Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
I am always surprised when people do get upset. Perhaps its just the nutty people who write to newspapers who get upset.
It never stops me from saying what I want to say about Ethiopia, the fact that a tour company is paid for me to go there. Book reviewers don't pay for the books they review.
There is a very big difference between American and British travel journalism, and that's this whole business of the assisted or freebie trip. In Britain we are unashamed about any travel company paying for you to go and then writing about it. That's the only way we can do it. But I have tried the same in the States, and I can't write for any sizeable American newspaper because they tell you to do it on this basis.
I tend to prefer traveling in the Third World countries. Like Ethiopia. Or Eritrea.
When McDonald's opened up in Moscow - I happened to be there when it opened and wandered in. And the Russians were queuing three times around the block to get in. And when they got to the head of the queue, they'd go, "I'll have a Big Mac please. Have you the cheese and the rolls? And do you have the meat and do you have the salad?" And everybody asks this because they are so used to things being awful that it took them a quarter of an hour to order a Big Mac.
There are no young people who know how to debate, who know how to vote, and who know how to persuade people to vote. And you have seen this in Paraguay and they are reaping the harvest now of fifty years of dictatorship.
I have an affinity for the law. I like looking at the small type on contracts, and if I could have afforded law school, I probably would have gone.
Yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.
If we are fortunate, we one day find that person who impacts our world in such a way that our life is never the same again. By chance, or by design, we met that someone who offers the support, encouragement, and inspiration to become more than we ever thought possible.
Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.