I’ve been in Cameroon (not at post, but in country) for one year. I’ve learned some things, and for your reading pleasure here are those things: 1. If your plumbing needs attention, handle it immediately. The other option is to watch a 15-year old kid dig up the neighbor’s concrete to get to your pipes and then carry literal buckets of shit away from your house all day. 2. Throwing tantrums in public is really cathartic, it gets things accomplished, and people seem to respect you more if you yell at them in this country. So my new approach to dealing with Cameroonians in business transactions is just to yell at them, act important and wag my finger occasionally. These are habits I will eventually need to break. 3. “La Blanche,” even when it’s not intended to be, should always be accepted as a compliment. I don’t mind being white; I should stop caring when people call me white. My new response to “La Blanche” is “Merci.” 4. No matter how much you love your friends, they will never understand you like your family does. Your family, the good ones, will not only support your decision to go to sleep at 8:30 pm at your own party, but they’ll encourage it and join you. 5. The golden rules of alcohol consumption as devised by my cousin and me based on strict research: 1. If you are having fun in one place doing one thing, do not seek out another thing in another place. Just go to sleep somewhere trusty and comfortable. 2. If you are assigning percentages (60-90%) or making up compound adjectives (drunktional, shwasted) to describe your level of intoxication, it’s time to take a tenner. 6. If you’re changing a lightbulb in your bathroom and get electrocuted causing you to drop the lightbulb and it shatters, make sure to clean it all up or you’ll probably cut your foot open pretty badly the next time you shower. Having never been electrocuted in my life, and then being electrocuted six times since arriving in Cameroon, I also suggest trying to never get electrocuted because it’s uncomfortable and it hurts. 7. Take a lot of vacations with your friends, if even just for one day. It will reset your brain and coming back to your town or village feels a lot better if you missed it while you were away. Spending too much time in one place for too long has the potential to turn you (me) into a crazy ball of anxious, bored energy – I’ve learned this from twenty-seven years of feeling anxious in places. 8. When in doubt, just say fuck it. Because here’s the thing about working in a developing country: nothing ever goes well but everything usually ends up fine – or in other words, nothing is ever working but everything always works. Worrying about it is a waste of energy. Instead, use your time learning new hobbies like banjo (at which I am terrible), washing clothes in a bucket (for which I’ve hired a Cameroonian) or writing crossword puzzles (which I send to friends so that they know how much I’m changing the world). 9. Don’t try to change the world. Just try to change yourself and a few of the people you meet. And try to leave the house at least twice a week. That’s the hardest part! 10. Internet is overrated.

2May2012 There are, it turns out, many international aid workers in Cameroon not affiliated with Peace Corps and for some reason I am always shocked when I meet one. "What are you doing here?" is often my first questions followed quickly by some sort of explanation as to why I am so impolite - I usually affectionately blame it on Cameroon. Many of these volunteers are here for shorter visits than we, three or six months, often living with other volunteers from their same host organization, and often self-funded. The biggest difference I notice between us and them is the integration. I know what you’re thinking, that “integration” is a buzzword that you couldn’t be more sick of hearing and that is only used to make us feel more like participants than observers – or maybe that’s me thinking that, until recently that is. I was at one of those parties we all end up at – a mélange of Cameroonians, PCVs, and other assorted aid workers – when a Swiss volunteer who is in country for three months made the observation that all the Cameroonians were sitting together and all the non-Cameroonians were sitting together. This observation was made by him standing in the middle of the circle and announcing (now say this is a pretentious Eurotrash accent please), “I am so disappointed in you guys, look at how you are sitting. It is like all of the white people are over here and all of the black people are over here.” Everyone quickly became uncomfortable. I realized then how lucky we are, as Peace Corps Volunteers, to have been given such an amazing opportunity to integrate with patience, to integrate slowly with host families, with coworkers, with neighbors, with employers. I had my problems during stage and its mandatory integration, but in retrospect, had I not been forced to integrate fully, immediately, but at my own pace, I would be the asshole standing up at a party to reprimand people for their seating choices. I know I was supposed to feel guilty for not sitting between Cameroonians and exchanging cultures. I was supposed to feel motivated to switch seats, to go talk to the gentleman in the bou-bou and casquette who for some reason kept calling my name. I was supposed to applaud their traditions, share mine, and press our temples together at the end of the night. But sometimes I am just sick of integrating and I want to talk to Americans about things like graduate school, Taco Bell, and when was the last time they had running water. I spend all of my time exchanging culture with Cameroonians – every time I walk down the street I exchange culture with Cameroonians, every time I buy food, every time I go to work, every time I step outside my dungeon. There is something to be said for reminiscing culture with the Americans when I see them. Sometimes I just want to sit on some cement steps with some Americans and talk about their favorite season of The Real World. My point here is not that three-month volunteers on the whole are less integrated than we are, I spend sometimes up to four days at a time inside my house consuming American media and eating the granola bars and fruit snacks that my lovely friends and family send to me so graciously. My point is solely that this one particular volunteer was kind of a douche-bag and should probably reexamine his own level of “integration.” I have spit my toothpaste onto somebody else’s shit while living with a host family in Bafia. Switching seats at a party to sit nearer to a Cameroonian does not mean integrating; it’s just an inconvenience when I already have a perfectly comfortable space on the staircase between the people with whom I came to the party in the first place.

Being a woman isn’t so bad. To clarify, being a woman in America isn’t so bad. I have the opportunity to at least be considered for most jobs, I can walk down most streets without being aggressively pursued, and I can go days and days and days at a time without someone asking me what’s wrong with me that I don’t have babies yet. On the list of things I miss about being in America, being a woman in America is far and away the most significant. “You are not a woman” they tell me, “you are a girl.” This because I have decided, made a conscious decision to remain husband- and childless. When I try to explain that I have chosen this life, that I am living in this country to meet people and help them (that is the reason I came in the first place, that changes day to day now that I am actually here) they tell me that I should be home having children instead. Having children is our purpose, being a woman is empty if we do not procreate. And the look on these faces when I express that I do not plan to have children ever is one of pure sadness, as though there is something wrong with me. I even tried to explain to my class that this is a cultural difference, that in America women have so many choices – careers, education, travel, singularity – and that forsaking these options to have children is as noble as a choice as not to. They respond by telling me that my mother created me and I owe it to the world to do the same. In the same way that they seldom understand my English and I seldom understand their village language, we do not understand one another’s feminine “purposes.” The difference being that we can teach each other language, we cannot teach one another what our purpose is because neither of us knows for sure. The distinction is that these women are certain, they do not question their purpose, whereas I question mine every day. Maybe they are the ones with the most sense. Or at least the most conviction.

I believe that we can be better... we may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another, that's entirely up to us. And I believe that for all our imperfections we are full of decency and goodness and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us. (Obama)

19March2012

Cameroonian music is, for the most part, terrible. It’s bad and what makes it even worse is the inordinate number of busted, feedback, crunchy speakers lining the streets playing it or the Cameroonians who think we all want to listen to it on the four-hour bus ride home so they blast it on their shitty cell phone. So that said, here are the other sounds that have come to mean something to me here:

1. The wooshing and gurgling of my pipes: when I am sitting alone in my apartment, filthy and scared to go outside, as I so often am and suddenly I hear a wooshing in my pipes, it means that the city turned the water back on and air is shooting through my pipes. When that wooshing turns into a gurgling it means the water has finally arrived. I run around and run all three of my faucets for about fifteen seconds each or until they stop flowing orange mud. Then I wash my dishes, body and floor – in that order.

2. The repetitive clicking and grumbling of my regulator: Throughout the dry season the city has cut the electricity every Sunday from about 10 to 6, I am told it has something to do with a river that becomes dryer and dryer and produces less and less power. That would make sense if I knew anything about how electricity works. But when the city turns the power back on, the small box that regulates my electricity clicks and grumbles and since my house is pretty silent on these days, I can hear it and use all my gadgets! It’s amazing what I’ve begun to notice here: for example, when the lights just shut off unprompted, it means the city cut the lights and it will be at least several hours before they bless us again with light. If the lights flicker and fade first and if my regulator clicks back and forth before the lights die, it means something else has happened and the lights will be back within an hour.

3. Roosters: they are just always fucking roosting. I hate them all the time but I especially hate them before 9am. The one time I have tried to retaliate by throwing rocks at them with all the strength I could muster, some Cameroonian in a suit came and shamed me as I tried to explain, “But but but…. it’s a rooster!”

4. Goats and Babies: I can hear the all the time and can barely tell the difference.

5. Motorcycle engines revving: My favorite bar in town is a balcony atop a motorcycle maintenance shop called SYNCHOUTICAM (which is a fucking outrageous acronym for something) so whenever we sit there for a beer or soda (beer.) we listen to the engines revving and smell the wires burning. It is also notable that the fellows who work here never ever wear any kind of protective face or hand wear while welding large pieces of metal to other pieces of metal using large faulty blowtorches.

6. Desperate chirping: When my africat Charles brings live birds in through the window, I can usually hear them frantically chirping until I come with a broom to shoo them both outside. I want Charles to eat them, just not in front of me or in my kitchen.

7. La Blanche: People just yell this at me every time I leave the house because I am white and they want to remind me of that.

i was going to celebrate women's day today but when i told my female coworker this she said, "why? you are not a woman." when i asked her why i am not a woman she told me that it is because i am not married. in cameroon, girls are considered girls, women are considered children, until they marry. you should have seen their faces when i told then that not only do i have no plans to marry, but i have no desire to bear children. "what will you do then?" they asked me, devastated for me.

i guess women's day means different things to different people.

3March2012

Man oh man I could make a LIST of the wacko things Cameroonians say to me. Hey, I think I will because I occupy this space of the World Wide Web and you so graciously keep visiting it, so I should try to make it interesting:

1. “Bringing up a girl is as pointless as watering your neighbour’s garden”: This wasn’t said to me, it was written on the board by the English teacher who occupies my classroom before me. I didn’t see him deliver the lesson but I shudder to think what it entailed.

2. “Someone told me that in America women can do the same work as men?”: This was said with a tone of incredulous disgust as though the idea of women and men doing the same work was not only laughable but annoying. What prompted this, you may be wondering, I used a roller to paint on a flat wall. Apparently moving my stupid female arm up and down (wink!) in a repetitive motion is shocking to a man. I can see where he’d think that maybe my uterus would interrupt and stop me from such a complicated action.

3. “Americans do not care about money, only time”: This is frustrating because sometimes Cameroonians blame our Americanness for our differences of opinions and I have to bite my tongue from reminding them that the American government sends us here and the Cameroonian government readily accepts us BECAUSE we are Americans and because our time and money management tends to be envied in some cultures. This is me being a cultural egoist, but that is a cross I bear these days, I’ll get over it. My darling, wonderful postmate jumped in and said, “In America, time is money.” before I had the chance to say something regrettable. He is always saving me from saying shitty shitty things to people, except for the time he allowed me to yell in the face of a Cameroonian, “YOU ARE NOBODY, YOU ARE NOTHING.”

4. “Why are you even here, we’re not a training University and you’re not qualified”: This was said to me at one of the first meetings I had at the University where I was assigned to work. They now consume about 40% of my worklife, the other 60% being consumed at a Non-Government Organization where they’re happy to have me and all the other volunteers they readily accept because they understand the importance of free labor. The man who said this to me last saw me sitting outside of my office with my friend listening to Tupac. I showed him!

5. “Look, she has muscles”: utter shock. Utter and complete shock, this is the same tone used when certain Cameroonians acknowledge that my brain exists and works.

Am I being one of those volunteers who only relays only the negative aspects of working in a developing nation? I don’t mean to be. Really, I goddamn love being here, working with Cameroonians is generally very pleasant, but they often say things that just stop me in my tracks and remind me that the mentality here is different. I have two options: Work harder to prove myself or give up on projects in early stages because I’m easily discouraged and not used to having to do so much to make people trust me. I’m really trying to start doing the former but I’m stuck on the latter. I’m working on it.

It is really encouraging to meet people who say things like, “You have the courage” and “It is only word that rests, everything disappears” because you realize that, just like in America, stupidity and close-mindedness are louder and bolder than wisdom and when you encounter wisdom you should consider yourself blessed. I like to remind myself of the disgustingly high number of American men who say things like, “You’d be a lot prettier if you smiled” to women and don’t find themselves to be complete fucking monsters. This is why my new friend and colleague Momo who said both of these nice things in only our second meeting together (and is very handsome and makes an effort to speak English to me and was listening to Basin Street Blues and is only missing one half of one finger) is going to become my new best friend, or I will be damned.

my dear friend, kalika, summed up live at the peace corps transit house far better than i could have.

so click here to see proof!

Besides talking about poop, sex, and food, Peace Corps volunteers spend a great deal talking about how miserable everything is. Every gathering inevitably turns into a suffering off: everyone competing to see who has it worse, who has it the hardest, and who is working the most to overcome obstacles. It is very frustrating, especially because my coping mechanism tends to be the exact opposite. I pretend everything is just fine for as long as possible and then when it becomes really difficult I lock myself in my house until it passes. Some people prefer to air their grievances, which is another option, albeit conflicting.

Life here is overwhelmingly good and I'm so much more often happy than unhappy. I spend an embarrassing amount of time feeling lucky to be here. I don't spend nearly as much time feeling like Cameroonians are lucky to have me. Maybe in more time this will pass.

We are allowed to terminate service early if we really find ourselves unhappy here. My problem with the suffer-off is that we're here on our own will. We applied to come here and waited months and months to be invited. If it ends up being something that doesn't serve you as you thought it would, then take the out that is available to you. You are making it harder for me to convince me that I love it here. Which I do!

20January2012

1. A Cosmo magazine article entitled either, “30 New Reasons to Hate Yourself and Your Body!” or “Why You Can’t Have an Orgasm You Fat Fucking Piece of Shit!”

2. A letter to R. Kelly outlining all the reasons he should let me ghostwrite his inevitable memoir with some thinly veiled reference to the magical “Sex Planet” so that he knows I’m serious and “down” – I considered (am considering) putting it in a Peace Corps official envelope in hopes that he’s an international volunteer sympathizer who will open it, I might also make it kinky, yeah I’m going to make it real kinky

3. A musical based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where one of two things is the catch: Charlie is actually Charles Manson or Willy Wonka is actually a cannibal

4. A horror movie in which a group of Peace Corps Volunteers are invited to a host country national’s home for dinner and are never seen again

5. A television show about Peace Corps volunteers, it’s a comedy, there are situations but it is not a sitcom and there is no laugh track, it might slowly evolve into a Lost-style program with time travel and monsters and African drug-lords

6. A song as good as or better than Skeeter Davis’ The End of the world – or really any great country song that makes other people feel the way this song makes me feel, which is satisfied and devastated

7. A poem about the hands of men

8. A political speech about Puerto Rico

9. A children’s book called, “Any Whistle can be a Rape Whistle.”

8January2012

In America, in my real life, I have what some people may refer to as some “adorable social issues” or “charming insecurities” or a “delightful and attractive inability to spend time in public without scrutinizing every movement I make and how it makes me look like an idiot.” I don’t fear spiders or heights. I fear arriving somewhere late and walking in and having everyone turn and watch me try to choose a seat. My head would swim with ideas about what they’ve decided about me based on my tardiness, my stupid green hat, my old dirty jacket, my boots that seemed hip when I put them on but now just seem pretentious and blow-hardy. I’d be so consumed with why all these people just decided to hate me that I’d try to sit down in the only open chair and I’d fall. Then I might as well not come to this event because I didn’t hear anything for the rest of my time there because my heart was pounding and echoing in my head as I watched myself fall over and over in slow motion in my head. It was exhausting, narcissistic, and completely unnecessary.

Now I live in a town where I am the only white female which makes me feel like a very popular I Spy subject – I mean really, do these people get points for spotting me and pointing it out. I walk down the street to choruses of “La Blanche! La Blanche!”, men call to me from bars either trying to buy me a beer or trying to get me to buy them a beer, children stare at me and follow me around laughing for no other reason than never having seen a white woman in person before and some of them even sing a popular Cameroonian nursery rhyme/song about White Man White Man White Man with the Long Nose, I walk into any establishment and before doing what I came to do culture requires that I green each and every other patron. I can’t go anywhere without everyone knowing. Oh and I continue to fall a LOT. I get a lot of attention and I hate it.

But here’s the thing: it no longer terrifies me. It no longer echoes in my brain, driving me insane, causing me to lock my apartment door, put down my shades, and refuse to leave until my livelihood depends on it. When I fall here, as I previously mentioned I do fucking often, I get back up, brush the orange dirt from my knees and keep walking, shrugging my shoulders exaggeratedly towards everyone who witnessed it.

One morning in Minneapolis I was riding the bus (the 2 for those of you in Minneapolis who know this monstrosity of a bus route) when a man got on the empty bus, sat down next to me and very friendly-ly tried to start up a conversation. My reaction, due to my “enchanting public anxiety” was to get off the bus six stops early in the middle of February and walk to work. Oh and I was late to work and as I walked to my desk, everyone swiveled in their desk chair to watch me, so I had that to fixate on for the rest of the day.

My point is that now when I am on a bus or in a bush taxi or a restaurant and someone gets in and sits on my lap or stares at me from another table while calling out and hissing at me, my reaction is to ignore it and carry on with whatever I came here to do (which is usually drink a beer, if I’m being honest). I certainly haven’t come around to liking this kind of attention and I’d really really love to have some sort of invisibility super talent or power, but I have rationalized things and decided that it’s no longer healthy to have my brain cave in on itself every time a man accidentally brushes up against my arm in public. Cameroon is doing a lot of funny things to me, but I think that for the rest of my life I’ll spend much less time worrying about what people think of me because a lot of these ones seem to outright hate me and I’m just fine with that!

3January2012

I was warned before joining the Peace Corps to prepare for a significant amount of alone time spent doing next to nothing. I have yet to experience this.

I’ll start from the beginning of December and work my way to now. I went to Yaounde on the 8th to meet up with some friends who I hadn’t seen since training. Our whole training group was to meet on the 10th for some additional training, Peace Corps loves to facilitate training events. We stayed in Yaounde for a couple of days eating pizza and cheeseburgers, shopping in white-man stores, getting robbed and staying at the Case. Peacce Corps Cameroon is really lucky to have these “cases” (French for “hostel”) in nearly every regional capitol where there are beds, wifi internet, a kitchen, and a media exchange. The Yaounde case is the biggest and the dirtiest, but it is the only one with the washing machine, dryer, and hot shower so we love it there.

On the 10th, a group of about 20 of us went together to Limbe beach (Southwest province of Cameroon) where the Peace Corps had us stay at a beautiful private black-sand beach resort. They fed us three meals a day, they housed us in two-to-three person rooms with air conditioning and hot water, and all we had to do was seven to eight hours of training a day. Training consisted mainly of creating and completing crossword puzzles.

After our seven Peace Corps-funded beach days, a group of 26 of us went to a beach camping site where we rented tents, built a fire, ate fish, and drank beers until the tide chased us into our tents. We woke up and realized that our money had been stolen from the freezer (trust me, that makes sense) and after I spent about an hour yelling in bad French at the proprietor of the property, I felt awkward so four of us moved again to another hotel further down the beach where we stayed for one night.

Two of my closest friends went and hiked Mount Cameroon (boo!) while the fourth one of us and I went to Bamenda – the capitol of the Northwest region and the Anglophone capitol of the country. We stayed for three days before coming south to Bangangte to await however many people decided to accept our Christmas invitation.

27. 27 people accept the invitation. We had stockings over the fireplace, a Christmas tree with lights and ornaments, we cooked a delicious Mexican feast and ate it out of trying pans, strainers, Marmite lids and pots. Our Cameroonian friend Francky called late and invited us to his house for a late-night bonfire. We tipsily wandered around Bangangte for about an hour before finding his house by hearing him yelling MERRY CHRISTMASSSS at us from blocks away. We sat around the bonfire, drank some beers, and ate deviled eggs while listening to Linda Ronstadt. It was the most memorable Christmas of my life. The next day we laid mattresses along my floor and watched Love Actually on a couple of Macbooks whil making Baked Mac and Cheese.

Right now is the first time I’ve been alone in nearly a month and while I spent the last week looking anxiously forward to this solitude, I find myself a bit lonely. I guess I really do love most of these weirdos who decided to join the Peace Corps and I’m really fucking honored lucky humbled to have them be my surrogate family on things like Christmas and Thanksgiving. So the solitude and inactivity of which I was repeatedly warned is not a reality and I couldn’t be happier. One day I was working at a call center in Minneapolis and I couldn’t believe my fucking life, so I put my phone on silent and filled out a Peace Corps application. Real good choice.

for my america friends for my peace corps friends for my cameroon friends for my family who eats cookies without me and tells me how good they are for leonard cohen for tom waits for bob dylan for intercontinental love for poets for music for merci as a response to bonjour for the days when i love peace corps service for the days when i hate peace corps service so much that i countdown to end of service (618) for passion fruits for packages and letters from my loved ones for every teacher i've ever had even the terrible ones for taco bell for cigarettes for beers for vices for late nights at the balcony bar for late nights at facebook for early mornings with the roosters for bucket laundry for wearing my filth proudly for learning how to call people black in local dialect (nas or minicen) for nights when the electricity goes out and the stars are brilliant

13November2011

When I applied for the Peace Corps I assumed I’d have no electricity, no running water, no cheeseburgers, no tacos, no cigarettes etc. I prepared myself for the “bare minimum.” So when I was given my post and realized I had not only running water but a hot shower, cheeseburgers whenever I’m willing to procure cheese from the next big city, tacos every day if I want them, and cigarettes every day whether I want them or not, I was relieved. Thusly, I have not learned how to live without these things. Water, in particular, it turns out, is really hard to live without, especially when you’re a snob from America whose probably never gone a day in her life without drinkable, bathable, filtered, clear, cold water. Water so cold the glass sweats, water with frozen water chunks floating within it, water for bathing, for washing dishes, for cleaning the floors, for drinking, for cooking, for flushing the toilet. I have literally been dreaming of water. On November1st the city came to cut our water pipe (literally!) because my landlord never paid our water bill. I had a dream about a week into this drought that it was Christmas, I was in Phoenix, my grandma and I were eating pot brownies in her kitchen, and the water was just running and splashing and sparkling in the sunlight. It was a paradise dream.

Now like I said, I was prepared to live without running water, I would have gladly gone to a well or forage for water if there were one near my house, this is what I did all throughout training and it wasn’t so bad. The bigger problem than my not having water is the monopoly that the water company has over this country. They are the one and only water company and in communities such as mine – where there is supposed to be dependable running water – they removed all of the wells to make it impossible for citizens to have an option besides paying them for water. But, their dependable running water only works in my neighborhood about three days a week anyway. So instead of ever going to a well, I have to just save water in jugs like a crazy person. I’ve literally told guests to poop outside because I didn’t have enough water to flush the toilet. I’ve actually gotten up in the middle of the night and peed outside because I didn’t want to deal with my bathroom. Once, to my chagrin, I even flushed my toiler with still-cold, filtered mineral water.

After my landlord kept yelling very aggressively at me every time I tried to suggest he pay the waterbill – which was getting higher and higher with penalties every day it went unpaid – I asked my “community host” to help me have a conversation with this man. My community host is a man named Roger, a Peace Corps assigned community guide who helps me with purchases, communications, cultural misunderstandings, and so forth. He runs an NGO youth space and language learning lab in Bangangte where I teach English four days a week. So he came over, and the long and short of it is that we decided that we will decide the water bill by the number of tenants in the compound with the caveat that I have to be two people because I so often have visitors. I agreed to this because I’m American – we don’t have qualms with throwing money at such problems.

I have some options now I guess. Continue living here, deal with this every month and get used to undependable water or move into a place where the water flows like wine and throw lavish hydration parties. My postmate lives in a gorgeous palace where the water always runs and we pay the same rent. So I’m officially looking for a new apartment. There are enough things that are minorly difficult about living here; I don’t see any reason to pile them on. I have a lengthy list of problems with my current apartment which don’t need to be listed. The water seems to be a big enough inconvenience that I’ll at least look at some places. Also, I’m just excited to see what apartment hunting is like in Cameroon, I’ve done a TON of it in America. Oh, and my dear community host offered to let me move into where we work because apparently there’s a two-bedroom flat in the back. I’m considering it but I don’t know if I want my colleagues to know how much Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga I listen to.

2November2011

I have my frustrations. For instance, anytime I decide to have people over for dinner, the cockroaches come out and scatter across the floors that I just mopped in preparation to have guests. I teach two hours a day four hours a week and nearly every time over half the class is over thirty minutes late. I never see mice, but there are holes in all my bags of flour and rice. I’m stuck in the kind of funk where I can feel myself becoming shittier and shittier to the people who are subjected to me. I got intoxicated at the mayor’s house Monday night and – because I’m not used to drinking liquor anymore which they kept pouring and pouring into my glass – I actually felt the moment where I withdrew and stopped talking to people like a functional human being. I don’t cook well. I try, but it is just not a thing I do well. But hey, check this out: I live in Africa, I listen to an embarrassing amount of Van Morrison and Steely Dan, and tomorrow morning I am going to get up before the sun and go to my actual job for the first time.

Unrelated, on Friday night a bunch of our friends came into town early for our Saturday night Halloween party and we had a party at my postmate’s house where we served cheeseburgers, played poker (I sort of won), and drank big Cameroonian bottles of beer. And then on Sunday, the stragglers who were – for whatever reason – unable to make it back to post following the party stayed and we ate popcorn, set up a projector and a mattress in my living room and watched horror movies on my wall. All in all, two fucking really great nights for the ages. This is not how I ever could have imagined life in the Peace Corps. Frustrations aside, I’m in love with everything… even my goddamn cockroaches.

"at any rate, i am convinced that god does not play dice."

14October2011

One of my favorite parts of living here, in the midst of all of the things I dislike about living here this particular week, is listening to Cameroonians explain American history. I am beginning to believe that there is a certain pride associated with being able to recall key moments of American history, regardless of their accuracy. Now, first off let me explain that I am not a history buff: I could tell you every Ernest Hemingway novel, most of the coolest charms and spells from the Harry Potter series along with the most badass characters who execute them, and a million reasons why Prince’s Purple Rain is one of the best albums ever recorded. But I couldn’t tell you much about the founding of America, I couldn’t tell you the precise year for almost any significant event in history (American or otherwise) and I don’t even know how many presidents we’ve had. But I can somehow tell when someone is really incorrect.

Tonight I dined with my new friend (I have a new friend!!), a literature professor at the University where I teach and her husband who is a professor of biochemistry in Nigeria. I was one of those dizzying evenings where every third or fourth thing either one of them said begged to be written down and retold. But since I am neither a pretentious, notebooked writer (yet) or rude, I just made scribblous mental notes. Keep in mind please that these are some of the most educated Cameroonians I’ve met thus far.

First, Mr. New Friend began telling me about the class he took that outlined how the Spaniards discovered America (which he called “The New Land” and explained that it wasn’t called “new” because of its age but because of its opportunity, which was a very dear side note) where they were greeted enthusiastically by the “Red-Skin Indies” who brought them treasures and jewels and songs. I know that in American public schools we are told a similar jargon about landing on Plymouth Rock and being greeted by Injuns with turkeys and cranberries and so forth, but the older I’ve gotten the more rape and pillage that story entails.

A few minutes later, Mrs. New Friend was trying to explain the Boston Tea Party to her husband and concluded it by saying, “and that is why they sank the Mayflower.” I honestly don’t know whether or not the Mayflower was involved in the Boston Tea Party, it is entirely possible, but it was not a detail that existed in my version of the story. In fact, I kinda like this version better.

Mr. New Friend asked me how I felt about Barack Obama and since this question has gotten me into trouble before (with my host dad who told me that Obama is weak and does nothing for Africa), I very diplomatically said something about how he came into presidency at a hard time and it is hard to tell anything definitively just yet. The ol’ “time will tell” argument. He said, which I loved dearly, that every time America has a Republican president, the world loses peace, and when a Democrat takes power, everyone can breathe again. His wife followed up with that WW2 quote, altered to say, “Every time America’s Republican president sneezes, the whole world gets a cold.” Obviously an oversimplification, but I love it nonetheless.

He then started to tell me about his life in Nigeria where he works as a lecturer at a University. Apparently Nigerian Universities have a crazy gang mentality and there are people just shooting one another in the hallways. He laughingly told me about the day he drove to campus and couldn’t find a soul. He wandered around until finally he found a lecturer scrambling in his desk and he asked what was going on. Only moments before arriving, one student had shot another in the hallway. There is an upside to this Univeristy gang mentality though, he told me. The upside is that these gangsters don’t shoot at random, they only shoot one another, and the professors who accept money for passing grades but then don’t award the passing grades. All you have to do, I was told, is never accept monetary bribes from gang members in exchange for passing grades. This coming from a man who teaches protein construction in upper level biochemistry classes.

I think the whole point of this post was to show off that I have friends now and while Mr. New Friend was just as lovely as Mrs. New Friend, he is heading back to Nigeria tomorrow and I get his wife as my first Cameroonian female friend (besides bartenders and seamstresses who both make money off of me which may influence their desire to be my friend) who is also my neighbor who also has a garden and wants to help me learn to cook and who loves literature and who seems to find me interesting. Win.

(Or: Thirty Percent of This is True)

5Oct2011

Ghost stories exist in Cameroon although I doubt they’d call them that. They might call them something with less of a note of dismissal. They may just call them family stories, histories, spiritual realities. Cameroonians, to generalize broadly, have a belief in spiritual beings and sorcery that us Americans have “intellectualized” out of our common story. We find excuses for the unexplained; shadows, breezes, science, religion. Cameroonians though, they believe the most obvious answer, the one that we ignore in trying to find ways to make it less frightening.

I spent last night in a neighboring village, Bamena, with some friends due to a split decision to make some chili and drink some wine. Villagoise is a term we use in Cameroon to describe those who live in the most remote areas (Bangagte is a “town,” I don’t get the honor of talking about life in village) and live a certain lifestyle that includes drawing water from the well, living by candle-, lamp- and torch-light and spending one’s time in between mountains digging in the orange dirts. We stayed in a house with cement floors and walls, three bedrooms, a bathtub in the front yard that collects rainwater from the roof-spout, and a squash garden in the front yard. All of the doors were numbered. We were specifically told not to open door number five as it had been locked by the landlord and was none of our business.

After a couple of bottles of shitty French red wine, a marmite of chili, and a round of Scrabble (which I lost miserably by a great margin) we decided that room number five had to be opened. The downpour outside which cast electric flashes through the windows had brought out a mischievous side in us. Of course we waited until after our host had gone to sleep, ignoring his explicit instruction to leave that room be. Haunted rooms are the fodder of campy teen movies and predictable King novels. They have no place in rural Cameroon.

The room contained, which we observed by lamplight (spooky, right!), a six-foot tall picture of who could only be the patriarch of a long-since gone family, a twin bed (sloppily made in that style of you just coming back into your apartment with a male caller whom you did not expect to bring home with you and so while he’s taking his shoes off, you quickly throw your comforter over your tangled sheets), and some sort of bamboo crib.

We closed the door, feeling as though we’d disturbed someone else’s space – no matter how far since gone – and went back out to the round dining room table which shown beneath the lamp and candles offering light. Things started to get weird now.

Midway through a round of a game called Cheers Governor (hey! Emily! it’s global!), prompted by no gust of wind, the candles extinguished, followed immediately by the lantern. I felt nothing, saw nothing, and felt my way through the blackest darkness to find matches. Your ideas become supernatural when your hands become your eyes and I tried my hardest to ignore that a mere eight minutes had passed between opening door number five and our light being burgled from us.

We went to sleep shortly thereafter, me on the couch cushions that I had moved unto the floor, my postmate beside me on a blow-up mattress, and the other two volunteers in a bedroom about nine steps away. We were awaken some time later, five minutes or three hours, by the sound of a shovel scraping and penetrating hard earth. This was followed by a banging, as though on the front door of the room in which we slept. The banging became louder and we heard a woman mumbling, “Maccat! Maccat!” Maccat is a local patois word for white man and we can’t walk down any street without hearing it hissed at us. There are several words here that people hiss at us that mean white man, but this one carries the most venom in the mouth of its executor.

We’ve grown somewhat used to hearing this word, usually muttered by old, crazy village dwellers and we figured it must be some neighbor that our host had forgotten to warn us about. My postmate got out his torch and made sure the doors and windows were locked and we went back to sleep serenaded by the lullabies of some windy woman as I quickly fell into a wine sleep. It’s funny what you learn to sleep through here.

We awoke in the morning and acerbically thanked our host for warning us about his crazy neighbor woman and he wondered why she was here, she hadn’t been around since they locked room number five, he informed us. When we ashamedly mentioned that we might have opened the door to room number five using a head lamp and a bobby pin, our host decided to tell us the story of some previous tenants of the house. Not that it has anything to do with what happened last night, he kept saying.

Twenty or thirty years ago a middle-aged couple lived in this house, they were the average Cameroonian village couple save for the fact that they had an incredibly difficult time having a baby. Most Cameroonian couples simply can’t stop having babies. But this couple became village-famous for their infertility and four previous miscarriages. They must be cursed, the villagers thought who quickly shunned the couple for there must be some sort of hex upon them.

Her fifth pregnancy was the one, she knew it, she could feel that this one would be different and so she took liberties. She stayed home, she allowed herself to be doted upon by her husband, she avoided leaving village or straining herself physically. This was going to be the one. She knew it. She could feel it.

When the baby came, she delivered in a bathtub that was kept in the bathroom, not wanting to make a mess in the room she had dedicated to her precious, lovely number five – the one that made it. When the baby came, it was white, it was cold, it was still. It was born still.

She carried her stagnant infant outside to show it the house, the garden over which she had labored to provide the house with some privacy, the front porch where she planned to nurse and lullaby her precious baby number five. Upon seeing her with her still, white infant, which had yet to be given a name – how does one give a name to something so perfect and flawless and magical – a neighbor began calling it Maccat, a cruel joke making fun of the color the little one had turned in death.

Unable to defend herself or her lovely new bundle, she returned into the house where she remained. Her husband watched for days as she attempted to nurse the infant, she sang to it, slept with it, and swaddled it in robes to try to warm it. After five days of this, the smell, the desperation, the utter devastation of the scene finally affected her husband and while she slept, he snuck the baby from her breast and left the house.

He returned hours later to a frantic wife who knew immediately what he had done when he lay his shovel in the corner of the common room and walked into their room staring at nothing but the hard, cement floor. For another week, they said nothing to one another. She sat in her chair on the porch, singing to nobody. He lay in bed until the tenth day when he stopped breathing and remained still. Grief, the traditional healer of the village attributed his death to grief.

Mother remained in the house until she became desolate and was removed. Unable to provide for herself or maintain coherent thoughts, she retreated to the mountains where she is rumored to spend all of her time digging, digging for Maccat. Occasionally she returns to that house where room number five is locked up, the porch is empty, the bathtub collects rainwater in the courtyard, and white people – maccats – are spread out along the floor of the living room wondering what kind of imperceptible gust of wind had stolen their light hours earlier.

25 september 2011

French is obviously not my first language and while I can speak it and understand it about 90% of the time, there are times when I’m very confused by attitude. I’m getting used to it, but it’s not really something I had to learn at training because my family was Anglophone, so I didn’t have to pay as close of attention to tone and intonation. But now that I’m out here on my own, trying to make friends and hug mamas, I have to pay attention really closely to what people are actually saying because paying attention just to how they say it causes real confusion.

For example, people yell at one another here. Just about every time I go to my spaghetti omelet shack for breakfast, the cook gets into what I used to think was a heated, angry, intense argument with another patron, only to almost immediately fizzle out. Apparently, people just yell at one another here – when they are not angry.

Also, finger shaking is a big trend here. If, in America, a man talked to me while shaking his pointer finger in my face, I’d probably either punch him in the dick-area or cry of embarrassment. But here, it’s just a way of clarifying what you’re saying and it’s very common. Plus, if I were to punch a Cameroonian man in the dick, he’d probably murder me and then tell my corpse that women come second and I should know my place. Actually, he’d probably say it to whatever man I was with and ask him to tell me it because sometimes they don’t talk to me at all, they just talk to a nearby man about me and then act shocked when I look over.

Forced hospitality is something I’m really starting to love. I went to a baptism today and the mama of the girl being baptized saw us leaving after eating and cornered us to yell at us because the party was only just starting, we couldn’t leave yet, and we must stay. She said it all very authoritatively and with an abrasive kindness that actually made me want to stay. Unfortunately I had to catch a car back to Bangangte so I thanked her and kissed her on the cheek. When I thanked her, she grabbed me by both shoulders and very firmly told me, “No, it is ME who is thanking YOU.”

People here are overwhelmingly kind, it just doesn’t reflect in their speech or mannerisms.

25 september 2011

These are the three things that Peace Corps volunteers discuss on an almost second to second basis. It’s astonishing really, but since my grandparents read this I can’t discuss sex and since boys I’ve dated read this I can’t talk about poop. So let’s talk about food, baby.

I like most Cameroonian foods. I eat “prunes” almost constantly, but mostly just because you can find mamas cooking them everywhere and you can buy three for about twenty cents. Prunes here have nothing to do with prunes as we know them in the Americas, they’re more like a huge olive/small avocado. They’re purple on the outside and neon green on the inside and super fatty and delicious. I’m going to get super plump just eating prunes and I’m going to love it.

I like street meat, as in whole fishes that are often described as “Chinese” or “Not Cameroonian,” or skewers of what is usually beef or some bush meat disguised as beef. Real delicious, real cheap, real easy to find. You just have to close your eyes, open your mouth, and hope.

Spaghetti omelets shacks are discernable by the white curtain hanging in the doorway and the smell of maggi cubes (blocks of MSG that taste like Top Ramen or Rice-A-Roni powder) and for about seventy-five cents you can buy a cup of sugary coffee, two-egg spaghetti omelet with tomatoes, onions, and peppers, and twenty minutes of banter with the foxy Muslim gentleman who cooks them up for you. This is the best option ever for a meal but it’s a gut bomb and I try to keep these to about one a week.

There are of course traditional Cameroonian dishes, most of which incorporate enough palm oil to slick down a slip-n-slide at the White House, Maggi cubes, plantains, manioc, beans, slimy green leafy vegetables, fish parts, mystery meat, corn, and/or rice. Most meals revolve around starch – which is one reason there are so many spaghetti sandwich mamas and also a reason that most mamas are morbidly obese and sit at their market stands rubbing their bloated, diabetic ankles which they rest on the open bag of rice they’re selling.

People here tend to drink an incredible amount of alcohol. Beers come in 32-ounce bottles, they cost about one dollar, they make you feel like your brain is going to explode, and you will often see a table of men drinking them at the bar before 10am. Another cheap option is the whisky sachet, a small, sealed plastic sac of whisky (or what has been described to me as “industrial cleaner with added whisky flavoring”). The best is when you go to get on a moto and notice the driver has a sachet of whisky hanging out of his mouth. I’ve drunk one or two beers (a day (just kidding)) since getting here but I haven’t yet stooped to whisky sachets – oh and I never will!

There are at least three bakeries in Bangangte and they all sell baguettes, which is great. They all sell unsweetened cookies and cakes, which taste terrible. And one of them sells whole-wheat rolls, which I just found out about and rejoiced.

Even though I often feel like I couldn’t be luckier about the diversity of chow in Cameroon, I still find myself often fantasizing about things like cheese, hamburgers, pizza and good, draft beers. This week though, I have eaten like a medieval king in a hot tub. First, some mega rich Cameroonian had us over for dinner and served us salad with cold cuts on it, sausages, brie cheese, and red wine. Then some pals and I made a proper greasy diner breakfast with an egg scramble, toast and home fries. Last night a neighboring volunteer had me over to help cook and eat tamales and tortilla chips for dinner with pancakes and bloody marys for breakfast. Bloody! Marys! And finally, this afternoon we went to a baptism where they served traditional Cameroonian fare prepared by a group of dedicated women and it tasted like I belong here.

I’m back home now where I have pretty much nothing but a half-sac of popcorn and two eggs in my kitchen. I’m really happy.

Some of you darling friends and family of mine have asked about sending packages. I would try to be modest and say, "No no there is absolutely nothing I need in life!" which is true, but there are, on the contrary, some things that would be nice to have. And it turns out, I'm not above posting them here. My mailing address is listed over there --> on the right side and it helps if you throw some scary bible threats on the packaging.

So now for the list:

- Dr. Bronners Castille Soap (preferably lavender or rose, but I'm not picky)

- Duct Tape - for taping my ducts, among other things

- Any non-perishable delicious cooking accoutrements (spices etc) and snacks

- Pink Lemonade powder

- Books, DVDs, anything to make me feel like a part of civilization

- Ziploc bags and tupperwares

- Trail mix, this shit is golden

- Peanut butter M&Ms, also golden

- Postcards, letters, photographs, anything to hang on my walls to remind me of my loved ones/places

- Parliament Lights (just kidding, kinda)

- Any catalogs that you were going to throw away anyways, to J. Crew, Anthro, etc. to bring to my tailor to get some dresses made so that I can stop looking homeless at work

- Febreeze, Candles, Incense sticks, Essential Oils, anything that doesn't smell like feces and/or burning garbage

1 September 2011

Days are long here. Long days give me time to think and too much time to think usually makes a monster out of me. So here it is. We volunteer to work for the Peace Corps, a government organization that works to promote sustainable change in developing communities (how’s that for jargon!). The rub: we work for “sustainable change” in a country that’s been hosting Peace Corps Volunteers for forty-nine years. How do you rectify working for sustainable change in a country that hasn’t sustained change in nearly a half decade?

I haven’t started my job yet at post, that begins in early October. So I spend the meantime scrubbing the floors and walls in my apartment, trying to get my cat away from me, watching American movies, listening to (mostly) American music, texting my friends from training to make sure they’re doing much of the same, and wandering around town hoping something happens. Things happen: people stare at me, men grab me, people yell “La Blanche” at me, I spend money on vegetables that I hope I can learn to cook, and I touch fabrics here and there and imagine them hanging before my windows or picture them sewn into dresses that I can wear to work.

But I always bounce back to an overwhelming happiness for being here. This morning, I got out of bed at 6:45 and washed my laundry in buckets on my porch. I used the excess water to bleach my floors and scrub my patio tiles. I cut up a watermelon to share with my friend who spent the night. I found a place to hang my hammock and walked into town to find some rope. I went to the cleaners to pick up a duvet cover that I dropped off last week and then I made my bed with new sheets and clean bedding. Little victories – like wearing clean blue jeans – make being here worth it, on a personal level. I will find a place eventually when I feel like I’m sustaining or changing anything, but for now, I’m sustaining and changing me.

I’ve never felt more strong. I’ve never considered myself a person of power until now. And when I’m walking down to the garbage pile at the end of the street and an eight-year old girl runs up and wraps herself around my waste and tries to speak to me in English, I feel like a billionaire, a body-builder, a poet, a goddamn light.

They are.

And some really nice ones decided to publish an article I wrote in their magazine.

Here's some information, and if you find yourself in the Uptown area of Minneapolis, stop in at Everyday People (Lake & Hennepin) to buy yourself a copy. Buy one for your neighbor and your mother too.

Creative Ladies Are Powerful

well i'm officially done being their daughter, but i will remain in their debt for some time

21 August 2011

I live in Bangangte now. It’s quite cold and rainy here. The soil is bright orange and copious. That combined with the rain makes for a ton of orange mud and a lot of laundry. My shoe, fingernails and floors are stained orange. My apartment is filthy, but luckily I am a compulsive cleaner. Yesterday, my post-mate and I went to the market to get plantains and guacamole ingredients. While we were there we saw three kittens playing in a store and then we bought them for 3,000 francs. That means about $6. So now we have cats. His is named Pigeons and mine is named Charles Manson. They’re brothers/sisters/siblings and best friends and they like to meow almost constantly. They also like to eat sardines. They’re both at my house for now, soon to be split up.

The situation pertaining to my actual job here is tricky. I hope very much that it is all sorted out soon. Otherwise it will be a long two years of scrubbing surfaces, watching movies, and pacing.

My neighbor, William, revs his motorcycle engine every morning starting at about 6:30. It’s probably going to drive me insane and I’m probably going to do violence to him or his motorcycle very soon. He also locks the concession gate every night when he gets home, so if I get home late, I have to stand in the rain banging on the gate until he wakes up to let me in. There’s actually not a rule that they kick you out of the Peace Corps for violencing your neighbor. So I’m probably in the clear.

15 August 2011

This morning when I was eating my (literally!) ninetieth Bafia omelet at my table facing the wall, Daddy informed me that tonight we’d be meeting to have a discussion. Now, usually when people preplan discussions with me, it makes me think I’m in trouble because sometimes I still feel fourteen and when I was fourteen I got into a lot of trouble. So all day I had this feeling in the back of my mind that I was going to get a talking to when I got home. I came home about thirty minutes earlier than usual, ate white rice with a fish tail and some arachide sauce (one of my favorite Cameroonian delicacies – all I know for sure, of it’s ingredients, is fried groundnuts). Daddy put two chairs out on the patio so that we could have a nice place to sit and talk.

The first thing he told me was that everywhere I go in Cameroon, I will be bothered by men because they are excited to see me (white woman) and don’t know how to talk to me properly. He is very proud of how I handled the aforementioned Uncle Paul and that “when you give yourself to the world, the world engulfs you.” This man speaks well.

He warned me that I need to continue to be firm and independent, which are two qualities they have mentioned to the housing director that I exhibit. I appreciated that. And then he warned me that I was going to have to buy a sweater because it is cold in Bangangte. He asked for my mother’s phone number/email so that he can contact her. She sent a box of USA paraphernalia, decks of cards, crayons, jump ropes and other assorted dollar store finds for the kids in the family, and Mama and Daddy were beside themselves excited about it, so apparently now he wants to call and thank her. So Mom, get ready for a really awkward conversation! He also told me that he is only three hours away from Bangangte and if anything happens he will be on the next bus out there to help me. He said this about five times.

Then he sent the house-boy into the house to fetch a bottle of red wine that he’s been saving for an unspecified amount of time. After he sent the house-boy to three different neighbors’ houses looking for an opener, he decided to try to just push the cork into the bottle with a spoon but every spoon in the house had too wide of a handle. When he started talking about just breaking the neck off of the bottle, I suggested that he save it for another night because I would have only had a half a glass anyway. He seemed simultaneously disappointed and relieved.

He told me how hard it is being a primary school teacher and how lucky I am that I’ll be teaching at the university. I said that my sister-in-law in America is also a primary school teacher and it seems really hard and he explained that in Cameroon, primary school teachers earn $190 per month. So, then I felt like an asshole.

He ended the conversation by saying that we’d drink the wine tomorrow and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I really want to spend tomorrow night eating street-fish with my friends. We’ll see which impulse wins out. When we stood to come back into the house, I gave him a hug. Mama showed up shortly thereafter in my room to give me a dress (a kaba - basically a big, long, really ugly moomoo that African mamas wear) that she had made for me. It's really ugly and I'll never wear it, but her giving it to me was so sweet. It was a real cute evening.

14 August 2011

In December of 2009, I was working full-time at a call center in Minneapolis. I spent most of every day watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on my work computer while taking the occasional phone call from a usually disgruntled obese woman without health insurance trying to get gastric bypass surgery. I typically knew that their surgery wouldn’t work out when they asked if we’d reimburse them for bus fare for the ride to the initial appointment, “No, I’m afraid not. But if you have a car we’ll validate your parking for up to two hours….. No, it’s a four-hour appointment.” I was, needless to say to most people who have met me, not good at that job. Plus, I was going full-time to graduate school and nannying part time at that time. My job was literally the least important part of my life, so I watched Buffy every day.

One day, I decided to switch my phone off and apply for the Peace Corps knowing that I was slated to finish school the following May and I had no life plans to follow. Twenty months later, I’m four days away from swearing in as an official Peace Corps Volunteer. I’m leaving the training city of Bafia to spend the next two years in Bangangte.

Time passes strangely here because the whole three months I’ve been in Bafia, it’s merely been a precursor to my actual service, it’s been a dumb little hurdle, just another hoop to jump through after a year and a half of applying. There seemed to be no point to really settle in here at first – exploring the city, becoming close with my family, making friends all seemed counter-productive when I knew it would just make it harder to leave.

But now I find myself in new pockets of the city eating new weird things most days with three friends I can’t imagine my life without before returning home to giggle in the kitchen with mama over nothing. In spite of myself, I am really sad to be leaving here this week.

That is not to say that I am less excited about doing the same thing when I get to Bangangte. If I’ve learned one thing through traveling for the past twenty years, it’s that no matter how many new places and people I fall in love with doesn’t make the last place less perfect. So to that effect, Bafia is too hot, I have to share a bathroom with a bunch of people who don’t believe in flushing, I have no freedom whatsoever, Daddy makes me contribute money to his church fundraising and I’m never clean for more than one hour but I love it here because I have some things that are mine. Those things will be mine forever.

31July2011

I learned tonight that death, in a village, travels very quickly and very incorrectly. I felt funny all day today, come to think of it. I woke up early and did my laundry in some buckets bathed, ate a chive and egg omelet with Mama, and then lied in bed for a few hours writing class descriptions and watching Harry Potter. Sunday as usual. I met my pals in town and we took motos to the center of the village to find a fish mama – a woman who sits outside of bars grilling fish and serving them with plantains, mayonnaise, condiment vert, pimont, carrots, onions and cilantro. It’s easily the best thing I’ve ever eaten besides tacos and it costs about a dollar for a full plate of it. I had a lingering strangeness all day though. I attributed it to my drinking three and a half beers last night instead of my usual one. After fish, we motoed back to our part of town for a “cultural soiree.” After that we went back to our bar and had a beer. I didn’t feel right.

I had missed a call from my mom in the morning but she calls on Sundays sometimes so I figured she just wanted to chat and would call back later. My curfew is 7:00pm. At 7:15, while I was eating pasta, my Mom called. I stepped outside because there’s only one corner of our house that has cell phone service. Mom told me that my grandpa died last night. I cried…. an embarrassing amount…. and then Daddy walked up onto the porch and very concernedly stood a foot from me and stared at me until I had to cut my Mom off to tell him what was going on. He was very sad. I heard him go into the house, tell the houseboy, and then I watched the houseboy sprint next door to get Mama so she could come comfort me. By the time Mama came home, I was off the phone and she was telling me, “My condolences, baby, death is the ultimate consequence of life and you must take time to feel it. I will fix you crepes.” She is going out of town tomorrow and asked if I wanted her to stay. I said no, but the offer was special.

Then I remembered that I’m supposed to teach tomorrow, but under Mama’s orders, I decided to stay home and mourn all morning – have my own Africa funeral. I had to find a volunteer who could take my lesson plans to school tomorrow, so I walked next door to Michelle’s house and she obliged me. She is a dear and her family must think that I am insane since I just showed up at their house at 8:00pm on a Sunday night with a superpuffypink face.

When I got back home, I noticed another friend, Elizabeth, walking towards my house. This is very strange because Elizabeth lives clear across town and has never been to my house. I figured she had heard what happened from my friend Easy who I had talked to in the midst of all of this clusterfuckery. Before acknowledging what had actually happened, I said, “Wow, news travels fast. I guess you heard?” and she said, very tentatively, “Yeah…. your….. brother….. died?” and I started laughing at the utter preposterousness of the whole situation, and it felt really great. Apparently, her host sister and my host mother are very good friends and somehow they had already discussed what was going on and there were some details lost in transit. I learned tonight that death, in a village, travels very quickly and very incorrectly.

So, my grandpa was 99 years old, and he was peaceful, and he was good, he was noble and proud of his family and he was ready to die. We said goodbye to one another before I left and I knew, without a doubt, that I was never going to split a pitcher of Premium Grain Belt with him again. But, there are going to be a million great people at the funeral who loved him and who I love and who I would really like to spend a day with, and unfortunately, I cannot do that.

Anyway - for friends of Johnny Ulku, here's the obit.

22July2011

My family here has taken some getting used to because there are some inherent troubles I have with living with a host family. Those troubles are as follows: I like to have my own space, I like to pee into a toilet that isn’t already filled with someone else’s shit, I like to do my laundry without five people judging, I like to eat what I want when I want, I don’t like having to check in with people every morning and every evening about my day and how it went, and lastly, I like to be able to walk around my house naked especially when it’s hotter than holy-living-fuck outside every minute of my life. But in the last four weeks, I’ve really learned to give up my idea of space in order to have people care about me and kind of seem to maybe like me sometimes.

My daddy (yeah, he makes me call him that) is trying to get into an online university and he involved me in a number of steps. First, he asked if I could do him a small favor of researching Anglophone online Universities to find a way to make it free. That wasn’t so hard, I just typed up a list of universities from a google search and then spent maybe an hour researching scholarships that have been given to Cameroonians in the past. Then I gave him the email address of a guy I know at the Cameroon Ministry of Education. He perused the list, chose the most scammy looking university (University of the People – anyone know anything about it?) because it claims to be free. Then he started writing the six essays required for the application which meant that I needed to get up an extra half hour early every morning to edit his essays. Then he told me that he was going to, when he gets into the University and has to take a Composition class, write everything, send it to me in Bangangte, and wait for my edits to turn anything in. As I was starting to feel a little hmm annoyed, he told me that he’s just never known anyone as “smart” and “successful” as me and needs my help. That warmed my heart right up. (Side story: last week he said everyone needs dreams and asked what mine were as a child, I answered that they were to be a writer and to live in Africa). But then tonight over dinner he gave me an envelope and said I need to contribute to his church fundraiser. No. I will not.

Mama may be one of my favorite people alive actually. She’s a super bad-ass lady who doesn’t take any shit from anybody but somehow her spit and vinegar really just come across as love…. lately. After the whole “drinking habit” debacle we had a big Peace Corps party to celebrate someone’s ability to cook Cameroonian Key Lime Pie (which, after seven weeks of manioc and fish heads, tasted like pure God pie) and I came home a tiny bit intoxicated. When I say a tiny bit intoxicated I really mean that I was probably still legal to drive a motor vehicle in the state of Minnesota but I was feeling a little mouthy. I got home and Mama was waiting up by a lantern and I decided to tell her the cultural norms associated with women drinking in the United States. “Until my decisions with how much alcohol to consume, when and where negatively effect my ability to do my job here in Cameroon, it is nobody’s business except for mine and the people who choose to hang out with me at the bar – I appreciate your concern and knowing that someone here is concerned over me at all is really really comforting and encouraging, but I would appreciate if next time you have a concern you’d talk to me instead of to the Peace Corps.” She nodded and agreed with me and told me that she admires me. Since then, she’s been treating me like a grown up, we’ve had long conversations about what it means to be a woman and she told me that she married Daddy because he allows their relationship to be 50/50. The next morning I saw him mopping the floor – a real faux pas for many traditional Cameroonian men. Tonight after dinner, Mama hugged me and said, “Good night, ma cherie.” Everything here in Cameroon is really amazingly brilliant right now – remind me of this in about six months when I’m going through a terror.

13July2011

Updates a plenty. Not really, but some points since returning from post visit. I’ll list them numerically because I am lazy and you are kind for visiting for updates in the first place.

1.In Cameroon, well probably many developing countries, women’s rights are fucking weird and sad and terrifying. Like really really weird. There have been a couple of “group activities” in which us Americans and those Cameroonians split up and write our culture’s perceptions of women on brown paper and then tape it to the wall and present it to the group. In the last one, us Americans – already knowing what those Cameroonians were going to say – wrote things like, “equal,” and “intelligent,” and “worthy.” The Cameroonians, in return, had a list of the following sentences: 1. The woman is merchandise, 2. The woman doesn’t have the right to make decisions, 3. The woman is a housewife, 4. The woman is for procreation, 5. The woman is the weak sex, and 6. The woman is the weak sex. This relates only kinda to the following story. In Cameroon, it is “improper” for women to visit bars, especially if they are going to drink alcohols and smoke cigarettes while in public at bars. I, being American and often bored here, go to the same bar every afternoon from 4:30-7:00 with my pals where we each have one or two beers and five or six cigarettes – it’s just a necessary step between being at school all day and being at homestay all night. Well, my family asked where I was everyday after school before coming home at curfew, and naturally I said “at a homework meeting” because technically, we do speak in French at the bar occasionally so it does count as homework since part of our job here is integrating. My family started sending spies over to the bar (mostly just our houseboy Simon, who totally sold me out) and when they realized that I was at the bar drinking moderate amounts of alcohol, they told our homestay coordinator that they’re worried about my “drinking habit.” To be far, I do habitually drink one or two beers here and there. I also habitually attend class for eight hours a day and I habitually have conversations with an African family who stares at me like I’m about to spontaneously combust at any moment. I’ve never come home drunk and I’ve never drunk at the house. As an American woman, I have greatly taken advantage of my freedom to drink and eat how much I want when I want without anyone suggesting that I don’t belong in public.

2. This week I discovered pizza sandwiches. It’s a half baguette, two triangles of processed, white, President cheese, and a can of usually-expired tomato paste. It tastes like a pizza and it’s my new livelihood.

3. I started a writing club for other Peace Corps nerds and three of us started a poetry club for students at our school. The writing club is fun, we’ve only met once, but I wrote two quicky essays already – which is progress! And poetry club rules because apparently young Cameroonian kids can write funny awesome poetry when they’re forced to go to after-school clubs.

4. I miss Mexican Food more than I miss any other American delicacy.

5. I started teaching this week at Model School – it’s a Bilingual Lycee in Bafia where parents send their kids for summer school and we get practical training on teaching in the Cameroonian school system. It went…. well for two days, followed by the hardest I’ve ever failed at anything I’ve attempted to do, followed by one day of success. So, I figure, at this rate I’ll be a mediocre teacher by 2014 or so? Here’s hoping!

6. Hey, thanks pals for following along on this weird blog. Sorry that my updates aren’t more enlightening or interesting but, perhaps in time, things will pick up. Mostly now I just live in a small village, do the same thing every day, and occasionally get really great clothes made by local tailors. Also, unrelated, while I was at post a group of young Cameroonian boys drinking Boosters in the market called me a “nigga.” Boosters are cocktail-flavored malt liquors. Africans calling me nigga is way awesomer than Africans calling me La Blanche.

2July2011

I spent last week in Bangangte, my new home (starting in August, which can’t come soon enough). While living in Bangangte, I will be working at the Universite des Montagnes to start an English department. A couple of volunteers from neighboring villages palled around with me for the week so that I could find where things are and meet people and so forth and I had a “community host,” which I think basically means someone in the community who volunteers to be a mentor of sorts for incoming Peace Corps Volunteers. Mine is a gentleman named Roger who I love to pieces; he runs a youth organization and language learning center where I’ll be working to teach English and “give guidance” to youth, his wife runs a women’s organization where I’ll be doing anything I can to help if they’ll have me. She also offered to give me cooking lessons, of which I am in dire need. So they’re my new host family once I’m done with this host family – big difference being that I don’t have to live with them. Instead I’ll be living about ten minutes walk from them and five minutes walk from their workplaces. It’s pretty ideal.

So, I got to actually stay in the house where I’ll be living and when people told me how nice it was before I left, they were not exaggerating. It’s a big white tile walled in apartment complex with me on the entire first level and a couple of college students living around me. I walk in past a large garage-esque gate (Peace Corps has security regulations mandating gates around the houses and bars on the windows), and up to my first floor door which opens from my huge veranda where I’ll be hanging my hammock. My salon/living room/foyer is enormous and lovely, my bedroom is big and my bed is comfortable, the bathroom has running water AND a hot water heater for the shower, the spare bedroom is a bit dungeonous but the boys who come and stay over don’t seem to mind, and the kitchen is lovely and I’m completely charmed by the family of mice living in my oven. I killed two of them and haven’t felt good about anything in life since. So I’ve just decided to learn to coexist with my new pals.

The house is in a pretty highly Peace Corps trafficked area of the West so the last guy who lived there got a lot of visitors, and it seems that in the month or so since he’s left it’s turned into sort of a squat house with people coming and going as they’ve needed to. I couldn’t be happier about this setup seeing as I like to have people coming and going and I like company.

The weather in Bangangte is just about perfect. It sits between 70-85 degrees Fahrenheit on an average day and it’s in the mountains so when a breeze rolls through it feels amazing. When I had my first in-country interview about what post I would prefer and so forth my only specifications were that my biggest fears in the Peace Corps were heat and isolation, so they really took care of me on those ones. My new biggest fear in the Peace Corps is that I’m supposed to be working at a University and opening an English department and I have no idea what I’m doing and when I set up an appointment to meet with the dudes at the school, they totally blew me off. So, here goes nothing.

And finally: some funny things happened in Bangangte. 1. I was walking through the market with my pal Tim (white, by the way) when a group of three or four Cameroonian teenagers started calling at us, but instead of using the traditional “Bonjour les blancs” they went with, “What’s up my niggas? My west coast niggas!” so that was a pretty proud moment of my life…. getting called a nigga by a West African IN West Africa. 2. While I was waiting for the previously mentioned (aforementioned) meeting at the University that never happened I found myself in a classroom with four or five classy looking male college students (side note: this is the most expensive/prestigious university in Cameroon so the student body is really well put together as far as the way they dress and so forth) while I tried to explain to them what I was there to do. One of them looked at me, dead seriously, and said, “So will you to teach American English, British English, or 50 Cent English? Because we LOVE 50 Cent.” And finally 3. Last night we had a bunch of people over to the house and cooked Mexican food. Yup. Mexican food. I think as far as happiest moments in my life goes, sitting around my new apartment in Bangangte, Cameroon with a bunch of Peace Corps kids eating Mexican food and playing Kings is definitely in the list. Oh and 4. Spaghetti Omelet Sandwiches. It's exactly what it sounds like.

My neighbor “Uncle Paul” (shudder) is trying to date me because I’m really desirable in Africa (read: white, not thin, presumably wealthy), so I’m learning a lot about Cameroonian courtship. Apparently it goes like this: First, tell the American women that she needs to praise Jesus more after she has made no indication as to whether or not she already praises Jesus at all. Second, demand that she give you her phone number so that you can “take her on a walk to the hotel.” The American woman in question is probably really naïve and stupid and will just give you her number instead of asking what exactly you plan to do at the hotel… she’ll worry about that later, she figures. When you start calling and texting her every day, she’ll just respond with answers like… not answering or texting to say, “I am too busy to go with you to a hotel, sorry.” Now you respond with vague statements like, “I hope that you’re not turning me down.” She won’t know how to respond because she feels like she’s being very obvious about her turning you down. Then, when all of this calling and texting fails, you should just bake a cake, send it over with the teenage son, and wait for a response.

This is where it got sticky. The cake was delicious, but there was a part of me that didn’t feel like I could accept a cake with ulterior motives. So I decided to keep the cake while making it clear that I was accepting it only because I’m in a group of forty-three Americans who miss cakes. I sent a text message to Uncle Paul (shudder) reading, “Je ne veux pas etre ta copine, non plus gateaux” or as I translate it, “I don’t want to date you, stop sending cakes.”

He didn’t respond. The following morning he showed up at my house while I was eating breakfast to tell me, and I quote, “I did not like your text message last night.” followed by a frowny face. My host-mother overheard and demanded to see the text message. After viewing it she kicked Uncle Paul out of the house and came into my bedroom with me where she delivered the following monologue in half-English half-French (my host family is Anglophone, by the way, so everything here is in Franglish):

“NO! That is not ok. You are here to study. He should not bother you with cakes. This is unacceptable. You are my daughter and you are here to study, to help Cameroonians, and to learn about our culture, you do not have to deal with stupid men who make you feel uncomfortable. He will no longer come over while you are here and he is very scared of Daddy. I am going to send Daddy over tonight to tell him to stop bothering you. Let me eat a piece of cake.”

So, to sum up, I am in love with my host-mother and my friends really really enjoyed the cake this morning when we started our language lessons at 8:00am. And then again, we all really enjoyed it for dessert after lunch…. it was a big big love-cake. The village I live in currently (Bafia) has lots of urban (urban?) legend about love potions having to do with Peace Corps Volunteers so when I told my fellow Volunteers that a potential suitor had made the cake, some were skeptical about eating it. But we’ve all been living on manioc, plantains, rice, and the occasional fish head or chicken mystery-piece, so the prospect of falling into unrequited love definitely trumped the idea of not eating free cake.

15June2011

I measure my life in new ways now. For example: forage water. There are two types of wells here in Bafia; there is the well we use to cook, bathe, flush toilets, wash floors, et cetera and there is the well we use to procure water to filter and drink. The first kind of well is in my backyard and it makes it really easy to cook and clean. The second kind of well – the forage – is super far away and water is apparently super heavy when in large quantities. I have learned to measure my life in jugs of forage water. One large jug of water from le forage lasts me one entire week of bathing (I’m a snob and I bathe in a bucket of potable water), filtering, drinking, and brushing my teeth. I have two jugs. When the second jug has one bath left in it, I find someone (An African because they can carry things on their heads and I am a weakling) to go with me to the forage to fill them back up. I measure my life in water jugs.

Another example: single dollars. My host family feeds me breakfast (crepes, omelets, baguettes with chocolate) and dinner (corn cous cous with vegetable ndolet or rice with fish) every day. I pay, at most, a dollar for lunch (rice and red beans with a piece of pineapple) every day. After training ends at 4:30 I usually buy one bottle of cold water for about seventy-five cents and one or two 32-oz beers for about ninety cents each. I buy, because I’m a sucker, one package of Cameroonian cigarettes each week for bout ninety cents. I measure my life in four dollars a day.

Final example: sleep hours. The number of hours of sleep I get depends on how hot it is. I have never woken up because of simply being that goddamn fucking hot. It’s seriously the worst feeling of the whole entire world in the history of humanity (hyperbole!). No, but it’s awful. I’ve been taking benadryl before bed every night for the past few nights to mitigate the amount of time I spend rubbing my ankles together to try to itch my billions of mosquito bites, ad that has helped. But I still awake often simply because I’m sweating my fucking ass off constantly. But on a positive note, I sleep at least eight hours every night, just like I require in the good old U.S. of A. I measure my life (still) in eight hours of sleep a night.

9June2011

Of the lessons I’ve learned in Cameroon to this point that is probably most worthy of note. Upon finding himself on a very long tangent about the meaning of life and the ultimate route to happiness, my host father in Bafia stopped himself and said, “These are the three secrets to happiness (imagine this in an African accent, will you): Be Always Patient, Be Always Observant, and Be Never Hostile.” The following evening, he insisted that I call him “Daddy.” Shudder.

We’re not incredibly close and I still haven’t worked up the gusto to call him “Daddy” but I felt, in that moment, that at least I should make a point to learn some lessons from this guy.

There have been awful moments of my now three-day homestay. The first night at the house we were sitting around the living room, all eight of us in my family, when the lights went out. Before I could even pretend to leap up to grab a kerosene lantern (which is really really hard to light with flimsy African matches), I felt child fingers all over my. Tracing from my eyebrow, down my nose, over my lips, into my mouth, down my chin, over my clothing. Or on my arms. And legs. Child fingers all over me. It was like a horror movie to find myself in pitch dark with mystery hands all over me – my worst nightmare really. And three minutes later when the lights flashed back on, I looked around me to find three children staring at me like I’m some kind of space alien. I’ve been living with them for nearly two weeks now and they still look at me as though I will, at any moment, transform into something magnificent. But instead I just eat my crepes and say things like, “Oui… Non… Bonjour?”

This morning as I ate the onion omelet that Mama made for me, the two-year old boy named Boy chased the housecat, Moose, around stabbing it with a pen every time he’d catch him. It was funnier than it sounds. It made a nice moment out of an awkward one seeing as I am served all my meals – which are for the most part delicious and enormous – alone at a table facing the wall.

I currently find myself in Bafia, a small town in the center of Cameroon. We began our trip in Yaounde, a huge city with the Peace Corps offices and a soccer stadium – among other attractions presumably. We were kept on a very short leash here, often strongly discouraged from leaving the hotel for any reason. One evening, however, the Peace Corps Country Director of Cameroon had us all over to her home in Yaounde where the United States Ambassador to Cameroon came to speak to us about commitment and patriotism and service and all this shit that made my heart and eyeballs swell. But then, to make my misty matters even worse, his wife Babs stood to speak about how proud Kennedy would be and how she felt when he died. It was intense. And then I drank two Cameroonian beers. Oh and I found out today that a ton of people got food poisoning that night and shit their pants for days and days to follow.

Some minor life lessons I’ve learned while here in Cameroon: 1. Don’t tell Cameroonians that your family is Juif, no matter how much you love your family or how much you love your heritage. 2. Just eat it. Knowing what it does not make it better. 3. Poop anywhere and then tell everyone all about it. 4. You sweat always. 5. Spit in your dirty laundry when you can’t find a sink. Worry about explaining the crusty white stains to Mama on Sunday when she helps with your laundry.

And finally, a combination of weird Peace Corps phrases uttered during training meetings: Human beings are the locusts of control; tradition is a good god.

i'm joining the peace corps, as most of you blogovisitors probably know. when i talk about it in public, which is happening more and more these days as i enjoy happy hours and dinners in the name of "goodbyes," i find that the conversation almost always leads to "what are you most worried about?" or "aren't you scared?" or something of the like. i find nice little skirts around these questions, but i decided to really start thinking about what scares me the most. here's the list i've so far compiled:

1. diarrhea: africa is fraught with malaria-carrying mosquitos and while i plan to be on a heavy dose of anti-malarial medications, there is still a good chance that one of these fucking mosquitos will find me, suck me, inject me, and leave me with malaria. and i really just don't want to shit my pants. goal number one is to not shit my pants.

2. egg-layers: i've already clarified that the bugs that scare me the most are the ones who can leave their little babies inside of me to hatch and emerge later. i do not want to be anything's host.

3. sweating: i'm going to obviously be sweating a lot. i just don't want to constantly feel like a disgusting sweat chunk with wet clothes and greasy hair. although this, i'm sure i can get used to rather quickly. this is not so much a fear as something i'm trying to mentally become comfortable with so that when it starts to happen i can quickly become physically comfortable with it too and move back on to worrying about shitting my pants.

4. missing everything: i'm worried about a family member or friend dying or being born while i'm away. i understand that my familiars will be moving on with their lives while i am away, but i don't want to come back to people having toddlers i haven't even met yet.

5. being terrible: sucking at my job and at my life, my host family hating me, not being able to acclimate and being uncomfortable and obnoxious constantly, people thinking i'm an asshole, being an asshole, thinking other people are assholes, other people being assholes, hating all the food, shitting my pants from all the food.

There we go. My list of scared-makers. Now you don't have to ask me next time you see me!

Oh and for the record, I could not be more thrilled, honored, excited, and anxious to go. I'm so excited I could almost shit my pants. There are just some concerns looming beneath the surface that I prefer not to bring up over steaks and martinis, so here they are. They are not my primary thoughts though.

There's a lot of press lately about Peace Corps rape victims. People close to me are aware that I'm about to enter the Peace Corps. So many of those people have been sending me these articles. It's nice that people are so thoughtful.

But, here's the thing. I, as a woman, walk around every day being mindful about the fact that, to some, the female crotch is a target. People are getting raped really really often - someone is probably getting raped right now. And she'll probably never talk about it because it totally sucks and she'll be embarrassed or people won't be compassionate or someone will tell her she was asking for it or someone will refuse to pay for her rape kit and she 14 and doesn't have any money, or she can't afford to get all the way to a planned parenthood or her parents will call her a whore or it hurt and she's ashamed or it's a really hard thing to say out loud because once you say it out loud it's a part of your forever consciousness and it might replay in your head over and over and over until you lose your mind, or any other number of reasons. (Certainly, this could apply to a man as well, but I'm a woman and I'm talking about women, deal with it.)

So while I am appreciative that suddenly a lot of people are reading these rape articles and expressing concern for me because they love me (all men, by the way, only men have sent me these articles), I'd rather that OTHER people weren't thinking of the female crotch - my female crotch - as a target.

So instead of thinking of me in conjunction with international volunteers getting raped, think about the fact that it's hard being a woman and then thank one for dealing with all that shit and not being a total pain in the ass about it. And if you know one who is being a total pain in the ass about it, be nice to her.

There's a lot of press lately about Peace Corps rape victims. People close to me are aware that I'm about to enter the Peace Corps. So many of those people have been sending me these articles. It's nice that people are so thoughtful.

But, here's the thing. I, as a woman, walk around every day being mindful about the fact that, to some, the female crotch is a target. People are getting raped really really often - someone is probably getting raped right now. And she'll probably never talk about it because it totally sucks and she'll be embarrassed or people won't be compassionate or someone will tell her she was asking for it or someone will refuse to pay for her rape kit and she 14 and doesn't have any money, or she can't afford to get all the way to a planned parenthood or her parents will call her a whore or it hurt and she's ashamed or it's a really hard thing to say out loud because once you say it out loud it's a part of your forever consciousness and it might replay in your head over and over and over until you lose your mind, or any other number of reasons. (Certainly, this could apply to a man as well, but I'm a woman and I'm talking about women, deal with it.)

So while I am appreciative that suddenly a lot of people are reading these rape articles and expressing concern for me because they love me (all men, by the way, only men have sent me these articles), I'd rather that OTHER people weren't thinking of the female crotch - my female crotch - as a target.

So instead of thinking of me in conjunction with international volunteers getting raped, think about the fact that it's hard being a woman and then thank one for dealing with all that shit and not being a total pain in the ass about it. And if you know one who is being a total pain in the ass about it, be nice to her.

generally, i'm ok with bugs (so far) as long as they don't threaten to burrow into me or lay their eggs in me.

so, i'm pretty wary of this particular potential health issue:

Filariasis. Filariae are tiny worms that develop in humans,

months after they are bitten by the filaria-carrying black fly,

mosquito, or deer fly. The disease usually causes problems

only after many years of chronic inflammation and scarring of

involved organs and tissue. Filarial flies exist primarily in the

South, Center, and East provinces of Cameroon. But filariasis

has also been diagnosed in Volunteers in the Southwest, some

parts of the Northwest, and the West provinces.

Yes, I caved and bought a kindle, but only because I'm moving to Africa and I can only bring eighty pounds with me and I like to read books a lot. It was either buy a kindle or learn to entertain myself in other ways, and I'm really really hard to entertain. So I bought a kindle. I'm not proud of it. And I still refuse to read it in public, even on airplanes and public transport. It is just unsightly and embarrassing and it makes me feel like a bad person.

Here is a nice summation of why I hate the e-reader:

There is a growing distinction between the book reader and the book owner. The book reader just wants the experience of reading the book, and that person is a natural digital consumer: Instead of a disposable mass market book, they buy a digital book. The book owner wants to give, share and shelve books. They love the experience. As we add value to the physical product, particularly the trade paperback and hardcover, the consumer will pay a little more for the better experience.

i'm going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children

at the bookstore i frequent in minneapolis, they keep the bukowski collection behind the counter.

when i asked, the adorable clerk informed me that they are kept there because of all the pre-adolsecent boys come in and steal it and i said "oh of course pre-adolescent boys steal bukowski."

the adorable clerk's response: "well, they don't stean ayn rand."

Easter means absolutely nothing to me besides eating one entire bag of Chicks, Ducks & Bunnies, getting a major gut-ache, and vowing to avoid Chicks, Ducks & Bunnies next year. Screw Cadbury Eggs.

i just learned the word apotheosis.

it is my new favorite of all the words.

get ready to get sick of my using it.

now, i'm not a charles manson sympathizer, obviously

but, if i was a latent psychopath just WAITING for signs that I should probably start murdering people

i can see how the white album would set me off

it's really manic

i mean, listen to that album, it's all over the place

and there are some really dark spots that might just tell a psychotic brain that the pre-apoctalyptic race war is coming

1. when the days plus the month adds up to the year. for example March 8, 2011.

2. when i'm typing something and i get distracted but my fingers keep typing and then i look back and my fingers were right.

i'll tell you what i realized....

i'm sick of life being long stretches of dealing with shit in order to get to the beautiful parts

i want to live in the beautiful shit and have unfortunate punctuations of annoyance

between The End (The Doors) and Moondance (Van Morrison) for most annoying song of all time