Diary entries are the bread and butter (or are they the meat and potatoes?) of The MonkeyBuddha Diaries. While they will of course from time to time involve events from my personal life abroad, the goal is to read less like a travel blog and more like Slate Star Codex or WaitButWhy or Dan Harmon’s Tumblr or the Rewild Yourself Magazine (password: IAMWILD). Part of the reason that I am where I am right now is that I wanted the chance to get out of an environment that moves a thousand miles per hour and always has a new source of stimulation around the corner, to instead have the time to reflect on who I am and what I believe. Over the course of my four years at university I accrued plenty beliefs about how the world works, what matters, and how to make things better, but all of them arose in that particular context of a fast-paced, young, achievement-oriented university. Not only is my context now radically different, but as my friend Jeff put it, I actually have reason to read a hard book for two whole hours. Still, knowledge won’t just come from passive absorption and writing is an incredible tool for mapping out the information in your head. Hence, diaries.
June 17th, 2018 – Cracking the Brain Crack – 30 Day Challenges
Loyal followers of The MonkeyBuddha Diaries will have noticed that there hasn’t been much to follow a while now. While the podcast has stayed satisfactorily strong (I have low standards), my last written post howls from the forgotten geologic era of seven months ago in, a time known as “November 2017.” Even that entry…
November 1st, 2017 – Reflections: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
First, a bit of context: this post is ridiculous. One day in my university’s senior writing class our professor decided to startle us all into awareness of just how high his grading standards were by handing out the rubric descriptions for what would be considered a “C” paper. For a grade most would be unsatisfied with, the goals seemed high-reaching: arguments were to flow logically…
October 10th, 2017 – Moments and Misconceptions
After being treated to the wonderful bulletpoint email updates of my friend Jeff who’s currently fulfilling a Princeton in Africa post with Imani development in Malawi, it struck me just how many interesting and noteworthy experiences have crossed my path here which aren’t big enough to warrant a dedicated entry, but may still, in aggregate, effectively communicate the paradoxes of my…
September 29th, 2017 – Reflections: African Friends and Money Matters by David Maranz
Making the decision to live and work in a culture substantially different from your own comes with the understanding that you’re going to fuck up. You’re going to misspeak, you’re going to stumble through cultural norms, and on more than one occasion you’re going to look like a goddamn fool. Worst case scenario, you’re likely to unintentionally broadcast a message of disrespect…
September 13th, 2017 – Means
This is an introductory post. Logically, you might expect someone’s what-seems-to-be-a-travel-blog’s introductory post to be about setting: Where they are, how they got there, what they’ve eaten, what they’re looking forward to. And as charming and easy to write as that would be, I’m not going to write that kind of post because I don’t want to read the kind of websites that that kind of post is introducing…