Capitol Thoughts

Part of the press corps during the Governor's press availability today at the Capitol.
This was my first time being on the third floor, the Governor's floor. Skip (the shorter guy standing with a beard) was running the camera and I was doing audio.

Alaska's Governor, Sean Parnell, the man who succeeded Sarah Palin.
I know this is a bad photo. I felt really silly taking photos with my iPhone when I was surrounded by really nice cameras being held by real photographers.

We are officially past ‘hump day,’ the halfway mark of this 90-day legislative session. It’s been remarked upon by legislators, pages, staffers, everyone. There seems to be this sense of “we’re halfway there,” as well as, “there’s so much left to do in so little time.” The media has reported that this 28^th Legislature has gotten off to a fast start, faster than normal, and that the days of bills moving sloth-like through committees and floors are over.

Within weeks, one controversial bill, which sped through various committees, was the subject of several presentations and public hearings and general chatter throughout the city, found its way back to the Governor’s desk. I say back to the Governor’s desk because that’s where it started. It was a Governor’s bill – he created it and he got to officially sign it into Alaska statute. One day it was merely a question and – poof – it’s now Alaska law. The ‘poof’ was plenty of “yea” votes in both the House and the Senate floors. Poof, the Governor gets what he wants. This will likely be a continuing trend for this session. Unfortunately.

If my voice carries a tone of disenchantment, that’s because I am disenchanted – with Alaska’s politicians, with the process, with the illusion of debate. For every floor vote that I’ve ever covered for Gavel to Gavel, I know which way it’s going to go; everyone does. So it seems so pointless to me, so futile. Imagine, if it feels like that for me, how must it feel for the legislators who go against the grain, who are in the minority? As often as I say I’m sick of them, of all politicians in the Capitol – the good and the bad – I guess I have to respect their fight, the fight of the underdogs that is. Do they really feel like they can do something? Or is it all a show? One big, elaborate, expensive show?

*

Since it’s the last day of February, I’m going to finally get around to posting something I wrote in hand back on the 5^th of February. I happened to have a pad of paper with me during a committee meeting and scribbled down some random thoughts:

I’m sitting in a Senate Finance meeting and I’m doing audio which is why I can write. Usually I like to listen to the actual meeting, but the Director of the Office of Management and Budget is rattling off sections, and numbers, and acronyms, and saying words like, “retroactive,” and, “please turn to the spreadsheet,” so I’m not sure if I’ll process too much. It’s the Governor’s Supplemental Bill, which amounts to over 24 million dollars. Plus, where I’m sitting for doing audio is pretty tucked away in a corner and no one will notice or care what I’m doing.

The Senate Finance room is beautiful and big with original benches from when this room was a courtroom. I wish I knew architectural terms to accurately describe what the room looks like, but it’s really old looking and elegant, classy. I love the light fixtures and the trim around the ceiling. Other committee rooms aren’t nearly as inspired or original. The committee members, who all happen to be “gentlemen” as the chair referred to them (it seems the one female member is excused because she’s introducing a bill to another committee), are sitting around the rectangle of wooden tables, with the committee chair on one end and the presenter on the other end. Bordering the center table are long, rectangular tables where the Senators’ staffers sit. I often wonder about the working relationship between legislators and their staff. Do staff members need to continually kiss their boss’s ass or do they serve more as mirrors, trying to be honest about who their boss is, how they behave, or appear to the general public? I assume it’s both.

Apparently the supplemental bill is a lot larger than last year’s, which was around 80 million dollars.

Senator Fairclough just arrived – the lone female on this committee. The committee members are now questioning the Director of OMB on the different line items asking to be funded.

Overall, I’m happy to get a glimpse into what goes on in the Alaska State Capitol, but it’s not a scene I’d like to get more involved in. Too many suits and silly rules and routines.  

A Thread

The feel of the smooth black floor beneath my feet, the mirrored walls surrounding me, and space all around – I was in a dance studio for the first time in more than seven years and a half years, and there was almost no fear inside me. To be put back into such a familiar space came a feeling of freedom. I had forgotten what it felt like to dance, to make my body do movements that had been memorized by my muscles and joints years ago. While I did have to think with my mind in order to follow the teacher and my fellow classmates, it was my body that took over. I had forgotten that I even knew how to do a flat back, but, of course, it had been programmed into my body. How many times had I’d done a flat back in the twenty years I danced? How many times had I looked to the ceiling and beyond and with rounded arms above my head, opened them as if to welcome heaven? How many times had it been drilled into my head that the only way to control the whole body is to have control of my core, to engage my stomach muscles, to breathe? And I learned that when you’re standing on your feet, your legs stretched straight, your body doubled over so the top of your head is as close to the floor as possible, and the teacher says to release, you release – you release your neck muscles, you breathe deeply into the stretch, and you nod your head yes and shake your head no to prove that you’re indeed released.

The hour on Friday night at the Juneau Dance Unlimited studio flew by. I didn’t want it to end. I stretched muscles and joints and parts of my body that hadn’t been awakened in years. When we moved across the floor, I wanted the studio to be twenty times longer – one always ends up running into the corner. I felt a confidence in dancing that I never really felt when I was in high school and dancing five times a week. I don’t even know if I loved it then. I think the love grew over time when I had a chance to process how much dance meant to me, how much I missed it when it was no longer an option, and how much it brought to my life, like discipline and stability and structure. Dancing, or more specifically, the school I went to – Steffi Nossen – gave me a whole world that existed outside of school and family. It gave me a changing room and a studio, mirrors surrounded by light bulbs, costumes, frenzy, flowers, the stage. It also gave me fear of my teachers’ disapproval, of not living up to expectations, of never being good enough. But above all, it gave me beauty. When I look back with my rose-tinted glasses, I recall the good dances, the perfect lighting and music, the moments I shined.

I didn’t back then when I was actually dancing and performing, but now, as an adult, I have stress dreams about being on stage and not knowing what I’m supposed to do. That would’ve never happened in real life.

Dancing was always a thread in my life – from age four to eighteen, through college, and in Hong Kong when I used to commute an hour and a half each way to get from Tuen Mun to the dance studio at the Fringe in Central. In Wrangell, when there were no dance classes for me to take, I created classes for children, but that only lasted a year. While I think I can finally acknowledge that fact that I can teach some things, when it comes to the realm of dancing, I am a perpetual student. I want to be told what to do for warm up, I want choreography to land on me, I want to be encouraged.

I’m so happy that now, after a long hiatus, the thread can finally continue again.

Since We're Digging Up Old Photos...

... here are some pictures we took at the Bangkok Airport before we flew to the States in May 2012 for my sister Cam Ly's wedding.

If I were a peasant farmer:

If Scott were a small Asian boy:

This Time Last Year

For all of last year, I carried a month-by-month planner, and between January 1st and July 20th of 2012, on each small square representing each day of each month, I wrote the location of where Scott and I were. While traveling, the most time we spent in any one place was about five days. Usually though, we slept in a town for no more than three nights. Last night, I pulled out this planner to play “Guess where we were this time last year” with Scott. He guessed Gokarna in India, which was almost right. When I said he was close, he knew immediately where we had been February 16 last year – Tenali, the hometown of our friend Vijay, who taught at Sherubtse in Bhutan (and perhaps still does) with Scott.

Scott and I first went through Tenali, a small town of India’s southeastern state Andhra Pradesh, in mid-January 2012 and spent three nights with Vijay and his family. After Tenali we continued our path of circumnavigating the country and headed south to Chennai, then Madurai, Kodai Kanal, around the southern tip of the country at Kanyakumari, and then followed the western coast north. After a week in Kerala, we toured Bangalore and Hampi before enjoying a few days of respite at the beaches of Gokarna. It was the calmest part of India we had found at that point and we wanted to soak it all in before heading to Mumbai. We already had a train ticket booked for the big city. But on the morning before we were scheduled to leave Gokarna, we got a phone call. It was Vijay and he had news – he was getting married.

Our options were to either follow our original plan of heading to Mumbai or change our plans completely and cross the southern part of India to return to Tenali one month after we had left for Vijay’s wedding. After much hemming and hawing, talking with travel agents, and lots of time on train and bus websites, we decided on the latter. We left Om Beach in Gokarna on February 14 and took an overnight bus to Tenali, spent two nights and one wedding day there, and then a full day and night of traveling on February 17 to get to Mumbai.

When I asked Scott to guess where we were February 16 last year, the correct answer is Tenali, India for Vijay’s wedding. And here we are on that day:

  

Magic

Magical moments can occur wherever one lives. Whether it’s in a big city or in a rural setting, magic can happen in the flight of a plastic bag or in an endless sky sunset. In Tanzania, a drive home could be magical for me. Actually, throughout our whole time in Africa, there seemed to be an underlying sense of wonder and awe, in both the amazing and the despairing.

There was magic the first time I saw giraffes in the wild. It was an utterly unforgettable moment that occurred as we were driving into Arusha National Park to climb Mt. Meru. At this point we’d only been in Tanzania for a couple of months and, since it was our first time in a National Park, we were preparing ourselves for a sighting. But you can’t really prepare yourself adequately for seeing that sort of thing – wild animals in the wild. Our eyes were peeled out the window of our vehicle and before my mind could catch up with my eyes, to the right of us was a huge clearing and – moving in perpetual slow motion – giraffes!

In future safari rides, Scott and I would get a lot closer to giraffes than we did that morning, but the distance between us and them added to the surreal effect of seeing these magnificent creatures. The color of the scene seemed enhanced as if a computerized magic wand had been swiftly waved in front of us, yet there also appeared to be a dreamy blur around the edges, like the wavy distortion of heat rising from the hood of a car. It felt unreal. But it was true; the giraffes were there and we were seeing them. That moment unhinged something in me, something deep and childlike – an unfailing belief in magic.

Whenever I travel, magic comes to me in unexpected bursts. I suddenly feel overcome with gratitude for whatever is surrounding me and wish my mother could be experiencing the same thing I am – seeing what I’m seeing, doing what I’m doing. That’s who I usually think about – my mother, or Scott (if he’s not with me).

Toward the end of our stay in Bhutan, Scott and I traveled to Khaling with our friends Shauna and Julian to attend a Tshechu, a religious festival where attendees dress up in their best kira and gho, watch mask dances, and gamble. We were accompanied by one of Julian’s co-workers who was from the area. After a short stay at the Khaling Tshechu, as Scott and I were being dropped off in Kanglung, Julian’s coworker informed us that there was another important religious gathering going on at the Kanglung Zhandopelri, so we stopped by the temple in lower market in the quickly falling darkness.

When we got there, I spotted Lopen Sonam, one of my fellow teachers at the primary school. Lopen Sonam was once himself a monk and has a son who’s a reincarnate, so he’s heavily involved with the temple and very in touch with Buddhist practices and rituals. As soon as he saw me, in his limited English, he asked me where Sir was. I explained that Scott was with friends from out of town and that he’d likely find me soon. Lopen Sonam led me into the temple where people were seated on the floor in rows, ushered me into the front row, and then found his reserved space where he started to perform actions that held no meaning to me but were second nature to him – pouring sacred water from one bowl to another or distributing dried flower petals to places where they belong. Across a small space that served as the aisle were other rows of people facing my row. I was alone but surrounded by people; seated near me was someone I recognized as being a student at the college.

Words were spoken, prayers said, and before I knew it, a mask dancer started moving down the small aisle. I had never before been so close to a mask dancer, especially inside such an intimate space. During tshechus, mask dancers perform outside in the temple courtyard. There are many dancers and they spin in circles constantly revolving as one body, as if each is a planet orbiting the sun. That night, inside the Kanglung Zangdopelri, there was one dancer and I was in the front row seeing – and feeling – in close proximity his bare feet stomp the ground with each fall of each jump and each step. The others in the front row with me tried to scoot back us as much as we could in order to give the dancer more room, but there were rows of others behind us and we could only go so far, so we leaned back as much as we could. There was a fear of the dancer, in his ever circling spins, losing his balance and using us to cushion his fall, but he never did. Inside the temple, the lighting was low and the air thick from butter candles. Surrounding us were rich colors, swaths of silk, and representations of Buddhist deities.

It was the end of a tiring weekend and I remember thinking that I had a slight cold coming on, and the breeze that came from the swooshing costume of the turning mask dancer made me feel chilled. I pulled used tissues from the sleeve of my toego and wiped my nose. The moving air around me made me feel weak but exhilarated – when else would I feel the wind emanating from the movement of a Buddhist mask dancer? I remember at one point, the dancer was spinning so quickly, his costume’s skirt blew out to a perfect perpendicular angle from his legs, and inside that 90-degree space that was created between, the girl who I recognized as a college student was sitting with a hunched back talking quietly into her cell phone. If the stomping bare feet or the cold breeze wasn’t enough magic, than that image, permanently etched in my memory, was more than I could ever hope for. In Bhutan, we were constantly surrounded my religion, but that was the only time when I literally felt it.

*

Last weekend and into the whole week, Juneau lived up to its true identity of existing in a rainforest. It rained, a lot. But that didn’t stop up from putting on raingear and getting outside. We drove across the bridge, leaving Douglas, and continued out the road in Juneau. Scott wanted to get to a beach. We turned left off the road at a place called The Shrine, a beautiful stretch of coastline where people live, get married, pray and go for walks.

We didn’t do as much walking as we wanted to. We did more watching. Whenever we could, Scott would find a place to come out of the trees and look over the water. We weren’t looking for too long before Scott saw a whale spout. I looked off into the distance in the same direction and within minutes, another spout. And like the first sighting of giraffes, that first whale sighting since returning to Southeast was a reawakening of something, a reminder that magic not only exists in Alaska but surrounds us all the time; we just have to be conscious of it. I felt like a little kid. I sighed in awe. This is why we’re here, I thought. Not for the whale spouting itself, but the fact that on an average rainy Saturday, we had the fortune to witness it, again and again.

For a brief moment, being in Juneau was alright, because it wasn’t about where we were specifically – all that mattered was that we were in Southeast. We frequently saw whales in Wrangell, and we could do the same here. And for some silly reason, that’s amazing to me.

After those initial whale sightings, we walked down to the beach and out onto the rocks. We spotted more whales in the far distance, but what was closer was a large group of sea lions.

They kept coming closer and closer to inspect us as well as to scare us off with their loud barks. We stayed for some time though and I was just so happy to be in raingear, that I had it at all, in the rain.

Natural Art

What we saw on our walk in North Douglas...

 

A Card From a Good Friend

Yesterday we received this card in the mail:

The card's artwork inspired me to create the image below.

 

Since working in the Capitol building, I've had to split my life between two pairs of shoes. I wear my Xtra-Tufs to and from work (and if I find any chances during the work day to take to walk around town) and I wear my black clogs throughout the floors and halls of the Capitol.

 

Wearing my Xtra-Tufs again is something I definitely enjoy about being back in Southeast Alaska.

 

*

 

What was better than the actual picture on the card was the message inside. Thank you. 

Where We Live...

... until the end of June.

 

At the moment, we're living next door to the Eaglecrest ski area on North Douglas, which is located about 9 miles from the town of Douglas. It's an extremely nice and comfortable house and I know we're already getting too attached to it.

Below is a bird's eye view of downtown Juneau from the State Office Building. If you look closely, you can see the bridge that connects downtown Juneau to Douglas Island across the Gastineau Channel. We drive that bridge every day of the work week in order for me to get to the Capitol building.

Where I Work

If We Were In Wrangell...

Scott says I need to stop saying that.

There are many things we miss in Wrangell, mainly our dear friends there, but there are many things to embrace in Juneau as well, and I need to focus on that a little more. One of these many things is First Friday – a night that falls on the first Friday of every month when Juneau-ites get to peruse new art exhibits, explore the capital’s museums for free during usual closed times, and sample some light appetizers.

Here is one of the pieces from the exhibit, “Thread,” which is displayed at the Juneau-Douglas City Museum, that particularly caught our eye:

I wish I had taken more pictures of Trevor Gong’s flies as they were all exquisitely put together and likely took hundreds and hundreds of hours of meticulously detailed, tiring, and gratifying work.

The next night, Scott and I hit the town and saw a live performance of singer-songwriter John Elliot at the Rookery Café. Live music performances were few and far between in Wrangell, so it is nice to live in a place where these events are more common.

We rounded out the weekend with a Sunday walk in the forest and along the beach before the Superbowl.

A Little Reminder

As we were watching the Superbowl on Sunday I saw a couple of players get into a small brawl – that seemed to happen a lot throughout the game – and I thought about Seuri K., one of our students in Tanzania.

During one of our last weekends at Orkeeswa, Allison and I traveled with the boys’ soccer team to Arusha to watch them play. At one point during the match, Seuri and one of the boys on the opposing team kind of fell on top of each other as they were both running to the ball, just one of those physical moments between players that happens all the time during soccer. After they got up, Seuri put on a big smile and tried to put his arm around his opponent but the boy threw off Seuri’s arm and ran away. Having witnessed this interaction, I watched closely for Seuri’s reaction. There seemed to be none; Seuri was completely unfazed by how his gesture of sportsmanship was received. He just continued playing.

I just hope that moment didn’t change Seuri. During athletic competitions, which were the core backbone to the culture of extracurricular activities at Orkeeswa, our students often had to face little injustices that we hoped wouldn’t affect their overall attitude towards sports. Of course, these injustices paled in comparison to the lifelong battles they fought every day of their lives – against poverty, against inequality, oftentimes against their culture.

It was a warm, humbling thought to be reminded of Seuri K. – of his big smile, his attempt at reconciliation, and my gratitude for having even met him – during the Superbowl.

Another Angle of Mendenhall

Before the weekend officially begins, I wanted to make sure I posted images from last weekend's snowshoe adventure on the West Glacier Trail.