random thoughts, Kansas City, 11 years ago tonight

eleven years ago i was in Kansas City, working as a production manager for a famous modern dance company, and halfway through a tour of the Midwest. i was in the middle of a catastrophic love affair, and the object of my desire lived in Bronxville. she was a dancer, two years younger than i and a decade wiser. the ramifications of this obsession would not be made manifest for months to come, when i encountered the Dancer's reflection on a Saturday night in Gainesville.

in time i would come to know that those rapturous months with the Dancer, and those torturous years with the Mirror, were in fact part of a single experience: the dance of Shiva and Shakti. to this date i have never had a better illustration of the dangers of conflating duality with the Divine, and looking back, i see them as textbook cases of projection and transference – the beatification of the Bronxville beauty on the one hand, and the malificent masochism of the Mirror on the other.

everything i saw in them was inside of me;
everything i saw in them was also in the other.

(a man named Peter once told me: 'everything is in everything.'
a woman named Lauren once sang: 'everything is everything':)

they're both right, but (right now) this is beside the point.

the point is that, for whatever reason, i found myself curious this morning about Halloweens past. where i was, what i was doing. i was able to remember, more or less, who i was for the past several years, but how about further back? i wondered who i thought i was a decade ago, but found the documents incoherent, lacking or absent.i stretched back one more year, to 1999, and this is what i discovered:

"SIN": 29 September - 7 November 1999

31 October 1999

Day thirteen is a day starts with a call from J______. It woke me up, and I was so happy to hear her voice and her choice. Sometimes I think there’s some psychic (but deeper, more emotional) bond...

I caught myself thinking this morning
and asked myself how the idea got inside:
I would be gone before you arrived. It was
the sound of a heart closing like a wound
– but I keep on picking at the scabs...

Gin at three, a tape, and a boredom thick enough
to grasp. I walk through the bookstore with my hands
clasped together to keep from shoving books off the display.
From where does this urge arise? It's not right to pawn
and merchant and whore these ideas and thoughts
and words under fluorescence and Muzak...

In Kansas City the nights are so quiet that
the table of three next to me becomes
deafening compared to the peaceful
lull of New York’s eight screaming
millions. I’ve read all my books;
and will have to read Kerouac
again, but then why did I buy it...

The penguin man cackles
at the table of three – not the
endearing cackle of Bobby, but
the sound of a small-eyed, hook-
nosed gentleman with glasses and
the manner of someone who is not
unhappy, but never laughs without
restraint. That deep hysterical laughter
of the mad, when your eyes water and you
gasp for breaths not for the oxygen, but only
to have another lungful of laughter, to spew into
the night until your sides ache and your bladder pains...

I finished The Bell Jar tonight, and
it’s fascinating that she turned her
depression, its simplicity, into a
novel. That’s how it is; that feeling
of watching life happen in front of
your eyes, the disbelief that what one
sees is invisible to everyone else. But
what frightened me was the calmness
with which she described it, and I
wonder if she was so removed when it
happened? I have always with me that
sadness, and a desperation to escape
its grasp, like clawing at some invisible
tie around the throat, like the lungs
were some never-stretched tendon,
feeling the pain of movement and
yearning for the freedom of mobility...

I
use
words
fast and
easy and
ambiguous
and so undefined
and unrefined and
unresolved and dissolved
and undeclared and uncleared
and I don’t explain and assume
you just know as I know and never
even have to ask if you know what I mean...

Watching
the Kansas
City streets
I miss New
York. I feel
tall enough
to see the
West Coast
burning two
thousand
miles away
and New York
engulfed in its
tungsten flame
one thousand
miles east, as
Hollywood and
Times Square
watch over me...

children's theatre and the panopticon, tied together with a White Ribbon

yesterday morning i was at a local theatre, where i work from time to time as a light board operator and occasional stagehand. it's not glamorous work, but the schedule and environment coincide well with my graduate program. plus, i get paid to see things people pay to go see. not a bad deal, but beside the point nonetheless.

the point is that yesterday's show was a children's group from the UK:

the premise of this show – like most productions aimed at kids – is to teach manners and good habits. there is lots of call and response, of course, and this particular narrative centers around a pigeon who is always trying to get into trouble: staying up late, not sharing his hot dog, etc.

(as an aside, the pigeon is referred to as 'he' in spite of the fact that the actor playing the pigeon is a woman. a minor detail, and undoubtedly scripted this way, but it irked me to no end. even tabling the issue of gender-biased language, this simply flies in the face of reason.)

anyway, it occurred to me halfway through the show that this show is a perfect illustration of how children are enlisted to inhabit the Panopticon:

flow chart of the Panopticon

the Panopticon is an 18th century prison design, initially conceived of by Jeremy Bentham (no relation), and made famous (at least among academics) by Michel Foucault. as shown by the diagram, the Panopticon was shaped as a giant cylinder and a guard station in the very center allowed a single person to warden over hundreds of prisoner.

very economical.

the genius of this plan was that, since the guard wouldn't be seen, the prisoners would have to behave all the time, just in case. the next realization was that you wouldn't need an actual guard at all. since they had to act as if they were being watched, each of them could be turned into both warden and convict, leaving the Panopticon full of nothing but prisoners minding one another.

(am i my brother's keeper?)

this is exactly what "Pigeon Party" does, by interpellating the audience as both responsible adult and irresponsible pigeon. in the process, the children are taught to regulate themselves and conform to the norms of society. the call and response allows them to practice this numerous times over the course of the hour, and i assure you there is nothing so dishearteningly eerie as hearing 700 children scream:

"go to bed!"

as fate would have it, this morning served as a perfect lead-in to the film i watched later that evening, Michael Haneke's unbelievable The White Ribbon:

the white ribbon serves as a reminder of purity

the story is set in a nameless village, somewhere in Germany before the first World War, and it left me equal parts riveted and horrified. a series of mysterious crimes unfold, all set against the backdrop of village life and revolving around a cadre of children. the protagonist is the town's schoolteacher, whose voice intercedes from an unspecified time in the future:

the school teacher with his betrothed

this teacher and his would-be bride are the only sympathetic characters in the film, and although we slip in and out of his point-of-view, the viewer is perpetual kept outside of this German town by Haneke's phenomenal, characteristic use of harsh vertical symmetry:

final scene

and long shots:

the preacher's daughter Klara is in the middle

the first crime is a inexplicable attack on a doctor, but the viewer's sympathy is quickly perverted as the man, upon his return from the hospital, is revealed to be an adulterer, an abusive lout, and an incestuous father.

the next crime is the ritualistic torture of a young boy, the son of the Baron who lords over the community. the town lives in fearful supplication to this man, and his presence serves as a reminder of the underlying class divisions upon which the social life of the village is structured:

workers in the field

the preacher, the Baron and Baroness, and their son

the second crime is the burning of the Baron's barn:

which is soon followed by a young girl's dream that foretells of another coming attack, this time on a child with Down's Syndrome. calamity piles on top of calamity from this point onward, and one by one the townspeople are shown to be petty, merciless creatures that evoke in some ways the films Lars van Trier.

what struck me most, though, was the children. they are explicitly shown as victims to the violence of their families; but also, implicitly, as probable perpetrators:

the preacher's children kissing the hands of their parents

this comes to head near the end of the film, when the school teacher believes he has deduced who has been committing the crimes. he goes to speak to the preacher, but their conversation results only in anger, threats and denial. the preacher is unable, or unwilling, to see that the crimes tearing apart the village are sewn from the same thread as the violence, shame and discipline being taught within each of the homes.

in the end, children become jailors

no resolution is reached in The White Ribbon, and the outbreak of World War One prevents the teacher or the town from ever learning the truth. the film's final minutes pass under the cloud of War, demonstrating how the town and individuals' struggles are ultimately swallowed up by the great tide of History – an even larger horror that, unlike the torture of the children, does not hold the hope of resolution or comprehension.

this was easily one of the most mesmerizing, captivating, and beautifully gloomy films i've ever seen.

(re)Listening to NPR in Atlanta

Part 1: for Plums and peaches

I listened to the voice of a woman
I knew nearly fifteen years ago, when
we teetered on the edge of adulthood.

I heard things that were, things that
were not, things that might have been.

I heard the girl next door
humming arias in the dark.

I heard Durham in August and
the diminishing of colloquialism
of South Carolina after the Return.

It was not like listening to the past.

Or living in Atlanta,
Manhattan and Denver.

Part 2: one year later

I visited the voice seven months
later and found photographs of an
unremembered me: a birthday party
and broken asphalt. I wondered if the

woman who kept it on her bookshelf
owned the memory in the photograph.
In some ways that day will always belong
to her, and I left unable to distinguish

how much of my re-collection was nothing
more than a picture of a picture. I wondered
how many fragments of my being are left scattered
in Atlanta; how much of my Self is left unremembered.

author, voice, and bookshelf

an earlier version of this poem appeared here

geography, Katy Perry and rejection letters

my sister is in Baltimore flirting with Camus, my brother is in North Carolina learning Italian, and my yin leaves tomorrow morning for Rishikesh. sadly i have been largely picture-less this past week, but she did encounter a Bengal two days ago in Ranthambore National Park:

you can read more about the tiger here

oddly enough, Katy Perry was there at approximately the same time, getting married or honeymooning or something. i'm really not clear on who Katy Perry is, but i know she's a famous singer of some sort and wrote a song about kissing girls.

thankfully, Katy Perry is beside the point.

the point is that my university is trying to raise AIDS awareness, and as part of their festivities have issued a call for poetry, essays and short stories. i submitted a poem two years ago, and the rejection letter read, in part:

Dear Mr. B___:

Thank you for participating... We received many excellent, thought-provoking submissions. Unfortunately, the Literary Expressions judges did not choose your work as one of the tops two entries. However, we do thank you for allowing us to share in your experiences with HIV/AIDS... Best of luck to you in the future...

this stands in stark contrast to the rejection letter i received last week:

Dr. Mr. B___:

Thank you for your interest in reviewing the books on Chris Marker for C_______. I'm afraid, however, that your proposal is far too academic for us. I suggest you try one of the academic journals.

Thank you for your consideration.

i'm torn as to which one i prefer. the first one is certainly better-written, but it is also painfully generic. there was an entire paragraph (redacted for your pleasure) devoted to plugging events associated with their World AIDS activities.

the second one, on the other hand, is short, sweet and tells me where i can stick my proposal (approximately). best of all, i like that they address me as "Dr. Mr. B___" because it's utterly baffling. since i'm not a doctor, and certainly didn't represent myself as such, i assume that 'Dr.' is an abbreviation for 'Dear.'

to my knowledge this is a non-standard abbreviation, but perhaps the book review editor at C_______ is too busy to deal with those middle two letters.

i need to return to the point.

the point is that i plan on submitting an essay to the AIDS Committee this year and tell a more direct and personal tale than the obtuse poem i submitted in 2008. there is a small cash prize associated with winning, but my main motivation is just to practice the whole submissions process. rejection is an inevitable aspect of all creative endeavors, and each time someone says 'no,' i believe that it nurtures that part of us that, as Chris Marker says, "insists on drawing profiles on prison walls."

with that in mind, i offer a revamped version of the poem that garnered my previous rejection. read it in whatever direction appeals to you:

(kissing) cousins

Kissing cousins

seven years old

to Grandmother’s house we go

Holidays home

nineteen and closetless

stained sheets and seventeen

weekend beers at auntie’s

singlewide lust

single widelust

Grandma says

that college done changed my

Kissing cousins

have you heard the sound of the cardinal

falling on a Sunday afternoon?

One gone Junky

one gone Queer;

illusions of Burroughs in every line

how many licks does it take to get to the two c-note sinner?

One gone straight

two got tested

retractions of allusion

in every rhyme

how many sticks does it take to get to the T-cell winner?

Come back in three months:

waiting…

waiting…

waiting…

Close the door.

sanyoga = sans yoga (Il n'y a pas de coïncidences)

last night, in spite of my earlier sloth-inspired reticence, i went to my weekly meditation group. the half-Canadian who leads the group is in India right now, and, being a complete and utter madman, he agreed to connect in via Skype at the ridiculously early time of 4:30am Jaipur time. the ethernet connection on our end, however, had disappeared into the ethers itself, and the group ending up having a nice long meditation while we waited for the half-Canadian to call.

fortunately, this is beside the point.

the point is that we finally did connect with one another, and the whole episode provided a lovely metaphor for that night's topic of discussion: sanyoga, which means, approximately and allegedly, 'without union.'

the term is explicated in the second book of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras:

drashtri drishyayoh sanyogo heyahetuh

which means damn near nothing to anyone living today outside of scholars and poseurs because Sanskrit is deader than Latin. thankfully, however, there are enough scholars and poseurs to pass down translations* to would-be scholars and poseurs like myself:

drashtri (द्रष्टृ, draṣṭṛ) = the seer; he who perceives; the true self; drastu
drishyah (दृश्यः, dṛśyaḥ) = that which is seen; experienced
sanyoga (संयोग, saṁyoga) = unity; bond; identification
heya (हेय, heya) = that which should be avoided
hetuh (हेतुः, hetuḥ) = cause

in other words, sanyoga is the disconnection from our true self, an identification with an experience rather than the recognition that we are the observer of the experience. this leads, invariably, to pain and suffering.

sanyoga is the root cause of all other obstacles:

the birthplace of desire
(my apartment, NYC, 1999)

the wellspring of attachment
(South Beach, Miami, 2009)

the fountainhead of loneliness
(Art Basel, Miami, 2008)

the breeding ground of aversion

(Wynwood, Miami, 2009)

the question arises:

why does this happen?

but only in the mind experiencing:

s e p a r a t i o n

so, rather than asking why, i find it more useful (and less agitating) to address the source of the question. that's why i:

close my eyes each day
(author with half-Canadian, Vermont, 2009)

practice mantra
(envelope containing mantra, Delray Beach, 2008)

and, most of all:

try to remember
(author seeing ocean for first time, Outer Banks, 1980)

*translation appropriated from here, without permission

"Take Off Your Sunglasses"

i've got this song stuck in my head:



and it's damn near driving me crazy. pleasantly crazy, but crazy nonetheless.
the singer says:

i don't need to think about

things i don't wanna think about

(in the middle of the night)

and in the middle of the day

i don't wanna think about

things i don't wanna think about

(in the middle of the night)

and i knew how he felt when i woke up at 3:45 this morning wide awake without reason or cause. i read Dostoevsky. i meditated. i downloaded pictures from India:

my yin in front of the Taj Mahal

i tried to fall back sleep and failed. i made coffee and journaled. i wrote short sentences. i wished i felt like writing my thesis but didn't.

i did not have this conference stuck in my head:

art for the University of Florida's "Film & Philosophy" Conference

but i will ten days from now, when i travel to Gainesville for the first time in i don't know how long. more than five years, less than ten. it's hard to tell sometimes if five is more or less than ten – the numbing mumble of numbers crumbling.

(Est-ce de la mémoire ou du temps,
dont on écoute dans la nuit?)

[alt.lyric]

there is no end to the things i don't need to think about in the middle of the night, but that has nothing to do with the things that are thought about in the middle of the night. (i don't wanna think about it. i don't wanna think about it.) i don't wanna think about the things i don't need to think about in the middle of the night.

[return]

[lapse]

[fade]

weddings, La Cienega and Agra

yesterday morning i went to a wedding:

the sun rose behind the clouds, moving from hidden to vermillion to amber curtains of light pouring down onto the ocean. the full moon hung in the western sky, almost as if it was waiting to hear the "I do," and it occurred to me that the same moon was just beginning to rise in Agra, where my yin was visiting the Red Fort:

how far apart are these places:
8000 miles? a 20 hour flight? 9½ hours worth of time zone?

these places are one moon away from each other, one moon that holds the day in perfect harmony with the night. i thought about these things as the preacher gave his sermon. i thought about four years earlier, when i stepped foot on this particular beach for the first time. so much has changed since then, and yet to the sand and the beach and the ocean and the moon it was nothing. it was less than nothing, a blink of the eye, slip of the tongue, a cliché waiting to happen:

time is a scam; a beautiful, inexplicably lovely scam.

do these denizens of Agra ever worry about time?

i have heard people liken the mind to a monkey:

"there goes my monkey mind again."

but these types of statements are an affront to monkeys the world over.

the mind - at least the mind prevalent in this part of the world during this time in history - is better compared to the ruthless precision of Swiss watches. a Rolex-ed tyranny of minutes and minutia, seconds and second-guessing. to live and breathe and swing from trees is the privilege and birthright of humans and monkeys alike. have you ever heard a child ask:

"do i have enough time to climb this tree?"

how about La Cienega, do you think she wonders about time in Nepal? no; we were in communication this very morning:

La Cienega wrote:

the author responded:

7:29am
in joying india ??

7:29am
that is fantastic!
[my yin] is in Agra right now.

7:30am
Life is!!!
You no

7:30am
alas, no. school. writing thesis.
saw picture of you and carrots. lovely.

7:30am
hmm...thought of you a bunch of times...in Kathmandu hehehe...from months ago! Lost my camera..boohoo

7:30am
we're already planning a future traipse.

cameras are overrated, a poor substitute for the creativity of memory.

7:32am
I agree! I actually havent taken many pictures...the crew i was travlling with did! So entering Nepal alone i took on the camera...crossed the border...no more camera!

7:32am
how long are you staying?

7:32am
???

7:32am
beautiful. have you been to Bhutan?

7:33am
In love! Yes! It is Beautiful! One of the 13 grandmothers lives there...a nepalese shaman! Hope to connect wioth her when she returns to nepal

7:33am
envy. someday someday someday...

7:34am
if you truly desire you WILL make it manifest!!

7:35am
agreed. envy, like all emotions, is beautiful in its impermanence.

7:35am
When do you and [your yin] enter into sacred union

7:35am
last Sunday in February.

7:38am
Beautiful!!! You are a most beautiful pair!!! May all the love that is, continue to radiate from each of you!!! and spread out over the whole world!!!! Radiant love!!! Yum! Thank you for the blessing of your presence in my life! Often you come into my heart and my mind and i am lost in love and gratitude!!! Please know this! So much love and gratitude!!!

7:39am
always and ever the same.
love, light, and safe travels.
every moment is a gift.

conversations like these, scattered and infrequent though they be, is why i call her La Cienega:



and while La Cienega is never beside the point, i should nonetheless return to the wedding...

there were three flower girls, the youngest of whom had a shiner and trailed behind her sisters (or cousins) saying "you dropped some" and pointing to the petals in the sand. it was an adorable sight, the magnificent fragility of life and the imponderable resiliency of children. how sad it is that, as we grow older, each of us has to learn that we can be hurt. even sadder, however, is that we come to believe that we can be injured in a way that dampers our spirit and being.

the preacher giving the service spoke to these things in his own obtuse way. it was a more traditional service than the one my yin and i plan, but i was able to listen for the truths he spoke rather than becoming lost in the semantics. i was reminded once more that the largest difference between Christian theology and Eastern thought (at least as it's been taught to me) is a matter of which state one calls 'acquired' and which state one calls 'natural.'

or, in other words, how original is our sin?

a Rose by any other name...

maybe i'll end up becoming a Christian mystic like Dostoevsky and see grand mal visions of the Divine and pen great sweeping novels with unpronounceable characters' names. maybe i'll write heartfelt accounts of normal people, flawed and anonymous, that come to represent the shifting tides of history as an empire begins to collapse upon itself.

how far apart are 19th century St. Petersburg and 21st century Washington?

the wedding and sunrise were followed by breakfast, and i made small talk with friends and strangers while my mind pondered Dostoevsky. i questioned an acquaintance about her vipassana retreat and asked the server to prepare me a plate without any meat. in spite of this, the ocean's breeze carried with it the smell of bacon.

after the cake was cut, i wished my friend congratulations. she is one of those special maniacs that does things like build surfboards in her free time and sew dresses for the bridesmaids. i still remember three years ago, when she attempted to set me up with her roommate and fed me a spinach-feta burger with sweet potato fries. the match-making didn't take, though, and that night i walked the beach with Mardou.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that i spoke with my yin after the wedding and gave her a brief recap. she told me about Agra and sent a picture of the Taj Mahal, as seen from the Red Fort:

more of the Taj to follow...

my favorite, though, was this one of her with a half-Canadian:

"looks like you got laid," i observed.

alas, getting laid is also beside the point... at least for the time being.

Padmasambhava said:

(alt.title=rhymed couplets and triptychs
for the aborted children of Krishnamurti)

“Though the view should be as vast as the sky,
keep your conduct as fine as barley flour.”

how fine is barley flour, how vast is the sky,
how many Icarus have fallen trying to fly?

Siddhartha abandoned, his family to see:
if perhaps the Buddha could out-wait the tree.

a Nazarene questioned the wisdom of his Father;
how do we judge the son, that entered the garden?

days pass by and understanding grows deeper
sometimes i wonder: are we our teacher's keeper?

Godard v. Dostoevsky

i turned in the first chapter of my thesis on Wednesday, and to celebrate (and to nurse my ailing, pre-tendonitis wrists and forearms) i decided to take a couple of days of from typing. i wanted to relax and take it easy, to clear my mind of all the convoluted mental acrobatics required to make a the muddled mess of Lacanian thought into a (relatively) straight line of reasoning.

Q: how does a super-genius like myself choose to unwind?
A: French films and Russian novels, of course.

Jean-Luc Godard and Fyodor Dostoevsky, scaled to stature

first, le film du jour, Godard's Vivre sa vie, which stars the impossibly comely Anna Karina as the prostitute Nana:

dig the Voltaire in the background

Vivre sa vie has all the wonderful Godard tropes: crime, allusion, tabletop philosophy, episodic construction, and a great jukebox dance scene:



unfortunately, it also has that other quintessential Godardian trait:

the vacant woman.

her lines are delivered emptily (sans la motivation, sans l'effort), and with Karina this is especially disturbing because she and Godard were married during the early and mid-Sixties. one cannot help but feel a certain animosity leaking into the frame from the man directing the camera, an invisible contempt tinged with subtle personal acrimony and the not-so-subtle misogyny of the camera's gaze.

the clearest demonstration of this is the final scene, when Nana is gunned down not by one, but by two pimps who were in the process of trading her. the film ends abruptly, with a long shot of Nana on the ground as her former pimp makes his getaway.

C'est la vie?

hoping to lighten my mood, i decided it was the perfect time to start Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. although i read Notes from the Underground a couple of years ago, which had great lines like:

"Vice begins with that in which true love finds its consummation."

it was Crime and Punishment, however, that instilled my awed, fearful reverence for The Dead Russian. i read it as an undergraduate (also for fun) sometime in the late Nineties, and a six-month period of mild insanity followed. in fact, i've never quite been the same since reading of poor Raskolnikov and the murdered pawn broker. something broke inside of me while reading the novel (i mean this in the best possible way), and i wish i had taken better notes on the experience.

there was simply something different me after the book, something so fundamental as to elude my ability to say it, yet so profound as to inform every thought and action that came after it. the novel had lodged itself into my unconscious mind, and i've been unable (and unwanting) to shake it in the decade that followed.

the same thing happened the first time i heard Stravinsky's Rite of Spring; maybe it's something about dead Russians:



the dead Russians are beside the point.

the point is that i started reading of Mitya, Vanya, and Alyosha last night, and i found myself captivated at the end of the first chapter: "In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we."

i know this is true in my own experience. the gremlins and ghouls and monsters that populate and terrorize this world are acting out of ignorance rather than malice, out of fear rather than evil, out of forgetting rather than remembering.

and so, i humbly submit myself once more to the divine will of the degenerate master, let come what insanity may...

ate daze uh weak (my yin's Himalayan adventures)

so my yin has been gone for eight days so far, and - amazingly - i've managed not to break into the giant block of cheese she left me before leaving. of course my notion of what constitutes a giant block of cheese changed somewhat this morning:

somewhere there's a yak with sore nipples

this monstrosity was spotted either in Kullu or New Delhi, and as the sign implies, it came from a yak. i don't even know what a yak is. maybe it's like a goat?

the yak is beside the point.

the point is that who could possibly need to buy cheese, yak or otherwise, by the kilo? more over, having procured said yak cheese, how does one go about storing it? maybe yak cheese doesn't need to be refrigerated. but wouldn't mice and mongooses eat it? and why isn't 'mongeese' the plural of 'mongoose'?

the mongoose is also beside the point.

the point is that i am obsessed with this block of cheese, and all the other tantalizing bits of information that find their way from my yin's exploits. these, for example, are Indian Converse:

the thing i love about this picture is that you can see other pairs of Converse in the background, and the shoes are basically strung up in the vendor's stall like these prayer flags across the Beas River:

she wrote: "how did they do that?"

my yin, when not documenting her adventures or pondering the finer points of stringing flags across holy rivers, likes to relax by drinking Nescafe with a maniacal grin:

or sipping on chai from hillside Himalayan cafés:

my yin says India is full of dogs

one of my favorites, though, was this one. those are the Himalayas behind her, although i'm uncertain if the view is towards Kashmir or Tibet:

i will post more photos and updates as time and technology allow.
until then, as ever...