Staging
Staging is done now; tomorrow it’s immunizations and then off to JFK to fly out. I’m taking notes on pen-and-paper again. I spent a half-hour saving pages of the Icehouse wiki as PDFs. The Organization pretty much out-and-out forbids you from writing anything that is negative about the Organization or the country you’re serving, which rubs me the wrong way. I was going to go through the old posts and remove tho country’s name to crudely hide from Google, but hey, there it is in the domain name. Guess I’ll have to robots.txt that bitch before someoene stumbles on this.
Spoke at dinner with a lady whose Swedish husband of 26 years is waiting for her back home, and another lady whose relatively new boyfriend is also. The Peace Corps keeps statistics — “We don’t know why, but for married couples of which only one goes to serve, there is a divorce rate of about 40%”. Scary stuff when your girlfriend is as awesome as mine. The other lady said something like “Actually I kind of like knowing that he’s there. Because after Peace Corps you’re so different, you won’t know what kind of place you’ll want to live in, you won’t know what you’ll want to do, but before I left I wanted to make a life with this guy and I haven’t felt that way in a long time. So to know that I have something nice to look forward to coming home to, that makes me feel good.” The married lady suggested letter-writing as a means to keep romance alive. I have 19 stamps and no envelopes. Please send help.
Otherwise, it’s a lot like college — printed materials, stupid getting-to-know-you games, and the promise of an environment different from any you’ve seen so far.
Turns out you can brush your teeth without toothpaste, but it sucks. Got away with shampooing/conditioning with much less material thanks to my mighty girlfriend’s hair-trimming skills.