Letter #64: typical week, waning

Dear everyone,

Fortunately for me, I serve with many fine people as Peace Corps volunteers.  Truthfully, each has honoured me – improved me – in his or her unique manner.  Many of us face the anxiety choking at our throats about what will follow.  Sincerely, I have always believed a disjointed path makes for a creative path; needless or heedless to say, I will surely test that notion soon.  This essay is to submit to you what a typical week is like for me.  Submitting openly to the judgement and criticism of others is not an easy task, especially as the value of my service remains uncertain and accountable to the starkest judge of all, time.  So, here is a brief journal of my last week to give you an idea of what I have really been up to down here in México.

Sunday, August 26th.  I enjoyed a nice luncheon with my former fiancée.  Hers is truly a beautiful soul.  The stresses she faces are consuming and yet she soldiers on, almost manly in her stoicism.  That we will not marry says more about me, little of which I want to dwell on here.  I then went out for a run for about two miles; damn, I am getting old and am out of shape.  That nano-second of stillness in motion hung like minutes and then my body slapped against the ground, hard.  Getting up, I noticed a curlicue of red migrating down my forearm, pain setting in.  “Shoot, mister, you have a run to complete…”  And so I did: this is the Neddy McDonnell I always knew, for better or, more often, for worse.  Stayed up until two in the morning working on a project to define the steps toward a financial structure to carry a new invention to market.  Felt like the old days in Manhattan.  Except that I was a financial structuring wannabe; truth is, I never really understood the whole ‘art’ of financial engineering; damn, neither did they, in retrospect.

Monday, August 27th.  A wasted day to be gotten through.  Having been through this drill before, I focussed on the collection of Spanish articles I distribute through my center each week on aeronautics, Querétaro, science, technology, energy and innovation.  In that mindless chamber of intellect and truth, I suspect that precious few people actually read these articles; damn, I wouldn’t either, in retrospect. Quickly, I reviewed the presentation once but did not present it as my counterpart was swamped, as always.  Finally, I sent out eight e-mails to professional contacts.  People love hearing from me, until I ask them for assistance and then they do not; not much different from me in the past, I have to admit.  That damn retrospect will eat me up and spit me out, I tell you.  I went for a run for the third day in a row, very slow.  It is a re-start if not refreshing.

Tuesday, August 28th.  Did a lot of revision of the presentation on this top-secret, compartmentalized, work for a counterpart with an invention.  I am plugging away at this project for two reasons.  Like so many other activities here at this national science center, it is new to me and I am learning.  While I feel inadequate and guilty for having neither answers nor experience, my counterpart likes what I am doing and so I keep on doing it.  Stubbornness about making some kind of difference persists; it keeps me working.  Today I analyzed carefully two key laws in technology transfer – besides the obvious two on intellectual property and on promoting science and technology – about forming corporations and promoting small businesses.  Mexican law is a lot like the bible: so many inner-contradictions that one can justify just about anything.  And so I piece together the bread crumbs of solemn paragraphs -to plot a way out the thickets of bureaucratic legalisms toward the wide and sunny market.  Only time will tell if that sun is the optimism key to the three out of a thousand who succeed with new things or if it is that of the blazing, coursing inferno of the desert, devoid of promise and happiness, consuming the forgotten 997.  

Enjoyed a dinner with one of the volunteers in a supposedly unsafe state.  Interestingly, the stress that has weighed him down is not what I felt in Afghanistan of that unacknowledged possibility that, on any given day, one might be killed.  No, while that possibility exists, his difficulty was the uncertainty of whether he would be pulled from that state, thereby undercutting his work.  Like the others, he has worked hard.  Frankly, I admire these young volunteers in the countryside, living in poor communities without comforts we take for granted and being alone.  I salute them for I am not sure I could do what they do.  In particular, I found this volunteer’s gratitude toward the Peace Corps management in Mexico to be refreshing.

Wednesday, August 29th.  Did a lot of research on how other states are faring in the automotive industry and engineering-related direct foreign investments in general.  It seems that Querétaro is losing out.  Such a fate is unsurprising for two reasons.  First, the state has only two million people.  Second, the advantage of the state’s investment clime has been its relative freedom from violence.  This advantage has lain, it is widely thought, in the many rival narco-families placing their wives and children here.  The honor among gangsters seems to be: hey, pal, we can blow each other’s head off but the mujer and niños are off limits, okay?  That advantage is fading fast as international investors get it that organized crime is having its private under-world war here in Mexico; for everything else there is Mastercard.  

I finally made the one-on-one presentation on the tech commercialization ideas.  So far so good.  Lots of revisions but lying in those critiques is not an indictment of my ability but guidance on where we need to go.  Had an interesting dinner with friends about the role of conscience.  PRI disdain for seven decades or no, Mexico is an intensely Catholic country, even for those who no longer believe.  One old fellow pointed out that a man of conscience, real conscience, is not the one who refrains from action when he espies a despised ulterior motive; he is the fellow who sees that motive but takes the right action in any case.  How like Blaise Pascal that notion is.  It is when I believe my own bullsh*t – or in contemporary slingo, ‘drink my own kool-aid’ – that I am likely to stumble.

Thursday, August 30th.  Wrote an essay about the corporation and small business laws for the book-let I am putting together for CIDESI (i.e., my host country agency) on technology transfer, my only physical legacy.  That book-let will be some sixty-five pages with three volumes of annexes of readings totalling 125-150 pages, with 65-75% being articles germane to the various subjects of tech transfer that I have translated plus my vision of what transferring technology with entail for a far-seeing Centro with a highly hierarchical structure.  Felt sad about the death of Neil Armstrong.  I wish we had a way of knighting our finest heroes.  

Such secular sainthood would befit that MidWesterner well, not so much for his walk on the moon or his timeless tribute to the mission – “one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind” – but for the virtues of humility, modesty, excellence and decency this man exhibited for the forty three years he remained on earth after returning from the moon.  How like the namesake of the university where he taught, Cincinnatus.  True heroes rise to the occasion when the situation calls for it and then recede quietly afterward, if fortunate enough not to be assassinated.

That latter action of public quiescence and private humility that proves who they really are.  It also reminds me of how Massachusetts led the intellectual ferment for abolition while three Generals from Ohio preserved the union.  A century later another, another fellow from Massachusetts threw down the gauntlet for space and getting to the moon.  And two astronauts from Ohio did more than any of the others to realize that murdered man’s mission.  

How fortunate I am to be a MidWesterner, notwithstanding excellent schooling in New England and the South.  That’s it: the essay will be deferred a week in favor of a tribute to Neil Armstrong – if this is not Peace Corps II, then nothing is.  Caught most of Governor Romney’s speech at my party’s national nominating convention.  Great speech, if he had just ended it with his biography.  Going negative on President Obama is unstatesmanlike and with pit-bull-sh*tters like Governor Sununu around, Governor Romney can take the high-road. 

Friday, August 31st.  Got the weekly articles out after I had goofed and lost the leaders.  Damn, what a pain in the pizats.  Nothing like bogus time pressure.  I quickly translated an abridged version of the speech by President Kennedy at Rice University when he threw the gauntlet down for the space program.  Did the rarity of including to illustrations in the weekly e-mail: one of the National Geographic cover with Neil Armstrong on the moon and the other of a map of how effective I believe my Centro’s strategy might be.  

Another meeting on the invention – again, more revisions; I was not getting it.  Stinging to the ego as these comentarios are, they do guide me toward the more important goal of the mission.  My counterpart is a typical engineer in that his patience for my liberal arts loftiness is limited and yet he is a far more sensitive scientist than people realize. 

At the end of the session, after we drew out another diagram of what the immediate tasks are, he patted me on the shoulder and said he would like me to extend my service because of my intelligence which, he believes, no one else has; he implied that the Director of the Center agrees.  Such a rarely given and gratefully received compliment fired my engines up – I will figure out a way to get there, dammit…before retrospect.  I have done it before and I shall do it again.  

Closed out the day with the second evening in a row of teaching conversational English, this week being ‘letra-libre’, a fight to the death or suicide between Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson.  Honestly, I picked these two for two very selfish reasons.  For a while now, I have wanted to sample a little of the poetry of these two women but would never do it any other way. Second, I want to go around saying I have been reading Plath and Dickinson – though I have read 1-2% of the poems of each. 

The classes came off really well.  Emily Dickinson, at least the little I read, is majestic – so clear with the big questions.  By the same 2% token, Sylvia Plath’s command of the language is unbeatable but the self-absorption is a little much.  It is like suicide was the logical and timely terminus of her analyzing an endlessly inward but illusory fractal geometry of her humanly limited personality.  The fun part was collaborating on the interpretation with my mexican friends; there was so much more ‘there’ there than I could have imagined.

We switched rather quickly out of Plath and into a beautiful poem by Ramon Lopez Velarde.  He seemed to strike a profound balance in his discussion of death between the breathtakingly detached veracity of Dickinson and the breathlessly dispatched tenacity of Plath.  That makes sense since Lopez Velarde was born in the middle of the century intervening between the lives of the two estadounidenses.

We also talked about many other things like Mexican culture and the place of her traditions in the winner-take-all new economy that appeals to old sins like greed. Of course, we debated whether an after-life exists to which I graced my interlocuteurs with my customary response, "I'll let you know when I get there." We laughed and now my students want to marry me off -- this is a bloody rebellion...Refreshing evening; home at one.  

Saturday, September 1st. Anxiety quite a lot today as my networking is proceeding slowly and the dread of my service ending sets in.  I went for a 2.5 mile run and felt it every step of the way.  I was worried I would quit and was whining inwardly about the all too real decline of my physical strength, speculating that running on an empty stomach was the cause.  I finally looked at the sweat shining in the sun on my arm and said, “Oh, shut-up and glisten!!!”  I kept going, slowly, but trying.  

The first one did not really hurt much; the second sure did.  It was May of 1972 and a bunch of us from Saint Edmund’s Academy -- an idyllic episcopal grade school reserved for the smart or well-born (and, then, me) -- had gone to a garden fair in our uniforms before heading home and getting ready for dancing school later that evening.  The slicks had been giving us a hard time for at least half an hour. 

Finally, it came to a head when some little urchin walked close by me and shrank back, feigning that I had elbowed him.  Picking on a punk was not in my repertoire; the slicks now had their Gulf of Tonkin.  My classmates – one now dead for ten years – split in holy terror.  I started to flee, too, for about five strides.  But the big invisible hand of manliness caught me and turned me around. So, I walked right back to the most overtly menacing slick, a good two years older (and many more wiser) than I, and looked him in the eye. 

Now I had a dilemma: I knew I could not fight worth a sh*t, especially with two other slicks standing nearby, ready to put a whuss in his pusillanimous little place; nor would I run away.  My big dancing school crush – whose great uncle had contributed three buildings, including what turned out to be I.M. Pei’s prototype for the east wing of the national gallery, at my imminent high school – might be watching all of this; I had really spazzed that year in showing her my poorly expressed, if sickeningly polite, desire. 

Yes, I was delicate but I would not be cowardly; this reaction to bullies has not changed much over the years. So I looked at the slick in the eye and said, “So are you going to hit me?”  The slick hit me in the chin, maybe even in the dimple.  Though I lost my balance a little, I quickly steadied myself and looked at him in the eye.  In fairness to the slick, I left him with little choice.  My slight frame and recognizable blazer established my bona fides as a card-carrying whimp. 

Now, in the real world, slicks – or most men for that matter – can’t afford to be upstaged by a self-evident cissy, like me, lest they be castrated publicly.  Now, the slick could have broken my nose or damaged my eye.  He kept his aim to the least harmful part, the chin.  Seeing that I was not moving, the slick wound one up and hit me 'but good' in the same spot.  I winced in pain autonomically, without choice.  Though unsteady, still I would not cut and run.  The slick, really not a bad fellow, knew enough was enough and led his friends away.  

Later that afternoon, we crossed paths again and the same guttural noises ensued, at which I said, with what little moxxy I could muster up, “Oh for sh*t’s sake, not THIS again…”  The slick instead smiled and punched me, not hard, in the shoulder which, in slick etiquette, meant a sign of respect and acceptance and said in the harsh but friendly Pittsburgh accent, “You’re a pussy, alright, but you’re a HARD pussy…” 

Elated, I felt like a debutante being presented; like my sister would feel just five years later on her big night and like my darling niece will be feeling just after I return to the States, which brought me back to why I was subjecting myself to this puritan torture of running in the first place – to fit into my full dress not worn since a winter’s ball put on by the Blue Hill Troupe in Manhattan fifteen years ago.  So, I kept running: this is Neddy McDonnell.  

Got home and watched hours worth of the Republican convention on C-Span.  What an uplift to hear the sheer intellectual majesty of Secretary Condoleezza Rice.  Nevertheless, I am getting tired of people pulling quotes out of context. And I am smiting, smokin' peeved that Representative Ron Paul was blitzkrieged by the "party establishment" like Governor Sununu.

On the misquotes, if we conservatives cannot make our case honestly and triumph, then we should re-think our case.  Another line that annoyed me was this notion that President Obama somehow took credit away from small business owners by saying “we built it”; what rubbish – the President simply stated that thought so well put centuries ago by that great Christian philosopher, John Donne, that no man is an island.