image: Antara/Rahmat Budiman

Here in Singaraja all the fishermen have their boats up on the seawall. Nobody is fishing these days with the large waves and high winds. Last night was another night of high winds and intense rain. The bad news is that everyone is out fixing their houses today, including us. Our lovely rooftop garden is trashed with almost all the plants either dead or dying. The good news is that I know where all the leaks are now so it’s just getting them all fixed.

Bali Weather Forecast

When I ended up in Bali and bought my first motorbike, I took many trips around the island, often spending a night here or there just to see what was going on. But that was many years ago, and the island has too many people with too many vehicles now. My road trips have been cut back because it’s just really dangerous out there with the number of crazy drivers increasing by the day – or so it seems to me. So, I was surprised to read the little handout that I received from the police when I was given my license last month.

The document explains the steps to get a license which is helpful as the steps have been changed a bit from the past – you have to get a letter of health from a psychologist which I find interesting. Obviously I didn’t need one. Then there is a list of the main factors in accidents. These I find great: I wish that someone took them seriously.

The ten causes are:
1) driving without discipline – I would guess that this would include texting while driving, going through red lights and stop signs, turning left from the far right lane and on and on.
2) being unskilled in driving – young children out on motorbikes who have no idea what they’re doing might be an example of this
3) being emotional or sleepy – I get emotional when I get sleepy, so maybe that’s what they mean
4) driving too fast – think government officials with the red plates and high school boys getting out of school for the day
5) not staying in your lane and keeping a safe distance – tailgating is considered a must by most drivers; many a time I’ve seen someone slam into the vehicle in front of them because they were right on their bumper and couldn’t react fast enough to stop when the vehicle in front did
6) having a poorly maintained vehicle – maybe those motorbikes that have been in so many accidents that they only have the frame and engine left
7) blownout tire – a common occurrence due to the poor conditions of the roads
8. wet or ruined road – people seems to drive faster during the rainy season when they roads are slick and the results of slamming on the brakes is a nasty fall
9) bad visibility – everyone who has driven the main road from Singaraja through Bedugal down to Denpasar has seen the drivers who are in just so much of a hurry that they pass on blind curves
10) drunk driving – think Saturday nights out in the villages particularly along the east coast road

All of these make a lot of sense so why are so many people out on the road doing exactly what they’re not supposed to?

There is also a long list of requirements for driving a motor vehicle, but I won’t go into the details here. Suffice to say, if everyone followed the directions and requirements on this document, the roads in Bali would be much safer than they are today. But then again, if everyone followed the rules, what would I have to complain about except the weather?

When I Am Old

When I am old, not like my younger self
Be understanding of me, be patient looking out for me.

When I spill gravy on my shirt,
When I no longer remember how to tie my shoelaces
Remember the times when I taught,
And guided you to do it

When I am senile and continuously repeat myself until you are bored
Be patient listening to me, don’t cut off my words
In the days of your youth, I continuously repeated stories that I had already told you thousands of times until you were lulled away into dreams

When I need you to help wash me,
Don’t blame me
Remember the times of your youth when I used so many ways to persuade you to bathe

When I am confused facing new things and modern technology,
Don’t laugh at me
Reflect on how patiently I answered your every question
during those days of your youth.

When my feet are too tired to walk,
Reach out your strong, young hand to lead me
Like when I taught you to walk in your childhood.

When I forget the topic we are talking about,
Give me a little time to remember it.
Really the actual topic isn’t what’s important to me
as long as you’re at my side listening to me, that’s what makes me happy

When you see me aging, don’t be sad
Be understanding of me, be supportive of me
like I was of you when you were beginning to learn about life.

disaat daku tua, bukan lagi diriku yang dulu
maklumilah diriku bersabarlah dalam menghadapiku

disaat daku menumpahkan kuah sayuran di bajuku
disaat daku tidak lagi mengingat cara mengikatkan tali sepatu
ingatlah saat-saat bagaimana daku mengajarkan
membimbingmu untuk melakukannya

disaat saya dengan pikunnya mengulang terus menerus ucapan y
ang membosankanmu
bersabarlah mendengarkanku jangan memotong ucapanku
dimasa kecilmu daku mengulang dan mengulang terus sebuah cerita yang
telah saya ceritakan ribuan kali hingga dirimu terbuai dalam mimpi

disaat saya membutuhkanmu untuk memandikanku
janganlah menyalahkan
ingatlah dimasa kecilmu bagaimana daku dengan berbagai cara
membujukmu untuk mandi

disaat saya kebingungan menghadapi hal-hal baru dan teknologi modern
janganlah menertawaiku
renungkanlah bagaimana daku dengan sabarnya menjawab setiap mengapa
yang engkau ajukan disaat itu

disaat kedua kakiku terlalu lemah untuk berjalan
ulurkanlah tanganmu yang mudah dan kuat untuk memapahku
bagaikan dimasa kecilmu daku menuntunmu melangkahkan kaki untuk
belajar berjalan

disaat daku melupakan topik pembicaraan kita
berilah sedikit waktu padaku untuk mengingatnya
sebenarnya topik pembicaraan bukanlah hal yang penting bagiku
asalkan engkau berada disisiku untuk mendengarkanku daku telah bahagia

disaat engkau melihat diriku menua janganlah bersedih
maklumilah diriku dukunglah daku bagaikan daku terhadapmu
disaat engkau mulai belajar tentang kehidupan

Time moves more quickly when you have nothing required of you. I was worried before I retired that the days might stretch on and on with me desperately trying to fill the day with meaningful activities. I’ve heard from some elderly folks who continue to work even when it’s not financially necessary that retirement is the beginning of death. My take on that is that it’s only true if you don’t have any interests or a sense of living creatively. Retirement offers the opportunity to see time in a new way – less as an obstruction and more as free-flowing, multi-directional paths to explore.

image: compassrosebooks.blogspot.com

And then, sometimes, the framework is just too restrictive. The floors can go a day or two without mopping – no one really seems to notice that they’re clean except me anyway. Sometimes I’m not tired enough to take a nap. Occasionally, I’m just too involved in something else to take the time to read for an hour. For example, I’m working on fixing one of the walls in one of the kids’ bedrooms. The other day I wanted to get as much paint scraped off the wall as possible so I spent six hours on it – everything else got pushed aside for the day. So, while I have a framework – a routine – I don’t lock myself into sticking with it if something more pressing, or interesting, comes along. The key thing is not to fetishize a framework. It’s only a temporary, artificial construct that can provide a sense of regularity, especially during the early months of retirement when, after the initial headiness of not having to go somewhere and do something everyday wears off, it’s possible to fall into post-retirement depression.

So, I take days now pretty much as they come up. The goal is to be open to whatever happens and go from there. Today is my 21st wedding anniversary. The framework is being set aside, and my wife and I are going out for a ride on my motorcycle to the tourist area to the west of us for lunch and some sightseeing. Nothing special, just a little time together out of the house and away from the kids and animals.

My air conditioner has taken to turning itself on and off seemingly at random, but usually in the early evening when I want to use the air conditioner to cool off the bedroom. Then there’s the computer network we have in the house. The ADSL modem started shutting itself down randomly as well. A bit of a pain for my children who like to leave homework that requires internet access until 5am. And for me, who likes to work until 1am and then get up at 6am to start writing again, being without the internet is a bit problematic.

So, I checked out the connections on the AC and the internet. Both seemed to be OK, but the modem was definitely showing signs of wear-and-tear plus some water damage from the roof that previously leaked. Using my best technology skills (that my students will remember), I whacked it a few times (softly) and all the lights went on and off for a few minutes and then, with a beep of resignation, went dark. One thing easy enough to figure out. I went out to buy a new modem.

I buy all my computer stuff (except for Mac things) at Bagus Computer on Jalan Diponegoro; they give excellent service and good prices. I came home with the modem and after hours of trying to configure it, I went back to the shop where I got specific instructions on what I was doing wrong. The short story is we’re back on line. The AC? Well, I’m trying something different with unplugging it during the day and then plugging it back in at night. Three days of this and no problems. Why? Electronic gremlins obviously.

another birthday in kampung bugis

I’ve finally come to admit that there are seasons of illness directly related to the weather here in Bali. Singaraja has gone from having nighttime temperatures of 90°F one night to 70°F the next (yes, I still think of temperatures in the Fahrenheit system. Just seems to be easier to relate to.) So, I’m just recovering from a week of a bad case of the flu. I’m not sure why tourists would want to be here for this kind of weather, but they seem to keep coming. The rainy season seems to be here now, so if you’re traveling to Bali for your vacation, don’t forget your umbrella. .

It could have been when I was living on Larrabee Street with Susie Rosenberg, but it more likely was when I was living on Armitage with Carl Davidson and Karen Gellen. Richard Monet lived in the front apartment back then. I became friends with Richard, and it may have been through him that I met Billy for the first time. Billy introduced me to the whole Lincoln Park group of people that he hung out with – most of them were involved with the movement. I’ve kept in touch with some like my old friend from Chicago and San Francisco, Pat O’Kiersey, for over 40 years.

Billy took on an older brother/mentor role from the start – trying to get me involved in one project or another. A lot of it had to do with writing, which I was very averse to at the time. I was this working class, hippy kid working for SDS who was trying to get as far away from my working class background as I could. Bill’s combination of advice, listening, and some timely history lessons helped me come to terms with my background and embrace it. He taught me about the rich history of the working class struggle and the development of unionism in the US. My involvement in the union movement came from those lessons of Bill’s.

Billy was a facilitator. Every time that we saw each other he had a new person that I had to meet. One of those meetings helped me get my job as a paperhandler – a job that provided me with a living for a good twenty years. Another person that Bill introduced me to got me involved with the Citizens Health Organization and opened up my interest in health-related issues that still concern me today.

Taste of Chicago - Bill and Bruce

My Indonesian wife had a chance to meet Bill on her first trip to the States. We wandered around Grant Park and the Taste of Chicago. He regaled her with stories of the city’s ethnic foods, and I dutifully translated all of his comments struggling to use just the right words to transmit his love of the place and its people. When I told Su the other day that Bill had passed away, she just shook her head and said, “I liked him. He was a good man.” I can’t think of any better tribute to my old friend. Rest in peace Bill, we’ll miss you.

Had a haircut so that I would look presentable and showed up at the Singaraja police station at 8:45. A pleasant officer saw me looking around cluelessly for the correct window, and he asked me what I needed. I explained that I needed new licenses for a car and a motorcycle. We went inside, he checked my documents and told me how to proceed.

I needed to get photocopies of my passport, KITAS, police registration card and visa. I walked a hundred meters down the street and had a pleasant conversation with the folks at a photocopy shop. 2,000 rupiah later, I had all my documents ready. Then it was back to the police station to get a recommendation from INTEL. Again, a very polite and helpful policeman in the intelligence unit took my documents and disappeared for while while he typed out the documentation that I needed. Then he walked me over to a doctor’s office where I needed to get a health certificate (no exam, just checked on my weight and height – I’ve shrunk 5 centimeters since I moved here 22 years ago). The health certificate cost 15,000. Then back to license division to turn in all my documents. A delightful young police officer filled out all my forms for me and asked me to wait to get my photo.

I waited about 30 minutes for my turn with the photo guys. Took the photo and gave them electronic thumb prints and out again to wait for my license. 20 minutes later, I got the licenses and that was that. A really pleasant experience and so much different from years ago when corruption during the license process was the norm. So, I’m good again until next year. The whole process took less than two hours. I just love Bali when everything falls into place.

I’ve been working on a post about discontinuities between expats or migrants (as I now prefer to call those of us living in foreign countries around the world), and I thought that I would go back to my Ph.D. dissertation to see what I had written about the topic twenty-plus years ago. As I was wandering through that long, somewhat rambling, document, I got the feeling that I should send a letter to my old mentor at the University of California, George DeVos, and see how he was doing. It’s been twenty years since we last corresponded; as I’ve written frequently, time is a curious thing and twenty years quite often seems like last week these days. So, I navigated over to the UC Berkeley anthropology department’s website. Not finding George on the list of professors, I did a quick Google and found several links to news items about his death last year. It was a shock to hear that George was gone. Not too dissimilar to hearing about my father’s death a few decades ago.

George was known for what one article called his “ground-breaking research” in psychological anthropology and culture and personality. It was George’s work in these fields that brought me in part to study in the anthropology department of the University of California, Berkeley.

On my first day on the Berkeley campus, not long after I had made the move from Chicago, I wandered into the little green house across from the anthro department that was George’s home for the years that I was studying at Berkeley. I knocked on the door which was already open, introduced myself as George’s new graduate student and cautiously entered. George nodded his head, looked up at me for just a moment and asked, “What do you know about the TAT?” Not wanting to lie, but not wanting to seem ignorant of something that was obviously important, I said, “Not much, I’ve been working on psychoanalytic anthropology.”

George solved the problem by sticking me in his little back room with boxes of data cards to sort out and catalog. That was my introduction to the TAT. Although I sat in several seminars where we discussed the uses of the TAT, I never used it in my own fieldwork. Years later, I received a letter from George at my home in Bali. Among a few reminiscences of his trip to Bali (including a humorous question about whether or not I found Balinese women’s breasts lovely), George mentioned that he had just returned from a conference in Europe about the TAT. I was gently rebuked for not becoming an academic with the reminder that “you could have been with us on this trip.”

We had other – theoretical – differences, George could never quite appreciate my Marxist approach to looking at the world and regularly accused me of favoring an economic analysis of society and culture over a more psychological approach. Well it turned out, as I finally realized years later when writing my dissertation, that he was right. That was one lesson that he kept trying to teach me that I finally got.

I was part of his group of students that focused on ethnicity and identity. Our discussions around the big table in the little green house could get heated at times, but some insight, some glimmer of the aha moment almost always followed. I still am focused on those issues in the context of Indonesian society and culture.

And that was how our relationship went. I was the somewhat reluctant graduate student – always feeling slightly out of place at Berkeley – and George was the pestering father, pushing me at times and pulling me at others so that I would follow the direction that he felt was right for me. At first it was easy enough to go along because I wasn’t sure what I wanted out of Berkeley or a Ph.D. In anthropology. Later, when I realized that I wanted to teach children, George and I began to go our separate ways. For George, teaching children was just wasn’t enough for me. He was an academic and for George that was the life.

But despite our differences about careers at the end of our working relationship, I always saw George as a father figure. He got me through my first year of graduate school at Berkeley when I wanted to go home to Chicago for personal and family reasons. His combination of humor and psychological insight always helped me find an answer to what was troubling me. George’s trickster sense of humor was legendary among his students, and he would apply it to the intellectual life as well as to topics of popular culture. When I think of George, it will always be as the trickster with the twinkle in his eye. Rest in Peace, Professor DeVos. You’ll be missed.

The Practicalities of Moving to Bali eBook

The International Teacher eBook

Just after retirement, I did a short stint of writing for Demand Media Studios, perhaps the largest and best known of the content mills. For a while I found it interesting that I could write an article or two and make a little money, but eventually I grew tired of DS’s constant changing of the writing requirements for articles, the cut in pay for travel articles and the sloppy, inconsistent editing. So I haven’t written anything for them for over six months, and now Demand Media Studios seems to be going out of the content mill business, or at least scaling down the number of articles so that there is very little to write even if I was inclined to do so.

I’ve had two other large projects that I started some time ago, but put on hold while I was doing content writing. The first one is that novel that every writer has to eventually try. I started mine back in India in 1987, almost finished the first draft about six years later and then put it in the bottom drawer. But, I’ve been coming back to it for short spurts over the past six months and have this compulsion to go back to it, and work on what I now see as a skeleton plot with a lot of dialogue.

The second project grew out of my time in Pakistan when some colleagues and students suggested that I write a book about Islam for non-Muslim Westerners. I have a nice collection of books about Islam, but I want to write a book that will cover all the major topics (as I see them) that a Westerner should know about Islam. There’s a mass of information about Islam out on the internet – a lot of it wrong. The plan for this book is to cover the topics in a thorough but easily understandable manner so that the information is, what should I say, user friendly. I’m trying something different with this book in terms of organization, but that’s the topic for a post over on my Tech Talk blog in the upcoming weeks.