Just A Bad Day, Not A Bad Life.

Melville’s Moby Dick begins with Ishmael declaring that when he’s grim about the mouth and feels like knocking people’s hats off, he takes to the sea.

I always loved the imagery of a disgruntled Ishmael just pissed and going away from the port, away from all the trouble that he had to deal with. He had someplace that was all his, or at least in his mind. He could escape from what was torturing him on shore and his release made for an escape from a situation that proved too much for him.

Landlocked in Africa, there is no sea, no place for me to take to, which means therefore, hats will be metaphorically flying.

There’s really no point in getting angry here. No one understands what I’m saying anyway. The point is moot. However, today was one of those days that starts with stepping in quicksand and ends with an anvil falling on your head.

Banking here is a disaster and after the third bank didn’t have power, I very rudely asked a teller if there was anything that worked in this country. His tired response, that was not at all offended even though it really should be, made me realize perhaps I wasn’t the only one sick of it here. Charging back through town, I literally almost pushed a bobo (little boy) into the gutter for referring to me as Opato (white girl). I get called Opato roughly 207 times every day, but this one in particular almost ended in violence. Throw in yelling viciously at okada drivers who shouted pointedly sexual epithets in my direction and the unknowing bystander might think that I had Tourette’s, not just a bad day.

I’m not sure how to make these days fewer with more time between them. Today was the worst in a long while and probably the first time I felt like being violent. No one could say that I was ever a patient person, or a particularly non-confrontational person, but I’ve never been someone to take my aggression out in a physical way. Perhaps there’s no more room inside my body anymore and it’s just coming out my extremities. Perhaps this is why flogging is such an issue here. Maybe if you had to be raised in this country, your anger would build to a point where beating kids with sticks was the only way to get it out.

I’m not sure if this is a welcome change from constantly bursting into tears. The fact that those seem to be my only two options makes me wonder how Peace Corps ET(early termination) rate is only about 35%. I would think feeling this many things at once would make people too insane to even continue service.

I just have to keep telling myself that it’s just a bad day, not a bad life. But when the day to day starts to get repetitive, you begin to wonder how much day to day strung together begins to form your life. And are you living the way you want to? What can you live with?

How much can one person really do?