Morning
9 November 2001
Francisco’s
Didn’t want to get up this morning. Today I’m going to have to deal with people, and people annoy me right now. Maybe I’ll feel better after breakfast. After all, the other group, the rest of the group is coming, and some of them aren’t so bad.
I feel absolutely humiliated by this experience in some ways. I really like to think that I am capable of doing worthwhile things for myself and others, but right now, I am having grave doubts as to my ability to do anything worthwhile for anyone. It does go to show what I was saying in a previous journal is true: I’m inconsequential in this world.
Maybe the only person to whom I can be worthwhile is myself. At this point, if I can get away with it, I’d be lucky to be a person who no one knows or cares about. If I can do that, at least I will not have been a burden on anyone else’s time.
We have some idea, a deluded idea, that life is going to get better for us. We say that “every day in every way it’s getting better and better.” I’m certainly not convinced that anything ever gets easier or “improves” except eventually we die and that’s the end of us for this go-round. We’ll hope that the great big cosmic Buddha has a few more coins to play the slots so they’ll be a next time, but death is the only sure thing.
That is one comforting thing to remember: this life of awful tragedy and inconvenience will pass. It’s been comforting to see that there’s a statute of limitation on suffering. Sometimes this means, to me, that I can make my best effort without fear because I know I will die, best effort or no. But today, it’s merely good to know that I’m not capable of doing too much damage.
This is a review of my personal journal from my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominican Republic in 2001-2003. Even if I feel differently now or found out later that I what I wrote was factually incorrect, I haven’t changed what I wrote then. Part of the joy of reading old journals is seeing a story arc where I’ve learned new things.
Names have been shortened to initials to provide some privacy. Even though those who were there may be able to use these initials to figure out who it is I wrote about, please remember that my journaling is not about other people or their experience.
- The next entry in this series is A hole in my soul where the oil leaks out
- The previous entry in this series is A litany for Peace Corps
- You can see the journal entries as I post them here.
- If you’re just starting, here’s the first entry.
