Changes are afoot

Changes in both my life and my website are forthcoming. First, life:

I decided to take advantage of a long weekend to travel to Tibet. Whilst there, I protested the Chinese crackdown on protesters, which in effect made me a protester. I was placed in a burlap sack and beaten, and I now write this from the slimy muck at the bottom of a jail cell in Sichuan province. My captors have agreed to update my blog for me, and have even given me pen and paper. All I had to do was promise to quit singing Kenny Loggins at the top of my lungs at all hours. Chinese prison guards HATE Kenny Loggins. Yup, my constant threat of singing KL has made me big man on campus around here. All the other inmates are forced to relinquish their gruel'n'guts eggrolls to me at mealtimes, and my guards give me a footrub on the hour, every hour. I'm thinking about staying here and starting a traveling band of inmate musicians. We will cover Abba, and only Abba, for every tiny podunk Chinese village for a thousand miles. If that all sounds pretty ridiculous to you, I suggest you take a look at the date on this blog entry. April second for me is April first for you USA types...

And now for something completely different... (reality or something like it)

I'm contracted to teach through the end of May here in Korea, at which point I will go ahead on to Thailand. I am midly considering extending for another month or two in order to obtain a faster laptop for my continued travels. In any case, at some point in the summer I'm going to Thailand, where I will remain for at least the rest of the year. How long I stay after that depends on how things work out. I will be training in Muay Thai full time, so I guess we'll see how I jive with that lifestyle.

Coming past the one year mark in Korea is a good time to look back. I've had a pretty excellent time here with few complaints of any sort. Or regrets for that matter, save one - I wish I'd spent the time to learn Korean and get truly immersed in Korean culture. This whole ex-pat scene has been a huge wake-up call for me. You come here and there is a friend group of english speakers pretty much ready to go. That plus high speed internet in your apartment can really kill your momentum on learning the local language and making local friends. It's taken me a long time to see how the habits and patterns form here, but I'm glad that I've learned how this works, because this will definitely not be the last foreign country that I live in for an extended period of time. In the meantime, it's never too late to learn - I intend to spend the rest of my time here hanging out with Koreans as often as possible and making a stab at speaking as much of the language as I can.

Martial arts wise, I continue to grow in capability and mental strength. Physically, flexibility remains my number one issue. But practice and exercise have become part of my mental and spiritual landscape to the point where I cannot imagine a life without training 4-5 times a week. There's a feel to it, a constant energy that is with you all the time. I've been getting more sleep lately too and that's always beneficial.

As far as the website goes, I'm basically reworking the entire thing. I've been using a Mac-based program to build and maintain the site, which has had pros and cons. The program is incredibly easy to use and enables me to do slick things (like those pop up menus on the photos page) without actually knowing what I'm doing. The downside is that it ties me to the Mac platform. I've been a Mac user for years, but lately speed and power have become most important to me as far as computers are concerned. Speed and power carry a hefty premium in the world of Mac, unfortunately. Also, I'd like to migrate my website activities to something that's more platform independent. As in, learn how to write html myself so I can build/maintain the site no matter what kind of computer I'm on. That's the end goal. This also ties in with my photography - I've stopped using iPhoto (which ships with all Macs) due to the fact that it cannot handle massive picture libraries like mine, on old/slow machines like mine. I've transferred all my photos to an old-fashioned regular old files and folders set up, once again with platform independence in mind. Ideally, I get a new laptop, run Linux on it, and do things the geekier/harder/ultimately more rewarding way.

To that end, the site is going to look really, really basic in the coming months. Also, I'm going with a new approach with the photos. Rather than having hundreds and hundreds of photos on the site, I'm going to pare it down to the shots I'm really, really proud of. I'll still try to keep things in chronological/geographical order, but I'm going to be a lot pickier about what I put up. Or maybe I'll just say screw it and put up a bunch of picasa web albums and call it a day. Only time will tell!

Real quick to my theatre friends: I miss you guys like crazy. Not living around a bunch of weirdo artists and doing theatre all the time is what's going to get me back to the states. For anyone who's wondering, yes I'm definitely coming back, and yes I'm going to work in theatre.

For those of you who have followed my Asian adventures and kept up with me via the website, email, chat, and what have you, thanks. As I look back on this past year I've realized the importance of community, and it's nice to feel that there is one/several that I can jump back into when I'm stateside again. I hope you're all doing fantastically well.