Back in the PRoC

"Back in the PRoC.
No one's as lucky as me, yeah.
Back in the PRo
Back in the PRo
Back in the PRoC."

Well, I made it back to Chengdu without any hassle. The streets of China actually appear clean and orderly compared to those of Kathmandu and Nepal. My opinion of Chinese traffic sanity has come full circle in a meager three years. The fashion has changed considerably in that time, shifting from fifties conservatism to eighties kitcsh, though my opinion of it hasn't: Chinese people categorically haven't known how to dress themselves since the middle of the Qing Dynasty or thereabouts. I love it here, of course.

My previous post gave light to a bit of angst I've had over the last short period of time, and it was going to be three separate posts but I felt that there were some undercurrents uniting my disparate thoughts and feelings about the last year. On the whole, I feel really good about the way things are going right now. In fact, the real question is whether to renew my contract for another year this spring.

To put it simply, I feel as if I've totally "changed my life" in the last year. I quit my two part-time jobs in Houston at the end of 2005. I feel like I spent most of the end of that year in Houston hospitals, what with Jay and Nath and Sonny (RIP). At our cousin Holly's wedding in PA Michael convinced me to move to New Orleans. Chris had already decided to leave Portland. I made arrangements and was there before February 2006.

I cut my hair and shaved my beard, and then cut my hair again. Between the Mardi Gras season and starting a good (read "decently paying") job in New Orleans and Mardi Gras, I kept myself quite distracted from what leaving Houston had meant for me. It turned out to be completely essential to leaving behind college and making the transition from that life and lifestyle to a more responsible (read "adult situations") one. It was all a matter of perception, of course, the change in physical space allowing for a new psychological space bereft of the baggage of finishing university. Leaving was doing something, and I had been treading water for eight months.

Some of those bags--the people with whom I lived and loved (though I was a coward to admit it, even to myself)--have found their ways into my dreams, though rarely my reality. I miss them, and I have been mostly unable to feel as though I didn't let them each down in different ways, and that has kept me from even contacting some of them.

As spring became summer in the difficult new Big Easy, I began to feel as if I was again stagnating. Waiting tables, like other types of indentured servitude, has the special property of breaking the will of the waiter. Mike left for Asia, and our idyllic months living together in an economical double shotgun came to a close. I moved near work, living with Chris's longtime friend Bjorn, a tiler from Baton Rouge. Bjorn tosses and heaves a baseball bat in exactly the same fashion as the axe-wielding Neil Cassady described by Tom Wolfe in Acid Test [edit 1/29 with picture]. Shuchin had returned to New Orleans from Houston. Lamar had begun doing well for himself in Alexandria. I embraced Louisiana with a clean heart after almost five years in Texas, but yet it was not enough.

I grew back my beard and decided to return to Asia too, again following Mike but this time to Delhi and Kathmandu. Crossing the globe did more this time than open up new psychological space, it made me feel like a new person again in a way I hadn't experienced since I was nineteen in that period between working the Rayado backpacking program in New Mexico and leaving for China the first time. I didn't have a plan but I had money from the restaurant, and the more I relied on luck or letting it be or karma the clearer things became. I effortlessly found myself in front of an amazing group of students by mid-September, two weeks late by their academic calendar but fifteen months late by mine.

Then it took until Thanksgiving to appreciate that luck, and considering that I still had 1800 Nepali rupees left in my wallet from the summer I headed back to Kathmandu to reunite with my brothers.

I tend to think about periods of my life as discrete units, at least since the time that I decided to leave Alexandria Senior High to attend the Louisiana School. Usually this directs my memory, but I've found it affects the way I make future plans as well. I have been breaking up my postgraduate future into different years, spending this much hypothetical time in China, and that much in Louisiana, and then this much in graduate school until I'm like thirty or something. Only time to time have I remembered how it feels to have the future open, gaping, almost bleeding in my face with possibility and the horrible pleasure that comes with the irresponsibility of living deliberately.

I don't feel that now though I'd like to, but I'm afraid not to have everything planned out in advance and yet somehow scared of committing to anything.

I'm also pretty uncertain as to what I'll be doing for the next couple of weeks. An Australian guy in my hostel dorm room is up for a bar, so at least I have tonight planned. My ill-timed return to Chengdu has left me without local friends who aren't sick or totally out of pocket. My buddy Drako is already back at his home in Amdo, which is the logically next stop on my trip but I hadn't planned on being there for two weeks. I may go up early and then return to Chengdu in a week or so, to reunite with some American friends. It doesn't matter to me all that much, and you, of course, don't give a shit either.

With love,