Back in Lincoln

Dear Constant Readers,

I wanted to write you a few days ago, but I never got around to it. I've had a lot going on these last few days. There was also stuff I wanted to touch upon in my last entry, but I felt like it was getting too long to delve into a new subject that also had potential to be a bit involved (although not nearly so as what I wrote about last time).

The thing I wanted to discuss last time that I never got around to was my personal views on religion. Actually, though, I'm not sure I have much to say, other than what I am feeling is likely to be rather similar to many other college students, or anyone in general my age perhaps, regardless of college or not.

My views on spirituality are the results of a long story (it would be with most people, of course) which I won't go into all here, but ever since I was 17, a couple of years before moving to college, I started to view religion in a more....observative way, a questioning way, I don't know what to call it. Throughout the years, the devotion I've had to the Roman Catholic Church has waxed and waned because I've come to see I'm not all that interested in the traditions and rules that to me seem rather artificial. I am open to the possibility that I have just flat out misunderstood it, but it seems to me, if one believes in God, whoever God is to them, that's what makes the most difference in the end. Organized religion per se doesn't quite do it for me. Even Christianity didn't start out as an organized religion.

I am not saying things against organized religion, or Catholicism, or Christianity, or whatever. I still identify with all three, however, some more strongly than others. I feel two things in Church at home: a comforting, almost nostalgic sense of belonging and home, and also a sense that I've moved on to something different now. I'm not sure what.

Maybe the fact that I want to be away from the conservative rule of the Vatican has something to do with it. Even though it is clicheed, and is perhaps kind of a trend, I suppose I'm part of it, although I'm not sure: I feel myself to both spiritual and religious, but more the former than the latter. I guess I explain that by saying that spirituality is the side of us that was given to us by God, the natural relationship, whereas religion is more a creation of man, man's interpretation of that relationship, and man's way of maintaining it.

Or maybe I'm way off base. I'm not a theologian at all, and maybe this is all just a phase. But it's something that's been on my mind, anyway.

So anyway, I'm back in Lincoln, to continue my schooling. I really wanted to get out of the house. I felt a little stuck there, but before I could leave, I fell ill with something, and it thwarted all of my attempts to take off. That wasn't all bad, though, because it forced me to take it easy at home, and plus I got to see my aunt and uncle and cousin, who came up to camp at the lake. I wasn't feeling my best, but one doesn't have to to stand in water and fish while basking in the hot sun. After a few Tylenol I felt pretty decent, as a matter of fact.

But I did get off to school finally, and am nerve-wracked to start this year. For the first time I have an apartment with two other guys, one who is a friend, and one whom I so far am getting along with fine. But I'm nervous about finances, as I have written about before. I'm becoming, if I am not already, a person who worries over money, which is not something I want to be. I want to be responsible, but not a worrier.

I haven't yet moved in to the degree I want to, because the person whose room I'm moving into has not moved out completely yet, so I'm sleeping in a sleeping bag in the front room. Had I known that it would take as long as it is, I would not have moved down when I did. I would have stayed sick longer.

But aside from playing Age of Empires, I've tried to use my time wisely. The bathroom, I thought, was in bad shape, so I bought a bunch of cleaning materials, and while everyone else was at their respective jobs, I set forth to clean it. It didn't bother me, I clean well enough to perhaps do it professionally if I wanted to, since the majority of my jobs have consisted of cleaning positions (working as house-keeping in a days in and a grounds crew for the summer on my college campus), and a bathroom that isn't scurvy and covered with soap scum so vile it crawls around and growls when the lights come on is a happy bathroom. I don't want to be a jerk to anyone at all here, I don't want to be a Nazi roommate, but it is important to me that the place looks half-way presentable at least. The clean environment also makes me feel better about myself; it's something I noticed when I got my little room in Germany in ordered, instead of coming home to a disaster area that just got its ass kicked by a category 5 hurricane.

I've been catching up with people: I had dinner with Amanda for the first time in about a year, which was nice, and I saw some of my professors, and I was reminded of the glorious news that I have 2 senior projects to do. What joy. This will be the most trying year for me I think, but I'm looking forward to tackling it head-on. There is something refreshing, and liberating about it all.

Anyway, I hope everything is going well. I'll leave you at this for the time being.

Iona, the best of luck my dear friend!

Sincerely,
Tristan

Very Personal Reflection

Dear Constant Readers,

I know it hasn't been a week yet since I last wrote, but there was some stuff I've wanted to write about, I guess mostly just to hear myself talk, but also to tell anyone who might care to listen. As with all my entries though, they concern my personal things, so I don't know of how much interest it is to anyone. I do like telling my friends (almost the only people who read this, I imagine) about things I have going on in my life, however, and that's the main purpose I write this blog.

When I was 15 or so, I started learning Esperanto on my own. I read about it in a book called "All About Language" by Mario Pei and heard it was one of the easiest, if not the easiest, language in the world to learn. After a while I started to consider learning this language, not for world peace, or universal communication, as the Esperanto community promotes, but because I was so eager to learn another language, something I'd dreamed about for years even when I was that young, and the promise of learning an easy language that one could learn quickly was very tempting. So I went to Amazon.com and bought "Teach Yourself Esperanto" and "Teach Yourself Esperanto Dictionary" and proceeded to work my way through the language.

No one really understood or supported me as I can recall. My family was confounded as to why I would want a language that is not even natural, has no native speakers (this is false, by the way), that has no practical purpose in the world, and has no one that I could speak with. Why not learn something more conventional?

Still, it was something important to me. I wanted to learn this language. I was also quite naive and inexperienced in language learning, which is another good reason I tried to learn Esperanto. I had never learned another language before, let alone on my own. I found out soon enough though, that learning solo was my preferred way, so I wanted to get it right.

The problem was, I had bad ideas about what it was to learn a language. It's not that my standards were too high: I think one should have high standards if they want. That's not bad. But my standards were too exact, and language-learning is an art. In art, there is not always room for exactness. In other words: I felt I had to master every word, every idiom, and drill myself to know it forwards and backwards.

The success I wanted in Esperanto kept eluding me. I expected that one I learned the language, there would be a feeling of accomplishment, like running a race and coming to an end. I practiced Esperanto in a chat room, and eventually felt that I had achieved a level of fluency, which to a point is true, but I never reached the level that I wanted to. I toyed with the idea of using other programs on the internet, other language exchanges, but aside from the Esperanto chat room, I didn't like chat rooms, and never pursued the options: I somehow didn't feel the urgency. Maybe I was being lazy.

It was during this though that I began to learn that learning a grammar does not equal learning a language. I learned course book backwards and forwards, and still return to it sometimes, but still couldn't figure out when I didn't have the "feeling" of closure that I wanted. I wasn't satisfied with what I had accomplished thus far, and often I just saw shortcomings instead of successes when I spoke, constantly referring to my dog-eared dictionary. I felt overwhelmed by vocabulary to be learned, and made up my own words sometimes, using the Esperanto feature of being a root-based language (one can string concepts together to create new concepts based on root words, simply put). But I didn't feel this was really helpful, and the amount official words I wanted to know started to frustrate me.

I never found anyone to personally speak with, there were no Esperanto clubs comfortably within the proximity of my area, and listening to Radio Polonia (the Esperanto broadcasting station I used at the time) didn't seem to be helping me much.

I never gave up on Esperanto, and never have. But priorities have changed a bit. Despite never falling in love with some aspects of the language, namely the sounds of it, I still enjoyed tinkering with it. I was disappointed in that it didn't help me learn other languages to the degree I thought it might. Instead, other languages have helped me learn Esperanto. I have never lost my interest in learning "uncommon languages", in fact I'm more interested in them than I am in many major world languages.

I attempted to learn the language again in college, rather relearn what I had learned and then finally get a level of satisfaction....By now, years later, I understood that there is no "closure" when one learns a language. It's a skill, not a race. Like learning to write. And I've learned to view my accomplishments in the light that they are steps in the right direction, not shortcomings where I've failed. I've written about this before, too, probably quite a bit.

And I always hoped that somewhere in the world I'd run into another Esperanto speaker in person. Finally, 7 years later after opening the book to learn it, I did. I've written meeting Judith and Chuck earlier in my blog, and although now I try to speak with them both in Esperanto, as they are the only speakers I personally know.

Speaking with them though has opened my eyes though, making me feel that I've lost something all these years. When I started out, I tried so hard to learn this language, and yet somehow the success I wanted, fluency, which, by the way, is like trying to pin down water with a fork, somehow got away from me. I've fallen out of touch with the culture that goes with it. Did I know if I would like it? I don't know, I was quite young and didn't really trust other people I met online, plus I had no way of meeting them even *if* I did trust them. But I never had the chance, or gave myself the chance, to find out if I would like the international, rather unique culture that has developed around it. I've become quite out of touch with it, what little touch I had in it to begin with.

And I feel that I let opportunities get away when I had the chance to really seize something. Chances to use all the resources at my disposal (chat rooms, language exchanges, voicechats, God only knows what else) to build up a decent working knowledge of the language. After seeing how they could have worked for me, I wonder why didn't I do that? I could have been somewhere further than I am now. That's kind of a silly thing to say, you could say that about anything almost. But I really feel it in this case.

The thing is, I'm only realizing this all now. I have refined my learning methods quite a bit, and have relaxed quite a bit too in being so harsh on myself, but I still try hard to learn what I can, and have don't like seeing gaps in what I've learned, where a word is missing, or a passage is hard to read, or something like that. It happens often still in my German or Spanish or Esperanto. There's not quick cure for it, it's just learning, and it's supposed to be fun. Sometimes I don't know how people do it though. I don't feel I have yet. To be able to read a book in another language without having it feel like reading instructions to building a grill, ie, more like a chore than a pleasure.

So why do it? Because I know that it will come. But when? There's no closure, but when will I be comfortable with what I learn? Those are standards I haven't even set myself yet, because I don't want to set a boundary for myself.

I think for some people, doing what you do must really be both a labor of love and faith. You have to love what you do, because even when you get frustrated, or realize how much ground you may have lost, you have to know that that's part of the game, and if you didn't know that, you had to have learned it sooner or later. And also faith that you can do it. Some things are bubbling to the surface here, I'm seeing. One is pretty obvious: That languages are pretty important to me. That's not shocking. The other one is though, that if I'm talking about faith in believing in myself, even though I have a hard time seeing results sometimes, I must have a lot more confidence in myself than I originally thought. I've always personally believed I'm really, really good at what I do in this field. So when I get stuck in a common conversation about someone telling me how they want to email microphish files to their account so they don't have to screw with the damned machine anymore (OK, that's not that common of vocabulary, I can't even spell microphish right, but maybe you get the idea), I'm not sure how to react.

This is a scary thing for me. This is a hobby I've loved so much for so long, that when I sometimes don't even know how to look at it, what does that mean? I believe that somehow, I was meant to making linguistics a part of my life. As I've tried to make clear, I have other loves in my life, and seek a balanced one, if there is such a thing, but this has been one of the most important things within myself.

I think, ultimately, I am comparing myself with others, great linguists, or people who have someone learned something I admire. That's a no-no that I have to guard against falling into. I used to be amazed by how many languages a person could speak. I still think it's pretty cool, but far less dazzling. What amazes me now is the depth to which some know them. I used to be hellbent on accents and perfect pronunciation. And those are still of high high high importance to me. As is grammatical accuracy and all those frills. But the more I've learned, thought, listened to others, the more I see the importances of learning how to express myself in a way I want to...that's more important to me now. And that's also the hardest part of learning a language well, the eloquence. The soul in the poet's body, maybe.

There's a difference between being inspired by someone, and comparing yourself to them in such a way you feel overshadowed. You shouldn't be that way. Get in the light and make your own shadows. And I have sooooooo much left to learn.

For those who have read this whole thing, I appreciate it. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Tristan

My Short Summer

Dear Constant Readers,

After having completed two weeks or so of having been home, I decided that it was time to write another blog entry.

My summer, though short, has not been idle. Since coming home, I've traveled to Colorado for a few days with my family to see Estes Park, a place in the Rockie Mountains that is known for its natural beauty. Granted, the town is a touristy spot, but even so, the scenery up there is well worth the trip.

Another trip to Colorado occurred last Sunday, as my family on my mom's side met for our annual family picnic. Most of my family is from Colorado, and a vast majority of them still live there, somewheres.

It was funny, though. Even at the family reunion, I felt strangely distant from the people there. Of course, there is this bond between us (although my mom's side is so large I can't keep track which cousin is the son/daughter of whom, or how someone more distant relatives are related through marriage or whatever) but at the same time, I haven't kept in touch with many of them. That probably isn't a huge surprise, since even as kids we met only for major holidays and the like. We made it to the graduations and weddings and funerals, and usually have at least an inkling of what's going on with the closer cousins and aunts.

But when it comes to the major happenings in my personal *personal* life, it's not my family I usually turn to. Usually I've talked to my mom about a lot of what has ailed me, but by and large, it has been the friends I've made who have been my consolers and soundboards and allies and supports.

So far I have seen two of my friends since coming home, although the ones who have been the dearest to me in my American uni are still hundreds of miles away. A few I have spoken with, but despite my plans to go to Lincoln this week(which I didn't pursue with the tenacity I perhaps should have had I really wanted to see it through) will not occur, because I am now working for a few days at my aunt and uncle's furniture warehouse.

This doesn't really bother me much, as I still want to spend a bit more time with my family, and also I need to earn a bit more money for this coming school year. But once one gets their wings, it is hard to stay in the nest. It's funny; I used to be quite the homebody, but as children, maybe most of us were. My first major trip abroad was when I went to France: I turned 16 there. And I was homesick for part of time; I didn't adjust to the point of feeling at home, although I was only there for a month, so that also is not surprising.

When I went to Mexico, when I was just turned 17, I also didn't adjust to feeling at home there, despite being there a year. Germany was different: I adjusted to the culture and really, at times, felt at home there, at least as much as I ever have.

Most times in my life I've not really felt like I have a home. I do in the sense that I have a place where I grew up, and have roots at and all that, but a place where I can really say with all my heart, "Not only is this the place where I am supposed to be at this moment, this is also the place where I belong," I have yet to find this place. Indeed, I am only 22. What's the rush? There is none, to me it is an adventure, partly why I am interested in searching the globe, not only to see the world, but also to find a place where I am content.

However, where I am content will almost surely depend more on myself than on wherever I end up. And maybe that's the answer right there: even if I trekked over every Kingdom this side of Eden seven times, I sill wouldn't find a place to rest, simply because at this point in my life I am still to restless and wanting some other adventure, trek, experience, call it what you want. I have an interest in joining the Peace Corps, for example. Although I want to help people, a sense of all this I mentioned is also a big part of it as well. I think it would have to be for such a situation as well. I'm from the richest country in the history of the world, but that's a pretty slim section of the world: I also want to see about the part of the world that the vast majority of our fellow men, women, and children inhabit. Earth is my home, after all, why not get to known it better?

This isn't the message that I wanted to write when I started writing, but I didn't have a structure in mind, either. Usually I don't have one, but tonight it's proving more difficult to put down what I want to say.

I spoke with Dylon the other night on the phone, and yesterday I got some messages from Iona, finally. She had not written me in what felt like half an eternity, and I was starting to wonder if all my Polish jokes had sunk in. :-P But finally she got back to me, and honestly, Iona, that made my day. :-) Dzienkuje! I can't express how important my close friends were to me in Germany, the ones that I really found were there for me when I needed them, so I won't here. It's me between me and each of them, an experience that is commonly unique for everyone.

The last two years of my life, by far, have been the best for me.

Hope all is well!

Sincerely, Tristan