Indignant rant alert

I moved out of my apartment back in mid-December, probably a bit earlier than most of the folks who are staging in March, because I wanted to be free to help my mom with her own move to TN (then expected to happen in late Jan.) and spend my last few weeks with her before Morocco.  Here's something I didn't count on:  that I would still be paying for that stupid apartment until the end of May as it sits there empty!  What a tremendous waste.  Here's why:

My lease isn't up until the end of May 2010.  The contract is written in such a way that says the tenant assumes the responsibility of covering the rent until the end of the lease period, regardless of whether or not he/she is living there, or until the management company finds a new tenant to sign a new lease.  (Big corporate out-of-state management co.--first indicator that this isn't going to end well.)  I gave the building managers two whole months notice that I was going to be moving out, and for a month of that time I was gone to India, so they could show the apartment at any time with no problem.  This is in a student neighborhood near a major university in an upscale renovated building.  It never even occurred to me that they wouldn't be able to find somebody else before that two months was up.  So when I did finally move out and that was the case, I had to pay the next month's rent and cross my fingers that they'd rent the place real quick and I get most of it refunded.  Guess what?  Didn't happen.

After two months of increasingly frantic calls to the manager explaining that I was leaving for Africa soon and that I didn't have the money, means, or inclination to keep paying for this boondoggle, and that some kind of alternate arrangement had to be made, the on-site manager suggested I write to the corporate office explaining the situation and that maybe they would let me out of the lease.  So I did my specialty: a long, well-reasoned yet impassioned letter describing that I was leaving for the Peace Corps, which is unpaid national service, and that I had no control over the timing of when I had to move, that I had been a model tenant who hadn't complained about their terrible building security, that I would forfeit my security deposit, and thanking them profusely for their consideration.  A week later I get a call saying, essentially, "Well, they thought you might have qualified under the Military Exception, but it turns out not. Sorry, bye!"   My head just about exploded.

Basically, what they're saying is this:  If I were going over to Iraq or Afghanistan to kill some people, they be cool with that.  They'd cut me all the slack the law forces them to.  But since I'm only going overseas to help people and hopefully improve the quality of their lives, tough luck.  Never mind the inverted moral calculus of this that is enough to make my blood boil, but it doesn't even make sense from a practical standpoint.  Last I checked, we still had an all-volunteer army who made just as much of a voluntary decision to join up as I did to join PC, so how do I not deserve the same leeway?

And when I think about how much money that I'm wasting on this I want to cry.  Just pouring it down the drain to do nothing for no one.  If I don't find some other way to wrangle free, I will have paid over $4500 rent on an empty apartment by the end of May.  The average per capita income for citizens of Morocco is $3950/year.  Think of the impact that money could have had in someone's life.  Think of that lovely apartment sitting empty for almost half a year that could have housed someone who has no roof over their head.  All because some greedy corporation has my signature on a piece of paper and cares more about what they can get away with than how their actions affect anyone else.

So I'm left with two options:  I can do what I feel like doing and just not pay anymore, and probably come home in 2.5 years to a pile of collection notices and seriously damaged credit.  Or I can give up, submit, and hate myself in the morning.  Of course you already know which it will be.  Like somebody said on The Wire, "the game stay the game."

Thinking others' thoughts

It's a time of great upheaval for me, of anticipation and a more than a little trepidation.  Such times call for the wisdom of cherry-picked quotations.  These have been running through my head lately:

You always got to be prepared but you never know for what.        -Bob Dylan

APRIL 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.                -James Joyce

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.               -Franz Kafka

This last was used by Bowles in Sheltering Sky.  I can't decide if that book should be required reading for every American thinking of going to north Africa, or be absolutely forbidden.

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.