to move (subtitled: back to the land of $4 coffee)

each time a plane takes off i feel the need to hold hands with those around me. that’s what my parents and i used to do every time the plane left the ground.

one of my favorite things about transit is the lack of “shoulding.” shoulding is the life-ruining technique of making oneself feel you should be doing something other than what you are doing. it’s a soul-killer, kids. and transit time—planes, trains, autorickshaws, boats—erases the shoulds. whatever i do there seems like bonus time. and traveling from mussoorie to minnesota provides apporoximately 40 hours of “bonus time.” so i currently ponder future amsterdam and u.s. food possibilities while soaking up the incredibly perfect lyrics of brian’s mix—“to move.”

the delightful klm flight attendant just deposited a towelette in my hand, which i used to wipe off the delhi filth from the two cab breakdowns on the way to the airport. having a conversation with jugdish, the driver, about the symptoms and warning signs for running out of gas in the heat seemed a fitting goodbye to india. completely foreseeable and preventable, but it happens, nonetheless.


my woodstock goodbye seemed like the famed birthday week of days of yore. to explain, when i was a kid, my birthday became a week-long event of my parents manufacturing of special moments. after i went to the hospital on thursday and made the decision to leave, my students and friends started pouring on the loving goodness. group hugs, a poem, words of affirmation and love, love in the format of food (what better kind?) and other intangible moments of pure joy marked my last days at my newest home. all and all, it was a perfect last weekend to reaffirm love for a place that could have been overcome with the bleakness of sickness. this saturday was mela—state fair (measured according to food and little handicraft stands) + student performances divided by an international community (buzz word… well, kids dressed in their native? ethnic? (insert culturally respectful and appropriate phrase here) attire and performing dances and serving food from their countries). these are two of my favorite students, shubi and akshay, selling hot dogs. so that whole thing i said about food from the kids' countries... anyway... we spent the rest of the weekend around the campfire, sleeping out in our yard, playing in a hail storm and eating.

on monday, singing along to music in brian's apartment, drinking red wine and enjoying the perfect balance of silence and laughter, i became fully aware for the first time the extent to which i have a woodstock family. ethan and jamie recently read cat's cradle by kurt vonnegut. vonnegut introduces a religion called bokonism. central to the workings of the philosophy are the karass and the wampeter. the karass is a "team [of people] that do[es] god's will without ever discovering what they are doing" (1). humanity is organized into many such teams. one can try to discover "the limits of [one's] karass and the nature of the work god almighty has had it do ... but such investigations are bound to be incomplete" ( 2). the wampeter is the pivot of the karass, around which the souls of the members of the karass revolve. i like to ponder the wampters and karassi (would that be the plural form?) of which i have been a part. the idea that we are intricately bound to others, even strangers, is intoxicating. and the bonds shared around wampeters appear to be my raisons d'etre.