Unconditional Neutrality

The past week has been marked by some pretty little twists, squishing my loosely defined life into a whole new shape…

1. That band I joined?

It’s a marching band.

This has severely affected my participation, although I am still into the whole sitting in a chair/playing music I haven’t memorized sort of thing. I do feel a hint of regret knowing I will not get to wear the fun hat. The marching band had its big debut concert at a fantastically delightful extravaganza titled ‘Sports Day.’

2. This Sports Day has taken over my reality for the past few days, as all classes have been canceled for the grand event. The basic premise is that the school is divided into four color-coded teams, who compete for trophies in categories like sports, marching around with mascots and flags, and decorating tents. Basically, one of my major tasks in life became the strange job of decorating a yellow tent. Countless hours were spent cutting out yellow snowflakes and weaving delicate yellow things.

In order to complete this mammoth task, I had a late night party inmy apartment that basically consisted of girls searching desperately through my ipod for music they recognized (“Miss Ellie, where is your Celine Dion?) and eventually blasting Gwen Stefani while others produced paper mountains of these snowflakes. Sorry trees.

The actual event involved a lot of racing,

marching,


and stretchers.

A disturbing amount of students fell down/passed out extremely regularly, which allowed these enthusiastic students to run over with the stretcher and place them on it with a shocking degree of glee. Here the Red Cross is replaced by the Red Crescent.

Good old team yellow came in dead last in sports, but first in marching and tent-decorating, which are much more useful skills I suppose. We also had the best mascot, as Big Bird beats a flower, a butterfly, and a princess any day.

3. My mindless obsession with manufacturing yellow snowflakes has been balanced with my job of helping the English Drama Club write a devastatingly sad play about AIDS. The plot, narrated by a ghost: a drug addict gets AIDS, then gives it to his wife and daughter, they are consequently and completely shunned by the community, and they each die alone vomiting blood. I worked with the students to add in some kind, understanding people and to complicate the story a bit more and get perspectives from all characters. But the head teacher isn’t having it, so I am back to writing a deeply problematic tragedy with no redeeming factors whatsoever. I just have this overwhelming feeling that this play is not part of the solution to the AIDS problem on earthball.

4. I took advantage of the fact that the glorious Perenthian Islands are less than an hour from my front door.

This sun soaked paradise is where the tourists are completely segregated from any actual culture as the islands are infested with little ‘mat sallehs’ prancing about in their bikinis, imbibing vodka and other sinful liquids. It’s a very interesting and slightly sick arrangement, but the turquoise ocean on white sugar sand seems so much bigger and more important than any of our sad little human stories. That ocean really doesn’t care about what any of us are wearing or drinking or even if we are living beings, drug addicts with AIDS, or large pieces of driftwood. It doesn’t love or hate us and maintains this neutrality unconditionally, which I find deeply refreshing.