I’m digging my new desktop.
It’s amazing how much the weather has an influence on me. I never really felt this in Texas. Sure, I bitched that it was hot, but it was ALWAYS hot, and for months and months that didn’t change. And anyway, I was always in an artificial climate - no matter what was happening outdoors, my day was an invariable 72 degrees and I was completely indifferent to the blazing heat or torrential downpours that were a norm. It takes a hurricane for people to notice the weather there, and only because they might be forced out of their air-conditioned homes and possibly spend some time in slightly less air-conditioned motels.
But here, weather matters. Especially now, when my days are often quite literally determined by what’s happening outside my window. Oh, it’s a sunny, beautiful summer day? Screw work, I’m going to bike 25 km because who knows when it’ll be this nice again. It’s above 30 you say? Well, that only happens a couple of times each year, so I’m definitely going swimming. It’s pouring and cold? Guess I need to leave 10 minutes earlier to catch the tram instead of taking my bike (yeah, I’m a pussy like that).
And layering - it’s really an art form. I can say I never really appreciated the amount of strategy a good layered outfit requires when I lived in a place with two fashion choices: t-shirt or t-shirt and light jacket. Here, depending on the occasion, I can go with as few as two or as many as four or five layers - and that’s just the top, there’s also the tights or long johns underneath the jeans when it gets really cold. So, a wintertime Friday night outfit can consist of a base layer of light dress over tights or a fancy t-shirt or tank top, layered with a sweater or hoodie, layered with a thick sweater if necessary, layered with a winter coat. Oh, and gloves and hat and the ubiquitous scarf (best if it can double as a hood) and perhaps another sweater in the purse, just in case. Even most summer days require light jackets or sweaters in reserve for the evenings.
But enough about fashion. What got me on the topic of weather in the first place was yet another realization of just how much influence the weather has on my mood. I feel powerless whenever I realize how little control I have over this effect, as if having control were the natural state of affairs, rather than the guise we all throw on to mask our impuissance. Heat, cold, rain, sleet - it means nothing! We mighty humans have conquered weather, have beaten Mother Nature at her own game. Watch us as we build our air-conditioned mansions and irrigate the deserts. What does it matter that it’s grey and dreary outside when I’m in my well-lit, heated office building?
It does matter, though. Being closer to the weather, having it directly affect your day also results in it gaining a direct ability in affecting your mood. In short - when it rains, I get less done. I’m sleepy and useless and have to force any semblance of productivity. And then the next day I’ve had even less sleep as I spent the previous day force feeding caffeine in order to work, but it doesn’t matter because the sun is out and I’m up and working out and working and the caffeine actually works too and isn’t it a beautiful day to be alive. And the difference is a few clouds releasing water molecules and lowering the temperature by an insignificant couple of degrees.
So maybe it is a kind of devolution - not exactly a return to nature, but at least a greater awareness of it. But it doesn’t feel like I’ve lost any kind of battle, because it seems like an awful waste of energy to be fighting this war in the first place. We evolved on a planet with seasons in most places, and despite our constant battle to ignore those changes in temperature and precipitation, as long as we’re not freezing to death or dying of heatstroke maybe it’s better to be affected by our surroundings, even if it means riding bikes instead of spending days in an office, or lying in bed watching TV instead of marking tasks off a never-ending to do list. Luckily, those are luxuries I can afford as a freelancer, but I still wonder if the rest of the Western world would be better off living like this as well.
“There are about 25 million Americans who develop grotesque facial ticks when they hear the words ‘9 to 5.’ … We call them freelancers.” —
N. Killiham, The Washington Post, May 23, 1989
I don’t know how I never came across this quote before, but I absolutely love it. I also wonder if that figure is much higher these days due to the economy…
“The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.” —
Attention Governor Perry: Evolution is a fact - On Faith - The Washington Post
When people ask me why I don’t see myself ever moving back to America, usually I say something like I prefer the European lifestyle - living centrally in an apartment, not having to drive, having seasons, living in a place with a lively city center, bars that never close (no 2 am cutoff here!) and a slower drinking pace, a culture that’s not as focused on materialism and keeping-up-with the-Jonesitis, better news sources, affordable health care and university, and in general, more freedom. But actually, most of those things can be found in some American cities (though they’re all certainly much more expensive to live in), and when taken on their own might not justify my decision to stay here. It’s my goto answer, though, because the truth is much harder to explain over a beer.
The truth goes something like this: in all of the places I’ve lived in, all of the places I’ve travelled to (and statistically, that’s a lot), America is the only place where I’ve experienced such blatant anti-intellectualism (and this coming from someone who spent part of their childhood in communist Poland). Sure, Europe has its share of idiots, extremists and radical parties, but for the most part, the democratic process works here because most people want the best person for the job of leading the country. They might disagree on the specifics of how to do this, but leaders are not selected because of their lack of credentials. Ignorance is not a qualification, it is a problem to be addressed with education before one can pursue a significant office. There is no mainstream pride in ignorance like there is in much of American society.
As someone who loves learning, who is constantly striving to gain knowledge and decrease ignorance, I can’t imagine living in a society whose views are so antithetical to my own. Sadly, I don’t see this changing in my lifetime; if anything, it’s gotten worse in recent memory.
Anyway, Dawkins’ article is quite insightful and worth reading.
***
EDIT: Right after posting this, I found two articles on this topic, also worth reading: Republicans Against Science and The increasingly antiscience Republican candidates (the latter by one of my favorite people on the Internets, Bad Astronomer Phil Plait).
I’ve been absent from this blog for a while, and no matter how I try to rationalize it (I’ve had a lot of work, my parents visited, there was an epic wedding weekend, I had to clean up cat puke) and say I’ve been too busy living to write, I find that excuse leaving a bitter taste in my mouth. Imagine me dropping dead and my obit reading, “She was doing so well but then she got too busy to breathe. Poor thing.”
So what’s the problem, exactly? It’s been eight months since I left my old job and turned freelance. I’m slowly getting to the position where I’m getting steady work (though I need to do more marketing and sort out some legal details still). My website is set up, so all that’s left is to do the actual work when I have it, and that takes far fewer hours per week than my old job required of me, especially since I no longer have to spend eight hours in an office whether I have work to do or not. I have more time than I’ve had since my first year of college (the only time I didn’t also have a job), and plenty of ideas for writing projects, not just in this blog. And yet, it seems that every part of my day is increasingly occupied. So what’s the matter with me?
I think I’ve isolated at least part of it: I may have left my old job behind in December, but I took my old habits with me.
When I had to sit in an office all day, I developed coping mechanisms. As I’m a late riser and night worker, I’d spend the first hour or two of each morning just trying to force my brain awake so I could start being productive. This involved visiting news sites, reading my RSS feeds, downing enough coffee to dispatch a small elephant and generally killing time until I either had to do something time-sensitive or felt like my brain was present enough to start writing an actual article.
When I used to check email at work, it was a matter of keeping my head above water during the daily flood, which meant ignoring a good number of messages, putting many off until the absolute last minute, and dealing with the truly urgent ones - but not immediately, just before it was too late.
These days, I set my own hours. If I feel like working early (say, noonish), I work early. If I feel like getting groceries and working out and making a nice dinner during the day and then working until the wee hours, I do that. I don’t have a set schedule, I have a schedule regulated by necessity and efficiency. I work when I feel I’m most productive. As for email, it’s no longer a flood but a manageable trickle.
And yet, I still won’t answer some messages for days, though they require minimum effort on my part. Worse still, I find myself spending significant parts of my day visiting news sites, reading my RSS feeds, drinking coffee and energy drinks and generally killing time. Except now it’s my time that I’m wasting, not an employer’s, and I’m the only one losing out.
This week was a bit of an eye-opener, in that all of my precious habits that I had developed during my years of working at the newspaper and continued into my freelance life were forcefully disrupted. My parents visited for the week, and since my apartment is tiny that meant I slept at a friend’s place while they took over my flat. That meant no computers, TV or even wifi before bed or right in the morning. Over the weekend two of my good friends got married, and since it was a proper Polish wedding that meant the festivities started on Thursday and finished Monday morning. Luckily, I didn’t have much work during that time, and none of it was that urgent, so that means I spent less time in front of my computer and more time surrounded by breathing human beings that weekend than I had in years - and I had an amazing time. Sure, it helped that the wedding party was well stocked with enough food and booze to keep a small nation-state going for weeks, and that I was surrounded by old friends, many of whom I hadn’t seen in years, as well as my parents, who I see about once a year, but in the end what matters is that the world kept going even if I wasn’t constantly reading about it, and I didn’t die of boredom even if I didn’t constantly have a screen in front of my face.
Does that mean I’m going to throw out my computers and start crashing Polish weddings? No, I like working just enough to ward off imminent starvation (though, have you ever seen a Polish wedding? Crashing those would keep me fed for life…). But it does mean that I need to reevaluate how I spend my time, so that every minute spent in front of a screen is spent doing something that will either earn me money now or in the future. I need to start creating more and consuming less. I need to unsubscribe from RSS feeds (or just delete Reeder off my Mac and phone), be content with listening to the BBC while making breakfast for my daily news fix, turn off the screens before bed and get enough sleep so I can drink coffee for pleasure, not necessity, and take back my time.
In other words, I need to unsubscribe from my old habits, and embrace new ones. It’s about time.
“I have to admit, I’m a little dialed out of the blog world right now, concentrating more on what I’m trying to create instead of what others are up to. I sometimes find that the less attention I pay to what others are doing, the more I just forge ahead in my own direction and the less insecure I feel about what I’m trying to create. There’s a balance to be struck, though; exposure to what other people create is often inspiring and provoking too” —
A sentiment shared.
(via lanipauli)
I’ll just use this to explain my absence from the tumblverse. That, and a month of nearly non-stop travel, a concert, my mother visiting, and finally some work, which I really should get back to…
Last month, I posted A Brief History of Poland for Non-Poles, which had originally run in the spring issue of Airgate magazine (one of my glamorous freelance writing gigs). The natural follow-up would be a brief history of the city I’ve now lived in for nearly six years: Kraków (which originally appeared in the summer issue of Airgate). Enjoy.
While the nation of Poland had yet to exist before the 11th century, by then Kraków had several hundred years of history under its belt. According to legend (an irrefutable historical source, if you ask me), the settlement was established in the fourth century when a brave shepherd named Krak defeated the dragon living under Wawel Hill, rendering the surrounding lands safe for settlement and flourishing under his rule. Unfortunately, certain killjoys calling themselves “historians” debate this legend, citing instead a tribe of Vistulans as the original settlers of Wawel Hill.
Capital status
Around 990, the first royal dynasty, Piast, incorporated Kraków into their territories, and the growing city became the seat of the Polish government in 1038. The city gained even more prestige in 1364, when King Casimir III founded the Cracow Academy (now the Jagiellonian University), the second oldest such institution in Central Europe. The university, along with the city’s capital status, made Kraków a flourishing centre of learning and arts in medieval Europe, home to such visionaries as Nicolaus Copernicus (Mikołaj Kopernik as they called him at home). Its Jewish history was also cultivated during this time, when the district of Kazimierz was established in 1495 as a home for the area’s Jewish community.
The Renaissance came to the city in the 15th century, and with it new ideas in the sciences and further development of the arts and all good intellectual pursuits. Much of Kraków’s iconic architecture arose at this time, including the famous alter of St Mary’s Cathedral, and most of the structures of Wawel Castle, when King Sigismund I hired a Florentine architect for some major remodelling.
However, Kraków’s role as royal capital would only last until 1596, when Swede Sigismund III moved the capital to Warsaw (a demotion many Cracovians still feel angry about today).
Invasions and partitions
After several Mongol invasions left the city in ruins, Cracovians finally got smart and decided to build a wall – and not just any wall, but a 3 km massive defensive structure with 46 towers at its completion, the most famous of which is St Florian’s Gate, still standing today. However, no amount of towers could prevent the decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that began in the 17th century and cumulated in the three partitions of Poland and the end of the Polish nation at the end of the 18th century. For the next 123 years, Kraków’s fate would be in the hands of the Austrian Empire.
Austrian overlords
In 1795, Kraków officially became a part of the Austrian province of Galicia. By most accounts, the Cracovians had it better than Poles under Russian or Prussian rule. The city again became a centre of culture and art, called the “Polish Athens”, after 1866, when Galicia gained autonomy and Polish became the official language of the area once again. This was another golden era for Kraków, when bigwigs of art such as Jan Matejko, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Stanisław Wyspiański and other names you’ll find in the National Museum were flourishing.
At the start of the 20th century, Kraków was a thriving modern metropolis, with a newly built tram network consisting of such wonders as electric lighting. While the First World War did some damage to the city, it was relatively unscathed and had the added benefit of being incorporated into the newly-reformed Polish state in 1919, which lasted a grand total of 20 years before Hitler and Stalin ruined the party.
Modern Kraków
The Second World War devastated the Cracovian population, especially its previously burgeoning Jewish community, but left the city’s infrastructure mostly unharmed. After the war, the new Soviet authorities ordered the construction of Nowa Huta as a working man’s counterpart to bourgeois, academic Kraków. Ironically enough, the district, now a part of Kraków, became a centre of anti-communist protests in the 1980s, and now remains a relic of communist chic since the fall of the Iron Curtain and Poland’s regained independence in 1989.
Though no longer serving as Poland’s capital, today Kraków still enjoys the title of “Cultural Capital of Poland” (and has the UNESCO status to prove it), and Cracovians certainly like to mention this fact as often as possible. And while it may not get the important state visits or high-level bankers that Warsaw enjoys, most Cracovians will tell you that they’re proud of living in an ancient city founded by a dragon-slayer.
Over the weekend, President Obama visited Poland as the last part of his European tour, which spurned comments across the American blogosphere mostly along the lines of “Why the hell Poland?” (along with the far too frequent “Where the hell is Poland again? Isn’t it like part of Russia?”) So to clarify the situation for some geographically and/or historically-challenged Americans, I thought I’d post an article I wrote last month for the Krakow Airport magazine (one of my glamorous freelance writing gigs). It was originally titled “A Brief History of Poland for Expats”, but I think it can be a bit more universal.
The polonophile is a rare breed of foreigner that comes to Kraków: a student and lover of Polish history keen to debate even Poles on the lineage of Queen Jadwiga or the finer points of military strategy during the 1920 campaign. The rest of us, however, arrive with only a general idea of recent Polish events: invasion, war, brief freedom, more war, communism, and post-communism, i.e. The Era of EU-Sponsored Hugs and Puppies. Not a very happy picture (at least until recently), and quite incomplete. So for those who would like a more robust view of the beginnings of their adopted country, without taking the time to get a master’s degree in European Studies, read on!
It’s not a stretch to say that Poland has had a colourful history. Though it’s seen as a very Catholic nation today, both its Catholicism and its status as a nation began in the 10th century. Let’s just assume that prior to this era, Poles were running around in animal skins hitting each other over the head with clubs continuously and getting nothing productive done. It may not be the case, but this is a magazine article, not a Norman Davies hardback, and our space is limited.
In 966, King Mieszko I brought Christianity to the heathens and the Kingdom of Poland was established in 1025 (these things took longer before Twitter was around). Not content with rule over a significant portion of the European continent, King Sigismund II Augustus, the last monarch of the Jagiełło clan (yes, the ones the university is named after), joined Poland with its northern neighbour Lithuania, forming the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The fate of the two peoples was sealed in the mid-16th century with the Union of Lublin, and though the two kingdoms were equal on paper, in reality, Poland dominated the partnership, and the Commonwealth’s capital was Warsaw. So while the rest of Europe was mucking around exploring the New World (like anything good came out of that), the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth grew to become one of the largest and most populous kingdoms during the 16th and 17th centuries. It was also one of the first modern quasi-democratic systems, and featured an elective monarchy and a parliament comprised of the nobility, as well as being uniquely religiously tolerant for the times.
Of course, all good things must come to an end, and for Poland that happened thrice over. Like a delicious piece of szarlotka, the Commonwealth was cut into pieces until there was nothing left. One by one, the Cossacks, the Swedes, the Russians, the Prussians, and Hapsburg Austrians invaded, snatching up land as they came through. The constant invasions and warfare took their toll in the form of population loss and economic decline. However, the crisis also gave rise to a period of intellectual and artistic enlightenment, and the May 3 Constitution (now known mostly for creating four-day weekends together with the 1 May holiday) passed in 1791, becoming the first constitution in modern Europe. Unfortunately, it didn’t do much good for the declining state, and with the third and final partition of Poland in 1795, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ceased to exist, and Poles found themselves now citizens of Russia, Prussia, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Though Poland disappeared from European maps for 123 years, Poles fought hard to keep their culture intact and even thriving, and widespread rebellions like the 1830 November Uprising kept morale (as well as body counts) high. During this period, the great Polish tradition of emigration to Western Europe, a practice I’m told is quite popular to this day, began, with figures like Adam Mickiewicz, Cyprian Norwid, and Frédéric Chopin all packing their bags to make their names in the West. Eastwards, various Polish puppet states came and went, but for the most part the Polish nation remained under the rule of the three afore-mentioned powers.
World War I brought conflict across Europe, but its end brought Poland’s return to the globe, as the 1919 Treaty of Versailles officially recognised it as a country once again. During the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921, the Polish army took advantage of Russia’s preoccupation with its own civil war to invade and annex old Commonwealth lands in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. This didn’t last long, as Stalin got those lands back and then some thanks to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and invasion by both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in September 1939. The devastation of Poland and near-elimination of what had previously been a thriving Jewish community followed, and then fifty years of Soviet-imposed communism followed that, as we all know. Since 1989, history has been kinder to Poles, a trend we hope will continue throughout the next millennium.
There. Don’t you feel smarter already?
12:21 am last night. That’s when it came, that moment. It comes more or less weekly, sometimes more, sometimes less, but always when you’re alone. No television, no spouse, no distractions in your headphones. The bed is the best place - that, or the shower. But it’s always when you have just let your guard down, whether scrubbing routinely or just about to drift away.
That moment, when just for a split second, you know you’re not going to make it.
It takes different forms for different people, most more mundane. A housewife knows they’ll run out of money. A father sees his children taken away. A soldier sees the bullet that will sail straight for him. And I see failure and mediocrity, of being not a late bloomer like I always thought, but a non-bloomer.
Just for that moment, you know, know it’s not worth it, that every effort you make is a waste. But then it’s over, and reason takes over, and you see the road ahead with your dreams fulfilled, or at least a damn good effort made towards them. And luckily, this feeling lasts longer.
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