A Little Bit of Justice Makes the Medicine Go Down

Hi all! If you recall from THIS post, all of my expensive things were stolen on New Year’s Eve. If you follow me on Facebook you probably already know that I have re-acquired my laptop in an exciting manner. Without further ado, I present to you a true tale from The Adventures of Zazz.

freebunny — Escaped rabbit in an Aussie yard.

I had my Mac-book stolen on New Year’s. Luckily, Apple lets you lock a stolen laptop and send a message to the computer’s screen, so I offered a fake reward of $1000 and left my phone number. One night I got a phone call from a middle aged man saying he wanted the reward in exchange for my laptop.

“And I didn’t steal it.”

He wanted to meet me in a place of his choosing to make the exchange.

“But don’t involve the cops.”

I involved the cops.

In my fluster of receiving this phone call during a night of drinking with my friends, I asked him to call me back in a half hour to work out the details. I phoned the police immediately after hanging up the blocked call with the man.

From there, the three of us did a lot of back and forth calling for a while; the police, the man, and me. But I didn’t have a car, the cops weren’t being too responsive, and the laptop man was being difficult to work with. I had asked him to turn the laptop into the police station assuring him I’d get him a reward. He didn’t like this idea. Even though he claimed to have bought the laptop from an unknown source, he was convinced he would be arrested upon stepping foot into a police station.

The last time the man called that night I told him to call me at noon the next day, I gave the excuse of not having a reliable ride. On a previous phone call, the cops had asked me to come into the station the next morning to give an official statement, so I planned to be at the police station at noon. As planned, the Laptop Man called right when I was sitting down with an officer. This was my last ditch effort to get a fire burning under the police force’s ass. I put it on speaker and we arranged to meet in a half hour at the location of his choice.

Interest peaked, the cop called in an unmarked car to use and we scouted the rendezvous on googlemaps. The officer went into the back to consult with his police palls and I was surprised when he reemerged and invited me to join them.

“You can stay in the car if you’re uncomfortable.”

That’s all I needed to hear. I cut him off with a,

“Yes!”

“I’ll approach the guy, I’d have to.”

I knew that if a cop showed up instead of me, I’d never see my laptop again. So I hopped into the “undercover” cop car with three officers and we made a game plan.

We figured that the Laptop Man would, obviously, be keeping an eye out from somewhere else to scope for cops; so they dropped me off around the corner so I could walk to the location. The plan was for me to stay in a spot where the officers could keep an eye out for me, then they’d call me and use my phone as a wire when the man approached.

The Laptop Man called and asked me to walk towards a swing-set across the street in a park. He told me that if any cops showed up, he’d throw my laptop in the pond. Naturally, I made sure to walk as far away from the pond as possible, near the road, and as far away from the kids in the park as possible; while still walking towards the swing-set. I dawdled in order to give the cops time to call me. When they did, I answered my phone and placed it in the front pocket of my jeans. They could now listen in.

The Laptop man approached me on a bike from behind and immediately asked to see the money. I stood in front of his bike and asked to see the laptop first. He wouldn’t show me at the start but, I reminded him that I was a young lone girl.

“and how do I know you wont just rob me?”

He understood that; and as soon as he showed me the laptop the cops, who had been listening in and watching me from afar, screeched into the parking lot Fast and Furious style. The Laptop Man couldn’t ride off and as he put his hands up and attempted to get off the bike, the police tackled him to the ground. Honestly, the tackle seemed a bit over the top to me. A brief thought occurred to me that these young officers might be trying to impress me.

I got my laptop back and they found out the bike he had been riding was stolen too. One police officer remembered the description of this bike when it was first reported stolen, the owner was eager to find it. They later searched the Laptop Man’s house and found him harboring other stolen items as well as a man wanted for rape and assault. My other stolen goods weren’t there, but I found that I felt more satisfaction in knowing I helped capture a criminal and get people’s items returned to them.

The police told me that druggies would often steal things, but have no easy way to sell them because all pawn shops send items through the police system. So they’d often go to one guy and exchange the goods for drugs, leaving the drug dealer with a bunch of things that he’d later pawn off through his networks.

Laptop Man wasn’t too bright and had a messy record of drugs, DUI’s, and being in possession of stolen property. He was banned for life from driving and lived far away from my house, so I highly doubt it was him who broke in. For this, I do feel slightly bad for getting him captured. Primarily because he very well could have bought it off of someone not knowing he couldn’t access it. Perhaps the weasel of a man only wanted his wasted money back. Instead he got jail time.

Is there a moral to this story? Yeah. Sometimes you have to be a little productive if you want things done. Also, don’t buy obviously stolen goods and attempt to get ransom money out of it.

Tbilisi, City Of Contrasts

Featured

Overlooking Tblisi — Zazz and friend looking out over old Tbilisi.

Standing beneath the shadow of the ancient medieval fortress of Narikala, my new friend Oliver and I gazed down at the city below us. His voice broke the momentary silence brought on by the awe that comes from taking in a beautiful scene.

“City of contrasts.”

I almost said, “jinx” before I realized he had taken the words out of my mouth. Old crumbling houses with sunken roofs, buildings in the shape of sleek metallic tubes, dozens of church steeples reaching out of dusty brick, and a modern cable-car lifting sightseers towards a giant metal woman brandishing a bowl and a sword. Tbilisi, Georgia is a city of contrasts.

I’ve always loved the sight of contrasts, whether in paintings, photography, or personalities; contrasts make things distinguishable. Two defined attributes working to highlight each attribute’s charm. Through contrast appears the heart and soul of a thing. What I found at the heart of Tbilisi was a proud culture rich in history and full of strength and opinion.

Unfortunately, I quickly learned that coupled with the old and beautiful buildings in Tbilisi, was also an old form of sexism. Tbilisi has a strong feminine face, but a thick matriarchal backbone. Everywhere I went I would find eyes of men ogling me in obviously inappropriate ways. This caused me to want to wear longer sleeves and longer shorts despite the humid and hot weather in the summer. Possibly more upsetting than the heat, was the pressure to dress in a certain way to avoid being disrespected.   However, I didn’t end up succumbing to the social pressure all thanks to a close friend of mine.

It’s easy to see that a truly strong country, making it through the test of time, produces strong people. In contrast to the old traditions of masculine privilege is a young woman working hard to make a difference with the rising generations of Georgian men and women. Elene Kvernadze of the United Nations Association of Georgia and my good friend, founded the movement “Open Your Eyes, Listen, Break the Silence” A movement to raise awareness about domestic violence in Georgia and to give more people strength to push social boundaries.

I got the pleasure of interviewing Elene about her home country and her views on gender equality in Georgia.

Elene Meditating — Kvernadze meditating on social issues over the old Tbilisi Baths.

As a guest to the country, my initial reaction might be a bit harsh. Is sexism really prevalent in Georgia?

Elene: YES! VERY! It’s strange how I never realized it growing up here… It took me leaving for college and actually looking at my country from afar to realize just how bad it was. It’s engrained in almost every aspect of our culture, but it’s wrapped in this strange tradition of respect; fake respect for women that blinds you.

Think of the statue you were talking about- it’s called the mother of Georgia. There’s a cult view of mothers and women, and how we have the utmost respect for them; when in reality the only thing this respect is visible in is calling the mother out from the kitchen during a feast to toast to their health and then letting them go back to being a slave for the evening- baking, cooking, and changing plates.

What are some of the cultural customs that stand out as sexist?

First of all, there’s the double standard! A woman is either a virgin or a whore; there is no in-between and the moment it’s know that you have had sex you are labeled as easy. It’s like you’re damaged goods. While on the other hand, guys are supposed to have a lot of experience with sex which includes prostitutes… from a very young age. It’s disgusting really. Women are basically not valued, no matter what they accomplish in life, unless they are married and have kids. So their value lies in their families. No matter how beautiful, smart educated and successful you are, if you are single, people kinda pity you. It’s weird… but it’s changing slowly.

Also, women are supposed to put their families first, raising kids and house work is their job… this is just the tip of the icebergs… there are also more serious issues, for example, that women should endure verbal and even physical abuse from their husbands for the sake of their families; which contributes to further violence within the home. I can talk about this forever, there are so many examples, but I think you get the idea.

Are there possible benefits to the way the gender culture in Georgia currently is and are they worth it?

I think in general the clear divide of roles between the sexes creates structure. Everyone knew their place and what was expected of them and life was “easy.” You know what I mean? Right now there is a crisis going on, especially in men, because those roles are changing. Women now do all the things men used to do but men are still struggling to realize that it means they now have to share the responsibilities women used to have. So there is a backlash from the society, and especially men, but I think that’s a normal part of change in any society: there is resistance and fear to the new and unknown. You will always have a part of the society who will try to conserve what was… but that’s just how it goes.

What needs to change and what are you and others doing to change it?

More strict laws need to be in place to battle gender based violence. These laws need to be implemented properly, officials need to be trained to understand these issues, civil society needs to take an active role; and most importantly, raising awareness in the public and ingraining the idea that each one of us is responsible for creating a society where everyone is treated equally and with dignity.

I actually think we are heading in the right direction and I’m very optimistic about it. This year 29 women were killed at the hands of their husbands or ex husbands in Georgia, this is a tragedy. And this tragedy was an awful awakening for the country to realize that this issue, actually IS an issue! Everyone from politicians to regular people have started talking about this, it is starting to become a priority… again; because people have started to care.

Tblisi Candy — Churchkhela, a Georgian fruit and nut candy. Not to be mistaken for anal beads.

I’ve been following social media in Georgia a bit and I realize that Elene is right. The rising generation of Georgians care, and in this they have once again proven to be strong and resilient people.

Contrasts are beautiful, they highlight features that might otherwise be missed in a blend. But possibly more importantly, contrasts make it easier to see what is worth fighting for.

Elene, me, & Khachapuri — Elene Kvernadze with author.

Judgements From a Pocket Monkey

Featured

There is a monkey on my sweater with a stern look on his face. I can see him looking at me through my bedroom mirror. I bought the sweater from a thrift shop because I thought a front pocket was a fun spot to place a stern looking monkey. Surrounded by shitty half finished paintings, I’m questioning my purchase while I’m drinking horrible tasting wine and smoking far too much weed. Is the monkey judging me? Where am I? What am I doing? I’m momentarily obsessed with questions like these, yet I love when I feel the need to ask them.

I’ve been traveling the world alone and I’m currently in Australia, working in cafes and living in a shed for a few months while I work on my paintings.   Considering my situation, I’ve had a couple of people ask me if I’ve found myself yet. I suppose it’s a cliche’ for people to travel while in search of themselves, so I can’t blame them for asking. But I can’t help but wonder, where is the finding when the found is always with you? What excites me is the thought that we’re always finding ourselves.

Whether stationary or not, travel is a metaphor for life. Confronting the world forces you to confront the different aspects of yourself in relation to the different aspects of the world. Because the world is full of changes, so are we. Since I was a teenager my goal in life has been to create myself through experience. What new things can I explore? What new sensations may I feel? I have inadvertently “found myself” while traveling, but that’s only because I’ll find myself everywhere I am.

Zazz and sweater-Pocket Monkey in her art shed.

This doesn’t mean I don’t get scared. In all actually, I’m often fairly terrified. What am I doing with my life? Why have I anthropomorphized a pocket monkey? Where will this all take me? I’ve recently bought an expensive professional camera with the goal in mind of creating a traveling podcast. I know nothing about cameras, filming, or editing. The other day I was playing around by recording random things, when the reality of what I’m trying to do freaked me out. Talking alone into the camera is actually pretty damn hard, it can make you feel vulnerable and a bit crazy. Especially when you find yourself doing it with little friend support in some crummy and cold shed in the backyard of a crummier house in Melbourne. Are my goals a joke? Even if I pull this off, who will watch it?

I travel in order to explore and open myself up to possibilities, but I also originally took off in hopes of finding an opportunity that I can commit to. I often feel constantly torn in the directions I want to take in life. Some days I just want someone to simply tell me what to do. Yet if there is anything else I hate more in this world, it’s someone telling me what to do. I’m a walking contradiction in that way. I think my desire for instruction is derived from a fear of responsibility. If someone else is dictating my life, I can blame them for my disappointments; but I can’t live that way because I know it’s a lie. I’m responsible for my own life, I have no one else to blame if I fail.

This realization of responsibility has been an enormous thing to take in. I’ve always thought of responsibility as this thing associated with a career, children, or doing the dishes; but it’s more than even that. We are responsible for our entire lives. Not just our current, living, and breathing in this moment lives, we’re responsible for everything leading up to our inevitable deaths. What’s worse, failing or never doing? The answer is never doing. Because if we fail when we reach the end of our lives, we’re failing anyway; but we’re failing without having even tried.

I ended up in Melbourne after a series of bizarre and fantastic events and my mind is still reeling with the freedom I currently possess. The pocket monkey might be looking at me disappointingly, but I love my situation. I’m living a dream of mine since childhood and I’m free to explore the world and myself as I please. This is a good thing. The more things I explore, the more things I try, the more I learn about myself; my true self, not the self filled with “shoulds” and “can’ts.” And whatever I end up doing or abandoning, at least I’ve learned something. At least I’ve DONE something, instead of sitting on my ass complaining about life and wasting it. Judge that pocket monkey.

Sit Down with Cliches

Have you ever repeated a word over and over again only to find that at such a fast pace that particular word loses it’s meaning and simply becomes a strange sound? If not, here’s a fun game to try. Pick a word, any word, and repeat it until you’re blue in the face. Go on, this is a safe space and I am giving you full permission to live in the moment.

A silly game designed to shed some light on the human brain shows us that repetition dulls awareness. Let’s take the word “love” for example and repeat it until it sounds like an alien spacecraft hovering five inches above the ground. One of the most powerful emotions and expressions in our human experience, love, becomes reduced to an obnoxious and meaningless noise. This constant repetition, sending us clear into oblivion, is the problem with cliches. They are wise words that are so overly repeated that they often lose their meaning and pizazz.

Follow your dreams.
Money doesn’t buy happiness.
Live and let live.
Be yourself.  Forgive and forget
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Laughter is the best medicine.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Zazz on a ledge on Hua Shan (mountain) in Shaanxi, China.

It has even become a cliche to hear these sayings and, “take them to heart.”

Fisherman showing off in Inle Lake, Myanmar.

We love cliches because they are so often true, but inspiration is fleeting without application. I challenge you to break the spell of the meaningless word sounds, go beyond taking it to heart and take these words to action. After all, “actions do speak louder than words”.

How can we reverse what appears to be obnoxious noise, thus transforming this cloudy clatter into meaningful application? It’s not the repetition alone that dulls cliches, it’s the speed at which we consume them. We read and see Pinterest and Instagram photos with interesting backgrounds and Insta-inspirational quotations posted online; sometimes we share them, or give them a “like” all in order to get our enlightenment fixes for the day. However, these words seem to insta-come and go, in one ear and out the other, as we continue about our day with little internalization of what these words actually mean. Let’s make a collective goal to stop treating our words like fast-food. It’s time to pause, taste, and enjoy our meal.

“Old habits really do die hard” but they can die eventually. Take advantage of the simple insta-reminders throughout your day to help clear the meaningless noise by reflecting. The next time you find yourself reading a beautiful quote on your timeline or newsfeed, remember to sit down with the cliche as if it were a decadent cup of coffee. Taste it, smell it, and let it give you energy to take action. It’s natural to be swept away into the fast-past hustle of life and social media, so don’t get yourself down when you do because there is yet another cliche that just so happens to be true: “The more you try, the more likely you are to succeed.”

Zazz showing off her goods on the Great Wall of China.

Secret War

Often when I come across a great travesty in this world my heart is filled with hot flame and a desire for redemption. I dream of going to great lengths to right wrongs, spread the word, and protect the realms from evil.

But after a few days go by I realize that the flame was only a spark, I don’t care enough to actually do anything, and I have been reading too much of the Game of Thrones series.

As the saying goes, “Out of sight, out of mind.”

What all of this blathering is referring to is my resent visit to Phonsavan, Laos.

Last week, upon first entering the country of Laos, was the first time I heard anything about The country in relations to the Vietnam war in the 60’s and 70’s. Even before hearing about any secret war, I was told that Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the world.

“Say what? The war was in Vietnam, not Laos. Why would the U.S. bomb the wrong country?”

At first I thought it must be an exaggeration. Despite my skepticism, the bombing stats turned out to be true.

Phonsavan is a city amongst mysterious jars, an area known as the Plain of Jars. And it was the jars that drew me to Xieng Khouang Province in the first place. But it was a less ancient history that captivated my attention and got the good-ol tear ducts going.

Right before my tour to see the jars is when I learned about the C.I.A. secret war on Laos. I was shocked about hearing the number of casualties and bombings in this beautiful and friendly country.

But seeing is believing and I became completely appalled to see the number of craters left by bombs during a war that “never happened.”

I was shown a very small cave, right next to a site of jars, where an entire village lived for 5 years hiding from U.S. artillery. The cave contains stacks of rocks that the locals compiled, each representing someone who died in the cave during the bombings. I counted over 70, and learned that there is a cave nearby where over 400 civilians, unassociated with the war, were killed.

Did I mention these were villagers? Farmers, mothers, children. These were not accidents either, the pilots were told to target the caves filled with people, because they were filled with people.

Many of the bombs were also dropped like trash. If a plane missed their target in Vietnam, they couldn’t land with missiles, so they had to drop them somewhere.

Laos was often that somewhere.

Worse yet, most of the bombs dropped were full of what the Laos call, “bombies” lethal mini bombs contained in what is known as a cluster bomb. 30% of these bombies didn’t explode on impact and continue to kill villagers today.

There are teenagers in this town with missing limbs. Children, who had helped with farming and struck a bomb or who had picked them up to play with. This is happening still, over 30 years after the war. The equivalent of one person a day was killed last year alone from these bombies.

Can you see now why my heart was hot for redemption and saving the realm?

On the tour we were informed to walk on designated areas marked by MAG (mines advisory group) that had been cleared of bombs. I felt at first they were being over-cautious until our van got stuck in the mud and a fellow traveler found one of these bombs off the side of the road.

This is real people, not just some documentary on Nat Geo. Which is sometimes difficult to comprehend when tucked away at home.

For 9 years bombs were dropped on Laos every 8 min. It’s still hard to wrap my head around that kind of bombardment. And sadly it’s easy to let the significance of this monstrosity fade away in my life as I nurse dengue fever and get lost in a wonderful book.

But I feel it’s important for us to realize these horrible realities. Even if distance and time come between our concern for the world for a moment, we can’t progress as a species (let alone as individual countries) if we don’t learn to pay attention to history.

History does repeat itself, and often in the most horrible of ways.

What worries me right now is that I hadn’t heard a word about this war in Laos throughout my entire life. An operation, carried out in secret, in direct violation of the Geneva Agreements which prohibited the presence of foreign military personnel in neutral Laos. But maybe you could blame me for being uneducated. (I personally feel better about blaming America’s poor educational system, but that’s just me.)

All of this leaves me to wonder what else our leaders aren’t broadcasting to us. The facts of what Edward Snowden revealed to us recently have left me wondering about this a lot lately.

An, “out of sight out of mind” mentality might end up being our downfall. While it might be a human weakness it’s still our choice to acknowledge what’s there.

Perhaps I don’t have the gusto and passion to save all of the Laos children from bombies like I wished. But acknowledging reality and sharing, is better than nothing I figure.

-Zazz

For more info on the secret war check out this documentary below.

Posted with Blogsy