Blaming on His Boots the Fault of His Feet

A Sunday evening found me falling asleep outside a Tbilisi metro station, waiting for my taxi to fill up and get on its way. I don't remember the two hour drive east. I'm sure it was dangerous, and I'm sure the music was not to taste – gratuitously energized Eastern European pop or revamped bad hiphop. And yet I catch myself finding it catchy sometimes. Cringe, yes. Sometimes I’m lucky and get Georgian folk or old Russian rock.

I paid the driver in the red glow of taillights and walked the short dirt road, up to the metal gate of a house in which I had never slept, my huge backpack and guitar, and dogs barking somewhere nearby in the darkness.

I worked the corrupt lock contraption for a few frustrating minutes, and then was inside. The lights worked. Relief. Everything will be okay. My belongings in two big piles, on the couch, on the table, all where I’d dumped them eight days before. A dead mouse lay a few feet away.

Imagine this. A hundred or so foreigners scattered across a small country, and months later plucked up from their respective coordinates, thrown back into the same conference room, the same noisy dining hall, the same warm showers, reliable toilets, fast internet, and the same rows of beds, in that same compound where they'd first found themselves green off the plane. A remeshing of personalities after a very thorough shake up: disorientated, lost, rediscovered, broken, fixed, dark, light, up, down, and then back to the compound in Bazaleti.

And then, in Bazaleti, the constant sessions and classes all day, talking late into the night, playing guitar, not enough sleep, food and tables and notes to compare, and drama, and wine. And then, as if all of a sudden, I was standing alone beneath high ceilings, the first night in an empty house. It was quiet, dark outside, and I was exausted.

I moved heavily around the room, stopping with random recollections, staring off for a minute, forgetting what I was doing.

I was preparing to bathe myself. I poured the boiled water from an electric kettle. It was dark brown. I washed it out, reboiled, and soon was standing in my little bathroom in an old metal tub , my bucket and my sponge and a small shampoo tube kifed from a hotel room a few months before.

A few awkward minutes later I shivered out into the kitchen; a spider was twitchingly lowering itself from the ceiling in front of my face.

This was all nearly half a year ago. I've lived in this house since. I've walked back and forth from the nearby school. I've sat in the teacher's room. I've stood about classrooms. I've been at home, at my table, working. I've bought top ramen. I've bought raw beans and rice and potatoes with my last few lari. I've bought chacha in 20oz fanta bottles and mixed it with carbonated mineral water while watching Blackaddar. I've bought more wood than I thought I would ever need, and went through all of it, and bought more.

For a while I cooked on a crumbling concrete hotplate: a floppy metal spring that's coiled around a pattern of concrete fixtures. The end of the coil is twisted with wires that then plug directly into the wall. I cooked on it exclusively until one day with a huge spark it threw the breaker. Since then I've cooked on my pechi.

I've discovered that laundry is mostly getting soap into clothes, and then trying to get it out again. This is my current working theory. I've learned to simply soak my clothes in soapy water, then haul my basket down the road to the fresh spring water that comes out of a pipe. I shove it under and come back an hour or so later so the water’s running clear. Women tell me I'm certainly not a Georgain man. 

You live alone? the women say.

Yes.

And cook?

Yes, yes.

Really? What do you cook?

Soup, I say.

Of course. Soup! You just put things in it! They mime dropping things in a soup and nod and offer warm and somewhat sexist congratulations. Fair enough.

But it's been difficult to write a blog post all this time. It's almost never a good idea to post when feeling down. You end up trying to sound positive; every line full of forced optimism. The subtext becomes some sort of melodramatic stance of brave endurance and future-thinking, and when thrown out into the blogosphere it is the position you must now identify with, and hitherto maintain until further notice. The whole thing is self-conscious and it all inflates and takes up too much space. And then whatever changes might have happened and new insight discovered, these are lost beneath a ballooning posture and a brave and pained expression, hand on forehead.

Better to stoneface, and withdraw a little. Make one's reports infrequent, playful and a little cryptic. In the meantime, reorientate oneself, where one is at, what one's life is now. Study the variables. Avoid big changes. Don't be spontaneous. Seek company when needed and avoid it when it's too much. Try to be understanding before being understood. Avoid cynicism and optimism: both illusory; both ways of misrepresenting things in order to circumnavigate them. And always affirm life, which sometimes means saying yes to darkness and loneliness and embracing them before moving on.

So it's been hard sometimes. Because of the loneliness? No. I was expecting that. Because of a completely new life that leaves one disorientated and exhausted? Not really. I was expecting that too. What's the hardest thing? It's to show up, ready to persevere, to grit ones teeth and march forward, to push on when exhausted, to endure!, and on all this self-satisfied heroic mythmilk, then find only a bare room, an echo, and a mirror.

So what's so hard is feeling superfluous. A sense of loss and waste. And lack of options. Why did this school request a volunteer, and then not want to work with me? What were they thinking? Did they not realize it wasn’t just a funding source to capture out of habit, but that a real person was coming? Why would a counterpart teacher openly confess to me that the teachers never wanted a volunteer in the first place? - a unilateral act on the school director’s part. In way of apology? Out of embarrassment perhaps? Or irritably, in hopes I will stop trying? I came all this way, I want to tell them.

I came all this way. The last volunteer established an English resource center, with a laptop that was soon appropriated by the director and taken home (one of two laptops this happened to actually, the other part of some USAid program donation last semester.) Several years ago a room was remodeled on a grant to become an English room. Since then it’s become the director’s and secretary’s office. My director has a sort of naughty child thing about her. Has the naive American put it together yet? But, oh yes, she knows what's she's done, overly friendly and fertive, tst tst, Zoya Zoya. But does he know? What does he know? Such is the guilty conscience. And so, it was with a mix of regret, disgust, irony, and relief, and on the advice of PC staff, that I recently abandoned the writing of my grant to have a nurse room funded. The school doesn't know yet, and I don’t think I ought to tell them. They would surely cool towards me even more.

Best to leave it there, not talk about too much. One reason, the more talk, the more folk will want to chalk it up to attitude and self, “…blaming on his boots the fault of his feet,” as Vladamir says of Estragon.  To dismiss someone's experience as the result of lack of character is easier than extending even a chilly recognition. I just think you should snap out of it, one friend told me.  I’d prefer a shrug thank you. Still, I've done good work here though, outside my site, working with other volunteers, creating resources for other folk, an adult English class in another village.

And here, in my village, I sometimes am overcome with an almost hysterical energy, to try to do everything, grants and classes and clubs,  to overcome all through sheer force of will! Crazy crazy. And I always come back here, and wake up here, and it’s hard. It’s like a solid dark entity is roosting on your organs. Hot and organic. It begins spinning like a like small black planet in darkness, and it spreads out like an oil spill, filling up your chest cavity, pushing aside your lungs, and then it turns into a demented ransacking rodent.

And in time you have to face it. You girdle it, leash and collar it in, clench down the choke ball, yank it hard into the backroom, and tie it to a pipe embedded in concrete. It can thrash about and bleat; it can be quite annoying, but is well-contained in this man before you, this well-postured specimen, save for an occasional sharp intake of breath, like the baby just kicked. Or a subtle strain in the eyes. Or long, hyperbolic blog posts.

One finds oneself watching oneself "getting worse," lapsing into self-neglect. Keeping a clean living space and maintaining personal hygiene takes quite a bit more effort in a village anyway. It is certainly more time consuming, bucket baths, and sweeping, and food preparation. It takes sheer will to force oneself up to get up and start, but once you've managed, it gets easier.

A sense of self-respect must be maintained. Force dignity upon yourself. Don't live a certain way, no matter how you feel. Force your head up when it hangs, and look in the eye everyone. What is paramount to the idea of making the world a better place? Pity and charity, no. Dignity is the essential factor, for oneself and for others.  And for oneself first, for practical reasons, plank-removing reasons.

Is it worth it, being here? I find myself wondering that less often than you’d think. If ever I decided to leave it would be something I just would know, I would one day find myself knowing. Not a conclusion rationally arrived it. Still, I don't think I would leave.

And transcendent experiences occur throughout difficult stretches of life.

I was walking home from the NGO I teach at twice a week. Good lessons by the way, and good people. They always make me coffee. They speak no English and yet we communicate well because we like and appreciate each other and want to work together. I enter the NGO tense and self-conscious after the school, and by the time I leave I've come back, I remember who I am and feel a warm sense of worth. See Ryan, it's not you ol' boy! It's not all your fault! Because no matter how counterintuitive, it still always feels like it's something I did wrong. But then I'm suddenly myself again, all this from being shown some genuine friendliness and appreciation. (Who knew I defined myself so much by circumstance? I had no idea.)

Anyway, I was walking home when it all came into focus and everything was in its right place. It was early evening. People moved, and were talking, and children weaving down the road on their bikes, and it all followed and flowed, with the earth in its great slow rotation and rushing silently through space, and I was a mere instance here, listening to the sound of my breath, my footfalls on a dirt road, and found that the only sense to be found in all of this is in what lay about you when you look up. Yes, all very cliché now, but these are mere reflections  here, in text-form. The quality of the transcendent experience is quite different than what one babbles on about afterward: a series of moments of death and life and beauty and acceptance and letting go.

I think I'll go hiking this weekend with Lucky to carry my stuff.

First Week of School, petals on a wet black bough

My first week of school I've passed well enough through my system now with minimal hiccuping, burps, or gastrointestinal  effervescence. The first day, variables were all yet undefined. No schedules posted, and no lessons planned. We ran through the motions mostly, I tagging along to all grades, first through twelfth.

We are meant to observe each counterpart English teacher, and select whom we would like to work with and for which classes. As it turns out, a stranger watching others from a corner is awkward for everyone involved, and soon I was participating in the lessons where I could, and doing my best to keep a friendly and warm smile on my face as I stood at the front.

In the first grade classroom though I found only rows of little, twitchy aliens, looking up through big eyes. They were small and so strange, each in their own little world, and all quietly arranged up like a delicate bobblehead display. They didn't quite know what they were doing there. I squinted at them, trying to discern by what principles they operated. One sat well, attentive and well-adjusted, and then with what looked like a sneeze coming on, began crying as if suddenly becoming overwhelmed by the recollection of some recent tragic event.

Parents nearby the first grade classroom were not much more normal. They gathered peeking in sometimes, smiling about and exchanging significant glances. A father would occasionally stand at the door, grinning and puffing out his chest like he'd just won a spelling bee. One mother, a gaunt woman with a small frowning mouth and big forehead, didn't leave the class room the whole time, but sat on half her daughter's chair, repeating the lesson sternly into her ear and pushing away the child's hand from her face whenever one came up to cover her mouth, which they did with compulsive frequency.

The rest of the classes were comparable for the most part to my school days, several good girls in the front following the lesson, while a few boys sat in the back sharing smirk-worthy comments, and giving the girls a hard time. Every class seemed to have one loud and funny boy who loved to distract everyone with occasional loud amusing comments, but for the most part seemed to learn alright.

The first day of anything is a good day for strange and unexpected things to happen. Perhaps this is why walking home from school later on I found a gathering of people in the intersection near where I am staying, and glimpsed suddenly a large long box with a greygreen head sticking up out of it. It was a funeral procession, and the coffin had been laid between two chairs. People gathered, talking amongst themselves, paying little attention, ostensibly at least, to the box.

I took all this in and looked back to the deceased. The color was astonishing, the deep greenish-greyness of the head contrasted against the prosaic flusterings and mutterings of the living all around. The only similar color in the world, I think, is that deep greenish grey sometimes on the horizon above the sea.

It was hot outside, and a few women bent over and kissed their former neighbor. It occurred to me then as I was standing there that in spite of the consensus that corpses are cold, or so becoming, and despite the data of cliched phrases like lies cold in the ground, or before his corpse was cold, and so forth, dead bodies are almost always warmer than they should be, freshly dead, in a box, on a battlefield, laid out two days, buried, or otherwise. Anything above frozen is too warm. And I found myself there thinking of Eskimos laid to rest in permafrost, and Scully­ in one of the many scenes when she slides out from the freezer a body on a tray in a basement. These thoughts, morbid to write and no doubt to read, seemed normal at the time.

I was all for leaving it at that, and to slip respectfully by and walk the remaining 30 meters or so the to the gate of house in which I'm living. My timing was bad. I then saw Mrs. Dumbadze, my host-mother by Peace Corps, bringing up the right side of flank of women, moving towards me. Her forehead crinkled when she saw me, her face grew long and her eyes wide, and with her lips pouting out a little she began to whine regretfully, in a slow sympathetic nodding. I was told to come along, and as we followed the procession up the road, the casket hoisted on shoulders of men, I found myself irritably thinking of all the things I had to do, my Georgian lessons in less than two hours, and how I didn't even know this person, and that, yes, it is a little inconsiderate, presumptuous even, to conscript me into a funeral procession without forenotice. I walked quietly, and despite the anguished posturing of a few minutes before, Mrs. Dumbadze was chatting and laughing with her friends. Predictably enough perhaps, I began privately drawing hackneyed parallels to The Emperor of Ice-Cream, an awesome poem nevertheless.

Following alongside us was a train of cars. I thought I caught a whiff of formaldehyde; it may have been just exhaust. Up ahead the bald grey-green crown floated onward in the sun, and I couldn't stop looking at it. Whether it was the green flesh in the sun or just Mrs. Dumbadze's powerful cheap perfume, I started to feel nauseous. We reached the cemetery and I was happy to be in the shade. They carried the body into a small chapel, and a few minutes later back out again, and off they went somewhere deeper into the cemetery.

I could have followed, pressing the moment for some epiphany or ironic truth, like we all tend to do at such times. A take home message. A well-earned meaningful reflection to our own life in some arbitrary context to think about as we walk back. But I was feeling nauseous still, and not particularly pensive, and so I let the dead go on its way and hung back, and when we found a ride out, I declined an invitation to a funeral supra, and went back to my room.

And that was the end of my first day at school.

The rest of the week went well enough, and on Thursday I called up a nearby PCV, Shannon, and asked if he'd like to go hiking over the weekend. He in fact already had plans to go with some of his friends overnight in Lagodekhi National Park, where he works, and I was invited along. It was a beautiful hike in the mountains to a waterfall, and the first night I've used the new tent I hauled with me from The States. We camped near the river, and played chess, and cooked fish in tinfoil, and talked in loud voices because the water was so damn noisy.

Down To Business or Something

Time I gifted my thoughts and words to my few and dear blogosphere followers once again; far past time in fact. If I've neglected you, I did so meekly, keeping you in my thoughts, wondering what to write . And if I have tried your patience, know I consider your strain a complement, and apologize while smiling to myself. So thank you. And sorry.

Still, few noteworthy things have happened since water melon picking. I finished The Language Instinct finally, after putting it down for long spells, and reading two books in between. It gets pretty technical about halfway through, and one really must concentrate to enjoy it, and it's very enjoyable, so worth the effort.

I've just started The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. And interestingly it's forward is by Bono. The eloquence  that penned such lines as "You make me feel like I can fly --- so high," comes through just as profound at times like "Equality is a very big idea, connected to freedom, an idea that doesn't come for free." But for the most part, it's alright.

The book is about what it might look like to begin to end extreme poverty. He starts with the fact that 8 million people die a year from being extremely poor. Within the first few pages we find  him in a small typical Malawi village, full of and exhausted old women and children starving and dying from malaria . What few agriculture tricks are available to coax the dry, dusty soil into growing a few things to eat are irrelevant, because the majority of able bodied men have already succumb to the AIDs epidemic. And soon the author, one of the world's most prominent economists, is explaining what can be done and why. He claims, at least he claimed at the time the book was published in 2005, that extreme poverty could be ended by 2025, if the right steps were taken. He also points out that terrorism is largely possible because terrorist organizations have highly instable countries in which to establish themselves. Fighting poverty, according to Mr. Sachs, also is a cheaper and morally superior way of eliminating terrorism (be moral because it's practical! uhg). And I’ll have to leave it at that, because, like I said, I've just started it.

The language is still coming, slowly but surely. I practice every day. I was always really bad at languages in school, and in our trainings I struggled in class as well. But studying alone goes alright for me. I think being an incorrigible introvert is my major obstacle here. Rather than drawing from the energy of the group, from the collective challenge, and the friendly competition of the classroom, I inevitably shrink from it, glaring at it from the corner, finding the whole endeavor all very exhausting.

Georgia: Watermelon Harvesting

After posting yesterday, I didn't take an afternoon nap. I played soccer for a few minutes in the garden with my host brother. It involved a lot of ducking because of all the tree branches at eye level. And then I went with him and his father, what's his name, I forget, into his car, and we drove for twenty minutes or so to a watermelon field. We picked up three other people, two older guys with huge bellies, and a younger guy, maybe eighteen, and we spent the rest of the day picking watermelons tossing them to each other, and putting them in piles around the perimeter of the field. When they found out I was American, a few of them got a kick out of saying "fuck you!" to each other for a while. One guy had his toddler along, and had trained him upon coaxing to chirp out, "puck you! puck you!"

After a few hours, one of them drove a van into the field. The field was full of bumps and small ditches, and to drive such a van into such a field was a bold move, it's low suspension and tires worn slick enough to be eligible for winter sports. It was hard not to admire the sheer optimism, the glass-half-fullness of perspective of the driver and those calling him on with advice and commands. Several times we pushed the van back and forth, breathing in exhaust, getting mud sprayed over us. The field filled with the smell of rubber and a suffering clutch, but eventually we were piling the watermelons into the van, and then encouraging the vehicle along to the next pile. I can't imagine we saved any time. Whether it's more difficult to get an empty van into a field, or a watermelon-packed one out of one, is a riddle I don't know the answer to, because it got dark and we left the van there in the field, and drove back. Tired? They kept asking me. A little, I said.

Apeni, Georgia

The village of Apeni, where I will be for the next two years it seems.


It's a nice place. I live alone upstairs. Everyone else is downstairs, the parents and their boy and girl, Giorgi and Lika.


They've painted the floor boards upstairs for me apparently. A dark reddish brown, a thick oil paint. You can reach down and scratch the floor and get a little of it under your finger ails. Should be interesting in a six or so months.


Last night they had a nice welcome dinner for me. The director of my school was over with her daughter and sister too. I was very tired though.

This has nothing to do with my post but when we went to the castle in Atskuri, John's dog walked out on the wall, and almost committed hari-kari, before John followed him out there, picked him up and carried him back to safety. He's hard to spot, so look closely.

Yesterday we swore in. The ceremony was at Tbilisi university, and host family members came, the directors, and all sorts of Peace Corps people. We sat on the stage in bright lights, and there were several speeches from people, our director for one, some volunteers, and some other people, and then we got to stand up, and say we promised to be good, and then we were congratulated, and walked off to sit down in the front rows. A Georgian music group got up next and played, and they were very talented.


Afterwards there was lots of crying and hugging all around me. We stuffed all my luggage into the trunk of my latest host family's car. It's remarkable it all fit. And then, we were off to Apeni.


The night before, on Thursday, we had a farewell dinner. I showed a short film I'd made in my village, and everyone liked it a lot. I'd finished editing it that morning. We got back to Kistauri late, and then I put off packing and gave my host family a bottle of wine. Wine? They probably thought. But we make our own... And went to sleep. Getting up at 5:50 the next morning was getting up late, and leaving then at 6:40 made me ten minutes tardy. I was almost to the road, when my host brother Zaza caught up and gave me my camera bag.


My new bedroom appears ransacked, my personal belongings everywhere and concentrated around two epicenters, a mostly clothes one, and a mostly books and notebooks and paper one. It's hot up there right now though.


What I'll be doing with myself for the next little while before school starts, I don't know yet. I have to do a summer camp or something, and last night I think I told my director I'd teach a computer class for the teachers.


It's a weird time. Starting up, a new place, new people, stuff I need to start planning, and already so much has happened here. Several crazy-busy emotional days, everything changes, and then now I'm here, waking up, with two huge piles of stuff, a billion digital photos, and nothing I have to do. I'm probably in some kind of withdrawn autopilot state... and I think maybe it's time for a sweaty afternoon nap...


I sitting on the couch now. It's hot, and I'm getting good at killing flies and mosquitoes in the style of the president (not as a metaphor --- that clip where he snatches a fly out of the air in the middle of an interview,  remembe?) They keep asking me if I want coffee or food, and have cut up a peach and brought it on a plate to me while I sit here.  I won't post any more photos right now. It's sound like too much work. But I'll take a laptop photo. And then be out.

Who Untangled Kite String

In our garden

my grandparents untangled kite string.

Now they are unraveling.

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