red pens, digital beer and paperbacks

so this week, i got brought into a project at work. each office of UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) has to write the "Country Report" for the year, which is something like an annual report. The office reports on influential circumstances in the country (Economic, Security, Social) and then what the goals for the year were and how UNHCR- Armenia did on them. Now, being new and being an intern, there wasn't much that I could write, per se, not being an authority. But I told my boss early in the week "Look, I can't write it, but I was a Writing major in undergrad and I'm a native speaker, so if you want, I can kind of go through the report from an editor perspective and see if I can make it read more clearly"
What did I get myself into?!?
So all of the staff in the agency speak English well, but the writing isn't so hot. Not bad. In fact, Armenia staff are writing alot better than some of the writing I've read by other offices in the UN. But that being said, there was alot of editing to do. So thats basically what I did all week. Didn't help that the report was 13 pages, single-spaced and needed to be cut down to 10. Also didn't help that three of the upper-level staff are away this week for various reasons so it wasn't always possible to defer to a higher-up. At any rate, I went through the report with a red pen and cleaned alot of it up. Cut out almost a page of extraneous facts, conjecture and opinion. In my opinion, I had it lookin pretty good.
Problem is, everyone kind of took it a little personal when I cut their stuff. In academia, you learn to take it as constructive criticism. The editor is trying to help you make your writing better. But it didn't really go down like that. So I found myself in the middle of a ballet of office-politics. The goal was to help as much as I could without drawing too much fire for butchering peoples' writing. People getting huffy about me deleting half of a run-on sentence or breaking it up into two separate thoughts. And I'm sitting there thinking "Look, I wanted to delete the whole fucking paragraph. I was being nice. This doesn't need to go into the report. Its extraneous." The interesting thing was, I feel like I really rose to the occasion. Its easy enough to slack as an intern. I don't think I have, per se, but this was definitely the most invested I've gotten in a project so far.
Not much to tell beyond that. I did my part. People fought to keep their poorly-worded sentences in the final document. And fine. I said my piece, now its an executive decision. Out of my hands.
What I thought was interesting was that doing that much editing (to be honest, I rarely EVER do more than one edit on my papers for school), i found myself calculatedly rewording my emails, choosing how I wanted to say things and I've become (temporarily) more conscious of my usage of the English language. Anyways.

Went to an interesting bar this week with my Aussie friend. I think the translated name is something like "Moscow Restaurant" and its traditional Russian/ Armenian fare. We got these fried Russian dumplings and two different kinds of shishkebab. But the cool part was the drinking experience. This restaurant had a beer tap at every table with the house beer. So you could pour yourself a beer right there at the table. No waiting. No waiter. Just lean over and get you some. Right next to the tap was a little digital reader. It measured how much volume of beer came out of the tap. When you ask for your bill, they just take a reading and you pay for the beer by the liter. Fucking genius. We were joking that you'd never be able to get away with this in Australia or the States without a mess because people would be laying out on the table, seeing how much they could chug, like a lying-down keg-stand. I guess the Armenians are just playin' it cool.

I finished reading the sci fi novel that I brought with me and I've been kind of sad to not have any reading. Its been strange to have a 9-5 job, one class (Capstone) and suddenly time on my hands in the evenings. Not having too many friends yet, I've been watching downloaded movies and shows on my laptop, but thats getting old, so I've been craving another book. I ordered 4 paperbacks on amazon, but I couldn't get them sent out here, so I mailed them to my Mom in MA, thinking she could get them in the mail for me. That proved to be too expensive, so she mailed 'em to Caity in Texas and she's gonna bring them out when we meet up for spring break. But I don't think I can wait, so I've been looking around. I stopped into the big bookstore on Republic Square yesterday and searched the racks, figuring there had to be a foreign language section. Finally I found one little shelf with a handful of classics. I was afraid it was going to be all John Grisham or Dean Koontz or something. I popped into another bookstore a few weekends ago and they had a section for english-language books, but it was bizarrely like the books section of a run-down Salvation Army thrift store. It was all old hardcover political-thriller novels about the Cold War, written in the 60s and 70s and then trashy romance novels. Like the ones with Fabio shirtless on the cover. That was it.
So I found my English-language section at this other bookstore and my choices were Old Man and the Sea, Gone With the Wind, Huckleberry Finn, The Count of Monte Cristo, Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I got Julius Ceasar and Frankenstein, figuring I'll come back next week for the Count and Huck Finn. I just can't see myself reading Gone With the Wind. Not yet.