Sopelshi

I feel like every week I’m writing one of those “how I spent my summer” essays kids are often assigned around this time of year. I ate various Kartveli foods, listened to people talk in Kartuli ena, and unexpectedly hiked up a steep hill to a ruined castle. Then I did it again three days later! I visited the regional center, where I met an acquaintance, walked about, bought a whiteboard marker, and poked my head into an Armerian church. I ate way too much hatchapuri, and studied way too little Kartuli ena. T turned six, so they had a little family supra in the nearby village where his aunt lives.

I angsted about teaching, and how I’m not especially useful most of the time. Then I got interrupted by family members who are visiting from Russia, and read 50 pages of a book on regional history over the past 200 years. I read blogs by other TLG-ers, current and former, and realized that they don’t have evangelical metanarratives asserting themselves rather prominently upon their imaginations, and instead have other meta-narratives about the traveling life, or making a difference in the world, or perhaps sometimes that life is an extended supra, or some other set of expectations I know nothing about yet. I wrote some five pages, and then found them boring. I had a brief bout of enthusiasm for the beginning of the school year, wherein I saw visions of nicely decorated and organized classrooms, with an attractive bulletin board, new pencils, craft projects, and a neatly organized scope & sequence. Then I realized that not only do I now now have any of the information that I would need to work on any of those things, but that I have no possible way to find said information either, and my dreams faded into nothingness again. I did get to have a hot shower two days in a row, which is a record for Adigeni.