meaning in the moving design

Getting old is a sneaky thing. Everyone always complains about the rumble of the big 3.0 but I'd say that my 30th birthday was perfectly chill- no neurotic impulse to deconstruct my life, no aching sentimentalism about all the lost years of my youth, no reminders of how time has past and the awe or reverence that comes with that.

No... that's all hitting me now, at 3.14159... tricky dick, that 31-and-a-half. Lately I've been running into a lot of old peeps. Not just people I used to hang out with, but also (and even weirder), people that I just used to see around. Like, back was I went out more. It's a strange feeling to be outside of a community you once felt so entrenched in, one that feels like it still carries that version of you with it.

I recently ran into some musician friends from OM days. I'd met their daughter when she was barely able to walk (we had a nice bonding moment when I picked her up as she was crying and she clung to me and fell back asleep. [Especially impressive because it was the morning after a sleepless night during which I was probably up to no good]). Last week, I saw her for the first time since and it blew my mind. She's six now. Six. like a completely real, actualized person. WEEEEIIIRD.

To save me from all these head trips, I recently got obsessed with feather stars, or rather, I reawakened an old obsession. I caught sight of these wily ocean invertebrates in Borneo, I was snorkeling along and suddenly I saw this awesome wiggling, wiggly feather thing. Then, when I dove down to get a better look, it went perfectly still and pretended that it was a plant!

Check it (sorry for the shaky video):

I almost failed art class in high school. I know, it's a pretty hard thing to do, impressively so even. The art teacher used to look over my shoulder and shake her head worryingly at my cartoonish mock-up of a fellow classmate. She took pity on me and gave me a C+ as a final grade. It was the lowest mark I ever got in school. Even today, it's hard to distinguish my drawings from a 7-year-old's. But once in a while, I slip out of self-consciousness (or get stoned) and decide to make something.
This is my mania contribution, although it's a little inexact. I could've opted to show you the 26 web links (and counting) of travel research I've collected for my upcoming trips around Taiwan and to the Philippines, Borneo, and Indonesia... but I thought this might be a liiittle more interesting. I have a horrible habit of always looking too far ahead or behind me, and as such, usually end up not watching my step and landing flat on my face. One day, thems smarty mcsmarterton physicists will build a space-time magic machine that will fix all that. yes.

dromomania - compulsive longing for travel

I've had a pretty ambivalent relationship with rituals all my life. In that I don't particularly like them, but sometimes I need them. They can be a nice, powerful anchoring energy... or just a really fuckin heavy anchor.

I've spent a big chunk of my life bouncing between several different jobs, contracts, and countries. And while I've managed to retain the same friends for the past some years, I've got lots of little groups of them to move between. So. What does ritual mean to me? Lately, I've been thinking about the rare rare times in my life when "ritual" has worked. When a constant felt comforting and not stagnating...

Ok, there was the invaluable ritual of going to tai chi twice a week, which gave me two much-need weekly excuses to leave my house in the dead of winter and socialize. I would say this same ritual helped me through a fair bit of depression as well. Um... sushi? Does sushi count? How about brunch??

Truth told, the only time I think it's actually worked was in Cambodia. Against all odds, I managed not only to spend 3 months doing the same thing every bloody day, but I managed to love it, like really feel connected to the ritual. Partly, I think, because I was was so proud of myself for not going rights nuts and succumbing to sheer and utter boredom. Which, to this day, absolutely blows my mind. I was in a remote village with no electricity, no running water, no TV, no pool table, no lights, no books... no distractions. There was one "mountain" (really just a hill) a scooter ride away, but basically, it was never-ending rice fields in all four directions, and not much to explore, with no means to explore it even if there was. My life was scheduled by the hour. The same thing every day:

Wake Up
Make a meal
Eat a meal
Teach
Make a meal
Eat a Meal
Teach
Teach again
Make a meal
Eat a meal
Light a candle/Watch the bugs/Chat/Chain smoke cigarettes and have an occasional joint
Go to Bed

EVERY DAY. Like the only variations were laundry day and getting invited to a neighbour's house for dinner. And I LOVED IT.

Yes, there are obvious factors. I'd been on the road for a long time before I got to Cambodia; I was tired and needed a place to lay my head. But the other major factor was the people. Frank, Anke, Babsie and I were a tight little unit and became incredibly close by circumstance. We never fought, were never awkward or uncomfortable with each other (except for that one time we got too stoned...) and just managed to pool our best qualities for the others to draw on. The people in the village were an endless source of amusement and entertainment, sometimes frustrating and sometimes just the most beautiful revelation.

I've always likened my time in Cambodia to the dizzy syndrome You remember, as kids, how we'd spin ourselves around and then stop and watch the world keep tumbling? I imagined myself as this kid who'd spun herself round and round and round for over a year, bouncing from one country to the next, and then, suddenly, I stopped. And the coolest thing happened- the world kept spinning. I was doing the same thing every day, but suddenly, experiences were finding me. Every big and little thing became totally interesting; every experience a lesson that I could draw on.

I'm sitting here thinking of all this because, yeah, I guess it just depends on the ritual. This 9-6 one, for example, kind of bites. I don't understand how people can breathe life into it, make it fresh, reinvent it. I don't understand how people can watch all their daylight hours slip by through a window (and btw, I don't even have a window) for 10 years and not realize that there are much better things out there to waste their time and energy on. And the thing is, I LIKE my job, so I can't even begin to understand the people who are putting up with this that don't. I guess I should admire their... stamina.

So what is ritual to me? Ritual is the Jedi mind trick of making some place old look new again. Ritual is revisiting myself every couple of years, watching younger and older versions of me spar and dance. Ritual is using the tools I've crafted over my lifetime to learn something new every day. Ritual can't be the same, it has to be different. However subtle the movement, it has to move.

... I think that's my subtle way of saying I need a vacation.

INDIA, JANUARY 2007


hindi devotional song intro



After 5 showerless days of sloshing around in the mountains, I decided to take refuge in a small village to recover the feeling in my legs. I'd heard about a place near Kalimpong, some community tourism initiative started by a former Indian army major. It was way beyond my budget to stay there, but I thought, "what the hell, I deserve a break." So off I went. After 4 hours in a jeep, along a rickety mountain pass road with hairpin turns and potholes that would launch my stomach into my throat, I arrived in a small village surrounded by nothing but green and mist. I was taken up to a ginormous house, and greeted by the benevolent father figure of the village, the army daddy, my host.

The Major (as he was known) had very strong opinions about what was wrong with India, and how he was going to fix it. He spoke about the unsustainable influx of people migrating to the city every year, and how villages like the one we were in were being abandoned. People were giving up these vast expanses of fertile land for a shack in the city slums, in hopes of raising themselves up economically; of capturing their share of India's newfound wealth. The Major thought this was ludicrous. He said he wanted to show the people who lived here that they had resources; that they had a different, arguably more valuable kind of wealth at their disposal. So he started a community initiative with the expressed purpose of keeping people in the village, to stymy the flood of urban migration.

It went a little something like this: the Major approached a handful of villagers and asked to build a one-room tourist guesthouse on their property, which he paid for. Then he organized people- tourists- to come stay there, offering them freshly-cooked local meals, peace, quiet, serenity, and the all-important "authentic local experience." All the money went to whichever family played host. The Major provided the capital, gave informal English lessons, and set up a small English school in the village.

Sounds good, no? It was for the most part... the only strange thing was that I think the whole set up was meant for a.. different kind of tourist. The guesthouse was an elegant raised woodframe house, lavishly decorated with local handicrafts and antiques with a cute little porch out front. Pretty much the swankiest accommodations I've... EVER had, and quite a step up from the cement holes I'd stayed in everywhere else in India. On top of this, the family I stayed with never really interacted with me (they were kind of shy on account of the language barrier) and their daughter was in charge of "taking care" of me... which made me feel like she was my servant girl... which in turn made me extremely uncomfortable. She was nice, but afraid to chat for fear of offending me, so would serve me my food, call me "madam," bow, and leave.

Anyone who knows me can probably imagine how horrified I was at this; can maybe even feel the awkwardness of that situation oozing out of this blog entry. The last thing I wanted was to be reminded of my privilege as a rich, galavanting Westerner. It was the faux tourism experience in full effect, born of good intentions, but horribly contrived nonetheless.

Thankfully I (and my lucky travel fairy) believe in making our own fun. The first night, as I was sitting alone on my cute little porch wishing I had... someone to talk to, I heard faint singing. "That sounds live," I thought. So I grabbed my recorder and went out into the night, following the sound of the music. I walked into a house where about 20 kids were gathered in a pseudo circle, singing and dancing joyfully with a harmonium and drum accompanying them. I sat down and made myself scarce, indeed no one really paid me any mind for a long time. After a while, some began to notice. The girls would glance back at me and smile or nod, and then whisper amongst themselves. Some came up and offered me food but mostly they just kept singing. I was sitting next to the harmonium player, and he just kept smiling at me. It was a shy but immensely gracious smile. I can still remember it, and yes I'm smiling right now thinking about it.

What struck me most about that night was how carefree they all seemed, and how I didn't feel like a part of the equation at all. They weren't singing and dancing for me, they were just doing it, from somewhere inside themselves, a spiritual place I have never known, but feel humbled to have witnessed.

Travelling often suffers from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: the measurement changes the result. I travel because I am awed by different cultures, different worlds, different ways of being. But often, by the very act of witnessing it, the... "purity" of those worlds is compromised. For this reason, certain moments stand out- those rare, rare occasions where the laws of physics do not apply, and the universe makes someone else's world immune to my eyes and my presence.

... I feel a big philosophical argument welling up in my throat, so I'm going to stop here and save that for another rainy day. I've started archiving my stuff at archive.org, so more samples can eventually be found here. Be patient, these things take eons to upload...

Enjoy.

hindi devotional song1

Every Chinese character has a story. Often a long, meandering story, rich in symbolism. The charcter for "female" depicts a woman kneeling in submission, and the character for "tranquility", is the female character under a house. Whoever invented these characters, they assumed that the story was a universal kind of truth. they didnt realize how subjective the story was. In some cases these stories become values frozen in time. They outline a narrative that Chinese people are culturally subserviant to, but will continue to identify less and less with.

There is something about this logic that reminds me of myself, though i cant quite put my finger on how. It has something to do with being needlessly complicated, with getting caught up in the details... with being consumed by my own subjectivity. I guess the Chinese way of thinking is just really bloody neurotic- everything means something, and the thread of meaning runs deep. You end up getting stuck in some all-encompassing history that's not even yours. Like using all these ideologically-outdated characters to narrate your reality today. Sometimes things are just coded in ways that I don't relate to, or understand.

We are saddled by our upbringing, by whichever way we were formed. If we grew up feeling negative, its easy to lean towards negativity. If at first we give too much, it's hard to learn how to be selfish later. If we were raised to be conservative, it's impossible to feel fully free.

A few years ago, I was on a personal mission to figure out the difference between habit and instinct. My argument was that there was no difference; that habits are instinctual. They are disguised as natural reactions, but in actuality, they are learned, and so can be unlearned. So, pumped by this new revelation, I took an inventory of all my habits, my long list of bad behavior and I started to unpack. I can't exactly remember what was going on in my life at the moment, but I was convinced that it was something happening collectively, to me and the people closest to me. I had an image of all of us packing up all our baggage, and jumping off a cliff. The lightest of us would fly while the pack rats would fall, like a test to see if we could change with the times.

I went back 20 years today:

I went back to the countless roadtrips we took as a family when I was a kid. In the big black Buick, so big it could probably fit a smart car in its trunk. I remember my dad behind the steering wheel, probably revelling in how big the country was, and how much.. space there was on the road. I remember my mom in the passenger seat, handing me my mini pencil and my red "Wordsearch Fun" book. And I remember me sitting in the middle, in the armrest-that-doubles-as-a-seat seat, no taller than the armrest; not having outgrown it yet.

And I remember Jacky, oh how I remember Jacky. I sang my goddamn lungs out to his entire album. The same album, every roadtrip. I knew how to sing all the songs by heart, even though I had no idea what he was singing about. I still don't but I kind of remember the words.



So... this one's for my parents, who put up with all my wailing for all those years.

And to Jacky, of course. Everyone knows you were the only Heavenly King who could actually sing.