Becoming Polakiem

You will no doubt have noticed the eight day delay between when I first decided to blog—unfortunate word, really, “blog”: from “blahblahblah” + “fog”—and my first post. A number of reasons account for the delay. First, having overcome a shyness to publication of any kind, I had to learn the basics of the contemporary push-button vanity press. Amazingly simple as it has turned out to be, still, cognitive and psychological hurdles had to be overcome in the process. Though by no means a Luddite, nor am I an early adopter of any technology. I seem to have proven, however, sufficiently techno-savvy and surprisingly vain.



The most important factor delaying my initial post, though, was that my original title, “Becoming Polish,” was already taken, and relatively recently. “Becoming Polish” chronicles the “life and times of a Scottish girl in love with a Polish boy.” Very nice. As big a fan of love as anybody—well, maybe not—I wish her a long career in blogging and love and thus can’t really wait for her to relinquish the title. So I had to come up with another on the fly.



After some unsatisfactory and unsuccessful wordplay in English, I struck upon a linguistic fusion of English and Polish (Engolish): “Becoming Polski.” The movement from left to right, from English to Polish would capture something of the movement of consciousness I was aiming at, and polski was, as far as I knew, the Polish word for “Polish.” But I do know, and did know, enough about the intricacies of the Polish language to suspect that “Becoming Polski” would be far too easy a solution to my problem, as well as being less than euphonious. And so I contacted my Polish language authorities, whom you will likely meet in later entries, and they confirmed that in addition to being a little hard on the ear, polski would be quite a ways from correct. In truth, the concept of becoming Polish is expressed so differently in both languages that no combination of English and Polish words seems grammatically satisfactory. The least wrong is my current title, “Becoming Polakiem.” Perhaps, like the title, the goal itself will prove incongruous. But so many things seem that way at the outset.



Finally, between the time I learned that my first title wouldn’t work and that my last title might, life intervened. Work. Laundry. Email. Personal relationships. Naps. Until this afternoon, when I finally got around to making the template selections for this site and posting my first thoughts. You will note, if you visit “Becoming Polish,” that that author and I have the same taste in templates. Strange. I may have to meet her sometime.

Becoming Polish

Just when in the last couple of years I decided to become Polish, I cannot say precisely, though with a little digging, I could probably narrow it down to the month or the week. The idea first inkled into my mind in 2001 after a trip to the north of Poland, an international family reunion, if reunion is the appropriate term for a gathering of families of virtually complete strangers who have never known union in the first place. Gathering then. I’ve accounted for that gathering elsewhere and won’t dally here, but suffice it to say, my decision to become Polish has been a rather long and deliberate one since then. Recently I have found myself actually talking about becoming Polish to non-family members, strong evidence to me that I have actually decided to do so. We like to think that decision-making is a conscious, rational, left-hemisphere activity providing inexorable, logical outcomes based on the weighing of inputs according to regular sequential patterns. I suspect otherwise. Not that conscious reason doesn’t have its place, but decision and motivation are whole brain processes whose complexities we will never untangle. The mind announces and explains as rationally as possible for social purposes, but never really provides more than an executive summary. So, my dear reader, though I cannot say precisely when—and certainly not quite how—I decided to become Polish, I can say with absolute precision when I decided to inform you about it: today, Friday, July 23, 2010.