So I made a mistake the other way: I grabbed Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” of my parents’ bookshelf. I find poverty a pretty interesting subject, thus why I studied economics, which has the improvement of material welfare as its essential concern. Another recent book on the working poor, Jason DeParle’s “American Dream is excellent. Ehrenreich’s book is the exact opposite.Ehrenreich is a freelance writer with a healthy dose of upper-class guilt. Her Dad was originally a copper miner, but rose to become a business executive, and Ehrenreich was raised in a leafy Northeastern suburb. Her first major work was a sociology book criticizing welfare reform, claiming that “forcing people to work” is unjust and that some people “ought be able to opt-out of work.” So that’s where we start. Nickel and Dimed is about her journey working around the US, taking low-paying jobs, and seeing how impossible is it to get by.

I’ve worked every job that she works in the book. Nursing home? Check. Retail? Check. Cook? Check. Dishwasher? Check. They weren’t that bad. Ehrenreich, however, is constantly cussing out her bosses, complaining of “exhaustion” (at one point, she refuses a high-paying job because she was too tired from an 8-hour orientation the day before), and looking down on her “exploited” coworkers. It’s interesting that the few times she reports on what her coworkers think of their job, they generally claim that the job isn’t bad for now and that they hope to move up the ladder as they grow older. They just as well could have told Ehrenreich that in Swahili, because she writes this sentiment off as delusion.

Beyond this, though, is the trouble Ehrenreich has making ends meet (or even not being homeless!) during this stretch. Are you serious? First, she manages to rent places (on a weekly basis) that cost between 600 and 1000 dollars per month. This is in places like Portland and Minneapolis. I can get you studios in Boston for less than that. Thought experiment: A full time job at $7/hour gets you 13000 a year after social security. I’ll assume that you have insurance of some kind, since even places like Blockbuster will give it to you. At 400 for rent and 200 for food, you’re left with 500 bucks for other expenses. I’ve never had a coworker as hard up for cash as Ehrenreich makes herself out to be, and I’ve certainly never had a coworker with as low a tolerance for manual labor as Ehrenreich has. Gah.

If you’re still up for some Ehrenreich hilarity, she has a debate on Slate this week with Jason Furman, a fairly left-wing economist with a Harvard PhD. By the end, and I’m not exaggerating, she’s calling for class solidarity and proletarian movements to increase the wages at WalMart. It’s good stuff.

We’re finally heading out on the roadtrip in a couple days! The loop is a bit truncated, but still, it’s gonna be sweet.

PS: I completely forgot my favorite part of the book.  Walmart gives her a job on the spot and sets an appointment for her drug screening.  “I had a slight indiscretion,” she says.  Ah, no worries, Ehrenreich, they won’t detect that J you smoked back in ‘72.  But no.  The ignorant, pill-popping, New York Times-writing, wannabe revolutionary was apparantly unaware that low-wage jobs make you take a drug test.  Now, I think drug tests are a waste of time because you have to be an imbecile to be caught; just lay off the pipe for a week, my groovy sista.   Ehrenreich had apparantly Cheech-n-Chong’d it a couple days before this interview.  So I guess that drug tests can catch some people: ignorant New York yuppies pretend to be proletariat.

PSS: Incidentally, I finally heard from the CIA.  I guess the fact that I came up as having 1) a history of drug use, 2) known terrorist connections, and 3) a long-term connection with a foreign espionage service, during my lie detector test didn’t bother them in the end.  When they called, I told them that, when they asked in April, I said I had bills to pay and needed to know about the job by May 20.  Today is June 29.  It woulda been cool to work for the Agency, though; I was going to be right in Langley, writing reports for the President’s Daily Brief (not bad, right?).   Then again, the management there are a bunch of screwups at the moment, and morale is disastrous, so maybe I’m better off not working there.  Did I mention how hard it is to take language classes at the CIA?  You’d think they’d have free nightly classes in Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, Uzbek and the rest.  No.  Nothing.  Sometimes they give long-term workers time off to study at a University.  Are you serious?  Well, let’s just hope the terrorists speak English then.

I’ve been using the internet for eleven years, yet nonetheless remain amazed by how quickly one can come across interesting information. Today, a search for cable TV packages out in Richmond led me to an .mp3 stream of Patrick Henry’s “Give me Liberty or Give me Death!” speech, which was delivered in Richmond to a chorus of “To Arms! To Arms!” Topping that, I went from a story about poet Liza Pilenko at a linguists blog to a biography of Pushkin (aka Russian Shakespeare) to a story about Ibrahim Petrovich Gannibal, “The Black Star of the Enlightment”. Turns out Gannibal was from either Eritrea or Chad, wound up in the court of Peter the Great via Istanbul, and was educated in Paris with his friends Diderot and Voltaire before becoming a top General in Russia and the great grandfather of Pushkin. Who knew Pushkin held it down for Africa

My car situation is settled. The car guys were wondering why I went to pretty much every dealer in town to see what was available. “Why not just drive off in X today?” I’ll tell you why: Look around like K and you can also roll off in a 40000 car for the price of a low-end Toyota Camry. Seriously. I’ll pop more details when I get the ride next month.

(Though let’s not imagine that I want a car - you know what I think about cars in cities. But if I’m gonna have a ride, I might as well go out in style, right?)

And back and still alive. Whew. You think the jungles of Borneo a bit of a throwback, right? Cannibals, headhunters, log huts, trained monkeys, all that ish. No. Not only was the little kid at my jungle camp rocking a “Carmelo” T-shirt, but I ate my last meal at a KFC before I got on the canoe.

Map of trip (dotted lines are flights)I got into Singapore late night on the 2nd and walked ’round the whole city the next day. You may have thought I was a pretty nerdy economist type before, but if you weren’t convinced, I ought explain that the site I was most excited to visit in Singapore was a container port. It’s not just me: there’s a whole book about container shipment on store shelves. Seriously, though, the Port of Singapore is the largest, and by far the most advanced, port in the world. There are miles upon miles of cranes and standardized containers, with boats stretching through the Malacca Straits as far as your eye can see.

Ah, beautiful containersThe rest of Singapore was hip, too. Singapore is essentially the proof of Plato’s philosopher king idea. Lee Kuan Yew ran Singapore as a dictator for decades, but he was also quite unselfish and a smart guy, which is why Singapore went from being a relatively grimy third=world port to a city that ranks among the cleanest and richest in the world. There are some people under the mistaken impression that democracy leads to better government. It does not. Democracy does, however, make really bad government harder to come about, and since we prefer stable mediocrity to waves of incredible competence and incredible tyranny, we choose democracy.

Singapore is definitely the kind of place I could see myself living, lack of freedom nonwithstanding. The museums (particularly the Museum of Asian Civilization) are great, there is an interesting mix of Indian, Asian, Moslem and Western culture, the food is good, the weather is good, the city is safe and clean, even the public housing is nice - really not much of a downside.

(As an aside, the traffic is also amazingly limited in Singapore. This is partly due to good public transit, but has more to do with the absurd taxes on vehicle ownership. A new mid-range Kia sells for almost US$40000, and after you buy it, you still have to pay tax on every mile you drive. That’d push me to bike to work, for sure.)

Petronas Towers in KLFrom Singapore, I hopped a bus to Kuala Lumpur, notable mainly for the “Say No to Porn!” billboards on the tollbooths around town. Well, and also notable for the enormous Petronas Towers, which now stand as the second tallest buildings on Earth. This is a bit of a game, though - the height includes the spire. I’ve stood underneath the Twin Towers, the Sears Tower, the Jin Mao and a bunch of others, and I’ll be damned if they, especially the Sears, didn’t seem much more substantial than Petronas.

KL was also cool because it, along with Bangkok, is the cheapest city in the world for 5-star hotels. I booked a room at the Regent for 73 bucks, which included butler service, top-notch concierge, beautiful pool, and Jack Daniels Black on the nightstand. Not bad. Even the Ritz is only like 100/night. Incidentally, I didn’t see another proper hotel the rest of the trip.

The mean streets of SandakanFrom KL, I flew to Sandakan, on the East Coast of Malaysian Borneo. There must have been a dignitary of some kind on my flight, because when we deplaned, there were dozens of local reps handing us gifts and saying “Welcome to Sandakan!” When it was my turn, they had me take pictures with a bunch of people for the news cameras and local TV. Celebrity for a day, right? The city of Sandakan itself, though, is a bit of a dump. I spent a few hours walking all round the city before managing to, completely on accident, run into an English Tea House on a hill above town.

One does not expect to turn left in a dusty Asian third-tier city, and find a croquet lawn (with peacock), white-gloved waiters, and rack of mutton with a cool lemonade to drink. I certainly did not, but what a welcome surprise it was. The Tea House is the old home of an author named Agnes Keith. Not a bad day to spend an afternoon - the Empire isn’t quite dead, after all. On my way back into town, I ran into three cute English girls, who decided to come with me to the jungle camp the next day.

(This town, by the way, was not really a run-into-backpackers kind of town. The Hello Quotient was very high; I must have gotten a hundred Hello!’s in one afternoon there. I managed to escape with only one “My assistant shopkeeper says she thinks you’re very cute!”, one “Ah, Justin Timberlake!” (I’ve since cut my hair; the curls are gone now), and one “little kid looking back at me so intently he walks into a table of fruit”. As far as backwater towns go, this is about par for the course. It also wasn’t a backpacker town because Sandakan is somewhat notorious for its terrorist presence. The southern part of the Philippines, especially Mindanao and the Sulu islands, is inhabited by a terrorist group named Abu Sayyaf who life to kidnap Westerners. There are tons of Filipinos in Sandakan illegally, including a number of Abu Sayyaf. No worries, though: the last kidnapping was on an island a couple hours away six years ago, when a dozen Europeans went missing while scubadiving!)

Kinabatangan RiverThe next day, I headed with the girls down to the Jungle camp, which involved a 2 hour bus ride, then another 2 hours by motorized canoe on the Kinabatangan River. The wildlife was quite good; we saw tons of monkeys and probiscus, a crocodile, a slow loris (which is a type of sloth), owls, 6-foot-long lizards and tons of birdlife. The monkeys (called macaque) were pretty ridiculous; in the mornings, you had to chase them away from your breakfast! At least it’s not just us humans; the macaques were stealing bananas from the orangutan at the orangutan rehab facility near Sandakan too.

Probiscus MonkeyIt’s amazing how hip with modernity the jungle guys are. We were *out there*. There wasn’t even a village within 25 miles, but nonetheless the kids who worked at the camp had Nike shirts, watched Premier League soccer on TV, and knew the words to the latest track by Akon. They even got cell phone reception! A pretty hip Borneon dude my age got a call at like 11:30. “Ah, my ex-girlfriend, I wonder what she wants?” See, they even have booty calls in the jungle.

View from about 12000 ft.From the jungle camp, I headed straight to Mt. Kinabalu. Kinabalu is the biggest moutain inbetween the Himalayas and Irian Jaya. At 13450 ft., it’s much taller than Mt. Hood, and a good 250 feet higher than Mt. Rainier. Apparently, though, it’s “an easy climb.” Apparantly was wrong. It is not an easy climb.

Evening Clouds on the MountainI joined two English and a Canadian on the climb over 2 days. The first day, we climbed from 4800 ft. to 11000 ft., which wasn’t too tiring aside from the blazing Equator heat. The second day, though, the climb from 11000 to 13450 was nearly continuous 45 degree granite, steep enough that you needed to use ropes to haul yourself up. Did I mention we had to do this in the pitch black at 2:30 am? Or that the granite was soaking wet? The view was great at the top, at least - you could see hundreds of miles in every direction. Not bad.

The four of us after summittingAfter the mountain, I hopped a bus to the capital of Sabah, Kota Kinabalu, from where I planned to take a boat to Brunei, spend a day in the rich Islamic sultanate, then fly to Kuching in Western Borneo. My legs were too tired, and I missed the boat. What can ya do? I spent the last three days hanging out in a backpacker hostel, watching World Cup, and chilling/snorkeling on a beautiful beach. Nothing wrong with that? Hey, it took 33 hours airport to airport, to get from Kota Kinabalu to Eugene (via Singapore, Tokyo and San Fran), so I needed to rest in advance!

Now I’m back in Eugene for a couple days, trying to decide on a car for going out East in. I’m thinking of getting a 2002 BMW 325i, which is dope in every way, but runs around 425/month with 0 down. For like 300, I could just get a Ford Focus or something like that. Tough decision, yeah? And I don’t even want to get a car at all!

More pictures can be found here.