Many things I am about to write about. For the moment I just want to relate that the first week back wasn’t intolerable. Wednesday was an assemblée generale, where among other things the most absentéeiste teachers were called out. Highest was something like 84 hours of absence. Turns out every time you don’t take attendance, they mark you as absent. I’m sure I was on the list somewhere. We also talked about the premiére classes — did I talk about my première class, which handed in 49 test papers, with 25 obvious cheaters? — and what we could do to rehabilitate them. The proviseur exhorted us to think of them not as stupid or worthless, but instead as a class in need of help, and ourselves as doctors, qualified to give them this help. Also, I think we’re instituting mandatory study hall for them until 17 o’clock every day. We’ll see, I guess.

Also fascinating was the announcement that despite my understanding of when the sequence ended, we were actually supposed to have finished giving tests by the end of that week. We what? Well, OK, if not, make an effort to have them finished by the following week. Right, but I’ll be in Yaoundé for two-thirds of my classes..

So, given that I had sixteen hours to prepare tests and hadn’t actually taught anything, what’s a poor guy to do? Two words: practical exam. Thanks Ryan for the idea.

I still have a couple classes to do tomorrow but generally it’s gone pretty well. Here’s what I did: pick ten computers, so about half of them. Pre-load them with data, since the students can’t type very fast. Bring in groups of 10 students at a time. Read them an instruction and give them two minutes to do it. Those who don’t finish in time, you do for them. Four instructions, each at four points, makes sixteen points. Two points for labwork from before the holiday and two points at random and you’re done. No grading after the test is over. Call it a day.

I experimented with volunteer assistants. In some classes this worked well. In some, the assistants just gave hints, so I had to ask them to leave. Also, I used the first group of ten as guinea pigs; as usual, I overestimated the students’ understanding and needed to tone the questions down a bit for every other group. There was a marked difference in performance between 3e and 4e, despite having almost entirely the same material, which surprised me.

Had a scary moment Friday morning when the power was out until about 8:05 AM, but overall I’d call it a success, especially since in general the students were super psyched about the idea of a practical. One of my favorite students in 3m1, whose name I don’t recall, lit up like a Roman candle when I said it was time for practical exams. She doesn’t always do so great on the theory stuff, but she got 17 out of 16, the highest possible score, on the practical.

I’ve also been spending a bit of time in the lab. I’m trying DeepFreeze on one of the computers. It’s not completely wonderful because the students lose all their work every time the computer shuts off, but then again that’s exactly the idea, because mostly their work involves putting games/viruses on my machines. A couple computers are up that were down before, and I’m mostly over the disappearance of a hard disk. The student that we caught taking stuff from the lab and selling it is going to get a conseil de discipline. How could I have forgotten about this stuff? Well, at least I’m not as burned out about it.

So that’s the first week back. Be sure to say "Bonne année à tous" to every class. They might say it back in English. Nothing like your native language to make you feel a little more welcome.

Some pictures from the mariage. I don’t have too many; it was crowded and I mostly got shots of a bunch of people in a huddle with no clear context.

This is a picture of the two ladies who provided the food and eventually found the bride.

I’m pretty sure this is one of the covered women they found and proposed as bride. She’s being escorted in on the left.

The happy couple. It was a little yellower in real life. A very pretty fabric.

No idea who this dude is.

Not sure if this has some ceremonial meaning.

On this, the occasion of my 27th birth, I thought it would be appropriate to look back at the last ten years and take stock of basically just how crazy I have been. Sure, there’s the impulse buys and youthful indiscretions, but I’m talking about real, reality-warping, you-ought-to-see-someone crazy. Some highlights:

• couchsurfing Boston for a week to extract an apology from a friend.
• believing that one of my friends was an alien from another world sent here to study human culture.
• acting "only a little" anti-Semitic in front of a woman I was attracted to so that she wouldn’t like me for "the wrong reasons".
• and of course, coming here to Africa.

And what’s even weirder is that there are whole other levels of crazy I haven’t even gotten into yet. Examples: I’ve never had a lesbian hookup in an Australian bar. I’ve never fired a gun. I’ve never changed my name. I’ve never run away to London. I’ve never even had a one-night stand (but, you know, working on that last one). By all accounts, I’ve led a safe and sheltered life, but living it, I’ve never felt either of those things.

Something mom said once was that someone who lives to 26 has outlived their crazy. And I guess, to an extent, I have. So, uh, now what?

Jenny points out that 27 = 3^3. That’s a good omen, I think.

P.S. Also, never got a tattoo. But Ryan has the word "PAIX" on his inner wrist, and Emily has two bars in the form of an equals sign on hers. So, give it time.

For New Year’s, I went to Bamenda, which is the capital of the Northwest region. Of the ten "regions" in Cameroon, the Northwest and the Southwest (which are north and west of the West region, respectively) are the "Anglophone" regions, where most people speak English or pidgin. The other eight are "Francophone" regions, where most people speak French.

We talk English gingerly here, unused to people who understand this language or our accents. It’s a welcome surprise that we can just talk, but it’s weird too. It’s weird understanding the things you overhear without having to think about it. It’s weird thinking that people probably understand a little bit the things you’re saying too. It’s weird that language isn’t a struggle.

And suddenly all your worn-smooth-from-use French phrases for getting around this crazy country are no longer appropriate. "Chauffeur, je sors ici." It didn’t stop Jenny from trying to address Cameroonians in French out of force-of-habit, over and over again, as I giggled and scolded her. Le Cameroun est bilingue, but you definitely get the impression that French is a little resented, and that they really identify with their adopted European second languages.

The language barriers aren’t gone, of course, just changed. People will try to talk to you in pidgin, which sounds like it ought to be intelligible but isn’t. And there are still all the Cameroonian-specific things with inappropriate or unusual English names. (like prune, which is rendered in English as "plum"; what we call pimante in French, a spicy pepper sauce, is called "pepe", pronounced like the word "pay" twice).

Volunteers in the NW say that the locals speak "Anglophonian" (but not to their faces). A common salutation in Anglophonian around this time of year is "Happy happy!", which means "Merry Christmas and a happy New Year". I had a fun time asking Allison’s counterpart how you say things in Anglophonian. Example: soya, which are street meat skewers, is just called "soya". Poisson braisé, another classic drunk food, is called "grilled fish". In the West, we call the semi-homeless semi-beggars fou, meaning "crazy", as in "Look out for the fou over there"; Allison says that they sometimes refer to such people as "madmen" (which is awesome).

[Side note: I tried to ask Jacqueline what she thought of the Cameroonian French and if it is as Twilight-Zone as the English we hear. She said at first that it just takes a little while to get into the rhythm of it, but when pressed did admit that some of the French people use is "bad French". Also remember that this woman speaks English, French, and Swedish, so she’s probably pretty accommodating about languages. I’m taking this as a "yes".]

People talk about money differently here too. Anglophones, and accordingly Anglophonian Volunteers, use an abbreviated form: the sum 2,800 CFA is said "two-eight", with an implicit "thousand — hundred". Whereas Francophone Cameroonians always say "deux mille huit cent", "two thousand eight hundred". The French words mille and cent are a lot shorter than their English equivalents so maybe that’s why they get more airtime. I haven’t conducted a survey on Francophonian volunteers, but I think I’ve witnessed "twenty-eight hundred", the use of "mille" in English ("three mille" = 3000), and use of French sums outright.

Allison was playing with her new blender, and I’ve wanted for a little while to get one myself, so we went shopping. Allison paid 10,000 CFA, about $20, for hers, and Jenny swore to get me one for 8,000 CFA. I think that for Jenny, haggling is the game and buying things is just the entry fee, whereas I tend to overpay, sometimes by two times or more, and still haven’t gotten great at haggling, so I was glad to let her try. She got it down to 9,500 CFA. You get what you pay for and I’ve been told to keep an eye out for cheap shit blenders, but I doubt I’ll use it extensively enough for it to really be a problem.

When I bought my blender, the shopkeepers called out to each other in French, so I naturally switched to French too. Jenny scolded me right back for doing business in French, but once I’d opened the door, they weren’t interested in going back to English. They even put Moulinex on the receipt (which is a brand name but means "blender", like "Xerox" means "photocopy"). Code switching is fascinating, and I’m super pumped to be able to finally do it myself.

Bamenda itself is beautiful. One says that it is built into a valley, and when you come in, you’re at a high point with many gorgeous views of this sprawling Cameroonian city. wp:Bamenda has a pretty good picture. I think we got out at a place called Up Station (which is what we would call a gare, station, but they call "car park" here); to get back we found a car at a place I think called Finance Junction (be sure to pronounce it with a short "Fee" sound). I keep saying that Bamenda’s population is like 300,000 people, based on this list, but the article on Bamenda itself lists its population as 269,530 based on a 2005 census. (Bafoussam is shown as 180,000 on the list, but the article on Bafoussam gives its population as 239,287 based on the same census.)

It’s a lot calmer here, and it especially feels less aggressive than the West. (But Allison says she gets déranged a lot when she’s alone.) The vegetables they have are different and better. Cucumber! Broccoli! OK, not great broccoli, but still! I kind of like it, and expect I’ll be clandoing up in that direction again in the near future.

We went out drinking with Allison’s counterpart the night before New Year’s Eve. I am pretty sure we tried to sing the National Anthem outside the bar, but I do not remember which nation it was. On the way back, Jenny declared: "I’m a pterodactyl! Rawr!" and then charged up the hill to Allison’s house.

The party itself was pretty great too — great fun to see Allison, Ben, Jenny, and Jacqueline, and to meet three new volunteers from the last community health/agroforestry stage. Allison cooked up a storm, producing gyros, Greek salad, french fries (Anglophone: "fried Irish"), and cut up a couple pineapples. Aerial support was provided by Jenny in the form of shrimp crackers and a watermelon that she haggled for and then was obliged to purchase. We played a game that was named "charades", but really wasn’t quite charades. The ones that I performed: "provocative eating of the pineapple", "talking dirty in Pidgin", "siamese twins", and "gangbanging a Fraggle" (which was a real challenge, let me tell you). There was also one "clue" that was challenging to perform because it was a picture of a blowjob being performed by what Jenny claims was an eagle. So, how many words? Sounds like..?

Lots of heart-to-hearts. Notable topics include: the two volunteers from our stage that are going home (about which more later); the divorce that one volunteer is going through, and by extension long-distance relationships; the way we act towards each other and the Cameroonian who walked uninvited into the party; Jacqueline’s motherly scolding of us when we fuck up, and whether this is at odds with the desire we assume she has to be "one of the guys". Other topics of conversation: the Fulbright student (which is different from a Fulbright scholar) who is living with Jacqueline, and how she is adapting without the support or training we got; vacation plans for Easter break; which Volunteers’ problems could be solved by "vigorous fucking". We also had wine from a bottle (as well as the miserable stuff they sell in boxes) and little itty-bitty firework things for when midnight struck.

Up until 3; awake again at 7:15 to find that Jacqueline and her "postmate" were already gone. Allison made pancakes, data was exchanged, and despite my qualms about travelling on New Year’s Day, we headed back. That gives me time tomorrow to do laundry and plan a lesson or two for Monday, just in case some students happen to show up to school. I’m working with the lights off right now because I don’t want my neighbors to know I’m here.

Still looking for a New Year’s Resolution (Evi’s). Chasing a sensation that I’m going to figure something out very soon. Listening to "This Year" by the Mountain Goats:

I broke free on a Saturday morning

I put the pedal to the floor

Headed north on Mills Avenue

And listened to the engine roar

My broken house behind me and good things ahead

A girl named Kathy wants a little of my time

Six cylinders underneath the hood crashing and kicking

A-ha, listen to the engine whine

I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me

I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me

—Mountain Goats, "This Year"

Happy New Year, everyone.

Back to post again. I’ve been here for 20 minutes and I’m already bored and morose. I’ve spent the last few days with other volunteers and a lot of time watching movies and TV shows. We deep-fried everything. I think I’m going to try not to eat for a day or two.

Going out to [the village where I spent Christmas], the car I was in knocked over a moto. Everyone turned around to look if they were OK, but we didn’t even stop. I was sitting next to a gendarme at the time, he didn’t seem especially upset.

And now, three car rides later, I’m back at post and "the boys" are still wandering in and out of my house. It’s weird that when you want to be alone, your best bet is to go to another volunteer’s post. Priorities for the next few days include: laundry, writing code, doing paperwork, planning at least one lesson for Monday, and trying not to spend any money. Maybe I’ll try to be sociable and stuff too. I’m not exactly happy to be back — maybe that will come when I am in Bamenda — but I am capable of smiling at strangers again.

Here are some of the better pictures [edit: almost all the pictures] from the last few weeks:

Jenny’s cat, I think his name is Aristotle, and its most recent kill.

We passed a bunch of plantations on the way down to [training]. I don’t know what the giant spiky things are, they look like giant pineapple plants.

Begin Here team.

This might be the same car we saw with a person riding on the hood, which is excessive even by Cameroonian standards.

Karen, showing off her new camera.

One of the training sessions where me and Jenny decided chemical enhancement would be appropriate. Allison is holding a connect-the-dots that Jenny drew for her, or she drew for Jenny.

I couldn’t decide which of the many "we love Paul Biya" pictures to put here. Shit gets wild on the beach.

Bus to Yaoundé. Julia, Timothy, and me.

G.I. Jake on the seat ahead of us, boozing it up with the Cameroonians.

The famed "nut balls" of our "hometown", plus the caramel my host family made for me.

Timothy, Timothy’s postmate Kim, and Kim’s neighbor Fernand. We ordered him to dance and sing for our amusement.

For Christmas we did a "chefferie crawl", where we went to one chef’s house for a party, which then migrated to the other chefferie. The first chef, informally known as "Papa Chef", was born in Paris and lives in California. This is his daughter and her husband, who is British and speaks French funny.

One of the other chefs and his wife. Her dress was the real Christmas miracle. When we split up to go to the other chefferie, somehow all the ladies ended up in his car, as if by sorcellerie.

Timothy’s friend Flobert.

Kareen, Kim, Timothy.

Who has two thumbs and needs a shave?

Papa Chef, taking pictures of the other guests using his Blackberry.

Timothy showing off his wizard robes. This fabric is a traditional Bamiléké fabric.

Bitches don’t know about my boubou.

Get out of bed, lazy bones.

Timothy.

Some shit we deep fried: potatoes, onions, green beans.

We deep fried an avocado, among other things, and as we were lifting our glasses to a toast, we managed: "To surviving the holidays!" So far so good.

It still doesn’t feel like Christmas; it’s still tropical, you still sweat walking up a hill. But to the Cameroonians, it’s definitely time to fête! We spent the day with the traditional chef here, who we affectionately refer to as "Papa Chef", mostly eating and drinking. Today we spent in bed watching MacGyver. So it’s been a kind of vacation for us, and I’m getting to the point where I’d like to be doing something useful. Back to post tomorrow — gotta do laundry and dry up in time for New Year’s.

[FB Status: And then I woke up in a pickup truck in a village called Makénéné with a film on my teeth and a clarity in my heart.]

When I woke up on the car in Makénéné, I realized very quickly three things:

1. I was lovesick. It’s one thing to have a crush on another volunteer — a dubious thing, but a thing. Being lovesick is not acceptable.
2. Everyone who was worried about my drinking — Jen, Suzanne, Jessica W., Timothy, and anyone else — was completely right.
3. The last week or so has been fun, but seeing my host family is what really recharged me.

At 5:30 AM I woke up to pack all my stuff in order to go "back home", i.e. where we had our first training, with Julia. Around 7 we headed out of the case in Yaoundé, where I left what were left of my sachets, and headed to Super Amigo Voyages, a 400 CFA fare. We paid 1300 CFA for tickets and not too much later we were on a bus headed out of town. We left at 8:25 and "touched down" around 10:45. Me and Julia headed our separate ways, and after I delivered a few Xmas presents that other volunteers had asked me to bring, I spent most of the day with my family, who was utterly thrilled to see me. My arrival was something of a surprise for them (and, I guess, for me), but we rapidly fell into conversation. They cooked for me my favorite breakfast — omelette and fried plantains, followed by pineapple for dessert.

I caught up with everyone, including Vlado, who can talk a little bit now — he responds to questions, occasionally names random objects ("Chaussures!!", "Shoes!!") or emits phrases like "Voici ça", "There it is", and "Je ne blague pas avec toi", "I’m not kidding around with you". It’s really adorable and a lot more fun than the mostly-mute child I left behind just a few months ago. Astride is on vacation from Yaoundé for some school in which I have no interest whatsoever; Nadege is preparing to retake the Bac, and is doing mighty well in math, English, and even informatique; Maman has been sick but I didn’t get to ask why. We talked about the most recent theft at [training], we talked about the volunteers they’d gotten from the stage after us — apparently they were party animals, like every other stage except ours. Maman said that she and one of the other mommies cooked for the entire stage rather than just a few days each week, and they regarded the fact that nobody had gotten sick as proof that one of the other mommies had fucked up during our stage. The new stage had two "desertions" pretty much right away, and the volunteers they hosted taught Nadege how to cook stuffing and cookies. Nadege says the stuffing didn’t turn out very well.

It was a real trip down memory lane going back. For three months, this little city was Cameroon for me, and it’s amazing to see it with fresh and experienced eyes. It’s much better paved than my village, and it’s much hotter. The students from model school don’t derange, they ask if I remember them (which I don’t, but hey). And it was super-nice to be someplace I knew geographically — the case in Yaoundé is a great place to be, but Yaoundé is something of a mess and I don’t really know it very well. Whereas once we got off the bus, the moto driver got lost trying to find "Lotus Bleu" and I had to direct him and point out to him where it was. (That felt GREAT.) It felt like years since I’d seen this village, but it’s only been months. Julia pointed out that if you analogize with post, there’s a real possibility that before long people at post will love us and miss us the way our training village does. Wouldn’t that be nice?

The family encouraged me to leave by 15h if I wanted to be back at post before dark, but they also wanted me to eat dinner so I didn’t really get out of the house until almost 16h. By that time the cars to Bafoussam were a little thin and I had to wait a little before a pickup truck pulled up and four of us got in the back and hit the road. Being awake since 5:30 was beginning to catch up to me and I had just started to realize that I was in a Bad State when I fell asleep, and when I woke up the following things were clear.

1. Lovesick. If you want to touch someone but are afraid to, that’s lovesick. If you are confused and upset when someone buys you things, but you also want to buy them things, that’s lovesick. It’s a great foundation for codependency and neediness. Informaticien, debug thyself.
2. Even though I’ve only gotten sick from it once, I think I have definitely been drinking unhealthily. I don’t think it’s just the breakup, but I’m sure it plays a part. I think it’s mostly burning out on being a teacher and volunteer, the endless work and recurring problems. I haven’t done the reading I promised I would do about substance abuse, but it "feels like" drinking relieved the tension I’ve accumulated and probably provided an escape from having to be responsible any more. While I do still believe at least some of the rationalizations I wrote Jen, namely that I’m "exploring the space" of possible Ethans, I woke up certain that I had made a hash of the last week and a half, and assuming anyone in our stage came through the last seven months with any respect for me I think I successfully deep-sixed it. Jen nailed it when she said that she wasn’t sure this is who I wanted to be.
3. Whereas just talking to some relatively intelligent and educated Cameroonians, specifically Nadege, and the other people in my host family that really cared about me, notably Maman, made me feel like my work really did have value, and that it really was possible for me to make a difference.

A few years ago, when I had a crush on someone named Judy, I just said, "Hey, I have a crush on you and I don’t know what to do about it", and then when she didn’t know either, I gave up on her. And in fact that seems like a pretty sensible thing to do right about now, when I have a tentative crush on someone who seems tentatively uninterested. But I’m not sure I want to be the kind of person who says "Hey, I’m in love with you so fuck off", and my fallback strategy of ignoring the problem until it goes away is also getting kind of old.

This is about when we started to pull into Bafoussam. Like many other cities, Bafoussam is beautiful at night, and combined with the release of the last weeks’ tension, I found that I was actually happy to be back. I’m not done voyaging for the vacation, what with Christmas at Timothy’s and New Year’s at Allison’s (money permitting), but today’s theme is retourner, returning, to my host family, my village, and my senses (or anyhow the senses of one possible Ethan). Best part: I spent the night at post, so I wasn’t clandoing!

P.S. Notable thanks go to Aunt Jeanie, my parents, and my dear friend Adam, whose packages I managed to bring home today. They sent respectively: medical supplies and "graven images" of Spongebob Squarepants; a ton of candy (including candy corn and chocolate!) and conditioner; and a towel, a spatula, more candy (including spearmint leaves — oh, that takes me back), and VALENTINES (they’re really planning ahead). Thanks guys!

P.P.S. I am looking at the postage on these packages and they are INSANE. You guys are crazy. <3

One other thing I forgot to mention: when we were in the water, it started to rain — really pour, the first time I’ve seen rain in weeks. Some people climbed out of the water and dashed away, which was confusing — are they taking shelter? ‘Cause we’re already wet — but then later some of them came back. I guess they wanted to make sure their stuff was dry, so they put it in the bar, which was then promptly robbed. Weird that skinny dipping turned out to be the responsible thing to do.

Apparently skinny-dipping in [this town at this training event] is a tradition at this training event, which is part of why we felt a need to go out and do that. But that it was just the four of us was disappointing by the standards of other, less inhibited stages. (There was also another group from my stage that went skinny-dipping when they got here before training.) So Thursday, at the bonfire (!) that the more motivated volunteers had put together on the beach, people decided that we needed to do another skinny-dipping expedition. Apparently last year they held hands and sang Christmas carols.

So we decided to try again Thursday. I left my man-purse with Julia and then we were all in the water again, doing all the absurd things that a bunch of slightly inebriated and relatively young people do. We did hold hands and sing for a little while, but we couldn’t agree on a carol so it wasn’t really coherent. And Ben kept sneaking underwater and grabbing people to spook them. I think we were talking about that when we heard a pop noise from the bar, like a bottle of champagne misfiring. We all looked and then we heard another one, and all these people were running in and out of the bar. It looked like people were running away, but some people were running back in. Suddenly it clicked that the noise we heard were gunshots. This is when I got scared. Specifically:

1. Am I going to die?
2. Did anyone shoot Julia?

We didn’t know what was going on, but those of us in the water stage-whispered good advice: stop talking, spread out so that if people were going to shoot at us, they’d have a hard time hitting us. We waited a tense little while, and then we saw three men sprint up the beach, and then (it seemed) climbed into a bush. Jake was hot on their heels, but he wasn’t chasing them; he came down to the water and shouted, "Guys, put your clothes on and get back to the bar! We’ve been robbed!"

"Jake, they’re RIGHT OVER THERE!"

"Over where?" And then he dashed off to follow them. Later he said he had been trying to get a look at their getaway vehicle, but didn’t see anything. This is the sort of reason why I call him G. I. Jake ("a real American hero"). We scrambled up onto the beach and got dressed, some of us needing a little bit more help than others, and then we went back to the bar. They had taken pretty much every wallet/purse but nobody was seriously hurt. Julia had gotten a cut on her little finger and was in tears, apologizing that they had taken my wallet, and Andrea had gotten a cut on her back, but everyone was fine. Everyone was safe. And that was so important to us.

If you’ve ever been in a weird situation like a robbery or even a car accident, you probably know more-or-less how things played out afterwards: we waited for more official people to take care of things, and we fretted and worried and debated what had happened and what was going to happen, without being able to do anything about any of it. The owner of the bar, an older French dude, had been hit on the head. We didn’t know where his girlfriend was (turned out she had taken a moto to go get the cops). Eventually Organization admin shuttled us across the street back to the hotel in a car in groups of seven or so. "New kids go first," the second-year volunteers said.

Me, Timothy, Allison, Jenny, and Jessica congregated in Allison and Jenny’s room, decided that for once alcohol wasn’t the worst way we could deal with the situation. Drank, shot the shit, and around midnight decided that the hints Jenny and Allison were dropping that they would like to go to bed were clear enough. Me and Timothy continued to talk for another hour or so before eventually calling it quits.

The next day I got an attestation de pert, a laminated piece of paper that says I lost my ID card so please don’t arrest me. I’m in Yaoundé right now, originally intending to get a new ID card but apparently the cops found all the documents (which I guess the thieves got rid of). So now I’m just hanging out and maybe I’ll go to Bafia tomorrow? I’m kind of thinking/hoping that I’ll stay away from post until I want to go back to post. But that hasn’t quite happened yet. Getting robbed is already almost a footnote to what has already been so complicated and bizarre..

OK, great, right now I’m in the real throes of culture shock, which is where I wanted to be when I wrote this post. The combination of high-pressure sales tactics with outright theft — not the thing at training, I’ll write about that next — plus whatever other shit is going on in my head just put me in a "fuck everything" mood. Let’s see if I can’t sublimate that into what Adam called "long-form cynical sarcastic proof that you haven’t been kidnapped/your account compromised".

So, first, Japanese culture is completely fucked. Everybody knows this because they have cartoons where tentacles have sex with animals or whatever. This fact was well known throughout the States, but we never realized that other cultures are completely fucked too.

Allison hasn’t been posting to her blog lately, probably because most of the things she does are illegal and she doesn’t want to incriminate herself. Anyhow, she’s on the record as saying that she finds this country a lot less difficult to adjust to than, say, the UK, because in the UK everything is only a little bit different. That’s not a problem here, of course.

The fuckedness of the culture here can be broken down into the following large, arbitrary, inconsistent, and overlapping categories: the people, the language, the environment, and the habits.