May 18, 2004
Sofa King... ugly
Among my favorite things to do:Wrap my legs around Him and watch Charlie Rose and count how many times Charlie interrupts his guests with windy sermonizing that inevitably leaves me with the kind of crazy rage that can only be assuaged by torrid lovemaking ....
Annnyyyyyyway.....
So, here's the problem: Charlie could be interviewing all three SellasEwech, and as enraptured as I could be with that conversation, eventually, inevitably, my attention would veer to the sofa in the corner of our living room.
Ohhhhh... talk about wicked cotius interruptus...
I am a broken woman. This sofa has broken me--inqiCH. So, this sofa is the remnant of his bachelorhood. And listen, honestly, I have no hang ups about his past life. The past remains in the past, is a steadfast rule I've had and stuck to. So, it ain't that that's been making my spine quiver for the past sixteen months--yeah, I've been counting! That sofa has been one gigantic stain (not too get all Bill Clinton on you) on my peace of mind and my rightful place as a yetekeberku bale tidarawi.
That sofa is spitefully ugly. It is an affront to every color sensibility, every fiber of every fabric, every interior design logic, and every Feng Shui lore. The spring Elle Decor on the coffee table mocks me mercilessly. It guffaws at me. It wants to wear a burkah and curse its wuqabi that made it end up in a house that's home to THAT sofa.
This sofa is... think purple stripes over pink circles, black squares over tewket yellow triangles, neon green diamonds over rude blue ovals ... all plastered on... velvet, of course. Be inqrt lie... and the arms are flanked with fake lacquer edging; its fluffy back stands like a proud warrior's chest ...
I hate that sofa. Not just hate, indigebachiu yasfeligal .Loathe. The kind of loathe you see in the eyes of the aTmaqi at Kidane M'hiret when he finds out that teTemaqi was once a PenTE. Uuufff!
When we combined households, I had just assumed, naturally, that the sofa would end up first at the Salvation Army, and then in it's rightful resting place: in some drug dealer's crack den. Really, I never even remotely thought about the possibility that it'd end up causing my bile to curdle. So, imagine my paralyzed-with-trauma speechlessness when I heard him instruct the mover to "be careful with that sofa; it's special... can you cover it up in the truck?"
Huh???
It all happened in a daze, and before I knew it, the sofa was angled by the new entertainment center, as conspicuous and nauseating as Weizero Manalebish's Chanel No 5 at an addis amet ye'rat gbza .
Now, I pride myself in being one of those women who don't believe in changing a man. Live and let live be-zia gebto bezia weTo.... But as much as I tried, after sixteen torturous months, I couldn't hold back anymore.
"That... that sofa..." My nose was wrinkled; my eyes were icy.
"What? What sofa? Which sofa?" Demmoko he says it with suuuuuch innocence, even though I know that he knows what I really think of that pink, yellow, green, purple monstrosity.
"That sofa!" I point to it as if it was one of those nifTam kids who have a knack for wiping their noses on your laundered jacket. "I don't think it's working for me." I tried my hand at arctic restraint while digging my nails into palm.
Pause.
Deep, meditative sigh.
"What's wrong with the sofa?" His right hand crosses over his mammoth chest and rubs on his left bicep. He knows that drives me a little over the edge with lust.
"That sofa," I say, holding my ground, "is everything that was wrong with the 80s."
Pause.
Deep, meditative and most definitely patronizing sigh.
"That sofa, nefsE, was bought in the 90s."
He lets that sentence hover in the air, as if its capacious truth, wisdom and revelation would eventually wash over me, and that the strength of the embedded profundity in it would surely leave me staggering... and... and he'd be there to steady me. He raised one eyebrow, giving me the same look James Bond gives a buxom double agent right before he's about to, um, interrogate her. The "I'm here for ya, babe" look that makes women finally realize that men really are wired differently from us.
What the...?!!?
That he would even think that such a defar non sequitur such as "That sofa was bought in the 90s" would, what, make me love that goddamned giff of a furniture!
"I want it out of my life," I spat out
There. FrrriTT.
"Why?"
Because it makes me want to torture it and take pictures of it in humiliating positions! Howabout that?
I wish I could be one of those manipulative women who can cry and bat their eyes at the drop of a hat ... because I have a feeling that he is the kind of Ethiopian man that likes swooping down to rescue fragile women. But I was bristling with anger and this was no time for coquettishness. Or, or, I wish I was one of those women who can bribe their man with sex.
I can just imagine how that conversation would go....
"If you get rid of the sofa I will let you X-Y-Z...."
Him: (dryly) "You like X-Y-Zing more than I do..."
And I do.
So, I decided the straight out route, except that now I was tongue tied as to why pink streaked sofa should be chucked into a bonfire...
It bothers the shit out me!!! When did that become an unsatisfactory reason?
I hate that sofa...
April 30, 2004
All the Seven Deadly Sins in One Neat Package
I have been told that I have three more of these to churn out. Three? Don't that seem arbitrary? --oh, I feel ye seba whine comin' on ....-- Geeez! I don't lead that exciting a life, I tried to snivel back at the Seledistas. And it takes soooo much work and whatever to self-examine and write about it without sounding whatever... They just blinked (they have the ability to do that over email) and snapped their fingers and forwarded me Dinqnesh's "Chop! Chop!" response to my last blog.Bastards!
The newest thing in my life that has added to its perpetual state of bedlam, not that anyone cares or nothin, is that a good friend of mine just announced that she and husband and kids were moving back to Ethiopia. Ohm'god! Talk about Shock and Awe.
a) Never knew she had such ambitions vis-a-vis the madderland
b) Why do these things happen to me?
c) What the f***!!
Milachiu, I wish you knew this girl-- she has "Sex and the City" viewing parties, eko! An upstanding citizen of the ETppie brigade...
So, as soon as the shock in "Shock and Awe" subsided, I couldn't help but feel awe, which, of course, I resented 'coz I moonlight as a playa-hata. I started with my lauded "Abdeshal indE?" (said in a prize-winning gasp of indignation) and graduated to "Ere be N'guss".... She kept nattering on. Something about raising her kids... simplifying life...entrenching them in identity... giniqulqual, giniqulqual. Then she said, "My parents did that for me. I owe my kids that." (Parents= the newly educated diplomatic barons thanks to Ababa Janhoy.) "Can you imagine if my parents stayed in Europe? How would I have turned out?" Er... not commuting from Darien and getting preferred status at Hermes?
Can you tell? Bitterness... drip... drip... drip...
It's all too much for me. How do people make life changing decisions like this? I am catapulted into a whirlpool of angst if I have to change dry cleaners, ferchrissake! But there goes she, my friend, and she's taking her rose-tinted glasses with her. Ahh... the rose-tinted glasses. Something we've been trained to drop. I am beginning to think, though, that we need those glasses to make this kind of leap in faith. We've all been so busy taking them off and examining and re-examining our lives (because we're hip therapy-savvy ETs), that I think we have been using "self healing" as a crutch. Hence, the whole BS about going back when things "get better". Meanwhile, what we needed was to don back our rose-tinted Ralph Laurens. What is braver than having the balls to have blind faith? What is more courageous than to embrace the belief that even among all the crap, there is enough good to hang on to.
It is so obnoxious to be blessed with that kind of hope.
So, I'm listening to my friend talk about this move with the kind of ease that it takes to flip a channel. I am disturbed by her peace of mind. I am envious of her optimism and confidence... especially the way she utters the phrase, "... besides, I owe Ethiopia". Suddenly, I am feeling lonely. I look for signs of faltering in her eyes.
"Don't you ask yourself 'What the hell am I doing to my children?'" I ask her. It was a desperate and shameless final stab to proverbially cold-shower her.
"Yep. I asked myself that when a friend of my daughter's asked her why her hair was not yellow like everybody else's, and I saw the pain in my daughter's eyes when she asked me to make her hair blonde. So, yeah. I did ask myself what the hell I was doing to my children. Especially when I have a choice."
I am fiercely bummed..... I am losing out to Ethiopia again-- she, that selfish, arrogant, haughty thing who knows not when to love her children and when to leave us alone. Just when we thought we've made our peace with life in sidet... she comes back to claim what should not be hers.
Seriously, what the f***!!
I want to talk about politics next time. Or sex. YenEw gudeNa has sworn to divorce me if I talk about the latter, and the SeledeNoch have promised to make my life miserable if I broach the former.
Have a great weekend.
April 19, 2004
There's No Guilt Like Yuppie Guilt
I've been chastised for not being up to speed with this Blog thing... oh, yeah, sure. As if repudiation will do the trick...OK. So I finally saw "Lost In Translation" and... can ANYONE figure out ferenjies? Seriously??!! Judging by the orgasmic reviews and arefa-frothing-around-the-mouth lovefest this movie has gotten, I thought it would be one of those movies that Hollywood gives back to thinking people as atonement for Rambo 1 to 20.
Is it me, or... what size balls do you need to GO to someone's country and feel totally at ease and licensed to portray the citizens as these sickeningly obsequious, overly sexualized afterthoughts that are props to your mediocre plots? I mean WHAT SIZE BALLS??? There is not one Japanese in that movie that has any redeeming quality.
And the best part is... there poses waifish, do-you-like-the-vapid-look-in-my-eyes, i-can't-raise-my-voice-more-than-a-whisper, deer-caught-in-a-demerra-bonfire director of this garish movie, Sofia Coppola, twirling in front of the paparazzi looking all Emmiye Mariyam like!! Whaaaaa? I mean... can you imagine her in the middle of directing this crap? "Yeah... oooh.... Yes... can the Japanese prostitute be a little more....ummm... like, more Japanese? I can still understand her English!"
I was appalled by that recent movie -can't remember the name- where the drought of 84 in Ethiopia was made to be a cute backdrop for two qebeT ferenjies to fall in love in the middle of all the tragedy! Thank God it did not do well in the Box Office-- but it still gave me homegrown rass mitat!
I recently got an email from someone I know well asking me to sign a petition asking CNN to stop airing "Surviving Hunger"-- a Sorious Samura documentary about food crisis in Ethiopia. Samura lives with a family in a village in Northern Ethiopia for a month or so and documents the family's plight. In my sometimes-but-not-often humble opinion, it is one of the best docs I've seen in a while. So you can imagine my surprise when I got that petition email from my friend... An email, by the way, filled with venom and hyperbole on how this documentary makes Ethiopia look bad.... Zeraff hagerE...
There is a scene in that documentary where two young men have to go begging from door to door for food. "Sile Mariam......" The look in their eyes... the way their voices break... it was a devastating indictment of middle class Ethiopians. Especially those of us ETppies (ET yuppies) in the Diaspora who have been doing jack to give back. As that memorable line in "Food and Men" (article in current issue of Seleda) put it so succinctly, "Karma is a bitch"! We are going to have to answer to ourselves sooner or later as to why we are so darn... mediocre.
The thing is, the person who sent me the email is a well-to-do ETppie, who I have not been able to get to contribute $10 a month towards a project a few of us have started to help a cause in Ethiopia. $10!! That same person spends $200 on a bottle of wine without batting an eye......
I'm over this shit! In a big way! "Surviving Hunger", although it can be campy at times, does something verrrrrrrrry uncomfortable to the guilty conscious of the part-time Ethiopian... it digs its fingers in our shoulders and shoves us in front of the mirror.... Yisewiren!
But I digress....
Zemzem
April 13, 2004
Secondo: (Temporary?) Exile from Feminism
A belated melkam Fasika, friends.Family dinner at Zemzem's:
It's hard to explain my uncle...
We started off Fasika dinner with one of my uncle's distressfully balmy statements: "YenE'mma ulcer....." [dramatic pause].. "YenE'mma ulcer Sweden d'ress hEjE new yetegeNechiew... Ay-hey-hey! Indihu beqelalu yetegNech indatmeslachiu...Swedenochu feligew yageNuwat ulcer nech..."
The thing is, when my uncle says this he uses the same tone he reserves for when he speaks of "YeNa'mma hager.... ItyoPPiya... ay-hey hey..."
So somewhere between the doro weT and the mnchet abish, we all very myteriously ended up opining on domestically detected ailments versus non-domestic.
I usually shun antakara regarding gender politics, but I need to get something off my chest: maybe the men are right. Maybe we women don't know what we want. Beqa-yawilachiu-uuff! My friend, Ms. Mole'qeq let's call her, just dumped a great guy for the flimsiest of reasons. Apparently he was not perfect. And then, of course, all her bellyaching starts about how there are no men... I'm over it. It's giving me export strength hod qusil.
But then again... my friend --Tewbelew, let's call him... Smart kid... one of those corporately pedigreed ivy leaguers who is supernaturally cerebral. After a stellar history of dating real women (except he calls them "Intellectual Femmes who are always primed for verbal warfare") he decided to settle down with one of those preternaturally beautiful Ethiopian women who's default it is to be dauntingly pouty while blinking in slow motion. The girl, for she was that, had steadfast ambitions to be the perfect trophy wife/domestic diva. And why not? When you look like her, those are the kind of things that you can afford to have as goals. And so, Tewbelew, smitten by her stunning looks and charmed by her... ahem, "unpretentious intellect", proposed marriage right before he made partner. I believe the exact quote he used was: "I can think for the both of us."
So, five years later, Tewbelew has moved out and is shopping for a divorce lawyer. (And we thought it wouldn't last... five years.) Now, the girl-woman stands accused of not being able to pinpoint Fallujah on a map. Y'know? I know I'm supposed to hold Tewbelew's hand and "m'Ts" the demise of his marriage, but somehow, I ended up telling him what a duplicitous shithead he was--- which made him... defensive. Uuuuffffff. "We can't talk about serious stuff. I want someone who can challenge me..."
Meanwhile at the ranch, stunning girlchild is trying to unfurl a map to find "Firja".
---
Anyway, so, I asked yenEw gudeNa if he would like to come to a showing of "The Vagina Monologues" with me. He looked at me and said dryly, "I'll pass. Tell me when it becomes a dialogue." I went with a friend and felt so oddly out of place with the feminist rhetoric once so easily rolled off my tongue.
I left the performance strangely liberated.
I actually like folding his clothes and getting dinner ready and waiting if I am the first one home.
There... there's that goddamned Fallujah! I knew I saw it on The NewsHour.
April 9, 2004
Ze First Dip...
Entry 1I was expressly told by the wayward felaCH qoraChoch at Seleda that the only thing I can't talk about is politics. So guess what I am going to talk about?
Ok. Maybe not since my political bent is comprised of an incomprehensible hodgepodge of political disciplines: autocracy, peppered with a soupcon of totalitarianism, anarchy, theocracy, meritocracy and a dash of ibdetcracy to make things interesting. And what the heck, add democracy to that pile-- (the doled out be ration card kind... not the runaway, hulum mebt alew kind.)
I am at that odd age where I find myself too old for self inflicted existential drama, yet too young for passive "egzihabEr yawqal"s. What's a girl to do? ... Although I did catch myself saying something that freakishly sounded like my mother... some random non-sequitor rejoinder like "ay ye sew neger..." So, where the hell does that put me?
I'm trying to quit cursing...
So, here's the part of the Ethiopian political psyche that has gotten me all hot and bothered these days... I was talking to an elderly Ethiopian man who has spent a good 30 some odd years outside of the country-- An educated ex-diplomat who, when the mood
strikes him, can wax nostalgic about his days in pre-Derg Ethiopia. Unfortunately, the mood doesn't strike him that often and it's like prying out a bong from a stoner trying to get him to reminisce. On the rare occasion that he does though... awww... he talks of an Ethiopia I wish I knew... an Ethiopia of wenzuwa-shentererruwa proportions...
I asked him recently when he was going back. "Never," he said, with shocking self-assuredness. "But...why?" It came across more a molqaqa lij blurt than a legit question. "Beqa. Ayasfeligim." !!!!
It's been a while since my heart broke. (And I didn't even get the benefit of a good roll in the hay here, neither.) He can't even think of going back to visit, let alone live. How did this happen? If 70 year old men from privileged backgrounds are opting to die and be buried in foreign lands, what chance do the rest of us have? When did this happen? I've been talking to some friends of mine who have also detected this trend among their circle of azawints. We've tried to volley about different theories: Is it that they want to die remembering the Ethiopia of yon days? IS it...?? None of the members of that generation wants to talk specifics... Does Seleda have an audience of 60 and 70 year olds?
So, I ask you, who is the lost generation here?
I wish I could will myself not to think about these things.
Until next time,
Zemzem
email_zemzem@yahoo.com
April 7, 2004
INTRODUCTION
We'd like to welcome you to a new feature at SELEDA that will temporarily replace the irreplaceable Life Diaries. SELEDA Blogger will be an on-line diary of someone...preferably someone with "Ammanuel Hospital escapee" kind of pedigree... who will scribble down his/her thoughts on a simechew/chat basis-the initial contract says ".... yadda, yadda.... commit to submitting entries at least once every three days for a period of 1 (one) month", but what are legalities at SELEDA? Nothing, that's what. (Perhaps it was a clause put in by lecherous Editor #456.2 stating the kind of punishments a blogger is to receive if he/she fails to deliver that made our first guinea pig all belligerent and unaccommodating, but that's between us and our sexual harassment coach.) Bottom line being, dear SELEDAwii, keep checking back on a semi frequent basis to read new entries.Our inaugural blogger is she they call Zemzem. (Hey, we don't ask. And we don't want them to tell.) Even though a known high maintenance curmudgeon, please help us welcome her to this forum. May she spawn other bloggers.