i don't really like grateful dead

and yet i have a ton of the dead in my itunes library. what's with that?

Anyway, today I realized that my best friend in town is the old man that guards the Dar Chabab. I see him 5 times a week and we almost always walk home from work together (he lives at the bottom of the hill, I live halfway up). His favorite thing to do is sit around and watch the world go by, preferably with a cigarette and a friend to talk with. For this reason, he has become invaluable to me. I don't have an Arabic tutor anymore (and honestly haven't even tried to find one), so I get a lot of practice just sitting around talking to the guard.

Sadly, today was the last day the Dar Chabab will be open until next school year starts. There's some camp going on there that I'm not involved in and the guard invited me to come by and sit with him during the long camp hours, but other than that I probably won't see him much.

Second order of business, there were like six students from Texas in town today. I heard they were coming a few days ago and was wildly excited, but when I actually met them this morning I was sort of disinterested. I think it had something to do with how they showed up for a meeting at the DC while I was cleaning my classroom with some of my kids. We were having a blast running around barefoot on the soapy wet floor and all of a sudden I had to go be social and shake hands with all these strangers. Some random guy I had never met started telling the Americans all about my work and how well I speak Arabic and it was just total bullshit. The bullshit level was made clear when the guy made me translate things for him and I didn't understand half of what he was saying. I'm working really hard here but I'm not perfect. Hell, I wasn't even wearing shoes during this whole transaction.

Soon after my translation fail I was able to escape back to the comfort of my classroom and resume having fun. The meeting I was missing out involved a bunch of cross-culture games between the American students and some hand-picked youth from my town. Of course it occurred to me I should be involved in that, but then I just kind of felt like my place was with the couple kids that showed up to help me clean out my classroom for summer. Plus it was way more fun.

One last thing, I am INSANELY fatigued lately. I don't know if it's the intense sun beamage or what, but yesterday, after sleeping 10 hours, I took a two hour nap and had two cups of coffee and was still a zombie. I'm a bit bit better today but I feel like something is off. In Darija you say "ana madiggadigga" which translates more or less to "I'm in pieces." I just really like saying "madiggadigga" and the sound of the word goes so well with how I feel.

snack time!