jacob's ladder

2007-06-15T01:51:00.000+09:00

I'm going to try to make my blog more regular and (as far as I'm able) more spontaneous, including the things I'm reading, listening to, thinking about, pictures of small animals doing cute things and political / cultural commentary. I can't promise that any of this will be interesting . . . The blog will hopefully be somewhere between the average Xanga (typically centered around the events of someone's life) and a culture & politics blog, centered around current events & the author's analysis of them.

For now, I'm interested in suggestions for music for our wedding. (To those who haven't heard, Jeanette and I are getting married on July 7th, you could read more than you'd ever want to know about our relationship at our wedding website, http://www.jj.weddingwindow.com/).

We're planning to do

- 4-5 pieces of music while guests arrive at the church (Piano & Violin)

- 1 prelude piece for the bridal party to enter

- 1-2 congregational hymns

- 1 reflective / performed piece (in church-speak, you might call it an offertory, but without $)

- 1 funky postlude to which the bridal party exits

My roommates Dan & Hani are taking care of the prelude/entrance music, a piano-violin arrangement of Bach's Air on the G String.

For congregational hymn #1, I'm pretty set on "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing", with a kind of folky arrangement. For Postlude / Exit Music, we're thinking of "He Reigns" or "Hosanna" from "The Rebirth of Kirk Franklin" (the videos have intros that we would cut).

I'm interested in all your suggestions for the 4-5 songs to be played while people are arriving, for a second congregational hymn (sung by everyone), and for ideas for a meditative piece performed without the congregation singing (I'm thinking of Great is Your Mercy , but am not sure). The 4-5 songs at the beginning and the meditative piece need not be church songs. Also, if you're interested in being part of our gospel ensemble, shoot me a comment or an email ASAP.

Alright, enough for now. This picture is from "Team Platypii", demonstrating the motion made during the part of the cheer that went "Platypii Platypii, snap your bill // Platypii Platypii Kill Kill Kill

2006-01-27T23:16:00.000+09:00

I'm interviewing Mdu (on the left) for my research project (see below). I'm also selling bananas.

2006-01-18T13:04:00.000+09:00

We lead thanksgiving dinner preparations for a bunch of our classmates and South African friends. Jeanette was in charge

2006-01-18T13:00:00.000+09:00

I was extraordinarily proud of these garlic mashed potatoes. This picture is proof for my mother

2006-01-07T03:15:00.000+09:00

We can really shake it.

2006-01-07T03:07:00.000+09:00

Singing while waiting for my ID card from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, which let us use their library

2006-01-07T03:06:00.000+09:00

I am trying to look like a normal person in this picture. Notice the vintage Pittsburgh Project wear.

2006-01-07T03:04:00.000+09:00

Our class with our Zulu instructor (Jacqui, in the pink shawl)

2006-01-07T03:03:00.000+09:00

We are just plain zany

2006-01-07T03:01:00.000+09:00

Singing a song in Zulu class. I may have given up at this point

2005-12-06T22:47:00.000+09:00

Jeanette and I originally wrote this as an endpaper for Bhumi Magazine, a undergraduate journal of international development. Because it overlaps too much with other articles in the issue, we'll be reworking it tonight, but I liked the original too much to just let it sit on my dusty computer . . .

Sobering Up: A Look at NGOs on the Morning After
By Y. Jeanette Park and Jacob L. Bryant

When you ask Harvard students what they want to do after graduation, many will answer that they want to “change the world” and, if they’re amongst the Bhumi-set, to “work for an NGO” to bring “development” and a better life to the poor of the world. For us, these NGOs represent havens of positive social change in a harsh world otherwise driven by private interests. But the last six months in Mexico, Hong Kong and in South Africa have questioned our perceptions on the role of NGOs in realizing development and our previous belief that NGOs ought to be part-and-parcel of every development policy.

Being on the ground where these NGOs are supposed to be effecting positive change reveals a far different picture than the glowing testimonies of program participants featured prominently on their websites. One problem, immediately striking even from far-away Cambridge, might be the general lack of accountability for NGOs to the goals which they set out to achieve. Private donors, aid agencies, and host governments often have few if any means to know if an NGO does what it says and if this is done effectively. A relative minority of NGOs makes any systematic effort to evaluate the impact of their services on the communities in which they are situated; neither do many people demand that they do so, under the blanket assumption that NGOs always do good. At its worst, this lack of accountability breeds gross-mismanagement and even outright corruption.

While none of us would set out intending to run corrupt or ineffective NGOs, for well-educated and well-resourced young people sympathetic to humanitarian causes, the career track of a “professional NGO worker” is a pitfall in itself. Earning a comfortable salary, attending conferences around the globe, hosting black-tie fundraising dinners, and speaking at universities, the career of a professional NGO worker allows us to claim that we are helping the poor while maintaining a jet-setting lifestyle. While none of these things in themselves are problematic, together they give rise to a bona-fide class or “development set,” with vested interests in ensuring that their organizations continue to exist and are perceived as important, whether or not the needs of their communities match the services they provide.

Among the most devastating consequences of this rent-seeking behavior by NGOs is the manner in which the causes and leadership of poorer communities are usurped by the very NGOs who ostensibly seek to serve them. Rather than acting as facilitators to home-grown movements and organizations, NGOs often do them a disservice by co-opting their causes and hiring their leadership, putting both out of touch with grassroots interests. Here again, no NGO takes over a grassroots movement consciously intending to demobilize it, but movement ownership shifts to the better-educated NGO staff in something of a “leave it to the professionals” coup. At the root of this lie both an attitude on the part of many NGOs that they know better than the communities themselves and a need to justify their own existence.

One might suggest that these problems hinge on a misdirected view of development on the part of these NGOs or that their leadership is poor, but we doubt that this is the case. Many who lead these organizations were probably not so different from ourselves when they started, matching both our idealism and our enthusiasm. Neither do we make the claim that no NGO contributes any good to the world. Rather, we mean to suggest that the environment in which NGOs operate allows mismanagement and spawns rent-seeking. We should not reserve an unqualified praise for the work of NGOs in our surveys of the development landscape. They should instead be viewed rather as parties to a political economy of development and even as a part of a “development industry,” with their own idealism but also with their own interests. So to students who want to do good in the world by working in an NGO: think carefully, understand their work and its consequences, and stop congratulating yourselves.

2005-11-04T11:27:00.000+09:00

What Does “Development” Mean?

We descended into the airport over a neighborhood of leafy cul-de-sacs dotted with white, two-story houses where station wagons scurried like ants through a maze of streets, houses, parks and small businesses. Johannesburg’s generic urban skyline in the distance, I wondered to myself whether this could be the “Dalpark Six” neighborhood that I had read about, a middle-class suburb where people of every race background lived as neighbors, the “new South Africa.”

Fast forward. I’m standing in a veritable dump, crumpled, soiled paper and packaging scattered across a muddy embankment where the heavier plastic bundles and a broken mirror have slid to the bottom in a growing pile. At the top of the embankment are the same colors and textures that litter the slope, but here they’re insulating, decorating, and patching the walls and roofs of shacks where whole families live.

These two scenes might as well be just a few blocks apart. In the first, a neighborhood that could be anywhere in the “developed” world exists as the other, a “squatter camp” filled the thousands whom the city hasn’t made room for, subsists. For me to describe the stark, side-by-side contrast between wealth and poverty that shows itself across South Africa as a revelation would be dishonest, for I knew that it would be this way. To call it “shocking” or “jarring,” the words that often modify this “contrast,” would be naïve. On the development path that South Africa and many countries like it have taken, the leaky shacks on the one side of this path and the insulated comfort on the other have come to feel inevitable by sheer repetition: Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, even Houston. Does “development” require both, dual turbines spinning in a fateful dialectic?

But I knew and still know that it doesn’t have to be this way. When I thought of development I thought of Seoul, of Tallin, of Bangalore and of Dublin. In each of these places, to varying degrees, “the masses” had moved from subsistence, even devastation, into a condition of access – to jobs, wages, education, health care, and to choices about their livelihoods and their futures. With this sort of development, villages that had perished from easily prevented diseases could now live free from this fear; women who had spent three hours of their day fetching water could work as seamstresses and save their own wages (if they chose to); children whose parents had been illiterate could read out loud. And when they came of age, I thought that development meant that these children could now choose from a range of professions, pursuing the one that they found most meaningful. So I landed in Johannesburg thinking of development as the provision of material security to all who chose to take it, and then of the expansion of educational, professional, and social opportunity within a framework of political and human rights. And as far as is possible, I understood proper development as incorporating the voices and hopes of the communities where it takes place.

I still believe that development means these things, or at least that it should. And while I still believe that development is about choices, I’ve seen how the expansion of choice for some will often—if not always—limit the choices of others. The priority of one voice over another might be decided on who has the lighter skin, the bigger wallet or the bigger gun—and it’s not clear that the wealth/financial dynamic has changed fundamentally here since 1994. For the poor, the rural, the undereducated—those most excluded and marginalized—the least development has occurred for the people who need it most desperately. So while my conception of the goals of development has only been nuanced, not fundamentally changed, I’ve come to bitter terms with the resources, priorities and indifferences that constrain or undermine the means by which this vision would be realized. Neither do I know who should or who can bring those goals of development about—who the “agents” should be. My heart has been broken by the things that people do in the name of “development,” and I’ve arrived at a deep skepticism of anyone who tries to claim the legitimacy that the word confers. I hope that this skepticism isn’t self-righteous—when it comes to understanding how development should work in practice, the one I’m most unsure of is myself.

In an early lecture introducing her idea of development to us, Professor Betty Mubangizi gave us an exercise with two sketches of a village, the first before a large Coca-Cola plant had been established and the second afterwards. In the second, the villagers had been relocated next to a large dam that was to generate power, their farming land was now used for cash crops, and their shoreline was now a freight-shipping port. Professor Mubangizi’s directions were probably too vague, but what resulted was no less illustrative. Asked to infer what was different between the pictures, I said “where before they had to farm, now they can work at the port, in the factory, or they could farm the cash crops” and “with the port, they have access to export markets and can develop a comparative advantage.” Asked about the downsides, I thought that perhaps this development might erode their traditional way of life, but on the whole it would bring good things. We soon saw that Professor Mubangizi had intended to illustrate something much different: she said that this was a village in rural South Africa during apartheid, and that the Coca-Cola factory and the agri-business had taken the land with the government’s assistance and relocated the villagers to land which was neither fertile nor desirable (because it was underneath a large dam). Her villagers were not given employment at the factory, they could only pick cotton on the new plantation that the government had given a white man. In short, these villagers had been categorically disempowered with no choice of their own; their opportunities had diminished and their livelihood and traditional culture have been corrupted.

The difference between her description and mine didn’t mark my own ignorance, for she had given such vague directions. Rather, it showed the difference between how development should occur (ideally) and how the power structures of unjust government coupled with the profit-interests of big-businesses have rendered it in this country. What Coke, aided by the apartheid state, might justify with the language of economic growth and opportunity hasn’t just “eroded” people’s way of life, it has systematically corrupted it and reduced their livelihoods to borderline subsistence. In these cases, we no longer have the luxury of abstract questions of what development should mean. Because everything that was has been destroyed, the question must instead be: “What do we do now?”

A walk around Amacambini, the rural community where we spent a week last month, ends with the same question. Here too are a people whose control of their way of life and their land had been wrested from them. They with their hopes and families have been dumped onto overcrowded plots of semi-arid land away from everything that they want and need. Because this land could not support them, the men had to travel to the cities to work, straining their marriages and the very cohesion of their communities. This condition had not been about choices – it had been a process of coercive dispossession and economic necessity. Ten years after the official end of the apartheid condition, the community still bears apartheid’s weight in under-education and underdevelopment. If anything, the underdevelopment of Amacambini only enforced my understanding what development should be, by their contrast. The villagers here needed all of the things I had described before – an improvement in their material security, in information about health and disease, and in the educations available to their children – if only to redress that which had put them there in the first place. Indeed, these were exactly the needs that my acquaintances there expressed: development could not be more “community-driven” or commonly agreed upon than it sounded like water, schools and feeding-schemes would be here.

Reading this far, you might protest that I am confusing the policies of the apartheid state with schemes for development that have simply gone astray, and I do realize that these are different in magnitude and in intent. Nonetheless, it was frightening to read the speeches of the apartheid’s architects, outlining the importance of “the natives” maintaining their traditional way of life on their traditional land, “developing along their own path”. Those calls for “separate development” do not always sound so different from today’s calls for decentralized development and “rural skills for rural peoples”. My point is not that the “developmental” goals of the apartheid state and the present government are the same; a closer look will show you that they are not. Instead, the similarity in their rhetoric goes to show that you must pay attention to language, and realize that sometimes it might not mean anything at all.

The language of the students we met on our visit to the University of Zululand and their classes we observed made me further skeptical that anything will really change for places like Amacambini. These students were there to study development, the next generation of government bureaucrats, and they were wonderful people. But from every lecture and conversation that I had there, it did not seem like they were being equipped to think critically about the discourse on development here; instead they were fed and could rehash the language of the government, but nothing much more. They threw around words like “infrastructure,” knowing that there ought to be roads and power plants, but not knowing how these could be designed, financed or built. A few of them came from the rural areas, but most of them were from the cities and said that they (correctly) saw the best jobs as being in government, and thus pursued developmental studies. To extend the comparison from before, the apartheid state’s so-called “development” policies were designed and controlled centrally by a small group of bureaucrats who were removed from those areas, not unlike the group of students I saw emerging there or the present group of consultancies and government agencies that control current policy. Not only did the students talk of “infrastructure” with severely limited understanding of what this meant, they didn’t see a problem in the fact that they, not a little bit out of touch with rural life, would be the ones bringing this about. What was most frightening, though, was that all they talked about was infrastructure, as if this would solve the problems of Amacambini. It sounded like the same shortcomings of government policy, parroted by its next generation of employees.

What has been most heartbreaking to me are the places where infrastructure doesn’t even enter the language of those, present or future, with control. To the Kennedy Road community, an “informal settlement,” any infrastructure would feel miraculous, as the state has provided them just four water-taps for a 6,000 people and even fewer toilets. As the Durban municipal government bails out theme parks and finances nightclubs and clears land for casinos, all in the name of development, they send empty promises and bulldozers to Kennedy Road, hoping that the people will take their shacks and families somewhere else where they can’t be seen. In this case, it’s clear that the priorities of the council are misplaced, probably in the pockets of the companies building these “attractions,” but that doesn’t change anything for Kennedy Road until they win over people’s sympathy. They must convince the council that building another toilet is feasible—that is obvious—but also that they deserve it. And herein lies the most awful fallout of the end of apartheid: in the popular narrative, for Kennedy Road, Amacambini, and every place like them, until 1994 and perhaps for a few years afterwards, their plight was the result of state oppression. Now, though little has really changed, their present condition is on their own hands. And the narrative that paints them this way is the same one that puts development in the hands—and on the shoulders—of individual communities. But if all this means development should neither be centralized (in the hands of out-of-touch bureaucrats) or decentralized (leaving disempowered communities to languish) then how can we bring it about?

To reside at the point where I find myself, knowing what development should result in, but not knowing who should bring it about or how, is deeply frustrating. Until we figure out how to do development, communities will languish in poverty and families will buckle under the pressures of unemployment and disease. But wait! For me to suppose that people ought to wait for me to tell them what development, of course, would be the most presumptuous claim of all. The fact that development cannot and is not waiting for me to work out all of confusion is comforting and exciting. The visit last week to the Xhosa women near Gugulethu, saving together and building houses one-by-one, was a strong case for people’s ability to develop their communities on their own. These women had taken matters into their own hands, and the results stood all around us—150 homes they had built themselves in the past 10 years. And people are coming together on Kennedy Road, too. They had more than anywhere else the “democratic mores” that de Tocqueville praises, electing leaders and holding weekly meetings. Their power with the municipal council is growing stronger as the community members come together to articulate their common concerns, often by way of 5000-strong, peaceful marches in protest. In the cooperative, the women are making the most of the grants that the government gives them to improve their own conditions; at Kennedy Road, the residents are demanding from the government the environment to empower themselves. In some places, the people get on in spite of the government and development community’s biases and delays. This is not a prescription for policy—“laissez faire development,” or something—but a testimony to people’s resilience, a second refrain of the struggle that ended apartheid.

So where do I fit in? For now, I’ve put some of my NGO-management aspirations on the backburner, wanting instead to take more time to really understand the development problems that communities face, and wanting to learn from those South Africans who are providing the leadership that NGOs sometimes co-opt. What I want to do most immediately is with my independent study project: I want to contribute to the popular narrative on what development is and who it should be for. I want to tell the story of Kennedy Road, to highlight their plight and with it to highlight their resilience and wonder, challenging the municipality’s characterizations of them as dirty and stupid. In this new narrative, I want mostly to tell the truth – to stop playing the games that real estate developers and apartheid functionaries played with the language of development, perhaps to begin its reclamation. As with my own role in and understanding of development, I don’t know where this independent study project narrative will end up, but I’m looking forward to arriving there (if “there” even exists).

2005-10-31T15:25:00.000+09:00

We just spent the past week in another township in Durban, called Wentworth. Here's Jeanette and her family's helper's baby.

2005-10-31T15:22:00.001+09:00

Two weeks ago, we climbed a Table Mountain, which overlooks Cape Town

2005-10-31T15:22:00.000+09:00

We are really tough

2005-10-31T15:21:00.002+09:00

Everybody loves babies!

2005-10-31T15:21:00.001+09:00

Princess and her baby (whose name I've forgotten)

2005-10-31T15:19:00.000+09:00

I can't tell if Jeanette is enjoying herself

2005-10-31T15:18:00.000+09:00

Jeanette, Kiara, and Austin

2005-10-07T17:56:00.000+09:00

we just got back from a week in a rural village called amacambini. it was more beautiful and more impoverished than any place i have ever seen. i stayed with a family their as did jeanette - here are our pictures. jeanette's also been blogging more thoughtfully than i have at www.xanga.com/silverain179

2005-10-07T17:53:00.001+09:00

jeanette and the wind

2005-10-07T17:53:00.000+09:00

me surveying the landscape

2005-10-07T17:52:00.001+09:00

the kids and their neighborhood crew. they mangage to take care of each other and entertain themselves all day while their parents work

2005-10-07T17:52:00.000+09:00

the two girls that i stayed with

2005-10-07T17:51:00.001+09:00

two of the kids that i lived with

2005-10-07T17:51:00.000+09:00

the neighbor (nicknamed 'potato') and my host brother

2005-10-07T17:50:00.002+09:00

Some boys I met at soccer

2005-10-07T17:50:00.001+09:00

My homestay brother in the village striking a pose

2005-10-07T17:50:00.000+09:00

Some kids from the salvation army came by and started singing

2005-10-07T17:47:00.002+09:00

This is where I live in Durban. I'm not sure how the car got there.

2005-10-07T17:47:00.001+09:00

My two sisters laughing (everything I try to say in Zulu is, apparently, completely hilarious)

2005-10-07T17:47:00.000+09:00

my street in Durban (Bonela township)

2005-10-07T17:46:00.000+09:00

my mom's garden at our house in durban

2005-10-07T17:44:00.000+09:00

YJP: scenes from my house at twilight

2005-10-07T17:43:00.001+09:00

my family in our large garden

2005-10-07T17:43:00.000+09:00

The area surrounding the village was still pretty pristine and very beautiful...

2005-10-07T17:41:00.000+09:00

Carolyn and our little host sister (Nonhlanhla)

2005-10-07T17:40:00.000+09:00

part of my house- my host mother in the village was a sangoma (a traditional healer) and this is where she practiced

2005-10-07T17:39:00.001+09:00

Jake and the program guys playing frisbee

2005-10-07T17:39:00.000+09:00

YJP: girls from our group singing and dancing/ playing with girls from the town/village

2005-10-07T17:36:00.001+09:00

Part of the village near Jeanette's house

2005-10-07T17:36:00.000+09:00

Jeanette's host family in Amacambini

2005-09-26T18:45:00.000+09:00

jeanette went to a wedding this weekend and i loved the pictures. here's jeanette with her host sister

2005-09-26T18:44:00.004+09:00

jeanette's host family

2005-09-26T18:44:00.003+09:00

the groom's younger sister

2005-09-26T18:44:00.002+09:00

a view from the hillside

2005-09-26T18:44:00.001+09:00

the township - 'Umlozi'

2005-09-26T18:44:00.000+09:00

the bride arriving

2005-09-26T18:43:00.003+09:00

the women sing to welcome the bride

2005-09-26T18:43:00.002+09:00

the guys across the street wanted their picture taken

2005-09-26T18:43:00.001+09:00

ladies waiting

2005-09-26T18:43:00.000+09:00

wedding hustle and bustle

2005-09-26T18:42:00.001+09:00

jeanette's mother (left) and father

2005-09-26T18:42:00.000+09:00

the women sing to say thank you for the gifts from the bride's family

2005-09-20T15:45:00.000+09:00

this is the village where we ended our hiking / kayaking journey. it's striking how parts of south africa can remind you of london, others of the grand canyon, and still others of the most rural parts of the world.

2005-09-20T15:43:00.000+09:00

when i was little my parents would feed me lemons at restaurants because they thought my faces were funny

2005-09-20T15:42:00.000+09:00

i wanted to climb those rocks

2005-09-20T15:41:00.001+09:00

check out the scenery.

2005-09-20T15:41:00.000+09:00

this is the back of jeanette's head

2005-09-20T15:40:00.001+09:00

we are really tough

2005-09-20T15:40:00.000+09:00

Kayaking in a river near the beach (above). The community that had lived there has begun to give tours as a source of income / to raise awareness of their situation . . . hopefully they can avoid the externalities that come with a tourist industry

2005-09-20T15:38:00.001+09:00

Jeanette's host siblings. They tutor her in Zulu

2005-09-20T15:38:00.000+09:00

Our group walking along the beach. The beach and the land around it was seized by the apartheid government for development by a casino and has yet to returned to the community had lived there.

2005-09-20T15:35:00.002+09:00

Jeanette being thoughtful

2005-09-20T15:35:00.001+09:00

I relieved myself from this view

2005-09-20T15:35:00.000+09:00

A village that we hiked through

2005-09-16T22:26:00.000+09:00

jeanette looking slightly skeptical outside of johannesburg

2005-09-16T22:24:00.000+09:00

i still can't remember her name . . . .

2005-09-16T18:56:00.000+09:00

my host family and their new baby, in our home in Bonela, KwaZulu-Natal.

2005-08-14T02:40:00.000+09:00

Yay for pictures! These are for my mother! I kind of put them up in the wrong order, you might do best to start from the bottom and scroll up. They're all from CT, whose artistic sense I've been appreciating more and more.

2005-08-14T02:34:00.000+09:00

I took this one. Imitation is the highest form flattery?

2005-08-14T02:24:00.001+09:00

I am a tourist.

2005-08-14T02:24:00.000+09:00

At first you think: whoa, how did they get all of the materials up the hill to build this thing (it's huge). Then you remember: oh, they used trucks.

2005-08-14T02:21:00.000+09:00

Our shenanigans ended at a Buddhist temple in the hills of Lantau.

2005-08-14T02:17:00.000+09:00

We went on an expedition to Lantau island. It rocked my socks off.

2005-08-14T02:16:00.000+09:00

I don't know what I'm thinking.

2005-08-14T02:15:00.000+09:00

Yes, yes.

2005-08-14T02:13:00.000+09:00

Yes.

2005-08-14T02:12:00.001+09:00

CT is especially tough.

2005-08-14T02:12:00.000+09:00

This is exactly how I feel about pizza.

2005-08-14T02:09:00.000+09:00

CT, JT, JB + someone I don't know. I'm trying to look tough.

2005-08-14T02:07:00.000+09:00

Arcade in Mong Kok. I don't know what to say, it just blew my mind.

2005-08-14T01:59:00.000+09:00

Feeling like these scenes are energizing must mean I'm extroverted.

2005-08-14T01:57:00.001+09:00

I just liked this picture. CT took all of these.

2005-08-14T01:57:00.000+09:00

I still don't understand the idea of this guy in the center of the picture.

2005-08-14T01:56:00.001+09:00

These buildings look like they're going to knock you out.

2005-08-14T01:56:00.000+09:00

This is the view from my office. It doesn't do much for my productivity, but does a lot for my soul.

2005-08-12T08:00:00.000+09:00

i am still alive! i've been busy and exhausted and thus somewhat incognito -- my apologies. perhaps my real problem is that i'm not very good about writing here, even when i'm not busy. it's hard to know what to say when your audicence is so ill-defined. it's also hard because i'm so self-conscious of chronicling my own life.

so to get over my inhibitions, i've decided rather than post infrequent, insightful things, i will air more on the side of frequent mundanities. after all, that's more what my life is really like. and i want to involve you in it, from wherever you are (<-- when i'm corny, i like to note that it's intentional).

brief update: i'm in hong kong now, and will be here for another two weeks exactly. outside of work and sleep, i've been visiting with people, and spending a lot of good time with CT. last night we went shopping, and i was confronted again with my lack of style. i used to think that i could just rock the aerodynamic t-shirts and jeans that i found in a park forever, but i haven't found anything lately and my speedskating is life t-shirt (R.I.P) that lasted me from 4th grade - freshman fall has gone missing (actually, I think my mom confiscated it). so it might be the end of that era, but it's hard to know where to go from there . . . i'm open to your style recommendations. a few things that i've been thinking about

1) i don't like living by myself. i thought that it might just have been that my tokyo apartment recalled a carpeted sanitarium, but i think it's mostly my personality and not my environment at play. i'm more extroverted than i thought.

2) i've been thinking about where we come from. actually, i've been wondering a bit how i'd gotten this far not having thought about it more. while he probably trivializes the distinctiveness of intelligent design from darwinism, this article got me thinking. i don't know anything more than high school biology, but it seems important to work out an idea of human origins before you even start talking about philosophy, etc. In particular, for an idea of individual uniqueness ("God made you special") or of specific design ("God knows every hair on your head"), which we use a lot to talk about reconciliation, it seems like we need a theology of a creator God. So I don't know, but I want to hear what you know (or think).

3) I've been thinking about gender roles, partly because CT asked me "are there gender roles?" in one of our social theory-accountability-Christianity conversations, and I didn't know what I thought. I want to hear what you think. More on this another time.

4) I've been thinking about the Presbyterian Church's (PCUSA) threats to divest from companies that support the Israeli military. While I'm encouraged by their political activism and their challenge to Israeli militarism, this seems like the worst possible timing unless their divestment can some how cement the Israeli military's withdrawawal. PCUSA in itself is an interesting phenomenon as it encompasses just about every possible stripe of political and theological perspective, with a lot of bickering between then, and is almost entirely white and Korean (in mostly separate churches).

5) Mostly I've been thinking about how excited I am to see people. Jeanette is coming to Hong Kong next Wednesday, and I've never ached so much to see someone. Suggest to me whatever Hong Kong excitement you know of for us to do / eat / go to. I'm also looking forward to being back in Pittsburgh for a bit. I feel like I've been away to long.

I'm going to run because I'm starving. For now, I leave you with a picture of my office home of the last 5 weeks. It is not a little bit phallic.

2005-06-30T03:57:00.000+09:00

i am an investment banker (?)

i have pretty strong doubts that this is something that i'd want to do after college, but i'm thankful for the opportunity now. it's hard to feel like i've done more than make money--and i don't know that i've even done that yet--at the end of the day.

i do still believe in the possibility of, broadly defined, achieving social goods through business (profit) interests, but i can't say that i've brought about much justice in the world via my work* here thus far. my hope is that that's because i'm so junior in the firm and can't see or don't have the influence to see what good is really coming about, not because justice and profit are always and everywhere opposed. though perhaps they are? at the very least, i hope that i'm learning things applicable to other jobs/places/ideas that i get more excited about.

*[for the mathy amongst you, my main job thus far has been to design a "fixed income structured product" that predicts the price movements of different bonds based on past data. if you can do this well, you can buy when the price is low and sell when the price is high. if the prices are volatile enough that your gains cover your transaction costs, you can make a lot of money. and by product, i mean a set of models that become formulas in one lovely spreadsheet.] fun!

I wish I were clever and insightful.

2005-06-29T23:55:00.000+09:00

And perhaps I will be soon, once I'm used to this blogging phenomenon and, not to mention, when I'm struck by real insight / cleverness. . . Until then, an update + pictures on the details of my VERY GLAMOROUS lifestyle.

To be expanded upon soon, but this quote captures a lot of the way that I've been feeling lately.

"Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness andjoy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadnessthat pervades all the moments of our life. It seems that there is nosuch thing as clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happymoments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In everysuccess, there is a fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is atear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship,distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge ofsurrounding darkness. Joy and sadness are as close to each other asthe splendid colored leaves of a New England fall to the soberness ofthe barren trees. When you touch the hand of a returning friend, youalready know that he will have to leave you again. When you are movedby the quiet vastness of the sun-covered ocean, you miss the friendwho cannot see the same. Joy and sadness are born at the same time,both arising from such deep places in your heart that you can't findwords to capture your complex emotions. But this intimate experiencein which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point usbeyond the limits of our existences. It can do so by making us lookforward in expectation to the day when our hearts will be filled withperfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us."- Henri Nouwen

2005-06-28T23:51:00.001+09:00

When you take pictures holding the camera at arm's length, it's hard to tell that you're in a national park. But maybe you can see what we really look like?

2005-06-28T23:51:00.000+09:00

I hoped for a second that this picture might look like I was starting a revolution. A revolution towards something -- perhaps a new breed of communalism, as most of the people in this picture are wearing clothes that belong to someone else in the picture. But then it struck me: for revolutionaries, these guys look extraordinarily happy. And friendly . . . oops.

2005-06-28T23:48:00.000+09:00

Walker is only slightly more revolutionary looking than Connie.

This is from a ways back, but I wanted to include it because Walker was behind the camera on the beginning-of-the-revolution picture above. With my family and Pittsburgh friends, I will miss these guys most as I'm away. I wonder if you doesn't take leaving a place to realize what's actually there. I'd like to think of the best communities as functioning beyond a physical place or space - exactly because the community is strong can it send someone (me?) out and receive him back again. Will write more . . .