Fish has been great lately about being my fact-checker. For example, I must’ve had Janice Mirikitani on the brain when I wrote “Janice Joplin” instead of “Janis Joplin” back in early July.

Later, he pointed out that Evan Bayh is from Indiana, not Iowa. Which really, I should’ve known (and did), but I managed to confuse him with Vilsack, whose name will never be on a nationally distributed bumper sticker. (Unless it’s of the ilk of “sh*t happens”.)

Speaking of bumper stickers, I’ve been thinking lately that bad drivers really shouldn’t put bumper stickers on their car. Or if they do, they should have bumper stickers that represent the opposite of what they believe. Nothing makes you want to vote for Obama less than being cut off and nearly hit by someone with three Obama bumper stickers on the rear of their car. Nothing makes you more tempted to set fire to a cetacean than being tailgated by and then swerve-rev-around-passed by someone advocating salvation for the whales. (I use these examples not because liberal bumper-sticker proponents are more likely to drive like feces so much as because that’s what’s around in my neighborhood. Also, because I couldn’t be less likely to vote for McCain or defend my right to own firearms, no matter what.)

But back to errors. I don’t correct things for the most part on this blog. I guess a legitimate typo that creates potential confusion where such should not have been may be fair game. I’ve corrected a couple of those. But by and large, I think there’s something interesting to be seen in the raw errata that come up in the course of spilling my thoughts on the page. In no way is this blog or its predecessor intended to be a refined product. I’m not trying to be particularly persuasive. I’m just trying to scrape little litmus bits of my perspective and what it’s like to be me at this moment in history and spread them on a screen. That sounds gross, but there’s something about the visceral feel for that description that perfectly reflects what I’m getting at. And why I don’t edit.

For some reason, I’d really love to see Janice Mirikitani sing “Piece of My Heart”. I bet she’d tear that up.

Peace
So it looks, thankfully, like the Olympic Ossetia War may be over almost as quickly as it started. If you’ve been under a rock for a week (or in Vegas, as I was for the bulk of the war), Georgia invaded the breakaway republic of South Ossetia as the Olympics opened. Russia invaded South Ossetia to drive the Georgians out, then kept going for a ways, stopping short of the capital in time for a ceasefire.

Sound familiar? I’ve already made much of the parallels between this Georgia-South Ossetia-Russia scenario and the Iraq-Kuwait-USA scenario circa the early 1990’s. It took a while longer for the whole thing to unfold in the prior case, but then again, it was the USA and not Saudi Arabia that went in to “liberate” Kuwait. The fact that no one in the US media or perspective has labeled this recent struggle as Russia’s “liberation” of South Ossetia is frankly baffling to me. I thought our country believed in self-determination. Well, no I didn’t really think that. I’ve always known that we were hypocrites.

But the hypocrisy goes deeper than recent history. The more compelling parallel, it occurs to me, is the Mexican-American War, with Texas playing the role of South Ossetia. The majority of Texas wanted to leave Mexico and they declared a shaky and unsound independence. Unable to sustain real independence, they floated between Mexico and the US, leaning toward the US. When the US finally tried to absorb Texas officially, Mexico went in to crack down on the renegade province. And the US quickly reconquered Texas and penetrated the aggressor, this time going all the way to Mexico City and taking the Congo California, Arizona, and New Mexico as a penalty.

Now I’m not on the side of the US in either of these examples, or Russia currently. Nor am I on the side of Mexico, Iraq, or Georgia. Frankly, all these people are committing horrible acts by using violence to resolve their differences. If people want to be free, let ‘em go. You’re not going to get very far by holding people against their will, be it in a prison, a camp, or a country.

What I do find interesting, however, is how prevalent the principle of defending a weak breakaway republic has been in US policy and yet how blatantly the US has sided with Georgia. It doesn’t surprise me, as stated - I expect the US to be inconsistent in an effort to only defend its friends and partners, no matter how atrocious their acts may be. I guess what surprises me most is how much the media have let the US policy advocates get away with this perspective. Not a soul has presented the counter-arguments about Russia defending a weaker (interestingly, ethnically Iranian) group against an invasive force. On the contrary, they’ve dredged up Cold War rhetoric and comparisons to the ‘68 crackdown on Czechoslovakia. This is just preposterous. If you’re going to believe in the Mexican-American War and Gulf War I, you have to side with Russia. It’s just logic.

Regardless, it very fortunately doesn’t seem to matter any more what side one’s on, because this conflict is over. It looked really scary for awhile, but everyone authentically seems to care more about peace than ego. Which is mind-boggling, but may give us some reason for…

Hope
Not only am I elated to see the end of this war, I’m also heartened by articles like this one, talkin’ ’bout my gen-eration. I know that I certainly feel like my generation cares more about being socially conscious, environmentally friendly, and actually doing good instead of evil, but it’s nice to see confirmation.

Obviously, though (you knew I wouldn’t stay optimistic for long), I am highly concerned by how this article seems to indicate that lip service is more or less enough to lure my gullible generation into signing on the dotted line. Yes, there’s a section entitled “More than just talk”, but if your company is destroying people’s lives on one hand and then turning around and giving a token amount of money back, it’s still mostly doing evil. Here’s a good indication if this is the case: the word company. This word means that the bottom line overrides other concerns, even if the bottom line can offer light dusting to the community. Usually the only reason it sprinkles this dusting is to advertise, to make people feel better about the company in the first place. Don’t be duped, fellow Y’s/Millennials (I still prefer Y because of the homophonic implication of my favorite three-letter word), it’s just a token. If you have to do a day job, best to put it directly into a non-profit, where there is no bottom line really.

But hey, if everyone is going into these businesses with these attitudes… and can somehow manage to maintain them while working in a company for decades (a gargantuan if), then maybe there’ll be some real change in, uh, 30 years. Hm. That’s a little hope, right? But the fact of the matter is that things are going to need to change big time before then. Fact? Perhaps I meant…

Truth
Which is actually going to be a section title for an update about fiction. Contradictory, you say? The old saying says that truth is stranger than fiction, but I’d actually like to coin that fiction is truer than truth. Before you start lumping me in with a Steven Colbert “truthiness” spoof, hear me out. This will explain why 98% of what I read is fiction and why I aspire to be a writer of same rather than non-.

The thing about non-fiction is that it’s trying too hard. The truth (!) of the matter is that everything that one writes, thinks, does is laden in one’s perspective. There’s no helping it or getting around it. Truth may ultimately be vision without perspective, but no one is ever able (in this species in this era in history) to divorce themselves entirely from their own vantage point. So attempts to be objective with a single or group voice are always going to fall short. One is always trying to prove a point, find an eternal truth, even just tell a story about something that happened to someone else. But it’s never (ever) 100% true. It’s fictionalized, cast in a certain light, omits some details, even if they’re only the details that physically can’t be attained in the process of researching the story.

None of these weaknesses of non-fiction would really be a problem if non-fiction called itself “semi-fiction” or “half-truth”. The real problem that non-fiction has is its branding itself as objective fact/truth. By claiming that something inherently biased is indeed objective, non-fiction sets itself up as misrepresentation and disaster, often misleading people into believing it, accepting it whole cloth. When of course, as we’ve established, it needs salt.

But is hope for truth lost? Of course not, because we have fiction. Fiction makes no bones about its factual content - it’s not even trying to be true. But to be believable, to be functional, to resonate with any reader, fiction must establish itself within a consistent and real framework. People are constantly analyzing and evaluating it for its reality, thus holding it already to a higher standard than non-fiction.

But more compellingly, fiction is freed from all constraints, so it can actually tell its story completely, regardless of what someone may say or think or feel or critique. And this liberation allows it to get at a more fundamental truth about the world, because it’s much less self-conscious. It’s not trying to recenter itself in some objectivity or reality, but simply trying to convey a feeling, a presence, a story, a reality of some sort. And this is really the only way to tell the truth. At least more fundamental truths, about how people really are, about what they go through, about what is important to humanity.

With that off my chest, this section was supposed to be about my proclivity toward absurdly long books this year. I’m close to completing Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s WWII treatise that feels more like work than any sort of recreation. I’ve never delved into Pynchon, despite being given the absurdly short The Crying of Lot 49 at some point in college, but he was compared to David Foster Wallace (actually vice versa), so I figured once I ran out of Wallace fiction, it was time to jump in. Having already read Infinite Jest (1,049 pages), The Brothers Karamazov (711 pages), and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (607 pages), I was not concerned about the 760 dense pages of this one. (Parenthetically, this is not me bragging so much as trying to explain why I’ve only read nine books this year.)

Boy, was I wrong. Gravity’s Rainbow is about as inaccessible and oblique as a book can get and still be in any way readable. While it’s an interesting challenge at times and authentically hilarious when one least expects it, it mostly leaves me apathetic. Part of my disappointment is surely derived from having read the first paragraph in a bookstore and being intrigued by what seemed like an apocalyptic plot. Instead, it was just another WWII retread. And I understand how WWII was confused for the apocalypse by the generation that lived it; I even understand why. But it’s less interesting now, it’s overplayed, and it clouds our vision of the future.

I mean, this may not be entirely fair. I don’t know where it ends. There could be a whole bunch of highly redeeming endings for Gravity’s Rainbow. Less than a hundred pages to go and it’s not looking stellar. But if Slothrop ends up in a GE lab with the five people controlling everything and all the other victims lined up… maybe. I’ve made a lifetime of reading books and watching movies out of hoping for crescendic endings that perfectly conveyed my perspective to all, only to have hopes dashed against the rocks 98% of the time.

Deus ex crapola.

Conclusion
I will talk about Vegas at some point, wherein I spent 72 hours (59 of them awake). I will talk about struggling through the ennui of life in the late summer of my day job world (because that’s something I haven’t talked about enough on this blog). I will talk more about the economic situation of a country that still doesn’t know it’s about to collapse, about the excitement and ambivalence of being here to watch it crumble.

But when the opportunity presented itself to filter today’s tidbits through the lens of my old phrase of the three big ideals, how could I pass it up? When I still haven’t decided whether to go to my 10-year high school reunion, why wouldn’t I label a post as I labeled my senior page in the yearbook supplement?

I think my world today can be summed up as follows:

“I’m thinking of going.”

Just because I don’t write Introspection anymore doesn’t mean that I don’t often think in terms of quick updates. This blog format affords the luxury of doing both short blippy quips about my life like the old days, as well as the longer, more thoughtful pieces…

One of the grand ironies of the American experience is that some of our greatest themes and anthems for revered concepts are actually songs lambasting said concept.

The least subtle example of this may be Peter, Paul & Mary’s “I Dig Rock-n-Roll Music”. This is a more obscure case, but it remains PPM’s only really fully legitimate radio song. With lines like “But if I really say it, the radio won’t play it, unless I lay it, between the liiines,” it’s not really hard to see exactly where this song’s loyalty lies. And yet it made the radio and remains there to date as a sincere tribute to rock-n-roll (as opposed to folk music, which PPM were actually advocating). I’m sure the even crueler irony of this being their one radio hit when it complains that the radio won’t play folk music… yeah.

The most damning example may be Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”. This tune has become third only to “Proud to Be an American” (a song guaranteed to induce vomiting within 30 seconds) and the national anthem itself as the theme music to flag-waving jingoistic American patriotism. And yet the song was written as an indictment of American hypocrisy and the Vietnam War. The non-refrain lyrics are just hard enough to understand and the chorus is just loud and brash enough to ensure that this song will always bring a smile to the face and a cheer to the voice of those who are unaware they are celebrating an anti-American tune. “So they put a rifle in my hand, sent me off to a foreign land, to go and kill the yellow man.”

But the song that’s stuck in my head from this category today is “Takin’ Care of Business”. Office Depot or a related office store has become the latest in an unending string of businesses using this anthem to explain how productive you’ll be when using their products. “It’s the work that we avoid and we’re all self-employed, we love to work at nothing all day.” Yeah. This song is about quitting your job and starting a rock band, which is explicitly stated to be a lazy sort of scam on those who actually slog away at day jobs. Business indeed.

The song is stuck in my head because it’s one of the rotating theme songs for my baseball video game of choice these days, the 2007 mod of the greatest baseball game of all time, MVP Baseball 2005. My Mariners are getting massacred in this game on a regular basis, but any time I win makes it all worthwhile.

And speaking of the Mariners and winning, last night offered a glimpse at the best inning of the year for the (real-life) Seattle Mariners. Raul Ibanez had 6 RBI in a 10-run seventh inning that catapulted the M’s from a 6-1 deficit to an 11-6 win. When I tuned in around the fourth or fifth inning, it was 6-0, Twins. I wasn’t even sure why I tuned in when the score was already that lopsided. The M’s haven’t exactly been specializing in comebacks this year. But Ibanez hit a grand slam that made it 6-5 and the M’s proceeded to tack on and on and on, all the way to bringing up Ibanez again in the inning as the 14th man to come to the plate, and again with the bases loaded!! He only smacked a single up the middle to plate two and the inning only ended because Willie Bloomquist tried to score too on a throwing error and got barely tagged out.

It’s funny how just an inning like that can redeem a mood and a perspective for a day or so. Even in a hopelessly lost season.

It’s the sun that’s hopelessly lost here in San Francisco, and it’s looking like my trip to Las Vegas (Thursday evening departure) couldn’t be coming at a better time. The 10-day forecast in San Francisco does not get above 65 degrees (high temperature). The same 10-day forecast in Las Vegas does not get below 81 degrees (low temperature). I am a little nervous about “Florida Syndrome” in LV, wherein people will air-condition casino interiors to the point of being as cold as August highs in San Francisco, but then I may just cancel half the poker to go sit outside on the Strip and bake. I desperately need to feel the illusion of some sort of summer.

Meanwhile, my job continues to be my job. Slightly more livable than two weeks ago, ebbing and flowing, constantly leading me on only to crush my spirit. If nothing else, it’s giving me great fodder for future books and stories, future tales of how the American work model fails its people on all levels. And I know that where I’m working is better than 95% of what else is out there. We’re not even driven by a profit motive.

And speaking of profit (and even prophet), is it too early to declare the End of Capitalism? Today, Wall Street wants to think so. It’s just so exciting to have a negative net interest rate! To just feel that money devaluing in your pocket. I mean, how often does your pocket burn a hole in your money? That’s just nifty. Let’s buy financial stocks before they fail.

What surprises me is not that people are revealed to lie, cheat, steal, cut corners, and fabricate in pursuit of almighty profit. What surprises me is that people are surprised by the revelations.

Work out.

I’m rapidly careening towards a decision. There’s just too much evidence, too much obviousness, too much at stake.

That train’s heading nowhere good. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

Call me if you strongly disagree. Or if you agree and want to vouch your support. Or if you’re really confused, but concerned.

Hopefully there won’t be too many cacti. And maybe a little water nearby where I land.

Like high inflation, everyone’s proclivity toward debt, and the Iraq War, StoreyTelling being inundated with a deluge of spam comments is looking like part of the reality I’m just going to have to adjust to.

The one spam comment per minute rate looks pretty consistent, so I think that’s what it’s going to be.

Meanwhile, the general barometer of how things stand based on the people on the streets of the Tenderloin says outlook not good. The theory about the end of the month causing the trouble seemed to be dented yesterday. But who knows at this point.

And if the Mariners lose one more exciting one-run game, I think they’re going to set some kind of record for fan frustration. They’re 1-8 in one-run games. 1-8! And they’re 12-8 (.600) in the rest of the games. .600 happens to be the winning percentage of the top two teams in the AL. The only good thing about this is that they can’t possibly keep up that kind of record in one-runners, so as that progresses to .500, the M’s will go on a tear. Right?

The cable may get fixed today and we’ll have some sort of explanation. It’s Comcastic!

Work’s been better; everything else has been crazier. The rate of change is looking pretty spiky as we settle into May. I’ve surrounded myself with distraction bolsters: the APDA Forum game, playing baseball on Sunday, and so on. But the world is there whether one’s distracted or not. Does anyone really think Bush is going to take record disapproval lying down?

Happy Friday.

So I haven’t updated in a while in part because I’ve been crafting and then moderating a Werewolf/Mafia game with a whopping 45 players online on the APDA Forum.

And just now, the Forum exceeded its bandwidth.

This is just a note to the players in this game that we are pausing the game and I would like to do anything possible to get the APDA Forum back up and running ASAP. I can’t imagine it taking longer than the first of the month, since I think these limits are monthly. Maybe we can then figure out how to expand the bandwidth, if not do that before.

The game will continue! Even if I have to find another forum to revive it in, we are not going to stop the game like at least one past game was halted by a Forum crash. So do not despair and do not stop thinking about the game! It will be revived.

And now, I must away to baseball. Hopefully it will be restored as early as tonight.

So, barring unforeseeable alterations or difficulties, here is a big chunk of my schedule for this calendar week:

Sunday, 4/13: Cardinals @ Giants, AT&T Park
Monday, 4/14: Diamondbacks @ Giants, AT&T Park
Wednesday, 4/16: Mariners @ A’s, McAfee Coliseum
Friday, 4/18: Pirates @ Cubs, Wrigley Field

7 teams, 4 games, 3 cities. That’s a good week. Makes it a little easier to deal with working and all that in the meantime.

But tack on things like an unexpected free trip to a luxury suite yesterday (apparent face value: ~$400/seat), Randy Johnson’s first start of the ‘08 campaign today, my beloved Mariners on Wednesday, and my first trip to Wrigley on Friday? It’s downright amazing.

I’m also hoping that the streak (currently a 1-game streak) of teams I’m rooting for this week winning can keep up. Even though my loyalties are somewhat torn tonight (my favorite pitcher vs. my favorite NL team) and are not strong on Friday (though they lean pretty discernibly toward the Pirates, which I just can’t say that the Cubs bleachers fans will be excited about), I’m looking to go 4-0. Or at least 2-2, with the second win being the M’s. Because really, that’s all that matters in the end.

April may be terrible - and it is - but it at least bestows the blessing of baseball. I’m not sure how I’d survive this month without it.

A first day - no joke. A joke in the bathroom. A dental visit. A decision: no anesthesia. A walk home. A phone call, somewhere between banter and the most important decisions of our lives. A poker game, where a lesson was actually learned. A Mariners game, where all season was lived in a day, or in two tumultuous sine curve innings. A heart-stopping phone call for all the wrong reasons. A joke that just doesn’t work because of history, of context, of life itself.

I could write all the details, flesh it out, spell it out in flesh (a pounding heart in the wake of feeling the Earth slip out from under one for no good reason) and blood (spilling onto the towel from prodded gums). But there’s no need, or no cause - today felt like a day that hearkened for blippy Introspection-style reflection. And some day I’ll read and remember and another dawn of another April will come across from the distance of years or months or weeks or days. And I’ll be just there. Inside it all again. April the first. April is the cruelest month. April come she will.

And has.

If you liked 76 pictures, you’ll love 84 pictures!

Check out the latest snapshots from the trip that was. Please note especially that you will enjoy this installment if you’re a fan of elephants.

I have other things to post about, but they have nothing to do with this update note. We’ll see if I get to them. I can say that it’s been a good weekend.

So it’s been awhile.

Check here for all the action and excitement of Day 4 (27 January) from our tour of India & Nepal. Please note that there are 76 photos on that page, making for some substantial download times, depending on the quality of your connection to the interwebs.

I’m a little embarrassed that my last photo update was on 18 February and it’s now 8 March. Almost more time has elapsed since the last update than elapsed between the actual third day and when the third day’s photos were posted. But at least I’m getting back on track now.

Hopefully it won’t be 20 more days till the next update.

Little is so humbling as setting slightly optimistic goals and then being bowled over with malaise and inertia. The fact is that I have found myself so overwhelmed by the online efforts I would like to produce that I have been unable to make any progress on any front.

But for now I bring you the slightest bit of progress: a landing page for the Photo Diary of my time in India & Nepal. It’s not much, but it’s a start… and it gives me a place to send all my friends who don’t read this blog so they can check for updates on their own.

There is more to come. I have a to-do list a mile long, almost all of it involving webby projects. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like without the Blue Pyramid’s demands hanging over my head. Less connected and quieter, to be sure. But would I have written 3 more books?

Enough of such concerns for now. Today is booked, so little more will be coming out today. And then it’s a work week. But it’s March, which offers hope of loosing the chains of inertia. Not losing them, to be sure, but loosing them. I know you were wondering if that was a typo.

Type. Oh.

Somehow, this weekend felt like someone sucked all the oxygen out of the universe.

I had big plans for the weekend, or at least moderate steps toward the things I’ve been intending to work on for a while. Many of which are things that just don’t take scads of effort or triumphant victories over inertia. And yet… nothing.

The weekend wasn’t a total washout. I saw some friends, played some games, watched an utterly frustrating Academy Awards session. (Tilda Swinton? In that field? The Coen Brothers on parade? Really?) But could I call myself productive? Did I sit down and get done? Nope.

I feel like I’m revisiting the same crossroads I practically inhabit all of the time. Does the Blue Pyramid, generally, as a potentially limitless pool of opportunity and time expenditure, add to or detract from my overall productivity? Would it be good to run a month of no BP as a litmus test for what else I could get done? Do feelings of inadequate productivity generally help or hinder the cause of making me more productive? Is there any way to make a day job compatible with my dreams, even in the short term?

And yet there is a larger inertia in play here, just in this particular weekend and seeming to extend to today. I hope I can shake it, that the fog lifts before I have to show up to a meeting or try to put together a project at the place that pays me. Which reminds me that I’m in record territory, as of just last week… Glide is now my longest-running employer ever. And it hasn’t even been two full years yet, even though it feels like eons. That’s probably telling.

But what is it telling me? And am I listening? And why was I startled, deep down, in the core, last night, to really contemplate for the billionth time how finite and fragile life is? For the first time in memory, it truly scared me. It didn’t hit as a passing observation or a reaffirmation of things I already knew, but it scared me. A new level of feeling that I’m falling short of potential, of where I should be. How would I feel if the writings didn’t get written, the ideas didn’t get expounded, the plan didn’t get laid out simply because I was slogging away at a day job in the meantime? Wouldn’t that be silly?

Storey Clayton: he made silly, shortsighted decisions that assumed there’d always be time.

God, save me from that epitaph.

No update from the trip that was today. Or at least not yesterday, bleeding into today as it now is. I was fully intending to, and I was probably going to do some other stuff with my night as well, when I got bowled over with a (thankfully brief) project.

Em & I were watching the primary returns come in, already yearning for a time when there were more names and more excitement than we’re down to in this, the allegedly most wide-open year in American presidential politics of our lifetime. And the old discussion came up about whether the Republicans counting all primaries/caucuses proportionally - instead of the status quo, which contains a smattering of winner-take-all, proportional, and mixed counting - would have changed any of the results.

Emily asked and I chalked this up as a quick trip to Google. But either someone’s done it under the wrong keywords or not at all… somehow, in this modern era of instant punditry and an army of political paraprofessional bloggers, could it be that no one had actually run the numbers?

This kind of stuff is now just about my (new) job, so you’d think I’d be tired of it after spending most of my 8 hours today slogging through statistics. But I simply had to know. And I’m glad I found out, because the results will blow your mind.

The fact that this kind of thing isn’t front-page news is either surprising or very much not so. I guess it’s one of those moot points of alternate scenario simulation, since there was never even so much as a tangential discussion amongst the Republican top brass that they might change this age-old system of assigning delegates. But, much like the superdelegate thing, it’s got to make you wonder if people are even pretending there are direct links between the voters and the final decisions.

Anyway, I’m already imagining possible follow-up calculations, such as (obviously, and no one do it while I’m at work tomorrow!) what if all the Democratic primaries/caucuses were winner-take-all? That’s a lot simpler to figure out, although it’s also beyond unrealistic since it’s clearly “going in the wrong direction”. Not that this superdelegate thing giving Hillary a chance to still maintain the monarchy by backroom means is much better.

In any case, I’m plenty burned out on that project for now. It was one of those things, maybe like the old 64-team APDA national tournament concepts, that I just had to sit down and crank out in its entirety without pausing to consider what else I could be doing with my time. I hope someone pays at least a little attention. How did Julian Sanchez put it so long ago… “Storey Clayton is a crazy, crazy man. But the tropical heat of obsession has yielded entertaining fruit in this case.”

That’s damn right.

Day three of my eighteen-day photo tour of India & Nepal (which before today hasn’t actually featured any India or Nepal) is up on the page.

More to come soon, hopefully still keeping up on the daily pace even during the work week.

In other news, today was totally shot down by a migraine, though I’m briefly through the worst of it, if my luck holds. I was long overdue for one and didn’t even have a terribly debilitating one throughout the trip (a minor one and a half, if memory serves). So no complaints, though this one’s been heavy on the vision-reduction as well.

Many reasons for keeping the update quick again today.

So I think I’m going to be releasing these roughly daily, which means I can keep up the pace of uploading photos without spending all my time on it and/or driving myself crazy.

Today’s photos are from the 25th of January, a plane day from London to Delhi. I really only took pictures out the window of Afghanistan, but there are several pretty good shots.

I’ve also added a category to these posts about the trip. And text transcriptions of my journal there will be coming soon.

Well I’m back from India, as should be relatively obvious from the recent spate of Duck & Cover updates (I missed Thursday because the internet was down), as well as the overhaul of the page theme here. It was an incredible time and I’m going to try to let the pictures and primary source writing from there tell the story.

To that end, here’s the first page of photos from the trip. I’m going to just periodically upload one day at a time and roll it out in installments. Similarly with the writing. For now, it’s all I can commit to. You should also be forewarned that the pictures are very large, averaging about 2/3rds of a megabyte each, and there will be tens of pictures on each page. So if you don’t have a superfast connection, grab a book while you wait for the pics to load.

Maybe it’ll be fun to watch this be released serially instead of all the photos and writing at once. Hopefully that’ll be the case.

In the meantime, I’m absolutely exhausted. Emily and I had our sleep schedules totally distorted upon return and have been waking up at 4 AM all week. Which is better than waking up too late for work, but still somewhat problematic. And today we were completely wiped out, unable to do anything at all despite needing to do a good deal to catch up from our time away. I would really think that jet-lag would wear off after five days, but my Mom pointed out that we have been going straight with travel or work without a break for basically 4 solid weeks. So I guess it makes sense to be this worn out.

Hopefully we’ll be able to catch up with people this weekend, not to mention some errands. We can’t stay this weary forever.

I’m back in an internet cafe, one with a painfully slow 33.6 Kbps that makes me yearn for the national parks of Nepal. We’re holed up in Orchha, India, a village of a scant 9,000 people with an incredible number of beautiful Hindu temples and a gargantuan palace of the Mughal era.

The palace itself was one of the nicest surprises of this trip, since Orchha initially looked like the lowlight of the whole journey. It’s a beautiful place, though, although admittedly vaguely tourist-trappy. There have been few places we’ve seen that aren’t at least a little touristy, though, or seemingly designed for a good bit of the population to cater specifically to Western visitors.

As predicted, I have made myself internet-accessible mostly to check in on the American political situation. CNN is a painfully slow website in general, opting for millions of bytes worth of loading instead of making information simply available. Nevertheless, I’ve gotten so accustomed to their format and their vote-counts that I can’t try to navigate another site on this connection. So I’m still waiting for it to load. I got a look at earlier results, however, and it looks like I may have been wrong about which party will have a hung convention. Although when there are only two candidates, one can’t really have a hung convention in the end, even if someone ends up winning by a single delegate. Maybe Edwards will refuse to drop out and cling tightly to his 26 delegates in the hopes that those few can swing the entire election.

Of course I still find it completely inevitable that Clinton will eventually be President, so this is all pretty academic. It’s looking more and more like a repeat of the 1996 election - a Clinton against a hopelessly old has-been who is about a decade past his political hopes and dreams.

But enough about America; I’ll be back there soon enough with very little else to ponder. I’m hoping to design a webpage to commemorate this trip upon return, but I’m already over 1100 digital photos taken (I’ve gotten used to my first digital camera in a hurry), so it’s going to take a good deal of time to get things posted. I am completely mentally unprepared to be back, save for a few bizarre work-anxiety dreams about the new post that I’ll be in within 16 hours of landing back in California.

The trip remains overwhelming and amazing and overall an incredibly positive experience. Trying to describe it in small bits seems to undermine the effort to describe the whole undertaking in full grandeur and detail, which I’ve kept up with nicely in my comp notebook. (Of course transcribing that will also take a while…) Suffice it to say that this is a beautiful country and different from North America in many of the very best of ways. Certainly not perfect, of course, and it’s been hard to transcend the experiences of a tourist to really get to the core of the country. It may be impossible, especially on a trip this short and this guided, though.

Emily’s Mom keeps saying on this trip “How could you possibly describe this?” and “You couldn’t possibly explain this to someone else.” I’m hoping to prove her wrong with my pages and pages of writing and hundreds of pictures.

But for now I’ll have to leave you with that and keep you in suspense.

Tomorrow, on to the Taj Mahal and then back to Delhi. I may run out of things to do in Delhi and post again, but I doubt it with the Gandhi Museum still to see…

Hello from Chitwan National Park in Nepal!

I won’t attempt to try to describe the events of the past few days, but they have been among the most memorable in a very long time. I am currently sitting in an internet cafe in a village on the outskirts of the Chitwan National Park, maybe a third of the way through our journey through Nepal and India. I have been taking copious notes in a comp notebook about the whole trip and I will probably dump them all straight into a “primary sources” entry upon return home. Already Emily and I have taken over 400 digital pictures and I’ve written over 30 pages chronicling the trip.

So I’ll save most of the details for when I get back. It’s been an amazing and extremely positive trip so far. I got a little sick (cold/ear infection type) the first couple nights, but have seemed to knock it out cold (if you will) with some crazy Australian cold/flu medicine that’s powerful stuff indeed.

Our group leader is phenomenal, a Nepali-born resident of India who has been showing us around and giving us the inside scoop. Our group is joined by three Australians and a British couple and we’ve all been becoming closer as we share this completely unprecedented journey. Yesterday we went on an 8-mile hike through the National Park and got within a few feet of a wild rhino, not to mention seeing a tiger in the wild, which is apparently incredibly rare here.

Less than an hour till my elephant ride, so I’d best log off soon. As this internet cafe and many of the things I’ve seen prove, the smaller worldview of interconnection has definitely come to Nepal, to a far greater extent than I could’ve possibly anticipated. We may be traveling “grass-roots,” but the whole world is traveling through the series of tubes.

I hope to update again sometime before return, but no guarantees. Maybe on Super Tuesday (since I primarily logged on to see what happened in Florida). Though now it looks like less is in suspense and everyone’s folding in behind Clinton/McCain. Surprising, but perhaps demonstrative that America’s obsession with voting for winners trumps all other political concerns.

Namaste for now.

And now I’m back. From outer space. If by “outer space,” I mean “a cabin in the woods with the Garin Clan.” And I do.

As far as Iowa goes, Henry Clay once said “I’d rather be right than President.” (Incidentally, the second quotes-Google search for this sentence brings up someone posting the coveted Feingold-Kucinich result on my Presidential quiz.) My phrase would be something more like “I’d rather be wrong than clairvoyant.” Which may seem to undermine the whole process of making predictions, but perhaps it’s part of the preparation principle.

The preparation principle is pretty basic and possibly almost universally held as a belief structure among people. It’s approximately If one is prepared for something, it won’t happen. Now most people might tack on a “bad” to this. As in “if one is prepared for something bad…” These people are optimists. In general, I think that the universe sees preparation as an exercise in prevention and thus works swiftly to prevent the prepared-for. Sometimes. In some ways. I don’t want e-mails talking about how someone brushed their teeth or combed their hair this morning and then still had a meeting or went to work.

The point is, I was really really wrong about Hillary Clinton. And this makes me really really happy. So bring on the saucy remarks about how I jumped the gun and spoke too soon… I’m happier than you are.

On the other hand, if you flip Ron Paul & Rudy Giuliani and give Huckabee a much bigger bump, I was pretty close on the Republican side. Not that this is where I’m putting any hope or much interest. And if Huckabee gets anointed, it’s going to be awfully hard for him to win, methinks. Although Obama v. Huckabee might be some kind of bizarre dogfight. I don’t anticipate a ton of turnout there.

But fortunately, my anticipations tend to be wrong. And while everything I can see leads me to believe that Obama is only fractionally better than Clinton or Huckabee, fractionally better is about fifty times more significant an improvement than I’ve seen from a mainline Presidential candidate since… Mondale? Really in my lifetime, functionally, since I didn’t start following Presidential elections till 1988, and Dukakis really seemed a buffoon. So that’s pretty exciting, all around. It would be a lot more exciting if he hadn’t equivocated on the idea of a full pullout of troops in Iraq by 2013, but at least he didn’t vote for the war in the first place (yes, I realize this is a technicality - he wasn’t in the Senate at the time).

Back to work now, and much more later. Today seems awfully surreal already and on the way toward the swirlier. The year already feels very old. Maybe that’s why I shaved today.

As I’ve often been known to say, change is the only constant. This has perhaps never felt more true than this week, which is simply over-brimming with upheaval and possibility. Forget ungainly metaphors about baby steps and windows and doors. Every door and window in the whole house has burst open and is flooding. Equal parts elation, nervous apprehension, and general anticipation.

As I told one of my assistants today, “I am an emotional ocean.”

Sadly many of the details are not public yet and I do still have to try to play ball with a world that thinks privacy is not an outdated relic. So it goes. What I can announce, however, is the EmStor 2007-2008 Winter World Tour.

I feel like we should have a corporate sponsor. Y’know, if I weren’t a Non-Profiteer and believed in that sort of thing.

The EmStor 2007-2008 Winter World Tour

Yeah, you read that last part right. India & Nepal. For 2.5 weeks. With a stop in London. Oh yeah.

Most all of this (and more things TBA) have just materialized in the last 48 hours. It’s kind of incredible. 2008, you are looking mighty mercurial. But exciting. Very exciting.

The downside of all this is that I have to jettison tentative plans for judging at the Brandeis 2008 debate tourney (8-9 February 2008), as I will still be in India. And I may also have to forgo a President’s Day Weekend jaunt to Chicago, though that can be delayed instead of cancelled since it’s not as temporally tied as a debate tournament. Although, who knows… maybe I’ll be up for more travel just 10 days after return. Chicago, you may make the Winter World Tour yet.

So, I’ll see you when I see you. Not a ton of these have the options of meeting up with people that, say, Boston & Chicago have. But certainly Albuquerque, starting tonight and for the next four days, will be a big opportunity for hanging out. Frontier, luminarias, and Pac-Man, here I come! Only 7 more work hours until almost non-stop holiday fun of one kind or another…