I’m in an Airbus 330 watching a movie on the flight to Brussels, which turned out not to be direct but instead a two-parter from Douala to Accra (Ghana), then to Brussels. I had no idea people flew to Ghana from Douala, but lots of people got off, to the point that the flight’s not […]
I’m writing this from Boris’s apartment in Douala, where I am kicking it for a few days before flying home. I think technically we’re not supposed to be here if we can avoid it, and certainly not while clandoing for a few days to start your vacation early, but Boris is from my village, and […]
I know I haven’t been writing much lately. I’ve been traveling a lot and the other thing is I just haven’t been as stressed out recently, maybe because I’ve been traveling a lot. And if I’m not stressed, I don’t write as much. One of the more tiring things about this country is being around […]
[I think Sandiego is a much better name than Santiago, don’t you? Sure you do.] Dear Diary! We made our way back to Mountain Reflex the next day, and it was much quieter this time. Ran into Bennett and Amanda, and of course Cherry Drop, at the Transit House and decided to splurge on a […]
My last post provoked an email from Suzanne, which is what I was hoping for, but it was an offended email, which was decidedly not what I wanted. She called me on a couple of important things: Some of the stuff I made up is probably legitimately offensive to someone of the appropriate faith. She […]
[This should probably be tagged "fiction", but it doesn’t fit with the other fiction, and I’ve wanted to write this for a long time. Names were made up to protect the ludicrous. I don’t usually go to this kind of service in the States, so I don’t have a basis for comparison, so this might […]
You can’t write a Woman’s Studies paper on grammatical gender in nouns. You just can’t. Masculine and feminine nouns are an orthographic issue, not a social one, and nowhere is this clearer than the fact that in French, the word for vagina is masculine (le vagin). It’s just like spelling — there’s no objective, logical […]
[Here’s another one from Timothy. N.B. laïque means more-or-less "secular"; also, the exchange rate is roughly 500 francs to the dollar.] Donfack approached me in the teachers’ office: "Oh, Professeur, mon cher," which is how he always addresses me, making me doubt sometimes that he even knows my name. He teaches French part time, and […]
[You may recall Timothy from around Christmas. He’s a writer but doesn’t want to go through the trouble of having a blog, whereas I want to share the people I know with the world at large. So we reached a compromise: occasionally I’ll put shit he wrote on my blog. Here is the first. Sorry […]
["Santiago"? I wanted a name that sounded, well, unhinged. At least you’re not getting another Narrator named "Narrator".] We burst onto the scene fashionably late, me, Buddy and Cherry Drop, late by about a day and a half, but that meant the party was in full swing already. The Mission house was more-than-full; people were […]