Home | Join! | Help | Browse | Forums | NuWorld | NWF | PoPo   

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
Tread Softly
Saturday. 6.30.12 7:11 pm
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

--W.B. Yeats

Comment! (3) | Recommend!

Zac Efron and Justin Bieber
Saturday. 6.30.12 6:28 am
"Try it," said Zac Efron, holding a beat up old motorcycle helmet and a little white pill. The helmet was dark green and sparkly, like a space ship from the 80s. I hesitated. I looked at Justin Bieber, whose smile was both friendly and sad. I was watching the entire scene from above, outside of my body. My little sister looked skeptical. She was the opposite of me in every way. I was willowy and shy with fine bones, a fair complexion and a pointed, elvish nose. She was sturdy and freckled, with a long pony-tail of thick brown hair.

I edged forward and he dropped the pill in my hand. I swallowed it and reached out for the helmet. When I put the helmet on I felt a great feeling of joy and freedom, wrapped up in a million colored balloon ribbons. "You feel good enough with that helmet on, you can make out with him" Zac said with a smirk, jerking his thumb at the Biebs. I had a far-away feeling that was supposed to be a good thing. Didn't everyone want to make out with Justin Bieber? I could tell all my friends! They invited me to take a train ride with them. The boat was owned by the American Girl Doll company, they said, and it stopped at all of these amazing destinations and all anyone did was wear the helmet and have fun. I agreed to come along. My sister took my arm and we followed them to the boat.

We sped through the countryside, and at each station we saw kids waving at us like we were in a parade. The platforms were decorated to look like Candyland and the children wore bright white pinafores. My sister described them all as we passed. I was delirious to be the center of attention for Justin and Zac. I was taking my turn with the helmet on, lying on the floor of the train, when suddenly Zac was there, kissing me. I thought it was supposed to have been Justin, but I just let him kiss me, not even believing that he could be so close.

When I took off the helmet everyone was just hanging around again, sitting on different levels in the candy-colored train. "Soon we'll get there and you can meet him," Zac said, "And you can tell him that you made out with Justin."

I was confused. Justin's face darkened. "I don't want to go back to see him so soon."

"Oh come on, Biebs," returned Zac, "he's our leader. We all love him." Zac turned to us. "He's great-- he invented the helmet!"

"Yeah, I know," said Justin, not meeting Zac's eyes, "but I just can't do it again right away. I was just there."

"Oh, whatever, you're such a baby." He threw the helmet at Justin, who flinched.

Zac motioned for me to come closer. I didn't move. "Come on, what are you waiting for?" Zac asked.

"She's blind, you idiots," my sister blurted out. My face flushed with embarrassment.

"She's blind?" Zac asked in astonishment. Now it made sense... the timid way I moved down new hallways, how I used my foot to feel the edge of the wall, the way my sister took me by the arm and described for me the things we passed in the train. The third-person view of the situation. In that moment other things came into my mind as well. David Bowie, the leader of their movement. The helmet made you feel happy. It shut out all pain. Their leader would put the helmet on the children and then beat them half unconscious, and they wouldn't try to stop him because they couldn't feel it. Justin was his favorite target. The helmet and the drug that went with it was addictive, but its hold on you diminished as you aged. Justin had started to feel the beatings through the helmet. He was afraid of Great Leader Bowie. The two of them had to attract new children to the cult so that the Great Leader could continue his work on more susceptible targets. I started to cry, horrified by the trick that they had played on me. Within my teenage mind was the double absurdity that my tears came mostly out of shame for my blindness, my trembling desire to be wanted and accepted by these popular boys, and my feelings of betrayal that Zac had kissed me not out of desire but only as a trick. I felt that by ignoring my normal feelings of vulnerability for a few hours I had beat them, but I had only made myself more vulnerable, and put my sister in danger as well. I started hitting Zac in the wild and angry but completely ineffective way that girls sometimes do, battering my fists against his chest like hammers as sobs overwhelmed me. "Why did you kiss me?" I screamed.

"Oh," he said softly, gently holding back my fists. "You are blind. The helmet doesn't work if you can't see. You knew it was me instead of Justin, didn't you?" He grimaced as if he were straining against a sudden feeling of pain. "Why did I kiss you? I wanted to kiss you, that's why. I imagined what it would have been like if you and I could run away together instead of going back to our Leader. I thought you would have the helmet on and you wouldn't remember." He kissed my tear-stained cheek and then turned away. "Give me the helmet," he said. Justin shook his head. Zac grabbed it from him and put it on his head. He shook out a pill. "Hit me, Justin."

"I'm not going to do it, Zac."

"Whatever, I'm not going to remember it anyway, hit me as hard as you want, I deserve it." His voice became hard. "I know you want to do it, Justin. I deserve it." He took Justin's hand and slammed it into the side of his own head.

The phone rang.

I saw around me my bed and my pillows and the ceiling. NO. NO I must figure out how the dream is going to end! NO. FUCK. I WAS MAKING OUT WITH ZAC EFRON. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

SO WHOEVER THE FUCK WAS CALLING ME AT noon o'clock in the morning, thanks a lot for fucking nothing because you ruined my Zac Efron make-out dream you asshole! Unless it was someone I know, or my family, or my boyfriend, in which case srryguyzIdidn'tgettothephonefastenoughtrycallingmeback. ^-^;;;


Comment! (1) | Recommend!

A Russian Tale
Wednesday. 6.20.12 6:47 pm
We had been in Venezuela for four days when we met the Russian on the street. He was covered in dirt from head to toe. His clothes were the same color brown as his skin. He was barefoot. All the stores were shuttered and the road was full of debris. We had empanadas.

The Russian was from one of those islands off the coast of Kamchatka. It's probably one of those islands that Japan claims as theirs, but it doesn't matter. No island like that could really belong to a country, and no man like that could ever be contained by an island.

Lord only knows how he made it to Canada, but judging from his looks, he probably swam straight across the Bering Sea. He bought a car in Canada and drove it clear down to the tip of Mexico. After he sold the car he hitchhiked through Central America, as one is wont to do. Upon reaching Panama, he sneaked aboard a cargo ship headed for Colombia. Because nothing bad could possibly happen to stowaways on Colombian cargo ships and "snuck" is apparently not a word.

Once in Colombia he hitchhiked his way across the Venezuelan-Colombian border (and a guerilla war) and eventually made his way to Caracas, where he met us and our styrofoam container of steaming empanadas. He had been sleeping on the beach, he said, but he was a bit worried because he heard that some sketchy characters had been hanging out on the beach. We wished him luck and gave him the empanadas and he smiled and wished us До свидания. We decided not to warn him that he himself was probably the sketchy character that others were being warned about.

Comment! (4) | Recommend!

High School Memories: Part I
Friday. 6.8.12 1:37 am
I first met him in middle school. I remember him running after the bus. The kid I hated said, "Hey, look at that kid running! Ha-ha! All those guys look like cartoon characters."

By "those guys", he meant my friends. I didn't say anything because I wasn't very good at witty retorts. Plus he was kind of right.

By the time ninth grade came around I was in love with him, of course. My best friend and I admired his triceps from afar. He had at least five different code names that evolved every couple of months. All of the girls in history class were in love with him, too, but I was in love with him more and I was in love with him first. I suddenly cared desperately about a bunch of things that I hadn't thought that much about before, like the Green Bay Packers, Blink-182, and freeing Tibet. His necklace broke when we were playing football and I spent maybe an hour trying to find all of the pieces in the grass.

We had stupid things in common. We both liked Tibet, we both liked Blink-182, we both liked staring off into space for long periods of time. Ok, so maybe staring off into space was the only thing we had in common. We went bowling with our friends and he asked me if I wanted to come out to his car and check out his new stereo system. I sat in his car and he played me some music and nothing else happened. My best friend and I drove by his house one time and we were so distracted that she side-swiped a concrete guardrail.

I called him and talked to him for an hour about nothing before I got up the nerve to ask him to our school's Sadie Hawkins.

He said yes.

I got grounded for staying out too late that night. It was the only time I was ever grounded in my life. My parents said I couldn't take any phone calls for two weeks, unless it was him calling.

But he didn't call.


THE END

Comment! (4) | Recommend!

Immigration
Friday. 5.18.12 7:19 pm
I stand in a line with all of humanity. Not just the kind of humanity that you see at the DMV, no, a whole new definition of humanity including Africans, Asians, Europeans and Americans in all state of dress and all stations of life. A large African guard lets us in one by one after peering into our personal effects. We file upstairs, where a hard-faced woman sorts us to the right and to the left. She is yelling at a middle-aged Korean. A gauche! A gauche! she shouts (to the left, to the left). The woman is trying to explain something in English but the french woman keeps shouting over her. A gauche, a gauche, no no no, we are busy here, busy busy busy, in English. The Korean woman persists. Finally her words penetrate the frenchwoman's shouting. "Ah," says the french woman, her face changing completely, "In that case, to the right. I see what you mean now."

I go to the right. There is a long line. There are large African women wearing turbans and sitting in chairs, fanning themselves. Old people, fat people, everyone who can't stay standing long enough to wait out the line. A frenchwoman yells at them: "If you never get in the line, you will never be seen!"

This new frenchwoman is at once brash and affable, brash when speaking to us, affable when speaking to her many co-workers who drift in at five-to-ten minute intervals despite the fact that it is past 1:30 in the afternoon. Our names are called. A waiting room. I'm in some kind of special group but I don't know why. One by one our names are called again, each one butchered so much that its owner can hardly recognize it as his. Each person disappears behind the same blue door that slams with a crash. Friendly cartoon posters warn us about Hepatitis and female genital mutilation in a variety of languages. Don't go to work if you are sick. Wash your hands. Every so often our old friend from the desk comes in with new clueless Japanese people to deposit in the waiting room.

My name is called. I disappear behind the blue door. The man pushes me against a wall. My height is measured. A piece of paper appears before my eyes with tiny writing on it. I read the sentence in french. Do you have insurance? he says. Yes, I say. God, I love it when they say yes, he says. I stand on a scale, still holding all of my paperwork. My weight is taken. Stand in these footprints. Read these tiny letters from afar. Read them again. Go through this door and take off your shirt.

Do what?

Take off your shirt. And your bra.

The door closes. I am alone in a small room with doors on either side. I hesitate, and then I take off my shirt and my bra. The sign on the wall says to lock the door behind me. I lock it a moment before someone tries to open it. I hear him laughing about how none of the ladies ever wants to take off her shirt. I sit alone, my shirt draped over me. For the first time in years, I am actually frightened. I try to focus on the absurdity of the situation before I hyperventilate.

The other door opens. Several squat nurses are there with an X-ray machine. I am instructed to face a low wall panel. She pushes me into it, first guiding and then smashing. I am instructed to stay still. "Waiting room!" she yells, and I stumble back into my two-doored room, confused. I put my clothes back on. Is this the waiting room? Or does she mean the larger waiting room? I venture back out the original door. There is a young Japanese man there. "Do I go in here?" he asks in body language.

"I have no idea," I say in French and English.

We exchange a look that needs no translation.

My name is called again shortly and I go into a doctor's office. She tells me that my lungs look fine and asks to see my vaccination record. I give it to her and she wonders what in God's name I did in 2005. Semester at Sea, I explain. I try to explain the program. She is intelligent and kind. She asks me how I like living in France. I shrug, not expecting the question. It's great, I manage to say, and then I am dismissed. I flicker a smile at an Iranian man as we watch a confused Korean girl. Are you allowed to smile at Iranian men? My name is called again and a lady in a dirty white lab coat gives me a piece of paper. I go into an adjoining room and a woman pulls out some paperwork that I did six months ago. "Stamps." This is her greeting. I pull out 369 euros worth of official stamps. She puts x's through all of them and sticks them to my paperwork. She hands me the Holy Grail... my residency card, for which I have been waiting for more than 8 months. "What stamps?" asks my Iranian friend. I explain to him in French. He looks confused. The woman calls his name. Good luck, I say. He smiles.

I walk out of the building into the sunshine. I present my card to the office secretary, victorious.

My goodness, she says, we had better get started on the renewal process for next year.

Comment! (5) | Recommend!

The Gymnasium
Saturday. 5.12.12 2:27 am
I crept carefully into the darkened gymnasium. A low, orange glow painted the bleachers and equipment from the emergency lights above. The gym had been built on the beach so that the ocean could come under the wall at high tide and fill the deep swimming pool at the western edge. Through the darkness I could see the gentle waves of sea as they lapped onto the hard linoleum. The sea lions were there; I could sense them despite the calm surface of the inky water. My heart pounded in my chest. My hands were shaking. He was there, too. He had to be.

It was a mistake, the first time I came to the gymnasium at night. I forgot my keys in the locker room, and I could not get into my cabin. I had entered the gym through an open window. He had been there, standing in a beam of moonlight: a perfect, beautiful, ordinary boy. He had floppy hair and long, graceful fingers. He had been wearing an old pair of sweatpants and a mesh pinnie. I was in love with him from that first moment. But he was not an ordinary boy at all, and when dawn came he would turn back into a sea lion.

He had to stay wet, that was the tricky part of being in love with a sea lion boy, and we would meet in the empty locker room where we would talk over the sound of the shower. Sometimes I would stand under the shower, too, and walk back to my cabin shivering violently in the freezing dawn.

I stole along under the bleachers, keeping out of sight of the water's edge. I imagined the sea lions watching me from the blackness, their dark, penetrating eyes exposing my secret. They looked so friendly and playful during the day, but they were the only thing my love was afraid of.

All at once he appeared, taking me into his wet arms, smiling through the darkness, kissing my hair, silent but ebullient. He cast furtive glances through the bleachers towards the water, but the water was still. We made our way towards the locker room.

Neither of us saw the shapes in the darkness until it was too late. We stopped short in the same breath, but the sea lions were already upon us. They wrenched our arms apart. They dragged us into the center of the gym, towards the water. I struggled against them, but their mammoth weight was immovable. They pulled him into the dark water. I saw his hand become a flipper as it disappeared under the surface. I could see their dark shapes as they pulled him deeper. They held him fast. They were drowning him. They were drowning him. They were drowning him.

I broke away from the slippery flippers of the sea lions. I dove headlong into the pool. The sea lions terrified me. They were the perfect predators of the sea. They thrashed and dove like lightning through the three-dimensional battlefield of water. I dove. I dove and dove until my ears threatened to explode. I swallowed and dove deeper, my eyes locked on the sea lion that was my everything. When I reached him the sea lions that had been holding him let go. They seemed impressed by my wild desperation. I put my arms around him. He was still. His natural buoyancy helped me pull him to the surface. I rolled him with all of my strength onto the dry land. The sea lions grabbed me again and dragged me away from him.

"If he had stayed in the water, he would have stayed a sea lion forever," said the chief sea lion. "Now, when he becomes dry, he will stay a human forever."

I screamed. I fought against the wet, blubbery fins of the sea lions. I had thought that they were drowning him. Now I had made an irreversible decision for him that I did not feel like it was my place to make. If he became a human he could never again be a sea lion. It would be my fault. I wanted in every bone of my body for him to be a human, for him to want to be a human so that he could be with me, but that was his choice, it was not mine. I collapsed into sobs. He lay still, slowly drying.


I woke up.





"You're right, I would have wanted to be a sea lion," said Shark Boy.
"I'm sorry," I said emotionally. Even though he was joking, and it was a dream, it stung me very hard for some reason to hear him imply that he wouldn't have chosen to stay with me.
"It's ok," he said, conciliatory, in a way that made it seem like it was.

Comment! (2) | Recommend!

Bleibenlust
Wednesday. 4.25.12 6:40 am
Throughout the years of my youth, I was consumed with an all-encompassing wanderlust, an unstoppable desire to move, to keep moving, to see the world, to travel across every continent on Earth.

So I did.

Now I am suddenly consumed with an all-encompassing desire to stay put. Get a real job, have a garden, buy a dog. Own something and fix it up. Is this what happens when you turn 28?

Oh well, I guess it's time to go see some Viennese palaces and eat some wienerschnitzel while planning my next trip to Morocco.

Ciao.

Comment! (10) | Recommend!

Scaffolding
Thursday. 4.19.12 1:26 pm
For some reason I was always aware of her skeleton. Perhaps it was because when she arrived she was thin and her hair was sparse, and when I rubbed my hand along her side I could feel her ribs, her pelvis, her elbows, her tail. Apart from her skeleton there was only her eyes, which contained the non-physical part of her being and which were profound and sad. When we paid her attention her skeleton would wriggle back and forth in a frenzied manner, as if all of her ribs were connected by single threads of tendon, forced into waves by the motion of her tail. When we ignored her she sank with a deep and heavy sigh into the corner, stared a thousand yard stare, and thought deep and heavy thoughts. Perhaps had she not been a dog she would have agitated for justice, or spoken out against abuse. But as she was a dog, she was a philosopher, and as a philosopher-dog her stomach sometimes won out over her mind when she made decisions. I knew her muscles well, having spent hours massaging them. Her skin slid in a rubbery sheet across her ribs as if it were only attached at several critical points around the edges. In return for my attentions I received a patient and thorough bath from her wide and methodical tongue. Together we felt like more than two beings, like between us there was a large black space filled with colliding galaxies.

She's been gone a long time now. In my memories she is tinged in golden afternoon sunlight. The scaffolding of the dog, of which I was so aware, turned out to be an order of magnitude less important than what hung from it, what lived with in it, what filled its spaces with flesh and blood.

I miss her.

Comment! (2) | Recommend! (1)

Zanzibar's Weblog Site • NuTang.com

NuTang is the first web site to implement PPGY Technology. This page was generated in 0.045seconds.

  Send to a friend on AIM | Set as Homepage | Bookmark Home | NuTang Collage | Terms of Service & Privacy Policy | Link to Us | Monthly Top 10s
All content � Copyright 2003-2047 NuTang.com and respective members. Contact us at NuTang[AT]gmail.com.