Quo-tedium

Today I was mildly productive and brought two Neem trees from my nursery in the garden back to my house to plant. One of the trees, in my nearly two month absence from the village had grown more than a half meter, indicating once again that things tend to happen better if I’m not around.

I had dug the holes to put them in, out of the hard gravelly earth, a few months ago, so that’s a relief. Today I just busied myself carrying over large rocks from other places in my compound to fashion into "impenetrable-(hopefully)-to-ruminants" walls around each little sapling, meanwhile trying to get the rocks to balance correctly and not tumble down and crush the poor things to death.

When that was satisfactorily, if rather shoddily done, I came inside and sat on the floor and made a half liter of Crystal Lite On-the-Go Rasberry-flavored green tea (only Americans could slam together that many flavors), which I guzzled. Then I stood up and paced around my one room shack for 10 minutes, poking into various pockets of my make-shift shelving looking for something interesting. Then I ate about 8 dum-dum sized loolipops, one after another, trying to suck on them slowly and not, after a few seconds, crunch them into bits, something I find almost impossible to refrain from doing with hard candies. This time was no different. Then I sat down and perused a miscellaneous pile of papers about colleges, degree programs and scholarships and felt bad about myself, my lack of all skills, and my future in general. Then I looked inside of my pack of ‘Congress’ cigarettes, which are the cigarettes that are made from whatever is left over when all other cigarettes have been made, and found it empty of everything except tobacco crumbs. Then I laid down, fluffing my pillows, and slept fitfully for 40 sweltering minutes in front of the doorway in the hot breeze and dreamt something about a banker. Then I made tea and tried to take an interesting picture of my charcoal stove hanging on the wall, but failed. Lately, since taking pictures of people comes with too much baggage. I’ve been concentrating on close-up pictures of the inanimate objects in my life, like pieces of burlap, my shoes and dirt. Then I crunched on a bag of dry biscuits for a while. Then I got up and stared at myself in a hand-mirror, until I felt really bad about my nose. Then I looked in my package of cigarettes again and found it was still empty. Then I listened to a bootlegged ‘Akon’ CD, but today, even his adorable, and highly obscene attempts to come off as Senegalese and/or gangsta, (of which he is neither) couldn’t cheer me up. Only 6 more hours until bedtime…..