C, F, L, R

I decided to shave my head. Allison and Jenny decided to take the initiative and make it happen.

Allison taking off my ponytail.

This is just minus the ponytail, but it might also be my favorite look. I get progressively more undressed in these pictures because I didn’t want too much hair in my shirt. The scarf was one we found in the up-for-grabs basket.

Jenny’s starting to get in on the action.

Jenny is having the most fun.

The hairbasket.

Jenny and Allison don’t feel bad about how fucked-up it looks, since they’re just gonna shave the rest off anyhow.

Um, I think the bottle of juice is unrelated?

There are so many possibilities for ridiculous hairstyles now that I don’t have long hair.

For some reason we didn’t go for the Mohawk, which is kind of a disappointment.

This would have been a cool look, right?

Getting shaving supplies from the locker.

This is Trevor’s hazing before he can really be considered a member of ICT committee.

Jenny really likes shaving my head, but she’s also the person I trust least to shave my head.

Allison did the bulk of the shaving, particularly the cleanup work at the end.

Thoughts on the new look? At first I was of the mind that I looked like the black sheep of the Jean-Luc Picard family, but now I guess I just look weird, but in a different way than I did before. Which is what I wanted, right? In the meantime, showers are much faster and things get caught on my head-stubble. It feels strange every time I touch my head. I feel like I smell different, scalpier somehow, but I might be imagining it.

This is after a day of growth and exposure to the sun. It seems like I don’t look that different, and indeed most Cameroonians recognize me. My local Camtel guy asked if I was "believed", because normally people who shave their heads are religious in some way. No, I just needed a change.

You can see I was on the Internet heavily while Allison and Jenny did their vile deeds. Internet eventually broke, and without Internet I didn’t have much left to do, so I went to bed. I woke up suddenly around 4, scenting Internet like a dog scents prey, and in my haste to get out of bed I forgot that I was in the top bunk, tripped over the bed rails and landed solidly on my back. It hurt, in fact it still hurts, and I wonder if I have some kind of hairline fracture in my clavicle or whatever. Not much I can do about it except carry everything on my right side. I’m probably lucky I didn’t hit my head on anything.

The bruise feels a lot more impressive than it looks.

On my leg, where I stumbled against the bed rails or something.

Uncategorized ennui, pictures

Someone bleached the entire well. All of it. I thought I was just smelling something funny, but I asked a local, and she explained that it was to kill microbes, and that if you don’t bleach the well, you could get "the gane" (although I have no idea what that is). I guess I’m safe. Not sure about my laundry.

This morning Claude asked me to borrow my dictionary. He wanted to look up some words: "will", "forget", "was". Considering the likely sources of English text, I’m assuming it’s something he got from his ladyfriend (another stagiaire). Hope it’s good.

This evening, Hyacinthe brought some friends home; one of them apparently has a crush on Christelle. This was completely obvious to me even through the language and cultural barrier within a matter of seconds. I have to assume Christelle knows too. Hope that works out too.

The language test seemed to go OK (although that’s what I thought last time). I really have to start finding the time to work on my presentation for Thursday. I decided to count the quiz for 10 percent of the grade in both 3e and 5e; grades are in, and tomorrow we calculate averages for all the students in our classes.

There’s a chart here that we got (today?) from "resiliency training"; the stages of life here for Organization volunteers. I’ll try to include it in full at a later date, or find a link to it. For now, the important part is "Month 2": "Too much structure. Too much routine. Group constancy. Fatigue. Impending assignment." leading to "Withdrawal. Anxiety. Restlessness. Easy irritation. Low tolerance for frustration." Suggested interventions: "Explore independence. Visit other volunteers. Make plans for first three months. Visit new site. Establish relationships with volunteers and staff. Gather skills for immediate use." Instead I’ve been spending a bit of time online and hacking when I get the chance. Today’s discovery: emacs’s visual-line-mode which does word wrapping correctly (more correctly than longlines-mode).

Uncategorized ennui

Well, at least now I know it’s not the booze; it’s something else about Saturday nights that makes me unhappy like this. I should probably just stop going out with the other stagiaires.

Twelve more days like this (unless I bomb the next language test, in which case it’s twenty-six more days).

Uncategorized ennui

The party last night was themed "Middle School Dance Party". Sometime during the night I drunkenly misplaced my Camtel USB modem, which is a pisser but in theory not a crisis. If nobody finds it by Tuesday I’ll buy another one. I can afford it, even if I have to take $50 out of my USD bank account. So now I’m sitting at the "training house" and surfing the ‘net here.

Today is hard for some reason. There’s some anxiety in my heart that I don’t understand. Maybe it’s the neurochemical aftereffects of drinking so much.

We’re having a bumper crop of sick stagiaires lately. Typhoid, worms, and possibly other random crap. (No malaria as far as I know.) Everyone has been treated but some people are feeling better than others. Timothy is still working on getting better.

Decided to take some time to clean up my about page and change the theme for the blog to make the link to the about page a little more prominent. Opinions gratefully solicited.

Uncategorized alcoholism, ennui