2008-11-05 - 5:02 p.m.
Two Brief and Highly Informal World Reports by ELOFTING@HOTMAIL.COM
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"Glory be to Allah, my child, that you have come safely out of their hands. The people who now live in the city are invaders from the black lands of the West; they came up suddenly out of the sea one day and massacred all the Faithful (Muslims). They worship strange and incomprehensible things, and speak an obscure and barbarous language; they eat evil-smelling, putrescent things, such as rotten cheese and game which they hang up; they never wash, for, at their birth, ugly men in black garments pour water on their heads, and this ablution (Baptism), accompanied by strange gestures, frees them from all obligation of washing for the rest of their lives. That they might not be tempted by water, they at once destroyed the hammams (public baths) and public fountains, building in their place shops where harlots sell a yellow liquid with foam on top, which they call drink, but which is either fermented urine or something worse. And their women, my son, are the abominations of calamity. Like the men they do not wash; but they whiten their faces with slaked lime and powdered egg-shells. They do not wear linen or drawers to protect them from the dust of the road, so that their presence is pestilential and the fire of hell will never clean them. Such are the people among whom I, the last Mussulman (Muslim) here left alive, must pass what rests to me of earthly existence. Yet I praise the Highest who allowed me to be born in a Faith as pure as the sky from which it comes."
-except from Shaharazad's two-hundred-and-seventh night of storytelling (one of my new favorite stories)
Considering this, it's sad and an uncomfortable kind of funny that America thinks it can win the war on terror. I mean, how is sending soldiers (who are probably the least-educated people most-prone-to-barbaric-behavior in any population) after the lunatic fringe of this religion going to help people get along better when even mainstream Muslims have, apparently, felt this way about non-Muslims for hundreds, and some say more than a thousand, years (when the Thousand and One Nights were born)?
Based on what I've learned from the Thousand and One Nights, the best ways to get along with Muslims are to smell really good (especially of rose and orange waters) and to serve delicate pastries and refreshing sherbets to your guests.
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Economic uncertainty, as summed up nicely by the Lehman Brother's collapse, has, meanwhile, produced an unanticipated benefit for me. People don't, it seems, want to bother me as much as they used to for not wanting babies these days.
And I declare to you now what I have learned from experience to be the best way to explain this decision; I like kids just fine, but I don't want to be a mom.*
(I know, I know, why should I have to explain myself? Having a womb is not an obligation to use it. But just you try being married to a tall, handsome thirty-three-year-old man who has an awful lot of friends who are in the throes of baby-making at this particular point in time. You will be all but interrogated for expressing anything less than a zealous enthusiasm for making your own babies.)
Until very recently, this explanation has sufficed, just barely, for the baby-enthused. I got the impression that some people thought me to be at least slightly monstrous for not wanting babies, but that was appropriate because I, in return, find an inability to understand this to be mildly appalling. It annoyed me when people I barely knew would tell me that I would change my mind (they don't know that), but Shuhei (who says that he likes me more than babies) knows that I'm not going to and he's the only person who really needs to understand this. Finally, it was both flattering and strangely offensive when people postulated about our babies being especially good-looking, but I think that, deep down, we all knew that that was a lame reason to breed.
Imagine my surprise when, at the wedding I attended this week-end, as talk of loved ones and future plan flew, not being a mom was suddenly a proposal that was immediately comprehensible, even to people I'd just met. Since the last time I'd had to explain this, people had become a lot more concerned about how they were going to provide for their babies. Being a mom was hard, everyone agreed.
As so, Lehman Brothers, I thank you. Thank you for making this world seem slightly less trustworthy and thus, for making it a slightly better place for unwilling moms.
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* My contribution to tomorrow's future is, I hope, as follows. Ten years from now, the babies that Shuhei's friends are making now will start to enter their angsty phases. It is my secret hope that after especially bad fights they have with their parents they will run away and come to us ("cool uncle Shuhei and cool aunt Erin" as they will think of us). I'll secretly call their parent when they're in the tub, or outside, or somewhere, so that they won't worry. Then we will play Scrabble and I will help them with their English and Science homework, or maybe teach them how to make trifles.
