Beauty, Envy, and International News

On the metro back from school today, I noticed a pretty red haired girl standing up against a row of seats. A few stops after I got on, a tiny Moroccan mother boarded, hoisting up her stroller into the cart, her tiny baby with enormous brown eyes sucking on a bottle.

I spaced out for a while; when I glanced back, the mother had removed the baby from the carriage and had him propped easily on her arm, like he was a perched parrot or something. A sad perched parrot he must have been, because he was wailing, and big tears were welling out of his eyes and resting on his full cheeks. He was squirming around, bawling, as his mother cooed to him and wiped his chin with the back of her hand.

I spaced out again (I do that often, it seems), and when I tuned back in, I noticed that the baby had stopped crying. The red haired girl was smiling at him and popping her tongue out of her mouth, making silly faces, beaming back at the baby. I've never seen a more genuine smile of fascination on a baby's face before. He was even trying to maneuver around his mother's headscarf to get a better look at the girl. Do you think when he grows up he'll remember how he fell in love, platonic or not, with the red head on the Belgian metro?

I got to thinking how inadequate I'd feel as a mother to have a stranger sooth my baby in a way I could not. No doubt that happens with everyone at one point or another, but I don't know if I could handle that sort of rejection from something I created. These are the thoughts I think when I ought to be writing a paper on Neo-realism's significant contributions to the field of International Relations. You see my dilemma.

In other news, I unintentionally dove into the news yesterday. I sat in the living room and watched CNN for about three hours, catching up on this and that. It's the first time I've done that since I've been here. And it was marvelously marvelous. Except for the disturbing stories, like the recently-busted polygamist colony in Texas. Holy moley. I was telling Brandon how I watched a guided tour of the complex by one of the sect wives- telling him how disturbing it was to see that people actually live like that and that they believe so sincerely in their lifestyles. For me, the polygamy wasn't the most disturbing... I guess it was the nineteenth-century attitude towards everything - entertainment, technology, apparel, etc. It was an intense and moving video clip, to say the least.

Other fun topical issues included the Pope's visit to the states (I miss John Paul, man), the crazy high-security running of the Olympic torch in India (my professor commented on that today and I actually had something intelligent to contribute to the conversation... weird...) and a man who proposed to his girlfriend on the same bus line which brought them together in the first place.

T.G.I.F., readers. Hope your weekends are most enjoyable and sprinkled with at least one, if not two, pleasant surprises. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this post was not one of them.

Tshuss,
Lauren