We got up at 6:50 and were waiting at our gate at 7:55 for our ride to AID. It wasn’t exactly where I wanted to spend my day, but I did want to get out of the compound and they were paying me, so I thought I’d spend the morning working there. At 8:10 we called the motor pool. After a series of calls the conclusion was that no cars were rolling today, even the one mile between AID and our compound. Nothing new had happened. It seemed like just an arbitrary decision. John said they might have gotten new intelligence. So today I have been counting sand (nearly a whole layer by lunch time), working on my paper and reading journal articles. I even took an hour to read about the History of the Middle East in the sun. It’s like 70. I just got to gunpowder in the book. The Ottomans adopted it but the Persians and Egyptians saw the use of guns as undignified and cowardly…so they got their butts kicked. The Ottomans took over Egypt, but the Persians hired a bunch of Europeans and developed better handguns and ballistics strategy than the Ottomans. Also, the Ottomans were mainly Turkey and Iraq and the Persians were Iran and Parts of the Stans. I guess I am beginning to see where some of the modern rivalries are coming from. I also found the Mongols really interesting.
It is hard to write a journal on days that I am stuck in the compound. I ate, I worked, I took a 20 minute nap after lunch. I thought about my wife and missed her.
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I made it all the way through the paper I am updating for sedimentology. It seems there is a fine line between accepted requiring changes and rejected but highly recommended to resubmit…but it is an emotionally charged distinction. I am still rejected until I resubmit (editorial note…this paper was eventually accepted). I have rewritten like 70% of the text, and I think it is a lot better. Plus, a lot of the bed form literature they wanted me to read, I needed to write my next proposal. So it was a double benefit.
We went to the gym at today. It was packed. I couldn’t even get a treadmill. I settled for 10 minutes elliptical and 10 minutes stair climber. It was a pretty good workout. I also was able to do the incline press without incident on a low weight. I was feeling bold and wondering just how ‘better’ my shoulder might be. That used to be the worst exercise for it. Well it appears that I am quite a bit better, which is surprising b/c I thought it was degenerative. I’m pretty thankful. Between my meds and my shoulder, I’m feeling like a 25 year old.
I’ve had another take on Lent and the ubiquitous forbidden soda. I think lent is like fasting in that Protestants are confused about why to do it. I know I am. So my latest reflection when I choose not to have a soda is the simple admission that I can’t have everything I want. I think this might be a pretty powerful application of the season. I have heard people talk about fasting this way and about how fasting leads to lower rates of affair. Particularly in our culture, where I can have pretty much anything I want, it is good to practice mild depravation and train yourself to say no…so when the thing you want leads to moral failure you’ve had a little practice. So today, when I reach for my juice box, I tell myself, “You are not the master of your soul. You can’t have everything you want.”
I worked pretty hard until around 8:00 then I started writing. I started the other story, the one about the guy who wakes up each day to a life formed by different choices. I had trouble sleeping, so I wrote like 6 pages. I feel like its kind of waste of time, but I’m really enjoying it. I find that I will pump out a couple of good paragraphs that are separated in time, and then string them together with some pretty mundane and mechanical text. I kind of wonder if they are any good.
I felt like watching a movie, so I went to see what the PX had for sale. They had nothing I was interested in, but I did find the new Switchfoot CD for $12. So I got it. It’s pretty good. I think they are about my age and it seems like they are going through about the same thing. In fact, earlier in the day I had written one of those ‘poems’ I write where the sentences are too long for it to actually be a poem but to short and disconnected to be an essay. I felt like one of the songs on the CD echoed some of the same themes and even used a similar phrase.
This morning the cars were going to AID so I decided to go in for half the day. When I got here they were able to give me my own cubicle, I put Cam’s cool earphones on and disappeared into a world of productivity. I started by going through the comments on my paper and marking the ones I hadn’t dealt with yet. One of the comments directed me to do some additional computations, so I spent much of the rest of the day doing those. It was really frustrating for a while since my hand calcs didn’t agree with RAS, but I think I’m getting close.
I was invited to go out to a Croatian restaurant tonight. It was tempting, but it against the rules to go off compound, so I declined. This compound business is a little restrictive. I’d like to come some time not with the government.
I am planning on trying to run here on the AID compound. It is a beautiful day, They have a road all the way around that might be a fifth of a mile and the mountains are visible in all directions. I’m a little light on the other things to say. My day is really summarized in the table.
Tomorrow is the Bazar and the official day off. I think we are eating steaks.
I finished one of my stories tonight. It is about a guy who feels trapped in his life and marriage who begins waking up each new day in a life that was the result of different choices made. He sees that his discontent and emotional barriers submarine every permutation of his existence and he starts to shed them. Along the way he ends up reading part of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot ends up to be a symbol of his unconscious quest for innocence and righteousness and, in the end, a symbol of the difficulty of both. I expected it to be a much longer story, but after the 4th day I couldn’t seem to write anything that wasn’t anti-climactic. I may go in and add intermediate days, but my current final day has to be the end of the story.
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