I am right now that (hopefully) forgivable blogger cliche, the writer who pledges to write and disappears from the web. I haven’t written in two months. You haven’t met my Minnesota friends. You haven’t experienced the coming winter. You didn’t come with me to get lost in that small town corn maze or stare wide-eyed [...]
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What does this mean? 1. I can write here more often! Since starting the new job, my only internet outlet has been the office, where — get this — I work. No time for the ol’ personal blog. I’m actually getting a warm fuzzy feeling knowing I’m going to be in this space more often. [...]
I. Love. Autumn. Bring on the soup. Bring on the sweaters. Bring on fall colors and cozying up. Tomorrow is the big apartment move-in day. I moved up here with my Peace Corps bags and a few boxes, so I’m fairly housewares-less. But right now my dreams are filled with me, on a couch with [...]
I’m here with minutes before work starts thinking about diving into all the details that this Monday holds. Details. So many of them. And my mind does not often seem equipped. You know, it’s hard to move to a new state. Very hard. New banks, new license plates, new cell phone service, new apartment, no [...]
So, it turns out it takes a long time to get from Texas to Minnesota. Long enough that you can make a thirteen minute video. Making the video kind of gave me someone to talk to for 18 hours which makes me sound crazy, but actually the video helped pass the time. And this morning [...]
My first Saturday morning in Minneapolis. One full week at the American Refugee Committee under my belt. This included reengaging American work culture (Microsoft Outlook is frightening and in general I feel like Lucy with her chocolates conveyor belt), getting to know a lot of new friends, enjoying Somali food for the first time, starting [...]
I can’t stop eating. This has happened before. Pre-Peace Corps I ate everything in site with, of course, the rational that I wasn’t going to get to eat my favorite foods for some years. I gained twenty pounds in two months. Before I left I didn’t have a pair of pants that fit, and for [...]
I spent some time on youtube last night watching old oscar speeches trying to come up with a way to describe feeling ecstatic. You see, a couple of weeks ago when I found out I got a job, scratch that, when I found out I go THE job, I was ecstatic. I ran around the [...]
Speaking of Mom and her jewelry talents, she taught me to solder. I had this idea before I left Armenia, and with a little instruction, I made these: I put them together in my first weeks back home. With a few photos, some microscope slides and my mom’s necklace odds & ends, I made a [...]
My mother is a jeweler. She’ll sit through a couple hours of shows with baskets of beads and findings and thousands of other little pieces. With whip-quick hands she’ll snatch up a few kernels of turquoise, a few gems and a charm or twenty, and before you know it there are fifteen works of art [...]
I spent most of today hanging out with fourth graders, talking about writing, about how to make your world into words and why the heck that’s worth doing. Their teachers won a grant to provide each of them with and iPad to inspire even more connections to writing and creative thinking. Here’s what I learned [...]
It has been a while. I know. I’m sorry. I have been distracted. I have been flying and landing and swimming and running. I have been distracted but for good reason. I have some incredible, life-changing, so-excited-I-can-hardly-stand-it news. That I’m not giving you yet. Because this news deserves a post better than I can write [...]
Last night I called my landfamily in Armenia. I haven’t in weeks. I knew it would be hard to keep in touch. They don’t have internet. They live in another hemisphere. They wake up when I go to sleep. But still, I saw them everyday for almost two years, and the morning I left made [...]
I’m sitting in the room I grew up in. We moved here when I was six. On the end of my bed is a quilt my grandmom made for me with the state of Texas sewn over large squares of white. Sunlight comes in through a window, and in the patch of backyard outside the [...]
I arrived some weeks ago here to Texas, and I found out that half of my brother is missing. Well, perhaps not missing. Perhaps just left behind. Right after I left for Armenia in 2009 my family decided to change their lives and get healthy. Since then they’ve been dropping pounds left and right. I [...]
There are so many parts of reentry to America to talk about, and I’ve started to make two lists. Here’s what I have so far: Things that are really not surprising at all: Super Wal-Mart is super terrifying. For two years, I did grocery shopping the Armenian way. I chatted with shopkeepers, had coffee with [...]
Stop the presses. No, seriously, I was writing another post, stopped and took a Diet Coke to my dad out in the drive way with raindrops falling on and all around me. RAINDROPS. He left, and I just stood in the driveway for ten minutes, befuddled by all this water from thousands of feet away. [...]
This was the original title for the post I wrote just before this one. But I had to scratch that title because I can’t say that word without thinking of this. First of all, did you know Fabio made an album in the nineties? Second of all, I blame Kathryn for ruining a perfectly necessary [...]
The trees have given up. Really, it’s too hot. They’re over it. It’s seems like our grass here in Central Texas just won’t grow. The trees can’t take the heat. This branch from a cedar elm was shed in desperation, if trees can experience such a thing. Over 40 days with temperatures on or above [...]
It feels like I dreamt it. The whole thing, the entire two years. This is a phenomenon I was not expecting, this incredible distance, both physically and emotionally, from the place I was living in just days ago. Before I left, it felt like there would be no end to tears, to this ripping at [...]
After five days I still haven’t finished unpacking. Armenia feels like a dream I keep trying to sleep my way back to. The world won’t stop spinning long enough for me to get my bearings, but slowly I seem anyway to make my way through the day in this familiar and yet unfamiliar small, Texan [...]
I’m back. After a week of tears and hugs and the kindest words said to me by the kindest friends, I have arrived in this tiny town in Texas. I took three flights, two with one of my fellow Peace Corps adventurers, and then a third alone. I followed that up with a missed connection [...]
I woke up in a panic this morning. Five days left before I leave Stepanavan. Two of those days will be spent doing a camp in a village near here, so in truth, we’re talking three short days here before I cram everything I own, and something things Peace Corps owns, into a taxi and [...]
NO!!!! I refuse to accept it. I will not be sick today. Today is supposed to be Landfamily Easter Party (because during actual Easter there was a thick layer of snow on the ground that would be have made hiding Easter eggs way too easy). There is supposed to be an culturally enlightening Easter Egg [...]
This started as a tiny effort to show you guys my house here in Stepanavan. It became a multi-day ordeal as I waited for each cloudy day’s hour of sunlight to do another take. It became a THING, an event my landsisters and I did every afternoon for almost a week. They loved it, began [...]
Yesterday, a nardi demonstration by my landfather showing that even after two years, he can kick my nardi butt. And this morning, I battled the army of ants living in my door. Ok, fine, my landmom battled them. But she used MY bottle of khandzori katsakh (apple vinegar), and that counts for something, right? She [...]
I took took my language proficiency index exam in Armenian last week. I scored Advanced-Low, which I feel great about. Still, today is exactly one month until I leave my life in Stepanavan behind, and moments ago I was eating dinner with my co-workers, unable to follow the conversation. I might have, I bet, if [...]
I wrote this in the spring of 2009 while I was living and working in Kolkata, India, a few months before leaving for Peace Corps. I reread it recently and thought you might want to have a go. ______________________________ On a muggy, still, Tuesday morning, Mangal and I walked through a Kolkata slum called Boro [...]
Aaaaaaah, yes. There it is, a blazing sun slapping my shoulders. I’m in central Armenia for sure. After sweatering up in cool Goris, the capital brought on some heat exhaustion and a massive headache which wiped me right out for a few hours. But after a cold shower and some gellato, CURED! I was then able to [...]
This southern town, Goris, has been hiding the sun from me for days. I can hardly stand another day of all clouds. It’s a good thing I’m here with a best friend, or I’d shrivel right up. Still, I have loved late nights watching The West Wing with Zoe, and yesterday sitting with her at a [...]
Two nights ago I spent hours and hours trying to find a plane ticket, trudging through travel website after travel website like I was chopping through a marsh with a box cutter, looking for the ever elusive, speedy (less than 24 hours), cheap ticket to the States. Three days ago I found out I’ll be [...]
I am currently on a jaunt through Syunik Marz, the southern most region of Armenia, an hour or so from Iran, 9 hours from my home in the North. I am helping a fellow volunteer and best friend with a project in her town. This morning we met a second round of smiling school directors, [...]
I thought returning in May I’d be back in Armenia for the summer. That assumption held true in the capital, where the lowland climate heats up much more quickly than up north. Upon my return, while waiting to see the doctors, I spent an entire day sitting in a park around a man-made pond near [...]
I returned to my Armenian town just days ago. Last time I was here, the night brought quarter size snow flakes, and the morning was covered in it eight inches deep. I flew southwest where I ate mounds of Mexican and Thai and Vietnamese food, relished in Americanness like drag shows, Just Dance, and Thursday [...]
Yes, I am still in a whirlwind, but I am embracing the crazy ride I’m on. I can already tell you that my 2011 is a wild, wild wave. I am currently doing a lot of looking in, doing a lot of personal writing. I can’t how long the void of posts will last; I [...]
I have not posted in April, and April is just about finished. This is a crime. I’m certain your life has gone on without me. I get that. However, I like writing, and I came to this blog to do it. I offer this feeble defense. I have not been writing because my life is [...]
A couple of days ago, I saw something discarded, stopped, pulled out the camera and took a lot of pictures. I think for some reason I felt just like that umbrella. Maybe you can see what I mean: I am tired of having to think so much about how and how much I can walk. [...]
Yesterday for the first time in a month I heard Armenian in the street. The du and duks were flying around; the hard sounds rolled right out into the street. They didn’t look Armenian to me. Where were the pointy shoes? Where were the one with the mullet? Where were the cigarettes? But I heard [...]
Best thing to happen in a long time: REUNION. One of the best people I know who I studied abroad with and lived with in college, one who now apparently runs marathons came to chug one out in DC. So, in a spectacular and unpredicted turn of events, we went and ate burritos and talked [...]
I have never concentrated so hard on walking. The brace is off as of today. My shrimpy little leg with the still swollen knee is free like a wobbly newborn calf. Walking from the hotel to CVS, from the Kennedy Center to Georgetown, I almost yell down at my leg, “CONCENTRATE!” Left, right, left, right, [...]
I am an undisciplined soul. I have a lot of free time, and as you have seen, I haven’t been writing much. Instead I’ve been binging on entertainment. I am admittedly a pop culture junkie, and here in the land of plenty I have been feasting on such wild delicacies as How I Met Your [...]
Here I am, currently alive in the land of the free and the home of the chili dog, and I haven’t posted a stitch in two weeks. This is not because I don’t have the time. I have plenty of time. This is because I am lost in the swirl, I think. This has happened [...]
Last night was the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s executive order which established the Peace Corps. I’m sure you guys all partied it up big. I definitely did. I guest-blogged about it over at the National Peace Corps Associations website. Go check it out! Meanwhile, stay tuned. If I’m not totally wiped afterward, I’ll [...]
I am on drugs. It’s 4 am; I’m in my hotel room. I am Kerouac or Ginsberg or some other guy famous for stealing the early morning hours and trying to swim the drug haze with a snorkel and a Macbook, set up to catch the ideas that swim like so many fish around my [...]
I was supposed to be laid up with knee holes right now, but I’m still here because PC HQ pushed back my surgery. This makes me lucky in some ways. For instance, the winter’s biggest snow fell on the day I was scheduled to travel to the capital. Not only did I not have to [...]
In three days I’m flying back to the US for the first time since late May 2009. I know I said that there was nothing wrong with my knee, but that’s only because I was told there was nothing wrong with my knee. But after my MRI results were sent to PC Headquarters, the sleuths [...]
A Giutkokwwabipimooacf(*) recently threw the following into her friend’s facebook newsfeeds: “I would love for someone with a beard to tell me things about the world that only bearded people could know.” Well, as it turns out, I have recently become bearded. Proof: So as One With A Beard, here’s what I know: 1. [...]
I’ve been in Goris for a week slogging through on a film project for Peace Corps with my team who has been working, some of us, since October 2009. We’re calling ourselves Skin of Our Teeth Productions, because… well, I think you get it. And this month I think, I hope, I pray, I light [...]
You may or may not know that I’m a movie fiend. I love to watch them, to talk about them, to read about them, to plan parties themed by them. I also love to watch the Oscars, a love spurred on by my friend Lara who has actual videotapes of past years’ ceremonies which she [...]
Knee news: Despite percolating for a while and sleeping in a tiny white room at the Peace Corps office for a few nights, the knee is a mystery. Nothing torn or damaged according to the MRI. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for having intact cartilage and whole ligaments. You only get two legs in [...]
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