[This one goes out to all the UPS drivers out there that are not delivering my computers. It’d be nice if you guys could, you know, deliver them. Sure, it’s an unreal wish-fulfillment fantasy, but hey! Speaking of unreal wish-fulfillment fantasies, here’s the last installment of the fiction.] I know I didn’t talk much about […]
[I don’t remember whether I actually talked about genders on Zhen. I’ll have to revisit all the old posts later..] I was in the teachers’ room, nominally grading papers, but really focusing more on the conversation between Mur Kang and Muh Cham. Kang’s a first-female, and apparently her husband had called her asking her to […]
[This section of the story kind of came to me once in the shower but then I didn’t write it down and I had to rewrite it. This is the second version, from a week or two ago, but I wanted to wait and let it mulch until I could see if it was any […]
The arm-bands are nice and all but the first sign I saw of things changing on Zhen was militias drilling. It was the second-most surprising thing that happened that day. The first-most surprising was that Morgan called. I was so stunned that for a second I answered the phone. "What’s up?" I asked. She was […]
[I’ve been "studying French" for two years and I still don’t know the word for "coincidence", for what it’s worth. I’m not even sure about "destiny", which seems to be either destin or destinée..] I joined the Church because of a coincidence. Most of us do, of course. I guess with the benefit of hindsight, […]
You may have a hard time believing that her parents really named her Bulimia, but most Zhenae don’t believe that your parents really named you a word that translates as "cloaca", so it’s perfectly plausible that she be a volunteer here, in this same village as me. We are drinking for the whole usual litany […]
[Note: Today’s coping mechanisms include: two little packets of Swedish fish from my parents (thanks guys!), three sips of refrigerator-cold Sprite, and this little bit of writing.] Zhenae aren’t unattractive, exactly. Some are even beautiful, and like humans, occasionally you find one who is breathtaking. Sometimes people talk about Zhenae looking like slightly less refined […]
[Note: my fridge is doing nicely since I can’t cook at the moment. Also, I read a review of Cory Doctorow’s newest book; sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?] In all honesty, my little Sumi training manual is an amusement, a project I work on when I’m too angry to work on anything else. It’s a little […]
Being on Zhen for so long, I’ve started to crave just a little bit of truth every now and then, the same way I crave broccoli or hamburgers or competent dentistry. It’s just one more commodity that’s hard to come by (although I hear sometimes they have it in the bigger cities). As a Missionary […]
We worked fast over the next week, while we were still together for Medical Week. We submitted to the tests and to the samples with the normal amount of distaste, but our real work was elsewhere. For once we pored over the Mission literature, indulged the bureaucratically-designed manuals on Behavioral Change Techniques and Memetic Design. […]