I began 2013 in a room full of people in an apartment in San
Francisco, not far from Haight-Ashbury.
It was a great night. I couldn’t
have slept more than an hour. Then I
packed up my things and moved into a new apartment at the edge of the city but
on a huge hill overlooking the whole city.
The price I had to pay for access to that hill overlooking the bay was
that it was directly alongside the freeway.
I was also sharing quarters with some very strange people, although some
of them were excellent housemates and teachers.
Speaking of which, after a couple months of living in a mostly empty
room, writing letters, reading books, collecting my thoughts from the whirlwind
journey of 2012 and writing an impromptu book on this web site, I finally got a
job teaching at the American Academy of English on Golden Gate Avenue, a few
blocks from City Hall. Every morning I
got off at UN Plaza and then taught about 15-25 students from around the world
whatever I wanted, so long as they increased their vocabulary, grammar,
speaking, writing and listening skills.
We took field trips at least once a month, watched an education film or
movie once a week, and shared as much as we could about what we knew of our
shared world. Meanwhile, I continued
writing on a consistent basis, climbed the hill a lot, and tried to drive to
the ocean or explore somewhere new in the city whenever I could.
Unfortunately, I didn’t make a lot of money, and there weren’t
any extra hours available, and nobody wanted to pay a private tutor with no
references, so I barely scraped by and didn’t enjoy much of what one of the
most expensive cities in the world had to offer. Then again, looking back, I was incredibly
blessed: four Hiromi Uehara shows, my first Sigur Ros show, Ahmad Jamal, the
Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Zoo, Golden Gate Park, Golden Gate
National Recreational Area, the Pacific Ocean, a wetland, canoeing on San
Francisco Bay, driving on Highway 1 to Big Sur, Kings Canyon, the largest
living being on Earth, Yosemite National Park, Muir Woods, West Oakland,
Berkeley, the most beautiful view in the city and being surrounded by people
with different backgrounds and opinions constantly. And of course, there were those types of
wares that made this city so popular for hippies J
I was lucky to see my cousin’s wedding in Mexico in June,
the first family I’d seen since I’d left New York in May of 2012. Actually, it was exactly one year since I’d
seen a family member. When I returned I
got to explore Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks, canoe a little and
keep writing. Eventually I moved to a sublease
in Berkeley, and decided I wanted to visit home in August.
Three weeks in New York reminded me of everything my
homeland had to offer, with gorgeous green trees and fields filling the
countryside, a spectacular magic lake, friends, family, and the most famous
city in the world, in which I had previous living experience.
Upon returning to California I didn’t have a place to live,
which led to a series of adventures.
Despite the beauty of Yosemite National Park (where I escaped to one
weekend because I didn’t have anywhere to stay and it was free), I decided that
a year in California was all that I had wanted of my West Coast living
experience, and that I was ready to plan to go back home. I spent a month living in Oakland, and then
drove back across America, my third coast-to-coast journey in the United
States, and second by car. The Jetta
Wagen has gone across this country and back, and it all began with 170,000
miles on it. I’ve got about 600 to go before
the big 200K milestone.
I was fortunate to land a job my second day in the city, and
I have been living on my good friend’s couch and going to work in the Bronx
teaching English ever since. One of my
initial leads was also a tutoring job, something that will hopefully begin to
come together next week when I retake the SAT, something I was promised I would
never have to do again when I was 17.
Currently I am tracking down and printing out all of the
absurd necessary paperwork it takes to rent a crappy room in a cruddy apartment
in this dirty noisy city. You might ask:
if it’s all so crappy, cruddy, dirty and noisy, then why am I even here?
I am here because it is the most exciting place close to the
people I love, and because I can get work here doing something I know how to
do, even if I would prefer to do even more with the language than the job allows. New York also happens to be the most complex mixture of human culture on
the planet, for all of its drawbacks. By
living here, I have access to the countryside, a lake, my college town, the
ocean, many friends and relatives, and the entire city.
If you asked me a year ago if I thought I would be living in
New York City at the end of the year, I wouldn’t have said it was
impossible. Then again, I didn’t want to
live here again until I had established myself more, because I remembered how
disheartening it can be to live in the ego capital of the world, where wealth,
luxury and fickle fashion appear to suffocate all of the honest artistry,
quality craftsmanship and love that made it what it was.
In all of my years of traveling I have been both blessed and
saddened to gain the perspective of how lucky I have been compared to most of
humanity. I have access to clean water,
shelter, plenty of nourishing food, information and entertainment. What’s more, I have a family who loves me and
friends who make me enjoy life and care about me. And I have the beautiful opportunity to do
the same for them. It takes patience and
practice, but I am slowly improving when it comes to refraining from letting
the unimportant problems ruining my appreciation of this wondrous window I get
to peek through into the universe’s imagination every moment of my waking life.
All of that having been said, there is still the same hunger
and drive that caused me to leave this city in the first place.
I was hungry for real experience, inner truth and true love. All three are up to this world I don’t fully
understand but do my best to enjoy anyhow.
Speaking of enjoying the world despite inherent uncertainty,
I have three resolutions for 2014:
1.
Stay alive
2.
Love
3.
Tell a story to make your world very genki
Happy New Year!
To You and To Me
