Faguo

Ey, yo, I went to France ovah heah. Ovah heah ovah heah! It was great to be in cold weather and for my francophoneyness to be an actual useful skill instead of a piece of useless personal trivia that I hope will seduce employers when I’m applying for jobs at the Pizza Hut call centre. Anyway, I arrived in the darkness of Paris at 7am – I hate it when the sun rises late and sets early in heathen, non-Brisbane places. It’s worse when the sun sets at like 10pm like it does in France in summer. I refuse to eat dinner when the sun is out! I’d sooner starve, you fucking frogs!!!! Anyway Paris, some guy saw me squinting at a map while dragging 30kg of suitcase behind me and helped me find the hotel, I told him he was a good representative of his country, he said he wasn’t a representative but I said he was, because, every time you talk to a tourist you’re representing your country, so you must always be nice to foreigners, always! Be like the Indians, treat them as a guest. So many people go to a country, happen to meet three people that are assholes, and walk away saying “Boy, the people in that country are jerks.” You know. They meet a jerk in New York, “All 300 million Americans are assholes because that taxi driver short changed me and flipped me off.” Anyway. Dont’ generalize and be nice to foreigners. And everyone, everywhere as well, while we’re at it.

Anyway, France. It’s a nice place, I find the people funny, but I’ve never had to deal with them as a non-French speaker which I guess would engender a bit more hostility from them, but if someone turned up in your city not speaking the language and trying to communicate with you in a foreign one, you wouldn’t think much of trying to have a conversation with them, would you? Plus, French was the international language before World War 1, so they’re a little sore that it isn’t anymore. Or was it World War 2. Shut up. French is a beautiful language though, I feel privileged to be able to speak it, or at least be conversational in it.  Speaking French has been pretty cool this week, but I have difficulty talking heaps of French for more than an hour or two, I get too tired, I haven’t exercised that part of my brain in so long, it’s weak, so weak… The brain is a muscle too, hey. It’s funny. If you think about something a lot, the neurons that fire when you think about that thing will get stronger, and it gets easier to think about it, just like lifting weights. It can be called learning, but it’s other stuff too. Like some types of meditation have you sit and just meditate on loving-kindness or equanimity, and if you spend time thinking/meditating about those things intensely (in meditation), the neurons that fire when you think about them get stronger and used more easily, so then you find yourself in a loving and kind mood more easily. Because you’ve practiced! Just like lifting weights! It also works the other way, if you keep thinking about a bad thing that happened in the past all the time, you’ll just think about it more and more, cos that memory gets stronger. Stop thinking about it! When you find you are, try thinking “May I sense my worthiness and well-being” instead. Keep doing that, and you’ll think about well-being more and about the bad thing less. It helped me once. Consciousness is still a big mystery in most ways though. Man, I’m feeling douchey tonight. It gets worse, keep reading (I wrote this bit last).

ACTED, they’re the organization I’m working for, I trained with them and was shown the ropes and told about the different parts of the company by various people with about 9 other newcomers to the company this week, who were all going to different places, including Iraq and Afghanistan, so I should probably stop whinging about Nairobi’s crime rate, as people are going to much harder places. It was an Italian lady who was going to Afghanistan, where ACTED started in 1993 and where twenty suicide bombers killed a dozen people and wounded almost a hundred others this week. She shrugged her shoulders and smiled, she’s still going. Brave chick! Another guy is on his way to Haiti, where an earthquake killed hundreds of thousands of people last week. The guy, Guillaume, was already being sent there before the quake, and is now extra-steely in his resolve to go there. He is also brave, everyone is very brave. Understandably, the Paris HQ was insanely busy responding to the new needs in Haiti this week. I hope people are OK. Or die as painlessly as possible. Each time I said possibly final goodbyes to people these last weeks, I found myself telling them that there’s a possibility one of us will die before we meet again, and if that happens, good luck on their journey and I would envy them for finding out the mystery before me. I think “Good death!” should replace “Goodbye,” what do you think? In French they say “adieu” when a goodbye is more final than “au revoir” (which means “until we meet again,” literally “until the re-seeing”), “adieu” means “until God.” I like. Something else French, I totally forgot that my name means “fuck” in that language (see popular rap group “Nique Ta Mère” for an example and source of merciless teasing by French friends) so I’m thinking of trying a new nickname while I’m working for a French organisation. I’m thinking “Kolas,” you know, the last half of my name, I think it sounds like a Greek warrior! Can I call you ‘Nick,’ or maybe just ‘Kolas,’ or how about, ‘Laddie’? Sounds like, ‘here boy! <whistles> C’mere Laddie!’ There probably should have been a paragraph break back there somewhere. Now!

ACTED is a nice organisation, they’re a real organisation too, like they’re real, and big, and have procedures and logistics and things. They have a whole floor in Paris and a 60 million Euro budget this year, they get funding from the UN and European Union, they’re a real company! It’s terrifying. They’re also French, which is cool because French are all left-wing and constantly scared of revolutions and strikes so they’re quite nice to their employees, like they get forced to have 24 days of paid holiday a year and things like that, though a Portuguese guy I met complained that he’d worked for companies with compulsory 2 month holidays a year – ah, lefty Europe, I love you so.

I saw old friends from when I lived in France that time, they’re all wonderful. The funny thing is, two of them are studying philosophy at university now and all of them have started smoking since I saw them last. “Never too late to start!” said Kévin. Man, talk about French. Philosophy and cigarettes, bunch of beret-wearing, Sartre-spewing, cheese-eating… well, you see where I’m going with this. I like how philosophy literally means “love of knowledge.” I haven’t figured out how to get my photos onto the computer yet so I have no photos of these friends I’m afraid, but you don’t know them, and who actually likes seeing photos of or hearing about your friends’ friends? Nobody. That’s what Facebook’s for. The hotel they put us in was a pretty short walk from the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Elysées and the Eiffel Tower and I was lucky enough to see a typical French protest on the street (against violence against Egyptian Christians – why not? Gotta protest something, you’re in France.), I mention this uber-French stroll because I’m currently reading and absolutely fucking loving and devouring Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments With Truth, and I wanted to share something he wrote about the Eiffel Tower when he was in Paris (he saw it when it was first unveiled at the 1890 exhibition):

I must say a word about the Eiffel Tower. I do not know what purpose it serves today. But I then heard it greatly disparaged as well as praised. I remember that Tolstoy was the chief among those who disparaged it. He said that the Eiffel Tower was “a monument of man’s folly, not of his wisdom.” [...] There is no art about the Eiffel Tower. In no way can it be said to have contributed to the real beauty of the Exhibition. Men flocked to see it and ascended as it was a novelty of unique dimensions. It was the toy of the Exhibition. So long as we are children we are attracted by toys, and the Tower was a good demonstration of the fact that we are all children attracted by trinkets. That may be claimed to be the purpose served by the Eiffel Tower.

Burn!!! You just got Gandhi’d, France! How does it feel? Stings, I bet. I went to an Indian restaurant on my last night in Paris you know (the restaurant was called Mahatma and I was reading Gandhi’s book and waggling my head at waiters like the biggest poser knob on the entire planet, please stab me in the face) and I ordered dal and rice and a lassi and I realised that I really miss India, I totally hadn’t realised. You know how smell is really strongly connected to your memory, like literally it is, science and shit, they’re linked, smell sets off memories or some fucking shit, and smell and taste are the same, anyway I got punched in the face with India nostalgia that night. I miss India, that’s a nice, curry-and-cardamom-smelling place. Warm people. Lots of ghee. I thought it’d be interesting to note that Arnaud, an old French friend I met, a former exchange student who took me to my first ever concert (Dandy Warhols in Paris, 2003) and who is just criminally good-looking, he recently spent a few months in India himself on exchange, in Kerala in the South, and said India’s caste system and the way people discriminated with it (which happens in smaller towns) made him lose as much hope for humanity as I lost in China, India had the opposite effect on him that it had on me. But discrimination based on caste is against the law, I mean, so it’s something that should go away eventually, right? Right??? Look, shut up.

Boy, the internet is great, right? Not only does it let me get information in two seconds that 15 years ago I’d have to drive to a library and paw through catalogues to get (and of course, were that the case, I just wouldn’t bother learning – I shudder at the thought of how stupid much stupider I’d be without Internet), I think the internet brings people together. The speed with which we can communicate with people zillions of miles away is amazing, like given the millions of years human beings have been on the planet and the billions of years the things we’ve evolved from have been here, it wasn’t that long ago that the only way we’d be able to share ideas with people brought up in a different environment would be to ride a cart for a few days to a nearby town. Then we got information and viewpoints from people from other countries thanks to boats  and shit, but still it was less than 15 years ago that we were essentially without internet, this thing that lets us learn about other opinions and viewpoints and history and news almost instantaneously. My friend Rowan posted this article on my Facebook a little while ago, over a fairly controversial issue of meal-timing versus energy balance and fat loss, and within 24 hours Rowan and myself and my friend Will Whitney had posted about ten comments on the article discussing the various issues put forth and what conclusions people could draw from it and such, and yeah, fifteen years ago, that information and that discussion just wouldn’t have been shared. Sharing, the internet is about sharing! It makes us more one, I think, the internet, barriers of sea and borders don’t matter at all on it, and it’s so new, so so new, I feel like something is going to happen, humanity is drawing much much closer to itself because of it, feels like we’re building up to something.  Because that whole idea of separateness is bullshit, you know, the idea of Otherness and people being of different race and different country and different culture, the “us and them” way of thinking, you know it always sparks violence and ignorance and patriotism, which I think is bad, there’s such a strong (and documented) link between patriotism and war, you know because it’s all about otherness, us and them, and the differences between countries, patriotism says that a person has more moral duties to fellow members of the national community, than to non-members, it’s selective in its altruism, while our moral duties apply equally to all humans, right? Where we’re born is just accident.

This is actually kind of relevant I think, in Paris I met with an old friend Kévin (worst French name ever) who said (in a not at all argumentative or redneck-y way) that international development might not be the best course of action because people in their countries should develop themselves on their own, that it’s a little patronising to fly in and do it for them. And while I am just starting out in development and have an awful lot to learn, I don’t think that’s right at all, nor do I think that’s what development is. When I went to India I worried a bit about how I was turning up in a country and complaining about it, but I mean, what’s a country? Five hundred years ago, even a hundred years ago, almost every country in the world had a different name and/or different borders. I have a friend in Prague called Katerina, the country she was born in (Czechoslovakia) doesn’t exist anymore. Where are her allegiances? If she was born in Bratislava but moved to Prague before the split while considering herself a Czechoslovakian patriot, and found herself in Prague when the Czech republic was invented, where is she meant to be patriotic for? What’s she meant to rabidly support and defend? And what happened to Prussia? Pakistan isn’t even a hundred years old and a lot of them want to declare war against India, a country they were just part of, where everyone looks identical to them. Craziness. It’s even clearer in Africa, where countries change borders and names every other day. When the Simpsons went to Africa:

Attention passengers -- please prepare for our landing in Tanzania.
[someone in the cockpit hands her a note] I'm sorry, it is now called
New Zanzibar.  [she is given another note] Excuse me, it is now called
Pepsi presents New Zanzibar.
-- Flight Attendant, "Simpson Safari"

Countries aren’t timeless or eternal or even thousands of years old, like being a human is, they’re such arbitrary lines in the ground, it’s a little different for islands but you see what I mean, and even islands rise and fall with eons, and any island can be cut in half and turned into two countries with a bit of paperwork. And we’re meant to divide and categorise people by country? It’s an illusion. And if I can’t divide people up by country and say they’re different to me that way, how do you want me to do it, by race? Fuck you. No differences, no barriers, quit saying us and them, those guys on the other side of the river, they’re a bunch of dickheads, no no no. All the same, all one, keep it connected. I see no problem crossing a made up line to help people. I mean, when you get into complicated areas of development like microfinance, that’s stuff I’m not educated enough on to say is an unequivocally correct thing to do (in training in Paris, the microfinance guy had in his presentation: “Access to credit and financial capital is a basic human right.” Is it? I feel like I should know an awful lot more about different political and financial systems before I can commit to that), but food and water security, emergency relief, the kind of stuff ACTED is doing in Kenya? It’s dreadfully hard to find an ethical problem with it. Though I’m sure I’ll manage to find one, being the ambivalent whiny douche that I am. Kenya Kenya Kenya!!!

I found an old group email I sent when I lived in France…

>greetings!
>my dad bernard is so cool, yesterday he plonked down this bigass book called “The World of Bamboo” and was like “check it out! cool, huh? want to read it?” and i was like “… bamboo? … well as much as ive always WANTED to know about bamboo… im kinda busy…” (i clearly wasnt° and he goes come see! and shows me these bamboo stalks he planted in his front yard and was like “cool, huh? isnt bamboo cool?” and i went “no its not cool! youre a very strange man!” i asked him if he had a panda and he went yeah, it sleeps out back. why else would we have bamboo? funny guy. he pronounces it “bombu”. i love it. i saw this bigass church with him yesterday, sooo cool. like 600 years old. awesome. so big and intricate. he was like do you have churches like this in australia? i was like australia hadnt even been discovered then!
>first day of school today, oh man was it scary. cold, too. and rainy. drizzly more like it. i spent the first hour alone in a physics class going “what the fuck… what the FUCK, man?? what the fuck is this? i dont get this in ENGLISH for gods sake!” second hour i was invited to join a group as we studied light refracting or something. then i had italian. mreugh. it was funny everyone was hooked up to this thing and we all had earphones and repeated the voice and… yeah… i thought itd be easier than latin, but. schmeh. it was hella hard. then i had three hours spare, and hung out with sarah and her friends, and ate the food at the canteen. for anyone whos ever wondered, the food IS as awful as everyone says it is. the cooked stuff was anyway. could be better tomorrow! then i had an hour of geography, an hour of french, and an hour of this cool subject called civics which i never had but i think ive heard of it, and me and 4 other dudes screwed around on the! topic of globalisation/why everyone hates america. i liked the guys i was with, i helped them by drawing a cartoon of a bigass ,cdonalds truck next to this lebanese food restaurant that was being wrecked, and the lebanese fa,ily who clearly owned the restaurant were crying while the mcdonalds guy was telling the press “we create jobs!”
>it was very deep. the others thought so too. i also did a comic (probably only dobo will get this… almost certainly) of a chef; who held a bigass live cow on the end of a leash and was telling a startled diner, “alors, vous disiez que vous vouliez un VACHEMENT bon dejeuner!!”
>fuck me it was funny. the others thought so too. that was the highlight, the rest sucked due to my not getting ANYTHING! im sure itll pick up. im looking forward to my english class tomorrow very much. not so much to the two hours of sport on friday.
>this friend of sarahs today said (jokingly, i think… hope) that he is “beesexuel” and wil fuck me if i want. i was like eh… its not THAT cold. we were kidding, though, everyone laughed. though the guy DID kiss a few other guys…
>well, i have to go. dinner is cool here, we all eat cheese afterwards. my mum, myriam is a hella good cook, i think she teaches at a cooking school. yeah. i got that photo of everyone at the airport, i liked it very much.
>henry: lazy fuck, you couldnt be bothered to sned jim and me SEPERATE emails? lazy sack of shit.
>”but… but you’re sending several people-”
>SHUT UP! i still cant believe you didnt come to the airport. your email made me laugh very much. its EASY to blame ourselves, but its even EASIER to blame apu! a large, bear-like animal– most likely a bear has wondered down from the hills in search of food, or possibly employment! “im sick of reporting the news! i wanna MAKE the news!” “arnie please, this isnt the time-!” “YOU’RE not the time, kent! YOU’RE not the time!” today at school my sister goes “put your cup in the trash can over there” and i said “YOU’RE a trash can.” she still hasnt gotten over it. i was like it was a joke, man we do that all the time in australia!… well, I do it all the time in australia…
>dobo:grow your hair, it rocks.
>hannah: same to you, your leg hair i mean. dont shave it when im gone! youll get a longer message when i get a respone to my paris email
>slutfuck: i mentioned your nickname to a sydneysider in paris, and he said his best friend calls him slutfucker. not slutfuck.
>dammit this keyboard is annoying to type on… this emails taken so much time
>lydifuck: thanks for typing out the letter! i showed sarah your photo and said you see that? THAT is some of the best hair on earth.
>frank: my number is 02 43 39 57 45 for when you get to your house
>dammit dinners ready! rest of you rock, and to whoever got me that dancing afro doll and the wine sin repenting lip balm/ priceless. absolutely priceless. see you dudes you all rock… except anna. hehe. im KIDDING oh and it turns out my luggage went to manchester! can you believe that? at least its close, il get it tomorrow. i think i told you that already. dinner smells good…
>love nick