Subtle Shifts in Austin, Subtle Shifts in Me
The Real Reality?
Being back in Austin feels like I just popped into the bathroom and wandered back out. It was a year, but everything looks and feels basically the same. Some wonderful people who were together are even more together by marrying. A few have replicated themselves. Life rolls on. There are a few tweaks around the edges of things. A new swanky restaurant or bar in the once poor part of town. A few more ultrahip people who, apparently, can’t afford jeans big enough to fit them.
A small southern town in China changes more in two days than the last year in Austin. Maybe it’s just that my sense of scale has been completely thrown off by buildings that go up in fifteen days and restaurants that turn into clothing boutiques in one.

The odd thing about returning to a familiar place is that the completely different world I inhabited for a year now seems so far away that my experiences there can’t possibly be real. Then I step into a Chinese restaurant and find myself talking to the owner in Chinese. Suddenly I can’t deny the reality of having been in China, and my time in China seems like the real reality… and who are all of these strange people around me?!
Correction
Since posting this next section, I’ve had a lot of worried phone calls. I edited it a bit to be more clear but I thought I should also say upfront that everything is basically fine, I just have to take it easy and not overdo things the way I used to. Lisa also pointed out that my complaints are essentially that I’m no longer able to stop bullets with my chest and fly!
The CO Brain
I haven’t been able to be as crazy active as I’d like. I did really well the first few days but then started getting tired while talking to people in the intense way I love. The CO brain is still doing its best to slow me down. I cancelled all of my meetups (two-three a day) for the rest of my time to take it easy and make sure I was getting enough recovery rest. I’m now trying to schedule a maximum of one event every day and take one day breaks in between.
I’m also trying to learn how to nap, but failing miserably. How do you people do this?! When I get tired, I can’t do anything but lie around bored. If I do fall asleep it’s for several hours and I’m an irritating grump as I crawl through the wake up process. (That part is perfectly normal!)
The result of all of this is that despite being in Austin for some time now, I still haven’t seen many people or do all of the things I love to do. I managed to make it to one Tango class and a writer’s group and then couldn’t power up for the Milonga (Tango dance) that night. Fail. I’ve barely begun the giant list of people I’d like to see, although couch surfing has helped make some of that happen.
Hilariously, some of my friends are getting to like this new version of me. When I showed up a little wound down to meet with Lisa Kaselak, she thought I had a marvelous gravitas and loved that there were pauses in our conversation and fewer simultaneous topics roaring along at ninety miles an hour. As a conversational speed freak it drives me nuts, but perhaps bodes well for my future as a 道教 (Daoist) monk.
I’ve extended my time in Austin a bit to see if I can work more in gradually. I do appreciate time with friends when I get it and access to Yoga and Tango. 慢慢来。 (Màn man lái : go slowly).

At Norman Alger’s memorial service this weekend in his hometown of Mantua, Ohio I thought a lot about what would make someone choose to be a farmer. My dad grew up on a farm but turned to physics. Despite this, he and my mother churned up the soil surrounding every house we ever lived in to make space for food to pour up from the ground. My friends used to laugh at the fact that my father worked with a particle accelerator all day and came home to drag a huge homemade wooden plow through the mud. He told me there was something about the magic of seeing things grow that was hard to explain, and for a farmer that used to also mean the independence of running your own business and playing directly with the forces of nature.
When uncle Norman was carried away on a submarine in World War II he kept a collection of pictures in his pocket. It’s not hard to imagine those guys curling up in their bunks at night and trying to make a connection with home by looking through the window of a photograph. There were no phone calls, no email, no sights or sounds for months at a time; just a black and white image of a couple of your brothers or friends grinning around a tractor, waiting for you to come back and help them out. 

