(Henna my host Mama did on me, of my Bambara name that family gave me, which has now changed! To Karija Coulibaly)“I don’t know if this makes any sense at all, but I don’t really think they have a private life.” – A PC Mali volunteer
“I feel like, when I go to stage (regional volunteer) house, I’m incredibly public, but when I’m in village, it’s an incredibly private life. I mean, I speak, but I’m thinking all the time. It’s almost as if I go through my entire life in pictures, in my head, and make sense of it all.” – Another PC Mali Volunteer
“As [a former volunteer in Brazil] put it in his book… ‘Because I spoke nearly no Portuguese and chose to go to those parts of Rio de Janeiro where no tourists go, there were weeks where I began to forgot that I exist.’” – PC’s book “A (Few) Cultural Adjustments” that they send to all volunteers before leaving
“ ‘It took us that long to realize that a purpose of humyn life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.’ “ – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Sirens of Titan, Pg 313
“Salo once described this durable form of government to Rumfoord as hypnotic anarchy, but declined to explain its workings. ‘Either you understand at once what it is,’ he told Rumfoord, ‘or there is no sense in trying to explain it to you, Skip.’” – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The Sirens of Titan, Pg 268-9
There have basically been four things central to the past three weeks or so of my time in Mali. They must begin, though, with what I now realize I have explained to almost nobody at home in anything beside short snippets floating around in my head at any given time. I must begin by explaining why I decided to join the Peace Corps.
I decided to join the Peace Corps in my sophomore year of high school. I decided to do so begrudgingly. In fact, I was incredibly angered by the fact that this would be a future decision of mine. But, if there’s one thing I feel that I’ve learned from my father in my life, as well as trying to live a principled Jewish life to some degree, it’s that you should try to act as much within principles that you believe to be righteous and somewhat just, whenever you have control over it. And a big principle I was raised with, as my once-Anarchist father’s daughter and as a Jew, was that, if the community falls, we all fall. So everything we do is so that the community is a more healthy, growing, and, for whatever it means to its members, a more spiritually enriching grounds for being able to love one’s life and find meaning in this crazy mess of a world while living it. So, I thought that the Peace Corps, in my sophomore year of high school until I left October 28, 2011 for service, angered me as a concept because it smelled at once as much like a well-meaning but incredibly open-to-mistakes foray into trying to help others as it did like an imperialist foray into trying to convince people that Americans were nice. But I knew that the central idea to the Peace Corps, since Kennedy put it into being in 1961, was sustainable development through putting people who could put in the time in places where there were problems and having them make relationships along the way that elucidated both sides as to some part of the equation of progress they’d all been missing.
I.e., I happen to see half of America’s vast structural problems as a result of making a country founded upon the idea of unrestrained opportunity if you have the drive to make something of yourself, but only allowing certain parts of the population the ability to be on the same playing field to have that “drive” and opportunity. In a country like Mali, which is the third poorest country in the world but yet has 719 local sections of its government with health clinics every 15 kilometers from people for them to access when they’re sick at a price that can honestly be afforded by everyone (after collecting money from others in the village, which happens frequently when people are sick and don’t have the money, as do community-driven money collections for impending times of hardship so that womyn can get things like prenatal exams regardless of the first-time fee), I happen to see half of Mali’s structural problems as a result of unchecked colonialism allowing other countries and languages to own all means of industry and, therefore, progress and commerce, while Malians themselves do not have the money to participate in any form of ownership outside of tradition, pitting tradition against commerce and industry to stunt the country’s progress in providing for its people (nothing, I believe, by the way, could feel more disenfranchising than having to choose between my traditions and my future, because the two are never opposites but can be manipulated by my country’s leadership to seem as such when I don’t feel like an active participant in change). I hope that all makes sense.
So, in favour of learning how to make a community work together for progress within itself, while simultaneously and almost more importantly (as a Jew, for me) learning how to do this as an active participant and member of the community (to not be a disenfranchising foreign cog orchestrating change behind the Wizard of Oz curtain of a community), I joined the Peace Corps. In order to work in transforming reproductive and sexual rights through constitutional international law in the Afro-diaspora (or at least that’s the plan right now, but who knows, everything could change at any given time!), I chose to apply for service with the geographic preference of “Sub Saharan Africa” (a region is all you can suggest, though Peace Corps does not have to give you a country in the regions you ask for), with the hope of learning how to work with others to help others as one of the others and not an impending, separate, better-off-for-knowing-more-and-having-been-trained-in-law-and-elite-schools-to-guide-change force.
It’s also important to say why I joined because a lot of people think—very kindly, might I add—that it was a large sacrifice on my part to join the Peace Corps! But that idea requires the proof of things I consciously gave up to be here. Which leads me into what’s been happening recently.
On not being in the army, and why the army is a place I could never go
So, I’ve read four books since I’ve come to Mali. Two were on the Peace Corps, one was “Fun Home” by Alison Bechdel—an amazing graphic novel tht she dubs a “family tragicomic” about her coming out as a lesbian in rural Pennsylvania but also simultaneously about her father’s suicide and a life of compulsions—and the last was a Vonnegut, the only Vonnegut I brought with me, which was a dumb decision because Vonnegut makes my life meaningful: The Sirens of Titan. Now, people usually knock on The Sirens of Titan because it’s not as good as Cat’s Cradle, or Slaughterhouse 5, or the Children’s Crusade, a story about Billy Pilgrim/Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. himself, a POW in Dresden, Germany during the big bombing during WWII, who has become unstuck in time and travels through space. But, all the same, The Sirens of Titan is a very good book.
The Sirens of Titan is about (SPOILER ALERT) a very stylish man whose life—orchestrated by the needs of the machine people of the planet of Tralfamadore, 150,000 light-years away from Earth—is dedicated to the gleaming showmanship of driving his personal spaceship into a pocket of space where time and all of its wonders meet in the solar system, becoming split between different parts of space and materializing and dematerializing as time should have it because of driving into this universe time pocket, recruiting an army for Mars and purposefully leading them on a suicide mission of epic proportions in a war against Earth, using this horrific suicide mission to unify Earth and dispose of borders by creating a Church of G-d the Utterly Indifferent, and ultimately, helping the people of Tralfamadore spread a simple message to the other side of the Universe. Because that’s all that Earth was supposed to do, since the Tralfamadorians needed a message sent across the universe and could use us to do it.
The Sirens of Titan talks a lot about war. That’s because Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a POW in Dresden, Germany, during WWII, and spent a lot of time thinking about what war means. And in The Sirens of Titan, he likens it, in a recruited group of people for the doomed army of Mars, to being an instrument for greater ends on the parts of leaders without respect for the lives of the soldiers. I’m not really sure how that’d make soldiers feel to read. But I do know, not ever having wanted to go into an army before, that reading the book freaks me out. Because in order to recruit for the army, they erase most peoples’ minds and make them do things that they are never sure they did, like kill each other for indisgressions, completing direct commands without thinking (they have radio antennas put in their skulls so that they get painful shocks when they don’t do what they’re told and have a drum beat to every march they make transmitted semi-telepathically that drowns out all their other thoughts), and painfully forget questions they shouldn’t ask. It makes them machines for this very stylish man who wants them all to go on a suicide mission against every city in Earth so that Earth can eventually not have any borders, which would seem as though there’d be no more wars.
I have never joined an army first and foremost because I’m afraid to lose my individualism for a cause orchestrated by someone else. That would scare me partially because I don’t ever want to plausibly have to kill somebody to protect the interests that somebody has told me exist, because I don’t think that there’s ever a big enough reason to kill somebody. Punish or banish, yes, but kill, no. I also think that it’s incredibly valiant to join a group of people for a cause bigger than yourself, but don’t think I succumb well enough to thinking as a group because I’m selfish and really like playing devil’s advocate and not having to agree with others in the favour of being a strong group. In fact, one of the big reasons I already said that I chose to join the Peace Corps was to get better at acting as a part of a dedicated group to change. So, I’m not willing to sacrifice a lot of things, let alone my actions and possibly my mind, for the trusted interests of a group of leaders to a cause that they’ve chosen. I didn’t sacrifice my nice house—houses are nice around the world—or my bathroom—my calf muscles are pretty good now from squatting and I ain’t need no Jillian Michaels fo’ dem workouts—or my life—it’s been pretty transformative here—to be here. I know other volunteers left their jobs, their children, their houses, and other things to be here—that’s a pretty big sacrifice. But I didn’t. I can still talk to whoever I want while I’m here, granted it may mean that I need to buy some phone credit or get my butt over to the regional house in order to skype them. I will soon have my own house, which I didn’t in the States. And, for free. I have a support team in Peace Corps that’s literally dedicated to me being happy and effective, and a village that threw a dance party for me and makes me food for every single meal of the day—and is giving me a puppy—and loves me and is excited about me working with them for as long as I’ll stay.
I’m not giving anything up, and no one’s making me go to war. I’m not sacrificing anything. I’m here because I want to learn and do it while trying to help other people, and the US is awesome in making a program that’ll provide enough for me to live while I do it.
Timafeyo and A Language to Yourself
So, we all went to our sites on Monday morning two weeks ago, and came back to regional capitols absolute latest by Caturday morning, for a romp-roaring good time with volunteers in our regions to welcome us to service (nice, right?!!??). On Monday, we traveled to our sites with our homeologues, and mine proved to be incredibly cool, as I’d thought he would be. His name is Jakaliah Kone, and he’s been a Relais (local health clinic volunteer unpaid and chosen by the community leaders to basically bring the health messages straight to peoples’ doors through demonstrations, vaccination drives, and baby weighings) since 1994, and began getting certified by/working with Peace Corps in 1996. He loves his work because, “When [he] started working in Ziangolodougou, there were far fewer people. But since [he] started, and people started understanding nutrition, and coming to prenatal check-ups, and coming to vaccination drives and [country-wide] health campaigns [that he helps the government get to the local level as a Relais], there are so many people, and that’s good.” He’s a Relais because he wanted people to stop dieing. And he really wants to work with me on health campaigns, vaccination drives, and health demonstrations (animations put on for community members to show why different healthy activities are important, i.e. washing your hands, feeding your baby protein after 6 months of age, etc.) to make more people live.
So THAT’S pretty fantastic.
He also likes my sense of humour, which is important for my incredibly large ego J.
On Tuesday, I met 4 other volunteers near me, including my site mate, who’s another health volunteer 5 km away in the next village over and quite loveable. Though she’s been here for a year and a half and will probably be leaving soon, she can be a kind of adjustment/work partner in crime until she does, and she also gets my sense of humour, which, again, is incredibly important. Also knows her way around Providence and has a puppy! So we bond, and we shall bond.
The rest of my time was spent speaking virtually no English. I met one guy who was a little creepy, though harmless, and who’s around my age and teaches French at a local school, and he kinda spoke English. Otherwise, nope. No English. None. Basically, watched a Country Grammar video on his phone, and then no more English.
Now, like the quote about the guy in Rio de Janeiro above, not speaking a language very well and not being around other people who aren’t from the isolated area you’re in where you don’t speak the language like your own makes you feel a little like you don’t exist. That sounds intense—as it feels!—so it’s not completely as if you don’t exist. You just don’t feel like you can affirm whom you are to other people, kind of like how I said in my last post on the power of language in speaking yourself. You kind of rely on language as a mode to communicate yourself, and suddenly, the first couple of months at site, you learn a different way to do that, really really well. And, in the process, you begin to feel, as I’ve gathered from other volunteers, as if you might have acquired two identities, completely distinct from one another.
One, the public self who exists as a volunteer in village.
The other, the private self who exists as an observer of everything, constantly absorbing, constantly reflecting, constantly drawing conclusions you never really had the time to do when you were constantly, well, talking about everything in the language you would otherwise require to process and reflect on it all with, all in your head.
Either you kinda get it all at once, or there’s no use trying to explain it. I just was overwhelmed to find that I am one of those people who frequently lives a completely public life. That means, I think aloud, so it’s hard to censor. Which means, to be appropriate, I try to think according to what I think is fair. Which means, I censor my own commentary on what happens around me most the time. But suddenly, I have been thrust into a job where I am almost forced into a private self.
It’s a tad strange.
After a few days, speaking in English felt really strange, because it began to feel like I was speaking my inner monologue to others. When English is the language you use to think in only, it begins to feel very private. I became almost possessive of it. When people tried to practice English on me, I could feel myself getting more and more irritated. It finally felt like I’d created a constant, through all of this crazy training experience where very little is under your control. I finally created this literal language of solace. And I couldn’t share it with anyone in village because nobody could speak it.
Village was intense on top of this because keeping to one’s self is seen as negative. Why, you might ask? One volunteer asked someone in their village and got the response that, “When you’re alone, you think too much. And when you think too much, you get sad.”
So, people would rather be in complete silence here with each other than on their own. This means that I was thinking all these amazing things to myself, but people both thought I was alone because I was sad, and I had no way of translating exactly what these amazing things were yet into good enough Bambara (or SENUFOKAN mjbfkjdbfkjsbkjd) to tell them about what I’d been thinking so they wouldn’t think I was antisocial anyway.
One thing I thought of, ironically, was how, if Bambara was so easy for me so far, I could have learned Ja Luo, my tribal language in Kenya, in the past. I hadn’t meditated on this at all before site visit really, but my great grandfather Timafeyo, before he died second semester of my junior year in college, had said that he wanted me to spend a summer with him, learn Luo, and see how they live. He died at the happy age of 104, and yet I still didn’t ever take him up on learning who we were, and who he was, through my mother tongue that I really should—and now, with Bambara, know I could—learn. At the age of 103, he could still speak some English phrases. But it just came to me all at once that, we frequently don’t things because we feel we don’t have time for it. Especially when those things are things we need to be happy or feel we’re leading fulfilling lives. And I cried, because I’d done that, preventing my great grandfather from ever hearing me speak our language, by not spending the time like I am now and learning who we are together over a summer.
Which leads me to, why I self-sabotage, and the ways of Hypnotic Anarchy.
I realized all of a sudden, along with how I could have spoken to my great grandfather had I have learned Luo, that I’d done that with several other things that would have made me happy. I’d done it with music—I’d deprived myself of singing, dancing, and playing any instrument whatsoever for years, because I “didn’t have the time.” I’d done it with health—I’d come to hate all forms of exercise, eaten mindlessly and guiltily, and slept far too little to be happy and just enough to be sick too frequently, because I “didn’t have the time.” In fact, I’d done it with preparing myself for things I’m worried about by allowing myself to become paralyzingly overwhelmed, cleaning where I lived by letting my life become as cluttered as my thoughts when I was stressed, and meditating to think clearer by watching TV consistently over having any form of silence to myself, especially when I had time alone.
Oprah once coined this term called “Self Sabotage.” The idea is that people frequently aren’t happy, as I’ve basically described here, because they’re sabotaging themselves against being happy purposefully. I think I’ve found since site visit and the end of homestay that I “don’t have enough time” for things that make me happy because I get so worked up about doing things perfectly that I figure I might as well not even start them. In a nutshell, I’m a perfectionist, but I don’t think that term even does it justice—I’m frightened by the possibility of letting myself down. Frightened of not taking full advantage of my turns at making the most of my life.
Now, while I was figuring all of that intense shit out, I was also coming to realize that, while I had all this time to think about and reflect upon myself, to live in a village like mine in rural Mali is to live only publicly. And that’s a little like the planet of Tralfamadore, where Salo, an alien machine, says that they operate by “hypnotic anarchy,” and that you either get what that means, or you don’t. In Mali, there are loads of cultural rules and regulations, and no private spaces in which to commit anything to the contrary of really anything that has proven to work for the community. If you don’t follow the cultural rules, you gotta go. Otherwise, people almost exclusively want to help you be happy at any cost, and will provide for you. Anarchy without being spoken, just thought. Catch my drift?
Example:
-No open displays of emotion beside laughter/happy things (no crying [i.e., even during childbirth and frequently at funerals], no hugging)
-No adultery/sex before marriage
-No showing of the thighs/knees if an adult
And you get…
-Always money to go to a health clinic
-Always greeted
-Always offered food and drink everywhere as a guest
-Always have food, even if struggling to make ends meet
Now, I realized that I can’t really say I don’t have the time to help myself be happy when a village of people who exclusively work to live together are depending on a happy, healthy me to help things work even more. That’s selfish, and no longer self-sabotage: that’s community sabotage. Which is the exact opposite of why I’m here. This is a lot, I know, paha. But my village is incredibly self-sufficient, it seems, thusfar. Which is great, since I’ll be working with them. It’s just a little intimidating when I feel like I’m joining this socialist collective dedicated to caring about each others’ health and wellbeing as a health volunteer who’s just figuring a lot of her own shit out. So I realized I need to work on myself privately to be a better public person. Which is a little contradictory-feeling to me right now, since I’m not, like I said, much of an alone type of person. But that brings us to the public work, in direct relationships, or how home-stay started to drive me insane.
I found that I needed to work out my self-sabotage as well as connect with people, as opposed to living inside my English-speaking zone thoughts, in order to be less overwhelmed, feel welcomed, wanted, and less watched from afar as a foreign language speaker, foreign culture, and general foreigner, and to feel like I was apart of my community and in turn propel me into working better with it and not being paralyzingly overwhelmed by it. But I returned to a homestay experience where, while my host-mom and I, and several other people in my family, love each other, everyone in village began to seem…unpleasant.
The best way to describe this is not as anyone’s fault, but as a result of a bunch of factors.
1. There were 8 of us in one village of 2000-ish people
2. We all came in not speaking more than 20 words in Bambara
3. We all came in not knowing the culture
4. We looked dazed and confused a lot (because it’s dazing and confusing to live somewhere else with a family that’s not yours all of a sudden)
All of these things made us become akin to the local zoo exhibit for people in Montougula. Which makes perfect sense, but, I don’t like being looked at like a zoo animal. A, because I’m a person, not a zoo animal. B, because I can speak a language, know how to cook and live for myself, and can do many things competently enough that I became a Peace Corps Volunteer to help others do things even better. When people yell my name without wanting to greet me (because they’re excited to see me, I’m sure) and only to laugh in my face when I respond after I’ve lived there for over a month (because I know it is crazy to here me respond in Bambara, but that doesn’t make me feel nice), it makes me feel sad, watched, unincluded, and like I can’t connect with anyone because I’m more of an attraction than a person to them to connect to.
How do I take care of myself when I feel like no one’s seeing me for myself?! AHHHH, and it was ALL in my HEAD! In my private self while the communities here on a small village level are completely public, and in Bambara. Homestay started to drive me insane. And if it hadn’t have been for my homestay family and the safe haven they gave me from what was beginning to feel, though it wasn’t intended to be at all, like harassment, I might have started to paint my walls with egg shells to represent my cracked mind.
All of this is to say, we came back from site visit, and I found out they were making me a new house from scratch where the volunteer 10 years ago had lived, which I get to help design (?!?!!!!!!!!). And that means, I get windows galore and a kitchen. Though people speak primarily Senufokan, the language of the Senufo (as opposed to Bambara) ethnic group, all people except young kids and older womyn speak Bambara (sad, but I’ll try to learn Senufokan dooni dooni [‘little by little’ in Bambara] to connect with them too). My village is a farming village that grows everything Mali’s known for growing. I mean:
-4 different types of mangos
-papaya (they gave me 3 the size of my torso)
-bananas
-pineapple
-rice
-corn
-millet
-sweet potato
-corn
-hot pepper
-ginger
-sour root
-spinach
-lettuce
-tomatoes
-peanuts
And they’re excited for me to start my garden!! Which means they’ll help. WHICH means I’m getting humongous sunflower seeds for my house J. And soy plants, as planned. The only two things they don’t plant, sadly, are garlic and onions. Gonna have to go get those at the market/border town once a week. Also, though, because my market town is a border town (Zegoua), I CAN DO HIV WORK BECAUSE THEY HAVE A HIGHER PREVALENCE RATE AT BORDERS OF COUNTRIES THAN INSIDE THEM. This is HUMONGOUS, because though it’d be nice to not have to do HIV work if it wasn’t a problem, I was originally going to do a specifically HIV/AIDS-oriented Peace Corps program before funding got cut for a bunch of programs, and have always wanted to and will always want to do HIV work. So, YAY. The CSCOM in Zegoua would like the help, and I’ll be overly glad to give it to them. Also, can do a radio show in Zegoua. YAY.
Requested my puppy…three times…homeologue said it’d happen.
Cute pictures and intense farming pictures ensue. But basically, good people, just a small village with not much to talk about in a place where culturally they don’t want you to not talk with them. Conundrum in any small town I’d go to in the world, so I guess I just need cue cards. Or something. I mean, honestly, when I won’t be working, I might need a puppy just to start a conversation. We can talk about what trucks are going where on the main road my village is on from dawn till dusk, but that don’t make us excited.
Homestay ended on the 31st. My mom did traditional Bambara henna on my right hand and feet the night and morning before I left. I gave her three kangas and a bracelet from Kenya, and she walked me to where the van picked us all up and cried (remember, not socially acceptable)…for half an hour. She hugged me three times. My 10-year-old brother who always wanted to love me cried. Every boy in my concession bar one teared up, as did my loud but loveable Aunt. They were and always will be my lovely homestay family. I’ll bring them, like I did from site visit, food from Sikasso, pictures, and loving, whenever I come back to Bamako and have a way to go into village. They were just lovely, gave me loads of salad, and I really couldn’t have asked for a better fit nor for a better time.
The 31st was a shitshow dance party, Peace Corps style. Care package food was indulged in. The next day, Wet Hot American Summer was watched. If you haven’t seen it, it’s ridiculously funny and about a Jewish summer camp in Maine. Everyone in SNL is in it. It made me realize that, on the lighter side of reflections, I really should’ve been a Jewish camp counselor.
Swear in is this Friday the 6th, at 10am, and I’ve been asked to give a speech in front of everyone about our stay here and what we plan to do with our time in Mali…in Bambara! I was told on my birthday, which, bar explosive diarrhea, was a fantastic day! I got a beautiful package from an amazing friend with a fantastic stuffed animals in it along with some amazing chocolate, painted my nails, had a private dance party, and then ate delicious food in our special shady grove in village with all the trainees and experienced good Tegan and Sara. Mama made me good food for the whole day.
Anyways, doing the speech! It’s a big deal, because everyone will understand it…hopefully, and it’s basically all about how home is kind of like a language, and, as we’ve moved into our homestays, learning Bambara, and learning what we’ll be doing at site as well as this rich culture, we’ve been expanding our vocabularies of home in a way to expand the dialogue on sustainable development and speak together about new ways and words to move forward in partnership as Peace Corps and Mali.
You can ask me for the English translation if you want it J. Excited. Need to keep on practicing, and happy I was speech captain to oddly enough prepare me for this, paha.
Moving into site on the 10th. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Last time moving in AWHILE, hopefully. ALMOST MADE IT, YAY. LONGEST UPDATE EVER. NOW PICTURES.
…And, let’s say we wanted to send you some letter or package or something, because we thought you were going insane and wanted you to keep in touch with reality a little more than Vonnegut novels?
Fair question! My NEW ADDRESS is as follows, which all things should be directed to from now on:
CORPS DE LA PAIX
Capt. Akinyi Shapiro
B.P. 227
SIKASSO, MALI
Send me ANYTHING! Surprises are honestly the best, and if they’re edible, my only request is that they be vegan and delicious.
Some ideas for letters are:
-amazing or hilarious pictures
-letters about what you’re thinking, what’s happened, or a story you think I need to know
-magazine articles I should read, from the internets or from your classily delivered hometown paper
-drawings/water colour/pastel stuff I can put up on my house walls here!
Some ideas for packages are:
-Green curry paste
-TUMS (I’m addicted to them, and constantly need them here as well)
-orzo
-quinoa
-dark chocolate with sea salt/mint (plastic-baggied in case it melts)
-dried pineapple/berries
-trail mix
-creamed honey
-seaweed chips
-cinnamon/mint gum
-Halls…of any kind (I’m ADDICTED and MISS THEM TERRIBLY)
-water mixes (i.e., crystal light/anything else that makes gallons of water every day still taste meaningful)
-vegan delicious things (and just an FYI, you can send baked goods you make!! People get them all the time in packages, and as long as they’re well sealed in Tupperware, or even PLASTIC DOUBLE-LOCK BAGGIES, they get here and honestly taste as good as the next day…which should freak us all out a little bit, but means that, if you’re willing to bake it, I WILL UNBEGRUDGINGLY EAT ALL OF IT. Baking will be a little tough for me here the first couple months before I can make a solar mud oven—I know, right?!—so I will eat absolutely ANYTHING YOU SEND)
-Tupperware
-PENS/COLOURED PENCILS/MARKERS, OH MY
-things that make homes homey
-things that make puppies happy
-sriracha
-smell-good bath stuff
-GOOD TEA (my favourites are ginger, mint, and deliciously fruity)
-GOOD COFFEE (instant)
-leggings/shirts (size large) in bright colours
-pretty pictures for my walls
-JEWISH HOLIDAY DECORATIONS
-a book you think I should read (VONNEGUTS are THOROUGHLY APPRECIATED)
and…SURPRISES! My favourite thing I’ve gotten so far is a surprise stuffed animal. We literally all talk about him (his name’s Michael, and he’s a rainbow tie-dyed sock chicken) and snuggle with him, and he keeps my stuffed animal friend Walrus company. which is incredibly important, you should know, because Walrus is an incredibly stately fellow with an incredible amount of things to do and not enough courage to ask for a friend every once in awhile to keep him company. But now, he has some. We’ve all been lucky to find Michael the rainbow-tie-dyed-sock chicken.
Love, and pictures shall continue. Happy I made it this well this far. J Happy holidays, everybody! And, if you HAVEN’T gotten a birthday shout-out, as soon as I have access to my birthday list again, you WILL, I promise. And thanks for all the birthday love J. It meant the world to me, really. It made my week magic.