Why is it you continue to grow, only to feel like you still havent learned anything? A realization about this came today: its because you bounce from side to side, action and reaction, and only rarely get synthesis. A very windy road, and you gradually get wiser. PC is like that, but its also raining and you keep running your car into the ditch! It's very literally the mountain road in the Andes in Bolivia.

I've become much more aware of what it means to be a Tennesseean. I learned what it means to have a nationality, and more importantly what that does not mean. In the epigraph to my favorite book RAYUELA, it says : There's nothing worse than to represent a country. I like being in Morocco, often I love it, and the trick to that sentence is that, instead, I'd much rather just have to represent myself. Especially when I'm sitting, like tonite, in the open air cafe alongside the street, and there's a more religious man-wearing the skull cap- with his chair pointed slant from his table, 90* to mine.

A friend of mine is trying to convert to Judaism. If you're aware, last week I was in Rabat and celebrated Hannukah with a Jewish-American family. They were giving her pointers : They don't want you to convert. They'll let you, but only after they send you through the grinder. They're going to haze you!

Similar to a religious convert, the more secular experience has many parallels to that. Just being here, you'll be beaten up in the same way. They dont (always) intend for you to suffer in order to earn your place in the new culture, but to adopt and manuever through their daily activities and life can be very a lacerating. Or, if they don't strike enough to make you bleed, at least they hit you hard enough to turn you purple all over. And the more time this occurs, the harder the punches can be.

The past two months were the hardest for me. Three weeks away helped a great deal. The fact is that the convert is always more rule-conscious than the locals are. And simultaneously, you are less conscious of where the flexible points buried in the rules, something that the locals utilize but that are hidden to you.

Then, you wear the rules less lightly. It becomes not second nature, but maybe a third or fourth nature. You still have the accent, but people dont have to ask you to repeat yourself. You do somethings automatically. This can be good; it can also cause havoc if you are too relaxed.

The chart PC gives us shows us these points. Acclimitization followed by new abrasions, followed by greater adjustment. Throughout the service you get these ups and downs. They say the mid point is the worst down you will get, at least until you go home and try to reassimilate (that's far worse, since your expectations are so loaded).



There's a story in TIME that I'll post here, saying how a study done related to testosterone levels and the body posture. Take up more space, and you can double the level of testosterone in your blood. Sit on the floor with your arms around your legs, and your testosterone level goes down. In a way, then, that's like what I've seen through these hard months. For 100 days here I had severe agoraphobia. The more I stayed in my room, the more I wanted to stay in my room, the weaker I felt and like that in a circle. Like in th Time article, and like they say in Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12 Step Programs, Fake It Until You Make It. So, coming out again and again, firstly, made it less of a sensation in the street, less crowding me, plus being outside and being OK outside reduced those mental stresses.


Now I feel much more accepted by the community. The people have been much more humanized. The less generalizations, the better, and that's not cultural but personal as well.

One major change : Different views on alcohol vs. marijuana

A major lesson, though purely anecdotal: in Sefrou, Will S. told me that he feels their society has a much better vice than ours. So, in case you don't know, Islam forbids alcohol. Kif, or hash, or marijuana, is not good but its allowed. Just like many Christians believe its OK to drink but not smoke. So, Morocco is apparently the world's leading producer of marijuana. Likewise, they have the reputation as the crazy cousins of the Arab world, exporting their sex workers to other countrys -- or else, the men come here to go to the brothels they don't have back home (another point of difference, the people here are not allowed to masturbate, and so they are expected to go to visit prostitutes as soon as they're in high school-).

Their belief about what drugs are OK is exactly the opposite of ours. A cafe here, directly next to the police station, has people smoking marijuana there every day. The police came only when they heard people were drinking alcohol. Accordingly, they watch American movies where people sit at a table and wine comes, and this is to them as it would be to us, to hear of a dad passing marijuana around the table to his kids.

I'm all about sobriety, not for Puritanical reasons but for control. When Will said they have the preferable widespread vice, I've come to agree with him. In low doses alcohol is much better, ok, but that second, third, or fifth drink add up quickly, pushing you into a whole different level of danger that seemingly is not possible with marjuana. I asked Americans here that smoke and they say, ''Alcohol makes you do things you'd never do. Drive a car off a bridge, shoot somebody that looked at your wife in a funny way. Marijuana, it makes you stupid, sure, but your decision-making ability is not affected so strongly that you will sleep with a person unless you already wanted to. You'd never pick up the gun, or never think to slit your wrists or beat your wife.''

With this in mind, being around people here all day, I only feel uncomfortable when a person stumbles into the cyber after drinking the super-strong date wine. I couldnt tell you if a person was high or not, though I know my host dad smokes for three hours every night, 10 till 1230. It makes him paranoid, sure, but the only times he's backed me into the wall were after he drank his beers, yelling tashleheet loudly at me.

I suppose its not that I think marijuana is necessarily better now than the way I used to think of it, its just I've come to appreciate this society is a lot more peaceful overall because the stronger, more unpredictable and chaotic of the two is the one they try to suppress, rather than the other way around (which is what we do).

Well, something to think about. 'Nite!

ps - Last thought, having read the TEL QUEL article about prostitution and the Morocco Loco view of other Arab nations, I feel some kinship with the people. We also as Americans export our vices, in politics and in media, and rarely do people get a glimpse of what makes us great. That we are as popular as we are is hard to believe -- like the convert, I feel the excesses of where I come from more strongly than they do, because Im more rule-conscious... a tourist girl I saw yesterday, for example, came wearing shorts. Such empathy I had with this person and at the same time, how strongly I felt the Moroccan man now living in my brain shouting their opinions at me. Then you add, well, those wine glasses so often seen in our movies and our advertisements, and then how we export our pornography across the world -- San Bernadino valley, voila our American girls' prowess on display. And to hear anyone in this country wax poetic about how great America is, and Im astounded. I agree with them, and now more than ever*, but it's still an uneasy and surreal thing to try to imagine how they arrived at their enthusiasm.


*Im proud of the US because, together with the fact that its all pretty orderly, we're confident enough to be able to allow people to pursue questionable things that aren't mainstream.