Winds Blow East

Again it has been too long since I have recorded anything in this blog. How unfortunate as well, as it has been a truly great summer with a lot of experiences, thoughts, and mental progress I think.

In short, since my last post Arcadiy and I completed our great journey West to California, where Kelsey met me and we had a fantastic two weeks in Big Sur, San Jose, Berkeley / Oakland / San Francisco, Napa / Sonoma Valleys, and finally at Get Golden with AIESEC San Jose at Yosemite National Park where we climbed to the very top of Half Dome - my greatest summiting feat. Then I flew out to New York to see some friends including Tiffany and A. King, who were on the cusp of beginning their terms as the first duly elected AIESEC US Member Committee team members in twelve years. I returned to Alabama, where Kelsey came down to visit again for a weekend, and I worked out and relaxed. In July I went up to stay with Kelsey for three weeks in Chapel Hill while also catching Independence Day in Washington, DC. After another week in Gadsden, I helped her move into a new home in DC, where we spent two weeks and said "see you later" for a year (or six months or so) the day before she started her new job this week.

The "see you later" is because on Monday morning I fly out to China for one year to work at a startup content delivery network company called Prime Networks in Beijing. It is a technical traineeship through AIESEC.

That came after a great deal of wrangling with three different opportunities over the summer, and this is what came out on top. Thankfully so, I believe. In China I will get to spend a year in a totally foreign culture, as the only time I've been to "Asia" was when I was on the eastern side of Istanbul for a month in August 2007. I will have the opportunity to learn as much as I can of a major world language, Mandarin. I will be working in an area that is related to my degree, and not just teaching English. I will be working for a start-up, to immerse myself in the entrepreneurial environment. From my perspective, although I don't want to get ahead of myself too much, I am getting a pretty good deal.

I know a lot of people get stressed and anxious and even teary-eyed when they go on a journey like this, leaving their homes and their loved ones. The leaving is not lost on me. I recognize and understand my feelings of separation from my good friends, my family, and my girlfriend very much. The same goes for the places I won't see for a year. But the drive to know and experience more, to know more people and be a part of more places and learn more from the wide world is orders of magnitude greater than the sadness. I have never been homesick before. I don't think I will start to in China. I feel propelled towards it, with the wind at my back and the path leading East for now. So much to learn and so much opportunity is a bell-clear beckoning on an early morning.

I must abed now, but soon I will be in Shanghai for two weeks to complete immigration. And then the task begins!

The Turner Experience

On Wednesday morning, Arcadiy and I started out in Atlanta, Georgia, after eating lunch with Ben James and Willy B. We crossed the entire country in his white stallion. Last night we arrived in San Jose, CA, at the house of former LCP of AIESEC SJSU, Colin. He has continued on to Seattle; I am staying for two amazing weeks in the Bay Area.

Here is our entire trip that we just took:


View Larger Map

Each night, except for in Salt Lake City, we managed to stay with AIESEC friends and have a great time. Also we hiked up to Dream Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park on Saturday (we would have continued up the trail to Emerald Lake but it was too snow-packed) and stopped off at the Sierra Trading Post in Cheyenne, WY.

This trip has been an intense experience for me. I have been to San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Oxford before, but (with the exception of Oxford) it was always via airplane. Driving across the country, inch by inch and foot by foot and mile by mile, watching every blade of grass bleed into every forest and give way to the flat green plains of Kansas to grow into the rising highlands of eastern Colorado, abruptly interrupted by the titanic Rockies and moving on up north to pass over the moonscape that is Wyoming, through the unfamiliar Western terrain of Utah's salt flats and Nevada's heavy mountainous deserts finally giving way to Tahoe's majestically beautiful summits rolling down to the Pacific coast has been a surreal and powerful accomplishment. I have come to understand and appreciate just how very vast and diverse this country is, and everywhere we passed by I thought of different histories, of 40 acres and a mule, of outlaws on the frontier, of buffalo massacres and Native American tribes, of Mormons crossing such an incredible distance to found Deseret and of the true end of the frontier coming from the western end as well. It has blown my mind and it has also been the very appropriate beginning to what I expect will be a wonderful few weeks enjoying freedom before I ship out to Asia (wherever in that even more vast land I choose to go).

Tomorrow Kelsey arrives and then we will go camping in Big Sur, we will stay with my cousin in Berkeley to hit up San Francisco, and we will go camping in Napa before Get Golden. I am ecstatic to be able to spend two great weeks in paradise.

More to come soon hopefully. I'm taking some pretty good pictures.

The Mountaintop

I have finished Georgia Tech. I have taken all my finals. Most of the stuff is out of the Duplex ready to go back to Gadrock. Tomorrow morning I head to the Georgia Dome to go through commencement.

And it is looking like I will have quite a plate of options on the table. I have interviewed with / am in the process of moving forward with three different opportunities. One is being on the expansion team expanding AIESEC into Mongolia, and continuing the good work begun by my former comrade Alina and her band of merry Yalies. One is a traineeship for Prime Networks, Ltd., a content delivery network startup in Beijing, PRC. And one is for Mindvalley in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

They all represent radically different possible paths for this new stage in my life. The winds of fortune will have to be read carefully for me to take the wisest path. I intend to be out of the country by August, but if I choose Mongolia I will have to be there by July 1. As the possibilities weigh themselves on my mind at the crossroads, I remember the words of the checkout clerk:

If you want to find the truth, you have to walk through the darkness. In the depths of the darkness where no one likes to tread is where the truth lies.

Those are the words that swim in my head at night when I lay me down to sleep, that buzz through my brain while the steam of the shower awakens me while the morning light streams through the bathroom window. I think they are the calling of my destiny.

But until then, I go with a great companion on a long trip where he will begin his life anew in Seattle, and will drop me off in San Jose, CA; on the way we will commiserate and rest with old friends in Ohio, Kansas, and Colorado; we will hike a bit and chat aplenty. Then I get the pleasure of spending two wonderful weeks with Colin before he begins his MC term working with Tiffany and the others on the AIESEC US Dream Team, the first properly elected and selected such team in twelve years. I'll also be with my new ladyfriend, exploring San Jo, San Francisco (I'm particularly interested in checking out a Long Now Foundation Seminar!), camping in Napa Valley and culminating in AIESEC San Jose's Get Golden camping trip in Yosemite over Memorial Day weekend. Then I fly to New York to visit those people beginning their terms on the MC, and then back to Alabama on the first of June for some much needed R & R after five years of mental siege.

So much to try to experience and prepare for before the next chapter begins in this saga. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Drum Circle

Yesterday I took the time to take my djembe out to Piedmont Park at 4 PM, when Shaun said the drum circle folks met every Sunday.

We sat down on a sunny, breezy afternoon in the small stone-paved plaza / overlook next to The Lawn. The core of the circle had already formed - a couple of experienced and well-practiced black conga players, and around them some people with djembes of various sizes. Mine was the largest and deepest. I can't escape the large instruments.

Shaun played first, and then I played two afterwards. The rhythms were varied, richly textured, and lasted a good long time. I definitely delighted in getting lost in them after I caught my groove. As the player of the lowest-pitched drum I was pretty important so I had to pay attention to providing a reliable beat, rather than indulging in adding garnishes or flair.

As we played to our hearts' content, people came to sit and watch, to listen. Children played and danced in front of us, and so did some adults - dancing skilfully to the syncopated beats, shaking every axis of freedom with the Sun and the people watching on. There were people unconventionally dressed - throwbacks to the '60s, some just not locked into the prevailing fashion, one woman looked like an African godmother. As I watched I became entranced by the very beat I was a part of creating. I closed my eyes and let it flow.

As I subjected myself to the charging tide of the beat of which I was a weaver, one of the paddlers on the grand boat down the river of music and art and life that was happening in the southeast corner of Piedmont Park, I thought about a world or a place where this gathering would be frowned upon, or illegal, or attacked. People dressed differently would be shunned, spat upon, pissed upon, attacked with rocks or sticks or bags full of old food. The musicians would be surrounded by the police, their instruments confiscated or smashed on the ground in front of the illegally gathered crowd who would have to flee for their safety, weeping with confusion and anger and desperation if they were caught. And when those expressing themselves were safely detained, the mouthpiece of the regime would declare to the park: "This has been an illegal gathering in violation of the Code of Peace. You are reminded not to attend unauthorized and unsanctioned cultural gatherings at the risk of punishment under the prevailing Ordinances. Return to your homes."

With that in my mind, I reveled in the small but remarkable moment of expression we were a part of. And I was thankful for the place I lay my head.

Finish Line Ahead

I will blog more about Spain later, when I have my photos all nice and loaded up.

The other night I was at Trader Joe's, just getting some milk. I noticed there were several long-ish lines (for Trader Joe's anyway) at the checkout counters, but the one at the left end of the occupied counters had one person who was about to be done, so I went to it. As soon as I settled there, a man's voice to the left asked, "Are you a philosopher?"

I looked and where I thought there was an unmanned counter there was a worker, with no line in front of him. I walked and I said, "Not yet anyway." He replied while looking me in the eye and taking my groceries, "I hope not. Because if you can't find the free check-out counter in the grocery store, you'll never find the truth."

He continued as he rang me up, "And you know, most people think that the truth, it's like rays of light that shine down from above." He paused as he looked at me deeper, not really leaning in but pulling me somewhat closer with his eyes. "But you will not find the truth as revelation. If you want to find the truth, you have to walk through the darkness. In the depths of the darkness where no one likes to tread is where the truth lies." He bagged my last item and I walked out the door.

I think that statement is profoundly true. When I was still a Christian, one of the aspects of Jesus that I most sought to replicate and admire (and admittedly I still do) was the part where he "ate with sinners." This had a true effect on my understanding and interpretation of the faith and the way of life, but many of the authority figures around me often dismissed this aspect somewhat when I would try to explain it, or at the least they rarely encouraged it.

At this point it should be noted that this entry has been written over three separate periods, each time with me meaning to finish it, but always getting interrupted before my thoughts finished. Here's some more:

I've been working on getting the sort of ideal traineeship in China: a year in a fundamentally non-Western country, a place where I can learn a major world language, working in renewable energy and utilizing somewhat, but not overwhelmingly, engineering. I have been in talks with a company but it's slowing down, so I'm not sure how that's going to work out. So I am expanding my traineeship search. I'm probably going to apply to MindValley, which would be so off the chain, and a couple of other places. We'll see - main thing is to get out into a worthwhile thing for my own interests and development, and to wait out this economic thing. I like to read fivethirtyeight a lot because Nate Silver does a good job of making statistically interesting projections and analyses of the economic situation, which is hard to understand, at least as much as I would like to understand it - which is profoundly deeply.

Very soon I'll be done with GT and then I think people will see someone return who hasn't been here in a while - a calmer, more amicable me. My own mother tells me how much less happy I seem now than I did before college, and with an awesome trip to be taken in May with people I really want to be with and the prospect of a year of new developments, I think my mind will sufficiently rest and recharge itself, along with my soul.

Gone Ramblin'

It only just hit me that, oh, I leave for the airport to go to Spain with my sister in a few minutes.

The first time I went to Spain it was like this huge movement and upheaval, but the next time I left the US for another country - to Istanbul, Turkey - it was more like sitting down in a room for 15 hours and then walking out in a new place. It wasn't a huge upheaval, it was just there. I think that's when I truly realized that travel had changed me at the core.

I like that a lot. I hope my sister will come to understand the same thing.

Another Set

I don't have much time before I need to lay me down, but I need to continue the exercise.

I have an unholy mountain to climb in the next 72 hours. On Wednesday I have two tests and a presentation, on Thursday I have a test, and it ends about six hours before I need to be at the airport to volar a España.

It's so much that I almost can't even "see" Spain over the mountaintop. I have to give myself solace in the fact that I only have five Mondays left at Georgia Tech (not counting finals week). That's nice.

Another huge difficulty is in our senior design project, the maglev train. Very, very ambitious. Too ambitious probably. We'll see. We'll pass anyway, but barely. F+. Click.

I probably won't get truly struck with excitement for Spain until I'm there. That's just the way it tends to be with me and travel, it's just going down the road. It's all a long road that goes on forever, not some huge exciting sea change.

But I am of course looking for that sea change, if and when it comes. I'm ready for something completely new. New parts of my brain need to be stretched, and the parts that have been blown out and salted over for the last five years need time to heal. Whatever it takes. But the learning curve can't stop.