Books Are the New Video Games

Sunset in the fields.  This is the best shot I've been able to get so far of those feathery plants.

From the series "Eric Enjoys A Pineapple."

Village girls gathering sweet potato greens.

Rodin picking lychees with the bamboo pole I call "The Claaaaw."

Rosy periwinkle flowers.  The roots are a treatment for stomach maladies, and scientists have recently begun investigating them for possible anti-cancer properties.  It grows only in Madagascar.

Written December 2, 2011
Fort Dauphin

    My phone rang, the notes barely discernible over the hubbub of the Tuesday market crowd.  I stepped apart from the throng haggling over bananas and fished it out of my pocket.  I didn’t recognize the number, so it was probably Peace Corps.
    “Hello?”
    “Hello, Eric, this is Lova,” came the reply.  Lova was the Homestay Coordinator during training, and she works as a much-needed go-between on other tasks for Peace Corps throughout the year. “I’m calling because of the emergency...”
    Oh, great, I thought.  Was it a kidnapping?  A shooting, a bombing, a riot?  Well, I should have known everything here was too good to last.  I guess the Transition Conference will be in South Africa this time.  At least this time around I got to stay in my site for more than nine--
    “...system, the emergency contact system.  This is just a test.  Is all your contact information the same?”
    Dang it, Lova, ya scared me half to death!
    Apart from that brief jolt (Have the lemurs finally decided to rise and exterminate the human scum infesting their island?), the last week has gone pretty well for me.  I did laundry and wrote letters to Maia and Maria, two of my professors at Guilford.  I contacted Tovo about booking my plane ticket up to Tana for IST, probably on the eighth.  And I collated most of the raw data for my CDS, and started planning out the text of the report.
    I didn’t get as much work done as I should have, however, because I was reading my third-favorite novel ever, The Passage.  I read it back in June just before I left the States, but as soon as I cracked the cover, I felt the pull the story exerted on me the very first time I picked it up in Borders.
    It’s probably my fourth time reading it, and this time around I was able to pick up on things I’ve missed before, like how Wolgast and Amy pass through Homer, Oklahoma, years before the town becomes you-know-what for Sosa, one of the Twelve.  I also noticed that the last third of the book is quite similar to Watership Down, only with humans and vampires in the place of rabbits and humans.
    And from there I moved on to an even greater literary endeavor, Game of Thrones.  My parents sent me the first three books in the septology, and I’m pretty sure I saw a copy of the fourth in the Tana maeva.  I’ve hardly been able to tear myself away from it, simply because I always want to see what happens next.  The wolves, the knights, the totally-not-Mongols!  The seven-hundred-foot-tall wall of ice!  And all the intrigue, all the blood!  If ever a book was made to be a series on HBO...
    And several people have told me the series gets even more addictive after this one.  That could be a problem.
    There’s also news on the video game side of things.  My parents found the Age of Empires 3 disk that I lost years ago.  They’re sending it with the next package.  It’ll be great to have both Age of Mythology and AoE3 with me again.  I’m already making plans to reconstitute my favorite profiles on my present computer, especially my British Black Watch Kick profile, and the Ottoman variation of it that I invented and named “Turkish Delight.”  Long live the White Queen.
    I say, did I just segue a lot of video game nonsense into a Chronicles of Narnia reference?  I did, didn’t I?
    It’s been a good week.