Adjusting

It has been nearly a year, but I’m back in the Balkans.

The last post I made to this blog spurred the greatest number of comments from readers I didn’t know personally of anything I wrote all year. I was angry at the treatment of my thesis adviser and it came through in my writing. Even though I’d already arrived back in the United States, I was still invested in one of the dozens of national conflicts that still rage across this region.

I was so invested, in fact, that it felt as though I was bringing the Balkans with me back to the US. The very first day I got back, my parents came to meet me in Chicago and within minutes of us sitting down at a restaurant, I realized our server was Albanian, started a conversation with him in Albanian, had another Albanian coworker of his come over, and promptly got into a heated argument with them about language issues in the Balkans. My parents had to intervene and beg the men to drop the issue so they could talk with their son for the first time in a year.

I remember my Dad asked me, “Is this what it was like in Macedonia all year? Is this normal?”

And my response was… well, no! But… well… yes. Sort of. Passions run high. People of all types, educated and not, love to hash these issues over. Hard-headed certainty with no room for shades of grey shows up at every level of conversation. I am not of this constellation of cultures and I cannot participate at the level of a native, but I had adapted closer to the Balkan norm over the year. That this marked such a change in me for my parents was startling. It got me to thinking I might need to distance myself a little.

So I have not posted in a year. I spent the year moving to a new city, starting graduate school, picking up a new sport, making friends, making enemies, and discovering new sides to my virtues and faults. It has been a good year, a mostly Balkan-free year except for purely academic work. I kept loose contact with my friends and colleagues, but not as well as I should have. I got the distance I thought I needed. I got too far away.

So now I’m back, throwing myself back into the mindset, the languages, the sense of frenzied, purposeful disorder of this place that simultaneously frightens and charms me.

I had a cunning plan that involved me landing in Sofia, taking a bus the same day to Skopje to crash with a friend of a friend, trucking myself to Albania one day later to see a fellow Fulbright-alumna and rekindle the smoldering remains of my Albanian knowledge, and finally bus it back to Ohrid just in time for the summer seminar on Macedonian linguistics. The plan immediately, of course, went awry, when my trusty, beat-up hiking backpack didn’t arrive with me.

So now I am spending the night in Sofia, woken up by politely intoxicated Serbian metalheads coming back from a Metallica concert and kept awake by the human body’s poor evolutionary adaptation to transoceanic jet travel. The hostel worker, who kindly has kept me company the past hour or so, is finally turning in. The day was full of muddled negotiations in Bulgarian-accented Macedonian and supplementary sign language. I’m not at full game strength yet, but I managed to make up a new, crazy plan to fit the changing circumstances out of what was available here.

A conflict zone is hard on the psyche. But I think I came away from last year a better, more complex person. I’m hoping another go at the Balkans this summer will push me even further.

I’m going through a bout of depression and lethargy right now. It’s lasted almost a month, getting a lot more intense since I came back from Tirana. I’m not doing too well at overcoming it, sad to say. I still have a lot of work to do before I leave, but I’ve accomplished almost nothing on my mental to-do list. About all I’ve been able to do is barely keep up with social obligations and collect some raw data on Macedonian narrative structure and a particular Romani dialect. I’ve yet to analyze that work, a big step. I’ve also failed to write an abstract for a conference talk I’ve committed to giving in November, failed to go any further with the results of my corpus data, and failed to continue working on my Macedonian and Albanian. I’ve sunk into something like culture shock again.

This was brought into sharp relief for me last night when I went to a gathering of Macedonian friends at a kafana, a sort of restaurant where alcohol flows free, meat comes out on big platters, and people stand on chairs to stick 100 denar notes into the crevices of guitars as musicians playing old national folk songs roam from table to table. Everyone at my table, despite ranging in age from 19 to no more than 25, knew the songs by heart. They rattled off a repetoire of at least twenty folksongs in Macedonian and Serbian. There was a feeling of shared culture that I just had no access to. Moreover, I didn’t even understand the ritual that well, since outside of karaoke bars and small parties, singing in public is kind of stigmatized among Americans. The feeling of alienation I had was wholly accidentally, but nonetheless powerful.

Moreover, for some reason my Macedonian really just wasn’t cutting it last night. The last time I hung out with this group of people, I mostly understood their conversation. But this time, it just washed over me. I couldn’t follow a single topic. I caught words and names but no content. By the end of the evening, people were simply switching into English to speak to me. I had been under the mistaken impression that my Macedonian had gotten good enough that I didn’t need people to do that for me anymore.

I’m trying to maximize the number of Macedonian- and Albanian-language social situations I encounter as my year here winds down. I want to rack up as much exposure as possible before I leave and my language skills inevitably start to collapse in the absence of continuous stimulation to hold them up. But at the same time, I’m finding myself even more exhausted than usual with social contact. I’m cancelling meet-ups or failing to return phonecalls. I’m promising to get in touch with someone within the week and failing to do so. This is especially annoying my Macedonian friends. I haven’t yet successfully explained to anyone here that my frequent failure to answer a phonecall, or get back to a message within the day, is not some sudden expression of animosity. Send me an e-mail, facebook me, SMS me–anything that doesn’t involve voice I’m down with. Just not a phonecall. This makes sense to me, but it clearly doesn’t translate when I try to express to othe rpeople that the reason I’m hard to reach on the phone is not because I don’t want to talk to you, but because I don’t want to talk to you on the phone.

Not that Americans get it either. I don’t know, perhaps I’m just extremely weird, but talking on the phone with anyone except very, very close friends or family is horribly exhausting for me. I dread hearing the phone ring. The longer the conversation goes, the more my body clenches up and the more awkward my ability to express myself gets in English, much less in a foreign language. I have trouble hearing what a person is saying without some sort of visual cue, and the narrowed bandwidth causes me to misjudge emotional nuances. It’s frustrating. I have to sit down and zone out for a bit after I make a phonecall to clear all the tension out of my head. But all this translates into behavior that makes it seem like I am turning the cold shoulder on people, which is a perfectly good reason for them to be irritated.

So getting in contact with people is hard, and then meeting up with them also drains me, so if I’m not floundering through social interactions I’m sitting around like an inanimate lump. I read blogs on the internet rather than tackling my unfinished pile of books or transcribing my new data or quizzing myself on new vocab. If I could just marshal my energies more efficiently, or if I didn’t stress out as much interacting with people, I would be accomplishing so much more here. I’m angry at myself for wasting time and opportunities. I think most people would be able to do a lot more with the resources I have here than I’m doing now.

I’m still looking for a way to give myself a kick in the butt. Until then, if I seem morose or if I seem to have gone off the radar, now you know why.

I am, at the moment, a Snot Factory and the accordant coughing and sneezing kept me up last night until I started having odd half-awake delusions at about 4am. This all being a preface to saying I finally went to the doctor today. Despite knowing that everything medical in Macedonia is orders of magnitute cheaper than in the US, I had been reluctant to seek help so far out of ingrained habit. I am only insured for Big Scary Health Problems that would require a medivac back to the US, and if I was back there with the barebones insurance I have, there’s no way I would go anywhere except the county general emergency room, if I really needed care. I’ve heard horror stories from friends about several hundred dollar medical bills for a fifteen minute examination.

An examination here though? Six dollars. In and out with no fuss. No wonder my landlord was horrified that I don’t go to see the doctor every time I get a cold or the flu. At those prices, I would.

Despite being sick though, today was a day full of Important Tasks, one of which was changing the dates for my ticket back to the US at the end of my scholarship period. Their websites told me that neither Lufthansa nor Austrian Airlines have an office in Skopje outside of the airport, but their websites lie. I managed to find the office for both downtown. Take that, outdated websites!

This article at Slate talks about the fiscal crisis in Argentina. No, not the fiscal crisis you’re thinking of. This one is weirder: 2-peso notes are worth vastly less than 1-peso coins, and 100-peso notes don’t amount to much in comparison to 5- and 10-peso notes.

That wouldn’t have made any sense to me if I hadn’t been living in Macedonia the past five months.

Here’s what’s going on: Argentina has a shortage of coins. Since the prices for everyday things rely on small distinctions that have to be denominated in coins, being able to pay the correct price for something you’re buying and being able to receive the correct amount of money for something you’re selling both depend on having a stockpile of small change. That’s fine if there’s plenty of small change to go around, but as soon as the supply tightens, everyone is motivated to hoard. And so the supply tightens even further, hoarding gets more severe, and pretty soon you’ve got a taxi driver saying very nasty things about your mother because you’ve handed him the equivalent of a $10 bill instead of a $5 bill.

The situation in Macedonia is not nearly as severe as in Argentina, but I still recognized much of the strategization and planning ahead described by the article. Everyday purchases take on a weird significance that has nothing to do with how much money you have, but rather what kind of money you have.

Here’s how it works in Macedonia: ten, fifty, and one hundred denar notes (~$.20, $1, and $2) are acceptable everywhere. Five hundred denar notes (~$10) are usually acceptable in restaurants, but small grocers and food stalls will give you a dirty look. One thousand denar notes (~$20) can be used in foreign owned chains, big grocers, and banks, but you will not get them past anyone else for everyday purchases unless you apologize a lot first, open your wallet to prove that you don’t have change, and put on your best “stupid foreigner” face. Additionally, shopkeepers really prefer if you can give them exact change in coins for the remaining 1-9 denars of a price.

And now the kicker: ATMs never, ever, ever give you a denomination lower than 500 denars, and that’s only if you force them to. Otherwise, you’ll be packing thousands till you find a place to break them up without getting a dirty look. Which means you can have sixty dollars in your pocket and still be cash poor.

In the US, I was the kind of person who does not like going rummaging through my pockets for spare change (I hate keeping people waiting), so I was used to paying in even bills and collecting those useless pennies and nickles over months at a time to convert at a bank or a CoinStar machine.

I’ve had to break that habit hard in Macedonia. Spare change is worth a lot more in terms of avoiding embarrassment and bad vibes from sellers, and a failure to hoard enough small bills may mean you’re functionally broke no matter how much money you have. Add in the fact that I’m converting prices into dollars on the fly for rough budgeting purposes (this is easier now that the exchange rate is approximately 50 denars to the dollar, but it was 40 mkd/$ a few months ago) and my mental math skills have been getting a hell of a work out.

There are some upsides though. Normally whenever I move apartments, I have a big collection of change gathered from little forgotten nooks, crannies, and document piles to exchange for worthwhile money, just another chore among many during the transition. Maybe when I do the same here in Macedonia, I’ll probably have just the store of a couple coins in my pocket to worry about it carrying over to the next place.

Because unlike everywhere else, coins will get you nowhere at an exchange bureau.

Last night I gave the second half of a presentation on culture shock at the American Corner in Skopje, an information center, library, and all around awesome symbol of my country. The people there put huge amounts of effort into offering presentations, workshops, and materials to help people get jobs in the US, study in the US, or just learn more about the culture and language. I think it’s excellent soft diplomacy.

Anyway, the presentation was split between me and a Macedonian, Igor, who had studied in the US. He gave a general overview of culture shock, and then I related some of my particular experiences of it here in Macedonia. What was interesting is that some of the symptoms Igor cited where things I hadn’t even realized I’d been doing. In the discussion afterwards, some of the Macedonians who had lived abroad pointed out more things that resonated with my own experience. They also pointed out that it’s hard to understand just how pervasive and involuntary culture shock can be if you haven’t lived abroad yourself. I’m just going to run with that and list off some of things I’ve done or felt here that are probably part of culture shock.

• Excessive anger about minor inconveniences: I have more than once been inappropriately ornery at my roommate about fairly small things. Friends and family have also had to hear me rant with nearly sputtering rage about such matters as “they make you pay for ketchup!” or “cars park on the sidewalk!”
• Sudden intense feelings of loyalty to your own culture: I look forward to every Sunday when I go with the other Americans to one of the local expat bars and watch football. Here’s the thing: I hate football. I never watch it back in the States. For that matter, I don’t watch any sports back in the States. Here though, it somehow makes me feel more essentially American and less homesick. My roommate has pointed out that, even when I’m talking about distant American government functionaries or matters wholly unrelated to myself, I’ll say “we” instead of “they,” stressing a shared membership that he finds puzzling. It’s probably part of this symptom.
• Overeating or loss of appetite: Both, actually. Some days I forget to eat. Literally, I just forget about it. And then other times I’ll be ravenously and insatiably hungry the whole day.
• A need for excessive sleep: I’ve been fighting this one recently, because it started to get a bit ridiculous. No one needs ten hours of sleep daily.
• Feeling sick much of the time: I’ve already ended up in the hospital once, and that turned out to be a legitimate infection I needed treatment for, but I’d just ignored this one too because I’d had so many other random maladies that couldn’t be traced to anything specific before it. For example, one day I was feeling totally fine, if rather stressed out, the entire day. I came home, ate the exact same things I normally eat for dinner, got on the computer to do some work, and inexplicably started to feel queasy. That queasiness turned into an upset stomach so severe that I stayed up till five a.m. vomiting every twenty minutes. Then, magically, the upset stomach disappeared. I had no fever, no other complaints, I was suddenly the peak of health again (though still stresed). It was literally one day perfect, that night more violently ill than I’ve been in years, the next morning perfect. I suspect it was actually just a physical reaction to the culture shock stress, though I could be wrong.
• Exaggerated cleanliness: I actually don’t mind this so much, as I tend to like neat spaces, but am not very good at keeping things organized or clean under normal circumstances. Here though, I clean almost obsessively. It makes me feel like I’m taking back control over my personal space, after spending the whole day being off balance and constantly on my guard interacting in a foreign culture. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me that this sudden change in my cleanliness could be a product of culture shock.

These are just the things that I was surprised to hear associated with culture shock. The rest you’ve already probably read previously on this blog, if you’re a regular reader. The upside to all these downsides of being abroad is, when you have a good day, you have a really excellent day, as yesterday’s post testifies. It’s kind of like a high. Everything is new, everything is an adventure, and there’s no time to be bored.

That’s definitely worth it.

I was waiting to meet my friend Seth, a fellow Fulbrighter, at a park. It was dark. I could only see figures approaching the park, not their faces or clothes. One of the approaching figures stood out from the others and I spontaneously thought, “That must be Seth. He’s walking like an American.”

And only a second or two later did I realize how weird an observation that was. I couldn’t possibly tell you what “walking like an American” means. I could only say that it was distinct from the surrounding Macedonians and I only needed to be able to see his hazy outline to tell.

Much of the fun of living abroad is encountering practices, common to your new home, that are bewildering to you. And then finding out the reasons behind them. Since adjusting to culture shock and functioning in a language you don’t speak fluently are both constant grinds on your temper and your self-esteem, those little “ah ha!” moments are important pick-me-ups. Some examples of what I mean:

Something I noticed here about the three or so roommates I’ve shared living space with is that they always put their shoes out on the balcony. I’m used to taking off my shoes before going into the rest of the house back home, but putting them on the balcony wouldn’t occur to me. I might’ve chalked this behavior up to a personal fluke if it hadn’t showed up among my roommates three times in a row. Finally, I asked K if he could explain why he did that. At first he just said it was ‘habit,’ but persistent questioning revealed that it probably came from Yugoslav times. Under Communism, there wasn’t a wide selection of shoes to buy, and they weren’t exactly top quality. People kept a single pair for a long time, which combined with Communist craftsmanship meant that pretty soon you had a stinky shoe on your hands. So it was considered courteous to put the shoes outside. Since most Macedonians live in apartments, at least in the cities, this meant the balcony. Though the market for shoes has opened up, the custom remains. Mystery resolved!

Another example:

The music you hear most often on the radio is a mix of songs familiar from the top of the charts in the US and stuff you probably haven’t heard unless you spend a lot of time in gay bars. Like pretty much all Europeans, Macedonians favor club tracks and danceable techno over hip hop as their standard radio fare. I was expecting that from previous experience in German, but what I was expecting was the constant interruptions of songs. Whenever a lyricless portion of a song sufficiently long comes along, the radio announcer will jump in and read off an advertisement, timing the end of the spiel with start of the next chorus. If the song doesn’t allow long pitches, then every once and a while a recorded announcer will at least mention a bandname. So three times or more in the middle of the song you’ll hear this disembodied voice saying “Heineken hit” or “Citroën.” As you can imagine, this is irritating as hell, and I couldn’t understand why the Macedonians would stand for it. Through asking around, I eventually found out that the interruptions were a habit from a while ago.

Say Radio Station A scores an exclusive deal to play a new hit song. What’s to stop Radio Station B from simply recording A’s broadcast and then playing the song themselves? Well, in the US, A would file suit within days, if not hours of the transgression and the judge would probably only glance at the evidence before smacking B six ways to Sunday with the gavel of Copyright Law. B would be out of business, or at least severely hurting within weeks.

This whole scenario would be dead in the water in Macedonia for the simple reason that it takes an abonimably long time for any court to reach a decision, if they do at all. It could be years before any judgment was made on A’s lawsuit, at which point the damage has been done, done, and done again several times over. Lawsuits do not get you anywhere in Macedonia, or anywhere else in the Balkans for that matter.

So if you can’t depend on the threat of a lawsuit to keep B from stealing your exclusive hit song, how exactly do you persuade B to leave your tasty treat alone? You poison it. You interrupt the song with your radio station A’s callsign, somewhere right in the middle where B can’t edit it out. Preferably multiple times. The song may be ruined, or at least mangled a bit, but it’s yours.

Macedonians apparently got used to this, and so now radio stations have taken to selling the interruptions to sponsors. And thus you get commercials in the middle of music. To be fair, there are a lot fewer commercial breaks on Macedonian radio. And the cluby, dancey emphasis leads to rather longer songs than you’d typically hear on US radio. All this conspires to make the sort of interruption acceptable here that would drive listeners bonkers stateside. Mystery resolved!

About a month and a week ago I said that I couldn’t understand people my own age speaking Macedonian to each other. I hadn’t gone out with Kyril and his friends since I’d gotten back from the language seminar in Ohrid, so I hadn’t gotten a chance to see whether that was still true until yesterday. I expected the conversations between the Macedonians to be the same supersonic boom of clipped vowels and dropped consonants and unfamiliar words that I remembered from when I first got here.

As it turns out, I’ve progressed faster than I thought.

I didn’t understand everything that Kyril and his friends were saying. Sometimes I lost track of the conversation’s theme entirely. And I didn’t contribute much myself—I mostly listened and added the odd sentence or two in Macedonian or couple sentences in English every once in a while. But usually I got what they were saying. I heard most of the jokes and understood what was funny about them. I wasn’t off in space-out zone when someone suddenly changed the topic to address me.

We ate mediocre Chinese food at a mall and then walked into the old city and up the hill around the old fortress to see a photo exhibition that turned out to be closed by the time we got to the museum. So then we just sat on the hilltop looking over the city’s nightscape and talking about sex, censorship, and art. And I was actually there, part of it. I wasn’t the clueless English-speaker rocking back and forth on his heels and staring off into space while foreign, incomprehensible sounds flew all around him. I didn’t understand everything and I didn’t have much to add, but I was part of that evening. I was having fun.

And some of the isolation I’ve felt in this country began to crumble away.

One of my main headaches when I first got here was the way people in Skopje talked.

I don’t speak Macedonian at anything higher than an intermediate level. Nonetheless, in my first few days in Skopje it was like I was hearing a different language. I might as well not have studied Macedonian (and it sort of sounded like Serbian would’ve done me more good).

These days that isn’t as much of a problem. The way people talk in everyday life, rather than in formal or academic discourse, still puzzles me and reduces my comprehension level, but I can function. I’m even starting to pick up on some of the differences! As a linguist, this of course amuses and delights me far more than reasonable for any other person, but I’ll present what I’ve found so far.

Pronunciation: All colloquial language forms go in for reduction of some kind. The problem is learning exactly what kind of reduction, when it occurs, and what’s being reduced. Some of the vowel quality distinctions in Skopje seem to be flattened. The e sound raises rather close to the i sound. Still distinguishable, but harder to tell apart in rapid speech and harder still if you’re processing this as a foreign sound system. The sound v drops between vowels all the time, especially in common words. So pravime “we’re making” becomes praime or even prajme. Final vowels are also devoiced, which is a phonetic process by which a vowel sounds like it’s being whispered. I’m used to devoiced vowels from my previous experience with them in Japanese, but the circumstances and the rules for vowel devoicing are much more specific in Japanese. In Macedonian, it seems to be just final vowels. The end result is that you can barely hear the vowel at all. The sound v and word final vowels are both important to verb conjugation, sadly to say for my comprehension abilities, but at least I know the reductions are going on.

Words: Lots of very basic words are replaced. The preposition vo “in,” for example, is replaced with u (which is the same in Serbian). Povekje “more” becomes poviše, which because of the v-dropping rule becomes poiše. Navistina “really” or “are you serious?” becomes stvarno. Mostly the borrowings are from Serbian, although I’ve heard a bit of Maklish as well, like searchne “to search” or googlene “to google.”

Grammar: Not too much that I can detect so far, though there are a some fixed accusatives borrowed from Serbian, especially in obscenities like pičku mater. I’m also hearing some non-standard clitic usage, specifically a lack of clitics where the standard expects them. But that’s going to require further research (happily enough, this is exactly my research topic, so I can count it as work!)

My friend Jeremy wrote about a really good metaphor for native-English speakers learning another language. Because of the dominance of English internationally and the pre-eminence of English in almost every domain imaginable, native-English speakers are the ultra-rich executives of the language world. We have an enormous amount of communicative power because of both our ease with the language as native speakers and because of its spread across the world as a default means of international communication. In learning another language, we’re giving up that power. Our tools and abilities in a non-English langauge may be extremely limited in comparison, especially if we’re learning it after that magic window between birth and twelve years of age as most Americans do. That sort of power loss can be highly frustrating. But the work has rewards too, in terms of a new breadth of communicative ability and a sense of accomplishment that you gain.

So while I’m still the linguistic equivalent of a temp worker in Macedonian, there’s hope for a promotion ahead.

Since about a week-and-a-half ago I’ve been in Ohrid, the summer tourist capital of Macedonia. Right around this time of year, the big cities of this country get unbearably hot. A lot of Macedonians close-up shop, pack their bags, and book it for the country’s biggest lake for some relaxation.

Lake Ohrid is one of the deepest lakes in the world, with crystal clear water and a surrounding of high hills. It straddles the border between Albania and Macedonia, with Macedonia holding rights to about three-fourths of the shoreline. The main city of the region is Ohrid, an old Roman town, a medieval center of Slavic learning, and now a place to go sunning in the day and clubbing at night. Purely coincidentally, any conference, seminar, or meeting scheduled for the summer tends to be held in Ohrid.

I’m here for the International Seminar for Macedonian Language, Literature, and Culture, where I’m knocking some of the rust off my Macedonian skills. The seminar gathers around ninety students, mostly linguists or Slavicists, but also some heritage speakers and some people who just feel like learning Macedonian. Most attendees are Continental European, tending toward Eastern, but there’s a cluster of us Anglophones. You can tell us by our discomfort with distinguished professors sporting rat-tail haircuts and our raging (and unnourished) internet addictions.

This seminar’s been good for me. Last year, I didn’t speak enough Macedonian to hold a decent conversation, so I mostly stuck with either other Anglophones or with people who were willing to speak English. That limited the number of people I could befriend. This year I’m more comfortable with the language and I can pravi muabet (shoot the breeze), though with limited vocabulary and sentence complexity. Speaking with other foreign students of Macedonian does wonders for my comprehension. Unlike your everyday Macedonian, they all speak clearly, without slang, and with standard grammar. It’s been a boon for my confidence to work in an evironment where people are only speaking literary Macedonian. I still can’t follow anything your average shopkeeper says. They might as well be speaking Serbian. But at least I know that I actually do have a baseline level of comprehension to work from in picking up the colloquial language. I was starting to think I might as well not have studied this language at all, for all I was understanding of it from normal Macedonian conversations.

We still have another week or so of classes and lectures. Despite my inclinations otherwise, I’m trying to put my worries about my research and my scholarship logistics aside and just relax a bit while I’m here. If you can’t take a break in Ohrid, you can’t take one anywhere.

Internet worked for an hour, then stopped.

This may have something to do with the interface between my MacBook and the cable modem, rather than any problem on the cable company’s side. But it really crushed my buoyant mood last night to have a success reversed so quickly.

I was going to give up on the issue until Monday, since I was going with K to see his family on the other side of Macedonia for the Ilinden festival. But Saturday morning came and the tap water had finally gotten to me.

Some Americans can chug Macedonian tap water like it was fresh out of a Brita filter. Others find themselves quickly incapacitated with gastrointestinal distress if they stray from a strict regimen of bottled water only. I fall into the latter category, unfortunately. I was starting to feel a little ridiculous always buying bottled water everywhere I walked and wanted to be able to refill a single bottle at one of the public drinking fountains or at home. So two days ago I started drinking water from the tap.

To which my body’s response has been, “Oh no you di-i’nt.”

So, faced with a three hour bus ride with no bathroom onboard, I stayed home. There was an attempt to get the cable problem resolved, but it didn’t go anywhere.

I can just hope it will set me up for another round of triumphal good mood when I manage to overcome this latest round of fail.

So, I may not have a firm grasp on the verb conjugation, my vocabulary leaves something to be desired, and conversations between anyone my age fly right over my ahead, but I’m still getting things done with what Macedonian I do have.

Kyril’s been gone and there were several things left to be done related to the apartment, so today I called my landlady to request an extra set of keys. She came over and we had a brief conversation in Macedonian. She seems to like us and she’s having us over for dinner at her house up the hill from the neighborhood of the apartment.

Here’s what I’m particularly proud of: we have a cable connection and a modem in the apartment, but it wasn’t activated. I had to go to the cable company to activate it, but the landlady didn’t know the name of the company. She vaguely gestured down one road while we were walking to the police station to register me as a foreign resident and that was it.

I had to find the cable company today because otherwise I would be required to return the modem and pay to get it back again since the previous tenants’ contract runs out on Saturday. So, since at first I couldn’t get in touch with the landlady and I didn’t want the cable place to close before I got there, I set off down that road she’d gestured toward hoping I’d find the cable company. I went about a mile without finding anything and was about to give up, but I decided to go into a store and ask in Macedonian if the shopkeeper knew about a cable company in the vacinity. Miraculously, she did, it was just next door, and she pointed the way to me. It was hidden on the second floor of a shopping arcade just off the road I’d be walking. I never would have found it without asking.

Cable company situated, I negotiated reconnecting the service with the lady at the desk, bought a new package, and fielded two calls back at the apartment from technicians who needed information printed on the bottom of the modem. All in Macedonian. Now, half of what everyone was saying went right past me and I made tons of mistakes. But the half that I did understand was enough, and people got my meaning despite the poor grammar and limited vocabulary. So here I am with the adequate number of key sets and a working internet connection from which I’m typing to you right now. I’ll just go ahead and call today a success.

I had to miss my tutorial session to do it all, but I called my tutor and we rearranged the session for Monday. She didn’t seem to be too unnerved.

Earlier today, if you’d walked into the apartment you might have caught me quietly thumping my head aganst the fridge because I felt so overwhelmed by all those tasks I outlined above. A couple hours later and some lucky guesses makes for quite a difference in mood!

Today was the flip side of yesterday’s euphoria. There’s always a flip side.

Every young Macedonian I’ve met so far speaks extremely good English. They’re also usually as well-versed as a native would be in the corners of American culture I slink around. They know the music, they know the movies, they know the political movements, the major figures, the minor scandals, books, TV shows, video games, everything. They name off American actors I don’t know and American plays I haven’t seen. They’re familiar with my culture. Nothing I’m going to say will catch them off guard and nonplussed. What could possibly depress me about that?

Well, they’re Macedonian. They know my culture and language as foreigners. As a foreigner on the other side, I certainly don’t know the equivalent amount about Macedonian pop culture. I certainly can’t switch seemlessly between American and Macedonian slang. It leaves you with the feeling of being… well, redundant. You have command of at most one half the languages and one half the cultures they do. A little pathetic, right?

I’ve always hated that my sphere of knowledge is so American-centric. I’ve tried to get along in at least three different foreign languages to expand that sphere abroad, but I can’t do anything worthwhile in any of them. It’s maddening that I can sit down with a Macedonian newspaper and read an article about a complex geopolitical situation, but can’t follow everyday banter between a shopkeeper and a customer. I’m trying to keep focused and digest what I can, but it’s rare for me to actually make connected sense from anything longer than a few utterances. It comes into my head as a word slurry–just foreign sounds interspersed with meaningful units that I can’t put together. It’s a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing: “Iewws spotted awerhuc cxfoewrfnfd while I awerrncx cxzersdifo aawe work and vcvzxc ewrwr to zxceawr you twrewds asdxcv friend werqw, but you zxcawe werdsfx be in xawersf ewrsxc of qwerf zxdsf, so werw decided xcvaer sdqwre wait zerwael today. Anyway, now you xczawer can zxfawer.”

When people know that I don’t speak Macedonian well, they can usually slow themselves down and simplify their vocabulary to the extent that I can understand a running conversation. I had a meeting with my host professor and my future Macedonian tutor today which went along mostly in that language. I spoke haltingly and with embarrassing errors and gaps in my vocabulary, but they understood me. I should be counting that as a success.

Because there’s nothing to be done about this feeling of inadequacy. It’s a rational reaction to the truth that, at the moment, I’m inadequate. There’s no particular comfort, there’s no quick solution, there’s no easy out. I will solve the problem by improving. I will improve by forcing myself to listen to and speak in the languages I’m trying to study. That is the sole way out of the morass of incomprehension. Unless I just suck it up and barrel through, nothing will get better.

This is sane depression. It stems from legitimate failure with no quck fix. Given that, I just have to wait it out.

I’m currently staying in my friend K’s aunt’s cottage at the far outskirts of Skopje. It’s a temporary situation that will need to be made even more temporary due to bizarre intricacies of post-Communist bureaucracy.

All foreigners are supposed to register themselves with the police wherever they’re staying and whenever they change addresses thereafter. K didn’t even know about the law, but one of his colleagues did, so we decided to set out and try to register me. As it turns it, this is no easy task. We went to three different police stations before we found the right place, only to be badgered for not having registered the day I arrived (Friday). The officers said this was a violation of the law, but all my sources say the law gives foreigners three days to register. Not that I’m going to argue that to a man with a gun.

In any case, it’s moot, because K’s identity card is registered to Strumica, not Skopje where I am now. In addition, he doesn’t own the cottage we’re staying in. Therefore, he can’t register me. Therefore, I’m still officially homeless, and assumedly a vagrant menace to Macedonian society or something along those lines.

There’s nothing to be done but for me to find a hotel, register through there, and then find an apartment as soon as possible. I only hope there aren’t more paperwork hoops to jump through in order for me to rent.

It’s only a few days now before I leave. I’ve been impatient to get going since graduation. But of course, as if by magic, all of a sudden so many things to do, people to meet, places to see have appeared that I won’t possibly be able to cover them all before Wednesday.

So, right on cue for my long-awaited exit, I’ve ended up wanting more time.

I’ve been in Los Angeles for the last month and I’ve only just gotten a sense of the city. The disorientation of moving to a place totally new to you is fresh in mind. The fact that I just got over it here in L.A. is making me less enthusiastic about moving, again, to Skopje this time, than I think I might be otherwise. I’m adaptable, but there are some faults you can’t overcome, and among mine is a truly epic inability to find my way someplace unfamiliar.

People joke that they’re bad at directions. I’m pathologically bad. Unless I happen to be facing directly north, reorientating the direction I’m facing onto a direction on the map is like trying to do long division in my head. And that is assuming that I can remember which directions ‘East’ and ‘West’ refer to, which sometimes takes me longer than anyone would think reasonable. I have to reference to my right hand and left hand to be sure. If I had an answer for you for why I can remember the difference between ‘North’ and ‘South,’ but not between the other two cardinals, you and I both would be a lot less puzzled.

So adjusting to a new locale for me is a matter of coordinating visual landmarks. I string together snapshots like stations on a subway route and gradually build a network of lines through the city that take me approximately wherever I need to go. But until I’ve built a density of personally relevant points of reference (”the fake windmill on the corner building,” “the grungy library with the concrete pillars,” “that f–king pothole I bailed over two months ago”), there’s a whole lot of whitespace for me to get lost in.

I could say that the fact I’ll be doing my reorientation in a foreign language compounds my anxiety, but the truth of the matter is that I’m one of those typical guys who will ask for direction only under threat of dismemberment. So actually the language barrier doesn’t make much of a difference. But language issues feed into my more general anxiety about the move to Macedonia.

I read Macedonian well enough to understand the gist of a newspaper article without a dictionary and the point of it with one. I can introduce myself and hold a conversation. I know basic, everyday vocabulary and some rather high-end linguistics vocabulary. But that yawning gap of unknown words in betweeen those two extremes promises an awful lot of misunderstanding and confusion. I have some English-speaking friends in Skopje and two months of lead time before I have to start taking university courses, so rationally there’s no reason to panic. Furthermore, I already know what to expect: I will sound like a mentally challenged three year-old with a stutter and a fixation on an oddly random set of words–this is okay. It’s a necessary step in the language-learning process. But if I want to get something worthwhile out of my research this year, that will have to be one step forward among many that I’ll have to make.

Meanwhile, my Albanian is, for all practical purposes, reading-knowledge only. I can do very basic introductions, but I’ve got a long way to go before I could call myself competent in using the language for anything more than library research.

We’ll not talk about Romani right now.

There are also endless administrative knots I’ve yet to untangle, among them my visa and my affiliation with the Rotary Club in Skopje that are both necessary for me to start getting my checks from Rotary International. But everyone coming back from previous rounds of scholarships in Macedonia has warned me that I either need to cultivate an attitude of patience and acceptance, letting bureaucratic hassle roll off my back like water over oiled feathers, or I will go barking mad. And the assure me that once you’ve entered a zen state of detachment about the constant document mixups and missed appointments and disorganization, everything usually ends up working fine. Frightfully difficult mindset for an American to get into, us inveterate builders of super deluxe turbo efficiency version umptillion mousetrap updates. But I’m doing my best.

Really though, the biggest thing keeping my mind here while my body edges toward Macedonia is that I have good friends in the U.S. I’m really going to miss them.

But another American quality is the relative ease with which we part from old friends for a time and make new ones to fill the absence. The very flexibility of the word friend in American English was the subject of an excellent analysis by Wierzbicka on the way culture can shift the semantic boundaries of supposedly ‘universal’ lexemes. She noted that whereas in many other cultures–Russian, for example–a ‘friend’ was a bossom companion, often closer than family, of which one could expect to have maybe one or two in a lifetime, in American culture we are far too mobile and gregarious on average for that. Our idea of ‘friend’ encompasses both the intimacy of relaxed companionship and the distance of easy aquirement. A friend can be someone who knows your greatest vulnerabilities over decades of shared experience, or a friend can be someone you met yesterday and got on well with. We accept both meanings under the same word. We consider those meanings to be the ends of a spectrum, one you could easily move along toward deeper intimacy given the right circumstances. I tend to think that is one of the cultural talents of Americans, that we can conceptualize relationships this way.

So I will make friends. I will adjust and build a new phase of my life off the previous foundations. There will be aching and loss. Parting from my boyfriend for a year will be especially difficult.

But at least I’m not going into the challenge empty-handed.

We made up your mind for you last night,
so you can decide that you’ll be alright.