Journalations

Today has been such a strange day…emotionally and mentally anyway. I’ve felt so torn in different directions I’m not “all” anywhere. This whole week is has been hard to not be home because of Careathon. This is my third year of not being there and the first time that I recall it really bothering me. I always miss being a part of it, but this year I really hated it. Partly, I guess, because I was able to “hear” so little of it that I felt even less participatory. I caught the end last night, from 6-7am this morning, and then I was able to leave work in time to hear the last hour tonight. It’s so weird to be like, oh well, it turned out well, that’s great…but totally not be there. I’m really glad my family is coming next week so that should make me less homesick…

This morning started out well…I actually got out of bed at 6am thanks to the mental stimulation of the radio. That made me early to work and I had time to get coffee…so I thought that was the source of my adrenaline rush but the feeling never went away—it was almost the physical feeling rush of the last day of careathon without being there…really strange….but it was good I stayed alert cause I had SO much to do today at work. The 10:15 staff mtg turned into a briefing on SA that last til 12:30 and I left with a very long list of things to do. I’ve become the main drafter of memos and letters to Secretary Rice so that keeps me busy both writing and getting all the clearances necessary for every single thing that goes to her. Today I put together a briefing book for Amb Hanford to use in his weeklong campaign to get the Dept of State, the White House, and the NSC on our side for what we want to do with Saudi Arabia. It’s almost harder to get the whole US Govnt together on something than it is to get a foreign govnt to agree! Crazyness, but anyway it was basically lots of summaries of my “findings” as well as related evidence. That was a huge project due this afternoon before he had a mtg with the undersecretary. Then I also wrote a memo to the Sec and a letter to USCIRF, which is a commission est’ed by the Int. Rel. Freedom (IRF) Act but unassociated with the office and ambassador…they function under congress and research and report findings to us… they are kinda like a govnt funded ngo…they don’t make policy recommendations. They have a love/hate relationship with the IRF office because they tend to publicly attack IRF for not taking the actions they want (since they don’t have to deal with the bureaucracy of trying to get things done) and yet obviously they work for the same ultimate causes so…yeah, it’s all complicated. A story a xian news service put out today was basically them attacking us for not acting on SA…oc, they have no idea we’re TRYING to do something… they just kinda can say whatever they want and everything IRF says is representing the Prez so you can’t speak that freely…

It was funny watching the difference to the news on N Korea dropping 6 party talks and announcing they really do have nukes. Outside, the media FREAKED …”They have nukes!!” and inside the bldg everyone was like, oh, btw, NK is being fussy again and saying they won’t talk to us. We’ll see how fast they come around… The “announcement” of nukes was NOT news and NK pulling out of talks is like “Oh, are we going to go through this again now?” .... interesting….

The funniest thing I saw today… a memo came through, a report on one of the human rights groups mtg with some gay activists from Kuwait or somewhere, expressing complaints about anti-gay violence there etc…The acronym for the group was J-FLAG and the report had a typo calling it J-FAG…. I thought that was pretty ironic…not sure if anyone else caught it or not =)

Anyways, I didn’t post yesterday cause I was so exhausted and feeling sick I just went to sleep..leaving undone homework I need to get to now. I’m going to call home to try to stop feeling so isolated and then get stuff done…