The Reader Travels

I’m currently reading Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, set in modern day Mumbai.  It’s led me to research the geography of India, to see which state Mumbai is in and what languages they speak.  There’s a glossary at the back of the book to teach me words I do not understand. I feel the tensions between the birds of different feathers, lines drawn between people of different faiths and those from different states and countries. I would love to see a Mumbai version of the movie Crash. It is perhaps a more apt setting even than Los Angeles.

When I saw the first story on Yahoo!’s home page about the attacks, I was drawn immediately, connected in a way I never expected to be.  My heart doesn’t often bleed.  I usually see things through a logical eye that accepts that humans will wreak suffering upon each other out of hatred and insecurity, in the name of their god or their country.  Sad, but inevitable.  Yet I still imagined myself there, since the literary word had already brought me to this land a half a world away.

So, even though there is violence and suffering the world over, tonight my warm wishes go out to the city of Mumbai, in the state of Maharashtra, in the land of India. May the waters of the Arabian Sea bring comfort and healing.

I think my Shakespeare in the movies tour was devised just so I could talk about Strange Brew and 10 Things I Hate About You, two of my all-time favorite films. But I realize it’s gotten way out of hand, what with so much other material out there.

10 Things is not just another teenage movie, and it’s not just another Shakespeare rip-off. It is a fine tribute to The Taming of the Shrew, embracing the interpretation that Shakespeare was a feminist. Kat is fierce and independent, a feminist as Shakespeare himself could never have imagined.

And I even liked Julia Stiles, even though she’s deterring me from watching O. I love the scene where she gets all drunk, dances on the table and then hits her head on the chandelier. It brought me back to my own drunken high school years. I was never a table dancer, but I did tend to throw myself at guys who couldn’t stand a woman who wasn’t submissive. There were no Patruchio’s in my high school.

I like to see a man with a small dog. It says to me, he ain’t compensatin’ for nothin’. It also says, he’s sensitive, yet brave, brave and confident in himself because he doesn’t care what others think.

Of course, it could mean he’s got an overbearing wife at home, who forces him to walk her little pet, when all he wants is a German shepherd. Or, it could mean he’s trying to appear sensitive to pick up chicks, like my first boyfriend, who used to bring his little white Maltese to the beach.

Either way, I prefer that guy to the one who says, I’d be embarrassed to walk a little dog like that. That guy! He’s got issues.

In searching for a good place to watch the Texas Longhorn football games, we found a new tex-mex restaurant called 7 Salsas close to Dallas Cowboys headquarters. There’s a pretty bartender and a football-loving manager who cheers along with us. After trying out a number of supremely obnoxious sports bars, we sat down at the bar and suddenly felt at home.

Last week we arrived after half time because the first place we went to was such a dud. But this week, we arrived for kick-off and stayed until the Red Raider fans rushed the field for the second time, when the game was actually over.

Apparently they do most of their business at the lunch hour, so the crowd was pretty slim for Saturday night.  The intimate bar area was full, kinda like having a party at home, where I cleaned the whole house, but everyone is congregating in the warmth of the kitchen.

So, in talking to the manager about his travels and his daughter studying to be an architect in Chicago, I asked him where he was from. He was born in the US, but was raised in Mexico. I asked him what state. He misunderstood my question and said it was Texas. After I clarified, he said he was raised in Coahuila, so today I went to my trusty map of the Mexican states to see where that was in relation to Sonora and Chihuahua and Nuevo Leon, the three border states I could see in my head at the time, and it was right there in the middle.

I can’t count the number of times I have visited this map. I just love to scroll over the states to see them light up and show their names. I can adventure here any time I want, even if I’ve only ever stepped foot in the state of Quintana Roo, which is as far from the Texas border as I could get and still be in Mexico.