My desire to be free of motherhood aside, I seriously thought about her feeling of “being unfulfilled” without a screaming baby at her side. A few weeks later, a 40 year old female friend told me about her dating frenzy to find a husband so that she could have kids soon and fill her void.

Since when have changing diapers and filling bottles been fulfilling?

Having children with someone one is in love with and wants to create a life with is one thing and understandable. But procreating just to fill a whole in one’s life is a sure way to disappointment. When we seek another to fulfill us, we give our power over to them. What if the kid is born with a disability and becomes one’s ward for the rest of his/her life? What if the kid doesn’t do with his or her life what you would like them to do? Children will at some point frustrate or anger their parents. Is this what desperate single childless people call fulfillment? I don’t get it.

I feel sorry for desperate women who go on dating marathons or Match.com filter sessions fueled by the noisy and scary echos of their biological clocks and/or intrusive family members telling them they better create progeny or live the miserable lives of spinsters.

I ask that the next time someone gets desperate to have a kid that he/she truly examines the motives behind their mad dash for the baby clothes section. (I see this more common in women than in men.) Do they sincerely want to be a parent and give up some of their freedom to create a new life and nurture this new being or are they chasing what they think is a societal norm they must exemplify?

Later on, the 40 year old told me that she had a hard look at what made her chase after available men her age, and she realized that she was driven by “the idea that she would be fulfilled as a mother” and not her true desire to be a parent. She actually liked being single! I am glad that she thought about what she really wanted and was true to herself.

If more people thought before they had kids, the world would be better off. We are already over populated as it is. Planned and genuinely wanted pregnancies are what we need, not “I need to be fulfilled” baby creation.

Fulfillment is a feeling we generate in ourselves. We decide when we are satisfied and complete, it’s not another being who does it for us.

Watch this clip from The Daily Show:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=231589&title=oliver-sacks

This man is a wonderful gift to humanity.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been wandering in the North End, the old Italian neighborhood in Boston. I actually visited the North End on June 11th, fifteen days ago. I’ve spent more time since I left Boston mentally walking along the streets of the charming and now yuppie-filled area of brick buildings than I did that moist afternoon.

I lived in Boston for my last two years of high school and I returned there two weeks ago for my high school reunion.

I can’t get the city out of my head.

That Thursday afternoon in Boston was my first day of rest in a long time. My mind and body needed to unwind. I had flown on a red-eye flight from San Francisco to the East Coast 1.5 days prior and hurried to Times Square in NY for a meeting with MTV and had been operating on little sleep.

Knowing I was not far from my dear North End, I exited the South Station train station in Boston and found myself unsure of how to get to my destination. Though I consider Boston as my second home, I hadn’t visited the city in five years, since my last reunion. I didn’t remember the street names. I found a large map on the street. As soon as I looked at the city layout, I knew where to go.

Around 4pm or so, I walked through the Haymarket and saw the vegetable and fruit sellers closing up. I wanted to find the underground passageway from the Haymarket to the North End that had copies of Botticeli and Modigliani paintings on the walls. I remember walking from the Haymarket with my friends Pilar and Makeda (on separate occasions) and admiring the frescoes. The frescoes were gone. The whole underground passageway wasn’t there anymore. Instead, there was a park. Disappointed with the new construction and landscaping, I walked into the North End.

Even though I hate licorice and anise, the aroma of anise biscotti coming from the bakeries was inviting,. The smell of the post-rain dew on the tree bark permeated my senses. Admiring the roses in Charter Street Playground, I recalled taking photos there for my Senior pictures with Makeda. With my glass of Chianti making its way through my brain, I was both a teenager and an adult at the same time. My smile never left my face. Meandering through the small streets and alleyways, I marveled at the inner courtyards and small shops. Though tour groups walked past me and yuppies carrying their yoga mats made their way to the yoga studio on the main street, I didn’t may attention to them. I was in my own little world and happy to be there.

Not only was I remembering how I first visited the North End as a 15 year old, I felt like I was discovering it anew.

Sometimes, I think it’s possible to both be in the past and the present and enjoy the feelings from both time periods. It’s when we are trapped by the past that we encounter problems.

I hope to visit Boston again soon and not wait another five years. It’s so fresh in my mind. Even though I am in my backyard in California with the fan blowing cool air onto my face, my mind is still partially on the Atlantic Coast.

Yesterday, I had a lot of fun dancing to the gypsy music of Goran Bregović, a Sarajevo-born musician and composer. He has collaborated with Iggy Pop and Cesaria Evora and created the soundtracks for Emir Kusturica’s films (Time of the Gypsies, Arizona Dream, Underground).

While listening to the concert, I felt like I was back in Sarajevo in my small cottage learning the local language (Bosnian, Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian) from my dear Bosnian friend, Damir Imamović. He taught me to sing popular songs from the former Yugoslavia. We would sit by my small table with its plastic red table cloth trying to keep warm in the cold Balkan winter listening to songs on my small cassette player. Often, our “language lessons” turned into English language gossip sessions. I was supposed to teach him English poetry in exchange for Bosnian language lessons through music. Not only did I learn the language through music thanks to Damir, but we developed a profoundly deep friendship. He is the brother I never had.

Now, Damir has his own Bosnian music band, the Damir Imamovic Trio, and can help other people learn the language through his sevdalinke and traditional Bosnian music.

Music activates a part of our brains that not only ignites nostalgia, but also language memory. At the concert, the thoughts in my head were in Bosnian. That’s surprising since Bosnian is the language I speak the least. Because of Bregović’s music, I felt as though I had never left Bosnia and hadn’t forgotten any of the language.

Damir taught me to sing the sad Balkan love song, Ruzica. Unfortunately, Bregović didn’t perform this dear song last night. But I was singing it my head, just like I sang it on many a snowy night sitting on my lone heater by my window watching the snow fall on the well in my courtyard.

Music moves the soul and brings us back to the past.

I walked in on Bill Santiago’s stand-up comedy routine in Spanglish, the mixture of Spanish and English by Spanish speakers in the US. He’s written a book in Spanglish called, Pardon my Spanglish: Porque, Because with jokes and explanations about how Spanglish is used. This is based on his Comedy Central Special. The English is written in plain text and the Spanish in italics. Since I speak Spanish, I could understand how the Spanish sections of the jokes sounded better in Spanish than in English. According to Bill, it’s the only book actually written in Spanglish. All the rest are academic by nature. Since I love languages, but fall asleep with boring academic linguistic explanations, I appreciate Bill’s humor and work to make the book.

Bill says “Life is too short to be multilingual.” He is totally right. It’s fun to be able to mix languages mid-sentence and know that one’s audience can understand him or her. I often wish I could put in a word from another language when I am speaking but I can’t because I know the other person can’t understand the foreign words I want to use. When I do put in those exotic words, I then have to spend time explaining what they mean.

Gracias Bill por el libro!
(Thanks Bill for the book!)

Last week, I was helping my friend David Mathison at his booth at Book Expo America. David was selling his book, Be the Media, a guidebook for authors, musicians, film makers, radio hosts and other creative people to create their own media companies. David’s aim is for people to bypass the major music studios and publishing houses and distribute their own content using the Internet and social media marketing.

A man wearing a T-shirt with the word “BEAR” was admiring the stand. I asked him if he had any questions. Miguel Vargas-Caba, the Latin American man, was marveling at the book because he had self-published his own book, BEAR: Flight to Liberty, and had to learn about social media marketing all on his own. He was happy that David had written a book to help other authors use the Internet and technology to maximize their exposure. He reached into his bag and pulled out some papers describing his book about Soviet airline pilot defectors in the 1970s.

A Latin American man writing about Soviet defectors?

He has got to be Cuban, I thought.

Who else in Latin America could comprehend the mentality of Communist defectors but the cubanos, many of whom will risk their lives in makeshift rafts to escape the land of Castro?

I read in his papers that he began learning Russian by listening to Soviet Army music in the Dominican Republic.

“Do you speak Russian?” I asked him in Russian.

Perfectly formed Russian sentences flowed from Miguel’s mouth. His accent was excellent. I was shocked. (I am a native Russian speaker.)

How did a Dominican learn to speak such good Russian?

Music.

He’s never been anywhere in the former Soviet Union.

In addition to Soviet army music, he taught himself the language by using textbooks written for English speakers to learn Russian when he lived in the Dominican Republic. He lives in New York now.

I was beyond impressed. Russian is a very difficult language to learn and it’s rare to find people who learn to speak so fluently and gracefully without having ever stepped foot in the land of Peter the Great or in any former Soviet republics.

Miguel was more proof that yes, one can really learn to speak with a good accent by listening to music in one’s target language.

He also told me that listening to the army music aided him in understanding the Soviet mentality. Being able to “feel” the spirit of the army, helped Miguel craft the characters for his book about Soviet airplane pilot defectors whose plane crashed on the way to Canada. Music is not only an entry into the sound of a language, but also the soul and culture of the people who speak the tongue.

I am truly impressed with Miguel’s ability to learn Russian and patience for Russian melancholic music. I doubt I could listen to as much somber Russian music as he does! I teased him that he went from living in the sounds of happy merengue to borscht!

Candidate character description:

Multilingual, sensitive to other cultures, can mix with local populations in difficult areas around the world, can get used to harsh living conditions, can gain trust of people if different countries, smart, and resourceful.

Education: Economics, international affairs.

Job: Be an economic hit man. Lie for the US government. Manipulate international leaders and governments to accept “economic aid” contracts and bad loans that favor the US and not the recipient country.

I fit the character description and educational profile, but the job doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve been mistaken on several occasions as a spy, but I never knew the term “economic hitman” until the book Confessions of an Economic Hit man by John Perkins was published. I didn’t expect to relate so well to the narrator. I was just curious about the book because several people had mentioned it to me as a good book to read to understand how the US exaggerates how much foreign aid it gives to developing countries.

There were several parallels between my life and the author’s life, despite our 30 year age difference that truly made me ponder how my life could have been different if I had been recruited to do the same type of work he had done.

1)He attended a New England boarding school, but was not from a family that could afford such an education. (His dad was a teacher at the school.)
* I got a scholarship to go to a college preparatory school for two years.

2) In college, he was recruited by the National Security Agency. The CIA and US Military tried recruiting me after college because of my foreign language skills.
He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador.
* My sister was a Peace Corps volunteer there.

3) In Latin America, he went off the beaten-path and went to places most Americans never visited. Since he spoke Spanish, local people were very fond of him and showed him things most Americans never saw in depth, including the slums and marginal neighborhoods.
* Same with me!

4) His first job involved projecting electricity usage in Indonesia and inflating those numbers.

* I had a college internship at the French Electricity Company charting electricity usage. (I didn’t over-inflate any numbers.)

5) He conned foreign leaders and government agencies into accepting loans for US foreign aid programs that the governments could never pay back. The loans mostly went to US construction and engineering firms to build dams, oil company and infrastructure projects, and building sites the countries may not have even needed. Some of the dams and electric grid projects displaced people, polluted waterways and caused uproars.

* When I worked in Bosnia, my salary was paid out of the US Department of Agriculture’s Monetization programs that dumped surplus American subsidized crops and milk powder on foreign markets. The USDA “gave” the surplus crops to US non governmental organizations working in developing or post-crisis countries to sell on the local market and use the proceeds to fund their programs. Well, the subsidized crops could be cheaper than the locally produced ones. So, then these NGOs who were supposedly doing good deeds could dominate the local market for these crops and outsell local producers. I was working on agricultural development programs. Therefore, outselling the local farmers was counterproductive. Luckily, none of my projects involved the same USDA Monetization program milk powder that was being sold on the Bosnian market.

US taxpayers are not only paying to subsidize crops, but if the government takes farmer surplus and keeps it from the local market, then the government is artificially keeping prices higher than they should be.

6) In pre-revolutionary Iran, two men took Mr. Perkins to a private meeting and told him that they were confiding in him because he was in between two worlds; he was in the middle.

*I am in between more than just two worlds, I am in the middle of a lot of worlds, cultures, ways of thinking and languages. People tell me all sorts of things about their countries and leaders that they would never tell a mainstream person. Right now, I am in between so many worlds that I sometimes feel like I am floating.

Wow! If those spy agencies had taken a hold of me after college, what would I be doing right now?

I bet there are other people like me with mixed linguistic and cultural backgrounds who are prey to be recruited for these types of spy-like or economic infiltration assignments.

I believe that those of us with a multilingual and multicultural background can do good in this world and not just exploit our talents and ancestry for the profit of corporations and greedy governments. My path is to teach others how to learn foreign languages easily using music and the media and be their own communicators. It took me a long time to find my niche.

I hope my cohorts find their paths that benefit humanity.

See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_Spanish) for more information about the particularities of Argentine Spanish.

At least that’s what I thought.

When I got angry or very enthusiastic about something, my melodramatic Argentine accent came out loud and clear and often surprised those used to hearing me speak in my strange Mexican-Castillian Spanish. If I spoke to someone from Argentina or Uruguay, the accent came back as well as did the particular vocabulary for the region.

Two years ago, I went to Guadalajara, Mexico to visit my friend Elvira whom I’d met while working there in April 2003. Elvira told me that I had lost more of my Argentine accent. She remarked that I was using less of the “vos”. I didn’t realize that in 2003, my argentinismos were still appearing in my Spanish. I really thought I’d closed the Argentine chapter of my life.

In August 2007, I returned to Buenos Aires to reconcile myself with the city that had so pained me. I wanted to stop the rancor that was inside of me every time I heard an Argentine accent, even my own. After five days in Buenos Aires, the rancor went away. I rediscovered the beauty of the city.

My accent came back, in a mild form. My sh sounds for the “ll” and y” reappeared.

A month ago, I was revising an essay about my year in Argentina. I was nostalgic for the country. A week or two later, I was listening to Argentine folk music by Los Nocheros (www.losnocheros.net) on You Tube and I could smell Argentine asado (barbeque) in the comfort on my own home. This strong flashback was not unique. I had other gastronomic and geographical flashbacks that overwhelmed me. I felt ungrounded, like I was floating in between countries. I was traveling in my mind. Thousands of miles away from Argentina, the distinctive smell of grilled meat came to me. Mind you, I was a vegetarian for most of my stay in the country, so I was not a huge fan of their bovine-centered diet!

Ever since rewriting the essay in early April, my accent has become stronger. I am using the ‘vos’ more than before. I dream of being on the streets of Buenos Aires — the same streets I was so happy to leave in January 2000. I dream of eating empanadas (Argentine turnovers).

I don’t know what’s going on with me. But, I do know that no matter how closed I think past chapters are in my life, my accents and speaking patterns may still reflect my past international living experiences.

The language surpassed political barriers. The former Yugoslavs reminisced about Yugoslavian sports teams and music groups that existed before the fall of the former Yugoslavia.

The Slovenian diplomat told me that children in Slovenia no longer learn Serbo-Croatian and focus only on English and German. Since Slovenia broke apart from the former Yugoslavia and joined the European Union, the country is concentrating on being European and not maintaining strong links with its former co-Yugoslavs. Though I understand the political reasonings for focusing on teaching English and German in Slovenian schools, there’s no reason not to learn Serbo-Croatian. Why should the young generations of Slovenes not be able to communicate in another Slavic language with their Southern neighbors? They still have business ties to Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and would have better relationships if they spoke to those people in their languages rather than English.

The same goes for former Soviet countries, especially in the Baltics, who also don’t mandate learning Russian in schools. Yes, I am very aware of the bad things that the former Soviet Union did in the Baltics and why people in the Baltics may not embrace Russia as their best friend, but they can’t deny the huge neighbor next to them. Wouldn’t it be better to negotiate with one’s neighbor in their language rather than using a third language like English or an interpreter?

Having lived on both sides of the Iron Curtain, I am intimately aware of political barriers. It’s because of my personal history that I see how vital it is for people to learn foreign languages and communicate directly. It pains me to see how political changes can effect educational policy.

Incidentally, if it weren’t for my being able to resurrect my rusty Serbo-Croatian from when I lived in Bosnia in 2000-2001, I would have been in trouble. I got very sick while in Macedonia and my local election coordinators called for an ethnic Albanian doctor to come to my hotel room to examine me. Everyone else in our group left for a party and I didn’t want to bother the interpreter who was resting. The doctor and I communicated in Serbo-Croatian. Even though I was sick and not very strong, I was still able to talk to the good doctor and explain myself. Here I was, a Slavic woman originally from Russia, speaking to a Muslim Albanian man in his third language, Serbo-Croatian. According to political fault lines, we probably should not have been communicating. But he was a doctor doing his job and I was sick and needed assistance.

There were no political barriers between us.

Language is language. Politics are politics. Don’t confuse them.

Physically, I was in one place — Macedonia. Technically, the name of the country is the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia or FYROM. I am not going to call it that. I don’t care if someone reading this is Greek and is offended by the country’s name. (Northern Greece is also called Macedonia and the Greek government opposes its northern neighbor’s claim to the name Macedonia, citing that they are the only place with the right to bear that name.) I am not going to entertain nationalism and name wars. I’ll leave it to the diplomats to wrestle with what to call the former Yugoslav Republic. I’ll just call it Macedonia.

My body was in Macedonia — a country I’d never visited before. However, I felt like I knew the place already as it reminded me a great deal of my 15 months in Sarajevo, Bosnia after the Bosnian War. Being in Skopje’s Carsija, the old Turkish part of the city (cobblestoned, no cars, small shops), reminded me a lot of Bosnia. The smell of grilled meat and fireplaces brought back a lot of memories. I think that Bosnia, despite its violent history, antagonistic language, cold weather, and other negative things, really got under my skin. The haunting music and melancholic chords resonated deeply with me. Being back in the Balkans and seeing ugly grey Communist apartment blocks seemed very familiar. The talk of ethnic and religious conflict, land mines and the sound of a familiar Slavic language all brought me back to my life in Sarajevo in 2000-2001. The Macedonian language is similar to Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian. Most Macedonians studied Serbo-Croatian in school because it was the national language of the former Yugoslavia. When I resurrected my rusty Serbo-Croatian skills, people could understand me and would respond to me in Serbo-Croatian. Even when people were speaking in Macedonian, I could understand them.

I hadn’t spoken much of the language since I left Sarajevo in 2001, but as soon as I was entered back into the former Yugoslavia, the words came back to me. It took me a couple of days to remember certain words, but I understood almost everything.

I was in a familiar place, speaking a language that I hadn’t used in a long time and I felt very comfortable.

But my brain must have had trouble processing being a new place with an old language and speaking to other foreigners in Macedonia in English, Russian, Italian and Spanish and communicating with friends back home on Skype in French, Spanish and English. It was as though I was in a constant haze of languages, able to communicate and understand, but losing my bearing as to who I was.

Perhaps the definition of being a global citizen means being in linguistic fogs. I’d like to think that I can navigate between these multiple realities without any trouble, but that’s not the case. The talk of genocide and the memories of bombed out areas in Bosnia may have been too much for me to handle.

I came to observe the Macedonian elections. The day before the elections, I felt very tired. I woke up the next day feeling sick. I had to leave my election partner alone and take a nap during election day. I lost my appetite. I vacillated between feeling very cold to feeling super hot and sweating. I became congested and developed a deep cough. I was weak.

The ethnic Albanian doctor had to come to my hotel room because I was too weak to move. He told me I had a cold with flu symptoms. Even though I was sick, I could still maintain the conversation in Serbo-Croatian. I couldn’t believe it. I was terribly ill and had to go home. No vacation in Greece. No work trip to Munich, Germany. Home. I had to go home.

What happened? Some virus took me over. It also affected my brain. I came home and had trouble readjusting to warm California after snowy Macedonia. I didn’t feel like myself. On Monday, I felt like I was floating and didn’t feel gravity. I had to force myself to eat. Words sometimes came to me in Serbo-Croatian. Yesterday, I felt like I could fall when I got up. I had to se the doctor. She ran blood tests. There is nothing wrong with me.

“International travel is hard on the body. The change in environment can make people feel depressed or anxious and cause feelings of disorientation and sensations of out of body experiences,” explained the doctor.

But I am not stressed. Yes, the smoke in Macedonia was annoying. But there was nothing terrible about my trip.

I am not giving up international travel. But for now, I need to stay in one place. The fog of languages may always be there. I will probably always experience multiple realities at the same time given my proclivity to travel and communicate in different languages. I just need to learn to deal with it.