this and that

I wrote a long something a couple of days ago, but the internet wouldn't post or save it for me. Lame.

It's getting very hot here. I am glad that I am going on trek soon because I'm just not good at this dry heat thing. Yesterday, I walked with Ama-la, the kids, and Tsering Dolma to a gompa outside of the city. Tais and Daniel came by taxi and met us there and we walked to Kopan. I'm glad I finally got to go. It is a really lovely place. afterward we all walked back home. In all I think we were walking for a good 4 hours. It was nice though because it gave me a chance to talk to everyone Diki and I spent about an hour of the walk discussing the art of making animal noises. She has a strange affinity to goats and can mimic their noises so well that some of them actually called back to her.

Today, I was just in a crummy mood. I should have just stayed in bed. We had a walk with Anil, but I just wasn't in the right mindset to enjoy it. The day got much better after I got home and had some alone time. I walked around the stupa for a while and right around sunset a flood of monk, followed by nuns, followed by school children, followed by what seemed like the rest of the Tibetan community all came in through the main gate chanting and carrying candles and protest signs. I called Tais to tell her what was going on and she told me to meet her at one of the roof top restaurants so that we could have a good view of what was going on. It took me about 20 minutes before I could actually wade through all the people and find Tais. It was a really beautiful sight. It was good to see such passion. From now to the Olympics is the time for people to make themselves heard before the world looses interest again.

That said, my moms brought this to my attention:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
~Barack Obama

As someone raised as poor white trash in small town Pa, I'd really like to know how being poor equates to being a gun toting, bible thumping, bigot. It reminds me of hearing people from not so economically depressed regions always say "illegal immigrants take the jobs that Americans won't do." It always makes me laugh at how detached people from higher social standing can be that they actually think that everyone else is so well off that there could possibly be jobs that the unemployed are above. I'm certainly not saying that I have a problem with immigration. The more the merrier. We were all immigrants at one time (except the native Americans, but we don't like to talk about them in polite conversation). Maybe the reason that there is such a small population of recent immigrants in most of pa is that us damn rednecks keep taking all their jobs.

Back to Barack, what the fuck is he thinking saying that just before the pa primaries? Did he not get the memo about how many electoral votes me have? Is he trying to throw the election to the ice queen? Granted, I didn't like either of the dem candidates prior to the above comments, but really, it is times like these that I'm proud to be green.

I think that blaming people's small mindedness on being poor is just giving them an excuse to stay that way. I mean, I didn't let a little thing like money stop me from traveling to the other side of the world. I mean, sure I'll probably be in debt an extra five years or so because of it, but that's life, and as far as I know I have plenty more of it to enjoy. So in June I will go back to working for 90% of my waking hours, but everyone does what they have to to survive so how can anyone complain?

This should have ended a few paragraphs ago and I've just been dragging it out because I'm not tired. But lights go out soon, so night night.