Yesterday I had one of those days that is inevitable for everyone who lives abroad. No matter how happy you are in general, there are those days, those cursed days, when everything you don’t like about your chosen place of residence just comes up and slaps you in sequence, one by one. It’s one of those days when the place you’ve decided to live, and the place you care about or even love, decides to drive you crazy.

Sometimes, people have those days when it’s just really one jerk who annoys them. Sometimes they have those days because of the regular annoyances which bug everyone including the locals, but which aren’t regular annoyances in their home countries. But the worst of those days are when stuff conspired to annoy you precisely because you’re a foreigner: the chains of miscommunication that somehow skip you for many apparent reasons, none of them good; the infrastructure not designed for one such as you, whether it’s the size of a bus seat or an internet designed for only one OS; the stuff that you could usually just grin and quip about, but today it’s decided to leave a flaming paper bag of poop on your doorstep.

And I didn’t blog about it. Okay, partly because of Internet connectivity problems. (Yeah, you can guess some of it now, but not most of it.) But mostly I didn’t blog about it because I have been thinking about this blog, and what I want to write here from now on. I’m still not sure, but I know one thing: I will be having students visit, perhaps colleagues as well, and I don’t want the first thing they see to be me bitching — not about them, not about their homeland, both of which I like very much most of the time. I don’t want them to see me at my worst. I do want them to see something enjoyable, perhaps something critical and incisive, but not just straightforward ranting and complaining. Something funny, like, how I said to the Internet guy, “See you in six months!” since the problem is biannual. But not rants.

So anyway, that’s it for now. I didn’t rant yesterday. It’s a step in the right direction, even if, like most of the iceberg, it’s invisible to y’all. I may slip, sometimes — thus the “(t Much)” in the title — but I’m aiming for less rant and more, er, usefulness.

Meanwhile, I’m busy with tons of stuff, but I’ll have the second half of my impressions from my summer trip soon. And maybe one linky post in the meantim, as I am pretty busy for the next few days and the trip-impressions thing takes some time to write.