Living Alone

I live alone.

This is how I have lived for a very long time.  For the entirety of my time in Ukraine, which started with my first apartment in September 2007 and has been nearly continuous (no lengthy stays in the U.S.) since May of 2008, I have lived alone in a modest, two-room apartment. 

Before that I lived alone for three years in a cabin in the Colorado mountains, where I could not see my nearest neighbors’ homes and where my most frequent visitors were deer, elk, raccoons, foxes and an occasional bear.  And before that I lived alone in a house that was much too big for one person in the south Denver suburbs for four and a half years.  There I had neighbors so close we could almost peer into each other’s windows, and my most frequent visitors were solicitors.

And even before that, I lived mostly alone or with one or two roommates for longer than I care to admit.  Living with a roommate or two is not exactly the same as living alone, of course, but it is also not at all the same as living in a relationship or marriage.  Even with a roommate, you can have a lot of aloneness.  Although you do have someone to talk with or do things with occasionally, you pretty much live your own lives and do your own things.  You give as much privacy to the other and keep as much to yourself as possible.

For many of us, at various stages of life, the idea of living alone sounds great.  This is especially true in our late teen years when we are dreadfully tired of living according to the rules and regulations of a family.  You can do what you want and not have to answer to anyone else.  You can go where you want, stay out as long as you want, make as much of a mess as you want, be as stupid as you want... it's great.  

If you want to use the bathroom with the door open, it's never a problem.  And no one uses your stuff or messes with the arrangement of your bathroom supplies.  You can make all the disgusting noises you want and never think twice about it. 

You can have privacy and quiet.  There is no one to stick his or her nose in your business, take offense that you didn’t clean up immediately after you made pancakes (three days earlier), or yell at you to pick up your room.  No one criticizes you for your choices of TV programs or for eating whipped cream straight out of the can… on the sofa… in your underwear.

If you want to play loud music, you can do it (unless you are in a flimsy Krushchevko-style apartment).  And if you want quiet so that you can concentrate or sleep, you don’t have to worry about anyone else interrupting your peace (unless you live in a flimsy Krushchevko-style apartment.

Yeah, it’s a great way to live!  Right?

Well, I wouldn’t recommend it… at least not for any long periods of time.  It can breed bad habits.

I have noticed certain things I do that I don’t think I’d be doing if I had a bunkie here with me.  For example, I talk to myself a lot more often than I used to.  I have some great conversations with myself sometimes, but those conversations often devolve into bitter arguments, which I always lose.

It used to concern me that I talked too much with my cats, when I had cats.  This was especially true in my mountain house when Tia the Attack Cat lived with me.  When she wasn’t outside terrorizing the local deer population (it was my dream, not hers), we used to converse a lot. 

I would try to talk about philosophy, spirituality, why she wasn't bringing home any fresh deer meat, or why I was living alone with a cat.  She, on the other hand, would just respond by yawning, standing by her food dish, or meowing to go back outdoors to terrorize the local rabbit and chipmunk populations (some of which she DID bring home).

So, it was a lot like talking to myself.  Now it’s sort of the same, but I don’t have buy cat food or clean smelly litter boxes.  So I guess it’s an improvement.

Talking to yourself is just one concern; there are others.

When you live by yourself, you don’t change your bed sheets as often as you probably should, you use the same shower towel for too long, and you don’t keep the place as clean as you would if there was at least one other person around.  Contrary to some popular beliefs, those are NOT good things.  

I am fortunate that I have students here almost every morning.  That forces me to keep the place picked up, looking good, and not smelling like a New York City dumpster.  To this extent, at least, I have retained some good habits.

And living alone is not conducive to maintaining personal discipline.  When you are responsible to and for no one but yourself, it's easy to be, well, irresponsible.  Not only does having another person around give you that extra voice of conscience (even if it sometimes seems like nagging), but if it is someone you care about - or love - it gives you extra motivation to do and be better.  Sometimes we really need that kind of motivation to reach our higher potentials.

But the worst thing about living alone is that you spend most of your time alone.  And this is not good for the soul.  The soul needs companionship: the warmth of a smile, the pleasure of long and sometimes intimate conversations, the joy of playing tricks on each other and laughing about it, the challenge of disagreeing and occasionally arguing without fighting or hurting each other, and that special, secure feeling of holding someone close or being held.

There is a quote I ran across once that went something like, “A life shared is a life well-lived.”  That always struck me as very true.  And at the same time, it struck me as a little sad because it suggested that my own life has not been particularly well-lived.

My most joyous moments have been the ones I’ve been able to share with others: thoughts, feelings, experiences, and especially love.  But those have come in short, fleeting moments lost in an enormous ocean of aloneness.  The sharing should have been the ocean and the aloneness the short, fleeting moments, but it hasn’t worked out that way.   

Why?  I really don’t know.  Maybe it was being too caught up in work and travel for too long.  Maybe it was not being grounded long enough to "build" something lasting.  After the terrible pain of some things that didn't work out, maybe it was fear.  Maybe I was waiting for something that never happened or perhaps didn't even exist.  The "why" doesn't really matter.

Aloneness is not a good thing.  For all the benefits you might think you can gain from this ultimate independence, you really gain nothing.  Years rush by in the blink of an eye, and you wake up one day shocked by the realization that you've seen many more years pass by than you have yet to come.  And it is not pleasant to realize that you've lived most of those years in a most empty and unsatisfying way.  I would not wish that on my worst enemy.

I still hold out some hope that I might enjoy a few years living well a shared life, but time is growing shorter, and prospects are dim.  Perhaps, sometimes, certain things are just meant to be.

My First Rant about Language

There are many things in contemporary use of the English language that just drive me up the wall.  Here are a couple.

You’re watching a news or sports broadcast, and some expert (or just someone who plays an expert on TV) is being interviewed.  As part of his response, he essentially starts interviewing himself, offering his comments as questions which he then answers:

Interviewer:  “So, coach, your team lost 59 to 3 today. I guess you’ve had better days.  How would you judge the performance of your team and coaching staff?”

Coach:  “Well, Chuck, yeah, it’s true that we had a pretty bad day.  Could we have played better?  Of course we could have.  Did we have a chance to turn the game around in the second quarter?  You bet we could have, if our running back hadn’t fumbled the ball to the other side twice.  Is he upset about his performance?  We all know that he’s not happy about it.  Am I upset with our team’s performance?  Of course I am very disappointed.  Will we take a different approach to practice this week?  You can count on it."

When I hear interviews like this, I just want to reach through the screen, grab the guy by the throat and yell something like, “Am I sick and tired of hearing you answer your own questions?  You can bet your life on it!”

OK… so I wouldn’t really say it like that.  I would make it a clear and simple statement like, “Stop making questions out of everything, you numbskull!”

This kind of interviewing has become an epidemic on television.  It’s exponentially worse in sports, but I find it happening with aggravating regularity in news interviews as well, even among people who are supposed to be polished, professional speakers.  Let’s take a minute and look at how the coach SHOULD have responded to the interviewer’s question:

Coach:  “Well, Chuck, it’s true that we had a pretty bad day.  Of course we could have played better, and we had a chance to turn the game around in the first half, but lost it when our running back fumbled the ball twice to the other side.  He is very unhappy with his performance, and I am very disappointed with our team’s overall performance. You can be sure that we will take a different approach to practice this week.”

Ahhh… that would have been so much better. 

But, it won’t get better.  This trend is growing and will only get worse.

Another growing trend over the past few decades, which for me is like the screech of fingernails on a chalkboard, is the politically correct – yet grammatically incorrect – use of third-person plural pronouns (they, them, their, etc.) to create gender-neutral, third-person singular pronouns.  I absolutely hate it when I hear broadcast professionals do this.

For background, English does not have a gender-neutral pronoun for the third-person singular.  We have he (him, his) and she (her, hers), and that’s all when we are speaking about people.  Of course, we have it, but we can’t use it when speaking of people.  We get into a gender bias problem when we are speaking in the singular to refer, in a general sense, to anyone. 

Decades ago, we would have said or written the following, and no one would have been concerned: “When you send your child to school, be sure he wears a warm coat.”  Everyone knew that this meant girls too, but the language had a masculine bias in it, and that’s how it was done.

Enter political correctness and the “need” to make sure that our speech contains no bias, either explicit or implicit.  We started writing that sentence as: “When you send your child to school, be sure he or she wears a warm coat.”  That’s a fair and appropriate change, and not too awkward. 

But sometimes, the “he/she” construction can become very awkward.  This would have been the old sentence: “If your child does not have his coat, he probably will find himself feeling cold, and he is likely to become ill.”

I think you can see how this is going to turn out when we go with the “he/she” routine:  “If your child does not have his or her coat, he or she probably will find himself or herself feeling cold, and he or she is likely to become ill.”

Arrggghhh!  It’s awful.  Many in the politically correct crowd decided that the perfect solution is to just make up a new pronoun: replace the singular (but gender-specific) he and she with the plural they and make this the new “gender-neutral” singular pronoun.  Here’s how their sentence would read: “If your child does not have their coat, they probably will find themselves feeling cold, and they are likely to become ill.”

Immediately you have a terrible numbers problem.  “Child” is singular, but “they” and the other pronouns are plural.  And the phrase, “their coat,” suggests that more than one person shares the same coat.  That’s just terrible!  I guess we need more government aid to make sure that every child has his or her own coat.

Of course, the real solution is to rewrite the sentence so that it is completely plural:  “Children who do not have coats will probably feel cold and are likely to become ill.”

This ridiculous use of third-person plural to replace singular pronouns has gotten so bad, that even when speaking completely about males or completely about females, many commentators still use they and create the number problem. 

It’s one of my pet peeves.  Hence my rant.

Also, for those of you budding language students who may be tuning in, remember that in correct American English, commas and periods ALWAYS go INSIDE of closing quotation marks.  Question and exclamation marks go inside of the closing quotes only if they refer exclusively to the quoted material; if they refer to the broader sentence, they go outside.  In proper British English, this rule applies to periods as well.

Yeah… this was a boring post, but it was stuff I needed to get off my chest.  Better stuff is coming.

Substandards of Living

ALERT: The following is a humor piece. Please place tongue squarely in cheek before reading.


Recently I visited my daughter and her family in Switzerland. They live in a quaint house in a beautiful little village in the foothills above Lake Geneva. One evening I had finished washing dishes and was putting away freshly dried silverware. What struck me was how smoothly and perfectly the kitchen drawers rolled in and out.  Very nice!

I guess I noticed it so distinctly because of the contrast with the kitchen drawers in my Kharkiv apartment. My drawers don’t move smoothly on rails and rollers – they slide, grudgingly, along a couple of pieces of wood that keep each drawer from falling and spilling its contents all over the pots and pans below.

And usually when I open the drawer, it pulls open the doors to the lower cabinet.  When I close those doors, I have to be careful to close them together so that they will fit properly. If I try to close one door first, the other will not be able to close past it. My coat closet also operates this way. I suspect that the wardrobe in my bedroom would work the same way, but it is missing a center door, which gives the other two doors a lot more freedom to do what they want. It seems lately that the door on the left wants to fall off.

Of course I noticed a lot of other nice things in Switzerland. Everything is so clean! Either people don’t throw trash out their car windows or drop cigarette packs and beer bottles on the ground, or there is a secret army of cleaning fairies who immediately run out and pick them up. I remember noticing the same thing on my first trip to Belgium; it was cleaner even than most places in the U.S.

Here in Ukraine, unfortunately, it’s common for people to just drop their trash on the ground wherever it suits them. And sometimes people throw rubbish items out their apartment windows instead of bagging them and taking them to the dumpster. That’s why we like to see fresh snowfall: it hides all the trash underneath. 

But in Kharkiv, we do have a not-so-secret army of cleaning people (definitely not fairies) who saunter out eventually to pick up the garbage. So it’s not as bad as some places I’ve been, such as parts of Peru where garbage piles become part of the permanent landscape.

I think my Kharkiv neighbors are getting better. I mean, really. The city installed nifty new trash bins along many of the major roads and in the parks, and it does seem as though people make an effort to use them. But back at home many of my neighbors still throw crap out their windows. Oh well… winter is coming.

But back to Switzerland. They have really nice roads there – almost perfect. I think a typical Ukrainian driver would go crazy in Switzerland searching for that axel-breaking pothole that absolutely MUST be out there somewhere. Here in Ukraine, you don’t find pothole, pothole finds you… and swallows your car.

And they have clean water too. You can actually drink water straight from the tap, just like in most places in the United States that are not named Detroit. In Ukraine, tap water is for washing, operating the toilet, and similar functions. You only consume the bottled stuff. In Peru, however, you don't even brush your teeth with the tap water.

And in Switzerland (again like in the U.S.) you can always count on the right handle being the cold water, while the left is hot. In Ukraine it’s 50-50. 

It’s interesting to think about water at this moment because I don’t have any water today. We frequently have interruptions in our water service, but it’s usually the city-supplied hot water (more on that in a moment). Today, my neighborhood got an added bonus and lost water service completely. This means that I can’t wash anything and can’t flush my toilet. I heard it will be back tomorrow morning, but I am not holding my breath. Fortunately I had a few six-liter bottles filled with water for just such an occasion, but they won’t last long.

In Kharkiv, as in most Ukrainian cities, hot water is produced in a few central plants and distributed by an extensive piping system to buildings around the city. This is why you have to let your water run for 15 minutes in the morning if you want an early shower. They shut it down for a month (or longer) every summer for maintenance, so you either boil your own water or take cold showers. Many apartments and single-family homes have flash water heaters (kolonkas), and some have tank water heaters. But my apartment has neither, so I am at the mercy of the city’s diligent hot water service.

The city also produces steam for winter heating and distributes this via pipes to individual buildings. We usually don’t get heat until mid-October, but sometimes later. In the meantime, you can start freezing anytime from late September to mid-October. That’s when you start dressing like Nanook of the North or running your oven and leaving the door open. And they usually shut the system down in the middle of April, no matter if winter is stubbornly hanging on or not.

My apartment is not so bad, really. I mean, it’s better than the first apartment I had here, and most people say it’s above average. It’s in a “Krushchevka” building: a type of cheaply built, five-story apartment building constructed during the early 1960s (time of Krushchev). The walls, floors and ceilings are fairly thin, so you can be on intimate relations with your neighbors, like it or not. And many have a nice bench outside the entrance (podyest) to your section of the building, where old ladies can sit in the daytime to gossip about their neighbors and just about anyone else they can think of, and drunks and hip-hopping goth head-bangers can congregate at night to serenade you in the most vile ways.

Now I can’t sleep without earplugs and a fan (not for the air, but for the white noise).

Did I mention that in my daughter’s village in Switzerland the people stay off the streets and make no noise after 10 p.m. so that they won’t bother others who might be trying to sleep in their homes? What a contrast! Even my neighbors in Bailey, Colorado, were not that considerate. Then again, they were bears and coyotes, so you can’t expect much. But at least they didn’t leave broken vodka bottles behind.

I have no mice in my apartment. But I do have a small colony of cockroaches living in my microwave oven. They seem to be smart enough to stay in the control panel and not venture into the hotspot. Occasionally they do wander out on to the counter, after which they can find themselves toppled into the sink and then swirling down the drain. Except for tonight, of course.

I could go on… and on… and on. But I need to save material for future posts. 

So you’re probably asking yourself why I stay here if things are so bad. Good question. I ask myself that same question occasionally too. Maybe I just like a challenge.

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(Quick Update: The water service DID resume the next morning as promised.  Thank God it's an election year!)

Better Late than Never?

So, finally I’ve decided to join the millions who have already entered the world of blogging.  Go ahead, call me slow. Probably I am – again – entering something past its peak of popularity and at the point where its decline is already underway. It’s my way. 

Blogging has often seemed like an attractive proposition because I like to voice (or write) my opinions and often think that somehow it will be world changing. Well, not really, but I admit that I do get some pleasure from the notion that my ideas and points of view are needed by the rest of the world and that many people will want to read them. I often expect to be applauded for them as well.

The opposite reaction is really not appreciated at all. But that’s just human nature, and if I am anything, I am painfully human.

In my exhaustive research of blogs – which means that I spent a few hours reading some blogs and became exhausted because of my terrible chair – I have learned that people blog for many reasons. Here are just a few:

1.   They are leading, or have led, a genuinely interesting life and want to share experiences and viewpoints with others who might relate to what they have been through.

2.   They BELIEVE they are leading, or have led, an interesting life and believe that their experiences and viewpoints are important for others to read, no matter if they relate to what they have been through or not. (See the next point)

3.   They are narcissists who believe they are the cleverest and wittiest writers the world has yet to see and just want to spew their “look at me” bloviations for all to admire.

4.   They want somehow to purge their inner demons by laying their entire sorry lives bare to any Internet denizens who happen across their textual self-flagellation.

5.   They believe they have found important, but heretofore undiscovered, secrets of life, and it is their duty to share these with others.

6.   They have deeply held (even if not well-thought-out) political views, which they want to share with others so that they can win the admiration of those who agree with them and instigate hate-filled comments from those who disagree, thus inciting ugly “comment wars” on their blogs.

7.   They are frustrated novelists or poets who just can’t get published anywhere else.

8.   Ultimately, no matter which of the above categories they might ostensibly fall into, they really just want to sell you something.

9.   They don’t really care if the rest of the world reads what they write, they just have things they want to say to friends and family.

There probably are others, but I’ll leave it at nine, because it’s my favorite number. 

So which category do I fall into?  Of course, I fall into none of those; my motivations are pure and on a higher level, and my written product far more impactful and important than 99 percent of those other bloggers. I suppose it’s what every writer thinks. And if you believe it, you should never go outside without adequate protection from the falling products of the many flying pigs that crisscross the sky.

Which reminds me of a moment, a few years ago, when a pigeon once scored a perfect bull’s eye on the top of my head while I was walking in a Ukrainian shopping mall parking lot on a warm summer afternoon.  I felt something wet on the top of my head, yet there were no clouds.  Then I felt with my hand and exclaimed, “A bird just crapped on my head!”

A Ukrainian friend who was going shopping with me started on about how fortunate I was, because being hit on the head by a bird’s mid-air dump is a sign of good luck and impending monetary windfall.  But all I could think about was the fact that I had just been crapped on.

That was just a little bird. Imagine if we really had flying pigs!

Anyway… I am blogging now, so the next thing is to decide what I should write about. It would seem obvious that an American expatriate in Ukraine should enthrall the Western world with his unique observations about life in a foreign land. OK, so I will do some of that. But I’ve read blogs and message-board posts by other English-speaking visitors to Ukraine, and they generally made me want to toss my cookies. Usually they were just silly drivel that were either entirely cliché or painfully lacking in insight. When I do offer my observations of life here, I hope they will actually be worth the time for me to write them and for you to read them.

My second area will by my observations about American life, culture and especially the current political and economic situation. Be warned: I am mainly libertarian in my outlook, although I cannot fully embrace the Libertarian party. The Republicans have disappointed me too many times to fully embrace their camp, and the current crop of Democrats just scare the hell out of me; the real Democrats have apparently been abducted by aliens (from outer space, not south of the border) and replaced with socialists and even communists. Someone needs to get out the over-sized flyswatter for that gang.

So… you can see where I am coming from on that front.

I teach English, and I am a writer, so I will undoubtedly write about the language from time to time. Misuse of the language drives me crazy, so I will do my best to drive you crazy with my rants about it.

I will not write about sports, unless the Avalanche have a great season and have a valid shot at winning The Cup.

The last area, it seems, will be largely undefined, but centered on my observations of the human condition: relationships, friendships, motivation, lack of motivation, personal responsibility and discipline (or lack thereof), childhood, changes, dreams, spirituality… and the list goes on. Just remember that whatever I write about in this area is probably something that I have failed at in real life, so keep it all in the proper perspective.

As for the name of this blog, “A View From Afar,” it may just be temporary.  But for now it seems to work because I will be looking at life in America from “afar” in Ukraine.  But as I look at life in Ukraine, it will be also at something of a distance because I am not Ukrainian. And as for the other stuff, well… whatever. It’s just a catchy title.

So here I am... and here I go!