Absence...

So after not spending more than four hours apart at any point for the last 6 months, Meg and I are separated for 12 days. She's wrapping up her rotation in Eritrea, and I'm in Ethiopia now with Zanja, my old college roommate, and soon-to-be professor of philosophy at Chico St. For those of you don't know Zanj, I'll just say that it's the perfect job for him.

My first day on my own was in the King Abdullah Jeddah airport in Saudi Arabia. I had a 24-hour layover there on the way to Ethiopia. I contemplated flouting the US State Dept's warnings that "no American citizens should travel to Saudi Arabia", but after reviewing my possessions at the time (a Red Sox cap, a frisbee, and a jar of peanut butter), I decided that there's no way I'd be able to keep a low, non-American profile and stayed in the airport. I did manage to bribe a security guard to let me step outside and stand on Saudi soil for 5 minutes. At first I tried to give him my copy of Noam Chomsky's The Hegemony of America, but for some reason he wasn't so pumped about reading any reactionary left-wing literature. So instead, I slipped him $5.

The only sleep I pulled off was on the Muslim prayer rugs in the corner of the airport, but around 4am I got bounced by a group of Muslims who wanted to use them to, y'know, pray. But after a couple days in Ethiopia, I'm well-rested and back on track. Tomorrow, we take off for some trekking in the Simien Mountains to see a group of "bleeding-heart" baboons. Maybe they'll be more psyched about the Chomsky.

But I miss my girlfriend.

--rahul