He's Come Undone (33rd-Year Edition)

I can't articulate WHY... but this speaks to me.

Real talk.

For a while in 2016, it indeed looked like I'd come undone. A better metaphor is that it was like being unmoored and lost at sea.

Unmooring a vessel means to lift up the anchor and release ties to the dock, releasing it to the weather, the sea, and the skill of the crew. It's always the start of any journey, and no ship leaves dock without a destination. I unmoored myself from Chicago when I left to travel abroad. The thing about journeys is that, when you have a stated end goal, your journey will end in either success or failure.

In other words, becoming unmoored is the first step to achieving your dreams. However, being unmoored is also the first step in getting truly lost.

This year, I ran into some headwinds at sea.

I had a series of jobs that I didn't like. I felt like my real talents were going to waste, but wasn't always able to articulate those talents in a way that made sense, to myself or employers. I attempted to start a few businesses, and was marginally successful in one of them. I got a job I loved, and then got fired from when I demanded a contract (oof, disheartening - she operated in America, FYI). I followed a lot of irrational hope, in hindsight.

In the meantime, all my internal plans were in disarray.

October 1887: French Indochina and Vietnam's Amazing Literacy Rates

Look at these crazy stats! These are for youngsters;
they taper off a few percentage
points as age increases.

In October of 1887, France formally founded French Indochina, and with it solidified a path which would result in modern Vietnamese rates that are through the roof.

(beat)

Wait, really?

Yes! But let's give credit where it's due: this story spans much more, from French Jesuit missionaries to a 8,000 word trilingual dictionary to a very recent (historically speaking) adoption of the entire written Vietnamese language.

Today's script is called Quoc Ngu, or "National Language," and is the national script of Vietnam. It's most interesting characteristic, beyond the tones inherited from it's Chinese history, are that it is in Roman characters and is pronounced phonetically! This makes it different in appearance from most other SE Asian languages, which generally looks like beautiful scribbling.

However, below the makeover it got in the 17th and 19th centuries, the grammar remains very similar to others in the regional language family (and the grammar is so easy it's almost comical, which probably also helps literacy).

In addition, literacy rates in Modern Vietnam are high. Like, really high. Per UNICEF's most recent data (2013), total adult literacy rate, 2008-2012, lies at a cool 93.4%. For youth it climbs even higher - 96.7% of Vietnamese females 18-25 are literate, and the males figure rests at 97.5%. These are STUNNING figures, and, if accurate (I'm not sure if that data was collected in-house by UNICEF or outsourced), are a serious achievement. We'll learn more about how these great literacy rates run up against the State Party and their media restrictions much later in this series, so keep these in the back of your mind.

To put this in perspective, America has an ongoing literacy crisis (as does much of the world, developed or no). 14% of American adults can't read. A ridiculous 19% of high school graduates cannot read. What. the. f*ck. (Yes, the problem is definitely unions, and not the fact that poverty shrinks your brain from birth. *eyeroll*) These numbers are from a US Department of Education paper published in 2013. If that doesn't break your brain, I don't know what will.

Ok, but backing away from the politics and back to the French (if I had a nickel)...

5 Things I've Learned From Writing This Blog

Keepin it real, since 1982.

As I approach the second anniversary of this blog, I'm ready to take it to the next level... but first I'd like to stop and recognize just how much I've actually learned from this experience. It's been a bona fide journey of personal discovery!

It's a bit surprising that I'm still writing, after all. How many projects in my life have I been as committed to, over such a period of time? Still, I'm not complaining, because this is slightly more interesting for those around me (from a social media perspective) than journaling to myself where no one will ever see it.

I enjoy the composition of pieces and the flow of pictures and text, and the flow of ideas and concepts and observations from post to post. I'm building something, but I can only place a single brick at a time. Maybe it will grow up to be a book, or a professional blog, or maybe it will be a delightful hobby forever - but whatever it is, I've learned an awful lot from doing this.

Here are my top five lessons!

1. Patience Pays Off

Patience with myself, patience with Vietnam, and patience with new experiences and cultures in general. I'm not a very patient person. In fact, despite my introverted ways, I'm not very good at moving my internal setting to 'chill' - I've got a lot of pointless, havoc-wreaking anxiety that makes me very impatient with myself, and by extension, sometimes those around me (although I try to be cool).

So remember, Ben: Deep breaths, and baby steps to the bathroom. Baby steps to the kitchen. Chill.

Dare to Fail Gloriously: What Happens When No One Reacts to Your Work?

It's usually about this time that I just put the laptop away and start
surfing reddit and imgur.

I'm pretty lucky in the fact that there are usually at least a couple dozen people who check out each post, and oftentimes more (maybe as many as 4 DOZEN! or MORE - like 5 dozen. So crazy). But not always.

Sometimes it gets me down. I've read a fair amount about blogging. The ins and outs, and the way you need to divide your time among many different tasks, the hard work of building, engaging, and maintaining an audience, etc etc etc... it's actually a ton of work, and a lot of it is promotion stuff that I, frankly, am not very good at.

One of the pieces of advice I see repeated regularly is that the ratio of content creation to promotion is much more lopsided than I previously assumed. In my incredibly naive brain, it went something like "IF YOU WRITE IT... THEY WILL COME."

Humph. Not good enough, apparently. There's this thing called 'social media' of which blogging is an intrinsic part, and you simply can't do one without the other. In fact, many self-described blogging 'experts' say the actual ratio of your workload should be about 20% content creation, and 80 DAMN PERCENT promotion. I hate self-promotion (although one of my new year's resolutions is to tackle it head on this year).

So every so often I'll see that I've been particularly prolific, turning out what I consider to be a series of high-quality posts that address a wide variety of subjects, but they get no views. In fact, several of the pieces that I feel are my best, thematically, content-wise, and in structure and form, get very few views.

Trip to Bummertown? Maybe a temporary layover...

New Year's Resolutions 2015: Foundational and Incremental

Well hello again! What's that you say - February already??  Man, I guess I'd better put all those vaguely anxious feelings and thoughts into a brand spankin' new set of New Year's Resolutions!

In America it is traditional to make promises to yourself on the occasion of the New Year. To me, this symbolizes the endless, circular nature of time, encouraging us to renew our commitments to ourselves and our world as we celebrate another year of not being drowned, electrocuted (well, not to death, at any rate), crushed, stabbed, dismembered, or plowed down by a bus.

(If, perchance, you find yourself in one of the aforementioned situations, my condolences. I hope you're reading this post in a hospital somewhere.)

Where I come from, resolutions can also act as a mental defense against the soul-ravaging bleakness of January and February, giving us some kind of vision or goal to strive for and negating, as much as possible, how truly shitty those months are (especially in those northern states, it's just gawdawful. Stay strong, friends).

And so, keeping in mind the massive scale of the goals I have for my future (however far that might be) here I am once again. The goal this year is to take small, constant steps toward a future I create for myself without letting myself lie fallow. My dreams are much to big to take in one year, or even two. But five years? That suddenly sounds sorta, kinda doable!

Resolution Check-in: 2014 Post-Mortem

The hour is almost here (on my side of the globe, at least): 2014 is slowly making way for the new calendar year. 2015, you ready?

But first, let's cut 2014 up into gloopy pieces and see what it was made of for me. What made it go? What brought it to a halt? What helped, and what hindered. And, most importantly, where am I going next?

Back in January 2014, I made a list of 8 resolutions, plus some Lesser Goals, for the year.

So... how did I do?

I should say that I've never before followed-up my resolutions like this. I've really enjoyed the time spent mulling over and reflecting on what I did and didn't do to make these goals come to life as I sit down to write - there's often a deadline on traveling, which makes it nice for setting practical goals and provides a good incentive to follow through, or at least thinking of following through - there's sometimes no 'next year' to restart and re-evaluate your chosen goals. Do it now, while the doin's good!

In thinking about my goals for 2015, I wanted to quickly review what I accomplished, and didn't, in 2014... and in my creative life! Some of it worked... some of it didn't. Entire projects fell to flooding, rust, and sun, and it was a helluva time finding and using new materials (including bamboo!) All of it was sweaty, dirty fun, and most of it didn't give me minor electrical shocks! But hey, that's how I roll.

Let's see, shall we?

Resolution Check-in: Maintaining This Blog

META BLOG.

I've saved this post for my 150th - Thanks for being my readers, everyone!! I LOVE YOU.

Let's hop back 8 months to the start of this year and the resolutions I made going into 2014...

(SIDEBAR: WOAH 8 MONTHS ARE YOU SERIOUS WHERE DID THIS YEAR GO)...