Bien arrivée... come what may!

I have been in Geneva for less than 48 hours, and I am happy to report that the flight over went without incident.  Letters to Juliet and L'Arnacoeur were the two in-flight movies I enjoyed (I love Romain Duris!), and my neighbor's dad offered me some sour Skittles and Starbust to further my enjoyment of the flight.  I got to London, where I awaited my next flight to Geneva, nervous about having to either get an expensive taxi or navigate the train system and walk with my copious amounts of luggage to my new home.  The decision was made for me when I found out that only one suitcase had made it on the plane (the heavier one!).  This was actually great news because 1) I had dealt with lost luggage before in France, so no big deal, I was a seasoned veteran on that, and 2) This helped me make my decision about how to get to the Foyer International pour Jeunes Filles!  With about 40 pounds less to weigh me down, I found the train station and then hauled my luggage to my quintessential Swiss apartment (aside from the no male visitors thing!).  My studio is AWESOME--kitchenette, bathroom, plenty of closet space, a sweet desk (which I anticipate will inspire some great dissertation writing), a balcony (which I anticipate will inspire some great dissertation writing distraction) and a bed that can sleep all 5'9" of me.  :)  Pictures for your viewing pleasure are below.

The woman who runs the residence has been such a huge help--she advised me on where to eat for cheap, gave me directions to the closest SwissCom to get my new cell phone, and even loaned me a hairdryer for the year--no purchase necessary! :)  Aside from that, she's been very motherly, in a good way, and I'm looking forward to meeting the other girls who live here on Friday for our first group meeting.

My French is rusty, but the good news is I think I'll get along just fine.  UniGe has cours d'appui for French, and I intend to take one to improve my spoken expression.  The first gentleman I spoke to at the cell phone store couldn't place my accent, and the second one I spoke to at a different cell phone store asked me if I had lived in France before, since I couldn't have simply "just arrived" given how well I spoke.  You can guess which gentleman got my business. :)

Other snafus and cultural frustrations?

In spite of my great French at SwissCom, when I installed the SIM card (not something they do for you here, like they do in the U.S.!), it was set to the German language.  After some coaching with my good friends AMA who speaks German and Carina who IS German, I fumbled through and found the SIM language setting.

I went to the grocery store, located all the items I needed (GREAT! NOT TOO EXPENSIVE!) and promptly felt like an imbecile when the cashier told me that I needed to weigh the produce.  :)  She was very understanding and even ran over to help me as I muddled through.  The other customers in the check-out line took it well, too.  The guy behind me must have been American because he said, "Don't worry, it happens to everybody." Whew.  At least I didn't start a riot.

I also checked out the bank to see about opening an account, but alas--no can do, until I have my student ID from the university.  Unfortunately, I won't get that until our séance d'accueil on Friday.  Until then, I'm working on locating a bike to get around town and exploring the town.

This evening I tried out the Geneva Runners group--I met a few people, but didn't go for the whole run, preferring instead to return and meander through (read: got a little lost) the jardin botanique.  I'll need to go on a few solo runs before I'm up to their pace.

All in all, a pretty good day, given it's only Day Two.  I can't believe I'm here and this is the life I'm living!  Lots of changes and new things to come in the next few weeks!  And I'll continue to update you all here.

Work vs. Play... Oisiveté à éviter?

So this past week or so my thoughts have turned to the idea of leisure.  How much work is the appropriate amount to be happy?  How much leisure is enough to drive you to want to work?  How does this vary from individual to individual, from person to person?

Take myself for instance... I do my most productive work when I'm busy, busy, busy.  Or, even if my work isn't at it's best, I ENJOY feeling busy, since it gives me a sense of purpose.  I start to feel restless if I'm idling around the house for too long, maybe because  I sometimes (though more recently less so!) define myself in terms of what I DO (and if I'm idling around the house, I'm doing NOTHING, ergo, I AM nothing).  In Madison, what I did was very concrete--I worked at the FBI office at least 20 hours a week, I volunteered at Domestic Abuse Intervention Services, I worked events at L'Etoile, and I served and bartended at Bellini. Frisbee Monday-Thursday rounded out the list (with occasional misses for things like Concerts on the Square or a birthday festa), or yoga/running/dancing if frisbee wasn't in season.  Oh, and throw in working on my dissertation in there somewhere (right now, that is the work I am AVOIDING). 

Don't get me wrong--I also enjoy taking naps and hitting the beach (or maybe both at the same time, since I am a multi-tasker :)), but too much of anything is a bad thing.  Too much work?  Makes Mary a dull girl.  Too much play?  Makes Mary a bore. This translates to my academic ideology as well--the idea of reading French literature for the rest of my life and writing academic articles about it that will simply gather dust in some journal on a back shelf in the library, well, strikes me as my anti-life-dream realized.  I like my academic work to be productive and serve some kind of purpose, too.  French literature does have its place in the world--it opens minds, introduces people to new forms of clarity in language, it expresses things in ways that English or other languages cannot--and it's just beautiful.  Its functionality isn't just in its beauty though... Jonah Lehrer talks about how Proust's literature anticipated major leaps in neuroscience and the study of memory.  It can unite, divide, provoke, or bore (though RARELY, as a Francophile :)).  

The thing is, all of those work obligations are also fun for me (at least most of the time).  Maybe the key is to find the kind of job that drives you to work, fulfills your passion.  That's why I came to graduate school in the first place.  Two quotes heavily influenced my decision and choice of field:

1.  Gil Bailie, "Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is more people who have come alive."

Things that make me come alive?  Foreign languages, especially French; meeting new people; helping others...

2.  Paolo Coelho, "You'll never be able to escape from your heart.  So it's best to listen to what it has to say."

A nagging sensation haunted me a lot when I was working at Kirkland and Ellis.... what was I DOING there?  I slogged through the LSAT and hated every minute of preparation.  That didn't bode well for law school.  The brightest days there were when I was correcting translations from an outside firm.  And then--I went to a concert by Padam at the French Embassy.  Rien à voir avec le travail des études supérieures... But the next day, when I was headed in to the office to put in some (non-)quality OT, and the band just happened to descend at my metro stop as I was getting on?  I just didn't think that was coincidence.  And I couldn't be happier with my decision... I'm not sure if my ultimate stop on the job train will be a professorship in a university (a lot depends on the job market and how picky I am geographically), but these past five years (and I'm sure the remaining year and a half to come!) have been thoroughly enjoyable.  I like what I do!  And that in itself is something...

The past two weeks at home have been about relaxing as much as possible before dissertation writing goes in to overdrive!  The funny thing is... I needed to take on a side translation job while I was here, or I would have gone crazy.  Fortunately, I have not!  And have even begun to enjoy the vacation.  Nine days left to squeeze out every ounce of leisure. :)

So enough about me, how about some of those questions about OTHER people and cultures?  That will come in the next post.

Inclinations...

Samuel Johnson wrote, “What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.”

This summer, I'm feeling more inclined to read neuroscience/non-fiction writers like Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell than works in French.  This is making me wonder about my life choices--comes with the territory I think when you're at the point of writing the dissertation, there's no class structure or professor telling me what I SHOULD read, I'm not teaching at the moment, so I'm not looking up interesting new snippets to inspire my students (and me! for that matter), and I'm contemplating whether or not this whole Ph.D. in French is ultimately going to land me a job at a university, given the tight academic job market.  And besides, do I want to end up teaching in Wichita?

Cynical?  Maybe.  But the coming year in Geneva will help remind me of my original inclinations--French language/literature and  "brassage culturel"--these are the things  that move me, inspire me.  And hopefully, it will help me get through this quagmire of doubt that is only natural as you're on the verge of realizing one of your life dreams. Once I finish and obtain the Ph.D., who knows where that dream may take me.  Perhaps in a completely different direction. Perhaps to the perfect job in Witchita! :)  On verra.  And in the meantime, I'll read--with inclination AND without, if it means I will finish.

Housing: To Worry or Not to Worry

The good news: I have received my visa!  I will have no trouble staying in the country legally for 10 months.  This is a small victory, since I navigated the bureaucracy on my own--with some advice from my predecessors who also studied in Geneva.

The bad news:  I did not receive housing at the university.  Utterly surprised about this.  Hyperventilating ensued, along with some tears, since I know housing is hard to come by in Rousseau's city.  Evidence of this?  Every housing website has a disclaimer that goes something like this: "Avec un taux de logements vacants inférieur à 2 pour mille, le marché immobilier genevois est traditionnellement tendu. Les loyers sont donc coûteux et la recherche d'un logement souvent problématique." or "STP Dessine-moi un logement" (love the allusion to Le Petit Prince, less excited about what that means with regard to my prospects of housing) or "une grande crise de logement sévit à Genève" (we know it's serious if they're using the verbe sévir--the crisis is RAGING?  Yikes!).

I've been thinking more and more about faith lately though, and how things have a tendency to work out--it's a mystery, as they say in Shakespeare in Love!--God does provide.  And as someone I chatted with today said, "I don't know of any students yet who have had to sleep under a bridge."  Whew!  I was worried. :)

This will be my mantra until I arrive, find housing, and get settled in my new home for 10 months:

 ²⁵"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? ²⁶Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? ²⁷Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?
 ²⁸"And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. ²⁹Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. ³⁰If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? ³¹So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' ³²For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. ³³But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ³⁴Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

 Honestly, maybe this should just be my new life mantra.  Perhaps that's what this housing challenge is all about... I'm known to be a worrywart.  And this is what I need to learn right now.  Not to worry.  (The reading at church today WAS all about how our toil and anxiety on earth is just vanity-love Ecclesiastes!)

Easier said than done, but I've done all that I can on my end to make things work... and faith can fill in the gaps! :)


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Consciousness

"Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. A mystery is a phenomenon that people don't know how to think about - yet. There have been other great mysteries: the mystery of the origin of the universe, the mystery of life and reproduction, the mystery of the design to be found in nature, the mysteries of time, space, and gravity. These were not just areas of scientific ignorance, but of utter bafflement and wonder. We do not yet have all the answers to any of the questions of cosmology and particle physics, molecular genetics and evolutionary theory, but we do know how to think about them .... With consciousness, however, we are still in a terrible muddle. Consciousness stands alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist -- and hope -- that there will never be a demystification of consciousness." ~Daniel Dennett

So, I've been thinking more about consciousness lately... you know, like what it is that makes us who WE are in particular.  Why am I the voice in my head, and not the voice in my friend's head?  How did I come to have this identity that is solely mine and no one else's?  Especially at the cognitive level... what part of the brain does that, anyway?  And what happens to that consciousness when we die?  Does it look something like this?

    ---------------[    EXISTENCE      ]----------------
      pre-birth                                              death

 It might--or that existence might just change form, and none of us can communicate what that is once we've reached it. Out-of-body experiences can be simulated with electrodes, the light at the end of the tunnel just before death may be simple oxygen deprivation--but no one has communicated from BEYOND that point, after death... although some people have reported encounters with ghosts or signs.  The mystery continues. :)

And then there's the question of consciousness vs. conscience...

If we look at the etymology (thanks wikipedia), we have the following:

"The word "conscious" is derived from Latin conscius meaning "1. having joint or common knowledge with another, privy to, cognizant of; 2. conscious to oneself; esp., conscious of guilt".^[12] A related word was conscientia, which primarily means moral conscience. In the literal sense, "conscientia" means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge."

The two terms are definitely related--in French "conscience" can be used for both meanings!--no wonder there's a lot of debate over where your consciousness goes in the hereafter based on your conscience or lack thereof.

All of these things remind me of the initial question in my Theory of Knowledge class-What if we're all just brains in vats, stimulated by a master mad scientist into believing  we have a full form? The thing is, we're MORE than the sums of our synapses and neurotransmitters.  Some things just can't be explained by science!  Take for example the question of phantom limbs--there is no pattern in how people experience this phenomenon following amputation, but almost everyone reports feeling as though their limb is still there.

On a separate note, there's this Time article which seems to say that when my brain dies, so, too, does my soul, and every bit of consciousness we have is a gift.  I agree with the latter but not with the former.  But then again, my brain hasn't been damaged to the point where I am no longer self-aware.  Well, except when I fell off my bike in front of my house, hit my head on the pavement, and was unconscious for a brief minute and then unable to see for several minutes afterward. The weeks following that incident, I would bump into things, had some minor linguistic challenges, and just seemed a little scrambled.  Fortunately, I bounced back... intact, with my own consciousness.  I lost consciousness for a mere minute (probably even less than that)... was THAT what death will be like?  I'm in no hurry to find out just yet.  As Albert Schweitzer put it, "I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live."

Just how I want to live... well, that can be the subject of another blog entry.

Je me lance.../Je m'élance...

This marks the creation of my second blog.... the first blog was just a semester-long experiment, a creative project for my Cosmopolitanism class. You can check it out here: Mary Moves

The blog was quite the personal endeavor, so much so that when I meant to send it to my Cosmopolitanism class, I inadvertently sent it to my French 203 students. You can imagine my surprise when I learned I sent it to them the next day, as students were telling me how much they appreciated what I had written. My cheeks were cherry red for most of the class as I realized just how much of my personal life I had shared with them. Well, at least they learned that TAs have lives and thoughts, too. :)

This blog is aimed more at my friends and family, so they can keep in touch with my adventurings in Switzerland and share in my musings. They already know about my personal life and I will continue to share it here...

I'm looking forward to my ten months there, but I'm also nervous and approaching it with some trepidation as I leave behind my familiar routines here in Madison. Geneva promises to be a great experience though. After all, as Rousseau wrote, "Je ne puis vous dire, Madame, combien Genève m'a paru embelli sans que rien y soit changé... Ce qu'il y a de sûr, c'est que cette ville me paraît une des plus charmantes du monde, et ses habitants les hommes les plus sages et les plus heureux que je connaisse. La liberté y est bien affermie, le gouvernement tranquille, les citoyens éclairés, fermes et modestes, connaissant et soutenant courageuse­ment leurs droits, mais respectant ceux d'autrui."

We shall see if Geneva lives up to that tall bill--but any city that is one of the most charming in the world, with happy, wise, respectful citizens sounds like a good place to live to me!

And the BBC and the Mercer 2010 Quality of Living Survey would agree:
Geneva ranked third in top 50 cities in the world

Here's where I'll be!