Homecoming

‘Welcome to Walmart!’

a little voice inside my head… ‘Welcome to the United States of America’

Maybe I had romanticized home a little bit too much.

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Maybe. Reading my past blogs would certainly give that impression. And basically, it was true. But, my change of heart in South America, sometime in April when I broke out a calendar and a calculator, was mostly owed to my complete impatience and contempt for my specific university. It wasn’t that Chile isn’t the US, it’s that UAI isn’t U of M.

That drove me a lot further up a wall than it probably should have. I hope I didn’t romanticize UM too much. I guess we’ll find out in September.

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What exactly is study abroad good for in the first place? I spent the vast majority of this blog trying in one way or another to answer that. It was a frustrating question. I even went so far as to propose an alternate study abroad plan; the assumption there is that I knew what it was good for and that my plan was better at providing it.

I had always planned on studying abroad; before I was even looking at colleges I knew that the right place had to have a good international program. If you had asked me why I was so bent on doing this, I probably would have been confused and said ‘just because’. Seriously.

After thinking and writing about it (and living it) for the past six months, I’m not sure that’s a bad reason at all.

It might actually be the only legitimate reason.

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Buddhism teaches that when we take action because we have expect that a certain result will be fulfilled, or that we should obtain some benefit from acting, we set ourselves up for unhappiness and profound dissatisfaction. The only way to truly experience life to take action simply for it’s own sake. In doing so, we actually get much more benefit than if we had expected to benefit in the first place. Because even if all our expectations and desires are fulfilled, we are still left with the unanswerable question ‘was it worth it?’ We are then forced to try to quantify an experience on an internal scale, set an arbitrary goal for what level of ‘goodness’ is ‘worth it’, and clearly the problems spiral out of control from there.

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People ask a lot of questions when you get back from a long trip. I understand. It’s almost impossible not to. But the questions themselves are equally impossible to answer. You can’t reduce an experience to a few words, or try to frame it with generalizations like ‘yes it was fun’ or ‘I learned a lot’ or any other standard-issue answers. You can’t do any better with a paragraph or a page or a hundred.

Although Mom hates it, I think my standard answer of ‘meh hmm wrrr ghhh’ to any question summarizes it better than anything else. I even answer my own questions like that. Just look at my blog.

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Here’s a common question: What was the best part? Counting the entire trip, hands down it was the plane descending into Buenos Aires on the first day. I wrote about it in late January in a post titled Arrival: Expectations and a New Perspective. It’s still my favorite post in the whole blog. Notice I used the word ‘expectations’ in the title. I concluded accurately in that post that for Argentina, I had no expectations at all. For one moment as the plane was landing, I felt free.

It’s hard to explain that when people ask.

The reason I suffered later on in Chile was the gradual relinquishing of that freedom. I wanted UAI to be more like UM. I wanted to be less gringo and more Chilean. I felt like I should be accomplishing more. I thought I was wasting my time.

I expected to gain more out of Chile than this.

What exactly did I want to gain? I couldn’t tell you for sure. But the trip did teach me that lesson pretty clearly. I now know why.

Just because.

I Hate Titling My Posts

Clearly, Friday wasn’t a good day for me. So like any self respecting young male, Saturday I went out and got into a couple good fights. Nothing like wheeling around and throwing your flipper in somebody’s face to get over a bad mood right? Three points for me.

Karate has been good to me here in Chile. It keeps me sane, focused, and is my main resource for meeting actual Chileans. I capped off a good stint here with a second place finish in Saturday’s competition (with just a 1-1 record in the newby division… shhh, don’t mention it). The test for my yellow belt is next week, and with any luck I’ll keep practicing back in Ann Arbor in a few months.

Speaking of which, I have to decide once again whether or not to keep writing this blog after I leave in a little over a week. I’m not going to lie, it still feels really weird every time I sit down to write an entry. I’m still surprised every time I hear that people actually read this. I just keep yakking about my life or the stuff that runs through my mind, and 90% of it to me doesn’t seem all that interesting. Plus, going back and living in Houghton for a bit will probably make it even less so. I’ll decide soon enough.

However, I do have to say that I’ve gotten a lot out of this. I like writing, even when my writing sucks, and this has given me a lot of practice and confidence in doing it. Actually, I’ve got a micro-announcement to make: I’m starting a website. I’m putting this on paper (or screen) here just for the sake of putting pressure on myself to actually follow through and do the dang thing. I’ll be creating the best travel writing pieces I can create to document my experiences in South America and encourage people to travel here, provide trip ideas, inspiration, etc. The end goal will be to sign on a couple of non-obnoxious affiliates and create a set-and-forget micro-income stream that way. I’m trying to convince one of my friends who has also travelled a lot here to help out. It’s basically zero investment (=low pressure) except the time to set it up, and even if nobody shows up it will still be a worthwhile experience. For now the goal is to have most of the content created by the end of summer and a working website up by Christmas. We’ll see how it goes.

Finally, a congratulations to my cousin Laura on her marriage this weekend; hope everything went well over the weekend, best wishes all around!

on control

Ademas, la ley fomenta el uso irresponsable y desinformado de… breathe, dude. stop talking so fast. o sea, los resultos de los cuales, eee... ok, ok, calm, eeeeh… dude, move your feet. your knees are shaking. back up and start that sentence again. mmmm… oy! quit shaking! …your whole body is shaking! stop! i can’t focus when you’re doing this! neither can I remember what comes next. great. the whole page is a blur of words in my mind. quit @#$#%# shaking!!!

congratulations.

how to fail a final in 15 torturous seconds. i thought you were good at this? i thought you had this down? i didn’t know you were actually physically capable of sucking that badly. congratulations. i wish i could shake your hand.

this would happen today. after missing morning class. after losing my karate suit. after…

seriously. it’s 8:30 already. maybe if people would have followed the flippin directions and kept their speech to two minutes we’d have been out of here at 7 like scheduled. now i can’t get to karate, when all i want to do is go kick something really hard. great. that also means you missed the bus. which further means that you aren’t going make it to that asado at redyn’s to say goodbye to everybody who leaves tomorrow. woo.

i wish i could leave tomorrow. lucky pricks.

there’s a fly in my room now. isn’t it something that he’s a fly and you’re not? sucky fly. it’s a good thing flies can’t squash me. lucky prick.

seriously though, are we really so powerful? are we really in control?

Notes on a Sunday Morning

I woke up with a bit of a start and glanced out my window, greeted by a pair of glowing ruby red eyes that stood out against the darkness of night like something supernatural. The stars were also out in force tonight, bright enough it seemed to light up the night even without the help of the moon. It could also have just been my imagination filling in the blanks I suppose, picturing trees and lakes in the distance to match my immediate surroundings. I looked back, and as always I wondered whether maybe those eyes were maybe stars in the past, now fizzled out into red dwarves and stuck into the soul of this wolf. This thing was about to try to kill me, but I wasn’t worried. I’d been here before, many times over. The first couple of times didn’t end well, but I kept making progress, finding hiding spots in this miserable shack in the woods and figuring out how to get away. By now it was ruitine, the terror was gone, just replaced by adrenaline. I knew how this would end. I was homefree. Sometimes endings are predictable; sometimes nightmares aren’t so scary.

I woke up in the real world to some racket coming from the back porch. I thought it might have been another earthquake, but realized it was just the cats going at it yet again. They fight up on the rooftop almost every night and it always ends with a crash onto the stairs below. I checked my clock, 5:30 am. I got up anyways, made a cup of tea and set my cactus up on my windowsill to catch the sunrise. I picked him up a few months ago in this miserable tourist town called Pomaire on an organized trip and named him Felix. Its hard to explain how a pokey cactus can be so calming and friendly. I gave him a few spoonfulls of tea.

On the way back from that trip I had stopped at Color Café with Holly, one of my best friends here, who also picked up a cactus. Along with Sushi Sun Mondays, Color Café Sundays had become a highlight of pretty much every week. It’s a hole in the wall joint in old-town Valpo, where houses are made of shipping containers and people pay to have professional graffiti artists paint the walls. The café is one of those places that feels kind of timeless inside, like you could spend a week there without blinking. The walls are decorated by the customers with drawings on napkins and souvenirs. The menu is six pages of teas and two pages of (real) coffees. Unlike Sushi Mondays, it’s usually just myself, Holly and sometimes Haylie on Sundays. It’s usually the best day of the week.

Holly took off this morning, gone in the first wave of the gringo exodus from Chile. She gets to spend three incredible weeks in Bolivia before going home, including a bike ride down the Death Road followed by a weeklong boat/hike/camp trip in the Beni River basin. I’m really excited for her, and not the least bit jealous. But I’m also sad, because today’s Sunday, and we’re not going to Color Café.

What do you do when endings are predictable? At least half the excitement of life is simply not knowing what the future holds. Do you pretend like there’s no deadline? Or do you just stop yourself from getting attached in the first place? Within a couple of weeks, every single one of us here will go back to our separate worlds, regardless, as if this whole thing had never happened. It’s almost like a six month long dream, where everybody knows the ending, separated down here from the real world, and everybody knows we’re about to wake up. This, like a lot of other life situations, will be all be a memory and a few blips here and there on Facebook. Things change, paths turn, the world moves on. It’s everywhere, yet it also begs the question - does goodbye always actually mean the end, or does everything, in some way, live on?

Chile in pain

‘Dude, I got effing tear gassed!’

That’ll pretty much put a wrap on any day. It’s also pretty good excuse to not go to class. That’s all Ryan was trying to do today.* Tough day all in all, but at least he dodged the irritant-laced water cannon, dogs, and projectiles.

Nobody else was going to class today either, or anytime in the past three weeks as a general strike by all of Chile’s public university students wears on and turns progressively more confrontational. The issue at hand is nothing revolutionary; students complain of rising tuitions and apparent misuse of funds, officials obviously deny the claims and accuse the students of wanting a free ride. It’s an issue heavily divided by generational and class lines, just as it is in the United States or England recently. Yet in Chile, issues like this are never quite as simple as a complaint or disagreement to be settled by lawsuit or edict. It’s a straight-up fight, and it’s personal.

The ongoing war over education, framed by the students in terms of social rights and responsibilities, is hardly an isolated incident. Just in the past four and a half months since I arrived, there have been three separate large scale waves of protest. HidroAysen. The May 21^st demonstrations. Now education. From the outside, this would sound like a good sign for the country; a vibrancy in the air, where people aren’t afraid to point out problems and challenge authority, demand change to improve society. Many international commentators cheered when the people came out in force to protest the government’s plans to dam up Patagonia, and undoubtedly the current situation with public education has it’s share of outside support as well. But from the inside, things look a lot different. Every one of these protests started with positive intentions and subsequently devolved into all-out riots that threaten public safety and repeatedly blur ethical lines.

The sad thing is that all of these rioters are rallying around good causes, and in doing so, they kill any possibility of change. It’s a case of having too much of a good thing. Students are right to be upset with rapidly increasing costs and poor spending, but they take that several steps too far when they work themselves into a rage and attack police cars with rocks and baseball bats. During the HidroAysen protests, one policeman was ripped from his car and beaten to death. That helps nothing. That guy had no influence over the issue at hand. Simply being tied to the State was enough, and it became personal. Further hundreds were injured, arrested, and the damages were heavy and widespread.

It doesn’t have to be like this. There’s a stark difference between civil disobedience and direct confrontation, and Chile has yet to learn where to draw that line. Ironically, Chile’s neighbors to the north in Bolivia, much poorer people with arguably bigger problems, provide a contrasting example to Chile’s behavior. Bolivians frequently strike by camping out in the streets, shutting down the country’s transportation, and quietly but emphatically forcing the business or government’s hand. By resorting to riots in Chile, the people force the government to squash it using tear gas and water cannons mounted on police tanks. The riot is dispersed, people are locked up or hospitalized, and the issue continues to exist. It also makes it extraordinarily easy for leadership to simply dismiss protesters as hooligans, rather than citizens in good conscience demanding change.

If Chile is to assert itself as South America’s flagship nation for economic and social prosperity, its youth need to grow up, fast. Being critical doesn’t imply being confrontational. Nor are the police your enemy. The Chilean police force is considered a model for all Latin countries, and it’s a good thing because they are stuck dealing with the most rebellious population. There are plenty of honest, peaceful demonstrators as well of course, but until they stand up to the legions of instigators, the resentful, and their wounded sense of pride, nothing here will change for the better. To reject violence, rioting and barbarism – now that’s something worth protesting about.

*to clarify, ISA still holds separate class for those at La Catolica. UAI is a private school and not participating in the strike.

Weekend Fun and Philosophy

As part of the ongoing effort to make life more exciting here, a group of us decided to make a weekend trip down to the tiny town of Pichilemu to watch the South American Surf Championships and see a little more of Chile. I’m not normally interested in surfing much, but it was a lot more fun than expected. The best waves in South America happen off the tip of a very rocky cliff, and the modest crowd camped out by the edge on a turf of blankets and tarp. Quality reggae was played throughout (another thing I’m not normally interested in but turned out great) and the surfers took the time to meet people and take a pics. Best of all, not only were free pancakes and fruit accompanied by free coffee, but it was real ground coffee made with a full espresso machine! In Chile of all places! It was too much for me to handle after suffering nescafe for five months. After my third double espresso with cinnamon in two hours, I was getting worried about twitching myself off the cliff edge and called it quits.

One of the things that struck me yet again was the sheer quantity of energy in every wave. These things were 7 or 8 meters high, at least as thick, and many miles wide. Think of how heavy a bucket of water is, then imagine a million of them moving as fast as you can run. That happens every ten seconds, continuously. Recreating that with machines would require incredible amounts of energy. In a given 1-kilometer stretch of coast at Pichilemu, approximating an average wave of 5 by 5 meters moving at 4 meters per second (8 mph) and a wave every ten seconds, the power output figures to 20 megawatts on velocity alone – enough to run 4 freight trains at peak output!

The next weekend was a day trip to La Campana National Park, featuring a very difficult hike up 2000 meters to the rocky summit of a mountain by the same name. Here are the picture highlights:

Additionally, Aunt Pat sent me this comment on my posts about time to start a discussion. Please join in!

‘I've been pretty interested in what you have written about time, as it's something I also like to think about. There are some radically different ways of thinking about time, which can completely change one's way of going about living. For instance, the early pagan cultures--Sumerian, Roman, Greek--all saw time as being cyclical. Whatever is happening has happened again and will happen again. Nothing is new, so why build anything? Those cultures also did not have the concept of the individual, rather one was always part of the clan/tribe/people/etc. So there was no such thing as individual history, and no such thing as linear time to go along with that.

Along came Abraham and all that changes. (I just finished a really interesting book called "The Gifts of the Jews" about this.) Abraham gets called by a God who is not just another family member, rather glorified (literally), but a God who created all and is above all. God called Abraham out of Sumer, and you have the first individual history starting to be written. The first writings that are about "I". The future is now really dependent on what I do in the present. History becomes the movement of time. Each moment is unique and unrepeatable. And so hope is born--hope of doing something worthwhile with my life, of making a difference.

Then there are the Asian folk, at least I'm told the Japanese, who do not "spend" time, but rather "collect" it. So when you get to the end of a long life, you have a treasury collected, not an emptiness spent--with the question was it all worth it?

Then there are interesting ideas about time when God gets included. For instance, as creator He stands above time, and sees all time at the same time all the way to the end of time (which study is called teleology, the study of the end of time). So He already knows everything I'm writing and your response. That calls forth a very different relationship!

In church we have something called 'liturgical time' (in the Orthodox Church, I don't think other Christians have developed this in the same way). So when we go to church, like I do at least twice a day every day, we consider that we are encountering eternity--the membrane between time and eternity is very thin, so we can actually experience the Kingdom of Heaven now. We can experience the reality of God now, even if in very small part. Which helps interrupt the constant demand of time--the urgency and resulting anxiety that you wrote about. It enables us to begin (it's a life-long process) to live more fully in the present, which is really touching eternity. Each moment becomes a gift both from God and that can be used for Him and given back to Him. One of our most well loved theologians said, "Become at every moment a fresh paradise to those around you." That's a goal worth living for!’ –

Well, let me start off by mentioning that this is now my fifth draft. I can’t make up my mind.

Philosophy is something I dodged for a long time, mostly because I found it depressing. I always ended up coming back to a kind of cynical, fatalist view of the world, as in ‘in the grand scheme of things, nothing matters’. If I could sit on Pluto and speed up time and just watch the Earth turn for a few billion years, it would certainly seem that way. Whether you were the one to build a fantastic empire, or the one to bomb it to the ground, well, who cares? I’m on Pluto, and it’s now a billion years later. In the long run, you and all your actions really didn’t matter, however spectacular they may have been. Pass me the popcorn and we’ll watch the sun die out and consume the inner solar system.

Depressing, and that philosophy would lead us all to hedonism and suicide. It doesn’t pass the gut test. It also doesn’t answer the question of limits – if I can sit on Pluto and speed up time at my leisure, can I experience the end of time? Is there an end of time? Does it even matter?

Whether or not there is a beginning and end to the universe doesn’t change the fact that there’s a beginning and end to life. You mentioned a number of different culture’s views on time – I’ll add one more: animals. The vast majority of animals (humans, elephants, dolphins, and perhaps a few other very intelligent animals being exceptions) have no internal concept of their own death. Many have little perception of the future as well. Their actions are all reactions; based on external conditions, habits, instinct, feelings. There’s a branch of philosophy/psychology that says that majority of human actions and feelings are, under the surface, tied to our consciousness of our own impending death.

So where does this all lead? If living immediately in the present is the ultimate goal, are animals smarter and happier than we are?

I have more questions than answers.

How to Study Abroad

Here’s another thought I’ve been working on: I screwed up my choice of study abroad. Of course, this is a ‘hindsight is 20/20’ thing, but interesting. 3 clearly better alternatives:

1. I shouldn’t have ever touched ISA. Basically all study abroad programs are built for one type of person – the one who has never travelled, doesn’t know any language coming in and isn’t uncommonly independent. Out of the ISA group, I’d estimate that’s around 75%. The job of study abroad programs is to alleviate those three primary concerns. Think about what the programs advertise and you’ll get the idea.

Where we’ve gone wrong is assuming that all exchange students fit that mold. For the other 25%, the efforts of ISA will effectively sabotage the authenticity of your experience and diminish how much you learn and what you get out of it all. Between organizing tours, offering classes in English, holding required excursions with all the other gringos, setting you up to live with families and all other manner of holding your hand, the true experience (for those who want more than pictures and token cultural integration) gets hopelessly lost for the sake of minimizing pain and culture shock. It’s like boiling broccoli – it may make it more palatable to some but destroys the nutrients and reasons to eat broccoli in the first place.

My DIY study abroad plan for the 25% looks like this. Transfer to your new university (you may even get a scholarship). Get a student visa and pack your bags, leaving yourself plenty of time (at least a month) before term starts. When you arrive, travel around the area for a bit to get familiar with the culture and locale. Then, settle in to your city and stay at a cheap hostel, camp or couchsurf while looking for shared student housing opportunities (you’d be surprised how easy it is to jump in on these – a couple of ISAers did it with no problem). Try to meet one or maybe two other exchange students casually to give you an outlet and a travel partner (most local students won’t want to make weekend trips where they’ve already been). Go from there. You’ll also save about 8 grand.

2. I should have gone somewhere else. Like, a different part of the world, in a different language. I knew before this trip that I wanted to learn one more language (at least) after Spanish. What I didn’t define was how far I wanted to learn each. I’ve been hitting the law of exponentially diminishing returns pretty badly here in Chile – that learning a language to 95% is work but learning it to 98% is brutal. With Spanish, knowing just 2500 words will allow you to understand 95% of all speech and text. Getting to 98% comprehension requires learning an additional 25000 words.

In my case, I’m not yet solidly committed to Spanish as my dominant learned language. I have no idea what that will end up being, or even if there will be one. If, in the future, I get a promising opportunity that requires Spanish, I can get started on it with what I have now while I work further on those extra percentage points. But let’s say I take the time I would spend now to perfect Spanish and get 95% of a different language. My options now expand quite a bit. In my view, it’s probably better to have 90+% of a couple of languages than 99% of one, for the same amount of work.

3. I shouldn’t have studied at all. This, in hindsight, blows all other options out of the water. Since I don’t really need any of these credits, I could have avoided UAI/ISA and learned a whole heck of a lot more by taking that money and travelling/volunteering. Doing this offers a range and depth of experiences that is far greater than any study abroad program can touch. Call it minoring in life. A lot of content on this blog has already been dedicated to the topic, so we’ll leave it at that.

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It is what it is. Like I said, time’s not scarce. But… Weeze – I’m lookin at you son!