I harbor a very strong fear of posting cheesy* motivational quotes by multi-millionaire self-help gurus on my blog, but since everything I want is on the other side of that fear, I’m doing it anyway.
*yet powerful, practical, and true
Category Archives: inspiration & encouragement
(get over the) hump day inspiration: Rilke edition
I’m not sure whether anxiety and depression are feelings, or mental states that keep you at a distance from your feelings. Regardless, a big old ball of anxiety tinged with despair has been hanging over me like that little Zoloft cloud lately, and every which way I’ve tried to fight it – or not fight it and simply get through it – has failed miserably…
…including posting this quote. Oh well. Maybe it’ll work for you.
(I don’t know whether this rightly belongs in the “inspiration and encouragement” category, but I don’t have one called “let’s all feel like shit together,” so it’ll have to do.)
(get over the) hump day inspiration: Desmond Tutu edition
Trying times. So many hate-filled people causing so much needless pain. I wish I could go hang out on Desmond Tutu’s couch and listen to him make me feel better about the universe. Last week I said I would pay to be David Sedaris’ friend. Today, I think I would turn over my life’s savings just to sit at a kitchen table with Desmond Tutu and David Sedaris and feel that all is right with the world.
Perhaps I should give up on language learning and join an ashram instead…
(get over the) hump-day inspiration: Paperwhite edition
I am actually over the hump already, since it’s 1:30 on Thursday morning here, but I never changed from EST to Dakar time on my computer so I’m just going to pretend it’s still Wednesday at 9:30. When it was actually Wednesday at 9:30, I was in a great mood despite this looming deadline, but since then a very industrious and vengeful mosquito has picked up tormenting me where it left off last night. This same mosquito bit me repeatedly on four of my toes yesterday, and today it has tattooed that ankle and also gotten both arms so many times that the hydrocortisone cream that usually kills the itch immediately has given up the fight and left me wanting to peel my skin off. I don’t even understand how one mosquito needs that much blood. How has it not exploded by now?
This is all entirely tangential. I had meant to post a song that, while not filled with the most inspirational words, is filled with an inspirational feeling that had described my current mood, until my current mood shifted from a world-is-my-oyster-happiness to a world-is-nothing-but-discomfort-itchiness. Is itchiness a mood? Because it is literally overwhelming all my senses right now.
In the battle of mosquito bloodlust vs. Ruth wanderlust, the mosquito has won out tonight. But there’s always tomorrow, and with that I am off to bed.
a new French benchmark! (Frenchmark?)
People. Today I had a meeting… in French.
The first thing the man I was meeting with asked was, “Français? Anglais?” I chose the latter because though I’m seizing every opportunity to speak French, a business meeting is no place to practice. I then proceeded to lose all professional decorum when he offered me espresso from his Lavazza machine.* It was like Beatlemania applied to a coffeemaker.
So to be fair, there wasn’t much farther to fall. But I was alarmed when the man called over one of his staff, seemingly to introduce us, but actually to join us for the rest of the meeting – in French, because I had said that was fine when I thought we’d be doing five seconds’ worth of, “Je m’appelle Ruth. Enchantée. À bientôt.”
For the next twenty minutes I had three parallel streams of thought running through my mind. One was, “Holy shit, I’m having a meeting in French and I can understand!!!!” One was, “Holy shit, I’m having a meeting in French, what if I can’t understand????” And then of course, one was the conversation itself.
Perhaps it’s due to this overcrowding that my brain seems to skip over some fundamental processing component when working in French. I’ve noticed that I’ll follow along with a conversation, respond accordingly, and conclude with some mutually agreed upon forward-facing plan, but afterwards I’ll find myself unable to recap what was said in anything more than vague general terms. The specifics don’t seem to get banked, even in my short-term memory.
Anticipating that I might have this problem today, I scribbled down notes in English immediately following the meeting. It felt a little like I was cheating the (language acquisition) system, but in this case I couldn’t afford to get anything wrong by writing in French. As it is, I’m terrified that when I email them to follow up they’re going to be like, “Why is she going on and on about X when we asked her to talk about Y?”
That’s not the point. The point is: today I reached a new personal level of awesomeness because I had a business meeting in French. I just gave myself a literal pat on the back, because such things are important.
*It takes capsules just like Nespresso but it is as delicious and potent as the real thing.
(get over the) hump day inspiration: Stevie Nicks edition
Yesterday was my one-month anniversary (monniversary? mensiversary?) in Dakar, and I spent most of the day crying. But that was before I realized what day it was. At about 6pm it dawned on me that I arrived on February 15 and it was now March 15, so I took a moment to be proud of myself before returning to weepiness.
This morning I was scrolling through Instagram (where I finally started posting photos) and saw this quote on @CarolineCala‘s feed. It was exactly what I needed.
I’m by turns discouraged, lonely, bored, frustrated, overwhelmed, disconnected, hungry, nauseous, and unsure of myself here, not to mention convinced that my hair – which I am hoping to grow out as quickly as possible and which I am thus loath to trim into shape – makes me look like a socially untouchable muppet. But I’m not leaving til I finish what I started.
(PS It’s not nearly as bad as that sounds. I am in a slump right now but there have also been many moments of pure joy, confidence, excitement, chattiness, connection, and happy gorging.)
(PPS Will share photos from my trip when I figure out how to connect an Android to a Mac to upload them.)
Coming out of the woodwork
It seems that the more boldly you go in the direction of your dreams, the more readily you find kindred spirits going boldly in the direction of their own very similar dreams.
It started two years ago when I traveled to Argentina for my first solo adventure abroad (apart from Vancouver the year before, which barely counts). I met a 20-something Korean woman who had been backpacking alone for four months across South America even though she spoke maybe 40 words of Spanish and even fewer of English. I sat next to her on the bus back to the hotels from the Argentine side of Iguazu Falls one night, and then ran into her at the entrance of the Brazilian side early the next morning. We walked around the falls together, and though we understood next to nothing of each other, her bad-assness translated perfectly.
A few months ago at a Speakeasy event I met a French woman in her fifties who was in the midst of long-term travel. She is the only person I have ever met who has taken a cargo ship to get where she was going, and she did it by herself. I asked her all about it because I would love, love, love to do a leg of my (still-nebulous) journey via one of those ships but am just a little wary of what that would entail. She assured me it was safe, clean, fascinating, generally awesome. More inspiration in the bank.
In Mexico City two weeks ago, I hit it big. At breakfast on the last day of my trip, I met a Dutch man whose adventure started twenty-something years before when he moved to Sweden after studying Swedish in school. He just loved the idea of Sweden for some reason, much as I love the idea of Senegal without really being able to say why. After something like twelve years there he quit his job as a translator to travel through South America and Asia, but he ended up staying in Buenos Aires for almost three years because he loved it so much. (Much as I fell head over heels for Argentina.) At some point, his former company called to offer him translating work that he could do via telecommuting, and he realized he could travel at the same time. So he’s been a veritable nomad for twelve years. He speaks seven languages, several of which he learned in his thirties, and he did it via self-teaching and immersion rather than classes. I practically bowed down to this man for offering living proof that it could be done.
Then I returned to work and found out that it was a colleague’s last day. I hadn’t talked to her much before but we started a conversation and learned that we are the same age, have trained in similar fields, and are both about to take off on a self-financed trip to Africa to finally do what we’ve been meaning to do for years. She plans to head to Tanzania in January to document the situation for Burundians in refugee camps. I told her I’d see her there – since, you know, we’d be nearly 6,000 miles from each other but we’d be on the same continent, so of course I’d come to visit.
Because that’s how you’ve got to think when you’re thinking big.
my new smartphone rules
I am something of a Luddite. A hypocritical one, as I rely on modern technology to do my work (documentary and news production), but a Luddite nevertheless. I don’t embrace machines that make life easier unless they free up my time in the world (dishwashers!) instead of taking time away from it (stationary bikes).
Even though it is a supremely useful device, I resisted getting a smartphone for years because I didn’t want to turn into a person who was more engaged with my phone than with everything and everyone around me. I succumbed a couple of years ago when I realized that without one, I was at a distinct disadvantage work-wise. Knowing that I tend towards an obsessive personality, I set rules for myself to try to limit the extent to which the smartphone could suck up my presence and swallow my soul. But as expected, I broke every single one, and little by little I became a smartphone brat like the rest of them.
There’s nothing like seeing how people live in a country with hardly any computers or smartphones to recognize that I am in my terrible twos of iPhone ownership, and if I don’t impose some mom-like discipline on myself, I’ll turn into a complete and utter wasteland. So it was two weeks ago on the plane home from this place – where it was impossible to use my phone as anything other than an alarm clock and camera, where I did not go online once, and where the digital age was limited to televisions and flip phones – that I decided to take advantage of the momentum and reset myself with some stringent smartphone and Internet rules:
– phone /Skype conversations only at home, at work, or parked somewhere. No walk-and-talks.
– no walking and texting, ever.
– text checks 3x a day max, unless I’m in conversation with someone and/or time is of the essence.
– email checks 3X a day max except work emails while at work.
– change notification settings so I don’t get any phone alerts when texts or emails arrive.
– use apps only for “necessities,” meaning: navigation, weather report, my schedule, checking on important work-related stuff, writing notes, accessing my bank accounts, getting the news, mapping my runs. (I know I am pushing the definition of necessity.)
– use social media only for work, except Facebook no more than 1X per week and for no more than five minutes at a time.
– no mindless Internet browsing – must have an objective in mind when online. Once that objective is met, get. the. !@#%*$. off.
Good rules, no? I’m going to see how it goes and reassess in a few weeks.
what luck!
In the more than two years that I’ve been going to French conversation Meetups, I have met people from virtually every francophone country – except Senegal, the one in which I’m most interested. Last night, less than one week after setting my tentative departure date for Dakar (February 15) and beginning to make concrete plans, I met two guys from… Dakar. They live in New York at the moment, but one of them, Michel, will be heading back soon. I told him he will be my first friend there, and I hope I’m right, because living in place where you don’t know a soul is pretty challenging.
He also works at a really great Senegalese restaurant in Harlem, so I now have a plan for my first lunch as a lady of leisure in January.
Ask, and – sometimes, when it feels like it – the universe answers.
[Photo: Tomo Tapio K]
(get over the) hump day inspiration: Terry Pratchett edition
I don’t actually need any hump day inspiration considering that I got back from vacation last night and did literally nothing at work today but hang out and hyperventilate/chatter about said vacation while extremely high on espresso and life.
I’ll share photos once I sift through all 1,500+ of them and find the gemmiest of the many, many gems… Because where I went, it was eye orgasms every which way you looked.
Hasta pronto, mis amigos! No puedo esperar para mostrar mis fotos del más magnífico vacaciones en la historia de vacaciones! (I’m still high on that coffee, fourteen hours later.)
talk foreign to me 