2005-05-25
Thoughts and recollections from a jetlagged fool after his first day back home in Nyékládháya...
I'm here. Back in Nyekladhaza and it feels great! It is amazing how much and how little has changed. The same Star Wars posters adorn the walls; the same coffee cups lie in the back of the cupboard, chipped and stained; I am sleeping on the same bed I used 12 years ago in the two room apartment; and my brother and anya are just as they have always been!
It was a decent journey -- could have gone much worse. The fella sitting next to me on the flight to Amsterdam was pretty darn large; so it was a bit uncomfortable -- wedged between a cold window and a gorilla. I didn't have much of a lay over in Amsterdam, just long enough to use the toilet. Unfortunately, this also meant that the baggage handlers didn't have enough time to get my main suitcase on the flight either. There was an extraordinarily obnoxious American family surrounding me on the plane ride to Budapest -- they all had iPods and, instead of taking their headphones off when talking to one another, they would shout to each other over the headphones. Moreover, the mother or girlfriend of the father, I couldn't figure out which, was singing the words to her music loudly, on purpose, and the little girl kept shouting -- stop it, Mum, stop it, hee, hee, hee... It was aweful! When I arrived in Budapest the only bag that came through was a tiny second one with my shoes and a Darth Vader sleeping bag. Luckily I had my computer, camera, and MP3 player in my carry on or it could have been a costly mistake! Instead, I am only lacking in clothing right now. But Adi gave me a t-shirt and my suitcase is currently being delivered from Budapest to Nyekladhaza; so no worries. Immediately played cards last night with my anya, Adi, and Viki.
Now 03:25 in the morning. Jetlag is a real bitch. Big winds outside, rattling everything and making dogs bark. It was 85 degrees today and we were fortunate to miss a monstrous storm dropping golf ball sized hail today – it went just north of us. My luggage came. It took all day, which meant I couldn’t leave the village until around 4 p.m. but it was worth the wait – I’m now all set for the summer, clothes and all. Because we didn’t know when the bag would come, Viki and Adi rode into Miskolc twice today on his motorcycle, instead of all of us taking the bus in together. They went a third time, when Viki’s parents picked us up at 4:15 p.m. and took us to the city center. Of all things, we went bowling! This was the most surreal experiences I’ve had in Hungary in some time, watching two older Hungarian villagers bowl for the first time in a megamall that makes Rosedale look antiquated. The irony of the situation was intense – Viki’s dad dressed in his typical village attire, while surrounded by 100s of 20-something year old metrosexuals, who look no different than a metrosexual anywhere else, throwing gutter balls and laughing. To make it even more surreal, the bowling lanes were lit up in fluorescent lighting – so it was like midnight bowling. To Viki’s Mum’s credit, she almost beat both Adi and I using the underhanded roll which I demonstrated early on in the game. She had a blast! Adi and I then wasted about $5 racing each other in a two person car racing game and playing foosball before heading over to McDonalds to eat dinner at an outrageous price ($5 for a value meal?).
I’ve had a fascinating day, actually, just hanging out with my brother and his fiancé (that is Viki). There is classic Hungary and globalized Hungary irony going on everywhere. For example, Viki is always offering to cook for the men (Adi and I). Yet she won’t eat, or won’t eat much, when cooking, because she “wants to eat at McDonalds” later. Viki’s parents eating Chinese food in the food court of the mall and dousing it in salt because it “it doesn’t have the flavor we are used to.” Adi has been describing his 14 hour work days without pay and only minimal comp time at the American corporation in the old Lenin City (Now TiszaRiverNewCity), including how they call him at 2 a.m. without hesitation even though he officially works 9-5, they audit him every two weeks to make sure the Hungarians aren’t stealing anything, and he has a company number instead of a name… (this is shit right from Elizabeth Dunn’s “Privatizing Poland” book but described by a dearly beloved brother of mine!) Meanwhile, I helped Adi today move and organize every single dismantled piece of his VW Bug that was lying on the garage floor in a pool of car oil today. He patiently described to me the inner workings of its engine, the rear axle, and everything I asked about. He went over which pieces he is going to sandblast, which pieces he is going to outright replace, the details of the body – that is being restored in the shop right now, and how long he thinks it will take for him to reassemble the 400 or so parts now in the cellar. Corporate grunt by day, car maker and electronics genius by night – he is also currently rewiring Apa’s (my dad’s) backup motorcycle right now to give it “more kick”!) It feels great to get to know my testve’rem again. For reasons I don’t feel comfortable explaining online, I believe there was a reason that in 2002 things were a little different between us. The stresses of life, etc. Things are like they have always been, except now he is engaged to a really nice, outgoing, friendly woman.
We went to Viki’s brother’s flat in Miskolc after bowling, mostly because Adi’s future in-laws wanted to and they had the car! There the food, the cake, the chips, the vodka, the Diet Coke(?), and the cigarettes came out in full force! Viki and her brother are both artists and so we sat in a small apartment room with a giant canvas of a big breasted woman reading under a smiling moon. The painting was about five or six feet tall and was phenomenal… towering over us as we ate and sipped cola. It has taken me a while to get used to how much smoking is going on here. I had totally forgotten, but once in a windowless room about three quarters the size of Birgit’s and my kitchen with four chain smokers, you remember quite quickly. Saw an ice cream man and ate some gelato ice cream for 80 cents before coming home. When we got home, my Anyam insisted that we must be hungry. Of course we weren’t because we had eaten at McDonalds. Anya’s spaghetti, which has been my favorite since 1994 when she made it, sat neglected. We played cards – the four of us again, as Viki lives here with Adi these days and has for years – and then popped “The Day After Tomorrow” in the DVD player. (I still haven’t seen a legal DVD or CD in this country since arriving. If there is a market for CD- & DVD-Rs, Hungary is a good one!) The movie was corny and cheesy, but the fact it was in Hungarian made it enjoyable for me, because I couldn’t understand most of the bullshit science dialogue or the crap father-and-son reunion garbage. At midnight we went to bed.
After an hour of tossing and turning, I couldn’t sleep. I began reading Persopolis 2 (or something close to that). It is as incredible as the first, I think. I highly recommend these graphic, autobiographical novels – and they do read like novels too – to everyone! The first was about growing up in revolutionary Iran as a little girl. The second is about living in Austria as a teenager leaving Iran and then returning. I’m not done with it, and I dread finishing it. I made myself put it down so I have something to get through jetlag in the coming days. I decided writing down the day’s events, albeit in a scattered pattern was worth doing. After all, I am here to do research and be self-reflexive… (this may not make sense to anyone who hasn’t endured a tedious graduate school seminar or two.)
What I am learning so far, after one day, is that all this neoliberal theory is correct, but all this reactionary, leftist bullshit about protesting, fighting for unions on campus, and arguing that socialism worked in many ways is bullshit. If anything, right now I think we could learn a lot more from the resistances used to circumvent the authoritarian socialist states in everyday life, akin to Verdery, to contest and circumvent the pressures of neoliberalism than the by rehashing the very same processes co-opted by socialism (e.g., solidarity, unionism, and vanguards of the educated elite). Shit, what is most incredible to me is that “community” is still very important here. Though the veneer of globalization is everywhere around me – half of downtown Miskolc has been bulldozed to make way for new megamalls that have exorbitant prices – people still care about others aside from themselves. They aren’t arranging their households to look like the malls, and not simply from a lack of money. Friends’ and family’s happiness still matter. And happiness isn’t gauged merely on success in the workplace, healthy habits, or political correctness. What matters is that people are still laughing here. They are laughing a lot more than they do in the Twin Cities. Much of the humor is self-deprecating and cynical – e.g., on the train the windows we couldn’t see through and the extreme heat on the train were topics of jokes; or Adi joking about his gut and the fact that he is lazy – but it is never overly antagonistic or judgmental. Who is anyone to judge? Everyone I have bumped into here seems resigned to the fact that they are caught up in the same shit – e.g., transformation and capitalist processes – as everyone else. One might as well laugh at it instead of get angry. And that is something I’ve missed. This past year at UMN I have read a ton of literature analyzing these processes, etc., and all it did was make me an angry cynic. Far better to be a subtle, tongue in cheek cynic. We are all born into a social system that we will never come close to understanding, so one might as well poke fun at it and play the game with only half interest, as there is far more interesting stuff in the world than analyzing it to death or spending one’s life trying to win the unwinnable game of consuming one’s happiness.
Who am I to talk? I don’t know. I feel the change coming over me – the who cares, everything will work itself out part of me that disappeared after a year of working a job just to join the system. Should be interesting to see where this takes me. Hopefully a more relaxed mental state similar to one’s I’ve experienced before when living overseas, not to one closer to insanity. That’s all for now. It’s four in the morning and the cleaning lady is coming at seven. I’m going to be a groggy shit tomorrow!
It was a decent journey -- could have gone much worse. The fella sitting next to me on the flight to Amsterdam was pretty darn large; so it was a bit uncomfortable -- wedged between a cold window and a gorilla. I didn't have much of a lay over in Amsterdam, just long enough to use the toilet. Unfortunately, this also meant that the baggage handlers didn't have enough time to get my main suitcase on the flight either. There was an extraordinarily obnoxious American family surrounding me on the plane ride to Budapest -- they all had iPods and, instead of taking their headphones off when talking to one another, they would shout to each other over the headphones. Moreover, the mother or girlfriend of the father, I couldn't figure out which, was singing the words to her music loudly, on purpose, and the little girl kept shouting -- stop it, Mum, stop it, hee, hee, hee... It was aweful! When I arrived in Budapest the only bag that came through was a tiny second one with my shoes and a Darth Vader sleeping bag. Luckily I had my computer, camera, and MP3 player in my carry on or it could have been a costly mistake! Instead, I am only lacking in clothing right now. But Adi gave me a t-shirt and my suitcase is currently being delivered from Budapest to Nyekladhaza; so no worries. Immediately played cards last night with my anya, Adi, and Viki.
Now 03:25 in the morning. Jetlag is a real bitch. Big winds outside, rattling everything and making dogs bark. It was 85 degrees today and we were fortunate to miss a monstrous storm dropping golf ball sized hail today – it went just north of us. My luggage came. It took all day, which meant I couldn’t leave the village until around 4 p.m. but it was worth the wait – I’m now all set for the summer, clothes and all. Because we didn’t know when the bag would come, Viki and Adi rode into Miskolc twice today on his motorcycle, instead of all of us taking the bus in together. They went a third time, when Viki’s parents picked us up at 4:15 p.m. and took us to the city center. Of all things, we went bowling! This was the most surreal experiences I’ve had in Hungary in some time, watching two older Hungarian villagers bowl for the first time in a megamall that makes Rosedale look antiquated. The irony of the situation was intense – Viki’s dad dressed in his typical village attire, while surrounded by 100s of 20-something year old metrosexuals, who look no different than a metrosexual anywhere else, throwing gutter balls and laughing. To make it even more surreal, the bowling lanes were lit up in fluorescent lighting – so it was like midnight bowling. To Viki’s Mum’s credit, she almost beat both Adi and I using the underhanded roll which I demonstrated early on in the game. She had a blast! Adi and I then wasted about $5 racing each other in a two person car racing game and playing foosball before heading over to McDonalds to eat dinner at an outrageous price ($5 for a value meal?).
I’ve had a fascinating day, actually, just hanging out with my brother and his fiancé (that is Viki). There is classic Hungary and globalized Hungary irony going on everywhere. For example, Viki is always offering to cook for the men (Adi and I). Yet she won’t eat, or won’t eat much, when cooking, because she “wants to eat at McDonalds” later. Viki’s parents eating Chinese food in the food court of the mall and dousing it in salt because it “it doesn’t have the flavor we are used to.” Adi has been describing his 14 hour work days without pay and only minimal comp time at the American corporation in the old Lenin City (Now TiszaRiverNewCity), including how they call him at 2 a.m. without hesitation even though he officially works 9-5, they audit him every two weeks to make sure the Hungarians aren’t stealing anything, and he has a company number instead of a name… (this is shit right from Elizabeth Dunn’s “Privatizing Poland” book but described by a dearly beloved brother of mine!) Meanwhile, I helped Adi today move and organize every single dismantled piece of his VW Bug that was lying on the garage floor in a pool of car oil today. He patiently described to me the inner workings of its engine, the rear axle, and everything I asked about. He went over which pieces he is going to sandblast, which pieces he is going to outright replace, the details of the body – that is being restored in the shop right now, and how long he thinks it will take for him to reassemble the 400 or so parts now in the cellar. Corporate grunt by day, car maker and electronics genius by night – he is also currently rewiring Apa’s (my dad’s) backup motorcycle right now to give it “more kick”!) It feels great to get to know my testve’rem again. For reasons I don’t feel comfortable explaining online, I believe there was a reason that in 2002 things were a little different between us. The stresses of life, etc. Things are like they have always been, except now he is engaged to a really nice, outgoing, friendly woman.
We went to Viki’s brother’s flat in Miskolc after bowling, mostly because Adi’s future in-laws wanted to and they had the car! There the food, the cake, the chips, the vodka, the Diet Coke(?), and the cigarettes came out in full force! Viki and her brother are both artists and so we sat in a small apartment room with a giant canvas of a big breasted woman reading under a smiling moon. The painting was about five or six feet tall and was phenomenal… towering over us as we ate and sipped cola. It has taken me a while to get used to how much smoking is going on here. I had totally forgotten, but once in a windowless room about three quarters the size of Birgit’s and my kitchen with four chain smokers, you remember quite quickly. Saw an ice cream man and ate some gelato ice cream for 80 cents before coming home. When we got home, my Anyam insisted that we must be hungry. Of course we weren’t because we had eaten at McDonalds. Anya’s spaghetti, which has been my favorite since 1994 when she made it, sat neglected. We played cards – the four of us again, as Viki lives here with Adi these days and has for years – and then popped “The Day After Tomorrow” in the DVD player. (I still haven’t seen a legal DVD or CD in this country since arriving. If there is a market for CD- & DVD-Rs, Hungary is a good one!) The movie was corny and cheesy, but the fact it was in Hungarian made it enjoyable for me, because I couldn’t understand most of the bullshit science dialogue or the crap father-and-son reunion garbage. At midnight we went to bed.
After an hour of tossing and turning, I couldn’t sleep. I began reading Persopolis 2 (or something close to that). It is as incredible as the first, I think. I highly recommend these graphic, autobiographical novels – and they do read like novels too – to everyone! The first was about growing up in revolutionary Iran as a little girl. The second is about living in Austria as a teenager leaving Iran and then returning. I’m not done with it, and I dread finishing it. I made myself put it down so I have something to get through jetlag in the coming days. I decided writing down the day’s events, albeit in a scattered pattern was worth doing. After all, I am here to do research and be self-reflexive… (this may not make sense to anyone who hasn’t endured a tedious graduate school seminar or two.)
What I am learning so far, after one day, is that all this neoliberal theory is correct, but all this reactionary, leftist bullshit about protesting, fighting for unions on campus, and arguing that socialism worked in many ways is bullshit. If anything, right now I think we could learn a lot more from the resistances used to circumvent the authoritarian socialist states in everyday life, akin to Verdery, to contest and circumvent the pressures of neoliberalism than the by rehashing the very same processes co-opted by socialism (e.g., solidarity, unionism, and vanguards of the educated elite). Shit, what is most incredible to me is that “community” is still very important here. Though the veneer of globalization is everywhere around me – half of downtown Miskolc has been bulldozed to make way for new megamalls that have exorbitant prices – people still care about others aside from themselves. They aren’t arranging their households to look like the malls, and not simply from a lack of money. Friends’ and family’s happiness still matter. And happiness isn’t gauged merely on success in the workplace, healthy habits, or political correctness. What matters is that people are still laughing here. They are laughing a lot more than they do in the Twin Cities. Much of the humor is self-deprecating and cynical – e.g., on the train the windows we couldn’t see through and the extreme heat on the train were topics of jokes; or Adi joking about his gut and the fact that he is lazy – but it is never overly antagonistic or judgmental. Who is anyone to judge? Everyone I have bumped into here seems resigned to the fact that they are caught up in the same shit – e.g., transformation and capitalist processes – as everyone else. One might as well laugh at it instead of get angry. And that is something I’ve missed. This past year at UMN I have read a ton of literature analyzing these processes, etc., and all it did was make me an angry cynic. Far better to be a subtle, tongue in cheek cynic. We are all born into a social system that we will never come close to understanding, so one might as well poke fun at it and play the game with only half interest, as there is far more interesting stuff in the world than analyzing it to death or spending one’s life trying to win the unwinnable game of consuming one’s happiness.
Who am I to talk? I don’t know. I feel the change coming over me – the who cares, everything will work itself out part of me that disappeared after a year of working a job just to join the system. Should be interesting to see where this takes me. Hopefully a more relaxed mental state similar to one’s I’ve experienced before when living overseas, not to one closer to insanity. That’s all for now. It’s four in the morning and the cleaning lady is coming at seven. I’m going to be a groggy shit tomorrow!
