Here is something that I bookmarked December 6th of last year and never got around to watching. Such a terrible way to miss out on something and random experiences; I was probably studying for a final or something. I passed the final, but I missed out on this excellent film.

It is a Oscar-winning animated short film about a man who plants trees. A single soul and human. And how he causes a world of changes. The film’s soft animation fades from screen to screen and the music and sound effects are very warming. It also goes off  into small 10 second tangential explosions of thought about creating something, God, isolation, happiness, passion, and so on.

It’s only 30 minutes long, so give it a watch when you get a chance!

Here are some of my favorite pictures from the 8-day motorcycle trip through Texas and Mexico:

The trip started with a cloudy but warm day and one of the coolest parts of Sunday’s ride was the stop on Hamilton Pool road over a piece of the Pedernales River. The air was crispy and cool as our three bikes took a rest near the water crossing. The water was a stiff 80 degrees despite the cool air being pushed in by the front. I couldn’t help but wander around the area and ogle at the palette of my favorite natural shades of green to light brown that filled my vision.

After finally getting my heart rate down from the exciting ride and plentiful colors, I couldn’t help but be drawn to a small pile of rocks on a larger stumpy boulder. I invited my father and college mate to join me in interacting with this collaborative work of nature and enjoy the simplicity of a balanced stack of stones.

Before we took off from this wonderful mini-oasis, I couldn’t help but snap a quick picture from the distance. My dad never was one to just give in and go with the human-imposed flow of things:

I jump a day ahead to my next favorite picture: a group of guys just hanging around as we were, looking for different feelings along the trip, facing in different directions, but united by the common blood of exploration and wandering. This is after we had arrived in Ciudad Acuna, just across the border from Del Rio, and tucked away in a restaurant with only one other family partaking in a late dinner in this still but warming town.

Waking up after a comfortable night of rest, I was alarmed by a sound that I need not hear; a sound that would hamper my trip with its natural fury: the sound of rain pouring down outside. I snap up onto the concrete floor, orient myself upwards, and head towards the window, still attempting to establish my balance. As I pull back the heavy curtain/blanket, I realize that the sound is coming from the restroom: the shower. I exhale a breath of refreshment.

I turn on the television and tune into a staticy weather channel as they dictate the wind speeds and air temperatures in slightly familiar packages of Spanish vocabulary. I see ice heading where we should be heading and lists of negative degrees Celsius. After a long walk but a quick breakfast, we head back to the hotel with a looming wonder of where to head next. And before I can even shake the overhanging feeling, we ask the hotel overseer if he can find out when the next bus to Monterrey leaves.

He comes back in about 85 seconds with a small piece of paper that says “Coahuilenses: 10:15 am” and it also has a bus number on it. I look at the clock on the stand right as he calmly tells us, “Esta dejando en cinco minutos. La estacion es una cuadra de esa y tres cuadras de esa.” I look at my friend for a nod of approval, but instead am returned with a look of indecision. The bus is leaving in five minutes and it is seventy-seven dollars for the round trip. My dad gives his regards and gets back on his way to Houston. I excitedly turn back to my friend and ask, “Are you ready to go?” And, well, I’ll let the next picture of the bus bathroom facilities speak for our decision to go or not:

After hitting my head on the bathroom ceiling a few times as I relieve myself, I shuffle back through the tight center aisle on the bus and plop down back in my comfy seat. Three more hours to go. I tire from watching the Spanish dubbed movie at the front of the bus and pry back the heavy curtain separating me from the view outside. Ahh, almost there.

With lots of blanks to be filled in later, after all this is only a best of my favorites picture tour of the trip, I continue on to the next day. After a few good meals and a plethora of broken word exchanges with the locals of Monterrey, me and my friend walk for miles and miles down to check out the mountainside and be immersed in the culture of Mexico. We head off towards the local Santuario de Guadalupe church with no other routes or distractions in mind. Just walking and looking, always having a third eye out for a good picture opportunity.

We notice droves of businesses, banks, and restaurants that are closed on the southerly walk. On a Wednesday? Add this as another odd thought that infiltrates my mind and has to find out the solution by some line of practical reasoning. I keep walking, and thinking. We get closer to the church and just like we crossed into the cold front and had it smack us in the face and torso, we cross into an area with thousands of people lining the streets. Aha, my brain is placing the elementary ideas together in a deductive and airy style: this must be some sort of holiday or festival. We round the corner of the church:

After a fantastic day of pictures, life, travel, experience, culture, food, people… we finally settle down for the night and as I glance in my wallet for our remaining stock of pesos. I pull out six coins and head to the local 7-11 for a round of the night’s entertainment. Paying for a pack of beverages with change has never been so fun, or real, as I realize that we are running down to our last 200 pesos for the trip. Nonetheless, we have a great end to a fantastic day.

The last day leads us between two major roadways in an empty river bed. We walked about 15 miles this day as our brains walked about 1,500 miles as we took in the sights and sounds of this mountainous cityscape.

Soon enough, nightfall comes on our walk back north, and I stop on a bridge to play with the long-shutter speeds on my camera. The massive amounts of vehicle traffic going by make me wonder how people think of these Mexican cities back in the U.S. Sitting atop this pedestrian bridge, I breathe in a cool breath and feel more of my ideas of the world flourishing. I look at the back of the digital camera screen and see how much bright light the aperture has taken in only six seconds, and I wonder how much light and culture the aperture of my eyeball has taken in on that 15 mile walk of the day. My brain and thoughts reassure my heart of the amount as I continue the walk back to the hotel.

Coming back towards the Macroplaza area, I run into a tree lit by Christmas lights and try to capture its fluid glory with the camera as best as I can. The way the lights flow over in a haphazardly fashion is quickly overcome by the soft pulsing and flowing of the blinking pattern. “Why didn’t they wrap the other trees?”, I wonder out loud. But it really serves me well that the one tree there is appearing like it does so peacefully, despite it being surrounded by an inflow and outflow of what looks like 900 cars per minute.

Fast-forward over a six hour bus ride back to Acuna and a long walk back inside the U.S., and I meet a friend while I have my hotel door open to take in the breezy, chilly December air:

On the way back to Houston, we decide to stop by San Antonio for Saturday night and visit with my family. And then, on the way to San Antonio I quickly pull over right before arriving in a small town called Sabinal and their appropriately named river, the Sabinal River. The colors again comfort and appease me. They also remind me whose trip this really was, it was a trip of nature with me just following along as an observer.

Night falls and a cold and clear night sky lights up the great ceiling. I fall asleep in San Antonio on my cousin’s couch from exhaustion and pure vitalization.

The final day comes and I still haven’t had a chance to ground my thoughts. Don’t get me wrong, I can express my thoughts, but my head is in the clouds after so many sources of inspiration on the trip: human and non-human; cultural and intangible. In fact, as I write this on the Tuesday after getting back, I still haven’t really returned to earth. And I love it. Thanks for the trip, Mother Nature and people of the world.

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I’ll be posting more mini-stories and topics of the trip in the coming weeks. And I have lots more pictures to share with you. However, if you just can’t wait and wish to cheat, you can view the full album at my Google Picasa Web Album.

Thanks for reading.

I made it back in town last night from my eight day motorcycle trip around Texas and Mexico. In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be posting words about different aspects of the trip: the people, the consumerism in a different part of the world, along with other ideas.

Another semester down and only five more months of undergraduate studies face me until another chapter is marked.

Please enjoy this “abstract letter” that I wrote while staying in a hotel near the Central de Autobuses in Monterrey, Mexico during the trip. Be sure to check out the trips from the picture when I post them, you’ll love them!:

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Please, me. I sit and contrast and compare. Or I stand. Lie down. What position flows blood from my brain to the heart quick enough such that => I can submerge myself into a lifelong dream of constant hope and vivid/lucid happenings. If I am obsessed and dreaming in this moment, I am led into yet another obsessed thought. It is more like a box of tic-tacs? Or is it more like a stream of consciousness. How continuous is this brook of synapses firing?

Keep in mind that my heart is thinking, too. And my right hand. It remembers July as well. A discontinuous series of experiences and sensory loads. What is the different between a flood of chemicals touching end to end or reality actually bringing us together? I’ll tell you. Something that classic philosophers quantified as unstudiable. A soul connection.

Soul is still a word to many that is just a euphemism for something not yet explained or covered by a multimeter. But I secretly whisper to them that they just haven’t heard of it yet. They haven’t touched the soul or had something touch the soul like I had done to me. Culture; travel; sleep; poverty. They spoke to me, and yelled at me. I heard them well. Why wonder how sure I am of going there in 8 months? Are our brains just related in a way that, when looked upon in an absurd flash of light, like the words cuarto and cuadra, waiting for a connection.

This sort of connection, once experienced, once the blood returns to your brain, sticks like a stapled report. Everyone thinks that you’ll one day move out of your phase. Well, I turn that around and ask myself this. I even know of a living and breathing pair of examples. When separated by space but not time, it grows stronger in both; a yearning for more, and a fear of continuation with a lack of pure and beautiful fulfillment. It scares the brain, but the heart remembers the arcing between potentials. Different potentials. At the same time, when separated by space, time, and most importantly: mind, they grew apart fasted than a decaying tree.

This, like all progressive experiences in life, not only serves to bring about more questions, but stronger questions. The kind that make you want to drop everything that you are doing in search for your personal legend. Thanks for that relighting of my mind. It broke what I know, and it made the physical into ruins; and I love that. If nothing ever becomes of this, something certainly came of nothing, and I am endlessly in thought of the results - infatuated. But please, me.

I suppose that I only seek meaningful work. That is a simple answer. It always is.

To describe working at a traditional engineering firm, you may hear me talk negatively of the type of work. Privatized research, closed-source for reasons of competition, etc. This can be meaningful, but there are more meaningful ways to provide value to the world. This is where my past experiences and future wishes combine with my decision on graduate school and ultimately a career.

Yes, this is me further breaking down the “do what you love” cliche when approaching life, but I always overthink things anyway, so allow me.

When in a sixty-minute lecture at a small university, I remember the speaker saying that if you wanted to be the absolute best and top in your field, you should follow these steps: some were regarding your productivity: like waking up at 5 and being done with your work for the day at 9 or 10 am. Other tips were regarding being a renaissance man, a jack of all trades who knows a little about a lot. I also remember a picture I took in Maryland, when it was raining on me as I was walking back from a bowling alley, and a sunset appeared  which contained every color in front of me that I have ever laid eyes on in my time on Earth.

I also remember a book that I read 8 years ago, called Essays by Francis Bacon, and how I loved his simple yet revealing and provoking style of writings from the late 1500s and early 1600s. I remember how some ways that he saw life by relationships or finances were mind-expanding, while others I loved to challenge. I also recall a lecture from one of my math professors, in which he stated that on that day in class, we were going to learn a method in differential equations that would finally and fully utilize something that I had been doing since grade 6: using the quadratic equation. Finally, a few years ago, I remember contributing to one of the open-source linux distributions by posting a version bump of a tiny library on the changelog so that the developers could update the repositories: I still run into that changelog every now and then when Googling my name.

Now, the common denominator behind all of these memories? First, let me say how I don’t think that I remember my past like most other people do. In fact, we all certainly have a method or way, as abstract or straight-forward as it may be, to remember our own experiences and life. But through this skewed method that I remember things, I can say that the primary thing that links together every drop of inspiration that I have come across or every muscle that I have moved - is meaning.

Meaning in a conversation. Meaning in having a smoke as the sun rises over the 70 foot pine trees and you wait for the rays to warm your freezing torso.  Meaning hitting you in the face as soon as you wake up. For me, meaning comes by many routes, and I look for more and more routes for it to be able to get to me. The meaning is all around me. I just work on venues that invite it in, and work to push away any entity, person, or culture that would try to keep that meaning from getting to me.

And ultimately, letting me share it with others.