One foot here, one foot there! A delicate balance between home, of which only a tangled web of memories remains, and the diaspora, which incessantly assails even those memories to force you to break out of your old familiar self and become familiar with the new-and-improved around here.

Sadly, it turns out that the new-and-improved is not all that it's cut out to be, and you often find yourself hanging on for dear life to those steadying values of ItyoPiawinet that refuse to vanish into obscurity even in the face of the break-neck acceleration, the over-elaborate "refinement" and the decadence called life in the diaspora.

It hasn't been easy, however! On many an occasion you got caught up in the charade and found yourself humming that White Hen jingle: "When you run ouuuuut, run out tooooo..."! And, just as you were told, when you did run out, you ran out to the White Hen and stood there in the produce section puzzling over the complexity of gomen! . . . In the simpler days back home, gomen was gomen...beza ketebale yeferenj or yabesha! Besides, you never had to pick it yourself. You simply raised your voice and in that typically condescending tone, demanded: "Ante, yeTenezawn merTeh new indE mt'seTeN? . . . yaTenzahi'na miyaTeneza neger?!" Bereded would laugh at your remark good-naturedly, proceed to slap each individual leaf of gomen against his wrist...meta meta, meta meta...hand you your bundle of freshly tossed, sweat-soaked gomen and send you on your merry way.

A far cry from the produce aisle at the White Hen! There...you stood...gawking and gawking and gawking at piles upon separate piles of different shades of greens. And when you finally decided to ask an associate for help, he knowingly pointed to each stack and rattled off the names: "Collard greens (gomen), mustard greens (gomen), slick mustards (gomen), turnip greens (gomen), kale (gomen)." You thanked him from the bottom of your heart (what would you do without him?) and wandered off aimlessly cursing the day that brought you to this place called diaspora, where even gomen doesn't know what it wants to be!

Imagine the pressures of having to keep up with the high-tech stuff out there when even good old gomen has transmuted itself out of recognition!...actually eating one of the gomen-types here is a different matter altogether. For all the time that you denigrated it back in your growing-up days, gomen has come back under the guise of...gomen to exact revenge by malessless-ing your anjet before it hits you with Montezuma's Revenge faster than you could say Imodium! Before you know it , then, all because of gomen, you will have become a victim of two evil powers: "uncertainty and diarrhea."

My fellow yager lj, therein lies the source of your stress; that andandE neka-qewess miaderg neger! Call it gomenapathy! You couldn't care less about the endless varieties of gomen, but the rest of the world here does and makes you feel like a primitive goofball for not being able to tell go-men from go-go girls. Not only do they want you to buy, buy and buy, they also expect you to know what to buy, how to buy, how much of it to buy and learn the proper use of what you buy after you buy it...more deplorable still is that, however unwittingly, you buy into all that buying frenzy and buy yourself right into bye-bye Ten'net followed by ras-yzo-uuuuuta!

It used to be simpler, much much simpler back in the day. You would send Mammush to the menged-dar-suq to fetch a tube of Colgate and, wouldn't you know it, he would brrrrrrr b'lo return in a shake of a lamb's tail brandishing a tube of Pepsodent!. ."Gosh MammuyE, gosh...ay yenEEE gobez! "...Why? Because Colgate was and still is the generic name for toothpaste back home, the same way KonsErba is for all tomato-paste, Filiiips is for all batteries and Aspiro-Bainak (two products, one word) is for all pain-relievers! Italian bread? . . .French bread? . . Vienna? Forget it!...it was dabbo and dabbo it still is, unless you insisted on being European about it, in which case it would be: Furno-o-o! I tell you, it just could not get any simpler than that!

Try picking up Aspiro-Bainak around here! You will actually feel your headache getting a headache of its own while you gawk and gawk at a multitude of pain-relievers sitting on rows and rows of shelving gawking right back at you. If these neatly packaged pills could talk, I swear they would fill the place with noisy chatter as they competed for your dollar: "Hey," Aleve would say to Advil next door, " that imbecile coming down the aisle with the imbi-sil headache is mine!" "Oh no, he ain't! That's a cluster headache, and you know he mine," Advil would insist! Guess who would lose? You... because you would end up getting both. Aleve, for the original headache you arrived with, and Advil, for the one you acquired in the store...and if you're not the imbecile that Aleve said you were, you'd be sure to pick up Tynelol too, to treat the headache that would inevitably follow as a consequence of being doped up!

Funny, but being doped up half of the time, might actually be good news around here since, for better or worse, it's an indication that something is indeed doing something to you. However, what do you do the other half of the time that the stuff doesn't do anything to/for you at all, because they lied to you about the magic that it's supposed to perform? . . .You don't think they do that? Why, I dare you to look up a fairly common world like Dishkinary in the best Dishkinary money can buy, and you'll see what I mean about lies! AngetEn lekara, if you find it!

And you wonder why you ain't been the same lately?...You may have attributed it to the usual culprit b'rd, but did you know that the neuromuscular twitches (Amharic translation: nuro-tics) and other neuropsychic (nuro-asakik) disorders you've been experiencing are actually diagnosable conditions directly or indirectly related to gomenapathy...your inability to live by your own set of values and buy whatever you say is gomen & Aspiro-Bainak without feeling guilty about your unfamiliarity with and indifference towards the excesses out there?

The fact that you live in-between cultures, in which your culture is fast becoming eclipsed and the things you care about, your priorities, are getting lost in the clutter, calls for nothing less than Tebel. Forget about importing some qessawist from ZegE-Mariam to burakE and Tebel-merCHet the entire diaspora, even though God knows it needs it...they could never secure the entry-visa. And even if they did, they would, upon arrival, open a restaurant in DC, call it DejE-Selam and serve you gomen.

Therefore, it's much easier for you to go there and immerse your confused behind in Tebel, if you can take the b'rd!...boy, is that water c-o-l-d! QomaTa miasaq'f ! . . .Lucky for you, the qomaTas are quarantined in that Leper-colony known by its royal name, Princess Zenebe-worq. Don't you know that you would actually consider hugging one if one were around? That's how Ittttttttttt-cold Tebel is. Come to think of it, wouldn't it be nice to install hot-water heaters at those places?...Sacrilegious?...ma, innEEE? Hardly!...just practical! They could charge a token sum for admission and call it a contribution like everybody else does. Granted, it would effectively shut out the local agerE. But, hey, those poor devils would just have to find their healing somewhere else with their relatively frivolous complaints of wugat and such. The hot-water-Tebel would be designated exclusively for use by diasporites with typically diasporian ailments such as gomenapathy which, if left untreated, has the potential of escalating into nurosis... a serious condition brought about by difficulties brought about by difficulties of nuro in the diaspora.

The post-Prozac-Paxil-Zyprexa-hot-and-cold-blowing Ethio-bipolar crowd would flock there for the hot-and-cold running Tebel, as well as for the country-club exclusivity it would provide. After all, being under the weather due to some stress-related beshita is never a reason to forego one's creature-comfort;. . . . besides, one cannot rub elbows with mere locals who, shame on them, would arrive on qarEza instead of in a PajEro-o-o-o!...Even amidst the destitution at Gordoma-Tebel and its environs, one has to keep up appearances! But...wait a darn minute! Isn't that, at least partly, the reason that one would end up over there at the Tebel in the first place?...keeping up appearances?

Of course, you would have spared yourself the trials and tribulations of life in the diaspora, if you had said gomen-beTena and stayed home. But, nooooo! You had to come over... hire a damn lawyer and sue yesew ager mengst for yesew ager zegnet and the right to buy a life-time supply of...forgive me...yesew ager gomen, of course!...and then, your dinqEm-citizen-behind got to thinkin' that you could do what Bubba and Willie-Mae knew was their inalienable right to do around here. T'gab meTana, meb't maskeber tejemere!...You forgot that you were made and not born! But, Bubba and Willie-Mae didn't. They took one good look at you and said: "Git!"

Before you learnt the subtleties of your new home, you even sang its praises...prematurely! You budgeted for that transcontinental call to your mother out of your tax-refund, and told her how lucky you considered yourself to be having settled down in a place, where mengist be-amet, be-amet be-Miaza-wor birr miseTibet! Your terribly misled mother was awe-struck: "Indiaw lesewuuuu hulu, indiaw beyyyebEtuuu? Ayaregut'm! Tadya inezih yeNawochu yihew yihen inkuan iyayu, erediaaa!" As you became a bit more enlightened, or thought you were, you told your mother how ridiculous it was that the government took people's money only to turn around and give it back in Miazia. Your still misinformed mother said, " ...ayyy bihon'm yewesedut'n memelessachewum tiliq neger new, ere temesgen new! . . . ad----e---rahin, yenE lj, yachinu yeseTuh'n teqebel, kesew atiTala!"

Funny how kesew meTalat has evolved into keras meTalat which, again, revolves around kesew meTalat. Most of the time, you're not even sure who the nemesis is, but you are in a constant mode of kesew-and-keras-meTalat, which tends to feed into and feed off of your nurosis in a vicious cycle of...well ...nurosis!

YeNa jegna, if you had known that life in the diaspora was going to be about meTalat, you could just as well have stayed home and fought the Dergue ; . . ja? . . .nein? The jegna that is now the New You probably would not have igrE-awCHiN-ed the hell outta there when Dergue masqeyemed you! (You lucky dog, you! If the reverse were true, namely you masqeyem-ing the Dergue, you would have ended up at the cemetery, in a remote spot on the outer periphery of Michael-guaro, where yesseffer-koredoch would meSedadat on your face at sundown!...how about that! At least, you would be in paradise already, a voyeur's paradise, that is. :O)

So, which is it? Did you leave home, because you were having difficulties, or are you having difficulties now, because you left home?...the proverbial "the chicken or the egg" parable! Only, in this instance, there is no question as to what came first...you, the cuckoo, did...when you chickened out of ager-bet, because they ruffled your feathers a bit!...then came the eggs, which you laid in a foreign nest, where they were hatched by the Bald Eagle...small wonder, then, that they came out looking like the chicken that laid them, but acting like the eagle that hatched them. Boy! The perfect recipe for a whole lot of keras-meTalat of cry-sis-kraraysoooo proportions in your bEteseb!

MeTalat in the diaspora is primarily about t'gil to maintain your sanity...but it's a t'gil nonetheless. Sure, in this type of struggle, you get to live to see another day of...well...insanity, because the struggle to maintain your sanity doesn't kill you dead on the spot...it s-l-o-w-l-y d-r-a-i-n-s the life out of you bit by bit. It's nothing to make light of, even if it doesn't appear to be k'nilikal enough to qualify you for an asylum. Not that asylum! (there you go again with your nurosis)...the Insane-asylum, my friend, the place where you will end up if they deny you that asylum!! Don't fret, at least they won't penitentiarize your "no-status" behind at Oz , where the inmates would welcome you with open arms before they would do with you what inmates do...mate! Boy, would you really, really lose it if that were to happen to your illegal ass...worse yet, your family would have very little of it to ship back home to Gordoma-Tebel where, in the wee hours of the morning, some insomniac qEs would maTmeq you in ice-cold water. (Ahhha!...that hot-water heater idea was not so bad after all, eh?)

And to think that, when leaving home many, many moons ago, you had proudly announced that you were going there to the land of milk and honey, and had thrown an elaborate party to bid your "not-so-fortunate" abro-adeg adieu! . . . But, when you got there to the land of milk and honey, Bubba and Willie-Mae laughed in your face, since you had no right to be laughed at behind your back...they said: " Lookee-heeeeah at this gullible clown, he da one who done got hoodwinked into believing that he was going there, when there is really only here...ikikikikiki!"

There (the land of milk and honey) became here (business as usual) rather quickly and, ironically enough, the more Bubba and Willie-Mae said "Git!" the more resolute you became in your desire to belong, and so you muTiN-ed the health out of your mental health. You went out of your way to adjust your maladjusted self there (here?), only to turn around and readjust your newly adjusted diasporite behind right back to your old pre-adjustment existence when it ain't miyawaTa no more. Unfortunately, by then, an element of schizophrenia had gradually crept into the picture as evidenced by your disorientation as to place and self...your failure to distinguish here from there (as Bubba and Willie-Mae had observed) and your inability to tell which one of you was the real you, after all that back-and-forth adjusting and readjusting you suffered through! Needless to say, all of your mental faculties would be intact today, if you had stayed Home!

Sadly, you have no one to blame but your own masochistic, self-destructing self!...if only you had not played hooky in those messeretE t'mhrt days twenty years ago, you would have learnt that even Shakespeare had said it: "...be it ever so humble, Home is where the heart is!" Forgive me if the phrase should be attributed to someone else (I, too, skipped a few of those sessions at the qebelE ), but if Shakespeare were indeed the one who wrote it, it was the only time he ever made sense...and that, because he probably plagiarized the Amharic aphorism: "Noro, noro kemerEt, zoro, zoro kebEt"...but, when thou art a Shakespeare, thy deception shalt tekedno y'bsel forever! (Think about it, Shakespeare's people had suffered no consequences for kidnapping Alemayehu Teodros, the heir to the throne, for crying out loud; just what was there to stop Shakespeare from lifting our words of wisdom?)

OK! Perhaps Shakespeare ain't your cup of tea, but...how about Steven Spielberg? Because he, too, had tried to tell you the way only he could...cinematically...artistically! He had attempted to get you to ponder the virtues of staying home by picking someone who had lots in common with you to verbalize his plea...a vertically challenged, beer-guzzling, beer-belly-skinny-legged-d'wiy alien of the same name, who spoke with an overweight accent: "Hommmmmm! . . .Hommmm! ET gooo hommmm . . .ET goooo hommmmm! "

You still don't get it?...Question for you: What was the first thing you did when you went back home for a visit? W-e-l-l? I'll tell you what you did the moment you found yourself among yager-sew on yager-soil. You raised your hands to the heavens and exclaimed: "IffoyEEEEEE Getaye, misgana y'gbah!" Yep! That's what you did! ...without realizing it, you thanked your Lord for bringing you back in one piece. What, then, did that say about your life in the diaspora, eh? The fact was that, deep in the recesses of your mind, there has always been the fear of not making it "hommmmm" fast enough before you melqeq-ed altogether...and that first surge of attachment and connection you felt towards home upon your return, "temesgen Getaye, temesgen," spoke volumes about your bewildered self. The question then is, if you had known you would be s-o-o glad to get back home, why on earth had you bothered to leave in the first place?...or, at least, why didn't you go back sooner, long before it became necessary to majeb the little bit of what was left of you straight from Bole to Gordoma-Tebel...eh ?"

And...y'all aymeleketen'm bayoch out there insisting that you have no complaints and that you do live the good life tebahr mado, more power to you...far be it for me to dispute your claim! In fact, we are in perfect agreement here except, you are saying it in ingilish "the good life" while I am saying it in AmariNa "ye gud nuro." I will have you know, however... even if you live in a mansion, you still live in a mad-bet...or mad-house, since you prefer z' ingiliz! Top-side or below-deck, you're still in the same boat, and that was the reason y'all yager ljoch, ilf'N and zanigaba alike, met over there at the produce section and frustrated over gomen, having given up your meat for the collective Tsom-Tselot that keeps the boat afloat.(enter Himmamat masinqo here)

bebEt mulu inante, iyale'qachihuuuuuu......!

na mineeew...na mineeeeew......! "

YewenzE lj hoy! All the diasporian ills that plague you are manifestations of an ancestral curse; an irgman for abandoning the millennia-old ItyoPiawi tradition of irga-man! You come from a long line of people who led an earth-based existence...set down roots, darn near worshiped the very physical soil under their feet and stayed put. And that, my dear, was how Immama tiliqua, your Dinqnesh, their Lucy (issat y'lassachew'na!) was found in the place from which you hail. While others wandered away into the unforgiving climates of the frozen tundras of Europe, Immama Dinqnesh stayed home to provide that irrefutable evidence that leaving home ain't in your history...that it ain't in your blood...that it ain't in your makeup. Imagine the consequences to your very identity if Immama Dinqnesh too, like you did six-million years later, had left home for the Caucasus mountains! You, her descendant, would now be walking the earth a Caucasoid, (tsk, tsk) looking at the world through deep blue eyes... your blond hair blowing in the arctic wind! (ikikikikikkikikikiki!)

The qumneger remains that your qbTbiT, yesew qbTbT-self left home and subsequently, Dinqnesh's irgman...andddddwam Teb sat'l ...came true. Nuro in the diaspora has now transformed you into an overworked, sleep-deprived nuro-traffic controller, constantly nuro-transmitting nuro-decisions from a nuro-fatigued (nuro-feteg) brain every second of the day and night!...Sorta like the stressed-out air-traffic controller at Laguardia who sees 1500 dots converging on him all at the same time and from all directions. You, too, are now reduced to having to make rapid fire decisions with blinding speed, keeping your fingers crossed all along that you land at least some of them safely. And you better do the required research within a fraction of the second that is allotted to you for each one of them dots coming at you...big dot and small dot!...Besmaaab, ye Decision-u gagata!

Heck! You can't even eat without deciding what to eat, how much to eat, with whom to eat, or whether you should eat at all! . . .But, you do have to eat, don't you? So, you read up on the latest fad on "Eating for Health " before you eat what you eat. And then, you go around bragging about your healthy diet until, exactly two years later, your doctor (it's always your doctor, your lawyer, your mail-person, your accountant...yeah right, they're all yours!) looks at you every bit like the alien that you are and calls you an "imbecile ." (He's been talking to Aleve):

Doc: "This stuff you've been eating was never meant for human consumption! How is it that you came to eat it for so long?"

You: "Well, doc, I really didn't come to eat it...I ate it because I came! I now know I shoulda stayed Hommmmm!"

Doc: "This is no time to be cute...didn't you know that the stuff was proven to cause Kersamotitis in lab-animals?"

You: " Lab? . .I know I'm sweating this, but I don't 'preciate the animal analogy!"

Doc: "Excuse m-e-e-e-e? OK! You presented here with complaints of Kersamotitis, which is not covered under your plan, incidentally. But, your problem is really of neuro-psychiatric nature as evidenced by your bizarre thoughts, which, I am afraid..."

You: " I know, I know...is not covered under my plan! Incidentally, doc! Have you ever heard of Tebel? Funny, it's not covered either...you k-n-o-w, it's all out in the open, where men and women lose their inhibition to spiritual healing, shed their covers and skinny-dip in ice-cold water!"

Doc: " But, that's a nudist-colony!"

You: "Close, doc, but no cigar! It's a nurotics colony! It is indeed a fine line, however, between nurotic and nudist...nudist being someone, who has reached the don't-make-me-no-never-mind-CHerq-Tlo-mabed stage of nurotic. "

Doc: " So, what's the name of this place, again? "

You: " Locally, it's known as: 'yeGordomawa Q'dst Innatachin Tebel .' Around here, it's known by its acronym: HMO-Gordoma (Holy Mother Of Gordoma Tebel )'"

Doc: " Hmmmmm! Lemme see if I got this right! S-o-o-o-o, at this particular HMO, nothing is covered...and yet...everything is covered?

You: " Yep! Mysterious, ain't it, doc? "

Doc: (salivating) "You know? I could go undercover to uncover the mysteries of this uncovered place that covers every ailment in universal coverage and have my HMO cover the cost! And then...Lord Almighty! Just imagine the millions of dollars I would receive in kick-backs from my HMO for referring my patients out to your Freebie-HMO! And...and it would all be perfectly in line with the latest craze of globalization and dollarization!"

You: "Forgive me, doc! But, I thought this was about healing!"

Doc: "You kiddin'? It's never been about healing!"

You: "So, what am I doing here, then, d-o-c-t-o-r ?"

Doc: " I dunno! But, remember what you said at the outset of our dialogue?"

You: " What? "

Doc: " You shoulda stayed Hommmmmmm!" . . . . .ikkikikikikikikik!