April 15, 2013

I jumped out of bed early as I remembered I had promised to skype with my sister, and my nephew and his wife who were visiting from New Jersey with their new baby. Alas, I had no Internet connection when I tried to log in. I tried plugging and unplugging the cable several times, but no service was available.

After about an hour, I was able to connect and call my sister. We tried to talk using the video call service, but my connection was so slow that it kept freezing, so we just talked for a little bit as everyone seemed to be spent after a full day of activities and Kevin and his family were flying out the next day.

I had to deal with the fact that my tax preparer had given me the bad news that I needed to pay an additional #1006.00 to the Internal Revenue Service on the measly sum of money I made last year as an English Language Fellow. It really galls me that I’m paying more taxes than many profitable corporations in the United States. No wonder some people choose not work at all and rely on charity instead.

Willoughby came by this morning and brought me more apple cake for my breakfast. We immediately got started on putting the finishing touches on the spring newsletter and got it all done. We reviewed the list of names on our list serve, and I showed her how to add contacts to the list as they became available. She didn’t know about the fact that we needed to put out one other issue of the newsletter expressly for the CATEC event in June.

I returned to the tedious task of reviewing the TEA applications while the wind started to pick up outside. I then took a break to cook some polenta for dinner. I had nothing to eat in my fridge and out of necessity went across the street to purchase a few takeout options, but the place is apparently being remodeled or turned into some other kind of business as all the shelving was gone and workers were painting inside and out.

I walked to Narodni and bought a few staples, mostly prepared salads, and got some bananas from a street vendor. It was then back to my desk and to the applications. Elvira wrote to say she’d cancelled her trip to the South that was supposed to take place ahead of mine and would be traveling with me instead. That was good news as I definitely would feel better in her company.

I watched a documentary on Gene Sharp, a person I’d never heard of, who’s being credited with organizing countless groups around the world so they can topple dictatorial regimes through non-violent demonstrations. How come the mainstream media has never interviewed him? Obviously, they’d not be interested in such views as they would contradict the fact that we tend to support those dictatorial regimes in the first place.

I felt the irony of the documentary resided in the fact that Mr. Sharp never even hints at the fact that one country where the people could benefit from some of his strategies would be the United States. How myopic some people can be.