date machine : peace corps

Date Machine: Who Am I and Why Am I Here? or Let’s Keep in Touch

amboabe — Fri, 08 May 2009 01:08:00 GMT

I didn’t want my last post to be a formal goodbye so I’m going to do all that formal housekeeping here, in my second to last post. My name is Michael Thomsen.

“Amboabe” was a dumb nickname I gave myself in Madagascar. After an extended rant about something marginal and self-reflexive my friend S, who was a fellow volunteer, said “I hear you barking, big dog.” Madagascar is a country defined, in large part, by taboos and there are a lot centered on dogs. Dogs are considered filthy. It’s taboo in many areas to bring a dog into your house. It’s taboo to feed a dog the same food that humans would eat. It’s taboo to refer to another person as a dog in any way.

Dogs are mangy and opportunistic lurkers, crawling through the filthy back alleys on a never-ending search for food and shelter. They’re turned away and cursed at every turn. Children amuse themselves by beating dogs with sticks or throwing rocks at them, giggling when they evoke a pathetic yelp.

“Amboabe” is a literal translation of “big dog.” Once I got to know people in my village, I would make joking reference to myself as “amboabe” to see how far I could bend the taboos. When I told Bernadiny, the tank-like nurse at the clinic where I spent most of my days, she scowled and said I was dirty. “That’s not alright,” she told me. “People can’t be dogs. That’s bad.”

I made a point to laugh and make joking faces whenever I said it, but it was always received with headshakes and clucking disdain. After my first year, I noticed people had started calling me by the name. “Where is the big dog?” they would ask my neighbors when someone was looking for me. “Are you coming on the vaccine drive… big dog?”

The scorn was still present, but I could see the lips pointing upwards just a little bit every time they said it. Bernadiny started calling me Amboabe regularly, shaking her head at how ridiculous it was. There was no one else in town who could have been called a dog, much less request it. It was stupid. Absurd. Wrong. She would shake her head, as if she couldn’t believe what she was doing, and then laugh to herself when she saw what an joy it was for me to hear her say it.

Nothing happened when the taboo was broken. There wasn’t any ugly incident, the gendarmes didn’t storm the clinic, and god didn’t strike anyone down for blaspheming the human spirit. We laughed, and shook our heads. It was so stupid. “Beeg dug,” she would say in her broken high school English. “Eka, izay ty anarako,” I would tell her. That’s my name.

I write for a website called IGN.com. I freelance for them now, but when I was in San Francisco I was an associate editor. I wrote about video games and music. Before that I lived in LA and wrote for a smaller video game website called Nintendo World Report and had a day job at a big game company called Activision (the people that make Guitar Hero). I wrote a couple screenplays and came pretty close to raising $500,000 to direct one I wrote about kids in high school. It didn’t really come together and then I got offered the job in San Francisco.

If you want to read other stuff I’ve written, you can Google me. It’s not hard to find. Here are a few links just in case. Hopefully you’ll recognize the voice, even if the terms might seem a bit foreign. If you aren’t moved by my writing here I don’t know if any of this other stuff will change your mind. But it’s me, I wrote it.

Editorial: The Case for Six Days in Fallujah
*and here's a short video interview I did for ABC about the game.

Contrarian Corner: Mirror’s Edge

Animal Collective: Meriweather Post Pavilion Review

Writing for Date Machine has been one of the most consistently difficult things I’ve done over the last year, and this has been one of the toughest years I’ve had. It started with my grandfather dying, and ended with the possibility of my mother dying. In between, the love of my life moved across the country to live with another man, I got an STD, I feel into a depression and lost twenty pounds.

But I wanted to write. And so I would come home after work every night and sit at my desk for three or four hours trying to come up with something that would be worth reading; something honest, entertaining, and worth returning to. I tried to do it five days a week, after twelve hours in another office, and in between directing, producing, and editing a short film, and working on some other freelance writing jobs.

It’s been great to do it with Zeitgeisty and Airheadgenius. It probably doesn’t seem like much of a trick from your end, but on my end it’s been consistently frightening. It’s easy to be honest and unapologetic with your friends and people you care about, but it’s a separate thing to do it out loud and in public. It’s really hard to spend hours sharing something vulnerable and intimate and indemnifying, only to hit publish and face an anonymous swell of readers eager to evaluate, convict, and issue sentence.

We’ve fought amongst ourselves, and the end has been no different than the beginning in that respect; but I’m thankful to have written alongside them. It was always a little less daunting to climb out on the rhetorical limb when I’d see each of them taking their own risks everyday. Whatever I’ve written here, it would have been less without their camaraderie.

I’m also glad that you’ve been here, reading all of this. I’ve tried to give what I could of myself in every post. I’ve also asked for you to give me your time, and your energy in reading all these little stories and thoughts. It may not seem like it given how self-absorbed much of this must read, but I appreciate that time and energy more than you may expect. Whether you liked what I wrote or loathed it, you still gave me a hearing and that’s the most any writer could ever ask of any reader.

If you want to stay in contact, I’m on Facebook. Find me if you want to. If you’re in New York, buy me a drink. If you’re not send me a note.

Tomorrow afternoon will be my last post. I’ll try and finish in the same way I started, with some red meat. I’m kind of scared to write it, but I’ll be talking about everything that’s happened since I moved to New York.

See you then.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: How to Pick Up Women

Date Machine: Women at 30, or the Scent of the Medicine Cabinet

Date Machine: My Friend's Girlfriend is my Girlfriend

Love Machine: Dating Someone with a Handicap

Date Machine: How to Pick Up a Nurse at the HIV Clinic

Date Machine: Full Disclosure

Sex Machine: The Bare Minimum

Date Machine: The Seductive Art of Dancing

Sex Machine: Becoming A Virgin Again

Sex Machine: Come On My Face

Sex Machine: Because I Can

Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?

Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars

Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor

Date Machine: Long Distance Lovers

Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores

Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents

Love Machine: Willing to Relocate

Love Machine: Taking A Break From Dating

amboabe — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:36:00 GMT

I started talking to a woman at a party this weekend who confessed that she was taking a break from dating. I was immediately excited. I wanted her to hurry up and finish her explanation of how she had come to a point of general exhaustion in her dating life so that I could add my own thoughts. "I'm taking a break too!" I wanted to tell her. It was a thrill to have found such immediate common ground with someone I had only met a few minutes before. Everyone I knew at the party had gone home early. I had turned to the closest person I could find to strike up a conversation hoping to stave off going home early on a Saturday night. I didn't want to seem like I was hitting on her, so when the opportunity arose to disavow any immediate participation in the mating rituals of urban city dweller I felt giddy.

The idea that one can take a break from dating seems languorous and self-indulgent. It's like saying you're going to take a break from ice cream. Dating isn't easy, and it can feel like work, but it's always interesting. Even when it's patently boring, you can always learn something new about people or how you relate to certain kinds of people. And the possibility of romance sparking underneath the surface, like some exposed electrical wire, is always an exciting secret to carry with you throughout the day. I always feel an extra sense of adventure and purpose on days when I have a date.

In a lot of ways it's a privilege to be able to apply so much time and energy to the idea of finding a partner who'll fulfill some romantic ideal. I always wonder about the comparative success of arranged marriages, at least compared to the staggering divorce rates in the unarranged world. I wonder if it isn't entirely reckless to believe that you can select your own mate using a divining rod whose most important criterion is love. Looking at marriage as an effective partnership between two people who agree to set aside personal agendas for the sake of a family is painfully anti-climactic. But it's statistically more likely to hold fast than the woozy promises made under a lovespell on a hot summer night.

One of the most rewarding things about being in Peace Corps was seeing how quickly and totally all the socially constructed barriers between people can be broken down. I remember the first day showing up for staging and looking around the hotel conference room at the rabble of oat-fed college graduates looking attentively at the bullet points on a government-issue whiteboard. I couldn't believe I had traded my real friends and family for this group of sandal-wearing do-gooders. It was repulsive to imagine I was leaving behind a life I had so carefully built for this random group of people who were so earnest and idealistic that they almost should have been wearing helmets.

A few weeks later we might as well have all been menstruating on the same lunar cycle. Stripped of country, companionship, language, and possessions, the need for trust and intimacy become irrepressible; like the unavoidable urgency of oxygen when you've been underwater for too long. Bonds form and love grows like a flower sprouted in cow shit, no less strong or real for its crass beginnings.

Sometimes dating feels like hurling yourself against another person's outer barriers over and over again. Both sides want the closeness, acceptance, and intimacy, and neither side trusts the other will be able to provide them. So we fixate on politics and fashion, deconstruct taste in music or movies, and use them as barriers to keep from having to offer someone empathy. We circle each other in bars and coffee shops, evaluating, approaching, and dismissing; as if love were something you simply find and not something you give.

I was just about to start telling all of this to the woman at the party, the pudgy one with horn-rimmed glasses who I was worried would think I was hitting on her. Twenty seconds after I told her I was taking a break from dating, she excused herself to go outside for a cigarette. I looked around the room and didn't see anyone I recognized. Then I left.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: The Celebrity You Most Resemble

Sex Machine: I Kissed A Boy

Vote Machine: No Gay People Can't

Sex Machine: Let's Have an Orgy

Sex Machine: My First STD

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Love Machine: Let's Make Babies

Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines

Sex Machine: My Kingdom for a Boner

Date Machine: Don't Make Poopy in the Office

Nerve Confessions: Fat and Skinny, Ugly, Pretty

Crying In Public: Some Corner in Brooklyn

Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much

Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop

Love Machine: Your Mom Will Do

Date Machine: Scary Movies or I Peed My Pants

Date Machine: Rate My Ethics

Love Machine: Let's Just Be Friends

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met

Sex Machine: Why Women Are Great In Bed

Sex Machine: Why Women Suck in Bed

Date Night: All By Myself on a Saturday Night

Sex Machine: Spank My Ass

Love Machine: Infidelity or How Long Can You Go Without Cheating?

Date Night: The 45-Minute Walkout

Date Night Redux: H's Version of Our Night Out

Celebrity Confession: Who is Lauren Cohan and Why is She Hitting on Me?

Sex Machine: My First Muff Dive

Crying in Public: Remember the Cheerleaders

Sex Machine: Masturbating Upside Down

Date Night: Two Women in One Night

Nerve Confessions: Rate My Penis Size

Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train

Love machine: How I Date On The Internet

Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs

Crying in Public: My Cubicle

Crying in Public: Remember the Cheerleaders

amboabe — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:26:00 GMT

So this one time I fell in love with an ex-cheerleader. She was a tall and lanky woman from Wisconsin and had an accent vaguely reminiscent of a goose. She camped out overnight once to get a new N'Sync album the day it released. She told dirty jokes and always had a self-deprecating line at the ready. I didn't think I would have anything to say to her when we met. The first memory I have of her is standing up in front of a group of scrubbed down Peace Corps volunteers in an incongruously posh hotel conference room in downtown Philadelphia and confessing to thirty strangers that she had cried leaving her parents that morning.

When I was twenty-five I spent a year in China teaching English with the Peace Corps before being evacuated during the SARS epidemic. I chose to re-enroll and was sent to Madagascar, which is where I met T. Going back into Peace Corps was a hard thing to do. Choosing to re-enroll was easy. After a dizzy year in China, living like a celebrity on an inflated government stipend while working 14 hours a week was one of the most surreal experiences I've ever had. I wasn't ready for that experience to end so I eagerly dove back into the nostalgic dream of living in a hut somewhere tropical and digging latrines for the world's incapable poor.

The idea was nice, but the reality of being back in Peace Corps in a totally new country and with a completely different group of people was overwhelming. It felt like re-enrolling in high school. Staying in country during my first year in Madagascar, abandoned in some dusty waypoint in the middle of the arid south was one of the hardest things I've ever done. It was the worst kind of déjà vu. I felt like I was doing something I had already done, but in a totally alien environment.

But so the cheerleader. She was the first person I remember meeting in the group of people I went to Madagascar with. I responded directly to that blunt first confession she made in front of the group. Then I dismissed her as a "type." She was a cheerleader. I don't date cheerleaders. I don't listen to N'Sync. A month later we got drunk and wound up hooking up.

For the next two years T was the emotionally unavailable one and I was sadly trying to swim upstream. It didn't work. I was in full freefall, trying to find something to keep me from abandoning my dream of digging latrines. It's easy for me to think of her as some kind of life raft I reached out to just to avoid having to leave country. Most of our friends in common believe I was deluded in thinking there was more.

Three years later she's in another country living with a square-jawed military man and I've moved on. But I still love her. I remember my flight out of Madagascar after having finished my time there. We shared a hotel room together the last night. We stayed out late and got drunk. We went to bed and didn't do anything. We laid side by side and fell asleep for a few hours. The car came to take me to the airport at 6am the next morning.

I emptied out my guts in Madagascar. I gave everything I had to give to the people in my village, and to T. It wasn't good enough. The best I got in my village was the nickname that has become my screen name here. I left behind some laminated drawings about proper nutrition in the local school. I lectured women on proper breast-feeding techniques, and I tried to tell people how to counsel friends with HIV that don't have access to medical treatment. And I fell in love with a cheerleader who never gave me anything back.

I remember sitting on the plane as we were ascending, pulling away from the land below and looking at pictures from the region where I had lived in the airline magazine. I started balling. It wasn't nice and quiet crying. My lower lip started shacking and soon my whole chin was spasming and I had to turn my head flush with the window so that nobody around me would see. I knew I would never go back to any of it. I knew that I would never get the shreds of myself that I had left behind. I felt a terrible gratitude, like a crushing weight pulling against the ascent. Everyone loses in the end. But being able to give it all away, to see bits of yourself drift off into an indifferent and alien world; Madagascar, a cheerleader. I felt like the luckiest asshole in the world.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: Masturbating Upside Down

Date Night: Two Women in One Night

Date Machine: Kissing on the First Date

Nerve Confessions: Rate My Penis Size

Celebrity Confession: Tom Brady's Love Handles

Date Night: The Wine Bar as the End of Civilization

Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train

Love machine: How I Date On The Internet

Sex Machine: Zeitgeisty's Ass Bangin'

Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs

Crying in Public: My Cubicle

Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train

amboabe — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:26:00 GMT

When I was 25 I left LA, dropped all the career momentum I had built up in the film industry and joined the Peace Corps. I had imagined of going to some sandy African coastal village and living beneath palm fronds for two years while digging latrines or building wells. Something romantic that would leave me with a perfect tan and well-developed forearms. Instead, I was sent to Western China. I spent a summer training in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province (which you might recognize in its more familiar western distortion as Szechuan). A lot of great things happened that summer. I had sex in public for the first time. I ate deep fried rabbit heads. I learned how to speak some Chinese. I taught a few eager college freshmen bits and pieces of English. And I also fell in love with a lesbian. Note to reader: if you fall in love with a lesbian your life will be beset on all sides with wondrous pain, heartache, and candy-colored daydreams.

After the summer was over, my newly sworn-in class of fellow volunteers was split up and sent out to work in sites all across Western China. I was sent into the southern-most part of Sichuan to a town called Panzhihua, a mining town that had grown exponentially since the 60's thanks to Mao's paranoid initiative to move all of China's main industries inland away from the coastal metropolises that were vulnerable to foreign invasion. One of the biggest steel companies in China set up shop over a speck on the map and, in a few decades, the city housed almost a million people and had an immaculate Kentucky Fried Chicken downtown. Peace Corps is a lovely establishment, but full of contradictions.

But back to lesbians. After a few months of being separated, working in cities 700 km apart, exchanging long circuitous emails and spending hours on meandering phone calls, I was reunited with C during a national holiday when we agreed to meet for a scamper around the tourist towns at the foot of the Tibetan plateau. We started at a place called Emei Shan, some famous mountain with a Buddhist monastery and which was renowned for having unfriendly monkeys on its summit. Then we bumbled around a small cowboy town called Kanding, which has a famous song written about it which none of you have heard but I can still sing by heart. We ended up back in Chengdu for a couple of days before having to part ways again. We had been drunk lots, and fooled around here and there. By the end of our week together I knew that there would never be anything between us romantically.

We were traveling with another volunteer for a good bit of the week, another woman, and one that irritated me immensely. She used NPR and the Utne Reader like a checklist for her personality. She was also exotic and attractive, and C was more interested in her by the end of our week together than she was in me. I spent our last night in Chengdu alone, while the two of them courted each other in a string of red light bars, walking by myself through the city. Chengdu is a giant cement maze, filled with more than fourteen million people (in 2002), and I walked through its rank corridors lined with incomprehensible symbology on either side, lit up in garish neon signs, wondering how I had gotten into the mess of being hopelessly in love with someone who wouldn't love me back.

That night, somewhere around 4AM, all three of us managed to come back to our shared hotel room at the same time. C and our travel companion drunk and giddy from trading teenage kisses in the night air of a foreign country, me brooding and exhausted, angry at both of them, wanting to be gone again.

The next day, I left on a night train back to Panzhihua. It would take fourteen hours, and would get me back by 7 the next morning, two hours before my first class of the week. I was out of money and bought a ticket in the hard seat section, the cheapest fare available. You don't buy actual seats when you travel hard seat in China, you buy entry into a car that is continually filled with more people at each and every stop. There is no maximum capacity. People sit on the floors, stand in the aisles, mash into the connector compartments between cars, and sometime after midnight the cars transform into human cattle transports.

As we pulled out of the station I felt hopeless and abandoned. There was no consolation in the rank night ahead, nor in the prospect of having to lead my students through the overwhelming labyrinth of verb conjugation the next morning. I didn't have any music to listen to, nor any books to read. I had nothing but a bag full of clothes, a lingering hangover, and a torn train ticket in my pocket. I pulled out a ratty notebook I still had tucked away in one of the compartments of my backpack and started writing a poem about my mother, wondering what it would be like to watch her age and die in slow motion before my eyes. I wondered how to say you love someone when you don't have any words left to use, when all you have left is the leaving. I wrote for an hour, and cried during most of it; surrounded by Chinese travelers, who stared but didn't speak because we didn't have any words in common just then. I kept writing while they stared.

Note to reader: if at all possible fall in love with a lesbian at least once in your life.

Previous Posts:

Love machine: How I Date On The Internet

Celebrity Confession: In Which Kevin Spacey Bangs Ass

Sex Machine: Zeitgeisty's Ass Bangin'

Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs

Intimacy; or A Trip To The Dentist

Crying in Public: My Cubicle

The McCain Date