Alien-Nation

After a year and a half, a trip to he US was in order. I guess after being immersed in my original, European roots for this extended time, an increase in alienation with my US side of the fence was to be expected – but I didn’t think it would hit me this strongly.

Due to a last minute change in travel arrangements beyond my control, my first stop was Phoenix, AZ, a place I have always been uncomfortable in. Why is it even there? The city is a cancerous growth in the middle of the desert, wasting water on its golf courses that everyone drives to from their suburbs with their SUVs. I got to Phoenix after 20 hours on the ‘road’ jetlagged and tired, and spent another couple of hours finding the car and the hotel. There could not have been a more alienating arrival for me. There could be no stronger contrast between the organically grown, lively, messy city I live in, and the artificial, cleanly futuristic out-of-this-world ugliness of Phoenix. It was like landing on another planet.

The next day, arriving in Silver City, the first visual impression that hit me, and stayed with me through two weeks, was one of decline. Crumbling dusty streets, boarded up stores added to the sense of stagnation I got – had nothing changed? A few things did, though: The two new businesses first visible to me were the second Sonic and the second national chain drugstore, both things the need for which is not immediately apparent in a town of 9000. Much better, on second sight: the new local brew pub and music venue in the beautiful Isaac’s location and the new local community radio station, GMCR. Looks like the WNMU pool is finally getting repaired, Light Hall is a movie theater, and there will be air service to Albuquerque again. Too bad that Masa y Mas had to close, the old Javalina’s was no more, and the Wellness Coalition has lost most of its funding, including AmeriCorps.

Despite some of this good news, I felt sad and estranged, and so the next day, Benny and I headed for West Texas. I wanted to show him the beautiful Davis Mountains and the Big Bend, the area that made me first fall in love with the southwest deserts in the late 80ies. I had not been there in over 15 years. I was re-stunned by the natural beauty and peace of the area, and how being there soothes my heart and soul. Benny loved Balmorhea with its spring-fed pool and oasis-like park. We swam with the fish and the turtles and had excellent burgers at the only place open in town, a little shack called Maria’s.

The next day, after the long drive passing Fort Davis, Alpine and then south on Highway 118, we arrived in Terlingua. This little former ghost town (pop. 58) has seen quite a bit of development in recent years, both in housing and tourism, with people now making decent incomes from renting their places to visitors. Of course the old timers now complain about having visible and sometimes even audible neighbours. If this place gets crowded (ok, this would be a very subjective, desert rat interpretation of crowded), where does one go? South Brewster County, I think, is still the least populated frontier area of the US. But rural infrastructure has its perks too, not having to drive 2 hours to Alpine for everything. There is a good coffee shop, a new grocery store in Study Butte, and even a social service agency, doubling as library, clothing & food pantry and victims of violence support provider.

Speaking of violence and trauma, it has made its mark on this little community as well. The legendary ‘La Kiva’ bar and restaurant was closed after its owner was brutally murdered in early 2013, found with his head bashed in, on La Kiva’s parking lot. A local river guide is facing murder charges. The restaurant now has been purchased by a couple from up North. They are doing extensive reconstruction of the crumbling, iconic site, and will reopen later this year.

I got to spend some sweet time with a few of my old friends, hang out on the famous front porch, and we were lucky to see Butch Hancock play at the Starlight Theatre that first night. I knew most of the songs still. 

The next day, we drove into the park, down to Boquillas Canyon, and hiked into it as far as we could, past donation jars for the Mexican Singing Jesus, little bead and wired art made by kids from Boquillas and the big, raging, latte-colored waters of the Rio Grande. 

It rained on and off, and Benny got covered in fine silt mud. 

I felt much better when we headed back towards Silver City after a few days. Somehow the old familiar combination of living in Berlin and visiting the Big Bend had put things back in order for me.

My time in Silver City continued to be bitter sweet, more for personal reasons than having to do with the place – though the town has suffered. Many people there have gone through a tough year, emotionally and physically. Everyone seemed exhausted. The community is very traumatized by the loss of the three young people killed in a plane crash in May. It’s a hard place to be. But there are those who are staying, to live and grow with and beyond this tragedy, to support each other and try to turn the pain into something creative and positive. Saving the Gila River from the grasp of 1950ies policies pushed by greedy and corrupt decision-makers already has become the central fight of this decade, and I hope that the good people of Silver City are not too exhausted to continue this fight in the spirit of Ella Jazz Kirk, and for the sake of their own future.

Most of all, I learned that I have a group of strong, dear, loyal, wonderful friends there, and I need to do a better job of staying in touch with them.

My last week in the US I spent in San Francisco, back at work with my Wikimedia colleagues. We stayed at a small hotel a few blocks from Union Square. Every day, walking to work, and back, I passed hundreds of homeless people, many of them in terrible states of hunger, mental illness and physical sickness. There is a reason for the extreme homelessness here, and it’s not, as some people claim, that the city does so much for the homeless, that it is an easy ride to be one here. Just look at these people’s festering skin, smelly clothes and piles of dirt they sleep in. It’s not easy at all. They are NOT taken care of. No, the reason is: Extreme poverty is the other side of the medallion of extreme wealth. Silicon Valley and the Bay Area now are the place in the country where income inequality is the highest, and has become most visible – to a point of being in-your face with almost unbearable intensity. The average rent in SF is now $3600/month. Given my income, I would be living on the streets there. My colleagues got a tour of the facebook campus, which looks like a gigantic playground – for white rich males, who are allowed to not grow up and yet make the top wages in the country. The fact that their bosses donate a lot of money to local charities does not begin to alleviate the suffering in the streets. These impressions taken together, SF left me with a sense of an economic system out of control and a society that has become completely insane as a result. It can’t last.

The mid-term elections, while politically inconsequential, didn’t help to alleviate the picture of an America that has lost its mind and soul, and abandoned any notion of taking care of each other, or of advancing the country beyond individual enrichment.

So, for now I will return to the messy city, with its unkind inhabitants, grey skies and its cheap grocery stores. I will wear a winter coat, pay taxes, make a decent income, and be safe economically. My kids will get a free, solid education. I will continue to miss my dear friends, my Silver City family and the beautiful rivers and deserts of the southwest. And who knows, maybe one day I’ll buy a little miner’s cabin in Terlingua, contribute to the overpopulation there and spend my last days as a desert rat….

One Year and Counting

When you are part of the global tribe, when you are familiar and at home in more than one culture, people ask a lot of questions: So what is this like for you? ….What do you miss most?.... How are the kids doing?....Is it weird to be back?.... there are never short answers. And I can’t help but constantly update this running pro and con table in my head, hunting for the never-to-be-found answer to the question: what is the better side of the fence?

We have been in Berlin for one year this month. June 11, 2013 was the day we left Silver City, NM.  Since I don’t believe in bearing my soul on the Internet, the rougher personal and emotional aspects of our move won’t be discussed here. This blog is about culture, politics, society, and economics, and how those relate to our lives, of course, personally.  I will try a snapshot of what we learned this year.

It is weird to be back. Until now, I had this rule in my life: Never go back to a place you have already been. I am not sure why, but it just wasn’t something I did. I always moved forward. Just breaking that rule in itself is weird and new.  Back to GO, the place of origin.

What helped was that Berlin is probably one of the places in the world that has changed the most radically over the last 20 years. If not the most changed place of all – in terms of the built environment and the culture, mostly. This is of course even more true if one is from East-Berlin. “Ossis” also changed political and economic systems. “Wessis” just had the fact changed that there was a wall around the place and that we were a small, provincial, over-subsidized pool of standing water with a high opinion of our subculture status, not really part of West-Germany, and certainly not part of the surrounding geography. Now Berlin is a full-blown European and global metropolis with most of the advantages, and a growing set of disadvantages, mainly rising cost of housing. But it is still cheaper to live here than in any other city in Germany, and way cheaper than in London or Paris.

So it wasn’t really like going back. It was going to a new place, with a lot of familiar cultural stuff, and the old West-Berlin neighborhoods looking largely the same.

There were a lot of unknowns when we first got here. Would the kids be able to manage school? Would I find a job in this tight job market? What’s the nonprofit sector like here? Would we survive a Berlin winter?  Would my friends remember me?

Most of these questions have been partially answered after one year.  The winter wasn’t so harsh, some friends turned out to be friends and others have moved on.  Engaging in the joy and labor of gently reconnecting with some of them, with their new 20-years later selves. The nonprofit sector has a slightly different role here and sits in a different environment. The German nonprofits themselves feel like very familiar territory. And I have found a job, and it has brought me the level-up in professionalism and challenge that I had wished for, for many years.

One thing I have learned: If I make assumptions about my children, they are probably going to be wrong.  All three have proven that this year, in different ways. From a parenting perspective, this has probably been the hardest year of my life, the most challenging and puzzling, frustrating year, taking me to an unknown edge I didn’t know existed: the point of not knowing how to handle a situation or behavior. And at the same time, my children have made it the most rewarding and reassuring year:  I have seen my older kids grow more into themselves, take the challenge of the new environment, deal with their loss and grief caused by moving. All of them have widened their horizon, their perspective, their relationships and have learned a lot – mostly not in school. None of them have done what and how I expected them to do 12 months ago.

What do I miss most? Of course my husband, and my oldest daughter. My husband.... lover, partner, co-parent.  Then the people of Silver City, and the few close friends I had.  Our spring break trip to Mexico.  Mexican food, sometimes. The Gila River. Our beautiful house. The Tour of the Gila.

What do I appreciate most here? My family (parents, sister, cousin) close by and spending time with them on a regular basis. My family. And then, my family. A few good friends. Being able to go to a movie and concerts, theater. The beauty of Berlin, its parks and lakes and its surroundings, much of which we have yet to explore. Being able to drive to Italy in a day. Living in a buzzling, global, diverse city with interesting politics and always something new going on. My kids being part of an international community at their school. The wild life in our backyard, and its giant old trees swaying in the wind at night. How cheap everything is.  That this is now part of Europe, which is a whole new perspective. My neighbor, who is nice and weird and feeds our cats when we are gone. And a socio-economic system that is still based on solidarity, even though it’s being whittled away, but the idea is still that you should be able to live your life not being in constant terror about paying for healthcare, child care, education, transportation, and that it is ok to pay taxes for this.

So for now, from this perspective of politics, culture, education, economics….this is the better side of the fence for us – but only if our family becomes complete again.

On Introverts

We have been in Berlin for exactly 5 months. While we have a home, schools, work and lots of family time, our social lives are somewhat limited still. Two of us are basically content, despite that fact. For the other two, the absence of their strong Silver City lifelong friendships has left a big gaping social hole. Wondering about how differently people respond to challenges such as this made me think about introvert and extrovert personality types. I wrote most of the content of this post first, and then surfed around the internet, only to realize that other people have been talking and writing about this recently too.

This past summer, a recovering corporate lawyer named Susan Cain published a whole book about the extrovert culture bias and how introverts are undervalued: “QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking”. She describes convincingly how schools and the workplace reflect that bias. Many additional smart things have since been written and said in response to her interesting argument. (I won’t litter links all over this, just google it.) So I probably don’t have all that much to add…. But since this is a cultural issue, it is also an “On the Fence” topic.

We all know that today, society rewards extroverts. And we have all bought into this to some degree. We tend to think positively of the people who are “out there”, who are visible, verbal, performing. We admire them as leaders, team players and trailblazers, perceive them as people who get things done, have a lot of friends, and operate within human networks effectively.

Introverts, on the other hand, are viewed as reclusive weirdos who stay to themselves. You never quite know what they’re doing, you just know it doesn’t relate to you or to other people - and that makes their activities suspicious, and sometimes makes the extroverts angry. Introverts are annoyingly content without the company of others. They don’t play by the rules. They probably don’t feel the need to spread their private lives out publicly all over social media networks.

They are forced to switch camps, though, sometimes….: The TED talk of Susan Cain, now the official spokesperson of the introvert tribe, has been watched almost 5 1/2 million times, and ironically she has received the Golden Gavel Award for Communication and Leadership, by a group that, one could argue, tries to turn people into extroverts - the International Toastmasters.

Of course the introvert and the extrovert personality types are two extreme poles. We need both of them. Most people are somewhere in between, and, if they have managed to develop a somewhat balanced personality, they unite the healthier aspects of both types. But the world loves extroverts. If you are parent or a partner of an introvert, you are constantly under pressure to explain or fix their behavior. I am not sure how and how many times my poor husband had to explain my absence at the political fundraisers he attends. Hopefully people just stopped asking at some point.

Introverts are under constant pressure to become more outgoing. But I think extroverts are actually more vulnerable. They depend more on the constant recognition and gratification of others. So maybe extroverts are just people who act out, or have found other ways to overcome their shyness? Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro were in Berlin recently to introduce their new movie, and when interviewed both said they were really shy people. It made me snort first, but then they said being on stage or on camera is an act of overcoming shyness every time. The introvert doesn’t need to do this, because he is not shy. He is just an introvert. So leave him or her alone.

The full-blown extrovert needs company all the time, or at least people around him. When I first moved to the desert 20 years ago, it was in part because I loved the utter emptiness, vastness and quiet of the landscape, and how it threw me back onto myself. I could hear myself think, and just be… without constant human input. I remember some people telling me that they hated the desert. It was too scary how the desert forced them to be with themselves.

The extrovert personality is often associated with leadership (another value-free concept that merits disassembling… but that’ll be a separate post one day). Extroverts lead us, but where to? Leadership is a very scary term in Germany, for obvious historical reasons.

The introvert, on the other hand, is often a thinker, a creator. Introverts have given us great works of literature, music and visual art. Makes me think of John Belushi’s impersonation of Beethoven. Cain points out that Steve Wozniak invented the Apple computer, not Steve Jobs. I am a grant writer, not a fundraiser. I don’t enjoy taking people to lunch and convincing them to write a check. I like holing up with a challenging writing or research project and fine tune my work until it is perfect.

Having moved back to Germany, I feel to a degree I have escaped the noisy US extrovert culture, the glorification of leadership and the exhibitionist aspects of social media. Even though I am in a big city again, the noise around me has quieted down.

However, many facets of that culture have been adopted here in Europe as well. Especially if you are trying to reinvent yourself professionally, you sort of have to locate yourself on the intro-extro spectrum and act accordingly. The competitive job market favors the extrovert, just as in the US. So, how many extrovert “qualities” does one have to demonstrate to land a job? How much do I gush and shine and brag in the job interview?

I decided I am too old for this bullshit. The bullshit of buying into the extrovert culture and playing someone I am not. So I went to a few job interviews, and was just myself. The grant writer, not the fundraiser. The thinker, not the leader. Eventually, it paid off. I got a gig where I can be me.

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