Wild Beets and Fishermen

"The World Beats Dead"

2010-05-09T14:23:00.000-07:00

(This is the fifth part in a five-part series.)

Thing We Will Miss #1: The People

Now the sun has risen over our last day in Lithuania. We have packed and weighed our luggage. We have scrubbed our toilet and emptied our refrigerator and swept our floor. Tomorrow at this time we will be somewhere in the airspace between Vilnius and Frankfurt, and by midnight Michigan time we will finally have arrived in Detroit. And so it is at this moment that our thoughts naturally turn toward exactly what it is we will miss most: all the people here whom we have come to know and to love.

I will miss my students: their humor, their kindness, their intelligence. I will miss being in the midst of all that potential and determination and having the opportunity to give it shape and direction. And as time continues to march onward, I will miss watching them do all of the tremendous things that they will undoubtedly do.

We will miss all the long-termers at LCC who taught us the ropes: people like Jared and Carrie, our appointed “buddies” and now friends, who gave us an in-depth introduction to the supermarket, the outdoor market, the bus system, the currency, and the cell phone situation. People like my boss and friend Robin, who, despite that she is a volunteer herself and has been here for years, welcomed us graciously to Klaipeda, fed us, took us on trips with childlike gusto, and made us feel unique and appreciated. People like our neighbor Geri, who made us cookies when we were stressed and soup when we were sick and graciously put up with us borrowing her furniture and wiping out her Internet. People like Steve and Laura, two generous souls who have an entire Lonely Planet’s guide worth of travel advice and the kindness to share it.

We will miss our co-volunteers, the others who came last August to commit a part of their lives to this remarkable place: Grace, my office mate and best bud, who became as close and comfortable as family to both of us. Mark and Sherry, our musical cohorts. The VanderArks, who, between the three of them, have read more books than everyone in the state of Rhode Island combined. Becky and Erik, who were crazy enough to invite everyone over to their apartment at 7:30 each Friday morning for a homemade breakfast and a time of communal thanksgiving.

And we will miss all of the other Lithuanian and non-Lithuanian staff and faculty at LCC who keep the place running: Scott’s IT colleagues Antonius, Aurelius, and Roman, along with his lovely wife Ksenija; our Lithuanian professor Radvyda, who should probably be sainted for her profound patience; the eternally cheerful Ilona, the gracious Robertus; the accommodating and affable Vaida.

As we leave these people, along with many others I failed to mention, we leave a community that has taken us in unconditionally and supported us beyond any of our expectations. We move forward with an emptiness in the impressions they have left upon our hearts.

Thing We Will Not Miss #1: Missing Other People

Although we will greatly miss all of the people over here, we do look forward to not missing all of the people over there. It seems as though, with all of the advancements in technology, living overseas would not feel like such an insurmountable distance, but still it does. There is e-mail, Facebook, Google chat, and endless variations on these themes. There is even Skype, a program that allows you to video chat for free with anyone anywhere who has a webcam and an Internet connection. These are wonderful things, and they do make distances seem considerably shorter. But does anyone else out there find each of these methods, especially Skype, to be strangely unfulfilling sometimes?

Before Scott and I left for Lithuania, I told myself that Skype would be sufficient for communicating with family and friends. It didn’t take long to see how far off I was. Don’t get me wrong; Skype is a precious invention. Still, it can also be extremely awkward.

The problem with Skype is that we tell ourselves it’s just like being in the room with someone. I guess it’s that expectation that makes the actual experience so disappointing. Sometimes I find myself thinking: Wow. Does it really feel this painful to be in a room full of family and friends? And the answer is, inevitably, no. One time we Skyped during a friend’s birthday party. Our friend called us up, then put us on a table. People would accidentally walk in front of the computer and then realize that they had been caught. The problem is, after you get stuck on the screen, you can’t just walk away and leave the computer people with no one to talk to, regardless of whether or not you know them. It’s kind of like answering a phone call from a very persistent salesperson or not walking fast enough past one of those Mormon missionaries. You have a moment where you think, “Dammit; why didn’t I stay in the corner where it was safe?” or “Next time I’ll make sure to walk across the other side of the room.” But you realize that there’s nothing you can do at that moment, so you’re just going to have to stand there for several blundering minutes and flounder for questions to which you don’t care to hear the answers. The aforementioned birthday party was particularly painful.

(A man who is married to someone’s high school band teacher, after he has inadvertently scratched his nether region directly in front of the webcam, glances down to see us grimacing out.)

Man: “Whoa! Hey! How you guys doing over there?”

Us: “Good.”

Me: “Great, really.”

Scott: “Yeah, great. Lovin’ it.”

(Man looks around for someone to save him; no one appears.)

Man: “Well, so….how do you like it over there?”

Us: “We love it.”

Scott: “We love it, but it sure is different.”

Me: “Yeah, it is different. We love it, though.

Scott: “Boy do we.”

(Man takes a long drink of beer, reaches for crotch, then reconsiders. Man drinks again. Looks back and forth. Party seems to have become strangely unpopulated.)

I would ask the man questions, but within the past minute I have become socially retarded. Plus, I do not actually know who the man is.

Man: “You guys are probably seeing a lot of things you wouldn’t see over here, huh?”

Us: “Yeah, sure are.”

Scott: “Yeah, you wouldn’t believe it, dude, seriously.”

Me: (in a whisper to Scott) “Wait. What’s his name? Dude?”

Dude: “What? I can’t hear you. You’re cutting out.”

(Skype hangs up. We breathe a collective sigh of relief. Then we feel guilty and call back. The person who answers creates some lame excuse and leaves the screen. After a couple of minutes, another unsuspecting victim, a cousin this time, gets caught in the webcam tractor beam. Looks over, realizes his mistake, tries to conceal his disappointment. Shakes it off.)

Cousin: “So, you two. How’s it going in Lebanon?”

These are unique and exaggerated examples, but you get the point. How many people in your immediate “community”, whatever it consists of, can you sit down and have a meaningful conversation with? Honestly? We have this idea that if we share words, especially if images come with those words, then we have communication. Many people, especially the older generation, despair about how people don’t have real relationships anymore, about how youth would prefer to communicate via computer and cell phone rather than face-to-face. It is perfectly acceptable for teenagers and twenty-somethings to answer a phone call right in the middle of a conversation now; I’ve done this myself. I’ve even facebook-messaged someone rather than walk 20 feet and knock on their door. But I realize now that the older generation has a point. Real community, real intimacy, even real communication is not just about saying the right words at the right time. And it’s not about saying enough of the right words. It’s also about being in one another’s physical presence. It’s about listening to my dad play guitar in the morning over coffee and helping my mother feed the horses and chasing my parent’s demonic dog around the backyard and taking a long walk with my brother and hoisting my nephews up on my shoulders and driving with my sister to the gas station for a disgusting cup of coffee because we have a Beantown Coffee Club card and think it’s hilarious. It’s about sitting next to people and sharing the same food and laughing at the same jokes even if you are falling off the left wing in your “Marriage is so gay” t-shirt while half your extended family members own entire walk-in closets full of firearms.

This is what we will miss, and this is what we will not miss. This is why we are so sad to leave and why we are also so indubitably glad to come home.

Because of you.

Captain Duona Versus the Ceburekine

2010-05-08T04:20:00.000-07:00

(This is part four of a five-part series.)

Thing We Will Miss #2: The Food

No, Lithuanian cuisine is not as renowned as, say, Italian cuisine or Japanese cuisine, and it’s easy to understand why. Yet there are still certain foods that you can only get here, foods that my digestive tract will remember with a vaguely confused nostalgia. I think it must be similar to the psychological state of falling in love with one’s kidnapper.

Item #7: Koldunai: chewy, palm-sized noodles folded around nuggets of gray mystery meat. I know that sounds horrible. In fact, maybe they are horrible. I’m not sure if I like these because they are actually palatable or because you can buy them frozen at the store and boil them up in less than 10 minutes.

Item #6: Saltibarsciai. Don’t let the chalky pink hue of Pepto Bismol fool you, or the fact that “saltibarsciai” translates to “cold beet soup”. Just close your eyes, plug your nose, and swallow.

Item #5: The Pomelo. These hefty, golden orbs are the patriarch of grapefruit. In fact, the grapefruit is Mr. Pomelo and Lil’ Ms. Orange’s famous baby. Imagine a grapefruit, double it in size, and extract all the extra juice. Also imagine that, when you split it open, its insides look just like the guts of that snow creature that Luke Skywalker slaughtered and slept inside at the beginning of “The Empire Strikes Back.” On second thought, leave that part out.

Item #4: Karstas Sokoladas, or “hot chocolate”, but without the extra liquid. Break up a dark chocolate bar, boil it down, and then drink it before it hardens. Now your esophagus has officially taken a figurative dip in Willy Wonka’s chocolate river. Hopefully you can still breathe.

Item #3: Chocolate Varske Surelis Bars. Lithuanians have discovered the inbred lovechild of ice cream and cream cheese, and it is as stupidly beautiful and delicious as you could ever hope it would be.

Item #2: Svyturys Baltas. This unfiltered Lithuanian brew, to our taste, leaves German wheat beers in the dust. Scott has even written meticulous letters to distribution companies in Michigan. Yes, that’s right, all you family members who have longed in vain for a letter from Scott. Maybe you should have been distributing Lithuanian beer instead. (To be fair, Scott was inquiring where we could get Svytyrus Baltas for the Lithuanian party we’re planning to throw after we get back.)

Item #1: Kepta Duona. Literally “fried bread”, these buttery rye sticks are sprinkled with garlic, then drowned in mayonnaise and cheese. They are also the inspiration for Scott’s alter ego, Lithuanian superhero Captain Duona.

Thing We Will Not Miss #2: The Food

I have already whined at great length about the food in Lithuania, so I need not wax eloquent here. I need not reiterate how my stomach convulses when I consider the heaps of boiled and fried potatoes I have reluctantly consumed, the lugubrious cement-colored slabs of what I hope is 100% meat, the virtual buckets of sour cream sauce, which is actually (Tada!) just sour cream. I need not ruminate over my failed attempts to recreate my mother’s recipes, nor do I need to restate just what has to happen psychologically in order to get to the point where you see “pig neck” on a menu and decide to order it because at least then you know which part of the little porker you will be hesitantly masticating upon.

No, I have already dwelled on such things enough. Instead, I will simply describe one Lithuanian entrée that I have heretofore tried my best to forget: the ceburekine.

Tell me: What comes to mind when you think of elephant ears? Cinnamon sugar? Fruit toppings? That luscious combination of soft and crispy textures that melds your mouth into a sweet and doughy bliss? Yes? Good for you. I’m glad that you have such positive associations. I, too, would like to think of elephant ears as you do, but, alas, I cannot. Not after my run-in with the ceburekine.

The ceburekine looks like an elephant ear. It is delightfully doughy, deep-fried, even ear-shaped. But this, my naïve friends, is where the similarities end. The ceburekine, for all I know, is actually the ear of an elephant. That is, it is stuffed with heavily-salted meaty gray rubber. And I ate one. In its entirety. Please don’t ask me why. It could have something to do with the fact that the ceburekine stand looked like a mini-circus tent. It could be that I have a deeply misleading belief that absolutely anything is delicious when lathered in batter and deep fried. Or it could be that I, in the early days of my Lithuanian experience, was determined, literally, to take everything in, and, what’s more, to do it with a blind, untasting, unquestioning glee.

Now, as Scott and I move into our final Saturday in Klaipeda, Lithuania, we can happily say that we drank our Lithuanian lives to the dregs, regardless of how much retching it took to get parts of that greasy gray potato milkshake all the way down.

My Carbon Footprint Just Kicked My Carbon Footprint's Ass

2010-05-07T17:35:00.000-07:00

(This is part three of a five-part series.)

Thing We Will Miss #3: Living a More Eco-Friendly Lifestyle

Living in Lithuania, in many ways, forces you to be kinder to the Earth. Scott and I don’t have a car, nor do we need one. We walk to and from school, or we use public transportation. There are local buses (the ones I wrote disparagingly of in an earlier post), and there are slightly more upscale minibuses that you can flag down wherever you want. There are also incredibly cheap taxis. Plus, if you want to get to any nearby-or not so nearby-cities, all you have to do is hop a train or a bus. Scott and I have not had to purchase one tank of gas since we got here. We haven’t had to get tune-ups or pay monthly insurance bills. Now, as we consider our plans for home, we realize that a vehicle is going to take up a large percentage of our monthly expenses. We’re committed to purchasing only one car, which Scott will use for work. I will be using the Ann Arbor bus system, a bicycle, and my own two legs to get around.

Lithuanian food, I suspect, is also better in many ways than food in the states. It doesn’t have to travel as far, and, as a result, it doesn’t need to be pumped full of preservatives. The food doesn’t seem to be soaked in pesticides either, judging by the fact that bugs can, and sometimes do, make their dirty little homes in our produce. This, although it might seem off-putting, is actually a good thing if you think about how many insects couldn’t get near your standard American apple without dying. When living things can’t live near your food, maybe you, another living thing, shouldn’t be eating that food. But I digress.

Not only do transportation and food live up to a greener standard; so too does our laundry. We don’t have a dryer, so instead everything gets hung on drying racks after it spends two monotonous (but energy-efficient) hours in our miniature washing machine. Of course, our laundry doesn’t always dry quickly because sometimes (like right now, for example) it is bitterly cold in our apartment. This is due to another “green” government strategy: When it gets up to a certain degree for a certain number of days, the heat is unceremoniously cut off, and regardless of the frigid temperatures that follow (and the fact that we’re still wearing three layers underneath our winter coats), there is no chance of the heat getting turned back on.

Thing We Will Not Miss #3: Living a Less Eco-Friendly Lifestyle

I have adjusted well, I think, to all of these changes; I would even say that I appreciate them if you don’t count my whining about being persistently cold or my drying off with a towel that feels like a thin slab of frozen concrete. But there are other elements that undo all of the good I like to imagine we’ve done.

When we first arrived, we quickly figured out which types of things could be recycled and began to faithfully collect and separate materials, just as we used to do in the states. Then I found out that everything we painstakingly sorted into the corner recycle bins was picked up by the trash truck and dumped in a landfill. Take that, Earth!

In addition to this, Scott and I, being practically illiterate in Lithuanian, often buy food that turns out to be unendurably disgusting. I am ashamed even to hint at the inedible goods purchased and then thrown almost directly in the garbage. One of our biggest problems is that we are both suckers for a picture. This is because pictures are the only things we can understand. Cute cow=dairy. Cute pig=pork. A couple of months ago, Scott was certain he had found patty sausage. You should know that no one else here in Lithuania has ever found patty sausage. Scott based this, yes, as you may have guessed, on an adorable drawing of a pig in a chef’s hat and apron. Scott is a sucker for cute pigs. I desperately hope that this is not a reflection on me.

“Chell!” Scott called, breathless with excitement. “I found it! Patty sausage!” He triumphantly pulled his find from the grocery bag. It was shaped like patty sausage. Plus it had a picture of a pig. Excited, we cut through the sleeve of paper. Underneath was a pink slab that looked like a cylindrical organ.

“It’s ham,” I conjectured.

“No, it’s spam,” Scott guessed. After cutting off the smallest piece, we discovered that we were both wrong and right. The pink slab was most likely an entire ham thrown, bone, gristle and all, into a food processor, then wrapped up like a giant Good n’ Plenty.

“I know!” said Scott, reluctant to admit defeat. “I’ll make ham salad! It will be delicious.” He mashed up the pink eraser in a bowl and put it in the fridge. Immediately our apartment took on the odor of salty pig mangle. Two days later, once our disgust had surpassed our guilt, salty pig mangle found its proper home in the garbage bag.

In fact, earlier today, this very issue sparked a heated debate. I was cleaning out the kitchen while Scott was programming on the couch. I had already had to throw a few things away, which notoriously puts me in a very guilty mood. In other words, I turn into mega-bitch. After finishing cleaning out the fridge, I continued on to the freezer where I discovered a family size bag of fish sticks. Neither Scott, to my knowledge, nor I had ever eaten fish sticks. Why, then, was there a huge bag of them in our freezer? I held them up in two hands and waggled them across the room at Scott, who was peering into his computer screen.

“What are these?” I asked.

“Ugh,” Scott said, glancing over. “Pitch ‘em.”

Mega-bitch reared her ugly head. I dragged the garbage can across the room and thrust the fish sticks into his hands. “No,” I said. “I want you to do this.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I would never buy fish sticks; I have standards.”

“I have standards, too! That’s why I couldn’t eat them!”

“Then why did you buy them?”

“I was hungry for something familiar!”

“And you couldn’t have gotten a smaller package? Or settled for something else familiar? Like an orange?”

“Fine! If it bothers you so much, let’s sit down tonight and finish them up, all of them, you and me!”

“No! Why should I have to eat fish sticks just because you, in a moment of idiocy, stocked up on a lifetime supply of them?”

Why, indeed?

The fish sticks, as you probably guessed, are no longer with us; they are heading over to hang out with salty pig mangle. I can only hope that the love we’re leaving here in Lithuania more than makes up for our piles of unnecessary garbage, but I do know one thing: No pig or cow or fish, no matter how cute or well-dressed, is going to lead us astray in the US of A.

The Customer Is Always an Idiot

2010-05-06T06:00:00.000-07:00

(This is part two of a five-part series.)

Thing We Will Miss #4: Being Different

Ever since puberty, I have tried to distance myself from groups. At first, this was because large groups of people made me hyperventilate. But as this tendency continued into adulthood, my panic attacks receded. Instead, I just chalked my militant individualism up to the fact that I do not like being lumped in with any group of people because being lumped in interferes with my ability to be perceived as an individual. I am aware that this implies negative things about my maturity level. It’s also counterproductive: When you use other people’s behavior to determine your own, whether by seeking sameness or opposition, that still means you are basing your decisions around the decisions of someone else and, as such, any goal of autonomy is consequently destroyed. Nonconformity is a wonderful thing as long as you’re being creative and authentic rather than reactionary. And it’s hard not to be reactionary, especially when you’re an American living in and traveling through Europe in the post-Bush era of politics.

But enough of that. Suffice to say, being an American in a sea of Americans was getting mundane, and it’s refreshing as a narcissist to be someone that doesn’t fit: not in beliefs, language, mannerisms, musical taste, haircut, or even dress. Living in Lithuania makes being an American seem unique, interesting, perhaps even frumpily exotic. And, surprisingly, it’s given me a more objective perspective on Americans that generally improves my opinion of being lumped in with such a bunch. Americans, from an Eastern European’s point of view, are overly eager, overly friendly, and overly, almost stupidly, happy. We are idealistic and generous. On the negative side, we are loud, uninformed, wasteful, and badly dressed (or, as we call it, comfortable). From this side of the ocean, I can see how these things are true of me, especially the things I like. I’ll have to see how this newfound appreciation changes when I go to Cedar Point and am herded like a hot, queasy cow through 3-hour lines that I will undoubtedly share with a bunch of loud, uninformed, and badly dressed compatriots.

Thing We Will Not Miss #4: Being Different

Yes, that’s right. Being different is not all it’s cracked up to be. The truth is, we are Americans, and we have American expectations. When I pass one other person walking down a deserted street and flash a toothy grin, I expect that person to at least nod back, perhaps even to smile. When I hold the door open for someone, I expect that he or she will react with the same overly-eager enthusiasm that I would show had someone done the same for me and not, as we both leave the store five minutes later, to slam that same door in my hopeful face. And I expect, when I enter a store, that someone there would be happy to answer my questions and take my money. Despite the disappointments we’ve experience here, Scott and I still have especially American expectations when it comes to customer service.

In America, everyone who works in the customer service industry is taught the same rule: The customer is always right. In Eastern Europe, customer service representatives are apparently taught a different set of rules. Some stores, if they were to qualify their tenets, would probably write things like “The customer is always less intelligent than you,” or “The customer should be treated as if he/she hasn’t bathed in days,” or “We don’t need the customer’s money, so feel free to ignore said customer until he/she forces interaction.” Actually, I can’t read most store signs, so maybe it does say this somewhere.

The upside to this is that I am no longer intimidated by people who, seen through American eyes, would be considered very rude. A couple weeks ago, I was trying to find a substitute for vanilla extract so that I could make chocolate chip cookies for my students. I found a small dropper bottle that smelled like cake and said something vaguely similar to “vanilla aroma.” I stopped one of the stockers to ask if the bottle could be added to food. That is, I tried to stop one of the stockers. “Atsiprasau,” I said in my enthusiastic Lithuanian. “Ar jus kalbite angliskai?” (“Excuse me, do you speak English?”) Without stopping, she looked me up and down, sneered (or so I imagined), and continued past. Nine months ago, this would have made me want to run home and nurse my wounded pride with a Victorian flick and a giant chocolate bar. Now, however, when things like this happen, I am nonplussed. “Uh! Uh! Uh!” I cried. She turned around to see if I was hurt. “This?” I held up the bottle. “Eat?” Then I threw back my head and pretended to down it like a shot of vodka. She blinked, then nodded. I happily purchased my vanilla aroma and went home, only to discover that, after licking a dab from my finger, it tasted like toilet bowl cleaner. She was a tricky one, I thought. Or perhaps she was just obeying the supermarket’s customer service protocol. I imagined a laminated sign hanging in the employee break room: “If the customer is an American and wants to know if he/she can knock back small bottles of harmful household chemicals, simply nod and continue on your way.”

Although we have had some less-than-favorable experiences with Lithuanian customer service, we must also include a couple of disclaimers. First of all, the key difference here is not that Lithuanians are less polite but simply that they have a different culture, one that has been greatly affected by the recent 50-year Soviet occupation. Secondly, we can’t say that these experiences represent all of Eastern Europe. In fact, the further north we travel, the more we begin to think that there is an inverse relationship between customer service quality and how good looking everyone is.

Okay, this is almost entirely in jest, but two of the most obvious things you notice when visiting a new place are the friendliness level of the people and the attractiveness level of the people. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Lithuanians, women more than men, are, to quote Zoolander, “ridiculously good looking”. And, as I just mentioned, Lithuanians tend not to fall all over themselves for strangers. In Latvia, however, one country to the north, people in general go down a notch or two in super-model potential and up at least two notches in friendliness to foreigners. Then, from what we’ve seen, once you get to Estonia, the attractiveness level kind of bottoms out (no offense, Estonians), and the friendly factor explodes. They even over-compensate by giving all the beautiful young women jobs as serving wenches, although this is at least partly due to the medieval motif. This observation is based on very little data, and the relationship, if accurate, is probably correlative rather than causative. Still, it makes you wonder: Why are we Americans so damned friendly?

Cultural Refinement and the Techno-Colored Nightmare

2010-05-04T03:51:00.000-07:00

(This is the first part of a five-part series.)

As most of you know, Scott and I have finally come to the last week of our time here in Eastern Europe, and as we set our sights toward home, we have been debating about how to write the blog’s finale. After throwing around a few half-assed ideas, we have decided to post a top-five list of things we both will and will not miss about leaving Lithuania and returning home to the states. Although there are many smaller things that could make the list (Scott dancing around in his boxers while singing the theme song “Captain Duona”, elderly men cracking open coolers of beer on morning bus and/or boat rides, and unsuspecting ex-pats crunching down on strips of pig ear that have been snuck into long-awaited bowls of soup, to name a few), I will bypass those and focus only on the most major pillars of our Lithuanian journey: both the mythic enjoyments and the irksome annoyances.

Thing We Will Miss #5: The Opportunity to Experience Different Cultures

Since we’ve come to Lithuania, Scott and I have tried hundreds of foods we never would have eaten, traveled to four countries we probably never would have traveled to, heard several languages we never would have heard, and visited countless museums and historical sites that we never would have visited. We have learned, just through casual conversations and a bit of reading, a wealth of Baltic history and the deeply harmful and personal impact of the USSR. We have experienced a different way of being in the world; we have seen a different way of doing life.

Thing We Will Not Miss #5: Certain Aspects of Experiencing Different Cultures

Although Scott and I are deeply grateful for these opportunities and would gladly pay a large amount of money to experience them again, there are some cultural experiences that we, in our ethnocentric snobbery, will not miss. A couple of days ago we were again reminded of this, this time in a particularly intrusive way.

As Scott and I were walking home after LCC’s Graduation, we spotted several lovesick-looking young men and women splayed out over street corners and folded under doorways, caterwauling and strumming their badly-tuned acoustic guitars. Scott hypothesized that, since this was highly unusual in Klaipeda, it must be National Shiftless Musician Day, and since the shiftless musicians were not particularly good, we proceeded home to take an afternoon nap. As we neared our apartment building, we heard a dull, lifeless thumping that grew louder and louder with each step until we finally realized that a shiftless musician of the worst sort, a techno DJ, had set himself up in the square directly underneath our window. And it was loud. I mean loud as in it made our apartment sound like a night club bathroom. Our dreams of an afternoon nap destroyed, we proceeded to do what disappointed people do: we began to indignantly mock our newfound enemy. We noted how he bent over and touched levers and switches without actually adjusting any of them, just to appear, we supposed, responsible for the intricate nuances of the endless bludgeoning. We noted how people kept approaching him and shaking his hand, as if to congratulate him for the carnage he was wreaking on our good taste. Then we started playing “Would You Rather?”, which is always a sign that we are about to get really mean. I think we should swear off “Would you Rather?” altogether, but I fear my family would probably disown me for that.

Scott: “Would you rather have to listen to this music for a whole week without stopping or set the plight of women back 40 years?”
Me: “Well, I’d take one for the team, but it would probably prevent me from doing anything helpful in the future seeing as I would have to live out my days in a psych unit.”

Two more minutes of the dreadful thumping.

Me: “Would you rather listen to this music for a whole week or punch your mother in the face without being able to say why?”
Scott: “Uh…could I write her a letter?”

One more minute.

Scott: “Would you rather have to listen to this music for a whole week without stopping or get diarrhea far from home and lose control of your bowels? In your pants? In public?”

Four more minutes. During this time, the music changed from standard, oatmeal techno to a Neil Diamond ballad accompanied only by a metronomic bass drum. The effect was unbearable.

Me: “Sorry, Scott, but I’d have to shit myself.”

The music ended about thirty minutes later, after we had exhausted our criticisms and tried to drown out Mr. Techno with a combination of broken fan and an episode of “Bang Goes the Theory”. I realized, once again, what a bitchy snob I can be and said a silent prayer for forgiveness. There’s something about aural assault that brings out the worst in me. The same thing happens when there’s a car alarm going off. I have these delicious images of me bashing in the windshield with a baseball bat. But no, it’s not just that. I’m a snob. And so is Scott. And we are working on this. We are, however, looking forward to working on this less as soon as we get back to a place where techno music doesn’t have such a stronghold. I will gladly return to criticizing the tasteless chauvinism of ZZ Top in its place.

Final Words

2010-04-23T06:03:00.000-07:00

(Below is the letter that I gave to my writing classes today, our last day of regular classes.)

Dearest Students,

Over the past nine months, I have come to know each of you as unique, bright, hilarious, thoughtful, and sincere individuals, and each of you has garnered my adoration, respect, and praise. From my perspective, you have seemed like seeds bursting through soil. You may have grown at different speeds, but each of you has unfurled and reached toward the sun. How proud I am of you all! And how sad I am to be saying goodbye so soon!

In light of my departure, I wanted to leave you with something from me. Because I love to write, and because you, my dear students, are now all writers as well, I naturally wanted to leave you with words. These words are my words of advice: some of the advice I have tried to give you throughout this year and other advice that I have not had the chance to share.

Advice on writing…

1) Write things that you love with all your heart, and with all your mind, and with all your soul. But if the things you write do not fit your purpose, choke them, stab them, gouge out their eyes, steal their wallets, and leave them on the side of the road to die.

2) In writing, procrastination is the devil. This is because writing is a process. It doesn’t matter who you are. In order to write well, you must give yourself time to think, to organize, to write, to rewrite, to revise, and to edit. When you receive a paper assignment, you should trick yourself into believing that it’s due a week before it actually is. Then start working on it immediately.

3) In this class, you have made many new friends who will help you through the rest of your academic career. The most important ones are:
-the thesis statement
-the topic sentence and its best buddy, the controlling idea
-the fraternal twins of unity and coherence
Yes, these new friends may not be as exciting as your other friends. You may be embarrassed to invite them to parties or write on their Facebook wall. But do not ignore them when it comes paper time, or they will single-handedly destroy everything you create.

4) Yes, Google is hands-down the best search engine on the web. But Google Translate is not a person who is fluent in 52 languages. It is a computer program. And when a computer program tells you that you should write phrases like “asshole singlet” in your paper, phrases that you do not understand or that you suspect contain English swear words, you should not trust it. Because it is not a person who is fluent in 52 languages. It is a computer program.

5) “Because it is not a person who is fluent in 52 languages” is not actually a sentence.

6) Writing and thinking are inseparable. Even if your grammar is perfect, your sentences are complex, and your paragraphs are well-organized, your paper will still ultimately fail if you do not have something that is worth saying.

7) If you plagiarize, ever, as long as I am alive in this world, I will buy a gun (remember, it is easy to do this in the United States), and I will fly to Lithuania, and, although I will not shoot you (being a Christian), I will personally lock you in a room and feed you only dry bread and rotten fish until you repent and promise to never, NEVER do that again. I don’t have a lot of money either to buy a gun or to fly back to Lithuania, so please respect my financial position and do not do this.

Advice on life (or “Things I Wish I Had Known Ten Years Ago”)…

1) As human beings, you are given three things: a mind, a body, and a soul. You are already cultivating your minds, but as you do this, you must not forget that these three things are all inextricably linked together. In order to do your best, you must also give your body and your soul the things they need, things like exercise and vegetables and prayer and beauty. Only then will you discover your true capabilities.

2) Kindness is more important than cleverness. Trust me. I have dated a lot of guys who believed the opposite, and they were really bad boyfriends.

3) Your expectations of someone affect that person’s behavior. It is therefore rational to have high expectations of everyone you meet, including yourself.

4) Every person, no matter how smelly or rude or stupid or annoying or badly dressed, no matter how loudly they laugh or slowly they think or quickly they judge, no matter how bad their choices, no matter how cruel their treatment of others, every person is a child of God. And as a child of God, their life is as important as yours.

5) Education is not only about getting a degree so that you can earn a lot of money so that you can buy a nice car and a nice house. Education is about learning how to care: both for people and for the world. Knowledge without good is empty.

6) Serving yourself, in the end, brings little happiness, but serving others and working toward their good brings an overwhelming joy.

7) And, as I told the Current Events class over and over, it is impossible not to change the world. How you change it is up to you.

And so, dear students, go forth, write well, and spread your knowledge and compassion to others. I thank you, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, for your attention, for your kindness, and for your respect. I will miss each one of you and will pray for you often. And, in some way, I will always be…

Your proud teacher,

Michelle

To Resurrection!

2010-04-10T13:13:00.000-07:00

For those of you who don’t know me very well, I have a tendency to turn myself into an achievement machine. This, according to the description of an Enneagram Type 3, is my method for feeling worthy of love. Unfortunately, just like this blog, this tendency can turn into a narcissistic free-for-all.

When I was about 19 years old, one of my friends had the computer game “The Sims”. Having already become a sort of accomplishment robot, I had decided that video games were the scourge of the earth, but this game attracted me. I could make my little character do anything I wanted her to do; she didn’t even have to mess around with motivation and self-discipline. My mini-me earned a Juris Doctor degree and became a lawyer. She bought a house and a car. Every day she went to work. After she came home, she practiced piano for three hours. Then she exercised for as long as she was able. She didn’t date or marry. She didn’t have any friends. Sometimes she even forgot to eat. After a few short weeks of this impeccable life, my mini-me slumped into a severe depression. Flies swarmed the overflowing garbage bin, but my mini-me didn’t care. Despite multiple mouse prods, she refused to get off the couch. After being informed by the computer that she needed human relationships, I convinced her to walk outside and then forced her to make out with the neighbor guy. This kept her clicking along for a few more mini-days, but then she succumbed to her shameful weaknesses and again took to the couch. I finally turned off the computer in disgust and never played the game again.

It has taken me a long time to appreciate human needs and limitations. It’s pretty sad when, at the age of 19, a computer game knows more about the importance of human relationships than you. And still at 29 I often put work before people. And, just like my mini-me, I also sometimes slump into despondency and refuse to budge despite the little general in my head who insists that I suck it up and get back to work.

Because of my tendency to overdo it, I decided to observe Lent this year in two ways: One, I planned to give up bingeing (on food, entertainment, sleep, etc.), a technique that I use in an attempt to sidestep feelings of emptiness. Two, I planned to prioritize people over the self-consumed development of myself. So in the mornings, I’ve been praying about and meditating on these things. One of the great things about God is that, when you ask for growth, instead of instantaneously instilling in you a better character, She responds by giving you plenty of opportunity to do it yourself. All of this leads me to the unanticipated events of spring break.

Being a consummate Type 3, I am also a bit of a control freak. As a result, I am not the sort of person who does well with surprises. It’s not that I don’t like them; it’s that I like them so much I have to figure out what they are before they happen. In the months leading up to spring break, Scott had been painfully secretive. What was more, any forthright attempt to pry information out of him ended in curt discourtesy. He told me that I had ruined enough Christmases and birthdays with my incessant questions and that he would not allow me to do it again. So I tried other, less straightforward tactics. Spontaneous questions that I had phrased to sound casual: “So, what are you planning to do next week?” Urgent questions that desperately required an answer: “Will I be in Klaipeda next Thursday? One of my students will be having emergency surgery.” The “What About Bob?” approach: “Does our hotel in Mumbai have high-speed internet?” “What time Monday will we be arriving in Rome?” “Does my Mom know that we’re coming home for the week?” But Scott, who knows me too well by this point, stubbornly refused to answer, and I, for the first time probably ever, finally gave up trying. Sunday morning my friend Grace and I went running and then headed to a coffee shop to visit when Scott, who had been out that morning discussing a class he was auditing with a friend, stopped by the place. He asked to speak to me in private, no offense to Grace, so I stood and walked with him to the back of the shop. I rounded a partition and stopped. There, in the corner, looking small and out-of-place, was my sister. I stood there and stared for thirty seconds straight. Reunions on TV usually show people screaming and running and hugging and crying, but all I could do was to stand and wait for my mind to catch up with reality. I was in Lithuania. But so was my sister. That should have been impossible because my sister was in Michigan. No, she wasn’t in Michigan. She was here. But that would involve a day of travel. Maybe she had found a wrinkle in the time-space continuum. Or, I supposed, maybe she had flown here. And maybe Scott hadn’t been discussing C.S. Lewis with a friend from class. Maybe he had gone to pick her up! Finally, I wrapped my mind around it. Then I ran to her, hugged her and, in the spirit of overly-emotional reality TV, laughed and screamed and broke down crying.

Throughout the week, any hope of waking early and being anal-retentively productive dissolved. Lent itself (and I can do this because I’m Mennonite) was suspended. Instead of focusing on discipline and self-denial, I would have to focus on my second goal instead, which would translate to making sure my sister, for all of her pains to surprise me, had a rip-roaring good time.

Luckily, Emily is not shy about her desires. She’ll tell you what she wants to do, and all you have to do is hold on for the ride. So we watched a horror movie and went shopping and sang karaoke and sucked at bowling (twice). Emily somehow fell in love with Lithuanian cuisine and Lithuanian beer, which is probably some sort of Guinness World Record. We even did some traveling.

On Wednesday, we took the train to Vilnius and found a lovely hotel in Old Town. That evening, Emily took us out to an international bistro for dinner where we shared a bottle of wine and a cheese plate, beef bourguignon and Thai red curry chicken. The cheese was imported, hence international, and lacked the strange Lithuanian dairy aftertaste, which tastes as if every cow in Lithuania has been reared in an onion patch. In fact, everything we ate there was compellingly un-Lithuanian with the exception of the raw potato lumps that found their ubiquitous way into the Thai dish. After that, we headed to a local brewery where they serve almond beer (read: sickeningly sweet beer with almond syrup that also gives you vertigo). The next day, having showered and breakfasted and recovered our equilibriums, we headed out to take over the city once again only to realize, once we reached the concierge, that it was a holiday in Vilnius and that most things would be closed.

Being relatively new to Lithuania, I didn’t know which holiday it was; I was simply kicking myself that I hadn’t researched it and scheduled our trip for another day. As we walked through Old Town, however, we came to realize that the Lithuanians weren’t celebrating just any holiday. That day was the 20th anniversary of the end of the Soviet occupation. We found ourselves swept up in a mass of celebrators in Cathedral Square. We stumbled upon a mile-long parade with five marching bands. We even made it to the KGB museum, which was thankfully open and free to the public that day. We finished up our explorations toasting to our luck with cups of karstas vynas (hot wine) in the town square, except for Scott. (He made the mistake of ordering karstas alus (hot beer), which tastes like beer water steeped with a potpourri sachet. He drank it anyway.) All warm and bubbly, we caught the train home.

In addition to visiting Vilnius, we also spent a good deal of time on the spit, the narrow strip of land that stands between Klaipeda’s harbor and the Baltic Sea. On Tuesday, we took a bus down to Nida and climbed five thousand sloping steps of ice in order to catch a glimpse, from the top of a broken sundial, of the Kaliningrad area of Russia. (Emily, because she could see Russia from that vantage point, considered ditching her job in sales for a political career, but then reconsidered.)

Saturday, we again took the ferry to the spit and headed down to Witch’s Hill, a hiking trail through the woods that takes you past untreated wooden carvings representing Lithuanian folktales. After we caught lunch, we walked back to the bus stop where the sign informed us the bus would be by in ten minutes. We waited ten minutes, then twenty. No bus. I asked someone in a nearby shop where the bus was, and she informed us that, because it was Saturday, the bus wouldn’t be by until 5:30. Our two choices were to wait three hours in the cold with NOTHING to do or to try flagging down cars.

Before you rail against us for our stupidity, you should know that hitchhiking is a common practice in Lithuania. When we Americans think about hitchhiking, we think about rape, torture, dismemberment, and painful deaths in cold, dirty basements. When Lithuanians think about hitchhiking, they think about either giving or getting a free ride to a different location. One of my friends asked a Lithuanian if hitchhiking was safe here. He responded, “Well, sometimes hitchhikers do stink up your car.”

So, since we were all relatively clean and respectable looking, I stood on the side of the road and stuck out my thumb. I’ve always longed to hitchhike, but I also long to die at an old age snuggled up in a warm bed with all my body parts intact, so I’ve never tried it. After about twenty minutes, a car pulled over and opened the door. In the driver’s seat was a man with yellow, crumbling teeth, half-closed eyes, and a mournful, grating voice. He wore a black trench coat that was positively lumpy with the arsenal of concealed weapons beneath. Next to him was a young girl bound in electrical tape who looked as though she hadn’t eaten for months. We promptly climbed in and asked him to do with us what he willed.

Actually, it was just a pleasant middle-aged man and his teenage daughter heading to the car ferry. With my broken Lithuanian, I didn’t fully understand their destination until, after about ten minutes, he drove onto a boat. Emily, Scott, and I quickly thanked him, jumped out and ran back to land, only to realize that we were more than 3 miles from the sauna, our final destination, and that we didn’t understand entirely how to get there. It was at this point that I decided that we should, despite the road we could have followed, hike through the woods.

This is why I love vacations. They give predictable, regimented people a chance to do things completely contrary to good sense and call it adventure. Never mind that there was already a road. Never mind that we didn’t know exactly where we were going. Never mind that there was a guard tower ahead that looked as though it may have been concealing communist soldiers with bayonets. Having survived the hitchhiking escapade, I possessed a newfound confidence in our invincibility, so hike through the woods we did.

It has been so long since I have marched through the woods in the snow, with no path and no clear destination. The land stretched about us on both sides, peaking in soft, white hills. The bare trees stood still and sober as sentries. Our feet made quiet crunching sounds in the snow, and our cheeks flared pink. We finally reached a road and followed it north. After about 45 more minutes of walking, we arrived at the sauna, which is situated on a snowy beach on the Baltic Sea.

Emily must have been in the same mode I was because, after hiking Witch’s Hill, eating a strange platter of food, flagging down a car, hoofing it through a mile of forest, and walking a half-marathon down an unfamiliar road, she was ready and willing to strip off her clothes, sit in a burning sauna, and then run out over the ice and dive into the Baltic Sea. And so she did. This was the grand finale of her trip; the next morning, she boarded a plane for home, and we sadly said our goodbyes.

Since Emily, my dear Peanut, has returned to America, spring has returned to Lithuania. Lent has culminated in the joy of Easter morning, and I’m back to bingeing on everything imaginable and putting my to-do list first every chance I get.

Well, okay, maybe not every chance I get. And this is because Emily’s visit taught me one more thing. What Emily wants to do, she does. And when Emily does something, she does it hard. She walks through life with a blunt and feisty simplicity that is guilelessly refreshing, plus she has a whole lot of fun doing it. I realize, in the wake of her visit, that it doesn’t just affect others when I put my accomplishments in the forefront of my life; it also affects me negatively by depriving my days of a certain amount of beauty and joy. I always want to listen to Baroque choral music and attend chamber music concerts and read bucolic poetry and meet friends for tea and fall asleep in patches of sun and cook gourmet meals. But instead I’ve always got shit to do: papers to grade and a house to clean and e-mails to write and paperwork to catch up on. So, in the proper spirit of Easter, I now resolve to focus less on all the things that need to be done and to focus more on the beauty in which we all stand, awash. To life, and to resurrection!

Lenten Confessions

2010-03-04T20:15:00.000-08:00

On the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, Scott and I attended the festival of Uzgevenis, which is the Lithuanian equivalent of Mardi Gras. People swaddled themselves in brightly colored, conflicting patterns of clothing. The men glued stringy mustaches to their upper lips and wore furry animal hides. The girls painted on harshly overdone strumpet make-up. Everywhere you could see masks with gaping mouths, red-rimmed eyes, and twisted sausage noses. Other masks looked like the empty-eyed heads of goats. Some people simply took Groucho Marx glasses and threaded pieces of yarn through the nostrils, and others dressed up like doctors and nurses, scary ones that you would never want to be alone with, much less naked. In one corner of the town square, children were getting their picture taken with a grim reaper and his real-life scythe, both splattered in blood. In another corner, children were climbing onto a heaping pile of grain bags only to be whacked off by a short man with bloodshot eyes who was taking his “King of the Mountain” title a bit too seriously. A little girl handed out cold, greasy palm-sized pancakes for 50 centas next to a line of dancing, masked characters who frequently paused to either take shots of hard liquor or to bully people into buying mittens and socks out of a beat-up suitcase.

I would try to explain the cultural significance of this to you, but I, unfortunately, have no idea what any of it means. All I know is that, at the end, after several sets of people had stood up on stage and tried to knock each other off a log, a parade of celebrators drug a giant-sized, cloth witch (representing winter) into the middle of the square, doused her with gasoline from a water bottle, and set her on fire. As she burned, they chanted, “Winter, winter, go away” in Lithuanian while they dodged the flaming chunks of ash that blew about the square. Then-what else?-they broke out dancing.

Now, perhaps it is coincidence, but the mountains of gray snow have begun to melt. The sidewalks swallow you in charcoal slush up to your ankles. Each passing car and bus parts a shallow sea of mud, spraying it sideways in arching fans. The heavy crusts of snow on the roofs have begun to fall in large, jagged chunks. From our apartment, they sound like bodies hitting the ground. I cannot think of a more appropriate time in the year, especially after the Mardi Gras spectacle, to give oneself over to the gray travail of Lent.

Lent, like Advent, is another mystery to me, one that I practice, but one about which I also wonder. It is a time to deny oneself, I am told. A time to practice the metaphor of death and resurrection. We march toward Jerusalem with the grim knowledge of what will come. In doing so, we practice dying to some old part of ourselves in preparation for the resurrection to the new. This cycle is part of the lifelong transformation to which God calls us. It is also a proclamation of a story both old and young. I understand that, to many of you, this makes as much sense as Lithuanian Mardi Gras did to me. That is, if you haven’t heard the stories and the language and the liturgy all your life, you have no basis for understanding it. It sounds like one big heap of crazy.

The truth is, I often get embarrassed about being a Christian. I also get embarrassed about being embarrassed about it. That, combined with a strong dislike of proselytizing, is why I don’t write about it very much. I’ve come to realize, however, that in a journey of faith, honesty with oneself and with others is a key element. So here are my thoughts, in all their honesty.

I have the tendency to try to look at things objectively, and when I do that to Christianity, it can seem like the most ridiculous thing on the face of the Earth. Ok. So God impregnated a virgin, and she gave birth to God’s son, and he went around and did all these miracles, but then he got killed, but then three days later he came back to life, and then he went back up to heaven, but at the same time he also started living in our hearts.

I’m not even exaggerating. This is what we Christians believe. But that’s only the New Testament. If you start with the Old Testament, you read about a God who commanded the Israelites to commit genocide and then punished them when they did not completely follow through, among other equally horrifying things. Then if you seek consolation in the Psalms, you might find yourself inadvertently praying that someone will pick up the babies of your enemies and dash their heads against sharp rocks. (Even during the Bush era, I didn’t get this angry.)

And then there are all of these social passages that are still used today to justify hatred and violence and oppression: passages about women submitting to husbands and slaves bending their backs in continued servitude and, in a couple tiny but widely-proclaimed verses, homosexuals committing abominations before God.

This is what we believe, and these are the things our holy book says. And we often don’t see why these things would be difficult for anyone else to swallow. Indeed, we sometimes claim that if someone doesn’t swallow them-hook, line, and sinker-then that person will be pitched into a fiery afterlife. FOREVER. Whoa! Hold up!

Once I read a Native American creation story. It was all about the great Creator making three other gods and those gods kicking around a ball of sweat until the ball expanded and finally became the Earth. And I remember thinking, “What do you think I am? Stupid? Come on!”

It wasn’t until I grew older that I realized people could have the same reaction to Christianity. The truth is, it is a difficult thing to believe if you are not culturally prepared to believe it. And even then, in a modern society, it presents some serious roadblocks to those of us who strive to be compassionate and rational. We see how the practitioners of Christianity have suppressed the discoveries of science. How they have justified feudalism and genocide and slavery and segregation and a whole host of other things. How they use it now to justify wars, to subjugate women, to condemn homosexuals, and to spread paranoid, fear-mongering delusions about those of other faiths. How they so often use it as a basis for division and violence rather than transformational love. Of course, those who do these things do not represent all Christians, but they are a vocal and riotous bunch; this, this, is what people see! And this is what makes me so embarrassed! It’s like constantly wearing one of those “I’m with stupid” shirts. Except it would instead read, “I’m with severely misguided.”

The strange thing is, though, I came back. After I turned from the fundamentalist beliefs of my childhood and unsuccessfully strove to live a meaningful life without them, God beckoned me back. As a homo-loving, war-protesting angry liberal feminist, God beckoned me back. And for the past four years, I have tried to follow Christ by living a life of love and service. I have also tried to reconcile the disparities between the world in which I grew up and the world which I now inhabit.

I am not a theologian or a philosopher, not even close. And I am misguided, too, I am sure, in even more ways than I know. But I do think, and I do also believe. And I want to explain how, for me, these things can go together. Because faith has been an inexpressibly precious thing in my life; indeed, it has become the page upon which my life is written. And this is such “good news” for me that it naturally desires to be shared. I’m not telling you that if you don’t believe these things, you will burn in hell, or if you follow a different religious path, I’m right and you’re wrong; I’m just telling you that these things have brought tremendous joy and hope and purpose into my life, along with a peace that passes all understanding.

Recently I’ve been reading Marcus Borg, a Bible scholar, and I discovered something very interesting. Apparently, only since the beginning of the Modern period have we begun to make truth synonymous with literal fact. That is to say, this over-stressing of the factuality of biblical events was a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment. Before the Enlightenment, to quote Borg, “it was not the literal meaning of the Bible that mattered most for Christians, but its ‘more-than-literal’ meaning.” By more-than-literal meaning, Borg is speaking about its metaphorical meaning. In other words, it is not so important whether or not God created the world in seven literal days, an issue over which (metaphorically speaking) we have been ripping each other apart. People get heated up on both sides, one side because it is completely contrary to heaps and mounds of scientific data, and the other side because they believe that if the Bible is not literally and factually accurate, it is not true. But what happens if we let that go, if we put aside that debate, and then read the passage in a search for its metaphorical meaning? What then do we find? Borg claims that we find the following messages, among others: “God is the creator of all that is. We are created in the image of God. We live our lives east of Eden; something has gone wrong. We long to return.” These messages are the crux of the passage, right? These are the foundational truths upon which we build our view of the world.

If you get hung up on trying to wrap your brain around something that it refuses to accept, from the creation story to the miracles of Jesus, give yourself some mental breathing space and instead focus on the metaphorical meaning of the passage. Let’s not talk about whether or not it actually, factually happened; what does it mean?

This continues to be a revelation for me: Just because something may not have happened doesn’t mean it’s not true. To go back to the Native American example, about which my young self was so incensed and perplexed, a storyteller about to tell his tribe’s version of the creation story began the following way: “Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.”

But then what about the blatant contradictions found in the Bible? The turning the other cheek vs. the killing of every man, woman, and child, for example? The Bible, as archaic as it might seem now, was actually very progressive for its time. Women, for instance, were finally valued as individuals and deemed to be free moral agents instead of pieces of property defined solely in relation to their husbands. But then for some Christians it stopped there. From this ancient document, people pieced together a worldview complete with the one true science, the role of women, the justification of slavery, and the correct stance on homosexuality, among other things. Then they fired it all in an oven (after it was finally assembled hundreds of years after Jesus’ death) and expected it to stay that way. But the Bible is a historical document, conditioned by the cultures in which it was created, those two cultures being vastly different from our own. And men wrote it. Yes, men who were seeking God, yes, men who were experiencing God, but men. And men decided which books were in and which books were out. And as such, to reference Borg, the Bible is a human product, not a divine product. The Bible is not God speaking directly to us but these two cultures, as well as they can, expressing their experience of God. And through these experiences, God speaks to us, yes. But the Old Testament stories are Israel’s stories of how they experienced God. The laws of the Bible were not necessarily intended to be laws for all time (as anyone who has worn two materials woven together can relate); they were the laws of these communities, the way they responded to the call of God in their culture and in their time. The Bible is not an encyclopedia or a history textbook or a scientific treatise or even a precise set of rules. It is an abyss of mystery through which we humbly seek wisdom to follow God in our own culture and in our own time.

I wanted to share this because these thoughts have opened up a space in my head where I can more freely move about. This metaphorical and historical view of the Bible has also made it possible for me to read it again, something which I have had great difficulty with since my rejection of fundamentalism eight years ago. I have deeply yearned for a life of faith but was informed that, because I could not accept certain things, that world was closed off to me forever. Some of you may have no trouble accepting the Bible as literal fact. You may also have no trouble accepting every word as the inspired and inerrant Word of God. If so, if that works for you and leads you in the way you should go, then that is a wonderful thing. But some of you may understand how painful my experience is: to leave behind the very teachings that have formed your young mind. I now find, though, that it was not the foundations beneath those teachings that were to blame; it was instead the restrictions in which they were presented. I think I speak for many in my generation who struggle with religion, who seek desperately for faith but find that it is insupportable. I share these thoughts for them.

I do not believe that women are inferior to men. I do not believe that it is wrong to be homosexual. I do not believe that practitioners of other faiths are going to hell. But I believe in God, and I believe in Jesus, and I believe in the Bible, and I believe in the salvation of the cross. I am a Christian. And I have a hunch, when I reach the top of this mountain, that I will stand there with others whom I had not seen as I journeyed, others who shared my goal but not my path. We will stand there together, fundamentalists and relativists, Muslims and Jews, Buddhists and Hindus and Taoists. And together we will rejoice.

Stay Hungry, Part 4

2010-02-10T20:45:00.000-08:00

(Note: This is the 4th part of a 4-part series.)

After bidding Greece a sleepy 4-in-the-morning goodbye and flying to Frankfurt, then to Riga, we boarded a moldy 1970’s bus that crawled slowly home, over the ice and snow, to Klaipeda. When we finally arrived after dark, we were famished and exhausted, so Scott and I dropped Rory off at a pizza joint to rest and proceeded home to deliver the luggage. Slipping along the unsalted crusts of ice that somehow pass for sidewalks, we passed the bus stop where we wait each morning, now that it is winter, behind the shuddering plexiglass. We passed the square where you can still see the base of a statue that used to be Stalin. We crossed the bridge over the lagoon where now, in the morning, sack-shaped lumps of hunched backs dip their fishing poles through the ice. And we passed into Old Town, with its tall, close buildings in earthy pastels, its cobblestone streets smothered in a half meter of snow, its graceful lampposts, its antiquated signs. All of these things were so expected that, despite the ice and snow and the bitter cold, we felt a jolt of joy and comfort. After the adventurous uncertainties of balmy Greece, we were again in a place where we knew how to ask for directions, where to buy food, and how and where and when to catch the bus. We were in a place where we had a cozy apartment with a refrigerator, stove, and washing machine. A shower for life-sized people. A familiar bed. We were coming back to two meaningful jobs and a close community of friends. Somehow, at some point, this had become our home. Later, over thin, flaccid slices of Lithuanian pizza that hung from our hands like wet laundry, I said a quiet prayer of thanks: thanks that we were home, and that home was a good, albeit slightly foreign, place to be.

The semester is now in full swing, and, as such, my all-out pleasure seeking has taken a back seat. My pleasure now, for these next four months, must be primarily taken in duty, in the purpose of my work. I am teaching two heavy sections of Research Writing, both of which meet every afternoon, and a class called “Special Topics: Current Events” where my students and I are using English to explore difficult issues like racism, gender roles, homelessness, and the effects of war on children.

This class is a difficult one for me to teach. At certain points in my planning, as I have been researching my topic, I have even broken down crying. News has never been an easy thing for me to digest. It is something I approach with a sense of duty and depart from with a sense of despair. I wholeheartedly agree with Charles Baudelaire, who was “unable to understand how a person of honor could take a newspaper in his or her hands without a shudder of disgust.” And so in the course of this class I have been asking myself the following question: Is it really our duty as human beings to examine these things unflinchingly? Are we, in addition to the labor of our chosen work, also supposed to know, even perhaps to dwell on, the hideous events of this world? And how, if we do this, could we ever possibly live a joyful life? In his “Eight Weeks to Optimal Health,” Dr. Andrew Weil goes so far as to prescribe what he calls “news fasts,” or entire days, even weeks, without listening to or reading the news, the implication being that it boosts mental health tremendously. I agree that sitting on depressing facts and statistics like Eeyore will get you nowhere. However, I think that Dr. Weil also implies that we can do nothing, and so we should not burden ourselves with all of that disturbing information.

The real temptation here is to do what I have often done: to embrace a false sense of powerlessness. I have wanted to be exempt from obligation and discomfort. Of course there is nothing that I can do; I already have enough on my plate. In order to experience any pleasure, in order to possess any happiness, I must turn a blind eye.

Yes, to some degree, I am powerless. I cannot feed everyone, nor can I single-handedly bring peace to Afghanistan. I cannot prevent children from being sold into the sex-trade or ensure that every woman is allowed the same level of education as a man. I, Michelle Webster-Hein, cannot heal the world. But I can pick up food at the grocery store to give to the woman who sits in the snow across the street. I can feed a child in Haiti for a month with the same money that it costs to buy a nice dinner out. I can volunteer with a literacy organization and teach someone to read. I can make donations in people’s names instead of buying them more shit that they don’t want or need. And I can examine my own thoughts and assumptions; I can confront my own ignorance and my own misattributed blame.

That’s why the harrowing experience of facing these things is important. That’s why the pain we feel in the face of all that pain is important. It is important because it provokes in us a deeply human response. We cannot simply stand by and let injustice be without doing something, something, however small. But unless we face it, we simply do not know. And, not knowing, we are incapable of being moved to our own small yet significant actions.

A week ago, my current events class watched a video on child soldiers in Uganda. One boy in the video, in order to save his own life, was forced by a paramilitary group to kill his own mother. At first, of course, he refused. But then he was told that his captors were going to kill them both if he didn’t comply. So he did. He beat his mother to death with a stick. As a result, he was given a place to sleep and a gun. A community in which he was protected. Food. Water.

How can we react in the face of that? Well, first we can give it our time and our thoughts. We can talk about it, react to it. We can give it the meditations of our hearts, which are also, I believe, prayers.

So we had a discussion. The students first expressed their reactions: sadness, horror, disbelief, anger. Then the discussion naturally turned to solutions, to grasping at something that could be done. So we talked about how this could be stopped. Some students talked about punishing the people who forced the boy to commit this act, insisting that they should be killed, hanged maybe, or tortured, or shot. But then another student in the back also mentioned how those very men who forced the child to kill his own mother were probably themselves, long before, forced to do similar things. And so, as a class, we were reminded together of the everlasting and often overlooked tragedy: If we had known those who commit cruelties before they committed those acts, when they were on the receiving end of those cruelties, those very people would be objects of our compassion rather than victims of our wrath. Realizations like this, I believe, change us at our core. They make us uneasy with simplistic solutions. They change our crude black vs. white to a spectrum of gray. These realizations teach us that ignorance is not exactly bliss but that cowardly ignorance is instead a shallow and temporal pleasure. All of this calls to mind a Franciscan benediction:

“May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart. May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace. May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy. And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.”

I do not know how this discussion will affect my students. I do not know if their capacity for compassion has greatly grown or if their behavior will change at all as a result. But that is not my responsibility. As a teacher, it is often more important to raise questions rather than provide answers. I must then trust the inquietude of the human soul to ramble and grapple and learn. And I myself, of course, must also continue to ramble and grapple and learn as I strive to live “deep within my heart.”

Two weekends ago, Scott and I took a break from our work and went with some friends to a sauna on the Baltic Sea. Under my thick coat, multiple sweaters, and thermal body suit, I wore my swimsuit, the neck strings sticking out ridiculously above my scarf. In the sauna, we disrobed and took our seats next to all the elderly Lithuanian men in Speedos snapped tight below their hairy, glistening bellies. The sauna was so hot that it fried the insides of our noses and frizzled our hair. We waited until we had halfway melted and our faces were splotched in angry red patches. Then we jumped up and ran out the door and across the beach. Under my feet, I could feel the sloping hills of ice and sand. Before my will weakened, I scrambled onto the ice shelf and stripped off my socks. Then I stepped into the sea and began to run. When the freezing water reached midway up my thighs, I dove headlong. In my brain there was an explosion of light. My body burst into one of those antiquated comic book pictures: a throbbing red and orange “BAM! POW!” I came up gasping. My lungs seized. My skin burned. I was certain that my feet and the bottoms of my legs were going to crack and shatter into a million pieces. I sprinted back to the sauna, certain that I would instantly become deathly ill. Once I got inside, though, I realized that I was still alive, very alive, even. So I did it again. And again.

This is how life finds us, how joy finds us, not in the muted middle ground of sustained comfort, but at the edge of the precipice. We cannot truly know warmth without the cold, joy without the sorrow, light without the dark.

Stay Hungry, Part 3

2010-01-23T13:32:00.000-08:00

(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.

Stay Hungry, Part 2

2010-01-14T09:30:00.000-08:00

(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.

Stay Hungry, Part 1

2010-01-09T01:47:00.000-08:00

(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.

Prisoners of Hope

2009-12-13T01:56:00.001-08:00

Tomorrow begins finals week. The tree limbs are now bare. The wind blows interminably, spinning tumbleweeds of trash across the open squares. It rains most days and nights. The sun rises by 9, sets by 5. There is a dusting of snow.

These, as Anne Lammott says, are “desert days.” The darkness, the coldness, the never-shining sun. These are the days through which we trudge with a transcendent sense of purpose, if not joy and hope. These are the days when we look around and are amazed that somehow we are still moving forward.

In the mornings, I rise at 5 and boil water for coffee, read and pray and write, then sit in the darkness for a while and try my best to simply breathe in and out and feel my feet on the cold, wood floor. In the mornings, the storm of the day is just outside the door, and I am inside, wrapping myself in layers, preparing myself as well as I can for opening that door and being whisked off in a stream of movement from which I cannot stand apart. I pray to God that I will be able to find my feet as I am carried along.

People say that the season of Advent is a season of anticipation, of expectation, which to me has always sounded strange. How are we supposed to anticipate something that has already happened? Are we to manufacture feelings that, in effect, place us in a different time? Are we to trick ourselves? Or to pretend? Are we to expect something that, despite two thousand years of regurgitated expectation, has still not happened? Mary, in the Magnificat, sings, “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” My initial reaction is simply, “No, God hasn’t.” At least not that I can see.

In spite of my doubts, these past few weeks have overflowed with preparation for the birth of our Lord and, of course, for the end of our semester. My dear students have finished their final essays, which I will grade this afternoon with much disquieted concern. They have performed their final interviews and taken their major English proficiency examination. Next week they will take their final exams, after which most of them will hop on trains and buses and planes that take them, finally, home. Some of them have soared and some have faltered, but each of them has earnestly tried and improved and each of them, however wayward, has burrowed their way into my heart.

This month also saw the production of LCC’s annual Christmas play. It ended with a chorus of staff and faculty singing, with high-pitched uncertainty (especially for me, a reluctantly recruited soprano), the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s “Messiah”. At the end, we led the crowd out both doors to the entrance of the center, where the sounds of our voices bounced like points of light, singing an old spiritual that bears new relevance in Eastern Europe, “Freedom, oh freedom, Freedom, freedom is coming, Oh yes I know…” We clapped, and we danced, and we sang until our voices were tired. When we had finished, I couldn’t help but feel a sense that returns to me often despite myself, an almost giddy joy for which I have always been grateful but which I have never been able to pin down with logic.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in response to a comment once that he sounded like an optimist, said “No, no. I am not an optimist, I am a prisoner of hope – it is quite different, because, you see, [for an] optimist when things don’t go well, they want to give up. But I and other people who are prisoners of hope are able to say that this is a world where ultimately justice will prevail.”

On the way home from the Christmas play, Scott pointed out the window of the bus. “Look,” he said. “They turned the Christmas lights on.” All down the central street, the lamp posts sparkled. From some of them, trumpets erupted into cornucopias of stars. I was reminded, as I always am when I see Christmas lights strung along the streets of a city, of the nights in the hospital when I was fifteen, after the car accident, when I would sneak over to the window with my IV tree and look out onto the town below. In Jackson, there were not stars, but angels with their trumpets, angels leaning out and up, ready to announce something good to anyone who cared to listen. And here in Lithuania, just as when I was fifteen, I had that uncanny sense of joy and peace and hope moving in the darkness: joy that I was simply alive, and peace and hope that, in all of the darkest currents, God is molding something beautiful.

Out of Context

2009-10-27T05:29:00.000-07:00

(Warning: I wrote this entry in a bout of culture shock. In my quest to be honest about my experiences, I have put Lithuania forth in an unflattering light. Please take this as what it is: not a commentary on Lithuania or its people but simply the ravings of a spoiled American out of context.)

I’m sorry, Lithuania. It’s not me; it’s you. Your buses stink, your people are rude, and your food, for those who actually eat anything in this godforsaken place, is enough to turn Cindy Crawford into a potato-shaped babushka. Let’s take these complaints one at a time.

Culture Shock Item #1: The Lithuanian Buses

Some smell like toilets, some like locker rooms, and the best like ancient attics drenched in diesel fuel. If you ride them after 7:00 am, you have to stand in the aisle and hold on to a greasy pole overhead while natives, mostly elderly women who have eaten too many potatoes, shove past, even though there is never any space in the back of the bus either. As they heave themselves forward, they knock me, my school bag, and all of the parts I am not supposed to rub up against people up against people. I imagine shouting, as I am thrust again and again into my wincing bus-mates, “This is what you get for sitting down!” Just when you think that it can’t get any worse, the bus police climb aboard.

If you think that “bus police” sounds like the equivalent of a Midwestern mall cop, think again. They may be all older women, and they may look all puckered and sweet, but if you don’t have a ticket, they will swarm around you with their little billy clubs and they will take your non-ticket-toting ass down. They will whisk you off to a van with shaded windows where they commit unspeakable acts of God-knows-what, but I’m sure it involves a scene like in Roald Dahl’s “Witches.” Another slippery thing about bus police: you never know when they’re going to show up. One minute you’re just minding your own business trying not to breathe through your nose and the next they’re invading the aisles in a spontaneous rendition of Charlie’s Angels meets the Golden Girls.

My first run-in with the bus police didn’t go so hot. I was standing at the back exit waiting to hop off at the next stop when the bus driver pulled over and failed to open the back door. At such moments, my Lithuanian abandons me, so instead of calmly requesting the driver to open the door, I began pounding excitedly on the Plexi-glass with my fists and yelling the Lithuanian equivalent of “Please! Please!” in a hysterical voice. It was only then that I realized we had been infiltrated, that I was trapped, and that in my present position of banging and shouting maniacally, I looked the slightest bit guilty. I then decided to confirm this by plunging around in the folds of my clothing for my ticket as though I were being attacked by a cloud of bees.

I am not the sort of person who cleans out her pockets on a regular basis, so when I reached for my ticket, I dislodged a linty nest of yes, bus tickets, but also store receipts, gum wrappers, bobby pins, grocery lists, and, somehow, the head of a broken potato peeler, which, though it did look vaguely threatening, didn’t stand a chance against their faithful clubs. After trembling through the scrunched wad like a woman condemned to die, I handed over the five tickets that looked the newest and prepared for the worst. Wouldn’t you know it, one of the tickets must have matched because the woman rolled her eyes (either a universal gesture of annoyance or a secret signal to the others that they’d have to jump me later), handed my tickets back, and went on to sweetly accost her next victim.

Culture Shock Item #2: The Lithuanian People

I am grateful to the bus police for one thing: They at least confirm that I exist. Other times I walk through this city and I could swear I’m invisible. Doors close in my face, people walk right in front of me and then stop, and pushing a shopping cart through the supermarket is like playing a virtual reality version of Atari’s Frogger. Yes, I know I’m supposed to be tolerant and understanding and blah blah blah, but at this point I’m just going to be honest: If one more person gouges me in the gut with a shopping cart, I’m going to look that person right in the eye, scream “AT-SI-PRA-SAU!” (EX-CUSE ME!) and gouge right back!

Culture Shock Item #3: The Lithuanian Food

I was reading an article about culture shock and discovered that one tell-tale stage is when you become fixated on food from your own culture. Lithuania doesn’t do much to help its cause, let me tell you. If Lithuanians were what they ate, this city would be full of gray meat torsos walking around on potato legs with dumpling arms and sour cream dollop heads. Because I am now completely obsessed with American food, I have been cooking more. However, this doesn’t work so well because I still have to buy the ingredients at Lithuanian grocery stores. Last night I baked corn bread. I imagined my mother’s fluffy golden cornbread clouds steaming with melted butter. Instead the texture resembled yellow Play-Do that’s been left out all night with the lid off. I’ve been so desperate to taste America I even went as far as making chili. Scott, bless his poor American heart, has been speaking about hamburgers like old, dead friends, and he’s even gone so far as to microwave hot dogs, which he’s then cut up and added to macaroni noodles in a powdered cheese sauce. I’m watching him go slowly insane, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Considering all of this, it’s really no surprise what came next. Some would say it was only a matter of time.

That’s right. We went to McDonald’s. And what’s more, we relished each and every bite. Because at McDonald’s, a Big Mac is always a Big Mac and fries are always fries and the Quarter Pounder with Cheese, although here it’s called the McRoyal, still contains enough saturated fat to clog a small artery. Afterwards, we felt both more dead and more alive. As we waddled back to the bus stop, we promised each other that we’d never do that again. At least not until Thanksgiving.

The Anointing

2009-10-25T01:38:00.000-07:00

I have been anointed in oil
by the bus that
runs too close to
the sidewalk on Manto
Gatve not only
oil but also
rain and whatever
the rain washed off
blood
perfume
piss
beer
smoke

in New York City I
once watched a man
bend back his head and
close his eyes and
smile and
take the whole sky in his arms and
spin

he smelled like I do
now
all of life is an
anointing all of life
is atoms suspended
in air my professor
said there is always
a chance however
small that you could
walk through a wall
there is also a chance
that the curtain of water
will pass right
through you

it’s enough to draw
the tongue from out
the mouth like
a dagger enough
to split you inside
out to throw back
your wings drenched
in blessing and
dance

Turgus Sriuba (otherwise know as Market Soup)

2009-10-12T10:19:00.000-07:00

Every Sunday for 4 weeks now Scott and I have made a hearty pot of soup with whatever we can find at the Klaipeda market, which is still an endless source of fascination for me. The things one finds there! Outside, along the tables that stretch long-ways under the slanted roofs, there are mum fireworks exploding everywhere out of rusty, sawed-off plastic water bottles. Buckets upon grubby white buckets of orange mushrooms. Crates of raw red cranberries. Gnarled white parsnip fingers. Tumbling heaps of pink and green apples. Runty brown onions, peeling. Garlic in tubby ivory clumps. Wilting, lovesick bouquets of parsley, lovage, cilantro. Caveman clubs of green zucchini. The rare bell pepper, red or green or orange, small, often wrinkly, and deformed. And the people-the people! One man with a mouth like a rotten bathtub cut me a piece of pear, fondled the heft with his soiled hands, drew the knife across. In America, I would have run the other way screaming. As it was, I took the sample straight from his coal-black fingers, popped it in my mouth, and promptly bought a kilo. Best pears I’ve ever tasted.

Inside the market building you find the meats and eggs and cheeses. The ham section, for me, is like a car accident. I just stand there and stare until they try to sell me something, upon which point I get scared that I’m going to accidentally purchase Wilbur’s foot and move on. There are pig snouts and pig hooves stacked in piggy pyramids. Sawed-off piggy faces with the little piggy eyes, glazed over. Curling piggy ears, pink and alert. It’s like they would have just put the whole pig in there if they could have, but to make it fit, they simply chopped off the parts that stuck out and tossed them into separate piles. I wonder if they even killed the poor things first or if they just started lopping. As an American, I naturally feel that meat should be completely unrecognizable, even though I know that to wish this is to drown myself in falsehood.

Further on, there’s my chicken buddy who surprisingly hasn’t died of Salmonella even though she picks up the raw, rubbery pieces with her bare hands and does questionable things, like smear her fingers on her sticky apron or lick them thoughtfully to assist in separating plastic bags. One time I saw her drop a woman’s change onto a heap of raw flesh. My chicken buddy simply dug it out, wiped it on her grimy sleeve, and handed it over the counter. The woman looked almost as disgusted as I felt, which made me feel a little less foreign.

Then there’s the egg lady, whom I secretly fear, with a castle of blonde hair and lips like a two-year-old colored her with crayon. She will never allow me to buy less than 10 eggs at a time, even though I try obstinately to pretend I don’t understand her when she rejects, over and over, both my mini egg carton and my carefully rehearsed Lithuanian. “Sesi kiausinai, prasoum. Sesi kiausinai.” I’ve even tried calling her bluff by shaking my head and walking forlornly off with my empty container, but she is adamant. She knows she is the only egg lady at the market, and she uses it to her advantage. I’ve got to find another egg lady, one who understands that it would significantly raise our cholesterol if we had to eat 10 eggs before they went bad.

Once home, we pull out all the precious veggies and scrub off the thick clumps of dirt. Scott sets up shop at the dining room table with our only good knife and the cutting board while I boil water and fry up the chicken. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it is cold here and there’s no heat yet, so cooking a big pot of soup serves not only as sustenance for days but also as a furnace of sorts. Pretty soon the windows fog up with the rolling steam and we toss the onions and garlic in with the chicken. The pot becomes a veritable rainbow. Red tomato skins, white and orange parsnip and carrot medallions, khaki potato cubes, translucent ribbons of onion. Then, the finale, a heap of fresh herbs that glow almost neon green for a glorious minute, then fade to the color of autumn grass.

The Nineteenth Fall in a Free Lithuania

2009-10-04T03:08:00.000-07:00

Fall has always been my favorite season. I adore wearing warm boots and thick, oversized sweaters. I luxuriate in harvest food and get a bubbly feeling in my stomach whenever I roast squash or sip cider or smell pumpkin pie. But the biggest reason is because I’ve always been a melancholy fool, even before I had much reason to be. Fall has always faithfully furnished me with plenty of opportunities to gaze out my window, wherever I am, and plunge myself into some vague delicious anguish while reciting poems from whatever poet I’ve been reading, especially poems about thwarted love, the passing of time, and, of course, death. This was most pronounced in high school after my 11th grade English teacher had introduced us to Alfred Lord Tennyson. I would sit out behind my parents’ garage on a fallen tree gazing abjectly out across the golden fields, smoking the secret cigarettes I had tucked carefully into my sock and imagining myself a modern-day Emily Dickinson. Oh, how the dying leaves wept as I recited!

“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depths of some divine despair
Rise from the heart and gather to the eyes
In looking on the happy autumn fields
and thinking of the days that are no more”

Of course, this anguish was paradoxically a delight, and I wallowed in it. As I have grown older, I have found enough in this world to make me sad without extra assistance. Though I still revel in poetry, I have read less and less to the changing leaves. I have come to realize that pain is not a rich and languorous passion. Quite frankly, it’s real and it sucks.

Here in Lithuania the autumn seems more ominous. It brings us warnings on the wind of the short gray days to come, warnings of entire months of half-lit darkness striped with the freezing streaks of Klaipeda’s incessant horizontal rain. The dying leaves here are not like the Michigan leaves that drop to the ground engorged with a furious blood. Most simply turn brown and crispy and unceremoniously fall. Here it is already cold and windy and wet. As I write this, I’m bundled up in thermal pajamas, two blankets, and duck down slippers because unseen forces control the housing temperatures, and it has to get really cold for a consecutive number of days before those forces finally cave in and turn on the heat. Already, it would be difficult to survive if you had to live on the street.

Before the weather plummeted even more, Scott and I decided to visit the capital city of Vilnius. It takes about 4 hours to get there by train, a train with compartments that delightfully resemble the Hogwarts Express. We arrived late Friday night and ambled through Old Town to reach our bed and breakfast. The next morning we visited a few ancient, breathtaking cathedrals and then arrived at the Genocide Museum, also known as the KGB Museum, as it is located in the building where both the Gestapo and the KGB used to operate.

Lithuania, as you can probably guess, has had a very volatile history. After the first Russian occupation, it celebrated about 20 years of independence until it was invaded by the Germans during the Second World War. During that time, hundreds of thousands of Lithuanian Jews were massacred. About 1941, due to a secret treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union, Lithuania was handed over to the Russians, and what would become a 50-year occupation began, not ending until 1991-not even two decades ago.

To enter the KGB museum, you walk along a sidewalk that looks like any other sidewalk. Then you notice the memorial. That very sidewalk is where the KGB used to dump the dead bodies of Lithuanian resistors whom they had shot and killed inside the building. From small windows in the basement rooms, guards would watch civilians walk past. If anyone passing the dead bodies showed signs of recognition or remorse, the guards would make a note of it, and the passer-by would be hunted down and taken to the basement of that very building, which was a high-security prison.

Our tour of the basement prison was enough to bring me to tears. English audio guides informed us of the atrocities committed there, of how 20 people would be kept in one room, not allowed to stand within 50 centimeters of the walls and never allowed to sit. We witnessed the padded cell furnished with the actual straight jacket interrogators had used, the long black ribbons of sleeves flayed out like bats’ wings. We stood inside the solitary-confinement room where prisoners were kept for weeks on end in order to break down their sanity. We peered through windows into the water rooms where prisoners had to stand naked on a stool for several days. When they drifted off to sleep, they would fall into the water. In the winter, they sometimes filled the rooms with jagged chunks of ice. Finally, at the end of the snaking corridors, we saw a collage of photographs, the dead bodies of men and women that the KGB had carted around town and propped up in different places in order to provoke the natural human emotions of other resistors and family members. Their clothing soaked in blood. Their faces almost comical, dazed. Their mouths half-opened, eyes rotting. This is where I thought about all those I love-about Scott and about all of you-thought about what that would do to me, to anyone, and I lost it.

Upstairs, on the 2nd floor, there was a different exhibition about the hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians-the elderly, the dashing young men, the pregnant women, the newborn babies- who had been shipped off in cattle carts to Siberia for years of hard labor in work camps. I was strangely reminded of Dr. Suess’s story about how the Grinch stole Christmas. Remember that? All the Whos down in Whoville lost everything: their Christmas presents, their Christmas lights, their food, even the logs for their fires. But the next morning, the Grinch heard singing-singing! They had nothing, yet they still held hands and rejoiced. In Siberia, Lithuanians made prayer books out of birch bark, rosaries out of thread. They made wedding cakes out of boiled potatoes. They gathered for Christmas Eve “feasts”, Easter “feasts”. They crocheted pillow cases. They wrote poetry. They played busted accordions. They danced! They hooked their arms around each other’s waists and smiled-smiled!-for pictures. One picture showed several women, some younger than me, wearing sheepskin coats and jumbles of thick headscarves. Snow whirled around them, the white flecks pelting their raw faces. They held heavy tools in their mittened hands. But they had all locked arms, and they were smiling. All of that, all of that, and still they were smiling.

To see that, to see what humans can do to one another, and then to see how that very same fucked-up creation can react is, itself, miraculous. The tendency when I hear such stories is to vilify one side and bestow the other with sainthood. The Soviets were evil, the Lithuanians were good. To do this is to miss the material point.

I had assigned my class to write a paragraph on an experience that changed their lives. One student, who is from Russia, wrote about a Russian friend of hers who had been caught in the middle of the recent Russian-Georgian conflict in South Ossetia. In America, we cursed those damned Russians and cheered on the underdog, the Georgians. But it was Georgian soldiers who changed my student’s life by shooting and killing her young friend. Whatever our intentions, war comes down to killing.

Now almost 20 falls here have passed free of Soviet occupation. Remarkably enough, the Soviets finally understood the Lithuanians to be serious about independence when Lithuanians from all over the country gathered in Vilnius around the Parliament building and the Television Tower on a frozen January evening in 1991 and held hands and sang. They sang patriotic songs, Roman Catholic songs. The Russians cut the city’s electricity, and the tanks rolled in. Still the Lithuanians stood and sang. In the dark, the tanks rolled silently, some over legs, arms, torsos. The swinging guns knocked protestors down and threw them under the rolling treads. The singing continued. With the whole world watching, it would have been folly to fire. After killing 14 people and injuring hundreds, the tanks withdrew. Finally, the Soviets packed up and left.

Now I see elderly men and women who never make eye contact and I finally understand why, because they have lived through that hell, through that fear. Now I climb the stairs to our apartment, an old Soviet building, and the concrete walls are the same dirty sea-green color as the walls of the prison, and I shiver and wish there were more light. But now I also teach students from Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, students who have just graduated from high school. I am teaching the first generation of college students here who has never, even in their earliest years, known Soviet rule.

We are here, and we are free and alive. Life itself has triumphed.

It’s enough to make you want to grab someone else’s hand and break out singing.

Me No Spleen

2009-09-28T20:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-24T04:34:00.000-07:00

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, ...

2009-09-07T10:05:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-01T20:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Three Dreams

2009-08-29T23:24:00.000-07:00

When I'm stressed out, I usually can't feel that I'm stressed out. Not until I can't catch my breath anymore on a daily basis or I start waking up with my blanket clutched to my chest in horror, most often to prevent whatever jeering audience is in my head from looking upon my nakedness. Lately, I've been having trouble breathing regularly and last night I woke up in a panic three times only to nurse myself back to sleep and wake up again, this time in a different but equally horrifying scenario.

Dream #1: Scott and I were only halfway packed for Lithuania when we realized that our plane departed in exactly two hours. We threw everything we could in a couple pre-used garbage bags and jetted out the door.

Dream #2: We must have been successful in making the flight because the next thing I knew we were being taken to a creepy, rundown shack with no plumbing or electricity in the middle of the Lithuanian woods where someone was to pick us up daily in a Landrover, take us to work at the university, and then take us home immediately afterwards.

Dream #3: After being unceremoniously punted from the Landrover, I found myself at the "university", which turned out to be conspicuously similar to my high school. Although I was in familiar terrain, I could not find the room in which I was supposed to teach. I wandered up and down the main hallway, back and forth, each time losing a crucial piece of clothing, and finally found myself in my "classroom", which was filled with students I knew a little too well as they had all done poorly in my classes before. Although already shouldering a heavy and bitter defeat, I looked down at my lesson plans, determined to give the task my best despite the consequences. Of course, these plans consisted of a few pieces of loose leaf covered only in sketches of various cartoon characters. Their only redemption was that they were at least large enough to cover the key parts of my body which I then realized was much larger than I had previously thought and, you guessed it, completely naked.

Scott's response to these dreams was that my subconscious obviously doesn't think much of my interpretive abilities.

I think at this point it's safe to say that I'm a little stressed out. My classes begin this Tuesday at 8:30 am. I'll let you all know how the first day goes. Until then, wish me luck!

My New Office

2009-08-26T22:14:00.001-07:00

Here's my new office, a view out the door, and yours truly pretending to be hard at work.

The Camo-Barbie Onslaught

2009-08-24T11:50:00.000-07:00

Scott and I recently discovered that Klaipeda roughly translates to "dirty foot" in Lithuanian. Which explains the numerous mud-encrusted brass imprints of feet scattered throughout the city. It may also explain the tendency of women to wear utterly ridiculous, sometimes downright punishing shoes. But, let's be honest, it also explains a lot more than I would prefer. I can hear it now.

"Oh, you lived in Europe? I lived in Europe, too!"
"Cool! Where?"
"Dirty Foot."
"...Oh."

It's a great city, don't get me wrong. It's just that the city’s name sounds bad enough without knowing it’s been christened "nasty hoof." All I can hope is that Klaipeda is not, in addition, the name of some rank fungal infection, especially not one contracted by wandering around without shoes. Luckily, my Lithuanian will most likely never reach the level of identifying fungal infections. Thank God.

Regardless, the historic city of Dirty Foot is the one where now our own dirty feet tread, end to end, old town to university and back again. We’ve estimated that, on our short days, we still log about 5 miles and, on long days, close to 10. With all that plodding back and forth, something’s bound to happen. I knew, with the prevalence of alcohol abuse, that there was the chance of getting harassed by a drunken person or two. What I didn’t expect was what actually happened.

It was Friday evening, and Scott and I were walking back from a faculty dinner. We’d been told that it’s best to speak at a moderate volume and avoid eye contact with people on the street-with some men doing otherwise can be seen as a challenge-so we were minding our own business and trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. One thing that remains conspicuous, however, is our speed. With our long legs and capitalistic sense of time management, we pass Lithuanians as though they’re standing still. Not so, though, when we passed the inebriated flock of life-size Barbies in their skin-tight, camouflage tank tops and, of course, matching forest-green stiletto heels. At the precise moment of our passing, they erupted into riotous giggles, lunged at Scott with their pea-colored fingernails, and began chasing him around a human-sized shrub in the middle of the sidewalk. In the twilight, I watched his awkward dance from the other side of the tree as he side-stepped, ducked, jumped, and dove his way out of what has probably been, at some point, the impossible fantasy of many teenage boys.

At that moment, besides horror and confusion, I also experienced a deep sense of pride. I imagined us having the conversation back in the relative boredom of our apartment. “No, seriously, if, like, 10 beautiful women threw themselves at you, all at once, what would you do?” “Run away.” He’d been telling the truth!

Scott finally extricated himself from the roiling mass of beauty queens and came running at me full speed, his face full of a frenetic, terrified glee. Suddenly, out from the shadows, two Barbies pounced, one from either side, and caught hold. One held him still while the other brushed back his hair with her hand and planted a greasy, red kiss on the center of his cheek. Poor, bewildered Scott could not find his words. They were laughing and shouting something in Lithuanian. “Nekaulbu,” I said. “Nekaulbu Lietuviske.” We don’t speak Lithuanian.

The laughter stopped. The head Barbie spoke. “She’s getting married tomorrow. It’s tradition to give 100 men 100 kisses.”

Scott clapped awkwardly. “Congratulations!” he cried.

“What a strange tradition,” we remarked to each other as we continued home.

At least it had nothing to do with kissing dirty feet.

morning trip to the market

2009-08-23T21:50:00.000-07:00

Here you have the door to our apartment, a sidestreet view, and two pictures of the Klaipeda market, which is open every day save in the winter.

My Second Childhood

2009-08-22T00:26:00.000-07:00

It’s important as an adult to never forget what it’s like to be a child, to never forget how long five minutes can last, how terrifying the dark can be, or how exciting and overwhelming life can feel because everything is so new and often mysterious. That’s what it feels like here sometimes, it feels like a second childhood. Mundane things fascinate or horrify you. Simple tasks turn into undertakings that require a herculean effort. And sometimes you wish you could just pop your thumb in your mouth and tuck yourself behind your mother’s skirt or sit in front of the TV and watch an entire season of Blue’s Clues while eating bowl after bowl of Cap’n Crunch.

Case in point, the grocery store. Yesterday I sat down to my morning Muesli with yogurt and discovered I had instead purchased sour cream, which had been selected after a full five minutes of painstaking label comparison with other things that might or might not have been yogurt. And tomatoes. I bought a rotten tomato. Even though, come on, it’s obviously a tomato and all you’ve got to do is give it a little squeeze to make sure it’s edible. I was so desperate to put something recognizable in my basket, I didn’t even check to see whether or not it was good.

After wandering around the store for a good 20 minutes and finding exactly five things to buy, two of which were either inedible or something entirely different from what I had hoped, I lined up at the check-out. Here they want you to move as fast as is humanly possible. By the time the cashier rings you up, you’re supposed to have finished bagging your junk and have gotten the hell out of everyone else’s way. I knew this, so I immediately started shoving the scanned items into my bag. This is survival mode at the grocery store. Say “Labadiena” with a believable accent. Act like you know exactly what’s going on. Bag your stuff. Locate the total on the screen because you can’t understand spoken numbers. Pay. Say “Aciu.” Leave. And all the while, pray to God that they don’t say anything to you. Halfway through my believable ruse, the cashier spoke, and it was all over. My face, I’m sure, washed white with a blank and awkward stare. Maybe I grimaced. Maybe she thought I had a cramp. So she said it again, loudly and more slowly. And again. There aren’t a lot of foreigners in Lithuania, so the woman was probably confused. I wanted to say I didn’t understand Lithuanian. I even know how to say that I don’t understand Lithuanian. But I couldn’t. Instead, I just panicked and shook my head and grabbed my debit card and left. I still have no idea what she was talking about.

So we try fast food sometimes, which is better here than it is in the states, and slower. The other day we went for kababas. Kababas is like a kabob pita sandwich stuffed with a bunch of meat that’s been shaved off a spit, cabbage salad, onion, and four mystery sauces. It’s delicious. And, because I am in my second childhood, strangely fascinating. The spit is vertical and wrapped in a slowly-twisting meat tornado. The machine buzzes as it roasts. Flies swoop in and out through the open doors and windows. Happily for Scott, I remember the Lithuanian word for onions, which he hates. I also remember the word for no. When our turn comes, I try to be as Lithuanian as I can. I say “Good day.” I order two big kababas, one with no onions. Unfortunately, the “two” comes out French, and the “one” comes out German. My gig is up. When our kababas are finished, the woman hands them over the counter. She points to one. “This one has no onions,” she says, in perfect English. I thank her. Translated, I say “Very thank you,” which probably sounds just as bad in Lithuanian as it does in English. Despite my taking a sledgehammer to her first language, she smiles and nods. We take the kababas and walk home.

As we walk, I think about my students back in the states: the refugees, the single mothers, the young professionals, the teenage boys and girls. I wanted to come here for many reasons, but one big reason was so that I could better understand what they go through when they come to the United States either to study English or merely to survive. Already, I understand that each thing they experience is probably more consequential than it might seem to anyone casually watching. A patient bus driver. A kind cashier. A simple explanation repeated for the sake of clarity. A map drawn on the back of a receipt by a stranger. Small, simple kindnesses that may indeed be just that simple but are definitely not that small.

my nameplate

2009-08-19T21:17:00.000-07:00

I am way too excited about this...

Thoughts on Process and Perfection

2009-08-19T13:52:00.000-07:00

I know I’m not alone in the sense of accomplishment I reap from a finished product, from things being done. My gut tells me that this is a very American thing, the admiration of things in their perfect states, in the states after we have perfected them: supermarket packages lined up in gleaming, colorful rows, clean laundry tucked into closed drawers, a spotless floor, a living room that looks as though it hasn’t been lived in, cars that look as though they’ve never been driven, even people who look as though they have not lived their entire lives in their own skin. There’s a certain obsession with wanting things to be perfect, with wanting things to be done, with wanting things to look as though we’re not messing around with them. In other words, there seems to be an overwhelming desire for product and a shunning of the process it takes to get there.

I had the same realization about life my freshman year of college. I was standing in the shower and bent over to get something. The water hit the back of my head, trailed around my face and shot off my nose and chin in two perfect streams. I felt like a flesh-and-blood fountain. I’m not sure why that struck me then, but it made me think, “Here, now, this is not a hurdle to be jumped over, not just a block of time I have to get through before going on to something else. This is an experience to be opened up and enjoyed or, if not enjoyed, at least noticed.” Of course, I was in college, so that didn’t last very long. I hadn’t really thought about it much until last night, when I hung the laundry up on the drying rack.

The laundry here, as I mentioned, takes two hours to wash and a couple of days to dry, once it’s hung. We don’t have a car, so we walk the 30+ minutes to campus, then back when we’re finished. Food doesn’t last as long, so people go shopping every couple of days, again, usually on foot. If you’re not cooking, you’re ordering from a restaurant, which takes just as long, sometimes longer, because the restaurant staff isn’t in a rush either.

I think the reason that we Americans tend to be the way we are is because we can have everything so fast, so it makes us move faster, simply because there’s nothing to wait for. In the states, it seems ludicrous to lengthen processes that could much more easily be shortened. Why hang laundry on the line when there’s a dryer in the basement? Why bake bread when you can buy it at the store? Why walk to work when you can drive there? It just seems like bad sense. I try my best to fight it, but it does. Foolishness. You could get an extra job with all that extra time, or earn another degree. In the states, I struggle to slow down, to take notice of things. But here, so far, life has just sort of slunk along and done it for me. Outside the early whisper of fall in the crispy leaves, the sad, chilled-earth smell. The rain outside our window which sounds, I swear, like someone is pushing a broken shopping cart across the cobblestone. And inside Scott’s black socks, my blue, the sea-green towels, the brightly patterned shirts, all folded so carefully and slowly drying over the heavy lines of wire.

...and there was music

2009-08-18T00:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon, joy of joys, I spent almost three hours hammering away on a new Steinberger. And, happy madness of happy madnesses, this (grand!) piano is available whenever the lecture hall is not being used, which means I can practice every day without troubling anybody. When the Academic VP showed us how to request the key and unlock the door, I could have lunged around the stage singing undeserving hits from misogynistic musicals, I was that happy.

So I've decided that my basic goals for the year are to relearn Haydn's Variations in f minor and Schumann's Fantasiestucke, then try to work up Ravel's Menuet Antique (for Scott), two Chopin Nocturnes, and, of course, Bach, the Italian Concerto, because nothing I've found is ever as good for the soul as some good ol' Bach.

The Morning Realizations of a Reluctant Yuppie

2009-08-16T22:35:00.000-07:00

In the morning I open the windows that face the square. The windows are tall and have no screens, so that I can bend out, like someone in a poem, and test the air with my arm. If I smoked, I would definitely lean out the window and exhale in slow, contemplative sighs, but as I don't, I'll content myself with simply breathing in and out while listening to the rumbling buses and shuffling feet on the cobblestone streets below.

I read and pray, practice Yoga poses to wake up, and then eat my Meusli with yogurt and drink my strange-tasting orange juice which I hope is actually orange juice. Then I boil water and make my coffee with the French press we found for 10 litas at the big grocery on the other side of town. I am in love with our French press.

Mornings here are as picturesque as a story book, but even while leaning out a window and imagining myself as a quaint character in some Eastern European folk tale, I am aware of a few less picturesque differences between here and home.

At home, I was able to both recycle and compost. Here there is no place to compost, which is not surprising, but I can't recycle either. My neighbor told me yesterday that walking your recycling to the containers located around town does no good because the country no longer has the money to collect and process it and, as a result, it all gets dumped in the trash. I cringed. Egads. So much for that. Scott and I will have to change our tactics and instead buy things that have as little packaging as possible.

It's more difficult to do one's part to take care of the Earth, but it's also more difficult to take care of one's body in the way I have gotten used to as an American. At home I am a bit of a health nut. I read packages obsessively and usually only buy things that are low in sugar, low in saturated fat, and have no hydrogenated oils, high fructose corn syrup, MSG, nitrates, or bleached flour. At home I know how to differentiate between the claims that different products make on their labels, and I know how to discern what is healthy and what is pretend. Here, I see a pretty picture of a tomato or a happy cow and I think, "Do I eat this or rub it on my face?" As far as I can tell, though, it's not only my lack of language that's the problem. The things I used to scour the stores for at home don't seem to exist here. In other words, I am starting to understand how much I have as an American and to wonder how much of what I usually consume is actually necessary for good health.

Now, just because those things aren't available here doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of good things going on that generally don't happen in the states. The obesity rate seems pretty low, and I think that's because most people walk or ride bikes instead of drive. Also, the markets are open every day until winter, when the market reduces its hours to twice weekly. The things people buy require less transportation, as they are more local, and they also require fewer preservatives, I think, since people go shopping every couple days and don't seem to cherish the longer shelf life that we do.

That's all for now. My coffee is finished, the sun is climbing, and I'd like to make the 30-minute walk to the university before it gets too high and hot for a comfortable jaunt. As to non-poetic technicalities, our faculty/staff orientation begins this Wednesday, and classes start September 1st. We are both excited for the working part of this adventure to begin.

Love to all our family and friends, and thank you for all of your comments! We cherish them.

Apartment Pictures

2009-08-16T11:13:00.001-07:00

Here you have our carefully chosen selection of books, living room, dining room, and kitchen. Quite lovely, though I say it myself.

Top 10 tiny reminders that we are not in Kansas anymore:

2009-08-16T08:47:00.000-07:00

1) the toilet button

2) the washing machine, which takes two hours and is the size of a shoebox

3) the laundry rack, on which our clothing dries to a crisp

4) the burner settings: 1 being the highest, 6 being the lowest (the acquisition of this knowledge requiring the sacrifice of 2 precious eggs and a slice of mystery cheese)

5) the pervasive belief that carpeting/area rugs/anything cushy underfoot is something for which only soft, dirty, foreign cretins feel the need

6) the mullet trend

7) the shopping cart deposit

8) the lack of blue jeans that aren’t vacuum-packed to young people’s gams

9) the woman at the sprawling Saturday market who pours fresh milk from a stained, green bucket that looks as though it must have, at some point, also hauled manure

10)the man down the street who, although he wears an American-flag-print headband, sings only Lithuanian songs so sadly it would break your bursting American heart

First Impressions

2009-08-14T18:14:00.000-07:00

Labadiena!

We arrived in Klaipeda last night at around 6:00 with all of our luggage. This is good news. However, it does mean that I was unable to use one of my five Lithuanian phrases, “Kur yra lagaminai?” or, “Where are the suitcases?” which, it turns out, I have over-rehearsed, along with “Ar cia saugu plaukioti” (Is it safe to swim here?) and, to my chagrin, “Ar ju suprantita Lietuviske?” (Why would I want to ask anyone if they understand Lithuanian? So I could then ask them where my suitcases are?)

Instead, I should have over-rehearsed the politeness words: “please,” “thank you,” “sorry,” and “cheers!” Then, at the Ikiukas corner grocery, I would not have sincerely apologized to the woman who rang up our milk, nor would I have toasted a glass to the harried man whom I gouged in the stomach with my shopping basket. Ah, well. Such things come with time. So says the overly-optimistic, overly-enthusiastic American.

As to particulars, we have unpacked our clothes and books and settled happily in to our apartment, which is surprisingly homey despite that it is a former Soviet building. We have also made acquaintances with our landlord, a kind and patient man despite that we blew out the entire building’s electricity in one fell swoop, then accidentally stole all of the high speed Internet for ourselves. Today we are meeting our new friends (recruited by the university), who will help us trade in our dollars for litas, negotiate the daily market and bus system, and find light bulbs.

Thus far, I have found a few natural ways in which Lithuania resembles home. For one thing, here too the clouds are all flat on the bottom and heaped up on top, like a bunch of mutated meringues on a sheet of Plexiglas. (I’m sure that’s true of clouds everywhere at one time or another, but having noticed it as the plane dipped down, I couldn’t resist the description.) The weather here is also emotionally unstable: blindingly bright one minute, then darkly morose, then sobbing. The trees are the same as well: balding cedars, ubiquitous maples, tall and slender clumps of white-limbed birches, poplars with their whispering disks of leaves. Lithuania is remarkably flat, as southern Michigan is, with a brown water meticulously filling any and all depressions, be they mud puddles that line the roads in a beaded necklace or entire lakes. And that, so far, is where the similarities end. The infinite differences will be forthcoming.

2009-08-14T11:04:00.000-07:00