Monday, April 20, 2009

.and there doesn't seem a way to be redeemed

Life in the Peace Corps: the Good, the Bad, The Ugly, and the Just Plain Ridiculous.

As for the good, I just got back from a conference in Almaty this past week, marking my very first time out of Kyrgyzstan since I came in July. I was slightly disappointed since the conference took up more time than I was hoping for and the hotel was too far away from Almaty to make regular trips in. In fact, even the number of times I went outside during the conference was minimal as they had us at it so much.

But at least the conference was useful… I have to say that at all the Peace Corps trainings I’ve been to, probably at least a quarter of it we could have done without and another quarter was pretty much useless. The FLEX training was all relevant, and there was nothing I felt that they spent time on that didn’t need to be addressed. In fact, I suggested that next time they make the conference longer so everything wasn’t so goddamn rushed. But, I’m assuming there are budgetary concerns involved so another day added to the docket probably isn’t likely.

The way that the FLEX Pre Departure Orientation (hereafter PDO) works is that there’s a teacher (PCV) and an assistant teacher (an alum from the program) who work together to put on a total of eight forty-five minute to hour and a half long sessions. There are actually eleven sessions in total, but the Country Director teaches three of them, the ones about legal things and the history of FLEX and ACCELS. The teacher/TA get to do the fun sessions about culture in America, how schools work, and tips on how to make friends.

The nice part about it is that they give you a binder with your lessons basically planned out for you. In fact, they even have it sectioned out into “speech paragraphs,” so it’s entirely possible just to stand up there and read directly out of the binder. But, I mean, that’s no fun, and the teachers/TAs are expected to take the material and make it interesting somehow.

It sounds a hell of a lot better, though, than working in a school, because the students got through a rigorous testing process primarily in English to get there, so you’re virtually assured that the group is going to be smart and competent in English… basically a class comprised of all the most dedicated English students in local schools. From the school I teach at now, I can honestly say that only one of them has anywhere near the language skills to be chosen for FLEX. (Too bad that she’s an eleventh former and thus going to graduate, rendering her unable to participate.)

And plus, all of the kids involved likely do want this information, so they’re going to be attentive as a whole. Of course, this doesn’t preclude us from all behavioral problems, but it should be dramatically less than the insanity that happens at the schools.

Probably the most interesting part of the seminar, though, were the people on it. Peace Corps volunteers from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan were there as well, so we got to swap some stories from our experiences. As a whole, it does seem as though Kyrgyzstan is the roughest country to live in, materialistically speaking… none of the volunteers from other countries reported having issues with electricity or water, which has been the bane of my life since August. In fact, in Turkmenistan the electricity and gas are free for locals (and Peace Corps volunteers). Interestingly enough, since gas is free but matches aren’t, the PCVs report that most of the locals just keep their gas burning 24/7, since they don’t have to pay for it. Yeah. Oh boy.

Also at this conference were Country/Hub directors were there as well, the ones from Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Novosibirsk (Russia), and Moscow. Of course, ALL of them had been Peace Corps Volunteers before. It doesn’t surprise me, since if you happen to be an American who really wants to be in Central Asia, there are very few jobs really available here. I suppose that most universities are gagging for native English speakers, but beyond that, the options are limited. ACCELS is pretty well-known among Peace Corps Volunteers, so it’s not surprising that a lot of RPCVs turn to them for jobs in the area after their service.

It is always interesting being in the company of former Peace Corps Volunteers. First off, it seems that there’s a universal code against letting current PCVs pay for anything. This is a very nice little gesture, compounded by the fact that we’re all poor as hell anyway, and it creates a little bit of ongoing community spirit… I know that if I happen to find myself in some obscure corner of the world one day and happen to find the PCVs, dinner and drinks will be on me. Partially because, I mean, come on, we’re all the same brand of crazy, and also because the only real way to pay back the people who’ve done it for me is to pay it forward for others. I find it charming.

But they also have a lot of interesting stories, like the guy from Turkmenistan who literally starved for about four months because he was in this mountain holler that nobody could get to. He said he got rations of onions, flour, and bread, and that’s what they ate until the flour went rancid and the bread got too moldy to even consider eating. Then they ate onion-and-water soup. When Peace Corps finally contacted him about four months into this diet, he had zero percent body fat.

All I gotta say is that some people are an entirely different brand of hardcore.

But at the conference ended on Saturday and since we had the luxury of being able to drive back, the other PCV with me and I decided to extend our stay for another day, just to be able to enjoy a little taste of Almaty.

We also got to meet up with some of Almaty’s expat crowd, who, surprise surprise, were all former Peace Corps Volunteers. Small effing world. Almaty is a pretty cool city, in the fact that it’s a ridiculously schizophrenic blend of Central Asian and Western, due to the influx of oil money. The bones of the city are very similar to Bishkek in the feel of the street configuration and the makeup of apartment complexes, but it’s juxtaposed against soaring skyscrapers, enormous shopping malls, and business centers that could easily compete with New York City in their bulk. The Hyatt in Almaty is composed of two fifty-story buildings built of dark green glass with an LCD strip at the top that rotates ads and stock numbers. It makes the Hyatt in Bishkek, a modest five-story beige block, look like a slum.

One of the things I had a hard time wrapping my head around was the absolute absence of marshrutkas. There were none in the city; public transportation seems to be built around buses that actually have fixed stops, trolleys that run on wires strung above the street, and streetcars with tracks embedded in the asphalt. Amazing.

Almaty also made me realize what an absolute flipping mess I’m going to be when I get back to the States. Reverse culture shock was never something I took altogether too seriously… I mean, when I came back from Japan, I was basically fine. The only things I had to get used to were not saying “sumimasen” every five seconds or so, and bowing like a bobbing drinking-bird toy when I was speaking. (These habits took me about two months to drop.) But, I mean, I was able to settle back into the rhythm of life easily enough.

When we met up with the expats, we decided to go to a coffee shop. Like, a real coffee shop. One with dark paneled wood with pastel walls and funky artsy wall sconces with classical music in the background and wi-fi. With actual booth seating and bistro tables. With terracotta tiled floors and wrought-iron backed seats. With wide glass windows overlooking the street and an outdoor seating area. With iced drinks and coffee that wasn’t instant.

I didn’t exactly freak out or anything, but when I walked in and saw the menu (which was chalkboard with the offerings listed in Cyrillic and English), and I started laughing. I don’t know why. I couldn’t stop. I had to walk away from the coffee bar to go compose myself. Then I ordered an iced mocha that cost four dollars. And it was wonderful.

My little episode prompted reminiscences from the other former Volunteers with me… one said that when she got back home and went to a supermarket with her mother for the first time, she lost her mother and ended up walking up and down one aisle for an hour with the cart staring at the cream cheese selection. I remember another story rotating around a breakdown sparked by too many varieties of orange juice.

After the coffee bar, we all decided to walk over to an Indian restaurant, since I haven’t had anything of the sort since I left home ground. We walked through a mall so somebody could get some money from an ATM, and I couldn’t stop pointing at things – the supermarket, the fragrance stores, the clothing stores, more coffee shops and proclaiming “holy shit” about every five seconds. Yep. I’m going to be a hot mess if I ever see the inside of a Costco again.

It’s just so weird, really. You come here, and you actually adapt to the significant reduction in quality of life quite quickly. You get used to not bathing more than once a week, to not having electricity or water all the time, to traveling in an overpacked minivan that might actually be worth more as spare parts. You get used to your main shopping experiences happening in bazaars or tiny dry good stores that sell vodka and maybe a few loaves of bread. Not to say that it never annoys me, but whenever I have a severe beef with my life, it almost never has to do with the material aspects of my living situation. Sure, it would be nice if the electricity didn’t cut out every day, but, I mean, whatever.

But then you go somewhere and you have some aspects of what you used to do regularly and what you used to have at your fingertips thrust back at you and… I don’t know, at least to me, it’s just so funny. I used to frequent coffee shops all the time. I loved them. But I hadn’t been to one in over nine months, and my coffee consumption quota is met by Nescafe more often than not these days. And it’s not as though I feel this is a severe lacking in my life… but just to have it again just, I don’t know, it made me laugh.

Another weird thing is bathing. The hotel we stayed at was actually very nice… easily the nicest hotel I’ve been in since I got here. It’s an old Soviet sanatorium, but they actually pay attention to the upkeep. There’s even a very nice golf course, and I think they hold the Kazakh Open there.

And the rooms came equipped with brilliant showers, with unlimited hot water. Great! I took a shower the first morning, and the second morning… and on the third morning, I woke up with frizzy hair and dry skin. Didn’t take any more showers. I suppose as much as I’ve gotten used mentally to not bathing as often, my body has adjusted too.

But Almaty is a nice city overall, and now that I have some friends there, I wouldn’t mind spending an idle week enjoying some Western comforts and good company. We’ll see what I do with my annual leave. If, near the end of my service, I actually have some days left over and it’s nearing the cutoff for using annual leave, I might go up to Almaty for a few days.

As for Kazakhstan itself, it is surprising how different the landscape is from Kyrgyzstan, considering how they're border countries. But as soon as we passed through the checkpoint, the mountains got farther away and we spent about four hours driving through the steppe. The steppe is an interesting bit of natural phenomena... the closest thing I could really liken it to are rolling hills, but they're hills mixed in with occasional cliffs and rock crags. It's like a cross between fields and mountains, if you can imagine such a thing. Very beautiful, or so I thought.

In Kyrgyzstan news, things have taken a turn for the interesting. Again. Two events happened today, which could possibly alter my future, but we’ll see.

The first one is that my counterpart is officially not working at the school next year. I asked her about it today, and she gave me a definite no. Of course “definite” has a way of changing around here, but it does look as though she’s not going to be here. She doesn’t know if she’ll be in Bishkek or Russia, but the main point is that she’s not going to be here.

Overall I’m happy for her, since I’ve said many times, teaching here is a crappy job and with her skills she could do much better. But, I mean, I’m sad for me, since this makes the second year of my service look a lot bleaker than it did previously. One of three things will happen if my counterpart leaves. One, I teach with the other English teacher at the school. There are a few problems inherent with this, namely that the other English teacher seems to teach the younger classes currently (at least, I and my current counterpart appear to teach all the classes from fifth grade and up… the school isn’t that big, after all), and plus, she, uh, can’t speak English. At all. She actually used to be a German teacher, and went to university for German language, but in the current political climate German isn’t as useful in the global market as it used to be, and everybody wants to take English. Thus, she got shunted over to the English department, despite the fact that I haven’t heard her say more than three words in English the entire time I’ve been here.

To be honest I do feel sorry for her, since she obviously put a lot of stock into the German language, only to have it become virtually unmarketable when the Soviet Union collapsed. I suppose, if she’s good, she could feasibly get a decent-paying job at a university with it, but it’s a lot harder to pass in the secondary schools, which are English-oriented when it comes to foreign language.

Also, she has some truancy issues, which were apparently so bad that the zavouch and director had to have an intervention. Which, I mean, come on, this is Kyrgyzstan, and I didn’t even know it was possible to be too late here. The situation must be dire.

So, uh, overall that doesn’t seem too appealing. She might not even really want to work with me, as she can’t speak English and the times that I have spoken to her, she’s seemed embarrassed about it. At my old village, there was one teacher who was unwilling to be my counterpart for the exact same reason. (At my old school we had three English teachers, the one who didn’t want to work with me, one who was an absolute nutjob and only really wanted me to help her get an American work visa, and the third, who was amazing.) I don’t know her comprehension level with reading and writing, though, which might be surprisingly high. A lot of people who came out of the Soviet system can read and write fairly well in English, though they can’t speak. I’ll just spend a year communicating with my counterpart through letters. …awesome.

The second option is that the school hires a new teacher, and I end up working with the new person. I’m sure they’ll need a new teacher, as I doubt the one teacher left will be able to take on the whole load herself. I won’t be surprised if they attempt to get me to teach alone, which I am not doing. I told my program manager about my counterpart leaving today so that when it comes up it can be nipped in the bud. Teaching with an altogether new teacher is kind of a wild card option, as I could be pleasantly surprised or unpleasantly displeased, depending on the person they get for the job.

Either way, though, it’s going to be an uphill slog since whomever I end up with won’t have gone through any of the counterpart trainings, and it’ll be difficult to write a grant with somebody who hasn’t done the PDM seminar. At this rate, though, I don’t know if I’m even going to attempt to write one. I was planning on it, but if I don’t have the personnel resources to implement it, it’s not worth the headache. I think we’re technically supposed to do one, but, I mean, it’s not required. I do know volunteers who haven’t.

The third and final option is, of course, another site change. Another one. I am torn over wanting this, and I guess it’ll depend on if a) the school here still wants me, or b) if it’s really awful working with whatever new counterpart they manage to dig up. Obviously, if the school can’t find work for me, I’ll have to leave regardless. I do have a feeling that they’re going to be interested in keeping me around, at least on an administrative level, since volunteers do bring a bit of prestige to the school and I think most of the students do like me.

Likely, they’ll find a teacher who’s at least willing to have me in the room, and then it’ll depend on if I can stand it or not. Again, I might get really lucky and end up with somebody who’s awesome, or at least interested in trying to work with me. Though, to be honest, I’ve been having a run of shit luck with things since I swore in as a volunteer, so I’m not counting on it.

But moving again is just… ugh, man, the most frustrating part about all of this is that nobody else seems to be having these problems. Not that site changes haven’t happened, but all the ones that I know of happened when the Volunteer had some sort of problem with their site, reported it to Peace Corps, and then they got moved of their own volition. Nobody has gotten moved because they got kicked out of their house and then were homeless and had to move because they had no place to put their shit and it was January.

And now… I have a house, but no counterpart. I suppose the good part about this is that if I do end up having to move again, I’ve got until the end of August to worry about it. There’s no reason why I can’t keep living here over the summer, even if something happens and I’m definitely not working at the school next year.

I’m starting to think that Peace Corps really doesn’t do enough research or put enough thought into their site placements. I really think that these major problems that have riddled my service could have been avoided with a little more thought. For example, take my first site. During our PST, they give us a sheet to fill out with requests we have about our sites. Doesn’t mean that we’ll get them, but it’s our chance to put our wants down and submit them to Peace Corps, for better or worse.

My one single request was an independent living option. I was totally willing to accept a compound house, so it didn’t have to be an apartment, but I was really not willing to live in the same house with a host family for two years. Six months, fine, but not two years. Of course, there was always the chance that I’d really hit it off with my host family and not want to move, but I definitely was very clear that I needed the option.

So, they put me in my first site. I’ve mentioned before, but the previous Peace Corps volunteer in my first site also had housing issues… he had to move to Bishkek for the last six months of his service, since he experienced problems similar to mine. On top of this, I started having problems with my host family almost immediately after moving in, and I was very open with Peace Corps about it, so they knew I was on the prowl for new housing.

And since I was so desperate for housing, I had to take the first place that came along, which was the fateful house I ended up getting evicted from for having the gall to invite three people over one night. And we had been looking pretty steadily for threeish months for independent living… hell, we were even asking about an abandoned apartment that had busted in windows. I knew that nothing else was going to come up after I had lost the house.

I can’t help but think this entire thing could have been avoided if my advocated want for independent housing could have been connected with the first PCV’s problems with housing. Not to say that Peace Corps is a travel agency and they should cater to my every whim, but come on. My only request had to do with housing. And they put me in a place that had known housing issues. They should have put a volunteer there who was willing from the beginning to live with a host family for two years.

And then, with the place I’m at now… they originally hadn’t requested a new Volunteer, and in the defense of Peace Corps, they were in a huge hurry to find me a new site as, well, I was homeless. And this new site had a compound house, which both satisfied my want for independent living and Peace Corps’ rule about moving within your first year and another three-month mandatory homestay period. But, I mean, maybe the reason why they didn’t request another Volunteer was because the counterpart had plans to leave the school. That was basically the first thing my counterpart told me when I got to site… was that there was a chance she wouldn’t be there next year.

I mean, seriously.

So, I don’t know. We’ll see. Chances are probably relatively high that I’ll still get to stay here, though my quality of work life will likely flat line.

It’s just so irritating, because basically ever since swearing in, more of my energy has been dedicated to just trying to survive and have good mental health, rather than actually serving. I think that I’m kind of at the point where, barring an emergency at home or catastrophic injury or illness or something else that forces my hand, I’ll probably live out my two years here. Life isn’t horrible. It’s irritating and depressing and frustrating sometimes, but, I mean, life at home was irritating and depressing and frustrating sometimes too. I’m on a semi-even keel, and I can make it.

So I’ll finish my service and I’ll be happy as hell that I made it, I’ll get the nice gold bangle to decorate my resume, and I’ll be proud that I made a commitment and followed through. However, I won’t have actually done anything. No grants, and if I keep on being bounced around the place like a migrant worker, it’s difficult to make ties and get really involved in a community. Hell, even if you just stay in one place for two years, in the grand scheme of it all that’s not that long. I was only in my first site for three months, and I’ve been here for about four months, two of which I wasn’t working due to the extended winter break. Come on, that’s frustrating. I didn’t join Peace Corps for a two-year vacation where I was poor as hell so I couldn’t actually do anything. I honestly did want to work, but all this other shit just keeps getting in the way.

I guess we’ll see.

The other issue that came up today was, of course, having to do with housing. My host father came in and asked if he could talk to me, which immediately set off red lights in my head because, well, he never comes in to talk to me unless he needs money for the electric bill. I said of course, and he sat down at my table, which, well, set the alarm firing off in my head along with the lights, especially when he said there was a problem.

I immediately started spinning off lists in my head about what I could have possibly done to upset the family. I have had friends over occasionally, but that’s only happened a handful of times, and it was only one person each time. I rarely drink here, and I’ve never been drunk. Plus, they didn’t seem to care much about either the friends or the alcohol. I pay my rent almost obnoxiously on time, and I mostly keep to myself. Plus, I mean, I’m generally gone at least one week out of the month, if not more. I couldn’t possibly be annoying. I’m not here enough. And when I am here, I never ask the family for anything. I even use my own toilet paper, for crying out loud. I even feel weird calling my host father “a host father” in writing, as I act more like a boarder than anything else. I call the couple I rent from by their names, not “Mom and Dad.” I basically say “host parents” only because I don’t like using people’s names in my blog, and it’s just easier than typing “the people from whom I rent.” I suppose I could say “landlord,” but that sounds too authoritarian and distant. We are friendly and we see each other every day, but it’s definitely not a close relationship.

Yes, I am ridiculously fucking picky about nomenclature. What’s the point of writing if you can’t write precisely?

But, actually, this time the problem had nothing to do with me. He was holding some sort of bank flyer in his hand and started talking about money. He asked if I paid rent or if Peace Corps did. At first, I thought that maybe he wanted to raise my rent, which wouldn’t have been such a big deal… I actually do pay under the max limit for housing allowance in this region, so if he hiked it a bit it wouldn’t have mattered.

Apparently, though, there was something going on with his bank and he needed a large sum of money. He was asking if I could pay in advance for the next year right now. He even said that if for some reason I had to move again, he could pay the sum back, so I guess he’s got a debt or something that he needs to pay off. I know he’s a decent guy and pretty responsible, so I don’t doubt that he’d be able to give me the money back at some point in the future if he had to, but, well, I didn’t think that Peace Corps would be willing to pay housing in advance like that.

Plus, well, the possibility arose today that I might have to move over the summer if the counterpart situation isn’t resolved, so even if Peace Corps said it was okay, I don’t know if I’d realistically be able to do it. I ended up calling my program manager to talk to him, since her Russian skills are better and it’s just easier if the fact that I probably can’t give him thousands of som in advance is also coming from my boss, and not just from me.

Though, the good thing about it is that he did say that even if I couldn’t pay in advance there was no problem with me staying here for the rest of my service. So, it’s nice to get a bit of positive reinforcement about that. Of course, if I have to move it’s moot, but it’s nice to know that I’m not just utterly hopeless at living in Central Asia.

But for the rest of the school year, I’m just going to let it all slide. Originally my program manager was going to come out and observe a class with my counterpart and I, just to reinforce the importance of team teaching. Since my counterpart operates as a school official as well, she tends to leave the classroom a lot to go do other administrative things. Which, while this is a ton more legit than just leaving the class to go drink chai (not unusual with some counterparts), it still left me in the class alone. This happened at least five times a week, sometimes for an entire day, and it was annoying me. But at this point, I suppose it doesn’t really matter. I’ll just print off a shitton of word searches to hand out in the event where I have to manage a class myself. Whatever. I’m actually leaving again for Naryn in a week, and then I’ll probably take more program travel at the end of the month to go out to the lake so I can work more on doing FLEX PDO prep with the other volunteer who’s participating. All and all, I’ve only got about three more solid weeks of actual teaching until the end of the year.

I also hear that students essentially stop showing up in May… it’s a very holiday-heavy month, and not to mention there’s more work in the fields that needs to be done. And I’m curious to see how many students actually do show up in June. The school year usually ends on the 25th of May, but since we had the extended break, it got pushed back into June. We’ll see about that one.

I don’t know if the school knows about my counterpart leaving yet, so I’m afraid to make any direct inquiries to the director about next year, as I don’t want to inadvertently cause trouble for my counterpart. One thing about living here is that it’s definitely made me a lot more laid back about these sorts of things. Back in America, I would have already been making phone calls and preparations and whatever else. Here, it’s just a lot less hassle to lay back and let it happen. If I have to move, I’ll move. If I get a new counterpart, I’ll try and work with her. If I end up with the English teacher that’s already at the school, I’ll give it a shot. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll request a change. The good part about this is that the new volunteers came earlier than we did, so the COS date for the leaving Volunteers and the swearing-in for the new ones don’t synch up. The new Volunteers will be at site in June, while the old Volunteers don’t leave until August/September.

This will open up a lot of sites that won’t be immediately filled by new Volunteers. If I really do have to move, at least I’ll have some options. There is a Russian-speaking TEFL volunteer in Chui who’ll be COSing this year, and he’ll be vacating an apartment that I could move into. The problem is that he also doesn’t have a counterpart (last year they started the team-teaching thing, but it wasn’t mandatory), which presents virtually the same problem I’ll have here. The other possibility I have my eye on is a volunteer out in Karakol who actually works at some sort of lyceum, and he has a counterpart. His kids have to test to get into where he works, and he says he doesn’t really have the discipline problems that most other TEFLs are plagued with. The problem there is that he’s a Kyrgyz speaker, but Karakol is a pretty Russified city so the language shouldn’t be a problem. The other thing is that Karakol’s out in Issyk-kul, so that’ll be a major move to the other side of the country. But he’ll also be leaving an apartment open. So, I don’t know.

All this, and the dogs that live here have finally started getting used to me. Figures.

Monday, April 13, 2009

.amazon fail

Important enough to pull my head out from my self-absorbed Peace Corps Volunteerin' behind and pretend I'm in a place to have a say about the first world...

Most people have likely already heard about the huge amazon.com fiasco by now. If not, basically all books having to do with lesbian/gay/transgendered themes have been deranked by Amazon. If you're not familiar with "book ranking," you should know that when you type in a book title or any search term into the Amazon search box, what comes up is based on the ranking of the book. If the book does not have a ranking, it either won't show up in the search or will only show up after a few pages. To prove my point, go to amazon.com and type in "homosexuality" and see what comes up. Take a look at the majority of the titles that come up. Yeah. Creepy, right?

In the official statement from Amazon on this, they claim it was just a glitch and was being fixed, but this is doubtful because certain authors have noticed their books being deranked since Feburary.

This came to light this past Sunday, when a self-published author noticed that some of his books had disappeared from Amazon's list, he emailed the company to ask what the deal was. The company's response to the author's query:

"In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature." [Source]


Interesting pattern of events, that... how something that was policy on Sunday becomes "a glitch" on Monday because Twitter lost its shit.

Bad move, Amazon. The utter senselessness of this censoring endeavor is brought even more starkly to light when you realize what books have been affected and which have not: Ellen DeGeneres' biography? Deranked. Heather Has Two Mommies? Deranked. Brokeback Mountain? Deranked. Lady Chatterly's Lover? Deranked.

Ron Jeremy's biography entitled "The Hardest (Working) Man In Showbiz?" Still ranked.. Autobiographies from porn stars from the 1980s? Amazon's still got 'em. An Orgy Of Playboys? You bet.

Oh, and if you'd like to learn how to "Tickle His Pickle," Amazon still has that book ranked too.

So, clearly, this "adult" labling of products on amazon.com is strangely slanted at best, and clearly biased at worst, considering how a lot of the deranked books are children's books, some are memoirs/autobiographies, and others are classics. Also quite strangely hit were books about disabled people and sex as books titled "The Sexual Politics of Disability" and "The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability" have also been deranked.

This is important on several levels, mainly for the issues with censorship it causes. Even if it doesn't bother you at all that the first book that comes up now when you search for "homosexuality" is A Parent's Guide To Preventing Homosexuality, you should be bothered at the completely arbitrary removal of certain titles as "adult" when they have nothing "adult" about them.

Besides, even if they only legit removed "adult" books regardless if they described homosexual or heterosexual sex with any level of disability, it should still bother you. Censorship sucks. Don't let media giants get away with it. One hopes that Amazon will either come up with one hell of a legit excuse or a beautifully worded apology, and I hope that until they do, you won't buy from them.

I say this because, well, I'm living in Kyrgyzstan and my online shopping is quite minimal these days, so I have to live vicariously through you. Get your books from Barnes & Nobel or Powells.

And, well, this is all. I'm going to Almaty tomorrow - see you in a week!

Thursday, April 2, 2009

.but when i dream of london i can only see your face

Author's note:

...not that this whole thing isn't an author's note, but whateves.

The sun is shining. I made bread last night and, wonder of wonders, my oven did not explode. Tonight I am making homemade macaroni and cheese with tomatoes. I have also bought a liter box of apricot nectar, and I am drinking all of it right now.

That's right. I care not for your values of "moderation" or "save it for later." Screw you guys. It is delicious and I am not stopping.

This is the dime at the bottom of the pool. I am focusing on it.

Return to your lives!