Category: Personal

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Transitions

I don’t usually talk about my relationships here because it’s personal, and personal in a way that involves another person. But there’s something I need to talk about, and I need to talk about it straight on.

Today my girlfriend moved away. She’s on a plane to Korea right now. She’ll be teaching English there for a year. What that means for us is that our relationship as we’ve understood it — as boyfriend and girlfriend — is done. We’ll see each other again, as soon as July or August, and I’m confident that we’ll stay connected. But a very important part of my life — a person I love, a relationship I rely on — is gone.

This is one of the hard parts. The stuff that maybe doesn’t go up on all the fluffy travel blogs about new places, new experiences, adventures. People envy what I’m doing, but they don’t do it, and there are reasons. Saying goodbye to people you love is a big one of the reasons.

Her departure, of course, comes before mine. But my departure was always a part of the plan, something she understood would come one day. It was never something she wanted to prevent. On the contrary, it inspired her to break free of her own habitual surroundings and start an adventure of her own. She’s on the way right now. I’m excited for her, even as I’m sad she’s gone.

People who don’t know us very well have tended to jump to certain conclusions when they hear that my girlfriend is moving to Korea. They think that we’ll be together again later, whether we know it or not. They think she’s going there to wait for me, to pine for me. They think that my wanderlust has been at her expense. This way of thinking tends to assume a bunch of things that aren’t really true for us: that the woman wants a long-term commitment while the man seeks to evade one, that the woman will shape her entire life around the capture of her man, that we’re fated to be together. Please don’t turn us into characters in a Nora Ephron movie, beset by obstacles and our own blindness until the magic moment. Real life is richer and more complex than that.

There’s something to be said for doing things the way we’ve done them. Everyone has had relationships that have come to an end — good relationships, relationships we’re glad we had. My girlfriend and I chose to do that consciously, instead of the more traditional approach of waiting until you can’t stand each other. We grew together, and we parted with love.

I am looking forward to seeing what she begins to create in this next phase of her life. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be a part of her life — past, present, future.

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Our Martian anthropologist

There are very few famous people whose deaths affect me, and fewer still whose deaths I worry about before they happen. But I have thought, from time to time, that Oliver Sacks must be getting on in years, and I have felt a pang at the thought that someday there will be no new Oliver Sacks essays to enliven and enlighten me.

Well, that time is coming.

I was young when I first read Oliver Sacks, still in college or maybe even high school. I must have picked up The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat off of the bookshelf in my grandmother’s office, where she kept all her psychology and spirituality textbooks (I also had my first browse through Kinsey in there).

Sacks’s  insights into the mind and the self had a strong effect on me. My own father had taught me, based on his psychedelic experiences in the 1960s, that reality is a contingent thing: if a few micrograms of the right chemical can alter it utterly, how certain are we about the reality we’re seeing now? Sacks, in his writing, took that insight and gave it depth and context through his clinical tales of people who encountered the world abnormally. He did more than simply catalogue the strange, though. As a doctor, he made it his task to help people live the richest, fullest lives they could, even when they were hampered by severe and strange impairments.

My father’s mother’s father was in the ward that Sacks wrote about in Awakenings, the book that became a Robin Williams movie, though he had passed away by the time Sacks arrived. My great-grandfather had been a society doctor when the influenza epidemic of 1918 struck. He worked himself to exhaustion and succumbed to the secondary epidemic of encephalitis lethargica — sleepy sickness — and was never the same afterwards. His decline changed my family’s fortunes and led to lifelong jealousies among his daughters.

In India, where I traveled on my own after graduating from college, I picked up Oliver Sack’s first book, Migraine, It’s not really a fun read: Sacks was not yet writing for a wide audience, and the style is clinical and technical. I picked it up in the bookshop of the Taj Mahal Intercontinental Hotel, and I read it during those first days of terrified overwhelm, coming to believe that I was experiencing migraines, or at least the migraine-like symptoms of nausea and headaches and semi-hallucinatory states. The claustrophobic quality of that book, and the sheer idiocy of choosing to read it then, remain with me as a core part of that initial experience abroad.

My grandfather, in his very last years, began running music workshops in his nursing home, bringing together his years of acting experience and his understanding of how music could reach even those who suffer from severe dementia — which included his wife, my grandmother. In this, he was informed by Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain more than any other text.

Sacks’s sense of curiosity and compassion remain a compass for me. His approach to healing has become my ideal. And whenever I see that the latest New Yorker or New York Review of Books has a Sacks piece, my mood brightens. I have rarely been disappointed. I haven’t yet read all of his books, but I expect I will — despite my earlier misstep in reading Migraine while hiding in terror in a Colaba hotel room, Sacks is usually good company on the road. And if I can approach the world — and the world inside my head — with Sacks’s trademark curiosity and kindliness, I know I’ll be doing all right.

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Traveling

Sometimes in life we make decisions. Sometimes we make big ones.

This was a big one.

In July of this year, I’ll be quitting my job to travel in Southeast Asia and then move to Korea. Here are the details.

As the departure date gets closer and once I hit the road, this blog will transition to more of a travel blog. Along with the sort of things I’ve always posted, I’ll be writing pieces on gear, planning, destinations, experiences. I hope that these pieces will be helpful to others who are going through the same sort of planning as me, and I hope they’re interesting to everyone else.

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Train wrecks and cancer

There are things you can only learn from being in a train wreck. Like how to survive a train wreck, what to do when you’re in a train car and it’s on its side and on fire and everyone around you is screaming or dead. Like what it feels like to be in a train wreck. And being in a train wreck is so intense and loud and such a big fucking deal that you start to think that there’s maybe nothing grander or sweeter or profounder than the things you learn from being in a train wreck.

The bullshit part is the thinking that all of life is like your train wreck. It’s not. Hardly any of life is like your train wreck, and your actual train wreck is boring. I once sat through an AA meeting up in Harlem where the speaker kept saying things like, “Remember zip guns?” or “Remember razor fights?” and the black men in their forties and fifties would nod, and I was thinking, Zip guns? Razor fights? I haven’t ever seen that shit in my life.

We are taught, however, to think of certain types of train wrecks as glamorous, even universal. I knew enough that in the seventh grade, when I went to San Francisco to do pot for the first time with Zorick and Tony the Russian car thief, and when they took me to somebody’s house where everyone was slumped on the floor, dazed and wasted and listening to thrash metal in their Megadeth T-shirts, that I was seeing the coolest fucking thing on the goddamn planet. I knew when I watch Sid and Nancy that I was supposed to want to be a suicidal junkie. There are a million rock songs about that particular train wreck — so many that you might start to think you haven’t really lived unless you’ve hung around Casey Jones and gone off the rails.

You know what else is a train wreck? Cancer. And it’s boring as shit. No one wants to read your cancer memoir. I’ve known too many women who’ve had cancer and written godawful poetry about it and cried when they read the poetry and been pissed as hell that I didn’t cry too. But it’s your train wreck, not mine, and no one’s written good songs about it — not even Bob Marley, who died of cancer while writing songs about marijuana and gunfights.

So yes, Michael Lally and Dave Hickey and Greil Marcus and Anthony Kiedis and a dozen other ex-junkies, I get a kick out of the way you jam. I was raised on it. Half the time I’m not even sure what you’re on about — maybe the drugs fuzzed a circuit up there, and now you talk faster than you think, or maybe that’s the particular skill that kept you alive when everyone else was crushed under luggage and broken glass. But don’t try to sell me on the golden glory of the old-timey railway and its switching errors. There are other ways of being alive, other ways of knowing. When you’re not so caught up on the trouble ahead and the trouble behind, you can light out and look all around.

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A year in the life

Happy New Year! 새해 복 많이 받으세요!

Another year has passed, another is beginning. We’re back at an arbitrary point in our rotation around the sun, so people will get drunk and spend too much money on dinner. (As for me, I’m in Phoenix, hanging out with my parents and planning on doing very little this evening.)

Arbitrary though it may be, the end of the year prompts reflection. For me, after some big events in 2013 — buying a house, getting into and out of and into relationships — 2014 was a year of continuity. On December 31, I have the same apartment, job, and girlfriend as on January 1. I’m still in school, working on that master’s degree in Asian studies. I spent three weeks in Korea this summer, like I did in 2013, again in pursuit of academic goals. I traveled to a couple of new places — a resort in Costa Rica as part of a work event, Tobago for a friend’s wedding, and most significantly, Israel — but I’ve also traveled in past years.

So it was, as the sign says, a year in which “the current trend is reinterpreted” rather than reinvented. What stands out most about 2014 is that I shared it with someone in a new way, and I got to be part of her journey as well as my own. (Out of respect for my partner’s privacy, I don’t tend to blog much about my dating life, but she’ll be OK with everyone knowing that her role in my life added a lot to 2014 for me.)

And what’s up for 2015? Big things. Stay tuned.

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Learning enough to understand sorrow

When I first went to Korea, in 2001, I knew next to nothing about it, and I didn’t speak the language at all. I’d given myself a crash course in the hangeul alphabet and knew a few basic phrases, and that was it. I was in those days too intimidated by the language to give it serious study, but I couldn’t help picking up words and phrases as I went along.

One word I heard constantly was 어떻게 (eotteoke). One day I asked one of the Korean teachers what it meant. Literally, she explained, it means “how,” but it’s much more than that. Koreans use the word kind of the way American English uses “what,” as an exclamation, a complaint, a rebuke, an expression of bafflement.

Early the next morning, I stepped out onto my little street of Pambat-gil (which I did not know until after I left Korea meant “Chestnut Grove Street”). Off in the distance was an ajumma. She stood in the middle of the street, arms spread wide. I could see that she was gripping a cell phone in one of her uplifted hands. And she was crying out, in the most mournful tone, with the final vowel long drawn out, “Eotteoke! Eotteoke!”

I felt a giddy sense of elation: I understood! Something was happening in Korea, and I got it. What I got, though, was that this poor woman was howling out her shock and sorrow in the middle of the street at 8 am. Whatever news had come through that cell phone, it wasn’t good.

I was reminded of that dissonance — of the thrill of understanding tempered by the sorrow of what’s understood — as I read a long Facebook post in Korean today. Usually I let those pass by unread. They’re still difficult. But I’d just yesterday finished reading the classic Korean short story 사랑방 손님과 어머니 (Mother and Her Guest), and I thought maybe I could manage the five paragraphs my friend had written.

I’m glad I did. I learned that my friend’s grandmother had passed away, an important event that I otherwise would have missed. She wrote beautifully about the way her grandmother had been a teacher to her, how at a difficult time in her life her grandmother had taken her in and taught her how to make dolls’ clothes, how the family sat together sharing memories and how each person’s memories were different, but they were all warm memories.

I’m sorry that my friend has lost a dear family member, but I’m also thrilled that — with much help from an online dictionary — I could share in my friend’s memories of her beloved grandmother, her sense of loss and sorrow. I’m pleased that words I learned from reading Mother and Her Guest helped me to understand what my friend had written. I am also grateful that I know enough Korean now to find out about my friend’s loss and express my condolences.

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The pleasures of transit

I’ve been meditating for the past month, using Headspace (I get it discounted as a Google employee benefit). It’s a series of guided mindfulness meditations hosted by Andy Puddicombe, who sounds like the GEICO Gecko. Each day, the GEICO Gecko tells me to take some deep breaths, leads me through a body scan, reminds me to let thoughts come and go. There are times when I want to do it and times when I very much don’t. But has it been having any effect?

There are few better tests of mindfulness and patience than transit. Yesterday I flew from JFK in New York to Phoenix, on an oversold flight the Saturday before Christmas. I thought of Radiohead:

Transport
Motorways and tramlines
Starting and then stopping
Taking off and landing
The emptiest of feelings

As they announced a last-minute gate change, sending the mass of passengers scurrying across the terminal, I felt the pull of that kind of numb irritation. But I made a choice to approach the experience differently. At that second gate, as an entire planeload of people mobbed the counter, I went to look out the window at the ground crew attaching the terminal ramp to the plane, balancing on a high platform to open the plane door and roll in the food carts, putting down and taking up chocks. I noticed the hashes on the ground for where different models of planes should pull in: 747, 777, Airbus 380, 767, 757. Inside the terminal, a sparrow was darting from window to window. A mother brought her toddler to the window and tried to point out the bird to him, but he was mesmerized by the big metal birds outside.

Getting on the plane, I stood beside the woman who was furious about being in Zone 3 and kept telling the counter staff, with tight-lipped determination, that “overhead space is my biggest concern right now,” as if no one else had luggage and the airline had never had to deal with a situation like hers before. Two different families on the ramp were dealing with crowds of children whose seats were somehow not adjacent to their parents’. On board, the young man next to me was coughing up a lung, and his father in the aisle had an argument with the flight attendant over his already-tagged bag that was supposed to be checked. The cabin was so cold that I kept on my hat and gloves. The pilot announced that our JFK ground time was estimated at 50 minutes.

There was every reason to be sour and annoyed, but somehow I wasn’t. I looked out the window. You could see Manhattan in the distance, the new World Trade Center tower, and the planes taking off in front of us were silhouetted against it. It was beautiful. In the air, I ate my overpriced terminal sandwich, put a travel mix on my headphones and took a nap. I woke up, meditated with Headspace. I tried watching Frozen, but it was terrible, so I turned it off. I looked out the window. By then we were over western Nebraska. There was a stripe of snow, maybe 50 miles wide and hundreds of miles long, across an otherwise undifferentiated flatness of squares and circles, as if a line of clouds had gotten exactly that far and said, “I think I’m gonna go right here.” I thought about how strange it is that I know Seoul and Beijing and Kathmandu better than I’m likely ever to know that farmland, that the chances of finding me in Omaha are far less than the chances of finding me in Phnom Penh or Vientiane. Then the farmland gave way to the layer cake buttes and canyons and the snowy mountains of New Mexico, and after a while that landscape changed into badlands where the icy rivers splayed out like white fractals, and then the land stepped down into the Arizona desert. It was beautiful. I took out my laptop and wrote about it, and I noticed that when I’ve meditated and been sober — the one other time I kept it up was when I lived in Korea — I’ve written more and more freely. I almost didn’t want the flight to end. Almost.

*

There are two related thoughts that transit evokes: that nowhere is anywhere, and that everywhere is everywhere else.

The first thought is the numbness that comes over us, the feeling that we’re in non-space, non-time. It’s easy to feel like a dead thing when you’re in the TSA line. (As Talking Heads put it, “I’m tired of looking out the windows of the airplane / I’m tired of traveling, I want to be somewhere.”)

The second thought is the unnerving feeling that planes and technology are shrinking the world, that there is no escape, that wherever you go will be the same as wherever you left. This illusion is brought on by the weird sameness of airports, airplanes, transit lounges, duty free shops, chain hotels. But these places need to be legible and at least minimally palatable to travelers from everywhere, and they need to be interoperable with planes coming in from wherever. Airports aren’t the world. The world is still out there in all its everyday strangeness. Omaha retains its mystery, if you’re open to that.

But contra Talking Heads, nowhere is nowhere, and everywhere is somewhere — even airplane cabins and duty free shops. We’re always in transit: through time, through space. We’re always between things. Something is always ending, something has always not yet begun. But we are always somewhere. And I’m finding, for myself, that the simple practice of noticing where I am makes being there less frustrating, more interesting, more worthwhile. It’s counterintuitive, but when I stop resisting the irritations, stop forcing them away, they lose much of their power. Even at the airport.

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Hanukkah

Hanukkah is a dumb holiday, and it’s my favorite.

I grew up with a weird amalgam of Jewish influences: an early childhood of high-style Reform Judaism gave way to my parents’ increasing devotion to the Chabad Lubavitch brand of Chassidic Orthodox Judaism, while I spent my summers at the Conservative Jewish Camp Arazim and attended the nominally Orthodox, highly disorganized and very Russian Hebrew Academy of San Francisco from third through eighth grade. My Judaism was pulled in different directions. I loved the high-church elegance of Reform, but it was pretty square, and I suspect I would have found it boring had I stuck with it into my adolescence. Orthodox Judaism, and especially Chabad, was full of baffling rules and boring prayer and eternal Saturdays full of Monopoly games and quietly setting fire to things while waiting for the sun to go down, but it offered periodic bursts of completely batshit alcohol-fueled celebration from which teenagers were by no means excluded. (The Hamantashen Riot of ’87, at a shul in San Francisco, became something of a legend.) And Conservative Judaism, sitting somewhere in the middle, was too chummy and too Zionist, but its passion for teaching young Jews to hook up with other young Jews was pretty compelling that summer I turned 16.

Today my connection to Judaism as a religion is pretty tenuous, and mostly it involves family: I go to shul when I visit my parents or my brother, who’s studying to be a rabbi, or I go to holy sites in Israel with my sister, or I go to the Passover seder out on Long Island with cousins. There’s not much that I do on my own. But I do Hanukkah.

Hanukkah is a dumb holiday because it celebrates the victory of a short-lived fundamentalist movement over the forces of tolerance, and it’s a dumb holiday because the attention it receives in America today is a product of American Jews’ desire for something to compete with Christmas. If you’re a Christian, the birth of Jesus is pretty important. If you’re a Jew, the victory of the Maccabees over the Assyrian Greeks is pretty low on the list of important things. It’s like a holiday celebrating the Battle of Manila or something.

Hanukkah is maybe the only part of Judaism that bridges the different parts of my Jewish experience. I loved it when I was little, when we would light the menorahs in the high windows of our formal living room that faced out to the street, and then sit in the part of the house we saved for special occasions and unwrap presents. Presents are excellent. Anticipating another one tomorrow is excellent. Getting the biggest Space Lego set of the year is beyond excellent. Gold-wrapped chocolate is OK too, not great, but who’s gonna complain about chocolate? Dreidel is a stupid game, but that’s OK because no one actually plays it. Hanukkah music is terrible, but who listens to Hanukkah music? We listened to my parents’ psychedelic rock records from the sixties. Latkes are great and we probably had them, I don’t know; I was busy with the Legos.

As my family became more Orthodox, holidays that had once been breezy and fun, like Passover or Purim or Simchas Torah, began to involve long compulsory prayer sessions and elaborate rules and restrictions. But that never happened to Hanukkah. Hanukkah was still about candles and presents, without much in the way of additional prayer time. And the new rules made Hanukkah better, because it meant we now set fire to olive oil instead of candles, and playing with fire is always improved by added complexity and liquid fuel. Even the Chabad menorah lightings in San Francisco’s Union Square managed to add to the awesome: they were trips to the city, at night, and one year Carlos Santana played.

There have been years when I missed Hanukkah. I didn’t light the candles when I was in India, and I don’t remember lighting them when I lived in Korea either. But I’ve lit candles in all my different homes in New York City over the years, and with my family in Playa del Carmen (where dueling Chabads have dueling menorah lightings). I lit candles tonight, in the window, in a kosher menorah, and I’ll keep lighting the candles through the end of the holiday, which I get to finish out this year with my family in Arizona. And next year, when I’m off somewhere in Southeast Asia, maybe I’ll drop in on a Chabad House or find some Israelis and do Hanukkah there too. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my world travels, it’s that you can find sufganiyot anywhere.

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A new home on the web

It’s time for a little upgrade in the world of my blog. Making a migration over to WordPress.com, which seems to be a little fresher visually than Blogger.com, and a little richer in the features, and a little less dependent on Google+. Welcome to my new home.

If you’re looking for posts from my previous blog, you can find them here.

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The quality of mercy

Mark Wahlberg has lately come under attack for seeking a pardon in his 1988 racist assault of two Vietnamese men. Much of the criticism has argued that a black man assaulting and maiming two white men in such a way would never have resulted in such a light sentence (45 days in prison) nor been given the opportunity to become a beloved pop star and movie star.

But this criticism strikes me as exactly backward. Even without his philanthropic efforts, whatever you may think of them, Mark Wahlberg is pretty much exactly how you want a violent, racist young person to turn out as an adult: he pays taxes, participates constructively in society, eschews violence, and expresses public regret for his crimes.

Keep in mind that Wahlberg was 16 when he committed his crime: a child, despite our unfortunate tendency these days to try 16-year-olds as adults. He was young and did something stupid and paid a limited price that enabled him to learn that what he did was very wrong while also enabling him to turn into a functional adult.

The core problem with our criminal justice system is that it denies these opportunities to too many of the young people who fall afoul of it — especially those who are black or Hispanic. Too much of our criminal justice rhetoric is focused on retribution and punishment and shame rather than on rehabilitation and compassion. There are deep cultural reasons for this, going back to America’s Puritan roots, and also racist ones, going back to the idea that people of certain races are incorrigible, ineducable, beasts in their essential nature. These ideas help to explain why America has such a high incarceration rate and such dreadful prisons and jails, and why brutal mistreatment and prison rape have been so long tolerated: criminals, according to this logic, deserve all the punishment they receive, including extrajudicial punishment like rape and assault.

We need to move away from this punitive thinking, and we need to avoid the easy outrage that demands that the unfair suffering heaped on black youths be heaped on a white youth too. I would like young violent offenders of all races to have the opportunities Wahlberg has had, and I would like for them, as non-violent adults who have demonstrated their decent citizenship, to be granted forgiveness. If you have served your juvenile sentence and gone on to a productive adult life free of criminality, that ought to be enough. That ought to be the whole point.