Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Senioritis

I have a severe case of Senioritis.Yesterday I couldn't motivate myself to leave my compound. Today, I left the compound, but wasn't happy about it. Everything is a struggle. Interacting with people who are not in my family: struggle. Pretending to like ceebu jenn: struggle. Feigning interest in the discussion of power outages (we had one hour of power between 12 and 1 and it just came back on at 9:15pm) while staring at the ceiling: struggle. Dealing with the new heat wave: struggle. Thinking about anything other than the countdown to America/ life in America: struggle.

A complete lack of desire to do anything, other eat ice cream in a climate controlled setting and think about the America inspired playlist I'm making on my iPod, consumes me. Actually one other thing does take a lot of time and attention...

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There is a lull in artisan work until our meeting next week and only so much I can do for Junior Achievement when Kerry is awesome and has really taken the reigns/ we never have class so dreaming about the end instead of acting on the present is taking hold. I'm actually impressed I've lasted this long since a lot of my friends had early onset Senioritis. I'm so close, but yet so far and I know that I should be doing really awesome things, but getting marriage proposals, lectures on how American English and British English are so wildly different that I couldn't understand a Brit, and being called really mean names are getting old. These things don't even anger me anymore because I'm just really rude and walk away.

I did manage to tear myself out of my compound today (mainly because we didn't have power/ I was starting to feel like a loser). This morning I went through the market and collected vegetable prices on a long list of vegetables for a project that Byron is working on and this afternoon I went to see Mme. Ly. Mme. Ly and Khady are awesome and usual and have some new necklace designs that I will post when I'm not too lazy to take pictures. Purchasing jewelry is a tried and true method of buoying my spirits so I may have indulged in some of Mme. Ly's newest wares, but it's all in the name of the Senegalese economy and getting Mme. Ly's stuff out into the public eye.

Back on the home front the main topic of conversation was electricity and how it makes no sense that the power comes on for one hour in the middle of the day when it doesn't help anyone. True. I've also started to notice that I am the "fly on the wall." All those times that you wish you could hear a conversation and not get noticed? Yeah, that's my daily life. My family knows I'm not a gossip (well, about their issues at least) or thinks I have no idea what's going so I got to listen to many interesting conversations today.

1. Jeenaba ripping her baby daddy a new one about not contributing enough money. You go girl.
2. Awa trying to explain to my mom that she can literally not taste how spicy the food is she's making because she's just that pregnant.
3. Awa and Ziabata talking about how Khady doesn't discipline Ahmed... at all. True.

That's about it for the Senegal rundown. Nothing too exciting, obviously, since I have Senioritis. I also swung by the post office and Shirley deserves another SHOUT OUT from another great letter! Thank you!

2 comments:

  1. Alyssa,

    Thanks for the pictures of your hometown. It brings back many memories of our visit. Keep your head up and you will make it.

    Dad

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  2. So many things to comment on in this post but I must defend Ahmed. He is so sweet. He either doesn't "need" discipline or Khady is doing a fine job!

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