it looks like i will be in the united states from june to september next year. i am not happy about this at all, but i suppose i just have to suck up and deal.

[there's a reason that few black people who attend high school in the city in which my mother lives that go on to university actually return to the city. once you get out into the real world, there are few reasons to come back, short of family issues.]

i'm really going to need to get a new driver's licence, as said city has no real mass transit system. [how are you a state capital in the northeast without transit? ugh.] my mother doesn't have a car, but few places in that rinky-dink town actually accept a passport as valid ID for things like buying booze or going into nightclubs. i shit you not.

after 16 years of not *needing* a car [i've had four cars, but i arguably did not need any of them], though, this is going to be a bit of culture shock. a friend of mine from high school is a cab driver in the town though. i might just say "plaz, here's $100, take me everywhere i need to go this weekend."

where i go after that? i don't know yet. i have a few idea, but i'm open to suggestions. south africa is not one of them as it's about to become just another expensive african country -- and if i am going to live in an expensive african country, i want to at least feel welcome *without* waving around an american accent.

i may end up in senegal again. on verra.

obama worship continues.

i've been a bit lax with posting lately -- finding kid a new school, looking for a new place to live, selling my current digs, interviews for teaching, things like that -- but i'm interrupting the silence with the mention that obama has won the nobel peace prize.

my first notification of this was when reading the crackbook feed of someone with whom i went to high school. i was like, lolwut? no, really, this cannot be. but the crackbook feed pretty much summed it up "joe scarborough just said marisa tomei did more to win her oscar than obama did to win the nobel prize". i almost agree with that. he should have said judi dench -- she was only in shakespeare in love for just eight minutes -- but the sentiment is about right. [that said, i don't expect joe scarborough to have seen shakespeare in love.]

then i looked it up, and was just amazed. as much as i don't like slick willie or the head of micro$oft, either of them is, in my opinion, more worthy of having won the nobel prize than barack obama on things accomplished thus far. they say that for the peace prize, unlike the other prizes, you can win for things you are in the process of doing, but given that the nomination deadline was all of 10 days into the obama administration... spending the last 9 months to ride it out to see how it goes was just not on. i'm not saying tsvanigirai should have gotten it [he was also nominated], but like i said, there were a few people who i think were better placed.

personally, i didn't vote for obama. this post explains why, if i must refresh your memory. [for the record, i voted for one of the other black people running for president -- obama wasn't the only one, believe it or not.]

but this is a bit much, a bit soon. it's as if the northern europeans wanted their own person with an "islamic" name to worship in the way that the southern europeans make pilgrimages to fátima. the nobel committee is worshiping at the shrine of hussein. whodathunkit? clinton might have had lewinsky under his desk blowing him, but it seems that obama has an army of well-placed wipers [qv the opening scenes of coming to america].

everyone i know who has met him personally says he's a nice guy, but this barack-means-luck thing is going a bit too far. [in arabic, baraka, from which the swahili word barack derives, is the kind of luck that is like finding a dollar on the street, using that dollar to play powerball and then winning. the chance of that is less likely than being struck by lightning, which is what the hebrew word barak means.]