(no subject)

Well it has been another whirlwind 24 hours.

My mom called last night (just as R and I were getting down to *business*, go figure) to tell me that she just got 2 rejection letters in the mail for me, one from AAUW and one from the UCLA OID teaching fellowship program. Neither are huge suprises, but still disappointments. My two strongest applications are still pending, but now I'm nervous. I have gotten no bites on my job applications and I'm still faced with that big question - what do I do if I don't get funded next year? Can I take a year off and realistically go back? Can I justify a year of loans for a degree that may not get me a job when I'm done? I'm still putting off making any solid answers to these questions, but as the rejections roll in, my brain keeps going back to them. Needless to say I wasn't feeling very amorous at the end of that conversation....poor R.

Then we spent all of yesterday in the most boring way ever. Malika opa had called a few days ago to ask if we wanted to participate in a concert in Gulistan that the TV show that filmed us a few weeks ago was putting on. I said that would be fine and a chance for R to go to one more Uzbek city (though Guliston isn't much of a destination). Big mistake. Most boring uncomfortable thing ever. The concert happened 6 hours after we got to the University where it was to be held, and we were treated to a very boring tour of the campus and talks by its dignitaries. Add that to the fact that I got carsick from having to ride a backward-facing seat on the minibus and the fact that R and I were both exhausted from the bukhara trip.

I can't really say never again, because this is just the way that things work here. You say yes to an opportunity because it could be something useful and interesting and fun. Sometimes it is, sometimes it is complete crap. The thing with stuff here is that I have a harder time judging what is going to be good and what is going to be crap when I make the decision to participate or not, so I end up just needing to say yes to everything.

(no subject)

I just remembered something Malika opa said while she was making a toast yesterday at dinner (she's really well spoken, I wish I had a recording of it).

Anyway at some point in her toast, after toasting the host of the TV show who sponsered the boring day in Guliston, she started thanking me for honoring her and Uzbekistan by studying the Shashmaqom and the mumtoz repertoire. She said that it was really wonderful that I was studying the music that was connected with sufi poets like Navoi and that were connected with the practice of zikr. This is really interesting to me because people often edge around the topic of sufism when talking about the shashmaqom and about music in general.

In previous conversations Malika opa has pointed out that all the love poetry in the songs I work on were written to God and that they were connected with Sufism, but made sure to emphasize that the Shashmaqom was not used in zikr. Interesting that during this meal she chose to emphasize the sufi aspect of the poetry of one of the reasons that Shashmaqom is so valuable. It may also have been because she was talking about a young poet earlier in the toast while praising the University that we were visiting.

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