(no subject)
Another week; hour follows hour like water in a river, sings my beloved Ani. The roller coastering continues:
The weekend was grand - there was the NYU revelry, and then I ran into four people I knew on lazy meander into Osu and back (resonating in my own environment, score!), snagged a quiche and a tall glass of pineapple coconut juice (oh, sweet ambrosia!) at the new café in Labone (hello, gentrification, didn’t expect to see you here…), and taught myself how to play All I Want Is You by fellow Marylander Barry Louis Polisar on the ol’ geetar. If you were a wink, I’d be a nod; if you were a seed, I know I’d be a pod…If you were applesauce, I’d 110% be your cinnamon; please, you don’t even have to ask.
At one point on my walkabout, I glanced down at my hands, stained orange from henna and pink and callused at the fingertips from the guitar, and thought, Well will you look at that? Here’s proof that I’m in a place where I have the freedom and wherewithal to do things that make me happy. I went home and reread my word doc journal from sophomore year, right before I left for Ghana the first time:
I also thought, I am never going to be the brave strong amazon activist I aspire to being. I’m too nice. Too afraid people won’t like me, too obsequious and uncertain. Too polite and careful. Neurotic. Always have been. I keep imagining this self out in the future, biding my time and waiting until it comes to fruition. When I get back to school. When I get home for the summer. When I get to Africa. When I get back from Africa. I’ll have the munitions I need then, the experiences and the mental fire. I’ll be ready, I’ll take on the world. But I’m only ever going to be me, me sitting and waiting, me reading about other people going out and wrapping their arms around this wounded earth and giving it love it deserves. And I get so frustrated with my own inertia, but I can never seem to figure out how to get started. After all, that’s the scary part. So I just keep wasting time, writing instead of doing.
I don’t think I can yet call myself an activist per se, but wonder of wonders: I’m out in the world, doing good things, working on being brave and adventuresome. And I’m full of all this pleased (if a bit shaky) confidence in myself and my trajectory, and faith in the universe and in my ability to pull off whatever I want to pull off. Damn, huh? It’s all so goshdarn novel and unexpected and marvelous. I don’t think my sophomore self would have believed it. I believe they call this growing up.
So I was finally feeling good about being back here, and then, boom, my laptop falls off a desk and cracks in two.
I overexaggerate. The left side of the casing for the screen is cracked, exposing some of the cabling for the screen, which is not the end of the world - it still functions perfectly fine - I taped it up with duct tape, the universal salve (duct tape! On my shiny cherryred wunderkind of a machine! Sniff), but it’s super fragile and vulnerable now, and ugh! It’s practically brand new! I was trying to be so careful with it, as it is (sad but true) my best friend here. I was so incredibly distraught all week, especially since the feeling of disconnect was horribly compounded by the lack of internet at all the usual spots. (I’m pretty much addicted, no denying it.) This is what happens when you get attached to things. But I am, once again, being a spoiled brat: it’s still totally functional, and I’m lucky I have a laptop and an internet connection here at all, so let’s just hope it holds out for the next six months in its current state. Big sigh.
M’s reaction when he heard about the crack was sympathy followed by, “Oh, you should sell it to me! A crack doesn’t bother me.” Okay, NOT THE POINT. I’ve been avoiding him as much as possible, it’s just not worth the aggravation. He and K fight and he rides off on his motorcyle, rumblerumble - ooohhh what a MAN we’re all so fucking impressed. Momma suggests my rocky first week might be blamed on jetlag and testosterone; I think she’s onto something.
So that was a big chunk of Downer, and then Ghana won the opening game of the African World Cup! (Forget Ghana @ 50; the air of festivity and the decorations and ongoing celebrations for the cup put the anniversary to shame.) I didn’t watch it on tv or even listen on the radio - I didn’t need to. Every play was in surround sound - from the stadium off in the distance, the houses all up and down Church Crescent, and spilling out into the rest of Labone and beyond. GOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL!!!! It’s fucking amazing. The city erupts. I got no sleep that night, and the streets were a sea of redgreengoldgoblackstars for days before and after. I got a kickass world cup shirt showing three teletubbies painted in Ghana colors playing football - absurd and amazing. I promise, pictures soon.
And then work was rather stressful the rest of the week - there’s a expat consultant in town, and a workshop involving ministry people in progress, and major cross-cultural (heck, cross-bureaucratical) miscommunication. Which is of course my forte, but it’s hard to maintain academic curiosity when you’re so invested in it. Welcome to the real world. Biiiig sigh.
But Emma, a girl my age who is fulfilling her national service (required civil or military service post following university) at the ministry of education, is totally my friend now! Score. She was educated at an international school in Accra K-12, so she’s got an unusual perspective - and her senior thesis was a quasi-anthropological exploration of exchange students’ experiences at University of Ghana-Legon (i.e., what are the bundled notions of Ghana they bring to the experience, and how does that shift when they’re here - what is the Ghana they’re engaging with, and why, and how much does that reflect the Ghana of their local peers?). Pretty awesome. I think she’s going to be a good ally.
But no word from the NYU kids all week, after that initial burst of extremely gregarious sociability. (Did I do or say something untoward after they broke out the Kasapreko…?) That plus the stress of work and the stress of home (avoiding M + new nanny for the girls, oh lordy), the laptop situation, Lindalinda being strangely standoffish, and my utter inability to get Skype to cooperate when I need it most had me feeling pretty blue.
An extended chat with dear Em and few calls later - one from my momma, one from my beloved Armenian and one from my would-be-academic-doppelganger down the street inviting me out to Celsbridge - and I’m feeling fine again. Ladies and gentleworms, your hapless heroine is quite the summer storm these days. Patter patter BOOM; rinse, endure dry spell, and repeat.
Postscript: It has come to light that the girl responsible for the phrase “I’m used to something a little more primeval than this” from my last post has a banjo.
A BANJO.
HERE.
With her. Down the street. In House 2; quite possibly in my old room. She must needs be my new best friend!! Sorry, laptop, you’re old news. Borrowing M’s extra guitar of late has been a marvelous salve for my nerves, but a banjo takes the cake any day. (Not literally though, banjos don’t have hands, don’t be silly.)