Transportation Notes:

Ewha Today. Wanted to get there early so I took the train. I’m hating subways more and more. Even though it was 10am, prime working hours when the subway passenger traffic is light, the train was late and the resulting person buildup on all the platforms meant all the seats on the train were taken. I didn’t sit for the entire hour. I monopolized one of the poles next to a row of seats, denying grips to many. Hot too, and I did sweat. Hotter still outside walking down the road funneling into the university; I was really sweating by the time I arrived at the Women’s Center with my Subway sammo and Coke.

At Ewha: Read a paper about women in the Bohra Islamic sect in South Asia. Very interesting, particularly the field notes describing a ritual tray meal and how afterwards the women retired to the TV to watch Diana’s funeral. Globalization? Industries that permeate all cultural boundaries: Coke, McDonald’s, and Diana.

The center gave me 100,000KW, about $75, for my work. Wow! I was quite pleasantly surprised. It’s not a lot of money but I never expect any so it feels like a huge gift. I will buy myself a birthday present with it. I thought it was a sign that I was supposed to talk to Mala about my ideas for research. I’ve been neglecting to bring it up, always coming up with excuses why it’s not a good time. But here I had this money, suddenly I felt valuable, so I went for it… and you know, she liked my idea! I was so happy! I’d been plagued by problems of "relevancy" because in Psych that concept is so important. I guess in other fields it’s not. Whew! Now I can move forward, make plans.

I had errands to run after Ewha, errands requiring three separate buses. I was happy though, after all that had transpired at the university. I was hot and sticky but cooling down quickly in the cold comfort of a naengbang bus - bus 8.

Across the aisle from me sat a geeky high school boy. His school uniform was pressed a little too well, his socks too neat and too white - his mother's special son. His hair was cut in the Spock Special that is so popular among Asian boys these days. I saw that he had cheap headphones like mine and I wondered about it: Mostly I see people with very sophisticated headphones that have a digital control along the cord, while ours only have cheap sliding volume controls. He was thin, but not too much; thick blue veins ran like ropes from his wrists on up, just the way I like them.

I transferred to bus 23. It was waiting at the transfer when I arrived making me run for it lest it take-off. The old driver saw me in his mirror and smiled when I hopped on, breathing hard. Later, after errands, I caught 78-3 and sat in the back seat the whole way home.

I ran into Mike on a reunion page last week. People can sign-up with their email address on a list of graduates from their high schools. Despite the sheer numbers of potential registrants, there were probably less than one hundred people on the list. Yet among them was Mike’s name. I hadn’t seen him in, geez, 4 or 5 years? I think the last time was a chance meeting at the QFC in U-Village. He talked about mountaineering, no doubt. Before that I saw him in the middle of the night at Pike Place Market. He was with a friend, walking the dark empty streets in the midnight hour; I was belly down on the sidewalk to trying to get a weird picture of one of the neon market signs. He strolled around the corner as I was lying there on the ground looking through my camera with Dave standing next to me. No one else was around at that hour, and it was very strange that, of all people possibly walking on a dark street at night, he should turn the corner and run into me.

So, I saw his name and whipped out an email. He replied a few days later, attaching a couple of photos and apologizing for the delay as he was involved in some big rescue on the mountain - Rainier - on which he is now the Lead Climbing Ranger he said. It’s funny because at the time I knew him I guess I never imagined climbing would become his profession. It makes sense that it would, I just never thought about it. The words read just like his voice, the sound revived easily in my mind - like riding a bike.

Monday I was ironing something in the afternoon and decided to turn on the TV for noise. Dateline NBC for Sunday was on. They were reporting on an avalanche that had swept away some climbers on Rainier, and there was Mike being interviewed about it. I’m in Korea you know, a universe away from all that I’ve ever known. I haven’t talked to Mike in years and only just, very recently, sent him an email. Then there he was being piped into my TV via the miracle of satellite.

It was the weirdest fucking coincidence.

He sounded and looked the same, and just like in the email I received, I recognized that I still knew him. I’ve been thinking about that, marveling how so much time can pass but still a part of another remains imbedded. The circuitry is already programmed. At once seeing him or reading his email is like communicating with a stranger, but I know precisely the intonation to assign the words, can read the purpose in his action that one can’t do with people unknown to them.

He was the first love. There was another significant relationship prior to him, but that boy has no long-lasting legacy with me for some reason. Everything about Mike is more salient than that first boy. Just by virtue of his particular mix of adventurous arrogance, his confident energy, he overwhelms the past. Probably that is why a part of him lingers still, despite the fact I thought I haven’t thought of him in a very long time.

He opened the door to my agency. Usually my rebellion is contained within, but with him I acted on it instead. I don’t know if its really right to call it rebellion. More it’s just the way I’d like to experience things vs. the way I think I should (or the way my fears prevent me from doing). Classic id/superego conflict I think it goes.

We explored sex together, in every glorious way people should when that world is opened to them. I’m glad about that, thankful for it. His taste in music broadened mine. We had hiking/climbing in common. It was his interest in photography, the fact he took me with him scouring for shots, that sparked the same interest in me - an interest I still pursue. My love affair with skiing began with him. Shit, he even taught me to drive in that way that is still so comfortable and easy -- one of my favorite things to do when I need to escape, to heal, and the very method is a product of knowing him.

All these ways he contributed to the layering of experience, the building of my world view. So much time has passed and it’s like I never knew him, yet there is this evidence. Maybe it’s like when people who are in touch with past lives they’ve lived encounter someone - a stranger in this life - whom they knew well in a past lifetime. That same sort of connection that transcends physical interaction - the kind recorded in the collective unconsciousness.

And there he was on the TV. I can’t get over how bizarre a world this is; how a piece of my soul was beamed around the planet and rendered on the screen in my living room at the precise moment I decided to look at it. How many events have to align just right in order for that to happen? How many such things have I just barely missed because one necessary link was imperfect?