Georgia: Bright Green Umbrellas Sleep Furiously

It's three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon,* and I just got home. The rain ruined our plans to walk to the river, and rather return under a borrowed bright green umbrella, I waited it out at Merissa's, unskillfully breaking open sunflower seeds with her host family. I decided not to walk home under a bright green umbrella, to not be stared at and chatted about, and referred to as the American boy who walks home with his bright green umbrella. Short of donning my flower hat, it's perhaps the most unmasculine thing I could do. So unmanly are umbrellas that they are used along with pipes as symbols to differentiate women's and men's toilets. Also villagers like to talk, and a lot about the Americans that have apparated into their village. I heard through the grapevine that a few weeks ago I was seen around the school at night with a bottle of beer, but I don't believe a word of it.

My host brother, Giorgi

Ironic things things are more amusing and more fun to write about too. What I mean is, don't mind me if I sound negative sometimes. Boring is hearing this and this were so pretty and so-and-so is so nice and I like all these things,and here's a list I made. But it really is beautiful here, and the people are good-natured, the mountains are far away and enormous. I am glad I came. I like it a lot. And anyone who saves up a bunch of money and comes here (or joins this), I will show you everything.

I have language classes everyday for almost four hours, and the language is hard. And it turns out I'm not very quick when it comes to learning languages. It would have helped if I hadn't been trying to get by in my meager Russian at first. For a while they just said everything in Russian to me. There are about forty of us new Peace Corps volunteers in Georgia, the G12 group they call us, and put us up about 5 to a village in what are called clusters. "Oh. Your clusters? That's so cute!" was how an American we met at a monastery put it through a lisp. "So, are you guys, like, in the same cluster?" We're lucky. Our cluster all gets along well. Still people weren't meant to spend so much time together. It's unnatural, I think, and unhealthy, and I've had to confront and manage some of the less people-oriented aspects of my personality. I was joking once wondering what it would be like to say in the Peace Corps interview something like, "Helping people is cool and everything, I want to do that, but the thing is, I don't really like people very much. Will that be a problem?"

It's true though, I was not made for groups. In groups, I have no eloquence. My thoughts are trite and uncertain of when to insert themselves into the social environment. Our minds and thoughts are unique. It's all we have. I think groups hijack it. A group imprints itself and imposes imperatives and manipulates thoughts. And the energy some gather from groups, from attention and from "leadership taking," is a kind of insecurity, in my opinion. The outsourcing of self.

They wear me out too. To engage them must be a constant and willful action on my part. I can't help but be aloof. I worry I seem contemptuous. I can become irritable, and then fear everyone suspects it. It is too easy to disapprove of the social outlier. Groups are designed that way. To force interaction, to compete, to ostracize and condemn those who do not participate. Such group-preservation strategies must have been naturally selected for since that very first group. When I am in a group, I have to pee often. My body is trying to escape the group I think. By making me need to pee.

It's not the group members themselves that are unlikable. As groups shrink, the people in them become proportionally more interesting and easier to talk to. People are not themselves in groups, and in compulsory groups in particular as apposed to those that form spontaneously. They are hijacked puppets, possessed by some evil god of groups, whose will becomes their own as they are brainwashed with a collective delusion that the group is the whole world and it's dynamics are one's own. Nonparticipating elements are like diseased body parts that must be treated, altered, or surgically removed.

It's not that bad of course. And again I'm lucky. My cluster is efficient and cohesive unit when it comes to doing things. And I do my best to keep up.





I'm the only boy in my cluster now, since the other one in our little group went back week 2 or 3, after realizing PeaceCorps wasn't his box of donuts. I never knew I would miss bro time, but I do. There are three guys in the cluster nearest ours, and next week I think I'll go there and go castle drinking with them, which is where we share a bottle of wine in an abandon castle. This is probably boring to them by now, but sounds to me like possibly the coolest thing I'll ever do. Castle drinking! One of them claims to have seen Noam Chomsky smoke opium, but I assured him that was utterly impossible. He also told me something he once heard about Peace Corps. Volunteers to Asia he said return to America zenny and enlightened. Volunteers to Africa come back with appreciation for all the nice things and opportunities we have. And Peace Corps volunteers to Eastern Europe return with cigarettes and a drinking habit. He had a hangover the other day, and I wanted to connect or something, so I told him about my last bad hangover, which began in Philedelphia just after our very first Peace Corps event, and didn't peter out until the following evening. Let me recount it for you too.

After our all day long session, hello and welcome to the peacecorps etc, I went to my hotel room and got on the internet for bit, had the last of bottle of jager left over from John and Katie's, and then left about 8:00 to find something to eat. The part of Philly we were in was old and quaint, and I walked a long way, and finally went into a restaurant. Inside everything was wood paneling, and steep wide wooden stairs went down to a bar. There were booths on each side as you descended, and at the very bottom was a stage where a man was playing guitar and woman was singing. It was in fact an Irish bar and there was an open mic going on, and I signed up and sat with some philly originals, Irish Catholic descendants with the strongest U.S. born accents I've ever heard. They bought me a drink or two, and I for myself a drink or two. And I hadn't had anything to eat, so I had some spicy soup of some kind, with another beer. I waited a long long time for my turn through a lot of bad stand up. And then I was introduced by the same Philidephian I'd been fraternizing with all night. I got up and sat down at the bottom of whole place and looked up, and raised the guitar, and realized, Ryan, my boy, you are little soggy. And then I began to play, and then sing, and realized, Ryan you are drunk. Quite drunk. Too drunk to even finish this song. But I accepted this in stride. Tried another song. Much the same. I gave up. Handed him the guitar. Apologized, and escaped. Up and out, and walked back to the hotel. I took a shower, and vomited there. And then I fell asleep, and my roommate woke me up and said under his eyebrows, "Did you sleep in clothes?" And on the bus to New York I was discreet, a ninja even, but could have been found there again vomiting quietly to myself.

It was a mistake. I didn't mean to. I was hard on myself. "Ryan, Ryan, what are you doing? You about to leave for the Peace Corps, and look at the state you are in." We waited all afternoon in the airport, and by the time we were about to leave I was feeling better. I've been much better since.

May 1, somewhere over the Atlantic

The most beautiful creature in the sky is sitting a seat back and across the aisle. She sleeps in my periphery. She adjusts herself, and I wait for the new way her black hair will fall on the vinyl of her airplane seat. She is smallish, the calm of the unconscious in her serious face, across her mousy features. Her feet, socked and stretching in the aisle are big, and the proportions add to her creatureness. Beautiful creatures are strange, because they look like strangers in the world. They almost always have black hair. She is sleeping, and I wish she was here sleeping on my shoulder as we fly against the night.

In a few weeks we go to our permanent sites. I will be in east Georgia near Lagodekhi in a village called Apeni, two hours from Tbilisi. We are not Peace Corps Volunteers yet. We are trainees, still in preservice. We haven't yet been given our wings. I will miss my PC fledgling host family a lot. They are wonderful people, all with good senses of humor, and we drink their homemade wine every night with dinner around 10pm. The men do not drink too much, and the women always ask me if I'm hungry. They make me kasha in the mornings, and I remember to make my bed everyday so as to not find it made for me. The food here is good, and would be even better if all recipes halfed oil, salt, and sugar content, and then halfed them again. There's bread at every meal, and hachapoori at almost every meal. And always a bowl of good tomatoes and cucumbers and a little dish next to it with salt that everyone but me takes pinches and sprinkles on these, or on their already salted food. There are many dishes, usually the same ones. I was familiar with the majority of Kakheti food within the first week I was here. Kakheti is the region I'm in, and the cuisine of every region in Georgia overlaps some and differs some, as do the traditions and temperaments of the people. Kakheti is also the region I will stay in --- I am one of the few --- and it is known for it's epic grape harvests, which I will witness in a few months.

my room

Georgians smile the perfect amount. In the streets they don't smile at strangers, which makes sense to me. Sometimes a little one to make a foreigner feel welcome but no big grins like in the States. They think walking around smiling at everyone is a little creepy, and it is. We Americans can be loud too, and somewhat obnoxious in public places. People stare, and I've heard Americans say, "Oh, no, well, in America it's not weird at all! Lots of people act like this, and it doesn't bother anybody." This is almost true. It always occurs to me that perhaps in America they simply hadn't notice if anyone was actually bothered. To be fair, Americans tend to become more silly, not serious, when they feel uncomfortable, anxious, out of place. But we are all welcomed well, and greeted, and given fruit in the streets. Georgians love guests.


I like how they speak in imperatives all the time too. Eat! they'll say. Sit! Come! If your trying to do something, they don't ask, "Do you need anything? Can I help you?" They either raise or lower their eyebrows and wag their hands and say something like, "Just what ARE you doing?" If you don't eat enough, and say you don't want more food, they tell you again, "Eat! Eat!" As if to say, "Clearly you haven't accepted the fact that you must eat." I think they are surprised sometimes we survived long enough to make it here to Georgia.


I feel I have been adjusting well. In Utah, I know I was an atrophied human soul. I felt like a ghost, haunting myself. Places I would go, I had been before many times, but as a different person from the past. And he was more real than me. He was discovering himself, having new sensations, experiencing pain and passion and happiness and uncertainty. He was restless with twitches. For him these places were the coordinates of a new sensation, something profound, a realization, a fight or a kiss, something funny, all visceral and solid and real, and all in the past. And then they all became the coordinates of memories. And what was I but a ghost going from memory to memory, and wondering what it all meant anymore. And even then I was a stranger. And the places I remembered were full of different people now and the places themselves were changing. As they changed, I found myself needing not only to remember who I had been, but also what the places around me had been too. I was a feature of the past, an impostor in the present.


But maybe I'm wrong. Before I left, in Utah I had good times and new experiences, and I didn't feel like a stranger with my family or friends. I wasn't always a ghost. But I remember now, whenever I was by myself, I was a ghost always. When I was driving. When I was at a park, or walking into a store. Or coming home late at night.When I was looking out the window, or suddenly distracted.


It's difficult here sometimes, but I have never felt as if going back would solve any emotional crises or problems, which is the gist of homesickness. Of those problems, the worst is the same I've had in the States for a long time, a constant absence. And here now it is internalized, and not a constant feature of the environment, not a fellow ghost always a little ways off, not something I might meet in a coffee shop by accident or see pull up nearby at a traffic light. It's not easier, but it's contained and predictable So I guess it is easier. Perhaps this is another reason why adjusting has not been too difficult. The hardest stuff is just old familiar stuff. So here I am. How's that for elusive writing.

Yesterday we celebrated Independence Day at a park in Telavi. They did a great job, with almost-hotdogs, and almost-hamburgers and even soyburgers, and almost-condiments, like ketchupy mixed with a barbecue something, and a darker more poignant mustard with the wrong consistency, and in the wrong bottle. And they had chips too, and soda, and they even brought a big cake, for America's birthday I think. It was, that's right, because the national anthem was sang, and then right after the Georgians amusingly and spontaneously sang their national anthem, probably because they are all so proud of Georgia that they couldn't help it. They all seem incredibly proud of their impressive little country. Even the ones who don't want to live here. "I want to live in America," kids will sometimes say, "But Georgia I love."


What else... my host family has a toilet, a real flush one. I'm the only one in my cluster to be so lucky. When I got here, I took showers by dumping water on my head. I would heat it up with their electric kettle and then mix it with cold water in a bucket. But a small hot water heater was recently installed, and now the showerhead in the concrete bathroom has hot water. I've heard this called poshcorps by some. What else... they way they drive is interesting and terrifying. It may be the reason they all believe in God a toast to him every evening at dinner. For example, a marshutka driver I patronized drove fucking in the middle of a two lane road passing everyone he could all the way across the country. Full speed. That's not the worst. He stopped and backed up in a tunnel, cars swerving around him, so he could pick up someone that had flagged him down for a ride just before. I still remember his jowly face, the fleshy grin in the mirror.


We have two weeks left before we become are sworn in as honest-to-god PCVs, to commit ourselves mind and body to the three tenets of Peace Corps, and to protect the Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic. As for me, settling in and getting to know the community where I will live and work for two years will be good, mind and body. To get used to this appointment. I always thought Wesley said that in the Princess Bride, but what he actually says, in response to, "I must know," is, "Get used to disappointment." Am I alone on this? Anyway, the first month with a host family is always pretty awkward.... one down, one to go... And with that...


*written over the course of a week