monkey wrestles ghost

New Mexico

I'm too mentally exhausted from work to write much, but wanted to let folks know that I've posted pictures from the trip A. and I took to New Mexico.  Click here for the pics.

The first thing to know about New Mexico is that the food is fantastic.  Especially coming from New York, where Mexican food is an overpriced travesty.  Of particular note are the amazing green chile enchiladas (often served using ground beef, the way I like it), and the sopaipillas, a fried bread that comes close to ambrosia when eaten with jam or honey.

Comestibles aside, New Mexico was a truly unique experience.  Utah may have more stunning red rock canyons, the Sierras may have more beautiful alpine valleys, and Nevada may have more harshly beautiful desert.  But New Mexico (at least, the area around Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos) brings some of the best of all those places together.  Combine that natural beauty with a culture heavy with Hispanic and Native American influences (and near-uniform laid- back and genuine kindness), and you begin to feel like you're in a world apart.  It's no wonder that New Mexico has become an escape for so many artists and freedom-seekers -- unlike so many other places overrun by the excesses of our modern society, New Mexico still delivers on the promise of the American West.

Every hand's a winner, and every hand's a loser

Another lull in writing, the second this year.  "You're happy," a friend observed wryly, when I expressed frustration at my inability to break my writer's block.  Yes, I'm happy.  But the A-B test fails  -- I was happy last year too, at least as I remember it.  But memory is a facile liar.  For proof of that, I need only look back to the first sentence of this post.  When I fact-check myself, I realize that there isn't a unusual lull in my writing at all -- over the past few months I've done one post every month or so, pretty regularly with just a touch of arrhythmia.  Not a stroke at all, just the quiescence of complacency.

In a strange counter-coincidence, it's during my own quiet period that my friends and family seem to be experiencing dramatic changes in their lives.  The last few months have seen a rapid-fire succession of birth and death, turmoil and accomplishment, the forming and breaking of life partnerships, relocations and career changes.  The extraordinarily ordinary stuff of life, improbably clustered in time relative to me.  If I were a gambler (which I am), my disbelief in randomness would deepen.  No one gambles if they believe in true mathematical randomness -- whether they admit it or not, they see the face of some god in the tumble of the dice or the shuffle of the card.

I don't drink, smoke, or do drugs.  It's not because I nurse a moral streak (although I do), it's simply that my body doesn't take kindly to interference.  When people learn that gambling is my vice, a common reaction is total shock.  I don't understand why, it comes naturally to me (after all, I am Chinese).  It's not a ruinous vice -- I play just enough for it to hurt when I lose and thrill when I win.  What's the point otherwise?  It's a heady mix of controlled surrender.

In contrast, complacency results from a surrender to control.  When you've eliminated the unexpected from your life, a certain dullness can settle, and complacency arrives when that dullness becomes comfortable.  In looking at the lives around me, I'm finding that our complacency can and will be shattered, whether we're prepared or not.  And like gambling, the outcome can be good or bad, traumatic or exhilarating.  You could argue that this obviates the need to gamble, but I for one would prefer to gamble than to be gambled upon, even if the outcome is the same.