and maybe some bags, too
in January last year (2021) some friends and I drove to Zugdidi, just because. Well, we thought we’d try to go to Abhazia… in the middle of the pandemic. Yah, that didn’t happen. We did eat at McDonald’s and drove around the cute little downtown. Not surprisingly, I didn’t manage to take any photos of that, but I did of the border town on the Black Sea coast that evening.
Apparently, this means deadline. You’d think I’d heard this before, but deadlines often tend to be not very important, at least outside the US. Or, maybe since the pandemic… they’ve become irrelevant as one day morphs into a week, a month, a year… and nothing has yet come to a catastrophic end.
On a different topic, this letter annoys me. V is a great sound – vvvvvvvvrooom, virgo, vivacious, vermont… and the georgian textbooks say it’s pronounced:
HOWEVER, I hear nearly everyone saying it as “wuh” … swaneti… mtswadi…shwili… which is funny because many languages don’t have the wuh sound so when speaking English they replace it with “vuh” … vat are you doing? vy must I do this? ver are you going? Is this an overcompensation thing? Or is the vuh dropping to a wuh in the middle of words?
Still trying to learn Georgian. Memrise helps, hearing it helps. But it is so far away from any other language I’ve learned. The words are just completely different.
Due to technical difficulties (read: someone made server changes that blocked my access and didn’t tell me), I haven’t been able to write for a while.
Nearly exactly 6 months after I left Erbil, I left Tbilisi. And then 5 days later I was back in Erbil. Hopefully I’ll be back in Tbilisi in a couple weeks.
The world seems completely different now. Or, rather, it is magnitudes worse than it was 6 months ago.
And yet, in other ways life has improved. I love my new job (even though I’m not going to be able to survive on it after the end of this year). I’m leaving Iraq with my stuff (fingers crossed). I’ll finally get back to Italy (toes crossed). And maybe I’ll see some old friends again.
I want to say something. I am so moved by the words others have said today, and during the last week, about racism in the US. When I try to say something it comes out weak, and not at all what I feel. What can you say after someone says, “I can’t breathe!” You can only listen and let that person breathe.
<rant color=white gender=ciswoman>Yeah, I knew adding to the blackout meme was questionable. Before I did it, I thought, I’m sure people are going to tell me why this is wrong to do. Mostly I thought it would be people from the “all lives matter” ilk. That I can deal with – they are kindly exposing their ignorance and latent racism with that response. Amazingly, a number of people that espoused that sentiment previously have finally figured out why it’s problematic. Others, such as my mother, are still refusing to listen. And I even anticipated the backlash of “you’re doing it wrong”… “this isn’t helping” … and worst of all “you’re hurting the cause”… And sure enough, those came out. Even though many people I love and admire joined in, and that moved me to stand in solidarity, I get it. I don’t want to silence anyone, even if they’re telling me to be silent. </rant>
I have stumbled upon an interview with Avital Ronell, the comparative literature & critical theory professor I had at Berkeley in 1990. Or maybe it was 1991. Who knows at this point… These days I remember very little from her class other than she asked difficult questions about self, power, and intoxication that I still think about.
I should transcribe the text. The auto-generated captions miss a lot of non-English references and slurred words. I might add some notes too.
It’s a Monthly Update! I was feeling like I should have been writing something for the last nearly 5 weeks since I left Erbil … but then I came across this:
https://medium.com/@noahhaber/flatten-the-curve-of-armchair-epidemiology-9aa8cf92d652
And now I feel validated.
So, in an attempt to document daily deeds, I realized I could just go through my e-mail and message apps to see what I have been doing for the last 35 days…
First off, I would just like to point out that I am on a 226-day NYT crossword streak, so there’s that accomplishment!
I’ve also learned the ქართული ანბანი with the help of Memrise
https://www.memrise.com/course/16558/georgian-alphabet/
I started Slovenian as well
https://www.memrise.com/course/2059404/slovenian-1/
And I’m on a 7-day streak with Duolingo’s Italian course, where I learn important things, such as:
