January 27, 2006
Photo-Less Entry
On Monday I was driving to Manatuto in heavy rain. The road is the same one to Baucau - a path I am familiar with in the dry season when the shockingly steep mountains that plunge into the ocean are a deep, smooth red that is dotted only by leafless white-barked trees. That day, however, as I slouched in the backseat listening to Franz Ferdinand through headphones to block out the redundant Portuguese music that disagrees fundamentally with my music tastes, the hills had completely transformed to a lush, rolling green as clumps of thick grass now clung to the jutting landscape and the white trees now bloomed with foliage.
The normally brilliant sea had turned a grey reflection of the unending sky of clouds. It wasn't a day of thunderstorms, but a day of straight, dull rain that runs in rivulets through the broken streets. Sometimes the old women we passed carried banana leaves over their tightly wound buns to ward of the rain, or in the less-rural kids walked to school carrying flowered pink umbrellas or plastic bags over their shoulders as ponchos. By one roadside stand selling soaked firewood, a girl no more than ten squatted by the road picking at the grass, an open umbrella tossed carelessly beside her, ignoring the dribble that ran through her hair and launched off her little nose.
Manatuto was a town of a couple long, holed streets, an unusual amount of young chickens, and long days of sun and light wind that pass as if they were not today, but yesterday. Our accommodations were in a fantastic Portuguese-style concrete house. The cockroach-free rooms are accompanied by the amazing amenities of a western toilet and shower-head, both of which are broken but their very existence gives the entire wash room the look of urbanity. I sleep well, waking only once at 4 am to the sound of a pig yodeling to the stars, but quickly am lulled back to slumber as soft post-rain winds flap at the red-flowed green curtains.
The next day, I stroll down to the market in search of paun - the small Portuguese bread that is my staple diet in the districts - and make the acquaintance of the woman who makes the bread too sweet, but seems sweet herself so I eat it and can't complain. In the midday, the silence and the pig squeals are occasionally accompanied by the low hum of a generator churning out power for a motorcycle repair shop or the laundry machine in a wealthy-woman's house. The days roll by with the quiet talk of project proposals and brochures, to the steady beat of thigh and neck-swatting due to the thick cloud of mosquitoes. In the afternoons, when the sun is too hot to even bother trying to nap, I sit on the porch and watch the stilted prancing of the baby chicks as they cross back and forth across the road in search of their mother or food (and that answers that question).
In the local restaurant one evening, where I am having my usual noodle soup to ward of the fear of fish and rice, we (my coworker and I) meet two Peace Corps workers. Over dinner, I can't figure out if I have lost touch with other malae society, or they have. That night the rains return with the heavy tapping on the tin roof, as if to say goodbye, and the next day after lunch we clamber back into the car and make the return trip past the steep red hills, now fleshed with dark green and reflecting the sunlight of their healthy wax-coated leaves, tumbling down to the sea that has now turned the turquoise of tourist photos.
Posted by storbert at 7:28 PM | Comments (0)
November 27, 2005
The Meaning of Vacation
Life moves at an incedible pace on the road. These past few weeks have flown by and I'm not even sure when they began. But this entry is really just a quick extolling of the virtues of vacation, which I previously didn't comprehend even the slightest. To me, for the longest time, vacations have seemed like a waste of money -- but this last one could never, ever be called that.
See, when I came back from vacation the little things about Timor that had come to bug me stopped bugging me. The honking of taxi drivers is once again an amusing diversion, and the street kids hawking their wares just kids, and not frustrations of the highest order. My neighbors with their screaming kids are no longer an infringement on my long-sought solitary existence, but kind people who will ask me where I am going each day with unfeigned interest and will sit around on my porch gossiping about life and giving gardening tips.
But the real difference is not in the time spent on vacation, but the returning of the ability to smile. People talk of 'energy' here: the energy you give off and the way that your energy interacts with the world. I am not one to speak in such terms, the concretist that I am, but in this case it has a remarkable applicabiity. Since coming back from some time i could actually call my own, I have been able to smile without reserve at random people walking down the street - and surpirse surprise they invariably smile back. By the time I left I was so tired as to think of Timor as unfriendly - but nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, before I had time to leave and to get some rest - the only person, I swear, that was unfriendly in Timor was me.
Anyways, on heading back here I have realized how much I actually missed it -- even though I never though I would. I miss my neighbors, and the kids in the yard, and the dogs who have slowly learned to become friendly. I missed being able to have chats with every taxi diver I meet, and eating at resturants where the staff all know my name and welcome me with a booming laugh and a 'hellloo, mana bo'ot!' each time I enter. Vacation also teaches you how much you miss the places where you live your everday life ...
Ok, I'm done waxing on. But I hope the next person who comes here understands that there is nothing wrong with taking a vacation. The world world will thank you for it - and not the least yourself.
Posted by storbert at 8:34 PM | Comments (0)
August 27, 2005
How Old am I?
Here is the story of the week. Standing in a room our organization uses for training. It's day 4 â€" the last day of a Business Development Workshop that has gone quite well and done an excellent job of letting me know that my growth in comprehension of a language does not meant that I am at all gaining the ability to speak it. Nonetheless, the only two malae in the room for the whole week have been me and the program manager, both fair-skinned women. It creates an interesting power structure, in a society that often has more tinges of sexism than I have ever seen before, but I need not go into much detail on that. The story is simple, about three seconds long, to be precise, but it really struck me.
One of the participants who has been very friendly to me, and not at all shy like many of the others (asking questions and generally being inquisitive even about material that is not even on the training schedule) came up to me mid-day with one of the women in the program, and shyly asked if he could ask me a question. The question was one we would never get in the states: How old are you? I was taken aback for a second, and then I answered the truth: I'm 23. The young woman started laughing, covering her mouth and looking away as if she didn't want to offend me but still found something about my youth hysterical. I looked at them both, taken aback a bit (I mean, I know I'm young, but still …) when the man explained that she had been too shy to ask, but she just assumed I was much older, and he laughed too and said, "You are so tall, I thought you were older. But I'm 29, so I can call you my younger sister." And suddenly it all made sense â€" they were trying to figure out how to treat me. And the woman smiled even broader (if it was possible) and said happily, "I'm 23 too."
In a town where normally my age is quite an anomaly (few people here are as young as I am), I was suddenly grateful for being young. In a way, I think I can use it, perhaps to let people be more relaxed around me and less formal. Respect is wonderful, but it also creates a lot of distance, and I just want to be able to talk to people. Anyways, not much of a story, but I found it so enlightening that for a moment, it was the last thing in the world that I would think would let people talk to me that gave me my way in. Now all I have to do is make sure I don't grow up.
Posted by storbert at 1:44 AM | Comments (1)
June 12, 2005
More On Speeches
Via my Mom (who is awesome):
The Chronicle of Higher Education has been reading my mind. They write:
It's a time-honored tradition for celebrities who are in demand as commencement speakers to use ghost writers. And when all else fails, the speakers have been known to simply deliver the same speech they gave the previous year. So it was that Tim Russert, the NBC newsman and best-selling author, found himself addressing Harvard students on Wednesday, at the university's annual Class Day event. It wasn't a commencement address, but it was one of four graduation-related speeches he has delivered this spring. Turns out, the speeches had more than a little in common. As first reported last month in the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, Mass., Mr. Russert has apparently delivered the same basic commencement speech for several years. (According to The Chronicle's commencement-speaker database, he has spoken on 17 campuses since 2000.) At Harvard on Wednesday, the students were ready. Equipped with cards listing pat phrases from past speeches, set out in a bingo-like format, they ticked off the passages as Mr. Russert spoke and then, having completed a row, shouted out "Bingo!" More details of the scheme are reported in an article in The Harvard Crimson, the student-run newspaper.
In case you were wondering who is speaking, you can also search the Chronicle for graduation speakers (requires subscription). A quick search on Google for Commencement Speakers brings up a whole load of other problems associated with the speakers these days. First of all, schools compete to get famous speakers, but that does not mean that a speaker will be any good, or even appropriate. Speakers can run into problems with religious questions, as Crossswalk.com reports on Senator Hilary's controversial honorary degrees from Catholic Universities. Ben Shapiro of Townhall.com thinks that all speakers are too liberal. Read: my problem with political agendas in a graduation speech - but for the record I don't think it can ruin a speech because Jon Stewart gave a horrendously partisan speech that I liked, because it was funny and honest.
But anyways - it looks like other people have had these thoughts before me. How disappointing. Humanity.org has a list of great commencement speeches in their article on 'the art of the commencement speech'. This should be required reading for all speakers.
Posted by storbert at 2:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 11, 2005
The Good, Bad, and Ugly Graduation Speeches
Having just returned form my brother's graduation, I am once again in the mood to spout on what makes a good speech. I know perhaps I get redundant, but in this case I am just plain tired of people blabbing who have no point and like the sound of their voices (man is this a glass house I live in), and I wish to jot a few notes, if only to myself, on some of the basic do-not's of graduation speeches.
First of all, I'd like to point to a few people who have mastered the art of commencemental inspiration. The crown goes to Garrison Keillor, a man whose compilation of poetry is the only one I care to read, and re-read, and dream of one day memorizing the damn thing so I can stop carrying it around. Let me give you an excerpt from his speech:
We need to talk about the pursuit of failure, I think. A person who does not know failure is a person with a poor sense of reality. A person who goes through his 20s and 30s racking up one prize after another, getting the great job and the beautiful size 4 wife and the starter mansion and the two beautiful, gifted children with the Celtic names, is a man who is headed for a gigantic mid-life crisis in which he runs away with a waitress named Misty and perms his hair and becomes a 45-year-old singer/songwriter. You don't want to do that. A mid-life crisis in which you feel that, in spite of appearances, your life is meaningless and you're a big fat failure and nobody really likes you. If you could, I think you should try having your mid-life crisis right now, when you're smarter and when you're stronger -- and not have it 20 years from now, when it's going to be a big embarrassment to everybody. It's amazing how much you can learn if you're lucky enough to get into trouble when you're young. I recommend it to you.
This is from his 2001 Baccalaureate Address to Princeton, and the only reason I know about it is because my sister sat through it and was forever more infatuated â€" perhaps even changed. But let me dissect (like a frog and kill the humor) why it makes a good speech. One: though he is in a chapel and begins discussing his Fundamentalist-Christian-Whiskey-tinged roots, Keillor manages not to preach. It's a harder thing than one would realize: the avoidance of peachiness. On a podium it is hard for the non-ordained speaker to remember he's not certified to speak on God's truth and the meaning of life and all that pop music. The most recent bad speech I heard was centered on the subject of gratitude with enough sappy alliteration that I feared I was in the wrong event and this was a sad poetry reading (see Charles Burkowski on that), and by the end I was only grateful for the long awaited shutting of her mouth. Yes, one should be grateful, and I'm glad she extols this virtue, but timing is essential and graduation is a rare event where speeches can either stick in the heads of the listeners or do nothing but waste people's time. I only remembered her address because I was busy cataloging all her holier-than-thou prim and pomp mistakes.
Ok enough â€" I'm moving on. Two: yes, you have an audience. More specifically, a speaker has a soapbox and an hostage audience. Hell, the kids can't graduate until you are done talking. But more importantly, your audience is listening for you to talk to them â€" not about some random subject you found interesting last Thursday after hardball. I'm hoping most speakers talk because they have some work of advice: in this case Keillor failed a lot and seemed to be damn proud of it. Like most advice, graduates might think about it, spit it out, go get drunk, and then start the long haul of soul-crushing workdays and health insurance forms until their faces and fingers wrinkle with apathy. Graduation really is, in my mind, a special day â€" because despite the many employment contracts already signed pre-diploma, there are a whole bunch of kids who are about to burst into the world who have hope and passion (hopefully), and who might actually change a thing or two if given the proper impetus. Yet, most speakers think that they are there to speak because they are cool, thus the audience must want to hear about their own lives, their personal interests, and especially their political views. Wrong â€" no one really cares. Speeches that are on-topic, pertinent and focused win my praise.
Three: shortness. I am to blame as well, as I am obviously not short. So I will try now for once. Be short. Society watches TV and has a short attention span so indulge us. Besides, the kids are graduating from sitting and being bored out of their skulls. Give them their first post-grad gift and don't blab.
So those are my few, well-meaning and rarely followed suggestions for anyone planning to speak, and not just about graduation, but to anyone who is stuck and can't leave. People will love you for it and I won't have to write any more ranting blog entries, and wouldn't that just make the world a better place?
Posted by storbert at 1:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 5, 2005
Still Not Done
So I thought I was done yesterday ranting about the problems of an isolationist society, but no, I'm still thinking about it. Today my thought have been about the old Southern family - the one I don't understand and never really will. I'm a Yankee by raising, Dixie by blood and cosmopolitan by arrogance - so I should have no real problem living with the fact that I call no place a true home. Yet . . .
I keep remembering this family reunion down in Bama, in the state which we left while I was still young enough not to notice the difference between the language and the cultural significance of 'Sir' and 'Ma'am'. The Yanks stood on the sidelines of warmth and potato salad. I just thought for the longest time that I just was excluded because I didn't belong.
In the South it's just plain different. Going to that reunion was an eye-opener -- all I could do was stare (not quite slack-jawed) at the familiarity of the people around me â€" with everyone except me and my family. It was also the first time I understood small-town mentality. The joys of the rural South had nothing to do with what you could do or become, or who you 'are.' Such things are happily unquestioned. You are who you have always been, in a place where you may or may not inspire local gossip, local lust, local admiration or derision. Whatever the case may be let no man go lonely. This was one true offering of Alabama. I bet there are others, but I haven't really been there long enough to know. Suffice it to say that it gets me thinking that my observations on the 'American' lifestyle are not really universal, but merely extensions of the places I am most familiar with - and cities and suburbs are inherently isolation. What it is like elsewhere, hopefully someday I'll find out.
Posted by storbert at 1:19 PM | Comments (0)
June 4, 2005
Americans Like Cars and Houses
Perhaps because I am leaving the country I am spending more time these days looking at how Americans live their lives, or more specifically, how I have lived mine in the 23 years up until today. Now, I may be an over-reflective person but I figure it might not be that bad of an idea to get some of these things down before I leave for distant lands. So here goes: a couple random thoughts about the American existence, mainly centered on the idea of cars and houses.
Sometime while helping an architecture student with his thesis on pre-fab housing (whatever that is), he told me the reason that modern America is so isolated into nuclear families in their cookie-cutter white picket fenced houses is the direct result of a post-WWII government program that encouraged WWII vets to move with their newly wooed and not-yet-domesticated wives to move to the suburbs and into houses with little beauty but lots of space. In history class, we learned that much of property law was formed around the concept of lineage, and parents trying to convince their kids to stay at home and help them with work. The single family home changed all that.
Thus began the foundations of the silent, sterile home -- where parents rarely speak to their extended families unless to go on awkward and very silted family vacations where the kids sit around and wonder who these freaks are (and quietly as how they could be blood relations . . .). Where did I come from with my love of the silence and isolation of a car. I dislike subways. Not because they are packed, but because it is the unwritten, iron-clad law that you never, ever, talk on a subway. Only at night when the drinking crowds descend upon the mass transportation system is talking allowed. On the commute to and from work, however – silence is preserved. Those few people who do talk are either entertainment or an annoyance to the rest of the train. No – even in crowded train where you are pressed up against an over-sized bosom on one side and the coffee-breathing mid-life crisis businessman on the other – you might as well be riding in a car. At least then you could play good music over the radio.
Then it occurs to me -- I am not distraught about the love of cars and houses. I value my privacy just like everyone else. My problem is that I see what was lost in the vaults of silence left by lack of human contact. Surrounded by walls and metal car doors we are both protected, and forbidden, from real human contact. [For more on this point everyone who has not seem the movie Crash must stop reading now and go and see it. I'm not kidding.] I don't know who I am to say it's worse - I can only say that I do see something lacking, and I don't know how to get it back.
Posted by storbert at 9:50 PM | Comments (0)
June 3, 2005
A Few Useless Thoughts
I just graduated. Recently graduated people do many things. They go to work. They go home. They discover there is this absolutely massive world out there that isn't as nice as they might want it to be. Whatever they do it's all new. I, in my new adventures, have been stuck waxing the hull of my dad's boat for about seven hours a day and unfortunately that gives me massive amounts of time to think. Thinking out of school can be very, very bad and can cause serious brain damage so I'm going to write down some of these random thoughts so I can stop.
Our graduation speakers were HORRID. By horrid I mean really bad. Chevy Chase might as well have given a lecture on how really stupid people can become famous in Hollywood . . . and something about vibrating razors that I didn't quite catch. So I wonder what I would have said if I had been there on that podium. Probably nothing, or a first-class demonstration on stuttering. But had I spoken I think I'd have said something like this:
-------------------------
Dear Graduating Class of 2005,
You are all like squirrels. Yes, at college you made fun of squirrels because they sort through human refuse for nourishment and tend to either get fat or die. They make silly noises at people who get too close, are unafraid of even dangerous drunken brutes and think they own this place. Moreover, squirrels tend to be isolated creatures unless it is mid-spring and they make this loud, cackling mating ritual dance that involves tree-shaking and shrieking in well view of the entire public. Now remind me â€" why exactly do Princeton students make fun of squirrels? The only difference I see is that we don't literally sort through trash â€" only the garbage of high-flatulent 'intellectualism' â€" which I believe smells worse.
See, like squirrels, we don't talk much. We get talked to. Graduation is three more days of being talked to in case we forget right before we leave that no one cares what we think and college students should be seen and not heard. When we used to talk, it was only to spit back what was said in reading or in lectures and any deviance from this formula is risking the ever-feared and damming "B". We pay many, many smackeroons to be shown, daily, how rear-kissing can be extremely useful, that the man who wrote, "On BS," had a really good grip on reality but he had to retire before saying it, and no one, ever will read your senior thesis. Probably not even your advisor.
So what should we know before we head into the real world? What can we finally fill in to the vast spaces in our so-called education that will make us float in the workpace or grad school, which does not value parrot-squawkers? I don't know. I've been doing it for four years too â€" but I do know what many of us have lost along the way and we must, nay, need to recover before trying to do anything. Many of us forgot what we started out trying to do. We all, I believe, had a good reason to be educated. Whether to find a profession that is really producing something for money, or trying to save the world (idiots . . .), we all thought we could do something in this world that is worth fighting for â€" worth putting up with four years of bad coffee.
We need it back before we do anything. Hope is a dangerous thing to lose. So often with studying the real world we can become cynical about its deficiencies, our own inability to do anything to fix it, and the vast, insurmountable, inertia that fills the minds of people who only talk about a problem but even begin the fight to solve it.
This is our chance - no more rhetoric, no more hypothesizing. We go places where life moves too fast to cry about your less-than-3.8 GPA - in the words of the ever-esteem-able Yoda: Do or do not, there is no try. Here we can finally see, and perhaps become, God willing, heroes. In short, we are leaving the squirrels. They will still be there in case we want to come and visit. But for right now we have places to go and its best not to look back.
-----------------------
Ok, I know that was bad. But I have been waxing a boat for eight hours a day for the last two days so cut me some slack.
Posted by storbert at 9:15 PM | Comments (0)