and now we emerge from the chaos

okay, folks.

the reason for my absence is that i've been entirely discombobulated for the past week. the story: from the beginning of last week, we started getting angry visits from the law office downstairs, saying that every time we used the water in our apartment their office was becoming more and more flooded. at first we decided it was the bathroom sink, which tended to be a little leaky. so we stopped using that. but no, they were still angry, and still getting flooded. okay, we stopped using the kitchen sink too, but excuse us, signori, we said, you can't ask us not to take showers.

but no, it seemed they could indeed ask us not to take showers. more like hysterically demand that we not take showers. so then a plumber comes by to "take a look" at our pipes and decides that the only logical solution is to tear apart our entire apartment looking for a leak in the pipes.

so in comes a little army of like 5 construction workers, who stay with us over the course of the next five days. first they tear out our bathtub and put it in our living room. still can't find the problem. they stand around and smoke, ask for coffee, flirt with grazia. who flirts back and temporarily becomes the maker of magically good coffee. they leave their cigarette butts all over the floor of our apartment. not enough. they tear up the floor of our bathroom, they dismember the kitchen, they leave a thick red dust covering absolutely every surface of the apartment.

what was supposed to be a half a day's job and turned into a five-day expedition into the bowels of our apartment finally ended today. and thank god. i felt like i was living in baghdad. no cooking, no hot meals, no showers, no bathroom, no teeth-brushing, niente. noise and dust and big obnoxious men who only speak sicilian, from early early each morning to late in the evening. it's amazing how much a thing like that can really wear you out, especially when you're working every day and have got loads of stuff to do on top of it.

today when they finally left (by now they were so attached i didn't know if they'd bring themselves to actually part with us), we looked around and said, oh shit it's going to take us days to clean this place up. (so much red dust it looked like the surface of mars, honestly.) alessia had to work tonight so she told us not to start in on cleaning til she got back, so we could make sure we were all pitching in equally. but instead, grazia and i attacked this place with all of a week's worth of pent-up frustration and general grossed-outness, and we totally transformed it in like two hours. you know in those teen movies where the parents go away for the weekend and the kids throw a party and trash the place and then they go into a frenzy and magically clean it all up at the end just in the nick of time? yeah, it was just like that.

so anyway, that's been the past week. i've been going by italo's parents' house every day to take showers and just to hang out for a while with a little bit of peace and quiet. italo's mom also ended up feeding me, a lot. you think maybe stereotypes are false, including the one about italian mothers who shove food down everybody's throats, but that's one stereotype that's very very true. not that i mind it, in smallish doses.

i'm on the fast track to chubby at the moment, so i really need to try to stop buying nutella and join a gym.

also, i've been relying on paola quite a bit and she's enormously generous and hospitable. plus i just love hanging out at her house. it's a combination of her and the dog and the house itself and the atmosphere she creates in it. it's fun, relaxed, quirky. she's been doing my laundry and also feeding me and giving me a ton of stuff, including a little space heater and her daughter's left-behind winter clothes. (once again, i find i have utterly failed to take into account my total intolerance for cold weather, despite my four years in new england.)

i'm grateful for all this mothering and attention, though like i said earlier accepting this sort of generosity doesn't come easily to me. and it's weird that this is the social network i find myself with. on one hand i feel like i've failed at making friends, reaching out to people my own age. my roommates are sweethearts but i haven't gotten super close with them. i'm friendly with the young teachers at cei but i haven't succeeded in actually socializing with them outside of school. but i'm not absolutely alone here... so basically instead of friends, i have mother figures. like i said, it's strange. but it's made a world of difference in these past few weeks.

comunque, more to come soon.