Across the Universe

The times are changing. I was searching for a more original opening (time by its very definition and perception is always changing), but it works as a summary. I woke up Tuesday grabbing for a blanket for the first time in three months, a sign that the worst of summer is past and we’re heading back into bearable hot weather. Those two months huddled next to the fan from 11am – 3pm were less than fun.

And our street has asphalt! The main road that runs next to the governor’s office and the school got a new resurfacing, and then with the leftover materials my little side street was honored with a new black-top. So good-bye to the huge pot-holes, gravel pits, three-inch deep mud in spring and fall, and cars slowly maneuvering their way through the rock obstacle-course. Two days ago kids were celebrating their new road by running sprint races barefoot, whooping with joy. And as of yesterday a teacher’s daughter is in the hospital after being hit by a car on a road where before everyone was going 10 miles per hour and now they’re pushing 60 or 70. We hear for the first time a vroom sound outside our gate and every time we glance at each other with foreboding that soon there’s going to be a screech, crash, and squish. People aren’t sitting on their stoops anymore.

With two weeks left before the reopening of classes, the school building is once again filled with teachers and workers scurrying around making everything ready. It used to be that I was the only one in the building teaching my clubs Mon-Fri, but now the hallways are filled with the bickering voices of Turkmen adults grumbling to be at work. It’s a nice familiar sound. The final stages of the first floor renovation are on hold as there is no cement in Baharly (troubles between the governor and the cement factory, apparently). When I asked for an estimate of when cement would again be available, I was told “five days, ten days, may be two months.” Translation = no one knows. So it looks like we’re going to be doing the work while school is in session, which will be fun for everyone involved, if everyone considers a massive inconvenience and logistical nightmare fun.

Even without a new floor, the school is being daily transformed. All images of the past President, Turkmenbashy (people are actually beginning to open up and call him a “dictator,” it’s heartening), are being replaced by images of the new President Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedow (we affectionately call him “Burdy”) and Ashgabat scenery. Considering the number of images of the old President around the building (a mural, a statue, more than a dozen posters, plus 4-10 photos in each classroom), this is a very large task. In addition, by decree, all images of the Ruhnama, the former President’s literary masterpiece (there’s a two-story statue of the book in the city that spins and people dance around it during national holidays), is also being replaced by pictures of Ashgabat architecture. Last week someone took a sledgehammer to our golden statue of Turkmenbashy in the front hallway (there’s a poster of the new guy now in its place) and there is a picture of the independence monument where there used to be a poster describing the former President’s ancestry and current family tree. Folks wondered how long the new President, the former President’s dentist (and the former Minister of Health, let’s not forget), would allow images of his predecessor to hang like deities from every flat surface in the country. Apparently he lived with it for the admirable period of two years and now they’re all coming down. We’re in a new regime, a new era. So far it seems to be a whole lot better than the old one: more internet cafes, less road blocks, a more open economy, less visible KGB surveillance, etc. I’m a fan.

On the home front, a carpet is under construction in our kitchen. Considering that the loom (pieces of lead pipe, brick, and paper mache resting on the floor) stretches from one side of the room to another with about two feet of walking room around the stove, the kitchen is now effectively the carpet room. Our cozy living space with sofas, a TV, a stereo, two sewing machines, and lots of pillows is now filled with stretched wool/cotton blend string. We’ve moved our eating either outside or into the other house (where my host father used to cloister himself sitting alone in his underwear watching Russian reality TV). It’s cool to see the carpet daily develop, the huge chaos of bagged colored yarn slowing being brought into a harmonious order, but it will be nice to have our kitchen/living room back too. Even with six women working eight-hours a day, it should take three months to finish and then it will sell for several thousand dollars to a market middle-man.

With all the changes around me, I am inspired to reflect on how much I’ve changed since entering this country 10 months ago. The conclusion? Professionally, I am a good teacher. I entertain and enlighten my students as much as they will accept (I’m not a god) from Monday – Friday and in the afternoons I either teach adult classes or go to my Turkmen counterpart’s house and do the best-friend thing: complain about boys/men and how much our lives suck. She usually wins. Personally, I feel a rod of steel in my spine that wasn’t there 10 months ago, a strength that I went into the Peace Corps to find (or prove I had all along, a trick of semantics), and my salary is nearly gone from overly-partying on the weekends. I don’t know if this evens out as being more or less mature, but I like to think that I’m learning how to grow up and have fun, rather than the alternative interpretation which is that I’m becoming an incorrigible adventure-seeker. May be it’s a bit of both.

Prepare Thyself

October is approaching quickly (well, quick enough) and profiles of the incoming group of new Turkmenistan volunteers are trickling in as we stalk them on Facebook, Yahoo friend groups, and MySpace. So as a message to them (and to any perspective Peace Corps volunteers to Central Asia), I want to paint a picture of what you’re in for:

First, prepare to go insane. And not just the eccentric uber-liberal, tree-hugging crazy that people expect from Peace Corps volunteers, I mean truly gaga insane. Like the girl in Bolivia who stabbed a cow with a butter knife after it ate her last pair of underwear (the cow liked the taste of washing soap, apparently). And how when I walk through a herd of sheep every day to go to school I imagine that I’m going to me medically separated for injury-by-ramming. Those sheep may look docile and sluggish sitting there all huddled in the shade, but I know that behind those black eyes lurks a devious intelligence that’s just waiting for me to let my guard down. But I’m onto their game: I won’t let any demon wool-walker get me.

Second, prepare to go ugly. Worldwide, the pattern for Peace Corps volunteers is for men to lose weight (think Holocaust-victim thin, poor fellas) and women to gain (like filling up a water balloon). I’m not going to describe what my feet look like right now. When I asked the Peace Corps doctor if I should be concerned with the discolorization and the morphed shape, she said I shouldn’t be concerned, it’s just the logical conclusion to walking around for ten months over dust and grime in sandals that tend to rub huge calluses in strange places. She assured me that ballerinas’ feet look much worse. I refrained from reminding her that ballerinas wear shoes to hide their feet while we PCV display our deformities to the world like a strange badge of martyred honor. And, of course, we have a wardrobe of approximately four (five if you’re lucky) outfits, so even if a shirt starts out cute, it loses its effect through repetition (and cursory washing) pretty quickly.

Thirdly, prepare to obsess. This may seem like part of the “go insane” prediction, but it is significant enough that it deserves its own category. Like the Victorian matron who sits in a darkened room cooking up new hypochondriac diseases for herself, PCV stew at site thinking over and over again about whatever pop culture has appeared in our lives recently. A TV show or movie that in the US might be “good” or even “really good,” is here the pinnacle of cultural achievement worthy of deep analysis, speculation, and life-changing decisions. Consider how in a recent email to my parents I spent a good page and a half comparing the relative merits of BBC Doctor Who vs. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the former has better guest stars, but the latter has a better all-around ensemble cast and more emotionally-provocative mythic parallels). See?

Fourthly, prepare to be given responsibility beyond what you feel capable of. This is a mixed blessing and is perhaps the reason why many of us join the Peace Corps to begin with. As 20-somethings coming straight out of liberal arts college with no skills except how to sound good on paper and subsist on Instant Mac-and-Cheese, our first jobs consist usually of grinding 9-5s where the most significant thing we achieve is getting the fax machine to work. But here you’re “the American,” the magical alien come from space with nifty toys and obscure skills (wow, how fast you type! But you can’t tailor a dress?), and they trust you to be the boss, not the intern. The first floor renovation is coming along (we have the money, as soon as the principal comes back from vacation we can buy the cement and start construction, then there’s just the paperwork) and the next project is all lined up: fixing/installing a new heater for the school. Installing and maintaining furnaces are services the local school system is usually expected to provide for schools (along with water, which we also don’t have at the moment), but it’s a bit like being on the organ donor list – there’s always someone else who the system decides is more “deserving” of the money that year. Our school is the newest in Baharly, but was built during a period of national turmoil in the mid 1990s and so is also the most shoddy. So although we need the most repairs, we’re the last on the list for funds and support because we’re still technically “new.” Nowhere but in the Peace Corps would they trust a book-worm academic anthropology/history major to over-see the assembly and funding of major construction projects. I’m learning fast.

Lastly, prepare to realize you had an adventure about a week after it happened. When answering questions from non-PCV Americans I realize that I live a rather bizarre life. There’s a new baby camel living in the neighbor’s yard, there are two dogs and three frogs that stare at me unblinkingly while I bathe over my bucket, I have a student who is an international chess contestant, cars drive over roads while they’re in the process of being paved (I was inches from getting hit by a steam-roller while in a taxi earlier today), and chickens poop on my window sill every morning. And that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head and doesn’t include all the Turkmen human cultural eccentricities, of which there are hundreds. But it’s just life now and most of my anecdotal “adventures” were, at the time, just another problem to solve with as little fuss as possible. It means that any individual day just feels like another day and only when thinking about it later (or when I talk about it and someone makes a face) do I realize that, wow, I’m living in a really strange world and am having the time of my life.

Because that’s what it all comes down to: you think constantly about how you’re going insane, turning ugly, obsessing to a point where you feel like a stranger to yourself; you feel overwhelmed by the expectations of others and fulfilling a role you don’t feel qualified for, but ultimately the insanity is what makes it marvelous and I wouldn’t be anywhere else. :)

Turkey!

Turkey and Turkmenistan are not the same country. I realize that they start with the same first syllable, but they are as different as Canada and Cancun. And yet small hints remain. In Istanbul there were chickens living in the highway median. In Ankara girls wore headscarves with jeans too small across the ass (a contradiction that isn’t seen in Turkmenistan yet, but would not be out of place). Our oh-so-Western and educated guide in Ankara said Mom got food poisoning because of the weather (I almost fell over laughing in the van). Our tour-guides were also generally more often of the Central Asian model than the Western: their purpose was not to give an insider insight and show us the places outside the tourist track, but rather to make sure that we stayed on the tourist track and only received the party line. It’s like we paid for our own KGB agent to show us around and tell us that the man being arrested in front of us was a perfectly safe individual who hadn’t done anything wrong, and yet the government was right to arrest him (true story). One of our fellow tourists (whose family is Turkish) told me that Turkmenistan is exactly like Turkey 30 years ago and I believe it. As Turkey is an immensely cool country which I wouldn’t mind living in when I grow up, I see this as a very optimistic prediction for Turkmenistan which I’m doing my part to bring to fruition.

I will spare you all a detailed blow-by-blow of our itinerary. My parents and I spent three days in Istanbul getting on and off a bus seeing the major attractions of the city and the Bosphorus. Then after a quick flight to Izmir we spent a day wandering through the immense Ephesus ruins. It was a rather impressively-preserved site, but our attention was distracted by trying to keep ahead of the Italian cruise-ship crowd advancing behind us like a solid horde of bronze-tan wildebeests in big sunglasses. The next day was Pamukkale (“Cotton Castle” because of the calcium deposits that make it look like a tiered sugar cake) and the ruins of Hierapolis, a Roman town built to take advantage of the Pamukkale thermal springs. I resisted the temptation to get covered in expensive mud. Then we saw Cappadocia for three days (see below). After Cappadocia we jumped back in a plane to see Ankara for two days, viewing the makings of Western civilization at the Hittite ruins of Hattusas and Phrygia Gordion, as well as the massive monuments where the modern Turks worship their republic’s founder, Ataturk; very cool guy apparently. As might be apparent, the word “vacation,” when traveling with my parents, is not synonymous with “resting.” It is in fact more synonymous with “journeying,” or -- do I dare? -- “working.” My parents got on their plane back to America 10 hours before I was scheduled to return to Turkmenistan so I used that time to “vacation”: sitting in various scenic locations reading “The Book of Air and Shadows” by Michael Gruber (really amazing book, far better than “The Da Vinci Code,” of the same genre), playing on the internet (everyone should see “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” at drhorrible.com), and watching movies in an honest-to-God movie theater (“Wanted” is okay, the Batman movie wasn’t out yet in Turkey).

I hesitate to gush about Cappadocia because I don’t want to give away the surprise. Call me an ignorant cretin, but I hadn’t heard of Cappadocia before this trip. While we were in Istanbul we’d run into other tourists and the first thing they’d ask us was “have you gotten to Cappadocia yet?” and we’d say, “no, but it’s on our list,” and they’d turn away with looks of secretive envy. Neil Gaiman in “American Gods” describes places of power, places in the world where sacred energy has gathered and human beings traditionally respond by building temples, monuments, and (in America) road-side attractions. I felt it in Delphi in Greece, in the slave pens in Zanzibar (for different reasons), and now in Cappadocia, that intangible something that leaves a mark on your soul. It isn’t just the physical wonder of the place, an ancient lava bed where erosion has eaten away at the rock and turned the landscape into walls of curling, sloping cliffs like the sides of a macaroon pastry and towers euphemistically called “fairy chimneys.” And it isn’t just the history, where ancient Hittites began carving out homes in the soft rock towers to hide from invaders and then early Christians built monasteries and chapels as well as entire under-ground cities linked by miles-long tunnels that go over 40 meters into the ground and served as places of storage and refuge. Functioning underground cities. Seriously. But there is a sense of wonder that goes beyond all that, a sense of sacredness that goes deep into the soil and is tangible even when flying hundreds of feet over it in a hot air balloon at dawn. Thank you, again, Dad for that trip.

And thank you, parents, for paying my way out of Turkmenistan, for being delightful and sensitive companions, and for giving me a wondrous vacation to remember as the days tick away at site. Now all I have to do is wait for next summer. Dublin, anyone?

All-Vol

It’s a bit surreal to realize that “All-Vol,” the once-in-a-year all volunteer conference bringing in all 60-some Turkmenistan Peace Corps volunteers from across the country for education and debauchery, has finally come and gone. We looked forward to it for months, we came early (if we could) to start the festivities as soon as possible, and then stayed until the Peace Corps staff started to give us the angry eye. The first night I stayed over at Brit’s, a T-15 (a girl from the year before me, I’m a T-16), with the five acknowledged biggest partiers in T-stan PC. For someone who never went to a Greek party, never stayed longer than 30 minutes at a suites party, never got more than tipsy in 4 years of college, and never went clubbing within the United States borders, I’m doing a lot of catching up. Beer tastes a lot better these days, although vodka remains only bearable when it’s so smothered in juice and soda that it’s undetectable. Even watching other people take shots makes me feel ill. Anyway, after the first night partying at Brit’s, there were three days of conference learning about methodologies and how to get along with Turkmen culture interspersed with healthy doses of peer support sessions making “don’t quit” cards for each other.

We got all dolled up on the 4th to attend a fancy embassy party at the house of the American ambassador to Turkmenistan. In one of the oddest evenings of the last year, we walked through a large metal gate, two sets of metal detectors, and past a security booth built more securely than the Turkmen airport, and then across a lawn -- an honest-to-God-lawn with manicured grass and everything -- through a large house that looked like a Monopoly hotel piece, and then out into a grassy reception area with free wine (wine!!) and beer and a demonstration of imported Native Americans doing a sun-dance in a corner and an imported cowboy doing rope tricks in the other. In between them was a huge buffet of Mexican food which was delicious enough to inspire us to wait in line for 45 minutes for seconds and thirds even when we were way past full. The food was so delectable and novel it made almost every single one of us extremely sick the next morning. And desert was apple pie and vanilla ice cream. Once people stopped ignoring the “tribal demonstrations,” the US Airforce band started up with a series of classic rock covers that had the drunkest of us up on the dance-floor going strong within minutes. The less-drunk followed soon after and soon a good half of the volunteers were screaming “Go Minnesota!” or “Go California!” at the top of their lungs as the band called out tributes to the states and then flailing about the dance floor in a way that had the Turkmen guests equally appalled and envious. We did a lot of laughing about being on “American soil,” but considering the small patch of American twilight zone the embassy achieved on that evening totally isolating us from the rest of the Turkmen world, they could very well have imported the ground beneath our feet along with everything else.

Our All-American week concluded with a true American past-time: baseball. Well, technically we played softball and then for only five innings (seriously, though, five innings is a really nice length, professional teams should learn from our example), but I can proudly state that the T-16s whooped the T-15s’ asses! With a score of 15-10 we had a solid victory. I should say in all fairness, though, that the spirit award should really go to Scott, the T-15 captain, who continued to play and make home-runs with an over 100-degree temperature and vomiting between plays. To help out my team I did them the incredible favor of not playing and instead dispensed water and cheered really loud. I may have played soccer and danced throughout my childhood, but my coordination is only in my feet: my arms might as well be attached to my knees for all the use they are during hand-eye coordination games.

Turkmenistan is a truly amazing place filled with wonders that are not available elsewhere. It is so bizarre sometimes that I wonder if the entire country isn’t a huge hoax and someone with a hidden camera is going to jump out from behind the outhouse one day and say “gotcha!” And then other days it feels so familiar that only the camel in the neighbor’s yard reminds me that I’m far from home. And yet, for all its endless fascinating features and new experiences, it’s time for a vacation. This week I’m off to Turkey to see my parents for the first time in nine months and to take a posh tour of the historic and cultural sites along the Turkish coast. Two weeks of running water, pedestal toilets, and not being alone in a strange land. It’s time to get out of town.

Watching paint dry was never so interesting

There are two ways to draw a world map. The first is with an overhead projector: you make a copy of the world map and then just project it at the wall. Simple, easy, concise. It requires an over-head projector and electricity in the art space to work. We have neither. So we’re doing the second method – the grid method. Using meter sticks to measure out 7cm squares across the 2mX4m space and then using the world map drawing provided by PC, copy each individual block onto its corresponding grid box on the map. After drawing the initial blue rectangle (mirroring creation, we begin the world with water before shaping land masses), we drew the first vertical line (not grid, the first LINE) along the side and the first horizontal line along the bottom in three hours. We didn’t have a leveler so each line had to be measured every inch or so to make sure it was still straight and then compared with hanging weighted strings to make sure that the vertical line was still straight. To repeat, two lines took 3 hours. Three hours. There are approximately 100 lines on the grid. The assistant principal stopped by to see our progress and politely and quietly explained that if we wanted to finish the grid, not to mention the entire map, by the end of this year, we should try something new. Taking the string we were using to check vertical straightness, we covered it with classroom chalk, stretched it across the wall from our starting to our ended points, then snapped it against he wall. The chalk on the string bounced onto the wall and made a perfectly straight line between the two points. Then all we had to do was trace along the chalk lines with pencil. Three of us working non-stop finished the entire grid in another three hours and on day 3 we could actually begin drawing the map.

The World Map Project began in 1988 when a Peace Corps Volunteer, Barbara Jo White, while waiting for a bus in the Dominican Republic was inspired to get kids interested in geography by drawing a world map on their school wall. The idea spread across the Dominican Republic and then across the PCV community until it became an iconic part of the PC organization. Until this year, each PC training group in Turkmenistan was required to draw a world map at their training site school. The program stopped when schools who had hosted multiple training groups mentioned they were running out of wall space. I am the first volunteer in Baharly, however, so this is a new task for us all.

Thankfully, I’m not taking it on alone. Although PC provided all of the materials and I’m the only one who can read the instruction manual, the project is being led by my English teaching counterpart and local Wonder Woman, Altyn, and carried out by her three student recruits: Batyr, Shamahammet, and Yurin, two 10th graders and one 8th grader singled out for their artistic ability. Working an intensive five days, three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, we drew in the continents and countries with pencil, went over the lines in Sharpie (our efforts hampered by having only one marker for the five of us), and then painted in the nations. As I write this, we’re nearing completion of the final stage: writing in the names of the countries in Turkmen. We had hoped to finish up last week, but my first bout of major stomach illness (the doctor thinks it was salmonella) sent me to Ashgabat for two days of recuperation and map efforts stalled in my absence.

Throughout the process I’ve been reminded of how important this map will be for the kids and for any visitors to the school. During the pencil outlining stage, one of my artists got off the grid by two squares, twisting China into an unrecognizable shape and making all of SE Asia appear on the wrong side of India. And here’s the clincher: no one noticed anything wrong until a good two hours of work was completed and I finished class to come check on it. Anyone with any familiarity with the shape of the world would have noticed that something was up immediately and double-checked the grid numbers. Our biggest blunder, ironically, occurred with the placement of Turkmenistan: one of the artists was so excited to draw his home nation that he forgot about Afghanistan and all of Central Asia was pushed out of kilter. We didn’t notice the problem until after we’d gone over it in Sharpie so Turkmenistan and its neighbors are a bit messier than the other parts of the world. After seeing what happened to SE Asia, I drew all of Africa myself to make sure that it got the appropriate care and attention. My drawing skills aren’t spectacular, but, like so much of this project, it’s the thought that counts.

My hope is that this map will inspire children to learn more about the world around them, ask more educated questions than “is Germany a neighbor of America?” and begin to see their lives as part of a greater landscape than their immediate surroundings. It’s possible that I won’t see the effects of the map within my brief time here, but hopefully future volunteers here will reap the benefits of students and parents with a greater world perspective and wider ambitions.

Fly with me

So my clubs have increased exponentially in size. Kids come, have a good time, then show up the next class with their friends, their neighbors, and their cousin visiting on vacation. Folks in the adult club get a sample of what I’m doing in class and then send their kids the next day, older siblings drag along their younger siblings, and so I no longer have classes with only four kids: now I have 20, 25, 15, and promises of more in the weeks to come. It makes planning tricky as I have to teach the kids who showed up to every session and have mastered “Hello, how are you? My name is Aygul” as well as find a way of intensively reviewing the basics for the new kids. Some days it feels like I’m just going in circles repeating old material, reviewing old material, and then running out of time before we can get to the new stuff. I’ve made a kind of peace with myself knowing that these summer clubs are more a symbol of my involvement with the community (they’re open to whoever shows up, while the school-year clubs are only by invitation from the principal and the other English teachers) than actual instruction.

The best part of the summer, however, is the five-day work week. For six months I have lived a six-day work schedule with a single day off (Sunday) to rest, recuperate, and seek out non-Turkmen companionship. When there’s only one day off, it becomes a source of minor anxiety to decide whether to spend that precious time connecting with people at site, going on field-trips with my students, or coming into the city for internet and American people time. But only working Monday through Friday means that on Saturday I can go on field trips and spend time people at site (see below), and then still have AN ENTIRE OTHER DAY to go to Ashgabat and pretend to be American for 5-8 hours on Sunday.

Last week I used my newly discovered Saturday to head with the eighth graders to Serdar Yoly (again) where the picnic was a bit lame until we found the swings. We arrived early, around 7am, before the swarms of kids (and my bio-rhythms) were awake so we had the playground all to ourselves. At first they just sat on the swings swaying slightly, using them basically as mobile chairs. At first I was annoyed – what a waste of a good playground swing! -- but soon it became evident that they didn’t know how to swing. When a boy pushed a girl’s swing, she went may be a foot and started squealing that it was too high. You must understand, I have this thing about swings. Swings are the closest thing we have to self-propelled flight; they simultaneously launch the imagination and create a breeze as the wind whips past your face and through your clothing. So when one of the kids got up to whisper something in a friend’s ear, I stole her swing and was soon getting a good 15 feet of air and terrifying my students that I was about to die. But they’re 16 and not about to be out-done by their stodgy old teacher so before long they were competing for who could get the highest. I even got Altyn, my fellow English teacher, on and up and going strong. The pictures don’t do the morning justice; they doesn’t capture the happy sighs and squeals, the laugher, the flashes of fear, joy, exhilaration, and discovery across their faces as they soared higher and higher. They can’t capture a kid’s first flight.

The Song of (Brown) Summer

The weather heats up, we pop Benedril pills to be able to sleep and ignore the pools of sweat and flies, and dream of vacations (Turkey with the parents in July) and upcoming conferences (i.e. clubbing, drinking, English language socializing, and, to quote one of my most infamous fellow volunteers, “blowing up”). The stores are overflowing with juicy tomatoes the size of softballs and apricots that look like they came from a Tropicana commercial. The Coca Cola is flowing like a river through my over-caffeinated system and I spend my time playing on the computer, writing letters, watching the same imported movies and TV shows repeatedly, hanging with the host family occasionally, and planning my lessons that continue despite the end of the school year.

My summer clubs began last Monday and I’m working out the kinks of each group’s needs and eccentricities. Out of my 8 English clubs, some have as many as 10 or 11 kids; others have as few as 3 or 4. My adult club has 4: two guys who are at a mildly conversational level and just need help with advanced grammar like the difference between past simple and past perfect continuous (I have to study before class as much as they do) and two guys who don’t know “what is your name?” Each club requires a little creative problem solving. With the younger kids I’m still working out the details (the advanced kids are bored and getting apathetic, the really ignorant are struggling and getting depressed), but I’m a bit proud of what I’m doing with the adult class. I plan two lesson plans at once, each filled with intense worksheets and dialogue constructions. I teach one side of the room and give them an assignment to do on their own. As they work, I run to the other side of the classroom and check up on what the first group has been working on. I advise them, reward them with a sticker for good effort, teach them a little, and then give them another assignment to work on as I run back to work with the other pair. I’m exhausted at the end of the two hours, but it’s the kind of exhaustion that comes after running a race you know you won.

Other than that, my only offerings to the internet void are recommended reading: “Will in the World” by Stephen Greenblatt, which isn’t so much a biography of Shakespeare as an adventure/theology/philosophy/romance/horror book with a strong narrative story and alive, memorable characters. And I hesitate to wildly recommend “Darkly Dreaming Dexter” by Jeff Lindsay and its accompanying Showtime television show as I don’t know what it says about me that I really enjoy a story about a charming, entertaining serial killer. And of course I’m in the middle of a slight “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” series obsession, but that should come as a surprise to few.