Carnet de Voyage

Do you remember when you were Nineteen, and I came back in Time in Spirit to play you Taylor Swift? 2001 won’t ever be back, but we will always have the Two-Thousand-Teens.

We are Americans. We work hard. Our Calvanistic ethics has brought our Nation to Greatness.

We are Americans. We work hard, and we achieve the Greatness we set out to do. But somewhere along the way, we simply stop being a Nation of hard worker, and we become a Nation of the Overworked.

I have always worked hard. Long before my psychic abilities exhibited itself—long before my Awakening—long before all of this Mediumship began—I led my life as a Schizophrenic.

I struggled with my health. More so than anyone in my life could ever imagined. I struggle and struggle to bring myself back into Society. And the moment I was capable, I began to work hard for the things that I wanted to achieve. I brought myself back to a kind of Greatness. I became a College Teacher. I was making a Living of my own. I became a successful artist. Finishing School, during my involvement, took itself to some of the top Museums in our Nations. It culminated in our successful inclusion into the California Biennial. The Fate of Finishing School does not end there. The Fate of Finishing School will keep on going.

I worked hard. I worked hard to achieve the things that I wanted. I worked hard to make my Dream happened. I took the American Spirit and I ran with it. I took the America of Simon and Shuster, and I soared back to life. I became Clark Kent. I became the American Dream.

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Several months ago I wrote this text after I went off Facebook. At the time, I had wanted to concentrate on longer forms of communications. I felt that the short form of the Facebook Status Updates and the 140 characters Twitter posts were becoming problematic. Since then I have found a way to work with those platforms again. The text below were one of a couple that I put together during that time. While it may be a remnant of a moment in my life, I do believe that its content continues to resonate with relevancy. I am posting it, because I do believe that now, more than ever, is an opportune time to publish this text.

When I came home the other night, after I had parked my car into the driveway, I looked up into the night sky, like I would normally do. As I perched my head upward, I was awestrucked by the shear numbers of the stars I saw. They shone so brightly–so many of them–that it made me think of my grandfather’s home in Thailand. My grandfather’s house sits in a small village in Kanjanaburi, a province about two and a half hours drive from Bangkok. The village is surrounded by vast farmlands–rice fields and vegetable fields. One of my aunts–my mother’s older sister–continues to live there, as she has always been her entire life. Every time I visit the place, the night sky would light up, just as it did the other night over Orange County.

I have always looked upward into the night sky. It is rare that I won’t notice the changes. Sometimes certain occurances will nag me so much that I will end up investingating their causes.

I am not an amateur Astronomer. Nor an amateur Astrologer. Nor am I an avid stargazer with expensive gears to observe the celestial heavens. I have always looked upward into the sky, because, within that moment of doing so, not only do I sqaurely exist in my present moment, but I also feel a complete connection to the times, events, and people that have come before me, as well as those that has yet to come.

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Nothing is real in reality unless you see it with your own two eyes. But even if you witness something with your own two eyes, is it still real? If an angel appears to you in person as a beautiful young woman in one instant, and in the next her form changes to something slightly different before your very eyes, is that real?

If the angel, who speaks to you every day for three and a half months, tells you that she has been one of your very good friends in reality over the past seven years, is she real?

If nothing is real, then how can you reason whether or not something is really real in reality? And what is reality if you drive down the 405 freeway from Costa Mesa, a drive that you normally do quite often, and your entire reality completely shifts? Twenty cops cars flying by. Billboards that changed to give you personal messages that ended up disappearing the next time you returned to the place? Or driving down a desolate desert highway in Arizona in one reality, and when you return later in another reality, the area became a normal residential neighborhood?

What is real? Is nothing real? Or is everything real? Is it a reality that any one person can come to terms with in this reality? If nothing is real, then how can we trust whether anything is real at all? How can we begin to question any of what is currently reality? If all we can perceive is with our own two eyes, then is nothing real, or is everything that is in this reality real at all?

A Sermon by James Rojsirivat, in collaboration with Amanda Miller, the angel of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Before I went on hiatus from teaching due to my sickness, I was teaching a magazine design class called Visions. The purpose of the class was to create a magazine with the same name. The text below is the transcript from a lecture that I gave in that class. I had realized at the time that the students needed a bit more guidance in understanding what I wanted to do with the class.  The transcript was written in one sitting. I had gone back and do minor editing on the written text.

One of the things that I have been trying to do in the last several classes has been to guide you through this process of conceptualizing what the final outcome of our magazine is going to be. Over the last couple of weeks I have been doing this without overtly stating my intent. We have definitely made progress in a direction toward our goal. And most of you have very successfully participated in furthering that process. But, somehow, I have been wondering if I should more overtly state what the intention this class is. It is very well known to many people in my life that I often do not successfully make the case for my intentions explicitly clear. However, in the cases where I do attempt to state that intention, somehow it always ends up getting misconstrued.

So this is why I want to take the time to have this conversation with you. I have been noticing that there have been some confusions as to what my intentions are for all of you.

All of us in this class have this understanding, coming in, that our objective is to create this magazine that will be put into production. What I have tried to do is completely contradictory to other classes that I have conducted. In those cases, when I have given out specific assignments, I have provided with them given rules that needed to be followed. In those cases I do have certain expectations of what I want the students to produce. In all cases, I would have left those expectations open enough so that there are room for the students to create their own expectations of what the outcome of the assignments would be. What I kept noticing was that the students would end up needing more information about what they are expected to do. They want to be given examples to see how they can specifically execute those works.

In this class I began with a different approach. If you remember, I began the class by showing you some examples of different concepts of a magazine to get the conversations going. But from that moment on, I made it a point to leave open the final conception of the magazine to all of you.

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Pinterest is like that girl you should be running away from, but she just have you hooked.

If love was as instant as Polaroids, you probably would still be frustrated. You either would have to shake them to make them come to their senses, or you would have to wait for them to reveal it to you.

“I’m OK, writing music, doing all of my domestic chores, hiking around since we have no car, and so on. The sun is out and that’s very nice.”

In this day and age of storing your entire existence on fragile, silver, magnetic platters, the thing you never want to know is you have a dead hard drive. Somehow, as you attempt to boot up that honking brick of plastic, you try to tell yourself that this isn’t the end. And if it was, then what can you do about it, really? There are always talks of backing up and redundancy, but, seriously, when the hard drive is a hundred times or more larger than the optical discs that you would be burning its content onto, do you seriously think that backing up your hard drive is the first thing you think about?

And what do you really do when the contents of your hard drives are more along the line of video captures that run multiple gigabytes each? How do you back those things up then? Buy another hard drive to backup that hard drive? At some point it’s sort of become this act of cryogenically freezing a copy of a copy of a copy of your head to make sure you live to Eternity. Only to find out that the cryogenic lab lost power one night, and all of your heads went the way of rat food. Oh, that’s right! You were supposed to store the backups of those backups at multiple sites. Just in case these things happen.

I’m not really sure how to solve this problem. I have drives that hold my past design works and photographs. Obviously I’m due to backup the contents of those drives onto larger drives. But then it’s sort of a never-ending proposition.

Just today I was thinking that I should backup the photos I have been taking on my Android phone (Yes, I have an Android phone. Because I’m creative.). So I updated my Dropbox app, and it automatically asked me if I want to back up my photos. Oh, rejoice, I thought! Of course, I’ll do that. Anyway, that was at 3:30PM PST. Now it’s almost 11PM, and we still have about 1,000 images left to upload.

We seem to have been accumulating so much of these digital files. It’s fine that I no longer have to purchase 20 rolls of film when I go travel somewhere. Or buy all those tapes to shoot those vacation videos. But then I end up having issue with storage—and storage that I know at some point will die on me. However, if the answer then is to send them all to the Cloud, then the questions are: 1) How much space will I need on the Cloud to hold everything that I have created? 2) What kind of bandwidth do I need to send every up into this Computer Networking Heaven without going to my own Heaven before the files finish uploading? 3) Finally, the last question, of course, is can I really trust that the God of the Cloud will continually do a nightly backup of my existence so that I won’t end up losing my digital soul when it all accidentally disappears?

Well, the hard drive didn’t die. The plug on it was, however. Thank God. So I just had find another one from my numerous collection of external hard drives to replace it. I mean, if you see someone lying still, and you think they might be dead, isn’t the first thing you do is get a stick and poke the person to see if you’ll get a response?

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