Rage Break

I am about to HAVE AN ANEURYSM at the document support staff at my firm.  They persecute me with their incompetence.

Why -- WHY!! -- is it so hard for people to do their jobs?  This firm rakes in something like $600 million every year and we have some of the top legal minds and most cutting-edge legal work in the country.  We go to great lengths to recruit incredibly smart, talented and competent lawyers (and somehow I managed to sneak in), but the support staff (with the exception of my own secretary and, like, two others who I know and like) is astonishingly bad. 

I mean, seriously, people.  My job, in theory, is to think and analyze and write things -- the firm pays me a lot of money to do that, and clients pay the firm even more to have me do it for them.  Also, in theory, there is a host of support staff on call to help me with all the other stuff that I need to be able to do my job efficiently -- secretaries, help-desk people, document support people.  Supposedly all the techie, computer-savvy people you could ever hope for.

So, for example, say you have a document that needs to be reformatted before it can be revised for the client.  Don't have a high-priced attorney who doesn't know the intricacies of word processing do it (or even if he does know), send it to the expert document support staff.  They'll whip it into shape in no time and at a fraction of the cost to the client.  That's how it works -- IN THEORY. 

IN REALITY, everyone's favorite lawyer knows he's going to be in a time crunch and working late through the weekend, and so he sends his document to the document support people LITERALLY DAYS IN ADVANCE with specific instructions on how to reformat the document.  They send something back, and it's wrong, so I return it with instructions to fix it.  They send something else back, and it looks fixed enough that I don't focus on it again until tonight at around 9:00pm, at which point I discover that not only is it still wrong, but IT's EVEN WORSE THAN BEFORE.  Sure, they fixed the one thing I mentioned in my first go-around, but in doing so they royally screwed up the rest of the document to the point that I have to go back, line by line, and fix everything myself.  And now it's 10:30 and on the substance of the document I'm no closer to where I need to be than I was an hour ago, and my heart is filled with rage and darkness toward everyone.  Hence my having an aneurysm at them. 

It's at moments like this when I wish I could just swear really loudly and not feel guilty about it (thanks, parents).

If this lawyer thing doesn't work out, I'm seriously going to get a job as a secretary or a help-desk person or a document support person or, heck, all three jobs at once, BECAUSE I WOULD BE A TOTAL ROCKSTAR.

Okay.  Now that I've gotten that off my chest.  Back to work.
 

Conversation at the gym

Okay, so.

Picture me.  Not huge.  You might even call me "slight of build."

Now picture a guy -- let's call him Jim -- who's probably 6'2" and around 275 lbs.  He's a big guy (a nice guy, too) and strong.  Not particularly toned, but not fat either.  Kind of what you would imagine a college or high school football player might look like by the time he's 37 year's old.

Now, finally, picture Jim and me being paired together as partners for a Crossfit workout that involves (i) running 400 meters carrying a 45-pound plate, (ii) doing 10 handstand pushups, and (iii) doing 20 pullups, all in that order, as many times as we can in 20 minutes.  We have to do the run together but can divvy the rest of the stuff up however we want between us.

Afterwards, this conversation:

Jim: Did you watch The West Wing?

Me: No.

Jim: Okay, well, in one of the last seasons there's a scene where Allison Janney (who's like, 6 feet tall) and Kristen Chenoweth (who's not even 5 feet tall) are walking down the hall together, and Allison Janney looks down at Kristen Chenoweth and says, "I can't believe we're the same species." That's all I could think about while watching you carry that 45-pound plate right now.  I mean your legs are all . . . [he gestures; I assume the word he's looking for is "twig-like"] and you have this skinny waist. And then there's me and I'm all, "HOW ARE WE EVEN THE SAME SPECIES?"

*     *     *

To which I had no good answer, because I've basically been wondering the same thing since I was twelve.  Not that I've ever wanted to be one of those huge, muscular men (though I wouldn't have been opposed to a more naturally athletic build) -- mostly I've just wondered what it would be like to go through life in such an enormous body.  I mean, it's got to be a different experience from what I have in my skinny body, right?  So strange!  It had never occurred to me that the big guys might look at me and be equally baffled.

Nor did I expect my morning workout to solve the problem of what to watch now that all my TV shows are on summer hiatus.  Double win!
 

We're having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave . . .

. . . the temperature's rising, it isn't surprising, she certainly can can-can.

Okay, so there's no can-can as far as I can see, but we certainly are having a heat wave. In the news it's being declared the "longest, strongest heat wave of the summer", the temperature maps for the area are all screaming red, and everyone looks wilted and a little, um, shall we say, "shiny" as they go about their daily lives melting from one air-conditioned refuge to another.

As I write this, I'm sitting on my balcony and the official weather report says it's 90 degrees Fahrenheit -- but feels like 100 degrees -- with 62% humidity. And I love it. I really do. Sure, I'm sweaty and and feel the tiniest bit claustrophobic, but what's not to love about living in a place where the air around you is such a tangible part of your life? All that muggy softness is like a fluffy damp blanket letting you know that your jasmine plant is about to bloom again.

I realalize that not everyone is going to agree with me, so I'm going to offer some helpful advice to those of you who think that "Scandinavia" and "beach vacation destination" are synonymous:  If you want to enjoy the summer in Washington DC, all you have to do is take an extended vacation to a place that has even worse weather! You might, say, spend two-and-a-half weeks running around Vietnam and Cambodia in June, both places where it's just as hot, probably more humid, and blessed with much less air conditioning. Or you might go to Morocco in July when it's 120 degrees Fahrenheit. That way, when you come back to the high summer swamp that is our nation's capital, you'll be saying, "Pshaw!  Is that all you've got?"

And now, who wants to sing along with Ella?





 

Water Lilly

Little miracles daily in the garden.

I awoke early this morning with the intention of going for a long bike ride before the heat of the day set in. As I ate breakfast on the balcony, something new caught my eye.

Something that hadn't been there before.

Delighted, I put cycling plans on hold and sat awhile watching loveliness blossom before my eyes.

This was supposed to be impossible. Gardening books and nursery experts alike told me that a water lilly will not bloom in the shade. They need sun -- lots and lots of direct, blazing sun -- to thrive. With a balcony that gets, at best, only a couple of hours of direct sun per day, I planted the lilly for its lilly pads and resigned myself to never seeing any flowers. Well, mostly resigned myself. For the past year and a half I've been content with lilly pads, but over the past few weeks as we toured Vietnam and Cambodia, with their lakes and ponds and fountains full of lotuses and lillies, I secretly began to hope that I might be so lucky. (Is it coincidence that I made a contribution to the god of good luck in that pagoda in Saigon? Who knows, but I'm not going to argue...)

I knew couldn't spend all of my day perched on the edge of my barrel amongst the begonias and New Guinea impatiens. I still had that bike ride to do (now in 90+ degree heat) and all my other Saturday errands. But I'm glad I took the time to watch the lilly bloom. By the time I returned in late afternoon, the flower had already closed. I don't know whether it just sensed the coming evening and will reopen again tomorrow, or if that's all I'll get to see; some lillies, I know, bloom only for a few hours. Either way, it was wonderful.

As if it knew I was missing Vietnam

My jasmine plant bloomed! 



Two blossoms this morning and a slew of buds getting ready to open.  This makes me all sorts of happy.  (And I give all credit to James and Chip, whose excellent watering skills kept my plants alive while I was galavanting through Southeast Asia.)

 

With the possible exception of gardenias, there is no floral fragrance I love more than jasmine -- and both jasmine and gardenias grew in abundance in Vietnam.  Of course, this meant that as Vanessa and I walked through towns I'd be stopping every ten feet or so to smell the flowers.  Or we'd be in a historic pagoda where everyone else would be gawking at the gilded lacquer, and I'd be all "Hey, look! JASMINE!"  Vanessa usually humored me enough to stop and smell them with me, but I'm sure everyone else was wondering who the crazy American was with his face in the bushes.  And I, of course, was wondering why don't I live in a place where I can grow jasmine and gardenias? 

 

Turns out I do.  (Yay!)

Home again

Well, I'm back.  Tucked safely away in my little apartment in Arlington, VA, enjoying powerful air conditioning and Mexican food.  It feels about as far from Cambodia as possibe.  Except for the humidity.  That is exactly the same.  Maybe even worse.  Way to go, Founding Fathers, way to build the nation's capitol in a semi-tropical swamp that doesn't even have awesome ruined temple complexes.

In the airport at Siem Reap, Cambodia.

As with the outbound trip, the flights were uneventful.  Unless you count the sighting of beadazzled men's Birkenstocks as an event (which I do), in which case that totally happened.  It's too bad that I'm feel so inhibited about taking pictures of people while they're sitting across the aisle from me in the airport looking at me, because then I could insert a photo here of the outfit.  Instead, you'll just have to imagine a polka-dotted button-down shirt, billowy hippie pants in an outrageous elephant pattern, and Birkenstocks covered in jewels.  All of which was in an understated navy-blue-and-white color scheme, because obviously when you have that much going on, something has to stay under control.

It's an outfit that would never fly in the United States (at least, not unless the guy wearing it was okay with everyone assuming that he was flamboyantly gay).  But on a slim, wealthy-looking, twentysomething Korean man, it actually worked.  That's one of the things I like about traveling -- you get to see what men can wear in societies that don't have such rigidly defined notions of masculinity that dudes get judged for wearing something other than flipflops, cargo shorts and a t-shirt.

In fact, it was interesting to see the difference between what the Koreans (men and women) wore on the flight from Cambodia to Korea, and on the flight from Korea to the US.  On the first flight (where, presumably, you had more Koreans who were planning to stay in Korea), people were wearing lots of really bright colors, with funky patterns and cuts and everything from sequins and pearls with high heels to what I can only assume were body suits that were meant for bobsledders.  On the second flight (which was equally full of people who looked Korean, but which probably had way more Americans than the other flight, and where, in any event, everyone was going to the US), the styles and colors were far more subdued, conservative and boring.  Makes me want to get out of the airport and see what people wear in the streets in Korea.

Another observation about the Koreans?  They're astonishingly good at standing in line and being orderly when it comes to boarding the airplane.  I mean, when put in large groups inside a ruined temple, they're a complete nightmare almost as bad as the Chinese for being pushy and obnoxious.  But give them an airport terminal and a boarding time and they'll line up like straight-A students.  Which actually worked to Vanessa's and my advantage.  Vanessa took one look at the long line of Koreans snaking down the terminal from our boarding gate door and said something to the effect of, "I'm sorry, but I am French today; I am not waiting in line."  Part of me wanted to point out that this was how society breaks down (just try getting through any of the Paris airports and you'll know what I mean); but the other part of me was all, "Ouais, c'est clair. On y va!"  For better or for worse, that second part won out, so we both cut right to the front of the line and were on board and seated in no time. 

The next fourteen hours or so are a blur of reading snarky memoirs and watching sappy romantic comedies and surprisingly boring thriller movies, with periods of sleeping interspersed throughout.  At one point I woke up enough to think, "Shouldn't I do something more useful with these 14 hours than just sit here judging the man in front of me for watching the GI Joe movie, like, 87 times in a row?"  So I tried to be all introspective and thoughtful, hopeful that I'd reach some new insight about myself and/or make a few important Life Decisions.  But the problem with making Life Decisions while in a jetlagged stupor in the middle of a trans-world flight is that you are not Paul Rudd in a romantic comedy with Tina Fey, and so "adopt an orphan boy from Africa and teach animal husbandry at a private liberal arts high school in New England" is just never going to be the right answer.

What I should have been doing instead of making Life Decisions was monitoring the blood circulation to my lower extremities.  Because sometime around the 12th hour I looked down at my feet and was horrified to see nothing but CANKLES AND SAUSAGE TOES at the end of my legs.  Which, btw, I don't normally have.  I'm not sure if it was the effect of gravity or prolonged seated inactivity, or just karmic reward for cutting in line to get on the plane, but basically all of the blood in my body was down in my ankles and toes making me look like an eldery woman who needs compression hose.  I considered turning around in my seat so that my feet were sticking straight up into the air and my back was on the seat, but I didn't want to get yelled at by the flight attendants (not that there's anything in the opening presentation that says we can't sit like that).  Plus, it was probably too late anyway.  So instead of deplaning into the DC airport with the alluring air of a well-tanned, ruggedly handsome scruffy traveler, I had to resign myself to deplaning with the air of a well-tanned,  scruffy traveler with cankles and sausage toes sticking out of his Birkenstocks.  But since my Birkenstocks didn't have any jewels on them, maybe people wouldn't be looking down there anyway.

And on that note, I'm off to bed.  I'm kind of dreading going back to work tomorrow and digging out of emails and backlogged projects, but overall it will be nice to get back in the routine.  I guess that's what vacations are for.  I'm hoping that things won't be too busy right off the bat so I can go back and fill in some gaps in the blog for portions that I didn't have time to write about during the trip.

 

Temples of Angkor

Like Machu Picchu, the Ayah Sofia, and Tikal, the temples of Angkor more than live up to their reputation.  It's one of those places where you get there and look around and have a hard time believing it's real. 



 

The temple complex, which is the largest in the world (way bigger than Tikal), was built by the Khmer kings between the 10th and 12th Centuries.  The temples were part of a much larger city -- population around 1 million, while London was somewhere around 55,000 -- but the mostly wooden city has since vanished, leaving only the stone temples. 

We visited three of the largest and most popular temples today: Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom (which includes Bayon, the one with all the faces), and Ta Prohm (the temple famously featured in Tomb Raider). I'm not going to do a full write-up tonight -- we're getting up at 4:00am so we can watch the sun rise over Angkor Wat (the largest temple in the group) -- but here are a few of the highlights from today.

Eastern facade of Angkor Wat

 

There are 54 towers in the temple of Bayon, each one with four smiling Buddha faces.

 

 

 

 

Part of the Terrace of the Elephants.
Note how the elephants hold clumps of lotus flowers in their trunks.

 

This is part of the temple where Tomb Raider was filmed.  It was, by far, the most crowded
of all the temples we visited today.



We fought long and hard with the Chinese tourists to get this shot.
Seriously.  They're like herds of kindergartners with ADD who
don't have any sense of personal space and who never got the memo
about how to wait in line.  They made me want to die (until I ate a
granola bar and regained perspective; then I just wanted them to die
(which, now that I think about it isn't really much of an improvement,
but it felt like progress at the time)).

 

 

 

Vanessa and our guide inside one of the corridors in Angkor Wat

 

One of the libraries in Angkor Wat

Detail of the pillars that served as blinds in the windows.

 

 

 

Central building of Angkor Wat

 

 

 

P.S.  Depending on how things go over the next 48 hours, this may be the last post from abroad.  We'll spend all the day tomorrow back at Angkor visiting more temples, and then we'll go straight to the airport.  We fly separately to Seoul around midnight and then continue separately to Chicago and DC.  With any luck, I'll be back home around noon on Sunday.  I'm hoping there will be good WiFi connections in the airports, but if not, I'll see you back in the States!

Siem Reap - Silk farm of Les Chantiers Ecoles and Artisans d'Angkor

On the afternoon of our first day in Siem Reap Vanessa and I went to visit Les Chantiers Ecoles, an establishment that teaches traditional Khmer artisanship to local youth.  The goal is to help them develop skills that will help them support themselves in the region, thereby reducing both poverty and the flight of young people to the big cities.  While the school teaches everything from lacquer-making to stone-carving, the heart of the operation seems to be their silk farm.  We arrived in time to take a free tour of the silk farm and see, first hand, the silk-making process.  Here's what we learned:

Silk worms only eat the leaves of mulberry trees.  Accordingly, the farm has mulberry orchards dedicated to feeing the little worms.  Given the risk that birds and other predators might eat the valuable silk worms, the leaves are stripped from the trees and fed to the worms indoors.
 

Mulberry trees

To prevent ants from getting inside the buildings, they're built on small stilts with mini-moats full of water surrounding each ground touchpoint.

Ant protection

The worms are tiny white creatures that have a very short life span.  We learned all the details of their stages of life -- and of course by now I've forgotten pretty much everything.  I think the life cycle is about a month long.  About half-way through, the worms spin themselves into fuzzy cocoons made of a single strand of silk.  At this point there's no risk of the worms' wandering away.  They're literally left on these giant flat baskets in the middle of the open room. 

 

Some of the worms will be allowed to hatch from their cocoons, as moths, and mate to produce new worms.  The majority of the worms, however, will be killed before they hatch.  This is necessary, you see, because the success of the silk farm depends on harvesting all those strands of silk intact -- and the moth's exit from the cocoon inevitably breaks the strands into unusably small pieces.  To kill the worms, the cocoons are placed on racks in the blazing sun. 

 

Once the worm has died, the cocoons are collected and taken to be spun into thread.  Each cocoon has about forty yards of silk, all in a single strand.  But that strand is too fine to be woven by itself, so it must be spun into thread.  The cocoons are placed into pots of boiling water to loosen the strands.  A barbed stick is used to stir the pot until the strands catch on the barb.  The strands are then fed into a spinning wheel device and spun into thread.

Raw silk spinner

There are actually two stages in the initial spinning process.  See how the cocoons and thread in the pictures above are yellowish?  That's the raw silk.  Once you get past the raw silk, the strand becomes finer and turns white.  This is the fine silk.  Given the different qualities, raw silk and fine silk are spun separately.  So once all of the raw silk has been spun off of a cocoon, the strand is cut and the cocoons are moved to a different cauldren for the spinning of the fine silk.  The process is essentially the same, but the machinery is, not surprisingly, finer.



Fine silk spinner

 

If you look closely, you can see the super-fine white strands of the fine silk
going up from the cocoons into the spinner.

Here's a photo of the different types of silk hung side by side, so you can see the difference between fine silk and raw silk.

The initial spinning creates the threads, but those threads are often gummed up with worm feces and other cocoon matter that must be removed.  Women sit and work through skeins of thread pulling out all the gunk by hand.

Once the silk has been cleaned, it must be bleached and then dyed.  Most of the colors can be obtained using natural dyes.  The baskets below contain some of the plants and minerals used to dye the silk.

Once dyed, the silk is spooled using this machine.

 

Once spooled, some of the silk is spun again into heavier warp threads.  Warp threads are the threads that run the length of the cloth.  The finer weft threads are woven over/under the warp threads.

 

The original spools are in the frame on the right-hand side of the photo.  The threads run from
the spools and are fed into the spinner between the man and woman.  The threads are then
combined into a heavier thread and wrapped around the wooden circular frame (all the red
stuff you can see is the finished warp thread).

The threads are then sent to the looms, where the weavers work their magic.  I've included photographs and video clips to give you a sense of how they work.

See the stick-spools of thread on the bench?  She's weaving an ikat.  More on that below.

Needless to say, I found all of this fascinating.  Not only were the silkworms impressive, with their miraculously strong cocoon fibers, but the skill and labor that goes into turning those fibers into gorgeous silk cloth was astonishing.  I became convinced that I needed more silk in my life -- a conviction that the school was more than ready to help with.  They have a beautiful showroom retail store called Artisans d'Angkor on-site at the farm, and another in town.  After the tour, Vanessa and I spent quite a while going through the shop thinking through how we'd like to redo our respective bedrooms and livingrooms back home... 

I instantly fell in love with the rich yellows, reds and pinks and decided to focus on pillow covers for my bed.  Narrowing my options down to just one set turned out to be impossible, so I bought a few different sets.

This gorgeous raw silk pillow cover shimmers between bright yellow and a deep reddish gold.
I bought two standard pillow cases in this fabric to serve as a backdrop of color on the bed.

Two throw pillows to go with the yellow pillows:  A large pink square with floral motif,
and a smaller rectangular pillow in multicolored stripes and red tassles.

I also got a large square pillow cover in this "jasmine" floral motif.  I went with a slightly
toned down red and gold pattern, instead of the pinks and purples and yellows that I loved
in the other set, because I realized that I have no pinks, etc., in any of my other decor at home.

I also bought some ikat, which is not only beautiful but also really cool once you know how it's made.  Remember how I flagged the photos/video of the girl weaving the ikat?  Well, here's how it works.  Instead of creating a pattern by weaving threads of different colors (see the jasmine pattern above -- that pattern was woven with gold-colored threads against a background of crimson threads), the patterns in ikat are created using a single thread that has been tie-dyed into multiple colors.  As you weave the thread through the warp, using it up and laying it against itself over time, the pattern emerges.  What's amazing to me is that they've figured out how to tie-dye the threads at such precise intervals that they can create beautiful and complicated patterns this way. 

Girls spooling the tie-dyed ikat threads

The threads are wrapped around narrow dowels.

The ikat threads don't look like much when they're just sitting there.  But feed them into the loom and, voila!, a stunning pattern emerges.

This pattern goes marvelously well set against the yellow of my other pillows.

So I bought a large square ikat pillow and a smaller
throw pillow in burgundy raw silk to complete the look.

Of course, I have all these lovely silk pillow covers but nowhere to use them.  My bed currently is done up Moroccan style after my trip to Morocco last year, and I'm not quite ready to switch out that bedding yet.  And my living room is basically built around the sofa pillows I brought back from Istanbul a few years ago.  I guess this just means I need to move into an apartment with another bedroom that I can design around these silks . . . .

(And for any of you who might want some silks of your own, Artisans d'Angkor does operate online and will ship internationally.  Just sayin'.)