Cerro Iglesias 2007

During the month of July, I decided to try an experiment. At the end of every day, I wrote down what I had done in the ‘Dear Diary’ manner that I mentioned and lamented in the previous entry. I also wrote down every nickel I had spent that day. I wanted, just for a month, to try being extremely organized, at least in that sense, and see if I liked it. One thing a seemingly endless landscape of time provides is ample opportunity for little internal experiments such as this one. For example, I’m currently working on a goatee, which has been described as a ‘goatette,’ and which I think makes me look like an evil fraternity brother (is that a tautology?), but learning these sorts of things is part of the Peace Corps experience. Despite my previous distaste for a daily recounting of events, I found that it certainly has its positives. I like having a record of what I’ve done and how I’ve felt, although the thought of future grandchildren discovering the journal in a dusty box kept some darker thoughts from finding their way to the page. More surprising was the Hisenburg effect it had on my daily actions as they were happening. Once I had gotten in the routine of writing every night, I got in the routine of thinking about the upcoming documentation. Whatever I was doing or spending was going to end up written down, so a kind of unavoidable personal accountability developed on the page. When I have a thought or a conviction, I carry it around with me and it often grows and changes. But once it is written down, it is tethered to that moment, to that page, and to that version of myself. If I had a job I hated, I might think frequently about quitting and might even resolve to do so, but once I’ve told a friend that I’m going to quit, I know that I will. The friend, just by being external, holds me accountable, and the words written by an earlier version of myself do the same. I didn’t plan on getting so existential here, but sometimes these things happen.
Daily writing wasn’t all positives though. Like any required activity, it sometimes felt like a chore. There were plenty of exhausted nights and at least one hungover morning – I remember describing my stunted thought process as ‘clockwork in molasses’ – when sitting down to write felt like homework. And as Mrs. Slaughter can attest, when I’m writing something I don’t care too much about, the drop-off in quality makes my feelings obvious. This project also left me with very little writing time or energy for letters, stories, and this erstwhile blog. I’ll have to check, but I think that might be my most long-winded excuse for not writing to date.
Not that there is such a thing exactly, but July has been far from an ordinary month. Two weeks from today, if everything goes according to my grand scheme, my family and I will be in route to my site up here in the Comarcan hills. I realized that having the family visit is something like a city hosting the Olympics. I want to make the visit as comfortable as possible while still preserving all of the quirks that make life here so different. So I have been planning for a month to present the best face of my life here, much how in 2008 China will celebrate its unique culture while trying to keep out of sight the fact that citizens have to swear allegiance to the State before downloading Nickelback songs. Of course, my family is only going to be here for a very short stay, so the improvements made in preparation benefit me for the long term. We fixed the holes – most at least – in my roof, fumigated, put in a skylight, and got a group of kids with sticks to hunt down the rat that had been living under my floor. Athens was going to eventually get around to making its streets smell less like a sewer, but the thousands of visitors gave them the extra motivation to get it done this century. Likewise, I’m sure I would have done all those previously mentioned chores at some point, but the impending deadline provided a lacking urgency.
Since the four members of my immediate family make up between eighty and one hundred percent of my reading audience, depending on whether one of my grandmothers is able to find this site, I probably won’t be updating again until their visit is over. My camera’s zoom has been a little jabberwokky lately, so that’s why the pictures having been lacking in quantity and quality. In spite of that, I hope that you can see how big that dirty ole rat is.