Hey guys! I’m here. Still not dead. Just, as you might imagine, crazily busy with life. For the past 6 weeks I’ve been working yet again as a substitute teacher at a local preschool. Between that, continuing to jump through hoops in setting up Linty Fresh China, and a recent obsession with documentaries, I’ve been online only sporadically in the last month. It’s funny, other Americans here will mention to me some news item from back home and I’ve just got this blank stare on my face… I’m more and more disconnected from stuff back in the States.

And that disconnect has pros and cons. As I’ve mentioned before, I think my life here is less stressful (though busy) than the one I left back in America. I feel healthier, too, since the diet here contains less meat and more fruits and veggies. And I’m getting a lot more exercise as well. I should get a pedometer. I think I’m averaging 2 miles a day. But life here has its drawbacks. Getting ripped off, getting hit by cabs, busses, and other motorists, and food poisoning are daily concerns. But you learn to take that sort of stuff in stride after awhile. Taking advantage of my downtime, I’ve found, is essential. A couple hours a day where I can just unplug from the world and relax. It’s important to maintaining my sanity.

So, I mentioned documentaries. In the month of July I watched about 3 a week. I do this a lot, get on these kicks where I’m sort of addicted to one genre or artist or director or whatever. And this month I [almost] totally boycotted traditional cinema to quench a sudden thirst for some reality. I started off with four Michael Moore films: Capitalism: A Love Story, Sicko, Bowling for Columbine, and Farenheit 9/11. The first two were my favorite. If you haven’t seen any of these, you should. You may not agree with all of it, and of course every form of media is slanted one way or another, but the insights and questions raised are worth thinking about.

I still remember this one day, about 8 years ago, in my junior year at Harrison High School in Kennesaw, sitting in American History class. Our teacher was going through the events leading up to the close of World War 2, and in his discussion of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he skimmed over a lot of the details of the aftermath of the bombs, the effects of radiation, and the tens of thousands of innocent citizens killed. Now, having grown up in Hawaii, where the population is roughly 25% Japanese-American, I’d known a different story about these bombs. I knew about the propaganda (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) that had been built into the media in America to make the Japanese look like crazed animals, and the plans that had been in place to drop more nuclear bombs throughout the country. It just didn’t seem like a very objective recounting of history, so I raised my hand and challenged him on it.

I guess what I’m getting at is that, one thing that’s always gotten under my skin is mankind’s proclivity to adopt baseless prejudices. We’re always looking to label people, to measure them up and put them in a box and figure out what makes us better between them and ourselves; to find a reason to put ourselves first. It’s funny to me that these invisible, manmade lines in the ground have had such a profound grip on our psyches for all these years. And I see it here too, the gap between rich and poor, the haves and have-nots.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the few travels that I’ve had the opportunity to enjoy, it’s that we’re all people. We have families, people we love, hobbies and habits, pets, favorite foods, things that make us laugh. We’re equal.

And to conclude this post that’s arguably way too deep to be on a tshirt blog, I give you a picture of the current view outside my balcony window.