a city is not a war zone

mama needs a new bike

2009-08-26T21:23:00.001-05:00

So this is a bit venal, but I haven't had a new bike since college and this one would let me bike Everett to school in style!

just one less car?

2007-06-30T23:22:00.001-05:00

img_8575
Originally uploaded by Zlatko Unger

I always thought of Critical Mass in terms of cars for some reason -- how they felt about it, how they'd react, how this could make them more aware of people on bikes. It wasn't until Friday, my first CM, that I realized -- Critical Mass is about bikes. (I'm pretty sharp for an old person, if you hadn't noticed.)

Gliding through a tunnel beneath the interstate, we whooped and hollered, sounding like a siren that lasted for miles and miles --
the city was on fire and could only be put out with water bottles, and the kind of joy you leave behind in childhood
I took off my helmet and tossed wisdom into the wind
It twisted my hair into knots and blew out any trace of the day
People on streetcorners called out to ask what we were doing
Riding bikes, dammit! Riding bikes...

------------

Imprecise collection of commentary heard on bikes this month:
-- Can I ride? and Lemme have your ride...
-- If I rode a bike like that, I'd be in that ambulance up there, bless your heart...
-- F*#% you" and variations on that theme...
-- Be careful -- there's some crazy drivers out there
-- One rock, tossed.
-- One teen, charging at.
-- (from a stopped mercedes) I love your shirt, good for you! (on my One Less Car tshirt)
-- Get your white asses out of the neighborhood (twice from the same kid trying to impress his date. he ducked when I turned to look at him, so he probably either lives on our street or has seen me around before)
-- get on the sidewalk
-- you ride that bike like it's a car. I've never seen a bike stop at a red light before. I'm not being negative, I think it's great!
-- a honk, a swerve, and a mouth full of exhaust
totals: about 60% negative, 30% positive, 10% neutral or just plain strange

shades of green

2007-06-29T12:49:00.000-05:00

I'm struck by how easy it is to sneer at people who dare to think they might be able to, in the language of the college essay, make a difference. I've made my share of patchouli jokes too, so I'm not immune, but the press around the U.S. social forum has got me thinking about what function it might serve.

(*AJC article describing the march kicking off the first ever U.S. Social Forum, held in Atlanta, here.)

At dinner last night, mentioning I'd been at the social forum, my brother smirked "yeah, I'm headed down there tomorrow to sell some soap I made from organic compost. I wanted to go today, but my hemp pants were at the dry cleaners..." He is the funny one in the family.

Since Slim and I started talking about things we are doing, and want to do, people have been labeling us. Nice words, nothing mean, but labels function to create differences.

Yes, I like trees, but who doesn't? I like clean air, too -- does that make me a fringe dweller? I also like: good food, not having to sit in traffic just to see my family, listening to the birds, and walking my dog in the woods. How odd can I get? Calling me a tree-hugger seems to let people escape our mutual responsibilities.

I'm just trying to make up for all the people driving Hummers, or air conditioning 5,000 square homes. I've accepted that your actions affect my health and well-being, just as mine affect yours. Slim and I are far from the greenest people I know. We're just trying to be more consistent. We care about something, so we try to do something about it. Simple.

Does the obligatory sneer help you avoid taking action, however small? The world is changing all around you. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

P.S. Jim Wooten, our rain barrel cost us $12.95 and we are saving a bundle on our water bill.

advice from my better self

2007-05-31T06:06:00.000-05:00

on how to go from consuming to creating and awaken the everyday glories...

"We live in a world of theophanies. Holiness comes wrapped in the
ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of
angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. Life wants to lead you
from crumbs to angels, but this can happen only if you are willing to
unwrap the ordinary by staying with it long enough to harvest its
treasure."
-Macrina Wiederkehr

1. tape a sheet of newsprint to the wall. draw on it every day for a week.
2. wake up with the birds, read a poem, and pick up a pen
3. teach yourself how to sew. scrounge for beautiful patterns at thrift stores regardless of the article of clothing they are attached to.
4. volunteer with your siblings -- let them choose where!
5. make a movie from your best friend's wedding video

What are your early-morning inspirations? What do you really want to do before the day recalls all the things you must do?

2007-05-23T06:45:00.001-05:00

Today it's wandering to a completely unoriginal question that has tormented working women since the 1960s: can I take this amazing, intense job and still start a family? I have two jobs before me. One practically screams family friendly, while the other whispers, "are you nuts?" Yet all the lists I'm making lead me towards the second job. All except one -- my list of baby names. Yes, my mind wanders.

skin deep

2007-05-20T21:27:00.001-05:00

I don't wear much makeup, but what I do wear, I wear every day. Even Sundays. It's just a habit, I guess. It's the mask I put on to face the world, even if the world doesn't often notice. Makeup counter girls are always flagging me down, thinking mistakenly they have spotted the bare face in the crowd of Georgia peaches. Apparently Atlantans spend more on makeup per capita than even Parisans (you heard it here). And I'm no exception. I have quite the pile of shiny thin sticks that lured me into buying and taking them home with me with their promise of a sparkling, alluring new me.

So when Slim sent me a link to the Cosmetic Safety Database, I wanted to know, but I didn't, because knowing would mean I'd feel compelled to change. Tonight I hesitatingly entered a few everyday items and hoped for the best.

The results? Every item scored at least a six on a badness scale of ten. The worst was a waterproof mascara. It's not looking good for my face the world face...

Ingredients in this product are linked to:
	Cancer
	Developmental/reproductive toxicity
	Violations, Restrictions & Warnings
	Allergies/immunotoxicity
	Other concerns for ingredients used in this product: Persistence and bioaccumulation, Organ system toxicity (non-reproductive), Multiple, additive exposure sources, Irritation (skin, eyes, or lungs), Enhanced skin absorption, Occupational hazards

This manufacturer:
	Compact for Safe Cosmetics signer
	Conducts animal testing

"A change is gonna come"

2007-05-17T08:45:00.000-05:00

"Hypocrisy is the first step towards meaningful change." -- Paul Sheldon, senior consultant for Natural Capitalism Solutions.

Despite having recently escaped the mouth of a consultant, I think this may actually be true. Every time I've opened my big mouth to espouse some ideal or moral, I've been motivated to look at my own actions to make sure they are in line with the mouthing off. Those times when they haven't been, I've changed, possible more due to perceived social pressure than anything else. It's what got me to take the bus, ride a bike, stop eating meat (several times actually, but who's counting?), and decide to only look for jobs in the nonprofit sector.

I may or may not be a better person for all this, but at least my actions are a weak echo of my lofty ideals. One step at a time, I'm working to bring those ideals down to earth long enough to change, not the world, but myself. Isn't that all we can really do? Change yourself, make your actions consistent with your ideals, and realize the world may or may not follow.

Sam Cooke was talking about the civil rights movement, but the moral and practical logic of that movement has influenced every social movement since, and I think it's applicable to the environmental movement. Some people will see it as a moral imperative, others see only their bottom line ("The Greening of Fox"), and that's okay. What's important is change.

A Change Is Gonna Come
(Sam Cooke, 1964)

I was born by the river in a little tent
And just like the river, I've been running ever since
It's been a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come

It's been too hard living, but I'm afraid to die
I don't know what's up there beyond the sky
It's been a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come

I go to the movie, and I go downtown
Somebody keep telling me "Don't hang around"
It's been a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come

Then I go to my brother and I say, "Brother, help me please"
But he winds up knocking me back down on my knees

There've been times that I've thought I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able to carry on
It's been a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come

Choice, fate, and higher education

2007-05-16T09:40:00.000-05:00

I often use Sergeant Serna as a foil in this space, focus on his falling sheds and sawed up couches, but today, inspired by Georgia's efforts to rid its state colleges and universities of those so-called illegals, I want to say something nice for a change.

Despite our political disagreements, I see Jose as the consummate patriot. Why? Not because he joined army. Not because he supports our nation's leaders unquestioningly. Not because he is willing to die for a strong, if vague, belief in "freedom."

It's simpler than that. It's because he chose this country. He crossed a desert, walking for days with no food and little water. He left his family, his homeland, his linguistic heritage, everything he knew and loved. Left it all behind for some shining opportunity he saw on the horizon, not even guessing it could all turn out to be a mirage. He was not born here by some lucky twist of fate. He chose the US of A, and even when it tried to spit him out, he found a way to stay.

----------------

I just sent my comments about the state's purge of its higher education system of these people it chooses to call illegal. Not understanding how people can label someone else "illegal," continue to call themselves "Christian," and go so far out of their way to NOT feed, NOT clothe, and NOT comfort those illegal people, I focused my comments on the economic impact of cutting Georgians off from higher education because their parents decided to emigrate.

If you want to comment, here's the link. Public Comment Sessions on Undocumented Students.

2007-04-22T13:44:00.000-05:00

Sustainable South Bronx executive director Majora Carter.

"In an emotionally charged talk, Majora Carter explains her fight for environmental justice in the South Bronx. This MacArthur-winning activist shows how minority neighborhoods have suffered most from flawed urban policy, and energetically shares her grassroots efforts to "green the ghetto." Her talk from the heart drew a spontaneous standing ovation at TED, and has proved equally moving online."

Watch this. So moving, so smart, so...just watch it! Make sure you stay for the end -- she tells Al Gore how it is. Best thing I've seen all year. HERE for the video.

I'm reading up on asset-based community building, so her call to stop wasting people from the so-called ghettos, their minds, energy, and wisdom, stuck with me especially. "Stop wasting me," she says, and there's no "please" spoken nor implied.

------------

related, from Building Communities Inside Out:

"There is nothing natural or inevitable about the process that leads to the creation of client neighborhoods. In fact, it is important to note how little power local neighborhood residents have to affect the pervasive nature of the deficiency model, mainly because a number of society’s most influential institutions have themselves developed a stake in maintaining that focus. For example, much of the social science research produced by universities is designed to collect and analyze data about problems. Much of the funding directed to lower income communities by foundations and the United Way is based on the problem-oriented data collected in “needs surveys,” a practice emulated by government human service agencies. Finally, the needs map often appears to be the only neighborhood guide ever used by members of the mass media, whose appetite for the violent and the spectacularly problematic story seems insatiable. All of these major institutions combine to create a wall between lower income communities and the rest of society—a wall of needs which, ironically enough, is built not on hatred but (at least partly) on the desire to 'help.'"

"The fact that the deficiency orientation represented by the needs map constitutes our only guide to lower income neighborhoods has devastating consequences for residents. We have already noted one of the most tragic—that is, residents themselves begin to accept that map as the only guide to the reality of their lives. They think of themselves and their neighbors as fundamentally deficient, victims incapable of taking charge of their lives and of their community’s future."

---------------

ride a bike

2007-04-18T23:24:00.000-05:00

"The bicycle should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets."
- Christopher Morley, novelist, and writer

"Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel... the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood."
- Susan B. Anthony

Yesterday I almost beat the bus home, taking back roads. Earlier on my ride I took it slow, riding with traffic downtown. I love how riding a bike is so many things to so many people, including the half-dozen or so humming around inside of me. I'm grateful I took this internship. I just needed a little push to hop on my gorgeous blue bike and get to work. Makes me feel so alive! And that's what I've got to figure this whole spinning thing is about, if it's "about" anything at all.

Restore

2007-03-19T09:23:00.000-05:00

Definition, Restore: a) what we've spent the last two months of our lives doing to our poor house in the End b) Habitat for Humanity's home improvement center c) the sound of the earth below the concrete, pleading to be set free (today's "Ideal Bite").

The backyard saga continues. If you haven't heard (lucky!), Jose decided over the course of the past year, for reasons unknown and possibly unknowable, to carve a gigantic hole in the backyard. Never the shack's best feature, it quickly became an eyesore, a monstrosity, Jose's personal Moby Dick, pursued with a passion that bordered on delirium and his ultimate downfall (the house being Ahab's ship in this silly over-extended metaphor, let drift to the brink of destruction by a year's worth of willful neglect by three hard living men...I hear Hollywood calling).

My dad advised him, wisely, to tell me he was building a basketball court. This deception didn't last long -- he was actually planning to pave my overgrown paradise into a parking lot. A parking lot! (see www.cfpt.org for why I found this particularly ironic) Luckily, the dream went unrealized, the concrete unpoured. We decided gravel would be an earth-friendlier choice now that we have a red clay mudpile to fill in, and started building a retaining wall to keep the rest of the yard from spilling over. And by "we" I mean Slim and his bearded brother.

Someday, we will prevail. At least, that's what the neighbors are telling each other.

In the Interim:

The RJ Shack before :and after:

My favorite spot to set the evening sun:

The gaping hole is tamed but not conquered:

inspiration and action

2007-03-17T09:24:00.001-05:00

"Nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action." -- Walter Anderson

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action. ~Frank Tibolt

So. Action.

Between midterms and planning the rest of my life (now there's a concept -- see Plan B, This American Life) I've been busy lately. But yesterday was spent in the garden, where I'm happier than most anywhere else. It's an anxious, can't wait to finish but I hope it never ends, kind of happy. I'm a never-satisfied, what can I say? All I know is that a beer and a trowel go a long way. A chainsaw-bearing man doesn't hurt either, although combining it with the beer is questionable.

Other people's remodeling trials and tribulations being fascinating, just fascinating, here are some before/after photos from our current obsession.

Dining Room Before (above) and After (below)

Living Room after paint job:

The Monday Morning Special wall collapse:

The culprit:

Making progress:

Next stop: the backyard
(Thank you, Jose, for your parking lot inspiration.
Sadly, the artist dreams alone, and that particular vision will never be realized.)

life and death

2007-03-12T11:17:00.000-05:00

9 Chickweed Lane

Lately I've been thinking about how murder came to be considered entertainment. We have a ruddy fascination with death, but not just death of any kind -- death by natural causes is your classic chick flick recipe (Beaches, etc).

Does that make the violence as entertainment culture exclusively male? I confess to a certain guilty pleasure that involves watching things getting blown up on the big screen, especially if it's a woman pressing the button (like Michelle Rodriguez in S.W.A.T.)

But human-induced death seems to be where our culture spends most of its entertainment dollars. It is thought that killing makes us godlike, I suppose. To me, a supremely fallible human being, goddessness is the last thing I'd want to aspire to. It's hard enough trying to live a fully human life. Apparently it is for politicians and the religious too -- our so-called "culture of life" seems to thrive amidst a yang that is our entertainment culture of death.

We've lost much of what past cultures learned about what makes us human, in contrast with that mysterious force in the universe we often personify as God or the gods. Greek mythology is rife with the dangers of trying to out-god the the gods. I guess it just goes to show how long this has been going on -- the endless decline of the human race. Like old JT said, "it's just a lovely ride." Unfortunately, although I admire that sentiment, I can't seem to live by it. I need to look at how things are and see how they could be. The idealist in me, I guess. Luckily I can use that same outlook on myself, otherwise things would be bleak indeed!

Colombian Army investigated for role in 2005 Colombia Peace Community massacre

2007-02-28T09:19:00.001-05:00

The wounds from this horrific event were still fresh when we visited in October 2006, and the community was still very much under attack by the armed forces, be they paramilitary, guerrilla, or official army.

The Congress is still considering aid to Colombia and whether to sign a so-called "free trade" agreement with Colombia.

Reuters is reporting that "Colombia plans to buy new helicopters and aircraft and send more troops to counter rebels after approving a $3.7 billion, four-year investment plan to upgrade its military...to consolidate a U.S.-backed crackdown on Marxist rebels. Washington has funneled around $4 billion in mainly military aid to Colombia since 2000, helping key ally President Alvaro Uribe battle the drug trade that partly fuels Latin America's oldest guerrilla war." '

This is bullshit, of course, but it's official bullshit. Taken in the context of the clip below, it doesn't quite add up, now does it? But then, we're not terribly concerned about making good policy sense when the terms "drug war" or "terrorism" come up.

Apparently for now most of this "surge" will be funded by a proposed tax on the wealthy and on companies, but at the same time the Bush administration wants to approve another $3.9 billion over seven years for Colombia. Currently Colombia receives the most US foreign aid of any country outside the middle east. Fortunately for the Colombian populace in the countryside, the people who suffer the most whenever the civil war flares up or moves to a new front, Democrats in Congress are not buying this wholesale due to the recent paramilitary scandal that has put eight Uribe politicians and a former police chief in jail for ties to the Ps. Demobilization hasn't turned out to be all it was cracked up to be...

clipped from www.amnestyusa.org

Amnesty International Welcomes Advances in Investigations Into 2005 Colombia Peace Community Massacre
The Colombian army soldiers who are under investigation reportedly belong to the Alacrán Company of the Counter-Guerrilla Battalion No. 33 of the XVII Brigade. The massacre reportedly occurred in the context of a large military operation in the area.

Amnesty International welcomes news that Colombia's Office of the Attorney General is investigating 69 army soldiers for the killings on February 21, 2005, of eight members of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, including community leader, Luis Eduardo Guerra, two children aged 11 and 6, and an 18-month-old infant.

More than 160 members of the Peace Community have been killed or "disappeared" with impunity in the last 10 years. In light of the killings, Amnesty International said the announcement of the investigation into the massacre could represent an important step forward in seeking redress for some of the victims.

To my Reader

2007-02-27T23:56:00.001-05:00

I think part of my share of the bounty is just lost. And I kind of like that.

clipped from blindcopy.blogspot.com

The real reason why no one reads your (my) blog.

Ever wonder why the traffic to your blog is so terrible? I too am concerned about increasing my readership, so I decided to gather some information to help me decipher why my traffic sucks.

What I found wasn’t encouraging.

Consider the following facts:

There are approximately 6.5 billion people in the world.

Only 16%of the world’s population (1 billion people) have internet access.

16% of the world’s population is illiterate, which leaves only 840 million readers.

Of that, only 20% of the world’s population speaks English, leaving 168 million readers.

Only 30% of internet users read blogs, leaving 50 million readers.

50 million people, sounds like a lot right? Wrong!

Technorati is currently tracking around 50 million blogs.

That’s pretty simple math, 50 million blogs for 50 million readers.

Therefore, with an average of only 1 reader per blog, then who’s reading your blog?

That’s right, just you. Depressing, ain’t it?

we love our "news!"

2007-02-23T10:20:00.002-05:00

3/5 of the most e-mailed stories of the day from the AJC are sports-related. I'm just saying.

1 of the 5 is celebrity gossip, and one is traffic-related -- not surprisingly since all of a sudden "traffic" and "congestion" are top news-getters in Atlanta nearly every day.

------

Have you ever noticed how everything is clearer under water? I wish my shower could last all day. It's where I get my best ideas, feel most creative, can accomplish any and everything. Then I turn off the spigot, and the energy turns off with it. Spirals down the drain. My only consolation is that the plumbing in this old shack is horrid. It's all probably still in there, somewhere.

Midterms are next week, thus the extremely rare blog post. Yesterday the army finally cleared "Private Presley's" crap from the driveway. What passes for a big day in my life...

This week I'm mildly obsessed with personality types according to the Jung-based Myers-Briggs test. Slim there picked up a book we're both reading called "Do What You Are" that is supposed to help you pick a fulfilling career based on your type. I think over time I've gone back and forth between and INFP ("the idealist") and an ENFP ("the inspirer") -- it's pretty revealing stuff for reeking slightly of pop pysch. What are you? Take the test here.

article of my week

2007-01-22T00:13:00.000-05:00

"Refugees Find Hostility and Hope on Soccer Field" -- amazing story. Nice to see it's the top e-mailed story of the week for the Times, as well. Clarkston soccer team made up entirely of refugee kids. Below, a few excerpts.

About Clarkston:
"From 1996 to 2001, more than 19,000 refugees from around the world resettled in Georgia, many in Clarkston and surrounding DeKalb County, to the dismay of many longtime residents."

About the coach:
"Coach Mufleh’s car is also an equipment locker, and her work continues off the field. “You suddenly have a family of 120,” she says.

Upon hearing of the low wages the refugee women were earning, Ms. Mufleh thought she could do better. She started a house and office cleaning company called Fresh Start, to employ refugee women. The starting salary is $10 an hour, nearly double the minimum wage and more than the women were earning as maids in downtown hotels. She guarantees a 50-cent raise every year, and now employs six refugee women. "

About the kids:
"In 1997, in the midst of Liberia’s 14 years of civil war, rebels led by Charles Taylor showed up one night at the Ziatys’ house in Monrovia. Jeremiah’s father was a low-level worker in a government payroll office. The rebels thought he had money. When they learned he did not, they killed him in the family’s living room."

"“What makes us work as a team is we all want to win bad — we want to be the best team around,” Qendrim says. “It’s like they’re all from my own country,” he adds of his teammates. “They’re my brothers.”"

About the field:
"Ms. Mufleh and Ms. Ediger, the team manager, spend the holiday vacation visiting the players’ families. On Dec. 26, Ms. Mufleh receives a fax on Town of Clarkston letterhead."

"Effectively immediately, the fax informs her, the Fugees soccer team is no longer welcome to play at Milam Park. The city is handing the field to a youth sports coordinator who plans to run a youth baseball and football program."

Are you a Cultural Creative?

2007-01-20T15:09:00.000-05:00

About 50 million Americans are. Go here to find out.

I learned of this demographic subgroup reading "The State of Non-Profit America." Salamon states

Cultural Creatives differ from both "Modern" and Traditionalists," the other two dominant population groups in America, by virtue of their preference for holistic thinking, their cosmopolitanism, their social activism, and the insistence on find a better balance between work and personal values than the Moderns seem to have found. Although they have yet to develop a full self-consciousness, Cultural Creatives are powerfully attracted to the mission orientation of the non-profit sector and could well help to resolve some of the sector's human resource challenges.

Demographer Paul Ray, who coined the term, has this to say on his website:

While Cultural Creatives are a subculture, they lack one critical ingredient in their lives: awareness of themselves as a whole people. We call them the Cultural Creatives precisely because they are already creating a new culture. If they could see how promising this creativity is for all of us, if they could know how large their numbers are, many things might follow. These optimistic, altruistic millions might be willing to speak more frankly in public settings and act more directly in shaping a new way of life for our time and the time ahead. They might lead the way toward an Integral Culture.

The same site has a nice list of books/websites on the subject of "living lightly."

MARTA-dreaming

2007-01-10T00:21:00.000-05:00

Gwinnett, which approved MARTA in theory but refused to pay for it back in the 1970s, may get another chance. As a new convert to the Gwinnett concept, forgive me for getting excited about this! Article in today's AJC here.

Other asides:
On the train home tonight, a large group of mostly bleached blondes discussed how much their kids love riding MARTA (they like to bounce, said one.) I thought the ringleader was going to etch the window glass with her enormous rock.

Which brings me to another observation. When did it become practically obligatory to give a girl a diamond if you wanted her to make you coffee (or vice-versa, in my particular case) for the next several decades? There's a definite generation gap. With mine and the thiry-somethings I know, they all sport shiny left ring fingers, and the hand-talkers pose a definite risk to their conversation partners.

Now that I've (somewhat ambivalently regarding the ring, full-heartedly as far as what it represents) joined this club (with a conflict-free ring, way to go Slim!), I've taken to noticing other womens' entries. Because make no mistake, it is a contest. The way my gal pal grabbed my hand and clutched it to her chest the first time she saw it (her own is more overwhelming) said it all. It's like those decoder rings that came in cereal boxes when we were kids -- they are keys to hidden, mysterious worlds, and it didn't matter how much granola you have to eat to get one, it's all about the ring. For some people anyway.

For the Colombian women I knew, especially displaced Colombian women, the ring was more of a barrier wrapped up in an access code. It was the key to a club they did not belong to. These women had lost everything, often including their husbands. Yet somehow they were still able to listen to my happy shiny story and smile. Maybe that's what every bit of metal and stone wrapped around the fourth finger says: ask me how it happened, and I'll glow.

Reason # 2 why I'm ring-obsessed: this week I'm picking up vestiges of a much sadder story, to be sold on ebay. I wonder who would buy a failed attempt at happily ever after? ... Maybe someone who knows that the attempt to lasso some kind of forever happy is capable of dissolvin in a moment, only to solidify once more with a look. And that behind every look, each touch, all the stray words and silent deeds is the choice to love and be loved.

quit dreaming and get a life

2007-01-06T11:21:00.000-05:00

In "Mixed response on rail funds," in the AJC last week, passenger rail advocacy group GARP describes its modest proposal for commuter rail: $62 million to fund the Lovejoy line, $38 million to take it to Griffin, and $10 million to start work on the Athens<-->Atlanta segment.

According to GARP, at $62 million, these lines of rail would cost less than two miles of a six-lane highway.

But when the group sent its proposal to our elected officials in the state legislature, they got this reply from state Rep. Don Lakly (R-Fayette County). "Please don't tell me how many folks will use public transportation; they just will not. Quit dreaming and get a life!"

It's good to see Southern civility is alive and well down at the Capitol.

With apologies to Willie -- to all the cats I've loved before

2006-12-29T07:33:00.000-05:00

To all the cats I've loved before
Who traveled in and out my door
I'm glad they came along
I dedicate this song
To all the cats I've loved before

To all the cats I've loved before
The winds of change are always blowing
And every time I try to stay
The winds of change continue blowing
And they just carry me away

To all the cats who shared the foot of my bed
Who now are someone else's cats, or dead
I'm glad they came along
I dedicate this song
To all the cats we've loved before

I must be getting old -- I always want to start blogging with a mini weather update -- it's foggy today, with chances of missing kitties. I can't believe I left the garage door open all night! My bike was still there when I got up this morning, but Fats was gone.

The stricken feeling I got made me realize I sometimes pretend to be sorry about things, like putting the knives pointy side up in the dishwasher, but this was the real thing. Fats, aka Kiki (after that annoying WestEnder whose screechy voice and clawing ways reminded me of the new kitty), had been afraid to crawl out from the tiny corner in the garage between a cardboard box and a tire all week. Two days ago I started trying to get Kiki to venture outside the garage. Last night I guess he did.

I had picked him up from the WE house Sunday, at the X's request. I had three cats when I left for Colombia last January. Only Kiki was left when I got back. Sammy disappeared a few weeks after Max died a horrible death at the jaws of some neighborhood dog gang. I was more shaken by it than I'd expected, cried about it for weeks.

Poor Sammy...they were pals, hanging out together for seven years since we brought them home from the shelter. Their little animal personalities developed with each other as the foil -- Sammy was always the timid one, while Max was funny and outgoing. Sammy was always my favorite -- his skittish ways and pitiful mews were so endearing.

Baby Kitty (I clearly didn't name this one) showed up one Halloween night, then disappeared after hopping into the back of X's truck one afternoon and leaping out right before he merged onto the highway, nothing but a kitty-shaped streak in the rear-view mirror.

But I've lost a lot of cats in my day. First Mustard, then Custard, then Pepper and Salt. Kitcat disappeared, his brother Milky Way lived a long life before expiring recently, and the mother of them all, Dora (for the way she always seemed to be on the doorstep when your hands were full of groceries). I dunno, maybe I'm all catted out.

Life in Lilburn

2006-12-28T11:21:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I had anything blog-worthy to say, if ever I did (never send your blog to your brothers). Then this morning my reflection in the mirror asked me what I'm waiting for -- if I want to write, I should write. The past two weeks are a blur, but I feel like my head is finally spinning back around, slowing down as it settles in.

Life in Lilburn...idyllic, yet isolated. It's the United Nations out here, without the interpreters and infighting. Our ice cream truck man (yes, there is an ice cream truck man, Virginia) wears the garb of the Nation of Islam as he passes out the melting treats to kids from India and Mexico, while their black, white, and mixed neighbors look on. Growing up in a very segregated DeKalb neighborhood, moving to an even more segregated West End Atlanta neighborhood, it's hard for me to believe.

And none of this was planned. White flight hit Gwinnett and turned out, in my eyes at least, to be a blessing. Not even a blessing in disguise, just one wearing an outfit that was unexpected, even exotic, to the white southerners who lived here before. Today Gwinnett is "Georgia’s largest and most diverse public school system with more than 100 different languages spoken in our schools..." Gwinnett promoters can brag that their school system "consistently outperforms our peer systems in the state and ranks among the best school systems in the nation in achievement." (Link to full article)
What created this human splatter, this array of languages, dress, and yummy food? Most of Atlanta ranks among the country's worst for residential segregation. It's changed so much since I was a kid, but it's still huge. Out here (I always call it that -- Slim loves it), out here, the housing is cheap and schools are good. Sure, people spend too much time in their cars and no one walks anywhere, but I'm starting to understand why people choose to live "out here" and to be less judgmental about that decision.

But given how much Gwinnett has changed, there's no reason why "out here" has to remain so isolated. We live three miles from the nearest bus stop. No one in the metro area should live three miles away from the nearest bus! I just got my bike back from my sister, but would never even consider riding down Lawrenceville Highway. So I have to use the sidewalks -- illegal, yes, but potentially lifesaving as well. And every time I ride the bus I hear people complaining about how long it takes them to get downtown. It's 25 minutes in a car with no traffic (which happens once a week, on Sundays) but about two hours by bike to Gwinnett County transit bus stop to Doraville MARTA station to Five Points, or an hour and a half by bike to the Indian Trail park and ride to Gwinnett County Express Bus to Five Points.

My bike, how I love it...

If Gwinnett were to approve the MARTA sales tax (or another funding mechanism), it could finally get the train station and quick access to metro area public transportation this diverse, thriving metro county deserves.

Recent article in AJC -- "Another look at MARTA rail: Board representative asks for feasibility study on bringing system to county" By PAUL DONSKY, , BEN SMITH

A group of Gwinnett County leaders is pushing for an extension of MARTA's rapid rail line to the booming area, 16 years after county voters soundly rejected a plan to join the regional transit system. Officials with the Gwinnett Village Community Improvement District, which spans the Norcross and Lilburn areas, say the issue deserves to be revisited because the county has changed dramatically since the last MARTA referendum in 1990. Gwinnett's population has more than doubled, and its traffic problems now rival the nation's worst bottlenecks.

Public comments on the article here. The first comment (and a fairly typical one) reads:

By Stephen W December 6, 2006 05:19 PM | YES! Please bring MARTA into lower Gwinnett’s booming areas!

It’s time to move past the old racist arguments that it will bring crime. Anyone who’s actually been on a MARTA train will tell you that riders aren’t loaded down with stolen DVD players and Plasma TVs —Yes Gwinnett, let’s move into the 21st Century and say YES to this one!

image of Gwinnett County Courthouse, by architect Edmund Lind, from the GA Encyclopedia

la despedida

2006-12-12T11:30:00.000-05:00

Colombia called. Said they'd call back, no message.

Photos from the massive going away blast:

Ellie, don't kill me for posting this - it's so cute! And I asked David's permission...

Goodnight

2006-12-07T03:31:00.000-05:00

I wrote an (*ahem) beautiful post about my people here and what a lovely last day it's been in Bogota, but it got deleted somehow. Given what passes for sleep for me lately, that's not a big surprise.

I probably dragged out what I wanted to say anyway. Just this: home is where the people you love live, and you can have more than one. My home in Atlanta is where Slim sleeps, waiting patiently for me as he has all year, but Bogota will whisper softly to me in the night from time to time, so long as the people I came to know and love live here. I miss you all already. Goodnight!

ow. it hurts to leave.

2006-12-06T07:17:00.000-05:00

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): "Connections are made slowly; sometimes they grow underground," writes Marge Piercy in her book *Circles in the Water.* "You cannot tell always by looking what is happening. More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet." Piercy advises us to use this strategy in our own lives. "Penetrate quietly as the earthworm. Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden. Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar. Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside, but to us interconnected with burrows and lairs." It so happens, Taurus, that this is the perfect astrological oracle for you, beginning now and throughout 2007.

(Brezsny's horoscopes)

--------------------

I started out quietly, sitting and watching, waiting for Colombia to show itself to me. Today I have a Colombia-shaped stain on my shirt, embedded in the fibers, odorless except for a faint whiff of cut grass and sweetly rotting fruit, but soft to the touch, and warm, so warm. I wonder if it will launder out.

--------------------

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." -Max Planck, Nobel Prize-winning physicist

most emailed articles

2006-12-03T10:53:00.000-05:00

I'm going to start a new recurring item: most emailed article of the day, on the theory that this says something about the current preoccupations, interests, and fears of the online news reading population.

Today's most emailed article from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution is, tellingly, in the business section: "Low-key, laid-back Jekyll Island targeted by developers." I found this out by emailing it myself, and after getting a little worked up by the article itself, I was somewhat comforted by the realization that others were interested in what was happening, or what will happen, as well. Hard to say what direction the interest goes in this case -- our *great state has been selling off state parks for years (see Stone Mountain, never a bastion of democracy, now a private sugary "historic" park).

If you grew up in Georgia, you probably have fond memories of a school trip to Jekyll Island's 4-H club, the way I do. I could never forget the Great Blue Herons that sprung, startled and wild from their nesting place above a swamp pond, or the look in our instructor's eyes when he told us that the sight was growing rarer and rarer. I can still taste the prickly pear's surprisingly sweet purple flesh, and feel the sting of the spines I hadn't removed in my haste to get to the fruit they protect.

Prickly pears...one of nature's secret delights. Removing the spines is laborious, something only a child has the time or interest to undertake. But the juicy interior's flavor clings to your tongue, leaving its taste in your mouth long after the buds have faded. It's not for everyone, but it's accessible to all who care to explore it.

I wish Jekyll had spines like that.

Eat. Words.

2006-12-03T10:16:00.000-05:00

www.lacucaracha.com

I hate to do this, I really do. I ran across a column by David Brooks in the Times from two years ago that made me reconsider my passionate *ahem, dislike of his column. I'm a big girl, fully able to admit when she's been not 100% correct (known in the reality-based community as being "wrong"), so today I'm going to quote from and link to...gasp...a column by David Brooks, my second least-favorite New York Times columnist. Any guesses on the first?

The title, "The American Dream", comes from a Samuel Huntington (a good nemesis if anyone out there is looking for one) quote from one of his later broadsides against modern-day America: "There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English." Get this guy a time capsule, he's crumbling before our eyes.

You have to give Huntington a break -- remember he was stopped illegally and then felt up by that racist cop in Los Angeles, and ever since has been struggling with feelings of anger towards...wait, I think that was "Crash." Huntington, on the other hand, has no excuse for the pseudo-academic nonsense he's been spouting for the past twenty years. Maybe he's truly concerned with the demise of his "Anglo-Protestant society." I just don't know where it ever existed in the first place. The only truly American art forms are jazz and hip-hop, and Eminem and Michael Bolton not withstanding, neither is exactly a bedrock of Anglo-Protestant influence.

But back to Brooks, whose columns I normally enjoy ripping apart. In this one, though, he really gets it right. I think in light of the national debate over immigration policies, it's worth re-reading.

We are bound together because we Americans share a common conception of the future. History is not cyclical for us. Progress does not come incrementally, but can be achieved in daring leaps. That mentality burbles out of Hispanic neighborhoods, as any visitor can see.

Huntington is right that Mexican-Americans lag at school. But that's in part because we've failed them. Our integration machinery is broken. But if we close our borders to new immigration, you can kiss goodbye the new energy, new tastes and new strivers who want to lunge into the future.

That's the real threat to the American creed.

2006-12-01T11:33:00.000-05:00

Technorati Profile

wrenched

2006-11-30T23:52:00.000-05:00

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. —Martin Luther King, Jr.

I believe that, but it's clear that not everyone does. Take the guy who shook his head angrily, not even willing to respond to my "excuse me, sir, but I think I'm lost" last week at the state government complex. And maybe it's not even true, but I choose this belief in the hope that it matters what we believe, hoping these choices make our lives richer, sweeter, and just generally more like ice cream (with apologies to Simply Wait).

I say goodbye to this country, to this year of my life, in one week. More than anything else, I feel wrenched. Knowing you're going to be in a place for such a finite yet intermediate period of time, at my age, you don't settle in too hard. You buy a bed, but maybe not the most comfortable one. You need curtains, so you pick up some cloth in the 75% off bin at a fabric store. You make friends, but keep most of them at a distance.

So it's almost a relief to realize you did live here, after all. For me the realization set in when I had an aha! moment last weekend. It was Saturday morning, too early after a late night waiting for the incredibly resonant club across the street to close. Just like every Saturday morning, I was awakened by a man selling something, that much was always clear, but just what I could never tell. The informal economy is huge in Bogota; since there are so few formal sector jobs to be had, people buy things in bulk or make crafts and sell them on the street, usually developing a sing-song jangle to advertise their wares. This Saturday, I crossed what felt like a significant signpost, just as I'm preparing to leave: I finally understood what this man was selling. Now I can buy "bolsas para la basura" (how embarrassing for me that it turned out to be so simple) any weekend morning I want.

Wrenched is the best word I can think of to describe this feeling. Twisted and turned til I don't stick here anymore, from one culture back to another. This morning a friend's English students interviewed me for a class project. They all wanted to know how my initial impressions of Colombia changed after I got here. All I remember is being terribly apprehensive | oh my god, did Macondo just open? It's after midnight on a schoolnight! I take it all back, I can't wait to split. Menea, menea... | and really having no idea what to expect. I knew it wasn't like the depictions in Hollywood movies (one has Bogota surrounded completely by jungle) but I didn't have anything concrete to replace those images I'd deleted.

Next week, I go back to something recognizable, but equally opaque in some ways. Exciting, cause it feels like anything could happen. Nerve-wracking, because it feels like anything could happen. And all I'm taking back with me is the belief I started out with, possibly lifted from a late-night made for tv movie, that we're all connected somehow. An inescapable network of mutuality. That and the ice cream. I'll always have the ice cream.

Jingly jangly

2006-11-29T00:12:00.000-05:00

I just figured it out. Why everything Christmas is so damn appealing to me right now: I don't have a job. While this puts a bit of a chink in my gift-buying routine, it also means this: I don't have an office.

Which means this: I don't have co-workers.

Which means this: No office party.

Read what The Cynical Girl has to say about that.

Unless, unless! I put in an appearance at Slim's (former co-workers being worlds less annoying than current ones) and I'm guessing no one asks me to make a copy in the middle of carving the turkey this year. But I exaggerate. Wildly.

No discussion of what to do for the office party, as if we were allowed to exercise judgment and do a single thing different from the year before. Meetings of the DOJ "kitty committee," as we were reluctantly known, a forced labor arrangement that involved purchasing large quantities of bagels, then putting up with the snotty attorney who simply must have her favorite flavor, and with the right kind of cream cheese, or she's destroyed...where was I? Oh yes, the "kitty committee" meetings are designed to maximize your migraine: three hours later, "now about the decorations - what did we do last year? Did we have lights or candles, I can't remember..."

Attending your fiancee's office party by choice, in all seriousness, is a different beast entirely from having to attend your own. I can drink too much and insult the boss (not too far from an ordinary work day at DOJ) and no fear of being fired. Who am I kidding, his boss is great and drinking gets me all sappy and silly. Well, no fear of facing people I got ridiculous in front of the night before, anyway. Small blessings are the best kind.

So. Here in Colombia, I'm insanely attracted to every single blinking light, every hint of possible jingly bells like music (so far, nothing), every family-oriented pastiche of holiday bliss, each whiff of cinnamon in the air. It's revolting.

Christmas last year, Dad's foot on film.

I love collecting, then wrapping, gifts. It's like when I was a kid and was always bribing Kathleen to play the packing game. Putting things into boxes has a strange meditative quality for me. Maybe I can get one of those jobs wrapping other people's gifts at the mall! It's clearly a symptom of my disease that I typed that sentence, click-clacking happily away. The mall. Good lord, it's worse than I thought.

Secrets lost and found

2006-11-26T23:16:00.000-05:00

I have too much to do. I'm leaving in ten days. You'll probably be seeing a lot of blog entries in the next ten days. Related events?

Two things I came across/was led to tonight:

One, a Book: LONDON: CITY OF DISAPPEARANCES edited by Iain Sinclair. Review here. I don't know about the book, but the review, by Peter Ackroyd, makes me feel mysterious, lost, and a tiny bit shiveringly, delightfully, decrepit:

The city is built upon lost things. It is constructed in a literal sense on the ruins and debris of the past; it towers above forgotten underground rivers and discarded tunnels. It is built upon old graveyards and burial pits.

...The city devours its former incarnations, leaving not a wrack or wraith behind. It buries its dead, and forgets where they lie. That is the source of its strength and its power. The living will in any case soon enough pass into darkness. The city itself will always rise again. It will be renewed when those who read these words have utterly disappeared and been forgotten.

There are stories here of other lost people — not dead but forgotten, relics of a past London culture that faded in the way that everything in the city fades. It is, also, a city of failure and disappointment that are the same thing as absence. That is why many wish to lose themselves within it.

I want to lose myself in it, I do!

Two, an Admission: "Colombian senator acknowledges singing loyalty pledge to paramilitary groups"-- and he wasn't the only one:

BOGOTA, Colombia: A pro-government senator revealed Sunday that he and dozens of other politicians, some of them now members of the government, signed a loyalty pledge in 2001 to right-wing paramilitary warlords.

They were supposedly forced to sign the document at a meeting they were "ordered" to attend. Who knows. It's possible they were not willing accomplices, but at least one senator is accused by Colombia's Supreme Court of "murder for his role in 'organizing, promoting, arming and financing' a paramilitary massacre of 20 people in 2000."

The senator who admitted signing the agreement also stated that some of those implicated in the scandal may claim status as paramilitary members to take advantage of the lighter sentences and greater protection this status provides since the hopelessly, even offensively, misnamed Law of Justice and Peace passed in 2005.

Passed by many of the same members of Congress who now stand to benefit from its measures.

Decried as incredibly lenient by human rights activists, legal observers, and families of the paramilitaries' victims. As Amnesty International points out, the law offers greatly reduced sentences, no extradition (to the US - this is huge for the armed groups, who are often involved in drug trafficking as well), short (in a vast understatement) investigation times that in practice in a country with a 99% impunity rate will only result in fewer crimes being prosecuted, in short, a multitude of ills.

A year later, we know that many of those called "reinsertados" in Colombia are once again involved in illegal armed activities. A demobilization process with no teeth resulted in, surprise, a justice that was swallowed whole and a peace that is indigestible.

Father Roy, founder SOA Watch

2006-11-26T10:53:00.000-05:00

For some reason I felt compelled to check the AJC this morning. I haven't read it in months, so I'm not sure why today. On the front page is a link to this story about Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch and lifelong opponent of the US military training Latin American soldiers. I'm not often much impressed by the writing in our local rag, but this article really got to me. The reporter captures something about Father Roy that other articles I've read about the SOA watch did not. Check it out -- good Sunday reading: The protester-priest of Fort Benning.

Bourgeois is at a loss to explain how the Benning demonstrations grew from the passion of one man to an event of thousands. It is as amazing perhaps as his own transformation. A working-class boy who grew up in Lutcher, La., the son of a power company worker, he made it to college, even earned a geology degree at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. But the military provided his ticket to the world. After four years in the Navy, he volunteered for Vietnam.

The young ensign arrived in Southeast Asia in 1965, ready to serve. "I was ready to give my life," he says. But when he saw hatred in the eyes of the South Vietnamese, he was confused: "I really thought people would see us as allies. But there was another side I wasn't prepared for." In orphaned children with swollen bellies and open wounds, Bourgeois saw God. In the rice paddies surrounding Saigon, he felt his faith tugging. "That was my introduction to the victims of violence," Bourgeois says.

He had thought of a military career but decided to devote his life to healing, to being a peacemaker. After his tour, he entered a Catholic seminary. He picked the Maryknoll order — the "Marines of the missionaries: the toughest of the tough," he says. The Maryknolls sent him to Bolivia to live among the poor in the La Paz slums. He worked to start a medical clinic, day care center and education program. He watched the military take away community organizers, students and union activists.

"Men with guns were running the country," Bourgeois says he learned in the land of dictator Hugo Banzer, another graduate of the School of the Americas. Back at his hometown church, he began preaching taboo politics. He used words like exploitation to describe the fate of poor Latin Americans. Bourgeois went next to El Salvador and witnessed a war in which thousands of innocent civilians were tortured and executed by death squads that he says were extensions of the military.

"I was on fire when I came back from Salvador," he says. He knew then he could not keep silent any longer.

Atlanta!

2006-11-25T12:03:00.000-05:00

In the Times: Atlanta among top five cities in attracting 24-35 year olds.

They are people who, demographers say, are likely to choose a location before finding a job. They like downtown living, public transportation and plenty of entertainment options. They view diversity and tolerance as marks of sophistication.

Good news for the Beltline, and for commuter rail. Of course, Charlotte is out in front of us. But have you been to Charlotte lately? I have flashbacks to my college days when I accidentally wandered into the khakied business school section of campus. Scary. When I'm in Charlotte, I feel a strange lightness inside. Then I get home to Atlanta and realize it was the soul being sucked out of me. I know, subtlety is not my strong point.

urbanismo

2006-11-24T17:58:00.000-05:00

I'm reading an article that I'm thouroughly enjoying, for a change: "EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS GOING TO HELL: Urban Scholars as End-Times Prophets" by Dennis Judd at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, and I'm not sure I do, it's refreshing that someone is pointing out how an "end times" approach is not terribly useful in developing urban theory or for urban activists trying to change cities.

Post a comment or email me if you'd like a copy. Here are a few choice bits for you urbanists:

"...local politics became a vital field of study after World War II when it gave up its preoccupations with administrative efficiency and reform and began to consider questions “central to political science as a whole. Who had power? In what sense were cities democratic? Howcould the public interest be secured? What were the political relationships among social classes? Whatwas the significance of ethnic politics? Could race conflict be managed more peacefully in this century than in the last?”

"But soon, in Peterson’s view, urban scholarship turned away from such momentous questions...by abandoning the timeless questions of political philosophy, urban scholarship had become irrelevant to policymakers and dominated by “feudal barons” with narrow specialties in transportation, housing, and other policy fields, expertise in suburbia, the central city, or other restricted urban geographies, or specialties in minority politics of every stripe. The upshot was, “We no longer have students of urban politics” (Peterson 1981, ix-x)."

"Indeed, the reform impulse may be regarded as only one variant of an understanding, long shared among students of the city, that the city is always going to hell, that the changes under way (whatever they may be) are making everything worse, and that things will become truly dire if something is not done now or at least soon."

"The new turn in national policy was surely motivated by the political calculations of the Republican Party. But it is important to realize that the abandonment of the cities also was rooted in a coherent intellectual argument, one put forth in 1980 by a presidential commission appointed by a Democrat, Jimmy Carter:

“It may be in the best interest of the nation to commit itself to the promotion of locationally neutral economic and social policies rather than spatially sensitive urban policies that either explicitly or inadvertently seek to preserve cities in their historical roles” (President’s Commission 1980, 66).

The report of the President’s Commission was the opening salvo of what grew into a political and intellectual assault upon the most hallowed assumption underpinning urban scholarship: that federal aid to the cities was essential to the economic, social, and cultural well-being of the nation."

"Old habits die hard. It is still common practice for books and articles in the field to call for a resumption of federal aid to the cities (I will provide no examples here, lest I be accused of singling someone out). But as Bill Barnes (2005) recently observed, “The era of federal urban policy is, like,way over.”Even in a resurgent Democratic Party—perhaps especially in a resurgent Democratic Party—urban policy is not going to become any significant part of the political agenda."

"The narrative power of the Chicago school can be traced to its foreboding mood of fecundity, decay, and violence: As Hans Christian Andersen’s fables reveal, children, like their elders, are attracted to the tension introduced by these elements. In our own time, a similarly riveting narrative has emerged about urban life in the twenty-first century. Like the Chicago school of the 1920s, the L.A. school’s storyline derives its power from its sweeping and often dramatically bleak interpretation of urban life. (“Dramatically dismal”:
In MikeDavis’s writings, balls of rattlesnakeswash up on the beaches of Los Angeles; there are “pentecostal earthquakes,” “dead cities,” and the question, “who killed L.A.?”; Davis 2002)."

(and my favorite part): "These kinds of rhetorical indulgences may explain why a student in one of my recent seminars began a paper with the observation that 'hyperbole may have become the principal methodology of today’s urban scholarship.' Amen."

image by Zack K.

I am so in the right field.

a new low in the job hunt

2006-11-24T14:07:00.000-05:00

seen while haunting craigslist's job board:

SHADOWLAND: The Publication of Terror and the Supernatural" is again open to submissions of: (1) Short Stories (2) Poetry (3) Art (black and white only)

Guidelines: Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy (preferably in a classic or retro style-- classic Universal, Hammer, Harryhausen, Rod Serling, Hitchcock, H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs). Would like to see traditional themes-- ghosts, werewolves, time travel, prehistoric monsters, aliens, zombies, wizards/witches, vampires, sea monsters and so forth.

You know, maybe I've been limiting my writing unnecessarily by avoiding those "traditional themes." Coming soon to this blog: a nice, old-fashioned zombie story. I did have a dream the other night that zombies had moved in to the Buckmaster residence without my dad noticing. They had set up huge wooden boxes angled at 45 degrees out in the front yard in the places where my brother spent his childhood digging holes. Dad mostly noticed those when he went to cut the grass, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised he hasn't picked up on the zombie presence.

shameful.

2006-11-24T08:45:00.000-05:00

I saw this happening at the University of Georgia after the HOPE scholarship was created. HOPE mainly benefits middle class kids, although lower income people buy more lottery tickets to fund the program.

NYT Editorial
Public Colleges as ‘Engines of Inequality’
Published: November 23, 2006

"Democrats who ran for Congress this fall made the cost of college a big campaign issue. Now that they’ve won control of the House and Senate, they can prepare to act swiftly on at least some of the factors that have priced millions of poor and working-class Americans right out of higher education. The obvious first step would be to boost the value of the federal Pell Grant program — a critical tool in keeping college affordable that the federal government has shamefully ceased to fund at a level that meets the national need.

But larger Pell Grants can’t solve this crisis alone. Policy changes will also be required in the states, where public universities have been choking off college access and upward mobility for the poor by shifting away from the traditional need-based aid formula to a so-called merit formula that heavily favors affluent students. The resulting drop in the fortunes of even high-performing low-income students — many of whom no longer attend college at all — is documented in an eye-opening report released recently by the Education Trust, a nonpartisan foundation devoted to education reform."

Aid to students from families making over $100,000 has more than quadrupled at state schools.

state flagship schools are measuring success by how many applicants they turn away and SAT scores, which favor richer students who can afford the study courses

first thanksgiving without

2006-11-23T10:57:00.000-05:00

Bob Herbert, as usual, is talking about things that matter: "The Empty Chair at the Table"

While standing on the porch where she got the terrible news about her son, Ms. Zappala spoke of the many other families that have lost children, or other close relatives, to the war. “I’m very aware that it didn’t just happen to us,” she said. “For everybody, it’s the same horrible loss. It’s the same tragedy. It doesn’t make any difference whether someone was for or against the war. We’ve met families who were very supportive of the war and we were crying with them. The pain is the same."

knitting a world

2006-11-22T22:52:00.000-05:00

Numbers do not tell stories. Millions displaced, the UN says. Thouands of human rights abuses a year, the international aid organizations decry. Grow the economy with "free" trade, our government disseminates. But today I heard the voice of human misery behind the stock figures, the catchphrases glibly tossed and dire warnings unheeded. I won't tell their stories here; they are not mine to tell. And I missed some things I should have picked up on as important. We were talking about grants, and one woman asked, "but they won't want to hear about our histories?" I realized later what she was really saying was -- does what happened to me matter?

I was meeting with ASMULIDER, an incredible group of women knitting their lives back together again, literally. They do have an awful name, though. It's supposed to be evocative of leadership (the "lider" part), but I'm pretty sure it falls well short of that, but then again, few words could describe their collective experiences, or who they really are. They are 25 or so women who have been displaced by the conflict. Displaced really doesn't come close to describing the horrors people who make the decision to pick up everything overnight and leave their homes have had to face. It sounds so clinical, one object moving into the space of another; ice cubes in a glass of water. This is anything but that. It's messy, humiliating, and degenerating.

The process of claiming status in the government's eyes as a displaced person involves bringing photos of your loved one's corpse, in triplicate. I cannot imagine anything worse, after the loss itself. So today the gruesome images made their teary way around the circle. It's hard for me to understand how people find the strength to go on, but somehow they do, at least that's what it looks like from the outside. As Gracie is fond of saying, the fight continues because we keep fighting.

weighing in

2006-11-18T20:12:00.001-05:00

best. dailyshowclip. ever. (I know, I'll probably say that about the next one I see, t00)

still sick-ly. saw an excellent movie last night: Machuca, about Chile in 1978 through the eyes of two boys from opposite backgrounds who become friends.

at the clinic the other night, where they gave me a shot in the ass but did not test for malaria, just looked at me like I was crazy for suggesting it, no matter how many times I repeated, but I've been in Uraba...the nurse guessed my weight. she was about 20 pounds short, which I can't say I minded, but then I got home, ran out of clean clothes and realized she wasn't as far off as she would have been pre-6 hour hiking days. so I'm looking a bit urchin-like since everyone else in Colombia, seemingly wears their pants pressed on.

back to the couch I am. went to the library for some brain food but they couldn't find the books I wanted. is it just me, or does my favorite library in Colombia specialize in making it nearly impossible to view or check out books? something about the top-story cafeteria makes up for it though. the only place I can read in Spanish.

2006-11-16T15:54:00.000-05:00

"Beset by Violence, Colombia's Nasa Women Resist"

“C’mon, muchachos, let’s go!” With this abrupt order, Celia Eumesa and a group of the Nasa Indigenous Guard under her command jumped into a van and drove off in hot pursuit of a handful of guerrillas that had just kidnapped some people from her community. Armed with no more than decorative staffs, which they carry to symbolize indigenous authority, they sped behind the guerrillas’ car with a caravan of 60 other Indigenous Guards trailing behind her.

The Nasa people, who number around 300,000, are Colombia’s second-largest indigenous group, mostly concentrated in the departamento (province) of Cauca. Their traditional homeland in this southwestern part of the country has been wracked by some of the worst violence in the country’s 42-year civil war. The armed conflict pits the Communist-inspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or FARC in its Spanish initials) and smaller leftist insurgent groups against the Colombian military and its right-wing paramilitary supporters.

begendings

2006-11-15T23:31:00.000-05:00

Why is it that once you decide to leave a place, things get a gagillion times better? Test it yourself, it's a proven fact. As soon as I had my ticket to ride on out of Atlanta, my life took a turn for the amazing. And while I wouldn't say exactly the same here, the circumstances being quite different, I have to say, life is good.

Today I had a paper proposal accepted to the XXVII Annual ILASSA Student Conference (now doesn't THAT look impressive, with those roman numerals and all...) in Austin in February. On a topic I don't recall. I submitted the 300 word proposal in a fashion you could conceivably call last minute (I realized ten minutes before the deadline that day was the day, and turned it in a minute before midnight). So I'm not quite as impressed with the quality of conference participants, shall we say, after getting my acceptance today. The fact that it was addressed to Emily Rebecca Serna (a lovely name, actually), didn't do much to increase my confidence levels. Speaking of which, back to that lost proposal. It did have quite an evocative title, which is I think what got it accepted: Participatory Budgeting in Bogota: Playing the Pinata. But I have no idea what it contains. Do you?

But back to Bogota making me miss it! Tonight was the big set-up -- I think it went well, probably because I had no hand in organizing it. I was just the convenient third wheel. I did get a delicious vegetarian meal and plenty of wine in the bargain though. Luscious tomatoes stuffed with brown rice, roasted eggplant and red peppers, basil, and asparagus. Not as good as Slim's stuff, but not half bad! And spicy...mmm. The luncheon Tom and Porter made Sunday was even spicier -- just what I have been missing here, just when it's time to go!

Also today we found out Trish is not leaving, not yet anyway. Her visa for the union job got postponed until next year. So now it's just me leaving. Better for Eli, so I'm happy, but it feels strange leaving everyone behind. Ah well, PorTom are still going home, so I'm not really the only one.

Last night I didn't have time to give my presentation on Community Justice in the Peace Communities, thankfully because as it turned out I hadn't the slightest what the presentation was supposed to cover. The professor, an expert in the field, sent me a very diplomatic email "suggesting" I make some changes, such as for starters hitting "delete" and starting over. Sigh. And today I spent the better part of the day translating the first Mauricio's letters of recommendation, which he wrote himself, for phd programs in political science in the states. The funny thing is, his research is on a topic I truly find interesting and important for the Andean region -- constitutional law and institutions. Things have been changing here -- Colombia has become the rightist exception to the leftist tilt. Although now with Uribe's senators being charged with paramilitary ties (to put it mildly: they may have participated in planning massacres), who knows what will happen?

That sums it up for tonight. I'm feeling agobiada (overwhelmed, my word for the day), exhausted, achy from a cold that wants to make its home, and exhilarated by the warmth of this freezing city, barely lukewarm showers and all. Tonight there was a conversation at least 10 minutes long devoted purely to the topic of gas water heaters, and who had them. One thing, at least, I won't miss.

parking minimums

2006-11-13T17:18:00.000-05:00

Good article about parking minimums (sounds sexy, no?): "No Parking: Condos Leave Out Cars"

No mention of Atlanta, where apparently even discussing parking caps to limit the number of parking spaces developers must provide is considered "too controversial" for the first phase of Beltline planning.

how to be funny

2006-11-13T10:29:00.000-05:00

Read this:
"How to be funny" compiled by babydaddy # 6, John Hodgman. (Yes I absolutely am hoping he links back again. What?) I just realized he is also the madman behind the scenes of "Ask a former professional literary agent," which I liked not quite as much as "Dispatches from a Public Librarian." Hopefully he won't hold that against me.

Of twists, turns, and Dramamine

2006-11-11T20:21:00.000-05:00

In a new twist, "Rebels ask celebs to assist prisoner swap"

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA — Colombia's largest rebel group is calling on actor Denzel Washington and directors Oliver Stone and Michael Moore to help it reach a deal with the government on exchanging imprisoned guerrillas for rebel-held hostages, including three U.S. defense contractors.

Colombia will only be home to me for another 25 days. 25 days. Nothing, really. What a strange thing, this life. There's so much I'll miss of life here, but so much I miss from my life too. I'm almost ready to go home, but will I be ready to be home once I'm there? This train of thought is making me feel like Carrie...falls under the category of thoughts that may have profound implications for my own life, but aren't actually profound and probably should be handled internally. Blogs are ruining the world. People don't keep anything in anymore -- everything is public, shared, and less forceful because a dozen earlier memoirs said exactly the same thing. Restraint: an underappreciated emotional tool. Anyway. Back to me.

Colombia is both a really tough and incredibly easy place to dive into headfirst and grow to love, despite itself. Last night at Son Salome, an excellent salsoteca, a professorial type I was dancing with asked me how I felt about Colombia. I answered without hesitation that I loved it. What that means really I'm not sure, but the response surprised him. Why? Why in the world? he asked, dumbfounded. I don't know, I replied. It's the ánimo (a word I have a hard time translating) -- I love Colombia despite its Colombianess.

ánimo
1 (talante) spirit
2 (estímulo, fuerza) courage
3 (intención) intention

So there you have it. Today we had a second salsa lesson with an instructor recommended by our friendly star-reader. Tom and Porter basically had a private lesson; Eli and I got one too. It's hard to lead! I have more sympathy for men when they try to learn to dance after today. As the female half of the dance team (which makes it sounds like sequins were involved, but there weren't thank god), you are responsible for "following." It sounds sexist, but in some ways it's a relief. I wouldn't characterize Slim and I this way, but in past relationships I've had to do way more of the leading than I would have liked. It's tiring! So dancing can be a good way to let go of that for a while, and just follow along. It's a bit like the difference between writing a story and reading one aloud. Both are challenging, but the reader can relax into their own private world to some extent and not worry about the next move.

Me being me, I have a half dozen unfinished projects calling me before I leave. Not least among them a final presentation (Fulbright really asks so little of us, it seems petty to complain, but that probably won't stop me from doing it), a paper, a website, a grant to seek, a proposal to translate, a computer to locate, and so so many nasty phone calls. Nasty not because of the people on the other end of the line but because I hate making phone calls! Another thing Colombia has challenged me, well, taunted me with: my many limitations are even more limiting in Spanish. Gives me a whole new appreciation for immigrants, especially those who struggle with our messed up, irregular language.

Spanish, in contrast, is nice and neat. And it still kicks my ass many days of the week. I'm actually pretty competent most of the time, then something will happen like I'll make a phone call, introduce myself, then listen with dismay as the person on the other end of the line exclaims, "I can't understand anything you're saying!" And I will merely have stated my name. Now that's a humbling experience when it happens once. Try to imagine it happening once a week. What can I say, R's are tough for me. Mom, Dad, there are so many perfectly nice names that stay far far away from Rs...why couldn't I have one of those? If I ever live in Latin America again I'm changing my name, to Ana, or Diana, anything two syllables or less and easily recognizable when it leaves my twisted tongue.

In two weeks we're headed back to Medellin. I realize I still haven't completed the saga that was our trip to Uraba, and the "community" -- right now I'm just hoping the bus ride to Medellin will involve lesser quanties of dramamine. Speaking of which, I sure do wish there were some kind of dramamine that could prevent the motion sickness that accompanies culture shock. Atlanta, Bogota, Atlanta, Bogota, Atlanta. It's been a year full of adjustments, and there's one big one left to make. You know what, though? I'm ready. I realized this year how much I need to be around my big, loud, stressful family.

What I'm listening to: Never needed anybody, I never needed anybody // I never needed anybody, I never needed nobody // Don't worry about it, honey // I never needed anybody // I never needed anybody, it won't change now.

And you know what? It's just not true.
But in 25 days, I'll be able to go back to pretending it is. And that I'm looking forward to. Big, independent me. Inside though, I'll know. I'm more connected to my people than I ever realized; before I stretched those links across a continent, and they held.

nicaraguan elections

2006-11-07T08:23:00.000-05:00

In Nicaragua, 70% turnout in presidential elections yesterday. 70%! from "Leftist headed toward victory in Nicaragua":

Mr. Ortega’s expected victory appeared to be another gain for leftists in Latin America, who, despite recent setbacks in Peru and Mexico, have also persuaded voters to abandon conservative governments in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Bolivia.

Now 60 years old and balding, Mr. Ortega has maintained he is no longer a Marxist, but more of a pragmatist. He has promised to keep good relations with the United States and chose a former political opponent as his running mate. He has also vowed to help the poor and run a positive campaign around the themes of “peace, love and unity.”

E Day

2006-11-07T07:49:00.000-05:00

Rainy season appears to have slunk past, nearly unnoticed in Bogota this year. Here's hoping for an un-rainy day in Georgia too! Dems hate getting wet. Republicans tend not to mind?

Last set of election day comics:

PreTeena

(Jeremy, there is hope!)
Brewster Rockit

Lalo Alcaraz

Election day strips

2006-11-06T22:11:00.000-05:00

do you know who the police are?

2006-11-04T09:42:00.000-05:00

Get Fuzzy

This made me laugh so hard this morning. I'm not sure it's really funny, but it did the trick. I'm nearly all caught up on my comics now after three weeks of travel and an adventure or two. But what Clara termed "quiet adventures, the kind you come back from." Although, I might add, you sometimes bring some microscopic friends back with you. Slim and I have been sick since we got back, but are all drugged up and recovering now. Maybe someday soon I'll even make it past 9 pm. Lately even full force Macondo hasn't been able to keep me up.

2006-11-03T08:56:00.001-05:00

2006-11-02T09:41:00.000-05:00

Candorville

a thousand words to make up for zero photos

2006-11-01T10:40:00.000-05:00

"Courage is not the abnormal. Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches. It is the thing steady and clear. The marriage, not the month's rapture. The beauty that is of many days. The normal excellence, of long accomplishment. Not the Prodigal Son, but Penelope." -- poet Jack Gilbert

Last week this is the kind of courage we were to witness. And in the process, we had the kind of fun you love to complain about -- dirty, sweaty, backbreaking (from all the falling on our asses), dramatic fun. We hiked, incubated malarial jungle mosquitos, piled in a muddy heap on the floor, ate marvelous and simple food surrounded by donkey dung, and somehow just by being present helped accomplish something big.

We were in the mountains of Colombia to accompany a group of courageous people doing something that is extremely unusual in Colombia, land of the millions displaced: they were going back. Life in displacement camps had grow too harsh, too hungry for them, and they were going back to their land. We, the international wimps, were there to observe and hopefully prevent violent repression against the community, Colombian armed groups being reluctant to bite the long American arm feeding the ravenous military mouth.

But our presence was fleeting, and although FOR remains in the base community of La Union to help protect the decision to wage peace, in the Colombian conflict there are no guarantees and little precendence. This week the real work begins for the community of La Esperanza.

They are five families, striking in their quiet resolve, the kind usually portrayed in cowboy movies by men in hats of few words but always a piece of sugar in pocket for their horse. But this is different; this is no game of cowboys and indians, although it sometimes resembles one in its senselessness. The people of La Esperanza have been coming and going in fear of paramilitary reprisals since they were first displaced in 1996. Prevented from farming the land they had always known to be theirs, they have been aching to return ever since, and on this third try appear to have succeeded. Land in Colombia, where the exodus to the cities is a recent, bloody history, is not just land. It is power, money, sustenance, myth, and battleground.

Articles about peace communities, La Union, and La Esperanza

Yesterday Tom gave a talk about his thesis ("Good Fences, Good Neighbors, and the State: The Politics of Property Rights and Economic Performance"), so I'm fresh off a crash course in agrarian reform and land struggles in Colombia. More on this topic later, as I learn more about the history behind The Return. For now, on to my tale of two comfort-loving adventurers, arriving sleep-deprived in a city too hot for dreams.

-----

Chapter 1: Sleepless in Antioquia

We had quite a trip, leaving Friday the 20th on the overnight bus to Medellin. We emerged, ten hours later, frost bitten from the overactive AC and greatly enriched by our viewing experience. "The China Dolls" is a timeless classic, with a little something for everyone: kung fu fighting, a nihilistic attempt at feminism, Asian fetishism, stunning landscapes running with blood, some light kiddie porn, fights to the death, and a classic love story (boy meets girl, girl tries to kill boy, boy escapes and pursues girl to lock her up, boy carries girl's mother on his back to the hospital after her jealous mother-figure boss tries to have her killed, boy gets girl only to lose her to the allure of the sequel). Pretty generic stuff.

And after the final credits rolled (I took notes)...the music started up again. I took off for the front of the bus, on a collision course with destiny, or the control-happy bus driver, whichever I could find first. Luckily someone else beat me to him, and the rest of the bus ride was spent in frosty silence. Not because anyone was angry, just that we could see the breath steaming out of our mouths. We landed safely in Medellin, and after a nice taxi driver caught my mistake at the bus terminal and prevented us from going an hour out of our way to the wrong airport, caught our plane to Apartado. Met up with PorTom at the airport, and Trish&Co met us getting off the plane. All of whom were a sight for sore, bloodshot eyes...

to be continued...

simple girl

2006-10-08T00:16:00.000-05:00

I was heartsick this week. I thought that's what I wanted, a good wallow. But I think what I really needed was exactly what I got tonight.

A salsa class had been planned (how I love the passive voice for avoiding responsibility...) for our living room (hardwood floors and no furniture = perfect dance salon) and I would've felt bad canceling, since we all know the show must go on. So on it went. Between heartache and stomachache, I tried to sit it out, but the clave and drums just wouldn't let me. It's a little known fact of modern medicine that Colombian bacteria can be mollified, at least for a time, with some good hip twisting and dipping.

Afterwards people stayed and stayed. We cooked, people left and brought things back, and there was laughing and silly talk and music. I felt slightly apart yet completely at home. Being surrounded by friends, the kind you don't have to explain things to, was exactly what I needed. Life has a funny way of giving you just that, at the very moment you give yourself up to it.

And the ultimate cure lived in a nice banana cake, baked up spur of the moment, half stuck in the pan, covered semi-convincingly with an even nicer rum glaze.

everybody was job hunting

2006-10-07T11:54:00.000-05:00

Everybody was kung-fu fighting
Those cats were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit frightning
But they fought with expert timing

Almost everyone I know is looking for a job right now. If you know of anything that fits one of these bills, feel free to add a comment. All are Spanish speakers.

Human rights activist wants to work in Portland, Oregon. Possibly labor organizing.
Redhead with social enterprise background, master's in International Aid seeks job in Washington DC
Her boyfriend is looking for a political science post at a decent university.
History major and English teacher with activist and social services background seeks job anywhere, world. Prefers Colombia or cities in US with mild climates.
Redhead (almost) with master's (almost!) in urban policy seeks job in the South. Something exciting, please god. No more desk jobs! Open to organizing positions that don't involve door stalking.
Mailliw A. Retsamkcub, esquire, being of extremely certain mind and very dextrous hand-eye coordination due to years of training on home electronics equipment, and the broad experience that one gets bagging groceries at Publix, does hereby affirm that he never wants a job that requires him to a) show up, b) be nice to people, and c) show up. If one of my two readers has such a position, please be so kind as to forget about it; he won't show up for it.

Bex's tips on jobhunting:

Tip #1: People like to know what hair color you have when you are applying for jobs. Try adding a flavorful description to your job objective. Something like this: "Nonprofit executive with extensive experience in delivery of social services and consulting for nonprofit efficiency seek position that will allow her to utilize her brilliant streaked blond and grey hair for maximum effectiveness."

See how that works?

stay

2006-10-06T14:22:00.000-05:00

For Better or for Worse

G.G. always read the comics first; I guess that's where I got the habit. I used to race her to the paper in the mornings, trying to get first crack at the funny pages. Usually I'd end up grudgingly sharing the half I'd already finished when she came downstairs, just a few minutes behind. If she got them first I'd have to go upstairs to ask for them, and sometimes wait until she'd finished. I realized reading them today as I do every morning (online) that I don't know which was her favorite. I read years later that people who read the funnies first live longer than people who read the obits first.

When Slim and I went up to Charlotte this summer we spent most of our time sitting and reading quietly in her room, G.G. with the comics folded in front of her, drifting in and out of sleep, waking up long enough to give orders, then drifting off again. When she felt like talking, she'd whisper "his name is Josh, isn't it? I do want to get it right." Finding out he was from Michigan, she reminisced about the time the whole family (all 8 kids) accompanied Grandpa George to a conference on Mackinaw Island. We didn't talk much, and she apologized more than once for being poor company, but it was enough for me. We'd never been big ones for talking, and most of the time we spent together we were both wrapped up in a book, curled up in parallel armchairs in the family room.

Momma

G.G., I'm glad for every quiet minute we had together, and even some of the more irritated ones, the ones I'm sure I'll look back on when I have obnoxious teenagers of my own. My parents may contest this, but it feels like I took more of my teenage angst out on my grandmother than on my parents. G.G., thanks for putting up with us, and for letting us put up with you for as long as we did. See you in the funny pages.

Grey Days

2006-10-02T19:28:00.000-05:00

"I love the rain the most when it stops..." -- Joe Purdy

I wish the rain would stop. Or start. I hate Bogota's occasional grey ways. They always seem to coincide with greyness in our lives. My grandma is ill, tired and old. I wish she weren't any of these things. I wish I'd known her as a young woman, that we'd been nurses together in the war, or bridge partners, or middle-aged housewives feeling too young to have such broods. How cruel is it that the people who often matter the most to us, our parents, our grandparents, are so much older and die sooner? I just wish it weren't that way. GG lived with us when I was a teenager, and when her manic depression mirrored my teenage ups and downs, the house was a bundle of jangling nerves and slamming doors. Sure wish I'd appreciated her more then. We did have some good quiet times together, both of us curled up in armchairs, reading in silence, or watching Wheel of Fortune and each trying to guess the word first. Guess I owe her a lot -- my love of words and books, ability to sit quietly and be happiest that way, and probably also my aversion to smoking (from her falling asleep reading and smoking and burning little holes in her favorite chair).

the Tubernet

2006-09-30T23:55:00.000-05:00

Jon Stewart: a lot of people don't know this, but the Internet is NOT a dump truck. Why didn't I think of searching for my baby daddy, ahem, I mean Jon Stewart, on youtube? And why am I so wide awake at 1 AM?

Answer: last night's "indigenous party," hosted by the Nasa I think. I drank chicha and made people laugh with my tall, tall dancing ways until 5 am Saturday. (Aside: one of the party-goers, a Wayu I think, kept asking why I wasn't an anthropologist. "But everyone here is either indigenous or an anthropologist," he repeated.)

I love coming home when the birds are coming up. One night last week I stayed up all night just because. Ah, the things I'll miss when I go back to having things like, I don't know, an actual job and a real live relationship, as opposed to one conducted almost exclusively over the tubes that make up the Internet (see clip above).

2006-09-30T16:11:00.000-05:00

living a little more

2006-09-28T01:17:00.000-05:00

"Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit. " -- Norman MailerTonight, Anne from Ireland read our stars. Porter and I were willing subjects. As much as we talk, there were surprises, spots of light shed on unexamined corners, and lots of future fun made.

Anne started mine out by exclaiming, multiple times, "boy are you weird!" Elly was perhaps not surprised, but I kind of was, a bit. I mean, I look fairly normal (lifetime studying how to look normal), I speak, walk, behave pretty much like other people. But Anne kept at it. I've never seen a chart like this, I don't know how to interpret this, I don't know what to make of that. Ultimately, she settled on some educational experience, combined with great shyness, shaped (misshaped?) my brain, and now I have a very unusual way of seeing the world. Well, it is astrology, after all, and we are humans, and we hear what we want to hear, but I confess, I was thrilled! Everyone loves to be told they are different, and here was my confirmation. I'm weird, it's in the stars. As Porter said, tonight was the ultimate narcissist's dream: complete focus on me and what makes me tick.

I may not believe in these things wholeheartedly, but there are so many ways of approaching human understanding, and this one may be just as legitimate as the next. I did learn a few things. I ought to trust my strangeness, my own lens for the world. Who of us knows how our own oddity? How can we? We're all wrapped up in our own thoughts, our own filters and prior beliefs. Who of us has any idea of the other?

In a minor example of this, Porter mentioned that at the U of Mich, referring to someone as an "anthropologist" is practically an insult -- they are completely focused on quantitative methods, and anything that values a different tool is threatening and therefore ridiculed.

Okay, Buckmasters, you can start making fun of me now. I did ask for it, calling to find out what time I was born...but I'll have you know I had your charts read too.

Fixin' to be

2006-09-27T19:56:00.000-05:00

from Dave Pollard's post on Intentionality:

But there are steps and there are steps, and the important steps, even the small ones, are bold ones, with no turning back. These are the steps that we only take when we must, when we have no alternative, when the pain of going forward is less than the pain of staying where we are. Those who profit from our inaction, our lack of true intentionality, our fear, are counting (with good reason) on the fact that, for most of us, we have not yet reached that tipping point when we must act, must Let-Self-Change. They keep us distracted and addicted and comfortable enough with our prison life that escaping is never urgent enough.

My weblog is, more than anything else, a diary for talking myself into practicing what I preach, for convincing myself that I must act. Help convince me, it says to my readers, who are impatiently hoping for me to convince them. How to be a model, I write. Won't somebody be a model for me, I am asking, to those who want and rightfully expect me, the advocate of Let-Self-Change, to be the model for them. My audience is dwindling as so many get tired of all-talk, no-action. So we sit here, by the exit doors of the prison, talking about possibilities and trying to talk each other into real change, to make each other bold.

We do what we must, then we do what's easy, and then we do what's fun. We are not yet persuaded that we must take that first bold no-turning-back step, and we know that step won't be easy and that it may not be fun.

We will only leave the prison when someone, probably inadvertently, with the best of intentions, or accidentally, sets it on fire. Maybe that's what we're all waiting for.

Worth a look. I love how honest he is about himself.

change

2006-09-27T09:56:00.000-05:00

"The moment you come to trust chaos, you see God clearly. Chaos is
divine order, versus human order. Change is divine order, versus human
order. When the chaos becomes safety to you, then you know you're
seeing God clearly."

—Caroline Myss, *Spiritual Madness: The Necessity of Meeting God in
Darkness*

I've been thinking about change lately, how we all change all the time, but often nothing seems to change for eons and eons (in our tiny brains). I decided I'm change-oriented: I focus on changing/improving myself, helping people around to make changes, changing the things I see wrong with society.

But Slim is helping me understand that it's also important to accept -- change, or lack of change, or just what's around us -- without growing complacent. That's the paradox: I had to learn to accept things the way they are in order to get better at making change. And now I'm learning to make change in a literal sense (cents...argh!) tending bar at el espacio (if it doesn't get shut down for good).

My latest favorite song: "I can change" by John Legend (with Snoop).

What's your orientation? Change, acceptance, something else?

Colombia Migration Project

2006-09-26T10:17:00.000-05:00

Got a link to this site today: Have Money Will Vlog. It's an interesting approach to fundraising, and the featured project is a New York anthropologist's baby, the Colombia Migration Project, a series of interviews with Colombians living abroad. She is raising money to travel to Colombia to interview people waiting to leave. Some estimate that as many as 4.2 million Colombians are currently living abroad, whether for political or economic reasons. About half of these live in North America. In addition, some 3.5 million Colombians have been internally displaced.

photo from bbc.uk.co

Two organizations that help Colombians outside the country contribute: Conexion Colombia and Give to Colombia.

weekend wrap-up

2006-09-25T15:48:00.000-05:00

El Espacio's website is up: www.elespaciobogota.org with photos of us, in capes. It only took me the whole first night to figure out who the guy taking all the photos was -- yeah, the webmaster. I kind of thought he was just a creep, oops.

Bad news for the Space, though -- more police harassment, and now they've been temporarily shut down after two minors were found in the 500 concert-goers. Check out photos of the party that spilled out onto the street, in the fanciest commercial zone in Bogota, you'll have a better idea why. Throw in a little sexual harassment by the police, some screaming aunties of rich, young concert organizers, and lots of kids who rather die than throw their own beer cans away, and you're practically there! The martini and seven jeans crowd doesn't want a bunch of punks messing with their exclusive fun. Or maybe it was all those capes.

------------

Medellin was great - no alarm clocks (you know how I feel about those, Slim), sweaty rivulets down our backs from just sitting still, lung-clogging air, streets that existed only to sell stinky fish, their eyes bulging from the heat, lots of aimless wandering punctuated by greasy and so delicious arepas, a mountaintop view from the comunas, friendly metro workers and warm people to match the warm weather in general, and dancing dancing dancing! And Craplations closed its doors in Medellin, so we actually (kind of) deserved the vacation we got.

-------------

In latest too strange to not be true news from Bogota, "Colombia's chief prosecutor hired a psychic who hypnotized his staff and even performed an exorcism over a voodoo doll in exchange for a government paycheck and use of an armored car." Full article: "Hiring of Psychic Haunts Bogota Official."

gone to Medellin

2006-09-20T00:15:00.000-05:00

just as soon as we finish craplating. which is looking more and more like 7 am, just before the bus leaves. be back Sunday. Cheers!

It's 12 AM...do you know where your translator is? The chocolate store (they may sell other items, but if they do I don't want to know about it) closes any minute. Who will win, girl or chocolate bar?

new motto

2006-09-18T21:05:00.000-05:00

Craplations, Inc.

Bastardizing your most urgent documents since Tuesday

procrastinating bits (a lemony stroke)

2006-09-18T12:26:00.000-05:00

Songs my laptop sings to me:

If I could talk I'd tell you
If I could smile I'd let you know
You are far and away
My most imaginary friend

Elly says she's heard this song more in 9 months living with me than in the previous 24 years of her life. What can I say? Lemonheads are my favorite candy, but I only like this song.

Songs I sing to my laptop:

Oh Tennessee, what did you write?
I come together in the middle of the night.
Oh that's an ending that I can't write, 'cause
I've got you to let me down.

I want to be forgotten,
and I don't want to be reminded.
You say "please don't make this harder."
No, I won't yet.

What does all of this mean? That I have 40 more pages to crapulate, and my laptop and I are developing a very close relationship.

My roommate to me:

You talk way too much
You talk way too much

Me to my roommate:

Now we're out of time
I said it's my fault
It's my fault

Can't make good decisions
It won't stop
I can't stop

and both of us to The Woman:

Give me some time, I just need a little time
Give me some time, I just need a little time
Give me some time, I just need a little time
Give me some time, I just need a little time

You talk way too much
You talk way too much
It's only the end
It's only the end as you know it...

"You're not supposed to say that
you taught me too much"
Is this how it ends?
Is this how it ends?

A Buckmaster Sunday

2006-09-17T12:04:00.000-05:00

Flight Deck

Images

2006-09-15T18:52:00.000-05:00

The texture of life feels different to the touch in different places. In Colombia it's rough, like natural wool, but colorful, strong, and warm. I was walking home from a meeting of delegates elected from my neighborhood to set our priorities in social programs (which involves a substantial amount of yelling, if you wondered) when I walked into the kind of scene that I will carry with me long after I've left Colombia. Two mariachis were practicing, and the clear notes of their trumpets cut through the traffic and noise, leading the way for a lumbering Coke truck making its way slowly up the potholed side street, flowing over the lushest purple flowers you can imagine, growing in beautiful disarray across a brick facade.

The rest of the walk got me thinking about how people use, I mean really use, public space here. I passed groups of university students sitting outside a little grocery store, laughing and drinking; street vendors on their way home after a long day but still hoping for one last sale, more couples than I could count enjoying (but how) the grassy spread of the national campus, in short, people everywhere conducting important parts of their lives and social interaction on the street. To me that's a beautiful thing. Too much of the life I'm used to happens inside, and it feels so confining, so small. Give me the noisy, dirty, alive streets of the so-called developing world any day. I don't think I'm going to re-adapt to Atlanta well...then again, there's no Macondo in Atlanta!

And the Lilburn house is a haven of peace and quiet, a place with actual birds in actual trees, where you can hear the crickets chirp on hot summer nights, well, when the AC isn't drowning them out. I think I could get used to that again - lately we've been honest to god fantasizing about shooting out the sound system across the street.

Installment Deux, Correspondence: Craplations, Inc.

2006-09-15T17:37:00.000-05:00

From: Rebecca Serna
To: Porter, Elizabeth

Date: Sep 15, 2006 1:14 PM

Subject: Portera!

In addition, find attached to this correspondence my latest foray into the sphere of translating documents from the original language intended to communicate purpose and resolve despite the unfortunate existence of a language barrier between the ONG WDI and the host country, in which the personnel have made numerous and varied adjustments to the cultural, social, and political contexts, given the reality of a lack of funding for translators and other cultural emissaries and so forth and so on.

In fervent hope a percentage no greater than 25% of the sentences in my translation sound like this one.

Also, I used the word "foray" today. Twice.

Onward, upward, el Ecuador-ward...

"Crapulating is my life"
Sernisma

------------------------------------

From: Elizabeth
To: Rebecca

brilliant, have i told you lately that you are? in spite of that its lacking originality, something for which should strive the people, it is thought a good idea writing in this manner that could be considered difficult for understanding by the people. in this way it is suggested that tonight the undertaking of the activity of crapulating, be accompanied by perhaps a pizza that could derive from the place that is considered by the majority to be in general preferred for these pies of DOUGH covered by SAUCE of TOMATOE and CHEESE and slices of TOMATOE.

your esteemed co-founder of this company which ventures to place in bank accounts funds in the form of dollars is available to volunteer to pass said pizza establishment that is the source of aforementioned pizza. she plans that she will be returing to the headquarters around about 8:30pm.

one more point that is worth mentioning is that miray, known as the other half of the team known as FOR presently residing in bogota, has thought quite definitively of the idea of traveling, on a bus, to the city that tends to be referred to as medellin, on the same wednesday that the team of crapulations will be on a bus moving towards said city of medellin(1) and also staying the night, as will also be the team of crapulations. it is an idea that has been posed that these three team members of different teams board said bus as a team and spend one night in a hotel still to be determined.

if any of those people reading this document are not in compliance with its suggestions, they should direct their queries at the person across the table (if the same person is in fact across the table at the time of reading) or if is not(2) dial the number of the celular phone of said person. then talk.

much suggestions of happiness,
grace w schmidt lovejoy

1. interview with trish abbott, interviewed 15 september, 2006
2. in this manner, will be teaching classes of english at the headquarters of an organization of the civil society which has no goals of profit.

Goodnight, Ann

2006-09-14T23:43:00.000-05:00

Very sweet article by Liz Smith about her friendship with Ann Richards.

The last bit:

Only recently when I asked Ann her point of view about granting some kind of amnesty to illegal Latins in the United States, she just laughed: "They better grant them some way to stay here because otherwise our hospitals and nursing homes will never have the staff to take care of all of us who are growing older. The people caring for me at Anderson are almost all Mexican, Dominican, Puerto Rican, and they are simply wonderful.
This was the last thing Ann ever said to me -- typically caring, penetrating, socially observant. So goodbye to one of the most fabulous women I've ever known. Ann, it was a great privilege to be your friend!

before the flood

2006-09-14T19:27:00.000-05:00

GALEO: Threat received over voter registration:

"ATLANTA - Volunteers in Hall and nine other counties, working to register Hispanics to vote, have been told to work in teams after organizers said they received a "threatening" phone call. "We need to run you out of this country. You are destroying it," said the caller, according to a tape of the call made available by the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, which is leading the voter registration drive. Since then, the volunteers in 10 Georgia counties that are working to register Latinos have been told to work in teams for their safety, said GALEO's director Jerry Gonzalez. "It demonstrates the dangers of political rhetoric fanning the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment," he said."

Visit GALEO's website to support their excellent (and blood-pressure raising) work.

Ann Richards died last night

2006-09-14T11:57:00.000-05:00

It's a funny thing, the way some people we've never met can feel like old friends. Sometimes it's an author whose books we've read and re-read. Other times a public figure like Ann Richards, with her Southern aphorisms and steely wit, will insinuate themselves into our consciousness and become people that matter, without ever having exchanged a word or a glance, or a handshake, the politician's bread and butter. She was one special lady. NYT Obit

Ann Richards quotes. I really identified with this one: “I have always had the feeling I could do anything and my dad told me I could. I was in college before I found out he might be wrong.”

Another good quote: "They blame the low income women for ruining the country because they are staying home with their children and not going out to work. They blame the middle income women for ruining the country because they go out to work and do not stay home to take care of their children."

what I want to get out of writing

2006-09-13T23:33:00.000-05:00

is this:

How did you get the idea for "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"?

When I started to write, the idea was very small, just an image, not an idea actually. A man who is 30, cooking spaghetti in the kitchen, and the telephone rings -- that's it. It's so simple, but I had the feeling that something was happening there.

Are you always surprised by what happens in the story, almost as if you were reading it yourself, or do you know where it's going after a certain point?

I have no idea. I was enjoying myself writing, because I don't know what's going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don't know at all what you're going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you're a kid and you're reading stories. It's very exciting when you don't know what's going to happen next. The same thing happens to me when I'm writing. It's fun.

from an old Salon.com interview with Haruki Murakami

You say that imagination is very important in your works. Sometimes your novels are very realistic, and then sometimes they get very ... metaphysical.

I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I'm a very realistic person. I don't trust anything New Age -- or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don't trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can't answer that. But I recognized when I was interviewing those 63 [sarin gas attack victims on the subway train in Tokyo in March 1995] ordinary people -- they were very straightforward, very simple, very ordinary, but their stories were sometimes very weird. That was interesting.

Baby steps

2006-09-11T19:24:00.000-05:00

From the Grist:

"In January 2006, the University of Michigan suspended the purchase of Coca-Cola products on its campus...the university cut the contract because of concerns over environmental issues in India and labor issues in Colombia. Corporate decision-makers should pay heed: this event is notable on several dimensions. "

"First, this decision was not due to any problems with product or pricing. Instead, the university cut the contract because of concerns over environmental issues in India and labor issues in Colombia. Second, and more amazingly, the decision was prompted by one man and the small nonprofit he runs out of his home in Southern California. Amit Srivastava and his India Resource Center have mobilized students on the Ann Arbor campus and elsewhere to petition their administrations to ban Coke from their campuses, and they are succeeding. Third and finally, this unusual form of pressure is leading the company to do something it would never have previously agreed to: open its overseas facilities to independent, transparent, third-party environmental and labor audits."

"Last year, the actions of a tiny nonprofit mobilizing college students over foreign environmental and labor issues was not considered relevant to the bottom line of Coca-Cola. Today, the decision of the University of Michigan (and more recent decisions by some Indian states to close Coke plants and ban both Coke and Pepsi products) has moved the issue squarely into the good-management quadrant."

Things do change, just not quickly or easily.

sample correspondence

2006-09-11T16:55:00.000-05:00

Darling Portera,

Is the Peruvian document the country report? You know me and Peru don't get along. Elizabeth doesn't know any better, so she'll do Peru, and I'll do the Voluntarios de Vida now and the Ecuador report later.

Thanks so much!

Rebecca Serna
Craplations, Inc.

-----------------

What Up P-Dawg,

So the Parques Para Chile document was in Arial 10 pt font, when I put it into Times New Roman 12pt its 32 pages. So that's the way I'm going to turn it in, otherwise the rate I'd get paid at would be ridiculously low, and less than what we agreed on, since we based that rate on a standard font size, no?

So tell those bitches in Michigan they can come down to Bogota and fight it out with some modern dance/capoeira/yoga maestras if they want to squeeze us any tighter.

Oppressed translators of the world unite!
Peace out,

El-Dawg
Elizabeth G. Walsh
Craplations, Inc.

a good day

2006-09-10T22:27:00.000-05:00

The Boondocks

Today was a good day. I know because I can barely move. Strained my hip in yoga, then twisted in playing ultimate frisbee. Caught sight of a new white hair in the mirror this morning. Sheesh. Not too much longer and I'll be wearing knee highs, sitting in a comfortable chair with an afghan, watching the street life and thinking, three flights of stairs means grandma's staying in! Oh wait. That describes three out of the past four days fairly accurately, with minor caped excursions.

Pearls before Swine

2006-09-09T11:10:00.000-05:00

Pearls before Swine

a minor success

2006-09-09T02:45:00.000-05:00

is better than an utter failure, I say. so when I say the grand inauguration of "El Espacio" was a minor success, I mean that in the best possible way. The take home may not have been even enough to pay off friend debts/investments, but pretty much everyone who made it through the doors loved it. It truly is just that, a space. The capes went surprisingly well with the bare walls still pockmarked by shreds of old concert posters, and the shocking orange wall at the very end made it all hang together.

I think my destiny may very well be to serve liquid refreshment and keep self-conscious punk kids from hurting anyone on the dance floor. It may be. You'd be surprised how much authority a cape made from curtains inveighs. And when Josh and I open our coop bar "The Public," we'll even serve coffee. And organic dinners, just one basic meal, Colombian style.

Hopefully with a lesser police presence though. As we left, 5.5 hours later for me, and 8 for Eli, there were three cop cars parked up and down the street, and all their occupants were making a beeline for El Espacio. We had to hide the "register" (which Eli made with cardboard) 3 times because, surprise, their liquor license application has not come through yet. News to me, but it was exciting. Here's to the urban culture space, and here's to dreaming big and not letting a few police and some missing paperwork stop you. Now that's punk.

unrelated links (I think...)

2006-09-08T15:24:00.000-05:00

Atlanta World Class Transit map and logo on bags, t-shirts, binders, etc.

Pope reborn as superhero in Colombian comic:

Kind of has a different ring for the English speaker, but "HomoPater" translates roughly to "Incredible Popeman."

CO soldiers responsible for bombing

2006-09-08T10:39:00.000-05:00

Those blasts did come as a shock -- we spent "inauguration day" indoors while the city appeared to drift into a wakeful sleep. Bombs were not supposed to reach Bogota anymore. Today the local news reports CO army officers on tape paying off a former guerrilla to plant the bombs. No one was supposed to get hurt. It was a grey day, a day of expectant, guilty silence, but nothing much happened. The buzz of helicopters swooping nearby was the only sound we could hear from the balcony in a city accustomed to constant noise.

google is Alert

2006-09-07T22:41:00.000-05:00

I love google news alerts, even if google probably is invading my privacy. hey, programmers have to get their kicks too.

But let's be serious, because the news today from Colombia was not great. For one, Amnesty International: Colombia turning blind eye to attacks on human rights workers:

President Alvaro Uribe incensed the public when he lashed out against human rights groups in a 2003 speech, calling them "politickers for terrorism" and "communists in disguise." He later apologized. "By not investigating threats, and discrediting their work publicly, the government is essentially giving a green light to their continued persecution," Sofia Nordenmark, author of the Amnesty report, told The Associated Press.

Often the threats are coming from sources embarassingly (and outrageously!) close to the government itself.

On a related note, I'm sorry to see a good paper like the Guardian buying the Uribist security discourse. It's so similar to the Bushie terrorism siren call; I'm surprised they weren't more critical of the explanations given by the Colombian national government in this article: 'Safer' Colombia launches tourism drive.

Let's start with this sentence: "The president's hardline stance against leftist rebels and the demobilisation of more than 30,000 rightwing paramilitary fighters have seen kidnappings drop 73% and murders fall 37% since Mr Uribe first took office in 2002."

But murders started falling in the 90s, when changes in the Constitution allowed Bogota to elect its first mayor, Jaime Castro. Most urban observers have attributed the safety gains in Bogota to the series of innovative mayors that followed this essential shift. See: Bogota, Island in a Land at War (I know, you've all heard this song and dance before, but I can't believe people are still attributing urban homicide rate declines to Uribe...)

There's another problem with that article, though. Yesterday El Tiempo reported that the crime rates for 2005 were massaged (actually, just falsified) to make it appear that crime went down this year. An honest man at the chamber of commerce noticed that the numbers for last year's crimes were suddenly much, much higher in the 2006 report than in the 2005 report created for the central city government. What a pleasant surprise! Party hardy, tourists. You're safer here than you would have been in the imaginary version we created of last year's city.

Patterns of violent death in Bogota 1997-2003:

As you can see, homicides began their decade-long decline before the current president took office in 2002.

Colombia meets opposition in privatization of nation oil company. Where's Evo when you need him?

One last thing in today's CO news buffet: "The head of the army has accused his troops, including two officers, of participating in a deadly car-bombing on the eve of President Alvaro Uribe's swearing-in ceremony last month that was originally blamed on leftist rebels. Montoya also said corrupt soldiers were behind the high-profile seizure in recent weeks of several weapon stockpiles that authorities originally said belonged to rebels but which now appear to have been staged to impress their superiors." Full article here.

Gee, when you can't trust the Colombian army, who can you trust? Unfortunately army service is still compulsory. The Red Juvenil in Medellin includes many conscientious objectors who are persecuted for their decision.

The lack of progress but everything will be okay if you just quack like a duck Report, by G. W. Bush

2006-09-07T08:50:00.000-05:00

Bush to visit Georgia today with a lack of progress report:

Bush to speak in Cobb County AJC, Sep 6, 2006
President Bush will be in metro Atlanta Thursday talking about the global war on terror before heading to Coastal Georgia to stump for Republican congressional candidate Max Burns. The president is scheduled to arrive at Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta about 10 a.m., then motorcade three miles to the Cobb Galleria Centre to address the Georgia Public Policy Foundation [right-wing group with deceptively neutral-sounding name].

The president's arrival at the Cobb Galleria will be met by protesters from the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition [just what it sounds like, how refreshing!], who are planning to line the sidewalks along Cobb Parkway near the Galleria, according to the group's website.

In other news today, US acknowledges existence of secret CIA prisons.

Boy do I feel safer.

on the brain

2006-09-06T14:12:00.000-05:00

what I'm listening to today: The Secret Life of Public Radio
(I'm a little behind but this was quite good: Marking Milestones with Bob Dylan's 'Modern Times')
reading: John Hodgman can't see you (blog by author of The Areas of My Expertise -- I can't wait to read this!)

Can you tell I'm procrastinating? Translating, transcribing...sounding too much like DOJ today but minus the B-Money, thankfully.

Changes

2006-09-05T15:29:00.000-05:00

In a discussion today, and a very serious one at that, about whether it's legal to change your name to a one-word name, I came across this article: Activist changes name to GoVeg.com. I hate USA Today, but the article is both ridiculous and mildly thought-provoking. What would your one-word name be?

And More: Slate asks, "Why do so many Brazilian soccer players go by one name?" "Brazil's affinity for nicknames might stem from the country's historically high illiteracy rate. As such, shortened spoken names are typically used more often than longer birth names. In Brazilian society, the use of a first name or nickname is a mark of intimacy. It's also often a class signifier. Lula, for one, is known for his working-class roots."

Eli is changing her name to Bob. She's interested in a man named Shaka, so if you think about it makes sense.

Falling

2006-09-05T14:51:00.000-05:00

Today so far: fallen twice on my head, a few times on my knees, uncountable times on my ass. I must say, the last is by far the best body part to fall on. The head, not so much. Only cried once though - the last head drop was pretty painful. I decided to demonstrate to Eli, on returning home, the crazy move we learned in class today, knowing the wooden floor was not having it. Down I went, and stayed for a bit. All of this thanks to capoeira.

But I think it's a useful if bruising exercise. The instructor today said the most important part of capoeira is learning to fall. If nothing else, learning to fall not on your head seems like a good idea. I know I've fallen a lot in my life so far, and every time I've stood back up more grounded, more humble, and less obnoxious.

It's easy to get caught up in the "there are winners and there are losers" culture, and capoeira is an antidote of sorts to all that. People watching can tell who is more advanced, but anyone at any level can play with anyone else, the more experienced person just adjusts their play to the novice's level.

Everyone's Excommunicated Now!

2006-08-30T22:47:00.000-05:00

Colombia Catholic Church Bishop Bans Those Involved in Girl's Abortion
"The Catholic Church in Colombia has excommunicated anyone directly or indirectly involved with approving or doing the first legal abortion in the nation since the South American country's top court legalized it in some cases [rape, incest, serious threat to the mother's life] in May. The abortion occurred on a rape victim who was 11 years old."

[Question: can you belong to a religion that does things you despise? And if so, for how long? And why? What I get out of church has zero to do with a bunch of rich bishops thinking they have the right to make decisions about anyone else's body or rights, especially when we're talking an 11 year old girl raped by her stepfather. What I get out of church will continue to exist, but I don't have to be Catholic to get it, just human. Which is more than I can say for the Catholic hierarchy here. I went to mass on Good Friday only to be so repulsed by the priest's sermon, which included slams on gays, politicians who aren't overtly Christ-centric "good" Christians, and anyone who disagrees with the church's positions on abortion that I walked out. First time I've done that. It was strange...he gave 50% of one of the best sermons I've ever heard, all about the power of love to change the world, then launched into a diatribe against 90% of the most vulnerable groups in Colombia. I didn't understand then and I hope I never will. Still, there are some brave and good souls in the priesthood, but they are susceptible to extreme repression from the higher-ups, just like everyone else in Colombia.]

Liquid Insecurity

2006-08-30T17:20:00.000-05:00

from the Guardian.com

"ANDEAN glaciers are melting so fast that some are expected to disappear within 15 to 25 years, denying cities water supplies and putting populations and food supplies at risk in Colombia, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia. Some glaciers in Colombia are now less than 20 per cent of the mass recorded in 1850 and Ecuador could lose half its most important glaciers within 20 years."

"The rate of glacier retreat has shocked scientists, says a report on the effects of global warming in Latin America by 20 British-based environment and development groups that have drawn on national scientific assessments. Their study says climate change is accelerating the deglaciation phenomenon. [The] report, Up in Smoke, says snow and rainfall patterns in South America and the Caribbean are becoming less predictable and more extreme. The report proposes that Latin American governments do not repeat the mistakes made by North American and European governments. "

"Several countries in the region are planning a new generation of mega dams that would displace thousands more people and destroy vast areas of the Brazilian Amazon." from Cities in Peril from Glacier Meltdown

What we need to do is privatize all the water tables. That way at least the rich will always be able to buy $20 bottles of water.

Lying Around

2006-08-30T16:45:00.000-05:00

My roommate is taking a modern dance class. It's so nice to be right...my suspicions about modern dance are being proven correct; it is mostly lying around on the floor. Every day she has class, she comes home and lies around on the floor for a while so I can learn, too.

I love Rob Brezsny's horoscopes...read yours here.

Mine for the month: TAURUS (April 20-May 20): "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts," wrote American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. "They come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." The first part of your assignment, Taurus, is to identify other people's brilliant creations that remind you of good ideas of your own that you've failed to develop. The second part of your assignment is to do something--anything!--to correct for your neglect. Get started on your own masterpiece.

Today I made a phone call. Usually difficult for me but not quite rising to the level of accomplishment, but today I called the foremost expert in participatory planning in Colombia. We'd met briefly at a conference on Bogota and human rights several months ago, and I was reassured that he remembered who I was, "ah, the Fulbright."

Also today I saw a job opening at the Carter Center...working under one of the people who helped with my Fulbright application, the director of the Americas Project and a political science professor at Georgia State! The position lasts for 12 months, which would allow me to readjust to life in the states while keeping one eye on Colombia. My degree is not exactly what they're looking for, and I'm not sure I have the necessary experience, but I'm going to apply anyway.

a whole lotta nothing is sometimes something

2006-08-27T21:32:00.000-05:00

Today was Sunday. Not much happened - I missed the am meeting when I couldn't find the Alcaldia of the Candelaria and no one else knew where it was either, so I watched the Aguila girls shimmy past in the "Solidarity Parade" (if they'd really wanted to be in solidarity, there would have been significantly more cellulite on display...), ducked into the Septima flea market where I heard my name called, a nice feeling when you're thousands of miles and four months from home (Sundays alone are, well, lonely). An artisan I met yesterday remembered me! We chatted for a bit, I saw her goods and met her brother and sister. Bought some smelly plants, came home and took a nap.

Tonight, talked with my fiancee (that word making its first appearance here!) and my folks, and got encouraged about some things (weddings in the woods with children wearing Halloween costumes!) and discouraged about others.

That's the something, the stuff that comes up when you have nothing to do but sit around in an empty apartment, missing people and talking to your plants. Wow, that sounded pitiful. It didn't feel as bad as it sounds. There's something attractively melancholy about times like that, especially when you know they won't last forever. And my plants are truly good company. They grow and live and get greener every day - they've almost fully recovered from that scary time spent with Aimee and Trish (wonderful people, not so great at watering plants). Then Eli got back from Medellin, and just in time. Attractively melancholy has a way of turning into just plain lonely on a Sunday night. Why is it that Sunday nights are always so sad?

Anyway, I've not had the easiest time deciding "what to do with my life" [that phrase just doesn't invite insight, does it? In fact, it practically slams the door on it, heart beating a bit faster than before the doorbell rang.] Tonight talking with my folks, my dad apparently heard for the first time my plan of getting a teaching degree, a masters in teaching ESOL. He said something about it being an awful idea. I've tried teaching before and it was not a happy time -- I remember lots of migraines and frustration. But I was responsible for Spanish in two schools, pre-K through 8th grade, no books, no curriculum, and no clue what I was doing. And it wasn't all bad -- the moment of getting through is magical, when it happens.

I think part of my problem in answering that big question is feeling the desire to do something big, since the world's problems are so damn big, and being faced with personal smallness. So what is the answer? I'm just not sure research is going to do it for me. It fills some of what I'm looking for, but a very limited part, that part of me whose favorite question is still, "but why?" But the part of me that needs to feel useful in the world, the part that is currently going empty much of the time, that part it doesn't touch. And when I look at the careers of even academics I admire, it still seems to be missing. I can't go through my whole life without that, without feeling useful to a larger community besides my family, to whom I am of limited, occasional use, and sometimes just plain obnoxious.

I've been flirting with the idea and act of teaching for so long, and I keep coming back to it. I loved the idea of being a city planner, and think I'd do a good job, but it's not my passion. It's a technical pursuit, when what I'm looking for is building community. I also believe that anyone who wants to change something should first understand the status quo. People who work in education policy but have never taught in public schools? Makes zero sense to me.

So tonight I'm feeling a bit like a rock, small and round and maybe, just maybe, the perfect size and shape for something that will pick me, instead of me choosing it.

on a lighter note...

2006-08-26T12:33:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was calling around, trying to find out when the series of meetings started, but people find me hard to understand over the phone in Spanish. Not being as used to foreigners here, they tend to say things like, "Where are you from, I can't understand anything you're saying..." then answering the question I just asked in my supposedly unintelligible Spanish. And my Spanish is pretty good - I'll never get rid of my accent completely, but people who know me find it possible to conduct entire conversations with me. Colombians just seem to get personal very quickly. Another example, in my mind anyway, is the sign I saw on a dress shop: "Dresses for fatties arriving soon." ("Vestidos para Gorditas llegaran pronto!") I kid you not.

2006-08-26T01:13:00.000-05:00

I wonder what motivates people to move to Colombia to work as human rights observers and activists. Purpose. I keep hearing people talking about purpose. Then I hear other people saying life would be better if we just existed, peacefully, on our own, purpose-free, like cats. Cats are nothing if not purpose-less.

Tonight, Aimee's despedida. A chiminea, loads of lasagna, no wine until I went out for some, in boxes that gushed cheap wine everywhere, and a house full of peace workers. Incredible people to a one. Heard a story tonight, of a police state, our fucked up drug policy, fumigation, torture, and a group of people from around the world who care enough to come to Colombia to see the worst and tell it back home. She took a delegation to visit the manual eradicators working to pull up all the coca in Colombia. Said most of them were demobilized p's who wore their former employment on their faces, missing fingers, burnt skin and bent noses. Torture being a mark of induction into their ranks.

Most importantly, the woman telling the story spoke with such passion of what she sees as the Colombian community, celebrating what they can, thumbing their nose at violence, despair, and utter destruction. If I take nothing else back, not Ciclovia nor trinkets nor bus lore, I want to learn this.

I'm starting to feel awfully constricted, stuck here by fear, whether reasonable or not, in the capital city. I need to get out of town, see the rest of this gorgeously messed up place. We're planning a trip to Cali in a few weeks, but I want to see some of the reality my friends work with every day. Just not sure how.
------------
Tomorrow I'm attending the first set of public meetings to decide local social spending. I'm hoping to compare the results among richer and poorer localities to see how "strata," a special Colombian formulation of socioeconomic status designed to reflect housing and infrastucture but which has become a proxy for social standing, affects the participatory process. Good clean city-loving nerd fun.

A Chosen Place

2006-08-24T10:38:00.000-05:00

Atlanta! Today's New York Times has an article about Katrina evacuees and how the places they ended up have shaped their lives. "Storm's Escape Routes: One Forced, One Chosen." That Atlanta is the chosen place makes my heart glad.

Atlanta’s evacuees, more likely to have left New Orleans before the flooding, often express enthusiasm for starting over in a place where even dishwashers start at $7 an hour. It is not unusual to hear people here declare the hurricane a net positive in their lives. In Houston, a city that offers similar economic opportunity, the mood lies on the far side of resignation, closer to homesickness and despair.

...many evacuees felt more at home with, even inspired by, Atlanta’s long tradition of black leadership and success.

At our church, Our Lady of Lourdes, near the MLK tomb, the congregation welcomed maybe a dozen people from New Orleans. My mom stopped on the highway once to help a couple whose van had broken down and it turned out they were from New Orleans. One of the people living in my house while I'm away this year was a refugee from the hurricane's economic impact on the city's film industry. Dear family friends of ours live in New Orleans and the son moved to Atlanta for a time to live with his sister. On the other hand, when helping a friend look for apartments soon after the hurricane, one apartment owner warned us to "Be careful...there are lots of New Orleans people here, walking around, causing trouble."

There are so many New Orleans/Atlanta connections, and the cities have much in common on both sides of the equation: lots of heart, especially in black and diverse communities, but lots of entrenched poverty and racism as well. Power structures are also quite similar, I'd wager, but Atlanta has gotten the greener side of the fence economically, although we can't wave a stick at New Orleans culture.

Culturally, then, I'd say Atlanta is going to see a long-term net benefit from the exodus. We were lucky to be chosen, rather than a city of last resort. It's a sad observation, but one I hope we appreciate, as many of the "New Orleans people" put down roots and make a new home in the Capital of the South, the "No South," our adopted hometown, for better or for worse.

Headlines

2006-08-23T21:34:00.001-05:00

Today I went by the local mayor's office in Chapinero, where I signed up for the series of assemblies in which each neighborhood will decide its priorities for social spending over the next two years. I'm so excited about this! I finally found an instance of participatory planning to study. Nerd party at my house tonight! Oh wait, I'm home alone reading articles. So appropriate.

Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Lourdes in the heart of Chapinero (from Wikipedia)

CJ

2006-08-22T22:57:00.000-05:00

Tonight I started my first (and last, and only) law class: Community Justice. As soon as he walked in the door, the professor zoomed in on me and asked me to tell the class what I knew about community justice. I said, I have no idea what it is, then I muttered something about how I didn't know whether the US had a tradition of community justice...he gently asked, are there indigenous peoples in the states? Well then!

I went home tonight and googled a few things, and not only does the US have a tradition of CJ, especially in San Francisco, Atlanta has its very own community justice program:

In September 2005, the Bureau of Justice Assistance of the U.S. Department of Justice funded ten demonstration projects under its new Community-Based Problem-Solving Criminal Justice Initiative. The following edited excerpt was taken from Atlanta’s winning proposal.

In late 2000, the City of Atlanta’s Municipal Court created a community court, which has evolved into a comprehensive problem-solving court. Currently, the Court is operating two neighborhood Restorative Boards, both in inner-city neighborhoods where poverty rates are high. Under its problem-solving initiative, Atlanta proposes to expand and enhance its Restorative Board program into four additional Atlanta neighborhoods. The Restorative Boards have proven to be especially effective by bringing an offender back to a neighborhood for sanctioning and restoration and giving a meaningful voice to community members in the justice process.

The boards seek to close the gap between the courts and community. Defendants, often young and first-time offenders, are identified by court staff as appropriate candidates for diversion to the boards. Staff recruit board members from the neighborhood where the board is established. After extensive training in the principles of restorative justice and the policies of the board, members are sworn into service by the judge of Community Court. When a defendant appears before the board, together they discuss the nature of the offense and its negative consequences for the victim, community and offender. An agreement is reached on a course of action that the defendant will take to “right the wrong” his/her actions have created. Activities are also identified for the offender to pursue in order to reduce the likelihood that he/she will offend again. Examples include GED completion, job search skills training, anger-management and conflict resolution classes, parenting classes, etc. Board members meet several times with offenders to monitor their progress and offer congratulations upon success.

I felt kind of silly, but it was such a great class, and the professor so genuinely excited about the topic that it was worth it. I'm happy to be made to feel silly any day if someone is going to get so worked up during socratic style lecture that he is actually out of breath! I tried to get out of doing a research project and presentation and some other things I'm not sure I understood, but my explanation may have been too elegant, and I'm on the hook. ("No quiero castigar la clase con mi espanol inventado...") My own fault for getting fancy with my stumblings.

I was secretly pleased, though, since I so rarely get to talk in front of groups here, and find it addictive. Must come from being from a big family where no one listens. When people are forced to pay attention to me I figure I'd better make the most of it while it lasts. I may have expounded, just a bit, when asked today in the extension class, on the elements of capoeira, my poor knees and back, what sports I played in high school...getting put on the spot tonight was probably payback.

Capoeira Lessons

2006-08-22T14:31:00.000-05:00

photo from www.hapkido.it

The first class today was mostly a history of capoeira. The instructor is a graduate of UN in philosophy, and mentioned the difficulty he's had trying to understand the essence of what he finally realized was a genre all to itself; it's neither dance nor sport nor martial art, nor anthropology, nor religion, but includes elements of all of these. I found a few aspects of the introduction especially intriguing. Here's what I took with me as we all walked out of class with a little extra spring in our step:

By falling you win. Falling teaches in a way that staying upright does not. If someone can fell you and chooses not to, this is actually harder to take than actually being knocked down (applies to other life situations, not just capoeira.)

Western people spend almost all of their time standing or sitting upright. We hardly ever bend over in a way that lengthens the spine. Put your hands to the floor, the ground, the dirt. Think of all the religions in the world that include this element: Islam, Buddhism, many indigenous beliefs. There's something about it that connects us to what came before.

Breakdance and capoeira spring from the same well of enslaved and marginalized peoples, and include many of the same elements. They both represent the exercise of freedom under difficult circumstances.

Capoeira on Wikipedia
Capoeira.com

But my favorite lesson from class today was the realization that at the very least, I'm not as awkward or self-conscious as I was at 18, or at 20, or at 22 (all median-ish ages of my classmates...), no matter how self-conscious I occasionally feel, especially being the strange bird I am here. That's something we should tell younger people at any age: it does get better, easier, and simpler. You worry less about how you are perceived, and care less about overheard comments directed at you. As time starts getting shorter, these things get filed under "useless time-wasting shit." That folder has been getting fat on my shelf lately.

UN Chemistry Department press release condeming bomb found in department

2006-08-21T23:03:00.000-05:00

COMUNICADO DE LOS PROFESORES DEL DEPARTAMENTO DE QUÍMICA

Los profesores de química, condenamos de manera enérgica el atentado ocurrido el pasado 14 de agosto en nuestro edificio. Este hecho demencial ha herido de manera profunda la armonía, el equilibrio y la estabilidad que nacen de las ideas, del quehacer investigativo y de la interacción con nuestros estudiantes. Dicho atentado, más que poner en peligro la integridad física de estudiantes, trabajadores y profesores y de destruir un espacio físico, constituye una seria amenaza contra la institución y la comunidad que de ella hace parte. Lo ocurrido es una muestra de la existencia de intereses oscuros que pretenden sumir a la UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL en un caos e inestabilidad. Atentados como el ocurrido no pueden tener cabida en el ámbito universitario, este tipo de hechos no pueden repetirse al interior de nuestro Campus. Por otra parte, creemos que dicho acto terrorista es totalmente ajeno a las diferentes posturas que se tienen en torno al proceso de reforma académica ya que ésta se ha dado en medio de discusiones y argumentación.
Bogotá, Agosto 16 de 2006

2006-08-21T16:22:00.000-05:00

Foto: AP (in El Tiempo today)

Installation in the south of Bogotá
A woman cries next to the bricks symbolizing the tombs of 600 people killed in the last five years in Ciudad Bolivar.

Scientists, Journalists, and other Subversives

2006-08-21T15:19:00.000-05:00

from "Colombian journalists face terror at home"

Colombia is a democracy, but one bristling with powerful paramilitary forces in the provinces, international drug syndicates, leftist guerrillas and underworld organizations that hold sway over scores of politicians. Against all of those horrors is a passionate press corps that works under circumstances so dangerous I think the average U.S. journalist would consider a career in insurance.

``You can go to Bogota and feel like you are in Paris,'' Coronell said. ``Drive 40 minutes to the south and you think you are in Iraq.''

In one of the most dangerous countries for journalists, 33 have died in the past decade, Coronell said. Self-censorship has become the mode of survival for those in the rural provinces where paramilitary and guerrillas operate.

Coronell's friend, journalist Jaime Garzón, was killed in 1999 after receiving threats. ``He told me, he told you, he told everybody,'' Coronell said to his wife, María Cristina. ``And they killed him,'' she said grimly.

Coronell's recent problems began after critical coverage of the president's demobilization compacts with paramilitary groups tied to drug lords. When he received threats last spring, Coronell enlisted eight reporters and a computer specialist to track some of the e-mailed threats sent to his associates. Coronell discovered some were coming from an IP address in a mansion occupied by Carlos Nader-Simmonds, a powerful cattleman, popular in Colombia's high-society circles, and friend of the president.

Culture of impunity

His resulting article, ``Unmasking the Executioner,'' caused a firestorm in Colombia. Despite the evidence, the government has made little progress investigating the case, but Nader-Simmonds' defamation suit against Coronell tore through the courts in the dead of Christmas in time for Coronell to receive a court citation Jan. 2 for early settlement. That sent a message about where true power lies to journalists throughout Colombia.

``If the government can't protect Daniel Coronell, who is one of the best-known and highly regarded journalists, it certainly can't protect them,'' said Joel Simon, who met with President Uribe as deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

``Many journalists live with these threats,'' Coronell said. ``I've had periods of threats in my career, almost as partners,'' but with a family to think about, it is so much harder.
The spring term ends soon and Uribe will undoubtedly be re-elected in May. And the Coronells will return to family and jobs in Colombia. They don't have a choice.

``Information is a treasure for our people,'' Coronell said. ``The promise of the journalist is not with popularity. It is with the truth.''

Even if the truth is awful.

from "Death Threats against Colombian researchers"

Colombian researchers have expressed concern about security at public universities amid rising reports of death threats and violence.

In recent weeks, a mathematician was assassinated and a geneticist went into exile.

Moisés Wasserman, president of the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, says it is not the first time it has happened but that little is known about the current threats.

The university is organising a campaign to express anger at the situation.

According to the Colombian Association of University Students, in 2004 and 2005 there were dozens of cases of threats, violence and attempted kidnappings against university staff and students, as well as three murders.

The association blames paramilitary groups, which it says have infiltrated state university campuses.

The problem has existed for many years but appears to be getting worse.

Geneticist Hugo Vega fled the country this month after receiving repeated death threats that accused him of being part of a guerrilla group. Other members of his research group at the National University were also threatened, leading them to disband in April.

In June, mathematics professor Gustavo Loaiza from the University of Antioquia in Medellín was murdered.

Sergio Caramagna, head of the Organization of American States (OAS) mission in support of the Colombian peace process says his office has received information about threats in public universities in Antioquia, Bogotá, Nariño and North Santander.

Caramagna told SciDev.Net that he has asked OAS's regional delegates to investigate, although he concedes that the investigation will depend on the openness of the people affected, and access to their testimonies.

No matter where they come from, the threats are to be condemned, he added.

Vega told SciDev.Net that the threats he received came in response to his team's success at publishing a study in the high-profile journal Nature Genetics in April 2005.
He believes that one of his colleagues paid a paramilitary group to force him "out of my job, my research group and my country, under the pretext that I am a member of a guerrilla group".

from Kentucky to Georgia

2006-08-21T02:14:00.000-05:00

I bookmarked this artist on Pandora before I knew anything about him, just heard this song: Beautiful Me. Then I read (see bio and review below) that he was born in Lexington and raised in Atlanta.

The smooth style of modern day soul singer Donnie is comparable to such other similar sounding artists as Macy Gray, Jill Scott, Seal, and Maxwell. Born in Lexington, Kentucky during the mid '70s, Donnie was raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and came from a very religious family (both of his parents were ministers). Singing for a choir at an early age, Donnie soon expanded his musical horizons, as he became influenced equally by such gospel artists as Walter Hawkins and Mahalia Jackson plus such soul/R n' B masters as Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Aretha Franklin. By the early 21st century, Donnie was signed to the Giant Step label, and issuing such singles and EP's as Holiday, Masterplan, Do You Know?, Excerpts from the Colored Section, and Our New National Anthem. The singer's anticipated full-length debut, the Colored Section, was released in November 2002. ~ Greg Prato

What a marvelously audacious introduction The Colored Section is. Emerging from the same Jazz Café-centered alternative Atlanta soul scene that nourished and nurtured fellow hippie-soul singer/songwriters like Joi and India.Arie all the way into the public consciousness, Donnie's first LP is a topical, unapologetically conscientious, and even righteously stinging declaration that, yes, can only be likened to the classic sociopolitical masterworks of spiritual heirs Donny Hathaway and especially Stevie Wonder. Songs like "Cloud 9" and "Wildlife," in fact, may be too indebted to genius-era Wonder -- the former with its wah-wah guitar and warm gusts of squelchy synth vibrato, the latter with its prominent clavinet and crisp harmonica ad-libs -- but are such stunning vintage impersonations that both easily could have slipped somewhere onto Innervisions.

Bogota Kite Festival 2006 at Parque Simon Bolivar

2006-08-20T00:40:00.000-05:00

Caravans for the Virgen del Carmen, patron saint of taxi drivers

2006-08-20T00:27:00.000-05:00