Category: Personal

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Phoenix

Phoenix, AZ

Phoenix has been very chill.

After months of not very chill — all that leaving New York (twice), punctuated by a whirlwind five weeks of intensity in Asia and capped by a couple of weeks of near-constant Jewish holidays in the company of a seven-month-old who has just learned how to climb up high enough to fall on his head — it has been a pleasure to be somewhere relaxed and easy.

Picking a direction home

I feel like I’ve been here a very long time, though it’s been just three weeks. I suppose it’s the first place that has felt like home in quite a while — maybe since June, when my girlfriend left New York, and New York began to feel like ex-home, a place I was closing up and shutting down.

I have made a conscious decision to think of Phoenix as home, of this house I own, this house where my parents are retired and where my stuff lives in boxes in the shed out back, as home. Someday Korea will be home, but it isn’t yet. I didn’t want to go off backpacking in Southeast Asia with no direction home, no sense of a place in mind that I can think of as the safe retreat if ever I need it. I don’t expect to need it, but it’s good to know where home is, even if you never plan to actually live there.

And I like Phoenix. As a place to live, it’s not bad. The weather is great — not just the warm and sunny you think of, but the crazy storms with the constant lightning and horizontal rain that come sweeping through and last twenty minutes. The storms here are about the best anywhere, and everything is dry again an hour later.

Phoenix days

So what have I been up to?

Sleeping late. Getting up, making coffee, going out for Mexican food for lunch. Treading water in the pool for exercise in the afternoon. Writing. I’ve finished a draft of my Vietnam book, and no, you can’t read it.

I’ve spent some time with my sister too, going to an Arizona State football game and a Phoenix Suns basketball game and a Make-A-Wish walk and the Phoenix Art Museum (“Art is our middle name” say the T-shirts) and a hike up north.

Beyond that, there’s been a lot of logistical stuff of the kind you do before you leave the country for a long while: getting an Arizona driver license and an international driving permit, buying travel insurance, getting a trust and a will and setting up durable power of attorney and making multiple visits to the notary at the UPS store, organizing boxes of my stuff in the shed out back, going to Target too many times and spending too much money on a year’s supply of drugs and toiletries. I have enough Imodium that I could stop pooping for a year, though that seems like maybe not the best idea, because that’s the number of pills that come in a Costco bottle of Imodium.

Like I said, chill. I’ve enjoyed the time with my parents, the relaxed flow of their retired life. It has been easy. I will miss it.

Back on the road

In another couple of days I’ll be on my way again. I’m nervous about hitting the road once more, a jittery feeling I’ve channeled into fussing over all the things I’ve packed and wondering how my bag is already this overstuffed when I haven’t gone anywhere or bought anything yet. (To be fair, it weighs only 32 pounds, not counting the stuff that’ll go in my carry-on. At some point I should probably make the inevitable blog post about what I’ve taken with me as gear.)

But the nerves will pass, I’m sure, once I’m in the thick of things. Next up is Seattle for a week (October 22-27) to visit one of my very best friends in the world, and then I’ll be on to Bangkok, arriving on October 29.

The adventure resumes!

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Moto X Pure gives you wood

I’m a few weeks into using my new Moto X Pure, and I love it. It’s beautiful (mine is white, with a bamboo back and silver highlights), it feels good in the hand, and it is neither too large (Nexus 6) nor too small (Nexus 5).

Why I got a new phone

Last spring, when my first Nexus 5 was dying from a bad battery, I jumped up to a work-issued Nexus 6. It was so huge that it wasn’t quite comfortable in my pocket, but I liked the big screen, which made reading The New Yorker more pleasant.

Even more, I liked the big memory.

Ever since the 120 GB iPod Classic went obsolete, I’ve missed it. I use Google Play Music now, so in theory I could stream everything, but I like to have my music on my phone for when my connection is limited, and I love to shuffle my way through a big music collection.

Then I left Google, returned my Nexus 6, and went back to my Nexus 5 (I’d been given a replacement with a new and better battery). It’s a fine phone, but 16 GB felt like a straitjacket. A few bands’ discographies maxed out the memory to the point that I couldn’t update apps.

Why I chose the Moto X Pure

I wasn’t sure I even needed a new phone, but I looked at a lot of them. The Sony Xperia Z3 has nice speakers and is supposed to be waterproof, but Sony’s whole mobile strategy seems confused at best. The Samsung Galaxy line is pretty but very expensive and burdened with Samsung’s TouchWiz software. And I thought about holding out for the new Nexus 6P, which I knew would be a great phone offering pure Android.

But then along came the Moto X Pure, with two killer features — beauty and memory — and very little fluff on top of the Android operating system.

First, the hard facts: The Moto X Pure, along with its on-board memory (I went for 64 GB), lets you add an SD card with up to 128 GB. That’s a lot of music. The rest of the phone’s specs are flagship-worthy, if not always quite the very top of the line (Snapdragon 808 instead of 810, but who cares?).

Second, the soft stuff: The Moto X Pure is pretty. It looks and feels premium. Every phone I’ve had for years has been some variation on matte black or matte gray — Nexi One through 6, and before that an HTC Hero. The white front and especially the bamboo back are surprisingly satisfying. It might seem like fluff, but your phone is an accessory you look at and touch all the time. It makes a difference when that accessory is elegant and appealing.

The speaker quality has also been a pleasant surprise. This is my first stereo phone, and it sounds pretty amazing for what it is.

And the Moto software is mostly pretty good. I like the camera app, the motions, the notifications, the subtle tools that change how the phone behaves at certain times or under certain conditions. It’s never invasive and often smart.

We’ll see how it holds up over time and as I travel, but so far, I’ve loved the Moto X Pure experience.

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Unemployed Drifting in America

Sandy Springs, Georgia

It’s been a little while, hasn’t it?

It’s now 86 days since I had a job. In those twelve weeks, I toured New York with an old friend; visited Vietnam for the first time, gave a talk on how Jews raise kids, and came away with a book project; spent a month falling in love with Korea and Korean and Koreans again; took the last steps to secure my master’s degree in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University; and moved out of New York once and for all. I’ve been busy.

And now I’m not.

It’s been 12 days since I moved out of New York. My apartment has been cleared out, the deposit check is on its way, and the movers have delivered my stuff to my parents’ house in Arizona. All my big worries are, for the time being, handled. It’s a nice feeling, as I sit here in Georgia in my brother’s house, listening to the rain come down and smelling the pot roast that will be Shabbos dinner tomorrow.

Riding Shotgun

I’m sort of in Atlanta but not really. I haven’t actually been to the city, or much of anywhere outside of my brother’s suburban orbit.

I’ve been to his shul down the street, and to the the rabbi’s house, and to the houses of a couple of other members of the community. I’ve also been to the nearby Kroger supermarket, a few kosher restaurants, two different malls, and a Lowe’s to buy reflective vests for the Shabbos walk to have dinner with some friends who live where there aren’t sidewalks. (The house, and the meal, were lovely.) I’ve spent a fair amount of time working from a Caribou Coffee with either my brother or his wife. It’s good coffee, and there’s a great view of the Walgreens across the street.

Once we went to a National Recreation Area for a short hike, and also to do tashlich, a Jewish ritual where you cast your sins into a body of water. Then later we went to a birthday party for a three-year-old at a playground next to an airport for private jets and small planes, where you can sit and watch the planes take off and land. What with shul and the holidays and Shabbos meals and the birthday party, I’ve spent more time around children and pregnant women in the past eleven days than in maybe the eleven years before that.

My brother has a good life here with his wife and his baby. I’m glad to have this time to bond with my little nephew, to take it easy and not do very much, to ride shotgun in someone else’s life. My brother and his wife are working hard — unlike me, they’re not unemployed drifters, and they have to deal with the baby when he wakes up in the night — which all means that they don’t have much time or energy to entertain me or take me places. Which is fine. I sit around. I work on my book. I nap. I read. I drift a little. I do some pushups, because pushups are good. I help out with the baby.

I have spent a lot of time watching the baby, who is seven months old. He laughs, he climbs things, he topples over and bumps his head. He eats pureed bananas with terrifying excitement and intensity, flapping his arms and lunging for the next bite, until suddenly he is done; usually he sneezes out a big gob of snot somewhere in the middle of his meal, and it looks more or less like the banana, and he flaps and complains while we wipe his nose because we’ve cut off the banana supply for no reason he can discern. His eating habits remind me of Alex from A Clockwork Orange.

The baby likes his set of colored plastic cups very much. He has started to like me too, I think, now that I’ve fed him. He climbs me and smiles at me. And then sometimes he cries for a while, which reminds me why I never kept one of these things at home. My nephew has poor manners and lacks skills. He doesn’t know anything about anything; I’m pretty sure the notion of representation, of things standing for other things, simply hasn’t occurred to him yet. Which limits conversation.

Sins Committed Through Light-Headedness

I’ve also spent a lot more time doing Jewish things and thinking about Judaism than I have in a while. I’ve been working on my Vietnamese book about Jewish child-rearing, and I’ve finished a draft of the background section, about who the Jews are, our history, the basics of the religion. I have done Shabbos and Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — by the end of the latter, I had a wicked caffeine-withdrawal headache, though a little snuff helped. As we read through the list of sins for the thousandth time, I began to wonder about the sins “committed before You through light-headedness” in particular.

I think the experience of writing my thesis on Korean shamanism has helped me to approach Judaism with a little anthropological distance, and maybe a lighter head too. I’m less judgmental about it than I once was, more able to engage it on its own terms without fussing overmuch about my own beliefs. This is also the one of the few times that I’ve been involved with Orthodox Judaism away from my parents, and that changes the dynamic: here it’s not a replay of my adolescent rebellion if I decide I’m done with shul for the day or duck out for a while or skip the night services.

America

So this is my sojourn in America. I sort of hate it when people say New York City isn’t America — we’re Americans too! — but the New York City way of life is very different from what I think of as normative America, with its cars and strip malls and wide-aisled supermarkets. By the time it’s done, this will be my longest stay in that normative America since 2003, when I got back from living abroad the last time.

I suppose it’s OK, but I don’t really get it. Somehow a coconut plantation on the Mekong Delta makes more sense to me as a place to live, and a giant city, whether it’s Saigon or Seoul or New York, makes way more sense to me.

It’s just about a month until I’ll be touching down in yet another Asian megacity, Bangkok this time. In the meantime, I have a book to work on, family to enjoy, naps to take, strip malls to visit. And I have to go soon, because Kroger awaits!

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New Beginnings

If ever there were a Rosh Hashanah that might symbolize new beginnings for me, this is it. For 23 years — even for the year I lived abroad — I have called New York home. Not anymore. Today I closed the door for the last time on my Brooklyn Heights apartment and walked out into a new life. Today I’ll fly down to Atlanta to meet my nephew, who will be experiencing his first Rosh Hashanah.

I have read that while our culture imagines us as walking forward into the future, some cultures see the future as something we walk backwards into: we can see the past clearly, but the future is hidden. It’s very easy for me to catalogue the things I’m leaving behind, and much harder for me to bring to mind, at this moment, what it is I’m heading towards. I suppose that I’m still in a bit of a pause before the start of what I have been thinking of as my new life, which is my life in Asia. For the next couple of months, I’ll be in the US, not at home in New York, but also not on my new adventure.

But this is also my real life, and something new and different. I am taking a pause, an interregnum, as we enter into the Jewish season of reflection and renewal. There’s an arc to the whole thing. Rosh Hashanah is the entry point into a period of sanctification, with Yom Kippur as its climax, the moment when (we hope) the purification is complete, and we are ready to begin the new year. Then comes Sukkos, a reconnection with earthy reality, where we build huts and eat outdoors under starlight and leaves and wave branches and fruit around. It’s a festival that focuses on joy, coming to its conclusion with a burst of celebration for the Torah, the text and the way of life that links the high spiritual plane of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with the material reality of crops and dirt and fecundity that Sukkos celebrates. 

I am thinking about all of this not just because my life is changing, but because of how it’s changing: among other things, I’m co-writing a Vietnamese book about Jewish childhood education. As I step away from what my life has been and prepare to set forth into what it will be, I’m interested in taking a fresh look at the Jewish part of my upbringing — a look that will be, I hope, a little distanced from all of the adolescent conflict that charged my experience of Orthodox Judaism when I was at home and living it. I will be writing my book over these next weeks and months, looking back on my own childhood to discover what was best in it so that I can share these things with a nation on the far side of the world about which I know very little.

As with my New York life as well, I will spend some time sifting out the resentments and frustrations, the disappointments and discomforts, to find the jewels I’ll carry with me. They will need to be compact and lightweight and durable enough for the unpredictable road ahead, and useful enough to be worth carrying.

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Floating in the Dark

I have just had my first experience of a “float,” or what is known, a bit misleadingly, as a sensory deprivation tank. And I feel great.

I decided to try it out as a bit of a birthday present to myself. I went down to Lift / Next Level Floats, where I spent an hour floating in the dark inside of a pod filled with high-density salt water.

One of the things about being 41 and having lived an active life is that most things I do now, even if they’re new experiences, are like other experiences I’ve already had. So: a float in a tank is like lying in the Dead Sea, but in a dark room and against a smooth surface rather than in the heat of the desert and with sharp salt balls underneath you. A float in a tank is like getting a massage, in that it’s an hourlong sensory experience that lets you drift. A float in a tank is like meditating, except that no one has told you to keep coming back to the breath. A float in a tank is like an afternoon nap, except you can’t roll over or quite get to sleep. A float in a tank is like being in your bed awake at 3 am with jet lag, in that you’re motionless in the dark at a time when your mind thinks you ought to be awake.

What’s surprising to me is how good — how relaxed — I felt when I was done and out the door. I don’t think I felt that relaxed during the session. As I began to float, I noticed exactly where all the tension was in my body: I could feel it in my legs, my arms, as they seized up while I tried to hold myself up, hold myself in place — which was, of course, unnecessary. The sharpest tension was in my neck and shoulders, which began to ache right away, such that I used the neck flotation pillow to hold up my head for maybe the first two thirds of the float.

After a while, once the water stopped moving, there was a curious sensation of solidity, as if I were lying on a solid surface perfectly contoured to my body. And it might have been this easing of the body into the float, and the melting away of physical tension, that led to the relaxed feeling I have now.

Whatever it was, I came out of the water feeling calm and mellow. We’ll see how this feeling unfolds over the rest of the day.

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Thesis

I have, at long last, posted my master’s thesis online. Called Swiss Gods Don’t Like Rice Cake, it tells the story of how Korean shamanism has begun to incorporate non-Koreans as shamans. You can find it here.