(Note: This is the 3rd part of a 4-part series.)
Athens is a place where the pursuit of pleasure is tangible. Everything is raw and spinning and pulsing and heaving. If you stand still on the cracked concrete, the whole world twirls around you, and if you move down the streets, it moves with you and against you. The wagons tumbling with green purple orange red vegetables parked on corners. The carts of fresh pretzels speckled with sesame seeds. Smells of roasting meat and baking pastries and sweat smoke coffee sewer whirl in eddies. Flocks of prostitutes with jumbled angles of elbows knees stilettos cigarettes and profusions of feathery curves scatter and gather at street corners like tropical birds in rhythm with the cop patrols. Gangs of motorcycles grumble at each traffic light and take off in a roar. Noises wash you: buses whooshing, people shouting, music humping, children squealing, horns blasting. Passing radios drum out the soft Greek language percussion. Graffiti reads you past the reeking market alleys of hanging meat, past the trains of side shops shuttered in steel and the clumps of stray exhausted dogs, through the endless maze of main streets that spill out into teeming squares that siphon into side streets off of side streets off of side streets strewn with litter and benches and rotting oranges, and then up past the millions of orange trees and the rickety stores stacked on stores stacked on stores and up to the distant glimpses of ancient pillars that rise eternal and up to sky always watching, to sky always the still, diaphanous blue of a watchful eye.
In the midst of all this swirling passion and freedom, I was going to have fun, but first I had to figure out what sorts of things I wanted to do, and, as a recovering fundamentalist, this is no easy task.
I’ve often feared discovering my true desires, and I think this springs from a deep-seated fear of human nature. At the Baptist church I attended growing up, we were reminded weekly of how inherently evil human beings are. This knowledge, strengthened by that nagging consequence of burning in hell forever, motivated me to mistrust any and all of my natural inclinations. In other words, it caused me to actually feel uncomfortable when I was feeling comfortable. To, when joy knocked on the door, squint suspiciously through the peephole, assume it was selling one-way tickets to a fiery afterlife, and leave it out in the cold to freeze. This fear, coupled with a Protestant Work Ethic (the obligation to prove, through constant toil, that you’re really not going to hell), wrapped a double chord around my joy’s neck and pulled hard. I was relieved years later to find that she was not dead, just weak and sickly and understandably pissed.
I’m writing about pleasure today, but I’m going off on a joy tangent because pleasure and joy are closely connected. It takes a lot of time and effort to revive joy, to strip off all of those layers we have smothered it under all these years, and it’s impossible to do this all at once. So instead of trying to climb Mount Everest, I’m hiking little foothills. I am trying to coax my authentic self out through the small things I have denied it for so long, much as you would coax an abused animal out of hiding with enticing scraps of food.
Now, I don’t mean that I’m going to do whatever I want to do. As Paul reminds me when he writes to the Corinthians, “You say, ‘I am allowed to do anything’—but not everything is good for you. You say, ‘I am allowed to do anything’—but not everything is beneficial.” We must seek wisdom in order to discriminate between what a theology professor here calls “doggy freedom”, or that frenzied state a dog exhibits when it’s let out of its cage, and the freedom that builds up. It is in this discrimination that joy can be our North Star, our guiding light. The things we believe will give us the greatest lasting joy are the things to which God is beckoning us. Being drawn along by joy is quite different from being dragged along by fear. And it’s a hell of a lot more fun, too.
In Athens, I was heartened to discover that the things I truly wanted to do were all good, wholesome, interesting things. I didn’t want to hook up with a Greek demigod or take breaks from drunken, scantily-clad booty dancing to do keg stands of Mythos, Greece’s national beer. I didn’t want to chain-smoke cigarettes or get wasted on the pot that Scott was offered several times by a cast of shady characters. (Rory and I attributed this to Scott’s long hair, plaid shirt, remarkable thinness, and repeated use of the words “dude” and “totally”.) I didn’t even want to stay up late double-checking my Facebook account. No, I should have known, after all these years of idealizing Anne of Green Gables and Elizabeth Bennet, not to be afraid.
I wanted to wake early and walk the streets just hearing and feeling and smelling and seeing everything I possibly could. I wanted to pick armfuls of oranges from the trees that grew everywhere and sneak them back to our room. I wanted to make best friends, Lassie-style, with one of the stray dogs that hung out in Syntagma Square.
Happily, the other things I wanted to do were things that Scott and Rory wanted to do as well. We wanted to see the Acropolis, of course, and Haidan’s Library, and the Theatre of Dionysus, and the Temple of Zeus. We wanted to visit at least seven museums, attend the opera, take a tour through the countryside to visit Poseidon’s Temple, and dip our feet in the Mediterranean Sea. And, of course, we wanted to eat everything.
After our big budget blow on day one, we were trying to reign in our expenses. Thankfully, we discovered a restaurant close to our hotel that was appropriately called Joy’s. I only saw one of these places, so I’m hoping that I don’t discover, upon publishing this post, that it’s the equivalent of a Greek McDonald’s. Joy’s had every traditional Greek dish I had ever known, plus it was cheap and delicious. Scott, Rory, and I made it our home away from home and ate there nearly every day. We were hoping to develop a camaraderie with the staff, but they always seemed vaguely annoyed by our presence, so instead of saying goodbye on our final night, we just stuffed our bellies and rolled out the door.
A couple of times, we splurged on more expensive fare: heaping salads with whole blocks of feta cheese, pasta tossed in creamy tomato sauces, smoked salmon with mango and capers, steak and Guinness pie, baklava drizzled in honey. We felt especially honored on these occasions because both times the waiter brought out three shots to finish off the meal, compliments of the house. We didn’t realize this was standard until later, so we probably seemed ludicrously grateful.
We wore ourselves out stay-hungry style seeing nearly everything we wanted to see and doing nearly everything we wanted to do. We missed a couple of museums because of the holiday schedule, the opera because of the prices, and dipping our feet in the Mediterranean Sea because getting down there would have meant falling from a dangerous precipice (read: dying).
On one of our last days in Greece, we were making our way back to our hotel after much delighted exploration when we heard blaring music and joyful shouts coming from an alleyway. Rory, in his hell-bent pursuit to experience everything, wanted to investigate. Scott, the cautious voice of our trio, thought it wasn’t such a good idea. I, being the yin to Scott’s yang, had already decided that nothing Scott worried about could ever possibly come true. So Scott was outvoted 2 to 1, and investigate we did.
Down the alleyway was, literally, a hole in the wall, and this hole in the wall had been transformed into a bar. The bar was stuffed with about 15 sopping drunk Grecians who were still sober enough to realize they had guests and, being Greeks, they had to show those guests a good time. The beer began to flow. I say flow because I mean flow. The woman who was trying to pour us drinks was so generous (and drunk) that she poured about twice as much as would fit in each glass. The beer flooded the counter that had been built into the alley’s wall and made a river down to the drain. As I was lamenting the loss of the beer, a white disk sailed past the corner of my eye and broke into sharp shards on the floor beside me. I looked up just in time to step back and miss being boomeranged by another glass Frisbee, then another. I realized then that the bartender was lobbing plates over the counter. I had no idea, at that time, that breaking plates is something that Greeks reserve the right to do for pretty much any reason, so at the time I assumed the man to be either angry, crazy, or both. But then, despite his evident fury, his patrons began to dance on the broken glass. One woman with a feisty temper, a haggard face, and a wizened pair of teeth, began gyrating wildly on the shards as though possessed by Bacchus. A man with Gumby limbs and hair balding in the pattern of Wolverine from the X-Men came out in the alley to dance too, but his dance was more of a slow robot. This was probably because the broken ceramic pieces had the effect, when you stepped on them, of turning into spontaneous roller skates. The feisty woman danced with Rory, then a reluctant Scott, then Rory again, and she punctuated these dances by squeezing their faces with both hands and planting kisses on their cheeks, throwing a couple of glances in my direction to see if I minded. Meanwhile, ACDC came on the radio, and a middle-aged Bob Dylan in a Sex Pistols t-shirt played air guitar with an all-consuming passion while his friend screamed “ACDC!” over and over into an air microphone. The wizened-tooth woman, who had become a sort of itinerant hostess, decided that now we should switch to half liter glasses of straight whiskey instead of beer, just to get the party started. At that point we decided that, regrettably, it was time to go.
I thought of our hostess throughout that evening, as she had been so far gone before the sun was even close to setting. On my morning walk the next day, I decided to check out the alley again, just to make sure it actually existed and that no one was sleeping on the alleyway floor. When I passed, I did a double-take. The woman, our hostess, at 8:00 in the morning, was (still? already?) belly-up to the bar with a glass of beer, engaged in a heated debate with someone on the other side of the counter.
I didn’t know what to think, besides admiring her passion and stamina. I started to wonder how she and people like her fit in to the Stay Hungry philosophy. Maybe she was always hungry, but not on purpose, always trying to satiate that hunger with things that could never truly satisfy it, things that, in the end, would destroy her. We all have a hole inside of us, a nagging hole, a gaping hole that we try to fill with so many things: alcohol, food, work, TV, self-righteousness, the admiration of others. Earlier in my life, I would constantly entertain myself so that I could not feel it there, and later I would escape into drunken oblivions so that I could not feel it there. I spent my teenage years trying to fill it with dogma, trying to convince myself that I was right and others were wrong, to convince myself that on the day God drew the line, I would be in. And recently, I’ve shoveled the hole full with hours upon hours of work, work, work. But now, in a moment of quiet and contemplative freedom, I discover that, when you sit with that emptiness there in front of you, when you just sit with it, it fills itself up as every opening does when exposed: with fresh air, shadow, and light.
Saturday 23 January 2010
Thursday 14 January 2010
Stay Hungry, Part 2
(Note: This is the 2nd part of a 4-part series.)
On our very first day in Greece, I was reminded of the immutable truth that pleasure is most intense when it follows a very unpleasurable turn of events. We arrived in Greece after midnight, having purchased the cheapest flights we could find, and hailed a cab to take us to our hotel, which I thought I had booked. The cab driver rounded the 23 Euros on his meter up to 30 because we had luggage, luggage that he had watched us stack in the trunk and that, afterwards, he had handed to us with much unnecessary huffing and puffing. We reluctantly paid the bill and drug our bags up the steps, comforting ourselves out loud that we had at least found an affordable triple room to make up for that extra expenditure. We were then greeted at the front desk by two handsome teenage boys who insisted that, no, we had no reservation, but they could provide us with two separate rooms for the equivalent of $170 US dollars. I was livid. First the cab driver, now these guys. Was Greece conspiring against us?
Of course, we had no choice. We were on the outskirts of a new city in the middle of the night with no option for travel save disingenuous taxi drivers, so Rory and I plopped down our money with much unnecessary huffing and puffing, and we all climbed the eternal stairway to our rooms.
One thing I had resolved to do on this trip was to ask myself regularly what I wanted to do. When I sat down in bed to explore that option in my journal, the answer was, “I want to beat those Greek boys’ heads in with a hockey stick. And hey, while I’m at it, throw the taxi driver in there, too.” Yes, I am sorry to report that that was exactly what I wrote. In my defense, they were sickeningly smug and seemed to take great delight in our misfortunes. Still, although the fantasy intrigued me and although I had given myself permission to actually do the things I wanted to do, I could find no hockey stick, and I had never been athletic anyway. In addition to these things, I often praised the wisdom of nonviolence and would not be able to bear, on my future tirades, Scott reminding me, “but remember when you tried to beat those Greek boys’ heads in with a hockey stick?” So I decided that the next day, after a good night’s rest, I would return to the desk and recommend that they try smoked piggy ears at the earliest possible convenience. Then I rolled over and fell asleep.
The next morning rose bright and blue with that skin-tingling feeling that comes from being near a great body of water. I felt much less homicidal, even after trying to take a shower in a stall that was apparently designed for emaciated hobbits. We packed and breakfasted and turned our attention to the challenge at hand. Somehow we had to get downtown and find an affordable hotel. This involved many foreign things we hadn’t researched before: how to get bus tickets, how to figure out which bus to take, where to get the bus to stop, how to get the bus to stop, etc.
I’ll spare you the details of how we accomplished these things. It’s enough to know that it involved hopping a bus illegally because we couldn’t figure out how to buy tickets and then riding up and down 50 escalators until we figured out the metro system. About 4 hours later, we were still wandering the streets of downtown Athens with luggage that had somehow doubled in weight when a portly old Grecian recognized our vapid gazes and led us down a narrow side street to meet his good friend who was, of course, a travel agent. Enter the enigmatic Ulysses.
I don’t like being a suspicious person, but Greece had not exactly put its best foot forward, so we were anxiously waiting for this charismatic character to rip us off in some new and unexpected way. At the same time, we were so exhausted that we wanted to sit in his comfortable chairs for as long as possible. So Ulysses proceeded to weave his web of enticements until, hypnotized and fatigued, we caved, paid him for a very affordable week’s stay at the Hotel Moka, and left with explicit instructions as to how to find it.
We successfully found the metro stop, then the street, but when we located the precise spot where he had promised we would find said “very nice place,” Hotel Moka was simply not there. We circled the block once, then twice. Nothing. Nothing at all.
In all my paranoia, I assumed that we’d been had and that Hotel Moka didn’t even exist. Scott, in all his paranoia, took it a step further and assumed that, when we returned to the travel agency to confront Ulysses (I at the front with my hockey stick), we would find nothing more than an abandoned cavern with one remaining poster of Greece’s islands fluttering on the wall. Rory insisted (a bit naively, we thought) that setting up an entire travel agency just to trick 3 tourists and make 350 Euros would be a very labor-intensive way of making a profit. Little did he know. The only thing left to do was to find a bench and then wait to die.
Of course, it turns out that we were a block off, that Ulysses, the little trickster, had marked the wrong location and that we should have followed the address he had given us instead. We found Hotel Moka, discovered that our payment had indeed gone through, and began praising Ulysses for all of his kindness and foresight. How like the great Ulysses he truly was! How deserving of his name!
Then came the pleasure that only comes from a torrent of relief. We were in the center of downtown Athens in an affordable hotel, one block down from the most savory gyros and the richest and flakiest pastries I had ever known. It was going to be a lovely week after all.
On our very first day in Greece, I was reminded of the immutable truth that pleasure is most intense when it follows a very unpleasurable turn of events. We arrived in Greece after midnight, having purchased the cheapest flights we could find, and hailed a cab to take us to our hotel, which I thought I had booked. The cab driver rounded the 23 Euros on his meter up to 30 because we had luggage, luggage that he had watched us stack in the trunk and that, afterwards, he had handed to us with much unnecessary huffing and puffing. We reluctantly paid the bill and drug our bags up the steps, comforting ourselves out loud that we had at least found an affordable triple room to make up for that extra expenditure. We were then greeted at the front desk by two handsome teenage boys who insisted that, no, we had no reservation, but they could provide us with two separate rooms for the equivalent of $170 US dollars. I was livid. First the cab driver, now these guys. Was Greece conspiring against us?
Of course, we had no choice. We were on the outskirts of a new city in the middle of the night with no option for travel save disingenuous taxi drivers, so Rory and I plopped down our money with much unnecessary huffing and puffing, and we all climbed the eternal stairway to our rooms.
One thing I had resolved to do on this trip was to ask myself regularly what I wanted to do. When I sat down in bed to explore that option in my journal, the answer was, “I want to beat those Greek boys’ heads in with a hockey stick. And hey, while I’m at it, throw the taxi driver in there, too.” Yes, I am sorry to report that that was exactly what I wrote. In my defense, they were sickeningly smug and seemed to take great delight in our misfortunes. Still, although the fantasy intrigued me and although I had given myself permission to actually do the things I wanted to do, I could find no hockey stick, and I had never been athletic anyway. In addition to these things, I often praised the wisdom of nonviolence and would not be able to bear, on my future tirades, Scott reminding me, “but remember when you tried to beat those Greek boys’ heads in with a hockey stick?” So I decided that the next day, after a good night’s rest, I would return to the desk and recommend that they try smoked piggy ears at the earliest possible convenience. Then I rolled over and fell asleep.
The next morning rose bright and blue with that skin-tingling feeling that comes from being near a great body of water. I felt much less homicidal, even after trying to take a shower in a stall that was apparently designed for emaciated hobbits. We packed and breakfasted and turned our attention to the challenge at hand. Somehow we had to get downtown and find an affordable hotel. This involved many foreign things we hadn’t researched before: how to get bus tickets, how to figure out which bus to take, where to get the bus to stop, how to get the bus to stop, etc.
I’ll spare you the details of how we accomplished these things. It’s enough to know that it involved hopping a bus illegally because we couldn’t figure out how to buy tickets and then riding up and down 50 escalators until we figured out the metro system. About 4 hours later, we were still wandering the streets of downtown Athens with luggage that had somehow doubled in weight when a portly old Grecian recognized our vapid gazes and led us down a narrow side street to meet his good friend who was, of course, a travel agent. Enter the enigmatic Ulysses.
I don’t like being a suspicious person, but Greece had not exactly put its best foot forward, so we were anxiously waiting for this charismatic character to rip us off in some new and unexpected way. At the same time, we were so exhausted that we wanted to sit in his comfortable chairs for as long as possible. So Ulysses proceeded to weave his web of enticements until, hypnotized and fatigued, we caved, paid him for a very affordable week’s stay at the Hotel Moka, and left with explicit instructions as to how to find it.
We successfully found the metro stop, then the street, but when we located the precise spot where he had promised we would find said “very nice place,” Hotel Moka was simply not there. We circled the block once, then twice. Nothing. Nothing at all.
In all my paranoia, I assumed that we’d been had and that Hotel Moka didn’t even exist. Scott, in all his paranoia, took it a step further and assumed that, when we returned to the travel agency to confront Ulysses (I at the front with my hockey stick), we would find nothing more than an abandoned cavern with one remaining poster of Greece’s islands fluttering on the wall. Rory insisted (a bit naively, we thought) that setting up an entire travel agency just to trick 3 tourists and make 350 Euros would be a very labor-intensive way of making a profit. Little did he know. The only thing left to do was to find a bench and then wait to die.
Of course, it turns out that we were a block off, that Ulysses, the little trickster, had marked the wrong location and that we should have followed the address he had given us instead. We found Hotel Moka, discovered that our payment had indeed gone through, and began praising Ulysses for all of his kindness and foresight. How like the great Ulysses he truly was! How deserving of his name!
Then came the pleasure that only comes from a torrent of relief. We were in the center of downtown Athens in an affordable hotel, one block down from the most savory gyros and the richest and flakiest pastries I had ever known. It was going to be a lovely week after all.
Saturday 9 January 2010
Stay Hungry, Part 1
(Note: This is the 1st entry in a 4-part series.)
I have recently enjoyed the book “Eat Pray Love,” and, although one of my friends warns that you must be at least 47 years old to read it and I am only 29, I have found a burst of inspiration which will, I think, give a good angle on our wild and woolly winter break. In her memoir, Elizabeth Gilbert has an entire four months to pursue pleasure for its own sake across the landscape of Italy. She wrote so engagingly of these experiences that I wanted to do the same thing, albeit on a much smaller scale (3 weeks to her 12) and a less provocative one (2 weeks of frost-bitten tundra as opposed to, well, ITALY.) Still, to be fair, we did make it to Greece, plus I was not compelled to give up sex like she was, so I guess we’re even.
First off, pleasure of pleasures, my brother Rory has spent the last three weeks with us and, as I write this, is hovering somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, hopefully on a comfortable chair which is also in an airplane which is also flying. We are already missing him enormously. (To comfort ourselves, we have been yawning loudly, and then following it up with an apathetic “shit,” just to feel like he’s still here.)
Secondly, on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day we were surrounded by the love and warmth of new friends: our endlessly hospitable neighbor and friend Geri (who makes a mean pot of soup, coffee, eggnog, spiced wine, and probably anything else that comes in a pot) and a few other groovy women from the university (who despite their youth can bake like uber-grannies). Thanks to them and to Rory’s visit, our Lithuanian Christmas actually felt like Christmas. The bad part was that, because it felt just like Christmas, I did what I do every Christmas: I gorged myself within an inch of participating as a blimp in the New Year’s Day Parade. Only I would not be a floating blimp. I would be a tipsy blimp that gets dragged behind the truck and eventually explodes like a garbage bag full of vegetable soup.
I don’t know why I do this, but I think it has something to do with a misplaced pursuit of pleasure. The problem is, it doesn’t please me; it makes me miserable. It could be that Christmas brings with it so many idealized expectations-love and peace and joy and the hope that, for one day at least, we will all experience a sense of rest and fulfillment. I guess as a recovering fundamentalist and Midwesterner, I take the “fulfillment” part too literally and promptly belly up to the 24-hour saturated sugar-salt-fat buffet. But it’s more than that. I think it has to do with the dualistic nature of my thinking.
It’s a pretty common phenomenon to separate our concepts into two columns: hate vs. love, black vs. white, right vs. wrong, etc. It’s a quick and easy way of stating one’s views and coming to a fragile understanding on a subject. The problem is, of course, that reality is not that simple. Case in point: me listlessly devouring a Christmas feast (and Christmas cocktails) for four, then realizing how horrible I felt, and then continuing. You see, sometimes I still struggle to understand that there are options beyond asceticism vs. libertinism, binge vs. purge, and tee totaling vs. walking into doorjambs and making embarrassing jokes that I will regret later in a hazy reminiscence. (Note to concerned parental figures: I am not, nor ever will be, either bulimic or alcoholic.)
This dichotomizing happens most notably with my concepts of work and leisure. Now, first I should say that I adore my work, especially the work that I am doing here in Lithuania. However, I still have this nagging belief that because work is challenging, difficult, unpleasant, and rigid (even though it’s not), vacation should be the opposite: an effortless, easy, pleasure-filled free-for-all. Unfortunately, this usually translates to me force-feeding all of the lesser parts of my nature until I end up resembling a skinny female Jabba the Hutt who takes up her fleshy residence on the couch and refuses to budge.
Having realized this tendency once again, I resolved to do things differently this vacation. Rather than surrender to a 3-week-long state of collapse, I would seek that evasive middle road that I usually only encounter in passing, while I am ricocheting from one extreme to another.
Rory’s visit helped. Despite the ice and snowdrifts and bitter, bitter wind, he was determined to take in everything he possibly could during his time here, and I, his loving sister and hostess, necessarily took part as well. Together we wandered through the outdoor sculpture park snapping photos until we lost all feeling in our appendages. One day we rose at 6 to take a 7 am ferry across the lagoon and hop a freezing bus down to Nida, a quaint fishing village near Kaliningrad. We attended a show at the Dolphinarium on the spit. We traveled to Palanga and visited the Amber Museum, then walked the streets with steaming cups of hot beer and wine. We sampled all of the other Lithuanian delights as well: kepta duona (fried rye bread with cheese, mayonnaise, and garlic), cepelinai (meat-stuffed potato dumplings), Svyturys Baltas (the local beer), koldunai (yet another meat-stuffed dumpling creation), karstas sokoladas (Lithuanian hot chocolate, which is like a cup straight from Willy Wonka’s chocolate river), and smoked piggy ears, which I would not recommend even to my mortal enemy.
During our outdoor adventures, I was struck chiefly by one thought: I AM COLD. And I mean COLD. We don’t have a car, and bus stops are far apart, so even if you use public transportation, you still have to walk a lot. Also, many places, especially buses, are poorly heated, so when you are inside them, you can still see your breath freeze. Your frozen fingers and toes only go from numb to aching, never from numb to warm.
In our walk through the sculpture park, Rory mentioned the phrase “stay hungry,” which I mistakenly attributed to a German philosopher instead of its true source: a Twisted Sister album with a demented man on the cover profanely licking a giant bone. (Sorry, Grandma.)
I’m glad that I didn’t know about this album cover because this phrase, for me anyway, does hold some wisdom. It reminds me that living fully (i.e. pleasurably) demands a certain level of discomfort. It also reminds me that we disengage from life when we invest all of our time and resources in avoiding any such discomfort. Children know this instinctively when they freeze their little butts off in the snow for the sheer joy of play, but as adults we often forget. Despite the impending frostbite, I repeated this phrase over and over to myself, making it my new mantra. “Stay hungry, stay cold. Stay hungry, stay cold.” Of course, I was hoping that, once we made it to Greece, pleasure would flow in brimming rivers of milk and honey. As usual, I was the slightest bit off.
I have recently enjoyed the book “Eat Pray Love,” and, although one of my friends warns that you must be at least 47 years old to read it and I am only 29, I have found a burst of inspiration which will, I think, give a good angle on our wild and woolly winter break. In her memoir, Elizabeth Gilbert has an entire four months to pursue pleasure for its own sake across the landscape of Italy. She wrote so engagingly of these experiences that I wanted to do the same thing, albeit on a much smaller scale (3 weeks to her 12) and a less provocative one (2 weeks of frost-bitten tundra as opposed to, well, ITALY.) Still, to be fair, we did make it to Greece, plus I was not compelled to give up sex like she was, so I guess we’re even.
First off, pleasure of pleasures, my brother Rory has spent the last three weeks with us and, as I write this, is hovering somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, hopefully on a comfortable chair which is also in an airplane which is also flying. We are already missing him enormously. (To comfort ourselves, we have been yawning loudly, and then following it up with an apathetic “shit,” just to feel like he’s still here.)
Secondly, on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day we were surrounded by the love and warmth of new friends: our endlessly hospitable neighbor and friend Geri (who makes a mean pot of soup, coffee, eggnog, spiced wine, and probably anything else that comes in a pot) and a few other groovy women from the university (who despite their youth can bake like uber-grannies). Thanks to them and to Rory’s visit, our Lithuanian Christmas actually felt like Christmas. The bad part was that, because it felt just like Christmas, I did what I do every Christmas: I gorged myself within an inch of participating as a blimp in the New Year’s Day Parade. Only I would not be a floating blimp. I would be a tipsy blimp that gets dragged behind the truck and eventually explodes like a garbage bag full of vegetable soup.
I don’t know why I do this, but I think it has something to do with a misplaced pursuit of pleasure. The problem is, it doesn’t please me; it makes me miserable. It could be that Christmas brings with it so many idealized expectations-love and peace and joy and the hope that, for one day at least, we will all experience a sense of rest and fulfillment. I guess as a recovering fundamentalist and Midwesterner, I take the “fulfillment” part too literally and promptly belly up to the 24-hour saturated sugar-salt-fat buffet. But it’s more than that. I think it has to do with the dualistic nature of my thinking.
It’s a pretty common phenomenon to separate our concepts into two columns: hate vs. love, black vs. white, right vs. wrong, etc. It’s a quick and easy way of stating one’s views and coming to a fragile understanding on a subject. The problem is, of course, that reality is not that simple. Case in point: me listlessly devouring a Christmas feast (and Christmas cocktails) for four, then realizing how horrible I felt, and then continuing. You see, sometimes I still struggle to understand that there are options beyond asceticism vs. libertinism, binge vs. purge, and tee totaling vs. walking into doorjambs and making embarrassing jokes that I will regret later in a hazy reminiscence. (Note to concerned parental figures: I am not, nor ever will be, either bulimic or alcoholic.)
This dichotomizing happens most notably with my concepts of work and leisure. Now, first I should say that I adore my work, especially the work that I am doing here in Lithuania. However, I still have this nagging belief that because work is challenging, difficult, unpleasant, and rigid (even though it’s not), vacation should be the opposite: an effortless, easy, pleasure-filled free-for-all. Unfortunately, this usually translates to me force-feeding all of the lesser parts of my nature until I end up resembling a skinny female Jabba the Hutt who takes up her fleshy residence on the couch and refuses to budge.
Having realized this tendency once again, I resolved to do things differently this vacation. Rather than surrender to a 3-week-long state of collapse, I would seek that evasive middle road that I usually only encounter in passing, while I am ricocheting from one extreme to another.
Rory’s visit helped. Despite the ice and snowdrifts and bitter, bitter wind, he was determined to take in everything he possibly could during his time here, and I, his loving sister and hostess, necessarily took part as well. Together we wandered through the outdoor sculpture park snapping photos until we lost all feeling in our appendages. One day we rose at 6 to take a 7 am ferry across the lagoon and hop a freezing bus down to Nida, a quaint fishing village near Kaliningrad. We attended a show at the Dolphinarium on the spit. We traveled to Palanga and visited the Amber Museum, then walked the streets with steaming cups of hot beer and wine. We sampled all of the other Lithuanian delights as well: kepta duona (fried rye bread with cheese, mayonnaise, and garlic), cepelinai (meat-stuffed potato dumplings), Svyturys Baltas (the local beer), koldunai (yet another meat-stuffed dumpling creation), karstas sokoladas (Lithuanian hot chocolate, which is like a cup straight from Willy Wonka’s chocolate river), and smoked piggy ears, which I would not recommend even to my mortal enemy.
During our outdoor adventures, I was struck chiefly by one thought: I AM COLD. And I mean COLD. We don’t have a car, and bus stops are far apart, so even if you use public transportation, you still have to walk a lot. Also, many places, especially buses, are poorly heated, so when you are inside them, you can still see your breath freeze. Your frozen fingers and toes only go from numb to aching, never from numb to warm.
In our walk through the sculpture park, Rory mentioned the phrase “stay hungry,” which I mistakenly attributed to a German philosopher instead of its true source: a Twisted Sister album with a demented man on the cover profanely licking a giant bone. (Sorry, Grandma.)
I’m glad that I didn’t know about this album cover because this phrase, for me anyway, does hold some wisdom. It reminds me that living fully (i.e. pleasurably) demands a certain level of discomfort. It also reminds me that we disengage from life when we invest all of our time and resources in avoiding any such discomfort. Children know this instinctively when they freeze their little butts off in the snow for the sheer joy of play, but as adults we often forget. Despite the impending frostbite, I repeated this phrase over and over to myself, making it my new mantra. “Stay hungry, stay cold. Stay hungry, stay cold.” Of course, I was hoping that, once we made it to Greece, pleasure would flow in brimming rivers of milk and honey. As usual, I was the slightest bit off.
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