Mid-January Status Update

Little Janka, president of the Green Club, will be coming on the ski trip to Austria next week. Pretty excited about that news. She'll be a good translator.

Gitta has the internet now and reads these pages. She's one of two Hungarians who know about it.

I have self-diagnosed myself as being in the critical fourth-stage of living alone abroad.

The first is excitement, pure and euphoric. For me, that honeymoon lasted a month.

The second stage comes as you realize what you've gotten yourself into. I walked around for two months, amazed at the differences between "here" and "there," wondering how the heck I was going to find an indigenous happiness without the tool of "inventing fiction and happiness."

The third stage came as I realized a little bit of happiness could be eked from the surroundings, even if they aren't your usual, comfortable setting. Helped a bit by the trip to Greece, it lasted a month and a half.

Last weekend, err, two weekends ago, I entered the fourth stage. It begins with a recognition that the happiness might be a bit superficial, and most certainly temporary. It began with the notion, cemented during the course of two back-to-back nights of walking up to random tables at Hungarian bars and introducing my lonely self, that to everyone here I am simply a "passing curiosity," a valuable 15-minute distraction or English language practicing tool.

"But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one: men know him not -- and to know not is to care not for..." Dracula (25).

It's a bit diheartening, when you realize it. But at the same time, I just sit and watch, content to observe and bemoan that problem, rather than cling to the first thing to befriend me. I suppose that's because I'm an American, where even a conscientious liberal is a conservative worrier according to world standards, and think it best to hold the world and children that I'm observing this year only as close as at arm's length.

Perhaps it's best. Perhaps it's not.

Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

(P.S. - Apologies. Another symptom of this stage is a strange reluctance and limited motivation to write stories, any stories at all. Perhaps it will pass.)