Friday, September 26, 2014

Māori Apophenia, a Turkish Prison, and Jerusalem Hospitality

Having sex and writing a blog are activities that for a long time I have grouped together:
  • it's a personal experience, but the world can hear you
  • however modestly done, it belies having an awesome time
  • everyone else seems to be doing it
It should make sense, then, that I had reservations about giving in to this temptation; but with enough suggestion and nagging from a critical mass of professed would-be readers (critical mass here being ~5), I figured it was time to start. A blog.


I am not usually one to read the future in chicken livers (even at Cracker Barrel), but I do try to follow the progress of languages and cultures that are moribund or on life support. (Before you get irritated about all the non sequiturs, these are related to each other and my travel.) And this year, the theme of Māori Language Week (te wiki o te reo Māori) is "The Word of the Week" (te kupu o te wiki). Yes, the theme is, because although this government-sponsored holiday falls in the final week of July, a list of fifty Māori words has been slated to be introduced to the wider New Zealand community, at a rate of one per week. (This is analogous to celebrating the twelve days of Christmas for an entire year.)

As I taught in the final few weeks of my job this summer, the weekly words seemed innocent enough--
  1. āpōpō = "tomorrow"
  2. heihei = "chicken"
  3. poitarawhiti = "netball"
--and, other than introducing the vocabulary to my own (confused) math students, I gave little thought as to their significance. But in the next week, as I chaperoned Chinese students around the northeastern United States, slept in New Jersey for the last time, and confronted more directly my intention to study in Israel, the fourth word of the week was nau mai, "welcome." Packing up my life and driving it home, only to hear the warnings of the adults around me and vacillate on the many logistics of my international travel, the word became engari, "but."


The psychological term for this is apophenia, wherein a pattern is "found" where it does not exist. Famous examples include the Face on Mars (later found to be a suggestive light angle on a geographical feature) and "Dark Side of the Rainbow" (the synchrony of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album with the visuals of "The Wizard of Oz"), but you can reproduce the effects at your own home, observing a car grill or a power outlet and letting your fusiform gyrus shift into overdrive. :-\

Apophenia is like love: describe it and understand it in terms of chemical reactions, and you do not detract from its beautiful power or suffer less from its effects. All weekly Māori words thus far had been as bland as chicken--common functional words or universal concepts, the only apparent exception being due to the relative unimportance placed on netball in my part of the world. Then came the week in which I had to FedEx my passport to the Israel Consulate in New York and called their office nearly every workday to check on the document's progress. No, "called their office" is too personal: with each dial, I entered a Narnian phone tree, carefully and bilingually enumerating at each node the upcoming holidays and regular morning hours; a long-distance Eldritch abomination revealing an aural glimpse of infinity without actually telling where its branches led; a sequence of voices which, sounding human, served only to underline the lack of a human presence on the other end. (If kudzu can be repurposed for electronic communications, I have discovered its niche.) And when I did find a real person, she was surprised at the sound of my voice: "Oh! I'm sorry, you just sounded so official for a moment. I thought I was talking to a machine."
"Ah, sorry, I understand; I have been hearing a lot of machines today."
The word of the week was waea.

Nor did it come as a surprise to be flying at the end of a week whose word (rangi) meant "sky"; by now, I had submitted to the hard reality that someone in the ranks of the Ministry of Māori Development had correctly foreseen my future for the next fifty weeks and was propagating it in local "schools, communities, and organisations." But when you fly across the Atlantic, you care less about conspiracy theories than the immediate dilemma: do you force yourself to sleep in anticipation of jet lag, or do you keep yourself awake and your eyes open in anticipation of the meal that will either be served in EST or İstanbul time? Pulled and thinking in both directions at once, you take the melatonin pill and keep your eyes open, just long enough to see a food cart enter the cabin fifteen rows ahead. Ten minutes later, sleep and stewardesses arrive at your row simultaneously, so that you must focus to accept the platter and make decisions about how to spread butter that is cut less easily than its packaging.

When the need to sleep waxes urgent in the hours that follow--hours made shorter because your plane and the sun are running to meet each other like star-crossed lovers--you are faced with another dilemma: again, succumb to your rapidly errant biological clock's needs, or repeatedly calculate your ETA based on the flight data (on the screen before you) that you know cannot change that your flight left an hour late and you will miss your connection? Here, your stomach steps in to help with its repeated grumblings, requesting that its contents be either less or more, or both, and affording you enough consciousness to jump the horns of this dilemma entirely and run to the bathroom instead.

When you are rushed and sleepless--but this time, not finishing a paper due later today--you are a little ashamed to care less about the Turkish signs before you, fascinating alone for their vowel harmony and agglutination, instead running past them to the terminal where a man says in Turkish what you already understand about the plane backing out of its gate. The dilemma is no longer a dilemma, for it suddenly grows many options and no options at the same time. The religious hostel where you are staying the first few nights in Jerusalem closes its doors at ten thirty, so you should call them and someone else to make arrangements...without a working phone. Your body and mind tell you you must eat, but first one and then the other rejects this decision as you puke the present lunch-dinner alongside the results of earlier dilemmas in a stall of Turkish facilities that cannot decide how they should be used. You finally find a stand where a nice woman sells phone cards, you cannot decide whether to purchase the card first or inform her about the vomit that didn't make the not-a-toilet, and you learn that she doesn't know enough English to recognize any of the fifty idioms for upchuck, nor to explain why her booth is closed at the moment.

By now, the naturally released chemicals that make you feel great right after vomiting are wearing off, and walking becomes less painful than remaining stationary. You return to the bathroom to change your shirt, for you still wear the sweat from your initial vain run to the endless terminal; this and the world's most expensive banana begin to give you some respite. When I did reach my dad on the phone (the card could call America with the airport phones, but apparently not Israel), the words that "This is the worst part of it" were reassuring, and of course correct. Five hours and two bananas after landing, I could thank my dad and future-professor for connecting to confirm that I could stay with the family in the Beit HaKerem neighborhood who was originally not expecting me the first few days.

But when it is dark out, and you are running on two bananas--albeit a central part of this all-nutritious dinner-breakfast--you do not see that the shuttle driver has given you the Italian man's suitcase instead of your own. No, it is only after you have met the couple of the house and their friends, been offered some tea (which, being water, is far too rich for you to stomach right now), been shown your room and told to go to sleep--now you see the different shade of green and stupidly ask whose suitcase that is. A comedy of errors unfolds, in which Myrtle, the mother of the house, contacts first the shuttle service and then the Italian man, who is apparently somewhat rude, while her friend Sine asks you about your travels. You quickly learn that Sine's favorite English word is "horrible," applied here to the shuttle service, Turkish Airlines, security protocols, and travel in general. Myrtle reenters the room, explaining that the Italian is about to enter Rehavia, a neighborhood where she cannot go, so she is about to trade suitcases with him at Damascus Gate and tells you again to go to sleep. Sine takes the opportunity to call Italian men horrible.

When you awake the next morning, it is not you but reality with a hangover. Every molecule of air fumes drowsily at the drilling next door, as well as the school's 8:00 musical chime next door in the other direction. You emerge from your new room to thank Myrtle once again for their hospitality and help in last-minute circumstances. You start receiving instructions on taking the tram to and from your first day of school. You thankfully see your own suitcase, open it, and pull out the toothbrush and toothpaste (after far too long) to clean your niho.

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