To learn languages
17/4/12
My fourth class is down, I await my fifth, the second of the day. After, I meet Murakami-san and get a possible quadruple-whammy: my hanko, a bank account, a phone, and hope against hope, my power cable. I have three indistinguishable choices for the third: AU, Soft Bank, or Decomo. The fourth should come today, according to my lovely girlfriend.
When I was working to get my TOEFL certification, the discussions about teaching reached a point when talking about classroom control, working with students, and tailoring lesson plans to suit class speed. Much of this boiled down to “feel”, several teachers said, “you would just know” how to make adjustments. Perhaps teaching isn’t something I learn by example, but everyone learns by example. How else can you learn it, if those in the know are at a loss of words? My attempts to approach it in this way seem fruitless, so I ran to something that suffers from the same condition at a certain point of advancement and to which I had become intimately acquainted: writing, and by extension, art. Which begged the inevitable question, are teachers under the umbrella of unconventionally defined artists?
After a few classes, my near collapse yesterday is embarrassing for a different reason: is this really all there is? If lesson planning is collaborative, I’m never alone. I don’t mean to demean teachers, there are several that spring to mind that I could never match for making learning fun or interesting, but what I was afraid of is now illuminated in such stark colors, and painfully noticeably not there. One wonders how lecturing a college course would proceed, start to finish, when the native language is your own, nothing moves slowly, and there’s no rambunctiousness to contend with. I thought I would need to think up games, have long speeches on diverse subjects, follow a general plan towards a competency goal, explain in detail the rules of grammar, etc. Today, if I finish telling the kids my favorite fruit and where I come from, we move on to past tense: was, and were. This job will be repetition: repetition for the children, repetition for me.
What I’m trying to say is, this is going to be easy.
I had considered studying Japanese with my free time. Today is the last five characters of hiragana before moving onto each character’s doppelganger in katakana – altogether, 95 characters. After that, to read a newspaper, one needs command of roughly 2,000 kanji, which are not an alphabet but just pictures. If Schuyler learns kanji for fifty weeks, how many kanji must he learn per week to reach 2,000?
The answer is forty. So eight new kanji every day, taking weekends off, two “holiday” weeks, say Christmas and New Year’s, and forgetting nothing. While this sounds do-able, at least for the first day or five, by day forty-seven I predict frustration. And this is simply to read. On top of all this, I will need to learn words, grammar, conjugation, and pronunciation. Sure, I’ve already learned twenty or thirty kanji since I’ve been here, but I think I will take in some phrases, maybe basic nouns and verbs, questioning words, and just write them in the roman alphabet, or maybe hiragana/katakana. I like working hard, and I like big projects, but this is just too big, too big for one year, and too big to likely never use again. I’m sorry Japanese, but I need to relegate you to the sidelines. I’m going to keep my New Year’s resolution, though a little late. I’m going to study French, which looks like child’s play in comparison. This will be a suitable project for 12-18 months.
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: C’est bien, n’est-ce pas?
To Teach
16/4/12
I am sitting at my new desk at Imaichi Junior High School Teacher’s Lounge, just before noon. Weaving seamlessly through all of my activities in Japan up to this time was the ironclad rule, legislation my own writing, lobbying, and approval, that one day I would become a teacher, even if only an assistant. The me of high school age once resolved with all possible resolve than available to never teach, and if I did teach, to for the love of god never teach English. As my girlfriend would say, “Never say never”.
Much of my preparation up to this time has been aside from this fact, running parallel to it, providing at best indirect support. My standard response to standing in front of a classroom is avoidance. In the absence of this option, there is usually some heart pounding, an abbreviated stammer, and copious planning, usually involving something that functions as an escape route. If there are others banished to the front, I keep my eyes on them. Filling five minutes I think of as filling two, and somehow the other three will slide. Do I constantly talk? Do I provide enthusiasm for entertainment? Ask questions, involve the audience? How do I save face if no one answers? Words, to me, are a matter of ideas, speaking a conveyance, and a speech a sort of argument or point of view, the saying of which an act of convincing or enlightening. How vigorously do I argue? Will there be counter arguments? What if they are stronger?
Information in preparation is control in this case, and I want a trial run – I learn best from example. What is at stake, what is the point of doing this and what is best accomplished and ignored? This is what I want to know, and it comes from experience.
My co-teacher today is Okayasu-sensei, though I should call her Mrs. Okayasu while we speak English. When I realize it, she looks unbelievably like my ex-stepmother, but a Japanese version. She is wearing a windbreaker indoors, has gray hair at the temples, which comes out in about the same width, has the same sort of enthusiasm towards kids, and moves quickly in sneakers. At one point, I stare into her face for a moment, searching for physical markers that suggest she never married my father. However, I get along with her much more easily, and she is more than happy with the prep work I’ve done for the class – were her ideas of questioning added onto my work the night prior, I’ve probably done enough to handle the entire class by myself, were they a higher level.
As we walk into the first class, Mrs. Okayasu and me, I am adopting the approach that I adopt on first dates and early flirtation: the outcome doesn’t matter to me because I own the place. Fear has no address if it is not heeded. I am not afraid of the students, I am not afraid of them staring at me, I’m not afraid of their apathy, nor their rambunctiousness. These are no longer arguments but statements of fact. I’m not afraid of speaking, I’m not afraid of looking silly, bending odd ways, miming verbs. I don’t like dead space, but I’m not afraid of it. My speech is slowed down adequately, my voice loud. I have my prepared speech. So where is the leak? Where is this fear getting in?
And yet, as I talk and introduce myself to the class, I begin to feel hot. By the time I realize what it is, removing my jacket does nothing. There is a tingling in my head, I can feel my own pulse. Completely out of place, I kneel as Mrs. Okayasu is talking, and to cover a little, I act like I’m sorting my papers, but I only have three, and the subterfuge is weak. Kneeling helps a little, but not enough, not enough to stand again and write, which I must do. This is pure nerves, and the wave it washes upon me in is tall. I stand again, with no choice, and my peripheral vision shuts off. I can only see things I’m directly looking at. My grip weakens automatically and I drop the chalk accidentally. It breaks into three, but when I bend down and try to pick up the pieces, I can’t see them. Blood has stopped flowing to my eyes and now it stops flowing to my head. From experience, I know the color is quickly draining from my face.
“Are you alright?” Mrs. Okayasu asks me, “do you need some water?” Spatial awareness is still working, and I find her face and excuse myself, asking after a little water, and leave the room as I break into a cold sweat.
As soon as I step out of the doorway, my vision begins to return, and just down the hall is a trough with several spigots. I pick one of the ones pointing down, twist, cup, and drink from my hands. This used to happen when I was younger, though it’s been several years since the last time. I know it’s anxiety, though I’m too proud to tell my co-teacher when the time comes. This is not how I expected the first class to go. I kneel in a weak draft coming down the stairs. I suspected it might happen, but now I know it had to. I realize I wasn’t afraid of anything except being afraid; looking for fear is what let it in. But it was unavoidable in some way, that this is the only way not to be afraid of teaching. Now that my nerves have had the bottom kicked out, they never will break again for this situation.
My cold sweat begins to disappear, and I am returning to normal. Twenty minutes have passed since we walked into class, maybe two since I walked back out. I walk in again, and I am fine for the rest of the period; nothing is unknown, I have learned through example what I needed. I try to be bouncy and over-enthusiastic, which for me, is probably externally not that different. The class finishes and some of the students (who all know Ichiro and One Piece but none know Nirvana) ask me additional questions about music I like, what they like, and in the case of two giggling girls, simply introduce themselves and request, “Please teach us English” which, adjusting for the situation and Japanese politeness and formality, I’m guessing translates into American as something like, “Welcome to the class” (for our first class of the day, two students come to the teacher’s office and ask us to come teach them – they ask me for the appropriate phrase in English, but there really isn’t one – I try to tell them “We’re ready for you now”).
Though we teach the very next period, Mrs. Okayasu and I return to the teacher’s office and I attempt to tell her what happened, but it doesn’t seem to matter much. Later she’ll simply ask if I was nervous, and I say yes weakly, unable to give much more of an answer, but for now we must go to another class. I’ve executed my first lesson plan, and we’ve taught my first class. It’s now time for the second.
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: Still alive.
Part III
14/4/12 Part 3
These mountains being swept by the storm clouds are jarringly beautiful, but I miss my mate.
-Still Schuyler
Supplemental
14/4/12
It’s now raining harder.
My goal of acquiring an alarm clock has so far escaped fulfillment. I feel vaguely like certain days I lack the required gameplan for a normal life. As I understand it, my unconnected condition, sans phone, internet, computer, books, and commitments, and yet being fully mobile, in a new country, and young and healthy should be perfectly desirable to many people, including previous instances of myself. Yet, met with these circumstances, I find myself wishing the day were through, and human interaction tomorrow would commence. Thinking of an upgrade to a smartphone, some would say inevitably, it’s easy to decry the helpless dependence of our generation/world to their own very recent connectivity. However, completely unconnected, I feel I’m careening back into the same helplessness, like walking off one end of a Pac-Man maze. Coming home from work threatens me in a similar way. I’m on my fifth of the six new CDs, and yet all I really want is to have someone here. I feel directionless by myself. And yet this isn’t even close to new. This is a recurring problem, like some disease you learn to live with. Perhaps it’s a symptom of the life resets. Perhaps it’s just me being dour. Maybe this is where hard work comes from – it satisfies the need to maintain this state, and gives me an excuse for not helping myself. But why maintain? The intimidation of the real world? The fear of living? Or the lack of interest? I’m sitting in the middle of Japan, afraid to leave my little housing unit. One time in Issaquah, when I was 17, I felt much like this, and went out driving east. I came back four hours later, no more money on me to pay for gas. Here, at the one gas station I saw, there are attendants to fill your tank for you, and I question the difficulty of this transaction when it one day will come. The sole of one of my slippers is beginning to come loose. Shit.
Ok, off to get an alarm clock, and maybe go looking around. I should’ve just bought that GameBoy.
-Schuyler
CDs
14/4/12
It’s not even one o’clock and already my day sounds like a series of implausible excuses. I concentrated on my inability to regulate my waking time with so much vigor last night, worrying about tomorrow (more on that later), that I awoke at 7 in the morning. Well, I had saved the ending of this Joan Didion book for tonight, when it’s too late and dark to do anything but stay home, but, you know, it’s 7:45 and rainy…and a few of the Moth podcasts I had saved up, one turned into four out of the ten left, cause I…slipped? I’m saving what in my mind has become the “World Heritage stuff” for a sunny day. And I should study for the LSAT, but oh, I looked over the wrong answers to the test yesterday after I did it, and it’s a good night thing anyway, and I’m only crawling under the blanket on my couch cause it’s cold and I don’t know how to make the heater work…
And when I finally go out, I just happen to wander accidentally into the further CD store (the entrance to the other’s parking lot was blocked! I swear!) which on the outside had many pictures of anime characters, including some of women with breasts bigger than their heads, in a colorful assortment of the stages of undress and eating something bitter. I’ve never seen a shop quite like this one, but I fear it’s attractive power. I think a few CDs were tucked in some corner, justifying the sign, but the rest was filled with video games and consoles, baseball cards, comics, arcade games, DVDs, clothes, backpacks, dirty comics, and something like seven different sources of music, either speakers or TVs playing loops, one of the former being (get this) that one hit Finch had once when we were growing up. There seemed to be more to the store, but I caught myself considering an N64 at one point (~$20, but I don’t have a TV or any games) and, avoiding attention, attempted to locate the exit.
Which brings us to today’s little pleasure – no, not the dirty comics. I went to the other CD store which had “books” which meant more manga and dirty comics, and possibly some normal books, but my Hiragana is still rough and my kanji laying with fixed and dilated pupils. The one aisle they had on CDs from out of the country was actually pretty reasonably stocked. Most things were between fifteen and twenty bucks, but their used section was even more well stocked. I returned home with a stack of six, something I haven’t done since 2009. As the British say, Smashing! This is how I make a good mood. Though they had Leann Rimes, Simon & Garfunkel, Meat Loaf, and Van Halen, they had the Cardigans, the Cranberries, Massive Attack, Silverchair, Halestorm, and the Corrs (yeah, yeah, kind of flavorless, but they have their time and place; they’re the water to my wine). All I can say is thank you Sara Starkey for leaving me a CD player, who/wherever you are. Also, I have some of your mail.
Now I just need to solve that alarm clock problem, which is why I originally set out. I don’t mind not getting breakfast tomorrow, but getting to school on time (hold back, memories!) is another matter.
Yesterday is yet another matter. I met the other ALTs here and we are few. I count eight in my head, including two girls (both from the Phillipines) and one aussie who had come from Sydney to the airport to the meeting that day. One Japanese teacher from each school came, and they discussed…something. We sat at the side of the room, and I, between Greg (the one who I corresponded with before I left) and Jeremiah, another ALT (who apparently knew Rick [for my Seattle friends, he told me about the job]) gathered as much information as I could as quickly as I could. When Murakami-san gave me my car, he showed me my two schools, but here I learned where in the school and when to go, the best place to buy fruits/veggies, milk/eggs, meat, the location of a pachinko palace, and got my schedule for the entire year (somewhat unbelievably to me, layed out entirely on two pages with space to spare). I learned where to get a phone, potential problems with signing a contract, how signatures here are replaced with a circular stamp called a hanko which has your family name, that I can use Jeremiah’s internet in a pinch, I can purchase an American-style fridge (which goes up to and beyond my waist, unlike the current one). What’s more, partly from driving around but mainly from talking, the town seems much smaller and more useful than it did at the start of the day. I found out from my lovely girlfriend that my power cable should be here in two or three days, and after Murakami-san and Taka(hiko-san, or is it Aiuchi-san?) took me to get my own hanko (which sounds humorously like honk-o), I can get internet and a phone and a bank account set up. Should be ready on Tuesday. (Taka is much younger than Murakami-san, very good with his English, and a very slick character by all appearances, but how much I will see him in the future is in doubt).
I got to meet with the teachers from my two schools afterwards, Imaichi Jr. High, and is my m-o everyday except Wednesdays, where I wheel across town to the junior high school named…Kobayashi! No word yet on if they serve Coney Island franks for lunch. My two teacher representatives that I met are Miho Eda and Naoyuki Shimizu, though properly called in Japanese Eda-sensei and Shimizu-sensei. Shimizu-sensei was in a large suit and some large glasses, keeping a straight face through the proceedings and jokes, wearing his wrinkles well, gained from no doubt more years of experience than I have at anything. His school, Kobayashi, is small he said, twenty kids a class, and only so many teachers, and didn’t seem to have much to give me. That, or Eda-sensei kept me too occupied until our time was up. She was short, by admission several years older than me but hiding all appearances of it. To go with her sweater and skirt, which seemed to be the standard outfit for all of the female teachers in attendance, she had a bob-cut and instructions for my first day – I should make a quiz about myself and introduce myself to the classes for the day. Shimizu-sensei said nothing on this, but I assume it will be the same. As the two discussed changes to my schedule for the year (some days cancelled, woo!), I saw, to my surprise, all of the teachers had been handed our resumes, translated. I could make out “GameXplain”, “Monthly Moose”, “Exigere Corp”. And next to my picture, Eda-sensei had written “very tall”. When she saw me read it, she covered her mouth with both hands as she laughed.
Jeremiah, shorter, freckled, informative, and apparently set to live here for some long time beyond his already accumulated three years, mapped for me many of the shops mentioned above, told me how to get a phone, things to watch out for, and offered to come with me, as well as invite me to a Costco run tomorrow. He has no trouble finding “Sara’s old place” and offered to pick me up at 7am, and allowed me to use his computer for the quiz and the pictures that will be part of the self-introduction Monday. “Hey,” he said, “I like helping people,” and one wonders if this is why he is going into his fourth year teaching.
One last interesting note – Murakami-san and Taka, who apparently remembered me from my interview in January too me to order a hanko, ready on Tuesday. The sounds of the Japanese alphabet always end in a vowel (almost) and breaking these sounds of a name up allow it to be translated, which, if you think about it, account for a lot of the accent. Syllables ending in consonants other than N become difficult, and usually become more than one before getting changed into katakana characters. However, the vowel sound “I” as in “lie” doesn’t exist. The two of them and the hanko shop owner weren’t sure how to spell my last name, then. Some time ago, Greg had translated it into katakana, but this had been four characters, and the head of the stamp was not very big, made to facilitate the much more common two-kanji names of the Japanese. They asked me how I wanted it written, knowing I was at least familiar with the vowel sounds of Japanese if not all of the characters. I was immediately and briefly reminded of Sharif Ali from Lawrence of Arabia when he learns Lawrence was born out of wedlock. Lawrence is tired from his heroic deeds saving Gasim, and additionally so from the story, not his proudest, especially in the very religious and patriarchal Arabia of the first World War. He doesn’t give up any more information than he has to to satisfy Ali’s questions. When Ali learns the truth, he smiles and tells Lawrence, “It seems you are free to choose your own name, then.” Lawrence, satisfied, rolls over and goes to sleep. In the hanko shop, I felt the same sudden freedom to invent myself. In the pronunciation of my name, I am limited. What it comes to mean, I am not. Nor are ay of us, I suppose, but with all of my life resets, and knowing another is coming, maybe my little Suzuki Alto can be like a camel in the desert. So continue the adventures in Japan.
-Laughing Cloud
P.S. We took an approximation of the Norwegian pronunciation and went with “Lee-suh-tah”, leaving off for spatial reasons the “duh”
Summation of the Action: No advancement on the list today.
Apartment.
12/4/12
I have an apartment. The name of the complex is “Play Park C”, and mine is #102. When I first heard about this, I wondered if I would get from my bedroom to the kitchen via slide, or be able to climb to the roof via rope ladder, or maybe my den would be a ball pit. One never knows what awaits one in a new country. I should have taken the hints from stores that had immigrated (or do I say emigrated now?) to the States, like “Lucky Dragon” or “Golden Wok” (My personal favorite was always Bellevue’s Vietnamese restaurant, “What the Phǫ?”). The Lucky is subjective, there’s very little Dragon, Golden is exaggerated, and only the Wok seems undebatable. In this instance, “Play” is subjective, and “Park” seems hard to deny. Only the “C” seems exaggerated, since I can only see one other that might fit the bill. I say “Play” is subjective because, though I live mostly near farmers, as is one of our liberal guilt talking points, people are generally smiling on my street, even though they’re working, and working hard. And I’ve got to say, their spinach and cabbages look excellent.
The plots of land are smaller than some front lawns I’ve seen, though I must say I’ve seen some expansive front lawns. In one plot of land, it’s difficult to leave inside voice earshot. They cover the visible distance to the hills, but in ten minutes, I can walk to a street fully lined with small buildings reminiscent of back alley-Beijing, everything somewhat gray and stone, some things run down, small, at odd angles, though not dirty, and irrigation dug into every crack along the road and between houses. The shoulder/sidewalk is is the width of my shoulders here, except where I get extra allowance from someone’s patio that isn’t at a right angle to the street. Caution is exercised when cars pass people or other cars. In some cases, with all three present, one has to stop and wait. A little further on, and I’ve come to a main thoroughfare to my town, Nikko. As I walk out on this real sidewalk, I can see a bridge to the right, and a street sign above it guiding people to the World Heritage section of town, some 9 km away. I’ve yet to go myself.
Each day is bringing new pleasures. The first day, though a marathon, yielded my visa and my apartment. The second day gained me hot water, and a couple North American veteran fellow teachers and their phone numbers, as well as food and furniture, guided by my apparent escort, Murakami-san. I even ate fried balls of octopus that, if laid flat, would cover my palm. I accidentally bit one in half, so I could see one of the tentacles, suckers totally intact, and a healthy purple and clear. The next day my international driver’s permit arrived, and though I was rather down in the dumps over not having a phone, computer, internet, or car, I did what I do best, and explored on foot. I found two sweetshops, a grocery store, a liquor store, about four barbers, plenty of specialty shops from fish to cheese, several cheap restaurants, and a payphone. That was yesterday. Today was my car (which I drove on the left for over an hour!), some chocolate from dad for easter, a library with internet, and a librarian with basic english. I’ve also secured the arrival of my power cable from my lovely girlfriend who is wonderful and smart and hardworking and loving and who takes care of me (clearly) and who I will cover with a thousand sweet kisses when next we meet, which will be on her side of Russia. If I continue at this rate, I estimate being supreme emperor of greater Asia by the time I leave.
I mentioned an apartment. It’s shaped rather like an H, the bottom side being my entryway and bathroom, the upper my den and bedroom, with my kitchen connecting the lot. I had the fortune to inherit from the previous resident (a Ms. Starkey – does anyone know if Ringo has a daughter?) a sofa, small table, smaller shelves, a couple of the best non-stick pans money can buy, a wealth of hangars, and a surprisingly formidable bed. But, this being Japan, there are some extra touches. The air conditioner has a remote, the door a video camera. When the doorbell is rung, the latter automatically switches on for my viewing pleasure, or I can turn it on at will to spy. My shower room has two control panels, one inside it and another in the kitchen. They’re linked by intercom, separated by maybe seven feet going around corners. I can control the temperature of the hot water with deft precision, fill my cramped tub with a single press of another button, alter the level with another, and this is confirmed by a wonderfully pleasant Japanese woman who seems passively appreciative of my selection. I can control an intercom between the two, and in the dizzying array of options, I’ve forgotten the last button. They’re written down for me, but in rather intimidating kanji (Chinese), and when I get internet, I will attempt to decipher them. So far I’ve managed the kanji for Nikko, Utsunomiya, Imaichi, school, on, off, entrance, exit, and stronger and weaker. I look forward to the challenge of my washing machine.
Far and away, however, is the toilet. It’s equipped with a cyborg arm, none of the buttons upon which influence the, at least to me, principal operation of a toilet, the flushing. There are six buttons, though I only have steeled the courage to try two of them, which happen to be the colorful ones. One is green and makes a small umbrella of dots. This button extends an arm a predetermined length below the seat and blows warm water in a constant stream upwards until it retracts at a second press. The other is pink, and has a similar symbol beneath the female toilets character, though she has no legs and it appears to shoot straight up her dress. Interestingly, these are different retractable arms, and both shoot with a force to impact the wall in front of the bowl. We’re talking head level, almost to the ceiling. One wonders how much toilet paper this nation consumes compared to its industrial economic partners. However, even the biggest prude can appreciate the constantly heated seat, warmer than a lover pulled from her blankets, and everyone can realize the obvious brilliance of a sink installed on the top of the tank which turns on automatically for the duration of every flush and refill period.
If this is how farmers live, I envision Tokyo with equal parts apprehension, admiration, and adventure. My nights, so far lonely, are spent with my iPod, books, and miniature balcony, which blocks me in as much as lets me out. If babble is what brooks do, then there is a brook babbling just past the rear gate, and its muffled chatter sends me to sleep, where I shall be headed soon. Tomorrow is an all-ALT meeting, as I understand from Murakami-san’s limited spoken English (which he more than makes up for with his politeness and dedication to me, as I find more and more things in need or correction, though hopefully this is almost over). The information I can get from other ALTs is staggering in it’s efficiency, much content squeezed into tidy brevity, brilliant fountains of practical information and long periods of quiet reflection. I bid you all good night from the start of the day (which I guess makes Seattle the end). I am safe, and I shall soon thrive. There is much more adventure yet to be had.
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: You might even call it a house.
Coming down.
9/4/12
I remember standing atop a hill I lived near in South San Francisco, looking back they way I had come some time ago. I was returning from the gym or something, and the twilight was almost giving way to night – the sky was indigo, and stars were beginning to poke out , twinkling against the haze of the horizon. I wasn’t looking north towards the city center, but south, towards SFO airport, from here a vast expanse of remarkably flat, paved land. And as I watched, one by one, the stars came down to this concrete field, to join the static yet complex network of lights belonging to the world terrestrial. There it would come to rest, and if one could follow it, extinguish. At will, another would come to life and drift back up to take the old vacant spot, rising silently, steadily. The wind brushed past me like another pedestrian on the sidewalk, and the star would rise, and find its place, and begin to twinkle, the debt of the world terrestrial coming to be settled by some external pre-arrangement.
Two years later I’m screaming across Siberia, squeezing the arms of my chair, ice creeping over the outermost pane of the window, sitting at the head of over a century of technology, defying inhospitability, skipping over countless ways to die quickly and painfully. I am the son of a son of a son of a man that took months to go a shorter distance west, slowly and steadily laying out plans for a new life. This man’s son’s son’s son careens south across Yakutsk, skirting Manchurian airspace, slipping to the side of the Koreas, taking advantage of a single span of eleven time zones. Within each, in warmer latitudes, my tongue is known; in some, permanently settled. This defining mark, my passport to the far east, is plummeting out of the atmosphere over Sakhalin, falling from the sky as angels would if they had our sense of fun, powered by heat they would never know. We trace lines across the dome of the sky, roaring loud enough to deafen if we were lower than we are, five miles up, and crossing 700 miles an hour. The shaking begins as we bisect the clouds themselves on the far side of the Sea of Japan, ahead is Tokyo, where 250 years ago pain of death was all that would have awaited me. It’s grown so expansive on our map, it’s not a demarcated city, but a region. The name is stretched over an area that has other cities in it.
We suddenly drop dozens of meters, a woman gasps, you can hear all the anxious looks. All the TVs abort their tasks and broadcast for us the forward camera. We all see it at the same time, a stretch in a field in the hazy distance, a target we could only trust was there as we were hurtled into the sky ten hours ago. It’s floating tantalizingly close: the main runway of Narita airport. We drop again. The woman across the aisle puts the crown of her head against the screen, stares at her knees. The young Russian woman next to me has her back flat against the seat, her long and sharp nails that match most of her clothes are pressed against the wall where she can see straight to the ground, which is closing in. I grab the side of the chair of the Frenchman in front of me.
We’re coming down but something isn’t right. Our angle of approach won’t surrender a straightening of the runway lines. The angle is good. Yet we drift off course, the promised adjustments don’t come. It’s like something is pushing us; is it wind? Is the camera zoomed and my perception of distance is to blame? We pull further into the runway, we’re pushed back again. We’re closing in strangely, and with a massive thrust, we’re thrown back into our seats as the plane lurches upwards. We can no longer see the runway. O captain my captain, your hammer-and-sickle logo, your heavy Russian accent from so many 80’s movies, the intercom is yours.
“Runway was occupied. We try again.”
We circle around, I continue to watch the ground as our side dips low. This land is the essence of a thousand whispered conversations, the veiled a priori context, the original reading between the lines. From the fear of usurpation to the invasion, from history to our living room, east going east and arriving west, and one little boy watching cartoons and playing video games. It has always been a valid topic for conversation (except the once), of innovation, industriousness, ingenuity, envy, and wonder, the unanswerable question, but never ensconced in the darkness shrouding the rest of the world like a choking mist. Like Commodore Perry, I will force this land to open itself to me.
We descend again, coming in fact, but carefully. The wind is trouble again, we’re off center, but closer than we were. He tries and tries as we descend, but it will not line up. If this were a simulation, he might try again, but it is too late now, and he’s got to save face, and no doubt has only such a window in the traffic of one of the points around which the world revolves. They’re not going to wait for him, and neither are we. Still at an angle, he manages to slip into an acceptable position, and moments before our wheels touch down, the lines on the runway are straight and clear almost to the horizon. The chance is his and we drop. Wheels hit tarmac too hard and bounce us right back into the air, but the captain has had enough and drops us one final time onto the pavement. The nose immediately sinks and we all lurch forward as the craft groans with the strain of shedding an excess 250 miles per hour, and the engines shout. As an exclamation point, the captain takes one of the earlier turn-offs even though we’re noticeably still above taxiing speed. We swing wildly to the left and begin our approach to the terminal. A round of applause has broken out.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Japan.
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: I’m sure we can do one or two with this.
Kronprinsessen
21/3/12
So a bit late on this one, since it happened before my last post. On the 11th, I was working my usual job at the ski simulator, and it just so happened to be the last day of the World Cup at Holmenkollen. While this meant I had very little business, it also meant that the King would arrive like he did the day before to watch the (men’s) jumping. I had brought my camera for other reasons, and had hoped this might occur. While it had only been him and the Queen the day before, this time it was the both of them and the Prince, his wife, their kids, and their very fluffy dog. To give you an idea of how close they were to my area, I was within the security circle that was established and cordoned off. I was at my furthest maybe thirty feet from, with direct line of sight.
(Quick note: They established a security line around my area, it being dug into a wall, essentially, but did not examine my very own person. I was not patted down, they did not inspect my area, and not finding my backpack in the kiosk, did not inspect it to make sure there were no weapons. Weird being in a safe country, huh?)
This is neat and all, but I got the main thrill when the exact same thing happened the year before. I even titled the album on Facebook “Schuyler meets the King” though I didn’t actually. I didn’t need to choke my way through a conversation in Norwegian with him, didn’t have to bow or shake his hand, nor did I have to figure out what to call him. I merited the same attention as would be afforded a stray dog. On my break, I went up to the museum, and the Queen and the First Lady of Iceland were getting a tour from our museum’s director, and I was within range as they came out. Lubka was the luckier one in the exchange, I suppose, since the Queen told her “Thank you” (English being the common language between here and Iceland).
But hey, we’re a national arena, I’ve worked serving diplomats, met some people from the South African secret service, and got to talk to Madeline Rees (though that was a different event). So I got to go back to my post and wait for the security circle to disperse so I could get customers again (or just read).
But as the games continue, I look up, and see a very alert fluffy dog inspecting my simulator from the edges of the concrete step into my area. The dog weighs the pros and cons of engaging a ride in the simulator, and decides, perhaps on the side of questioning the notion of money as worth, and using some of this personal worth to be moved and shaken for five minutes in a facsimile of skiing like Aksel Lund Svindal, that what would allow him to come down on one side or the other would be a good sniff. On the other end of the leash happens to be princess Mette-Marit with her two kids (and some other guy that doesn’t make the front of the postcards).
She is very tan, especially for March, and very blond, and does not look quite right in her wool socks that go halfway to her knees. The only other thing I know is the prince met her while she was working at a restaurant, and she has a kid from a previous marriage. She looks like she would be more at home on a shopping street in New York than in a cabin beset by snow in a Norwegian mountain range. But these are just outward appearances, and she was nice to me and really enjoyed watching her kids have fun.
She asks me if her son is old enough to take a ride, and, not knowing if he’s old enough or not, I say sure. She orders three tickets, and I tell her the total, this other guy, the dog handler, moves in to pay, and I really really hope the machine doesn’t have one of it’s moody spells, where it suddenly loses air pressure and drops, or the screen goes pink, or the doors fail to close, or the power goes out. I sneakily snap a couple pictures, and everything finishes smoothly. She leaves.
My boss comes and I show her the pictures, and we are a bit giddy. Ok, so I still get a little excited by stuff like that. But it’s pretty cool.
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: Just enjoying the ride.
Yoroshku onegaishimas
14/3/12
Ohayo Tokyo. Konbanwa New Yorku. Kon’nichiwa London.
So begins the intro to a podcast I’ve decided to lend my ear to. Originally, a language that consists of three alphabets, one of which is Chinese, and a whole new sentence construction seemed too large to tackle while I was in Japan, even if I was going to be immersed. One year? I’ve been here two years, and still have to ask people to switch back to English sometimes at work. Norwegian has very similar construction to English, and many of the words are borrowed, how could I even think of tackling Japanese in that short time while I will be studying law and French and travelling and teaching English?
Which is the argument I made whenever anyone asked me. However, more people than I had thought told me they knew someone who had picked it up quickly, or at least gotten enough to get by in that time. I had time, they assured me. And, ironically, when the least likely source told me this (the mechanic at the simulator at work), I finally figured, yeah, maybe I could. Besides, wasn’t I trying to get into international law? Wouldn’t some experience with Japanese help me?
So I looked up Hiragana, turns out it’s not thousands of characters, it’s less than 60. That still seems like a lot, but manageable, and a drastic reduction from what I was expecting. If I understand that, I can understand the translation of my name that I’ve already gotten, or at least read it. There are plenty of free resources online to study this, and learn the kanji (the Chinese characters) and even the katakana. Plus, there is a site that’s generally well received which offers free lessons and for a very small fee lets you access literally thousands more. I’ve begun to listen to their podcast, little lessons they release from time to time covering different topics: Japanesepod101.com. They do a good job disguising that this is incredibly basic beginner stuff, and laughing about small things and going over small but fundamental concepts in a way that even I can understand aurally. In fact, if I take away the consideration that I don’t know Japanese, they sound high. But it’s taught me several words already, and it’s effective.
Plus, I’ve noticed a strange tendency in me recently to want to take all things seriously, rather than have fun. So let’s have fun. Let’s study some Japanese and give it a shot. With luck I’ll get as far in it as I am in Norwegian right now, and I’ll be satisfied. The idea of perfecting it removed, there are no expectations, and I forgot how rewarding it is to be able to say basic things in a new language. If I don’t get into law school, I really need to do more of this. And even if I do, once I finish, I’ll try to find the time if I can.
Now all I need is my visa.
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: So entry one, what do you mean by conversational?
Volunteers?
26/2/12
I think I may be losing the faith. Writing doesn’t have the same draw it used to. Like Senor C in Diary of a Bad Year, I am too tired with writing the middles of stories, I think them up, resolve them in my head, let them go. More serious pursuits seem to occupy my time. Development gets harder and harder. Starting gets harder and harder. I wanted to start a shorter project while I was back in Seattle, but no dice. I thought I would be the one to hold the spirit together when our writing group failed to materialize, or coalesce, but it wasn’t a matter of drive, it was a matter of time.
K. So.
Number 6a. Done. I’m calling it done. The whole damn thing, started writing in 2001, I’ve finished my little edits, it’s now 4 sections, 45 chapters, 608 pages. Worked on it in 10 or so different places I’ve lived, over three continents, and a couple places I’ve only visited. I’m sure I’ve told you all about it at least once.
So.
Any volunteers to read it? Criticize? Comment?
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: 6a crossed off.
Skyscraper
28/01/12
Last post I said I had regained this time zone, but I wasn’t sure: I’ve had trouble sleeping.
My standard schedule here is heavily influenced by the sun. In summer, I can drop off around one am and rise and shine fully rested around six in the morning, maybe earlier. During the winter, the trend reverses, and being in darkness extends my slumber well into ten or eleven, even if I break my ritual and nod off at ten. Norway will slowly siphon off my lifeblood if I were to habitate here over the long term, regardless of other benefits. I used to think that this difference was caused externally, and so I could correct for it by ignoring or countering the external influence, but oh, how long it takes to feel woken up when it is dark outside versus light! Combine this with crossing the twenty five year mark, and my stats are dropping, sports fans. My rookie card is not a hot commodity.
My new determination is that this has to do with stress. My master’s degree is ending, and along with it my visa. I acknowledged early on that this degree would primarily enable me to stay in Norway for two years, and that’s precisely what I got. However, the idea of a career was still a distant cloud in my sky (and it wasn’t even laughing). What job requires a master’s in English over a Bachelor’s? PhD candidate?
Additionally Lubka and I were going through some troubles and reacted in a way that exacerbated them. We both had outside factors influencing our attitudes: mine was turning into my very real pressing need for a career path, and staying in Europe looked like a whole long line of struggling for jobs, hours, and money.
Once again, Marie came to my rescue. Her toothless insistence that I pursue law (or rather, her as she navigates her own life which happens to include going through law school) left deeper and deeper marks as I looked into it. A career not dissimilar to what I was doing, on its fundamentals at least, and would not be short on hours or money, or creative solutions and intellectual stimulation, for that matter.
I’m sure my visit to D.C. has bored many people, both before and after the fact. All I can come down on certainly is that researching gives me opinions, and the new information has been mined. I stll don’t feel frightened of it. I can study anything for three years, and the questions that remain, I can’t answer. Will I get in? Will I like it? Will I get a job afterwards? Will I be fulfilled? How, on the basis of the changes wrought upon myself in the last six years, indeed in the last two, how can I project with any certainty what I will want in forty years, what I will feel proud of and regretful towards and attempt to match that reliability with steps of action now? Especially ones so irreversible – I’ve always said I like to keep my options open.
The conclusion that I ultimately came to is that these questions are irrelevant. The reason that they matter is due to their impossibility. I wasn’t balking at a possible ‘No’ answer so much as I was the attempt to arrive at an answer I felt I could trust (which, really, was a condition of answering them). The thing is, they’re not dependent on law, but dependent on me. Law doesn’t raise them, I do. So law won’t answer them, I will.
I realized later I had another problem with my approach. Asking these sorts of questions presumes that my career must give me such returns for the valuable investment of my life. I was supposing that there was some correlation that had to be present between work and payout, although I know this from personal experience to be untrue. It began sounding like a structural game put on by the world, and I was trying to be a savvy player when my hand was inevitably being forced. However, I realized another option was to not get a career at all, just be a bum, and this make it obvious to me that there was no global game, just custom. A career isn’t some path designed for you, it’s more constructive. A career is an amalgamation of work experience, deals agreed to for set times, and essentially that you can make of the working environment. A career isn’t driving a road, but seeing where you can get to by driving down that road. Law isn’t a condemnation, it’s a determined effort to build a skyscraper.
So I bought a one way ticket to Japan. Yes, the adventure continues. It’s also a financially sound venture, and will require of me a sustained extroversion in a style I am not familiar with. Middle school english instruction will be new, I may lean on my friends ever so slightly (Jami Jami Jami hey!). But I will study for the LSAT and take it in the Land of the Rising Sun. And then (and here’s the real kicker) me and my Bublinka will rendez-vous stateside. And we’re talking long term. Talk about changes in the last two years, eh?
There’s a lot to fear with this plan, and I haven’t really answered the questions I had. Just because they’re irrelevant doesn’t mean I don’t still worry about them, apprehensively plan for them, try to work towards them. But lordy, is it good to have a plan! Sleep well, sports fans.
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: Probably working towards #37, the money one, but not looking at it that way. Also, during this japanese year, I WILL visit Syndey and try to make Wellington, which will make 5/7, and #9e, the continent one. Also also, three scenes from the end. Look for #6a, the book, to be available for reading real soon.
Crossing off another…
13/1/12
Hello from the wide cold north again. I’m back and after sleeping for 16 hours, I’ve regained this time zone. The Bulgarians I lent my room to in my absence didn’t tear it apart, and the faint odd smell was quickly dispatched. So, update.
Odd that, knowing I would get to check one off, I didn’t bring a pen. English James and I, with our day free, we ventured to the Mall shortly after our tour of the White House. While we had come in the night prior, the Washington Monument stood out against the rest of the city, a pillar of brilliant white with a spot of blinking red as planes from Reagan National Airport seemed to keep buzzing the presidential residence. It was easy to mark out the city by that alone, and we were around one of those markers that was unmistakable. It’s a monument that doesn’t just stand for a man or even an idea, but a nation.
When I was in London, I was on a walking tour and keeping no track of my location, we turned a corner and, staring me flat in the face, was Big Ben, possibly (certainly debatably) the most recognizable building in the world. It literally stopped me in my step, and I could only stare, as if I could make it part mine the longer I looked, or I could unlock the secrets of it, how it must have looked to the quarter of the world once under the crown, or siphon off the old sentiment that it was the center of what was considered proper western civilization.
The Washington monument, along with the White House, like Big Ben, can now be seen as another symbol of the most powerful country in the world; just as England fell, so too will America, but while Big Ben can also symbolize a legacy, the Washington Monument can’t claim the same, or at least, one that isn’t fully developed or constantly changing. Also, being intimately involved with the country in question, I don’t know if I’m seeing it as someone else might. D.C. feels like vaguely like a different country, but one I have no expectations from, or relate myself to very closely – I suspect this is being a part of the east coast, but it may also have to do with not being in a state, and thus I have no conception of it.
The feeling Big Ben gave me inspired me to write entry 36 (see Big Ben, Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty), and I felt like I wanted to do that one again, so I did 38 (Washington Mall, Roman Colosseum, and Sydney Opera House). English James and I walked up behind it from the White House (as much as can be said to be the front or back), and, looking south to the Jefferson Memorial, west to the Lincoln Monument, and east to the U.S. Capitol building, I could say definitively that I was on the Washington Mall. Borrowing a pen from one of the men sitting around, to James’s clapping, I crossed off 38a. The list has been updated.
Also, I’ve changed the rules of 31 a little, because Lubica saying hi to my dad for two seconds on video Skype didn’t seem worthy, and the idea is for it to be the same girl. So that’s the state of the list. I’m also a few scenes away from completing 6a, and will be getting assigned a section for my Norwegian level 3 class, passage of which certifies conversational status, so it’s a step towards 1.
Additionally, in D.C., I got the opportunity to follow Marie around to her new classes. I will be expanding on this later, but I bought a few LSAT prep books just now off of Amazon, they should be here in a week. It’s taken a lot of thought and I think this is the direction I’m going to move (and perhaps after wards I’ll move in a direction Marie hasn’t suggested).
It’s strange to think I am entering the last leg of my time here, that I’ve only 7 months left on my rent, and 8 on my visa, which I won’t be renewing. This place doesn’t feel new to me anymore, as I’ve “come home” twice now, first from Cape Town and second from Seattle. Oslo is beginning to have less of an obvious connection to me (“I’ve been there!”) than it does a passive one (“Yeah, Oslo, what about it?”). I suppose this is because it’s not worth a mention, like Seattle or Dallas, as I’ve lived there, gotten used to it, smelled the air, eaten the food, payed the rent, held a job, made native friends and had real friendships. When did this happen?!
I was just suggested to check out a Facebook group, “New in Oslo” and I almost blurted out, “I’m not new, I’m about to leave!” Hopefully I’ll find out if that’s true, and where to, soon. Interview monday.
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: 38a is crossed off, making steady progress with 1b (languages) and 6a (book). And since I’m a member of the human race, I resolved to lose some weight this year, so I guess progressing towards 7 (pull-ups). Last I checked, I could do 6 of them in a row.
Resolving to Have a Resolution
1/1/12
It’s New Year’s day, and Spike is taking care of its viewers by showing the entire Star Wars trilogy.
I feel like I’m writing from the future, though staying in the last significantly populated time zone, I’m writing from the past. 2012 is upon us, and I have missed a New Year’s Resolution, which was to finish the book. I was sure I was going to, but here we are. It’s two and a half years after I wrote the last word, finished the epilogue, with the three first chapters in their newest form, which I thought was a vast improvement. There was a small level of arrogance, though, I’ve found, as I attempted to cram several useless names into the reader’s head immediately and expect them to keep up. I’ve got a new plan, and it won’t take much work, I think. So not counting it, I have less than a chapter to go, as I finished another today. In fact, I have five scenes left which I will condense into four. Then I’m done with 6a.
Much of writing is clearer to me now than when I started, and I’ve noticed another sort of arrogance in my writing that I have been eradicating: expecting the reader to care about flippant words I throw in with half a thought. I may have a view of one of my characters as dangerous (let’s call him V), but it’s far more interesting when I undermine the view, especially through the eyes of another character that does the same. Instead of having all of the characters around him say he’s dangerous, he should think of himself as such, and the others should have a new view of him. Of course, this is one case. I hope I’m keeping a more even hand when I describe a character. Anyone care to help me when it’s done?
This may be the chronologically last time zone in the world, but it’s got to be one of the most fun, and one of the most habitable. I can only blame myself for being away from my friends for so long, so here I am, keeping odd hours and running myself all over town. Gifts for people here, check. Gifts for people back home, nearly check. I’ve gotten Mac & Jack’s, Mexican food, burgers from here to Issaquah, seen the fireworks at the Needle, the RR from Twin Peaks, and gone hiking in some mountains. It really is difficult to see a difference in natural beauty between western Washington and Oslo, except perhaps the mountains are bigger here. I’m recharging batteries I feel like I’ve long run down. This is Seattle, and you can do anything.
My sister and her husband are treating my extremely well, better than I feel I’ve been in a while (certainly in Oslo). Verene is buying organic food left and right, I’m joining her for vegetarian meals, and she’s interested to go anywhere with me: the perfect guide. We’re even drinking raw milk, which, if I had the money for it, I would be a convert. They also hosted this Christmas and it was…hmm…let me put on my Achebe mask for a moment: they threw a Christmas with much food and drink, so that no one went without feeling full at all times, whether from chocolate, or eggnog, or sweet palm wine, nor did anyone feel excluded from the present opening or the games that ensued, whether family or friends, old or new. Those that went and everyone agreed it was one of the best they had ever seen.
But things are looking up in general: I’m getting more hours at work automatically, I still get a Saturday or two off so I can go to the Stortinget tours, and it looks like my grand adventure isn’t at a close yet: I will end up in either Japan or go back to San Francisco next year, and both sound wonderful. A chunk of the big debt has been knocked off painlessly, and it’s going to keep going down, with the next bit coming on soon, it looks like. I’m going into Norwegian level 3 this coming semester, which, if I pass, will put me at the level of conversational.
2011 has been great. I started in Slovakia watching fireworks over the Danube; romanced in Italy; rocked out in Paris; sky-dove, surfed, and wrote in Cape Town; walked a small corner of the Middle East; and ended up in Seattle below the Needle, waiting for the next year to roll in. What’s more, I spent times with a girl I loved that I’ll never forget, even if we can’t be together, and had times with friends that made my life. It ends here, starring my old friends, who are some of my best. It’s difficult to say quite what they’ve meant to me, but I’ve been wanted this entire time, had no bad day, gotten to see everyone, all disagreements and strange feelings two years buried. Being in Seattle offers distance when I want it, and proximity when I find it convenient, as well as walking access to everything I’m interested in, it feels like a city in itself. I challenge another city to match Capitol Hill.
Since finishing the book is too easy a resolution (am I the only one that still does this?), I’m moving onto 1c, and have chosen French. That’s my goal for the next year, and I can do it. Each flick of the tongue, opening of the nose, it’s small flutters of beauty. Feminine, subtle, and airy, I have been obsessed with this language for too long. 2012 is going to be a dazzling year, I can feel it: one filled with new adventures, even if they be a little more austere.
Just checking in to show I’m still alive, and thanks to being back, very much alive. Here’s hoping the new year sees me on this blog a little more, too, as much as I say it. You’ll hear about updates to the list, at the very least: 38a. is approaching quick, and b. seems to be within reach, should I choose to do it. Hope to see you all in the new year. I hope you all had a good 2011, and happy 2012 all around,
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: Coming to DC in a few days, and one more chapter down. It’s a-comin’, oh boy, it’s a-comin…
Theme
07/12/11
This introduction is unrequested by subject. System is the culprit.
I have few days left to finish it if I am to make my own deadline of having the lot done by the time I go back to Seattle for Christmas. It’s fully within my realm of capabilities to renew my library books the day before I leave and just take the damn things with me, I’ll be gone less than the loan limit, but I have doubts of working on it there. More, I have dared myself, and I work best when I press weights on myself: ticking clocks, guilt at wasted time and letting myself down and going back on what I bragged, my casual ease with a thesis. Lubka calls it time management. I remember the panic I felt when I attempted to write the first pages about Magda; I had nothing, literally nothing, and in response changed the shape of my thesis. I rescaled what I thought I could know, admitted I was only following in the footsteps of other critics, looking for space to occupy in their gaps, or not even, rather than on their heads.
The game has changed: writing an introduction is shorter, less conclusive (I leave that to the conclusion), there is a blacked out block of text I am unallowed to say. In Rondebosch, as now, my stomach constantly rumbles, not out of hunger, but help, to pull me away. I have been cautioned this very day not to write it off as simply an extra bump on the road to my degree, whatever use that will turn out to be.
Let this blog post then be seen as a small pillar of steam escaping from a pressurized yet inactive coupling. It must go somewhere, though apparently not forward yet.
My adviser has given me a book for keepsies, Peter McDonald’s The Literature Police (Coetzee talks about being contacted for it here, a very entertaining speech). The book is excessively dry, and piled up to the brim with language that David Attridge is prone to using: anti-realist, post-something, obligation, authority, culture of letters, political significance, divided society, implication (at this point I am literally repeatedly opening the book to a random page and selecting the first sentence my eyes focus on), humanistic artist, anti-individualistic line of argument, in short, all of the things one might toss under the bus of “textuality”. I am not criticizing the book objectively. There is a critical portion of this I am simply not intelligent enough to grasp, or at least, not any more. One day I may finish this book. To follow Herman Cain by quoting an irrelevant movie, “but it is not this day”.
It’s impossible to read a valuable chunk of criticism of J.M. Coetzee without encountering Nadine Gordimer, and as a large stack of my ‘post-thesis’ reading, I picked up July’s People. An ok book by itself, I felt nothing out of the ordinary until the ending. However, one line stood out to me like a toothache. After Bam kills a pig for the village and the family experiences an almost drunken relief of switching from waiting to being functional in this village and existing as part of it rather than just bundled to it, he and Maureen dissolve their stretch of abstinence and sleep together. When Bam wakes up the next morning, he sees blood on his penis, and mistakes it for the pig’s for a moment, when it’s actually Maureen’s menstrual blood.
I don’t even want to think of this from a symbolic standpoint, because I’ve had it with this tired repetition, and I’m sick of being told masculinity is destructive and painful for those around it. Can we reduce the symbol of man and woman, father and mother to something else, if we need to reduce them? Pure femininity is not nurturing, either, nor do we envy the position of one parent so to be closer to the other. And while we’re at it, Rushdie, breasts are not life-giving, and Indian women are not superstitious to the point where they can’t function, nor do they learn to love their husbands piece by piece. Can we please evolve as writers? Once I am out on my own, I give myself life, by buying food and paying for heat and housing and clothes. I conquer superstition with logic and reason and science. My penis does not make women bleed, they do it on their own. It doesn’t make anything else bleed either, unless I use a sharpened tool to cut it. I don’t use my masculinity to conquer people and rape them, I use it to conquer the unknown, to capture in my mind a vision of a place I visit or a skill I acquire. Women are just as capable of screwing up their kids as men are. What I consume is information.
As we read, we don’t see stereotypes in plot, we see them in theme, and in symbol. I am a living, breathing, thinking person, and I can overcome the alleged perceptions of my gender, race, culture. My struggles are not physical, nor do they have anything to do with colonization, or against authority, or with my parents, either serving, overcoming, or protecting. Does anyone? Or have we been taught that we relate to these?
And that’s why, when I had to wait for two hours in the library and read Don Delillo’s Point Omega in the UiO library, I felt like I had passed some sort of gate, walked into a different room. I think I have a new writer’s oeurve to read.
-Schuyler
Summation of the action: Two more chapters to do, and I’m chipping away.
Food
16/11/11
I’ve been thinking about eating flesh.
Graham and I had this discussion a few times before, occasionally to gross out whoever was near us: if you liked the taste of human flesh, would you want to know? Our answer was always yes.
Flesh eating (of any sort) has been an issue for a while, and it’s not the first time I’ve considered it. Like when I decided to try to be a vegetarian for a month. Coetzee, in more than one of his books, makes a case for the vegetarian cause, and makes good arguments about it: yes, carnivores exist in the animal kingdom. But the “natural order” only exists as a “natural state” because we give that state value as being natural. We are no more than animals, ultimately, except we have a higher consciousness, and it is our duty to use that to keep ourselves from slaughtering en masse other animals, especially in brutal ways. Whether they realize our contribution is of little consequence; we should undertake this thing for the purpose of itself, invoking morality. David Lurie weeps over the massive loss of life required so that other animals may thrive. How strange, Elizabeth Costello notes, it would seem to an alien race to see the natives slicing up flesh, storing it in their fridges, tenderizing it and searing it so that we may rip it apart on our plates. Watch a cooking show – these rituals are not in the natural order.
This is a new direction to take the debate, but I wonder about it. Talking to people non-confrontationally, I tend to arrive at the same destination: Life is valuable, creatures shouldn’t suffer. This is difficult to argue with, and I don’t think anyone is going to try to make an animal suffer, all other factors being equal (excluding the sadists). Whether they fall on the side of eating meat or not is really inconsequential.
“Would you kill a spider?” I feel compelled to ask. “Or a fly?”
This seems like playing devil’s advocate, or being a wise ass, and usually people barrel through accordingly, assenting. We all kill flies. Ants, spiders, cockroaches, etc., should they come into our kitchen.
I’m not just trying to be a wise ass, though. The point is obvious: well, these have life too. But so do plants, trees, ears of corn, apples, etc. It seems like a cheeky point, but if I am to claim my life has value, on what basis do I claim that it has more value than a cow? Or a spider? Or a sunflower? If I point to the relationships I have, then look at it from the other end: can we say relationships define value in life? If a ship is sinking, is that the best way to determine who should be saved first? And are we conscious of all the relationships that exist within the floral kingdom?
The most common answer I have heard is superior intellect, or superior intellectual processes, but that’s actually quite arrogant to suggest. I think we’ve proved that there’s more going on in our brains than just about any other creature out there, but that seems to be simply pointing at something that we have and saying it’s valuable cause we have it. I don’t mean to suggest the whole ‘condemn humanity for our destroying the world’ argument, but really? Superior intellect? And that makes me a higher life form?
I’ve heard of a sect of people that only eat dead food, fruit that’s fallen from a tree for instance, or something that’s died of natural causes, which seems extremely difficult, but dedicated. Much more so than myself, anyway. Thinking about this has had the ironic result of me continuing to eat meat, but throwing spiders, ants, and flies that wander into my room out the window, or somewhere where they don’t bother me (my compassion extends to the nearest window). Rarely do I kill one now, which proved pretty trying while I was in Cape Town, and there were a lot of ants crawling into the house from the garden.
Ultimately, however, I am not strong enough to do the same things, adhere to the same rules that would seem to fit the morals I am talking about. I can’t wait around for food to drop. I love processed foods. I like to overeat from time to time. I had a spider winding himself down from my ceiling onto my desk the other day while I was present. It’s getting tantalizingly cold outside now, and I didn’t really want to open my window, so I whacked him with my planner, and I had intended to hit the thread from which he dangled more, but didn’t really care if and when he died. Not having a cup + cold weather + not wanting to touch him myself = not having much compassion for spiderkind. I’m OK with this.
It seems unfair not to scale this back up: is that how I feel about people? If it gets too inconvenient, it’s to each his own? Or do I not identify with the spider as much as a person? What about a person from another region of the world, or someone I just watched kick a stroller? Or both, the homophobic deeply religious guys from, say, Islam (apparently a lot live in Grünerløkka now), or Korea, or Spain, I’ve met one of each? And if yes, would they do the same for me? Assuming yes as well, does this point to a devaluing of life for those that are different, or are we just assigning it too much in the first place, and this points to a more accurate valuation? What is it that makes life valuable, except being life?
Of course, this is bordering on overboard, or may have crossed it some time ago. After all, every time you wash your hands, you extinguish life. The universe will grow too cold to support life some day, and there’s no grand plan behind that, either, no deity who has cursed us all or will save us from a chilly fate, according to science, which I happen to subscribe to. If we value life, we are doing so against design. We need to draw lines somewhere, and if I am going to subscribe to the principle of value in life, it’s very difficult to decide where. Tradition dictates that we allow the flesh of dead animals to pass our lips, sink down our gullet, digest in our bellies, and become part of us.
Which brings me full circle: If the taste of human flesh appealed to your taste buds, would you want to know? Does knowing this about yourself trump your line in food choice? I have to say yes.
-Schuyler
P.S. Normally, for the above reasons, it seems vegetarians, while doing something I don’t think I could do for a year or so, haven’t totally thought things out. There is another sect of vegetarians, such as my sister Verene, that don’t eat animals based on taste, and/or to protest the brutal industry standards. I’m all for these people.
Summation of the Action: Eating human flesh is not going on the list, though I’m considering adding one of English James’ entries on his list: Kill and eat an animal. In fact, I once had to cut up a salmon which had no head or guts, but which still had bones and a tail and fins and such. My repulsion turned out to be very slight. I wonder sometimes what it would feel like to, in a night, go from watching an animal moving under its own initiative to being severed under my fork and knife, and going into my mouth. This seems like it should be a mandatory activity, perhaps even initiatory for carnivores.
My Moth – Vanity
3/11/11
So I was listening to a broadcast of the Moth this morning (Chris got me hooked), and they had a night where each speaker chose one of the seven deadly sins and the one I was listening to had chosen sloth (this is from back in May, I have been building casts up). Being a master of his couch, he had the matter well in hand. Most of the performers on these events seem to be writers, and it’s easy to see the evidence of it after a few episodes. I think everyone has a few stories, and I often imagine what I would talk about if I were to give a similar talk. Writing, especially writing here, doesn’t really have many differences, so I wondered as I walked to work what I would do were I to take on the challenge. It occurred to me I would take Pride. (And, since no one reads this anyway, I figured here was as good a place to orate and opine.)
This was a strange thing to admit, and I have to say I was very easy with admitting it. Partly because I don’t give a lot of creedence to the ranking of sins in Hell by men who have never been there (nor to Hell), but partly because I think I have a bit of a different case.
If you hang around me long, you’ll notice I look into mirrors often. If I am on the T-bane, I’ll look out the window and see myself. If I am in a restaurant with a wall mirror or a mirror behind the bar, I will try to find myself. Occasionally I look at pictures of myself on Facebook, seeing my profile pictures as a sort of ‘set’ that stands for something, and my eyes will dart to myself in pictures of groups in which I am involved. You’d be surprised how many store fronts you can see yourself in walking down the street. I know I do it, and it’s not something I’m terribly proud of. I usually try to sneak looks, trying to avoid any one else noticing, trying to be so quick the me in the mirror doesn’t catch me. Being a teenage boy, you learn to move your eyes very quickly, very stealthily. Maintaining eye contact is something you can work on later, it’s NOT letting people know you’re looking that’s the challenge. I will say, with this, I’ve gotten quite good.
But. Never in any of those instances am I looking at my reflection and thinking to myself how handsome I am, or admiring myself as a cut above those around me. I’ve seen plenty of men more handsome than me, and in the presence of one, it really doesn’t bother me. I don’t mind being second, fourth, last, unranked. I never wipe clean my clothes or try to get my hair under control or rarely even change posture when a better looking guy is around. And if I spot the most beautiful girl in the room, why shouldn’t she go after that other guy? I’m sure several times they’ve gone back to his place, had a few drinks, had incredibly beautiful sex. It’s not this that I’m thinking about.
What I’m thinking about. If I walk by a store front and there are very reflective windows or it’s much brighter outside and I happen to turn my head, more often than not I am examining the look I give out, that I am reflecting to the world. When other people look at me, I think, what do they think? Do I look weird? Do I have something sticking to me that I should know about? Of particular interest is the weird way my pants look when I hit the maximum forward stretch of my stride.
I used to wonder about this as a teenager too, part of the self-conscious bit. When around other people, I always wondered what they saw when they looked at me. Did they laugh when I went away, or was outside earshot? Did I stick in their minds as a weird looking kid? Growing my hair long was a sort of way of helping this: if I had something like that about me, not only could it hide my face, but it helped to define the way I looked, and the first thing that stuck in other people’s minds wasn’t how tall or fat I was, but that I had a big beard and long hair. Tall, yeah, maybe ok, but seeing a reflection of myself next to someone else is always strange, because I dwarf them most times. The sheer size of my head is always difficult to accept. I avoid looking into the reflection to make this comparison.
I have two quotes I really like, though I like one more. One is by Billy Corgan, which goes, “Don’t judge yourself by someone else’s standards. You will always lose.” I suppose part of my interest in seeing myself the way others do is a way of escaping my body and consciousness and seeing the world through someone else’s, which has often been a dream of mine (think of how much you could learn about human cognition, especially your own), but some of it is self-consciousness as well. It’s always hard to lose that bit, hoping everything will be alright, and that you will be liked, even in this shallow way. The other quote is from Kurt Cobain, “Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.” This always had two meanings to me: a) It’s a waste to want to be someone else, and b) the person that you are now is intrinsically worth being. This is also another person’s thought, but I like it, and I want to keep it as my own.
A lot of changes happened in the last two years. I lost a lot of weight, and when I was more comfortable with it I cut my hair, and have kept it pretty short, considering. I got more looks, I went out more. But I still never had a girlfriend for more than four months, usually less, and I never really felt totally at peace unless with a select few of my friends, and maybe a couple members of my family. There are a lot of people who I want to make the right impression with, even if I’ve seen them a thousand times (my dad, for example).
Eventually, I moved to San Francisco, and started meeting girls online and doing narrated videos for GameXplain.com. I’ve been thinking about it recently, and though I was restless to move on to Norway, I loved that job. I got to create videos, edit them how I pleased, and I even got to write, help film, and host our own web show. And a strange thing happened: I began getting responses to my videos online not only with how they had helped the person watching them, but how sexy they thought my voice was, and a couple requests for dates. Of course these were no doubt partly facetious, but I started getting a lot of responses on this dating site, and I took a few of them up on their offers. After several first dates, I got myself a girlfriend, sort of, and our show and site began to take off. We needed an episode a week, and I was only too happy to stand in front of the camera.
But being with this girl, another strange thing happened: I felt less and less at peace with her as time went on, like I needed to work harder and harder to put on a good face. Some dates went well, some were only ok. I was a little glad I got into the UiO and wouldn’t have to worry about deciding when to break up, or starting the whole event. And then I began to worry more and more how I looked on camera. I still enjoyed it, and had lost my sense of foolishness as I dressed up like a cowboy, talked to empty spaces, and posed as an angel, but I would need to check out how I looked in the mirror beforehand, or even feel uneasy not doing it between some takes.
I suppose this still counts as Vanity. And it’s the desire of every individual to scream their individuality at the empty spaces of the world.
I came to Norway, and was happy to be a student again. I was getting better at flirting, and decided, having gotten out of a relationship I knew I would like less and less as it progressed (we didn’t fit each other at all anyway), I decided to be irresponsible. I saw several good looking girls, and even slept with a couple. I was uneasy about getting back into a relationship, but it was what people did, and the uncommitted lifestyle wasn’t really for me I found out, and I did like her.
I just didn’t know what part of me she liked, the part I showed her, the part I assumed she could see, the part I didn’t assume she could see but still controlled, or something even less serious. I still caught myself in mirrors, reflective windows, the glass panels on the bus and T-bane, but I was looking at her too, seeing if she was looking at me, or if I could sneak a look, did she look somewhere else? Not out of distrust, but I was interested to know where she looked when we were in public. Besides, it was better to look at her than myself all the time.
One night we went on a sort-of date. Oslo recently opened an Ice Bar similar to Stockholm’s and several others around Europe. You dress in a huge poncho, get a free drink with your ticket and sit on furs on an ice couch while you drink out of a cup fashioned from ice standing on the ice table, gazing at the sculptures in ice, the designs carved into and inside the ice, and watching your breath. It’s icy, is what I’m trying to say. And I remember, we went there together, along with a couple of our friends, and had our ice drink and had fun together, taking more pictures than sitting still or having alcohol. We hadn’t been dating long, and there were no pictures of us together, so she and our friends remedied the situation. I didn’t really feel the need to make sure I looked good that night, worried more about being with her, how comfortable it felt to be photographed, and most of the time, I tried not to even notice it was happening. In most of the pictures, I’m not looking at the camera. Act natural, they say.
But some of the decorations are quotes from famous rockers, rockers and ice having gone together since time immemorial, apparently. And I couldn’t help but notice, there on the back wall, was a quote:
“Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.” -Kurt Cobain
I tapped her on the shoulder, and said, “One of my favorite quotes is over there on the wall.”
And she said, “Yeah, they have one of my favorites too.”
“Which?” I asked. I had read them all.
She recited Kurt’s with a smile. She pulled me off the ice couch, and they got a picture of it, and us.
We’re coming up on a year together.
-Schuyler
P.S. What’s your sin?
Summation of the Action: Kind of unrelated.
Stew
18/10/11
Getting home from work, my legs are tired, and my mind is tired, and I have an urge to nap. But more than that, I have an urge to sit, mindlessly, stare at a blank wall, eat something sweet maybe, and procrastinate my procrastinating. I hate being this tired. I hate feeling like I will do everything later, later when I have the energy and motivation, later when I am not so fatigued. I’m not even exhausted, just pushed up to the limit of energy loss that it seems an occupation is allowed to get away with. Tyler Durden tells me I am not my job, but how many jobs made him?
The hours slip away. Like fish in a river, they go through my fingertips. This is my no-day, my not-a-day. The day where I look forward to other days where I am able to do what I please, where I have the free time I have now, though do not feel like I am stealing it back. I am sitting in front of my computer, doing nothing to improve my situation, doing nothing to change my occupation, my education, my waistline, my diet, not working on my hobby, trying to forget that at the moment I am going nowhere. It seems like a panic, when I think of where I am going in this life, and what my plans are, and have to face how much work is required to get to point B that I won’t get paid for. It seems like a panic but it is a state that I drift in and out of, and am too tired to fight off. I can go out to the bar, I can invite friends over for a dinner, I can work on my writing or try to put together a blog people will follow, the beginning of any good marketing strategy, they say. I haven’t even cleaned my room, nor put up the things on the wall that I specifically brought to put up on my wall. The problems of putting them up are small, the creative demand miniscule, and insurmountable. Maybe learn another word in Norwegian. Maybe watch a movie. Maybe waste time on the internet.
The problem is, if I do any of these things to fix the situation, they are temporary, and some days later, I will be back. Instead, I will drive away my readers.
Our problems come in large chunks that we must break down, solve inch by inch. The psychological aspect is the part that takes its toll, moreso than the others. Lolling about and avoiding them is slightly easier than bitching about them. The problem is, at times it begins to feel like future wants and current wants are at odds, ambition matched only by the work necessary to achieve it. After all, we’re just people. Just people with limits, as much as we hate to admit them sometimes. It’s not like this every day, but sometimes it’s like getting your feet stuck in the mud. As I grow older, I sympathise with people a little more, admire people working hard a little more. I wish I had an easy answer, a mnemonic trick to follow when feeling down, or some little inspirational energetic jingle, but I don’t. If someone walks through your door it’s easy to perk up, but without, langour grows thick and oppressive, and it gets added in thick slabs, until it is not an effect but a command.
There’s only so much energy and time a person has in a day, a week, a year. I could say to enjoy it, but that’s just hollow, a quick turn off from the point I was trying to make. Perhaps I am trying to make no point. This is a blog and I am trying to figure out what that means, and the way I figure out what things mean is not through research, it’s through exposure. Language, music, writing, people, relationships, employment, you name it.
I could also turn off into Kurt Vonnegut’s reply to a young creative writing student asking him for advice, the reply being don’t write for a while, and get life experience, but that’s not where I was headed either. Right now, it feels like there’s a great cauldron, and anything can be thrown into it, anything at all, and I’ll sympathise. That is my super power, I’ll roll out sympathy like a mighty appetite, and nothing will be safe. A little of this, a little of that, I’m not allergic to that anymore, I don’t mind if that’s not cooked all the way through, it’s not too salty or spicy for me, I’m taking all comers. Just don’t put a bit of me in there, because it doesn’t belong. This is my no-day, and its capacity is beyond all of us.
Of course, this may be a symptom of the oncoming Norwegian winter. Round two, here goes.
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: Nothing. I’ve gotten some ideas down for other less pathetic posts, maybe the next one will be there.
Mother City
11/10/11
“First world environment” are the words Eckard uses before I leave, assuring me finding food will be no problem. My concern wasn’t that Rondebosch might be in the bush, but that it was tiled with suburbs and suburbs alone. There was no discernible public transportation that I could see from the other end of this time zone, and the distances were deceptive when I asked Google how long it would take to walk here and there. All I could tell is I would be back and forth through that one damn park again and again.
My thesis is now done (the meat anyway), and I’m inching onto the launching pad, one foot forward, one foot back. I can’t say I’m really slicing any cherished connections, since I met a record low number of people here, and two I spent the most time with live in Germany and Norway anyway. If I were to bond, it would be with the location, and I think I have. While he was here, my dad asked at the UCT if they had any part-time teaching positions in the math department. In the back of my mind, like undressing my waitress with my eyes, I’ve been keeping tabs on the market for my degree here. I learn of things that I store in my mind to do one day, things I could never do during my time here: Hikes, places to grab a beer, trips to non-Western world Africa (honest to god Africa), where’s hip to rent and to buy, events after I leave, bands I’d like to one day catch in a concert. Come a bit closer, I’ll lean in and whisper something in your ear, my tongue flicking over my teeth, the ice swirling in your glass, yeah, I’ll let you in on what I think of you, what I want you to do. Seattle and Oslo are different continents, and they’re not fun like you are, they’re not so full of surprises, I haven’t pried you open yet.
But the lights are about to come on and my taxi is waiting. I’ve crossed over the limit where it feels like I live here, and by my standard of whether or not I am paying rent, I do. Either this is too long or not enough. I read, I thought, I wrote, I surfed, I wrote, I hiked, I shopped, I christmas-shopped, I wrote, I saw penguins and then skydived, I wrote some more. I actually missed Oslo, my eyes watered when I considered not going back to Seattle this year too.
There are so many little strange things here, scars of earlier times. White home owners, black and coloured laborers (and the acceptability of saying coloured). The patriarchy which seems to infest under-developed/developing countries (selectively applicable), and the accessories and accoutrements and infrastructure and attitude and availability of the first world. Driving on the left, walking in traffic. Most of all, a city with flavor, man, yeah, spice too. The cuisine is particular, but familiar. The city small, inviting, neighborly even, in a way most cities aren’t, and I don’t mean the people, I mean the shape and structure. I feel invited. The speech is varied, the locals have too many different accents, tri-lingual signs, if they all fit in, could I? There are many layers to the social make up, and so many people scattered across them, at times, indiscriminately, at times, rigidly. You just wait Cape Town, I’ll be back. I’ll walk the veld again, handle your six exclusive-animals currency, avoid and give to your beggars, curse your late trains, hike your hills, drive through your townships, maybe learn one of your languages.
The odd thing is while I’ve been here, no one seems quite to know what to make of me. “You sound American.” “You’re Norwegian?” “Oh, you’re at the UCT.” “You’re from Seattle.” “How is the Texas heat?” If people keep saying it, does that make it true? Part of it? Or part of me?
I don’t know what awaits me, even in the next year. But I pronounce this episode a success. I like what this city is laying down, and though I do not feel a print left on me, no piece of my heart lives here (not yet, anyway), I am a bit dizzy and ready for more. I promise nothing, and I would like to see Oslo and Seattle again, but I want to come back, really want to. So…
5 Word Review: Cape Town – Stamped for approval.
See you all in the other Mother Cities.
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: Nothing on the list, really. Bought a ticket to Seattle, stopping in DC on the way back, which means 38a is a go.
Number 2
10/10/11
“Put your left leg into ‘ere,” Klaus says to me, and I step inside. He holds open the loop for my other leg, and naturally catch my shoe. “End pool it up onto yo’ beck, round yo’ shouldehs.” It’s a set of black straps interconnected I don’t know how over my back, hooking around me somewhat like stars in Orion. Much of it is of a material that reminds me of the adjustable part of my backpack straps, but there are several thick rubber bands and metal hooks about half the width of my finger, mostly on the front of my shoulders. “Nehw, I need to make it toyt, so it’s good to meyk shuh it’s only legs in them leg streps, if you understend,” Klaus says, draping his blond dreadlocks behind his shoulders. “I’ll leeve it to you. I don’t get paid enough for thet.”
He does something behind me, and the leg straps pull up to an amble-adjusting height, but I can still maneuver around it. He explains to me something they call the magic trick, where you bend your legs backwards as far as they go, head back and up, and pelvis forward. It seems more to be “The Big Thrust” and I suppose he’s heard it before, even if in his own head. He will tell me when this is necessary. He doesn’t seem to mind my being a head taller than him, which I was afraid might be an issue. We walk out into the noon day sun.
We make small talk on our way, he’s been somewhere I’ve been, wants to go back. How long have you…? Yes, very excited. No, not scared. I’ve been wanting to do this since I was five or so, maybe longer. My desire is as old as my memory. This red one? No, the blue over there. I actually have this list…
Inside the plane, there is not enough room to stand, hardly enough to crouch. There is only the floor space of a sedan if you removed the seats. He gets in first. Watch your head – I watch my head. I sit between his legs on the far side, and altogether six of us cram into the space, there literally is no space for another person. Suze and her guide are literally crammed into the place where a co-pilot should be. I stick my feet the only place they fit, and one of the other experts slides closed a clear plastic shutter that covers where a hole has been carved into the fuselage, like it suffered a bite from a bigger plane. The rest of the fuselage looks to be one layer in most places, like a car when the upholstery is removed, like you are the last slice of meat in a gutted fish. We hear the propeller begin, unfiltered, and are in motion. We are in the air. “We’re not gonna land,” Ingrid realizes aloud. We exchange looks.
“I’ll explain evrythin’ when we’re ‘alfway” Klaus shouts into my ear, and I nod, because he will not hear me if I say anything and there is not space to turn around and face him. We climb. I see the flat veld fall away, to the south is the picturesque outline like on an EKG machine. One bump, Devil’s Peak, flatline, Table Mountain, recovery bump, Lion’s Head. The coast is a whisp of a painter’s brushstroke, the waves crash steadily into the shore until they are simply all white. I spy a sliver between the windows and the grounding, and I can see raw sky. “We’re at 1000 feet!” Ingrid’s guide shouts, non-plussed with battling the engine for aural superiority. He flips the camera on his glove around the plane, catching the view, our faces, the view again. We can tell he likes this part.
Ingrid and I cannot exchanging looks, I cannot see our other friend Suze. I hold up my hand, hold it flat, and it stays like that. Ingrid holds hers up, her stomach no longer tying itself in knots as in the car, her hand is flat. Klaus holds his hand up and shakes it. I cannot believe how calm I am. My mind must be elsewhere, but it isn’t.
How can I be this calm? Envisioning is usually my way of preparing, but I’ve been envisioning this since I can remember. In my vision, the door of a plane is open, the guides standing, the clients sitting. The clients shy away from the door, I grab the edges, look out, and throw myself out either nonchalantly or with wild abandon. I should be bouncing with excitement. I am now sitting calmly between another man’s legs. My one leg is falling asleep, and the leg straps have pulled my pant legs above my socks. I know better than to try to adjust them. It occurs to me they’ll be more or less in the way, as far as appendages go, until we land.
Klaus points out to me Table Bay, which I had recognized, and the bigger features, Robben Island, Table Mountain, etc. We fly in one direction, turn, fly over the sea, turn, fly along the coast. When Klaus explains to me what we will be doing nothing is new or unassumed, but I take it all down as if I will be tested. I turn and struggle to ask him about something he said. It is an easy procedure, I could have anticipated the answer. He tells me to grab a small load-bearing girder running up between two windows and hoist myself onto his lap. I do so, making sure to set myself down easily. “This is the part we won’t mentien agein,” he tells me. We are now strapped together, but I still have no visual basis for the strength of the straps. I realize now I have known Klaus for most of an hour, and I easily trust him with my life. At the time, my life doesn’t seem to be at stake.
All three guides have what looks like a watch that they keep checking, but I realize early it is an altimeter. Ingrid’s guide checks his as if he were waiting for a bus, scoots himself forward, and as we are banking, throws open the shutter. I actually gasp. I have felt this way on a roller coaster when I was little, going up the first hill of the wooden Texas Giant: powerless against known impending doom. Canceling flashes through my mind, the words arrange themselves into a sentence in my head. I know better than to speak; it is my instinct but not my inclination.
Ingrid inches to the edge of the opening very bravely, more than she led us to believe, and dangled her legs out. She believed this was far enough, but her guide knew it wasn’t, and inched her further, until she had no seat at all. For a moment, her guide is sitting with his legs dangling out of the plane, and she is attached to the front of him, and that is all that keeps her from falling. I wonder about myself talking her into this, talking her up to it. They sit for a moment, then she puts her legs and head back. A second later, they are gone. They are gone too quickly to register where they went. I try to register it, but it fails, and in that time, we have begun moving forward.
Seeing the outside of the plane is not startling, because I saw it earlier, and several times I’ve thought of fight scenes in movies with this setting. The ground does not startle me since I’ve been watching it this whole time. The wind does not startle me as I have been feeling a lot since I’ve been here, like on Table Mountain. We sit for a while, waiting on I don’t know what. I am holding my shoulder straps as instructed, and my head goes back several times. There is only the moment when we fall which does not come. My heart has finally begun to thud, pound.
“Magic trick!” Klaus shouts, and I curl backwards as far as I can. Before I am in position, we are falling.
The first moment is like falling into a cold lake, and pulling breath is difficult. We spin into orientation and are falling face first towards the ground, but are too high to notice it increasing in size. I am not falling, but flying. All around me is the cool blue line of the horizon, splitting the white-speckled brown veld and the deep blue of the African sky. The wind is not unbearable like I imagined it would be. I am existing in a Cartesian point in space, floating, able to move in any way I want, moving faster than anything I could care about to catch up with me.
I hear and feel the chute before it catches air, and we rotate to what feels like a sitting position, sitting on the leg straps which pull tighter. We are still very high up, the world does not seem to be any bigger. I now know exhilaration. Is it of adrenaline? I lack the tenseness of escaped danger, high speeds I cannot control. Like cuddling after sex, my mind has not left the act, I am warmed, open, receptive, calmed, at peace, speechless.
Klaus hands me the controls for the parachute, gives me the simple instructions for manipulation. I gingerly pull one, and he instantly yanks it down, and we spin until we are horizontal. He lets up and we straighten out. I try the other way, the exact same actions play out. I can see a black elongated speck floating from a parachute far from us, on a plane that is not earth and as we move, it moves independently of the earth. As we stop spinning, I realize I have gone tense, cannot move, the straps are pulling tighter, I would not go any faster for fear of significant discomfort. I can see us falling finally.
Klaus begins to explain to me landing instructions, takes back the reins. There’s nothing for me to do until we land, and we are getting close to the ground. I hold my arms out to either side. This is flying I say to myself, with no need to convince or imagine, I’m flying. I’ve forgotten this desire, yet fulfilled it perfectly. I bob my head back and forth as we lightly turn, trying to anticipate the movement and pretending it’s my own, acting like a child, not caring, smiling like one too. I cannot feel another person near me, I am coming in for the landing, I am visiting the ground.
I am still a head taller than Klaus and cannot reach my legs up very far in these straps, even if I use my hands. He gives up trying to land on our feet and we fall backwards in the sand. We wait a moment to recover and he disengages me, and we stand independently. Ingrid is already on the ground, jumping with excitement, I look up, and Suze is coming in almost over our heads. She and her guide make a perfect four point landing, their chute coming down on its side right in front of Ingrid, and her guide gets a great shot with the camera on his glove.
“How was that, hey?” Klaus asks as he begins packing away our parachute. But I am breathless and I do not know what to answer, or if I do.
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: #2 crossed off (two days ago). This was a bit of practice to get back into real writing after finishing the meat of the thesis, and I will have ample time to finish the big book by the end of the year. Less than two chapters remain. Volunteers to read and comment?
Dubai: Sum-up
The residual heat accosts me as soon as I step out the door, and I can remember Dallas and New Orleans and how the newcomer chokes on the air outside the airport, learning to breath again. It is forty degrees and there is no cold water, not in houses, not outside. I took my water bottle out of the fridge, applied sunscreen liberally, and understanding the general route and main turns, I began my walk. My couchsurfer, a Belgian businessman named Peter, has warned me against trying to walk to the main drag of the city, Sheik Zayed Rd, which Google Maps tells me is over an hour’s walk, from his house in a place established so fast that it’s literally known as [Region] [Number]. Google Maps cannot guarantee me that there are sidewalks along the displayed route. As it turns out, neither can I.
The most direct route is a brisk four kilometers or so, to the Marina and a beautiful tropical beach I apparently have to see before I leave, which gives a stunning view of the man-made Palm Jumeira and the natural majesty of the Atlantis hotel. It’s where the beautiful people go, Peter says. See one? See this. But take a taxi.
I can see everything a city has to offer, but if I do not walk its streets, the locations are merely stations at which I step out of a car, unconnected, irrelevant to this place that I think I am. Walking is how one becomes used to the city itself, connects the dots, and sees it as a whole. On a city’s streets, you can see how it operates, you can feel the required infrastructure, prescribe for yourself.
I am circumscribing this vast neighborhood, all of which looks identical. It is centrally located, well advertised, peopled almost exclusively by foreigners, and almost full. I meet almost no one on the sidewalks. It looks normal, but the details are incorrect. Like Dave at the end of 2001, I am plumbing the bits that don’t make sense: why are there no crosswalks for almost a mile, past the few turns and roundabouts? Why do the sidewalks merely outline the islands of land, never connecting? Why is there sand in this grass?
To arrive at my destination, I am darting through traffic, running across freeway exits, climbing walls, and sloshing through wet cement to get to the Marina. And I finally make it, meeting next to no one on the streets: without cars, Dubai is unpeopled. So too are the unfilled towers: there are no surrounding buildings, no small attempts at accommodation of business space, just a tower, and next to it, grass, and past that, sand. These buildings are younger than me and still growing.
After an hour and a half, I arrive at the Dubai Marina. If I brave the light of the sun, I can see a building actually twisting out of the ground, and paragliders coming down impossibly like isolated rain. I am exhausted. I sit down to rest as I plan my new direction. My arms leave large damp stains on the thighs of my shorts, the white stain of dripping sunscreen. The writing on my water bottle is melting off. Fuck the beach, I think, I don’t care how goddamned white the sand is. I go to the metro station, but saying I walk wouldn’t be fair to walking. Can one limp from heat?
Once on the metro I can access three super-sized American style malls, the tallest building and structure in the world, and the airport. I could now be on the moon: all the atmosphere is heat-controlled, and one does not have to bother themselves with where they are. The locals certainly don’t. They play their game, big bigger biggest, they are the minority, they hold all the keys. They have gone from camels to 4x4s in thirty years. There is an indoor skiing facility in one of the malls, as beneath an indoor midnight canopy women haggle for jewels to wear under their abaya. A minibank literally vends gold (“Gold to Go – The gold ATM”). Around the corner is a two-story walk-in aquarium. Thirty minutes’ drive outside the city is the Arabian desert, alone with the sand for miles, and Peter shows me the opening ceremony of the Atlantis on YouTube, both of us laughing. Is this the new Cordoba? Or Vegas?
As money and services flow along the newly-routed currents to Dubai, the Emiratis face a new hurdle: nutrition. Peter is organizing a conference on Type-2 Diabetes, a recent plague of this city, and it is easy to see the habits. The fruit is better than in Oslo, but I am the only one eating it. I see one white woman jogging. Meat is everywhere, in every dish. Ice cream relieves the heat of the air conditioning. At the water park, Peter tells me, when they remove their robes, you can see it. Foreigners must observe Ramadan with the locals, who gain weight by the end. Insulin, he tells me, is sponsored by the government, which does not take taxes. Several Ferraris cross my path during my two days.
As the sun sets, the shadows of the buildings sweep the desert. For all of these shops, services, and customer-service personnel, I cannot find a patch of the UAE flag, my one travelling souvenir, my collection with a gap. My last meaty meal is 25 dirhams, a later drink costs 35. I am early for the last metro to the airport, and stick my head outside. The sand is cooling off very little.
The glamour of the shine of the desert jewel attracts and delights and lays out promises on the sand. I can grab the jewel but I cannot see it. The shape is not that of a jewel, nor the texture, and the shine does not go away. It is late, and I must leave. I have seen no jewel, only shine.
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: Totally planning skydiving, and SOON.
Africa
05/09/11
So, yeah. Africa.
After reviewing the picture of the world on the in-flight map displaying our current location throughout the seven hours’ flying time between London and Dubai, I came to the distinct conclusion that Dubai can be considered part of mainland Asia, in the same way that Korea can. For some reason, there was a red herring in my geographical knowledge that suggested the separation of the Arabian peninsula on the African side was repeated on the other side as well. This, I assure you, is not the case. I argued with myself, coming into the fight with a decision, and point I was going to stick to, but could not make it stick. It’s not how I intended with the ulterior motive mentioned last time, but that’s just misleading semantics. By the time we touched down, I made sure to set foot into genuine Arabian sand. And that counts as Asian soil. And that means I crossed off 9g.
Dubai was strange. I’m attaching what I wrote on a post card to a loved one:
“Half the time, I don’t know if I am coming or going, enactor or witness, sweating or cooling, rich or poor. Am I at the desert or beach? The Middle East shrunk to fit into the world, or Bell Square super-sized, city-sized, big bigger biggest. Texas heat, Mississippi humidity, Vegas wallet. A majority as a minority. I’ve walked where no one walks, been quiet at a crossroad of language, and read left and right. I am older than most of the city – we could teach them a thing or two, eh? This city is a great experiment in as many ways as you can think. It’s a case study, and I’ve met a couple examiners. Leisure is a dish best served cold and still moving, that’s what I’ve learned…Dig?”
I’ll need to sit and write more. It’s an experiment, whether Cordoba can be resurrected, and how far the Middle East will come to meet the neutered and drained-of-flavor West. As my couchsurfer put it, “In thirty years they went from camels to four by fours.” Everything was put up so fast, there was no time for sidewalks. The temperature was forty celsius or so, and I managed to walk a couple hours anyway. But these warm locales, I tell you…the same thing happened in Athens. My motivation could not take the heat, and melted slowly. The bubbles of air conditioning revitalized a strong part of me, and gave me too much of an excuse to stop trying.
So I went to Africa.
J.M. Coetzee once wrote that a person can only fall in love with on landscape in their lifetime. I challenge that, but being here, can easily understand what he means. Table Mountain is incredibly scenic, and there’s a character to the suburb here that I haven’t been witness to in Europe. There’s something less grand, more relatable to people as they are. Though there are electric fences, there are colors to the houses, different architecture, varying styles, real personality man. And wouldn’t you know it, two blocks away is Rondebosch Common which has a flower that only grows there, and no where else in the world. It also has those tall, flat trees that you sometimes see in African desert establishing shots in movies, usually with a giraffe running by.
The campus of UCT is also one of the top ten most beautiful in the world, I was informed, and I can see it. You climb a mountain, getting to more and more serious buildings as you ascend. As you ascend to Upper Campus, already a whole pile of uphill behind you, you see Jameson Hall above you, with Table Mountain framing it. Stop and turn around: there is a statue of Cecil Rhodes, seated, head in hand, looking out over the town, which is impossible not to stop and stare at. Rhodes may have the best seat in the house, but you can sit next to him, and at 4am, watch the sun come up over the mountains to the east. I look forward to doing it, South African wine bottle in hand.
Food is no problem here, and my rent from Oslo covers an entire annex to a house, bath/bed/living room/kitchen, and additional room that apparently should also have a bed, but it has an internet connection, and here I am. Soon I shall embark on two new fish I have never heard of before (Hake, and if I remember the name correctly, Snoek, or something similar), and more of the VetKoeks. I’ve even seen the southern cross. There is so much more to say that has not become condensation on the inside of my head, and cannot be harvested yet, I will attempt to ‘capture’ this place in a less invasive way than so many others.
My host for the first day was a graduate student studying the same author, and gave me a great overview of the campus and how to manipulate the bus system, the location of the UCT store, and all the buildings I would need to know, while doing so in a deliciously Afrikaans accent. No mistaking it, I know where I am. This morning, I went running around Rondebosch Common, and stopped, figured North, and looked on. How much of the world lay before me, how much history, and how much work and toil and creation and sweat and hardship and invention and appreciation and love and reconciliation. Look to the South. What lies there? I can get closer, Cape Agulhas, but there is the final continent, the hardest nut to crack. I have come so far.
I have come so far. The way is clear of obstacles and excuses – I need to do my thesis. I think I will start tomorrow, before Ingrid and dad arrive. Wish me luck.
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: That’s 9g. AND 9d. And 2 is still a go. Amanda went to Beijing, and Marie may be having quite an adventure herself. I hope life never stops being this fun.
Crossing another off
22/08/11
So I missed the day, but another has been crossed off. I would’ve gotten to this sooner but I was wrapped up with my lovely and intelligent girlfriend, whose birthday happened to be the same day.
Many of these entries are more than just goalmarkers, they have an ulterior motive. The point behind the “Stay 365 days in another country” was to foster some sort of inclusion, to find another home, or at least a place that feels normal to live. Getting a job was part of that – the idea is to be sustainable. Whether that’s the case is up for debate, at least at the moment, but the inclusion part may very well have been done.
The attacks targeted more than Norway, they targeted a part of me. I see new international students walking around and offer directions, explain the difference between two student organizations. Names of T-bane stations summon images and possibly experiences rather than just names and numbers of stops away. If Norway is a game, I dare say I’ve learned to play it. I have passed through the segment where this country could do no wrong to where it could do no right, and passed through that as well. But there is a difference between learning where everything is and learning how you can fit into it. This includes looking at opportunities, not just for programs, but for advancements, and developments. Learning the language will only get you so far. I feel the difference in my outlook from one year ago – I can see where I have grown, and only mostly for the better.
In 10 days I will be crossing off another entry, and working on even more. English James has commented that at this rate I will need many more entries to sustain the list, but finishing has never really been my goal. Experiencing what it demands is. And what it demands is not actually all about me. I have to remember to open up and let other people take command of a bit, if only a bit, of what I am developing into.
I get the feeling I’m being repetitive. Is that the case?
Preparing for Africa where Ingrid Ø will be for the next year, and as it turns out, dad will be visiting as well. But first is Dubai, and before that, London. I have promised to post pictures of Dubai and Cape Town. For now, I slow my furious pace of reading and sit comfortably behind only a few books that I want to finish before the flight in a week’s time. The chapters are winding down, and I am going to hopefully finish it before the end of the year (though we’ve seen how well those sorts of goals have turned out). You know, as soon as possible. Whatever.
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: One more down.
Vennerskapet
03/08/11
Blir litt syk, kanskje. Og snart blir arbeidsledig, kanskje. Ingen skær her. Men jeg har venner.
-Sky som ler (og har vondt i hodet)
Anniversary
2/8/11
It’s a year, sports fans. Three hundred and sixty six days since I landed in the country, and one less since I moved into my room. I haven’t forgotten the favor Sabina and Cormac did for me letting me stay with them during a three day layover, nor Karoline did for me on the 1st, letting me stay in her room, covering a small gap in my housing. Now I will be showing new students the city as a buddy leader, I can carry on a short and light conversation in Norwegian, I have a job I can sustain myself with, a girlfriend I love, a romantic getaway in memories like a slideshow, new prospects I had never dreamed of for jobs and residences, learned of/became obsessed with/chose as thesis topic/grew disillusioned with J.M. Coetzee, have come so close to finishing the novel (which seems to constantly be the case), and been drawn in to definable distances with this country as of late. It’s been a hell of a year.
Now, with all of the trips, we’re getting into overage time. I can cross off entry 8a on August 18th, 16 more days.
I started off this journey with the quote from Hook, “To live will be an awfully big adventure.” I’m feeling that right now too. More than the kid on YouTube with the inspirational speech from riding a bike, at the moment I’m really feeling like what you want to do is out there, all you need is to chase it. Don’t just want it, outline a plan to get it. If that plan is too tough, you didn’t really want it. English James, Marie, and Jami all have similar lists (mine sorta came from Jami), and since I got here, Jami moved to Santiago and Marie to D.C.
A line from Rush’s “Losing It” goes, “Some are born to move the world / To live their fantasies / But most of us just dream about / The things we’d like to be / Sadder still to watch it die / Than never to have known it”. I have no savings, live paycheck to paycheck, had five days without work in July, stress all the time about money and the future, but I wouldn’t change things. I’m not going to get those years back, and if I break even over all, I’m proud of what I have been able to do. And five years ago that would have been a lie. That’s where I place my value.
Self-flattery, yeah. But where would we be if we weren’t proud of ourselves? Here’s hoping you’re all working towards something right now,
-Schuyler
Summation of the Action: Seriously, getting close on the novel. I got one chapter down while you weren’t looking, and have nearly finished another. I’m now looking up info for this little thesis thing I need to do, which feels so small and forgettable at times. See you all before long.
Oh, and not a vegetarian anymore. I stopped on the 20th or something like that. 5 word review: no real great difference, honestly.
The No Regrets List 