the great white queen himself

So I attended this Borneo Research Council conference all week and became addicted to tea made with sweetened condensed milk. The final night after the conference was George and Laura's (the anthropologists) last night in Borneo, so a group of us went out for dinner, and I ended up talking to this real rabble rouser Borneo historian guy fromAustralia named John. Apparently he's a real big shot, but through my intimate association with George and Laura who are the biggest of the big shots here, I too pretended to be a certain type of big shot. I felt so natural in that role, I think that's where I belong (; So obviously I was going to end up at the big shot table that last night, and that's how I ended up rabble rousing with John. So he's telling me about his excursion to a Dominican monastary in London to go through their archives to get info about the British colonial rule here, and it becomes immediately apparent that several of those priests are openly gay and in relationships with each other, and so he says to the librarian, "You know, I'm gay, and I find the idea of gay priests a little disturbing." Apparently that comment just opened the door for him, because the rest of his visit was spent getting a tour of the rectory (or whatever you call it) where he was showed brother Pete and brother Joe's room (with one bed) and brotherMarcus's and brother Rob's room (with one bed) and on and on. Then the priests start to tell him the story of one of their students (a very pretty boy) who went to the Vatican, and of course was getting asked out nearly every night by different Cardinals. Well this student finally finds himself at dinner with the Pope himself who left early so that everyone else could party into the night. So now, John's wondering (as perhaps all of you are) if the Pope too is gay at which point they pass a photo of His Holiness and the priests stop and declare, "Well, there he is, the great white queen himself!" What a shocker, eh?
I also met an anthropologist from Australia named Anna and liked her immediately because just moments after I met her, we were sharing a cigarette, and she tells me a story about her first night staying in a longhouse, she couldn't communicate verbally, and had to act out everything, charades style. She really had to pee, and was embarrassed to act it out to find out where she could go, so instead she waited in pain until every single person had gone to bed. Then she crept in the pitch dark on her tiptoes across the entire length of the longhouse, and at the very end tripped over a sleeping dog, who woke up and started barking setting a chain reaction of other barks so that soon every single dog in the 4 mile radius was also barking its head off. So much for an inconspicuous piss. So now, Anna and I are sharing a dumpy but cheap hotel apartmentwith an interesting hole in the wall by the head of the bed that I graciously assigned to her. She's helping me figure out how to manuever around the seemingly ineluctable constraints I'm up against in my research. Tomorrow, I head back up to the Kampong with stacks of newspaper for drying my specimens, a computer with a brand new hard drive, and several pounds of dried fish and rice to sustain me through the next month. Borneo and I are, in no way, involved in a passionate love affair. It's more like an arranged marriage, and we're at the point of trying to figure out how we're going to make it through. I appreciate things about this place--I could list them if you asked. Top of the list would be the fruit and its vendors who let you try all that wierd looking stuff before you commit to spending your precious 30 cents on it, but generally I'm just trying to give it my all so I can leave here satisfied for having genuinely tried. Hope your summers are splendid and relaxing. Love to you all, and love hearing from you all! -Betony