12 November

12 Nov. 2006
I cannot complain that my life should become any more interesting. It just needs to become directed.
I spent three hours today studying German and Hungarian. It really improves my mood because I see I can grasp an expression and tell someone how I feel. This used to be so important to me in my own language...and I discovered the pleasure of doing the same in German.
I have had an amazing variety of experiences, and all I can do sometimes is think about what could be of more variety and more excitement! It’s silly, but natural I suppose.
In the river I am floating along in, people are all going all over, crossing borders, challenging themselves, seeing what is to be made sense of, what is to be figured out, seeming to accept, also, when the answers are so unclear. Something (editted) I wrote to my mother today:

Even though he has been gone for almost 4 days, I have had a good time alone here. I stayed overnight in Budapest Friday night with a colleague from university, went to see some documentary films (very disturbing- a women's shelter in Iran, Russian runaways living in Moscow train station, sniffing glue, the siege of Leningrad, the Polish secret police reports under communism-- seeing all this makes it very clear that, while I see the good aspects of the theory of communism, I could never agree that it was humane, good, free in practice... it is the horrible, heavy feeling that you could NEVER achieve anything, have any acknowledgement of your talents...it's so hard to imagine, coming from a place like the US where this is so inherently part of our culture, my up-bringing.) The theatre rooms were quite small, but it was packed. I made some make-shift Hungarian conversation with my neighbor...I should expand my political vocabulary.
Yesterday, I came back here in Gyor. I went swimming with Kriszta and Nikki (Brian met Nikki), and then last night we went out to a karaoke bar and a disco.
It is good he went to Germany at this time. He was with a hunting party the last two days, in the Eifel, and when i talked to him yesterday he was SO happy. It was a courteous invitation to go hunting with these people, I think. But also, he said he had some very "grounding" conversations. Now he is with his parents, and his mother's birthday is tomorrow. I wrote her a long card, in which i tried to articulate myself especially well...(It took about an hour to write! I kept looking up more vocabulary and checking tenses and genders!) I realized she has been my best German teacher, and from the beginning, she has had such an open heart towards me...so I told her how much this meant to me.
Last night, I sang along to Hungarian songs on the karaoke system in a bar with vaulted, stone ceilings..it was so difficult to pronounce everything. Besides Brian Adam's "The Summer of '69," the topics of the Hungarian songs were interesting (as Bea was translating some into my ear as I precariously perched upon the bench: 50 tons of coal, working, working, and more working, "I am in the middle of the circle, and this circle has both my friends and enemies" and travelling to Africa to enjoy the sun and women- and returning and claiming that nothing happened during the trip to Africa.
The expat's desire to be incognito.