MKA Basketball, The Vegas Reunion, and Five Things I’m Looking Forward To…

1. Hitting The Books Bottle- Well if there’s one thing that the Prey Sundek School knows how to do well, it’s throw a good party and this past Saturday night it certainly didn’t disappoint. From 3pm to 8pm about fifty students and teachers crowded into a classroom and helped me celebrate the end of my two-year service. A good time was had by all. One goodbye party down, two more to go.

2. Drinking/Dancing/Singing/Eating – A few random thoughts on the goodbye party…

• I’ll never feel completely comfortable drinking with students.
• I’ll never feel completely comfortable watching people drink and then get on their motorbikes to drive home.
• The students/teachers asked me to say a couple of words so I spoke for about three minutes. Then my school director took the mic and (surprise surprise) talked for about twenty-five. See my post: Public Speaking in Cambodia.
• There are few things more awkward than watching Cambodian teenagers dance. It’s especially awkward watching the boys and girls dance together.
• You know you’ve been in Cambodia for too long when you know how to dance to the Cambodian songs, but are helpless when the American ones come on.

3. The Long Goodbye – Yesterday I went and visited my home stay family from training and said goodbye for the final time. While I don’t see them all the often, it was still way sadder than I expected. No matter how many times I say that I’m going to come back and visit in two or three years, it still feels like I’m saying goodbye forever. I can’t believe I have two more weeks of this ahead of me. Ugh…

4. Five Things I’m Looking Forward To – Because it gets depressing talking about leaving, here are five things I’m looking forward to doing when I arrive back in NYC…

1. Seeing a movie in a movie theater — I haven’t done that in over two years.
2. Going for a run in Central Park with Mike.
3. Spending Sunday morning with the New York Times, the NY Post, and endless amounts of coffee.
4. Listening to Corey talk about his fantasy baseball team and pretending like I care/have any idea who he’s talking about.
5. Sitting in Courtney and Terence’s apartment and looking through the wedding photos (which I still haven’t seen.)
   

5. The Peace Corps Reunion – Now I know that Las Vegas (or what I like to call Little Phnom Penh) has seen it’s fair share of crazy parties, but I’m not sure the city’s ready for the Peace Corps Cambodia reunion tentatively scheduled for November 9-11, 2013. All Peace Corps Cambodia alums, save the date… it’s happening.

6. Racing Calender – Running the half marathon last week reminded me how much I love racing. It also made me realize that if I want to run around 2:45 in NYC, I’m going to have to get myself in some more races before the big day. It’s tough to plan ahead though when you’re moving all over the country and don’t really know what your fall schedule is going to look like, yet I’m pretty sure I’ve found at least three good options…

• August 21 – Heart and Sole Half Marathon (Boulder, CO)
• September 17 – Kensington Challenge 15k (Kensignton, MI)
• October 9 – Big House Big Heart 10k (Ann Arbor, MI)

Until then it’s nothing but long slow distance.

7. Bachmann 2012 – “@BorowitzReport: Sarah Palin must be looking at Michele Bachmann and feeling the way the Jonas Bros felt about Justin Bieber.” I think everyone running in the GOP primary is a little jealous of Michelle Bachmann right now. Did you see the results from the first Des Moines Register Iowa poll with Mitt Romney at 23% and Michele Bachmann at 22%? As crazy as it sounds she is going to be a real player in this election. I don’t think she’ll be able to win (although I heard Chris Matthews say he thinks its possible), but if you look at the field, you gotta think that Huntsman, Romney, and Pawlenty are all going to be fighting for the same moderate voters, while Bachmann is pretty much going to have the entire right-wing/Tea Party faction to herself. It’s going to be interesting to watch.

In the meantime get ready for the Bachmann news blitz. She’s going to be the most talked about politician in America for the next six months.

8. Cuomo 2016 – Did anyone have a better week than Andrew Cuomo? I don’t care how you feel about gay marriage (although I don’t really understand how you could be against it), but you gotta respect the guy for taking a bold stance and really standing up and fighting for it. As a lot of bloggers and columnists have been pointing out, Cuomo’s performance presents an interesting contrast to Obama, who always seems to want it both ways.

Nate Silver: Cuomo’s Presidential Moment Forms Contrast With Obama….

But the type of leadership that Mr. Cuomo exercised — setting a lofty goal, refusing to take no for an answer and using every tool at his disposal to achieve it — is reminiscent of the stories sometimes told about with President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had perhaps the most impressive record of legislative accomplishment of any recent president.It’s also a brand of leadership that many Democrats I speak with feel is lacking in President Obama.

Mr. Obama has some considerable achievements, including his health care bill and the reversal of the military’s ban on openly gay and lesbian soldiers. But he often seems to achieve them by outsourcing much of the work to Democrats in Congress or to his various lieutenants. And his considerable speaking abilities sometimes seem to be directed more toward healing the country in times of crisis than toward persuading it to move in a new direction.

It’s a strategy that Mr. Obama’s critics and admirers have sometimes characterized as “leading from behind.”

And from Maureen Dowd : Why is he Bi? (Sigh)…

The man who was able to beat the Clintons in 2008 because the country wanted a break from Clintonian euphemism and casuistry is now breaking creative new ground in euphemism and casuistry. Obama is “evolving” on the issue of gay marriage, which, as any girl will tell you, is the first sign of a commitment-phobe….

Still, Obama’s reluctance to come out for gay marriage seems hugely and willfully inconsistent with what we know about his progressive worldview. And it is odd that the first black president is letting Andrew Cuomo, who pushed through a gay-marriage bill in Albany on Friday night, go down in history as the leader on the front lines of the civil rights issue of our time.

But for the president, “the fierce urgency of now” applies only to getting checks from the gay community, not getting up to speed with all the Americans who think it’s time for gay marriage.

As with “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Obama is not leading the public, he’s following. And worse, the young, hip black president who was swept in on a gust of change, audacity and hope is lagging behind a couple of old, white conservatives — Dick Cheney and Ted Olson.

As a community organizer, Obama developed impressive empathetic gifts. But now he is misusing them. It’s not enough to understand how everybody in the room thinks. You have to decide which ones in the room are right, and stand with them. A leader is not a mediator or an umpire or a convener or a facilitator.

Sometimes, as Chris Christie put it, “the president has got to show up.”

9.What Do Kyrie Irving and I Have in Common? – It turns out that Kyrie Irving, the first pick in this years NBA draft, and I both played two years of middle school basketball and one year of high school basketball at the Montclair Kimberley Academy. Yet while Irving went on to Saint Patrick HS/Duke/the NBA, I quit basketball after my freshman year and went onto become a very mediocre D3 distance runner. It’s hard to say who did better for himself, but I’ll say it’s about even.

10. Party Pics – And finally, a few more pictures from Saturday’s bash…