Concert Michael's Church, Munich

It's pouring rain today, and our kitchen ceiling is leaking, damaging the ceiling repair I had done several years ago. I'm looking at hotels and apartments in Prague, and getting a slight zing, even with the drip in the background. Ah. Drip away.

Meanwhile, a shaky clip of a concert I attended in Munich recently...

Running Around

Today I did a lot of walking around. I don't own a car, and peddling my bike has become impossible. It's not the best bike. Even the back tire, so thick it can withstand tacks—it's guaranteed not to go flat!—is flat. We must have biked through glass shards, or extra long nails. It should have repelled those tacks I saw on the ground.

I bought a three-year insurance policy, unaware that the bike wasn't going to last that long. It's a reasonably-priced Dutch bike. I was determined to get all I could out of it. My full money's worth. In the process, I've damaged my right knee. Actually it was already weak, but it's gotten progressively worse.

I got into the habit of wearing running shoes everywhere, but since my trip to Munich, I've started wearing fashionable boots. With all of the walking I do, it isn't a wise decision, even if it does make me more socially palatable.

Maybe what I need to do is to spend even more money on some socially acceptable running shoes! I could invest in a "hip" pair, and look good enough to attract other parents at my kids' Dutch school! Wow. Why didn't I think of that before.

As you might be aware, it's advisable to walk 10,000 steps each day to promote longevity. That's about five miles. If you do so, you're supposed to need a new pair of running shoes every six months.

Oh what a mistake fashionable boots are. Sure, I look good, but I'm paying the price. My feet hurt, and I have to place my weight on my right leg to compensate for my left knee, in order to walk up and down stairs.

But hey, more Dutch people might say "hi!" to me! Where have my priorities gone, and what was I ever thinking? I'd become such a practical loner.

But enough! I'd already vowed to knock off the sob story routine. I had one friend at the school playground, and now I'm going to have two soon! Another mother has be-friended me now.

My first new friend is an extremely nice, accepting, interesting person, and her daughter is my daughter's best friend. We don't meet everyday on the battlefield, uh playground, but when we do, it's nice. This morning her three-year-old son invited me for a cup of coffee, which was very sweet!

In total, I've walked about three hours today running errands in fashionista boots, bringing little people here and there. In the past month, I've spent about two weeks confined to the house with sick little ones, so it's either run all over the place, or sit inside.

This is my third post of the day. Two of them were transcriptions. This is also possibly my last post in November, which marks the end of the "post everyday month." Now it's time to catch up on studying Swedish. I also hope to make it to yoga class before all of my yearly lessons expire! :-)

Guidelines for Care

Today, I got an invitation in the mail from Ypsilon, a Dutch organization for family members of people with Schizophrenia. It was an invitation for the Christmas evening with drinks and snacks. I don't go to their monthly activities or meetings, but perhaps I ought to...

On the inside of the invitation was this list (I've translated it from the Dutch):

Guidelines for Good Medical and Community Care for People with Schizophrenia or Psychosis:

1. Involvement of parents, family members, and those closely involved with treatment and guidance, in deliberation with the patient, when possible.
2. Continued ambulant care that's arranged before discharge from the clinic. Attention to possible dual-diagnosis. No discharge without an observation plan and agreement in care plan/care agreement on paper.
3. Support in self-care, house-keeping, budgeting, debt advice, via care plan/care agreement. (inclusive SSI and insurance.)
4. The right to a safe and individually suited living arrangement with modern facilities in an environment where safety and human dignity are guaranteed.
5. Prescribed medications offered in the form preferred by the patient, pills or injection. Realization of hospitable and pleasant (brunch) policlinicals within own location—potentially with an expert volunteer—to ensure medication intake.
6. Good attention to physical health. Yearly medical screening for heart and artery illnesses, and diabetes; half-yearly dental check-up, and encouragement of physical activity.
7. The offering of and guidance toward constructive daily activities, work, or study, including transportation, if necessary. Opening of day programs on Sundays to break the "empty Sunday" routine.
8. Offering of psycho-education. Liberman modules and cognitive behavioral therapy to support functioning in society.
9. Attention to life questions, depression, suicidal thoughts, and absence of meaning in life, possibly by a spiritual care-giver.
10. Attention to the development and maintenance of social contacts and relations, and for vacation possibilities.

Ypsilon 2007

Malamud Quote

The world is full of invisible people stalking people they don't know. More homeless strangers than ever before. God since the time of man should have made it his business to call out names: Jacob meet Ishmael. I am not my brother's brother. Who says?

pg 25, The Tenant

Bringing in the reigns

Okay. My negativity about the Dutch is getting out of control. It isn't good for my health, or life expectancy to carry on this way. I've been on the edge here for far too long, but there must be some way of not allowing it to further chip away at my psyche.

I suppose immigrant groups face similar challenges in the United States. I just finished reading an article about Asian American communities in California. It's funny, though. The key word there is "community." I know plenty of people in the United States who were quite capable of succeeding there no matter what their background or skin color. It seems a lot easier to establish a secure life in the United States, but perhaps I'm wrong.

I'm sure there are plenty of Americans very happy to be here. I've met Americans who almost stop speaking English once they get here, even with their kids, and they certainly wouldn't speak English "on the streets."

The author of the piece on Asian Americans made the same point. There are people who do all they can to shed their identity, and want to "blend in" as much as possible. And there are those who hold on to their language and traditions. I don't see why it should be such an either/or proposition. I think it's mainly the pressure from "outside," or the population of the "host" country that immigrants feel so much pressure from to change their ways. It must seem a natural expectation from most natives to expect people who come to "their" country to adapt and assimilate as much as possible, to change completely, in fact.

One of my favorite Dutch writers, who died last year, Henk van Woerden, who wrote the wonderful book A Mouth Full of Glass, and taught at the University of Michigan said, "You don't know what you're asking of a person" when you expect them to make such a radical change in who they are in "integrating."

I had no notion of what would be expected of me in coming here, the invisible pressures I would face to bend my identity in order to be accepted. Well, I didn't do it. I haven't given up my language. I am who I am, even if in being that I've often felt that I am "an island in a sea" of hostile, indifferent, oblivious Dutch people. A stranger in a strange land, though I am no stranger. Somehow, whatever I do, I just don't fit here.

In the past few weeks there seems to be a small change taking place. I think a few more of the parents at my children's school are actually starting to wonder what it is about me, and we'll see. The nice people might finally triumph over all of the nastiness I've experienced. It looks like I might be accepted, after all. Wow. I guess if you make yourself into a fixture for long enough, people will take notice.

Again, there are a few golden individuals who've stuck their necks out for me, and I must concede, and be thankful to them. There's one mother who's particularly helpful and friendly, and a few of my yoga teachers are also quite nice. There might be hope; there might just be some light on the horizon.

A French woman once approached me on the school playground, and to9ld me that I really ought to speak Dutch with my kids while we're at school. But I'm perfectly capable of going back and forth between languages. If someone wants to speak Dutch, I can, but when it comes to my kids, I speak English all the time. The speech therapist even backed me up in this decision, saying that it was "consequent," as they call it, bi-lingualism.

Once, waiting for my bags at Schipol, I spoke with a Dutch woman who had moved to Rhode Island with her husband, and had a family there. She told me that once her kids went to school, that she met people, and that everything was fine. I guess it's just taking longer with me. It's happening now, after four years of school. What a long wait. I think Americans are probably more open on the whole, but I was born there.

Old European societies might represent more of a bulwark for outsiders than the United States.

I also read an article that negative and positive experiences of the day are processed during various phases of sleep. If you short change yourself on sleep, you'll end up short changing yourself on processing the positive experiences, since that happens later in sleep. Depressed people also have too much "active," REM sleep, and are therefore more prone to fatigue. Negativity, depression, fatigue, more negativity. It's a snowball effect. I wonder how many years I'm taking off my life by staying here.

Maybe if I studied Buddhism I could learn not to allow all of these things to eat at me so much. Buddhist are good at that. I went to see a Tibetan Buddhist speak in Rotterdam. Even after being driven out of his homeland, he was still able to laugh, and experience positivity most of the time, it seemed. It can't be found in a pill. Let it role off you. If only I were a rubber band.

Someone came by and fixed our water heater. It's getting warmer in here already.

Some people simply belong in the comfort zone of their own cultures. Maybe I'm one of those people. It's been time to "go back" for a long time, but I don't know how to do that, either.

The "American" Language

It's true. The Dutch think they know everything. They even think they know English better than we Americans, and they also think that "American" is a language, an inferior cousin to the English language.

It's a bizarre state of affairs. In the United States we don't refer to the Mexican, Puerto Rican or Columbian languages. We also don't refer to the Australian language, the Canadian language, the New Zealand language. No. These are all either Spanish or English. We recognize that there are differences in accent, usage, punctuation, but it always goes without saying that people in Australia speak English, and people in Mexico speak Spanish, unless they speak a tribal language, which we recognize as distinct.

In the United States we speak English. We know that our version of English differs some from folks in England, but still, we can converse, read each other's books, and watch each other's films.

That's why I never get it when a Dutch person tells me or my children we speak "American." There's no sense in correcting them, because they'll always brush you off with a "whatever, you know what I mean," and they'll continue on with whatever they were doing as if you hadn't said a thing. Because Dutch people are always right, and they always know better. They're Dutch, and you're American, and therefore inherently inferior. They also learned English English, so their English is also better. They think they can translate Dutch into English, but I can always tell when one of these people has translated anything, because it grates my ears.

Several weeks ago I was faced with the unpleasant experience of conversing with one of my son's teachers. The one who is so mean and impatient, he stews about her at times when he's not in class. She wanted to impress upon me the urgency of his problems in speaking Dutch. He's introduced the "th" sound into their most sacred of tongues, and urgently needed speech therapy. Though I spoke to her in perfect Dutch, she still asked me if I could understand her, and then she said, "Should we speak Engli, uh, American?"

(She's also one of the teachers responsible for the art project her students completed last year: 100 dollar bills with the words "The Bogus United States of America." I saw it, and said, "Well, I guess they don't like Americans here very much," and walked away, so I suppose she's taking out her ire on my son by making his 3rd grade experience as miserable as she can. She's going to change her manner soon, or else.)

We were at the speech therapist today. I thought she was enlightened. She's a speech therapist, after all, with an education in language, but I started to wonder when she kept repeating herself to me like a parrot, "Dutch is a what harder language," she said, "unlike American." I bit my tongue. It's no use telling these people anything.

Sometimes I wonder if they think this way because of the distinction they make between Dutch and Belgian. They'll say that a person in The Netherlands speaks "Nederlands," and a person in Belgian Flanders speaks "Flaams." But "Flaams" is still "Nederlands," something that even the snootiest of the snooty Dutch will concede. (They're a proud and arrogant people, but the softer Belgians are still "one of them," "in their camp," "on their team," etc.)

Next time anyone is stupid enough to tell me that I speak "American," I'm really going to have to call them out. Then again, maybe it's not worth it. The Dutch are highly skilled in brushing people off as though they're nothing, I've learned.

It's taken me quite a long time to realize it, but they actually really do see me as their inferior. Everyone, except for about three people. It seems like almost a universal. Perhaps it's something you can never really shed. I realized it when suddenly the word "FOB," popped into my head this evening.

Fob is actually an acronym for "Fresh off the Boat," and was used as a derogatory term referring to Europeans who just landed in America over a century ago. It's become antiquated as most educated Americans have learned to treat people from other cultures as intelligent equals.

It's odd that in the day of mass migration, of large numbers of people working, marrying, and moving across continents that people should still maintain such provincial attitudes toward people with an accent, another language, etc, but the Dutch manage to hold on to these attitudes with an ever tightening grip. I wonder if it will ever be possible to be treated as anything other than a "fob" by the masses of Dutch on automatic pilot, constantly putting you into the "foreign," or "lesser" pile as soon as you open your mouth.

Malamud Quote

This from a Bernard Malmud book I'm reading, The Tenant, about a writer struggling to finish a novel, while fighting eviction from his apartment in New York. My copy is from The Slegte in Rotterdam, and is from 1972...

Without looking up at the window at his side, the writer imagined the wintery day beyond, crystal bright, lit cold beauty, glad of his existence, but without desire to be in or of it, breathe its stinging glow into his half-retired lungs, live it. This sort of pull and push he had long ago quelled in the self, else he would never have seriously written.