justinpack

problems

2011-09-07T19:39:00.000-07:00

last post was my annual (or so) "starfish or system" rant. Because, like many Christians (and post Christians), I need to save the world, I get frustrated when I try to figure out what exactly to do. Three options:

1. individualized approach (help 1 person, then the next, then the next...)
2. structural approach (tweak the system and hopefully bring about broader results)
3. ideological approach (change basic assumptions/ideas)

The individualized approach is the most sensitive to specific needs, but it is also time consuming and can be easily undermined by structural issues or ideological issues. For example one could sink lots of time into helping so and so, only to discover it is nearly impossible for them to extricate themselves from a situation due to racism, sexism, cultural issues or deeply embedded problematic ideas. Furthermore, to use the metaphor, after throwing so many starfish back one can wish for a more systematic approach.

The social sciences tend to take the structural approach. They are interested in figuring out what is going on a larger scale, making adjustments and ameliorating problems most often through institutional means. This can have broader effects but it can also have unintended consequences. At worst it becomes human management that is over bureaucratic and insensitive to local conditions.

Lastly, the ideological approach is what philosophy should deal with (it doesn't always). This approach attempts to understand problematic often unrecognized assumptions or ideas. The hope is that bad ideas can be recognized, rooted out and altered/improved/replaced. This approach risks being abstract and impotent.

I have ended up in this last group and feel like I have gained some understanding of the problematic ideas of modernity, but am powerless to do much about it. So I tend to get fed up with 3 and want to go back to 1, but when I focus on 1 I run back to 3. By casting this in a personal light I suppose it may come across as whiny, but I think it is a fairly good mapping of the alternatives and the rudimentary pros and cons.

butterflies and stale air

2011-09-02T21:48:00.000-07:00

"Forgive them Father for they know not what they do."

When DO we know what we are doing? Everything has unintended consequences. Life seems to be a cacophony of butterflies and hurricanes. Except perhaps when you want to stir up a hurricane. Then its all stale air and a dead end job.

We like - we need - to believe that we have control. And we do to some degree. We like to think we can do what is right. And we do to some degree. I think this is why we like to push our morals and our morays to the black and white extremes. I don't kill, I'm good. He kills, he's bad. It's almost always somewhere in between and it isn't hard to get lost in the haze.

God is going to sit me down, pull up an excel file with all the hours of my life added up and divided into general categories: I don't think it will be impressive. Somewhere along the line I wanted to get away from the petty neighborliness that feels so futile. Buy a tie for him, cookies for her. It is exhausting and people are dirty. There must be some structural shortcuts - something we can tweek and really get things moving.

Which battle to fight? little battles get little things done. big battles likely get nothing done. so getting anything done means becoming ephemeral?

Thinking about it all can paralyze.
Not thinking got us in this mess.

[Nothingman by Pearl Jam]
Once divided...nothing left to subtract...
Some words when spoken...can't be taken back...
Walks on his own...with thoughts he can't help thinking...
Future's above...but in the past he's slow and sinking...
Caught a bolt 'a lightnin'...cursed the day he let it go...

Nothingman...
Nothingman...
Isn't it something?
Nothingman...

Angry thoughts about what Josh dealt with, RIP

2011-05-14T16:13:00.000-07:00

My best friend from High School, Josh Flanders, died last month in a motorcycle accident. I went to his funeral in AZ. On some levels it was nice to see people I hadn't seen in years and walk around the old stomping grounds. On another level I found my visit very disturbing. Many good things were said about Josh and I have many things to add to that praise, but I want to talk about the disturbing things for a moment.

The Arizona I grew up in was deeply racist. The Mexicans in sixth grade were mixed throughout the classes but they stuck to themselves. They didn't tend to mingle with the whites too much. All throughout my teenage years racist Mexican jokes were quite common. It would not have been an easy place to have grown up if one was a Mexican.

Josh was 1/2 Mexican. His father was white and left Josh with white skin and the last name Flanders. I didn't know Josh was Mexican when I first met him. He didn't hang out with the Mexicans, he didn't speak Spanish, and he passed himself off as white. I remember him saying racist Mexican jokes.

I found out at the funeral that Josh was born in Mexico City. This came as a shock to me, because Josh had always told me he was born in Utah. He used to tease his brother Jacob for being born in Mexico (when, I think, it was actually Jacob who was born in Utah).

I didn't know Josh was half Mexican at all until we become good friends and he felt comfortable enough to invite me to his house. Josh, his mother and his siblings lived in a Mexican trailer park. I don't remember any white people in that trailer park, although I'm sure there were some. Most of the people who lived there were Mexicans who worked at the next door dairy. I remember the Mexicans driving cars in the neighborhood listened to strange, loud Mexican norteno music. When I asked Josh about it he said he hated that kind of music.

The neighborhood always smelled like cow poo being next to the dairy. After so many good times at Josh's house, I now actually enjoy the smell of cow poo (I reminds me of then).

Clearly, Josh struggled with his mixed race status. Those of use who got to know this side of Josh were aware of how he internalized the racism and didn't broach the subject with him. It wasn't just the racism though. Josh's father was out of the picture by the time Josh was 14 and his mother worked hard at the dairy, but they were never wealthy. As a result Josh worked a lot. He worked construction, he worked odd jobs, he did what he could. One summer I worked with him in an auto-parts yard. It was the worst job I ever had, I hated it. It was normal for Josh.

At the time of his death he was 30, and was just about to graduate from college. Because his mother couldn't afford to put him through college he had to go it alone, as many people do. This was a long, protracted difficult endeavor. Josh was always in and out of jobs, in and out of school. As far as I know, to the end, he refused to apply for scholarships based on his Mexican status. We would argue about this, but he insisted that he didn't want to "mooch" off others. I insisted that the kind of scholarships that he could receive were made precisely for people in his situation. If he ever did finally take advantage of such scholarships it was very late in his life.

Josh had not only internalized the racism of AZ, he had also internalized the Protestant Ethic story that was universal among the religious white people in our hometown. This ethic insists that everyone work hard by themselves and largely for themselves. We shouldn't be dependent on other people. We should work hard. Don't take handouts. Work for what you get. The flip side of this is: don't give handouts. Make people work for what they get.

The western cowboy version of the protestant ethic is particularly virulent. It is very atomistic, by which I mean that it tends towards "every man for himself." It is very suspicious of government and strongly opposed to any form of redistribution of wealth, welfare programs, scholarships for minorities etc.

Josh didn't have a chance. He didn't want to be seen as a "mooching" minority. He didn't want to take handouts. So he worked like a dog and took ten years to finish a BA. Meanwhile, many of his friends, whites, pushed through college without thinking twice about how we were going to pay for things. We had our token jobs that assured both us and our parents that we were working hard, and they supplied the rest. This "rest" could be quite a bit depending.

Josh had a lot of self hatred. This self hatred, I think, was aimed at his relative poverty and his Mexican race. He didn't always articulate this. Only late in his life did he begin to come to grips with it and to overcome his rage.

---

Sitting at his funeral, I couldn't help but be angry while everyone sat around and talked about how hard a worker Josh was. He was a good example of someone who struggled through things and achieved his goals. Yes, true. But the very language which had victimized Josh was being used to praise him. This language also exculpated the rest of us from taking any responsibility for such difficulty. "Josh had a tough situation and worked hard." No one said, we should have paid him a little more than minimum wage when he worked for us. No one said, we should have helped him get through college. No one said, at the funeral, Josh is an example of how many people struggle through life and we, as a community, should be more sensitive and do more, much more, to help.

Many, probably most, of those at Josh's funeral will continue to support politicians and vote for policies that make life difficult for the poor, for minorities and for anyone who needs help. I like to see Josh praised, but I found it difficult to see Josh praised in terms that will also be used to deny others. It is sad for me to see Josh talked about in language that will also be used to support an "every man for himself" type of society. Josh was always very charitable and I wish we talked about him as an example of someone who did his best and yet who could have used more social support too.

RIP my friend, I wish I'd done more for you (even though I know you wouldn't have taken it)
Justin

What I've been reading

2011-04-10T20:16:00.000-07:00

Marxist Philosophy of Education

Post-postmodernism? Now this is interesting: Lipovetski is a French philosopher and seems to be the Zygmunt Bauman of France but with a twist on Bauman. He thinks hypermodernity is both good and bad while Bauman seems to be more pessimistic. Lipovetski examines the "logic of fashion" that drives (hyper)modernity. This is good stuff. His older book "Empire of Fashion" is on my list to read.

Dewey. 6 or 7 years ago I emailed Rorty with some questions. He recommended I read this book as part of his answer and I've finally read it. Dewey has too much faith in science for my taste. Too American. 4 or 5 more books from Dewey in my reading this term.

And the stuff for fun. This is a little too lite for me, a little on the Harry Potter side, but oddly compelling at the same time. i get tired of the genius trope. But it was good enough to get me to read the next one when it comes out in paperback.

Google Earth Eastern Oregon

2011-04-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

I've always loved photography. Someday I'll buy a really nice camera.
Most of the time no one shows up to office hours so I spend my time looking around on Google Earth. lately I've figured I might as well save the cool pictures I find. If I can't take the picture at least I can look at the nice ones other people have taken.

These are all from Eastern Oregon.

Random Beautiful Places

2011-03-31T16:49:00.000-07:00

Araucaria Forest, Chile

Real Del Catorce, Ghost Town, San Luis Potosi, Mexico

Chomolhari, China, just across the border from Bhutan

Kamchatka, Russia

Finger of Fate Spire, Hell Roaring Lake, Idaho

pics from the sea

2011-03-23T13:19:00.000-07:00

yar a timely draft

for fear of wetting myself

Books I've been reading

2011-03-08T19:45:00.000-08:00

Thumbs up.
Foucault isn't a great writer, but he isn't nearly as bad as other French philosophers.

Mixed response.
This won both the Nebula and Hugo award and deserved it. I was unnerved that science wins. Science never wins in Sci Fi. Almost always it is a warning about technology and science. But no, this time science resolves the situation. It took the wind out of the points Asimov was making about stupidity (The title is short for "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain).

Two thumbs up.
People should read this.

Thumbs down.
I'm tired of bad writing. I understand what Derrida is doing, but I don't see why stating the point clearly is that offensive.

Oregon

2011-03-06T19:14:00.000-08:00

Days that are past

2011-03-06T19:00:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted anything on the blog in months.

I'm not sure why.

I think my days of traveling may be over.

San Miguel de Allende

2010-10-15T16:21:00.000-07:00

Parade

2010-10-08T16:59:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the break, classes got started and I was busy getting settled in that regard.

A strange parade in San Miguel Allende. Rather frantic photos on my part.

San Miguel de Allende

2010-09-21T17:42:00.000-07:00

San Miguel de Allende is a beautiful, very touristy colonial town and hour northwest of Queretaro. We were very excited to see the town and started by eating.

Anna had "tunas," cactus fruit.

I had a torta with apple soda.

Anna wanted a close up of the tuna with all the fruit in the background.

We went to mass with the Catholics.

This was their nice church.

This is Allende on the left and Hidalgo on the right. Mexico heroes.

A view of the impressive main church in San Miguel. More of this later.

Actopan, inside

2010-09-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

Right before we left we went to Actopan and got to go inside this time. Previously we had gone on a Monday when the ex-monastery was closed. It turned out to be extremely impressive!

This is where the monks ate. Notice the cool indented ceiling.

This was an incredible stairway. The whole thing was painted with pictures from the history of Augustinian monks, with the oldest at the top and the newest at the bottom.

Here is a picture to give you an idea of what the cool wall paintings looked like. While we were in the monastery a rather odd fellow approached us and started explaining what things were. Sometimes in Mexico there are freelance guides that expect a fee for their services. The problem is sometimes they come up and help and THEN ask for a fee. I thought this guy would do the same, which can be very annoying (turned out he didn't, I think he was hired by the city to try an raise awareness about this great but under appreciated site). But as a result of him being with us I didn't take as many pictures as normal. What I really should have got a picture of were the graffiti made 400 yrs ago by the monks in the bathroom. At first I thought it was just modern day vandalism, but he showed us how in the graffiti the Spanish in their funky clothes were caricatured. There were castles and haciendas drawn up there too. There turned out to be 400 yr old graffiti in a variety of places around the monastery.

The main chappel.

The grody Jebus.

Teaching English in Mexico

2010-09-18T18:01:00.000-07:00

This is Anna's classroom on our last day. We had a fun little party. Notice that there aren't many boys. Busy playing video games during summer vacations.

In the sun.

In the shade.

Justin attack!

Anna with Japnel, who showed up late or the party.

On our last night Tomas paid for a band to come and perform. There were a band made of descendants of Otomi, playing with some strange instruments. The two oldest guys still spoke Otomi and the grandpa (Don Tomas) insisted they teach us some words.

Of course we had to dance.

This is Tomas, Lupita, Eileen and Nadzyeli (who goes by Nadz). Sadly, I don't have a nice picture of Lionel.

Tula River

2010-09-16T16:55:00.000-07:00

This is the nice view looking north at the Tula River from the road we lived on. The river is hidden below these large trees. There was a hot springs at the bottom that was a popular vacationing spot and a small water park had been built up. Lots of people on the weekends.

These are the giant trees that grow by the river. I wish I could remember what they are called. There were a couple of rickety wooden bridges to cross.

Looking back at the hot springs.

Standing on the bridge with Don Tomas. He likes to walk down by the river and he liked to show us the plants. This was actually our last day with the Garcias and we wanted to take some pictures of the river. Any time he saw us headed down to the river he wanted to come.

There were a lot of small little waterfalls that were almost like leaks on the hill.

The bottom looked like it had been mowed but it was actually from people bringing their sheep down to the river.

These are some pictures of the river. Nowadays the river is polluted with water from Mexico City. This is pathetic because the river was so beautiful, even with the stinky water. It was very sad to see the brown water.

This is my favorite picture of the bunch.

At this point we stopped. We had come down the river to see some old symbols painted on the cliff face. No one knew how old they were. Apparently there had been some burial sites up on the cliff above the symbols (which the locals called "el aguila" - the eagle - but those had long since been raided. I don't think archaeologists ever got to see the site. Apparently some guy thought there was buried treasure and bought the land around the area and started digging with big machinery but never found anything.

I like the tangled roots.

I think this is a nice picture of Anna.

This is the view from around the aguila looking back towards Tezontepec.

Ex-convent in San Angel

2010-09-12T15:46:00.000-07:00

The day we went to San Angel was really nice because the plan was to go to Mexico City and see some museums. Which ones? We weren't sure. While looking for an art museum we ran into an ex-convent that was a museum and went inside. Turned out to be real nice.

Can't argue with old paintings.

RAWR RAWR BLAR. Who knows what these guys are saying, but I like that they wrote it out. Some of the painting the words were coming out of their mouths upside down.

Up on top. The place was actually quite spacious.

Nice gardens.

By far the best part was the mummies down in the crypt. Apparently in 1910 during the revolution people raided the convent looking for treasure. While digging in the crypt they found these old mummies. They were quite interesting to look at and a little scary.

My camera was running out of batteries so these were all the pictures I managed to get of the mummies. :(

This is a replica of the standard that Cortez brought into Mexico City when the Spanish first showed up.

San Angel

2010-09-10T18:24:00.000-07:00

This is a neighborhood in Mexico City called San Angel. It was a small town on the side of the lake before the lake was drained (in fact there are some incredible old paintings of what it was like). It is close to Coyoacan. Both of these areas are now very ritzy and pretty.

This picture is of a fountain in a rich guys house that is now a museum.

The fountain if made up of Chinese bowls. I'd heard that people did this but never seen it in person.

His backyard. He also had a big library.

Sitting in a market under a Virgin.

Grody Jebus sitting down too. Lots of these grody Jesus statues around.

The nice convent behind the church in San Angel.

Just some interesting interior details.

I like stairs.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera had a house in San Angel. The house had two parts, this blue part is hers. Apparently they would sleep in "his" house unless they were fighting and then she would stay in "her" house. The houses are connected on top by a overpass thingy. She was from Coyoacan and we went to see her house, known as the blue house, there too.

There were lots of old stuff of Diega Rivera here. His room was interesting because it was set up with his stuff apparently as it was. His shoes on the floor, etc. There were giant paper mache monsters in his art room. Fun to see. Just down the road was an hacienda that had been converted into a hotel. That's a random detail but I just love to see the old haciendas.

Anna on a typical Mexican street on our way out of San Angel.

Tepeitic

2010-09-10T07:24:00.000-07:00

These are some pictures form a small town north of Tezontepec called Tepeitic. We went out here one day for an 80th birthday party that our host was playing at (Lionel played piano in a band). later we went back and took some pictures. The place was nice because it was up in the mountains and a little removed from everything else. It had a very authentic feel.

Apparently it is dirt cheap to get land out here and people are still very knowledgeable about their environment (we ran into a lady who gave us some mushroom soup stuff she had made from mushrooms she had gathered on the mountain).

FOOD!

2010-09-08T08:29:00.000-07:00

I don't know which has better food, Mexico or Thailand. Yum.

These are strange little tamales flavored with licorice (anise) from Santiago de Anaya.

Enchiladas Verdes. These used to be my favorites. So good. Except, since we were at the fair, a brazen fly landed right on my enchiladas and waltzed all over them as I tried to wave it away. I've never seen a fly with such disdain. I actually had to pick him up to get him off it. Don Tomas who was with me said I should just get another plate and throw this one away (he hates flies). Yes I'm a pig: I ate it.

Mole, also at the fair. Very pretty.

Except when the picture isn't so good.

Fair Bread. beloved by Mexican women - who knows why, it wasn't that great.

Anna's beloved dulce de leche candies.

Not a very good picture of delicious enmoladas. Perhaps my new favorite food from Mexico. tortillas dipped in mole with onions and lettuce.

Lupita is from a city called Tulancingo that makes these weird Tortas. She made some for us. They have an enchilada inside. And hot dogs. Weird but delicious. Anna just reminded me they are called Guajalotes, which means turkey. No one knows why.

Even better with Oaxaca hot chocolate.

Lupita also showed us how to make chiles en nogadas, one of Anna's favorites.

And of course there must be cake.

This is a cake shop in Pachuca. I was looking at the interesting building, but Anna kept noticing people with boxes from this cake store. obviously it was very popular, so we had to visit.

This is cake town.

Dance

2010-09-07T10:24:00.000-07:00

A fair isn't a fair without some dancing

Anna is in the background.

La Feria de Santiago de Anaya

2010-09-06T19:52:00.000-07:00

We went to a really fun fair in a smallish town called Santiago de Anaya that is probably 20 km from Actopan. This is their church.

It was magnificently decorated with intricate designs that were woven from the leaves of a kind of cactus they call the mountain palm because it has palm tree like leaves. There are the leaves of the cactus pulled out, dyed then woven together.

This is the inside of the church. Locals from mearby towns had come and had brought their town saints so the church was filled with lots of different saints (lots of Virgin de Guadelupes). people were paying coins to get lightly whipped by the priests and their helpers. it made for a rather odd sight because a bunch of kids in jackets were getting whipped. Clearly their parents had told them to wear jackets so the light whipping didn't hurt. It was a strange sight.

This is the tree man cross. I guess when the Spanish arrived the indigenous people already had crosses which meant "tree" to them. So naturally they stuck their own symbolism in the enforced Catholic symbols and this is the result.

This was one of the most authentic feeling events we went too. Although apparently they have another fair wherein people sell all sorts of strange meats like lizards and snakes and this attracts many people. Either way it was very nice.

Grutas (Caves) of Tolantongo

2010-09-05T12:58:00.000-07:00

About an hour northeast of Ixquimilpan (originally an Otomi town), heading into the Sierra Gorda of Hidalgo, all of the sudden there is a giant chasm that looks like this:

Those pictures don't really do it justice. Oh well. You can get a feel for how mind blowing it is on Google Earth.

Down at the bottom, at least during the wet season, it looks like paradise:

And in one of the canyons there are a series of caves that leak out the beautiful blue water that forms the river (the railings you see in the picture lead to an awesome, very hot, near perfect circular cave):

The most amazing part was this cave. Inside there was a natural tube that shot warm thermal waters straight down from the roof. Out the back side of the cave came cool water. The result was a wonderfully strange place that was hot and cool depending on where you sat or swam. Since it was a cave there were bats.

Crazy beautiful.

I found a tree and had a sit.

Actopan

2010-08-08T16:27:00.000-07:00

1540s

There is an exconvent on the side. 500 yr old pictures.

These are people burning in hell.

Adam and Eve

This was a weird outdoor chapel built to convert the Otomi peoples.

Some sort of giant demon snake eating people. And a bum sleeping in the corner.

Old churches make me happy

2010-08-05T12:27:00.000-07:00

Real del Monte

2010-08-01T12:25:00.000-07:00

This is Real del Monte, a mining town in the top of the mountains above Pachuca. Origionally settled by Cornish miners, they brought along Pastes, which have stuck and are still eaten. We saw some very white, possible descendents, but how could we know?
The town is a weird mix of Mexican and British archetecture. it was qutie cold being way up in the mountains.

Huasca

2010-08-01T12:06:00.000-07:00

Huasca is a small town on the other side of the mountain from Pachuca. We didn't have a lot of time here so i don't have many pictures, but it is a great place since they have preserved it's traditional style. It is a "frozen" town in the sense that they don't let people knock down old buildings or build new ones. unfortunately, as i mentioned, since we didn't have a lot of time we didn't take many pictures. We DID eat some incedible quesedillas. yum!

Prismas Basalticas

2010-07-29T11:52:00.000-07:00

I realized I should just put a bunch of thematic pictures together instead of in seperate posts...
There strange rocks were just outside and up the canyon from the hacienda San Miguel de Regla.

San Miguel Regla

2010-07-27T18:18:00.000-07:00

Entrance.
Notice the arrow/gun slits in the tower next to the door.

not so bad when you aren't where all the sick slaves are. There were areas where they dumped the bodies of the sick and left them there until they died. it was pitch black in that part of the hacienda (below the spanish ovens) so I couldn't take a good picture. When I left I felt both disgusted and amazed by the hacienda. It was a solemn reminder that all beauty created by humanity is the product of slavery. Civilization wouldn't exist without exploitation.

Here is where you pick up your gold. you don't even have to see the indigenous slaves!

naturally part of the servitude of the indigenous peoples was forced conversion. Their souls did need saving after all...

This is near the back gate. All of the walls were topped with obsidian so that if someone tried to leave they would be cut to shreds. They were paid piddly wages. Out the back door there was an underground tunnel that went to the gold mines. It was 20 miles long. the workers that dug it were killed to keep it a secret.

Incidentally a part of the film The Mask of Zorro was filmed here.

San Miguel

2010-07-27T18:03:00.000-07:00

This is the Spanish side of the haciena - rather, the side with Spanish ovens.

And here are the scary places under the spanish ovens part.

Hacienda de San Miguel Regla

2010-07-27T17:41:00.000-07:00

This is San Miguel Regla, an hacienda from the late 1700s. Most of the hacienda is actually underground. The part on the right side is underground smelting area. interestingly, this part had English ovens. Pople went blind working the ovens. The church on the left was built by the owner to "pay back" the virgin. Supposedly at one point he was one of the richest guys in the world and this chappel was covered with gold. in the revolution people stripped all the gold away.

They've supped up the place and it is a resort now. Which is odd considering how many people died here.

These other pictures give you a feel for what it is live underneath - and again, most of the hacienda is underneath the ground. Anna got stuck in this picture.

Convent in Tula

2010-07-24T18:46:00.000-07:00

This are pictures from a convent built in the 1500s. There is a large cathedral next to it, but the cathedral was built in the 1950s or so.

There were some cool old paintings on the walls on the upper floors.

This was some crazy european queen that became a saint. She was from somewhere bizaare like bulgaria or perhaps bavaria. i just remember thinking that she was an odd saint to see on a convent in mexico of all places.

Random Tula

2010-07-24T18:31:00.000-07:00

I am posting all the pictures I have because will filled the memory card on the camera but still want to take more pictures. So I'm dumping the pictures here for now.
These are three that don't relate thematically to the forthcoming pictures so I just threw them in.

another sweet cactus tree

More Atlantes

2010-07-24T18:15:00.000-07:00

The Atlantes of Tula

2010-07-23T14:25:00.000-07:00

my buddy and me

huh?!?

Tula pyramids

2010-07-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

ball court

Images from the Tula pyramids

2010-07-23T14:03:00.000-07:00

Tula flora

2010-07-23T13:45:00.000-07:00

The Nopales get huge here and get to be big cactus trees. Bigger than this one.

This is a cactus tree.

Anna likes the Maguey.

The century plant ones get really big.

oops there are the pyramids...

Tula

2010-07-23T13:22:00.000-07:00

These are some artefacts from the musuem of Tula where the Toltecas built some pyramids. I liked this weird crying face guy.

Apparently the Chacmul sacrifice alters the mayans had they got from the toltecs.

Selene on the right is a student and friend.

Another weird head.

Atlante warrior legs

Zions II

2010-06-28T07:30:00.000-07:00

The narrows. I was exploring with light. My camera isn't good enough to really get into the nuances.

Zions

2010-06-26T10:40:00.000-07:00

Zions in the morning

2010-06-25T18:30:00.000-07:00

We got to Zions around 8AM and the park ranger wasn't ready so we got in for free. Hooray!

We're headed off to Mexico tomorrow (we were going to go today but there was a day delay), so the rest of the pictures will have to wait until after we return. I'll probably have some Mexico pictures to post soon enough.

We entered the East side, which is not as commonly used as the western entrance. The eastern side of the park is at a higher elevation and to get to the main canyon you have to go through a mile long tunnel that was rather freaky. I was driving and Anna was entranced so I don't have any picture of that. There were holes in the tunnel you could see out of but there were signs asking people not to stop.

"I slept in a car last night!"

Anna loves Zions

Red Canyon

2010-06-25T08:10:00.000-07:00

This is Red Canyon. After Bryce (which costs $25 to enter so we just skipped it since we were going to have to pay the same to get into Zions) there is a small area called Red Canyon. Apparently Butch Cassidy hid out here.

As cool as this arch is, it is artificial.

Reminds me of Arizona.

We didn't have much time to stay in Red Canyon since we were headed to Zions. A couple of the rangers claimed that Red Canyon was much better than Bryce for hiking. For some reason people are derisive about Bryce. Anna has been there and thought it was way to cold since it is at a much higher elevation than Zions. Either way, Red Canyon did look fun even if we didn't get to do too much hiking.

Escalante

2010-06-24T17:17:00.000-07:00

I believe this is Calf Creek off to the right.

The view to the left. Some ranch.

Escalante.

From this viewpoint (although I'm not sure about this picture) we could see the Henry mountains and the Navajo mountains that border with Arizona.

Lower Calf Creek Trail

2010-06-24T09:01:00.000-07:00

This is the lower falls.

Calf Creek

2010-06-23T17:50:00.000-07:00

These are all pictures of Calf Creek. It was quite amazing because outside of this canyon it felt like a barren desert but there were deer and turkeys in the canyon. It was full of water too. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of petroglyphs or the granaries because they were very high on the cliff.

Back in the day they used to grow watermelons down in this canyon.

The Freemont Indians grew corn and other things. It is in a fairly wild state now. Both the pioneers and the Freemont had it looking more like farms down there.

Searching for Enlightenment.

Boulder Utah

2010-06-23T06:57:00.000-07:00

This is Boulder Utah. Remarkably picturesque, apparently it was one of the last places in the US to get mail because it used to be so hard to get there. Highway 12 was only paved in 1988 or something crazy like that. I'm not sure how the politics work but apparently the ranchers were being forced out. They use all the water for their cattle and dry up the stream bed, basically killing all the desert except their fields used for cattle. Now there are still some cattle, but the bulk of the town was a couple of restaurants. Tourism not ranching anymore...

Outside of Boulder Highway 12 becomes a road in the sky.

We stopped to enjoy the view.

Looking right. You can see the green canyon at the bottom called calf creek. There was a nice campsite at the bottom we stayed at. Good hiking.

Looking left.

Leaving Capital Reef

2010-06-22T17:09:00.000-07:00

To get out the back side of Capital Reef we had to go up some scary switchbacks. Nice view from the top however.

Outside of Capital Reef is Escalante.

Clinton made Escalante a national monument. Conservatives in Utah were not pleased. That meant they couldn't mess with the land. In Utah Freedom amounts to driving ATVs where ever one pleases.

This is the last of a cool red rock canyon just before (or after, depending on where you are driving from) Deer Creek.

Looking back at the red rock canyon.

Capital Reef III

2010-06-21T09:02:00.000-07:00

The main campground at Capital Reef was full so we ended up going down into the park aiming to camp at Cedar Mesa.

The location of Cedar Mesa was nice, but there were hordes of gnats. The especially liked Anna.

We ended up getting out of there ASAP and found a campground outside the park.

We met some nice people from Colorado that had been eaten alive by gnats the year before. So it looked like we made a good choice. We ended up camping at Deer Creek instead.

Capital Reef II

2010-06-20T14:09:00.000-07:00

She won't get away from the edge! Likely she will be blown off!

Southern Utah Trip: Capital Reef

2010-06-19T12:20:00.000-07:00

Anna and I just got back from a trip to Southern Utah. After traveling down through Manti and near Fish Lake our first stop was Capital Reef.

I am afraid of heights.

The wind made these formations and the wind can blow you off these formations.

Anna isn't afraid of heights.

She could climb up there.

I have to stay in the car.

In Praise of Doubt

2010-05-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

From In Praise of Doubt: How to have Convictions Without becoming a Fanatic by Berger and Zijderveld:

"Relativization, especially in its early phases, is commonly experienced as a great liberation. Much of European and American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries described this experience in great detail. It typically involves a biographical trajectory from a narrow, provincial background into the broad horizons of modern life. Very often such a biography takes place in the context of urbanization: The hero or heroine moves into the big city from a village or small town. there occurs the great transformation of urbanity, Old prejudices and superstitions are discarded, and new ideas and ways of life are enthusiastically embraced. As essential part of this experience is that the individual is then confronted with a multitude of choices that previously were unimaginable--choices of career, intimate relationships, political and religious values, even the very definition of one's own identity. There's no reason to doubt that this process can be exhilarating. Very often it's just that.

"Where is the dialectic here> It's quite simply this: The relativization that was at first experienced as a great unburdening now itself becomes a great burden. The individual now looks back with nostalgia to the lost absolutes of his past; alternatively, he or she searches for new absolutes. the liberation that is now sought is a liberation FROM the burden of relativity, FROM the many choices of the modern condition." (45)

According to the authors there are many different ways to deal with this. Most people immerse themselves in "the busy-ness of life." Some become obsessed with finding the absolute. Totalitarian movements also seek to "escape the burden of freedom." (26)

Two thoughts from bourdieu

2010-05-17T21:05:00.000-07:00

http://mondediplo.com/1998/10/10bourdieu

Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it. It is so in tune with our expectations that it becomes hard to challenge it. Now, more than ever, it is crucial that we work to dissolve the apparently obvious and explore the symbolic structures of the androcentric unconscious that still exists in men and women alike. What are the mechanisms and institutions which make possible the continued reproduction of this age-old domination by men? And is it possible to neutralise them in order to liberate the forces for change which they are instrumental in blocking?

Throughout my life I have been amazed at what one might call the paradox of the doxa: the fact that the order of the world as we know it, with its one-way streets and its no entry signs (both literally and figuratively), its obligations and its penalties, is generally speaking respected. I find it surprising that there are not more transgressions and subversions, crimes and "madnesses" (here you need only think of the extraordinary concordance of thousands of human dispositions - or wills - involved in five minutes of car-driving around the Place de la Bastille in Paris). It is even more surprising that, leaving aside the odd historical accident, the established order, with its relations of domination, its rights and prerogatives, its privileges and its injustices, manages to perpetuate itself so very easily and that it is often possible for the most intolerable conditions of existence to appear as acceptable and even natural.

You can follow the link if you want to read more.

Racist

2010-05-15T16:14:00.000-07:00

I found this quote in a great book about languages called Empires of the Word. I wanted to write it down somewhere were I would remember it...I guess this is as good as any other.

The author is talking about how the USA almost took over Mexico in 1848 but was too racist to do so and instead took over the areas that didn't weren't a fully developed part of Mexico yet.

Senator John J. Calhoun: "To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of...incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours...is the Government of a white race." pg 488

Why I love Borges

2010-05-07T10:23:00.001-07:00

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary . . . More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.
-- 10 November 1941

Sunday Afternoon on Google Earth

2010-04-25T15:54:00.000-07:00

Some of these pictures I didn't want to mess with the size to make it fit this small format. Click on them for the large picture.

Little Wild Horse Canyon, San Rafael Swell

Capital Reef

La Sal mountains (Black Hawk's winter hideout)

near Fish Towers

False Kiva

Elephant Canyon

Against Theodicy

2010-04-19T15:44:00.000-07:00

"I was impelled to the view, which every doctrine of faith would probably find heretical, that it is not God who can help us, but we who must help God."
- Hans Jonas

Jonas tells a story of a God who makes a world and watches as things evolve, frogs come out of the water, the dinosaurs get wiped out, mammals spread across the Earth, humanity eventually comes around, there is a lot of fighting as humans take over the Earth and duke it out with each other. God suffers as he watches humanity.

Jonas was a Jew that survived the Holocaust. His family was killed. His reaction to this is to insist that God had nothing to do with it, that God could have nothing to do with it. Humanity did it to themselves. Evil must be human and it must not be explained away.

This desire to explain evil away is called theodicy. Often it consists in arguments about the nature of God and humanity. But Jonas will have nothing of it. Evil must be recognized, not explained away. ANY EXPLANATION THAT SEEKS TO JUSTIFY SUFFERING AND EVIL IS FLAWED. Evil should not be justified but fought.

Any time someone says "it is all a part of God's plan" they are justifying away evil. They are saying that God is the Deus Ex Machina that will magically make everything better. The only way this would be possible is if evil action were to have never been done. Scars will not disappear. Nothing can "fix" the Holocaust.

God is NOT in control of everything. If He were, He would be failing miserably. I am not sure to what degree I would be comfortable saying God intervenes in human existence, but it is false and dangerous to insist that everything that happens happens because He wills it. It is disingenuous to say so and more often then not it cuts out the human entirely.

I am inclined to agree with Jonas that God is not responsible for everything that happens here. I am also inclined to think that He needs our help. Attempts to put the burden on him may help us feel more at ease with the state of the world, but they also make us comfortable and complacent.

feminine obedience and masculine obedience

2010-03-26T14:28:00.000-07:00

Eve and Adam
So they get contradictory commandments.
1. Don't eat from the tree.
2. Make babies.
They can't do both.

The typical story goes like this:
Satan tempts Eve.
She is tricked. She eats.
Adam has to eat too in order to stay with her.
Eve dumb sinner. Adam competent, but forced into transgression.
Women bad. Men good.

I have been thinking that a much better version goes like this:
Satan tempts Eve.
She realizes that Satan's argument is correct. She cannot obey #2 if she doesn't break #1.
Eve makes the logical and superior choice.
Adam is oblivious to all of this. He is so focused in on obedience to #1 he doesn't put 1 and 2 together.
Eve was smart enough to recognize that the point was not to stay in the garden forever. If they had done things Adam's way they would have remained there playing with tigers in an innocent and ignorant state.
Eve convinces Adam.
They get kicked out.
They rejoice in their (her?) decision.

I think there is something to this second version. The Adam and Eve story seems to often be used as a story to stress the importance of obedience and the danger of sin (whether it be taken allegorically or not). What I have never seen discussed is the possibility that obedience itself is more complicated than obey or not. Interestingly, it seems to be gendered.

Masculine obedience: i have noticed that men tend to be more black and white than women. We like things to be crystal clear. Choice A: good, choice B: bad. This view doesn't tend to recognize the possibility of contradictory commandments. That would be illogical of God. This view is often extended out in such a way that the commandments of God become a giant but completely coherent, independently comprehensible set of rights and wrongs. Getting to heaven involves making the right choice at each juncture.

But this seems to be contradicted right off the bat by the Adam and Eve story. If we take it to be a foundational story, could it not be that one of the major points the story makes is that human existence is riddled with ambiguity? Is it not more accurate to say that some things are bad, other good, AND OTHERS EVEN BETTER. Masculine obedience like to see only BAD and GOOD, but the world seems to be more complicated than this.

Eve figured this out. And her daughters seem to be better at recognizing this too. Men tend to be atomistic. Women on the other hand seem to be good at seeing the interconnections between things. Feminine obedience, then, is more sensitive than masculine obedience and sees that the choice is more often than not, NOT a choice between BAD and GOOD, but between GOOD and BETTER (or BAD and WORSE as it may be). Men don't like this. They like the assurance that the choice they have made is the only GOOD option. Women, on the other hand, tend to recognize the pros and cons of every decision, how such decisions will affect others and as a result don't see the world so black and white.

The masculine version of obedience is simplistic. It gains a kind of power in so doing, but it also becomes something problematic. Suppose there is a particular choice between A and B. According to feminine logic A is BETTER and B is GOOD. But masculine logic that wants black and white says A is GOOD and B is BAD. According to feminine logic choosing B over A is not necessarily a sin, just a different, if not as good, choice. But for the man, choosing B over A is a grave mistake in judgment, a sin. Feminine obedience and logic can often recognize the reason in choosing B and the potential good it offers. Masculine logic doesn't. Furthermore, often a person is associated with the choice they have made. Thus the Feminine logic sees the person who chooses B to be GOOD (even though they may have not chosen the BETTER option) while masculine logic just sees BAD.

The masculine obedience and logic thus can become a system that ostracizes while the feminine system is one that includes.

This isn't the only mistake the masculine obedience can make. Suppose there are 4 choices. A, B, C and D. What if A B and C each have attractive parts and D is the wrong choice (or even suppose they all have some truth). If the masculine is insensitive to these differences it not only risks ostracizing alternative good choices (mistaking a GOOD choice as the ONLY good choice) but also risks taking an inferior choice as the BEST choice and systematically enforcing it although it is an inferior choice.

I think this often happens.

Whether it is fair to gender it this way or not, i don't know. Perhaps I'm giving a masculine version of gender obedience (only giving you two options when there may be many)!

Either way, I suspect that the common denigration of Eve is deeply mistaken. Maybe it wasn't Eve that made the mistake, but Adam - by being dogmatically obedient to one commandment and not seeing the inherent complexity and alternatives. Had they done it his way they would have been stuck in the garden forever and the whole plan of God would be stuck on pause.

Again, although it may not be fair to gender it, I think there is something to this. I think one of the greater threats to belief in God is a kind of narrow minded, masculine(?), form of thinking that cannot recognize the ambivalence and difficulty of human life.

Perhaps we need to begin holding Eve up as the hero and thinking about how the problematic nature of Adam's dogmatic obedience.

Adults of Israel and Free Agency

2010-02-23T07:39:00.000-08:00

Whenever the discussion of free agency comes up the inevitable example seems to be the kind of choices parents give children: You will share your toys with your brother and I'll give you both a treat later or you will go to timeout for 10 minutes. The explanation of the example is that the child is free to choice the right thing and get a cookie or choose the wrong thing and get time out. But any kid knows this is bunk. It isn't much of a choice at all, the whole thing is a set up. Cookie or timeout? Of course cookie. Why a kid does rebel and use his free agency to choose timeout is often out of frustration and rejection of such a stupid set of options being presented as if there really was much of an option.

Imagine if a mafia type came to your house, put a gun to your head and said: "pay me protection money or I will shoot you in the head." You still have a choice. Die or pay the jerk money. It isn't much of a choice however.

And yet this is precisely how free agency gets talked about. You can choose to do the right and go to heaven where we have and all hour buffet or you can choose evil and burn in hell for a long time. Doesn't seem like much of an option. No one wants to go to hell.

The Children of Israel in the Old testament are always treated like this. Do what I say or you will be invaded by Mongolians and slaughtered like animals. Great.

And yet the idiots of Israel kept getting it wrong. Don't get me wrong, there is still room for choice. Obviously it comes down to temporary pleasures that lead to hell or eternal pleasures in the next life. So, yes there is a choice here, although it seems to me to be a fairly stupid option and I think it creates all sorts of psychic trauma.

The problem with these kinds of stark calculated options, obedience and heaven later or fun now and hell later, is that it often turns people into childish rebels or arrogant pharisees. The childish rebels are sometimes just childish, but sometimes they are genuinely annoyed at such a stupid set of options and rebel at such an absurd situation. I can sympathize with that. When the mafia guy puts a gun to my head and says give me money or die, there is a part of me that feels like responding by saying "screw you, I'll die before I give a jerk like you money." Similarly, I think there are a lot of people who rebel against God because they feel like God is threatening them will hell. So they say "forget it, this is such a raw deal, I don't want to be manipulated into obedience so I'm not even playing the game."

But this childish treatment also produces childish followers. Since the options have been turned into a set of rules that can either be obeyed or not, one of the dangers for the followers is that they come to obsess with the rules and miss out on the larger picture. They become Pharisees telling everyone how many times to wash their hands, which hand to take the sacrament with, how many steps one can take on the Sabbath etc. They turn God into a kind of contract. The Gospel gets turned into a math problem, with a variety of steps that lead to salvation. One just has to walk through the steps in the right order and God will have to let one into Heaven. I find it really weird when people treat God as if he made a contract and if we do our part he HAS to comply on His end. There is a tingle of forcing Gods hand to this that seems misguided.

This sort of view turns the whole relationship between God and humanity into a robotic relationship. A giant math problem. If I do A, B and C I get D.

The philosopher Kant argued that it is undignified for both humanity and God to be reduced to this kind of calculus and contract. He argued that you can't tell if a person is good or bad if they are just following God based on either fear of punishment (hell) or a desire for reward (heaven). To know if a person is truly good, if they will make correct choices, requires letting them make these choices in a manner that is free and to let them see the results of their own choices. You can't spell out the consequences beforehand, or they might just base their choices on a calculus of desired results/avoiding undesired results.

Kant argues that only in an environment where everything isn't spelled out can you truly see whether a person will choose good or not. A child that aims for a cookie or avoiding timeout doesn't really make a free choice. They make a calculated choice. If you really want them to learn and to really see if they are making the right choice for the right reason you have to let them go.

In other words, you have to let them be adults, make their own choices and accept responsibility for it.

Of course and adult doesn't function in a vacuum. They have all kinds of ideas about what is wrong or right. But the world of adults in a whole in which the answers to what is right are not always straight forward. Life is more difficult than cookie or timeout.

Oddly enough, no one seems to talk about about Adam and Eve this way. They are given commandments that contradict: Don't eat the fruit and make babies. But they can't make babies without the knowledge that comes from eating the fruit. Eventually Eve figures this out and makes a hard decision, break one commandment to fulfill another.

Most of the comments I've seen about this try to turn it from the complicated difficult decision into an easier one by doing something like turning the choice from a sin into a transgression - which in my mind is a vague and cheap way out of the conundrum.

What if the story of Adam and Eve is a story about being an adult in and adult world where things aren't as simple as cookie or timeout? What is life is more like what Nephi had to deal with: kill Laban even though it is against the commandments.

We do NOT like these messy stories. The messiest story of all, Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac, is, as Kierkegaard pointed out, more often than not treated all to facilely.

My experience is that more often than not we seek for an easy way out. Abraham was just a test. Nephi gets a rational explanation. The Adam and Eve one never really gets resolved. The most we get is an explanation that attempts to disarm the situation by calling their choice a "transgression" and not a sin.

In the end, I feel inclined to think that Jesus represents an invitation into an adult world. It is a world were some choices are not easy. Where consequences are not immediately apparent. Where lessons are learned through experience and wrong choices. Where life CANNOT possibly be turned into a calculation. This adult world is a world where one has to grow up and stop looking for easy formulas. It is the world of real free agency.

I want to hear some talk of the Adults of Israel or the Adults of Zion, instead of the Children of Israel and Zion. Seems to me the whole point of all this is get people beyond being children and to be like God - and not God the robot, but God the competent negotiator of a complicated, contradictory world. I want real options, difficult options, instead of having the gun of hell aimed at my head and the buffet in heaven hung over it. That doesn't seem much of a choice at all.

Be taken care of or not

2010-02-13T07:13:00.000-08:00

I haven't commented much lately on this personal blog. Its been a weird month. Not bad, just strange. i am teaching a couple classes and working on my thesis, which I am actually hoping to polish up this weekend and take to my profes. Anna and I are waiting to hear back from grad schools and so we're just working and waiting. I enjoy teaching the classes I have at UVU and there is an air of finality around it: probably the last time I'll be paid squat. I think this more than anything is the strange part, even though I am teaching classes and in a position of authority I get paid as much as the Subway sandwich guy and no one really cares what I do. Now all of the sudden I'm on track to be a professor myself and will be doing things that ostensibly matter and getting paid as if it matters, and yet I know I won't be doing anything different than I'm doing now. I'll just have another piece of paper.

It is exciting and disturbing at the same time. If you are in the system you are taken care of. If you aren't, as I am right now, no one cares. For me it is very important to remember that marginalized position. Don't get me wrong, I didn't grow up in the ghetto, there is a lot I DON'T know about, but I think it is so easy to get sucked up in the game and go with the flow that those that can't play get ignored. Since I'm allowed to play on the lowest level, I like to think I understand both sides to some degree. Perhaps that is arrogant on my part. I suspect however, that I will only be comfortable in that position. If, someday, someone wants to give me a book allowance, they'll get no complaint from me, but it will still feel...odd if not wrong.

Cloudburst

2010-01-25T19:58:00.000-08:00

The following comments should be read while listening to this new, effulgent song by Pearl Jam:

Last week I was on the bus riding down to Orem when the skies above the mountains in the Salt Lake valley opened up. They sky was bright blue but there were misty clouds hovering over the mountains and it made for the strangest impression. Even though I was just sitting on the bus I felt like i was flying above the mountains. i sat there staring out the window wondering if anyone else was seeing this. The last time I remember feeling this was was in Dali and Lijiang China near the foot hills of the Himalayas. Even though I was below the mountains, I remember seeing them at a distance in the shifting clouds and blue sky. What the heck, it looked like this:

Click on the one above and look at the picture in detail. Amazing.

While sitting there on the bus it occurred to me. I've been to China. I've seen mountains that had red pandas in them and wandered around the streets quiet and alone.

I was so happy. Just bursting out like a cloudburst. Or the strange surplus of light you would get in the Arizona and Mexican desert. The world was TOO bright. The world was suffused with light and glowing. After I taught class I walked from UVU to grandmas house. The world was too wonderful for that one strange day in January, sunny and bright with the winter bite -- how could I not walk? how could everyone else bustle about when the world was overwhelmingly beautiful for this one moment?

Those moments are only meaningful if they happen once and a while. If they happened all the time they would become mundane and normal. Or perhaps I would burn myself out with joy.

Of course pearl Jam would be the band that gets it right:

Just Breathe by Pearl Jam

Yes I understand that every life must end,
As we sit alone, I know someday we must go,
I'm a lucky man to count on both hands
The ones I love...

Some folks have just one,
Others they got none,
Stay with me...
Lets just breathe.

Practiced are my sins,
Never gonna let me win,
Under everything, just another human being,
Yeah, I don't wanna hurt, there's so much in this world
to make me bleed.

Stay with me...
You're all I see.

Did I say that I need you?
Did I say that I want you?
Oh, if I didn't I'm a fool, you see...
No one knows this more than me,
As I come clean.

I wonder everyday
As I look upon your face,
Everything you gave
And nothing you would take,
Nothing you would take...
Everything you gave.

Did I say that I need you?
Oh, Did I say that I want you?
Oh, if I didn't I'm a fool, you see
No one knows this more than me...
like I come clean.

Nothing you would take...
Everything you gave.
Hold me till I die...
Meet you on the other side.

a strange clamoring ugly tenuous order

2010-01-15T18:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had a strange experience.
I am teaching a couple of classes at UVU and as part of their classwork I have them watch some movies. I scheduled the movie for 6 PM in a big room and probably 30 - 40 students showed up only to find that I couldn't get the volume turned up loud enough for some strange reason. I tried to call for technical help to figure out what was the problem only to discover there didn't seem to be anyone in any sort of administrative position at all around the entire campus. I dismissed the students and apologized for the weird glitch and then went home.

While walking accross campus I noticed that there were students everywhere. There are lots of night classes, kids were studying in the hall, jogging in the gym, eating, sitting at tables and in classes, but it was like there was not a single administrative individual in sight. There were janitors moving around, but every office was closed. There was an odd feeling about all of it, as if there were too many kids for the school to handle, so they just dump them in the hands an army of underpaid adjunct professors like myself: "I'm going home, you watch after the students and make sure they don't wreck up the place." It felt like one of those odd moments when you look behind the curtain and see the bare machinery and you realize it is run by mostly inept people and moments away from collapsing. Maybe they aren't inept, but they certainly don't seem competent.

Being a missionary was a weird situation like this. you aren't sure what you are doing even though you always thought people in this situation would, but now your there and you have no idea what you are supposed to do. I suppose having kids is the same way. It is unnerving to see how incredibly fallible some of these institutions are.

I work 1 hr a day, 5 days a week. I often am riding the bus for up to 4 hours a day. It is absurd. Don't get me wrong, I choose to do this because I like teaching, but it is strange to think that in terms of earnings I am living under the poverty line while there are others who have a similar class load but publish a paper a semester and get paid $60,000. It is a strange moment to discover you are as competent as people above you - which alternatively implies they are as incompetent as you are.

After dismissing the class early on account of the confusing technology and my ineptitude I walked up the road and bought a Krispy Kreme, looked at a car wreck and the ambulances while crossing the road and got on the bus, feeling like a ghost.

I am not in a bad place. I don't need money, I just needed something to do and these classes give me the latter if not much of the former. Carole is letting us stay at her place. I am almost finished with a second MA degree for which I generated no debt at all and actually managed to save money. I'm waiting around to hear from grad programs and I've got it pretty good.

And yet my liminal position has left me feeling ephemeral and wrathlike and yet oh so typical. I'm another nobody. Another person that holds things together while the administators who make the real money go home. And yet I'm the everyman. I'm the woman who works quietly at home and never gets publicity, the Guatemalan guy working at Carl's Junior for minimum wage, the worker who fixes a car and then waves as people drive off. But I'm also not. i don't have to worry about the next pay check, I have no house payments, I have lots of spare time.

I really hate it when those same rich administators start lecturing everyone about how everyone earns what they are worth, how taxes are bad and how the redistribution of wealth is injust. Strangely and distrubingly, they don't see that the wealth is already being redistributed, unfairly, in their direction. It is funny how some of the hardest workers, say construction workers or fruit pickers or factory workers are treated as inferior because they are replacible.

When I walked down that street in Orem with a donut in my hand watching the traffic jammed up because of the accident at the intersection I could see all the people in each car, talking on cell phones, listening to music in the eerie, unnatural commercial lights and I just couldn't help but feel like a bum, looking in on a strange society that will only let you back in if you play their game. Get the right signature on the right paper and you can come in out of the cold. Smile up at the administrators, learn the rules to win friends and influence people and you can get in our lines and hear our gossip.

I feel like I have to keep moving or I would go crazy. it's a strange place we live in, a strange clamoringugly tenuous order.

Eat more Kim Chi

2009-12-27T16:28:00.000-08:00

eat kim chi!

2009-12-25T16:03:00.000-08:00

C Wright Mills and American totalitarianism

2009-12-15T07:52:00.000-08:00

I have recently discovered the Sociologist C Wright Mills. His book the Sociological Imagination was wonderful and I feel like he is the kind of person I would have liked to work with. Here is a quote from Steven Seidman about C Wright Mills take on modern America.

"Mills imagined America drifting into a quiet totalitarianism in contrast to the noisy harsher version in the Societ Union. Its basic feature is the development of a dependent social mass ruled by an elite through impersonal bureaucracies and the media. A totalitarian society is marked by the absence or enfeeblement of public debate and the social movements that influence the direction of society. In the Societ Union, a state dictatorship undermined the possibility of a democratic society; in the United States, the formulation of a mass consumer culture coupled with the consolidation of a power elite threatened the demise of democracy. The illusion of freedom perptuated by consumerism and electorial politics blinded Americans to their social drift."

Sounds about right to me.

Heretical Thoughts: Origional Sin

2009-11-27T07:55:00.000-08:00

It is a little bit difficult to figure out what the origional sin was. If we believe traditional Christian orthodoxy, Adam and Eve had sex. I'm not sure where exactly they get that idea, but that's the story.

As far as I can tell there is no Biblical evidence for this and Mormons certainly shouldn't take it seriously. In the Mormon version the origional sin seems to be disobeying God. But then again, God gives contradictory commandments: don't eat from the tree, have babies. Adam goes blissfully along, Satan tells Eve she can't do both, she sees the logic and goes for it. Later after getting kicked out of the garden they both agree it was the right decision.

It is a bizaare story. God gives them contradictory commandments, then kicks them out for not obeying. If they had not eaten the forbidden fruit would they have just hung around for 1000 years until God finally says you idiots I really meant for you to eat the fruit? How long do they go for before they get kicked out for not obeying that commandment? This is strange stuff.

There is a sense that what really matters is the symbol. Humans sin and as such cannot live with God and are condemned, etc. The origional sin is more a representation of all of humanity's inevitable sins.

Sometimes traditional Christians talk this way, but sometimes they act like the origional sin (sex) tainted humanity. Just by being human you are tainted. babies that are fresh born are tainted, so they must be baptized asap.

Mormons don't buy this either. Mormons opt for the option that the origional sin is a symbol of humanities fallen state, not some metaphysical taint. This still leaves unanswered the question of what exactly the origional sin is. Again, for traditional Christianity it is sex. Often mormons talk about it like it is disobedience. But, again, this doesn't make sense to me. Disobedience was inevitable by the conditions set up in the garden.

Does this really matter? I think it does. Traditional Christianity thought sex was the origional sin and this made sex a very bad act. It represents a turn away from the spiritual, a choice to embrace the carnal over the etherial. So, naturally, if you start off with those assumptions, people start talking like their physical bodies themselves are bad. Next thing you know people are whipping themselves, starving themselves, assiduously avoiding sex, shaving their heads, etc.

Mormons don't think of sex as the origional sin and reject many of the implications that are drawn by traditional Christians. Sex isn't bad. The physical body isn't bad. It just needs to be used in the right way.

On the contrary, as I have already pointed out, Mormons seem to see the origional sin as disobedience. I have argued that this doesn't make sense solely based on the Adam and Eve story, but it is plausable in a metaphorical sense as a symbol of the human condition.

I don't like this. Just as taking sex as the origional sin leads to a culture that denigrates the human body and rejects this life (although I should mention that Jews didn't read the story this way, it seems that what happened was Christians adapted the Platonic assumptions about the physical world being bad and then interpreted the Bible on these grounds, thus producing the origional sin = sex story), the Mormon tendency to see the origional sin as disobedience leads to a stultifying culture of obedience.

What is wrong with a culture of obedience? Too often it is mindless obedience. Tell me what to do and I will do it. this leads to all sorts of problems because humans and prophets are fallible and if all we ever do is obey then we risk doing something immoral in the name of God. To put it bluntly, the Nazi's produced a society that was pretty obedient. God doesn't want mindlessness. He may want obedience, but he also wants competence and competence requires intelligently weighing alternatives, motives, nuances, etc. Too often, painfully too often in my opinion, mormons are guilty of this.

I really dislike the mindless culture of obedience. I want to suggest an alternative origional sin story. In my mind the Adam and Eve story is convoluted and paradoxical. I don't think the Adam and Eve story tells us that we are supposed to be obedient at all, I think it shows us something much more complicated about the complexity and possible ethical conundrums that are inevitable with a pluralistic humanity. But I want to leave this question and ask, if disobedience is NOT the origional sin, what is?

Interestingly, the Book of Mormon has a rough equivalent of the Pure State like the Garden of Eden. While not sinless, there is nonetheless a period of 200 years after Christ comes when a Zion like society is established and there is "no envyings, nor strifes, nor tumults, nor whoredoms, nor lyings, nor murders, nor any manner of lasciviousness; and surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God." (4 Nephi 1:16)

I find it interesting that 4 Nephi doesn't play a much larger role in LDS theology and popular culture. Mormons love talking about how humanity is here to have joy (2 Nephi 2:25). You would think we would be intersted in the happiest people to ever exist in the history of the world.

Furthermore you would think we would be interested in what destroyed the happiest people in the world. Whatever sin destroyed the happiest people in the history of the world should merit major reflection and consideration as the/an origional sin.

It is fashion. "...there began to be among them those who were lifted up in pride, such as the wearing of costly apparel, and all manner of fine pearls, and of the fine things of the world." (4 Nephi 1:24)

Sure we could say it is pride, but the explicit manifestation of what destroyed the happiest people in the history of the world is fashion.

"And from that time forth they did have their goods and their substance no more common among them.
"And they began to be divided into classes; and they began to build up churches unto themselves to get gain, and began to deny the true church of Christ." (25 - 26)

The clearest I have ever found the origional sin, the fundamental sin, stated in the scriptures occurs in D&C 49:20.

"But it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin."

There it is. People aren't supposed to have more crap than each other. They are supposed to share. Sin begins when one person attempts to get more crap than another. And that is precisely what fashion, the great destroyer of the happiest people ever, does. It sets one person above another.

The question of fashion, of setting ourselves against and above others, is everywhere in the scriptures. But Mormons largely ignore it. Why?

Personally I believe it is because Mormons have bought into the doctrine of Korihor, which states: "every man fared in this life according to the management of the creature; therefore every man prospered according to his genius, and that every man conquered according to his strength" (Alma 30: 17). Korihor suggests every person should be able to "make use of that which is their own" (28). Essentially Korihor says it is a dog eat dog world and we all have to fight to get what is ours for our family. Protect your own first.

This attitude is related to the Protestant Ethic, which is still very present in America and plays a foundational role in the rise and perpetuation of capitalism. It isn't going away anytime soon and, in my opinion, it is another version of the fundamental sin.

Why don't Mormons fixate on 4 Mephi? Because it condemns us here and now. We love our fashion, we love fighting to protect our own, and we hate having to share.

It is black Friday. People all over the united States are running to stores, trampling each other, buying meaningless garbage to try and distinguish themselves. It is probably worse here in Utah than other places.

Reverence

2009-11-22T03:43:00.000-08:00

it is 4:44 AM. I woke up at 3 and didn't feel tired. It is noon in Korea.

The last weekend before we left was bittersweet. I had been in a zombie like state for a couple monthes and fall was finally dying. The cold in Korea has an edge. Somehow we ended up at Coex, a large underground mall. Overpriced and silly as they are, sometimes I like to wander around malls just to see people. It is like poking an ant hills, the shoppers frantically scrounging around for another supercillious sale, another preplanned discount. I'd rather be at an old market than a mall, but modern gods are as thorough as the old ones--old gods can stay around as long as they sell.

Out the north side of Coex there is a large Buddhist temple complex with a huge Buddha statue. Inevitably Anna and I ended up hunkered down in front of it watching the last leaves swirl around the grainy grey figure and she asked if I thought it had a soul.

I think the buildings, statues and cultural creations that humans make are embodiments of the world of their creators. This giant buddha statue with tiny Korean figures below it bowing down repeatedly has a soul. Granted, if you knock it down no djinn emerges and screeches away. But there is a presence to ancient things left behind, a world that was made flesh and if you listen it forces itself upon you.

What is the difference between the person who stands before the Buddha statue and feels God, history, ideals and culture and the person who feels nothing and would rather get back into the warm mall? I've given a lot of thought about this, and it was only sitting there with the smell of incense tickling in the rigid wind after having emerged from the oppressive chemical frankenstein perfumes of the mall that I realized it is the same thing that leads some people to be indifferent to animals while others respect them: reverence.

Perhaps it is right to associate reverence with obedience, but turning it into a sunday school virtue doesn't do it justice. Max Weber was getting at this when he argued modern life disenchants the world, eliminates the eternal, the power of the external. It turns us all into hermetically sealed headons that only reach outside ourselves in voyeuristic gestures driven by a pleasure calculus. The outside world ceases to be something we listen to, something that we must acknowledge and revere and instead becomes something we consume (while at the same time turning ourselves into commodities to be ranked, wondered at and bought).

In a world where we are taught to go out and get what we want it is hard to learn to be gotten. We are in the full time business of cracking open tombs and divulging secrets, lifting up skirts and dissecting corpses. When we aren't actively dispelling them, we no longer can take the time to pay attention to the souls all around us.

Modernity is learned irreverence. Little kids have reverence about the world. They are excited by it, open to it. So much of the madness that is modern life is driven by the ability to shut off reverence. Economically, reverence is a disaster. The last thing the businessman and entrepreneur wants to deal with is their potential customers detained in a stream watching waterbugs and minnows. So we are stimulated by the new omnipresent force in modernity, commericals, into a constant state of voyeurism.

Anna and I talked about this while sitting before that statue. Then we sat in a temple for a while and watched as people stand up, then get on their knees, then bow, then stand back up, then get on their knees, then bow, then get back up. The sound of breathing, shuffling, quiet prayers and clinking prayer beads. There was a little temple in Suwon than was the first place I took Anna to. No one was there. No Koreans, no foreigners. i remember we sat down in the temple and were quiet for a long time. Then we talked.

being alone in the desert has the same effect.

It it important to be small. To be a part of something bigger. Too see the god in a statue and the god in a scarlet tanager that flits briefly from one Saguaro to another.

CDG 5

2009-11-09T17:08:00.000-08:00

If you are wondering why I have been posting so many pictures it is partially because I can store them here and also because I might as well show them.

CDG 4

2009-11-07T15:00:00.000-08:00

More Chang Deok Gung

CDG 3

2009-11-04T16:02:00.000-08:00

Details from the servants quarters. Oddly enough I found the plain brown and white servants quarters the most beautiful buildings in Chang Deok Gung.

These two little kids were holding hands and skipping and Anna said "Justin, get the camera!" Didn't quite get them in the door but close enough.

CDG2

2009-11-03T02:13:00.000-08:00

Chang Deok Gung

2009-11-02T02:41:00.000-08:00

This was the King's main palace until the Japanese took over in 1910 or so.

Wei guk! Wei guk!

Housekeeping!

Wa wa wee wa.

pics

2009-10-30T17:58:00.000-07:00

Pheasants and Indian Food

2009-10-29T15:22:00.000-07:00

Anna and I went to visit Samakhan, my old favorite restaurant. it was even better now.

Stupid sideways picture.

I think maybe some ten years down the line if we are more settled, perhaps I might like to raise exotic pheasants. They are basically awesome chickens.

Golden phesants! Yes

Cacti garden

2009-10-26T16:01:00.000-07:00

We visited the zoo. Like always, I especially liked the cacti garden.

These beats are 20 years old

2009-10-22T17:47:00.000-07:00

The IS and the OUGHT

2009-10-16T20:25:00.000-07:00

In the magnificently titled Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard, using the pseudonym of Johann Climacus, argues that we finish too easily. We are always finishing.

He is specifically refering to Christianity. His claim is that too many people claim to be Christian and think they are finished. It is as if by claiming to be Christians we feel content that we are on the right path and forget that there is a path to be followed. For Climacus, it would be better to say I hope to be a Christian some day. I aspire to be worthy of the name Christian. Claiming to be it already makes people think there is no more work to be done.

The same thing happens with democracy and rationality. Both were ideals but too often are taken as givens.

I don't know very many people who recognize that we don't really live in a democratic society. Many people voting once or twice every couple of years doesn't constitute a democracy. Democracy means rule by the people. But we certainly don't rule ourselves. Most often we don't even take responsiblity for ourselves. We don't run our own lives. Most of us are paid by others to spend 8 hours a day doing things that will make them even more money. Albert Schweitzer talks about how, despite all the wonderful benefits of modern technology, one of the odd results is that people come home so tired and atrophied from their factory like dayjobs that the most they can handle is watching TV, drinking, or seeking some other distraction that can help them relax and, as we say, unwind. As he puts it, we become so exhausted from physical exertion that our spiritual sides get ignored. And by spiritual he means the communal, the educational, the democratic.

Instead of meeting in large groups and intelligently thinking about the future of our communities we go out to restaurants, watch movies, sports, etc. Some of the founding fathers argued that the masses would never arise above such mundane lives. The common man could not be trusted because he worked on a farm all day and doesn't have the time or intelligence to develop to really participate in government (this is why we have the electorial college and other institutions that are meant to keep out the common man and make the US a republic more than a democracy). Others insisted that the common man COULD if he or she was educated. Then there were others that argued in a Rousseauian vein that the common was the only one that could be trusted and that we should leave all government to them (this last alternative was the anachic group, like Thomas Jefferson).

Either way, for a democracy to truly function, you need an intelligent, competent group of individuals who have the time to meet and work through local problems, etc. This is clearly not what the US has. At best we have a oligarchy.

Most Americans simply assume that we ALREADY have a democracy. Sadly, those same people likely cannot say what a true democracy would be like. By assuming that they have already accomplished a democratic society, they never feel the impetus to think about how we fall short or even to articulate what democracy is.

Frankly, it is absurd.

Rationality hasn't done much better.

Rationality was a goal. A rational society was to be a polite, sensible, open, intelligent, communicating society. It would be accomplished through education.

But for a variety of reasons, rationality has become something we assume everyone ALREADY is, instead of recognizing how deeply irrational we are and working to get out the kinks and create a truly rational society.

If that wasn't bad enough, the idea of rationality has been radically and fatally warped to mean something completely different that what it was intended to mean. Rationality got hijacked by economists and came to mean "weighing pros and cons" to figure out what was in one's best interest. Weber says there are different kinds of rationality and calls this economic version "instrumental rationality."

So instead of an idealist vision of people communicating openly and thinking through different alternatives, rationality became a supposed natural human propensity to seek what was in their own best interests.

In the case of Christianity, Democracy and Rationality something that was meant to be a difficult alternative that serves as a regulative ideal instead was taken as a granted or warped into something we already had. This is very nice for helping make people feel good about themselves, but it is very bad if you actually care about really being a Christian, really achieving a democratic society or really being rational.

Leo Strauss and others argue that modern society begins when Machiavelli specifically and the Renaissance generally decided to base decisions about human based on the way there WERE rather than how they SHOULD be. The ancients, Plato specifically and many Christian followers of Plato, talked about humanity as it SHOULD be, rather that how it IS or WAS.

But modernity said, we're not paying attention to the way things ARE, we have our heads in the clouds. Lets stop thinking about how things OUGHT to be and instead start dealing with things as they ARE and people as they ARE.

The ideals, the oughts, were around still. They took a beating in the early modern period though. Lots of thinkers focused on how to make the best society possible based on the way people are. Only with Kant in the late 1700s do we get an explicit recognition that humans are very malliable and that we can indeed be very different. But this claim is a fairly controversial one on my part that involves a great deal of simplification. I'll just skip it for now and point out how this divide between the IS and the OUGHT tends to used in contemporary politics.

Since the French Revolution Conservative meant those that want to keep things the way they are. Conservatives stress pragmatically recognizing the limitations of people. People are self intersted. Liberals were origionally those who sought more freedom, especially economically. Ironically, the origional liberals were market minded rebels that opposed the artistocrats (the bourgesoisie). The artistocratic conservatives wanted to preserve the social order. The liberals wanted to change things.

Obviously the liberals won and we have moved increasingly away from an aristocratic society. but the old liberals have become the new conservatives. When the liberals won, they changed things and made the world into a market driven one. now they are the statis quo. The origional liberals have now become the conservatives that want to preserve the world the way it is. the new liberals are more akin to 19th century socialists. they want to change society to be more egalitarian. In the US at least, leftists that are concerned with how things OUGHT to be and who want to CHANGE them are now called liberals. Confusingly the old liberals have now become the conservatives and they don't want to change things. This is why in Europe they (Reagon and the Margaret Thatcher types) are known as neo-liberals. To avoid confusion in the US they are known as neo-cons.

It gets more complicated though. Contemporary leftists (liberals) often claim science for themselves. Conservatives (or as they are called in Europe, neo-liberals) have now claimed they are the party of religion. But religion has always been idealistic. Thus we have conservatives who base they economic policies on the supposed way things ARE and on preserving the status quo, also claim to be religious and thus idealistic. Liberals, who base much of their policies on how things OUGHT or SHOULD be, turn around and claim science, which is about how things ARE.

All this makes for a real mess. But it does allow me to explain the weird position of Mormons. Mormonism is EXTEMELY idealistic. heck, mormons went out to the deserts to create Zion, their own little Utopia. But Mormons are now the most conservative religion in America. Thus they vote for policies that will preserve society the way it is when the very reason they left to go to the desert was to change things and make them better.

I remember my father once told me as Mormons we refuse to compromise our standards. We stay idealistic and fight for our high moral standards. This is true. but them most mormons turn around and vote for the party that explicitly seeks to keep things the way they are. I understand that this is because Mormons are worried about the implications of the vision that motivates most liberals. But instead of creating an alternative and intelligently seeking to push LDS values, most mormons have turned around and embrassed conservative values that are ostensibly but ultimately not Christian.

What would it take to fix the confusion in Mormon politics? This takes me back to where I started. It would take a serious recognition that we are NOT YET Christian, we are NOT YET Democratic, we are NOT YET rational, and we most certain are NOT YET saved.

While most mormons might talk like they recognize this, they turn around and vote conservative and reinforce the apathy, the status quo.

origionally I didn't mean for this to be about mormons. i was thinking about disingenuity and lack of honesty. For whatever reason I went down the road that deals with how Mormons can fall into this trap. Perhaps sometime I'll deal with the broader questions I started with and think about democracy and rationality more throughly, but I've been thinking too much. Hume used to play billiards when his head began spinning from thinking too much. Mostly I'm just to lazy to pick the argument back up. Have a nice day.

29

2009-10-09T16:29:00.000-07:00

When I was a teenager there was a band from Arizona called the Gin Blossoms. To this day some of their music connects really deeply with me. It isn't the best music ever, it is just what I listened to and liked at the time so it makes me nostalgic, sad and happy now.

They have one song called 29 that I found very sad when I was a teenager. It is about turning 29 and being more of a kid than an adult and feeling sad about a life that is supposed to go somewhere but being 29 and not sure where it is going.

29 you'd think I'd know better
living like a kid...

only time will tell
if wishing wells
will bring us anything
daylight scenes
from childhood dreams
forgotten memories

Here is the best video I can find:

I'm not sure why but at the time I felt like 29 is a sad age. You are supposed to be an adult at 29. it is a nowhere age. you aren't 30 yet, but you are saying goodbye to the 20s. you are passing your prime. There is was, probably your best days. you haven't done nearly as much as you wanted to and you aren't sure where you are going. your 29, a meaningless scary age.

I think as a result of hearing and feeling sad about this song as a teenager, turning 29 has been a hard thing for me. I suppose all the birthdays will be hard from here.

Anna ready to move on from Summer, Justin doesn't want winter

2009-09-27T05:38:00.000-07:00

Admire

2009-09-24T16:10:00.000-07:00

Anna tried one of those odd self exploration exercises yesterday that involved thinking about who you recognize and why. The idea is to learn about what virtues or characteristics you admire. Normally I find these things tacky, but I have always liked self introspection - there is something intreging about discovering how little we know ourselves and how complicated we are to ourselves.

After some thought, I generated the following list:

Nietzsche
Gandhi
Nephi
Camus' Rebel

Why? Nietzsche because he seriously and powerfully dissected the malaise of modernity and fought on in the face of failure. I love the image of finally going insane and hugging a horse that was being whipped.

Gandhi because he, it still boggles the mind, found a way to stop colonization and oppression without resorting to violence. It actually isn't the nonviolence I care about so much (although I like it) as the intelligent and articulate rejection of British authority.

Nephi because he is the best example of someone standing up for justice - against God! Talk about integrity. I have always slightly disliked Abraham for ostensibly not questioning God about the sacrifice of Isaac.

Camus' Rebel is the nameless, faceless individual who chooses to fight even when it appears absurd. most people opt out and find their opiate of choice and to hunker down in their own little sphere. The rebel says NO.

So what is it I like? Well, what i don't like more than anything else, what makes me sick and what I consider to the most important (because it is so common and so innocuous) damning characteristic is disingenuity. this is a form of inauthenticity that relies on cliches, doesn't question, and sacrifices justice for personal benefit. The businessman and the positivist academic/bureaucrat are the perfect examples of the disingenuous individual. The businessman uses bad justifications to pretend that living a self serving life is actually for others, that greed is a virtue and that others are to be used while made to believe they are not being used. The positivist academic/bureaucrat follows orders, fits in and does what the system says without thinking about the broader ramifications.

The virtue I prize the most is the opposite of disingenuity, but I'm not entirely sure what it would be called. Integrity? By it I mean constantly thinking though what is just, attempting to be authentic, attempting to gain a broad perpective and exploring alternative perspectives while not loosing oneself in the multiplicity. But I guess it is more than integrity because the implication I seek is also fighting for justice in the face of the impossible task that it is, standing up for what is right even though most people are busy following rote forms or enjoying opiates.

Yet again, more music videos

2009-09-20T02:55:00.000-07:00

Just some good stuff I've been listening to this week.

The very scary video to the great song Strange Overtones by David Byrne and Brian Eno

love it love it love. David Byrne and my favorite band Cafe Tacuba: Desconocido Soy. What a song! What a great cello bassline!

This is a song in process by Memo del Real AKA DJ Angustia, the pianist for Cafe Tacuba. This is his own side project. Since it is ripped off the radio, the song doesn't actually start for 1 minute, so skip forward to get to the song. The song is called Asi Es. Oh man, I love this. Makes me so sad and so happy. i sure hope he finishes his project and puts out a CD soon.

Anna's first visit to Namhansanseong

2009-09-18T17:37:00.000-07:00

Scenes from Dongtan

2009-09-13T17:14:00.000-07:00

There is a hyper new city south of where we live called Dongtan. It is quite fancy. Here are some views of it from a distance.

And there was a store called Pee n Poo.

Around the school

2009-09-06T16:30:00.000-07:00

One of the many plant stores around the school

One of the many construction sites around the school

One of the many people crossing the street and moving about around the school

Some of the many stores around the school

The school, fourth and sixth floors

San Diego

2009-09-01T17:38:00.000-07:00

Besides New York and Chicago, Anna's Mom invited us out to San Diego for the second time with her uncle Jerry. He lives in the mountains outside of Escondido. It is a near place because it is close enough to the coast to have the beautiful weather and wonderful flora and fauna and yet it is on the border with the desert too. It makes for a nice mix.

This is where it starts getting deserty.

And this is what it is like around his house.

He collects cacti. yes!

And of course they have a pool.

San Diego is nice, perhaps too nice. If you managed to get out there and get a place before everyone and their dog went there, you have made a pretty penny. The grandparents Pack obviously are in such a situation. Makes me wonder where the future "everyone is moving there" places are. It is my understanding that Star Valley is selling like hotcakes, maybe Gma Fletchers place is worth a ton now. Who knows. I'm not interested in investing or land prospecting, I think I just wish I could afford a place on the Cali coast. perhaps I'll just have to go to Mexico where things are still cheap and even nicer. Woot!

New York, Chicago, San Diego

2009-08-31T16:45:00.000-07:00

This year Anna and I have done a lot of travelling.

In January I went to New York and stayed with my old friend Matt, his wife and daughter in New York while interviewing with the New York Teaching Fellows (I didn't get accepted). I'd been to New York before but as a child and it was interesting to see it now that I am older. I'm a very geographically oriented person, so normally just visiting a place can give me a mental map. I flew into JFK and took the subway into Manhatten and up to the Upper East Side where Matt lives. I stayed there for a couple of days and even went on a long walk across Central Park (were Shaunee was living on the West side but I didn't know her apartment number) and down Broadway all the way to Wall Street. New York was big and interesting and nouveau riche and pretentious and ultimately I didn't like it. Oddly, I think one of the ways I know if I like a place if by the food and most of New Yorks food was expensive and uninteresting. The only food i really liked was the street halal and falafel stuff. Sorry New York, you may have nice museums and may be the art capital of the world, but your food sucks unless you spend a fortune. I'll stick with the West Valley (Salt Lake) Rancho markets. Better yet, I'll go back to Tehuacan and eat tacos arabes, chiles en nogadas and elotes.

i have always liked where the poor people live much more than where the nouveau riche are. Perhaps I would have liked the Bronx and Brooklyn more. It was good to see Matt.

Perhaps the opposite of New York is San Diego, which Anna and I visited with Anna's mom in May. I'll post some pictures of that trip on the next post.

The other big trip we went on was to Chicago, where we presented papers at a conference on Humanities and Education with an emphasis on Humanities and the environment. BYU paid for the trip as they do for all professors running around to conferences and let me tell you, if that is what your tax money is being spent on it is a horrendous waste. Don't get me wrong, perhaps there are good idea passed around and perhaps something gets done, but here we were at a conference on the environment and we stayed at ridiculous hotel that looked like this:

My paper was on the hypocracy of the Salt Lake City Farmers market, but it just as well could have been about the absurdity of having a conference about nature and staying in a nutso hotel like this.

Of course, many grad students just use conferences as an excuse to travel (i'm telling you, academia is incredibly backwards. These people think they rule the world. Weston knows all about these guys, but doesn't dislike them as much as I do). So we did get to see some of Chicago.

this is the Natural History musuem:

Art museum

people on Segways ?

Chicago skyline

While I liked the L and the old pictures of what Chicago looked like back in the day, I didn't like Chicago near as much as Anna did. The food was expensive. We had a dish deep pizza and i think I like Papa Murphey's better. Again, perhaps it was just the ritzy downtown, but ugh, bad expensive food again. (California has good expensive food.)

But Chicago infuriated me for this:

Southside Chicago is a rundown all black nieghborhood just south of downtown. I must have taken the elevated train south to look at Southside Chicago 4 or 5 times in as many days. On the one hand it was fascinating but on the other depressing. Just minutes out of the fancy part of town Southside is a wreck. Totally run down. Chicago's Harlem, it was made when a lot of exslaves came north to find work in Chicago. Of course they weren't in the best situation and they all moved to South Chicago and like Detroit it looks bad.

I found the contrast amazing and alarming. One minute you are in fancy pancy Chicago the next is a wrecked neighborhood. I actually had to work myself up to get off the Subway and walk around. having been in some rough neighborhoods in Mexico, I was surprized how intimidating I found Southside Chicago.

but by far the most disturbing part of all this was to find that the University of Chicago, the center of academic economic thought for the USA for much of the 20th century is right next to these neighborhoods. I don't know if I've ever seen such a sharp contrast in my whole life. On minute you are in a run down neighborhood and the next in a snobby university.

Perhaps I'm just being a naive bleeding heart, but I did find this heartbreaking and absurd. Here we have the worlds experts on economics next door to a ramshakle neighborhood. in my mind it didn't lend much confidence to their claim that all ships rise, seems those on the bottom remain on the bottom if we follow these economic principles.

I'm sure there are people who start making justifications for whose fault it is, but what I wondered was how the students at the University of Chicago could be psychologically at ease knowing they are running around spending tons of money on an expensive education while next door there is a painfully wrecked neighborhood. Same for downtown Chicago. how do you sit in a fancy restaurant eating yuppie food when just down the road there are people who are hungry?

this is an old question for me, and perhaps the fundmental question that has driven my life since my mission. How can us rich people be at ease with others suffering? How can the students at BYU spend their money frivolously while on teh other side of the tracks some people are stuggling to get by? How the US as a whole get so addicted to American Idol while we have many people in out country and outside of it that are suffering?

I used to think it was only a matter of making people aware of these injustices, but I quickly discovered there is a huge apparatus of justifications that exists to hide, cover over or help us ignore and justify these indescrepancies. it is amazing. And what is most amazing is that so few people see it.

Again, perhaps I'm just a naive kid, but how do the Southside Chicagos of the world not hurt us more?

bindung bindung Justin

2009-08-30T03:43:00.000-07:00

Well good heavens I haven't posted in a month. I'm not sure why. I guess I just had some vacation time and Anna came to Korea and I haven't taken time to put something on the blog for a while.

I origionally intended to something daily like a journal but I keep forgetting and my early morning time is normally spent working on the Rosetta Stone German stuff I have been doing. I guess I need to manage my time better.

Anyway, I have some pictures I'll get around to posting one of these, but I guess I'll just leave you with a good song for now...

Psychological Mysteries!

2009-08-05T05:38:00.000-07:00

I had a very strange experience today. After 6 days of vacation, I went back to work today. And when it was over I felt good.

So much of our lives we spend hoping for more free time. I had 6 days of free time with more than enough money and almost infinite access to media. I didn't waste it either, I have been writing and watching informative BBC programs such as The History of Scotland and Francesco's Venice. And yet I enjoyed going back to work.

Sometimes in all our craving for vacation, we forget how much as humans we love working. We love making stuff and organizing the world around us. Anna is the perfect example of this. She loves working in the garden, making wonderful meals and writing fiction. Heck she even likes sewing stuff, making cute little animals out of felt, etc.

When it comes down to it what Marx had to say is pretty simple: it is human nature to enjoy working but modern society has turned working into a cruel farce that sucks out all the joy and turns people in automatons. In all the freaking out about Marx's Socialism, people miss his profound and obviously correct criticism of Capitalism. Now, it may be that earlier economic systems were not much better with regard to human work and when we think so it is just lingering Romantic yearnings, but it doesn't change the fact that Capitalism is highly efficient at treating people like cogs in a machine - more effective than other system in the past. That is why it is so successful.

Part of the reason I felt so weird today is that I am hypersensitive about the absurdity of modern life. I know there are thousands of teachers as good as or better than me (I am not looking for affirmation when I say this, I know there are just as many that are worse than me). If I were to quit my job, some other person would plug in the hole. Even if I eventually become a professor, I will get a job because I possess some skill, I can fill some hole in the university system. Just by existing in a system that reduces things to means and ends, to instumental purposes, means that humanity has been reduced to an instument. This is a subtle and important point. Anytime someone says, you are wonderful because...you have been deemed valuable, you are on a table being viewed, weighted, offered to the buyer. Again, I don't say this so that someone will come along and say "you are special just because you are you" - that seems true if cliched to death. The point is that if one doesn't want to feel like a piece of meat one has to stay away from economics, which is impossible to do, although I do a pretty good job of it most of the time. There is something gross about turning the world around us into pure fungibility and parceling it off as if we actually know how much it is worth.

SO just having a job already comdemns me to feel empty and for sale. Again, I don't know if there is any way out of this, but Marx shows us how prevalent it is in capitalistic societies.

Now, with all of this in mind, I was nonetheless glad to get back to school. Although there may be some kids that react well to me, lets face it, there are other kids that react well to others. One of the things that is odd about being a teacher is you can capture a persons attention for short periods of time. You can, if you know what you are doing, mold others into something you desire. I can take lazy kids and give them some discipline or vice versa. As a professor I would widen horizons and get people reading good books and good movies. But at the end of they day they all go home, to their parents, to their lives, to all of that I as a teacher can rarely reach. I loved my Head Start kids, but at the end of the year they would wave goodbye and run off with their parents and if I followed to make sure things went ok I'd be arrested as a voyeur or heaven knows what. I'm not trying to deny that teachers can't have a lasting and profound influence, that wouldn't be fair to those who have influenced me - and yet, it is hard to see the head start kids walk away and me to stay behind crying because i am worried about them or to get an email from a student asking if I need a TA, monthes after I have left. What is painful is not that nothing matters, but that a little bit does.

I know most of these kids here in Korea don't need me. My sense of enjoyment and pride today was an illusion. And I know it. And yet, knowing it is an illusion, it still felt nice. I couldn't help but imagine if I worked all day to make something and then it just disappeared, I'd still probably feel good.

At the same time, while I was amazed at myself enjoying work, it also brought to my attention how little people seem to realize how absurd our system is. I was brought out of my normal scepticism on my walk home, but this also meant that I could see it from a distance, and it is so plainly obvious to me that I couldn't but wonder at how many people treat work as some kind of divine blessing. There is nothing more painful than the guy getting paid minimum wage while his boss makes a killing (at his expense according to Marx) talking about how it is good to work. We are in such a zombie state that these guys that are on top of the system are treated like good people! Anyone who has a lot of money is withholding it from, even if it was legitimately earned. I think of money as human life turned abstract. Money was made with human life, it represents human life, and saving it up is like saving up your own life (and quite often other peoples lives). Doesn't anyone look around when they go into the supermarket or the fast food restaurant and look and around and see the sad meaningless waste of human life going on? Some people see the guy working construction and think theres a good man, I think that guys not making as much as some other guy that tells him what to do and probably doesn't work as hard. Life is a big incredibly unjust mess. I see the people on the bus or the girls running back and forth behind the counter at McDonalds and it is enough to reduce me to tears if I pay attention.

But I guess that is the trick, learning how to not pay attention. While by Stoicism we now mean "a person who isn't overwhelmed by their surrounding or emotions" what Stoicism really was was a way to trick oneself out of seeing the injustice of life. It was a purposeful illusion created to detach oneself from suffering - quite Buddhist in a way.

Anyway, I don't want to be no zombie. This is why I hate optimism so much. I don't think of myself as a pessimist, however. Perhaps all us realists are pessimists who have deluded ourselves into thinking it is ok. But I have always been ridiculously idealistic too. Most people don't take their ideals seriously. Americans are good pragmatic capitalists.

Boy I'm running around in circles now.

I want to see evil and never cheat myself out of feeling injustice. In Chaim Potok's The Chosen the Hassidic Rabbi father teaches his son to feel the suffering of the Jews and of humanity. I remember as a teenager reading that book thinking that something profound that I couldn't understand was going on, and I don't know if I get it completely, but it is a familiar sentiment to me know. That is one of the things I like about the Jews, they have been though so much that they have learned to try and not forget. Every people has been though suffering, we just don't put a premium on remembering it very often.

There is an odd moment in the dregs of suffering, when crying on the Subway for a girl with a mishapen face who is minding her own business or perhaps crying by herself - a moment when one feels alive, when one feels like one is being honest. there is a joy and a brilliance in those moments, when everything is dark and because of that it is also so light. Tonight was one of those moments where I felt opposites at the same time, something you think shouldn't happen, but then - when you were just trying to be honest, some wonderful odd paradoxical moment comes over you and, as it was for me tonight, you feel joy at an illusion or infinite in your misery or shames in your happiness. With that girl on the bus I wished I could split in two, create a copy of myself, and send him off to make things right for her. I don't even know what was wrong, but I wanted to make more of me.

I think that is when you are living right, when you would make more of yourself and give it away, send it away. As Marx shows we spend most of our lives organizing the world for our purposes, working on it, making it ours - every once and a while (and it is a rare sentiment, otherwise it wouldn't be special) I don't want to take things in, I want to send myself out, not to come back, not to go get things and bring them back into, but to genuinely send myself out, to give myself away.

Most acts of service are such mixed events. We do them because it is the right thing to do, because of duty, because it feels good, because God tells us to, because god will give us reward, because it is just, because we want to feel important, because it impresses others - rarely, very rarely, I think we have a moment of genuine service when there is absolutely not motivation at all. There are no reasons, one articulates nothing. I'm not doing it out of love, at least i'm not thinking it that way. there is no thinking, just pure commiseration.

I'm not sure you can seek this out. i don't think you can go get such experiences. Seeking them in that way would mean treating them the same way we treat most of our daily activites - as things we go get and bring into our world. The feeling of abandoning our world for another is not one you can make happen, it happens to us. Heidegger argued that if we want to escape the cycle of treating things as valuable and turning them into money and instumental use, you have to stop seeking. At best we can prepare for what may come, but not in the sense of thinking anything must inevitabley come if we have prepared. I don't now if you, whoever you are reading this, have had this kind of experience before, but I find these odd moments of contradictory emotions and insight come from attempting to be honest with myself. And this is something it took a long time for me to do. I think religion is one of the biggest impediments to us being honest with ourselves. We get so tied up in what God wants us to do (or in what others will think - Durkheim says God and society are related) that it becomes impossible to honestly sort though our own emotions and impulses.

Letting yourself really feel how you feel doesn't not imply following every whim we have. that is also a mistake. But I found personally that I was so bent out of shape trying to please God that I often denied true feelings I had. I thought it was bad to hate, so I would try to quash those feelings. but that isn't honest. One can let oneself feel and beware of hateful emotions without acting on them or succumbing to them. When I started trying to be more honest in this way i discovered there was a lot going on that i was simply quashing. It took me a while to learn to let feelings bubble up but to not be overwhelmed by them either. I choose hated as an example although the more obvious one is sexuality, because the post-religious response of many people to how religion can bottle up emotions is to simply follow the emotions - to let it all out. But this is to fall prey to the emotions in such a way that one becomes superficial while thinking oneself profound. Some people float along in life doing what they feel like, thinking they are being honest, when they are actually being swept along the main currents and not learning to see and appreciate the eddies that swirl back the opposite way. Damning the river completely or being swept away by the current are both ways to create dishonest lives.

What a psuedo-poetic pretensious mishhmash i have created!

From one of my favorite works, Mist (by the philosopher Unamuno):

Psychological Mysteries!

The new Park at Namhansanseong

2009-07-30T05:27:00.000-07:00

Foot therapy

Finally the Masterplan, I have been looking for this for years

See, it's a nice place

More stompin grounds

2009-07-28T19:31:00.000-07:00

The mysterious rocks on the trail down from namhansanseong

Places to eat lunch

The South Gate

View of part of Seoul from the North Gate

The old stompin grounds

2009-07-27T20:19:00.000-07:00

Revisited Namhansanseong a couple weeks ago

Things to tempt Anna to come to Korea

2009-07-25T01:34:00.000-07:00

Buddhist temple?

The cactus garden

Justin's Apartment in Korea

2009-07-23T16:18:00.000-07:00

So here is the apartment here in Korea

View out the back window. It freaked me out living on the 11th floor at first, now i am ok with it. I don't dance by the window though...
This is looking South.

A View from the hall outside the apartment looking East.

The computer room.

The bathroom

Not a good picture of the living room/bedroom.

The Bird People In China: Movie Review

2009-07-22T19:37:00.000-07:00

The Bird People In China is an odd and wonderful film from Takashi Miike, who is most famous for bloody Yakuza films which I haven't seen (he also did a Japanese musical). For years I have been meaning to watch The Bird People In China and I'm not even sure why. I love Yunnan. When Westerners think of a mystical wonderful place, they think of the East, and Yunnan (although in the South) is the East of China.

What is the East? It is everything that is different, it is the strange, the wonderful, the possible. When Enlightenment thinkers needed a place to represent a possible better future they picked the new world, made up worlds (utopia) or created a fictional "East." The East is what we want in our dreams, and, in the case of this movie, the East is where people can fly.

It might seem odd that a Japanese director would make a movie about the East, but the Japanese have considered themselves as Westerners since they embraced the West in the late 1800s.

Thus the movie is a yearning for the "East" - a meditation on whether modernity, westernization, the modern world, is worth it. What have we lost in becoming modern? What have we gained? When we look back to the past or to the "East" are we just making things up? Are we unfairly romanticizing?

What are we to do as Yunnan, the mysterious East, becomes modern? The Bird People in China attempts to deal with these questions in a film that seems completely unpretentious. If Yunnan wants to modernize who are we to impede it? but then again, should we not take the advice of a man dying of cigrettes when he tells us not to smoke? Is modernity a disease?

These are the questions The Bird People in China deals with. In the end, it doesn't offer an answer. It both takes away our dreams of justice and dangles them before us. The film is both brutally based in cruel reality and yet connected to the realm of fantasy.

I enjoyed The Bird People in China. Like many foreign films it is not rated, but, like many Asian films, the swearing is often just translated as f-words. Thus while the film is meditative it nontheless has quite a bit of language.

Definately worth watching
8/10

Suwon in 1966

2009-07-19T04:44:00.000-07:00

This is the first time i have double blogged on this and the family blog, but i was so amazed i wanted to makes sure everyone sees it.

Suwon (where I now live) in 1966:

What the fancy parts of Korea look like now in a picture I took in 2005

40 years people! In less than 40 years Korea went from those to that. Absolutely incredible. What has a shift like that done to social structures? It is like a mad scientists social experiment, wonderful and insane. Oh man would it be fun to write a book on modernity and South Korea. I won't bombard you with international development issues, but whoa!

here is the slideshow with 540 pictures of South Korea in 1966. Just blows my mind:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/60112728@N00/show/with/350927253/

Saturday

2009-07-11T03:41:00.000-07:00

6:20AM I get up. It is sunny. Check the time. I go back to sleep.

7:00AM Back ap. Tired but stay up. Turn on the computer. Bathroom, drink water.

7:20ish Anna gets on Messenger and we talk until 8:30ish which has been the norm since she has a play on weeknights (it is still Friday in the states).

8:30AM shower, no breakfast. I turn on the TV briefly to the Japanese channel which shows sports in the mornings (again, Friday night in the states). The Redsox are playing. It is 0-0 in the 3rd. Eh.

9AM Walk out of Digital Empire (apartment). Walk to bus stop, but I keep stopping at the little markets to see if anyone has Peanut butter Oreos. It seems I bought the last 3 packages in all of Korea last week. This is a tragedy. I love peanut butter oreos so. BHC no longer sells Chicken burgers either. This isn't the same Korea I knew.

9:15 Get on the 720-1 bus and sit in the front seat so I can see well. I have been planning to try this bus out for a while. It's final stop is Namhan mountain, my old stomping grounds. I have brought Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book about the Holocaust and the human tendency to blame evil on abstractions and/or bureaucracy. Journalistic style, but not exactly light reading.
There is an express bus that goes to the same place, the 7200, but I am taking the 720-1 because I know it goes all over the place isntead of on the highway and I just want to see what things are like.
Boy does it go all over the place! Takes 2 and a half hours to get to Namhan mountain. After a while it all looks that same and I just read my book.
At a certain point we pass what used to be a Carrefour, a giant French grocery store. It is where I bought my birds before. But it is not there! It is now a Home Plus, and English store. they probably don't have birds! Danggit. Stupid Home Plus is really making me mad.

11:30 I realize I have no money. I have some money on my bus pass so I'll be ok, but i have to find my bank to get out some money. I feel stupid because I was going to do that last night but i thought i'd do it in the morning and now i've gone and forgot. I didn't eat breatfast so i am hungry too. If I can't find a bank I'm going to have to head back home without having seen much. Idiot.

11:40 My bank! But it isn't close enough to the mountain...maybe I'll wait and see if there is another one closer.

11:50 There isn't. I get off at the mountain and backtrack. There are some closer banks but they charge a bit. Besides I want to go up a side road because there is only 1 bus that goes all the way up the mountain, the other buses just leave you at the front where I am. I can't remember what bus goes up the mountain, but I think it is single digits and I know a side street it goes down.

12:00 There is a 9 bus packed with people! Must be that one! Sometimes around here I get to the bank and take out 50,000 Won ($45).

12:20 I go down the side road anyways to make sure the 9 bus is the one I want and to look for food. i have to go fairly far before I find a Kim Bap store. I go in.

12:30 The owner has too much make up on. I order Ramon, 2,000 Won, and a Tuna Kim Bap, 2,500 Won. I like these places because there is free water. They have little metal cups that get really cold when the water is cold. it is delicious. The lady turns on the tv for me to watch and begins making the ramon while talking on her cellphone. A couple minutes later I have a hot bowl of ramon, a little bowl of kim chi, a little bowl of little egg omlete thingys, a little bowl of yellow pickled somethings that I like because you can eat them with the cold water and they taste really sweet. I forget what they are called. While I am eating ramon she fixes up the tuna kim bap which is a sheet of seaweed with a bed of rice, then various roots, tuna a leaf of some sort, carrots and a long slice of more of that yellow pickled sweet thing, then it is all rolle dup like sushi. heck it is like sushi but no raw fish. These things are $5 in the states. Cheaper here, yum.
The meal is really good. Or perhaps I was really hungry. I don't know. I watch the tennis game while I eat. it is a Chinese team against a Korean team. The Chinese team wins the first set, the koreans the second and they are on their way to the third when I finish. I pay and attempt to ask if the 9 bus goes up the mountain. She says yes.

1:00 I wait a bit and get on the 9 bus. Sure enough it goes up the mountain.

1:30 On the mountain I find a bathroom. Then I wander around to the north gate. The place is a big fortess and I used to come here almost every weekend. I work up a good sweat getting to the north gate and a little kid yells "hi" at me. I say "you little punks think you own this town!" haha, not really. i say hi and her parents are surprized by the little girls initiative.
I keep walking up the trail and find a water spring. The Korean set these up so you can get drinks. I wait a while until someone else comes and takes a drink. Ok, I'm good. i take a drink. nice.
There are guys up in the trees cutting off the branches. I thought the trees looked strange naturally but they might be being groomed that way. Hmmm...
There is an old man walking mindfully with his hands behind his back. I have passed him a couple of times and he smiles. After he is out of sight I immitate his midful walking position and think about the meditation we did in Thailand. Too hard for me.
i walk to the top of this trail and finally take some pictures, something I haven't been doing since I've been here yet. Too bad I can't see much of Seoul. The last time I came here, the day before I left before, the sky was clear and I took a ton of pictures. Some turned out really nice. I can't see much of Seoul with the muggy humid weather today.
I will probably never recover the feeling of joy I had that last time. It makes me sad. This place is still neat and it will be ful to bring Anna here, but that was a once and a life time experience. Sometimes I go look at the pictures I took to remember what an oddly beautiful experience it was. I feel like Kierkegaard in his book Repetition where he goes on a vacation to see if he can have the same experience but he can't. I felt this way when I went back to Mexico after my mission but 1000 times worse. Everything changes. Our best memories, especially when tied to place are limited to ourselves. that is why it is nice to be married because if we both exprience it, it doesn't feel so solipsistic.
After wandering around, I decide to hike down the mountain instead of taking the bus down. This involves crossing the little valley that forms the top (the mountain is kind of like a volcano with a hole in the middle. On the rim there is the fortress wall, all the way around. In the middle there are scattered buddhist temples and a main center with restaurants.
I get to the South Gate and head down the mountain. it has been completely redone! Someone has fixed the trail up. nice. I take some picture and head down. i see some birds I've never seen before. Other people are heading up and down the trail. At a certain point I find a Buddhist temple and there is a lady worshiping inside. No one else hiking stops at the temple. The lady inside stands, then kneels, the bows, than gets back up. She keeps doing this. i don't want to interrupt her so I leave.
There are some weird stacked rocks along the trail. i take pictures.
I go off the trail at a suspicious looking trail. Sure enough, another temple. This one has people and a drinking spring. I take a drink and go off another trail which leads to a third temple. This temple has an old monk woman cleaning. No one else is there. I stand there thinking for a while and breathing in the smell of incense. I really like the smell of incense at buddhist temples.
The trail splits and one goes up to what I know is the BIG temple, but I am really tired so i opt to come back later with Anna and head down the trail.
Towards the bottom I can hear the cars again. then there is a weird new little park and lots of kids playing in the water. I have to go to the bathroom but I want to check out the park. It has one of those weird barefoot walking routes the Koreans set up in parks. Asian medicine says the feet have certain spots that correspond to certain parts of the body. if you massage or acupuncture certain parts of the foot it helps those other parts of the body. So they make rock walkways that have different sized and placed rocks for people to walk on with the idea that it will help your health. I start walking but an old man tells me to take off my flip flops. OK. Some parts of the trail are made of rubber and is easy to walk on but other parts is made of rocks and hurts a bit. I get tired of that real quick and go back to the main trail. There is a little water park now.
I stop in the bathroom. The door is proped open so you can see the guys peeing inside. Oh well. I pee too with the door open.
As I am leaving the front gate to the mountain a little girl with impressive English stops me and askes me my name, introduces herself, asks my age, etc. She is ten and fearless apparently. She says nice to meet you, bye and then kisses her hand and holds it up. I don't know if she is blowing me a kiss or what, so I kiss my hand and give her a high five. She seems a little confused but turns off and skips away happy.
I go out into the city again.

3:30ish. I walk down the big road until I find the bus stop. Some teenage girls yell out hello. I wonder if they will yell hello when I have Anna here. The 7200 bus comes less often and costs more but it goes much faster. i will try it out. Takes 20 minutes for it to come. I read Hannah Arendt.

3:50 I get on the bus. i am the first person on it. Costs 1,700 Won. I sit in the front seat but I watch the road because I am curious about the route. Goes down the road I used to ride my bike on. Goes past Moran station and past a big parking lot that on some Saturdays is a huge market I used to go to. it is where I saw the Chinese Chicken God, where they sell dogs to eat, where they were also eating little birds roasted like Chickens and where I ate a Pajeon (pizza like thing) and had old guys give me Korean whiskey which I thought was a milk drink. I drank some and then realized it was alcohol so i just pretended to drink the rest. They kept wanting to give me more but wanted me to finish what I had. i hurried up and ate and left.
I thought that place was at Yatab station but I was wrong, Moran station. now I remember.
The bus keeps going down the road I used to ride on. We pass the old Carrefour which is now a Home Plus. I am angry at Home Plus again. There is the old McDonalds I used to go to. i think about Mcdonalds for a while (I later posted my thoughts on the family blog).

4:50 The bus takes an hour to get me home. Much fast than the 2 and a half hours the other one took and only 200Won more (20 cents). It is lightly sprinkling rain.
I figure I might as well eat now. Pizza School $5 pizza? I look in a Chinese restaurant but decide not to eat there. Same for a kalbi meat place. I end up going in another kim bap place like the one I went to lunch at.

5:00 I order donkas. japanese style breaded pork. It comes out with some ketchup on it. That is weird. there is Ketchup on the little cabbage salad too. these guys love ketchup. Doesn't taste bad. There is also, yellow pickled sweet things, kim chi, cold water in a cold metal cup, and a little fruit from a can. Oh and some watery fish soup. The tv has an obnoxious dancing/singing program.

I pay 4,000 Won and have 1,500 Won left over from my daily allowance ($10 daily). I go to Duncan Donuts and buy a yummy heart shaped donut that has jelly creme filling and creme creme filling. Yum. I head home.

6:00ish I get home and turn on the tv just to see what is on. One channel has a game show where children talk about crazy things their parents do or say while their parents get embarrased and everyone laughs. I can't understand it but you can tell what is going on. Another channel has a dating show. A guy is dressed up like a tree. Another guy with a foam ax runs up and pretends to chop him down but accidentally hits him in the crotch. The tree guy falls over. Ah, its funny all over the world. I turn to a third channel. Some show about pigs. It is talking about wild boars and how big they are. Then it shows a guy and his pet pig. He speaks English and is treating the pig like a dog. I think I might like a pig. Anna would like a cute little pot bellied pig.
I turn to the music video channel. I liked the Korean music video channels but this is a Chinese one. They are playing Michael Jackson videos. i won't go there. Lastly I check the Japanese channels. one is a baseball game. the other one is old school star trek in Japanese. eh.

I turn on the computer, check baseball scores, watch a few highlights, my email and then decide to blog about McDonalds and my day.