lucky for you im skipping work

so today is palm sunday (i think) and so schools in the ministry of education are required to give their christian workers the day off. of course i decided to take them up on this nice little break from school, which in effect gave me a 5 day weekend. i was in amman these last few days for a training with peace corps so i haven't been to work in awhile. lucky for you all, however, i am currently feeling a little guilty about slacking off work to do nothing so i figured i'd get in here and write a lil somethin.

nothing really interesting or different has been going on around here. i can't remember what my last entries were all about but i have been a little...down lately. not seriously depressed, or anything like that, more like irritated. cranky. and you all know how cranky i can get. so i have come to the realization that this comes from the fact that i am getting too busy. all the talk among the other pcvs is about visiting. its almost like a point system with some unattainable goal. "i visited 8 families this week" "14 families called to invite me for dinner on sunday" "i visited for 19 hours yesterday." now i just don't see the point of this. i personally need my own space. i have always been that way. i don't need to say i have 37 bestest best friends or 1,723 friends on facebook; i think all the talk of visiting had me thinking about it too much and forgetting this basic fact about myself. so now i am in the process of cutting back on my visiting and tutoring english because i need a little bit of time by myself in my house. the trick now is actually making that happen.

i think in the beginning i was so content with my me time/visiting time ratio because there was no one trying to force me to visit more. people must have just thought i was this crazy american that didn't want to go visiting anywhere (kinda true). but now that people have seen me coming back from other people's houses, and hear other families bragging about how the american has visited them twice, they are becoming more insistent that i come visit them. and a refusal of an invitation is much ruder than pretending that you don't know that you should be visiting. so this is going to be a very tricky, and probably really slow, process of decreasing my visit time. but i'm already happier now that i have identified the reason i've been cranky and have a bit of a plan of how to fix it.

in an unrelated note, watched the 'hurt locker' and it was great. you probably don't need me to tell you that being that it apparently won oscars and stuff, but just sayin. also it was filmed in the jordan! i also read a book called 'who speaks for islam' and it was not great. as in really bad and i only wanted to mention it to give it a whatever is the opposite of recommendation (condemnation?). if you need to be convinced that muslims are actually human beings who live in families and not pods or something, then go for it and i would appreciate it if you let me know so we can have a little talk. but really i was excited to read it because it is basically a collection of surveys from millions and millions of muslims in different countries, and i was eager to see the differences between what is jordanian culture and what is muslim culture. i certainly couldn't get that out of it and...yeah i just think it was a generally useless and poorly written book.

since i can't stand knocking a book like that and not offering something in its place i'll go ahead and recommend 'professor and the madman.' it's about the creation of the oxford english dictionary. maybe it was just a lack of common sense that kept me from realizing that something like that would be freaking hard. i can not understand how people got on without computers. anyway a sizable chunk of the dictionary was submitted by an american officer in a mental institution in england. he was completely insane with paranoia and hallucinations; and yet he was a total bookie with lots of free time so he was able to make enough entries to be the major outside contributor. the creation of the book itself and the time it took (70 something years if i remember correctly) along with how the idea of a dictionary was arrived at is also really interesting.

well that's all i've got for you folks. enjoy the day!