JasonUnbound

10 Years Gone

Ten years ago, a dance community called The Rhythm Society was founded here in San Francisco. In the lead up to tonight's quarterly ANDC (All Night Dance Celebration), those involved are sharing with the community what they were doing ten years ago, in 1996, and how they subsequently became connected to the RS. This is what I just wrote:

Hi, I'm Jason and I'm a procrastinator. I've been loving everyone's stories, but am just now motivated to write up my own. Here goes:

As 1995 ended, I was living in South Korea, teaching English. I'd been there since I finished college three years earlier, and I loved it. Living, teaching and exploring, every day was an adventure for me there. I spent most weekends visiting Buddhist temples and hiking in the mountains, and when I had a week off, I'd fly to the Philippines or take a boat to Japan. My girlfriend Jiwon wanted to go to grad school in the US, but why would I want to go back? I was having so much fun.

She mailed off her applications, we quit our jobs, filled our backpacks, got our shots and flew to Burma in January 1996. We spent the next five or six months meandering about Southeast Asia, moving slowly but continuously from Burma to Thailand to Laos to Cambodia to Vietnam to China. There was no goal, no destination, just the two of us waking up each day and asking: What now? It became a lifestyle, a lifestyle of adventure and wonder and simplicity. We swam in the Mekong, rode motorbikes on Ko Samui, climbed on the temples at Angkor, ate our malaria pills, bathed in rivers, rode some nasty buses, got fined in Vientiene, and got high almost everywhere. We eventually reached the east coast of China and took a boat to Korea, where we learned Jiwon got into grad school.

At summer's end, we returned to Ithaca. We'd met as undergrads at Cornell, and now she was back. We lived in a rural area outside of town, and I helped with the harvest at the organic vegetable farm down the road. And that's how 1996 came to a close for me: With the pond behind our house freezing over, and me baking bread and settling into the quiet American winter, far from the cyclos and durians and monk's robes and modernizing madness of Asia's teeming cities.

The sweeping arc from Ithaca to the RS passes through Boston, where I went for my master's in library science, and where Jiwon went for her Ph.D., and then to Berkeley, as we both got jobs at Cal and moved out here in August 2003. And I found fellow hula hoopers, and the local breaks scene, and Burning Man. I'd struck gold! It was a deep, wide vein, and I dug right in. And soon came the day that I met Lura B, and after a certain number of nights of dancefloor revelry, she said: I've got something I think you'd really appreciate...and she brought me to the Origins ANDC in December 2004. And then sponsored me last summer. And so it begins.

I haven't met all that many of you yet, but those I have? 24 karat, baby. May I have s'more, please?

Thank you! - Jason

And there you have it. It was fun thinking about what I was doing then, but really, I don't think I've ever been in a better place than I am right now. Yay 2006!