Rest in peace, buddy.

In dog heaven, you'll never get in trouble for pooping on the kitchen floor.

I know spring is coming because my back is acting up. Or: A spine-tingling time at the theatre

Friends, would eight or fifteen groups of singing and dancing girls, boys, and old people lie to you? I don't think so. This must mean that spring is upon us, because I have just returned to my office from attending a variety show at the local cinema slash theatre, which was put on to celebrate the onset of spring, as well as Mothers' Day, which was this past Monday (I don't really know how Mothers' Days work; is it like a country by country thing, or is it pretty unified and either America or Georgia is bucking the trend, or...what?). So the town jammed itself into the cinema, with people sitting on the armrests between chairs and packed like sardines into the aisles, to see various singing and dancing acts, separated by the giving of gifts to distinguished mothers of the community, picked apparently at random. Maybe there was a mother raffle.

Now, the last time I attended anything at the cinema, I ended up sitting through a three and a half hour play of which I understood maybe five words. Also, during the play, a man started yelling and lifted a woman up onto a chair (I suppose I should clarify that this happened on stage, not in the audience, which would probably have made just as much sense). So I was hoping this variety show would not take that long. And, it didn't -- it took about an hour and 45 minutes. But it started half an hour late, and we had to get there early to be Seat People and not Sardine People. So I was sitting in there for about two and a half hours. Improvement! Perhaps I can introduce the cultural idea of an intermission. When we got there, they were handing out flowers at the door, as a crush of dozens of people all tried to shove their way through a single door at the same time. I didn't get a flower, but I did get a chance to look around. The stage was decorated with some sort of curtain and the words "Chven gazapkhulze gepatizhebit," which means, as far as I can tell, "We with invitation in the spring _______." I cannot identify a verb, or any indication of WHAT, exactly, we do with invitation in the spring. Perhaps it is meant to be a subtle philosophical postulation that nature, cruel mistress that she is, invites us to do NOTHING, EVER, and that we must TAKE what we want from her, especially when she has just subjected us to four months of torturous weather. ECO Project or no ECO Project -- when I am put upon by nature as much as I have been put upon this winter, I'm going to cut something the f#$% down.

I had no idea what the show was to consist of. It turns out that it consisted of a lot of singing and dancing. As you may have gleaned from other posts of mine, Gurians LOVE to sing and dance. It is endearing and entertaining. Slightly less so after two hours of it, but endearing nonetheless. Old women and old men sang traditional songs. Youngsters danced traditional dances. The ladies who run the local music school sang a couple nice songs (I am probably obligated to point out, in case anyone with a Cho Connection reads this, that the wife of my supervisor was the very best of the trio). An opera singer even brought the house down with some soprano aria or other. All in all, the performances were pretty impressive. And, in between the performances, there were curious presentations of presents to local mothers. A man would stand up, say something that sounded nice that I didn't particularly understand (when Georgians aren't speaking to me specifically, it's much harder to understand them...this is probably too obvious a point to even mention), and then everyone would clap vigorously, and then a coworker of mine would lean over and say something like, "that woman was in the war," which it turns out means World War II. So I suppose that's pretty impressive. There was also a present for a woman who my coworker claims is 102 years old. This woman, after being helped to the stage, took the microphone and said something that sounded to ME like, "I have 47 children!" which was met with a raucous roar from the crowd. She must have meant children AND grandchildren AND great-grandchildren. But the number still seems high, since Georgian families tend to be pretty small. Maybe she was utilizing metaphor.

So, anyway, the other thing that happened this week was that I (drumroll...) utilized the healthcare provided by the American government for the first time! Those of you who hate your health insurance provider, close your eyes and imagine this scenario (if you actually close your eyes, your computer will sense it and begin reading aloud to you): you have what seems to be a severely strained back. You are on (what you hope is) powerful Russian medication. You call your doctor, and she calls you into her office for a followup appointment (your doctor's office is five hours away, which I suppose isn't too farfetched if you have an HMO). At her office, your doctor tells you that she is going to order a "precautionary" MRI, even though you probably have nothing seriously wrong with your back. She also orders an X-ray. You get the MRI, you get the X-ray, and your doctor gives you her diagnosis, which is that there is nothing seriously wrong with your back. This costs you........absolutely nothing! Which is good, because you make about 150 dollars a month. Those of you who have fainted because an MRI in America costs 11 trillion dollars might want to call my doctor. She's awesome. You will have to spend two years here working on a mountain. But it might be worth it.

MRIs and opera singers, friends. The ancient signs of spring. Tonight I am going to attempt to sleep without my long underwear on for the first time in four months. Hopefully Jesus doesn't punish my rashness with fifty-seven feet of snow.

Better Know A Georgia, Part Whatever Plus One: The Supra. Or: Seriously, you want to come to this country.

I am not one who usually lacks for words, and yet I keep trying to start this piece on the Georgian supra, so that you, the fresh-faced new volunteer, will be properly informed when you finally get here, and I keep drawing blanks. Once you have been here for a while, the word “supra” and the word “Georgia” just fit together so naturally that it is hard to imagine one without the other, and just as hard to describe the both of them in a way that fully captures what the supra is to Georgia, and to Georgian people. While Georgia is rapidly modernizing, it is and always will be primarily a land of traditions. There are traditions here for every time and for every occasion. But paramount of these, not only in the perceptions of volunteers but in the perceptions of the Georgian people themselves, is the tradition of the supra.

The supra combines the most cherished and most legendary characteristics of the Georgian people: they love hospitality, they love to party, and they really love wine. So a tradition in which a person will open his or her home to others for what could nearly be termed an orgy of food and wine – perhaps to celebrate an occasion, and perhaps for no reason at all – could not be more suited to their sensibilities. It is said that the supra is intended to evoke the Last Supper; indeed, Georgians treat each supra like a Last meal, and this is what makes a supra so enjoyable, but also so problematic, on some occasions, for volunteers. Excess is the name of the game at a supra, and if excess is not something you are comfortable with – especially when it comes to alcohol – you will have to stand your ground amidst people who, at least at first, will be confused that you are rebuking their hospitality. But if you know what you’re getting into, and you stay smart about your limits and your surroundings, then it is entirely possible that you will take nothing but excellent memories away from the supras you share with friends, family, and coworkers here. At the very least, it is likely that supras will dominate your anecdotes for friends and family back home. “You drank what out of what?” will probably be a frequent question. “Something out of a big ceramic horn,” you will say. “I don’t remember what or why. It was six hours into the supra.”

I am sure you have read or heard something about supras by now, and know the very basics. Supras can involve as few as two and as many as hundreds of people; everyone comes together to eat and drink (usually wine, occasionally liquor of some variety, but never beer, which is only for informal occasions) and give elaborate toasts for everything from peace to friendship to relatives. The supra is run by a man (always a man, unless it’s a female-only supra – this is, after all, a country governed by tradition) called the “tamada,” who decides when, and to what, each toast will be. Since a guest is always given special treatment at a supra, and you will always be a guest in this country, you may sometimes be offered the position of tamada, despite your initial lack of language ability and knowledge of supra customs. You are absolutely free to beg out of this. However: know that it is tradition, when the tamada is being chosen, for the person who is asked to be tamada to refuse several times before relenting. So, if you are asked and do not feel comfortable leading the supra, you will have to refuse more forcefully than perhaps you might think.

The tamada will decide when to raise glasses, and in some places or situations may decide what the subject of the toast is, but the order of toasts in a supra is actually relatively fixed (some volunteers claim that it is rigidly fixed, but, in my experience, this order is a little more variable than tradition would technically dictate). Once you learn what the usual order is among those you tend to supra with, this fact will make keeping up during the supra much easier, since you will only need to hear and successfully decipher one or two words in someone’s toast to know generally what is being said – which is good, because when drinking is involved, usually difficult-to-understand Georgian men become impossible-to-understand, slurring, shouting Georgian men. The first toast is always, “Mshvidobas” – to peace. But the tamada will not simply say, “Mshvidobas gaumarjos” (“Cheers to peace”). He will spend between 30 seconds and five minutes talking. I wish I could tell you what he will talk about, but you’d have to have amazing language ability to follow the many digressions and explications in a typical Georgian toast. Victory is understanding the one- or two- word subject of the toast (it is also, incidentally, the literal translation of “gamarjoba,” and the root of “gaumarjos,” which translates colloquially to “cheers” but technically means, “may he be victorious”). The tamada will talk for five minutes, sometimes with theatrical arm gesturing and shouting, and then often you will ask what the toast was about, and receive a two-second answer (“He was toasting to your brother.”). Subsequent toasts will include: a toast to the occasion of the supra, if there is one; a toast to the guests, if there are any (which there always will be, if you are in attendance); a toast to Georgia and Georgian people; a toast to parents; a toast to siblings; a toast to children; a toast to ancestors; and a final toast to the tamada himself. There also may be toasts to God, to spouses, to love, or to other things; the more formal the supra, the more toasts there are likely to be. There is also a strong likelihood, due to your attendance, that there will be toasts to America, and to its friendship with Georgia. Once the tamada has made the first toast, everyone around the room gives their version of the same toast. It is considered rude to skip a toast; make sure that, if everyone is toasting and also keeping an eye on you, that you raise your glass in turn to say something. Especially at first, you will not be expected to say much more than, “gaumarjos,” but toasts are a good place to practice your Georgian. Everyone is drinking, so they won’t care if you mess up, and they will be riotously pleased with your effort.

When you finish talking is where it gets hairy. It is tradition that your wine glass, after each toast, must be consumed bolomde – to the end. I’ll let you count the number of possible toasts I mentioned in the previous paragraph, and I’ll also say that it’s probably not a real supra unless there are at least seven to ten. Now I’ll let you imagine yourself after ten glasses of wine. There are ways – sneaky and not – out of drinking bolomde, but the fact remains that you will end up drinking a lot of alcohol at a supra if you either do not set ground rules for yourself, or drink enough that you forget them. Wine consumption, on even the personal level, is not even usually measured in glasses – it is measured in liters. As in: “He didn’t drink that much last night. Only a liter and a half.” Thus, rules number one through, well, eleven, of Safe Supra-ing: always know, before beginning a supra, how much wine or liquor you are willing to drink. If you do not want to drink at all, say so at the very beginning, and don’t budge. You will be begged. Begged. “Just one.” “Why not?” “It’s ok, my family made this wine. It is very delicious.” If you relent, and drink one, “just one” will turn into “just eight.” I was at a small supra a few weeks ago where four straight toasts were promised to be “the last one.” And this was with vodka, not wine (an important note: homemade Georgian wine, while it varies in strength, is usually relatively weak, despite its fun vinegar taste. Homemade Georgian vodka also varies in strength: from fire-down-below to pure jet fuel. Be advised, and be careful). If you’re not drinking, don’t drink. People will eventually take you seriously. If you don’t want to drink very much, start drinking less than bolomde from the very first toast; you will, again, be exhorted to finish your glass, but if you refuse for long enough, you will be left alone. A good excuse is, “I’m an American, I can’t drink as much as you Georgians can.” They will take this as an immense compliment.

This is a good point to mention the gender difference at supras. As a male volunteer, I have not had much opportunity to witness how American females are treated at supras, but from what I have heard from other volunteers, it is relatively easier to beg out of drinking heavily. Also, there are apparently all-female supras, where there are no men who must be tended to, which are evidently loads of fun. I wouldn’t know. But I do know that, if you are a man, you will either drink a lot, or say, “No” a lot. Georgian men drink, and they drink a lot. They will want you to drink a lot with them. They will want you to drink a lot the morning after you drank a lot, because this is the best way to cure hangovers. They will want you to drink a lot when the electricity goes out, because this is the best way to pass the time when you don’t have electricity. They will want you to drink a lot at 11 o’clock in the morning in the office of the school principal, because this is the best activity to engage in while in the presence of children. It is a fact of life in this land, and it is one you will get very used to very quickly.

Your endurance will be tested at supras in ways even beyond your tolerance for alcohol. Full-blown supras usually have vast arrays of food; every traditional Georgian dish will be present, and there will be a lot of it. On the table, plates will be stacked on top of plates that are already stacked on top of plates. You may never have seen as much food in one place as you are likely to see at big supras (weddings, for instance). Partly because your Georgian hosts will be wanting you to drink an unfathomable amount, they will want you to also eat an unfathomable amount. You will hear a lot of, “Tchame, tchame” (“eat, eat,” if you haven’t yet encountered this most ubiquitous of phrases in other parts of this handbook). Pacing yourself is an important part of the supra experience. Do not succumb to the temptation to eat all of the delicious-looking things that you see immediately, even if you do not get these foods at normal meals. You will immediately feel tired and finished, and you will have many hours yet to go. Georgian supras can be prodigious in length. A normal supra will probably last a few hours, a supra for a special occasion can last much longer. I have heard stories about volunteers who have left supras, gone to sleep, and woken up the next day to discover the supra still in progress. Besides knowing your limits in terms of alcohol, and how to stick to them, knowing your exit strategy is the most important thing you should think about during supras. There are lots of strategies. Try to sit near an exit, and to not get blocked in by other guests. Sit with people who will be sympathetic if you wish to leave – friends and coworkers, perhaps – rather than with over-enthusiastic hosts. Text a friend, and tell him or her to call you; then, when the phone rings, pretend that your mother is calling, which is an acceptable excuse to get out of anything. You can even just wait for everyone to get so drunk that they won’t notice or care if you slip out the door. This sounds like a joke to you right now. It will not six months from now, when it’s 1:30am, nobody is showing any signs of stopping, and you have to wake up to teach class or go to work in the morning.

It occurs to me that I have probably either excited you immeasurably or terrified you beyond words. But, whether you’re texting your friends to tell them, “dude, peace corps is gonna be awesome, wait til you hear how much they drink there” or having terrible visions of a bottle of Merlot chasing you down a dark tunnel screaming, “tchame, tchame” (of course, I am kidding – homemade wine, which is what you will always be drinking, is to Merlot what a go-kart is to a Mercedes), realize that the volunteer experience is highly variable. Some volunteers rarely have supras. Some supra multiple times per week. It depends on your host family, where you live, and your willingness to take part. As long as you stay in control, you will be totally fine. Gaumarjos!

Turning a new leaf. Or: That is, if the leaves start coming back.

So I spent the last week in Tbilisi. It was a very difficult week, punctuated by several different sources of stress during the day and then, as young people are wont to engage in, various means of releasing that stress in the evenings. Let me just say, as an illustrative example, that any beverage entitled, "The Kiss of Death," is not something about which you should contemplate, "I wonder what that will do to me tonight and tomorrow morning."

Much of what made the week difficult was that I was spending three days working with two members of my organization, on really important things like time management and long-term planning and project design. These are crucial themes for them, and I felt a really heavy sense of responsibility to be doing the best I possibly could in helping my coworkers to understand them, and to somehow correct the situation if they didn't. The first half of the training was centered around the creation of a "practice project," which for us was actually not a practice project but a real project that we will be attempting to get funding for very soon. It's an integration project where we take children from a nearby boarding school for orphans and handicapped children to a camp, where they would plan a school-year long set of further integrat...ive activities for other children. So, basically, it felt like if I f#$%ed something up, I would be causing the ruin of orphans and handicapped children. Oh, and I have not yet mentioned: I was doing the entire training in Georgian. This is something the other volunteers at this training did not have to do. Their counterparts speak at least pretty decent English (except for the one who can talk to her counterpart in Russian, which is just unfair). Mine do not, so I had to struggle through discussions of things like, "we have to make our objectives and action plans more concrete," and, "what other resources will we need to have in the budget?" in Georgian, with minimal help. I'm glad that it, seemingly, worked out, and that both me and my "counterparts" were able to communicate our ideas most of the time, but it was one of the most mentally exhausting things I can recall ever doing. People kept complimenting me on my Georgian during the trainings; obviously, it's nice to be complimented, but it would be nicer to have the sort of successes that are only possible when you can communicate your ideas in English to someone who will understand them.

Thankfully, it was a very successful week. I'd been struggling to find directions to move my organization in, recently, and this week solved those problems. We have a lot of work to do now. But it will be up to me to help my coworkers do that work. And the week did little to pull me out of the (at this point comically) extended funk I've been in. I'm sure you're all (perhaps using an open-ended, plural term to categorize my audience is overly optimistic) getting a little tired of how I have been utilizing this space recently -- basically as a limitless forum for my own complaints and whining. And I'm hopeful that I'll come back to my winter posts at some happier time (say, June) and be dismayed at how snively I have been sounding these last two months. After all, today is the first day of March, the first day of the first month in which nature begins to rouse itself from months of slumber and stupor. Spring is around the corner, friends, and perhaps with it a solution to the things I have been unable to solve purely through personal willpower. I may snap out of my troubles the first day I wake up to the sight of something other than my sleeping bag. I may begin to skip again when doing so will not result in landing in a puddle of slush, dirt, and the motor oil from a 1974 Lada sedan. I may resume posting flowery treatises on the idyllic things I see every day here once I am finally able to stop ignoring them, lost in my own head.

This would be a preferable scenario to, say, realizing that not even spring could make what I'm dealing with easier. Which is just as plausible. You can't shit a shitter. Not that I'm calling myself a shitter. I have forgotten my point entirely, here.

What I am saying is, my apologies for the woe-is-me vibes. But, at the same time, I promised a more lengthy, amusing entry on the Week That Was, and I don't really feel like writing it. So, instead, I am going to post directly after this post the other Better Know a Georgia segment that consists of an entry I wrote for the G8 Alternative Handbook: The Supra. I have already laid out for you some information about supras, in my post about my host brother's wedding, but you can never get too much supra, in Georgia. I, for instance, had a supra two nights ago, and will have another one tomorrow! Hooray! Of course, if you are reading this post in the normal way -- on the actual blog page, instead of through some fancy feedreader or whatnot -- you know what the next post is, because you have already read it! Because it is above this one! On the page! But I wrote this first! ... You have stopped caring. I know. You can't, after all, shit a shitter.

Well I was born in a small town. Or: And I live in a really, really freaking small town.

Hello there, friends. It has been a week since I've mosied by. And what a week it was! I have been in the capital, Tbilisi, since last Friday, engaging in meetings, trainings, and other such shenanigans. I will be preparing a lengthy entry on these events, because they were...eventful. But, for now, to sate you, I will simply share one thing that just happened to me:

I had to go to the pharmacy, just now, because on my way back from the capital yesterday, I picked up an enormous bag I had (which was full of, by then, clean laundry, since I spent a night engaging in washing machine use at an expat's house...more details to come on how scarily excited I was about this), and apparently I did it wrong, and I wrecked my back. So, today I called the doctor, and she told me to go to the pharmacy, where I was to call her, so she could give the pharmacist instructions on my care (believe it or not, my stunning Georgian is not yet stunning enough to say, "I need 100mg tablets of your strongest painkillers, because I have strained my back muscles"). When I was at the pharmacy, hoping that the doctor was telling the pharmacist, "He needs Russian vicodin. Lots of it. Stat," the wheelchair-bound proprietor of the establishment looked at me. I do not know this man. It took me a few seconds to realize that I sometimes pass him in the street. We have never spoken, and if he's ever looked at me in a more than glancing manner, I haven't noticed it. He asked me a question. One would think that this question would be a normal, "Who are you?", or even, "Do you like Chokhatauri?", which is a question I get from people who know who I am but don't know me. Here, instead, was his question:

"Why did you shave your beard?"

I shaved my beard last week, in Tbilisi. I am, apparently, so famous that even the pharmacy manager knows my facial hair status at all times. Next time, I'll go in there for some more Vicodin, and he'll say, "I liked the sweater you were wearing yesterday better."

Small towns, friends. Small towns.

More tomorrow (the usual disclaimer about how this might be an absolute lie).

Better Know A Georgia, Part Whatever - The Alphabet. Or: Fun weekend films for the whole family.

Hello there. Normally, while apologizing for not actually posting this entry two days ago, as I promised, I would use the clever rhetorical device of giving you "zero" guesses to determine the cause of the delay. However, it occurs to me that you would all likely guess the reason to be that I am lazy and uninterested in your edification. This is not, actually, the correct reason. The correct reason is that I have been without internet for two days as a bunch of partially frozen water particles, none identical to any other, decided to make their way down from the sky at a torrid and sustained pace. But today it is clear (so far), so, without further ado:

Wait! There is an ado! An important BREAKING urgent advertisement-style PIECE OF ADO. Tomorrow, the most important piece of film in the history of cinema is being released, and you are not to come back to this blog until you have taken five or fifteen friends to go see it.

Yes, friends, Be Kind Rewind, the delightful comedy starring Jack Black, Mos Def, and about two seconds of footage worth of giant black and white photographs that I took of old cars unlesstheycutthatpartoutsinceilastsawascreeningalmostayearago, is coming out tomorrow, and I expect you all to go see it, because I have an ENORMOUS profit percentage in my contract as "Additional Production Assistant." So. There's that. And now for our feature presentation (that's a Hollywood term):

The Georgian Alphabet Entry for the G8 Future Volunteer Alternative Handbook
So, this is something I wrote for an informational CD, composed by current volunteers, that gets sent to the NEW batch of volunteers who are still in America (Flee, future volunteers! Flee while you still can! Ha ha! Just kidding! Maybe!). I thought it might be fun to post it here for a few reasons. Foremost, the Georgian language/alphabet is an ancient, historic language/alphabet, but one that almost nobody has ever seen or heard of, because of the relative closedness of the Georgian society, the small number of people who know it (estimated by Wikipedia to be only about 4-5 million, making it approximately the 120th most common language in the world -- with the caveat that it's almost impossible to have accurate numbers for such a ranking), and the fact that this country doesn't have a diaspora that does a lot of college-campus-marching, like Armenia has (there also, sadly, is no Georgian equivalent to System of a Down). So I thought it would be interesting for those of you who read this blog to see a description and an explanation of its alphabet, since, if you read this blog, it's possible that you may come into contact with this alphabet at some point. Perhaps you have received a Georgian-language postcard from me, or perhaps you are planning on VISITING HINT HINT HINT HINT. Or, perhaps you're just interested. Or, perhaps you're an actual Georgian, who has stumbled upon this blog after searching for "pictures of shakira concert," in which case this entry will perhaps have ENGLISH language educational opportunities for you (example: in a chart below, I use the word, "burrrrrrito." This is the proper spelling of this word. All other spellings are wrong.). So, without any further ado (I swear):

The Georgian Alphabet Entry for the G8 Future Volunteer Alternative Handbook

Congratulations on accepting your invitation to serve in Peace Corps Georgia! I am sure that, while you were making your decision, you thought of many benefits to serving in the Peace Corps. “Learning a new language” was probably among the benefits you thought of. It was certainly one of mine. “I will be able to use this new language that I learn, later in life, to great benefit and acclaim from my peers!” you are probably thinking to yourself. You will be tickled and delighted, then, to discover that Georgian is approximately the 120th most widely used language in the world! There are perhaps five people in the entire world, outside the borders of Georgia, who can speak this complex, ancient, and fascinating language! But do not fret, volunteer-to-be; there will be rewards for your seemingly meaningless toil. For instance, I just wrote a bunch of postcards in Georgian to my friends back in America, because I know that they will be very impressed to see something in the mail that they cannot read. “What the hell is this?” they will say, when they receive my postcard. “Did he accidentally sneeze ink? Are these words?” Friends, the Georgian alphabet can be as confusing to look at as a parrot wearing mittens. If you have ventured to find it already, perhaps on the internet, you have already discovered this. If you have not, please consult this chart, before reading on:

Now, now. Put the sharp implements down, and take a deep breath. We will get through this together. You can now probably see why the Armenians say that the Georgian alphabet looks like someone threw a plate of spaghetti against the wall. Some volunteers prefer to say that it looks like “Elvish.” But it’s not as difficult as it looks at first. It just takes practice. It’s much easier, for instance, than remembering the hundreds of different versions of each verb. Stop! Please put the implements down. Thank you. Anyway, you will get to verbs in due time, but it is the opinion of most volunteers here that, language-wise, the most important way you can prepare for your departure is to learn the alphabet. If you learn the alphabet before you get on the plane, you will start your first language lessons at least being able to understand what is being written down by your language instructor, and you’ll have that much more of a head start on learning the actual words. Past the very basics (“gamarjoba,” “nakhvamdis,” “madloba,” etc.), it is very difficult to learn anything about this language when you are not here, being taught by an exceedingly competent teacher (trust us – the language teachers are amazing; you’re in good hands). Buy a language book if you want to, and study as much as you like, but any head start you get with actual words is likely to be minimal. However, I recommend in the strongest possible terms (and most volunteers agree) that you learn the alphabet before you get here. It’s doable, and it will make it easier for everyone to get started.

So – how to learn it? The internet can be a good resource for you, but when I did my research before leaving America, I never had any idea how reliable the information was on the few websites I found. Some of it was contradictory. So, since the alphabet is such an important first step, I have compiled the Absolutely Unassailably Correct Pre-Departure Future Volunteer Alphabet Guide for you, so that you can feel reasonably confident that you are learning what we learned. I do not require your thanks; merely that someone bring me a Taco Bell Burrito in some sort of thermos when you get here from America. Thank you.

Now, then. As you can see from the first chart, the Georgian alphabet is made up of 33 letters. Some of the sounds contained in these 33 letters basically do not exist in English, and some of them sound exactly the same as other sounds, to our ears, but are in fact different. Differentiating sounds, and being able to identify the proper letter when you hear sounds that are not in English, will end up being a much more difficult task for you than just memorizing which squiggles correspond to the sounds you CAN hear. It is still hard for volunteers who have been here a long time. I will do my best to explain these sounds for you, but it will take arriving in-country for you to really grapple with them. Let’s start with an alphabet chart, and then parse it further from there:

One thing that does make learning the alphabet easier is the fact that the sounds never change with context, like they do in English. There aren’t several different sounds represented by the letter for “a” – there’s just one, so all you have to do is learn the sound for each letter, and it will always sound like that. This frees your brain to try to recognize the letters that sound, to English speakers, exactly the same. But we’ll get to those in a minute. First, the easy ones. These 16 letters have English equivalents; except, as I mentioned, each letter has only one sound that never changes. This chart tells you which English sound is used for the equivalent letter in Georgian:


Of these, all are very commonly used except for the last two; “j” is used infrequently, except in the word “gamarjoba,” and “h” almost never, except in the word, “ho.” This is fortunate, because they can be difficult to write.

Next, there are five letters that do not have an EXACT equivalent in English, but are either pretty close, or combine a two-letter sound that we DO have in English. These are also easy letters:


Of these letters, the letter “zh” is not used particularly often, but the others are very common.

Finally, we come to the twelve letters that will be the most difficult for you to learn. These twelve letters consist of six sounds in English, each with two variations that will be very, very difficult for you to hear at first. It will get easier for you to sometimes hear the difference between these sounds as you spend more time here, but you will continue to make mistakes, and if you have annoying coworkers, they will laugh and try to get you to make sounds that you cannot (for instance, they LOVE to try to get volunteers to say “bakh’akh’i,” which means frog, and twice uses what is generally considered to be the most difficult sound for Americans to say). When this happens, my best advice is to say the word, “faith,” which combines three sounds that don’t exist in Georgian, and are thus just as hard for them as “bakh’akh’i” will be for you. Ha ha! Cultural exchange is fun.

The easiest way to think about these sounds is in pairs of letters, one with a “soft” sound, and one with a “hard” sound. The soft sound is closer to the way the letter sounds in English; for these sounds, you should be letting air escape your mouth. For the hard sounds (marked here and in many language guides with a ‘), make the same sound as before, but stick your tongue back in the roof of your mouth, and force the sound through it, without letting air come out. A good way to test whether you are saying the sound properly is to put your hand in front of your mouth; if you feel breath, you’re saying the soft sound, and if you don’t, you’re saying the hard sound. Let’s give it a try:


Of these letters, the general consensus is that the most difficult is “kh’,” or the letter that looks like a “y” (I have to describe it, instead of typing it, because you probably don’t have Georgian font drivers installed on your computer yet – find a driver online, if you can). It’s hard enough to say the soft version of this sound, especially when you haven’t had a glass of water in a while, but the hard version can be very, very difficult. The best piece of advice I heard for pronouncing it is to tilt your head back as far as it can go, and look at the ceiling. Then say the soft, “khhhh” version of the sound. That should produce the proper, harder sound.

It will be hard to know if you’re getting the sound right until you’re here, in your language classes; your language teachers will do an excellent job of trying to teach you the sounds, but you still won’t be able to tell them apart in conversation-speed speech for a while. But don’t really worry about it. Georgians will understand you, even when you say the sounds wrong, and to my knowledge there aren’t any extremely embarrassing words that sound exactly like a more innocuous word, only with one sound pair switched. It ends up being mostly a spelling issue; you will NOT be a good speller in Georgia. Just trust me on that one.

So, now that the alphabet is laid out for you, how can you practice it so you know it backwards and forwards once you get here? What I did was to write the letters over and over and over, just like kindergarten all over again. This allows you to start putting sounds with squiggles, and gets you more comfortable with writing the letters more quickly (although don’t try TOO hard with j, t’, ch’, or ts’ – there are handwritten versions that are easier than the typewritten ones). There is also an excellent website that has a small alphabet game, where you are shown either a Georgian or an English letter, and have to select the proper equivalent in the other language. A combination of these techniques, along with any other materials that you find on the internet (although be careful with these, because as I said before, I found a lot of contradictory information online; the sources usually have the alphabet right, but often have differing explanations of the sounds) or that Peace Corps might send you, in whatever way you think works best, will work out fine for you.

So, that’s it! I am sure you will arrive here with the alphabet in the palm of your hand. Eventually, though, you will have to wash that off, and actually learn it. And it isn’t so hard, with practice. Trust me. The time you spend pre-departure on the alphabet is time you don’t have to spend on it here, when you will need every word you learn immediately, in order to be able to communicate at the most basic level with your host family and with people in the community. The Georgian language is a fickle mistress, and you must do your homework if you wish to tame her. Good luck.

F#$%^ing February. Or: Comments on comments, with some added alliteration for your amplified amusement.

First, comments on a couple comments. I am attempting positive-commenting-reinforcement, since there are STILL LOTS OF PEOPLE WHO COME TO THIS BLOG AND DO NOT COMMENT. This blog is a LEARNING tool for you, dear readers. A learning tool so that you can know More About the Peace Corps and More About the World and More About Important Things. It should be a conversation! Nobody enjoys me talking endlessly to myself (Except me. I enjoy this immensely). So, I shall respond to the most recent comments. Ruth commented on the post that questioned the Meaning of Everything:

Hey you got your wish to start a band by going to Georgia! Congrats. Will you do a Georgian version of the sandwich song? Was it "Make Me a Sandwich"?
You'll probably start to feel better when the weather improves. Being cold really ruins attitudes.
Realizing you don't know everything is a sign of maturity. I don't think anyone expects you to have figured out too much at this point in your peace corp career. At the end of 2 years though, watch out! (kidding). I think we're all just impressed that you went and you're trying your best in a difficult situation. Maybe someday you'll be able to sum up neatly what you've learned, but even if you can't I don't think that means you have changed or learned anything.

To clear up any confusion, "Make Me a Sandwich" was not the name of a song, but instead the name of my band, which is on hiatus until we can all learn how to play instruments and write songs and do heroin ambidextrously. Rest assured, MMAS fans: my new band, Mzis Chasvlis Sikhvarulit Momgherlebi, is more of a side project, and our album Bakhakhivit Mgherian will not affect the recording schedule of MMAS' debut album Pastrami on Rye, which is still on target for its "never" release date.

As to Ruth's other points: being cold does seem to be affecting me more than I thought it would. We heard, from G6 volunteers, that February was the worst month, in terms of morale and motivation. One volunteer (the one and only Tom Schreiber) told me that, at one point last February, the hot water went out while he was showering, and, if there had been anyone else in the bathroom, there might have been a homicide. This despite the fact that last year was, apparently, an unusually warm winter. Not only has this winter not been unusually warm, it has been the coldest winter, at least in Chokhatauri, that anyone can remember. A coworker of mine just complained to me that, usually, there is one big snow per winter. This year, I have lost count of the big snows. There have been at least five, probably closer to ten. I knew, from the aforementioned G6 warnings, that the winter would be difficult. I didn't anticipate it being this difficult. Either the other things that are making this month difficult are making it really, really difficult, or the winter is affecting me more than I thought it would. I'm not totally sure which it is. I'd prefer to attribute it to the winter, though I know that the winter is not entirely to blame. I suppose what I am saying is: perhaps home, office, and automotive climate control are more of a factor in the economic success of the western world than one would think. It's hard to be productive when you're cold and/or really hot, and most of the world is one of these things most of the time. But, whatever the case may be, Ruth: I appreciate the encouraging words. The difficult thing, for me, is my tendency to conflate success with effort. If something doesn't work, I feel like somehow I have failed in my effort, and I wonder whether I'm trying hard enough. Maybe I am, and I just have to accept that what happens, happens. Or, maybe I'm really not. Who knows? It is February, after all. I think I am going to rechristen it, "f#$%$%ing February," because I enjoy both bad language and alliteration.

The second comment comes from "Linda," which is the nom de plume of my mother, regarding the post about the criticism of Peace Corps in a New York Times op-ed:

The Peace Corps is a very large organization working in a very large number of dissimilar countries throughout the world. A world that is changing very quickly. That PCV's need to be better qualified for some of the posts that they are sent to is a point well taken and I believe accurate. However, there are also many areas where PCV's are not only useful but a great benefit to their host country, city, town. It's a matter of fit and some rethinking of some of the more technical posts that PCV's are sent to.

I can't really speak to some of the more "technical" posts that PCVs are sent to in many countries; in a lot of countries, PCVs work in forestry, agriculture, medical, and other quite specific and technical fields. I hope that the volunteers sent to work in these areas have the experience to make a difference in their host sites, but I have no idea whether or not this is actually the case. Georgia is not a Peace Corps post with highly technical programs; volunteers here either teach English, or work as consultants at business or social organizations. Some volunteers here are highly qualified for their work; some of us are either directly or recently out of college, and got all of the specific knowledge for our work from two months of training. I don't know a great deal about how other volunteers feel about this, but the conversations I have had about it lead me to think that they feel much like I do: when things are going well, it seems like what we thought before coming here is true -- that merely coming from a good educational background in America allows us to transfer knowledge and ways of thinking that the people here really need, but have had little access to. When things are not going well, we think something else: what am I doing here? Why me? How can I help this town and this organization? And I suppose such thinking is inevitable. It is, again, f#$%#ing February. My program manager said something to me recently, in an email. She said, "You may not be seeing the results of this yet but you have changed [the members of your organization, local youth, and the town in general]... and trust me it is a change for the better." Slow change can sometimes seem like no change, or not enough change, and that can make a person think, "perhaps someone else could be doing this better." And perhaps someone else could. Hopefully, at least, I'm doing enough. Maybe ask me in March.

Speaking of "someone else" -- not of someone else instead of me, but rather of someone else in addition to me -- I would like to acknowledge a crazy reality: there are going to be new volunteers here pretty soon. We have been here for eight months, now, and in a little less than four more, there will be a whole new batch of idealistic trainees who have no idea what F#$#$%ing February 2009 (this sounds like the theme of a bar crawl) has in store for them. It's hard to believe we've been here for this long. Regardless, these volunteers will soon be finding our blogs and reading what we wrote for an informational CD that Peace Corps will be sending them, and they will start to ask us questions about stuff. This is frightening and exciting at the same time. I am sure that it is obvious to those of you who know me and those who do not alike: I enjoy being seen as a person who Knows Something. But the responsibility is daunting. What if they read this blog and think that all volunteers do is complain about the weather and talk about toilets? Could I live with myself, knowing that 60 idealistic still-in-America pre-trainees have such a correct notion of what is in store for them? Maybe I should start writing about how I've taught everyone in my town to recite Shakespeare in English and how we built a community center with no materials except sweat, companionship, and increased intercultural understanding.

Oh well. If any newly-invited American is happening across this blog, feel free to email me with any questions you may have. I will try to be as idealistic as possible in my response. And, for your edification as well as that of anyone else who might be interested, I think I may post my contributions to the alternative handbook (that informational CD) on this blog, because they were on the fascinating topics of the Georgian alphabet and supras. Also because I have already written them, and it would be a shame not to pad my post count with things that have already been written for another reason (I may also post something or other from the January edition of The Tamada, the volunteer-written satirical attempt-at-a-publication, because I know people love reading collections of inside jokes that they may not find at all amusing). I am happy to be a resource for you almost-almost-volunteers in any way that will be helpful. But, a warning: I might, if I were you, either wait until the weather warms the #$%^ up, or take any response with five or thirty grains of salt.

It is, after all, f#$%#$ing February.

Tomorrow: my Alternative Handbook 2008 article about the Georgian alphabet. Finally, after all this time (I am too lazy to look up exactly how much time): a new installment of Better Know a Georgia! Dream happy dreams until then, friends.

Tom Schreiber. Or: Welcome, searchers!

Friends, I don't pretend to understand the internets. It may be a connected series of tubes. It may be run by gnomes, or the French. All I know is that the internets are wonderful. All eleven of them. I sometimes mention in this space that my favorite thing about this blog is getting to see what random people, all over the world, were searching for when they stumble upon my blog. I discovered a while back, to my surprise and bemusement, that Google, in its infinite wisdom, puts my blog on its search results pages for all sorts of queries to which my blog provides absolutely no answers. Most mornings, when I get into work, I check an internet tool that allows me to see, among other things, all the search queries that led to "hits" the previous day. Here, for example, are some of the best ones from the last few weeks:

• "Reginald wood stove"
• "It is time to look sooooooo good."
• "shirt off" "my host"
• "can you take a photo of us"
• "cramps in hands at night"
• "find a map of where the war on terror is at"

And, I swear to God:

• "a greek Mythological sculptor reputedly able to make sculptures that could walk and talk"

I checked Google about this last one; it turns out that this blog is on the FIFTH PAGE of results for this search query. If the person who searched for this has returned to this blog and is reading this, please let us all know why you (a) searched for this in the first place, (b) scrolled through five pages of results before finding something to click on, and most importantly (c) what in God's name compelled you to click on THIS result. If you answer, I will award you fifty credits. But try not to hurt yourself when collecting them.

Google not only presents odd search results; it also ranks them via a mysterious formula. The only person who knows this ancient and powerful formula is not even a person. It is a dragon who lives in a cave on a mountain. His name is Albee the Racist Dragon. We volunteers have recently come to discover that this search result formula is also a formula for fun; a volunteer named Tom Schreiber (that's Tom Schreiber, if you didn't hear the first time) realized that, when searching for his own name (his name being Tom Schreiber), Google returned another volunteer's blog post ABOUT him (him = Tom Schreiber, in case I'd lost you already) above his own blog (that is, Tom Schreiber's blog). We became curious about what would happen if other volunteers started posting about Tom Schreiber; sure enough, a couple other volunteers' posts have ALSO jumped Tom Schreiber's own blog on the Google results page if you search for his name (type in "Tom Schreiber").

Now, you may be wondering if I am going to be joining these volunteers in this experiment. I am not. I refuse to write a post about Tom Schreiber. I am certain that this blog, behemoth of the online community that it is, would not only supercede Tom's blog on Google, but would literally make Tom's blog cower in fear and run to an uninhabited, poorly-lit corner of the Internet, to the unfindable realm currently occupied by the "Nudie Photos of George W. Bush" blog, the "Black People Support Hillary!" fanpage, and the Armenia National Tourism Board's official website. I do not wish to embarrass Tom's blog in this manner, because Tom is a very nice man, a friend of mine, and a seventh degree black belt in a martial art that he invented himself because he thinks that karate is "for sissies." So do not think that this post (the one titled, "Tom Schreiber") is an attempt to engage in this activity. It is merely my discussion of the activity, and my musings thereon. I do not wish to "beat" Tom Schreiber. That is all.

Tom Schreiber Tom Schreiber Tom Schreiber Tom Schreiber Tom Schreiber.

A letter to Jesus. Or: Acts of the a-frosted.

Dear Jesus,

Hi. It's Dan. I don't ask you for a lot of things. I try to keep to myself. You're probably pretty busy. That said, I have one teenysmallrequest for you. Here it is.

Make it stop snowing. Right now. It is snowing very hard. This displeases me. This makes me think you don't like me very much.

Sopleasemakeitstopmmmmmkthanksbye.

Indubitably yours,
Dan

PS I still have your toothbrush.

Something to chew on. Or: Besides pigeon meat.

So, first things first: I know there are Georgian readers of This Blog. Occasionally, I pick up a straggler from the internets, someone in Tbilisi or Rustavi who has been searching for "lyrics to misha magaria" or "where is shakira concert" or some other query for which this blog provides no help. I also know that at least a couple of the Georgian staff members at the Peace Corps office stop by from time to time. Ostensibly, they do this to make sure I am not saying anything that would reflect poorly on the Peace Corps (they will particularly enjoy part two of this post), but the real reason is, of course, that they cannot resist my mirthful musings.

Part one of this post, thus, is a question: what is up with the bird meat? Obviously, I would not be able to get an answer to this question from those I work with, since they hardly speak English (they are clustered around my desk right now, going through an English textbook, saying English phrases like, "I live at school," and, "kidney beans," and looking at me for approval). But today I was exhorted to consume what appears to be pigeon meat for the second time in a week, and I just don't really get it. Like I said before, it tastes fine, but it is tiny and thus very difficult to consume. Why bother? I'd imagine that it is difficult to shoot pigeons. My mental picture of doing so involves a Georgian man, standing on his porch with the shotgun one uses to fire shells at random into the air on New Year's Eve, luring pigeons into the yard with cornmeal before emptying a beltful of .22s in their general direction. I'm not 100% sure why everyone seems so excited when there's bird meat to be had. You have much larger birds in the yard! And you don't have to shoot them! Someone please edify me.

While you're ruminating about that, I have a far less frivolous topic for this post. I was talking to my mother a little while ago, about various things, and I mentioned an op-ed that had been written in the New York Times a short time before, and that had been circulated amongst volunteers. Basically, in the op-ed, a former Peace Corps country director in Morocco expresses his displeasure with the way Peace Corps works, who it sends where, and how effective volunteers can be in the situations in which they're placed. Our country director here sent us, after the email was circulated, another link, to a published set of letters to the editor, responding to this op-ed, including one from the current Director of the Entire Peace Corps, Ron Tschetter. I told my mother I'd email her this article, but I decided that I am interested in whether anyone reading this has thoughts about it. Of course, nobody posts comments on this blog despite there being quite a number of readers (I have conniving ways of finding out who you are), but I will put this out there anyway, because it touches on themes that I think about every day. This blog, for better or worse, is an "out there" document of the Peace Corps, so I'm going to refrain, I think, from discussing the article in detail, what I think about it, and why. I will say that I think many of the author's points are very, very wrong, but some of them are undeniably right. Life is complicated and hard to figure out, friends. That's the sort of penetrative, insightful, and original commentary you come back to this blog again and again for.