I Want my Money Back/Happy New Year

Bad news.  As I have finished more than 2/3 of this trip, I am beginning to come to terms with the fact that I’m not going to come back enlightened.  I feel gipped by the Indian ministry of tourism, and I want to write a letter demanding my money back (well gypsies do come from India after all, but that’s a racial slur that should never be made).  When you get off the plane in Delhi you see a huge mural of an Indian woman doing yoga by a river in a serene meditative set and setting.  Ah I’ve arrived, I thought.  But I think I’m gonna come back mostly as me, as a westerner, one who has learned a little bit more his place in the world, perhaps as more patient, more flexible, more experienced…but enlightened? No.

I’m really sick of meeting some of these travelers who have already been to India and who have come back.  The annoying ones are the ones who don’t give you a word edgewise and berate you with how coming back to the corrupt, decadent west was so difficult, how they made new friends and forgot the old because they had evolved so much past these people who had merely stayed in the west doing the same thing and never having grown.  Maybe they lost their friends cause they wouldn’t shut up about India.

Please, I want you all to kick me if I ever become so annoying, recounting incessantly story after story about what I did, assuming your time spent in the west was time wasted.  Going to India is one of many experiences, one I’m extremely grateful to have had, but it’s certainly not the only key, and I maybe imagined it was.  But it is true that India is epic, larger than anything imaginable, a myriad of colors and smells and sensations and peoples.  What is India to me?

Synecdoches of India in order of association:

Cows
God
Gods
Trash
Smiles

Chai
Sympathetic vibrations
Urine
Drones
Density
Saris
LOUD annoying Bollywood music
Spice
Humidity
Turbans
Squating
Boys holding hands
Boys and girls not holding hands
Burning trash
Incense
Dead dogs in the streets
Indian English

So there’s obviously a lot you could say about India.  But the enormity of these associations, fragments of experiences might be better expressed as a list rather than some enclosing narrative.  So perhaps I’ll just speak in fragments.

Photos are also good lists.  They are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30498771@N02/

I guess the real test of some change will indeed be going back to America and reinvesting myself in everything I was doing there.  But I really hope that this won’t make me more exclusive (maybe some discrimination is good), but that it will make me more open to the depth and variety of experience, more compassionate, less elitist, etc.  Speaking of lists and experience, I’ve been thinking as the new year approaches about all that I’ve already done in my young life.  I’m pretty damn lucky I think despite a mishap here and there, ca et la.  My departure from childhood started when I was 15 and this is what I did.  This is really self-indulgent, but it’s my blog and it’s good for me to list my experience.

2000
Fell in love for the first time

2001
Got engaged
Went to Paris for two weeks as part of a foreign exchange with the great grand-daughter of Charles de Gaulle
Went to Japan with my highschool concert band
Dropped out of highschool and began homeschooling myself
Started hanging out with English grad school students

2002
Went to France with my girlfriend as part of the same exchange and then travelled in Italy with my dad, a total of 2 months
Began taking college courses at a liberal arts school as a junior in highschool
Broke up
Went back to Santa Fe and decided to leave Georgia for school

2003
Went to Bulgaria for a music tour
Went to St. John’s College to study the foundations of Western Civilization
Saw the Grand Canyon
Hung out with the son of country music star Michael Martin Murphy.  Learned about techno music, meditation and raves.

2004
Dated a successful painter who has a gallery in LA
Decided to leave St. John’s to follow what seemed to be more relevant passions

Went to Ireland with my mom

Accepted to Reed
Lived in the Mountains of Georgia in the summer, working on a farm that was also a music/dance community
Moved to Portland
Began Reed
Fell in love with Reed
Fell in love with Portland

2005
Accepted to study at the Sorbonne in France
Went to Mexico with my dad
Lived in the Republic of Georgia for 2 months for a music tour and to study the music, language and culture
Traveled from Georgia to London in 2 1/2 months
Began to live in Paris
Fell in love
Traveled in France with the aimee
Heart broken in Holland

2006
Went back to Reed
Lived off street earnings during the summer as a folk duo in Portland
Joined a professional choir
Began a thesis on Impressionist poetry and music
Performed in an international music festival with a renowned conductor, now three years running
Paid by Stanford music school to go to Prague for ten days and perform with their group
Saw New York

2007
Studied Debussy with the best mentor I’ve ever had
Fell in love with a mountain girl
Graduated from Reed, sat next to future girlfriend; we were the last to graduate in our class and we show up in our parents’ graduation photos
Offered by the Reed music department to complete the Reed music curriculum unofficially for free during the next year, one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever been given
Worked during the summer for the Friends of Chamber Music, learned I don’t like arts administration
Went to California several times to visit mountain girl, backpacked in yosemite
Began my unofficial year at Reed
Began performing and studying music ridiculously
Produced my first electronic music track
Went to academic music conference in quebec
Sang corny jazz chistmas carols for good money
Broke up with mountain girl

2008
Went to New Orleans with dad, fell in love with jazz and gumbo and finally the south of America
Started my own jazz/funk band called Aporia which grew to six members, ended up performing with a variety of groups all around Portland
Fell in love with a pink haired hippy
Performed the Eroica on violin
Graduated again, no diploma but much more fulfilled than the first time
Girlfriend hit by car
Began working at a sketchy internet book dealer
Got hit by car
Suffering
Fired from book dealer
More suffering
Left for India
Hiked in the Himalayas for 8 days in Nepal
Studied sitar and yoga in Varanasi
Traveled independently from the Northeast to the beautiful beaches of Goa in the southwest
Now about to flip over to the next…

So I’m pretty damn lucky, right? Privileged definitely, spoiled probably…but wow, i’m really lucky and fortunate and grateful, and I’m excited to take the next steps and add to lists and be more independent and be constantly in love.  And I hope to learn humility at some point.

This all I am thinking about as I laze on the incredibly beautiful beaches of Goa.  I feel like I’m not in India any more.  In Pushkar I met up with some super cool French kids who were all on their way to Goa.  Tropical beaches without beggars and poverty with decadent French kids really did sound better than an ashram up in the cold north.  I had plans of going to Rishikesh but I had to go south to meet my dad anyway and those plans didn’t make sense.

I’ve made my way through Arabic deserty Rajastan with the Frenchies and after 3 days of sleeper bus (definitely an oxymoron) out of four, crossing thousands of kilometers, we arrived in the overwhelmingly beautiful SW region of Goa.  An old Portuguese outpost, Goa is now home to hippies escaping India and the western world, with trance parties, liberal atmosphere for everything, cheap scooters and awesome food.  At the moment I have never lived so well.  But I feel like I’ve earned this decadence.  India was hard and never ever relaxing.  I shouldn’t talk in the past tense about India, but I just don’t feel like I’m there any more.  It’s waiting for me though.  I know it.

Goa’s a perfect place to spend Christmas and the Holidays, nowhere near as depressing as Kipling’s poem (below).  I’ve never been more relaxed as I am now.  I’ve been hanging out exclusively with my Frenchy friends and we have set up camp 2 minutes from the beach.  I’ve rented a very cheap scooter and we’ve been scooting around from beach to beach.  Terrorism has decreased tourism to the point at which we have the beaches to ourselves even during this, the highest tourist season (western holidays).  I havevn’t had a prolonged conversation in English for a week and a half.  I’m making more progress in French than I ever did in France because I’m constantly surrounded by Frenchies and I realize that I understand basically everything and I’m really actually quite fluent in French.  Not sure how or why I got to that point, but I like it.  Someone will have to pry my fingers from a coconut tree to get me out of here, but my dad and I will then go to Kerala, which I hear is just as, if not more, beautiful.

So I’m happy.  In less than 2 months, I’ll be in America.

This is where I make my list of resolutions.  It’s hard when life is so up in the air.  But here are some vague attempts.

Resolutions
Love
Listen
Practice patience
Meditate
Play music
Actively create with others
Read more fiction
Go on some long bike trip somewhere with my sweet new touring bike
Write more
Climb a mountain, maybe Mount Hood
Read more in French
Work

Here are some fragments, memories, ideas.  Don’t try to connect them.  It won’t work.

New Happy Your!