Living on a Jet Plane

Ed

2011-04-10T21:04:00.008-04:00

When I wrote my last post I felt this blog needed an indefinitely long break. I had a mind to suspend it permanently (or until I turn 25, whichever comes first). But I had an experience this morning which I feel compelled to share.

I was on my way home and stopped at Dunkin Donuts for coffee. A man outside the store offered to sell me a copy of the Boston Globe. I declined, but then when I stepped out of the shop with my coffee, he and I started talking.

He told me his name was Ed. I gave him my Starbucks name, the one that just about anyone can pronounce regardless of their ethnic and linguistic origins. Ed told me that he had had a long day, but he didn't mind because his new boss had given him a chance to earn some extra money.

Up until last November, Ed used to work over in Brookline. He had another boss at that time and he didn't like the way she treated him. She had a habit of taking 80% of the commission they made from selling papers. "She took advantage of being a woman," he complained, "it wasn't fair." But he made a habit of showing up regularly for work anyway. And he told me that's why he was able to get this new job, with a new boss, right near by where he lives.

The job opened up because his predecessor died of cirrhosis. Ed shook his head sadly as he told me what happened. "He was 62. Too much alcohol, that stuff will kill you." I nodded a little self-consciously as he went on. "I've been sober for two years now." He certainly seemed sober.

It was half past ten on a Sunday morning. Ed explained that he had been standing there since 530am with his new boss, the one he likes. A little while earlier the boss had left him with all the unsold papers, saying "These are all yours. If you sell them all, you can keep all the commission." Ed was grateful for his boss' honest generosity.

If he sold all the papers, Ed stood to make seven dollars.

We talked for a couple of more minutes, about how it was such a nice sunny day, about how I was new in the neighborhood, about nothing at all. Then I went home, still marveling at Ed and his enthusiasm at the chance he'd been given to earn a little extra money on a sunny Sunday morning.

Later in the day I took the Zen Mistress out for a walk. I thought about Ed and I kicked myself. I should have just bought all of his unsold newspapers and sent him home. Opportunity lost, and I feel humbled and ashamed.

I can only hope that Ed didn't have to stand outside that Dunkin Donuts for too much longer. And I am thankful to him for reminding me that we may be imperfect creatures living imperfect lives but we can still find something to be grateful for.

The converse is usually true

2011-04-07T19:42:00.002-04:00

I frequently have theories. My latest theory is that every popular saying is rooted in truth and for every such saying, the converse is often true. And that applies to the very first post ever in this blog. Mystified? Read it and figure it out. The link is on the right.

Want a clue? It's in the very first sentence of that very first post.

Somehow I feel relieved.

Thank you, Morpheus

2011-03-30T19:19:00.004-04:00

I feel like I’ve lost a friend. It’s not often that you discover a fictional character so vivid that you feel like you know him personally. I felt that way about Morpheus, the lord of dreams and the principal character in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. I finished reading the last of the books in the series last week and as soon as I did, I realized I was going to really miss Morpheus. Damn you, Mr. Gaiman!

Since I no longer had new stories about Dream to read, I started to think about the nature of dreams. And thinking about dreams made me think of the world of dreams as a hall of mirrors.

Some of those mirrors distort. I look inside them and see my sleeping self reflect back at me a twisted reality. Sometimes that reflection is shrunken and sometimes it is magnified. But one way or another the image it casts is a familiar one, just slightly pallid and a little out of kilter. These are the dreams seen in funhouse mirrors.

Sometimes the mirror is like Alice’s looking glass. I lean in for a closer look and fall through it into a world beyond imagining. I have dreamt of flying, of feeling the wind touch my hair. I have dreamt of falling and of knowing that no matter how far I fell, I would not hit the ground. I have had dreams where I was suspended in a bubble from within which I explored a world of wonder. These are the dreams that open a portal into the fantastic voyage.

And sometimes the dream is a mirror of crystal lucidity, silvered with the purest self-knowledge. I look at myself, past my eyes, into my own soul. I see in vivid color my deepest hopes, even the ones I dare not speak aloud in my waking mind. I see many futures, colored in colors more true than any limp imitation of truth that conscious reason might scavenge. I look into myself and the naked honesty of that gaze is so piercing, it intimidates. I had such a dream when I was six. I had another such dream last month. And I remember both of them as vividly as if I were in them right now.

In The Sandman, the dreamlord Morpheus induces Shakespeare to write The Tempest. And it’s in The Tempest that Shakespeare wrote

…. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The idea fascinates me that I was born from a sleep that I will one day fall back into, and that what I experience in between as a life is the most vivid dream of all. I like the idea because if this is a dream, then that is good because in a dream anything is possible. And perhaps the dreams that I dream when I think I am asleep are beacons showing me where my waking dream might take me.

By way of explanation

2011-02-12T19:52:00.002-05:00

I've been asked if the last few posts are autobiographical. Since some of the people who read this blog know me and might be concerned that I'm having a breakdown, I thought it best to respond to the question.

In Greek mythology there are five rivers in Hades. Of these five rivers in the underworld, the waters of Lethe are oblivion. Acheron is pain. Phlegethon is flame. Cocytos is lamentation. And Styx is hate. Any human with feelings has experienced each of these in some small measure. What would happen if the essence of each of these was distilled and amplified to the limit of endurance and then just a little more?

The fortunate among us will never find out.

And no, I'm not having a breakdown.

Epilogue: Styx

2011-02-04T12:38:00.009-05:00

I look at you now, and the way you make me feel takes me by cold surprise.

I used to hate your eyebrows. Those dark twins that arched in a mocking display of self-satisfied assurance. You could do no wrong. So I must have been the wrong one.

I hated your eyes. I hated them for being so beautiful and so cruel. You acted as if you did not know what you were doing. But you knew. We both know that you knew.

I loathed your lips. I loathed the careless words they formed for your amusement and my mortification.

Your hair. The tilt of your head when you pretended to listen. The shape of your shoulders when you stood up straight. The curve of your spine when you slouched. Your goddamned voice. I knew them intimately and I hated them all.

You danced capriciously through my consciousness. You laughed your hollow laugh and left behind a wasteland. You twisted the knife with a smile and a glint and walked away. And so there was a time when I hated you with all my heart.

And now? Now I just don't care.

Cocytos

2011-01-30T11:30:00.005-05:00

Night
She knows the taste of sadness. It tastes like Scotch whisky. She pours some in a glass now and holds it to her nose. She inhales slowly. It smells like rain. Then she takes a sip and lets herself feel the bitterness seeping in.

Evening
She takes a walk through the forest. It used to be a favorite spot for her, once upon a time when she was happy. It's still a favorite spot for her, because it is a good place for someone who holds darkness in her heart.

Morning
Mornings are the worst time of day. She cannot escape the sight of an empty space which was once filled with a living, breathing person. She stands in the doorway, looking at the bed where someone once slept. Her chest feels as if there is a solid mass of sadness swelling inside. She can feel it pressing against the inside of her ribs, threatening to burst them apart.

Night
She is grateful for the comfort of darkness. She looks at the stars. Then she closes her eyes and wills them to go out one by one. The sky turns as black as coal. She lets her shoulders drop. She lets the memories come. She opens her mouth to sob soundlessly.

She feels the comforting cold stab of despair, and she welcomes it into her. Despair is not the enemy; the enemy is hope.

Phlegethon

2011-01-29T15:54:00.005-05:00

Let's call him Prometheus. It's not his name, but what do names matter?

Prometheus' face is smooth. His eyes are calm. His lips are relaxed and show no sign of expressing any emotion. He holds his chin in his hands and looks thoughtful. Noone would guess that he is raging inside.

He rages at the rainbow he chased his whole life. He rages at the pot that only holds fool's gold. He rages at the hopes he once held, and the dreams that are now hollow. He rages at the despair of knowing that he is the only one who knows how futile it's all been.

He can feel himself shrinking. For months he has been casting off layers of his personality. And in a strange sympathy his body has been becoming smaller. It's an angry anorexia that has taken him.

What brought this all on? It was a cup of coffee on a late summer night last year.
He sits by himself, looking at a couple looking out of the window. Two men, one in his twenties and one with grey hair. The younger one reaches out and touches his companion's shoulder.

Prometheus watches the couple and tries to hear their conversation. They are having an argument. Their voices are quick and urgent but their words are indistinct. Then, without warning, the older man stands up and wrenches his gaze away to break eye contact with his companion. As he does so, he locks eyes with Prometheus.

For a slow, dizzy second Prometheus looks at a man who could be his identical twin. Then the spell breaks, and the older man (who looks nothing like Prometheus) leaves the cafe without another word. Prometheus lets out the breath that he did not realize he had been holding.

He will never forget that older man's eyes. They were filled with a grey longing. They screamed aloud an old man's despair. They set off a sympathetic detonation in Prometheus' head and the reverberations still deafen his mind and deaden his heart. From that day on he began to tear up every tie with every person in his life.

He can no longer bear the hypocrisy that's the foundation of every relationship. He refuses to lie and pretend to care when he doesn't. He refuses to trust anyone anymore. People lie all the time. It is better to believe everything is a lie than that anything is true.

He has been tearing up every tie and feeding the flames of his anger. When the last one is done, he will have cleansed himself in fire.

Prelude: Acheron

2011-01-25T21:21:00.001-05:00

She closes her eyes and feels the pain. It's not physical but it is in her bones. It's the ache of choices made in a life that's so old while still young.

Each choice followed the last. How can so many good decisions add up to something so ragged?

It started with a glimmer. Something bright white and gossamer. There was a boy. Of course. She didn't care for him. Of course. But he wore her down.

There was a child. Then there wasn't. She still remembers the rawness of that.

Then there was another child. That child is her essence now.

How much longing can you distill into one small life?

Lethe

2011-01-22T19:12:00.011-05:00

He drinks his little cup of medicine and waits for evening to fade out. He turns out the light and looks out through a small, square window. There is a faint glow of streetlights reflecting off snow, and a vague haze that must be the husks of trees.

He turns away from the window, turns into the pillow. It is time to dream.

Hours pass, half-aware. He sees visions inspired by medication, the modern man's muse. They are so vivid, these visions, that he knows he will remember them when he wakes. He wakes then, and on the instant he feels the visions fading away into an oblivion beyond reach of his memory. Perhaps it is for the best.

This happens many times in the night until the night turns into morning. He wakes suddenly. His eyes open onto that little square window again. He sees snowflakes falling from a grey sky. He sees the husks of naked trees. He watches the snowfall for hours. Sounds of human voices wax and wane around him. They are signs of life. He pretends to be severely ill. This gives him an excuse to remain aloof from the human sounds outside. Then, embarrassed by his own morbid imagination, he turns away from the snow and turns into the pillow and sleeps some more.

The dream visions return. This time he does remember them. Friends and strangers pirouette around him in a circle in a stately dance. He looks into their eyes. Their eyes are all made of the same smoky glass and no one can see him. They know where he is but their eyes do not see him. Nor do they see each other; each one thinks they are alone. No words are exchanged. No one has anything worth saying.

He wakes again. He is surprised that the dream has not left him feeling disturbed. It is late into the afternoon. The sun sheds a few final sparks as it sinks behind the twilight. Perhaps there will be stars tonight. But he will not see them.

Changeling

2011-01-10T02:43:00.004-05:00

I've been in a whirlwind of travel for the past several weeks. But now that's coming to a close. Later tonight I will get on the first of three flights that will eventually bring me back to Boston.

Right now I'm in Singapore. For a change I'm here on holiday, not work. So while my evenings and nights have been a high-speed stream of parties and meetings with old friends, my days have been lazy and relaxed.

As I write this I can look out of the open window and see a familiar sight: rain falling on a dense clump of tropical trees. I'm alone in an apartment in a university campus. So the only sounds are a low rustle as millions of raindrops fall on palm leaves, a gentle whirring from the ceiling fan above me, and an occasional swish as a car drives by on the wet road outside.

This is a good place and a good day to be silent and to think.

I'm thinking about the friend in whose apartment I am. We met years ago, when we were in college. We didn't know it then, but we were still children. He is a professor now; if we had known in college that he would be a professor one day, we would have laughed so hard at least one of us would have ruptured an appendix.

It took an impossibly convoluted set of coincidental events for us to meet and to still be friends years later, in countries thousands of miles apart from each other. It fascinates and terrifies me that a hair's breadth of circumstance can make all the difference between someone remaining a stranger or becoming a dear friend.

These are the ways that I came to meet some of my closest friends:
A chance meeting at a concert.
A party where everyone else left early.
Another party where we were both uninvited guests.

I could as easily - no, more easily - have never met them at all. I could as easily have gone to a different concert, or even stood just a few feet further away than I did, and I would have had one less friend.

The professor and I, we tend not to talk much. It's good to know someone with whom you can share silence. When we do talk, the conversation sometimes turns to other people that we both know. Last night we were talking about how they seem to us to have changed much more with the passage of time than we ourselves have. But I'm thinking about that conversation again now, and I think that perhaps we were wrong.

I have only a very, very few people that I consider to be truly close friends. There are maybe five or six people who I think know me inside-out. Oddly, most of them have never met each other. And if they did get together, and if for some reason they got to talking about me, it strikes me that each of them would probably describe a different me.

It's not because of any duplicity on my part, of course. It's simply that each of these people came to know me at a different point in my life. That's probably why the me that they came to know was a different one from the others. Perhaps in a way each friendship is a sort of time capsule, a way of preserving the person you were when that friendship began. And all the different friendships you begin at different times in your life allow you to change while also staying the same.

I'm trying now to imagine what would happen if my few close friends did meet, and what each of them would say about me. I'm trying to hold it all in my head at once and it's oddly unsettling. It feels as if I might have multiple split personalities.

I wonder - am I alone in feeling this way?

Lessons From The Zen Mistress

2011-01-01T17:56:00.005-05:00

Over the past few months I’ve been paying rather more attention than usual to Phoebe. The reasons why don’t matter; or rather they matter a lot but I won’t go into them here. But because of how much I’ve been attending to Phoebe, I’ve realized that there is a lot to learn just from watching her. These, then, are the lessons I learned from her in 2010…

If you really care for someone, sometimes the best way to show it is to simply sit near them. Say nothing, and do nothing, but be there waiting until you are needed.

You don’t always get rewarded for being good. You don’t always get punished for being bad. That just isn’t how the universe works. And that’s okay. Life is for living, not for keeping accounts.

It’s always a good idea to go outdoors, even if only for a little while. No matter what it's like outside, a few minutes spent out in the open will make you feel better.

Age is a state of mind. How old you are depends on how badly you want to go out and smell the grass.

If you are happy to see someone, let them know it. It’s not something to be shy about.

Accidents happen. Get over it.

Never take a good thing for granted. Enjoy it while it’s there. And if it’s gone (when it’s gone) don’t brood about it. Sooner or later another good thing will come along. You need to keep your mind clear so that you can see it and seize it when that happens.

It’s okay to still love the toy you had when you were a puppy. There are some things you will never grow out of.

If you’re happy and you know it, wag your tail.

Actions are a lot less confusing than words.

There's somebody who's going to miss you very much when you are not there. If you know who that is, you are very lucky. If you will miss them too, you are even luckier.

Real Magic

2010-12-28T23:57:00.006-05:00

I'm in an airplane leaving Atlanta, on my way to Boston. The stewardess is getting ready to do an in-flight safety briefing that no one will pay the least attention to. In order to avoid eye contact with her I stare at the carpet. Suddenly it strikes me that I am looking at a magic carpet. This carpet, on which sits my chair, on which in turn sit I, this carpet is about to fly and take me far away.

At a given moment there are about half a million human beings up in the sky. They are in pointy cylinders of various sizes. They are all going from point A to point B (sometimes with an onward connection to point C). They are the beneficiaries of a miracle whether they know it or not, whether they appreciate it or not.

How else would you describe flight, if not as a miracle?

When I was younger I often had dreams in which I flew. Sometimes if I tried very hard I could make myself have a flying dream. Unexpectedly I had such a dream last week. I floated effortlessly in the air. I could glide to wherever I wished to go. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to do.

It surprises me that we don't all fall on our knees in wonder at our magical ability to fly. We complain about missed connections and mislaid bags. We don't give thanks that we can vault over mountains, cross vast oceans and speed across endless plains. We don't give thanks that we can nonchalantly complete journeys which just a few generations ago men would embark on not knowing if they would reach the other end alive. How did we become so jaded?

I've noticed that people become very quiet in an airplane. The same people who talk loudly in an airport become strangely subdued once their plane takes off. They start talking in undertones and subdued whispers. I don't think it's deliberate. I think their bodies know that they are doing something amazing and that to ruin the experience with loud voices would be uncouth. Of course, babies are an exception. Babies have no qualms about being loud in an airplane. But then nobody expects any better from babies.

I once flew in a helicopter. I imagine it was a little like being a bee in a flower garden. We hovered and flew, hovered and flew. We savoured the sight of the landscape below us like nectar. We would swoop down close to drink our fill, then flit away to another spot, then swoop down again.

What makes flying special is that it involves transcending our limitations as mere wingless earthbound humans. When we fly, we become like angels. Oh, it's easy to lose sight of that amidst the minutiae of visas and boarding passes. But visas and boarding passes have everything to do with airlines and nothing to do with flight.

Because this is what flying is about...

It's when the you feel the airplane accelerate. It's when you feel the gentle pressure on your body that molds your back to your seat. It's when you feel the rumble of the runway transmitted to you through the wheels. That rumble becomes more and more insistent until it turns into a shock of silence as your plane throws off the yoke of gravity and rises joyfully into the sky.

And that's when you know you've experienced a miracle once again.

Another Time, Another Place

2010-12-24T11:00:00.008-05:00

I love the thrill of going to a new country for the very first time. Even when you think you know what to expect, you know that you will be surprised. And this, my first visit to Mexico, is extra special because it's more than my introduction to a new country. It's also my introduction to a new civilization.

I've read about the Maya since I was a child. I've been fascinated by the New Age theories that they were the beneficiaries of instruction by an advanced, alien race. I've watched the movie Apocalypto (a rather visceral film, but one I would still recommend). And now I have seen the Maya with my own eyes.

I went to Chichen Itza today. I'd heard that it's one of the most impressive of all the Maya sites that still exist. I was impressed all right.

I was impressed by this pyramid.

This is not like the Pharaonic pyramids in Egypt, which were either built to be over-elaborate tombs or as landing beacons for alien spacecraft (depending on whom you believe). Instead, the Maya pyramid of Chichen Itza had the supremely pedestrian function of being a calendar. Each step represents a day of the year, the orientation is designed around the solstices and equinoxes, and so on. In other words, the gigantic object in the picture is a 3-dimensional mother-of-all-calendars.

But perhaps dismissing it as a mere calendar is unfair. After all, the Mayan calendar is undeniably dramatic. It ends in two years. That's right, under one popular interpretation of the Maya calendar, the 21st of December 2012 will mark the end of Time. You might want to reconsider your retirement plan.

One of the few things more dramatic than the Mayan calendar is the Mayan version of ball sports. The ball court at Chichen Itza is the biggest of all the ball courts in Central America.

And the ball games played here were played for the highest possible stakes: the captain of the losing team would forfeit his head.

Just behind the ball court is a wall with grisly images of death.

This is where the skulls of the decapitated were kept. The sight brings to mind something said by Bill Shankly, the late manager of Liverpool Football Club: "Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that."

It was odd for me to see that many of the souvenir vendors at the archaeological site were wearing replica t-shirts of European soccer clubs. I saw Barcelona and Inter-Milan and Juventus, to name a few. These vendors looked like they could be Maya, and they had clearly adopted a far less lethal version of ball sports than their late ancestors.

Later that night I was back in my hotel. I had smoothly switched back from the Maya to a far more familiar civilization, that of the international traveler in a chain hotel. I thought about the Spanish conquistadors who came here half a millenium ago and who thought their Christian European civilization must engage the pagan Maya in a fight to the death. I thought of their compatriots who similarly strove against the Inca to the south. I thought of the Mayan souvenir vendors and the Spanish and Italian soccer teams that they support from thousands of miles away. I thought of the dinner I had had, with Italian food, Argentinian wine and Mexican coffee. And I realized something I had not paid attention to before.

There is no such thing as a clash of civilizations. People can and do clash violently. But civilizations simply cannot. Civilization is in food and drink, in art and music and literature, in civility and finesse, and it comes alive through people living with other people. A clash of civilizations makes as little sense as a battle of desserts.

Some of us are privileged to have the means to travel and encounter other civilizations at first hand. And all of us are privileged to live in a time when encounters with other civilizations are not just possible, they are commonplace. I'm going to be reminded of that now every time I eat a gyro sandwich, or watch a kung-fu movie, or listen to music that samples African drums. And I'm going to be very grateful.

The Secret Language

2010-11-24T15:14:00.006-05:00

The English that is spoken in India is no longer the language that the British empire left behind. In fact it's not even one language anymore.

There is a straightforward (if slightly odd) version of Indian English that gets everyday tasks done. This is the English where you reschedule an event to an earlier time by 'pre-poning' it instead of by advancing it, or where you politely request someone to introduce themselves by asking for their 'good name'.

But lurking behind this functional language is a second underground language that sounds deceptively similar. To truly understand this second language you have to appreciate that it is a language of fantasies.

Pradeep lives in a slum across the street from one of Mumbai's newer shopping malls. I was with a small group of people who met with him in the course of our work. To get to where he lives we stopped at a street fronted by small stores. In front of the stores there were three live goats that had been decorated for the upcoming Id festival when they would be ritually slaughtered. Flies buzzed idly around us as we found a little corridor that we had to walk through to get to the one-room home where Pradeep would meet us.

This wasn't his home. In fact we never figured out whose home it was. But Pradeep insisted on meeting us there instead of in his own home, which he was worried was not presentable. Soon it became obvious that he wanted to dissociate himself from his home and his family. At one point he made a telling comment when he talked about the things he did to cultivate a 'funky look' to fit in with his friends at college. He made it clear that his parents approved of neither his friends nor their contagious funkiness. And he implied with unspoken eloquence that their funkiness symbolized their relative affluence; an affluence that he keenly wanted to partake of.

We heard the phrase 'funky style' used by many different people. And every time it carried the same undertones: a funky style is one that allows you to make an uncompromising statement that you are an individual distinct from the family and the community that you have come from. It is a signal that you are brave and flexible enough to fit into an exciting, demanding, competitive world where sometimes style is substance. (And it's a gentle hint to your parents that you have a little bit of a rebel inside you.)

Vinay already knows he fits into the exciting, competitive world around him. He hasn't made his mark in it yet. He still takes a train and bus to work, which means that he commutes for 3 hours everyday. But he is confident that he will work his way up the corporate ladder and buy a car so that he can drive to work instead. That's not his fantasy; it's his plan.

He reserves his fantasizing for a different sort of escape. He wants to go bungee jumping in Australia or New Zealand. In his words, he has been 'passionating' about it for two years. In truth, I don't think he really cares where he jumps off a bridge as long as it's in a place far away from home.

"Passionating" is a word that is as vividly expressive as it is hideously ugly. When Vinay said he had been passionating for 2 years I just knew that for those 2 years he had been playing and replaying in his head a movie of what he thought bungee jumping would look and feel like.

Ryan was the driver who took us to meet both Pradeep and Vinay. While negotiating a particularly bumpy road he turned to me and said wistfully half in Hindi and half in fantasy-English "The roads in 'Foreign' must be very smooth, not like what we have in Mumbai."

To him, the word 'Foreign' was not an adjective. It described a specific place. It's a place he has seen on TV and in the movies and which probably exists in his mind as a unique mash-up of New York City, Interstate highways in the US, airports in Europe, and other such internationalized images of life in richer countries. For Ryan the word 'Foreign' does not describe all the places that are outside India. Instead, it describes his idea of the place that is not India.

'Funky', 'passionating', 'Foreign' - these are all part of the vocabulary of a language that linguists have not yet discovered because it impersonates English so well. The words seem deceptively familiar but if you listen carefully you can hear the dreams of men and women who yearn for a whiff of the extraordinary to come into their lives.

If you could have heard Pradeep and Vinay and Ryan whisper their dreams in their secret language, I think you would have had the same wish as me: that they would experience the fantasies that they had thus far only imagined. And that what they experienced would be everything that they had hoped for.

Um Provérbio Português

2010-10-17T22:04:00.007-04:00

Two weeks ago I was in Sao Paulo. I was talking to Roberto, a 22-year-old with spiky hair and a passion for playing Farmville. Somewhere in the middle of a rather mundane conversation he quoted an old Portuguese proverb that made me sit bolt upright:
God writes straight with crooked lines.

The instant I heard it, I knew that there was something magical in its simplicity. But then it took me a few days to really appreciate just how much had been said in those few words.

Perhaps I got distracted by the word 'God'. As an atheist, I am sometimes a bit slow to absorb ideas that refer to Him. (And no, I am not such a rabid atheist that I would de-capitalize God or His pronoun.) But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that whether or not He exists, He does indeed write straight with crooked lines.

I can think of times when something happened in my life that made me stop dead in my tracks and ask Why me? Why do I deserve this? And somehow, unexpectedly, that bad thing led to something good. I'm not suggesting for even a second that whenever something bad happens, something good will follow to compensate. It's not as if the universe would try to compensate us, like some retail chain threatened by a lawsuit.

But I am beginning to believe that sometimes bad things have a way of mysteriously begetting good things. The gestation period can be so long that the connection is really, really hard to see. And if you are in the middle of the bad thing (and if you are a normal person with normal emotions!) it's probably impossible to imagine that anything good could come from what you're going through.

But if you think about something that happened years and years ago that angered and saddened you, and then you take a step back and another and maybe a few hundred more, you just might be able to see the straight line that connects that bad thing to something else that's good and that you can be grateful for.

And if you can do that, then maybe you can also believe in my other favourite piece of practical wisdom from Brazil:
It'll all be okay in the end. And if it's not okay, then it's not yet the end.

I'll leave the last words for Scot James, a man who is living proof that God writes straight with crooked lines.

Life and Motion

2010-09-26T10:56:00.006-04:00

I have two arduous projects underway. I've already mentioned in an earlier post that one of them is to write a novel. The other is to run a marathon.

To my surprise, I've been training regularly. One of the unexpected benefits of that is that I get lots of time to listen to music while I run. That's given me the opportunity to rediscover some truly brilliant lyrics. The one I came accross this morning was from Dreamline, by Rush:

We are young
Wandering the face of the earth
Wondering what our dreams might be worth
Knowing that we're only immortal for a limited time

There was something eerily appropriate about the fact that I listened to this today, just a couple of hours after landing in Rio de Janeiro, five thousand miles away from home. It's my third visit to Brazil. The first one was back in 2008, and it taught me about living in the moment. The second one was in May this year, and that one taught me that every single day can bring a delightful surprise - you just have to be ready to embrace it. I wonder what I will learn this week.

I've already had my first unusual conversation of this trip, and that was while I was still in the US. I was eating dinner while waiting for my connecting flight. Tyler, the waiter who was serving me, noticed I was reading a book about human intelligence. He asked to read the back cover and saw that it made mention of dreams and myths. For some reason that reminded him of the spiritual journey that he was on. He told me that his wife had just bought him a very similar book as a present for their anniversary, which was on the following day

To appreciate the unexpectedness of that statement, you need to know what Tyler looks like. He is thin as a rake. He has a sparse billy-goat growth of thin curls on his chin. He speaks with the confident earnestness of someone who has never had a difficult conversation with a policeman. He doesn't look a day older than seventeen. I could accept that even at a tender age he had spiritual yearnings. But there is no way he is old enough to be legally married.

Nevertheless, I hid my disbelief and encouraged him to tell me more. He recommended a site called www.nohoax.com. Obviously, with a name like that I was intensely suspicious and looked it up immediately. I was not disappointed. The site is run by a a guy called George Green who claims that God was the leader of an extra-terrestrial race and that more recently the aliens contacted George himself to get him to spread their message. I tried to read what that message was, and swiftly concluded it was just page after page of polysyllabic rambling.

I guess spirituality is like ice cream. It comes in many flavors and we are all entitled to choose the one that comforts us best. I can judge George Green - in fact I already have. But it's not for me to judge Tyler's willingness to hear what Green has to say. I don't understand why, but Green's ideas help Tyler feel connected with his world, they reassure him that there is more to life than collecting tips in an airport restaurant and they give his (probably illegal) wife a reason to buy him an anniversary present. So I have to concede that something good has happened.

It's part of the gift of human intelligence that we can search for ideas, we can try them on, we can live through them for as long as they work. And when they no longer improve our lives we can discard them and move on to new, richer, more fulfilling ideas. Maybe Tyler will follow Green's ideas for years. Or maybe he will move on to something new next week. But as long as he's thinking about what's around him, eventually he will move on. That's why it's a spiritual journey, not a quest. A journey continues, a quest eventually ends.

As long as we're searching for new ideas, we're still thinking. And as long as we're still thinking, we're still alive. Whether or not we travel from place to place we can still wander the face of our inner world, weighing the weight of our dreams. We may only be immortal for a limited time, but it's up to us to make that time last as long as we want it to. It only ends when the wandering stops.

Open Your Nose

2010-08-24T21:15:00.003-04:00

Sometimes when you travel you are lucky enough to get the feeling that you have a personal connection to the place that you're in. It's a feeling that comes very rarely. But when it does, you look around and say to yourself "I could live here. I really could!"

I had that feeling on Saturday night. I was in Lincoln, a small town (population 1300) in New Hampshire. During the day I had already been charmed by the New England Ski Museum. There, in a building smaller than the average McDonalds, I saw Olympic medals for the first time in my life. There was a gold, three silvers and a bronze. All had been won by Bode Miller, who was raised nearby and grew up to be one of the greatest Alpine skiers ever. A few feet to the left I saw a sword that had belonged to Benito Mussolini. Yes, that's the same Mussolini who led Italy into an ill-fated embrace with Nazi Germany. How his sword found it's way here is a story for another time. The point is, I was instantly captivated by the quirkiness of the place.

So I was already in a good mood by the time dinner was eaten. My companions were friends from Boston, each with a son the same age as mine. After the children were asleep we started talking over mojitos and red wine. As the conversation grew more animated I felt a strong urge to step outside by myself.

It was a warm night. I walked barefoot accross the grass and sat down on a rock. A drop of water fell on the back of my neck. I looked up at the overcast sky but no more water fell.

I closed my eyes. As I had recently explained to a friend, to be fully present inside a moment you need all your senses. And sometimes you need to close your eyes so that you can hear and smell and taste and feel.

I heard a river. It was rushing over a bed of stones with a sound like white noise. It always amazes me that running water sounds so busy yet it's the most relaxing thing to listen to.

I felt the grass under my feet and between my toes. I moved them around, gently massaging my soles with the wet stalks underneath. Then, on a whim I got up from the rock I was sitting on and stood on it instead. I could feel every inch of the grained surface that I was standing on.

I breathed deeply. The air was cool and clean except for a faint trace of woodsmoke. I breathed again and caught a delicately sweet whiff of something familiar but unindentifiable.

I stood like that for several minutes. I was soaking in all the sensations, imprinting them on my mind. Then I opened my eyes. I looked around. And I whispered to myself "I could live here."

More Than I Can Chew?

2010-07-25T22:35:00.005-04:00

A few days ago I decided to begin a serious attempt at writing fiction. The last time I tried, I was 10 years old. So I'm just a little rusty.

I rather like the idea of writing a novel. I actually wrote that into my bucket list when I made one a couple of years ago. But at that time I had no idea when I would get around to making a beginning. There were a few other things in the list that seemed easier, so I figured I would focus on them first. There would be time enough to write a novel after I went to Machu Picchu and after I got my hair colored purple.

But for a few different reasons I've decided that the time to begin the novel is now. And I am discovering that I have taken on an even bigger challenge than I had realized.

I had assumed that the hard part of writing a novel would be the mechanics involved in telling a long story. Things like keeping track of characters and chrolonolgy, avoiding plot inconsistencies, and maintaining a consistent writing style. It turns out I had over looked the biggest challenge of all: finding a story to tell that people would be interested in reading!

I now realize how easy blogging can be. All I have to do is find something interesting, and then describe it. There is no real creation involved, it's simply a matter of telling it like it is.

The trouble with fiction is that it is all about telling it like it isn't. It's got to be a story that is not an ordinary everyday story, because that would be boring. But it also has to be within the realms of believability otherwise it won't be credible enough to be engaging. It has to have characters that are interesting enough that you care about what happens to them. But they also have to be relatable otherwise the reader would not empathize with them. And so the art of creating a story for a novel turns out to be a phenomenal balancing act between the believable and the fantastic.

One of the great things about this adventure is that it has made me much more aware as a reader. I am currently reading the Girl Who Played With Fire. It's a crime thriller by a Swedish author named Stieg Larsson. I already knew it was a great book. But now I have become more conscious of what makes it a great book. I am now able to appreciate the care that went into creating Lisbeth Salander, the title character. She is obviously totally different from me or anyone I know. And yet Mr. Larsson tells me just enough about her that I feel like I know her, that I have known people who had glimmers of the characteristics that Lisbeth has, and that I can understand her well enough that I give a damn about her fate. And this is for a character who is clearly disturbed, somewhat sociopathic, given to intense violent rage, and is absolutely brilliant.

I now have an urge to go back and re-read my favorite books, the ones that had the most lasting impact on me. I want to read them simultaneously at two levels, the reader who just cares for the story and the apprentice who gazes in awe at a master craftsman at work.

It's going to be a hard and painful road, writing a novel, and I'm looking forward to every bit of it!

About Once Every Twenty Years

2010-07-05T07:50:00.004-04:00

It was a Hollywood moment. The one where you're in a cafe on a summer evening with a girl in your arms. You look into her eyes and the sounds around you fade away into a soft murmur. She looks into your eyes with complete, unquestioning trust.

And then, softly fluttering her tiny eyelids, she falls asleep cradled against your chest.

I looked up from little Sofi to her parents and said defensively "This never happens to me!"

You see, I don't like other people's children. I avoid their babies. They're ugly. Last week a colleague offered to show me a picture of her baby. I looked at her (I have a special look for moments like these). "There's no good way to say this", I explained, "so I'll just say it. I don't like to look at baby pictures. They're all the same to me." She tried to explain that was impossible, that everyone loves babies and thinks they're cute. Finally, in desperation, she said it must be because I'm a man. And I thought to myself No, it's because that's a baby and one day she may be gorgeous but right now she's mostly fat with limbs attached. I didn't say it, but I thought it.

I did once meet a child who was irresistibly charming. I think she was around 5 years old and her name was Kati. She lived in a tribal village in central India where I spent a summer. She had a smile that would very slowly spread across her face until it was brighter than the sun. That was the summer of 1991; I still remember her vividly.

But she was the one enchanting exception to prove the rule that if you're too young to drive, your parents should keep you away from me.

I don't make funny faces at babies. I don't lisp at toddlers. I don't ask 6-year-olds what they're doing at school because I don't give a damn. And if you've just delivered a baby I'm really happy for you but I will not visit you in hospital. I actually like hospitals, I've had some incongruously funny experiences in them! But newborns give me the creeps.

And no, I don't want to hold your baby. You made it, you keep it! That's what I should have said in response to the question "Sofi seems to like you; do you want to hold her?"

But Spain had just won their quarter-final in the World Cup, I was drinking Sangria, it was a lovely sunny day, and I wanted to be nice.

And that's how Sofi ended up with her head against my chest and my arms around her. That's how she fell asleep with her fingers loosely curled around my thumb. That's how... Gah! Never mind. It's no use trying to deny it. I like Sofi.

This could be the beginning of the end of me as I know him.

My Best Friend

2010-06-28T21:36:00.004-04:00

28th of June. It's my birthday. lt's the day I reaffirn my status as a 24-year-old.

I'm alone.

A neighbourhood bar. 3 friends. Alright, 1 friend and 2 aquaintances. And an aquiantace of an aquaintance. But we can still drink beers and be polite and pretend that we care.

Two beers and a shot later our patience is wearing thin. Let's get the check, let's shake hands.

Start the engine. Stop the engine. Open the door.

What's that sound? Feet shuffling on the wooden floor. A snort turns into a bark. A small golden object hurtles towards me.

She licks me, she loves me. She's my best friend. Ever.

Dog.

Ten Things

2010-06-19T23:24:00.005-04:00

Looking out through an open window.
Wearing flip-flops to walk the dog.
Chipmunks everywhere. And I mean everywhere.
Eating dinner on the patio.
Sunglasses at 8pm.
White wine, not red.
Ice in the coffee.
The sound of cicadas at dusk.
Grass under your toes.

And ice cream in the car with the windows rolled down.

That's what summer is all about.

Curtis

2010-06-15T00:25:00.004-04:00

When I got into the waiting taxi, the driver was talking on his cellphone. I listened to him murmuring into his handset and I hazarded a guess. "Is that your girlfriend?". He put her on speakerphone and passed the conversational baton to her. "Are you my girlfriend?"

A pause. Then an amused voice spoke up from the palm of his hand "I guess I am."

That settled, I suggested to Curtis (that was the driver's name) that we pass through a McDonalds drivethrough. I was hungry and there's nothing like Maccers after drinks at 2am. He let me buy him a fizzy orange soda. With the ice thus broken, I indulged my curiosity.

He said it was his first day driving a taxi since his return. Return from where?, I asked. From away, he said. Away where?, I probed. My hunch was right. He had just got out of prison.

How he got into prison was quite a tale. He had been driving an NFL player who was with the Bengals. He'd been doing it for a while and thought they had become friends. Until the day they got hit by a car. Curtis got hurt and missed an appointment with a probation officer (so clearly he'd been in trouble before). For missing the meeting he had to go to jail. His NFL buddy turned out to be no friend and no help.

While in jail, Curtis' girlfriend told him that she had delivered their baby. And that the baby was now his problem. So when he came out, he had to take charge of the child as well as two other children from two other relationships.

And so here he was, driving a taxi through Cincinnati early in the morning, telling his story to a complete stranger.

How much of what he'd told me was true, I wondered. And what were the things that he had left out?

Howdy, Neighbour!

2010-01-04T23:40:00.003-05:00

I touched a piece of the moon yesterday and I am unashamedly giddy about it. I was at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, home of the space shuttles. There, on display and available for visitors to touch, is a square inch of rock that's been brought back from the moon.

There's something staggering about touching an object that's come from another world nearly half a million kilometers away. And something sobering about knowing what went into bringing it back. The moon rock is displayed a few meters away from a Saturn V rocket, which was the sort of rocket used for lunar missions. The moon rock is a few centimeters long and weighs a few hundred grams. The rocket is 110 meters long and weighs over 3,000 tons. That means it's about as big as a 35-storey building. It took the efforts of tens of thousands of men and women to build. And it claimed at least three lives.

Astronaut Eugene Cernan stepped off the moon's surface in 1972. He didn't know it then, but he was about to become 'the last man on the moon'. He still holds that unfortunate title, nearly forty years later.

A lot happened in those forty years. Wars were fought. Smallpox was eliminated. Our world became digital. And uncomfortably warmer. But nothing, simply nothing, came close to firing our imaginations like the grainy images of men in white spacesuits clumsily bouncing off a desolate lunar landscape. I touched a fragment of that landscape yesterday. I could not feel more pleased, or more privileged.

Second Innings

2009-12-21T21:43:00.007-05:00

Yeah, it's my second winter in Boston. You can tell by the fact that I now speak Farenheit. It's such a relief that I can do that now. It's been excruciating to have to mentally convert from degrees F to degrees C, just to decide whether I should feel icy cold or totally frigid.

But I still resent the Farenheit scale for being inexplicably difficult. It was originally designed so that the temperature of the human body would be 96 degrees. Not 100 degrees, but 96. Then, in an "improvement", the scale was modified so that the difference between the melting and boiling points of water would be 180 degrees. Not 200 degrees, but 180. Oh, and of course the freezing point of water is 32 degrees. Not 30 degrees, but 32. It is a travesty of common sense that the scale still survives.

Clearly it takes more than 2 winters to learn to speak in ounces. That's partly because of the number of ounces that exist. There's the avoirdupois ounce, the troy ounce, and the Maria Theresa ounce, each of which is a different measure equivalent to between 28 and 31 grams. Then there's the Dutch ounce which, with characteristic Dutch obtuseness, is 100 grams. And then, just to really make things enjoyable, there's the fluid ounce which is not even a measure of weight. So when I go shopping for food, it's always a matter of conjecture as to whether I will buy enough to feed a family of 3 or an entire clan of Indians.

I miss the sheltered, metric world in which I grew up. It was a simpler time, when men were men, women were strangers, and it was a cold day if you could stand in the sun without breaking into a sweat.

Interestingly, according to the 2006 CIA World Factbook as quoted in Wikipedia, i.e. according to an obviously incontrovertible source, there are only 3 countries which do not use the metric system as their standard for measures. One of them is the US. The second is Liberia. The third is Myanmar.

Make of that what you will.

Punching My Card

2009-12-06T03:16:00.004-05:00

It's almost obvious what makes a person begin a blog: an irresistible and sometimes ill-advised urge to express. Lately I've been more interested in what makes a blogger stop posting. I'd like to figure out what happened to me.

As "A regular reader" commented, I seem to be on an indefinite sabbatical. I do, don't I? Except that a sabbatical is meant to be time taken off for rest, or for learning. I'm afraid in the past few months I've rested little and learned less. And, much as it disappoints me to admit it, I've not thought anything interesting enough to motivate me to write.

It's a potent combination of circumstances. I've had too much to do at work, as much again to do at home, and too little inspiration in either place. That combination ensured I would stay away from my keyboard. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would enter such a phase sooner or later.

I can only hope it is a phase, and not a permanent condition. Keep watching this space, and you'll find out.

Back In Time

2009-08-28T22:49:00.009-04:00

When you're trudging up a mountain at four thousand meters, when you take deep gasping breaths to suck in as much oxygen as you can find at high altitude, when the sun seems to bake the skin on your neck even as the wind chills the sweat running down your back, you need some intense motivation to keep on going.

Especially when you know that after crossing this first mountain pass you will break for lunch and then climb another pass later that same afternoon.

It's hard work. But no one said that hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu would be easy. It's a labour of four days and three nights. At times you wonder why you're putting yourself through this trial. You've trudged up and down mountainsides for tens of kilometers. You've put up with an abundance of mosquitoes and a lack of personal hygiene. You've experienced burning heat and freezing cold and all points in between.

It starts to feel worthwhile when you catch your breath and look around. The Andes rear up proudly in every direction. Up close they are covered in brush and spotted with the occasional llama. Further away they stand tall and black, glorious in their simplicity. And in the distance rise the benevolent snowy heights of La Veronica and Salcantay, looking down from six thousand meters.

And then you encounter remnants of the Inca empire and you realize you are making memories that will last a lifetime. Like the time when you explored a small Inca outpost shaped like a giant ceremonial knife. Or when you gazed in awe at a staircase plunging down for hundreds upon hundreds of meters. The excitement is building up now, and it comes to a crescendo on the final morning, as you crest the path that leads to the Sun Gate.

Then, as you top this final rise you are greeted with a sight that takes your breath away. For a few brief, shining minutes the dawning sun shines full onto a magical city in the near distance. It sits like a proud jewel on top of a smaller mountain below you. Then, with astonishing rapidity, the city is cloaked in a rising mist of clouds.

You're tired, you're exhilarated, you're hungry, you're wide-eyed, you want to stand up and jump, you want to sit down and stare, you look around at fellow hikers and grin your mutual congratulations, you stare straight ahead at the mountaintop jewel and pretend you're the only person on earth.

You take a picture. You eat a chocolate bar. You take a very deep breath.

This is why you came.

Chasing Condors

2009-08-16T23:02:00.005-04:00

Just two more days to go! What? Two more days to what, you ask? Why, just two more days to go to my holiday to Peru!

I love vacations (duh!) and I love the anticipation of an upcoming vacation every bit as much as the holiday itself. So right now I am beside myself with excitement.

After an initial hiccup I got myself a visa. And now I am all set for a backpacking, mountain hiking, all-action adventure in the Andes.

Of course I'm looking forward to seeing Machu Picchu. I read about it as a child and ever since then I've dreamed of seeing it for myself. What I did not dream was that I would get there the old-fashioned way, hiking through wilderness to come to a lost city.

And right after Machu Picchu I'll get to go another dream destination, Nazca. I don't care what you think, I would really prefer to believe that the Nazca lines were made to serve as landing strips for alien spacecraft. I know that I need to survive a fourteen-hour overnight bus ride to get to Nazca, but even that cannot dampen my enthusiasm to see the lines.

I know it's odd to blog about a trip before I make it. I'm almost worried I might jinx myself. But only almost, because how can you possibly jinx a trip to a destination as exciting as Peru?

Maine Attractions

2009-08-07T21:46:00.007-04:00

I am almost embarassed to admit that last weekend I went to Maine to see lighthouses. I know, that sounds as geeky as going to a Star Trek convention. Except that at a Star Trek convention you won't get to see something as pretty as this.

This gem is a hundred and thirty years old and is named the "Nubble" lighthouse, after the rocky little island it sits on. And it might just become the best-known lighthouse in the universe. In 1977 NASA launched the Voyager 2 sattelite. This satellite is now well on it's way out of solar system. It carries pictures and recorded audio on a gold-plated disc, in case it encounters intelligent aliens who are curious to know who sent it. And on that disc is a picture of the Nubble lighthouse.

Yes, I know, sharing that bit of information actually made me seem more geeky, not less. Well, never mind. I am hoist with my own petard, so I might as well go on.

On to Portland Head Light, for instance. This is another beauty, an hour's drive north of the Nubble. It was built in 1791. And when it was completed a certain Captain Greenleaf was appointed as its first keeper by George Washington, who at that time was himself just 2 years into his term as the first president of the United States. Capt. Greenleaf clearly won the approval of his employers, because 2 years later they decided to start paying him a salary.

His name is engraved at the top of a plaque that honours all the keepers who were in charge of the lighthouse for the first two hundred years of its existence. But when I looked at the plaque myself, the names that caught my eye were those of Joshua E. Strout (keeper from 1869 to 1904) and Joseph W. Strout (keeper from 1904 to 1928). A quick internet search confirmed that they were father and son. But there's more to their family story than that. Joshua's wife was his assistant keeper for a decade, and his mother was a housekeeper for a previous lighthouse keeper. In fact the combined service of the Strout family at various New England lighthouses was 128 years!

Imagine that: one family devoting over a hundred years to bringing sailors safely home. I wonder what it was like growing up in their home. Was working the lights just a trade to them? Or did they, as I would like to think they did, take their job very very seriously? Did they ever get bored? When Joshua had a cold and fever how did he drag himself upstairs to climb to the top of a 100-foot tower to do his job? And when he got to the top did he ever accidentally drop something and have to climb all the way down the stairs to pick it up?

We shall never know, but we can speculate.

Seriously, though, that's what really fascinates me: not the lighthouses that are still standing on the rocky coastline of New England, but the men and women who used to tend them and are now gone. If you squeeze your eyes half shut and stretch your imagination really hard then you can sort of picture them. I imagine them as earnest, weather-beaten men and women who liked the company of others but only in small doses. I wonder where you'd find them today.

It's A Sign!

2009-07-13T22:15:00.005-04:00

I love it when random chance leads to a revelatory insight, as it did to me today.

I've never been on good terms with Monday mornings. Of late our relationship has gone from bad to worse. I try to undermine Monday by waking late. Monday retaliates by throwing me out of bed and forcing me to go out into the world and meet stupid people.

It makes me meet people like the consular officer in the Peruvian consulate. I went there today to get a visa for a trip that I'm going to make at the end of August. But first the officer wanted a certificate from a doctor to prove that as of today I do not have the H1N1 virus inside me. It did not matter to her that I still have six weeks after today to acquire it, store it in my body, and smuggle it into her country when I go there. And she's only interested in swine flu; she does not care if I have the bugs for bird flu, typhoid, or the bubonic plague.

Yes, I tried to reason with her politely. The more fool me.

In the end I was forced to walk back to my office without a visa, ranting silently and tearing my hear out imaginarily. I was way too pissed to notice anything around me until I saw a sign that made me stop dead. "Life is short", it said. "Be quick to love and make haste to be kind."

And here I was, frittering away my precious minutes in silent fury at a problem that I could do nothing about today, but which I had plenty of time to take care of later.

So I stopped looking inside myself at my bubbling pit of frustration and instead looked around. At the lovely church that stood behind the sign that had woken me up. At a cyclist who had dismounted and was now stretched out in the sun with a newspaper. At an engraving in the pavement in front of me that recorded the past winners of the Boston Marathon and their race times. At the few tourists who were out and about and who had been taking in all these sights with wide eyes while I had been ignoring everything.

And then for the rest of the day crazy stuff happened which made no sense at all, not even by Monday's abysmal standards. I won't go into detail because I can't; and even if I did, it would be insufferably boring. Suffice to say that I have seldom seen as much corporate irrationality packed into a single day as I did today. But I kept remembering that life is short, and I got the better of Monday.

(Until later in the eveining, when I went to the gym and my trainer kicked my ass. Effing Monday got it's revenge then.)

Pass The Sausage And Wave The Flag

2009-07-09T22:59:00.006-04:00

You have to admire a country that knows how to celebrate itself. This year, for the first time, I got to experience the 4th of July celebration. It was not the self-important display of national strength that I expected to see. Instead it was one massive party to which everyone was invited.

We chose not to go to the big celebration in Boston. Instead we went to the one in our suburban town. A mobile crane had been stationed in a school sports field as a makeshift flagpole. There were vans dispensing snacks and drinks. In the middle of perhaps two or three thousand people there was a stall selling lightsabers for children. (Jedi Knights would have to take their custom elsewhere.) At one end of the ground a music station was playing hits from the 70s, 80s and 90s for people to dance to. Then, at about 9pm, a half-hour firework display brought the festivities to a climactic end.

And that was it. No parades. No speeches. No displays of martial patriotism. No tragic/heroic re-enactments of a bitter struggle against the British army.

No jingoistic tributes to glorious nationhood.

Just one long, awesome family picnic.

It was almost the opposite of any Independence Day celebration I had ever seen before, in any country. And in an unexpected way, it was also the most inclusive celebration of nationhood imaginable. It even made me feel privileged to be a guest and a participant.

For so many years I have been baffled by the blithe sense of superiority that so many Americans seem to feel for their country. Now I begin to understand it just a little. When you celebrate your nation's independence as if it was a giant family event, I think it becomes very natural to take for granted that your country's way of life is the way that life should be. And that the rest of the world should aspire to that same way of life.

And if every day were a summer cookout followed by fireworks, maybe they should.

Turning The Other Cheek

2009-06-24T21:50:00.007-04:00

Americans, if they do it, do it once. The Swiss seem to do it thrice. And a couple of days ago I may have accidentally offended a young French girl by only kissing her once on each cheek. But in my mind she's still the bright little eight-year-old I knew, not the fifteen-year-old debutante she's become. So I'm just relieved that when she turned her cheek to me in greeting I did not freeze in surprise with mouth agape.

I was in Geneva this week, and boy did it feel different from my last trip out of Boston. And that wasn't just because of the pressures of following the correct etiquette for social kissing.

You see, a week ago I was in Cincinnati. I spent four nights there and did not sleep well through a single one. I was kept up by the constant stream of police cars racing past my hotel all night with sirens blaring.

In Geneva, on the other hand, even rush hour traffic is barely audible. Perhaps that's because noone is in much of a hurry. Sasha, a Russian colleague who lives there, told me of her horror story when she gave her leather jacket to the cleaners and it took her six months and an argument to get it back. According to a porter in my hotel, a gentleman with an improbable South African accent, such sloth shows the influence of indolent French culture on Geneva. He clearly prefers Zurich where, according to him, the Germanic character of the people makes things run as smoothly as the legendary Swiss clockwork.

But Geneva's leisurely atmosphere suited me just fine on Monday evening. I took a stroll through the old town with a former boss. She pointed out the sights to me as we walked along cobbled streets lined with the red & white flags of the Swiss nation and the red & yellow standards of the Canton of Geneva.

Afterwards we had a dinner that featured three things I rarely get to enjoy in America: portions that are modest enough that you can really enjoy your food; dessert made of fruits; and exquisite after-dinner espresso.

For three days I drank coffee incessantly from very small cups. I snacked on croissants instead of cookies. I lunched on sliced meats, fruits and cheeses. And I wondered if I too should acquire some European flair and start wearing a snappy summer jacket when I go out.

Perhaps I will; but only after I first figure out if the Italians expect to be greeted with three kisses or four.

Travelling Salesman Blues

2009-06-15T21:53:00.003-04:00

Flick. CNN. Flick. The Weather Channel. Flick. ESPN. Flick. Flick. Flick.

Thirty years ago Pink Floyd sang "I've got 13 channels of shit on TV to choose from". Times have changed since then. We now have more than 13 channels.

So this is the glamorous world of executive travel. Meetings all day. A couple of polite drinks in the evening. Then everyone goes home and you're the solitary out-of-towner.

It's still light outside and your feet are too itchy for room service. So you walk around the block looking for dinner. An overly bright gyro restaurant serves you just right. Then you decide to check out the famous local ice cream. It's all right, but you wish the taste of strawberries was a bit stronger. And now you can no longer put off going back to your solitary hotel room.

Flick. Cartoon Network. Flick. TNT. Flick. Flick.

It's no use. The television can't take your mind off the fact that you'd really rather be somewhere else. You switch it off and clip your fingernails instead. It's equally entertaining and vastly more productive.

Thank goodness for the coffee machine in your room. You're in the mood for a bitter brew.

This is the glamorous world of executive travel?

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes...

2009-06-02T20:53:00.005-04:00

"In the morning I sat in my usual place. I giggled with my friends. We acted silly but we pretended to be very serious. That was funny.

One of the kids was sulking. I don't know why. Maybe he had a booboo. But we paid no attention to him, so he went away.

Then someone started a game. We took turns to say silly things that we did not really mean. It was a noisy game and it made the teacher angry.

So we became very quiet. We had break-time and we ate a snack.

Then we acted silly all over again."

"Your pre-school sounds a lot like my office."

Sybil

2009-04-26T20:57:00.006-04:00

San Francisco has multiple personalities. Walking through its streets, you never know exactly what to expect,

There's no question that it is extremely pretty. Up in the hilly residential areas the houses all seem to have elegant bay windows and small, carefully tended front gardens. Strolling past them you never know when, as you turn a corner, you might be greeted by a breathtaking view of the city below and the bay beyond it. And down in the financial district, ultramodern office towers look right at home beside classic edifices that pre-date the Second World War.

It all seems very genteel, until you lower your eyes to ground level and see people begging for money. On a Saturday afternoon in downtown Market Street there was one on every block. Not all of them seemed destitute. There was one lady in particular who seemed rather healthy and cheerful as she sat cross-legged on the sidewalk. A passer-by even felt compelled to check with her that she was in fact begging, and only when she smiled and nodded did he hesitantly drop a few coins in the tin in front of her.

They seem to wear their green credentials with pride in SF, even when it makes them seem daft. At the Ti Couz restaurant, in the Mission area, they proudly inform customers that they will only serve you a glass of water if you specifically ask for it. That's their way of conserving water for drought-prone California.

But the pride that this city is really known for is gay, and it is on vivid display on Castro street. Oddly (or perhaps not) everyone there seems to be male. And unshaven. I don't know why, but designer stubble seems to be a badge of sexual orientation in these parts. The only clean-shaven men seemed to be the ones in martial arts uniforms, standing in a small group on one street corner. I had no idea what they were doing there.

And I did not stop to ask either, because I was eager to make my way to the corner of Haight and Ashbury. That was the epicenter of the hippie movement and psychedelic rock in the late 1960s. Janis Joplin lived there, as did the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. And so did many many more young men and women looking for peace, love and a good smoke. Today the area attracts an odd ensemble of tourists and emos. Sadly there were no throwbacks with tie-dyed shirts and flowers in their hair. I would like to think that the hippies did not grow old (or overdose) and die, that they just got haircuts and shirts with collars. If that's the case then I probably saw many of them sitting outside Starbucks cafes, of which there seems to be one next to every fire hydrant.

At about the time that Haight-Ashbury was experiencing its Summer of Love, a young American was starting work as a reporter for a newspaper in Freeport, Bahamas. He did not know it then, but in a matter of weeks he would cover the election of their first ever Prime Minister, a landmark in the journey of that nation to independence. Today, more than forty years later, that same American drives a taxi in San Francisco.

He drove us from Japantown to our hotel. He talked about Bahaman politics, and about teaching English in the Virgin Islands. As he talked, I looked out of the window and watched the people of San Francisco. They had come out to celebrate the weekend, the Sundance Film Festival, spring.

In a city of multiple personalities, it was the happy, flirtatious San Francisco that I saw. And I was glad that she was the one who had come out to wave at us.

Mo' Mash

2009-04-24T11:52:00.003-04:00

There's a special joy that comes when an eagerly anticipated travel experience lives up to expectations. I felt that joy yesterday while driving up and down California 1, the Pacific Coast Highway.

The road hugged the edge of the ocean. Yellow and purple wildflowers lined the route. At one end there was a colony of hundreds of elephant seals lying on the beach. The drive was everything that I had hoped it would be, and a little bit more.

Back in San Jose, in the homes of Silicon Valley's elite, the conversation was less idyllic. I sipped on a friendly local wine and listened to my friends deplore interest rates, income taxes, and the bankruptcy (financial and political) of the government of California. Their voices were lowered out of consideration for the children asleep in a room next door. But their tone was unmistakeably worried at the recession of the American Dream.

Years ago they left small towns in India to spend their adult lives as professional nomads. Then California drew them in with a promise of professional challenge and financial reward. They still hear the promise but are wondering whether it's still trustworthy.

But that worry seems insubstantial today in the blaze of a bright spring afternoon. I'm at a playground, watching the children of the digital diaspora. Sunlight slants off their hair while they run around in circles and shriek in delight.

The fragrance of jasmine rides gently in the breeze, but the kids don't notice that; they're too busy living the childhood dream.

California Mashup

2009-04-20T10:58:00.006-04:00

There are three wooden bears outside the front office of the Comfort Inn at Oakhurst. Another, much larger wooden bear stands guard over the parking lot. The basket of flowers in its hand softens its otherwise forbidding appearance. All this ursine pageantry is a salute to Yosemite National Park, an hour's drive away.

Inside the park, the real bears are up and about. Their winter hibernation is over, now that the weather has turned cheerfully hot.

This burst of warm weather has been good to the waterfalls and streams. We stood at the foot of Bridalveil Fall, and turned our faces up to catch the spray generated by water crashing down from a height of six hundred feet. (American) Indian legend says that doing this makes you lucky in marriage. It works.

Yosemite Falls is even bigger than Bridalveil, and far too violent for such gentle folklore. By the time the water hits the rocks at its feet, it has fallen fifteen hundred feet. The force of the spray and the gusting wind threaten to push you over into the rapids below.

But the waters in Yosemite Park are not all sound and fury. We ate lunch by a brisk but quiet snow-fed creek; next to us The Kid amused himself by throwing in pebbles to make splashes.

Back in Oakhurst the Jade Gazebo waits to feed Chinese food to hungry naturalists. There is no actual gazebo here. But the walls are painted a bilious green so the name is at least partly appropriate. I want to believe that the family who run the restaurant are descended from the Chinese labourers who came here to work for logging companies a hundred years ago.

Back then the lumber industry was booming. Today big agri-business has moved on to run orchards and vinyards. And now the manual labourers who work for them come from Mexico. There is a 50-mile stretch of farmland running west of Yosemite. And on the edge of this, in a place called Gilroy, hides the El Siete restaurant. Like Jade Gazebo, this is a family run restaurant in a working class neighbourhood. The food they serve is simple and irresistible. I ate more carne asada than I should have, and far more than I thought I could have.

Then I sat back, looked around, and was delighted by what I saw. Against one wall sat a device with one foot on either side of the Pacific Ocean, one that Chinese and Mexicans would both approve of. It was a karaoke machine with Spanish songs.

Watch Out For That Tin Man

2009-04-17T00:49:00.003-04:00

Have you heard the joke about how many morons it takes to change a light bulb? Well, that's old news.

The real question is this: how many adjectives does it take to make a cup of coffee? The answer is 6. Or at least it is if your idea of getting coffee is to go into a Starbucks and ask for a cinnamon soy decaf grande non-fat extra-hot latte. By the time you execute all those instructions, it's not even coffee anymore, it's some kind of ghastly mongrel brew for the lactose intolerant.

At least all those adjectives are functional, even if only in way that is dysfunctional for the coffee aficionado. What really turns me off is when people add redundant verbs thinking that it makes them sound powerful. A few days ago I had to suppress a shudder as a colleague stridently told a room full of managers that "When (blank) does happen, you do have to follow the procedure". I might have gotten up and slapped her if I had not been stupefied by the ugliness of her usage.

I don't understand why some people get the idea that the more words they speak, the more important they become. Don't they get a clue from the glazed expressions of the people they are talking to? Does the movement of their mouth cut off blood circulation to their eyes, so they can no longer see that audience has dropped dead from listening fatigue?

What we need are millions of little robots to go walking around, slapping people who talk too much, and screaming at them to shut the f^7% up!

:-) Four! :-(

2009-04-08T20:05:00.006-04:00

My son is four years old today. Strictly speaking he turned four yesterday in Singapore. But this is not the time for technicalities.

No, it's a time to stop and stare in amazement at what he is. And what is he, now? Not a baby, that's long past. Not a toddler, that's long past too and it's time we admit it. He's ... a boy. And he's everything that that implies. Loud. Rumbunctious. Wrestles the dog. Wants to climb trees. If trees are not available, will jump up and down on the sofa until the floor shakes. And when he wants to cross the road, he will cross the road. So by golly, you'd best hold on to his hand and follow him.

No, that's not right. He's more than a boy, he's a few different boys rolled into one.

Let's see, there's Monkey Acrobat Boy. That's the one who careens down the stairs, and in one motion swings up onto my back, over my shoulder, and then head first down into my lap. Or at least that's what he does most of the time. Occasionally he overshoots, and with a practiced roll and tuck he recovers from the fall and runs around behind me to try again.

There's Avant Garde Fashion Boy. That's the one who follows the neighbour's daughters and wants pink shoes like the ones they have.

There's Bookworm Boy, who likes nothing better than to have his dad sit with him at night and read. Sometimes he wants me to read one of his books, and sometimes he's happy to let me read one of my own. As long as I'm reading something, he knows it's safe to sleep.

There's the one who loves company. The one who hates staying still for the camera. The one who thinks chicken, yogurt and watermelon make a balanced meal. The one who...

The one who turned four today and I still cannot fathom how it all happened so fast.

This Won't Hurt A Bit

2009-04-01T14:35:00.004-04:00

"It's pina colada!" must rank as one of the things you're least likely to hear when you're sitting in a dentist's chair. But truth is stranger than fiction and that is exactly what my dentist's assistant said to me a few hours ago. Sadly she was not referring the contents of a cocktail glass, but to an anaesthetic cream that she was about to administer.

I was not sure whether to be amused, gratified or just a little disturbed that a manufacturer of anaesthetic would choose that precise flavour. Why not peach, for instance, or simply a bland and reassuringly dental mint flavour? In the event it didn't matter because the cream tasted more of cloves than coconuts. So much for truth in advertising,

I was quite curious and apprehensive about what to expect in the dental surgery. Curious, because this would be my first dental procedure ever. This surprises some people; it certainly surprised my dentist. The first time she examined me, she kept muttering "no fillings!" in muted lower-case amazement.

Apprehensive, because I've been reared on a diet of popular culture which makes the dentist out to be the spiritual descendant of the medieval inquisitor. They both uses pointy metallic tools, so the resemblance is real. Though in defense of inquisitors I don't believe that they ever employed chirpy female assistants.

Dentists, on the other hand, seem to only employ people who are excessively cheerful. Or perhaps they become that way. Perhaps their effervescence is an occupational disease, triggered by over-exposure to laughing gas. And isn't that just the most wonderful name, laughing gas? As soon as I hear the words "laughing gas" I find myself giggling a little.

I didn't get any gas, though, only an anaesthetic injection. I'll admit I was a bit uncertain about that. The only previous time I'd had local anaethesia, a nurse said to me "Get ready, I'm going to give you an anaesthetic injection and it'll hurt". Then, as I pondered the irony of those words, she went ahead and proved them to be true. Of course on that occasion I did not have the benefit of numbing cream masquerading as a pina colada. I did have that this afternoon, and so I did not feel a thing.

Instead I listened with a strange sense of disconnection as the dentist, poked, prodded, jimmied and eventually ripped out my wisdom teeth. It's quite odd to be aware of something that should hurt like hell but you don't feel a thing.

Kudos to the dentist of course. If she's half as good at extracting confessions as she is at extracting teeth, she'll be my pick for Imperial Grand Inquisitor any day!

What Have They Done?

2009-03-22T19:31:00.004-04:00

It's a familiar scene in B-grade movies. A scientist, fuelled by ambition and besotted with his own genius, creates a terrifying new creature. The creature spins out of control and ravages through the world, destroying lives everywhere. Eventually humanity is saved from extinction but only after staggering devastation has been caused. The message is clear: do not be too arrogant in your knowledge, humans, lest you unleash a force that will bring you to ruin.

We watch these movies in wry amusement at their melodrama. And we're silently relieved that the deep fears that these movies play up to have so far proven unfounded.

Or have they?

Substitute "financial whiz-kid" for scientist, and replace "terrifying new creature" with "sub prime derivatives" and suddenly the story sounds uncomfortably familiar.

No loss of life has yet been blamed on the current situation in the world's financial markets. The only deaths reported until now have been those of corporations. The human impact so far has been limited (such an inappropriate word!) to loss of income and depletion of savings. That's bad to begin with, but it will probably get worse.

A loss of income always hits hardest on the poor, who have little saved up against hard times. They're the ones who will be forced to compromise on nutrition and health care. They're also the ones who will be hurt the most when governmental and non-governmental funding for health care programs comes under pressure. We'll probably never be able to say exactly how it happened, but I have the sad conviction that many lives will be hurt and some will be cut short by the financial shrapnel that will fly around the world over the next few years.

Somehow the media seem to have lost sight of this completely. Instead they've given in to the basest instinct for revenge. You can almost hear the shrill voices in newsrooms everywhere as journalists try to find the best way to sensationalize the news of bonus payments to AIG employees. Yes, there is something obscene about these payments, but will it really matter whether or not those bonuses get paid? The damage that's been done to the world's economy will not be undone. The genie is out of the bottle now, and we can do little more than watch grimly as governments and regulators struggle to undo the damage they failed to prevent.

No amount of punitive legislation will reverse the effects of the collapsing markets on the people who will be hit hardest and are also the most defenseless. I wonder if we will learn the really important lessons from this episode. There are multiple instances of economic crises that were triggered by investment bubbles in new markets and by "innovations" in financial markets. And yet governments seem to do precious little to ensure that these innovations are safe before they allow their widespread use. It seems to me that it's harder to get regulatory approval to sell a new toothpaste than it is to get permission to sell a new financial instrument.

I think it's time that governments started to take the sort of "safety first" attitude to regulating financial markets that they bring to health care products. Because if a financial product turns out to be toxic, the side effects can be deadly.

Maybe we'll get lucky, maybe this time the men and women in power will make decisions that in the future will protect us better . Time will tell. For now, we'll just have to struggle through the scary movie that we've found ourselves in.

Is It Here Yet?

2009-03-15T23:49:00.006-04:00

It seems too good to be true. I've been standing outdoors in my shirt-sleeves for five minutes and I have no symptoms of hypothermia. Could it be that spring is finally here?

As if on cue, a pair of girls in jogging gear go past. Of course the sight of a jogger doesn't prove that it's warm outdoors. I've seen people out running in weather that I wouldn't bother to drive in. But the girls that I see in front of me right now look like casual exercisers, not the beady-eyed obsessives who run through blizzards and guzzle protein shakes.

I've seen enough. I must pull on my own running shoes and test the air.

And by golly, it is warm today! A couple of kids have set up a stall in their front lawn and under the watchful eyes of their parents they offer me a refreshing drink for 50 cents. Inflation has come a long way since I was their age; I can remember looking at comic book versions of this same scene where a glass of lemonade would set you back only 5 cents. In any case, it's too soon to stop so I politely decline their offer. And silently I wish them luck in this entrepreneurial venture. (Should I tell them that they could probably sell an organic version of their drink for a dollar?)

The neighbourhood is suddenly swarming with children on bicycles. They've been hibernating for the past six months and now the rising temperature has made them stir and step out squinting into the sunlight. They don't squint for long. With a whoop and shouted encouragements to each other they pedal jauntily away in a loud and harmless pack.

It's good to hear my feet softly pound on the ground again. It's good to work up a sweat with the sun on my back. It's good to huff and puff my way home and hungrily quaff a big glass of cold milk.

An hour later I'm in Harvard Square. A band plays blues in the background as I stretch out on the grass and catch up with a couple of friends. We're warm-blooded creatures, the three of us, and we tell each other excitedly how glad we are for this lovely day. We let the sunlight seep into us as we sip coffee. We exchange notes on what we've been up to over the past few months. My jacket lies next to me, unneeded.

But then dusk falls to remind us that we're still in New England and it's still only March. Our chatter slows as we stiffly pull ourselves to our feet, realizing that for some time now a chill had been soaking up through the ground we were sitting on.

No matter. We walk together a little distance, enjoying each other's company for just a bit longer. Spring is in our steps, whether or not it is in the air.

There's One In Every Meeting

2009-03-08T15:24:00.004-04:00

"That's terrific!!" is not an appropriate thing to say in all situations. It's a perfectly acceptable response to "I'm happy", or "I like tortillas"; but it sounds all wrong as a reply to "We're in a pile of trouble and we don't know how to get out."

You'd think that this would be obvious to any adult. And yet it's a law of human nature that in any business meeting involving eleven or more people, there will be one person who sets everyone else's teeth on edge with just this sort of bloody-minded cheerfulness.

Let me be clear, I like happy people and I like being surrounded by them. If I'm going to work with someone day in and day out then I want them to think positively. But you don't have to prove that you have a positive attitude by talking as if you've been breathing helium.

What follows is a reconstruction based on a true event. The true event was a 3-hour meeting involving me, a Senior Manager (SM), a More Senior Manager (MSM), a hysterically cheerful person whom I shall name Buttercup, and several others who did nothing interesting (SOWDNI).

SM: ...and that's our plan for the short term and the long term.
MSM: You guys have a problem that needs fixing in the next few days.
Buttercup: That's terrific!!
SM gives Buttercup a flat look and turns back to MSM: We appreciate that and we will get back to you with a solution soon.
MSM: You have to; if you don't fix the short term, there will be no long term.
SOWDNI nod at each other intelligently
SM, me and SOWDNI, all in chorus: We understand that, O More Senior Manager. We will work on this urgently and diligently.
Buttercup: That's terrific!!
It is now my turn to give Buttercup a flat look. I wonder whether she's on crack or merely deranged.

SM (trying to pretend that Buttercup does not exist): We'll have an update for you next week.
Buttercup (overcoming SM's attempt to pretend Buttercup is invisible and inaudible): This is so exciting!!
SM and MSM look at each other and nod. MSM pulls a lever and Buttercup falls through a trap door and into a nest of hungry crocodiles. As they close in, Buttercup looks up through the trapdoor at us with an ecstatic smile and yells in a high-pitched voice: Isn't this totally exciting?
The trap door closes over the sounds of crocodiles chewing.
Me: Now that's terrific!!

Author's note: no crocodiles were harmed in the making of this story.

Memories, Lessons And Friends

2009-03-03T00:14:00.001-05:00

A few nights ago I was on a flight out from Mumbai to the US. As I tried to sleep, my mind drifted back to a day years ago when I had set out to live in Mumbai. I had two suitcases stuffed with clothes and books, and a motorcycle. With these in my possession, I got onto a train in Delhi and set out on a 16-hour journey to a new life.

When I left Mumbai some years later I had rather more by way of worldly possessions. But despite appearances, the most substantial things that I took away with me when I left that city were not the couple of dozen boxes that got loaded on an eastward bound freighter.

I took with me lessons learned over four years of building a new life in a new city. It does not matter what those lessons were. What matters is that they were the unique, non-replicable product of the experiences that I had in my time in Mumbai. I have vivid memories of those formative experiences. And even though I did not know it then, I can look back now and see how they connected to make me the person that I am.

The thing that amazes me about memory is that it records more than just facts and events. Think back to events in your life that you know to be significant. Chances are that you remember who was there, and what they did and just how it felt. Just thinking about those instances, mentally placing yourself back there, you can sometimes feel the exact same feelings that you did then. Memory is a time machine that each of us carries around in our heads.

I traveled in my time machine that night, cocooned in the dark of an airline cabin. I flickered through memories of “the night where we ….”, and “that crazy time when…” and even “that thing we did not think we would ever get through but we did.” And it struck me that many of those memories centered not on me, but on other people. There were a few people who showed up very often in those memories from Mumbai. They were the friends I made there.

And that’s what I really carried with me when I left Mumbai: memories, lessons and friends.

Since then there have been a few more instances where I moved to a new place to start a new life, and it’s always been the same. With each move my shipment became bigger. And with each move the biggest thing I carried with me was still memories, lessons and friends.

Some of the lessons have been unlearned and some of the friends have faded away. I guess it’s only the deepest truths and the most instinctive bonds that can withstand the twin tests of time and circumstance.

As I write this, my thoughts turn to you, my friend, and the journey that you are about to begin. You’re going to start a new life armed with some boxes, some lessons, some memories and some friendships. I hope your boxes arrive safely. I hope you find that the lessons were worth learning. I hope your memories stay fresh, and become a source of strength. And I hope our friendship is one of those that will pass the tests of time and circumstance.

It's Time For The Gloves To Come Off

2009-02-25T20:51:00.007-05:00

You can have too much of a good thing. Now that winter in Boston is entering its fifth month, I am convinced of that.

Did I say something recently about the cold, invigorating air? Sure it's invigorating. Just like dozens of small knives slicing into your face.

Winter is retreating, and it's downright ugly. The dense pile of snow that covered everything for months has now turned into treacherous slabs of ice. I risk a fracture with every step when I take the dog out for her walk. She, of course, continues to be blithely oblivious to her surroundings. She can only focus on one stimulus at a time, I think, and the scent of squirrel blots out the cold for her. I'm not so lucky. I am fully capable of noticing multiple stimuli, and so I feel the cold in every part of my body.

It's tiresome to wear layer on layer of clothes even to step outside for a few minutes. I long for summer, when outdoor wear will again mean t-shirts and shorts. I'm desperate to put away the fleece-lined gloves, the down-filled jacket, and the beanie hat. Especially the beanie hat. It's such a ghastly thing to wear. Beanies are great for women, they make them look willowy and graceful. But if you're male and you wear a beanie, all it does is make your head look round.

But it's not my fashion sense that's protesting, it's my common sense! This interminable winter is not what humans were designed to endure. I'm told I should be grateful that the Boston winter is bright and sunny, unlike the dreary grey that many other places experience. Well, that does not make me feel any better. Cold and bright is still cold, and Boston gives the word 'cold' a depth of bitter meaning that few other places can impart.

These were the thoughts that went through my mind this morning as I took the dog for a walk again. It was just a bit warmer than days past. The slanting rays of the rising sun glanced off the ice-plated ground, giving it a faint gold sheen. Once again I was arrested by how pretty it all looked.

Then, without warning, I started sliding slowly and helplessly down the sloping, iced-over path. And in that moment I knew a truth that would not be denied. Winter sucks!!!

Look Before You Hit The "Start" Button

2009-02-20T21:18:00.003-05:00

Florida is a lucky state. The balmy weather here casts all things in a favourable light. Under a warm breeze, even the certifiably insane seems pleasantly eccentric.

And eccentricity is certainly abundant here. You can find it at the local laundromat. The other day I was about to toss some clothes into the dryer when I happened to read the instructions on the front of the machine:
Step 1: Open door
Step 2: Check for small children and animals
Step 3: Set temperature
.....

Check for small children and animals? In a tumble dryer!?!?!?!?

But perhaps that instruction does make sense. If you’re a small child trying to escape from an alligator, the dryer might well be the safest place to crawl into.

And if you are a small child in Florida, the idea that you might need to hide from an alligator is not very far-fetched. The biggest alligator on record in the state was a 24-foot monster, and it was found inside a lady’s kitchen. The authorities suspected that the lady had been feeding the reptile, so they put the animal down.

And you know what, I am fully prepared to believe that someone would be nutty enough to feed a 24-foot alligator as if it was just another fluffy household pet, like a guinea pig or a bunny rabbit. Earlier this week we were at the Everglades national park, when a fellow tourist decided to stroke a passing alligator on its tail. As if that’s not crazy enough, our tram driver told us of an incident when someone actually placed their baby on top of an alligator to pose for a photograph!

Now it is true that after a couple of hours in the national park you've seen so many alligators that they seem as commonplace as houseflies. If, that is, houseflies were armed with two feet of vicious teeth running down either side of their jaw. Alligators are said to have brains the size of a walnut, but even they know better than to leave their young to the mercies of their own kind.

But that’s Florida for you. Warm. Relaxed. Peopled with alligator-stroking weirdos who continually misplace children and small dogs inside household appliances.

And you know what? I could live here. If only they didn't have those pesky hurricanes...

Sun, Palms, and a Dash of Triple Sec

2009-02-16T07:53:00.004-05:00

It wasn't exactly love at first sight. It took me an entire half-hour before I was smitten by Miami Beach.

It began in the morning when I looked out of my hotel window at acres of sand fronting endless miles of rich blue Atlantic Ocean. Soon afterwards I went down to get some coffee and breakfast pastries. I had walked a hundred yards or so when I abruptly realized that I was walking twice as fast as anyone else. I slowed down, looked around, and with a contented sigh I let myself slip back into island culture.

And make no mistake, Miami Beach is an island culture. It has the veneer of designer labels, plastic surgery and overdone suntans. But it also has the lilting sounds of Spanish, English and French, all spoken in Caribbean accents. We heard them all in good measure when we went for a stroll on the promenade at South Beach. And we obeyed their mingled subliminal message to relax, relax, relax.

Yes, we were at the South Beach, known for its bods and it's low-carb rival to the Atkins Diet. Sure enough, we saw plenty of bulked-up men with bare chests as they peacock-stepped with their very tiny dogs. It was just a little less camp than watching The Birdcage, but it was every bit as delightful. There were enough and more bikini-babes as well, and my wife and I soon tired of ticking off different kinds of plastic surgery.

We were rapidly catching the infectious feel of the place. How could we resist, when we were walking in front of the most beautiful buildings I've seen in America? We walked past one magnificent Art Deco building after another. Hints of Aztec motifs mingled with a Spanish aesthetic to create buildings with a delicate but casual grace. Palm trees set off their pastel colours to perfection. Looking at those buildings, it was only too easy to imagine them peopled with smiling, unselfconsciously stylish men and women who knew that life is meant to be savoured in the company of friends.

As we continued to explore it became clear that not all the dogs here are Hollywood miniatures. On the contrary, those not owned by the Liberace set seem genetically enhanced. I saw a Bassett Hound the size of a pig, and a Golden retriever as big as a little pony. I did not see any felines, but I bet a Miamese cat could eat a Siamese cat for breakfast and still have room left over for some empanadas and croquetas.

Perhaps the thing that I liked most of all, the thing that made me feel most at home, was the sound of music everywhere. From the cars cruising past broadcasting urban rhythms in English and Spanish, to the street musicians trying to parlay their talent into tips. This is a city that feels like it never forgot to disco. The songs of Donna Summer and Miami Sound Machine mingle on the streets. And at lunch we had to wait for several minutes for the waiter to take our credit card because he was busy dancing with one of the waitresses. We didn't mind; the Margharitas were exquisite.

Homecoming

2009-02-13T14:25:00.004-05:00

I know, I've been very silent. I was on a 2-week business trip that ended today. As with all such trips, the days immediately preceding it were manic, to put it mildly. So for the past month there's been little time to think clear thoughts, let alone write them down.

But now I am back home. Mentally I roll the word 'home' over my tongue a few times. After 6 months of living here it seems that Boston has finally become home, if only for a time.

I felt it the moment I got off the plane. The smell of burnt Colombian coffee and freshly fried hash browns drifted through the corridors. I guess that is the smell of mornings now.

I stepped outside to get a taxi; this time I did not reel back at the exposure to the winter air, even though I had just returned from balmy Mumbai. There was a time when I would have said that my face was blasted by a gust of dry, freezing air. But now I would tell you that I felt invigorated by the sharp, robust breeze. Cold, but invigorated nontheless!

The grimy grey snowbanks by the roadsides seemed natural now, not regrettably ugly. And it was only natural that the taxi driver would have a vague African accent.

It's nice to sit on the staircase landing in my drawing room and munch on warm buttered toast. It's nice to look out at the sun shining on the deck outside, and to imagine how nice it will be sit out there again in a couple of months.

Most of all, it's nice to come home to the waiting hugs.

Say What?

2009-01-14T22:22:00.003-05:00

I used to be fascinated by antagonyms because I thought they were extremely rare. An antagonym, in case you're wondering, is a word with 2 meanings which are the opposite of each other.

(An example is "cleave" which can mean "stick to" or it can mean "split apart". And in in case you were not wondering what an antagonym is then you either lack a sense of curiosity or you should be teaching post-graduate classes on the English language.)

I have now found that antagonyms are remarkably commonplace in the corporate world. I collected several in the course of a single seven-hour meeting on Monday.

"I may be wrong, but..."
While this seems to be a humble admission by the speaker that he is not omniscient, what it really means is this: "You would like to think that I am wrong. But I'm right. I am more right than you will ever be. I am more right than you ever dreamed of being. In fact I am so very right that I make Mussolini look like Marx. You on the other hand, are wrong. Live with it. Or not. I don't care, because you're wrong and you don't matter."

"I'm not saying this is wrong but..."
"... that is only because I have chosen to magnanimously care about your feelings for the next seven seconds. And then, after this decent pause, I will proceed to tell you in excruciating detail that you are more wrong than Britney Spears covering a Joan Jett song. The extent of your wrongness is an embarassment to you, your colleagues, your nation, and the entire ecosystem in which you occupy an insignificant yet excessive space."

"I don't know how I feel about that".
"I know exactly how I feel like that. I feel a nauseating mixture of contempt, impatience, profound dissatisfaction, and acid reflux. And by the way, you're an idiot".

"Thanks for your help."
"No thanks to your help."

"Have a good day."
"Don't."

Antagonym's are lovely, but like a spicy meal they are full of sensory stimulation and are best followed by the soothing dessert of a tortured metaphor. Luckily for me, my marathon meeting on Monday ended with an all-time classic. And I quote...

"I'm really happy that we got on the train that got us here, because now we know where our bus is going."

Amen.

It's All About The Mystery

2008-12-29T13:28:00.004-05:00

The population of Cupertino, California reminds me of a five-star hotel in Bangalore. There are a few Asians. There are heaps of Indian software engineers. And there are a small number of caucasian Americans who look like they don't really belong here.

On weekends these Indians take turns bringing their families (or, in the case of my hosts, their college buddies) to The Mystery Spot. The primary attraction of this place is that they have a canteen (isn't the word "canteen" redolent with the smell of the British Raj?) which sells hot Indian food. For $1 you can pop a plate of dal-rice or a besan laddoo. A close second to the canteen in its power to draw in the Indian crowds is the Mystery Spot itself.

This is a tourist attraction crafted with delightful cleverness. The claim is that in this place space is warped and gravity works erratically. Strange forces push at you. Small round objects roll up a slope. Tall people shrink. And there is not a sngle mirror or smoke machine in sight. The enthusiastic tour guides demonstrate these unique phenomena and spin theories of carbon dioxide vents and magnetic field anomalies. The Indian software engineers take it all in silently with keen eyes and furrowed brows. If you strain very hard you can hear their brains humming gently as they try to work out the real secret that makes the magic trick work.

The Mystery Spot is a shining example of the American talent for infusing drama and fun into anything. Domestic air travel is a contrary instance of them sucking all the excitement out of an experience that used to be all about pleasure and adventure. I have remarked before about the bigness of the USA. The distance from Boston to San Francisco is about the same as that from Boston to London, and so the flight takes about the same amount of time. The resemblance ends there.

I don't like being asked to pay for every single bag I want to check in, regardless of weight. I hate undressing for the security checks. The whole ritual of removing my jacket, belt and shoes and then putting them back on is inconvenient and undignified. I'm thinking of buying a velcro traveling suit that I can unfasten with a single sweeping gesture, like one of the male dancers in The Full Monty.

I do like to get my meal served on a tray with each individual item of food clevely pacakaged in its own little receptacle; but on my US Airways flight I had to make do with a "buy your food on board" service. When in mid-flight a shaggy-haired and overweight guy in an indeterminate steel-grey uniform tapped me on the shoulder I was first startled and then baffled. I tried to work out whether he was a steward or a pilot while he made small talk about the t-shirt I was wearing. In my mind I was wondering whether we would not all be better off if he would just go back to flying a plane or selling pretzels to passengers.

I am convinced that the best way to travel in this country is by road. That way you can skid along a coastal highway and stop occasionally to look out over the Pacific. And you can bend down to gape at the seaweed washed up on a rocky beach. Giant, 15-foot stalks of seaweed as thick as a man's arm.

That's the thing that redeems this country for the traveler: they screw up their airlines like noone else but then they make up for it by nonchalantly tossing unique oddities at you when you least expect them. There's always the chance of something new just around the next bend in the road. Now if I could only find the store where they sell those velcro suits...

Point That Bottle Away From Me!

2008-12-08T23:24:00.004-05:00

"Here, let me open that. Of course it's easy. I'll just..."
(pop!!!)
"...Oh my eye! I'm blind!!!!"

How many champagne-swilling morons are there in the US? About 1500. I know that because the American Academy of Opthalmology recently announced that every year one and a half thousand people suffer cork-related eye injuries. You have to wonder about these people. What kind of jackass points a projectile weapon at themselves before pulling the trigger? And just how idle do you have to be to keep count of all these suicidal projectile-pointers?

I'm surprised that none of them have yet made it to the Darwin Awards.

For those who don't know, and can't be bothered to follow the link, the Darwin Awards are a celebration of those who did the human race a favour by removing themselves from the gene pool through sheer spectacular stupidity. Unfortunately for our species, the eye is not a reproductive organ, notwithstanding the fifteen hundred or so people who annually sheepishly confess "I accidentally %@^&ed my own eye with a cork". If it were, then their numbers would have steadily been culled at every Christmas party, every wedding, and at the end of every motor sports event. As it stands, though, they remain monocularly capable of perpetuating the existence of their own kind.

Our only hope is that one day they will all join the NRA and start cleaning their handguns.

Oooh, This Stuff is Tingly!

2008-12-07T23:51:00.006-05:00

Phoebe the dog woke up and sniffed the air; something was different about today. She barked quizzically a couple of times, but I pretended to still be asleep in bed. So she got up and skidded downstairs to investigate by herself.

At first everything seemed the same around the house except for the silence, which was smothering.

Then I opened the door and that's when Phoebe saw that the world had changed overnight. The ground had turned crunchy! And it had a new smell, like ice. And it was white! How very strange....

Phoebe rolled over experimentally to see if doing that felt any different from yesterday. And it did, it was pleasantly cooling. As was this powdery stuff that was settling on her coat of hair. Some bits landed on her nose, and that was a bit tickly.

There were certainly a lot of birds around. That was a change too, she hadn't seen any birds for the past several days. A chipmunk flitted behind some trees in the near distance; for an instant Phoebe thought of giving chase but for now this new sensation underfoot was far more interesting.

So she rolled over some more, and then tried running. Even that was not the same. This new stuff on the ground made her skid a little at high speed. The other dogs seemed to be rather nonchalant about what had happened (except for one hyperactive poodle that was running in supersonic circles). Could it be that they had experienced this before?

Well if they had, then this was nothing to worry about. So Phoebe went back to doing what really matters: sniffing at bushes, cracking twigs, and waving her tail at anything that moved. After all, this might be the very first snowfall of her life, but that was not going to distract her from the serious business of being a shaggy dog out for a walk on a Sunday morning.

Laws of Nature

2008-12-03T21:38:00.003-05:00

There are some things you can't mess with. Gravity. The ocean. The 10-minute rule.

What's that, you ask? Let me explain by way of example. Pretend it is a day when you need to leave work no later than 5 in the evening. No, lives will not be lost if you don't leave by then, but you do really really want to leave by 5. So, late in the afternoon you're feverishly wrapping up all the little to-do items that you can. It's nearly time to leave now, and you're about to hit the "Send" button on the last email of the day so you can start to pack up. And then it happens. At 10 minutes to 5 your door is darkened by someone who steps in to talk about an issue at work. He says he'll take "a minute"; instead, he stays for sixty.

It's as if someone sent a memo: "Dear colleagues of Mahogany, today he has plans for the evening. It's up to us to ruin them. Will one of you step up and be a jerk? Will one of you walk up to him at precisely 4.50pm and proceed to trap him in a rambling, frustrating, endless discussion about something that no sane person would really care about? You would? Thanks, we knew we could count on you!"

And so the trap is set.

But where there's an ocean, there is a boat. Where there is gravity, there is anti-gravity. (Don't scoff, I know for a fact that there are alien spacecraft interred in Area 51 that are powered by anti-gravity drives). And where there is a 10-minute rule, there is a 30-minute stratagem. From now on, I will plan to leave 30 minutes before the time that I plan to leave.

Let's see how long I can fool the universe.

November Reigns

2008-11-25T23:18:00.006-05:00

There's something very comfortable about padding upstairs in my socks, glass of wine in hand, and settling down at my keyboard. I still have the tropical spirit running through my veins (and no, I don't mean rum); but I'm learning to make my peace with the winter.

A good pair of gloves help. I am grateful to them every time I take my dog for a walk in the morning, especially if it is in the subzero conditions we had last weekend. I've been in cold weather before, I've even been in cold weather in Boston before. But this is the first time that I've stepped on a clod of earth, heard it crunch under my feet, and when I picked it up I found that it was half an inch of soil sitting on four inches of perfectly formed ice.

There was more ice on the car windshield on Friday morning. I turned on the de-fogger and watched it melt slowly. I almost wished it wouldn't melt, so that I could keep staring at each perfectly formed crystal, and at the flawless snowflake pattern that stretched right across the glass surface.

We're expecting snow next week. It'll be my first snowfall. When it comes, I intend to go outside and turn my face up to the sky like a walking cliche. After all, cliches exist because they mean something.

It's good to come home from the office, get out of my car, and feel a slap of cold air on my face. It's a welcome reminder that there is a real world and that nature does not bother with protocol.

But most of all I like stepping out on a clear night. I like to look at the stars frosted onto a perfectly black sky. And if the moon is full it turns the trees into mysterious, faintly silvered silhouettes. I still have the tropics running through me, but I can see how a person could get used to this.

Shifting Winds

2008-11-16T02:52:00.004-05:00

I have a feeling that something significant is going to happen in America. I get a feeling of forces gathering, of a society that is taking a deep breath before stepping out into a time of change. It’s not any one event that makes me feel that way, it’s more an accumulation of occurrences.

The obvious one is the election of Barack Obama as president. Perhaps my view is coloured by living in Massachusetts, a state so liberal that it was the only state that did not vote for Nixon when he ran for President in 1972. And you have to worry about the weight of expectations on him when 2 out of 3 Americans said in a recent poll that they expect the country to be better off by the end of his term. But I think it’s got to the point that this expectation will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In any case, there is more to the gathering storm than the tailwind that propelled Obama on his trajectory to the White House.

There’s the current economic situation and all that that could lead to. It’ll lead to job losses of course, and hardship for many. In just the past few weeks it’s got to the stage where I can see local businesses shutting down around me, and people losing jobs as a result. But there’s more. It feels like the country is poised to change its consumption patterns. A year ago restaurants were advertising the great deals you could get on extra-large portions. That's changed. Today I saw a TGIF ad promoting "the right-sized portion at the right price", and that's only the most recent of the small-portion / low-price ads I've seen on the television.

That's just the beginning. Imagine what could happen if the big American car companies do go bankrupt (as many fear they will soon), and credit remains expensive, and so does fuel. Will American decrease their usage of cars? Will we see the demographic momentum reverse direction and move from the suburbs back towards urban centers? If it does, that would be a profound social and cultural change.

And that’s not the only social and cultural change in the offing. Apart from voting for Presidential and Congressional candidates, voters in 3 American states voted against legalizing same-sex marriages. Ironically, that seems to have sparked a tremendous burst of support for a movement in favour of such marriages. The demonstrations across the country in the past week suggest to me that it’s only a matter of time before same-sex marriages are recognized across the country, and it may not be a matter of very much time at that.

So what do a change of Presidency, an economic recession, and a challenge to social norms have to do with each other? Absolutely nothing, except that they are simultaneous in time and place, and therefore they cannot help but affect each other.

This has happened before, and not too long ago. In 1990 it was the Soviet Union which swore in a new head of state, Mikhail Gorbachev. Movements for democracy and independence from the USSR spread like wildfire across Eastern Europe. Saddam Hussein ordered his troops into Kuwait, sparking American intervention. And just like that we saw the end of the cold war and the making of a new world order.

It is, of course, impossible to say that that’s the sort of momentous change that awaits the world now. But there is one thing that I think is clear: we have some exciting times ahead.

The Soul Of A City, Part 2

2008-10-30T21:29:00.003-04:00

Singapore houses four million people, but no two of them live in the same city. A city isn’t made of tall buildings; it’s made of the people who live and work and play in them. You might walk among the same buildings as I do. But for every person you know that I don’t, for every person whom you speak to that is a stranger to me, your city is different from mine.

So my experience of revisiting Singapore this week wasn’t really about going back to familiar places, it was about returning to familiar faces.

Stretch the thread of a relationship over a great distance, and it starts to fall slack. It’s a delicate thing, that thread, and easy to neglect. You don't notice the neglect until one day you try to pick it up and discover that it’s lost its suppleness. It’s a sharp and instantaneous realization when that happens. You listen to your conversation turn polite, you recognize the palpable disinterest that’s impossible to hide, and in a flash you realize that you now have one less friend and one more acquaintance.

I was pleased to come away from Singapore without any new acquaintances.

The best friends help you learn something new. This week I found out I can enjoy art even when it is disconcertingly abstract. I discovered the quiet pleasure in sharing an afternoon with a friend and their family, just watching them be a family. And in a single evening I realized that friendships may be born in many ways, but they are shaped and defined by the vulnerabilities we choose to reveal to each other; that you can tell how important someone is to you by how bad you feel because you weren't around to help them; and that it's useful to have a shrinkable head.

I'm back in the US now. But I can feel each taut thread of friendship that pulls gently at me. One end is in Boston, and the other end is in a city that I once lived in.

The Soul Of A City, Part 1

2008-10-27T11:55:00.003-04:00

Singapore surprised me. I arrived here a couple of days ago for a short trip, four months after moving away. I expected to fit back into these familiar surroundings like a hand sliding into an old, snug glove. But I didn't. As familiar and comfortable as the city felt, there was something missing, something that made me feel like I was in an old haunt rather than an old home.

That sense of absence faded on Saturday evening while I was at Sentosa Island. I was at the beach, and the sound of the sea gently murmuring against the beach sands temporarily soothed my sense of being there-but-not-quite-there.

The same thing happened on Sunday. During the day I felt like a visitor even as I strolled through the lanes of Holland Village for the thousandth time. In the afternoon I looked out across the grounds opposite City Hall and I could not convince myself that I'd seen them before. But when night fell I was watching a movie at the Botanical Gardens. The screen was set up in the middle of a lotus pond. The light from the projector bounced onto the water in a gentle, reassuring glow. And for a couple of hours I felt once again like I belonged.

That feeling did not last very long. It was gone again this morning as I helped one friend buy a Chairman Mao t-shirt and helped another friend not buy a picture-book of "artistic nudes". But in the afternoon I waited in line for a taxi while the heavens opened up with rain twenty feet away from me. I heard the dull rumble of water falling on the road then, and I remembered it again several hours later.

I remembered that roar again several hours later as I sat in a little garden in my hotel. I heard that roar echoed in the sound of the waterfalls in that garden, and in the lapping of the pond that the waterfall poured into.

That's when I realized how much of my sense of Singapore has to do with water. Whether it's falling in a deluge during a rainstorm, or ebbing and flowing through the tidal rivers, or simply splashing in waterfalls and fountains all across the island, water is as much a part of the experience of Singapore as air. Even the absence of water is part of that experience, inasmuch as that absence reminds me that something's missing.

And now that I understand, now that I've seen the rains and listened to the waterfall, now I feel like I've visited home again.

And That's Really Important Because...?

2008-10-13T22:30:00.004-04:00

I don't understand how people can get upset at work, about work. Over the past weeks I've been in numerous business discussions where a remark expressing an opinion would incite a retort that would flare up into an intense argument between colleagues. And all that intensity would be about stuff that sells in supermarkets.

I understand that people's jobs are important to them. I do think that people who can immerse themselves into their work are lucky. Heck, I'll even confess that I often have fun with what I do for a living. (Yes, that statement is deliberately open to interpretation.) But let's be honest here, what we call work is stuff that is so unpleasant that we wouldn't even do it if we weren't paid.

And yet I've found myself sometimes in the same passionate conference-room arguments that, when I look back on them, they bewilder me. My current theory is that we each have a spring of emotional energy inside us. And if it does not find a meaningful outlet like art or helping people, well then it will find a meaningless outlet; such as choosing the most effective design theme for a Powerpoint presentation.

Our office towers are ivory towers and we glide through their corridors like so many fairy-tale princes and princesses: graceful, privileged and clueless. We have the luxury of getting upset about things that don't matter because we have no need to be upset about the things that do, like survival. A few days ago I left office late because an unplanned meeting lasted about an hour longer than it deserved to (the meeting was an hour long). On my way home I stopped at a toll-booth to hand over my dollar and change to a tired-looking man. I'd have been embarrassed for him to know that while he'd been sitting there inhaling exhaust fumes, I had spent my day listening to grown men debate what project name would best inspire the grunts working on it.

There are some things that are obviously worth getting worked up about. War, for instance, or famine, or love. Occasionally even football deserves a shout. But the forecast for next month's department store sales? No thanks, I think I'll save my hormones for a rainy day.

Larger Than Life

2008-10-03T13:26:00.003-04:00

Every time I think I'm used to the bigness of America, something new comes and slaps me in the face. This time it's Ohio.

Yesterday we had four hours on the road. Flat fields of corn stretched out endlessly. Every couple of miles a 50-foot tower marked the spot where a McDonald's or Wendy's sat. But none of those prepared me for the sight that awaited me at the end of my journey - Lake Erie.

Standing by its shore, it's very hard to believe that it is in fact a lake. The dull roar of the waves creates a compelling illusion of an ocean, one that's reinforced by the sight of unbroken water stretching out to the distant sky. I thought at first that I could see a low, jagged outline of land on the horizon; but when it shifted in front of me I realized it was just enormous waves silhouetted against the sky.

Lake Erie is so big, I have to admit it is a little bit scary.

So it's fitting that in this landscape of bigness, sits a monument to the one art form that embraces excess like no other.

Visiting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was a great thrill. They had lots of supercool memorabilia, much as you'd expect. Michael Jackson's single white glove shared a stage with David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust costume. Elvis' purple cadillac was surrounded by his grotesque jumpsuit, pictures, and a pair of handguns from his collection.

The exhibit that I liked the most was a psychedelically painted Porsche that Janis Joplin once owned; it was an ironical counterpoint to my all-time favourite Joplin lyrics:
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz
My friends all have Porsches, I must make amends

Janis recorded that song on October 1, 1970 in Los Angeles. Ten days later her Porsche was found in the parking lot of her hotel, shortly before she herself was found dead in her room from a heroin overdose.

I think Janis is the one individual who represents everything about rock music, the bad and the good. She was attention-seeking, depressive and self-destructive. She was passionate and as one writer described her, could "sing the chic off any listener".

I can imagine her sitting on the shore of Lake Erie, slightly dishevelled, singing from the belly, in a plaintive voice that would carry above the sound of water foaming on the pebble-strewn beach. I bet she would not have been intimidated by the vastness of the lake.

So here's to Janis. Here's to the big bad world of Rock and Roll. And here's to this crazy landscape that inspires its inhabitants to live life large.

Towards Points West

2008-09-28T20:17:00.005-04:00

Baseball caps and hot dogs. Gritty inner-city streets. Suburban lawns. White picket fences. These are among the many images of America that Hollywood has imprinted on the world outside its borders. But perhaps the most evocative one of all is that of a solitary car cruising on a long, empty highway with open country on either side.

So I was absolutely thrilled to set off on my first road trip in the US.

And yesterday was a good day for it. Summer is over, and the trees are starting to wear their autumn colours. I'd seen pictures, of course, but they don't come close to the reality of fall foliage breaking out in the last days of September. It's hard to keep your eyes on the road when on either side of you are vivid swatches of yellows, oranges and scarlet reds. Pretty soon all of New England is going to erupt in a crescendo of colour, and I can't wait to see it in it's full glory.

But after a couple of hours the colour tone of the countryside had changed from burnt orange to cool grey. As the clouds gathered overhead, raindrops fell on the asphalt and were promptly churned up by the traffic around and showered onto the windscreen in front of me. Meanwhile clouds of mist settled on the trees to our left and right like a ghostly quilt.

By nightfall most people had gone to bed. We'd been accompanied by fellow-strangers through Massachusetts and Connecticut, we'd been part of a throng through New York State. But as we reached into western Pennsylvania, it seemed that everyone else had chosen to retire and renew their journey another day.

Not us.

We stopped at a diner to refuel.

People look different in the Midwest. Out on the East coast they move briskly. They talk fast. There's an energy that spills out of them and impregnates the atmosphere. Sometimes it's only nervous energy. But it's there. And it's infectious.

Hundreds of miles away, far from the coast and its temples of commerce and industry, things are different. People slow down. They seem to amble rather than stride. It's as if their energy has seeped out of them and been vacuumed away.

We still had some distance to cover, and I was not keen to soak in more of the air of apathy at that diner. So we got back into our cruiser and hummed on through the night. Our path was lit by sentinels on either side: reflector poles lined the road to our left and right like an army of torch bearers in endless single file.

We sped on over the Ohio border and deeper into farming country. Eventually we pulled into Akron - birthplace of Alcoholics Anonymous, one-time rubber capital of the world, and our resting place for the night.

13 hours on the road. 5 states. 1,000 kilometers. The journey had just begun.

To be continued...

Long On Stories, Short On The Sides

2008-09-20T10:46:00.004-04:00

Right. This is it. The final heavy-shopping weekend before we declare that our new house is finally settled, 10 weeks after we actually moved in. Most people would have made that declaration right after they had set up the toaster and put their shirts away in the closet. But being the sort of OC nut-job that I am, for me it's not over until every last piece is in place.

One of the biggest milestones for me when I move to a new place is finding a place where I can get a haircut. When I moved from the Philippines to Singapore, for 2 years I would continue to get my haircuts from my regular hairdresser during my then-frequent business trips to Manila. But then Salai disappeared and I had to go through the trauma of starting a new relationship.

Yes, I have just confessed to a disturbing level of vanity. And I am sufficiently un-deluded to recognize that it is misplaced vanity. But as I explained to a colleague while asking her to recommend a salon, going to a bad hairdresser is more risky for me than going to a bad doctor. I can recover a lot faster from the flu than I can grow back my hair from a bad haircut. And I'm going to have a beating heart in my chest a lot longer than I will have hair on my head. It's that curse of the 'Y' chromosome.

It's a well-kept secret, but the reason that men have mistreated women since the dawn of history is not because we are power-mad, insecure or just plain jerky. It's because when we discovered male pattern baldness we decided to throw the mother of all tantrums and we simply did not know when to stop.

So anyway, once the colleague had understood how seriously I was taking the issue of my first haircut in the New World, she canvassed her boyfriend and those of her friends and then directed me to Joel.

I don't get it. Why is it that all male hairdressers act gay even if they are not? Are the genes that are responsible for nimble fingers also the ones that make your voice lilty and lispy? Or is it a sort of career expectation, the way all investment bankers must have sharp sideburns and weak chins, or all boxers must have pock-marked faces unless they are named Miguel? At any rate, right after telling me about his weddding plans, Joel saved me from a faux pas by telling me about his fiancee. (As opposed to his fiance.)

It all turned out well, though. I got a very respectable haircut, Joel had his chat with the nice young man from Asia, and while my wallet left lighter than I expected it would, I know I can compensate by going to a back-alley quack the next time I come down with a virus.

Higher Grounds

2008-09-09T22:18:00.005-04:00

Many months ago on this blog I confessed my love for good coffee. Alas, said coffee has proven hard to find in Boston. I was reminded of this in the morning at the one decent cafe near my office. I asked for a latte. They said their Espresso machine was broken. And in that instant I could see the rest of my day going down the tubes.

For a coffee-drinking nation the Americans sure do put up with vast amounts of horrendous coffee. And please don't use the S-word. I've not generally been a fan of Starbucks but I will concede that in most parts of the world they will give you a passable cup of the stuff. Not here, though. I've been unhappily amazed at the consistency with which their baristas manage to burn coffee just enough that it is still barely drinkable while tasting vaguely unpleasant. I think they train them for it.

(It does add to the Starbucks experience in Boston that the baristas are incapable of spelling perfectly ordinary names. I once tried giving them my initials and they even got that wrong. I have a colleague named John who is now reduced to calling himself Joe, just to make things easier for them. It's shameful.)

Most places are no better than Starbucks. Somehow Dunkin Donuts has acquired a reputation as the everyman's cofffee shop. It's not very well deserved. Except in the very literal sense that every man (and woman) seems to be in them. I have never seen such long lines for such an ordinary beverage.

I should be fair, and I should admit that several of the coffee shops, including Starbucks, offer very acceptable flavoured roasts. Hazelnut seems to be a particular favourite, and it does drip quite satisfyingly down the tongue. But a flavour like that is good only for an occasional distraction. It is not a substitute for the good, strong, straight coffee that I like to drink every 3 hours.

So after multiple cafe misadventures I decided to not rely on others to make my coffee for me. It was time to go the Do-It-Yourself way. And so I Did It Myself. I bought an elegant little French press. I went to the supermarket, bought some beans and ground them. And then I brewed my first pot of Javana Blue Mountain coffee from Jamaica. The aroma was perfect. Unfortunately aroma was all that the coffee had. It had absolutely no taste at all. For several minutes I experienced extreme sensory dissonance, as my non-plussed tongue tried to work out what my nose was so ecstatic about.

Then I tried brewing a pot of Green Mountain Colombian. This time there was some flavour to the coffee. Which was a pity because I think it would have tasted much better if it had been tasteless.

By this time I was close to despair. I mean, coffee is one of the essential food groups, and I was on the verge of starvation.

And then I found it. The most amazing blend of Indonesian coffee. It's just the kind I like. It has a strong, bold aroma, a sharp almost tangy after-taste, but is not too acidic. It's amazingly drinkable. I know, because the day I brought it home I had 4 cups over breakfast. And the best part is the fragrance of ground coffee that lingers in the air for several seconds after I reseal the bag of grounds.

I am now sated. I have found a coffee that I really enjoy. In fact, I love it so much that I am not at all bothered by the irony of finally finding it in Starbucks. :-)

What's In A Name?

2008-09-02T22:13:00.004-04:00

It happened in the supermarket. There, next to the figs and berries, I saw something ugli. No, that was not a typo, and no, I did not make up what's coming next: I had spotted an ugli fruit!

It's a sort of orange the size of a melon. Except that it's not quite an orange, it also resembles a grapefruit. Or a pomelo. Actually, it's really hard to say what it is, except that it is an ugli. And of course with a name like that I simply had to buy it! In fact, it gets better. The fruit comes from Jamaica, where it's name is pronounced "hugly". How adorable is that!?

Life (or at least food) would be more fun if people took the trouble to give interesting names to the things they eat. Take miracle fruit for instance. That is actually very aptly named, because miracle fruit berries confuse your taste buds and make them think that sour foods taste sweet!

But inapt names are even more fun.

The British are pretty good at this game. They created the toad in a hole, in the making of which no amphibians were harmed. They invented the Yorkshire pudding, which is really a pie. And they famously gave us spotted dick, which is a pudding and not, well, you know.

And then closer to home (omigosh, am I calling it home already!?) there are the Rocky Mountain Oysters. Obviously one part of the name has to be inaccurate, either the Rocky Mountains, or the Oysters. As it turns out, this food is not really oysters. Instead it is actually something that in Spain is known as "bulls' eggs". I leave the rest to your imagination.

Another inspired name is the geoduck. Which is not a duck (by now, you knew that was coming). It's really a clam. And it's pronounced "gooey duck". But not because it's gooey, because it isn't. It's name is derived from a word that means "dig deep". If it's any consolation, that actually does make sense, because the geoduck likes to burrow.

But my all-time favourite name is from Japan and belongs to the most refreshing and best tasting sports drink in the whole world. It's just too bad that it's called ...

Pocari Sweat.

Yechh!

Clink!

2008-08-30T22:01:00.006-04:00

8 weeks. Or is it half a lifetime?

It's 8 weeks almost to the minute since I got on a plane in Singapore that would take me to my present home in a suburb of Boston. 8 weeks since I said goodbye to the clipped Singaporean accent, the matronly Straits Times newspaper, avuncular taxi drivers, and 24-hour food centres with a constant supply of grilled sting-rays. 8 weeks since I drank Spinelli coffee (I wish someone would teach the guys at Starbucks how to make drinkable latte). 8 weeks and more since I worked off the angst of a working week over Kilkenny beer at Harry's bar.

Do I miss Singapore? Hell, yeah!
Do I regret leaving? No way.
I guess you could say that I'm happy, and at the same time I've been in a constant state of wistfulness for the past 8 weeks.

Did I say 8 weeks? Make that half a lifetime.

Because I am already starting to forget. Forget what it was like to live in an urban jungle. Twice a day now I go across the street and walk my dog in the woods. I'm starting to forget what it was like to have a maid always around to pick up after me. I like the routine at the end of the day: pick up stuff, load the dishwasher, and once a week take out the trash.

I'm frustrated, amused, and intrigued at the way I'm treated by the State. I need to prove once again that I can drive. I need to prove that I can be trusted to have a credit card. Or a cellphone. I need to show that I can be unfazed by the monumental rudeness of the Boston driver. Believe me, they could make Delhi drivers look civilized.

I'm relearning to listen. And I need to, so that I can understand the people among whom I now live. I think that is the best part of all. I'm learning something that I once knew and then forgot: how to slow down my mouth and speed up my ears. How to listen to what's said, strain to hear what's left unsaid, and try extremely hard to hear the nearly inaudible whisper of what is truly meant.

This is fun! And it's only been 8 weeks!

Or has it been half a lifetime?

Either way, here's to anniversaries!

Have You Hugged Your Sofa Today?

2008-08-23T23:16:00.005-04:00

I wonder if there is something dysfunctional about being comforted by furniture. All the stuff that we had shipped over from Singapore finally arrived a couple of days ago. Most of it is now set up where we want it in our new house. And with that, to borrow a tired but true cliche, the house has become a home.

Our neighbour's seven-year-old daughter had come over earlier today to pay her daily visit. She surveyed the living room and announced "Your stuff looks really different." And so it does. The crappy faux country muddy brown junk that we had rented for the past month is finally gone. In it's place is a suite of furniture in an eclectic style that can best be described as Ikea meets Indonesia. That sounds schizophrenic, but it's a combination that looks pretty good to my eyes.

So now as I type this sitting at my dining table, I can intermittently look up at my television set and see where Hugh Grant is at in his reluctant journey to fatherhood.

It's a night for romantic comedy and we've come to the climax of a Hugh Grant movie marathon with Nine Months. Of all his movies this must be his lamest in every possible way. But despite it's mediocrity it is a great caricature of the Hugh Grant school of acting - mildly eccentric, harmlessly amusing, and as comfortable as an old couch. Which is why, as bad as the movie is, I can always watch it once again. I mean, given a choice between loading the dishwasher and watching Nine Months for the seventh time, I'd choose Nine Months any day.

I think that says something. I think it shows that when you want a bit of mood-elevation, a dose of something familiar is exactly what you need.

And that's precisely why I am so pleased to have my furniture with me again. It's great to be able to relax at the end of the day, surrounded by familiar everyday objects.

It's ... comforting.

Does He Want Fries With That?

2008-08-15T23:33:00.005-04:00

What does one athlete's 10,000-calorie diet have to do with the US Presidential election? Absolutely nothing, and for that I am deeply thankful.

For the past week Michael-mania has swept like wildfire across the American media landscape. The airwaves are saturated with descriptions of Michael Phelps, his exploits in the Olympic swimming pool, and his meals. I can now tell you how many fried-egg sandwiches he eats for breakfast (three), how many sugar-coated slices of French toast follow the sandwiches (also three) and how many ham-and-cheese sandwiches he eats for lunch (only two; he is human after all). This is neither entertaining nor edifying.

But it is a welcome relief from non-stop discussion of the American presidential election. Or more precisely, it is a welcome relief from discussion of the election that is not about the candidates. A few days ago I heard a venomous tirade against Mrs. Obama that left me bewildered. I cannot understand why it matters whether she is a likeable person. Or why her skill in managing the media is relevant. Probably the only people who really care how well Mrs. Candidate deals with the media are the media themselves. But it is all to easy for a self-important radio show host to act as if the President's economic policy is less important than his family's ability to create snappy soundbites for lifestyle and feature reporters.

So I consider it very fortunate that the media coverage of Phelps's quest for 8 gold medals has outshouted the trash that often passes for political commentary.

I'm also thankful for Nastia Liukin. I grew up believing the Olympics serve one primary purpose. That purpose is to reveal every four years a supremely elegant Eastern European gymnast who makes everyone gasp in amazement. And while Nastia's passport is American, everyone knows that in 1988 her father won an Olympic gold medal with the Soviet Union's mens' gymnastics team. Now Valery Liukin and his wife Anna (also a former gymnast who represented the Soviet Union) are proudly celebrating Nastia's stunning performances in Beijing. I was about to declare that she crushed her competition on her way to the women's all-round gold. But it would be more accurate to say that she delicately ground them under her twinkle toes. I wish I could have looked forward to seeing her again at the next Olympics in four years, but that's too much to wish for. After all, by then she will be 22 years old, a veteran among her teenage competitors.

But maybe it is not too much to hope for. Oksana Chusovitina would certainly think so. After all she is 33 years old. Sixteen years ago she, like Valery, won an Olympic gold medal while representing the Soviet Union. Since then she has had a child, become a German citizen and is now twice as old as most of her competitors. And yet she placed a respectable 9th in the all-round championship last night, and is still in the hunt for a gold medal next week. I know I'll be rooting for her to be one of the most improbable Olympic champions ever.

But even she is not in the same class as Hiroshi Hoketsu. This week he rode in the Olympic equestrian event for the second time in his life. The first time was in 1964. Yes, that was 44 years ago. He is one of perhaps fourteen people in the world who have had a career longer than Mick Jagger, and he's managed it without acquiring Jaggeresque furrows all around his face. Alas, he did not make it to the podium. But I think his was one of the rare cases where the phrase "winning is not everything" is more than just a cliche.

I'm reveling in my immersion in familiar sports again, and in the sheer variety of the human drama playing out in Beijing's Olympic venues. I have another week or so to enjoy it. After that, it's back to talk-show hell!

Here Comes The Sun

2008-08-10T00:33:00.006-04:00

What a glorious Saturday it's been! It all started with the weather...

The past few days have been miserably cold and rainy in Boston. This is supposed to be high summer, but that's hard to believe when the thermometer tells you it's 16 degrees centigrade outside. So when the rain looked like holding off for a while this morning, we made a dash for DeCordova sculpture park. And what a good idea that turned out to be!

When a wealthy merchant named Julian de Cordova died in 1945, his will stated that his estate should be used to create a public museum of art. The trustees duly built a museum in his mansion. But they did not stop there. They turned the grounds of the estate into a giant outdoor museum and filled it with large outdoor sculptures and installation art.

By the time we got there, the sun was out and it was a perfect summer day, exactly the sort that we had not seen for a week and more. It was the ideal setting for two adults, a toddler and a dog to satiate their artistic appetites. We'd amble past a couple of bronzes, then stretch out under a tree for a break, then nod appreciatively at a set-piece constructed of wire-frames and thousands of pine-cones, then stop under yet another tree to nibble at a sandwich. Quite a far cry from your stereotypical "Museum Of Contemporary Art & Sculpture".

And then there was the unexpected bonus when the cashier at the museum cafe jealously asked where I'd gotten the Andy Warhol t-shirt that I was wearing. "I've been looking for one for ages", she said, "I even looked for it at the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh but they were out of stock." With intense glee and a nonchalant look I told her. "Oh, I got this for free at an exhibition in Singapore."

By then I knew that this was one of those days where everything goes like a dream. I went to a toy store and found exactly what I was looking for: action figures of Yoda and R2D2 from Star Wars and Blackout from Transformers. I went to the neighbourhood wine shop and got some great deals on New Zealand wines. (Oddly enough, whenever I miss Singapore, Kiwi wines always seem to cheer me up).

And then there were the Olympics. Finally I got to watch sports that I actually understand. Trust me, I've tried very hard to watch baseball, but (a) it's hard work and (b) every time I've watched the Red Sox they've lost. So it's with an intense combination of relief and pleasure that I've been watching volleyball, handball, and most of all I've been lapping up the gymnastics.

Somehow gymnastics have always been the centrepiece event of the Olympics for me. The've always had the most drama, because the top countries always seemed to have some sort of political tensions playing in the background. But more importantly, it blows my mind to watch the combination of strength, control and precision that Olympic gymnasts bring to bear. And then there is the tension when a gymnast stretches their routine to go for the spectacular: will they pull it off and get the extra thousandths of a point that will lead to a medal? Or will they overreach and fail completely?

And just to put the finishing touches on it all, I had my first taste of decent Chinese food in weeks.

Oh yes, this is the Saturday that I've longed for.

As Fast As The Speed Of Thought

2008-08-02T23:16:00.005-04:00

Night falls early here. At least, that's how it seems. Soon after dusk, the street outside our door feels empty. There are no more joggers, no children rattling along on their tricycles, and no dogs out for a stroll. It's a warm, pleasant sort of emptiness, though. The kids are not on their cycles because they're being tucked into bed by the now-absent joggers while their dogs look on benevolently. They'll all be out again tomorrow, hopefully after a night of sweet dreams.

There's a curious self-contradicting nature to time here. On the surface, it seems to flow with a refreshing languor. I can feel its torpidity when I'm out with my dog for an evening walk. She takes her time, savouring each moment from within that moment. I watch her from the sidelines, and that draws me into the moment with her. The clock stops ticking when that happens.

But then we return home and the clock screeches back into gear. Now the thick, staid stream of time transforms into a raging torrent. As simply as that, life enters the fast lane again.

We're neither relaxed not rushed. Neither busy nor idle. Neither fully content, nor terribly concerned. Or perhaps it is better to say that we are all of them. It's an intensely rich sensorial experience. I wonder if you can only handle it by being a little dazed a lot of the time. Perhaps without that the senses will simply overload.

Or perhaps this is just fevered late-night mental static from someone who'd like to imagine mystery in everything.

Stateside Sisyphus

2008-07-27T01:40:00.005-04:00

Who am I kidding? It's tough living here in the US of A.

Everything I wrote in my earlier posts is still true. Our surroundings are still way prettier than we can believe. Our neighbours are still incredibly nice, and strangers are still unaccountably friendly. We've had spells of miserable cold rain, but we've also had plenty of glorious sunshine on endlessly long summer days.

So what's the problem? Life, I guess, and what it takes to live it.

After the office-work and house-work have been seen to, there is little time and less energy left over for anything else at the end of a day. My long silences on this blog are eloquently mute testimony to that. I knew that living here would take some work, but so far it has been just a little bit more than I was prepared for.

I feel oppressed by the feeling that the my day is merely assembled from a sequence of tasks that need to be completed. Every morning I wake up feeling that I have a fraction less energy than I did the morning before. I'm tempted to make a to-do list to help me get things under control again. And I'm not making that list because I'm afraid that once it starts, it will keep getting longer. I'm scared I'll keep adding things to that list faster than I can check them off.

I've found it impossible to fully relax. I seem to have a constant semi-conscious scan running on my memory banks, trying to recall what 'useful things' I should be doing. As a result I have not truly goofed off in weeks. That does not mean I have been in constant motion; on the contrary it means I have often been paralyzed into inactivity, intimidated by all the things that I'm supposed to do that still stand undone.

Yes this is a whinge. I usually find a way to end these whinges with an upbeat memo to myself. This time I don't have the heart for it.

Behind The Veil

2008-07-12T01:51:00.002-04:00

I knew that just because I'd been consuming American pop culture for years, that did not mean I should expect America to seem familiar when I actually got here. Still, I keep getting surprised by the things that surprise me.

I'm still getting used to the wholesomeness of suburbia. The weather is simply flawless. At least it's flawless by my standards; I've heard locals describe it as humid but coming from tropical Singapore that really does not wash. At any rate, it's all too easy to spend an entire evening in the park watching kids play, watching people walk their dogs, watching jet planes silently leave vapour trails high in the sky, watching the moon rise in a crystal clear summer sky. And people are nice here. I don't know how to put it any more expressively. They're just ... neighbourly. And being a bit of a grouch myself, that takes some getting used to!

There are other surprises. I always thought of the US as Political Correctness Central, but I'm amazed at how rude radio talk shows can be. The Presidential elections are a constant backdrop to everything here, and the radio hosts are openly insulting about whichever candidate they do not support. For instance one talk show host insists on refering to Barack Obama as YoBama (the emphasis is his, not mine). I thought I had a thick skin, but even I cringe at some of the remarks I get to hear.

An English colleague who's lived in America for years had an interesting comment to make. "America is more diverse than Europe," he said. "In Europe they all speak different languages but the people are the same. Over here they speak the same language but they're totally different from one place to the next." It's going to be interesting to discover the truth of that observation.

Where Noone Knows My Name

2008-07-03T19:51:00.005-04:00

We all have them. The songs that mark certain chapters of our lives, like musical bookmarks. My first ever crush on a girl was set to the music of Dreams by Van Halen. When Sammy Hagar screamed "We'll get higher and higher, straight up we'll climb", he could have been describing my state of euphoria. Later, during my somewhat bipolar years in college, the Doors' provided the soundtrack with Roadhouse Blues. As they pointed out, "The future's uncertain and the end is always near." More recently, as I prepared to leave Singapore, the song that played repeatedly in my head was Leaving On A Jet Plane.

I'm leaving on a jet plane. Don't know when I'll be back again.
Oh babe, I hate to go
- John Denver

Years ago I read Dune because it was a terribly fashionable science fiction epic. I discovered it was also terribly boring. But somewhere in its ponderous prose was a passage I have never forgotten...
"Thufir, what're you thinking?" Paul asked. Hawat looked at the boy. "I was thinking we'll all be out of here soon and likely never see the place again." "Does that make you sad?" "Sad? Nonsense! Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place."

And that's exactly how I feel about leaving Singapore. Even more so after the frequently overwhelming farewells of the last couple of weeks. What were they like? There were some gruffly spoken goodbyes. Some stiff-upper-lipped nods among the guys, because that's just what guys do. Some hugs. A few tears. Many pictures. A couple of beers. A couple more beers. One karaoke night. Lots of amazing presents, the sort you only get from people who really know you.

And one theme song

It's called Boston. I was introduced to it by a friend who told me I'd find it fits my situation perfectly. She was right.

I think I'll go to Boston
I think I'll start a new life
I think I'll start it over
Where noone knows my name
- Augustana

We knew we'd arrived in a new place when we landed at Newark and saw some boys practicing headspins to the sound of music only they could hear. We're truly going to start a new life tomorrow, when we move into our house. I've been a city rat all my life. Now I'm about to get my first taste of suburbia.

But that's the whole point of moving here: to shake up the life we were living. To change things around and make them fresh and new and exciting again. Exciting is not always pleasant. But then the only thing that's always pleasant is a coma.

I'd rather be awake.

Travelers' Tales

2008-06-17T05:20:00.015-04:00

When you travel with someone you create your own story. When you travel alone it gives you a chance to listen to the stories of others.

I heard Tom's story at a bar called 1/2 Man 1/2 Noodle. Tom is a freelance computer programer. He came from San Francisco to Vietnam four years ago to get away from George Bush's America. He says he might go back home if Barack Obama becomes president. I don't think he will. He's too comfortable living with the Vietnamese girl he married. He's too comfortable telling me how the bar we're in got its name: "The owner named it after a British cult band called Half Man Half Biscuit. They became unpopular in the eighties; they were never popular. As to how the band got its name, that I couldn't tell you." Tom is too comfortable living half American half native to go anywhere, I conclude.

Curtis did not come here to get away from anything. His advertising job brought him here. But once he got here he liked the place enough that he changed employers so he could stay on. Now he explains to me his belief that each advertising agency has a different character. His view is that they continue to channel the persona of their sometimes long-dead founders. As the conversation rapidly becomes morbid I turn my attention to Miss Hien.

Hien had no need to escape to Hanoi - she was born here. The escape that she does seek has come to her in the form of an Australian engineer. Six months ago he arrived in the country to help set up its power infrastructure. Now Hien hopes to wed him so that when he goes back home he'll take her along.

And so the stories twirl around me in an erratic choreography. A young Czech explains to a bored German how he once nearly got arrested for riding a motorcycle without a helmet. A cheery young student tells me how he came from his village to Hanoi to study economics, and how he dreams of earning enough money so he can travel to China. The proprietor of the Hue Cafe serves me exquisite Vietnamese coffee and tells me I look like his mathematics teacher. I wonder if his teacher has purple hair.

The time I've spent in Hanoi has been an utterly absorbing interlude. Now I'm ready to go back home and resume my own story.

Of Sidewalks and Serenity

2008-06-13T06:30:00.005-04:00

There is a state of mental calmness that once you attain it, it helps you transcend all your anxieties. I entered this state today on the streets of Hanoi. For long minutes I stood on a sidewalk watching a torrent of scooters, motorcycles and bicycles. I was waiting for the traffic to abate for just a few seconds so that I could cross the road. It didn't. After a while I sank into the moment and my legs started ambling across the road of their own accord.

And just as if we were sharing a single collective consciousness, the traffic gently opened up a gap just large enough to surround me. I floated accross it like a bubble drifting on the surface of a pond. When I made it to the other side without so much as a brush with the tide of two-wheelers, I knew that I had fully phase-shifted into my Vietnam vacation.

A little later I was leaning back into a tiny plastic chair. I was on one corner of an intersection; I could see other travelers similarly settled in on the other street corners. A nice old lady poured me a 25cent glass of beer out of a keg through a slighltly dubious little plastic hose. She poured another one for the old Vietnamese gentleman sitting in the chair next to mine. We sipped our beers very slowly in a lazy silence. I came out of my reverie intermittently to take pictures of the world as it passed by us.

After a while the heat of the afternoon had abated a little. I stirred myself to saunter back to my hotel. I think I like it here.

In Praise of Paulistas

2008-05-18T00:35:00.003-04:00

It’s always interesting to go to a country for the very first time and form an impression of how the people there think and feel about their lives. I’ve just come away from a short trip to Sao Paulo in Brazil with a deep respect for the people I met there. I’m not sure I’ve been to any other place where they seem so content with what they have. Not complacent, because they clearly have aspirations to better their lot. But those aspirations don’t get in the way of appreciating what they have today.

Simon works in a stockroom in a cable company. In his own words, a big part of his job is moving boxes around. He wants to save some money and go back to school to learn technical skills so he can move on in his career. I’d have thought that his attitude to his current job would be tolerant at best. Not a bit of it. “I love my job”, he said, and by gosh he meant it. He even makes a point of getting to work half an hour early, even thought it’s a 90 minute commute for him and he needs to change buses twice just to get there. But he still hits his job with gusto everyday. Simon lives in a small house with his parents, who are separated but still live together, and with his sister. It seems like an awkward arrangement, yet they seem to be genuinely happy to be with each other.

34-year-old Alex revealed the secret to us. “The best place in the world is my home”, he told us, “it’s with my family that I remember who I am and I renew myself”. He told us without a trace of bitterness that after a 3-year marriage that ended in divorce he has put all his energy into his businesses. He talked about these businesses with pride, and with excitement for his dreams of making them even bigger. But the point where his face truly lit up was when he told us about his five siblings who live within shouting distance, his niece who has recovered from serious illness, and the joyful chaos when they all got together for Mothers’ Day a few days ago.

I’ve been places where people are content with what they have, and I’ve been places where they are excited about what they will accomplish in the future, and I’ve been places where people talk with passion about how their lives are centered on their families. But it’s only in Brazil that I’ve heard people talk about all three meshed together so perfectly that regardless of their present condition they are full of happiness and hope.

As Sandra told me half an hour before I took a taxi to the airport: “In Brazil we have a saying, it will all be okay in the end. And if it is not okay, that only means that you haven’t yet come to the end.”

I’ve never heard more beautiful words to live by.

The Ancient Home

2008-05-12T20:09:00.007-04:00

Here I am, sitting in Johannesburg, and I think to myself "Wow, I really am in Africa!"

The view from the flight was not what I expected. The city looked almost European, with wide, modern highways and several large clusters of townhouses. It was only on the outskirts, in the farmlands, that the sub-tropical Africa of National Geographic was recognizable. Out there it looked as if someone had carelessly daubed a few faint smears of faded green over a dull brown grass-scape.

At the airport the first thing that struck me was how cheerful everyone looked. I have to say, there is nothing quite as beautiful as a smiling African. Their faces seem to glow with a rich inner radiance that I wish I could share.

Joburg was unfortunately just a transit stop for me. So I did not even get to set foot on the soil of the mother continent. I just sat with my nose pressed to the airport window where I could see out beyond the tarmac and the small twin-engined aircraft parked in the outdoor lot behind the main runways.

The land stretched out flat and brown until on the horizon I could just see the hazy outlines of the highveld. And in my mind I could imagine looking beyond the ridged highlands, soaring over mysterious tropical miles, swooping through the Great Rift Valley, all the way to Luxor and Alexandria.

I wish I could have gotten out and headed out into those grasslands of legend. Where Mother Nature and human nature have met each other in their rawest form for millenia.

I'll be back one day. I know I will.

I Want My, I Want My MTV(.com)

2008-05-03T02:36:00.007-04:00

This sentence is an act of dissent. It is a thumbs down against a couple of rather sanctimonious geeks in Canada who do not want me to use my computer today. For that matter they want me to eschew the use of any communication device other than two cans and a string. Apparently if I do as they say then I will be more in touch with humanity and with mother nature. As if that would be a good thing.

Where I sit, nature is hot, humid and inhospitable. I know that in about six months I will be on my knees begging for this weather. But right now I'll just bond with my air conditioner, thanks very much. As for humanity, the less said the better. No, scratch that; perhaps something is worth saying. About messieurs Rajekar and Bystrov for instance, the brains (if that is the right word) behind Shutdown Day.

Rajekar and Bystrov are IT professionals. Last year they discovered that they were spending too much time on their computers. So they invented a day on which misfits like them could unplug for 24 hours. As if it was not bad enough that Hallmark has given us Mothers' Day, Fathers' Day, 2nd Cousin Twice-Removed Day and Let's All Read The Newspaper With One Eye Shut Day, we now also have Shutdown Day. A day on which geeks will nail themselves to the inside of a padded cell and go cold turkey for 24 hours without a computer, television, digital thermometer or any other electronic gadget.

The whole idea that technology cuts us off from other people is totally wrong-headed. I'm sure anyone who reads this blog needs no convincing that the Internet helps us maintain relationships and sometimes build new ones. No, it's not the pointlessness of Shutdown Day that irritates me, it's the presumption.

It's the idea that if a couple of people use computers as a way to hide themselves from having to communicate with real people then that must be what everyone else does too. It's the thought that the world needs rescuing from some sort of dark, machine-worshipping slavery to the mighty microchip. It's the whole born-again attitude: now that I have been saved, it is my duty and my right to save you too, whether you like it or not.

Well here's some news for you, M/s Rakjekar and Bystrov. It's not your duty. And it certainly is not your right. Why don't you go ahead and pry yourselves away from your keyboards with a crowbar. I'll just keep on chatting with my friend who lives on the other side of the world. And we'll meet again tomorrow, when you are 24 hours older, and the rest of the world is wiser.

3014 Down, 2000 More To Go

2008-04-28T10:12:00.010-04:00

There is something very character-building about hand-indexing five thousand songs. Having laboured over this task in fits and starts over the past couple of weeks, I can confidently say that I am now a better person. More patient. More meticulous. More thin. OK, not more thin, but all the rest is true.

When my hard drive crashed and died, I lost all the songs on it. I retrieved them from my iPod onto a new drive, but iTunes refused to associate the songs on the iPod with the same songs in the hard drive. So what's the problem, you ask? The problem was that I was about one third of the way into listening to and assigning ratings to every single one of the five thousand songs in my library. If I was now unable to match the records in the hard drive with the songs on the iPod, I would lose over a hundred hours worth of song ratings. There is no way that someone with an obsessive-compulsive streak like me could bear such a loss. So the only choice left to me was to match each song to its MP3 file manually.

(I could explain why I was so keen to have all the songs rated, but it won't make me sound any less crazy so I won't bother.)

After indexing about five hundred songs I realized that this could be an informative experience. For instance...

I noticed that by far the funniest song titles belong to the Ramones. In 1974, Dee Dee, Johnny and Joey Ramone played their first concert. They did not really have the same name; they just thought it would be amusing to pretend to be brothers. With that same whimsical sense of humour they went on to record songs like "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue", "I Just Want To Have Something To Do", "The KKK Took My Baby Away", and my favourite: "I Wanna Be Sedated".

On the other hand Pink Floyd are the masters of the weird song title. After "Pigs On The Wing" and "Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk" you think you've seen it all. Then you come across " Careful With That Axe, Eugene" and you think the limit of eccentricity has been reached. Then you spot "Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict". I'm convinced that the band used to generate song titles by picking words at random from a dictionary and squeezing a preposition or two in the middle just to make a complete phrase.

Be that as it may, one can only entertain oneself with song titles for so long. It came to a point in the indexing process that I began to wonder whether I had lost my mind. Was the effort I was putting into it worthwhile? If I decided to just give up on the ratings, would it really be so bad?

Then, just as I was about to lose my religion, my faith came back to me in the form of jet lag-induced insomnia. I spent six hours in a late-night marathon of keyboard-bashing. I knocked the whole darned library into shape and order emerged out of the chaos on my hard drive. Beautiful order, rising like Aphrodite from the foam.

With a silent (lest I wake the neighbourhood) roar of triumph I clutched my iPod to my chest, did a little victory lap around my chair, and fell into a deep victorious sleep such as only the righteous can enjoy.

Now all I need to do is listen to all the as-yet-unrated songs and rate them. It should only take me another couple of hundred hours or so to finish that task.

Anyone got a straitjacket to spare?

Through The Looking Glass

2008-04-26T03:43:00.004-04:00

I love dogs of all sizes, from giant Great Danes and St. Bernards down to little bitty Dachscunds. But if an animal can be cradled in the palm of one hand, I cannot consider it a dog anymore. Anything that small is either a hamster or a guinea pig. A dog is an animal that really should be visible to the naked eye.

Laura (real name kept secret to protect my safety) does not think so. She's a 200-kilo realtor with a 2-kilo dog. I'm not kidding; Duchess, her Yorkshire Terrier, rides around in a litte pouch suspended over her mistress' ample tummy. Together they look like a strange species of marsupial, a cross between a Kangaroo and a fur mitten.

We met them while viewing houses in Boston. They lived up to every caricature of a large woman with a pet the size of her fist. In a loud falsetto voice Laura told us about Yorkie party she was taking Duchess to. There would be about 30 of these creatures milling about like possessed furballs. And the only way to identify individual animals would be by their jewelry. Duchess' birthday was coming up later in the week. And for that grande soiree she would be prepared with nine (yes, nine) different dresses. Heaven only knows what mountains will be moved when Duchess has her "sweet sixteenth" birthday party.

Fortunately all the other people we met in Boston last week were sane. And we were really lucky that we had Sally (real name hidden to protect her from the embarassing revelation about to follow) to take us around. We loved that she shared our interest in food from different countries. That was not obvious at first, when Sally extolled her town Newton for being more tolerant than neighbouring Wellesley. The Wellesley town council would allow only Starbucks to open a coffee shop. Newton, on the other hand, was willing to admit Dunkin' Donuts as well so that its residents would have access to different kinds of coffee. (To her credit, Sally went on to talk intelligently about middle-eastern, Indian, Thai and Chinese food, all of which are also available in Newton.)

All in all it's been an interesting week. For the first time I got a good look at suburban America and it was beautiful. We drove through towns with charming wooden houses separated by wide tracts of forested land. Inside every town there were extravagant stretches of playgrounds and parkland, interspersed with lovely lakes and ponds. Winter was turning to spring in a wash of bright green. Not the deep, glossy tropical green of Singapore but a lighter, crisper, more temperate shade of green. And over the long weekend it seemed as if everyone was out running or cycling or at least out walking with their kids and dogs.

It wasn't all smooth and pretty for us. It took us half an hour to change terminals at JFK airport, which made us think wistfully of the efficient and passenger-friendly airports in Asia. The practice of tipping had me in a perpetual state of bewilderment. I'll probably need night classes to figure out whom to tip and how much. But that's all part of the normal friction of moving to another country with a whole other culture.

For now I'm just pleased that at the end of our week-long scouting trip we came back to Singapore feeling positive about Boston. There's plenty to look forward to when we move there in a couple of months. And in the meantime, we'll continue to soak up tropicana, Singapore style.

Man vs Machine

2008-04-20T08:49:00.005-04:00

Here I am, at 9am on a Sunday morning in Boston. The weather outside is fine, which in April means that it's a toasty 10C outside and there is no sign of rain or snow. I'm wide awake and have been for about four hours. And already I've been outwitted by a washing machine.

Earlier this morning I'd gone to the hotel laundromat to wash some clothes. I had duly loaded the machine, closed the lid, inserted my coins, and rammed in the coin loader/machine starter. And then I and the machine stared at each other in dead, calm silence. I soon tired of trying to outstare a white metal object. So I asked a passing employee to help. With a pleasant smile (that screamed "You daft furriner") she sweetly pulled the loader/starter back out and presto, the machine started running.

It's history repeating itself. Years ago I visited a friend who had just moved to Bangkok. He was facing a crisis because he'd run out of clean clothes and didn't know how to operate his washing machine. The Thai user manual did not help. The building staff were a little better. We phoned them and said "Please repair washing machine" using every syntax and accent we could think of. Eventually we managed to transmit the word "repair". Then followed a Siamese version of Twenty Questions in which we successively denied damaging air conditioners, toasters, televisions, refrigerators and assorted other appliances. Eventually a technician came up to investigate and in about seven seconds had the washer up and running. In the process we learned that you have to turn the starter knob, and then pull it out.

So within 36 hours of leaving Singapore I have learned two valuable life lessons. The first, of course, is about the intricacies of operating washing machines in alien nations. The second is about the incompatibility between toddlers and laung-haul flights.

Imagine a three-year-old boy. Imagine getting him into a plane at 11 in the morning, wide awake and full of beans. Imagine keeping him there for the duration of an 18-hour flight. If you're imagining a small, roughly cylindrical object ricocheting off the walls of a flight cabin, you've got the right image.

In hindsight it was rather funny. I, my wife, and our Monster were seated at the back of the cabin. The Monster invented a sport which consisted of giggling all the way to the front, then hopping all the way to the back. Along the route he would stop at randomly chosen fellow passengers, look them closely in the eye, and then giggle some more. They were obviously unprepared for such childish attention; at this point it's worth mentioning that every one of them was a tired-looking businessperson.

After about 10 hours of alternating the mile-high hopscotch with lusty renditions of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", we had gotten to know the cabin crew rather well. They were great - they went a long way to take care of us. Maybe they thought it was a neat way to get back at excessively demanding business passengers. Or maybe it was just the exceptional dedication to service that Singapore Airlines instils. Either way, they took fantastic care of us, bless their sarong-clad souls.

And now we're here in the promised land, with a week of house-hunting ahead of us. The weather forecast promises sunny skies. Let's hope that's an omen.

Caught In A Mosh ... Forever

2008-04-09T13:43:00.011-04:00

A giant panda from hell plays speed metal guitar and laments mankind's extermination of other animal species. If you think that's bizarre, wait till you find out that he (she?) is called Death Panda.

I'm not making this up.

The guitarist is Marty Friedman, formerly of Megadeth. The vocalists are from Akihabara48, an all-girl Japanese group.

This could only happen in Japan.

At this point you're probably wondering why I know this. It's because I recently watched the loudest movie ever. Sam Dunn is an anthropologist and a heavymetal fan. He did what any such person would do - he made a documentary called "Global Metal" about heaymetal music around the world. And watching it made me feel like a teenager again. It took me back to when I was 14 years old and there was a new boy in school. He had just moved to Delhi from Cyprus, and he passed around a tape with music like I had never heard before. It was loud and it was rude and it could only be listened to at maximum volume.

Soon afterwards I heard of a band called Metallica, and how they had titled their first album "Kill 'Em All" in a nose-thumbing reference to record company executives who blocked the original title: "Metal Up Your Ass". Then, in quick succession, I discovered Iron Maiden, Slayer, Anthrax and a host of other bands with evil names, twin guitars, double-bass drums, and buckets of attitude.

My parents (and probably my neighbours) waited for me to grow out of it. But the thing is, once you're into metal, I don't think you can ever get out. As one of Dunn's interviewees in another documentary put it, "Metal fans love it forever. Noone goes 'Yeah I was really big into Slayer ... one summer.'"

The popular stereotype is that metal fans are long-haired drug-toking satan-worshipping anarchists who are incapable of fitting into civilized society. And while that is completely true, it totally misses the point. Which is that they are hearing-impaired long-haired ... anarchists.

Sometimes that stereotype can get quite hilarious. Years ago, when music was still sold on vinyl records, Iron Maiden went on tour in America. They inadvisedly scheduled a concert somewhere in the bible belt. A local preacher decided to crusade against their diabolical influence by organizing a bonfire to burn their albums. His devout followers duly bought a lot of records (somehow believing that this would be a bad thing for the band) and chucked them in the flames. All seemed to be well until someone realized that the plastic would release vapours. Evil, Satan-worshipping vapours. Panic struck and the crowd disappeared hastily to escape the fumes from Hell. Days later when the band arrived in town to perforate some eardrums, the only people who showed up to scream and point at them were their fans.

Coming back to Global Metal, I was blown away by some of the vignettes. There was the fan from Iran who somehow managed to keep up with his favourite music while living in a country where music CDs are illegal. There was the guy in Dubai who wore a traditional dishdasha like the ones in the picture below while being interviewed.

With a sheepish grin he reminisced about playing in his school band. and doing a cover of Jimi Hendrix's classic Purple Haze. He had worn just such a dishdasha on stage - except that it was all black.

There was the rather pudgy and incongruously named Sahil "Demonstealer"Makhija, lead singer in a band in Bombay. And the absolutely hilariously named band Bhayanak Maut. That's comic-book Hindi for "grisly death"; the humour in the name is sadly untranslatable.

There was a guy from Israeli band Salem recalling the time they sang about the holocaust. That sparked a debate in the national parliament about whether it was appropriate for a metal band to sing about such a serious topic. There was Max Cavalera from Brazilian pioneers Sepultura describing their first time in Jakarta. The fans, mostly students, got excited and rushed the stage to get closer to their idols. The police were already on edge because of political activism in Indonesia's universities so they panicked. They beat the kids down with batons. Then they forced 20,000 kids to sit down on the ground and watch a show by one of the loudest, fastest, most energetic bands ever.

And the absolute best part of the movie for me was X-Japan. In the late 1980s they started creating what would eventually be known as Visual Kei, a sub-culture that fused their musical style with extravagant make-up and fashion.

Don't be fooled by the posing and pouting. These guy kick ass and they kick it very very hard. They make the American glam metal bands of the 1990s look like a bunch of wusses; check out their videos on Youtube and you'll know what I mean.

So there you have it - giant Japanese pandas, Indian "demonstealer"s, and kosher headbangers, the world of heavymetal has it all. Is it any wonder we don't feel the need for civilized society?

A Soupcon of Soup Cans

2008-04-07T09:24:00.000-04:00

The first time I heard of artist Andy Warhol, I thought he was the ultimate pretender.

He once described how he got the idea for a particular series of paintings: "I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked me the right question, 'Well, what do you love most?' That's how I started painting money."

And so he went on to paint dollar signs in various shapes and colours. And when he wasn't painting dollar signs, he was painting cans of Campbell's Soup. 32 different flavours of Campbell's Soup. I really didn't get it. They said he made 'Pop Art', which sounded suspiciously like a polite way of saying that his work was kitsch, not art.

But I have resolved to live life large. So when I found out that an exhibition of Warhol prints was running in Singapore, and that there was no admission fee, I had to go. I'm so glad that I did!

The thing that I had never appreciated before was that through his art Warhol was telling the story of his times. It wasn't Pop Art in the sense that it was lowest-common-denominator product, packaged to sell millions of copies like a New Kids On The Block album. On the contrary, it was art that observed popular culture. A great example is his portrait of James Dean, or rather his portrait of a Japanese poster for the James Dean movie Rebel Without A Cause.

Here's the original poster for the movie (I could not find a Japanese one, but this gives a good idea of what it would have been like).

And here's what Warhol did with it; I love the way he stylized the portrait to make James Dean look even more sullen and aggressive than in the photograph.

Warhol did not just observe, he also commented.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were American communists. They were sentenced to death by electrocution in 1951 for passing military secrets to the Soviet Union. Julius was strapped to the chair first, and he died quickly. Ethel was not so lucky. She recieved a charge of electricity for 57 seconds but at the end of it she was still alive. Two more charges were passed before she was pronounced dead. Eyewitnesses said that by then smoke was rising from her head.

Warhol made 10 prints based on a press photograph of the death chamber. Individually, each image is intensely haunting.

And when you see all of them displayed side-by-side, the effect is profoundly disturbing.

There were a hundred Warhol prints exhibited and I loved almost every one. I did draw the line at a poster titled How To Tell If You're Having A Heart Attack. It was exactly what it sounds like and incredibly dull. But that was a rare exception in a collection of sheer genius.

So I am now officially a fan of Andy Warhol. I'm a proud purveyor of Pop Art. And my farewell tour of Singapore is off to a flying start!

It Begins Now

2008-04-05T06:13:00.004-04:00

I spent all of Friday in a blue funk and I could not understand why. At first I thought it was because I had started the day by pissing off people from 8 in the morning; but I'm way too thick-skinned, and probably too misanthropic, for that to bother me for long. Still, I spent all day feeling sorry for myself for the most trivial reasons (and probably pissing of manymore people in the process). Then, late in the evening, it dawned on me what had happened.

A couple of months ago, my company decided to move me to a new assignment in Boston (Massachusetts, not Lincolnshire, in case I have any British readers). I've had time to get used to the idea, but in truth it seemed far off in the future because the actual date of my move had not been fixed. That changed on Friday when my new boss made it clear that by the end of June, I would either be in Boston, or I would be in deep doodoo.

So now there is a date. And it's less than three months away. And it feels like it's tomorrow. I have twelve weeks or less before I pack my bags and leave on a jet plane. I know what you are thinking: "Twelve weeks is a long time, so stop whinging you snivelling infant". You're missing the point. There is a clock and it is counting down. I can almost hear the ticking. It used to count in months, now it's in weeks and soon there will only be days left.

I have so much unfinished business! So many things I had planned to see in Asia this year! I spent last Christmas planning my travel in 2008 to Laos, Vietnam, Tibet and Australia and now I don't know when (if?) I'll get to go. There are so many people to say goodbye to, and some of those people deserve really looong goodbyes.

(And there are so many places I still haven't eaten at in Singapore!)

I could go on and on and on but ... that way lies despair. So I won't go there.

Now that I know what's been biting me, I'm going to bite back. I'm going to make the next twelve weeks count and I'm going to start today. Twelve weeks from now when I sit by an airplane window and take a last, parting look at skyscrapers sprouting out of a carpet of tropical foliage, I'll still be sad; but I'll also be satisfied. Because twelve weeks from now I'm going to look back and say to myself "Dude, you really went out in style!"

Looking With Your Feet

2008-03-29T01:44:00.005-04:00

I'm convinced that the best way to really see a city is to walk through it. And it is even better if you're lost. I learned this a few years ago in Glasgow. On the way to a local museum I took a wrong turn and before I knew it I was at the entrance to an enormous park full of men and women in tartans. They were there for the World Highland Games. I spent the next couple of hours wandering through the grounds, between swirling bagpipers, twirling dancers, and enormous men practicing to throw large pine logs. Six years later I can remember the sights and the sounds as if I'd been there this morning.

Ever since then I've made a point of discovering cities on foot. It helps me see more, and it also helps me understand more. On one of my trips to Bangkok I decided to walk to where I was staying, instead of taking a taxi. On the way I spotted a gorgeous pagoda. It was a particularly fine monument, and I turned aside to take a closer look. When I got there, I realized that while it was grand enough to have been another imposing reminder of Thailand's golden age of empire, it was no ancient relic. On the contrary, it was a brand new temple that the current King had just finished building. Suddenly I had a new-found appreciation for the importance of Buddhism to everyday life in Thailand.

Occasionally you do get to see a holdover from an ancient time. For example, if you feel thirsty while walking down Stonegate in York, you can nip into the Punch Bowl for beer. And if one of your ancestors had been walking that same street three hundred years ago, he might have done the same. After all, the Punch Bowl has been dated back to 1675. On the other hand, going walkabout can also introduce you to more recent history. Like the time I stumbled across The Red Piano cafe in Siem Riep, where Angelina Jolie and her crew hung out while shooting for the first Tomb Raider movie.

The point of this reflection is that very soon I will move out of Singapore. I'm surprised and embarrassed to admit that I've lived in this city for seven years and made scant effort to see the city where I live. Very soon after moving here I fell into a comfortably familiar routine, the sort where you go from point A to point B without really seeing anything in between.

So now I've resolved to change that. For the next 2 or 3 months I'm going to act like a tourist. I'll see the sights and take the pictures and most importantly I'll walk the streets of the city I've taken for granted for so long.

Stay tuned, because I'm sure I will see something utterly unexpected.

Going Down In History

2008-03-23T01:10:00.006-04:00

I'm trapped.

It all started in December 2006. That was the last time I went to India for a holiday. On the rare occasions that I holiday in India, I like to fill up my time and my suitcase by shopping for books. That is the one thing that is still much cheaper there.

I'm also a bit obsessive about "collecting the full set" of anything. I'm a sucker for boxed sets, the full trilogy in one package, that sort of stuff.

So if you put these two impulses together, and then place me in front of a book called The New Penguin History of The World, I turn into putty. Very silly putty.

A historian named J. M. Roberts set out to write the enire history of the human race, from the time before there even was a human race, all the way up to the present day. Before he passed away in 2003 he took the story as far as America's war on terror, and Nature's newly uncovered war on mankind via global warming. Such staggering ambition deserves to be rewarded. I snapped up the book without a second thought.

The cover blurbs described the book as "A stupendous achievement.." and "A work of outstanding breadth...". But they left out the fact that it is stupendously boring. Here's a sentence picked out completely at random: "Political democracy developed faster than social, on the other hand, even if the universal male suffrage already long-established in the United States would not be introduced until 1918; the democratization of English politics was already past the point of reversibility by 1870."

That was from the 782nd of 1184 pages of unrelentingly turgid prose.

And I cannot stop reading.

You see, I've trapped myself inside this paperbacked prison. I started reading the book three or four times, and each time I gave up within the first fifty pages of multiply-nested subordinate clauses. Eventually I started thinking of the book as a living adversary that was determined to prove I'm too stupid to read it. It was disturblingly like the feelings of clumsiness and inadequacy that dogged me through high school.

"This", I told the fat snob sitting on my bedside table, "is now personal. I will defeat you". No I didn't. I'm not yet deranged enough to talk to books; only enough to feel intimidated by them.

So I made one more attempt and this time forced myself through the polysyllabic sludge with bloody-minded determination. I was an invincible hero forcing my way through dense enemy ranks. I was a fearless explorer trudging through an arid, oppressive desert. I was a moth wading through molasses, and about equally elegant.

But more successful.

I have now bludgeoned my way through six hundred pages, and just about passed the halfway mark. I'm winning my struggle against my inanimate adversary and it's doing me no good. In one of history's more savoury moments, the Greek king Pyrrhus commented on his own losses after winning a battle: "Another such victory over the Romans and we are undone". I can empathize.

Finishing the book will probably destroy my surviving brain cells, and leave me a gibbering idiot who is unaccountably knowledgeable about seventeenth century European power struggles. Finishing the book will probably take me another year; evry time I open it and start reading, I fall asleep within ten pages. Even so have I made my way to this present pass, reading three pages a night before passing out with my nose pressed into the binding.

It's in front of me now, just lying there inertly. As if I don't know that in a matter or hours it'll be in my hands again, gnawing away at the edges of my consciousness.

I swear to you, the next book I read will be a graphic novel.

Not Akademia, But Academia Nonetheless

2008-03-15T06:39:00.023-04:00

Usually if people pay attention to what I'm saying at 930pm on a Friday, it's because they've been drinking. Last Friday was an exception. At least, I hope it was. Because if it wasn't, then I spent a couple of hours giving a guest lecture to a class of drunk graduate students.

Not that it would bother me terribly if that was the case. I was there just so I could say that I once taught at a university. Whether anyone actually learned anything was really quite incidental.

Earlier this week I'd had an encounter with a rather more accomplished set of teachers. The Singapore National Museum had an exhibition of Greek sculptures on loan from the Louvre, including portraits of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates.

Two and half thousand years ago Aristotle lectured on philosophy as he walked through the gardens of his school, the Lyceum. His students followed him as he walked, which is why they were called the peripatetics. I, of course, could not take that sort of risk. If I tried to deliver a traveling talk through the walkways of Nanyang Technological University, I'm certain the class would melt away in search of more pleasant occupations. So I did my rambling verbally instead, within the confines of a rather stark and antiseptic classroom.

Instead of Aristotle, I took inspiration from Plato. That was partly because Plato was rather less choleric looking than Aristotle. (Either that or his sculptor was more adept at flattery. Plato is the one on the right below.)

But more importantly, Plato had a healthy respect for both abstract and applied science. He advocated the study of number theory by philosophers, and of arithmetic by businessmen and military commanders who "must learn the art of numbers or he will not know how to array his troops". So after my professor friend had talked through the theory of evaluating marketing campaigns, I described some real world examples from my professional expreience.

Plato himself was a student of Socrates, who had a rather fun approach to teaching philosphy. He would discourse in a symposium. Our modern-day symposia are drab affairs in stuffy conference rooms with uncomfortable chairs and bad coffee. But in ancient Greece a symposium was a drinking party. Gentlemen of leisure and refinement would gather in a room, stretch out on couches, and talk long into the night on love, ethics and the nature of truth.

Since then standards for drinking party conversation have fallen a little. Last night, for instance, I was at a St. Patrick's Day celebration where the talk centered on rugby, cellphones, and the excellentness of the meat pies. And that was before someone hooked up the karaoke microphone.

Plato's school was at Akademia, a sacred grove dedicated to Athena. She is one of the most interesting characters in any mythology. I find it fascinating that she is the goddess of both wisdom and of victory in war. That seems like an odd combination at first. But it does make sense because in pretty much every instance where she favours someone in a battle, she does so by showing them how to win against great odds through the use of stratagems and ruses. The most famous example is the wooden horse that she told the Greeks to build so that they could defeat Troy.

I've had a soft spot for Athena since I was an undergraduate student. Back then the odds of me ever graduating were very grim. I decided I needed a patron deity, and I picked Athena. I figured that if she could get Odysseus out of the pickle he'd landed in by upsetting the sea-god Poseidon, then extracting me from the academic quicksand I was thrashing in would be a piece of cake. I loved driving my friends crazy by insisting on pouring libations to her in every party. "The first drink belongs to Athena", I'd proclaim and pour a little on the floor. We were all penniless students, and the look of horror on my friends' faces at this wasteage was priceless.

It worked. I did eventually graduate by the skin of my teeth. And if any of my professors in college knew that I had been turned loose on a class of graduate students, they would certainly keel over in shock.

I guess the moral of this story is that you should never depend on a university to educate you - you never know what half-baked idiot they might set to take your classes! It's much wiser to place your fate in the hands of a Greek goddess. ;-)

But Where's The Missing Link???

2008-03-09T10:56:00.006-04:00

A couple of weeks ago Quirky quill snagged me with a tag that was deceptively simple. I was in a blue funk at the time, but I did promise I would take up the tag when I returned to humanity. So now it is time to pay my dues.

The tag instructions were to recall five previous posts, pertaining respectively to my family, my friends, myself, my love, and anything else I like. I did consider taking the easy way out, which would have been to link five times to a post about myself. But where would be the fun in that? So I'll do it the hard way.

My family, then. A little over a year ago I wrote about the monster in my life. And then there was the one about my dog. I've been really lucky that both of them are seriously eccentric creatures with enough character to make up several different alphabets. There's never a dull moment when either of them is around. Oh, how I yearn for dullness. (Not!)

I hadn't really ever written about friends until a very odd phase in January when several things happened almost simultaneously. They made me re-examine the friendships that I had and acknowledge how fragile they can be. And (which was the best part) they reminded me that it's always a good idea to let the people who matter to you know that they matter to you. These posts are so recent that it seems superfluous to link to them. So as a bonus I've also flashedback to a rather embarassing reunion from a year ago.

How do I link to a post about myself when this entire blog is really about me? The only way to choose a particular post would be to do it with a touch of whimsy. And since I just happened to buy some seriously funky t-shirts today, I suppose I should cast my memory back to the day Hollywood awakened my inner fashionista.

A post about my love? You won't find one. You will find fleeting references. I'm generous enough to tell you that, and jealous enough to not make it any easier for you to find them.

As for likes, I have many. One I have a particularly soft spot for is coffee. back in college I had painted onto one of my t-shirts a picture of Garfield holding a steaming mug, and captioned it with "Happiness is a poor substitute for coffee". There are still times when I think that might be true.

Oh, and the final part of the tag is to tag five others to take it up. But I've been so slow to complete this tag myself that anyone I might have thought to pass this onto has already recieved it from someone else. So I'll be the terminus on this particular line (QQ - hope you don't mind). Regular service will soon resume with a new post.

Language, Timothy

2008-03-05T10:25:00.003-05:00

I'm standing at the counter at Subway, waiting for the guy in the green cap on the other side to wrap my dinner and slip it into a plastic bag for me to carry away. He has an odd accent which I simply cannot place. I pride myself on having a good ear for languages and accents (it compensates for being blind to other peoples' faces), and I don't like being unable to place his accent. So I unobtrusively lean forward to read the name on his tag in the hope that it will give me a clue.

It turns out his name is "Sandwich Artist". Sure, that would explain his accent and my inability to recognize it. After all, I've never before met anyone from the Sandwich Islands.

(Irrelevant geographical note - the Sandwich Islands, currently known as the Hawaiian Islands, are not to be confused with the South Sandwich Islands which are in the South Atlantic.)

Seriously, what is it with these ridiculous job titles? I could even accept the guy being known as a sandwich technician, but an artist? I'd love to walk up to him one day and ask for a toasted post-abstract neo-classical club with extra cheese and sweet onion sauce. Oh, and can I have some French impressionist fries with that? I'll concede that his sandwich tastes good, but what does it mean?

I'm convinced that the sandwich artist was dubbed thus by some dimwitted business school graduate. I was taking job interviews at a business school last weekend when one eager young newbie proudly told me that he had run something called Schmeezer (name changed to protect the asinine).

"What the hell is that!?" I asked, momentarily relinquishing my usual suave dignity. "That", he told me sagely, "is our communication platform". I asked him to try again, in English this time. He did, and confessed that "communication platform" is idiot-speak for "college magazine". And on that high note, the interview ended.

I wonder where it will all end. My poor pet dog will probably mutate into a canine social accessory. Bless her shaggy little soul, she does love her tissue-based dental resistives (that's chewy bones to you). She's asleep now, sprawled on the domicile/inhabitant ambulatory interface (floor), blissfully unaware of the perils of human language.

I'd like to take all this dumbass jargon, bring it back to the weeds who invented it, and get them to make a solar-deficient depository credit.

Oops. What I mean is that I'd like 'em to stick it where the sun don't shine.

Redemption

2008-03-02T01:02:00.015-05:00

We live embedded in a mosaic of people. And some of its parts matter more than others.

The one who who seemed so alien until the first time you talked...
... deep into the night. And then you realized that you could have been twins. Years later you have the same connection. You spend months in silence. Then you pick up the phone and in an instant it’s as if you’re in the same room again, talking about the discoveries you’ve made and the life you’ve lived since the last time you talked. Everything's changed around you but nothing's changed between you.

The one whom you did not expect.
Lunchtime conversations. Exchanging notes on movies, on food, on the past and the future, and on yourselves. And just like that, you were friends - long before you realized it. And when you did realize it, what a delightful surprise!

The one who was cool and then became warm.
You were boys who thought they were men and together you set about making mistake after mistake. Back then it seemed better to be clever than to be wise. Back then it seemed style was substance. When your paths crossed again you had both realized it was okay to not be as cool as you used to pretend to be. You sat across a table and showed yourselves and you liked what you saw and it felt good.

The one whom distance brought closer.
When you were in the same place you were unfailingly cordial. It was only after you went your separate ways that you started talking. Most bonds abrade under the twin frictions of space and time. Unexpectedly, this one matured and strengthened.

The one who laughed...
... who laughed hysterically with you as you traded whimsical theories on the extinction of saber-toothed tigers. You wouldn’t dream of saying that you value each others’ friendship (that would be too … transparent) but you show it at every opportunity. Perhaps it is time to put it in words?

The one you saw once and could never forget.
Maybe it was the tilt of the head. Maybe it was the open, utterly uninhibited smile. Maybe it really was the purple eyeliner. Who knew that two people so far apart could be so inseparable? Despite others. Despite even themselves. Perfectly unmatched, but a perfect match. The most important piece of the mosaic.

(There are others but these are the ones whom, over the past few days, I’ve had the chance to let them know they matter. I hope they heard me.)

Lament

2008-02-22T12:15:00.000-05:00

We live embedded in a mosaic of people. It is much more than the sum of its parts, nevertheless some of the parts are more essential than others. And when they change, the mosaic changes utterly.

Sometimes unexpectedly...

The one who you took for granted would always be there. Adamant. A silent, reluctant inspiration. A role model despite never seeking to be one. When that piece is removed from the mosaic, suddenly you realize how fragile the rest of the pattern is.

Sometimes with sickening inevitability...

When you know things will not be the same again, when you watch the time pass by knowing that the change you dread is inexorably grinding towards you, when you hope wistfully that it will not come and at the same instant you can feel your spirit flag, and in your mind's eye you see the mosaic ripped apart a hundred times with sickening finality.

And then?

And then you tell youreself you're unbreakable, that new bonds will be created amidst the gnarled skeletons of the old. You tell yourself that you will dust away the debris like you've always done before and a new mosaic will take shape.

But still,

But still, in a corner of your soul, there is an ache. Will it go away?

Viva El Mariachi!

2008-02-19T19:32:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I had the rare privilege of watching a master at the peak of his powers. Carlos Santana was performing in Singapore, and I was there.

He played without a pause for nearly three hours. And he had me on my feet without a pause for nearly three hours. To be honest, I had not expected it. I was apprehensive about going to a show where everyone was assigned a numbered seat. And I was not reassured when I got into mine. Sitting in the stands in the Singapore Indoor Stadium at the far end from the stage, I did not exactly feel like I was in the middle of the music. It felt more like watching a concert video on high-definition TV.

But a couple of songs into the set I realized that the place to be was at the back where there was room to dance. And from that point on the evening turned into magic.

I had a blinding flash of reality soon afterwards. It suddenly hit home for me that I was watching someone who had played at the legendary Woodstock festival. And in the time since then he has been making music for nearly four decades. He's been performing for longer than I've been alive. And last night he played with a passion that has not been dimmed by the years, nor been perverted by wave after wave of musical fads and fashions.

It must seem to him a long way from the days when he was an upcoming musician in San Franciso and was rather obscurely described as a purveyor of 'mariachi samba-rock". Whatever the heck that means. And I'm sure the width of a universe lies between a muddy field in Max Yasgur's farm southwest of Woodstock, and the crisp air-conditioned interior of an indoor arena in squeaky-clean Singapore.

I remember watching Woodstock, the movie, while I was still in college. (It remains for me the best Martin Scorsese film I have ever seen.) And the best part of that movie was Soul Sacrifice, an eleven-minute opus with which Santana ended his set. At some point last night, time contracted and distance disappeared when the beat of conga drums laid the rhythm for the flickering, insolent guitar intro to Soul Sacrifice, and I could pretend to myself that I had been transported back to the golden age of peace, love and music.

Losing My Seoul

2008-02-14T10:53:00.004-05:00

This place is killing me. I’ve been in Seoul for five days now, and I just cannot stop eating. If it’s not the tabletop barbecue then it’s the sweet potato noodles. If it’s not the kimchi pizza then it’s the egg waffles. If it’s not … well, you get the picture. It’s got to the point where I can no longer pick a favourite food because everything I eat seems irresistible.

I do, however, have a favourite drink. It’s called muju. It’s a sort of thick wine with a strong cinnamon flavour and it’s served piping hot in a bowl. It works very nicely in the depth of winter because you get a nice warm glow outside from the hot bowl cupped in your hands, another one inside from the hot wine trickling down your throat, and a pleasant little tingle from the warm smell of cinnamon wafting in front of you face.

(I’m leaving tomorrow morning and I'm really going to miss the pleasure of having a hot meal and then stepping out into a breezy night while the temperature is -10C. Yes, that is a minus sign and yes it is that cold).

There was more to this trip than food, though. There was the historical incident at Namdaemun Gate. I was flipping through my Lonely Planet guide on Monday. It was especially cold outside and I had decided it was prudent to be a virtual tourist in the cozy comfort of my hotel room. But then I saw an article on the said gate, also known as National Treasure No.1. I am incapable of resisting a name like that, so I dragged my feet out of my room, squared my shoulders, and set out to savour the sight.

About half an hour later I got my first sight of the gate, and I have to admit I felt a little disappointed. The gate seemed to have collapsed, and the monument seemed in remarkably bad shape, especially given it’s rather grandiose designation. The big striped blue-and-white scaffolding really did not make the picture ny prettier.

Then I noticed the news crews. There must have been a dozen TV vans and as many groups of cameramen and carefully-groomed anchorpersons. I thought of asking someone what the big deal was, then realized my folly. This has got to be the least English-friendly city I have ever been too. They even do sign-language only in Korean. Rumour has it there was once a Scottish tourist who spent thirteen years walking in a very large circle because he could not ask for directions. It’s so extreme that they actually have Korean-to-Korean language dictionaries.

Anyway, the point is that all I could do was take pictures of news crews and walk away.

I found out later what had happened. A certain Mr. Chae had decided to turn the gate into the world’s most historic bonfire. He’d been ticked off at not being paid in full for some land that he had sold, so he decided to vent his spleen by destroying a six hundred year-old monument. That’s right, folks. He went to a beautiful wooden building that had survived wars, invasions, and six centuries of inclement weather, and set it on fire with paint thinner. He did not even give it the dubious dignity of dousing it in petrol. He burned the poor old building with half a dozen cans of glorified nail-polish remover!

Here’s the kicker: apparently a couple of years ago he had set fire to Changgyeonggung Palace, another ancient monument. The guy is a freaking serial-offending land-selling monument-killer! Jokes apart, it really is very sad. Most of the classic old buildings in East Asia are extremely elegant and extremely fragile wooden structures. It’s a miracle that some of them have survived bombings and fires in multiple wars and revolutions. To then destroy one of the prettiest ones in such a callous manner, for such a petty grubbing reason, is simply unforgiveable. It’s a crime against a nation, a culture and millennia of history.

I guess I should be thankful to have seen the things that I have seen while they still exist. Can you imagine not being able to see the Taj Mahal or Stonehenge anymore because they were fire-bombed by football hooligans? It's disturbing that it can be so easy for disgruntled louts to ravage the milestones of human civilization. Now I'm even more determined to see as many of them as I can, while I still can. The milestones, that is, not the louts.

Next stop, Egypt.

Food for the Seoul

2008-02-11T10:18:00.001-05:00

The coldest spots in Seoul are the exit tunnels that lead from the subway stations up to the street. It takes less than a minute to traverse one of these. But in that little time the cold seeps in from the concrete up through your legs, through your spine and all the way through to the tips of your ears. I learned this many times over the past two days.

It's been pleasant enough despite that. Yesterday I went to the Gyeongbokgung palace in the northern half of the city. It was built six hundred years ago. Since then it’s been damaged, rebuilt, damaged again during Japanese colonization, threatened during the Korean war, but still stands today with a quiet dignity that gives no hint of its beleaguered past. I spent the morning tramping through the grounds. The maze of corridored walks was lined with leafless trees and scattered patches of late snow. There were hardly any other visitors, possibly because of the lunar new year festival (and possibly because few others were fool enough to venture out in the cold). The absence of tourists set off the quiet wintry dignity of the building and grounds in a very fetching manner.

The cold did not bother me too much, because luckily I was able to insulate myself from the stomach out. I enjoy Korean food at any time. But when it comes piping hot from a roadside vendor on a frigid day, it is simply irresistible. Barbecued chicken skewers, sweet potato wrapped in a blanket of minced beef and dunked in spicy red sauce, pan-fried buns stuffed with cinnamon cream – and those were just a few of the things I ate. I won’t even bother to mention the food I passed over longingly because I was too stuffed to eat it.

Did I mention the ice cream? I went into a shop and asked for a banana ice cream with cinnamon topping. It turned out that the term ‘topping’ was misleading. The girl who took my order dunked a scoop of ice cream on a cold slab of stone. Then she sprinkled a small heap of cinnamon on top and used a pair of scoops to knead the cinnamon into the ice cream as if she was kneading a lump of dough. Divine! Of course my left hand nearly froze and broke off at the wrist because it was holding the icy cone while I walked down the street at night. But that was an acceptable risk to take for the gastronomic plesure.

I got to enjoy more than just amazing food; I also had one of my more unusual shopping experiences. I was browsing the wares at a stall selling fashion jewelry in hopes of finding something nice for my better half. The salesgirl helpfully asked whether the style I was looking for was elegant or cute. “Elegant”, I repled. “Elegant”, she muttered to herself as with great satisfaction she handed me a pair of Mickey Mouse earrings.

Mickey Mouse! Not even the most ardent Disney fan could call Mickey elegant! He wears red shorts, for crying out loud. The only person who comes close is Superman, and we all know what a dork he looks in his scarlet lingerie. Fortunately for the better half, and even more fortunately for me, I managed to overcome the salesgirl’s attempt at assistance and find something suitable. Something that I considered elegant despite its lack of rodent motifs.

So now I'm back in my hotel, and tomorrow the work part of this trip will begin. I do hope it lives up to the tone set by the last two days, because they were really great!

No Fury Like A City Scorned

2008-02-04T10:13:00.000-05:00

It's midnight on Friday night. I'm in the back seat of a police car as it tears through the streets with its siren blaring. And I wonder silently whether a city can have vengeful feelings.

It had been raining all through Thursday night and Friday morning. I had left my hotel at 1130am with a couple of colleagues. We'd been advised to leave early so we could catch our afternoon flight, which was scheduled for 230 in the afternoon. At 130pm we were still in the taxi. I could see cars and buses and trucks stacked bumper-to-bumper for about a kilometer ahead of us, beyond which the road curved out of sight. My driver offered his estimate of how much longer it might take to reach our destination: "Maybe one hour, maybe two hour, maybe three hour, maybe four hour." We gathered that he wasn't really sure.

At 230 in the afternoon we were still in the taxi. The driver was slowly unfolding his vocabulary. He waved vaguely at the immobile traffic and announced we had a problem. "Problem", he said, "problem problem." Apparently there was a problem. Apparently we were too daft to know it without the benefit of his keen insight into gridlock in Jakarta.

By this time it was obvious that we were in the sort of mess that invariably makes it to CNN. About twenty minutes into the world news report they have a slot for third world disasters and other cock-ups in the developing world. This would fit in very nicely as either "Creaking infrastructure collapses at first sign of strain" or "Global warming causes freak weather - tens of thousands stranded in floods." It was vaguely comforting to know we were in the middle of a bona fide global news event.

Over the next five hours we inched our way through about two kilometers. I'm not kidding - I saw the road markers and counted off the distance we had covered. By this time we'd given up on making it to the airport in time to catch any flight that night and decided to try again the next day. As soon as we decided to turn back to the hotel, we found ourselves trapped on an exit ramp where traffic had come to an even more complete standstill.

Awe-struck at the realization that there was a level of immobility beyond what we'd already experienced, I slowly started to notice the people around me. They were all supremely calm. Not in a resigned way - everywhere I looked I saw pleasant, cheerful faces. No one was shouting or even getting mildly irritable. People casually got out of their cars or trucks, exchanged a word with those around them, smoked a cigarette, went for a little stroll among the inert vehicles, or just sat back calmly and waited.

Incredible as it seems, being in that traffic jam was a deeply relaxing experience.

Which lasted another two hours.

By this time I was convinced that the city was somehow sentient and had taken deep offence to my last post in which I'd whinged at traffic in jakarta. "You think you've seen traffic?", I imagined it fuming, "I'll show you traffic that will bring you to your knees. I'll show you gridlock that will make your soul cry out in despair. You want traffic? I'll give you traffic!"

(I think by this time I was mildly delirious. I don't ordinarily have morbid fantasies of animated metropolises plotting vengeance against mankind.)

Then our taxi broke down. With sickening inevitability our driver explained the situation. "Problem", he announced. Then he brightened up as he remembered another word he knew. With doubled eloquence he went on to share his thoughts and feelings: "Problem. Stress." In hindsight he looked much more relaxed than he sounded. Perhaps it was because by that time he had been running his meter for nearly ten hours.

Luckily our local office had swung into action and managed to organize a police car to try and extricate us. At first I felt a little guilty that these officers of the law had been pulled away from their crime-fighting duties to aid a bunch of foreigners stuck in traffic. But then I realized that any would-be criminals were pretty much stranded in their getaway cars, much like us. The cops could safely find us, extricate us, bring us back to our hotel, watch a movie, spend a couple of hours hitting golf balls, read a book, have breakfast, go back to the scene of the crime, and still find the bad guys smoking cigarettes patiently while they waited for the flood waters to subside and the traffic to dissolve.

That made me feel much better. That, and the prospect of finally being able to go to the washroom.

The only problem was that the cops could not get to us because ... they were stuck in the traffic! After another hour of practicing breathing exercises we were lucky enough to encounter a good samaritan who managed to find a way to get us to where the cops were stranded. Then we got into their car and after another hour we finally managed to extricate ourselves from where we were trapped and turn around to go back to the city.

Then, under a screaming police siren, we zipped through the streets to return where we'd set out from. After thirteen hours.

The next day we made it to the airport in two hours.

And just to set the record straight, Jakarta is a lovely city. The traffic really isn't so bad at all.

Bird? Plane? No, It’s CamelMan!

2008-01-30T11:46:00.000-05:00

There is nothing quite like the sense of helplessness that you experience when you’re stuck in a traffic jam in downtown Jakarta. It’s late at night. You’re hungry enough to be discomfited, but not quite enough to feel starvation pangs. The air-conditioner in your taxi is on. But the only reason you know that is because the LED is glowing green. You can feel the first drop of sweat begin to form under your skin. You try to make up your mind whether to feel irritated (which will give you something to do) or feel resigned (which may make the time pass less slowly). Either way you’re screwed because it’s at least another hour before you get to your hotel.

I bet all superheroes were conceived in traffic jams. I bet they’re born out of the frustrated fantasizing of their comic-book creators.

You’re motionless and everyone else is motionless around you (wouldn’t it be cool get out of the car and fly faster than a speeding bullet). There’s a space opening up ahead but another car is blocking your way (when I get really angry I turn green and chuck cars about like snowballs in a schoolyard). You’re past caring now and step on the accelerator to try and muscle into the empty space first. But you scrape the other car and brace yourself for a heated scream-off (I’ve got these metal spikes that when I ball up my fist they shoot out of my knuckles and I can impale you on them with a single upper-cut).

(Yes, I do think Wolverine is cool).

(Yes, parentheses are my thing right now).

(Yes, they are getting a little old).

(But indulge me for just a little longer).

You just know. When you get ushered into a taxi by a guy who tells you “If you want toilet then tell driver because there is traffic jam after the rain”, and you exchange looks with your fellow passenger who just bought a big glass of fruit juice, you just know it’s going to be a tense ride. Twenty minutes later while you’re whizzing through an empty highway, you want to not remark on the welcome absence of traffic. You realize that will jinx your trip. But the neural pathway that allows your brain to control your tongue was severed earlier in the day. It had succumbed to the sheer stress of telling a colleague (with infinite politeness) that he’d just demonstrated the intelligence of an earthworm with a head injury.

“Hey,” says your tongue, “this traffic isn’t so bad after all."

(“Idiot”, thinks your ever-eloquent brain, “idiot idiot idiot idiot idiot. Idiot.”)

Your fellow passenger gives you a dirty look and clenches his stomach muscles because he knows that you’ve just doomed him to a very tense car ride.

A long time later the two of you gratefully check in and go to your rooms. You now have a relaxed air.

He doesn’t.

One day you'll look back on this and laugh. But not this week.

You're Odd. I'm Weak. We're Doomed.

2008-01-21T06:39:00.000-05:00

The last place I'd have thought to look for words of wisdom is the mouth of Kevin Federline. But Mr. ex-Britney Spears surprised me with his observation on the tabloid frenzy surrounding the custody battle over his children: "I think that the infatuation with the whole thing is that watching us go through things makes other people feel normal."

I've done my share of sniggering at the eccentricities of celebrities. I used to wonder whether their behaviour was rooted in some insecurity that comes from fame. Now I'm embarrassed and wondering what my smugness reveals about my own insecurities.

I'm pretty sure I don't have a strong need to feel normal. I think normality is a just a powerful fiction. And yes, I am convinced it is a fiction. If you believe that everyone is unique, then you can't possibly believe that "normal" is anything but an abstraction.

I think "he's normal" is really a euphemism for "I don't feel threatened by him". It's only the people who make us feel uncomfortable that we label as "not normal". Maybe their personalities differ from ours. Or their beliefs. Or their abilities are so different from ours that they make us feel vulnerable. (When I was in school I was sometimes taken to visit a home for spastic children. It used to terrify me to consider that I myself might one day experience some form of disability.)

Maybe that's it: by declaring ourselves as normal we can fool ourselves into feeling invulnerable. It's way to say to ourselves "that will never be me".

What scant security if it comes from such self-deception! It would be so much more honest to admit that "there, but for the grace of God, go I".

Leaves Stirring In The Darkness

2008-01-08T09:37:00.000-05:00

There's a tree outside my window. It's silhouetted against the lights from the apartment block across the courtyard. Its leaves tremble faintly in the rain, which is finally flagging after pouring down for the better part of the evening. It's quiet, both inside my apartment and outside. The gentle tapping of raindrops against the window pane only serves to amplify the silence. I feel peaceful and cocooned.

The feeling won't last.

In a matter of hours the darkness will be bleached out by the morning sun. Voices will rise up again in the streets. Neighbours and strangers will walk past each other, oblivious to anything outside their own thoughts. I'll look outside the same window, at the same tree, and I won't even see it in the bright light of day.

My eyes will be too wide open to see, my mind too alert to notice what surrounds me. When I pass by the neighbourhood playground maybe the bench by the jungle gym will be empty. Or maybe someone will be seated on it in solitary stillness. I won't know, just as I did not know this morning or on any morning last week, last month, last year.

Another day will pass in three long strides of morning, noon and evening. I won't be older and I certainly won't be wiser.

Then sunset falls. The darkness draws a soft curtain over dusk and wakes me up from wakefulness. The seconds slow into minutes again and minutes magically dilate into hours. I can hear and I can see once more.

The rain is quickening again, and the branches outside my window sway in response. There's a barely audible roll of thunder somewhere in the far distance. It reminds me that I am in a cocoon, awake but peaceful, and I'll enjoy the feeling all the more because I know it won't last.

The Lament Of The 'Real' Traveler

2008-01-02T12:14:00.000-05:00

While planning my next vacation I discovered an interesting debate on the forum at the Lonely Planet website. Come to think of it, it wasn't really a debate. It was more like a collective diatribe.

In one thread the 'community of independent travelers' lament the changes taking place in Laos. Some of the gripes are about the developing tourism industry and the growing number of hotels and guesthouses. Others decry development in general, with the dark prediction that soon Laotian homes will be just like the ones across the border in Thailand - made entirely of brick and equipped with televisions and refrigerators.

I feel a little sorry for these people. They are willing to travel thousands of miles from Europe or the US just to get away from their appliances for a couple of weeks. How they must feel cheated when they arrive in Luang Prabang only to find that they still have the option of watching TV.

How inconsiderate of the Laotians to refuse to remain a rustic, tribal backwater despite the obvious charms that that holds for the first world "eco-tourist".

Eco-tourism, now that's a term to warm the heart. It sounds so righteous and well-meaning. And to be fair, if in the name of Eco-tourism more travellers choose to travel over water by canoe rather than speedboat or jetski, then I am all for it. But it riles me when these same eco-tourists complain about the spread of roads which make travel "too easy". Sure, travel that is "too easy" makes tourism a little less romantic. It also gives the local population access to a better livelihood. Unromantic, but so much more valuable than a pretty picture or two.

There was a particularly fascinating discussion about the newly built railway line to Lhasa. "Tibet will be overrun by Han Chinese" complained some; "this will lead to colonisation" predicted others (presumably ignorant of the fact that Tibet is already administered by China); and my favourites were the pompous, self-righteous oafs who declared that they would not travel by the train because to do so would be tantamount to supporting the Chinese government.

Apparently it is irrelevant that the same railway line now makes it much cheaper to bring into Tibet such essentials as food. Or that this line now gives more Tibetans the option of migrating out in search of better incomes. Apparently Tibetans are not supposed to want better incomes, since richer Tibetans don't make for a very good tourist attraction.

I have an idea. I have a yearning to experience what Europe in the middle ages was like. Maybe all of Europe could oblige by giving up electricity, cars and even potatoes (imported from South America in the 16th century). Maybe they can go back to being a society of a few nobles living in wooden forts while the rest of the population sinks into serfdom. If they do that for me I promise to practice 'responsible tourism' while I visit them.

And then I will come back home and use the Internet to tell all my friends in Asia what a quaint, delightful, utterly charming experience it is to spend week in the citadel of London, where you wake up to the sound of cocks crowing outside your door and sleep as soon as it is sunset because sometimes there are wolves in the street at night.

An Average Random Friday

2007-12-23T10:59:00.000-05:00

"I hear that East and West Germany are now joined. Is that good news or bad news?" That was the rather unexpected question that my German friend M was asked on Friday morning.

About an hour earlier we had set out on the Tiger food trail. This is a day-long do-it-yourself tour of Singapore that takes you to some of the best hawker food stalls in the island. Each stop comes with a recommended dish or two which go down very nicely with Tiger beer.

We'd been off to a strong start at a stall called Epok Epok. They sold us some really good sardine pastry and absolutely outstanding kueh (a kind of Malay sweet). We were not bothered at all by the dirty looks we got from a couple of schoolgirls. They obviously disapproved of the idea of able-bodied men drinking beer at 11 am on a weekday. We obviously were loving the fact that we could.

No matter. We were on a mission. We were not to be deterred even by finding that the next stop, the delightfully named Skylab stall, was closed for lunch. (Yes, a food stall that was closed for lunch.) That meant we couldn't get any prawn vadai, so we had carrot cake instead. And Tiger beer.

That's when the stranger from the next table started chatting us up. After complaining about the high taxes on beer, he informed us that had paid his dues to Singapore by doing his manadatory 2-year stint in the army. Then, after being reassured that the reunification of Germany was good news, he turned to a topic closer to his heart.

"Is it true", he asked interestedly, "that there are some beaches in Germany where you can only go nude?"

He then told us that he intended to go to Germany for a holiday one day. I wonder why.

And so it went. Roast duck noodles and Tiger beer. Grilled tofu and cuttlefish and Tiger beer. Then, as the sun was setting, came the high point of the day: oyster omelette with the most wonderfully tangy tamarind-and-chilli dipping sauce. The oysters were fresh and juicy, the omelette was fried in generous amounts of oil, and the sauce was to die for.

It was so good that we decided we neded a break from all the eating. We took a couple of hours to recuperate at a wine bar. Then it was time to hit the final stop of the food trail. Good thing too, because by this time I was hungry again! So my supper of barbecued stingray went down very nicely indeed.

Satisfied by a good day's work feeding our baser appetites, we decided it was time we did something more intellectual. So we went to the National Museum where I remembered they were running an exhibition of Greek sculpture from the Louvre. Of course by this time the exhibition was closed for the day. But that was fine, since we really only wanted to go the museum bar anyway.

One drink and many photographs later it was clear that it was time to add a different flavour to the evening. So we made our final stop at Club Momo, a club that for some reason draws an almost entirely Chinese clientele and can usually be counted on to be interesting. I was not disappointed.

The entertainment for the night was a Thai band. Who sang only in Thai. And who did their stage banter entirely in Thai. In the middle they broke out into a sort of skit, for which one of the band members pretended to be pregnant. But I could not really tell what the skit was about because ... it was entirely in Thai.

I love this city!

BabyLegs: $12 + shipping. Salvation: priceless.

2007-12-17T00:58:00.000-05:00

When I'm in a mall I expect to spend a couple of mindless hours walking between racks of merchandise and stuffed wallets. So on Sunday I was pleasantly surprised by an educational experience. In a store selling stuff for kids I saw a flyer that educated me on the dangers of Gapiosis.

You may unfurrow your brows now; I will explain all. Gapiosis is the space between the top of a baby's socks and the bottom of its pants. Bad enough in ordinary circumstances, it gets accentuated if you are callous enough to carry your baby in your arms. Horror of horrors, Gapiosis condemns the unprotected baby to contact with air!

That's right folks, this is the same air that is unfit for fish to live in, that can slowly and inexorably transform a fresh pizza into a two-week-old lump of moldy green culture. Imagine what it can do to a sweet, delicate baby's shins!

Thankfully, help is at hand in the form of BabyLegs, striped leggings last worn by Jane Fonda in fitness videos in the 1980s.

But now that our children are protected against gapiosis, you have to wonder what other dangers lurk. For instance, how will we defend our young against the dangers of tubercolourosis? No, no, not tubercolosis; we have vaccines for that. I'm talking about tuberCOLOURosis. This is the less well-known affliction wherein children who eat too many carrots turn orange.

And who will guard the generation of tomorrow against the depredations of cheeking pox? (You haven't heard of cheeking pox? This is when swarms of well-meaning but otherwise daft adults grab a baby by both cheeks and shake its face hard while pretending to lisp.)

While diplomats from the world over are jawing at each other over climate change in Bali, the next generation of mankind lies in its collective cradle under the shadow of these and other perils. Will we realize our danger in time? Will the BabyLegs corporation succeed in their heroic struggle to rescue our future?

Or will our race die out in an epidemic of shivering legs, orange tans and saggy jowls?

Only time will tell.

The Golden Years

2007-12-10T11:17:00.000-05:00

I've been moaning softly to myself for the past few weeks that I'm losing my reading habit. I've bought many books and then not read them. Perhaps it was for the best. I was idling a little while ago and on a whim pulled out a book that I had bought a couple of years ago; today was a very good day to open it for the first time.

Woman's Best Friend is a collection of writing by women about their dogs.
Pam Houston's foreword reminded me of the lessons we learn from our dogs: "... that if your paws are too big to fit in your ears, you have to get someone else to do the scratching, and that if you want your hand to be licked you might have to put it under somebody's nose ... that sitting in the grass together doing nothing isn't really doing nothing at all, and that sometimes, even if you haven't acted perfectly, the good thing happens anyway."

I'm not sure that makes any sense to anyone who has not had a dog. But it reminded me why the best part of the weekend that just went by was not the partying (and there was a lot of partying). It wasn't the sleeping in (although there was a lot of sleep to catch up on). It was the Sunday morning hour I spent slowly brushing my dog Phoebe as she lay patiently with her head resting against my knee.

It's been slowly creeping up on us that she is growing older. She is six years old, her muzzle is more white than brown, and it is very probable that she has lived more years than she has left. And those years have not always been kind. From the time she was four months old she has carried a limp in her hind legs that surgery could not cure. It has slowly grown worse over the years.

Not that it's taken away her spirit. She sometimes makes a pretence of being all ladylike. It helps that she has coal-black eyes under improbably pretty blonde eyelashes. She can sit patiently for hours while you trace a finger gently between her ears. But then something clicks in her canine brain and she leaps up in a flurry of activity, ready to wrestle with you for possession of her favorite toy, a stuffed dolphin.

She is on her second dolphin now. This one is pink, much more suited to her (usually) feminine demeanor than the steel-grey one that she had earlier. Not that her feminity is much in evidence when she is in the mood for tug-of-war. She comes at you with the dolphin's tail clamped in her jaws and her tail marking time as it wags maniacally behind her furry brown bum. At that moment you know that you are expected to grab onto the dolphin's nose and hang on for dear life. There have been times during these games when I've had to let go or I'd get my hand yanked out of my wrist along with the disputed dolphin.

Phoebe gets along famously with her vet. With total disdain for behavioural stereotypes she charges into his office as soon as the door is open. After years of regular injections she has her routine down pat. She goes straight for the weighing scale so that we can make sure her weight is under control and not putting undue strain on her delicate hips. Then, while she waits her turn to go into the treatment room, she asserts her authority over the rest of the gathered creatures in the waiting room. She scrutinizes each new patient as it trots in and makes sure they know that she is the senior personage in the premises. Any challenge is dismissed with a peremptory bark.

The vet's eyes always light up when he sees her. "She may not be the best-looking dog in Singapore," he told us once, "but she is certainly the best natured."

Fiddlesticks! She is too the most gorgeous dog in the island!

Where's Your Half of the $100 Bill?

2007-12-06T11:00:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you just have to wonder about consultants. Over the past few months I've worked on two projects with consultants that were hired by the company I work for. During that time it became pretty clear that consulting is mostly about having a client ask you a question, asking the client what they think is the answer to their own question, and then playing that answer right back. While distorting it just enough to turn a right answer into a wrong one.

Yes, it's been frustrating. And like all frustrating experiences it's also been hilarious. Earlier this week, for instance, I was informed that I am now a Change Agent. This was revealed to me during the course of a POW! workshop. Don't ask me what POW! means. If I tell you I will have to shoot you.

What I can tell you is what it means to be a change agent. Mostly it means that you sit in an uncomfortable chair in a freezing room for two days, while surfing the net on your cellphone under a desk. And it means gnashing your teeth when you run out of Oreos before lunchtime. And it means suppressing giggles when people around you argue passionately about whether or not to start calling a marketing plan "building blocks". It's like being back in kindergarten. You spend all day shut up in a room and contemplating cookies and building blocks when you'd really rather be outside twiddling your toes in the grass.

Of course there is a bright side to being an agent. For instance I can now go to office wearing a trenchcoat and trilby hat. I can spend the day hiding coded messages in the flowerpot near the coffee machine. And I can sneak up behind colleagues I dislike and garrote them with an Ethernet cable.

Mind you, there are dangers too. The Enemies of Change and Progress are everywhere. Saboteurs lurk in wait of an opportunity to perpetuate the status quo. But so far they have been unable to catch me off guard. Today I spent the day sitting in front of a giant window. It was dark and rainy outside, so the window acted like a mirror. When people tried to catch me unawares by approaching me from behind I could see their reflection long before they came close enough to initiate hand-to-hand combat. Noone could catch me off guard, and in the end the forces of freedom prevailed over the axis of evil.

Tomorrow in office I will start feeding bits of disinformation to the people I suspect of involvement in the resistance. I will then watch in meetings to see how this disinformation seeps through the organization. This way I will unearth the hidden networks of spies and renegades. Then I will unmask them and hold them to account for their evil deeds.

I must stop writing now. I have a feeling I am being watched.