Welcome, friends & fiends; also, FAQs

Hello, hello! - clearing throat - DOBREE DENN - I think this means "hello" in Ukrainian but your guess is as good as mine, because I'm in America for two more weeks and my accent still sounds like Borat's.

For the next 27 months, I'll be checking in here whenever I can (yes, Ukraine does have internet, and probably also houses and roads and food), sharing topics of interest from my Peace Corps service with you. By "you" I mean "my mom and maybe 2 other people," but whoever you may be - welcome!

There's not much to report as of now, of course. My preparation has mostly involved a) feeling every feeling that exists, b) shoving the feelings waaaay down to the pit of my stomach, c) eatings SUNDAES, d) having a stomachache, e) staring at the Ukraine Peace Corps facebook group and rapidly spiraling spiraling spiraling because everyone seems more prepared than I am. In that order.

But now I'd like to take time now to answer a few questions that you, dear reader, might have about my service.

What will you be doing in Ukraine?
I'll teach English as a foreign language to secondary school. The first three months, from late September to mid-December, I train with other PC volunteers, then we're unleashed to our new communities.

Weren't you going to be in Morocco or Jordan or something? Why Ukraine?
The answer to this question usually involves me slapping my forehead and muttering "bureaucracies!" and "medical forms." I lost my spot in the North Africa PC group, but they were able to fit me in to the Ukraine group leaving later the same month.

Coincidentally, my great-grandmother Yetta emigrated from Ukraine in 1912. I don't know how she'd feel about me going there since her family - persecuted as Jews and starving - fled that country. But I don't think there's that much anti-Semitism in Ukraine anymore (probably because there are no Jews left to hate). And I have to think the universe had a hand in this "coincidence," as it always does.

Why? Just... Why? Why are you doing this?
I really never know how to answer that without sounding unbearably earnest. What's more precious than an aspiring poet returning to the country of her ancestry? Correct answers = "calling oneself a poet under any circumstances," or, "any Jonathan Safron Foer book," or "listening to Sufjan Stevens and crying." (OK, so I just did that last one. BIG DEAL. Also, I actually do still like Everything is Illuminated. BIG DEAL. Actually, JSF and Sufjan look very similar - aaaaand I've never seen them both in the same room at once. Think about it.)

Seriously, now: I've planned to join PC since I was 16. My curiosity and desire for experience are ravenous, I am terrified of boredom. Always I'm preoccupied with language - the thorns of its rules and inconsistencies, its elasticity depending on usage and context, its facets of beauty. In teaching English, I want to learn how to better manipulate my own language, and also how to better communicate.

The hardest lesson to learn, I think - how to be a person with other people. How to be authentic to your own personhood - but flexible enough to learn from them, even when we are all so strange and solitary among each other. I am no longer interested in Rilke's ideal of the solitary artist's soul, of lonely pleas to the angel. Now is the time for collisions, border-transgressions, transmutations.

What is this term "bluestocking" you are always bandying & blogging about?
I'm glad you asked! It is a somewhat pejorative term for a woman with literary leanings. The bluestocking is "the most odious character in society ... she sinks wherever she is placed, like the yolk of an egg, to the bottom, and carries the filth with her." - William Hazlitt, who obviously didn't know how to appreciate a female intellectual, nor the charms of colored hosiery.