7.22.05

Father Charles left for the Philippines to study for a year. We had become good friends. I will never see him again. This reminded me that when I leave I will never return. Before he left we went into Kundiawa together to have a beer and a game of pool. The sound of the balls clicking around the table saved us from complete silence. We had nothing to talk about. I kept thinking about how we were going to say goodbye. What should I say? Are we supposed to hug? Maybe a hand shake, pull-in to a hug? In the end, we left each other with an awkward handshake in his car. I said something generic that I can't remember.

It's the dry season. This only means that it does not rain quite as much. But the rain is polite and comes at the right times. It will dump sometimes at dusk and you can see the clouds coming in mid-afternoon. When the cold breeze sweeps through you know you only have about 15 minutes. It also rains at night and shuts the dogs up, making sleep almost fun. You just don't get those long gray days filled with intermittent spurts. The rain is nocturnal.

I watch more world news than I ever have before. A lot of coverage of the London bombings. I don't know how you stop a suicide bomber. When your own death is not a deterrent, every security precaution is virtually eliminated. It seems to me that a backlash against Pakistanis in England is imminent - a move the government is seemingly condoning. I feel bad for the mass numbers of Pakistanis, Indians and Middle Easterners in England. I doubt the average Londonite can tell the difference between a Pakistani and another nationality of similar skin tone. An Egyptian student with his books on his back is going to get on the wrong car of the tube and get his ass kicked.

When I was young I remember thinking that war was simple and cool. I liked looking at strategic battle plans that depicted the positions of each army and the advancing fronts. I was happy when we went to war with Iraq for the first time. It was an opportunity for USA to 'kick butt'. The death toll was just another stat, like the number of rebounds or blocked shots in a basketball game. It was clean. There were great villains with fantastic names that made you scowl when you said them right - Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini. We were the good guys. The dates were defined. WWII, US Involvement: 1941-1945. No sweat. This terror war, or whatever it's called, I don't know when it started. 9/11 is the simple answer but it began before that. I don't know who we are fighting anymore. I don't even know what I mean by 'we'.