liberate life

For seven days in Nepal I neither washed nor changed clothes.  It was liberating.  If you don't smell why clean up?  Today, I sit at the desk wearing my dark blue short sleeve oxford for the third time in five days and ooooh, whiffs of something not good is not good.  In Nepal it was too cold to sweat, two days ago I walked back to the grotto, temps are about 90 degrees by mid afternoon now, and I shouldn't have worn this shirt again.  Well, this is the last day before we begin teaching next week. I'll wear a tie again, maybe polish the shoes, shave as usual and I'll look as professional as I can muster. 


Why are decisions that break up the daily routine so hard to make?  I'd like to cross the border, do a little shopping, have an American burger, maybe catch a movie, but to do this means getting in a taxi for an hour and when I return to the city of my grotto it's another taxi for another hour, a chunk of change totaling $52. 


If doing a little shopping, having a burger and seeing a movie is worth it then why hesitate?  I don't think I'm lazy, it comes down to what is valued.  This is going to be a last minute decision for Saturday.  Otherwise my weekend will be what it has been for exactly five months.  Five months.


I have thoroughly enjoyed 'East of Eden'.  Samuel Hamilton is the kind of man you follow.  Few books read so poetically like Steinbeck's work.  Ten years of school wouldn't teach me to write the way he writes.  A natural, God-given talent he was.  Sure, school could clean me up, show me the hows and whats but the creative element can't be taught.  Right? 


The problems with movies I'm seeing is all the relationships work somehow in the end.  Will I have to wait for the end of my movie to meet someone?  And there has been a tendency this week where events in movies connect with me and I know there is no coincidence in this.  Movies, like a good book, generalize, touching all aspects of the human endeavor and we're likely to relate to something in the trivialized tragedy.  It's just dumb.


I probably shouldn't watch these movies but considering there are only five channels plus two news channels to watch, surfing is a quicky.  And shall I then close off another vessel to the outside world, well, if it's leaving me miserable I guess so.  In the meantime, the tesol conference is in two weeks, I've got to find a tailor and take up a pair trousers, buy a small suitcase for two nights in the big little D, copy my cv, book a hotel somewhere in the bani yas square area, ya da ya da. 

up and way down

Up one day, down the next.  I imagine happiness and love.  There's no reality to it, it's just day dreaming.  Then reality arrives and it's ugly.  Why dream, why hope.  I should know better, going down lasts longer than the moment I dare to dream good.  And somehow I slowly drag myself up again and remain in a safe, secure middle place void of human contact.  Take care, expectations suffer greatly.


I saw the man who saved her and her child.  It only took a moment.  I am so wrong and out of tilt to expect.  I am happy for her and her child.  They are alive and are safe.  There is hope for them.
 
Up and down, a chemical imbalance, it makes sense to find the balance, to avoid and kill the pain of the past, the good and bad of it all, simply cut it out of your life and move forward.


I watched 'The Social Network' last night for the third time in five months.  To be 20 again, surrounded by inspiration.  Inspired to live good, to love God and Jesus, trusting I will be taken care of and will lead a life worthy of the calling, but really, those aren't the tools one needs in the job market.  At Harvard we invent our jobs we don't find them.  Do I have to go back thirty years to recreate myself?  The mind crusts with idleness and age.  Wait, you have a job before you, you're being asked to produce a syllabus in four days meanwhile I dig out of the darkness.


Fifteen new teachers arrive this week.  They have no idea what they're getting themselves into.  A dozen present teachers expect to be elsewhere at the end of this year.  I waffle but lean towards the exit door.  It isn't the job and the school so much as it is this city. 


I taped a photo of the Annapurna Himalayan Range next to my desk.  There's no place I'd rather be and if I were 23 again would I have a better idea how to make it happen?  Right now I'm all over the map.  I look at Japan, I look at Ramallah, the rest of the Middle East.  You're not looking for happiness, well because happiness and this profession don't exactly connect.  If I am looking for happiness and a profession it'd be writing and photography and shit, is returning to school the only alternative at 51?   


I don't know but wouldn't I be happier at this job if there was someone to love, the inspiration to do good, to be good, comes from someone else, right?  Here's the problem with God.  God isn't emotional.  I can't touch, I can't hug, I can't kiss God.  God is a mind-game and we are emotionally messed up creatures clawing out of the depths of despair.  Even the worst off on this planet, if they have some kind of family, some kind of love to embrace, they endure.  Pity the homeless man in Rochester, pray the refugee in Syria.  Where is God in Syria?  God has really messed this one up.  This isn't our fault. Real mercy means intervening right bloody now.  Almost 12,000 children dead?  C'mon you #%@.  How dare you call yourself anything but a delusion.  Shame on you. Shame.

That sonnava...

I don’t have any reason to rejoice about being another year older.  Would I be happy if there was a reason to be happy?  When I turned 40 and 45 I took friends out for dinner and that was fine.  These were self created life markers and it seemed natural to share the moment with someone else.  At 50 word got out and the family on the mountain gave me a cake and gifts and it was nice.  I appreciated the effort but it would have been ok if nothing happened at all.  Why celebrate if there is nothing to celebrate?  So what, I am a year older.  Should I be thankful for being alive? 

Ok, I am thankful that I haven’t had to visit a dentist in the past year.  I am thankful I haven’t had any serious physical problems that would have taken me to see a doctor.  I am very thankful for this.  What else.  I am thankful I have a job though I wish the job were somewhere else. 

Are you thankful for what you don’t have?

What a bizarre twist.  I am thankful I don’t have anyone to love?  I am thankful I see the sun rise every morning and there is no one share this with?  I am thankful I go from job to job pushed by a restlessness that can’t be tamed?  I am thankful for being indecisive, without ambition? 

I look at jobs around the world, what’s more important, the salary or the location.  It would be nice to have both, a salary like the kind I see in the Middle East somewhere in Asia or Europe.  Not too long ago I said the salary wasn’t as important now as it used to be.  Before I couldn’t save a plugged nickel.  Living from paycheck to paycheck and friends would say where is all that money going?  But now, I can save.  All things being relative, there’s no value in personal goods.  I’ll wear the same pair of trousers until they fall off.  Tattered ties, worn out collars, who’ll see the stains, worry not. 

Can you look at today and say ok, my goal is….nah, I can’t do that.  My goals are limited in time.  Looking for a new job will happen when the time comes.  Planning ahead, too far ahead creates only stress.  I have been thinking of leaving this unfortunate part of a country I don’t want to leave and think of the anxiety that will occur when I do leave.  But I can’t continue to avoid what has to be done.  My disappointment is summed up in the 3km to the border-180km to get there equation.  Sure in another six weeks I can apply for a road pass and the equation would be solved, but to wait six months, well, that’s a lot of time to think and wait and change minds.

This morning I graded placement exams and half of them didn’t do the writing part.  One student out of 14 will not begin in the beginning level.  That one student, not surprisingly, is from Basra.  He is motivated.  He has been, most likely, displaced, and knows, whether it’s through family or the natural predicament, that a little bit of English might open some doors for him.  The rest?  Has your life already been mapped out? 

My lower back feels a little better today but it still feels the process is slower.  Why be surprised?  I’m not surprised, I’m depressed.  It’s an indication of age.  Are you surprised you haven’t met anyone again?  You’re speaking in a tone that suggests I am not going to meet someone again.  Well, look around, what’s going to change for you in the next five months?  Not a damn thing.  And after that?  Ya know if you stay in this part of the world you’re simply going to be disappointed even though your friends all met partners here.  So can’t I hold out for that kind of good fortune? Though seriously that kind of hope, that is what drove me mad five years ago leaving me with more questions than answers and the answers, ha ha.  The biggest dope in the world I am.  Hope and disappointment with God.  That big sonnava….

access to good is good

After ten days of traveling my back gave out.  There is no comfortable position, even lying down hurts.  What to do, a few advil.  My meager supply of vicodine ran out.  They were helpful for the seven hour bus trips through Nepal's central mountains. 


But now I sit in an empty office, classes begin in two weeks, no teachers have come in this morning.  Easy for them with cars and a life.  I'd stay here for another year if it weren't for the lack of mobility.  I did my part, got a driver's license last year, but no go.  Before I took this job I envisioned driving into the mountains on the weekends to camp.  I envisioned joining up with the Naturalists from Al-Ain for weekend excursions in the wadis and villages of rural Oman.  I imagined having a beer once in a while at the only hotel in the city that served it.  No more to all accounts. Here's an absurdity: I live three kilometers from the border and have to travel 90km to cross it!  To book I have to travel another 90km when I re-enter the country.  Rules on border crossings have effectively shut out those looking for bugs and fossils, no more beer for the tourist who doesn't even show up.  What has changed in this town in city in the last 21 years is laughable: the roads have been widened and there's a supermarket 5km out of town.  Yawn.  There's only one thing that could keep me here for another year and it's the same request that goes unfulfilled year after year, job after job. 


So, next month, a job fair.  And what is necessary to be happy in a defaulted profession?  Access.  Buraimi has nothing to offer. There are no facilities that keep me off the sofa and the tv off.  Access to like minded people who wish to explore photography, athletics, travel and so on is not an option.  Even though Salalah didn't have access to much, it did have the beaches.  Access to nature is a perk and w/o transport I'm detained in this strange house of arrest.  I know if I go on it'll be the third job where I've bailed out after a year.  The first two bailouts were because of Nepal, I wanted to be there, that's all and I quit work to be there.  There have been no regrets.  This one will be about being happy, as happy as someone living alone can be. 


So for the rest of this week, I'll walk gingerly.  New old books should kill time gracefully.  Simon Winchester's 'The Map that Changed the World' was good enough to finish though the author's superlative cheerleading got old.  This week I'm starting an old book from Jonathan Raban and then it'll be East of Eden.  On the back of the book there's a pic of Steinbeck's serious mug shot and that look persuaded me to buy it.  And there is Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot'. 

a naturally thankful thing

I didn't tell anyone I was coming and when I saw Suraksha first, standing at the entrance outside the guesthouse she told me she had a dream yesterday that I was would arrive today.

Could this be defined as a coincidence?  If one explained, simply, that her spirit and my spirit had a chat of some kind, would I have to enact a scientific method of some kind to prove the occurrence  empirically? 

I finished 'A Million Little Pieces' on the bus to Pokhara.  It was good enough to ignore the herky jerky ride for seven hours that a day later now leaves me with a sharp knife pain at the base of my neck and between the shoulders.

The fresh air is as I remember.  Two Chinese tourists ask about paragliding while I stand behind the counter as if nothing has happened in eight months. "The sunrise is about seven o'clock, but go up about 6:15 or earlier.  In the east you'll also see Venus quite well."  I asked two kids at the top pushing tea this morning what the name of that very present bright thing in the sky and they knew the Nepalese name but not the English name which I didn't know. 

The family went to a wedding and it is quiet.  Except for a dog and flapping banana leaves.  And a rooster, distant talk.  I paid for a taxi all the way up because my back hurt.  A new section of the road that is usually treacherous on small vehicles is paved and it is very nice.  Nice enough to have skateboards here. 

The power comes on as the sun sets, a power saw below and the fridge behind me.  I don't mind drinking warm beer on cold nights.  Lamjung slides from the clouds and warms under a faded pink veil.  Four more nights and it's back to Kathmandu and then back to the peninsula.

What more is there to say.  A lot if I carried a typewriter of some kind.  Most ideas fade before I find one which is ok sometimes.  I'm fortunate to have seen a planet this morning with my bare naked eyes.  It's not an anti-technology thing, it's a thankfully natural thing without having the need for technology to improve the moment.