The Pale King
19 Aug 2011 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: David Foster Wallace, freedom, grad school
I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, lately (which reminds me that I should probably try to return it to its rightful owner, seeing as I borrowed it without asking quite a while ago. He finished Infinite Jest in the time it’s taken me to read PK). Now is a good time to admit that, for as much as I love DFW–like adore… OK I practically worship the guy–I’m actually a little concerned that I’m becoming too indoctrinated by the practical genius of his beliefs and opinions, and lest I lose sight of who I am and what I, Lydia, apart from DFW, thinks, I need to lay him on the shelf for a while and just let my beliefs sit with his, and let life shake out what fits and what doesn’t.
I’m working on applying to graduate schools and I would love to study contemporary American literature. Or more specifically I hope to work with the concepts of grace and redemption within the context of American literature and what role those concepts play in contemporary culture. Or something like that. The idea of studying the environment as a distinct character and symbol in American literature is also extremely intriguing. The longer I spend thinking about what I want to think about, the more things there are to think about. It’s really fun, in a nerdy kind of way.
But anyway, DFW’s writings about freedom and what role it plays in American culture and how much we value it and how debilitating our concept of freedom can actually be totally, completely intrigue me and I also want to incorporate them into whatever I end up studying (we value freedom so much that the only common value in our culture is that everyone is free to think, feel and believe what they want, until what another thinks contradicts what you think, and then they’re wrong. So in fact America’s common ideology is one of hypocrisy, which is what a good friend and I concluded the other day).
I’m intrigued because the Christian tradition teaches that complete freedom is attainable through submission to God, a concept that I totally accept, despite the obvious paradox in the equation, because I believe that grace and redemption are the keys to absolute freedom. I know most people resist this idea because how could you become totally free by being less free? It’s a good question.
If I wanted to matter–even just to myself–I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way. p.224
This is getting too tangential, though. The point is, despite my possible DFW indoctrination disorder, which I’ll argue is not a terrible thing at all, I still think he’s a genius with some very True things to say. I just need to sort out what I think from what he thought and make sure my ideas are truly mine.
I do want to share some gems from The Pale King, which is the most fascinatingly boring book I’ve ever read. I hope you find these things to be true, like I do:
Sometimes what’s important is dull. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes the important things aren’t works of art for your entertainment. p. 138
…Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. p. 229
Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui–these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real. p. 231
I know they aren’t super uplifting quotes, but I think that by voicing the fears and realities of boredom and repetition and tedium DFW is offering hope, and companionship, and validation. In our most alone moments, in times of angst, there is peace in the knowledge that someone else, most likely lots of someone elses, is experiencing the same fearsome sense of insignificance. So essentially in a book about the IRS and weird people who sweat a lot, Wallace has created community in the depths of solitude and despair.
(I Have Missed) The Joy of Focus
18 Aug 2011 Leave a Comment
I’ve neglected this thing for a while, for lots of reasons. Because I’ve been working a TON, trying to make ends meet and pay all my bills, trying to be a generally responsible 26 year old after my six month fully-supported teaching excursion in Thailand. I haven’t written because in the time that I’m not working I’m trying to catch a few waves, or catch up with friends. Because in the time that I’m not working or surfing or catching up with friends, I’m going to weddings, or helping my sister plan a wedding, or talking about weddings.
But mostly I haven’t written anything lately because I’ve been trying to catch up with myself. I’ve done very little to keep myself focused and centered and otherwise grounded, and to be honest, I’m tired. Really tired. It’s so much easier to throw myself into helping others, teaching Bible study, working, and being “busy” than it is to sit and be still and focus on the things that are going to make me feel good. Like writing, or studying all those GRE words that are sitting in a stack on my nightstand (and believe me, it’s not peaceful to wake up in the morning to a tower of unfamiliar words. I should move those), or running, or heck, even sleeping. I just haven’t given myself any time to be alone, and that’s so draining.
Plus, there are aspects of transitioning back into being “home” that are still catching up with me. How do I continue pursuing my passions and dreams without losing momentum? In Thailand it was easy to focus on, well, being in Thailand. I had a specific purpose for a set amount of time, and I had all the resources and desire to be fully engaged in that task. But back at home among friends and activities and distractions it’s so easy to drift and be busy and lose focus on the things that are so important to me. I don’t want to lose that drive to achieve the things I hope to achieve. And then there’s the whole transitioning-into-a-new-job thing, which actually takes up a lot more focus and energy than I had anticipated. I love the job, but adapting to it is taking some work.
All of that to say: I miss writing! I was inspired by this advice column tonight and decided that enough was enough: it’s time to throw myself back in and write like, well, a motherfucker, according to the column (Sugar’s words, not mine. Sorry parentals). Not that writing will make all of life’s little stresses disappear, but it definitely helps to frame them in their proper contexts. Which helps a whole lot. And in the process of writing, there is joy, which is always a good thing.
A Little Light all the Same
09 May 2011 Leave a Comment
Corrigan once told me that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.
What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth–the filth, the war, the poverty–was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn’t interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence.
Let the Great World Spin, p. 20
Hosanna: Palm Sunday
17 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment
So the last few weeks I was in Thailand I taught the ALC kids this song (their request) in English, and we performed it together at church the last Sunday I was there. I love how they sing with their whole hearts (when they think they know the English words well enough). Happy Palm Sunday 
The Joy of Today
14 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment
Today I have God, and he has the provisions. Tomorrow it will be the same.
Dallas Willard, “The Divine Conspiracy”
Little Bit of a Shameless Plug Here…
21 Mar 2011 Leave a Comment
I was published online today.
Self-effacing comment: probably not my finest piece of writing, but there it is, in digital print, for the world to see.
Eeeee
All the Things I Didn’t Tell You about Thailand – PART 1
20 Mar 2011 Leave a Comment
So happy to be back at the beach
I’m not exactly sure how to proceed with this blog now that I’m no longer a volunteer English teacher in Thailand, although I am still very much living for the prospect of joy. Maybe I’ll update the little tag on my title to say: “The Prospect of Joy: Notes from a 26 year old unemployed college graduate with nothing better to do than write and watch birds down at the creek all day”. Too wordy?
Well, I’m home. That’s an awkward half-jump picture over there, but you can guess from what’s going on that I’m pretty excited to be back on the beach in California. I wrote to my dad, who picked me up from SFO, a few weeks before coming home: “I don’t care how tired or jet lagged I am; please take me to the beach when you pick me up. Thanks.” It’s only fitting that we drove over to Ocean Beach… San Francisco’s OB, anyway. The surfers were out, the air smelled salty, the wind was cold (cold!) and the sand was… sandy. There’s something about the rhythm, sounds and smells of the beach that resonate in my soul, and I don’t care if it sounds cheesy: being there I felt fully alive again.
Which isn’t to say that I didn’t feel alive in Thailand. Thailand awoke parts of my heart and my soul that I didn’t know existed before. But the beach… the beach is special. The beach is a place where I feel much more connected to myself, to nature, to God. I can’t freakin’ WAIT to get out there and surf again!
In the few conversations I’ve had with people about my time in Thailand, I’ve realized how little I’ve actually told everyone about what I actually did, and what it was like. I might have updated everyone on me (I’m apparently much more narrow-minded than I give myself credit for) but I explained so little about Thailand. This realization struck me as my mom kept interchanging the terms “camp” and “village”, and after being annoyed at her for her ignorance I finally had to admit that I’d never actually explained the difference between a refugee camp and a village, to her or anyone. So, with that, here is part one of all the basic things about Thailand that I failed to write about while I was actually there.
Let’s begin with a basic vocab lesson, in honor of my mommy, to whom I didn’t explain very much to, as it turns out: 
CAMP – refers to the nine refugee camps situated (in Thailand) along the Thai-Burma* border where Burmese refugees flee to escape the various violent atrocities–rape, forced labor, pillaging–being committed by the Burmese army/government (same thing, really).
I visited the Umphium Refugee Camp near the Thai city of Mae Sot twice. There are nearly 40,000 refugees living in the Umphium camp alone. They get basic supplies from the Thai government, but the Thais are not particularly thrilled to be the hosts so many refugees. They accommodate them with as much enthusiasm as we accommodate the common cold: an inevitable existence whose presence they can do little about, except to treat it and hope it goes away eventually. Most of the refugees’ needs are provided for by NGO, “non-government organizations” who, in some semi-coordinated fashion, provide food, clothing, education and basic skills training to the refugees. They give them work, they teach them how to live in a free world, they help them survive. There is always a need for help in the refugee camps. But the camps are not, by any means, tragic places. If you hike up to the top of the camp and look down on the sprawl of bamboo huts and dirt roads the view is far from dismal, the sounds far from sorrowful. What you see is fields of boys playing football and women walking with their arms linked, talking and laughing, men working together in their tobacco shops. What you hear is guitars playing, kids laughing, and intermittent swells of chatter and laughter.
I don’t write this to make it seem like the refugee camps are fun. They aren’t. Someone needs to fix what’s going on in Burma and let these people return home as free people. I guess I write this
to note the resilience and beauty of the Burmese people to make the best of a truly awful situation. They have so little to be thankful for and they’re so joyful. I have so much to be thankful for and I have to make joy a deliberate pursuit.
VILLAGE – a town, basically. There are cities in Southeast Asia, of course, and towns, kind of. But there are also villages. It might be like saying, “There’s the city of San Diego and
the village of Julian, or Del Mar…” roughly, except again, we’d be dealing with bamboo huts and outhouses instead of beachside mansions. Villages are communities of people that exist co-dependently; their entire existence is wrapped up in their location and the handful of families who live, farm and worship with them. A village can be home to one particular people group or several different tribes. One village I know of is home to eight people groups, different tribes from both Thailand and Burma. But they all live peacefully together, depending on each other for basic survival.
Contrary to what my sister might have initially thought, villagers do not wear loin cloths, they do not have animal bones protruding from their noses, and they don’t make human sacrifices. At least the villagers I met. They do all have traditional tribal clothing, which is awesome and I came home with several handmade tribal skirts and bags to show you all, they have their own unique style of preparing foods, and OK, some of them do eat dog. (I don’t think I ever ate dog meat… although I never explicitly asked…) They have some awesome Christmas carols in complex languages I couldn’t even begin to understand and they have a gentleness that I think comes from living such a simplistic life. When you live in complete dependence on the earth and on each other, and on God, you cultivate a certain degree of sympathy/empathy that I think is relatively unknown–either extinct or extremely rare–to us here in the USA. The villagers were my favorite people.
Stay tuned. More to come. 
con dio(s)
03 Mar 2011 3 Comments
Good morning, on my last morning in Thailand! This past week I went to Bangkok to visit the cutest little babies in the world…
and now I am trying desperately to squeeze six months of my life into two checked bags and two carry-ons (one being a hand-woven basket from Burma) and all my last minute events and good-byes into these last hours.
Earlier this week, in what was a fun outcome of a communication breakdown (I thought he invited me, he thought I hadn’t been), I went to ride elephants and bamboo rafts with Ken the Driver and his wife. Now, typically the driver doesn’t participate on these tourist-y things, but we’ve all developed a friendship so I enjoyed having him along. The only thing that bothered me was that he had to explain to all the elephant mahouts and raft steer-ers that I came by myself, so they’re coming to keep me company.
All day long I heard them explaining “con dio, con dio …” which, in Thai, means “alone, by herself, by herself.” Which, honestly, made me feel kind of lame to be known by all the mahouts as the girl who came to ride elephants by herself… I didn’t know I was going to ride elephants that day! I didn’t love that my alone-ness was being so publicly announced, but I chose to focus on the bigger thing here, which was that Ken, his wife and I all had a blast.
But the next day those words kept running through my head, “con dio… con dio…con dio…” and as I drove (con dio) to the the x-ray clinic to make sure Buddha I hadn’t actually broken my foot running through that temple (not broken… and an x-ray only cost $7 here, no appointment necessary, by the way) the gravity of the fact that I’d just spent the past six months of my life living in Thailand con dio struck me. What on earth did I just do … I moved to THAILAND… alone! Then the alone-ness started to bother me; no one loves being alone and I had to acknowledge that in coming back to the States I’m not going to be any less alone, although I will be back with friends, family, and my surfboard and people who share my culture. But to a degree we all move through life alone, sharing every single experience with someone being a fairly impossible thing to do: “Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can share its joy.” (Proverbs 14:10) We are all con dio.
I’m still recovering from this realization.
When I first got here my tendency was to speak, and hear, Spanish. I do it a lot less now that I know Thai, but every once in a while it creeps back into my brain and I hear Thai words as Spanish. As I repeated con dio in my head yesterday I realized that it has actual meaning in Spanish: “with God.”
“Alone” in Thai, means “with God” in Spanish. Alone with God.
That’s abundantly enough for me.
I just wish God could help me carry a few of these bags home.
Last Day of ESL
25 Feb 2011 1 Comment
Last day of ESL classes. Here are the three classes, with the three teachers, and their certificates of completion:
So proud of them. Such a strange feeling to be finished with what I came to Thailand to do. Tomorrow is my last day with the ALC kids and then it’s a week of packing, shopping, and good-byes. And baby time in Bangkok
And yes, I’m holding a lamp with my picture on it. My gift to me from the students.
This Post Brought to You by Non-Vanilla Creamered Coffee
21 Feb 2011 2 Comments
I’m not a huge “foodie” person. I appreciate really good foods and I’m particular about loving some things, I hate others with the passion of a two year old who hates brussel sprouts.
For example, when it comes to ridiculously loving certain things, and my roommates can attest to this: I always drink my coffee with vanilla creamer. Can’t live without it. I. Love. It. Will wake up early and run to the store in the morning to buy it if we’re out. I won’t even say “we” – I’m the only one who drank it. The people at Stumps market knew me and laughed at my AM creamer trips. I really did begin to wonder if I drank coffee for the coffee or for the vanilla creamer. It was bad, and I knew it was bad, but I couldn’t help it; I loved the vanilla.
Anyway since being in Thailand I can’t stand touching the stuff: too sweet! I feel like a real grownup drinking coffee with plain old milk and sugar, and really, not much sugar. Not sure what changed, because Coffeemate definitely exists over here… whether it’s been six months of drinking bad coffee, sometimes instant coffee (oh, how my standards fell while I was here) it just sounds gross to me now
And as for hating certain foods: anyone who knows me knows how I feel about the following: mushrooms (mold, fungus, nature’s athelete’s foot), coconut (smells like sunscreen and tastes like soap with the texture of burlap), jelly drinks (who likes chunky drinks?!). But when mushrooms are an inherent part of every… single… dish and to pick them out would be to remove the most nutritional part of a meal; when coconut milk is the base of every curry and soup you eat, when it’s mixed into the best desserts and sweetens the most amazing little sticky rice breakfast treats; when drinking jelly drinks becomes an adventure rather than a weird fetish option at boba places… I don’t know, things change. I wish I had pictures to prove that I will now eat, and occasionally enjoy, mushrooms, coconut, and jelly drinks. (Liz, you can tell Fausto about the mushrooms) Except I broke my camera.
The point of this silly post: Thailand has obviously changed me. My tastes, sure, my perspective on things, absolutely. Think of this post as a shallow food-as-metaphor pre-cursor to some deeper-level ruminations on how six months in a foreign country affects a person, especially as I’m staring my return trip in the face and starting to really mine my thoughts and experiences for what I’ve learned and how to live life in light of my time in Thailand. It’s definitely going to be different.
There won’t be any vanilla creamer in it, at any rate.
