Shopping for Frustration

I love to shop.

I love to look around for that perfect gift for somebody.
I love to come out of a shop with a bag full of DVDs I hadn't even known I wanted.
I love spending hours on end in a bookshop and browsing until the stack of books I want to buy becomes too heavy for me to carry.

And yet, shopping for clothes makes me want to cry and scream after about five minutes.
There is nothing that will destroy my morale and my will to live quite so quickly as a clothes shop.

You wonder why? Me too.
The last time I checked, my anatomy was "normal". One head, two arms conveniently linked to the body at the shoulders, one torso, two legs ending in two feet, which point the right way (as far as I can tell). My joints bend in the directions they should, I have no tail, no wings, nor any other appendages not normally associated with Homo sapiens.
Granted, my body is closer to Rubens' idea of beauty than to Karl Lagerfeld's...but still.

It's the same pattern every time. I walk into the first shop with a clear idea of what I want and what it should look like, full of naive hope that *this time* will be different.
Five minutes later, my hands are full with stuff I like (just like in a bookshop).
Then follows the dreaded ritual of Trying It On.
In small, enclosed spaces with far too much light and far too many mirrors for self-delusion.
At this point, my mood takes a nose-dive into the deepest depths of self-loathing, because the clothes don't fit.
After the fourth item, I become convinced that nothing will fit. Not today. Not ever.
That the search is hopeless and therefore not worth continuing. But I know that I still need those clothes, because going naked and/or freezing is not an option. At that point, I want to either scream in frustration and trash the entire shop, or curl up in a corner and cry...or both.
I'm not kidding - clothes shopping regularly brings me to tears.

By far the worst is the sacred quest for Trousers That Fit (TM).
Finding the Holy Grail seems easy by comparison.

There are billions of trousers out there, and a portion of those are (nominally) my size.
Of those, some are basically imposters, which aren't really my size at all, but have been labelled as such purely to increase the feeling that there is something wrong with me.

Others are, in all obvious respects, more or less my size, but there is a wrongness about them that makes them look weird on me or at least uncomfortable for me. Some even look good right up until the moment when I first sit down and get back up again.
Those are Ill-Fitting Trousers, some of which live in my closet by necessity, because I'm not much of a skirt-person, and even less of a going-naked-person.
Jeans are the worst. I like jeans, but somehow they always make me look as if I had a penis because they bulge in all the wrong places. For the record, I don't have a penis and I don't want one. And no Freudian jeans-conspiracy will convince me otherwise.

I actually can't remember if I ever owned Trousers That Fit (TM).
If I did, it must have been at least 10 years ago.
But I still haven't given up hope that somewhere out there, they do exist.
I have a clear idea of what I want and what it should look like, and I'm absolutely sure that next time, everything will be different.

On the way back?

I don't know...maybe?

Most of the time it doesn't feel that way at all.

But sometimes I look at the fact that I'm reading (and occasionally even writing) again, or I go home from the couple of hours of almost-work I'm doing most days, and I get the feeling that I might be on the right track.

Anyway, I'll try and post here again - just to prove to myself that I can.

Hiatus

I'm sorry this blog has slipped into a coma almost before it even started.

Bla bla bla ... cycloid depression ... doctor-talk ... yadda ... mumbo-jumbo ...

Bonus question: Is "cycloid" a real word? (and if it is, should it be?)

In Other News...

• First and foremost - Happy Birthday Philip Roth!
  
  
• Arthur C. Clarke died at the age of 90 in his home in Sri Lanka.
  
  
• Another great man, Philip Jones Griffiths, has passed away on Tuesday.
  
  
• The BBC tells me that Shin-Bet has launched a blog. Isn't that a little absurd? Counterintuitive? Reading just the headline, I thought that this would contain either somewhat factual accounts...
  
  

  "Today, we spent 18 hours sitting in an unmarked car at an undisclosed location, waiting for our subject to make an appearance. Nothing happened. Between us, we had 12 cups of coffee and 8 sandwiches. Nothing continued to happen."
  
  

  ...or some intern's opportunity for Mary-Sue/Gary-Stu-esque wish fulfillment...
  
  

  "My backup was delayed, so I was forced to single-handedly clear out the Hamas command centre/Hizbollah stronghold, using nothing but my trusty Uzis. After I had run out of ammunition, I had to rely solely on my superior Krav Maga skills to neutralize the six men who were still on their feet. Just another day at the office, I always say."
  
  

  ...but it turns out the whole thing is just a boring ol' recruitment drive. I'm so disappointed.
  
  
  

Happy Anniversary?

Today is the fifth anniversary of the War in Iraq.
Or, as The Dick put it, "the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the campaign that liberated the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein's tyranny."

I will not go into what I think of this war. That is for any other day. But I received an IRC newsletter today, and it contained a set statistics that cannot be highlighted enough.

The Iraqi refugee crisis is one of enormous scale, and today it is the fastest growing refugee emergency in the world. The statistics are alarming:

• 60,000 — Iraqi refugees fleeing their homes every month, mostly because they have been threatened with death, torture, or kidnapping
• 4,400,000 — displaced Iraqis
• 220,000 — displaced Iraqi children who have stopped going to school
• 12,000 — United States goal for the number resettled Iraqi refugees to enter the country in FY 2008
• 1,432 — Iraqi refugees actually resettled in the United States in 2008 so far.
  

Okay...let's break that down then, shall we?

60,000 Iraqis fleeing their homes every month.
These are people who found themselves threatened for such heinous crimes as 'trying to make a living', or 'trying to do their job'. Examples of this include people who worked for the Americans (in any capacity, but I would assume translators get the worst of it), journalists, and even male gynaecologists.

4,400,000 displaced Iraqis.
The number is actually pretty hard to estimate, but it's probably in the ballpark. The figure includes internally displaced Iraqis as well as the refugees who fled to neighbouring countries. Estimates for the total number of refugees speak of 1-2 million, who fled in two major waves - during the period of sanctions against Iraq and after the bombing of the Askari Mosque in Samarra in Feb 2006.

220,000 displaced Iraqi children who have stopped going to school.
They stopped because it's too dangerous for them to leave the house, or, if they are refugees, because their parents can't afford to send them to school. There is probably also a number of them who can't go to school because they are too traumatised.

12,000 - United States goal for the number of resettled Iraqi refugees in FY 2008
To put this in perspective: The official target for FY 2007 was to resettle 7,000 Iraqis...they managed to resettle 1,608. On the upside, in the first four months of this new fiscal year, they have already managed to resettle 1,432 Iraqis. Will they do better than last year? Sure. Will they reach their target? Not likely. To be fair, State Dept and Dept of Homeland Security have conceded that they may not make it. On the other hand...131,000 Vietnamese were successfully resettled between May and December 1975 alone (over 900,000 in total), and more than 150,000 Bosnian refugees were accepted during the Bosnia conflict.

Some more anything-but-fun facts about Iraqi refugees:

Of all the surrounding countries, only Lebanon permits Iraqi refugees to work. Elsewhere, particularly in Jordan and Syria, the refugees are forced to live in desperate poverty, hidden from the authorities, and oftentimes without legal status. In order to receive help from the UNHCR, they have to come out of hiding and get registered, which is difficult and can lead to imprisonment or deportation, while chances for successful resettlement are relatively small.

In other cases, refugees come together in refugee camps, which means that they can be registered and receive support from the aid organisation administering the camp. For Iraqi refugees, there are no camps, with the people instead spattered across urban areas (e.g. Eastern Amman). This makes it difficult for aid organisations to reach them, let alone provide any sort of systematic, ongoing support structures.

Their situation also means that they are exposed to hostility from the host population. Eastern Amman is a poor area, and the people there blame Iraqis for their poverty. Jordan has been generous in accommodating large numbers of refugees before, and it has caused the country a number of difficulties. It is not surprising that Jordanians should be wary of more of the same happening. Also, let's not forget that, thanks to Saddam Hussein, Iraqis are probably not the most popular to begin with.

The host countries' ambivalence towards the refugees also makes it difficult for aid agencies trying to help, as anybody who wants to support the Iraqis is met with mistrust.

As for repatriation (which has been widely reported on by the media), according to UNHCR only two families have returned from Syria, and few have returned from Jordan. Most refugees seem to find the idea inconceivable (and who can blame them?), and many of those who try turn back almost immediately when they find their homes occupied by others or their neighbourhoods unsafe.

So...on this anniversary, I wish Iraq and its people FEW UNHAPPY RETURNS.
May the nightmare end soon.

Big News

(comes from small typos)

According to the Comment page of the Times Online,

Hair can reveal regions where you drank water and can determine whether murder victims lived prior to death.

The wonders of science never cease to amaze me.
I wonder how long it will take them to fix this. (I'm enjoying this too much right now to alert them myself...)

The Lost Tribe

All week, Al Jazeera has been running special coverage on the Hmong tribe of Laos. (Just when I thought I couldn't possibly love them more...) The features are on YouTube...watch them if you can.

Before the 1960s, the Hmong were recruited and armed by the CIA to fight a civil war against the Communist Pathet Lao. When the war was lost and the country became Lao PDR, the CIA dropped them.
Many Hmong emigrated (about a third of those to the United States), some are living in abject poverty in Thailand. But some remained and found that their war simply would not end. Targeted for retribution by the victorious government, they had no choice but to remain in the jungle.
Let me repeat that...this is not some stubborn rebel militia, this is an entire tribe, including their children and their elderly, who spend their lives on the run from one jungle camp to the next, without food, without shelter, without healthcare. The weapons they received during their war are just about the only thing they own, and there seems to be no hope for reintegration in their immediate future.

(...) I walked among starving children, their tiny frames scarred by mortar shrapnel. Young men, toting rifles and with dull-eyed infants strapped to their backs, ripped open their shirts to show me their wounds. An old man grabbed my hand and guided it over the contours of shrapnel buried in his gut. A teenage girl, no more than 15, whimpered at my feet, pawed at my legs and cried, "They've killed my husband. They've killed my mother, my father, my brother �" (...)

I read this article when it first came out. There were pictures, some of which I still cannot get out of my head. This story is partly responsible for my choosing my field of work (peace & development), because I ended up with a ball of white hot rage inside my gut. That rage is still there, and it's fuelled almost every single day, but now I can at least channel it into something constructive.