tonight i had dinner with a couple of women i've known for a while and a couple of others i just met. I left feeling vaguely depressed. There's this irritating phenomenon in international/aid/development of single women who went out in their 20s looking for adventures and putting their careers first, but they got caught... because all the single men their age who did the same thing hooked up with local women, or younger women (or both). And suddenly there's a glut of really cool (and some less cool) women in their late 20s to early 40s who have no one to date.

It turns into many many dinners with 3, 4, 5 single women. Sometimes these dinners are awesome, but often everyone's just working a bit too hard and drinking a bit too much and sleeping with the wrong dude and obsessing over it.

These are big cities but in so many ways they are just small towns, with a limited pool of people in the same economic stratum. There's not much fresh blood. It basically turns into a choice of married men, of dating exes of friends, of obsessing over someone it didn't work out with, and/or of women dating local men whose salaries are a fifth of theirs. Everyone has a different story, everyone has advice.

Listening to them, it's easy to be impatient because it gets old very very fast.

But I've only been here for a week, so I quietly sipped my beer(s) and kept my mouth shut. I can't really identify with them because i saw how it could get, and opted of the game when i decided to stay in school. I remember how it felt to be unable to connect, how I made myself have a massage every week just to make sure that I had some human contact. Now I just do this in little manageable spurts. Now I'm going home in two weeks. What do I know? I know that it's two months into the rainy season in Addis and everyone's a bit down. Tomorrow we'll be driving far far out into the countryside and something will click and it will all be worth it. These are the ups and downs.

10:31 p.m. - 2012-07-02