Momentum

One of the things I had forgotten about the application of oneself to large-scale projects is that momentum plays a big factor in getting said projects done. Last week presented more of a challenge than may have come off in my last post, and I had a pretty hard time - first sitting myself down and organizing all my notes, then beginning to actually write. Progress was--shall we say--halting, and as a consequence, the five days of work I had anticipated turned into seven.

But by Sunday night, with Section 1 finished, I was back on schedule, and the previous four days of solid writing set the stage for Monday, when I woke up, organized my notes for Section 2, took care of some other business, found a setting conducive to working in one of Sofia's many coffee shops, sat down, and, intermittently over the course of the next 14 hours (don't worry, I changed locations), pounded out the entirety of that section. That left me with two full days to write Section 3, which I just finished mere minutes ago. So, 13,000 words in, I'm still right on schedule. And now, having pigheadedly stuck to the time budget I set for myself, I have four free days to go explore Vienna.

It just goes to show that, at least for me--and, I suspect, for much of homo sapiens sapiens--starting (or restarting) something is the hardest part of completing anything. It's the same way when I have to go for runs - I may, in some extreme cases, let hours go by in the most extravagant displays of procrastination the Earth has yet seen, but once I'm out the door, it gets done. Having spent so much of the previous week writing, without even a pause for the weekend's sake, catapulted me right into this week's bout with the lingering parts of my childish irresponsibility.

None of this bodes well for next week, of course--a four-day weekend reserved purely for sightseeing and jollity will surely kill any momentum I may have built thus far--but for this week, I'm right on schedule, and (as I just realized, having looked up at the calendar) nearly halfway done with the initial drafting process, which should be significantly harder than the revision stage. So, all I have to do is to continue to procure the smoke and mirrors for another 3 weeks, which will take us well into the month of June (Hard to believe, isn't it?).

So there's the first third of this thing disposed with. As of now, it's on (the alarming) pace to come in between 120 and 150 pages, and has an outside shot at threatening 40,000 words - much longer than I had envisioned it. But we'll see how much of the actual material I write ends up on the cutting room floor. Probably, though, better to be too long than too short.

Next time, we'll talk about my weekend in Vienna, and after that, it's back to work. Until then -

This Mother's Day is Full of Post

Something I suppose it took me until about 9 months into my Bulgarian adventure to notice about Bulgarian society is that peace and quiet are not especially valued here, at least not in public.

This has been the week that I've dived headfirst into vast tracts of academic writing, and because I seem to have such a hard time working when I stay home, I've been seeking out good spots where I can sit for a few hours, churn out a couple of pages, and relax as much as possible while doing so. The problem in every place I've tried thus far has been that music seems to be a sine qua non of public space here. Coffee shops, restaurants, and the like have all been filled, to varying degrees of volume, with music, chatter, and/or commotion. I suppose there are some of you who can work perfectly well under these kinds of conditions--I remember that I used to work better with music on in the background--but now, I have the hardest time putting words together to form coherent thoughts and sentences together to form cogent arguments when my ear is being bombarded with what-have-you.

And thus has gone the week - a series of never-ending searches for a good space to work, followed, when a remotely satisfactory space has been found, by the exhaustive cudgeling of my brain in sometimes vain attempts to string thoughts together in manners that will somehow advance my thesis.

It's been an interesting experience, delving back into academic writing; it's something I haven't done in quite a while. But--resounding praises to the deity of your choice--I'm making satisfactory progress so far. The goal for this past week was to complete the introduction and Section 1 of this thesis, and come the neighborhood of midnight or 1 AM tonight, these will indeed be finished, albeit much longer than I had envisioned them being. But their unanticipated lengths, in some ways, are a blessing, as I was--and remain--unsure that I have enough material and will be able to say the same things in a sufficient number of different ways expound enough upon the critical subjects to flesh this thing out to the length I had originally envisioned. But I'll let you in on a little secret: I may not be actively striving to write in the concise manner that high school teachers upon college professors have tried to beat into me by virtue of pain and F's.

One scheduling matter that I had hoped to avoid, however, was working on the weekends. The way this process had come together in my mind prior to the actual moment when I sat down and dug in was that I would slowly grind through page after page, Monday through Friday, and so earn weekends that would be gloriously free and unfettered by self-imposed exile in order to get done the tasks that needed doing. Having failed to complete the week's requisite amount of work by Friday evening, however, I've had to work straight through this weekend, which isn't exactly how I had envisioned spending it. To unabashedly mix two wildly disparate pop culture references, I have met Lumbergh, and he is me.

On an unrelated note, wild pianos have appeared at various points in my neighborhood. There's currently an old, beat-up upright, encased in an inexplicable exoskeleton of styrofoam, sitting in the middle of the path in the Doctor's Garden--a four minute walk from my house--which I've taken the liberty of playing a few times as I've walked by. There's also a much nicer one, a quasi-in-tune 6-footer, sitting underground in the Sofia University metro station. This one, more-or-less constantly attended by surprisingly well-trained Sofians, has been a bit harder to gain access to, though I did manage to bang out a rendition of Tiny Dancer on Thursday. These have apparently been placed in preparation for the Subtitled Music Festival, which is taking place this week. Exactly what said Festival will constitute, I couldn't tell you, but I've certainly been reaping the early benefits of its publicity in the form of the little vain thrills that attend the public performance of anything. 

Nearly every time I've passed one of them by, there's been some mix of jazz, classical, and blues issuing therefrom. And as I've started seeing the same people over and over, the greater meaning and lesson to be taken from this episode has begun to dawn on me. It's a very real illustration of the power of music to bring people together in ways that otherwise wouldn't happen. The crowds stopping for minutes--or, in some cases, hours--at a time would have otherwise continued on their way, following the quotidian routines of their life, but for these accessible, public implements of music, and skilled hands to play them, in their midst. But, by virtue of this art and its accessibility, a great many Sofians have already been brought together--and more will surely follow suit--in a manner totally foreign to the norms of everyday life.

Looking to the next week: 

This coming week will be of a character broadly similar to the one of the week past. Two more sections of my thesis await being bullied into existence, after which their oppressor is going to take a long weekend in Vienna to visit fellow Los Angeles Fulbrighter Andrea before she, surely called to be one of the Elect, has the privilege of returning to the City of Angels on June 1st. 

Happy Mother's Day to All, including my own forebear, if she's reading this. I love you! Treat your moms well today. Stay tuned for more on climbing this Final Hill.

Reset

My time here in Bulgaria has so far managed to divide itself neatly into more-or-less coherent, theme-oriented chapters. Chapter 1, were there to be a forthcoming book (there isn't) would detail FISI and my first two weeks here. Chapter 2 would cover the first days in Sofia up through the High Holidays, including my first trip to Munich. Chapter 3 would comprise the month of October and my trip to Romania, and Chapter 4 would be the story of the rest of my time up until the Holidays - rushing to finish the allotted amount of research, my weekend trip to Belgrade, and tackling the titanic task of finishing my Grad School applications. Chapter 5 would, of course, be about merry, merry Christmas in Germany.

Chapter 6 would be the account of how I delved back into my research, traveled to Istanbul, found out about my Grad School auditions, and began putting all sorts of undue stress onto myself because of them. Chapter 7 would be the month of February back in the States, the memories of which remain a nightmare and a scourge unto my psyche. Chapter 8 would tell all about 'Conference Month'--as I've taken to calling it in my mind--and my trips to Berlin and Thessaloniki. And Chapter 9 would include the euphoric episodes of Spring Cleaning and Passover, making my final trip to Munich, heading off to the States for my brother's wedding, and what has transpired in the past week.

On Thursday, I interviewed Kremena Stancheva, one of the featured singers of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, to ask her about how her craft changed between the time when she was an amateur singer in her home village of Kovachevtsi and when she began singing professionally in Sofia. It was truly awesome--and a little surreal--to sit in the living room of one of modern Bulgarian folklore's celebrated figures and to get to chat with her about her experiences, having her get up halfway through to serve tea and banitsa, continuing to pick her brain about the state of modern folklore, and to get what was my most direct firsthand account of the stuff I've been trying to assimilate and understand for the better part of 8 months. And when it was over--having completed my archive work on Wednesday--I was officially finished with the research portion of my grant.

In my Fulbright application, I had originally proposed a deadline of April 30 to get this done, which would give me exactly 2 months to write my thesis. While I missed that deadline by 3 days (and I won't actually begin writing until tomorrow), it's a nice feeling to be (roughly) on schedule, especially since I proposed that deadline with no knowledge of my subject and absolutely no conception of what the situation on the ground would be.

So I'm in good shape, more or less. I have 5 full weeks to pound out my first draft, which I'm hoping will come in somewhere around 50 pages. You can do the math--all I need to do is to produce 2 pages per day for 5 days a week--and it doesn't seem that daunting. We'll see how things actually progress, but I'm optimistic that I can do a satisfactory job in that amount of time, it will leave me with 2 full weeks to revise, tweak, edit, and proofread.

To celebrate the end of this long slog quest for knowledge, I headed back to the Black Sea, along with a number of my Fulbright compatriots, for a long weekend starting on Friday. I'm on the bus back to Sofia right now, in fact, and as we fly past the forests and fields of Bulgaria, we are surrounded by largely untouched, heartbreakingly beautiful landscapes that conjure up in my mind images of an isolated, far-flung pre-modern agrarian society. It really puts me in the mood to come out here, into the Balkan Middle of Nowhere, and just sit for awhile. Ah, to be a monk, with the sole purpose and quest of finding enlightenment.

At any rate, we stayed the weekend at a little for-rent apartment complex in Byala, a resort town of moderate size located on the coast halfway between Varna and Burgas. Most of us arrived on Friday afternoon and spent a few hours resting up from our travels before making dinner and having a not-crazy party before collapsing, exhausted, into bed before midnight. Yesterday was spent largely at the beach (and what a хубаво beach it was) before we packed it in to repeat the previous night's festivities. Today, we packed up to leave, spent a little more time in the sand, and miraculously made it back to Varna on time and without incident before going our separate ways. It was a lot of fun, considering it may have been the last chance we had to party mostly together before our collective year here is done.

So, this was a weekend to reset, to mentally sweep away the entirety of the complicated, confusing, convoluted process of living--academic, emotional, and personal experiences alike--that has brought me to this point, and to prepare myself to climb this last, entirely new and unbekannt mountain that lies in my path, the one through which, by virtue of the work necessary to crest it, I will earn the right to conclude my year and leave this place satisfied and at peace. After this weekend, nothing that I've done up to this point matters any longer; I am left only with the knowledge I've accumulated, the growth I've experienced, and the people to whom I've hewn close. Nothing else.

This thesis is the last thing standing between this point and the end of my stay. I'm not going anywhere, save a long weekend trip to Vienna, and my focus is now narrowed to the singular task of finishing the year up strongly. Whereas the last 8 months have been marked by variety, the next 2 will be defined by their simplicity, consisting of nothing more than writing and celebration. It puts me back in the mindset of those years when I was in high school, when, as soon as the weather turned truly, gloriously warm again (as it has finally done this week), every one of us, to a student, was checked out and ready to finish up.

But it's overarchingly strange to think that this will truly be the final chapter in the story of the year I spent in Bulgaria. I've gotten used to this place, my travels to destinations abroad notwithstanding, and while I'm definitely ready to go home, I'm finally realizing just how great it's been to me and for me. I can say with confidence, regardless of how these last two months turn out, that it has been one hell of a year, and it's been genuinely good for me.

Leaving, Again

My bags are on their way to being packed, and my dad and I are hitting the road in about an hour. This is the last time I'll bid farewell to Pennsylvania before I come back to the States for good.

Somewhat unexpectedly, it's been quite difficult for me to go through the mental process of saying goodbye today. The last two times, while they included their share of difficulties, were different, I think partly because my sentimentality at leaving was tempered with the excitement of going. I'll attribute the challenges of doing so this time around to the emotional content of this trip. My brother's wedding on Saturday was beautiful, and it made me happier than I ever would have anticipated to watch him take this leap with his wife, Jenna, and to welcome her into the family.

I suppose what it did was to throw into relief everything that my life has been over the last 6 years. And, to be quite honest, I wasn't expecting that. I hadn't anticipated just how much this would affect me. But: Here I am--a somewhat new man thanks to a dose of new perspective--and things look, from this vantage point, both a bit clearer and a bit more muddled.

Over the last 36 hours or so, I've had to take in a large part of the contents of my life and reassess where I really am. The most immediately direct and powerful result of that process has been my assessment of the relationships I've built over the last 10 years of my life, and how I've prioritized and valued them.

I certainly haven't done so in any kind of egalitarian fashion - nor could I--or should I--have. A part of being human, something I've learned as I've grown up, is that some relationships are, necessarily, more fulfilling, and some more fun, and some more important, and some more difficult, and some more instructional, and some more complex, and some more organic, and some more trying, and some more stable than others. And as we develop them and grow through them, the only healthy thing we can do is to prioritize those that are better for us over those that are less so based on what we feel and what we know at the time. We can do no better than that.

So I've been doing that, and as I've gotten better and better at it, the overall quality of the  relationships that I've cultivated and maintained has--surprise!--risen, and dramatically so.

But what this weekend--and, really, this entire week back at home--has done has been to make me reexamine some of those relationships and to really think about their places in my life. And what I've realized is that I haven't given some of them the energy and time they deserve.

I had an OK life in Pennsylvania before I went off to university. Every adolescent's existence is fraught with self-esteem issues and heartbreak, melodrama, frustration, and tough, painful lessons, and I certainly experienced more than my fair share of those. Overall, though, it could have been a lot worse, and what it did, at the end of the day, was force me to grow. But the time I had after I moved to LA and started my new life was so overwhelmingly positive and happiness-inducing (Though it was, by no means, idyllic or perfect - there was just as much drama in my life during those four years as during my previous four) that I unconsciously tore down and devalued various aspects of my life back in Pennsylvania. In short, my time in LA was so much fun that my former life seemed negative and incomplete by comparison.

And while I can now, with the benefit of hindsight and psychological insight, understand why I mentally denigrated the memories of the first 18 years of my life, I can also now see that it wasn't the healthiest or most judicious thing to do. I had a few relationships back on the East Coast that I, instead of tearing down, should have been building up.

Many of them were with members of my own family. To be sure, some of those relationships were actually served by the introduction of space into them, and have since regrown, stronger and better-adjusted. But at some point during my college years, I think I realized, luckily, that I really missed not having them close by, and this imbued me with something for them--appreciation--that I don't think I had had enough of prior to that. And so the time I spent away from them actually strengthened our relationships in the end.

This happened with my brother. He and I, separated in age by 8 ½ years, were never particularly close, and the fact that we were two totally dissimilar people didn't do anything to mitigate that. But the last 6 years, having thrown my growth process into hyperdrive, have closed the gap between us, and we've also grown more similar to each other as people. Having begun to develop a relationship with him in the past couple of years has been more fulfilling than I had ever thought possible.

I think that's part of the reason why I've been so affected by his getting married. I'm incredibly happy to see him begin his life with Jenna, who is pretty damned excellent herself, and I'm excited, as their family, to share in their household.

I have a lot to think about, coming back to the East Coast in the Fall; in particular, about what I'm going to take with me from LA and what I'll have to leave behind. And in my emotional state this weekend, I remembered something important that I had forgotten: That I have some truly precious things, things from my former life that have endured through all the changes and situations and lessons of the past few years, that I'll be coming back to. And, despite the emotional maelstrom of the last month, that makes me, at my core, happy.

And they lived happily ever after.

 

Pause

Today, on this meteorologically erratic, rainy-sunny-delugeal-sun-setting-over-peacefully-parting-clouds day, I will make soup with the matzah remaining from Passover, call home, listen to the Phillies game, and take a breath.

It has been a disjointed week. I'm caught in the limbo of the middle ground between trying to finish the fieldwork component of my research, a quick trip to Munich and Vienna, and a trip home to the States on Friday. The week past, and the one coming, are no-man's-land, flexible time whose use I have not yet determined, yet ganz wertvoll; I feel the time I have left in this place, and thus, the time to fulfill my purpose here, inexorably slipping away, grain by grain.

This past week, and this next one, are planless - with much to be done, full of specific tasks to be accomplished, but utterly lacking those sine quibus non of all constructive progress: definitive order, clear organization, engaged motivation to use them to their fullest.

This is what it is to drift.

I could write about the weather which greeted me upon my return to Sofia on Friday, about how the rainy season is here in full force, evidenced by sometimes-torrential downpours and intermittent hailstorms mixed thereinto. I could write about going out for pizza and beer last night with some friends to celebrate the end of Passover and the subsequent reintroduction of leavened breads and wheat products to my diet. I could write about later being swept into a beautiful Easter vigil at an Orthodox church, being given candles, witnessing the entirety of the musical ceremony, congregating with hundreds of other churchgoers as the crucifix was paraded around the church, being subsumed into the thrice-completed procession around the church, and walking home at 1 AM, accompanied on the streets by hundreds of Sofians, all bearing lit candles, keeping them lit the entire way back to their homes.

I could write about my excitement at my impending excursion back to the States to witness my brother get married, see old friends, and be able to enjoy the pleasures of home without the hindrance of a stressful purpose for being there, in contrast to my last trip home. I could write about my anxiousness to finish my research and start writing my thesis, my soon-to-be-frenzied drive to move towards that final step in my work here, the completion of that process being the golden key that will unlock the gateway to what promises to be the best summer of my life. I could write about all the fun things, still prospective, that lie on the horizon, waiting first to be planned, and then realized, over the course of my final two months here.

But today, and for this I sincerely apologize, I simply and utterly lack the inclination to do so. Today I would much rather simply check in with you, my magnanimous readership, tell you that I'm surviving, drop hints about all the exciting things that lie ahead, and call it a day. The internal battle to procure a high-quality, detailed account of this particular episode in my life is one from which I will have to accept a moral victory, in the fact of the realization of this post, alone.

Just know that things are the same as they never were, and that I will see you very soon. Good night.

Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden, und der Tag hat sich geneiget.