I really like the movie Boondock Saints. I hear there might even be a sequel coming out. One of my favorite parts is when they are trapped in the mafia guy’s basement and getting their asses kicked and their italian friend gets shot. The dark haired brother says “Oh yeah I love this shit,” or something like that. His friend just got SHOT.

I’ve always taken it as a sort of exultation of life in the midst of tragedy. We love the high flying moments of success, achievement, love, etc… But we hate the moments of loss that are inevitably all mixed up with the good times. There is something sort of Buddhist in this, and usually people think that means one should try to be level and calm, seeing the highs and lows as attachments. I prefer the view exemplified by the brother, who seems to love the ride of life, the roller coaster ups and downs, the passion of our human struggle, of loss, of love.

I feel asleep thinking of that, and then when my alarm went off this morning I was grumpy with life. There is a question of control in all this. How much of life can we control? We don’t like it when we think we have control over something and life throws in our face the fact that control is an illusion. The struggle to manifest what we want in the face of a laughing mirthful world is what life is all about right?

Still, I don’t imagine that if I was laying in my friend’s blood as he was dying and I was tied to a chair that I would be saying “I love this shit.” Maybe that is insanity. Maybe I didn’t hear it right the fifth time I saw that movie. Maybe I’m just musing.

As far as my living situation. I still have no house, and it appears that I won’t be getting one, which means that I have a roommate for the next two months until he COSes and goes home. That’s not terrible, since at least I know where I am staying and I can start doing things like fixing the place up and putting in a garden. Still, I won’t really be moved in for another two months, and that kind of sucks. But if there is anything that I have had practice with in Peace Corps, it is the impermanence of things.

I wonder sometimes about other volunteers, and how they spend two years in one village. That must be a completely different experience from mine, where I will have lived in three different sites over my two and a half years of service, not including two months at training in Guinea, one month in Mali after evacuation, and one month in training in Niger. My service has been characterized by short stays in different places. Most volunteer’s services are characterized by staying in one place the whole time. How much have I missed out on really getting to know people and a community by moving around so much?