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Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
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I'm going to be a TA.
Hooray for my first job using that damn degree.
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Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, January 30th, 2007
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Monday, January 29th, 2007
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Friday, January 26th, 2007
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Thursday, January 25th, 2007
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Friday, January 19th, 2007
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Things are going well.
I'm in Guatemala, I almost assuredly have a place to stay for the next few months, and definitely will be able to get some coin to offset the cost of living. It's strange how I can dismiss an apartment renting for about 200USD as "way too expensive"; though I would have been able to play with their pet chihuahua named Lola. In the afternoons I'll get to volunteer in the community most liekly, though doing what I'm not sure. I can help rural communities build safe stoves. Awesome.
Photos will be forthcoming on the flickr page, which I trust you all know and love.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Thursday, December 21st, 2006
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Once the engine turned over, the speakers put out a single sharp squeel. I killed the power to the radio with the same swift motion that I use when I hear my phone ring, but the squelch just became intermittent then. I revved the engine to keep water out the muffler and sailed down the block to the cross street which was not inundated. The squelching continued, became a white noise crackle that danced around, and did nothing to keep me calm and collected. I killed the engine and started bailing the water out of the cabin, when I thought to check the trunk. That smell is burning rubber. Burning wiring insulation. The toolkit was in the bottom of the trunk, under all the books and clothes meant for bringing home that afternoon. The battery's connection was bolted on, and I dropped a few wrenches to the gritty wet pavement as I fumbled for the one that fit. All this time, I could still smell that burning rubber in my mind and hear the speakers short out further. With the doors closed, the squelch lost much of its treble and midrange, but the base came through quite clearly. It was as if my car had a stomach, and I could hear it growling. The battery was disconnected, and I was walking home.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, December 19th, 2006
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Dear Livejournal,
It has been fifteen weeks since I last wrote to you. Much has happened since. Where when we last spoke, I was full of energy and throwing myself at my last semester of undergraduate work; now I'm emptying my closets, folding clothes to go into a series of plastic bags to take home. Then I wait for my degrees to arrive in the mail in January. No ceremony, no pomp, no circumstance.
Which is just how I wold have wanted it, to be honest. I always get uncomfortable when such attention is thrown on me, though I doubt that this commencement would have focused as heavy and intense a spotlight on me as the last one. No speech, no accolades, just a handshake before I would have flopped over a tassel and sat down back in my chair and realize that it's all over with each passing breath and nervous glace at all the beaming faces around me. Instead, I just get a manila envelope in the mail. I just hope it doesn't feel too much like receiving a late holiday package from a perennially forgetful relative.
And now what? Three weeks of flying above Bourg in a holding pattern, doing ovals over lower Terrebonne. My staggered graduation--the fate of those occupying the distant ends of the bellcurve, though it's not certain which end is mine--has provided me with a vacancy of time. I'm applying to graduate schools, five to be precise, in less of an attempt to delay real life an attempt to keep working on the one thing I've been trained to do. At least that's been my mental mantra.
New Orleans has been good to me, sure, but it's time for a change, time to make a break. Anyway, Ilene doesn't particularly like the environs, and I've started getting bitter, so we looked for a new place to go. But what about those grad school applications? If we go anywhere, we'd just have to move again in a few months. So we decided to go somewhere interesting. Ilene suggested Guatemala, and the more we learned the better it's looked to us.
I now have a one-way ticket to Central America and an appointment at the travel clinic in my future. It's definitely exciting, the kind of exciting that brings disapproving concern from some and well-wishing encouragement from others.
Our destination is Quetzaltenango, Guatemala's second-largest city, located in the southwestern portion of that country in a region known as the Western Highlands. Mountains. Volcanoes. Our plan for self-sufficiency is teaching English to the folks in the city. We won't get rich, but we figure we wouldn't get rich at any other job we would hold for only four months, and the living's not as pricey down there. If self-sufficiency and clandestine paychecks aren't possible, then there is absolutely no shortage of NGO work to be done in the region. Besides, as Kijowski once advised me, sometimes you just have to make the choice that has the greater potential for stories at the end of it. And if I happen to pick up a bit of K'iche' along the way, all the better.
Regular communication will be essential, and I will be soliciting all of your emails and mailing addresses at some time in the near future, as mass-mailings and postcards (postcards!) will be in the future.
Bis bald, zai jian, and 'tá logo
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Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
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Thursday, August 31st, 2006
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Awkward: having a class with a professor you've already taken a course with, and with whom you have already formed a camraderie.
Much more awkward: having a class taught by someone you've taken classes with as a student.
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Comments: Read 3 or Add Your Own.
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Friday, August 18th, 2006
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From Wednesday:
"And it's even better that you're young with longer hair; nobody'll think you're Immigration."
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Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
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| Time: | 5:32 pm. |
| Music: | the court and spark - sundowner. |
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Overheard undergrad logic:
"If three different people answer a multiple-choice question with three different answers and they all get it wrong, there's something wrong with the question."
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Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
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Remember: if the FBI calls, I am a model citizen. Specific briefings to follow.
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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So, is "sea change" the new "paradigm shift", or am I the only one who's noticed a sudden increase in "sea change"'s popularity in the past few months?
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Comments: Read 5 or Add Your Own.
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So yesterday morning I was playing a small set of some Phil Ochs covers that ended with Jello Biafra and the Melvins' cover of "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" in which they updated the original lyrics to circa 1992.
Someone called up the station to say, "I don't get it, is this supposed to be a conservative song or a liberal song?" I told him it was a song about hypocrisy. He then said that if it was, he'd have to "find him and kick his ass!". Just what he was talking about, I haven't been able to figure out, but the fact remains that someone called up my show because they didn't understand the song I was playing.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Dropping by campus yesterday to return a movie to the media library, I stopped in front of McAlister to listen to Casa Samba perform (and eat some empadas and coxinhas) and I was reminded of the peculiar bowed percussion instrument that they used during some of their capoeira pieces. And given that some of you have expressed interest in the digeridoo and other generally unusual musical instruments, I felt I should bring the berimbau to your attention as well.
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Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
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In one of my classes today, we watched Quilombo Country, a documentary about the current communities in Brazil that are the continuations of camps formed by escaped slaves back in the 1800's and earlier. In one scene about the residents' practice of Macumba, the narrator read a fantastic line.
"Being a communist didn't keep Beti from being visited by the spirits."
So remember kids, your preferred economic model cannot protect you from the effects of the spirit world.
That is all.
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Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
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( WTUL playlist 04/05/2006 0400-0600 CDT )
Now I'm kind aglad that I'm going to be skipping my next show, given that if I had to do all this over again in a couple days, I'd probably be just sick of it. Now I'm off to repair a tire. Tires and I don't get along well in the city.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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alguien's journal