BEIJING. The dissertation is nearly done and I am days from submission. I have to get back to work, so I’ll write more soon. But just for fun, below is the final paragraph of the document. Without reading what came...
SAN FRANCISCO. I’m in the city for a week on a visa run. I just dropped off my application and have to wait four days to get my passport back. My regular hotel in North Beach gives nice discounts for...
CHIANG MAI. Yesterday I completed my 100th reading for my dissertation since becoming ABD. (It also marks just over a year since I became ABD.) I can be meticulous about projects such as this, so when I finished classes last...
CHIANG MAI, THAILAND. The film Her by Spike Jonze plays with two intertwined journeys: Hers is from innocence to transcendence. His is from heartbreak to love to heartbreak to hope. Considered from a strictly narrative “hero’s journey” framework, hers is the archetypically...
KRABI. As we think, we are inexorably negotiating our own fragmented consciousness. We live always in two times—the pre-reflective now of experience, and the reflective then-that-is-recalled of possible understanding. Both are always with us, but we tend to give our...
CHIANG MAI. I’ve given up trying to understand time. Not that I can understand it. But time was different this year. The year was all about the future at every now I had. What is the next trip? It’s coming...
LUANG PRABANG. "I arrive in a village for my holidays, happy to leave my work and my everyday surroundings. I settle in the village, and it becomes the centre of my life. The low level of the river, gathering in...
CHAING MAI. Imagine if pain projected itself to the mind as sound. Only I can hear the dull ache of my kneecap. Or if pain resonated audibly outward from itself, from the source, a continuous grinding hum of my kneecap...
BUSAN. I have just returned from the European Graduate School to Busan—from one community to the other. In a few days I will leave Korea and move to Chiang Mai. I used to think of Korea as my bubble, a...
BUSAN. I’m just now catching my breath after a quick trip to Singapore (plus a brief stay in Shanghai). No, I’m not referring to the quality of the air (more on this later). I was there to attend a conference...
BUSAN. After six and a half years in Korea, I’m packing up and moving on. To put a long story into a single sentence: My department folded at Kyungsung and rather than shift into a new department I took it...
