But I knew that something bad was going to happen. Well, before I left I had imagined that maybe I could get a job over here, or get into graduate school, and that if that happened I might stay. But I wasn't going to stay at all costs. The first day of the siege was the day I was scheduled to fly out, and so I had to decide right then if I should stay. When you speak, you can drop articles, and you can use whatever words you have available to communicate, not to mention using your hands.
Writing is a whole different story.
You have to choose the words that are somehow perfect, the exact words, and you cannot approximate. I mean, I cannot approximate. And so, even when I spoke at that time, I had a sense that somehow there was always this discrepancy between what I wanted to say and what I was saying. It made me feel as if I were lying, which I wasn't, strictly speaking, but there were always misrepresentations. Well, I got a job, canvassing for Greenpeace, which made me talk a lot without having time to be self-conscious.