December 2

6:30pm

We are going crazy.

I am sitting in the entryway/bathroom of our hotel room, smelling the lovely odorous toilet. I can’t think, I can’t write anything intelligent, I don’t know what to do with my project.

I am distracted by Carly, who is sitting on her bed conducting “science experiments”: cupping her hands together and clapping spastically in order to determine “if my hands are louder when I cup them and clap the air.”

I laughed.

We’re stressed, we’re pissed off, we have inactive academic directors, laissez-faire (me) and micro-managing project advisors (Carly), our projects are entirely different from what we’d originally intended, my questionnaire subjects go on strike at their universities so I can’t interview them, Carly has hours of interviews to transcribe and edit, we both have to figure out how to structure our work, we want to go home right now but we don’t really want to leave Morocco, we want our projects to be over, we want to see our families...

and we’re conducting science experiments and listening to country music to quiet the demons in our heads.

In other news, I’m a bad-ass. I shoved a guy last night. He was harassing me and wouldn’t stop following me after I’d asked him repeatedly to go away, so I let go of Carly’s hand, and shoved him. He almost fell backward into a fountain as I yelled at him, “No! Go away,” in the fiercest voice I could. He was stunned and it took him five seconds to recover and start calling me a whole slew of derogatory terms in French. I didn’t care. He stopped following me, and that’s all I wanted.

I’m loaded up on caffeine (three café au laits), and I’m currently nursing a Coca-Cola Light. I plan on being awake, sitting near our damn toilet that won’t stop running, until I get somewhere with this ridiculous project.

I hope Carly keeps experimenting. It’s funny.

Happy birthday, Mommy.

“I thought if I cupped my hands together and forced the air out,
it would sound like a sonic boom.”