My Summer Vacation: Yoga Mats, Dental Chairs, Church Pews

OK, peeps, here they are: the final pix and entries you'll be seeing for some time. We start with photos taken in the latter stages of my cross-country trek in late May: these were all taken at rest stops in Colorado and Utah, aside from the beautiful sunset shot just below, which was taken from the moving vehicle just north of St. George, Utah, the evening before my arrival in LA. Driving across the US is almost always a pleasure for me -- it's so big and beautiful, and I'm sorry I didn't get the camera out earlier to record tornado-laden thunderclouds over the great plains; wide, generous streams running through green grassy fields in the midwest; my beloved alma mater of Oberlin; or the great long weekend Steve & I spent with Heather in Pittsburgh seeing operas, exhibits and plays. I've got one month of vacation left, and I plan to shut down completely in order to be fully rested before heading off to Port Harcourt, Nigeria, which is my next planned assignment. (Assuming nothing changes, viz dental nightmares noted below...) Wish me luck, take care of yourselves, enjoy the pix and texts, and drop me a note when you can.

To my shock and horror, my summer vacation is mostly over. And it really has been a summer vacation, like we used to have as schoolkids: what a treat! In response to requests…mostly from my beloved Ondrej (who’s solidly in love with someone else, so any single guys out there take heart: I’m still eminently available, more’s the pity)…I started taking pictures of the American landscapes I traveled through en route from Pittsburgh to LA. I’ve also continued, for the sake of my non-American friends who are holding off on US visits until they’re too old to go trekking on Borneo, to record some of what I’ve been up to here in California. As I draft this on August 2, I’m sitting in my favorite café on Noe Street in San Francisco, possibly my most-loved city in the world and certainly one of those in which I feel most at home, and pondering the fact that in about about six weeks I’m likely to be en route to Nigeria, which appears to be my next assignment. More on that when the time is right.

My storage space is now fully reorganized, and more belonging are being unloaded to those who need them more than I do, such that it leaves room for my bike and a few other items that hung out in the Shansi House basement at Oberlin and in my brother’s basement for the past two years (thanks, Deb & Carl; thanks, Steve).My various personal affairs and projects are wrapped up, t’s seem mostly crossed and i’s mostly dotted, so I feel I’m now able to spend the final month of my vacation purely and completely on vacation. Not that the past months haven’t been great, but there’s usually been some “work” mixed into the days in addition to lots of transcendant yoga classes, great tennis lessons, much-needed quality time with my great friends like Gary, Steve, Howard, Gene, Mike and so on and so forth.

In early July my friend Steve (one of the Steves) and I went diving with SoCal's LGBT diving group out on Catalina Island. I'd never done cold water diving with a full wetsuit and hood before; despite the bulk of the gear, it's well worth it as I hope these pix, all courtesy of Sharon and other members of the group, attest. Neal & Elizabeth: do consider going with me when you're out here! :-)

I’ve gotten fabulous ego rushes from all those people who seem to think my current career path makes me sorta special (why don’t cute guys like Matt Damon seem to think so, though?), and even finally had something that felt like a real date the other night. That was fun: holding hands in the movie theater! Since I didn’t get to do that in high school – at least, not with the guys I wanted to – it’s fun to make up for lost time now. The big shadow over my summer has been – and remains – my overly-frequent visits to the dentist’s office to deal with repercussions from a tooth I chipped while eating a guava in Sri Lanka in January. My lessons learned: if a dentist proposes anything major (and from my seven visits so far, I must say that crowns and root canals are major, NOT FUN, and EXPENSIVE), be sure to ask A LOT of questions, consider a second opinion, be completely confident that you know and trust the exact dentist who proposes it, ask questions of a few friends who’ve had similar experiences, and consider getting a second opinion before agreeing to it. I’m trying to get over my regret that I did none of the above until it was way, WAY too late…and I certainly won’t ever be going to this dentist again. Now I only pray that it’s all done and completely taken care of before it starts to affect my departure for Nigeria: please send up good energy for that to happen, one and all.

I'm the standing one, not the waving one, in case you couldn't tell. :-)

On the plus side, there’s been a glorious new addition to the spiritual side of my life that started to blossom when I found yoga teachers who pushed me to broaden my practice beyond the assanas. Thanks to Bruce & Jen in Indiana, and Shari here in Pasadena, I’ve been greatly enjoying as many services as I can take in at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Santa Monica. For any of you who’ve wished for a space where you can share your joy in life’s mysteries and magnificence without all the prescriptions, proscriptions and dogmas that seem to go along with most organized religions (not to mention that frequent requirement to turn your brain off and believe what someone else tells you blindly), I’ll say this: check out the UU congregation nearest you, whatever your faith background.

I’ll leave the introduction at that: there’ll be captions on some of the pics, and more about what’s next when the time comes. There are also a few pedantic and preachy texts about issues ethical, political, humanitarian and social down below. Feel free to skip those and just enjoy the pix. You all know how I need to vent every now and then; please don’t hold it against me. As always, thanks for the support, and spare a smile and kind word for someone you don’t know today.

Watts Towers

One summer highlight was Mom's visit, during which she convinced me to take her to Watts Towers, which I'd somehow imagined to be a 1960s-era urban renewal housing project, like coop city. NOT! For more than thirty years, a relatively uneducated Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia single-handedly constructed and decorated everything that you see here - to thank his adoptive country for providing a home and a living, to atone for things he'd done that he wasn't proud of, to express his faith, and/or for other reasons that we may never know. They certainly stand out in the low-income neighborhood of Watts.

Left and right here, you see some detail of the tiles and glass that Simon Rodia cut and placed meticulously to create the artistic effects he wanted. Mom particularly wanted me to include some photos of the green glass for our old family friend Florence Cole, whose husband worked many years with 7-Up -- from which most of these bottles came, back in the days when all bottles were made from glass and polymers weren't even a gleam in an inventor's eye yet.

Island America

In history class, I learned that US history in the 19^th and 20^th centuries included several episodes of isolationist sentiment. One example was the American public’s unwillingness to get involved in what it viewed as a European war right up until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, years after the war started in Europe. What I find curious about the current context in the US is that our government has arrogated to itself the right to abduct citizens of other countries and hold them indefinitely at Gitmo under torturous conditions and without rights (such violations of basic rights are far, far worse than the injuries from King George that led colonists in Boston and elsewhere to revolt against England in 1776…and to start a military campaign that the traditionalist and more powerful British military viewed as ungentlemanly and rather uncivilized - the concept of terrorist didn’t exist yet then - in nature), to invade Iraq and Afghanistan despite, in the former case at least, very strong and legitimate international concerns about the invasion.

Mom and I also visited the newly-reopened Getty Villa, up on a cliff above the Pacific near Malibu; this museum now houses the Getty's classical collections from ancient Greece and Rome, and reminded me after two years spent absorbing the wonders of China and south and east Asia that we westerners have much to be proud of in our history as well. All visitors to LA should have both the Getty Center (the more famous building) and the Getty Villa on their itineraries; both can easily be full-day or nearly full-day excursions, and are well worth all the time you can give them. And their cafes have excellent food at very reasonable prices - so why not make a day of it, with lunch in the middle!?

All this happens at a time when the average citizen in the US is so utterly clueless about the world in which we live, the history of American foreign adventures in the 20^th century and how almost every problem we now face grew from seeds planted in earlier interventions full of hubris and ideas about projecting American power or democracy or what have you around the globe. (Hey, you want specifics, write me a comment and I’ll give them to you...but for a few quickies: we put down a democratic rebellion in Iran in the 1950s and installed the Shah, whose repressive policies led to later revolt and Islamic republic; it was the Desert-Storm stationing of American soldiers in Saudi Arabia that helped radicalize one generation of Islamic extremists, and American dollars to fund the anti-Soviet Mujahideen that started what later morphed, after the Soviet withdrawal, into the Taliban…oh, and for the record, we installed Sadam Hussein and his Baath party in power, back in the 1970s in Iraq, and supported him right up until the day he invaded Kuwait in 1990, although by that point he’d committed plenty of the kind of atrocities with which the Bush Greedmongers later tried to justify his invasion. And for those who’ve forgotten…GWB’s dad headed the CIA during some critical periods in the evolution of that US policy towards Iraq in the 1970s. When are we gonna learn that we have to stop trying to play God globally, and support meaningful international institutions that may not always do what we want, but will help build some global stability and consensus???)

But where am I going with all this soapbox, you ask…quite rightly. My experience of the US is of an almost surreally ripe, rich and spoiled country utterly isolated from the realities with which so much of the world lives every day. On one hand, I love the ease of life here, the ready availability of all consumer commodities, and so on. But the issues, the concerns, the things that Americans get excited about just seem so alien to me. Standing in line overnight for I-Phones? Hello, I’ve seen farm families in China who work their rice fields 14 hours a day 330+ days a year and are rewarded with rice gruel and smoky fires to light their breakfasts and dinners. Do they merit less access to consumer commodities than we do? Do so many of us truly not recognize that we’re a small part of the world’s 6+ billion inhabitants, yet we’re consuming WAY more than our share of the world’s precious resources…and, whether viewed from an ethical lens or a purely utilitarian realpolitik one, this simply cannot continue? When I got to Cleveland, a participant in an online chat room tried to get people motivated to protest against high prices of gasoline. Hello? How about protesting against government subsidies for military adventures that ensure short-term oil supplies but do nothing to develop longer-term renewable energy sources and grow public transportation?

In late June, as part of my volunteer work with Oberlin Shansi, I had the pleasure and honor of driving down to San Diego county to meet the abbot of Metta Forest Monastery, a Buddhist Monastery in the Thai Forest tradition founded by a very deep Buddhist thinker who grew up in the US and studied in Thailand. These are pictures of the mountains, valleys and orchards surrounding the hilltop where the monastery is located. What a perfect place to retreat from the world and ponder one's essential self.

After I drafted this section, I posted the news clippings you see below from Sri Lanka, and always spectacularly-loyal reader Ondrej blew my mind by reading it the very same day and posting a wonderfully thoughtful, long comment on it the very same day. (To read his comment, simplyl click on the “comments” link at the bottom of the post, down below.) To summarize his argument: viewed from Australia (already a developed, rich country closely allied to the US), it seems American news gets way more air play than it merits, given how much or little it may affect the lives of people there. If white Australians feel this way, imagine how much less an inhabitant of, say, most parts of Africa, or occupied Iraq, feels that Paris Hilton’s jail time touches their lives – as opposed to their ability to vote safely in a meaningful election, get a meningitis vaccine for their kids, or find food for the family’s dinner. Yet we march blithely onward, acting like the price of our gas, access to developing markets for our corn and soybean products, and above all (for the Bush Greedmeisters and his cabal) our military companies’ ability to sell weapons where they want, when they want with tax subsidies from Joe Taxpayer in Kansas should matter more to those folks than their own dinner tables and paychecks. No, George, it’s not our “freedom” that the world resents…it’s our selfish monopolizing of the world’s resources and blind ignorance of the consequences for everyone else…or even ourselves. So yeah, Ondrej – I agree. Americans are in store for a hard dose of reality somewhere down the line.