Bon Voyage

[Today’s entry is slightly shorter than the others, mainly because I didn’t write enough down on the actual day and now, three weeks later, I don’t remember squat, but also partially because I did less on this day. Took it easy after all the effort; relaxed in the afternoon, did some reading. In a way, what I’m doing in these first few weeks in France – reading and writing – is what I should’ve been doing all summer. Ah well, as one high school English teacher used to say, ‘Better late than dead’. The quotes that stick in our heads, eh? But my activity today, or lack thereof, should explain the format; most of this is thoughts I had at various points throughout the day.]

You know, it is a fight to go out – to go out again today, trying to get this paperwork done, encountering numerous obstacles. I have to will myself into doing it some more and not just staying in this room. Again, I’m sure there are countless exchange students, new missionaries, and others the world over who’ve been experiencing those feelings for decades. I can now relate to them firsthand, a skill that will certainly not remain unused throughout the rest of my life.

I went this morning to try again for my student card. Yes, I know they told me Friday, but that seems like a very long time from now, and if the disorganisation thus far is any indication, not everything they say is written in stone. Sure enough, this time the guy, though he laughed slightly when he saw me, told me jeudi, quatorze-heure. Thursday at 2 p.m. That’s tomorrow. Boom. Persistence.

Speaking of persistence, I also went to the international office to see if the woman had sent our papers back to Bradford that would release our funding. She hadn’t and asked me to come back tomorrow. I highly doubt she will have done it by tomorrow, but I’ll keep coming back. I’ll be the very essence of graciousness each time, but I’ll keep coming back. That’s my plan.

[Whatever you think of that plan, I didn’t actually go back until more than two weeks later.]

Right before I went into the office I ran into a group of French-speaking ERASMUS students and the French girl helping them asked if I needed to go down and do the payment for my student card along with them. She asked in French! And she didn’t recognise me as one of the English speakers, so she asked it at full speed! And I understood! I didn’t know how to respond in French, so I said, ‘Yesterday’ in English, but I understood the question! I will get this.

Went shopping after that; had to withdraw some more money from overseas, hopefully this’ll be the last time.

*     *     *

I was just thinking about when we arrived at Toulouse-Blagnac airport. We swept out of there so quickly – waiting for our suitcases at baggage claim was by far the most time-consuming. The immigration officers or whatever they’re called asked us no questions, they simply (for me) turned to the French visa in my passport and stamped it. Coming to the UK the first time I had to produce my CAS letter, possibly other documents, and they asked me questions. I thought that the laidback-ness of our arrival in France boded well for the registration process and all other formalities awaiting us. It did not, it was a severe anomaly.

[This is the other complaint I referred to earlier that you are meant to take with a grain of salt. It’s not so bad, and like I said then, they gave us mini-fridges! Means I don’t even have to go to the kitchen and risk running into a French person when I wanna munch. That was a joke. I am practicing my French by speaking to French people, yes I am.]

But I’m not just tired of all these formalities, I’m tired of complaining about them, so for both my sake and yours I hope they pass quickly so I can go on to telling all of you about my lectures, my interactions with French cultures, my hilarious language goofs (for that I need to be far more daring – I promised myself I would be), and the people I meet. I’m sure they will; the first few days always seem the longest and hardest. But telling myself that doesn’t help as much as I want it to.

*     *     *

I guess one thing that makes it hard is feeling like a burden, what with not being able to speak even a minimal level of French. If anyone told me I was a burden on the system, I would angrily retort that the system is a burden on me, and that would be true. But I still feel like a burden, coming into their country and expecting them to, at least somewhat, condescend to my level. I need to at least repay them for that kindness.

What also came to me today is that the reason I’m so frustrated with the language barrier is not just that I can’t communicate, but that I can’t express myself. Language has so much to do with how I convey my identity and persona to others that, excluding that, I feel so little. They don’t know me. I don’t fully exist. Now, part of that is valid, and useful to know about myself, but it’s not alright that I am so focused on me and my conveyance of myself. I should be about actions, not words and impressions.

*     *     *

In the distance I see a plane rising into the sky (my window faces the airport, though I can’t see it). Do I wish I were on it?

[Perhaps I should interject that the reason this question comes quickly to my mind whenever I see a plane in the sky is that several years ago, after having been asked at numerous points through my life what I considered home to be, I came up with the following definition: home is where you can look up at a plane in the sky and not wish you were on it. So now I, unbidden, perform that test quite often.]

No. I’ll stick this out a little longer (by a little longer, I of course mean the entire year). I just need to find something to sustain me here, like City Vaults Sunday night jazz in Bradford.

Another reason I don’t wish I were on that plane is that landing in Toulouse on Sunday was the second time in my life I have felt a searing pain in my head during a plane’s descent, and when I say searing, I mean searing. As in it feels like something behind my left eye is growing and trying to escape. My eyeball starts watering and seems about to pop out, every nerve around it is on fire, little pinpricks on my forehead feel like needles stabbing from the inside out, and generally I get the impression my left brain lobe wants to get as far away from my right as possible. It’s awful.

I don’t like to complain about pain, I mean, I am male. I wasn’t even going to write about this originally, but as I’ve been flying all my life and this has only started happening in the past few years, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried. The first time was on a flight from Japan to the US last summer. Same sensation. I looked it up a few days after arriving, and at least I’m not the only one who’s experienced it (one of the joys of the internet). Apparently it’s caused by fluid filling some chamber in the head at high altitude, and then expanding as the atmospheric pressure builds. I’ve had some trouble off and on with nosebleeds in my life, and those are always from the left nostril, so some of my piping back there must be wonky. But since I didn’t feel it on my flight back to the UK, I thought (hoped) it was a one-off. Seems it wasn’t. I’ll have to do some more research, especially on potential remedies.

Because it’s not just about being able to comfortably use the fastest form of transportation currently available to mankind. It’s not just that I enjoy flying and want to continue to enjoy it. Flying, for me, is much more than those things; it is far more sentimental.

No, I don’t have childhood ambitions to be a bird or Superman that I’m secretly clinging to (though some of you might take issue with the latter claim). But I have been flying longer than I can remember. I’ve lived in a lot of different places, and airplanes have taken me between almost all of those places. You could say that the cabin of a jumbo jet has been a relatively constant physical location (with irony as my elixir) throughout my life, something I cannot say for any house in which I’ve lived. So air travel is a glue that holds all my life experiences together. After long periods without it, I miss flying like I imagine other people miss their hometown. As for the place I sometimes call my hometown, Yokohama, well, yes, I love it there, but I love it because it’s cool. I probably have stronger feelings for Tokyo and my high school, but Yokohama is cooler so I call it my hometown. I’m not sure that’s completely legit.

Going back to the previous point, I suppose that the reason my definition of home is so useful for me is that it’s not merely asking if I wish I were in a different place, it is asking if the place I am in right now beats being on a plane, a wondrous long-haul plane flight, with all the home-ness I attach to that experience. To be told that I cannot, or probably shouldn’t, experience that anymore would be, in my mind, akin to someone who finds out that they, for whatever reason, cannot return to their home, though I don’t wish to trivialise those actually in such situations. I realise that my mentality, or perhaps sentimentality, rather, is born very much of first world privileges.

There’s more I could say about this, such as that one thing I like about being on a plane (long-haul, of course) is that for the duration of that journey, everyone is from the same place and they are going to the same place. There is none of this pesky, ‘Where are you from?’ business. And likely some of what I have said could be said in a better way. But I will do that at a later date, in a far more polished form. For now, these are some of the thoughts flitting through my head as I watch that jet (Airbus-made, perhaps?) climb away from Toulouse-Blagnac. If you’re a fellow TCK I would love to hear your thoughts on what I’ve said, or even if you’re not a TCK, I suppose.

That’s Wednesday.

Day 15: Party All Night

I’m not actually writing this at 23:57 on Wednesday the 15th of December. I’m writing this on Sunday the 19th. The past five days have been crazy.

I have a friend who says, “I do procrastinate, and yes, I do regret it” and I think that sums up most people on the planet fairly well, me included. But I think I can say reasonably that I’m also fairly diligent and hard-working, because I take my work seriously and hate being rushed. I’m inefficient, though. I get an image at the beginning of a project of what I want it to look like, and no matter how unrealistic or difficult that image I go for it until time shortage forces me to compromise.

Unfortunately I also suffer from an unreasonable lack of urgency, which probably stems from chronically underestimating how much more time a task will take. This means that by the time I realise there’s no way I can do something the way I want to, it’s often too late to make any choice about how I want to do it.

All that to say that I usually do alright.

When I was a freshman in high school (grade 9) I heard a senior (or had he graduated?) say, “Save the all-nighters for college.” I thought that was good advice at the time, and when I became a senior myself and failed to follow it, I thought it was even better advice. I also discovered how much better three hours is than none. However my first year of college was actually easier than my last year of high school so I was able to gratify my newfound appreciation for sleep without much challenge.

This year I’ve gotten into sleep cycles, meaning that rather than try to get as many hours of sleep as possible, I measure by 1.5 hours. 7.5 is optimum, 6 is manageable, 4.5 is unfortunate, 3 is unpleasant, and 1.5 is a nap. With my low number of lecture hours per week and high number of hours I choose what to do with, I’ve been able to do most of my study during the day (well, day-ish, the sun goes down around four here) and keep my sleep sacred.

We’ve had four deadlines this semester, the last two being two essays apiece. The November 25th one was a bit tight but I pulled together and put out what I thought were two fairly decent papers (which, due to my forgetfulness, I will have to wait until next semester to find out my grades for). I swore to start earlier for the December 16th deadline, get them finished with time to spare, and enjoy the many events taking place during this last week.

I thought I started earlier. I thought I was being diligent. If it had only been the international relations essay, it would’ve been smashing. But there was the politics one, too.

I chose the topic of citizenship (in Britain and in theory) because I’ve never felt much like a citizen of any country, and wanted to find out more about becoming a British citizen. I even thought that maybe I could put a bit of a personal perspective, and if I did it in a tactful and scholarly manner, even cash in on it (meaning get a better grade than without it, if you can’t follow the vernacular).

But, like I said, I was inefficient. I didn’t start reading soon enough, and when I did, I made the mistake of starting with the feminist perspective.

Hehe.

Don’t get me wrong, I think feminists make a lot of good points. The world’s been stuck in a few ruts for far too long, and they propose ways out of them. But they write so complicatedly! My experience these past few months (backed up by those of a few of my classmates) has been that if you don’t already have a firm grasp of the issue the feminists are critiquing, you won’t get their point either.

So I started with Lister’s book when I should’ve started with Faulks’, because when I, exasperated, switched to the latter, things started coming together in my mind, and when I went back to Lister’s later it too made sense. But I also didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to talk about or what point I wanted to make, and I was trying to marry the very different topics of my own experience and considerable influence of liberalism on British thought surrounding citizenship in theory and practice.

All that to say, this time I didn’t do so alright.

I went for about a week feeling like my every spare minute was devoted to these two essays, but apparently I wasn’t making enough spare minutes, because I got to this last 24 hours and still hadn’t finished either essay. The IR one was in significantly better shape, and I was able to polish it up and submit it to Turnitin only a little past midnight. But politics…

My productivity hovers around zero in the wee hours of the night, and I suspect that nearly everyone’s does, though they refuse to admit it. Some claim that they work much better when pressed up against deadlines, and that they feel better doing it all at once instead of spaced out over several days or weeks. Excuses for laziness, I say. In theory, if one were productive in other things when deadlines weren’t looming and then threw oneself into papers when they were, one would get more done in life than the average person, but this world isn’t primarily theoretical. One can’t go at full speed all the time.

And how much would you actually learn from a paper written like that? This is the problem I have with people who measure the amount of work they have left to do by the required word count minus the number of words they’ve already written. This implies that every word you write is final-draft quality and flows exactly the way you want from intro to conc the first time around. Maybe you can do that, I can’t. I have to get a knowledge base, set up an outline to know what the points are, and only then write the paper. If I don’t do that it’s just shaky regurgitation.

Again, theories and ideals that get discarded when deadlines come calling. I’m happy to be able to say I learned a ton from the essay on citizenship, but in the end I wasn’t to able to do much with it at that time. Wasn’t able to put in my personal perspective either. Had to settle for throwing in 1500 words worth of what I’d discovered, and tie it together into something that would hopefully pass for halfway cohesive. I don’t know about other people, but one of my biggest pet peeves is knowing that I could do something better but not being able to for whatever reason, usually reality.

That said, I do like to think that when I know something needs to be done, I push through it until it is. Finished about 8:30 (‘finished’ here being a word used to mean ‘wrote a bunch and shifted it around to formulate some sort of message and get within the acceptable word count range and disliked the content but realised I had to go with it’). Was hoping to finish before sunrise and, seeing as I’d been up all night, make it at least a little worth it by taking in one of the most magnificent and inspiring sights nature has to offer (and to think it puts on the show every morning, regardless of whether anyone’s watching!), but alas, by the time I headed for the library to print 32 pages (two copies of each essay) it was already light. Fortunately the final-day frantic printing crowd I’d heard so much about was yet to be seen and I obtained the fruits of my labours without hassle.

It’s an interesting feeling going into a day on zero sleep. For one thing, the previous day feels like morning, and this day the afternoon of one massive, druggy day. With the morning light, shower, and breakfast, tiredness is chased away, but it’s always lurking, waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting. But I had a fairly busy day planned. In a season like this with brisk, refreshing air, it’s not too hard to forget how non-existent the previous night was. And if I don’t sleep in the morning it becomes a running count, bragging rights for some future, worthless conversation.

Funny thing to brag about, how little we sleep. Really the person who wins is the one who gets the most sleep and still gets a lot done. But it’s not the fact that people brag about not sleeping that annoys me the most, it’s when people act like they didn’t sleep when they really did. Saying things like,

“I just pulled an all-nighter!”

“I didn’t sleep at all last night!”

“I was up all night working on this.”

etc., when really they slept as much as three or four hours, and most likely were not working even most of the time they were awake; they were watching YouTube videos. Or people say they only slept three hours when it was more like five. If you’re going to brag, fine, but get the facts straight.

Here are some facts for ya:

• The record for the longest period without sleep is 18 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes during a rocking chair marathon. The record holder reported hallucinations, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech and memory and concentration lapses.
• REM dreams are characterised by bizarre plots, but non-REM dreams are repetitive and thought-like, with little imagery – obsessively returning to a suspicion you left your mobile phone somewhere, for example.
• Elephants sleep standing up during non-REM sleep, but lie down for REM sleep.
• Some scientists believe we dream to fix experiences in long-term memory, that is, we dream about things worth remembering. Others reckon we dream about things worth forgetting – to eliminate overlapping memories that would otherwise clog up our brains. (Another one of those instances where it’s all belief and reckoning, but for some reason we think it holds more weight because they’re ‘scientists’. If it were more than a belief, they would’ve used a different word, though sometimes they use stronger words when they really mean just ‘believe’.)
• Scientists have not been able to explain a 1998 study showing a bright light shone on the backs of human knees can reset the brain’s sleep-wake clock.
• British Ministry of Defence researchers have been able to reset soldiers’ body clocks so they can go without sleep for up to 36 hrs. Tiny optical fibres embedded in special spectacles project a ring of bright white light (with a spectrum identical to a sunrise) around the edge of soldiers’ retinas, fooling them into thinking they have just woken up. The system was first used on US pilots during the bombing of Kosovo.
• Feeling tired can feel normal after a short time. Those deliberately deprived of sleep for research initially noticed greatly the effects on their alertness, mood and physical performance, but the awareness dropped off after the first few days.
• Experts say one of the most alluring sleep distractions is the 24-hour accessibility of the internet. (Didn’t need them to be experts, but did need it to be said.)

Good stuff, eh? More to come with tomorrow’s tales.

Back on this topic of bragging, I submit that it’s not really an all-nighter unless you stay up the following day as well, otherwise it’s just staying up really late. Anyone can do that.

But I don’t see why so many people want to, and want to repeatedly. I did what I had to, I’m not proud of the result other than that I finished, and if I can I intend to never stay up all night writing a paper again unless I’m really interested in it, although I know it will inevitably become necessary again. Uni life: there’s what you want, and what you do. Wait…Life: there’s what you want, and what you do.

So save the all-nighters for forever, kids, but do what you have to and take pride in it and suffer silently.

And this was only the beginning of the craziness which I’m hurriedly trying to catch up to in my journaling.

I’m A Writer

[Originally published 11 November 2008. Updated 4 November 2010.]

Sometime during high school I realized how cool I think it sounds to be a ‘writer’. Someone asks another in some setting, whatever it may be, “So what do you do?” and the other replies, “I’m a writer.” It says so much and yet so little. It speaks of the courage to interact critically with the forces at work in the world, yet ambiguously refers only to the act of putting words on paper. And at some point quickly following my realization of my admiration for that label, I came to the conclusion that I wanted it for myself (No doubt a story I read in junior high called ‘The Book of the Banshee’ was an influence in this process, though I didn’t recognize it as such until much later).

In the general scope of things, ‘writer’ is a rather accessible aspiration, quite like being a runner. There are speedy and slow people, fit and fat people, tough and tame people, but all that is irrelevant. One is a runner simply by getting out and running, entering a league of elite set apart by willpower alone. And writing is the same way.

Many write to no one but themselves. They are the unheard artists, or perhaps merely the heartbroken. But unlike those who run alone and, though runners, keep their efforts and performance to themselves, I want to take this further than myself, both for my own improvement and for whatever may come of it. I’ve run a long ways alone.

So I will be a writer, regardless of any other labels I may accumulate, whether I can coherently present perspective or not even negotiate a single sentence succinctly. Getting published is certainly beside the point (in this age of blogging – ugh – no one needs an editor of any sort to get opinion out, and the world is the worse for it). You are my editor, should you choose to make your presence known by responding. And while Truman Capote emphatically states that the ability to write is an innate talent unaffected by formal instruction, iron does sharpen iron.

That’s one thing writing has over speaking (because, make no mistake, this is about communication as much as expression) – those who read are under no obligation to react visibly, or even stick around if they don’t care. But those that do will stay, read, and hopefully interact. I truly do hope that. Accepting the fact that communication is what you take in, not what I spit out, tell me what you don’t like (and what you like, of course, though I try not to take encouragement, however well-intentioned, too seriously) in the concepts, opinions, facts, vocabulary, anything.

And if it bugs you terribly, by all means, call me out on straying from my focus, whatever that may be. It’s a dreadful temptation for me which I succumb to far too often – as evidenced by the earliest entries on my blog. I mean to minimise such distractions as much as possible in these more lengthy compositions. Rambling is for Matsu entries, Facebook messages, and shorter blog entries (which in turn grow tiresomely long). Still, keep in mind that any material here is in draft form; nothing short of publication is final. Hack away, that’s what threads are for, but know that you may just get what you demand. Revisions should be expected; I’m finally realizing that I must stop trying to get it right the first time.

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, even as I swear that that will not become the refrain of the rest of my life. The greatest catalyst was coming to America [and more recently the UK] and seeing the sharp differences in certain aspects of life. I want to record my observations and I figure they could be entertaining to more than just my future self (hello there, by the way – are you where you should be by now?). No doubt I will look back on these and marvel at my erroneous mindsets and beliefs, but these are necessary stones in building a vantage point from which to look back. If I have even an inkling of what I’m doing here.

Welcome to the process.

-Brad