Expat with Elephants: Happy Independence Day

Friday, July 4, 2008

Happy Independence Day

Today is Independence Day in my native country. My Embassy, which I pay taxes to support, will not allow me to come to their festivities. Happy 4th of July to you.

Today is also the last day of my contract at Sewalanka. I told them I'm willing to stay the month of July, but now they are saying things like, "we need to check with Chairman." So now they expect me to show up on Monday to see if they will bless me with a contract extension for one month. No skin of my teeth if they say no -- just means more time in Nepal.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: I wish I'd gone to Nepal when I was still in Asia earlier this year...one of the students in my program was from there. Looking forward to your photos from there.

Why won't the Embassy let you go to 4th festivities??; July 5, 2008 at 1:15 AM

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What I am reading

A Field Guide to the Birds of Sri Lanka by John Harrison
A Guide to the Mangrove Flora of Sri Lanka by Padma K. de Silva and Mangala de Silva
A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby
A Walk in Portland, Oregon by Chuck Palahniuk
Absurdistan: A Novel by Gary Shteyngart
Alias Grace, A Novel by Margaret Atwood
All the Right Places: Travelling Light through Japan, China and Russia by Brad Newsham
Around the World in 80 Dates by Jennifer Cox
Birds of Sri Lanka
Brick Lane by Monica Ali
By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept: A Novel of Forgiveness by Paulo Coelho
Conservation -- April - June 2008
Conservation -- Jan. - Mar. 2008
Conservation -- Oct. - Dec. 2007
Do Not Pass Go by Tim Moore
Dog Stories by James Herriot
E-magazine -- June 2007
E-magazine -- May 2007
Expat by various authors
Footprint -- Sri Lanka
Fragile Things, Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens
God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
How to be Good by Nick Hornby
Like the Flowing River by Paulo Coelho
Lonely Planet -- Nepal
Lonely Planet -- Sri Lanka
Loot and other stories by Nadine Gordimer
Monsoon Rain & Icicle Drops by Libby Southwell with Josephine Brouard
Monsoons and Potholes by Manuka Wijesinghe
Muck, A Novel by N.J. Dodic
My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates
National Geographic July 2008
National Geographic June 2008
Newsweek -- February 11, 2008
No Shitting in the Toilet, by Peter Moore
Oracle Night by Paul Auster
Our Feet Walk the Sky by various authors
Passion India by Javier Moro
Rough Guide -- Sri Lanka
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs* by Chuck Klosterman
Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
South India -- Lonely Planet
Thai Girl by Andrew Hicks
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
The Constant Gardener by John le Carre
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
The Inheritance of Loss: A Novel by Kiran Desai
The Island by Victoria Hislop
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Laws of Evening by Mary Yukari Waters
The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Namesake: A Novel
The New York -- December 10, 2007
The New Yorker -- April 24, 2006
The New Yorker -- December 3, 2007
The New Yorker -- November 19, 2007
The New Yorker -- November 26, 2007
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollen
The Red and the Green by Iris Murdoch
The Sinharaja Guidebook for Eco-Tourists by S. Vigallon
The Sun -- April 2008
The Sun -- December 2007
The Sun -- February 2008
The Sun -- January 2008
The Sun -- July 2008
The Sun -- June 2007
The Sun -- June 2008
The Sun -- March 2008
The Sun -- May 2007
The Sun -- May 2008
The Sun -- May 2008
The Sun -- November 2007
The Sun -- October 2007
The Village in the Jungle by Leonard Woolf
Time -- February 11, 2008
Trading Up by Candace Bushness
US Weekly -- February 18, 2008
Walking to Kataragama by Sunil Goonasekera
What is the What by Dave Eggers
White Noise by Don DeLillo
White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Past Quotes of the Day

June 22, 2008, "You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself." -- Alan Alda
July 20, 2008, " A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort." --Herm Albright, quoted in Reader's Digest, June 1995
June 17, 2008, "A religion without the element of mystery would not be a religion at all." -- Edwin Lewis
July 11, 2008, " Eighty percent of success is showing up." -- Woody Allen
July, 9, 2008, "A vacation is what you take when you can no longer take what you've been taking." -- Earl Wilson
July 8, 2008, "Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason." -Abraham Joshua Heschel-
July 8, 2008, "The sound of a car door opening in front of you is similar to the sound of a gun being cocked." --Amy Webster
July 5, 2008, "Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us." --Peter De Vries
July 3, 2008, "Inflation hasn't ruined everything. A dime can still be used as a screwdriver. " -- Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
June 25, 2008, " Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time." --- Steven Wright
June 25, 2008, "[T]he bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created: Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon." -- Bill Strickland
June 18, 2008, "I think a photography class should be a requirement in all educational programs because it makes you see the world rather than just look at it. " -- Author Unknown
June 10, 2008, "Giving up doesn't always mean you are weak; sometimes it means that you are strong enough to let go." -- Author Unknown
June 6, 2008 "Cutting stalks at noontime. Perspiration drips to the earth. Know you that your bowl of rice each grain from hardship comes?" -- Chang Chan-Pao
June 3, 2008 "We pretend to work because they pretend to pay us." -- Author Unknown
May 31, 2008 "No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself." John Muir
April 25, 2008 "God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west... keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. " Mahatma Gandhi
April 7th, 2008 " A great war leaves the country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves. " -- German Proverb
March 30, 2008 "Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war. " -- Loren Eiseley
March 19, 2008 "Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
March 2, 2008 " Wind chimes in your yard will serenade garden creatures - squirrels, fairies and angels." -- Author Unknown
February 29, 2008 "The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out." -- Annie Dillard
February 17, 2008 "For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver. " -- Martin Luther
February 13, 2008 "What I am actually saying is that we need to be willing to let our intuition guide us, and then be willing to follow that guidance directly and fearlessly." -- Shakti Gawain
February 4, 2008 "Are bombs the only way of setting fire to the spirit of a people? Is the human will as inert as the past two world-wide wars would indicate?" -- Gregory Clark
January 29, 2008 "There out, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice -- patched, retreaded and approved for the road." -- Sylvia Plath
January 22, 2008 "Tea id drunk to forget the din of the world." -- Tien Yiheng
January 17, 2008 "There are now electrical appliances with the main unit so sealed in that it cannot be got at for repair. There have always been human beings like that. " -- Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
January 10, 2008 "The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion." -- Lewis Mumford, in Anne Chisholm, Philosophers of the Earth: Conversations with Ecologists, 1972
December 20, 2007 "Home is not where you live but where they understand you." -- Christian Morgenstern
December 20, 2007 "Peace - that was the other name for home." -- Kathleen Norris
December 14, 2007 "It is time to make peace with the planet." -- Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech
December 10, 2007 "I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over." -- Jimmy Carter
December 8, 2007 "I was with some Vietnamese recently, and some of them were smoking two cigarettes at the same time. That's the kind of customers we need!" -- Jesse Helms
December 4, 2007 "From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it." -- Katharine Whitehorn
November 30, 2007 "Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties." -- Doug Larson
November 27, 2007 "If you think mitigated climate change is expensive, try unmitigated climate change." -- Dr. Richard Gammon, University of Washington, on the steps of the US Congress, June 28, 1999
November 26, 2007 "An inability to stay quiet is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind." -- Walter Bagehot
November 22, 2007 "As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them." -- John F. Kennedy
November 17, 2007 "What do you call a cyclist who doesn't wear a helmet? An organ donor." -- David Perry