What I Want In Life

Within the bounds of what I think is possible for humans, I can see paths for working towards those things. President with this mind, body, background, and set of intentions? Maybe in another lifetime.... Still though, many, many kinds of careers and results, I know how to work my way towards.

The thing I want though, is to live them all. I want to live 1000 lives during my 1. Oh, reading is one way of doing it, and yet, how does it compare to lived experiences? I've read so many more experiences than I've lived, I can scarcely answer that question. The temptation to switch jobs and countries every six months is not unrelated. My curiosity is boundless.

Now I am trying to write so I can better live inside imaginary lives and worlds someday, in addition to my own.

Is Language a Tool or an Anima?

Last night we say goodbye to my closest friend here Matej, who is leaving for Israel on Tuesday. From pub to potraviny to park to apartment we drift, bottles passing non-stop from hand-to-hand. The calm summer night breeze cools down the alcoholic burn.

On our way to the park, Matej and I are walking some steps ahead of the group with David from Hungary. At thirty-one, David is ten years older than we are, but with a decade of professional DJing behind him and a full head of radically long and upright-resting dreadlocks on top, the difference between him and us has less to do with age than with life experience. The Czech Republic is the fifth country David has lived in, but having arrived but recently, he speaks English rather than Czech.

There is a break in the conversation. Following the silence, Matej comments, "It must be weird for you, to hear talking me and David.... You know, because we are two European guys, and for us English is international language, but I think it is different than in America or Great Britain."

David says "Yes!! We have many phrases that are common all over Europe, taken directly from European languages, but that aren't making sense in English."

"You know, when I first started teaching," I reply, "I used to have a really different attitude towards error correcting than I do now. I thought it was my job to make everybody sound like an American, and if anyone would say anything different than how I would say it, I would correct them. I don't believe in that anymore. People think differently, and there are certain kinds of  'mistakes' I really question the value of correcting. Language is a tool for communicating."

"Yeah?" says David, "Language is a tool? Many people wouldn't say that."

"Well I would."

"Yeah, but what about the spirit of a language? What is BLOWing my mind," he exclamates the point with his hands, "is when you are speaking a language like a native language that is not yours."

"How so?"

"I just can't imagine it! Hungarian is in my bones."

"I see, but also, languages change to articulate different realities. My English is definitely nothing like in England, and lots of minorities in America have had to form new languages to express their realities."

"Ehhh... maybe some minor details," says Matej, see-sawing his right hand doubtfully, "but it is basically the same thing," he concludes with a grimace. "Yes, really the same," agrees David. Matej wanders back into the rest of the group.

"Why do you think we are always smiling in America?" I ask David, with a tentative smile.

He smiles back warmly. "I don't know."

"I think it is because we are a pluralistic culture, and when you don't know somebody's language, you always smile to tell them everything is okay. British English sounds very cold and foreign to us. It really is a different spirit.

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When I woke up the next day, I thought of it some more. Realized that as an American, my ancestors spoke Polish, Russian, Yiddish, German (Switzerland), French or Dutch (Belgium), and probably more. It seems just as well as anything I am speaking English. Maybe my heritage, made possible by America, which is the most multi-cultural society I know, is the way I always see eight different sides of things at once, like faces on a totem pole.

When Life is Like Checkers and the Only Move Left is To Jump Somebody or Forfeit

Today, I offered to welcome a French couchsurfing roadtripper named Jonas, who sent out a last-minute request, and if he found no one, was planning on sleeping in his car. We met up at a bar. He tried to leave without paying, but I paid for his beer to make it okay. Next, we got dinner at a restaurant next to my flat. He suggested leaving the restaurant without paying, and I told him absolutely not. I asked why he would do that, and he said because he is not at home, and because it's important to violate the rules sometimes. He started telling me stories about encounters with the police in every country he has visited so far on his trip. When we left that restaurant, I told him I no longer felt comfortable hosting him. First he tried to convince me to feel otherwise, then he became aggressive, and then he walked away.

Tonight is a State Of Emergency in Prague due to flooding. The lowlands and the wetlands are being evacuated. I live in an elevated neighborhood, and far enough from the river. Jonas' car is parked just a few blocks away from me. Still, I want no one to have to sleep in their car on a night like this. Also, if Jonas gives me a bad review on couchsurfing, my plans to couchsurf this summer will be less viable, which could be a problem now that I've finalized plans to sublet my flat.

Both of us want happiness and to avoid suffering; in that important respect we are the same; and yet, we somehow find ourselves diametrically opposed. I mistrust his empathy enough that I think he could steal valuables from the flat, such as my roommates' laptops, which would cause suffering, and he wants a warm, dry place to stay at night, which will prevent him from suffering. On earth is there any solution? It is as if we are two chess players, meeting each other from a predetermined position, and don't even wish to be in competition, but only have a finite number of choices available to us. One teaching I've read about for escaping this is releasing yourself from attachment, but releasing myself from attachment to my roommates' attachments their laptops seems quite similar to releasing oneself from attachment to a restaurant staff's attachments to their paychecks.

I can detach myself easily enough from my couchsurfing worries- there are an infinity of ways to walk this earth, and it is no impossible task to choose another one. Perhaps OkCupid will become my Couchsurfing, for example. But I cannot detach myself from Jonas' suffering in his car tonight, and it is so unfair that his not suffering should be positioned in opposition to my not suffering (or my roommates not suffering). Okay- it is his behavior in the restaurant that caused this problem- but from a far-enough-back perspective, that is quite beside the point. His behavior in the restaurant was due in turn to other things similar to chess. The animal part of him will feel suffering, and I don't see what that has to do with it, or why it must answer to the consequences of his sociopathic intellect. Furthermore, as a reasoning being, it becomes necessary in this case for me to be the instrument causing someone's suffering: my own, my roommates', and Jonas's, or more than one of those at once.

I seek Perfection in the way I treat others, but insofar as the world works like this, it seems impossible. I don't understand what I could have done differently in this case without being unfair to myself and my roommates based on my reasoning capacities.

We actually DID welcome a sociopath for a couple months, despite my instincts about him, and he stole some money from Nica. The alternative could have been his homelessness. In the course of this year then, both decisions were made, and both caused one kind of suffering and prevented the other.

The way life works, if one is aware of consequences, this sort of decision bares its head all the time. I have no idea how to deal with it better.