i succeeded in losing my only black pen, and i must say, it makes me rather unhappy. i HATE blue ink. le sigh.

i saw david yesterday. also saw his community and its un - fucking believable. windowless homes made out of tin, rivers of waste, dry garbage, pigs, hens, goats, barefoot children playing in dumpsters.. yet so much laughter. so many smiling faces. an actual community of neighbors.

my friend anne took me to see her old home, some of her friends, and a sewage river that all of the neighborhood kids learned to swim in.

david met up with anne, rose and i after leaving his internship (goal kenya) under false pretenses.. on his first day of work, for that matter. after joining up, the four of us went to a pub and kicked back some beers/cider. conversation was nice, but not necessarily easy.. also, lots of swahili was being spoken. i'm not sure if it'd be polite to insist they speak my tongue instead.

after we finished at the pub, the gang of us took a mat into town. wouldn't ordinarily be anything to report.. however, it was david and my first chance to really talk alone. the interaction was a bit overwhelming for me, i have to say. essentially, he told me that he developed 'strong feelings' for me as soon as we met. i don't know why that weirds me out, considering my experience was identical. however, i guess that some thoughts feel better in my head and worse on my tongue.

when we alighted in town, we kind of began doing and arm in arm thing, and then a hand in hand whatnot. at some point, he also extended his arm around me. (and yes, i know that doesn't qualify as shit/is boring as hell, but we're talking milestones, baby!)

other happenings of the evening are a bit blurry. i did recieve a parting gift, however. a card with a poem inside that made me feel a bit uncomfortable because i'm an asshole like that.

past 24 hours haven't been so smooth, however. mental mutinty might be a way to describe it. when i was on the phone with my mother yesterday she instructed me to enquire about whether david had another girlfriend or kids. suffice it to say, that got my mind whirling in every crazy direction imaginable. shit capped off during afternoon teatime, when i mentioned david to a friend at work also named david. when i commented that he was a sociologist at daystar u, my colleage told me that i had been lied to or else he would know him. (they share the same major, the same name and are studying at the same university ?.?.)

alas, when it comes down to it, i think i'm having so much trouble conceiving that this is real, im looking for reasons to say its farce. it certainly seems so. poetry and greeting cards? significant looks? the best explanation i can find is that david is a primary school dropout with three kids vying for a greencard. second best is that he's on crack for being interested. third is that i'm on drugs. (option three sounds good at this point)

heh. seems like i'm having difficulty with this trust thing.

returned from the maasai mara today. the trip was wonderful, the lanscpaes were beautiful, and the company above average. on my two days in the part, i saw a variety of animals -- lios, giraffe, ostrich, zebra, elephants, wildebeast, gazwlle, vultures.. at one point i even saw a cheetah guarding serveral new born cubs. it was amazing to see all of these creatures -- graceful, eccentric, bizarre each in their own way.

i admired the giraffe and the ostrich the most, however, for their lithe movements. one of the aspects of my trip that i found most fascinating were my encounters with the maasai. everywhere you looked on the landscape, it was possible to see little dots of red.. maasai men and women draped in red woven cloths of different description. many were also adorned with glass beaded jewelry and large guage earings. whenever their herds moved, the air was filled with ringing bells (the cows and goats wear them on their necks). the sound was remarkable.

oftentimes, the people i spotted leading the cattle were children between the ages of 4 and seven, swathed in red and carrying sticks to prod the animals.

the four most amazing things i saw on my trip were:
1 - a maasai man herding goats and cattle while carrying a little, white baby-goat in his arms

2 - a maasai warrior wearing a pair of retro superfunk mirror-lens sunglasses

3 - a vervet monkey peering mischenviously into my tent at the campsite

4 - a french and korean reality tv-show being filmed in the safari park. upon boarding their tour bus, i was served a hearty portion of french wine (french husband, korean wife, biracial kids -- collectively, they speak french, korean, english and chinese)

that aside, i had mixed emotions about certain elements of my trip. in a classic bout of egalitarianism gone wrong, two of the people on my trip boycotted paying an official visit to the maasai villages on accout of the fact that it was a form of prostitution (maasai prostituting themselves to foreigners). normally, i wouldn't disagree with the sentiment. however, in making their determination that taking such a trip was damnable, my travel companions ignored the comments of kenyans and maasai that the visits help fund education and nutrition in the communities and that the maasai welcome the interaction. the people in my group also declined an offer by maasai men to perform a tradional song.

really, wtf? how to you know a communities' values better than they do? whatever the internal politics that motivated their actions, in the end it seemed like they declined to take interest in the community. i, on the other hand, was interested and royally annoyed.

being maasai is semi-revolutionary in my eyes. you are a renegade -- anti-matieral, free of boundaries, free of government, ruled by custom, free to roam, all the land you touch is yours. and such beautiful land.

in news that is perhaps unrelated, i've been thinking about my beautiful beautiful boy.. since saturday, to be precise, when he left me to go on my safari in mai mahiu. david okoth, sociologist from the slums.

i guess its not uncommon for me to feel anxious and curious about things. however, the part that i can't figure out is how things could work out between us when we live in such different worlds. even my dirty thoughts of the past few days have been confused by these questions. for example, is seduction possible in a pentacostal and catholic society? heh heh.. moreover, where to stay the night? i don't imagine that i'd be able to visit him in korogocho, and i can't quite imagine him comfortably coming to visit me in the burbs of nairobi. seems like we might have to settle for cheap hotels.. just kidding..heh heh.

alas, i hope to see him on wednesday, although i'm not sure what to do or say.

it's funny that i had to travel halfway around the world to feel this way, but i'm am wholly in love with the countryside. the rural areas of kenya are so beautiful i can't understand for the life of me why people live in the cities. nairobi is a dump, in the same way that new york city is a dump -- although it has a nice veneer, car exhaust is so thick that you choke on the air, your mucuous is perpetually black and for every person that you see driving a mercedes there are five barefoot children sniffing glue.

i want to move into the middle of the wilderness and grow pineapples. fields and fields of pineapple, maize, and plaintain.