I am trying so hard to be good at my job, and I really, truly hope that I am, but it feels sometimes like they are expecting miracles and all I can give them is ordinary me. But I fucking try, so that’s something, I guess.

I’m not sure my ego has ever cycled as fast as it has lately. I mean sometimes, I talk to people, and I just want to laugh at them because I know so much more than they do. I have been in Central Asia long enough to know the deal here. I speak Uzbek and a surprising amount of Russian and I’ve been to the villages and eaten the bad food and seen the hospitals and the clinics and the public transport and this, as much as anything is, is my territory. I know how it smells, how it sounds, and the way the grit of the (two puddles and a) dust bowl formerly known as the Aral Seal gets in your ears and the back of the throat.

And, you know, I read fast. So aside from knowing my ground here, I know more about most stuff than just about everyone, by sheer volume of words I have consumed in my life. (side note – this would be why I value my friends so much – I mean, just out of my friends who’ve been here, Rani and Mike and Ian and Kir can pretty much kick my ass and laugh at me intellectually and so very much do I love that) And with some people I can barely even hold a conversation because I would just end up explaining too much or answering questions they intend to be rhetorical.

“everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance / everybody thinks it’s true…”

Then I sit there and stare at a spreadsheet and cannot even begin to imagine how to work out the budget I am supposed to do for it so I procrastinate and avoid it and read fan fic for shows I HAVE NEVER EVEN SEEN and it’s just my twisted little life, and how much more productive would I be if I just did the hard stuff in the first place? Then I remember Georgetown and how I was pretty much one of the slowest people in the room at any given time, and probably I am not getting smarter. Probably I’m just spending time with people who know less stuff.

Not to mention that the knowing lots of stuff edge is going to erode pretty fast if I persist in reading fan fiction on the internet instead of say literature or magazines like I used to. (My mom sent me books, though, so she’s doing her part to maintain my intellectual acuity, and you can’t take a laptop into the bathroom like you do a paperback. (Well, actually, you can but you worry a lot more about dropping it.))

I am in Turkmenistan this week, back to UZ tomorrow night, and realizing that I actually really love the isolation of being here, spending every night alone, watching DVDs, reading, and working. It would kill me full time, but for a week of each month, I like. It’s healing, somehow. And makes me miss Kir like an amputated limb making me all cuddly sweet when I get home to him so win-win for everybody, pretty much.

Listening to Sheryl Crow, now, a little after midnight. “No one said it would be easy, but no one said it would be this hard…”

I am surprised sometimes that I don’t associate Boston with despair and bad relationships. The first time I moved there, in a 5th floor walk-up studio apartment that made Lasher’s mother cry the first time she saw it, realizing slowly but surely that I was engaged to a complete asshole and no friends in the city who didn’t belong to Lasher first, except my brother who was busy with his own flunking-out-of-college and getting dumped despair. I used to listen to that Sheryl Crow song and wonder just how much of a mess I was capable of making of my life.

Then Ace, living with him and knowing I didn’t love or even eventually like him and counting the days until I could break up with him. Then the break-up, with every cliché on his part, of tears and rage and desperate attempts to reconcile that made me cry and squirm and want him even less, less than the nothing I already felt, until my sympathy turned to pity and then something very akin to hatred which I feel to this day. Bringing me jelly donuts will never win my love, for I hate filling.

Breaking up with Lasher was surprisingly easy, logistically, I just called my parents and told them, sent out a mass email, and spent the next few months crying non-stop and oversharing with people I hardly knew, like Rani.

I suppose I lived in Boston when I met Kir, drove from Boston to Iowa – lo and behold, in Iowa City, love of my life, standing there at a picnic. (An indoor picnic, he always feels compelled to point out.) And I loved my actual coursework at grad school, and I loved sharing an apartment with my brother, even if I hated his girlfriend and had to do everybody’s dishes.

<<|>>

You might have missed...
I’m not sure my ego has ever cycled as fast as it has lately. - 15 July 2004
shots - 12 July 2004
But that was long ago, and in another country. - 22 June 2004
I was getting bored with linear thought… - 09 June 2004
You told him we slept together before marriage? - 20 May 2004

USAID is one of many donors for the project I work for. The views expressed herein are the author’s own views and do not necessarily reflect those of the author’s employer or especially those of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States Government. And I mean it. I probably give the US government heart attacks.