Let It All Out

I have no idea where life is taking me. That's part of the beauty of everything, and yet as a planner in all senses of the term it makes me extremely anxious a lot of the time. Wouldn't life be so grand if we knew exactly what we were supposed to do at any specific time and place with whichever specific people we need to do it with? "But that's not the way it works." (Oh, how I love Relient K - what a great band!).

I feel like I don't have anything insightful to talk about this week, especially as I have been exhausted  from my looong trip to Seattle and from getting over this slight cold I acquired there. All I have been wanting to do is sleep, and yet this has been one of the busiest weeks of the semester. I haven't even had time to work on my thesis, and all I end up doing in my spare time is sleeping. Even getting outside to run feels like (more of) a chore because everything seems to be working against me accomplishing anything this week. I don't feel like I am getting anywhere, and in fact I feel like I am falling behind; 'tis the life of a graduate student, or so I have heard. And yet, looking back on it, this past week has been one of the most accomplished weeks of my life. Presenting my research in Seattle at the Pacific Sociological Association conference has shown me that I do have what it takes to succeed in academia as well as to make a difference and affect change in this world to at least some degree. I just need to do it! Unfortunately, it seems as if acting upon intentions is the hardest part of life. But isn't that because when we do what we say we are going to do and when we accomplish what we set out to do everything becomes all the more rewarding?

Over the past week, not only have I formally and successfully presented my research in an academic setting for the very first time, but I have also gotten a lot closer to one of my 2011 resolutions: to travel more! I have seen at least one new city this year: Seattle, the Emerald City. What a surprising city full of hidden gems and treasures. I am so excited to have experienced such a "foreign," exciting part of the world that I have never known before.  I still plan on visiting Chicago with Trish in September (hopefully for a half marathon) and London this summer with Tianqi. It really is only hitting me now that I am living out this part of my dreams! Travel has the profound ability to morph a part of ones soul into something entirely new given the sacred and profane nature of the experience one has in any sort of new environment. I wrote my term paper for my Graduate Classical Social Theory class on this aspect of tourism, but that is a topic for another day.

On top of everything else, I have also been blessed this week to prepare for the release of my book, Thais in Los Angeles, which I co-authored with my old boss at the Thai Community Development Center, Chancee Martorell. It comes out on Monday, March 21st (all proceeds go to the Thai CDC, a nonprofit organization which is a major basic needs resource center in Los Angeles and fights human trafficking), and I am so excited to finally be a published author!


I have accomplished a lot in my life, especially coming from my particular background. On my dad's side, as far as I know I will be the first one to have a graduate degree in a family that has only a handful of college graduates. On my mom's side, she is the only one who was able to come to America, and she gave up a lot to leave Thailand. I am reminded every day how lucky I am to have been born and raised in America with the opportunities I have available to me. Today, as I reflect on the successes of this week I realize how blessed I am in life. Counting your blessings does work wonders! Life seems so much more rich and full after such reflection. Meaning in life truly does develop out of a reflection on your lived experiences.

Correspondence

This March, I will be traveling to Seattle, Washington to present an academic article at the Pacific Sociological Association's annual conference on the negative effects of the growing transportation market in Southeast Asia. For one thing, I am excited to be visiting Seattle for the first time! I love to travel, even if it is just to visit America's great metropolitan areas rather than some new, exotic country. Each city is so unique that it's just like being in a new world anyway! I am also very excited to be presenting my very first piece of research in a professional setting, and as a first author. In general, my main argument focuses on the fact that increased access to modes of transportation such a motorcycles has improved the lives of people living in rural areas of Southeast Asia, particularly women, but with automobile industries continuing to over-assert their presence in these markets (mostly for profit, unfortunately) there will be an increasingly negative effect on everyone's lives.

My advisor sent me this article from the Jakarta Post (click here) showing how important it is to pay attention to the effect transportation issues have on the quality of life in any city. In a way, it presents a new sort of development curve or Kuznet's curve relating the saturation of the transportation market to the quality of life, and I believe Southeast Asia has come to the point where that curve is beginning to move in a downward direction. Here are my thoughts on the article with which I breifly responded to my professor.

This is exactly the kind of situation I am trying to get at with our PSA article. I think this will be a great help in conceptualizing the problems of traffic congestion and of too much "mobility" not really being a good thing. I think we should include it as a real life example in our presentation to talk about the ramifications of car ownership in places like SE Asia.

On a different note, while I do think public transportation, when done right, can really ease congestion burdens of large metropolitan areas, it is rarely ever done right. The only truly successful example is the original Bus Rapid Transit system established in Curitiba, Brazil, and even that system has seen decreased effectiveness in recent times with a booming population that is starting to become unmanageable for them. Public transit is generally on a success where there is already a demand for it, which is why it works well in places like NYC. Not a lot of people own cars there, and taxis are expensive, so people use the subway often. But still, only 20-something percent of people in the NYC area use public transit, and when a rising amount of the population are car owners, 20-something percent population use of public transit is quite frankly not enough.

Also, the article's recommendations for implementing congestion (road) pricing and better parking management have all been effective in very particular cases (i.e. downtown London for congestion pricing, although this has not seen complete success either). While the author is right to say something needs to be done, I think these are all lofty goals which are not localized enough for a Southeast Asian city like Jakarta. It's a really unique case, particularly with all the motorcycles on the roads. There aren't a lot of examples of good traffic calming or traffic management tools in these cities which are new to transportation development booms. Since SE Asia particularly has been seeing a fast rise in congestion in recent years being at the end of the Auto Industry's drive for profit, they are facing especially crude advertising campaigns for the sake of more automobile sales. It's going to take something completely new, different and very creative in order to even begin to "solve" (or at least slow) the problems in SE Asia.

It's also sad to hear about the flooding issues in Jakarta; this issue is a testament to the fact that we are trying to develop in places where we just shouldn't be building, which also means we cannot extend the city infrastructure, much less the transportation infrastructure, much more in island nations and other places which are geographically bounded in many ways. This is important to consider in our analysis of SE Asian countries.