Thursday, August 25, 2011

Back With Nary A Sound

Yes!

I found my way back to San Francisco and the joy of love in a place called home. The quick rundown goes:

April: Hauled 25 boxes and a New York-weary ass back to the West Coast. Invaded the home of my lovely and generous friend Jen, who let me stay with her in Oakland for three months. Can I recommend Amtrak for all your cross-country shipping needs? It's $0.39 a pound. They don't make deals like this anymore!

May: Internship at UCSF going full speed ahead. All HIV, all the time.

June: Days spent lapping around San Francisco's best outdoor pool. Weekends spent pedaling through the hills of Oakland and the summer fogs of Marin County. Browner and browner I become.

July: Internship ends. Moved to an apartment in San Francisco. Engaged in full-blown love affair with the city. Slowly getting back my drawering mojo (stay tuned, new drawerings to come).

August: Funemployment and all its trappings.

Past bouts of joblessness have gifted me with handy bits of wisdom. Schedules, lists and spreadsheets are a big help, like spoons in a mashed potato food fight.

My latest plot to escape the terrible traffic noise outside my window is to bring my laptop to different libraries to work. They've renovated a lot of the branches in the last five years, so most are bright and modern. Sidenote: These photo galleries of ribbon-cutting ceremonies for various branch re-openings are fun and revealing. Former Mayor and douchey hottie Gavin Newsom pretties up the scenery, as usual, and where else but San Francisco would there be lion dancers at almost every event?

I've been working at my neighborhood library, but it's time to explore farther reaches. They say your senses dull as you age, but my nose can't seem to stop sniffing the complex subtleties of the heavily scented homeless people who hang out in city libraries. Maybe a trip to a different location will yield fewer aromas than my Park branch, only a block away from the malodorized lives of Haight Ashbury.

Back on the east coast...

Something Nice Happened in New York.



Sunday, January 23, 2011

Seven Years Of...

“Break your mirrors!  Yes, indeed — shatter the glass.  In our society that is so self-absorbed, begin to look less at yourself and more at each other. Learn more about the face of your neighbor, and less about your own.

...You’ll get more happiness and contentment out of counting your friends than counting your dollars.  You’ll get more satisfaction from having improved your neighborhood, your town, your state, your country and your fellow human beings than you’ll ever get from your muscles, your figure, your automobile, your house, or your credit ratings.

You’ll get more from being a peacemaker than a warrior...Break the mirrors!

Be peacemakers of the community, and you and your family will be happy.”

– Sargent Shriver, 1915-2011


Sargent Shriver was a career public servant and American politician who was appointed by his brother-in-law and then-President John F. Kennedy to, "Let the word go forth that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans:..To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves…”

By August of the same year, 1961, Shriver had started the Peace Corps program and shipped off the first group of volunteers to Ghana.

I imagine that, true to the spirit of Peace Corps then and now, there was plenty of well-intentioned bumbling and headless chicken flapping accompanying this noble step towards greater international goodwill and cross-cultural understanding. The program has worked out a lot of kinks and paternalistic undertones since the early days, like no longer sending new trainees to the ghettos of DC to expose them to "African culture," but Peace Corps has also in many ways evolved into yet another grinding government bureaucracy. There are deep inefficiencies and heartbreakingly missed opportunities. But while it has major problems as a development agency, Peace Corps stands alone as the only program that gives Americans a chance to break our mirrors.

Peace Corps' first goal is to provide technical development assistance to developing countries who ask for it, and like most NGOs and development agencies, it does a mediocre job at best. We'll not get into that for now. It is far better at its second and third goals: to share American culture with the people of host countries around the world, and to share host country cultures with the people of America. I think those are reasons enough for its existence. (And for more funding. Ahem, Congress. How about some good news for us in March?)

An obituary in the New York Times about Sargent Shriver's passing last week is what sent me googling his name in the first place. What has been more interesting than his life and work has been coming across all the purported ideals behind the Peace Corps program.

Shriver said, with typical American grandiosity, “The Peace Corps represents some, if not all, of the best virtues in this society. It stands for everything that America has ever stood for. It stands for everything we believe in and hope to achieve in the world.”

Seriously, Sarge, maybe not quite everything. But Peace Corps has always been an agent of youthful idealism and satisfyingly nebulous concepts like world peace and friendship. It has also been, more concretely, an outlet for volunteerism, public service, and community giving, all ideals that are no longer high on the priority list for most Americans or the politicians they elect to represent them, if they ever were at all. Informally, Peace Corps has further been a beacon for anyone with restless wanderlust, a sense of adventure, brimming curiosity, possibly a twinge of hero complex, and lots of energy for hanging out with lots of different kinds of people.

An investment banker friend once asked how being in Kenya had changed me. "I now view the world in terms of communities," I said. She gave me a blank look, but paid for my outrageously expensive sushi dinner.

Communities are the organizing principle that I see every society designed around. Ten years ago my trajectory in the world was focused on a sun named Justina and planets called job, hobbies, friends, partners, vacations, parental disapproval and an underlying existential dread about some void I couldn't put my finger on. I was like most people I saw around me -- too self-absorbed, too concerned about acquiring personal status symbols and cultivating an impressive outward identity for others to even notice that we each belong to a community, and most of us belong to many communities.

But it's not enough just to belong. Since coming back from Kenya, I'm deeply convinced that we each have a role and an obligation to participate and engage in our communities. I'm also deeply convinced that few people truly value this participation if it requires an actual sacrifice of their time, money or comfort zone.

I don't fully agree with Shriver, though. The mirror metaphor isn't complete. Sure, break mirrors. I think what we're really striving for when we learn about our neighbors' faces, though, is learning more about our own. Looking in the mirror doesn't reveal as much about ourselves as looking into our neighbors' living room windows. Not that I'm suggesting being a peeping tom. But.

There are so many things I've learned about myself through learning about Kenyans, and Thai people, and my parents' culture, and unemployed men in economically depressed countries and New York neighborhoods drinking outside shops and harrassing women walking by. Ultimately, when you've started to understand people seemingly so different from yourself, you've suddenly started to understand yourself a little better as well.

I recently read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, a brilliant and exhaustively researched account of a refugee Hmong family resettled to California and their struggles with the American health care system. The author, Anne Fadiman, at one point says that she now admires the Hmong more and idealizes them less than she did when she first met them.

There are a lot of things left unspoken in that comment. The frustration that comes with dealing with people who don't have the same values as you do. Who don't communicate the same way. Who don't value your status in society the same way because of your gender. Who think less of you because you're not the same race as they are.

Idealizing a culture is easy when you've never been challenged by the things that aren't beautiful and colorful and exotic and musical and mysterious about it. Admiring a culture once you've been challenged - and defeated - by the unbeautiful things is something that doesn't come automatically. It takes compassion, for one thing. For me it has also taken a lot of time, a lot of distance, and a lot of reflection.

Most Peace Corps volunteers return home with a solidifed commitment to communities as well as a clearer idea of how to build and work in them. When Obama visited Kenya in 2006, when he was a Senator from Chicago and I was in the second year of my service, he said that he was impressed by the incredible sense of community that he saw in the country.

It was supposed to be a compliment, but by then I had figured out that communities aren't perfect social structures. A community is formed around something that all members have in common, but also excludes people who don't meet those requirements. Those requirements are often rooted in being born into a certain religion, tribe, ethnic group, social class or gender. And exclusion frequently comes in the form of  institutionalized discrimination, active persecution or violence. I no longer idealize the concept of communities, but I admire places where people value theirs.

I wouldn't trade my two years in Peace Corps for anything. If I had the money I'd go back to visit in a heartbeat which, if you knew me then or if you followed my Kenya blog, was something I was incapable of saying for years after I returned.

People told me before I shipped off to Africa, "It will change you." Of course it will. Duh. Two years in a rural African village? No other foreigners around? Your naive liberal heart bleeding with sympathy for all those suffering women and children? But it doesn't change you in the ways you expect. For one thing, you stop idealizing. You get cynical and angry. And, when your heart softens again and your soul heals, your cynicism eventually turns to admiration.

It's not Peace Corps the government bureaucracy, but Peace Corps the air-drop into the bush that changes you. The program is still based on some vague notions from the era of hippie love. I mean, what does world peace look like anyway? Yet in very concrete ways volunteers bring home a new view of the planet as composed not just of atoms, but of villages.

Participating in a community becomes a lifelong pursuit. We've learned that serving and helping is rewarding, but comes with great sacrifices. Our market system doesn't reward teachers, social workers, public health experts, or anyone else who breaks mirrors. But we do it anyway, because we believe it brings us closer to being citizens of the world.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Spaces

Literally and figuratively, there's not enough space in this city. It's not all that surprising that I feel like I'm constantly trying to create space in this city of tiny living spaces that I can't afford. The world around us designs the world inside us.

Most people have no space for anything except empty crap, those things that they use to fill voids in their lives because they don't have the patience or wisdom or humility to stop and look inside and figure out what's actually missing. There's only room for our things, our status symbols, our pedigrees, our photos of impressive places we've been to, hung up on the wall, posted for all to see, while the wisdom or beauty or truth was left behind because our apartments aren't big enough to fit them, because we've forgotten that the safest deposit box is within ourselves. There's no room in our lives after we've stuffed it full of Facebook status messages and checked-off goals that didn't come from an authentic place. Empty crap taking up space that should be reserved for souls that are lost and souls waiting to be found. Isn't that ironic. Empty crap taking up space. We pay so much for all this emptiness crammed into tiny spaces that we have no room left for ourselves.

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Let it be let it be let it be let it be.

This week may be the last time I'll ever see my pirate friend. I've been angry with him for the last few days. I asked him for immense courage in the face of the wound I inflicted. In hindsight, I asked him for the impossible. He said yes anyway. I knew before he did that he was lying. Who doesn't wander there sometimes? Even pirates are flawed human beings. He is who he is. He is where he is. There's nothing I can do. Give him time and give him space. Let it be.
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I met a Pied Piper. His voice was clear like honey, his music was as red and intoxicating as poppies. His singing made me feel for brief moments the recklessness of falling in love, and how fleeting those freefalls are, where you just lose yourself in the luxury of breathing, where there's no past and no future, only the luscious present. And you realize you've just tasted opium, and you wish you'd loved it more, because a chance to love something worth loving so purely and so deeply doesn't come along very often. And you want more, not just because of what it was, but because you've already forgotten what it was like; all you remember is that you touched something elusive, and maybe that means it was divine.