"It's wonderful what we can do if we're always doing."

The quote, from my ever-growing quote arsenal, is from George Washington. I'm having some serious missing the US-of-A pains this week, mostly because, for the life of me, I can't feel productive. I want so desperately to feel productive again. I just don't think its possible here. Or I'm good at making excuses. One of the two.

So the next week determines whether this project is actually going to work or fall apart at the seams. I resubmitted my IRB with the corrections (for those not familiar, the people at UNC that make sure I'm not giving them a bad reputation/following ethical standards in my research), and if they don't approve it in the next week, I'll literally run out of time to do the interviews. Which is bad. Not an epic failure since I still have the literature research, but bad.

Plus, Amoun is having a mental breakdown, because of everything crashing down at once. Which I have no idea how to handle, especially when her epic defeatist mood transfers onto me. And since the girl who took care of most of the administrative stuff left right before I came, leaving no information for me, I'm having to figure EVERYTHING out about how this organization runs to do anything (Amoun apparently did very little in terms of the actual administrative stuff because of her limited written English skills), which means I'm working on that stuff all day, plus teaching English and having to develop a program that doesn't exist right now to do so by myself, and having to do research at night. I'm not even sure she is going to be up to helping me with the interviews, now, either. I'm a tad bit stressed, to say the least. I was planning on helping out, but taking on the whole administrative structure (if you could even call it that) for a non-profit was not what I was expecting. Part of me is mad that she throws all of this at me, part of me just feels overwhelmed.

On a positive note, I'll be writing an article for a German publication on the Gyspy community.....

Oh, and I'm also running out of money. I had to pay 5 bucks today for crappy spaghetti sauce. Noodles not included. US economy, you are KILLING me.


I have a lot of cool cultural stuff to talk about and some crazy people to make sarcastic comments about, but I'm too exhausted to do so right now.