28apr09

presi’ve got about 40 days left in the marshalls, so i’m more focused on daydreaming about returning to the states and civilization. getting my car, moving into my apartment into chicago, going to a reputable salon, dentist, and bank, etc. also wearing jeans, my ass looks good in jeans and my legs enjoy being recognized as two separate entities. the anticipation is swelling, but i’m going to try and keep the focus and maintain occassional updates on the ridiculous incidences over here.

we’re going to roi this weekend. last time we went to roi we got super trashed, ate from the pool like dolphins and lost sara’s shoe. hopefully this trip will prove to be equally as enjoyable. it’ll be for three days instead of two and sara and i have become more comfortable with the thought of wearing american bathing suits, so we can do that.

here on guegeegue, one of the neighborhood racist dogs died. the wrong one actually. stich and yogi, the black/brown one and the white one, were both horrible horrible dogs and in my opinion, only the loneliest of people would ever find it necessary to use them as company rather than just a branch from a tree or coral rock from the ocean. they are that horrible. though if i had to choose which i thought should die, it would definitely be stitch. i think i’ve mentioned that before, a lot of times. he growls and bites and starts fights and doesn’t listen. yogi is annoying, but goes away when you yell and i’ve never seen him growl at a person.

anyway, apparently the guegeegue police have the right to drive around the island and shoot any dog they want to if it doesn’t have a collar. they went riding around last weekend and started shooting up dogs. i heard they got five or so. (keep in mind that’s probably less than 1% of the animals-on-four-legs population) usually i think they just go for the females. my guess is the females make the puppies, so it’s a dually effective way of “controlling the pet population”. it was originally thought that they also got yogi, who is/was not female. him and stitch have recently been adopted by a few of the teachers out here, none of them marshallese, but they still do not have collars, so whatever. anyway, there was some unrest of the treatment of yogi due to said recent ownership declarations. as it turns out, the police did not shoot yogi. it was, in fact, some guy. HE had a dog that was also white, and he was getting really irritated that the dog kept bringing ticks into his house. so he did what all rational and level-headed individuals do and decided that to solve the tick problem, he needed to go shoot the dog. so he goes and gets a gun, we’re not really sure where he got THAT, since only the police are allowed firearms, but whatever, and walks out into the night, sees a white dog, thinks it’s his, and shoots it. obviously the dog wasn’t his, it was yogi, and now yogi’s dead. and the man probably still has a tick problem in his house. and during the midst of all of this something happened to stitch’s face that makes it look like he has organs or intestines or something oozing out of it. you know like when you impale someone and guts and stuff start seeping out? well that’s what his face looks like, it’s disgusting.

finally, nine more days of teaching and then final exams. i am stoked. the copier’s not working, the duplo’s not working, none of the printers will print because the black ink is out, and the secretary doesn’t really show up that much anymore. it should be an amazing couple of weeks.

08apr09

so i haven’t been feeling the best for the last few weeks. fever, sore throat, swollen tonsils, headache. i kept teaching just because i didn’t want the kids to be running around during the school day with nothing to do, but they didn’t seem to have any mercy for the health deprived and i hold their behavior responsible for antagonizing my condition into deeper severity. not that they were doing anything really out of the ordinary for a regular day, just that they didn’t quite feel it necessary to tone it down a bit either.

anyway, this is spring break, which has been nice. it’s going by fast and i haven’t gotten done what i need to get done, but i guess there’s more time. we went to kwaj monday and that pretty much brought my entire spring break down a peg. i don’t feel like really getting into all of the parts that led to the major event, but in the end, i basically missed the last ferry from kwaj to ebeye by about five minutes, had to sleep on the docks, got my sponsors in a bit of trouble, then caught the 5am ferry back to ebeye the next day and walked, at 530 in the morning, the five miles from the docks to our house in guegeegue with no water, no food, and no money, what felt like 60 mile an hour winds pushing me in the opposite direction, and about 5 open gashes on my feet from the evening before. it was pretty monumental and there were a lot of moments when i didn’t think i was going to make it and that my body was going to be found collapsed on the causeway with half of my face eaten by stray dogs and pigs. fortunately my body didn’t fail me like i thought it would and i did in fact make it home, though the degree to which i dislike the kwajalein military base has skyrocketed exponentially. even with the free phone calls factored in, i still prefer my island more. we took a few photos that i plan to post, unfortunately my harddrive decided to die and so i have to wait until my new one arrives next week for the ability to transfer things from computer to computer.

short of all that, we have 5 weeks of school left before graduation and prom. as much as i’ll miss this place, i cannot wait to get to chicago, get to my apartment, get $40,000 in debt, and get started on my masters. i booked my connecting flight to the east coast last week and am starting plans on reintegrating myself into a more developed society. it should be pretty interesting.