[things i'd like to write about but haven't]

• My trip to Budapest and Vienna.
• My trip to Ann Arbor. And Ypsilanti.
• All the churches in Brooklyn Heights: visit each, learn about it, attend a service, blog it.
• My life as a Korean dancer.
• My theory of Tom Tom Club vs. David Byrne.
• My trip to Ghana.
• Being sick abroad.
• Toilets of the world (this one's more of a photo essay).
• My trip to Mexico. (Noting a theme?)
• My trip to Paris.
• An open letter to the mayor demanding seasonal weather changes. (This will be funnier when actually written, I hope.)

[how not to apply for a job]

The following is an opening paragraph that I won't be using for a cover letter (for an internal position, peeps — I'm not leaving Google!).

I feel it’s important to write you and express my firm point of view that a sense of humor is not an appropriate job qualification. Those of us who were not blessed with this sixth sense at birth nevertheless deserve to be taken seriously (ever so seriously) as candidates for any and all roles that don’t expressly have ‘comedy’ or ‘comedian’ in the title. I think, for example, that we need more humorless talk show hosts, postal workers, and veterinarians, who could bring the appropriate seriousness to the tasks of celebrity chitchat, mail delivery, and cat-sticking respectively.

Yes, snow does cause brain damage. Why do you ask?

[how to fail like an olympian]

When you watch the Olympics, it can be easy to forget just how ridiculously good these people are at whatever bizarre thing it is they're doing. Take, for example, figure skating. Early in the evening of the ladies' long program, long before Kim Yu-Na and the other medal contenders took the ice, there was Tuğba Karademir, a Turkish skater who ultimately came in 24th.

Now, I have never been the 24th-best person in the world at any particular skill, as far as I know. It's an extraordinary achievement. And yet, watching her skate, it was absolutely clear why she was in a different class from the top five or six skaters in the world. So when you're watching the coverage of a medal contender in the slalom who misses a gate, or of a bobsled team that plays it conservatively and can't shave off that hundredth of a second they need to take the lead, you go, "Yeah, that was a mistake," and you forget how insanely difficult it is to do whatever it is the athletes are doing in the first place.

And after a couple of weeks of that sort of thing, today I went to my Korean dance class, and I imagined what it would mean to be the best in the world at it, or one of the top ten or twenty. For one thing, it would mean practicing more often than once a week for 90 minutes. My dance teacher is an extraordinary dancer, and part of how you get to be that way is to do it a lot. And then there's the level of detail: spending a week or a month or six months concentrating on just the right way to get your torso to expand and contract, or how to extend your fingers to draw out a line.

Beyond that, as I fumbled my way through my little bit of choreography, I started thinking about how much concentration is a part of athletic success. Sometimes, as I dance, some move I've just done half a dozen times will suddenly desert me, and I'll be shrugging my shoulders when I'm supposed to be twirling already, or my arms will be flopping at my sides because I've forgotten where they're supposed to be. Again, this is incredibly far removed from the kind of mental effort that serious athletes make, but I felt like it was an inkling, at the very least, of how it is that someone who's done a routine a thousand times in warm-ups can suddenly flub it in competition.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

[cold winters]

This winter is the coldest and snowiest I remember in a long time — maybe since my first winter in New York. I was a California boy then, new to the rigors of winter, so I've sometimes wondered whether my recollections were overblown — whether perhaps the winter of '94 had grown harsher in my imagination that it actually was.

Not so.

Here's a fun little sampling of articles on just how rough that season was:

• Bitter Cold Stings East Coast, Shattering Record Temperatures
• New York, Stuck in Winter's Headlock, Is Pummeled Once Again
• A Reprieve Promised From Weeks of Freezing Temperatures
  
• THE ENDLESS WINTER: Season's Harshest Snow Yet Paralyzes New York Area; Hope for Relief Is Buried Again in Region
  
• Winter's 13th Storm Puts Ice Back in Spring Tonic
  
• A Winter of Disaster Leaves the Bills to Prove It
  

I recall the Columbia campus covered in ice sheets an inch thick that made going to class a treacherous affair. My Lit Hum class was way over in the International Affairs Building, east of Amsterdam Avenue, and getting there required a late-afternoon traverse across the howling wind tunnel of West 120th Street, a canyon between the high walls of Teacher's College and the Columbia campus's forbidding backside. There were many afternoons when I simply didn't make the trip. I had a hard time meeting people and making friends because so few people went out and did anything. But when the snow banks had piled up above the height of the parked cars, someone carved an entire life-sized automobile from snow, with a grinning grille and an icicle for an antenna.

I remember that on that arctic January 17, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, the pipes in my dorm froze, leading to a basement fire. I heard my RA pounding on my door, shouting, "Get out! Get out! There's a real fire!" — we'd already spent much of the morning waiting out a false alarm in a slowly flooding lobby — and quickly pulling on boots and a coat over my T-shirt and sweat pants before running from the building. I didn't have my wallet or my student ID or socks. It was very, very cold, and there was nowhere for me to go. I begged my way into another dorm, where I sat in the lounge and watched pictures of the aftermath of the Los Angeles earthquake.

There were ice floes on the Hudson. I could see them from my dorm room's sliver of a river view.

I was totally unprepared for a winter like this. I didn't know to get long underwear. My boots were designed for jungle combat and had air vents down by the soles. When at last the snow began to melt, deep slush puddles formed at all the corners, and you could only cross at the corners, where cuts had been made in the towering snow banks. Going to the store directly across the street meant walking to the corner, crossing, and walking back.

I recall a long, wandering, intellectually confused discussion with my Logic and Rhetoric professor, an angry feminist grad student in the English department. I wanted to know what differentiated my B+ essays from my B- essays, and she came around to the position that her methods were holistic and could only be understood once the course was complete. Along the way, she suggested that maybe I needed to experience bad grades because I had already had so much white male privilege, "locker-room camaraderie" and the like. I countered that seeing as how I hadn't actually been on any sports teams, my friend Monica, who played rugby at Wesleyan, had undoubtedly experienced far more locker-room camaraderie than I ever had. This enlightened symposium took place outside in bitter cold. We were both too stubborn or too stupid to suggest going inside somewhere and continuing like civilized human beings.

My work-study job that year was at the reserve desk in the library, another institution dedicated to purging white male privilege. I was the only white person on the staff, and I'm fairly certain that was what my boss disliked about me, though I have no real proof. In any case, whenever I was on duty, it was invariably my job to go outside in the early morning and bring in the books from the drop-bin, which involved unlocking the Master Lock, which in turn required that I hold it in my bare hand until it thawed. Then I had to scrape the ice away from the bin door so that I could open it and retrieve the books. When I suggested that we perhaps wait a bit to open the bin on days when the temperature was in the single digits, it was pointed out to me that this would unfairly enable students to get away with returning their books late by several hours. I didn't think this was such a bad thing, but I wasn't in charge.

When at last the forecast was for 60 degrees, I went alone to Central Park — I was often alone in those days — and sat on a rock, thrilling that I was outside and it didn't hurt.

That was a very hard winter. The hardest I've known. This winter has seen a fair amount of cold and snow, but it's nothing like the winter of '94. 

[beatles and birth order]

Does birth order affect who your favorite Beatle is? My sister is the youngest. Her favorite is George, who happens to be the youngest Beatle, who had to fight to get his voice heard, and who really came into his own as an equal to John and Paul only on the later albums.

My brother, the middle child, seems to like Ringo, the amiable peacemaker without strong opinions. Such a middle child!

As for me, I'm the firstborn, and I like John, the solitary dreamer, the one who turned his back most firmly on the fraternity of the group, and who really just wanted to settle into a relationship that didn't have the bother of outside interference.

[moving]

For a while now, I've been talking about moving to Manhattan. At this point, it's more a question of when than whether. Bay Ridge is pleasant enough, but it's far away, and I like to have a home that people actually visit. Plus, I'm tired of the long commute, and of feeling like once I've gone out for the day, popping back home is simply too far to go if I want to go out again. And then there's school: if I go back to school, living as far away as I do now will make things all the harder.

So I'd like to move to Manhattan, preferably somewhere very close to my office, in Chelsea or the West Village. Most of my life happens around here anyway: Korean dance in K-town, swing dance near Penn Station or Times Square, work in Chelsea, socializing in the Village or the East Village, shopping in Union Square.

As for the timing, well, I guess my life is pretty full. I'm just not going to get it together by the end of January, and anyway January is a rotten time to be going around, looking at apartments. Also, I have jury duty. So that rules out February 1. March 1 would be feasible, but I'm leaving for India on March 5, and that double stress is more than I need, nor do I want to come home to the chaos of a new apartment when I'm all jet-lagged. There's pretty much no way, coming back from India on March 21, than I'll find an apartment and get packed in that final week of the month. And so it looks like May 1 is the next really good date.

May 1.

I have until then to clean out my junk drawers, give away my old clothes, and generally scale down the stuff. That's plenty of time, but also plenty of time to worry over it.

[the plan, as it unfolds]

For a while now I've been thinking about graduate school. Here are my reasons:

• Everyone else seems to be doing it.
• My brother and sister are doing it, which means I'll be the least educated member of my family if I don't (dad has an MBA, mom an MA and JD, grandma a Ph.D., grandpa a JD, sister and brother both working on MAs).
• Barack Obama asked every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education, and while this obviously meant at least one year past high school, which I have, I'm taking it to mean at least one more year than I already have.
• It might be vaguely useful professionally to have a higher degree, though that sort of depends what it is.

Those are my reasons for thinking about grad school. So I talked to a few coworkers who'd done the whole master's thing, and one of them told me to study something I love, because it's a ton of work, and I won't want to see it through if I don't feel passionate about it (he has an MFA in creative writing).

So that got me thinking about specifics. An MBA is right out, 'cause I completely don't give a shit. International affairs? Maybe. Central Asian history or linguistics? Off chance. Asian studies?

Duh.

I mean, look at what my plans were for the weekend: go to a lecture at the Korean Cultural Service on Friday night, by myself, to learn about traditional Korean music; meet a new Korean conversation partner on Saturday and study; meet an old Korean conversation partner on Saturday and study; meet a friend from the Korean Mission to the UN on Sunday; go to my Korean dance class.

Sure, I read articles from time to time on foreign policy. And sure, I'll slog my way through tomes on Central Asia. But I waded through nearly 5,000 pages of East Asian history and translated political and philosophical documents as a self-study program. And on weekends I study the Korean language and go to lectures on Korean culture for fun. When I arrived in Seoul in October, I was ecstatic to discover that here was an entire city completely dedicated to my hobby. For reasons I've never been able to pin down, the study of Korea has become my passion.

You knew that. I knew that. But I only just realized that this had a direct bearing on what I should study.

An obvious practical question arises: What will I do with an MA in Asian Studies? And a practical answer: No idea. Yes, it's a lot of work for no concrete result. Yes, it's expensive. But I want to do it. And the advantage of being passionate about the subject while not needing the degree is that I can drop out without feeling like the whole thing has been pointless.

My plan, then, is to do this ... eventually. I'm hoping to move to Manhattan when my lease is up, in September of next year. Starting grad school at the same time that I move strikes me as pointlessly exhausting. So I'm going to shoot for spring of 2011 to begin my studies. Between now and then, I'd like to make substantial progress on the language. I'll also need to talk to people at the Asian Studies programs at Columbia and NYU, and also maybe CUNY. And study for the GREs. And that, in sum, is the plan so far.

[memory, history, and the beatles]

What does it mean to remember an experience? Sitting with my parents recently, listening to the Beatles remasters that just came out, it became clear that what my parents remembered about the Beatles — the order things came out, which songs were on which albums — was a kind of visceral memory, often inaccurate when measured against the archival record. My father compared it to the way people of his parents' generation remembered World War II versus the way he grew up learning about it: they knew better what it was like, while he knew better what had actually happened.

Time also has a way of distorting our views. I know that I take Kurt Cobain a lot more seriously now than I did when he was alive. Until his suicide brought his art back into focus for me, I thought of Nirvana as a pretty good if simplistic and overhyped grunge band that was never as cool or interesting as Soundgarden or Pearl Jam. He wasn't the voice of my generation until he no longer had a voice.

That effect is probably even stronger with the Beatles, who shaped a generation far more intensely than Cobain ever could have. In the many years since the Beatles were a going concern, we've seen Wings, and Plastic Ono Band, and the Concert for Bangladesh. We've seen The Compleat Beatles and Anthology. We've heard Let It Be de-Spectorized. We've seen John Lennon martyred, and Yoko Ono transformed from witch to hipster icon. And we've grown more familiar with the canonical materials, while the uncollected detritus of abandoned pop culture — radio and television interviews, DJ chatter about new Beatles songs, the speculation of one's friends about whether the Beatles turn on, the newspaper and magazine articles — all fade into oblivion.

Above all, we know how it ends now. We know that Sgt. Peppter's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the highwater mark, that Abbey Road is the coda. We know that no Beatle ever did anything solo that was as impressive as the Beatles together. And we know that the story was closed forever by a pointless murder.

But what was it like to here "Tomorrow Never Knows" without knowing what was to come?

Sitting with my parents, listening to their memories of these songs when they were new, I got a taste of what that might have been like. And that got me to thinking about my own first experience of the Beatles.

Until 1987, what we had were the records — the American records. I grew up with an album called Song, Pictures and Stories of the Fabulous Beatles, a decidedly silly repackaging of Vee-Jay's Introducing... the Beatles that included a gatefold, drawings of the Beatles, blurbs on their likes and dislikes, and places to put heart-shaped photographs of oneself under photos of each Beatle and the words, "JOHN LOVES," "PAUL LOVES," "GEORGE LOVES" or "RINGO LOVES." It was a record meant to be bought by a schoolgirl, and it was, and that has some meaning to it.

What changed in 1987 was that the surviving Beatles and George Martin released something resembling the whole Beatles catalogue in what became canonical form, based on the British albums, with the stray bits and pieces gathered onto Past Masters I and II. I say something resembling the whole because they did away with the instrumental versions of several songs that populated the American versions of A Hard Day's Night and Help!, and because all of the canonical CDs were in stereo. To muddy the waters even further, in 1987 George Martin took it upon himself to redo the stereo mixes of Help! and Rubber Soul, so we've been listening to different versions of those LPs than the already somewhat obscure British stereo records.

The newly released remasters are a useful corrective. The music sounds grand, which is obviously the most important thing. I don't imagine that it sounds quite like a brand new pressing of British wax played on a brand new hi-fi from 1965 — certainly not when I play it on my iPod, through quality earbuds — but it sounds clear, resonant, full, and punchy.

And the release of the mono remasters, complete with the original stereo mixes of A Hard Day's Night and Help!, makes it possible to hear something much closer to what everyone heard when the Beatles' music was new. For the first couple of albums, the stereo mix is pretty arbitrary, mostly an artifact of how the music was recorded for mono: the vocals are all in the right channel, and the instruments are all in the left. I'd go so far as to say that Please Please Me and With the Beatles are actually preferable in mono, even on headphones.

There's also the peculiarity that certain songs have different bits in them, depending on whether you're listening to the mono or the stereo version. The Sgt. Pepper that played endlessly on the radio was probably the mono version, in which "She's Leaving Home" is a faster number in a different key, avoiding some of the soupiness of the stereo version, and the reprise is noisier, layered with more crowd noise and crescendoing with some great shouting by Paul that's missing in stereo. (In other cases, the stereo versions are better. Who wants to miss out on Paul reaching for the high notes as he sings, "Every single day!" during the fadeout of "Got to Get You Into My Life," or Ringo's famous "I've got blisters on my fingers!" as "Helter Skelter" fades back in?)

Getting to hear all this music, in a variety of formats, is wonderful. And it's not too difficult to create a playlist that recreates the American discography (although you do have to live without those instrumentals).

So what's the difference? Well, often the songs were in different orders, and the whole experience of the early Beatles was shaped by the overlapping releases of Introducing and Meet the Beatles!. The latter album, which launched American Beatlemania, opens with the world-conquering "I Want to Hold Your Hand," but leaves out "Twist and Shout" (not released by Capitol until The Early Beatles came out in 1965).

Even more significant were the changes to the middle-period albums, which were my parents' favorites, and whose structure and release schedule helped to map their courtship and coming of age. The now-canonical albums aren't the ones my father remembers. Help! opened with a James Bond theme intro (not digitally available), and was full of instrumentals. It didn't contain Yesterday, which wasn't on a US album until after Rubber Soul.

And it's maybe Rubber Soul where the changes matter most. My father remembers that record as part of his experience of traveling around Europe in the summer of '66, being in love with my mother. In the US, it opened with Paul's lovely, folkie "I've Just Seen a Face," not the smirky "Drive My Car." Side two opens with "It's Only Love," a considerably sweeter number than "What Goes On." And the dark moods of "Nowhere Man" and "If I Needed Someone" are left off completely. The result is an album that has a different ratio of love to chagrin. There's a different vibe.

Then there's the whole sea change that seems to come with Revolver. In the US, that change was spread out over two albums, with "Yeterday"...and Today coming first, opening with "Drive My Car," "I'm Only Sleeping," "Nowhere Man," and "Dr. Robert," and closing out with "Day Tripper" (not found on any UK album). In America, Revolver was a bit less trippy than in the UK, and provided almost a lull in the psychedelic experimentation before the summer of Sgt. Pepper and love in 1967.

Somewhere in my parents' house is a reel-to-reel recording of my parents calling in to a radio show and chatting with John Lennon while they were tripping on LSD. I'm not entirely sure whether I've actually heard this tape, or just heard of it. I can't remember what anyone said. But this sort of relic reveals the unbridgeable gulf between the canonical text and the lived experience. No one will ever release a handsome boxed set of snippets like that. But chatting with John on the radio was another kind of listening to the Beatles. I'll have to dig up that tape one of these days and find out what, if anything, they talked about.

[more dancing with the ajummas]

As my grandfather tells it, he always thought of himself as rather weak and small. He's short, and as a child he seems to have been somewhat bookish (though his idea of bookishness was to run five miles to the library, get a book, and run five miles back), and as an adult he became a corporate lawyer, not a role that necessarily calls for strapping men.

Then, in his forties, he took up mime. Now, this was before mimes became a horrible punchline, before that awful time in the eighties when mimes, like the homeless, became a constant urban menace. The way her learned mime, it was a serious, strenuous art form. He lost weight, gained strength, and developed a sense of physical presence and spatial awareness that was still serving him well into his eighties, as he would dance about the kitchen, closing cabinet doors behind him with his foot.

I take after my grandfather in a lot of ways, and certainly physically. As a kid, I was small for my age, and I was never much good at sports. Compulsory Israeli folkdance at summer camp was always a horror of ineptitude and humiliation. And you might have noticed that I have certain bookish tendencies.

But in the last couple of years, I've started to dance. I was not the quickest student in my swing classes, but I wasn't consistently the slowest, either. And at this point in my life, I'm willing to learn slowly and awkwardly. It's really OK. I make a grownup living and can spell and all that, so it's not really a big deal if my Charleston is a little sloppier than some other people's.

And now I've managed to find my way into Korean dance. Karen, the resident American who's been studying this stuff for 15 years, insists that I'm learning faster than most students, that I've got great lines, that I'm a natural. I kind of think this might be similar to the way Koreans have been telling me my language skills are amazing ever since I learned to say hello, but she might also be being honest. For once, it seems, my odd little duck walk may be paying dividends. I tend to walk back on my heels, with splayed feet, and I've been told this is the walk of a yangban, or traditional Korean gentry. And my years of swing dance practice have taught me to keep my knees bent. So maybe I am better at following dance instructions than I used to be. Maybe my physical prowess is greater than it was when I was 12 and practicing layups.

[revivifying the palaverist]

It has been brought to my attention that I did in fact once have faithful readers, and that they're kind of disappointed that this blog has slowed to the point of nothingness.

So I came rattling back around in here and found that the place had grown a bit musty. For one thing, my about page still had me working at the South Korean Mission to the UN, a habit I gave up back in January of 2008. And the picture was in need of an upgrade. I'm much cagier now.

I've also decided to embrace modern technology — blogs are so early aughts! — by creating a Facebook page where you can become a fan and pick up the feed for this blog. (The Palaverist shall not, however, tweet.)

More than any of that, however, is a renewed interest in actually producing some content. So enough of this meta-content! On to the other kind ...

[how i spend my days]

The product manager was so amused by an email that I sent, he reposted it in his blog.

[things about me]

Yet another Facebook meme ...

Place an (x) by all the things you've done. Then send it to your friends (including me). This is for your entire life!

( ) Been to South America

(X) Been to Europe (if you count Ireland)

(X) Been to Asia

( ) Been on a cruise

(X) Gone on a blind date

(X) Skipped school

( ) Watched someone die

( ) Been to Canada

(X) Been to Mexico

(X) Been to Florida

(X) Been on a plane

(X) Been lost

(X) Been on the opposite side of the country

(X) Gone to Washington , DC

(X) Been to Vegas

( ) Been to a lighthouse

(X) Swam in the ocean

(X) Cried yourself to sleep

( ) Seen the Cherry Blossoms in Washington , DC

(X) Played cops and robbers

( ) Flown a plane

( ) Owned a boat

( ) Recently colored with crayons

( ) Been to the Kentucky Derby

( ) Been to Key West

(X) Been to a rodeo

(X) Sang Karaoke

(X) Paid for a meal with coins only

(X) Done something you told yourself you wouldn't

(X) Made prank phone calls.

(X) Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose

(X) Caught a snowflake on your tongue

(X) Danced in the rain

( ) Written a letter to Santa Claus

( ) Been kissed under the mistletoe

(X) Watched the sunrise with someone

( ) Seen the green flash at sunset

(X) Blown bubbles

(X) Gone ice-skating

(X) Gone to the movies

( ) Owned a convertible

1. Any nickname? Joshy Teacher, Rooster, Ushua, Ush

2. Mother's name? Pesha

3. Body Piercing? Left ear, now closed

4. How much do you love your job? A whole lot. A serious whole lot.

5. Birthplace? San Francisco, CA

6. Ever been to Hawaii ? Yes, as an infant

7. Ever been to Africa ? No

8. Ever eaten just cookies for dinner? Who can remember?

9. Ever been on TV? Yes

10. Ever steal any traffic sign? No

11. Ever been in a car accident? Yes

12. Drive a 2-door or 4-door vehicle? No

13. Favorite number? I dig primes.

14. Favorite movie? Barking Dogs Never Bite

15. Favorite holiday? Chanukkah

16. Favorite dessert? Chocolate with chocolate, dipped in chocolate, with chocolate sauce and chocolate on the side

17. Favorite food? Too many to choose just one, but I could eat San Francisco-style burritos forever

18. Favorite day of the week? Saturday

19. Favorite brand of body wash? Aveeno

20. How do you relax? I watch Simpsons episodes I can sing along with

21. How do you see yourself in 10 years? With a positive net worth, and maybe a Ph.D., or a nice State Department posting

[25 random facts about me]

Note: This is a meme from FaceBook, thus the instructions are Facebooky. 

Rules: Once you've been tagged, write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you.

At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to Notes under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people [in the right-hand corner of the app], then click Publish.)

1. I have a teddy bear named Elver, which I thought was a perfectly normal name when I gave it to him, at my cousin Louise's bat mitzvah. This bear is somewhere in my parents' house back in California.

2. Throughout much of my childhood, I was deeply concerned with war. Specifically, the war between the good people of Planet Salvania and the bad people of Planet Alto Deto over the resource-rich jungle planet of Reorilia. I made this all up in my head, of course.

3. The highest place I've ever been (outside of an airplane) is Muktinath, a Buddhist and Hindu shrine in the Himalayas of Nepal.

4. In middle school I stayed back a year, repeating sixth grade by taking a year off from Hebrew school and going to the local middle school. That year, I discovered that I was a nerd and made the transition to wannabe, buying Bugle Boy jeans and T&C surf shirts and totally failing to fit in.

5. The first time I heard "Loser" by Beck, it was on my car stereo, and I actually pulled off the highway to make sure I wouldn't lose the signal before I found out who the singer was. I felt like I had been waiting for exactly that song for years.

6. The first time I heard "Hand on the Pump" by Cypress Hill was at the Berkeley Square, a fantastically hip little club on University in Berkeley back in the day. It blew my mind so completely that I asked the DJ what it was. "Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of/Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of..."

7. The first tape I ever bought was Quiet Riot's Metal Health. The first time I heard Quiet Riot was in the car with some friends, and there was heated debate over whether the singer was a boy or a girl.

8. I'm a big fan of a local Brooklyn artist by the name of Elyse Taylor.

9. I love the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and one of my absolute favorite works of art there is a miniature sculpture of the goddess Durga killing the buffalo demon, Mahisha (Mahishasuramardini).

10. When I decided to go to Korea, I had never even tried Korean food.

11. The first time I was given a seriously grownup book to read in English class, it was with Mr. Poirier in seventh grade. We read The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. It was breathtakingly magisterial. I just reread it, and it wasn't as brilliant as I remembered.

12. I like that breakfast cereal that's made of oats and is super high fiber, and it's kind of like square Cheerios made out of granola dust.

13. I keep my old heavy metal T-shirts in a trunk because they simply can't be thrown away.

14. I'm an inconsistent meditator at best.

15. When I was little, I assumed that everyone wanted to write books when they grew up, and the only reason not everyone was a writer is that we need people to do other things sometimes. It was a shock to discover that there were people with no interest whatsoever in becoming writers.

16. I've always had a legalistic, argumentative streak, and for a while I thought I might want to be a lawyer.

17. My very first time on the Internet, I went fishing in Gopherspace and discovered instructions for seducing a horse.

18. I'm not sure I believe in God, but I pray a lot anyway.

19. I've always been fascinated by the exotic. When I was very little, I would imagine that my bed was a lifeboat drifting off to some undiscovered country. When I got older, I thought Ozymandias and Kubla Khan and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner were totally cool. I also really liked The Horse and His Boy, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was my favorite Narnia book.

20. I will contemplate the other desserts with due seriousness. Then I will choose the chocolate one.

21. My favorite pair of boots ever was the biker boots I got at Daljeets on Haight Street.

22. My first car was my dad's old Toyota Corona, which burst into flames early in the morning of New Year's Day, just after I'd dropped off my friend Teresa, having gone to a concert together that night.

23. I know that the battle sequence at the end of Star Wars takes longer than the time that's stated in the movie. I know because I've timed it.

24. At various times, the Beastie Boys, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, the Beatles, Metallica, Guns'n'Roses, Bang Tango, the Cult and Soundgarden have been my favorite band. 

25. Briefs.

[en méxico]

So we're in Mexico, my brother Effie and me. I flew into Phoenix on a delayed flight Saturday, slept a few hours, and got into the car for a long, hard drive down through Tuscon and Nogales and into Mexico. From there we pressed on to the town of Hermosillo, got lost crossing it, and finally cruised into the tiny coastal town of Bahía de Kino, driving dead on into the sunset and racing to get there before dark.

Kino is really two small villages. Kino Nuevo is a string of hotels and condos and houses for snowbird norteamericanos. It's really nothing more than a strip against the water, behind which begins the Sonoran desert. Kino Viejo, the older fishing village, is more oriented towards Mexicans. There's a small fleet of motorboats for fishing, a little pier, a few taquerías selling fish and shrimp tacos, the sole breaded and cooked over wood fires. It made a pleasant enough stopover for a day on our way further south. Amusingly, the best food in town was to be had at the Restaurant Trailer Park.

On Tuesday we took off before dawn, driving the entire day and finally arriving in Mazatlán as the sun was setting. It was exhausting, and it took a while to find our way to the beach, and then out of the Zona Dorada, a hideous enclave of package tourists, full of hulking mega-hotels and restaurant chains from America. We opted instead to stay at the Belmar, a 1950s-era behemoth on the beach in Old Mazatlán, where John Wayne supposedly used to stay, and where nobody has done any maintenance to speak of since. It's musty and absurd, but it does the job.

I'm getting by on what Spanish I can remember, dreaming now in Spanish, and wishing I could remember how to conjugate verbs in more than the present tense. In Mazatlán most folks speak at least a little English, because this is a town where cruise ships unload — we saw a group being herded into a crafts boutique, all wearing stickers saying,¨I'm ready to experience!¨ and being told by the tour guide that this place was ¨just like the West Covina mall.¨

But Old Mazatlán is lovely, and as my friend Patricia pointed out, the beach is always real. Typing on a Spanish keyboard is a little confusing, and Mazatlán awaits, so I'm off!

[¡viva méxico!]

So I'm not going to Thailand. Instead, through the magnanimous gesture of canceling my ticket, I brought peace to that country, and instead I'll be heading to Mexico.

It was over Thanksgiving weekend that it became apparent Thailand wasn't going to work out. The People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) protesters — who probably don't think PAD Thai is a funny joke — were digging in at the airports they'd shut down a week earlier. Reports were saying it would take as much as a month to clear the backlog of stranded travelers. Then someone threw a grenade at the PAD protesters who were occupying Government House in Bangkok, wounding 51, and the PAD response was to give up the Government House occupation and focus on the airports. (If you missed all this, it's because it happened at the same time as the Mumbai attacks, and American news networks, like the human nervous system, can only focus on one painful sensation at a time.)

This all seemed like the ideal situation to not visit. And so, on Monday morning, I canceled my ticket and ate the change fee. That night — daytime in Thailand — the Thai high court told the government to dissolve, which it did, and the protesters announced that they would give up their blockade of the airports.

Dandy.

In the meantime, however, I hatched a different plan. Forget Thailand. Forget Asia. Instead, I would fly to Arizona, meet up with my brother, a student at ASU, and drive down to Mexico. I talked it over with him, and he seemed to think it was a great idea. Then I asked him what his financial situation was, and how much he could contribute to the trip.

"I have thirty dollars."

Ah. Okay. Well, I decided to go ahead anyway. I'll basically pay for everything. It'll still be cheaper than flying to Thailand. The plan, subject to change as always, is to fly in on Saturday, December 20; leave early Sunday morning and head east, crossing the border at Columbus, New Mexico, a tiny town whose principal claim to fame is having been sacked by Pancho Villa, and whose principal advantage as a crossing point is not being El Paso/Ciudad Juárez; drive south through Chihuahua and Torreón; and spend most of our times in the central highlands, around Guanajuato and Zacatecas and San Miguel de Allende.

I've never really traveled in Mexico before. I've crossed the border twice, once into the tiny village of Boquillas, and once to spend a grotesque evening on foot in Juárez, trying to ignore the taxi drivers who kept offering to take me to Pusi — that's the name of the local ruins, apparently — and to find someplace reasonably non-disgusting in which to sip Tecate. The sum total of my Mexican experience, then, is the equivalent to an evening in Newark and an afternoon in Antler.

I'm excited to experience Mexico as a nation, a destination, a place separate from the United States. Latin America has never been the part of the world that has most grabbed my attention, and I don't know that this trip will change that. But it will hopefull broaden my perspective and stimulate a new curiosity. I don't expect this will be my last trip to Mexico.

[chaos in mumbai]

So when the situation in Thailand went pear-shaped, I started looking at other places to go. One of those places was Mumbai.

Then, of course, Mumbai was struck by a horrific series of terrorist attacks, which are still unfolding. They've targeted places popular with Westerners, which means places I've been. I've met people and relaxed in the Taj Mahal Palace lobby, even bought a shirt there. I've caught trains at Shivaji Terminus.

And Leopold Café! Friggin' Leopold's! For a New York equivalent, it's as if terrorists attacked not just the Waldorf-Astoria and Grand Central Station, but also Katz's Delicatessen. It's just wrong — and yes, I know that the whole thing is about as wrong as can be, but bringing Leopold's into it is so dementedly off-script for this sort of thing. It's horrible, and I'm sad.

Meanwhile, Thailand seems to be moving towards a confrontation with the protesters who have shut down the airports. Will I still be going there? We'll see. If there's not any actual fighting, and the airport is open, I probably will. And if things suddenly get nasty again? Well, "I was trapped in a foreign land by a military coup" would be the most interesting excuse I'd ever given for missing work.

We'll see.

Update: A Mumbai Chabad House has been attacked as well, and there are hostages inside, and probably some people have already been murdered. Horrible.

[thailand in crisis]

In 23 days, I am planning to fly into an airport that, at the moment, is being occupied and shut down by a protest group called the People's Alliance for Democracy.

This is not good.

I expect that this situation will be resolved in 23 days. I will almost certainly go ahead with my trip. But it's unnerving, and I'm stuck with the lingering worry that the situation will worsen, and then what'll I do? I've already bought the ticket.

I've been down something like this road before. The day after I arrived in Nepal in 2002, King Gyanendra dismissed the prime minister and dissolved the parliament. There was some tension, but it all seemed to be happening above the heads of average Nepalis.

This PAD situation in Bangkok is much more serious. And it's growing into a standoff, with no easy end in sight. And so, from an incredibly selfish perspective, I worry about my vacation.

[wheels and straps]

Years ago, when I went to Ireland, there was some kind of snafu at Kennedy Airport. I can't remember the details, but I do recall that I literally ran from Terminal 1 to Terminal 3, had some kind of a discussion at a ticketing counter, and then ran back to Terminal 1. I had my backpack with me, and it would've been hard enough to run had I been wearing it. But by the time the sprinting started, helpful airline staff had already wrapped the thing in cellophane so that the straps wouldn't get caught in the baggage-handling equipment. And so I was stuck cradling this giant, slippery football in my arms as I trotted from terminal to terminal.

Since then, I've stuck mostly with a rolling suitcase for domestic travel, where the road surfaces and airport landscapes are predictable and well maintained, and where schleppage is largely from baggage claim to the trunk of a car in the parking lot.

On my international trips, though, my backpack served me well. It was necessary for trekking in Nepal, of course — hiking the Annapurnas with a wheelie bag makes less sense than heading up there in high heels. There were times, too, where a long walk from the train or bus station, over broken ground, was made infinitely easier by a bag I could heft onto my back. Still, there were times, as the bag grew heavier with our accumulated goods, when it was painful to carry, and wheels would've been a serious relief.

And so began my quest for a backpack with wheels. There are a few on the market, and they're mostly pretty expensive, but I consider this purchase an investment in my future travels. I hope to go to a lot of different places, and I wanted one bag that could go with me on all but the most strenuous adventures. (For those, I'll break out my beloved Gregory backpack.)

After looking at the Victorinoxes and the Eagle Creeks, I settled on the Osprey Meridian. As the salesman explained, Victorinox bills their bags as the lightest, Eagle Creek as the most durable, and Osprey as the most comfortable. The Meridian is easy to convert from a backpack to a rolling bag and vice versa. It has a spacious interior that will be big enough for most of my travel needs. And a big selling point for me was the detachable day pack, which is spacious and well enough designed to be genuinely useful. That means I can attach my carry-on directly to my luggage, then remove it when I'm ready to check in. Without that, I'd either have to carry two loaded bags around, which I've done and not enjoyed — wearing the day pack on the front is no picnic when you've got an overloaded pack on your back — or else stop and transfer items from one to the other whenever it came time to check the bigger bag.

We'll see how it performs in actual transit.

[dreaming of fluorescent pepsi in the night]

So where were you last Tuesday night?

Seven years after the definitive where-were-you-when moment for Americans under sixty, it is with great relief that there is now a new moment to talk about. For the past week, conversations have turned to the election, which has unleashed a giddy elation in myself and countless others.

As for me, I was at a house party in a high-rise on West 42nd Street, where I stayed to watch first McCain's and then Obama's speech. At around 12:30, I headed out, planning to walk back to Times Square and take the subway home, but soon it was clear that something extraordinary was happening. Packs of people streamed by, chanting and waving Obama signs. Strangers were smiling and talking to each other, even embracing. A black woman threw her arms out and howled, "I'm goin' ta work naked tomorrow!"

Times Square was still packed when I got there. The big screens around the square were all showing the results still coming in, and Obama's picture kept drifting by on the giant LEDs. I called my sister, then my parents, then some friends, to let them hear what was going on. "YES! WE CAN! YES! WE CAN!" "O! BA! MA! O! BA! MA!" "YES! WE! DID! YES! WE! DID!" Fire trucks drove by and honked in rhythm. I talked to a man from Guinea who was texting his friends back home. They were still celebrating, though it was nearly morning there.

I bought a T-shirt that said President Barack Obama. I cheered and I chanted with strangers. I stared at the monitors and talked shop with strangers about Senate races. At last I headed home, by cab, sharing my joy with my Senegalese driver. It was a beautiful night.

*

The next day, I bought my ticket for Thailand. I'll be going on December 20, returning on January 4. At first I agonized over how I would book internal flights for when I arrived, but yesterday I decided to let that go. I'll just show up in Bangkok and figure it out. There's always a bus to somewhere.

Bus travel, of course, is unpredictable. I have been battered and bruised on buses, ridden on the roof over mountain roads, crossed the United States with Euro-hippies, been awakened by snapping fingers in my face and a man barking, "Tea, toilet!" But what comes to mind most viscerally for me are two experiences. In one, I am riding through Bridgeport, Connecticut, gazing out the window at a bombed-out husk of a city, and listening to "Whiskeyclone, Hotel City 1997," by Beck:

I was born in this hotel, washing dishes in the sink
Magazines and free soda, trying hard not to think

The other memory is of India, staring out the window of a night bus — god knows where — listening to Dig Your Own Hole by the Chemical Brothers and watching these islands of fluorescent light drift by, illuminated roadside bhatis with walls of turquoise and pink, hand-painted Pepsi logos, and skinny, mustachioed men with bushy hair, bushy mustaches and dhotis.

In each case, the memory mixes music, bus travel and alienation. Buses, it seems to me, are an ideal environment for feeling alienated, with none of the romance of trains or the sense of occasion that still clings to air travel even in the age of the flying cattle car. Buses rattle and bump, stop unpredictably, go off course, get stuck in traffic. And music is ideal for creating a contrast, or an emotional frame, for absorbing images that are somehow surreal and out of context.

And so I'm sorting through my music, trying to figure out what goes on my iPod for my trip to Thailand, and contemplating a bus trip up the country, from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, with stops in Ayuthaya and Sukhothai and who knows where else. What will settle into my memory this time?



My first little taste of adventure travel was on a Green Tortoise bus down from Oregon, and it sold me on the notion. I soon spent ten days crossing the Northern US with the Green Tortoise, and then another fourteen days heading back across the South. After college, when I leaped blind into India, I experienced bus travel in whole new ways: riding the roof with a couple of cackling old men on the road that winds over the mountains back into Pokhara; wrapped in a shawl, trying to sleep as the cold desert wind whips through the empty window frame of a night bus to Jaisalmer; pressed up against a man smelling of sandalwood and sweat, trying to tune out the high-pitched warble of distorted Hindipop. I have been bounced and battered in a sleeping compartment with no seats. I have been awakened early in the morning by snapping fingers in my face and a man barking, "Tea, toilet!" I have



Bus travel is unpredictable. Some of the best and worst travel experiences of my life have involved buses. My first trip, down from Eugene, Oregon to San Francisco, was a revelation: my first time jumping into a travel experience with no clear idea what it would entail. I sat on the back, on the mattress platform, while an impromptu bluegrass band struck up, and then sat by a river at the Oregon campsite stopover and shared stories with probably the most beautiful woman I've ever met.

Over the next couple of years, I twice crossed the United States in Green Tortoise buses. Then, after college, I made a grand, blind leap into India, where

[regarding the posting of open letters in the comments]

Open letter to the woman who posted an open letter to Sergey Brin in the comments, which letter I'm not publishing, which makes it not much of an open letter:

Let me make it very, very clear that I do not speak for Google. I work for Google as one employee among many. My blog is not a part of Google. It's my own space for espousing my own views. As such, I don't feel any obligation to publish views I disagree with. The Internet is big, and there's plenty of space for you elsewhere.

If you genuinely want to write an open letter to Sergey Brin, please do so in a forum that is either public or your own. And don't use Blogger, because Google owns it.

Sincerely,
Palaverist