chores

(yesterday)

So, I should write something. This feels like more of a chore than it ever has before. Usually I want to write things. But now writing, like so much of my life, feels frozen in time.

I've been gone for a while. I did a lot of driving, which hurt my poor golf elbow extremely a lot, and I encountered a lot of disastrous radio stations. From now on, I'm flying any distance over 5 hours of driving. Or if I drive, I'm doing it with at least one other person. On your own, it is not so fun.

Now I'm ready to leave Michigan. The US, really. I've had my little break, the month of June. I've explored some of this country (it was lovely, indeed). I've relaxed, so much that I'm having a hard time remembering what "work" means. Now I want to go back to Africa, specifically Liberia, and it's annoying me that the soonest I can do so is about two weeks from now, largely because I need a visa before I can get on a plane. Why, oh why, do they not sell them at the airport? All the cool countries are doing it! Rwanda? Kenya? Uganda? They do it!

Okay, the peer pressure is clearly not working. I have to wait at least a week before I leave so I can get the application all together (hopefully Monday), and overnight it to the Embassy and wait to get it overnighted back. And actually, who wants to go to a country that lets just anyone in, anyway? This shows discernment, this requiring of the application. (And, we US-ers deserve it, for what we put Liberians through in applying for our visas. I was in the US Embassy in Monrovia in 2000 and wanted to hide my head under my wing, if I had one, at the way the US staff were talking to Liberian visa applicants. I was embarrassed for them. The Embassy staff, I mean. I cringed at their rudeness. And their yelling. I would have fired them all if I were the Ambassador.)

Note that I still don't have a ACTUAL JOB. Ha. I've emailed the people I worked with last summer and hopefully they will let me give them 12 hours of my life, six days a week, for three months, at no cost to them. Funded by Ridiculously Expensive Law School. It's about time I got something back from RELS, other than some vague knowledge that I can't actually remember now and a big hairy diploma that hasn't yet arrived. (But I checked my grades, which were all there in a row like they should be, so I assume it's coming. I did, in fact, complete law school. Somehow.)

I had to get some passport pictures taken today for the visa application. It's expensive, first of all, a fact which I had been deluded about because the last set I got were in New York with a lovely digital thinggobby that printed 16 of them at a time for something like $8. Now I'm paying that for two photos, because no one from Michigan goes anywhere, so who needs a passport? The old Polaroid passport photo machines, long dead in New York, are still working here. And so the photos are all washed out and hideous. I was wearing a white shirt, the background was white, and I look approximately as white as the shirt/background. Scary. See, it's been three years since I was in the sun on a regular basis. New York - no. Tanzania - rainy season. New York - no. Liberia - rainy season. New York - no. Frightened by my photos, I determined to go to the beach tomorrow and then remembered SKIN CANCER. That's why I use the sunscreen, after all. So I'm undecided on the beach. I might risk it.

Now I sound all nostalgic for New York. I'm not. Not at all. Michigan and surrounding states are so beautiful I could cry, even though I'm back to watching jets trailing tails across the sky and wishing longingly to be on them.

So, this writing wasn't so hard. It was just the getting started. You are not a chore, my friendly blog.

P.S. How much am I starting to love running? Hint: very much. There's this running nirvana, when you feel like you could run forever, and I'm finally getting to it. Some days.