Basketball at Midnight

For you, dear reader, this post marks the end of many things.  Due to unstable relations with the internet and a lot of obligations, deadlines, reservations, and things that do not set aside enough time for my soul, I have been unable to send any of the three or four posts I’ve wanted to send, and I still will not be able to.  In all likelihood they will go in the way of all bits and you will never have the pleasure, pain, and annoyance of reading them.

For your edification, however, I will give you a synopsis of things that have ended since I’ve last had time to sit and write a significant post:

• My visit to Indonesia ended with a tolerable homestay with a family in Pekan Baru.  There is close to nothing of travelling interest there.  The guy, who waits in the bus station in the mornings for travelers before work begins, lives at a “university” which is oddly familiar to a boarding high school based on the ages of the kids.  I gathered that formal state education ends around middle school, and so the university had general education courses as well as a nursing and midwife program, all for kids 13-18.  School was not in session, which was sad, and he promised if I stayed an extra two days the dorms would be full and I would have hordes of young muslim women with whom to talk (the school, less balanced than Malaysia, had 400 women and about 38 men).  This place reminded me in part of a little school in Malaysia I had taught at for 7 months in 2008.  Gee, I probably need a little more critical distance before I can make references like that.
• My time involved in the Fulbright ETA program fully ended.  Depending on your own whims, the point of enditure may have been when I finished teaching, when the school followed me to the airport to wish me good bye (viewable films taken, but unwittingly left on the computer), following my exit interview at MACEE, following the return of my phone and pickup of my luggage from MACEE, or at the point of departure from the nation of Malaysia, on Monday.
• I finished Walden Two, a very interesting utopia by B. F. Skinner, the bio-psychologist.  It deserves a post on its own and it may well get one.
• My stay in Malaysia, insofar as it was home and a base for my travels, ended, and now I am once again wandering nomadically through eternity.  No phone, no computer, no mailing address.
• My interaction with my computer ended.  It was working fine at the time, but I ran the battery down, put it in a box, and shipped it to my parents.  I did not want to lug it through all of India.  That would probably be une idee mauvais.
• My proximity and visits to Singapore ended, as I flew out of there into Bangalore on a flight that cost roughly $150.  It should have cost $100, but the sale ended before I had my act together.
• I finished Animal Dreams, a book by Barbara Kingsolver.  It’s an excellent book and I recommend you read it.  Nancy Pope might be proud of me finishing two books in a week’s time, but then again, she might say I should have read 5 more in the same span.  It also ends a rather long phase in my life of not becoming emotional as a result of media.  I think of it as a grand triumph, years in the making.  Some out there know of my quest to overcome my emotional guardedness, which was a struggle since around Freshman year in college (at a realization that I likely hadn’t cried in about 8-10 years).  Although I had done very well at being more emotional, cognizant of those emotions, and somewhat more expressive, the common welling up at sad movies and books didn’t really come to me until recently.  I few movies had a minor effect, but it wasn’t until Animal Dreams that I really had to stop to wipe my eyes.  I see this as progress
• There’s probably lots of other things that have ended that I haven’t listed and may or may not be very important.  Thus is the fate of classification.

And of course, consistent with my own appreciation of Shiva, the destruction and end of something is intimately connected to its recreation (think of reincarnation as a motif, not an afterlife), and so all of these endings are remanifest in some new beginning that I may or may not be aware of.  The most obvious is India; curiously, Bangalore is the first city outside the USA that I have re visited (it’s been 5 years), and it will be interesting to get a feel for it again.  Or I might just hop a train to Hyderabad on my trek to Uttarachal and the mountains.  Nous verrons.

Kevin

(pardonez moi pour francais qui est torte, s.v.p.)