A (Summer) Day in the Life of Jen

9:00 Wake up. I briefly consider rousing myself out of bed in a timely manner so I can run before my community computer class, but this thought dissolves into about an hour of daydreaming. The thunderstorm from the night before is still rattling my windows. The power's probably out.

10:30 Finally get out of bed and confirm my hypothesis about there being no power. My host family's in Tbilisi, so I go downstairs to make breakfast like an independent woman.

10:40 There's three different valves on the gas pipe. I find that the first one releases a stream of gas into my face, which in hindsight makes sense, since there's no pipe attached to it. The second one turns out to be the lucky winner, and I am free to fry some eggs. Looks like the third one is attached to the gaslight, which I suppose I could be using now since it's dusk-dark in here from the thunderclouds, but since I already fear that the second of gas that came out of the open pipe is going to dissipate throughout the house and then explode and end my life, perhaps I don't trust myself enough to turn it on.

10:45 Eating some eggs with soy sauce I bought in Tbilisi a few months ago. It's Russian soy sauce, but it still livens up the monotony a bit, like that week where I had a pack of American cheese.

10:55 I go to do the dishes, but there's no dish sponge or soap. I avoid thinking about the implications of that. I decide to check the outside faucet for some cleaning supplies, but unfortunately the back door is gated and locked, like the other doors in the house, and I don't know where the key is. Great.

11:15 A break in the rain comes, and I head out to the grocery store for some food, being that there's none in the house since we were in Tbilisi for like a week.

11:20 I tell the first storelady that I want the 10-lari pack of chicken in the freezer, to which she tells me that, no, I don't want it because it's old. Never mind.

11:25 Sweet Nikora has a whole chicken for me, presumably not old. Nikora is one of the more successful chain stores in Georgia, selling meats mostly, but also yogurt and American cheese. My host family likes to buy wrapped hot dogs from Nikora. Boy, wrapped hot dogs. Mmm.

11:30 The lady at the next store is the same one who wouldn't sell me any matsoni (Georgian yogurt) yesterday because I didn't bring her a jar. Nonetheless, she hooks me up with the rest of the stuff on my list, and a Diet Coke. Time to swing by the school and see who signed up for my 2-week computer course that starts today. This class is for the trainers, and then the next two one-week classes are for regular community members and will be co-taught by the trainers. See how that works? Sustainability? Capacity building? The total four weeks of class also carries me over clear until Eco Camp in Ratcha, which is a week and a half before I leave to visit the US, so I can thus avoid the situation I was in last September, wherein common tasks were spread throughout the week so I had a reason to get up every morning ('I need to go to the bazaar and to mail these letters. I'll go to the bazaar tomorrow, since there's a concert this afternoon, and I'll mail the letters the next day.').

11:40 Strangely, someone has typed up the handwritten sign I made in Georgian and printed it out for me. The next thing I notice is that, while the community one-week classes are full, no one has put their name down for the trainer's class. Thus, I am now committed to teach a bunch of non-English speakers computers two weeks from now, without any capacity building or skills transfer to trainers. Great! At least I have something to do in two weeks. I'll try the trainers' thing again in September. It's probably better this way, since I have to go speak at the new volunteers' hub day in Gori this Friday, and I have a girls' sports camp meeting in Batumi on Wednesday. I hang my head and walk dejectedly from the school, the computer room's generator growling in the background.

11:50 I head to the bazaar for cucumbers and tomatoes. I'd like to buy them from the group of ladies who always give me free cherries, but I can't find them, and I realize I'm not exactly sure what they look like individually, since there's usually eight or nine of them that shout, "Gamarjoba Jane!" when I walk by (Jane is a name that they learn in the really old English textbooks for 5th graders, so about 40% of people call me Jane, 15% of people call me Jen, and 45% of people call me America).

12:00 I sit in the kitchen. Some things tend to get done when you have more pressing things at hand. For example, I found out last week that I'm ineligible for next year's Rhodes Scholarship competition, so I have to turn in my application this week, two and a half months late, to NYU (don't laugh at me-- my chances are .0001% greater of winning if I try than if I don't). I also gotta write a lesson plan for talking to the new volunteers about transportation safety this Friday, and I should also be starting on a handbook for next year's Writing Olympics competition and working with Bald Ryan in Dimi to draft an English textbook for 6th graders, as well as attempting to secure a donation of 20,000 English books from an American donation company for our regional public libraries.

12:05 I scrub the candles of my water filter. They don't look any cleaner when I finish.

12:15 I change my clothes for no reason and then head off to the post office to mail a letter to Mom, a thank you letter to Darien Book Aid for sending our class library new books, and a pack of letters for Aunt Lynn's 6th grade class, who were my students' pen pals.

12:30 The woman in the post office greets me as "good girl" as her coworkers sit around a table behind her. There's always a herd of women there, and I haven't figured out what they do yet, but maybe it's like the pony express, and as soon as I leave one of them grabs my letter and runs it to Tbilisi on foot. Things take an annoying turn as she pokes the large pen pals' envelope and asks what's in it. I tell her it's letters and pictures, but she keeps poking it, since apparently it has the texture of contraband. She has her friend poke it, and then they agree (out loud) that I'm sending something that I'm not telling them about, but that they should okay it anyway. She weighs and prices all three envelopes and praises me for giving her 17.20 lari in exact change.

12:45 Seeing as I've decided to institute a policy of sanitation during my stay alone in the house, I stop at a small store and buy dish soap and scrubbies. There's something on the shelf that looks like packs of American cheese, but with pictures of fruit on it. It piques my curiosity for a second (usually, you know in advance everything that's going to be in a Georgian store), but not enough to buy it. It could be fruit cheese. Ew.

1:15 I've nearly run out of ways to postpone working on the Rhodes application or the security session lesson plan. My sitemate's in Kutaisi for the day, and while he did leave his Iraqi bootleg James Bond collection DVD here (very high quality, seriously, and it has every single movie on four disks... we're on Thunderball), it'd be polite of me not to watch them all while he's not here, I guess.

1:20 With the pretense of copying down the Rhodes essay requirements, I turn the computer on, only to write a blog entry (this one! my God!) for thirty minutes, despite the fact that I have another unpublished entry on my jump drive already (the Writing Olympics one! my God!).

1:50 I finally buckle down and work on the Rhodes app for a little while.

2:50 The power goes out. Fortunately, I anticipated this and saved the document approximately every thirty seconds. I head downstairs to make tuna salad with the last pack of sweet 'n' spicy tuna my sister sent me in a care package.

3:15 Tuna salad + cucumber + tomato turns out to be delicious. Time to use the extra beans and rice in the cabinet to make... beans and rice. To avoid the debacle that was my crunchy-bean chili, I decide to boil the beans for several hours, playing Donkey Kong Country 2 on the Game Boy that Andrew gave me in the meanwhile.

6:30 Still no power, but the beans are decent. The rice has somehow become a mashed-potato-esque white blob. I'm surpremely glad that my host family isn't here to see this and tell me that I'm making lobio da brinji wrong. They always guess that I'm making something Georgian, despite the fact that I have yet to do so. Then they add a handful of salt to it.

7:15 I'm sauteeing chicken in mayonnaise since it turns out that there's no oil in the house. It doesn't seem to be working. I add a handful of salt to the concoction in the hope that my host family knows something I don't. The chicken carcass is boiling into what I hope will become soup, or at least that was my intention when I threw the noodles in there. Or are you supposed to skim the fat first?

8:00 I dine on chicken (with more Russian soy sauce), beans, and rice-blob. I debate turning on the fridge and storing the leftovers in there, but it's not that hot this week; they'll keep.

8:30 The power comes on, so I get to working on the Rhodes resume and activity list. Somehow this list makes me look more like a dilletante than a focused student of international relations who wants a prestigious scholarship. I don't think College Bowl is going to earn me any extra points... but at least I know who MC Skatkat is.*

9:40 An NPR podcast launches itself in the midst of my work. Or perhaps I turned it on. In any case, it turns out that 'Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!' is my new favorite podcast, behind 'Foreign Dispatch.' Can I include listening to 'Foreign Dispatch' on my Rhodes list of substantial activities?

10:25 Back to work.

10:35 The power goes out again. I slump in my chair and unplug the computer.

10:37 After feeling my way into the bedroom and grabbing my flashlight (reserved for such occasions), the power comes back on. I return to the computer and my incomplete application.

10:40 The power goes off again. Must be fate. I re-unplug the computer and change into my pj's for bed, despite the fact that it's not even 11 and I woke up late in the first place.

10:50 I lay down in bed, only to notice that the light in the next room is on: the power's back. Rather than tempt fate, I turn the light out and return to Donkey Kong Country 2 and the delicious escape of my off-brand mp3 player. The same kind of tree-felling thunderstorm as last night is raging again outside. I fall asleep counting my meager accomplishments for the day, determining a plan to space out tomorrow's meager accomplishments, and hoping that the backyard water tower doesn't blow over and fall in through my window.

*MC Skatkat is the cartoon cat who sings with Paula Abdul in the "Opposites Attract" video, who went on to have a solo album sans Paula. I've often said that it's the only thing I learned from College Bowl.