My host Mom, a good cook and eager to please, has been pestering me for recipe suggestions lately. One morning I told her about corn flake chicken before rushing off to work. She didn’t seem to understand and, consequently, I didn’t expect her to try it.
Upon my return from work that day host Mom brought a frying pan into my room with the dreaded “see what I did” look on her face. Peeking sheepishly inside the simmering pan, for something didn’t quite smell right, I saw fried chicken patties next to a overflowing pile of oily corn flakes. “Usually we fry the corn flakes on the chicken but lets give it a try.”
After diner I went outside to find the cat because it was cold and I still felt bad about the corn flakes, and was welcomed by curds of snow pelting the muddy ground. I’m don’t think I’ve ever had to wait until February to see my first snow.
That night I started reading, “The Emperor’s Children.” I had heard something about this book being a post-September 11th “end of irony” type of novel. I’ve also made an effort to read notable contemporary writers. It turns out that the book reminds me of this reoccurring nightmare I have.
The thing is that being constantly surrounded by other Peace Corps volunteers has me kind of freaked out about my generation. I think that having our coming of age party during the information revolution must have really screwed us up. It’s as if being turned loose at the same time the world really was shrinking knocked everything out of whack for us: expectations disproportionate to opportunities, trophies disproportionate to accomplishments. We’re like a band of maverick explorers oblivious to the million other ships flanking our search.
The two main characters in “The Emperor’s Children” are confined with the same egotistical brand of wanderlust that’s identifiable in almost everyone I know. At first the characters seem like a modern incarnation of the dangerous nihilist, you know the dudes Turgenov and Dostoyevski wrote about, but in “Emperor’s” they’re rendered harmless by the fact that everyone else in the book is just as faithless as they are. September 11th happens, suddenly, but seems to only slightly magnify their atrophying.
As my flight flew over the Atlantic and approached JFK airport outside of New York last month on my way back here I was shocked to hear the lady in front of me mistakenly tell her daughter that the foam from the waves was debris left over from September 11th. Does that girl realize how dumb her mother is?
It seems that September 11th could have been the moment my wandering cohort came to grips with reality. After growing up during a winning streak, maybe the longest in our history (cold war, world wide web, gulf war, record economic expansion, dot-com), that was the day when we should have felt that invisible tide of human muck pulling us down.
My reoccurring nightmare starts with me waiting for a job interview. While staring blankly at some toothless Rockwell girl on wall I overhear snippits: “Well, I helped facilitate victory in cold war by participating in air-raid drills” and “As you can see from my travels I have a lot of experience teaching people how to smile.” My competitors in the waiting room are busy shining their faces with some kind of polish. “So what if that guy helped win the cold war?” I snide to no one in particular, “I fell in love once.” Now that I've gotten their attention I keep going...“she looked good in green. She loved Martinis if you added enough Sprite. I mean it’s all I could afford that she would drink. So what are you in for?”
Finally they call me in. The perturbed interviewer is already gazing at my blank resume, “are you sure you’ve never done anything?” he starts to probe as I sit down. An awkward clock ticks five or ten times. “Nothing?” he tries again.
“Nope. Not a god damn thing.”
2 comments:
you oblivious ??? i think not.
Bryan-
I've been thinking about this for weeks, and I still don't quite know what to say. Looking at my own intentions, I know that I didn't come here to further my own purposes. I also think that having grown up in a prosperous decade had a different effect on different people: some people became very self-absorbed, and other people grew too comfortable in their communities and wanted to work outside of their comfort zone. September 11th made the first group of people more insular or had no effect of them all, but it made the second group of people look even further than they had. I consider myself in the second group.
I finally commented because I saw this clip in the Washington Post online:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/27/AR2007022701651_pf.html
Money quote:
"People do volunteer," said Bayram Abbasov, a senior, "but they do it for a reason, not because they want to help someone else." He volunteered at a hospital when he was in high school, he said, because he wanted to get into a good college.
I think there are Peace Corps volunteers who do it in order to improve their resume. It has never crossed my mind that Peace Corps would help my career, since I have no intention of working abroad after this. But is it really that bad if some people volunteer in order to open their career? I know that when I return, I'll join Teach for America because I view it as the best way into the public schools, where I want to teach as a career. Sometimes haivng a bit of a professional stimulus isn't a bad thing.
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