Room for Sleeping in the Cloud - Suzhou

What's New?

Brand Spanking New

Crossing and contemplating cultural boundaries and wandering though parallel realities is always a walk on the wild side, opening possibilities in my brain that were invisible only seconds before the encounter.

Qu'est-ce qui est nouveau?

a confident man with 4 or 5 dozen eggs in cardboard cartons balanced on his head who is walking down the hill;

working until 3 p.m. without lunch;

carefully crafting every phrase in French only to make errors despite all my hard work;

speaking and listening to a colonizing European language in a Central African nation with an anything-but European worldview;

watching Congolese music videos filmed in Brazza with amazing hip and shoulder action;

listening to the French news headlines on Congolese television;

a colonizing mother country that isn't the United States;

few Americans;

exhaustion;

and much, much more...

Do you know about Zoom?

If you search your own name on Zoom:

http://www.zoominfo.com/

you may be surprised by what you find: I know I was.

When I entered my name, I found a three jobs listed on my employment history with a photo attached of me taken informally when I was enjoying my time in Hawaii. The information in the Zoom profile included some of my past employment history and was unclaimed, which meant that anyone who wanted to claim my history and photo could have logged in to the site and done just that.

I don't like the idea that information about me, including a photo, is let loose on the Internet when I am unaware of its existence.

Is this legal? I claimed my information on Zoom, but wasn't sure if I wanted it published. I didn't have a choice in the matter.

How does this happen? I am concerned.

Elimination Dance

Elimination Dance
(an intermission)

Michael Ondaatje includes an intermission dance between the two sections of his poems in the book “The Cinnamon Peeler”. His particular intermission is sparkling with humor, exposing miniature moments of life that surprise readers with an unexpected novelty separating the doers from the observers. Here are a few of the elimination dances. I encourage you to add your own moments to the intermission.

Those who (while visiting a foreign country) have lost the end of a Q tip in their ear and have been unable to explain their problem

Gentlemen who have placed a microphone beside a naked woman’s stomach after lunch and later, after slowing down the sound considerably, have sold these noises on the open market as whale songs

All actors and poets who spit into the first row while they perform

Any dinner guest who has consumed the host’s missing contact lens along with dessert

Those who have filled in a bilingual and confidential pig survey from Statistics Canada (Une enquête sur les porcs, strictement confidentielle)

Women who gave up the accordion because of pinched breasts

Those who have pissed out the back of moving trucks

The person who borrowed my Martin Beck thriller, read it in a sauna which melted the glue off the spine so the pages drifted to the floor, stapled them together and returned the book, thinking I wouldn’t notice

Anyone with pain


Here is one of my own.

anyone who has taken a photo of a performing chicken, a strutting cock, in one of the busiest squares in Africa, Djemaa el-Fna in Marrakech- (envision acrobats, snake charmers, date sellers) and screamed at the chicken owner that she would not pay him for the shot