The Journal of his Delights

It occurred to me today that I’ve been in the Bay Area approximately six months now. How so much time has slipped past, I don’t know. It feels like it’s been a couple of weeks at most, maybe a month or two.

It also feels like, even though I’m not traveling, the journey is still continuing. An inner journey though, with landscape and characters just as varied, and requiring just as much energy towards confronting the unknown and the awkward.

I told a friend the other day that travel is “is a looking for opportunities that will stretch the conception of the world and ourselves, so that we can become bigger and accommodate more of life.”

Just because I’ve been staying put for the past six months (short as it feels), it doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped traveling.

Over the weekend, I watched Citizen Dog (Mah nakorn), a Thai film that came out in 2004. A cross between Amelie and I’m a Cyborg But That’s Okay, it’s a bright, charming love story that pokes fun at the illusion and disillusionment prevalent in Bangkok.

The story centers around a country boy named Pod who moves to the big city and falls in love with Jin, an obsessive-compusive maid. He follows a winding road in his pursuit, meeting along the way—among others—his grandmother reincarnated as a gecko, an undead motorcycle taxi driver, and a chain-smoking, homeless teddy bear.

Yes, it’s that kind of film. Plus the opening song is catchy. Check it out.

This is a test of PhotoXhibit for Wordpress. If this works, you’ll have a pleasant flashback of my visit to Dazaifu.

Update: It works! If you click on the images, you get a cool lightbox feature. Even better, you can move from image to image from within the lightbox. Just move your mouse to the upper right or left till the Next/Prev buttons show.

Point Montara Light Station is approximately 25 miles south of San Francisco, and the hostel there has been my base for the past week. There’s nothing quite like waking up in the morning, grabbing something warm to eat/drink, and heading out to watch the ocean roar against the rocks for a time.

I hope to be here for a couple more days as I continue the home-hunt. Speaking of which, there’s one place in particular that I think would suit well; a 1-bedroom apartment on a lovely street and within walking distance of downtown Redwood City. I submitted an application today, but there’s some competition and it’s not certain I’ll get it. *fingers crossed*

It’s been a long day, and I don’t have much else to add. Here are some pictures from the hostel though. Enjoy…

P.S. The lighthouse is still in duty, and you can see it lit up at night.

A couple of quiet days have passed. Portland in the wintertime is very good for that. The rain and clouds urge you to stay indoors, keep warm, and laze about all day. It doesn’t help that I’m feeling in-between, a null point after one tide goes out and just before the next comes in. Something’s cooking, friends. Some good news on the horizon, but it’s not ready to break yet. Don’t want to jinx it.

What I’ve discovered though is that I’m not very good at sitting down to write when I’m not settled. I don’t have to be somewhere very long to settle in - witness Fukuoka - but I do need some sense of “this is where I am now.” And right now, I’m not really anywhere. So I’m using the time to rest, to plan, to gather myself up. I have a To Do list that’s a page long, but not the urgency to rush the items to completion.

Things are just as they are, and that’s… well… okay.

The sun was out in Eugene this morning, and it was fair skies all the way to Portland. An uneventful drive except for Trooper Decker, who was only doing his job as he handed me a speeding ticket (83 mph in a 65 zone). $242… ouch.

But I’m in Portland in a cafe drinking the biggest mug of hot chocolate I could find, and I just sent my resume off for what might well be a very interesting endeavor indeed.

In other news, I just re-read First Mindy, and I’m not all that happy with how it turned out. It may be that the honeymoon is over between me and the story; that enough time’s past for me to see it more clearly. That said, I think the Jacob story is still good. It needs work, but it fundamentally has more potential. We’ll see, I suppose. Oh, and I think I have a proper title for Jacob, but as it involves some structural re-writing, I’ll wait till that task’s done.

The title came to me while driving through the snow, so the road trip, as frustrating as it’s been, is at least bearing this fruit. And I now know what black ice and divine intervention combined feel like.

I’d been driving 10 hours but only got as far as Eugene in Oregon. The weather’s been absolutely horrible. Leaving Oakland it was fair skies and I thought I’d lucked out, but I soon discovered otherwise. Rainstorms, fog, snow flurries, and even a patch of black ice that had my heart in my throat and me cranking hard on the wheel desperate to get some grip on the front tires. It’s been a tough, tough drive, and even though I’m only two hours out of Portland, I’m exhausted. Not to mention a little tingling notion that maybe it would be a good idea to get off the road. I respect those notions. The car is undamaged, I’m okay if tired, and so I’m calling it a night and moving on tomorrow.

Speaking of bad weather, there are patches of Northern California that are likely to be without power till Thursday. Something like 500 miles of power lines came down in the recent storm.

You have the option when driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco of taking Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH). It’s a beautiful, scenic route that (appropriately enough) hugs the Pacific Ocean and provides you with a multitude of panoramic views. Just gorgeous.

That’s NOT what I did yesterday. Mostly because as lovely as PCH is, it’s so much longer than taking Highway 5, which is a direct shot up through the California central valley. The downside of taking Highway 5 is that it’s a direct shot up through the California central valley, which has to be one of the most boring drives in the United States. Don’t get me wrong, the central valley is a huge agricultural center and vital to both the California and U.S. economies. But there’s nothing to see for miles and miles and miles except for dust and the occasional cattle farm. (Time to switch off the car vents!) Continue Reading »

Just a heads up that I start a road trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco tomorrow. I’ll spend a couple of days there and then move on again to Portland. It should be fun - there are folks in the Bay Area that I haven’t seen in a long time. I also heard about a couple of really interesting job leads. Woohoo!

I’m back in Los Angeles. I flew in yesterday on a remarkably easy flight given that it was the weekend before Christmas.

I found some photographs from my trip (with Lowie) to Dazaifu, and I’ve uploaded them to Flickr. There’s a short slideshow - take a look. The pictures from Komyozenji, a zen temple, are especially beautiful, I think. The mediation hall had that hushed feeling of sacredness, and the fall colors in the garden were just amazing. It was crowded too. Everyone and their uncle was there with a camera, but somehow it didn’t intrude too much onto the peacefulness of the place.

I hardly took any pictures of Tenman-gu, a shinto shrine dedicated to Tenjin, the kami of scholarship. Even though the grounds were much larger and more “impressive”, it didn’t strike me in the same way that Komyozenji did.

Later in the day, we went to the Kyushu National Museum. What a fantastic piece of architecture that was. Very modern, but also incorporating traditional Japanese materials and styling. A wonderful combination of old and new. And the museum itself is very well done with some interesting exhibits on history in Asia.

A small sample from the slideshow: