The Motion of Life in Water

In the days that intervened between Cape Town and Barcelona, I decided to take a workshop being offered aboard ship. I can’t give away all the secrets we learned about the “Theater of the Oppressor,” but I can say that it was an interesting series. Co-facilitated by C., A., B., and N. – all from Onboard Life - they did a great job of walking 25 of us through a series of exercises designed to stimulate thoughts and feelings about what it is to be human within the constructs that we place upon ourselves and one another. Some of the exercises were taken from the pages of actors’ improv and others wouldn’t seem out of place in a therapist’s office. However, PPP was neither about acting nor about therapy. It was a chance to get real with ourselves and each other, and I think for many of us, myself included, it struck at the core of our identities and being.

The first night we did a lot of “ice breakers,” an activity that I usually loathe, but I really wanted to divest myself of some of the baggage that I brought with me to the overall TSS experience so I went along with it. We did some role plays about the concept of power, allowing us to physically flesh out a sense of what it means, who has it, who doesn’t, ways of getting it, etc. At the end of the night we broke into small sessions where we were permitted to reveal personal things about ourselves – the kinds of things usually kept secret from others for reasons ranging from shame and guilt to various forms of fear. For some it was truly an emotional experience. The things I revealed – like the fact that I have fibroid tumors – weren’t necessarily shameful or things to which I feel emotionally attached, but they did qualify as things I wouldn’t normally say to anyone other than close friends. For that reason, I almost felt like I had “cheated,” because some of the things said were really intense. However, that night I laid awake for a long time as an ancient memory came to me … something that had happened in my childhood that I hadn’t thought about in years. I was surprised that this little nugget had been unearthed, though I hadn’t consciously buried it. The more I thought about it, the more I became aware of how much of an impact it’s had on me and how much of my behavior and reactions stem from that event from so long ago.

During the next session, which came some days later, we went from examining power to talking about privilege. Again, we did a series of activities designed to get us thinking about the role that privilege plays in our lives – the moments that we have it and the moments that we don’t and how that impacts us. The outcome, again, was very powerful. Unlike the first night, I easily fell asleep but I had very intense dreams. I had also noticed that the dynamic between the participants had shifted between our first meeting and the second. I think we all realized that each of us has been through a lot in this life time – that you can’t live life and escape all the hurts and anger and pain, no matter your age, race, gender, religion, financial status, etc. But the workshop isn’t about feeling sorry for yourself or dwelling in the past. It’s about making conscious choices and making connections by letting down one’s guard.
Before PPP I fancied myself well aware of the walls I’ve built up in order to survive this trip, but I wasn’t aware of how high I had made them nor how thick. Nor had I thought about how the foundation of that wall had really been built during that long siege in San Francisco and my return to the D.

After each PPP session I felt refreshed, as if by punching a few holes in those walls I’d given myself more room to breathe and made more space for people to enter my world. I also felt more freedom to visit the others in their worlds, and as hokey as it sounds, I felt like maybe it is all one world – neither mine nor yours. I began to feel an empathy for some of the students with whom I had had a difficult time prior to the workshop. (I will admit that in a couple of instances, the result was the opposite – I had less empathy for some people). But I really appreciated being able to interact with everyone on a new, level playing field, and writing this some weeks later, it’s stuck.

During the third and final PPP session, we put it all together, exploring all of the concepts by looking at real world examples taken from our own personal experiences. I told them about an incident in San Francisco where I had been riding a crowded bus when I saw two youths blatantly harassing a third one. It was clear that they were threatening him, both physically and emotionally, but not one of us passengers did anything. We all sat there mute, blind and deaf as this kid was punched, kicked and forced to give up his watch. I remember feeling hot all over as it happened, yet frozen stiff in my seat. At one point, I made eye contact with the victim and his expression clearly begged for help but in the same moment one of the attackers leered at me so I turned and faced the window. I remember the extreme guilt I felt the rest of that night, alone in my apartment in San Francisco, refusing to answer whenever I asked myself why I had done nothing. The fact that nobody else had helped only made it worse.

We heard all kinds of stories that night from the Middle Eastern student scarred from being taunted by schoolmates as a child to the story of an Australian woman who debated picking up a bleeding aboriginal from the streets only to encounter a racist medical professional who suggested, “You could pick these people up your whole life.” We spent a lot of time reconstructing that event to show how it could have played differently. It was an intense night. We ended by telling each other what we had come to admire about one another. And once more, my mind and heart were released from their cages.

PPP was definitely one of the best experiences I’ve had on the ship and on the voyage. I wouldn’t say it changed my life, but it did have a meaningful impact on me. For the first time since I’ve been with this group of people, I felt connected. It’s a good feeling.

There are three major contributors to green faces on board the ship yesterday.

1. We're right smack dab in the Agulhas Current, which is one of the strongest ocean currents on the entire planet. Running mainly from northeast to southwest, in some places it's as fast as 6 knots. Knots, or nautical miles per hour equal miles per hour times 1.15, so we're talking a current that's about 7 miles per hour, which is pretty damn swift.

2. This Southern Africa region is also characterized by variable weather patterns - low and high pressure systems that move from the South America's Atlantic coast to the eastern seaboard of the South African one. At 1pm yesterday afternoon, which was about the peak of my trauma, the South African Weather Service predicted "Heavy Seas: Very rough seas with wave heights in excess of 5m expected over the southern half of the Mozambique Channel with "cyclonic" gale force winds of 30 to 35 in the south.

3. Between Durban and Port Elizabeth, two lovely South African cities, there aren't any “sheltered harbors or anchorages,” meaning we can run but we can't hide.

One other factor is at play: we are in an area prone to giant, rogue or so-called "abnormal waves." In their book Basic Ship Theory, Rawson and Tupper note that "Abnormal waves can be created by a combination of winds, currents and seabed topography. A ship may be heading into waves 8 m high [we had a few at 7 m today and have been encountering 5 m waves most of the day. We're talking 16 to 23 foot waves, my friends] when suddenly the bow falls into a long, sloping trough so that in effect it is steaming downhill. At the bottom it may meet a steep wall of water, perhaps 18 m high and about to break, bearing down on it at 30 knots." These "monstrous, freak" waves can be devastating.

I feel calm because my stomach has ceased to churn, although I wondered if I shouldn't take some Dramamine before going to bed so I that I wouldn’t wake up in the same dire straits (no pun intended) as I had the previous morning, I decided not to and was fine.

Yesterday I was giddly joking about my disappointment that we haven´t encountered any rough seas. Earlier in the voyage, just past Shanghai, we did have a day or two of rolling swells. There were even a few nights where we were warned to put our computers on the floor before bedtime to prevent damage from them crashing to the floor. Books fell off the shelves in the library and a few dressers tipped over. But I was fine during all of that.

Today is another story. Items aren´t crashing around so much as our innards are. During that earlier time that I mentioned, the ship was rocking from side to side, which was one thing. Now it´s actually lifting and dropping as well as rolling from side to side. Since 2:30 am – when I woke up slightly nauseated and panicked about it – the ship has been listing and pitching. And so has been my stomach, and my brain feels like jello being tossed around inside a gourd.

When I awoke just a couple hours past midnight, I wasn´t sure why I was waking. For weeks now I´ve been waking every two hours because the coils in my mattress dig into my ribs. Then I had the brilliant idea of sleeping on top of my duvet cover instead of underneath it, and whala! I´ve now been sleeping about four hours at a time. So to awake at 2:30 without feeling like my bedsprings were attacking me like a corkscrew going after a vintage wine was a disappointment. Realizing a few seconds later that my stomach felt “icky” was further disappointment. But there was a small glimmer of hope – I had a melody in my head, at the same beats per minutes as the rhythm of horizonal rain that sprayed the ship as if fired from an automatic weapon.

I tried to place it because concentrating on that was better than acknowledging that I was experiencing my first true sea sickness. Turns out the melody is that of a subliminal “positive thinking / relaxation” tape I have used from time to time in the past year. I was tickled that subconsciously I was trying to do the right thing by myself. From that, I conjectured that it might be best to try concentrating on my breathing and breathing from the lower dantien as in yoga and qigong meditation. Doing so helped immensely, and I was able to go back to sleep.

11 hours later, I am in the LRC. I´ve sent two student workers back to their cabins because they were too sick to work. I´ve been asked for numerous barf bags – of which we have plenty – and I hope I don´t end up using one myself. I was a good Samaritan and lent one set of my acupuncture bands to a student a few ports ago. She never gave them back. Today I was going to ask her for them, but she entered the LRC wearing them and thanked me profusely for them. I hadn't meant them as a permanent gift. I decided to take the loss as an intercultural miscommunication. I have one other one, but I can´t remember to whom I loaned it last. But good deeds do get recognized.

K. saw me taking a brief lay down in the lobby when I suddenly felt like I might chuck up the three chocolate biscotti I had for lunch since, the rest of the meal (some nasty little lamb stew that tasted like Alpo puppy chow, “seafood” pasta tasted and smelled fishier than a rotting Carp; cauliflower that tasted like … cauliflower; and steak fries that were crispy on the outside and completely uncooked on the inside) was grossly unedible. She took pity on me for having given her some of my medicinals during the Norovirus outbreak and was kind enough to dispense some sort of homeopathic remedy that dissolved under my tongue like cotton candy, leaving me with a smile.

Meanwhile, one student told me that her professor was passing vomit bags out along with the mid-term – one per student. Several have asked me how bad it has to get before classes are cancelled, and I smiled to remember the mounds and mounds of Michigan snow that suggested cancellation to students, while the superintendents and school boards seemed not to notice.

I´m pretty sure they won´t cancel classes, nor do I think they should, though I´d love an excuse not to conduct my research workshops during the next three days. I vastly prefer doing one-on-one sessions, partly because what will happen is that the 18 students who sign up will be really eager but they´ll forget. And at least half of them will need to have one-on-one sessions not long after the group workshop. If there´s anything that gets under my skin, it´s having to repeat myself. This is why I´m not a teacher.

At least, it´s a nice advert if I do say so myself. I failed to surprise myself in that I had more fun writing and designing the flyers than I will in actually conducting the workshops. Info design, y'all.

Broaden your knowledge of resources and research strategies by attending a
LIBRARY RESEARCH WORKSHOP
 Discover what makes a scholarly article different from a popular article and how to find scholarly articles in Ebsco and JSTOR.
 Search the web more effectively and know how to evaluate critically the sources you find online.
 Decide when the web might provide the best sources for information and when it would be better to use a database, journal, or book.

Each half hour workshop (the sessions are identical) is limited to 6 students. Sign up TODAY in the LRC. Attendance will be taken, so professors can be notified.

For those unable to attend, please make an appointment for a personal research consultation with a librarian by filling out a Research Request Form in the LRC.

23 February (No Class Day) – 13:00-13:30
24 February (Blue Day) – 13:00-13:30
25 February (Green Day) – 12:00-12:30

Oughta be loads of fun, but I´ve gotta earn my keep some way. Besides, the day after the last one session, I get to see my Pops. Yebo!

[map=113435 lat=1.4210854715202e-14 lon=-2.8421709430404e-14 zoom=1.98]
TSS Life is a social experiment of grand proportions, owing to the fact that we’re each other’s captive audience and most of the people on the ship are cracked if not fully broken. A faculty member, R., and I were talking, and he theorized that most people on the ship – students, staff, crew – are running away from or running to something. I think it’s true, even for me. With some few exceptions, most of the shipwide community are either infantile or poseurs. It's like the Biosphere in here. ("In 1991, 8 people for 7 countries were placed in Biosphere 2 to live for 2 years. They survived despite communal and agricultural problems. A second crew entered after them for 2 years, but due to ill-prepared plans and a series of social problems, they soon subjected the experiment to ridicule).

The careerists, mostly of the intercultural communications ilk, are running towards some imaginary glorious finish line and ruining it for the rest of us, armed with masters degrees that they think mean something. Yet, I’ve never met more culturally insensitive people than these so-called “cross-cultural” experts. Naïve as a lot, they are convinced that they are plying their trade and working in their field, but they don’t know dick about dick.

The faculty are just as bad. They don’t want to listen to anybody; they only want to talk. It’s impossible to have conversations with most of them because all they do is yammer away, expelling hot, fetid lectures, during which you can’t get a word in edgewise let alone breathe.

The crew is unhappy because the management (not TSS proper but a group called Seahawk) treats them like dogs; many have left though for them to have been here in the first place suggests that “out there” was nothing but a void for them. Take my cabin steward as an example. He’s a year younger than me with a wife and young children in his Latin American homeland. There he was a professional, working in the banking industry. But he makes three times as much on the ship, scrubbing my toilet, folding my sheets, and running the vacuum for months at a time. Meanwhile, it’s like the old mine system (or like Macy’s corporate as I once found out). With the cashless system on board, everything comes out of our accounts. A soda the crew bar costs $1.00 a can. The crew get minimal breaks during long shifts and are lucky to be able to get off the ship for a few hours to see the sights of each new port, even if we’re there for days at a time. One crew member told me that she requested enough leave to visit her family, who lives two hours from one of our destinations. She hasn’t been home in eight months. The Man said no.

The Executive team is largely ineffective. They struggle to create policies that they are too timid to enforce, but their ever-present to hear any and everyone’s concerns 24/7. There are a handful of good kids/students, but they’re dwarfed by the rich (mostly American) spoiled brats who’ve come along for a Club Med vacation and the handful of Aussie kids who would slit a throat for a grade.

Since Seychelles, which has only been a few days, people are starting to fall apart. A faculty member and I have started a betting pool between ourselves on who will totally lose it and who will merely teeter on the edge without falling over. Couples that formed at the beginning of the voyage are splitting, and suddenly all the girls are gay, which some announce by making out with their new squeezes in public. Staff burst into tears when asked “how are you?” and students erupt into angry but impotent tantrums I haven’t seen since the likes of Elena Garcia Byrne Simon - who is two and a half years old.

As if he’d read my mind – or the bones of this writing - a student came up to me as I was typing this and said to me: “You seem like you’re becoming unglued like the rest of us. Is that true?” I smiled and told him he’s projecting.

Yes, some students are feigning illness strictly for the prospect of a sanctioned 48-hr. quarantine, but that can’t get them out of their mid-terms. (Oh yah, that "doctor" is still here. Today I gave myself a headache by focusing on his eyes as they bounced up and down, from a female students eyes to her breasts as they engaged in casual conversation by "the cooler.")

Another faculty member told me that she feels like she’s reliving all of her past patterns on the ship. I agreed. We’ve all reverted to our oldest and most perverse (because they’re outdated) modes of survival. For some that means pushing others away, for some it means exhibitionism, some drink and some stuff their faces (which could explain why I had lunch twice yesterday, though I wasn’t very enamored of the offerings).

I’ve had students and staff come to me in tears or near tears saying that they’re so stressed or feel like they’re having a nervous breakdown. Me – I wake up, workout or meditate, rush to work, work from 8 to 3:30 (ironic how bloody close that is to a “real” 9 to 5”), go out on the upper deck for anywhere from half an hour to 2 hours (reading, meditating, watching the water), eat dinner (often, though not always alone), and then usually retire to my cabin to read, write, go to sleep or on rare occasions watch a movie or hang out w/ visitors that may happen by my door or who may invite me to their cabins. How closely this mimics my life in SF during those last hellacious months, except that now I’m used to it and at least here the scenery changes when we arrive at new ports.

There are a handful of people – both staff and students - who feel the way I do to a greater or lesser degree; we all kind of stick to ourselves rather than banding together, but like those flying fish that veer from the pack, I guess we’re the individualists. I think we all know that none of us can save anyone except ourselves.

I’m not too worried about it to tell the truth. It is what it is. The bottom line is that no matter what seedy or misguided things happen on the ship, we’re still sailing around the world. Nobody is going to feel bad for us, and I don’t think any of us want that anyway. I just want to enjoy what I can of the experience, though every rose has it’s thorn. But we've survived the short-lived Norovirus outbreak and this morning's Full Moon Lunar Eclipse (which was obscured by clouds); it's likely we'll survive everything else that comes with this voyage. We're even skirting a cyclone as I post this.

I have yet to have settled on a fixed feeling about it all. Some days I just wish it was over already so I could move on; some days I hope it will never end, though I know it must. Sometimes I yearn to go “home,” though I’ve no idea what that means. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself or even afraid because I not only do I not know what “home” means, but I’m all too aware that whatever it is, I don’t have it. Other times I know exactly what home means, and I just miss my friends and family.

Every moment is a grab bag of fleeting thoughts and emotions that pass like the clouds on the horizon. I see myself planting myself somewhere for five months and then going on the September voyage, and then I catch myself and wonder what the hell I could possibly be thinking because this hasn’t exactly been a cake walk. I’m not even so sure that I will be invited back. Then other times I’m cocky enough to know that I will definitely get a call back but not so sure that I will take it. The truth is I don’t know dick about dick right now. And that’s okay. I suppose that’s why I’m here. In a Gadda Da Vida, baby. Such is life.

This morning I awoke to find that I’d received a “candygram” from M. The kids decided to sell candygrams to help raise money for the students with hardships. It’s a nice gesture. I didn’t get candygrams for anybody, but I invite all of you to be my Valentine. I’d blow you a kiss to seal the deal, but later in the day we had a community-wide meeting to announce that we have a Code Red on our hands – a gastroenteritis Code Red to be exact. If a certain percentage of people on a ship have viral GI issues, steps must be taken to ensure that a full on outbreak doesn’t occur, and nobody wants that as we near the idyllic Seychelles because we could actually be banned from the port, so I'll keep my kisses to myself, windblown or otherwise.

There are less than a dozen cases of people with problems – nearly all of them travelled extensively in India or are rooming with people who did. When a case is identified, that person and his or her roommate are quarantined in their rooms – normally for 48 hours, but we were just told that period has been extended to 72 hours. An additive is also being used in the water that’s used for laundry, and ship officers are maintaining a watch outside of the dining hall to make sure that everyone entering uses the hand sanitzer. (I just go in the back way, as I don't believe in those hand gels). I’m not super worried about this, but one of the LRC student assistants with whom I was working closely (we share a desk) complained of stomach problems just before lunch yesterday. By evening, he was inducted into the 72-hr. hall of misery. If I'd caught it from him, I would have known within 12 hours.

The community-wide meeting was called by the “Doctor,” but the decision to go Code Red was actually made the ship’s Staff Captain, so this is serious business. We are urged to wash our hands frequently – at least 20 times per day – and to be vigilant about turning ourselves or others in if there’s a suspicion of illness. Symptoms include headache, stomach discomfort and cramping, diarrhea and vomiting. I’ve already been keeping to myself for the most part, so I’m going to continue to do so. I spend a lot of time in my cabin or out on the deck but almost always alone. I tend to eat alone or with one other person – I rarely join a table of more than two or three people. I haven’t been washing my hands anywhere near to 20 times per day, but I do wash frequently and with water that’s hot enough that it’s remarkable that I don’t need a skin graft. I’ve got my probiotics that I’m taking every single day. And basically, I’m just sticking to common sense. Anyone who gets quarantined now is screwed because we are due to reach the Seyechelles in less than 60 hours, meaning that a 72-hr. stint would effectively keep you from seeing what is supposed to be the most beautiful spot on the planet.

On a lighter and completely unrelated note, I was on the deck earlier today, reading The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva by a Cape Verdean writer. I am not in love with it, but I was engrossed enough that I wasn’t paying any attention to the water. We are passing through a part of the Indian Ocean that is know as whale and dolphin territory. Suddenly, I heard a yelp and two or three people running towards me. When I looked up, I saw a gigantic pod of dolphins going past us – I’d say at least 100. It was pretty nifty. It was about twice as many as I’ve ever seen at one time. (I routinely saw pods of 20 to 50 when I was at Esalen for a month in 2006). Plenty of flying fish about too. Fish with wings - who knew?