"Everything Must Go!" or "A Mildly Informative Dinner"

Yesterday marked the commencement of my full-out liquidation sale on Craigslist, and an interesting event put on by the Boston Area Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. I attended the dinner with Kristen, an acquaintance of mine who has been nominated to the Peace Corps in Asia for this fall. After donating a fair amount of the requested canned goods at the door (hurray for Chef Boyardee cans being 10-for-$10 at Shaw's), I went in and found Kristen talking it up with some parents of a current Peace Corps Volunteer. I joined the discussion for a while, and then broke it off to get some snacks and a beer.

I had three good conversations in the three hours there. One was with a guy who had been in the Ukraine from 2000-03, and his female companion of some sort, who had been in Niger (pronounced the French way, with the stress on the first syllable, as she was playfully picky about pointing out). Because the name Chad is coming to mind, I'm going to presume that I actually remembered his name, and I'm going to call him that for the purposes of the blog. I can't point to anything in particular that Chad said, or any specific advise he gave me, but overall he gave me a very solid positive feeling about my upcoming two years. As if merely by his demeanor he was saying, "I did two years next door to your country, and I turned out just fine." Not that I ever doubted that I would be fine, but it was comforting to meet a RPCV from that area for the first time.

Kristen and I went to sit down for a while, and there I started the second good conversation from the night—with a girl about eight years old who was sitting under the dessert table. (It may sound like I'm short-changing my conversations with Kristen. I'm not. I'm just not counting them in the three because I talked with her outside the event, too, and three is a better number of stories to recount than four.) I asked the girl if she had been in the Peace Corps, or if it was just one of her parents who had been in it.

"I don't know what the Peace Corps is," she replied joyfully.

"You don't?!" I said. "Well, that's what this whole party is for."

"Oh," she said. She then proceeded to show us her "house" that was built underneath the table. Kids are great.

The third conversation was good, but not necessarily in a totally rewarding way. I spoke with another Ukraine RPCV named Rob, and an RPCV from Benin named Claire. Claire was very happy and bright-eyed, even when she was recalling how in Benin, the priests on the radio dial tell the country every Friday night that condoms will give them AIDS. If you can say that while still smiling, you've probably done enough to make a good impression on me.

Rob, on the other hand, threw me. His personality was not one that I enjoy being around; it seemed that either he was deliberately shooting down my ideas about using a video camera to teach or other ideas I brought up, or that he was trying to impress Claire, or perhaps both. Who am I to know or to even assume? I didn't like him very much, but he did say one useful bit: When you get to your country, you might not like your day job. The key is to find other ways you can be useful in the community, by matching their needs with your skills. (Upon further reflection days later, I think that his condemnation of my video idea was tied in with him having been in the country from 1996-98, when the technology wasn't as good. Also, he seemed to think I needed a VHS deck for it, so his technical know-how was lacking. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt before I further demonize him.)

The whole evening was enjoyable enough, but I wonder if I didn't go about it the wrong way. I treated it almost as a fact-finding mission, hunting down people with Eastern European countries on their name tags, and dodging people who were at the same or earlier stage of the the Peace Corps process as I was. Perhaps I should have smelled the roses a bit more. But then again, I approached it in a way that I need to approach things right now; I don't need to go around making new friends in Boston. I need to sew things up nicely in Boston, while at the same time preparing for the future. Any betrayal of those priorities would have made me much less happy at the end of the night.

Finishing things in Boston is in some ways very easy, and in some ways very difficult. The most difficult part at this moment is not saying goodbye to friends; it's finding a sub-letter for my apartment. Emotions can be pushed aside until the final days, but $1,875 for three months of rent cannot. What makes the emotional part of leaving Boston easy is that, for the most part, I was going to cut myself off from many of these people anyway, or at least suddenly live very far away from them. Even if I were to stay in Boston, very few people I know would still be here by September. With my California friends, I had never entertained moving back to California, so for them, it's more of the same long-distance communication, only this time it's a 10-hour time difference instead of a three-hour.

Yes, I think things will wrap up easily in both places, and I intend to go out with a bang on both coasts. Next Friday, May 13, I'll be having a huge party at my apartment. Basically, I'm inviting everyone with whom I've been friends in Boston. Everyone from freshman-year neighbors to video clients. My intramural hockey team and my current middle school co-workers. It should be a really awesome time, and it'll allow me to go into probably even more debt while stocking my bar.

I leave Boston on May 28, at which point my friends John, Dennis and I are driving down to Atlantic City to gamble our asses off. The next day, we'll leave early in the morning to get down to Silver Spring, MD, to attend Sean's graduation party at his mom's house. On the 30th, we'll catch the Washington Nationals hosting the Atlanta Braves, in my final pro baseball game for a long time. That evening, I'll be driving down to Greensboro, NC, and staying with Aunt Paula, Uncle Rocky and my cousin, Tyler, for a couple days before flying to California on June 1. June 4 is, finally, the big big party in Los Gatos. Mom has ordered three cases (27 bottles) of Moldovan wine through some wild arrangement that has them brought to Florida, then to L.A., then up the coast to Los Gatos. All that fuss for something I'll be drinking every day just a week later. Seems ridiculous, but in a good way.

From there, my schedule is still a little muddy, but it's becoming more clear. I received a new packet and an e-mail last week, telling me that I would be staging in Philadelphia from June 6-8 before heading to Hincesți. That packet also gave me a CD and a pamphlet about learning Romanian, trying to grill a few introductory conversational phrases into my head. Think of the first week of a language class, and then think of someone saying, "Alright, you're ready to live there for two years now. You'll pick up the rest just fine."

Bottom line, everything continues to move at a dizzying pace. It's odd when I think about my job, and for a moment I think, "Man, life's gonna be a whole lot simpler once work is over in three weeks." Except then I think about the next two years, and I realize that this part is my vacation.