Dearest Iqbal-

Your silence has led me to make decisions for us that you my not approve, but I think I'll do it anyway.  Until you respond, I'm going to publicly post these letters on a blog.  You don't mind, do you?

I suppose you'd laugh at me; call me a po-mo hipster or whatever.  My jeans aren't that skinny and you know it.  I think I'm doing it more for me than for you.  Every time I email you,  gmail tells me my message has been sent.  Sent off into the ether (the 'series of tubes' that is the internet according to FORMER Sen Ted Stevens).  But you don't write back, and that's cool, and all.  I've never held it against you, but sometimes it's nice to see in a solid form that at least I'm real!  Hence the blog that this letter will be posted to right after I send it to you.

I watched No Country for Old Men again last night.  Only the second time I've seen it.  I think it's quite good.  Do you?  That's pretty un-po-mo for you!  Despite the love and adoration that Javier Bardem got for his performance, the best really is Tommy Lee Jones.  He's really understated and elegant, good at playing a character who knows just enough to realize how small he is (I think that's an interesting theme in the movie: how self-aware are these characters and how might they act differently if they were more self-aware).  More than that, it makes me think about what self-awareness is.  Some people fixate on identity as the key to self-awareness, while others think about their role in a larger structure/cosmos.  Is the proper question "Who am I?" or "Where do I fit?"

Where do we fit Iqbal?

-Robert de Saint Loup