O (in his traditional Vietnamese ao dai gown and in front of a flag from Vietnam):

C (opening up her 4th birthday card):

H (and his 1st birthday cake):

Get this damn hat off of me:

Just a quick post to say that I am home in the U.S.  It’s currently Monday night, about 7:25pm EST and I’m at my mom’s in Georgia.  I left Vietnam on Thursday morning, September 25th, and flew from HCMC to Taipei, Taiwan, onto Los Angeles, and then finally to Atlanta.  A very long flight – as always – made to feel a little longer this time around because I managed to slam the index finger on my right hand in the door of the taxi as I exited the taxi at the HCMC airport and badly smashed my finger.  I had to get a doctor at the HCMC airport to clean and bandage up my finger, then had to have the bandage replaced at the Taipei airport.  Finally, because it continued to bleed through the bandaging, I had to rebandage it myself using paper towels and adhesive tape on the flight from Taipei to LAX.  Here’s a photo my buddy Aaron (Mexi-Nugget) took of me and my finger at LAX – he met me for a cup of coffee during my layover:

Anyway, I got into Atlanta about 11:20pm Thursday night and my sister picked me up at the airport and drove me to her house in Auburn – about an hour and a half away.  I surprised her kids Friday morning – they didn’t know I was coming home early – and then we all surprised my mom again.  We have a videotape of her being surprised this time, but haven’t yet gotten it uploaded.  Once I get it uploaded, I will post it and tell the story.  I rode back with my mom and stepfather to their house in Thomaston, Georgia on Friday afternoon.

Saturday morning, I got up early and picked up my friend James (who visitied Vietnam with his wife, Erin, recently) and we drove over to Athens, Georgia for the UGA vs. Alabama game.  We hung out with my friends Will and Ashley and some other friends and then went to the game that night.  UGA got hammered by Alabama and the game was not that enjoyable, but we had a nice time in Athens anyway.  We spent Saturday night in Athens, then on Sunday I drove James back to Atlanta then went to visit my friends Dave C. and Jamie and their daughter Emily in Norcross.

I drove back to Thomaston last night (Sunday night) and went to bed about 9:00pm.  I ended up sleeping until about 11:00am this morning.  I am obviously still not adjusted to the time difference and am still being affected pretty strongly by jetlag.  I’m going to try to watch Monday Night Football tonight and stay up until at least 11:00pm.

Tomorrow I’ll continue hanging out in Thomaston, then it’s back over to Auburn to spend some more time with my sister’s family.  This weekend, I’ll be going over to Mississippi for the Ole Miss vs. South Carolina football game, and I’m also going to stop over in Demopolis, Alabama to visit my grandmother, Cacak.  I don’t have any firm plans after this coming weekend – I need to get up to Atlanta to see some people but I don’t think I’m going to make any more long road trips – gas is too damn expensive!

Today it’s been nice just hanging out and relaxing – I am enjoying being home a lot.  I just wish (a) I wasn’t so damn tired; and (b) the weather was a little cooler.  It’s cooler here than in Vietnam right now, for sure, but not as cool as I was hoping it would be.

I chatted with Thao over IM earlier today.  She’s apartment-sitting my place while I’m gone and said everything is going fine there.

More later after I wake up a little bit more and have a little more energy!

I take a break from what I like to call grading hell to post these photos that my buddy Aaron emailed to me recently. Back in 2005, we found some website where you could upload a photo of yourself and it would show you what you would look like: (a) normal; (b) old; (c) Hindu; (d) Chinese; (e) black; and (f) as a chimpanzee. So here you go.

I will only say this – I hope the old image is not an accurate predictor, I am one sexy Chinese man, and what the hell happened to my nose on the chimpanzee pic?

Okay, back to school and yet another stack of papers to grade! I will be so glad when the next few weeks are behind me and I can chill out with family and friends for a couple of weeks!

Hope you’re all doing well!

Joanna Newsom, The Sprout and the Bean:

I slept all day
awoke with distaste
and I railed,
and I raved

who know th’outside!
Should we go outside?
Should we break some bread?
Are y’interested?

Gillian Welch, My First Lover:

Merle Haggard, Mama Tried:

One word: Grading.

Damn I have a lot of grading to do. Oh well, I will get it done.

After grading all day Saturday, Thao and I went for a swim at the pool at my gym and then went out to eat. That night, we watched a scary movie called “The Strangers” starring Liv Tyler. I’m not a big fan of scary movies – only every now and then. This one was pretty freaky though. Not a great film by any means, but I enjoyed it and it freaked Thao out. At one point she got up to make sure my door was locked – which I’ve never seen her do before. Great songs in that movie by the way – Gillian Welch’s “My First Lover” is used to chilling effect, and also a song by Joanna Newsom called “The Sprout and the Bean” that I thought was very good. And any movie that includes “Mama Tried” by Merle Haggard can’t be all bad.

Sunday: More grading. Thao and I went to lunch at my favorite restaurant, An Lac Chay, and Thao said something really funny. I am always giving her grief about how much she eats. She usually orders a ton of food – and usually finishes it. She just eats a lot. Yesterday she surprised me by only ordering one thing – usually she at least tries to order something else and I tell her maybe the first thing will be enough. So yesterday, after we finished eating, she said “If I ever try to order something else, don’t let me because my eyes are bigger than my stomach.” And I told her that I agreed and that I was surprised that she had only ordered one thing at lunch. Then she said “Remember that Elton John song we heard at University Star, ‘Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word’? For me, ‘full’ seems to be the hardest word.” [She said "full" in Vietnamese, which is "no" - but pronounced like the "kno" sound at the beginning of the word "knocking."] She comes up with some pretty funny stuff sometimes.

Oh, I forgot! On Saturday night Thao and I also called my sister and had a videochat with my sister and her three kids. We are all very excited that we’ll be seeing each other in about three weeks! O and C were as cute as ever, and H was adorable. He was really focusing hard on the computer monitor – wondering who the hell Thao and I were, I’m sure. I was making faces at him and making funny noises at him and he was smiling and laughing. So cute! I can’t wait to see all of them! Not too much longer now!

Okay, I’m back to grading! I hope everyone is doing well!

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address – May 21, 2005
David Foster Wallace

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go
ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna [mumbles while
pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].)
Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class
of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen
to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says
“Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a
bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes
“What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the
deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story
["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty
conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present
myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you
younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish.
The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important
realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal
platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult
existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so
I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m
supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try
to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human
value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the
single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which
is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up
with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If
you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you
tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to
teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a
college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think.
But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out
not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education
in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t
really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of
what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what
to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you
to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes
your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys
sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of
the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are
arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that
comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s
not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s
not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer
thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that
terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing,
and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the
snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this
blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the
bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled.
“Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.”
The atheist just rolls his eyes.
“No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering
by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts
analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different
things to two different people, given those people’s two different
belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from
experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief,
nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one
guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad.
Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where
these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they
come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic
orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were
somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically
absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct
meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice.
Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is
so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the
passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True,
there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of
their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive
than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’
problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind
certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total
that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me
how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less
arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and
my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to
be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and
deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates
will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to
be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience
supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe;
the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness
because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for
all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at
birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you
are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is
there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on
YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and
feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so
immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about
compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This
is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the
work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired
default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and
to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who
can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described
as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental
term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how
much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual
knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the
most dangerous thing about an academic education — least in my own
case — is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff,
to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply
paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying
attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay
alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant
monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now).
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to
understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to
think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea:
learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some
control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and
aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you
construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise
this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent
servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface,
actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least
bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost
always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master.
And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long
before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your
liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going
through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead,
unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting
of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.
That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete.
The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue
what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large
parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement
speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty
frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well
what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up
in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate
job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the
day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home
and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the
sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do
it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You
haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job,
and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the
supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to
be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it
should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very
crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other
people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And
the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or
corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but
you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the
huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and
you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired,
hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out
because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your
supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out
lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout
line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you
can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the
register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and
meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a
prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay
for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that
is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy,
flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy
wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the
crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all
the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et
cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part
of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month
after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides.
But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap
like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in.
Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines
give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about
how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and
miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default
setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all
about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just
get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else
is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look
at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and
dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how
annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones
in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally
unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form
of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic
being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and
Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish,
forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the
patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the
biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest
[responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to
think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the
ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think
about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the
future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled
and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern
consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine.
Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and
automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural
default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring,
frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the
automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and
that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the
world’s priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to
think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these
vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some
of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the
past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all
but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough
to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being
driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next
to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a
bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in
HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that
everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and
frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have
harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that
I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects
you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will
and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do
it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you
can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up
lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s
not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights
holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe
this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department,
who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating,
red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.
Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It
just depends what you what to consider. If you’re automatically sure
that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default
setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that
aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay
attention, then you will know there are other options. It will
actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow,
consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on
fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the
mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing
that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try
to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to
be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and
what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day
trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism.
There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The
only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for
maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship –
be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the
Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is
that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real
meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have
enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual
allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start
showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as
myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every
great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily
consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will
need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling
stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that
they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are
default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after
day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you
measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re
doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on
your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and
money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and
frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture
has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary
wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords
of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.
This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there
are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious
you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of
wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"].
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness
and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to
sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every
day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think.
The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race,
the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite
thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or
grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to
sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with
a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away.
You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish.
But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura
sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or
dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost
nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple
awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in
plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep
reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the
adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché
turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime.
And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Well, I am in the midst of grading hell right now. I have a ton of ComLaw finals to grade – 218 to be precise (it was supposed to be 219 but one student didn’t show up for the exam), plus all of my Business Enterprise I (business plan development) plans to grade. I’ve made a little progress on the BEI plans, but none on the ComLaw.

I am frankly worried about being able to get all of this grading done – especially since I have several more exams to monitor – before I’m supposed to leave for home on 10/5. I suppose it will work itself out though – it always seems to. Other than that, not much to report. Pretty much all grading all of the time.

I am in the process of upgrading my iPhone to software version 2.1 and re-cracking it. Version 2.0 has been very buggy and slow for me – with a lot of app crashes and other random glitches. I’m hoping 2.1 fixes those issues. WinPwn 2.1 just came out – right on time!

I have been thinking about getting a new iPod when I’m home. The prices have come down so far and my current Nano is only 2GB, whereas I can buy the new 16GB nano for only $199.

(I think my damn 2GB was $249 when I bought it.) But then I look at Apple’s website and while I can buy the 16GB for $199, I can also buy the 8GB iPod Touch for $229 – only $30 more. And the iPod Touch has built-in wi-fi, can download apps from the app store, etc. Also, the iPod Touch has the Nike running sensor built in – you don’t have to stick the ugly attachment on the bottom of your Nano. Yes, the Nano is smaller and lighter and maybe better for working out – and granted it has double the memory – but if I can get wi-fi, the touchscreen interface of the Touch, the Nike thing built in, the app store access, etc., for only $30 more, that seems like a no-brainer. I can deal with a few extra ounces on my arm while I’m working out. Also, I still have my big 60GB iPod Classic, my 2GB Nano, and my 8GB iPhone – so it’s not like I’m hurting for storage space on my various iPods.

When Rudy and Hayley blew through Saigon in 24 hours or so a couple of months ago, they showed up with some serious-looking Nikon cameras and equipment. They’ve finally gotten some of their photos up and, as I suspected would be the case, they managed to take better photos in their 24 hours here than I’ve taken in 14 months! A sampling is below or you should be able to look at the whole album here: http://picasaweb.google.com/Tanasijevich/HoChiMinVietnamJune2008#

Yesterday morning I retried filming my commute from a camera mounted on my motorbike’s handlebars. It turned out it wasn’t the battery going dead en route – it was my memory card filling up. But I still was able to capture about 5/6ths or so of my commute.

I don’t expect anyone to watch the whole thing – but I think watching part of this will tell you what it’s like living in Saigon on a daily basis better than 100 blog posts with me just describing it or taking still shots. Nothing too crazy happened yesterday morning – just a typical commute. Anyway, if you’re interested watch a few minutes of it.

For those of you familiar with Saigon, I’m leaving my apartment on Pham Ngoc Thach (north of downtown), ending up going south on Nam Ky Khoi Nghia all the way to the river, then across the river, through District 4, and south into District 7. I’m on the main road almost to Phu My Hung when I run out of memory. Anyway, here you go:

This is a nice live performance of this song. I haven’t listened to the Sky Blue Sky album much since it first came out, but this sounds nice to me now:

*Jeff Tweedy may have supplanted Roy Orbison as the new “Dr. Ugly.” Tweedy looks like a cross between a caveman and . . . a caveman.