So it turns out that five days of getting drunk, eating too much, and marinating in a hot tub is a bad way to transition from a village in Kazakhstan to the United States.

If life went as fictitiously scheduled, I would have just flown home from Almaty to a hot Minnesota summer. As it were, I’ve just returned from a week in the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area.

I am extremely blessed, blessed being the reluctantly used word describing a state of fortune that is due to something beyond my comprehension. Maybe fortunate is a better word, less weight. Whereas my experience in Central Asia didn’t end well, there is no other reality in which it would have ended differently, and it made me the man I am today.

Not much has changed on the surface, I’m still unsure of the world around me, let alone my place in it. I’m still enthralled by people and our ability to be beautiful and kind, and horrified at our capacity for evil. I’m still enchanted by women and wonder at their ability to be magical. However, somehow everything looks different, the world looks different. It’s filled out and dirtier, deeper, sadder, lovelier, more horrifying, funnier, but most of all more fascinating and deserving of a life well lived in service to others.

Every once in a while when I smell something like burning trash, or see the sunlight catch the edge of water in a way that reminds me of a river, I violently push memories into the recesses of my mind until they no longer turn my stomach. I’m much better when someone asks me about being in the Peace Corps, my stock of replies are more associated with telling stories than reality, and they’re easier for me to digest.

I wish it was only melodrama, but the truth is that I hate the fact that part of me was shaking with joy when I found out I was going home. I hate it because the second I felt it, it was a betrayal. It was a betrayal to the people I cared for and a place I was learning to build a life in, I was betrayed by my emotions at a time when I thought I was content with the life I was living.

Now it all feels like a dream, except for the bitter taste that joy left in my mouth.

It is weird to be back. Less than a month ago I was walking home from school in a -25 C blizzard, marveling at the fact that although on the surface my life seemed to suck stupendously, I was happy. As Russian worked it’s way deeper and deeper into my brain, I started to better understand and appreciate the world around me. A single phone call on Wednesday afternoon changed my life. The only thing I remember from the four-minute script that my Country Director read to me was the “Peace Corps has decided to suspend it’s program in Kazakhstan,” and “You’ll receive an email tomorrow with more information.”

I was in denial. I immediately decided that when my counterpart found out, I would tell her that I’d stay on in Sergeevka on my own. I figured that I could pay my way until June when school ended. The email I received the following day instructed me to be in Almaty by the next Wednesday, which meant that I needed to leave on the Monday night train. It was Thursday night. I only had three full days left in Sergeevka to pack and say goodbye. Those three days were heartbreaking and difficult, and I managed to make them weirder for myself by not fully aknowledging that it was my last goodbye. I capped off the last night by doing a three-hour public banya and beer with the military teacher, and the birch whipping-broiling-overextended-event at least saved me from thinking about leaving.

Then I was off, first on a bus to the city, then on a train to Almaty. Kazakhstan went out of its way to make our last trip interesting by having train police come into our wagon, take all of the volunteer’s passports, and threaten to put us in jail for drinking beer that was purchased on the train. Fortunately I hadn’t been drinking and negotiated us out of the situation by way of heartfelt apologies and bullshit. We were cracked out when we pulled up in Almaty at 5 am, and then basically short-circuited when we walked into the hotel that Peace Corps put us up in. I walked into the five-star Rahat Palace, looked up into the glittering skylight ten floors above me, and then I mentally transitioned into a place of thoughtlessness decadence.

We had a pool, sauna, hot tub, gym, and three meals a day of gourmet buffet-style food. I had a room to myself with a king-sized bed. Every day there was a morning session where staff passed out forms and information, and a late afternoon session with more of the same. Between these two sessions we were broken into small-group sessions covering everything from counseling to thirty-second elevator speeches. I skipped every one of them in favor of hot tubs, napping, and working out. There were some volunteers who complained about living out of a hotel, but I would have been cool spending another five months. It was a wild week and by the time they kicked us out on Monday morning I wasn’t sure how I was still standing.

Then I went to Nepal..

- I couldn’t get a visa to stay, so after a 5-day closing conference at a 5-star hotel, I flew to Nepal to travel and trek before I go home.

My life is currently an exhausting combination of the new and old world, or maybe just the underdeveloped new world. Between working full-time, running clubs, heating the house, cooking, and shoveling snow, I just barely have enough time to get in a run or two through the steppe. There’s a strong correlation, controlling for multiply variables, between the minutes of skype and teaspoons of Nescafe into my yellow mug. I’m thinking of scrapping skype. But yes, I’m back to running in the snow again, and I love it because it actually gives me an extra three or so hours of running time due to increased visibility. Long story short, I’m realizing what a luxurious life I’ve lived that’s allowed me to spend free time reading books, watching movies, playing piano, and doing yoga to Rodney Yee videos.

Continuing my Odyssey. The train rolled into Almaty at some ungodly morning hour, so I sat in the train station drinking poisonous coffee out of a machine, waiting for the buses to start running. It took me over three hours to get to the Peace Corps office which is a thirty minute cab ride away, but I didn’t care because this trip was about adventure and spending my money wisely on food, drink, and cover charge. The bus I was on quickly blew past capacity due to rush-hour commuting, and by the grace of God I was squeezed and pooped out of the bus at the right stop.

I immediately stripped off my stale train clothes, pulled on my stale running clothes, and jogged out the front gate. Peace Corps office is a little removed from the center of the city and so its home to stunning views of the mountains and city, perfect for a frosty fall morning. Toward the end of my run I found myself in a huge park with a sort of pantheon at the entrance. I ran around the edge of the park, but felt myself eventually drawn to a huge raised monument in the center at the back. I ran up the stone stairs, watching the Tien Shin mountains grow in front of me like giant white monsters, and when I got to the top I spun around to face the city. It spread out before me in all it’s smog and glory, the polar opposite of the ice capped wonderland at my back. It was a cold morning, but I was feeling epic, so I stayed at the lookout and did a monstrous workout as the sun came up. By the time I got back to the Peace Corps office, it was late in the morning and I felt like a god.

As the goal of my trip was to have fun, my first night in Almaty was spent at bars, smoking hookah, and didn’t end until around four in the morning. I rolled out of bed at ten and struggled outside into the cold drizzle in order to get in a run before my six-hour bus ride to Zharkent, where I was going to help conduct a teacher training seminar. The run got better as it went on and by the time I got back to the apartment I was literally shaking with hunger. My traveling buddy and I packed quickly and trudged outside into the rain, finding a ‘lagman’ restaurant on our block, across the street from the Green Bazaar. Lagman is an Uighur (ethnic group between Kazakhstan and China) food that’s basically fantastic spaghetti. As we looked at our heaping plates of noodles, my friend commented that this would either be the best or worst decision of the day. Halfway through my plate I declared it as the best decision, which he cautioned might be premature. On the taxi to the bus station the situation became critical as I broke out in a clammy sweat and my tongue got thick. It was hands-down the worst decision of the day, maybe my trip, but I was healed by a trip to the soviet bus station bathroom and passed out cold once we got on the bus.

Six hours later we rumbled into Zharkent and were met at the bus station by one of our incredible volunteer hosts. He stuffed us in a cab and drove us to his girlfriend’s house where a feast of more lagman awaited us. The table was spread with cakes, vodka, wine, cookies, cognac, and chocolates, but like I mentioned, the main course was another steaming plate of lagman. I don’t know how my stomach handled it, but I didn’t leave my seat for over three hours. Maybe the vodka settled my roiling gut, I’m not sure, all I know is that it was one of the best nights in Kazakhstan and I woke up the next morning feeling like a champ, ready to give a presentation about developing meaningful relationships with your students.

I’ll write about my odyssey to Almaty in sections, sticking as much to the story as appropriate. So here goes, and I guess it makes senses to start at the beginning, a Saturday night snowstorm. My train ticket was for 11 pm, scheduled to arrive in Almaty on Monday morning. A cold snow storm was ripping through Petropavlovsk, making the old Soviet city harshly beautiful. After getting a questionable haircut from my favorite stylist, I met two friends for the only good dark beer on tap in this entire country. Coming off a pretty severe cold, I let them do most of the talking in our train station bar, and just tried to eat meat chunks and drink beer without coughing or making disgusting noises with my nose. It was pleasant, and I got on the train and passed out.

The next morning I got a better look at my section companions and noticed that it was a Russian father and son, another Russian guy, and a Kazakh babushka. I’m talking ethnicities (whatever that means), they were all citizens of Kazakhstan. The men were unusually civilized and compassionate for men, and we were all treated to a holiday breakfast by the Muslim babushka, it was the first day of Kurban Eid. I’m not really a fan of the moral behind the story of Abraham offering to sacrifice his son, but the holiday itself manifested in a pleasant multi-cultural breakfast, always a treat.

Two unfortunate things followed. First, halfway to Almaty in the former-gulag city of Karaganda, the single Russian man was replaced by a Kazakh man with a penchant for beer and salted fish. He was harmless, but he stank and was irritating. The fish didn’t help. The second unfortunate event was that I had a completely inappropriate thought while standing by the bathroom. I was listening to music and staring out the window when the this thought just popped into my head: “Taylor Swift is the musical voice of our generation.” Don’t know where that came from, but the feeling was uncomfortably sincere. Then I started reading Little Women

The kids rocked it though. There were souls, a headless horseman, James Bond, Zorro, and a lot of stylish zombies and witches. Girls all over the world are the same, it’s like they have this little switch in them that goes off at Halloween, even if they’ve never celebrated it before, the switch tells them to use this holiday to make themselves as pretty as possible while still kind of being spooky. Not that it always works, but the effort’s there. Maybe this shouldn’t surprise me, maybe it’s just another example of how "In contemporary patriarchal culture, a panopticon male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women: they stand perpetually before his gaze and under his judgment".

My friend asked me what I thought of that quote the other day, and besides thinking that there was some truth in it, my biggest thought was wondering why the author didn’t just say: “Nowadays most women feel like they’re always being judged by men?” I know that it’s fun to put a little Foucault in your writing, but you end up sounding like such a prick. Shit, me using the word “prick,” must be the panapticonal chauvinist writer residing in my own male consciousness.

We had a costume show and I threw candy at their heads, a mummy wrapping competition, pumpkin carving, bobbing for apples, blindfolded sampling of chocolate, brains, and eyeballs, and a disgusting bobbing of apples/sharing germs. It was amazing. One girl left and said it was the best day of her life, I think she had too much chocolate.

Last Monday I remembered that someone had told me about a basketball game at the sports school on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so I put on my running shoes and jogged over after dusk, a nice twenty-minute jog that wasn’t as fun coming home. I expect everything in this country to be a tweaked version of what I’d normally expect, but basketball was refreshingly normal. At first it was just a bunch of high school kids, but then a bunch of guys my age showed up and we played against a rotating high school squad for over ninety minutes. It was good basketball; the kids were below average individually, but played well as a team offensively and had a vicious zone defense. I was hacked, jumped on and the victim of too many moving screens, but I was in heaven.

It was pitch black at nine when I walked outside the gym to go home. I literally couldn’t see five feet in front of me and stumbled around until I got to a road and followed it home. I felt bad ass until I stepped through a snow-covered puddle, then I felt sorry for myself. Anyways I was frozen by the time I got home, so the first thing I did was bring three armfuls of wood in and heat up our stove until the water boiler was making groaning sounds. Then I kept my eyes open just long enough to fry some eggs, eat them by the pechka and sink into bed.

I could barely stand up the next day. Basketball rocked me.

The last time I wrote, I mentioned running through a part of Sergeevka that I’d never seen before, which is sad because I live in a small town in Siberia. While I was on that run, I came to a road that seemed to connect our town with a tiny neighboring village that I’d also never been to. My reasons for avoiding this village were a little better, because before I saw this road, I’d thought that the only road to Akambarak was a single-laner that runs straight west from a complex of abandoned buildings on the north side of town. I used to live in this area and was repeatedly warned against running this road because of dogs, but had to find it out for myself just to make sure.

As I ran past what looked to be old turkey farms, I heard barking and turned to see four massive dogs running at me from inside the low buildings. I sprinted ten or so yards back down the road to a section of torn up asphalt and started throwing it at the dogs. The worst part was that their human just stood behind them and watched the attempted assault. Anyways, I’ve been avoiding that road and subsequently that village ever since, but when I saw another way to get there, I figured it would be the perfect Saturday run.

I was dressed warm and had all the time in the world to do my run, so I savored running through the new snow, shoes crunching and breathing in the crisp air. The first thing I did was circle the village to an idea of the dimensions, then I switch-backed through the streets. There were “big” houses and tiny houses, but the thing that bound them together was that everything felt old-world. Snow unquestionably added to that sensation, but it was magical to see a guy in a horse-drawn sleigh, or another bringing his cows to the well. Lassy-type, pull your bucket up wells; they were on almost every street, very cool to look at but probably not as cool to use. I tried to find the center of town, and to the best of my knowledge it was a street that connected the cemetery and the school. The cemetery was small and well-kept, and the school was a beautiful three-story building that dwarfed everything else in the village and made me jealous. Our school is not so nice. Running makes me feel epic and melodramatic, so the it seemed very significant that all the town had was a cemetery and school. Life and death, rebirth, that kind of thing.

The snow started to fall as I made my way back to Sergeevka, and by the time I reached the square it was falling fast in thick soft flakes. I stopped and walked through the square because I wanted to savor the moment. Looking at the looming abandoned apartment buildings through the heavy snow made me think about the fact that I live in a three-dimensional world, or that the world is at the very least three-dimensional, but probably has more dimensions than I can comprehend.

Then I started thinking about things like the fact that if I wanted to, I could just run off the road and go touch that tree, and that my body is real mass that takes up real space, and that I can do so many more things than I do, and that I’m not living in a track no matter how tracklike it seems sometimes. I think screens, brains, and laziness all obscure this idea, and I miss out on so much of the reality around me. It’s funny, because I look at our cat, and she doesn’t seem to be fooled by two-dimensional reality the way that I am. She doesn’t give a shit what’s on my computer screen. No matter how trippy it is, she’s way more interested in what’s simple, but real and in front of her, like my slippers or the curtain on my door. Hate when my cat’s right.

Saturday the 15th of October

It’s Saturday morning. I’m sitting outside in the sun and soaking up all this Indian summer has to give me. After eating plouf (rice and meat soaked in oil) and singing to Disney musicals while making my coffee, I walked outside in my slippers to read in the sun. I drank a whole pot of gas station coffee and since no one is home I stood outside for number one, enjoying the steam that rose off the night-blooming flower patch. My host mother left for a pilgrimage to Turkestan (Kazakhstan’s Mecca), or at least I thought it was an important Islamic city, but I’ve since learned that it’s sought out by all kinds of people to cure their ailments, including my orthodox Christian host mother.

Haven’t figured out religion here or anywhere yet, but from what I can see, it’s a lot like culture, makes people feel special and different from each other, but ultimately results in everybody doing the same thing. Which makes sense then that people only freak out when they corner you and you’re pressured to admit that you haven’t got religion or any other orthodoxy, including atheism, blinded by fear to the openness that your position affords them in communication.

As I notice inconsistencies like this in the people around me, I wonder what inconsistencies they see in me. Health is another obvious one, people always searching for the magic potion, incantation, place, instead of sitting in the sun, eating vegetables, and exercising. But what do I do that doesn’t make sense? Actually, doesn’t make sense might not be the right term, because that implies there’s a “sense”. I’m curious about what do I do that brings me more pain than pleasure, or what I could do that would do the opposite.

Teaching is a mind trip. Every once in a while I like to sit with the students when my counterpart is reprehendalking to them and try to feel their place again. It’s scary how easy this is to feel without even trying, just the physicality of being in one of the chairs facing the chalkboard. I want to start chair circles. Teaching is kind of like growing up again, realizing the humanity of the institution that formed you. The wasted time, the crappy lessons, the flawed people, the imperfect ideology, are all scary when I think about it. But it’s not just the teachers, in fact, I’d say they’re often the ones who fight it the hardest. It’s our society, many societies, that have decided that education is just another thing, a shitty nine to five job for those who fell short of their ambition, instead of seeing it as the infinity complicated and magical thing that it is, the development of our next generation, the strengthening of what we are as a species.

Monday the 17th of October

So the past eight days have been perfect. Nights are cool, mornings are crisp, and the sun warms into the seventies during the day. Even if we don’t have a single other day like that for the rest of the calendar year I will be grateful. Each nice day past the first of October is a gift, because it could easily be total shit and misery. Not that our citizens don’t do their best to fight paradise by burning trash, creating the illusion, or maybe not, that Sergeevka is perpetually on fire. I didn’t feel bad about sneaking an evening cigarette the other day because I figured as long as I’m inhaling smoke, I might as well get narcotics. That’s not fair I guess, to the best of my knowledge we don’t have a waste disposal system here, so you do what you do. No, screw that, it is fair, you live in a town, your kids play in a town, clean that shit up. Anyways on Sunday afternoon, I sat cross legged on a granite cliff, looking at Sergeevka a few kilometers away, just breathing, breathing the fresh air into the bottom of my lungs, drinking it.

I went for a Sunday easy run in the brown steppe and stopped at the rock formation by the river to do yoga on my way home. I was only in my purple short-shorts and I figured that as any day could be my last, in the short-shorts, at least until spring, I’m gonna be naked as much as possible. Balance poses take a whole new kind of focus when falling means fifteen feet to granite.

So the last thing that I’ll say, is that becoming a short-term home owner makes me even more appreciative of the women in this country who do everything. I’m only taking care of myself and the dog, but between cooking, cleaning, working, and heating the house, I realize how precious free time is. It’ll settle down now I’ve bought groceries I know how to cook with, but these women… I’m impressed.

Saturday the 22nd of October

I talked up the weather on Sunday and then on Tuesday it mean-mugged me. The sky was gray, the air was damp, and my clothes weren’t warm enough for the first fifteen minutes of my run. My joints were uncomfortably cold and I wanted to get out and back as quick as possible. To avoid the wind, I ran into the village, crossing the main road to the other side of town. I snaked my way through the dead grass behind our tuberculosis sanatorium, aiming for the low-slung Russian orthodox church that I’d passed once in a taxi on my way our of town. The sanatorium looked simultaneously creepy and welcoming from behind, creepy because it’s surrounded by large trees and empty buildings, welcoming because in contrast to those other buildings, it was lit up inside.

The old church was beautiful; it sat low to the earth, the fat blue onion domes barely rising above the one-story houses surrounding it. Something about the church, the domes, the old-world stonework, the small windows, or maybe it’s angular grounds setup, seemed powerfully different and exotic to me. It made me think of a Jewish more than anything else, strange because it didn’t look like any temple I’ve ever seen, but the impression was still strong.

Running around to the other side of the church, I saw the cemetery stretching back into the brush, through the poplar trees, and finally into the steppe. I’d always been curious about our cemetery and it seemed odd that I’d never come across it, Sergeevka being such a small town, but it was one of those mild curiosities that just kind of simmered in the back of my mind. Each of the graves was lined with a small iron fence, usually painted white, and although the newness of many graves was evidenced by the photo impressions on the tombstones, the cemetery itself was overgrown and abandoned looking.

I kept running through the east side of our town, possessed by a kind of elation, the elation of discovering something new in a place you thought you understood. My head swiveled back and forth as I jogged through the streets, trying to absorb the atmosphere that felt increasingly old and Russian. The Soviet asphalt was mostly still there, the streets were long and clean looking, and the houses were tiny and new to me. I felt high by the time I reached home and opened my gate, completely changed from when I locked it an hour before. Fall might have touched down only to jump right into winter, but I have a good feeling about this year.

Gas station coffee never tasted better. I saw a black brick of something peeking out behind Nescafe Gold in the store the other day and asked the store lady if it was real coffee. “Nescafe is real coffee,” she said offended, handing me the brick, “What are you talking about?” I was too busy reading the loopy English Combines to make sweet and full coffee harmony to pay her much attention, but when I saw the words “Ground Coffee” I almost kissed her. Not sure how well that would have gone over, but maybe for a moment she would have forgotten that she worked in a tiny section of an abandoned apartment building. It tastes like burnt dirt and reminds me of Super America.

I bought the coffee on my way home from my weekly tutoring session. I was in a great mood, I found coffee, this tenth grade guy from the “B” class had showed up for the second week in a row, and little things seemed to be trickling down into my students’ consciousness’. Take my lesson on fitness; we were brainstorming different ways to be fit and one of the kids says “eat vegetarian.” It felt like the world had just creaked to a stop. “Meat is what makes you smart, lets you live through the winter, makes you strong, keeps you fertile/virile, protects you,” are only a few examples of the meatisms I’ve been informed of. It is as central to this country as the flag, the President, the capital city, and their grammamas. And I get it, I have respect, Kazakhs were historically a nomadic herding people and meat was their life. However, modernity hits hard when you keep your diet of high-fat meat and you stop living physically in nature.

Long story short, a week ago I transformed Thoreau’s argument with a farmer in favor of vegetarianism into classroom introduction. I asked a student to draw a big strong-looking bull on the chalkboard and then asked them if they were bigger, stronger, and tougher than a cow. They looked at me like I was an idiot and said of course not, cows are huge, they sleep outside in the winter, their bones are enormous, and have muscles that make us looked like pencil-necked economists. Okay, I said, stupid question. Then I wrote the word vegetarian on the board and grinned at them. It took a moment, but then they started laughing when they got my point. I left it at that for the day, but the lesson I learned was that presentation is everything, I can sit on my soapbox all day and expound on statistics, which I love to do, but one real example is sometimes worth a billion peer-reviewed journal articles.

I’m an amateur teacher, and each day I realize how true that is, I rarely go home without thinking about things I really want to change or things I really want to keep doing. Interacting with male students has been the trickiest, because I have to do more than just show up and be charismatic. But I learned something the other day, if a kid isn’t working, sometimes all he needs is you to just sit down with him and non-condescendingly work with him individually. Shit, everybody loves to feel seen and sometimes I forget that because I get lost in the theater of it all. It’s sad that it takes so little, but most of the time I’m just too clueless.

Intention too, they pick up on it. Example, today I was halfway through a great class on fitness, and then everything fell apart. The person I was teaching with started to harangue the class and I just stood awkwardly staring at this one kid’s face, trying to figure out what happened. Then I got it, I assigned an activity that was too difficult and subsequently the class went to shit. By this time, all of the ninth graders had hard looks of defiance and the other teacher looked like she was going to have a stroke. So I dropped my fist onto the desk and asked to everyone to give me a moment. Then I broke the unspoken rule for teachers here, I apologized and told the class that I made a mistake in assigning that text. Teachers do not, ever, say that they messed up, and their eyes all went wide. In the extra moment that earned me, I hushed the other teacher and said that I would try not to make that mistake again, but that if I did, it was their responsibility to let me know. It shouldn’t be their responsibility, although it would be nice, but I’m only slowly learning this teaching thing, so I figure that I can ask and hope that my student’s share some of the burden of my limitations. If anything, I think at least it allowed them to see under the veil for a moment, that I know that I’m not perfect, but that I also want to be the best I can be.

But being a teacher in Kazakhstan isn’t all lessons and students, and for international teachers day it was about getting down. Wednesday night was cold and rainy, like all of October, but I thought it would be interesting to at least check out the Teacher’s Day celebration at a close by bar. I was one of four dudes there, so I was on wine and vodka duty all night. The party met Kazakh standards of toasts, food, dancing, and lots of drinking. I enjoyed myself and ate enough to keep up with the drinking, which I did enough of to keep up with the dancing. Most of the time everything feels normal, but every once and a while I look around me with true wonder at life’s strangeness. This time my eyes wandered from person to person as I danced in a kind of dreamlike state to Russian techno music. What a life we live.

Around ten o’clock I had enough, grabbed my jacket, and walked into the black night. The cafe is in a forested area of town, and everything seemed to melt together in the trees. It was a cold and wet, but the vodka in my belly kept me warm and relaxed, or as relaxed as I ever am here in Kazakhstan, which means ready to fight or run at most anything. As I hit the “main drive” that runs into our square, one of the huge abandoned apartment buildings stood out against the sky, it’s hollowed-out windows staring at me like a thousand empty eye-sockets. For a moment it felt like I was looking at the personification of the Soviet Union, harsh ambition and massive failure. It was beautiful.

The whole night felt magical, like everything was dipped in something sweet. The condensation from my breath floated in the air in front of me and blew away in the cold breeze. Our gate was locked, signaling that my host-mother was still m.i.a., so I did a little mental juggling to find my keys, and made sure to bar the door behind me. It was a good night.

Running with a storm coming

Try to understand for a moment that you are energy. That your body is mass, which is energy, which is the same as everything else in the universe, that when your feet hit the ground, it’s just two manifestations of the exact same thing coming into contact. It’s one thing to intellectualize this idea, but something else to feel it. After a lunch of Kumis (fermented horsemilk) and hotdogs a couple of weekends back, I set out running towards our dam, staying to the dirt road running along the river because it was just me and my purple short-shorts. I ran towards a trail on the other side of the river that I hadn’t run before because the path seemed to die past the old quarry. However, I figured that the summer rains were far enough behind me that I could go through the high grass along the bank, path or not.

After bloodying myself through the brush for a while, I eventually found another path and started cruising through the grass in optimal think-about-life mode, and somehow fixated on the idea that twenty-five years ago I didn’t exist and at some point in the future I will cease to exist again. I’m not talking about darkness, infinity, pain, suffering, or fear; simply put, I was not and I will not be. I stretched out, breathing in the warm prairie air, and meditated on that. I didn’t exist and I won’t exist, I didn’t exist and I won’t exist, I didn’t exist and I won’t exist. I wasn’t trying to think about this idea, I was trying to understand it in my cells, in my brain, in my tendons, to feel it. I think reading novels by dead people helps me better conceptualize this, because when you read someone, even though it’s a one-way relationship on the surface, there’s a certain communion that happens, even though the reality is that they’ve long since rotted away in the physical form.

Suddenly I felt it and it felt good, like life is a breath, a gift, it’s less than a moment in time in which energy transforms itself out of all of the energy in the cosmos and beyond in such a way that allows me to play, to be, for one moment. It’s one thing to think this, but another to understand it, understand that I am the same as everything else in the universe, grass, dirt, birds, the sun, clouds, plastic, my shoes, nats, everything. It feels like everything and nothingness, sameness and limitlessness. Life is a moment, it’s a breath in time, a manifestation of energy that gives birth to consciousness, a gift, the energy in the universe dancing so as to give me the ability to become. Life felt like such a blessing and it felt like the only sin in the world was not to make the most of that moment.

Humans have been walking the earth for a while now and we’re not even close to getting it right, but that makes sense because we’re animals with big brains, an evolutionary blip that’s having some serious consequences on our planet. What baffles me is how wrong we get it. I currently live in a country struggling with rabid nationalism, severe gender discrimination, post-soviet fallout, and buckets of oily cash coming out of the Caspian Sea; I won’t even begin to go into how we’re getting it wrong here in Kazakhstan. Sometimes I succumb to the idea that it’s all better back home, but then I get online and read the Times, Herald, or any other news outlet coming out of the States. The other day I got to read about the Anoka-Hennipen school district in Minnesota and its problems with harassment in regards to sexuality. Eight suicides, four probably related to discrimination regarding sexual orientation, a kid being pee’d on in a bathroom stall, not feeling safe in the locker room, all that good shit.

So again, I understand why we don’t get it right, but I don’t understand how we get it wrong so bad. This is the school district of Michele Bachmann, a top candidate for the United States Presidency, who has been silent on this issue, instead choosing to spend her time fighting a vaccine that keeps girls from getting cervical cancer. It’s just peachy then that she’s supported by groups like the Tea Party and Minnesota Family Council, people obsessed with telling individuals how they should and shouldn’t love each other and have sex, while trembling that Democrats are pushing dangerous Socialist agendas that invade our personal sovereignty, like taxing the top two-percent of the population, trying to make sure all of our citizens have good health care, and funding our public schools. Funny how it’s just in the United States, and pretty much excluding all serious American economists, where we’ve decided that government is bad and the source of our problems.

With our big brains, why do we keep simplifying things to good and bad? Right and wrong? How did we get so twisted as to tell people how they can love, that this loving is the issue when children are being harassed to the point of killing themselves. The words I hear is that people don’t want children to think something is “good and normal” when it is not. In my own experience, not to mention Weinergate, the Lewinsky scandal, and all those closeted Republicans keep on awkwardly getting caught diddling, in terms of sex, people seemed to be pretty much driven by their, uh, own sexuality, whether they like it or not.

Anyway, I have hope. I have a hope that the more people are able to talk to each other and to understand each other, the more we’ll be able to love each other regardless of our differences. I’m choosing to believe that we’re at a junction, that technology has just taken humanity far enough to put us out of our element, but that we can control it in order to take us to the next level of living.

The world can be a mean and violent place, and unfortunately I’ve been witnessed and been a part of more of that than I’d like. One thing I’ve noticed about violence though, is that it’s always awkward. I’m hopeful, because for one thing, it seems like it’s always more unnatural to be violent than not to be, it’s easier to be kind than to be aggressive.

I believe that this aggressiveness and fear is in us because we need it in extreme cases, and that’s what people are exploiting. Fear, lust, aggression, anger, they’re all in us, but they’ve been stoked by people using other people for money and power. Acting on these feelings can feel right, natural, and even good, but I don’t believe they’re conducive to long-term happiness. However, I have hope that there are enough intelligent people in the world that people will begin to start exploiting one another’s deep humanity, long-term happiness.

There are people now who starve themselves in deserts, train with  military instructors, eat foul-tasting foods, and do all sorts of unpleasant things to find happiness, so it seems as though humans are beginning to understand that happiness isn’t some cheap pill that can be bought, now we think it’s an expensive and painful pill. At least we’re moving forward. Or maybe we’re at the brink of a revolution in how we do things and look at the world, like a kid in a candy shop, we’ve realized that gorging ourselves on ease and technology won’t make us better or more satisfied people. That living in the moment really means to live in every breath, not perpetually satiating our impulses.

This isn’t an easy thought or way of life, especially when you don’t have a culture that’s supporting it, let alone a culture that goes in the opposite direction. I constantly struggle to maintain that kind of discipline, even while understanding that committing myself to conscious living is what resonates and sounds me out. I’ll wrap this rant up with this last flurry of thoughts, that in choosing to live your life, you not only treat yourself, but you treat others better. Pity-parties are weak, and looking back on my blessed life, I can see that not only do I have no reason to complain, but that the people who I’ve met who have the most reason to lament are often the last to do so.

Writing about happiness and the importance of gratefulness is always easier when you’re happy and life is charming, but I’ll write about it anyways. Starting school, living in my new home, sitting outside on warm fall evenings, life has been very good lately, and it’s not challenging to recognize that. My real question is wondering if I can keep this same attitude through March, whether I’ll be looking back on my hippie-gooey philosophy and eat my words. I’m going to try not to though, if not for my mental health, for the mental health of my students.

Teaching is powerful, and has so much potential for good and destructiveness. The fact that teaching forces one to into constant interaction with young vulnerable people, increases the stakes. Never before has something so challenged, frustrated, and inspired me. Kids just open up and literally pour out warmth, pain, anger, or happiness on you. I’m trying to see how I can let my own humanity come through, but keep that humanity focused in a way that will ultimately be positive for my students. I don’t want to just react and let bad emotions feed off each other, or conversely shut down and be a robot. So let my last comment be a shout out of respect to all the teachers out there, with a special one to my mom, the best mom and educator I know, you taught me how to seek peace, learn, and fight, and to my dad, the best father and hardest boss I’ll hopefully ever have, you taught me how to seek wisdom, think, and be patient. You both taught me how to question and love life and everything about it, and I can’t thank you enough.

The love of my life working hard at my side in the garden.

I think I threw out my back the other day. Got up and dug out potatoes, had lunch, then split and stacked wood all afternoon. One of my best days in Kazakhstan, despite the stupidity  for throwing out my back. The sun beat down on the asphalt that I occasionally bit my axe into, and it didn’t let up until late in the evening. After an hour, the steel handle was slick with my sweat and I started to fade. When I got tired, the whole thing struck me as absurd. I was using energy from food that got its energy from the sun to chop wood that grew using the same energy from the sun so that I could burn the energy this winter in order to keep my own energy from freezing. And chopping wood is probably the most basic thing I can do besides eat and reproduce.

My woodpile. Looks smaller than I'd hoped.

As the second or third hour wore on (I’m still not sure how long it took), I adjusted my form. I set the little pieces up in rows of seven or eight and walked down the line chopping at them crookedly. For the big stumps, I swung the axe one-handed to get the rotation behind my back, caught it over my head, adjusted to dad’s safety stance, and then jump slammed it into the wood before falling on the axe for support. I am overwhelmed with empathy for those suffering from back pain.

On Thursday the 25^th of August I moved from my temporary home into my latest residence. I was bumming out when I woke up because I really liked the family I was living with and would have loved to finish my service there if they just had an extra room. So I went running. Emotional running can mess you up, and that morning I did it good. After my warmup I  went right into a five by five workout that I used to do. Five minutes as fast as you can go, then five minutes recovery; not a hard workout unless you’re stupid and out of shape. After four minutes I tasted pink, like I was eating my lungs. Then I jogged for five minutes, dangerous due to the illusion of recovery. On my next set I tasted pink again, a little more and a little earlier. I’m a slow learner.

During my recovery minutes I noticed that I was running through golden, waist-high wheat. So beautiful. The wind blew the heavy tops back and forth and it looked like the whole field was dancing to an orchestra of rustling feathers. I note the melodrama but I couldn’t care less, because sometimes life is so beautiful it’s mind-blowing. Then I started my next set and ate some more of my lungs.

Moving in went smoothly except for my rice bag splitting as I got it in the door. I took it be a good sign. I helped put in a new TV, organized my things, and then passed out on my pullout couch.

The next day I headed into Petro for a three-day weekend and end-of-summer party with all of the volunteers from our oblast. The city is always an adventure, lots of food, cooking, karaoke, and wine. When I can, I go to the nearest store and find the one bottle of dry red that they have for the odd foreigner who comes in. Other options are terrible beer, sweet wine, cognac, and vodka. I’m slowly learning the uncomfortable dance with vodka; eat your food, take your shots slowly, and be the first to stop drinking. This meant that my duets to Baby and Womanizer were done inexcusably sober.

No comment.

I had a good time, but I was glad to be back on Monday, I wanted to meet the new woman in my life and adjust to my new digs. Galina is a 58 year-old grandmother who is just about to get pension, which means that in fifteen days we will be seeing a lot more of each other. Her house is small, airy, open, with a good vibe. There are old lady things all around, but for some reason it works. (note: “old lady things” is a reflection on the items, and in no way implies that being 58 makes one an old lady) We have bright kitchen, two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom, a dog named Sharik, and a kitten named Murka.

Kittens are disgustingly cute. Something about the way that they run, or just kind of jump around makes it hard not to pick them up and nibble on them. This one is a princess who thinks she can speak human, and although I’m completely under her spell, I’m working on setting boundaries. Every time I lay down my ratty Lion King blanket to do push ups and sit ups, she plops right down in the middle wanting to play or cuddle. This usually ends in cuddling.

The dog is another story. For the first three days I was here Sharik would literally froth at the mouth every time he saw me, pulling at the end of his chain so hard that I thought he was going to choke himself. The one time that I accidentally got close to him, he bolted behind his dog house, snarling and hiding with spittle running down his snout. When I asked, Galina said that he was a lost cause and that I shouldn’t bother, because he acts the same with her brother who’s been coming over regularly for years. When I said that he seemed more afraid than anything, and she told me how she found her drunk neighbor beating Sharik with a pole in her yard one day after coming home from work, he stumbled back through the fence saying he was looking for his chickens.

I figured that I would just start by talking to him every day when I went by, giving him food, and being as nonthreatening as possible. I bragged that we would be friends in two weeks and I’d be petting him in three. By day six, I’d completely won him over. I like our new friendship, but I’ve cooled off a bit because he smells like a biffy full of dead animals. Big heart though.

Then I got to thinking, why am I so much more patient and understanding with animals than I am with people. I’ve dismissed people for far less than snarling at me and threatening to rip my throat out, but in the last month I’ve made friends with two dogs who’ve treated me like a t-bone. I’m not sure why this is, but I suppose it has something to do with the fact that dogs are so different from me. It’s sad that it appears as though similarity makes it harder to be compassionate, although it kind of explains things. I mean why in the world would Americans keep buying into Tea Party bullshit, ehm I meant rhetoric, that screws over their most needy countrymen. Actually all of us, but it’s hard to imagine that all the lower to middle-income whites, ehm I mean voters, would knowingly vote against their own interests.

My buddy Muktar from my old house.

The tragedy is that we seem to have so little compassion for our fellow citizens that instead of stopping to see the clouds in the paper, we automatically assume the paper magically appeared and manifested itself the way it did because it wanted to. What I’m trying to say is that I need reflect on the fact that I accepted that Sharik acted the way that he did because of reasons out of his control, and although I didn’t appreciate his behavior, I didn’t blame him and leave it at that, I showed him a little compassion every day and hoped that he would change. But people do this all the time with animals and rarely with other people, because we/I tend to focus on the behavior instead of the reasons for it, or even the end result. How cool would it be if I could stop and treat one person the way that I treated that dog, or if we as a human race could start looking at each other that way. Fuck, even if we get nowhere, it just feels better.

But enough on the moralizing, as my little brother always reminds me.

After lunch on Monday, Galina asked me if I could try to fix the plumbing in our bathroom and install a new faucet and euro-shower head. I’ve never done anything like it in my life so of course I said yes. The initial plumbing luckily only needed some tightening and new washers, and I figured I would just memorize how the old stuff went out before installing the replacements. It worked too well and now I’m worried that she has an unrealistic sense of my abilities.

It’s a different life now, and I’m trying not to get my hopes up, but I like it. On Tuesday I helped Galina pick cherries from the top of our cherry tree, and the ones she’s didn’t preserve in jam she put in a bowl and drowned in sugar. Although I have my own space and appreciate it, it’s also nice to sit back and have tea with her, learning about her life, this town, and just a different slice of life. She’s broken down twice during conversation, and I’m choosing to look at it as a good sign instead of a mental health indicator. All in all, I couldn’t be happier with my new home.