pickin' peppers

 

previous post extended

I guess maybe I never felt comfortable seeking out things that make me happy, sometimes because the seeking seemed wrong and sometimes because I couldn't define that which makes me happy. Like a stupid high school kid, maybe it seemed that happiness was “below me”. Or maybe I felt guilty for feeling happy, that I didn’t deserve it somehow. Maybe it was simple indifference, the same consuming indifference that haunts a lot of us. Well, in the end we choose indifference, it never chooses us. It’s our own desire for self-victimization that causes us to seek it out and hold it tight. It’s an excuse that shrouds our failures in the twisted happiness of the fact that we think we know what others don’t: the world, and life, is meaningless. It's a way of winning, of success, that occurs without a single word, not a sentence to be debated, not a thing produced or counted or scored. Every tired morning, every drudging step, all of the depressing minutes of the day are little victories proving the fact that you are strong enough to continue living in spite of the fact that life is meaningless. No one keeps score. There are no judges. It's a game we play that we win, again and again, every day, against a world that doesn't even know their playing.

Maybe it is, but it doesn’t mean you can’t create meaning! There is no principle question in life, there is no great answer, and it’s not our failure that we can’t answer the one thing we think we should be able to. It is, however, our failure that we think we should have to answer it.

It seems funny that the persuit of happiness should be so hard for so many people, including myself. It seems like such a clouded subject, both the persuit and the happiness itself. Odd something so fundamental to the functioning of life is so complicated... why is that? Now that is a good question.

The first wedding of the rest of my life

Dramatic, isn’t it? No, it’s not my wedding, it’s Shie and Leigh’s wedding, two Peace Corps volunteers that met here and got married. I want to say congratulations and numai bine, un viitor lung impreuna, plin de dragoste si intelegere.

This was the first wedding I’ve ever actually enjoyed. It’s also my first wedding of my generation, with my friends, in which I felt comfortable with the majority of the people in the room. I’ve never danced before, hell, I don’t even know how, but I danced. I whooped and hollered. I felt truly moved by their vows and their nervousness, a sort of lack of professionalism compared to your average wedding that didn’t indicate a whimsical love, but a couple so excited to see look in each others’ eyes they sometimes trip over their own two feet.

This is one of the few occasions in which I felt I couldn’t have enough fun. I didn’t sulk. I didn’t think about what other people were thinking, I don’t I really had the time to consider it. People have always had a hard time describing what they like about dancing to me, I never accepted “it just feels fun” as a good enough answer, but I’ll tell you what I liked: I like holding other people’s hands; I like running and moving in a way that makes sense, following a beat of something; I like seeing girls at their physical best; I liked seeing other people happy too.

Before when I tried dancing, people always said “just let yourself go, and you’ll start feeling good”. Well, I couldn’t, I don’t work that way. I just wondered what does this mean, a bunch of people wiggling around in a way that you would never do on the street, you would never see anywhere? It seemed like a big institution that faded away with any real thought, like a two dimensional building seen from the side. I always tried to dance thinking that happiness would just come, “feeling good” would start as if someone pushed a button, but that’s not how it works either. Not thinking is not the solution to happiness; in fact, the very opposite is true. Think, focus on the music, pay attention to everything around you that makes you happy.

The Moldovan dance the Hora really helped me out. It’s a dance you do in a circle, similar to Jewish dances, and it’s something that I can do. I can focus on moving to the music, I can move my arms in a consistent motion, I can look across from me and see how what I’m doing is making: a big, pulsing circle of people!

Where is Moldova's real John Galt????

For those of you considering to come to Moldova, I suggest reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (yes, even more than Playing the Moldovan's at Tennis... I know, it's clever, but it doesn't really say anything about Moldova damn it!). It's as if we're living in that dysfunctional world where no one says what they mean, all the smart people left, and the regular guy is determined not to think to hard for fear of getting himself into trouble (or realizing that he's already in it). Just like in the book, the most common word on the lips of people living anywhere that seems an economic decline is "blame"... it's an important word, I guess. Without it, we'd never figure out who to punish since those who are guilty are never going to finger themselves. If blame serves the function of pointing the finger at the guilty, it seems that in a "civil" or "polite" society, a society in which you can't even tell your neighbor to their face you'd like to buy their chicken out of embarrassement of not having your own even if you simply choose not to have them (don't laugh, it's true), you certainly couldn't confront someone directly with blame. You can holler and scream, you can stand at your gate and yell in the streets, eyes to the sky. Politicians can point fingers (in the air) and make stern (directionless) comments. But you can't go up to the fella that's guilty and say "you're the guy who stole all the cows", or "you stole half of the vegetable crop", or "you took the smartest Moldovan's and carted them off to siberia", because that just would just be too direct and might hurt feelings, besides the fact that he's probably got the goods on you anyway. Ah hell, in the end, who cares, right? It's all in the past. And so, everyone blames silently, screaming in the public consciosness all of the sins of the past, hoping that they will arrive at the ears of a real person without any return address. Though no one is held responsible, everyone is left with a distorted sense of happiness you get from being the snitch, but it's just a whole lot of mental snitching. Everyone can point their finger, yet no one has to fess up. What an amazing system.

When I go back to the US, I'm going to take a long hard look at what it represents. I don't think I've ever really looked too closely, but I hope that if I do I'll find something that I'd like to live in. I hope we don't ignore responsability, victimize ourselves so that we can wallow in our self-pity, or ignore facts with the hope that they will go away (or don't exist) if we do so. I hope we're moving in the right direction, and that no one is defining that direction except the people who refuse to accept the fear, lies, and self-victimization.

less trips down the valley

I want to preface this by saying that I, more than your average guy, am a direct product of my surroundings (both in time and place). If I watch someone build greenhouses and grow tomatoes for a living, I think that I should do so to; if I play Civilization III a lot, I tend to think as if I were Abraham Lincoln in control of the Americans; if I read a book, I tend to think in the style of the writer and judge the world through his eyes. Having said that, I have been reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (like it or not) and have found it extremely relevant to Moldova.

The past few weeks I have removed myself from the day to day work related to the irrigation water project. The water users’ association which exists is headed by a fellow with a rather unpleasant personality who I expect will soon get kicked out as president. I used to head down the hill and check on people using water after it was pumped, talk and help out moving pipes or fixing leakes, checking water meters at the station, etc. The last two times I was there, I got into two different arguments with two different fellows. They centered around the unjustness of the fact that water costs .60 lei (9 cents) per ton, how the payment was calculated, and in general the fact that someone is “checking” on how much water they are using. I’m not going to take issue with their arguments, because they are complicated and I understand where they are coming from. It’s not that I don’t have an opinion, but it wouldn’t make sense to write about it here.

In any case, my attitude as a Peace Corps volunteer is that whatever I can do, however much I can do to help, I will do. Help is defined as forward movement towards better long term solutions to problems than the ones that exist today (this can include implementing short term solutions as well). And so I thought I was helping by spending my days down there trying to get everyone to agree on how much water was used, and how much everyone should pay. Maybe this is a redundant position, maybe it doesn’t even need to exist… in that case, the association itself is redundant in it’s goal of regulating water use under the current conditions. That is a distinct possibility.

Well, I’ve gotten off track. After being yelled at, argued with, and told to basically go back where I came from, I realized that help is no good where it is not wanted. The main problem with these couple of fellas is not that they are fundamentally self-interested (this fact has made them rather wealthy), but that they don’t see the world in terms of clear social contracts, but instead as a nebulous cloud of negative no-talent corruption. You can’t sit down and talk with a nebulous cloud. You can’t change a nebulous cloud’s mind. You can’t even wring a nebulous cloud’s neck. About all you can do to a nebulous cloud is blow at it with a bunch of hot air to make yourself fell like at least your moving it, even if you’re not really getting rid of it. That’s what these guys do. They do it because most of Moldova is a nebulous cloud and has been for a long time. They don’t even know what to do when they meet a real person, a person who’s come to try to make a contract beneficial to both parties. All they know how to do is holler and blow hot air, but that doesn’t do anything except get real people angry, frustrated, and finally, fed up.

I’m not even sure if I’m not a nebulous cloud. I don’t think I am, I try hard not to be. I find it funny how amazingly similar some of the things that Ayn Rand says in Atlas Shrugged are to Moldova, mostly the pass the buck, who the hell cares (who is John Galt?) attitude and the resulting economic breakdown based on flight and theft. I know it’s not exactly the same: in her book, a sort of social responsibility/ennui on steriods comes out of an entrepreneurial capitalist economy and results in the state of economic destruction, whereas here, people were tought the social responsibility/ennui on steriods for generations and then someone threw an entrepreneurial capitalist economy in their laps. In any case, it resulted in a similar state of economic destruction.

My point? You can’t convince people to work together in a normal contractual way if they don’t really know what that means. You can’t make people like their jobs. You can’t force people to work hard. You can’t (almost ever) change people’s basic personalities, and you sure as hell can’t if they don’t want them to be changed. You can’t help people that don’t want to be helped. In fact, you can’t even call it help if they indeed don’t want it!

But you know what you can do? You can work hard (for yourself, or for someone who actually wants what you’re doing). You can work together in a clear contractual way and make progress. You can like your job. Why? Because, that’s why. The rest of them can go fuck themselves (I apologize for that comment for those members of my family who might come across this page).