De colores...

The most amazing sight on this trip was of this waterfall I saw on a boat ride in the Canyon of Sumidera.

Textiles!

A family that shared morning tortillas with us.

Colorful streets and houses

Where am I?

The Mayan ruins of Palenque

Ooo, ruins.

Ah, the beautiful falls of Agua Azul.

Amazing blueness.

A view of San Cristobol from high up at a church on a hillside.

All the whippets, sad to be ushered into the house and not be going on a car ride.

Chichanpec! He was the smallest of the pack of dogs and also the most afraid of people. No wonder since mother of the friend I stayed with found him in her yard one day when the neighbor threw him over the fence.

I'm finally back in Oakland and when officially back to work today. It was very hard to go back as I miss my vacation already and I got a cold that has had me hacking and coughing all day. In the evening I was so tired I just crashed for about an hour, but roused myself up enough to make some vegetable soup with rice. Here is a small collection of some of my photos from the trip. The last few days were spent in strolls through the city of San Cristobol de las Casas, enjoying the cobblestone streets lined in colorful houses, poking into papelerias, and buying handmade souvenirs like little Zapatista dolls and wool toys. I ended left with more pesos than I had planned and snapped up some more souvenirs and a book in the airports as I hopped home. It's nice to be back in my own warm bed, but like with any trip, it feels strangely like I had never left. Oh how wiley traveling is, those huge jumps in consciousness when you are suddenly somewhere new and miss home, but then the feeling of almost transmografication when you are home and it was like you never left.

I'll have one crabby patty!

I decided to forgo the beach as the rain keeps flying in over the mountains in waves throughout the day. The forecast did not look good for a trip to the beach. Or a 4-hour bus ride. Ugh, please no more bus in the mountains... So instead I´m staying in San Cristobol. I think this may be the most relaxing vacation I´ve had, not because of what I´m doing or where I am, but because I don´t feel stressed out. This is a very new feeling for me, one that I´ve not really experienced in my life before. I kind of like it, but don´t know what to do with it really. Also, my friend´s friend is very much into stargazing and has a great location for it up in the hills of San Cristobol. He showed me a computer program he has that follows the position of the stars and he also calculated my zodiac sign, which is actually cancer and not leo, owning to the variations of positions of the stars over time which do not follow the Gregorian calendar. Cancer! It was like a whole revelation for me. I was always figured there was nothing to astrology as it got my personality as a leo completely wrong. I'm the opposite of an outgoing person who can command attention in a crowd. But, as a cancer, well, that is a whole revelation. I can totally count myself as an introvert with mood swings and a huge loyalty complex. Maybe there is something to this astrology stuff. Really it just made me think about myself and how I see myself. I can accept my weaknesses, knowing that the flip side of them are also my greatest strengths. Now which signs are cancers compatible with?

Despues...

Hola from Chiapas! I´m now in San Cristobol de las Casas, a colonial city in Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico. I´m here visiting my friend and am using his computer, so I can write things like ¡Excellente! and ¿Is that water potable or is that paramecium I see? I don´t have time for a complete post I just want to give you some highlights, my few but intrepid regular readers.

- I initially kinda lost my suitcase because I didn´t get it checked through customs in the Mexico City airport like I was supposed to. I actually went through immigration twice looking for customs but couldn´t find it. So my bag didn´t arrive in Tuxtla Gutierrez with me and I had to go back to the airport later to get it. Mexicana said they would call me but didn´t and none of their numbers worked, of course not, why would they. So my friend and I just ended up going to the airport where, my goodness, it had luckily arrived on the last flight and had been stowed away in a storage closet. I think if we hadn´t just gone, I would be now wearing a whole new Mexican wardrobe right now.
- We took a boat tour of the Cañon de Sumidera on the river that runs through it to a huge dam that produces half of Mexico´s energy. The canyon was full of animals like monkey, birds, and crocodiles, but the highlight was a gorgeous waterfall of mist and huge water droplets falling over rock precipices that resemble a Christmas tree. It was one of the most beautiful things I´ve ever seen, and I´ll post my pics with the post once I can, but I´m not sure the photo does it justice.
- We had some trips to see the villages of Zinacatan and San Juan Chamula. Both towns are inhabited mostly with indigenous people with their elaborately embroidered clothing and hordes of begging children trying to secure sales of bracelets or belts. In San Juan Chamula we went into a church where the locals practice an eerie combination of traditional practices with Catholicism. They lite candles on the ceramic floor surrounded by pine needles and sprayed soda or alcohol from their mouths. The ceremony was then completed with the killing of a chicken. Very interesting, but felt wrong to be intruding as tourist and there was a definite energy about the outsiders buying tickets to view a spectacle...
- I´m staying at the house of my friend´s friend. He lives in a gorgeous house set up in the hill with a view of San Cristobol de las Casas and its surrounding mountains. He also has 11 very exuberant dogs, which makes eating and entering a huge exercise. Wow, whippets are some hyper-ass dogs.
- Took a 6-hour bus ride to Palenque to see Mayan ruins and see two famous waterfalls. The ruins were cool and the waterfalls amazing. We got to swim in one until the rain drove us out. Ah, but the big adventure proved to be the bus ride there where my friend and I both ended up getting major road sickness on the windy roads, last minute tamales, and an unwise choice of morning mexcal. I was feeling a bit piqued from the road but the smell of my friend´s vomit totally put me over the edge. Honestly, it is one the funniest things that could happen and as gross as it was I can´t help smiling or exploding with laughter when I think about my friend´s first hamster-cheeked vomit face.

My Spanish still sucks as ever and I may have to solo a trip to the Pacific coast. Ah! I hope I´m ready for a little adventure. Though, please, no more gastronomic ones.

home is where the seratonin is...

If you will notice, I've finally updated the title of this blog to indicate that I in fact live in Oakland, and not Berkeley anymore. I know, it's about 2 years behind my actual physical move, but the current status update has a lot to do with mulling over my living situation and possible changes to it.

For the past few months I've been looking at condos and houses with a milquetoast intention to buy. And today I saw a lovely house that I could totally picture myself living in. Strolling to the local bakery and grocery shops. Visiting the local library. Taking walks in the residential streets and to the nearby park. Figuring out new routes to get to work. Signing up at the local gym. Planting a garden...(I have a lip tremble at that one.) But then also freaking out at how I could possibly cover the mortgage payments for an exorbitantly priced house, trying hard to stay in Oakland but not anywhere I might get shot. My anxiety level spiked at thoughts of possibly three-fourths of my paycheck being siphoned off each month and having no savings at all, being stuck in a large--albeit charming--space that is devoid of the furniture I can't afford.

But let me backtrack a bit. This whole house searching thing started in the spring when my mom pointed out that housing prices are plummeting and it's a great time to get into the housing market. Low interest rates. Foreclosures priced to sell. Great investment opportunities. At her avid urging I went to an open house and met a realtor and have since been on a bit of a runaway train seeing condos and houses from listings sent to me by my mom, my realtor, and some that I found on my own while combing trulia.com and redfin.com. I even made offers on 2 condos, but at prices that I was quickly relieved were too low to be accepted.

I've learned a great deal about Bay Area real estate, though to be honest not as much as if my heart were really into to buying a place. I've maintained a search out of a weird sense of obligation to my parents to be fiscally-minded and accepting of their offered generosity--because for real there ain't no way I could independently afford any kind of downpayment on anything. My parents really want to invest money in me by helping me to get a place and I had to struggle with being able to accept that gift and not resent or degrudge it as an prod or a chain. After finally grappling with that, today's seeing a house that I could actually potentially live in made me freak out again and feel rushed to act. Because I'm not ready to buy a house. Or a condo.

And talking it over with my mom, while she went what price we should offer and launched into giving me more listings to look at, I finally was able to articulate how stressful and painful this whole process was and how in a hurry I was to put in offers just so that I could stop looking for more houses. And this time my mom heard the desperation, or maybe just peevishness, in my voice and realized that I was not enjoying this housing search and was doing it out of some misplaced sense of filial duty. And she released me. Said, you're not ready--it's ok.

I was surprised. I was gearing up for a verbal melee with hurt feelings and blame and a culminating burst of sobs to get myself out of this particular spiral of parental expectation, but my mom was cool about it. Which reminds me of a recent revelation about how Asian parents feed off their kids' insecurity. If I can't project confidence and manage up, my parents will give explicit instructions and expectations and manage down believing that they need to guide me out of my uncertainty. I mean, I knew when this whole thing started that I didn't want to buy a condo or house. I was paralyzed just by the thought of moving out of my drafty, tiny studio apartment (for what? where? ahh!). If I could have conveyed that uncertainty with certainty to my mom, I realize that I could have saved myself months of grief. It's hard for me too to learn that my parents aren't going to push me to the edge of a cliff just because they want to. If they can understand what I want, they won't feel so compelled to guess that I need to want what they want. What a crazy thought. We don't have to torture ourselves or each other just for the hell of it.

Maybe I'll browse craigslist and see if there are any nice one bedroom apartments around. If I feel like it.

For goodness sake

I just finished reading Nick Hornby's How To Be Good. I didn't encounter verbal artistry to coo over, but the book got under my skin, which is maybe the genius of it. One theme it hits, alongside the narrative of a family struggling along and a ridiculous spiritual healer with turtle broaches pierced to his eyebrows, is how does one be good? What do you owe to society, to the poor, to injustice, to meanness? How much should we feel guilty and take responsibility for the shittiness of the world we live in and the ugly side of humanity. I think what shocked me a bit is how much I didn't care for any kind of sanctimony anymore. I don't know if it has to do with getting older or having turned "charity" into my career by doing social work, but the desperate need to change the world now to right so much socially constructed inequality has puttered out of me. The righteous indignation and inability to understand how there can be so much ill in the world has been replaced with an easy satisfaction with knowing that things are the way they are. It's enough to keep myself together and not get depressed or mean or unsatisfied with life. Maybe it's also the futility that I learned in doing social work as well, that you have limits to what you can do and the world will stumble merrily along in it's usual fucked up state with or without my intervention. It sure takes the pressure off. Also some of the sense of purpose though. So what's left? How do you be good?