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May 11.

can't believe i am still alive. every day i look at this thing i can't understand. this blob. some people call it survival instinct. some are afraid of death. distilling out all the superstition and garbage i would just call it "the habit of living." every morning when you wake up it's like rebooting your computer. during the day the apps get heavy with data and the whole os slows down. when it gets too heavy you sleep. then it starts again the next day. some people sucker punch the bOSs with a few shots of gentleman jackass and beensodieasapeon, but that just sets them up to reboot clean the next morning. that could go on forever. the only way to wipe the drive is to do a 13 pass sdelete overwrite and melt the plates. that's where i'm headed, if i can just get my head straight enough to stay on program.

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arpil 7 2:00 am

still alive. contemplating kauai. daily life becoming monotonous here. not ready to kick the bucket. maybe one last adventure on the shores of the wild island. been there once before. lots of hiding places for a hammock and a mosquito net. still thinking. haven't bought a ticket yet.

continuing saga of women's problems in cambodia. they cannot talk to doctors. a. the doctors are idiots. b. they don't know which drugs are real and they sell the fake ones for a higher profit. c. women in cambodian fear that a doctor can tell if they have had sex before and can spread the rumor that they are not a virgin. d. a large percentage of the women i have interviewed have been raped in some form (those who are willing to talk about it. this is not the first time that i wished i could be a woman so that i could break past this sex barrier of communication. e. i am treating people as if i were a doctor. i have studied medicine for nearly three years. it is the most pressing issue in cambodia. doctors here are morons. one girls had a cut on her cornea and the first doctor wanted to take her eye out. the second doctor actually had a modern eye exam setup, but after the exam he prescribed a hair-loss medicine (alopecia). that trip cost me a teaching job at ALA school, but i was not excited about working for the totally corrupt owner of the school, whose name is "vutha." how many tangents here? ok that's enough for tonight.

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april 30, 2014, 1:27 am, cambodia...

still alive. not much to report. made a telescope today using pieces of pvc and magnifying glasses. total magnification between 9x and 10x. reminded me of cali projects in rainy arcata, and the rain started today! big lightning and thunder here. had a temporary fifty cent rain coat but gave it to the security guard at the market. he was soaked and didn't have one. i had another one at home, and i enjoy the rain. he was cold.

on the last leg of the journey now, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, ready for the last big adventure. don't say i didn't warn you. i started this warning in early february. if you have anything to add, you have been quiet. fine with me, but don't complain when it happens. well, who are you going to complain to? ha ha ha.

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dear jonathan, april 21, 2014

i am very happy that you found my email interesting. i have made many interesting discoveries here. but i am a physicist and a coder - not a sanskritist. i do not speak the "insider's" language of the sanskrit scholars. so those i've written to disregard my inquiries. it is a competitive field like all others, but for me it is just for fun.

i want to answer your question about why we confuse the devanagari with ancient sanskrit. that is my purpose in this email. along the way, i want to send you links to some interesting research sites about sanskrit (and khmer.)

i want to begin with a small example: the water buffalo! it is the same word in modern khmer and ancient sanskrit! (shown clearly on many of the sanskrit inscriptions here.) and if you examine the sample i am sending carefully, i think you will see the remarkable resemblance between even the ancient and the modern script. so let's begin:

my example for you comes from one of the oldest stone inscriptions yet found in this region: Angkor Borei, area: Ta Kev, Saka year: 533 (about 610 CE - we add about 78 years to the old sanskrit lunar calendar "saka" to compare with our modern gregorian.)

here, i want to show you a process which i think you will really enjoy. please follow along with this step-by-step process, and you can see how the modern sanskrit scholars process the information in the stone inscriptions.

a.) find the inscription K.600 N at the http://www.sealang.net/classic/khmer/ website... under:

"Corpus restriction / display"

scroll down to 600 N and then click the button "both" and then you will see in line 2 the following text:

"{2} va kcār 1 ku kantau 1 kon ku va alaṅ 1 ku yaleṅ 1 tmur 60 krapī 2 vave 10 toṅ tneṃ 40 sre sanre 2 ai aṃpoṅ z kñuṃ aṃnoy jaṃ añ ai ta vraḥ kamratāṅ añ mahāgaṇapati z ​"

my focus for this example is a common and simple word: krapī, which is underlined in my quote above. this is the sanskrit AND modern khmer word for the big grey horned animal we call "water buffalo" (in english.) notice that the sanskrit words have been transliterated to a unique phonetic set of characters, and do not use the devanagari or the pallava scripts. (a note about the reason for this later...)

b.) the next step is to view the "gloss" for the word i am showing you at the next link, so you you will visit this next link and paste "krapī" into the sanskrit dictionary of sealang, and click the button "go!":

http://sealang.net/ok/index.htm

on the resulting page, you will see the modern khmer (a screenshot is attached,) along with a list of references to the same word as it appears on other inscriptions. please note that so far all the analytical work on sealang is done in "romanized" characters, neither the ancient pallava from which khmer derives, nor the more modern devanagari, which looks like modern hindi. i have a note about this at the end of this demonstration.

now, please have a look at the attachments to this email. most importantly, have a look at the sample of the estampage of the inscription at k. 600 N, and notice that i have circled in red ink the word "krabey" or "krapī" as is shown on the sealang site. next have a look at the table of letters which shows the evolution and morphology from the pallava script, first used to write sanskrit in southern india, and later migrated to the mekong delta, and beyond, to evolve to the modern khmer letters.

you can see the differences and similarities readily. krabey is a simple word that was written in the region of SE asia for at least 2000 years!

referring back to the question about devanagari, the answer is simple. grantha pallava was replaced by devanagari in india as a means for study, but pallava speciated in SE asia into several modern forms including khmer, thai, laos, but vietnamese has been romanized.

when i first arrived in cambodia, everyone told me that the stone inscriptions were sanskrit. and so it is. khmer letters are a much older form of written sanskrit than the devanagari. but many modern hindi words have the same derivation as you can see in the table i sent you in a previous email.

finally, it appears that "sanskritists" or sanskrit scholars have rendered all the ancient forms of letters into a european form of phonetic characters, because it is apparently not feasible to learn 10 different forms of pallava as they evolved over the course of 2000 years. and, codifying this phonetic form makes it possible to catalog glosses from multiple epochs in the same database, wherein all precedents and variants can be noted withing a single gloss.

now i have a puzzle for you! some of the words in the inscriptions are sanskrit words from india, and some are regional dialect written with the pallava script that arrived from india. my puzzle for you is this: how would you determine whether "krabey" was orginally sanskrit migrated from india or a local spoken-only word transliterated to the pallava letters?

i await your answer!

best wishes,

mark

ps:

i have sent you another long email. this email is a footnote to the other, so please read the other first.

as i have scrutinized the web resources on ancient sanskrit in the khmer empire, it appears to me that there are no sanskritists who are able to read the pallava, old khmer, modern khmer, and devanagari, in order to make the connections among them clear. as a result they have cataloged the words in romanized or transliterated form. this has advantages in efficiency, but the richness of discovery is plundered in this mechanized process.

i must admit too that i have shown my table of old sanskrit and modern khmer equivalents to several students, and none of them agree with me that the forms are similar. to me the similarity is remarkable. khmer people are not analytical. they are not interested in pattern recognition algorithms, and they see no benefit from this course of study.

in cambodia, if a project does not have a financial reward then it has no value. that may sound prejudicial, ​but it remains the mantra of people living in the shadow of the khmer rouge, whose former combatant and murderer is now the prime minister of cambodian, one HUN SEN.

​hi paul,

this is a story i know you will appreciate, so i am writing it first to you, and then i will copy it to my website journal. i have a close friend here i've known for 2.4 years and we've been through a lot of trials and tribulations. there have been some fun care-free times, like the day you met my group of friends at the hotel pool​. but most of the story is unending toil.

sarath is very unusual as a cambodian woman. she won a scholarship to the university where i taught statistics. for the first year that i knew her she lived in a shack and rented a room for $10 per month. there was an outdoor toilet, and well with pump, where she and the other tenants bathed. she told me the story of how a monk came to her village and gave a special test. she scored in the top three and got the scholarship. it included only the tuition. she had to move to siem reap, a real "city," from her village, where she had no electricity, and the light and the little tv in the house run off a car battery. there's a place in the village that recharges everyone's car batteries for fifty cents.

when she arrived in siem reap she was afraid to cross a road. she had never seen so many cars. she had to go everywhere with another person because she did not know the place, and cambodian people cannot read maps. there no street names, so maps are really useless unless you have gps (which i use a LOT by the way to find my way out of the jungle.) she had to work at a part time job because the scholarship only paid for the classes. she finished her first year at puc when i met her. we had a lot of interesting chats, and i was really intrigued by the stories about her mother.

ever since, i have wanted to visit her mom's farm, because from the stories she has told me, her mom is living off the grid as i have tried to do many times. but the farm is hard to reach. it's way off the road in a jungle that is harsh mostly because of the climate, and the hopelessness of most of the people there. under ideal conditions, it's reachable by mountain bike, but i have never observed any ideal conditions here. villagers travel by "nissan" which is what they call a small toyota flatbed pickup taxi. they pile 15 people, sacks of rice, and bikes on the back, four people in the cab, and bounce down the road.

i met her mom once before, last year, when she came to visit sarath at siem reap, and to see the "big city" and the temples. she had never seen a "modern supermarket. there are some pictures of her standing in front of long shelves of products in flashy packaging such as she had never seen before. she wanted to buy something but didn't know what was in the containers! i knew about her life on the jungle farm from stories, and i could relate to the stories from my experiences, but there is something strong about this woman that i could not grasp until i visited her.

this past weekend began the big festivities of the khmer new year, which really lasts two full weeks, with the official hoildays only on april 14 - 16. a chance to visit her mom finally appeared. we rode our bikes to psa leu to meet the "nissan," and piled on and rode to daem daik, about 40 km from sr. cost of taxi $1.50. then her cousin let us use his moto to ride through the jungle and rice fields to her mom's farm.

what amazes me about sarath's mom is that she is always smiling and chuckling, even when she is sick. she is overweight, which is rare especially in remote places. when we arrived, she had a very upset stomach, but smiled and looked so happy to see us. sarath's half sister was their with her two sons. she is staying with the mom until she can raise money to build a grass house. sarath was very happy to see her mom. they only have a chance to meet once or twice a year since sarath came to the city to study.

20 minutes prior to our arrival, a massive rainstorm hit and the sandy road flooded. the moto was overloaded with weight, two people and two huge bags of provisions. we were soaked. the moto was fishtailing everywhere and there were huge puddles of water developing on the trail. we fishtailed badly one time and fell over into a big puddle. my leg landed on the muffler pipe and i seared off the top layer of skin instantly. my bag landed in the orange muddy water and everything inside was absolutely soaked. everything but one white towel, which i slept on.

so when we arrived at the mom's house, i said hello and headed for the well. i needed to clean the mud off my burns and bag, and sort out the mess. i had nothing dry to wear. the mom gave me a big "sarong" to wear that was not very manly, but at least it was dry. we hung everything up and sat down to talk. i put alcohol on the burn as antibiotic and then tiger balm to keep water out of the wound and slow swelling. sarath's mom was looking at me and smiling. all this was perfectly normal for her. she knows me as a city boy and she is not surprised that i crashed the moto in the jungle. there was a little boy sitting next to her and smiling like sunshine. it was sarath's little nephew. he had just brought the cows home from the field and tied them to posts around the house. the cows are enormous. one of them stood on my shoe and mashed it into the mud. i cleaned it again and hung my shoes on a nail on the side of the house. the "stairs" leading up into the house are round logs of hardwood, spaced far enough apart that it takes some practice to go down them without falling off balance. the mom sort of crawls down them.

we forgot to bring mosquito nets and so sarath's mom gave me an old one that had huge holes in it. i keep a small sewing kit in my travel bag, and so i put on my reading glasses, sat by the door in the fading light, and drew up the holes with thread while the women talked. they said they never saw a man sew. i got it done just in time for dark. i hung it up and tucked the edges under the straw mat. i crawled inside about 7 pm and slept 12 hours.

when i woke up the little nephew, named "sain" asked me to go with him to take the cows to the field. he looked so happy to meet me and i really wanted to go, but all i had to wear was this goofy sarong. i tied a line between two trees and hung all our stuff to dry. then we headed out with the cows. sain had a hundred questions for me. but the cows had never seen a big white man before and they were scared. i jumped down from a log and they all scattered into the woods. sain kept instructing me to walk in particular directions to keep the cows in order. he said everything with a big smile. we came to a river and he said, "uncle, can you cross this river?" (khmer people cannot swim, but he can, so he was worried about me.) i said yes, but i asked him if there were leeches in the water. he said no, so we crossed the stream with the cows. the jungle was so beautiful i could not believe it. the rice fields were surrounded by so many curious trees and there were millions of big violet flowers growing all along the trail.

i had seen a familiar primary school textbook at the house, a grade 3 social studies book, and i asked sain if that was his book. he said yes. i asked if there was a school around. he said yes but he could not go because he has to work. he is 13 and has dropped out of school to manage a group of cows. he said he wanted to go to school but couldn't meanwhile his parents were busy getting drunk at a "funeral party." sain is so bright and full of energy. his pants are too big so he holds them up with one hand as he walks. i told the women that i should watch the cows so sain can go to school, because i have already been to school. they laughed, but it's really not funny at all.

when we walked back, we stopped at a little house where there were several members of a family, the sons getting ready to take the plow out to the fields. the father's name was "vong," and sain introduced me to all of them. the mother was seated up on the ledge of the hut, topless, with her sarong pulled down to her waist (this is normal in the far country, but she covered herself soon after i arrived and started talking.) vong was seated on the wagon behind the tractor. his legs were thin like twigs, and folded beneath him. i saw a special bike under the house that looked like it was broken. i had my tools with me to set up a small light for sarath's mom (she has a car battery for her radio.) i wanted to fix the bike but i knew we couldn't get into that because even the poorest people don't do projects on holidays. so we just talked.

i was very sad when i learned from vong that most of the people in that region had sold their rice fields to a private company in vietnam. the village leader came and told everyone they were going to build an airport. it was a ruse. but most people, being so poor, jumped at the chance to get some money. the village leader said they could still work their land and keep some of the rice, so they have all become "tenant farmers" or "sharecroppers."

they know that foreigners cannot own land in cambodian, but i don't think they considered that. what happened is that the cambodian government bought the land secretly through the village leaders, and then leased the land to vietnam. it is just about the most despicable example of corruption and cheating i have heard of. people always talk about the prime minister hun sen stealing land, but this is just pure cruelty.

later, back at the hut, i asked the mom if they offered to buy her land. she said yes but she refused to sell. i was beginning to see how this woman taught her daughter and why sarath is such a resilient person. she said they offered her $2,700 for 4 hectares! absolute corruption!

that day i walked the trail from hut to stream four times. each time i came back the mom was doing something interesting. she disappeared into the thick woods and emerged with a basket full of cashew fruit. i asked her if she knew how to process the nuts. she said that she just sold the fruit to the factory. smart. she had a basket of little fish curing in the sun. she showed me the medicine the pharmacist gave her. it was a ridiculous little bag of seven different pills. after watching them cook food, i began to suspect that she might have an intestinal bacterium. so i replaced her meds with metronidazole and asked her to take it for five days at least. i also gave her some maalox tablets which she said made her stomach feel better right away.

that night sain begged us to take him to the nearby village to a new year party. he put on his little blue jeans and best shirt and combed his hair. we went down the trail. we called another little girl to go with us but her aunt would not let her go. i had no idea what to expect at the village. it was pitch dark when we arrived. we crossed the stream in the dark.

when we arrived at the little cluster of houses, there was an incredible blasting of music from huge speakers at two houses which were side by side. at one house there was a new year party and about 4 people dancing. at the next door neighbor's there was a funeral! there must have been 50 people at the funeral party. i asked sain which party he wanted to go to. he said, "the funeral party." it was so strange. turned out his parents were there and he wanted to be near them.

all the little sellers were closed and the only thing i could find to drink was sugar cane juice. so i bought about six bags. i was so thirsty from being in the sun all day. we walked back home, crossed the river again. i took my sixth bath at the well. there were three frogs trapped in the deep well and i tricked them all out with the bucket. then i crawled into my mosquito net. everyone else slept in one giant mosquito net and chatted while i slept.

this morning, i asked sarath's mother if she followed all three of the usual religions that khmer people follow. she said NO! only one. "preah put." buddhism. there were such moments which peppered this visit. focus, clarity, smiling even when sick. neighbors arriving to buy fruit and things she had prepared. she was such as strong woman.

sarath is very strong too. some things here make sense. some things make me cry. it's a mess, but it's an awesome mess that will kill you or make you stronger.

i hope you enjoyed this story from cambodia.

mark

sr april 15, 2014

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april 11 C O N V E R G E N C E saka new year 1936

what is the magic number? it is at least related to july 22nd, but i don't know why. does anyone out there remember? ... googling now... http://www.historyorb.com/events/july/22 i don't see anything that resonates with me.

today people in cambodia are "gearing up" for an unprecedented huge new year celebration, especially in siem reap, where there is a massive festival planned at the temple park. it is said that people must park outside the park and walk to the temples. that is a long walk for people who culturally do not exercise because "it makes them tired." my house is so close to the entrance to angkor that i imagine my neighbors' cars will not be able to enter or exit for four days, the 13th through the 16th. but i will be gone. i am going to a far farm. a village far from the madding crowd. a place of interest only to those who live there, and now me. i am told that i will see "wildlife," something i do not see in most human inhabited areas because cambodian people will eat any living creature. but this place off the beaten path purportedly accommodates actual untampered wildlife. so i will hope to report back about this if i survive it. "there is no electricity," they say, which i find humorous for so many reasons, including the fact that our brains are powered by electricity.

i am a miscreant. i completely forgot the whole point of this journal entry. as i said, khmer people are getting strongly aroused, aroused to the point of arousal, about this new year holiday bidness. i read that tourism related crap last year amounted to 3.5 billion dollars. not that ordinary cambodian people benefit from such elaborate erections by the ministry of tourism, the apsara authority, and others...

but for most ordinary working khmer people this is their only real holiday. so i want to start with some ordinary examples and finish with the point of this journal entry. the staff at the "preah vihear" pharmacy in siem reap work every day of the year, 15 hours per day, with the exception of the new year holidays from the 14th through the 16th, a three day period in which they race to visit their "homeland," and hopefully offer some of their saved wages to their families in the country. i know three of the staff at this pharmacy. they all live at the pharmacy, on the second floor. they eat all three meals at the pharmacy. the owner brings food in and they eat in the back office. one in particular, named "savy," is actually quite savvy. she knows all the drugs, but is not rewarded for her knowledge. her pay is low, less than $100 per month. she could fruitfully operate a pharmacy of her own but does not have the courage to try it.

i also know the owners. they have several "modern pharmacies" around town. the "father-figure" is what cambodian people call a "doctor," but he couldn't tell you the difference between a leukocyte and a lymphocyte (http://www.differencebetween.net/science/difference-between-lymphocytes-and-leukocytes/) they could double savy's salary for a pittance. probably the amount they spend for gas in a week.

the 14th, savy will ride a "taxi," sitting on the back of an old toyota pickup with 15 other people, their luggage, chickens, and whatnot, and go to her village in "jikrang," about an hour away, paying about $2 for the "taxi" ride. if she has any savings from her work she will probably give it all to her mother.

that sounds harsh but it's not the bottom of the scale. tour company office workers have no holidays, but they trade days off. some people are "lucky." all the other parameters are the same, but they have saturday and or sunday off. still others own their own shops. these people must make the big decision whether to close up, visit relatives, and lose the increased holiday revenue, or work through the madness and get the extra money.

so here is what i am working toward. my next door neighbor "sina" is about 21. she and her cousin (?) started a sewing shop across the street at the "borei premprei" market. they are doing ok. sina's hometown is close enough that i could bike there in two hours. tonight i opened my door and put the fan outside to blow in some fresh air. sina was standing out on the balcony looking very sad. i spoke to her and asked what was the matter. she said that a friend had visited from phnom penh. when they left early today they stole her phone and the small amount of money she had saved at her apartment. as she spoke, she was holding back the tears, but they were welling up in her eyes. she said her roommate and partner had already gone home and she was there alone. said she did not even have taxi money to get home. a friend loaned her the phone and she called home. her family said they could not help her. she was on her own.

i said that i was so sorry about this, and that i had heard so many similar stories that were heartbreaking. i told her that i was taking a taxi with a friend to the town near her village and she was welcome to ride with us. she said that she could not go because khmer people can not travel without pocket money, or, money to go out with their friends, which is the whole point for young people. i stopped short of offering her money, because i am nearly out of money myself, and because i have made this mistake before. no matter how much a foreigner offers a khmer person it is never enough. it is like having a partner or a father who harasses you to "mow the lawn" and when you do it they are not satisfied and point to small swaths of grass that you missed. it is really like that in cambodia. it is pervasive. every person i have ever given a gift of any kind to has always acted disappointed. it is an act to get more. it's that simple. there is a new school of acting excessively gracious, which has the same motive. so, i was sad for sina, sad for the fact that i did not have the means to help her, and sad for my own cynical attitude, evolved from three years in this hell.

anyway, happy new year. oh before i forget... according to the "writing on the wall" at the temples here in the former "khmer empire," this is the beginning of the new year of 1936. the khmer used the "saka" year, and to calculate this year we just subtract 78 from the gregorian calendar year (roughly.) so, i happy because this year i can celebrate my -26th birthday, (negative 26th) and so i don't know if that means i can subtract 26 years from my current age or what. i've actually had a couple of shots of this awesome coconut rum thang which is a partial pina collada. so again, anyway...

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

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APRIL 4, 2014

ALL ARGUMENTS VANISH IN THE MIDST OF PERFECT INFORMATION.

MAKING IMPOSSIBLE THE NOW FREQUENT MISCOMMUNICATION.

IF THE MYRIAD THINGS ARE ONE, AND ALL IS OF A WHOLE,

WHAT ELSE CAN DISAGREEMENT BE BUT AN INFORMATION HOLE?

QUANTUM MECHANICS HAS A FATAL FLAW: PROBABILITY. PROBABILITY DOES NOT APPLY TO INDIVIDUAL EVENTS. IN A CONTEXT OF ABSOLUTE INFORMATION, PROBABILITY CEASES TO EXIST.

IT IS ALWAYS NOW. WE CAN SEE THE RESULTS OF THE EVENTS WHICH PROBABILITY PREDICTED WOULD OCCUR NOW, AND AS WE CAN NOW SEE, THERE WAS (if you believe in the little t) ALWAYS A 100% PROBABILITY THAT THE RESULTS WE NOW OBSERVE WOULD OCCUR.

THE PROBLEM AT THE ROOT OF PROBABILITY IS THAT WE WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO ACCOUNT FOR ENOUGH VARIABLES TO PERFECT THE PREDICTION. IF WE DID ACCOUNT FOR ALL THE VARIABLES, THEN WE COULD NO LONGER CALL IT PROBABILITY.

PROBABILITY IS GOOD FOR BUILDING MACHINES THAT ARE RELATIVELY GOOD AT DOING WHAT WE WANT THEM TO DO, SUCH AS CHANNEL FILTERING, TUNNELING MICROSCOPES, AND SPEECH RECOGNITION. BUT IT ONLY WORKS IN THESE CASES BECAUSE WE HAVE PREJUDICED THE OUTCOME WITH OUR DESIGN OF THE FUNCTIONALITY OF THE MACHINE. CAN IT BE A SURPRISE THAT, KNOWING WHAT WE KNOW, WE SET OUT TO EXPAND WHAT WE KNOW, AND SUCCEED IN DOING SO?

IN CONCLUSION, IN THE ARGUMENT BETWEEN HEISENBERG, AND EINSTEIN, BOTH WERE CORRECT! HEISENBERG SAID THAT OUR KNOWLEDGE DEPENDS ON THE QUESTIONS WE KNOW HOW TO ASK. THIS CAN BE RESTATED FOR THE TECHNO-GEEK AS "WE WILL ALWAYS EVENTUALLY BUILD THE MACHINES WE INTEND TO BUILD, BUT THAT IS ONLY BECAUSE WE MOVED FROM ONE BRANCH OF THE TREE TO THE NEXT. WE DID NOT LEAP TO ANOTHER TREE." OUR CONCEPT OF PROGRESS IS ABSOLUTELY PREJUDICIAL. WE CONTINUE ON THE EVOLUTIONARY COURSE NO DIFFERENTLY THAT DID OUR PRIMORDIAL ANCESTORS: ONE OF ABSOLUTE PREDESTINATION. WE DISCOVER WHAT WE SEEK, AND A FEW OTHER RELATED ACCIDENTAL DISCOVERIES ALONG THE WAY. EINSTEIN WAS SIMULTANEOUSLY CORRECT IN HIS METAPHOR, "GOD DOES NOT PLAY DICE." GIVEN ABSOLUTE INFORMATION, PROBABILITY WOULD VANISH AS A BRANCH OF MATHEMATICS. ABSOLUTE INFORMATION EXISTS; THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT IT DOES NOT, AND SO THERE WAS ALWAYS A 100% CHANCE THAT I WOULD WRITE THIS BRIEF ESSAY CONNECTING QUANTUM AND RELATIVITY FOR THE PURPOSE OF DENYING THAT THEY ARE DISPARATE. HEISENBERG'S UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE DOES NOT SUFFER; IT IS EQUAL TO THE LIMITATION OF OUR CAPABILITIES AS HUMAN BEINGS.

today was a day in cambodia which i would have declared productive a year ago. i gave a brief french lesson to a student and then helped her with an exhausting summary of a book on theravada buddhism written in english by a non native english speaker (and my student is a non native english speaker.) i got a take-out package of fried veggie rice on the way to the lesson and ate about half of it - just enough to get me through. i found a job on a cruise ship for another friend and sent her cv to the office to request an interview, and got a favorable reply. i visited the memorial service for another friend whose husband was a friend and who died two years ago. i found a little bottle of perfume to give her as a gift. she seemed to like it. then i went to study with my favorite student, wattana, who is clearly showing signs of the transition into young womanhood (i have no idea what to call this - puberty sounds stupid.) went shopping for food, took a friend to the bus station for departure to phnom penh, and then came home to eat and return some emails.

two years ago i would have said this was a productive day in cambodia, but i know better now. life is a net zero game. an exercise in the futility of the conservation of energy. we just can't see why and we don't want to believe it's all just mahem.

april fools in cambodia, 2014

hi c,

i am replying again to your email here, because i reflected a lot about what you wrote, that cambodian people are without "...identity." many visitors here have made similar comments. i would like to add something from my experience here and have your opinion of it.

along the lines of your observation, while i lived out in the village, i noticed that neighbors who had grown up together within a hundred meters of each other did not know each other's names, nor anything other than whether or not they were married, and maybe a trifle of useless gossip that usually turned out to be incorrect. as i mentioned to you before many of the kids and even adults that i worked with were nicknamed "mao" (khmer for "black.") i asked a few of them what they though about being called that. they said they didn't care.

when i first arrived here three years ago, there were some enduring impressions. i visited the homes of many people. in the bedrooms of people there are only pictures of themselves on their walls. not their friends, mind you, only pictures of the room's occupant. there is no art. there is some religious iconography but nothing like what europeans call "art." parents have one or two enormous wedding photos installed very awkwardly between the top of a door and the ceiling, some i have seen actually tilted because there was not sufficient space for the frame - this was a modern house in town. my former partner's nieces inspired me to create a facebook account, and it turned out that facebook is where cambodian people store their identity (hidden for the most part, but at least some elements of an identity are there.) like their rooms, their accounts seem about 99% filled with pictures of themselves. and the name "facebook" does seem to suggest that if you look at my facebook you are going to see my face a lot.

recently there were some events which caused me to interpret these things in a different way. to the point, it is not the individual that lacks an identity; it is that the individual does not recognize the identity of others. this might seem like two sides of the same coin, but for me it makes sense of the genocide.

i have hundreds of anecdotes which suddenly fit neatly into this interpretation. but my emails are too long so i will write about one here, and if it interests you i will share others.

anecdote 1. two years ago i stayed at the beach for a month before my annual visit to my parents' in nc. while there i invited a woman i was seeing at the time. a taxi driver who lived in my neighborhood took us to a beach spot one day. i hopped into a store to get some drinks. then we went to the beach, i paid the driver, and we swam and did the usual beach stuff. while we were there, the woman - her name was sarath - told me that while i was in the store the driver asked her if i had paid her yet, and how much did she get.

this was a woman i held in the highest esteem. she did three months service as a nun at angkor. she has a full scholarship at the university where i was teaching statistics. i was quite angry. i asked her why she didn't tell me immediately. she said to avoid trouble. she returned to siem reap, and i returned to my rental.

a day or so later i saw the driver again. i flagged him and he thought i wanted a ride. i started out by knocking the helmet off his head. i told him that i knew what he said to my friend and that he made her feel like a prostitute. he said that he was going to bring the police. about an hour later he and a "police man" appeared at my rental. my landlord was there. the landlord and i hit it off well from the start, and had some nice chats, so he was concerned. the driver, the police, and the landlord and i sat down for a chat.

the police asked me why i hit the man. i told him the story. that he had berated my friend and inferred that she was a prostitute. i said that she was a person of the best reputation. the landlord then said that this driver was a gossip. the police said that because i was a foreigner he was required to call an interpreter, even though i could speak khmer. the interpreter came.

the police told me that, no matter what happened, i had no right to strike the man. i agreed. i told him it was an act of outrage. i told him that it is the driver's responsibility to transport people from one place to another and not to ruin their reputations. the police agreed. when the interpreter came, they all wanted to talk to sarath and hear her side of the story. so we called her.

when she spoke to the interpreter, she told him that the situation was not clear to her. she did not know what the driver meant when he asked her how much i had paid her. she completely revised the story she had told me at the beach. it occurred to me that she was afraid because the police were calling her. in that moment of fear when the police called her, it never occurred to her that changing her story would leave me hanging out on a cliff. but that is what happened. this inconsistency in story-telling has cost many an acquaintance his fiance's visa, and worse. it is possibly the best positive reinforcement for absolute honesty.

ultimately it was my landlord who saved my ass. he told the police that this driver was known to cause trouble like this. ultimately, the police warned me not to use violence, the driver stalked away claiming that i had injured him, and the only relevant result was that my relationship with sarath was permanently damaged, possibly ruined. we discussed this several times. she apologized many times saying that she "did not know what to say to the police." each time she did something stupid like this there was an accompanying excuse which protected herself.

i am not saying that this "self" constitutes an "identity" in your terms, but that there is a core self which is self-preserving, fully endowed with survival instinct. in cambodia it is not clear to me whether identity is, for example, myself or the perception of myself by others. but i am beginning to feel strongly that it is the latter. this is reinforced by the fact that so many decisions are made totally on the basis of "how the neighbors will talk," rather than "what is the smartest thing to do."

i don't want to belabor the drama with sarath. she is a flake. she changes her story every day, and so i just blame myself for getting involved with someone without knowing them well enough (without a basis for trust.) hemmingway said "the best way to find out if you can trust someone is to trust him." i did that. i found out.

there is something peculiar about my brain that is like the "common denominator effect." stories that have similar components tend to collect in compartments in my brain. stories like the one above, where a supposedly mature adult changes a story suddenly like a child who fears punishment, have collected in my head in the hundreds under the heading, "think only of myself." or just "selfish," or "self involved," worst of all, "just plain stupid."

so, my point in writing this is not to refute that people here have no identity; i believe that you are exactly right. but i would like to add that they are desperately searching for one by taking hundreds of photos of themselves, and by thinking only of the consequences to and for themselves, and never, as far as i have observed, considering the "identity" or consequences (compassion) for another human being.

that was likely exhausting. but i hope not boring. why was i suddenly inspired to write this? during the past week i have encountered a story like this every day. (i have not been physically aggressive,) but the substance of the stories is all the same.

i hope you will let me know what you think about this with regard to you experience here.

best,

mark

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29 march, 6:02 pm

still alive. surprising revelation about a khmer friend "hooking up" with a foreigner at a bar on pub street (which is the area in town where foreigners go bar-hopping and khmer people go foreigner-hopping. technically i suppose foreigners foreigner-hop too, but but why fly from new york to cambodia to apples when there are star fruit, dragon fruit, durian, and a hundred other exotic fruits to taste?) rationally, i should not be surprised but i am. that is the nature of emotion; it is irrational.

like the sudden unexplained death of a favorite student, a middle-class student's crying to me that her family are poor as if i could help them, the myriad nonsensical events of everyday life in cambodia, this one will just travel down the list as the list expands.

i am tutoring french again. when i tell people that i failed french in high school, they reply that i speak french perfectly and without accent. it was the only class i technically failed in high school. in reality i failed high school completely and my interest in study did not arise until i discovered the computer terminal and a book on basic programming when i was 15. one thing led to another, and it now appears that study is the only thing that i am interested in. "research" is probably a more fitting word than study. but this is just prattle. so, who cares.

counting the dots below, i nearly reached my two week supposed deadline for using this page as "proof of life." whew!

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17 march, 4:00 pm

almost time to go teach my favorite student. just a few thoughts to enter into my journal that is, according to google sites, "shared with the entire world." this thought is about a balancing act. a narrowly intelligent person once told me that if i don't have a family of my own i will eventually become a lonely old man. these words from a "published and (somewhat) esteemed" author. i write "narrowly intelligent" because some people appear to be quite smart in a particular area and quite dumb in a lot of other areas. they are not balanced, and so their advice is likewise unbalanced. so it appeared to this person, who obviously cared about me and expressed some concern for my future that i was on a course leading to a future of loneliness. what i found striking about this statement of concern was that my friend had a family: a husband who was the chancellor of a university, and four bright kids who were also friends of mine, and yet it was SHE who seemed truly lonely. it seemed to me that her life was a trap which prevented exploration, limited her range of new experiences to those considered by american society to be appropriate for her position as wife, mother, and professor. furthermore, her own personal fears appeared to correlate well with this prognostication about my future. i suspected that she was projecting her own situation into mine. why? she had a family! how could she, in her unhappy situation prescribe a similar fate for me? is it "misery loves company?" is it jealousy disguised as empathy?

why do people need other people to "join their club?" christians are the most fierce aggressors in this arena, and my friend was catholic. people need "drinking buddies," new adherents to give them "strength in numbers," confidence that they are not "out on a limb." i love a good cliche, and this is an area which seems like a fountain of cliche. so we debated this subject regularly. i recalled a photo of menachim begin taken shortly after his wife died, and pointed out that love is not something permanent. are the magnitudes of love and loss balanced? i did not want to say that my friend's husband did not seem to love her passionately and that this was perhaps the reason we were on the subject. but i hide nothing from myself. if he had died she would have mourned briefly, and i suspect very soon thereafter realized a freedom that she had never imagined.

on the other hand, i have recently encountered a claim of such a deep and inspiring love that i am now motivated to revisit this subject. many anecdotes of recent months converge here. the first story is of a love which many people bore witness to as a inspiring true love. that love ended in a tragic death. i don't mean to say that some deaths are not tragic, nor to be insensitive in the way that idea resounds. but this death was especially tragic because there was subtracted from the world's ledger of positive force one generous soul. and the grief of those bearing witness to that loss appears as a never-ending memorial. this love story amounts to a testament that is persuasive.

yet another friend's wife died recently, and though this is a delicate subject, i feel that learning is more important to us than the maintenance of secrecy or the preservation of "dignity" - a concept i find suspicious especially when applied to people. my friend's wife threatened to kill him, among other terrible things, and their struggle was intense for many years. i might go so far as to say that this "love," was the antithesis of the inspiring true love mentioned a paragraph above.

i stray not from the subject at hand: that one can do battle with loneliness and win, as proposed by my friend in paragraph one. let me be the first to complain about the confusing nature of the word "friend" as used here. i cannot include the names of these friends, so please attempt to name them yourself by the characteristics attributed them. my friend and i discussed this subject at length as i transcribed, proofed and edited her biographies of semi famous women.

i cannot exclude the example of my parents from this discussion because they are the couple that i know most about. my mother is one determined to extract positive results from even the most hopeless situation. she is jolly, fun-loving, generous, and kind. my father may have possessed some of these qualities when they met in high school. but his career, fear of poverty, "nose to the grindstone" work ethic, rigid self-contradicting ethics, religion, and morality all appear to have marched through his front door and destroyed the joy. what holds these two people together i long suspected to be my mother's flexibility and my father's money. women want a provider, even in 2014, and manly men love a subservient woman. this is an unforgivably brief summary of a fifty year marriage. age forms habit, habit is intransigent, and people cling to it even as they themselves disintegrate. another example of "love" thus given: is one of them lonely? if so we will never know. "appearance is everything" with these two.

next, we have an unmarried man who is free to roam about and do as he pleases. he has a few friends, an occasional "love interest," some lasting months, and some years. he feels lonely sometimes but is more often preoccupied with study, reading, writing, doing art, and searching for answers to the mysteries of life. this person unfortunately suffers from occasional severe "clinical depression," for lack of a better phrase and to distinguish it from the depression that accompanies the death of a spouse or child. for many years this person's family and friends suggested that erroneous life choices, mistakes, blunders, financial mismanagement, and general purpose crazy behavior resulted in the "clinical depression." fortunately, these uneducated assertions were dispelled by research, and the depression became an illness like an immune dysfunction or any other congenital problem. we all have them, whether identified, recognized as such or not. the sooner the better for the development of the individual, which is why i claim that revealing and learning from personal problems supercedes confidentiality. talking about a drinking problem, a persistent urinary tract infection, herpes, for example, all contribute to the collective wisdom, whereas secrecy preserves only ignorance.

an important consideration, i was taught by force while living in cambodia, is that each person has a valid and relevant point of view. my ideal was always to adopt a child rather than to marry someone and give birth. this ideal unrealized probably led me to do the volunteer work with the kids in cambodia, as i was never qualified to adopt formally. while here, i met several women who were interested in marrying me. it is funny in retrospect that conflict and disagreement are of a hierarchical nature, and that if the problems near the the trunk of the tree are never resolved then the problems on the outer branches may never even be discovered! my attempts at marriage here ended because of conflicts related to buying dead animals and beer for 600 people to eat at the wedding party (i am a vegetarian.) "why can't you eat meat?" because i don't want to kill, and it's not necessary since the vegetarian diet is healthier. "you don't have to kill - the animals are already dead." sorry, not a solution. once i got past this "tree trunk problem of money, killing, and feeding 600 relatives of my fiance, people i've never met." we then moved on to the next branch of the tree. the baby. "when do you want to have a baby?" never. there are too many children already, and their parents don't take care of them. that turned out to be a "deal breaker" more potent than the one about the meat and money for the party. the reason it didn't come up first was that cambodian people get married first and then get to know each other later. and also khmer people presume the woman will pump out the babies. the question only arises with foreigners marrying khmer women.

finally, we have a multitude of scenarios. people who are married and lonely. people who are married and lonely but refuse to admit it. people who are married and happy and double-plus unlonely. people who married, someone died, and the survivor was either liberated or lost in dispair. people who married several times, apparently never achieving their goal, and their goal may never have been known to them. and finally people who never married, are occasionally lonely and occasionally happy. what's the best answer? i claim there is no answer because we are not in control of what happens in our lives. there are too many variables even for the best computer. we simply cannot know. however, i do believe that there is a conservation of emotional energy at work in our social contract. there is balance, and people seek balance whether they know how or not. the result is slightly ordered chaos.

14 march, 10:04 pm

i am reading a khmer book right now entitled, "why do people lie?" the actual title in khmer sounds more like "the point of lying." it reads like an instruction manual rather than an analysis of the problem of lying. but there are a lot of expressions i don't understand, so i am hoping there will be a positive message somewhere in the text. more on this later. as for the story of dalin related in the 13 march article, no further attempts at connecting appear to be forthcoming. so i will just "let it go," as they say. let sleeping dogs lie.

on the topic of "almost romances," two of the staff at my favorite lunch restaurant returned after a three month absence yesterday. the older sister, "pheroom" had invited me to her village to meet her parents. she expected me to ask them to allow us to marry, but i had been through this so many times that i had a different plan. i will use any excuse to get access to a remote village in cambodia and add a story to my collection. i met pheroom's parents. this was maybe five months ago. a lot of her relatives gathered around under the house to listen in. i gave some gifts to pheroom's immediate family. i noticed a still smoldering nearby and asked if they were making rice wine. they said yes, this was their family business. the big surprise came when i asked her family to allow us to meet occasionally to get to know each other better. i said that most khmer people marry without knowing each other, and the problems arising from this unfamiliarity were apparent everywhere in cambodia. some people said i did not know what i was saying. others understood. the parents agreed, i suspect because they were surprised by the question and did not know how to improvise an answer. pheroom was clearly unhappy with my request. she expected a definite proposal, to be followed by an agreement upon the dowry amount. her purpose was to help her family, her duty as eldest sister. so she was angry, and remains so to this day. her parents agreed to allow us to meet, but each time i called pheroom she said that she was busy. she changed jobs and moved in with her brother. i did not see her for several months.

yesterday she came back to work at the restaurant where we originally met. she is marginally polite. she claims there is no problem as all khmer people do, but the problem is no mystery. i broke a khmer rule, and she will never forgive me for it. fortunately the owner of the restaurant is not phased by the incompatibility. she continues to make me two take-out orders of veggie rice every day, which i eat at home while studying. how many times have i gone through this cycle? each time there are nuances which seem worth mentioning. for example, khmer people generally acknowledge that alcoholism is a problem here. but pheroom's family distills enough ethanol to keep all her immediate neighbors drunk from sunrise to sunset.

13 march 2:00 am depressing.

my "friend" dalin and her mother have a sewing shop. dalin's husband does not live with them. i don't know why. as of today it seems everything she ever told me may have been a lie. while most khmer women agree that khmer men are bad, this seems increasingly spurious as i gather these anecdotes.

within a few days of meeting me, dalin said that she had an australian fiance and asked me to translate and negotiate the terms of their wedding. she can't speak english. he can't speak khmer. when he arrived and got diarrhea he went to the hospital, they told him he had dengue fever and he paid $1200 for a day there and a couple of shots and serum bag of sugar water. he was tricked into visiting cambodia by a website which offers "retirement in chiang mai for $500 per month," and the initial fee for setup includes a woman. a foreigner operates the website as if it were in the popular thai city of chiang mai, but all the phone numbers on the website are cambodian. it's a "bait and switch" scam. tuktuk drivers collect phone numbers of women around town who are interested in a foreign husband, and when a customer arrives the tuktuk driver accompanies on the first date and attempts to translate. this went awry for dalin and geoffrey. they could not communicate.

when i came to translate for them, they immediately agreed that they loved each other and would plan to marry. dalin's mother looked grumpy. she said in khmer that, "this man is fickle, or flaky." Geoffrey smiled and asked dalin to "hug" him. this is not appropriate in cambodia, but dalin is not very appropriate either so she attempted to hug the man. he weighs at least 150 kg. for those of you who don't speak metric, that's HEEAAVYYYY. i got a photo of tiny dalin (maybe 45 kg) trying to hug jabba. i had to delete it i can't stand to look. i asked dalin to wait until the next meeting to discuss money, and to enjoy the happiness of the moment. she told me to ask him for $3000. he said he would not pay more than $2000.

they repeated the equivalent of a childish "yes no" volley for three minutes and then geoffrey stood up with great effort, mounted his motorcycle, and drove away as if he had decided not to buy a TV that was too expensive. i didn't see any evidence of what i would call love, nor any sparks of romance flying between them. it was business.

a day or two after he left dalin asked to marry me. my first reply was that she had very recently claimed to love the australian and agreed to marry him. i also told her i could not support her family and do my volunteer work. since that time, more than a year ago, i have tried to help out a bit. we remained friends, although it seemed as fragile as her "engagement." my real interest was with dalin's two cute little daughters. they always want to play and they always seem so happy, a stark contrast to their mother and grandmother. recently, last week actually, our relationship took a sudden turn.

a true friend sent me a quote recently, "no good deed goes unpunished." i had an idea to bring foreigners who live in siem reap to dalin's shop and translate so they could get more work. the first person i brought to them is a neighbor named rachel, a very kind and flexible person. she needed a simple hem. dalin botched it, leaving the horizontal stripes uneven at the bottom of the skirt. my golden goose was dead. instantly dead. killed in two days. i bumped into rachel coming home from work. i could see on her face that she was unhappy. it's not just the cost of the repair that was botched - it's that now you have to wear this skirt that is asymmetrical. i was really surprised. they let me use their machines to do my own repairs. i've seen their work and it's always sharp and clean.

so i told dalin that i would not be able to recommend additional foreigners. she didn't seem to care. i offered to pay rachel for the skirts. she wouldn't hear of it. i have lost count of how many of these "brilliant ideas" i've had that have just turned to dung in a splat.

the week before, dalin told me she needed to build a new house and needed $20,000 for the building. that's a lot of money in cambodia. she has two little girls who are growing fast and in another year they wont be able to get all four - two moms and two daughters - on one motorcycle. so i've worried about them a bit. this was the motive for trying to bring foreigners into the shop. dalin and i have had moments where it seemed like something might happen between us, but it never does. it's creepy in a way. it's like she's not real.

today i went by the shop to say hello. dalin was not there but her younger brother who does not know me was there eating lunch. dalin was not there to tell him to shut his mouth, to warn him not to give away her secrets. i asked where she was. he said she went to get the deed for the house. i said what house? he said the new house...did she invite you to the "new house party?" i've been lied to in cambodia a lot and i am used to it, but i have to admit i was really surprised by this one. i told him dalin said the week before that she needed money to build a house. he said the house was already built and they planned a "house warming" party for 400 people for the 30th of this month, and he asked again if i was invited. i asked where the money came from. he said they borrowed ten thousand from the bank. well, at least now i know why she was not interested in my idea to bring foreigners into the shop.

i have written about this before, but i will mention it again as a supporting anecdote. cambodian banks are still making "sub prime" loans, even after the crash of 2008. the effects in cambodia were very bad for a lot of people, but not as bad as in the usa. today in cambodia, banks loan money to people whom they suspect will not pay it back, with the specific aim to take their land (and house.) khmer people think they are clever and they borrow extra money - more than needed for the main purpose - with the specific aim of keeping the extra aside and using it to make the initial monthly payments to the bank. their hope is that they will get lucky and "find money" as cambodians call it to pay back the loan. what eventually happens is that they start borrowing money from friends piecemeal to make the monthly bank payments. this scenario was an important part of the reason for the breakup with my first "fiance" of three years ago. her family had gotten into the same bind of "borrowing from peter to pay paul." my volunteer fund was a pittance compared to their debt (i am writing about sineth now.) and so it appears that dalin and her mother have made the same blunder.

this bit of unexpected family mechanics from dalin's brother also shed light on another issue. recently a rather large display of zippers, beads, and various other accessories suddenly appeared out in front of the shop. there were hundreds of zippers on a rack that blocked half the facade of the shop. i have no idea how much a huge zipper display costs. it stood out. it was intended to draw attention. the other sewing shops at the market have nothing like this kind of display. i noticed it of course, but it didn't occur to me how they might have paid for it until her brother told me about the loan.

so last week when she told me she needed $20,000 to build a house, she had already borrowed $10,000 from the bank and already built a house. i suppose i have become a collector of lies. the lie collector. a lot of people have told me that i am crazy for staying here. cambodian people, like mexicans and people i've met from other countries are telling me daily how much better my life would be if i lived in my country. the irony of that tickles me. do they think they know more about life in the USA than i do? i am not leaving, but i am narrowing my little path considerably. i am no longer the explorer that i was in my 30s and 40s. i am happy to have one good friend to go out for a drink with. i am content with my small comfortable rental, and my old bike. i like the family that make my take-out lunch and diner and i am friendly with them and the neighbors. it is a simple life, and it is getting simpler. i am closing in on the center. the point where i disappear.

there now! that's a story.

11 march, 2:00 am

sluggish means "slow-moving or inactive." i use this word to describe most cambodian people. i wonder if this derives from a "slug," which is a "shell-less terrestrial gastropod mollusc." but "slug" also means "to strike a heavy blow," and it also is a word for a bullet fired from a gun. to "strike" means "to hit," but it also means to swipe a match across a rough surface so as to ignite the combustible material (Phosphorus sesquisulfide and Potassium chlorate) a "match" though could be a game, a couple of star-crossed lovers, a pair of items that are extremely similar (nearly alike,) or as already mentioned, a little stick with a chemical on the end used to start a fire. back to "striking a heavy blow," blow means "cocaine" to some people (methyl (1R,2R,3S,5S)-3- (benzoyloxy)-8-methyl-8-azabicyclo[3.2.1] octane-2-carboxylate). why cocaine is called "blow" when it is actually "sucked" into the nose or "snorted" is a mystery (sucking and blowing are sort of opposites non technically.) "blow" also means to "exhale forcefully," as to "blow up a balloon." "blow up" means not only "inflate" but also "to explode," as with a bomb, which is not what we usually hope will happen with our balloons, but which is what nixon did to cambodia, and which is one of the reasons that cambodian people are sluggish. "means" can refer to wherewithal, or resourcefulness, or it can be about the meaning of a word, while "mean" can mean someone who is double-plus unkind. my father uses wondering when he means wandering, but uses both incorrectly. slug appears to be the point of this journal entry. my students are confused by the contradictions in syntax, semantics, morphology, discourse, vocabulary of the english language (ie, all the components of linguistics can be discounted with regard to english.) "suck" has a lot of meanings.

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9 march 2014 1:00 am

FREEDOM BY FORCE.

i just deactivated my facebook account. i tried to let the few friends i had there know that i will be posting here now, until the count up is complete. no one replied. i don't know if anyone there has seen this page or not. about a week ago i "hid" all the content on my "wall." goddess damn i hate facebook. tonight i have a story to tell, but first a little intro.

around age 27 i spent two years studying genocide at the wake forest university library. i read books. we had the internet but at that time it was not yet "stocked" with the millions of pdfs we have now. i started with the "pogrom," the nazi destruction of the jewish people and culture in germany. i was surprised to learn that there were many "genocides" throughout history, and i wondered why we never learned about those horrific events in history classes.

i finished up my study with cambodia. the genocide in cambodia remains in my mind as the most unique and strangest of them all. khmer people killing khmer people without particular distinction. personally i don't think there was much distinction between german jews and german non jews. after all, were all human. cultural differences don't amount to much, and the cambodian genocide made that evident.

i have watched documentaries where khmer men who killed thousands of people at S21 and other locations in cambodia were interviewed. their demeanor was calm, and almost devoid of any expression of emotion. one man was asked why he killed his fellow khmer people. he answered that if he did not kill them his bosses would kill him. when he was asked why these killings were ordered he answered that the purpose was to "prevent khmer culture." that is a literal translation. in other words, he and his comrades felt no powerful instinct to resist this destruction. not only did they kill their own people, but they performed horrible mutilations of their victims before and after death.

i have rarely revealed to people that an important reason i came to cambodia for my humanitarian or volunteer project was that i wanted to explore the social environment of a place where a genocide had recently occurred and try to understand why it happened. after learning to speak and read khmer well enough to interview people on my own, i felt confident that i could get at the heart of the matter. old people are reluctant to talk about the genocide. often because they did the killing, and often because they were victims. as a result they do not discuss it with their children. furthermore, most cambodian school kids upon hearing stories of the genocide do not believe it. they believe it is a myth, like a ghosts story. it is too big to believe.

to sum up the results of my three years of conversations and interviews very simply: cambodian people hate each other.

that is the end of the intro, and now for the story. about a month ago a friend connected to the government here called me to visit her house because she had a job for me. i arrived a bit early and caught the last part of another meeting. in cambodia today, former "soldiers" of the khmer rouge are called "tehien chas chas," which means "old soldiers," even though they are only old by cambodian standards, where half the population is under 20. in this other meeting my friend and another man speaking about gold and jewels that were found in a cave in another province. after the other people left i asked my friend if an "old soldier" had told her about the treasure. she said yes. i told her that if there were actual treasure then it was certainly the personal possessions of the victims of the genocide. she understood the implication and replied that if she did not get and sell it someone else would. i asked her why the old soldier would tell her and not take the treasure himself. she said he did not have the resources. the next part of this story i consider to be improbable, but this is what my friend told me. she said that the son of the prime minister had already visited the cave with some "equipment" to test for the presence of the gold and so forth and that it was a valid claim.

it was a hot day. i was disgusted with the subject and exhausted after a very long bike ride. on the way back home i texted my friend and told her i could not accept the job (the job was not related to the treasure.) she seemed a bit pissed about this but she is too busy to worry about a singular employee. a few weeks passed. we spoke again one day by phone. i asked her how the treasure hunt turned out. she said it didn't. she said she is sticking to real estate from now on. real story? actual result? i have no idea. i don't know why she told me any part of the story. the only value in this story is the disregard for the genocide and the destruction of life that occurred, as represented by the lack of interest in the origin of the supposed treasure, the race to lay hands on it, the craven greed that has a death grip on this country.

we know the hutus hate the tutsies. but why do cambodian people hate each other? i have another simple answer. all people actually hate each other because of the single force that drives all survival: competitivity. people pretend to cooperate with each other when there is a mutual benefit. when that mutual benefit breaks down, the former allies become competitors.

i suppose for a social anthropologist there is nothing new here. but for a computer programmer attempting a transition into the world of humanitarian aid these revelations about human nature are demoralizing to say the least. but each example correlates well with prior experience. when my father retired from his job, his company stopped paying for his country club membership. when that happened the people at the club realized he wasn't wealthy and they dumped him. he had thought they were his friends. he moped about in a cloud of naivete for some time and apparently the prozac got him through the anxiety. he just gave a simple anecdote that a former friend did not invite them to their daughter's wedding. he pointed out that these social echelons are divisible by money. he asked me if i thought i could be friends with bill gates. this became known as "the garberville preponderance," which i have written about exhaustively.

so why don't american people have a genocide and kill each other? i think they will.

a lot of individuals have obviously tried and succeeded in executing their own personal holocausts, ie, sandy hook, va tech, etc. when will people get the big picture and do it on a larger scale? what will trigger it? when i was a kid people "went postal." now they "go academic."

since i was a kid growing up on "60 minutes" i have always known that american government and big business are one and the same entity pretending not to be. obama's obamacare has only served to unveil the pretense. the government is now forcing people to buy insurance they can't afford and using the irs to punish them for not doing so. capitalism by direct economic aggression. maybe the ensuing american holocaust will be a medical holocaust.

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march (back and) fourth, 2014. 11:44 pm

i am walking in the shadow of the last "depression episode" which was extremely painful for two full weeks. it felt like people i loved had died. it felt like a nightmare. now i look out on the far horizon as i did from the mountain hut in tucson and watch the storms marching across the desert. i mark the ones that appear to be headed toward me. i estimate their arrival. i brace. but i have no defense.

in the usa i volunteered as a math tutor evenings for kids at a school for deaf or "hearing impaired." that was a government school. a private school of the same type would need private sponsors. if private, profitable companies in the usa use NGOs fronting as poverty, disability, or education relief to line their pockets, it's just something i'm not aware of personally. it's only because i never explored it. we know that most corruption dollars in the usa disappear in the form of "taxes." in cambodia profitable companies fronting as NGOs is a social disease.

today one of my private students asked me why people lie. we made a list of reasons. so we know why, but the answer to the question is not satisfying. it's not satisfying because it's not really a question - it's an exclamation of frustration and bewilderment. the correct answer to the question is not satisfying because it means the world sucks, especially for people who have depression like me.

when i taught statistics at pannasastra university here, i asked my students what they "wanted to be when they grew up." about half of them said "i want to start and NGO and help my people." in cambodia this has only one meaning: free money from foreign sponsors. everyone knows about it and everyone is trying to cash in. this is the reason i stopped fund raising for my project and started working to support it on my own. businesses like the dive center pretend to have an conservation program. the owners may have 20 different fronts. there are no environmental laws in cambodia. some may be written in the bogus constitution but none are enforced. it is all a big lie.

the american manager of the giant ibis bus company publicly pledged $50,000 to protect the endangered ibis that his company is named for and that is native to cambodia. he is a capitalist pig who is simply tapping the "green" or environmental money. i bet he never saw an ibis in his life. but ministers from the gov showed up for his donation because his company is owned by kith meng. there's that name again. that name is a curse like the name of the prime rib roast minister.

i didn't know that the educational center was connected to the dive shop at koh rong. but i noticed the similar address. usually when companies in camobodia (pretending to be schools) advertise for an esl teacher it is a paid job. if it is not a paid job then they call it a "volunteer" position. and within this nomenclature there is the implication and craven craving for "donations."

wow. i have to say, turkish and khmer - that's about the most ridiculous mix culturally i have ever heard of. people who are just about money make me sick. sakip wrote me a stupid note that did not reference any of the info i sent him. what an idiot. i really don't care if people pretend to be nice. i've lived though that pretense for 3 years. i would like to see someone produce something of substance rather than flash.

i am probably not going to travel. as i mentioned before, i have found a niche, a comfortable routine. i have no intention of shaking it up. i have been to 101 islands. i'm just not the thrill seeker anymore. this is perhaps the onset of age. it is inevitable.

{technically the same day...}

march back and fourth, 2014. 1 or 2 am

"give me chastity and give me constancy,

but do not give it yet."

quoting an article by an old friend i have never met, mr. brooks:

"Michel de Montaigne and Samuel Johnson are two of the greatest essayists who ever lived. They tackled similar problems and were fascinated by some of the same perplexities, but they represent different personality types and recommended two different ways to live.

Continue reading the main story

BUT THEN JOHNSON SOUGHT OUT TO EARNESTLY REFORM AND CORRECT HIS SINS. HIS DIARIES ARE FILLED WITH URGENT SELF-COMMANDS TO STOP BEING SO LAZY. HE WAS A MORALIST, WRITING ESSAYS ON THE VICES AND PAINS THAT PLAGUED HIM: ENVY, GUILT, BOREDOM AND SORROW. HE PINNED DOWN AND NAMED EVERYTHING THAT TERRIFIED HIM. HE WROTE BIOGRAPHIES OF MORAL EXEMPLARS THAT READERS COULD EMULATE.

dear kelly

you always amaze me with your ability to send me articles that are fascinating, apply to my personal being, and ones that without your recommendation i probably never would encounter. david brooks was my only conservative tv friend during the 12 years i lived with wadeth. he appeared in a regular (thursday?) evening debate with a liberal counterpart whose name i don't recall, and jim lehrer sitting between as ombudsman. we used to eat dinner and watch. brooks seemed like the smarter and more energetic one, but in keeping with his summary of montaigne, kept his presentation under control, although frequently we noticed his butt leap forward a few inches and perch on the front edge of his chair!

i think that if the buddha could have spoken english he would have chosen the word "equipoise" instead of "middle path" to describe the way people should live their lives. this is one of those moments where we search for just the right word, it seems like one i invented. someone invented it. or "coined" it. and it's like the tightrope i've been walking socially all my life: thoughts emerge stimulated by conversation and i am constantly applying filters i have developed for 40 years to try to decide what to reveal and what to conceal. the line in this article "if he has a small penis he will tell you" made me chuckle. because i was at my friend's sewing shop and they have a huge bag of foam rubber bra inserts to augment the apparent breast size of the woman. i told my friend (who is a bit irreverent) that i might insert one of those in my pants. you remember the "flight of the conchords" song "i see you girls checkin' out the front of my trunks" ?? but my friend suddenly got very serious and said, "cha! khmer women are afraid of a big penis. they afraid it will hurt. they want medium penis."

for a person like me who struggles with inner monsters and "chimera" like montaigne, it is a great advantage to live in a country where i cannot speak the language very clearly. when i say something really absurd, crude, or disrespectful, everyone automatically laughs and attributes it to my poor grasp of the khmer language. they don't realize that i said exactly what i intended to say, and just presume i don't realize that it's unacceptable. i get the laugh i hoped for, but for a different reason than i intended. :-)

"tolerant" this is a word that haunts me. patience and tolerance were the two virtues most lacking my life. that struck a nerve i must say, as i read this article. this is where a person like montaigne can be distinguished from a person like me. he apparently developed a working strategy for life. i am still flopping around like a fish out on dry land. in cambodia. but i do know how to die, and i look forward to that freedom.

the description of johnson reminds me of my father. our last interaction was when my father sent me a "statement of his beliefs." the statement contained a segment of a prayer which my father says that he prays often. part of it goes, "no one on earth knows how to pray correctly..." the statement is externalizing moral problems like brooks' description of johnson. when i replied that i "believe in probability," my father fired back one of the most condescending remarks i have experienced from anyone. he wrote, "you should stand in front of the mirror and repeat that 20 times to test if you really believe it." he can write that sort of crap to me, but he dare not write it to his "friends" from the country club, lest he find himself abruptly de-clubbed. and when i hear indirectly of the friction between myself and my father in emails from my mother it is quite clear that all under my father's financial dominion twist and curl to fit themselves into his narrow tunnel of reasoning. i think this is the most common way that people deal with their personal problems: to find external issues that appear to correlate with their internal conflicts, thus giving them substance, rather than leaving them suspended in the ether of the imagination.

my new neighbor from australia goes to an adventist church her but says that she is not adventist. she loves the old testament. she says that there is enormous wisdom in the old testament, and that if if people would simply follow the ten commandments the world would be at peace. i have to agree with that. it seems like jesus (in modern practice) sort of nullified the ten commandments. i hear a lot of people claim that accepting the sacrifice of jesus exempts us of the sins, or the breaking of the commandments.

finally, thanks again. i really appreciate it when you forward me these gems that inspire thinking. i don't get this kind of thing in cambodia. and when i follow my own lines of thought it always leads to genetics or quantum something. i need diversity!!! thank you! and i am also hoping to hear about your own thoughts. this obviously touches on some of your inner turmoil right?

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feb 26 12:30 am

it appears that the depression "episode" ended two days ago. an "episode" should last an hour, like a tv show, not two weeks. that's not an "episode" at all; that's an epoch, when it hits you and lasts that long. somehow 25 years passed but the literature on bipolar reads the same. maybe i am actually in hell. maybe this is how hell really works.

i have tunneled into a very superstitious and enigmatic culture where guests are not welcome. there is the tourism industry in cambodia, where tourists and volunteers and their piles of money are very welcome. but those people don't stay. they don't learn the language and dig into the secrets of this place. it was a thread of fascination that never ended; that is why i stayed. there are so few foreigners who can speak and read khmer that when cambodian people meet me they are so surprised as to act like a person caught naked in public.

tonight a cambodian woman told me that she is christian. they are told the rules in the christian churches here - that you can only worship one god. i asked her if she is also buddhist, and she said yes. i pointed to a little golden house and asked her if she followed that religion too. she said yes. the little golden house is a relic of hinduism, and a period when indian culture dominated this area. now people still offer little prayers to the "village god" as they refer to "lok ta poo," but it's not a hindu prayer. the instruction manual was lost a long time ago, people don't know how to stop trying to use the little golden birdhouse. it's like the day before a yard sale. you pick up a nice compass you've never really used. your grandfather gave it to you. it's sentimental. you have 10,000 items like this in your house. the reason you're trying to have a yard sale. you can't get rid of the compass but you don't know what to do with it. about 20% of the people i talk to informally about the hindu relic know that it's from the brahman religion, some even mention india, but they don't know what it's about. the man with a monkey's face (hanuman.) the elephant with too many human arms and hands (ganesh.) some people think that's part of buddhism and some think it's part of another religion. that's the true nature of culture: it's a mixture of 14 million people each with a varying level of knowledge and ignorance. culture is not coherent. even in this isolated, nearly impermeable, extremely racist culture, the culture is incoherent.

in a name. i know hundreds of people named "mao." like "mao tse tung." but it's not really a name. it's the short word for "kmao" which means "black." it took months for me to figure out that this is not a name, and people called mao have an actual given name that is never used. they wear long pants and shirts, hats, scarves, gloves, and even surgical masks to hide from the sun because they are so afraid of becoming blacker. it is understood by all neighbors that a person is ugly because he or she is black. in a region where about 95% of all people have "dark skin" it is especially strange to find prejudice against people with "darker skin."

cambodian people believe that the spirit of a person stays at the place where the person dies. i do not know how this fits in with buddhist ideas of reincarnation, but cambodian people don't seem to be concerned with logic. a pregnant woman and her unborn were killed in a car crash at one of the entrances to the temples. since that day all the people who know about that story and who work in the city gather at a place near town at 11:00 pm, waiting till the last villager arrives so that no one has to go home alone, and then they all take the long route to avoid the road where the mother and child died. it is not obvious to me what a "ghost" is supposed to be, so i will state it plainly here: cambodian people think that the spirit of a dead person becomes a ghost and mills around the site of death and occasionally does harm to passers-by.

and cambodian people are aware that people from "developed" countries as they call us do not believe in ghosts, and they are embarrassed when a foreigner learns about their quirky superstitions, and so they try not to talk about it. also, talking about spirits can be like an invitation to a spirit to visit your house and do harm to your family. since harm always comes to everyone at some point, this superstition is constantly reinforced. this may only be a new revelation to me personally. i am certainly no anthropologist. but i have reached the working conclusion that a "primitive culture" is one in which most of the activities and behaviors of the people involved are driven by superstition.

in all khmer dictionaries i have checked, there is no distinction between "belief" and "superstition." i have thought about this often. i think this actually makes a lot of sense. there is a hyperbolic hypocrisy in "developed" countries wherein christian people for example think that what they believe in is real and what everyone else thinks is superstition. in cambodian culture, there may be prejudice about the color of your skin, but everyone is confused about religion, and there is no need for anyone here to try to distinguish between "belief" and "superstition." they are the same. to everyone. the dictionaries make this clear.

cambodian guides who lead tourists around the temples here are utterly confused about the polytheism of cambodia. there is a big job market for any foreigner who wants to lead tours for people from his or her home country. but this is a significant task. cambodian culture makes no sense to people who consider rationality an important component of decision making. most foreigners ride around in a tuk tuk with a "licensed" guide (meaning the guide paid the government for a license,) and listen to broken korean, japanese, german, and english, without challenging any of the information. most of them don't know the guide's statements are mostly wrong. the ones who know just keep their mouths shut because why pick on a poor cambodian? it's not their fault that pol pot made knowledge illegal and destroyed the education system. and it's not their fault that his legacy, hun sen, continues the work of destroying the remnants of khmer culture even today. tourists don't realize that hun sen gave angkor wat to vietnam and now all profits from ticket sales go to a vietnamese company.

journal, journal, in my machine,

about the strange things i have seen,

about our deeds so cruel and mean,

reveal them all and make them clean.

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feb 24 1:00 am

rode my bike to sras srong and put up the hammock by the lake like i used to, trying to find a way out of this depression. the virus must have rebooted my brain. i found myself recalling my first ride through the forest around the temples 3 years ago. it was so new and awesome and there were monkeys everywhere. today i brought an old half baguette and fed pieces to the monkeys. they chewed it and spat it out. smart monkeys. i didn't realize today would be a trip down memory lane; that's exactly what i would like to avoid. everything is throwing me for a loop these days. dizzy and headache every morning, congruent with the symptom list of major depression. but it's not very convincing. i could have a brain tumor for all i know. missed 4 days here, but the count up continues... still alive.

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february 19, 2014 (about 01:33 pm)

still alive. i watched "all is lost" yesterday. didn't help my lonely feeling. but later i watched it again. i've been in so many situations like that i've lost count. anyway, this is the "count up," it's a new day, and i am still alive, but not kicking. i am sharing an email to another friend...

this happens to me so often in a discussion. we think we are talking about the same thing and have differing takes or ideas about it. then it turns out we are talking about two different things, which is the actual reason for the disagreement. that was the reason my partner and i broke up after ten years. we just could not get on the same page and so it seemed like we were reading different books!

after you wrote that the the agency offered you three months for $78, i realized that i have never applied for a single month!!! a single month tourist visa could be $200 for all i know. i've never even asked. i ASSUMED that $75 for 3 meant $25 for 1. obviously wrong. in any case,the discussion contributes to this idea i've been working on for a long time now...

as our world becomes more technically complicated, clear information is more and more difficult to obtain. i don't feel very confident that what i "know" is really true, but that it is linked to my personal experience, and does not always work for other people. a funny thing that we arose during all those years of disagreement was the realization that individuals working at the same large company often gave different answers to the same question. you could call the same number twice in five minutes and get a call center in the philipines first and another one in india on the second call. one call center operator might tell you, "yes, i can create a pin number for your visa by phone." another might tell you, "no, because of security restrictions, blah blah blah." sometimes it's because the training for the staff is different from region to region. sometimes the staff does not know how to do something, sometimes it's their mood. in any case the funny thing that developed over the years was this idea that, "if the first person you call doesn't tell you what you want to hear, just hang up and call again." it's like the call center lottery.

once i called symantec for help with the anti-virus program. at the end of the call the rep said, "thank you for calling, i would like to add three months to your subscription." i said, "wow! thank you!" then i hung up and called again. this time i just asked a silly question about the program. at the end, talking to a different rep, they gave me another three months! i tried it again. the limit seemed to be a year. the last rep tried to add more months, but the "days remaining" hovered below 365.

another thing like the single month cambodian tourist visa we were talking about is that all the other foreigners i know who live here have to sign rental contracts. they pay $300 to $500 per month for satisfactory accommodations. when i tell them i have a nice rental room for $50 per month and no contract, they simply don't believe me. maybe i have become cambodian. no, it turns out they they are renting something much larger than what i have. "nice room" for me is "ghetto" for them.

now cambodian people are developing rental property specifically for foreigners because there are so many who live here, and they are more reliable than cambodian renters. i can see that when cambodian people speak english to a foreigner the prices just double and triple without reason. when they talk to me they know that i know the normal price. and they are predictably unenthusiastic. khmer people do not like foreigners to speak khmer. especially in the city.

the really funny thing is: it doesn't matter. most of the foreigners here have so much money that they still claim everything is cheap. they have so much more money than me that it really doesn't matter to them. some foreigners pay $1 for a liter of water. i pay 25 cents for 20 liters of the same water. after living in the village, and coming back to town, i thought it was AMAZING that my acquaintance heather has a washing machine!! i had never even seen a washing machine in cambodia! weird world. you find what you are looking for! that's paraphrasing heisenberg.

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for months i have had recurrent nightmares on two or three subjects. all of them suggest that i am "trapped" in a situation. in most i am desperately searching for a person with the fear that they are gone. i feel lost and hopeless. i wake up with the memories of these dreams every morning and sometimes the feeling stays through the day.

at odds with this sleep problem is the fact that i want to sleep too much. i've been routinely sleeping 8 to 11 hours. i feel like i have worked myself into quite a bind here, and i don't know how to fix it.

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february 17, 2014 (about 00:33 am)

tonight i was helping two students summarize a chapter about buddhism as their next door neighbors fought loudly. at a point it sounded like it got physical. i jumped up and opened the door. the fighting neighbors' door was wide open. the man was on top of the woman beating her. i threw him down on the bed and pinned his shoulders under my knees. i told him that if he hit that woman again i would kill him. the whole building went silent. we finished the chapter on buddhism and then talked about husbands beating their wives in cambodia. so much for buddhism.

today i hit the old wall. i realized that i am finished in cambodia. some days it hits me harder than others. i went to deliver medicine to a sick friend. on the way in her sister said, "she's not sick." i said ok. i am not debating this; i am dropping off the meds and leaving. i also had some books for her kids. she really didn't seem sick. she seemed rather energetic. i explained that i had to get busy and i left. i went to watch a movie with some friends. it was the new hansel and gretel with jeremy renner. the scenes in the redwoods reminded me of my 12 years of hiking the redwoods behind my house every day, and the fact that i really have nowhere to do anything like that now. today was the first day when i realized that i am finished here and there is no benefit for me to stay here.

i then received a job offer at company at the beach. the timing was incredible. i am still waiting for details before i can give an answer. that's where i'm at just after midnight on Feb 17, 2014....

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february 15, 2014 (about 2:00 pm) this "day" gets two entries.

knowing it, understanding it, and living it: three completely different worlds. i knew a lot about cambodia before i came here. i understood nothing, and i had never "lived it." here is an example of the difference. spanning a 20 hour period from last night through this morning, i've been on three "wild goose chases" the likes of which i have done hundreds of times in the past three years. i attempted to visit a sick child in a hospital that does not allow foreign visitors, in spite of relying on foreign money to operate. i searched for a tiny guesthouse in the maze of guesthouses to recover the memory card for a friend who'd left it there and gone to the beach. i went to teach class and found that the students had changed the schedule and not called to tell me. the computer programmer in me thinks that i can learn to identify these WGCs and avoid them before they happen. but three years' experience in cambodia tells me the futility is unavoidable, which is especially ironic because this is a supposedly buddhist country. isn't buddhism the religion where you extract yourself from the "chain of lives" and futile action? well it turns out that cambodian people are only nominally buddhist, as christians are nominally christian. and furthermore, nearly all cambodians are polytheistic and follow three to five religions! i have learned to believe that it is partly due to this schizoid contradictory hodgepodge of superstition and religion that cambodian people will say anything, no matter how absurd or irrational, to get what they want.

i was very sick. also, my friend's little girl was very sick and in the hospital. last night i felt well enough to try to visit her. my friend said i could come any time after 5:00. over the past 3 years i was told by many people that foreign visitors are not allowed at "kantha bopha" or "jayavarman VII" the hospital with two names. i told my friend this but she said that they would let me in to see her daughter. i went to one of the three gates and called my friend. she was at a different gate. people nearby sent me to a second gate. also wrong. it's a big hospital. finally, i arrived at the third gate and met my friend. i locked my bike and we approached the entrance. a guard came out and asked my friend if i was related to the patient. she said "no." the guard told her that i was not allowed to enter. like most cambodians he assumed that i could not "listen" to him, so he spoke to my friend and never looked at me. but as he spoke his last sentence i said the last four words along with him in tandem. he then apologized, and i left a bit angry because i still have not accepted the i have to go through these stupid wild goose chases, and there is no way to avoid it. my friend could have told the guard that i was the father. she lies most of the time, so why not this time? i had told my friend that they don't allow visitors. she could have asked someone earlier and called me not to come. that would have taken her 3 minutes and saved me an hour. that's just not how khmer people work.

one reason, i have learned, that khmer people don't mind waiting an hour for nothing, and therefore don't mind letting YOU wait an hour for nothing, is that they actually don't have anything in mind better to do. i asked my friend what she did while sitting there waiting for the doctor to release her daughter. "nothing," she said. "do you have a book to read?" i asked. "no." her daughter was well enough to go home two days ago. i asked my friend if she could ask the doctor why they were keeping the patient so long. she said that she could not ask the doctor. the implication was that she had no qualification or right to question the doctor - it would be like questioning his authority. so, the doctor doesn't mind wasting a bed for two days. or maybe it's easier for the doctor to treat people who are not sick, while fifty truly sick people wait outside. this is the hospital that has the PERMANENT sign out front for at least three years continuously reading "PANDEMIC DENGUE Hemorrhagic Fever" and please give blood and so forth, and the old doctor richner is still beating on his cello and claiming that 60% of cambodians have tuberculosis, and i have met one person out of thousands in three years who actually had tb and it was a complication of HIV developing into AIDS. so now i am venting.

similarly, the three (oops there were really three or four or more) serious attempts at engagement i made here both (all) contained a common ingredient: incredulity about my claim that a new cambodian law (http://cambodia.usembassy.gov/getting_married_in_cambodia.html) prohibited me from marrying (age 50+ or income less than $2500 USD). the harangue, the debate, the fights, the strain and stress over the "documents" ran contrary to my intentions to work as a volunteer in a poor village. neither of these two (or more) potential partners valued my work in the village, and both (those who understood it) considered it a waste of time and money, although they could not say so directly; both (two of the total) eventually told me that i would have to choose between the poor kids and the wife idea. all prior fiances (separated in time sometimes by as little as a few minutes and sometimes technically overlapping) denied my claim that i could not get the documents without bribes that were beyond my means. they both (some of them) claimed that, "if you really want to marry me, you can make it happen." strangely, i really did want to make it happen, but could not find a way. i emphasize this emotional pressure that is completely disconnected from bureaucratic reality. in the USA if i receive in the mail a speeding citation from a computer that took my photo and measured my speed with a radar unit, i can either pay the $300 or the computer will simply revoke my license. there are no people involved in the process, unless the computer breaks. in california, there may be people with connections who can "fix" a speeding ticket, or "make it happen" (go away, that is), but most people just pay the fine. we would not even know where to begin to "make it happen," meaning to "make it go away."

this morning i awoke with a well deserved feeling of depression (about which see the entry of last night below this one) and a dizziness that might be remnant of valium or my actual viral syndrome of the past five days. a nice korean woman from uzbekistan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koryo-saram) who friended me who left for the beach a week ago wrote and asked me to retrieve a memory card she'd left at her guesthouse here in siem reap. she had invited me to go to the beach, but i could not go on a single day's notice. so awaking this morning and feeling lonely and wishing i'd gone to the beach and realizing that i had to go and seek out her random guesthouse in the maze of a million guesthouses here all caused me to surrender to a temptation to take one last tablet of a super strong med i've been using for "pain." that was successful, at least until tomorrow, and i was on the road, starving for the sixth day, following the incorrect instructions on the guesthouse business card which put the place on the corner of the aforementioned hospital which i am not allowed to visit, and inducing me to ride another lap around that heap of lies and attain another level of futility. finally i called the place and the owner told me the actual location - the road to the dragon bridge. a guesthouse with an unsayable sanskrit name and a stated location that does not exist. magic.

next i went to teach my saturday afternoon lesson and found that the students had changed the schedule without informing the teacher. i stood outside the building and called a friend to meet me for a swim at the hotel pool to try to salvage something nice from the day. thus ended the trilogy of futility of 20 hours which began with the next entry below...

february 15, 2014 (about 1:00 am)

it hit me tonight, maybe for the first time: if one spent 30 years of one's adult life "living in the moment," carpe diem style, or "living like there's no tomorrow," in order to savor every drop of sunlight and snowflake, one must then in senior years, if miraculously one living "over the top" survives youth and middle age, accept the consequences of living wild and woolly and flying by the seat of one's pantaloons. the consequences may include little or no savings in the bank, few friends who lived similarly and survived, and thus few friends indeed. it really hit me tonight, but not that i had not thought about it many times over the years, just that i felt a sense of loss of something unknown, and immediately realized that it was a known consequence of a life i chose very intentionally at every step of the journey; again and again, when offered "security and stability," i chose the wild.

i had many stern warnings from mentors in many places. one that i will never forget is one which i will not quote, because it is only of personal value to me on this subject. but it was a sobering forecast, which became a reality. what the forecast lacked, on the other hand, was a summation of the "stop and smell the roses" effect, or an accounting of the benefits of living in the moment. it was a naked forecast of a future then 30 years away. and at the time, the dismal forecast actually fueled the fires of my engines to ignore the warning and speed away; because if my mentor's life was any evidence of the consequences of following her advice, then i had a glimpse of that future, and i certainly did not want it, nor do i today. the point is, i am suddenly prepared to accept my fate.

one brief anecdote among many which set me on this course in early years i will share. amid stories of wanderers like john muir, vagabond artists like arthur rimbaud, and a lot of fantastically absurd adventure movies watched and fantasized about, came the story of a high school friend's father. he had worked perhaps 30 years selling washing machines, supporting his family, awaiting his retirement, when he dreamed of moving to a beach in florida. a week after his retirement he died of a heart attack. not that his was a wasted life, just that given my mind for probability theory and adventure, this was not a risk i was willing to take. that story was compounded by 18 years spent observing the domestic squabbling and stress of family life with kids. this family plan was just not for me. so, after 30 years of snowboarding, long-distance bike camping, and a lot of mahem, here i find myself in very likely my final destination, scambodia....

last sunday began a week in hell which is enough to make me move to koh rong tomorrow. first, one of my students brought a truly insane X from 2 years ago to my house because she didn't know the story and the crazy X was delighted to spring in on me. i was asleep at noon when they started banging on my door. it was a short visit and it it ended badly. now the student is upset and calling me to mend. that was sunday, and that night i started feeling a virus invading.

monday and tuesday i was so weak and dizzy i couldn't walk. i had nearly nothing to eat till wednesday when some village friends started bringing me porridge because their daughter was in the nearby children's hospital with a suspicious disease called literally "not purple." (khmer) i've been through several lists of pediatric diseases and cannot find this one. i may have told you that my best student died of "cow wind" in december. now sine has "not purple." along the way i learned that epilepsy is called "crazy pig" (by doctors.) i still have a lot to learn or avoid maybe better.

at the same time, monday through wednesday, there was held the three day funeral for the mother of my friend dara (who died 2 years ago, whose wife i befriended and visit with books for her kids.) and so i lay on the bed and missed work (and money), funerals, visiting 7 other know sick people in homes and hospitals. contemplating a polite way to cancel a date made for valentine's day by accident because i was sick and did not know that the date set was valentine's day. yesterday i started feeling a bit better and returned to work.

a new friend just reported finding a job on the island of koh rong after a visit of only 4 days. i am surprised at myself for the things that make me jealous! i've already done this escapade several times. i know it does not work, or not for more than a few weeks if that. at odds with the "live in the moment philosophy," i find myself having learned from experience not to follow this trail. but a little fire of jealousy nips at me. it seems i have reached the red limit of repeating mistakes, or apparent mistakes anyway.

i must be feeling better to have wasted 30 "living in the moments" writing the above. there are no photos for this entry.

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february 12, 2014

sick. maybe flu. but still alive. lowy brought me បបរ today. her daughter sine is in the hospital with the same symptoms i have. my friend dara died about 2 years ago, and i have become friends with his wife and kids. she called two days ago and said that dara's mother passed away. they had the បុណ្យខ្មោច yesterday and today but i could not even walk. headaches and dizzy. here below two cute neighbor babies. i am watching interviews with khmer rouge men who killed people at s21. that's not very uplifting. the translator makes a lot of mistakes, she omits crucial points completely. that's my update. done with facebook.

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february 9, 2014

i will be logging out shortly, or relatively shortly, probability willing. i am starting a "count up" instead of a "count down." because i don't know when it will happen. i have deleted from my actual facebook page all but my closest family and friends. i will not be using that page further. i will leave it "active," and the photos of my volunteer work in cambodia, along with some others will remain there presumably for some time after i sign out. so, this is the first entry in the "count up." according to heisengerg, our concept of the realm of our world smaller than a wavelength of light can never be defined except by probability. this "uncertainty principle" liberated me from the "cause and effect" world which constrains most people into a paradigm which joseph campbell called "the field of opposites," most significantly "right and wrong." since the time that i digested the fundamental mathematics of heisenberg, i have held agreement with the author Timothy Ferris who said, "we might as well believe that the probabilities are real." although this is a concept of early quantum mechanics, it threads the needle of my personal journey. i see the events ahead of me with only a probability that they will work as planned. however, if the parameters converge as i predict, then it may be inferred that a period of time of more than a month without an update to this page will indicate a high probability that i have signed out. as for mechanics of this notification system, the most recent entries will appear at the top of this page, and the chronology will flow back in time toward the bottom. therefore, compare the date of the entry at the top of this page with a gregorian calendar to make your inference.