Que Le Vaya Bien, Quixote
So . . . we're back! We've actually been back for over 6 weeks now but since we've been couch-surfing ever since, it still feels like we're traveling. Only with much better food and higher standards of hygiene. We've been visiting long-lost friends and family all over the country under the guise of Meg's interviews for residency. To her momma's relief, she agreed to get a real haircut for the occasion, and traded in her tired backpacker garb for an interview suit and her backpack for a smart little attaché (whatever that is).
Meg's soon to head back to New Haven to finish up that whole med-student gig she's got going on, but not without checking out Rahul's new life as a cowboy first. Because he can't look for a job until Match Day comes and we find out what city we'll be calling home for the next 3 years, he's decided to shack up at his friends' cattle ranch in eastern Oregon and make himself useful. Goals include: looking less stupid riding a horse, pulling a calf from its momma's wahoo, changing a poopy diaper (an adorable one year-old named Roan is in the house), and of course continuing his quest to write the Great American Short Story (downgraded from previous Great American Novel ambitions).
While we won't have anything in the way of a permanent address to show for ourselves until June, we are in possession of new cellphones (with multi-colored flashy blinky lights that please us greatly). Call soon and often!
Rahul: 415-623-4559 (415-MAD-ILLZ)
Meg: 415-623-4562 (415-NAD-GLOB)
Before we get all philosophical and long-winded on you, we wanted to say:
1) The blog shall live on (http://tothevolcano.blogspot.com). Starting next week, Rahul's gonna start telling stories of his new life as an Oregon cowboy. There'll be blood, there'll be tears, and it'll be waaaay more graphic than Brokeback Mountain.
2) For everyone who didn't have the patience or the bandwith to view all 2000+ photos that we uploaded, we've narrowed 'em down to a mere 171! If you're interested, head to our Best of the Volcano photo album: http://flickr.com/photos/rahuljyoung/sets/72057594049841786/
-----------------------------
We keep promising to come up with deep and profound reflections from our year on the road in this, our last Quixote email (until the next journey, that is), so here's a start. The questions we've been asked the most since coming home have been "Do you feel like a different person from when you left?" and "Is it hard/weird/distressing to be back in America after everything you've seen?" And the honest answer, dissatisfying though it may be for the asker and us too, is "well, not really." We certainly hope that spending a year in the developing world has changed us. We almost wish we were suffering from extreme "reentry" shock and angst, but the truth is that being home still feels like, well, being home. It feels pretty natural to be back, to spend on a mocha what we spent on a night's accommodation a few months ago, to call family and friends whenever and wherever we feel like it on our disco cellphones, to spend hours on Christmas Eve driving all over Houston looking for the perfect last-minute addition to the Zapatista dolls we bought in Chiapas that no longer seem like quite enough. And it feels damn good to pile Meg's whole family + Rahul onto her parents' bed for the annual "Twaz the Night Before Chriztmaz" reading/debaucle (don't ask), or to know that when Rahul's mom needs the lawn mowed and the gutter unclogged, we're the ones to do it.
There are times when we are aware of differences in ourselves, and they creep in at unexpected moments. When Meg realized that her airport shuttle driver was Eritrean, instead of having no clue where Eritrea was, she excitedly jabbered about her favorite places to get shiro and cappuccinos in Asmara and got to hear about the driver's experience as a fighter in the struggle for independence from Ethiopia. When we spent New Year's in the Mission district in San Francisco this year, it felt more like home to us than it had a year ago when we lived there, as we caught Spanish phrases floating by and stopped longer to gaze at the boldly colorful street buildings. We felt ourselves focusing less on our own vulnerability and whiteness, and more on the vulnerability and vitality of the people all around us. When we wandered the aisles of a Costco in Idaho celebrating the low low prices on vats of hummus (without bargaining!), we wondered what our favorite Himalayan vegetable vendor would think of the massive shelves of shrink-wrapped bulk food.
For both of us, the stark contrast between life here in the developed world and life there in the developing world, the brutality of extreme poverty, the outrage and helplessness it engenders in us, and the need to do *something* about it have never been so palpable. For those of you who've been following the blog all year, you haven't heard a lot from us about outrage or injustice. We tried to keep our blogposts light-hearted and (hopefully) entertaining, and also reassuring to our mothers that we'd return home unscathed.
And it wasn't just the way we wrote, it was the way we lived. We had an absolute blast last year, and yet, for most of the trip, we were surrounded by poverty and hardship. We could have spent the entire year despairing at the fucked up state the world is in, and maybe we should have more than we did. We could also have distanced ourselves from the suffering, blocked it all out, and left it behind when we returned to America. What we tried to do instead was recognize the sometimes harsh realities, but continue to seek out beauty and humor whenever we could. Now we're back, and we're starting to ask ourselves: how do we adapt without forgetting, immerse ourselves in our lives here without losing track of the things we want to change, enjoy every moment in America without ignoring the responsibility we both feel to start doing something damnit!?
We don't know. We don't know. Is there room in Meg's upcoming 80-hour workweek to work toward social justice? Is taking a job in green building enough to make Rahul feel that he's doing his part? What happens when we have kids? It's so damn hard to change the world even if you're willing to sacrifice the rest of your life in the process. Can we even start to try and still indulge in gourmet dark chocolate and cheap red wine, romantic getaways to New York City and impassioned karaoke ragers, and love everyminute of it? We don't know, but we're trying to figure it out. Let us know if you've pulled it off, because we could sure use some role models right now. For now all we got is that we have to keep searching for an answer, and try never to lose the outrage, or the chocolate.
Meg's soon to head back to New Haven to finish up that whole med-student gig she's got going on, but not without checking out Rahul's new life as a cowboy first. Because he can't look for a job until Match Day comes and we find out what city we'll be calling home for the next 3 years, he's decided to shack up at his friends' cattle ranch in eastern Oregon and make himself useful. Goals include: looking less stupid riding a horse, pulling a calf from its momma's wahoo, changing a poopy diaper (an adorable one year-old named Roan is in the house), and of course continuing his quest to write the Great American Short Story (downgraded from previous Great American Novel ambitions).
While we won't have anything in the way of a permanent address to show for ourselves until June, we are in possession of new cellphones (with multi-colored flashy blinky lights that please us greatly). Call soon and often!
Rahul: 415-623-4559 (415-MAD-ILLZ)
Meg: 415-623-4562 (415-NAD-GLOB)
Before we get all philosophical and long-winded on you, we wanted to say:
1) The blog shall live on (http://tothevolcano.blogspot.com). Starting next week, Rahul's gonna start telling stories of his new life as an Oregon cowboy. There'll be blood, there'll be tears, and it'll be waaaay more graphic than Brokeback Mountain.
2) For everyone who didn't have the patience or the bandwith to view all 2000+ photos that we uploaded, we've narrowed 'em down to a mere 171! If you're interested, head to our Best of the Volcano photo album: http://flickr.com/photos/rahuljyoung/sets/72057594049841786/
-----------------------------
We keep promising to come up with deep and profound reflections from our year on the road in this, our last Quixote email (until the next journey, that is), so here's a start. The questions we've been asked the most since coming home have been "Do you feel like a different person from when you left?" and "Is it hard/weird/distressing to be back in America after everything you've seen?" And the honest answer, dissatisfying though it may be for the asker and us too, is "well, not really." We certainly hope that spending a year in the developing world has changed us. We almost wish we were suffering from extreme "reentry" shock and angst, but the truth is that being home still feels like, well, being home. It feels pretty natural to be back, to spend on a mocha what we spent on a night's accommodation a few months ago, to call family and friends whenever and wherever we feel like it on our disco cellphones, to spend hours on Christmas Eve driving all over Houston looking for the perfect last-minute addition to the Zapatista dolls we bought in Chiapas that no longer seem like quite enough. And it feels damn good to pile Meg's whole family + Rahul onto her parents' bed for the annual "Twaz the Night Before Chriztmaz" reading/debaucle (don't ask), or to know that when Rahul's mom needs the lawn mowed and the gutter unclogged, we're the ones to do it.
There are times when we are aware of differences in ourselves, and they creep in at unexpected moments. When Meg realized that her airport shuttle driver was Eritrean, instead of having no clue where Eritrea was, she excitedly jabbered about her favorite places to get shiro and cappuccinos in Asmara and got to hear about the driver's experience as a fighter in the struggle for independence from Ethiopia. When we spent New Year's in the Mission district in San Francisco this year, it felt more like home to us than it had a year ago when we lived there, as we caught Spanish phrases floating by and stopped longer to gaze at the boldly colorful street buildings. We felt ourselves focusing less on our own vulnerability and whiteness, and more on the vulnerability and vitality of the people all around us. When we wandered the aisles of a Costco in Idaho celebrating the low low prices on vats of hummus (without bargaining!), we wondered what our favorite Himalayan vegetable vendor would think of the massive shelves of shrink-wrapped bulk food.
For both of us, the stark contrast between life here in the developed world and life there in the developing world, the brutality of extreme poverty, the outrage and helplessness it engenders in us, and the need to do *something* about it have never been so palpable. For those of you who've been following the blog all year, you haven't heard a lot from us about outrage or injustice. We tried to keep our blogposts light-hearted and (hopefully) entertaining, and also reassuring to our mothers that we'd return home unscathed.
And it wasn't just the way we wrote, it was the way we lived. We had an absolute blast last year, and yet, for most of the trip, we were surrounded by poverty and hardship. We could have spent the entire year despairing at the fucked up state the world is in, and maybe we should have more than we did. We could also have distanced ourselves from the suffering, blocked it all out, and left it behind when we returned to America. What we tried to do instead was recognize the sometimes harsh realities, but continue to seek out beauty and humor whenever we could. Now we're back, and we're starting to ask ourselves: how do we adapt without forgetting, immerse ourselves in our lives here without losing track of the things we want to change, enjoy every moment in America without ignoring the responsibility we both feel to start doing something damnit!?
We don't know. We don't know. Is there room in Meg's upcoming 80-hour workweek to work toward social justice? Is taking a job in green building enough to make Rahul feel that he's doing his part? What happens when we have kids? It's so damn hard to change the world even if you're willing to sacrifice the rest of your life in the process. Can we even start to try and still indulge in gourmet dark chocolate and cheap red wine, romantic getaways to New York City and impassioned karaoke ragers, and love everyminute of it? We don't know, but we're trying to figure it out. Let us know if you've pulled it off, because we could sure use some role models right now. For now all we got is that we have to keep searching for an answer, and try never to lose the outrage, or the chocolate.
posted by Meghul at 8:22 AM
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