let’s go back

her: “let’s go back.”

me: “but I thought you wanted to see the world, travel. you said that there were so many other places to see.”

her: “but Bali feels like home.”

me: “I know.”

her: “let’s just go back home.”

(maybe I am scared to admit that I finally found what I was looking for)

method to the madness

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”

(-Oscar Wilde)

The thing about being back in Vancouver is that I find myself constantly evaluating where it is I want to eventually be. These questions have always been there, but getting back from something that felt so real puts them into the spotlight. While it is four in the morning and I can’t fall back asleep, I’ve been catching up on what I missed from Something She Dated (basically the trials and tribulations of somebody attempting to date in Vancouver). And all this reading is making me realize specifically what I miss about being in Indonesia. That something, summed up in a word, is spontaneity. Here in North America, it’s like in order to meet someone and to actually figure out whether you want to pursue things further, you first have to go down lists upon lists of things you’ve already decided you need (“oh, he/she must be university educated” “no, can’t date someone who listens to Coldplay” “must be at least 6 feel tall” “I know my type, I definitely need someone who has traveled. It just makes you so much more aware, you know, of your own privilege.”), and then exclude those who don’t fit. Then, when you find someone that fits into those boxes, you need to craft a series of questions in which your carefully-constructed repartees mask as wit. And then, if that stage goes well, and only then, can you make plans. Inevitably, these plans will be for ‘next week’, ‘wednesday night’, ‘the only time when you and I both have to do this thing that we’ve pre-screened each other for and deemed to have a probability of being worthwhile.’

And I get it, that’s life. People are busy here. It probably makes sense to pre-screen and to avoid a whole slew of misfits who, God forbid, don’t share your love of the ukulele and who wear Ed Hardy. But all this reminds me of a brilliant post on Tiger Beatdown, which shows, better than I’ve seen done elsewhere, why we land into Hipster Hell with the kind of thinking many of us upper/slumming-it-in-the-DTES/midde-class twenty-somethings get trapped into.

Maybe you’ll discredit all of this since in Bali I was on vacation – days of the week mattered only in as much as drink specials did. But it’s something else, too. There’s a difference in vibe there, and an unsaid appreciations of last-minute, unplanned, unrehearsed moments that can only come from walking down the street, running into someone you sort of know, getting on the back of their motorbike, and heading wherever the evening takes you. Come to think of it, when Jenya came to visit, the only night when we explicitly made plans turned out to be a disaster of epic proportions. The others began with starting points only, like a choose-your-own-adventure book. And they were the most memorable, unpredictable, didn’t-expect-that-to-happen nights in recent memory.

It’s funny because the very structure of Vancouver’s nightlife prevents (or makes much less likely) the sort of thing I’m taking about. Because once you’ve chosen where you’re gonna go, how you’re gonna get there, stood in line for and hour (only to walk into an empty establishment), invested at least $10 into cover, bought at least a few drinks from the same bartender in an effort to encourage stronger pours, and waited for all your friends to finally make their way through this same routine, well, the spontaneity has kind of fizzled. And there you are, trying to make the best of your night, because you’ve already invested in it and because your friends  are there, and that means you must be having so much fun, right?

The same with dating. You go into a date having allotted that specific time for it. You’ve spent time going through your wardrobe, matching clothes to accessories, shoes to handbags, all the while avoiding looking like you tried too hard. Then, when you’re there, even if you can tell it’s not going to go anywhere, you stick it out, hoping that at some point in time you’ll feel a spark. As if all of a sudden your date will mention the same documentary you just saw last week and then you’ll go off on a tangent about your favorite indie film festivals, which will then lead to a wider discussion of the role of independently produced content in democratizing media. And when you recall that date to your friends, you’ll bring up how cool it was that you were totally on the same wavelength when it came to that, and you’ll mention how you’re thinking that for the next date you’re hoping to play off that in some way, like by taking him to see that performance art piece that’s playing at the Roundhouse that you’ve been meaning to check out.

But here’s what you’re missing out on: you’ll never be on top of a rooftop at midnight. You’ll never find yourself at a street stall drinking a surprisingly delicious egg-honey-milk-ginger mixture. You won’t be on a random beach with a beer at sunset. You won’t be listening to acoustic guitar while watching a lonely woman spin poi. You won’t be receiving middle-of-the-night let’s-just-smoke-a-cigarette-together visits. You won’t be sneaking off while nobody is looking, just to be. Nobody will be showing you a Buddha Box hidden in a hutong. You won’t end up on the sloping sidewalk at 3 a.m., cigarette smoke and silence.   (Or maybe you will, but then that date will be an anomaly, a figment of your imagination that will be so decidedly un-Vancouver that you won’t quite know what to do with it). And that’s why it’s a little hard to part with the rickety mess that made up Indonesia (and also China). Because there, spontaneity has a logic and a beauty, and you either run with it or you don’t.

three hundred sixty five days ago

I am not usually very good at looking back, but I remember exactly where I was this time last year. I was on an airplane (one of three) going from St. Petersburg to Manila. Anna and I were just embarking on the trip that we had been planning (dreaming of?) since high school. We spent so many beautiful days on beaches and in the dots between them. We mingled, ate roti canai for breakfast, drank copious amounts of watermelon juice, and wandered through malls and street stalls. We saw the second tallest man in the world. We took pictures and made video blogs. We laughed. For me, the trip ended in September, while Anna’s continued. I went to Vancouver, filled out applications for grad school, and took off again. I saw New York. I went back to Ottawa. I spent precious time with Salima, time that there could never be enough of. I made my way back to the West, both earlier and later than I had hoped. I got a wonderful, challenging, rewarding job that I wish could have lasted longer.  I decided to go (back, sort of) to Indonesia. I’m here now. I know where I will be in September. A big, beautiful world with so many colors. That’s how life feels and I’m so incredibly grateful.

objects in mirror are closer than they appear

Two ideas have been floating here, somewhere both in my head and above, somewhere else, where I can’t adequately process them. Let me give it a shot. At first, they’re seemingly unrelated, and I suppose that the way this will make sense is if I speak of it chronologically. The first idea came last year, even, although I began to dwell on it only with this successive trip to Indonesia.

When you come to Bali and go to Kuta Beach, there is an undeniable air of surf/beach-bum cool. Part of that whole deal are the well-known Kuta Cowboys, some of whom are the people I know best in Indonesia. Recently, a documentary trailer was released that aimed to show what these guys are about. It caused an amazing amount of controversy in this corner of the world, with the government immediately cracking down on the boys themselves – a group was rounded up and taken to the police department to be questioned under allegations of negatively affecting tourism. In a heartbreaking gesture, many of the guys cut off their long hair to get away from the stereotypical long-haired Kuta Beach Boy look. I talked to people on the beach about this trailer before having seen it, and now that I have watched it, I’m still amazed at how two and a half minutes of at once vague and pointed footage can generate such a fuss. My friend Deni, one of said Beach Boys, described the trailer as “not entirely wrong, but almost wrong.” I loved his description, not because I necessarily agree with him, but because I can’t believe the double standard that exists between this documentary and countless others that have aimed to shine the light on (mostly female) prostitution in Asia.

Whereas the female sex trade (particularly in Asia) is often seen as survival prostitution, the scene at Kuta is painted of one in which boys collect notches on bedposts, reveling in the power of the fantasy they create for tourist after tourist. And this is what struck me: men are allowed agency in prostitution, whereas women are most often denied it. Here, it is assumed that this is all for fun, that the casual sex is simply a favorable afterthought in the overall paradise that is Bali. Asian women, however, as portrayed as having no other choice, as being forced to take this upon as a means to support themselves and their families. The reason that this bothers me is because I think the type of relationships exemplified in Bali can be as much about survival for the Kuta Beach Boys as they are for many Asian women who are living this lifestyle. In a situation where you never, ever know how much money you’ll bring in each day from renting surfboards and giving lessons, you have a natural tendency to cling to a source of stability, to a person who never has to wonder whether they can afford to spend a dollar on dinner that evening. At the same time, the reverse is true. There are those men and women who do this purely because they can, purely to indulge in the fruits of Western sexual liberation.

Deni had a point when he said that the trailer was “almost wrong” – it portrayed one scenario of several, after which we are left to deliberate what room is left for genuine feeling. It’s hard, this honesty thing. Fantasy is an ingrained aspect of traveling somewhere where you are dripping with privilege – the fantasy of ever being equal begins, for a moment, to seem real. That fantasy doesn’t just dissipate when you fall in love. I have experienced being painfully aware of my own privilege in the past few months, and it has made me question my commitment to living in Asia. I constantly crave anonymity and I wish nothing more that my efforts to learn Indonesian and do as common people do would bring me closer to being seen as a part of this society. At moments, I manage to convince myself, but that’s just until another motorbike speeds by and the driver turns his head to check that, yes, it was a white person he saw.

And yet I know that without the realities of this scenario I would hardly be able to afford trips to Bali, buffet lunches at the Shangri-La, and massages on a whim. I find myself in the perverse position of abhorring the expat lifestyle and yet knowing that I’ll never be able to (or perhaps even want to) give it up completely. Where does this leave idea #1? Oh yes, perhaps at the somewhat anti-climactic conclusion that all of us buy into a fantasy and most of the time we retain the agency that exists alongside doing so. I think that that is true for both the one who is seen at the exploited and the one who is perceived as doing the exploiting (and the mere mention of this instantly makes things more complicated). The government is ill-advised to treat the Kuta Beach Boys as a threat to tourism – it would be smarter instead to realize that this form of exploitation at least comes with the added benefit of fulfilling a basic human need. Many other more common forms fail to do even this.

sick in surabaya (part 2)

As the days go by and you sit in a hospital bed, the absences begin to matter. You start counting the things that haven’t happened as they normally do because routine has claimed so much of your time. The day is broken up into tests and meals and doctor visits. The tests are broken up into blood samples, temperature checks, IV drip monitoring, and doses of medicine. The meals are broken up into the soup, the rice, the piece of meat, and the piece of fruit. The daily visit by my doctor breaks up into answering routine questions, into finding out my thrombocyte count, into hoping to hear the word ‘discharge’. Things are broken up into their substrates, their substrates, their substrates. I feel completely alone and I realize that half this battle is psychological. I don’t give up easily but in certain moments I feel completely broken. There is so much goddamn time to think.

sick in surabaya (part 1)

written on April 21st, 2010

Oddly enough, the thing I wish I had brought is a camera. I wish I could show you the florescent lights above my head, the coral and grey color scheme that seems to envelop everything, the way the nurses look, covered by headscarves, the IV drip that’s fused to my palm, and the way the food looks when it’s brought in, all cling wrap and plastic. It’s a weird thing, being hospitalized for my first time in Surabaya. Being told, for the first time, that I’m too weak to walk or even be in a wheelchair and having the nurses wheel me to my room in a stretcher. For more reasons than one, I feel like this city and I are off to a rough start. There are things in our blood called thrombocytes, and I have a number of them that’s way below normal. Usually, this is a sign of dengue fever. So I’m here, at Rumah Sakit Mitra Keluarga, and feeling better now that the doctors are doing whatever they’re doing. My energy seems to be coming back slowly – I can type this and not feel like I have to take a break, for example. I also never knew how terrible the world becomes when your sense of taste loses its power. For six days, almost the only thing I could stand to eat was watermelon, and my mouth felt incredibly dry, and everything I tried to ingest felt like cardboard. It’s not my dream, of course, to be coming back to epicurean delights with hospital food, but I’m not being picky. Although today was my full day of meals, the menu seems to consist of rice (that comes in pleasantly hot, lukewarm, and dreadfully cold), some sort of questionable meat, boiled egg, some soft veggies, and a bit of fruit. At some point, the nurse brought me a menu on which I was to choose a main meal and a type of bread with it. I have yet to see anything resembling my choices, unless by tomato omelet and cheese bread they meant Spam-like meat (with an egg oddly inserted into it) with tomato-ish sauce and a side of rice. I remain perplexed but, as I said, I’m not picky.

The hospital isn’t so bad, actually. I’m finally doing the things I said I’d do when in Surabaya – reading, practicing and studying Indonesian, and writing. I’ve just finished “Love is a Mixtape”, which is overall not a very good book and a pretty bad one to read while in hospital. My original plan was to send it to Jamie when I was finished with it, but I now understand why Anna was hesitant to recommend it in the first place. The basic story is that this rock critic guy is writing a book around mixtapes he used to make, mainly in the mid-90s and mainly for his wife-to-be, Rene. She dies and he spends the book talking about the experience of being a young widow and how music means so much to so many people and defines more things than we admit. I agree that music matters a hell of a lot (I can pinpoint the soundtrack to some of my highest and lowest moments), but Craig Sheffield isn’t a good enough writer for me to fully feel his emotions and he isn’t self-deprecating enough to be funny, although he makes some attempts. Also, he refers to R.E.M. As ‘punk rock’, which confuses me – he does work for Rolling Stone though, and how they’re still thought of as music journalism confuses me as well. Anyways, maybe I’m unfairly judging this guy simply because he pales in comparison to the literary orgasms I get from Chuck Klosterman, whose book “Killing Yourself to Live” I just finished listening to (again) while I was too weak to read or watch movies over the weekend. When it comes to writing about the intersections between music and relationships, there is still, as Carly Simon would say, nobody who does it haaaaallllfff as gooood as you. Another reason for my disdain for this Sheffield guy may be that I just read a book Zach gave me by David Rakoff, who, if only in terms of language, is an even better writer than Klosterman and who makes Sheffield seem like a teen angst writer.

So now, I am onto “Master and Margarita” which is a book I borrowed from Jenya way too long ago and promised myself I would finish while I was here. And holy shit, it’s really good. Much to my great shame, I don’t usually have the patience for Russian classic literature (maybe I haven’t given it the chance) and I leave it for people like Jenya to talk in depth about the philosophical debates within ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. I have started that book a couple of times before giving up way too easily and running to my own collection of cheesy Russian crime novels (“sunflower seed books”) for consolation. I’ve decided to make Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita” an exception, probably because it’s at least 1000 pages shorter that ‘the Brothers’. Anyways, I’m only about a quarter of the way in and so far it’s excellent. A page-turner, if I may say so myself. And it’s funny! Not Klosterman-funny, but funny in a way where you imagine what you’re reading as a scene in a movie and the brilliance of the author’s craft becomes painfully obvious.

Oh, to end this blog-post-to-be short, I must mention that I’m not the only intern who has gotten sick like this. Apparently, this is quite a familiar routine for the school’s administration, so I am just a proverbial notch on the hospital bed-post. But, as I once told a guy who commented that I had gone the longest without completely rejecting him because of his lame pick-up techniques, ‘I work(ed) for the Olympics, and we are all about setting records’.

a half-hearted fanatic

despite the rather cheezy ‘us vs. them’ spirit of the conclusion, I quite like the sentiment expressed here:

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast… a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”

a song for starlit beaches

Last weekend, Anna and I sat in a surf shop and sang. We sang to the melody of the guitar and the soft rhythm of the bongo drum. Renditions of old favorites reverberated on that warm, Bali evening and things felt exactly like they did just a few months ago. Bali felt like it had stayed still, trapped in time, without any accountability to the days of the week or the times of the day. All that mattered, once again, was the tide. The ocean coming in to greet anxious surfers who wait and wait for the perfect set. That night was as they always had been – me and Anna and Yopi and others who seemed to float in and out. And nothing else mattered. Not the fact that we couldn’t hold a tune or that my back and shoulders were on fire. It was just me and her and them and the warmth of the night. Surrounded by surfboards that had claimed stillness for the night. I told Anna as we walked back that the perfection of these moments was sometimes almost more than I could take. If I could somehow take these instances of time and pack them away in my pocket… so that I could take them out when I felt lonely or less than… Instant perfection is found there, on the wooden benches that surround Toba surf shop, where the memory of Raoul still lingers. Where we never run out of cigarettes never and the laughter never ceases. This is what Kundera must have meant when he talked about the unbearable lightness of being. I felt it and touched it and it brought me back to why exactly it would be so easy to resign myself to this simple life. Perhaps a romanticism of the facts, but more likely the closest I have ever come to the truth. To the pure release of goodness that plays along to the sound of the guitar. There are a million ways to kneel and kiss the ground. This is mine. I would love to one day live up to your words, Rumi. I would like not just to live up to them but to live them and to have them run through my veins. When she thanked humanity, I think that this is what she meant. And then we ended up on a lonely Balinese alley, waiting. Waiting and speaking quietly and dancing on the empty streets to reggae. To the gentle flow of the music that mingled with the comfortable quiet of the night.

questions

thank you, life, for not having any answers. Could I be? Am I? Was I there, in your thoughts, resting somewhere between the ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’? Tell me what you know about dreaming, because I will be there, playing my part. I will be there, thinking of things left unsaid and moments not captured. Restart later, let me finish what I want to say. Thanks for coming back, reading, asking, challenging, staying exactly the way I want you to. I saw today that you’re going to be a hard one to replace. Maybe it doesn’t have to be like that, maybe we will change our minds. Habit comes back all the time. Is it true  that being forbidden comes as a surprise? This is just the kind of thing I think about when I want/need a distraction, you know? Of course you know. You were there, so near. A witness to my indecisiveness. Thanks for noticing and thanks for letting me know of the obvious. I remember the first accusation. It hurt more than the successive, indirect ones. If I am wrong, I will surrender. But I feel it, you know. I feel the indecision as it flirts with the truth, tests its boundaries, mocks its apostles. Thank you for remembering the good parts. I will make use of your selective memory when it’s time.
Soundtrack: Burial – Archangel

jigsaw falling into place

Digested last night with a cup of coffee and thought about what ran through my head. Oh, nameless, interchangeable, disposable clubs – you offer little except insights into a world I know very little of. Every once in a while, it’s nice to get lost in the smoke-machine and strobe light glow of the bodies around you, pressing against each other awkwardly, some fighting for space, others for less of it. It’s fun to play by the unwritten rules of this society. To look coyly away as your eyes meet someone else’s, to act like your stilletos are the most comfortable pair of slippers you own, to allow mere seconds for snap judgments to manifest inside your brain. And in a strange way, to feel the honestly amidst the caked on make-up and the overbearing cologne. To know that you are all working towards some common goal. To know that you have all come here to have your most carnal instincts converge. Here is a world stripped of subtlety and wit and intrigue. Here is a world of forgone possibilities, replaced by utterly formulaic conclusions and choices. Here is an industry created around this world, repeated ad infinitum.

Radiohead puts it much better than I do:
[audio:http://structuredmoments.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/09-Jigsaw-Falling-Into-Place.mp3]