The only risk

...well, except for the occasional scams, robberies, muggings, kidnappings, and general street harassments.

The U.S. security officer promised that it was not his aim to scare or intimidate anyone.  However, he did want everyone to be aware of the potential dangers involved living in a city of eight million people with more than 50% of the population below the poverty line.

The first portion of his informative presentation was a vocabulary lesson:

Paseo Milionario: A joy ride at gunpoint to a series of ATMs from which you are kindly asked to withdraw the maximum amount of cash.  

FARC, ELC, and AUC: Colombian paramilitary groups.  Responsible for $200 to $500 million in kidnappings.

Scopolamine: Dopamine on steroids.  Side effects include nondiscretionary openness to suggestion (“Back to my place? Ok,”) and interference with the synapses that make memories.

Next he shared some general safety tips:

1.  When someone approaches you claiming to be an undercover cop on a mission to sequester counterfeit currency, call the police station before handing him all of your money.

2.  Don’t let people “test out” your bike.

(and my personal favorite)

3.  If you are being threatened, do not resist...Unless you are being stabbed, in which case resistance would be quite prudent.

But, mom and dad, not to worry.  The Americans that actually live here can assure that living in Bogota only requires the vigilance and common sense necessary for any large city.  Although they do not deny the high prevalence of the risk of wanting to stay.

The honeymoon

Scientists, musicians, athletes, and activists are among them, but the Fulbright Scholar is somewhat a species of its own.  And when a flock of them are herded together in an exotic environment, a peculiar dynamic emerges.

Each is a leader, but also a diplomat. All are intelligent, but none are highly experienced in this particular context.  Everyone feels slightly anxious in the new and unexplored territory, but no one wants to seem nervous or unsettled.  The goal is to appear assertive yet nonchalant.  A typical interaction may proceed as follows:

“Do you know when we’re getting our visas?”

“Probably tomorrow, but I’m not worried about it.  Did you ask Alexandra?”

“No, I’m sure it will work out.”

“Are we going out for dinner later?”

“Yeah, at some point.  Do you know of a place to go?”

“No, we’ll figure it out.”

“Yeah, whatever.  Something will happen.”

The key is to emphasize unpreparedness as a way to highlight a near professional level of spontaneity. For example:  

“I didn’t read any of the information packet, I just met a guy when I arrived and it was no big deal.”

Independence without isolation.  Freedom without insecurity.  

According to someone, the first stage of cultural immersion is the honeymoon.  But that only comes after the awkward dating stage, in which The Fulbrightus Sapien attempts to impress The Culture and trick her into thinking he is not intimidated by her beauty.  

But once sufficiently fed and slightly inebriated, pretenses within the group melt enough for everyone to effortlessly soak in the enchanting newness of a foreign place.  A place where spicy brass music plays through all six stories of a downtown restaurant.  Where a birthday is celebrated with a shower of confetti hearts and not one, not two, but three rounds of the Happy Birthday song played by a five-man band.  Where a party is not a party if there is no dancing.  Let the romance begin. 

Fulbright, dimmed.

T minus 4 days until I depart for Colombia (that's ColOmbia as in South America, not ColUmbia University in New York, to clarify a common misconception).


I will be going as a Fulbright Scholar. 


Official (Wikipedia) definition of the Fulbright Program:  Prestigious merit-based grants to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries through the exchange of persons, knowledge, and skills.  


Actual definition (from what I have gathered thus far): What the government does with all of the non-vocationally oriented LIberal Arts kids who have received its subsidized education.

With all the funding funneling into lovely private universities and the thousands of taxpayer dollars distributed in Stafford loans every year, the State is manufacturing a small army (no pun intended) of young experts in International Relations, Cross-Cultural Studies, Peace Studies, Diplomacy Sciences, etc.  And at the end of the assembly line, the shiny idealists are prime and ready to go out to the battlefield and relate internationally (in a nonviolent way)!  But how can one do so without being perceived as an aimless globe-trotting vagabond?  With a government seal, of course (normally in the form of a Peace Corps or Fulbright polo shirt).


I, personally, have no problem with being an aimless globe-trotting vagabond.  But if someone is going to front the bill for my flight and housing arrangements in exchange for "community development" and teaching English part time, sign me up.


Many brilliant and earth-changing people proudly bear the Fulbright badge.  I hope to join their ranks.  And no one (except maybe Rush Limbaugh) will deny that this world could use a lot more idea sharing between different kinds of people in a non-militant, non-imperialist way.  And for that (and the free trip), I love Fulbright.  I believe in the mission statement.  I believe in the objectives.


What I don't believe in is the religious adoration of a program that is not much more than humans meeting other humans.  I don't believe in the self-congratulatory elitism of a name--no matter what the historical affiliation.  I want to see this institution for what it is: an opportunity to see another part of the world, to learn, and to teach.  Not an automatic one-up card or a gold star of specialness.  


The Fine Print: (they asked us to post this on any web postings we publish during the grant period)
This is not an official Department of State website.  The views and information presented are personal and they do not represent the Fulbright Program or the Department of State.

Differentiation

Fulbright Orientation in Washington D.C., June 19, 2011.

I grew up in the suburbs and I attended a private university in the Northwest.  I haven’t exactly spent a lot of my life as a minority.  But I’ve never felt more like a grain of sand on the beach than I did at this event.  I was surrounded by clones. Every person there was young, moderately wealthy, well-educated, well-travelled in Latin America, bilingual, recent graduates of liberal arts colleges with degrees in Spanish and International Studies.  There was almost no point in introducing myself.

I started to feel claustrophobic.  When we went out at night I was so desperate for a cigarette that I asked every person who walked through the door of the bar.  I don’t usually smoke and I wasn’t craving nicotine, but I had an immediate need to exert SOME kind of individuality--even if that meant casting myself into the “dirty smoker” circle of Dante’s social inferno.   At least it would allow me to escape from the confident and extroverted intellectual broken record conversations about the kinds of cocktails people had tasted in their travels to Bolivia and Argentina.


(Disclaimer: The law of Narcissus tells me that I will almost inevitably grow to love these people, as we have so much in common...and I may want to delete this post from the internet eventually).

And that's why they call it the present

I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw the scrapbook my mom gave me as a graduation present. Right on the first page are two juxtaposed photos of me, one from freshman year and one from senior year.  However the chronological contrast is only appreciated by myself and my mother (and maybe people that have personal memories of the captured moments) because any outside observer would undoubtedly fail to note four-year the time lapse of the two uncandidly smiling faces.  From all appearances, I have not changed a bit.

Change is quite the enigma.  Have I changed? Relative to what?

Does my shift in religious/political ideology mean that I (my being) have changed?  Do a couple new hobbies and an ever-so-slightly modified social circle make me a different person?  It’s 1,460 days and several thousand dollars later and I’m still here.  In the same pair of sweat pants.  At my house.  Getting caught up in the same mindlessness of home life: eating, cooking, cleaning, errand-running, to-do-ing.  

I’m still scribbling Notes to Self in the attempt to catch the spills of my brain that seems to be stuck on the perma-momentum track of academic productivity.  Lists of books to read, movies to watch, things to buy, tasks to perform all must be captured and held hostage on the check list until they can be satisfactorily crossed off---lest they be (God forbid!) forgotten. 

But if there is one change I have observed since my return home as the Graduate Alumnus Bachelor Degree Bearer, it is that my fear of the infinite abyss of memorylessness has subsided significantly.  I don’t really make many lists anymore or even journal as much as I used to.

Perhaps it’s apathy.  Perhaps it’s one step closer to attaining the Nirvana of existing permanently in the present moment.  Or perhaps it’s just a phase. 

But if there was ever an idea that has motivated me to live in the present, it is this:

“Steve Graham points out that you and I are ourselves more like a wave than a permanent thing. He invites us, the reader, to think of an experience from your childhood, something that you can remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there, after all, you really were there at the time, how else can you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren't there. Not a single atom in your body today was there when that event took place. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are therefore, you are not the stuff from which you are made. If that doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, then read it again until it does, because it is important.” (Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion)

The Not-So-Soft Sciences

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as quick as anyone to roll my eyes at psychology/sociology/communications/education majors. In the academic world, they are simply uncool and there’s nothing they can say or do about it. However, as a fellow “soft scientist” I feel a responsibility to make a case for the underdogs of the university playground.

Four of my best friends are biology fanatics. They can hardly suppress a dramatic fake gag at the mere mention of the “ology”s on the other side of the science spectrum. For their love of equations and absolutes, the statistical analysis of human behavior based on surveys and subjective observation is the scholastic equivalent of identifying shapes of various animal species in passing clouds. To them, philosophies about human nature, theories of communication, and hypothesis of sociological phenomena are matters of opinion that any stratospheric warm front of hot air could transform into the likes of a crocodile holding a balloon. They want data. They want true or false, black or white. A2+B2=C2. Period.

But for all the grey ambiguity involved in political and social sciences, to declare all “softies” to be smoke-blowing thumb-twiddlers is pompously misguided. A common accusation is that the work they perform is not real or practical, and it's all just guesswork to create quasi solutions to irrelevant problems.

I beg to differ. In fact, it is the absence of clear formulaic answers that make such areas of study even more challenging and yet even more essential for society. When a soldier returns from war, the psychologist cannot write up an algebraic equation to alleviate his post-traumatic stress. When a classroom of underprivileged 5th graders need to improve their standardized test scores, the teacher cannot mix up a chemical solution to stimulate their learning (as much as the advocates of Ritalin may want us to believe).

And that is exactly the flaw in modern scientific thought--as especially seen in the medical field. You got a problem? Here is the empirical answer in the form of a $400 prescription.

Soft sciences are not exact sciences (in the sense that Input 1 yields Result 2), but they are very real and relevant to society. Psychologists, social workers, educators, and yes--even politicians face problems every day that demand action, even when (and especially when) there is no clear-cut answer. It strikes me as ironic that a person hovering all day under a vacuum hood pipetting microscopic cells would accuse work outside of the hard sciences as “nonreal.”

The point is that we need each other (as the emerging branch of holistic medicine is suggests with the integrating of physical health and emotional/spiritual well being). The world is not all cold hard facts. But it is not all warm fuzzy emotions either. For better understanding of human beings and this world we live in, the catalyst for progress is a little dose of mutual respect.

(So therefore the most important study of all is obviously Peace Studies. Bam.)

Cereal Wisdom

(My rant in "The Culmination of My Education" was exceeding appropriate blog length, but don’t be fooled, this is just a sequel).

It’s Saturday morning 1997, you’re watching Recess and Doug on ABC. There’s a commercial break.
Trivia question: who are the baddest asses of the advertisements run during the cartoons?

If you guessed the Hot Wheels kids or the Transformers... [BUZZ!] Wrong.
If you guessed the Apple Jacks crew... Ding Ding!

(Allow me to refresh your memory)
Mother: “Kids, why do you like that cereal so much? It doesn’t even tastes like apples!”
Kids: “WE EAT WHAT WE LIKE!”

Hell yeah.
In these post-collegiate times of uncertainty, I think it’s time my generation makes an effort to appeal back to the Apple Jack spirit of our youth.

We students are so easily conditioned into the mechanistic rhythm of productivity. We cultivate a persistent shadow that attaches itself to our heels and haunts us with a perpetual sense of urgency; a desire to do, to go. This addiction to motion may not always be strictly scholastic (i.e.: “I need to watch three more episodes to finish the season” or “I have to work out because I didn’t yesterday”), but it is tinged with the flavor of academia for it’s arbitrary deadlines and fabricated sense of pressure. Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre referred to this as “Bad Faith,” or the self-imposed mentality of duty. It is the “I have to”s and “I need to”s, or Freud’s “Superego.”

The formula is elementary: If you spend your entire academic life shoving what you want to do under the rug in order to do what you “have” to do, you will graduate a box-shaped robot spitting out copies of a square resume that will land you a 9 to 5 in a cubicle (into which you will fit like a 3D puzzle piece).

Tragically, this is the curse of our generation (and the worst part is this economy is running out of cubicle space faster than a game of Tetras). The robot monster (operating on the binary code: [Requirement][Achieve][Requirement][Achieve]) consumes our souls to the point that when we reach the point where nothing is statedly required of us, we hardly know what to do with ourselves. Many of us resort to inventing new external gags for ourselves (under the guise of “goal setting”) so that our daily lives can revolve around a different robot god.

We don’t know how to do what we want. We fill the chasm of indecision with the only solid object our non-actualized selves can cling to: “What’s best for us”, a.k.a. Momma’s advice + pop culture norms.

Let's give ourselves (and our free will) some credit, shall we? Let's volunteer, travel, read for pleasure, make art, and get interesting and random jobs-- not because we should or we have to, but because we want to. Let's eat some damn Apple Jacks.