This Time of Year

really gets to me. It's not the cold or the snow ... those have actually cushioned the ugliness a bit. It's the dark. And the long stretch of nothingness until Memorial Day. The endless string of mornings of getting up in the dark, showering in the dark, getting dressed in a cold bedroom, and trudging off to the bus before sunrise ... it saps my enthusiasm, motivation, cheer. I don't want to do anything and I have a hard time making plans. I don't have any good ideas.


This is a picture of our living Christmas tree, the newest member of our family, which I had intended to write about, but I just didn't have the energy (see above). It's also to break up the text, because an unnamed critic likes this blog better than its sister blog, Blogging Saddles, because it has more pictures. :)

So I'm going to steal other people's ideas. I was reading the New Yorker on the way home the other day and found two very apt descriptions. I'm always struck when someone is able to describe an idea or event in a way that really conveys an experience to someone who hasn't experienced it. I guess that's why some people make their living writing for others, and the rest of us don't.

The first is an article about two guys who were in the Peace Corps in China at the very time I was in the Peace Corps in Armenia. Peter Hessler seems to have given it a lot of thought and come up with how living in another culture for two years affects us. Or perhaps I just had a very similar experience of Peace Corps. He writes:

The experience changed you, but not necessarily in the way you'd expect. It was a bad job for hardcore idealists, most of whom ended up frustrated and unhappy. Pragmatists survived, and the smart ones set small daily goals: learning a new Chinese phrase or teaching a poem to a class of eager students. Long-term plans tended to be abandoned. Flexibility was important, and so was a sense of humor. There had been nothing funny about the Peace Corps brochures, and the typical American view of the developing world was deadly serious--there were countries to be saved and countries to be feared. That was true of the Communists, too; their propaganda didn't have an ounce of humor. But the Chinese people themselves could be surprisingly lighthearted. They laughted at everything about me: my nose, the way I dressed, my use of their language. It was a terrible place for somebody stiffly proud to be American. Somtimes I thought of the Peace Corps as a reverse refugee organization, displacing all those lost Midwesterners, and it was probably the only government entity that taught Americans to abandon key national characteristics. Pride, ambition, impatience, the instinct to control, the desire to accumulate, the missionary impulse--all of it slipped away (Jan. 12, 2009, p. 32).

The other bit that I thought was dead-on, and helped me understand what I've found so troubling about the u-rah-rah response here in the U.S. to events in the Middle East (I couldn't find a way neutral way to say it without being this vague!), was by David Remnick in the Talk of the Town section:

As in so many instances in the past half century--the Lebanon War of 1982, the "Iron Fist" repsonse to the 1988 intifada, the Lebanon War of 2006--the Israelis have reacted to intolerable acts of terror with a determination to inflict terrible pain, to teach the enemy a lesson. The civilian suffering and deaths are inevitable; the lessons less so (p. 18).

The more terrible pain inflicted, the worse things seem to get, and at least 1,200 Palestinians have been killed. Nobody seems to learn anything. Or perhaps it's just mid-January talking.