Luxuries

I'm feeling a bit off-kilter at the moment, maybe because I had such a strange day today. After two seconds of conversation with J-ka early in the morning as I folded up her guest bed (never enough time at the J-ka residence!), I headed on out to have breakfast with a prominent member of my field -- I had planned on buying this woman a drink on Tuesday afternoon, in part as an expression of gratitude for some nice stuff she did for me recently, and also to listen whatever lore and mentorly words she was willing to share, but when talking on the phone to make plans she said, "maybe tomorrow morning is better -- why don't you come over for breakfast and I can make you oatmeal?" There was no way to say no, and really, why would I? But how odd, and oddly delightful, to have someone you cite the hell out of and respect tremendously and really don't know all that well make you delicious oatmeal in her bohemian NYC pad as her cat sits next to you, biting your hair. One major academic-gossip session later, I was off to midtown, where I got on a bus back to Spookytown, a bus that I sat in for 6 solid hours, with traffic every step of the way from beginning to end (on Christmas Day, largely traffic-free, the journey up to New York had taken all of 3 1/2 hours). Plus, as a bonus, Mission Impossible III was yammering at me from the speakers above my head as I tried to read a highly theoretical book about social interactions -- this even though only two of the teeny-tiny televisions on the bus were working, and these were way up front ("Why so angry, villainous Philip Seymour Hoffman?" I would think while gazing out the window at the endless traffic on the NJ Turnpike, "you're getting very well paid to star in this shlock.")

Anyway, after getting home several hours later than I'd expected, my plan was to simply collapse on the couch, but instead GG called and talked me into going to see The Good German. It's dark and cynical and kind of experimental (and convoluted as hell, plot-wise) and I really quite liked it, although poking around the intertron now that I'm back home, I see that most reviewers seem to have not liked it very much at all. In lieu of giving away any of the plot, I'll just say that it's set in immediately post-war Berlin and that it's a time full of darkness and manipulation and bitterness and double-crossing. Which got me to thinking about how there are times and places when things like kindness to strangers, or really, kindness to anyone outside the most inner circle, seems to be a luxury more than a consistently viable option. When I lived in that provincial post-Soviet city for my year of research, one of the things I noticed is that there really seemed to be not enough pie for everyone (especially with the "privatization", a.k.a. "stealing", of the state and state resources by the new socioeconomic elite). Once you were in, were "us", people would make a real effort to look out for you, do what they could for you, watch your back -- all with a tacit understanding that you'd do the same for them given the opportunity. But if you weren't in, were "them", your problems and issues were simply no concern of theirs. And who can blame people trying to grapple with such circumstances and survive? Meanwhile, for the last week I've been spending at least an hour a day reviewing fellowship applications from young college students in a different post-Soviet state, one also controlled by a repressive dictator (although not as bad as some recently deceased ones). Sure, a few of the applications are egregiously terrible, but if I could, I would give all of the remaining applicants that yearlong fellowship here in the States (I'm finding the "who do you look up to as a leader?" essays that invoke Gandhi and MLK and the hope that non-violence can triumph in even the most adverse circumstances particularly heartbreaking). How they all deserve a break from the many unkindnesses and difficulties of their lives! To top it off, almost all of them live and go to school in the country's capital, the city from which my mother's grandmother fled about a hundred years ago. And with every fellowship score that I tally and every application that I place in the potentially life-changing (or life-not-changing) 'yes' or 'no' pile, I find myself mentally thanking my great-grandmother for getting herself the hell out of there and giving me the luxury of not having to be unkind, hard-hearted, or cynical just to ensure my survival, or the well-being of the people that I love.