Waking, naked, today, feeling my body about me like a little collection of apples (bright; bruiseable; subject to time's arbitrary sweetening, softening, drying, rotting trends), for a disarming moment I couldn't place my consciousness: where was its seat, this morning, as the sky paled and brightened blueward following the set of a big whole moon whose night had been punctuated in the middle by an hour of starry dark? My heart yawned, its vacuum drawing the question in and annihilating it. Here I am, here I am, in the hollow at my core – which flickers back and forth between being a broken grief-pit and a happily vibrating shaivist emptiness. Rising, then, wincing to rediscover the pain of my right ankle, which I turned yesterday on the ice, I remembered, just before my cousin's voice began speaking into the telephone downstairs, that I was in Vienna.
I've been here two days, having played the poor post-soviet card in order to cook up funds through an EU program to come for a conference. It's good to be with cousin X, to share briefly in her brilliant world. Yesterday in the early afternoon we heard a performance of one of the string quintets, K. 515: ecstasy, nasaputaspandana, the Europe-dream somehow transmuted into Bhairavi/Bhairava, or cosmic laughter like in that Milan Kundera book. Tonight she wants to take me out to eat at a lamb/rakia place she likes. She courts me with her city; I resist, but not without pleasure.

Passing the Serpeni Pillar on a windy trip to work today, I paused for a moment to watch the guards in their salute. I was hit by a wave of envy, not for them, but for what they almost are but are not. Maybe other people (those who get off on uniforms) feel differently, but I think that the dress-up men are allowed is far inferior to that of women. Men play dress-up by taking power; the uniforms are the slight, pitiful amount of play that resides inside (on the outsides of?) the structures that maintain that power relation. Meant to show strength, uniforms concede weakness, just as punishment and manipulation (like of nationalisms!) can come from silenced vulnerability. I root my poverty (of being part man) in my lack of sanctioned dress-up. I don't exactly want to engage in the same kind of dress-up that women here are allowed; I envy makeup and heels and accessories and other pizz-pazz, but I do not feel comfortable with these things on my person. However, I also feel strongly that patriarchy is restricting my opportunities for play.

A difficult morning with my brother. The sour weather, the tea, the chains of knotty emotional heritage we wear each thickly midst his sinews and fleshes. The tea he's taken lately to brewing up is this earthy chinoiserie called puerh, boy! It comes in cakes similar to the cook-fire fuel we'd harvest off the street when I was living in Kerala, black bricks at which he works with a little steel pick, teasing out the stuff of our tisane, minding the qi. The pot and cups are tiny, the infusions serial. "The first pot opens on damp warmth, lit dimness, a feline presence; immediately an unwelcome draft rises, brings you to the door, adjusting which leads you to be standing outside when a handsome peasant happens past astraddle his outsized fjord-horse. The second pot is sunlight beclouding itself just as you're at the verge of swim, stripped, at sea's edge, hungering sexually, wanting food. The third pot is a strange bed on top of whose orderly eiderdown you cede to sleep, fully-clothed, having just eaten chocolate, your beloved's long hand resting on your sternum." My brother. I leave for the office at eight, pot four; he keeps going.

I feel it necessary to give voice to a preoccupation of mine that has carried over from my professional duties, with hopes of reaching an audience not ordinarily acquainted with these cartographic squabbles.
The copy of the map shown here sat atop the papers on my desk when I arrived this morning. It is a typical example of U.S. central intelligence agency maps of the post-Soviet republics. Unfortunately, it is also an urgent reminder of the poor state of affairs regarding the availability of accurate maps of good quality for the English-speaking world.
In the middle 1990's it seems that many of the U.S. schools and libraries were dumped upon by this agency of intelligence with such hastily prepared maps. Many documents not of sensitive or classified status (oftentimes educational or propagandistic publications) were deemed undeserving of the costly process of destruction: we can see the form they have taken as an insidious gift to the nation's citizenry.
What's more, the recent ascent of the latest cinematographic work by our Roumanian neighbors has earned their fine films much deserved esteem in "world cinema" circles in the West and has aroused a new and unprecedented interest in our region.
What can we do to stem the tide of misinformation and the air of disrepute which hangs about our image as a people at such a crucial time as this?