June 30, 2008
Notes from the Desert.
I've enjoyed spending time in Arizona decompressing. Perhaps the highlight of my time since graduation was my river trip through the Grand Canyon last week. It's only the last part of the Colorado--from Diamond Creek down if there are any canyon buffs among my imaginary readership--but it's still the mighty river and the humbling canyon.
The joint force and full effect of a river trip is hard to describe, but it can be a life-changing experience. Firstly, there's the immense complexity of the canyon itself. It's the kind of place that makes you want to become a geologist, especially viewed from the bottom where all the really interesting strata are. I recommend especially the Vishnu Schist if you ever get a chance--it's like modernist sculpture formed before the dawn of man. And the stars at night...ye gods, so many of them it makes me wonder how much you really miss living in a city. It's humbling, and as I talked with one of the guides we agreed that any good journey of discovery should be humbling in a good way. The canyon reminds you of where you stand in the grad scheme of things--not in any mean or intimidating way, but simply through its awesome presence. I'm hoping my year in Cambodia will do the same, albeit in a different way. No matter who you think you are or how important or wise you think you are, a good discovery will change that.
As a side note, It's an amazing feeling to escape time as a number: I woke up when it was light, I went to sleep after the moon came up. Did it really matter what exact time it was? In my case, however, it did have the side effect of making me an early riser.
I'm back in my hometown of Yuma for the next week, which is now proud to be sending sending not one but two of its homegrown heroes to Asia this August. Firstly there's little old me, who just got a nice story in the paper. Secondly and more notably there's Yuma's own Jackie Johnson is going to Beijing to represent the United States. I wish her the absolute best. I went to high school with Jackie, and I can assure you that she's not only a phenomenal athlete, but also a great person, and I think she has big things ahead of her.
It's kind of funny, Yuma is one of the bigger cities in Arizona outside the Phoenix metropolitan sprawl, but in many ways it still thinks of itself as a small town. That's really not a bad thing, but it certainly means that "being from Princeton" means something more here than back east, where you can't swing a copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations without hitting an Ivy League liberal arts major offering to close-read for food. It's not any judgement, it's just different, and I wonder if it might make a good warm-up for Asia.
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June 11, 2008
If you whistle and hum at the same time...
...You can create overtones like Tuvan throat singers do, incidentally making a sound strangely like a radio tuning or a strong winter wind.
The blog presents me with a great place to put down my thoughts a couple months before I go, and as I stand today, I'm musing over the challenge of finding the middle-range expectation. I don't want to be the stereotypical naive white liberal/Quiet American, thinking they're coming in to enlighten everyone, while ignoring what the students realistically need and what I can realistically provide, which is English instruction and basic cultural fluency. The other benefits of intercultural interaction will come, but I'm being paid to for a job. Completely ignoring that job in favor of high-minded and impossible ideals would be a bad thing.
At the same time, though, I don't want to fall into a cynical resignation before I even begin. I hope to make authentic connections with people, and being hard-minded doesn't mean I can't be open for opportunities to help. Societal change is hard to notice and it takes a long time to build to a point where it actually is noticeable. The best that I can hope for is that my year in Cambodia, if it does have effects, will probably affect people in ways that I might little note nor long remember, but will add up in the long run.
During the elapsed chunk of my time on this sweet swinging sphere, I've figured a few things out about myself. I know that I'm comfortable both leading and following. I know that I enjoy the aquisition of random knowledge via Wikipedia far more than I should. I know that I'm a sucker for big eyes and bright smiles. Most importantly, though, I know that I'm given to grand gestures and big-hearted actions. As nice as that can be sometimes, it can drag after a while if one doesn't develop the requisite hard-heartedness necessary for urban life and its discontents. I had the good fortune to get to talk to my soon-to-be predecessor Andrew Turco at reunions a few weeks ago, and he talked about how draining the entire experience can be. He wasn't even aware of its effects until he took a vacation for a few days, and realized how much he needed it, how much relief he got out of it.
I've been rambling a bit here, and I'm still very much in the early stages of figuring out how I ought to orient myself to my impending experience. I think my watchword should probably be, "Striking a balance." The balance between playing it safe and swinging for the fences, the balance between the naive worldsaver and the snotty expat. The balance of expectations, the balance of preparedness (I don't want to over-plan to the point that I'm too busy to embrace strange opportunities that come my way.)
Bah, I'm getting fuzzy and abstract now. That's a good sign it's time to stop writing. On the plus side, I did try to put in a link.
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The Rudimentary Beginnings of a Highly Rudimentary Endeavor
My name is Adam Flynn and I get to contemplate the possibility of being the biggest person in the entire country of Cambodia.
Oooh, I get to have a jump. More after the Jump.
I am going to Cambodia to teach at the Royal University of Phnom Penh as part of the Princeton in Asia program. It's a great side-step after college, because it gives me a good answer to the question, "So, what are you doing after graduation?" More importantly, however, dropping onself into a foreign culture delivers a badly-needed jolt to your perceptions of human nature, the all-important torquing of perspective that only deep travel can really bring.
While I am very enthusiastic about jumping into the great wide world of the Khmer, I'm still feeling out this whole internet thing. It's probably going to be a learning process, so bear with me as I figure out the whole blogging thing. I expect by the end of the year I'll have all sorts of sweet stuff piled up on here in a tasteful but functional design that maximizes my effectiveness while minimizing my hassle. But that's in a year from now. I do have a twitter, however, and am endeavoring to figure out how to plug that sucker into my bloggaria. Right now I'm just hoping to get this entry to appear. Wait, I need to have links, right? All good blog entries are filled with links, creating a sort of intertextual hypertext. Well, maybe that's my objective for next entry. Right now I just need to enter words that seem interesting to me. Trappings and fixin's are to follow, along with a more definite answer to the question of "who does this jerk think he is, anyway?"
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