Non-Malarial Paul (or Paul in Nepal, or NePaul, if you prefer)

2009-11-05T00:26:00.003+05:30

Hrm.

Not everything in Darfur makes perfect sense. I just completed a paralyzingly dull day of workshops on the environment and natural resources in Darfur - most of which was in Arabic and thus of predictably little value to me. One of the few portions sufficiently translated was an exploration of how an explosion in the number of nomadic herders (and consequently in their flocks) has ravaged the environment of Darfur. The numerous and hungry sheep, goats, cattle and camels devour grass, shrubs, trees, roots, and whatever other edibles they can find in an already shockingly inhospitable environment. This further dries the environment, erodes the soil, kills most of the plants lucky enough to escape the goat's teeth. More immediately, it also drives the growing number of herders onto land occupied by a similarly soaring population of farmers, where their critters, being critters, find lovely and well-nurtured crops upon which to feast. The herders are desperate, the farmers aghast, and one or both of these parties usually has an AK-47. Throw in a hefty dose of Machiavellian meddling from the central government and a ton of complexity I haven't hinted at here, and voila - you get the Darfur conflict. So it's clearly an idea beyond reproach that, among a great many other things, weaning a few well-armed nomads off their herding lifestyle might pay some delightful dividends in reduced environmental damage and bloodshed.

The next presentation was a discussion of how to improve the lot of nomadic herders by making it easier for them to increase the size of their herds.

This is one of the lesser of many insane contradictions espoused by well-meaning people today. What an odd place.

2009-11-03T00:30:00.002+05:30

Oy...

I suppose I could say my plate is full. I'm bouncing back and forth between Khartoum and various metropoles of Darfur and, on one happy but too brief occasion, Switzerland. I'm working absurd hours, though to be fair I just partook of my first proper weekend in a month or so. I'm learning a ridiculous amount about subjects I hadn't known existed. All this is in service of a $2.5 million project that operates (lightly and loosely) over an area roughly the size of France. Oy. But jeepers, it's interesting stuff - at the nexus between war and poverty and the environment, using technology waaay beyond my understanding to tackle (or at least comprehend) problems similarly beyond my pay grade.

If only I didn't have to relearn Spanish in the next 3 days. Speaking of which, I'm strongly considering abandoning my bid for the Canadian Foreign Service, propelled largely by their hideous lack of communication over hte last year, their nightmarishly disorganized HR department, and my growing impression that I'd spend most of my career trapped in Ottawa, sequestered away from the (rather captivating) sort of field work I'm doing now. Choices, choices...

2009-10-13T00:19:00.003+05:30

Long days...

Tonight after leaving work, the last by an hour or more, I settled into a wire chair at the Lebanese restaurant with which I've grown too familiar over the last months. After eating I ignored the bill on my table for an hour while devouring the final heartbreaking pages of What is the What, which I've been criminally tardy in completing. I'd recommend it immensely even if I weren't here. I recommend it all the more for the fact that I am.

I've been gone awhile from the interweb, and a few inquisitive folk have written requesting tales of adventure. I've written little because I have little to tell. There's a mundanity to my daily life you wouldn't expect from the exotic sound of Khartoum. My office is a block from my home, and between the vicious hours I log at the former and the few I while away at the latter, I pass many a day without leaving sight of either. But it's time for me to invest a little more effort in finding (and sharing) the bits of wondrous texture I'd encounter if I weren't working so damn hard, like the melody of the evening call to prayer that rings from the mosque just out my front door.

More wonder should be easier to find now that I'm dragging myself out from behind my desk. My project, a potentially fascinating mix of environmental science and conflict management, is beginning to rise steaming from a murky ocean of paperwork and take ungainly flight. I'm off to Switzerland on Wednesday to consult with a long-courted subcontractor, and back for a blink on the weekend before I depart for South Darfur for two weeks. There will be more to tell - always is, I suppose, if I make the time to tell it.

2009-08-13T00:34:00.002+05:30

Cliffhanger resolved...

A pygmy hedgehog just wandered into my living room, snuffled around a moment, and vanished behind the couch. Not what I expected from a legendarily shy creature.

But a decent welcome to Darfur - or technically El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state. What little I've seen of massive Darfur is precisely as flat and dry as you'd expect from the newspapers, with drifts of dust a foot deep against walls. But it is the rainy season, and as we drove in on Monday from the airstrip, goats huddled single-file against walls, seeking scant shelter against a few minutes of unexpected rain, and donkeys clustered, shivering in the low-30s heat, under the few dessicated trees. El-Fasher is a single-story town, nearly as flat and featureless as the desert surrounding it. I've seen very little of it, because Sudan is a country roughly the size of Western Canada, and Darfur the size of BC, and there are few incentives to conserve space when building towns. It's spread out to an almost comical degree, with roads (a term charitably applied) often a hundred meters. The sky is imposingly vast, and after a brief and intense shower yesterday morning, cloudless and startlingly blue.

There goes the hedgehog against, poking unhurriedly around the lawn furniture of my guesthouse.

I'm here in Sudan for a few months to help an NGO coordinate support to people displaced by the Darfur crisis, and I'm unlikely to often offer more detail than that. I'll spend most of my time in Khartoum, the similar dispersed capital that's nonetheless rather more welcoming than Kathmandu, at least according to my single day's impression. I'm here in El-Fasher, many hundreds of kilometres away, until Saturday, learning the ropes and shaking the hands of the people I'll be collaborating with in the coming months.

I've got much more to tell, but first I think it's time to see if that hedgehog wants to be my friend.

2009-08-09T00:53:00.002+05:30

One of blogging's cute ironies is that while unexpected, entertaining, or even tumultuous events often fuel the most fascinating blog posts, they frequently make actually writing such posts a practical impossibility.

For example:

During a brief but lovely visit, Emily and I took a too-short sojourn to Pokhara, the anti-Kathmandu - a serene, yet still marvelously entertaining city where, had I been sane, I would have settled rather than in the nightmarish capital.

The rainy season turned Kathmandu to goo. (Hey, that rhymes!)

My thuggish, sleazy bottom-floor neighbours nicked $500 from my coffee table. I'm loth to go into the details, but suffice it to say that it wasn't due to any silly lapse in security on my part but rather to a previously unexpected layer of depravity on their part. Jenn and Court (my cool and considerably less larcenous neighbours) have informed me that the theft has led to the eviction of the guilty parties, so I'll call that a Paul victory, if a Pyrrhic one.

And I'm in Sudan.

Bedtime.

2009-06-21T16:03:00.002+05:30

In brief...

Like many, I'm completely enraptured by what's underway in Iran. An uprising long in the coming and provoked by a ludicrously blatant fraud is well underway. I've learned repeatedly (and always the hard way) that dictatorial regimes are as a rule far more tenacious than one would expect, and tend to hold on long past their appointed bedtimes. However, I see some reasons to hope there's permanent change underway in Iran.

When the monks of Burma rose up against the State Peace and Development Council in 2007, there was never much hope for them, despite the romantic glory of the images and the undeniable rightness of their cause. The Burmese military never showed any signs of internal fracture, or of any refusal to obey the regime's brutal orders. And without any change inside the military, any collapse in internal discipline, no change was ever really in the offing. The situation in Iran feels different. I don't believe that the Iranian police will have the unwavering, uniform mercilessness required to crush a worthwhile uprising through force alone (though the basijis are another matter. I don't really believe that they'll systematically slaughter thousands, in the manner of Tiananmen, as opposed to the sporadic brutality seen in response to protests in the last couple of days. And if that's true, as I desperately wish, then I don't think they'll be able to suppress this uprising; military discipline could fail, and we might see soldiers and policemen siding with the protesters.

Damn, I hope so.

2009-06-18T15:52:00.002+05:30

In which I age cheerfully!

I had planned a great meandering post on this, the occasion of my 30th birthday, but I got far too caught up in having fun and wandering around Thailand. Narcissistic details on my decade marker will surely follow, but I think it's time to go track down more food!

I love Thailand.

And I'm fairly certain that my 30s will treat me as well as my 20s did.

The best times are yet to come.

2009-06-09T16:12:00.002+05:30

Apparently it wasn't hyperbole...

When I described Kathmandu as one of the worst cities in the world, I feared I might have been exaggerating. I apparently wasn't!

To my endless joy, I'll be spending the next two weeks marinating in the sunlight and pad thai of Bangkok - precisely the break from Kathmandu I need! That's assuming I survive the next two days of grueling work securing funding for my NGO. I'll have a very quiet online presence for the coming days, but hopefully there will be lovely pictures of Thailand to soothe the soul.

2009-06-02T16:13:00.003+05:30

Bad blogger! Bad!

I've been off the grid for some days now. It's not because nothing's been going on - quite the opposite. I've had a proposal shortlisted and now have a 40-page application to write, to secure oodles of funding for my organization. That's claimed most of my waking hours of late, inevitably. In fact, it's about to take me out to the mountains for a few days, where my colleagues and I will hole ourselves up for 3 or 4 days to write a first draft. I'll be incommunicado until then. But I did want to pop online for a moment and wish Emily (who I'll be seeing in 9 days - yay!) a happy Healthy Brain Day! Here's to many more!

2009-05-18T09:39:00.004+05:30

There's a huge "but" coming.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have earned their extinction, and today it apparently arrived as Sri Lanka declares victory after a half-century of hideous civil war. The Tamil Tigers are one of the most reprehensible guerrilla groups on Earth. They pioneered modern suicide bombing, refining a technique later imported to the Mideast by Hizbullah with such hideous consequence. They have proudly assassinated hundreds and massacred thousands. They have inducted child soldiers by the thousands and committed acts of grave ethnic cleansing against ethnic Sinhalese living in the territory that the LTTE claims as intrinsically Tamil. They have used the very Tamil people whom they claim to represent and defend as human shields, even into the last hours of this terrible war. The Tamil Tigers deserve to vanish.

But.

In pressing towards a deserved victory over the Tigers, I fear that the Sri Lankan military and President Rajapaksa have accepted its own rhetoric about the finality of military triumph. The LTTE earned their end, but many of the grievances that animated them are inconveniently legitimate and will outlive them. Ethnic Tamils face religious and cultural discrimination, a painful shortage of economic opportunities and, particularly in the wake of the war, a gruesome humanitarian crisis. If the Sinhalese majority fails to address these issues, then Sri Lanka's crises will continue. The Tamil Tigers (or whoever claims their name) will wage a quiet war of bombings and assassinations much as they did in the 1980s, with the support of enough Tamils to sustain their efforts indefinitely, and Sri Lanka will not have peace.

I'm not optimistic. The Sri Lankan military was no more restrained in the latest round of fighting than the Tigers themselves; both sides have almost certainly committed war crimes in recent weeks. The government has shown, in its moment of triumph, painfully few signs of a serious effort at national reconciliation. The end of the Tamil Tigers presents a rare opportunity, a necessary but not sufficient condition for lasting peace. It must be paired with genuine and effective programs to extend opportunity and cultural protections to ethnic Tamils, or peace in Sri Lanka will be short-lived indeed.

2009-05-17T19:40:00.002+05:30

Argh.

Blogger's misbehaving badly... or possibly my computer is. There was a massive series of Maoist rallies today, of which I have photos that I'm desperately trying to post. Meanwhile, the other parties are likely to form a government without the Maoists as early as tomorrow, at which point things could get really nutty. I'm going to try to whip Blogger into shape and post photos... your patience is greatly appreciated.

2009-05-14T17:02:00.002+05:30

Outside.

You may have gleaned that Kathmandu’s hardly a paradise. Hell, let’s add a little more hyperbole: Kathmandu is surely the most unlivable city I’ve ever seen. From the sidewalk-spanning pools of garbage and the raw sewage stink of the holy Bagmati to the suffocating dust-fog and the absurd, broken Nash Equilibrium of the local traffic, this place is nearly as hideously dysfunctional as developing-world metropolises get. The great tragedy is that this lunacy makes it easy to forget that this, one of the world’s worst cities, is located in one of the world’s most beautiful countries. I’m discovering that it’s painfully essential to leave Kathmandu frequently (once a month, ideally) to avoid gruesome burnout and remind myself of the incredible offerings of Nepal’s vast outdoors.

My two-day rafting trip the weekend before last is a harrowing and entirely worthwhile case in point. Waking at the uncomfortable hour of 5 AM, I trudged from (comparatively) ritzy Baluwater to the narrow, nerve-jangling tourist ghetto of Thamel, to meet my erstwhile raftmates (including a half-dozen Vancouver Islanders!). None were in tip-top shape, the innocent victims of liquid overindulgence two nights before (!) and a far-too-early morning. For my part, I hadn’t had an instant of sleep the prior night, kept conscious first by my appetite for episodes of Deadwood, then by rare insomnia, and then by the glorious news that I’d passed my foreign service exam.

We all dozed fitfully through a blessedly uneventful bus ride, three hours north of Kathmandu to the district of Sindhupalchowk, on the Tibetan border, parking on a gravel plain on the banks of the Bhote Khosi river, and tested the dark, swift, shallow waters while our hosts prepared an inoffensive lunch and briefed us on river safety. The river was as cold as you’d expect of water that quite literally melted yesterday; every abrupt dunk provoked spasms of gasping and the familiar, unhelpful urge to go fetal to preserve body heat. That passed, thankfully, and by the afternoon of the first day many of us were cheerfully hurling ourselves into the water in the rare calm stretches between white-knuckle rapids.

It’s a good thing too, for once we got on the water every one of us spent some involuntary time in it each day. The Bhote Koshi hosts genuine rapids (often Class 4 on the 1-5 scale) that took obvious delight in hurling us from our rafts. Rounded rocks taller than I am dotted the river in most places and many more concealed themselves under small swells of water.

I’m a reasonably experienced rafter, as BC has some mighty rapids, but the Bhote Koshi was definitely an exercise in intensity, with surprisingly few calm and quiet spots. Those few serene places often sported riverbanks half-crowded with happy children waving at us; and more than a few cheerfully swimming alongside our immense rafts. I think it amused them enormously, the sight of foreigners swaddled in protective equipment while the children themselves swam unconcerned through some unsettlingly quick water.

Even those kids had the good sense to stay clear of the meaner rapids, one of which provided us with a moment of collective terror that rivals just about any of my more foolhardy moments. Entering a particularly sharp rapid early on the Saturday afternoon, the second-to-last of six rafts in our tour, our far-too-quiet guide shouted commands that we six rafters failed to hear over the water’s roar. We struck a vast rock, inadvertently wedging ourselves ourselves high onto it, while the water continued to pound at the lower edge of the raft. Hydraulics worked their magic, and the boat abruptly flipped, a moment after we all realized we had no power to prevent it. Rafters and guide, we all pitched into the cold water.

It’s quite a thing, to be utterly at the mercy of the elements – I don’t think I’ve ever been so aware of my own useless inertia. Instantly separated from my compatriots, I found myself flying downriver with absolutely terrifying speed, bobbing, gasping. Instantly my lifejacket seemed a useless thing, a frustrating, waterlogged, purposeless anchor – I was momentarily furious at it for failing to keep my head above water. In retrospect, I suppose that my quarrel was with the fuzzy boundary between water and froth in a river that angry; lifejacket or no, you’ll never float above the foam, and I’m now sure that the lifejacket kept me much closer to the surface, where I could enjoy the occasional furtive breath. South Asian river water is as healthful a beverage as turpentine (it’s clear and looks clean but surely hosts a swarm of novel ailments), but in between involuntary bobs it was impossible not to half-fill my mouth with the stuff as I grabbed at sparse lungfuls of air. Each time I reached the surface, I could only clear my airways by half-sputtering, half-swallowing, and I’ve no doubt I welcomed a healthy dose of giardia (for which I’ve since pre-emptively self-medicated) into my body along with a pint or two of river water. I remembered after a moment to point my feet downriver and lie on my back (the finest advice I’ve ever received), and a great back monolith that then seemed fifty feet tall rushed up to smack my soles. For the most part, the river guided me around the more savage rocks and my bent legs cushioned the unavoidable impacts.

Eventually, I found myself in reach of a rescue kayak, which I assume came to me, since I was probably too concerned with breathing to reach it under my own power. I wrapped my legs around the bow until it reached a nearer raft. I was hauled from the water, substantially bruised and mildly bloodied, but ultimately no worse for the experience. I was not especially coherent at the time, I’m told, but did manage to ascertain that everyone else in our raft had been similarly plucked from the water, and the raft had then righted itself without supervision. Our paddles were snatched and returned by other rafters downstream, and someone even managed, miraculously, to find my missing sandals. My sunglasses, however, are gone forever. We were repatriated to our raft, lectured unduly by our guide, and resumed our journey. Some were more shaken than others; we eventually redistributed the less experienced rafters to other rafts where they felt more comfortable; our harrowing flip was not repeated. At least, not by us – a couple of other boats had similarly life-affirming experiences.

That experienced, however startling, reinforced the terrific importance of getting some occasional contact with nature at its unyielding best. Kathmandu challenges the soul but rarely the body; you can flirt with death in rush-hour traffic (which I typically avoid) but there’s no exhilaration to be found. Out in the Bhote Koshi it was possible to remember, often forgotten in Kathmandu, that there are places where I can exert myself without a particulate filter on my face, where a deep breath is a pleasure rather than poison, and where every small joy needn’t be fought for tooth and nail against the aggravations of the city.

This is still Nepal. Ugly pinwheels of flotsam and thick black bubbles often whirl in the eddies behind riverside rocks, and behind every village and home on the bank a small, stinking landslide of junk flows down to the water’s edge. Very few people here give a second thought to tossing garbage down the nearest hill or into the river behind their homes, and so mounds of torn plastic and wadded paper blight many views that should be pristine. Sewage processing is inadequate in the big cities and simply non-existent everywhere else; even along the lovely Bhote Koshi, the houses perched fifty feet up the cliffside often simply discharge their drains from overhanging pipes directly into the river.

But the Bhote Koshi is beautiful far more often than not, black rocks and deep gorges presenting an illusion of isolation impossible to find in Kathmandu. Many of our crew swore off rafting permanently after we capsized; I was ambivalent, myself, but in the two weeks since I’ve felt a powerful need to get back on the water or do something comparably exhilarating in clean air. Two days out of the city recharged me enough for the past two weeks of hard work; I think I’ll need to make a regular ritual of it. Surviving Kathmandu demands no less.

P.S. Pictures will follow – my camera stayed at home, but Craig and Kristen have a waterproof point-and-shoot that likely captured some candids of me in the throes of mild terror.

2009-05-11T14:20:00.003+05:30

I'm no longer certain...

That no news is good news. Nothing of real significance has happened over the weekend in Nepal's ongoing, slow-motion constitutional crises. If there were protests today or yesterday, I didn't see them, and it's tempting to think that we've dodged a political bullet here. Unfortunately, this country in desperate need of good government remains politically decapitated, with no Prime Minister, no ruling party, and certainly no one setting a comprehensive plan for ensuring "paani, bijuri, baaTo" (water, electricity and roads) for the 70% or so of population going without. Everyone who has a full stomach is fixated on the inter-party imbroglio; I presume everyone else is mainly preoccupied by coping with crippling fuel shortages and vegetable prices that have risen fivefold in the last month due to intermittent blockades of the trade roads to India.

So, in the absence of new news, I offer photos from last week's goofy yet absurdly well-coordinated street rallies. As I pedalled sweatily to work on Thursday the road, previously painfully thick with traffic, instead became this:

I've gradually learned that this is a bad sign during rush hour in Kathmandu, typically home to some of the worst traffic in South Asia (and by extension, the known universe). So I went wandering, and a block away found a Maoist rally, loud and surly but obviously well-disciplined and not visible hostile to my intrusions with my camera.

Police kept a conspicuously close eye on the whole process, maintaining a light human cordon around the entire moving crowd (which was perhaps five hundred people strong, though I've no real ability to estimate crowd size).

I wandered briefly alongside the crowd and then decided against making my way to work; there's no telling, on a day like that, when the return commute will be possible. En route back to my own neighbourhood, I encountered several dozen motorcycles, each carrying two men (one to drive and the other to wave the Maoist flag and yell). They'd pause every block or two to whip each other into a riotous frenzy and then continue on their way.

I have no idea what this guy said, but he really got the Motorcycle Maoists fired up.

They left rather unimaginative tags on the pavement as they paused - Y.C.L.N. is, you may have surmised, the Young Communists League of Nepak - the Maoists' unnervingly numerous and slavishly loyal youth wing.

Once the motorcyclists passed, they were succeeded by another crowd of protesters, led by two rows of shirtless YCL drones bearing (I'm told, but could not read) high-minded satire written across their chests. They flanked a wheelchair-bound effigy of the reviled (by the Maoists) Ram Baram Yadav, leader of the opposition Nepali Congress party and a focal point in the vicious debate that precipitated all this lunacy. Of the wheeled impostor, however, I have no worthwhile photos. My apologies.

I was invited to join the protest (presumably with my shirt on), but demurred. And that was my Thursday, for I shortly thereafter fled back to the CECI office and my home. That was the last protest I've seen, though I'm told many more have taken place since then. We're still on tenterhooks here, waiting the next ill portent. It's likely to be the apparently imminent announcement of a coalition government between the (ideologically opposed) United Marxist-Leninists and the Nepali Congress, which will probably exclude the Maoists from seriously power and provoke another round of anarchy. I'm not putting any money on it, though - prediction is a fool's game here.

I'm sequestered at the CECI office right now in northern Kathmandu, across town from Worldview (my more permanent employer), where I fled after the lights went out and my laptop battery died. I crossed town accidentally (and miraculously) just before the storm of the century tore loose and turned the roads into opaque rivers. If you've never heard a serious hailstorm on a tin roof before, you'll need to seek it out. This is what the apocalypse will sound like. I'm hiding from the torrent of hail and the literally endless rumblings of nearby thunders, watching my bicycle submerge in the yard outside the window, and trying to figure out how to make the 5-minute ride home without drowning.

2009-05-08T13:22:00.004+05:30

Before the storm?

There's been an uneasy but relatively undisturbed calm on Kathmandu's streets the last two days, as the populace waits (with either trepidation or eagerness) to see how the Maoists will respond to the near-certainty that they will be shut out of the next government. One party covenant after another is underway, the Maoists have consistently disrupted Parliament from within and without, and minor protests continue to echo around the city center. But the schools are mostly reopened, the traffic only periodically paralyzed, and the reports of protest-related injuries mercifully few. Nobody really expects it to last, but one thing I've learned over the last six months in Nepal (with a real crash course in the last week) is that anyone who predicts the political future here with any certitude is a blooming fool. No one really knows what's going to happen, and we may not for months. It's almost certain, though, that something will have changed by next week; those meetings have to draw up some actual resolutions at some point, even in Nepal, and the party faithful won't wait forever for their marching orders.

Technical issues crippled my attempted uploads of rally photos yesterday - hopefully my cable modem will have ended its own protest by this afternoon and you'll have visual evidence of the oddities of the Young Communists of Nepal shortly thereafter.

2009-05-06T20:57:00.003+05:30

If only I understood (much) more Nepali.

Then I'd know better how to make sense of the last day's events. Perhaps... or perhaps everyone around me, Nepali-speaking or not, is equally befuddled.

The Maoists are struggling to reclaim the moral high ground, if ever they had it, after the suspiciously well-timed release yesterday of a year-old video showing former Prime Minister "Prachanda" bragging to an inner circle of party elders. He boasted therein of having deceived the UN and the country regarding the strength of Maoist forces at the end of the war - the official tally was 25,000 troops, far in excess of the apparent true figure of 8,000. This has arcane implications for the peace process, none of which I'll dive into here. What I will explore was a pieace of Prachanda's response, though I wonder if it's gained something in the translation - an element of menace, if you will.

Speaking at a press conference to respond to the furor over this video, Prachanda (I really shouldn't call him by his own self-aggrandizing nickname, but it's so much easier than "Pushpa Kamal Dahal") grew visibly agitated. Pressed about the tape, he eventually burst out that h was considering releasing more tapes, from during the conflict, showing the brutal murder of various people by his own party. Saying, "I am thinking of giving you another videotape to disclose the rebellious character of Prachanda," he elaborated that the tapes would give the public a more complete understanding of the true ideology of the Maoists.

This was all said in Nepali, of course, and translation is a notoriously unreliable creature here in Nepal. But is there any way to interpret this other than as a gruesome threat? At the very least, it was a terribly intemperate outburst at a time that demands calm, and it supports my continuing view that Prachanda lacks the will, wisdom or temperant to tamp down his furious hordes and reduce the risk of renewed war.

There was a rally tonight in Baneshwor, the core government district of Kathmandu today, wherein Maoist activists brandished torches (in an allegedly non-threatening way) in front of the Parliament. Sadly, despite my best efforts, I couldn't find the bloody thing, which would surely have produced some fine photographs. As it was, I wandered confusedly around downtown Kathmandu for an hour before admitting defeat and heading home. On the walk back to my apartment, I unwisely crossed under the trees ringing the grounds of the now-disused royal palace. These trees are the nighttime nests of apparently all of Kathmandu's birds, and my choice of route had predictably messy results. To compensate, I did find myself in the midst of a gloriously intense swarm of fireflies closer to home; for a born-and-raised Vancouverite, fireflies are a novel treat.

2009-05-06T13:40:00.003+05:30

It's a frustrating thing...

Working at home becomes rather less productive when there's no juice in the lines, so I attempted journey this morning across town to my office, despite foreknowledge of certain civil unrest. This voyage is harrowing and uncertain at the best of times, Kathmandu traffic being what it is, and takes a hair over half an hour. It becomes noticeably more so when roving protest gangs, ranging in size from a few dozen to a thousand or more, cheerfully obstruct traffic and quite consciously bring the maximum disruption possible to an already disrupted and inconvenient city. Today it took me an hour to give up my foolish ambition to... well, to actually get a proper day's work done, something that hasn't happened for anyone in Kathmandu since the start of this crisis. In that hour, I covered half the distance to the office, and was ultimately defeated by hordes of red-flag-waving militants and their advance guard mounted on several dozen motorbikes, all members of the Young Communist League of Nepal, the youth wing of the Maoist party. I was startled by their strict organization and near-military discipline, apparently a hallmark of the Maoists. Thankfully, none of the other parties' own youth militias appeared, and extensive conflict was forestalled.

They even (I think) invited me into the rally as I (non-belligerently, I hope) took photos from the sidelines. I think, however, that such participation violates both my contract and my ideological leanings, so I pretended the tourist and stood slack-jawed while they pass instead. I'm hearing now that the tear gas has been brought to bear by the police, and that a handful of Young Communists have been hospitalized. I'm comfortably ensconced in the CECI office down the street from my home, well away from the violent proceedings. I do, however, have a handful of photos from this morning's demonstrations, and I'll post them when I get home.

In the meantime, I'm aggravatedly contemplating the fact that it took me an hour to throw up my hands in defeat during my morning commute, and another hour to return to my own neck of the woods. Two hours to travel nowhere.

Kathmandu is a hard town if ever there was one.

2009-05-06T07:33:00.000+05:30

In Nepal, it's never one problem at a time...

With the Prime Minister's ouster, my electricity supply has abruptly dropped, from nearly 24 hours daily to something like 4(?!). I attribute this unfortunate happening to the fact that my house is close to his official residence, and thus enjoyed a somewhat privileged status these last two weeks; with his abdication, I think we're being punished. It hasn't made blogging easy.

Fortunately, there hasn't been all that much to blog about in the last day. Things in Kathmandu stayed surprisingly quiet. A late-afternoon bicycle sojourn revealed tire soot on the main streets but few other symptoms of unrest. Perhaps 50% of the stores were open, an unusually high portion given the situation. Street violence in the (to me) remote district of Rolpa killed one person, but I don't think there was any such activity in the capital.

So I'm going to work today - kindly cross your digits that I don't get trapped on the other side of Kathmandu.

2009-05-05T12:05:00.000+05:30

Is no news good news?

So far today, it appears so. The streets are presently what passes for quiet in Nepal (a mildly deafening din of furiously keening street dogs, rough-hewn construction work without power tools, and noticeably fewer honking car horns.) It's a hair after noon and the protests are currently under wraps, as the parties have all convened to plot their next steps. Major protests are still expected this afternoon or tomorrow, but for the moment things are calm.

It's probably still best that I didn't go into work today. My route to the office and back takes me not only clear across this chaotic hive of a city, but directly through a warren of politically tempestuous colleges home to the local youth wings of the key political parties. When things go wrong in Kathmandu, that's invariably where the misery starts. I have no desire to find myself trapped at the office at the end of the (short, marginally productive) workday.

2009-05-04T23:39:00.000+05:30

From my bedroom window...

I can dimly see the lights outside the former Prime Minister's official government residence - a house and parcel of land remarkably modest by head-of-state standards. I see no disturbance there; I don't even know if he still lives there - does a Prime Minister abruptly pack his bags and move upon resigning? Methinks the rules for this sort of thing aren't especially well codified. In any event, the sickly yellow streetlamps that ring his home are lit and betray no signs of agitation or violence; but then, I'm rather far away. Inasmuch as my last house in Kathmandu was across the street from his place, bathed in that wan, mildly nauseous glow, I'm rather glad for the greater distance. Prime Minister's Lane seems an imperfect place to live right now.

2009-05-04T23:16:00.000+05:30

"Agitation from the House and street"

Word is that the Maoists will be launching street protests as wide as they can manage (and their reach is wide indeed) to augment their imminent uprising in the Parliament itself. This will be complex, and it will be very interesting to see how the army responds. I'm still not making any real predictions; tomorrow will hopefully be informative and minimally violent.

2009-05-04T17:12:00.000+05:30

In which I offer more third-hand information...

CNN India is reporting that the Nepali Foreign (Finance?) Minister, a Maoist, is claiming that the resignation of Prachanda (the Maoist Prime Minister) enables the party to retake the moral high ground. They are arguing, as I expected, that the Maoists were not undone by their own overreaching but rather betrayed from within by agents of India acting through their erstwhile coalition partners. Allegations of betrayal are one of the surest ways of firing up any party's restive hardline base. He has, apparently, stated that it's time to "take the fight to the city" - surely meaning Kathmandu, which was largely untouched by the civil war. I have no way to assess the credibility of these threats, but I was planning on staying at home tonight anyways.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister's resignation speech included such tidbits as blaming "foreign powers" for his government's lack of progress. "Foreign powers" is always (always) code for India here. I don't have much reason to believe him - this has always felt like a homegrown crisis to me. That said, there's a great deal I don't know - for such a small country, Nepal has fantastically complex politics which I am as yet struggling to understand.

For the record, I have no idea what procedures this resignation will trigger under Nepali law. Nepal is still writing its true Constitution, and the Interim Constitution is a raggedly ad hoc and incomplete document which (I believe) offers only minimal guidance in a complex and evolving situation such as this. I'm certainly not expecting to be going to work tomorrow, it seems, so I'll be updating throughout the day if the power stays on.

For those following along at home, CNN-IBN is a good source for quick updates, while Nepal News is tolerably fast and a lot more local.

2009-05-04T15:21:00.000+05:30

Well, I really didn't see it coming.

The Prime Minister of Nepal has just resigned. No idea what that will mean for the street protests yet. More info to come.

2009-05-04T13:07:00.000+05:30

Nothing moves quickly in Nepal...

...except rumours.

There are unsettling moments when, perched on my bike, I realize that the road around me has become suddenly empty, the bustle evaporated and the throngs of glossy, underpowered motorcycles abruptly nonexistent. I usually realize then that everyone else knows something I don't, and that it's time for me to get off the roads, preferably home and certainly out of the way until whatever calamity passes.

All Kathmandu feels much like that this week, and it's likely to get worse. I returned last night from a whitewater rafting adventure (which left me bruised and sore and much entertained) to discover that Nepal has entered a long-incubating political and constitutional crisis from which it's very unlikely to emerge without fresh scars. The government has fallen in all but name, and will most likely officially die tomorrow afternoon. The fallen and their opponents are all mobilizing their professional thugs to contest whatever outcome on the streets. Violence is very much in the air, and I'm more than mildly nervous.

It's worth noting early on that, reportage being the unreliable beast that it is in Nepal, and rumours so often fantastically elaborate and ill-founded, my understanding of the facts on the ground is incomplete in many places and no doubt downright wrong in many others. Here's a little background, streamlined and simplified, as best I understand it:

The Maoists, officially the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) or CPN-M, are the largest of several extreme-left parties that emerged the principal victors of Nepal's 2008 elections. Those elections were one of the steps that ended the decade-long Nepalese civil war, behind which the Maoists (but by no means only them) were a principal driving force. The Maoists formed a government in coalition with several of their ideological near-brethren such as the United Marxist-Leninists (Nepal being one of the adorably few remaining countries where the myriad flavours of Marxism are goofily thought to be practically different). Ideological opponents such as the Nepali Congress Party, which ruled Nepal none too successfully for many years, made up the large bundle of minority representation in Nepal's fragile and fledgling Parliament.

Unfortunately for the Maoists, they've had a rather unpleasant but utterly inevitable lesson, which they might have vitally learned in advance if they hadn't been blinded by discredited ideology: toppling a government and running one require radically different skill sets. Enormous rifts, which I will mostly ignore for now, opened between the ruling coalition partners, and between the government and the opposition. The most germane was regarding the Nepali Army, a well-trained, highly-disciplined and very proud force which was asked to integrate the irregular combatants of the Maoist People's Liberation Army (PLA), the fanatically dedicated but rather more ragtag guerrilla force with which the Maoist's waged their ten-year insurgency. The Nepal Army, as conservative as any you'll find (and armies are a conservative lot) chafed at the thought of inducting the tattered PLA, let alone giving them command posts. Chief among the objectors was the Army Chief of Staff, General Rookmangud Katawal, the country's top military official and one of the few people with the means to topple the government.

The Maoists, led by Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, lead instigator of the war, demanded the sacking of General Katawal, who unsurprisingly refused to step down, leading to a month or so of speculation that Katawal would simply remove the Maoists from power himself, with the loyal Army behind him. The Maoists' coalition partners, fearful of this very event, urged the PM to abandon his plan, instead allowing Katawal to serve out the remaining five months until his planned retirement. No dice. The Prime Minister unilaterally declared that the General was officially out of a job, though the authority over the Army lies with the President (who is not a Maoist and rejected the move).

Here's where things take a turn for the byzantine and the purpose of my long-winded exposition becomes clear. The Maoists have no constitutional authority to take any action without the support of their coalition partners - they simply haven't the votes, which is precisely why coalitions are formed in the first place. But, visibly indignant that anyone would doubt their supremacy, they "fired" Katawal anyways, attempting to rule by decree rather than democracy. Several things happened:

The President, of the opposition Nepali Congress party, told Katawal to defy the Maoists.
Katawal, a proud man, ignored the Maoist edict.
Most provocative, the Maoist's coalition partners, incensed that the CPN-M would attempt to rule by decree and override their position, abandoned the coalition, leaving the Maoists without the votes to form a government.

And so: The Maoists no longer lead a majority coalition. The Nepal Army is openly ignoring their commands. A non-confidence vote is expected tomorrow to formally strip the Maoists of their government status.

In most Western countries in this state, we'd see a flurry of furious politicking and horse-trading as all concerned scramble to form a new government. But this is Nepal, and the Prime Minister has previously said that if the Maoists ever lose power by legal means, they'll simply pick up their guns again and reclaim it the way they prefer. It's a credible threat; ever since the war ended, many of the Maoist's grunts have been visibly itching to get back to guerrilla combat. They've discovered, as I've previously mentioned, that tearing around the country blowing up government offices, robbing villagers and taking potshots at soldiers is a great deal more fun and sexy than the drudgery of actually writing and implementing policy. Many are simply looking for an excuse, and they've got one now.

Scattered protests broke out around Kathmandu yesterday while I was riding white water in the North, and the soot from burnt tires was thick on the streets in front of the colleges that I passed on the way to work this morning. By 11AM, it became clear that worse was likely to come this afternoon, and with the rapid consent of my employers I decided to go home rather than try to cross the city during protests. As I rode through unnervingly thin traffic, Nepalis on the sidewalk moved with uncharacteristic speed and purpose, and many clustered in anxious knots around radios or people professing new knowledge of the unfolding situation.

I passed groups of surly but so far nonviolent moving rallies, a few hundred strong each, waving red Maoist flags. By the time they converged on the centre of town, they were numbered at least three or four thousand, growing angrier and visibly seeking provocation. I passed them and went quickly home.

The Maoist Prime Minister is scheduled to address the nation right now - I'll know what he says when the first English translations appear online. I'd love to believe he'll urge calm or even resign, chastened, but he's never seemed the sort. He considers himself proudly forged in war; his self-granted nom de guerre, Prachanda, means "The Fierce One". I don't believe he's ever marshaled his considerable charisma in service of peace rather than conflict, and I have no good reason to think that, with the power he so long craved now slipping from his grasp, he'll embrace reason and calm.

There are innumerable rumours flooding around Nepal, so quick and scary and of such uncertain origins that I won't begin to list them here. I am, all things considered genuinely nervous about what's to come; street violence is almost certain and days of unrest seem unavoidable. I am, however, also safe. I have days' worth of food and fuel at home, and I won't be going to work if it's dangerous to cross the city. I'm reasonably well plugged in to the legitimate news of the country, and I work for an organization with a excellent protection plan honed by a decade of continuous and successful operation during the war. I'll be evacuated if necessary, but I expect it won't be.

But there's no denying that I am nervous about what's next for Nepal and for my time here, particularly if the war begins again. I will be blogging as honestly and as often as safety and technology allow.

This will surely be interesting.

2009-05-02T02:40:00.000+05:30

In which I receive long-awaited good news...

Dear Candidate,

Further to your application for the Fall 2008 Post-Secondary Recruitment Campaign, we are pleased to inform you have successfully completed the interview portion of the recruitment process.

(etc., etc...)

That's not the final step by a long shot - I've got security clearances and language testing to complete - but YAY!!! This is a very good thing.

I'm going rafting tomorrow and Sunday (on zero sleep, argh) but I'll be back with more details and updates as I have them.

Joy!

2009-04-25T17:38:00.000+05:30

Sick of elephant photos?

Me neither.

2009-04-22T15:06:00.000+05:30

My elephant was hungry...

So he grabbed a snack midway through our walk.

I do find it unsettling that an elephant's trunk is powerful enough to casually snap a healthy tree as he passes by.

An elephant ride is not a soothing journey, involving as it does a ludicrous amount of swaying, bouncing and lurching. Four or more people cram themselves into a small carriage of approximately the same configuration and comfort as the underside of a wooden chair, and bumble about atop an animal thoroughly indifferent to their comfort. But you've got to do it at least once in a lifetime - and really, it's the only reasonable way to see a handful of the world's essential places.

One such is Chitwan National park, a surprisingly large swath of virgin savanna and jungle straddling the Nepal-India border. It's in the Terai, Nepal's vast, blisteringly hot and mildly anarchic southern plains. The Terai is one of the more ungovernable portions of one of the world's more ungovernable countries, and it's been the wellspring of much of Nepal's recent chaos; indeed, another economy-crippling blockade began there this morning. Even the route there forced we tourists to skirt a feeble but inconvenient banda; we had to abandon our bus when tractors blocked the road, hoof it across a road bridge, its surface painted with the carbon-smear remnants of burnt tires, to reach the tourist enclave of Sauraha, at the mouth of the park.

Once there, thankfully, there's no indication you're in the troubled Terai; in fact, I half-forgot I was in Nepal at all. With its plentiful elephants, loudly diverse birdlife, and gorgeously expansive grasslands, Chitwan seduced my subconscious into thinking I was back in Southern Africa, notwithstanding the heffalumps being a touch smaller and the people noticeably paler. Chitwan is famously crowded with rhinoceri, and hosts most of Nepal's remaining (and dwindling) tigers. I saw neither from my elephant on the next morning's early ride, which is apparently unusual (re: the rhinos, anyhow). I did see much hauntingly beautiful fog-shrouded savanna.

And a few unexpectedly lazy deer, sitting serenely in the underbrush, with the confidence that evidently grows from the knowledge that Asia's tigers are nearly extinct

The ivy-like vine surrounding the deer is (according to our elephant handler, or mahout) an invasive South American weed, furiously overrunning the forest. It has apparently consumed more than a tenth of the very large park, and is resistant to all reasonable methods of extermination short of napalm.

From a wildlife perspective, it was an underwhelming journey. It was, however, crowded with exotic birds, the occasional camera-shy warthog, and and beautiful scenery.I did see a few elephants (namely the ones carrying us):

Better was to come later in the day. My uncooperative internet connection, I regret to say, is stubbornly refusing to upload the remainder of the day's photos, so it appears that finer photos will be yours tomorrow. More to come!

2009-04-21T17:28:00.000+05:30

In which I am shamed...

Because it would never have occurred to me to play ping pong with a temple step as the playing surface, a row of bricks as the net, and books taped to sticks as the paddles. Necessity is truly the mother of invention:

This is from Pashupatinath temple, the holiest Hindu site in Nepal, and apparently something of a recreational hotspot as well.

2009-04-19T22:57:00.000+05:30

My new favorite Youtube!

For today, anyways: not only is it intolerably cute, but also it contains somewhere the germ of an incredibly interesting study in information ecology and non-reciprocal altruism. Fun!

2009-04-19T16:42:00.000+05:30

The Roof of the World...

Or, at least, closer to it than I've ever been before.

Life trundles along apace in Kathmandu. Work is a harmless drudgery of proposal research and proposal writing, punctuated by flurries of deadline-motivated hyperactivity and the occasional spasm of frustration, all of which are entirely par for the course in the part of the world (i.e. the poor part). I'm tolerably content with my work; dream job it ain't, but it's worlds better than being stuck behind a desk wondering whether I'd ever get back out into the great wide world.

So, short of enlightening revelations about my job, I offer instead more photos from the high Himalayas!

A couple of hours North (and up!) from the waystation of Namche Bazaar is the minute Sherpa village of Khunde, a hive of nestled in a shallow valley in the shadow of Khumbila, a snowless peak mildly sacred to local Buddhists (among whom the Sherpas are entirely included) and thus forbidden to climbers. Khunde is a resilient community of surprisingly precise and sturdy stone houses, intermingled with scattered patches of unwatered gravel that the locals somehow coax into producing vegetables. From the village itself, there's little to see, aside from the local Stupa and Khumbila itself which, in a landscape positively crowded with its more towering sisters, isn't much to look at.

There's a hidden gem above Khunde, however, unknown even to our Sherpa Mingma and most of the villagers, and which we found solely through the assistance of a hand-drawn map provided by my trailblazing Canadian friend Craig. About 400 meters above Khunde, on a unnerving knife-edged ridge overlooking every village and valley in the region, are three memorials erected in the memory of Sir Edmund Hillary, first summitteer of Mt. Everest (along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay), and his wife and daughter, who sadly predeceased him in a plane crash. Hillary is "our God" in the words of Mingma, and is widely revered for spending much of his post-Everest life bringing schools, medical services, and other vital social improvements (many of which bear his name) to the unspeakably remote Solukhumbu region that hosts the Everest mountain range. After his death in 2007, local Buddhist monks in the Khumbu built these traditional stone memorials in a location whose startling inaccessibility and even more impressive view fit the legend of the man. Forest fire smoke wreathed the valleys below, but the view lost none of its power.

From the memorials, there's an astonishing view of the Everest range, perhaps the best you'll find without making the two week trek to Base Camp and Kalapattar.

The distant black pyramid at the photo's center is Everest, which must be seen to be believed, and which is sacred to all the peoples of the region and has acquired more names than I can recount. For the record, here's the closest view I had of Sagarmatha, Chomolungma Goddess Mother of the World:

By Mingma's estimate, we reached 4500 metres, a kilometre up from Namche and a hair over halfway to Everest's peak. Not surprisingly, that's the highest I've ever travelled. Ye gods, what a walk it was.

More photos and tales will come, in characteristically discontinuous and scattershot fashion. With Nepali power and internet connections, this is a slow process, but I've much to show of the rest of the trek, an elephant ride, and last month's rather different sojourn to Hong Kong.

2009-04-17T19:28:00.000+05:30

Guilty as charged...

Behnaz, who has been communicating telepathically with my blog (again) over my explicit objections, tells me that it misses me (and despises purple). I too, despise purple, and in recognition of this commonality (and the very gradually improving electrical situation in Kathmandu) have found the opportunity (though barely the bandwidth) for some photoblogging of a portion of the 2000+ photos I've taken in the last few months. I even managed to upload 4 photos from my recent trip into the Himalayas, a feat that only required 4 hours (the uploading, not the trip). You will be sick of mountain photos by the time I'm truly done, and you'd best make your peace with that now.

These birds, whose names I do not know, chased thermals in the valley between Namche Bazaar, a key trekkers waystation en route to the Himalayan peaks, and Kongde, an astonishing 6,187 metre peak that looms over much of the lower Himalayas. Shorter by nearly 3 kilometres than Everest, Kongde Ri is nonetheless indescribably beautiful in person - the impact of seeing such a mountain for the first time is something that I, rarely at a loss for words, am still seeking to vocabulary to convey. You'll probably have to come see it for yourselves.

2009-04-17T08:35:00.000+05:30

It's time for some war crimes trials

This is one of the most disturbing things I've ever read.

2009-04-14T01:43:00.000+05:30

Happy New Year!

It's 2066 by the Nepali Hindu calendar! My bottom-floor neighbours rang in the New Year by getting furiously drunk, hurling bricks at each other, and apparently breaking a bottle over our guard's head. Bloody hell. He's all bandaged up now (no thanks to the bludgeoner) and I'm very cranky at the stupidity of it all.

No news as yet on my Foreign Service application - which is, I'm told, good news. I should have a more definitive answer by the end of the month.

2009-03-21T15:05:00.001+05:30

The world begins to oblige...

It's raining. That's fantastic.

Mind you, it's not coming down hard, and the sky is giving us fitful volleys of hail along with the rain. But I'm optimistic that it will disperse a bit of the suffocating ABC (Asian Brown Cloud) that's currently choking Nepal, along with most of South Asia. The ABC is a kilometres-thick layer of haze and soot, an unhappy consequence of unregulated vehicles and power plants, burning agricultural waste and literally billions of cookfires fueled by wood or cow dung. It reduces sunlight so much that it's been markedly colder here the last couple of weeks, obscures anything a kilometre away and, incidentally, kills millions of people each year. It's both fascinating and horrifying, and I'm eager for the end of it, which will only really come with the start of full monsoon rains in May or June. Today's short shower is only that, and sadly it's already over. Damn.

In other news, the Nepalese Free Student Union, a student government pervasively aligned with the uncountable, incomprehensible political parties, held its elections this week. Since most of the affected campuses were between me and my office, I skipped work for the day and took photos instead. This being Nepal, it's inconceivable that such an event wouldn't cripple traffic across the entire city. The elections blocked Durbar Marg, the main North-South street in central Kathmandu, for the entire day. Traffic would have a rough time getting through this:

The enthusiasm was remarkable, and occasionally unsettling, given the alignment of the various student parties with larger political groups who cheerfully demonstrate their capacity for violence whenever given the opportunity. There was even a super-fan, with his support painted across his body, leading a marching rally:

Police, either fearing violence or eager for it, kept a careful eye on the whole thing:

Oh, and Nepalese students are still rather like ours, give or take a few years, in some fairly universal ways:

But there's no denying the marked fervour of the whole process, relative to the much-ignored (but nearly as corrupt) process of student politics in Canada.

I spent a few hours there, curious as to whether the zeal would turn to aggression and the relative order to a maelstrom. Most students cheerfully obliged my intrusions with my camera and, satisfied that things might actually remained peaceful, I took off.

Later in the day, riots at polling stations in East Nepal (and the heavy-handed police response) killed one student and injured hundreds, some of whom are not expected to survive their wounds. Pipe bombs went off at university poll about 90 kilometres from here, wounding six students. This is Nepal, after all - can't have things being settled by a free and peaceful election, can we?

I neither know nor care who won the election.

2009-03-18T16:02:00.000+05:30

What a change...

It's been a complex week, for a number of reasons. One of the biggies is that it's quite a transition to move from Asia’s armpit to its bustling brain and back again, in the space of 3 days. Hong Kong feels like the centre of the world. Kathmandu… doesn’t. I’m still wrestling with the enormous difficulties of getting anything done here; electricity, despite numerous optimistic promises from the powers that be, has predictably not improved, remaining at a miserly 8 hours per day. The street situation is tense – there are police and military checkpoints left and right, but I don’t have much idea whether they’re specifically looking for someone or just making themselves seen.

Over the last two weeks, much of southern Nepal has been consumed by riots over a classification error that lumped one distinct ethnic group, the Tharus, in with a much larger and thoroughly different one, the Madhesis. In inimitable, illogical Nepali style, the aggrieved responded by burning tires, trashing cars, and beating (occasionally to death) people who disrespected the righteousness of their crusade by (horror of horrors) driving to work. If there was also an attempt to vent in a less vicious, counterproductive fashion, I surely missed it. Though this transpired hours from Kathmandu, the effects were widely visible here, as the stricken region straddles the key trade routes from India. My housekeeper, whose son is severely ill with some form of liver failure, was long unable to visit him at their home in Nepalgunj, far to the west. Petrol lines snake around the city as desperate drivers with dry tanks follow the rumours that a fuel shipment here and there has snuck through the southern blockade. Things have apparently calmed down now, but this isn’t a unique event. There’s always another aggravated group that feels the best (and only) way to make a point is to radically disrupt the lives of millions who have done them no wrong. If there’s a shred of civic responsibility at play in Nepal’s public arena, I haven’t seen it. Painfully few people are out to improve the lot of Nepal as a whole; most seek only enlarge their personal piece of the pie. But Nepal, you have surely inferred, has a very small pie, and most are quite openly indifferent to the fact that taking more for themselves drives others further into poverty.

This is the brutal logic of Nepal, the crushing truth that keeps this place starving and marginal. I’ve heard it said by many Nepalis: “We would rather see everyone suffer equally than see anyone else get ahead”. It may sound egalitarian, but that reasoning destroys a country. I could see it in January, when the small town that hosts Kathmandu’s dump blockaded the trash trucks for three weeks over whatever grievance, leaving this city of 2.5 million to marinate in a sea of rotting garbage, swarming rats and rivers of fermented liquid foulness running along the main streets. Or in February, when the residents of the village nearest one of Nepal’s few functioning power plants padlocked the facility, demanding 24-hour electricity at the expense of the rest of the country. Or this month, as I’ve described above, when militant Tharus decided that depriving a malnourished country of cooking gas furthers the cause of universal justice. The government and their police blithely indulge such political temper tantrums, which mystifies me. Even in Canada, a free society by all but the most absurd ideological measures, no group gets free rein to starve others in order to make a point.

With the exception of Burma, whose vicious tyrants deliberately keep the people on the very margins of survival, Nepal is the worst-governed country I’ve ever seen on the ground. And just about everybody pitches in to make it happen.

2009-03-11T12:51:00.001+05:30

Regarding all things afoot...

Life may begin to calm down a bit after this week. I've just concluded the toughest and most important interview of my life (thus far). I'm tolerably confident I succeeded, but it'll be up to two months before I truly know.

Meanwhile, I LOVE Hong Kong! Though it's ridiculously consumeristic and not the least bit friendly, it's kinetic, clean, effective, and full of fascinating sounds and alluring smells. It has reliable electricity, drinkable water, traffic lights (that are consistently obeyed) and enticing food left and right. Most compellingly, not once in the last two days have I felt the need to scream "Why #@$^%$@# bloody @#$@#% doesn't this work the way it's supposed to!!!"

Methinks Kathmandu has lowered the bar for what amazes me. It will be a hard adjustment going back, which I'll be doing in a few minutes.

Pictures to follow, if the electricity ever comes back on again in Nepal.

Argh.

2009-02-16T15:26:00.000+05:30

Update...

Definitely going to Hong Kong, on March 8th... now I'm just waiting for DFAIT to send me the vital details so I don't show up hideously unprepared.

Power still goes out 16 hours a day, but may improve by the beginning of March.

And I'm going to make a concerted effort to resurrect the blog despite the energy crisis in Nepal.

2009-02-01T09:40:00.001+05:30

Argh

For at least 16 hours a day, I'm without electricity, and often without water simultaneously. This is crippling my blog.

But I AM definitely going to Hong Kong!

2009-01-22T15:09:00.000+05:30

Fun with scientific notation!

Zimbabwe's inflation rate is now believed to exceed 13 quadrillion percent per month, which works out annually to the absolutely fantastic number of 2.3 * 10^193. Now since that number isn't nearly as fun in scientific notation, let's also think of it as:

2,329,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000.
Two thousand three hundred and thirty vigintillion vigintillion vigintillion.
More than the number of elementary particles in the entire universe.

For the record, that means that prices double approximately every thirteen hours in Zimbabwe. So if you're a Zimbabwean in the employ of the civil service (like most Zimbabweans still lucky enough to be employed) you have to run to the store with your thrice-daily pay, as what few goods are still on the shelves will become noticeably more expensive in the time it takes you to get to the shop.

Isn't it amazing what going absolutely bonkers with a banknote printing press will accomplish?

2009-01-20T22:51:00.000+05:30

Wow, continued...

This is a good day.

If he can do half of what he promises, tomorrow will be a good day too.

It's hard to keep walls of cynicism up tonight.

2009-01-20T22:36:00.001+05:30

And so it is.

Wow. It actually just happened.

2009-01-19T22:22:00.000+05:30

It's been a very big week...

During which the full force of the energy crisis hit me, crippling my ability to blog. But in brief...

I published my first book, of which I am the editor and uncredited co-author: "Reporting Safe Migration and Human Trafficking: A Guide for Media Practitioners". The bloodless title was not my idea.

I was named the Best-Dressed Person working for CECI (my employer) in Nepal. That's a little like being the tallest midget at the circus, but hey, it's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

I've got a job interview with the Canadian Foreign Service! I'll be off to (probably) Hong Kong in (probably) early March. Joy!

I'm trying to come up with something profound and insightful to say about Obama's epic inauguration tomorrow, but so far I've been lethargic with an incredible swell of relief that the catastrophic reign of Bush is finally at its end. I'll think hard about what to say by tomorrow.

2009-01-12T22:13:00.000+05:30

It's that time again!

When the Buffalo Beast's delectable new edition of the 50 Most Loathsome People in America is released onto unsuspecting web audiences. If you can tolerate bitter satire laced with a total lack of regard for human decency, this one's for you. Just try to get past the Obama listing if you're fragile.

2009-01-11T22:39:00.000+05:30

May I live in Nepal in interesting times...

This is a complex place.

We have 4 hours of useful electricity per day.

There are occasional street riots, though I've been unable to find them each that they've happened.

Cows graze on garbage here, rather than grass, which contradicts everything I thought I knew about ruminant gastroenterology.

And there are rumours of an imminent military coup swirling about. I don't think it would be like the one in Thailand.

For such a small, poor country, Nepal has phenomenally Byzantine politics. This blog will, for the foreseeable future, focus on decoding this insanity, until my employers or more sinister forces tell me to stop.

2009-01-09T00:48:00.000+05:30

It's late and I'm tired...

Which merely emphasizes the urgency of what I'm about to say: Slumdog Millionaire is absolutely fantastic. If you haven't already seen it (and if you're in a comfortable Western country, shame on you) cancel all other plans, skip work, and go see it right now. It has quickly elbowed its way into my all-time Top Ten, and may even have dethroned The Dark Knight as my favourite movie of the year.

OK, now I'm going to bed.

2009-01-04T23:44:00.000+05:30

I'm still here!

Today I went to Asan, a wondrously crowded warren of shops and stalls hawking pashminas, spices, crafts and tools. I went camera in hand, and found it a photographic goldmine - I'll post the results here as I'm able to upload them.

For example:

And:

2009-01-01T20:10:00.000+05:30

In which I state the obvious...

Happy New Year from Kathmandu! Hopefully yours was eventful and brought little agony the next morning. Last night I reveled in the one-day suspension of Kathmandu's draconian 11PM curfew, and with a handful of other impoverished Canucks wandered from bar to restaurant to bar to scuzzy sandwich joint to bar to mysterious tower block in the midst of this odd urban wasteland. I rediscovered my genuine affection for Bhangra music, and surreptitiously dumped mystery shots (pure vodka, I think) into the fountain of one of Kathmandu's classiest restaurants. I got home at 5AM, and for some unrelated reason I'm a mite foggy today...

...

...

2008-12-25T22:06:00.000+05:30

And a Merry Christmas from Kathmandu

There's a hint of rain falling outside, the first drops I've seen since I got here and very unusual for the season in Kathmandu. It makes me thing of the epic snow Vancouver's received this week, and I'm more than mildly jealous to have missed it. Moreover, I wish I had the chance to spend Christmas with my fine family and friends back home - the occasion is rather different here in this very Hindu country. Aside from the occasional "Merry Christmas" tossed my way, there's little to show Christmas is happening at all here.

So we Canadians and a few other assorted bideshi (foreigners) arranged a Christmas of our own, complete with presents, trees, and Santa Claus. We had a fairly epic party last nigh at my friend Craig's house, wherein a suspiciously skinny Santa (not me) orchestrated a somewhat spiteful but highly entertaining Secret Santa exchange. I spent morning making Christmas calls to back home, and it helps immensely to check in with loved ones on a very un-Christmas Christmas. This evening, about 15 of we volunteers gathered at the home of John and Cathy, two soon-to-depart volunteers who prepared a lovely Christmas dinner with virtually every trimming. It was relaxing and hugely appreciated. Now I'm whiling away my last hours of the day, and wishing deeply that Boxing Day were also recognized here.

Merry Christmas to all - I promise I'll be there for the next one!

2008-12-16T09:59:00.000+05:30

Mein poor neglected blog...

I’m going to take a short break from ranting about Nepali traffic to rant, in brief, about the politics of other countries.

Every time we think Zimbabwe’s situation can’t get any worse, it does, and now a cholera epidemic that doesn’t officially exist is ravaging Harare. African leaders are beginning to make promising noises about ousting Robert Mugabe, but seriously, guys, couldn’t this have come 5 years ago? He is, with the arguable exception of (the possibly incapacitated or dead) Kim Jong Il, the worst person in charge of a government today. He has overseen the deaths of (at a guess) over a million people, mostly by malnourishment and disease, of his once incredibly promising and self-sufficient country. Zimbabwe is beautiful beyond description, and full of industrious and friendly people who need to have the shackles of the ZANU-PF party permanently removed. In the words of more than one Zimbabwean I met while travelling in South Africa, “We are just waiting for him to die – waiting so we can return home and get on with our lives.”
To the other African leaders who have quietly coddled Mr. Mugabe since he embarked on a rampage of ethnic cleansing in the province of Matabeleland in the mid-1980s, and half-heartedly clucked their disapproval at his spree of land theft early in this decade: it’s time you guys acknowledged a few things. Robert Mugabe is a vicious thug who will never willingly share or relinquish power, and he has already demonstrated his willingness to immolate Zimbabwe rather than give up the reins. His “power-sharing” agreement with rightful president Morgan Tsvangirai will remain a sick joke, as Mugabe will always undermine (or kill) anyone who represents a significant challenge. Every month he remains in power sets Zimbabwe’s development back by years, and all that wasted human potential is increasingly on your heads. He won’t be quietly shuffled aside, or coaxed into leaving the country as Charles Taylor was lured out of Liberia. Even at 84, he won’t succumb to illness nearly as soon as he ought to, displaying as he does the unfortunate resilience of the truly evil. He may have to be removed by force; either way, his continued vicious rule discredits the much-appealing vision of the New Africa.

2008-12-11T17:10:00.000+05:30

Kathmandu brings out my inner nerd.

But then, so does everywhere else. Today’s geek spasm comes courtesy of Kathmandu’s incomprehensible traffic. Through the magic of queuing theory, a single taxi can pause to pick up a fare, and create an astonishing Gordian gnarl of outraged honks and stalled two-stroke engines that can easily take 10 minutes to untangle, during which time it will cheerfully paralyze traffic for kilometers in every direction. It’s absolutely fascinating, and it sets my mind abuzz with formulae I never really learned, the remnants of the queuing theory and game theory that I half-grasped in undergrad. (Econ 382, Applied Game Theory, is still the niftiest course I took at SFU, for those enrolled there now).

In a rational, well-ordered city, this would be impossible. Those two adjectives, however, are as likely to be applied to Kathmandu as “soothing” and “verdant”. This city is a mass of undifferentiated bloat, nourished by spontaneously-formed one-lane capillaries and gasping in cobalt-blue smoke, a vaguely benign urban tumour. But it offers me endless, tantalizing food for thought, filling my mind past capacity with tenuously-connected fragments of pop sociology, science, politics, and sheer (often aghast) wonder. And thus it reminds me why I travel.

2008-12-07T11:18:00.000+05:30

Much is afoot.

I've been conference-enthralled much of this last week, and I'm leaving for Nepali lessons in three short minutes. I'm not neglecting my precious blog, nor either of its devout readers. I'm popping in to note that it appears I'll be professionally obliged to spend some time in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka at some point in the next year. Most excitingly, I've got a line or two into some short teaching gigs in Peace and Conflict Studies at some universities in South India. I'm not sure where this will all leave time for my actual job, but I'm sure it'll sort itself out.

I came here to network; I had no idea it would happen so bloody fast. Yippee!

2008-11-30T21:25:00.000+05:30

In which life continues apace…

Friday’s banda never materialized, which is surely for the best. I’ve got far too much to do to be dodging flying brickwork in the process. And yet… sigh…

I completed my first semi-week at work. I’ve spent my mornings at Worldview Nepal, an organization that (at the moment) trains reporters, teachers, and other change agents (in the parlance of the field) in human rights-related issues. I’ve been editing a couple of reports and brochures on how to combat human trafficking without trampling on the rights of the trafficked. It’s undeniably grunt work, mainly copy editing, but on a fascinating subject that will allow me to get my feet wet with the organization before I attempt to shoehorn myself into their program work.

A bit of clarification on that last point is due. I’ve been hired as a Communications Advisor, which means that my official capacity is to write, edit, design and proofread English-language proposals, training manuals and marketing materials. This is not what truly fuels my professional passions. Why then, you ask raptly, did you take the job? I took it because the primary preoccupations (human rights, post-conflict development and microfinance) of my two employers just happen to be things that fascinate me to no end, and the things for which I’ve really been trained. My rat-race profession of Communications Something-Or-Other will serve mainly to bring me closer to those far more fascinating subjects, close enough (in theory) for me to jam my fingers into many different pies. I’ll start, the theory, by working on their written materials, and then pop my head in all the appropriate doors, wedge myself into all the relevant meetings, and generally make a nuisance of myself until I’m doing hands-on fieldwork. I’ve discussed my intentions with my liaisons at CECI, the Canadian organization that funds and organizes this entire endeavour, and they wholly endorse my mildly deceptive strategy. Nifty.

Until that happens, however, I’m getting the lay of the land here, and reducing the odds that my travels will kill me. I found a cruelly expensive, viciously ugly, canary yellow bicycle helmet that will nevertheless be more attractive than a skull fracture. Speaking of my wheeled commute, I had a bit of a run-in last week with the Chinese diplomatic corps. Cycling past the Embassy, I curved around a parked car at the precise moment that the driver (shoulder checks be damned!) decided to pull out, indifferent to my presence. I clipped the corner of his car and, startled, staggered to a stop without suffering any particular insult to myself or my precious bike. Not so lucky the lesser vehicle – I mightily tore the bumper, headlights and all, almost free from the car, and it dangled feebly by a few wires. A Chinese gentleman (whom I judge to be a diplomat by the fact that his English was more eloquent and precise than my own) leapt from the car, apologizing profusely, and assured me that the blame was his (or his driver’s, whichever). I bid him adieu before he could change his mind. Paul 1, China 0.

Much else has been underway: language classes, moving, plotting some epic treks, and a tale of $600 dumplings (not my money, thankfully). My internet connection will be a bit inconsistent for the next 3 weeks, by which time I’ll move into my permanent digs, but in the meantime I’ll sure I’ll find the bandwidth to share more tales of Kathmandu.

2008-11-28T06:50:00.000+05:30

I've only been here two weeks...

... but I know what it means when the distinctive "you've got a text message" chime wakes me up - it's Banda time, baby!

In practical terms, this means I won't be able to make it to work, since it's needlessly provocative for me to try to run the blockades. It means that my long-delayed haircut gets delayed a little longer, since the shops will be closed. Food will be a little more difficult to acquire - I'll have to eat in the hotel restaurant, methinks. And, oh yeah, I'm going to go out and get some snazzy photos. It's just 7 AM, and I hear whooping crowds from the direction of Lazimpat, the nearest major street. Don't worry, they've no problem with photographers - helps to publicize the cause.

Yesterday I wandered through the mob that constituted the embryonic phase of this banda, which is called to protest (?) the as-yet unexplained deaths of two 15-year-olds, likely by nefarious means, on the outskirts of town. As I rode my bicycle home from work in suspiciously sparse traffic, I saw with curiousity that other cyclists were dismounting and walking their bicycles. It seemed wise to do the same, and shortly I came upon a nearly empty intersection normally swarming with taxis and tuk-tuks. A swarm of perhaps a hundred youths roamed the street, none visibly older than 15 (though it's hard to tell, in a country where malnutrition masks age very convincingly). They carried makeshift banners, photos of the two dead boys, and they accosted anyone disrespectful enough to drive a car or motorcycle through the bare street. I couldn't understand these conversations, but I infer that the protestors demanded the drivers show the banda the proper respect by walking home. Those who refused and tried to drive on had to dodge a rain of fist-sized chunks of masonry (none of which connected with anything fleshy, so far as I saw). A few plumes of black smoke that I (correctly, as it turns out) took to be the product of burning tires rose a few blocks away. Once safely clear of the mob, I slowly, and respectfully remounted my bike, like many other commuters, and enjoyed a remarkably smooth ride home on a street nearly devoid of traffic.

Oddly, about 30 minutes later, when I'd grabbed my camera from the hotel, life seemed to have resumed its normal pace. Traffic had returned and there was no mention of the riot. And yet, it appears that yesterday was the rehearsal - today we see a full-blown city shutdown. Photos and eyewitness accounts to follow.

2008-11-27T19:13:00.000+05:30

A day.

I had things to write about, but now I'm just watching the horrific events unfolding in Mumbai. It's a little hard to know what to think, right off the bat. The head of Mumbai's anti-terrorism squad has been assassinated along with his top deputies. At least a half dozen different sites have been attacked in commando raids entirely unlike the typical Al Qaeda coordinated attack. I've never heard of the "Deccan Mujahideen" before, and I don't think anyone else has either, but I presume we'll be hearing much more of them soon, though it seems likely that's a front name. I'll just watch for now, and keep my opinions to myself.

A few people have asked, so: I'm fine. I'm a thousand kilometres out of the way in a country that shares none of India's issues with Islamic radicalism. Thanks for your concern - I'm in no danger here.

2008-11-25T22:42:00.000+05:30

The first of many...

Bandwidth remains a fickle, miserly mistress, but I've been able to cram a few photos through the thin straw and more will follow. First up, the riot cops last Thursday:

Next, a cremation about to begin at Pushpatinath, the holiest site in Nepal for Hindu funeral rites.

I visited the temple complex at Pushpatinath last weekend, and witnessed several such cremations underways. My tour guide reassured me that taking photos was offensive to neither the grieving nor to Vishnu.

2008-11-25T20:34:00.000+05:30

I accelerate...

It's a wonderful thing to be wheeled. After two weeks of walking, time enough to taste the contours of this jumbled city, I bought a bicycle for my 20-kilometre daily round trip commute. My new steed is a shiny craft of aluminum and plastic that would have mildly embarrassed me before the bicycling bourgeousie back home, but here it's the pinnacle of human-powered transport, and to me it's a genuine godsend. Uber-sophisticated it ain't, but it has brakes that appear to respond to pure thought, and fat, guileless tires that would grip and oilslick on an iceberg. It lets me outmaneuver the motorbikes and outrun the other bicycles. It's precisely what I need. The beast was costlier by a hefty margin than any of the others I found in a week of searching; indeed that's why I brought it home with me. The $300 price tag is a feeble midget next to the mighty expense a bent wheel would extract in blood and treasure. The gnashing maelstrom of Kathmandu traffic is not a place to entrust my sanity and endoskeleton to the wretched steel frames offered up by the lowest bidder. My colleagues with the dreaded "cheap Chinese bikes" begrugingly popular here have walked away from such potential mid-ride catastrophes as watching the handlebars or pedals abruptly detach from their trusted rides. I won't test my luck so.

That ominously said, Nepali traffic, for all its chaos and bluster, hides an odd tranquility. Lane markers are an absurd fever dream here, and stoplights an amusing suggestion. Traffic ostensibly moves on the left, but that's only a guideline, and shoulder checks are effectively a religious taboo, but somehow I don't feel my own mortality on Kathmandu roads the way I did in Chiang Mai. The overstuffed roads seem to naturally divide themselves into capillaries, admitting only one vessel at a time, and no one takes it personally if it's not their their turn. Nothing moves particularly fast, and my thin profile lets me weave through the nearly motionless traffic - I typically get places far faster than the car-bound. People actually slow down or (gasp!) stop rather than tear through me. It's busy, it's anarchic, it's noisier than anyone who hasn't been here could possibly comprehend, but in it all, I don't feel that anyone on the road is actively trying to end my life. Unlike Thailand.

2008-11-23T21:54:00.000+05:30

Blowing stuff up real good...

I had many menial errands to run on Thursday; a bicycle to buy, a barbershop to find, self-medication to perform. None of it happened, because a Nepal has an odd tradition called the banda, which I’m told it shares with much of the Indian subcontinent. A banda is a particularly obnoxious variety of street protest wherein the aggrieved consider that they have the moral right to demand a complete shutdown of the entire bloody city. In this particularly obnoxious form of dissent, a mob of several hundred or more snarling citizens roams the street and, among other behaviours I don’t yet fully comprehend, ransacks any business or working vehicle that has the audacity to disrespect the banda by disregarding the general strike.

My employers at CECI send out a mass text message on Thursday morning saying that a banda had been called for the entire Kathmandu valley, and that those of us with long commutes should stay put and avoid the madness. I wasn’t working that day, but was a bit under the weather, and so I didn’t leave the hotel until 11 or so, camera in hand. The fun had largely petered out by then, but I still passed a public bus thoroughly wrecked by the angry mob, and the streets were littered with fragments of masonry. Kathmandu’s ample supply of tottering brickwork provides ready ammunition that presumably rained down upon riot police for much of the morning. Traffic was unsettlingly sparse, as only a handful of motorcycles and no cars plied the streets. Late in the day, hundreds of armored cops manned major intersections. A few wore a curious scarab armor that brought to mind feudal Samurai, but they rebuffed my requests for snapshots. I later snuck a few surreptitious shots of their less exotically attired colleagues, which will be e-displayed as soon as I have functional bandwidth.

My taste for urban chaos is well-known, and I briefly cursed my inertia for depriving me of a first-hand taste of Thursday’s banda. However, I’m new here, and it’s likely better that I avoid such lunacy until I’ve the local knowledge to safely navigate it. Bandas of one variety or another are reportedly a regular event, though this was (I’m told) one of rare intensity. There’ll be another for me to enjoy sometime tolerably soon.

2008-11-21T21:26:00.000+05:30

I've had my reasons...

... for slacking off on the blogging. Namely, that I've been sick and still occupied with my Nepali language classes and general acclimatization. Much has happened (the aforementioned classes, a meeting with one of my new employers, and, amazingly, a banda which will defined and described in great detail when I have the bandwidth to upload photos tomorrow). I've secured an apartment (two, actually) and am settling in nicely, aside from being humiliated in last night's poker tournament. I've had two welcome lunches (at one of which I was required to sing) and am plotting treks to Everest, Annapurna, and possibly Tibet. All of these wonders deserves a post of its own, which it will get, but in the meantime I'm checking in.

2008-11-18T17:10:00.000+05:30

Another try...
The following are worth a shot:

011 977 01 980 800 1055

011 977 980 800 1055

011 977 0980 800 1055 (especially this one).

Sadly, I can't test it from here. Whoever can tell me what works gets a free Sherpa.

2008-11-17T10:34:00.000+05:30

Phone!

I have a mobile phone here - reachable from Canada by calling 011 977 1 980 800 1055. Fun!

2008-11-16T20:58:00.000+05:30

A victim of itself...

Kathmandu is a perplexing city, mystifyingly ancient and yet obviously wracked by adolescent growing pains. Pale Buddhist stupas and intricate Hindu temples lurk and loom in every neighbourhood, having survived centuries of South Asia’s famed mix of war, privation, religious upheaval, relentless monsoon weather, arbitrary seismic spitefulness, and a mercilessly thriving tourist trade that (I presume) predates outsized Americans in Tilly hats and cargo pants. Kingdoms have blossomed and withered here with stubborn regularity since before Gautama Buddha went for his long walk, and empires have washed over Nepal like tides, for longer than words have existed to record them. Every iota of this history and prehistory has left marks, and the occasional ugly stain.

But Kathmandu’s most belligerently obvious trait is its unmistakable newness. Nepal’s unsettling rate of population growth and textbook developing-world economic superurbanization have bloated this town far beyond its healthy size, a process greatly accelerated by ten years of moderate-intensity civil war that drove the capable and the fearful to the shelter of the capital. Planning was negligible, pollution controls nonexistent, and the city has a people-to-stoplight ratio somewhere (literally) in excess of a million to one. So now Kathmandu marinates in pollution far greater than wind and rain can alleviate, with demands on the water, electrical, road and sewage infrastructure three times what they were designed (I use the term loosely) to handle. The results are (here’s that peculiar Nepalese poetic incongruity again) both utterly predictable and completely flabbergasting. The street traffic is an extraordinary pandemonium that defeats my capacity for hyperbole. In most districts of the city, the power fails for (a meticulously scheduled) 35+ hours per week, anticipated to leap to 90+ by early December. Odours of genuinely demonic provenance occasionally waft up from… nowhere in particular. Kathmandu is struggling, and thus far failing, to deal with its own explosive growth, and one result among many is that there are a great many conundra here with which someone like me can busy himself.

This will be an interesting year.

2008-11-12T19:08:00.000+05:30

The first day is always the most foolish...

My Nepali/Canadian hosts at CECI (my new French-acronymed employer) graciously opted, in light of my midnight arrival yesterday, to begin my day with a leisurely 12:30 lunch, for which I am boundlessly thankful. I awoke at 6:30 and briefly chronicled the sunrise with my shiny new Canon (still waaaay too much camera for me, I’m willing to admit). I sleep-chewed my way through an inoffensive hotel buffet breakfast, hunted down some bottled water, and quickly toddled back to bed for a few more hours. I roused myself for a lovely lunch with my new overlords and my fellow volunteers, and enjoyed chorizo enchiladas, a noted traditional Nepali delicacy. I suppressed jetlag yawns through a few hours of orientation, and then bravely (though not wisely) decided to walk hotelward from the CECI office.

Nepal’s now-extinct(dormant?) civil war left a heavy legacy of militarization, and so major government buildings remain lightly surrounded by manned gun nests, with sixty-year-old bolt-action rifles resting lazily on sandbags, indifferently attended by soldiers a third their age, barrels consistently pointed out into the streets and sidewalks. In the 30 minutes it took me to get badly lost, I walked in front of these ancient arms at least a dozen times. I’m sure they’re appropriately locked down, and so forth, but I find it unsettling to be forced to march point blank in front of the bloody things anyways. While observing this absurdity and wandering through this mangled labyrinth of a city, I unsurprisingly ended up badly off course, and was retracing my steps when a CECI coworker miraculously happened by on a motorcycle. He offered a courteous and very welcome ride back to my hotel (in unnerving Kathmandu traffic, of course, but there’s some line about beggars and choosers) and I wisely resolved never to try anything new or adventurous again.

Once returned to familiar territory, I purchased a single local electrical adaptor. Marveling at my ingenuity and financial acumen, I ingeniously plugged in my single Canadian power bar and ingeniously saved myself the cruel expense of buying multiple adaptors for my multiple toys. My power strip abruptly surrendered to the unfamiliar Nepali voltage, waving a furious white flag of searing blue plasma, molten plastic and acrid dark smoke. I’m reasonably thankful I didn’t ingeniously try this on my Xbox first. Ye GODS, my room stinks now.

And so I go looking for food, in the hopes that the stench of electrical experimentation will have evacuated in an hour or so. More to follow tomorrow.

P.S. Nepal is 13 hours and 45 minutes ahead of Vancouver. Ponder that briefly. If that’s perplexing to you, imagine how I feel, stranded in this temporal no man’s land.

2008-11-12T11:11:00.000+05:30

At 11PM, Kathmandu is tomb-quiet, and nearly so dark. Little to see as we rode in from the decaying, crazed airport, except an abundance of street dogs rooting wherever. At 6 this morning (I think) - the red sun had barely risen and cast my hotel room in bright pink. I'll go exploring.

2008-11-04T13:13:00.001+05:30

In days to come...

History will be made tomorrow - and it won't even be a close outcome.

I'm moving to Nepal on Sunday.

I'm returning to my own life, after a year in someone else's skin.

'Bout bloody time.

The blog will be resurrected.

2008-10-02T04:09:00.000+05:30

Others have said it first, and better.

A bloody good (and bloody long) article expounding on what I just said. Of primary interest to people like me.

2008-05-20T22:53:00.000+05:30

Big day today.

That is all.

2008-05-14T11:53:00.001+05:30

Much to tell, but not today...

Big things are afoot, but I'm in enforced radio silence at the moment. There may be important news in a week.

Things are going well.

2008-05-08T11:34:00.000+05:30

There are better things I should be doing.

I miss my students, and what they symbolize - meaningful work, meaningful existence, daily challenge and self-improvement. I wrote to them yesterday, inquiring about their situation in the wake of the devastating cyclone in Burma. One year ago today I was in Rangoon at the start of the monsoon season. I'm half relieved that I wasn't there when the cyclone descended in its fury. Yet my remnant half is desperately wishing that I were there, so I could be of some value. It's hard to imagine a worse place for this to happen - ruled by a vicious clique indifferent to the people at the best of times, paranoid to the point of parody, and consumed by rank greed. Burma is an aid workers' nightmare, with the most decrepit transportation infrastructure I've ever seen, miserable sanitation and uncounted local rivalries that politicize humanitarian assistance. I will be very surprised if the death toll is below 50,000, and I won't be shocked if it exceeds 100,000.

Anyhow, I received this email in response, remarkable primarily for its unvanquishable good cheer.

Dear teacher Paul,

There is clearly no need to say how much i thank you for your kind regards on our families and all of my friends, and i get happy to get nice and kind message from you. Dear teacher Paul, we ( all of your students and all of your students' families ) are in good situation. Dear teacher Paul, i would like to say you again " thank you very much" and one thing i would like to apologise is that i really hope that you will understand on me why i have been absent to send nice message to you. The reason why i have been like this is that i was away from internet. Dear teacher Paul, i really and honestly wish you to give my nice and kind regards to your family, especially your girlfriend you love more than your parents. Just kidding, teacher Paul, ha ha ha....... i really miss you so much, teacher Paul. Good luck! By the way, i would like to know where our kind and nice teacher, Jonna is staying and including her email address that can be sent to her.

May you get free from illness and diseases.

I remain,
Yours very good student,
Name witheld

2008-04-17T11:30:00.000+05:30

Things to do...

I'm likely to go dark for a few days. I know it breaks the compact, but these are unique circumstances and there are a lot of things I need to do. Emily's sick (I'm not going into details now), and though she'll get better, she's frightened and so am I. I'm having a rough time with it because I don't have many ways to be useful at such distance. So I'm going to spend a few days applying here and there with a newfound vigour, and trying to pull some strings to get me to where I can be of some value at a bad time. I'll be back when I have some time and something relevant to say.

2008-04-16T10:30:00.000+05:30

The joys of sleep-deprivation...

A while back I noticed that I made a special point of going to bed early on Thursdays, so as to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when Friday's parties rolled around. Being well-rested during the slave week seems a lesser concern. My coworkers opine that this is an unfortunate reversal of appropriate priorities. I reject their hypothesis.

But I do think it's time I slowed down for a couple of days. I was up at 5 AM today to do a favor for CUSO, interviewing some would-be international interns. One was supremely qualified, the other radically less so, and I hesitate to recommend the latter for international work. Ugly thing is, they're a couple and travel as a pair, so it'll be interesting to observe the vicissitudes. That nicety concluded, I worked a further 10 hours at my actual job (the departure from which I've momentarily stalled while I accumulate capital for something more cataclysmic). I'm wiped, and my bed beckons.

In other news, I'm sunburnt, I've raged at a couple of people who might not have deserved it, and I'm two episodes behind on Battlestar Galactica. More impressive is that Brendan finished his thesis defence today at SFU, capping a years-long process in which his entire skull has frequently incandesced with stress and intellectual fury. Now he's finally, blessedly done, and is likely to rejoin the functioning human race. Yay Brendan!

2008-04-15T11:01:00.000+05:30

Mmm... food...

Inasmuch as I'm forced to get up at 5:30 tomorrow morning, in order to do a favor for CUSO and interview a Vancouverite who wants to move to Thailand, and inasmuch, as I spent much of the evening updating online profiles for people who might someday oblige me with a trip to Afghanistan, I'm somewhat bereft of time and content. I did, however, just enjoy a spectacular dinner at Guu (many thanks to Erin - Bob, you should come sometime very soon). If memory serves, it consisted of chopped salmon sashimi with raw quail egg served in prawn chips, a hard-boiled egg wrapped in pumpkin croquette, grilled yellowtail neck, some form of spiced egpplant, incredibly textured pork intestine, grilled squid legs with wasabi mayo, and some sesame balls to wrap it up.

I love eating in this town. Guu is one of my favorite restaurants, an honest Japanese izakaya with incredible food, rational prices, and an shriekingly authentic ambiance that can't be outdone. The food isn't all as... exotic as the freakier bits above, but there's plenty to reward the adventurous. Go there tomorrow if you haven't already been, or if you haven't been this week.

2008-04-14T11:47:00.000+05:30

Self-flagellation...

It's late, I'm tired, I've just spent an hour applying for a job, and I lack the energy to say anything perceptive and poetic at this feeble hour. And yet I've bludgeoned myself into more posting, because otherwise more of my slavishly gained dollars will shoveled down Christian's remorseless maw. It's an indignity I won't abide.

But dammit, that doesn't mean this post has to be good. Mainly it's to announce that I'm officially hunting for international work opportunities again, even if that means semi-paid volunteerism. I've got my eye on India this time, in part because they say it's that place to sear some humility into the soul of the complacent and self-congratulatory traveler. I'd also hit New York, but everyone's been hearing that for months and I'm still no closer to a work visa. So we'll see.

2008-04-13T12:19:00.000+05:30

Only in Vancouver...

I waited a few minutes for a bus this evening at Main and Terminal. While I stood among a crowd, a dreadlocked man in his early twenties wandered loudly among us, asking proudly but not belligerently for a cigarette. All the while he cradled his left arm at an odd crook, and when no one passed him a smoke, he began cheerfully showing his elbow to us. A small but unmistakable blade of bone protruded cruelly through his forearm. He showed no signs of pain, and whatever chemical amusement had blunted the appropriate agony had also rendered him ignorant of the pressing need for medical care - or the imminence of amputation.. He just wanted a cigarette.

I've seen much worse injuries in much worse places... but this story could only be told in Vancouver.

2008-04-11T12:30:00.000+05:30

Missing Thailand...

Song Kram, a gargantuan water war involving a quarter-million atavistic revelers, is underway right now on the streets of Chiang Mai. Last year during Song Kram, I had my foot overrun by a pickup truck, a bucket was shattered on my forehead drawing plenty of blood, my keys/wallet/phone were inadvertently stolen by my students, and I acquired a whomping case of heatstroke wandering about trying to find a way back into my apartment.

And yet I desperately wish I could be there in the chaos right now.

2008-04-10T11:05:00.001+05:30

Late nights...

I'm up anxiously devouring what information I can devour regarding cerebral arteriovenous malformation and taenia solium infection. Not for me, but it's worrying all the same. I'll share more some other time. I'm also schizing out over my thesis, but it's forcing me to re-lubricate my mental gears and fire up my critical thinking after a lengthy atrophy. It'll be good for me.

But both these things conspire to make tonight's post a short one.

2008-04-09T10:39:00.000+05:30

I've previously mentioned that I'm a bit of an adrenaline junkie, and perhaps seek out more fear and mayhem than is entirely healthy. As I suss out the contours of this particular psychological peccadillo, I've begun to grasp that while I'm mildly addicted to fear of my own death, I'm thoroughly petrified (like most people) of public humiliation. Given the prospect of making an intolerable schmuck out of myself, I fairly typically shrivel into myself and refuse to get off the couch.

Why the conversational detour, you ask? I'm dipping my toes in the fetid swamp of academia once more. My friend Jocelyn (who just laudably had a paper published in The Lancet) is organizing a conference on Global Public Health at SFU in May, which includes some subthemes of Conflict and Public Health, and Global Mental Health. Some strange amalgam of those two apparently covers the odd academic space inhabited by my unpublished thesis on the evolutionary psychology of suicide terrorism. So Jocelyn has asked me to submit my thesis for inclusion in the conference, the expected outcome of which would be me blathering for half an hour in front of 50 bellicose skeptics who desperately want to prove me decisively wrong. And, if possible, they'd prefer to demonstrate further that I'm a feeble dimwit with intolerably sloppy research techniques using a psychological framework that more than a few people have (utterly wrongly) labeled as enabling racism, sexism, and cultural discrimination. I've never presented a paper at a conference before; I'm unfamiliar with such academic rigours and I have a sneaking suspicion that my thesis advisor in grad school never actually read my paper. So it's possible that I'll open a merciless torrent of ridicule on my embryonic academic reputation, annihilating a field I'd otherwise like to develop much further (since no one else seems to be doing so). I could even lose control of all muscle function halfway through the presentation.

I'm going to do it anyway. But some cathartic kvetching is exactly what the doctor ordered. This is a necessary rite of passage, particularly given that 2 years absence from the cheery world of counterterrorism policy has started to blunt my carefully cultivated (and entirely psychosomatic) micro-reputation as an International Man of Mystery. I'm strongly considering launching my PhD pursuit in the next few months and this would be a fine start. And besides, I was supremely confident in these ideas two years ago when i wrote the thing - I must have been on to something then, right?

So I'm going to go dust off my thesis and immerse myself in my own gibberish about status competition in environments of externalized morality, and kin-altruism identification mechanisms, and higher-order theory of mind. Somewhere in there is 250 words that makes my ideas sound relevant to this conference without sounding utterly ludicrous. Wish me luck.

P.S. It'll also take my mind off the fact that someone important to me is having some inexplicable and scary medical issues very far away, about which I can do very little. I don't feel like getting into the details, but I'm more worried than I probably should be, which does very little to alleviate my apprehensions. So a little ivory-tower sequestration is probably just what I need.

2008-04-06T15:26:00.000+05:30

It's time...

For me to resume my e-scribbling. It's been pointed out to me that I'm sexier when I write. I feel larger and more the master of my own life when I write regularly, and well, and with abandon. I've recently absented myself from an ocean of drama, and to hell with it all - no fun to write about, no fun to read. Now's a fine time to chronicle many thoughts on different things that fascinate and motivate me far more. The rank yet hopeful Zimbabwean elections, my imminent-tentative-amorphous vanishing, the interminable gorefest of the Democratic primaries, the food I'm gradually regaining the alchemical skills to prepare, the mythical-yet-scintillating dream jobs I seek here and abroad, my ongoing efforts to reconstruct the obscenely ugly ninja clock, the reluctant onset of blessed summer, and the curious fact that all my kitchen cupboards get extremely hot when closed.

So I'm back on my autofascistic pay-per-blog-lapse program for a month. Though I'm allowing myself a single mulligan, to be used at a time and for a reason of my unimpeachable choosing, should I need it. The usual caveats regarding hospitalization, sudden travel, and the disintegration of technological society also apply. Speaking of which, who knows a cheap, simple and fast way to get a US work visa?

2008-03-20T01:10:00.000+05:30

And the fun continues...

I'm enjoying my job a lot more now that I know I'm leaving. That's encouraging - it'll mean I leave on an up note. It doesn't alter the basic calculus... I'll get bored again, badly, if I stay, and it's time for me to start seriously turning over rocks for international work.

Right after I moved into a new apartment. Oh well, them's the breaks.

It's been very gratifying, actually, to contemplate the new opportunities. I belatedly recognize that since I got back to Vancouver I've been in reactive mode, as Erin puts it. With a mediocre job outside my field, I've been a touch too stressy and well below my normally irritating level of self-confidence. And now I feel bloody fantastic... everything's on the way up.

Speaking of good times to come, I'm headed up to Hope Friday, for an apparently massive party with Jim and Tamara. Should be a blast - I haven't seen those fine folks since Christmas. I'll be back Saturday, so if y'all know of any festivities that night, I want in.

2008-03-17T10:12:00.001+05:30

In which I abandon "In Which"...

Because I'm tired of it.

Great night Saturday. At Bob's insistence I hit the Railway Club on the last drinking day before St. Paddy's Day to enjoy the Dreadnaughts, a kickass and kinetic Celtic punk band I should have found long ago. I doubt we many revelers left the club before 2, and then only after some forays into a merciless mosh pit (which pummeled poor Eva's nose) and a few rounds of high-impact hugging. After a brief stopover at my apartment, so that my compatriots could devour the expensive scotch I'm unlikely to ever touch myself, we took an odd 4AM trip to Hamburger Mary's. It seems ill-advised at the time, but somehow I woke up feeling absolutely pristine 3 hours later. Perhaps a wee-hours greaseburger is a fine hangover preventative - I'll test this further in future, since I'm a block away from that reliably mediocre kitchen.

There's much afoot for tomorrow. I hope you'll wish me the courage I need to do what must be done, the dignity to do it well, and the sheer anarchic atavism required to enjoy it from start to finish.

Tomorrow will be a very good day.

2008-02-25T12:21:00.001+05:30

Nicolas Parenteau, a friend of mine, died on Friday in Chiang Mai. He skidded off his motorcycle in unforgiving Thai traffic, on a chaotic road that terrified me a thousand times, and died in hospital ten hours later.

A fellow Canadian working through CUSO with Burmese exiles in Thailand, Nic was a good person in the purest senses of the word. A gifted agriculturist, he was most fascinated by digging his fingers into fertile earth, and dedicated his final year to giving long-downtrodden people new means to feed themselves. I didn't know him as well as I should have, but I spent a fair portion of my final months in Thailand hanging out with him. He was kind, generous, devoted, funny and full of cheer. Were you to describe the kind of person the world needs to see more often, Nic would be a fine place to start. A vast many people, myself included, are richer for having known him and poorer for having known him so briefly.

2008-02-14T12:36:00.000+05:30

In which I go on vacation...

Okay, I've blogged a month and only missed a day. I've fulfilled my contractual obligations. I'm going on hiatus until Wednesday while Emily visits. Toodles!

2008-02-13T10:19:00.000+05:30

In which unrequited counsel becomes a stream of babble...

Then again, it seems likely that any post like this is a call for advice. Christian hates his job, and has understandably begun to wonder if his general malcontent and short temper signifies something chemically amiss in his wetware. I doubt it. Christian's a cranky man, but I think he's generally far better-balanced than he gives himself credit for. He needs to find new work. Not a new job, but a radically different line of work. It's trite, but he has to find something that he loves to do, or he'll spend the rest of his life mired in this sort of restless antipathy.

I'm not doing what I love these last few months. My work is an endless, hurried banquet of minute, unsatisfying tasks that have never once engaged anything outside my reptilian complex. I write a dozen letters for other people a day, tasks so anxiously dull that I feel like instinctively rejecting the praise I receive for their quality. I tread water in a vast ocean of business buzzwords that bury the cliche-meter deep in the red zone.
I am genuinely confused by the deep satisfaction that most of my coworkers draw from their daily labours, which change not one whit between days. I don't begrudge them that - they've found something they enjoy doing day in and out - and I'm sure their heftier paydays lubricate the deal more than somewhat. They are fine people to work with, and my job is neither dangerous (sigh) nor unreasonably difficult nor cruelly underpaid. But this isn't what I'm meant to be doing.

I've been fortunate enough to find politics, which I excel at. I know what I'm supposed to be doing with my life, and I'm not doing it. I must return to work that I love as soon as possible. It's not always a picnic doing what you're best at, either - frustration and impatience are still my periodic companions. On a couple of dire occasions last year at the school in Thailand, my erstwhile boss and I came very close to violence. But for my part, I was so angry because I had legitimately different objectives which I felt he was obstructing. I was in a situation entirely unlike my current one, in that I was an expert in my field and he in his, and so we both had the philosophical footing to demand certain things from the project we shared.

Whereas I'm a rookie at my current job, a mid-level grunt spot in a dandy and well-respected human resources firm. If ever I'm certain I'm right - which happens less often than you might think - it doesn't matter. My superordinates' experience and rank trumps my conviction every time, and despite their superficial attempts to ladle more responsibility into my bowl, I'll never attain the rank and experience to go head-to-head with the powers that be when we fundamentally disagree about what's best for the organization.

That doesn't work for me. I'm not confrontational by any stretch, but I'm a person of conviction and I chafe enormously at lacking the intellectual freedom to set my own agenda to some significant degree. Christian, I think, is more like this than he has been willing to admit to himself. He's a smart guy, and he's frustrated. If I spent a decade selling plumbing supplies to ingrates and miscreants, my rage and contempt for humanity would start to poison the rest of my life too. But go straight for the cause, my friend. Chemical alteration is surely worst conceivable answer (with the possible exception of having kids to beat the boredom) - it doesn't even treat the symptoms of this malaise, it merely replaces some of them (anger and loathing) with others (mental slothfulness and serotonin malfunction). Religion won't help either - that just replaces a few of your dilemmas with larger ones, and then tells you you're going to hell if you dare to ask for real answers. The better solution (though I surely repeat myself) is find something you're bloody good at and that you immensely enjoys. This is surely easier counsel to give than follow, but it's true.

My advice to Christian and anybody else in this situation (including myself): take night classes in whatever the hell you're even vaguely curious about. Start reading the Economist cover to cover - more than once something I found in there sparked an interest that substantially redirected my entire life. Take up a serious hobby in which you run the risk of tragic failure - start growing green things, or making something with your hands, or learning some musical skill, or speaking a foreign language. Fail at things, get better at them, ignore your deep intrinsic laziness, and push far outside your intellectual comfort zone. This sounds like an idiot laundry list of generic self-improvement shite, but it's not - it's a shotgun approach to finding something that ignites a genuine creative passion that you've largely abandoned hope of finding. If you can't stick with it entirely of your own accord, do what I do - set up a system of penalties that screw you even harder if you stop trying. Then once you've found something you love to do can find a way to make money off it and stop doing all this make-work shit you can clearly no longer tolerate.

This is a lot of effort for uncertain reward. It's inconvenient, it's annoying, it might even be expensive - but if it saves you from spending the rest of your life enraged at your career and great infuriating masses of humanity, it would be a bargain at a thousand times the price.

Now I need to get back to following my own advice. I've got some jobs to find, and a thesis to publish, and a PhD to pursue. I'll let you know how that goes.

2008-02-11T12:02:00.000+05:30

In which I breathe great relief and unload a little guilt...

Today has been a good day. I grinned through the Chinese New Year's parade downtown, which was remarkably enough my first ever, a strange feat given that I'm a Vancouverite born and raised. I nerded out on Rock Band for 6 hours. I gorged on Hon's for lunch.

Far more important, I discovered that my friend and former student, whom I'll leave nameless for his protection, has been released from the grotesque Burmese prison in which he has been incarcerated on no meaningful charges for the last six months. With his long history of human rights work, he was arrested returning to Burma from Thailand and quickly sentenced to 8 years in prison for crimes I've never heard elucidated. Burmese prisons are even worse than you imagine them to be. Torture is routine; medical care is nonexistent. Prisoners commonly go without food or the most basic hygienic needs. 8 years is more than most could endure, and for months I've been terrified for his survival. It has been no small source of shame for me that I haven't been able to do anything for him, save for throwing some money (to no discernible effect) to the effort to secure his release.

But now he's out. I don't know how, nor why, nor why now. I spoke to him briefly yesterday, and he's coherent but clearly traumatized (to the extent that one can discern from a Gtalk conversation). I don't know whether or how often he was tortured inside, and I don't know the impact his incarceration has had on his health (though he said he has been seeing his doctor daily since being released on Wednesday). He's with his family in Lashio, northeastern Burma, and hopefully recuperating. He has told me that in good time he'll describe the human rights abuses he witnessed and suffered behind bars. Good for him - it's vital that people understand the relentless cruelty of Burmese life.

I still don't feel he's safe in Burma at all. The government launches vicious, sweeping crackdowns with alarming frequency, and he'll remain a priority target for the jackboots so long as he remains in the country. I can't imagine he'd leave his family inside that wretched country, but I'd still feel better if he were in Thailand. For now, though, I'm beyond overjoyed that he's alive and he's walking free. That will have to suffice for the moment.

2008-02-10T14:38:00.000+05:30

In which I'm abso-frickin'-lutely overjoyed...

Today just became a VERY good day indeed... best by far of this (admittedly crappy) year. I'll blog more about it in the morning as soon as I find out how much I can safely say.

2008-02-10T12:45:00.000+05:30

In which I make plans... again...

I'm at (hypothetical) spider-bite plus 10-15 days, and I still don't have any superpowers (other than self-deprecation, and that one I was born with). I've been attempting to climb walls and seduce Kirsten Dunst for most of the day, to no avail. Those movies lied to me.

I've just gotten home from a Jehovah's Witness wedding at the Art Gallery. I was constrained from drinking by the vast quantities of penicillin in my body. So I ate, didn't dance (with the waifish 20-something God Squad in ample attendance) and was a bit bored. But I did get to see Will and Bree and their delightful hatchling Wesley for the first time in months, and bantered briefly on politics and publishing with Will's sister Jocelyn, who is wrapping up her M.A. in Public Health. It got me thinking...

Maybe it's time to re-enter academia. I finished my Masters' almost two years ago and abruptly dropped off the academic map, mostly because I went to Thailand. My ambition of carving my Master's thesis into 2 or 3 smaller papers and publishing them somewhere where potential employers would see them got thoroughly shelved, and I haven't really dusted them off yet. I'm actually starting to fall behind a lot of my rival Men of Mystery because I haven't had much published, academically speaking, and at some point I need to get that done in order to boost my job-seeking chances out in the dangerous world. So I surely need to get in touch with my adrenaline-junkie thesis advisor for some pointers and see if I can get some press writing about suicide terrorism.

But I'm also wondering if I ought to bite the bullet and go get a Ph.D. No minor question, that. It's a minimum three year commitment that thwarts most of the people who try and dooms the bulk of those who DO complete it to lives toiling in academic obscurity. That last bit certainly doesn't sound like my cup of tea. Academia drives me nuts - the infuriating moral relativism; the inane need to treat any idea, no matter how asinine, as potentially valid; the constant pissing contests between nerds of all stripes. These things and more tend to send me scowling from campus after a year or so. Moreover, it's bloody hard work to finish a dissertation, and it pays starvation salaries - I've little desire to re-enter penury so soon after (marginally) escaping it.

And yet.

Terrorism, rumour has it, is a hot topic these days. I have genuinely new approaches to counter-terrorism policy that could be hugely influential if I had much more extensive research to flesh them out. I could make a name for myself in the field with an eye towards policy jobs rather than academic tenure, and probably find my way into a think-tank or (better yet) international enforcement at the UN or somesuch. I could learn Arabic in the process of doing my fieldwork. I'd have the credentials to find work in my field anywhere, even here in Vancouver - no more dicking around with jobs where people ask me "why the hell would THAT interest you?". Most importantly, I could demand that everyone, including my blood relatives, constantly refer to me as Dr. Paul.

I've spent enough time on my hiatus from my true (if somewhat unhealthy) professional passion - figuring out why people kill each other. I think I need to start doing some research on who might be willing to pay for me to go talk to terrorists for a couple of years.

2008-02-09T13:35:00.000+05:30

Nothing today either. I'm still awfully sick and exhausted (shouldn't have gone to work today). Christian, if this upsets your mulligan-meter, so be it. I think I built in exemptions for severe illness. I'll make it up over the weekend.

2008-02-07T09:52:00.000+05:30

Sick. Spider. Bad. No post today.

2008-02-06T10:24:00.000+05:30

In which I enjoy MY Super Bowl...

... better known as Super Tuesday. As it stands, it looks like Obama and Clinton will come in very close in terms of delegate count, even if Hillary takes California by 10 points. That's not the tie it looks like. If Hillary wins by only a small margin, she's in trouble, because the as-yet undecided states are mainly places (Texas, Ohio) where Barack has either a polling lead or an organizational advantage, or both. I wouldn't have expected it a month ago, but it looks to my ignorant eyes like there's a 50-50 chance for either nominee. It's going to be a long night... and a long year.

I like them both, I really do - either would make a fantastic president, and either is almost certain to thwomp McCain in November. But I must confess that whenever Barack pulls ahead I feel a minor twinge of excitement that was oddly absent when Hillary took New Hampshire. So there it is - I'm an Obama fan. Good luck , Barack.

In other news, I'm again spastically expanding my music collection. Having had my fill of emo rock, I'm trying to dig up tracks with some proper volume to them, and yet enough rhythm to be properly catchy. VAST-style stuff, perhaps. Or maybe some quality new hard rock - any suggestions? I don't know what's new in Canadian music, but I'm in a download frenzy and will happily accept all advice.

2008-02-04T08:20:00.000+05:30

In which all partying and no sleep makes Paul a sluggish boy...

Like a civilized person, I was set to leave Grae's birthday party last night at the sane hour of 1AM, the better to recuperate from the previous night's 6AM bedtime. But after I'd done my goodbye walkabout, someone asked me, in all sincerity, "What's your opinion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?"

So I didn't get out of there for another 3 hours. Ye gods, I need more politics in my life. Yes, I'm a nerd. Yes, I'm comfortable with that. But running on 2 nights of nearly no sleep, after several unusually exhausting weeks, has left me a wee bit tattered. I'm wrapping up a quick blog post and then going to bed.

In other news, I offer my heartiest congratulations to Graeme and Corinne on their successful production of a parasitic zygote! Way to fertilize, you two!

And I should know about that apartment downtown within a couple of days. I've dropped off all my data, the manager says it's probably mine, and I think it would be a fine place to be. It's walking distance to everything, and a block away from both a Blenz and a liquor store, so I can be simultaneously and perpetually altered by both fermented joy and the stronger-than-crack-and-twelve-times-as-addictive Matchachillo! All the better, Brendan has agreed to take the place (including my TV, XBox, DVDs, etc., naturally) off my hands should I need to abruptly leave the country, as has been known to happen. So I don't need to worry about breaking another lease, nor about whether I've locked myself into a year of professional discontentment. So it appears welcome changes are afoot. And when I move, there will be Rock Band.

2008-02-03T04:49:00.000+05:30

In which I owe Christian more money than he deserves...

Stupid pay-per-blog rule. I'm out $40 while I'm in fairly dire need of apartment-startup funds. My bad, I suppose.

Is there a full moon or some sort of vicious cosmic alignment underway? Seems like improbably vast numbers of my friends are going through trauma of one ugly sort or another right now. Pets are dying left and right, professional dreams are being dashed, and romantic disillusionment rears its foul head at nearly every turn. Too many people I know are having a really bad year so far, almost entirely in ways that I can do nothing about.

That said, this morning I went apartment-hunting, a none-too-meager feat given my 6AM bedtime last night and the accumulated toxins of Sanctuary. 2 hours of treading the West End did clear my foggy head, and I think I even found a decent 1-bedroom just off Davie Street for a mere $995 per month. It's nothing palatial like my last digs in Vancouver, but I've reluctantly accepted that those salad days are long gone, or at least on hiatus.

As for whether and for how long I want to stay in Vancouver... that's another matter entirely and fodder for another post. At the moment, I need sleep more than I need to pour my heart out. G'night.

2008-02-01T12:22:00.000+05:30

In which I extend my condolences to Corinne...

On the loss of Themba, her much-loved and too-short-lived hedgehog. I hope Corinne draws some solace from the knowledge that Themba was loved like no other hedgehog in history.

And also perhaps some solace from the Walking with Dinosaurs show we saw tonight! Sure, it's cheesy and kid-focused, but damned if it ain't a ton of fun! Some minor technical glitches notwithstanding (a toppled Utahraptor and a slightly delayed Mama Rex), I was floored by the ingenuity of what they managed to put into a live show. I'm glad I'm nerdy enough to appreciate live theatre about evolution and plate tectonics. Even if I weren't, the big T-Rex (when she finally showed) was just plain mind-blowing. Was it worth 70 bucks a pop? Hrm... maybe not. But it was surely worth more than the nothing I paid for the tickets. Corinne and I happily roared at each other all the way to the Skytrain, mimicking the hyper-enthused youngsters who populated the show. Good fun all around.

2008-01-30T19:40:00.000+05:30

In which human ingenuity both stuns and terrifies me...

I'm not certain whether this represents the absolute peak of our civilization, or is a herald of the coming dark age. Yes, it's a cheeseburger in a can. What will those wacky Germans think of next?

In a related note, I've been scrambling to finish Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food before Erin wrests it from my cold, dead fingers. I highly recommend it, and it dovetails fairly nicely with my attempts to eat as healthily as possible of late. If only my bosses didn't insist on leaving a vast bowl of delicious Jelly Belly beans at my desk. Bastards. Thank the gods for Coke Zero and cheap Vancouver sushi.

2008-01-30T10:30:00.001+05:30

In which a twelve-hour day makes Paul a dull boy...

Trade shows are lame. They take away from my time playing in the snow with the puppy.

For those of you sequestered in remotest Vancouver, you should know that Burnaby got a solid foot of the finest white powder in the last 24 hours. Notwithstanding the 45 minutes I waited patiently for the Skytrain this morning, snow remains the greatest thing ever, and I'll never stop loving this weather.

For those of you who hate snow and need to see the error of your ways, the key is to have a puppy. Despite having seen snow only a handful of times in her short life, Tempo sits eagerly at the window after every flurry and stares mournfully outside. Once unleashed, she tears madly into every snowbank, driving her nose gleefully into the frost. She emerges sneezing, bouncing, and wagging madly. She's obsessed with catching snowballs, which explode gloriously when she collides with them. She waits patiently for me, across the yard, to hoist a vast and fragile double-armful of snow, so that she can sprint furiously and careen headlong into me and witness the joyous results. Anyone who despises this weather simply needs to see Tempo at play in the snow.

2008-01-29T10:33:00.000+05:30

In which I'm shuffling on... desperately...

Burnaby ain't doin' it for me anymore. My folks have asked me to stick around for a few months while they complete renovations - all the better for my mom to have an extra pair of functioning eyes around a redesigned house. It's an arrangement that's worked well enough - financial benefits on both ends, and plenty of time to play with the Tempodog. But now I'm fairly desperately needing my own space, hampered as my social life is by both remoteness and lack of privacy. I've targeted March 1st as my move-in deadline for some place downtown or in Kits, but I'd REALLY like to find something decent (i.e. 1 bedroom) for less than a grand per month. I've been out of the market some time, and it looks like things have gotten nuts in my absence.

Anybody know anything about co-ops? Or hidden treasure apartment buildings where I can get a palatial loft for pocket change? I'm in dire need of pointers here. Of course, there's always the entirely probable risk that six months from now, I'll up and move to Sudan. But we'll cross that bridge as it comes.

2008-01-27T12:06:00.001+05:30

In which I still don't believe in karma...

You know I've been sullen over myriad unwelcome events of the young year. But when I tallied up my life scoreboard of the last few days, over an obscenely vast tureen of noodles at Kintaro's, I couldn't deny that this week was vastly brighter than last. To elaborate:

The vicious bout of long-undiagnosed pneumonia I had battled since at least December, which rose up and thoroughly crippled me two weeks ago, seems to have been decisively curb-stomped. I feel great, and I credit my absurdly simple new health regimen: LOTS of exercise, lots of food, and lots of sleep. And the military-grade antibiotics.

I had a hugely productive week at work, well-appreciated and remarked upon by the powers that be, after weeks (at least) of growing dissatisfaction with my unreasonable workload and unrewarding tasks. Meanwhile, the coworker who'd shunted the lion's share of her work onto me got a gruesome two-hour talking-to from the same elder gods, which left her in no doubt that her job is doomed if she keeps slacking off. I'm genuinely sorry for her situation (I fold instantly when confronted with sincere tears, which were in abundance), but the whole scene still showed me that my efforts are more appreciated than I previously thought.

Last and best, I discovered that I'll have a previously unexpected and entirely welcome visitor from New York in a few weeks - news that couldn't come at a better time. Joy! Details to follow.

There's been other welcome stuff, but I'm tired and that's all for now. Cruelly, criminally, I have to work tomorrow morning, so I still don't believe in karma - but I've still felt some scales tilt back towards the center this week. May next week be even better.

P.S. I was planning to write about politics and my love thereof, but sometimes a week well lived needs a little credit too. Politics will wait for tomorrow.

2008-01-26T10:30:00.001+05:30

In which Christian's pestering leads me on some unsurprising tangents...

In wondering why I'm so obsessed with finding work that fascinates me, Christian said of himself:

"My dream job doesn't exist. I'm not excited or passionate about anything. I don't have the skillset to do anything glamourous, and am honestly pretty damn lazy."

I'll set aside the obvious (and probably true) cliche that Christian just needs to find something to really motivate him. Instead I'd like to point out right now that I'm about the laziest sack of turds I've ever encountered. I procrastinate to a degree that would promptly level civilization if one person in ten followed my lead. I've been known to spend ten hours a day surfing Wikipedia instead of doing my paid job. I didn't start writing my honours thesis until twelve hours before it was due. I can (and do) waste time with the very best of them.

That's why I force myself into asinine deals like my current pay-per-blog imbroglio. I love to write, even thuddingly dull blog posts; I cherish how healthy I feel after I've torn around the Stanley Park Seawall on a disintegrating rented bike; I enjoy a hefty sense of accomplishment as much anybody else. It's merely that that alone won't get me off the couch at any particular moment. Lazy as I am, I still curse myself for days wasted and creativity unexpressed - just never enough to motivate me to do anything substantial. The end result is a predictable spiral of slothfulness, foul-tempered discontent, and ill health. So I rely on my (very) rare moments of proactive lucidity to create contracts that punish future inertia. I get jobs (like my current one) where people rely on me every instant - occasionally with more than their profit margins - because then I can't slack off. I make promises to other people that I'm too cowed to break. I enlist your help in forcing me to write daily. Stiff penalties either financial or social usually suffice to spur me to consistent action, while guilt alone at a wasted life rarely does the trick.

I've accepted my laziness, and now I spend my life defeating it merely by rank self-betrayal. It's worked well enough for me these recent years.

But there's one productive pursuit to which I've never needed any trickery to motivate me: politics. I've been thinking a lot lately, lamentably separated from the great game as I now am, about why that should be so. I'll write more about that tomorrow. Not that this is particularly gripping to you - but it's helping me shine lights into ill-understood chunks of my mind, so I'll be on this tangent for a wee while.

2008-01-26T05:50:00.000+05:30

In which I briefly procrastinate to save some cash...

Tonight's post might come in after midnight - I'm going to a concert and ain't sure when I'll get home. As long as I post something more substantial before I go to bed, I've posted for the day. Them's the rules 'cuz I says so.

2008-01-25T11:57:00.000+05:30

In which nothing has happened...

My perhaps-foolish attempts to hasten pneumonia's departure with daily workouts has yet to cause a resurgence of the dread disease, but it has left me sleepy as hell. I'm not getting home before 10 most nights and I'll be working much of the weekend (a one time deal, methinks). It's left me with tragically insufficient time and energy to undetake the wholesale reworking of the blog I've promised myself.

That and nothing has happened in my life since yesterday - except that I am the proud owner of a tent-like blue shirt emblazoned with an in-your-face Star of David and reading "SHALOM FROM NEW YORK!!!" Thanks Emily! Heehee... it's funny because I'm not remotely Jewish.

Oh, and it's bloody cold outside. The snow that fell last week in Burnaby has yet to melt. To non-Vancouverites, this ain't much of a shocker, but to us, it's vaguely paralyzing. I'll see you tomorrow.

2008-01-24T12:08:00.000+05:30

In which I'm pondering...

Christian asked me, in essence, why I'm not content with a job that doesn't fascinate me. It's a decent and sincere question, and I've been thinking about it in some detail - why do I love the work that I love, and why I am so fucking impatient with every other kind of labour I've ever been asked to do? His question has led me down some well-worn tangents, about which I am far too tired to blog tonight. But I'll have a good blather about it tomorrow, more for my edification than his.

But in the meantime, a counterpoint question to Christian, and everyone else who suffers through work the despise (or to which they merely acquiesce) - why are you content to sacrifice half your waking life just to support the better hours between 5PM and midnight? You'll be doing this work thing for a third of a century, and when that's done you won't get another shot. You can be amazed and energized by your day job, and still draw vast fulfillment from the rest of your life. Why do you think it's somehow undignified or greedy to demand both?

P.S. I need a more private place to blog. I think my coworkers know where this one is. I can't let all my posts be sexless sludge for fear of employer espionage. I'm working on it. Something new comes soon.

2008-01-23T09:32:00.000+05:30

In which I devour the meager fruits of my laziness...

After a hard day at work, and an ill-advised visit to the gym, I got a mite slothful on the way home and didn't pick up anything to eat. I'm paying for it now. The closest thing to a ready-to-eat meal that I could assemble from the contents of the kitchen was tortilla chips with dijon mustard, which, though a tolerable snack, is hardly the banquet I usually try to serve myself. It also seems to be making my throat close up, which might mean I should stop eating, but the taste has grown quite addictive. I guess I need to thaw some chicken.

In other news, I've stopped giving a rat's ass at work. Not that I slack off, but I'm no longer working the nearly-daily overtime I used to - 5:00 sharp every damned afternoon, I now call it quits. Some time ago I noticed that my extra effort wasn't actually making the pile of work smaller, so to hell with it. If I can work flat out for 8 hours a day and still not finish all the tasks gifted to me by the powers that be, then that's their problem, not mine.

Today's photoblog: the Good Friday Procession in Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica, Easter 2006.

In probably every small town in Central America, where the church is the core of the community, Good Friday sees an active reenactment of the walk through Galilee. Locals play the parts of the Romans, the Pharisees, and many others I'm too biblically-illiterate to name. I was charmed by the sincerity and earnestness of the display, but also somewhat unsettled by the genuine grief I saw. More than a few people weep openly as the procession wends through town, and a handful openly wail at the loss of Christ. It confuses me on levels both spiritual and logical, and I suspect it would even if I weren't an atheist. I don't comprehend having such an intense emotional connection to an event that predated me by millennia. Moreover, I don't grasp how a sincere believer can grieve the loss of someone resurrected three days later, whose death was the central tenet of their faith.

Anyhow, it's still a sight to see.

2008-01-20T09:03:00.000+05:30

In which I revel in geekery...

If you're as nerdy as I am, and much quicker of wit and defter of hearing, you need to spend some time at Zero Punctuation. It's a nearly-new Youtube compilation of 5-minute game reviews written, voiced and animated by an acerbically misanthropic Brit. It's profoundly addictive and worth every instant you can devote to it.

In other news, pneumonia is refusing to vacate the premises (my alveoli). I pray to Vishnu that it does so in the next 8 days of antibiotics, lest I suffer the indignity and uncertainty of a chest x-ray. Also, I've exhausted my sick days at work, so it's fairly essential that I recover before demolishing my finances.

P.S. This is written on Eva's computer, which I have briefly commandeered early in the evening before a prospective bout of Rock Band, merely in order to deprive Christian of my $20. Sucker.