Highlights: worked to organize all the photos I’ve taken so far, and get my blog updated. For some reason, I can’t access my blog account. Blogger won’t let me log in. I killed several hours trying to figure that out. =/ Eli came by this afternoon to repay the 2nd half of the loan I gave her for her mom 3 months ago… for the Arisan. I’m so proud of her for paying that back! She paid half (1 million Rupiah) on time, when I got back from Vietnam, and this half, she has 700,000 Rp ($70), but needs a little more time to come up with the remaining 300,000. still, I’m very impressed & happy she saw that through. We got to talking about Vita, and the opportunities that getting her through school will someday open up,,, which led to tangents about parenting & how daughters are traditionally treated different than sons. Eli says she won’t let Vita discover boys or start dating until she’s 20. (= ha ha. “Good luck with that!” I said. The fear is that ‘boys will say anything, and sweet talk girl with sugary nothings, knock them up then runaway.’ Ha ha… in so many words. My response was, learning to socialize, interact & even date boys is an important part of life learning for her… and I wouldn’t want to shelter my daughter from all that. She has to learn to sift through boys BS for herself. Mom & dad can’t do it all for her.” But what do I know? I’m not a dad yet. (=

Conversation flowed through social norms here, then snowballed through very interesting tangents that spanned religion, history, culture, and somehow we pulled it all back to what we can hope for in Vita’s future.

I was amazed that Eli was interested enough to sit & talk about this stuff with me for 3 hours! It was great! Normally, it’s been my experience that women run away whenever men start talking about,,, things where a formalized education becomes handy. I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. I think there’s a social norm here which suggests that men are entitled to have opinions about weighty things, and women aren’t. To be more fair, I bet the sticking point is that I’m male, so it’s somewhat inappropriate for women to have discussions like these with men who aren’t their husbands. Perhaps women sit around & talk about these things here,,, but I’ve yet to hear about it, or see it.

Nina’s dad loves to talk shop about politics, religion, social issues like corruption & economic conditions of police, teachers, health care in the Javanese countryside. I think it’s great & enjoy talking to him. Mom & Nina usually disappear in 10 minutes. It’s happened on at least 8 occassions, even after trying to coax opinions out of them. They sit quiet & smile. Drives me nuts. It must be a Javanese cultural thing.

The one subject I could get women to talk about was relationships. In most cases, the subject always finds its way back to concern over what’s “appropriate”. Figuring it out as you go doesn’t cut it here. Boy-girl situations have to have a precedent, and all those precedents fall clearly along “appropriate” or “not appropriate” lines. Indonesian society openly judges which is which. It’s like blackjack: advice comes free at a lively table, whether asked for or not.