Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Week 24 - The Faux Fixety of Time

I believe it was Shakespeare who once said “Time: What the fuck?” Sometimes it passes slowly, sometimes quickly, but rarely do its distortions feel like both at the same time. That may, in fact, be a lie. When I was still at Carleton I felt that it was full of long days and short months, supposedly quick papers that turned into marathon slogs, and hourly battles between my fatigue and jump starts at the coffee shop. Still, deadlines teleported to the present, terms ended spontaneously, and somehow college concluded in only four pinched years.

I really don’t write a lot of papers here but, like Carleton, I find myself marveling at the time paradox. It’s been 24 protracted weeks, give or take a day, since I last saw my oldest friends, drank water from the faucet, or fell asleep in America. That means it’s been six miniscule months of riding camionetas, exaggerating religious fervor, and straining to understand what’s culturally appropriate.

It really depends how I look at it, a sort of “glass half full/half empty” situation. If I think about the last time I was in the US, it seems like it’s been forever. I’ve changed, the US has changed, as has our relationship to each other. Where has all that time gone? My life back then was just that—a different life. I’ve found new parts of myself that I didn’t know existed, unknown reserves of patience and strength as well as buried flaws and irrationalities, and used those as tools of reinvention. There is a truly significant break between what I was and what I am. It’s been years since I was Old Me.

On the other hand, if I look at my time here, it’s passed in almost a blink. The time blurs and meshes together into irregular chunks, so it feels like it’s been only a few hours since I wrote Week 23, a few days since I got to site, and perhaps, with a huge burst of mental reckoning, a week or two since I was getting Spanish lessons around a kitchen table during training. Indeed, I’ve only been New Me for a couple of seconds.

The day I left Minnesota, my brother, an RPCV himself, and I sat in a commercial bar in the airport, styled to look beaten down and faintly dive-like. We sipped mass-produced microbrews in a booth at ten in the morning, much more for my sake than his. As my tremoring hands gripped the contoured pint glass, already steadied once a few hours earlier by a mother-sanctioned slug of bourbon, I remember him telling me, no matter what, to stick it out for the first six months.

“If you make it through the first six months, you’re probably fine,” he told me, suggesting that it takes at least that long to feel comfortable in such new surroundings. “It’s not the physical hardship that gets you; you get used to that pretty quickly. It’s the mental stuff that’s the hardest, the loneliness and feeling out of place; the boredom. The sense that what you’re doing doesn’t benefit anyone. You’ve got to get through that.”

I looked up from my beer and the little circles the glass’ condensation made on the wooden table. I didn’t really believe him about the physical hardship. He had a house with electricity and running water when he was in Namibia. I was positive I’d be shitting in a bucket stored under a reappropriated army cot, picking the tarantulas off me with improvised salad tongs. Still, six months seemed like an eternity. Even as I prepared myself mentally to go, I was sure I wouldn’t last. Parts of me at that moment hoped that I would get injured and medically separated within the first few weeks, sent home for something that wasn’t shameful or my fault.

“I know you’re scared, Jóbalo,” he said, calling me by a pet name that only older brothers can get away with, “but just take it one day at a time. Every night that your head hits the pillow is a victory. And when it gets really hard—and it will—just keep telling yourself ‘for better or worse, this too shall pass.’”

It’s usually the nights that are the hardest. After I’ve eaten my solitary dinner and finished my single serving of dishes I perch on top of my bed and don’t know what to do with myself. It’s in those undistracted moments then that the longing resurfaces, that desire to see my roots, my friends and city, sharp and disorienting and animal; like a hook twisted along my guts, pulling me backward and up from somewhere behind my navel. In all truth I still can’t face the idea of 21 more months without an element of panic insidiously seeping in. And so I think of the months I’ve been here instead, stroking the number like a baby would a security blanket. It grows longer and more solid every week, better able to remind me that despite my occasional misgivings, I am still here. I am succeeding here.

And now that it’s been six months—that length of time that seemed like aeons to Old Me—I see what he meant. He has been prophetic, a slightly taller Yoda with a curly Jew ’fro. I feel more comfortable here. I still have low moments, moments of panic, but they’re not met with the same canned responses to the silent, landscaped question:

“What. Am I. doing, here?”

I am here because I enjoy it. I am here because I want to be. I am here because the alternative would be a cubicle in a hospital talking about interest rates and potential repayment plans, making ten times the salary I make now with one tenth the thrill. I am here because life’s an adventure and I want to push myself, to be that indomitable spirit that’s alright with looking like an idiot in the name of self-improvement.

Old Me wouldn’t be comfortable with that.

Please find the pictures, a veritable clip show of my service, here: https://picasaweb.google.com/sigrinj/Week24?authkey=Gv1sRgCJ25md_hjvv0nQE

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