Hosoyama Shimmei-sha Shrine
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Walking past the temple
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Category Archives: Uncategorized
Shibuya Crossing and a Close Call
Up to 3000 people cross on a single walk sign at Shibuya Crossing, the world’s busiest pedestrian crosswalk.
For comparison, note that for about 100,000 years (roughly 900,000 to 800,000 years ago), the entire population of our human ancestors was reduced to about half that. I’d say that’s a close call.
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Alice pics
A few days in Romania
Hitchhiking Istanbul to Izmir
Istanbul was great — the architecture, history, international culture, my neighborhood of cafes and small galleries between Taksim Square and Galata Tower.
Erratic start getting out though. My planned route to begin with a ferry from Istanbul to Bandirma is not doable on the winter ferry schedule. A tip on a shorter ferry to the Bursa area was given in a good spirit of cross-cultural camaraderie, but I scoped out the landing point and could be stuck with a very long walk to a questionable highway ramp. That Bandirma ferry would have disembarked at a great hitchhiking spot. If I ever return for the busier summer ferry schedule …
So I took a bus to Balikesir. My couchsurfing contact there couldn’t host me for the night but walked me around, bought me a Turkish dinner, and gave me a local bus # to the highway several kilometers away. Once there, I liked my spot. But no one else did. An old lady tried to tell me something in Turkish, seemingly about my spot, but she gave up. So I stayed. Lots of space for cars to pull over, near a traffic light so they’re going slow, a half km to the highway ramp. Suddenly a motorcycle turned around and came back to me. “Wrong spot,” he said. “This is the city road.” Apparently in Turkey, unlike many countries, it’s better to go right up on the main freeway to hitch. Somehow the biker got my bags onto the bike and he took me 2 km to a spot on the main highway. Another old Turkish hitchhiker — much more picturesque than I — was there, so I walked ahead to give him space. I saw a truck stop for the old guy. Good for him. Then the same truck stopped for me. So there we went, the three of us. The old guy got out on a farm road, and then the trucker wanted pictures of me and him for his friends. In Japan, a similar request was due to the thrill of having a hitchhiker period. Here, I think the signature novelty was that I was an American hitchhiker. At least that’s the best I could get from what pitiful, choppy communication we could muster across our languages.
He dropped me, as trucks usually do, on the very edge of town. For any hitchhiker regardless of language barrier, getting from the edge of an unfamiliar city of 4 million to your destination in the center is more daunting than a crossing a few hundred km of open highway (cp. my posts hitchhiking out of Puebla and into Guadalajara). Google maps is fitful at best in off-the-beaten-track local transit. (Wisely, it doesn’t even try to identify the local buses – which often handwrite the daily destinations in the window — in my adopted hometown of Guanajuato, Mexico.) It did however point to a thoroughfare two km away where there would some local buses going somewhere. After a bit of push and sweat with my hitchhiking backpack, I found a bus stop and started badgering the first hapless passerby for info. I had learned maybe 5 phrases in Turkish and he had maybe 3 in English, but a high school girl stepped in. She and I figured out a route and luckily got on the bus together – you can’t pay with cash or credit card on the buses here, but only with a pre-obtained Izmir transit card – so I just dumbly looked at the driver when the girl scanned me in a fare on her own card. As happens over and over in my vagabond travels (30 countries visited, 18 via hitchhiking), a local stranger stepped in out of nowhere and saved my ass.
And thus into Izmir and the old retired furniture maker who managed my cheap hotel.
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In honor of Mr. Gombrowicz
Café Guardatiempos, Condesa, Mexico City
Doormats in Love
I confess it. I’m a doormat in love. The good news is, there’s nothing cringy about my doormat status. I boldly embrace my identity as doormat. The oft-heard dictum that you should not be a doormat in love is, to me, wrong-headed. Catastrophically so.
First, a working definition. By “doormat,” I mean you tend to do, where possible, whatever your partner asks. You don’t question whether they are taking advantage or being unfair or…. You just do it. Not because it’s fair or justified, but because it makes them happy. This is a variant of unconditional love: you don’t care about what they deserve; you only care about what makes them happy.
Sure, there are risks to being a doormat. You may well get burned from time to time. If your top priority is NOT to be taken advantage of, NOT to be disrespected, etc., then the doormat identity is not for you. But there is a tradeoff. You can watch closely to make sure your partner is not stepping over the line, and this will indeed keep them on the straight and narrow, but the cost is less openness and more caution in the relationship – each side monitoring at least a little bit to make sure they are getting their fair share in the relationship, each side knowing if they say or do too much that falls outside of the prescribed scope, they will be called on it, each side being careful about what they say and do.
If the risk of the doormat identity is that you may (and probably will) get burned from time to time, the gain is in the potential for a much deeper relationship – where all the doors and windows are open between you, no hesitation, no fear of saying the wrong thing, knowing that the other person is not monitoring whether you “deserve” their love, knowing that the flow of love is unconditional.
Obviously, this doesn’t work if one person is a doormat and the other is a bully. But the ethical failure in that case is wholly on the side of the bully. 100%. Anything less is no better than blaming the robbery victim for leaving the door unlocked or blaming the rape victim for dressing a certain way. No, the person who commits the injustice is 100% responsible for the injustice.
But if both our young lovers are doormats, then, ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner! The trust, the love blows away all conditionals and becomes so deep that there is no longer a bottom. So to any of my friends and foes, to any of my confederates and combatants in the grand dialectic who want to be pushed and challenged and held to a standard in love, I say it’s time to come around and face the facts: Happiness is two doormats in love.
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Featured on Freebooksy
Featured on Freebooksy today. Free one more day. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MTGGWZV/
Go on. Do it. Release your inner hippie.
Exiting the archive
We were in a crowded place.
No, we were on a boat
hearing the slap of water.
No, we were in the jungle
on a B-movie set.
There is no we
in the archive.
There is only I
with the husk
of the world
of the
sunrise, sunset, no pillow and stone,
no moving stars of earthly time,
just saltaway hope and who knows what
lavender rose and jacaranda
wine too bitter for the glass.
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shakemyheadhollow 