Friday, June 18, 2010
The Kruetzer Sonata, or, When I Woke Up He Was Gone
Reading The Kuetzer Sonata was a lousy idea. If I had known that it was going to play a part in throwing me down some emotional stairs I probably would've left it alone.
I've already mentioned that it's hard to leave. I won't go into it again, but I should add that some days actually go really well, I mean, some things really confirm, or rather, justify, my experience here. A few days ago I went to the dentist to get some cavities filled. I spent most of the day skating around and listening to my headphones. It was one of those days when I was really happy to be in Yerevan, to be in a big city, where people are busy and don't pay much attention to the odd foreign skateboarder rolling past. Although the day was hot I wasn't feeling too fatigued. The music I had been tired of a few days earlier on my headphones sounded nice to me again, as if it had undergone some kind of remastering since I'd last listened to it. I felt friendly too, as often happens when the world seem to be smiling upon one. I remember joking with everyone, buying some food for a stray puppy and blundering an attempt to compliment the receptionist at the dentist office.
[I should add that where I live it would be unheard of for a single young man to just blurt out a compliment to a single young woman that he didn't know. I thought it might be different in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the capital, but it didn't seem to be.
I used to enjoy complimenting strangers because the few times I have received such unexpected compliments they have stayed with me a long time. It's one thing for your mom to tell you that your hair looks nice like that, and quite another thing for someone in line at the bank to turn around, notice your hair and say "hey, I like your hair!" Ok, yeah maybe nobody's complimented me on my hair in a decade, but you know what I mean.]
Anyway, you can see it was just the kind of day where things fell into place. The fillings went pretty easy, my dentist was a pleasure to talk to, being from Baghdad. On the ride home the marshutka had side windows that opened so we were able to dispel the afternoon heat pretty well and I got invited to a curry dinner and was actually able to eat it as the Novocaine wore off just in time.
That was only about five days ago and for the last three days I've been smoking constantly, feeling awkward even in previously comfortable situations and quick to anger. It's probably true that I have had many similar episodes, even over the past month, but going through this, Fortuna's latest downward spin, compounded with the memory of a very believable bleak story regarding that which supposed to bring us happiness in life is really playing at my nerves.
In the story the narrator (and Tolstoy's experience in a bad marriage definitely factors in) begins a story in a train carriage about how he ended up killing his wife. He takes a good 60 pages before reaching this climax describing all the petty misunderstandings, miscommunication and misgivings that resulted from his attempt to get married and live with a woman, who, in the eyes of society, he was supposed to cherish. He delineates all the things that make such long term adoration and even cordiality impossible. Eventually, the narrator and his wife are constantly arguing, while the narrator is, only half-unconsciously, trying to force her away from him, so that he can feel justified in his repugnance of her, and feel vindicated in, by that time what has become his hatred of her.
When he thinks about his wife from the perspective of other men he is able to understand how she could be beautiful although she has longed ceased to be for him. In the births of his children he finds no solace, saying that they, too, were only drawn into the battle between him and his wife. Both these points struck me as particularly depressing. To be able to see someone as beautiful but not have the courage or the means to appreciate them anymore, only to feel jealous that this person should still appear beautiful to others when she has long since ceased to be beautiful for you. I remember having somewhat similar feelings when I was younger in regard to my friends, who, having been friends with me, suddenly discovered some other crowd and left me alone. I remember thinking something like "yeah, I know you think this person is great right now, but you don't really know them. Not like I know them." That is to say, I can see what beauty you think is there, but I myself, have long ago discovered it to be false, as,no doubt, will you. At one time or another I think we have all had such a feeling.
In the end the narrator leaves the house, becomes insanely jealous when thinking about his wife, although he positively loathes her, with someone else and rushes back to find her with another man whereupon he stabs her. The story ends shortly after this action with a debatable note of repentance.
Personally, I have always thought Tolstoy to be the master of characterization, he writes characters' inner lives as plainly as their physical actions. In Anna Karenina there are so many thoughts of hubris, fear and apathy that seem pulled out from one's own phyche. He writes all the little things that we think make us individuals, the reoccurring day dream, the awkward way we sometimes talk with a friend we don't see very often when meeting by chance, saying the wrong thing and then not knowing how to correct it and the little things that make us happy such as a proffered drink of water, an agreement, a comfortable silence or a frost covered road.
When he turns his powers of observation on a certain event its interesting to read, sometimes you find pieces of yourself amongst the foibles of his human characters, but sometimes, like in any novel, their actions seem ridiculous. But in The Death of Ivan Ilych and The Kuetzer Sonata, he focuses on a general situation of two people who thought they'd be happy together and ended up trapped, and living lives into which they felt forced.
There's no sense of agreement necessary here. The hardest part is that Tolstoy isn't asking you to subscribe to his idea that marriage is horrible and that everyone feels alienated by one's children. He merely shows you how the scenario, as it were, is entirely possible. Even if the reader doesn't believe in the possibility of this scenario, even if, as some unreasonably positive person, you choose to ignore all the correlations between this bleak story and your own life you are still forced to file it away in the portion of your brain where you retain memories and thoughts on relationships; and there it seems to fester, tainting the picture of happily-ever-after that's much more prominent, but somehow less convincing than Tolstoy's brutal depiction.
You read this and examine all the past relationships you've been in, and see how they all ended because there was a flaw there that couldn't stop growing a flaw that, unchecked, may have grown into something monstrous like in Tolstoy's vision. It's not that it's assured, it's just that it seems possible and it's awful to comprehend that such a miserable life could grow from something that initially was a great source of happiness; that one might find, in another human being, something so repulsive, just doesn't, itself, seem human.
I've already mentioned that it's hard to leave. I won't go into it again, but I should add that some days actually go really well, I mean, some things really confirm, or rather, justify, my experience here. A few days ago I went to the dentist to get some cavities filled. I spent most of the day skating around and listening to my headphones. It was one of those days when I was really happy to be in Yerevan, to be in a big city, where people are busy and don't pay much attention to the odd foreign skateboarder rolling past. Although the day was hot I wasn't feeling too fatigued. The music I had been tired of a few days earlier on my headphones sounded nice to me again, as if it had undergone some kind of remastering since I'd last listened to it. I felt friendly too, as often happens when the world seem to be smiling upon one. I remember joking with everyone, buying some food for a stray puppy and blundering an attempt to compliment the receptionist at the dentist office.
[I should add that where I live it would be unheard of for a single young man to just blurt out a compliment to a single young woman that he didn't know. I thought it might be different in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the capital, but it didn't seem to be.
I used to enjoy complimenting strangers because the few times I have received such unexpected compliments they have stayed with me a long time. It's one thing for your mom to tell you that your hair looks nice like that, and quite another thing for someone in line at the bank to turn around, notice your hair and say "hey, I like your hair!" Ok, yeah maybe nobody's complimented me on my hair in a decade, but you know what I mean.]
Anyway, you can see it was just the kind of day where things fell into place. The fillings went pretty easy, my dentist was a pleasure to talk to, being from Baghdad. On the ride home the marshutka had side windows that opened so we were able to dispel the afternoon heat pretty well and I got invited to a curry dinner and was actually able to eat it as the Novocaine wore off just in time.
That was only about five days ago and for the last three days I've been smoking constantly, feeling awkward even in previously comfortable situations and quick to anger. It's probably true that I have had many similar episodes, even over the past month, but going through this, Fortuna's latest downward spin, compounded with the memory of a very believable bleak story regarding that which supposed to bring us happiness in life is really playing at my nerves.
In the story the narrator (and Tolstoy's experience in a bad marriage definitely factors in) begins a story in a train carriage about how he ended up killing his wife. He takes a good 60 pages before reaching this climax describing all the petty misunderstandings, miscommunication and misgivings that resulted from his attempt to get married and live with a woman, who, in the eyes of society, he was supposed to cherish. He delineates all the things that make such long term adoration and even cordiality impossible. Eventually, the narrator and his wife are constantly arguing, while the narrator is, only half-unconsciously, trying to force her away from him, so that he can feel justified in his repugnance of her, and feel vindicated in, by that time what has become his hatred of her.
When he thinks about his wife from the perspective of other men he is able to understand how she could be beautiful although she has longed ceased to be for him. In the births of his children he finds no solace, saying that they, too, were only drawn into the battle between him and his wife. Both these points struck me as particularly depressing. To be able to see someone as beautiful but not have the courage or the means to appreciate them anymore, only to feel jealous that this person should still appear beautiful to others when she has long since ceased to be beautiful for you. I remember having somewhat similar feelings when I was younger in regard to my friends, who, having been friends with me, suddenly discovered some other crowd and left me alone. I remember thinking something like "yeah, I know you think this person is great right now, but you don't really know them. Not like I know them." That is to say, I can see what beauty you think is there, but I myself, have long ago discovered it to be false, as,no doubt, will you. At one time or another I think we have all had such a feeling.
In the end the narrator leaves the house, becomes insanely jealous when thinking about his wife, although he positively loathes her, with someone else and rushes back to find her with another man whereupon he stabs her. The story ends shortly after this action with a debatable note of repentance.
Personally, I have always thought Tolstoy to be the master of characterization, he writes characters' inner lives as plainly as their physical actions. In Anna Karenina there are so many thoughts of hubris, fear and apathy that seem pulled out from one's own phyche. He writes all the little things that we think make us individuals, the reoccurring day dream, the awkward way we sometimes talk with a friend we don't see very often when meeting by chance, saying the wrong thing and then not knowing how to correct it and the little things that make us happy such as a proffered drink of water, an agreement, a comfortable silence or a frost covered road.
When he turns his powers of observation on a certain event its interesting to read, sometimes you find pieces of yourself amongst the foibles of his human characters, but sometimes, like in any novel, their actions seem ridiculous. But in The Death of Ivan Ilych and The Kuetzer Sonata, he focuses on a general situation of two people who thought they'd be happy together and ended up trapped, and living lives into which they felt forced.
There's no sense of agreement necessary here. The hardest part is that Tolstoy isn't asking you to subscribe to his idea that marriage is horrible and that everyone feels alienated by one's children. He merely shows you how the scenario, as it were, is entirely possible. Even if the reader doesn't believe in the possibility of this scenario, even if, as some unreasonably positive person, you choose to ignore all the correlations between this bleak story and your own life you are still forced to file it away in the portion of your brain where you retain memories and thoughts on relationships; and there it seems to fester, tainting the picture of happily-ever-after that's much more prominent, but somehow less convincing than Tolstoy's brutal depiction.
You read this and examine all the past relationships you've been in, and see how they all ended because there was a flaw there that couldn't stop growing a flaw that, unchecked, may have grown into something monstrous like in Tolstoy's vision. It's not that it's assured, it's just that it seems possible and it's awful to comprehend that such a miserable life could grow from something that initially was a great source of happiness; that one might find, in another human being, something so repulsive, just doesn't, itself, seem human.
Friday, June 11, 2010
The Mantoux Test, or, A Tangle of Fountains
The days have gotten so long that taking a nap doesn't seem to take up any time, no matter how long it lasts for. You get drowsy around 3 or 4 and wake up, sweating to a six-o'clock world that looks exactly like the one you left. But, even after a week of siestas, the skin on your arms still has a burnt siena color to it and the hair that grows from them has a sweaty pomade kind of look. I spend more time than ever sitting out in the fields north of town, sometimes not even bringing any distractions with me, just sitting there and trying vainly to memorize the landscape and the feeling it produced over the course of two years of contemplation. I'd like to take some pictures of it but I know I'll probably forget before I go. I don't really want a reproduction anyway. Pictures of people are nice. They help one look directly into the eyes of the past, but landscapes often look like postcards of unfamiliar places no matter how new or relevant.
Everything Breaks When You Want to Move.
The water pressure has been vacillating incredibly since the summer heat set in. This caused me no small amount of irritation due to the malign nature of my bathroom facet, bandaged as it's been since I moved in with a piece of wire to keep it together and to hold the gush of the building's pipes at bay. Although the facet has always mercelessly dripped it never reached a deluge proportion until last month when I began to hear the pipes growning in the walls. I would wake up in the night to find the facet spraying water all over my bathroom and the meter faithfully recording this rediculous unchecked water expendature. Sure, water's not that expensive, but it just seems so wasteful to watch it swirl pointlessly down the drain and leave rust deposits all over the place. I'd try to tie the wire tighter, but often this would permit an even more devulian quantity to belch forth from the useless facet. Aftet fighting with it for weeks I finally got tired of the whole farce and just punched the damn thing.
I immediately regretted it.
Everything in this building came from Brezhniv. None of it's reliable, none of it's sound or even secure. The windows drop out of thier frames when storm winds blow through the staircase, the drywall/whitewash combination drops in chunks from humid bathroom walls and nearly every time I go in my bathroom there's a party of large roaches in there that have gotten stuck inside the slick and steep washtub basin, like skateboarders skating a pool they dash madly up one side only to slip down and be carried by their momentum up the other convex side. Yeah, they're big enought to have momentum.
Considering all this I shouldn't have been suprised when a light punch of irritation suddenly bathed my bathroom from floor to ceiling in water. And in fact I really wasn't that surpised, but even when one intends to splash cold water on one's face it's still shocking, the mouth still opens suddenly as if seeking a final source of air before going under an enormous wave. The facet, now rendered completely useless, ratteled into the sink and the water, free from and obstruction at last, maddened by its lengthly captivity, roared from the open pipe socket.
I stood there stupidly for a while, trying to block the flow and replace the facet. The pressure only angered the rushing cataract and the facet acted as a conduit to get the most water on my ceiling as quickly as possible.
I believe it a good indication that something of the pace of life here has effected me that I was able to actually stand there, in front of the raging torrent, and contemplate what to do next. It wasn't until I noticed my weight had changed due to the amount of water I had taken on, that I decided I had to get someone else's opinon. My neighbors weren't home so I went upstairs to the apartment of one of my students, a nice kid who's helped me out with apartment problems in the past. As he was apparently not in a hurry either we slowly made our way downstairs to where my bathroom was beginning to seep out into my hallway.
When we met the water outside the bathroom door my neighbor regarded it quite stoicly, merely glancing down at it for a second, looking at me and saying,
"Jure ka" [There's water here].
I responded my saying, "ghist eh" [that's correct]. And nothing in this exchange felt odd to either of us.
After this appraisel I almost expected him to turn around and return to his apartment, as if he'd only come down to make sure I was telling the truth about my broken facet, but had no deside to help me do anything about it. Luckily, he went in for a closer look and I soon found him, trying, just as unsuccessfully as I had, to cram the broken facet back into the rushing stream. I told him I thought we should turn off the water. He agreed but kept trying to get the obstinate facet back into the hole it had produced. Once again the water was blasting the cobwebs off my ceiling and raining down amidst the flaking paint and dead bugs that had peacefully been reposing up there.
When we got outside by the main shut off switch (I didn't have one in my apartment) he pointed it out to me and walked rapidly away, as if to secure a place of innocence when the water screeched to a halt in the two adjoined buildings. Luckily, I was firm in my resolution to not flood out my downstairs neighbors, and much to my neighbors' irriation, pulled back the hubcap that served as a cover for the water shut off switch and cranked the thing around until I heard voices lifting from every window in dismay.
"Inchi anjetel es?" [why'd you turn it off?] a chorus of balcony voices demanded to know.
"im ban@ jartvel eh" [my thing broke (I didn't know the word for faucet)].
I like to think how it must of looked for them. One minute you're washing clothes, or running bathwater for the baby and suddenly the water is ktrats [cut-off, it sounds so much better]. You look out to see if maybe the guy from the water board is down there doing repairs, or if someone's tapping the pipes to wash their car, and instead you find the foreign kid from the next building over, grunting with effort and totally soaked with water.I can't help but to think it looked like some really ill-concieved sabotage effort.
My neighbor's father, sitting in the gazebo-type of thing that's usually staked out by the old men, playing nardi in the afternoons, called me over and told me to go buy another facet. Soon he was in my bathroom with an acetylene torch blasting away at my pipes with a bunch of old and battered tools all over the place. My neighbor and I watched while he banged tool after tool down on my pipes to clear out the facet threading that had broken off inside of them due to my careless punch. Although the work was rough, my neighbor's father showed a deft familiarity in his trade and soon knocked all the offending objects out of my pipes.Within minutes my facet was in perfect working order and I was upstairs eating strawberries with my saviors, trying not to think about the huge mess that awaited me downstairs.
The Kind of Person that Always Adds 'Right?" After Saying "We're Friends."
Yeah, I neglected a bunch of friendships, to some degree I even neglected my family, simply because I had to if I wanted to remain here. I know this might sound pretty sevire. And I'm sure many Peace Corps volunteers would disagree with what I understood as an inherent incompatability between the life one leaves behind in the states and the life one starts in a host country. Initially, I didn't give it much thought. Before I left I occasionlly considered the effects of two years of transitional living, but I wasn't able to really ask myself what that would mean for the life I had in the states. I thought of new and exciting relationships and letters back home that would make reference to them, and I did have both of these things at different times since I've been here, but not quite the way I had imagined it.
I have often told the story of my first homecoming back to Jackson, MI (my hometown) after my first move away at 18 in order to illustrate the importance of holding low expectations for any kind of return trip. I tell this story to my friends here and to myself when I begin to get too excited to see old faces and walk old streets. I've heard myself telling it so many times that it no longer disappionts me, no longer feels pathetic, but rather just seems like truth, and indeed reminding myself of this event before any kind of reunion has never let me down.
I moved to Chicago. I had been there for about a six weeks when I had to come back for my Grandfather's funeral. When everything was finished I still had a day before going back to Chicago and decided to drop in on my friends.
I can still recall the scenarios that played out in my head on my way over to the house where many of my friends had been congregating before I moved, and, as far as I knew, still were. I imagined all kinds of surprise and champaigne bottles popping as I walked into the room nonchalantly. I saw my friends bounding up and down in surprise; every handshake turning into a bear hug, actually lifting me from the ground.
I parked down the block to make sure that no one recognized my Dad's car and proceeded up to the back door. As I approached the house I could hear all my friends' voices lifting and falling like a fond but forgotten song. I was suddenly overcome with a sense of lonliness that I hadn't been aware in Chicago. I realized how much time I had spent with these people and how much strain our friendships had stood over the often turbulent high school years. I was beginning to feel relieved, happy just to be back around them. Still, I hoped for something in this way from them. I wanted reciprocity.
I found the door unlocked, exactly as I had hoped, and entered, trying to supress a latent grin. As I crossed the livingroom threshhold I found them all facing the TV, playing the same videogame I remembered them playing before I left, six weeks before. I walked in, they turned around, and the great reception I had expected barely leveled out at an enthusiastic hello.
For what it's worth, any of my friends that were there at the time might contest this. They might say that I actualy recieved a thoroughly enthusiastic greeting, but I don't remember it that way. I couldn't remember it that way because I expected too much. I had only been gone six weeks. To the people that had stayed behind hardly any time had passed at all. Life had continued on as usual, and suddenly, I was back. They had hardly noticed my absence. I, however, had been very well-aware of every passing day, thinking constantly to myself, "I'm going to make it, I'm going to start all over again and be happy." But, at first, this was not easy, I had no friends, I didn't know anything about where I was, and although I enjoyed a lot on a superficial level nothing had touched me the way a good friend's phone call or smile can.
I remembered this lesson well, and although I continued to pine after my friends long after returning to Chicago and living there for a while longer, I gradually learned to distance myself. To live with them, so far away, was just torment. they became figures of near-mythical proportions. Even the most drab memories became colorful stories, and I spent most of my time telling these stories to people I met who probably didn't care to hear them.
Although I never repeated this mistake with the same intensity, I certainly repeated it.When I moved back to Michigan I spoke of Chicago as a perfect and baffeling place, where everything one could want was easily procured. When I moved to California I hung out with other people who had moved from Michigan, true, they were all wonderful people who I'm sure I would've befriended anyway, but our shared Michigan past certainly didn't hinder things. It wasn't until I moved to a small town in Northern California that I began to truely see how I had always cluched to my recent past.
When I moved to California I had gone to live in San Francisco with a very good friend of mine. We lived together for a year and became impossibly close. Upon suddenly finding myself in the boonies of northern California, I longed for the companionship I had known in SF. I thought not only of my friends in SF but also those in Chicago, Lansing and Jackson, MI and all the other places to which many of my friends had scattered. I felt lonliness like I had never known and although I tried to make new friends I just couldn't seem to get close to people with the knowledge that I already had so many wonderful friends all over the country.
Eventually, I found myself in a realtionship that substituted for all the friends with which I couldn't be. I poured myself into it, overjoyed at finally having found something familiar in what, until then, had seemed a desolate place. What I hadn't realized was that I was setting myself up for prolonged longing. If I could have left northern California without having ever really attached myself to anyone, without having made any lasting friendships perhaps my Peace Corps service would've been easier at first, but once again, upon arriving in Armenia, I found myself without, I found myself missing something too strongly to truely look around and appreciate what was around me.
It took nearly a year, but eventually I began to open my eyes and see the country in which I was living and the people with whom I was living.
And now, with about five weeks left here, I know what I've done. I've established more relationships that will echo well into the future; voices without people behind them when I find myself back in northern California again, again a stranger, again alone. That's not to say that I've ever regretted any of this. In fact, I know that all these people have ultimitly made these places for me. If I had never met Viki in Arcata, CA I couldn't possibly think much of it, if I hadn't moved to SF with Mikey and met Sam there the bars and the bikes wouldn't have held my attention for long. If Bretton hadn't enticed me to move to Lansing and Mark and Akikwe hadn't been there it would've been a lousy five years and I probably never would've been able to get through college.
So as I begin to comtemplate some kind of return back home, experience has taught me not too make to much of it, least I find myself a half heartedly received guest at my own party, and, probably for the first time, I am truely conscious of just how much I am going to miss the friends I have made here. I can already feel it pulling at me, although I am still here. I can feel the echos of so many voices, that have yet to travel across the Atlantic and reach me in California, but certainly will, all too soon. At the same time, these echos have confirmed this place for me, and without them, as with other places, Armenia would mean nothing.
I did what I had to do. I have missed many things over the course of time that I have been here, but it was necessary, for me, to live here without constantly checking Facebook updates, or sending long e-mails of heartfelt longing. Now, as I begin to look more at the place to which I will return, I find these things confusing. My friends talk of things to which I can't relate. They post pictures of people whom I have not met. All of them smiling in appreciation of a life I have not known. And I talk with my friends here and feel comforted, they too understand this feeling of disorientation, they too know they are going to miss speaking Armenian and drinking hykakan s'rge, to mention nothing of oghe. It may have been awkward but we have built up lives here, we have places, that though we may be tired of occupying them, they still feel familiar to us.
If I neglected anything it's because I truely made it. It's because I became comfortable enough here to let go of the past. It's what is always needed, but, after an experience like this, I know that I cannot fully do it again. I will not go one living in Vyke, in Yeghegnadzor, in Yerevan, I will not try to drag these places back into an incompatable America, but where ever I go, I know that eventually I will leave that place too, whereas, in some way, I will always have Armenia with me; it's simply been too long and too seminal and, in many ways, too damn beautiful.
Everything Breaks When You Want to Move.
The water pressure has been vacillating incredibly since the summer heat set in. This caused me no small amount of irritation due to the malign nature of my bathroom facet, bandaged as it's been since I moved in with a piece of wire to keep it together and to hold the gush of the building's pipes at bay. Although the facet has always mercelessly dripped it never reached a deluge proportion until last month when I began to hear the pipes growning in the walls. I would wake up in the night to find the facet spraying water all over my bathroom and the meter faithfully recording this rediculous unchecked water expendature. Sure, water's not that expensive, but it just seems so wasteful to watch it swirl pointlessly down the drain and leave rust deposits all over the place. I'd try to tie the wire tighter, but often this would permit an even more devulian quantity to belch forth from the useless facet. Aftet fighting with it for weeks I finally got tired of the whole farce and just punched the damn thing.
I immediately regretted it.
Everything in this building came from Brezhniv. None of it's reliable, none of it's sound or even secure. The windows drop out of thier frames when storm winds blow through the staircase, the drywall/whitewash combination drops in chunks from humid bathroom walls and nearly every time I go in my bathroom there's a party of large roaches in there that have gotten stuck inside the slick and steep washtub basin, like skateboarders skating a pool they dash madly up one side only to slip down and be carried by their momentum up the other convex side. Yeah, they're big enought to have momentum.
Considering all this I shouldn't have been suprised when a light punch of irritation suddenly bathed my bathroom from floor to ceiling in water. And in fact I really wasn't that surpised, but even when one intends to splash cold water on one's face it's still shocking, the mouth still opens suddenly as if seeking a final source of air before going under an enormous wave. The facet, now rendered completely useless, ratteled into the sink and the water, free from and obstruction at last, maddened by its lengthly captivity, roared from the open pipe socket.
I stood there stupidly for a while, trying to block the flow and replace the facet. The pressure only angered the rushing cataract and the facet acted as a conduit to get the most water on my ceiling as quickly as possible.
I believe it a good indication that something of the pace of life here has effected me that I was able to actually stand there, in front of the raging torrent, and contemplate what to do next. It wasn't until I noticed my weight had changed due to the amount of water I had taken on, that I decided I had to get someone else's opinon. My neighbors weren't home so I went upstairs to the apartment of one of my students, a nice kid who's helped me out with apartment problems in the past. As he was apparently not in a hurry either we slowly made our way downstairs to where my bathroom was beginning to seep out into my hallway.
When we met the water outside the bathroom door my neighbor regarded it quite stoicly, merely glancing down at it for a second, looking at me and saying,
"Jure ka" [There's water here].
I responded my saying, "ghist eh" [that's correct]. And nothing in this exchange felt odd to either of us.
After this appraisel I almost expected him to turn around and return to his apartment, as if he'd only come down to make sure I was telling the truth about my broken facet, but had no deside to help me do anything about it. Luckily, he went in for a closer look and I soon found him, trying, just as unsuccessfully as I had, to cram the broken facet back into the rushing stream. I told him I thought we should turn off the water. He agreed but kept trying to get the obstinate facet back into the hole it had produced. Once again the water was blasting the cobwebs off my ceiling and raining down amidst the flaking paint and dead bugs that had peacefully been reposing up there.
When we got outside by the main shut off switch (I didn't have one in my apartment) he pointed it out to me and walked rapidly away, as if to secure a place of innocence when the water screeched to a halt in the two adjoined buildings. Luckily, I was firm in my resolution to not flood out my downstairs neighbors, and much to my neighbors' irriation, pulled back the hubcap that served as a cover for the water shut off switch and cranked the thing around until I heard voices lifting from every window in dismay.
"Inchi anjetel es?" [why'd you turn it off?] a chorus of balcony voices demanded to know.
"im ban@ jartvel eh" [my thing broke (I didn't know the word for faucet)].
I like to think how it must of looked for them. One minute you're washing clothes, or running bathwater for the baby and suddenly the water is ktrats [cut-off, it sounds so much better]. You look out to see if maybe the guy from the water board is down there doing repairs, or if someone's tapping the pipes to wash their car, and instead you find the foreign kid from the next building over, grunting with effort and totally soaked with water.I can't help but to think it looked like some really ill-concieved sabotage effort.
My neighbor's father, sitting in the gazebo-type of thing that's usually staked out by the old men, playing nardi in the afternoons, called me over and told me to go buy another facet. Soon he was in my bathroom with an acetylene torch blasting away at my pipes with a bunch of old and battered tools all over the place. My neighbor and I watched while he banged tool after tool down on my pipes to clear out the facet threading that had broken off inside of them due to my careless punch. Although the work was rough, my neighbor's father showed a deft familiarity in his trade and soon knocked all the offending objects out of my pipes.Within minutes my facet was in perfect working order and I was upstairs eating strawberries with my saviors, trying not to think about the huge mess that awaited me downstairs.
The Kind of Person that Always Adds 'Right?" After Saying "We're Friends."
Yeah, I neglected a bunch of friendships, to some degree I even neglected my family, simply because I had to if I wanted to remain here. I know this might sound pretty sevire. And I'm sure many Peace Corps volunteers would disagree with what I understood as an inherent incompatability between the life one leaves behind in the states and the life one starts in a host country. Initially, I didn't give it much thought. Before I left I occasionlly considered the effects of two years of transitional living, but I wasn't able to really ask myself what that would mean for the life I had in the states. I thought of new and exciting relationships and letters back home that would make reference to them, and I did have both of these things at different times since I've been here, but not quite the way I had imagined it.
I have often told the story of my first homecoming back to Jackson, MI (my hometown) after my first move away at 18 in order to illustrate the importance of holding low expectations for any kind of return trip. I tell this story to my friends here and to myself when I begin to get too excited to see old faces and walk old streets. I've heard myself telling it so many times that it no longer disappionts me, no longer feels pathetic, but rather just seems like truth, and indeed reminding myself of this event before any kind of reunion has never let me down.
I moved to Chicago. I had been there for about a six weeks when I had to come back for my Grandfather's funeral. When everything was finished I still had a day before going back to Chicago and decided to drop in on my friends.
I can still recall the scenarios that played out in my head on my way over to the house where many of my friends had been congregating before I moved, and, as far as I knew, still were. I imagined all kinds of surprise and champaigne bottles popping as I walked into the room nonchalantly. I saw my friends bounding up and down in surprise; every handshake turning into a bear hug, actually lifting me from the ground.
I parked down the block to make sure that no one recognized my Dad's car and proceeded up to the back door. As I approached the house I could hear all my friends' voices lifting and falling like a fond but forgotten song. I was suddenly overcome with a sense of lonliness that I hadn't been aware in Chicago. I realized how much time I had spent with these people and how much strain our friendships had stood over the often turbulent high school years. I was beginning to feel relieved, happy just to be back around them. Still, I hoped for something in this way from them. I wanted reciprocity.
I found the door unlocked, exactly as I had hoped, and entered, trying to supress a latent grin. As I crossed the livingroom threshhold I found them all facing the TV, playing the same videogame I remembered them playing before I left, six weeks before. I walked in, they turned around, and the great reception I had expected barely leveled out at an enthusiastic hello.
For what it's worth, any of my friends that were there at the time might contest this. They might say that I actualy recieved a thoroughly enthusiastic greeting, but I don't remember it that way. I couldn't remember it that way because I expected too much. I had only been gone six weeks. To the people that had stayed behind hardly any time had passed at all. Life had continued on as usual, and suddenly, I was back. They had hardly noticed my absence. I, however, had been very well-aware of every passing day, thinking constantly to myself, "I'm going to make it, I'm going to start all over again and be happy." But, at first, this was not easy, I had no friends, I didn't know anything about where I was, and although I enjoyed a lot on a superficial level nothing had touched me the way a good friend's phone call or smile can.
I remembered this lesson well, and although I continued to pine after my friends long after returning to Chicago and living there for a while longer, I gradually learned to distance myself. To live with them, so far away, was just torment. they became figures of near-mythical proportions. Even the most drab memories became colorful stories, and I spent most of my time telling these stories to people I met who probably didn't care to hear them.
Although I never repeated this mistake with the same intensity, I certainly repeated it.When I moved back to Michigan I spoke of Chicago as a perfect and baffeling place, where everything one could want was easily procured. When I moved to California I hung out with other people who had moved from Michigan, true, they were all wonderful people who I'm sure I would've befriended anyway, but our shared Michigan past certainly didn't hinder things. It wasn't until I moved to a small town in Northern California that I began to truely see how I had always cluched to my recent past.
When I moved to California I had gone to live in San Francisco with a very good friend of mine. We lived together for a year and became impossibly close. Upon suddenly finding myself in the boonies of northern California, I longed for the companionship I had known in SF. I thought not only of my friends in SF but also those in Chicago, Lansing and Jackson, MI and all the other places to which many of my friends had scattered. I felt lonliness like I had never known and although I tried to make new friends I just couldn't seem to get close to people with the knowledge that I already had so many wonderful friends all over the country.
Eventually, I found myself in a realtionship that substituted for all the friends with which I couldn't be. I poured myself into it, overjoyed at finally having found something familiar in what, until then, had seemed a desolate place. What I hadn't realized was that I was setting myself up for prolonged longing. If I could have left northern California without having ever really attached myself to anyone, without having made any lasting friendships perhaps my Peace Corps service would've been easier at first, but once again, upon arriving in Armenia, I found myself without, I found myself missing something too strongly to truely look around and appreciate what was around me.
It took nearly a year, but eventually I began to open my eyes and see the country in which I was living and the people with whom I was living.
And now, with about five weeks left here, I know what I've done. I've established more relationships that will echo well into the future; voices without people behind them when I find myself back in northern California again, again a stranger, again alone. That's not to say that I've ever regretted any of this. In fact, I know that all these people have ultimitly made these places for me. If I had never met Viki in Arcata, CA I couldn't possibly think much of it, if I hadn't moved to SF with Mikey and met Sam there the bars and the bikes wouldn't have held my attention for long. If Bretton hadn't enticed me to move to Lansing and Mark and Akikwe hadn't been there it would've been a lousy five years and I probably never would've been able to get through college.
So as I begin to comtemplate some kind of return back home, experience has taught me not too make to much of it, least I find myself a half heartedly received guest at my own party, and, probably for the first time, I am truely conscious of just how much I am going to miss the friends I have made here. I can already feel it pulling at me, although I am still here. I can feel the echos of so many voices, that have yet to travel across the Atlantic and reach me in California, but certainly will, all too soon. At the same time, these echos have confirmed this place for me, and without them, as with other places, Armenia would mean nothing.
I did what I had to do. I have missed many things over the course of time that I have been here, but it was necessary, for me, to live here without constantly checking Facebook updates, or sending long e-mails of heartfelt longing. Now, as I begin to look more at the place to which I will return, I find these things confusing. My friends talk of things to which I can't relate. They post pictures of people whom I have not met. All of them smiling in appreciation of a life I have not known. And I talk with my friends here and feel comforted, they too understand this feeling of disorientation, they too know they are going to miss speaking Armenian and drinking hykakan s'rge, to mention nothing of oghe. It may have been awkward but we have built up lives here, we have places, that though we may be tired of occupying them, they still feel familiar to us.
If I neglected anything it's because I truely made it. It's because I became comfortable enough here to let go of the past. It's what is always needed, but, after an experience like this, I know that I cannot fully do it again. I will not go one living in Vyke, in Yeghegnadzor, in Yerevan, I will not try to drag these places back into an incompatable America, but where ever I go, I know that eventually I will leave that place too, whereas, in some way, I will always have Armenia with me; it's simply been too long and too seminal and, in many ways, too damn beautiful.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Bleeding to Death on the Bus (heavily anthologized)
I wrote this story almost 4 years ago, but I really enjoyed reading it again so I thought I'd pull it off Myspace where it's been moldering, unread, for quite some time now.
Apologies to those who have already read it and didn't like it the first time.
"Damn!"
The kid's looking at me like I've got leprosy.
"What do you mean 'damn'? How bad is it?" I ask, trying to keep the hysteria out of my voice.
"Man you've got a hole in you chin!" The kid lets me down gentley.
"Fuck." At this point it's all I've got. It's all I know: fuck. "Fuck."
I'm about an hour subway ride from home out in the middle of nowhere sitting on a bench trying to keep my blood from running all over the place. My shirt is covered with gore and hair from my unshaven face. Well, unshaven until now when the concrete did it for me. Taking just a little extra and only in one place. I've got no map or anything so I hardly know how to get home despite the fact that I did a bang up job of getting down here. Also, when your bleeding as much as I am now your thoughts tend to jumble around a little. The blood splatters down on your shirt making new red lines in the cloth. On your shoes the blood coagulates in the dust and forms little beads. When it hits the sidewalk blood looks so remarkablely red and opaque that it has all the visual power of a bright yellow wasp or one of those poison dart frogs, bouncing around the rain forest like fire globules. Stop signs are dramaticaly red for a reason, the color makes you pay attention. It's a warning and right now I've got warning spalshed all over me, from my chin down to my shoes.
"Do you know where there's a hospital?" Suddenly it occures to me that I should probably get moving.
"It's like a BIG hole, man" I've apperently impressed the kid with my injury but as flattered as I am I'm starting to get a little nervous. I lift the edge of my voice a little higher.
"DO YOU KNOW WHERE THERE"S A HOSPITAL?"
"No man, I have no idea."
This kid's been a great help. I'm starting to walk away when he suddenly snaps to.
"Those guys might though," he says pointing to a group of surly looking kids in the corner of the park.
Immediatley I'm walking up to the kids trying to control my steps afraid I might fall again. Everything feels numb. My finger tips are tingling. A trail of blood is following me around the park.
"Hey guys," I butt into their conversation trying to look as relaxed as possible, you know like I bust myself open everyday.
"Do you know where there might be a hospital around here?"
"Not really." The surliest looking one says without even looking up. And I can't help but to think about grabbing him, shaking my head and screaming like Tyler Durden did to his boss in Fight Club, flinging my blood all over the place, mostly on him.
'Not really?'
What kind of shit is that either you know or you don't. Look at me for shit sake. Do I look like I only kinda' need a hospital?
Another one takes sympathy on me, or maybe he just doesn't want any blood dripped on his new Emerica shoes.
"I think there's on on Valenica, like Valencia and 19th."
Ok that's enough I have a vague idea where that might be and I don't want to stand around anymore leaking like a faucet. I thank the guys and skate off in the direction I came.But the skating is slow under my wobbly feet. One of my shoes is all ripped up and the blood pouring down my shirt is taking my concentration away from everything else. After about three blocks it's all hills and I've got to get off and start walking. The kid's words keep echoing through my mind.
"There's like a big hole. Your chin. Big Hole"
It just keeps playing over and over again. making the injury in my mind worse with each repitition . By the time I'm out of the hills I'm seeing half of my face hanging off. I start thinking about debilitating scars and and amputations. My mind is abuzz with staples and stiches. If I do get out of this I'm going to end up looking like Frankenstein's monster. All the while my shirt is growing darker and darker with the blood its taking on.
After about 10 blocks of intermitant skating and running I begin to realize I realy have no guarantee there's going to be a hospital at the end of this road. Those kids didn't sound very sure and it seems like I would've seen a sign by now.
"Fuck."
I'm back to that again now. Cursing my self for my exteme penury that won't even allow me to get a cab at a time like this. I've got blood all over myself but I can't stop thinking about how expensive cab rides are. It's a good thing I've got insurence or I probably wouldn't even go to the hospital.
After about half and hour of searching I'm moving up the lower Mission. I see a man at the bus stop who looks like he might know where things like hospitals are and, hesitating no longer I ask him.
"Well what kinda' hospital you looking for? There's quite a few. They got St. Luke's up on Chavez St. there's the General on...wait where's the General again? I can never seem to remember that one or maybe you want a clinic there's a shit load of 'em around here."
The man continues to drone on seemingly oblivious to the severity of my situation, as if he sees blood streaked guys around all the time. I finally cut him short and ask which hopital is closest.
"Well," He begins seeming kind of offended at my impertenence. "Well this bus here'll take you right to one of 'em." He gestures to a bus coming, about a block down the street.
"Thanks," I tell him fumbling for my change hoping I have enough for one of the costly San Francisco buses.
The Number 17 Valencia pulls up in front of me and I wait for everyone else to get on so I can speak to the driver.
The bus is packed. The seats are all filled and the people standing are all packed in like sardines. The windows are all up and the air inside is stiffeling, at least 20 degrees warmer than it is outside.
When I reach the bus driver he's yelling in Spanish for everyone to move back further,despite the fact that everyone is already shoulder to shoulder, even head to head, childern and elderly people are squashed in the middle of the crowd. I don't know what these people are breathing but it isn't air. I think air technically has to have some oxygen left in it and there's none what so ever in here.
"Dude, you got like a hole in you chin!" Ahh fuck. The kid's words again. Why did I ever ask him what it looked like? I should have just gotten up and walked out of the park to the donut shop down the steet and asked one of those nice old folks how bad the wound looked. Shit, they probably would've offered to drive me to the hospital too. Instead I...
"Come on kid get moving!" Oh shit almost forgot what I'm doing must be the loss of blood. the bus drivers scowling at me, either because I havn't payed my fare yet or because I look like I just robbed a liquor store and didn't quite make it out before the shotgun went off.
"Hey are you going by a hospital?" I stammer, no time for formalities now.
"Which one?" He asks looking at me from under his bus driver visor. A green plastic thing that makes his face look even less inviting.
"Anyone." I'm getting tired of this run around so I answer blankly hoping he'll get the point.
"Well if you get off at 16th and walk about 8 and 1/3rd blocks clockwise from the five-way intersection there's another bus that'll be coming by, you don't want that one but you want the one after it. you take that to..."
This seriously went on for about 10 minutes. Someone in the back starts to yell, babies are beginning to cry.
"You got that?" he asks, almost pleased as if hes been enjoying the convoluted directions hes been giving.
"No," I tell him. But I'll try." I don't know what else to say.
"It's easy!" He tells me closing the door and slamming down the gas. Sending my stumbling toward the back, blood and all.
As the stops go by I begin to notice that no one is actualy getting off the bus. Riders get on but none get off, there is no counter measure and within a few short moments I am engulfed by the crowd. They swarm around me edging by, stepping over the seats, hanging from the safety bars and crawling beneath the seats. Normally I wouldn't mind but I'still bleeding all over
the damn place! Doesn't anyone notice? I've got my shirt brought up around my chest trying to catch all the blood that seems loosened by the warm, fetid bus air. My shirt, is sticky with blood, it's all over my hands and running down my chest. A man is standing right in front of me with a brand new white button-up shirt on. The bus rocks and sways going over the bumps and around the bends. I am doing everything I can to stay far away from that white shirt, straining my muscles to compensate for the movements of the bus. I hear someone near me say 'Sangria.' I look up but no one is looking over at me. I'm trying to hold the bar with one hand and mop my face with my shirt with the other. The bus stops again, more people get on and the guy with the white shirt is even closer to me now. I notice a few mothers pushing there kids past me, quickly. A group of kids are learing at me. My skateboard falls and when I reach down to steady it five or six drops of blood splash on the floor. I pretend not to notice but I'm afraid that they've splashed on someone. The bus is getting hotter by the minute more
people get on. I feel like I'm saturated in blood, light headed, beginning to wonder why the hell I got on this damn bus.
"It's like a HOLE, dude!" Shut up, kid. I hardly even care anymore. I'm resigned to dying on this bus now, The Number 17 Valencia. I'll fall down, collapse in a pool of my own blood and these people probably won't even notice, if they do they won't care, probably just take my wallet or something.
"Hey Hospital Guy?" The bus driver is suddenly yelling at me over the din of the 3 thousand people on the bus.
"Hospital Guy, get off here ok?"
"Thanks" I stammer out shaking with excitment of finally getting off this terrible bus.
"Yeah," he adds. "Get off here and get on the bus behind us."
Great another bus probably packed even tighter than this one, everybody wearing brand new white shirts.
When I go to get off the bus everyone clears a path for me. I almost feel gratefull that they finally seemed to have noticed.
The next bus is almost empty. The bus driver is very cordial and there's even a place to sit. After about five minutes she nforms me that we've reached the hospital.
I walk in, check in, wait in the waiting room, still bleeding all over myself.
The nurse calls my name and I follow her to the preliminary room.She runs through all basics asking me how it happened, where it happened etc. while taking my blood pressure. I've got gauze packed in the wound now and I'm waiting for here to tell me they'll have to amputate or do a graft.
She doesn't say anything so I ask.
She looks at me, smiling like nurses do. "Oh you'll probably just need a few stiches, nothing major."
I practically collapse in relief.
"We'll have to do something though," she smiles " I mean you've got like a big hole in you chin."
Apologies to those who have already read it and didn't like it the first time.
"Damn!"
The kid's looking at me like I've got leprosy.
"What do you mean 'damn'? How bad is it?" I ask, trying to keep the hysteria out of my voice.
"Man you've got a hole in you chin!" The kid lets me down gentley.
"Fuck." At this point it's all I've got. It's all I know: fuck. "Fuck."
I'm about an hour subway ride from home out in the middle of nowhere sitting on a bench trying to keep my blood from running all over the place. My shirt is covered with gore and hair from my unshaven face. Well, unshaven until now when the concrete did it for me. Taking just a little extra and only in one place. I've got no map or anything so I hardly know how to get home despite the fact that I did a bang up job of getting down here. Also, when your bleeding as much as I am now your thoughts tend to jumble around a little. The blood splatters down on your shirt making new red lines in the cloth. On your shoes the blood coagulates in the dust and forms little beads. When it hits the sidewalk blood looks so remarkablely red and opaque that it has all the visual power of a bright yellow wasp or one of those poison dart frogs, bouncing around the rain forest like fire globules. Stop signs are dramaticaly red for a reason, the color makes you pay attention. It's a warning and right now I've got warning spalshed all over me, from my chin down to my shoes.
"Do you know where there's a hospital?" Suddenly it occures to me that I should probably get moving.
"It's like a BIG hole, man" I've apperently impressed the kid with my injury but as flattered as I am I'm starting to get a little nervous. I lift the edge of my voice a little higher.
"DO YOU KNOW WHERE THERE"S A HOSPITAL?"
"No man, I have no idea."
This kid's been a great help. I'm starting to walk away when he suddenly snaps to.
"Those guys might though," he says pointing to a group of surly looking kids in the corner of the park.
Immediatley I'm walking up to the kids trying to control my steps afraid I might fall again. Everything feels numb. My finger tips are tingling. A trail of blood is following me around the park.
"Hey guys," I butt into their conversation trying to look as relaxed as possible, you know like I bust myself open everyday.
"Do you know where there might be a hospital around here?"
"Not really." The surliest looking one says without even looking up. And I can't help but to think about grabbing him, shaking my head and screaming like Tyler Durden did to his boss in Fight Club, flinging my blood all over the place, mostly on him.
'Not really?'
What kind of shit is that either you know or you don't. Look at me for shit sake. Do I look like I only kinda' need a hospital?
Another one takes sympathy on me, or maybe he just doesn't want any blood dripped on his new Emerica shoes.
"I think there's on on Valenica, like Valencia and 19th."
Ok that's enough I have a vague idea where that might be and I don't want to stand around anymore leaking like a faucet. I thank the guys and skate off in the direction I came.But the skating is slow under my wobbly feet. One of my shoes is all ripped up and the blood pouring down my shirt is taking my concentration away from everything else. After about three blocks it's all hills and I've got to get off and start walking. The kid's words keep echoing through my mind.
"There's like a big hole. Your chin. Big Hole"
It just keeps playing over and over again. making the injury in my mind worse with each repitition . By the time I'm out of the hills I'm seeing half of my face hanging off. I start thinking about debilitating scars and and amputations. My mind is abuzz with staples and stiches. If I do get out of this I'm going to end up looking like Frankenstein's monster. All the while my shirt is growing darker and darker with the blood its taking on.
After about 10 blocks of intermitant skating and running I begin to realize I realy have no guarantee there's going to be a hospital at the end of this road. Those kids didn't sound very sure and it seems like I would've seen a sign by now.
"Fuck."
I'm back to that again now. Cursing my self for my exteme penury that won't even allow me to get a cab at a time like this. I've got blood all over myself but I can't stop thinking about how expensive cab rides are. It's a good thing I've got insurence or I probably wouldn't even go to the hospital.
After about half and hour of searching I'm moving up the lower Mission. I see a man at the bus stop who looks like he might know where things like hospitals are and, hesitating no longer I ask him.
"Well what kinda' hospital you looking for? There's quite a few. They got St. Luke's up on Chavez St. there's the General on...wait where's the General again? I can never seem to remember that one or maybe you want a clinic there's a shit load of 'em around here."
The man continues to drone on seemingly oblivious to the severity of my situation, as if he sees blood streaked guys around all the time. I finally cut him short and ask which hopital is closest.
"Well," He begins seeming kind of offended at my impertenence. "Well this bus here'll take you right to one of 'em." He gestures to a bus coming, about a block down the street.
"Thanks," I tell him fumbling for my change hoping I have enough for one of the costly San Francisco buses.
The Number 17 Valencia pulls up in front of me and I wait for everyone else to get on so I can speak to the driver.
The bus is packed. The seats are all filled and the people standing are all packed in like sardines. The windows are all up and the air inside is stiffeling, at least 20 degrees warmer than it is outside.
When I reach the bus driver he's yelling in Spanish for everyone to move back further,despite the fact that everyone is already shoulder to shoulder, even head to head, childern and elderly people are squashed in the middle of the crowd. I don't know what these people are breathing but it isn't air. I think air technically has to have some oxygen left in it and there's none what so ever in here.
"Dude, you got like a hole in you chin!" Ahh fuck. The kid's words again. Why did I ever ask him what it looked like? I should have just gotten up and walked out of the park to the donut shop down the steet and asked one of those nice old folks how bad the wound looked. Shit, they probably would've offered to drive me to the hospital too. Instead I...
"Come on kid get moving!" Oh shit almost forgot what I'm doing must be the loss of blood. the bus drivers scowling at me, either because I havn't payed my fare yet or because I look like I just robbed a liquor store and didn't quite make it out before the shotgun went off.
"Hey are you going by a hospital?" I stammer, no time for formalities now.
"Which one?" He asks looking at me from under his bus driver visor. A green plastic thing that makes his face look even less inviting.
"Anyone." I'm getting tired of this run around so I answer blankly hoping he'll get the point.
"Well if you get off at 16th and walk about 8 and 1/3rd blocks clockwise from the five-way intersection there's another bus that'll be coming by, you don't want that one but you want the one after it. you take that to..."
This seriously went on for about 10 minutes. Someone in the back starts to yell, babies are beginning to cry.
"You got that?" he asks, almost pleased as if hes been enjoying the convoluted directions hes been giving.
"No," I tell him. But I'll try." I don't know what else to say.
"It's easy!" He tells me closing the door and slamming down the gas. Sending my stumbling toward the back, blood and all.
As the stops go by I begin to notice that no one is actualy getting off the bus. Riders get on but none get off, there is no counter measure and within a few short moments I am engulfed by the crowd. They swarm around me edging by, stepping over the seats, hanging from the safety bars and crawling beneath the seats. Normally I wouldn't mind but I'still bleeding all over
the damn place! Doesn't anyone notice? I've got my shirt brought up around my chest trying to catch all the blood that seems loosened by the warm, fetid bus air. My shirt, is sticky with blood, it's all over my hands and running down my chest. A man is standing right in front of me with a brand new white button-up shirt on. The bus rocks and sways going over the bumps and around the bends. I am doing everything I can to stay far away from that white shirt, straining my muscles to compensate for the movements of the bus. I hear someone near me say 'Sangria.' I look up but no one is looking over at me. I'm trying to hold the bar with one hand and mop my face with my shirt with the other. The bus stops again, more people get on and the guy with the white shirt is even closer to me now. I notice a few mothers pushing there kids past me, quickly. A group of kids are learing at me. My skateboard falls and when I reach down to steady it five or six drops of blood splash on the floor. I pretend not to notice but I'm afraid that they've splashed on someone. The bus is getting hotter by the minute more
people get on. I feel like I'm saturated in blood, light headed, beginning to wonder why the hell I got on this damn bus.
"It's like a HOLE, dude!" Shut up, kid. I hardly even care anymore. I'm resigned to dying on this bus now, The Number 17 Valencia. I'll fall down, collapse in a pool of my own blood and these people probably won't even notice, if they do they won't care, probably just take my wallet or something.
"Hey Hospital Guy?" The bus driver is suddenly yelling at me over the din of the 3 thousand people on the bus.
"Hospital Guy, get off here ok?"
"Thanks" I stammer out shaking with excitment of finally getting off this terrible bus.
"Yeah," he adds. "Get off here and get on the bus behind us."
Great another bus probably packed even tighter than this one, everybody wearing brand new white shirts.
When I go to get off the bus everyone clears a path for me. I almost feel gratefull that they finally seemed to have noticed.
The next bus is almost empty. The bus driver is very cordial and there's even a place to sit. After about five minutes she nforms me that we've reached the hospital.
I walk in, check in, wait in the waiting room, still bleeding all over myself.
The nurse calls my name and I follow her to the preliminary room.She runs through all basics asking me how it happened, where it happened etc. while taking my blood pressure. I've got gauze packed in the wound now and I'm waiting for here to tell me they'll have to amputate or do a graft.
She doesn't say anything so I ask.
She looks at me, smiling like nurses do. "Oh you'll probably just need a few stiches, nothing major."
I practically collapse in relief.
"We'll have to do something though," she smiles " I mean you've got like a big hole in you chin."
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
"but Soft..." or Posies
It's always the usual days I want to write about, but when I sit down to write something about them I find that all the flavor was in the individual moments, leaving me with nothing to write about, nothing that will flow anyway. For example if I wrote a sentence like "the sky had that faded rose color that precedes a storm, back over the mountains, and two of the neighbor's kids were chasing each other around a broken pipe sticking straight out of the ground, running around and around like they were never going to stop." it's fine as a sentence but if I tried to expand upon that further, by bringing in a series of events to lead up to and away from the kids and the sky, well, it just wouldn't work; it would be obvious I was just leading up to that sentence. Furthermore, some days are just paced out in sentences rather than paragraphs or pages.
-I went down to get bread from the new Georgian place (Vratsakan haats), yesterday's rain still all over the place, and it took me twice as long to get home as I decided to pick up everything else I wanted for breakfast on the way back.
-Paige and I walked to another part of town that I now realize I've hardly been through; I was still drowsy from sleeping in so late but it didn't hinder our conversation as I'm so comfortable talking to her.
-We waited for the marshutka to take her back to Vyke sitting on a rock by the road.
-I stopped at the post office as I've been waiting for a letter from my friend Sam for awhile; the letter was there along with the last package my mom said she'd mail me, what she called my "welcome home" package, full of stuff that could be eaten on the road, some of which I've already eaten.
-I read Sam's letter on a ridge just north of town that overlooks the village Getap below, while the flies buzzed around me in the hazy May afternoon.
-I couldn't ask for a nicer letter from an old and dear friend, although it arrived nearly a month late,
-I stopped by the trauntella nest I found about a week ago and have been looking at nearly every day since.
-One of my students called me down to the university to practice for a recital coming up that my skateboard and myself are to play a part in, while I was talking with her I noticed her eyes, in some way, remind me of a butterfly, and as a result I talked in a quieter tone than usual.
-I came back to find the area around my apartment building in a flurry of late afternoon activity, my neighbors talking while their kids jumped and ran around shouting; they joked with me and I joked back, including me in the community activity.
-Bought a local brand of spring water to take to my favorite bench to read some more of the Central Asian Lonley Planet guide that I haven't been able to put down lately, jotting notes here and there, only to scribble them out after finding out about another visa restriction.
-Two old men sat down next to me and talked for some time; it was clear from the way they spoke that they'd been friends for their whole lives.
-I was offered popcorn later brought to the bench by a young girl and and young woman who was there with her 2 or 3 year-old child, who'd just been gifted with a new tricycle.
-Every time a car would come down the sleepy street everyone would stop talking and look up to see where the little girl and her tricycle were.
-I spoke with the old man after his friend left; he invited me in for vodka, I declined but meant it when I said I'd take him up on it some day, he does, after all, frequent my favorite bench and I'm sure I'll have another chance.
-I listened to Bjork's Vespertine while making a dinner that I expected to be lousy, but turned out to be tolerable.
-The sun went down about half an hour ago but I still haven't turned on the lights in my apartment.
-I went down to get bread from the new Georgian place (Vratsakan haats), yesterday's rain still all over the place, and it took me twice as long to get home as I decided to pick up everything else I wanted for breakfast on the way back.
-Paige and I walked to another part of town that I now realize I've hardly been through; I was still drowsy from sleeping in so late but it didn't hinder our conversation as I'm so comfortable talking to her.
-We waited for the marshutka to take her back to Vyke sitting on a rock by the road.
-I stopped at the post office as I've been waiting for a letter from my friend Sam for awhile; the letter was there along with the last package my mom said she'd mail me, what she called my "welcome home" package, full of stuff that could be eaten on the road, some of which I've already eaten.
-I read Sam's letter on a ridge just north of town that overlooks the village Getap below, while the flies buzzed around me in the hazy May afternoon.
-I couldn't ask for a nicer letter from an old and dear friend, although it arrived nearly a month late,
-I stopped by the trauntella nest I found about a week ago and have been looking at nearly every day since.
-One of my students called me down to the university to practice for a recital coming up that my skateboard and myself are to play a part in, while I was talking with her I noticed her eyes, in some way, remind me of a butterfly, and as a result I talked in a quieter tone than usual.
-I came back to find the area around my apartment building in a flurry of late afternoon activity, my neighbors talking while their kids jumped and ran around shouting; they joked with me and I joked back, including me in the community activity.
-Bought a local brand of spring water to take to my favorite bench to read some more of the Central Asian Lonley Planet guide that I haven't been able to put down lately, jotting notes here and there, only to scribble them out after finding out about another visa restriction.
-Two old men sat down next to me and talked for some time; it was clear from the way they spoke that they'd been friends for their whole lives.
-I was offered popcorn later brought to the bench by a young girl and and young woman who was there with her 2 or 3 year-old child, who'd just been gifted with a new tricycle.
-Every time a car would come down the sleepy street everyone would stop talking and look up to see where the little girl and her tricycle were.
-I spoke with the old man after his friend left; he invited me in for vodka, I declined but meant it when I said I'd take him up on it some day, he does, after all, frequent my favorite bench and I'm sure I'll have another chance.
-I listened to Bjork's Vespertine while making a dinner that I expected to be lousy, but turned out to be tolerable.
-The sun went down about half an hour ago but I still haven't turned on the lights in my apartment.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Dreaming with the TV on or Your Tone of Voice is far too Serious for this Occasion
I.
There's a mania taking over. It's not really a bad thing; I haven't lost any ability or sense as a result and I wouldn't even say that anything has been dulled, still, I'm living with thoughts that vacillate so quickly I usually have a difficult time gauging my own opinion on anything, especially issues of importance. The problem here is that my service here is almost over. This brings a cascade of thoughts that have been building up for these last two years down on top of me. The stretch of time that separated the day I arrived from, say, today, often seemed interminable. I realize now that in my listless, day-to-day musings I was thinking about eventually leaving in such an abstract way that I had nearly blocked the possibility from my mind. Now, just two months from some kind of departure, I find I am not at all prepared for this drastic change. In part because I anticipated it far too much, and in part because I took my anticipation to be indulgence and not really connected to reality or worth my time.
The question I seem to be continually asking myself is whether or not I want to leave. Of course I don't want to stay here for ever, in fact even the idea of staying here another year is really not appealing at all. There are things I miss, things that I feel entitled to miss. Yet, the idea of returning to America does not fill me with enthusiasm either. I know I've built up a ridiculous picture of what America is in my mind. Two years of exaggeration have taken their toll. And when I really look through the memories the only relevant and worthwhile thing I can find are my friends and family. Yes, I desperately want to eat avocados, fake cream cheese, bagels and all sorts of crap again, but, really what is appreciation of such things? Am I going to savor the flavor of these things for months on end? Am I going to thrill every time I get on my bike (Which I've been without) for years? Yes, there's going to be an immediate, probably overwhelming shock of readjustment, but later, when these things again become normal, I know that my mind is going to wonder back to this place, the people I met and the things I did, and I already know that I'm going to regret not having done more of a great many things.
So I find myself in a kind of limbo. Stuck between the incredible contemplation of a realistic return home to all the things I have ever known and my last two months in Armenia, a place that I will not return to for many years, if ever, but none-the-less, a place where I have left an indelible mark of persistence, of will.
I know that I will continue to relive this place for years, much in the same way that I still remember what was happening in California right before I came here. Sometimes, what was two years ago seems like it was only a few months ago. For example, my last night in America, in Philadelphia, before catching a plane from NY the following evening,I walked around all night, past Ben Franklin's grave, down by the river, up to the north side, which seemed more hood than the west side. I remember walking through this city thinking over and over to myself that this was the country that I was going to be leaving the following day, that all the things I found familiar here were soon going to cease to exist except in memory.
I had my headphones on most of the night, I remember listening to "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss" a lot and finishing a letter to a girl, shortly before trying to call her from eight different payphones and losing something like 6 dollars in quarters on old drugdeal AT&T coinslots. I went to a bar later on where other volunteers were meeting each other. I felt pretty numb to the whole thing, trying to remind myself that it would be a long time before I heard live rock music again.
And then, like that, it's the next summer and I'm standing in a bar in Novi Sad, Serbia listening to a decent rock band, with vague memories of a year in Armenia. After I left the country for my first vacation after a year, it was almost like I'd hardly spent more time than a month there. If I really pondered it I could pull up all kinds of memories from training and subsequent site placement, my first host family and moving out on my own after 7 months of living with families, but, usually, I didn't really ponder it, I just experienced it in waves of vertiginous dreams.
It'll be like that again, too. I'm going to lose a lot of this experience just by leaving. It's collapsible somehow. When I really want to think of it I will, but not without regret, but mostly I'll just remember the tunes to Armenian and Russki pop songs, the swallows outside my window and the sound of the recording on the Yerevan Metro, warning passengers that the doors are closing.
"skushasek dnera pakvum en--hajort gayarana yeritasardakan"
but that one I'll keep until I'm old, shuffling around a retirement center, mumbling it to myself through a trick of Alzheimer’s.
II.
I haven't been writing much because I can’t help but to feel like these posting are becoming fairly formulaic. I try to elucidate on my internal struggle, my new dual identity as someone who lives in Armenia, someone who hasn't seen his friends and family in years, someone who has changed with none the usual people around to witness the change and, well, the kid who graduated from Jackson high in 2001, moved to Chicago, moved back to Michigan, worked in a bookstore, took road trips to Minneapolis and Pittsburg a lot because he knew people there eventually moved to San Francisco after discovering it to be the most beautiful city in the US, one February evening after driving all day up from LA, to the Richmond and getting out of a van that smelled like Red Bull and socks on 19th Ave and something, watching the light from the setting sun run up the street car rails that cut the streets out there. The kid who grew restless even in SF and moved up north and, eventually left for the Peace Corps, by again driving back across America for the forth time.
I write and try to reconcile these identities by talking about what I miss about America, indulging that character for a while, but this always seems kinda' fake, not that I don't miss these things, but I often find that I hardly have the attention to give full description to what I miss and why, mostly because my life here is continually hammering at my door. The kids who live in my building are coming in and bring their English homework, or their just coming in and asking me what I'm doing while sorta' drifting around my apartment, as kids are wont to do. If it's not that, someone's calling me asking me when the hell I'm ever going to come back over, people I met once, months ago are still calling me with this question and it's not unusual to me at all anymore. Even if nothing is deliberately intruding on my American musings Spring here is just too lively to ignore. In the evening the crickets chirp in alternating waves of somnolence, a sound at once so beautiful and bucolic that I listen to it and wonder why I ever enjoyed living in cities so much. During the day my neighbors are outside working on cars, revving the engines, yelling out their windows to each other, walking their babies, who have been imprisoned inside all winter, around the building. There are at least 5 different kinds of bird song that I can differentiate outside my window, all of them enchanting. When the kids get home from school they seem to just run frantically back and forth under my window, switching their aim every three minutes but always running, running and yelling. With all that going on I try to reflect on my time here, I try to think about what I left and what I'm going to return to and I'm not really there at all. I get fleeting glimpses of things, American things, that I try to write down, but can never seem to mold into anything substantial. I think about food and I mention that I miss certain food but no one, besides perhaps my mother, would care at all that I miss certain foods, to tell the truth I don't either. I write those kinds of things and I think to myself, "you're writing about avocados again, aren't you tired of writing about that?"
This all, of course, begs the question what the hell am I trying to express? If I'm totally acclimated to being here why do I keep trying to reminisce about things that I've obviously drifted too far away from to say anything interesting about. If my Armenian life and my American life can't be reconciled why do I continue to write about them in the same post? The only solution I have is that the two, for me, are totally intertwined. My Armenia doesn't exist without American fantasy. I can't really think to any time period that I was here when a certain facet of American living wasn't in the back of my mind. The first six months I was here it was the people. I just missed the raw material behind the people I knew in the states and wished I could somehow conjure up analogues to this in Armenia (I also didn't really have any friends here at that time.) Then, as I began to meet more and more people I began to miss the specific entertainment options. I would meet the people I had come to know and wish that we had something better to do than smoke cigarettes and talk, I wanted a background to the conversation like I'd always had at home, a bar, a bike ride, a to-go coffee and a beach-side bench. In time, I found this as well, cafes replaced cafes, mountains replaced the ocean, kitchens replaced bars, marshutkas replaced subways and bikes. As I became more and more acclimated I began to miss the little things, like sounds and flavors, things that are hard to replace, things that do not often play a very auspicious role in one's life but are constant. This began the long lament over foods and ephemera of life in America. But now I feel even this is fading, the little specific things have lost their import, they just aren't important enough and I can't hold on to them forever; I like the foods and the smells and the sounds of life here now. These things have become my life, and as they too are ephemeral I'm taking more time to appreciate them. So what does that leave me with? Just when it seems like I've gotten over every American fantasy my mind could conjure up, a new theme presents itself, probably the most troubling theme of all, that of pure fantasy. What now prompts me to write about America at all is nothing that comes from my own experience, but things I imagine I may be able to obtain when I go back, things that I have no familiarity with heretofore not because I've never done them, but I've never experienced them the way I think I will after having been away from them for years. It seems odd to say but this category of pure fantasy is probably the most mundane longing or nostalgia of all because it takes the most commonplace things and converts them into nearly limitless experiences. Let me give to an example to illustrate my point.
I was listening to This American Life today and there was a segment where two people talked about watching TV together and singing the theme song to a new TV show that they liked. A married couple singing along to a sitcom theme. When I heard this I was immediately transported to a reality where I was sitting next to someone after a long day of work and awaiting the start of our favorite new TV show. The between-shows commercials ended and the theme began, we began to sing lustily in anticipation of the continuation of a story we had come to appreciate and identify with. There was really nothing else to this fantasy, but while I was considering it I felt inexplicably happy, especially for someone who, back in the states, hadn't had any kind of network TV connection since 2002.
That's it, that's what I think about now when I think about going back to America. That's what makes me happy. The really boring parts of life that are probably the hardest to appreciate anywhere. I don't like TV, but the idea that it could really mean something to me and play a background role to the relationships I would have with other people is novel as hell. That's what entertains me now, the prospect that the things I used to reject as dull and unimportant will now be reinvigorated with a sense import, a sort of background potential I was never able to see before.
The only other thing I really think about, fairly frequently, are the cups of coffee I'd like to drink with different people in different places, some of them don't even make sense, that is, the cafes I'm putting these people in are thousands of miles, in some cases, from where they live. Sometimes my vision of America can almost be totally reduced to a handful of people and cafes, indeed there's really little else I'd want from it at this point, permitting a job.
There are about 14 weeks left. I'm going to travel around the country, work at a summer camp or two, finish all my paperwork and try to get a final project finished, then I'm going to Iran and onward to central Asia through Turkmenistan. My somewhat sedentary period is coming to an end, so the focus of this record is probably going to change. There's a lot to anticipate in returning to America, but I'm not going to write about it anymore, I think I exhausted it tonight. It would seem, just 20 days short of a full two years, I've finally used up all my desire, which should make this summer incredibly interesting.
There's a mania taking over. It's not really a bad thing; I haven't lost any ability or sense as a result and I wouldn't even say that anything has been dulled, still, I'm living with thoughts that vacillate so quickly I usually have a difficult time gauging my own opinion on anything, especially issues of importance. The problem here is that my service here is almost over. This brings a cascade of thoughts that have been building up for these last two years down on top of me. The stretch of time that separated the day I arrived from, say, today, often seemed interminable. I realize now that in my listless, day-to-day musings I was thinking about eventually leaving in such an abstract way that I had nearly blocked the possibility from my mind. Now, just two months from some kind of departure, I find I am not at all prepared for this drastic change. In part because I anticipated it far too much, and in part because I took my anticipation to be indulgence and not really connected to reality or worth my time.
The question I seem to be continually asking myself is whether or not I want to leave. Of course I don't want to stay here for ever, in fact even the idea of staying here another year is really not appealing at all. There are things I miss, things that I feel entitled to miss. Yet, the idea of returning to America does not fill me with enthusiasm either. I know I've built up a ridiculous picture of what America is in my mind. Two years of exaggeration have taken their toll. And when I really look through the memories the only relevant and worthwhile thing I can find are my friends and family. Yes, I desperately want to eat avocados, fake cream cheese, bagels and all sorts of crap again, but, really what is appreciation of such things? Am I going to savor the flavor of these things for months on end? Am I going to thrill every time I get on my bike (Which I've been without) for years? Yes, there's going to be an immediate, probably overwhelming shock of readjustment, but later, when these things again become normal, I know that my mind is going to wonder back to this place, the people I met and the things I did, and I already know that I'm going to regret not having done more of a great many things.
So I find myself in a kind of limbo. Stuck between the incredible contemplation of a realistic return home to all the things I have ever known and my last two months in Armenia, a place that I will not return to for many years, if ever, but none-the-less, a place where I have left an indelible mark of persistence, of will.
I know that I will continue to relive this place for years, much in the same way that I still remember what was happening in California right before I came here. Sometimes, what was two years ago seems like it was only a few months ago. For example, my last night in America, in Philadelphia, before catching a plane from NY the following evening,I walked around all night, past Ben Franklin's grave, down by the river, up to the north side, which seemed more hood than the west side. I remember walking through this city thinking over and over to myself that this was the country that I was going to be leaving the following day, that all the things I found familiar here were soon going to cease to exist except in memory.
I had my headphones on most of the night, I remember listening to "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss" a lot and finishing a letter to a girl, shortly before trying to call her from eight different payphones and losing something like 6 dollars in quarters on old drugdeal AT&T coinslots. I went to a bar later on where other volunteers were meeting each other. I felt pretty numb to the whole thing, trying to remind myself that it would be a long time before I heard live rock music again.
And then, like that, it's the next summer and I'm standing in a bar in Novi Sad, Serbia listening to a decent rock band, with vague memories of a year in Armenia. After I left the country for my first vacation after a year, it was almost like I'd hardly spent more time than a month there. If I really pondered it I could pull up all kinds of memories from training and subsequent site placement, my first host family and moving out on my own after 7 months of living with families, but, usually, I didn't really ponder it, I just experienced it in waves of vertiginous dreams.
It'll be like that again, too. I'm going to lose a lot of this experience just by leaving. It's collapsible somehow. When I really want to think of it I will, but not without regret, but mostly I'll just remember the tunes to Armenian and Russki pop songs, the swallows outside my window and the sound of the recording on the Yerevan Metro, warning passengers that the doors are closing.
"skushasek dnera pakvum en--hajort gayarana yeritasardakan"
but that one I'll keep until I'm old, shuffling around a retirement center, mumbling it to myself through a trick of Alzheimer’s.
II.
I haven't been writing much because I can’t help but to feel like these posting are becoming fairly formulaic. I try to elucidate on my internal struggle, my new dual identity as someone who lives in Armenia, someone who hasn't seen his friends and family in years, someone who has changed with none the usual people around to witness the change and, well, the kid who graduated from Jackson high in 2001, moved to Chicago, moved back to Michigan, worked in a bookstore, took road trips to Minneapolis and Pittsburg a lot because he knew people there eventually moved to San Francisco after discovering it to be the most beautiful city in the US, one February evening after driving all day up from LA, to the Richmond and getting out of a van that smelled like Red Bull and socks on 19th Ave and something, watching the light from the setting sun run up the street car rails that cut the streets out there. The kid who grew restless even in SF and moved up north and, eventually left for the Peace Corps, by again driving back across America for the forth time.
I write and try to reconcile these identities by talking about what I miss about America, indulging that character for a while, but this always seems kinda' fake, not that I don't miss these things, but I often find that I hardly have the attention to give full description to what I miss and why, mostly because my life here is continually hammering at my door. The kids who live in my building are coming in and bring their English homework, or their just coming in and asking me what I'm doing while sorta' drifting around my apartment, as kids are wont to do. If it's not that, someone's calling me asking me when the hell I'm ever going to come back over, people I met once, months ago are still calling me with this question and it's not unusual to me at all anymore. Even if nothing is deliberately intruding on my American musings Spring here is just too lively to ignore. In the evening the crickets chirp in alternating waves of somnolence, a sound at once so beautiful and bucolic that I listen to it and wonder why I ever enjoyed living in cities so much. During the day my neighbors are outside working on cars, revving the engines, yelling out their windows to each other, walking their babies, who have been imprisoned inside all winter, around the building. There are at least 5 different kinds of bird song that I can differentiate outside my window, all of them enchanting. When the kids get home from school they seem to just run frantically back and forth under my window, switching their aim every three minutes but always running, running and yelling. With all that going on I try to reflect on my time here, I try to think about what I left and what I'm going to return to and I'm not really there at all. I get fleeting glimpses of things, American things, that I try to write down, but can never seem to mold into anything substantial. I think about food and I mention that I miss certain food but no one, besides perhaps my mother, would care at all that I miss certain foods, to tell the truth I don't either. I write those kinds of things and I think to myself, "you're writing about avocados again, aren't you tired of writing about that?"
This all, of course, begs the question what the hell am I trying to express? If I'm totally acclimated to being here why do I keep trying to reminisce about things that I've obviously drifted too far away from to say anything interesting about. If my Armenian life and my American life can't be reconciled why do I continue to write about them in the same post? The only solution I have is that the two, for me, are totally intertwined. My Armenia doesn't exist without American fantasy. I can't really think to any time period that I was here when a certain facet of American living wasn't in the back of my mind. The first six months I was here it was the people. I just missed the raw material behind the people I knew in the states and wished I could somehow conjure up analogues to this in Armenia (I also didn't really have any friends here at that time.) Then, as I began to meet more and more people I began to miss the specific entertainment options. I would meet the people I had come to know and wish that we had something better to do than smoke cigarettes and talk, I wanted a background to the conversation like I'd always had at home, a bar, a bike ride, a to-go coffee and a beach-side bench. In time, I found this as well, cafes replaced cafes, mountains replaced the ocean, kitchens replaced bars, marshutkas replaced subways and bikes. As I became more and more acclimated I began to miss the little things, like sounds and flavors, things that are hard to replace, things that do not often play a very auspicious role in one's life but are constant. This began the long lament over foods and ephemera of life in America. But now I feel even this is fading, the little specific things have lost their import, they just aren't important enough and I can't hold on to them forever; I like the foods and the smells and the sounds of life here now. These things have become my life, and as they too are ephemeral I'm taking more time to appreciate them. So what does that leave me with? Just when it seems like I've gotten over every American fantasy my mind could conjure up, a new theme presents itself, probably the most troubling theme of all, that of pure fantasy. What now prompts me to write about America at all is nothing that comes from my own experience, but things I imagine I may be able to obtain when I go back, things that I have no familiarity with heretofore not because I've never done them, but I've never experienced them the way I think I will after having been away from them for years. It seems odd to say but this category of pure fantasy is probably the most mundane longing or nostalgia of all because it takes the most commonplace things and converts them into nearly limitless experiences. Let me give to an example to illustrate my point.
I was listening to This American Life today and there was a segment where two people talked about watching TV together and singing the theme song to a new TV show that they liked. A married couple singing along to a sitcom theme. When I heard this I was immediately transported to a reality where I was sitting next to someone after a long day of work and awaiting the start of our favorite new TV show. The between-shows commercials ended and the theme began, we began to sing lustily in anticipation of the continuation of a story we had come to appreciate and identify with. There was really nothing else to this fantasy, but while I was considering it I felt inexplicably happy, especially for someone who, back in the states, hadn't had any kind of network TV connection since 2002.
That's it, that's what I think about now when I think about going back to America. That's what makes me happy. The really boring parts of life that are probably the hardest to appreciate anywhere. I don't like TV, but the idea that it could really mean something to me and play a background role to the relationships I would have with other people is novel as hell. That's what entertains me now, the prospect that the things I used to reject as dull and unimportant will now be reinvigorated with a sense import, a sort of background potential I was never able to see before.
The only other thing I really think about, fairly frequently, are the cups of coffee I'd like to drink with different people in different places, some of them don't even make sense, that is, the cafes I'm putting these people in are thousands of miles, in some cases, from where they live. Sometimes my vision of America can almost be totally reduced to a handful of people and cafes, indeed there's really little else I'd want from it at this point, permitting a job.
There are about 14 weeks left. I'm going to travel around the country, work at a summer camp or two, finish all my paperwork and try to get a final project finished, then I'm going to Iran and onward to central Asia through Turkmenistan. My somewhat sedentary period is coming to an end, so the focus of this record is probably going to change. There's a lot to anticipate in returning to America, but I'm not going to write about it anymore, I think I exhausted it tonight. It would seem, just 20 days short of a full two years, I've finally used up all my desire, which should make this summer incredibly interesting.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Hro or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Answer the Phone
A friend of mine went back to Russia about a week ago and another friend of mine is coming back from Russia in a few weeks, or at least he said he was the last time I talked to him. The season changes and people from the CIS countries go back up to Moscow to resume summer work, mostly physical labor, and send the money back home, buy cell phones and other western products that are either really over priced or not available here. My friend Arshack is an exception in that he owns a skatepark in the capital Yerevan, where he hopes that summer will be a higher grossing period than the winter, wherein he had very few customers, other than myself, dropping by on occasion to practice the same tricks that I've been doing for the last eight years or so now.
My friend Hro, who went back, left without much pomp. A few friends and I dropped by his place in the evening, had a barbecue, talked, danced a little and then left, leaving him with an unopened bottle of vodka and two new DVDs, that I don't think he really cared much about. He walked my friend Paige and I back home and we joked a little, dodging open manholes and unmarked trenches in the dark. When we arrived at my apartment, I suddenly realized that I was going to miss what I used to consider his relentless badgering but had come to understand as his means of relating to people.
When I first met Hro about a year and a half ago we would occasionally talk and walk around town together on my days off. It didn't seem to be a big deal to him whether we hung out or not and I found myself appreciating this after having met so many younger kids that would call me 7 or 8 times a day just to ask me where I was and what I was doing. With Hro it seemed simple; we hung out for a little while, had a coffee and then parted ways, really just what I was hoping to do usually. But when I moved out to my own place he began to drop by, it was, after all winter, and he had nothing to do. The problem was that I was really busy, still getting used to my work at the university, and even after seven or eight months, still getting used to being in Armenia. I can remember far too many occasions when I would return home after a long day to start a meal and put on some music (the kind of private activities I had been longing for after seven months of living with two families) when my doorbell would ring, not a normal doorbell either but a screeching racket of an imitation bird call, something I initially thought amusing, but later came to loathe the sound of. Above the sizzle of potatoes and onions and the insufficient tones of my computer's speakers I would hear it, "SKREEEEEEEEEEEE!" and I would shudder, wait a moment to make sure I hadn't mistaken, perhaps it was the neighbor's, but again, like the sound I imagine an Emu or some other huge predatory bird makes before ripping you open with those grizzly talons "SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEEEE !" held down longer this time as if he sought to ensure me that no, it wasn't the neighbors doorbell, and, yes, he knew I was in there. At this point I would reluctantly head to the door, peep through the peephole, sure enough, standing there brushing snow off his boots.
"Hello, Hro, What doing?" My Armenian still being pretty laughable at this point. And without answering he would come right into my apartment. When he had gotten settled on the couch he would repeat my question back to me as though he hadn't heard.
"What's up, Jon?" Already rubbing his finger all over the touchpad of my computer and looking for songs to play 10 seconds of and then skip to another and another and another while I went back to the kitchen to finish cooking my dinner, knowing that I wasn't going to enjoy it.
At this point you might be thinking that I'm some kind of rude and secluded bastard who has problems relating to people because he likes to hang out alone and mutter to himself like some kind of latter day Golem, but well I'm quite sure that at one point or another, everyone has taken the sociology class that introduces them to the notion of social distance and how this tends to vary between cultures, how for instance, middle eastern men will lean right into your face when they talk to you, and an American will keep backing up, trying to preserve that little bubble of his or her own space. Although I don't recall anyone rubbing noses when they talked with me in Syria, in Armenia there is definitely a notion that your friend and even your neighbor is supposed be social toward you at all times. If there is some loophole that allows you to say you are busy I never found it; such a thing simply isn't done here, or maybe I just never encountered it because I never just showed up at someone's place. Either way I spent about 3 months in minor irritation. It seemed like every time I was in the mood, after a long day, to just hang around and read and relax, that hideous doorbell would blast through my thoughts again, and I'd spend the next two hours, hoping that Hro would get the drift and that I was not really in the mood to talk, but every time he stayed; I would be reading and he'd just go on playing around on my computer as I read the same sentence over and over again. I wasn't trying to be rude, we just didn't have anything else to say to each other. In twenty minutes, at the time, my Armenian was pretty much exhausted, and yeah, I guess I coulda' pantomimed around, but Hro really wasn't the talkative type either. The result was that when he left in March I was kinda' happy he wasn't going to be around to bother me anymore. I had begun to avoid going home just to avoid him. It was becoming ridiculous. Yet, when he called me from Russia about two months later, well, I was happy to talk with him for a minute, perhaps because he was so far away and I knew he wouldn't come barging in my door, but I was also surprised he hadn't forgotten me. Since he spent so much time at my place with my computer, I had begun to wonder if all I had ever been to him was a warm apartment where no one would bother him and an interesting contraption that played foreign music. He call proved otherwise.
When Hro cam back in October I was happy to see him. He had called me maybe once or twice more during the time that he stayed in Russia, and although our conversations were short I was always happy to receive them. When he returned I met up with him in a place that sells lumps of fried dough sprinkled with powdered sugar and filled with what looks and tastes like a mixture of flour and sugar. They're pretty simple these ponchiks, but they're good with coffee in the morning if you're feeling like going back to bed in an hour or two, as after such a large dose of sugar you will inevitably crash later. I was already done working for the day when I met up with Hro for a coffee and ponchik. We talked a little about what he had done in Russia and about the phone that he had bought that he was absolutely blasting music from, some ridiculously large, boxy-looking thing that had what appeared to be a TV antennae sticking out of it. After our meeting we parted and I went back home both happy and already somewhat disconcerted that he was back in town, perhaps indefinitely, as he had said he wasn't sure if he'd be going back to Russia.
It wasn't long before things returned to their previous state, Hro, again deprived of anything better to do, began dropping by and hanging out in my apartment. The only difference was that this time he no longer bothered to ring my doorbell and dispensed altogether with the formality of even knocking at my door. I remember more than a few times he would come in when I was in the bathroom. I would yell "I'm in the bathroom!" and I'd hear him proceed to my couch and soon the music would begin from my computer, sometimes I thought of staying in there to see if he'd go away. Despite finding myself annoyed again with his presence I always tried to be cordial; I'm sure that at times my weariness wore through, but, in truth, he never seemed to notice, or deliberately ignored it. Once, however, I remember, having just returned home. my friend Henni, had called me and we had decided to make something to eat together. She had been in my apartment not more than 2 minutes when suddenly Hro's head popped in the door.
"Ok if I come in?"
"You're already here" I heard myself reply in some unbearably wry tone that certainly was not my own, but rather the accumulation of months of irritation. But I never really had to feel bad about this rude remark because Hro just came in and plopped down next to the computer as if I had responded by saying,
"Why, Hro old fellow, come in and take a load off, there's my computer, all set for the tampering! Knock yourself out!"
He didn't even seem to hear me, just came in and made himself at home as usual. I never understood how he was capable of that. I know there were other time when he must've seen my impatience, but he never seemed to regard it in the slightest, just acted like everything was fine.
After my outburst, I began locking my door. I didn't like to, but I realized, the next time I might say something worse, and for all the irritation Hro caused me, there was something about it that made it difficult to stay angry with him. Although locking my door helped with the spontaneous visits, and even helped me block him at the door, it couldn't stop the phone calls, coming at least 3 times a day. Asking when I was going to come over to his house. I tried to diffuse this be going over there on a number of occasions, thinking that if I came by he would stop asking about it, but it never seemed to matter. I guess, and I hate to say this, it would've been a different story if there had been something to do over there, like eat dinner or work on something, but every time I went over there, we just sat on the couch, hardly conversing while the TV roared on behind us. And several times when he had invited me over I would arrive to find he wasn't even there. I'd call and he'd say "oh, ok you're there, don't go anywhere I'm coming right now." But 'right now' sometimes took as long as 20 minutes and by the time he came I would be ready to go, to get back to my own nest of solitude to think over my lesson plans for the next day and what I was going to do about that class that never listened to me.
There were also the girls. One of the things that made forging any kind of relationship with Hro hard was that he was interested in all the foreign girls I hung out with. He had told me over and over again that he liked foreign girls, almost mentioning it as some sort of consolation, like, because he understood that I had to hang out with them, that he, contrary to other males his age, actually found them intriguing, when actually ever other male in his age group found that equally, if not more intriguing than he did. Whatever his intentions were it always made me feel like a go-between. It seemed like more and more often the only time I would see Hro would be when I was hanging out with one of the three female volunteers in the Yeghegnadzor area. I couldn't help but to feel awkward in these situations because he was forever doing stuff like helping them out of their coats, taking their arms when they had to cross puddles and paying for their drinks, things that always seemed brazen to me, but then I began to wonder if they were so brazen. I couldn't help but to feel like something of a bastard not keeping up with the protocol myself, lagging behind the group like some kind of third wheel while the guy in front of me was constantly reaching over to help my friend down stairs and around construction area heaps of dirt. I began to wonder, "should I be doing those things?" After all these were my friends he was helping along, I had known them longer, was it more my responsibility than his to offer them my coat if they complained of the cold? Sometimes, I even felt like something of a spurned boyfriend, wanting to just say the hell with it and leave these two to their coddling if that what they wanted to do. My female friends were always telling me that it annoyed them, but it was hard to be sure, and it just felt awkward. Even if they truly were annoyed, what then? Should I intervene? Then I'd like look stupid, but if I knew that they didn't want to be taken by the arm when the ground got a little uneven was it my duty as a friend of both parties to say "hey, she knows how to walk, you know." Not to mention it seemed to me that this wasn't really my place, perhaps if I had been dating one of these girls I would've had a place to say something, but the situation was just so nebulous and ill-defined, really, who the hell were we all to each other.
The months went by and the telephone calls continued on a daily basis, but, strangely, after a while, I discovered that I didn't really mind them. They were usually no more than 3 minutes long, and, though they all ended with an invitation to Hro's house the same day, we seemed to have had come to a tacit understanding that most of the time I wasn't going to be able to make it, ( I usually have something to do) that he understood this and wasn't bothered by it, but had to offer every time nonetheless. Even his visits became much more tolerable, he seemed to expect that I was usually busy with something, and got to be more tolerant of having a quick conversation in my doorway. Within a few months I found that I was actually expecting him to call, and when a day would go by when he wouldn't, I'd notice.
At the beginning of March Hro mentioned to me that he was probably going back to Russia for the summer again but didn't know when. I received the news initially with a kind of relief, although I wasn't really bothered by him anymore, and in fact, in many ways considered him my friend, I was glad that he was going to have something to do for the summer and that I would be able to spend my last few months here without having to continually turn down invitations to his house.
On April 3rd we had a small going away party for Hro. Like I wrote above, we brought some gifts and ate a little bit of food while we were there. At some point Paige called on me to make a toast, something that I'm really horrible at, something about the structure of laudatory speech like that evades me even in my own tongue, not to mention my lousy Armenian. I started the speech by saying how Hro and I had first met nearly two years ago and how he was the first person that I had really met in Yeghegnadzor. I wished him well in his work in Russia and said that I hoped we'd meet again either in Armenia or in the states. I also added, for effect, that he was a great friend. I didn't really felt like I meant it when I said it, I mean I thought of him as a friend, but I certainly didn't number him among my really good friends, but the nature of friendship is an elusive thing. I guess it was hard for me to really think of Hro as a good friend because he did all the work for me. I never had to call him, I never had to stop by his place, he always did these things for me. And, perhaps more importantly, I realize now that Hro actually taught me a lot of the place I have lived for the past two years. As I have few other friends his age and gender here, (the little kids seem to think I'm pretty amusing, my students are all female and everyone else is at least middle-aged) I have learned most of what I knew about the behavior of young Armenian men from him.If it wasn't for Hro I probably wouldn't know when to say 'da vai' [Russian], 'prosta' [again, Russian] or how to light cigarettes for your friend and try to make him smoke yours instead of the ones he has. Sure, these things are ubiquitous in this society and you see and hear them all the time, but there's something akin to an initiation that yo have to go through to really understand them, for me, Hro took me through this initiation.
It wasn't even a week later when I was hanging out with two other young men when he called me from Russia. I was happy to hear from him and we talked for a few minutes about what it was like in Russia. When I came back in the room one of the young men asked me who I'd been talking to, when I told him he kinda; smirked. "I think he just wanted to get to know the foreign girls you're friends with" he responded, and soon I found myself vehemently defending Hro, the same guy who had annoyed me in more ways and on more occasions than I care to count. it was at this point that I realized, like so many other seemingly trivial things, Hro had become a major part of my time in Armenia, although he had nothing to do with my work or how I spend most of my free time, there he was, and probably will be forever when I recount stories from this place.
I should add here too that while I was writing this he called me, the second time from Russia and he's only been gone about four days. Our conversation went something like this.
"Huh? Barev Hro jan , vonc es, inch ka?"
"Inch klini, Jonis, du asa"
"Lav em, inch pes meesht. Inch ka aynter?"
"Ba, voch mi, heto?"
"Heto..yes im, ban, vagha yes kgnam Sisiani im ankroch senund."
"Lav, kzanges, kshnorhvorem"
"Lav, kzangem, heto."
"Heto ban chika."
"Lav, uremen, kzangem yete pogh umen vagha."
"Eghlav,da vai"
"Da vai"
In more ways than one we speak the same language.
My friend Hro, who went back, left without much pomp. A few friends and I dropped by his place in the evening, had a barbecue, talked, danced a little and then left, leaving him with an unopened bottle of vodka and two new DVDs, that I don't think he really cared much about. He walked my friend Paige and I back home and we joked a little, dodging open manholes and unmarked trenches in the dark. When we arrived at my apartment, I suddenly realized that I was going to miss what I used to consider his relentless badgering but had come to understand as his means of relating to people.
When I first met Hro about a year and a half ago we would occasionally talk and walk around town together on my days off. It didn't seem to be a big deal to him whether we hung out or not and I found myself appreciating this after having met so many younger kids that would call me 7 or 8 times a day just to ask me where I was and what I was doing. With Hro it seemed simple; we hung out for a little while, had a coffee and then parted ways, really just what I was hoping to do usually. But when I moved out to my own place he began to drop by, it was, after all winter, and he had nothing to do. The problem was that I was really busy, still getting used to my work at the university, and even after seven or eight months, still getting used to being in Armenia. I can remember far too many occasions when I would return home after a long day to start a meal and put on some music (the kind of private activities I had been longing for after seven months of living with two families) when my doorbell would ring, not a normal doorbell either but a screeching racket of an imitation bird call, something I initially thought amusing, but later came to loathe the sound of. Above the sizzle of potatoes and onions and the insufficient tones of my computer's speakers I would hear it, "SKREEEEEEEEEEEE!" and I would shudder, wait a moment to make sure I hadn't mistaken, perhaps it was the neighbor's, but again, like the sound I imagine an Emu or some other huge predatory bird makes before ripping you open with those grizzly talons "SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEEEE !" held down longer this time as if he sought to ensure me that no, it wasn't the neighbors doorbell, and, yes, he knew I was in there. At this point I would reluctantly head to the door, peep through the peephole, sure enough, standing there brushing snow off his boots.
"Hello, Hro, What doing?" My Armenian still being pretty laughable at this point. And without answering he would come right into my apartment. When he had gotten settled on the couch he would repeat my question back to me as though he hadn't heard.
"What's up, Jon?" Already rubbing his finger all over the touchpad of my computer and looking for songs to play 10 seconds of and then skip to another and another and another while I went back to the kitchen to finish cooking my dinner, knowing that I wasn't going to enjoy it.
At this point you might be thinking that I'm some kind of rude and secluded bastard who has problems relating to people because he likes to hang out alone and mutter to himself like some kind of latter day Golem, but well I'm quite sure that at one point or another, everyone has taken the sociology class that introduces them to the notion of social distance and how this tends to vary between cultures, how for instance, middle eastern men will lean right into your face when they talk to you, and an American will keep backing up, trying to preserve that little bubble of his or her own space. Although I don't recall anyone rubbing noses when they talked with me in Syria, in Armenia there is definitely a notion that your friend and even your neighbor is supposed be social toward you at all times. If there is some loophole that allows you to say you are busy I never found it; such a thing simply isn't done here, or maybe I just never encountered it because I never just showed up at someone's place. Either way I spent about 3 months in minor irritation. It seemed like every time I was in the mood, after a long day, to just hang around and read and relax, that hideous doorbell would blast through my thoughts again, and I'd spend the next two hours, hoping that Hro would get the drift and that I was not really in the mood to talk, but every time he stayed; I would be reading and he'd just go on playing around on my computer as I read the same sentence over and over again. I wasn't trying to be rude, we just didn't have anything else to say to each other. In twenty minutes, at the time, my Armenian was pretty much exhausted, and yeah, I guess I coulda' pantomimed around, but Hro really wasn't the talkative type either. The result was that when he left in March I was kinda' happy he wasn't going to be around to bother me anymore. I had begun to avoid going home just to avoid him. It was becoming ridiculous. Yet, when he called me from Russia about two months later, well, I was happy to talk with him for a minute, perhaps because he was so far away and I knew he wouldn't come barging in my door, but I was also surprised he hadn't forgotten me. Since he spent so much time at my place with my computer, I had begun to wonder if all I had ever been to him was a warm apartment where no one would bother him and an interesting contraption that played foreign music. He call proved otherwise.
When Hro cam back in October I was happy to see him. He had called me maybe once or twice more during the time that he stayed in Russia, and although our conversations were short I was always happy to receive them. When he returned I met up with him in a place that sells lumps of fried dough sprinkled with powdered sugar and filled with what looks and tastes like a mixture of flour and sugar. They're pretty simple these ponchiks, but they're good with coffee in the morning if you're feeling like going back to bed in an hour or two, as after such a large dose of sugar you will inevitably crash later. I was already done working for the day when I met up with Hro for a coffee and ponchik. We talked a little about what he had done in Russia and about the phone that he had bought that he was absolutely blasting music from, some ridiculously large, boxy-looking thing that had what appeared to be a TV antennae sticking out of it. After our meeting we parted and I went back home both happy and already somewhat disconcerted that he was back in town, perhaps indefinitely, as he had said he wasn't sure if he'd be going back to Russia.
It wasn't long before things returned to their previous state, Hro, again deprived of anything better to do, began dropping by and hanging out in my apartment. The only difference was that this time he no longer bothered to ring my doorbell and dispensed altogether with the formality of even knocking at my door. I remember more than a few times he would come in when I was in the bathroom. I would yell "I'm in the bathroom!" and I'd hear him proceed to my couch and soon the music would begin from my computer, sometimes I thought of staying in there to see if he'd go away. Despite finding myself annoyed again with his presence I always tried to be cordial; I'm sure that at times my weariness wore through, but, in truth, he never seemed to notice, or deliberately ignored it. Once, however, I remember, having just returned home. my friend Henni, had called me and we had decided to make something to eat together. She had been in my apartment not more than 2 minutes when suddenly Hro's head popped in the door.
"Ok if I come in?"
"You're already here" I heard myself reply in some unbearably wry tone that certainly was not my own, but rather the accumulation of months of irritation. But I never really had to feel bad about this rude remark because Hro just came in and plopped down next to the computer as if I had responded by saying,
"Why, Hro old fellow, come in and take a load off, there's my computer, all set for the tampering! Knock yourself out!"
He didn't even seem to hear me, just came in and made himself at home as usual. I never understood how he was capable of that. I know there were other time when he must've seen my impatience, but he never seemed to regard it in the slightest, just acted like everything was fine.
After my outburst, I began locking my door. I didn't like to, but I realized, the next time I might say something worse, and for all the irritation Hro caused me, there was something about it that made it difficult to stay angry with him. Although locking my door helped with the spontaneous visits, and even helped me block him at the door, it couldn't stop the phone calls, coming at least 3 times a day. Asking when I was going to come over to his house. I tried to diffuse this be going over there on a number of occasions, thinking that if I came by he would stop asking about it, but it never seemed to matter. I guess, and I hate to say this, it would've been a different story if there had been something to do over there, like eat dinner or work on something, but every time I went over there, we just sat on the couch, hardly conversing while the TV roared on behind us. And several times when he had invited me over I would arrive to find he wasn't even there. I'd call and he'd say "oh, ok you're there, don't go anywhere I'm coming right now." But 'right now' sometimes took as long as 20 minutes and by the time he came I would be ready to go, to get back to my own nest of solitude to think over my lesson plans for the next day and what I was going to do about that class that never listened to me.
There were also the girls. One of the things that made forging any kind of relationship with Hro hard was that he was interested in all the foreign girls I hung out with. He had told me over and over again that he liked foreign girls, almost mentioning it as some sort of consolation, like, because he understood that I had to hang out with them, that he, contrary to other males his age, actually found them intriguing, when actually ever other male in his age group found that equally, if not more intriguing than he did. Whatever his intentions were it always made me feel like a go-between. It seemed like more and more often the only time I would see Hro would be when I was hanging out with one of the three female volunteers in the Yeghegnadzor area. I couldn't help but to feel awkward in these situations because he was forever doing stuff like helping them out of their coats, taking their arms when they had to cross puddles and paying for their drinks, things that always seemed brazen to me, but then I began to wonder if they were so brazen. I couldn't help but to feel like something of a bastard not keeping up with the protocol myself, lagging behind the group like some kind of third wheel while the guy in front of me was constantly reaching over to help my friend down stairs and around construction area heaps of dirt. I began to wonder, "should I be doing those things?" After all these were my friends he was helping along, I had known them longer, was it more my responsibility than his to offer them my coat if they complained of the cold? Sometimes, I even felt like something of a spurned boyfriend, wanting to just say the hell with it and leave these two to their coddling if that what they wanted to do. My female friends were always telling me that it annoyed them, but it was hard to be sure, and it just felt awkward. Even if they truly were annoyed, what then? Should I intervene? Then I'd like look stupid, but if I knew that they didn't want to be taken by the arm when the ground got a little uneven was it my duty as a friend of both parties to say "hey, she knows how to walk, you know." Not to mention it seemed to me that this wasn't really my place, perhaps if I had been dating one of these girls I would've had a place to say something, but the situation was just so nebulous and ill-defined, really, who the hell were we all to each other.
The months went by and the telephone calls continued on a daily basis, but, strangely, after a while, I discovered that I didn't really mind them. They were usually no more than 3 minutes long, and, though they all ended with an invitation to Hro's house the same day, we seemed to have had come to a tacit understanding that most of the time I wasn't going to be able to make it, ( I usually have something to do) that he understood this and wasn't bothered by it, but had to offer every time nonetheless. Even his visits became much more tolerable, he seemed to expect that I was usually busy with something, and got to be more tolerant of having a quick conversation in my doorway. Within a few months I found that I was actually expecting him to call, and when a day would go by when he wouldn't, I'd notice.
At the beginning of March Hro mentioned to me that he was probably going back to Russia for the summer again but didn't know when. I received the news initially with a kind of relief, although I wasn't really bothered by him anymore, and in fact, in many ways considered him my friend, I was glad that he was going to have something to do for the summer and that I would be able to spend my last few months here without having to continually turn down invitations to his house.
On April 3rd we had a small going away party for Hro. Like I wrote above, we brought some gifts and ate a little bit of food while we were there. At some point Paige called on me to make a toast, something that I'm really horrible at, something about the structure of laudatory speech like that evades me even in my own tongue, not to mention my lousy Armenian. I started the speech by saying how Hro and I had first met nearly two years ago and how he was the first person that I had really met in Yeghegnadzor. I wished him well in his work in Russia and said that I hoped we'd meet again either in Armenia or in the states. I also added, for effect, that he was a great friend. I didn't really felt like I meant it when I said it, I mean I thought of him as a friend, but I certainly didn't number him among my really good friends, but the nature of friendship is an elusive thing. I guess it was hard for me to really think of Hro as a good friend because he did all the work for me. I never had to call him, I never had to stop by his place, he always did these things for me. And, perhaps more importantly, I realize now that Hro actually taught me a lot of the place I have lived for the past two years. As I have few other friends his age and gender here, (the little kids seem to think I'm pretty amusing, my students are all female and everyone else is at least middle-aged) I have learned most of what I knew about the behavior of young Armenian men from him.If it wasn't for Hro I probably wouldn't know when to say 'da vai' [Russian], 'prosta' [again, Russian] or how to light cigarettes for your friend and try to make him smoke yours instead of the ones he has. Sure, these things are ubiquitous in this society and you see and hear them all the time, but there's something akin to an initiation that yo have to go through to really understand them, for me, Hro took me through this initiation.
It wasn't even a week later when I was hanging out with two other young men when he called me from Russia. I was happy to hear from him and we talked for a few minutes about what it was like in Russia. When I came back in the room one of the young men asked me who I'd been talking to, when I told him he kinda; smirked. "I think he just wanted to get to know the foreign girls you're friends with" he responded, and soon I found myself vehemently defending Hro, the same guy who had annoyed me in more ways and on more occasions than I care to count. it was at this point that I realized, like so many other seemingly trivial things, Hro had become a major part of my time in Armenia, although he had nothing to do with my work or how I spend most of my free time, there he was, and probably will be forever when I recount stories from this place.
I should add here too that while I was writing this he called me, the second time from Russia and he's only been gone about four days. Our conversation went something like this.
"Huh? Barev Hro jan , vonc es, inch ka?"
"Inch klini, Jonis, du asa"
"Lav em, inch pes meesht. Inch ka aynter?"
"Ba, voch mi, heto?"
"Heto..yes im, ban, vagha yes kgnam Sisiani im ankroch senund."
"Lav, kzanges, kshnorhvorem"
"Lav, kzangem, heto."
"Heto ban chika."
"Lav, uremen, kzangem yete pogh umen vagha."
"Eghlav,da vai"
"Da vai"
In more ways than one we speak the same language.
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