There's Always a Future in Plastics

Around this time last year, my friends and I spent a lo of time talking about what it meant to "sell out." Was selling out entering the private sector or was it about settling for a job you weren't passionate about? At the time, we were still in the bright eyed stage of sending out resumes and we didn't realize just how long we would have to wait to hear so little. I liked this column by my classmates, but my friends and I typically took a less forgiving stance. To me, "selling out" was also taking a job that was "safe" rather than one that pushed me in some way.

That conversation seems very far away now, and it's hard for me to recapture why it felt so important to discuss at the time. What remains relevant is a conversation I had a few months prior to that conversation while in Tanzania about the choice between direct service, policy making and advocacy.

My friend Rachel always speaks about "activist division of labor." In its original incarnation, this meant that it was ok I'm not interested in spending my life working on saving the enviroment and it's fine she doesn't want to spend hers shaping policy towards the developing world. I think the division of labor argument can also apply to all the different roles people can play in developing and enacting the same policy. Academics and journalists get to shape and extend the conversation about the problems the world faces and the scope of the solutions. Legislators, lobbyists and advocacy groups develop a policy, and a third group of people carry out the policy.

I'm really unclear what group I'd like to be in. I think I've felt the most fulfilled when directly helping someone, and there's a slightly immature part of me that feels like I'll always be selling out a little bit unless I wind up handing out food in an IDP camp in the northern DRC. On the other hand, the "problematic" bells started sounding in my head as soon as I typed that. I think part of what is appealing about that is the level of deprivation invovled which makes it feel like a more heroic act even though my comfort level doesn't impact my efficacy. Then I remember everything I've read about the aid machine being self-perpetuated, etc. Farewell, Constant Gardener style fantasy. Stop raining on my daydream, Swarthmore College.

I also think I tend to get very frustrated with imperfect systems (this works just great in college but is a potentially unattractive and arrogant trait in a 22 year old, so I bit my tongue).They are neither as bad nor as avoidable as nama gomi. After volunteering for a campaign, my friend Jon and I would spend thirty minutes privately debriefing on their poor volunteer stewardship or inefficient allocation of flashlights. He'll make a good marine officer. Our friends got sick of our endless treatise on loopholes in the RA selection process. It was painful.

I credit some of this to my mother. I think my mother ran my third birthday party better than most government agencies are run. Therefore, I'm always left asking whether a thing would go better if my mother was running it. The answer is almost always yes.

Personal neuroses aside, I think people who spend their lives in direct service have to be very good emotional boundary setters. They have to be able to accept that they only have resources for a limited number of people, and can only do a limited amount for those people. I think I'd really struggle as, say, an English teacher in Tanzania. You can't teach everyone, and you can't give everyone shoes, and you can't feed everyone, and yet every day the barefoot and hungry would come into your classroom. Clearly, there are limits on resources no matter what, but I don't think I have the type of emotional strength required to set those limits every day without going insane and reinventing the facts.

My current job is a great opportunity and I'm glad to be able to learn so much! I think learning is the most valuable thing right now. In the long run, though, I want a job more interactive and direct than the one I have now. I think in general, I'm most effective and happiest one-one-one or with small groups.

I've been thinking about law school for a while. I enjoyed the tort and contract law parts of my law and econ class, which I'd been told was the "bad part" of law school. I happily ate, slept and breathed con law for the second semester of my senior year, so I think I'd enjoy law school. I also have this hope that law could be a good fit for me because a good lawyer can directly help their clients but they can also create precedents that shape legal policy in other cases. At best, it could be a way to help individuals while simaltaneously reshaping the framework that societies operate within, bridging the direct/indirect gap.

On the other hand, I don't know much about what international case law looks like, and professors give me the "it doesn't really exist" vibe. Maybe I'm just being naive, but I do believe we're going to see the development of a stronger international legal infastructure in the next decades and I'd like to do some of the building.

Sometimes I get the feeling all this ambition and life angst is sort of silly, a post college version of my seventeen year old self carefully examing my body in a mirror. I think maturity comes less from knowing who you are and what you want, and more about not feeling like those are the important questions. On the other hand, I do have to make big decisions about my future and graduate school in the next year, so it's impossible to entirely avoid.

Maybe you should drink a lot less coffee

My computer saga has continued, and I don't think I'll have my own functional computer back until I return to the states. Rachel has kindly given me her backup to use as a sub, and although it relies on a Japanese operating system (maybe I'll leave knowing the kanji for "save as" and "this program needs to shut down!"), it works very well. However, the sound isn't as good as on my computer, which has resulted in a few changes in my post-work internet diversions.

In the evening, I used to read the news and legit political blogs for a while, and then switch over to America's Next Top Model Re-runs on Youtube or free Heros downloads. Now, rather than watch ANTM without sound and miss the crucial in-fighting, I've had to do some revamping. I usually start out with legit news-- which devolves into reading about countries I don't know anything about on wikipedia (Tajikistan looks beautiful)-- to obsessively googling primary polls. I'd say this is a step up, but I'm a little alarmed by how easily I can sub out reality TV for primary coverage.

In November of 2006, I had an argument with one of my favorite Political Science professors. He was teaching a class that met once a week from 7 pm to 10 pm (read: midnight) on Tuesday. Several students in his class wanted to reschedule the class on Election Day so they could watch the results come in. He thought this was a superficial element of participation, watching the results come in like a sporting event. He was disparaging of the trend of staying up all night in order to get instant information, pointing out that the result would be the same in the morning regardless of how many people had slept.

I was indignant and argued that a lot of the students had been working on the election for months, and it was difficult to not have a level of emotional investment after that degree of involvement. Even if their watching would not change results, to wait until the morning would be akin to putting your college admission letter on a shelf and not opening it for a week. Even if you found out you were waitlisted (“too close to call”), better to sleep knowing that than nothing at all. He then asked the class if we believed the election results really made a difference, and people answered enthusiastically.

I also pointed out that if he didn’t let his class watch, people were likely to be distracted and text their friends for results or take advantage of the wireless zone on their laptops-obsteniably-brought-for-note-taking. Sometimes I really like technology.

I think he ultimately bought my argument. The next day, he let us take 20 minutes at the begining of (the six hour) class to watch Rumsfeld's resignation speech. To be honest, every minute of that class was solid gold, and retrospectively I wish I had discussed Nicaragua for twenty minutes more instead. At the time, though, the exilheration was worth it.

Still, I left the conversation wondering to what extent closely following polls and fundraising totals is like watching a sporting event, just good competitive entertainment rather than bona fide engagement. I don’t mean pulling up Clinton’s healthcare policy and contrasting it to Edwards', or watching the youtube debate —the things you do to be an informed voter or volunteer. I'll never say politics is just a game. I’m more calling myself out on my obsessive tendency to check polls in primary states on a daily basis, information that doesn’t affect my decisions and that I can’t affect from Kikuna, Japan.

Political commentators who I respect a lot, like Atrios, seem very frustrated by the primary. I suspect that if I were cooler, I'd also be bored by the primary and have a minimalist facebook profile and listen to bands before they sold out. While I could make a case for the primary-- candidates can articulate a much broader scope of policy options than would be acceptable in general debate-- I don't think this is necessarily what happens.

In 2004, I was so into Dean--and so frustrated with the other candidate' attacks on him--that it took me a long time to be geuninely excited about Kerry. While it's important not to rally around a candidate before the primaries even start, the months of un-electable-mongering and dubious matchup polls and campaign gossip and hypothesizing and criticizing and attacking from supporters, media and candidates alike aren't productive. I was so planning to not get hooked on this primary season and hold off until the general election, but it's too late.

I can't blame it all on the lack of sound on my computer. I did the same thing the last two times around. I also have this bad habit of needing to announce my findings to whoever is in earshot. Rachel, my sophomore roommate, pretended that this was useful and she misses it now. Rachel, my boss and current victim, agreed, but I think they are both just nice people.

I guess as addictions go, it's cheap and harmless and more useful than most. Youtube debate next week?

Coming through a little fuzzy

I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a friend who had also recently graduated in which she commented that we didn’t have any hobbies . I thought about it and was forced to agree. Everything I can chalk up as a hobby falls into the banal (running, reading, travel, friends), sub-catogories in my major (domestic politics, international politics, comparative politics), “likes” (dresses, cheese, colorful shoes, spicy food), or deliberately quirky and obscure (haploid maps of the world, looking for cheap flights, bad makeup videos on youtube, improbable currency unions). I don’t think any of that ultimately says much about me.

There was a time when I had proper, concrete hobbies but I think since early adolescence I’ve defined myself in a community-based way. I am what I mean to people. I am the composite of these social roles and relationships. Every interaction with a friend reflects us back at ourselves.

It’s not the same as being 13 and having angsty conversations with yourself about who you are. There’s no tense internal struggle. It’s also not about trying to find my place in the world. It’s more like looking at my hand underwater or feeling like I could melt into a fog or disappear in a Tokyo crowd. It isn’t a bad feeling, it’s sort of vague and pleasant, but it still leaves me with the impression that I am redrawing the line between who I am and who I’m not with every statement I make, including the ridiculous (“I was really obsessed with the Basques in middle school French”) and mundane (“I always eat breakfast.”). Each post I write is a piece of a definition. Maybe it’s just that this level of introspection is really new to me.

The closest parallel I can think of is this: if you ever had a point in your life where you thought something you do now was a big deal, or something you’d never do, think back to that. Then think of the first time you did it. Maybe it was waking up hung over the second weekend in September your freshman year of college, and thinking, “oh, I am someone who gets drunk.” Or “I am someone who can drive.” “I am someone who is married.” “I am someone who has an apartment.” And then that just becomes part of everyday life and you stop thinking about it, but there was a moment when you had to reconceptualize yourself to fit in the new bit of who you are.

Maybe adults do this all the time, or maybe they define themselves by what they do or who they love. Or maybe people don’t have the time or energy for this degree of introspection.

And then Pinochet got mad

I used to think that jobs weren't stressful. (I also have this illusion that 25 is a stress-free age because you have figured life out, but I'm not letting go of that yet.) I imagined that some jobs could be stressful-- for instance, being in charge of something, or having your pay based on sales commission or working in a dangerous enviroment-- but somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, I thought the majority of jobs were pretty stress-free.

One of my friends who works for a certain government agency happily confirmed this. She said she left her work at the door every day at five and didn't think about it again until she came back. She told me this during a particularly stressful part of senior year, and I think it was supposed to make me feel better. It weirded me out. I still can't really get my head around it.

It's crunch week at Swarthmore (isn't it always?) and I can report that so far, my job commands fewer all nighters and much less racing to meet deadlines than college. However, I think there's a different kind of stress. Although extracirrcular and interpersonal duties may impact other people, a major part of stress-in-college is about stuff that only affects yourself. It won't impact anyone else's semester much if your paper is in late (except in seminar, but that's a seperate tangent) With most (all?) jobs, anything you do poorly then impacts other people, which is a different kind of pressure.

I started thinking about this because last night I had my first work-related nightmare. It started when I dream-woke-up to discover I had twenty more endnotes to write in an afternoon that we'd somehow forgotten about. In real life, I'd substantially changed an endnote about Pinochet because I felt that in trying to be neutral, we had wound up sounding too sympathetic. In my dream, Pinochet was very angry with the changes I had made. How dare I change "modernize the economy" to "liberalize the economy!" Only "some" critics accuse him of human rights abuses, not "many!" He refused to ever be interviewed by us, and was starting a law suit. I tried to remember what I had learned about public figures and libel but I wasn't sure whether we'd be tried in Japan, the US, the UK or Chile. In the meantime, my list of endnotes had grown, spanning several pages, and all the while, Pinochet was marshalling his evidence. (In my dream, he definitely didn't have Operation CONDOR at his disposal. That would have made it a much worse nightmate.) It was all my fault!

I woke up, hugging my knees, to remember that Pinochet had died on December 3rd, 2006, four days before Jeane Kirkpatrick, UN ambassador and Reagan advisor who advocated US support for authoritarian governments so long as they were anticommunist. My Latin American politics class may have been briefly inspired to hum "ding dong the witch is dead" upon discussing the 91 year old Chilean dictator's death, but I promise that didn't make it anywhere into the endnote. Back to sleep.