devastation

I'm sure you have all been watching the news, seeing the images coming out of SE Asia. There are no words.

My last days were spent traveling from Yogyakarta in Central Java back to Jakarta to catch my flight out. I stopped in a couple of cities along the way for a day each, just to see more of a country I had come to love so much, and saw so much. Wherever I went, there were flags. Two simple stripes, red on white, were at half-mast everywhere I looked. There were whole avenues of houses, each with a flag in the front yard, each remembering countrymen who had been taken. Government buildings, restaurants, gas stations - everyone shaken by the loss of so much in this country where so many have so little.

Indonesians are easily the friendliest people I have ever met in my life. All the time, "Hello! Mister! Photo? Good morning!". A smile as I passed on the street, as I took a photo, as I turned down buying something from them. Trying to assist me when I must have appeared like a lost puppy, even if they didn't speak a word of English. Invited me to sit down, share a cup of tea with them, a cigarette, a meal. And so when I saw my first televised images of the destruction, the tragedy, the suffering on the plane on my way home, five days after the earthquake, I wept. Sitting in my coach seat, I cried for these people that I had met, who had welcomed me, had talked with me, had made my time there so amazing.

I was filled with rage in the first days, seeing governments pledging a couple of million dollars, not even putting a drop in the bucket, a bucket with sides reaching up to the sky. Rex Murphy struck a chord - if we are to keep calling ourselves part of the First World, we have obligations to those less fortunate. But the stories I've read and heard - governments hiking up relief, private citizens donating millions of dollars, Modest Needs (a charity I support whole-heartedly) potential recipients, people who may be evicted or lose their cars or suffer other potentially life-wrenching consequenes if they don't have the money, saying give to the aid first before them, well, it's inspiring. Faith back in humanity.

I'm still shocked. We've seen the largest natural disaster in recorded history. I've waxed eloquent with people this holiday about world problems, and my solution was simple (or so I thought) - if we're going to call ourselves a world village, then we have to act like a village and look out for each other. To care for each other. If you can, please give. Anything. One thing I found, when they say on those ads you seen with the phone number across the bottom that for "Only a dollar a day, you can support...", you can. I ate for a dollar a day. Anything you can give adds to the giving of others, creating a torrential downpour of caring.

You may never visit any of these countries. You probably have bought things from them (what isn't made in Thailand or Indonesia or Malaysia these days?). You may not like their food, their customs, their laws, their politics.But rest assured, they are your neighbours, and right now, they need your help.

text messages worth saving

Gonna throw your arms round a side of beef? Haunch of venison, well-hugged?

Will keep my eyes out for shades. Will keep up the tree. Will miss you terribly. Love u, and a merry muslim christmas.

Right, my mom would like a 4x4 inch ceramic decorative tile from Taiwan. I can clarify when you call me tonight at 9pm Regina time when I'll be with the couple. We'll be downstairs at Persuti's. If no reception, I'll rearrage for 2moro. Gift total, with wrapping and car=$107each. Pls deposit Sept 2. OK?

That's awesome dude. It's always the little things that make what you do rewarding. You are an inspiration to a generation.

you too - sweet dreams!

Thank u ryan for an unforgettable evening once again. u're truly one of a kind. sweet dreams and have a good week :-)

And Now We Dance! I do love ya babes. Rod is so fun :-)

happy you're okay, happier still that you're back. sorry don't get off till 9 and am going right to the space - i have to open it. see you there though!

Yes. I guess I'll just have to stick it out like only a man can. Just make sure you put it in the right place when you stick it in! Oh I love ya -)

Ah, did the obscure byrd clamor the livelong night? :)

Fan-TASTIC! You're a ninja!

...and when they were down, they were down

I've been sickalicious this week. Bugs go around here like nobody's business, what with kids and hanging around in small groups. I've infected at least three other people, I believe, and my lungs have taken a beating like no time I can remember. I'm doing OK now, thank you, but I've been going to bed at insanely early times, the earliest, I believe, I've ever laid head to pillow in Taiwan, and getting full-night, nine or ten hour sleeps. Which have been leading, the last couple nights, to dreams involving Indonesia, poorly-made drums, and some kind of physical activity (lifting? running? both?) that has had me waking up drenched in sweat the past couple of nights. Bizarre.

I'll be back with pictures soon. I'm reconciling them in the real world first.

tense living

Dates are for the past tense. Yesterday's glories and headlines all come easily to those with a book in hand. Memories explode again and again like fireworks on a home video, but like the tape they are recorded on, they can only last for so long. The past never fully intrigues - it's a one-trick pony. Sorry, folks, that's all she wrote, and the focus moves elsewhere. The stink of decay and desperation begins to pervade those who live there, caught in the thralls of yesteryear.

The future holds such promise. The fireworks to come, the preparations to be made. Connections, people, a world to explore. There's so much there - lovers, children, riches beyond imagination. It's an oyster waiting to be plucked, full of dreams that have been growing from a grain, sometimes for a lifetime. And coincidences - funny thing, those coincidences, that pale flash that distracts you and throws you off course, and when you turn back, you're half a lifetime away. Planning is intense, and as often as not, goes awry, making you wonder why you lined that shot up anyway, when a handful of rings gets the same result when tossed at the stick.

The present is the only place you really get to be, despite where your head is, and can be so painful and so heavenly that you're not quite sure where white ended and black began, and which one is supposed to be the bad one. Tenses are juggled like those spinning plates that always impressed me as a kid (still do) - gotta keep them all in mind, moving, can't forget one, as it will change completely from what you remember if you leave it too long. Exhausting work, barely leaving you time to remember that this is only a job, and that it's really an audience of one. Everyone else would watch, but they've got their own plates to keep an eye on. Don't want one to fall. Can't fall. Can't stop. No time. Can't forget this one. What will happen next?

What will happen next?

why we travel (my jaded notion)

Indonesia was my first travel experience that I accomplished completely on my own. I'd done weekend trips by myself, short holidays in Taiwan, international trips to visit others, but this time, I knew not one person in the borders of the country when I touched down (oops, a bit of a fib - a coworker was a couple of thousand kilometres away in Bali.) I had no idea what it would be like, what I would be like. I had considered it before, wondering if I would meet a lot of people, be sociable, party, explore, get lost, get swindled? I wasn't too worried about food and language - living in Taiwan had prepared me for anything in regards to those.

I've been told that we travel to discover why home is important to us. I'll grant that, though it didn't hold water for me. Living in Taiwan, I know that almost everyone pines for home, those not running from it, anyway, though sometimes they are the ones that are the most homesick. Funny that. By going away from what we don't think we want, we discover what we really need. Metaphysical purges, if such a term could be employed. When your home changes regularly, you find an appreciation for settling down, establishing oneself. This is balanced, however, by a steady flow of new, often amazing people into your life, people who can have a set of life circumstances so drastically different from you you never would've thought that they existed before. Before they became your best friend for the next three weeks, only to disappear into the mists of time again, forgotten to the world, impressed into your memory tracks.

My revelation was that travel is a test of limits - not pushing them necessarily (although that is often done), but simply finding them. Traveling, really, is not much more than constantly subjecting oneself to a tantilizing almost-infinite number of situations and finding out how we react. Can I eat a whole bird with my bare hands? Can I live in close quarters with five other people for three weeks and still trust and talk and like them at the end? Am I a strong enough person to go out on my own for (time period)/Can the (relationship) that I have with (person or people I am traveling with) not deteriorate in (time that we are traveling together for)? Can I use a communal squat toilet? Can I give up what I have grown up with, survive with a basic collection of supplies and my wits, and make it back, along with a myriad of stories and souvenirs?

But as much as, or even more than, that, travel pulls us out of routine. Habit, by nature, tends to remove critical though about the routine. We all fall into the trap - eat, work, study, do our extracurricular activities, have our discussions and book clubs and water-cooler chats - but travel makes a gift of a constrant stream of input that demands attention. Reaction. Analysis, if you feel up to it (oh man, did I analyse everything that I saw). Remove obligations and expectations, and you free the mind to ponder, to explore, to create, to examine with a child's eye (even itself).

And that's my favourite part. Travel frees me - my travel journals are so different than my daily/weekly journal entries. Both are part of me, neither are less vital to me, and I would be devastated if I lost either, but I do admit that my travels are filled with much more external information gathering and scrutiny and inquiry. There are elements of introspection in both, though travel seems to deal with reactions, and home seems to deal with relationships.

Of course, there is also the always important moral of learning more about our fellow man (and woman) and understanding him (and her). It's a lot harder to hurl words and weapons at someone you've met than a faceless picture painted by others. This is usually another terrific result, rather than a primary instigator, however.

So what is it that drives these nomads? It's hard to say self-discovery is a motivator, but it is definitely a result. For many, escape is the draw - I've met so many people running from something, someone, the future. And, of course, experience is the easy answer - who can't say they'd love to learn to surf in Bali, eat fresh curry in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, or say that they had walked across the Great Wall of China? For me, though, these are just the situations, the things, and things are passing fancies - anyone can have them, it's the story, the experience, the feelings that are unique to us, the only thing that only we get. And when we gather our grandchildren around us to tell the story of floating down the Rhine, it's not the feeling of the thousands of kilometers that have passed under our feet that we cherish, it's the memories of how those things changed us and made us what we are that comfort us. To quote a character named Hannah, who very much resembles a Hannah that means a lot to me, "Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanted to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in."

baby it's cold outside

Some of you have heard my lament of Taiwan being 'cold' in the winter. And I have been thusly mocked - 'Come on, you live in a sub-tropical country!', 'Oh, quit your whining, it's -40 here.', 'Why, back in my day, we used to live straight in the snow, and we loved it!' - by those who have not yet come to understand the vital difference between cold in a sub-tropical country and cold in a place that is used to cold.

Heat.

As in, there is no heat in Taiwan. When it is ten degrees Celsius outside (as it was this morning), it is about twelve degrees inside. There is no such thing as insulation here (why would you want to be insulated when temperatures are pushing 35?) Internal heating is a foreign(-er) concept. Properly-sealed doors and windows also appear to be quite foreign - wind howls like a toothing child each night. I feel like I'm living in a haunted house, until someone starts shouting in Taiwanese nine stories below. Then I feel like I'm living in a Taiwanese haunted house. And so, everyone wears sweaters for about three-and-a-half weeks. But oh, man, do we loathe those three-and-a-half weeks, like a convict loathes the shower.

Of course, my father recently emailed me, recounting the woes of living back in Canada - a -50 week (with windchill). And though I know he said it just as conversation, it really did make me feel better to hear it.

yo yo yo, happy birthday bro

It's my little brother's birthday today, he's turning a whopping two dozen years. I cannot believe it. We've always been a year-and-a-half apart (well, it's two for six months, and then one for six after I catch up), but, I mean, come on, he's my little brother. Not my 24-year-old, holy crap I remember when I was 24, that wasn't too long ago, what's he doing there, brother. I've written on him before, but he's grown even more, hitting the top and bottom and part of the middle of Australia, enjoying the company of beautiful women, collecting experiences, memories, and trinkets, taking absolutely fabulous pictures, and even has a goal lined up between the uprights. And, ladies, he's single. I mean, how awesome is it when a hostel throws a party for your birthday (well, for the January birthdays, but they make sure to have it on your birthday), give away a tonne of food and booze, and possibly even charge people to come in? That's at least seven separate, examinable kinds of awesome.

So enjoy your last weeks of blazing heat, Chad. I can't wait to see you here in Taiwan. And you'd better be able to use chopsticks by now.

"sorry, baby, randy's sick, someone's gotta cover his shift"

He said his name was Mort. And he had become her Mort.

Does this happen in other places? she wonders. In the world a world away, those places on the news and in the magazines in the beauty parlour she picks up when she goes in for her perm, the third Thursday of every third month. Her two kids sit (well, one hers, the other the offspring of his last wife), grudgingly, silently consuming the Hamburger Helper she pulled out twenty minutes before they got home and the peas, their least favourite, but all she had. They've got their own thoughts, and besides, she knows they know not to ask. She knows how much she knew at their age about her parents' problems, and though they don't say anything, she feels pity emanating from them. They've heard him slam in at two enough times, if he even returns. Randy was fired a month ago - she ran into his brother at the liquor store last week. Funny thing, the two of them meeting there. A sob jumps to her throat, and she barely holds it in, running to the bathroom. Maybe she could purge it there.

Head hanging over the toilet, she lets the tears fall. He's with her again, she can feel it. She's trapped in this, this torturous humane trap. Drawn in by temptation and dreams and survival; can't, won't die as a direct outcome, but neglect will kill her all the same. And so she scurries a bit more, trying to ignore the eyes outside watching her. She looks up from the sink, and a hard, haggard set of eyes bore into her head, now pounding like the surf she's imagined seeing since a girl. He promised to take her. Still does.

A sniff, a cracked window and a cigarette, stolen from her son's crumpled box of Marlboros he's gotten hidden under his motorcycle magazines - second drawer, left side, at the back. She pulls her hair back, wishing life were that easy - just pull it back to where you want it, tie it there, and it stays. She opens the door again, the VIP of an abolished team, the cheers mere echos in her head. Back to the game, but Casey knows now she struck out before she even got to the plate.

i'm sorry, let me make it up to you

Life has been excruciatingly busy and blogging-unfriendly as of late. Running rehearsals, moving, girlfriend, research, reading, a dream journal... I should have plenty to write about someday.

For now however, sleep is a currency which I like to trade in. Please feel free to enjoy the pictures which have finally made it up, as you can see on your left there (another intense taker of minutes in the recent past). Five galleries from my talented, handsome, worldly, single brother as he winds up his time in Australia, and three from myself - a taiwanese wedding dinner, a peek in my life from the last two months, and my christmas epiphany in indonesia. I hope you enjoy. Be back soon. (I apologize for the huge load of pics in the indonesia gallery, but there really was no way to pare it down further. I would be punishing you by not sharing it. Really. Consider it this way: it's less than 12% of the pictures and videos I took.)

no vacancy

The girlfriend was reading me poetry last night (which in and of itself is at least eighteen kinds of cool), and since both of us were leaving on a trip soon (she's already left on hers, *sniff*), she read parts of Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road, a piece every traveler should hear, read, and take to heart. One line, however, got me thinking, with a discussion of future and past and achievements and goals until the wee hours the other night and an email due out to you, the reader, this weekend on the subject of Indonesia.

The past, the future, majesty, love -- if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.

It's not just those, however. One of the biggest concerns/complaints/causes for lonliness people get out here is they lose touch with friends. I mean, we are a visual (and lazy) species - if we don't see someone, we don't tend to think of them much. Most everyone starts out enthusiastic, sending updates and summaries and hilarious occurences, but they peter out as one gets adjusted and as responses become fewer and fewer, until the vast majority give up, keeping up with one or two close friends. I've seen it again and again, and even when I was in Canada. These lines just reverberated why with me. Certainly, they ring truth in themselves, but for me, they also pertain to friends and acquaintances. If I don't take the time to inquire about them, to fill up the vessel in my mind with their name on a piece of tape on the front, how can I expect them to come to drink at my well? Communication is key, people.

Anyway, go read the poem. It's long, but terribly wonderful.

eclipsed

Right between the birthday party and the 2 AM bowling, on a scooter singing along to Moxy Fruvous, surrounded by friends on scooters and in cabs, waving, chatting, sitting at a red light, I realized that in one sense, there was no more to be had. This thrilled me in satisfaction and achievement, saddened me through acknowledgement of the end, and piqued my interest at what was next.

And then the light turned green, and I started off again, knowing my destination, yet unsure of where I was headed, and reveling in the potential of the surprises both held.