One of my friends has helpfully pointed out that today is World Toilet Day. According to the World Toilet Organization, fully 40% of the world’s people do not have access to proper sanitation facilities.

We do deserve better; I for one don’t particularly enjoy squatting in the bushes. The World Toilet Organization agrees, and sponsors World Toilet Summits and World Toilet Expos, “wherein all toilet and sanitation organizations can learn from one another and leverage on media and global support that in turn can influence governments to promote sound sanitation and public health policies.” They also started the first World Toilet College, providing training in toilet design, maintenance, school sanitation, disaster sanitation, and implementation of sustainable sanitation systems.

Okay, you can snicker now. I know I am.

This would be even funnier if it wasn’t actually serious — human waste is a major disease carrier if not handled correctly, and an awful lot of people are still just pooping on the ground or in the river. But let’s not dwell on negatives; in the carefree spirit of World Toilet Day, I thought I’d briefly discuss, and show some pictures, of the types of toilets I’ve encountered in various parts of the world. Travel yields many surprises, and, astonishingly, there were places where I had to learn to wipe my ass all over again. (”Don’t you know how to use the three seashells?” indeed.)

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Obama is the son of an African father and a European mother. Why is he black (with a white mother) instead of white (with a black father)?

What makes Obama black? Is it nothing more than the color of his skin? How light do you have to be before you’re white? (If anyone brings up “just one drop” I’m going to slap them for exhuming idiocy.) Does the fact that he married an African-American woman make him blacker? If he had married a white girl would he have been whiter? Or maybe it’s the work he did in the black communities of Chicago, but what about the service he’s given to the white people of Illonois as their Senator? Perhaps it’s the fact that he shoots hoops — with white guys.

According to Rolling Stone, he listens to Jay-Z, but also Bruce Springstein.

Tell me what “black” means, because I honestly don’t know.

It must have been six in the morning and I was in the kitchen with Naomi, and we were trying to figure out if the party meant anything. This always happens to me. Probably it’s because I’ve ended up at some very good parties. This one involved poets and a hundred black berets, and fresh-baked cupcakes for breakfast. Naomi looked fabulous and she really was Danger Girl that night, and we were trying to understand whether that amazing energy, that vortex of possibility that surrounds any truly good party, whether that could save the world.

If we just… all these people… all this energy… why can’t we live like this all the time? It’s the old vision, that 4:00 AM glimpse of utopia, surrounded by friends and new friends and peace among your kind which makes you forget that there are other kinds. It means something, it has to, and you’re sure that this dawn among all others represents a new beginning, if not for all humanity then at least for the people who were lucky enough to be there. But it’s never that simple. The party absolutely depends on temporary suspension of disbelief. For example: this party was in Bayview and the few local kids who turned up — black kids at a white party — they didn’t fit in so well. It was hard for many to agree when they rapped “fuck the PO-lice!” Not that we wanted the cops to show up, to be sure, but it’s just, it wasn’t, they weren’t…

The party is its own reality, that’s the seductive pleasure of it. It plays by its own rules and does not mix well with racial tension or economic complexities or genocide. At this party, I did not perform a poem about genocide. I’ve been working on one, based on my experiences in Cambodia. Genocide + Party = bummer, Naomi observed, and she was right, and I suddenly couldn’t explain to her what the hell I had been writing about and why I wanted to do a poem about PEOPLE FUCKING DYING at a party, other than the fact that this was intentionally a “happening” with lots of experimental art. I made out with her instead, which was absolutely a good idea.

And then the french toast was ready and Evan was on the decks playing the most amazing sunrise set, and this woman I’d never met named Molly was standing behind me giving me the most amazing massage. And many of the people I love were there, and I thought — yes. This is life. This is what I want.

It is. It is what I want. Moments like this, I live for them.

Except for riding across the desert on top of a truck. Or having a woman beam with pride as she shows me how her one goat she bought with the loan is now three, how she thinks her future will be better and how she suddenly believes that she is the one who can make it so. Or showing Wikipedia to an Indian journalist. Answering my young friend when she asked me what a polynomial is. Understanding something, finally, and writing it with passion, near to tears that I was able to get even a hundredth of what I felt onto the page. The party is a mere flirtation compared to everything beautiful that I’ve ever seen or done, every tiny spark I may have planted. Some of those sparks were very hard to strike, and many more times I utterly failed to make anything better at all, but I wanted to be there just the same, just to know. I have walked through a bombed-out city, and I am glad that I did, because that is just as real as this fabulous french toast.

There is the party, and there is the work. I defer to The Beatles here. “Sure we did lots of drugs,” said Harrison in an interview years later, “but we never let it get in the way of making music.” The party and the work. The things you do because the thrill of the moment propels you to, the aerial somersault in the free fall towards the crystal blue water and you are seven years old and nothing else matters; that kiss and watching 200 people show up and have a mad great time at a happening that I helped create; this is the flight of life. But there is also the work, the slow and much longer runway. It often takes immensely more planning, months or years, and sometimes you can’t plan at all and you were just lucky you were there to help. Even more often you don’t know if you helped at all. So we do the work. At our party was a physicist, a handful of doctors, a man designing a genome sequencer, several linguists, a kindergarten teacher, a therapist, a pair of international aid workers, a civil rights lawyer, and perhaps a future politician or two. Oh, and some artists, I gather. We were all there, and what we do when we are not there also makes us live.

The party and the work. They are the yin and yang, each could not exist without the other, and this is what I was trying to explain to Naomi messily that laughing morning. The party is a focus of intention, it is a coming together, and we desperately need that. But is it not the only thing. Now matter how glorious the dawn seems, the party will not branch out to save the world (and this is where the Merry Pranksters failed.)  Most people aren’t invited, for one thing. So we will go home and get some sleep and then get up to create the world we want to live in, because we have to. Because we want to. The same thing that drives us to want french toast with friends at dawn is the thing that lets us understand that the rubble of war is a travesty. And when we are willing to walk through that rubble — to stop imagining the rest of the world and see that it is real too, even the genocides — we see where our efforts are needed. I cannot see that throwing the best party ever (and it really was the best party ever) is any different, in spirit, from swabbing the infected eyes of Ethiopian children or campaigning for finance reform or being a foster parent or however it is that we each choose to take care of the rest of existence. Attending to either of these poles makes me weep equally that I could bring something good into the world, however meaningless or small. The party is never the work, and the work must be done, and sometimes the work kinda sucks. But we do it anyway. I must have both– I will fade away somehow without both. Both are the creation of a more marvelous existence.

It’s very hard to understand the world in the abstract, without walking its cracked pavement or trying to have a conversation with someone impossibly different from you. Wikipedia defines a “developing country” as a nation “that has not reached Western-style standards of democratic government, free market economy, industrialization, social programs, and human rights guarantees for their citizens.” But this glossy language never prepared me for the things I saw almost immediately that first time I landed somewhere poor. This list is a primer for those who have not yet had the mind-blowing experience of stepping outside the castle walls.

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Science is sometimes really tricky, which makes writing about it even trickier. No real experiment exists apart from a huge background of assumptions, abstractions, caveats and complexities;  the writer’s job is to find a strong narrative that is understandable with little or no prior knowledge, scans well, and catches the reader’s attention.

Recent research on physiological differences between liberal and conservative voters seems like a dream come true if you’re in need of a catchy press release, like this one from the National Science Foundation. I read the actual paper, and it says that people who answer more conservatively on a questionnaire about their politics tend also to have more pronounced “fight-or-flight” reactions to disturbing or surprising stimuli, as measured by skin conductance and startle response.

The press release tells a different story, and I believe that the NSF science writer told the wrong story. I attribute this partially to the politics of publicity, but mostly to the fact that science is actually very subtle, and hard to summarize.

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I remember this blender, though I didn’t remember owning it. In another box I find my emergency medicine textbooks. Among my former desk contents, a box of staples and a rainbow plastic slinky. Enameled Japanese-style soup bowls come out of newspaper. Everything comes out of boxes.

Is this my life?

I’m finally back “home.” I finally have an apartment. I can now own more than I can fit into my backpack, and suddenly I have a great many jackets and an abundance of fresh memories. I unpack more books and try not to think of these objects as my life. My stuff is not me, I keep insisting. A friend of mine says he learned this very clearly when his house burned down. How marvelously zen. I can’t throw out my first girlfriend’s leftover lingerie.

Or my iPhone, which traps me. I’m secretly ashamed of it, not because of the geek lust I feel, but because of its semiotics. To the casual observer, it pegs me as exactly what I am. Is some part of me an iPhone?

Hence the Chinese grocer.

Not only is the produce cheaper, but I don’t recognize most of it. I stand in front of bushels of something leafy and green, and discover that I can’t even read the name. I like this. Behind me there are tentacled things on ice, and sea snails. I had an excellent plate of sea snails in back alley of Saigon, and some others steamed on a beach near Danang. Those two incidents are the extent of my associations.

Not so for my distant counterpart. Is there, I wonder, some Vietnamese kid who even now is returning home and going out with his friends? He grabs a plate of food, reveling in familiar tastes, and at the same time thinks: is this really me? This home cooking, is it my life?

Because he got home that afternoon and started pulling all his old familiars out of big nylon duffels. He finds his old clothes, and a familiar pair of shoes. Knickknacks. Some books. But what books? What knickknacks?

I have no idea, and this excites me tremendously.

Everyone gets my jokes here; everyone grew up on the same cartoons and more or less the same food. Qarly found fish balls in my fridge the other day and said, ewww. What? Everyone eats them in Korea. I think. I don’t really know. They have completely different stuff there. If I was there I’d have completely different stuff too. I’d read different books and watch different movies and my nightlife would run in different neon veins.

I might be someone else. Do I really want to keep unpacking?

“Verizon customer service, how may I help you?”

“Yeah, hi. I think we have a problem with last month’s bill. The amount due is, let’s see here, $140 million dollars.”

“What line is this, sir?”

“This is for Mars Phoenix. You know, the rover?”

“I’m sorry sir, I’m not a sports fan. Let me check on that for you; yes, that’s right, I’m showing an outstanding balance of $143,212,700. And nine cents.”

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At first I didn’t think much about other people.

I was doing very well for myself. It was not until my early twenties that I really failed at something I wanted. I had no friends who weren’t much like myself — white, well educated, happy childhoods, culturally Western.

A woman named Crazy Kim disabused me. She runs a bar in the seaside town of Nha Trang, but that’s now. One night she told me about her student days in communist Vietnam, the way she used to get out of mine clearing duties by pretending to be sick. On the day before she was to graduate, she set out to sea in a small wooden boat. She was lucky; she got picked up by a passing freighter bound for Holland. Twenty years later, she had to apply for a Vietnamese passport to return home, so thoroughly had her birth country forgotten her. Now she uses the revenue from the bar to fight pedophile tourists who come for the young girls.

She was the first person I’d ever met with real problems — not problems like getting a job or wishing someone would call you back, but problems like surviving on a boat at sea and starting a new life in a new country. She’d overcome all of this, and talked about it like it was normal. It was normal to her, the only life she’d ever known, and after all that she’d decided that what she really wanted to do with her days was help other people out. I felt like she was living more life than me. My heart went out to her. After a few more shots, my heart went out to everyone in her little bar, tourists, locals, all of them. I leaned into my neighbor and told him that I loved everyone I’d ever met.

The epiphany outlasted the hangover. Why shouldn’t everyone in the world be happy? Why shouldn’t I extend the benefit of the doubt to everyone I meet? Hell, we all want the same things, right? I began to see that peaceful people before me had scratched “LOVE” into wooden surfaces everywhere. The guest-house guest-books were filled with “all we have in this world is each other” and “live life today!” and “We are One!”

It’s the basic realization of compassion.

What astounds me is that I’ve heard it over and over again from people of all cultures. A stoic Ethiopian on a bus told me about his principle that all humanity is united. A passionate journalist from Dakar has expounded to me that we cannot afford to see ourselves as different. Over tea on the streets of St. Louis, a young mullah explained to me patiently that all are equal in the eyes of Allah. And of course I’ve been on the other stool so many times now, with a drunken Thai or Nigerian or Russian all but drooling on me in their eagerness to explain that they’ve realized something amazing: we are all merely human!

And you can look into their eyes, the eyes the person across the table from you, across that gulf of experience and education and culture and attitude that you just can’t bridge, and you know you’re supposed to feel a deep human connection somehow.

Then the bastard shatters it by asking you for money to beat his wife. Or something.

Because I don’t really know what to say to that Lebanese guy who talks about his African servants as “idiots.” I was astounded at how often the Hong Kong Chinese wouldn’t take my order if I couldn’t speak Cantonese, and more than one Moroccan man once told me to “go back to your hell!” For every beautiful soul I met along my way, there was an asshole who wanted nothing more from me than whatever he could get.

The stereotypes are what killed me most. I wanted to keep an open mind; I was enlightened and I knew that the terrible things I’d heard were the rantings of bigots; they couldn’t possibly have any truth to them. So it was with some dismay that I began to see that Germans really are uptight, that Indian merchants would lie to my face if it made them a buck, that Africans would heap scorn on Africans just one shade darker then them. (Also, the Chinese really are atrocious drivers.) These aren’t universal principles, of course. Like all stereotypes they are no substitute for looking at the person in front of you. Yet I found myself with opinions–

And you discover you’re wrong about what’s important. My mother always told me that everyone in the world wants the same things: family, food, shelter. No. It’s not true. The things that drive us differ. Depending where you live, the most important thing in your world might be allegiance to your father, or Allah, or ridding the province of Pakistanis, or making enough money to buy an air conditioner. We are not all one.

The first step is always to ask, why can’t we all just get along? This the is the moment where you take to heart the idea that everyone is deserving, at least in principle, of your love, compassion, and good will. You suddenly see that this is what peace and cooperation are, that civilization itself is built upon extending humanity and generosity to others. I am with the sages and the hippies in shouting from the rooftops that this is a Good Thing. But it’s not enough, because not everyone wants what you want. In fact, a great many people aren’t even remotely similar to you, and in ways that will probably upset you.

There has to be a form of compassion that embraces the world as it is, not as we wish it was.

Jai told me that everyone in Siliguri was crazy about the new mall that opened there. He hastened to assure me that he personally wasn’t all that impressed, being from more developed Punjab state, but he took me there anyway. It was big and white and air conditioned and full of the usual global chain stores (Adidas, Sony, Starbucks.) Compared to the dirt markets of traditional India, it struck me as surprisingly bland and expensive– but also clean and comfortable. So badly did the locals want to see it on opening day that the security guards had to physically keep the crowds out, letting in only those who actually had money to buy.

America was once this way. Witness the 1957 promotional film In The Suburbs, courtesy of the Internet Archive:

Yes, this is real. Was real, an icon and instigator of the shining consumer culture that Kerouac critiqued even in its nascent state. Today, the notion of the white plastic suburban wasteland is so mainstream in the West that we can easily forget its intrinsic appeal; modern marketing is all about being unique and different, but it was once enough just to be new and middle class.

But the other billions still want this! They want to drive their new cars (thank you Tata) to the new mall. In the developing world, Middle Class is the holy grail. It’s a deep, almost universal aspiration that seems shallow to us only because we already have it. While I drink imported wine with my friends and ponder global economics, neuroscience, and avant-garde electronic music, most of the world just wants to be rich enough to shop somewhere air-conditioned — and in quantity.

The shopping centers see these young adults as people whose homes are always in need of expansion. People who buy in large quantities, and truck it away in their cars… It’s a happy-go-spending world!

“Just one email,” they said. “Forward it to all your friends.” That’s how it starts, and before you know it you’re that guy in the recent Onion article who won’t shut up about politics. Then that creepy little troll who volunteers for MoveOn.org suddenly thinks you’re dating — and no spam filter is ever going to convince him that you were never together in the first place! Hell, it might be worth telling him you’re voting for McCain, in front of all of your friends, just to get rid of him.

Nonetheless, McCainFreeWhiteHouse.org is pretty damn funny.

(As with so many cool things, my friend Brendan brought this my attention.)