Today...I slept in.

That's right. I successfully performed the 21-year-old equivalent of waking up to watch Saturday-morning cartoons. Which is to say, I decidedly did not wake up to watch Saturday-morning cartoons. It's interesting, though. The sun, in relation to the Sri Lankan clock, rises and sets about two hours earlier. With my bed so close to my window, I find my body aligning itself to this rhythm in the wee hours of the morning. It's kinda nice, actually. 6:30 is my normal wake-up time, and the sun has been fully out for over an hour by that point. Rolling out of bed at 9:00 today was sorely welcomed, though.

This past week has been really cool. I've been able to finally start the kind of work I really came here to do. Some of the least-exciting tasks have been paperwork and bureaucracy-related, as the Centre applies for consultative- or partnership-status with a number of UN Programmes, Departments, and Councils. All told, Uchita and I machete'ed our way through three applications for consultative status this week. I imagine they will all be accepted, which will lend CED much greater freedom (and responsibility) in participating and reporting on UN activities. The Centre is already de facto operating at consultative-status level, but hopefully now it will become official. And now I know how these things work.

The details of one of the projects on which I'm working are still kind-of-classified as the legal details of the arrangement are negotiated. I can say, though, that it involves designing a curriculum for a professional certificate course on Climate Sustainability. These first stages have involved lots of brainstorming, big-picture thinking, heckling, and an occasional obscenity between me and Uchita. As we hashed out the context of a serious academic course, I found that I was having a really good time. Exploring the complex interlinkages between all the sub-contexts of an issue like Climate Sustainability and then trying to map those units into a linear pattern to be taught over a period of time proved to be a welcomed challenge for me. It also made me realize that an Eastern mind like Uchita's is much more accustomed to thinking in circles and webs than a Western one like mine. My analytical skills proved useful in this context, as we had to present a salable sequence of lessons to a potential collaborative partner, but it's clear I have a long way to go in the art and practice of holistic thinking. We all do.

My other main task has been to prepare for a large project. The result of the project will be a comprehensive report on Sustainable Consumption and Production Governance to be issued well in advance of Rio+20, the goal of which is to seriously influence policy in the official negotiations. One of the "themes" of Rio+20 is "Sustainable Development Governance", one part of which ought to be SCP Governance, specifically. My mental stumbling block in trying to situate our SCP Governance report within this theme for Rio+20 has been the sheer hodge-podge that is the existing institutional framework for SD Governance of any kind. Within the UN, there is a mind-numbing web of programmes, councils, and offices who claim some authority in the matter, and determining the power flows between them and their real-world efficacy has absorbed a good deal of time lately. Thankfully, an NGO called Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future has put together a ton of neat reports on the matter (some targeted to the uninitiated, like me) and are working hard to spread information. CED is also in this track, and I've been asked to start contributing to our blogs over the next few weeks. Looks like I'll get some more experience in this strange form of writing! Chip chop chip. (Chip chop chip?)

On a more-interesting note, I had a near-pants-soiling moment this morning while walking to Uchita's. I was groggy from sleeping so much, so imagine my brainfog when I was charged by a slather-mouthed, 7ft-long monitor lizard bent on stealing my soul and feeding my remains to his hellish offspring. Nugegoda's a heavily urban district of the greater Colombo area, so the most-threatening wildlife I've been exposed to have been fruit bats and stray dogs. (Well, actually, dengue-mosquitoes ought to be my biggest fear, but they're so...little.) This lizard though...sheesh. It forced me into a fight-or-flight response, which mostly resulted in a noise I can only represent onomatopoetically with the word "BLLLLEEEEAARRAAAAAGGGGHHHHAAAAAA", in combination with some gymnastico-evasive maneuvers. And thus, dear friends, was I the laughingstock of a half-dozen white-and-blue clad Sri Lankan punk-children. Uchita explained to me that the stream that runs through a concrete channel near his home affords them some habitat a little further downstream, and that being charged by this lizard was not an offensive move on his part. He was merely trying to return to the water in the drainage ditch, and I just so happened to be in his way. Indeed, he plopped into the water just behind me and disappeared underneath the sidewalks that cover the drainage ditches here. This is the Sri Lankan version of alligators-in-the-sewers, I think. But these ones are real. Appallingly, Godzilla-ly real.

I'm now in Colombo 7 after visiting the National Museum of Sri Lanka (pictured). All I can report is that I was more interesting to the three-and-a-half-thousand schoolchildren there than their own cultural artifacts. Which might be an quantitative exaggeration, but surely not a qualitative one. I had a prolonged moment of being followed by at least 20 giggling children who kept asking me my name in their beautifully-clear-but-limited English. One was even bold enough to pull my bun. Have I mentioned that long hair on males is an extreme curiosity to the people here? Apparently men haven't worn long hair in this country in a long, long time, and many children just haven't seen enough tourists to get used to white skin or long hair. The museum got really warm and my entourage got too close and numerous. When I got politely-but-sternly reprimanded by a museum official for taking a picture without the requisite permit, I decided to quit while I was ahead. Now, having ingested some caffeine and dried out my back-sweat (yuck, I know) I'm ready to hike over to the Galle Face Green (Google it). Hooah!