The Bostonian Abroad

-- We each have our own "passions" to bear, and mine includes the baggage that got stowed away in the overhead compartments of my psyche, where "the past comes alive!" I started to really notice it a few nights ago while my wife and I and some new friends were making teams to play trivial pursuit. When our friend E. ended up on my team, she said, "Yay! I got the SMART one!" - and she meant it! This struck me as something that would have gotten a huge laugh back "home". Me, the smart one? Baahhhh! In this place, no one knows my past; they only see my present, and they actually see me as intelligent! The stigma of being the geeky, big-nosed flunky in my k-12 days has never left my psyche. Even now, I struggle to keep those old lingering ideas from undermining my confidence. At one time, being seen as the the "air-head" or the "absent-minded one" was so normal to me, that when our friend said what she did, it ...

- I read this and it makes me ill: (Written by a "nonwhite" student at my institution of "higher" learning.) "'White guilt' offers no solution for racism "Don't hate me because I am a white, straight, upper class male." "Stop making me feel guilty for being born white!" Sound familiar? These statements are the sentiments of something that is very popular these days, and it's called white guilt. White people hate feeling guilty. They just hate it. They wish bygones could be bygones, and that we could all live in peace and harmony. They are the first to point out when they themselves are victims of "racism", and call affirmative action "reverse-discrimination". Sufferers of white guilt overlook systematic inequality and define racism simply as an individual's prejudice against another individual solely on the basis of their skin color. They argue for a "color blind" society, using the buzzword ...

- Here is something I have been thinking about in the conspiracy theorist part of my brain: Gas prices are the highest they have ever been, supposedly. The housing market has really jumped, so now it is getting harder and harder to buy a home, due to the high prices. In my hometown of Lynn, Massachusetts, renting a crappy one bedroom apartment - and Lynn is considered by many snobs to be a dump - costs an astronomical sum of $900 per month! (This, for the priviledge of listening to gun shots and screaming crack ho's!) Airline prices are soaring too. Starting to see where this is going? . . . The government tells us and the media obediently follow along in reporting to us that the inflation rate is low. What acid trip of alchemy is being employed to arrive at this outrageous conclusion!? It's like that Terry Gilliam movie where the heroes arrive on an island and break the taboo of no bloodshed. When the island starts sinking, the leader denies it is happening. T...

- Every once in a while it comes back to haunt me. Not very often or for very long, but when it comes it feels like a cross between fetishism and archeology. Maybe I am the one doing the haunting. Why do I go and pick through the past like some old lady with too many cats at yet another yard sale, looking for that long lost LP of Elton tunes or maybe a forgotten first edition of "The Joke"? Truth is, the past is too easily forgotten or made irrelevant. But it is right that this should be the case, I suppose. The trick is the balance between whimsical nostalgia and pathetic obsession. I don't want to end up like some I have known, crying how everything once was right, and how Camelot is lost. It is sad to be so self-limiting. As I sit here and contemplate another day, another commute, another class taken, I think it is ever more important to think of the past in order to lessen the present - to bring it down to size. The "travails" I suffer today are n...

- I look on my return as a tiresome ordeal, something to be endured, rather than enjoyed. I have had such a marvelous time, and I don't want to leave this, for fear it will be "discontinued". This has felt more like home than ever did my unfortunate place atop the sad slopes of the Ko'olaus. And so it is: back to the land of the kama 'aina, the short jean shorts, the bowed legs, the bad food, the stupid drivers, the anti-haole attitude, the lack of logic and hard work, the lack of understanding of anything but that selfish little enclave of unreality deep in the middle of the huge, uncaring ocean - and so I return, as sad to leave here as I was when I left there, but for entirely different reasons. Sigh. I shall remember this place, and vow to renew my solemn relationship with the reality I have rediscovered. May it warm me as I suffer the cruelly ironic chill of that increasingly despised guilded prison of sun and palm.

- To sit in open air - Not hot, Nor cold, But cool; To gaze upon trolley cars Lumbering along the cobblestones; To be engaged in stratospheric conversation Surrounded though, by the supposedly mundane - This place, this atmosphere, These people and their honest decency, All of it Feels like HOME. -Vinaka, Jone

--- So I have been doing the usual: Teaching Taking three classes Commuting Doing House Things Entertaining Guests Despairing Waiting Now, I'm in week ten of a ten week program of teaching. I'll have the next three weeks free, but two of those weeks, I'll still be obligated to come into town to take classes in the afternoon. The one week where I'll be totally free, L. bought me a RT ticket to Portland. It isn't Boston, but it'll do. Actually, I'd rather go to Paris, but there is little chance of that. I have very much needed to get the hell out of here. L. saw this need and I love her so much for it. It will be great to be someplace different for a change. And, "Anything different is good." This summer, I am hoping to be able to go to Fiji to collect data and catch up with family and friends. We'll see what happens. The semester goes on. . .