desert autumn

No, you can’t watch and read the news and not become depressed.  You need to live your life and think of all that is good on earth and most importantly, you have to put out of your mind all who suffer.  You have to forget them.

We have to forget.  Sounds pretty selfish and I don’t know how to handle this imbalance.  Ya do what you can when you can, meantime enjoy what is good and that requires forgetting. 

I like looking at my wardrobe because 95 percent of the clothes hanging haven’t been worn for… coming up, a month.  I like not washing.  My blue kameez though has taken on a lot of food and markers and just dirt collecting at the cuffs, but...nothing is smelling.    

Is Kandahar better now than it was ten years ago.  An astounding yes.  Unfortunately that astounding change isn’t felt among all and many still want to get out. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im_8kv2xGYk

the present and the future.  It looks like a long long term plan.  Unless they’ve shaken hands with them Chinese looking for those precious metals that no one knows about yet. 

8.31.15

Your jumping from job to job is as if you are constantly turning the wheel.  You don’t want the wheel to stop y…wait a second, I do want the wheel to stop and I do want to get off and settle down and have a yard with flowers and kids and a wife though that seems absurd, so does having a yard.  So, I don’t want to get off the wheel that I am spinning?

That begs another comment, what if I am not spinning the wheel but someone else is, my fate is not in my hands because everything that happens has already happened.  So just go with it and stop yer whinnying. 

I have to give a 90 minute seminar in a week’s time on resume writing.  What the hell, and it has to be a power point presentation, what the hell.  In a week’s time I also have to begin the writing component of the toefl, what the hell, and I still haven’t figured out how I am going to teach this bulky obnoxiously laid out skill that I’m sure is helpful.  When will I have time to read the last 130 pages of All the Light We Cannot See?  I’ll have to get up earlier.

It was the coolest of mornings, I turned off the fan around 3am and I rose from the mattress on the floor, put on some flannel and my old stained pea-green ultra lite fleece jacket/pullover/shirt, I don’t know what it is.  But it was nice to feel the beginning of a desert’s autumnal finest.    

8.25pm

Today’s lunch was a very local dish and I ate from the plate in front of me very carefully.  And as a result I am hungry and I got sugar free biscuits and a handful of the p. nuts left and a handful of cheerios and a box of juice.  and that’s it.  The kitchen is empty of all food.  Nevertheless I am thankful for all the meals I have enjoyed here.  I don’t ask how or who is buying it when they’re not making it but it’s greatly appreciated.  And if it weren’t for my painful left leg says no to yoga sitting concern, I’d perhaps eat more?  I don’t know. 

Going back to university is a daunting decision and I’m getting a few cold feet.  Serious reading, serious organizing, serious research on a topic I will have to take other classes to get to the classes I want to take.  Hebrew.  Oy vey.  I have no use of Hebrew but Greek.  That kind of terrifies me.  I think, I hope, if I make this leap it has to be one in faith.  The doubts have to disappear and stories on the random FB feed that is kind of telling me to go. 

 
Oh, right, it’s all algorithms, click on one interest story and they track you and send you more of the same interest stories increasing the chance there’s a story that might more likely say something about what you’re going to do.  And to note these are not coincidences.