EFM: Evidence For Moods

If you were reading through the comments in the first part of the leaky ceiling story, the last one on there might have seemed like an overreaction.

In actuality, I'll Take Mine...To Go, Please! was responding to a comment I had left on another blog. To quote Shannon from Cyberbones:

You know that handy little chart that floats around diagramming the stages of acceptance at a new post? If you are not FS it goes something like this: honeymoon, depression, resigned acceptance, happiness. Well I completely skip the honeymoon period everytime.

I added her comment section that my honeymoon period is over and I feel stuck in the depression. (Not to worry, family, that is an overstatement. This is not a call for help.) I also asked for a copy of said schematic. Well, ask and you will receive, which is where I'll Take Mine...To Go, Please! came to the rescue. (And thank you very much for that!)

OK, so first off, how did Natalie spend from September 2009 through June 2010 in A-100 (introduction to the foreign service, essentially) and Federally Supervised Instructions (FSI) without ever receiving a copy of this thing? How did I attend three or four FSI courses and never receive this thing? Sure, learning about how to seat guests at a state dinner is a skill I use everyday, but in hindsight, I wish they offered a course on coping with cultural adaptation instead of etiquette.

So moving across the chart, I didn't really have the pre-departure ups and downs. I wasn't excited about pack-out day or living in a hotel for 10 days, but it had no bearing on my emotional well-being.

I definitely enjoyed an initial honeymoon stage, or as I like to think of it, becoming accustomed to this awesome house - leaky roof aside. But after about a week or so, I began to slip into what the chart refers to as culture shock/acute homesickness. I don't know if those words feel appropriate for what I was actually feeling or not, but you get the picture. The emotional well-being red line dipped.

(Important case study note, in which I'm the case study: The chart, while cool and scientific looking, is a generalization. In my particular case, I think my honeymoon and culture shock stages were more intertwined and instead of a nice smooth curvy line, mine is more jagged with more ups and downs. Even in the culture shock area, there are still good days; it's just that the bad days are a little more intense than bad days back home and a little more frequent.)

So because FSI has failed us all by its lack of cultural adaptation class, I'll offer my four lessons from my own struggles.

1. I wish I would have been more studious in learning Spanish. This is 100% my fault, and I accept the blame, but that isn't helping much right now. I've been using the Stone a bit more (still don't particularly like it), and Spanish class is to commence soon at the Consulate. I hope ironing out this inability-to-communicate wrinkle will make life here better, but I'm not putting all of my eggs in this basket.

2. Speaking of eggs in a single basket, I wish I wasn't so reliant on a single client for my freelance work. The problem with working with this magazine - other than the fact that the editor holds a personal grudge against me - is that both the editor and publisher are lousy communicators and fear confrontations. So are they not responding to my e-mails because they are angry with me, are just being lazy about hitting the respond button, or do they just not want to tell me they think my story ideas suck? Another situation in which I saw the red flags before coming here, but I decided to leave it all to chance that it would work out.

3. I miss my stuff. I'm not really a possessions-oriented person, but I miss my coffee pot, food processor, toaster and/or toaster oven and cookbooks. I also miss our DVD player, DVDs (and VHS tapes) and books. I feel like Steve Martin from The Jerk. "I don't need this or this. Just this ashtray...And this paddle game ... And that's all I need. I don't need one other thing, not one...I need this." (And yes, that is my second movie reference in as many posts.) So I wish we had better planned our air freight.

4. This is the big one - managing expectations. I'd like to say I came here with no expectations. I thought I was coming here with no expectations. But after the first couple of weeks here, I found myself saying to myself, "This is not what I expected," so I must have expected something, right?

I had heard Hermosillo described as a small town within a big city. I really have no idea what that means. But I grew up in a small town. I went to college and had my first jobs in a small town. Hermosillo is not a small town by any stretch of the imagination. In a small town, you can count the number of stoplights on two hands or less. In a small town, there is two or three main roads that go no further than two miles without leaving the city limits. In a small town, you can live anywhere and still walk to what the locals refer to as its downtown.

Hermosillo has almost a million people here (some anticipate that the 2010 census will push past 1 million). Sure, there aren't any skyscrapers like in big U.S. cities, but a small town has like 50,000 people at most, not a million. And it is spread out. There are a couple of downtownish shopping areas, but none in walking distance from where we live. Not that you would want to walk in this heat anyway, but still.

In truth, having seen a few pictures of our home before we arrived, I didn't have high expectations for it, so I was pleasantly surprised when we got here. The few descriptions I had of Hermosillo had me expecting something else, and given my current standing on the emotional well-being line, I guess that wasn't such a pleasant surprise.

But with any luck and some hard work, will be getting the rest of our stuff soon and I'll get a better grasp on Spanish. And maybe the working situation will improve - it seems to ebb and flow. And after some time, I'll get used to this version of a "small town." For starters, just having this chart bumped up my emotional well-being line. It was refreshing to know that this is such a common experience there is a scientific-looking chart to describe it.

Upon Further Review...The Stone

BOSTON - I’ve decided I’m going to dedicate this week to updating some older posts in part because circumstances and opinions have changed, and also because it is becoming increasingly difficult to be creative enough to think of new posts. (Did I really post images of keratatic eyes on Saturday? I must have been really tired. Sorry)

Today, I need to go back and talk about learning Spanish and Rosetta Stone because now that I’m seeing a bunch of former colleagues, after they realize I’m not in Mexico yet, they are curious about what I’m doing with my down time and the proceed to recommend I try the Stone.

I’ve talked a little about the Stone back in the early days when I was a little more naïve and thought I would spend hours every day sitting in front of this laptop practicing my Spanish.

That is what I should be doing, but things come up, I procrastinate some, and frankly, the Stone program isn’t that great or user friendly, which makes it easy to put off.

Before proceeding any further, I need to state that 99.9% of my Spanish failures are my fault alone. I haven’t taken it seriously enough, and I can blame only myself. But I don’t want to use the rest of this space making fun of myself, so I’m fixating my angst at the Stone.

What I’ve realized is that what the Stone does best is market itself. When I tell people I’m on the Stone and have been a bit underwhelmed, they all express shock because they’ve heard it is the greatest thing language teaching device ever derived. “How could the Stone, with its extensive marketing campaign, not work miracles?”

This disbelief reflects the genius of the Stone’s marketing campaign. Everyone wants to believe that learning a foreign language can be done easily. “So all I have to do is shell out $1,000 (or whatever exorbitant amount the Stone charges), insert the CD, and I’ll know Spanish? Sign me up!”

This point was driven home a bit during Easter weekend when I was talking about learning Spanish with Natalie’s aunt. She said when she was in high school, they were promoting the subliminal, sleeping tapes to learn Spanish. Another miracle-based, no-work-involved Spanish lesson.

For the Stone to be successful, you need to dedicate a couple of hours per day, every day. Guess what. With that kind of time commitment, you could probably pick up a Spanish lesson book out of your local library and learn and retain the same amount of knowledge.

OK, so you say you are willing to put in the time. Great start, but I find the second big problem with the Stone is that it isn’t really user friendly. You buy the Spanish Stone, and all you get is Spanish. No English instructions. I think the reasoning here is that they can sell the same Spanish Stone in Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, etc. These Stone people are pretty clever like that.

Also during Easter weekend, I showed my mom the Stone, and has a teacher, she simply said, “I can see why you don’t like using this.” It should be added that I never said I didn’t like the Stone, but during weekly phone calls, when asked about Spanish, I would say it is coming slowly and that I’m not really putting in the time

And during Snowstorm 4.0, Natalie decided to try it out to make sure she wasn’t forgetting what she had learned before the GREATEST SNOWFALL HUMAN EYE’S HAVE EVER WITNESSED. She, too, complained a bit and became more sympathetic about my plight, which has since worn out.

The problem is that you don’t really learn the language. You learn expressions and vocabulary. You don’t learn grammar rules or culture understanding, which are both huge factors in language. Hell, you barely learn conjugation. In this regard, that library book is probably more valuable.

I think the Stone is a great supplement for learning a foreign language. As the lead tool, or stand alone tool, it comes up way short. Especially considering the price tag (thanks, tax payers, by the way) and gaudy claims you hear on TV.

Day One at Home

I got my first taste of what life will be like in Mexico as I spent my first day in my new office, the living room.

Sure, there were a few difference between working at home in Crystal City and working at home in Hermosillo. For example, while it did reach a sunny 61 F here, it was a sunny 74 F in our future home. And their low only dipped to 50 compared to the nearly freezing 37 here. Oh, and everyone I interacted with spoke English, but otherwise, yesterday was a microcosm of my future life.

The day got off to a rude start as I had wanted to sleep in until 7 a.m., but Natalie was less than quiet getting ready in the morning. For almost five years, I've been getting up before her to go to work, quiet as can be, and on this my first morning of getting to be the later riser, no dice. To her credit, she improved a thousand times over this morning.

After seeing her out the door, I started my new morning routine - making my own pot of coffee. While I'll be saving a lot of gas money and time not having to drive to and from work, I will be incurring new coffee costs as there was always as much free Starbucks coffee at work that I could drink. At home, I use Guatemalan coffee beans I bought through a vendor I met at the Crystal City's farmer's market last summer. Now, I like coffee, but I don't love coffee, but if I don't get two cups in the morning, I start going through withdraw by lunch time, which is marked by a throbbing headache.

Then I took Tiffy on her morning walk, and came home to get our breakfasts. I don't think my being home altered Tiffy's schedule too much, as I imagine this is how she spent her days while home alone. She didn't pester me at all.

Fed and caffeinated, I spent much of the morning getting organized. This included lots of e-mails. Some of it was work related, some personal and some foreign service oriented. The main task was to get an extension from Free Spanish on Internet (FSI) for another three months of Rosetta Stone access. I've been in touch with our Career Destruction Office (CDO; after much discussion, this has been accepted as an alternative to the Official Unofficial Acronym Chart's designation as Curmudgeon who Decides Overseas post), FSI and some other group, and I hope this gets resolved today.

After a couple hours of this sort of work, I went a jog until I nearly puked. I made it five miles, but before you say "good job," let's not forget I need to get to 9.3 miles by the end of the month for the Cincinnati minimarathon. That pretty much wiped me out for the rest of the day, but I ate lunch, checked on my e-mail accounts to make sure I wasn't following behind on my communications, and ended up watching TV for an hour or so.

Of course, this is when Natalie came home from work, finding me sprawled on the couch in pajamas. This is how I get judged.

All in all, I felt like it was a good start. I need to create a routine to make sure I get everything done, and yesterday went a long way to doing that. This is an exciting time right now, and I don't want to squander the opportunity to start good habits to maximize my situation.

A Call-to-Arms for Spanish Assistance

Rosetta Stone. My Spanish lifeline, yet also my biggest hurdle.

For the uninitiated, part of the FSO training regimen involves necessary language training. So the government (thanks, taxpayers!) provides intensive language courses that essentially become the forever-studying-for-overseas' (FSO’s) fulltime job.

Kindly enough, the government (thanks again, taxpayers!) also opens the door to us, eagers-for-mastering (EFMs) a foreign language, if space permits. Of course, the other qualification is if the family’s economic situation permits.

But as I have to work 40-hour weeks to pay the bills, the government (really, taxpayers, you are outdoing yourselves!) provides an online version of the Rosetta Stone for spouses unable to give up their jobs and attend classes.

In the early going, I was a big fan. I still remain relatively impressed with the program, but it suffers from a huge drawback. No English. I hope I’m not giving away too many secrets, but the program works by using images and matching the images to the Spanish words. Up until my specific gripe, which is coming shortly, I’ve actually preferred this method because the pictures are more memorable than an English translation.

But the problem arises when the lessons get more complex, and they are trying to describe a verb that doesn’t really provide an action. The first encounter was the verb tener, “to have.” After a few images, I was able to piece that one together, but how do you illustrated someone having something?

Now, I’m only up to the second chapter, and I’ve reached a sticking point. The offending sentence: Yo quiero a mi padre. And several variations with third person subjects like: El nino quiere a su perro. And then the corresponding pictures show either a person hugging his/her father or a boy hugging his dog, etc.

As we all remember from Taco Bell commercials, when a chihuahua says “Yo quiero Taco Bell,” it means it wants Taco Bell. But we’ve never heard that dog utter “Yo quiero a Taco Bell.” What does that “a” mean? How does it affect the verb, querer?

The best of I’ve gathered is that it means “love,” but heaven forbid Rosetta Stone from providing a glossary of terms to address any confusion for their images’ inadequacies. So if anyone speaks Spanish, could you please help me with this translation?