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Today's Featured Biography
Geri Knick
Hey everyone, I accidentally read every single 96er profile last night. I was planning to stay missing, but I guess I got inspired.
Well, I tried school-MSU- and managed about 4 semesters in 3 years. During semester 5, I found myself doing a student exchange program on a tropical island full or waterfalls, beautiful beaches, pineapples and rhum. Paradise, seriously. There weren’t even mosquitos. It was a totally cliché and wonderful paradise. And I realized that every minute I spent in the classroom was one minute I could be spending elsewhere, and that my time was limited. And then I realized that this glaringly obvious truth was no less true back home at MSU. True, at home my time was limited to maybe 70 years instead of one, but we’ve all seen how fast 10 years can go, right? So, I finally had the guts to quit school, and maybe it’s a stupid thing to be bragging about, but even now, 6 years later I feel it is the best decision I've ever made. Not because life without a diploma is so much better, because in fact, it isn’t. But just because it marked perhaps the turning point of my life. Trusting my own instincts instead of trusting the experts, reason, logic, the economy, basically the whole world but me.
Since then, not so different from everyone else, the one major broken heart, lots of jobs-baking bread being the only one I loved, learning sign language, teaching English in china whilst attempting to learn chinese. Yeah, even tried the ski bum thing but I wasn’t very convincing.
Right around the time of Bush’s getting re-elected I started to seriously question weather I could really call this country ‘home’ and decided it was time to get the hell out. I’ve been working on organic farms in France ever since and can’t imagine ever again becoming a city dweller.
Met the love of my life just this last August. And he met the love of his life in September. I know, I know, you’re not allowed to call someone the love of your life until the two of you agree upon it. I know this. Anyway it was too good to be true: imagine me with a tall, vegetable-growing, hurdy-gurdy playing French man with an red afro and a beautiful 3 year old. Its too perfect, there would be nothing else to look forward to, it could only go downhill from there. Or at least that’s how I console myself.
I realize it sounds like I’ve just stumbled around randomly, disoriented in a fog for the last 10 years, but from the inside it doesn’t feel that way. At 19 I fell madly in love with languages (all of them) and linguistics, and almost everything I’ve done since is sort of related. It has been not exactly an all-consuming passion but at least a moderatly-consuming passion. Mostly I try to Wu Wei my way through life, but when that doesn’t seem to be working I let my passion for languages take me where it will. And more recently, the fulfillment I’ve found in growing almost all my own food has been like finding something I’ve been searching for my whole life but didn’t even know existed. Finally filling the metaphorical ‘hole in the soul’ The re-union with the web of life. Am I gushing? Sorry. I know I’m a little overzealous about it all, but I can’t help it.
I never thought of myself as the farming type, but hey, I had a lot of language-based prejudices to overcome. Consider the fact that ‘dirt’- the source of nearly everything we eat- is, well, dirty. The word ‘soil’ doesn’t fare much better- ‘’soiled’’ also means unclean. French dirt is called ‘’terre’’ and there is nothing dirty about la terre. Even when I’m covered in it, which is usually, I’m not dirty, I’m just earthy.
And yes, its more information than any of you wanted, but its because I definitly won’t be making it to the reunion this summer. Maybe its because I’m scared that going back will prove to me that I haven’t changed at all and I’m still the same shy kid, scared of her own voice; but mostly its because there are a lot of vegetables growing in August. Vegetables that need my tender loving care. Also I’m really poor. I probably haven’t made it above the poverty line ever, but I’ve never been quite so far beneath as I am now. (That’s sort of an irrelevant fact though because my life proceeds quite smoothly without money- I help out on one farm, they give me free homebrew, on another I get free goat cheese.) I’m saving my expensive euros to come home for christmas instead . . . hopefully I’ll see some of you then. And if anyone is in france, don’t hesitate to give me a holler.
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