happy thoughts

(There's something wrong with my browser so I can't change the time and date displayed. I wrote this post January 18, 2006 around 11:31am.)

As my sister Susan packed up to go home, I downloaded vacation pictures from her camera. I also eagerly saved the few she had of Columbia.

There are only ten, but I look at them often and keep noticing new things, like the small crowd waiting by the falafel stand outside of Law and the unlit thousands of Christmas lights silhouetted off the tree trunks of College Walk. A minute ago I noticed a little gray spot in front of Kent. It looked like a sphere with a bump on top and two red sticks poking out the bottom. “God Bless America,” I realized, “It’s a pigeon.” A very fat pigeon.

I love having a laptop. I can now type up forms and lesson plans. I’ve started brainstorming a newsletter geared toward empowering the youth in my community. I can write blog entries without being online. I can watch a movie, program, or write before bed.

Best of all, I can look at the same ten pictures of one square block of NYC over and over and over.

The first time I watched a movie in bed and then let myself out of my mosquito net to pee in my pee-bucket, I almost had a mental breakdown. The contradiction seemed great enough to crash the whole system. But I mean, come on, I have a laptop now. It’s a lot easier to adjust to something you’ve always known and had a break from than to adjust to something you’ve never known. (From what I hear, the reintroduction of my laptop into my life is a preview of what it feels like to go home for good.)

Regardless of my personal technical advances, village life is fast a-changin’. Livingstone now sells brown sugar and wheat bread. The Bomet Supermarket just got their first shipment of ice cream that comes in a cone.

One night I made ten slices of well-buttered wheat toast and went to bed. It was 6:23. I dreamt I was having a buffet dinner with Susan and my friend Joanna. I joined them at the table after they’d already gotten their food. Between the two of them sat one and three-quarters mixed-berry pies. I just sat down and started eating pie. As Susan reassured me with a, “Yknow, whatever,” when I worried about hoarding pie, I ate another bite and declared, "I just can't believe how FRUITY it tastes!" Then I woke up at 9 with heartburn, but I was so, so happy.