segue

I've met a few new friends this week and tried a few new restaurants. I am in that job stage where one minute you are thrilled with how well everything is going and how competent you are and then the next minute you feel like you've made the most amateur mistake on the planet. During the week, I'm starting to like this town.

Now is the test: the weekend.

The weekend forces me to spend time in my apartment, which means that I have to confront the truth, which is that I am living in chaos. I suspect that the stack of unpacked (but so useful!) boxes that block my route to the table and the assortment of boxes around the edge of the bedroom (but I don't have a dresser!) are not exactly helping me to feel settled here.

I am trying to hold out for the church rummage sale. One of the ladies informed me, two weeks ago, that there were several nice dressers already donated there. Plus, half the point of church is that people help each other out, and I bet someone will help me get a dresser home. I guess, now that I think about it, I am not so much holding out for the church rummage sale as I have no possible way to get a dresser home before then, so the church rummage sale and potential church members with trucks are my only possible option to get to a point where I can actually unpack.

...

I just got distracted reading through things I wrote during my international work years, and I remembered how very much there is that you can't say on a public internet site, how very much there is that maybe you can't ever say in public. I had forgotten many of them, until I saw them there in words. They were just life.

I went to a bunch of African movies earlier this year (ugh, another reason to regret leaving Gone West City), and at one of the movies, which was about a sensitive issue in one of the countries in which I have lived, one of the organizers asked me if I would be the person to respond to questions after the movie.

I said no. Call me paranoid, to think that it could ever be a problem that I talked about that particular sensitive issue (about which I actually know very little) at a movie screening in Gone West City, but I did not grow up where and when I did to grow up to underestimate exactly how sensitive these issues are. I have a lot of opinions, but I keep my mouth shut about other people's countries' politics.

Writing of opinions, have I ever explained here my hierarchy of knowledge of a country? I firmly believe that if you have been in a country longer, you get to be the explainer. It goes like this:

One month in country > one week in country
One year in country > one month in country
Ten years in country > one year in country
Lifetime in country > everyone else.

If you are on the right side of that equation, you do not explain how the country works, or what people believe, or how the politics work, no matter how much you have studied it. You shut up. At least, I shut up, and I think you should, too.* This conveniently avoids the know-it-all person who says, "But I have a B.A. in Culture-of-Country-X, even though I've never been there." That person** is required to shut up under my theory. Although they never do.

* Exceptions to shutting up are made for asking intelligent questions.
** If I am friends with you, you are not that person.