Take 'er easy, Barak

3.29.13

Can too many birds singing in trees become a distraction?  For the two backpackers in room seven, they’d like some shanti as the sun ascends this Good Friday and there it is and wouldn’t you know it, silence. 

Tomorrow there should be an interview with this fella and today I ought to prepare for answers and ask my own questions such as:  is there a coffee machine in the teacher’s lounge?  Is there a smoke tent outside under some nice shady trees?  Are sandals permitted?  What questions will you be asked, what have you been doing for the past eight months? How would you teach inference to an elementary level class? 

I’d like to end this four year journey and there’s only one way to do that and that is settle down.  And settling down has never seemed so unrealistic than it is right now.  Do I really want to settle down in the desert, well, yes and no.  There’s nowhere else, you’ve remained in the vicinity for a reason.  Turkey hasn’t called back and I haven’t heard anything from the others still in the radar.  The recruiters have gone home and the work of sifting and contacting the best people begins.  I’m a long-shot, a Bedouin liked well enough by the Saudis, at least five immediate contacts from an array of places I have no business being in at this stage of the journey.  The last and final mother%#$@ stage in this journey. 

Where would you really like to be now, Johnny boy, give us your day dreaming best.

If there was no financial obligation to consider before allowing such desirous and surely unworthy splendor entry into a most minimalist existence for the last eight months, I’d have to say I just don’t know right now. I’d like to return to Ireland.  There.  Enough?

Well, then take the job wherever it is and make the best of it, save up and visit the pretty island.  There, that wasn’t too hard was it?  And if I wanted to settle down there, that is a crazy day dream because in reality if I don’t have a job to go to before I leave I will make the pilgrimmage to the corner of Michigan and Trumbell, that’s right homey, I’ll bring fence clippers and a tent. 

Michael Card.  What is Easter music without the solemn, without the sorrow and joy.  Easter at St. Francis Xaiver’s in Salalah was the last time in church so, Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.  Yes, I know I’ll be in Pokhara on Easter, go to mass while you’re there.  I’ll do the sunrise on top.  Happy Easter.

Next to the tap right below lives two precious baby black goats and yesterday I helped the women remove a nasty gauze bandage from the rear leg of one of them to reveal a pretty nasty wound.  Sure that leg would be delicious with a nice cherry-bernaise sauce, hey happy Easter!!  I don’t think anyone’s slaughtering goats on Sunday.  A baby lamb, though, hmmm, that sounds good right now.  It is late afternoon and still a small chance for rain.  I’ll believe it when I feel it, the pattern bends each day a little more but doesn’t break. 

The satellite imagery shows all the flash lightening and rumbling in the north and remaining there on its way east.  A breezy starry night above and another dry day.  I’ve thought of a lot of questions for this interview and I don’t know if I’ll remember to ask any of them. 

The Indian guest who is from the Indian state of Assam and works in New Delhi couldn’t help but tell me how much she envied my self-imposed sabbatical and we talked about matriarchal societies and a general, universal hatred, in her words, distrust in mine, of lawyers, one of which she says is one of the hated.  I don’t hate you.  You’re cute. 

3.30.13

Another trio of threes.  Thank God it’s almost April.  An interview in five hours, what to do before then?  Shave, a rare shower, review my blurry history.  Tell us, what have you been doing for the last four years, be brief, please.  Well, it’s been eight months here, then nine months there, and five months here and then ten months there and three weeks there, and seven months here and three months on the road and then ah, four years here.  Whew. 

A warm and quick sunrise and already the queue at the banyon tree rest stop tap is long.  I wish I hadn’t read a thread about this school in Oman.  Teachers can be quite dysfunctional when they don’t understand and accept the flow of ambiguity.  There are no intentions to mislead you, compassion might not be a factor, an unfortunate side affect to fatalism in a harsh monotheistic culture, but nothing is done with malicious intent. 

I understand this clearly, after April, the anticipation, the hope for anything to happen even remotely supernatural will end and will it be depressing?  Well, there’ll be no crawling under the bed now, life goes yawn and on.

A nice hot shower in room one and a shave.  It feels clean once again, and I should clean this tall room. Didi comes by occasionally asking to clean it up but I wave her away.  I can do it it just a guy thing, like wearing the same clothes for two weeks, if it doesn’t smell what the hell.

A group is coming this morning and Suraksha, Prisma and I went to look for some wild flowers to put on the tables and there are none.  The Rhododendran flowers are drying up and the nice colored ones are connected to vegetables.  We did find a lot of juicy yellow berries as far as the farm across from the grandparents.  The interview meanwhile has been delayed a few minutes.  What to do. 

Nothing.  Everything looks fine on the table.  A birthday, an anniversary.  A lot of people, one group from Israel lead by Avinon Barak.  Barak.  Mozaltov and breathe deep.  We’re on top of a mountain, no one sells balloons.  Happy Passover, still?  Mozaltov, am I using this in the right context, Avi? 

I hear a lot of kids running around, but there are only six in the group.  Shalom and Happy Easter, Christ has risen recently, at least in God time, not in people time.  I am trying very hard to be civil.  I would like a nice peaceful evening.  Okay pass the hookah one more time.

10:05pm—This morning I wrote the third paragraph up from here.  After the interview I walked to the grandparents house for a delicious lunch I must describe later. When I came back I found Barak in the garden and a very nice table set out with all kinds of flowers red.  I assumed this setting was for him and his family only it wasn’t.  The group that Laxman told me about had booked the tables and ordered the meals a day in advance, a group celebrating a relationship, an engagement of sorts.  The Israelis were walk-ins.  Are there any significant coincidences going on here?  Two parties, both asking for balloons, one an engagement, one a birthday party, and may it be noted a rather peculiar one.  The former military officer asked that the village kids be rounded up and here they were, the cake comes out the kids are anticipating the excitement, the balloons, helium ones, and the singing is finished, Barak passes out little candies and the kids are dispersed.  What about the cake?