I'll let it rain on me.

Two things: I'm sort of worried about the rest of my life. I'm going to owe a lot of money and I'm going to have to pay it back for years to come. Fretting.

I'm also in Poland, in a hotel listening at the rain and reading about modernity.

I need to let go of one to accept the other.

I am more aware of the former because of my age. Everyone else in this program thinks I'm a baby, even, I think, the 22-year-olds (oh, pardon me, 23). I find it incredibly patronising especially coming from academics who deconstruct everything (except age, it seems). Our professors, some aged 60 and over, see us all as children, or young adults which is a euphemism for children.

"You want to work?" they ask me, incredulously. Yeah, I have a lot of fucking loans, I respond with exasperation. This heightens my panic about money, and makes me forget that I'm in Poland with REAL Polish people.

Like,

I signed off facebook with two of my friends yesterday because I had to listen to my Russian, blind violinist friend play some jazz next door. I was sitting back thinking how ridiculous it would be to explain that when I got back home, but in the moment it seemed normal and acceptable as a thing that happens in life.

But earlier,

I made some offhand comment about my disappointment with people that join cults to postpone accepting adulthood, a comment I was very proud of, and my deconstructionist academic peers said I was being ignorant. What is adulthood? Why accept such norms. Pish posh.

I was talking to the program coordinator for the Wrocław a couple days ago at lunch. I asked about her doctorate, which she was given a month ago, and she told me to stay away from the doctorate. It is NOT worth it, she said. Once you finish your Master's program, you feel unaccomplished and the doctoral program helps you feed your academic addiction, but you're stuck in it for years, head to the paper. Everyone is working around you and now you are a doctor of your subject. Where did your life go?

Another guy, a composer (one of two I've met on the trip), went to the New England Conservatory and then a conservatory in Wrocław for two Master's and told me he regretted his New England experience because of the expense. Really?

I'm going to finish reading and sit back all of tomorrow. I'll let it rain on me, real Polish rain.

Stupid Stupid, stupid (Dobranoc.)

My concentration requires either an internship while enrolled or studying abroad. I didn't know how much time I would have in the next year, so I decided to go abroad. I am a student of the globe, so why not see the globe, rather than just theorize it?

I'm alone in the hotel lobby right now. It's next to a forested park with a big fountain that does water displays that move to music. I thought I was going mad in my room when Also Sprach Zarathustra danced outside our windows. Vitaly thought that the Poles were reenacting the war when the fireworks came.

Turns out it's just a normal Friday night in Southeastern Wrocław.

I'm one of the only students in this program without a Bachelor's. Most of them are working on their dissertation and are including their coursework in their projects. How many Polish intellectuals does it take to upset your vision of stupid Poland?

Just one, just one intellectual. There are none here with toothless, happy grins, old world charm, there are none. These people are wearing better shoes than I am and many speak English. Honestly, whatever stupid image I had of the Slavic countries East of Germany... I will tell you, there are more scags on public transportation in Portland than there are here. I'm not even in the largest city in Poland. I'm in the fourth largest. People aren't rich here.

I managed to upset one of the Polish students who are also part of the program. I said I disliked the mass-mediated discourse surrounding the failure of the socialist experiment that was the USSR. He was aghast. "You actually think that we should have another try at Marxist socialism?"

Well, I guess not, when you say it that way. I believed in the decency of humanity and that the bourgeois were replaced with totalitarians that enacted and reinforced boundaries that already existed, but now I don't believe that. I can't believe that.

I didn't live under socialism. I know nothing. Americans know nothing. Why does The New School discuss Marxism in so many contexts if it is not worth discussing? Maybe because it's great sociological critique, my UN table was able to agree on that, but Joel, the time for socialism is dead.

I had to remind them that my name is Joel. You can't remember both names and polemics.

That's a joke. I've only been here two days.

I got into an argument with one of my closest friends before I left. I presented a radical leftist perspective unabashedly (and unprovoked). I was not received well. To fight complacency, I was reactionary and that did little in the way of conversation.

I find this shit terribly interesting and righteous, but I don't have even reason to bring it up in social situations. I don't want to be a zealot. I don't want to not speak and go on like I have in the past, or like I am here, too embarrassed to mutter in Polish to go anywhere, but I don't need to be so virulent or violent.

And hell, even these international academics are less radical than I think I am. Maybe I should keep reading and absorb more everything. A crisis is like a sponge, and so will I be. I don't want to be wrong anymore.

Prolix

All young whites are juggalos and juggalettes and I'm tired of it. I'm tired of kicking past Faygo bottles at MAX stations and I'm tired of black and white makeup kits catching in gutters. I don't understand this whole fascination with the Detroit Mecca. Detriot.

I don't understand the white people of today. White culture is so loud and obscene. I heard about the bullshit evangelizing of Violent J, but his name underscores a larger obbjective violence done to the faiths of his listeners. He is, they are ignorance and misappropriation. I read about a group of wild and rangy juggalos that attacked a group of journalists and teachers. Evangelism, Violent J? Your evangelism brought this.

I can piece together the puzzle and the politically correct media won't say it, but all of these kids were juggalos. The music is their destruction. Blither and bluster and stupid, stupid stupid. No time for it. Who to blame but ICP for this and similar assaults? I want these men to be punished for inciting these crimes, but I can't expect the parents to make a move. They were as easily incited as their children by the Black Flags and the Nirvanas and whatever. And their grandparents with the riot-induction of Gene Krupa, David Brubeck, Stan Getz.

Every generation faces a moment of clarity where we can see the culprits and it is up to the strength and intelligence (not verbosity and wayward desires) of the society to pare down the overgrown culprit trees.

We must not let this stand.