Me No Spleen

I had my first cold, which was drippy and exhausting enough to land my sniffly butt in the doctor’s office while I should have been teaching. I had unsuccessfully searched for the word “spleen” in my English-Lithuanian dictionary, as I don’t have one and felt the need to warn the doctor of this. Not finding the word increased my trepidation as I had already heard horror stories about the Lithuanian healthcare system. One of my friends told me that when he had stomach pains they’d folded him up in the fetal position and placed a wooden block in his mouth. It turns out that the block was actually just to assist in slipping a tube down his throat, not to prevent him from biting off his tongue in a paroxysm of pain while they amputated an unsuspecting limb or probed cold, pointy metal instruments into orifices unmentionable, but it sounded barbaric enough to scare the hell out of me.

Luckily, a friend who speaks a good deal of Lithuanian picked me up and drove me. She signed me up for my appointment, then took me upstairs to find our door. Here you sign up as early as you can, wait in a long line and then shove your way in as soon as the preceding patient exits. In this way it is similar to lines anywhere in Lithuania: at the grocery store, for example, or the public toilet. Had my friend not taken me, I would not have known that the Lithuanian woman with the grimacing underbite who followed us in wasn’t shouting “I’m going to bite you,” but was instead yelling “I’m next, you American idiots!” Nor would I have known that it’s normal for the doctor to have only one room with the door always opening and closing, and that it was apparently perfectly acceptable for the audience of sickos waiting in line behind us to get several fleeting glimpses of my bare, hunched back. Had she not been there, I might have mistaken my doctor’s visit for another of my messed up dreams.

The doctor “spoke English,” which I shouldn’t sarcastically put in quotes because she definitely had more English than I have Lithuanian. My friend still had to translate her English for me. Only after Robin had dropped me off at my apartment did I realize that the doctor had been telling me to “drink liters tea” and “lay bed long time.”

Somehow the lack of language increased my sense of the barbarity, as though we were pointing and grunting and gesturing with clubs. The cave-woman speaking match came to a climax when I tried desperately to communicate my lack of spleen.

“I have a stomach. I have a liver. I have kidneys. I don’t have a spleen.”

At least I didn’t switch completely over to Tarzan mode. “Me no spleen. Me sick no good.”

Now, ironically, thanks to “drinking liters tea,” “laying bed long time,” and “eating two pill day,” I am back to teaching students valuable lessons about prepositions and word choice. I am also back in my Introductory Lithuanian class, where I have happily resumed clubbing their language to death.

29 Is a Prime Number

I know that this is ridiculous, but 29 sounds a lot older than 28. And yet, my 29th birthday passed happily enough. Scott and I figured out how to hop a minibus and visit Palanga, the equivalent, it turns out, of a runty Eastern European Cedar Point. I was disappointed to find out that the rides were only for children; however, I was thankful that I realized this before embarrassing myself with the broken Lithuanian dialogue I’d been planning:

“How much game? Want one, please.”

For the dinner portion of my Lithuanian birthday, we decided to sample some more traditional Lithuanian food. At the restaurant, after two warm half cups of Lithuanian-style Coca Cola (no ice and no refills), I had my first cepelinai, which is a strangely translucent potato dumpling shaped like a UFO, stuffed with meat and orbiting the plate in a mystery cream sauce. It tastes quite good until it lands in the very bottom of your stomach like a boulder and makes it difficult to walk. Scott also ate another traditional edible boulder: a deep fried pancake stuffed, you guessed it, with meat.

After much groaning and belly rubbing, we dragged ourselves out of our seats and down the Palanga boardwalk to the Baltic Sea, where we walked out on the pier and then barefoot across the sand, all the while thinking wistful thoughts about age and eternity appropriate to the sea and the day.

Of course, there was really only one thought circling around and around my head: “I am 29. I am 29.” Now, I know that 29 is not old, and I know that many of you are going to read this and say “Michelle, honestly, wait until you at least have kids and age spots before you wax eloquent on aging.” That’s probably good advice, but I’m going to go ahead anyway.

In the United States, I’ve always been conscious of how much the culture worships the appearance of youth at the expense of reality and of how a woman is not considered truly successful unless she is also hot, regardless of her age. I’ve known women who’ve spent the best years of their lives in front of department store mirrors, cursing their tiniest flaws and all the while thinking of new, painful ways to punish themselves into a more socially acceptable shape.

But in the U.S., there is also the I-don’t-give-a-damn-so-you-can-shove-it constituent, the women who just let their hair go gray when it goes gray, who do not curse their bodies for growing slightly softer and rounder with age, who wear comfortable shoes even though they may not be the cutest style, who think a lot more about whether their buying practices are supporting child labor than whether the pieces are the most modern or the most flattering.

I have always admired these women, women like my mother who approach life with a healthy balance of stylish sense and graceful acceptance. Women who embody Anne Lammott’s longing to, as they age, earn a face of kindness and integrity. This is the kind of woman I want to be, and, up until recently, I had plenty of role models for that.

But if the superficial forces are still alive and well in the US of A, they’ve totally taken over the women of Lithuania.

I walk to and from the university each day, and each day I feel as though I am wearing a giant cardboard placard that reads: “I, Michelle Webster-Hein, have given up.” Mostly this has to do with my shoes. There’s no way in hell that I’m going to traverse 35 minutes to and fro in my cute teaching flats, so each morning I stab my vanity within an inch of its life by donning my beat-up sneakers over my tights and making the trek. One day last week I was wearing a pair of striped capris. With tennis-shoes.

“I look like a clown,” I told Scott as I gazed into the full-length mirror that morning. I was hoping that he would contradict me. He responded by humming the carnival tune and dancing around like a drunken marionette.

But it’s not just the shoes. It’s the whole damn thing: the make-up, the perfectly-styled hair, the matching handbags. The overwhelming number of stick-thin women who seriously look like they just stepped out of a Vogue advertisement. It makes me feel like I used to in high school shuffling back and forth between classes in my marching band sweatshirt. Only here it’s worse because here no one else even considered joining marching band.

I shared my observations with a friend who is slightly older and much wiser than me. She told me about her own Feminist-Marxist interpretation as to why Lithuanian women dress the way they do. Basically, they don’t have as many opportunities here as they do on our side of the pond, so they have to boost their “assets”. Fair enough. Another friend of mine claimed that they dress that way because, due to alcoholism and lack of male role models, the pickings are slim, and, as a result, the competition is high. Another valid point.

So why should this make me angry? Can’t I just chalk it up to cultural/personal differences and let it go?

Not yet, not until I say this and remind myself that I believe it: Society’s ideals of beauty keep women down. They keep us down because they are always asking of us the impossible, the impossible into which, to make others happy, we end up pouring so much of our precious time and our precious resources, all, ultimately, to no avail.

And, though sometimes I feel these young years slipping past too quickly, though sometimes I want with all of my heart to be that grand and ageless turner of heads, I will not be a part of it. I will seek true beauty, and the rest I will let go.

So now I am 29, a number divisible by nothing save one and itself. A number that makes no neat set of rows. A number that only fits into something as wild and wide and yielding as the sea around my fingers and the sand around my feet.

Lithuania is great; on the other hand, ...

Ok. Since I don’t have as much time anymore, I’ll give you the abbreviated version of the witty-yet-tender, pulitzer-prize-worthy entry I wrote earlier and accidentally deleted.

My students have been working on conjunctive adverbs (therefore, in addition, nevertheless, etc.), and I asked them to write 5 sentences, one using the connector “on the other hand.” One student came up with this:

“He’s a great boss; on the other hand, he’s a brutal dictator.”

Ah, duplicity. Which leads me to the title of my post.

Lithuania is great; on the other hand…
1) I ordered fish-eel soup (my own fault), in which were drifting fins and long bits of bone.

2) Scott has come down with a feverish cold and been out sick for three days. Poor guy. He’s feeling better now, but I think his two jobs are putting a major strain on his natural resources. I tell him to consider cutting back his hours, but he is dedicated to both endeavors and won’t hear of it.

3) Because Scott was sick, I went grocery shopping alone and got stuck in the rain dragging 40 pounds of food and cleaning products 10 blocks home along the already-muddy sidewalk. (This is actually a valuable lesson which also explains why people go shopping every day here, or at least every couple of days.)

4) Anyone who is reading this is most likely not here.

Yes, Lithuania is the experience of a lifetime, and we haven't once regretted our decision to come here. Still, sometimes even the shadows move differently across my ceiling at night, and, although I have propped up my chin with an unbreakable stick, I miss all of you. I miss my home.

First Days

September 1st, unless it lands on a weekend, is always the first day of school in Lithuania and, as such, it’s also a national holiday. The students all wear starched and pressed uniforms and carry handfuls of flowers to their teachers. Lithuanian folk dancers in traditional clothing spin out their patterned skirts in the public squares. The mayor gives a well-attended oration, and everybody cheers. It feels the way the first day of school was always supposed to feel had there been no bullies or puberty, just a promising year full of good books and good work and, at least for that day, the infinite possibility of knowledge taking you wherever you wanted to go.

All that possibility felt nearly palpable this morning as I crossed the bridge over the green-gold river and passed the men with their bristle brooms and reflective jackets spot-cleaning the sidewalks, the women with their kerchiefs and puckered faces setting out the wooden crates of pears and plums and, today, flowers at the roadside stands and, of course, the children, even a teenage boy with dirty sneakers and greasy hair but also with a crisp green blazer and arms full of roses.

It was in that wash of excitement and apprehension that I arrived at the school well before 8 o’clock and promptly set up shop in the lecture hall, about 30 minutes early.

At this point, it would probably be helpful to explain what exactly I’m doing here. I am one of the two instructors in the Intensive English Program, which is only one year old. We have a total of 30 students whose English is not yet high enough for university study. Our job is, in nine months, to get each student’s English to that point. My workload is pretty heavy for a professor: I have 16 teaching hours per week, and one of them is a writing class (6 assignments with 2-3 drafts of each!), not exactly a light prep. Although I will surely get tired and discouraged, right now I am head-over-heels in love with the challenge and all of the surprises in store. As evidenced by my showing up half an hour before class was supposed to start.

So, back in the lecture hall, I occupied myself by turning on and off the speakers (just to make sure they were working), turning on and off the projector, moving the whiteboard to the middle of the stage and then back and then somewhere in the middle, rereading my lesson plans, and reapplying my chapstick.

Despite fueling all of my neuroses, when the students finally started showing up, I behaved like a normal human being: I smiled, said “Welcome!”, and played selections from Bach’s Cello Suites over the speakers, partly to make sure the speakers were still working and partly to infuse the sense of calm, purpose, and poise I wanted so desperately to feel.

Though I worry myself into a blind panic whenever I have to stand in front of a classroom for the first time, I think that teaching will always be a part of my life no matter what I end up ultimately doing. As my students file into their rows with their new notebooks and planners and pens, their bashful glances, some of the boys in ties-one in a full suit!-I am overcome by this strange mixture of maternal adoration and concern for their well-being. I have always had this feeling when it comes to new students, and I have yet to decide whether or not it’s healthy. All I know is that I want to try my damnedest to 1) give them the best opportunities possible and 2) not look like an obsequious fool.

In this spirit of joy and quiet concern, my classes slid smoothly by. I found the teaching zone and stayed there. By the end of the day, I learned everyone’s names and, I hope, imparted a sense of purpose, hope, and goodwill. In other words, LCC was not my old high school, I did not get lost, my lesson plans were not covered in cartoon characters, my students were not students whom I’d failed before, and I lost no crucial pieces of clothing. And so, I believe I can, compared to my dreams at least, declare my first day teaching at LCC a success.