Where Am I Going?

I hope I can continue to blog semi-regularly since I have two jobs, one of which can be rather stressful; both of which I find rather unchallenging according to my intellect. Also, I am torn about blogging because here I really cannot sit down and craft my writing the way I would in a personal journal.

The temptation of blogging is not to really tailor your writing meticulously because there is always the underlying desire to get what you write out immediately if only to see it in sitting online. Also looking at the statistics of where your readers are coming from only adds to the ego, but leaves those of us who have dreamed of and have been encouraged over the years to take up the writing life professionally feeling a little empty as if we wasting valuable time. I have also noticed that I do a very poor job of editing when I write online, much worse then when I keep a journal or a diary.

I was encouraged when I was a 24 year graduate student by the then editor of a local newspaper to write after he printed a column I wrote about teenage pregnancy in his paper. That editor was Philip Lee Williams, and you can read his biography on Wikipedia right here. He later became a published novelist, and at his first book signing, I was there where I met his agent who showed an interest in me and who asked me if I might have something written that she might look at. Those days seem like eons ago. I have gone through so much and experienced so much which a blog is painfully too small and restrictive to contain. My life has been rather extraordinary for its' ups and down and degree of adventure when I come to think of it, though everyday I feel I still have not done enough despite choosing years ago to not live an average life. I stepped out of the box as an African American woman and developed my own style and uniqueness, and I feel I am so much the better for it.

So where am I now? I am in a place (not really the physical location) that is too small for me, and where I am wasting a little too much time just "piddling" away. I need to be refreshing my knowledge of Spanish which is an important language to have here, and I need to be working on learning how to play that guitar I bought two Christmas' ago. I feel empty sometimes because I need to get back to just old fashioned journal writing far from the maddening crowd of the internet. I will continue to write here though, but entries may come down to only 2 or 3 times a week at most because of my jobs and also because I need to focus on what I expressed above.

Sometimes I think that if Phil Williams remembers me, he is wondering, "Where is her book?" Life is short, and I had better get on the two I have started. Yes, I have started two, and it pains me that I have got them here lying around like neglected children.

Tomorrow will be an event. I have to work tomorrow morning for 5 hours, but after I get off, I will go to the home of one of our neighbors who sold us the land on on which our home was built back in 1966 when I was only 4 years old. Our Miss Lizzie Swanson will be 100 years old tomorrow. The neighborhood is giving her a centennial celebration. Miss Lizzie, as everyone calls her, is a widow whose husband Jack committed suicide during my first year in college when he discovered that he had cancer. He just blew his brains out in their yard one day. Miss Lizzie never had any children and most of her family members have now passed away, so she has a number of people she views as her adopted children, some of whom are my parents. I knew she was nearing the 100 mark, but it was not until a few minutes ago when I asked mom did I learn about her landmark age. It seems that Miss Lizzie just keeps going and going like the Energizer Bunny.

Where as with most things, I guess the same applies to blogs: quality is more important than quantity. Of course, I do subscribe to the belief that if you have a blog, don't go for months on end not writing in it and permit it to die if you can at all help it. Write, by all means, as regularly as possible.

I will end here pointing to a blog with lovely photos which speaks volumes on the Romantic, beauty, exoticism, eroticism, mysticism, just the plain cute, the gritty, the edgy, you name it if you are a Romantic and a connoisseur of beauty like I am. This is an eclectic mix, and I also adore the eclectic along with the Romantic. While searching for blogs that fit my perception of the some of the best of what the blogosphere has to offer on the arts, history, the personal, Romance, etc., I found Images That Speak to Me that can be seen here. These images are a real treat:)

From Volodya, With Love

Volodya is the diminutive of the Russian name Vladimir. Russian names can have several short forms. My friend and "sister" Tatiana's is Tanya. Her long time boyfriend Nickolai is Kolya or Nick. Anastasia can be Nastia, Stasia, Tasia, Nastenka, and more.

However, here I am writing about a Volodya named Vladimir Putin, the new "Tsar of all the Russias" which is currently the Russian Federation. I was mightly surprised when out picking up some things this evening to see the current issue of Time magazine with Putin's face on it. 'So Time thinks Putin should the person of the year,' I wondered. Well certainly Vladimir Putin was an unexpected choice winning out over Al Gore, J.K. Rowling, General David Petraeus and China's paramount leader Hu Jintao. After my initial mild shock, I thought it all made sense and goes right along with our times. There is a bad, cold, and calculated sort of Romanticism about Putin just like it was with Saddam Hussein.

I read Vladimir Putin's autobiography back in the late 1990s. One thing that came out was the man was a man of authority and iron conviction similar to the old Russian autocrats. Putin, I learned then, was quite disciplined, tough, and saw himself as a Christian even though he had been a member of the KGB and had grown up knowing nothing be an atheistic Soviet Russia. A warmth once existed between President Bush and Putin because the former no doubtedly saw in the latter a follower of the Good Book. Over the years both men has shown some dictatorial tendencies and a tendency to get into wars they cannot nor have the desire to extricate themselves from. Under Putin some Russians feel that Russia never had it so good with a vibrant nouveau riche and luxury stores and items that would have made the Communists and Bolsheviks puke. But the rich is getting richer in Russia and the poor are not seeing the fruits of capitalism like they had hoped. Corruption is rampant. The mafia runs plenty behind the scenes. Journalists are learning fast to not criticize and make waves against Putin's methods or accidents or bullets may happen.

So is Putin a new Tsar? If one has read the histories of some of the Russian Tsars, I would say that Putin is a throw back to them having the characteristics of a strong sense of destiny for Russia, purpose, authortarianism, and perhaps even silent feelings of his own divine right. When Putin was first elected president, I asked my Russian friend what did she think about Russia's possibilities with this man. "Putin was with the KGB," she said with concern and wariness in her voice. "We don't know about this man." Last year the director of studies at the language school I taught at in Istanbul who is a Russian citizen, said to me, "Putin looks like a rat! The man is terrible! Russia was destroyed because of people like him before. Those who ruled there during Communist times were mainly drunken soldiers and peasants. The Romanovs at least had some class. They were cultured and learned, but Putin comes from this same group that caused so much suffering in Russia."

In the prelude to Times' article "A Tsar is Born" which can be read here, it is written, that Putin is "no ordinary politician. He is charmless yet adored by his nation. He took a country in chaos and remade it in his own image: tough, aggrieved, defiant." (12/31/07-1/7/08 issue)

According to Time, Vladimir Putin has never sent an e-mail in his life.

Perhaps a new Tsar HAS been born...

My Wish For the New Year

I have a wish for the New Year that some way, somehow things will get better in this world. I am not very optimistic that it will, but still I hope.

Peace and hope seem to be ephemeral for so many. People look to groups and government to bring them peace, when so many fail to recognize that if each individual could seriously and without fear look at their own failures and remedy them, it would be a start towards a better existence. Each and every individual that is old enough to know the difference between right and wrong really need everyday to look at the man or woman in the mirror and ask what he or she can do to make this world a better place?

Making the world a better place is not about running away from challenges, being cowardly, being constantly critical and seeing everyone else's fault, not facing up to reality, or isolating. Some of the world's ills are the result of too few of us examing our hearts and finding out what is wrong there. This year what many of us need to do is make resolutions we can keep. This year the first place where every person can begin is to forgive all hurts and to ask for forgiveness. Just thinking I'm going to move on is not the way to go. The baggage from failed relationships and friends just accumulates and carries over to other relationships to only destroy them too in the long run.

Over the years my best friendships have been very fine in quality indeed because they all involved transparency, honesty, respect, and similar high principles. I only offer advise to my friends when they ask for it and vice versa.

It all begins with the individual. Start asking yourself each day, "How can I make someone else's day?" Not always, "How can someone make MY day?" Just a kind or delightful word, gesture, and look can go a long way in helping people. Listening helps too. No one cares much for a person who turns a conversation into a one dimensional exercise. Just listen sometimes. Tonight I just sat and listened at work to an woman who told me how she had to move to Georgia because she and husband lost their business and their home in Michigan. She is having to start over at 57. I hope my listening to her helped. I think it did. I was very happy to oblige by hearing her tale.

Last night I chatted with my best friend in Turkey just before New Year's here. We share each other's secrets and dreams, and I think it helps my friend just to have someone to listen who does not judge her. She thinks my off again on again Turkish boyfriend who lives in Turkey is being ridiculous in some of his overly emotional and Romantic comments he makes in e-mails to me, but she is like a sister to me and is free to say what she wants. I even joked with her that she can have him, even though I do care for him and is concerned about what might happen to him and his country. I have begged him to stop smoking, but he says he can't.

I do make the time to think about myself. I know when I need attention, and I know when it is time to focus on others. It is never fully about me. I hope it never becomes that way.

I had never met any Iraqis until last winter when I was Istanbul when I met a young woman name Waa'fa. Waa'fa and her family were the children of an Iraqi father and a Turkish mother. She was born in Baghdad. Before I meet her and her two brothers I had still felt very troubled about the plight of the people of Iraq. You don't have to physically meet a people to care about what happens to them. For the four years that the war in Iraq has raged, not a day has passed when my heart did not ache for that country. Some American citizens have long seemed to be only concerned about our troops, but the Iraqis are people too with hopes, dreams, and aspirations. I did not believe the surge would be big enough to help, but it seems now that perhaps it is working. I feel some happiness and hope for Iraq, a thing a year ago this time, I most certainly did not feel.

So I will end this rambling piece before midnight strikes and it is January 2nd with a very nice video of pre-war Iraq. Some of the refugees have started coming back. The walls between Sunni and Shiite communities which were erected by American forces are being brought down it is said. An Iraqi Romeo and Juliet who are "living happily ever after" now can be seen here.

Here too is my favorite video of Baghdad as it once was. The beautiful song in the video is sung by Hussein al Jasmi as in my previous post.



I wish all humankind a peaceful and a USEFUL 2008, and especially so for the people of Iraq.

Romance of the Despot

As you get older it seems that years just wisk by leaving you to wonder how a year seemed to drag on when one is a child or teenager, but once you pass 30 or 40 how it just seems without explanation to speed up. Well, one year ago one of the most blustering and dramatic of the world's strongmen was executed: Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti.

Saddam Hussein, "The Butcher of Baghdad," "The New Nasser," "Liberator of Palestine," "The Godfather," "The Anointed," "Great Uncle," along with other titles he probably reveled in and loathed, really had an amazing career which was Romantic by its' rise from the dirt and desolation of the Iraqi village of al-Ouja to "great" Arab lion and leader with over 30 palaces scattered throughout Iraq to the gallows of one of his former prisons. Saddam's story was definitely one of the poor boy who makes good, but his own pride and miscalculations along with the pride and miscalculations of others led to the suffering of millions of Iraqi innocents. There has been much written about Saddam, much of which is only rumor, speculation, and sensationalism. Feelings about him run from passionately for him to passionately against him. Just look at YouTube in the last year where there are more and more videos put on in honor of the man. The comments about him after these videos run the gamut from calling him a saint and martyr to a dog and bastard. Some think he is either in Heaven or Muslim Paradise and others think he is burning in Hell with his two sons Uday and Qusay who preceded him in death. Rarely is there a middle ground reached where Saddam is concerned.

Today in Tikrit which is basically Saddam's hometown (al-Ouja is where he was born and apparently in close proximity) he was honored with songs and chants by children, many of whom are so young they don't remember him. There were also fiery speeches. Saddam was loved and hated by many. When he was executed last year, demonstrations broke in of all places, India. India has the largest Muslim population of an country on earth even though the chief religion is Hinduism, but for some reason there was a lot of outrage there on December 30th last year. Some of it was certainly because Saddam was executed on the first day of

Eid, but Saddam has also been rumored to have given aid to India in the past. The reason why Indian demonstrated may have been because his personal physician is said to have been Indian. Saddam was also said to be generous to those whom he felt honored or liked him. Here is a photo of him back in the 1970s on a visit to India when he was vice president of Iraq.That is Indira Gandhi, the prime minister of India, beside him. Like her counterpart in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, who died on Thursday, Indira met a tragic end. Bhutto's father who was president and prime minister was executed by hanging like Saddam. The real relationship between Saddam and the Indians is unknown to me. I do know that over the years, Saddam actively courted friendships with some countries in Africa. He was a friend of Castro and Qaddafi, and near the end of his rule was visited by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela as this photo attests.

Saddam was a Romantic Despot and once the special glowing friend of the US in the region. At one point, before Iraq entered the war with Iran in 1980, Iraq was the most advanced nation of the region with a highly literate population, many of whom had university educations. Saddam, himself, always aspired to the best. He listed himself as both a lawyer and a general, but both titles were false. As a young man, Saddam allowed his penchant for politics to interfere with his quest to become an attorney. He tried to get into the military academy in Baghdad, but he was rejected. Being a tall man at 6'2" who at different periods of his life was strikingly handsome, he might have done his country a better service if he had become an actor. Saddam loved to dress up and would don the robes of the Bedouin chieftain, the general, or the look of the 1930s style gangster. He was a family man who loved to swim and play with his children, or at least he created this image for the public.His youngest daughter Hala was his favorite and was often seen with him even at political meetings when she was a little girl. She is reputed to have been a very sweet girl who loved Iraq and the Iraqi people, even stealing money and jewelry from her parents to hand out to poor people. Here is Saddam playing with Hala.

Here is Saddam sewing the sleeve on the dress of his eldest daughter Raghad, but it may possibly be Hala.


Here is Saddam and family in an old photo from the 1970s or 80s. The little girl beside him sucking her thumb is Hala.Saddam was said to have been married possibly 4 times. The photo above is with his first wife Sajida, who was also his cousin. She is the blonde lady. Saddam's and Sajida's marriage was arranged when he was only 3 years old. They met when he was about 10 and had run away from home to be with Sajida's family where he would be allowed to go to school, Sajida's father being a school teacher. Saddam's stepfather was totally against him receiving an education, beat and abused him, and felt Saddam should only aspire to be a farmer. Saddam obviously thought otherwise and hit the road to find his destiny.

Saddam Hussein saw himself as a Renaissance man, a throwback to leaders of old like Nebuchadnezzar and Saladin. Like Old King Neb, Saddam promoted colossal building programs for his country with many monuments to himself also thrown in. When he began modernizing his country while still vice president, he had electricity put in place throughout Iraq, plus he also made sure that every family received a television set and a refrigerator. More darkly, Saddam also got ideas from Joseph Stalin to whom he bore a slight physical resemblance. Saddam had the ancient city of Babylon reconstructed. He claimed to be a direct descendent of the prophet Muhammad. He was a patron of the arts with artists constantly using him in their subject matter as the "New Saladin" on a white horse leading Arab armies into victory or dressed in the garb of a Babylonian or Assyrian warrior in a chariot firing arrows. Saddam forged and forced a common identity on Iraq, a country pieced togther and created by the British. Out of Sunni, Shiites, Christians, Bedouins, Yazidis, Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Persians, Turkmen, Syriacs, Chaldeans, and even Jews Saddam demanded that they all see themselves as not just inheritors of an Arab state, but as descendants of the ancient empires of the Babylonians and Assyrians.

Saddam saw himself as a poet and also as a novelist, writing about 5 Romantic novels with political and allegorical themes. One of his first was Zabibah and the King. Even in his second and final imprisonment, Saddam was writing poetry.

Over the years we have heard mostly about the very bad Saddam Hussein, a man viewed by many as a brutal criminal, but don't we all have our faults, some of us with small and others with gargantuan. Saddam was a big promoter of the importance of education and pushed for women all across Iraq to be educated. All of his supposed wives were educated women. Under Saddam, the Christian community of Iraq was protected, but now they are threated and persecuted. One of Saddam's highest ranking officials was Tariq Aziz, a Catholic, who is still imprisoned by US forces. In the documentary Uncle Saddam, Saddam is shown as a man who saw himself as a father figure to his nation, encouraging people in the basics of just taking baths everyday in his regular TV announcements. When all hell broke loss in Iraq, some people lamented that perhaps Saddam knew what he was doing by keeping his foot on the necks of the Iraqis. He obviously was more well versed in Iraq than we Americans were.

Saddam's rise and fall were dramatic. When he was found in a hole in December 2003, he showed the world that the old adage, "the bigger they are the harder they fall" is very true. Saddam had gone from gangster to dishoveled Santa Claus. As my pastor said, "That was a SAD end."Saddam's destiny ran full circle in December 30, 2006. After the embarassment of being shown to the world as a poor old man pulled out of a hole and living in a two room filthy hut just across the river from one of his palaces, Saddam redeemed himself on the gallows. He died bravely and with dignity, praying the prayer which Muslims say before they die. The world's reactions were mixed. I was in Turkey at the time, and one of my colleagues who was Australian told another one of my American colleagues, "That was WRONG what the Americans did to Saddam Hussein. There is going to be hell to pay for this." Even the Vatican condemned the execution as morally wrong and said that modern nations do not engage in conduct such as hanging.
Though the world now does not seem to have the time or the common sense to learn and remember tough lessons, the life of Saddam Hussein is a lesson which many of us could benefit from by learning about.

To wrap this post up, here is a very well done tribute to Saddam Hussein. There are many on YouTube using Arabic songs, rap tunes by Tupac Shakur, and I even found one with a Hallelujah tune. The song in this video is sung by Hussein Al Jasmi.

The Romance of Cinderella 1997

After the shock and sadness of Benazir's Bhutto's death and how it will certainly impact and have tough consequences for Pakistan and I believe the entire planet, I need to go back to the realm of the Romantic and the beautiful. Leave politics to bloggers who obsess about politics and current affairs a little too much, some who have no new ideas or expertise.

In the realm of the Romantic is the story of Cinderella. Most people are probably familar with the story of the beautiful girl who is ill treated by her stepmother and sisters, forced to be their servant, is rescued by a fairy god mother who sends her to the prince's ball, has to leave before the strike of the clock at 12 midnight, loses her glass slipper, and is finally reunited with the prince after his great search with the slipper, marries him and lives happily ever after. There have been several film versions and stage musicals of the fairy tale adapted from what is a folk tale/myth found in a number of cultures.

Ten years ago, Disney presented Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella which was very unique because the cast was multi-racial. The African-American singer actress Brandy Norwood plays the title role. A Filipino actor, Paolo Montalban, is the prince. Whoopi Goldberg is the prince's mother. A white actor, Victor Garber, plays the king. Bernadette Peters plays Cinderella's evil stepmother. And Whitney Houston is Cinderella's fairy god mother. The production was Emmy award winning despite its' very innovative casting. I was fortunate to see it when it was first presented on Disney, and felt that if I were a movie producer I would cast parts not according to race, but by talent.

Look at this scene when Cinderella comes to ball and the prince sees her. Pure Romance!



I was amazed that Disney took this chance with the casting. Most comments about this production on YouTube site are very favorable, with many saying they just love Paolo Montalban as the prince and how he had done Asians proud. He has a very good voice which shows training unlike Brandy's which is good, but does not indicate professional coaching. Just like the song "Ten Minutes Ago," "Do I Want You Because You're Wonderful" is also another one of my favorites in the film.



I have Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella in my collection. It can be bought here at Amazon. For Romantics who are either children, adolescents, or adults, this version of Cinderella is a feast, a miletone, and a unique treat.