Oh, Gosh!

It's been too long, dear readers.  I'm sorry.  The daily little eternities have piled up to an intimidating, mocking height. At this point I can hardly hint at them.  I may try, but probably I'll stick to the here and now, and my  new four walls.  I'm just going to new lief it. 

OK, i should back up.  At the beginning of October I moved across the apartment complex at Hope University to my friends' couch.  It was a nice change of pace actually, and my teacher friends Dawit and Kiburu are just awesome and very generous. So, that said, finding the space and privacy to write, or do anything other than the essentials, the really bare naked essentials, escaped me.  Guarding my own little agendas enough for them to take root and stalk and leaves and fruit is a struggle of mine. Living in a common space filled with distraction, or actually just the possibility of distraction, devoured my sprouting agendas from the root creating a near desert of self motivation.  An agenda Sahara. 

I read books.  Book reading is something important now, a new internet.  And the old internet isn't itself.  Internet in Addis has few western equivalents...maybe the library.  The internet here is like the library, kind of.  It's public, or in public.  Porn is off limits, for example. Self imposed.  Uncouth music videos, most music videos, have me looking over my shoulder for co-workers or neighbors with whom I might want to avoid the exposure.  The understanding that the strangers sitting next to you will continue to sit next to you and perhaps chat and eat with you next week and next month and as long as you live in this neighborhood gives me a gritty determination to sanitize my internet rovings.  And it's more than just online sex abstinence.  Letting photos and articles with 'political' headlines, especially ones suggesting complicity with LGBTQ rights, linger on the screen before scrolling down starts to feel like a statement, given the general dismissal of the existence of gay people here.  Of course, no one looks over your shoulder, or cares, but the possibility, for me, is enough.  

I lost my camera.  Because I'm living in Addis Ababa though, I can say, “my camera was stolen” with more authority.  I don't know what happened to my camera, but without it I feel less motivated to blog somehow. I think that maybe I think I might disappoint you.  You might not believe me without the usual array of unrelated pictures of buildings and street animals that follow my main posts.  I dunno.  Um, I'm sorry.

So now, I'm tapping on my laptop in a new apartment, shared with a couple of other cool guys.  But I have my own room, this time.  A veritable agenda-garden, pictures pending.  One roommate is an Ethiopian 20-something job-hunting graduate of agricultural-management-logistics-vague-business-descriptors.  He also looks and acts oddly similar to a friend from college, Brian Cohen.  (If you're there, Brian, uh, hello!)  The other is a British 30-something published poet-writer-wanderer. Things seems positive.  The transition between places has gone well. I feel like I've moved from Bellevue to Capitol Hill, or from Exec to the Quads, or from some rich, nature-touching suburb to some almost-as-rich urban area.  My richness is sort of indisputable here.  The air is less clean but the smells of exhaust and dust and food and perfume and unnameable things easily make up for it.  The digs are nice.

There's too much else to say.  Merely glancing at the last two months of thoughts and experiences inflates it mountainous.  I'll be back sooner though, hopefully.