Self-inflicted poverty

I have never had this little money. In the past I have always had some savings to rely on. I think that was a combination of all the Christmas and Birthday money that I had gotten from relatives from a young age, plus the money a made working full-time and not paying rent for a summer before I started college. The fact that I didn't until recently develop a habit of buying things very often helped out too. Leaving Beijing in June, I had thought that all the money I had managed to save that year (a good deal, I think) would work out pretty well for me. Not well enough, I guess. This whole post is a bit untrue, though. I am not, and likely never will be, poor like a young family that can't make ends meet and sees no future. I am not poor like a woman or a man in *pick your favorite developing country here* who will die with little more (or less) than he or she was born with, with a life of pain and struggle in the middle. As a smart and adaptable individual I have great potential to earn money. I just wish I could borrow a couple of thousand from the financially stable 40-year-old Joe to help the 23-year-old Joe.

It isn't like I can legitimately whine or complain about having hardly any money left (about $250, plus debts). After all, if I hadn't been so loose with my money while in Beijing buying things that I didn't really need, spending more on food than I had to, and even buying meals for friends, than I would have more now. Of course, I view my financial choices during the summer as having a greater impact, since I had a good amount of money when I finished working in Beijing. I choice to attend Isa's wedding in Spain. It cost me a lot, but I am very glad that I did it. Not only was it a great experience for me culturally (as a newcomer to Spain), it also helped to cement my friendship to Isa. We really didn't have to be friends. We were just acquaintances at Kalamazoo. But when she came to visit Kalamazoo (during the summer of 2008, was it?) I happened to be there, and I was so happy to have her come that I went to pick her up at the train station. From there we chatted every now and then online, but when I went to Chicago (for my Chinese visa) in 2010 I stayed on her couch. We watched her favorite show, I met her boyfriend, and we gossiped and exchanged life updates. I feel that we grew much closer. Julie would say "bosom friends," but I would just say "someone I love and trust." While I was in China she gave me the news that she was engaged, and I knew that I wanted to attend her wedding.

Aside from that there was the cost of the time I spent in Madrid, and the cost of spending time in Berlin to visit an old, dear, close friend who lived there. She was probably one of my oldest, dearest, and closest, actually. The price of attending the European Juggling Convention in Munich, much of which (food) I hadn't foreseen, also helped deplete my funds.

None of these were things that I had to do, but were choices that I consciously made, without considering how much they would cost me, both financial and (Berlin especially) in terms of emotional energy and friendship/personal relationships. I made the financially sound decision to spend the remaining part of summer on a WWOOF farm in Spain, managing to spend no more than a few dozen euro during the entire month. That was more than offset by the cost for me to fly back to the U.S. in order to claim my visa to work in Spain, that round-trip flight being the most expensive visa regulation that I have encountered to date. Certainly if I had arranged my schedule differently(such as not attending the wedding, or not visiting Germany) then I could have avoided that cost, but these were things that were important to me: attending the wedding of a close friend, seeing a best friend that I hadn't seen in nearly two years, and attending the biggest juggling convention on the planet, were things that I prioritized, and I am (for the most part) still glad that I made the general choices I did, although f I did I would go back and tweak a few things (aka: still attend the events, just be more frugal).

I certainly gained things from my summer too, experiences and memories, new juggling friends, stories to tell, a few words of German and somewhat improved Spanish, boasting rights for having spent a summer romping around Europe... I just didn't gain anything that I can exchange for food at the grocery store or give to a landlord for rent.

So I (am trying to) live simply again. For food: potatoes, pasta, and rice. When I saw a 3kilo sack of potatoes for less then 0.5 euro per kilo I snapped that right up. Anything that is more than two euros per kilo is just out of the question, which means that meat and butter are not on the grocery list. Shampoo? Not necessary, I have water. Towel? Not necessary, I have air. Reminds me a little of some weekends in high school when I just had one or two bowls of ramen and nothing more in an effort to save money. In college some people told me that they liked ramen, but I found it impossible to like it after that experience. For entertainment: my roommate has a wifi network, and the local library does too. I have spend a lot of time at the library so far, reading and researching online, studying just a little bit of a new language (Russian!), and slowly hacking away at my to-do-list that I have accumulated. Thank god entertainment, learning material, and most of the things I want to read online are still free.

I'll be trying to get more work here, so I can earn more money. I have to earn more than enough to live on, both to pay off my debts (which increased substantially this summer; the only thing keeping me from complete bankruptcy), and to save up for an airplane ticket to get me out of here once this small chapter of my life finishes. Maybe I will stay in Spain for a second year, but there is no way that I will stay in a city this small in Spain for a second year.

A philosophical question

Which is better:
A) to force someone to do something that they do not wish to do
B) to force someone to not do something that they wish to do, or to prevent someone from doing what they wish

The extremes could be seen as rape, murder, etc. for A, and sensory deprivation, imprisonment, etc. for B, but rather than playing with conceptual extremes I will try to ground it is some reality for you.

A few specific examples:
I thought about this a couple times in China where it isn't terribly uncommon for people to use their cellphones as very small stereos, playing their music out loud in a public place, such as on the subway. When I was in a van once with several people, a girl was playing her music like this. I asked her if she had any headphones and she said no. Then I told her that I didn't want to listen to her music. Was I right to feel that she should not forcibly impose her choice of music on others without consent?

At the juggling festival in Badalona there was a DJ playing reggae music. Reggae is not a kind of music that I usually enjoy, and this music was so loud I couldn't even ear my own music (techno and electronic are my genres of choice for juggling practice, if you are curious.) through my headphones. I felt that as long as I wanted to stay and juggle I was being "forced" to listen to the reggae music.

Far more generally, think of smoking. Those of us who do not smoke consider it perfectly acceptable to use our personal preference as a legitimate reason to force other people to not smoke. Think about that: we override other people's free choices. Ignore the health issues for a moment and think about the moral issues related to choice and opinion, the freedom to choose one's own actions. If I am sitting in a car with three smokers, it is okay for me to ask them not to smoke because I don't like the smell/taste of it? What are the limits of this? When is it okay and when is it unacceptable for a non-smoker to force a smoker to not smoke.

What do you think?

Another thing that I could never have observed in China

A few days ago I found out from Foro-Ciudad that there would be a protest in Albacete on Friday, October 15th. It was considerably bigger than I expected. It also seemed to lack a clear goal or purpose. From chatting with an Italian lady I met there I discovered that it was part of a broader movement in many different countries. Perusing the website for this broader movement I also did not find any specific goals, aside from the amorphous "uniting the people." There is some retoric there about equality and justice, real democracy, etc., but it seems that this is more of a party, which a revolution is not. Indeed, the entire protest march here in Albacete had a very festive feel to it. There was a percussion band, some crazy costumes, and lots of singing and jumping. Granted the songs were protest songs rather than dancing songs, but I still considered it to be fairly festive. The one part I severely disliked was when people started chanting "revolution, revolution," which made them seem (to me) as childish and unthoughtful. Revolutions involve blood, pain, suffering, and actual fighting, rather than just making use of rights well within that the political system grants you.

Another observation is how accommodating the police were: apparently it had been cleared with them before, because there was a police van in front of the march slowly moving forward, and farther ahead the police were clearing the way, making sure that the roads we were to march on were cleared off from traffic. I found this an interesting contrast to the reaction of police in the United States to (peaceful) crowds shouting "revolution" and "the people united will never be defeated."

Even though I haven't much more thought to write down, I took a bunch of pictures, so I will share some of  them here, with the full collection going to my picasa album.

"The revolution is in your heart"

One guy had some more specific grievances

Hard to have a protest around here without seeing a republican flag

The police van is far ahead, clearing the way

The Internet, Communication

Based on an except from an update email.

I think back on my experience on a WWOOF farm near Toledo:

Although that calm of the countryside was nice, the self-inflicted separation from the world caused by a lack of internet access was more than I would wish for again. Aside from not being able to write emails or to make Skype calls to friends and family, I was surprised at how much I desperately missed reading the blogs that I follow, world news, and the ability to look things up online. I often use the internet as a giant encyclopedia: if I want to know how to cook apple pie I search Google; if I want to know where the donuts were invented I look it up on Wikipedia; if I want to know how to translate, spell, or conjugate a particular word I crowdsource it to the internet to find out my answer. To learn a language, to read or download a book or an academic paper, to find song lyrics, to see what kind of communities are active in certain places, to compare products and prices, to look up exercises... I don't want to get all melodramatic, but the combination of innumerable resources on the internet really is almost everything for me. My time on the WWOOF farm taught me that I can live without internet access. But it also taught me how much I really do value having it. Even the times that I have been without internet access before, such as when I have moved to a new place, I have been able to get to an internet cafe or some location with a wireless network every couple of days. On the farm there weren't any places like that around, so I just had to go without. I am not going to go so far to say that life without internet access would not be worth living or anything so extreme as that, but it is easy and (for me) true to say that life without internet access would be very different and of much lower quality. The number of friends (either in the German sense of “very close and very important to me” friends or friends in a more casual sense as "someone I merely am acquainted with but whom I enjoy") I would be able to have would drop dramatically and my ability to learn about any subject area at all would be greatly lessened. These two things, (the ability to communicate with people I care about and the ability to learn (or to easily access information)) are the two main reasons that I consider access to the internet to be so important. Entertainment is there as well, but it is a very distant third after communication and learning/information.

Of course, if I chose to life a different lifestyle (and by that I mean, not a global nomad), this could greatly affect the first factor. There have been times during the past few years when I have felt like more or less of a nomad. During my senior year at Kalamazoo College I had a community of people who were physically located close to me, so I relied less on the internet for communication, since there were only a few geographically-distant people whom I was in touch with. When I lived in Beijing, I would regularly meet friends in person at juggling and improv events, or just for a meal, so the internet wasn't so terribly necessary to communicate with those friends, but I still used it intensely for information and for communicating with friends in the United States and in Europe. I assume that here in Albacete I will develop a group of contacts and friends here, and I am certainly going to try and go out more. While in China I became quite zhai, staying at home a couple nights a week and some weekends to read, watch movies, or have Skype chats. Although I don't feel that watching a movie or curling up with a book or studying at home is in anyway inferior to going out to a bar, I do feel that there is a cultural value that places going out to socialize with other people as a “higher” or a “better” things than doing something solitary at home, which makes me feel as though I need to justify myself each time I would prefer to not go out. I have to say, though: although I had loads of great times with good friends, at improv, and out on the town, one of my happiest memories of that year in Beijing was sitting at home alone on my couch, curled up with a blanket, crackers, peanut butter, and Cosmopolitanism.

But now I have people from two places in the world where I have lived in (Kalamazoo and Beijing) that I want to stay in touch with, not to mention all the people from those two places that are no longer there: friends have moved and now there are people from Seattle to Grenada to Quito, from Chicago to Beijing, from Minneapolis to Milwaukee to Madrid to Moscow, all of whom that I care about and that I want to have as a part of my life. Almost every continent in the world has people I know and care about.

I am still hoping to become less zhai and more Spanish during my time here, to go out for drinks and tapas, to find/create a group of local friends, and to adapt myself to the local culture here, but I do value the relationships that I have with people from far away, and I want to keep those going.

Menus for the Bar and Menus for the Terrace

This blog post is about some behavioral economics instituted on a society-wide scale that I discovered. Perhaps in order to shape people's behavior or perhaps in order to benefit some and in order to better utilize sparse resources?

Imaginary questioner: "What are you talking about, Joe? Do you mean realistic prices for energy to encourage less consumption?"
Joe: "Nope."
Imaginary questioner: "What about textiles and other cheap products that could take externalities into account? Ya know, like environmental and social costs that aren't listed in the price tag when I purchase an object?"
Joe: "Not that either."
Imaginary questioner: "Please tell us, wise and powerful Joseph, what do you mean?"
Joe: "It is simple, my children: prices on menus."

Probably most Spaniards would find this to be nothing special, but to me the pricing on Spanish menus lies somewhere between interesting and ingenious. First, a little bit of background: most Spanish restaurants seem to have an outdoor patio in addition to indoor seating, and many have seating at the bar as well. I don't know whether the intention is to take advantage of peoples' desire to sit outside in order to make an extra euro, or if it is to subtly encourage spendthrifts like me to sit inside, thereby making more space on the patio, but I an intrigued by the idea of people paying a little more for certain seating in a restaurant. It is like paying more money for a good seat on an airplane, and less money for a less desirable seat. I wonder what Dan Ariely would have to say about this kind of pricing on menus. I am also really curious as to what kind of reaction there would be if a restaurant in the United States priced it's menu like this, with differing prices depending on where one sits.

High-tech trains

I think that to be an international journalist from the United States nowadays, one must make an effort to mention the relative decline of the U.S. as often as possible, making particular references to infrastructure and public transportation. Although I am not a journalist (yet?), I too find myself marveling at the areas in which other countries have advanced and are advancing. My experience in China no doubt gives me a certain view on it, but now I am living in Europe, on the opposite end of the development spectrum. Having experienced trains in China and in the United States, it would be pointless for me to comment on speed, efficiency, price, or cleanliness. One thing that I haven't seen a lot of in the press, though, is doors and locks. Seriously: on the high speed train between Toledo and Madrid, there isn't even a handle on the door to the bathroom. Although I normally consider myself to be a fairly tech-focused person, I was absolutely amazed. I felt like a bit of a Luddite. But is this a display of technological prowess? A waste of funds that could have been put to better uses? Since physical contact is still necessary I would assume that there is not major effect on sanitation, while there is an energy consumption where previously there was none, without significantly improving life for the majority of the population. Is having this kind of a high-tech door worth it?

Yogurt

Apparently "Yellow Fruit" is a legitimate flavor in Spain. I remember people giving me shit for saying that I liked the flavor of red when I was little, and empowers me in some strange way.

The Multi-Faith Prayer Room at Heathrow

 I was only in the Heathrow Airport in london for a few hours, but I liked seeing so many Sikhs there. Having just seen a public demonstration by the local Sikh community in Madrid (where I was told that Sikhs are identifiable by their turban), I was excitedly to suddenly be recognizing people's religion by their head ware. Although it is likely a side effect of historical British imperialism in south Asia, I really enjoyed seeing this little bit a cultural diversity. It wasn't unusual for somebody working in a shop or a kiosk in the airport to be wearing a turban.

One thing I found especially amazing at Heathrow is that the airport had a prayer room. Not only were these individuals who believed in Islam accepted, but they were even accommodated to the extent that a place to pray was provided. Of course, it seemed to be a Islamic prayer room rather than actually a multi-faith prayer room, which I found to be interesting, but I found nothing wrong with it. If there is, hypothetically, a faith that requires men and women to pray together, these individuals can't very well pray in the same space as most Muslims, since Muslim men and women usually pray separately.

If you don't know, many types of Islamic faiths require it's adherents to pray several times a day. Unlike a Cristian prayer where you can just think about saying something to God, when a Muslim prays he or she is supposed to go down to the knees and speak the prayer. Since the prayer times each day are standardized, it is usually a community of people praying together, although if someone is traveling or out and about it is perfectly possible that they will find themselves praying alone. That being said, I know very little of Islam, so if I got anything wrong here or if I left out important facts, please leave a comment to let me know so I can correct it.

Reading Material at the WWOOF farm

I like to read. While at the WWOOF farm I read Errant in Iberia, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Ethical Slut, plus The Count of Monte Cristo as an audiobook. I was also intrigued by some of the reading material that was available there. Half of the living room seemed to be stacks of old magazines, with a cupboard full of atlases in the corner.

The bathroom had magazines of two distinct types. One was a magazine with political comics called El Jueves, and the others were adult comics. I was amazed! Although I think that I was vaguely familiar with the idea of dirty magazines in a bathroom, I had never actually seen them in anybody's bathroom before.

The living room and the kitchen provided some more mature reading options, ranging from political books, cooking books, multiple dictionaries, and one book that I recall as being "A Complete History of Drugs."

My best experience of finding reading material on the farm was definitely a comic book that I took a liking to. It featured some teachers and some students at a secondary school in Spain. The comic book, called Acné y 4º de ESO, served fairly well to introduce me to some new vocaulbary, as well as to show me some fairly humorous situations of the teachers and students. Some of them I could even relate to. I really enjoyed reading it, and I felt it was sort of a culturally educating experience for me, especially useful since I will likely be working with kids of that age.

Chinese and Spanish

I can read in Spanish more quickly and with greater comprehension than I can in Chinese. Seriously; after three years of study and one year of post-college life focused on China, I am able to comprehend more written Spanish within a few months of my first visit to Spain. (for oral communication my Chinese is still far stronger than my Spanish)
 
It is disheartening considering how much time I spend on Chinese, and encouraging as to what it suggests about my potential achievements with Spanish. It is also encouraging that I may be able to find books I want to read in Spanish at the public library in Albacete.