has been taught for the purpose of becoming a better waitress.

She asks me if I like studying, and I say I do, although I am here in Bali now, ‘studying’ abroad, for a break from the intense studying that got me into the place I now want a break from in the first place.

I ask her if she likes studying.

She does, she says.

Then why aren’t you in school, I ask, in my Bahasa Indonesia that’s smaller than her English.

Mahal.

Expensive.

It costs money to learn, even in what Westerners escape to and deem as Paradise with a capital P.

Even in Bali.

I tell her I’m sorry.

Ma’af.

She says, “No problem. I work,” and offers a brave smile.

I know she is telling the truth.

And that she also isn’t.

In my stay here of six days, she has come to my room each night.

The first time she asked me if I was going to sleep. I said I was, but she came in anyway, and now she no longer asks.

We talk in the ways we can. Eye contact. Smiles. Shrugs. Words exchanged through the passing of a Bahasa Indonesia-English dictionary back and forth across my bed.

A few nights into my stay, she feels comfortable enough to inspect my stuff. My laptop, ipod, iphone, and kindle are out charging. I hadn’t thought to put them away, thinking of my room in terms of an American sense of privacy that does not exist in Bali.

She wants to know what the kindle is. When I tell her it is a bucu, she doesn’t believe me.

I show her the books, with words like “the” and “I” the only identifiable ones, and I show her how to flip through the pages with her fingers.

She does not know what the words mean, but she flicks through multiple complete books from start to finish until she gets bored.

She tells me she doesn’t have any friends now. That if I go back to America, which we both know is a when, she will be very sad.

She had one friend in the village, she tells me, but she is now gone, now with another girl.

I only know two weeks worth of Bahasa, so I cannot ask her why they cannot all be friends, why eighteen year-old girls in Bali must choose one.

I do manage, however, to ask her why she “tidak bicara ini taman?” Why she doesn’t speak to this friend?

She doesn’t know, she says. She is a lonely girl, she says.

Her words, not mine.

I have already maxed out the permutations of my limited Indonesian vocabulary and cannot say anything more that is appropriate (I eat fried rice everyday for breakfast did not seem relevant), so I put forward another Ma’af.

Sorry.

In class this week, our fearless leader Bu Ari has told us about the current suicide epidemic amongst Balinese teenagers.

Recently, she said, she read of a teenage son committing suicide when his father couldn’t buy him a new phone; the social pressure was too much.

You read of one every week in the paper, she says.

Apparently it got bad fifteen years ago. Globalization. Materialism. They say comparison is the root of all unhappiness.

These maxims of humanity, which have always been true, seem to be getting truer.

Bali has been privy to brutal Western forces for hundreds of years, from the Dutch colonial bureaucrats to lost yuppies on an Eat Pray Love tour today.

But based off of youth suicide rates today, somehow the latter appears to be having a worse impact. Or at least a more brutally palpable one.  

Which is shocking. Tourists, unlike colonialists, at least pay for their damage.

I am reminded of a story I once heard from someone who had spent two years in the Peace Corps on the remote, sinking Pacific island of Kiribati.

She told me many stories of her time there, but the one that stayed with me was how the first time, not so long ago, a movie had been brought to the island, multiple people killed themselves after it was over.

Their whole world had been that island, its stories and storms, the fish one could eat and the fish one couldn’t. And now their whole world was gone.

And for as long a time as any, they had been as happy as you or me. As much as anyone else is, always returning to one’s internal equilibrium, floating in his own paradigm, the turtle steadily carrying the world on its back.

But then images from the outside flooded in, of snow and big cars and shops and cowboys and God knows what else, and it was too much to bear in one two-hour sitting.

Not because stuff is the source of life’s goodness.

Not because people in America are any happier than the people of Kiribati, or Bali.

In fact, the evidence, last I checked, seems to point to the contrary.

But in the moment of impact, the sheer shock and brutal force of the comparison, beyond comprehensible or natural distances in space and time, obliterated another abiding truth.

Wherever you go, there you are.

I believe this applies to everyone.

It doesn’t matter if it’s because you got: the-Porsche-you-had-been-eyeing-for-months-and-at-first-you-were-excited-but-now-you-feel-just-the-same-as-you-did-before-you-spent-all-that-money.

Or if it’s because you got: a-new-sharp-knife-that-cuts-fish-better-than-your-old-one-and-at-first-you-were-excited-but-now-you-feel-just-the-same-as-you-did-before.

I’m not a psychologist, but I’m willing to bet a lot and them some that this phenomenon applies equally to Bali or Kiribati as it does to America.

Then why all of the suicides?

Because knowing that wherever you go, there you are takes time.

It takes exposure. It takes the luxury and privilege of having, and realizing that as wonderful as it is at first, that it bides the time, how it wanes faster and stronger, and you will soon be just a girl again, or just a boy.

On the phone yesterday, when I told her what I was chewing on, my Mom shared my thoughts back with me in the biblical terms of the apple and the fall from Eden, how you can only truly know Eden for what it is once you have fallen from it. How to fall is a tragedy, but also a privilege.

Don’t get me wrong.

I think stuff matters. I’m a fan of stuff.

I wouldn’t want to give up my house, or my retainer, or my favorite pair of jeans, or that burrito I ate last night for dinner because I was homesick and I could afford to. Or my education or family travels. Or my personal library. The list goes on.

I could fill this page with the stuff I love.

Stuff is nice. It helps. It does. Money matters. Not as much as people think it does, but more than English majors like myself like to think.

There’s all the research on how much and how little money matters.

But that’s not why I’m writing this instead of my essay for Field Methodology and Ethics class tomorrow right now.

I am writing this because of two memories.

Two years ago, I left an NGO peace and conflict school in Wales that was a social experiment in multicultural understanding through exposure and communal living.

Of the many special parts of this school, the one that shocks most people I know in America, even more than the communal showers, is the policy of EDW: Excessive Displays of Wealth.

We had a socially enforced policy of limiting our public usage of ostentatious goods, being a part of a community comprised of everyone from princes to refugees.

There was no punishment for breaching EDW other than shame and scrutiny, and for the most part, at least beyond what any American I know can imagine, it was followed.

Ipods, iphones, and computers were only to be used for individual pleasure inside one’s room. If it was for music or a movie to be communally shared, that was OK, but other than that, luxury goods were limited to the private sphere only. Even the wealthiest kids, the seemingly flippant ones, bought clothing that showed no particular affiliation to a fancy brand.

Without being asked, because that was how it was done.

Over the course of my two years there, I completely forgot about how special and rare EDW was until I arrived at an elite private liberal arts college.

My first night of college, everyone sat around in our common room on their Mac laptops and iphones, chatting and texting and facebooking simultaneously.

I walked in, shocked. I was horrified, but I also felt liberated.

No more pretending like I wasn’t the white upper middle class girl I was. In America, there is no pretending when it comes to class or race.

The second memory is also at this same school, when my dorm had a fire and I lost every item of stuff that was at all relevant to my current life, two years of letters from my Mom, and pictures, and jewelry, and my prom dress, and books, and class notes.

And how little it mattered so very soon, how little I thought of it all.

But the flip side of that coin, the side we don’t talk about, is how six weeks later, I already had a suitcase full of stuff when I left.

From friends who had stuff to spare, and from stuff my parents sent me, and from stuff I bought. I had insurance and a family who could spare whatever needed to be spared for their daughter to have what she needed. And wanted.

I forgot about the favorite dress I had intended to wear for graduation and my books. But that’s because there were new dresses and new books, more dresses and more books.

You can describe this phenomenon in cosmic terms, about how when you create space, the universe rushes in.

As much I like aphorisms, this sentence is an abstract way of avoiding talking about the reality of stuff, how stuff and cosmic truths repeatedly defy each other, about the costs of being alive that have nothing to do with what we would like to believe.

Two years later, I still love what the EDW policy stands for, for equality and respect, for no one having to feel lesser than because of a lack of stuff, because the playing field should be level.

But it’s not.

EDW tries to make stuff not matter, but it’s very existence illuminates how much it does.

Not because of any intrinsic value, not because people with ipods are any more enlightened or loved, but because of what stuff does to people.

What were the creators of the policy scared of?

In Bali, sitting across the bed from my homestay cousin, I think I now understand a little more.

Stuff doesn’t matter, and yet it does.

I know see EDW’s meaning as this:

Stuff shouldn’t matter, but it does, and not in the ways you would think, and this is scary and awful, and because we can, in our bubble, in the middle of nowhere, full of comparatively like-minded individuals, distract you from it for as long as we possibly can, not because of how little it matters, but because of how much it matters, because of its unfathomable ability to tear lives to shreds. We cannot save the islanders of Kiribati, or all of the lonely Balinese girls with broken phones, but we can save you, for a while, because you are here.

It is an easy thing for me to say and know, an American girl who has never wanted anything, an American girl who will, mayahashem, one day go home as planned with the return ticket her Dad bought for her on his computer with his checking account.

I know how little lasting impact buying the next, new, shining thing will have, but I also know this because of having had the very privilege of having it.

I do not think Ayu would be any happier in America listening to Justin Bieber than she is here, surrounded by many generations and branches of her family, living in a family compound that has existed longer than my family has been American.

She does not seem to fully know how special her part in the ancestral ceremony every six months is, how special her familial ties are, everyone she knows having equally strong ones too.

How lucky she is to know of ancestors to pray to, to know the rhythms of temple life, to belong to the Balinese concept of Desa Kala Patra -- space, time, person -- to be connected to spirits, to believe in cosmic harmony, to not have to fight against everything around her to live a life that is also good to other people.

But I do. And that’s a privilege. And a luxury.

So I sit on my borrowed bed with Ayu, in a house belonging to her family for longer than my own people can possibly imagine.

I say Ma’af.

I let her borrow my ipod.

It’s hers for as long as she wants.

I almost forgot to tell you

This year, I spent Rosh Hashanah in a Balinese Hindu temple of the Wesia caste of Bedulu, asking for purification from Saang Hyang Widi Wasa, the Balinese God that unifies Wisnu, Shiva and Brahma, for purification through offerings of flowers and incense, and celebrating the temple’s anniversary.

Now there’s a sentence I never dreamt of having the privilege to write.

Amen.