Sunday, October 25, 2009

Raproachmemont

This was a snazzy word that I relearned this past summer. In the words of clinical psychologists, raproachemont (said with a complete French accent) is a way of a client to reconnect with his/her life to recognize what they were working to get back to. It made perfect sense in the setting I worked in; children were away from their families for six weeks and only had 4 hours over that period to catch some face time with their primary care givers. This period was completely meaningful and really gave the children some sense of direction when it seemed as they were floating with no wind in the middle of some massive New Hampshire pond.

Of course when the parents left, the children acted out in the most inhumane ways possible to attempt to show how much pain they were going through.

I recently spent a week at home. It made me realize that I do indeed fucking love my family, friends, and the wonderful town of Elkhart. I feel people diss on their families and home life, and I don't understand this one bit. I feel like I've been adrift at sea for the past five months. After residing in New Hampshire for two months, working with kids who were fucking amazing for days on end (six, to be exact, then a day off, then another six, then a day off, then another six... repeat this two and a half more times) then being transplanted to Philadelphia, I felt empty. And confused.

I began embarking on the quest of obtaining my mother-fucking Master's from Villanova in European History. Talk about a complete reversal of what I was doing this summer. Everything is so minimized in history. Everything is a cold fact, a solitary digit, a theory. The exact opposite of what I gave sixty days of my life this summer, sixty days last summer, and sixty days the previous summer enveloped in. I felt lost when I would sit in a seminar and hear numbers thrown around without others recognizing their weight. It was saddening.

But enough self-employed sympathy. I got over that shit. I thoroughly enjoy the program, I feel like I've learned more in the past two months than I did in the (scholarly) collaboration of my four years at Purdue. In the class room, that is. I guess my problem lies in the fact that I love history. I love what I'm studying. But I don't love the way that history is being employed and projected to the masses. Most of the people I know thing of our present position in history as a concrete, non-static state of being. We are the present... Us six years ago? Yeah, that's the past, but it is still like the present. We separate ourselves from painful pasts in humanity by saying "Yeah, eleven million Europeans died in the years 1933-1935... But that's because they were in a 'communist' state and back then they were incredibly backwards and archaic." Its a sad frame of mind, distinguishing the past from the present in completely separated, dispersed terms.

Anyways, I'm not quite sure where I was going with this. But when I visited Elkhart I realized that everything is going to be okay. Things may be tough, I may have to write more than I've ever written before in my life (Objectively, about the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 and the Great Purges in the USSR during the 1930's) but I'll get through it. Rent may be expensive, tutoring kids may be a pain in the ass, working with people that view things as one-dimensional facts is disheartening, and attempting to not become one of those that views everything as a fact of a diminished past may be incredibly trying... But journeying to Elkhart showed me that I'll do it.

And it will all be okay.

This post may have been inspired by me listening to the Guillemots again.