the things you carry.

The old things ending are only a sign of something new.

Ohh, haven't forgotten about you, friends. I've actually written a handful of drafts for different blog ideas I've had floating around, but every time I ultimately decided this wasn't the venue. I'm pretty sure that most of my readers are in some way related to me, and so this seems like an odd place to discuss what how my heart is broken for the sexual slaves of southeast asia and how this is a dirty broken world that has a way of leaving one jaded about where it's headed. So many of my experiences here have been very profound, and yet in a way it's very hard to make them translate. I do my best to put you in my shoes, but with much of this stuff you'd just have to be there. There's the easy gross-out stories about getting vomited on in the middle of a twelve hour bus ride or what it's like to use a squatty potty, but I think those miss the point. I've gone through some really uncomfortable stuff, true, but oh, how the joys do outweigh the sorrows. So instead, here are some thoughts. And the funny thing about them all is that so much of it are tiny little lessons, the little things one picks up over the course of a day. But they all add up somehow into a grander wonderful truth, and life made beautiful.

It starts here: With everything in life worth doing, there's this moment. You take the step that can't be undone, can't be partially refunded, where suddenly there is no going back and undoing. It's no longer ideas, or plans, but what you're doing with this part of your life. And for me it meant to get on the plane, one that sends you far away from everything that seems normal to you. and it's just you, sitting there by yourself. and you feel very alone, helpless, and nervous. Don't panic, it gets better from here. The hardest part is over. And yet so much of the wonderful things that can happen in our lives hit the roadblocks here. Often it feels like too much work, too much to give up, just to get to this point. Getting past that moment is a prerequisite for living well.

A true friend is something precious. The kindness of strangers is a humbling and life-affirming thing that restores my hope in times where I feel like accepting cynicism. I have so much gratitude to the friends I made along the way. Living in community is just beautiful, and can't be replicated. The way a group of strangers can turn into a family is something to be treasured. Being so far away from home, it's nice to have a few familiar faces to see every once in a while. Many of the things that seem like they'll be a big deal about living in a new culture, the things about comfort and food and what you will and won't be able to buy - that's the easy stuff. Being a tourist is easy, living somewhere is different. It's hard and frustrating, but it's beautiful and it's worth it.

Designer clothes and luxury cars are boring. All-inclusives are for those who don't want to actually experience anything. Many people don't understand what gives things value. There's a beauty to the dirt of humanity. We're all just dust anyways. There are few things that are as shocking as just how little care is given to the poor in this world and how little people think about where their money goes when they spend it. Scrapping your plans and having to do something completely different can sometimes be better than anything you could have planned ahead of time. If you really want to live fully, you have to accept that sometimes it will be smelly, sometimes it will be uncomfortable, sometimes you'll feel very alone. If you aren't ready for that, stay home. Sometimes the experiences won't be happy things, and they won't be nice or pleasant at all. Sometimes life can downright hurt, but the whole trick to joy is to take even the bad things and use them to get better and to learn. I'm learning to appreciate the good in everything.


It's weird to pack everything up, to see everything in your life fit into a few bags. But that's ok. it was never the stuff that made life fulfilling anyways. What I really carry with me are the stories, the memories. thousands of pictures. places I'll remember all my life. And most of all, the people, and the way they changed me. I love Thailand, and I'll miss this place very much. Mostly I'll miss the people. I have been shown amazing kindness, and my time here has changed me for the better. Those who've been a part of my life in the past six months, thank you so much. America, see you soon!

Other things I should mention.
What I've been up to: Traveling. When I was booking the plane ticket last august I decided to stay late, and booked my return flight about 8 weeks after DTS ended. Originally the plan was to stay in Bangkok the whole time, find something to do. When I made the decision to pursue a School of Biblical Studies in the fall, it meant that suddenly the next year and a half of my life is looking very busy. So I decided to take a break, and took two trips, taking up about half of my time. I went to Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos on the first trip and Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore on the second trip. It's been crazy, and while I scribbled journal notes all along the way I'll probably save those thoughts and stories for elsewhere. But it was good. My mind works better when I'm moving, which is as it should be. And in the last few days being back in Bangkok with not much to do, I see it's been good that I had something to keep me occupied.


What's next: I'm going HOME. On Wednesday. I'm going all out and I'll be scraping my heels to the finish line. My amazing charles schwab use-it-anywhere-for-free debit card, which is ever so handy and I'm so grateful for, expired at the end of january - so I made one last final withdrawl at the end of last month to cover all my expenses to get me home. I'm down to 254 baht with 3 days to go. (I'll need to save basically all of it for the cab ride to the airport at three in the morning, so if anyone in Ramsong wants to buy me a meal, let me know!) I do have a loaf of bread, though, and some coffee grounds, and a can of baked beans (leftover from my flood survival kit), and some peanut butter. Gonna make it, kids. As soon as I get home I'm going to sleep for two days, and then subject myself to CCF spring break. I'm pretty excited about seeing many of your lovely faces. After that I have a window of about six months. It's gonna be good, I've applied for a few internships and will otherwise plan on finding some job somewhere (can't be too picky, I suppose). If anyone has any ideas, or is looking for a housemate, let me know. Then, if all goes well, Sweden in mid-september. More on this later.

I do love you all, by the way. Thanks for reading and caring.

on self-serving blogs about travel.

ohhhh, dear readers, I'm not even gonna post this one to facebook, because it's just a thought, for you.

I'm in Penang, Malaysia. It's lovely here. And I could wax poetic about all these lovely old brick buildings, and I know that I'm supposed to blog about my adventures, but the subtext of all of those blogs written by everyone has always been "hey, look at meeeee...."

and so much of what I do isn't just to brag to my hypothetical readers. Several times now people have said that they were jealous of my travels, and it makes me reconsider everything, because what my entire generation seems to be fixated on is doing stuff just so other people will think highly of them. and that's stupid. I never want to be a part of that. ohh, I have stories, mind you, but I'd much rather like it if you asked me about them instead, because wheras bragging is stupid, stories are beautiful. It's lonely sometimes out on the road, and getting on here and writing to nobody doesn't seem to help with that all that much.

anyways, off to Kuala Lumpur.

lessons learned, part 1.

I'm a few weeks from going back to America, the land of my birth. I have one last adventure in me yet, but even now I've begun to do more to reflect on my time here in Thailand, to make sense of it. to think about what it's meant to me, specifically in terms of the lessons learned, and how it should affect me going forward. So here are a few thoughts I've had. I'm going to save my more sentimental "aww, I'm going to miss Thailand" thoughts for a later post, this is going to focus on two lessons.

Lesson #1. Places are just places, and people are all people.

in a few of the interactions I've had with people back home, one of the most striking things that I've noticed is that being here in Thailand, many people back in the comfort of the developed western world seem to be under the basic assumption that I miss all America has to offer.
Meals with cheese and bread, readily available air conditioning, my own room, my own car, having a lot of control about how I spend my day, never getting sick, bathrooms where the toilet and the shower aren't the same thing, being able to read the signs on highways, being able to communicate using big words that express myself. Want to know a secret? I don't miss any of that. at all. I would give it up willingly again without much thought. Oh, dear friends, please don't take it personally. If I say I miss America, it's no lie, but it's you that I miss. If you were all here I might never go back.

Some of my reasoning for this is just as surface-level as the assumptions people have come to. for example, I don't miss american food because thai food is great. Every restaraunt sells only fresh food, and the reason the markets sell the meat and fruit and vegetables on hooks and on tables instead of in refrigerators is because the food was harvested and butchered only a handful of hours ago. Thai food involves more creativity and variety in a single dish than in an entire western buffet. Western food is built around french cuisine, which is a bit like science: mix exactly the right amount of each ingredient in order to replicate past perfections. Thai food is truly a bit more like art. Work with what you have, be daring, create something new and wonderful every single time. At every table there's an arrangement of peppers and oils and sauces so that you, the eater, can go even farther if you want to.

but there's something deeper. I could make a line-by-line comparison of my Thai experience and my American experience and try to measure them up, but I think that would be missing the point. It goes down much deeper than our daily conveniences and into the things our heart believes. One natural thing we as humans seem to be ingrained with is the idea that our experience - our country, our particular sports team, our school, our city, the little unique things about the way we live our life - is somehow intrinsically better than the next guy's. American politicians are quick to pander to this line of logic, often reminding us that "America is the greatest nation in the history of the world." But living cross-culturally, that pride only serves to humble me frequently. America isn't somehow magically better than other countries. (I would even go so far as to say that while I was in Laos I couldn't help but feel great shame for my country, who "secretly" carpet-bombed a beautiful country out of xenophobic paranoia.) And the thing is, it's not that we're better or worse than other people, it's that when it comes down to it, nationalities are kind of imaginary. There's really no such thing as an American or a Thai or any other nationality; on some level we're all just people. Trying to use words to further qualify that definition isn't a good thing.

So what to do with this knowledge?
walk humbly. act justly. love mercy.
be kind.
love your neighbor.

it's always the simple lessons that are the most profound.

Austin's new rules for personal photography.

I'm angry at my former self.


cutting down my photo library to "things that aren't awful" is taking WAY longer than it should, in no small part due to the fact that I've gotten a lot better at photography than I used to be. In other words, a lot of pictures that are in some way or another greatly flawed. So I'm setting forth some new rules for my own picture-taking-and-library-maintaing practices:

1. Go through and delete duplicates and unnecessary pictures from the rolls within a month of adding them. don't wait for them all to stack up.
2. If you're taking pictures of food, and there aren't any people in it, it better be some really interesting-looking culturally informative food. No pictures of the soup you ate. ever again.
3. if you stay in a hotel room, you get one picture of the room. one. find a way to fit the stuff in the frame. if the view is notable, that's your picture. bathrooms aren't worth remembering.
4. less is more. three thousand pictures aren't as good as twenty pictures. ever.
5. if the subject matter is important to you, but the picture didn't come out, delete it. tough cookies.
6. Just because you're ashamed of past haircuts and overall sense of style doesn't mean you get to delete every picture of yourself from 2004 to 2009. The past happened, and you need these pictures as a way of keeping you from regressing.
7. Don't be lazy. don't settle for the most convenient way of getting the shot possible. stop your car and get out and take a picture. don't upload pictures to facebook without cutting it down to the top roll or two of shots (I'm SO SORRY, Cape Town '09 team.)
8. When using a camera in a historical museum, don't use your camera in such a way that you attempt to replicate a walk through the museum, complete with every single title card and object. If you use a camera at all, stick to artistic shots and things you can't just look up on wikipedia.
9. If you're looking at a way to frame something, involving people in the subject and not trying to isolate something from its' environment nearly always makes a picture better. Capture moments, not things.
10. If, looking back at a picture from 5 years ago, you don't have any idea what is going on but you clearly did at the time and there's no way to jog your memory, delete it.
11. If you have a picture that encapsulates a friend looking particularly unphotogenic compared to normal, it doesn't matter what else is in the picture. delete it.

Meta-rule #1: You can make exceptions to the rules, but they have to be actual exceptions and not just a recursion to arbitrary decisionmaking.

life in transition/stories from the road

Hello, friends.
I haven’t been blogging much lately. I spent those weeks on the road, and ever since I’ve been back in Bangkok I’ve been living at BJD, a lovely campus ministry in my neighborhood in Bangna. It’s community living, which means that the internet shuts off automatically at 10:30. This has unintended consequences for my blogging, because I work best when it’s really late and I’m sleep deprived and I turn off my filter and wing it and just do the writing equivalent of vomiting awesomeness. (I don’t think that’s the first time I’ve used this phrasing.) It’s an awful tendency I have when I’m fully awake, to play literary softball and just hope I end up with something that makes people think highly of me.

but I’m tired now, and so I don’t really care what you think of me. The internet has indeed shut off, so I’m mashing it into a pages document and if it’s any good I’ll throw it on in the morning. I guess I’ll just say how things are going and inevitably it will spiral into my own hokey philosophy-theology. Also, my grammar might get worse and worse as this thing goes on.

ok, fine, you win. a few stories from my wanderings.

I prayer walked in the ancient hindu temples in Siem Reap, Cambodia. It’s a weird thing prayer-walking in such places, I don’t mean that in a bad way though. I don’t feel weird about it in a spiritual sense, because, let’s face it. Temples aren’t really about worship. They’re about one-upsmanship. We need to have bigger temples than the neighbors. even the people who give offerings at such places aren’t offering true worship. they believe in a god, so they go and give it stuff that they think will make it happy. Not because they love it, but to “make merit”. In order words, there’s something in it for them. I’ll give you incense and orange fanta, and you will bless my business and help me conceive a child. it’s a business transaction. As christians, we can look at this as phoned-in idolatry, but wait: often this is what we do with our worship. We give god portions of our time, perhaps enough to feel inconvenienced, and then we look for the tangible benefits. I’ve learned in the past few years to get away from this with the God I believe in. If we really trust God, it means that we trust him to provide us with what we need. In my prayers, I often say, “Hey God, I think this is what should happen”, but I’ve gotten away from all the demand-making like when I was a child. and I don’t mean I found a proper balance, I mean all of it. Who am I to dictate orders to God. It’s me who follows him, although often I need to be reminded of that. I’ve found that the more I rely on him, the more joy I have, even though I have less than I would otherwise. Occasionally I’ve thought about what my life would look like if I did the pragmatic thing and got a job and started climbing ladders. I could own my own car at this point. I might have a promotion or two under my belt, and a budding resume that could attract some better salary options. But the conclusion I’ve come to is that my life is filled with so much more joy without all of that stuff that I would choose this again without much thought. Joy, perhaps, in spite of the tangible benefits. Since the end of DTS, I’ve spent nights in some of the seediest places in the world. I’ve eaten on about two or three dollars a day for the most part and lost about somewhere between 5 and 10 pounds pounds in a few weeks. I’ve been alone for the vast majority of my time, sometimes hundreds of miles from the nearest person who would recognize my face. I’ve gone weeks on end without legitimate fellowship with anyone other than God. I’ve felt alone, at times as though more than ever before. By all worldly standards, I’ve given much and gained nothing. And yet, I have this joy. This stubborn light that refuses to go out. And in a way, it affirms everything. All the hardships chip away at all my imperfections, and I manage to learn from everything.

Umm, what else happened? These many weeks feel like a blur. Time passes faster when you’re alone. Oh, I saw my lovely friends in Phnom Penh. Thearith and Angela are kind people, and introduced me to even more kind people. I’m not allowed to return to Phnom Penh as a single man without being prepared to marry one of Thearith’s cousins. I ate a handful of duck eggs, the kind where the egg is fertilized and the fetus is allowed to grow a bit before they boil them. Not bad, better than a regular boiled egg.

...Saigon. a city that aches, and my heart aches for it. I stayed in a small dormitory on the walking street, the kind of place where a child can be starving and sleeping in the ledge in front of the closed entryway to a building, and across the street tourists can be drinking 4 dollar mixed drinks and soliciting prostitutes. And yet there is hope. I can’t tell you why here, I started to write the next story, realized I couldn’t. I’m not being elusive, just protecting some friends of mine. I bought the child a meal, by the way. I’m not trying to bring light to my good deeds, I say that to make a point. If you see someone starving, give them something to eat. That’s what separates us from the lower primates, and, well, Mitt Romney.

I then went to Nha Trang, which is where young men who have dignity and self-respect go alone to - no wait, I lied. I am the only young man with dignity and self respect who travels alone to ever go to Nha Trang. It’s a place one can go to turn down offers for prostitution to build one’s own self-esteem regarding such matters. Travel note: if you find yourself in southeast asia alone and you’re a young man, wear long dress pants and wear collared button-up shirts, and show an even remote respect for the culture. eat at the restaurants where only locals eat and order what they’re ordering. The locals will like you, and try to set you up with their daughters.

I took the bus to Hue. Oh, did I mention that I had to completely reorganize my entire itinerary because there’s no way to get from Saigon to Hanoi directly during Tet without booking weeks or months in advance? the mental notes are stacking. anyways, picture this for me. You’re laying down. There are two iron bars on either side of your knees. if your sleeper-bus chair is laid flat there’s about two feet of clearance between the ground and the peice of plywood above you, which has more people on it. There are two people lying directly on your right side. There are two people lying directly on your left side. As though you’re sharing a king sized bed with four other people. There is no air circulation whatsoever, and after about 15 minutes you and the other four people are all sweaty and emit all sorts of awful smells and heat. Now imagine the bus ride is 12 hours long. Yes, I’ve done that. Special thanks to the lovely australian couple on the right side of me for being sociable and good sports. The weird thing was that it didn’t phase me at all, I never thought to complain. It was another in an endless succession of ridiculous things to go through. Shake it off, move on, get stronger.

Hue is a nice place, as far places go. there are ancient walls made of the most wonderful crumbling bricks that have slums and gardens on top of them now. The locals will let you walk through and even smile at you as long as you aren’t a jerk about the way you use your camera and you wai at everyone who’s an elder. Also, wear collared shirts and dress like an adult with respect and dignity. you’d be surprised at how many western people miss this memo, and stand there shell-shocked, entering into non-touristy neighborhoods wearing flip-flops, swimming trunks, and a beerlao t-shirt. On behalf of all self-respecting people with white skin who get treated with suspicion because of your self-disrespecting behavior, “This isn’t Bonnaroo. Please leave Asia.”

halfway through the 12 hour bus ride from Hue to Savannakhet, the poor lao man behind me began projectile vomiting all over my seat and got a good splatter all over my back. Remember how I said nothing shocks me anymore? I’m dead serious, nothing shocks me anymore. All I could think about was how bad I felt for him, as he lost some serious face. The kind woman across from me donated several of her wet wipes to clean me up. Lao people are so kind.

I spent 6 nights on the Mekong: 2 in Savannakhet, 1 in Thaklek, 1 in Pak Kading, and 2 in Vientiane (pronounced Wiang Chan). Met many lovely people. Pak Kading was my favorite, as I was perhaps the only barang in the town the night I was there. In a sandbar along the Nam Kading I got to play football with some kids, and the next morning I had breakfast with the town primary school’s english teacher. Lao people are among the kindest, most welcoming, and most considerate people I have ever met. That is perhaps the best summation of my time in Laos, so I will leave it at that. There are other stories you can ask me for, though.

..And now I’m back in my lovely neighborhood, Ramsong. Being here makes me miss my friends, but I am glad to be here.

I’m sitting in on a week of the Applied Principles of Communication school this week. It’s very good. We’ve been talking about basically the way we as humans process information and come to assumptions about the world and derive conclusions and meaning from that, and in that context asking what it means to learn and to improve, and to break out of our patterns of false thinking and to break away from false masters.

I’m also working on my resume, and I’m in the process of applying for both the SBS in the fall and internships for my time in america. I need something to do, might as well do something constructive. If anyone has any ideas shoot them my way.

OH MAN YOU GUYS. so I was writing all of this late last night, as I said, and whenever I write like that I reach this point where the brilliance just takes a dive and I just go off in a completely tangent direction. It’s a way of knowing that it’s time for bed. The stuff I wrote from this point on is pretty good, but it needs a good editor and I need to add to it and clearly define a thesis and turn it into something else. So I’ll fix it up and post it later.