Hiatus

Finding Maude is officially going on hiatus.  It may be for quite a while.  But I'll let you all know when I'm back.

In the meantime, thanks for reading for so long (and for some of you, so faithfully), and I hope you'll come back when I do.

xRachx

Goodbyes

My grandfather passed away yesterday at the age of 75.  He’d been battling with his health for years, first with his heart and, more recently, his kidneys.  The last time I saw him, I asked him how he was feeling, and he put his arm around me and said, “Much better now that my little Polish girl has come to see me.  Jak sie masz?”  He liked that I was in Poland.  I’m not sure he wouldn’t have liked it better if I’d settled down up the street from him and had some children to bring by for visits every day, but he seemed to take a certain pride in scouring his memory for off-color jokes in Polish that he could relate to me, always hoping I would understand, no matter how many times I told him my Polish was quite weak. 

My grandfather was funny.  He sometimes liked to hide his humor in comments that sounded like grumpiness or annoyance, but then he’d give you a little wink so you knew he was kidding.  Often these particular jokes were directed at my grandmother.  After 57 years of marriage, he liked to pretend that he had to nag her constantly to get her to do anything for him, and then swat playfully at her as she said, “Oh, Ernie!” and then bustled off to find whatever he’d been hinting around for.  It was always clear he was a softie, though, because of the way he doted on the children around him.  Now, as I understand it, he could sometimes be a strict father, but as a grandfather, it was always about me getting what I wanted.  Somewhere, in a dusty box of photos at my parents house, there is a picture of my grandfather sitting on the floor while I walk and climb all over him as if he was a jungle gym.  It’s one of my favorite memories, climbing around and jumping off of chairs to be caught by my grandfather.  It’s something I do now, with my niece.

This summer has been a constant surprise. And several of the surprises have been nasty ones rather than nice ones. At times it seemed that just when I was starting to cheer up again, something else would happen to unravel everything I’d been planning.  And it’s a bit tempting to give in to that train of thought right now.  But I can look at it another way: one of the outcomes of this strange summer was an unexpected opportunity to spend a few weeks in the United States and visit my friends and family recently.  If all had gone according to the plan, I would be in Guatemala right now and would not have had these last few opportunities to sit with my grandpa and listen to his jokes, to hug him and have him say the two words he always  said, without fail, whenever we said goodbye: “Come again.”  Even if he had come to visit me, he would say this, but with a little chuckle.   However much I wish I could be there now, with my family, to say my proper goodbyes, I’m grateful that I got to say some kind of goodbye.  That the last time I saw him was only a week and a half ago, instead of nearly a year.

What's in a Dumpling?

It was a damp, windy afternoon in my little corner of Poland today.  As I waited for the train to take me from my new students’ office in Szczecin Dąbie back across the river, I felt like Autumn had arrived…a bit too abruptly.  But it is my favorite season (when I’m dressed appropriately for it), so I put my mind to thinking about all the nice things I associate with Autumn.  And that’s when I had a truly inspired idea.  I decided to try to make my mother’s homemade chicken dumpling soup.  I didn’t have a recipe, and with the time difference, I couldn’t really call and ask for one.  But the soup itself is not that complicated – it’s the dumplings that take some practice - so I figured the worst case scenario would leave me with a lot of chicken stock to use in another recipe. 

So off I went to the corner veggie stand and the shop just down the road for supplies.  I couldn’t find everything I thought I needed, so I had to make one or two substitutions. I chopped everything up, making some educated guesses with regard to quantities, and threw it all in a big pot.  And, much to my surprise and delight, before very long, my apartment filled up with one of my favorite aromas from my childhood – it was like being in my parents’ house in late November, and it brought back this incredible sense of warmth, ease and comfort. 

After an hour or so, I mixed together my best guess at what the dumplings might be made of and spooned the batter into the stock, fingers crossed the whole time.  And guess what?  I did it!  The dumplings were perfect, and the soup was awfully close to Mom’s.  I think the substitutions I had to make here in Poland made up the majority of the difference.  As long as food-poisoning doesn’t begin to set in before breakfast, I’m going to consider my efforts a roaring success!

check out those dumplings...

OK, excuse all the detail about cooking.  I really don’t flatter myself that most of my poor readers really give a damn what I made for dinner, but the point isn’t the food itself (though if you’re keeping score, I’m officially ticking off dish number three from item 74 on my list).  It never is with me, is it?  What was so great about this is what it stands for.  The last few years of my life have been full of upheaval.  Some truly amazing things have happened, and so have a few awful things.  I’ve felt lost more often than I care to admit.  And when I came to Poland a year ago, I kind of drew a line in the sand between my “old” life and my “new” life.  In some ways, that has been very good for me.  Letting go of hang-ups, searching for ways to define my life through more fulfilling endeavors, and dropping some very bad habits.  But it also cut me off from some things that have made me happy over the years.  And the more I pushed back against my past, the more disconnected I felt from any success or happiness I’ve felt in the present, because it wasn’t really me who was doing all of these things…it was this shiny new girl who lived someplace different and had an exotic new life.  Not to mention that it’s a lot of unnecessary pressure.  All that time, being worried that one wrong choice was going to send me into a tailspin that would put me “right back where I started,” as if that was even possible.

Well, going back to Wisconsin for a few weeks reminded me of something very important: you can’t change where you come from.  And you shouldn’t attempt to.  Trying to make a home and a life for yourself as an adult is scary, whether you do it 5 miles away from where you grew up, or 5000.  But there is a surprising amount of comfort to be found in being reminded of exactly who you are and just how far you’ve come already.  It puts things into perspective and makes “the future” seem so much more manageable. It’s just a series of small steps you take, steps that add to who you already were, rather than transforming you completely.  And the small pleasures will always be there.  They come from the flavors and smells of day-to-day life, and in tiny moments of recognition, like when you come back from vacation and see someone who was so recently a new friend, and the smile on their face looks like home.  And from the (probably excessive) pride you feel as a result of accomplishing something as simple as recreating the warm feeling of your old home however far away you happen to be now.  Even if all you really did was make some soup.

Work in Progress

At times like this, when I’m not sure exactly what I want or where I’m headed, I find it’s best for me not to force it.  To wait it out, and, while I’m waiting, to go back to the basics.  Try to sort out “who I am,” or, in other words, what my most basic values are now.  This is one of the many reasons "the List" has been so important in my life.  In addition to being a tangible reminder of the things that are important to me, it is, when all else fails, a damn good distraction.  At any given time, I can put myself to work chipping away at one (or more) of the items.  And, if I’m paying attention, each attempt, big or small, successful or unsuccessful, teaches me something new.  It’s kind of like finding a puzzle piece that fits somewhere on the picture you’re trying to make.  It’s not always the piece you were looking for, but every bit helps.

  

The more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that I put my list on the sidebar of this blog a few weeks ago.  I felt a little weird about it, because some of those items are a bit personal, but I figure you can’t expect to get what you want in life if you won’t even admit what that is. So there it is.  And hey, if you think you can help, let me know.   Anyway, right now I’m working on items 16, 55, and 74.

Number 55 isn’t easy, but it’s simple.  It doesn’t require much more of me than dedication and tolerance to pain.  Like most of life.  There’s only one way to accomplish it, and that is to go straight into it.  At least once every other day, I try to do as many push-ups as I can, and I try to do more than I did last time.  My progress? The number I can do with my knees on the ground has been going up relatively quickly, so I think any day now I’ll be able to do more than ½ of a “real” push-up.  Any day now.  And from there, 10 can’t be so far off.

Item 74 has been trickier than I thought it would be.  But only because I let it be.  I can bake, but I want to learn to cook. Specifically, I want to be able to cook at least 10 dishes well. I’ve already got enchiladas, and I more or less know my way around a lasagna, but with 8 dishes to go, I need some items in my repertoire that aren’t casseroles.  That said, I’ve concluded that I’m not much for complicated recipes and exotic ingredients.  I went through a phase where I wanted to make really impressive food, and it generally led to culinary disasters.  I thought I must be hopeless, so I decided to take advantage of the close proximity to my mother, grandmother and sister by getting recipes from them and then following them to the letter.  Well, guess what I’ve learned? It’s not about the recipes, exactly: they all make exceedingly delicious meals by, for the most part, keeping it simple.  They don’t need 30 types of seasoning when one or two will do just fine.  They don’t have to hunt for ingredients at special supermarkets.  I’m going to follow their lead, and see what happens.  Sometimes you’ve got to get out of your own way and stop complicating everything with grandiose plans.  That’s true of food, and it’s true of just about everything else.

Finally, my favorite: number 16.  I started playing the piano when I was 6 or 7 years old, when my parents bought me a Casio keyboard, which I’m pretty sure they could barely afford, and enrolled me in lessons at my school.  I spent long, agonizing, enchanted evenings poking at the keys in an effort to make “Kumbaya” come out.  And eventually, I did.  It felt like a miracle.  By the time I was about 12, I was agonizing over Bach and Beethoven.  But I decided that playing piano wasn’t as cool as hanging out with my friends.  So I quit.  I didn’t regret it right away, but for about 10 years now, I’ve wanted to find my way back.  The problem is that whenever I start again, I get discouraged.  I’m rusty now, my fingers aren’t as nimble as they used to be, and even reading music requires a lot more thought than I feel like it ought to.  And when I stumble over a simple song, I lose heart. 

At the time I quit, I had just begun learning Beethoven’s Fur Elise.  Now I want to finish.  Of course, what I really want is to start.  Start playing again, playing everything under the sun, not just that song.  But first I want to make it back to where I left off: Fur Elise.  I could’ve learned it relatively quickly fifteen years ago.  But now I’m going to have to work my way up to it.  I can play the first two sections.  I still haven’t managed to make my fingers move quickly enough for the third.  But when I sit down at my mom’s piano, I feel my world shrinking down to the notes, to my fingers, to the way the music feels, and I remember this piece of myself, a piece I let go when I first started to care what it meant to be “cool.”  A piece I’ve approached dozens of times since then, but walked away from each time because I wasn’t sure if I had what it took to do it anymore.  I’ve been playing every day here.  And it’s such a small thing, but it makes me deep-down happy.  One more little thing that makes me happy to add to my life, to the other little things.  One more puzzle piece in place.  When I get back to Poland, I’m going to find a practice space and keep working on it. 

Amateur Cartography

But I am not an explorer.  I haven't a single explorer on my planet.  It is not the geographer who goes out to count the towns, the rivers, the mountains, the seas, the oceans, and the deserts.

–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This won’t come as a surprise if you've been paying attention, but I haven’t been feeling very positive about life lately.  I checked with a friend and the notion was seconded.  There has apparently been an observable decline in my optimism and cheerfulness in the past several months.  I could get into how it happened and what’s to blame for all of it, and I’d probably come up with some good answers, but knowing those things isn’t particularly helpful in this situation.  The questions I should really be asking are ‘what have I been doing that I need to stop doing?’ and ‘what things can I do that I haven’t been doing enough of?’

I’ve been going over and over this in my head for weeks, and I think there are probably a fair number of minor adjustments that could be made, but it hit me a few minutes ago that the major thing I’ve been doing in the last few months that I wasn’t doing before is that I’ve been thinking too far ahead, worrying about problems that haven’t arisen yet, and that may never arise.  Yes, it’s good to plan for the future, but when I had a wake-up call about how short life can be and I quit being a lawyer and decided to make some major changes, I also resolved not to do that anymore.  Not to get my head so tangled up in every possible thing that could go wrong years down the line that I never made any real decisions.  Not to put off my happiness until conditions were “favorable,” i.e., my life was exactly the way I’d envisioned it.  And I did quite well for a while.  But for one reason and another, I’ve somehow wandered back to the point where I am today, too concerned about where I’m going, not nearly concerned enough about where I am. 

It stops now.  I’m going back to being more in the present.  It’s true that I’ve realized this year that I may have gone too far with my “no tomorrow” theory, and that I can’t just drift along forever hoping I’ll stumble into a satisfying life.  This means that, yes, I still have some very real concerns about my present and about my future, and I need to sort those out.  But I’m going to come at them one at a time, as they relate to the life I’m living now, and not try to guess at every conceivable consequence of each action and try to figure out how to deal with those, too.  The best choices I’ve ever made have been the result of other actions I took.  They have not come from a process of bullying my brain into deciding something.  And the happiest times of my life have been those when I had goals I was aiming for, but not overly-specific road maps that I felt pressured to follow.  Because there are always surprises, always unforeseen obstacles or delays.  And the more I had my heart set on every detail going a certain way, the worse it felt when the world had other ideas for me.  So I’m going to have to let go of a few things that I’ve been trying too hard to control.  If I need to grip it so tightly, maybe it's not something I'm meant to have.  And who knows?  Perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised by what keeps floating around me once I've let go.  As my friend Elaine’s pappy says, “What’s for you won’t go past you!”*

Also, I’m going back to the list.  Look forward to a series of entries detailing how I’ve attempted (and succeeded at) crossing items off the epic list of things I want to do before I die.  Please hold me accountable.  If these entries don’t start appearing soon, do me a favor and ask me about the items.  And if I ask you for help with checking one off, do both of us a favor, and say yes.  I bet you won’t regret it.

*Thanks again for that gem, Elaine.

Home is where...um...er...

So, it’s been a while.  But there are reasons.  I really don’t like feeling like I use this blog as a platform to complain.  But it’s the middle of July now, and in the interest of complete honesty, I’m just gonna say it.  This summer has not been the easiest of my life so far.  Luckily, there have been some high points scattered amongst the lows, or I might have given up and crawled straight into bed for at least a month.  My summer plans for Guatemala all unraveled at the last minute, while I was at an airport just outside of London.  That was a low.  But I was taken in and cared for and entertained by Leah and Pete’s warm and wonderful English family.  That was a high, and I felt really blessed to have people who cared for me around at just the right moment.  Then I came back to Poland and found a lot of empty days stretching before me with no work waiting here for me to do.  Low.  But I had a few people here to help me fill my spare time and to help me scrounge up a lesson or two, and my boss wrote me a recommendation so I could try to get summer camp work, and it seemed like it might be manageable after all.  Maybe not a high, per se, but at least a little bump in the right direction.

But this week has not been good.  I got some bad news from my mother, and it wasn’t remotely feasible for me to fly back to be with my family.  And it’s pretty lonely here right now.  I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for the friends I have here, but sometimes when things are bad, what you really need around you are the people that you know you can call in the middle of the night if you have to, even if it’s just to talk.  The ones who know you well enough to just turn up, even though you didn’t ask.  The ones who you can really cry in front of – you know the ones…you’re so upset that your face is all red and puffy and you’ve got snot coming out of your nose, and they act like they don’t even notice.  Those people, for me, are pretty far away.  Skype helps, but there’s still a seven hour time difference to contend with, and sometimes there’s a delay, or your internet stops working for no reason, or whatever. 

And this has all got me thinking about home.  What is ‘home’?  Because I don’t really know if I have one anymore.  I had a long talk with my best friend tonight.  She said that, for her, it’s all about deciding who you want to spend your life with.  Then anyplace is home.  No matter where you live, there are going to be shitty things about it, but if you’re around the right people, then you’ll always be home.  I’m inclined to agree, but that doesn’t wrap it all up as neatly as you’d think.  My family and most of my dearest friends are in the United States.  But the idea of moving back there fills me with dread.  I want to live someplace where at least I can go to the doctor if something’s wrong with me.  I want to live someplace where I’m not constantly being told I have to have a lucrative job, or a mortgage, to feel successful.  I want to live someplace where my kids won’t be made fun of for being know-it-alls if they should happen to like to read or watch documentaries about how the human body works or where our food comes from.  I want to live someplace where gun violence is virtually irrelevant, because nobody has guns.  And I don’t meet a lot of people there who feel as strongly as I do about those things.  And they don’t have to.  But it’s hard to feel you belong someplace where your core values are so different from everyone around you.  It’s hard to imagine finding a partner and making a good life there. 

But.  There is something very fragile about life as an expat.  Especially here.  When I had no work in Wisconsin, I got a job waiting tables for extra cash.  That’s illegal for me here, even if I spoke enough Polish to do the job.  My grasp on the language is tenuous at best, so though I can afford to visit the doctors, they’re intimidating.   And that also makes it hard to make friends with anyone but the other English teachers, who come and go on 9-month contracts.  So (and this is the important point) there is a considerable scarcity of the kind of friends I described above.  And this is partly my own fault.  I could’ve made more of an effort this year.  But I worked a lot, and I spent a lot of time with people who’ve now either moved away or who have their own lives here, based on something other than just the job they happened to have (their partners, families, school, etc.).  I never planted myself that fully in this community.  And if I’m honest, I probably never will, because Szczecin is not really the place I envision myself settling in and growing old. 

So, what do you do?  It’s tempting to believe that you can just keep moving around until you find the right thing, but I’ve seen people who’ve done that and found themselves just as aimless at 35 as they were at 20.  There’s also some comfort in the idea that if you just commit to some random choice you’ve made, you’ll make it all come together eventually.  But as I learned from law school, if you force yourself to commit to something that is just not right for you, you can end up several years older, deeply in debt, and even more confused than when you started out.  Maybe it’s blind alchemy.  Make the best choices you can from where you are,  commit yourself to them as completely as you can, hope everything doesn’t fall apart, make subtle adjustments when it does, repeat, repeat, repeat.  Nothing is perfect, but slowly it takes shape. 

I hope so, anyway, cause that’s the best plan I’ve got right now.

Sorry for whining.  I’m sure it will all be better tomorrow.  Or the next day.

Put me in my place

Increasingly, I’ve been feeling like my values are way out of step with those of the societies I’ve been living in.  I left the United States partly because I love traveling, partly because I wanted to try a job that felt more like helping someone (I couldn’t face up to one more second as a lawyer) but also because I felt like everything was for sale - even the health and happiness of small children has a price tag on it.  Especially that, because people will pay anything for it.  In Poland, it’s not quite there, but after their history with dictators, it feels like they’ve swung around and begun worshipping anything with the word ‘free’ in it: free market, free trade, free-for-all…Because America once looked like the promised land when they were younger, they’re determined to become that.   I used to look to the government for change, used to identify with liberals the world over.  Now I’m starting to feel that most world leaders are the same, wherever you go.  And I swear to God, as strange as this sounds, this has not made me a pessimist.  I still believe in people.  I just don’t believe in the systems.  The governments are corporations now, and you know how I’ve always felt about those, right?  

No, I’m not saying we’re irretrievably lost.  I’m wondering where the path is.  Where do you go when you feel like living your day-to-day life is a series of tiny contributions to something that you feel is genuinely appalling?  When all of those tiny contributions start to pile up and become mountains?  Lately I’ve been mentally stretching the threads from one puzzle piece to another (like a paranoid in the movies), and  I can see the connection between my dirt-cheap pair of jeans and the Haitian worker who’s trying to feed his children on 31 cents a day.  Between my bottle of water and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  Between my savings account and the commodities speculators who are starving families to death in Guatemala and elsewhere.  And I don’t like it.  I know I’m not actively supportive of these heartless billionaires, but I am supporting them just by living where I do, and having the things I have.  And there doesn’t feel like much of a way to live in the modern world without lending your support to them.

So my friend and I were debating this.  It seems like you have some choices, but there’s always a catch.  Part of me would like to wander off to the remote countryside, go back to nature, to the way life was a long time ago, and have a little farm.  Not much, just some fruits and vegetables, chickens, maybe a goat.  Enough to live on, without all the extra stuff.  Use environmentally-sound practices, and not hurt anybody.  Maybe help some people, in small ways – my neighbors, etc.  But then someone can point the finger and tell me I’m running away.  Burying my head in  the sand.  But if I stay put and try to fight it, I’m living in a place where most of the things I’ll use/come into contact with every day are part of the problem.  Where me and my privileged family are part of the problem.  Also, it’s beyond frustrating to always be fighting.  It’s one of the reasons I quit the law.  I wanted a life, not a constant battle.  And this fight is enormous.  It seems impossible sometimes.  Do I just try to find a country whose values are at least a bit closer to mine, raise some children there, and accept that it’s good enough?  Move to the “third-world” and live a life of service?  Work some kind of middle ground between escaping it completely and staying for the fight?  Is there one? 

I know I have some friends who feel the way I do.  What do you do?  How do you square your life with your beliefs?  What feels right to you?  Because for me, I’m really not sure anymore.  Most likely, if I keep up the way I am, I’ll stumble about for a bit longer and then “end up” wherever I am when I decide to get married, have kids.  And then make the best of it for those children.  Maybe that’s ok.  Maybe it’s even what most people do, and I’ll make peace with it when/if it happens.  From here, though, it feels like the kind of thing that should be a choice, not just a hole you fell into when you weren’t looking.

[A few notes: This entry was hard to write.  In more than one way.  First, it’s a hard topic to even wrap my head around some days, so I’m sorry if it didn’t make a lot of sense.  Also, I know some people might feel that this is somehow a judgment about their lives.  (So let me get this out there: it’s honestly not.  I know that my values and desires are different from other people’s.  This is a reaction to thoughts I have about living my life in accordance with my personal value system.)  Finally, it’s hard to write because I feel that this blog can be a bit heavy sometimes, and as a matter of vanity, I want people to think of me as cheerful and pleasant, not preachy and bleak. But I write when I need to untie knots for myself, so I guess it’s bound to be messy.  Hope you don’t mind too much.]

Aceptando Ayuda, With Love...

So it’s been a while without an update.  And I’ve been pretty bad at writing emails, too.  Sorry about that.  I have an excuse!  And a good one, too.  I’m getting ready to spend three months in a Guatemalan jungle with 250 children. 

It’s funny, because it sounds like a joke, but it’s not.

Getting myself prepared for my summer plans has actually turned up quite a few more challenges than I thought it would.  But now that I think about it, it’s kind of a miracle there haven’t been even more.   I want you to imagine something: you are going to the jungle for three months.  You need to buy certain supplies that are not commonly needed in every part of the world (super-strength insect repellent, for example).  You need injections and malaria pills, and you need to decide what to bring to a place where you will have no electricity, no hot water, millions of animals and critters, and no department store just up the road.  Got it in your head?  Now do it while living in an Eastern European country where you have the language skills of the average 2-year-old, at best.  Not that I’m complaining.  It’s actually been a bit of an adventure already.  And it’s given me the chance to let other people help me, and therefore made me appreciate some of the people in my life even more.

There have been several friends who have offered me help with their encouraging words, assistance with Spanish, priceless advice, phone calls to friends to get information, etc.  I hope you know who you are, and that I’ve thanked you enough.  Some of you have quite simply been life rafts on days when I’ve been scared and felt lost. 

There is, however, one person I simply can’t thank enough, so I want to mention her by name.  Natalia, who works at Bell as one of the administrators, is, to use a Spanish expression I just learned, un alma de Dios.  (This is a person who is incredibly kind and for whom there can be no harsh words.)  When I told her what I was doing, she went straight to her computer and her telephone and started asking everyone she could think of what kinds of vaccines I needed and where I could go to get them.  She got the people at medicus to order the rabies vaccine specially for me, and when my doctor was lecturing me for not knowing exactly how many malaria pills I would need, Natalia spoke to her on the phone and made it better.  When I overpaid at the doctor,  she took care of everything again.  I’m pretty sure I would’ve quit halfway through the medical process if I hadn’t had her to help me.  Now I’m one rabies shot away from being vaccinated, and just waiting on a package from England with my malaria pills in it.

With just over three and a half weeks to go before the “real” adventure begins, I’m sure I’ll be pretty busy right up until the moment I get on the plane.  I’m sure I’ll be some combination of scared, excited, stressed, and humbled.  And I’m sure I’ll keep being touched by what wonderful people I know (and in fact, some I don’t know – I’ve been helped by total strangers).  I wrote about responsibility a while ago.  About taking responsibility for both the good and bad that I’ve created in my own life.  And it feels amazing to be able take responsibility for having such people in my life, but I think I get to share the credit with them for a lot of the magical turns my life has taken, because I couldn’t have made any of them alone.  And the more I think about it, I wouldn’t have wanted to.  It feels better to share the experience with people who care about you.

Gracias, mis seres queridos.

Sorry, I guess I'm feeling quite sentimental today.

Todo está en su cabeza

Sometimes  I get the sneaking suspicion that the things I write about in this blog – especially the ones that seem like great revelations to me – are not remotely new or interesting ideas, but are rather painfully and embarrassingly obvious.  In fact, this suspicion is strong enough and appears frequently enough to make me consider that maybe it’s a waste of time to write it - or at the very least that I should change the name to something more apt, like “A Complete Idiot’s Painfully Clichéd Guide to Life…”  I have, after all, proven myself to be capable of trying to glean wisdom from the most obvious of sources, and from my most moronic decisions.  Some of which, I might add, I seem to make again and again without ever learning any better, as I have ostensibly been endowed with the memory span of a hamster (apparently, fish have much longer memory spans than is commonly believed, by the way.  Thank you, Stephen Fry).  So, why don’t I do it?  First of all, fear of a copyright suit from Penguin Books.   And second, I guess because I’m trying to forgive my foolishness.  Isn’t this what we all do?  Stumble from one thing to the next constantly discovering, forgetting, and re-discovering the essential?  Sometimes we need the obvious to hit us over the head with the force of a heavy wooden baseball bat.  Many times.  So I keep writing, just like I keep learning.

This weekend, through various conversations, encounters, coincidences, and the secret magic of samba drums, the oh-so-obvious lesson seems to be one of attitude and perspective.  When everyone you know is going through similar struggles, and some remain cheerful while others are miserable, you can see how attitude makes a huge difference.  When positivity makes you try something different for a change, and it works to make you feel better - or when it makes you appreciate something nice instead of wondering when it’s going to start to go bad - you see it.  When 3 lines of drummers stand shoulder to shoulder making the same brilliant music, you can see how the lively, laughing, goony-looking man becomes so much more appealing and eye-catching than the beautiful but dour woman next to him.  And how the middle-aged mom who’s dancing and laughing looks funny, but much happier than the cool young couple next to her who are nodding their heads drowsily.  It’s very easy to fall prey to the idea that life is about your circumstances.  And a little bit of it is.  But mostly it’s about the joy, isn’t it?  If there is absolutely none to be found anywhere, then maybe your circumstances are making your life.  But for most of us, we can choose to mine out the enthusiasm and enchantment from what we’re already doing, in the place we already are, and then continue to follow it to wherever else it may lead us. 

I’m going to try harder to remember that this time around.  Like usual. ;-)

Something I've been thinking about for a long time: this city looks much prettier
 if you look up.
These are the same buildings, at street level, and above.

Mother's Day

A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, 

promptly announces she never did care for pie.  ~Tenneva Jordan

The older I get, the more of the world that I see, and the more people I meet, the more I understand that probably the most extraordinary person I have ever known is the first person I ever met: my mom.   I was talking to a friend last night about my mother, and I told him that I have never met a more loving, patient or supportive person in my life.  That if I ever met a person who honestly didn’t like her, I’d probably die from the shock of it.  That my greatest hope is that I have been able to learn enough from watching her to be even a fraction of the mother  she is when my time comes to have children of my own. 

So, on the eve of Mother’s Day in America, here are just a few of the millions of reasons I love mine:

• OK, I’ve got to say the obvious first: she gave me life.  She made me, carried me around in her body for 40 weeks, and then underwent surgery to bring me into the world.  It’s so commonplace, people having children, that I think we sometimes forget how remarkable an act it really is.
• She always encouraged me and my brothers to choose our own paths in life, and always supported whatever we chose without reservation.  I know that most parents try to do that, but so few truly succeed at it.  They’re only human, after all.  It must be maddening to be worried about your children’s’ futures but to bite your tongue when you see them making decisions that you think may be mistakes.  My mother always seemed to understand implicitly that no mind was ever changed by nagging.  She could guide, she could set an example, but she could not choose for us.  She could only offer her support as we went about tying and untying our own knots in life.  One perfect example: despite the fears I’m sure she must have about my summer plans to live in the Guatemalan jungle at an orphanage, the only things she has ever said to me about it are “I am so proud of you,” and “How can we help?” 
• She did, however, impress us with the great importance of really trying.  Quitting was frowned upon in my family.  That’s not to say it never happened, but usually not without a fair amount of discussion and thought given to whether we were quitting because something wasn’t right, or simply because it was challenging.
• She read to me.  All the time.  And when I learned how, she sat patiently and let me read to her.
• She made hard decisions and stuck to them.  Even when we told her we’d hate her for it (oh, adolescence!).  In the time I’ve spent working with kids in my life, I’ve learned only one thing: discipline is the hardest part.  When you see their sad little faces you just want to hug them, tell them it’s ok, and back down.  But if you do that, you hurt them more than you help them.  My mother made the decision to help us be better people, even if it hurt sometimes.  That said, she rarely yelled at us and never made us feel stupid or small.  I’m sure that sometimes we must have annoyed the hell out of her.  But I don’t remember her ever making me feel it.
• She’s smart and funny and, now that I’m old enough to let her be, a great friend.

Having fun in Zakopane

Like I said, that’s only a few reasons.  And of course, I wouldn’t be the person I am now without my Dad either.  His was a different set of skills and sacrifices.  But that’s a whole different holiday.

Responsibility is the watchword.

I know.  Who am I kidding?  I’m aimless and often obnoxiously resistant to the status quo.  Who do I think I am, anyway?  Well, it all started with Easter.  I had five days off work, and the flat to myself.  I like my flatmate, but the alone time was nice, too.  I wandered around in various states of undress, sunbathed on the balcony, and moved all the furniture and cleaned under, around, and above it.  I went for long walks at whatever hour of the day or night I felt like without worrying about disturbing anyone.  And while walking, I did some thinking.  I realized that in the last year, I’ve done everything I said I wanted to.  I am out in the world.  Living in a country where every day is a learning experience and I don’t take any opportunities for granted.  And it’s a pretty great life, most days.  But (there’s always a but) I also felt it, how everyone else was gathering around the table with their loved ones, celebrating the holiday, while I’d moved 5000 miles away from my family and the friends who’d known me my whole life.  And how I do not feel even a single step nearer to building a new family of my own than I was when I left my parents’ home ten years ago.

So I did what anyone would do.  I spent a few hours sitting on my bed with a dozen old issues of National Geographic spread out around me.  I looked at all the photos of far-flung corners of the earth, all the things I still want to see and do.  It usually helps me, to see everything that’s out there in the world for me.  But this time it just made me feel small.  Like one little ant crawling through the vast desert.  A speck.  Yeah, going it alone in the world is exciting.  It affords you the opportunity to feel a part of the whole world, instead of just the corner of it that you happened to be born in.  But it also means that you have more opportunity to see just how small you are.  How fleeting.  And last week, it made me wonder why I wasn’t at home (wherever home might be) building something.  Carving my name in one solid place and leaving behind a procession of people who will look a little bit like me.  Why I haven’t, at the very least, pulled someone into my orbit and together decided to share the open road with them.  I knew that the easy solution would be to say that I simply haven’t met the right person yet, dust myself off, and carry on as I was.  But it’s not true.   I’ve probably met a lot of right people.  But I never chose them.  For a variety of reasons.  Either I was busy choosing the wrong person, or I didn’t feel the need to choose anyone at the time they came around.  The point is, I brought myself here.  And I wanted to know why.  And I wanted to know if it had all been a mistake.

When life isn’t what you thought, or when things fall apart again, or even when you’ve got mixed feelings about where you’ve found yourself, it’s easy  to find something else to point your finger at.  Your job, your partner, God, circumstances, fate, the world.  And, yeah, some things are out of our control.  But it can’t be that many things.  It can’t always be something else.  And furthermore, is that really reassuring?  Does it really feel better to tell yourself that your life hasn’t been up to you at all, but rather a long string of fate, happenstance, and other people’s choices?  To kick and scream like a child and say, “This isn’t what I wanted!”  No, it’s not really fun to think about what you did to contribute to your difficult moments, to your doubts about your life, but if you force yourself to do it anyway, you can do one of two things: appreciate the choices you made because you had good reasons, or recognize your mistakes and do something different next time.  I’m not sure which one I’ve decided on yet.  Maybe a little bit of both.

And here’s the good news:  Taking responsibility has a pretty significant bright side, I’m learning.  I went for a drink with a good friend a few nights ago.  We were having a heart-to-heart about the state of our lives: the beautiful, the ugly, the confounding.  I told him that whatever else happens, I do feel pretty lucky overall, because I’ve recently been on the receiving end of a virtual cascade of love from my friends: invitations, care packages, offers of assistance with my plans for Guatemala and beyond, and unbelievably kind words.   Basically, tangible reminders of how many people I have in my life who care about me and support me.   And then my friend , in his wisdom, said this:  “Yeah, maybe you’re lucky.  But maybe there is something about you that all these people respond to.  Maybe this has something to do with you, too.”  Would you believe I’d never really considered that before?  When everything goes wrong and I feel so impossibly adrift that I just want to lie down and give up, I don’t hesitate to wonder what the hell is wrong with me.  But did you know you can take responsibility for all the good things in your life as well?  That you’ve brought wonderful things upon yourself just as surely as disappointing ones?  That taking responsibility can be more than just an act of accepting blame – it can be an act of validation, too?

Taking responsibility also means telling yourself it’s ok if things are going to be difficult.  That “easy” is not the measuring stick you should use to decide what you should do next.  For example, since I arrived in Szczecin, there have been one or two people in my ear about how difficult it is to make friends here, and how most of the teachers tend to stick with one another’s company because this isn’t the same kind of young, outgoing, friendly city that others may be.  Well, of course I ignored them.  And I got off to a fairly promising start.  But then I ran into a few walls and I, too, gave in and began to accept it as true.  And maybe there is a grain of truth in it.  But there is no such thing as a place where you can’t make friends.  There is no such thing as a place where you have nothing in common with anyone else who lives there.  You just have to find those people. 

And this is where responsibility comes in: it’s not easy.  You have to let people in.  You have to be willing to walk into rooms full of people you don’t know, who speak a language you are struggling to even understand, and let it roll off your back when they find your accent funny.  You have to laugh at yourself and simply accept the fact that you won’t understand every word of what’s going on around you.  It’s intimidating.  Scary, even.  It’s a million miles from a life where you pass comfortable days and nights with people who know you at least as well as you do, if not better.  But one moment you’re having heart palpitations about just how long a barbecue with people you don’t understand could turn out to be, and the next you’re sitting around a table with 8 Polish people and a Mexican man, drinking vodka, laughing and chatting in French, English, Spanish and Polish.  Sometimes all four at once (and yeah, ok...some more than others).  You’re making plans to go kayaking.  Receiving invitations to Barcelona and Berlin.  Happy just to be where you are.  Sure, you could have a nice family and beautiful children at home.  And maybe it’d be wonderful, life-affirming, solid.  But it would also be hard, at times.  And it doesn't even matter what it would be like, because you didn’t choose that.  You chose this.  And this is something special, too.  Something not everyone gets to do. 

And that’s what taking responsibility for your life gets you.  That’s what happens when you start from wherever you happen to be, ignore your fear, and try anyway.  You see that you’re never going to be alone if you don’t let yourself be, that for every awful day, there’s an extraordinary one, and that your life can take an infinite number of shapes, each one beautiful in its own way.  Could anything be more amazing?

Le Mal du Pays

I’ve been kind of homesick lately.  Here’s the thing, though: I don’t really miss my life in the United States.  It was too easy for me to take things for granted when I lived there.  I was talking to a friend yesterday, and he said that he thinks living abroad can become kind of an addiction, in a way.  And it’s true.  Even when you’re going about your mundane chores, there is something about all of it that is interesting and challenging and requires you to celebrate small victories.  Calling a taxi or asking for chicken at the butcher’s counter (and getting exactly what you wanted) become huge successes in your day.  Most of my friends here speak at least two languages and can tell me great stories about countries I still want to visit.  And being a bit isolated from society (both the one you left and your new one) makes it easier to step back, look at all of the millions of choices people make because they think they have to, and ask why.  [Just a few examples: Why do I need to join a gym to be healthy?  I keep healthy here with all the things I do outdoors.  Why would you continue to pay taxes in a country where there is a private police force for rich people because it is assumed that the regular police won’t do their jobs?  Why would I want to eat something that smells like that? Why do I accept it as natural that doctors (and medicine) are supposed to be expensive?  Supposed to make a profit from my health?  There are plenty more questions.  Some serious, some incredibly not serious.]

Milwaukee from the edge of Lake Michigan at the end of winter.

Anyway, back to the point.  I’m not homesick for the lifestyle I had.  What I’m homesick for, quite simply, is people.  For one thing, I miss the sheer variety of people back home.  Poland has an interesting culture and a pretty incredible history, but they’ve somehow ended up with a country that is not particularly racially diverse.  (You’ve never seen so many shades of white.)  On top of that, you rarely seem to see someone walking toward you on the street who is tattooed and grungy and has purposely messy hair, or who thinks she’s a Japanese school girl, or that it’s 1966, and it’s ok to be barefooted in a flower-print skirt while walking down a city sidewalk.  You mostly see slim, fashionable women and muscular, conventional men.  I really do miss all the colors of the people in Milwaukee.

Much more important, though, are the people I love.  Starting, of course, with my family.  There is no doubt that families are tough.  No other people on earth will ever be quite so honest with you, quite so harsh.  But if you ever need anything, no other people on earth will jump through quite so many hoops to get to you, even if they’re angry with you at the time.  No one else will tell you they miss you even when you were a huge asshole the last time you saw them.  Also, no one else could provide you with a tiny person who runs to the front door when you come home for Christmas shouting, “Auntie Rachel!  Can you sleep with me tonight?”  And that feeling is worth more than every material possession I have ever owned or hope to own. 

And then there are the friends.  The ones who’ve known me for ages and seen me from every possible angle and somehow love me anyway.  I’ve got friends back home who had to drag me off the couch and force me into the shower after a bad relationship ended.  Friends who went roller-skating with me for my 26^th birthday and then sang karaoke (and sat through my rendition of “Pussy Control” again). Who will never say no to Mexican food, and who send me pom poms, glitter and a harmonica in the mail.  Friends who told my near-suicidal lawyer-self to stop whining and quit if it was really so bad.  Friends who are really really funny.  (I just have to remember Evie asking John if he thought she was Mr. Peanut, and I still laugh until I cry).  Friends who would never tell me to come home if I’m happy, no matter how much they miss me.  

Well, I may not be coming home, but I miss you, too.  And I thought you should know.

P.S. Happy birthday, Evie!

Happily 'Til the Next One

“When you tell [grown-ups] that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you, ‘What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?’ Instead, they demand: ‘How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?’ Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him… you might say to them: ‘The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists.’ And what good would it do to tell them that? They would shrug their shoulders, and treat you like a child. But if you said to them: ‘The planet he came from is Asteroid B-612,’ then they would be convinced, and leave you in peace from their questions.”  --Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

 I went for coffee with Kate yesterday, and we realized we were both having similar fears and doubts about what we should do with ourselves.  We talked about our attempts at making the "right" choices in our lives, and how when you're afraid of making the wrong choice, it's generally due to the belief that there is a right one - that just around the corner, there will be a decision that will set off the grand chain of events that is your real life, and it will define who you become.  Do I want to be a teacher or a writer?  Speak Polish or Spanish?  A traveler or a mother?  And poof!  That's what you are.  But if you make the wrong choice, then you are (forever) the wrong thing. 

 But that's not the way it works, is it?  There is no final decision, the one that sets everything up.  One choice flows into another, and another, and another.  The most you can say, really, is that making a decision  is better than just letting things happen to you.  And that you really can't make more than one major choice at a time, make some master plan, and expect a good result.  Because the world you create with your first decision will change how you look at the second.  But despite all the pressure, does it somehow bring us comfort to believe that this majestic moment, this imposing decision, is out there, waiting for us?  That once we get it out of the way, we'll be all sorted out?  We'll know what we are?  Or to put it another way: Are we that ludicrous grown-up in our own lives who insists on knowing only the most inessential facts about ourselves? 

 For all I might say about not letting other people judge me, it has still been me, telling myself that I'm trying to become something that causes me most of my heartache when I try to slap some kind of label on myself and figure myself out.  Because even if I am a teacher, or a mother, or a traveler, what else does that say about me?  Does it change what my voice sounds like or what games I love best?  Or the fact that my best friend can still make me laugh so hard I snort?  Of course not.  Things change when you make any decision, but things change every day anyway.  A decision doesn't put me in a box where I have to be like all the other teachers, mothers, wives, single women or travelers in the world.  

Anyway, I guess my point is this: maybe it's not so comforting to think that I'll never quite be properly figured out, but it's more realistic and more forgiving.  And frankly, it feels kind of good.  I'm free to do whatever I want - I don't have to think about what it will make me, besides happier, or wiser, or at the very least, someone with a good story to tell.

Little Reminders

How many times do I have to learn the same thing over again?  I keep forgetting.  I've been stressed for weeks, trying to figure out what exactly I'm doing, where my life is heading, and how it's going to "turn out."  Then I was walking home from doing the shopping (and Spring has finally come to Szczecin, which brings me no end to joy) and I was listening to Iron & Wine, and I remembered the thing I don't want to have to keep learning the hard way:


Fuck happy endings.  It ends when you die.  
I'm gonna have a happy life.

Anyway, just thought I'd share, in case anyone else needed or wanted reminding.

A Guatemalan Summer

Casa Guatemala is a home and school for orphaned, abused and abandoned children.  The Children’s Village is located in the jungle on the banks of the Rio Dulce near the Caribbean coast in Eastern Guatemala.  It is accessible only by boat.  They care for over 250 children, relying on volunteers from around the world to do so.  Last week, I sent them a letter of application  to be a volunteer for the summer, and on Thursday I received a reply.  They want me to come.  I looked over their orientation guide for volunteers and today I wrote back, confirming with them my desire to go.  I will be spending three months there this summer, as soon as the school year is done here at the end of June.  It is an amazing organization that has been helping children for over thirty years in a country where many of the children desperately need help.

I don’t know for sure what my work will consist of, but probably I will do a variety of things.  They need people to do all of the things that parents usually do: wake the children up, get them ready for school, make sure they brush their teeth, eat, do their chores, etc.  They need people to help at the school.  They need help with their farm, and with the small hotel down the river that helps them to fund the Children’s Village.  I do know it won't be easy.  I’ll be living in the jungle.  Cold water, no electricity after 8pm, wild animals, simple living conditions.  Most of these children will have seen trouble I can’t begin to imagine.  And there are a lot of them.  But I think it will be incredibly fulfilling.  And even if it wasn’t, I’d still think it was important for me to do.

The decision to do this has been incredibly easy in some ways and incredibly difficult in others.  There has been no doubt in my mind about wanting to work with these children, notwithstanding the challenges I mentioned above.  But it’s not without sacrifice.  It will cost money to get all the way to the Rio Dulce from Szczecin.  It will cost very little to get by once I’m there, but I am also foregoing the possibility to make money this summer.  I’m leaving a comfortable flat, friends, and the relative safety of Poland behind for something unknown.  It might turn out to be better for me – I have been awfully skeptical lately about just how much “developed” society has truly done to improve the quality of peoples’ lives – but it will certainly require adjustment.   All of that in mind, I’m genuinely excited about this.  It feels right. And if you know me, you know that though it may take some time for me to make up my mind, once I’ve decided on what I want, it takes something awfully strong to get in my way for me to give up.  So I will do this, whatever it takes.

I once read an interview with someone who had done amazing things to rebuild a small village in Africa that had been ravaged by war. He was asked how he’d managed to do as much as he had, and he said that it was thanks to all the help he got from friends and family, from strangers, from all over.  They asked him how he got all these people to get involved, and he said, “I asked them.”  Well, asking for help hasn’t always been by strong suit, but this is really important to me, so I’ve decided to start.  

Here goes: I could use some help.  So far, nearly everyone has been really supportive and positive about this, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for that.  It’s probably the most important thing you can do to help me.  Honestly. 

But here are a few other things I’m concerned about:

• Airfare/living expenses:  This is probably my primary concern right now.  My plan is simply to save up money from work, and throw in my small tax return from 2010 to make up as much as I can, and make do with that. But you can help, too.  Maybe you (or someone you know) has airline miles you’re not using.  Maybe you know of the best website in the world for finding cheap travel deals.  Or where I can get some freelance writing or translating work on the internet (I can’t just wait tables here – my Polish isn’t good enough).  Or maybe you’ve always wanted to give me a birthday or Christmas present and never knew what to get.  Maybe you’d like to get me this year’s presents now, and have one less person on your list come December (I know, I know, it’s only March.  But I’m happy to forego gifts when these events come around in exchange for this opportunity.  There is nothing I am really lacking that can be wrapped up in paper and put under a tree.)  If you want to help me out with money, I have a paypal account under the email r.studinski (at) bellschools.pl.  Now, I know times are tough for everyone, especially in Wisconsin, right now, so I’m not expecting a lot of financial help, but I think it’s better to say this than leave it unsaid: in the event that your help (airline miles, money, etc.) allows me to come out of this with more than I need to get there and have my basic needs met, I will turn any leftover money into a direct financial contribution to Casa Guatemala.  It will not go into my bank account for beer or new shoes or whatever.
• Spanish lessons: I have exactly one year of junior high Spanish and a few months at a Milwaukee Community Center class.  I know at least some of the kids take English lessons, but they communicate in Spanish.  I’ve been working on brushing up (and learning new things), and my roommate Angela has been very encouraging and helpful, despite not speaking the language herself.  I know a few of you speak it, though. Maybe you want to write me emails in Spanish, or skype with me.  Maybe you don’t mind if I write you with random questions about the language.   Maybe you could come up with a list of useful expressions for me – you know, things like: “Give that back to him!” and “Take that out of your nose,” and “We don’t bite our friends!”
• A backpack: I will need to travel light, but I’m going to be in Guatemala for 3 months, and there are certain things I need to take.  I think a real backpackers pack is my best bet.  They are expensive.  I’m looking into buying one second-hand, but perhaps one of my readers has one I could borrow for the summer instead?  If you have to mail it to me, I can reimburse you for shipping, as it will still probably be cheaper than buying one.  I don’t mind if it’s not in brand-new condition or anything.  In fact, that’s probably better.  I don’t need to walk around looking like I have a lot of money.

OK, those are the main things I can think of right now that I have been concerned about. I’ll keep updating this blog as I make plans.  If you can help in any way, I’ll be forever indebted to you.  If you can’t, maybe you know someone who can, and you could pass this link on to them.  But as I said, the most important thing I can get from you is your support.  I'm sure this is the right thing to do, but it’s very different from anything I’ve ever done before.  So I'm a bit scared.  Maybe you have some experience that you think would be helpful for me to hear about, or you have some inspiring music for me, or you know of something that always makes you feel better when you’re nervous.  Maybe, somewhere along the way, you’ll just have a kind word for me when I get freaked out.  So far, you’ve been wonderful, and I couldn’t love you more for that.

So, thank you.  Again, and in advance, for helping me live my dreams.