Back on the blog.

wow, so hard to get back into this after such a long break. I think after all the positive responses to my Bhutan blogpost, I got some kind of performance anxiety. I have actually been nervous to write about my time and travels in Borneo feeling like I couldn't live up to people's expectations for my writing. THEN I remembered this is just a blog, and I am not a paid writer, and not many people really read this thing after all, and I was just getting a big head. Sooooooooo, I am back at the keyboard.

I will eventually get some more substantive posts up here about the work I have been doing with Noah Jackson and his NGO Forest Voices here in Malaysia this summer. But in the mean time, I have decided to try a new format. This one will be shirt little quips about the randomness of my life and travels in Asia this year. No big thoughts. No big ambitions. Just my disassociated ramblings. Here goes:

Today, I went running for only the second time since I have began traveling in January.  It is ususally too hot here, but rainy season has arrived early which cools things down considerably and blocks out the brutal equatorial sun. I run in this massive, hilly Chinese cemetary surrounding the apartment complex where I stay in Kuala Lumpur with my friend Mohala. The cemetary must be at least 4 or 5 square miles with a big network of access roads running through it. The Chinese build these huge elaborate enclosed graves of molded concrete and tile.  Their families come and leave offerings of water, incense, flowers. You know, the stuff you need in the afterlife.  On most of the older graves there are also black and white pictures of the inhabitant of the grave. Thes pictures are somehow made of tile and very durable, so the pictures are in quite good shape. Chinese men and women stare out at me as I run past. Some smile, some just appear sullen, others distracted. I pretend that I am running a marathon and that they are cheering me on to the finish (ok, let's be honest, it's only a half-marathon, even in my fantasies.) There are children in the pictures too. I wonder if they died as children or if their family members chose the pictures of them as children to put on the grave. If they never had a better picture than their 1st grade school photo with slicked down hair and tight collar. Twice, older people visiting graves have yelled at me. I assume that they are telling me to leave, that I am being disrespectful. But I like to think that the dead enjoy me jogging past. That it adds a little excitement to their eternity.