clunky

I’m here with minutes before work starts thinking about diving into all the details that this Monday holds. Details. So many of them. And my mind does not often seem equipped.

You know, it’s hard to move to a new state. Very hard. New banks, new license plates, new cell phone service, new apartment, no furniture, no friends, no clue… about anything. Where is the nearest gas station? Where do I go to find toilet paper? Where did I leave my brain?

I had to get photos done for a new passport. The receptionist, right before she snapped the photo, told me that I need a haircut. A haircut?! Thank you for that nugget of wisdom which I will now carry around with me for the next ten years. Any advice on where to find a barber?

I have been staying with a couple people from work. This is humbling, moving to a new city, having your new landlord push back your move in date, having to ask your barely-not-strangers coworkers if you can sleep on their couches. A couple of them kindly welcomed me into their homes. One in particular let me stay for three nights. On the afternoon after the third we both left work, and seeing her walking to her apartment I called out a salutation, which included calling her BY THE WRONG NAME. I literally shouted a wrong name at her from across the parking lot. “Did you just call me ‘Angela’?” she said. Yes. Yes, I had.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot of excitement to be had in all of this New-Place Adventure. I have already been to gallery openings and concerts. I have ideas on ideas on ideas about plays and city bike rides and winter wonderlandness that keep building.

Currently, however, my life feels absolutely clunky. I move forward on one task only to find I’ve forgotten another. I call a new friend a wrong name. I miss every exit, make every wrong turn. I’m just clunking around the city, a Texan in the great white north about to get lost in the first snow drift.

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texas to minnesota

So, it turns out it takes a long time to get from Texas to Minnesota. Long enough that you can make a thirteen minute video. Making the video kind of gave me someone to talk to for 18 hours which makes me sound crazy, but actually the video helped pass the time. And this morning I put some scraps together. Here you go… just in case you want to watch someone talk to himself.

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first saturday morning

My first Saturday morning in Minneapolis. One full week at the American Refugee Committee under my belt. This included reengaging American work culture (Microsoft Outlook is frightening and in general I feel like Lucy with her chocolates conveyor belt), getting to know a lot of new friends, enjoying Somali food for the first time, starting to learn my fourth language (Hdg ban ah’hai! I am a star!), and learning that my new workplace is one that matches my soul. My imagination is running wild with plans for my new apartment (moving in a week from Monday!), plans to make even more new friends, and plans to get so incredibly creative in ways that honor and share the amazing work I get to see happen everyday at ARC*.

This morning the sun is shining over an amazing fall day, and after I make pancakes for my host I’m going to go explore this city and meet a friend that just happens to be visiting here from my hometown. I promise to share my new space with ARC here at the blog as soon as it’s created, and here’s a little bit I made for ARC two weeks ago to promote their our I Am A Star campaign.

*Disclaimer: I will be sounding pretty schmaltzy in most upcoming posts. I have arrived at my dream job, and while it is incredibly challenging, I am getting to be as creative as possible to share incredible things that are happening in developing communities all over the world. This job, for me, is way better than Christmas. Christmas is as schmaltzy as it gets, so I’m employing my schmaltzy license now. This logic works in my head.

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my peace corps house

This started as a tiny effort to show you guys my house here in Stepanavan. It became a multi-day ordeal as I waited for each cloudy day’s hour of sunlight to do another take. It became a THING, an event my landsisters and I did every afternoon for almost a week. They loved it, began to tell visitors to their house that they had to help me make a video, that they were my ‘astghiknere’, my little stars. (You can see Greta explaining this to her grandmother in the video.)

I have never felt more myself than I have in this little cottage. It has been a refuge from the cold winter. It has been my favorite reading spot. I have laid out my mattresses for many sleepovers on the cottage floor. I have reveled in morning light coming in through the windows, beckoning me to get out of bed, eat breakfast and read, and then dance my way through daily chores. Every inch of the place feels like me, more than any space ever has. I am the first person to ever live in this house, and right now, for three more weeks, it feels all mine.

(There are a lot of Peace Corps House videos up on Youtube. I like to peruse them and imagine my life around the world. Here’s a friend of mine and her Peace Corps House in Sevan, Armenia. Here’s another friend’s home in Honduras. Take a look around the vids; tell me which ones get you dreaming about life in a new place.)

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i should live on two sides of the world

I took took my language proficiency index exam in Armenian last week. I scored Advanced-Low, which I feel great about. Still, today is exactly one month until I leave my life in Stepanavan behind, and moments ago I was eating dinner with my co-workers, unable to follow the conversation. I might have, I bet, if I listened very closely. But I instead nodded, I smiled at appropriate times, and as I have done almost daily for two years, I let my mind drift. This drifting is familiar to anyone living around an unfamiliar language, and even after learning to speak a new tongue, the habit of drifting is hard to break.

Usually, my mind wanders among go-to drifting topics, pulls them out like worn folders from a file drawer. I think about relationships. I dream about my future life in the US. I wonder about the lives of my friends and family. I worry about work.

This time however, I kept my mind at the table and thought about my office friends. I thought about Davit’s charm, how he sets the table at ease with deep-voiced interjections and warm laugh. I watched the sibling like bickering between Alvart the Clooker and Arman who argued over the location of the tea break’s remaining snacks. As usual Hasmik jumped into the lunch time conversations with questions and prompts that seem to keep the conversation moving. Armen made sure everyone has good food on their plate before piling a big-boy sized portion onto his. And after another one of Edgar’s room-raising anecdotes set everyone chuckling, I realized that here is a family. Every single one of them has a beat in the rhythm of this place, and because I work here I do, too. They would have to tell you what  part I play, but I know I play it because as soon as I walk in from being away I fit directly into the flow as if I never left.

As soon as I hear my name mentioned at the table I start listening again, and it’s Davit asking me something. I have no idea what he said, so I nod and say, “Mmhmm,” and see if the conversation will end or keep on and clue me in. But this time he knows.

“Inke chi haskanum,” he says. (“He doesn’t understand.”)

Somehow I am touched that he knows me well enough to know the difference between my understanding and my merely wanting to. Despite my trying to hide it, he knows the cues that say I haven’t followed a word.

“Asel em, ko oratsuitsi vra es jinjum orere minchev gnalu?” (“I said, ‘Are you marking off the days on your calendar until you leave?’”)

“Che, che.” I tell him I can’t do that because I don’t want to think about how soon the leaving starts.

“You don’t want to go?”

“I want to be home. I don’t want to leave. I want to live in both places at once.”

“Apres,” (“You should live”) he says, and with that common affirmation he leaves me to drift into a dream of a life on two sides of the world.

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A Portrait of a Woman Having Tea

I wrote this in the spring of 2009 while I was living and working in Kolkata, India, a few months before leaving for Peace Corps. I reread it recently and wanted to share it here.

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On a muggy, still, Tuesday morning, Mangal and I walked through a Kolkata slum called Boro Ghati. We met a woman; her image is still with me.
She sat in a chai stall off the side of the road. The little hut was all woven and collected. Its structure was a tight bunch of crude tethers and brittle strips of bamboo. The dinted tin tea pot, the blackened kettle, the warped spoon and weak cheese-clothe all seemed ‘found’. There was a thick glass jar with some unappealing biscuits. There was an uneven, lacquered bench, shiny and dark grey. The woman sat there, on the high side, her cracked feet hovering over a floor of dusty earth.
She wore a white-turned-dirt-grey sari slung about her shoulders and waist in such a tumbledown way that it betrayed the decreasing mobility of her arms, the fading dexterity of her fingers. The thin fabric was wrinkled like the thick raffia my mother used to stretch and glue to her country crafts in the ’90’s, and I wanted to reach out and touch it, hear it crinkle and feel the tiny folds against the hinges of my fingers. Perhaps her whole form might have collapse in my hands; I would very well be able to roll her up into a paper ball and toss her.
She was missing her front teeth, and her speech had a slurp to it that was detectable despite our differing mother-tongues. Her hair matched her raffia sari in color and fell oily and in dreads, down over her dark brown shoulders. She was the same dark, crust-of-bread color all over. With all her freckles she looked as if she’d gone soft like a banana.
She held a shot-glass size cup of dark, milky chai lightly between her knotty fingers.
Mangal asked her how she was doing, “Ap kyese hei?”
Her slurpy speech turned quickly, shot off like thread on a kicked spinning wheel.
Mangal would later tell me that she was desperately spooling her last few days for us; her brittle words told of ejection from her home by a family that did not want to feed and house a non-working adult. As merely an eater, she was too costly to support. Forget the ties that bind. There was only one here, daily bread, and there is not enough of that to go around.
She spoke as if what she had to say was a glass of water, tipped and running across the table, gathering at the edges, dripping in the air, then sinking in dusty ground. Without skewing her rhythm, she looked directly at me. Our eyes met. Such round, brown, wet eyes welling more and more until tears were finally running from them & hiding within the wrinkles of her face.
Then, her speech stopped as abruptly as it had started; she was spent. Left to her own devices and those of a coming death, she had simply come to this chai stall. There we found her. After she stopped talking, she lifted the glass of chai to her flappy lips and slurped the tea over her gums. The gesture seemed compulsive and desperate, her instincts’ attempt at comfort. It was as if her subconscious was saying to itself, ‘It’s not so bad. See? Tea!’
I looked at her sitting there, sipping tea, her deep brown eyes staring forward.
Mangal touched her shoulder, uttered something and walked on. I reached out and touched her shoulder as well; then I remembered touching the shoulder of my dying great aunt in Lousiana a couple weeks before I came to India. I remembered, after attending a Mass in Houston, dipping my fingers in holy water.
I walked after Mangal, rubbing my thumb across my fingertips.

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busted

So, on Friday I stood up.  That’s all.

___________

Well, that seems simple enough, standing.  Except that it seems I must have aged or something because unlike most occasions of acting out that evolutionary miracle, this time it hurt.  I stood up, and my knee screamed at me.
Its horrible commands were clear: “Down, you! Down!”  And down I went in a flurry of unmentionable speech and frantic claspings of the knee.  I was out of town for The Europeans’ going away party.  And there in Kristine’s room I had fallen and could not get up.

Calls were made.  Drunk polish men urged me to go the hospital.  The kind Estonian girl talked to me about her horse riding days while she swaddled my knee in her scarf.  An ran out to bring me some snow to pack around the traumatized limb.

At the intruction of PC medical officers, I ended up staying at The Europeans’ apartment for the next two nights, unable to bend my leg at all, let alone fold myself into narrow marshutni seats.  Disregarding pain, it wasn’t so bad really; we played Settlers of Catan and watched The Kids Are Alright.  Still, I’m fairly certain I annoyed everyone with requests to fetch me water or help me get to the bathroom; I was at least annoying myself.

I stayed there waiting for the Peace Corps office to reopen in the capital following their celebration of MLK’s birthday.  Then, with An’s help, I transfered my busted self to the med unit.  I’ve been staying here for a few days waiting for an MRI, watching among other things, Project Runway, Top Chef, and the fluxuating bagginess of my swollen knee.

Despite yesterday’s message that no appoitment would be possible this week, the PC doctors worked some magic, and the MRI was scheduled for today.

At the hospital they laid me on a table and slid me into this thing:

I think it looks like a coffee machine.  I’m fairly certain I was percolated.  It’s really hard to stay perfectly still for 20 minutes when someone tells you that it will ruin everything if you move.  I did fairly well, I think; there were only two moments I thought might jeopardize our message to the aliens the coffee the MRI picture: the alien sounds, with all their shaking and loud humming jerked me out of my dream about talking to Regis Philbin in the tropics (for real).  Also, towards the end of my sentence in the machine my hamstring started to twitch.  But I knew things were going just fine; somewhere in the middle of the intimate machine-guided glance at my insides, a voice over the intercom spoke slowly, clearly and in Armenian, “Everything is NORMAL.”

After it was over the technician let me, the guy with the busted leg and without the MRI-forbidden glasses stumble down the MRI chamber steps.

The doctors said they will tell me how broken I am tomorrow.  In the meantime, I’m going to go watch my new favorite thing, the Sleigh Bells music video for “Infinity Guitars”.  It will help me deny the fact that inside I might just be a brittle old bird.

 

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knit-hate

I knit, right?  We’ve established this. And I know, I’d like to pretend that everywhere in the States this is standard, that we have arrived as a nation to a place where knitters can be knitters. But let’s be real, you see a dude flailing his needles and trailing a wad of string, and most anyone still has to suppress that urge to think him queer.  James Franco, can you just let some paparazzi snap you with your half-finished hand warmers?  It would do a lot for the XYers with a proclivity towards small time productivity.  And also for those of us who like hats.

Still, I feel fairly certain I could wander into any ol’ coffee shop in the States, whip out the needles and go to town, and no one would give me the stink eye or start whispering to their friend.

Even in Yerevan I can walk into the yarn store, Tel, without so much as a sideways glance.  Rather, the staff tend to ignore me.  Better yet, sometimes they help me find what I’m looking for and then over-enthusiastically cheer for my choices.  The manager of the place greets me like an old friend every time I go in for a skein.

Yesterday, however, I was in Stepanavan with a knitter’s quandary.  You may remember that it get’s cold in Armenia, especially without central heating (re: I can see my breath when I wake up in the morning).  So, believe it or not, leg warmers make sense.  And, like Veruca Salt, I want them now.  Problem: I didn’t have the right needles.  Since I’m not going into Yerevan soon, yesterday I grit my teeth and walked right into the only store in town with needles.

First, the girl on the floor recognized me.  She hid her smirk VERY poorly, I’d say.  I asked patiently for needles.  A boy standing with his girlfriend watched me, shocked, and then without breaking his line of site to my guesturing hands, shout-whispered to his girl, “Does this boy knit?”  She actually laughed.

Then, the shop girl led me to where they keep the needles.  And of course, THAT’S where they keep them: with the panties.

Shop girl couldn’t find them and eventually I had to point to the one pair that sat on top of what I think were millions of panties.  I then endured another girl giggling at me all the way through check out.

You’d think I was about to walk around this town in drag.

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cold

This will not be the happiest of updates.  Last night, still sick, I actually stabbed my journal while writing because I couldn’t get all my angst to quietly come out on the page.  Then I scribbled a big “F—!” on the bottom of the page and called it a night.

I’m sick.  I’m worried.  I’m cold.  And I’m emotional.  Oy.  But let’s just take stock of what’s going on today:

I can be positive, see: The snow is dancing in flurries.  Huge white snow bits are swirling outside the glass and laying themselves down on the ground, quiet and unassuming.  Thanks, flakes.

__________

Plus, I took a hot bath today.  With candles.  While starting John Knowles’s A Separate Peace which is appropriately angsty.

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I just had the most disturbing snack.  My friends called me into the break room to break with them.  I, being a bit hungry, was so thankful.  But there they were, bowls of the unwanted.  There was a bowl filled with slices of bologna.  There was a bowl spilling over with strips of cold, seasoned fat, with one of yesterday’s boiled hot dogs on top.  There was a plate with a collection of fried fat pieces.  And finally, there was a cold bowl filled with chunks of pig skin.  The proper mode of intake was with bread and sour cream.  I took the one hot dog, and when your best choice at the table is a hot dog boiled yesterday, you have reached a new snacking paradigm, to say the least.

To be fair (and I know my BRILLIANT AND LOVING, English-speaking coworkers are reading this), this is winter where produce is expensive and hard to come by.  And every enlightened culture learns to laud those who can use every part of the buffalo, or whatever.  And furthermore, I come from a land where we merely diguise our strips of fat and hooves of cow by shaping them into chips and snack cakes.

So basically what I’m saying is, please forgive my mini-shock after realizing I’d been invited to snack on a bowl of skin.

__________

I seriously need my tonsils to cooperate with me.  If they insist on making it hard to swallow, perhaps we can agree that the tension headaches caused by strained swallowing should be abated.  Yes, tonsils?

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After many sleepless or sleep-interrupted nights where upon I gave up completely and started knitting and listening to podcasts, I can confidently say the following concerning NPR’s mostly quite nice Pop Culture Happy Hour:

“Glen Weldon, shhhhhhhh.”

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And finally, I’ve been thinking a lot about writing.  You know what’s bad about that?  Actually I’m quite confident you KNOW what’s bad about that: Thinking about writing ≠ Actually writing.  However, I did consider this:

Snow makes a great metaphor.  Like right now this current winter snow feels like a covering over all these things I’m feeling underneath the surface.  I’m feeling icy and anxious and cold.  And here comes the snow, this beautiful, quiet white covering which I mostly wish would just melt, turn into spring and give me a blooming chance at a reborn world.

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another new year in armenia

On the last night of 2009 I was sitting with my best Peace Corps friend, Zoë, talking late into the evening about New Year’s resolutions.  We almost missed the New Year, and with moments to spare we ran outside with pots and pans to ring in the new year with a metallic clamor.

This year I was invited by my friend and co-worker, Gayane, to spend the evening of the 31st with her family.  When I called to confirm the plans, I found out that they had already prepared a room for me to sleep in after we had toasted and danced and otherwise welcomed in the New Year into the wee hours.

After wishing my mom and sister a happy new year over Skype, I wandered in the dark, calling friends to spread around the holiday cheer.  Of course, without street lights Gayane’s house became hard to find (re: impossible).  Eventually Vartan, Gayane’s husband found me wandering the dark, cold streets.  I finally showed up in time to hang balloons around the newly renovated living/dining room.  Little Rueben assisted me, trying his hardest to blow up the balloons before handing their slobbery spouts over to me to tie.

When the party started, we ate every delicious thing available on an Armenian Nor Tari (New Year) menu:  salads and dolma and khorovats and tkhvatsk and more.  We toasted the New Year, shnor-havoring all around  We danced and stuffed ourselves into a food coma which took us to bed around 2:30am.

The real surprise came in the morning.  After a very strangely dry winter, I woke up, finally, to a white spread over our little Armenian town.  I reached up to wipe a spot in the fogged window of my guest room and gazed out onto that tireless cliché, that winter wonderland.

Being from seasonless Texas, I finally get why people dream of that White Christmas thing.  It’s one of the world’s miracles.  The entire landscape becomes absolutely new.  Streets and homes and trees and hills have a new shape.  The place is quiet, and in between racing out of doors to marvel at the new world, we huddle together near the wood stove or under throw blankets drinking in warmth from tea cups and from the souls of people we love.

After looking outside at this new little town of mine, I crawled back in to bed to write in my journal.  I heard Rueben stumble across the wood floor to look under the Nor Tari tree to see what Grandfather Winter brought he and his brother.  He raced back and yell-whispered, “Maaaa!”  I didn’t hear any movement after that and assumed the tot crawled back into bed wide eyed and anxious.

When they finally woke up, I pulled clothes over my long johns and joined them in the living room.  There the boys played with their gifts.  I immediately dove onto my stomach in front of the new hockey/foosball game and challenged Rueben to a game on the ice. Later we set up a firing range of stuffed animals; Mom, Dad, the boys and crazy uncle Brent took turns with Narek’s new bow & arrow.

Then to breakfast, a comfortable meal of blinchik and tea, before we went out to take on the snow.  We built a snow man which I destroyed with an old car battery. It would have made a cool head for that dzyni mart, but of course I was ignoring physics entirely which I tend to do.  No matter; the chunks of snowy body made a perfect pre-fab pile of snow balls to use in the shortly ensuing battle which ended with a crying three year old and a wet but eventaully triumphant me (take that Vartan jan!).

I left their house thinking I’d go home for a few alone hours before going out to visit more friends, but this holiday wasn’t letting go.  The storybook feel continued as I met an old grandmotherly woman in a magenta bathrobe who talked to me about her hopes for the new year and for whom I shoveled a path from from her home to the road.   Her well wishes followed me down the street while I listened to my Sufjan/Brandon Kinder/Arcade Fire/Destiny’s Child/Vince G Mega Christmas mix, giving my heart again to Sister Winter.

Finally, before coming here to write this blog post I ran into a blonde grandmother with her three grandsons.  She was tugging them on an old metal sled down the sidewalk.  I asked to take their picture which turned into me pulling those tiny boys through the white powder in circles like my own Dad used to do for me on Texas ice days.  The blonde grandmom invited me back to their house in true Armenian fashion and spread before me a feast of pases dolma, beet salad, more vodka, more tkhvatsk and a final cup of Armenian coffee before I walked back out into this white wonder of a town.

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