my gurnal

i do this every time i have a journal. i start writing in it and i do it every day for five days then there's a week long gap and then there's a six month gap. that's no exaggeration.

a few weeks ago a peace corps lady called me to see if i would be interested in doing a program that leaves june 11th. i said, "sure, yes, yes i'll do it." hmm. well, i think i was having cabin fever and feeling a little too earthbound but in the end it didn't work out (thank god), and now i'm still on for the july program that i was originally supposed to be doing. last week there was a little slow-down and i had a bad day, got mad, waste of breath.

working this weekend was tough b/c i have been feeling sort of unmotivated. it's that lethargic feeling where you look at your work and you just can't do it and you write some notes on things and make excuses that that's enough for one day type of thing.

tomorrow is my second day volunteering at planned parenthood. it's actually good work, it goes by quickly and there's actually a lot for me to do, which isn't always the case at some jobs i've had. i keep thinking this is great it will look good on my resume; women, public health, giving up my free time, i'm a liberal "look i'm pro-choice", yada yada. not feeling too much better about myself after it, and still not two days later. maybe tomorrow i will.

tomorrow i will, because i've reformed my outlook. peace corps has been draining me. not knowing anything and not being excited and having to deal with people who are slow, condescending and incompetent over the phone (that is IF i don't get sent directly to voicemail) has made me unmotivated. it's starting to affect my job. i think i forgot why i was doing it in the first place. i'm not even excited to tell people about it because i don't want to hear their naive idea of what peace corps volunteers do out there in the BFE. i mean, for god's sake, we aren't saving the world! (maybe that's negative, if anything it's realistic) obviously there are other things out there more important than taking a 2 year vacation to bring a few people's attention to a small corner of the world. if i do anything while i'm in peace corps it's inspire one american to make women's health their reason for living. if i can do that, then i will have succeeded. this is what i say today, who knows what it will be when i'm done.

the point of this, however, is to mention this book i just started. i bought three books a while back to read and i just finished my latest book. i had to choose, tonight, between Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer; The True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen & Aldrich Ames, and The Best Travel Writing 2007: True Stories From Around the World. i decided i needed some inspiration myself, so i picked the travel writing. something light. anyway, the first story (which is all i read) is about a guy taking a freighter boat from Jordan to Dahab, Egypt for the last Ramadan holiday. couldn't have been a better story to start off with. i might have written it myself the words rang so true to being an american in a muslim country during ramadan, in fact, i had almost the same experience myself. and thank god for that, because i think i forgot why i wanted to do peace corps in the first place. i want to travel and push myself and be horribly uncomfortable and hot and lose my patience in my head but keep my cool on the outside. i want to be reminded of those times by bad smells and shocking sunsets and those strange and weird quiet moments we have when the wind stops blowing for just a second.

from this day on, i promise to be excited and i promise to not let the awful and putrid complexity of our government's bureaucracy deter my faith in myself. i am going to write in my journal or my blog more because i like to see my feelings on paper, and i think i'm going to relax a little bit. maybe get less sleep and read more books, and get really really excited to travel. most of all, i'm going to miss egypt. damn, i do, too.