Google, My Cohort In Nonaction

Ice on the ankle seems a fair trade for another enjoyable Soccer Sunday pick-up game. And! Being physically immobile also increases the likelihood of a blog-posting - there's a silver lining. So here you have the lemonade from lemons. As long I can walk to work tomorrow I'll continue the good cheer.

Some people would naturally throw the tired legs up on the couch and veg through some American Idol or Real World or Lost or whatever else is trendy at the moment, but as you might expect I'm not much refreshed or inspired from exposing myself to the false idols of this nation.

What's my idol? Tonight it'd be Google Earth I guess. I entertained myself with satellite imagery of the many places I've visited and still pine for. I swung by San Telmo and the People's Palace. I then dallied about in some places I reckoned I may never visit - in this case, Kamchatka and the panhandle of Alaska. Which, almost expectably, after a romp about the fjords and meandering rivers of these two, my globehopping theme quickly reversed itself into a "All the Places I Really One-Day Hope to Visit" tour.

Soon afterwards I had the thought to fly myself over to a digital visit of Srinigar, where I'd spent 9 days on a houseboat in 2003. At that point, violence had quelled significantly from previous years, and if you were willing to forgive a regular midnight raucous due to the first cricket test between India and Pakistan in decades, well then you'd have right to think it was a fine season for a visit. OK, so I was only half-mad.

Here is a satellite photo then, of the area I spent those 9 days, half of them ravaging away with some sort of food poisoning:



I can narrow down to about five houseboats the one I stayed in. I'm sure I could dig it up from my journals somewhere, but I've also forgotten the first name of the good hearted man who took me in, welcomed me with such openness. Towards the end of my days there, when my body had nearly recovered, he took me on a cruise around Dal Lake. I forget the words of our exchange, but he ultimately decided it would be best to show me both the most beautiful and the most tragic parts of Dal Lake.

The description of that trip should be left for another time, but I remember the beauty of the Kashmiri Valley, flush up against remembering the trash and pesticides which polluted its water into a toxic green. In my half-conscious recovery, I was overwhelmed with appreciation for my guide and the good people we met padding along in our shikara. He only asked of me to help him, to write to newspapers or embassies or anyone that could be in a position of power to help remove the tragic element from the lake.

I felt powerless physically, mentally, and even politically. I said I would try. To myself I wondered if the best way I could help would be to continue in academia. To get a geography degree and learn Kashmiri. Few times before did I feel that what I could study could do so much.

But I haven't done it. In my own sort of way, with cohort Google, this is my vegetating way of feeling the potency without acting. This is supposed to be a time of non-acting. A relaxation before I return to work.

I can very clearly remember the movielike face of a twentysomething man in a woolen coat, describing to me how most Kashmiris have only ever wanted independence. In the last month, the state of affairs in Kashmir have not often captured the news, given our current saturation of tragedies. But for those searching, there are a few blogs from those who live in Srinigar (some with graphic content, be advised):

http://kashmir.wordpress.com/
http://kashmir-truth-be-told.blogspot.com/

Some entries speak of the ecological nightmare that is Dal Lake, some about the darker side of Gandhi, and many many entries about the unfortunate sense of being occupied by Indian troops.

Make It For the Right Reasons

The Musty Man weighs in on the fallacy of hating where you're from in an article titled "Hating America". Citing his experience as an American traveling to Guatemala on multiple occasions, he concludes that one's reaction to foreign places speaks more of lens than location. A recurring theme of his critique is the reiteration that he holds little esteem for that most visible and archetypal of travelers: the American-who-hates-America.

While such a topic could easily degenerate into a "if you don't like it then don't come back" cliche, The Musty Man takes great effort to remain solemn, articulate, and entertaining. He opens several cans of worms about why Americans who hate on America are preposterous and self-loathing. This is why I found "Hating America" to be a thoroughly inspiring piece, not because I agree with its key tenets, but because it's a well-advocated point of view (from a lawyer) who is particularly acerbic towards those who settle for a superficial understanding of the weighty reality of what it means to be an American abroad.

I'll tag in for Musty Man and note that if you are fond of espousing how much you hate your home country, you've forgotten some key things about yourself:

• The vast majority of traveling Americans speak American English. Language shapes culture. Culture shapes language. You think in ways you've learned how to speak, and you express your origin in the way that you speak. No matter what you may hate about America, some of its deepest most unchangeable things are also some of the deepest most unchangeable things in you, and it comes out whenever you open your trap and jabber about Mr. T or Oprah or NPR. If you've had the priviledge of not being able to speak English for weeks or months on end, didn't it feel incredible to speak at full-speed again? What is that anyway?


• Kindergarten through PhD, we are the product of one of the world's most exquisitely demanding education systems (OK, some Europeans would contest this, but I disagree) If you're sitting in a mudhole on some other continent and considering how you could be happy spending the rest of your life in said mudhole, it's only because you have a potent frame of reference that is anything but a mudhole. Regardless, you've probably learned a few do's and don't's from that third grade teacher you hated so much.


• And the most important point, the wealth of this nation, acquired through luck, hard-work, and superpower militancy, is the reason you could climb in a steel tube and throw yourself over the oceans. The wrong way to push this point would be to say, "people have died for your good fortune, be grateful". The better way, one more worth pondering, is that the power of centuries of nationalism has led to the stark differences between what you see abroad and what you see at home. You could have been born on either side of the looking glass. And on any given day, the whole system could evaporate. There's no reason to get militant or depressed about it, just make yourself and others happy. And you can't do that by hating.
  

Truly I think all of the aforementioned points are self-evident and we all feel them, even if they aren't always at the tip of our consciousness. But all of that said, I think I've led us along a false axiom right at the start of this essay. All of those points are directly aimed at those Americans who genuinely hate America. All thirty-two of them.

The author of "Hating America" had a mutually drunken conversation with someone who mercilessly attacked the problems of America. And as those barstool conversations usually progress, one side makes a demon out of the other. One side gets polemical, the other side takes the bait, and woooo-eee, down goes the bottle and "I'd rather be in Mozambique, god damn it".

Let's face it, when we're not so drunk, we'd vouch for the good things: that America being from America means you have the freedom to disagree (although that's not something unique). You'll carry your currency farther (although that's not something unique). You'll travel using what has become the global language (although that's not something unique).

Perhaps it's already obvious: these are merely variants of my three subjects above. The difference - instead of nuanced cultural histories, these jingoist hijackings measure happiness by how powerful we are. And we shouldn't travel for these reasons nor should we remain in a country for those reasons. America shouldn't be loved for economic superiority, for once we're eclipsed by some other nation, what will have left for a history? There's Ralph Waldo Emerson, Buckminster Fuller, and Martin Luther King. If the jingoists win, I might need to salute all of the good ones and find another land. Carry the spirit of where I'm from to another place.

Are you surprised? Is it really that radical? That's what most of this nation's ancestors did.

R.I.P. Wageslave Sleepmind

 Since the Great Move, I've opened a lot up to reassessment. Dramatically, the first house of cards to fall was the very impetus for my voyage to California.

A lot of simultaneous change brought this on - in driving west, I spent ten days without working, the longest in two years. I reintroduced the outlet of writing back into my life. And, least measurable but also notable was that I took time just to think about life. It all came together, and I decided that a lot of things had to change.

You've read about the bold job change - well it's official, I've left the startup and will now be a contractor for a more significant player in the computer industry. If Friday - day one - is any indication, the move is everything I've hoped it would be.

My anguish of a few weeks ago has left, and in its place is a retrospection. The anguish was deep, and had a longer tenure than I had ever clearly recognized. This doesn't go back a few weeks or a few months. It's been my lifeline since I returned from traveling and joined the working world. It started as a noble cause: I knew that I needed to travel again, I knew I could do it with enough hard work, and I would do whatever I could to make it happen. But the means to this end nearly broke me.

Coffee, cigarettes, and keyboards narrowed my focus and concentration to such powerful levels that I took on a self-imposed fog. I'd created a personal faith - that if I keep working as hard as I could, I would be noticed, have something to show, and would eventually "make it". The cigarettes especially contributed to this passion-bent-on-autism. Naturally they also degraded my general health. I felt shitty (especially in the mornings), had difficulty finding anything interesting that wasn't computer-related, and I spewed cynicism and egoism so predictably my then-girlfriend accused me of pulling a Jeckle & Hyde. Thank god I've escaped cigarettes. Health effects be damned, the worst is how they change who you are. Let me reiterate - the worst part of cigarettes is not that they'll kill you, the worst part is that they'll change you before they kill you. Damn them. Course I should disclaim that if a friend offers one at the bar, I usually accept - I figure wet smoking in moderation is well almost ok.

Back to the matter at hand, the reason all of this anguish took such a head now, I've decided, is that I was internally roiling at the fact that I was so close, perhaps even had "made it" already, and couldn't recognize it even to myself. Or at least, if the startup was the measure of success all those labors led to, then I was also roiling at the possibility that I'd swindled myself. Had I come all this length only to realize the only proof of a good employee is the count of his unpaid overtime hours?

Fortunately, with a slightly panicked sidestep to a new job, I can now bask in newfound confirmation, both internal and external, that I don't need to struggle to that extent for computers ever again. I can take a few months to exhale all these insecurities I never recognized that I had.

And now, the next chapter begins - slowing down, calming focus, improving mindfulness and anticipation. I don't think I've ever done this before. But it's important because raw focus isn't what will improve my work any further. That component is already there. But if I cannot pick up the rest of the context of what I'm working on, or what's being said to me, then I'm not living up to my potential.

New thoughts to consider then... but I welcome them. I'd never trade these dilemmas for the two years of wageslave sleepmind that brought me here.

Was it worth it? Guess I'll have to wait and see.