Next Steps

So what is life after Peace Corps?  I wouldn’t quite know yet, since I’m in a “second lockdown,” as one PCV put it.  But in a week and a half I’m looking to move back home (that is, my home, not home of record home) and restart things.

I don’t really have anywhere left to pick up; I had dropped my graduate studies, given that I wanted to do something in life beyond reading journal articles and playing departmental politics.  I don’t have much of a job to go back to, beyond one that pays the bills; even if that is the status quo, I’ve never much cared for complacently following it (just because everyone else makes themselves miserable just to be “adults” doesn’t mean i’m going down without a fight!).  So now that I have a nearly blank slate, what are my new goals?

My main goal is to play music.  I’m skeptical about being able making a career out of it.  However, I at least want to make it a serious hobby.  So I’m looking to practice the hell out of some mandolin (and hopefully violin as well), and by December be up on stages, at least for open mikes.

Why December?  Because that’s when I can actually start looking into other options.  I can start reapplying for graduate schools; although I hated grad school in the humanities, I’ll give the sciences a shot.  It’ll at least be a different kind of awful.  Linguistics and economics are my top two choices; maybe poli sci as well.  At the same time, I’ll also apply for the foreign services exam to become a diplomat and get back to travelling.  That test is, by all reports, difficult, so I want some time to study.  Then I’ll be waiting for at least a year most likely to be placed somewhere (and grad school wouldn’t be much better, since I’d be waiting until August to actually go).  Finally, I might look at opportunities to teach English overseas.   Like grad school, it’s not my first choice, but going out and travelling (especially to East Asia) sure beats most prospects here, unless I luck out and land the perfect job, or find an awesome relationship, or ideally both.

So in closing, some musical and philosophical thoughts: I’m fascinated by alternative music systems, as I’ve mentioned before.  I was thinking today about how this relates to life (as I do about most things musical, or indeed most things period).  I don’t like completely atonal music.  Music needs some boundaries in order to be what it is.  Letting music be “free” might be an interesting experiment, but it’s not really music any longer.  However, just because music needs boundaries doesn’t mean that we need to keep the same old ones.  There’s room to explore, to create new limits or see what other people have done differently.  Creativity and progress cannot be anarchic; they thrive on rules, even as they question them.  (Similarly for dance: those people who come in and “just feel the music” are often the worst dancers on the floor, flailing around and being a menace to everyone around them.  You need discipline and practice to be the most creative and free.)  So both disregarding all rules and remaining tied to any particular rule are stagnating actions.

So long, and thanks for all the pap

It turns out that not only will I not make it in time to avoid medical separation, but the reinstatement process generally requires that you be stable for 6 months out of a year.  Which is just too long to wait around here in the meantime.  So I will be officially leaving Peace Corps as of next Thursday.

It is sad.  I miss my village, and many people in it.  I feel bad for them, thinking that they were going to get help and then being left high and dry.  Also, I wanted to make it through this challenge and say that, yes, I lived as a PCV for over two years.  Hiking in the mountains everyday probably also makes the list of reasons I wanted to return.

But I’ve also gotten tired of just waiting around here.  45 days in one spot, without crowded taxis to take me into town, with no challenge, just hasn’t appealed to me.  The governmental bureaucracy I had to deal with was tortuous, and quite honestly concerned so much with PR that their concern with PR is their main public image (and not a positive one).  And honestly, I was growing rather cynical of any attempts to help the children learn; they would just go back into the same broken system once I left.  There’s not much an American volunteer can do if South Africa itself doesn’t decide to make education a priority.

So time to head back to Milwaukee in a couple weeks and see what life has to offer.  It’s kind of nice having choices again.  And I’ve rediscovered my love of music in the past month; I really want to see if there’s anything I can do professionally with it, once I practise hard for the next year or so.  Already got some great blues pieces to play through on this mandolin, and I’m looking forward to a book on Gypsy Jazz coming in.

I’ll be heading out on more adventures, so I’m keeping this blog up.  I’m still looking toward the future and trying to find time wherever I can to make the world a more awesome place.

The Long and Winding Road

Update!  Kind of.  I thought I was going to be able to take advantage of a cancellation to get an appointment tomorrow, but I was wrong.  So it’s almost certain now that I will not make it back in time before the medical separation period is over (45 days).  That doesn’t mean that South Africa is rid of me; I can still apply to be reinstated, especially since I won’t be going that much over 45 days.  But still, it’s annoying.  Especially because the wait isn’t due to treatment, but because I still haven’t started the actual treatment yet, since Peace Corps cares more about getting the right paperwork and written evals done thrice over than about the actual care of its volunteers.  Ship them out after a half hour informal chat; send them back after in-depth monitoring from multiple professionals, with whom Peace Corps won’t lift a finger to help you get appointments in a timely fashion, while conditions worsen under effective house arrest, when everything could have been taken care of in a week or two back in South Africa had anyone listened to me.  Have I mentioned that I’m getting a little miffed about the situation?  At least the inefficiency and incompetence reassure me that I’m still on the government dime.

I doubt that I can manage any trips around things here, especially since I have to be ready for cancellations at any minute, so excursions to Billings or Milwaukee or Chicago or whatnot are out.  The only thing keeping me reasonably sane and occupied at the moment is music.  So seriously, send me messages or something, or set up a Skype-jam to give me incentive to play more.  Secret admirer gifts for Valentine’s Day are also accepted.

In Defence of Pessimism

I’m spending an awful lot of downtime right now, waiting on Peace Corps to decide that the paperwork is finished so that they can actually get around to taking care of me.  So I’ve been doing odd things; most recently, I picked up a mandolin and have been spending hours learning how to play it.  I’ll be a bluegrass star by the time I get back to South Africa, at this point.  But I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking, about a million and one things.   So first thought, for this post: I’ve been told by various people that I need to be more optimistic, often by people who seem downright offended that anyone take a negative view to things.  And I’m kind of sick of it.

We all know the standard “glass half full/empty” scenario.  And in such a scenario, it may very well be rational to take the glass to be half full.  After all, one might as well be happy, all other things being equal.

But I, as a professional pessimist, don’t take the glass to be half empty.  Other things are *not* equal.  My claim, rather, is that the glass is darn well near gone.  The optimist might claim that the glass is half full, or even entirely so.  This is mere delusion.  It is an emotional security blanket that might give her peace and comfort, but at the cost of her ability to actually engage the world as it is.  Polyanna-ism is highly selfish.  

Other optimists might rather say that we should be grateful for the water we have instead of cursing what we lack.  As long as they also act on that latter knowledge, I guess that I have no serious quarrel with them; it is when they again wrap themselves up in “gratitude” to feel better while ignoring that lack that I have my concerns.

The pessimist claims that the world is actually in a bad spot.  She does not merely say that it can be viewed as such, but rather that things are actually messed up.  And recognition of this mess, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us, is a necessity to doing anything about it.  She might be factually wrong.  In that case, give her facts and evidence to show her otherwise.  But to deride her for being negative and critical, as if such were in itself a vice instead of active engagement with the world, is to showcase one’s own emotional inability to cope rather than make any statement about the pessimist.

In the end, emotions don’t tell us about the world.  They tell us about us.  Feeling good, feeling bad, feeling something to be true or false, are mostly meaningless when we assume that they refer to something more than, well, how we feel.  Which is not unimportant, and is ignored at one’s own peril; but to take them as our compass to the world would be like me saying to myself: I am madly in love with that woman, therefore we will be together one day.  The fact that a view makes someone feel bad or out of place is not in the slightest bit a piece of evidence that such a view is wrong.

So please, I implore my readers, don’t put people down for pointing out the uncomfortable.    Thank them for having the courage to do so, and honestly assess whether they might be correct.  Challenge them in turn if necessary, but never let comfort and peace of mind seal you off from the world.

And speaking of being sealed off from the world, I’m still sitting here, playing music and writing blog entries, probably for at least another month (though who knows? It’s not like I’ve had any clue about what was going to happen the rest of this trip back).  Send me messages and emails and music and, I don’t know, funny pictures or something.

Waiting Around (or, Americans and Greeks and Arabs, oh my!)

Still no news about when I’ll be going back, though I’m hopeful it will be soon. Basically, the way medical leave works, from my understanding, is that you sit around, sit around, sit around, attend an appointment, sit around more, yada yada…. then PC tells you to get on a plane in 24 hours. So there’s no actual telling what will happen. But initial evals are done at least, so we can start planning.

It’s been interesting being back home. Also odd, because I constantly feel like I don’t belong here. My home and work are back in Africa right now. Of course, the fact that it’s been snowing here and in single digits (Fahrenheit) might have something to do with my newfound nostalgia.

It’s interesting coming back home and comparing it to South Africa. And I’ve found that I’ve become much more interested in exploring my own culture and its own folk traditions since studying those of KwaZulu-Natal. I spend time thinking about the course of most people’s lives in my little suburb of Detroit, one which still has barns randomly strewn along city roads in people’s back yards, one where many people grow up and remain their entire lives. I’ve also been out to Milford with its country feel a few times, which makes me think on how my own family’s rural roots compare to those of my little African village. (Though African rural sites do tend to have fewer gastropubs and microbreweries.)

Other than that, I’ve been learning languages and music, two of my biggest hobbies (/obsessions). My goal is to read Homer in Greek by the time I’m done with Peace Corps, and perhaps even to translate some of it into Zulu. Can’t you just see the stories of Achilles and Odysseus being set in the times of Emperor Shaka and his conquests?

In addition, I’m currently fascinated by alternative tonal systems in music. Not that this has anything to do with Peace Corps, but I’m bored of sitting around right now and have you reading this anyhow. Arabic music is fascinating (http://www.maqamworld.com/); as usual, I’m floored at the level of sophistication of their theoretical analysis and how little we pay attention to it in the West. My overall impression of Arabic scales is that they are circles and curves to the straight lines and squares of classical Western music. Western music is better for harmonies, but there is a sort of roundness and artistry about Arabic scales which smooths out melodies by playing around with quarter steps and microtones. Also: the Bohlen-Pierce scale (http://www.huygens-fokker.org/bpsite/index.html) is a harmonic scale which builds a set of tones from scratch that don’t fit into the traditional 12-step chromatic scale. Listen to some samples here: http://ziaspace.com/_microtonality/BP/. It sounds to me like the key keeps changing around almost atonally, yet there remains an odd coherence which atonality lacks. I think the music actually sounds quite lovely and wish I had an instrument which could play around with it.

Ok, geek mode off. Or at least hidden for the moment.

Service Interrupted

It looks like I’m going to be back home in the States for a bit. I’m being medevac-ed (a fancy PC term for “medical evacuation”) for various reasons. No clue at all how long it’s going to be for; maybe a week, a month, up to a month and a half. So no new Africana here for the time being.

Ethics and Development Work

In an Ethics class a while back, the question came up of whether it is better to go out and do development work, making the world a better place, or stand around being a philosophy professor, who might perhaps persuade a couple students to examine their lives and live better.

At the time, this presented a rather large moral dilemma to me. Now that I’ve left philosophy for Peace Corps, though, ironically I see less force to the conundrum.

First, let’s not pretend like people doing development work are making a huge difference in the world. We make small differences, and hope that they take root. They may not always. But we do not necessarily change the world any more over here than doing something else. Honestly, there’s not a whole lot I can do here until South Africa changes from within.

Second, one must keep in mind one’s own strengths. I was reading something by Brad Warner of Hardcore Zen fame. I forget the details and am having trouble locating the post right now (it might have been in one of his books, anyhow), but the point was that he had been doing a job that was regarded as being all nice and humanitarian and what-not. And stunk at it, probably making problems for people instead of solving them. So instead he went and made monster movies; a “lesser” job, but if he could work his values into something he actually could throw himself into, this was better than forcing himself to do the “right thing” and doing it poorly. Being a half-arsed teacher out here isn’t helping anyone and might harden communities against making the changes they need.

Third, there are all sorts of ways to be effective. Seneca, tutor to the Roman emperor Nero, was asked why he didn’t spend more time in the public life doing something. He answered that his writings would last far longer than the political actions of his day. Considering that I read that from him almost 2000 years later, and yet there is no more Roman Empire, Seneca seems to be on to something. We need some people helping raise the standards of humanity around the world. We also need some people in scholarship to remember our past, some in more “normal” jobs keeping things running, and creative sorts showing us visions of what life could be like. If everyone were to become a PC volunteer, or otherwise go and give up their lives to “be good people,” society would crumble.

Sometimes, doing the right thing might be enjoying yourself where you are.