Posts from the “Life” Category

On your left

Posted on 24 September 2022

“On your left!” “Thank you!” “Thank you!” “On your left!” “Get it, girl!” “I’m trying!” And so on. A couple weeks later, back home, while passing a couple of other cyclists with a wide berth: “Hey, coming up on your left!” Silence. I was a little put out. They call the community at AIDS/Lifecycle “the Love Bubble”, which is cheesy and something I typically have trouble embracing for that; such things are, all too often, a façade, an untruth. But the reality is, people on the ride were so damn friendly. I was there, unexpectedly, on my own, and yet as I rode among hundreds of other groups of people, I found friends. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how it’s hard…

Human History is Always Dying

Posted on 31 December 2020

A traveling band of robbers fell upon our household one night. They were as senseless and villainous as robbers are in fairy tales. Father stood in the door with a pitchfork and shouted to the older children. “Run! Escape! Fly!” The robbers overpowered my father and knocked out his front teeth. They hit my mother, and she fell to the floor unconscious, and they picked up the baby she had held in her arms and swung her against the floor so that she was killed instantly. … The band of robbers carried away all of our belongings worth anything, and partially razed our house. … “We must leave a country where such things can happen,” said my father, and with that I agreed entirely.…

Intersections

Posted on 16 February 2020

Sometimes the world seems as if it is made up of different planes of being that may overlap, or crash into each other, or may simply stay parallel, not touching. It sometimes jars me to think that my life in Seattle exists in tandem on the same earth as that of a child growing up in the remote Andes or of a yacht-owner in Monaco. These planes of existence sometimes intersect, but geography mostly holds them apart. There are places, though, where the edges bleed and blend, and one of these places is Po Toi. Po Toi is the southernmost island in Hong Kong. And though the Hong Kong you’re likely thinking of is full of towering skyscrapers and crowded with people, this part…

Questions from Hong Kong

Posted on 10 January 2019

  How is the public transportation so good? How is it so cheap? So clean? Why do their buses have seatbelts and ours don’t? Why do I see so many bike share brands and so few shared bikes being ridden? Why do I feel so safe? How is it that I haven’t been sexually harassed? How do they build so high on such steep slopes? Is the slope maintenance environmentally friendly? Why do the street crossings take so long to change for pedestrians? Who are the people behind the dueling Falun Gong/Dafa protest displays? Who would pay over $1,000 USD for a pet fish? Are the caged birds in the market alright? How is the coffee so good here? When did they start serving…

Across Hemispheres

Posted on 12 November 2018

I walked into the hostel’s lobby, agitated after the most harrowing taxi ride of my life, during which the driver threatened to veer off the mountain road at each bend and then tried to raise the price when we arrived, spurring a Spanish language argument with me. Thus shaken, it took me and my traveling buddies a bit to correctly navigate through the streets of Potosí to the hostel we’d booked. After all of this, I just wanted a bit of security and dinner for the evening. I remember plopping into a chair in the lobby, plugging my phone in to charge, and conversing with a French woman who was traveling through South America solo. We realized we’d met the same fellow traveler at…