NYT's Election Day "Word-o-Matic"

Well, that's not exactly what they call it. The New York Times has a much more verbose title for one of the more creative methods of capturing the sentiments of Americans at this historic juncture. It being 4 November 2008, Americans are turning out in droves to cast ballots for the president who will inherit the morass of troubles that have accumulated in the past eight years.
So the Times has come up with this thing. They call it " What One Word Describes Your Current State of Mind?" which seems a bit clunky and long winded, but I guess it gets the point across. (I'm just going to continue referring to it as the Word-o-Matic, because everybody loves something that's o-Matic!)
Essentially, the Word-o-Matic is a data collection engine. You type provide a word as per the article's title's instructions, punch a button describing yourself as either a McCain or Obama supporter and submit your data. The engine aggregates the ways other people are feeling and presents the data on the screen as the actual words people input. The more frequently submitted a word is, the larger and more opaque it appears in the stream of words, which have a kind of waterfall quality to them, i.e. the less popular a word, the smaller and further down on the screen it appears. So words like "anxious" and "hopeful" appear near on the first line in like a size 48 font, while "thrilled," "bored," "eager," and "pensive" appear on the bottom row in a faint size 18 font. The words are continually updated, so they're always shifting, left to right, like a flowing stream (the water analogies here are very apt and useful).
I'm assuming that NYT has some tech-nerds and/or editors massaging the submitted data so that words like "slutty," "trigger happy," and "full or murderous rage" (which I guess is actually a phrase and not simply a predicate) don't slip through the digital cracks and wind up on the computer screens of emotionally tender Americans.
In many ways, the Word-o-Matic is similar to another data collection engine that has been up and running on the internet for a while now. We feel fine has been "harvesting human emotions" (eww) from "a large number of blogs" for more than three years. Its software identifies the phrases "I am feeling" and "I feel" in blog posts,grabs the full sentence from the blog, up to the first period, and then sends that info to a database where it is compiled and then displayed on an interactive Flash site as lots of little flourescent dots floating around in black space. Check it out.
The most intriguing thing about the Word-o-Matic is its insight into the emotions of the supporters of both candidates. The words chosen by McCain supporters are almost unanimously negative: "battered," "betrayed," "angry," "disgusted," "resigned," etc. "Resigned" and "worried" are some of the most popular sentiments among those people.
Obama supporters’ words are a mix of positives and collective breath-holding: "patriotic," "energized," "antsy," "jittery," "inspired," etc. "Hopfeul," "excited," and "optimistic" rank at the top of the charts for Obama supporters.
The two sides share one big feeling in common: anxiety. I know I can relate.

Trains, Lemon Trees and Baseballs

The train pulls through a hilly pass. There’s a cabin in the nearby woods, and you can see Steve’s Farm in the distance. A bear stalks an unwitting camper, a farmhand tends his sheep behind the barn. Coming out of the hills, the train shuttles along an elevated track through town. It passes by a church where a wedding has just let out, rolls behind the synagogue and Doc’s Greasy Spoon Diner. The Royal Hudson locomotive steadily puffs steam as it rolls past Mary Jane’s Frosty Bar, past the No-Tell Motel, where a young woman peers through a window, and a dude lounges in the heart-shaped pool. It continues around a bend, bound for the ski mountain. The horn blows, and its strained organ cry can be heard in every corner of Daley Mae Land.

“I love that sound,” Mike Humphries says wistfully. He is wearing river sandals with socks, a ringer t-shirt tucked into khaki shorts, a Boston Red Sox hat and his trademark No. 2 pencil tucked behind his right ear. He stands at the boom-box-shaped model train controls, hands resting on both throttles. He has a simple tattoo of a sea turtle on his left calf. His blue eyes follow the two trains as they wend through the miniature town he built and populated. The display occupies most of the floor space in the two-car garage beside his house, which in turn lies only one block from the Piedmont High School athletic fields—a place Humphries oversees with the same compassion with which he presides over Daley Mae Land.

Since 1969, Humphries has been a central figure in Piedmont schools and sports. He has taught physical education in Piedmont and coached freshman and junior varsity football for nearly 40 years. He has been the high school athletic director for 20 years. Last spring he quietly retired from his role as varsity baseball coach, a position he held for 33 years. In all that time Humphries has displayed a passion for teaching youth that, as he is proud of saying, has shaped young boys and girls into capable men and women.

On the career track

Humphries, 64, was born an only child in Vancouver, British Columbia. When he was four-years-old, his family boarded a train and moved to his uncle’s lemon ranch in Goleta, a town just north of Santa Barbara. Friends and family visited the ranch, but without any brothers or sisters to play with, he developed an “incredible imagination.” The same imagination that inspired him to set up tableaux in Daley Mae Land in his 60’s entertained him as a kid in Goleta.

“I would play whole nine-inning baseball games by myself,” Humphries recalled, with his hands in his pockets, jingling his keys. “I used a wooden slat, and would pick up rocks and hit them to determine how many bases a batter would reach. If you hit a rock over the electricity wire it was a home run. That was my early training for baseball.”

Baseball has always been a part of Humphries’ life, but he never considered himself much of an athlete. Early on, he decided that coaching and teaching physical education would be the next best thing to playing sports professionally. He majored in PE and minored in history at UC Santa Barbara. After graduating, Humphries attended Santa Barbara City College to play baseball and avoid the Vietnam War draft. When his student deferment was revoked in 1964, he joined the Marine Corps and served in a construction battalion until he moved to Piedmont in 1969, where he took a job as a student teacher.

Humphries was soon hired as a full-time PE teacher at Piedmont’s elementary schools and coached the middle school football teams. In the early 1970’s he coached varsity baseball for a few years, went on hiatus, and returned to the position in 1979 at the request of his friend, Mike Roof.

The conductor

It’s a Thursday afternoon, and Humphries is out in the garage, watching his trains go around the track.

“There’s one rule,” he tells me, “and that’s that nothing bad ever happens in Daley Mae Land.”

Daley Mae Land is full of family. The Diner is named for his father, Godfrey Ogden “Doc” Humphries. Steve’s Farm is named for his son, an assistant football coach at Piedmont High and director of football operations. Mary Jane’s Frosty Bar is named for his daughter, who lives in Dublin. The Cobbie Burgers served at Mary Jane’s are named for Humphries’ best friend, Cob Berger, a Piedmont High grad who emigrated to Fort Bragg.

Daley Mae Land is named for Dale, Humphries’s wife of 20 years. Years ago she conceded the garage to his passion for model trains. She echoes the sentiments of Humphries’s friends, students and colleagues when she lists his kindness and congeniality as some of his best traits. She does suspect that dubbing his train-town Daley Mae Land is an attempt to placate her, but if it is, it’s surely in keeping with Humphries’s contagious good humor.

It’s the kids, not the wins

As a coach, Humphries has high expectations for what his teams should do and how they should do it.

Mark Delventhall, who coached varsity baseball alongside Humphries for most of the 1990’s, said that Humphries was committed to coaching as an extension of teaching.

“It wasn't always about winning or losing to him,” said Delventhall. “Mike was passionate about doing things the right way. To him, the game was a matter of integrity. There are certain things you do, and certain things you don't, and that's not only mechanics or strategy or execution, it’s the way one carries oneself, how you enter and exit the field, how you put your uniform on, your appearance. There’s a right way to it and that's how the Piedmont Highlander’s do it, period. I coached with him for nine years, and never, not one time, did I hear him say anything bad to an umpire. He didn’t let kids get away with that either.

“Mike also believed in a practice plan, not unlike a lesson plan in science or history class. He always had a lesson plan, written on a 3x5 card, tucked into his pocket and a No.2 pencil behind his ear.”

Humphries says that he is a disciplined coach, and that he can be demanding, but humor has always been one of his most useful and natural coaching tools.

According to Drew Olson, a Piedmont High School Hall-of-Famer who played catcher for Humphries for four years, his former coach allowed guys to play the game without micromanaging, and he also created a fun but competitive atmosphere.

“He cared, and he was truly passionate and knowledgeable about the game,” said Olson. “He had a lot of funny expressions. He gave out a lot of nicknames to people, and would say some hilarious things.”

Humphries recalls two brothers, the Morgans, whom he coached in PE. On this day, the Morgan brothers’ proper names eluded him, but he had little difficulty remembering their nicknames.

“The older one was called ‘Moondog,’ and when the younger brother ascended into my PE class his name was ready for him: we called him ‘Suncat.’”

Humphries’ friend, Berger, a retired Fort Bragg baseball coach and teacher, recalls a game when his Timberwolves simply had the Highlanders’ number. Looking out from the dilapidated guest dugout in Piedmont, Berger was diligently focused on the game, until he happened to glance over at the home dugout, where he saw Humphries waving a bat with a white t-shirt dangling from it, admitting defeat.

Humphries says though he enjoys sports, his interest is more anthropological than most coaches—he likes kids because he thinks they’re fun and interesting.

“I'm more of a people person,” he says. “I'm not the type to sit around and watch football or baseball all weekend. A lot of coaches are more interested in the sport: I was always more interested in the people than the sport, which helps me be more patient with kids. I have more empathy for kids who aren’t terribly skilled. I wasn’t that skilled.”

As a teenager, Humphries only played when his team was trouncing the competition or being trounced, so he learned to think more about the elements, tactics and systems of the games.

The talents he developed on the bench have served him and his athletes well during a career spanning more than three decades. In recounting his teams’ accomplishments, Humphries eyes wander into the nostalgic space between then and now as he stares at the mesmerizing motion of the trains wending around the track.

In 1985, Humphries coached a highly talented baseball team that included his son, Steve. That year they persevered through a triple-round-robin tournament to reach the Alameda County Athletic League Tournament for the first time. In the late 90’s, with a consistency for which he has become famous, Humphries coached the freshman football team to 36-straight victories, four years of undefeated football.

In 2000, Piedmont’s varsity baseball team made its deepest run to date in the North Coast Section championships. With a talented team including Brett Webster, Matt Shartsis, and Piedmont Sports Hall of Famers Pete Schneider and Olson, the Highlanders reached the NCS semifinals.

But Humphries says his greatest accomplishments as a coach are less tangible than championships. He takes the greatest joy in the number of kids who return to Piedmont and tell him what a positive experience athletics were for them.

His wife Dale says that Humphries receives letters from parents whose children played freshman football for him. “The parents say, ‘You saved my kid’s life.’ And I’m not talking about one or two letters. He has gotten at least a hundred of those during his career,” she said.

Made to roll

But eventually, the demands of coaching a varsity sport began to wear on Humphries. He still takes great joy and pride in coaching freshman football and teaching PE, but in the past few years he found himself less and less excited as the varsity baseball season rolled around.

“I got to the point where I didn’t have the enthusiasm required for the kids or the position any more,” he said. “Varsity sports require more energy, and baseball is real hands-on. Fungo-ing balls all the time starts to wear you down.”

Humphries is still a regular fixture at Piedmont baseball games. He recently followed the Highlanders to Albany to watch them face No. 2-ranked St. Mary’s. He mingled with the team, coaches and umpires, and joked with visiting-team fans. At home games he sets up a folding chair adjacent to the home dugout and grabs hold of the infield fence. He peers intently at every play from behind reflective sunglasses and talks strategy with his old assistant coaches in the dugout.

“I enjoy going to games now and not having to worry about the lineup – when to pull a pitcher, stuff like that,” he admitted.

So, last year, Humphries quietly walked away from coaching baseball. He’s a gregarious guy with a cheerful personality that feeds off of the youth that surrounds him; he’s not loud, and a quiet exit is just his style.

According to his son Steve, Humphries will be honored for his 40 years of service to the school and the community during halftime at a varsity football game next fall.

As a gesture of the town’s gratitude for his decades of service, this evening the school board will approve the naming of the Piedmont High School baseball field after Humphries. In the near future, a sign will hang over the concrete stairway leading down to Coach Humphries Diamond.

For his part, Humphries says he wants to coach and teach in Piedmont for as long as he’s able, or as long as they’ll let him. When he retires, he says he’ll go into construction, both on the house up the hill from the Piedmont athletic fields (his wife says there will be a lengthy “Honey-Do List”), and, of course, on his beloved model train set. But his son doesn’t see that happening any time soon.

“He’s been a teacher for 40 years,” said Steve. “He could retire with full benefits, but why would he? He loves what he does. There’s no better way to put it.”

No More Broken Hearts

NO MORE BROKEN HEARTS
(HINT: Click on the above emboldened link)
This is a performance piece I did a little over two years ago on the corner of 5th South and Third East in Salt Lake City. The protest itself was inspired by Miranda July's art-assignment website learningtoloveyoumore.com. I recited a 15 minute long poem-ish monologue twice one day at the corner of 5th South and State Street and again the following day in front of the Salt Lake Public Library.
The piece itself was essentially a nonsecular prayer inspired by a terribly traumatic event. It was an attempt to cope with intense pain and loneliness.
On the latter occasion, a rotund woman who appeared to be mentally disabled stood on the corner and listened to me. When I finished my the piece, she asked me, "What organization are you with?" To which I replied, "I'm not an organization." Other than that, nobody approached me. Enjoi!

Sewing the Seeds of Religulous Disbelief

Very few sacred cows remain untipped in contemporary western culture. Music, television, video games, books, cartoons and the internet have made just about every formerly sacrosanct topic fair game for criticism and even ridicule. Religion, however, remains a dangerous no-fly zone. Sure, some people have had a go at religion, most notably the recently deceased George Carlin, who made a habit of exposing our observance of taboos as childish and unnecessary, but those salvos have typically been delivered by individuals of a certain faith against that same faith, and if they weren't (e.g. the Dutch Allah cartoon debacle), they have been frequently disastrous.

In the fine tradition of Carlin's acerbic humor comes Religulous, a new documentary starring comedian and political commentator Bill Maher. Religulous (which is apparently a faux-Bushism, and a very good one at that) is Maher's box-office attempt to inspire greater skepticism of organized religion and even faith itself. The film's incendiary concept is that we'll follow a provocative atheist–i.e. Mr. Maher–as he travels the western world to try to understand, by way of direct confrontation, why rational, intelligent people believe what he perceives as irrational, childish and downright dangerous stuff.

Whether you will find Religulous entertaining and amusing depends largely on your religious/spiritual affiliation as well as the intensity of your belief. If you're an atheist or agnostic, you'll probably have a very good time: if you're an avowed Christian, Muslim, Mormon, Scientologist or Jew, or if a "higher power" is the gravitational center of your life, smart bets are on your getting significantly warm under the collar.

Maher makes his agenda and his opinions clear from the get-go, which is probably a good idea for such a confrontational movie. In a nutshell, he was raised Catholic, never bought the party line, finds the idea of an omnipotent being absurd, and is convinced that organized religion is detrimental to society and the planet and basically exploits people and gives them false hope. So he heads to a trucker's chapel, a Biblical amusement park, a creationism museum, speaks with an ex-Jew for Jesus, a goofy Vatican high priest, the self-proclaimed second-coming of Jesus Christ, a Holocaust-denying Jew, an evangelical senator from Arkansas, and many others.

Aside from the truckers and some visitors at the Holy Land Experience, he doesn't talk with very many "regular" people about their beliefs. Instead he has assembled a cast of sectarians on the religious fringe whose beliefs serve, for the film's purposes, as a decoction of the beliefs of their representative religions. The idea seems to be to find ladies and gentlemen whose zealotry and faith can be exploited as ignorance.

Maher, standing at the pulpit inside the tiny trucker's chapel, states that he preaches "the gospel of uncertainty," and his mission in the film is to sew some doubt in people's minds about their beliefs. How, he wonders, can someone adamantly believe that Lot lived in the belly of a giant fish for three days? Why isn't Moses, who thought he heard the voice of God from a burning bush, considered a prophet instead of a crazy guy, which he most certainly would be today? Why is the Christian God both loving and vengeful, and isn't the capriciousness of his emotions kind of childish for an omnipotent being? Basically, he thinks religion doesn't have the answers, and the fact that it makes people think it does says scary things about how easily we can be manipulated. If we can be convinced to believe in a man in the clouds who hears all of us murmur to him at the same time, is it really that hard to believe that G. W. Bush was able to convince us to invade Iraq with similarly fictitious information?

Much of Religulous's humor comes from Maher's exasperation as he tries to wrap his mind around people's beliefs, which is a sophisticated way of actually getting people to laugh at the beliefs themselves. Christianity receives the most sustained roasting, if only because it's the one Maher's most familiar with, and while he does address a number of other western religions–he ignores all the eastern ones–he steers away from any direct condemnation of other religions' gods, most notably Allah, perhaps at the earnest behest of the pack of lawyers that must have been consulted in making the film.

Religulous was directed by Larry Charles, the same guy who did Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The format, content and humor of Maher's movie is similar to though not as grotesque as Sasha Baron Cohen's ground-breaking film, and it borders just as precipitously on the cliff of being cynical and offensive as does Borat. However, if you're willing and able to approach religion and belief with a healthy dose of skepticism, or if you once lived in the countryside and reveled in cow-tipping, Religulous will preach to you, a member of the choir.

Passion at Play in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona"

(Note: This article appeared in the 27 August edition of the Piedmont Post.)

You don't have to be overly familiar with Woody Allen's extensive oeuvre to enjoy his newest film, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," a sensual, finely tuned exploration of love's confusion staring some of the most gorgeous people on the planet. It is an engrossing investigation of the difficulties of knowing what one wants in and from love, difficulties compounded when you know what you want, but can't attain it.

Billed as a romantic comedy, Vicky Cristina Barcelona's main characters are so desperately lovelorn and lost that most moviegoers will be too wrapped up in their juicy love quadrangle to think twice about laughing. And that's not a bad thing.

Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is a level-headed graduate student spending a summer in Barcelona studying the buildings of the Spanish architect and artist Gaudi. She is joined by Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), an impetuous, wandering soul regarded by her friend as a "mental adolescent." While Vicky's stated goals for the summer are academic, Cristina is eager to fully immerse herself in the indulgent side of Catalan culture—art, wine, leisure, sex and passion—and her prayers are at least partially answered soon enough.

It's not long before the ladies encounter Juan Antonio, a talented abstract painter, artistic celebrity, and dyed-in-the-wool romantic played to perfection by Javier Bardem. Throughout the film Bardem has the sultry, punch-drunk look of a wolf on the prowl. He approaches Vicky and Cristina in a restaurant and with only the briefest of introductions proposes that the two friends fly to Oviedo in the north of Spain with him for a weekend of food, wine and sex. Cristina is instantly charmed, Vicky less so, but Juan Antonio's magnetic sex appeal is undeniable, and the ensuing tryst is unadulterated voyeuristic candy.

While Cristina is the first to be seduced by Juan Antonio, she falls ill at the worst possible moment. With Cristina incapacitated, Juan Antonio focuses his sight on the reluctant Vicky, and he captures his willing prey after filling her full of wine, tapas and Spanish guitar. Vicky would love to give herself over to Juan Antonio. She yearns for him endlessly, as does Cristina. But inevitably some entertaining wrenches are thrown into the works.

For one, Vicky is engaged to Doug, a preppy young go-getter back in the States who keeps interrupting her Spanish dream with lovelorn phone calls. Cristina and Juan Antonio, both hopeless romantics with insatiable appetites for life's rich treats, seem perfect for one another and move in together. Problem is that Juan Antonio is recently divorced from and clearly pines for Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz), a frenetic apparently bipolar sex bomb.

When Maria Elena tries to commit suicide, Juan Antonio rescues her and brings her back to live with him and Cristina, which is initially an inconvenience. Soon though, Juan Antonio, Cristina and Maria Elena establish a healthy ménage a trois of a relationship. Meanwhile, Vicky still lusts for Juan Antonio, she and Doug elope in Barcelona, and everything goes awry when Cristina makes one of her idiosyncratic impetuous decisions.

If all of this sounds like a month's worth of soap opera episodes crammed into 90 minutes, you've got pretty good ears. There's even an attempted double murder and a disenchanted matchmaker to help Vicky Cristina Barcelona fit
the daytime soap bill.

To his great credit, Woody Allen manages to keep Vicky Cristina Barcelona above the level of crass melodrama. Much of the film's success is due to the sexy, talented cast, especially Bardem and Cruz, whose gazes might have you sweating in the air conditioned movie theatre.

In the end, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a delightful, indulgent way to pass a late-summer afternoon or evening, and may have you asking yourself some of the same questions facing the main characters. That, or make you want to move to Spain.

Surfing the World, One Couch at a Time

(A much shorter version of this article was published in the March 30 edition of the Catalyst, a monthly magazine in Salt Lake City, UT.)

The Freedom of Couches

One of my friends says CouchSurfing.com is for bums. My girlfriend’s father says it’s for freeloaders. CS.com’s nearly 150,000 users believe the site helps unite the world—its cultures, locations, and its travelers—in trust, tolerance, consciousness, and understanding.

CS.com is not your run-of-the-mill social-networking Web site: It helps you sleep on people’s couches. Whereas sites like Facebook.com, Tribe.net, and MySpace.com serve mainly as a means to keep tabs on one’s circle of friends and keep them informed of the crucial events in one’s life (actual quote from a random MySpace.com blog: “Every few days I would buy a bag of Hot Cheetos…”), while these sites serve mainly to foster online community, CS.com seeks to actually physically connect people, to put travel-weary butts in otherwise unoccupied couches. By providing travelers a resource to help them find cheap, friendly accommodations, and hopefully an informed and friendly personal guide to a new place or culture, CS is revolutionizing how the world interacts via the internet and rewriting the rules of travel. I was eager to test my hypothesis so I created my CS.com profile, made my own couch available to potential surfers, put some serious miles on my personal pedometer, and went out to surf some couches.

Losing My Couchsurfing Virginity

This past September I traveled to West Africa via NYC and Paris, laying-over in both locations for a day or more.

FACT: I cannot afford either of these places.

Using CS.com’s “CouchSearch” utility—the White Pages of the CSing community—I found and contacted Tim Tolka in NYC. When CouchSearching one can choose from a number of potential hosts, that number ultimately dependent on how remote or otherwise your destination is. At the time of writing there were 300+ potentially available couches within 10 miles of NYC: There were four couches in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

It took one simple email exchange to finalize my surfing Tim’s couch, but I soon learned there would be a catch.

In late September, Tolka was subletting with a couple guys in Queens. The CSing situation there was a little tense. Tim had failed to let his roommates know about the CSer he had previously hosted which proved to be something of a surprise when his roommates came home in the middle of the night and found an apparent intruder asleep on their couch. We were, as Tim told the story, old friends. In reality we had met in Union Square earlier that day.

I was standing baffled among a squad of rollerblading thirty-something’s, all wearing matching white shirts, red sweatpants, and clad in neon-green helmets and hand, knee, and elbow pads. Along with a growing crowd we were watching a break-dance troupe perform coordinated head-spins and various other acrobatic maneuvers (for which, and I apologize, I don’t possess the necessary terminology) when Tim found me. Here is a transcript of our introductory conversation:

Tim: Are you Ben?

Me: Yes.

Tim: Do you smoke pot?

Me: Every once in a while.

…and we walked to a set of benches deep in the by then dark heart of Union Square, G. Washington’s back to the soon-to-be and currently drug-addled homeless men there, and Tim and I really no better at law-abiding, though we really were hitting it off like the old friends we were supposed to be. He had even blown off a hot-date with a 32 year old Puerto Rican so he could show me around.

I asked Tim if smoking herb in the middle of a public park in the heart of downtown was something he did often, seeking reassurance that this was a common and probably safe thing to be doing. His reply, “I’ve never done this before,” was quite distant from the response I was hoping for.

This was all as I had imagined the CSing experience to be—well, minus the pot-smoking. Before setting out from Salt Lake I had described CSing to my inquisitive family and friends as essentially like having a friend wherever you went. An acquaintance who would enthusiastically welcome you into their culture and home, and it turns out that’s exactly what it is.

Tim and I had only ever communicated in a sum total of two emails, and we had little in common besides our love for travel, but we are both open and trusting people, which, as we shall discuss later, turn out to be the most important characteristics of the CSing community.

How Safe Can This Thing Be?

But before we get any further I’ll address what’s probably on your mind; all of the above raises a number of issues, most importantly, safety.

How safe is CSing if the first thing my host asks me is whether I’ll do drugs with him? That’s a hard one. I guess if one has ever had any experience in turning down drugs or alcohol the situation is easily diffused. There are several approaches one can use, the most effective probably being “No, thanks.”

But what about potentially hostile, dangerous or mal-intentioned hosts or surfers? According to CS.com, “CouchSurfing has implemented several precautionary [safety] measures for the benefit of its surfers, hosts, and community. Every user is linked to the other users he or she knows in the system through a network of references and friend links,” which benign though it may sound is really CS’s best safety measure. It functions basically on the same feedback system used by eBay, which seems to work well-enough for major, frequent, and global exchange of goods and currency.

Had Tim proven to be a less than savory character I could have gone onto the website and posted a negative opinion of him on his profile, thus alerting others. This kind of feedback is highly encouraged by The Collective, a group of constantly rotating volunteers who manage the website from a globally inconstant location. Peer review has proven to be a reliable safety-valve for the most part.

Of course, some bad-apples slip through the cracks. When that happens, the only option available to The Collective and the CS community is complete exposure.

Recently, a user known as REDXKING was accused by CSers of writing fraudulent checks for thousands of dollars and stealing credit cards. So a mass-email was sent to all 150,000 members containing the user’s name, his photo, his email address, and his aliases. His profile was disabled, and every effort will be made to prohibit him creating a new profile. That same email emphasizes CS’s safety measures:

“Our referencing system is the most important security measure, which I would like to reiterate to our members: If you have a negative experience with another member of this site, it is your duty to leave an honest factual reference. Your reference could help to protect another member. Safety on couchsurfing is the responsibility of all of our members, not just a few!” (Emphases theirs)

Meanwhile, Back In NYC…

My Kongian backpack was killing me so Tim and I went back to his place in Queens and then out into the city. I have never been to NYC and Tim proved to be an exceedingly friendly, knowledgeable, and willing host, introducing me to the city as no guidebook ever could. Together we explored more of Manhattan in one night than I possibly could have through the lens of a Lonely Planet or Fodor’s.

While such books are largely necessary for a traveler without ties to a location, they become wholly optional for the CSer. A guidebook could never be as dialed into a city or culture as a local.

With Tim as my guide we ended up in a Texas-themed bar crowded by white-collar suit-&-tie types where a lady dressed in black leather chaps and wielding a bull-whip danced on the bar to “La Cucaracha” then poured vodka all over the bar, took a swig herself and proceeded to blow fire and set the bar ablaze. We got a ride with a porn-star cabbie, visited a poetry-bar where I talked with a fifty-something Aussie punk lady obsessed with Andy Warhol, met up with one of his friends who revealed her engagement to an Israeli, and ate pizza slices at two in the morning and talked with a trio of Japanese musicians who had traveled to NYC to start a band.

Suffice to say it was a rich experience and I slept like the dead at the end of the night on Tim’s full-size couch.

So This is Paris?

I arrived in Paris after a restless flight across the pond. FYI: flight-attendants on Air India have a tendency to physically wrest you from sleep (or else employ other passengers to do so) to offer you free booze and really delicious Indian food, which sounds cool, but at three in the morning over the central Atlantic you might not be all that interested in a tall glass of Johnny Walker; I don't know, maybe it's just me.

A quick ride on the Réseau Express Régional—the rapid-transit train that connects Charles de Gaulle International Airport with the Île-de-France region of which Paris is a part—dropped me off at Le Forum des Halles in Paris’s 1^st arrondissement. All of this might be as familiar to you as it was to me at the time, which is to say not at all!

I had no idea where I actually was in Paris until I found the house of Julien de Casabianca, my host there, and his fellow artists on a corner on Rue St. Martin. Nobody was home so I put my bag down and waited in front of the door, feeling really out of sorts because I had only studied French for two months before setting out to explore Francophone West Africa.

I was soon approached by a friendly German who spoke perfect English. I explained my lack of geographic orientation and he told me that I was only a block from the Louvre; that I was in the heart of one of Paris’s oldest and most popular districts.

Rooms in the 1^st arrondissement run from roughly $150 to $600 and into the unadvertised if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it range. There are about four hostels in the area and they will all cost you US$50 and up. Thanks to CouchSurfing, I would be staying here for free!

Julien’s housemate Sophie arrived about an hour later. She let me in, showed me my room, and told me that Julien was busy working but that I should meet him at 8:00pm at La Fontaine, a café on rue de le Grange-Aux-Belle at the Colonel-Fabien stop on the Metro. I explored the Champs-Elysées, walked in and out of the Louvre, and then jumped on the Metro at 5:00 to make sure I knew where I would be meeting my CouchSurfing host.

I killed time in the area by walking to Montmartre, running up and down the seriously numerous stairs that lead to le Basilica de la Sacré Coeur, and then jumped back on the Metro.

Unfortunately, Julien and I were unable to connect at La Fontaine that evening. Instead, I sat outside of the packed bar and talked with Damien, a circus performer who was more than happy to help me muddle through my limited French comprehension.

I returned to Julien’s place in Les Halles and found my bed on the second floor of his apartment, in a studio space that was occupied and used by a number of artists. As I learned from another of Julien’s roommates, Héloïse—a somewhat surly and moody but altogether charming girl who kind of fit my personal prefab mold of a Parisian—the house I was staying in was an artist’s squat-house provided at no-cost to Paris’s more creatively talented.

Luckily for me, most Parisians speak better English than a good deal of Americans (which made me feel like I fit the typical prefab mold most of the world has of Americans as insular and unwilling to learn another language or culture, but hey, I was doing my best). Héloïse squatted at the edge of my bed and smoked maybe five cigarettes during our hour discussion about travel and art and people’s preconceived notions of Americans and Parisians.

The following morning Julien and I finally met. He was handsome in a rustically urban kind of way, his hair and well-trimmed beard variously black, grey and white. He could easily get work as a model for expensive men’s clothing.

As kind of a rule of CouchSurfing etiquette, a CouchSurfer treats his host to a drink or does the dishes or polishes the silver or something. Julien and I went down to the café next door and had the opportunity to finally get to know each other. CouchSurfing is a great way to build one’s interpersonal skills. If you have a shell you’ll need to come out of it to get the most out of the experience.

As it turned out, Julien had been at La Fontaine the previous evening, but because A), the place was so packed, and B), we both had no idea who we were looking for, we just missed each other. He told me that La Fontaine was Paris’s first Jazz bar and really important to a lot of people, and that, for reasons I couldn’t quite intuit, it had just seen its last jazz performance. I had unwittingly witnessed history in Paris thanks entirely to CouchSurfing.

Julien and I talked about a number of things over strong and delicious French espresso, getting a feel for each other, trying to find common ground. If you’re at all interested in sports and traveling abroad I recommend learning about football, “soccer” to acolytes. If you do so, you will almost automatically be able to generate conversation.

Sports aside, there’s something about the brief time a CouchSurfer has with their host that makes everything you say doubly important. Because you’ll only know this person for maybe a day or even a single evening, and because they’re opening their door and their home for you and extending you a terrifically generous amount of trust and kindness, you want to be as genuine and real with them as you can, as a way of showing them that you appreciate their efforts. Sincerity, gratitude, and your honest interest in your host or CouchSurfer is worth much more than a beer or a cup of coffee.

CouchSurfing Vs. The Hotel Industry,

I’ve slept on numerous couches, often under less than sober and/or ideal conditions, on couches soiled, frayed, and outright decaying. I have also slept on floors, and once on a lawn. These occasions were often impromptu and (maybe you can identify with all of this) unenviable and often followed by a morning of intense cerebral trauma: some report feeling as if they were struck by an eighteen wheeler, and typically a couch isn’t as comforting as one needs after such an experience.

In such instances, CSing lacks in glamour, comfort, style, and is maximally utilitarian, primarily a last resort.

While not typically as cushy as any number of chain-hotel accommodations (there are always exceptions), the perks inherent in CSing are manifold and are in many ways more valuable than simple comfort.

Allow me to explain by example.

During the Research Phase of this article I completed a trans-continental drive from SLC to Providence, Rhode Island. Along the way I CSed in Lincoln, Nebraska, Indianapolis, Indiana, and Poughkeepsie, New York. If one follows the posted speed limit, SLC to Lincoln is approximately a thirteen hour drive. If you’ve never experienced thirteen solo hours behind the wheel yammering to yourself and chewing at your cheek, consider yourself cosmically blessed.

In Lincoln, Avishay Artsy, my CS-host there, and his roommate Amy took me out to a downtown bar called Duffy’s where a metal-turned-bluegrass band was covering Misfits (“an American punk rock band formed in 1977” (source: wikipedia.org)) tunes with thunderous banjo twang and washboard scratching fit for the gods.

At the end of the night I slept on the Persian rug pictured in the inset. As you might expect of a rug, this one was on the floor. Sleeping on the floor isn’t most people’s idea of a luxurious get-away, and I’ll be honest, if luxury is what you’re after you might want to forgo CSing and surrender your hard-won cash to the hotel industry’s overflowing coffers. I for one would prefer to spend my hard earned cash on a dormitory experience that excludes 150 channel television, single-serving shampoo bottles, and sheets starched so effectively I’m afraid they’ll cut me.

Having just spent thirteen hours in an accelerated solitary confinement bubble I was eager for some human interaction, and CSing helped me find that. There is no doubt I would have slept better on a hotel bed a hundred yards from the highway, far from the bustling, raucous center of NE’s liberal heart. As it turns out, I had in fact stayed in a hotel just outside Lincoln on a previous cross-country journey, years before CS.com went live. That experience was only note-worthy for being stunningly bereft of redeeming qualities.

CSing isn’t only valuable as a way to meet people and create memories; it’s also a valuable alternative. Let’s be honest: the majority of hotels that anyone on a limited budget can afford suck.

Staying in a hotel is an exercise in confinement. They confine one to a familiar and antiseptic environment. They are designed to mollify and passively entertain. There is little or no active stimulation. They are lonely, innocuous, and unoffending. Like schools, hospitals, government buildings, and most business offices, they are, by their very nature, institutional, that is “characterized by blandness, drabness, uniformity, and [a] lack of individualized attention.” You get the point.

Hostels are little better. One often shares a room with others, the noise-level can be unsuitable for getting adequate rest, they are difficult to find and in short supply. Hostels are cheaper than hotels, but sometimes only marginally. Still, they cost money, and money spent on accommodations is money that cannot be spent on transport, entertainment, dining, adventure, or shopping in strange bazaars and markets

Give me accommodations in the homes of friendly, outgoing, generous, intriguing strangers who will welcome me and my dog; give me a sleeping bag on the floor; give me genuinely friendly faces in the morning and a bowl of cereal and genuine house coffee; and give the continental breakfast to the guy in room 33.

Not Your Typical Surfers

I hope you’re not getting the impression that CSing is a social-networking site for ascetics. There are cushy couches out there. One such “couch” is that belonging to Peter and Thily Hayes.

As you can plainly see, to call the accommodations provided by the Hayes family a “couch” would be like calling the sun a “light bulb.” The tranquility of the bed is enhanced by the view it commands: the back of the Hayes’ eastside Salt Lake house lets out onto a local mountain-fed stream which one can see from the large window that sits above the bed.

According to Peter, “Accomodations are primo!”

He, Thily (pronounced TEE-lee) and their son Lucas invited me to their gorgeous home to talk about CSing. In true CSing spirit they also fed me dinner and introduced me to their pet ferret Ding-a-ling, after Chuck Berry’s only U.S. number one single.

It was Thily who first suggested that the family provide their downstairs bed to travelers. She self identifies as the family’s CS liaison.

“I read about [CSing] in a local paper a year ago and I created my profile soon after,” she told me.

Thily also describes herself as a very shy person. For Thily, CSing has been a good way to overcome her timidity. Peter, on the other hand, is as shy as a Kandinsky.

The Hayes’s are apparently financially well-off and live in an affluent neighborhood, which is to say that they’re not living or traveling on a strict financial budget as some CSers are. I asked them if CS.com enables freeloaders.

Peter was adamant in his response. “CSing is absolutely not for freeloaders.”

I then asked him why he and his family recently CSed for five days in an unoccupied beach house in Florida if he could afford to have stayed in a hotel instead. “Nobody in the U.S. is saving money,” he told me, “So we save our money rather than spend it on hotels. I’d rather take a vacation and save money for something else. Is traveling only for the affluent? Is there another way that people can afford to travel? There is. Listen: CSing is a legit way to travel and stay within our means. Period.”

Tourism is considered by most to be the largest and fastest growing industry in the world. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the tourism industry generated US$680 billion in revenue in 2005. Numbers aren’t available for the global hotel industry, but Smith Travel Research tracks U.S. hotel revenues. In a press release published last May, STR made the following statement: “The year 2005 marked the most profitable year ever for the US hotel industry. [It] generated some US$122.7 billion in revenue.” That’s only accounting for the U.S. market, the third largest tourism market in the world behind France and Spain. Even considering that the UNWTO’s numbers account for other receipts (e.g. entertainment, attractions, ancillary services, surf-side daiquiris, etc.) the U.S. hotel market alone accounts for almost 20 percent of tourism revenue. That seems like a pretty significant share to me. Hotels are doing just fine; spend your buck elsewhere.

Financial concerns notwithstanding, when Thily first mentioned CSing to Peter the idea raised some red flags for him.

“I was leery at first because of stories you hear,” he said, “But every experience we’ve had has violated that initial trepidation. It reminds us that people can be friendly and nice. We grow up in a paranoid world. You can’t try anything new because you’re so worried about what could happen.”

The Hayes’s have hosted five CSers in the year that they have been part of the CSing community. Their guests have run the demographic gamut, from a recently widowed 60 year old attorney out on the road to rediscover her life, to Adam Schofield, the legendary couchsurfer who is on a mission to couchsurf the world and write a book about doing it. For the Hayes’s, CSing reflects the trust we have for one another.

“Trust is something we need to get back to,” said Thily. “Everyone we’ve met has been an intellect. [CSers] are not superficial or flashy. They’re liberal, open-minded, activists, Burning Manners; very Bohemian. They’re adventurous and they’re not a threat. CSers are not out there to get you.”

Peter has come to embrace CSing, but he wants to keep things in perspective. “There could be predators,” he said, “To say that something couldn’t go wrong is irresponsible. Just don’t be stupid. If you sense something is odd, trust yourself. We have no reservations about denying someone who wants to CS with us if they look sketchy,” said Peter.

The Big Question: Can I Trust You?

All of this is a circuitous way of addressing one serious flaw in American social relations: “stranger danger.” I’m unsure exactly when this term entered our popular lexicon, but its basic premise is that people you don’t know want to harm you and you’d best avoid them. This dangerously loaded term is directed at America’s youth but ends up permeating pretty much every age demographic.

I ran into an 18 year old guy while CSing in Indianapolis who said he liked the idea of CSing but would only ever CS outside of the United States because people here are dangerous psychos. I don’t want to get into all of the logical trapdoors of this guy’s impaired reasoning, so let’s just say this: he was talking to one of those potential psychos—me. I left him unharmed.

Embracing CSing makes a statement about one’s value of community. Communities only exist through a web of trust expressed through tacitly understood and adhered to agreements. Take, for example, the simplest, most historically common community: two platonic, heterosexual friends. There are so many trust agreements here that to list them would bore us both, so let’s list one: You do not kill a friend. Pretty elementary. If you and a potential friend can’t reach an agreement on that one I recommend discontinuing relations post-haste.

But these are unspoken agreements. How do I know that you know that you’re not supposed to kill me? I could ask you, but if you really wanted to kill me you probably wouldn’t let me know. So, I have no alternative but to assume that you know you’re not supposed to kill me. I have to trust that you won’t kill me. But I can best extend that trust if I myself am also willing to agree to that maxim. I trust you because I hope that you trust me, and then over the course of a relationship, no matter how brief, we continue to define where our trust boundaries lie. Sure, this is all theory, but much of our social lives are built on just this theory of trust.

Agreeing to a CSing exchange is an amazing expression of trust in other people. It expresses our belief in humanity and the kindness and generosity of strangers, people who we’re constantly reminded—by news organizations of all kinds, by our governments, by our schools, etc.—want to harm us.

In addition to the safety measures noted above, the all-volunteer Collective that manages the site encourages minimizing rather than encouraging the growth of the CSing community. They want the cream of the world’s traveling and hosting crop, people who trust other people. This could potentially insure CSing’s independent and free status: by maintaining a small, tight-knight community of users, CS.com can be effectively managed by a small team at a low cost (which cost is now funded entirely by donations: the site also operates free of annoying advertisements—thus, it receives zero advertising revenue); it can also fly under the radar of companies who might potentially want to purchase it to make a buck

But so, let’s face it: someone with less than golden intentions will, in the end, take advantage of the admittedly utopian altruism of CSing. Bad things happen, and maybe one prerequisite for joining the CSing community is a pair of roseate glasses. It is unfortunate but inevitable that some great misfortune will befall a CSer or a CS-host. The questions this eventuality poses are crucial to the future of CSing.

What will happen to CSing and its values when this bad thing happens? Will the community dissolve and return to its hostel and hotel beds? Knowing that bad things can and will happen what do we do? Do we remain geographically stationary? Do we allow fear to force us to experience the world, its cultures and peoples, its wildlife and landscapes, its winds and tastes and smells and textures, its smiles and frowns, it beauties, do we let ourselves be compelled to experience all of these only so far as the internet or magazines or television or radio shows or hotels can take us?

Or do we allow ourselves a tiny slice of utopia? Do we open ourselves to the possibilities contained in trust?