Wanderlust

I have often wondered to myself what life will be like when I am eventually forced to stay in one place for more than nine months at a time.  Although we were certainly fortunate enough, when I was young, to take yearly family vacations, we were relatively stationary and our lives relatively stable.  However, since the age of fifteen, I have constantly been on the go.  In college, my roommate tended to joke that I was not actually from one state, but that I was from the United States given my propensity to travel all around the country during our time off from school.

Relative to many families, most notably those with ties to the military, the church, diplomatic missions or large international companies, my propensity to move is hardly remarkable.  And my travels have usually taken me down relatively safe and well-travelled paths.  

Nonetheless, I take a certain pride (perhaps unwarrented) and an enjoyment from having seen many different corners of the US and the world.  I easily recognize myself in some of the lyrics of the Dixie Chicks song "The Long Way Around". And yet, while I still plan to continue to visit and explore new locals, the time of "settling down" is rapidly approaching.  Even as I type those words, I sense the pang of ambivalent emotion that Joanne Harris describes through her main character Vianne Rocher in Chocolat:

"Places all have their own characters, and returning to a city where you have lived before is like coming home to an old friend.  But the people begin to look the same; the same faces recurring in cities a thousand miles apart, the same expressions.  The flat, hostile stare of the official.  The curious look of the peasant.  The dull unsurprised faces of the tourists.  The same lovers, mothers, beggars, cripples, vendors, joggers, children, policemen, taxi-drivers, pimps.  After a while one begins to feel slightly paranoid, as if these people were secretly following from one town to another, changing clothes and faces but remaining essentially unchanged, going about their dull business with half an eye slyly cocked at us, the intruders.  At first one feels a kind of superiority.  We are a race apart, we the travellers.  We have seen, experienced, so much more than they.  Content to run out their sad lives in an endless round of sleep-work-sleep, to tend their neat gardens, their identical suburban houses, their small dreams; we hold them in a little contempt.  Then, after a while, comes envy.  The first time it is almost funny; a sharp sudden sting which subsides nearly straight away.  A woman in a park, bending over a child in a pushchair, both faces lit by something which is not the sun.  Then comes the second time, the third; two young people on the seafront, arms intertwined; a group of office-girls on their lunchbreak, giggling over coffee and croissants...before long it is an almost constant ache.  No, places do not lose their identity, however far one travels.  It is the heart which begins to erode after a time.  The face in the hotel mirror seems blurred some mornings, as if by too many casual looks.  By ten the sheets will be laundered, the carpet swept.  The names on the hotel registers change as we pass.  We leave no trace as we pass on.  Ghostlike, we cast no shadow." (192-193)

The rising cost of information

On March 28, online consumption of the NYTimes enters a new realm.  They will begin charging users for online content.  The question is: how much do I value being able to browse through their news stories at varying volumes throughout the week.

In the new system, users will still be able to access 20 articles a month for free.  Beyond 20, a paid subscription is necessary.  However, articles that are accessed and read via a link from a blog are social network will not be deducted from a reader's 20 article limit.

 On average per week, I'm pretty sure that I read 15-20 articles.  Sometimes I read them in their entirety.  Other times I find that reading a couple of paragraphs is sufficient.  If I decided to remain a non-paying consumer of the Times, maybe I would have to be a little more selective in my choices of articles, which would ultimately take time away from actually reading the news.

This change in the NYT online access has appeared at about the same time that House Republicans have voted to end public funding for NPR radio programs.  One Republican called it a "non-essential service".  Although many in the Republican camp consider NPR to have a slight (or more than slight, depending on how far right the thinker is) left-leaning bias, which on average is probably true, the radio and its programs offer an important alternative to print and TV news.  I believe that having some insight as to what is going on in the world is essential to being an informed and thoughtful citizen.  In fact, I believe that it is just as important a civic duty as going to the polls to make one's voice heard.  The notion that it is a "non-essential service" is really just a faulty justification to cover up a right-wing agenda.

It is clear that in a time when State and Federal budgets need revising, some programs will end up on the losing end.  However, many of the programs that are losing against this season of spending reductions are those that help to shape an informed and educated public, like funding for schools and public information.

While I certainly value print and radio news enough to pay something for it, access to news should not be considered a luxury good.  As someone in the education industy whose salary already represents the lack of value that society places on young people's time in the classroom, I am particularly reliant on free or inexpensive news in order to represent to my students the importance of being a curious and invested member of society.

Percolating fears and an emerging personal philosophy

Two of my favorite prolific producers of poignant one-liners are Oscar Wilde and Yogi Berra.  While the former made seemingly pessimistic observations about the world and the latter more paradoxical statements that nonetheless closely ressemble many things people think and say, reading and hearing quotations from both men allow us to look on life with a slight air of humor and irony.

The expression "fear of the unknown" very closely imitates a Y.B.-style pronouncement.  For what is fear but a particular physiological and psychological response to uncertainty.  For me, this fear comes from a lack of understanding of human emotion, which is one of the reasons that I have become such an avid reader of the news and fiction.  In much the same way that a child's lack of awareness of the potential for physical harm in many of his or her daily activities allows a certain freedom of movement, so does this same lack of awareness allow him or her freedom of speech.

One of my favorite movies in a French film called La Faute à Fidel or, in English, Blame it on Fidel.  In the film, a rather precocious, 9-year old girl named Anna is growing up in Paris and is constantly confronted with the changing social and political ideas of the late 1960s and early 1970s, most notably through the reactions of her parents.  While her mother is from a French bourgeois milieu and her father from a formerly powerful Spanish family once friendly with the Franco regime, the parents become stauch advocates of Communism.  Anna and her younger brother try to make sense of all these changes and often ask the sort of "naïve" and yet poignant questions that produce in the specatator a reaction similar to that upon hearing or reading O.W. and Y.B. quotes.  But one of my favorite lines is when the young Anna, after having been told bluntly to keep her thoughts to herself by one of the nuns at Catholic school, asks her mother how she is supposed to know when to speak her mind and when to keep quiet.  Her mothers sets her down, takes her firmly by the arms, looks into her eyes and says "You're a talker.  You talk."

I grew up in the school of "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."  But the world isn't that manichean.  Clear cut lines between "nice" and "not nice" don't exist.  For years, I have feared expressing my opinions or feelings unless I was sure of how they would be received.  I feared offending others or utterly altering relationships for the worse based on a single misinterpreted statement.  However, I'm learning that a small part of this fear is healthy.  It makes us aware that our ideas are not the same as everyone else's and that a particular amount of restraint is necessary in society.  On the other hand, if you want to be respected, you must make yourself heard.  If you never open your mouth, no one hears your ideas but you.  Without discussion and debate, it is difficult to learn and grow.  Reading is a way to test my ideas against other writers.  To learn more about how other think and experience the world.  Both writing and speaking allow me to articulate those thoughts.  They serve as a sounding board both for myself and for others.  Being a writer is a first step towards being a talker.  So here in this forum is where I've decided to work out my thoughts.  To think about and articulate my thoughts and reactions to the world around me, for it is the only world I know.