Goodbye to all that

There are plenty of noble and selfless reasons why I chose to serve in the Peace Corps, but it would be an incomplete picture if I didn't include some of the more selfish ones as well.  Chief among these is the desire to get away, to leave the known and familiar and predictable, to just be somewhere else for a while.  A lot of that probably comes from my inherited wanderlust that I'll never lose, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that some of it also comes from just plain frustration and dissatisfaction with what it's like to live in the U.S. right now.  In that (admittedly negative) spirit, I present the following list.

Six things I look forward to not missing about living in the States:

-Omnipresent advertising

-The news cycle, and the general stupidity and shallowness of what passes for most public discourse

-Fast food, processed food, chain restaurants, and the whole industrial food complex

-Driving everywhere and the lack of quality public transit

-Getting robbed by the health care system and despairing over our inability to fix it

-Television (even the stuff I like)

I'd be curious to hear others as well.

(Before someone else points this out, I'm sure that living in Morocco will make me appreciate plenty of things that I currently take for granted about living here, and I'll be sure to note those eventually.)

Music Without Borders

A pleasant surprise in the vast wasteland:  Sound Tracks. Excellent new long-form journalism program on PBS using music to investigate contemporary world affairs, and for its own sake as well.  Basically a TV version of NPR's The World, and in fact one of the hosts is from there (and not afraid of shirts no white man should attempt). I hope this sticks around.  The whole program is online here.

BTW, all three of the countries from the stories in the pilot episode are current or former Peace Corps partners.

Before you ask

Unless you had a similarly misspent youth, you might wonder from where I cribbed the sardonic title of this blog.

Wandering Star

Perhaps it's an obvious move at this point, but I've finally gotten around to reading some Paul Bowles. (Feed the words American+Morocco+Literature into a search engine and his name is likely to be the first thing that pops up.) This passage from the first few pages of The Sheltering Sky seems particularly apt at the moment:

He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.

...another important difference between tourist and traveler is the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.

Dipping a toe in a new language

I've known for almost a year that I might be going to Morocco, but only for sure since early December.  That's a long time to be anxiously wondering, and a long time spent looking for ways to prepare myself that wouldn't turn out to be a complete waste of time if my assignment turned out to be somewhere else.  The three primary languages spoken in Morocco are Moroccan Arabic (aka Darija), Berber (of which there are numerous variants, but trying to keep this simple), and French.  The first two are pretty difficult if not impossible to learn Stateside, esp. with the limited educational resources available to me in SC, so I decided to go with French--knowing full well that it will probably be the language I'll rely on the least over there, but it's also the most portable to other likely assignment locations.  And besides, I've always wanted to learn French.  I've probably seen hundreds if not thousands of French-language films in my day, so it's long overdue.

Originally I planned on taking a 101 course at the local state university, but my trip to India right in the middle of the fall semester made that impractical.  I've always been skeptical of the legion of teach-yourself language products out there, despite the fact that anyone who knows me knows I think "self-taught" is the best kind of knowledge there is.  If those things were effective in proportion to how many millions of them exist, then we'd be a far less monolinguistic nation.  Same principle applies to diet books and other diet products; we probably have more of those than any other country in the world, and still manage to be among the fattest. (The top two can almost certainly blame genetics.)  Actually, that's a good analogy.  Lots of people start learning new languages like they start a diet--throw themselves into it with a lot of enthusiasm at first, buy some product to help them out, then quickly realize how hard it is and it falls by the wayside.  Learning a new language, like losing weight, is supposed to be a lot of hard work.  It requires patience, discipline, practice, and long-term commitment.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to make a buck and probably doesn't care if you succeed or fail.

After a lot of research, I decided to go with the relatively new company called Fluenz, despite their ridiculous name that sounds like something you need to get vaccinated for.  Theirs is a series of lectures and workouts presented on DVD-ROM, supplemented with some audio CD content.  At present, they only produce in a few languages, but fortunately French is one of them.  They present themselves as sort of the anti-Rosetta Stone, and even though I've only barely seen what RS is actually like, that sounded like the way I wanted to go.  They craft their lessons not in a futile attempt at duplicating the total immersion experience, but talk to you like an adult who can understand sophisticated instruction.  Each hour-longish lesson begins with a conversation that we hear and read, followed by a 5-10 minute lecture explaining what we've just heard and exploring the concepts and vocabulary, followed by a series of workouts (both written and spoken) that are similar to the old-fashioned workbook exercises we did for homework in high school.  The best part is the instructor, Sonia, who guys will especially enjoy and who apparently teaches all their languages, even Mandarin!

The software itself was incredibly buggy; it had all kinds of obvious mistakes, poorly re-dubbed audio during the lectures, random gaps and inconsistencies, and the microphone workouts didn't work at all on any computer I tried them on.  (They have since released a version 2.0 for all languages that probably fixes a lot of this.) Yet despite all that, it's been the most rewarding language learning I've done, because it it actually kept me wanting to come back for more.  I find myself thinking, or trying to think, in very basic French and speaking aloud whenever I can, often to the annoyance of those around me.  In fact, I'm sorry to see it end after completing all 60 lessons of Levels I and II.  There's supposed to be a Level III coming, but it won't be out in time for me, so I'm kind of at a loss now for how to keep building on what I've learned and not let it atrophy (which is the other big risk with learning a new language you aren't forced to speak every day, as I will be in the Peace Corps), but I suppose I have bigger fish to fry in the near future.

The Year We Make Contact

You know you're getting old when not only 2001 (which once upon a time sounded like the most absurdly futuristic date imaginable) has come and gone but now we're into the realm of its inferior, unnecessary sequels.

Reminds me of one of my all-time greatest experiences at the cinema:  2001: A Space Odyssey, rereleased for about 2 short weeks in the year of our Lord 2001, in a new 70mm print at the old Astor Plaza on 42nd St., which was at the time the biggest screen in NYC (now gone, appropriately).  For reasons more mysterious than a black monolith, there was no publicity, no ads in the paper, no reviews, hardly anybody knew it was happening.  I saw it in the afternoon with maybe 2 or 3 other people in the auditorium.  It was like having the only ticket to the Big Bang.  I must have seen it maybe a couple dozen times on video and DVD through the years, but I literally felt I was seeing it for the first time.  It was like staring at the sun--that intense, that elemental--and I haven't been able to look at it since.

Catching Up

I've never been able to keep a journal for more than a couple of weeks in my life, so blogging regularly is going to require more discipline than I've been able to muster so far. (And will depend on the availability of internet access at or near my site, which will be a complete unknown until I get there.)  Doing so is a pretty good way to contribute to the Peace Corps' Third Goal, so I'm really going to try.  I've learned an incredible amount from the PCV blogs I've read, and what I've sampled is just a tiny fraction of what's out there.  You really have to marvel at how the internet has changed the Peace Corps experience from what it was almost 50 years ago.  Which reminds me, I have a copy of Come As You Are: The Peace Corps Story by Coates Redmon, all about the early Kennedy years of the PC, that I'd really like to read before staging (because it's hardcover and too big to pack.)  Anyway, I digress...

It's been a hectic few weeks over the holidays, and this is supposed to be the calm before the storm.  Since last post I have:

-Packed up my apartment--the first place I've ever lived that was mine and mine alone--and put everything worth saving into a 10x10 storage unit.  Pretty strange to see all my stuff stacked floor-to-ceiling in an oversized closet like that.  Even though it's supposedly climate controlled, it's South Carolina ("famously hot") and I don't trust them enough to put my vinyl in there, lest I return from Morocco to unplayably warped records.  Those will be going to an undisclosed location with AC maintained by someone prone to hot flashes.

-Moved into temporary housing provided by Mom, made all the more temporary by the fact that she's moving midway between now and staging.  I am indeed a man without a home at the moment, but it's kind of liberating.

-Dealt with a (feline) death in the family.  2009 was a tough year all around on that score.  Happy to see it go.

-Already started saying some goodbyes to people that I won't be seeing again before staging, e.g. Heather's parents.  Shivani left back for M.I.T. on the 2nd, and I won't see her again for at least two and half years, unless she comes to Morocco.  Again, hard to process all this abstract future time.

-Most crucially, had a mini-crisis (occasionally blowing up to moderate) when Medical Services put a new hold on my file a few days before Christmas.  I thought I was being overly diligent when I undertook to inform them that I was now taking medication for acid reflux, but apparently that counts as a New Condition and requires a fresh doctor visit and, of course, more forms.  I tell you, these folks do not fool around when it comes to interrogating every aspect of your medical being with SS-like rigor.  (I'm sure I'll appreciate it more when I'm Over There...) It was frustrating, esp. while still riding the high of finally having an assignment, and timing couldn't have been worse for getting all that taken care of.  I finally managed to see the doctor today, faxed off the paperwork, and hopefully put all this to bed.