christmas, yay.

every christmas eve eve I hear this weird ominous music in my head.














it's coming...

public school

I spend a good amount of time trying to convince people that UMass Lowell is a great school, that it doesn't deserve its horrible reputation, and that I'm getting a super rigorous education (well, as rigorous as I can handle anyways).

Then UML decides to put THIS on their homepage to advertise how eeeeeeasy it is to get a few credits over winter break.

I have no words to describe how misguided this marketing scheme is, how many months of convincing this is going to set me back, how much lamer I now feel for being overwhelmed by my coursework...

a desalambrar

"It is better to remain quiet and to forget. That is the only thing we must do. We must forget. And that won't happen if we continue opening up lawsuits, sending people to jail. FOR-GET: That's the word. And for that to happen, both sides must forget and continue with their work."
~Pinochet


So Pinochet is dead at the ripe old age of 91. He will have never known suffering like that he inflicted on others. He was never punished for the crimes he committed, he may never be held responsible.

En la Villa Grimaldi cayó un septiembre amargo
Un grupo de hombres lobos sentó allí sus reales
Se les unió la muerte con su fría guadaña
Y el horror con su corte de atroces materiales

En la Villa Grimaldi se callaron los pájaros
El silencio del bosque se hizo duro y tullido
En su lugar crecieron sórdidos estertores
Agónicas plegarias e inhumanos aullidos

I'm working on scanning my pictures from Chile, so you'll be able to see what Villa Grimaldi looks like. It was a concentration camp that was active in the late 1970s and early 1980s in he hills on the outskirts of Santiago. While I was there I visited Villa Grimaldi twice, with a man who had been interned and tortured there. More about that later, I'm tired now.

q&a with patty, worrywart

So I was telling my friend Patty about his argument I got into with some pretentious plastics engineers about toxic substances in household products. This one guy basically tried to argue that if we didn't have brominated flame retardants there would be dead babies lying around everywhere. I made a feeble attempt to get into it with him, but eventually decided that there's no point in arguing with someone who just wants to win so he can feel better about himself. Anyhow, when retelling the story started to go on and on about how the toxics stay in the body for decades and how there are natural alternatives that are just as flame-retardant, etc...

Patty, always the pragmatist, pointed out that a lot of these issues could be solved if people had a little common sense:

"JUST DON'T PUT YOUR BABY NEXT TO A FIRE!"

Now that is what I'm talking about.

tha woo

I went to Worcester with my boss/professor Bob yesterday. We did some interviews and one guy drove us around the neighborhood where I went to school when I was little. I didn't tell him that until we had already left the neighborhood, because I thought telling him would be like cheating.

It was so surreal though, to hear this guy talk about these places as if we were tourists (well, weird eccentric tourists who come to see abandoned factories and redeveloped affordable housing units). It was interesting to notice what he mentioned and pointed out and what he glossed over. Like I said, though, I kept my mouth shut.


I was sad that we didn't have more time after the interviews, I should have shown Bob some more Worcester, like this mural that I saw every day of my life for years:

It must have been done right after the Berlin Wall fell. The Perestroika and Glasnost were always there; the Target logo was not.

I just finished this a few days ago. I started it over a year ago as a Solstice present for Maggie, then it evolved into a birthday present for my mother. Her birthday was September 12, and she got it on Thanksgiving. Not bad, but I'm getting faster and more efficient every day. When I called my dad on his birthday (November 29th) I told him that his birthday present will definitely be finished before it's too warm to wear a scarf.

la memoria obstinada

Pinochet is dying, just a few days after he admitted responsibility for all the atrocities of his dicatorship:

PINOCHET’S CONDITION STABLE, BUT CHILE FORCED TO DEBATE DICTATOR’S LEGACY

Doctors Reject Second Intervention After General Suffers Heart Attack

(December 4, 2006) Former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet suffered a severe heart attack early Sunday morning and was rushed to a military hospital where doctors preformed a life-saving angioplasty on the 91-year-old former general.

Dr. Juan Ignacio Vergara reported that Pinochet is conscious and is breathing without assistance. He added, however, that the heart attack left Pinochet in serious condition because of his advanced age.

Pinochet’s youngest son confirmed that the former dictator had received his last rites from a Catholic priest and said doctors literally had brought Pinochet back from death. “He’s no longer in the hands of the doctors, but in the hands of God,” said the young Pinochet.
more...

And Chavez won in a landslide.

Simón Bolívar, Simón,
caraqueño americano,
el suelo venezolano
le dio la fuerza a tu voz.
Simón Bolívar, Simón,
nació de tu Venezuela
y por todo el tiempo vuela
como candela tu voz.
Como candela que va
señalando un rumbo cierto
en este suelo cubierto
de muertos con dignidad.

croix is absurdly cute

OK, compare and contrast: no wonder she's the freaking godmother and I'm the...not... Maybe my mother is on to something with all her worrying.

Black Friday

Today is Buy Nothing Day. Buy NOTHING.

Thanksgiving

"That was horrible.  If you want to end war and stuff you got
to sing loud.  I've been singing this song now for twenty five
minutes. I could sing it for another twenty five minutes.  I'm
not proud... or tired.

So we'll wait till it comes around again, and this time with
four part harmony and feeling.

We're just waitin' for it to come around is what we're doing.

All right now.

You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
(Excepting Alice)
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant"

I have no idea why, but hearing this song on Thanksgiving
always makes me cry like a freakin' baby.  Seriously, I don't
know what comes over me.  I wish I had the kind of family that
sat down and listened to it all together, because there are
families that do that.  My family, on the other hand, went to
a restaurant for Thanksgiving, which I consider to be the
gravest possible Thanksgiving sin.  So I was forced to hear my
Alice's Restaurant in the car on the way to the restaurant. 
Then I got lucky and heard it twice on the way home.  Then
I got home and made the mistake of turning on NPR, and now
I'm seriously depressed.

I was all aggravated that I had to go to Worcester to spend
Thanksgiving with my family.  This is the first year since
college that I have been home for Thanksgiving, and I would
have much preferred to spend the holiday working at the
restaurant as I've done in past years.  I would bust my ass
all day from 11am to 11pm or later, never stopping for more
than thirty seconds to stuff a roll in my mouth, gulp down
some gingerale and bitters (Thanksgiving Eve what what) or
smoke half a cigarette in a single drag.

At the end of the marathon we were all sweaty, filthy, and
so beyond tired that our arms and legs felt more tingly than
achy when they finally stopped moving.  We had mint jelly in
our hair, gravy in our shoes, and pecan pie encrusted our
shirt cuffs.  But at the end of it all, after we all served
our last seated parties, the chefs started to dole out the
little styrofoam boxes - turkey, ham, or lamb with creamed
peas and onions, mashed potatoes, squash, and all the rest. 
They always ran out of ham before the restaurant closed, but
the chefs always managed to pull one out of some mystery
location for me. 

We were like people who had been stranded in the desert
getting our first taste of water in a year.  We all ate
standing up in the kitchen, styrofoam boxes spread out on
every available surface, bread board, salad bar, ice chest,
cardboard box.  We barely talked, but looked at each other
as if sharing the happiest secret - it was almost over.
Even though we inhaled our food in a matter of minutes,
having to go back to check on tables or give checks or
whatever, that was the closest thing to a family Thanksgiving
I ever felt. 

Earlier in the day we had fought with each other tooth and
nail for forks, and screamed that someone had taken the
wrong drinks or bumped into someone.  Some of us cracked
under all the pressure, some of us broke down because of evil
customers, some of us cried because we got boiling water
dumped on us.  In fact, one waiter organized a trifecta bet
every holiday, in which people picked the three waitstaff
most likely to break down first.  At the end of it all,
though, we were all on the same team and knew that none of
us would make it through the day without everyone else.

I missed those little styrofoam box Thanksgiving dinners
this year, and the people I used to stand around eating
them with.

the poetry of DH Rumsfeld

I am blatantly stealing this from The Slate, but it's too good to just have off to the side as a link - everyone needs to see this!

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

get your patchouli stink out of my store!

There are certain songs that always conjure memories of my most horrible experiences at school and work. It seems like every time I get myself into one of these situations where I procrastinate to the point where I have to stay awake for 72 hours at a time staring at a computer screen, I inadvertently adopt some anthem and listen to it over and over because it somehow soothes or motivates me.

Right now I'm in precisely such a situation, trying to whip my crap-ass thesis proposal into shape and "send it by Thursday". It's officially 2am, so now I'm just aiming for 6am Friday morning. And I'm miserable. And no one can fix this except for ME. And yet "ME" is writing a blog right now instead of doing the proposal. And "ME" keeps listening to "Hallelujah" and feeling sorry for MEself. "ME" is a dumbass, or perhaps, as some have suggested, a masochist. But not in the sexy way. And by sexy I mean "relating to sex", not as in appealing or whatever. God knows there's nothing less appealing than unwashed overtired dehydrated me who seeeeeeriously needs to get going on that freakin proposal.

So anyways, this is a list of my Top 5 "time of incredible school-related stress" songs EVER. There are way more than five songs I could write about - I have an incredibly long history as a crappy, stressed, procrastinating-to-the-point-of-absurdity student. As sad as it is to leave out some really good ones, my boyfriend John Cusack taught me that five is a magical number.

5. Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen, but I hate to admit the Rufus Wainwright version is kinda better).
This is my song of the moment, the Thesis Proposal song. When I listen to it I kind of insert "thesis proposal" where nouns such as "she" and "love" are supposed to go. Example: "Maybe there's a THESIS PROPOSAL (God) above/ And all I ever learned from THESIS PROPOSAL (love)/Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you". Yeahhhhhhh...

4. Only Living Boy in New York (Simon & Garfunkel)
"Hey, I've got nothing to do today but smile". Even though most days I have a laundry list of things to do that would not include "smile" in the first fifty or so, hearing Paul Simon say it somehow makes me believe it. Happiness on a stick, except it's not "on a stick", but rather "in a song". Or something. This song was especially dear to my heart about eleven months ago during my first finals week of grad school.

"Half of the time we're gone but we don't know where" was especially inspiring, in that funny way that really depressing things can be inspiring, as I tried to figure out how to use Excel the night before my Research Methods final was due. Needless to say, we were supposed to be using it all semester, but I somehow slipped through the cracks and managed to do everything by hand until we got to multiple regressions. My economist friends Alexis and Bill Jenkins III got many a 3am T-Stat-related phone call that week.

Hearing that song also makes me think of eating this totally nasty Chunky Soup that was the only food item in the house at the time of that particular schoolwork spree. It was so horrifically gravy-like, my arteries probably aren't fully recovered yet.

3. Wooden Ships (Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young)
"There's just one thing I got to know, can you tell me please, who won? Say, can I have some of your purple berries? Yes, I've been eating them for six or seven weeks now, haven't got sick once." I literally wrote a five-page section of a term paper about this song. It was during my year of school in Chile, when I wrote all of my papers with a pen and paper (well, pencil first of course. and graph paper - that was the thing down there.)

I was sitting at the dining room table of my Chilean family's house in the middle of the night, trying to write a paper; the assignment was "What is Psychedelia"? Yes, I took a class in which the final paper was about Psychedelia - it was called History of the Underground, and it was quite possibly the best college course I've ever experienced. Anyhow, I started writing about this song and other stuff I was listening to at the time, Talking Heads and King Crimson, etc.

I ended up making the argument that "true psychedelia" was what happened after Psychedelia, i.e. some kind of post-modern absurdist surrealist rejection of what had come to be considered the "movement" (and a rejection that denied its own existence, to boot). I threw in the craziest lyrics I could come up with (thank you Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno) and upon re-reading it in the morning though to myself "whoa, this is the craziest and possibly most questionable paper I've ever written" but I didn't really have a plan B. Amazingly, the professor fucking LOVED it. I kid you not, he gave me the paper back with a perfect score and said it was the best paper written for that class. He also threw in "gringo or otherwise" which really warmed my little heart since he was a major gringo-hater (as all good Chilean revolutionaries are).

2. Trouble (Ray LaMontagne)
"Feels like every time I get back on my feet she come around and knock me down again". In this case, "she" was the personification of my collective final papers from this past spring semester. There was the draft thesis proposal that got rejected and I had to rewrite (long story, see my MySpace blog if you really want to know), the infamous Honduras Incident (too painful to go into), and my first foray into writing about green cleaning, a paper which took every fiber of my being to complete.

I kept hearing this song on the radio and bought the CD, listening to it repeatedly one night while I was up late editing the Honduras disaster, feeling like the world was about to end. Miraculously, the world did end, kind of. That was when the whole flood thing happened, giving us a two-day extension on our final papers. When that week was all over, after much stressing and crying and adderall-borrowing, I left for a roadtrip to DC with Amanda, which is an apocalyptic tale all its own (again, see MySpace blog if you really want to know). I subjected her to endless Ray LaMontagne for the duration of the 12 hour trip. I know what you're thinking, and no, it definitely should not take that long to get to DC from Massachusetts. But it did, and after returning from that trip, "Trouble" became a much more cathartic and happy song that gives me all kinds of sappy "you can overcome any obstacle" thoughts. I didn't mean to end this one on such a lame note, but I just can't be fascinating and edgy all the time - just ask anyone who knows me in person...


1. Naive Melody (Talking Heads - who deserve, and will soon have - their own category)
"I'm just an animal looking for a home, share the same space for a minute or two. And you love me till my heart stops, love me till i'm dead". In addition to being quite possibly the sweetest love song ever, this song went along with my undergraduate thesis, quite possibly the hugest disaster of my life (so far). While I'm confident that I'll soon look back on that time longingly (while I try to do my master's thesis), at the time it was quite an ordeal. A 100-page document, en espanol, which I wrote in record-shattering time (three weeks, tops) and with a record-shattering lack of actual research to back up anything I wrote.

That thing was ridiculous - I clearly remember the day a week before the due date when my adviser Gustavo called me into his office, sat me down, and said gravely "Tu tesis esta en crisis. Tu tesis ES una crisis." Yeah, there was crying and stressing and adderall-borrowing then too, but on a much larger scale. I even went to the Wesleyan library during Spring Weekend in order to avoid the potential distractions posed by my friends having "fun", something with which I was unfamiliar for almost all of May 2003.

Anyhow, I would always play Naive Melody during my many many many all-nighters. I was always alone in MCEC, feeling very isolated and depressed and hopeless, especially when the sun started to rise as if to mock my night of non-productivity. I would go outside and smoke a cigarette and consider how it was a new day, the air felt different and people were starting to emerge from various corners, I would only be alone with my thesis for another hour or so.

The line "Home - is where I want to be, but I guess I'm already there" made me so sad - I always imagined that I might really be sleeping and dreaming, and I might wake up and magically be in my bed at my parents' house, where I would be safe and secure and happy and not have a thesis to write. But like the song says, I was already there - college and MCEC and the sunrise and my unfinished thesis were "home", and I had to accept that painful reality. Much like the previous song and its story, I did eventually finish, and then the song took on a much happier meaning as far as school is concerned, and also resumed its position as one of the most understatedly beautiful love songs I've ever heard.


So that said, I need to get on back to the proposal... I hope my procrastination is indicative of some kind of serious, but treatable, mental illness - because if not, it means I'm just an unambitious dumbass. I'll let you know when I figure it out.

no blogging allowed

Good thing I didn't actually sign up for the NaBloPoMo thing in time, because I am not allowed to blog today! My thesis proposal is due at midnight... Everyone on my committee will be asleep by then, so if I'm not going to get it sent out anytime soon, I technically have until they wake up...

more democracy in/action

Excerpt from D.E. Campbell's Why We Vote:

"On September 26, 1989, Traci Hodgson cast her ballot in Boston’s City Council election. It was the only vote cast in her precinct. For a number of reasons, the political science literature predicts that Traci should have been like the other 275 registrants in her precinct and not turned out to vote. She was only twenty-one, she had lived in Boston for less than two months, and she admitted that she was “not very familiar with the candidates running.” So why did she vote? When asked she replied, “I just think it’s important to vote. If you have the right, you ought to exercise it—whether you are going to make a difference or not” (Mooney 1989).

This book is about why Traci voted, and why she voted alone.

MADISON AND TOCQUEVILLE: A TALE OF TWO MOTIVATIONS

Our starting point in answering this question is not what did motivate Traci, but rather what did not. Clearly she did not vote to protect or advance her interests, as she admitted that she did not know enough about the candidates to select them on the basis of who best represented her. To someone with only a cursory familiarity with the study of American politics this may seem difficult to explain, as politics is typically described as a forum for the “clash of interests.” Equating politics with conflict underpins much of the political science literature and is an assumption shared by scholars working within many theoretical frameworks. I recall an introductory political science course in which a professor defined politics as the “scarcity of consensus.” In 1960, E. E. Schattschneider wrote simply, “At the root of all politics is the universal language of conflict” (2). Forty years later, Morris Fiorina and Paul Peterson note matter-offactly in their introductory textbook on American politics that “politics is fundamentally about conflict” (1998, xvi). For all the ink spilled by contemporary political scientists, however, no one has ever expressed this way of understanding politics better than James Madison in Federalist 10. Madison writes compellingly of how “the latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man,” and that “the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts” (1961, 79).

It does not seem, however, that Traci had her passions kindled as Madison describes. Instead, by her own account she was motivated by the glowing embers of obligation. She felt that she ought to vote, that it was her duty.

In invoking a sense of duty as a motivation to vote, Traci highlights a second, if more subtle, theme in both contemporary and classic writings on political engagement. If, in Federalist 10, Madison has written the quintessential statement on political participation as “protecting one’s interests,” then perhaps Tocqueville has written an equally quintessential description of political participation as driven by “fulfilling one’s duty.” In Democracy in America, Tocqueville observes that American political institutions lead citizens to see that “it is the duty as well as the interest of men to be useful to their fellows. . . . What had been calculation becomes instinct. By dint of working for the good of his fellow citizens, he in the end acquires a habit and taste for serving them” (1988, 512–13).

These two opposing views of politics are not merely the abstract statements of theoreticians, the political science rendition of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. They also inform the writings and doings of political practitioners, with some of America’s founders as notable examples. Of course, Madison was one of the founders and, as noted, in his words we find a cogent description of how politics is inevitably defined by conflict. However, George Washington’s vision was of a republic free from strife among its citizens, in which citizens were involved in public affairs out of duty (Schudson 1998). Ironically, given their disagreements on so many other matters, Thomas Jefferson’s vision for the new republic mirrored Washington’s. Jefferson idealized a nation of small Tocquevillian communities, mentioning his ideal in almost every speech he gave (Morone 1990).

The ongoing debate between civic republican and liberal political philosophers over the nature of political life at the time of America’s founding underscores the two competing visions of democracy’s nature. In summarizing this extensive literature, James Morone writes,

[T]he dominant interpretation of liberal America focuses on the pursuit of self-interest. . . . In the republican view, the colonial and Revolutionary ideal lay, not in the pursuit of private matters, but in the shared public life of civic duty, in the subordination of individual interests to the res publica. Citizens were defined and fulfilled by participation in political community. (1990, 16, emphasis added)

The distinction between engagement driven by interests versus duty need not be seen as either/or. The very fact that evidence can be mustered to support both interpretations of the founders’ ideals suggests that neither one dominated to the exclusion of the other. Nor should we assume that the essential difference between engagement spurred by a threat to one’s interests and engagement motivated by a sense of civic obligation has faded over time. Indeed, the distinction between interest-driven and duty-driven engagement is at the core of this book, which is about contemporary patterns of public engagement in the United States."

read more...

So anyways, what I take from this is that there is a good, albeit never-discussed outside of this book, reason behind those ubiquitous and lame excuses of "I'm not voting because I don't like any of the candidates... "I don't know enough about the issues/candidates to choose..." "My vote doesn't really matter anyways..." "The whole political system is so fucked up I'm not voting just to protest it..."

The way I see it, not voting because you don't approve of the system is basically admitting defeat to the hegemonic two-party system. People in power have created and perpetuated this crazy dichotomy, which exists in such an intense form in very few countries (including the U.S.) So we don't have much choice if we want to vote for someone who is likely to win, but we do have a choice and we can't get scared off by the language of "conflict". Although which choice we make is crucial to each of us and our quests to further our personal interests, exercising the right to make the choice is crucial to our collective interest.

No, the world is not really separable into black and white, good and evil, Democrat and Republican - so it may seem unsatisfactory to have only those two choices before you. But by not voting to "protest" that, you are doing exactly what they want you to do. When less people vote, power remains concentrated in the hands of those who already have it. Although one vote may not matter much statistically, there's NO OTHER WAY to make changes. Unless, of course, the non-voters of the world are willing to put together a coalition, lobby and petition, run for office themselves, and go out into the streets to make their point. I am not saying non-voters are all kept away from the polls by laziness (although some might be) but rather that this frustrating political situation makes apathy a more reasonable choice for some people. However, those people shouldn't blame their apathy on the system, because they are the only ones who can change it.

As far as "not knowing enough" about the candidates or policies or ballot questions, I really can't come up with a polite way of saying that there's no excuse... Listen to NPR while you're in the shower or commuting. Watch the news in between commercials. Shop online for a candidate you agree with instead of shopping for a pink Teflon-coated frying pan. Read the newspaper, cnn.com, or The Nation instead of reading this blog. Fuck it, for all I care you can even watch a little Fox News - just don't listen too hard - while you're at the gym (why do they always have Fox News on in gyms?)

The point is, it does not require superhuman effort to be reasonably informed. In addition to learning about the candidates in your local elections, you will inadvertently learn about other stuff too. The latter will likely get you so fired up that you'll find it impossible to resist voting ever again. Even if it doesn't and you find my entire argument pointless, the frying pan will still be there.