I was reading a stolen copy of the New Yorker at a friend’s parents’ on the south side. Joyce Carol Oates had written a beautiful reflection on the last week of her husband’s life. I have not read her writing before but was really struck. She used the phrase “pools of memory.” She was writing specifically of hospital waiting rooms, but the expression pertains to those spaces which accumulate emotional residue. When I think of places where i have left puddles of memory, my mind flashes to my house in Majuro. I picture the bare and cracked concrete floor, dusty louvers, and rickety, crumbling furniture. As I put myself back in that place and remember the details, all these memories flood back at once: happy, sad, crushing. I remember small island kids like Alpert and Kilmej and Nako drawing pictures at our kitchen table. Quiet Saturday mornings, reading and drinking coffee while everyone else was asleep. I remember toward the end, when things were falling apart. The layers accrued. Pools of memory, so deep.

drop the k

time is short.

every second counts

down.

we can not be caught

sleeping,

watching,

waiting

because that is what we will be:

caught.

there is no time.

there is no time

but

now.

do not wait to do

until you feel

you know.

you will end up

doing

neither.

there is no know.

drop the k.

there is only

now.

thoughts on the soa

this is a much belated post i began and never finished...until now.

in november i went to columbus, georgia for the soa/whinsec protest*. i had been there 4 years before, when i was a jesuit volunteer. it was a much different experience this year. i went in association with the white rose catholic worker, a community in my neighborhood i have become friends with. we camped. chris climbed the fence and was taken into custody. regina and anne-marie were arrested by columbus police. eventually all were released. i watched the puppetistas performing and was so transfixed by this woman who seemed to be directing the performance while prancing around with a dazzling smile. her joy was so palpable and it made me want to be that happy.

the soa this year made me stop to think about a few things. i have been back from the marshall islands for exactly 2 years. i am blown away by this. have i been doing justice to all that i have learned? have i been living in a way that reflects these things that i say i hold dear? certainly i waste far too much time with things that clutter up my life with little real meaning. how do i change that? i'm not sure that becoming more of an activist and engaging in civil disobedience all over the place is the answer. rather, the joy of the puppetista girl, now there is an answer. i need to connect to things that make me smile like that. maybe i'll run away from home and become a puppetista.

*http://www.soaw.org/

a conversation lodged in my brain

i usually eat lunch with my coworkers. last week i ate with two of them and we discussed some things that are both interesting and not. they spoke of gas shortages in the '70s, mortgages, the current economic plight of the middle-class, and how in their estimation, most people of my generation would not be able to own their own home. then a lawyer brother-in-law came up whose more than half a million dollar salary just isn't enough anymore. i found myself becoming more and more upset, not angry, just sad. it was an incredibly depressing lunch.

it took a couple days to pinpoint why that was exactly. it was not so much what we were discussing but how it was being talked about. clearly, all of us were in agreement that this state of affairs is not good. yet there was this resignation in the air that "this is the way things are;" that this arrangement of power, rights, and impressed obligations is not really good for anybody but, "oh well, lets go back to work." i am ashamed that i did not give name to this feeling at the time, the feeling that there really is more (or perhaps more accurately, less) to everything than we are led to believe. we need to see that there are other ways, other stories, that different possibilities exist or can exist, but we can not see this when we walk lock-step with a system that tells us not to think and that defines things in its own hollow terms. the institutions of our society are not interested in enriching our communities but in monetary power. until we see this and have a genuine human reaction to it, we'll continue to just "go back to work."

all of this is stuck someplace i can't reach, like plaque on the inside curve of a molar. no amount of brushing can scrub it smooth.

the past 6 months, in pictures

i baked bread.

i hung out with will and andrea in camden.

i got a new bike.

i crashed it.

i moved to a gigantic house.

when it comes to being a photographer, i really don't take very many pictures.

elvis costello has been growing on me and all the little plants are driving their tender roots deep into the soil.  keep your ear to the ground; there is something rumbling down there.

a wave of the creative has taken hold of me and i've been engaging myself with all sorts of little projects.  i've been playing with sounds a bit and while nothing has really come out of it, the various ingredients of music are beginning to stew again.  i built a couple of small bookshelves.  it was nice to work with my hands.  i've been baking bread regularly.  jeremy says life is good when you have time to bake your own bread, but then again, you can make time for anything if you set your mind to it.  while all of these and other little undertakings have felt good, they haven't really scratched the itch.  i'm not satisfied.  i don't know what's going to do the trick or if the trick can be done, but lets try and find out, shall we?

in less self-centered news, there was a swine flu case in my neighborhood, rogers park.

while i was driving:

you can't keep anything

what you don't give away

will be taken from you.

like jenga in reverse

sometimes things fall together just so neatly

and all the pieces gently slide into place

all you can do is smile so sweetly

and there's no amount of rain that could wipe it off your face

sometimes i get dizzy when i'm sleeping. my dream gets all topsy-turvy. i feel as though i'm sliding head first down some sort of chute. i wake up and the room is spinning so i shut my eyes to try to make it stop. does this allude to a sub-conscious feeling of lost control?

The Speed that is Possible

Sometimes when I ride I am a man on a bicycle. I sit up and my head swivels to take in storefronts and pedestrians and trees. I grip the handlebars with fists at the end of arms held stiff by locked elbows. I pedal and coast and pedal and coast. I chug up hills and lift my body off the seat. The bicycle leans first this way, then the other, back and forth until I am at the top, where I pause, panting but puffed with the accomplishment and look around to see if anyone has noticed my triumph over gravity. I am careful but I let my mind wander. I think about what I am going to cook myself for dinner: “Macaroni and cheese? No, burritos.” I think about the current object of affection, if there is one, and review our last interaction, scouring for hints to intentions or expectations or the future. I carry on an imaginary dialogue in which I am clever and charming and she drowns in me. Maybe I have a basket full of groceries or library books to return. When I reach my destination, I carefully lock my bicycle to a street sign or lamppost or carry it up the stairs of my building.

Other times I am not a man on a bicycle. The machine and I have fused into a being of pure motion and reflex. Amongst calculations of position and vector there is no room for plans and girls. The bicycle and I, we are a rocket, we are a jet, we are a comet, we are sound waves that are unscathable. We dart past parked cars and into turn lanes. We swoop around children crossing the street and confused, barking dogs that do not mean to hurt us but whose canine brains can not grasp what could possibly be moving so fast. Our heart and legs are pumping and our chain orbits the gears faster and faster, pulling the teeth of the sprockets and the back wheel spins and we move.

Our face is grim and our eyes squinting, scanning peripheries for danger. A car pulling out sees us and jolts to a halt as red brake lights ignite. Green to yellow, we hunker down and dig our toes into the pedals and clear the intersection just after the light has gone red but before the sluggish cars can react. The cars and their drivers cannot know what we are, have no way of knowing. To them we are a surprise, a sharp inhalation of breath, a streak and then we have disappeared. They worry that they will hit us, will damage us, that a brush with their fender will cripple us and send us to the pavement, but we know, as the cracked concrete uncoils below, we know that we are untouchable. We know what the cars will do before they do it and we are ready. The ground that is a blur below us is only for our tires, the rest of us will never touch it. It is not meant for us.

We are a flash on the side of the street, sometimes in the middle, but always on the street, not on the sidewalk, never on the sidewalk. That is where the people are. They are smaller than the cars and they do not move fast, cannot move fast, or will not, we are not sure. What we know is that they are best avoided because they are unpredictable. They will panic when they see us and will not just let us roar by, but will try to get out of the way and we will hit them because they are stupid and they think that we do not know what we are doing. We stay on the street and go fast, always faster and faster and never slowing down unless we have to, unless there is no possible curve or angle or maneuver we can make. When there is no escape and we are fenced in, we slow but as soon as we are clear we pump and push and spin and we are going fast again.

Often we do not know where we are going. It is almost as if we have some mystical connection to the city, that through our tires’ contact with the ground, instinctual knowledge of thoroughfares and distances flows through us. We do not have errands to run. We are not conducting business. We are cutting through the air like a knife because that is what we do, that is what we must do. There is nothing else that we can do. This is who we are. It is the actualization of our primary cause. We are, therefore, we are fast. We are pushed on and on, faster and faster by a passion and a fire burning in our marrow and in the very air in our tires. This is how we know that we are alive, to see the world blur into streaks to our right and our left and to feel our speed humming through us.

When we get to the park, the one by the lake that is all green and grass and trees and dogs, we swing one leg over our frame and coast with both feet on one pedal until we run out of momentum and collapse on the soft turf. We are panting and puffing and our limbs and tires are hot and we sweat. We lay on our back and look at the sky, at the bright blue, so blue it makes our eyes lost in it and we can not see the other side but we try and try and can not tear our eyes away and we peer into the huge brilliant nothing that is everything. The sun is there and it is not like us but we like how it feels on our skin and on our paint. It dries our sweat and makes us smile and the breeze ruffles our hair and feels like the air rushing past when we were a rocket, a jet, a comet, but like a baby of that air. It knows only a hint of the speed that is possible. We also see the clouds. They make us smile. They are so round and fat and the way they float without seeming to move at all makes us think that they know both nothing and everything about being fast. Like Zen masters, they watch us from above, smiling at how fast we can be, smiling at how much faster we could be, not judging us for how we are sometimes slow, but just smiling and smiling. We feel their distant benevolence and think that if anything understands us it is probably the clouds.

We close our eyes and can see the shadows, the traces of the cars, the people, the obstacles we have just navigated and the street, always the street, the two lines, parallel but intersecting somewhere, somewhere out there, somewhere we have to find, have to get to, have to get to now, have to be at this very moment! We do not know if we will ever get there. There is a nagging feeling that we will not, that there might not really be such a place, but we are young and fast and we will see that feeling proved wrong.

drift away, drift back

i once compared blogging to keeping a pet fish. if this was a fish, it has died. that is certainly one way to look at it, even if it is a bit fatalistic. let us rather take a broader view and see this thing as a critter that has undergone a metamorphosis and become something that it previously was not. isn't that the only constant, change?

to get you up to speed, here are some things:

• jack, kate, hurley, sun, aaron, and sayid have left the island. wait, thats lost.
• i left the islands in november and after a short search have found myself a job in chicago. re-adjusting has been well, something, but not as mountainous terrain as i thought.
• a few things i like about being stateside: hot showers, fresh fruit, friends
• a few things i miss about majuro: students, speaking marshallese, the ocean, "morneeng!"

i've been trying to explore many things; things like yoga, music thats come out in the past 2 years, and miles and miles of sidewalk.

i think i will be putting up snippets of this and that here over the next period of time until i stop. if you think of anything i should know about, just sing it loud and clear and it will be carried by way of melody to mine ears.

aaron

a betrayal of trust, or, living with the oppressed is easy until they start breaking into your house

there are numerous kids that hang out around our house. we give them drinks of water and they laugh at our attempts at marshallese. its a symbiotic relationship. one of the boys we were the closest to was Kan. he was in 5th grade at assumption elementary. he is really outgoing and often helpful. sometimes bridget would wash his uniform and we would help him with his homework around our kitchen table.


two weeks ago mike noticed some of his money was missing. then, last saturday evening, i came home from church to drop off my guitar before going to a fijian baptism party (if you ever get an invite to one, go. fijians know how to have a good time) and i noticed that the lights in our bedrooms were on. curious. the next morning shannon noticed that she was missing some money as well, not all of it, but half of her stash was gone. sunday afternoon, the lights all mysteriously turned on of their own accord again and the rest of her money was gone.


the pieces started to come together. our roof/cieling are still in the state of (dis)repair that they have been since late november and a panel of the cieling in the roof was broken. a chair that didn't used to be there was found under it, dusted with bits of wood which was curious because shannon had just swept the porch. hmmm. fr. rich had seen kan after someone broke in eating an apple and was pleased and surprised that he had made such a healthy snack choice. we had just gone grocery shopping. hmmmmmm. then kan started walking around with a new bike and new clothes, including a oversized black gangsta shirt with a huge sequined dollar bill sign. hmmmmmmmmm. then there was the realization that before someone broke in, kan was asking all of us where everyone was. hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.


we set a trap for him, telling him that we were all going to church monday evening while fr. rich hid in our bathroom. he didn't show, but the next day, he did. bridget saw the light go on from far away and ran to the house, catching him on his way out. we got our man.


there was an ensuing mess with meetings and consequences that i wasn't a big part of because thankfully, nothing of mine disappeared. i figure i only have two things anyone would want to steal, my ipod and my guitar. the guitar never would have made it out the ceiling and i keep my ipod camouflaged. so while it didn't effect me in that way, it did in others.



just the idea that we considered kan a friend and trusted him and that he would betray that just hurts. that he would sit at our table talking with us, knowing that he was going to come in and rifle through our belongings when we were gone feels so bad. on a different level it sucks because at least part of why we're here is to serve. it makes it much harder to do that and to openly embrace this place and people when things like this happen. by no means has this soured me on the people of the marshall islands, it just makes it a little more difficult to be welcoming to the kids that frequent our porch. my friend Jeremy, who lived in intentional community in the Camden House once told me something to the effect that making the oppressed your neighbors and living in community with them is easy until your neighbors start breaking into your house. what is most foul about this situation is not that kan stole from us, but that he would steal; that we live in a world that makes children into thieves.

i am a part of something big, or, my thoughts from this morning

in september i started getting up early to pray with the sunrise. i have a flat chunk of concrete i spread a towel out on and i meditate, calming all the worrying and planning about the many stresses that buzz through my brain all day long. i listen to the waves and the wind and God. sometimes i have deep, moving experiences but mostly i don't.

this morning i had a great feeling of joy. i opened my eyes after meditating and was overcome with how beautiful life is. i am a part of this huge, minutely detailed, incredible patchwork of life with God running through it all. i looked around and saw the ocean and the sun and the clouds and the houses of Small Island and the coconut trees and i just couldn't help smiling and even laughing a little. this is all so amazing! not the tropicality of my location or what i'm doing here in majuro, but this whole earth is such an unbelievable place and i get to be a part of it. i get to see and taste and draw meaning from all of this incredible creation. what more could a guy ask? there's no reason in this crazy world to be angry or sad or anything you don't want to be for more than a second!
its simple but it absolutely set me on fire.

public library, or, books on bata's porch

in the weeks leading up to this fall’s election, a series of large deliveries were made to assumption schools. aa man running for office (mayor, i think) arranged for mass quantities of books to be donated to the school. i’m not certain how expected these deliveries were but every time one was made there were so many books no one knew what to do with them. unfortunately, most of them were things that we didn’t need. some boxes made their way to the library, but many boxes were full of outdated textbooks in poor condition. i think most of them came from hawaii. eventually the majority of them were thrown away. the thought of so many pages going to waste makes me sad. however, before they were disposed of, all these boxes full of words sat stacked on the porch of fr. rich’s house, next door to ours. instead of playing “iraq” (a war game involving two teams and toy guns with rubber bands that fling pop can tabs at high velocities), the throngs of little boys who haunt the neighborhood would sit on the porch rifling through this public library, for that is truly what it was. it did not have shelves and dewey would surely have scoffed at the lack of organization but anyone was free to take anything they wanted. one day i was coming home from school in the afternoon and saw a father and daughter going through the volumes, picking out one here and one there to take home and become memories.

where' waldo? sucks when somebody already circled waldo.

gender relations or lack thereof and outgrowing reflections

one of the facets of life in the marshall islands that has been getting under the skin of the collective JVI community is the relationship between male and female people. men and women do not talk to each other unless they are going to sleep together. they do not make small talk and they are definitely not friends. there is this strange seperation between the sexes that is hard to breach. the women that work in the cafeteria at school will say "iokwe" when i greet them but that is about it.

clearly this is frustrating. while i want to avoid stereotyping the gender roles prominent in marshallese culture, the things that men do and the things that women do are very exclusive and clearly defined. i sympathize with my female community mates who are frustrated by the constraints these gender roles put on their behavior. men are allowed to do pretty much whatever they want, while women are held to a much higher standard including, but not limited to, not showing anyone your knees. i hesitate to write much more about if, for fear of coming off as judgemental.

as far as this sort of cultural examination goes, i realized the other day that i don't do that much of it. while i do not automatically accept every aspect of marshallese culture as good i do not think about such things as much as i would have expected. my peers struggle over what their response to cultural standards and attitudes that they do not agree with should be. should they speak out against them? should they accept them simply because they are a part of this place?

i find my own examination of such things to be lacking. its not that i don't notice things that make me uncomfortable or that i do not see the value of. there are things that bother me about how life is conducted here. for instance, the adjustment to marshallese time (everything starting 2 hours later than scheduled) can be an annoyance. however, for some reason my reactions to these things are very much internal. the thought of speaking out about values of the marshallese people that i do not agree with is not something that occurs to me often. i don't feel it is my place. i am not here to change or fix anything external. the only thing that i can legitimately expect to change through my time here is myself. it is my place to examine my own view of the world in light of the marshallese culture and not the other way around. certainly there are aspects of life here that are destructive to people, just as there are in any culture. but how can you remove the speck from one culture when you have not removed the plank from your own?

it is thinking like this that leads me to see my future work and vocation as being geographically (and culturally) located in the united states. it is hard enough to work for change in a social environment governed by cultural standards you are more or less familiar with. to be an outsider ostensibly working for social change in a literally foreign environment seems impossible to do effectively. also, i miss my friends.

a continuation!

last time my photographs stopped uploading, so i gave it another go today.

here is tsuyoshi, our kitten. he's dead now.

some of the friendly locals.

here is the desk of one of my colleagues, Pablo after I put CAUTION tape all around it!! its not exactly a stapler in jello, but some people laughed.

this is something i found the last time i was correcting my biology students' notebooks. also pictured is my response.

finally, here is a picture of me and my mustache, Robespierre.

someday i'll write something

recent developments, or, a smorgasbord of images

here are some pictures.


first up is our community christmas picture. this was taken christmas eve by a 2nd grader, so it is a bit skewed, but ocean did a pretty good job. this was right before we went out to eat before midnight mass.






this is some bread i baked:




this is the view from my desk in the faculty room. notice the stacks of notebooks to grade and the multitude of file folders. also the I CLOSED WOLSKI'S bumper sticker. i usually put my feet up and so things tend to get a little sandy.





there were a few more i wanted to add as well. i will try again at a later date.

these are some thoughts i wrote down about christmas a year ago

i thought alot about christmas; what it means to me.
it is God showing us what its all about. God, Emmanuel, comes to us, enters into our midst not at the head of a host, but in the most vulnerable, marginalized context possible: in a backwater region, to a homeless family, as a normal baby. what could be more humble?

i think the message is that if this homeless baby can speak truth to power, so should someone born to ease (even though that ease is the product of the injustice we are meant to cry out against). little baby jesus didn't have alot going for him: young mother, poor, people living under an oppressive imperial yoke. yet despite all this, jesus actualized that potential within each of us to be people of God. whats more, he tells us exactly how to do it. if that baby can go on to inspire us, what excuse do i have not to do God's work? with supportive family, friends, and most importantly the power of an education (the most powerful tool imaginable).

in other words, the message of christmas is that we all start somewhere. our origins are important, but in some ways they are irrelevant. everyone has the same potential to change the world and be the hands that build God's kingdom. its just a matter of actualizing that potential by seeking God. be still. listen. be open. God is there.

failures of power and another sort

the 2nd quarter ended last week. i'm not sure what happened, it was here and then all of a sudden its gone. it was a pretty good quarter. i became much more comfortable in the classroom and efficient in preparing to be in it. keeping that unlruly class in line is a bit easier now as i have a better idea of what works and what doesn't. i've also had success "breaking through" to some students. there were some that wouldn't talk to me for the first few months of school and now they do. although i still have stacks of grading to do, it feels good to have the first half of the i make it sound nice and smooth, but last week was a bit bumpy. the rough draft of the final paper for my freshman english class was due on monday and more than 2/3 of them didn't feel like doing it so i sent the whole lot of them to sandy, the principal's office. she made them stay after school until they finished it, which for some was after 6:00. so they have their rough drafts done, but the night before the revised paper was due, the power was out so none of them could type it. which is why i am in the school computer lab now, 10:00 am, christmas eve morning. of course the hitch is that so far none of the students have shown up to finish their papers. i have about half of them and many of the students who didn't hand theirs in yet probably won't bother to at all, which means that they have a good chance of failing. i don't like giving F's, but when students won't pay attention in class or do their work, what am i supposed to do? there were 3 kids who hadn't turned in any homework all quarter. one of them was already dismissed for disciplinary reasons and one of the others is on her final warning. one slip and shes "fired," as they say here.

the power has been going out alot lately, sometimes it is announced and sometimes its unexpected. a few weeks ago it went out without warning and there was a rumor that the power plant exploded. it kept going out in the final weeks of the quarter and everyone got a little nervous with having to prepare and copy exams in time. also, its hard to cook dinner without power. although its an inconvenience, it certainly isn't that big of a deal. the flow of electricity in majuro is pretty reliable compared to some other places.

the assumption faculty christmas party was friday night and as the new male jv, it was my role to emcee the affair. i cracked jokes and made fun of people while leading a few games. musical chairs was a big hit. we also played a game suggested by one of my favorite teachers, pablo, that was like dancing charades. the capper of the games was a race of sorts, in which 4 contestants tie a string around their waist that suspends an empty soda can. participants must move their hips to swing the can in order to move a small object on the ground. sr. monica was the defending champion but lost to the 8th grade teacher, deanna. it wasn't a bad party. before it started i hung out in the cookhouse with some male teachers drinking coconuts and grilling the chicken and fish. i drank 6 coconuts that night. mmm, delicious.

i will be sure to post again soon, describing christmas vacation adventures, of which there may possibly be one. i'm looking forward to reading, playing guitar, walking around, trying to stay out of the rain, and doing laundry.

a change of pace, or, notes of context to better compose a mental picture

I think that there are some things I’ve been leaving out. The goal for this work in progress is for it to consist of little word postcards; self-contained anecdotes that display some facet of my life and activities here. This will be a deviation from the norm. This is be a list.

Here are some things that I really like about the Marshall Islands and/or Assumption:


· The apex of style for the young Marshallese man is a rat-tail.


· The proper way to bid someone adieu is the phrase “Goodnight,” usually with a raised lilt of voice on the last syllable. This is appropriate regardless of the time of day. I can not express how much I enjoy saying “Goodnight!” to people after mass on Sunday mornings.


· The moon on the ocean. Some nights I stay up late grading or lesson planning in the faculty room at Assumption. When I head home, often the moon reflects off the water beautifully and bathes everything in soft silvery light.


· The Marshallese, instead of saying “dang,” or a like expression of frustration, have their own mild curse. I’m not sure of the spelling, but it might be “worwor.” It is pronounced with rolled R’s, “arrrrrrrrr-arrrrrrr” with the first half being longer and the stress on the second half. It sounds a little like a growl and perfectly fits the emotion.


· Instead of nodding, the universal sign of agreement in the Marshall Islands is raised eyebrows. Likewise, shaking of the head is replaced with a sort of “yucky face,” with one end of the mouth pulled down and out. I often do it in conjunction with a headshake.


· To peep on someone, like looking in their window, is called Corned Beefing, after the popular canned meat product.



as an added bonus, here is a picture of me from the Assumption High School Halloween party. I was a chaperone. Dressing in drag is very funny to the Marshallese. please note, that is a wig and not my real hair. thanks.