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Getting psyched (out)!

2007-12-13T17:47:00.000-08:00

i'm starting to get really tangled up in the details. it's really frustrating because everyone i've met on the road or online who has done the area i want to visit has basically played it by ear and done really well for themselves. But the more i talk to my family, the more problems i seem to have....

Prob #1: the route

it's not just that there is alot to see on limited cash and time, it's that within the timeframe i've established (3 months) i have certain specific targets that limit the rest ofthe trip, namely salvador for new years and recife for carnaval. moreover, brazil is a third world country making places more distant than they look on the map: some roads are good and some are crap, making it sorta impossible to calculate travel times.

the current plan: fly to porto seguro (bought the ticket last night), do southern bahia for just under 2 weeks, salvador for new years. chapada diamantina after new years for maybe 2 weeks, then i have no idea how i'm going to kill time getting from chapada to recife for carnival. maybe kick it in salvador, maybe slowly work it up the coast. after recife it gets cloudier. i may book it to jericoacoara (may need to go by way of fortaleza), and from there go to são luis.

Prob #1a: CHAPADA vs S.BAHIA

the biggest issue with the route right now is where to start. apparently i've got my time priorities reversed. i thought i needed to give myself more time to get to know chapada, but apparently 2 weeks is way mroe than enough time, whereas southern bahia is totally worth seeing. moreover, the beaches are really hard to get to, so it's time consuming. also, it's a really relgiious area, so everything is basically going to come to a dead stop for christmas. i've been told by two different family members to do chapada first, then go south, then cut back north for recife. still, apparently going to chapada at all might be a bad idea. according to weather.com, december is actually the areas heaviest month in terms of rain volume, and the park is notorios for suddent floods that can be quite dangerous (especially if you're unlucky enough to be in a canyon at the time)

prob #2: money

read last post for more details on that one. today was my last day of classes and paulo basically offered to pay me R$500 for 4 days work; 6 classes. 4 with him, 2 with another client at his office. that's roughly 1/16th of my current budget, which by the calculations/assumptions i'm working with right now could keep me on the road another 6 days. sticking around is quite tempting, but it means losing a week to buy a week if that makes sense.

prob #3: the flight

Given the route problem, changing my ticket to salvador so i can get to the chapada seems like a good idea. but if i take paulo up on his offer, then my ~2 weeks becomes one (also subtract travel). if i stay a 'week', will I have sufficient time to really do chapada? of course, maybe i don't need to do EVERYTHING available there. maybe i'm being a greedy little eco-tourist.

still, i'm not even sure i feasibly CAN change my ticket. see, i got the ticket online, and didn't register for the site when i did it. i got on online promotion, so i'm not sure if i even can change my ticket, but the info they sent me looks optimistic. thing is, i think i can only change the ticket online. so i went back and registered, and now it shows my username with no reservations, and no way to add tickets bought before registration. and i've tried calling both phone numebrs they offer, and so far i've been sent back to the website by a voice message and put indefinitely on hold by another.

i'm going to try calling back tomorrow during business hours. hopefully i can work my way backwards through this list

Logistics

2007-12-11T16:28:00.000-08:00

So excluding airfare to and from the north, i've set aside roughly R$7000 for the trip (according to my most recent calculations); somewhere between US$3k-4k, toward the lower end of the spectrum.

given that i'm going to be travelling during the high season, new years in a party town, and carnival at a party, the question is of course: will dave's money last?

i might end up finding that i need to pick up a job on the road. if i'm lucky, maybe i'll run into some rich tourists going somwehre cool and i could offer up my services as a guide/translator. with my superior local guidebooks and language proficiency i could totally pull it off. i heard about a friend of a friend who lives in europe doing nothing but getting free rides to travel to the coolest area of brazil as a guide. so he also gets to travel europe.

hopefully it won't come to any of that. I think the money is going to last, according to calculations i've made and people i've talked to. i'm going to pad-crash as much as possible through my mom's and my own connections (including couchsurfing.com). the parties are certainly going to hurt a bit though.

still, tonight my uncle had a sit-down with me and told me he was worried about how i was handling myself with respect to the trip. it felt like an intervention. he was really addressing how i've been putting shit off lately more than anything, but he used that as a platform to tell me that he felt the trip would cost more than i'd thought. my most recent calculation turned out to be more than i'd estimated for him and airfare is looking like less than he'd predicted, so all's well so far. still, he did spook me a little.

i'm a versatile kid. i've traveled a ton in my life, solo too. everything always wokrs out. this trip isn't going to be any different.

i might have to fast for a week or two towards the end though.

when travelers colide

2007-12-09T19:40:00.001-08:00

When I was up in Recife I met this aussie traveler named Tom who was backpacking South America. He passed through são paulo this weekend, so i offered to show him around (sadly i couldn't give him a place to crash though). Last night i took him and his hostel crew (total party 9 people!) out to vila madalena to ó do borogodo for some traditional samba. we got tehre an horu before the usic started, and they all decided to get some food. well. we got back 2 hours later to find the place was crazy full plus a line, so we went next door to grazi a dio, the club georgiana itnroduced me to (did i mention she broke up with her bf? shame i'm skipping town).

we had a good time. sambasoul was playing and did that thing they do. music ended sorta early, but we kicked it until we were the last kids there. looking for an after party we got some drinks at a tiny bar set up in a parking lot, which was soorta wierd but cozy. the bartender was kinda unfriendly but it jsut added to the whole drinking in a parking lot atmosphere. some other guy there said he was trying to compile a book of drink mixes and that he felt it aws almost complete. i had the honor of giving him the white russian recipe. i'm pretty sure he doesn't actually know shit about cocktails if he didn't know that one and thoguht his book was complete.

today i met up with tom and his friend joel again in the center of the city to visit some museums. i only had a little under 2 hour to play cause i had stupidly arranged for a make up class with a student that day and had a chanukah dinner with the extended family to get to afterwards.

we never made it to the museums. we were all still sorta hungover and more interested in food. i took them to liberdade, SP's answer to china town, where we ate alot. really good food. eating with tom and joel was alot of fun cause they had been eating basically the same thing for months (i suppose i have too) and needed the diversity. their elation rubbed off.

wierd coincidence: on the way to meet them, i ran into some relatives on av. paulista. crazy crazy crazy. 4th biggest city in the world by population: you don't jsut "run into people" here. by the way, ehre's how complicated the relations get down here: the family i ran into are my mom's cousin's brother's daughter and two grand kids. so i think my 3rd and 4th cousins?

i hung out with that crew again later at channukah, which was well timed; as i'm leaving in a week, so it gave me a chance to see the family again. we had a goofy arts and crafts contest making little menorahs out of potatos we painted and decorated with stickers. we didn't ahve a dreidel, jsut a die. we enver got aroudn to playing , but i would've been DOWN to play some craps at chanukah. i always thought it was funny how we encourage litle kids to gamble, why not step it up and teach em a real fucking game, right?

Ugly blog

2007-12-06T19:51:00.000-08:00

so i'm playing with the format right now. the goal was to pick the widest template possible. i know i'm prone to writing a lot, so i figure if i have wide margins at least it doesn't look quite so long.

problem is the color. the template was all white and shit and well that a) hurts to look at for a while, and b) is an unnecessary waste of energy. not that billions of people look at my blog or naything but hey, i do what i can.

but see, i am shit for matching colors. if you thik you got a cool scheme for me, shoot. otherwise the color scheme of my blog will probably only get worse.

hell, the only reason my clothes match sometiems is cause i only have bland colors. blue, white, grey, black, green, brown. and a handful of bright colors i occasionally wear.

interesting post today, right? whatever, next week is my last week in town. once i hit the road they should get pretty cool.

Getting mean

2007-12-05T19:33:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sure i've bitched about him before, but i really hate this one student i have, paulo. he's 54 and by pure coincidence related to a close friend of my mom's. He's a wealthy business man, and has no respect for our classes. today was the straw that broke the camel's back. I wrote the following while drinking a much needed caipirinha at a nearby bar immediately after the events described.

Paulo asked me to come to class early today. We normally have class at 5:30, and he'd asked for 4:30. No way, I said, but conceded to try for quarter to 5.

I got there 4:40-ish. And Waited. And waited. and continued to wait, filling out a news-stand logic puzzle. I listened to 2 full albums on my MP3 player. I checked with the receptionist: he knew I was there, he just wasn't ready for me yet.

After 6:05 rolled around I'd had enough. I went to this secretary and told her I was leaving. I was annoyed. frustrated. direspected. a little angry.

She said paulo had called me up to his office. was he for real? i decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and walked upstairs to find his office empty. He was still in his meeting. apparently he thought that changing the ambience of my waiting room might get me to stay longer.

I waited for 5-10 more minutes, after which he finally showed. I was pissed. I've taken alot of shit from him and now was time to unload.

"David, how are you!"

"I've been waiting for over an hour. imagine if i had come at 4:30."

my voice was cold and bitter in its grittingly polite, monotonous lack of emotion.

"I'll pay you for your time!"

"that's not the point paulo. I udnerstand you're a busy man but just because my hours are flexible doesn't mean my time is worthless. these are my last twoo weeks in town. there are many other things I could be doing with my time. would like to be doing with my time. This is my job, paulo. you show little respect for the class and disrespect me on a regular basis by regularly taking phone calls, leaving to do business, starting class late and ending class early."

"i totally agree. i understand---"

"No paulo, you don't. I have a flexible schedule and not that many students, so i usually put up with this sort of stuff. i'm a patient guy. but you're about to get a new teacher and he may not be. he may have a much tighter schedule and will not be able to wait around for you like this. also--"

"yes, i understand. I need--"

"No paulo. let me finish. also, it's very difficult to teach when you don't know how long the lesson is going to be....."

and so on. I was calm and composed the whole time, wearing the poker face of anger only people who smil and laugh all the time can pull off. Lecturing him i experssed most of my personal grief with him as a student throguh the lens of his tentaitve new teacher's needs and limits. it aws all stuff i'd bitched about to others before, including students, so it was a long time coming and bound to happen given that our time together was coming to a close.

He made excuses. "i was busy." "I thoguht you were teaching felipe" (another client in his office who wasn't scheduled for class today). Doesn't matter. not the point. i wasn't. you still show very little respect for me or my classes.

He said he was free until 7. i was really not in the mood to give him a class by this point, but i decided to play ball anyway.

and THAT's how i ended up doing the most passive aggressive thing i've ever done in my life.

"ok, we're going to play a little game. a vocab exercise. I want you to put yourself in my shoes. I want you to try to come up with as many words as you can to express what emotions you might be feeling. I've already given you two: 'annoyed' and 'frustrated.' can you thin of any others?"

he stared blankly at me, trying to beat his poker face with mine. it's a game he plays when he doesn't like an exercise. it's his time so i usually just give up and little him read out loud from Cigar Afficionado or Wine Spectator (yeah, he's that kinda guy. i really loathe our classes). But not this time.

"Can you come up with any other words for how you might feel, besides annoyed or frustrated?"

I waited for a response, face unchanged in cold crystallzied boredom since he called me up to his office.

"you know what, i've got this really bad headache. right here, on the back of my head. how about we have class tomorrow?"

"we've already scheduled for class tomorrow, paulo. so yeah"

"yeah I just really want to go home and rest. it's this headache."

"Ok Paulo. I'll see you tomorrow."

Damn right you've got a headache. ME. lecturing him, getting m gripes off my chest, then subtley telling him to go fuck himself with an english exercise had been cathartic enough. i already had the win. i didn't mind letting the control freak end the class on his own terms. i didn't have a class prepared anyway.

12/5/07
sipping a caipirinha from 6:20(?)-6:50. could've gone home/somewhere cool at 4 after my last class, but instead i've gotta deal with rush hour. really, paulo wasted 2.5 hours of my time, not just 1.

Follow up

2007-12-03T03:45:00.000-08:00

No troubles at all. changed my flight for the very reasonable fee of $220 to March 17th, giving me what should be ample time to travel brazil, and more importantly piece of mind that I don't need to pack my bags as soon as i get my paycheck today (how wierd is that timing? mayb i'm supposed to leave or something).

Everything is going to be OK.

The best laid plans.....

2007-12-02T19:57:00.000-08:00

...aren't as potent as bad habits.

I am a pathological procrastinator. it's gotten to the point where i wonder if i don't have some sort of subconscious self-defeating drive. in college i often put off major assignments to the last minute, completing them in high-octane coffee driven all-nighters that would leave me cracked out with the shakes the next day (an inconvenience during exam week, to say the least).

i never changed my flight.

i kept telling myself i would do it today, or tomorrow, or damnit i'm doing it by this weekend! December. i was going to have done it by december. Tonight. I was going to do it by tonight. around 1am i opened the eMail from orbitz i received for my original flight itinerary to find that my flight was not aroudn the 13th as i expected. my flight is on tuesday. this tuesday.

i'm supposed to be on this plane in 42 hours.

i had planned this whole backpacking trip. new years in salvador. carnival in olinda. natinoal parks. beaches. parties. girls. top it all off with a week in rio with my cousin then fly home.

the reservations office doesn't open until 8am tomorrow. if i can't change my ticket, a one way flight in march will cost me over $2000. that's almost the entire budget i had saved up for this backpacking trip. Hell, with the R$/US$ convertions, it might even be more than i had saved up.

Lately, i feel like i've been jsut been getting irresponsible.. i think it's cause i'm bored. the other day i accidentally left the stove on after making eggs (on low!) for like 4 hours. tonight i smoked a fat cuban cigar on my way home only to find my relatvies had arrived a day earier than i had thought they were going to (did i mention they dont know i smoke?). and the energy put into my lessons has gone way down too.

what is wrong with me????

Cyber Sprawl

2007-11-28T17:41:00.000-08:00

For a little while now i've been thinking about doing an inventory of my cyber identity. After a comment dan made on one of my recent pots, i think it's about time.

This blog started as a mandatory assignment for an anthropology class called "life online," so this feels pretty appropriate

Just organizing this is going to be a pain. I tried doing this functionally, and that didn't work. I'm going to do this by username (i'm not gonna actually post em though. internet paranoia!):

google: gmail (primary email account), blogger (techinically i have 2 blogs, but teh ootehr i only set up to figure out how to link picture from flick to a map i made), iGoogle homepage, Orkut, google mesenger, google maps, scheduler. so that's at least 8 google services. man, i sure hope they don't turn out to be big brother.
wvrs: my work email
AOL: my AIM sn
XFire: mesenging app for gamers. only way to get in touch with one of my friends.
bored.com: used to be my primary email account. now i only sue it as a registration email for sites i dont wanna give real emails to. But ehy, now i have hotmail and yahoo emails for that.
hotmail: MSN messenger, which I literally only use to talk to 1 person. lame.
meebo.com: flash IM app that let's me use all my messenging services simultaneously (minus Xfire). thank gd.
yahoo A: Flickr account
yahoo B: 2ary Flickr account
Travbuddy: online community of travelers. I have 2 travel blogs (with geolinked pictures on a travel map!) and participate in forums whe i get bored. I'm starting to host pictures there more than flickr, and facebook is falling behind.
Couchsurfing: internet community of travelers who support each other by offering places to stay. cool, right? i'm trying to work my way in for some free housing on my backpacking trip, but i dunno if i can work up teh refs in time
Wikimedia: i sued to have a wikipedia addiciton. because wikimedia is retarded, you have to set up an accoutn on each project. so i have shaggorama accounts at en.wikipedia, pt.wikipedia, en.wikinews, en.wikibooks, en.wikiversity, en.wikiquote, and en.wikimedia
Uncyclopedia: keeps me from vandalizing wikipedia
Facebook: my primary social networking tool. I only have orkut to appease the brazilians. travbuddy is taking over pictures though.
Livejournal: i have a friend with a LJ blog who locks 2/3rds of his posts, so i got an account to see what he's up to
youtube: i don't post videos, i just use my account to comment (read as criticize) other peoples movies and collect favorites and subscriptions
dailymotion: same thing

depending how you count, that's 30 different services listed. Damn

and let's see....i know i must be missing something... I read fark all the time, but don't have an account there yet. I play boggle online sometimes. and i have usernames at some newspapers, but i don't think that counts. i'm trying to set up an accoutn at zooomr.com because i heard they let you upload and as many pictures as you want with no cap on bandwidth or storage, so that's cool, but somethings been going wrong over there.

i have a feelign i'm going to be adding to this list as i realize how much i left off it. Fucking internet....

Using my assets

2007-11-22T04:23:00.000-08:00

here's how cool I am:
-not only did i not have to get a visa to enter the country (brazilian baby!)
-not only am I not paying for rent (living with family baby!)
-I have connections.

My network in brazil is not limited to my family. My mom grew up here and has friends spread out all over the country, and many of them have invited me into their homes.

back to the weekend.

Fri I saw the brazilian side. Saturday I hit the argentinian side which was SPECTACULAR. way cooler than the brazilian side. I got stories, but i think i'm gonna put those on my travel blog for now. fuck..why do i have 2 blogs??!? this is bad..but yeah, sunday i went to paraguay and bought soem shit that doesn't work. Then it started to rain. I'd already done the big 3 things to do down here, and fuck the torrential rainforest downpour, so i decided to come back a little early. i called the bus station, and they said there was room on all 3 buses to São paulo. Of course, with my luck that day by the time i got there that was no longer the case. So i did the next best thing and arranged to go to Curitiba, a coastal city where i coudl cget a connection to São paulo. Buses leave every hour to SP from Curitiba, so I didn't buy the ticket to São Paulo.

And good thing too. I ended up spending two full days there. My mom has an old friend who lives in Curitiba. In fact, she had been trying to get me to live down there instead of São Paulo when I first started organizing this trip. So this weekend I got to know Curitiba and my mom's friend's family as well as Iguaçu!

I'll post more details about argentina, paraguay, and curitiba in a bit. I've decided this should be the "master blog," and anything i post to the other blog should be logged here in some form. So yeah, i'll get around to that later.

Adultery

2007-11-22T04:05:00.000-08:00

blogger, it's time we talked. sit down. have a drink, I need to confess something.

I've met another blog.

I'm sorry, it just sort of...happened. I don't know what this means for us. I still want to write you! this other blog....what we have is different from what i have with the other blog. It's jsut such a pain in the ass trying to post pictures to you blogger....this other blog, it's a TRAVEL blog. I can post date entries, import pictuers directly from flickr.....it even keeps a running map!

i'm sorry blogger, i never meant for this to happen. A backpacker told me about the other blog, and one thing led to another, and now here I am....a blogging bigamist.

Maybe I'll cross post, maybe i won't. we'll see.

I don't know what the future holds for us blogger. This should only be a temporary division of my attention.

please visit my new travel blog . if nothing else, it has a map and pictures. old posts aer written with much the same content as this blog, but at least there are pictures.

Birthday at Iguaçu

2007-11-16T13:12:00.000-08:00

It was David's (my uncle) idea. This weekend is a long weekend because of some crazy roman-catholic holidays or something, so why not take a birthday trip(Question mark) going to iguaçu now allows me to focus my longer backpacking trip in northern brazil.

the idea was originally leave for the falls in mid december, go to florianopolis for new years, then work my way up the coast to recife for carnival...a LONG way up the coast. Now the whole carnival plan is much more doable.

so last week i bought bus tickets and a shitty back pack (shitty as in no frame and minimal padding on the hip straps). I left são paulo as always with paulo's disapproval, but with a very full backpack: i decided to use this trip as a guinea pig for the bigger backpacking trip. what have i learned so far (question mark): gotta get some padding for the backpack.

left late last night on a red eye bus. seated behind me was a couple from bermuda: a local who married a canadian. 'i was an underwriter, she was an accountant' 'sounds romantic...'

i learned alot about bermuda. wierd little place. apparently it's reached critical mass with foreign business moving in. mainly insurance companies. moreover, they have more accountant jobs than they can deal with. all sorts of wierd shit....seriously, the country sounds like it came out of a douglas adams novel.

so we arrived this morning and after moving into the hostel (which is a PALACE for a hostel. even has a bar by the pool), i hit the falls with another kid form the hostel. i'd post pictures, but i'm having trouble connect my archos, but i'll try again later. to say the least, the falls were SPECTACULAR. loaded with toursits though, and none of the hiking trails were open to the public. they are all operated by a third party eco-tourism company, so if you wanna hike, you gotta get in on a bigger package. fucking lame ass. hopefully the argentinian side will ahve some hiking, but i doubt it.

in search of hiking, i went across the street to another national park, parque das aves (park of the birds). I was suspicious of this park from the get-go and my suspicions were verified upon entrance: not a national park, an aviary. just a big zoo. i mean, it was cool and they had nice birds, but it was really anti-climactic and i was kinda dissapointed.

still, the night is very young and i've got time to get shit-faced and party. i mean hey, it's my birthday!!! although, ain't nothing special about turning 23....maybe my auto insurance goes down or something.

Technologically Savvy

2007-11-10T13:11:00.000-08:00

My Birthday is next week, and my first (and probably only) gift arrived yesterday from my mom. A digital camera, a gadget i've been jonesing for for along time now, and am quite frankly pretty stoked on. Tog et it here, my mom passed it along to a friend who lives in rio who happened to be in the states, who gave it to her daughter who was visitng but lives in rio, and i went to her house to pick it up. I never even got to meet ehr to say thanks in person, she had her housekeeper send it down in a chocolate shop bag. It was raining at the time, so i decided to hang out at the building and learn to use it a little.

I felt really 'mission impossible' flipping through the manual of a gadget i recieved in deceptive packaging from a contact i didn't know and never meant at an apartment building where i felt kind of unwelcome.

Afterwards I hung out with my friend georgiana who lived nearby, and ended up crashing at her pad. I'll post pictures soon, but this damn computer is too old!

But yeah, back tot he point, camera = awesome. it's a Pentax Optio M40. about the size of a credit card, it's really light and has tons of features (although it doesn't have manual control of the apperture or shutter speed...it does have ISO sensitivity though, which i guess osrta controls the shutter speed...). It has optical zoom, and records at a maximum resolution of 8mb. Also, my mom got a 128mb sd card, which suits me fine. From poking around online i think it cost my mom under $200, which is perfect.

it is exactly the camera i wanted. it's small. it's light. It has optical zoom and records at a decent quality. it's cheap enough that i won't feel too bad if it gets jacked.

the last bit is important because next month i plan to hit the road and backpack north through to march or so (fuck, i still need to change my ticket and extend my leave at the firestation!). the whole purpose of this trip was to see brazil, and although i've gone on about one serious sidetrip a month, i haven't seen nearly as much as i wanted to. So as far as traveling is concerned, i'm happy not to have a professional camera on me.

Along with clothes, i plan to take this camera and my Archos (Media player). I had originally intended not to take the archos with me on my travels, but ARCHOS + CAMERA = LETHAL COMBINATION. here's why: the archos isn't just an mp3 player and movie viewer, it's 40GB hard drive the size of my hand. and it's pretty light too. I'm going to look into the cost of a bigger SD card for the camera, but i feel like taking the archos along will probably give me more versatility.

I will be much more bummed if my archos gets jacked than my camera. But at least I can back up my music collection on my old 80gig external before i leave (the uneven power currents here have been wreaking havoc on it though, it's been glitching alot lately and some folders are becoming corrupted).

Class and soccer

2007-10-31T15:14:00.000-07:00

I meant to make this post awhile ago, but mess outside from the pending soccer match reminded me to get my ass in gear.

so about a month or so ago i attended a soccer game between corinthians and spfc, the two são paulo teams. corinthians are traditionally "the people's team," whereas spfc is the upper class team. Corinthians where here first, and their stadium is way out on the edge of the city. SPFC is much newer, and their stadium was built in the middle of a wealthy area.

the rivalry between spfc and corinthians is probably one of the most serious in brazil. the game i attended was called a "classico." SPFC were the favorites by far, well on their way to winning the championship (which they may accomplish tonight, if not next week), whereas corinthians had been having a shitty season.

everyone i talked to, corinthian and spfc fans alike, warned me not to go sit with on the corinthian's side. apparently, i don't look corinthian enough; i look like an spfc, and that could get me lynched. I reluctantly took their advice to heart.

as the game got under way, both teams raised their respective banders: huge flags that span a chunk of the stadium. the ends get passed up the crowd, and people wave them by beating on the underside. after a minute or so, they get lowered. The corinthians raised theirs first, an eagle. then spfc raised theirs, a dragon. a tear formed in the banner, just below the dragosn head. as the banner was raised, the tension caused the tear to spread, ironically cleanly beheading the dragon. a very bad omen.

it was a dirty game. there was significant fouling on both sides. at one point a fight broke out on the corinthians side. as the police poured into the stadium to quell the small riot, the spfc fans started cheering the cops on, saying "break them!" ugly, ugly business.

there were much fewer corinthian fans than spfc at the game, probably about as many as attended on that first, cold game i saw with ben. but they were waaaaaay more into it than the spfc fans. the spfc cheers barely circulated the crowd, staying focused only in the hardcore-fans section. moreover, the cheers got super repetitive despite the vast repertoire of cheers. the corinthians, on the other hand, were on their feet, dancing and singing the whole game through.

no goals were scored. bad energy filled the stadium. finally, with about 5min left in the game, the corinthians landed one on the spfc goalie.

wow. spfc couldn't even cheer. the stadium erupted with the songs of the corinthians. i couldn't even hear the beat of my team's drums.

as the game came to a close, i decided it would be a good idea to get teh hell out of dodge. i started moving towards the exit a little before the goal was scored. as soon as the game ended, i was outta there. outside the stadium were more cops than i have seen in one place in a long, long time, forming human walls in full riot gear, dividing the corinthians from spfc as much as possible. i had to hoof it over a hill just to get to my street (which actually pops out right in front of the stadium, but the cops wouldn't let us get to it for a ways).

leaving the stadium was a racket. singing fromt he stadium, singing in the streets, people honking horns (even taxis!), flags waving out car windows, fireworks exploding all around... suffice it to say, all the spfc fans had removed their shirts before hitting the street.

at one point, while waiting for a light to change a car drove by carrying some corinthians. they taunted my group waiting at the intersection. one of the people near me responded, mumbling one of the ugliest thigns i've heard in along time: "allegria da favela." happiness of the ghetto. that's what the corinthians were to this guy, a ghetto team. many people seemed to share his sentiment.

when i got back to the house, i sat down at the computer and started messign aroudn on my email or something. i could still hear cheers and sirens and explosions outside, even though thehosue is a ways from the stadium (by outside, i mean RIGHT outside). the explosions got closer, as did the sirens. then, i started to hear scuffling in the busshes by the window. it was 2 corinthian fans, being chased by the cops for setting off fireworks and generally being unrully. the cops landed their spotlights on em pretty fast, but i mean damn, what a mess.

i found it really itneresting how the class division in the city bleeds into soccer. soccer is the lifeblood of this country. you better believe they talk about soccer pretty damn early on the news. the victory of the corinthians was a victory of the lower class defeating the upper class.

the corinthians hadn't beaten spfc in many years. it was quite an upset.

The best thing to happen to the internet since wikipedia

2007-10-31T07:28:00.000-07:00

Ok. I'm not special. I like to go online as a diversion just as much as anyone else. But i also use the internet as a tool for self-motivated study.

today i was trying to find a material for a class i'm teaching today. One of my students is a film teacher, and i wanted to use the "Learning from Youtube" class being taught at Pitzer College, my alma mater, as a topic for discussion. sifting through blog posts, i came across the following incredible fact:

UC BERKELY IS POSTING ALL OF ITS COURSES ON YOUTUBE.

i alerady have a degree. who cares if I won't get college credit? i wanna learn. I never got to take an anatomy class, now i can! hey, if i wanna brush up on my ochem, i don't need to go to a library!

UCB, you guys are awesome. i hope otehr schools follow suit. home-schooled kids are gonna eat their hearts out.

http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=ucberkeley

Psychiatry

2007-10-30T16:27:00.000-07:00

[for context sake, it's worth noting that i'm watching garden state while i write this]

it's been a while since i've posted a good rant, so maybe this has been a long time coming. Today I came across a book review for "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became A Mental Illness". I definitely plan to read it.

For at least a decade now, I have had issues with psychiatry (what an ironic way to phrase that). my uncle, a clinical freudian psychoanalyst--last time i checked freudian theory was...archaic?--loves to tell me that he is sure i will ebcome a psychologist. I can't blame him. my interest in philosophy of mind has me browsing through at least as many books classified as cognitive science, neurology, and psychiatry as philosophy books. also, psychology would be a fine way to blend philosophy with medicine. But i have too much against psychology as an institution to seriously consider jumping in.

"Shyness" addresses one of my many reasons for hating on psychology: the ideology of better living through chemistry. Psychiatry attempts to cure illnesses of the mind, but a large number of these "illnesses," as robert pirsig points out, often can only characterized in the context of culture. A disease in psychiatry is basically anyway someone can be "different" from some imaginary norm, usually in a way that "disrupts" their life. basically, is someone has a character trait that makes them inefficient as tools for society, they have diseased minds.

According to the Shyness, there is another way psychiatry characterizes diseases: if we can give drugs to cure it, then we should. I often like to use ADD as my exemplar anti-psychiatry disease. Sure, there exist people who's inability to concentrate is a legitimate disability. But let's be serious here. The LARGE majority of the ritalin-popping public are just poeple who think the pill helps em out.

So let's call this shit what it is. Social anxiety disorder may exist. But the vast majority of people who take paxil are jsut your average run-of-the-mill wallflowers. fuck, i'm one of em. but i don't need paxil, i jsut need the right environment. i happen to think certain parties have hostile vibes, and just don't get comfortable enough to jump in.

still. right now i'm living in a foreign country where i previously only knew family; no one my age. I go out on my own all the time and have tons of fun, and am making friends more easily than i ever have in my life. fuck paxil. not taht i've ever been on it or anything, but i think that most people don't need drugs, they need experience. most people aren't mentally ill, they're just humans.

who the fuck do psychiatrists think they are, telling people they are abnormal? almost every psych-major i knew in college was in it to figure out what was wrong with themselves. shit, freud was so fucked in the head he even managed to project his neuroses onto more than a few of his patients.

Of course, then there's always the conspiracy-of-capitalism paranoia that is often attributed to western medicine by alternative medicine types. but the author makes a pretty convincing case for this kind paranoia with respect to american psychiatry. inf act, it's sort of the focus of his book, as i understand it.

From the article:

“Every marketer's dream is to find an unidentified or unknown market and develop it. That's what we were able to do with social anxiety disorder,” a product director for the drug told Advertising Age magazine.

fucked up, right?

ugh...i just invited my uncle to talk about the article. his newest attempt to get me to become a shrink:

uncle: "you need to get psychoanalyzed! just as an experience!"

me: "you think i've never been to a psychologist?"

uncle: "not a psychologist, a psychoanalyst. it's different! you will see, you will like it. it's very
close to philosophy."

maybe i should become a philosophical counselor. it's very close to psychoanalysis!

Rosane

2007-10-27T15:11:00.000-07:00

So i've written bits and pieces about this kid, but i think at this point she deserves a full post, at least.

i met rosane last sunday. it was really random that we met at all. i met this guy thiago at the party and he convinced me to stick around. he brought me down to this post-party at a reggae bar,
where i was perpetually on the verge of leaving.

Rosane doesn't go out much. she doesn't smoke, or drink, or even curse much. she hangs out with lots of people, but only considers three people in her life to be true friends. Sunday night she went to the beach to surf with a few classmates (note, not friends), and they convinced her to swing by olinda on their way back. she normally never even goes to olinda, less to bars.

As she walked by about 20 feet away, we saw each other. i thought she was cute, but didn't really have the balls to make a move. apparently neither did she, so instead she asked her friend to go talk to me.

we hit it off, but only got to hang out for about a half hour before she left. The next day i called her up and was blown away by the phone call. she offered to take the bus in the middle of the night to see me (not the safest idea) and suggested dropping school and work for a few days so we could get a motel to check out a local beach. needless to say, i'm not used to this kind of attention. according to shaun's friend roberta, this kind of behavior is apparently not unusual for the local girls.

according to rosane, this kind of behavior was very unusual for her. she's not accustomed to making this much effort for people she barely knows, nor does she normally open up to people she's known for so little time.

she says that she likes galegos, guys with blond hair and blue eyes. but she seems to have been especially stricken by me. she keeps asking me to stay and be her boyfriend. she offered to move to rio so we could be closer together. she cried today while we listened to a Ben Harper song - She's only happy in the sun, which turned out to be surprisingly appropriate for the moment (it was fun trying to translate for her).

it's killing me. i barely know this girl. i feel like i'd be crazy to rearrange my life for her, but we get along together really well. i like her alot and she seems to REALLY like me, which i mean is kinda unusual for me. usually when i pursue girls, i either get nothing or a good friend out of it. that's what i've got, lots of old crushes turned good friends. my list of "one's that got away" is much longer than my list of past girlfriends.

so now i'm in the midst of a conflict. she seems pretty crushed on me. i can either allow myself to crush back, or i need to be careful not to lead her on. have i been leading her on? am i leading her on? has she been leading me on? maybe she's just on the rebound. she met me 3 days after breaking up with her boyfriend of over two years (she said that in brazil when people break up, it's usually long after things go sour; only when there's nothing left. still, the guy left her a lipstick message on her mirror one morning when she was out with me. did i mention he's a cop?).

i left recife this morning. she just wrote me saying...well, all sorts of intimate things i feel would be innappropriate to post here, but among them were the phrases "i didn't go with you to the airport so you wouldn't see me cry," "i need you," and "if you find a way to be with me, i'm here."

I can't shake the feeling that i might be letting something really good pass by for poor reasons.

I told her i had to go back to são paulo to earn money so i could travel more.

i have a little journal in which i jot down my thoughts. i track the ideas by number, not date, to keep it from turning into a diary. one of the entries in my journal expands on a value judgement i made about myself. i used to think that having a strong relationship with a woman was the most important thing in the world to me, but in traveling i've learned that i'm just not ready to settle down right now; i cherish my freedom. after this experience with rosane though, i've learned that the freedom is a huge tradeoff, completely sacrificing any possibilty for a relationship of the kind i used to pray for.

maybe my values haven't changed as much as i'd thought.

in my journal, i called myself a traveler, which i thought sounded free. rosane called me a nomad, which i think sounds lonelier. her assessment might be closer to the mark than mine.

a busy week

2007-10-26T08:13:00.000-07:00

wow.... i haven't posted all week. i'm gonna skip around alittle here.

wednesday night i went on a date with rosane that went super well. lesse....shaun was still sick, tom had already left...or did he leave that day? oh yeah, and i went to janga beach wed, real shithole. polluted. real fine sand, got all over me.

....ok, time to work backwards.

thursday (yesterday) i wandered around olinda, took some pictures, talked with some local artisans (one of which offerd me a room for rent during carnaval)....then i tried to hook up with Alex for dinner since he finally rolled into town last night. his cell died mid conv so i didn't know exactly where he was. my first try was the espaço ciencia where his exposition was, but that turned out to be totally closed. the next attempt was this shitty mall nearby (i tried to hitch a ride on the bus but they wouldn't have it. i mean shit, it was one stop, and all i had a was a 50!), and he wasn't there either. had chinese mall-food for dinner, went back to the hostel, then went up to Sé to here a choro. there was a rehearsal going on there that was awesome. alll young kids, i don't think anyone of em was even as old as me. they were super good, and were rehearsing two songs, farol (lighthouse, in reference to a landmark here) and dança da latinha a song i recognized and sung along to, althouh i'd never heard it sung to a choro beat before (eu quero uma latinha pra botar uma bebe...). at the rehearsal i ran into thiago for the THIRD TIME. he took me into town to a little samba bar where we hung out. from there we wandered around and randomly found ourselves at an outdoor fashion show, then headed back to the bar. on the way there, i bought a bottle of Axé da fala, a local drink taht was super sketch. i bought it from what looked like a closed bar. thiago goes up to the bar and starts calling out "THIAGO!!" the other thiago pops his head over the wall, takes the order, and passes ove ra bottle of the homemade drink. it was pretty strong stuff, apparently loaded with herbs or something. good, kinda had a mediciny after taste though. we talked it up with a group of kdis we ran into for awhile, then i went home. i needed the rest.

tuesday.

monday first. fuck, i've already blogged about monday...

allright, no excuses. tuesday. tuesday!!! tuesday was terçã negra! i got to know shaun and tom better over breakfast then helped tom hitch call the bus station to figure out when his bus was leaving.then the three of us went into the old city to kick it a little. got to play translator some more (plus tour guide), kinda fun. it was also nice seeing the old city in the light. i can't believe i forgot to bring my camera, i'll just have to jack some pics form them. tom met up with his friend from recife who showed us a great spot to watch the sunset over the city. shaun and i went back to olinda soon afterwards. while shaun took a nap (he was getting sick) i did laundry by hand for the first time. lotta work, but worked well. kinda embarassing that i had never done it before. somewhere in here tom came back. kinda late shauns girl, roberta, and her friends came by, and we all went to this local bar to warm up. there, we met roberta's friend's younger sister, 19 i think, and her like 30 year old swiss/turkish bf. wierd wierd couple: he met her a year ago during his like 4 wk vacation here, apparently they stay a couple all this time, now he's back and they're a couple again, and he plans to take her back soon to marry him in switzerland. wierd wild stuff. we caught the tail-end of terça negra, a big bloc party with "afro" music, then went to the bar zero um (01) to here some reggae. cool place, and wouldn't you know it, there was thiago. same fucking guy man! he's always at the good parties. oh yeah, i also bought somethign from a sketchy street artesan who was selling mainly smoking related art. leonardo ("not 'da vinci', 'da VIDA!' ") made this thing he called the "coco loco," it's this goofily carved coconut. i'll post a picture of it. definitely never seen anything quite like it.

allright, i'm all cuaght up, time to talk about today. today i went to the mercado riberio where i had passed through yesterday because i saw them setting up for something today. see, this famous brazilian actress XUXA was coming to town, and the city organized a big carnival-esque display for her. quite frankly, i just wanted to see the show, but everyone else wanted to see her. i waited for a long long time. i talked it up with some local SAMU folks (paramedcis), and sat on top of a very uncomfortable fence for much longer than was advisable. after like 2 hours the show finally started. it was awesome, huge walking dolls, marching maracatu band, crazy frevo dancing, dudes with spears doing another dance who1s name i forgot...very very cool. much shorter than i would've liked though, and had a bad view. As XUXA was leaving, people kinda stormed her bus, so i took that opportunity to get a better view of the real show, and in so doing almsot got stabbed by a charging spear dude. very very cool stuff, i wanna come back here for carnaval real bad. so yeah, did that, had some tapioca for lunch (i've been eating alot of it. good local food, they heat fine yuca flour to make pancakes and put cheese and meat inside), bought some local art sicne it's my last day in town then kicked it at the hostel for a little. tonight i'm meeting up with rosane again. hopefully we'll make it to this big Choro show. a popular brazilian reggae artist, Adão Negro, is also in town so maybe we'll do that. or maybe we won't get around to either, she's not coming by till late. either way, i'm sure tonight will be fun, and tomorrow we're going to porto de galinhas with her to learn how to surf. i leave in the wee hours of sunday morning, so i dunno what i'm gonna do sunday night. hopefully i won't spend it at the airport.

Porto de galinhas

2007-10-22T20:10:00.001-07:00

yesterday at the party, the two spanish girls from the hostel (ainara and sara) and I arranged to go to a very famous beach just south of recife. i woke up at 6:30 without an alarm cause i'm a freak like that, did some qi gong, then had breakfast with them. we hit the buses and, surprise surprise, it took us 3 or 4 hours just like for calhetas (we'd been told this bus was faster, even though the beach was further away). thank god we woke up early.

when we got there, we were dissapointed to find that the beach's most sought after feature, tidal pools off the coast that form ddep swimming pools, weren't going to be available to us because the tide was high. still, the beach was gorgeous and we had a great time.

we bought fresh fruit on our way to the beach. among the fruit we picked up was a "caju." now, this fruit looks pretty wierd. my mom has a wax one at home, and after years of playing with the wax version and never seeing a real one, i long ago came to the decision they didn't exist and the wax fruit was just sort of a cool idea. wrongo tanto. seeing a basket of caju for real was like seeing a unicorn walking around. i had to have one, and they taste even wierder than they look. we also bought mango, which has become the fruit-mascot of my time her ein brazil. really, i can't believe how long it took for me to try mango. the kind the guy sold us was one of the no-fiber kinds, jsut soft and tasty. mmmmmmm

on the beach we feasted on the fruit and fresh crab chowder from a cart vendor, one of many on the beach (as with all beaches in brazil). i picked up a little sunburn out of my no-sunscreen-wearing arrogance, and made a new friend in the form of a stray dog who hung out with me after i pet him for awhile, but was above eating an orange slice i tossed him (not above sitting at my feet though, little cutie). we ran into him again as we walked back to the bus, which was funny cause sara, who was on a walk when i met the dog, apparently doesn't like dogs. sucked for her, cause the mutt followed behind her much more so than he did me, little cutie.

we had pizza for dinner at the beach (deciding catching the bus wasn't worth running back as we had walked a long distance..did i mention that as the sun waas setting the tide was finally low enough for us to have hit the pools? what a jip!). i'm sure i've mentioned that i love brazilian pizza, but i'm gonna put it in print one more time for good measure. the pizza here rocks, and even though this place was mediocre for brazil, it was still quite quite tasty. the spaniards didn't see any significant difference to spanish pizza though. maybe that means brazilian pizza really is european tasting?

sadly, they're heading out tomorrow so i won't be seeing anymore of em anytime soon. good people though, so i'll definitely keep intouch.

i've been really happy with all the freinds i've been making through this hostel. i've decided hostel's are the only way to travel, an opinion which will probably get me into trouble at some point down the line.

after we got back to the hostel, i met some knew kids i hadn't seen around, a canadian named sean and an ausie named tom.....woah, that sorta rhymes! they seem like good kids, so i'm sure we'll hang out. also, i called up rosane, a cute girl i met at the party last night. for details on that call, read the end of the previous post.

in summary, this girl was so forward it made me sorta paranoid, enough so to ask sean's pernambucano friend roberta if i should be worried about a mug-setup. the short verion of her explanation is no, and the anthropological lesson i learned from her is that northern brazilians aren't just forward, they totally reverse the order of courtship we have in the US: first they get to know each other's bodies, then they decide whether or not they like the person.

makes sense to me. brazil sure is different from the US though. i think tonight i experienced real culture shock for the first time in my life. i mean, this girl wants me so bad i thought she might be trying to rob me!

NEXT POST: david gets robbed.

WAWAWEEWA!!!!

2007-10-22T19:42:00.001-07:00

good lord, i'm having too much fun here. After boa viagem, i went to maria farinha. gorgeous, gorgeous beach. that night i went into the old city to party. the bus dropped me of alone in a relatively bad neighborhood. bad like i was offered crack by some kid waving viles at me from across the street. I asked a cab driver if he knew about a bar i'd heard about and he told me that he didn't and would i like to go find it iwth him? uh...red lights flashing in my head, i quickly realized he was just a reasonably well kept homeles guy hanging out by a cab and quickly crossed the street. luckily, i met a super cool couple after i finally found the bar: irish guy married to a brazilian. suffice it to say we drank alot and got happy as larry.

the next day i decided on a whim to go find a beach i knew nothing about besides what a guide-to-beaches told me --sought out for diving-- and what Pedro (cool kid who worked at the hostel) knew. i left at around 11, which was a mistake because i was on the bus for three hours. i had to hoof it from the bus stop to the beach, touching sand at a neighboring beach about after about 30min. finally, exactly 4 hours after i got there, i rented a mask and went snorkeling. i was not dissapointed. in the space of an hour, i saw about 25 different kinds of fish ( il ost track around 21 or 22), crabs, snails, hermit crabs, sea urchins, shrimp, tons of diferent kinds of plants and alga and corals, a sea anemonae barnackle kinda thing that receded when i touched it (i almost wrote my name in the stuff).....lotta cool life. after wards i goofed around in tidal pools and ahd a victory snack on the naighboring beach Gaibu, where i took a picture of a kid doing a weelie on the sand. he thought i was crazy. well, i couldn't havce been any crazier than the kid on the bus (by bus i mean van with 20 people in it) who insisted on taking pictures of and filming me with his knew camera phone. i'm the subject of the first film he ever made! how cool is that!

that night was wild. i was supposed to meet pedro at the hostel then hit this party up in front of catedral da Sé, but he'd left as soon as he got work (7) and i didn't find him at the party. what i did find when i got to the HUGE party (8) was two cool spanish girls who i knew from the hostel. we drank and watched capoeira, then randomly met a local poor surf intructor named tiago. he taught us how to dance coco, a really simple looking stomp kinda dance that's surprisingly hard to get the hang of. the girls went to bed so they could wake up early, and tiago and i went on to the beach bars as the party migrated. there we drank, met his friend rodrigo who introduced us to two italians he'd met. after hanging out with them for awhile we continued on to find a chess board at the bar (how cool is that?).

interlude: northern brazilians are really forward, at least in terms of sexuality. i thought it was wierd that tiago kept trying to get girls attention by touching their hair, but then 2 girls passing by in the crowd casually caressed my face and told me they thoguht i was handsome (actually, they said some dirtier shit than that. still, too bad they were ugly).

now back to the bar. waiting for a chess game to open up, i saw a cute girl in the crowd. a few minutes later, her friend came up to me to tell me she thought i was cute and would i like to meet her. we only got to hang out cause she had to leave about 30min later, but how's this for forward: over the phone tonight she offered to take a bus at 10:30 (from boa viagem, where you're not even supposed to walk the streets at night) to come by, despite having stuff to do the next day. moreover, she casually suggested ditching work and school for a few days so we could rent a room at a nearby beach for a few nights. WILD.

here's how in shock i am: i have actually been entertaining thoughts that maybe, just maybe, she wants to mug me. i mean....DAMN!! another pernambucanan i talked to assured me that she's actually displaying fairly normal behavior for the area. still, my head is SPINNING.

Olinda

2007-10-20T06:54:00.000-07:00

Recife is hot as hell. I am practically on the equator, and this area of brazil doesn't get much wind (it's actually cooler further north, i.e. on the equator, cause of the wind). The sun here is more intense than any sun i've ever been exposed to. You look up into the clear sk y, block the sun with your finger, and you can still see those incredible halo around it. when clouds pass under it, they almost always make sundogs. I hit the beach yesterday and it was almost unbearable. thank god for the free beach umbrellas set up and the easy access to beer.

i moved out of the hotel to a youth hostel in ol inda. it's much cooler here. the people staying here are awesome, the place ahs a hammocks and a kitchen, olinda is safe enough to walk around...much more my style. little further from the beaches though.

last night i went out with a good group of kids who are also tstaying here; in town for some kind of pharmaceutical conventions. we played this game that's like a cross between indian poker and 20 questions: everyone gets a four-letter word and puts the paper on their head. they ask the group questions to try to figure out their word. we played for like at least 2 hours.

oh man, we laughed so hard at the dumbest shit. at one point, one girl' word was her own name (rafa). she learned that her word is generally at her house, but not right now, was very close to her at the time...i almost died when she guessed the word as "you" (voce). so close, and yet so far. her word before that was "two " (dois), a word i'd given her, and she spent the first hour just trying to figure out what class her word belonged to.

another girl got the word "alive/live" (vivo). right off the bat i thought it was real hard, so i jokingly whispered to the girl who gave her the word "what happens when she asks 'is it alive?' " oh man, she overheard the question and was like, "Ok, it's alive!" and then started asking a bunch of different animals and shit...it was so bad. then someone told her it was a verb conjugated to the first person singular, and her train just jumped the tracks. she just let out a string of four le tter verbs. it was so sad.

another kid got laugh, and was told that it was a part of him, and his was big, but it's not part of your body.

...clearly , i had a lot of fun with these kids. we went out to a nearby bar afterwards and drank and ate and listened to music...real goo dbunch, i think they're leaving today or tomorrow. too bad, too bad.

i was getting bummed out about travelling alone, but i like the hostel situation. did i mention it's also super cheap here?

allright, i'mn gonna go shower. fucking heat man....

RECIFE

2007-10-18T19:41:00.000-07:00

So i'm finally spending some of that money i've earned!

i'm in recife right now, way up north. i'm in my hotel instead of enjoying the nightlife cause the food is really heavy and it's apparently not safe to walk the streets anywhere.

right after i got here, i asked the front desk wher ei could get a nice meal cheap nearby, and they recommended a restaurant 3 blocks away, then arranged a ride for me. in fact, they insisted. the hotel made it sound like they were protecting me form the prostitutes. to their credit, the hoes are EVERYWHERE.

still, not being able to walk outside at night is pretty lame. i only picked this overp riced hotel cause the cabbie said it was in a safer enighborhood than the other one i was thinking of. what's the point of being in a safer neighborhood if you can't walk outside?

Nina quer mais paginas en portugues na internet

2007-10-17T06:01:00.000-07:00

e chato que não tem muitas coisas en portugues na internet, por que eu não sei ler ingles!!

quero aprender a ler ingles, não so para ler a internet. Eu gostaria de entrar en um escola de ingles, so quando eu ficar mais velha.

she didn't realy want to write any of this, i had to force it all out of her. but hey, now my nine year old cousin is published.

I am the greatest english teacher ever.

2007-10-16T17:43:00.000-07:00

yesterday, i taught an english lesson to an advanced student using the following materials:

1) a page long essay summarizing Kuhns "Theory of Scientific Revolutions" using excerpts form the wikipedia article on the book

2) johnny cash - boy named sue

3) Kirpal - "you kicked my dog!" prank phone call
-->i brought the kuhn in as a response to a discussion we had last week about 'Heroes" where i started bashing the science of the show, particularly how they present evolution. we started talking about heroes again, and tangentially she started talking about indian accents. so, i showed her a good strong pakistani accent. she udnerstood the whole thing the first time around and laughed the whole way through.

With these materials and a hw review, the lesson lasted about 2 hours.

Also I'm reading John Krakuer's "Into the wild" with another student. After our little 'book club' lesson, we tag-teamed a piece about Pélé on the uncycloopedia (the browser froze so we lsot it before he posted)

I am like the best english teacher the world has ever seen. Fullbright scholars, kneel before me and my greatness!!

Opus? Dei be Ridikulus!

2007-10-14T13:17:00.000-07:00

This past weekend was a national holiday so i hit the beach with my family. they own a house on a small private beach directly between to very popular beach communities: Ubatuba and Caraguatatuba (awesome names, right?). the house is a part of a small, gated community composed entirely of houses. no resorts, no hotels, not tourists, no crime. just beach property.

On either side of the beach is a large hill. at the top of the northern hill is a huge church that was allegedly built by Ops Dei on the vatican's orders.

Immediately upon completion, the church was sold to an american company called "Sunrise Homes," that will turn it into a resort-hotel.

There are many, many reasons why this is fucked up, and I will outlien a few of them here. First, and most obvious, is that the property was built illegal (this whole diatribe is based on rumor by the way, but the story adds up). Builing resort properties on this beach is illegal according to local zoning. The first attempt to build the church did not pass, hence the papal orders. Brazil is a roman catholic country, so they do what rome tells em to and allowed the church.

moving right along, building a church means they don't have to pay taxes. in my opinion, if you build a dog house and then put a cat inside the day you finish, you didn't build a dog house. similarly, opus dei did not build a church, since no mass will ever be held inside (unless a rich couple decides to get married there). in my humble opinion, this constitutes tax evasion.

now here's the real kicker. Who funded this little operation? sure, the curch may line its pockets with similar enterprises, in which case old ivnestments just built up a new one, but think about this. A cathedral was being built in a poor, catholic, beach community. The build recieved the support of the people, who gave what meager donations they could to support the church, which is now being sold.

I feel that this is really fucked up. I plan to write a leter to the vatican, but shit, i've barely goten around to writing letters to my friends.

besides, when I sign the letter "MARX," they might disregard my opinion as a heathen.

Throw transportation down the well

2007-10-04T19:49:00.000-07:00

if the sudden surge in posts isn't telling enough, i've had alot on my mind lately. i've also had more time on my hands. maybe the two are related.

i need to start working out my future a little bit. I just got out of a talk with ruth and david that started with me wondering with how i shold tender my earnings, and led inevitably to how long i plan to stick around, when and where i'm travelling, where i plan to go when i'm done here, and of course fillign me in on their travel plans so i can try and make mine coincide.

david causally pointed something out that is very important to consider. he told me that he was afraid for me (with respect to my travelling) because he recognized taht i am kind of spontaneous and like to act in the short term, whereas many of the things i wanna do really require liong term planning. at the time we weer talking about going to carnival in rio. i don't just need to figure out travel plans and junk, but i need to hook up with a samba school. before any of this hapens, i need to see if i can exchange my return ticket. if that happens, i need to put in for a leave extension from the rescue squad.

see, this is exactly whty i don't like making plans.

i asked david about a road trip we had done about 10 years ago (man time flies!). he mentinoed to me that the road we took wouldn't be a bad one for me to check out again, if i could rent a car. i started talkign about how road trips were my style and began to wax reminiscent about my x-coutnry trips in the US and sleeping in cars when david immediately jumped on me and said "if you sleep in your car, you WILL get mugged." i started laughing because his certainty was nuts. i wasn't laughing becuase i didn't believe him, but because this country is just so wierd like that.

anythign and everything you do, you are at a high risk of getting mugged in one form or another. jstu about all of my students, friends and family have been "assaultado" at one point or another, or even multiple times in a mroe than a few cases. one of my students told me about a time a biker snatched his glasses right off his face.

brazilians like to remind me how "violent" their coutnry is. as bad as the country is, unless michale moore lied to us, the US is MUCH more violent than brazil. here, sure, you are more likely to get mugged. big whoop. my glasses mysteriously disappeared on the bus, i got conned in rio, and some cops fucked with me. big whoop.

You want violent? let's talk to ex-DC mayor Marion Barry for a second: "Outside of the killings, DC has one of the lowest crime rates in the country." nough said.

still, i don't udnerstand how sleeping in your car can be more dangerous than camping. locked doors oughta win the security contest over tent flaps, right? oh wait, no guns win.

Latest steven spielberg travesty

2007-10-02T21:31:00.000-07:00

Crimes against culture commited by Steven spielberg:

1) he "remastered" the star wars movies. once art is produced, leave it alone. Or for fucks sake, at least leave the original available. CG looks like crap next to the scenes with models and miniatures. Artists are never satisfied with their work...

2) he ruined A.I. by conitinuing the movie way after it should have ended. Cheap shot against Kubrick if you ask me: dude was dead and couldn't stop it.

3) he shot the star wars prequels. enough said. at least the third one satisfied what we ahd been waiting for. Too many new characters and politics and cg and general retardation in the first two...in general in fact. and he totally fucked up yoda.

Spielberg has performed yet anotehr sacriledge: to be released in 2008, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be the latest edition to the indiana jones TRILOGY. guess we can't call it that anymore. I mean, what the fuck is this, rocky? Indiana can't be old. it doesn't make sense. I thought harrison ford new better than to sell his soul like this.

I met spielbergs son max when i was at pitzer (kid goes to pomona). seemed nice enough. too bad his dad is a douche. I kinda pray someone kidnaps the kid and demands spielberg never sit behind an editing computer or within 200 yards of a respected actor as ransom. no offense max, but we have to save society from your dad.

if it HAS to be done, we should at least just let the raiders guys do it:

The State of the Union

2007-10-02T13:46:00.000-07:00

Friends, Friends of friends, strangers who pass by my blog, distinguished readers. we meet here today by law and custom to consider the state of Dave's trip.

I am currently at something of a halway point. The original plan called for a five month trip, and we have recently reached the 2.5 month mark. Looking back on this trip, some of my intentions have been fulfilled, as have some of my fears.

I have spent lots of time with my family. I usual do not get to spend much time with my brazilian family, or even see them more than once every few years. this trip has provided me with an opportuntiy to get to know my family better, and even meet a few new members.

I have traveled. I have been to a variety of local beaches, a farm city in the interior and of course rio de janeiro. yet I have not traveled as often or nearly as far as I had originally planned.

I have worked. My recent pay days have resulted in a deficit of R$1152 from my agency and R$420 from one of my clients, with another R$640 expected form other clients. this equates to jsut over US$1000 spending money, rounding down deductions for food bus and cell (which has been a pretty shitty investment thus far). Hopefully, the bulk of this money will go to future travel, as that was the idea to begin with. I have recently learned that travel is more expensive than i thought, and most of the things i wanna do i should give more time to than i had planned, especailly for the price.

I have partied. I have met many cool people. but my party average has been stable at approximately one outing of note per week, far below the revelery originally planned for the trip, likewise the precedent set while Ben was in town. this problem at least can be easily remedied, and shall.

One of the fears I expressed early on was an uncertainty in my capacity to meet people without contacts my age, without taking classes, without co-workers. In the above described parties, I have met many cool locals, as planned. yet, my loneliness persists. I ahve always been comfortable in my own skin and have no problem entertaining myself on my own, but a few friends would be nice. The friends i've made seem like really cool people, but i haven't had the opportunity to hang out with anyone more than a handful of times which has been a dissapointment.

Clearly, this situation is complciated and will take some thought. there may be no solution readily available, short of befriending the homeless who do not have jobs or school to get in the way of hanging out. Not good drinking buddies though.

Mainly, what needs to be considered is the duration of the trip. The big question is, am i erally at a halfway point? i want to build stronger relationships. i want more money for travel. I want to travel more. I could do all of these thigns if i commit more time to this adventure.

the more time i spend in brazil though, the less time i ahve to spend elsewhere. Will i travel the world? will I travel latin america with ben?

Moreover, will i continue my education?

that's probably the biggest question of all. Med school has always been on the horizon, then i started thinking about grad school in philosophy. lately i've been entertaining thoughts about fidning a neurology program that would allow me to do philosophy of mind. the logner i wait, the harder it will be: my MCAT will expire.

i came down here largely to find myself, and the process has begun, but certainly has a way to go still. i need to start thinking about my next moves. i hate to think about the future in general, but at this point in my life/trip some planning is clearly necessary.

Entertaining myself

2007-10-01T18:33:00.000-07:00

So this weeknd David and Ruth went to Ubatuba. I had already arranged with Paulo to have class on saturday to make up for one he missed; athis week had been busy for him, and he'd actually missed a few. normally, i wouldn't give classes on saturday, less in the morning, but he's my most loyal fan, so i bent for him. well, he canceleld on me at the last minute, no surprise, meaning i cuold sleep in! still, to late to go to ubatuba, whcih would've been cool.

i'm glad i didn't go though. i had a good weekend.

i sorta wasted my friday. i kept telling myself i was bored and that i would go out. well, 11pm rolled aroudn pretty fast and i spent all night in front of the tv. But that whole laziness jsut made me more stoked on saturday, cause I HAD to make up for my lost friday.

saturday i met up with nayara and some of her friends at an art exhibit in the city center. I got there n hour late cause i waited for a bus that never came. waiting for the bus i ran into a friend of Falvia's (my cousin), so i got on the bus with her and went to a neaqrby metro. the art exhibit wasn't my style (old religious carvings from the center of brazil), but i got there so late that we practically left right after i got there anyway. nayara's friends all bailed, so nayara and i wandered the city a little.

we checked out this beautfiul cathedral called Sé, where there jsut happened to be a police wedding going on, so it was kinda fun seeing the honor gaurd and hearing the police band. the cathedral had a huge organ that spanned the back of the cathedral, apparently only one of 4 or so of its kidn in the world!

afterwards we grabbed a quick bite to eat, then lazed towards the buses. on the way there, we passed a mall that was featuring a really really good beatles cover band, so we checked it out. a few weeks ago a local cover band (recognized as one of the best beatle cover badns in the world) set a world record playing throuhg the entire beatles repertoire front to back in one set; i think this was them. they even had the voices down, i was super impressed. still, i couldn't et over the fans. these people realy loved the beatles. it was wierd seeign so many people singing along in english, and it was great hearing heavy accents on certain words.

after a few songs, nayara had to get on her way so i walked her back to the buses. i decided to hit up a few friends and see if anyone could hang, so i called up basically everyone i could who wasn't family, only to find no one could hang out. everyone was either working or sick or had plans....it was crazy. so, i continued my little adventure. i went back to the beatles jam, heard em out till the end, then wandered the city center.

the city center is kind of...a shit hole. it's touristy during the day, but at night it's all goths, tramps and cheap porn vendors. don't ask me why, but there are tons of goth kids in são paulo. you'd think being a goth was hard enough with the alienation and teen angst and all that, but i mean, FUCK, these kids must be nuts to rock the black, heavy clothing and long hair in brazil. whatever. it's hot enough for me, anyway.

there wasn't anythign to do after the beatles quit, so after i'd satisfied myself wandering around, i jumped on the metro hoping to find a new bar to hang out at in villa madalena. i got off a metro stop early since my last experience at the villa madalena stop sucked (ben and i couldn't find any cool bars then got hassled byt he cops at gun point). i got some bad advice about a road to check out by the metro guy, so i kept on going and ended up back at the Ó Do Borogodo, a samba joint and realy enjoeyd a few weeks ago.

i got there about 2 hours before the music started, so i bought a beer, and started warming up, which was kinda lame cause i was there alone and they give you HUGE beers, meant to be worked at with groups of people. so i decided to invite myself over to a table occupied by two girls. When i asked if i could sit down, the cuter girl answered me "Disculpay, No fahla pour-two -gase." no fucking way. last time i was here, i met Georgiana and spent the whole night speaking english. saturday night, the first table i sit down at jsut happens to be the only english speakers in the joint.

One girl was from miami, the other form finland. they were nokia workers on a night out. not the most interesting conversationalists, but it was nice talking to another american who had been in the country about as long as me (of course, i speak portuguese and she don't, mwuahahaha). When ricardo arrived, i ditched em to say high.

I mentioned ricardo in passing a few posts back. I met ricardo at a feijoada Alex (flavias bf/fiancee/husband) brought me to a while ago. Ricardo, a professional musician, was the birthday girls bf. they're no longer together, but that's neither here nor there. Ricardo told me at that party that, yeah, he'd be totally down to trade english lessons for samba lessons, and we traded info. well, i never got back to the kid, and i wasn't going to let this chance slip by. I got his info, and we are def gonna do it.

ricardo plays the pandeiro (a kind of tamborine), and he plays a MEAN pandeiro. i was skeptical when i first saw thing, kind of wondering why he was the only percussive element in a badn with 3 string instruments and a flute/sax player. all i can say is that i am ready to leard from this guy; it sounded like he was playing 3 drums at the same time.

but yeah, the ó was fun as usual. met 2 cute jewish girls, Talita and her friend Ligia (super rare to meet jews outside of hebraica, i've been finding), and their friend Fernando. Talita was super cool, a psych major at PUC and a kidnergarten teacher at hebraica. def wana see her again. her friend was cool and really outclassed me as a dancer. i asked her for a lesson and she jsut kept giving me advice about trying to feel th usic...damn theater kids. their friend fernando was a good guy too, spent some time in canada an dpicked up a taste for football and hockey while there (i foudn someone to watch the super bowl with!!!!).

leaving the ó, i entered the twilight zone. Not only did the cab driver recognize me, he rememebred i was an english teacher, and the street i lived on. woah der. i hadn't been to the ó in at elast 2 weeks, maybe mroe; last time i visited was the ngith before i left for caconde, which was before rosh hashanah.....i mean, damn!

one of the worst parts about going out on my own is that i have no backup, no one to help me piece things together from the cryptic artifacts occasionally unearthed when seeding through the nights wreckage the morning after. sunday morning i was thumbing through my notebook and found what i thought was an email address for "fernanda - canada." WHO THE FUCK WAS FERNANDA?!?! I DON'T REMEMBER ANY FERNANDA??" i beat my head against the wall for about two hours before i put canada and hockey together, realized the 'a' was an 'o' and remembered who it was. super frustrating, not the first time, and far from the last. Hopefully i'll pull a system together to keep this sorta thing from happening, like taking notes wheni get emails or something.

whatever, i think i've been doing pretty well for myself on my own. there hasn't been a single night i've gone out on my own and found myself unable to meet a few new really cool people.

so sunday i slept in and decided to go check out a fair in liberdade, the asian district. the fair was cool and i wandered aroudn there basically all afternoon, and picked up some books that were on reserve for me at the bookstore.

I had bought a dvd of Child's play a few days before cause it was super cheap (packaged with the amityville horror, the two of them were less than $7!! and this was in a legitimate store!). i was decided from the hangover and all the walking, so i decided to just kick it with a beer and a pizza with the movie that night. well, the pizza took for ever and turned out to be a poorly choiced order, and i couldn't figure out how to get the dvd player to work, so that plan kidna went to hell, but it was nice vegging out in front of the tv anyway.

David and Ruth got back to find me half asleep on the couch, painfully trying to stay awake to watch the man in the iron mask (which was a dissapointment).

I slept alot, danced alot, met some new people, and even caught a few new sites. I'd say it was a pretty successful weekend.

Tiiiiiiiime, is on my side....

2007-09-25T18:55:00.000-07:00

So far, this week has been awesome, and it looks like it will continue to be so. The weather these days has been kinda lame (overcast, cold, windy). But you know what? THIS WEEK IS THE WEEK OF FREE TIME. I've had tons of cancelations, so consequently I've had more Dave time lately than i have in a while. today I had my first free weekday-afternoon basically since I started working!

I started the day by waking up early, biking to a local park where I did my qi gong, which I hadn't done in weeks excluding sunday. i've been meaning to practice more, and just the practice i've done these past few doeshas been really energizing. My cousin flavia was thinking of starting tai chi classes. if she ever gets aroudn to it, i'm totally in. if not, maybe i'll teach her my qi gong...

afterwards, I had breakfast at a bakery. I usually have breakfast on the run, which means some kinda fried food i can walk with or a pão de quejio (baked ball of cheese bread).

after this glorious morning, I still had time to run crazy errands on av. paulista before class. I hadn't made it up to av. paulista in WEEKS. I used to spend all day there. lately Faria Lima has been my home base and I don't like it nearly as much. Paulista has a great bookstore, a museum, a park, all kidns of crazy buildings, cool street vendors, and metro access. all faria lima has is a mall, some restaurants and an internet cafe, but it's where all my students are at.

Paulista sorta became my stomping grounds when i got here. It felt good to be back.

I'm going to write more letters. I finally got aroudn to sending Laura chernin a postcard in nepal. we'll see when that gets there. so that just leaves like 20 billion people i need to write and send things to. i was going to write on sudnay, but i spent all day playing with my cousins (a worthy sacrifice, those kids are hilarious). maybe i'll knock some more names off that list this week.

lord knows i have the time :D

Kol nidre

2007-09-21T17:51:00.000-07:00

tonight was the first night of Yom kipur. We had a nice pre-fast dinner at the house with my aunt, uncle, his three kids and two grand children. Afterwards, we went to the temple. Of course, i knew no one and had crazy trouble following the service: not only were the translated portions in portuguese, but the few prayers I shoudl have known by heart were either slowed down alot or sung to a different tune, making it really really hard to keep up!

but that's not why i'm posting. I'm posting because as we were walking back to our car, some dude driving by called out the window, "JUDEUS FILHO DA PUTA!"

It was pretty clear to me who the "filho da puta" was in this situation and although i am trying to experience as much of brazil as possible, I have no intentino of geting acquainted with their prisons. My uncle on the other hand had other thingso n his mind and chased after the guy. I couldn't let my 60yo uncle get his ass kicked by some anti-semite, so I followed him.

My uncle gave the guy a good scare. When the asshole saw him coming, he almost hit a car trying to get away. David (my uncle) chucked his keys at the car since they were the only things handy, then foudn a rock and continued the chase as the car went around the corner. he never got a chance to use the rock, but luckily he didn't get hurt either.

I don't know how common this is. One of the people on the Caconde trip relataed a very similar experience that had happened a few montes prior.

I would have liked to have caught up with the car and beat the guy through the open window he shouted at us from. I would have liked to have thrown things and gotten all worked up. But would good would that have done? if he thinks badly of us, that behavior certainly wouldn't change his mind or encourage positive attitudes towards jews. If he thinks badly of us, his opinion has that much less value and shouldn't effect me. If he thinks badly of us, fuck him. It's Yom kippur, and i'm focusing on my own sins tonight. I don't need to worrya botu some other asshole's problems.

Watching my uncle chase after the guy when I had made the decision that "fuck him, he's jsut some asshole" made me wonder if i had done the right thing. As a foreigner, playing it safe makes sense. As a Jew, I believe my pacifism was the right decision as well.

Shanah Tova.

Stay safe.

Peace.

Camburi

2007-09-18T17:46:00.000-07:00

So last thursday I called up Pablo (from the caconde trip) to see if he was down to get some beers. He said he was busy, but would hit me back on Friday. Well, on Friday he called me up asking if I wanted to go to the beach with him, his brother, and another friend.

I ended up blowing off the PUC kids again to go to the beach. It’s been at least a month since I’ve hung out with them, so I feel kinda bad about that, but the beach was sick and pablo’s little group was nothing but good people.

Saturday and Sunday we went surfing. The water was great, but the weather was so-so. Still, great time.

Coming back from Camburi, My friends surprised me when we stopped to eat at a foreign pizzeria franchise (one of only two or so in the city) where we had to wait 20 minutes for a table. They were all over the place, talking up its great food at a low price. What was the restaurant you ask? Pizza hut. Fucking pizza. Same greasy, gross pizza as the states, but the restaurant was made up to look respectable.

Really, they weren’t selling pizza, they were selling an image. They were selling a “first world” experience. It hadn’t really occurred to me how impressive that image is to people down here until driving back from Camburi, we saw a billboard for a whorehouse (really. No shit. Billboard for a whorehouse) that advertised itself as “your night in the first-world!” I laughed, no one else did.

Caconde

2007-09-10T19:35:00.000-07:00

get ready for a long post folks. sorry. i had a really raelly good time this weekend and i've got a lot i wanna put down.

thurs evening i left for caconde. The trip was off to a shaky start: i ate fast as hell to get there on time, which i was only one of 2 people to do. waiting for the bus, the people who trickled in only got wierder and wierder until finally after about 5 people some normal folks started showing up. despite an alleged age cap of 25, i was easily the yougnest person on the trip, the oldest being 42. i bunked with 3 other guys who turned out to be pretty cool, even the the kid in the bunk next to me snored like he was sucking his dying breaths through a straw.

friday we went white water rafting. i took the front of the raft, which was a challenge since the commands were in portuguese but was fine anyway. we hit some really fun rapids; the water was fast and there were some surprising drops. as often as possible, our guide would pop us into hygros and spin us around with the raft filling up with water, sometimes working the raft to buck people out. towards the middle we stopped time walk the raft aroudn a dangerous class 4 and took a break to cliff jump into a really big rapid at the end of the series. it was high enough that I could flip off....coolness.

saturday we went "cascading:" rappeling down a 45m waterfall. the guides set up a guideline over the fall for safety which was super lame, forcing you to fly over the fun parts. i've rappeled plenty at the squad, so after one run i wasn't really down. I convinced the guide to elt me go without the guide line which was MUCH COOLER. i slipped and slide a bunch on some parts but didn't hurt myself. i got rappel right into and udner the fall, which no one else had the opportunity to. at one point, there is a negative space behind the fall, so i had to invert right under the fall. totally sick, thrilling as hell, lots of fun.

Caconde is out in the middle of nowhere. hella stars like WOAH (cali enough for ya?). thing is, it's the southern hemisphere, so i couldn't find anything i recognized besides the milky way which was GORGEOUS. a friend pointed out a few important constellations (scorpio, the southern cross), and i saw 3 shooting stars.

Being in the boonies, the locals don't stay in caconde if they can help it. this results in a phenomenon i had never before imagined: the party scene is overrun by high schoolers. friday night we hit the town and couldn't find a girl over 16 out. pretty, pretty lame.

saturday night, on the other hand, was AWESOME. for some reason there were less children around, more kids our age. a friend of a friend who lived in town set us up with his neice, juliana, who was really cool and managed to find us rides to this party we were trying all night to get to (she was so cool, she arranged rides for her friends but didn't go herself until she found a way for us to get there. cool chick, huh?).

at the party i ran into a friend of ju's i'd met earlier that night, adriana, a 21yo recently graduated nurse who wanted to work on ambulances. i spent the night hanging out with her and her friends who were all really cool. they did these silly litle dance rituals where they would all fall on the floor and kick their legs, or just tackle each other...cool locals. We ended up hooking up and my friends from the trip saw us, so the next day i'd developed a reputation as a "pegador" (loosely translated as pick-up artist, pimp, or maybe man-slut. good connotations, good connotations) which was kinda embarassing.

dri's cousin's fiancee was super drunk and generally alotta fun. she kept encouraging us to kiss, which made me feel like i was in middle school, but whatever i didn't really mind. at one point the drunk cousin caught me in the face with ehr cigarette, nearly taking out my eye. i've still got a little burn on my cheek, maybe 50mm from my eye. close call folks, close call.

dri, her cousin, and the drunk fiancee gave me a ride back in their car that night. the drunk girl had to pee really bad but was to drunk to get anything out, so we kept stopping on the way back, which was fine cause it gave us a few last make-out opportunities on the way back. we ended up beating my crew form the trip back to the motel even thoguh they left before us (they had stopepd for food). they literaly pulled up right after us, so they basically started busting my balls as soon as i got outta the car.

by teh way, folks from caconde showed me crazy hospitality. i got invited to stay at 2 people's houses and a wedding in may!

i spent the bus ride back to SP trading jokes with the guys and watching borat and episodes of south park i'd gotten from one of the nerdier guys on the trip. the jokes were sometiems really ahrd to understand/tell, but the effort taught me a bunch of new vocab, and the fact that i could appreciate brazilian humor built up my confidence in the language a little more.

all in all, an AWESOME weekend. i'll post pictures when i have em.

VIVE LA REVOLUTION!!

2007-09-04T11:35:00.000-07:00

So this friday is the brazilian independence day, Sept. 7th. consequently, it's a national holiday. i've signed up to go on a random trip to some place called Caconde through a jewish comunity club called "Hebraica." hopefully i'll meet some cool folks there, and if it sucks, at least i get to go white water rafting (they cal lit "Cascading") and maybe see some nice chunk of nature.

also, the brazilian people have been really dissatisfied with their government for along, long time now. on the 7th, there's going to be a country-wide panelação. "panela" is portuguese for pan, like pots and pans. a panelação is a very brasilian method for showing discontent: they bang pots and make noise for a couple of minutes.

i know about this demonstration because of an email my aunt recieved a few days ago. she seemed excited about it. my uncle said he'd been waiting for something like this and proceeded to show me how many books he's written or organized relating to teen violence. i have a strong feeling they got caught up in a chain mail, but we'll see what happens.

did i mention i think my english is getting worse? i spend all my time speaking english to people who speak it poorly, and i think it might be getting to me....

a moral dilemma

2007-09-03T12:16:00.001-07:00

this will probably seem lamer than lame to anyone reading it, but this is has been bothering me all weekend.

my biggest client, Paulo, is this middle-aged dude who's the president of a lartge real estate firm here in são paulo. i don't jsut say biggest because well, the man is intimidatingly huge, but i teach him 4 times a week. i need horsu, so that's GREAT, even if our classes move frustratingly slow.

the dilemma: last friday, one of his associates came to me asking mehow much i charge. i gave him the breakdown, then remembered paulo is actually my client through this company that hands me business for a cut. in other words, if i take paulo's associate on, i make more money (double, actually), but run the risk of charging him less than paulo is charging, which would be, well, fucked up. worst case scenario: i get fired (obviously). why is this so bad? well, not only would i (might i?) lose my clients, but i'd also lose my main resource for learning material, i.e. textbooks.

i encountered this company through my cousin who is good friends with my boss, so i actually ran into my boss at that brithday part on sat. i couldn't bring myself to talk to her then. i really feel like i should talk it over with my boss instead of just jumping into this client head first. it sucks that i make chicken feed with this company, but the fact is i need their books.

i ahve other clients. maybe i shold decline the client, and not take on any more clients through this company so i ahve mroe time open for students who will pay me directly. of course, taht might make me a worse person in context....

i'm not perfect, damnit.

birthday

2007-09-03T12:04:00.000-07:00

The family down here has this really cool tradition they do for kids birthdays; instead of hiring entertainment, they have the kids write a play. it soudns campy and i suppose it is, but it's actually really cool. the whole family helps out in the creative process, and everyone has a role in the play.

Saturday was the first time i got to participate in one of these plays. my young cousin/neice/whatever you wanna call her Lis turned 9, and had a space themed party. her play was super cute. there was an ambiguous problem on the moon that had to be resolved in person, so she flew to the moon with a couple other astronauts (aunt, uncle, grampa), passed an american ship on the way up (me), encountered an alien (sister), ate at a cafe on the moon (mom, grandma, nanny), and in the end saved the day (the problem was smoke coming from the aliens moon-marshmallows or something...she convinced the alien to sell ehr recipe to the restaurant, and they all lived happily ever after). she even wrote a little song, and of course tehre was plenty of other childrens songs incorporated which was wierd cause you know i've never heard children's brazilian music and every one else knew the words.

but yeah, really cute birthday, and i was glad i got to participate. i'll put up a picture in the near

SPFC

2007-08-26T15:40:00.001-07:00

I just got back from the wildest game. It was a beautiful day. clear skies. sorta hot, but totally bearable. last game i went to was corinthians; they're a SP team, but it was a super cold day and it was the middle of the week. Lotta fun, but poor showing

not today. oh no. the stadium was PACKED. everyone was wearing white jerseys and singing and stomping.....

<<-**-# 5-0 #-**->>

what more can i say? Nautico got raped. In the first half SPFC had lots of shots on goal, and nautico was fouling left and right. straight up. it was 0-0 at half time, but after the second goal nautico just stopped playing. the third goal was a penalty shot (which apparently is goalie v goalie..wierdness). for christ sake, the fourth goal looked like an accident....the ball jsut sorta bounced in when the goalie wasn't looking. and the 5th goal happened with about 5min left.

awesome, awesome game.

i've got to admit, it's getting better...better, all the time...

2007-08-23T19:07:00.000-07:00

the other day i was kinda bummed because one of my favorite students told me he wouldn't be able to continue lessons. he's a lawyer who wants to get an LL.M from Columbia so he can start teaching law on the side, but he's currently in a masters program and he jsut foudn out that his 200 page masters is due in october. so i definitely respect his priorities, but hey, i need work!

In his place, i've taken on a new student, a 54yo real estate mogel who is like super rich and married to a singer named Fortuna who is famous enough taht my mom's heard of her. to squeeze him in (he wants 4 days a week, which is great for me) I had to bump my uncle out of a time slot we marked down the day after we finally scheduled his classes. so that had me pissed with myself too.

But today has been a good day. I bought 2 new books: The 6th harry potter book in english, and Paul Feyerabend - Against method in portuguese (which apparently only recently just got translated). I taught both of my newest students, 2nd lesson with one and first lesson with the guy i just mentioned. after my first lesson with guilherme (the younger kid) we traded music like crazy, which was fun.

i was really gunning to go out tonight after working a bit and taking HOURS of public transportation, but i started practicing guitar and now that i'm starting to pick up the samba beat i'm really getting into it. like, i'm in the zone you know? you can't drop the ball when you've finally got it!! i met a kid at a fejouada last weekend who would trade me samba lessons for english lessons, but he's gonna teach me percussion i think. so today i realized that, "hey, i bet i could find some good guitar lessons on youtube..." and well, let's just say i've been watching this video repeatedly over the past hour. after practicing this guy's technique, this whole samba thing seems much more doable. i can really see the beat now!!!

back to the axe.

Guitar Notes

2007-08-21T05:16:00.000-07:00

The other day I spent all day wandering around Av. Teorodo Sampaio, a street where there are tons of music stores. I foudn a few guitars i liked and marked down the names of the stores. Shopping for a guitar made me realize something though: in the meantime, seeing as i'm not making enough money to justify that kind of purchase, why not borrow one?

So now I have a guitar to play!! my cousin Flavia is lending me hers, a beautiful little classic guitar with quite a history. It belonged to my André, my aunt (one of those complicated relations that i call "aunt" out of convention) Celia's son. He died....probably more than a decade ago in a car accident. If I ever met him, i'll be honest, i don't remember it. I really only know the guy through a memorial CD-rom Celia made with images and some of his music.

It's always nice to play an instrument with a little history, you know? adds personality to the instrument. I finished changing the strings last night; Flavia hadn't picked up the guitar in years. There's something meditative about the ritual of replacing guitar strings, i really enjoy it.

Time to learn some samba--and maybe eventually buy that spanish guitar I saw on Teodoro Sampaio....

having a borrowed guitar is makingme really want to have ownership of one. I want to take the guitar out, you know? go practice by the lake in pq. Ibiriapuera in between bouts of reading....

really, i'm just happy to have a guitar to fool around with again.

to sleep....

2007-08-17T16:50:00.000-07:00

awwwww man.... so last night was fun, but what a night....
so yesterday after a whole lot of nothing i went out to Av. Sumaré to meet up with some friends of nayara's, the girl i met at the PUC party. do to a ginourmous miscommunication, i ended up walking up and down the street for about 1.5 hours only to eventually learn that the restuarant was in fact not even on that street. so round 11:20 i finally met up with her friends who were pretty cool, but after working up a huge appetite walking up and down the street, wouldn't you know it, the kitchen closed. meh.

so afterwards, we left to go find a bar in villa madaleña, where we met up with nayara and some more friends of hers. we had a chill time, and nayara and i finally got to eat something which was a good thing, believe me. we hung out at the bar until like 4am, sharing rounds of beer and sipping some nice cachaça (all the kids were from Minas Gerais, an area renowned for good food and good cachaça).

allright, here's the real story: after the bar they drove me a ways towards home and dropped me off with a cabbie. dude was asleep inhis car, and it smelled like he msut've been living in there for days. i mean, his cab really smelled like straight up ass. pretty...pretty nasty. dude woke up and said he'd give me a ride, but damned if he wasn't snoring and driving in-between lanes the whole way home.

so finally i get home, and i try to get in.....but the door wouldn't unlock!!! my uncle had left the key in the top lock, making it impossible to get my key in!!! so what could i do? i walked up the street, took a piss at the gas station, came back, laid my map on top of the stones of the garage and slept in front of the car for about an hour. cold, cold ngiht. a little before 6 i woke up freezing and decided that may need for sleep overwhelmed my guilt at waking them up early, so i rang the doorbell and was let in.

I passed out immediately and slept till about 10 when i woke up for no good reason. I did a little work, arranged to take on a new student, and read for about 2 hours until i finally got tired enough to go back to sleep. and sleep i did. when i woke up, it was DARK out. i slept all fucking day! i had thought earlier, "hey, i'll jsut take a nap until i'm rested enough to go to pq. ibirapuera and read there and maybe pass out on the grass in the sun...that sounds nice." nope. when i woke up, i had to feel around the bed for my book just to make sure i hadn't dreamed up the small amount of productivity i'd experienced that day (which thankfully i hadn't).

so now it's a little after 9, i've got no plans, and i'm concerend about my sleeping patterns. i really hope last night/today doesn't throw me off too much. i kidna wanna get to bed early just to set myself straight, but on the other hand tonight is the 2nd of 3 nights out of the week i can get my friends to hang out.

oh well. next time i'll set the alarm or something. ridikolus.

bored....BORED!!!!!

2007-08-16T10:35:00.000-07:00

gaDAMN i'm bored. yesterday i had my first day of paid work. I taught for 1.5 hours, and arranged for another calss next week. my student clearly doesn't want many calsses, and regardless of how many ig ive him in the short term, he certainly does not want classes to continue past september.

after class, i walked to av. Teodoro Sampaio which has a bunch of stores on it, and just wandered around listening to my music. when i finally i got to the music area, i wanderd from instrument store to instrument store looking at guitars i can't afford. I'm actually thinking of buying one and i foudn 3 i liked that are reasonably cheap, but i can't keep blowing money like this without having a steady in-flow, you know? it felt raelly good to play again though; yesterday was probably the first time i'd picked up a guitar in about 2 months--at least a month without a doubt.

but walking and reading and watchign tv get old. i'm prob gonna go chill at the park for a few hours, but man...i need a job with mroe hours and some friends with more free time.

Lost in translation

2007-08-15T18:34:00.000-07:00

So not speaking portuguese great can be fun, but sometimes making language mistakes ends up resulting in....real world mistakes.

When I was in rio, the shampoo in my cousins bathroom said "PROTEÇÃO" in big bold letters on it and said somethign about hair breaking. i thought it was for split ends. I liekd it, so i bought a bottle when i got back. Today i realized it's an anti-baldness shampoo. I've got enough hair already: i really hope this shampoo doesn't turn me into sasquatch.

funy, but not quite as funny as when ben and i saw that youth group perform thinking it was gonna be a huge party with live music.

blogger, orkut, and sleeze

2007-08-12T17:45:00.000-07:00

for some reason, there is like a city wide, possibly countrywide problem with blogspot.com domains. there's a sizeable thread in google groups about it, so i'm not the only one having problems. translation: chances are, none of my friends in sp could read my blog if they wanted to. i made an orkut account mainly to satisfy people i've been meeting down here. honestly, not a fan and i like facebook way more. but still, i posted a blogger link there and i bet none of them can read it. so this blog will remain with zero readership minus i, but hey, at least i'm motivated to keep a journal of my trip.

also, i think orkut is going to make me look like a slut. in general when i go out and start talking to strangers, i go up to girls. so consequently, i've been meeting more girls than guys. i'm not saying i don't have an agenda, but i wanna make normal friends too! but yeah, i feel like there's gonna be tons of pictures of girls on my friends page, and kids round here will stop calling me "gringo" and start calling me "slut bag."

or maybe "pimp."

Sampa it is

2007-08-12T17:36:00.000-07:00

so i made up my mind: i'm staying. sp really ain't such a bad city, even if it is filthy and has no beaches...it'll be like LA all over again minus the snoboarding and natural parks (yes, LA has beaches, but they suck so i never went).

when it comes down to it, i'm sure i'll have fun wherever i live, sp or rio or dc for that matter, because i want to and i ahve that outlook on life right now. i originally came down here thinking i wanted to live alone and be in a situation where i was uncomfortable and unsure; i was concerned that living in a small apartment behind my uncle's hosue in a city where i already have a vast network of family might be too....comfortable and easy. i was afraid sticking aroudn would be a cop out of sorts.

but when it comes down to it, living in brazil is not just an opportunity to find myself and try someting new (which is stil the case in sp), but also an incredible opportunity to get to know and spend time with family who i normally see once every few years, if that!

my family back home isn't that close, so it actualy feels wierd making family a priority like this, but you know what? i'm at peace with my decision. also, i feel that having gon ethrough this dilemma i may enjoy sp all the more, having turned down the opportunity to live in rj. in making that decision, i recognized staying as worthwhile and the city as a good place to live. it wasn't jsut a decision, it was a declaration of confidence in my future here.

also, met a cool girl on fri who i went out to dinner with on sat night. we didn't hook up or anything, but she turned out to be a really cool chick and we jsut spent hours talking, and then i made my decision to stay on sunday morning. so yeah, maybe she had something to do with it, or at least helped instill the "são paulo ain't all that bad..." attitude in me

Rio vs. São Paulo

2007-08-11T06:27:00.000-07:00

So I really have to decide now, am I going to live in RJ or SP? I've been invited to 2 different peoples placees in rj, so housing is not a(n imediate) problem. i've sorta made a few friends down here, but they're not like great friends, more like college kids who know where the party is at. I feel like I shouldn't have any trouble making friends up in rio, maybe even less than here.

the big issue is: what will I do if i can't get a job? my mom has already offered to send me extra cash basically as long as i'm doing something moderately productive with my time and am enjoying myself (so basically i'd be supported even if i was just taking classes), but really i don't want to have that financial crutch. as if finding work teaching wasn't hard enough already, the second semester started about a week ago; i'm looking for a job teaching in the middle of the school year. not good, not good at all. at least here in sampa i've got a call back interview and a private tutoring hook-up.

honestly, i'm not really sure what's holding me back. maybe it's the people. i've got lots of family here in SP, but i barely see most of them anyway, and my friends shouldnt be holding me back. the job issue might be an obstacle, but really it shouldn't get in the way of my living in a more interesting area. maybe I just find the possibility of failure in job search so concerning because i really really don't want to go begging my parents for money. in fact, i was udner the impression that that life line was severed after graduation.

rio is gorgeous. the night life is wild and kicking basically every night of the week, and the weekends are off the hook. the beaches there are fantastic and there's at least one within walking distance of pretty much any part of the city (did I mention SP has no beaches?). the girls are gorgeous and are all over the place. the bottom line is that I would probably enjoy myself more if i lived in rio. I guess i'm just concerned that even though I came to brazil to be largely on my own, rio might force me to seek financial support. would that be so bad? probably. but i mean...maybe i could just put up flyers and tutor college kids or something. or hell, who knows, maybe even find a job doing something other than teaching! I feel like i maybe haven't pinned down exactly what's bothering me about this move.

I've probably repeated myself alot, but hey, i was out all night at a party at PUC and i'm really tired. the party was pretty sick by the way, started outside the school, then eeryone went to this gym where there were like a thousand people or so. i met this cool chick at the school who i lost at the gym, but i found basically the whole crew from the bar from a week ago! also, the school batucada (drum band) played for like 2 hours, just churning out rhythms while the students chanted their school anthems. tiny little carnival contained in a school gym. fun night, but had to bail to teach my cousin's fiancee some english, and mofo is LATE! i left the party early and woke up for this foo! anh, whatever, he's gonna teach me how to drive a bike, so we're cool. man i'm tired though

rio part 2

2007-08-09T10:14:00.000-07:00

So we didn't end up staying in buzios. Ben and i got trashed our one night there, and just hung out in this bar talking philosophy, which was fun. The enxt day was really jsut a day of traveling, going back to rio. The next day, tues, Ben and I went hanggliding in Tijuca national forest. that was SICK. hanggliding over rio was definitely not in the original plan, but it was totally worth it. The wind on tues wasn't great, so there was a long line to jump, and we had to wait for like 3 hours. finally, the wind got better, and ben and i got to fly. we were lucky enough to be in the air at the same time, and were actaully the last people to get to fly that day.

little recap of the experience. First, waiting. waiting in line was ok, waiting on the ramp, ready to start runing as soon as my pilot gave the word was wierd. we were super high, with an incredible view. The camera on our glider died before we jumped, so i don't have any pictures, but ben has a few which i'll post later. finally, the wind changed, so we started running balls out. then the dive. the dive off the platform was so cool, like a roller coaster. it was too fun to hold back, so let out a pleased "WOOOOHOOO!!!!!" i had total confidence in my pilot, so i wasn't worried that we wouldn't pull up, but we definitely fell for a little while. when we came up, it was like we were floating. after a few seconds, ben followed us intot he air. at one point we crossed behind them and the lag of their stream caused us to dive a little, which was alot of fun.

we soared over the city, over the water...at one point I could see corocvado and pão de açuca in teh distance between these two moutnains that had a large favella between them (might've been cidade de deus). flying over the water was gorgeous. the way the sand got churned up into the water made the whole coast look like some sort of abstract/fractal painting.

the ride was only about 15min cause the wind was low. coming in for the landing was strange, first the pilot touches down then you just start running on the beach.

so yeah, hangliding was awesome. it's now two days later. Ben left for the airport about 2 hours ago, so now the only friends i've got aroudn ehre are my family and a handful of kids i've met in bars and in the city. I still think i wanna move to rio. if i do, i need to decide FAST, because i'm on the verge of solidifying some jobs around here, and it would be really uncool for me to do that and then bail, since 1) the jobs are at schools and they will start to form schedules based on the assumption that i'm around, and 2) my family has helped me land these jobs, so it would reflect very poorly on them.

so now i'm hitting the phones, getting ready to teach, and evaluating my priorities. i'm pretty sure partying is high on the list; if so that's Rio: 1, SP: 0.

Rio

2007-08-05T08:46:00.000-07:00

On the 2nd, ben dand i left for rio. bus ride was pretty but long, no big deal. My cousin Ricardo is the PR director for the rio orchestra and we're staying in his apartment, which is awesome and in a cool neighborhood.

the day after we got in, we decided to do some touristy stuff. After walking along the beach for awhile, we wanted to get a cab from Ipanema (the beach we were at). as we stood by the road trying to hail a cab, some guy walked up behind me saying "excuse me sir, you've got some shit on your shoes." i like down, and there's this HUGE GLOB of gunk on my shoe. on the top of my shoe. the bottom was totally clean. it looked like someone had dropepd it on, or spat a ton of ice cream on. and the shit was...not the consistency of shit. and wouldn't ya know it, this nice fellow jsut happened to be a shoe shiner! what a fucking con. what could i do? it was obvious what was going on, but my shoe was filthy, ya know? i let the jerk clean my shoe, and then he charged me $15!!! i tried to get off paying him 10, but he made a gigantic fuss, and did i mention that he introduced us to a small group of his friends while he was cleaning my shoe? i didn't want any trouble...

so yeah, geting conned my first few hours in rio was not cool. afterwards went to the top of Pão de Açuca, then took a cab all the way up corcovado to see the giant jesus, which was really cool. great views of the city, i'll put up pictures as soon as i can.

the nightlife in rio is insane. we went to this area called Lapa one night, met some very cool people....the whole area was a giant club. there was music in the streets, vendors selling beers and food. youd dindt' need to go inside to meet people or dance. we did anyway, and well....sat night was alot of fun. i'm running out of time at the terminal here so i'm moving on. sat night was a story in itself!

so yeah, now we are in Buzios. it's this peninsula near rio, with a ton of beaches. real ritzy area, so we1re not sure if weere gonna stay...fuck, gotta go.

driving while black = walking while gringo

2007-07-31T09:55:00.000-07:00

so last night ben and I had nothing better to do, so we decided to go back to Villa Madalena (bar district). After dinner, we wandered around looking for the bar from saturday night. At one point we got to a major intersection, and saw a cop car driving by with their lights off. I thought that was kidna wierd, so i pointed it out to ben.

As we watched the car, they stopped, watching us. Bad vibes were exchanged. Then the cops all bailed outta the car (brazilian cops roll like clowns, with cars packed full of officers) telling us to put up our hands. two had their guns drawn, and one was pointing their gun at us. Ben didn't understand what was going on, less the portuguese commands, so I told him to get his hands up and tried to explain to the cops that he spoke no portuguese and mine was bad. they had us turn around, spread our legs, and lock our finges behind our heads, still yelling at us as they interrogated me about where we from and what we were doing. ben and I stayed calm, more confused than scared despite the guns. the cop who patted me down stopped at my wallet, asking me if I had any drugs on me. of course I didn't.

they never asked us to present any form of identification; i suppose our accents spoke for us. they also never apologized for the harrassment--an apology definitely would have been appreciated at least from the cop who unnecessarily grabbed my balls really hard as he frisked me for weapons.

the bar scene was lame that night. it was a monday after all, and super cold. maybe that's why they bothered us, cause it was strange for anyone to be out at all. Afterwards, ben and I stopped at the first bar we saw and got some stiff drinks. the mood had been killed by the incident, so we left soon afterwards (the bar was closing early anyway).

fuck the police.

??!!?!?

2007-07-31T09:38:00.001-07:00

So let's pretended I posted this on saturday.

Sat was a day full of surprises. It started out with a trip to the MASP, thinking it was the museum of modern art. turned out to be the museum of old ass art, which was ok, but i mean i twas really funny getting off the elevator expecting some really out there shit and finding a bunch of dusty portraits.

After the museum, we went to see a concert. I thought it would be cool if ben saw a batucada (lots of drums), and i saw in the paper there was a group reording a dvd that night, and student tickets were cheap. so we go to the venue, and even though we bought them that day, we were 4 ROWS AWAY FROM THE STAGE. that was our first hint that something was up. we looked around, expecting to see kids our age (it was a pretty small auditorium, second hint), and instead we saw a ton of families. hint number 3. we started joking about how we were going to see the brazilian version of Raffi. ha ha. when the show started, a bunch of kids ran out on stage. hmmm.....that's a wierd way to start......the group we were seeing was called "Meninos do Morumbi," which means 'Boys of Morumbi' or 'Kids of Morumbi.' The newspaper ad showed 2 adults with drums, so I assumed it was the latter. Nope. It was a social program run by a music school. We stuck aroudn and put up with the show for awhile; the drumming was cool, but the little kids singing kinda ruined the vibe. we bailed after an hour, and on our way out were confronted by about 20 clowns at the door. that caught us way off guard. I was so surprised i tried to grab ben outta the way, "we can't go this way!!" some lady saw us leaving and told us we were missing the best part. whatever lady...

the biggest joke about that was that my uncle new what we were getting into, and so did this girl i invited (she's like, "uh, i'm outta town right now, maybe we can hang out tomorrow?" embarassing!), but no one gave us a heads up. And the newspaper def did not make it clear if you didn't already know the band, which apparently everyone does.

so yeah, after that ben and i retreated home laughing our asses off about the whole thing, especially the clowns, watched a dvd, then went to the bar district. we ate at this shitty restaurant where we discoverd a great brazilian beer called "Malzebier Brahma," then wandered out to find a bar. We walked into the first place that looked promising, and bought some Jager shots to get started. 2 CUTE girls next to us had never tried jager before, so we bought them shots, and well...these girls were part of a going away party for a friend, so we met this huge group of really cool kids at the bar, who i hope to see again (we traded numbers like crazy). we partied till ike 4am. i'm def not worried about meeting people anymore.

Best day in brazil yet.

my dogs are barking

2007-07-27T15:21:00.000-07:00

so ben and I spent ald ay jsut wandering around sao paulo, and it was actually really cool. the morning started off early cause i ahd a job interview. they totally threw the job at me. in fact, i don't think i've ever had a job interview where i wasn't handed the job. then again my last jobs were snowboarding instructor, writing tutor... whatever. but yeah, the interview went great and so now i've officially got a job! start the day i get back even.

from there ben and i just hopped on a bus to go find the city. last night my uncle took us aroudn town after we treated him and his wife to a churascaria (brazilian bbq), so we had some idea what streets to check out. but as the bus got deeper into town, people aroudn us could tell we had no idea where we going. enter Ramony, this super cute chick who offered to get us to a metro station where we could get to a more itneresting part of the city. see, according to her, the downtown area we were headed to was full of boring old stuff we didn't wanna see. so she showed us which way to go and I got her number before she left, and well, the metro in SP is kinda silly. the city is basically split in half, one sides metro doesn't conenct to the other sides metro AT ALL. so the station we wanted to get to wasn't accessible from teh metro she took us to.

and so began our long day of walking. we ended up seeing a ton of the city because we jsut walekd through all of it. we waalked for about 5-6hrs, and finally around 5pm we got to the metro station we were originally trying to get to (Luz, where tehre are a few museums and junk). so we got there, bought a coupla drinks cause we were exhausted, and took the first bus we could find home, which took an hour. But hey, i'd rather have an adventure than see a museum anyday.

Back In SP

2007-07-25T11:42:00.000-07:00

So Ben and I just got back from my uncle's beach house in Ubatuba where we had this chill family gathering (plus ben) for like the past 2 weeks. We gto a lot of rain, the place is sorta in the rainforest, but the sunny days we had were unbelievable. Some assorted highlights:
--meeting lots of new family. My aunts brother remarried, so i got to meet the wife, two new "cousins", the wife's sister, and her daughter. Also, my cousin (my "uncle" David's Daguhter) Adriana's kids Nina and Alice were babies last time i saw them, and now they're 7 and 9! saw that was really cool getting to know them too
--drinking caipirinhas on the beach. the first day we got there ben and i went straight to the bar, got sorta drunk, stumbled back to the house in the dark where we found out adriana and her kids had jstu arrived. I drunkenly said hi, gave them gifts, and then Ben and i both went upstairs and passed out. great first impresisons all around!
--eating breakfast with the birds. Right by the dinner table there's a hummingbird feeder, and my uncle always puts out a little tray with fruit to attract birds. the brids in the area were beautiful! there were these realy colorful green birds that flocked to the tree, yellow birds, blue birds, this one brilliant red bird called a "Tieh Sangue," and tons of hummingbirds.
--BEN AND I ROCK AT EBACH TENNIS. 29 volleys, bitches.
--oh yeah, i started running with ben. i hope i keep it up. one day ben was running alone and saw what we think was a tamandua.
--this one day, all the young kids held this goofy "Espactacular!" for us. it was like a magic show (with pretty low end magic, i mean the oldest ones were 10 or 11), some clowning i didn't understand cause it was in portuguese, and acrobatics on the hammock chairs. it was realy cute. they were super disorganized, fighting over who got to do what, and the show went on for like a half hour.
--Ben and I made the theme of the trip, "BITCHES." There was no one on the beach our age, less any girls, so we just joked all the time about the dirty shit we'd say if we foudn any. finally we met these 2 really cute girls on our beach, helena and leila, so we invited them to the next beach over for a drink. Helena said she lived near me in SP, but they were on their way to lunch, but would be back afterwards. Ben and i left the beach as well to go running (really hard run up this monstrous hill). Lunch was waiting for us whend we got back, so we didn't get back to the beach until about 2 hours after we met the girls. They had already gone home, so ben and i went to the bar alone. it was kinda late, so surprise surprise, a bunch of people hanging aroun the abr were already drunk. two of them decided to be friendly to us. super friendly. they were liek touching us and making us generally uncomfortable, and were generally just hard to get rid of. this one really nasty old lady just loved ben and kept hugging his head to her breast and kissing him. finally i was just like (in poor portuguese) "allright lady, leave us by ourselves. go to some other place away from here." she got kinda mad and gave me the "you're a jerk! i thought you guys were cool" bit and scampered off. As we left the bar, and started to rain. heavily. we got soaked. The next day we left for a friends place on a nearby island for the weekend, so we never saw those girls again. damn shame too, cause that helena girl seemed real nice, and lemme tell you, she had a rack.
Our whole family-crew went to a friend's place.
--so we spent a weekend at this island, "Ilha Bella," at David's friend's house, Carlos and Vera. These two folks have the nicest place i've ever seen. They had this sorta 3 house set up real high up on the island overlooking the ocean. the houses are set up so you can't see any other nearby houses, so you feel like you're alone at this beautfiul place. We ate very well too, cause carlos knows how to cook. i tried to learn a little, but we'll see what i picked up next time i try to cook fish. That night Ben and i hit the town. We started out with coffee with my cousin Flavia and her faincee Alex at this wierd cafe. Anywhere you sit, you are looking at display cases filled with random crap they are trying to sell you. after that we wandered around and found 3 bars, only one of which interested us. We got there early, so the place was empty with nothing but us and a Shitty DVD of some concert going (i'm pretty sure it was the same show from 40yo virgin). the drinks were terrible. they were soooo strong, and we made the mistake of trying to drink them with straws, which made them taste worse. finally the band started at midnight, playing brazilian rock. Really, they played US covers with made up brazilian lyrics. People were singing along, so i guess most of brazilian pop is probably plagiarized rock. These two girls, prob firends of the band, sat on the stairs right in front of us. We asked them over to our table a couple times through the night, and they always said no (bitches!). Later on i got these 2 local girls to sit with us. we flirted a little, then after maybe 30min one of them said they had to leave. really, they meant they were bored and were goign to the opposite side fo the room to hang out away from us. roudn 4am when Ben and i were leaving, they were a little closer to our table, and well, i was a little drunk. so i look to ben and i go "ben, i'm gonna kiss her!" he didn't even udnerstand what i meant at the time, but we went up to them to say goodbye, and i made a move on the cuter of the two. we made out for like 5 seconds, then ben and i stumbled home (up this hill for 45 min).
--Our last day at ilha bella, we went to this secluded beach where we met these 2 cool girls, esther, who lives outside SP, and her friend lorinne, who was visiting from france. it was kinda embarrassing, my relatives started talking to them, and then like called us over, and left when the four of us started talking. i got esther's email, so we're probably gonna hang out some now that i'm back in town. So at least i've got one friend in SP my age now.

so yeah, that was a long blog entry but hey, it's been a fun 2 weeks. Ben has been digging brazil, and i'm glad he's here. next week we're going to rio, and then to a beach nearby called buzios (sp?). The airports are kind of a problem though. we were planning on flying out of congonhas, but there have been problems there to say the least. A few weks a go a plane almost slid off the tarmac in the rain, and a week ago one actually did, killing at least 144 people and startign a pretty heavy fire. we were at the beach at the time, but kept up with the situation from the news. it was kind of annoying, the news never really reported anythign new. last night or the night before, we were watching some higher-up give a speech on teh investigation and he said (loosely translated), "in brazil, we traditional don't look for 'causes.' we don't liek to point fingers. we don't even liek to use this word 'cause.' the word cause implies 'responsibility,' and we're here to identify factors that contributed to the incident so we can minimize them in the future, not place blame on anyone." Now, it was recognized the nigth of the incident that a) the airport floods in the rain because the tarmac does not have special ridges, and b) the pilots had been telling the airport folks to close down, but they weren't listening and were recieving direct orders from someone or some organization to stay in operation (the brazilian FAA i guess). translation: some one is definitely responsible. I thoguth it was really funny hearing this kind of bullshit, cause i was so used to it from the bush administration, and now here it was again in portuguese. Apparently the president of brazil, Lula, can abrely even read. you win brazil. either way, the airport flooded again a few days later, there was a landslide of some construction material, and now the place is clsoed and it's supposed to be really hard to get local flights anywhere.

so yeah, the short story is Ben and I are going to take buses to rio. i'm going to stop writing now cause chances are you stopped reading. i'll update in a few days on the rio plan. And oh yeah! i've got job interviews this week, so wish me luck!

enter brazil

2007-07-12T13:53:00.000-07:00

I just got back from watching "Shrek Terceiro (Dublado)," if the title of the post wasn't hint enough as to where i'm at. Turns out my uncle/cousin has high speed at his house, so it's no big deal for me to go online, so y'all (whomever my readership may be) well get plenty of updates on this trip.

As soona s i get a hold of a digital camera i'll put up some pictuers of my place. I'm living in this little apartment behind the main house, which totally rocks. Got my own bathroom, hardwood floors, a dresser jsut big enough to hold all my clothes, and even my own tv! the tv doesn't have an antenna or cable or anything, but that's no problem because the media player dealie I brought (archos 504) hooks up to the tv fine. i've even got my external harddrive plugged in!

so i'm pretty well set up right now. Only problem is, where are all the younhg people at? everyone in my family is much older than me, so i can't really go by the friend-of-a-friend route, and SP isn't exactly a young peoples city, so i'm having trouble finding hangouts. Hopefully my cousin flavia will be able to show me aroudn to some of the hipper spots. if all else fails all jsut start hanging around local universities or something....nothing's really close to the house though, just this big ass shopping center.

oh guess what i discoverd today?? none of the bank machines aroudn here accept my atm card!!! YAY!!!! so yeah, that's a bit of a problem...i mean, credit is cool and all, but i need to have some access to cash. i guess i'll just need to wire some money down and open up a bank account locally.

whatever, i'm more concerned about meeting people than finding money.

speaking of money, here's the current job situation: I've got an interview lined up with this one school, but I'm going to be travelling for the first week of school, so that might cause a problem. From what I understand, they need teachers however they can get em, so maybe my travel plans won't be such a big deal. My friend Ben is coming down to travel with me (arrives tomorrow, bitches!) so i can't really cut the travel plans out or he'll kill me dead. Also, I might have a job as a more private english teacher for business professionals, which will probably pay better but i mgith need to arrange some form of transportation for that gig. One cool thing about the 2nd gig: don't need to figure out what my CPF is (brazilian equiv of SSN). red tape can't stop me.

so to summarize: cool house, need a job, can't find people my age. Of course, this is only day #2 in the country (and last night i went to see a show featurign the Rio de Janeiro orchestra..not the youngest crowd. lots of family though!).

my fourth was better than yours

2007-07-04T20:41:00.001-07:00

so, i reluctantly spent the entire day at the squad, so if you got shitfaced (which i'm sure most of you did) then at least you've got that on me.

so last night i was bored cause no one wanted to hang out, so i stayed up late watching arrested development. this turned out to have been a shitty idea, because at 645 i got a call from the squad saying they were really shortstaffed. so i roll/fell out of bed, through on some clothes and drove up to weaton, where i've been since. After i was at the squad for a few hours, it wasn't really worth it to leave since i'd have to come back in later; wednesdays are my duty night, and it was jsut bad luck that it fell on the fourth.

so enough bitching. During the day, I responded to 3 or 4 fires. I'll admit, none of them were that cool as far as fires go, and i didn't get to see anything more than a little smoke. but still, you've gotta understand, i've only been in town for a month and i'm leaving in less than a week, so i was stoked to see even the smoldering remnants of a small oven fire.

after the fires, things were relatively quiet. to watch the fireworks, we went up onto the roof of wheaton plaza, cause hey, firefighters have keys baby! wheaton is a natural high point, and the plaza is the tallest building in the area (10 stories), so we weren't theo nly ones with the idea. at the plaza, we met an engine, a truck, and 2 ambulances who had also stopped by to see the show. We lost a few crews to calls, but whatever. we had a good group and an amazing view.

from the top of the building, you can see clear to crystal city, VA. We could see ALL THE FIREWORKS WITHIN AT LEAST 60 MILES. you name it. if you saw any fireworks in maryland, DC, or northern virginia, we were watching them too. The fireworks over the mall were gorgeous. the fireworks from virginia were just colorful explosions over the horizon. the wheaton fireworks, on the other hand, were something else entirely.

on our radios, we could tune in to the channel being used to orchestrate the show from the ground, so we even got to hear the countdown. The fireworks were being shot just a few blocks from us, and the biggest ones barely got above our eye level! it was a fantastic show. Looking down into fireworks that were shooting up in series looked like a giant tree of white light.

Ultimately, we missed the finale because we got a call, a "bicyclist struck." WE showed up, and thankfully no one was seriously injured. one of the patients spoke only portuguese, so I got to play translator for the ambulance crew and the cops, which is always fun (since I speak rudimentary french and spanish too, I end up doing the translator thing alot, but i'm so much better at portuguese that it's just way more fun).

So I started my day annoyed and tired. I had to brush off invites from friends and a barbecue at my house, but ultimately I had a great time. And you know what? I don't think I'll ever see a view of fireworks as spectacular as what I saw tonight.

Of course, i am still sober and you're not.

Getting into gear

2007-06-18T07:17:00.000-07:00

So the ball is well in motion with respect to the whole brazil thing. I've (sorta) been in contact with ben; i think we've resoolved the whole when-we're-going-to-meet-up issue. it's going to be awesome to go down to brazil with that kid. I still need a job, but my cousin's friend is desperate to have me join this company of hers that teaches english privately to working professionals, so that could be some bank just in tips. I also still need a job up here or i'm going to wear down all my graduation money before i even get to brazil! it's not easy finding a job for just a month, so it's lookin like i may be a pizza delivery boy, but i also hear that doesn't pay dick, especially if you work day hours.

also, i've been shopping around for a laptop. now, my much more computer savvy friend kyle thinks i should not get a laptop and just get a much more powerful desktop later down the road. He raised some good arguments in our last dialogue (over eMail), so i've definitely got a lot to think about. i've wanted a laptop for a while now anyway, so this isn't just about going to brazil. But i'd have to be super careful with the thing; lord knows the beach humidity in ubatuba could thrash it, and it's 20 times more likely to get stolen (and make me a mugging target in general) every time i leave the house than it would in the US. Still, i'd really like to be able to take my work around with me, and it would make it super easy to collect music in brazil.

i really like that all my problems right now are really frivolous. I've been having a pretty good time since graduation, and it seems like i'm going to continue to for at least a little while longer.

Frustration

2007-06-12T05:27:00.000-07:00

What is the deal with my internet? we finally got highspeed at my house, but we're using a wireless router and the signal strength in my room is really low. Consequently, i am constantly losing and re-establishing my connection. Most of the time, the internet runs so slow it feels like i still ahve dial-up. At least with dial-up the internet didn't keepdying though; i can't even download powerpoint presentations!

the internet wouldn't bother me so much if i didn't have all sorts of small errands I need to run online. I need(ed) to do a bunch of recert stuff for the fire department which required that I download powerpoint documents, then do a bunch of online quizes. I also need to do online training that is supposed to take an hour for kaplan. There's no way I can keep my internet connection for 10min, less an hour! the problem here is that I can't fill out my hours until I've done this damn training. That means I'm going to have to go to the library, but the local library only let's you use the computers for an hour a day, so I have to finish the training real fast. Still, i don't really feel comfortable connecting to my account for work from a library computer...

in the words of charles schultz, UGH!

even using facebook is a hassle. how silly is that?

Rolling with it

2007-06-08T13:19:00.000-07:00

So I don't think of myself as the most spontaneous person, but I'm starting to realize that maybe i am much more spontaneous than I see myself. I've had this "roll with it" attitude towards life for a while now, and it really rules me when I'm out on the open road. I guess the freedom of not having any commitments or responsibilities and just being able to point my car in any random direction and say "I feel like checking this place out" makes me feel very at home with myself (if that makes any sense).

But yeah, returning to the point, tonight I probably made the most significant spontaneous decision of my life. short version: starting mid july i'm going to be living in Brazil for four months.

This happened so suddenly, LITERALLY no one knows it yet except for myself and my mom. not even my dad knows yet (you're probably hearing it before he does :-p).

The Long version
So I got a pretty sweet graduation gift from my family: on top of a decent chunk of cahs, they payed for gas for my drive home (which really made the drive possible, given how insane gas prices were this summer), and they also were going to buy tickets for me to fly down to Brazil and go to the beach with my family down there. My friend Ben Brokaw is going to be in Bolivia during the time I planned to be in Brazil, so we started kicking around ideas of traveling around south america a little.

A couple of days ago, a wrench was thrown into the brazil plan in the form of an opportunity. one of my relatives in Sao Paulo works at a school where I could potentialy teach english. The catches: 1) very little pay2) Sao Paulo is kind of a shitty city (lots of crime, bad traffic, and not much to do)3) I would have to kill my previous travel plans
Now, don't get me wrong, this is totally something I've wanted to do for a while now. I've been thinking about living in Brazil anyway, and teaching english was the main job I had in mind. My friend Mike de la Paz had similar ideas and had told me that after looking, he learned that such jobs were basically non-existent for kids like us, so when Helio called me up I felt like I was being handed a really golden opportunity.

Well, despite how cool this would be, I decided getting a no-money job in a lame city wasn't worth killing my much cooler travel plans.

So tonight, I sat down with my mom to start working out the ticket details (we hadn't done this sooner because I still had to work out some issues with my brazilian passport, but we had to get it done ASAP because this shit was getting pricey). kinda out of nowhere, we decided to extend my stay. I'm going to visit my family as planned, meet up with ben in Rio. then my plans end after he leaves, up until my return flight december fourth.

Summary
I intended to buy a ticket to visit brazil for 4 weeks, and ended up commiting myself to live there for four months. beyond the first few weeks, i have not established places to stay or jobs while i'm down there. I might not even be staying in rio de janeiro; for all I know I might end up living in a different city every week. That's the beauty of Brazil: my mom has contacts all over the place! I've got family and friends I can crash with all over the country. Thing is, -I- don't really know anyone there except for some family in Sao Paulo (which is probably not going to be where I spend the bulk of my stay), and I certainly don't know anyone my age.

I've never lived anywhere except home and college. I've traveled outside the country alot, but this is different. This trip is unstructured like one of my drives, but I won't have a car. I'll have some money, but I still don't have a place to stay. I have family, but I still feel like I'm moving to an area where I don't know anyone.

I'm not going to lie, I'm intimidated as hell. Mostly, I think it's just how suddenly this all happened. I'm not concerned, sure Brazil is not the safest place in the world; most of my family has been held up at gun point at least once, and my cousin was even abducted from his car at a red light and held as a security hostage by bank robbers. I really think that this is going to be an incredible experience for me, and that i'm going to have an amazing time. Mainly, I just feel really wierd about committing such a huge block of my life without any real thought.

guess I'll just roll with it

Elliot's house

2007-05-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

MAN kyle is hard to wake up! So yeah, wed night the kid was up late, but I mean i wake kyle up at like 1130 or something so we can go hang with elliot, he goes back to sleep, and an hour later i'm banging on his door for like 10 min with no response. When that kid gets knocked out, he gets knocked cold.

So yeah, esterday my brother and I visited Elliot at his new place. Elliot and kate have the coolest appartment in the world. I'm so proud of them and am super jealous. They're down the stret from this gian cement troll that's installed under a bridge (appraently some kind of landmark around here), and their place is walking distance from some great restaurants too. The house itself is the perfect size plus an extra bedroom, they've got access to grills, and they've even got a silky smooth cat. Elliot is living the life.

As i was calling him to arrage hanging out yesterday, elliot was conveniently in the process o buing a wii. Guess what I did yesterday? that' right, ate a lot of good food and played alot of video games. Rock on seattle, rock on.

Today we're leaving (in fact, I should really wake up my brother soon so we can cover some distance). We're heading west on the 90 to yellowstone. Neither of us has ever been, and I'm kind of concerned for my car again. I mean, shit, i've already seen 3 bears on this trip, and yellostone is supposed to be grizzly central! don't get me wrong, I LOVE bears, but the fact of the matter is that i'm traveling cross country with alot of stuff in my car i'd rather not wake up to find strewn all over th campsite.

I'm sure yellowstone will be fine, i'm just wierd. After yellowstone, we're driving to chicago to meet up with wes, then cleveland to bother laura, then we're heading home. Depending on the timing, we might try to pass through tennessee.

i guess the trip is winding down, but it only feels like it's picking up. This is my life right now. This is how i'm starting the "life-after-college" segment of my life, and I think i'm doing fine.

5/11-5/23 Driving the west coast

2007-05-24T12:40:00.000-07:00

I still need to try to write up some of the insanity of senior week ang graduation, but for the time being, let's stick with documenting the drive. If this all looks familiar, it's cause it's all on facebook :-p

5/11-5/16: Post-Graduation, still in town.
So a few days before graduation, my brother basically moved into my dorm room (5/11). We partied together, and he helped me pack out a bunch. I graduated (5/13), had a cool reception with sam sean and sarah (plus families and sean's friends, all good people), then my bro and I went to a party at the co-op later that night. We crashed on the floor of my parents hotel room the next 2 nights (mon and tues) while I ran errands around town. After my parents flew back home, we moved into Rob's place for two nights. While at rob's, my brother and I took a day trip (5/16) to joshua tree, which rocked.

5/17: On the road
From rob's, we drove north through sequoia and played near big trees. We even saw 2 bears! From sequia, we continued north on the 5 to yosemite, but decided not to risk bears tearing the car apart just to camp in a pretty spot and stayed in a motel outside the park. 5/18 yosemite and sacramentoThe next morning we had breakfast with some hungarians who were also doing a gnarly roadtrip, then drove into yosemite to enjo the park. As always, the drive in was gorgeous and the valley hard to navigate. we hiked up to lower yosemite falls and went off the trail to get wet under the waterfall (off course we forgot to bring the camera, as with most of our small adventures). We continued on toward mirror lake until we decided hiking without water wasn't going to be worth it, and walked a nearby road back to the car. We drove to this parking lot near some trailheads to make some lunch (the same parking lot I'd used when I went to yosemite over fall break with with the two laura's, nicole, ben, and aussie john). We hiked in to the woods a little ways, made quesadillas and cracked a few beers, theng ot back ot he car. we noticed this note on the car we hadn't seen earlier, but didn't read the note until we stopped for gas a few hours out in a town called oakdale. Turns out Sean Taft-morales from Rescue 2 was in the area for some rason and had recognised the stickers on my car! talk about small world, right?We took 120 out of the park, which was a ton of fun to drive, not to mention gorgeous. from there we took 5N to sacramento where we met up with laroi.Laroi's house was gorgeous. Small thing, hardwood floors, big garden out back with raspberries, different kinds of figs, sage, basil, kumquats....ridiculous, right? And he didn't ahve to plant or care for any of it, his landlord handled the whole garden. The house even came with these two awesome cats!

5/19: Laroi's house
Woke up, read some books laroi had thrown at me the night before and played with the cats while I waited for alex to wake up. laroi had work, so I taught alex how to drive stick for a little bit. When laroi got back, we hung out with some friends of his who graduated form pomona (jaqcqueline and her fiancee pete). Afterwards, laroi my bro and I went to a vietnamese place to get some pho for dinner; great great pho. We left, bought some drinks, and got drunk at laroi's house. We did some drunken qigong (I tried to teach laroi the dragon drill), then we did taco bell around 1:30-2am for chalupas. First taco bell i've had since high school. We didn't get to bed until around 3.

5/20: laroi and dave's
woke up, drank lots of tea and just generally hung out from 10am-1p. Laroi then taught me his wu dan qigong, and I finished teaching him the dragon and eagle wei tuo drills. Alex and I finally let his hose (after 3 days) at 5pm. We did some serious grocery shopping at the nugget, ate chinese in the parking lot, then drove to dave's house in oakland (piedmont).We arrived just as Dave's family and pete (his friend from pomona) were finishing dinner.dave, pete, alex and i then went to a park to slack line into the sunset. The line took a while to set up because we couldn't find appropriate trees, but we had plenty of fun when we finally got it together. We hung around that park until after dark, then went back to the house because pete had to get to bed early (had WFR class the next day).Dave alex and I were still up, so we found a park to go hango ut in, then wandered aroun the neighborhood taking in the piedmont view of the bay area and generally waxing philosophic. That night we all slept outside dave's house on this huge pole vaulting mat he has set up behind his house.

5/21: PCH, still not out of cali
That mornign we had bagels for breakfast in oakland with dave, then left to head north. We had al ittle trouble staying on 101 through the city, but ended up getting a nice driving tour of san fran as a result. We made our way across the golden gate bridge, and pulled onto the 1 (the pacific coast highway) as soon as we could. we drove the 1 all the way north from the bay area until it merged back with 101. lots of cool views and cliffs, pulled off a few times for pictures (much to alex's dismay). Blasted the beatles alot of the way. Had a nice picnic of sandwiches by this crazy view of the ocean, a few feet a way from what we didn't at first realize was a roadside toilet. That night, we camped at patrick's point just north of homboldt county.

5/22: Pacific Northwest
We'd slpet outside the night before, and i woke up to find that alex had moved into the car (that whole no-sleeping-bag thing can get kinda cold i guess). had a granola bar for breakfast, then built a fire to get warm while alex continued sleeping, or at least tried to as I kept going back to the car for different stuff.I'd hoped to see the lost coast brewery in eureka (or is it arcata?), but we decided we didn't feel like drinking so early so we continued north through redwood national park. beautiful driving through the old trees. stayed on 101 into oregon, had some coffee at a tiny local shop. checked out this wierd monument to a battle where a bunch of indians were killed (kind of a wierd monument), then got off 101 on the 42 to connect with the 5 a few towns north. From I-5, we drove north to portland where we checked in with Powell's City of Books. I called up Dan hoping to hang out, but he was running errands until we started to head out, and alex was getting impatient with the pace of our travel so we moved on.about an hour north of the city, we pulled off the freeway to make some dinner; pasta with onions, garlic, tomato, and parmesan. We were parked behind this restaurant about 20 feet away from a stak of used cardboard boxes, and periodically the restaurant folks came out to wierd us out about firesafety 9it was a propane stove...the thing doesn't even make sparks, come on). we think they were jsut generally wierded out by us. We ate and left as quickly as we could, then pulled into Kyle's house on mercer island (seattle) around 10 that night. We stayed up late listening to music, and kyle made us 12 mp3 cds for the road!

5/23: Hoh Rainforest
The next morning I had breakfast with Kyle's dad (since I always wake up earlier than everyone else). I started running some errands online, which woke up alex who was sleeping by the computer. We eventually decided it was time to wake up kyle. We all had some coffee, then left for this rainforest in olympic national park, west of seattle. Kyle thought it would only take a few hours to get there, but it ended up taking all day (another day in the car...). Whatever though, the drive was awesome and it was good hanging out.we arrived at the rainforest a few hours before sundown. The place was amazing. there was life absolutely everywhere, everything was green. Trees were growing out of fallen trees. ferns were growing out of piles of older ferns. there was this light moss hanging off of everything that looked like golden confettis, but was actuallly rooted prett firmly to whatever it grew off of (allegedly the stuff grows solely on light and air!). just an amazing place. Kyle and I drank water straight out of the glacial river that flowed thorugh the park, and also drank directly from a stream that was fed by mineral springs. yummy water.We had taken a ferry to get out of seattle, but it was pretty late when we drove back so we actually had t swing all the way down to takoma to come back. we didn't arrive at kyle's house until around 2:20am.

Driving home

2007-05-23T11:55:00.000-07:00

Graduated, now i'm driving home with my brother.

Definitely going to cover a few posts, but for the time being, here's a map that shows some spots we've been to. i'm going to add lines later.

Journal (or "ideas: pt.2")

2007-04-30T18:04:00.000-07:00

So earlier today I was digging around the trunk of my car for a book when I came across a small notebook: a journal I decided to try to write in periodically a year or two ago. There are only a few entries in it, probably not even ten, but well....it got dammaged. My car isn't exactly high-end, and water leaks into the trunk when it's wet out. I hadn't realized it until now (apparently I haven't even opened the journal since last summer) but since I left the journal in my trunk for months, it has been accumulating water damage. I don't think anything has become readable, but for a book I invested some emotion into I'm pretty annoyed I let this happen.

There was another book in the trunk that picked up water damage, a small pocket size notebook similar to what I described I was looking for in the "Ideas" post from a few days ago. At first I thought it was a travel log from one of my road trips x-country. When I opened it, all but the first few pages were empty, and most of the horizontal lines had been washed from the pages. What bothers me is that it could still be a travel log, just with all my entries washed out. That's just no good. A few days ago I came across another such travel log from my road trip home this summer. It hadn't picked up water damage because it was in the passenger compartment, but waws still in very poor condition from being trampled. I've gotta take better care of my memories; I have enough trouble holding onto them in my head, I need to cherish them after I commit them to paper.

At least I have that notebook I was looking for.

Procrastination

2007-04-29T03:04:00.000-07:00

Hello. My name is David Marx, and I'm a compuslive procrastinator.
It's been a 6 hours since I last procrastinated, i'm jsut glad I finally got some work done tonight. I have a long tradition of not doing homework in general, turning things in late if at all. I stay afloat based on test grades and the fact that when I do produce my work is always of high quality. I'm graduating this year, which means I have a few days to wrap stuff up or I don't get a diploma.

This is a bad situation for a compulsive procrastinator like me. I'll often find myself on youtube, telling myself, "This is the last video, just one more and that's it!" an hour after telling myself the same line. Tonight I decided i needed to get away from my room if I was going to get some work done (my typical last resort strategy, and it usually works. wokred tonight too). So, I went to one of my favorite sanctuaries: the closed writing center. I work there, so I can get in when it's closed, giving me access to what's effectively a private library, complete with couches, tables, writing supplies, computers printers, and even free coffee. But get this: I'm such a clever little procrastinator, I even made a facebook event out of it, and spent at least 20 minutes working out the kinks in publishing the event and inviting people I thought might be doing work instead of partying tonight. Crazy huh?

Earlier tonight, when I was procrastinating hardcore (which is why I retreated to the writing center), I googled myself. I occasionally google old friends just to see what I find, and I usualy find plenty; if you've ever played a sport, even just in high school or maybe even middle school, chances are googleing your name will atl east pull up some stats and maybe a picture or two. But damnit, "David Marx" appears to be an incredibly common, and nerdy name.

Here's what some of the other DM's are doing out there:
* Photography Instructor
* A few musicians, one I KNOW sucks and another who lives in Tokyo!
* An Emergency physician who lives ~50 miles from me (what are the chances a firefighter and ER-MD with the same name live w/in 50 miles of each other?)
* A Lawyer
* A couple engineers (/professors)
* A chemistry professor
* A psychology professor
* A cinematographer
* last but not least, one of these turds took the amazon account "david marx" and posted his nickname as "mingieboy"
>>and that's just from the first 2 pages of hits.

what's your favorite procrastination strategy? cleaning your room? facebook? I've gotta say i'm pretty fond of the online TV.

Allright, time for bed. Good luck getting your stuff done!

a busy news day

2007-04-25T15:49:00.000-07:00

Here we go, in the order I heard:

1) Planet found roughly 20 light years away that could potentially support life

2) Boris Yeltisn died (fuck yeltsin. am I right?).

3) French fries give you cancer.

ok. so that was probably alot to handle, and I apologize if I shook your world a little there. Let's just focus on the last one for now.

Acoording to wikipedia, the reaction of asparagine (an amino acid) with reducing sugars under high heat creates acrylamide. acrylamide has long been known to be neurotoxic, which is why if you've ever done an SDS-PAGE in a bio class you wear gloves. apparently, it may also cause cancer.

Long story short, ANY FOOD that is browned during baking, overcooked or fried (and maybe even microwaved too) contains acrylamide. I guess fired potatoes are of particular concern because they are chock loaded with sugar.

Time for us all to make an important decision: what's more valuable to me? 50 years of eating fries and chips, or not going through 6 months of chemo.

Time for me to start saving up for the chemo.

Ideas

2007-04-22T16:27:00.000-07:00

I like to read. I don't read for myself as often as I'd like; hopefully now that i'm graduating i'll finally ahve some time to really dig into some books. Still, when I'm home i like to hang out at bookstores and jsut flip through what I find, often spending hours in the philosophy section

Winter junior year (winter before last) I had the great idea of keeping a small notebook on me as often as possible. If you know me, then you know that I have an incredibly shitty memory for certain things, so I decided that having a book on hand would be great for jotting down ideas, to do lists, phone numbers, appointments, whatever.

One day last winter I was wandering through some philosophy at the local Borders (Barnes & Noble?) when I came across a book by a philosopher of mind I like a lot, Douglas Hofstaedter, the guy who wrote Godel, Escher, Bach and The Mind's I. Flipping through the book, I found a snippet where he tried to develop an account of what creativity is. I wrote a little diatribe on what came to mind in my notebook. If it were shorter, I'd write the whole thing out for ya. maybe some other time.

Either way, I found the notebook the other day and have begun using it again for some brainstorming related to end-of-the-year projects i'm working on. It's so packed that I've flipped it upside down and now am writing on the backsides of empty pages.

I need a new notebook. I want to revive the "have it on me at all tiems" policy. I like reading my old ideas, they're not bad.

No Subject

2007-04-17T10:20:00.000-07:00

So I'm kind of out of the loop at school. I don't watch tv so I don't see news briefs as the evening news is advertised. I don't really keep up with news online, although it's ony a click away. recently I started using firefox as my main browser, and i deliberately set the homepage in firefox to washingtonpost.com a while back(unlike the eMail homepage I have set for IE).

I'm going to try to keep up with the news more. yesterday morning a massacre occured at VA Tech, which is not far from my home outside DC. The shooter killed 33 people, making it the deadliest shooting by a single gunmen in US history and the worst school shotting as well.

To say the least I feel like the columbine post from a few days ago was in poor taste, although it did happen before the shooting. But in general I just feel terrible. I talked about being jaded before, but hearing about large amounts of people dying just strikes a nerve with me, and a school shooting in virginia feels almost personal.

Some of the vicitms are listed in the wikipedia article, and boy did it feel wierd looking through jsut to make sure i didn't know anyone.

I need to get some work done, i've been dwelling on this all morning. I feel like i'm disrespecting the dead by pushing my emotions away, like i'm giving them the cold shoulder or changing the channel mid-story. it doesn't matter, i have to TCB today; last night i ran into my professor/advisor at a bar, and i'd rather he not think i was unprepared for class because i was too busy partying.

maybe i'll watch elephant later tonight and really own my emotional reaction to this.

Weekend update followup

2007-04-16T17:06:00.000-07:00

So awhile back I posted an entry titled "weekend update" that mentionted the blog palmsout. The reason I love this blog, as I mentioned, is their sample wednesday features. The way i was introduced to the blog was the post they made about Daft punk, which a friend sent me. After I checked out the blog, I went around to as many friends as I could disillusioning them about different songs/bands

well, someone else was as impressed as I was with the stuff on palmsout and made this tight little video out of the Daft Punk post:

Video Games as Art

2007-04-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

So looking for literature for my ethnography of BF2, I ran across a couple of gaming blogs. One referenced this game: Super Columbine Massacre RPG! an RPG created by filmmaker Danny Ledonne.

"Welcome to Super Columbine Massacre RPG! You play as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold on that fateful day in the Denver suburb of Littleton. How many people they kill is ultimately up to you."

To say the least, this game looks controversial as hell. Still, I think it is an incredibly interesting idea and social statement. Trivializing the events of Columbine to the narrative of a low bit, sidescrolling, cartoony RPG seems sort of appropriate when presenting the story from the perspectives of the shooters. Granted, I don't actually think their perspectives on their actions were as simple as that; they did kill themselves afterwards. But, if you want to be reminded of the gravity of the event, watch the film Elephant.

I remember columbine. I remember the insane fear that gripped the country afterwards; as students were expelled for making similar plans, wearing shirts with the anarchist A on them, or even playing cowboys and indians in school. I was scared too. After my first viewing, I have since refused to watch Elephant again because I did not want to relive the emotions I associated with columbine that the film forced me to remember.

Still, just the screenshot of this game sends a whole different kind of chill up my spine. The superficiality of it reminds me of the cold calm both of the shooters wore in the security camera videos from columbine as they moved from room to room murdering their classmates and teachers.

I don't ever plan on playing this game, but I think it makes a strong enough statement to be regarded with more respect than it seems to have recieved.

~~~~~~

So I thought I was done with this post, but today (the day after the bulk of this was written) I discovered what could be characterized as an ongoing performance art piece inside America's Army. This artist, 'playing' under the name "dead-in-iraq," goes into the game and does nothing with the character (i.e. he dies). After being killed, he types the name of a real soldier who died in Iraq and the day they died into the chat interface. as of 9/14/06 he'd enterred (unavoidable pun) 1,273 names. The fact that gamespaces can be appropriated for this purpose certainly speaks strongly for the metaphysical status of such media as legitimate "space" for mediating interactions http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2006/09/16/americasarmy/

Rocky!

2007-04-13T19:57:00.000-07:00

So last night I saw the Rocky Horror Show with some friends. I had to go; I'm graduating, had never been to the show before (only movies), and I knew like half the cast.

The show was fun to say the least, and we all went drunk as hell. But....well, facebook strikes again. Among other pictures that were posted from the pre-party is a picture of my friend (who is, well...a pretty big girl) doing what appears to be licking my nipple. She wasn't, but that doesn't matter. The point is that less than 12 hours after that picture was taken it's already causing me problems.

Facebook + incriminating pictures = rumor factory. light speed.

GO PLANET!

2007-04-11T16:11:00.000-07:00

So last night I was up until 6am working on this powerpoint presentation for my biochem class. After I finished I knew I wasn't going to make it to class tomorrow anyway, so I decided to get high and watch some TV before bed. On a whim, I decided to watch the first episode o fthe second season of Captain Planet: mind pollution.

This episode is incredible. drop what you are doing, find some friends, get lit, and watch this NOW.

Assorted highlights:
- Leika becomes a crack whore
-a crackhead jumps through a glass window, lands face down on the floor and bleeds. pointlessness
- Kid ODs and instantly dies, accurate to reality
-Washington DC becomes overrun with crack heads. Also true to life.
-did I mention that drugs make people into zombies?
-"The drug made him do it!"
-"OK wheeler think: if you were a zombie, where would you be? The vice presiden't office!" (current vice president: Dan Quayle)
-"No! I've polluted MYSELF! No! NO! NOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Jaded

2007-04-08T02:43:00.000-07:00

More than most people, I often worry that I'm jaded; desensitized. For example, I was recently on a date with a girl who my friend had told me got into a car accident on the freeway involving some friends of his. The account of the accident sounded pretty minor and no one was hurt, so on the date I jokingly brought it up. well, to say the least that openned a can of worms. As any normal person would've guessed, the car accident waws hardly minor in her eyes. In fact, she still complained of some minor shoulder pain from it, and was even still experiencing a high degree of what she described as post-traumatic anxiety (of course, she was heavily self-medicating on adderol, which she'd never done pre-accident, but we don't need to get into that).

the point is that I feel like many of my experiences that have taught me to instinctively dissociate myself from otherwise emotional situations (i.e. firefighting/EMS) may negatively effect the way I interact with people on a day to day basis. I don't think I'm incapable of empthay or sympathy or anything like that, I'm not sociopathic. But my sympathetic instincts probably don't kick in as often as they should. More than that, I feel like my emotiuons in general have been dulled (probably more from a years of depression growing up and a few romances gone rotten). It's gotten to the point where I tend to characterize myself as passionless. The fact that I'm kind of a loner and don't have many friends that i'm really close to (especially out here) doesn't help much.

consequently, I really enjoy those rare moments when I really feel human.

Tonight, instead of partying and all that jazz I went to the writing center and did some much needed HW. Mainly I didn't feel like partying; although there was a lot going on and my friends were practically begging me to come out, I just wasn't feeling social. But that's not the point. The point is, on my way over to the writing center, I saw a tiny little frog hoping around on the sidewalk, a pretty rare sight in SoCal. I tried to catch it and put it somewhere safer, seeing as there was a fairly large party going on about 50 feet south in front of the dining hall, but it kept escaping my grasp. I was on the phone with my friend at the time, and I mentinoed to him that I was worried someone would step on the frog.

Sure enough, as I returned to my room a little after 2 am I found the frog squished fairly close to where I'd found it earlier. I tapped it and tried to find a pulse to see if it was still alive; of course it wasn't. It kind of hurt a little knowing that I could've saved the frog if I had jsut tried harder to catch it, or at least chase it towards the grass. I decided no one else needed to know that a tiny little frog had been squished, so I picked it up by a hind leg and gave the little guy a fairly undignified trashcan-funeral.

As I continued back to my room, I was reminded of the only animal I've killed on the road (that I nkow of). Driving to school at the end of the summer, I hit a a crow in the midwest. I was going really fast on the freeway. it was flying across the freeway, then suddenly swept low and got sucked under my car. There was nothing I could've done about it, it happened way too fast. I was so struck at having killed the crow, I actually pulled off the freeway a few exits down, held a small memorial for it at a farm on the side of the road, and even erected a small monument of stones for the bird (I've even got a picure of the monument somewhere, it's apparently not on hand though or you'd bee looking at it).

I guess when I'm doing CPR on a soon-to-be-dead person, or cutting a screaming car accident victim away from their metal cage, i fell useful. My usefulness gives me focus, a goal towards which I can focus my energy, more easily putting my emotions aside. When I find myself in situations where I feel helpless or useless, emotions I would otherwise ignore or perhaps not even give my self opprotunity ofr come to the surface and dominate my experience. I suppose that means I feel most human when i'm in situations of distress. I sure hope that doesn't mean I feel pity stronger than I feel satisfaction or joy; i'm probably just making it seem that way because it's on my mind.

I mean, I am human after all.

Identity ownership

2007-04-05T19:08:00.000-07:00

Today (yesterday?) I took a big step in taking ownership of my online identity: I posted a link to this blog as "my website" on my facebook profile. When I first started this blog, I thought i'd never had a blog before, but it's recently occured to me that facebook sort of is a blog, especially with those notes. But I've definitely never had a site I considered to be "my website" before.

For some reason though I still feel like leaving my name as "carvstree" on this blog. It's not as though I feel particularly vulnerable putting my real name up; it seems like plenty of people do it all the time and haven't been subject to identity theft or severe stalking or anything of the sort. I guess that for the time being, this is carvstree's blog, not David's. That probably sounds wierd, but I'm kinda wierd about it myself.

Next step will be personalizing this blog a little bit more, making it something I can be proud of and less of an assignment. The name bit will come later.

The Weekend Update

2007-04-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

This past weekend was 3 days long courtesy of this wierd holiday that only SoCal schools recognize called "Cesar Chavez Day," and I either used the holiday really well or really poorly. I got almost no work done, despite the midterm I had on monday, and instead partied really really hard through the weekend and went snowboarding twice.

Brief follow-up on the Germany party. Suites around the world was a ton of fun, but was also pretty frustrating. Our budget was cut significantly, and the "more money than in previous years" became $75-85 for beer. I bought 6 5L kegs of 3 different german beers, and a ton of sausages and german cookies for snacks. The beers, it turned out, all had very foamy heads, meaning we had to have comitted pourers all night serving the beer. As soon as the other parties closed down, EVERYONE flooded into Germany. There were probly around 120 people packed into the tiny place I live in, so consequently the whole Discotheque theme failed because there wasn't enough room for anyone to dance. The beer only lasted 40 minutes, and the fact that someone jacked a whole keg from one of the fridges didn't help. Pretty much as soon as the beer got out, the entire party emptied to go see what was going on at the other party (mount olympus, who ran out of beer immediately after, or maybe were already out). Since everyone bailed on the party, I decided to shut it down for good: I locked the door, and left my suite empty. After the party I got trashed wandering around to different parties....well, I was kinda trashed already but I had a fun night.

Day after that (friday), I drove to Bear on my own and had a day of lone snowboarding, which was great and exactly what I needed to unwind throuhg some lingering frustrations from the night before. That evening, I got back to school, had a sausage barbecue with some friends (hey, we were all too busy serving beer to make most of the sausages), then got trashed playing beer pong.

Saturday I decided to just take it easy, so I mostly chilled on the mounds with some friends. My friend Laura and I decided to work on a mural together and are currently finalizing the design. That night I watched science of sleep which was fantastic and everyone should just drop what they're doing and go watch it now. Sunday I woke up early and took one of my roommates to Bear where we spent the day, then I went to work in the evening. It was a good weekend: I probably had more fun in the past 3 days then I did over the entire spring break.

Before I peace, let me share a few cool things I discovered over the past few days:

http://www.olpcnews.com - One Laptop Per Child. This company Quanta is working with an MIT techie to design and implement in mass production a laptop that costs only $100. The plan is to sell it for 200 in developed markets with the consumers understanding that they are buying a second laptop for a child in the Third World. Their current prototype only costs $150.

http://www.geekologie.com - Hard to describe...this website basically has a bunch of stuff on it that you'd think was especially cool if you were a nerd. Last I checked, they had a 1million dolalr laptop, high speed photography of a bullet, a foldable chair made out of ( i think) cardboard that you can twist into various cool designs, and a deep frier with a fish living in a water phase below the hot oil. Just cool, random stuff.

http://palmsout.blogspot.com - Palms Out Sounds, a music blog. Before my friend introduced me to this blog, I never really followed a blog. I feel like I defintiely would not mind keeping up with this one. Every wednesday they compile an album of songs sampled by a particular artist, every sunday they publish an album of remixes....all around an excellent find, especially if you are into hip hop.

And last but not least, there's a whole series of videos of this guy on Youtube. Yes, BlendTec is a real company, this is a real blender, and this is a real viral ad campaign. But, will it blend?

The Fourth Reich

2007-03-27T10:13:00.000-07:00

At long last, the Suites Around The World party has returned!!!! SATW is one of the only annual parties (non-music oriented) at Pitzer It never even happened last year, which was my first year living in the dorm that hosts it, so I'm super stoked to announce that this thursday night Mead LY230 will be transformed into an alcoholic caricature of Germnay!

Countries to be represented by other suites are Japan, Mount Olympus, USA (The RA's sub free party because America is lame I guess), and Italy.

The plan:

1) Acquire good German beer with the school's money.

2) Acquire something resembling german food (sausages? it's gotta be cheap to keep the money on beer)

3) Ship the freshman off to Harvey Mudd

4) Find some German music. nominees: Kraftwerk, Rammstein (at the least Du hast), 99 red ballons by whoever that was, Generic traditional Oompah-pah (sp?), bad techno...whatever I can get my hands on.

5) Invade Poland

6) Atmosphere. The more seriously we take this party the better it will be. I'm not just talking about music, that had it's own step in the master plan of the fourth reich. I'm talking about decorations, costumese even! it's imperative that we turn this place into a wierd avant-garde discotheque or a bavarian beer hall, or maybe some overlap of those two entirely different scenes.

The bar has been set.

My freshman year, the suite below where I currently live (I think) was Germany for SATW. They ran out of beer kinda quick and had to send someone off to make a run which was kinda lame, but honestly I think it was the best suite that year. Why? they took themselves absolutely seriously. Every member of the suite was dressed in black, spoke with bad but hilarious German accents (meine beer is warm!), they played bad techno all night and danced nothing but awkward-robot...it was a blast.

Their performances made the party.

This year Mead (allegedly) has more money to allocate to the party than it has in the past, and it sounds like there will be less countries than there have been in the past, a formula that equals lots of beer money. I'm looking forward to having an ample supply of good stuff, but I don't want the party to just get dissolved in alcohol. I want to keep the tradition alive. Suites that only use their drinks to represent their country tend to fail at this party: it's all about commitment.

This is my last year, so this is probably going to be the last big party I host in college. I want it to be epic. I want the freshmen this year to remember how awesome this party turned out the way I still remember the seniors who did Germany back when I was a frosh.

If you can't take the heat, don't post online

2007-03-20T00:56:00.000-07:00

so I spent alot of time deciding just what rant I felt like posting today, and it finally came to me: rating systems. Every now and then after watching a Youtube video I scroll down to see the comments. Pretty often if a user gets flamed, someone or other speaks up for them saying something along the lines of "you know, you didn't have to watch it." Sure, I'm a fan of the whole if-you-don't-have-something-nice-to-say-don't-say-anything-at-all philosophy, but the fact of the matter is that if you post something on Youtube, you are placing your work in a very public forum where it may become highly visible; all work on Youtube is subject to judgement and criticism. This should be fairly obvious, given that there is even a 5-star rating system in place, and posters even have the option to TURN OFF RATINGS ON THEIR POSTS!

One of the things I LOVE about the internet is how it has become a mechanism for self-publishment. I support a slew of musicians who distribute primarily online and are basically self-produced, I have a collection of video-comedy sources I frequent (see below), and I know plenty of people who publish poetry and prose online as well. I like to think that individuals who use the internet as a medium for expression aren't doing it in the hopes of categorically recieving positive feedback. It's one thing to give a paper to a friend and ask them what they think (honestly, if they're a good friend I'd hope they'd be honest...I only mention this because I've noticed livejournal often looks like a support group in the comments/replies section of posts), but if you are going to present your work to an incalculable population of strangers, you ought to expect it will be criticized. And if you are a viewer who appreciates work that is being criticized, you would be doing the artist a service by defending them in a more substantial manner than "if you don't like it, don't watch it."

I remmeber there was this one forum I was a member of that was, well....packed with "new agers" to put it lightly. I'm premed, so I gave them a lot of slack and put up with them for the most part. One day, someone came in talking about 12 stranded DNA. now, anyone who has taken high school chemistry ought to know this is absolutely impossible, and having taken much higher levels of chemistry and biology I can give very articulate reasons why. I decided this was just to tripped out to pass, and decided to correct the misinformation with a rather condemning reply, and was so anoyed with the bad science presented that I gave the poster "-1 karma," the karma system being a means by which posters could be rewarded or punished for their posts.

Apparently, although there was a negative karma button clearly available to me, I was the first person in approximately the 3 year history of this forum to do such an offensive thing. A huge argument broke out, ending with the abolition of the negative karma button, and a new convetion of tossing around karma points for no particular reason to the result that the mroe often you posted the more karma you got, regardless of the quality of the post.

The point of the story is that I feel that many individuals seem to have the impression that unconditional support is necessary for the existence of community and interpersonal relationships. But I mean, given the fact that most material placed online--be it blog post or video--is subject to being viewed by totally strangers, I think people ought to expect a little criticism, and constructive or not be capable of dealing with it.

there are trolls out there who enjoy starting riots. There are jerks out there who will be outright mean even if it's simply not their cup of tea but may be good anyway. And there are even a few people out there who enjoy giving constructive criticism. But if you are going to put something out there for the world to see, you shouldn't expect hugs all around.

I suppose that in context, it's not the posters of the material that are saying "dont like? don't post!" but other viewers. perhaps these are people who have been subject to critism and are trying to protect others, or perhaps they are members of lovey-duvey communities like the one I described who think the whole internet could and should be one big love-fest; maybe they're both. I've never taken psych, i'm jsut a philosopher. Whatever their reasons, these people need to reconcile the fact that although the internet operates and appears as though it were its own realm/dimension/enviornment/world whatever metaphysical term you want to throw out there (and it may well be that), the internet does still exist within the real world, and is inhabited by the same real people you find on the street.

We ought to expect the same kind of criticism online that we would recieve from strangers on the subway, because that is EXACTLY who the audience is. Moreover, due to the degree of anonymity available oinline, we should perhaps expect HARSHER criticism online than in the real world, yet the internet is still flooded with drek. sure, deviantart has tons of incredible art on it, but it also has lots of pedestrian stuff. we've all seen the kind of trash that is the majority of youtube. Most online literature sites are just mechanisms for high school students to say they've been published and have no review process for accepting material.

So why do these support groups form? it's obvious really: the internet is packed with amateurs. that's ok; that's the point. the amateurs support each other and that's fine. it's great when small artistic communities form around which these people can thrive in their self-expression, like groups of mutually subscribed directors on youtube or deviantart-ists who keep up with each others work like bloggers, and of course let's not forget the livejournal communities. but many of these smaller supportive communities exist within more public frameworks, and certainly even the more private ones are still open to being stumbled upon by the occasional kid who just doesn't get it.

so what's the point? if you're going to express yourself through a medium as visible as most websites are, be ready for criticism and keep a stiff upper lip. keep in mind, are you making your work for yourself or for your audience? Do you just like doing what you want to do or do you want to get better at it? considerations like these should determine to what degree criticism effects posters, and under no circumstances should people expect to be necessarily well recieved or liked and similarly if you encounter someones work who is being heavily criticized, you shouldn't feel the need to defend them because it's unlikely to change anything.

If you're going to post online, fine, but expect some bad reviews. If you're going to browse online, fine, but you're not the fucking lorax and these trees can speak for themselves.

this post is more than long enough. as a reward for reading through it (which you probably didn't), here's a collection of what I consider to be some high quality sources of comedic videos online:

Youtube users who produce some solid sketch comedy:
-brookers
-leftofcentercomedy

Online "TV stations" whose series compete monthly for syndication, keeping the quality surprisingly high. you remember that family guy joke where the dud ein the red wig kicks peter in the nuts and then points to a hidden camera and says "you jsut got kicked in the nuts" like it's the name of a TV show? that's from channel101. if you want to participate ina live screening, the sites are LA and NY based respectively
www.channel101.com
www.channel102.net

New computer vs. Spring break

2007-03-06T10:06:00.000-08:00

Since none of you have ever seen it before, I'll just come out and say it: my computer kinda sucks. It's your typical Dell POS I got freshman year and has lasted me through college, but it's jsut real bent outta shape. Moreover, I just haven't been taking care of my baby. I've never reformatted the harddrive. I've maybe repaired the OS once. I haven't used windows update in a WHILE. I've downloaded mroe than a few corrupted files, which has given my computer a few...let's call them neuroses. At times, in fact pretty often, it takes forever just to load a program or a webpage.

My computer just isn't in the best shape. I've erecently been trimming down the files on my computer in the hopes that more space might help (even though it still refuses to defragment properly), but ultimately I'm going to buy a new computer. In particular, I'm going to MAKE my new computer. This scares me. I know some theoretical stuff about computer structure, I used to know how to program, and I know my way around windows pretty well, but I definitely don't know much about components.

Suffice it to say, I'm going to need to do some reserach. But moreover, I need to save some money. My hope is that building the computer myself will save enough money that I can afford the thing soon, build it before school let's out (I wanna get ahold of my friends' music), and hav a computer powerful enough that I can use it to game with. however, saving up this money is going to be a bit of a sacrifice. Currently, I'm approximately halfway there. I just got a 3rd part time job, which pays significantly more than my other 2, which should put me over realtively quickly. The only problem is that spring break starts this weekend, and I now have 2 jobs I would need to get subs for (the third is on campus). I'm a supervisor at the first job, so it's not the easiest thing in the world to get a sub to begin with, and I just GOT this other job, so I'm definitely not in a position to ask for vacation.

So in case you couldn't read between the lines, I'm not going anywhere for spring break. Really, I only have to actually WORK 4 days over my 2 weeks of vacation, but they're spread out enough that I can't really go too far away. I mean, I'm in southern california already, AND I have a car so I guess I shouldn't really complain, but this is my last semester in college and I was really looking forward to going on some epic trip with my friends. I've stayed on campus for spring break before and immediately regretted it afterwards (cabin fever). My only hope is that I remember to get off campus and have some fun. Maybe road trip it up to the bay area or the grand canyon. Worse case scenario I'll go snowboarding alot (rough life for Dave, right?). I guess I shouldn't mourn my vacation too much, I just sorta feel like this is one of the last vacations i'm going to get. My older friends always tell me how hard it is to make your own time once you're out in the real world, and that's where I'm presumably going to be hanging out from this summer onwards.

This computer had better be worth it.

Chiptunes

2007-02-22T10:08:00.000-08:00

So one of my stranger interests is Chiptunes. Chiptunes is a gnere of music characterized more by the technology used to make it than by any particular style. The reason is because the technology places a huge limit on the music produced. Basically, huge nerds either dig the sound controller chips out of their old nintendos or use special software to hijack the chip in their gameboy (etc.) to make music.

It can get kinda strange sometiems, but in general I think the music is pretty cool, and the idea is really cool. One of the really neat things about the whole scene is that since it's such an underground (read as: "no one but them gives a shit") scene, just about every artist involved provides their music for free either through their personal or label webpages. one label I particularly like is www.8bitpeoples.com , a label that makes their entire discography available for free download.

I actually first discovered chiptunes through that label. I had just discovered the website www.rocketboom.com , a Vlog that sort of does the news and is responsible for that annoying "ask a ninja" podcast. I was watching a video on rocketboom where they were describing this neat experiment someone did with an NES game called Gradius where they overlayed 15 people playing the game to observe patterns and successful strategies (the experiment was published in a video game developers industry journal). At the end of the video were 2 website names, one of which directed me to 8bitpeoples. After rewatching the video, I'm fairly sure the music is from the original game, but whatever. I just figured this story was worth telling given how random my encounter with this music was. You can watch the video or read about it here: http://thenewgamer.com/content/archives/averaging_gradius

So I just embedded this flash player from Last.FM, which apparently has a shit-ton of chiptunes on it, to try and give you a taste of this stuff from the convenience of my blog. Ironically, the first song that came up after I put it up was a Venetian Snares song, which is NOT chiptunes (cool IDM, but not what I wanted). So as a disclaimer, if it doesn't sound like music you might find in an old NES game, just click the next button.

hyperreality on Youtube

2007-02-19T21:15:00.000-08:00

So my favorite concept related to post-modernity is hyperreality:

"Hyperreality is significant as a paradigm to explain the American cultural condition. Consumerism, because of its reliance on sign exchange value (e.g. brand X shows that one is fashionable, car Y indicates one's wealth), could be seen as a contributing factor in the creation of hyperreality or the hyperreal condition. Hyperreality tricks the consciousness into detaching from any real emotional engagement, instead opting for artificial simulation, and endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearance. Essentially, (although Baudrillard himself would perhaps balk at the usage of this word) fulfillment or happiness is found through simulation and imitation of a transient simulacrum of reality, rather than any interaction with any "real" reality." -From Wikipedia Hyperreality.

I'm bringing this up because well, I find myself encountering hyperreality on a regular basis online (in fact, I first encountered postmodernism in general when doing research on internet-related philoisophy about 5 months ago: the term "hyperreality" came up in a JSTOR search and the rest is history). Story time.

So everyone remember that shitty "Man of the Year" issue time released last year, where it turned out to be "YOU."? Well, in one of the articles on Youtube it mentioned the SNL digital short "Lazy Sunday." At work about a week ago I let slip that I hadn't seen it. Apalled, one of my co-workers demanded that we find it on Youtube. Little did he know, I tried that and it has been absolutely BURIED under imitations and parodies. I brought up hyperreality, and my friend commented, "This is the most post-modern thing that has ever happened to me." After a while he found it posted on a blog somewhere under a different title, a title I certainly would never have guessed having not seen the video. I challenge you to find it. Seriously, poke around; it's not as easy as it sounds.

For a different hyperreal experience, check out these videos in sequence.

Citi Bank Identity theft commercial
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGPBRXKuoMc

Youtube Identity theft
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCDccnwgJdY&mode=related&search=

Re: Youtube Identity theft (1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTor_JGxIHc&mode=related&search=

Re: Youtube Identity theft (2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Wc7e0QYKo&mode=related&search=

The same thing happens to every video posted online.

>>EDIT: I decided this waws as good a post as any to link to GAM3R 7H30RY http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/ . It's a book/forum sorta. This Media Studies professor at New School is offering up a full draft of his upcoming book for public viewing and commenting. It's an interesting idea, an open source review. The book is an application of critical theory to video games. Check it out. Also, if you're interested, there's an interview of the author on This Spartan Life (I think it may even be the video I linked to in the TSL post).

The library

2007-02-19T12:36:00.000-08:00

I should really just stop borrowing books. I get most of the info I need from articles that are readily available through online databases my school subscribes too, but every now and then I'm just too tempted by some juicy piece of book I have to read. Often, the book is relatively rare making it expensive.

A few months ago I checked out 2 books. I renewed them over winter break, and they were due at some point in late jan/early feb. I just checked my school eMail account (an account I rarely look at since I have about 10K pages of eMails and well...suffice it to say I can't send anything from that account) and not only are those books late, I'M BEING CHARGED $100 PER BOOK. On Saturday I earned $120 snowboarding, and recently got a paycheck from one of my other jobs (i'm currently working 3). I'm trying to save up for a new computer; I really don't need these book fines.

There's nothing worse than getting excited over a paycheck only to realize you have to blow the whole thing and-then-some on bills. Well, no... plenty of other things are worse, like cancer, but I mean it's pretty frustrating. i guess working 3 jobs means this computer will happen eventually, but the sooner I can afford it the better. I'm planning on building it myself from components, and I've never done that before, so the project alone is kind of intimidating without the added frustrations of me being a flake with library books.

I mean, come on. The books are lying right there by my desk. Every evening I see them and think, "Fuck. Today should have been the day. It's late now, I don't wanna walk over, I'll do it tomorrow." They're going in my backpack pronto. Time to go to the library and plead with whoever is at the desk to cut back the fines. Otherwise I'm keeping those suckers (and losing some bank).

Grammar flaming

2007-02-13T10:49:00.000-08:00

In my opinion, one of the most dissapointing things about Computer-Mediated-Communication outlets is that there are always those individuals who instead of addressing the content of a discussion attempt to discredit a poster ad hominem by highlighting poor spelling or grammar. Take this post for instance from some random forum at (i just learned that " 'learn to spell' + forum" is a fun search) : http://www.girlslearntoride.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=869&whichpage=2

"how old are you? edit: I'M confused and misdirected? how about learning how to spell, then you can propose a worthwhile argument."

In the 'real world,' grammar and vocabulary are used as metrics for education; this is why verbal reasoning figures so highly on standardized test such as the SAT, GRE, MCAT, and LSAT. But the fact of the matter is when people communicate online, be it on a BBS style forum or live chat, people are often in too much of a hurry to get their ideas out on the table that they simply don't care neough to significantly review their posts before tossing them out. Folks who have clumsy typing ability end up getting the ass end of the stick.

Personally, I could care less. Whether someone abbreviates the word whatver as "wtv," (maybe 1337 speak isn't quite as pertinent to this discussion), or just types so fast that tehir wodrs come out all jmubled, the content of their posts ought to be the focus of attention. Perhaps we ought to treat spelling variations and irregularities like accents expressed through ones fingers. I have friends who drawl and slur words together, and I myself am a fan of words that don't really exist in the english language like "howdy" and "ain't," but these types of speeking patterns don't pose a problem in day-to-day communication. Anyone who has ever transcribed a verbal interview knows that people often speak with awful grammar and throw sentence fragments around like confetti on new years. The double standard must end!

Forums are typically not homes to polished essays, and I posit that we should not expect them to be. Poor grammar is not indicative of an immature poster, just sloppy typing. Keep the ideas and arguments central people, lay off the spelling and grammar.

This Spartan Life

2007-02-01T01:41:00.000-08:00

Machinima: a portmanteau of "machine" and "cinema," machinima is a broad genre of animation chracterized by the use of videogame engines as 3D rendering platforms. A classic example of machinima is the video series "Red vs. Blue", which is filmed and about the game HALO.

"This Spartan Life", TSL, also filmed in halo, is at the top of my list of favorite machinima. It has one various awards within the machinima community, and has a rather original format for a machinima: most machinima are science fiction chronicles, TSL is actually a talk show. Topics on the show generally are focused around the general theme of emergent media particularly machinima, and are not above touching on the postmodern. TSL guests run the gamut from media theorists to multimedia artists and video game designers. They even got Malcolm Maclaren. Here's one of their most recent interviews, it's pretty good: http://www.thisspartanlife.com/1004_mod3.html

One other reason I like the show is that they feature some excellent 8 Bit music, AKA Chiptunes. More on chiptunes later, but for now feel free to check out the playlists available through TSL at http://www.thisspartanlife.com/8bit.shtml or go straight to the source and check out on of the most active labels, http://www.8bitpeoples.com (their entire discography is available for free download, but don't be afraid to show them some support).

I guess i'm just that big of a nerd.

Dreams

2007-01-31T11:25:00.000-08:00

So I've been dreaming alot lately. I guess that's wierd for me; not that dreaming is wierd, but the nature of the dreams themselves are a little different for me. They're good dreams, don't get me wrong, but they're the kind of dreams that feel loaded with symbols, the kinds of dreams that people who like to read dreams are into. Personally, I think the whole notion of the "subconcscious using dreams as a vehicle to communicate with the conscious mind" is kind of ridiculous, treating the subconscious like some sort of homunculous that inhabits some occult corner of my mind. Still, the dreams feel like they mean something.

The night before last I had this emotional dream that I had a child (Not like I gave birth, but just my child). Could be around the kid wihtout breaking into tears, and much of the dream was comitted to me trying to figure out how to suport it. To contextualize this, I had a job interview to be an MCAT tutor with Kaplan that day.

Last night I dreamed that I picked this HOT girl up at a bar, and we went back to her room. When we got there, there was some dude like fixing the plumbing or installing cable or doing something like that in her room, and people just generally kept interrupting us (I kept on anyway, but she was distracted). At some point, she got pulled off to go do something saying she'd be right back, and I got left waiting for her on the bed. I killed time watching TV with her friend (yes, someone was watching TV in the room the whole time), and the girl never came back. CONTEXT: Last night I went to an OK dance party with some friends (didn't take anyone home) and went to sleep watching TV.

Followers of Freud and Jung: feel free to analyze me.

Blogging community?

2007-01-26T14:43:00.000-08:00

So recently I discovered my friend kevin has a blog on blogger, and wanted to see if I could somehow "friend" him like facebook/livejournal/myspace style, and quickly realized I just didn't know how. So then I decided I'd check out other people's blogs to see if that might enlighten me. I was flippin through the "next Blog" link blogger offers, and I notcied no one's blogs had any list of friends or subscribed blogs, and that most comments on blogs were either straight up spam, or were to the tune of "nice blog, come check out mine www.blahblhablha.com!"

Blogger is not what I expected. It's like we're all sitting on our own little islands, screaming our thoughts into the atmosphere, competing to be noticed by the birds. Not being able to link directly to other's blogs seems like a pretty big roadblock to forming social connections with others on the network. I've already started this blog, so I'm gonna try to stick with it, but maybe this site's not for me.

Seems like a lonely way to blog.

crack deals and bank robberies

2007-01-24T22:23:00.000-08:00

So this is my first blog. In fact, this is my first blog post! I'm making no promises to content: with any luck, this will be a pretty free form blog. I'll probably talk about my life here and there, but I'm not above waxing philosophic, complaining about postmodernity, and just generally ranting.

So I guess what I'm saying is that this is not a political-blog, or a personal-blog per se, or any label people like applying to blogs. This is an experiment. If posts seem incongrous, they probably are. I make no promises to the quality of content, nor to any consistency of subject matter. In fact, every now and then, I may outright lie. I'll level with you: when I was setting this up I considered creating a completely fictitious persona, just for the sake of giving you something interesting to read.

Maybe if this gets old I'll start writing abour crack deals and bank robberies.