Alan Gutierrez

Mai Pen Rai

I’m reading a book that Evelyn Rodriguez mentioned in her current travels of the Thailand. It is called Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind.

Evelyn is one of my favorite bloggers. She was in Thailand during the tsunami in 2004. She returned to write about the Thailand a year after the tsunami.

Crossroads Dispatches: Tsunami Anniversary: Mai Pen Rai:

Mai pen rai may help explain the Thai response to recovery better than anything else.

It’s hard to translate but it’s not just “never mind” or “whatever” but rather a calm acceptance, a yielding to what is so. A deep okay that I may mouth, but they mean.

I’ve seen with no exaggeration hundreds of photos by now since I’ve arrived. Everyone whips out their tsunami album when I explain what I’m doing.

There is one photo that sticks in my mind.

It’s a picture of the Coco Bar owner evacuating after the third wave, whom Mama insists is a very meticulate and exacting business owner. He’s walking uphill through young trees. And carting in his arms a small sack with bottles of Bacardi and a few other liquors.

It’s all that’s left of his bar.

“Today,” Mama says he said when he joined the others, “Everything’s on me.”

I look at the picture again. He has a huge grin. If I didn’t know it was only hours after the tsunami I’d have thought he was on an afternoon jaunt.

If there is a translation for this Thai phrase, it is probably “It is as it is.”

It Is As It Is

This gets said daily, “It is as it is.” The New Orleans post-Katrina refrain.

Matt said this to me, with an exhale, while he was talking about his post-Katrina experience, during the night of dropping names. The dread locked delivery, it hits me. “It is as it is, man. Is is as it is.”

This is s strange time, as the city lights up again. The Mardi Gras season begins for 2006. There is much hope. In the vast swath of the city that was once my stomping grounds, a fair degree of normalcy.

People are waking to find their lives oddly unchanged. It is shocking to find your life neatly kept in all this destruction, as I found mine, my belongs, most of them, accounted for, in Mid-City. (I left everything here except my laptop when I went to Ann Arbor last year.)

Waking to a life oddly unchanged was an experience I had in Ann Arbor before I left. Four months of obsessing over Katrina. I’m still in Ann Arbor. Another year is coming.

I’m so out of touch. On occasion, I’m trapped in coversations with people who muse about whether New Orleans should be rebuilt, moral hazzard and all that. (Do they know the concept of moral hazzard? Are they simply repeating the lines they heard on NPR, as they are wont to do.)

The lack of change was a loss. My response to finding my life unchanged was either to grasp or to angst. Grew tried of that. Bought a ticket for New Years Eve. It was bad timing. Exceedingly bad timing. But, it was time.

Here I am. In New Orleans.

Stores close early. Certain blocks are unlit. Mid-City is a construction zone.

It still feels like New Orleans, though. It still feels entirely unlike Ann Arbor.

In the comments of my Name Dropping post, Niti Bhan says. (UPDATE: Niti Bhan expands on Limnos in Clamoring thoughts struggling to be heard.)

Welcome to Limnos. Living in liminality is liberating (to alliterate profusely) - in the simplest terms, limnos is the greek for ‘threshold time’ when what was is over and what will be is not yet. If you’re interested in this concept further, I’ve collected my own explorations with this “dancing in between” indefinite unknown under “Collections” category.

And enjoy!

So long as I’m translating, let me offer a translation for this greek word “limnos”, in english it’s called “couch surfing.”

Out with a woman last night. Despite mounting stress regarding invoices, prospects, and finding a time and place to work, I managed to affect romance. I’m reticent to discuss the issues I’m facing, and yet I do, rather than simply fester in silence.

Then as the evening progresses, I discover that my luxurious Mid-City squat is entering a new, even more unstable state. I thought I’d apartment hunt in the coming week. Now I’m thinking about heading back to Ann Arbor. My BATNA. The evening grinds to halt.

I do something unlikely. I talk it out.

The mystery woman assures me I’m simply not acclimated. I’m new to post-Katrina New Orleans. Not knowing where you are going to sleep is part of the experience. You’ll get used to it. You are not alone.

Another practitioner of the fine art of mitigation.

It’s a week right? You’re worried about waiting a week for an apartment? A week is nothing.

It is as it is.