A few months ago my grandmother, my father’s mother, came to visit me. She’s friendly but not used to VietNam yet, so it was funny to hang out with her. The funniest thing was when she saw me teach the students for a few minutes, and assumed all these things about my teaching style. It was tiring, therefore, to talk to her after. Nevertheless, it was good to see her.

getting fat in viet nam

This one’s for Tully…

Hi Tully, Since I know you read this blog, I decided to send a curve ball at you. As you can see, below this picture is a swath of pictures. From my life 5 years ago,, from my life a few months ago, from my life a few days ago, from my life last summer. etc. in no particular chronological order. Nevertheless, nostalgia abounds. This past few days, as I touched up and looked over these pictures it was a bit of a review of myself and others. My question to you, my dear Tully, is do you remember yourself? mwa ha ha.
And what does this silly picture of yourself wearing that goddamn ugly hat tell you about yourself? What does that smile say? Are you ready for what you will become? He he. If you looked into an old picture of yourself where you’re looking directly at the camera…it’s almost like that old self has come to look straight into you. Your old self sees your new self, and a part of him is scared, a part of him is even horrified, but you know, a lot of it is just plain pride in oneself. “Wow, that’s what I became? I can’t believe I had the potential to explore that part of life! Awesome! Awesome for whatever it is, I guess I’ll just keep watching myself from this venture point of this moment when my own picture was taken.”
Anyways, it’s funny that you look like a squirrel here. You’ve got nuts in your mouth or something. I like this picture. It’s a good telling smirk.

By the way, folks, Tully is one of my best friends in the universe. Hard to find a person of this caliber in which you can even share your barely cognized feelings about the universe with.

This is a picture of Ryan Damron. He’s one of my favourite people in the world. I only met him for four months, at the same time that I met Lama Tsultrim. Ryan lived in Nepal for ten years, studying, teaching, and practicing Buddhism. Lama Tsultrim likes to say that he is a deep practitioner of Buddhism, something that he tends to scoff at, and responds with “Hm…and I thought Lama Tsultrim was a smart guy…:-/”. At first, Ryan and I only had a sarcastic exchange. But I quickly saw through his first defense mechanism, as I’d call it. He’s really sweet, and he won’t let you know it at first. He’s like a grizzly bear that’s actually a teddy bear. Towards the end of my stay at the gomde we were really quite close. I think we share a certain eye about the world, and that’s rare to find, and we could kinda see it in each other, yet were both curious about each other at the same time. We started playing GO together towards the end of my stay, and that’s something I absolutely love, not to mention, him.

I like to participate in the Ubuntu-Linux community in small ways. There’s a website called brainstorm.ubuntu.com. Where you can propose ideas for changes in the way the operating system is run (examples of operating systems are Mac OS X, and Windows, or even the software bundle that sits inside of your cellphone). This is one of the reasons why I like Ubuntu, because it is open (although how open remains to be seen, because there’s going to be more people out there who are “LISTENING” to the user-base that is found in the ubuntu-forums, brainstorm, IRC channels, etc. I mean, what is happening is that they’re trying to listen to users, but I don’t think they’ve hired enough people to listen, and there aren’t enough people to implement the ideas that are floating up into the process of programming. So, we’ll see.

Anyways, I write a few ideas here and there in brainstorm, some get voted into the dust, but this time I got over 200 votes! That’s such a cool feeling, there are at least 200 people in the world who thought my idea was good. Somehow, this is particularly meaningful.

This is Lama Tsultrim. I lived in a place called Rangjung Yeshe Gomde for a little over 4 months. In that time I became really close to this monk. He told me there are two people in the world that he is really close to and that I was one of them. It was a very sweet thing to say. I still email him every once in awhile. He lives in Nepal now and often goes on month-long retreats. He’s one of those people that you look up to in a way that you don’t remember but when you see him you remember, it’s mainly because the humility that that person exudes is so pure, and the strength that the person has isn’t visible at first glance, but it’s almost bottomless in reality.

Co Diep, Dr. Xuan, my mother, Co Quyen holding Khoi. I can’t even begin to explain the connection I have to all these people. Dr. Xuan has known my family since before I was born and in many ways he’s the hero of AGU and Vietnam because he’s so well educated, has vision and really helped the rice industry in Vietnam become what it is today. My mother, of course, is my mother. Co Diep is currently the boss of ADAPT and VA-NGO. Two big organizations that have been quite important to my mother and father. I worked for Co Diep many years ago. It was hectic! he he, she’s really smart though. And Co Quyen is her sister. Co Quyen is really interested in Buddhism, she always says she wants to talk to me about it, but we haven’t been able to talk about it yet. It’s funny how certain people slowly change as you get to know them and how the meaning that they hold for you changes also. Obvously, my mother is the one that has changed and shifted the most relative to my growth.

I wish I had a picture of these three womens’ husbands. They’re like the opposite of each of them.

This is Giang and I in what is called ITBC (Information Technology Boot Camp) where Vietnamese and Viet Kieu programmers trained people in the government about the potentials and applications of IT. I’m not sure if it was successful or not, nevertheless, it was fun. Giang and I hung out together a lot for about two months traveling the countryside of Vietnam and working.