Siren Songs

In desperation for new entertainment, because I now have an egregious amount of free time and I no longer have Bravo and Andy Cohen to fill the free moments of my life, I have turned to podcasts to keep me and the dogs company. So far I have listen to a few TED talks (I recommend the TED Radio Talks on ‘Food Matters’), Librivox is my new best friend, and, of course, a super hipster cooking podcast called “Joy the Baker”. It would be expected that I would listen to something like Joy the Baker, it is two quirky girls, who undoubtedly wear glasses and scarves just like me, talking about random stuff that stems from their original cooking topic. One of those topics happens to be about siren songs, defined as “an enticing but dangerous appeal, especially a misleading one” by Wikipedia. I had no clue what this was until I listened to that specific podcast, and this is where it ties back into me being in Madagascar. Hold on with me—I promise I am about to make my point. This particular podcast defines a siren song as when you want to do something really bad that is super inappropriate and discusses their various siren songs, at which point I ran through mine. As a result, I have found my Madagascar siren song. I swear I have a ton back home in St. Libory and now in Boston. For example in St. Libory, on my morning run, instead of merely running my usual course through the corn fields, I want to blast the Scissor Sisters song “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing” and dance my running course at a bright and early 5:30am, and if I could talk my mother into joining me all the better. Oh and we are also wearing rainbow knee socks with matching sweatbands in this scenario, but that doesn’t really relate to the actual siren song part, just the stylistic details so you all have an easier time picturing it all. Anyways, back to the point. Antananarivo is a super jam-packed city on top of a few hills and the roads are extremely narrow. Why I don’t know, I feel like there is plenty of room to spread out here, but what do I really know about this place, being here 2 weeks barely warrants my opinions for how the capital city should be built. So every time a taxi drives by I always think they are going to hit me. It is a miracle or due their stealth driving ability that I am not. But always, always, always, I just want to fake that they ran over my foot. Just so badly, I think it would be pretty hilarious, but I don’t know if they are the practical joke kind here. So far it seems like the Malagasy have a good sense of humor, but would that extend to the point of pretending to have a bodily injury? I don’t know. Plus, I don’t speak either of the languages here, which would make it very difficult to explain that I was not injured, and merely fulfilling a sort of longing desire to be inappropriate. So I guess that is why it is my siren song here, I will never know because I am too chicken to try it out. I also kind of want to do it in Boston to the bus drivers, but Lord, I would end up with way more than an injured food, I fear. So onto other things, like work. I finally have a work plan. Thank the Lord. If I had to cipher through one more .pdf about field survey structures, I may have sat my happy bum on a plane and traveled back home. This was all self imposed though, with out a definitive work plan, last week, everyday I planned some new sort of research and now that I did all of that, it probably won’t even get used…oh well. So in a little over a week we are off to do some fieldwork. Observing successful survey sites for good nutrition and then taking some of their practices to the sites where nutritional practices are lacking. I’m sure it will be super interesting and I get to travel to some rather remote areas of Madagascar. Thank God I brought some books and I will be sure to load up on more podcasts, music, and even an audio book or two because while we may only be going a couple of hundred miles, it will take a few days to travel to these sites due to bad roads. I found out that we were going to be doing all of this and be gone from Antananarivo for about a week or two. You know that moment when you are talking to your supervisor about a project and you see him/her see your eyes get big with all this new responsibility and you see that hint of amusement in their eyes? That happened to me yesterday when I realized we are going to have to plan all this out. This was also a pretty big ‘oh, crap’ moment for me too. Now, though, I’m looking forward to it, now that I have a better grasp on it. It will be me and another intern (who is Malagasy and speaks English, French, and of course Malagasy) going out to these places with a driver to do these nutrition assessments. I’m really happy to now have a solid work plan and an interesting topic to study. Although I feel like a turd with the other intern knowing three languages fluently, and me with only knowing bits of Spanish (completely useless here), the remnants of Sesotho (again useless), and my super poor Rosetta Stone level one French, which I don’t even count. I’ll be relying on her to help with all the translations and to keep me out of trouble. All in all, though, I think it will be a good experience—to be out on my own (in a way) working with limited resources in a completely foreign place. It should be fun, right? I’ll leave you now. I am comfortably sitting on a couch watching “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” because of course such a random movie would be playing on the TV tonight, watching two very sleepy dogs stretch out and relax in the comfort of home before I boot them out for the night so I can read a bit of my trashy novel and go to bed. Have a lovely day and au revoir!