Ruth:

I think your blog is missing a direct link to a good map of Georgia which shows its relationship to other countries in the area and actually labels those countries. In English. I'm a dumb American when it comes to that area of the world so while I know what direction you're headed in I still can't quite picture it. And I'm too lazy to look very long to figure it out.

Setting aside the troubling notion that the person studying to be a schoolteacher is "too lazy" to figure out world geography, I have provided a map of the relevant sector of the world with helpful "War On Terror" labels:


If you're still having trouble: Me = Georgia, the country that could be a sandwich = Turkey, the Black Sea = the Black Sea, the Evil Sea = the Caspian Sea, the Mediterranean Sea = the Pacific Ocean, Evil = Syria, Iraq, Iran, Chechnya, and the Russian exclave of the Kaliningrad Oblast, and the arrows = Europe.

P.S.

This, in case you have not yet scrolled down the page (SCROLL DOWN THE PAGE I HAVE CREATED IT FOR YOU AND YOU WILL GAZE UPON IT AND YOU WILL KNOW WHAT IT IS TO LOVE), is the Georgian alphabet, in case you were wondering or planning on learning it yourself. It is sort of cool, and sort of fun to write once you sort of get the hang of it (sort of).

Here is the online test that you can use to see if you've gotten the hang of it in the last five seconds.

Fun Things to Do When You Don't Have Work

I have had very little work since I have been back in Los Angeles. It seemed, initially, like I had an acceptable amount of work -- my teeth still hurt early last week and I didn't feel like working, which seemed like an acceptable excuse not to be, and then I had LOTS of work Thursday and Friday -- but, alas/alack/etc, I have had no work yet this week and have not been informed of any in the near future. This makes me feel like a lazy, unproductive asshole, especially when many of my still-school-bound friend are in 10th and finals week and have work out the proverbial ass (note: there is no proverb about asses that I am aware of, thus this is an invalid rhetorical construction and I should be flogged). The problem is that I'm sort of in a bind; I was out looking for other jobs to replace my current part-time quasi-freelance position a few weeks ago, but then I was hired to work full-time for 2+ weeks and I had no time to keep looking for other jobs (I also thought I might potentially not need one, since I had started to work full-time and thought that perhaps this might continue). Then I went home for nine days. Now it seems much too late to jump back on the jobhunting bandwagon, considering the rapidly more imminent imminence of my departure, and yet I currently have no work at my quasi-current job.

So I had to fill time the last few days -- had to come up with at least some sort of excuse for sitting on my couch and not leaving the apartment except to accompany friends to a fro-yo place a couple times. My time-filler has become learning the Georgian alphabet.

I discovered that there were several sites from which I could obtain the alphabet and at least a general sense of what the letters were called and sounded like (though I have also discovered that there are discrepancies, leading me to become worried that I will spend a lot of time learning this alphabet only to arrive in Georgia, overconfident in my ability, and learn that I learned it COMPLETELY WRONG). The alphabet either takes from or simply has a lot of similarities with the Greek alphabet, which I briefly learned in high school, meaning that it was pretty simple to get at least the beginning of the structure down -- but also meaning that I keep saying "alpha, beta" when I should be saying "an, ban." But the script is completely different, not to mention pretty complicated until you get the hang of it, so I've spent the last two days feverishly repeating the letter order in my head and scribbling the letters over and over and over on a piece of paper. Today I found a java "test" of sorts online that does a much better job of drilling the letters into my head than copying them down did. I am feeling by this point that I sooooooort of have the hang of it, at least from a beginner standpoint, but I will keep working at it until I have it down cold. Then my preparation for this journey will be complete!

Oh, wait....languages have words, too. And syntax and structure and pronunciation and MAYBE DIPTHONGS. Although I have no idea about the dipthongs. I'm still on Chapter One of "Learn a Funny Alphabet and Language That Only Like Five Million People Speak." Maybe Chapter Two will concern the dipthongs. Dipthong dipthong dipthong dipthong Olive Garden.

That is all.

It took me several hours to get this template to be wider

I just wanted the negative seven people who are reading this blog at this point to know that, just in order to widen it by 250 pixels, I had to find and change like eleven things and it took, honestly, hours. Good thing I was working on a Mandy Moore music video with nothing to do for hours at a time.

While standing around with other production assistants for hours at a time, you also get to talking about a lot of random things. Here are some things that we decided are funny under any circumstance that you could possibly conceive:

- the Olive Garden
- Falconing

I'm sure this will be an evolving list. And I'm equally sure that you're tantalized by it.