Teach Your Children
When I was a teenager, there was always some sort of girly magazine somewhere in my house. The now defunctYM or CosmoGirl! would come in the mail or I'd pick one up for a flight to which I hadn't bothered bringing a real book with actual substance. 90% of the content is mindless entertainment. Sexual mishaps! The best night creams! 28 weird sex tips involving a set of silverware! Vests!?
However some of the articles featured were actually relevant to my romantic/relationships/sexual education. One article actually began with a quiz, and not a stupid "Lol which red panda r u this week based on your mom's astrological sign?" but a quiz asking for my experiences with children and if I'd hypothetically be interested in having them in the future. It was fairly short, nothing I needed to take a prep course for. And my results were unenthusiastic: maybe.
I absolutely love kids. One of my favorite things to do with my nephew is to "answer" a banana and hand it to him saying "it's for you." I'm sure he's so sick of it by now and I like picking on him with his opinions about the world around him, mostly the wrong information kids receive about certain stuff. When I was home for Thanksgiving, he was adamant that Ken (Barbie's Ken) was the same person as GI Joe. After some further insistence and some back up support from my mom, Laszlo still wasn't convinced that the army ranger and Barbie's boyfriend were from two entirely separate universes.
It sounds incredibly exhausting to have kids. Both of my step-siblings have kids and I've tried to be around as much as I can in Seattle while they're growing up. They're all under the age of 8 and at varying degrees of communication and exposure to the outside world. Laszlo has discovered YouTube and Maddy asks me to chase her. Emily can't speak much at the moment but she likes eye contact and high-fives. Their development has been cool to watch, and I love them dearly. But within the last eight years or so, I've decided that this enjoyment is best felt as an aunt and not a parent.
In short, I'm not having kids.
As I said above, it sounds incredibly exhausting to have kids, and I know what I'm like when I'm exhausted. I practically become a child myself when I've hit strenuous periods of overwhelming stress and the subsequent aftermath. If I could boil my stress down to a few factors, they're definitely immigration, bureaucracy, finances, and my mental health. If just one of these goes into awry, at least one other will follow until I'm contemplating my entire living situation. For instance, getting let go from my job last month sent my mental health into a spiral, which led to applying for jobs in UlaanBaatar. Eventually I caught myself mid-fall and recovered, but it took a while. I was never so low at a point where I felt like drinking, but at one point, the thought of picking up seemed more plausible than dealing with the inclement blow of losing my job. Is having kids just because I'm expected to or have the biological capability worth blurring the lines of my sobriety when things get tough?
I think about adding kids to that equation. Not even plural, but any living human younger than me. It feels selfish to say that I want to conserve my time and energy for myself but it's not necessarily a bad thing. I've chosen to live my best life, which I know sounds like I pulled straight from a 22-year-old's Pinterest board, but it's true. I also don't want to compromise the quality of life of someone else because there are indeed times where I cannot handle my own shit, and they don't deserve that.
You know, this bullshit.
Speaking of quality of life, my shit genetics are also a huge part of my decision. Diabetes doesn't run in my family, and before you make a joke like "hhhnnnuurrrr it's because no one runs in my family," please know that extending this disease to another human is not a type of guilt I want to feel. We already bring kids into this world without their consent. No microscopic embryo can hold up two middle fingers to an ultrasound to give its plea for non-existence. But imagine knowing that the person you're bringing in to this world may end up with the same difficulties that you currently live with or that may have ended someone else's life. It seems incredibly cruel to me. Having kids should be the best part of your life, not a regret or a burden.
There are varying studies about Type 1 and the likelihood of your offspring developing the same disease. Some studies place it around 8%, and others place it as high as 25%. Keep in mind these are just my genetics alone, not paired with someone else's who has the disease in their family, as well. I know what I go through on a daily basis to not die. I encounter extremely misinformed people who, at no fault of their own, have ingested information from the media that "diabetes" is synonymous with obesity, poor lifestyle, amputations, no exercise, food choices, etc. They hardly ever differentiate from Type 1, 2, and the two other types that affect people, so all of the misinformation gets lumped into one disease which everyone thinks I have. Type 1 used to be referred to as "juvenile diabetes," as it was mostly common in children, sometimes as young as six-months. But with factors of exposure to viruses, Epstein-Barr Syndrome, and other autoimmune disorders, adults can be diagnosed into their 40s. I was diagnosed at 22, roughly six years after I had mono, a virus which stems from contact with Epstein-Barr. Doctors I've spoken figure that my body started attacking itself around this time, but the symptoms of my pancreas giving out and no longer producing insulin didn't develop for a few years.
As of now I've been diabetic for 8 and a half years. Managing the disease has become second nature for me and I have to be incredibly in tune with my body to make sure everything is operating according to plan. I'm always on manual mode to ensure my body can function the same as a person without diabetes. The process is exhausting, frustrating, time-consuming, embarrassing, and difficult to navigate bureaucratically. The reason I'm handling it well (most of the time) is because I was diagnosed at an age where I could effectively communicate and use my entire vocabulary to describe different feelings or the difficulties I was encountering with my doctors, parents, and friends. A six-month-old child doesn't have that same luxury, therefore creating an entirely different path of stress for parents to navigate with a diagnosis. I don't want to do that to a child or myself.
Not to mention the financial burden behind it. There have been so many times in the last eight years where I've felt like a financial burden due to my disease. Knowing it wasn't my fault and wasn't avoidable didn't make it any easier. I didn't ask for this, so why am I paying for it? But not just paying for it, why am I paying so much?
To give an idea of what the financial costs associated with diabetes are, here are a few numbers for you:
Between 2001 and 2015, the cost of insulin rose 585%.
Insulin is the sixth most expensive liquid in the world at $9,600 a gallon.
In 2013, diabetics in the United States spent more on their diabetes medications and supplies than the NFL and NBA spent on advertising combined.
If you wanted to know how staggering the numbers are when it comes down to treating diabetes, that's what it looks like. I'm of the belief there will be no cure. It's become a joke in the diabetic community, only five to ten more years! If there's no cure, they keep making money off of us. If we have diabetes and want to live, we have to pay. Bringing a child into the world to possibly take on that burden seems like a death sentence, and if the price of insulin keeps rising, it may very well be. I know I've harped about it on here before, but the movie Arrival got to me in a lot of ways. It didn't only affect me as a language nerd, but it also struck me as someone who has the ability to change the course of life for someone else and ultimately know I could have done it differently. Arrival has been out since 2016 so I'm not going to do a spoiler alert because you had your chance.) Amy Adams has a daughter and at one point in the movie, we learn her daughter dies from an incurable disease. However, Amy has the ability to see time in a non-linear fashion as a result of communicating with the Heptapod aliens. Before she even has the child, she sees that her daughter will die from the disease at a young age. She knew the outcome of her life and her daughter's pain and demise, yet she went through with it anyway.
I can't be that person.
Initially I thought the decision to go childless was easy. I've presented myself with all the evidence, it makes sense, and there won't be any drawbacks. But the only thing I'm hung up on is the opportunity to name another human being. Most of my family's pets have had human-ish names: Jake, Elwood, Gracie, Edgar, Rocky, Cosmo, and Patrick. Patrick came with his own name and the rest were a family effort which took a number of days to come to an agreement. I can't have a kid just because I want to name something, someone. When you're growing up and you get a new puppy for Christmas or find a stray kitten there's a whole "well, what should we call you?" process. It's exciting!
Sometimes their name is an indication of their physical appearance. But most newborns usually look the same. There's no striking characteristic which will sway you one way or another about a particular label or comment on your child's appearance. But with humans, names aren't facts or statements. I had a short list of names I really liked, nothing complicated or tough to spell. I like them still, but at the same time they aren't names for pets; they are names for people.
Josephine.
Vivian.
Cedar.
So I feel like I've had to abandon this little list. They aren't terribly rare or elusive, just an extension of me and what I feel connected to. But choosing to knowingly make someone's life more complicated, arduous, or tragic, isn't worth a name. I know I'm making the right decision.
Plus if I ended up with twins I would fucking lose it. So there's that, too.
Down by the Water
My first trip home from the Czech Republic was surreal. Including an 11-hour layover in London-Heathrow, the entire journey came to about 33 hours from start to finish. One tram, one train, one bus, one plane, one bus, and another plane later, my step-sister picked me up and we made the essential white girl stop on the way home before doing anything else: Starbucks.
Seattle changed but didn't change at all. I kept expecting this massive influx of reverse culture shock but instead it was little mannerisms or habits I picked up in CZ I noticed, like putting my key in the door the wrong way, assuming the flush for the toilet was located in the center of the tank, or how to drive a car. It wasn't like coming back to the Pride Lands after your British uncle screwed everything up for you by killing your dad. Everything was still standing even though the mood was openly more volatile than when I left. Despite the crazy jet lag and early morning insulin regimen, I slipped back into the normalcy of being an adult living at home with their parents.
After arriving, I came to realize how much I missed a few things, like Corn Chex. I don't mean this as a pun and I temporarily had to rewire my brain to type that word, but cereal isn't a common breakfast food here. In the US you have an entire aisle dedicated to cartoons and the sugary nonsense they sponsor. But what I missed was lumbering out of bed, haphazardly pouring squares or circles out of a really noisy bag and then dousing it with a milk of my choosing. Then I was done! That's it. Boom. Breakfast, and not necessarily a balanced one.
Cereal does exist here but not in the way it does in the US. Same thing with big trucks. I maybe see a truck twice a week here, a Ford something-or-other. It's not that I completely forget they exist, but it's kind of like I completely forget they exist. They're just impractical. Brno is a tremendously easy city in which to not own a car. With 12 tram lines (well, 11 tram lines but the number 7 is missing...) and numerous busses and trolleys, there's no reason for me to get a Czech drivers license. As a resident here, I can no longer get an international driving permit and I would need to take drivers ed in Czech.
A little more than 24 hours later after landing in Seattle, I headlined a show in Tacoma at a community cafe/gallery/meeting place or whatever these multifunctional purpose spaces are called. All 25 minutes of me rambling were interrupted with little jet-laggy sighs or intruding thoughts with zero filter. It felt good to let loose in front of an audience that could understand me in our mother tongue. On stages in CZ, Slovakia, Poland, and Austria, I've had to slow my pace WAY down just to get a simple joke across but also to make sure everyone could understand me. Now I had a room full of people that understood me and a mic to make it even louder. It might have been the jet lag, but it felt so relieving to relax on stage, dick around, and take my time.
I did a handful of sets in Seattle with a trip to Tucson sandwiched in. As I was getting used to one jet lag, I set off for Arizona to see my dad, step-mom, and uncle for another subpar time change. The desert was welcoming with temperatures in the 70s and food which wasn't commandeered by another culture who tried to create what they think is Mexican food. Everyone in my Tucson family is a photographer so the images which resulted from my trip look easy, natural, and effortless.
After looking through the photos, I sighed when realizing that there haven't been a lot of pictures taken of me in the last year because of how much time I've spent alone. And this isn't going to turn into a pity party; it's just fact. In Brno I'm either taking pictures of myself or other stuff, usually kitty. I was pleased how my hair turned out, which was done three hours after I landed in Seattle, and it was nice to be outside in a t-shirt because Brno was crazy cold when I returned.
I flew back to Seattle from Tucson on Thanksgiving Day and spent some time in Salt Lake City between connections. The family dinner in Seattle was a bit bumbling, a little off-the-rails, and somewhat distracting, but we kept it together between wrangling kids and passing dishes in a direction that was never discussed beforehand. I also got to meet my new niece, Emily. Well, not new. She's a year old now and was born only a few weeks after I had left for CZ. She's an incredibly happy baby and very interested in everything around her, especially her almost three-year-old sister. When combined with eight-year-old Laszlo, there are actually a troupe of kids now at family gatherings. For so long it was just Laszlo in varying degrees of age over the years, but now he has cousins who are beginning to communicate better. I don't use the word "rambunctious" ever, but that's exactly what Thanksgiving was. It was like the Benny Hill theme was the soundtrack to Toy Story.
The next day I turned 31. I went out to dinner with mom and step-dad who were trying incredibly hard to get the server to become interested in me. I think he was until my mom went the extra mile and mentioned I live in Europe, which is something else I'm going to debunk now:
I'm not on vacation 24/7 because I live here. I received some confusing reactions right after I moved, comments to the tune of "god it must be amazing to be on vacation every day." If you've kept abreast of my immigration situation on here or my social media, you're well aware that this has been far from vacation. All bureaucracy aside, I'm doing everything I'd be doing in the US. For instance today I went to a psychiatry appointment and the discount grocery store on my way home. I stopped to take some pictures, and now I'm home with Patrick. This exact day has clearly played out in Seattle more than once and I'm really not trying to be hacky, but that's where I'm at. One day last year I watched all three Men in Blacks in one sitting. Depression doesn't know I moved to Europe. My anxiety sure as shit does, but my depression doesn't.
Anyway, my birthday. It was great. I did a show in White Center and overall it was cool seeing how Seattle is getting it's shit together with comedy, and when I say that I mean there are some seriously great people doing some seriously great things. Some parts of me felt weird to be back, some places definitely felt like the cafeteria in Mean Girls. I wasn't sure of what my status was or if I would be perceived the same upon my return. I had a lot of shit to clear up while I was trying to sort out my life while living nine hours ahead, and I'm hoping a lot of it has been forgotten.
One important day when I was home was seeing my three closest friends in comedy but also just my three friends who I can get real with. We had a family dinner of sorts with chicken wings and hella La Croix. We talked about our fears, tumultuous events from the past year, our travels, and our current standings with stand up. It felt good to be myself around the people to whom I feel comfortable revealing myself. No pressure.
And to be honest, the hardest part was leaving. The only other time I've cried when flying out of an airport was when I was in Burbank and I was leaving a relationship that had ambiguous boundaries at the time. This time it was different, even harder than moving last year. I felt so reconnected with my family and my hometown and my familiar environment. I'm still unclear about what was making me cry. It could be a lot of reasons but I think maybe it's because I didn't want that camaraderie to end. I was knowingly taking a trip forward, and this time I even knew what was on the other side. I knew what was waiting for me. So why was this time so much harder, so much more emotionally taxing than the original move itself?
I returned to Brno with the city anxiously celebrating Black Friday because they don't have a Thanksgiving. The Christmas markets are up and running and all of the white and red holiday lights are running through the alleyways in the city center. We had our first snow on Saturday and I turned my heat on in my flat for the first time. Nothing blew up or caught on fire so I think we're safe for now. I outfitted my sleeping nook with some shelves and a nightlight so now my opium den is almost fully functional and almost ready for Instagram.
Right now I'm spending time waiting to hear back from IBM. Oh yeah, probably should have explained that earlier. I've been too stressed to write until now but long story short I got let go from my job at AT&T and due to the timing of it, the trial period I was under erased any valid visa I had so in order to not get deported at the end of December, I needed to find a job which will sponsor both my job and my residence in the Czech Republic. I interviewed at IBM with a group of four women and within the next week, they offered me a position. Part of the reason I was stressed was because I had initially made plans to go home for the first two weeks of November because it was the only time I could take from my job for the holidays...but then I had no job for the holidays and I needed to patch things up with immigration before leaving the country. I suspended my trip for two weeks while I communicated with IBM and made sure everyone knew I would be on holiday and unavailable for interviews and phone calls. The situation with IBM became more and more solidified and on Thanksgiving morning I woke up to an official job offer.
I'm hoping to start sometime in January, but as I've learned over the past year, I need to add an extra 60 days to any sort of bureaucratic timeline in the Czech Republic. So maybe before Easter is more realistic. Once again I have something on the horizon, but now I just have to wait.
Also I went to Dick's while I was home and it was fucking awesome.
I Am Human
I went into Arrival not knowing much about the movie. I knew it had something to do with Amy Adams and aliens, but I wasn't provided with any context until actually viewing the movie itself. On my 29th birthday, my mom and I ate dinner at Palace Kitchen and went to the AMC theater for this mysterious movie about pods that may or may not contain extraterrestrial life.
The film centers around Dr. Louise Banks, a linguistics professor who had previous translation experience with the military. After 12 pod shaped spacecrafts land all over the globe, there's a worldwide race to decipher the intentions of the pods: curiosity or destruction. Contact between us and the beyond was surrounded by language and the components that were necessary to communicate effectively. Do the aliens understand the concept of a question? How is their sentence structure comprised? Is syntax relevant? Does the written version of their language indicative of what sounds are produced?
I'm not going to do a WhOa SpOiLeR ALeRt!!!11 thing here because if you're interested in language at all, I've probably piqued your interest in seeing the film and I'm not going to ruin it for you, but I'll offer up some interesting ideas. The aliens communicated with Louise and her fellow researchers by using curls, swoops, splats, and twirls measured out in a circle called a logogram, and the team finally breaks through with one word: human. Eventually, after some test runs and estimations were successfully executed with minimal clues or prior knowledge, Dr. Banks is able to not only see the language, but is able to visualize the language through time. I don't mean "well she had an hour so she understood it after a while" time, but actual time.
Arrival made me cry a few different places. It's a rollercoaster when you least expect it to be, especially when walking into it not having any frame of reference for the plot. Today I have the logogram for "human" tattooed around my pulse on my left arm. A lot of people think it's some sort of significant coffee stain when really it's a great example of what it means to communicate, and if heptapods do invade the earth in the name of curiosity and things which cannot be expressed in what we know as an alphabet, at least I'll be tagged and bagged when they get here.
I'm a language nerd. I excelled in reading, writing, and spelling, even though I still have a tab open to Google just for typing words I'm nervous of spelling wrong (maintenance, privilege, and indigenous are among them). I'd like to think most people enjoy communicating effectively in their native language or another they picked up along the way. Most bilingual people I've talked with in the Czech Republic have brought up the subject of language, whether it's asking if I'm learning Czech or asking how difficult of a time I'm having learning Czech. English is now a much more common language throughout the country. Lots of old timers speak a second language, but it most likely isn't English. If you lived in Czechoslovakia before it went the way of film and the VHS, chances are you were speaking Czech, Slovak, German, or Russian since that whole "we're gonna occupy the fuck out of you" thing really took off in the 20th century.
I've been in the country for about three weeks, and I've only had to use "do you speak English?" maybe once every other day, most of the time with people over the age of 40. These Czechs are hardened Czechs, as in they've witnessed power exchanges multiple times throughout their lives and endured influxes of languages other than their own, which I'm sort of experiencing in reverse right now. Czech is supposed to be more stark and halting while Slovak is more sing-songy and whimsical. But for now, I just hear a bunch of hard consonants with murdery letters and sounds. They even made up their own "r," which is a combination of the letter itself and a bit of both "z" and "j."
I met Lenka under a clock near the popular tram stop of Česka. She sent me exact coordinates on Google Maps because the Czechs have this peculiar habit of making the current time very public on multiple surfaces, so some clarification was needed about which historical timekeeping monument I needed to find. Lenka is almost 40 but when it comes to her age, she's ambiguous. She could have given me any number of ages and I would have believed her. Her dyed auburn hair compliments the highlights in her face and doesn't wash her out like many women I've seen here. She carries herself well and speaks English with a British accent from spending time in London. A few weeks before I arrived in Brno, she contacted me on Facebook about wanting to find an "adventure buddy" for her nine-year-old daughter. She explained how she wanted to have her daughter exposed to more conversational and non-traditional English rather than what was taught in school for someone her age, which is usually a verb and its relative conjugations, trying to figure out which adjectives are placed before which noun, and a vast array of numbers which might as well all be the same. I was excited to take on my own language while analyzing and using it from a beginner's perspective. And I could finally put my fucking Creative Writing degree to use in a vocal sense and not just...on here.
Lenka explained that not only do I just get to hang out with her daughter, Alžběta, but her current best friend whose status will undoubtedly change three or four times before high school. Alžběta (the Czech version of "Elizabeth") and her friend Miša (I now have a sticky note open on my computer with all of the relevant hats and reverse circumflexes for the alphabet) are extremely bubbly and act like nine-year-old girls do. They met me in front of a church across the street from their school. Both buildings are incredibly expansive and are complete with ornate architecture and pumpkins cut out of construction paper placed neatly in the windows for the fall season.
Alžběta was holding a huge Czech/Slovak/English (Anglicky) dictionary from the 1970s. It was almost comical to see a young kid carrying around such a ridiculously thick book that could have easily been mistaken for Moby Dick or The Count of Monte Cristo. We greeted each other in limited English but I was really blown away with the amount of English they've already learned just from being taught in school, as in it wasn't just pointing at things and knowing the vocabulary. The two girls had complete thoughts and sentences in English and a lot of giggling in Czech.
My memories of language learning at a young age aren't great. The teacher I had as an elementary school student was extremely selective and active with her favoritism while teaching my class. I had an easy time learning Spanish and all of the words to "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" in a different language, but if any sort of enthusiasm or humorous contribution was made to the class, you were linguistically shunned and given the silent treatment in both languages.
When I entered middle school, I discovered I was to take Latin for two years in order to prepare me for the life or death decision of taking French or Spanish through high school. While I couldn't exercise my learned Latin in every day situations, it was during this time I figured out that I was a visual learner. Even today I'm seeing it in action. If I go to the supermarket (not grocery store!) up the street from my flat, I can remember the labels of food after I see them accompanying the appropriate food. But if someone were to stop me mid aisle and say, "the Czech word for 'butter' is ‘maslo,'" I won't remember it at all. And after using this sentence, I'll always know the Czech word for "butter."
Alžběta and Miša took me around the center of Brno to a few different stores and coffee shops they find interesting. I tried to ask them as many questions as I could without seeming like a hipster version of the foreign police. If I asked them something and they didn't know what I said, they would either ask me politely "again" or all three of us would stop and huddle around the giant dictionary while we tried to find a Czech word and it's English equivalent. Some of these words ended up being "music," "pathway," "take," "late," and "decaf." Technology ended up saving us a lot of time because we all defaulted to Google Translate. We used my phone to type and pass back and forth, but this process illuminated the difficulties and vagaries of the English language. Words such as "take," "go," "set," and "be" have many definitions so zeroing in on the exact one to translate a particular thought effectively can take some patience. There were a lot of guesses as to meanings and estimations on which phrases were actually intended to be a question. In a lot of ways, I felt like Dr. Banks with her new alien friends except I don't feel threatened and I know why they're here.
After a confusing amount of time, Lenka's daughter led me back to their flat on Rooseveltova, about a ten minute tram ride from my flat. Czech flats usually have what Minnesotans would refer to as a "mud room." There's an entirely different room you go in prior to entering the apartment that is meant for shoes and storage and a place to kick dirt and snow off of your boots, which I'm sure I'll be doing a lot of but it appears Seattle and Minneapolis both beat me to it. Their flat is homey and well lived in. There's a small loft for a bed above their living room and their ceilings are very tall. Large double insulated windows let a lot of light in so the need for indoor lighting was minimal, even after dark.
Alžběta's room is the perfect nine-year-old girl room. She has a stack of books on her nightstand for bedtime stories. She has little pink boxes that I'm not even sure hold anything in them; they're just boxes meant for buttons or small things magpies would pick up. There are plenty of small stuffed animals on her bed. Everything in her room has a label (in Czech) for which items go where. She has a hook for her backpack, a perfectly made bed with polka dot sheets, and picture frames with bright flowers around the edges. Her shoes are perfectly aligned underneath her steel coatrack and her white curtains are somewhere between doily and fabric meant for an American Girl doll.
Alžběta and I played Bejeweled, Merged!, and Angry Birds and I realized I could use games to help with her English so we may be spending a lot of time on tablets in the future. I'm going to be helping Miša out as well and I hope her and Alžběta don't find new best friends too quickly. At some point Alžběta messaged Lenka and asked if I could stay longer because "Liz is really cool and we like her," and I have my Monday afternoons blocked off until further notice.
While I've been writing this, I found out today I have a brand new niece named Emily November Vekich. She was born this morning and she's already smiling. I lost my favorite aunt this week but gained a little bundle who will make the family incredibly happy. It's times like this where I wish I was home, just for a hug and a warm exchange. Facebook is stupid for a lot of reasons but it's helping me connect with people back home so it's acting as my temporary portal. I'm nine hours ahead of most people I know, which has made communication somewhat easy due to me keeping weirdo hours but it's made watching football on Sundays rather difficult. I guess I'm still adjusting but I feel at home, but not home home yet. And I'm doing better than most of my league in fantasy football and I'm not even in the country. Two thumbs up for this human right here.