NEW BLOG: lesothopc.blogspot.com

I've decided to create a new blog reserved for all things Peace Corps. I received an invitation five days ago from the PC to work as a secondary English, health, nutrition, and lifeskills teacher in Lesotho, Africa. Today I called and accepted the invitation.

This new adventure in the mountain kingdom will begin in November 2006 and last just over 27 months. During that time I hope to describe as best I can my experiences and opinions concerning the initial 3-month training period, the language (Sesotho), the people (Basotho), teaching, and traveling.

I really have no idea what to expect when I arrive; I anticipated going to Eastern Europe or Central Asia! But that's okay. My paperwork was turned in too late, but I am honestly more intrigued by Africa anyhow. I did have an African Politics class and studied two neighboring countries, South Africa and Namibia, extensively. Maybe that will come in handy. In the meantime I'll be reading up on the history and culture of the Basotho, the Sesotho language (it has 3 clicks for crying out loud!), and the AIDS epidemic.


check it out!

I just wrote the best blog entry describing my 10 minute-old fantasy football team, but alas, the blogspot-spellcheck erased it. I'm pissed. you would have been impressed. I'm staying up tonight to watch the US play Greece at 3:30 live in the FIBA basketball championship. My invitation for the Peace Corps (ie where and when) is supposed to arrive tomorrow morning in the mail, so I'm pretty anxious. As much as I'd like to stay up, I'm tired and plan on falling asleep by halftime ..especially if it's a sucky game. more to come!

about the peace corps

It’s very late (or early, depending on how you look at it), and I’m bored, so I’ve decided to write a blog entry. I went to sleep last night at 11, woke up at 1:30, lay in bed until 3, and have been awake ever since. I know why I couldn’t sleep. I’m excited about finding out where and when I will be going to work in the Peace Corps—I should be finding that out very soon, I hope—but even more than that, I’m anxious about leaving again, this time for 27 months, and I find myself constantly needing to justify to myself why it is that I want or wanted to go so badly. My best friends and family never really gave me much flak about it, because they know how I am—that it’s not just sheer boredom that’s driving me. It’s great to have their support, because this is a big deal for me, personally, and I’d have trouble going without at least their implicit consent.

The most obvious reasons why I am so anxious and why I consider this to be such a big deal concern the distance and the fact that this experience will last 27 months. Yeah, I’ve spent over two years in Germany, but having studied German for 6 years prior to going, I was in my comfort zone there soon after I arrived. When my aunts and uncles visited me in Germany in March and took me to France for two days, I was definitely not in my comfort zone, and I know that this is going to be 50x worse. The 12 countries where they could send me are: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Krgyrz Republic (I don’t even know how to pronounce that), Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Turkmenistan, or Ukraine. My best bet would probably be an assignment in a Russian-speaking part of the Ukraine since I studied Russian in college, but even so, there’s no guarantee that they’d send me there, and I only remember how to say, like, 6 words in Russian.

And about those 27-months.. that’s going to be really tough. Every other time I went away, I knew that I would be home within a year, so I was never too home-sick. During the 27-months I might only be able to make it home for my brother’s wedding, and it scares the bejesus out of me that some sort of family emergency could occur, and I’d be in bumfuck kyrgryrzyryzryrzzryr. [Spellcheck is informing me that I might have meant to type “jumbuck” instead of bumfuck. I looked up the word on merriamwebster.com, but apparently it’s only to be found in the unabridged version. shame] I joke, but I worry more than anything else about how horrible it would be if somebody got hurt or died while I was away.

Another thing that scares me about doing this is that the experience could somehow make me a broken, dysfunctional person. For instance, I’d come home and be incapable of communicating with anyone (I already suck at it), and then I’d go and live in a dirty shack without electricity or plumbing like Ted Kaczynski, all the while bitching and moaning about how the United States is egregiously screwing the rest of the world. That’s a worse-case-scenario, for sure, but I do know that I would fall out of touch again with some of my friends, not because I want to, but because, that’s what happens when you leave. The most frustrating thing about being home now is the communication gap which has grown between my friends, family, and I, where catching-up is too much like small-talk, and talking about my experiences teaching in Germany is difficult, because people seem too annoyed or disinterested. Even my mom, God love her, wasn’t really aware of what I was doing in Germany until I showed her a scrap-book from the school that a bunch of teachers made for me before I left. I don’t mean that as a bash—I love my mom, and she does have a very active role in my life—but, that’s the way it goes. Maybe I’m too proud—the world doesn’t revolve around me, afterall—but I want people to be involved in my life. On the other hand, I have trouble connecting with what people around me are doing, because I don’t have a full-time job, credit, equity, much debt, a car, much responsibility (other than remembering things like that a cheese-plate only gets 10 crackers and garnish on top of the mustard cups), etc. I still like to chat about things like that, but I’m probably asking the wrong questions, who knows.

On CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC

Today is the second consecutive day in which I have woken up marooned in my house without much of anything productive to do except to go to work at the Knickerbocker in the evening. So far I have read the newspaper, taken a nap, watched CNN and FoxNews (and become absolutely disgusted), done laundry, checked my email 8 gazillion times to see where and when the Peace Corps is sending me abroad [I’ll write about that soon], showered, watched the news and become disgusted again, and now I think I am going to write a short critique of 24-hour news stations so that I will feel like I have done something semi-fruitful.

Whenever I arrived home from Germany on June 29^th, one of the first things I did was turn on the television to watch Sportscenter and to see what was going on in the world on whatever 24-hour news station wasn’t advertising at the time. Sportscenter, as always, was exceptional. However, watching the news made me want to vomit, and I can’t say that any more plainly.

Obviously, I knew before I left the country a year ago that the TV-news in the United States sucked (and I hope that I don’t sound like an elitist, but all I can remember is the news about Terry Schiavo and Michael Jackson), but never before did the talking heads on CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC seem more unprofessional, sleazy, and downright unintelligent to me. Canned sound-bites, everything dumbed-down and sensationalized, no context, every anchorwoman is smoking hot (except Greta van Susteren [yuck]), name-calling and unabashed hostility, Giraldo Rivera in a flak jacket [mon dieu!]—these are all of the ingredients of incredible infotainment disguised as news, and when I say incredible, I mean both “amazing” as well as “not credible.”

The problem is that it’s impossible to understand the news—especially foreign news—unless we are given some sort of historical context. Unfortunately, tv executives think that Americans are too stupid and inattentive to understand complex news stories, and we viewers consequently only get to watch stories which involve gore (like the 20 women and children killed in Qana) or taboo subjects like homosexuality (Lance Bass is gay! omg!). “If it bleeds, it leads,” I've heard before. When was the last time you saw a news story about Central or South-East Asia, Africa, or South America? Believe it or not, Yossarian, there are a lot of people in those regions of the world who would like to kill you, not-to-mention many other newsworthy stories which should be relevant to Americans.

My problem is, if there are 3 major 24-hour news networks, why do I feel so under-informed after I watch them? Does anyone else feel like this? Does anyone else feel like any morning we could turn on the TV to find that we are being attacked by Canadian Mounties who had been gathering in large numbers along our northern border for weeks or that California finally got so pissed off that they decided to secede and form their own country with William Shatner as king just because CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC were too busy worrying about Oprah Winfrey’s sexual orientation to report real news? What if you woke up to find out that over 1,000,000 people had been brutally murdered with knives in Africa in little over three months because no one was informed enough to react to the slaughter before it was too late?

Well, I’ll step down off of my soap-box now. I wanted to make a few other points, but I've honestly run out of steam. If anyone should come to the Knickerbocker tonight, just remember what I always say: if you happen to order a cheese-plate after 11 PM, I might just have to break your legs.

home, sweet home

not frustrated

I intentionally wrote my last blog entry, frustrated, and didn't post it right away, because I knew that things were going to get better in Altoona, and they have. Transitional periods in life are always accompanied by growing pains [grasshopper], and I just missed what I was used to.

So what has gotten better? Well, I'm pretty active. I work 20 hours a week or so at my neighborhood bar, the knickerbocker, and detail cars on the side with my brother Neil and Zacharias Moussaoui. I only make 6 bucks an hour at the knick, but it keeps me busy, and as long as I'm working, at least I'm not out spending money. [they let me drink for free] I've been on two separate reading kicks since I've been home. That could have something to do with the fact that I think the checkout girl at Walden Books is both novel in hotness and worth checking out, but she could be like 35. [all you need is glove. glove is all you need]*

I see my friends often enough too. They're busy at work, I know, but they always manage to pencil me into their busy schedules. [they buy me stuff{just kidding*not really|love you|*}] Furthermore, I talk to my buddies in Germany every Saturday, and I might even be receiving a visit from the "hottest girl in the world who lives (lived) at the end of my hall." (from the archives) I really hope that she can visit anyhow, but time will tell, I suppose.

Soo.. in summary, my basic needs are taken care of, I'm well-fed (too well-fed probably), my friends and family are great, I've been doing lots of stuff, the latent potential that I mentioned earlier still exists, I have a plan for the future, and life is actually pretty okay.

Better blog entries about more important stuff to come. Sorry.

*that is a Sportscenter reference, btw, not an allusion to condoms lol (added 8/11/2006)

frustrated (blog entry from July 10th)

So I’m home now, teaching escapade in Germany swept under the rug, biggest transition of my life thus far sort of deal. Everything disjunct, broken, miserable in a way. I dearly miss my friends from away and am searching to regain footing with my friends here. No job, 20 hours a day sitting in a house where multiple tvs are continuously running on different floors and someone is always awake. I can’t complain about finally having fridgespace again, however I’m much too self-indulgent to be living in fastfood nation. Neither sitting on my laurals nor feeling particularly useful, all the while letting alcohol flush through my body like a sieve, although I never drink alone. I intend on cutting-back. I’m sick of my dad trying to do everything for me or my mom always pushing $20 into my hand, even if I appreciate the help and accept the money. I left behind my independence and a lovelife packed with enough latent potential to haunt me for years to come. I miss a lot of stuff that I can’t mention without being annoying, and sometimes I feel like my being out-of-sight, out-of-mind is not only desired by me, but by the general consensus.

the word

Inundated by swells of boredom and futility due to my utter lack of meaningful preoccupation, I have decided to begin blogging once again. [whoa pretentious sentence]*

Well, I think that constitutes a blog entry. Time for bed! (It’s 7:10 in the morning, but I actually did go to sleep last night.) [that parenthetical expression was relevant. see how this works?]

*Is anyone familiar with the Colbert Report on Comedy Central? There is a segment of each show called, the word, in which Steven Colbert rants about something, and while he does it, parenthetical jokes and unspoken afterthoughts are printed on a blue screen beside him as though his conscious [I'm tired.. is conscious a word?] were speaking. Maybe I’m not explaining it well, but at any rate, I’m going to steal that idea and start writing things in brackets that don’t offer much in terms of relevance, but which I would like to say anyways [like bleep off you bleepity bleep bleep bleep, etc.]. It’d be funny, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about fitting everything into a perfect structure so much. [I am anal-rententive] Get my drift [focker]?