Last week during a very hot day that was intended to orient me to the next two years of my life, Dr. Tinkcom got up to introduce himself, and welcome us to Georgetown.

“I have two favorite days each year,” he said, “and one is the annual sale at Barneys.”

He was quick to inform us that his other favorite was the orientation day for our program, although he didn’t clarify which he liked best.

“You know in Las Vegas,” he continued, adjusting his fashionably thick rimmed glasses and not missing a single beat, “every night at the Celine Dion concert there is this encore. And people have talked about this…” He proceeded to describe how the show includes a second encore that is engineered with such intimacy that every night the audience is meant to feel as if this encore was just for them, that no one else had seen it before.

“And all of this is to say, this is not like that”, he finished.

Looking around the room, he was right. No one would ever have to construct a reason to be excited with my classmates. They are some of the most interesting and diverse people I have ever met.

There was only one thing that was bothering me. I had just flown in from Las Vegas where, I now must timidly admit, I saw Celine Dion. And you know what? There wasn’t a second encore. In fact, there weren’t any encores.

ARUP Labs just sent me the following rejection letter:

Dear Jed,

Thank you for your interest in the Converted Candidates position with us at ARUP Laboratories. As a result of a thorough and comprehensive candidate evaluation process, we have filled this position… Please continue to monitor the job postings at www.aruplab.com as they may change regularly.

Sincerely,
Human Resources

This was confusing. ARUP is known to be one of the best companies for whom one can work, but I applied for this job three and a half years ago. The address in the email was four households ago. Errant database trigger? Or did my application temporarily get caught in an eddy of data management? And what is “converted candidates” anyway?

Well, everyone, it looks like I am not moving back to Salt Lake City. Georgetown will just have to do.

Update (8-28-2007): I received another letter from ARUP today. Apparently I am not going to be an entry level phlebotomist either. Despite my aversion to needles, I was still willing to give it a go. I must have really wanted to work for ARUP.

A 1:00 AM flight from Las Vegas to D.C., Judith Butler in hand, haven’t really slept since (check the time stamp). Georgetown here I come.

Capitol Pride – sponsored by Bud Light, Mayor Fenty, 32 candidates for positions I didn’t know existed, Haagen Dazs that no one will eat, and a poster featuring Hillary Clinton’s face. Where did my community go?

Trish, who is a stunning new addition to my life, agreed. From South Carolina, she is much more accustomed to the grass roots type of gay community that I grew up with in Salt Lake City. Instead, yesterday’s parade was a series of moving billboards. It is bewildering to look around and see an endless sea of people who have somehow been collectively relegated to marketing targets. It is troubling because this is exactly what we wanted.

I remember my first Pride. I was scared to have my photo taken by the newspaper, uncertain how my parent’s would react if the Jone’s next store became aware of my “phase.” But we weren’t there to hide, and cameras or not, personal ethics were involved. Salt Lake’s Pride is started with the traditional Dykes on Bikes, but it is quickly followed with a Pride flag that stretches for at least a city block. Pride officianados know that it is customary to throw money into the flag as it passes, honoring the drag queens who first threw coins at police men and ignited our fight for equal rights. Salt Lake’s version was created by a local family who lost their son, and touched by the story I volunteered to help carry the flag. It wasn’t act of pride that first year, but rather hope for self-acceptance.

Over the years, my love for Salt Lake’s Pride grew. I would go to march and support my friends, thrilled as those who had made such an impact on my life all gathered to cheer each other on in a culture that wished we would disappear. But with the oppression gone, has my community left with it? Perhaps I still don’t understand D.C., or I don’t quite grasp how to create family in such a large and now seemingly arbitrary LGBTQ(l, m, n, o, p) designation. It might just be a by-product of D.C.’s famously transient nature.

Parades are fun, but is the fight over? Did we win? What were we fighting for? The struggles of my childhood have evaporated with the years, and this generation seems to enjoy a normalization guaranteed by the Will & Grace effect. The fight for marriage falls flat as we question the sanity of marriage in the first place, AIDS has been demoted to history, and I can’t help but feel we are all on the edge of an existential crisis.

Perhaps Salt Lake was just a set of training wheels: “I march, therefore I am.” This is pretty much how the equation worked. Without the training wheels, perhaps now the hard work can begin.

Last night was amazing. Amazing food, amazing drinks, but most importantly amazing people.

When people in the ’09 class of CCT started to meet through various online avenues (so Web 2.0), the logistics of moving to DC dominated most conversations. Having the luxury of already living in DC, and able to bypass what is nothing short of a nightmare, I focused on other logistics: BBQs.

Moving is always rough, but from my perspective it is the landing on the other side that always catches you unexpected. I was fortunate to form a couple close relationships quickly after moving to DC, but it was nothing compared to the social networks to which I was accustomed. To top it all off, some CCTers were moving to DC early and without even classes to act as distraction, I set out on a mission. “We have to have a BBQ the minute you get here!”, I said to Sarah one day on Facebook.

This was of course a ridiculous thing for me to say. I live in a basement condo with only a small patch of ground cover/ornamental grass in front. Events like these, however take on a life of their own, and before I knew it there was an Evite in my inbox inviting me to grill in my own “front yard.” After many nights of preparation and shopping, Friday arrived, I went to pick of the grill and Juliet (grill-maven, honestly the one who fed us), and whip everything together last minute.

(more…)

Minka is bald. But at her age, are we surprised? I was considering Rogaine (now for felines!), but decided against it on logistical grounds.

No, so really, she is bald – except a stupid mane, fluffy feet, and the most pathetic attempt at a poof on the end of her tail. As the swampish summer here in DC set it, she began to leave a trail of hair behind her everywhere she went. She was drinking a ton of water and just laying around, which is all fine by me, except then I started sneezing.

I talked to a groomer who 30 minutes later was her sheerer, who explain that when it comes to pets “It’s DC in the summer, you just have to shave them.” She is now cool and frolicking around and demanding a lot more attention, generally unaware of people’s discomfort with her sitting on their faces.

As for the shaving, she didn’t take to the process kindly. Think collar/head/funnel thing and lots of people gathering around the window to see the psycho kitty play jujitsu with the clippers. At the end of it all, I kindly told the groomer that he “was brave.” He talked to me for 5 minutes about his grooming philosophy and what he called his “respect for the creature.” Okay, not that brave.

A week ago I got this email:

Quinn joined the Electronic Communications team within the Office of Communications yesterday. Her principle duties will be Web site design, consulting, and publishing support.

Quinn worked most recently as a marketing advisor and graphic designer for a niche marketing firm. She hails from Michigan and is in the running for the shortest commute to AAMC headquarters.

Please introduce yourself and help welcome her to the AAMC!

I’m sorry. I fell asleep. (more…)

My departure from Sri Lanka was understated. I said my goodbyes to Kara and Keven, dismissing the sentimentality. “I’ll write you an email”, I replied, a cheap reference to an interconnected digital world. I should have said “I’ll miss you too”, but that might have been to close to the loss. The taxi had arrived early, and only as I sped off to the airport did I realized how much of a home Sri Lanka had become.

One red-eye later, I am back in Bangkok with the strange obligation of taking a vacation. As my cab slowly worked its way through downtown Bangkok toward my hotel, I couldn’t help but feel a recently familiar anxiety.

“You can always change your tickets,” Keven said when I told him that part of me felt anxious to get back to the United States. Skeptical that he was implying that I should once again extend my stay in Sri Lanka, I reassured the status quo, and my vacation, by quickly adding “it will be good for me.”

But it is more than this. I am not just leaving the country, I am also leaving my job and my life in Salt Lake. While out of the country, I received a job offer inviting me to come work at the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, D.C. It seems this association, where I have been teaching, would like me as a Senior Programmer. The offer is good, the opportunities and timing are right, and while I have logistically accepted the offer, I am waiting for my emotions to catch up. I find myself asking existential questions. “Why do people leave?”, “Why do people stay?”, and “What makes something a good decision?”

Ted, my boss, had sent me an email a few days before in response to my resignation. “I believe that the best decision would be to have Kara steal your passport and ticket back to the US and keep you trapped in Sri Lanka as a slave under corporate ownership. However, for some reason that seems to be socially unacceptable.

“Although you will be leaving our firm,” he continued, “I prefer to think of your departure as an indefinite ‘leave of absence’ or sabbatical.”

And so I leave knowing that if I don’t like D.C. I can always return. But I know that I will, and so I won’t. Paradoxically, that is the problem.

Cheri, the Brooklyn based massage therapist I met at 30,000 feet on my last trip to D.C. had sent an email informing me that my emotional moon sign was Cancer. I couldn’t help but think of my brother-in-law. “Cancers, we’re crabs,” he once said, pinching his hands like ad-hoc claws, “we build nests.” And he would begin to dig in the imaginary sand. My temporary nest in Seeduwa now abandoned, returning to Salt Lake promises an emotional security that Bangkok will make me temporarily forego. But even that nest in Salt Lake now seems somehow insufficient.

I received the job offer last Saturday, minutes before I waltzed out the door to Sri Pada. However, as the train lazily climbed the hill country, my excitement slowly gave way to the emotional implications of my impending move and the existential questions took on a different tone. “How can people leave?”

Restless before the climb, I laid in bed wishing in vain that life would somehow slow down long enough for me to regain my footing. A brief respite before the next adventure was all I wanted. Simultaneously optimistic and saddened at the change, I searched in vain for a way to mourn a loss about which only I knew, knowing that if I could just break down I would get the catharsis I so desperately needed.

Instead I was left with questions, most importantly this: “What makes home?”

Funny, I suppose, that crabs build nests in something as impermanent as sand.

All good things come to an end. Today is my last day in Sri Lanka, and I am not sure I will ever come back. A month in a foreign country — not too shabby.

Reflecting on the time, the changes are funny. My feet are constantly dirty, and my hair, ravaged by the humidity has just given up and turned into a British fro, if such a thing exists. My mom would cry. I have been so busy while here that it has been hard to keep up with myself.

It would have made sense to learn some Sinhala while I was here, but for some reason I never did. Somehow in my personal labor camp it seemed unimportant. One more victim of lack of time. Yesterday, however, in the emotional preparations for my return, a classic moment crossed the line, linking this life to my past.

“How do you say ‘no’?”, I asked Kara. She had been yelling at a driver who had intentionally taken us out of our way in order to make some extra cash.

She looked at me, stunned at the realization that I had somehow missed these essentials. “Nae” (sounds like “Neh”), she said. I looked back at her and burst into hysterics.

“What?” she asked, my laughter having scared the driver back onto the right course. Kara had said this so many time during my time in Sri Lanka, and I had always found it a bit amusing. Carly, in moments of indifference or annoyance would respond in exactly the same way. “Neh.” I assumed that Kara was doing the same. To find out that all this time Carly had been accurately expressing her emotions in Sinhala was a bit too much.

The other day, Carly sent me an email. “Write in your blog”, she said. The truth is that I have a half dozen half finished entries that I have been to busy to finish. So, in short Carly, “Nae.”

There is a line, or at least a rough space, at which your lines are crossed. In a country where the color of your skin is the best indication of status, walking down the street is enough to draw attention. Everyone seems desperate to be friendly, at least with your wallet, and the propositions, even if only for attention, can become overwhelming.

While everyone seems desperate to try out that one English word they know, no where was this more apparent that during the hike up Sri Pada. The stairs were scattered with teenagers, emboldened by the social credit they were sure to receive from their peers. These interactions, however, which had little if anything to do with me, don’t compare to when that one word is intended to obligate you into handing over money.

Of course this works both ways. “Where are you from?” was far too common a starting place. Pretending I didn’t speak English became a favorite tactic. While in Kandy, a English tourist asked me, “Are your from Canada or the United States?”, apologizing for being unable to place my accent. From that point on when asked the tiresome question, my tactic changed to one of an assumed nationality. “Canada”, I would say, beaming proudly.

And so I was caught of guard one day in Kandy, when a man responded by saying “What part? Ontario?”

“Oh, no no”, I said, trying to catch my balance and distance myself at the same time. “Vancouver.”

“Oh Vancouver!” I was about to learn this was not the right answer. “I used to live there.” Apparently this man who spoke more than just one word of English, but wanted my money none the less, went to school in Vancouver. He precede to rattle off a list of his favorite spots, places about which I was now obligated to enthusiastically reminisce.

I refused his taxi service, explaining that I was going to the train station and would like to walk. “Ah yes,” he said, “Canada very big, you guys like walking.” 15 minutes later, and completely lost, I hired a trishaw to drive me. It was one block away.

And so it was that Kara, Keven and I were taking a walk, with more success this time, to dinner. We were discussing Jaffna, and the possibility of Kara visiting, or rather the lack thereof. Jaffna, at the northern tip of Sri Lanka is home to largest concentration of Hindus, Tamils, and the Tiger rebel group. Things are decidedly restless, which I secretly think made Kara all the more restless to go. No one was exactly sure how long the trip there would take, but the consensus was two days by train. Sri Lanka isn’t that big, really, the trains are just that slow.

“I don’t think so”, Keven said to the ad-hoc itinerary, met by a stream of Kara’s faux protests.

Just at that moment, a trishaw pulled up. “Where you go?” the driver said, spouting off another common favorite.

“How much to Jaffna?” Kara spouted, spinning in his direction. The driver was too stunned to reply, and Kara, like the rest of us, could have looked over her shoulder and seen that personal line go right on by. “We go to Jaffna, and then you wait two hours, and come back. How much? 300 Rupees?”

I would have felt sorry for the man, but I was laughing too hard.