Your Daily Fix of Oslec's Ego

The Sense of Wonder

2011-12-15T03:37:00.000-05:00

After finishing Deep Space Nine the other day, I proposed to a few friends that "What You Leave Behind" is essentially the end of Star Trek, or more specifically, a hypothetical series trilogy starting with TOS (and its films), continuing on to TNG, and ending with DS9. I thought that DS9 matured the themes of the Original Series and brought them to a sort of sublime conclusion, and that all other Star Trek that came afterwards were real "spin offs" insofar as they branched out or diverged from what I now consider a thematic arc across TOS-TNG-DS9. I think this might only work if you divorce yourself of the notion of a Roddenberry "vision" that must be or was always at play, and that divorced from "what Gene wanted," TOS-TNG-DS9 was about how hubris meets sacrifice, how history and empire are made of small people acting out roles larger than they can comprehend or accept, and that at the end, space is and never was "home," no matter how hard we tried to make it.

Or maybe WYLB was just a real, legit "ending" -- an ending that surpassed the attempts to "end" the previous series, for whatever their motivations. I liked how O'Brien takes his annoying-ass family back to Earth, how Sisko "dies" and literally leaves this mortal plane, how Odo and Kira shed no tears as they say goodbye. None of this bringing Spock back to life, none of this fuzzy poker playing ending where we assume the adventure continues: people finally have to deal with loss. But maybe what made DS9 for me was the episode "Waltz," where a hallucinating Dukat breaks down in front of his hostage Sisko that he should have killed all the Bajorans during his time as leader of the occupation, Sisko sneaks up behind him as he rants, smacks him in the back of the head with a metal bar, and then grits this line through his teeth. "And that's why you're not an evil man," before he runs off to escape.

I said all of that to distract you and myself from the crushing truth that winter will soon be upon Gambier, and I the winter-weary type in summer, will soon find I can only have so much fun throwing my cat into the snow to see what she'll do. I suspect that Irene will probably be okay as she's got fur.

On The Move

2011-11-21T00:59:00.001-05:00

I'm probably flying over Ohio right now, heading home to California. I've got mixed feelings about Mt. Vernon and Gambier, a lot of which I've chalked up to learning how to be middle class, for realz this time. That is, having professional relationships, chatting in sitting rooms, and never seeing the kind of semi-bohemian lifestyle that I led for eight years ever again. Now people buy houses and go antiquing to fill them with stuff; they don't scrounge around the Internet to pick up milk crates and pressed-wood furniture just to have a kitchen table, or find a terrible but sturdy piece of wood and cover it with an equally-terrible table cloth because, well, you accepted your fate. The stories we tell about our furniture are different now.

And I hesitate to use "we" here, but I suspect I can't fight this tide, as the pull of class (the reality of class) melts me both physically and mentally into a gigantic grilled cheese of terrible food metaphors about selling out. God that was so bad, I'm going to end this paragraph prematurely.

I say this as if there's a "real" to be kept, when this may be fate of sorts. Granted too I'm lucky, considering how the economy has been treating others like me, but you never really get a sense of those sociological concepts like assimilation or socialization until you actually take historical stock of them. I don't have the confidence of Bourdieu to say I can see this dispassionately -- I'd say I'm at the Camus stage of the "French philosophical stages of acceptance" -- but I can't avoid the trajectory my family has taken from living 10 or more to a house to all my aunts and uncles (and my mom) stepping so far away from the immigrant life.

If I'm throwing loaded dice in some terrible crapshoot of fate, I wonder if it's Marshall Berman's maelstrom of change or some appalling American Beauty/Donny Darko/bullshit white person problem suburbia ass leakage that I'll be losing with. Either way, it's dissatisfaction, but one is solved by obsessive changes while the other is only solved by rebellious teenagers (I hate those things).

One thing is certain, I will refuse to tuck my polo shirts in on the weekends. Occupy my pants!

For Spammers, I Give No Quarter

2011-04-11T00:21:00.001-04:00

I'm taking a break from a desperate moment of dissertation writing, having been drawn out by spammers spamming spam on the comments. Look, I know no one says a darn thing to me on this blog, but come on, do you really think that you're going to get someone to click on your links from here?

I think I just tried to apologize to them. Bad writing! Bad!

In other news, mom and Al were here this weekend and a good time was had by all. I would say, however, a better time will be had by me as I've got a pyrex full of shrimp stir-fry, a pot of chicken curry, a quarter-bag of beef jerky, and a half-loaf of pan de leche. This, my friends, is bachelor food supplemented by home cooking -- and it is good.

As Promised, Lifestyles of the Loan Borrowing and Lazy

2010-09-13T16:40:00.000-04:00

So here we are, face to face, a couple of readers and I. As you can see to your left, my bedroom is hard to take a picture of. Compared to how I'd been living for the past maybe twenty years or so, this bedroom layout is completely different: no computer whatsoever. Basically, I come in here to sleep and change my clothes, which makes it infinitely less stressful on me. Still, if I could get in here at a decent hour, I might sleep in the first place. Note too that I've not graduated too far past "collegiate" tastes in furniture here, in part because furniture is fucking expensive.

Now, dear reader, we're in the living room. Downstairs in my old apartment, Andrew and Emily lived in this room. I've opted to make it a place to waste my time. While it might look comfortable, those couches are a perfect combination of all-right looks and borderline comfort -- you can only sit on them so long because they're not very forgiving on the butt. But they're brown, and stuff matches in there. I actually built the room around those two damn couches.

Oh damn, what the heck is that? It's an actual live TV. Seen only faintly is the HTPC on the bottom, along with the receiver for the speakers. All that stuff was a luxury purchase, mainly to keep me off of my main comp and therefore less likely to stay up to the wee hours of the night reading about Icelandic cuisine on wikipedia. A fairly expensive way to overcome one's internet addiction, but I figure it's still cheaper than detox and recovery.

Ahh the kitchen. It's kind of gigantic and I love it. The island/bench was here when I got the apartment and I have every intention of stealing it when I leave. What you don't see to their fullest extent are all the kitchen things I bought off of my friend Julia. I think I can fairly say that every man should have three ladles, each of different sizes and weights.

The bathroom, or, where the existing furniture dictated the color of the stuff I ended up buying for the place, which was actually limited to a blue and white bathroom rug you don't see here; and the white mat near the shower. That mat, by the way, is very plush. It's like Tempur-Pedic for the showering set, and since I shower, I'm a member! I would hope you are too.

I realize now that the only place missing is the office.

Well, and there you go. That's a dissertation face.

Neuroses of Living Solo

2010-08-31T13:07:00.000-04:00

I think I have carpal tunnel syndrome. When I'm in bed, my entire left arm feels like someone's crushing it. Welcome to repetitive stress injuries, Ossy Bossy! So here I am, trying to affect good typing form on my I netvertible in public no less. Still, the people watching from this Au Bon Pan window is exceptional.

I'm trying to get work done here not because I should really try to get my shit finished, but rather to save on electricity. In fact, I'm going to have to sleep relatively early or at least work by candlelight on this tiny thing of a computer. All this reminds me of eight years ago when I first came to Providence from Conn and my roommates hadn't yet moved into the house I was staying at. I was convinced I was going to starve, go bankrupt, or both if I didn't eat anything but cheap pasta and canned tuna. Something about being accountable for an entire apartment seems to engender my most miserly of tendencies.

I say this just as I've sunk cash into a home theater PC, along with a very meticulously selected flat screen TV, which since I've spent time and money into researching and building the damn things I have to be neurotic in making sure they're protected AND making sure they're not gulping my power. So I got one of these things and it better work as advertised. Each day it takes for the thing to arrive I die a little inside, mostly in the form of electricity. In addition, the motherboard I used can't take my TV tuner and the wireless keyboard I got for the HTPC has a defective trackpad, but the cost of returning both would exceed the $30 rebate I'm about to get. I could go on, but writing all this crap down makes me realize how absolutely dumb this is.

In better news, I got up at 9AM today because the FedEx dude came early and delivered my two area rugs that match my placemats. Now I have two giant placemats on the floor. The one in the kitchen actually distracts you long enough so you don't notice that the floor is sloping pretty severely towards the middle from both ends. Anyway, for the most part, the rugs "complete" the rooms, so I'll get pictures up of the kitchen and AV room up soon.

Now here's the part where I try to sound either smart or funny. Let's do funny. Au Bon Pain is playing the We Are The World sequel. This is now the center of Hell. I forgot that Justin Bieber opened this song. Couldn't they get Nicole Richie? Also, damn, this version does not hold up over time, and it's been what, 8 months? How's that for topical humor? It's a good thing I don't do this for a living or else I'd have to go back to graduate school or something.

Episode 8: A New Home

2010-08-29T02:36:00.000-04:00

Last night I didn't sleep much. I was up constructing a home theater computer, an endeavor akin to writing a dissertation in that in both, fingers become raw. i was troubleshooting for most of the evening since this was the first PC (second overall) I've built with off-brand parts and leftovers from my main comp. Needless to say, I ran into some problems around 3-4AM when the thing wouldn't post, and then the most expensive part of the machine -- the bluetooth keyboard -- decided that it really preferred typing over being part-mouse.

In part I was awake because I was having materialist fits the night before after failing miserably to buy some furniture on craigslist. I was stood up so to speak by a lady who was selling a TV stand and didn't show up, and then I couldn't get anyone to help me pick up a coffee table in Lincoln. I had to call her back to cancel the pickup, but accidentally called a woman in Warwick about a TV stand that I had decided I didn't want. Telling her husband the sad story of my supposedly cancelled trip to Lincoln, he offered to deliver it to me. Now I was stuck with furniture I wasn't all that enthused about. I had weird bit of adult-style frustration that I was bending over backwards to save $5 or $10 and had come away with nothing for the effort. Mad at myself for being so frustrated, I figured that I could do one on over the universe and build something instead of waiting for it to give me pressed wood at a killer discount.

With the problems the HTPC was giving me, I didn't get a whole lot of sleep before I had planned to jump on a garage sale around the corner and pick up a coffee table. I was reminded of the time we set up a garage sale for my grandparents in Carson City. Before we knew it, old ladies were waiting like stalkers in their cars parked across the street from my grandparents' house. I decided I was going to be an old lady; I was going to passive-aggressively stare at the people setting up and feel like some sort of hitman, but one that assassinates underpriced housewares.

I did come away with a small coffee table that looked pretty 70s, if placed in the right context (I guess we could say that about a lot of things), and my friend Francisco did thankfully come to help me move the TV stand up the stairs. A few minutes with a hacksaw later, and I had "modded" the TV stand to fit the HTPC and I had a coffee table that looks (to me at least) like I'm in the basement listening to early Chicago. I then very, very slowly moved a good majority of my things from my room to up here, including my bed, from which I am now blogging this very blog blogstastically.

I took my first shower up here tonight too. Remind me to CLR the shower head, lest I keep getting spritzed directly in the left eye every time I turn to grab the soap. National Grid, you done good.

Update on Gas 'Plosion Aversion Calamity Fist Breaker

2010-08-27T00:16:00.000-04:00

It's about midnight and I decided to check on the work outside because I heard the beeping-beep-beeps of a truck backing up. "Maybe it's them leaving!" I thought. Well, it turns out that they look pretty much done out there and that they were using a bigger Nat'l Grid truck to compress some asphalt/tarmac where they had dug a hole on the other side of the street. So the truck would drive forward, put the truck in reverse, then drive forward again. Over and over. After each round, the workers would reshape the black rocks into a pile and the truck would go over it again. A Providence Police officer stood by with his hands in his pockets, moving to pick up a shovel leaning on a tree and place it on the wall over on the neighbor's property.

Wherein I Shut Down An Entire City Block

2010-08-26T22:01:00.000-04:00

So I slept with my phone next to my pillow last night because National Grid had informed me that they would call to announce their arrival to turn on my gas service any time between 8AM and 8PM. Seeing as I've turned into a vampire over the past 8 years, and seeing as how excited I was that I was going to start paying my own gas bill (hooray!), I didn't sleep at all the night before. When the door buzzer bleated at 10:20, I was thankful that they gave me 4 hours of sleep.

I pulled on some clothes over my PJs and answered the door. A thin man with a hard hat and a bright orange vest was happy to see me. And crap, was I excited to see him! But it turned out that he was testing for gas leaks and over my rapid babble-squealing about turning on the hot water heater he said his being here was simply a coincidence. Out of sheer curiosity for how this amazing substance for which I was about to pay a monthly fee was monitored and transported, I followed him to the basement. This all sounds very much like a bad porno...

"These numbers don't move very fast," I said, observing the gas meters, hoping to learn something about the nuts and bolts of natural gas.

"Nope, they don't," the dude said.

"So, how do you know if there's a leak?" I asked.

"Oh, this thing'll tell me," he said as he maneuvered a long wand attached to a box over the pipes.

Beep. Or rather, the box let out a short squeal. "Oh," he said nonchalantly.

"Was that a leak?" I asked.

"Oh yeah, but it's a small one," he replied. "I'm gonna go outside to check if there's a leak outside too."

So after our porno dialog, I left him to catch whatever sleep I could in the living room, phone tucked near me so I wouldn't miss the call. I didn't get much in: a pretty resonant, rhythmic slamming of metal-on-metal scared off any of the melatonin fairies in my head. The dinging and donging went on for about 20 minutes until I decided to check up on my new friend outside. He had been smacking a large pole into the flower beds out front, then probing the holes with his squeak-box. Apparently he smacking the gas pipes under the house, then testing to see if he had made anything leak. I guess that's what you do.

"I did 30 houses today already," he told me. "I do about 75 or so a day, but these things slow me down."

Anyway, he eventually stopped and made a call to the higher-ups to send a team over. I went back inside, satisfied knowing that he'd finished slamming and tried to sleep a bit more. My phone rang. It was National Grid. They were coming in 15 minutes. I told them they had a dude out here already, but he was checking for leaks. At this point, I was less excited and more tired. In the back of my mind, I didn't think this gas thing was going to turn out so easily completed a task.

I met the new guys outside as they were talking to the leak tester. He thought they had responded to the call real fast; they kept saying it wasn't their specific task, but they'd look into it. They eventually made it down to the basement and started to check the meters and heaters. One of them seemed to be a trainee, but was an old hat at gas plumbing. When I first saw them at work, they were painting some kind of substance onto part of the pipe that registered a leak, but told me that they weren't the leak crew and they were going to turn on my gas just to have that task done, then when the leak crew came, they could turn everything off, then on again. "After about 45 minutes, you should have hot water upstairs," they said. A minor hooray.

So I had "breakfast" and Andrew came home and I informed him of all the fun that was going on. I went back to obsessing about big screen LCD screens with low response times and high resolutions until we got a knock on our back door. The third ghost of National Grid future appeared and told me a bunch of stuff I already knew (see how fast a learner I am?) -- that he was part of a crew that was going to replace some pipes and that everything would be fine by early evening. If I could just get people to move their cars, they could get started. Andrew had gone to bed after a night shift at the hospital so I got his keys and drove around the block to park on the other side of the street. As I parked, the Nat'l Grid guy came by the window of the car and said, "Well, could I get you to park around the corner, 'cuz water is on that side" -- he motioned to the opposite side of the street -- "and that means gas is on this side, probably."

It turns out that even if I moved Andrew's car, some random lady had parked in front of our building and we had to try to find the owner before Nat'l Grid could start work. By this point, our loud weird neighbors had decided to park themselves on their stoop and watch the business going on. I went down to the florist down the street (www.anewleafflorist.org) and got a couple houseplants and came home, sat down, and smelled gas.

I scrambled around my room to turn off everything I could. Then I bolted out of the house. As soon as I popped out of the front door, I saw Nat'l Grid had jackhammered into the sidewalk and one of the workers looked at me and said, apropos of nothing really (well in response to me literally jumping out of the door), "We know, that's why we're here. Thank you!"

I left the house in case it blew up. I like to think I was responsible for shutting down a city block, though technically that's not true. But heck, sounds fun, no?

Towels... FOR WIPING SURFACES!

2010-08-24T22:08:00.000-04:00

Let's go at yesterday's post with a little more effort, shall we? Ok, looky here:

See that towel? That's not for wiping your hands -- IT'S FOR WIPING THE COUNTER! The only thing missing from it is a little loop sewn on a corner so I could hang it from a cabinet knob. My mother should be proud.

Next up,

These two towels are different colors. One is for hands and one is for dishes. Can you tell me which one does what? I didn't think so because like many mothers I CAN NOW ARBITRARILY CHOOSE A TOWEL FOR A SPECIFIC PURPOSE. Actually, I have a dishwasher, so the dish towel will probably get less use. This means that it'll stay cleaner longer. Something must be wrong with me because I'm actually proud of that.

And finally,

Now, you should know better by now. So you've dripped all over the sink after washing your hands and you correctly took the towel you see in this picture to wipe up the counter. Then what do you do? YOU FOLD IT BACK INTO A TRIANGLE. Oh god, this is so much fun.

So I've moved a few things upstairs, but most everything is in a holding pattern until a friend of mine bequeaths to me her stuff. The place is still a tad bit scary when you're alone up there at night, especially without much furniture, but that'll be taken care of as the week goes on. Last night, I was up there until about 1-ish doing some measurements in the front room (eventually an AV room), and I realized as I was going back downstairs that our building has its hallway lights turned off late at night. It's like walking into a pit of despair, but less melodramatic. I might have to set up some adhesive tap lights or something. But then once I get down the stairs, how am I gonna turn them off?

Speaking of purchases, I spent a little too much time last night looking through the Craigslist furniture and free sections. Stuff is not as cheap on CL as one might be led to believe. Even a quick once-over at Overstock.com produced nothing really convincingly cheap in terms of furniture. I just want a dang coffee table man! But, I did find a somewhat ok deal for area rugs -- bamboo area rugs! -- that I'll stick in the kitchen and the front room. By the by, they match my placemats. One man shouldn't be this excited for bamboo area rugs.

I will end this very domestic post with a couple of frustrations. One is that the 30 minutes or so Andrew and I spend trying to light the pilot light to the hot water heater was all for naught because my gas was off. So, I had to make requests for both electric and gas from National Grid who continue to add to the list of things I need to fax them. FAX THEM. Because they don't have walk-in locations. We're up to a W-2, copy of driver's license, and my rental agreement. Then I was told to call back in two hours after I had sent the fax. I was told over the phone that I have to wait 24 hours, then, no, I have to wait for 4 hours and I could call back after hours. I called back after hours and they're closed. Hooray! At least I haven't had to wait too long to be told they're idiots. The end.

2010-08-24T05:26:00.001-04:00

See that towel? That's not for wiping your hands. It's for WIPING THE COUNTER! I've turned into my mother.

More later! Better light needed!

A New View

2010-08-23T01:50:00.000-04:00

I'll admit it: this post is nearly worthless without pictures. And while you may have thought I'd be showing you something titillating, I'll simply arouse you with some horrible extended metaphors and the fact that I'm in the process of moving to the third floor apartment in the building in which I live currently. The unit is nearly exactly the same, minus a bay window where Andrew and Emily's room is currently and the sloping walls from the roof.

While the previous tenant left behind some quite useful furniture -- a long kitchen bar/table with two very tall stools, an over the toilet hutch, and a few trash cans -- I don't have nearly enough stuff to fully populate this place. Luckily my friend Julia is moving to Minnesota and she's selling me a good portion of the furniture in her old apartment, so that should help. The problem is that the way I have everything laid out, I'll have one completely empty room (the front room), one lightly furnished one (the bedroom), and one that'll probably be overdone (the office). This isn't counting the kitchen, which looks more like a dancefloor now more than anything.

So after I went on a few shopping sprees for the essentials (trivets!), I vigorously swiffer wet-jetted the floor but not without protest from Sean who had been helping me clean the kitchen. As much as I'd like to stop him from going through all the trouble, he's gonna try to bring his parents' steam mop and go over my floors once again. He's crazy. But at least he's cleaning for me! And basically for free!

I'll supply pictures once the place looks more homey. I'll be moving in fully September 1st, hopefully with electricity, cable, and all my bills coming to the new address.

About Kids, For Daniel!

2010-08-20T01:06:00.004-04:00

You might have noticed a kind of gigantic banner ad on the NYT recently, hawking the Ralph Lauren kids line. I took the liberty of clicking it for you. I was directed to most overdressed children, playacting to Harry Conick Jr.'s narration of how adventurous and imaginative your kids will become if you clothe them with Ralph Lauren. To that I say, at least to some of you, your kids are only gonna be cute once!

This post is dedicated to my good friend Daniel who should be (fingers crossed) a new dad right about now-ish. I just shouted at him on Facebook chat and I certainly don't expect a reply since I mean, what new dad on Facebook has time to chat?

Me

sweet man

how you holding up?

1:14amDaniel

pretty good. got 9 hours sleep last night, so i'm not too tired. browsing hulu, not interested in anything

And that, dear readers, is what an expectant father thinks about. So no baby yet, but maybe tomorrow.

The internet and babies are, I think, a good combination. Much like how tortillas and beans provide complimentary proteins, the internet and babies provide complimentary (perhaps combinatory) laughing fits. Just think about it, Daniel, you could dress this kid in Ralph Lauren and make him or her an internet star. I think it's nearly equivalent to being the non-famous child of a famous person: a little awkwardly cool. I get the impression that raising a child for the first few days is some combination of fear -- how do we keep this thing alive!? -- and surprise.

Best wishes to Daniel and Nikolin!

Testing Twitterfeed, Littering Bytes on Info Superhighway

2010-08-18T23:34:00.001-04:00

Well now, I continue to join all my social networking blog-type thingies into their gestalt form: Voltron.

Chone Figgins

2010-08-18T22:29:00.002-04:00

See that unpalatable photograph of what look like oily kidneys? Those, my dear reader, are figs. And while typically I don't take very good foodtographs, this one seems to be the worst one I've ever taken. Look at how the light smacks down on them like vomit, how that blue bowl looks like a bedpan, etc etc. See? I don't want to eat them either after writing that. I have just psyched myself out of eating figs. New York Times food critics: take notice.

Actually I just got up from a 9PM nap; the kind of nap that'll seriously fuck with the rest of your sleeping. I attribute it to $5.99 worth of penne pasta I picked up at Eastside along with my groceries. I briefly considered sleeping outright, but I figured that I'd get up 4 o'clock in the AM, which isn't prime time to get anything done, other than try to go back to sleep at which point I'd get up at 12PM anyway. That is not to say that 12PM is not a good time to wake up, but why sleep for 14 hours? I'm not flying to Australia.

I just ate all those figs I said I was too grossed out to eat. The astute reader will notice now that the power of snack is stronger than the power of the blog. Also I did try to actually sneak in the phrase "the astute reader will have noticed" in an academic paper once, in a footnote. The reader found it and said it was too "blue." Goes to show that only old white guys can sound like old white guys.

Anyway, I leave you with this: Fight Football League. It's Italian (I'm not sure I get the stereotype) and it involves trying to throw a soccer ball into a black box while the opposing team literally tries to punch you in the face. Watch a few minutes of the game clip and don't tell me it doesn't remind you of some kind of old-timey gang fight. Also, it's stupid. The end.

The Takeaway: Sleep Earlier

2010-08-17T00:52:00.003-04:00

I'm tired and it's 1 AM. This is sort of a new thing for me, since I don't go to sleep tired per se, but surprised that it's not dark out anymore but purple. 1 AM is a good bedtime. At 1 AM, you can sleep for 8 hours and it'll only be 9 AM, aka "the morning." Sleeping at 1 AM and getting up at 9 AM means I get to skip Dianne Rheim's (ok you spell it then) unmelodious voice on the NPR radio alarm, though I think I'll have to listen to The Takeaway and that show is just as annoying. And at 9 AM, I'll have done all the errands I wanted to do by 11 AM.

So why not sleep earlier, you may ask me, and make all those morning dreams come true? I'm distracted. No, that's not true. I enjoy the company of the internet. Last night I learned more about sharks. Friggin' sharks! I also realized that only I send emails out at 1 AM (later really). No one responds that late. I used to tell my students that I was up late (not by choice), but that they could expect an email back as soon as I got it. Not one emailed me late this summer, so yet another thing I can't blame on other people.

So with mounting somnolence, I say g'night dudes!

The Mango Was the Brain

2010-08-16T01:34:00.005-04:00

I saw Scott Pilgrim vs. The World today. I "got" it. But what I really want to do is play the video game, which looks like a good ole beat-em-up with requisite chipset soundtrack. To be honest, for a movie where music was a key theme, I did not find any one of the songs or musical cues to be memorable. Well, the original ones, at least; I was all over the Zelda and Final Fantasy tunes. Still, don't say you won't catch me pretending to swing my red umbrella around like a katana. And that's my grasp on reality: tenuous.

Anyhoo, things moved relatively well on the apartment front. I'll get a little discount off my rent for paying utilities myself (which as far as we can figure for the building is just electric and cable internet). And I'll be able to start moving stuff in before the end of the month, so that should go smoothly. And as I was yesterday, I am feeding the universe with good karma and hoping my landlord sells his apartment.

To celebrate (not really, I needed to go), I went to Whole Foods and got more fruit, vowing this time that the fruit flies and their little fruit larvae would not see victory this or any other day! So I have a few bags of fruit all lovingly suffocating in the fruit basket (note to self: need one of those). As I was standing at the checkstand, the bagger lady said that she should probably eat more fruit instead of junk food. Her cashier friend said, "Yeah, hmmm." Then they talked about how they were hungry and were missing cookouts today. Later on, an employee came back from lunch at Eastside Market and raved about their chicken wings. "But they don't have core values!" said a deadpan coworker.

I haven't eaten any of my fruit yet. Rest assured, dear reader, that I will eat the living hell out of it. I have to say that living with roommates for the past five years has nary required that I reprimand anyone for eating my fruit. Maybe I give off some kind of "don't eat my fruit" vibe, which may explain why people who don't know me think I'm too serious (I'm serious about my fruit, though). I still remember bringing back a couple kilos of rambutan from Davao and complaining about how much I disliked rambutan, and then sitting down to eat the entire two kilos in the span of two days. If I actually liked the dang fruit, I'd have finished it in a two hours.

There is a place in every real man's heart for fruit. Or, if you're this fictional dude, your heart IS a fruit. As with all fruits (get ready, 'cuz I'm gonna lame out on ya), you have to give hearts time to mature, you have to squeeze them a bit to find out if they're ripe, and you should try to keep the fruit flies away from them. Also, wash them first. No one likes to eat dirty hearts covered in pesticide and e. coli. Only one of those extended metaphors sounds remotely good. But seriously, think of your heart as a fruit.

Did you really think of your heart as a fruit? You're silly. I apologize; this isn't an insult comic blog. Know this, my dear reader, when the zombies come to eat all our brains, they'll find mine totally unpalatable because it tastes like rambutan. And on that, zombies and I clearly have the same taste in fruit.

The Amazing (Not Permanent) Return of Your Daily Fix

2010-08-15T01:32:00.004-04:00

I was going to add some exclamation marks to that title, but why be so ostentatious? To be honest, the reason I'm writing here is to write something at all -- anything -- with the hopes that I'll get into the habit of writing something more important (disastertation). You'll have to excuse me, dear fan, as I try to remember how I made magic here once before -- I did have over 100 views in one month (that weren't me!)

So if I recall correctly (IIRC. That's how real nerds say it), I wrote two kinds of posts. One was your typical ego-driven post that strove to make my neuroses sympathetic. To varying degrees of success, I think that worked. The vast majority of the adventures I posted in those blogs tended to be about me overthinking my immaturity (see, for instance) and for some reason, counting up instead of counting down. I guess I decided to try some new crap, like "sleep" (whatever that is). I think what caught your eye, dear reader, were the more humorous adventures I had, which to be honest, after having wrote about them, I forgot about. And that sentence had the worst syntax ever.

The second kind of post you might have seen here, reader, were those topical ones that were so Law-and-Order-ripped-from-the-headlines that I might have single-handedly cancelled Law and Order with my headline-ripping. After glancing at a few, it seems like I avoided saying anything serious and went for irony, which other sites do so much more better than I do. Again, like the rest of the crap I wrote here, I didn't remember half of the things I wrote about that were trying to be "serious." Goes to show you that you might write to learn, but fuck it if anyone reads it, including yourself.

But I think the common thread here was that this was some strange stream of Oslec consciousness that meandered into some river metaphor for self-referential humor. So in that sense, you can see how my id, ego, and superego make some horrible muck slurry where piranhas and tiger sharks hide to eat up unsuspecting swimmers. I'll let you decide if you're a swimmer. Actually, no, you're a swimmer. In any case, the blog was very "meta" and I guess having written that, it still is.

So let's get started with something that none of you will read fresh, but some of you will read later then remind me what I wrote. Today, I am planning on signing a lease for my first apartment where I am the sole occupant. Considering how I've basically been avoiding people for the past two years, this can only result in more avoiding of people. But, I'll be able to do it in the comfort of a rented living room, which I envision to be only the second-largest black hole in my home.

The deal is a little uncertain. That is, the fellow who owns the unit is trying to sell it and so I would be paying month-to-month. For the past few days I hoped that the Providence condo market would continue to suck so I could have a nice place to live. But today on the way back from a horrible drubbing in basketball at the gym, I decided that I shouldn't wish upon anyone such a negative thing. I hope the place sells. In fact, I will bet with you now that it sells because I'm going to rent it out. In basketball, this is called a "tie." Actually, there aren't ties in basketball, so I think the pretentious types say "two cheers" for whatever it is they can't quite get an extra cheer for.

Now, I'll promise you this. I'll write something here again tomorrow. You silently observe from your comfortable place sometime in the future.

(Hi! I edited this post because some of my grammar was embarrassing me. The rest sucks too, but I don't like you that much.)

Holy crap I need to sleep

2010-01-27T04:00:00.001-05:00

Well looky here. I blame technology for keeping me up. Now, watch as this post replicates itself over all forms of social media!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Gano St,Providence,United States

2009-08-26T14:38:00.000-04:00

I'm on the way back to Providence from New York/New Jersey actually
more tired than I was when I left for this trip. I brought a
colleague's diss with me to "inspire me" for lack of a better term,
but did nearly nothing in terms of tangibly advancing my own diss. I
did, however, spend an ungodly amount of time riding in some sort of
conveyance and in the process, New York lost a bit of its sheen for me.

I dropped off my bro at Vassar yesterday. It reminded me of how
awkward that first week of college was for me (with the near-tears in
the shower in the middle of the night because I couldn't stop
pooping). And at the end, I liked college a lot, enough to stick
around in a way.

But as I helped Al build his furniture (after a kinda hilarious
journey from Vassar Shipping and Receiving to his dorm with 7 boxes, a
pushcart, and some rolling hills), I realized that I want to go to the
"next stage" of my life already, but that it seems like things will
pretty much stay the same for a long ass time. I've had some flashes
of change -- new room, first real class, etc. -- but I realize that
I'm 28 and haven't lived by myself yet and that I could be teaching 3
or more classes at a time (you wonder why your professors are so
strange). I wonder sometimes if this unsettledness is just part of
being in my late 20's or some inherited trait from my father who for
other reasons had never really settled on something until recently.

I talked to Daniel and Kim about what it is I want to feel when I have
that one job or one person or one path that I'm to be heading down for
the rest of my life. It basically boiled down to being able to not
take myself so seriously that I'll have drunk the kool aid and believe
that what it is I do is so great that I can't share my detached irony
with a like-minded person. In other words, for better or worse, I want
to live the absurd. I also realize that sorts sucks as a life goal --
such is the strangeness that is being me.

In Philadelphia, No One Can Hear You Scream

2009-06-09T17:49:00.000-04:00

So a few people have been re-reading the ole blog (some very
thouroughly) and so I *guess* I'll give you more than a tweet's worth
of an update. And really there's not a whole lot worth saying, other
than a few depressing issues with my funding and the fact that I
probably burnt out the graphics card on my laptop.

Though yesterday I had to play high school again and my mom dragged me
shopping with her. As usual, I fell asleep in the passenger seat. When
I came to, I realized my mother had locked me in the car without the
keys. It was fairly stuffy inside, and luckily I had been wearing
layers (and shorts), so I thought nothing of it, until I decided to
get out and go to Office Max next door.

I attempted to unlock the doors from inside, it slowly dawned on me
that I couldn't AND that if I tried to open the doors, the car alarm
would go off. I started to flick the "unlock" switch more desperately,
of course to no avail. I called my mom who was still in the store.
"Mom?" I said. "Um, I'm suffocating in the car an I can't open the
doors without the alarm going off."

"I'm still in line. 10 more minutes," she said.

So I was convinced that if I were a small dog or an elderly person,
I'd probably be dead already. Bejeweled wasn't helping, so I went back
to trying to unlock the doors. Eventually mom came out and
thoughtfully unlocked the doors from a distance. I opened the door and
panted in some fresh air. Mom had kind of a silly look on her face,
and we had a good (sorta) laugh about it.

Today, we we discussing what my brother has to buy when he gets to
Vassar and the subject of the Philadelphia airport came up. Apparently
the airport has a big mall that's tax free, which produced this gem of
a nonsequitur from Mom:

"They must have a lot of gays there in Philadelphia (silence)"

"Why's that, Mom?"

"Well there's that movie, Philadelphia Story (sic) and [Al's] teacher
is gay, so..."

And then we had one of those "that doesn't make sense" moments. You
wonder where I get it from.

How I Got the F- Out of Dodge, Part 1

2009-03-22T19:08:00.003-04:00

A couple nights ago I dreamt that I broke down and told off all my Providence friends, telling them that I couldn't stand them or the city and that I was leaving for good. I count it as a bad dream, seeing as my arguments for telling people I really like that I disliked them were pretty bad, but it was defintely the capstone to a night where it became painfully obvious that Providence wasn't a place I'd ever call home. And as my dream self cried unthorough insults, my real self slept somewhere besides my own bed for the first time in months.

I spent that day criss-crossing New York, first from Brooklyn to the Bronx to see my aunt, then from the Bronx to Jersey, then on the ferry from Jersey to Manhattan. A cross-town bus later, I met up with my friend Daniel and spent a few hours with him and his co-workers at a frattastical bar that held a lame fake orgasm contest. Daniel assured me that co-worker bar nights rarely happened, though in my mind, I believed they did. Daniel had apparently "pimped me out" to his single co-worker, so much so that his male co-workers greeted me with, "Oh, so you're Daniel's single friend." Owen and Yu-wen met up with us there, and we had dinner and hung out at an Italian restaurant in the Meatpacking District. Kept a seat away from the girl I wanted to hit on, Owen and I caught up.

Daniel and I headed back to Brooklyn, munching on a donut and a cookie. In a half-drunk, half-concussed moment of truth, Daniel and I talked about how much life and work became more fulfulling for him when he left Providence. And while he cut some ties, he basically said he's happier. I felt like a wet blanket, as Patrick would put it later, droning on about how I had no motivation to work. But, it seemed very clear after that that I should get the fuck out of dodge.

The Finer Points of Pancaking

2009-03-03T10:44:00.002-05:00

While others may choose to do good while procrastinating on their
dissertations, some of us (me) just make ourselves fat by cooking.
Well, I like to think of it as practice feeding my offspring, lest
they succumb to Red Vines and Soft Batch cookies.

Here we see what happens when you get one side of the pancake right
and then you leave to see if anyone responded to your email about
basketball and burn the other side. Also, those banana pieces were
supposed to be inside the pancake, but I blame a lack of oversight. So
basically, I forgot to use up all my remaining groceries in this batch.

Of course no kitchen folly would be complete without me dropping my
knife as picked up the plate. As you can see, without supervision I am
pointless.

Harey Kiri?

2009-03-02T09:55:00.005-05:00

A while back when I was a Netflix subscriber (happier times...), I ran through classic films, just to get a sense of what I was missing by watching Star Trek IV over and over as a kid. Admittedly, I liked Ben Hur, but fell asleep during Raging Bull, but I also managed to fit in lots of great Blacksploitation films, Peter Jackson's Dead Alive (ever see a pair of lungs preen itself?), and Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

Anyway, I kinda want to go through some of Hollywood's depression era screwball comedies, but without Netflix, I'm limited to reading summaries on Wikipedia (or exerting effort to find them at the Brown Library). But one thing stands out: the Wikipedia page for silent film actor Harry Carey -- who played the Senate President in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington -- has a little disambiguation link at the top. You may have accidentally wandered into his biography looking for a way to commit ritual suicide, or Hara Kiri, which I can only assume happens when you're looking for Capra movie actors and thinking in a Southern accent.

In other news, we're under more snow, with more snow to come. These are the kind of days when I wonder why I really need a Ph.D.

King of Soups

2009-02-25T20:24:00.002-05:00

So for some reason, Blogger just posted the photo and not the text of my post. Suffice it to say, I heaped generous praise upon myself for making the soup you see above. It's a spicy catfish stew, which I made in the good ole crockpot with minimal elbow grease and a moderate amount of chili powder and red pepper flakes. I take the disappearance of my original text to be a sign to be less proud, but damn, this soup is like the queen of the catfish allowed me to do whatever I wanted to her, and we made magic. And this post just got creeptastic.

Is It Because Readership Is Down?

2009-01-17T17:16:00.001-05:00

From Don Assmussen's Bad Reporter, my favorite comic strip. This week's gem is the first panel: "Obama to Close Gitmo - But Promises to Retain Its Online Presence".

Am I R1? Or Just R1-Is-The-Loneliest-Number?

2009-01-13T23:05:00.003-05:00

So I mailed my first ever job application yesterday, Priority Mail because the materials have to be in by this Friday. In the process of geting that appready, I started to muse about a few things. First of all, can a human being live strictly off of Fig Newtons? I submit that it may actually be possible -- and maybe even enjoyable. By the way, the "fig" in "Fig Newton" stands for "FrIckin' Good". Also, what is a fruit?

But what really got me to stop in the middle of Providence slush and take a minute was whether or not my time here at Brown has actually proven to me that I'm not an "R1" kind of researcher -- that is, a publishing machine who brings in tons of external grant money and commands legions of graduate students. I have meager accomplishments by R1 standards, I think. Actually, "meager" might actually be me avoiding the truth, since I'd think by R1 standards, I have no accomplishments. But I wonder more deeply whether or not I failed along the way to become R1 material or that somehow subconsciously I was steering myself towards what I thought my profs at Conn College were like -- independent scholars who were sort of unbound by data sets to milk or grant deadlines to meet (probably not true, but it seemed cool).

I should know better, of course. I do have memories, however, of a couple of my favorite profs going on long sabbaticals to write their books, which sort of indicated to me how the typical process of scholarly work supposedly went: you teach most of the time, you go on a long sabbatical and write a book, and then you come back and teach again. Actually, when I was younger, I was convinced that the publication process was when you write an article, someone criticizes that article, and then you compile that "conversation" and others into a book. Oh how naive was I.

But these past few weeks I saw my good friends pick up NSF grants, I read my friend's research statements, and just generally looked back on my experiences as a "researcher" and realized how strangely uncommitted I was to any particular topic or research project (mine or others). And I'm not talking about effort; I mean to say that I was never a "something-ist" nor was I ever continuously part of some big NSF-y team. As such, I was never part of a sort of publication mill, nor did I work with (or was attracted to) big data sets or flashy methods. But I never really had a substantive passion either, or even sort of a sense of daring-do that I think people who do really good fieldwork have to have. Also, since I'm so obsessed with my writing, I haven't been able to turn my own work into something publishable (now if dissertations were blogs... well, I'd still not be done!)

Anyway, I really wanted to write my research statement (I'll link the bastard for ya'll) like I wrote my teaching statement: personal, more passionate, and just plain better. And in writing my teaching statement, I reviewed my all-time favorite C. Wright Mills piece, the last chapter in The Sociological Imagination -- about being an intellectual craftsman (I guess now we should be craftspersons or craftspeople. Might as well be artesanos). He had this line that I didn't quite quite get as a piece of advice, until recently (though as a sort of philosophy of the discipline, it makes sense given what he wrote in the rest of the book):

Now I do not like empirical work if I can possibly avoid it. If one has no staff it is a great deal of trouble; if one does employ a staff then the staff is often even more trouble

and later, he basically speechifies:

Let everyone be his or own methodologist; let everyone be his or her own theorist; let theory and method again become part of the practice of a craft. Stand for the primacy of the individual scholar; stand opposed to the ascendancy of research teams and technicians. Be one mind that is on its own confronting the problems of the individual and society

Replace those periods and semicolons with exclamation marks and I think I might start crying. And this is certainly not what we mean nowadays when we talk about "independent scholarship". Mills wanted us, I guess, to be a little like him: a sort of a maverick, as we'd say now, who did his own work and justified it because it had meaning for the "big questions" of the day, and who didn't base his status off of the quantity of his publications, but their craftsmanship.

I'm not going to be C. Wright Mills, though what Mills advocated wasn't the R1 model, it'd seem. I think I do see my research as being more oriented towards this sort of individualism, that includes sort of these thinly-veiled fuck yous that Mills would write into his work (when he wasn't actually writing explicit fuck yous). I mean, I think like he suggested: take opposites, play with words, move stuff around in your files, I write to think and think to write, all that good stuff. And really, in terms of research "themes", I'm interested in historical irony and the strangeness of human agency, not in some three-headed monster of a research agenda that we all have to stick up front in our CVs or in these research statements. And sadly, I did not do the file thingy for my research statement; had I though, maybe I'd have written something different.

Missing Mural

2009-01-02T01:56:00.002-05:00

This was one of those times when I should have used my mobile blogging powers, but as Elli drove me home today, we took 101 past Farmers Market and I noticed that the People Power mural that was on the side of a nearby building was gone.

Apparently, it's been gone since 2007 (http://www.mbulletin-usa.com/printview.asp?ID=170&NM=KP%20Gallery) and shit, I wish I could find a picture for all you folks, but it was the first and maybe the only political mural that ever really affected me, that I was proud of. It featured people pushing back a tank (the tank's cannon ends at a grate in the wall), and on the left -- if I remember correctly), there was a hand holding a torch, smashing a bust of Marcos.

Fuck, I feel like I've lost something.

iPhone Blogging Test Número Dos

2008-12-31T16:39:00.001-05:00

Just beyond our backyard here in Pacifica is Highway 1, and just
beyond that (sort of) is the ocean.

It took about half an hour last night before my last post went up. I
decided to go to bed instead of wait, and this morning I finally saw
it update. I guess what this means is that I won't be "liveblogging"
anything -- well, maybe with the Internet-equivalent of a tape delay.

Testing The Mobile Blogging

2008-12-31T05:59:00.000-05:00

Can't talk much. Got an iPhone for Christmas and so now I'll
permanently have bad neck alignment. But that means I can send little
gems like these, almost instantly. Hooray?

Thanksgiving Out of Context

2008-11-28T13:30:00.002-05:00

A few days ago, I called up my mom to ask what we were supposed to wear for Thanksgiving. Usually my grandma has us wear a particular color, if only to look good in family photos. Almost always is that color red, but we're not exactly sticklers for tradition in my family (some of the time).

"Well," my mom said. "The theme this year is Moroccan, so I guess you could wear something red. Or brown."

"Oh," I said. I began to think about what I could wear. I have a brown sweater, and I guess since it's Thanksgiving, I could wear my TA-ing chinos and look kinda semi-formal.

"Tita Telly is bringing costumes for the girls, so just wear something in the theme," she said.

It took me a whole day to realize that my family what "the theme this year is Moroccan" actually meant: we were taking a holiday -- which by definition already have themes -- and doing something that had absolutely no relationship to what that holiday is about. In other words, my family was about to commit (and I mean that in the "perpetrate" sense) a non-sequitur of the most illogical order. What did it matter if I wore red or brown or chinos or jeans or shorts? We were commemorating a meal between Pilgrims and natives by dressing up like belly dancers.

Oh and yes, there's nothing like Filipinos doing their best impression of "the oriental". My aunt from Vegas made up costumes for other aunts and my girl cousins that involved some sort of jangly waistband thingy and what I can only call a "forehead necklace" and my mom made "turbans" (think Lawrence of Arabia, but in flashy colors) for the guys in the family. Even my grandparents got into this stuff -- my grandma was all color coordinated in blues, jangly waist thingy included. And even my teenage girl cousins went for it (though one wore her jangly thing with pleather pants).

Of course, I was too cool for school and just gave my mom funny looks when she tried to put my "turban" on me. My brothers and my stepdad were wearing theirs all up through dinner, and so eventually I decided to put mine on. "Just for the pictures," I told myself. And since I didn't really figure out how to put it on because I was running away from my mom, I ended up looking like a cross between a pirate, Aladdin, and a Catholic Cardinal. In other words, totally sweet.

Later in the night, my brother commented that "this was the shortest Thanksgiving ever! We spent more time setting up than eating." And it was true: we took the entire day to put up streamers in the living room to make the dinner table look like a "bazaar", an undertaking that involved nearly 200 yards of monofilament fishing line from my uncle's deep-sea fishing pole, endless duct tape, and lots of up and down on short ladders, with the requisite straining to reach up that short ladders entail. To top it off, none of our food was "Moroccan" -- it was just Thanksviging food. Of course, calling my family on any of these discrepencies would elicit some strange justification that, if it were me (I'd assume at least), I'd be told I was being lazy: "oh, do you really want couscous for Thanksgiving?"

So once we sat down to eat and then took our family picture, I realized that I must be genetically-programmed to be random and to be absolutely unapologetic for it. My family might be all observant Catholics, and we might have all the similar oddities that Filipino families share, but I think that every person comes to the realization when they watch a video of their mother dancing with the dancers on a riverboat tour, and hearing your grandpa and uncle sing karaoke just as off-key (and just as dramatically bad), that being cut from the same cloth means that deep down in your bones, you've inherited this stuff in the blood.

Planes Are Made For Sleeping, Not Classes

2008-11-26T18:10:00.002-05:00

Good news (for now!) My Summer course was approved, and so pending various approval steps and enrollment, I'll be teaching "Social Change, Democracy, and Dictatorship", meaning (1) I'll have to put together a syllabus (which works out doubly-nice since I need sample syllabi for my teaching portfolio) and (2) I'll be making money, which means I'll be able to eat this Summer. Though, if I end up blowing my savings on just trying to get to Brazil this June, who knows if there'll be enough of me left to feed.

Of course, all of this means I'm going to have to essentially condense a semester's worth of material into two months, spread out over three, 3-hour classes a week (or five, 1-and-a-half hour classes, or whatever bad math you can come up). In any case, it'll be all democracy, all the time for me and at least 10 students. Hopefully there'll be some inspiring and motivating going on.

---

I'm in Houston, getting some use out of the $8 I paid for internet access for the day up on Detroit. After not having slept at all Monday night, and hardly sleeping at all last night, I've been sleeping on my flights. As is typical of me and moving vehicles which I'm not driving, as soon as I sit down -- and as soon as I figure out that no one will have to cross over me to get to their seat -- I'm out like a light, or whatever metaphor about falling asleep quickly you'd like to use. I think I might stay awake for this last leg, if only to be able to sleep at a reasonable hour when I get to San Dimas, though I wouldn't bet on it, or take the points.

"Oslec is an annoying person, but a good TA" and Other Things People Say to Me

2008-11-25T21:57:00.003-05:00

The past few days, I've come across some good leads on a couple things that might keep me off the street next Fall. The first is a visiting assistant professorship at Roger Williams University here in RI in comparative-historical sociology; and the second is a teaching-oriented, two-year postdoc at Grinnell College in Iowa. There's also a longshot (and I mean looooongshot): a tenure-track comp-hist position at Duke, but without pubs and not much to show on my diss, this one looks like it's very much out of my reach.

So, I've been researching a bit about those prospects, working on some cover letters and trying to piece together a teaching portfolio. I looked over my evals from my past few classes, and as usual, some people loved me, some people thought "[I was] an annoying person, but a good TA" and others just didn't like me. I was feeling pretty down yesterday, but our former department chair happened to be around when I was kvetching and calmed me down a bit. He said, "the only things that matter are faculty evaluations anyway," which was kinda helpful, but I did think about a billion ways to improve myself. I e-mailed my friend Brian at U of Florida and he talked me off the ledge, and really, a couple bad reviews do not the scholar break.

Still, I started plunking away at a sample syllabus for a summer course I proposed (probably not gonna get it), and I wanted to take a look at a course I took at Conn many moons ago that Prof. Gay had taught. So I e-mailed him, went to bed, and this morning he wrote back:

What the [expletive deleted] are you doing up at 1am? Get some sleep!

Well, he wrote more, but that was the best part.

Today, I tried to find something to keep me off the streets this Summer, and looked into adjuncting at RISD. I e-mailed a contact my friend Jen had in their History, Philosophy and Social Sciences department, but they're all full for this Summer. They said they'd keep my e-mail "on file", though, so that's sort of all right. Still, without really knowing if I'm going to get that Summer course I proposed, I need to either make money or plan to be in the Philippines or Pacifica this Summer.

After all that, I feel all right. I feel like I'm moving along, despite not having anything truly tangible, and a bit tougher after being rejected a few times -- and in a few different ways. Bob, after telling me I need to go to bed, said that it's par for the course to be a visiting prof for a couple years now before you "really" go on the market, which in a way means that I'd be disadvantaged going on the market now, since I'd be competing with a bunch of people who've incubated as visiting profs somewhere. Of course, it's also par for the course for no one to tell me that it's not always a straight path from PhD to tenure-track position. Ahhhh confidence.

* I eat bad idioms for breakfast, and write them for dinner.

Write MOAR

2008-11-21T00:32:00.002-05:00

A few months ago, I happened upon a yard sale around the corner from our place. I got there just as they were closing up, so everything was going for free -- clothes, kitchen shit, board games, etc. Of particular interest to me were a collection of early to mid-90s alt rock (I took both Gin Blossoms cassettes) and a kind of crappy usb keyboard.

As soon as I got home, I put in New Miserable Experience and cleaned and plugged in the keyboard. Part of my excitement was that now I had something to type my dissertation on. Well, I mean something that look more officially "established" than squatting over my laptop over a coffee table in Venezuela or hiding out in my room in Ecuador, hoping that the lightning won't fry anything. I got so excited over the prospect of this new apparatus that I made Andrew drive me to Staples so I could buy a mouse.

Of course, since I've been using a laptop for the past ten years of my life, getting my wrists to remember to use a separate keyboard and finding and using the mouse (it's cordless, so it runs and hides from me) are a task unto themselves. I'm currently debating whether or not I'm going to give myself carpal tunnel from the position of the keyboard and the mouse on the tiny sliding keyboard table in my desk. Then my mind wanders to college and I realize I did have a keyboard, but I used it nearly as much (never).

So fast forward a few months and here I am, half-typing my dissertation on not-so-new keyboard. Admittedly, it's still slightly more "official" and slightly more motivating than typing on my laptop, and I need whatever extra pushes I can get at this point. I'm not yet at the point where I'd welcome a healthy shove off a cliff, but I could use some dangling over the precipice.

Now, the reason why I've somehow convinced myself that writing yet another egotistical blog post is that I need to get the cobwebs out of my writing machine (read: "me"), and since I really don't care too too much about what ya'll think (actually, I care a lot), I'll just write like the middle-class person I am without having to be the middle-class person trying to be some other class in my dissertation.

Old Red Shirt

2008-11-19T22:37:00.002-05:00

I got rid of all but 8 or so t-shirts before I left for the Philippines two years ago, and over the course of the next few months of fieldwork, I picked up a couple more. T-shirt wear in the field is an art, I submit -- it requires some sensitivity to the state of irony in the country you're in, as well as some attention to important shit, like politics. For example, my "Middle Class" t-shirt worked pretty well in the Philippines, mostly because people speak English and that, after awhile, I wore it out of tiredness of my topic. I wore it again in Ecuador a few times, too, but only when I was out in La Mariscal -- of course with the hope that some gringa would think it was funny. Sadly, no one really found it that funny.

All of this rumination and reminiscing is because I unearthed my one red t-shirt. My cousins gave it to me many years ago as a Christmas present, and it's been a pretty faithful t-shirt -- ya know, covering my torso, exposing my arms, etc. But the reason why I "unearthed" it is because I chose not to wear it while I was in Venezuela. My Venezuelan host family insisted that wearing red would be akin to "talking about politics", which you shouldn't do in public. Though I did meet quite a few people who had no qualms about talking about politics in public, I wasn't going to draw attention to myself for no reason. And of all the things my family told me about Caracas -- don't go out with a watch, don't go out with money, etc. -- the one I really followed was not to wear red in public, lest I be thought of as a Chavista.

But strangely, I hadn't worn it until now. What can I say? I look like a socialist, but I'm a crass middle class intellectual. Oh the troubles of the armchair intellectual.

Filipino Food: Keeping Captives Alive Everywhere

2008-11-18T23:00:00.002-05:00

I'm looking for a link, but this morning I was awakened by the dulcet tones of BBC World Service, analyzing the recent capture of a Saudi oil tanker by Somali pirates. While interesting in and of itself, the analyst noted that these pirates employ (in the "use" sense, since I can't clearly remember if they were captured or paid) Filipino cooks to make food for captives. One would assume that they feed them Filipino food, meaning that if anything, if you're a-hankerin' for some adobo, just get yourself on a tanker heading past Eyl.

In other news, while I've caught up with grading, I've also caught the wrath of my diss adviser who pressed me for "actual chapters". And with that, we're really writing the dissertation.

So Slow, So Not Steady

2008-11-17T20:50:00.002-05:00

I've reached "that" point in my life where I feel guilty for writing on the ol' blog when I should be writing my dissertation. At least I've got a nifty title for my Philippines chapter, but that should have been done about a month ago. Instead, I've got half an intro and half a theory chapter, which I guess isn't too too bad, but far behind my more optimistic setup for the sem.

Otherwise though, I got through a big hump last week for the class I'm TAing -- had to do up 50 or so research proposals and hand them back. I felt so motivated correcting papers, I just kept correcting through the weekend and realized what it was that grad students should do: not have fun, so they can have peace of mind. But who am I kidding?

But another thing sort of laming out this blog has been facebook's "share a link" thingy, which makes posting shit up for all to see so lazily fast that, well, I just abuse it. But, I abused it only because there was news to abuse it with: the leadup to the election was sweet, with all the Obama news. But now, I'm just posting links to Slate, which is what I did here anyway. I figure that commenting on the blog about the posts makes me "a better writer" -- in quotes, since you can see how stream-of-consciousness all this crudupucularness is.

So, let me make a promise: I'm going to find something worth doing a Video Fix on, and I'll do a Video Fix for ya'll. I figure that lets me be a different kind of awesome.

This Week's Instead of Writing, October 13th

2008-10-13T02:32:00.001-04:00

Ah Pistol Pete. Since most sounds in the condo reverberate through all three floors and across to the other units, I'm doing this drill over my bed, along with another one involving flipping the ball and... it's complicated.

Your Video Fix #6

2008-10-08T23:51:00.002-04:00

Six is in the mix. Linkity.

By the way, this is all important relaxation between writing words and commas in my dissertation.

Oh Boy, Wasilla...

2008-09-29T22:41:00.002-04:00

Cross-posting this on facebook, too. Apparently all that extra footage from the Couric-Palin interview really was horrible: Sarah Palin could not name another Supreme Court case other than Roe vs. Wade. Now, I dunno about you, but that's "damning" as they say in the media game.

You can say it's all biased since it's a DailyKos diary citing a Huffington Post article. Shit, I mean, it couldn't be any more biased than a Sociology grad student from York citing Lenin, but I digress. As it seems that us libs have been right for the past few months, I think this one will pan out to be only diffusable by a shotgun wedding... Now, who could possibly get married?

Trying, Among Other Things

2008-09-28T22:04:00.002-04:00

Two nights ago, I pulled an all-nighter to finish a conference paper. Let's just say two things: my paper sucked, but for reasons I won't say, I don't think I needed to try so hard. But in any case, that little rush of fun gave me a tiny, tiny break and I decided to clean my room a bit today and wire the cable connection to my computer. I will never have to leave my room ever again.

But I feel like I've been letting you (all three of you) down. Hardly anything insightful here as of late (as if you came here for insight), but I'll try to give you a paragraph's worth of stuff more regularly. Sadly, now that I'm back in Providence, the likelihood of me having any sort of adventure or seeing anything really "new" is pretty slim now. So I guess I really AM back.

As for the election, last Sunday I phonebanked for MoveOn with Jen, and donated $100 to Barack a few days before that. I sorta don't want to turn this blog fully into a bad DailyKos diary, so that's why I've been hesitant to say much. I have, however, been posting links to my facebook page, which is the quick-and-dirty way to get the point across.

But I'll cross-post this one. From the DailyKos, a chemical irritant was sprayed into a mosque in Ohio where children were waiting for their parents at prayer. The diarist linked that incident to the distribution of an anti-Muslim scaremonger DVD in swing states, with the tacit support of the McCain campaign. For whatever reason the attack occurred, I agree with the diarist: this is American terrorism, which I guess here we call that shit a "hate crime."

Ohio. I've driven through you once. You can't be that bad.

Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator

2008-09-16T22:35:00.001-04:00

Stolen from DailyKos. Find out your Sarah Palin baby name here!

If Sarah Palin were my mother, I'd be named
Fleck Rookie Palin

Well Hello, Please Donate to Obama!

2008-09-16T21:29:00.003-04:00

Hi. So it's been awhile. Let's get back to work.

I've been stretching and stretching out a due date for a conference paper, so I've felt a little guilty about blogging. Of course, I've been dicking around on DailyKos (I signed up so I could make comments and to start a diary, but I've felt guilty about doing that, too). Sliding around on the surface of the liberal blogosphere for a bit got me pretty riled up, more on that later.

But I've settled into a pretty reasonable rhythm back here in the PVD, minus of course the moments when instead of waking up at 8, I get up at 11:30. I'm TAing every day of the week, more or less -- class Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and office hours in the mornings on Tuesday and Thursday. Conceivably, I should have a lot of free time to work on my dissertation, but well, you know (or you will know, I guess). I set up a "schedule" with Jose, where I'd finish a chapter or two each month, with January off (probably to finish all the crap I didn't finish). That plus going back to a free gym and my basketball friends, things are rhythmic.

Last week, I got pretty fed up with the McCain campaign, and really with McCain and Palin. It started with this story from the sfgate politics blog about how McCain released an ad called "Factcheck", which cited factcheck.org. Factcheck.org then proceeded to factcheck the ad, and found out that they lied about factcheck.org. I can only assume that the reason why they pulled that shit was because both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report were off last week, because they couldn't have made that stuff up. That and how they continued to repeat some pretty idiotic lies -- lies that if you knew how to google (which isn't hard) -- that you could poop on.

So I talked to Patrick about making a "cheat sheet" to e-mail out with the claims and a link to disprove each of them. I figured that somehow this wasn't going to get picked up in the media and I wanted to do my part to help Obombs, especially considering how he was polling poorly against McCain, too. We got a few things listed (I'll put what we got at the bottom here), but it looks like that the "MSM", as they call it on DailyKos, has picked up on the lies, turned it into a meme, and following the lead of "The View", they're all abandoning the McCain ship pretty quickly.

Well, sort of quickly. Even if Karl Rove admits that McCain is going too far, he did manage to get in a "...on both sides", which plays into the grad-student-like insecurity about "balance" with the media. Just to be sure, when people call Obama on stretching the truth, he fixes himself, and really, he's not even close to McCain. Really, "on both sides" is stretching the truth: McCain is turning pathological, and compared to that, Obama looks like a typical politician.

Anyway, look, here's some stuff we can do. McCain now has $84 million dollars in federal funds for his campaign and can't spend or collect any more, unless it's through the the GOP. Because Obama didn't opt in to the federal system, he can collect and spend a whole shitload more.

The thing is, we're short a bit. The last funding update from the campaign from last month said that Obama collected $77 million. So to make sure Obama has a financial advantage, we've got to donate, especially in this last stretch.

Here. I made it easy for yas. I did it.

-------

Crap, I can't find the list! Ok, I'll dig a bit on my desktop.

35 Years Since The Coup, Chileans Make Out More

2008-09-12T21:58:00.002-04:00

Thanks New York Times. A solemn rememberance of Augusto Pinochet's bloody coup against Salvador Allende would be great, and appropriate. But it's ok, you've turned Chile into some sort of pedophile's dream, with 18-and-under parties and "making out" running rampant.

It's too bad that Bristol can't study abroad in Chile. 'Cuz she'll be raising her child.

Well, "My Dad Worked in a Mill" Didn't Work

2008-09-06T00:06:00.005-04:00

As it's seemed to be once again, this election is about empathy vs. biography. Now after how many years of being beaten over the head with "narrative" from the Republicans, one would think we'd finally understand what it is that narrative does so well. Since POW vote isn't so big, we keep assuming that John McCain the War Hero should have no bearing on what really matters -- "the issues."

But the thing that the Dems and maybe even the blogosphere don't quite get is that McCain was telling a redemption story as a means to describe two things. First, he was trying to show that he's a different kind of leader, not simply someone who was a POW (which is what we're all fixated on, his characteristic of being a POW), but someone who's POW experience humbled him -- humbled him enough to return to the states and give his life up to public service. This allows him to contrast his biography to Obama, who cames from humble beginnings to the pinnacle of "celebrity", and to basically make him appear as St. Paul: a man who was born into status, but was cut down by his own pride, saved by the kindness of others, and then returned to serve, to reform -- in his own words (well, let's assume that he wrote it), he was "anointed by history" to "save the country." While it sounds fairly egocentric, the redemption story is pretty familiar to Americans as the "American Dream" story, and like I said yesterday, it's the political equivalent of Bush's born-again/rehab story: a man born into privilege, fucks up out of his own arrogance, gets saved by those who teach him what's really important, and emerges both a servant and warrior for the cause. And what it says about McCain is that his path to leadership, to his anointing by history to save the country, allows him to see things differently -- he is purified by his POW experience, not exhalted by it -- and as such, he will be the ultimate servant -- a contrast to his assertion that Washington does not serve the people, but itself.

And look, think deeply enough about it, and it suggests that this purity through humility allows him to overcome both wonkishness and elitism. This recalls for me the narrative of the pasyon as used by Philippine revolutionary movements at the turn of the century. If Ileto was right about how movement leaders believed only through purity could one bring ilaw (light) to others, John McCain made his case for why he was not only the ideal Republican leader but also why he was a maverick -- because his moral compass was set to true north by his POW experience.

But secondly, McCain's biography is a metaphor for the Republican Party this year. If Washington serves itself (and though, unspoken, Washington might as well be synonymous with the Republicans), the downturn for the Party this year is its Hanoi moment. That's why their platform is filled with this stuff about grassroots Republicans taking back Washington, because for them, this isn't about multiplying a thousand points of light, but conversion and purification, of multiplying a thousand St. Pauls. Of course, in the framing of this projection of McCain's story, we've already come back from Vietnam and divorced our first wife, so the only way to go from here is up. It's not simply an underdog story, it's a story of purification -- perhaps not unlike the 1964 convention where they basically told the moderate Rockefellers to fuck off.

Now, when I say "purification", I do not necessarily mean ideological purification. Again, this is why McCain's campaign manager keeps saying it's not about the issues. Narrative, as Francesca Polletta points out, is open to interpretation, and as such, it can unify people with disparate beliefs as they take different things away from the story. Now, not explicitly dealing with policy in his speech helped -- the more vague the narrative, the more people can come up with ways to identify with it. But pace Polletta, the plot itself can do as much work to convince as the process of identifying with it. What McCain's purification narrative signifies perhaps across interpretations is his moral leadership -- literally (literarily?) his "character", and, when projected to the Republicans as a whole, their agency-through-purification in the midst of recent history hating on them so badly and the RNC was their revival meeting. When McCain says he is anointed by history to save the country, he suggests his story is not over, and when projected to the Republicans as a whole -- regardless of their beliefs on the issues -- the point is that the journey is not over.

Does this then make Palin look a political decision, not a narrative one... Or, well, it's both. Palin's story hews much closer to testimony rather than redemption, which is why we see her as "telling a story" (i.e. screeching on about nothing, or at worst, lying). It feels particular to lots of us because of how she's being presented as an empathy candidate, versus a narrative one. But, don't discount what her narrative attempts to do: it's a right-wing Obama-Clinton mash-up. For one, it's the American Dream narrative, but explicitly drawn to a smaller scale than Obama's. This has the effect of making Obama's Harvard-lawyery-confusing-Kenya/Kansas goodness a liability by showing a pretty much the lower-middle class White (I mean, seriously, hockey?) version of the same story. Second, it's the feminist politician narrative, and it's had enough of an effect to get even progressive feminists to question their own assumptions.

Now, the Democrats from what I can see, have been a party of empathy at least since FDR. Empathy is not quite biography, though they're related a bit: empathy focuses on more characteristics than on plot, it's not about twists or drama per se, but about identifying with people (and connecting them) through a shared condition. It's forming common cause. As you can tell by the first day of the RNC, the Republicans kinda suck at empathy. But, the Democrats are pretty good at it. Even when they deploy narratives -- for example, Obama's American Dream life story -- it's used to show that there are muliple paths to the same condition (i.e. "I'm an American like you!") All the stories might be different, and that's the point: the only thing in common is the last line of the plot, and that's what matters. Why trot out four or five different people talking about their lives under Bush if ultimately the point is to show that life under Bush sucks for everyone? Or, why suggest that Joe Biden go at it in Pennsylvania: his roots, his narrative, allows him to connect to people who's narratives might be similar to his.

Empathy as it's deployed by the Democrats also lends itself to being about "issues", and the battle for Democrats has been to frame these issues in such a way as to build some sort of consensus around them (the economy, the environment, etc.). Of course, consensus requires deliberation, knowledge of the facts, and the great mystery of rational thought, which is why we get so pissed off when we assume that "Kansas" is not voting for its "rational self-interest" when it votes Republican. All this is not to say that Democrats don't care how you got to be poor, but just that you're poor. Rather, what I'm suggesting is that when Obama talks about "change", it really is the progressive, liberal image of equality he's pushing for -- a state in which everyone has the opportunity to achieve some standard of well-being and dignity, which is always lower than it should be, lest "change" or "progress" mean nothing. It's equifinality, to use a horrible term from comparative history (that always reminds me of horses...) When Obama says "we are the change we've been waiting for", it means our agency is built on collective action, and when (or better said, "if") we get our act together, we can move "the story" forward.

And so the ultimate frustration for Democrats is essentially their modernism. When they (I should say "we") see biography, we see characteristics so particular that it cannot be abstracted to others -- "so what?" in other words. So what if John McCain was a POW? What Eugene Robinson in the cited piece in that link, and Kos diarist teacherken who linked it (and, maybe even sadly Joe Biden too) can't grasp is that stories have the potential to provide more than just dressing to a salad, no matter how stale the lettuce is -- they put you right in the middle of things, in a sense. Time will tell if McCain's narrative works, but we really miss out when we assume that biography has no pull, no effect, and -- worst of all -- "dupes the masses".

Like I said, there's a relationship between empathy and biography, but it's not just putting one's characteristics into plotted form. The plots have to be familiar, and they can change to fit one's needs, but they have to have some grounding in plots already existing. What we still haven't done as social scientists is figure out under which conditions do particular plots work the best. Will we (this time, the Democrats) be able to trot out our single-plot empathy narratives with enough force to counter the McCain biography of self and collective redemption and purification?

Asleep at the Podium

2008-09-04T21:26:00.006-04:00

OK VANITY TIME
Apparently people still notice that I pooped out 15-20 pounds back in January. My new roommate Kenny has a scale in the bathroom and today's fun-with-negative-body-image fact is that I'm 140.5 pounds. The thing is, I feel a whole crapload better at this weight and all its attendant not obsessing over eating and gaining weight. Plus, when you can outlift bigger dudes or are proportionally relatively as strong, your penis doesn't feel as tiny.

OK BRAIN TIME
Without snark, I have to admit that I could not figure out what "Country First" meant at the beginning of the week. Now, with snark, I think that "Country First" means that the Republicans hate themselves. I mean, I could be thoughtful about it and say that there's some sense of promises unfulfilled from 1994, but there's something strange that if the original intent of "Country First" was to emphasize John McCain, some liberal arts major decided to shoehorn the title into everything and now it seems so weird to see the convention essentially saying "que se vayan todos" -- a pretty common refrain in the ole LA among right-wing "anticorruption" parties there too.

So America's problem is that we know how it's done, but we've elected idiots. McCain is the self-proclaimed "anointed by history" to save us. If we elect him, he'll make government more accountable by making it less effective. I love liberal democracy. Someone is an idiot, and it's never me (or you).

Or Obama is the idiot. If McCain puts country first, then Obama puts himself first -- the "uppity" kinda guy he is. Voting for Obama would doom us, not so much that he's inexperienced, but that he'll act just like one of these other self-serving folks. So the battle is over the narratives, and not about the issues.

Case in point: Charlie Rose asked one sympathetic-to-McCain-dude if the election was about issues or personality, and the response was, yes, it's about personality and that's the way it should be. That entirely explains why the policy stuff -- or rather the explanation about McCain's maverickiositousness -- falls by the wayside for stories about his POWness. So he's trying to appeal to us by a redemption story. If Sarah Palin is "King Ralph", John McCain is "It's a Wonderful Life" with evil Asians (but we're friends now)?

So a quote from Judith Warner, who's quoting Doris Kearns Goodwin

... in the past, it was possible to fill that need through empathetic connection. Few Depression-era voters could “relate” to Franklin Roosevelt’s patrician background, notes historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “It was his ability to connect to them that made them feel they could connect to him,” she told me in a phone interview.

The age of television, Goodwin believes, has made the demand for connection more immediate and intense. But never before George W. Bush did it quite reach the beer-drinking level of familiarity. “Now it’s all about being able to see your life story in the candidate, rather than the candidate, with empathy, being able to relate to you.”

And just as Warner suggests "We’re not likely to get a worthy female president anytime soon," based on those criteria, we're not likely to get a minority president, either. Until, of course, we speed up our already-insidious plan to turn America brown (I'm comin' to get you, Sam Huntington!)

But seriously, if all this shit about narrative is true, then when we say that "John McCain just doesn't get it", we've already lost the battle. His POW story is nearly political equivalent of Bush's born-again-rehab story, and we're not looking for him to empathize with us ('cuz fuck if either of them do). Why else would we find the Daily Show so funny, or watch failed American Idol auditions, or go to a convention to hate on yourself? Hubris is funny, but with a side of redemption, is sexy.

PATRICK SAYS
(in regards to McCain's "I'll do this, Obama will do that" and the boos)
krunkle: sounds like a baseball game
Teh Bosslec: boooo!
krunkle: i will kiss babies, he will eat them!
Teh Bosslec: hahahaha

(on McCain's rousing "stand up" conclusion)
krunkle: stand up for puppy chow
krunkle: and healthy puppies
krunkle: stand up for fabreeze and the freshness it brings
krunkle: fight for extra meat for the hamburger helper
krunkle: finally this shit is over

Indeed.

ps.
Teh Bosslec: i'm not sure what this speech accomplished
Teh Bosslec: at the end of it
krunkle: you have to fight efor everything
krunkle: wehter its health care, a chic fil a sandwich or a code red mountain dew
krunkle: you have have to stand uip
Teh Bosslec: haha

RNC Message: Sarah Palin is a White Jock and You Can Be Too

2008-09-03T20:25:00.008-04:00

I've been back in Providence for about a week, with nothing too amazing to note. Well, maybe except the bachelorette party-goers who asked for my underwear at a bar in Portland, Maine ("why won't you give me your underwear? Do you have really expensive underwear or something?").

And there's Sarah Palin. I heard about her nomination while I was in Venezuela and did as much hand-to-forehead-slapping as any Obamaite could have done. Viscerally, Palin reminds me of my mother (pro-life, religious, homeschooled my brothers, does it all) except not as smart (my mother voted Green the past two presidential elections). She makes McCain look cynical and calculating, which in the Clinton-Gingrich-Rove world, isn't a bad trait for a politician. If "maverick" means doing things that no one expects you to do, then there might be such a thing as a bad maverick.

But as much as we're laying into her for justified reasons (and for unjustified, but deliciously ironic ones, too), she embodies one vision of the American Dream that will certainly resonate with a lot of people, not just Republicans: you can overcome any obstacle -- gender, children, not having gone to Harvard, childbirth, etc. -- with stick-to-it-iveness. Slate.com nails it:

More subtly, Palin embodies a notion that Republicans can create a society like Alaska—where the culture has a heavy working-class influence, state taxes are nonexistent, economic prospects are good for people regardless of formal education, and bricklayers can make the same money as urban lawyers (and have more fun in their spare time)

In short, the American Dream for White People, a dream easily shattered when us immigrant kids manage somehow to do better in school (or do worse); when our parents "take all the jobs"; and when language, race, and all those other hard things to think about get in the way -- and to which the current response is "build a fence".

It's also the American Dream for Jocks -- vigorously engage nature or face the wrath of knowing that your college degree means nothing if you can't skin a moose (after killing it... to death!) No wonder that Palin wanted to ban books, hadn't "thought about Iraq," and wished that someone "would tell her what the VP does" (i.e. have someone else do her homework for her). I guess in some way she taps into the narrative of the young black person who leaves the projects to go to college, then goes back only to have to dance-off with Wesley Snipes.

But back to serious shit. As a Filipino nerd, I have nothing in common with Sarah Palin. Her story is of all the idiot jocks that my own mother told me I could finally beat when I went to college. Her "narrative" (which even Peggy Noonan thought was "bullshit" [thanks Patrick]) which, when she tells it, involves a list of her children, spoken in reality-show-makeover voice, isn't inspiring: I want kids, I'll raise cain at a PTA meeting, but that will never make me uniquely qualified to be President. That, I think, is a delusion for Hollywood (King Ralph, to be exact). I've also disliked sports parents, especially since my mother begrudingly allowed me to play sports, and after seeing some great 8th graders get ground into the ground by their dads.

But to all those families out there that over-schedule their kids' time -- an outcropping of overscheduling their own time, which is an outcropping of latter-day capitalism -- which is the new, fun trend in America, even they aren't the same kind of hockey families of which Palin's is the archetype. The relentless pressure to succeed, the music lessons, the sports, the tutoring, the SAT courses -- I would not be surprised if in Palin's family does not do this. After all, in Alaskamerica, it's not achievement that matters, but values (and values like to do it young).

But ok, let's assume that I've been taken over by the hegemon and I'm convinced that my, you know, nearly-completed doctorate in sociology from an Ivy League school is going to lead me to a world of frustration and that I'm just all mind-warped. Why shouldn't I be cheering for the sort of equality that Palin's place on the ticket represents? Because, unlike Alaskamerica, the rest of America does have poverty, it does not have people gleefully prancing around some middle-class dream, and partly because we aspire for more, even if we are searching for serenity.

But with both Palin and Giuliani smacking Barack around for being a community organizer -- for helping poor people make claims on government -- most of all insults me as a sociologist (and even if I'm an armchair sociologist, it still pisses me off). And, I think she might have forever gained the emnity of every single Americorp, Peace Corp, and Teach for America volunteer for a generation. Here's a better rant.

Let Patrick and I take you home:

krunkle: she sounds like simcity
krunkle: we're gonna start with coal
krunkle: then go to nuclear
krunkle: then explore wind and solar
krunkle: did she read that off gamefaqs?

...

krunkle: mccain remidns me of mumma
Teh Bosslec: momia?
krunkle: kinda of gets up and yellows
krunkle: mum-ra
krunkle: from the thudnercats
krunkle: gets up and yells
krunkle: but runs out of energy and has to leave
Teh Bosslec: and is Palin Mumm-Mutt?
krunkle: well she did comapre hockey moms and pitbills
Teh Bosslec: this is very true
krunkle: I thought an ancient evil coming out of pyramid and being mostly annoying douche was an apt comparison
Teh Bosslec: and obama is clearly lion-o
Teh Bosslec: so is biden pantro?
krunkle: yup
Teh Bosslec: and michelle is cheetara
Teh Bosslec: and the kids are the twins
Teh Bosslec: so who's snark?
krunkle: hmm
krunkle: dennis kucinich?
Teh Bosslec: that works

Senator John Kerry at the 2008 DNC

2008-08-29T01:54:00.001-04:00

From a couple days ago. Damn, where the hell was this Kerry four years ago?

Almost There...

2008-08-28T16:52:00.002-04:00

Well I finally made it out of Caracas with a couple hours of sleep here and there, but feeling all right. I guess I was a little more nostalgic for my trip than had expected and spent a few minutes running through the news from Quito, then checking the ever-exciting dollar-bolivar exchange rate. And, of course, I picked a *great* time to leave: today dollars were selling for Bsf 4.05 and if I wanted to buy bolivares, 3.95 -- a .75 bolivar difference from when I arrived.

Anyway, I'm in Atlanta for a few more minutes before I finally head back to Providence. Andrew called up to confirm I'd be back, and I got a few e-mails and wall posts welcoming me back in various ways. I've got a haircut tomorrow at 12:45, and then in the evening I'm heading to Conn to do backup percussion for Vox at the orientation concert. And then for Saturday/Sunday, I'm heading up to Maine to see Greg before he heads off. It should be funtastical.

Oh and there's work: good old, actual work. TA excitement starts up next week, and I've got a deadline for a conference paper on Thursday (but will somehow turn into Friday...) So far, the stress of being a dissertation writer hasn't smacked me in the face yet, but with some jobs wanting materials by the 20th of September, and me with nothing to show... well, I can probably mine that little stress molehill into a cavern.

Outta Heres

2008-08-27T23:12:00.003-04:00

I had a couple glasses of wine with Luchy and Pablo, finally talking to them after four months. We talked about politics, language, a whole bunch of stuff. I'll miss them for sure.

Today I had my last interview, and it went really well. Of course, after walking through a torrent from Ciudad Universitaria, a few false leads, and then through Santa Monica to find "Quinta LACSO." It was great, though: a good end to my work here.

And well, if you've been keeping up "work" is sort of a weak term to use to talk about my time here. But I've got these data sources that haven't seen the light of day in English -- and in very few places in Venezuelan social science -- and so I think I've got a bit to work with in terms of original data.

So I'm off tomorrow. Sr. Juan is coming to fetch me at 4:30am, giving me a long, long day of travelling before I get back to Providence at about 8:30pm. I intend to sleep a bit on the plane, despite whatever arm of Hurricane Gustav we'll be flying through. I hope that we don't get canceled tomorrow.

Sharpton! Helicopters! It's OK, Really!

2008-08-26T19:33:00.003-04:00

Some thoughts going into tonight's DNC fun: Here's Al Sharpton saying something about helicopters. If you think my sentence didn't make any sense, neither did his: "I hope that she takes the roof off, but takes a helicopter off and hits the streets." I assume he means that he expects her to give a good speech, and then personally go to her supporters everywhere and tell them to vote for Barack. Or, he's saying something about like how Diana Ross got airlifted out of Super Bowl XXX (towards the end) - she blew the roof off then took a helicopter and hit the street? The stadium didn't have a roof though, but I guess the helicopter part is even figuratively the harder of the two to pull off.

I'm trying to keep track of the claims of the rogue Clintonite holdouts as I listen to tonight's proceedings. Here's what I've got so far:

- The DNC (national committee) rigged the election, specifically with Michigan and Florida (both delegations are now fully seated at the convention)
- The DNC will rig the election.
- The caucuses were rigged
- Obama "race-baited" by turning Bill's comments against himself
- The media loved Obama, the media was sexist, ergo Obama was sexist
- Obama is just sexist
- He didn't come up with enough titles for Clinton fundraisers when he tried to incorporate them into his horizontally-organized fundraising structure.
- The onus is on Obama to unify the party, not Clinton
- Obama has not done enough to recognize Clinton's achievements
- Superdelegates gave him the nomination, not the state delegate count
- Obama is too inexperienced (I like this one, only because if Clinton apparently convinced people to believe that, and now she's supporting him, that means Clinton followers [1] believe independently of Clinton, and if so [2] she can't do squat to convince anyone at this point)

A few days ago after CNN cajoled its sources to leak the VP choice (my favorite part was how they kept saying how "secret" it was, even after they leaked it), the first caller to Larry King Live said that he was a Clinton supporter and could not vote in good conscience for Biden: "I can't stand in front of my students and say that I voted for a man who plagiarized." And there's all the people who are basically switching parties. I have to say, though, even if they do decide to vote McCain, "it's OK, really" is really a funny way of saying "honestly, did you think the election would matter anyway?"

What will make tonight hilariously bad is if Obama does not secretly show up in Denver at the end of Hilary's speech and they hug it out, but instead they play the awkward version of Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert at the end of the Daily Show via Barack-o-Vision. At this point, I'm not sure how much Barack can do other than start making out with Clinton on stage and admitting they've been having an affair. With Bill.

The fun thing about liberal democracy are all these ways of "aggregating preferences" that always manage to piss enough people off to make all democracies imperfect. Funny how at the same time all the dissension in the party swells back up again, the Pakistani opposition splits up. And how in hundreds of other democracies in the world, parties fracture so they can become electoral vehicles for individuals.

Here, of course, instead of forming some splinter party, we punish politicians by not voting or by switching sides completely. Though, this did happen. The problem is that the Progressive Party was borne of a serious ideological split in the Republican Party -- other than how universal their health care packages would be (and I would assume now that Barack would be amenable to fully universal coverage), there's no important ideological differences between the Hillary Camp and the Obama Camp. If there are, then I bet they were hatched after she lost the nomination. Note too that all the fun stuff in our history happens after one of the parties hemorrhages and the President gets a funny split in the electoral college vote.

So what's the deal? I think the Dems might be fucked. The problem with Obama is that he hasn't convinced anyone hard enough that the stakes are high -- nor has Clinton. What seems to be happening is that while people surely mind having to muddle through the economy as it is, Iraq, incompetence in the executive branch, etc., they don't mind nearly enough to vote for someone who stands at the complete opposite of the other dude on those issues -- even if both of them are putting out smeared shit on construction paper and calling it "a plan", those shitstains still look conspicuously drippy towards the left or the right.

This election is for everyone symbolic, not substantive. Change is symbolic. Electing a woman is symbolic. Having a POW commander-in-chief is symbolic. And in that sense, Clinton and McCain are just as charismatic in the Weberian sense as Obama is (which explains why evangelicals still haven't given a full-throated endorsement of McCain and why party-switching is running rampant on both sides) -- Obama is just better at it. But it's probably more Habermas right now: mass media, destroying the public sphere, massification of a bourgeoisie pasttime. And really "pasttime" as if voting for one or the other "is OK, really". We're either incredibly patient or incredibly stupid.

But sadly in liberal democracies, you have to be smart. In order for shit to get done, you have to act like a rational actor and hold your damn nose (fuck, the French literally did it when Le Pen made it to the last round of voting). Opting out fucks up the game, and as all of the money-making political science tells us, everything's a damn fucking game. I hate liberal democracy.

Outside Looking In... CNN, Charles Barkley, and Obama

2008-08-26T15:20:00.004-04:00

Consider this one of the sporadic "liveblog" posts on the DNC. Well, more like CNN International's coverage of the DNC. Today's spot-o-fun: a very serious interview with Charles Barkley about why he's voting for Barack, about the Georgian crisis, and why Clinton supporters should vote for Obama.

I'd let it speak for itself, but I must have been gone for too long. Did Barkley become that important in the past eight months? Considering how Schwarzenegger became governor, I shouldn't be too incredulous, and celebrities have been giving political opinions since way back when, but the anchor treated the interview with dignity and respect and not the sort of half-serious treatment that celebrity interviews get, and was in strange contrast to how unprofessional CNN International anchors usually are.

So all of this interview was strange. In any case, with all seriousness, CNN discovers:

"We've got to intervene at some point" - in regards to Georgia

"The reason why I'm voting democratic and for Barack is that I don't like the economic situation going on here in America" - why he's voting against his party.

"I don't feel in good conscience to vote Republican in this election" - because he doesn't believe that poor people can achieve very much in this economy

He also believes that Clinton supporters should "shut up" and vote for Barack. I have to give him credit, he's a straight-talker. He's not like Schwartzenegger who peppers his speech with really terrible puns and references to his acting career. Barkley doesn't talk about making a "slam dunk" or "throwing an elbow" to Russian aggression. Plus, I guess no one gave him the talking point sheet (which I can only assume tells you when to laugh at certain questions) that's going around the DNC.

So the most surprising thing about my surprise is that I was surprised at how informative that interview actually was. Despite the fact that, currently, Charles Barkley is politically irrelevant.

OK, Um, Never Mind

2008-08-26T08:56:00.002-04:00

So despite how much Barack pissed me off with his txtacular VP search, and despite how much I didn't want to watch the convention, I feel a little better after seeing Ted Kennedy and Michelle Obama. Just a little though: CNN was annoying as hell (I can only watch CNN International, which, by default, went to Wolf Blitzer's show), and there was a quite a bit of boring shit last night, especially Jim Leach. If you think Obombs is professorial, shit, Jim Leach was like reading a demography paper. A demography theory paper.

Let it be known that CNN's wonderful comment that Michelle and Barack must have some sort of "rhetorical DNA" in them could be construed as saying that Black people can preach -- though if Jesse Jackson Jr.'s speech was any indication, that is definitely not true.

In other news, I tried to pay a visit to Ediciones UCV yesterday to buy some books, and unfortunately, the whole campus was on vacation (even CENDES). The cleaning crews were out in full force, using high-pressure water on the concrete (lots of it, mmmm modernism), cutting the grass, etc. There were a few students around, I figure doing some summer courses, but for the most part, the campus was empty. Strangely enough, the UCV campus looked fairly interesting devoid of people, which is, I guess, the moment of wonder in modernist architecture when all the cogs are gone and you can just look at the shell of the machine -- and the machine is a giant high school. Wait, I think I got the metaphor wrong: the students are the product of the factory that is UCV. I still can't believe that place is on the same UNESCO register as old Quito.

Anyway, enough armchair architecture. I'm off to try to find more books, just so that it looks like I've done more data collection. Tomorrow I have my last interview and then, all packed, I will try to sleep a bit before leaving at 4:30am to the airport.

Pick Someone Funny

2008-08-22T23:45:00.003-04:00

I'm not quite sure what Obama has planned with this hypetastical VP search. Tomorrow, the made-for-24-hour-news saga will finally be over and I know -- I know -- we will be underwhelmed. The fact that Obama's camp has grown adults waiting for text messages is the political equivalent of seeing Venezuelan MILFs, or Dina Lohan, or moms in general saying "cool". Actually, it reminds me of Crazy Frog, paying for cellphone ringtones, and Juicy Couture sweats with the "Juicy" on the ass.

If you're not already into "buzz" for buzz's sake, and you like the internet, but not every contrivance found on it, then you're probably turned off enough not to even care about the damn convention because of this idiotic shit. I think the lowest point today was CNN camping outside the houses of the prospective VPs, as if they were going to crack, jump outside in their pajamas and reveal the special dance that she or he will do with Obombs in Springfield tomorrow. The AP is all over it -- thanks AP.

I see some pretty rough patches for Obombs in the next few months, partly because McCain is doing all too well with being subdued -- which apparently Americans think he's really like, and that they assume a President should be -- and because Obama is turning his campaign into the world's most annoying MySpace page. Some dude suggested that Obama start speaking in short sentences -- might as well start speaking in txt cuz its whr hes going nw. Both of them are aiming at a pretty low denominator, though not "common", it still plays with some stupid assumptions on how stupid both candidates think we all are.

So who should Obombs pick? Usain Bolt. Michael Phelps is McCain's pick -- proven, but boring.

Vanities and Vacating

2008-08-22T20:34:00.003-04:00

Sticking around 3/4s of a week longer than expected means some of my long-run purchases are drying up a couple days early. Today, I used up the last of my protein powder (clearly for research) and so I asked the dude who works the shake bar at the gym how much their packets of protein were:

"So how much is one packet of protein?" I asked.

"Which one?" he responded.

"There's different kinds?" I asked.

"Yeah, there's [whole bunch of brand names that blew right over me]," he said.

"Ok, um, which one is the cheapest one?" I asked.

"Well, they're all the same price," he said.

He went back to smashing a plastic bag of ice with a large metal tube.

Anyway, last week I had to purchase a new ticket out of Venezuela. Mom had sent me some quotes from cheap fare sites, but while they were cheap up front ($675!), they had fun little fees ($220 for taxes! $50 for membership!) that made Travelocity relatively cheaper. I say "relatively" since they offered travel insurance that was $80 cheaper than the cheap fare sites, which made the actual price a couple dollars higher, but technically I'd get more for just a few more dollars.

Booking flights was an adventure in and of itself, as the Travelocity system would present me with flight options, but then reveal that the flights themselves didn't have any available seats -- after, of course, I had entered in a whole crapload of contact and billing info. Ultimately what that meant for me was that I couldn't be sure I'd get out of Caracas on the 31st, so I had to search for flight options with available seats for earlier in the week. Eventually, I got myself a ticket on the 28th -- next Thursday -- and I'll be back in Providence at about 8:30pm. Whew.

So now that I knew when the dance was, I needed to find a date. And by "date" I mean "do as much research in a week as I possibly can, maybe even collecting more data than I had done in the past four months." On Wednesday, I made my last, hour-long trip to the Biblioteca Nacional with the intention to snap some digital photos. For those of you who might be considering taking some digital photos in the BibNat, be forewarned that their digital camera has been broken for awhile (they took the pictures for you, then charged you), and so for "Derecho de Archivo", you need to make a Bsf 3.40 deposit in a nearby bank for a day's permission to take photos.

As you would expect, going to the bank to make a deposit is as annoyingly long as it is anywhere in the world. I thought it kinda funny that I was depositing small change, while everyone else in line had wads of cash to deposit into multiple accounts. And of course, when I got back to the Biblioteca, it turned out that the secretary in charge of verifying the deposits was "taking a test" (tomando una prueba, for what, I have no idea), so I went and ate my homemade lunch in the Biblioteca's canteen, which, let me say, has seen much better days (no people, no food, and literally for both).

Yesterday, I had an appointment to use the digital archives at one of the major dailies here, El Nacional. I ended up teaching the archivists how to use the boolean operators in the search engine (well, one particular operator), then spent six hours cutting-and-pasting articles onto a word document. The archivists charged .80 Bsf per page, but abetted me when I suggested that I just change the font size to "absolutely unreadable" -- "well, you're the one who's gotta deal with it in the end," one said. Of course, that meant that I could stuff in a billion articles, have in come out in 54 pages, then get home and just change the font back (or even change the font to 24 for all I care). I like to think I cleaned up there.

That plus the 10,000-plus entry qualitative data set on protests I got from a very famous, very busy, and very nice scholar makes it all seem like I did some real dirt-under-the-nails fieldwork. Really though, I was just looking at all the MILFs' boobs.

THE REDEEMING QUALITY OF THIS POST
This, stolen from the borev. New Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo and Hugo Chavez sing at Lugo's inaugural party, with I believe Chavez singing pretty much out of key (he's the dude with the off-pitch baritone). Somehow this reminds me of when Cory Aqunio announced she wasn't going to run for re-election in 1992 by changing the lyrics to "My Way" (or something like that) and singing them at some event. All of this makes Colin Powell dancing at that foreign minister's meeting a few years back seem like small-fry politics.

Now With Even More Stuck

2008-08-17T17:00:00.002-04:00

Now only fearing the worst with my ticket out of Caracas, I checked the Delta flight listings today and found out that their flights are overbooked through early September. This of course means that I can't fly out on the 31st with my Delta ticket, and if I can't do that, I've got to buy a ticket or get back to Providence very, very late -- something that I can't do, actually.

So, I had to begrudging e-mail my mom and my tita to see about a subsidy. I'm not quite sure yet what I can say about this leg of my trip that's been unambiguously good.

IN OTHER NEWS
Excellent review of the polling numbers from Bolivia's referendum last week (stolen from BoRev, who stole them from Inka Kola). In Otto's final analysis, it's not the department of Santa Cruz that wants autonomy, it's its capital city. Santa Cruz. Interesting stuff.

Dogs Ate My Brains

2008-08-15T18:21:00.003-04:00

Ouch, my brain. Sfgate posted this story about a couple who were arrested after breaking their dogs out of Animal Control. But, wow, the first sentence was just a brain buster:

A couple who received a $210,000 settlement from the city of Richmond after police shot and killed their pit bull are in custody after two of their other pit bulls - abducted from a Sacramento County animal shelter after attacking a utility worker - were shot and killed by a sheriff's detective.

When you read the rest of the story, the whole ordeal is pretty crazy: a couple had a dog, the police shot it, the couple get a big settlement, their new dogs get impounded for attacking a utilities worker, they break the dogs out of jail, the cops come after them for robbing an old lady, their dogs attack another maintenance worker, the cops shoot the dogs. So I guess that sentence is as close as you can get to a summary of what happened.

Mentality

2008-08-14T11:25:00.003-04:00

Well, missed these guys. Luckily, I know someone who knows someone who knows someone in that group. Otherwise, today I'm gonna run it backwards and hit the gym before running up some more false leads.

Today's ruminations take us back to the Philippines, or rather, all those phrases that people tritely use to describe some sort of trait that we collectively share. Actually, I could only come up with two that I find fairly annoying:

- Filipino ingenuity (this is good, "we're not lazy!")
- Filipino mentality (almost always bad, "we're impatient, etc.")

If you think hard enough about it, Filipino ingenuity sometimes abets the Filipino mentality. In other words, we're too smart for our own good. Ah but for a nation whose bureaucratic elite speaks in pedantic, outdated mixed metaphors, this is par for the course.

The Church Shows Up To the Party

2008-08-11T11:35:00.003-04:00

Well, I mean, there were always sorta hanging around, but now that Ecuador is ready to approve a draft constitution next month, the Ecuadorian Catholic Church is flexing its muscle, calling the new constitution "abortist." Still, when you look at how involved the Catholic Church is in the Philippines (or, for some people, how it should be involved, which speaks to its clout in politics), the Ecuadorian church seems a little lazy.

What is more interesting to me in that article is that the Vice President went out of his way to reassure people that the new Constitution actually supports the Catholic view of life -- "I invite those who don't understand to defer [fuck, how do you translate "acudir"?] to a science book. Conception begins from the moment in which the sperm fertilizes the egg, and if the Constitution declares that from that moment it will protect life, there's no turning back." For the Church's part, they want the thing to say something far more explicit, since they believe without specific anti-abortion language, the door is still left open.

Again, this Ecuadorian "Revolucion Ciudadana" is significantly different from Chavez's "Revolucion Bolivariana": when this issue came up a few months ago, it was Correa himself that tempered (or gave in to the Church, depending on who you ask) the calls for pushing the document in directions that would completely piss off the church (gay marriage, abortion). Also, if I can find the opinion piece, the opposition nailed him for being a flip-flopper. Now, for what I can tell, the Church is just being the Church. But for what it's worth, this document picks its fights fairly well.

The Race To The Pooper

2008-08-10T20:50:00.002-04:00

Sundays have been my "splurging" days since I started my fieldwork -- there's nothing like hearing about the immorality of excess at Mass, then eating until you're about to burst. Though today started out like a research day: head to a bookstore in Paseo Las Mercedes, buy a ton of books, go home and sleep on said books until you have to actually open them in three months when you finally get off your ass and start writing your dissertation.

Anyway, after carefully plotting out my Metro and Metrobus routes (which, of course, turned out to be wrong), I made it to Paseo Las Mercedes and found out that (a) the place looks like the inside of a Chinese restaurant and (b) nearly every shop in there was closed, including the bookstore. So, figuring I might as well make a day of it, I hopped on the next Metrobus I could find and decided to go on a little cruise.

That cruise ended up being nearly an hour long, but I did get to see some parts of Las Mercedes, La Trinidad, and a couple more malls before the bus actually went back over its own route, then branched off to head to the Altamira Metro station. I was half-asleep when we stopped, jolted to life since the Metrobus drivers are the most meticulous drivers in all of Caracas, and thus must stop exactly at their well-designated bus stops (he backed up and I did sort of a snort-tip-back move).

Plaza Altamira was abuzz. "Abuzz" because the Chavez youth had a noisy speaker setup, rallying tens upon tens of people to support Evo Morales in his recall referendum (he won!). I thought this was a fairly strange place to hold a rally, especially since Altamira is like enemy territory for the Chavez crowd (which would explain the paucity of people). I hung around for a bit, but there wasn't too much to see: significantly more kids with dreadlocks than emo haircuts, older people decked out in their Chavez red, and some ladies carrying wiphalas.

I started wandering around somewhat aimlessly, looking for something extravagant to eat, but at a place where they'd be unlikely to give me dirty looks for speaking strangely-accented Spanish and looking like a Peruvian or Ecuadorian or any other "darker-skinned" Latin American. I settled on a pretty popular burger joint in CC San Ignacio where, damning the dollars (er, bolivares), I ordered their most horribly gigantic burger with all the fixings -- sauteed onions, mushrooms, a pretty sizable slab of cheddar cheese, and bacon. When the cashier asked me how I wanted the burger done, I fought with myself: should I order it well-done, but without knowing exactly how to say "well-done" in Spanish; or should I order it medium, since I can say that, it'll taste better, but I might die of salmonella? I ordered it done medium.

After my vibrating coaster called me back to the counter, I saw that they didn't skimp on the toppings, and I noticed that once you got your burger, you then went through what was basically a salad bar, adding as many vegetables as possible to your already-overloaded sandwich. Figuring the sad-looking lettuce sitting in a few millimeters of water wasn't gonna help too much with the flavor, I skipped ahead to the pickles and the jalapenos (lots of em). After trying to smush the burger down so I could hold it, I just went with a strong grip and before I knew it, I had wolfed it down in less than 5 minutes. There were a few condiment casualties, but I could only imagine what the people who stacked their burgers up with three inches of alfalfa sprouts were dealing with. Actually, after eating, I had a moment of middle-class anxiety, as I noticed some ladies who had piled on the veggies on their burgers, eating with a fork and knife. Luckily, my status fears were relieved when I saw the people behind me chowing down like the barbarians us middle-class people really are.

Fast-forwarding a bit, I made it back to Macaracuay with enough time for a 10-minute catnap before I had to leave for Mass, and as per tradition, I did some grocery shopping on the way back home. Today's impulse buys: fruits, and lots of (lotsuv) them. After a strange moment with the checkout lady and my tub of yogurt, I made it home, cut up my papaya, washed my grapes, then proceeded to eat said grapes for dinner -- one pound (more or less) in about 15 minutes.

So the question is, which one of my water-wasting, land-destroying meals will make me have bad stool -- the medium-done burger or the pound of grapes? Or, will they meet in my gut and create an alliance so unshakable that the only way to defeat it is to read War and Peace on the toilet? Only time will tell.

REDEEMING QUALITY OF THIS POST
This.

Oslec Puts Logic In Jail

2008-08-08T19:15:00.003-04:00

Somehow I stumbled upon this. If you know me, then you know what I'm doing right now. Problem is, this is really way out of my league. Let's see how long it takes me to get something that looks like it down.

Also, I stumbled upon this. Um, this makes me want to do other things.

Also, I'm sorta torn about this vid. It's of a Laura Branigan song, but it's pro-GMA. If anything, it proves that once the opposition loses the support of the Church, then you lose the support of the "Dancing Inmates" (mmm exploitation), and then you lose the support of the world.

Not Cool Venezuela, Not Cool

2008-08-08T13:12:00.002-04:00

So it's been awhile. I made it up to Boston and felt re-invigorated, rejuvenated, etc. then made it back here to the Vz. After a day of strange jet lag (Venezuela is 30 minutes behind East Coast Time), I tried to scheme my quick-and-dirty last two weeks of data gathering and came up with a reasonable plan to smash the bookstores, order copies, and grab data sets.

Then, I got an e-mail from the organizer of the APSA panel I signed up for back in December. This prompted me to check up on my flight outtasheres and back to the PVD, and my worst fears came true: for nearly three weeks straight, Delta's outbound flights from Caracas are overbooked.

I'm stuck here until at least August 31st -- a week more than I'd like, and a good day after the APSA panel. I e-mailed the organizer to apologize, and here I am now, trying to figure out how I'm gonna get out of here. Granted, it's just a week longer, but as you already know, I sorta want out, AND there's a few logistical things I want and need to get done before classes start up again (e.g. buy pillows, go to meetings, etc.).

Pillows are important.

Anyway, knowing I have an extra week isn't exactly "liberating", though now taking out extra dollars before I left Boston is turning out to be a pretty big deal -- though it's sorta putting a damper on the idea that I was gonna use that money to buy books. A week more of work (provided I work) might turn out to be game-breaking for my diss. Who knows?

In any case, I hope the torture doesn't extend itself by default.

Going to Boston, Ecuador Makes Me Happy

2008-07-30T22:35:00.002-04:00

So two good things to look forward to: (1) I'm going to Boston for ASA, and (2) Ecuador's constitution is reflective of its middle-class origins, which means I'm suddenly more relevant.

The ASA trip is (well I hope it will be) a real "rest" and a good time to refocus with three weeks left in the Vz. I'm staying with my cohort-mate Laura and her husband Ken outside of Boston -- which means I'll have friends again! My social calendar is filling up as if I were trolling the streets of La Mariscal again. That plus a low-key roundtable presentation on Sunday morning and meeting with Jose (my diss advisor) means I have time to be the dilettante that I want to be.

As for Ecuador, I'd link you a couple links, but take it from me: while the foreign press is nailing the newly-approved draft as another notch in the tree of socialist populism, it's fairly moderate for all the socialist hype, Correa has had to lay the smackdown on people's pet projects (the right to women's sexual pleasure), and I think the innovative institutional move of letting presidents dissolve congress, but also immediately putting themselves up for re-election as well. And, they can only do that once.

The critics lambasting the document for its re-election clause immediately link it to Chavez's failed amendment for indefinite re-election, but such calls are not endemic of "socialist" countries: Colombia's Uribe has been trying to put himself up for re-election, with little to no concern on the part of the foreign press. What, of course, would be truly neat is if Correa chooses not to run again -- which, if his popularity drops, he might actually do, since he's an avid poll-watcher -- something that Chavez does not do, unless its in his favor.

But all of this is the medium-term result of the "Revolucion Ciudadana" that began with the Forajidos and the self-assertion of Ecuador's middle class. For what it's worth, the Ecuadorian middle class (its emigrant and Serrano strands) have been left-leaning for quite some time now -- "leaning" because they're still fairly racist, but suffered in dramatic ways during the late 90's dance with neoliberal reform. Their "Que Se Vayan Todos" attitude -- perhaps borrowed from the Argentines -- is far more explicitly anti-political class than Venezuela's right-leaning "anticorruption" middle class. And while it remains to be seen if they'll be happy with the possible new institutional regime, they appear more willing to keep an eye out on Correa than to give him a free pass. For his part, Correa will be watching the polls.

It brings up some differences in how academics describe the manifestation of modern middle classes in Venezuela and Ecuador. Granted in the Habermasian sense, both the failed coup against Chavez in 2002 and the Rebelion de los Forajidos in Ecuador in 2005 were extra-institutional responses to government unaccountability, both were tinged negatively with racist and certainly classist undertones (well, overtones), and both were moments of Durkheimian "collective effervescence", you could not see two more different manifestations of class in the academic literature. Short form, Venezuela's middle class was (is) disempowered, shrinking, leaderless, needing to be revived, and thus, unable and unwilling to participate in the political life of the country (read: the source of instability) -- explaining for many the end of party politics and Chavez's "blank check" -- while the Ecuadorian middle class is revolutionary, self-conscious, emergent, and a manifestation of "civic republicanism" as a response to both oligarchical politics and neoliberal economics -- reviving the term "ciudadano" as a person not only with rights, but with responsibilities. Perhaps had Chavez been removed permanently after 2002, we might see more adulation, but from what I've read, the opposition was not fawning over its middle-class base, nor has there been anything but lament.

Anyway, that was more for me than it was for you and subject to lotsa change. But, it's fairly interesting. To me. And maybe whomever God made for me to marry.

"In Sudden Shift to Center, Obama Calls For Troops To Come Only Halfway Home"

2008-07-23T11:41:00.003-04:00

I should put a linky to Don Asmussen's Bad Reporter on the blog. I've talked about his stuff before -- especially the one about the Runaway Bridge being found in a cup of Wendy's chili. Don't remember that? It's topical humor!

Anyway, here's today's Bad Reporter:

California -- And America -- Laught at Rhode Island (Again)

2008-07-22T18:40:00.002-04:00

A quickie: the RI State Police caught a dude from North Providence with a BAC of .491, or, just shy of not actually being alive. Of course, where did I learn about this? Sfgate through the AP.

Rhode Island continues to be the New Jersey of New England.

Too Much Slate, Not Enough Feist

2008-07-17T13:44:00.002-04:00

Because I hate doing work now, all I do is read Slate. But, Leslie Feist's bangs have made me less guilty: Slate linked a vid of Feist singing "1, 2, 3, 4" on Sesame Street. Aside from me thinking that Feist and I should make out (soon, preferably), I thought of a little more awkward rendition of pop-songs-with-numbers-translated-into-counting-songs-for-Sesame-Street.

In between not working and levelling up Strikebird on City of Villains, I'm arranging "One Evening" for Vox, as per my non-denial of my a-cappella past. Clearly, I'm contributing to society.

More A-Cappella Nerds Hate Themselves

2008-07-16T14:23:00.005-04:00

So if you recall a few months ago, I talked a little bit about an upcoming book by GQ editor Mickey Rapkin on collegiate a-cappella. I haven't been back in the country yet to get a copy, but so far I've found out that at least two people have read it: Bill Hare, producer extraordinaire; and Nina Shen Rastogi, yep, you guessed it, a writer from Slate.com.

Nina's piece from Slate touches on that strange self-denial that apparently lots of people go through from being part of a collegiate a-cappella group, woven into her criticisms of Rapkin's book. Nina admits begrudgingly that she "snapped [her] fingers on the downbeat" with Yale's Mixed Company. By the by, the RARB review for Mixed Company's 2000 album "Change of Plans" is still one of my all-time favorites for RARB snarkiness.

But Nina picks up what does suck about collegiate a-cappella: "Perhaps most damning of all is the fact that a cappella is so painfully earnest, so distressingly eager to please" As I've mentioned before, collegiate a-cappella's song selection shows us how terrible our taste in music is (Guster about a billion times, Staind?) But Mixed Company, by way of a relevant example, expects people to pay $20 for a concert recording (and a recent one, at that) of such overdone songs as "One Fine Day" and "Walking In Memphis" (which the CoCoBeaux deemed so good nearly 10 years after it debut for them, they sang it in their first losing appearance at ICCAs). In other words, the vast majority of collegiate a-cappella doesn't take musical risks -- unless I'm missing some sort of dangerous experimental arrangement of "Just Once" -- and when it does (Staind), it just pales in comparison to the original song. Then you have your "supergroups" who can do basically just about anything, because they define the genre for its purists, for lack of a better term, but for the most part can be shrugged off by lots of groups since "we want to sound pure" (i.e. suck). But why?

To the extent that Nina admits the suckiness of a-cappella as a genre ("The bands most frequently covered on the circuit are uniformly schlocky: Coldplay, Maroon 5, Billy Joel, Journey"), she suggests that what Rapkin sorely misses is a-cappella as camaraderie: that as a nerd from the suburbs who didn't know all the New Yorker bylines (now that she works for Slate -- the idiot's guide to being too cool for school -- I bet she knows all of them now), she basically felt a-cappella was a cushion for middle-class people moving into the rarefied air of elite Yale. Is the short life of being an "a-cappella singer" determined by its nerdiness or by how your particular group related to class distinctions in the school as a whole? Mixed Company proudly touts itself as a feeder group to more prestigious ones. Once you "get it" -- that is, you've figured out how to maneuver among elites -- why recall your rise to the top? This is collegiate a-cappella we're talking about here, not professional; the dynamics of class (and race and gender) are still completely ignored.

Now that's a little brutal, but why not be subversive? Why not join a group to say "fuck you" from the inside? Why aren't their politically-themed groups, other than the ones who emphasize particular cultural or religious traditions -- do Christian a-cappella groups sing pro-life songs (I'm guessing no). How many groups sing Rage Against the Machine? How many groups sing poorly on purpose (at least I hope so...)? The point is, if you're in a group to say "fuck you" in some way, shape or form, I think you might have a better recounting of your a-cappella days than if you were part of one that proudly displays its inferiority non-ironically. If you've joined a group to fit in, then maybe we've lost you to Slate already (which I read...)

But the point of denying collegiate a-cappella, I think, is to show how you've "come so far," that beyond maturing, you've figured out a certain degree of comfort with the habits of social class, which all those goddamn wine-and-cheeses and free trips to Japan can do to you. It's an interesting filtering mechanism, if we look at it this way.

So, of course I assume that my experience with Vox was a big enough "fuck you" to warrant my continued interest in its welfare. Indeed it has. Though on the class side, I did manage to learn how to read music, and have achieved the greatest of the great Bourdieusian scams -- convincing people I have a "natural" talent for things musical, when seriously dudes, I don't. Such is how I both proudly display my Vox colors and helped me move up in social class.

Slate Reporter + Absinthe = Accessible Coolness for Everyone!

2008-07-13T13:28:00.003-04:00

A quick one for now: Slate Magazine, if you've never read it, is for college-educated people who ask earnest questions at parties, then do non-threatening and accessible things on dares, wonder how to be a "connoisseur" without even trying (connoisseurs don't try. Thanks Bourdieu!), while trying to out-crackpot each other with logical-sounding conspiracy theories (i.e. "contrarianism") that are still conspiracy theories. It's sort of Jackass plus Weekly World News, but for people who are "totally done" with college, and who are cool enough to acknowledge that they're "open" to "other" views while drooling over Obama. It's the young dilettante's New Yorker.

Of course I read it.

Anyway, Slate often does these video reports which can be snarky, can be youtube-y in their "regular-people-doing-things-you-could-probably-do-but-would-rather-have-other-people-do-it-an- say-it's-interesting" way. Today's experiment: what happens when a post-college person drinks absinthe? The answer: an interesting-enough report wherein said reporter learns enough to talk about "the purists" while she and her friends toast to turn-of-the-century frenchies and then either (a) do actually get drunk or (b) should never, ever be hired to play drunk for TV. Though, they kinda look like they're having fun. You can learn to be stylish!

If you recall an earlier post from last year (I think around this time), my cousins and I went to a bar in Makati called Absynthe where we drank absinthe. That night ended with me singing Hey Jealousy in an ex-pat bar in front of a live band. Anyway, one of my cousins whose parents live in Sakhalin Island in Russia (!) discussed how instead of the sugar-cube-on-fire/sugar-cube-with-water-drops method of serving absinthe, the Russian bar he went to lit the cube on fire underneath a tumbler, with a straw sticking out. You then took a hit off the straw, then drank your drink. I wonder if the purists would shake their heads.

Cold Showers

2008-07-11T13:37:00.002-04:00

The water heater attachment to my shower busted itself a couple days ago (how's that for Spanish translations to English? Pass the blame onto the object. Actually though, I did nothing). Not to say it worked well before, but lukewarm water is better than cold, cold water. Actually, I think the reason the water wasn't cold before is that it warms itself in the pipes. Anyway, there's a nifty little middle-class preoccupation for you.

Trinity College sent some undergrads down here for some research. Aside from the e-mail we LASA-Venezuela people got, they sorta stuck out like a sore thumb: one dude wore his Trinity lacrosse practice jersey in the middle of the Plaza Central. It didn't look like he had any pockets, so I guess there wouldn't be much to steal from him.

Conspiracies I Want to Believe, Jumper Lahiri

2008-07-07T12:56:00.003-04:00

While my leftist inclinations usually lead me to sympathize with Chavez's sympathizers, I think sometimes they grasp at straws, for the sake of grasping. As you probably already know ('cuz I imagine that intelligent, well-read people read this blog), Ingrid Betancourt and a few other people, who, in the minds of anyone but their families -- aren't important were rescued from the FARC with no shots fired, no lives lost, with only cameras a-blazin'. Betancourt was greeted by her children, and I imagine that after six years, by now she's probably gotten around to telling her son to get a haircut.

In any case, the coincidence of her rescue with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's call for a national referendum to verify his 2006 re-election (among other things) makes me stroke my stubble. Now while I can be cynical, I don't think I can pull enough cynicism out of my butt (since I'm using it all up on Venezuela's fake boobs) to call shenanigans on the rescue just yet. Yes, while it seemed incredibly strange to have those cameras going, to manage to fool the FARC so badly, and strange the political timing, my leftist friends have to do a better job of trying to convince me.

My favorite snarky blog, BoRev.org, from speculates that the whole thing was a ransom payment gone right (here and here, in English for all us imperialists). To summarize, they speculate that Uribe paid a $20 million ransom to the FARC for the exchange, then dressed it up as a rescue to divert attention from his political scandals. In response to one report claiming just that, the Colombian defense minister is blaming the Swiss. Yes, it's as funny (ha-ha) as it sounds, but I'm not sure if it's funny in the "hmmm" sense.

Of course, as is typical of the English-language leftist reporting on the situation, not everyone subscribes to the same conspiracy theory. Venezuelanalysis says (after, of course, telling us in two earnest-sounding paragraphs not to read any other news but the pro-government Diario Vea), following a Diario Vea story (!), that

According to the article the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) had agreed to turn over Ingrid Betancourt and the other hostages to Swiss and French negotiators who agreed to arrange to pick up the hostages from various locations in two helicopters. The Colombian military got wind of the upcoming release and took control of the helicopters

So while we still have the Swiss involved (and interestingly, they're all over Latin America, usually doing social work), now it's not a $20 million bribe, but a negotiated prisoner exchange that got hijacked by the Colombian military. While we could still speculate that this was all Uribe's doing, the facts still don't come together so cleanly.

Does this mean we shouldn't read these news sources? No, but it does suggest that these news sources aren't reading each other very well. And of course reading the "mainstream" press will just get you the same account, which, while inspiring, is now boring to me and looking pretty fake. Just not "fake" in the ways that other people claim it is.

JUMPER
My landlady's son (the dude who changes my dollars for me) gave me a bunch of DVDs when I got here for my viewing pleasure. I never got around to watching any of them, 'cuz they're sorta "eh" on first glance. But, he did include a copy of February's smash hit Jumper, starring the worst actor of our generation, Hayden Christiansen, and the mildly boobtacular Mila Kunis, er, I mean Rachel Bilson. I got through about 30 or 40 minutes of it, until it started to play like a kid's movie. Even Samuel L. Jackson sucked in it, which is hard for him to do, maybe except for that movie where he develops super pot, or something like that.

Anyway, coincidentally, the Onion AV Club just did a feature on Jumper in their "I Watched This On Purpose" segment. At the end, the dude sorta liked it, but the best part, as always, are the comments. Before the comments section turned into a serious discussion about what makes a good film, people discussed two things: (1) whether or not Billy Joel sucks and (2) the title of the next film in the Jumper series. The former was a non-sequitur within a non-sequitur (a metanonsequitur), based on this observation by reviewer Josh Modell:

Before I even pressed play, anticipating watching Jumper infected my brain with the chorus of Third Eye Blind's horrible anti-suicide song "Jumper." ("I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend.") That song, in turn, always makes me think of the even more horrible "You're Only Human (Second Wind)" by Billy Joel, which features one of 1985's most annoying God-complex videos—a guy is having a bad day, so Billy Joel sings him a jaunty song, and he doesn't want to jump off a bridge anymore. And to think, people whose opinions I respect have some admiration for Billy Joel

And the latter, well, it was borne out of ironic acceptance that the boulder of sequels is going to roll down the hill again. Among some of the "entries" to Sysyphus' Jumper sweepstakes:

- Jumper 2: All Nude Revue starring Hayden Panetierre (the best one)
- Jumper II: 2 Hours of Rachel Bilson Nude (not nearly as good. Points for using roman numerals in the title)
- Jumper 2: The Nudening
- Jmpr 2: Here We Go Again!
- Jumper 2: I'd Jump 'er!
- Jump and Jumperer
- 2 Jump 2 Jumpious
- Jumper 2: This Time, It's Different Pyramids
- Jumper 2: Now Even Jumpier
- Jumperstar Galactica, Battlejump Galactica, Battlestar Jumpactica, Battlestar Galactajump
- Jumping Miss Daisy
- How To Jump A Guy in 10 Days
- Jumper II: The Wrath of Khadigan
- Jump/Off
- Runaway Jumpy
- Jumper 2: A Heartbreaking Jump of Staggering Genius
- Jumper 2: A Series of Unfortunate Jumps
- Jumper 2: Dreams from my Jumper
- Jumper 2: The Audacity of Jump
- No Jumping For Old Men
- Jumper 2: Pig in the City
- Thus Jampe Zarathustra
- Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right A B Select Jump
- Indiana Jump and the Jumperdom of the Jumping Jump

And the list goes on. All of this produced the Jumper Sequel Title/Billy Joel mash-up post:

Storm Jumper
River of Jumpers
Piano Jumper
An Innocent Jumper
Songs in the Jumper
2000 Years: The Millenial Jumper

I leave you with this: a list someone had the time to write up and code in Wikipedia.

Shirts-Off Venezuela!

2008-07-01T13:45:00.003-04:00

So July is here, and with it comes the expiration of my debit card, meaning, I guess, that I can't spend as much money as I could -- if I had money to spend. Actually, in commemoration of its death, I took my card out for a spin on Sunday and took out about Bsf 200 (roughly a little less than $100), then proceeded to make calculations in the mall about what food I could buy that wouldn't go bad in two months, probably confusing the crap out of the sales staff as I darted in and out with a pen and paper in hand.

Yes, all I can still think about is money. And honestly, that's not too far from the mindset of the people I know here in Venezuela. I'm still amazed by the incredibly full shopping carts people push around in the supermarkets (which I'm now convinced is not because of shortages.... more on that in a bit), and how people have traded in the suits and pantsuits of Quito for fake Abercrombie and tank tops with plunging necklines. I'm close to calling the Caracas lifestyle crass, but maybe even that's too generous.

I was telling Daniel yesterday about more crazy antics at my superficial gym, which, by the way, has finally decided that instead of Latin American MuchMusic playing the same songs within a 5-minute span, they'd instead play DVDs of Fatboy Slim concerts and the ubiquitous "Classic Project" video mixes, so ever present in your local Latin American bar. Anyway, one of the MILFs who works out in only a sportsbra because she's got great abs and likes to show off wanted to take pictures. She and this bodybuilder dude with a bad haircut (as most of the guys have) started to pose, but then all the other bodybuilder dudes kept telling him to take off his shirt. Of course, he obliged, and so two half-naked, over-worked out, and probably vain (probably) people took pictures of themselves at my gym.

Anyhoos, this link's from the BoRev. While BoRev's pretty funny, he's a little shouty in this post, but the point is in the chart: Venezuela sucks. So while it's not "inflation," it's "% increase in prices from the previous year", which still suggests that in the late 90s, in relative terms, prices were rising faster than they are now. So if we assume that 1997 is our index year, then in 1998, prices were 35% higher than they were in 1997, in 1999, they were 25% higher, etc. But the king of all points is that things cost a whole shitload more in this country as compared to the rest of LA.

But of course, it's not just that this country's economy has been horrible for unfunded helicopter gringo researchers, it's that the politics get kind of annoying after awhile. As a student of politics from the social side, I should have a thicker skin. But, what I dislike is that both sides -- pro and anti-Chavez -- are simply, simply messy at their work to the point where -- I will admit to the detriment of my own work -- I believe hardly anyone anymore.

Take for instance one of the more important events in the past year, other than the Referendum: the closure of RCTV in May (which as you know I feel has really risen to the challenge...). While I am in agreement with the flimsy, but comfortable response of OAS General Secretary Jose Maria Insulza (it was legal, but poorly carried out), the move appears so clearly politically-motivated that you cannot argue against it -- RCTV and Chavez weren't ever friends. And, RCTV did incite riot in 2002 when it aided Chavez's temporary deposition. So coincidentally, their license runs out, Chavez claims having to form a national channel, and they go and claim repression and the end of freedom of expression in Venezuela.

In response they've put forth two main arguments. One is that the whole deal was constitutionally-mandated and it was merely coincidental it was RCTV. The other is that RCTV's actions in 2002 justified its non-renewal of its license because of bad-faith journalism -- actions, which many gringo sympathizers point out, would never fly in the US or any other country. Problem is, these two points are ever presented in the same breath and when they are, they're not inherently compatible. Which one is it? Non-political or politically-justified?

Stuff like that frustrates me. It makes me think that there are good arguments for Chavez, but that the Chavistas haven't made their points very well and that the gringos are starstruck.

Another day in the life of get me out of here please.

Your Video Fix #5

2008-06-29T23:45:00.002-04:00

Linkity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aOjZIDhoqQ#

"Later, the two films attracted the attention of Aaron Spelling and Esther & Richard Shapiro when they were looking for an actress to play the part of Alexis Carrington in their hit TV series Dynasty. In that sense, the two films were an integral part of Collins' becoming one of the biggest TV stars of the 1980s."

Dressing Up (Sort Of) In the Vz

2008-06-26T18:00:00.005-04:00

For what Venezuela was -- an aristocratic republic (or at least it aspired to be) -- it sure ain't what it is now. You see pictures of Romulo Betancourt in a well-appointed suit, and you think nothing of it -- president wear suits, especially if they're going to be on the cover of Time. But if you spend any time watching floor debates of the Asemblea Nacional here, you can see in that Bourdieusian sense why people think this country's going to the pooper with case of the poops: checkered cotton shirts, leather jackets, suit jackets that are too long, no ties. I had this sweater when I was in high school. In other words, things that would tip you off to people either so comfortable with their class that they don't care or people so uncouth that they're not even trying. Carlos Escarra, you might ask? Nope, only some of the time -- I guess only when you're chiding your colleagues for not working with the people.

I don't know what the traditions are for dressing up in the Venezuelan National Assembly. What I do know is that even in the Philippines where you might be tempted to rock the leather jacket in 80% humidity, the legislators (some of whom have dubious class backgrounds to be "traditional" legislators) still wear barong tagalogs to work (sorry for the macabre photo), and the ladies the exciting pantsuit. Even the Cubans wear suits, so the Revolution hasn't done them in on style (errr, well, for some. The best part is that it's Chavez who's telling him to stop being a slob, basically.) That doesn't mean that the Vzs Assemblypeople don't dress up: they do, like most of us, for important occasions.

Relatedly though, and going back to the TV topic again, Globovision's reporters have been quite aggressive in calling out the sartorial choices of Chavistas. Here an interviewer calls out two students for not wearing clothes produced by Venezuelan cooperatives, and here a reporter asks how someone can support socialism if his tie and shoes are Louis Vitton. Gotcha there, bud. Now the only thing to do is to cut down these interviews into these clips and play them on your TV station as filler, which, of course, makes you even righter (as in correct). If Orwell were alive today, it would suggest, he'd be sending out mass e-mails with the last scene of Animal Farm, just like these dudes.

So for a country so obsessed with looks, it would appear that no one knows how to dress. Though as this ghetto Wiki site about business dress suggests, "Venezuelan women tend to be meticulous dressers who closely follow European fashion... You may find it an asset to wear exquisitely made watches, jewellery [sic], or other accessories made by prestigious designers." Thank you, Jackie Collins. I assume then that the excessive cleavage comes from a close following of European fashion? Doubtful. Seeing as the operative act here is "flaunt it if you've got it," and European fashion is all difficult-to-wear pieces on hangar-thin models, something ain't right here.

That doesn't say much for men, though, for whom it appears that a fanny pack, white loafers (only the kinds with rubber on the soles), and your garish AE/Abercrombie/AX t-shirt, matched with the fake jeans is on the first page of the look-book. And those are the ones that aren't buying their clothes from the Chinese almacen. For older men, it seems that you can't get away from the tucked-in polo shirt in your jeans (khaki isn't popular, it seems), with all your phones (and I do mean all) hiding in their belt clips. Or, if you're trying to be hip, you stick your iPod down your shirt and string the headphones up through your collar. For a people afraid of being mugged or kidnapped on a daily basis, these obvious displays of your consumerism seem unwarranted, or is that your cynicism showing through?

"Well-dressed" or even appropriately-dressed is a limited subset, but as many people have pointed out (all two of 'em [only post listed under the tag "cleanliness" btw] on the internets), that Vz'ers don't stank and "some street dwellers may even shave every day." Look, while slightly more people in Quito had B.O. on the Ecovia, the sheer number of suits and pantsuits in that city -- even if they were poor-fitting -- makes Caracas look like it's sartorial Gini coefficient is through the roof.

I was going to end this post with some screed about culture. I won't. I'll say this: get me out.

Your Video Fix #4

2008-06-25T16:31:00.002-04:00

Cynthia Freeman and Cosmo teach us about the mysteries of life, and how to prevent them.

Linkity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aia7IHhebFw#

Your Video Fix # 3

2008-06-24T20:30:00.003-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foEy1E2Tfdg

"The theme is the importance of recognizing the threat of totalitarianism and also a feminist message of women standing up for themselves."

Your Video Fix of Oslec's Ego 2

2008-06-24T12:43:00.003-04:00

Get me out of here. Please. Before I make more of these.

If you have problems: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXC5DGe2iwA

Link to Deepa Ranganthan's piece on changing one's sleeping habits.

Oogling. Gross, Gross Oogling.

2008-06-18T21:51:00.004-04:00

Today at the gym, all the meathead weightlifters (whom, let me say once again, lift about as much as I do and I'm half their size), all stopped their meatheady weightlifting and oogled a woman who had come in to, I guess, inquire about joining the gym. I debated earlier whether or not I'd describe her at length here, since part of me wanted to explain why this woman got so much attention, and the other part of me wanted to not be completely completely sexist (um, previous comments about short, curvy blonds notwithstanding).

Nearly the entire gym stopped lifting weights or watching a godawful Madonna concert video ("I apologize for revisionist thought," she said, followed by cheers), and while some of the women looked too -- then looked away disgusted at either her or the men -- the guys were not hiding the fact that they were burning holes in her, gawking, mumbling to each other loudly, basically giving each other mental high-fives. It was the guys that drew my attention more than anything and I thought at that moment, "fuck, no wonder some women don't want to go to the gym." It's not the first time I'd thought it (gotta keep up my liberal cred), but I guess just the absurdity of this beer commercial scene was enough to get me to make me feel bad to be a guy. I mean seriously, I felt guilty for being a dude.

For her part, I think she knew she was being watched, and whether or not she enjoyed it at all is besides the point: she never moved her head, never looked at anyone except the tour guide and I guess her mom (no, they weren't looking at her mom), and kept perhaps so poised as if she were trained to be oogled, like so many Venezuelan women aspire to be.

To be sure, I looked at her and she was stunning -- way, way out of my league, but in that way where you don't even consider thinking about it anymore -- but I tried so hard not to look that I can't even remember what her face looked like.

And so adds another rock on the scale of Venezuela, tipping it more towards "Get Me Out" than "Cool Place, Dude."

Things Are Moving

2008-06-17T13:04:00.004-04:00

THINGS ARE MOVING
I planned an "escape" of sorts on Sunday, since there was going to be a Father's Day party at the house and I didn't want to play nice. Turned out I just ate a lot too quickly, played with the kids, and then took a nap while the hurricane blew over, so to speak. It wasn't as bad as I expected, but I'm still feeling a little down.

A few days beforehand, I called up the Philippine Embassy here in Caracas to see if they had anything planned for Philippine Independence Day, which was June 12th. First of all, it became evidently clear I was speaking to a Filipina, as her Spanish was littered with "sen(y)or". I asked her if there were any cultural events happening today, and she said no. Puzzled, I said, "you have nothing planned for Philippine Independence Day?"

"Where are you calling from, sir?" she asked (the Philippines would have celebrated Independence Day the day before).

"From Caracas," I said.

I could hear her flipping through her calendar. "Oh yes, today is Independence day," she said.

"And you have nothing planned? How about this weekend?" I asked.

"No sir, I'm sorry," she said, sounding like a Philippine bureaucrat speaking Spanish.

The moral of this story is that I'd like to take credit for reminding the Philippine Embassy that it was Independence Day, but with a few days' retrospection, it could very well have been that they celebrated Independence Day on June 11th, since in the Philippines it was technically June 12th. Still, it makes very little sense for an institution whose partial task is cultural exchange to not have any events for their own country's independence on the date of said celebration. That's absolutely nuts. Of course, because Philippine bureaucrats aren't exactly the best critical thinkers in the world, either, they could have had a celebration (or might still have one), but of course, just not tell me. Minus 10 cool points to the Philippine Foreign Service.

Still, I made a research breakthrough, as I'm meeting with the National Coordinator of Clase Media Revolucionaria tomorrow. CMR is so far my only in with the group that makes more sense for me to study, Clase Media en Positivo, whose web presence probably died sometime in 2004 -- when I wasn't studying the middle class, of course. Problem is, when CMR showed up in mid-2006, two of the leaders of CMenP were cool to the idea of having a political wing to their social organization. As it is, they've been cool to the idea of maintaining their website and e-mails and I can't contact them. Nor have I been able to contact their regional branches for, well, the same reason.

While I'm absolutely grateful and relieved to snag an interview, I'm still getting the impression that nearly everything here is a mess. I had the same feeling in Ecuador, but on a "Barrington Moore" scale (blasphemy!). This "mess" sense I have here is more akin to the sense of mess I have about the Philippines: that I'm seeing and feeling that maelstrom that Marshall Berman talked about -- that Modernity throws everything up in a frenzy, while the best-laid schemes of men do more to dislodge us from what we can brace ourselves against than give us anything to grab onto, people must somehow come to grips that instability is the status quo -- however unsatisfying that is.

Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote through one of his characters in We that "There is no final revolution. Revolutions are infinite... only children fear infinity", which you could interpret in that horrible way that the wikipedia article did (by the by, points for me for remembering the rest of the quote), as a brain prop for "incomplete revolution," or to remind us (well, me) that to be modern is to live with constant change. Which, as usual, brings me back to my existentialism -- why bother to do anything, then? -- and back to my sociology -- why do people bother to do anything, then?

A billion points for editing this post to fit the title hours after it was posted. So far, I'm up one billion six or so. You've got some catching up to do, Philippine bureaucrats.

Well...

2008-06-11T17:40:00.002-04:00

Here's another amazing post entitled "Well..."

I'm still trying to get up early and be like a yuppie, minus the money. Today I managed to get up, but didn't go anywhere for having not slept well last night -- it was more hot than usual. So I've been doing some processing today, watching the film adaptation of Northanger Abbey (because of Felicity Jones), and wondering how to save money: another activity I do besides not working.

Yesterday, I was quite proud of myself for spending Bsf 4.50 on three ham-and-cheese empanadas and a cup of tamarind juice, and then was shot back down to earth when I tried out this place that weighs your ice cream (Bsf 10.90!). Plus, I thought I scooped out lemon, when in fact, it was bubble gum.

Today, I've spend Bsf 0.00, but $1,000.00 or so on my flight to Boston for ASA. Jen D suggested I stay for a bit longer in the States to recover a bit (a great idea), but I don't have the cash for it (oh well). Still, considering how much plane fares are this Summer, $1000 is par for the course and maybe even pretty decent if things get more expensive.

LOST IN TRANSLATION
TV watching here with a decent command of Spanish and speed reading skills, you get to see some strange, strange translations. Mind you, most of the stuff that's subtitled in Spanish is broadcast for the Mexican, Colombian, and Argentine markets, since, well, they don't show English-language stuff on local TV. I really have no idea what kind of people the Mexicans, Colombians, or Argentinian are like, but maybe those three countries would like to explain why there's enough softcore and unblurred breastisises to make me think this was Europe or something. Speaking of which, the amazing (terrible) film, "Dangerous Passions" was translated as "Dangerous Passions" -- but with an accent.

Two nights ago, I was watching a documentary on Indian call centers, which was pretty decent, though one scene was just absurd. An instructor who had lived in Australia was trying to teach his soon-to-be call center students Australian slang, which, if you think about it, is like two or three layers of translation as it is. But, translating that discussion into Spanish was pretty hilarious:

"Ok, who knows what this is?" (teacher points to the image of a chicken)

"Chick," one student says. They shout out different variations of "chick."

"Very close. When you want to say 'chicken' in Australian, you say 'chook'," the teacher responded.

The Spanish translation went something like this (excuse the missing accents):

"Cuando quieren decir 'pollo', digan 'pol'"

And then the teacher asked, pointing at the picture of a thumbs-up, "how do you say 'cool' or 'awesome' in Australian?"

The answer, my friends, is "bonzer". The Spanish translation substituted the word "macanudo" -- a very Argentine thing to say.

Anyway, that was strange. Here's to not going to bed on time.

Count Duckula Karaoke

2008-06-10T18:53:00.002-04:00

I wonder when I'll take this blog down the path of maturity. Though if I think about my writing-for-me-for-other-people over my lifetime, I've come a long way since my second grade writing journal, where in one entry I tried to recall the lyrics to the theme to Count Duckula from memory (I also snuck in some peeks at The Making of Star Trek to copy the terrible lyrics to that show's theme, too).

Actually, that's all I wanted to say, since I spent a good ten minutes cracking myself up trying to remember the lyrics to Count Duckula last night. As it turned out, I was confusing the lyrics to the Count Duckula outro with the Count Duckula intro. Hi-larious.

The Water War

2008-06-09T17:17:00.004-04:00

I got up pretty early this morning to try to fit in my gym time before my day started. Overall, it turned out all right and there was a very cute short, curvy, blond at the gym (this has to be some sort of pathology). Otherwise, I did get up early enough to watch the national anthem on TV (which, in contrast to the Philippines, they play in the morning instead of at the end of the broadcast day), and the song has been stuck in my head. I talked about it before in an earlier post -- it's got this little minor chord moment that's just awesometastic -- and I've been trying to remember the words all day (and the exact tune of that minor chord). It's one thing this country's got over Ecuador. Which leaves us with the question: where are the rest of the verses to this one?

Anyway, sometime overnight, a water line blew out on the subdivision's main street. The city had been doing repaving and I guess exposed the tube, and it was a matter of time before someone drove over it and loosened the fastener. When I passed by it this morning, it was in a little less than a gush, but still wasting gallons of water, sending it in a suburban waterfall down the hill.

So on the way back, I decided to be a good citizen and try to fix it. I mean, it didn't look too hard to do: two surprisingly small rubber tubes and a metal fastener that linked the two together. One plus one, right? After a few minutes of trying to coax one end into the other -- made difficult since, well, gushing water makes hollow things quite rigid -- I gave up, having known I tried and having become incredibly soaked. When I left for the biblioteca, someone threw a big piece of broken asphalt on top of it, which really didn't make much of a different in terms of the quantity of water, but did make it a little more zen-fountainy, I guess.

Of course, some idiot decided that he or she should just drive over the rock, so it cracked and now we've got a gusher in the middle of the street, as you can see above. The picture admittedly sucks: the water's shooting up at least seven feet up and now no one wants to drive over it. I kinda found it interesting that none of the neighborhood kids were out prancing underneath it, though would I really want to play on unsmoothed, exposed asphalt, even if I were under a refreshing geyser of water? Not a happy combination. Also, considering how inconsiderate these kids' parents are when they drive, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near a street (I have a hard enough time avoiding getting hit by mototaxis on the sidewalks).

Luchy said she called the municipio this morning, but followed with "since this is not the USA, you know..." Yes, I know. Some other neighbor would have fixed it already.

Death By Exchange Rate

2008-06-06T21:29:00.003-04:00

I had the fortune of living in Quito for four months in the middle of my stipend. As those of you who keep up with this blog know, now I'm ever-so-daintily perched above a giant spear aimed directly at my butt here in Venezuela. Well, in terms of money, not like in terms of being attacked by unknown tribes in the Amazon. Said spear grows closer and moves away at the invisible hand of the black market exchange rate of the dollar.

I'd link you to stuff, but most of it's in Spanish, however the Wall Street Journal did a story just today on the topic. As it points out, Chavez is selling a whole bunch of dollar bonds to fight off the black market, which is funny since the best way to end the black market would be to let the damn exchange rate float. As a friend said, this country is like studying Market Distortion 101.

And then, of course, is my growing obsession with the City of Heroes/City of Villains market, where you can sell imaginary things like "Ancient Artifacts" for imaginary money (well, it's not really money in-game, either). It's like playing the stock market, only except you don't make real cash and you waste just as much time in real life.

Make A Hot Girl Laugh: Quinn It To Win It (Episode 9)

2008-06-06T11:39:00.001-04:00

Ok, so besides Rob Schneider (good company!), which Filipino comic is the funniest to non-Filipino people? Maybe (not) this guy? I really wanted him to finish the "once you go Filipino..." joke.

Arroz a la Cubana: Take that, Cuba!

2008-06-05T20:59:00.005-04:00

I just got an e-mail from my friend Greg who's basically going the long way from Ecuador to the Brazilian coast. It's a great e-mail, all adventure and pushing boats off sandbars: stuff you'd probably not see in this blog since (1) I'm not quite sure I could take it and (2) the fact that my I'm my mother's son would be plainly obvious as I'd have too many things bagged in plastic "so they wouldn't get dusty" or in this case, wet. But good luck to Greg as he is about to have the most panty-dropping stories to tell until panties become obsolete.

Anyway, what I got instead is food, that is, my adventures in making it, which aren't really that adventurous but again, what do I do that is? The more I think about it, I really should have figured this stuff out a long time ago -- cooking, that is -- since it's both apparently genetic (like me playing golf...) and absolutely necessary if I want to live past 28. As I'm still alive as I write this blog (but as Lisa Loeb says "dying since the day [I was] born"), I figure I've done all right in the feeding myself department, though not panty-droppingly well, let's say.

I have, however, become an expert at creating perfectly rounded arepas in the arepero and am working on getting them impeccable on the skillet, too. As a Filipino, bread is sort of a funny contrivance for people who haven't figured out how to boil rice. But, as a Filipino without a rice cooker and not so much time on his hands, arepas manage to fill a void that satiates my carb cravings while preventing me from sullying my fingers with loaf bread (by burning them. a lot).

But I've been homesick or depressed or one or both of those things, so I made some rice on the stove and I asked my mom for the recipe for arroz a la cubana -- something she makes a lot of... a LOT of... and freezes in Gladlock stacks in the freezer like an igloo of ground beef and raisins. The woman Luchy has come during the day made some ground beef dish a couple weeks ago, and I think I was the only one who ate it and used it to fill my arepas. All it did was, though, remind me of arroz a la cubana.

If you look above, you'll see that I need to work on making poached eggs. I did some following, some adjusting of my mom's recipe. Next time I'll cut down a bit on the soy sauce, continue to put a ton of pepper in it, and maybe put a few more raisins in, but overall it turned out all right. I gave some to Luchy to try and she cleaned out her bowl.

So now I've got about five or six days of cubana to eat, which means we'll find out soon how cubana tastes in an arepa.

Obama

2008-06-04T15:02:00.002-04:00

So Barack Obama became the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic Party yesterday. I bet you knew that already, though. Did you know that he's the first black man to ever win the presidential nomination of a major party? Yes, it's true: no black men ever were nominated as presidential candidates for the Democratic-Republicans or Whigs (I checked).

Did you know that he was black? For all intents and purposes, he's run as "a black man", though a year ago Time said he wasn't black enough (err, well, it finally concluded he was too black). And after Iowa, Christopher Hitchens was his usual crumudgeony self, declaring "The more that people claim Obama's mere identity to be a 'breakthrough,' the more they demonstrate that they have failed to emancipate themselves from the original categories of identity that acted as a fetter upon clear thought."

You also probably already know that Obama is half-white, and his father was from Kenya, which in some circles (e.g. this piece by Salon a year ago) by doesn't make him "black" as in "descended-from-slaves". On that point, The Guardian's Gary Younge tries Hitchens' argument without being so mean, but maybe by being too liberal arts:

Most intriguing, in all of this, is how those who wish to police these racial borders claim that Obama's mixed-race heritage denies him essential blackness. They certainly must be forgetting the famous black people who are of mixed-race parentage, from Bob Marley to Halle Berry; or the basic truth that race has no basis in biology or science; or that, thanks to mass rape during the slave trade, nearly all African-Americans are actually mixed-race

Or, as someone said during a school-wide meeting at Conn a few years ago, "when I see the ceiling, I don't see white, but I see beige". As a professor put it to me afterwards, "after the artists started talking about the color of the ceiling, I was outta there."

But Obama is definitely black enough for people to be afraid he could get shot -- an early Secret Service detail, his wife talking about it candidly on TV (then getting misquoted). As our history shows, these aren't unsubstantiated fears. Though, if Wolf Blitzer's "best political team on television" was right, Obama's nomination was historic... by of course, trying to one-up each other on important dates, such as:

- 1808, the year the slave trade was abolished (initially stated as "200 years ago, slavery was ended)
- 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated (40 years ago)
- 1961, the year of the Freedom Riders. "And in that year, Barack Obama was born."

All of those were followed with "we've come so far." Yes we have, thank you.

Actually though, I think those of us young minority types in our twenties might look at Obama and go both "damn, finally" and "oh, shit, is THAT what I'm gonna become in twenty years?" Because seriously, while he's my candidate, the guy is a goof. For example, how many forty six year-old people can pull this off with cheers instead of laughs? Exactly one: Barack Obama. Or, manage to do a fist-bump with his wife at a 20,000 person rally (Slate did a nice little summary of how the press tried to figure it out, proving that the press is white). Yes, yes, inspiring (I'm inspired), a leader (he's leading), etc., but come on. This isn't "street Obama" leaking out, this is an upper-middle class, Harvard-educated lawyer doing shit that he does at home, maybe in his underwear when no one's looking. It's hilarious, or bemusing, or quirky, but not ironic -- he's not Rainn Wilson at the Grammys (whom I guess plays himself?). In other words, none of this is Obama looking for street cred or him being black or white, but someone on the tail end of our generation -- just cool enough to be charming, innocuous enough for all you oldies to think highly of him: the psychic projection of all us hopeful youth, but with enough stiffness to nag at our subconscious, pre-midlife midlife crises.

Remember, he doesn't bowl well, which has much less to do with his race as it does his class. Though speaking as a Filipino who's only bowled over 110 once in his life and can't hit a pool ball for shit (though I can play basketball. So can Obama, incidentally: "I've got skills", not, btw, "skillz." Oh, and he could dunk.), I may identify with Obama more than I can make fun of him. But what I'm really saying is that when he's misunderstood, we're all pretty much misunderstood, and while we can treat race matter-of-factly in our own lives, explaining that experience it is still a minefield instead of hopscotch.

We already know he's sort of an elitist, but then again, most of us believe that the working class is being duped (prolly not). But the race issue was enough for Clinton to carry West Virginia, so while it's not guns or religion that has allegedly swung the "middle class" to the right, lay down another race mine and watch your opponent spend time trying to defuse it, while Americans -- whom, like all humans, are capable of thinking harder about race -- would rather just walk around instead of help.

So anyway, to make this long post end, I'll say this: if the Clinton era is over -- meaning cynical liberal democratic calculations are out -- then we have to try a little harder to open up.

Not Ecuavoley

2008-06-01T18:51:00.002-04:00

I'm trying to reset my body clock so I can face the week without driving my cortisol levels through the roof and taking three-hour naps before bedtime, which as you can imagine, move bedtime three hours later. I'm feeling a little drowsy right now, probably because I half-forced myself to wake up "early" (read: 11am) and then made myself traipse around Caracas to look for an umbrella.*

I decided to walk to the metro station from the house today and considering that I beat the bus there, I may just walk the 20 or so minutes every day. It's not a trip I'd take at night unless I were in a car; there's some spaces under overpasses, crosswalks over freeway exits, and some blind corners -- each of which will probably kill me, maybe in a different way (so many ways to die!) I pass over the River Guaire on the way to the station, which despite last night's rainstorm, wasn't that high. It's quite an unexciting sight: murky brown water flowing over a concrete riverbed, which evoked images of Foster City and downtown Providence, but built for utility, not for beauty (as if Foster City got it right, though).

It seems that Caracas on Sundays is less noisy, either because there are less cars on the road, people are relaxed enough to not hit their horns, or both. The northernmost highway -- La Cota Mil, named so because it reaches 902m above sea level (close!) -- is closed to vehicular traffic and opened to bicyclers and pedestrians. It had rained a bit last night had remained a bit brisk and overcast today, so the air was a bit cleaner and it wasn't terribly hot. All in all, not a bad day for a stroll.

So, I made a detour at Parque del Este, one of Caracas' main green spaces. It's a strange park, I have to say. It seems like they definitely close it down at night -- there's only one entrance and its gated -- and the pedestrian pathways that snake around the premises are very, very wide, almost as if people were as wide as cars. Despite that, it feels far more compact than let's say La Carolina, since it's not built to be as "open" to the surrounding city. The grassy areas aren't as well-kempt: muddy mostly, a bit burnt, overused. And there are some zoo exhibits that either seem empty (the open-air jaguar one, especially) or annoying (the bird cages with very annoying parrots), and a reconstruction of Francisco de Miranda's ship, the Leander, but it seems to have stalled (being built since 2006 with just the keel and part of the hull). But the park was still filled with people happily enjoying their Sunday, people having birthday parties; people sitting on benches, looking at fenced-in grass; and people making out.

What stuck out is that people were playing actual volleyball, not the weak-ass "volleyball" as played by my friends in Ecuador. In a previous post, I noted how Ecuavoley had some strange rules (palming the ball, running spikes [maybe no spikes?]). Since we're in the Vz now, all I saw were dudes clearly not built for volleyball playing a fast-paced game of bumping, setting, and spiking THE HELL out of the ball. It was a power game -- the object being to spike the shit out of the ball, so that it'd clobber some dude in the face. That being said, I saw some pretty decent returns, but no blocks whatsoever. Let's just say that playing long hours at La Carolina will not save any of those Ecuadudes in a game here.

To end, two people asked me for directions today. I'm so totally native. Plus, I'm being called "chamo" ("kid"). Nothing new there.

*Sadly, I still can't find an umbrella outside of rainy days, meaning I'll have to suck it up and buy one while in the process of getting wet.

Caesar's Trade Imbalance With God

2008-05-31T21:25:00.002-04:00

Today's important question: do I give God the official exchange rate or the black market rate during the offertory?

Speaking of exchange rates, apparently we're down to somewhere around 2.9 or 3 to 1, which means I lose out on an extra Bsf 20. I did manage to save about Bsf 50 this month, which is all right, considering I spent a lot on sunk costs (e.g. my cell phone from which I've made 5 calls). Still, I took a look at my statement today, in lamentation for my last paycheck from Brown, and it looks like I'll be able to survive the summer, due to my inability to correctly multiply by the number 4.

It still looks like a long summer, mostly of work, with very little play. I e-mailed the Venezuela Fulbrighters the other day and got back two responses -- one from Caroline who's out in Merida (far), and from one named Evan who's been very busy as of late. So far, I've made lots of professional acquaintances, but not so many non-professional ones. I guess if I just keep going to work I'll eventually bump into someone, but I'm all for imagining this is just like my life in Providence, which usually has me spending weekends playing basketball and writing blog posts.

I Gotta Do Better

2008-05-27T22:57:00.003-04:00

Actually, that last post wasn't so hot. I'm not sure if I'm lusting or complaining, and either way, it was way too gratuitous. I'll leave it up there because I think "mammary tops" is just spiffy.

Boobs, Part 1

2008-05-27T21:41:00.002-04:00

To begin, a scene from today's adventure. After I got a little less lost today, took a nap in the CENDES library, and had another meeting, I headed over to the Ciudad Universitaria metro station to begin my trip home. When you buy your little train ticket, you've got two options: either wait in line to buy it from the kiosk, or wait in line to use the ticket dispenser machines (which, by the way, look like ancient BART ticket machines). The advantage, I guess, of the kiosk is that at Ciudad Universitaria, there's a little rope that helps to define where the line is. The fun of the ticket dispensers is that they sometimes don't take the coins you drop in, and people have less respect for the line -- cutters, nudgers, etc.

Today, I went to the ticket dispenser line, awaiting my fate of having to re-feed my coins in the machine while the people behind me jockeyed for position, when some dude pulling a rolling carry-on bag, with his shirt creepily unbuttoned, and his face unstylishly 5 o'clock shadowed pulled up right next to me. He asked a few questions about the ticket machine to the kid in front of me, then ASKED HIM TO BUY HIM A TICKET. Granted, maybe he was from out of town, but even then, do you ask someone to buy your ticket for you? That's cutting. And cutting gets your name put on the board if the teacher catches you.

Anyway, second, to get you all in the mood: aural sex (thanks JSTOR!)

So as I promised, I was going to talk about boobs today, more specifically, how every woman here has huge boobs and how there's no way around them: they're in your face all the time. Let's talk about my gym. You know those commercials where all the women exercise in sports bras? Well, welcome to my gym. Except imagine the vast majority of those women are forty and older, probably with kids, and (because of that?) with enough cleavage that two scoops of sports bra couldn't hold them back. Granted my gym has basically two client bases: meathead weightlifters, some of whom I can actually out-lift (mmm I love to compensate!); and said mommies. Both groups like to flaunt what they've got, and that often means wearing as small a top as possible. As you might imagine, this prevents anyone but me -- apparently -- from running on the treadmills, lest they bounce all over the place. You would be hard-pressed to see any woman at my gym wearing a t-shirt, unless said t-shirt had an incredibly low neckline.

But the public display of mammary tops (a medical term. I just invented it) is not limited to the gym. This isn't Quito and its pantsuit denizens, this is Caracas and be it the weather or something else, the pantsuit gives way to the tank top that somehow squishes the boobies together and lifts them up so that everyone's cleavage is about a mile deep. People aren't walking around naked, but they're certainly walking around confidently.

So everyone's got breasts. Funny then how the most attractive person I've seen here was nowhere near the norm. She was wearing a long fuschia strapless dress (in the middle of the day), with fuschia flip flops, carrying a fuschia purse, with a fuschia hoodie tied around her waist. She laughed as she ordered her Japanese food. And she goofily kept readjusting her dress since, well, there really wasn't much to hold it up. Later, I saw her nearly skipping along in the mall while her male companion sheepishly carried their tray.

Clearly, I've got strange taste in women, as the "I-Like-Your-Bangs" Debacle of 2008 shows. But if this post is any indication, I've clearly not grown up very much.

Lost, Part 1

2008-05-26T22:06:00.003-04:00

LOST, PART 1
I couldn't sleep last night. Venezuela has decided to begin its rainy season, and the downside of having windows that don't close is that once it starts pouring, the sound of the rain is deafening (plus the mosquitoes get in my room). I really shouldn't just blame the rain I guess I can be enough of a man to blame myself on this one: since I've been lonely and depressed, I've been staying up late, and so I jetlagged myself for Sunday night and didn't really get to sleep until about 2am. I did, however, get to see Chronicles of Riddick and some lame show with Dylan McDermott in it. I also like how I made that sound like that was some sort of appropriate consolation prize.

Anyway, I got up at 6:45 to try to eat, get dressed, and figure out where to go -- my plan was to get to the opening session of the LASA conference at the UCV, then head over to CENDES, which I thought was on campus (foreshadowing, a popular literary technique), for a 10am meeting. The internet connection was wonky last night (and finally not the reason I stayed up!), so I multitasked over an arepa with peach jelly while Google mapping. Turned out, however, that CENDES was nowhere near UCV, and so I decided to just try to make my meeting at CENDES and show up to the LASA conference tomorrow.

I timed myself as I waited for the Metrobus to the Metro station. It was 9am when I arrived at the stop, and it took the bus 15 minutes to get to the station, and to Plaza Venezuela (where I figured it'd be easy to catch a bus to CENDES), it was about another 20 minutes. So, there I was in Plaza Venezuela, fairly confident about what I was supposed to do next: take a metrobus to Colinas de Bello Monte, get off at the sixth stop, then walk a bit downhill to Avenida Neveri and voila, I'd be at CENDES.

Of course, I couldn't figure out for the life of me where the bus stops were. So I walked around, trying not to look lost, until I decided to trust my sense of direction and head south towards Colinas de Bello Monte and see if I could hoof it. Once I crossed Bello Monte -- a pretty large street -- I followed a sign that pointed towards Av. Neveri and figured I'd be all right if I just kept going. But I ended up in a very residential area after walking uphill for a while, and as doubt started to creep into my mind, eventually I asked a dude working at a kiosk where Avenida Neveri was. He seemed sort of ticked off that I had interrupted him or something (I don't think I did), and he said I had a bit more walking to do -- uphill.

So uphill I went. And finally, I arrived at an intersection and Av. Neveri. So all I had to do now was find the CENDES building and I'd be early for my meeting. Well, after walking up the wrong street, and then finally walking up Neveri, I came to another really residential area. I asked a security guard at a construction site where I should go, and he said that I had a long, LOOOOOOOOONG way to walk, all the way uphill, then "down down down," he said.

I figured it couldn't have been that long, so I kept going uphill. Mind you, I decided to wear my boots today and my suit jacket, first impressions and all, and so after my second blister on my right foot and sweating through my shirt, I decided to stop in the shade and call up Luchy. She had no idea. I called up Lissette, the sociologist daughter-in-law, and she had a better idea of where it was, but ultimately her advice was to take a taxi. So I took a taxi (I was pretty far, but not that far. But far enough). Long story short, I had my meeting, I have to go back tomorrow, and I read some books.

TOMORROW: Boobs, Part 1

TV in Venezuela

2008-05-24T21:35:00.003-04:00

Unlike my house in Quito, this place is equipped with multiple TVs. Luchy and Pablo's room has the flatscreen, and they eat their meals in front of it. My room has a small TV, but it's got cable and about a hundred channels. And downstairs is another small TV that keeps me company when I eat.

So I watch a lot of TV, mainly because work is boring and I have no friends. As I think I mentioned before, if you get up early enough, you can sing the national anthem either karaoke or in sign language on nearly all the channels. And, I think I mentioned in the same breath that Chavez is all over the media. In fact today, he had a press conference/early Alo Presidente that was carried by nearly every single TV station, except I think for one or two. And on those other channels: telenovelas from Colombia. As a statement of the absurdity of politics, I think they missed the mark a bit.

One of those channels, RCTV, is one of the few anti-Chavez channels out there, but they spend valuable time doing that stupid music video montage of the entire staff and talent of the station singing some pep-up song. Also, again, going with the telenovela while Chavez is out speaking both nonsense and truth to power makes you look lazy.

But today, I had dinner in a small Japanese restaurant in Macaracuay Plaza (fyi, all sushi in this country has cream cheese on it). After a mixup that involved the waiter thinking I was there for a job, I sipped the really sweet green tea and waited patiently for my yakisoba to show up. I started to watch the TV they had hanging over the sushi bar, and I think I found the worst television show ever conceived: Bailando con los Gorditos, or Dancing with the Fatties.

As the name implies, instead of dancing with celebrities, professional dancers dance with fat people. And then, they get massacred by a panel of four judges. Just so you know what you might be up against if you were to go on Bailando con los Gorditos: brush up on your hip hop, or dress in slimming colors, or do that country-western piece you were working on. It's raining men, indeed (nice cartwheel, I have to say. I can't do that shit).

It's weekend #3 that I'm home. There were fireworks earlier, and lots of the clubs here turn on searchlights, so the night sky on the weekend in Caracas is a hazy glitter of city lights and white circles. Me, I'm sitting in the bar/lounge area of the house, which I figure in its glory days was the rockinest place in the suburbs, but no one's sat on the big leather couch for ages, judging by how much dust it's collected. I think I'll join the furniture in collecting dust, lest I join a gang or buy some drugs in the dark alleys of Caracas.

Fight!

2008-05-23T00:13:00.002-04:00

Oops, I forgot to mention my highlight of the day yesterday: a fight. A lame-ass fight. A fight in the heart of CC Macaracuay Plaza, another one of Venezuela's terribly-designed malls, but also the closest one to the house and the location of my gym, as well as the not-disgusting supermarket.

And that's where I was, in the midst of bagging my own groceries and telling the particularly apathetic cashier to subtract the granola bars (there's a 9% VAT that always catches me off guard. Fucking 9%!?), when, like in all good fight observation stories, there was a commotion out in the main plaza. I turned around and saw the entire working population of CC Macaracuay Plaza literally run out of their offices and stores to watch a security guard tangle with some dude. I mean, one dude ran out of the fucking bank to see what was going on (an apt time time rob the bank, and now in retrospect, a missed opportunity), and by his button-down shirt and lanyard, he clearly worked there.

Anyway, the fight was pretty lame because while fights on TV and the movies are usually carried out by one or two (or more) "skilled" fighters, real-life fights are either brutally clumsy or clumsily brutal. This fight was the former: the dude tried to "karate kick" the security guard, but instead managed to raise his leg with minimal force. The security guard, not being of great acumen in fighting either, ran into the "kick" then tried to grab the back of the dude's shirt. The fight entirely reminded me of the Great DMV Melee of 2005, when I watched a Chinese dude whom I guess figured he knew kung-fu, lame-kick a guy who had taken his seat at the DMV.

As the "fight" dragged on, more and more people were running out to watch and there gathered a huge crowd to see these guys go at it. Eventually, the other security guards had to restrain their own man, and the other dude got led off by the police (I think). Still, the guard was chomping at the bit, struggling against his buddies who were trying to pacify him. He ended up winning that fight, and ran down the hall to chase after the dude.

At that point, I decided that I'd had enough of bad fighting and made my way outside. Turns out that even the taxi drivers had all ran in to watch, leaving a backup of taxis outside the main entrance to the mall. They were all heading back to their cars, shaking their heads at how lame that fight was.

First, No Fire, Now No Water

2008-05-21T17:05:00.002-04:00

A couple days ago, the stove here in the house "exploded." It burned a bit of the counter -- a ceramic counter, mind you -- and all the oil-catching foil wrap covering it. It was a fairly contained blast, all things considered, and whomever was home put the fire out real fast. Despite the possibility that it could happen again, Luchy said it was a-ok to keep on using the stove. I made some arepas, boiled water for pasta, all of course, having used up five or six matches each time before I realized there was a pilot light (well, for one burner).

Well, a couple days ago, Luchy had also warned that the city was planning on doing some major excavation in our area and as a result, we'd have no water for a day. Well when the day came around (Saturday), she simply called a plumber to have the water pressure turned up on the house tank. I figured that since the delay was supposed to only take a day, we'd be a-ok with the water once the weekend was over.

On Tuesday, we had the old stove removed and Luchy's live-in handyman knocked out part of the counter to fit the new stove, and today the new stove arrived. While all that is splendid, it turns out that the city's excavation either started late or they never finished; we ran out of water in the house tank, and now I've got a 1-liter bottle to use until they get the pipes all fixed.

So, that means I've got to go unbathed for a second day. Not a terrible prospect, considering I don't leave the house for fear of spending money (or doing work). But as I collect dust on the couch in the house's "bar" (clearly not used for a long time), I figure a shower would be in due order sometime soon.

Or...

2008-05-19T23:52:00.001-04:00

How about karaoke "My Humps"?

Which raises the question: what the fuck does "mix your milk with my cocoa puffs" mean? That's a question I should have asked out loud in 2006. Or before.

Need Upbeat Songs Now

2008-05-19T23:40:00.002-04:00

Please send me upbeat or hilarious songs to my gmail account. I'm listening to "Open Arms" over and over again and it's making me sad. Though I have to say, the most amazing combination of awesomeness is Journey's new Filipino lead singer singing "Open Arms" in Chile (that's almost like me!)

But it's like I'm either heartbroken or homesick, not sure what it is. It's not quite heartbreak, since usually I can't listen to any music when I'm heartbroken. And it's not quite homesickness, since usually I end up downloading every song about San Francisco and playing them in heavy rotation, which would sound mad funny in between the freestyle that makes up nearly all of the music on my computer at the moment.

I think I might just be lonely. Funny, this is usually how I feel most of the time in Providence.

Two Weeks in the Vz

2008-05-19T17:27:00.003-04:00

I'm settling in here in Caracas, albeit sorta slowly. Turns out that the "pirate" wireless signal I've been using is Luchy's son's from his apartment below the house. Something happened though, and so now I can only get the signal if I'm working out on the terrace outside my room, which, I guess really isn't such a bad thing during the day (but pootacular at night when the 'skeeters come out). We have a great view of El Avila from here, and while it's not nearly as high as Pichincha, it's a whole mess greener and a little more attractive to look at.

Last week, Coach Wuyke was in town, along with Lindsay, a girl I should have met while we were at Conn together, but I guess I was too much of a dick to talk to the distance runners. Anyway, with Coach around, I got to meet a lot of his friends and do some touristy things (what little there is to do in that regard around here). We went up Caracas' teleferico to the top of El Avila where it was a little too foggy to see the Caribbean, but you could get a hazy view of Caracas.

(Side note, I just saw two parrots fly into the tree in the neighbor's yard)

That hazy view day, coupled with how much Coach and his friends would gush about Los Roques made Lindsay and I keep dropping hints about wanting to go to the beach. Coach relented and on Thursday of last week, we hung out in La Guaira for the day at a private beach (that is, it cost about $17 bucks to get in). I got to dunk myself in the Caribbean for the first time in my life, and, as usual, tan the outsides of my arms.

Besides having some friendly company, Coach's visit proved to me while Venezuelan food prices might be higher than Amy Winehouse in a bathroom in the Eiffel Tower, nearly everything he got us to eat was downright tastetacular. The highlight might have been our visits to Coach's mom's house; she cooks very, very fast and she cooks very, very well. I think other than sleeping and swimming in the Caribbean, I did not stop eating all of last week.

In other news, I finally got notice that I'd be funded for next fall (yay!) as a TA (boo...) I imagined having to TA a huge class again, but this time as a jaded, cynical TA telling the kids straight up about how some of them aren't gonna get A's. Ah, so much to look forward to.

Mother's Day

2008-05-11T19:36:00.002-04:00

I got up very late today, strange considering I didn't sleep that late. In any case, I wasted much of my morning. I did, however, learn how to make arepas yesterday from Luchy's daughter and they're pretty cheap, though I do wonder about their nutritional qualities. In any case, I spent most of the day at a family party for mother's day with all of Luchy and Pablo's kids and their kids (a lot of little kids them!)

Everything was generally good, except one dude pulled me aside and started talking politics with me. Long story short, he basically said to not talk to two people at the party, as they are "the enemy" and then throughout the rest of the day, would come up to me and greet me again (shake my hand over and over), and basically try to win me over to some side of something that honestly I don't want to stick my head in. Of course, instead of making me afraid for my life if I talked to "the enemy", he made me afraid that he'd end my life if I talked to them.

Anyway, I was told to try to avoid moving around on Mondays because the traffic and density of people will be horrendous. Still, I want to start working so I'll be sending out e-mails from home, I think.

Half-a-Day

2008-05-09T18:47:00.005-04:00

For some reason, my body decided to sleep for ten hours last night. I woke up to the sound of a whistle from somewhere nearby, and I got up in shock. I spent the next few minutes trying to locate my pirate wireless signal and it turns out that I've got to connect from the terrace outside my room, then come inside, which really isn't so much of a problem (until it rains, I guess).

I took a walk around the neighborhood today, and I think it's best described as the Pasig of Venezuela, unless I find a more Pasig-like place: apartment buildings, gated neighborhoods, high concrete retaining walls, jungle, and here and there some strangely-constructed shopping centers. About ten or so minutes up the Avenida Principal de Macaracuay (which is actually what it's named) is Macaracuay Plaza, a tower of a shopping center with a far better-stocked supermarket and the closest gym (which, by the way, is about $100 a month. push ups!). But, like most everything else constructed around here, it's concrete and reflective glass that's poorly cleaned, with a purple-and-black-and-exposed-concrete color scheme that evokes a subway station. Also (and I have to get a picture of this), the shopping center is basically stacked concentric rings (luckily not named, but numbered), but instead of let's say a pair of escalators per level to bring you up and down, the architects built low-sloping people movers -- the kind you see in airports -- that move you from level to level. It's amazingly strange.

In the world of social interaction, I talked to Coach Wuyke today. Apparently, the black market rate for dollars may be down to BsF 2.8 to $1. With that news, he also said, "you'd think you're living in Japan or something."

Calculating Crepes & Waffles

2008-05-08T14:25:00.004-04:00

Today, I got up at 5:30 so I could make poo and eat something before Wilfredo, Luchy's son, came by for me at 6:30. I turned the TV on to give me something to do while I ate breakfast, and I think three different channels had the Venezuelan national anthem playing with subtitles and a sign language interpreter. There's a great part in the choruses when the bar ends in a minor key, then retards and rests, then the line repeats but ends in a major -- it's like the Beethoven, but not.

Anyway, Wilfredo took me to the country club that the Ramos' are members of. It immediately reminded me of the clubs that my friend Andrea studies in Mexico City, complete with guarded entrances, a waterslide (under repair, along with the tiles in the jacuzzi), what seemed to be a quite elaborate equestrian area with stables and a grandstand with a huge horseshoe arch, and a baseball diamond/soccer field. Of course, when I think "club", I think of "athletic club", but this place only had one treadmill. Though if I wanted to play bolas criollas, I definitely could (heeding of course the warnings that no little kids could be in the bolas criollas area). But, with only 50 minutes, I ran around the perimeter of the club a few times until I could feel the onset of blisters, and then I just walked around.

But I really started walking around because I forgot my towel, and thus had the bright idea of drying my shirt in the breeze to use in its place. Afterwards, Wilfredo said they probably had towels somewhere, something I deduced too with the baskets that said "For Towels Only". In any case, I was none the worse for drying off under the ceiling fans set to "really fast" and my running shirt.

Wilfredo took me to his office at the Alcaldia de Chacao, where he sent his assistant Karina to help me buy a cell phone. What ended up happening was we had to go up and down the Municipio building about four times because the Movistar store was "open" but no one was there, you can't buy a cell phone without a cedula here, and to actually come back with Karina's cedula to buy my phone. I chose the second-to-cheapest phone, and in total it came out to be BsF 60, or about $19 something at the black market rate. The number should be up on my Facebook profile, if you're my friend (meaning, you'd be pretty likely to call me. Right?)

Anyway, before I left home, I remembered to check where the Caracas Crepes & Waffles was on line. After taking a few minutes to get lost, I managed to find the mall it was in, Sambil, or, Venezuela's largest mall (a dubious distinction I might add). I took another few minutes to get lost in Sambil as well, since apparently there's a quite stupid (if you ask me) naming convention in the malls here where the floors aren't numbered: they're named. Hence, I couldn't figure out how to get to Nivel Autopista from Nivel Miranda and then from one side to the other.

After awhile, though, I did find the Crepes & Waffles, and after thinking about it long and hard, decided not to eat there, nor get an ice cream cone, mainly because of the price of food. The cones, by the way, were BsF 6, meaning they were roughly $1.86 -- about 51 cents more than the cones in Quito. If that was the case with the ice cream (which, by the way, they had to explain how asking for ice cream worked on a sign), I didn't feel like spending $5 for a $3 pocket. In addition, the place was dead empty -- at lunch. Something was a little off.

So, after looking at other eateries and getting desperate (though not desperate enough to pay $10 for fast-food Japanese; a place where people were so put off by the cost, they didn't even get in the line-ropes but congregated in the hallway looking at the menu from about 20 feet away), I ate at Wendy's for around $3.80. Not the best thing I'd eaten, but oh well.

Afterwards, I took the Metro for the first time from Chacao to La California, the stop nearest to Macaracuay. I explored the mall near the stop -- C.C. El Marques -- which, by the way, also had that stupid convention of naming the floors instead of numbering them (if anyone's interested in not-quite-Tony-Roma's, you can go to Tony Libano's, which seemed awkwardly similar). Anyway, afterwards, I queued up for the Metro's connector bus to Maracaracuay. Strangely, and even unlike in the States, people lined up single-file to wait their turn to get in the bus and the driver waiting for quite a long time until he could either fit everyone in that needed to get on, or for stragglers. And, you actually had to press a button to get the driver to stop AT DESIGNATED STOPS. Wow, order. And let me just say, order is very slow.

The bus stop isn't too far from the entrance to the subdivision, but what became clear after five minutes of walking and not having reached the house was that I'd have to still walk another ten or so minutes uphill (not a Guapulo hill though, mind you) from the stop to get home. Meaning that if it rains, I'm gonna get pretty much soaked after waiting for the Metrobus and then the uphill walk. Though, luckily all of today's walks were sponsored by sunshine and a nice breeze.

So far, not as bad as yesterday's freakout/tearfest. Tomorrow, I'm going to see what's around Macaracuay and then try to head a little further into the city for a look-see.

And the Frustration Sets In

2008-05-07T23:06:00.000-04:00

So I got here yesterday, here being Caracas. I took a taxi, and on Coach Wuyke's insistence, his mother-in-law paid for the ride. Having been accustomed to taxistas in Quito -- and well, most Ecuadorian prices -- I was scared to shit when I found out that it cost about $50 to get from the airport to Macaracuay. Holy moly crapadoly (say that slowly).

So with that introduction to middle-class life in Venezuela, I started to freak out. Today, I went to the supermarket with Luchy, coach's mom-in-law, and was doubly-surprised. First of all, while I'd never call Quito a shopper's paradise, even the viveres had more selection than this place, and compared to Supermaxi, it was like night and day. While one can overcome such difficulties, it bears pointing out that all the stuff that has been reported to be missing on shelves -- milk, maize, coffee, sugar -- was missing from these shelves. There was condensed milk and powdered milk, a few corn tortillas, and maybe a bag of sugar, but no coffee. As it turns out I don't eat any of that stuff, except for sugar, but of course everything else was driving me nuts, since it wasn't like there was much else to choose from. I ended up picking up about $60 worth of groceries, hopefully stuff I won't have buy every week. Still, I'm not expecting costs to get much lower than that.

Anyway, I ended up drowning my sorrows in a moussaka I made from a ton of ground beef and eggplant. There's more frustrations there hidden in that sentence, but at least I knew I could command food out of anything in my life at the moment.

Though I should be much more generous: the Ramos' are great people, they live so close to each other, and I can only assume how close they are in love as they are in distance. Wilfredo, Luchy's youngest son, is taking me to his gym tomorrow and then to work so I can attempt to find a cell phone in the city. And Luchy's daughter-in-law is a sociologist with the Universidad Catolica, so she's got some connections.

But I talked to my mom today and did what I should have done in Quito when I left -- I cried. I broke down. All the goodbye tears I had for everyone back in Ecuador ended up on a bed in Caracas and in front of my mom. And all this is fairly absurd: I've done bigger transitions than this in my life and I'm bawling because everything is six times more expensive, I won't have any money, there's no one to eat dinner with every night, and I miss my friends who all became like a family to me?

Fuck that.

That shit's baby shit, no? 200,000 people might be dead in Myanmar, the Donner party ate each other, and families worry every night whether or not their mom or dad or son or daughter is coming back from Iraq. And for all I know, instead of shitting liquid like I usually do when I'm seriously stressing out, maybe I can just keep crying, 'cuz that seems much more hygienic.

Thanks to Mike Racine for laying down today's best pick-me-up quote:

“hey, they're socialists in Venezuela, maybe they'll think you're über-cool in that your redness comes straight through your eyes”

Maybe they will.

Different Kinds of Smushed

2008-05-07T11:11:00.002-04:00

This isn't the post I want to write; I want to write one about my last days in Ecuador and(/or) how I nearly liquid pooed out money in Atlanta. But I'm freaking out about how I'm going to manage my money while I'm here (oh, I'm Caracas now).

Because it's better to know people than to not know them, I decided to stay with Coach Wuyke's in-laws in the southeast of the city. This had changed from staying with family friends after, I guess, they upped their price to about $1000 a month for rent. Here I'm paying $450/month, using a pretty ingenious scheme where I mailed checks to Coach Wuyke's wife in the states.

What's freaking me out, however, is that said $450 is only room, not board, meaning that I've got to buy groceries and cook. Of course, that's nothing extraordinary in terms of my "regular" life back in Providence, there's talk here about the rising cost of staples -- milk, coffee, beans, maize -- all food I don't eat, but perhaps an indication of how much things will cost. In addition, without two other dudes splitting up the cost for things we all use, I lose out on the economy-of-scale of ketchup and eggs.

Actually, what's really freaking me out is that it cost Bsf150 to get from the airport to the house. The black market rate is about 3:1 right now, meaning that my taxi ride cost $50. FIFTY FREAKING DOLLARS. So much for chatting up the taxistas here in Caracas.

And what's more, while I think I took out enough cash on top of rent for living expenses, I forgot to budget in some sunk costs -- cell phone, umbrella, bus/metro passes, and of course, books. It may perhaps make slightly more sense to purchase anything big or important with my card, since lugging around that much cash will probably make me so paranoid that I'll look like I'm carrying that much cash, and thus, an easy mark.

But I guess I should just calm down before I start pawning off my clothes or something. I'll be going out to see how much things really are in a bit, so let's hope that I'll calm down and figure some stuff out before the next -- and real -- post.