114. All I got

Dubai, Morocco, meandering around a subject

What I’m up to

Writing this on a flight from Casablanca to Bahrain (from where we’ll travel to Dubai, spend the night, then depart for Taipei first thing in the morning). We got to spend our Lunar New Year break with friends in UAE and Morocco.

Trip highlights:

• Seeing our friends, of course. We love every chance we have to see C and S, and it was so meaningful to get to see the Ws’ new home in Casablanca.

• The absolutely perfect weather we enjoyed over our entire visit.

• Driving from Marrakech to the Atlas Mountains; some of the most beautiful vistas I’ve ever seen in my life. For most of the drive from Casablanca to Marrakech, Paul could not stop commenting on the snow-cap mountain range (“There’s just so much snow!”). The next day, we headed straight for them. We ended up picnicking in a snow field under bright blue skies. Just the stuff of dreams.

• The Marrakech Medina. While I didn’t enjoy haggling blindly, I loved winding through alleys, my senses overwhelmed. Our Marrakech haul: a knockoff Arsenal jersey for me (which I put on in the car while Arsenal crushed Tottenham), cactus silk throw pillow covers, bracelets for Lucy and her friends, a leather ottoman (which Paul calls le pouf), and two tiny mint tea glasses. I also got a small painted dish for my mom.

• Some of the most delicious meals: a ftour (Ifkar) feast with dozens and dozens of dishes; Turkish breakfast round 2 with a view of the Dubai Palm; grilled meat, frites, salad, and as many olives as we could eat in a hole-in-the-wall grill near the Ws’ house; a Filipino-Cajun fusion seafood boil with the Ps and the Cs.

What I’m reading

I read Vendela Vida’s The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty. I just searched for “Morocco” in Libby, skipped the non-fiction and historical novels, and landed on this. I’ve read other novels by Vida (whom I discovered when she married Dave Eggers). This one started quite inauspiciously: a girl is flipping through a guidebook on the plane to Casablanca and she reads, “The first thing you should know about Casablanca is how to get out of Casablanca.” She then proceeds to get robbed. I put it down at this point, but curiosity got the better of me, and the story improved (before ending somewhat abruptly). I am not not happy to have read it.

I finally finished North Woods.

I’m listening to Amor Towle’s collection of short stories Table for Two. He is always so good.

I am ignoring the copy of The Odyssey I should be reading.

What I’m watching

I just watched Gone Baby Gone for the first time because that’s what the Monday Night Movie crew watched in our absence. I didn’t realize it’s a Dennis Lehane story (and I think Mystic River is a masterpiece). Well, I thought this - especially the first half - was quite a masterpiece, too. Affleck > Damon in my book. Unpopular opinion?

I also started Ryan Murphy’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. My TikTok has blown up with 90s fashion because of it, and so far that’s the highlight for me, too. A couple of TikTokers that show up regularly on my feed worked in fashion (one at Calvin Klein, just a couple of years before Bessette) and tell great stories about their experiences, and ohhh, it gives me nostalgia for a world before cell phones. (I see the irony in that sentence, I do). In terms of the love story itself, I do remember when all of it went down and knowing how it ends makes it not quite just a breezy watch, for sure.

What I’m thinking about

Today marks 3 months before Anna graduates. I was talking to R the other night about how it’s not just hard to process how quickly time (e.g., my child’s entire childhood) has flown by, it’s also the bittersweet realization that we never really know when “lasts” happen. I am mourning the imminent end to the period of my life with kids at home, but the reality is, the “kids” part is so different even now. We used to go on family camping trips to the mountains somewhat frequently, but now with sports, homework, etc., it’s just not as feasible to pack up on a Friday night and wake up in the mountains.

There’s mercy in the gradual shifts of life, of course. I think it might be too much if we had to process every time a “last” happened.

The truth is, every moment is a last, right? We can’t relive any moment twice.

Thankful for this last.

What I’m learning

I mentioned before that journaling - and Substack - helps me process my thoughts; otherwise, an idea or observation or tension will enter my mind and then just as quickly disappear. Talking with friends helps, too, although I have found that sometimes my disjointed stream-of-consciousness processing can elicit confusion more than understanding. Recently, I was trying to articulate a jumble of ideas I had yet to consolidate into a singular topic (the jumble below, in fact), and fell silent in embarrassment when the two people I was talking to looked blank, then amused.

But then! I opened my email and read a Substack by Jeff Chu, who, in his last letter and his most recent book, Good Soil, mentioned a Chinese way of storytelling, which he describes as “orbit[ing] its subject.” He says,

“…sometimes it might feel as if the details are sketchy, even scant. Digressions are common, particularly as fragments of memory emerge in the light of new information, and thus the storyteller can seem to be going in circles or meandering around their subject. Slowly, though, the data accumulates… But (one hopes) the story builds.”

YES! Yes, that’s exactly what I do! Sometimes articulating the fragments - the data points - helps to build a story. This is, then, the line of reasoning that is starting to tie together some thoughts:

• During my last International School Teacher Book Club meeting, B talked about the book Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch. The concept of cultural literacy has maybe dropped out of fashion because of its inherent elitism, but there are aspects of this idea that ring true to me. As a teacher, I’ve found it’s become more and more difficult to come up with shared stories and references my kids will understand. It’s not even that they don’t understand my references because I’m older - it’s more that they don’t even share references with each other (outside of internet culture). I am constantly interrupting my own lectures when I realize that oh, my students don’t get the allusion because they’re not familiar with the Greek myth or oh, they can’t understand why this statement caused such political chaos because they don’t know the history. Practically speaking, B points out that missing reference points (or what we could consider important shared knowledge) makes it harder to develop a schema, which in turn makes it harder to “place” new information.

• During an Innovation Team meeting at school, one of my colleagues showed us a BBC news clip about the increasing percentage of Japanese teens who admit to having AI boy/girlfriends. The very next day, I stumbled upon a study that found 1/3 of American teenagers see AI as a “friend.” At the same time, I was reading a book called Annie Bot, about a “companion” AI doll that gains sentience. In all of these cases, what stands out is the appeal of frictionless relationships. Human relationships are hard. What makes human relationships rich is the tension, the need to work through challenges in order to build closeness. AI circumvents this altogether. I can get why people see the allure in this (human relationships are HARD!!) but oh, how frightening.

• When I brought up Annie Bot and the AI studies to my book club, my fellow teachers and I sighed heavily. It feels like we’re fighting a losing fight. Then I said, “But we’re still here.” One of the teachers, J, perked up and said, “Did you know that’s a motto of the Welsh people? Yma O Hyd. Still here.

• And then I saw this exact sentiment came up in the halftime show: Seguimos aquí.

• The act of persisting, of staying “in it,” of STILL CARING, is an act of resistance, of rebellion, of courage.

• I had my AP Lit students analyze the halftime show, but I realized before doing that, they needed to build their cultural literacy in the form of a refresher (or primer??) on Puerto Rico and its relationship with the United States.

• You can’t analyze what you don’t understand.

• After the Super Bowl, my social media feeds were inundated with Bad Bunny think pieces. I loved all the examples of real life literary analysis! What gave me pause, however, was a Facebook post one of my acquaintances shared. In it, a pastor was working through the tensions he found when contemplating the Bad Bunny halftime show and Turning Point’s alternative. One, he says, depicts God’s love in action without invoking his name. The other invokes his name without putting love into action. He concludes by affirming the importance of grappling with how we define what is godly vs. what is not.

So how do these thoughts come together? I think the thread here is the necessity of tension… of building understanding, which allows us to analyze, which then allows us to place new information into our framework of understanding, which builds out worldview… which makes us who we are.

That wouldn’t earn the thesis point in AP Lit, but it’s all I got.

What I’m digging

I picked up this viral Uniqlo bag for my plane personal item. At around $20, the bag isn’t the best quality, but it served its purpose. It’s a good size for travel and it zips securely. I can wear it cross-body. Probably most importantly, the bag itself weighs next to nothing. (However, if I were to do it all over again, I may have just stuck with my 17-year-old Patagonia tote bag.)

I have this Anker Power Bank that’s also a charging block. It’s heavier as a combo device, but it’s so nice to just have to remember to pack just one thing to charge my devices. I recommend it!

Paul restocked my perfume (my second time mentioning it in two newsletters!) for Valentine’s Day. One of them smells like Morocco to me - sandalwood, a whiff of smoke cutting through clean, cold air. Lovely.

Obviously, obviously - I’m digging the rugs I bought in Morocco.

Kate