mad clubbing

This week has been full of

• Seemingly endless shopping for supplies at the Dollar Tree and Fred Meyer: measuring spoons, alka seltzer, baking soda, white vinegar, corn starch, half-and-half, plastic zip lock bags...


• Playing in the fountain in downtown Hillsboro and getting head-to-toe soaking wet, much to the delight of the kids


• Breaking up a fight started by this foster home kid who'd entered this obstinate Beserker rage that reminded me of the Bloodwrath of the badgers from Salamandastron in the Redwall novels.


• Life-saving yoga classes in the evening on Alberta street.


• Dodging and praying not to run into Max ticket officers. It's like clockwork: I don't buy one, I get checked, I buy one, I'm never checked. I'm just waiting for Laura to get back from Montana so she can help me arrange having one of her college student housemates buy me one for 1/2 the price.


• Dealing with the wrath of the kitchen lady (NEVER borrow a kitchen lady's garbage can, and then forget to return it.)


• Daily 6AM wake-ups.


• Missing Corey, in Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker until Thursday.
  
• Missing talking to my sister about stupid stuff.


• Getting tons of e-mails now from Kiva. The internship has officially begun. It's both exciting and a little scary at the same time. Another new chapter and crazy adventure is coming up here pretty soon...


• Half-heartedly applying for part-time jobs, even though I really really enjoy my current schedule of 30-35 hours per week. I have yet to work the "standard" 40-hour a week job; those hours sound so crazy and soul-sucking to me...


• Learning to play "Once Upon a Dream" from Disney's Sleeping Beauty movie on the keyboards, as well as playing the babyfied version of Moonlight Sonata over and over and over and over again.


• Getting helped out by A., probably the Club's biggest problem child, while making ice cream (he helped bring ice cubes from the kitchen). VICTORY! Small steps! Small steps!


• Never-ending program planning and refining. Animal Camp is next week for 10-12 year olds and it's been a nightmare to plan for, especially after the two field trip places I had lined up canceled on me. Groan...

I've also been reading Arlt's The Seven Madmen, the 1984 edition translated by Naomi Lindstrom. (Arlt is really ripe for a rippingly good, modern-day translation, in the style of "The Savage Detectives" or Elizabeth Grossman's "Don Quixote.") I've only read Part I, but some stuff has really stood out for me. In Piglia's Respiracion artificial, one of his characters has a long rant about how Arlt is a bad writer, but how that's ok (it goes much more in depth than that). But yeah, that was definitely my first impression of this novel: I could never have gotten away with using some of these similes in the few creative writing classes I took. Take this gem of a sentence: "He felt each spasm of grief hopping like an owl from branch to branch in his misery." (25) How visual is that? Or how about this one: "Like a horse with its guts torn out by a bull, mucking around in its own viscera, every step he took drained his lungs of their lifeblood." (17) O dear.

Strangely enough, the book this has reminded me the most of is Fight Club. The main character, Erdosain, is fired from his dead-end job as a bill collector for embezzling six hundred pesos and seven centavos on the same day that his wife leaves him for a creepy dude called El Capitan. In order to get the money he needs to avoid jail, as well as refind structure and sense to his life, he turns to a strange figure called the Astrologer, who is this book's Tyler Durden mastermind character. The Astrologer has this ridiculously convuluted plan that is never clear: we're not sure if it involves the Ku Klux Klan or Lenin-loving Marxists. In the words of the book cover summary, his plan is "a terrorist conspiracy to help the unemployed that will lure workers to mountain stronghold factories and enslave them. For start-up capital, a chain of bordellos is proposed. To finance these, the murder of Erdosain's wife's rich cousin is planned." Believe me, it's never made as clear as all that.

The main character, Erdosain, reminds me of a hero from a novel by Camus or Satre, bringing way back to memories of middle and high school days of me lying on my stomach on my bed reading dusty, battered books pulled out of my parents' shelves, based on how interesting the cover art looked to me, as well as the novel's fame (Nausea, the Stranger). On page 6, Erdosain is already asking of himself, "What am I doing with my life? What kind of soul do I have? What have I made of my life?" (6-7, 12) That ought to be the first indication that this novel isn't going to be your regular, run-of-the-mill crime caper or pulp fiction that Arlt supposedly adored.

Anyway, in the one of his ponderings, Erdosain makes an interesting point:

"I'm nothing in everyone's eyes. But still, if tomorrow I throw a bomb or murder Barsut, [his wife's rich cousin] suddenly I'm everything, the man who exists, the man for whom generations of criminologists have prepared punishments, jails, and theories... That's really weird! And yet, only crime can affirm my existence, just as evil is all that affirms the presence of man on earth.. Really, this is all so weird. Still, despite everything, there is darkness and mankind's soul is sad. Infinitely sad. But that can't be how life is. If tomorow I figured out why that can't be how life is, I'd pinch myself and disinflate like a balloon spewing out all these lies I'm filled with." (81)

Depressingly enough, this reminded me of the whole Michael Jackson debacle. I can't believe how swiftly news of the frontlines of Iran has been banished from headlines to make room for story after story of a dead entertainer (the L.A. Times receives a particularly big FAIL in this regard--I mean, I know it's L.A., but come on! Seriously?). Also, somewhat depressingly, this passage made me think of some kids where I work. It's tough dealing with troubled individuals from what are defnitely some very messed-up home lives, because so much of your time and energy and attention and focus goes into trying to prevent these kids from having one of their explosive temper tantrums or freakouts (or calming them down when they do). This summer, it feels like there's just been an explosion of eccentric individuals (all worthy of their own novel) at the workplace. Isn't it weird how, in the end, these are the kids who seem to "exist" the most strongly for me, the ones who take up my daytime time and attention to the point where they've even started making appearences in my dreams?

The other thing the novel touches upon that I found interesting (which I won't write about too much now because it's nearing 10:30 and I'm exhausted and need to get to bed) is the characters' search for truth and (in Erdosain's own words) that wonderful phrase, "the meaning of life." Ha! Let me end this with a quote from the Astrologer:

"In the old days we could have taken refuge in a monastery or traveled to unknown and marvelous lands. But today you can eat a morning sherbet in Patagonia and be eating bananas in Brazil in the afternoon. [This book was published in 1929, mind you.] What are we supposed to do? I read a good deal, and believe me, in every book from Europe now I find that same undercurrent of pain and bitterness you describe in your own life." (87)

June Books

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

This book punched me in the gut and wouldn't stop. Those who say this is just another Updike/Cheever-esque angst-ridden rant about life in the suburbs is so, so wrong. It's not angst that Revolutionary Road is channeling. It's rage. Yates is one pissed-off MF. And it's not suburbia life that Yates is angry about (that would be far too simplisitic), it goes much deeper than that.

I read the majority of this book while The Real Housewives of Orange County played on my friend's TV set. "Close the book, you're being rude!" one of my friends told me. Maybe I was, but I couldn't help it--I couldn't put it down. I honestly can't think of a more appropriate context in which to have read it, either: women getting their Botox shots, taking their pilates class, buying their teenage daughters cars, while Yates writes (of the audience leaving a play in the opening chapter):

"There was nothing to watch now but the massed faces of the audience as they pressed up the asiles and out of the main doors. Anxious, round-eyed, two by two, they looked and moved as if a calm and orderly escape from this place had become the one great necessity of their lives; as if, in fact, they wouldn't be able to begin to live at all until they were out beyond the rumbling pink billows of exhaust and the crunching gravel of this parking lot, out where the black sky went up and up forever, and there were hundreds of thousands of stars."

This image of the infinite universe stretching out expansively overhead with "hundreds of thousands of stars" is contrasted with the petty, poisonous squabbles going on below. How sad that none of these people ever thought to take a pause, take a breath and crane their necks upwards. I just love these end-of-chapter gems that Yates sprinkles throughout the book.

I've wanted to read this book since I saw the film back in April, on Corey's laptop on the flight back from New Orleans. Along with Faulkner's The Wild Palms, it made me really, really grateful for the freedom I have over my body. It's really true: if you can't decide what you want to do with your won body--who to give it to, what to give from it--then shit, girl, you are really not free at all.

Most of RR is narrated from the point of view of the husband, Frank Wheeler, who comes off as pitiful and pathetic, rather than hateful. April Wheeler may be selfish and self-absorbed, but at least she's trying to figure out who she is and want she wants, you know? I can't believe that someone out there had the balls to think that this would make a good film: "Woooo, a movie about a couple who were once in love but now can't seem to stop fighting because they don't know who they are or what their desires are anymore!! WEEEE!" No wonder so many people I know didn't like it--it certainly hits close to home, and this fear of connecting to the book or film can definitely be related to the fear that it will somehow relate to your life.

I think the universal theme of Yates' book can be summed up in the words of John Givings, the madman character, who waltzes in at two critical points to turn the Wheeler's lives upside down. In response to Frank's sardonic comment about "the hopeless emptiness of everything in this country," John responds, "Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part... but it takes a whole hell of a lot more guts to see the hopelessness." (164) Yates has got the guts. He taps into the feeling of "this is wrong, this is not working for us, this is not the way things should be, this is not the way we should be going" that I think really sums up the past 8 years of the Bush administration. Frank and April's attempt to escape to Paris can be analogous to people getting out there and voting for Barack Obama: the feeling that they've had enough of this trap, that there had to be a different way of life out there.

In the end, I think Yates has two main messages in his work: 1) people are very lonely, and death is the loneliest experience of them all, and 2) counterculture rocks in a life-saving way. After reading and watching RR, I am now more than ever extremely grateful for the counterculture movement that arose in the 60's as a reaction to the McCarthy conformity of the 50's, which in turn was a reaction to the infiltration of the military mindset into everday life of the 40's. Here's to the sketchy figures like Arnold Friend in Joyce Carol Oates' "Where are you going, Where have you been." Yay for my friends like B. with their shaved heads, mascara and huge piercings. Yay for tattoos and piercings, for non-goal and professional advancement oriented careers, for environmentalism, for psychedelic culture, for Look at This Fucking Hipster, for Vice Magazine, for the Oregon Country Fair, Renn Fayre and Burning Man, for progressive leftist anarchist feminist hippies, for Naomi Klein and George Orwell, and for all the good bike-riding yoga-goers of Portland, Or.

Take this one for a knock-out punch:

"But the worst part--the worst part of the whole weekend, if not of his life to date--was the way April was looking at him. He had never seen such a stare of pitying boredom in her eyes. It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the driveway in the crumpled old Ford he used for a station car. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged." (61)



The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton

A good, fast read. I liked the idea of dissecting the question "what is the meaning of life" in less than 90 pages. I liked Eagleton's approach to the task, by discussing the phrase word by word (what do you mean by "meanng"? what do you mean by "life"?). He points out, very astutely, that the question itself of "what is the meaning of life?" is not a very good one, as it presumes/anticipates that the answer to that question needs to be very compact, like "42." How can you get a good answer if you don't have a good question? A very good point.

I also liked his discussion of how just there are good and bad questions, there are also good and bad answers. For example, "asphyxiating dormice" is not a very good answer to the question WISTMOL (my abbreviation). Literature nerd that I am, I enjoyed how he used examples from literature (like Beckett and Macbeth) in order to back up his arguments. In the end, Eagleton seems to say that people have come up with several answers as to what constitutes a meaningful life: love, happiness, altruism, nature, family, friends, art, etc. He uses the memorable example of a jazz band in order to describe how important it is to have a balance of all these different things, how you can sort of pick and choose between them, but you don't necessarily need to have one thing take center stage all the time. Our lives are never straightforward narratives, he argues, and few and far in between are the people whose lives have neatly wrapped-up introductions, climaxes and epilogues.

I also liked his discussion of Aristotle's definition of happiness (man, if I were to take HUM 110 again, I would so rock that class--that whole experience = wisdom thing, I guess), of how happiness is not a state of mind, but rather is connected to actions. Yeah, this is a good read, very thoughtful and involving, the kind of book where you could underline passages on every single page.

To this date, in June I've also read:
--The Easter Parade by Richard Yates (a fast, pleasant read, if not particularly challenging or moving)

--Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates (good Carver-esque short stories, none really earth-shattering)

--Dry by Augusten Burroughs (Boring. The only interesting part is his description of smoking crack.)

--The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (Cute for teens. Cartoony. A lot of unrealistic parts. Did he *really* have to suddenly transform into this amazingly successful basketball player? Even if I were 15, I'm pretty sure I would still only find this merely mediocre.)

--An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by Cesar Aira (another WTF?! mindbender from Aira. Aira is gonna have to get an entire post to himself here pretty soon. This is yet another book that easily captures the title of one of the weirdest I've ever read. Whatever Aira is smoking, I want some of it. There's a lot to unpack in here: a 19th-century landscape painter travels to Argentina, gets hit by lightning, and continues wandering the country with his horrendously scarred face covered by a woman's funeral shroud. Is this a manifesto about art? A reflection on foreign influences in Argentina? The question of civilization vs. barbarity written as fiction? All this and more, in less than 90 pages. It's really quite impressive. I think if I reread it (and in one slow, drawn-out sitting, as opposed to broken up fragments from me getting on and off the bus and other constant interruptions) I would get a lot more out of it.)

Right now I'm currently reading Aira's Ghosts and Arlt's The Seven Madmen, still feelin' the Rio Plata love. What next? Cortazar's Rayuela? Moby Dick? Should I try to finish Ulysses, once and for all this time? (eeeeh...) It's gonna be a long summer on the Max...

2666: no angel came

I went to Juarez spring break of 2005. I was a college freshman and the main preocupation of the trip was worrying about whether my Spanish would be accent-free enough to impress the Mexicans, and how much attention my ex-boyfriend (who also came along) would give me. Typical mindframe of the self-absorbed spoiled 19-year-old (I'm being hard on myself, but lah dee dah!). There are a couple of things I remember about the trip. I remember feeling completely terrified as we walked over the border from El Paso into Juarez; I was convinced that as a large group of white kids, we were going to be mugged immediately just walking down the streets (we weren't). I was impressed by how the people for the labor union we interviewed smoked inside their offices. One of them invited us to stay back at their house for the night and I remember being shocked that it was made of mud and tin--I guess I thought that since she wore nice clothes and worked in an office, the house would be nicer. It was very touching. I remember the anarchists whose house we slept in one night and how in awe I was of them. All in all, I think I was too young and inexperienced to absorb or analyze the experience properly. It was experiences like that that make me really believe in the validity of experiential learning: you really gotta get out of your self-absorbed head and experience education for yourself, first-hand. Your early experiences where you're kind of dumb and in over your head are like bricks that you're stacking for experiences later on in life, where hopefully your eyes and ears are a little more open.


In the same way that Che Guevara ate my May, Bolaño has completely swallowed my June. Maybe that's why this entire month has felt so weird and unbalanced to me: how can you expect to be in a sort of stable mind, when you're reading page after page of descriptions of horribly mutilated bodies of women found in the desert? Then you gotta put the book away, get off the Max and then hang out playing with kids for 6-8 hours. Talk about disjointed!

Unsurprisingly enough, there's a lot to be said about this almost 900-pg monster. I'm not even sure where to begin. I kind of feel the way I imagine I would feel after finishing "Ulysses" or "Moby Dick": simultaneously drained and exhilarated. I borrowed the book from a friend, so I couldn't underline any passages or fold the corners of the pages over when I read an excellent quote or a passage that felt particularly meaningful, so that makes me sad, because now, faced with the prospect of this "review", I have this 893-beast in front of me, and I have even less idea of where to begin than I would otherwise. So in advance, let me proclaim I am definitely going to have to re-read this, and thus analysis is definitely going to be very sketchy and first-impressiony, at best.

This book is very different from a lot of Bolaño I've read before--"epic" is definitely the first term that comes to mind. While other Bolaño books felt like the novels that Borges would have written (had he ever written one) "2666" is unmistakably and clearly Bolaño; there's no mistaking his style for another author's. What do I mean by Bolaño's style? I guess when I think of Bolaño, I thinkof the Murakami-like flourishes of what the characters ate or drank for dinner. The plotless plots where nothing really happens and nothing gets explained or resolved. His morbid gloomy view of life contrasted with the fierce joy his characters feel for reading and writing (a characteristic strongly reminiscent of Arlt's "El juguete rabioso" hero). That is Bolaño for me: witty, gloomy, harsh social realism, subtle political commentary, passionate crusader for the validity and worthiness of writing endeavors.

The book is divided into five parts, which all have titles like "The Part about the Crimes" (which unfortunately reminded me of the way "Friends" episodes are titled--the similarity ends there, thankfully!). The first book is the one most similar to the Bolaño I've read before: four literary critics, in the style of "The Savage Detectives", travel to the Mexican-U.S. border town of Santa Teresa (a fictionalized version of Juarez that easily deserves to be mentioned in the same breath of Macondo and Santa Maria) to track down an obscure German author, who may or may not have been last seen there. "I know the two of you will understand," is the last sentence in book one, but we don't.

Out of the five books, the fourth (the one documenting all the murders) is ironically both the most gripping and the most difficult to read. I feel sick about myself typing this, but it gets almost boring, turning the pages: oh, another murder, another death by strangulation, another unidentified decomposed body in the desert, another closed case, another police investigation that goes nowhere... I rached a point where I just felt numb reading name after name after name. The deaths quickly come to seem depressingly similar. Anally and vaginally raped. Body unclaimed and unidentified. Maquiladora worker. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, twenty, thirty-three years old. Bolaño isn't stupid, so this numbing effect is obviously what he was going for. What Bolaño does with thepolice detective genre is very intriguing, as he writes in this very matter-of-fact, CSI-documentation tone. The following quote is a pretty good example of most of the descriptions of the deaths:

In the middle of November the body of another dead woman was discovered in the Podesta ravine. She had multiple fractures of the skull, with loss of brain matter. Some marks on the body indicated that she had put up a struggle. She was found with her pants down around her knees, by which it was assumed that she'd been raped, although after a vaginal swab was taken this hypothesis was discarded. Five days later the dead woman was identified. She was Luisa Cardona Pardo, thirty-four, from the state of Sinaloa, where she had worked as a prostitute from the age of seventeen. She had been living in Santa Teresa for four years and she was employed at the EMSA maquiladora.

And so on and so forth in the longest chapter of the book. Anyway, so it's interesting that Bolaño uses this detective tone to describe this very physical, material evidence in the form of mutilated bodies, and yet despite all their materiality, this bodies embody absence more than anything else: there's no explanation for how they got there, no solution for the crime, and no resolution. Meaning is ecliped and absent despite this very matter-of-fact, supposedly transparent prose. Again: talk about disjointed.

This treatment of meaning by Bolaño is something that definitely deserves a lot more thought (and not just because of his professed admiration for Borges, who loved writing his way out of stories without centres). For a lot of modernist authors (like Kafka and Conrad and so on), meaning was still around recently enough for them to still be pretty bummed about it draining away. That's why so much of modernist fiction seems to centered around the absence of meaning, something empty and silent and critical: hence the empty caves in E.M. Forster's India, Joseph K's crime, Virginia Woolf's lighthouse, Onetti's goat, Godot, Addie's monologue. There's definitely still traces of that critical silence and absence here in Bolaño. One of the questions I have is whether or not Bolaño he sees this absence of meaning as something to be all angsty and anguished about, or whether he sees literature and fiction as sufficent compensation for the disorder and meaninglessness of the world.

On that note, I think one of the most important things to mention when discussing what makes something "Bolaño-esque" is his use of absurdity. In the face of some things that could just never make any coherent sense (like why someone would shove a metal pole up at 12-year-old girl or bite a woman's nipple off and dump her body in the desert), sometimes absurdity is the best (and perhaps only) option. By absurdity, I mean all the extraneous details that go on for pages and pages: what characters dreamt last night, and all the random people who pop in for one scene of the novel and just as quickly pop out, never to be seen again (WTF is up with the psychic lady on TV? The Indian carpet-vendor girl one of the literary critics falls in love with? I could go on and on).

Another thing to consider when trying to define the Bolaño-esque is this quote by the one and only Eric Blair: "a novelist who simply disregards the major public events of the moment is generally either a footler or a plain idiot." With his use of Santa Teresaa as his stand-in setting for Juarez, Bolaño is definitely making very powerful political commentary about violence and power. I see violence as one of the main themes in this book: this dark beast that we have in all of us, which we need to get in touch with in healthy ways (a la Pip from American Doll Posse), but when we let it take control of us--yikes. Even the first book, the one about the literary critics, has this very interesting passage where they randomly beat the shit out of this Pakistani taxi driver. No one escapes, it seems, irregardless of your literary and academic pretentions.

The second book ("The Part About Amalfitano") is a character study of a university professor who may or may not be going crazy. It felt like the most random of the five parts to me. The image at the center of the second book involves a geometry book being hung out on a laundry line, slowly getting eroded by the elements as the professor waits to see how long it takes for the desert to destroy literature (this feels like a very important metaphor for the rest of the novel to me: how does literature stand up to the eroding, corrosive effects of the really harsh, fucked up reality that is our everday lives?).


The fifth book is the the one about the German author, Archimboldi, whose name is apparently a homage to the the painter Archimboldo, whose work is depicted in the picture above--his paintings are of individual subjects that together form an apparent whole, just like how the five Parts in 2666 are meant to form one entire work. This book is the most surreal and dream-like. What to make of the last 3 pages? Why does this book end with a guy in a park talking about the different ice cream flavors his ancestor? Is it a commentary on the impermenance of art? The randomnee of life? A homage to Cesar Air and his fondness for strawberry ice cream in How I Became A Nun? Man, I don't know! Good God, give me a place in a PhD program and maybe I'll give it my darndest to figure it out!

"Apocalyptic" is another word that comes to mind for this book. When one of my co-workers saw the cover, he asked me if it was a book about the devil. "It doesn't seem to be yet," I answered honestly. I haven't even touched upon all the apocalyptic imagery and references to the Four Horsemen and the reoccurring images of the abyss and voids that keep coming up, again and again (as the review in Slate handily pointed out). Mental institutions and jails also appear in each of the five books, so I think that's probably important as well. There's also a lot of scenes that play with light and dark: on the last page, "Suddenly the park lights came on, as if someone had tossed a black blanket over parts of Hamburg." (893) Similarly, on the last page of Book 4 (The Part about the Crimes), "Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost." (633)

For Bolaño, is literature the only beacon that keeps us from getting lost? Why else would the story of writers (university professors, academics, journalists, authors) be juxtaposed with the story of these crimes? Does Bolaño think fiction can save us, or is it a petty refuge, a distraction from the savageries of realism implemented by bourgeoise folks like the Jesuit priest in By By Night in Chile in order to distract us from the torture going on beneath the floorboards of our houses? In By Night in Chile and Distant Star, the violence always took place "off-screen." In contrast, the violence in 2666 is very front and center. I think that's why Germany plays an important role in the fifth and final book: if you want to write a book about torture and mass crimes and the apocalyptic end of eras, then yeah, WWII Germany is about as good of a setting as it gets. "The bones, the cross, the bones," is all one character can say in face of it all, and that's about as close to the the expression "the horror! the horror!" that Bolaño gets.

A lot of people are going to write their doctoral dissertations about this book in the next 5-10 years. This book makes me feel proud to be alive during the period in which it was written.

For further reading:
- A list of all the names of the women who have been murdered in Juarez, from 1993-2006, with a brief synopsis of death.
- Very good article from the Nation about 2666.
- The best article on Juarez I've read on the Internet, written for Salon by Max Blumenthal.
- Tori Amos' solo performance of her song "Juarez" from 1999--she looks like she's about to burst into tears at the end.

Never Stop Reading: I Must Give So I Can Live

"We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain."

It feels good to end the month on a high note! Yesterday Laura and I got dirty from digging her garden, walked down Alberta St., drank a lot of coffee, had Happy Hour at the Tin Shed, and wandered into a music instrument store. Laura has her heart set on getting an oud but alas, her quest has been a bit hard-going. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get a keyboard, because it's a) cheaper than a banjo and b) I already know how to play it, you know? Sometimes, laziness does play the winning card.

I'm pretty excited about June and the summer in Portland. The Boys & Girls Club is closed for the next two weeks for summer maintenance and to get ready for summer programming, so that's been a nice little break, albeit a bit boring (there's only so much dusting one can do without getting bored). Right now it's so unbelievably hot in the house I'm not sure how much more of this getting-caught-up on silly computer stuff I can take, but I'm sitting in front of the open window where there's a nice breeze so I'm gonna give it my best shot.


How I Became A Nun by Cesar Aira

This is the weirdest book I've ever read in my life. I can definitely see why the Bolaño rave is on the front cover. The back cover summarizes the book as "a modern day 'Through the Looking Glass,' that begins in cyanide poisoning and ends in strawberry ice cream." That's probably about as good as a summary you're going to get.

It's also important to mention that although the main character has the same name as the author, it's never clear whether the narrator is male or female (she appears as a female more often than not). The NY Times book review focuses on this gender ambiguity quite a bit, viewing it as the key unspoken part of the novel: namely, more than anything else, this book is about a girl trapped in a boy's body. I don't know if this interpretation is what Aira intended, but it definitely makes for an interesting reading.

I liked the first chapter, involving said cyanide poisoning. The last chapter, involving a kidnapping, is quite Fargo-esque. The main word I would use the describe this book is "surreal." Or maybe "dream-like." What's up the section involving the main character's friendship with a boy who likes to play dress up with a plastic nose and his grandmother's teeth? What to make of the character's inability to "read" when he/she rejoins kindergarten, after his/her extended hospital stay? What does the title refer to? (The NY Times book review thinks it's a reference to Spanish picaresque novels.) What to make of this book, period? Damn, I've never read anything quite like it, and it's doubtful that you have either. It's pretty damn cool to read contemporary fiction like this.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die


A Mercy by Toni Morrison

I OWN I am shock'd at the purchase of slaves,
And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;
What I hear of their hardships, their tortures, and groans,
Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
(William Cowper, Pity for Poor Africans)

How could we do without sugar and rum? I mean, we like sugar and rum, right? We like our little comforts. They make our lives easier. We don't need them on the level as we do, say, shelter and food and warmth, but they sure do make our lives a lot better and a lot more comfortable. And when it's our own ease and comfort that's at stake, it gets very, very trick when we start considering where that comfort comes from, and at what cost.

This is just one of the questions asked by this very powerful, well-written book. Toni Morrison kind of reminds me of Tori Amos, in the sense that they can both pump out these absoultely brilliant masterpieces with an ease that would be monumental and earth-shattering for any other author. This book reads as a very effective companion/prequel to "Beloved." There's a lot to like here: the Faulknerian narrative, the poetic language, the history of early European settlement and the beginnings of slavery on U.S. soil, some Bruce Springsteen-worthy imagery of a man's dream house rising on a hill above the Virginia fog, a New World-esque motif of a girl struggling to fit into and get used to her shoes. Themes dealt with include debt, freedom, family, and ultimately how “to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.”

This book made me think a lot about Power and how I use Power in my everday life. There's this essay by George Orwell called "Such, Such Were the Joys," in which he describes how his experiences at prep school were his earliest experiences of fascism. Blind Justice being dealt out arbitrarily, for no rhyme or reason that you can see. Sometimes I feel like I'm teaching kids about Facism at my job. "Line up, it's time to go to meeting!" "But why?" they ask. "Why can't I just run around screaming? Why can't I just throw things on the floor? I don't like him, why do I have to stand next to him? Why? Why? Why?" It all must seem very silly, these exercises in How To Be A Socialized Polite Human Being I'm responsible for implementing, day in and day out. I think in the end, as Tori Amos sings on her new album, "I must give so I can live." A good mantra. You get what you give. You can use power (over yourself and over others) wisely, for good rather than for evil. You can be aware of it and the consequences of abusing power. It can make you appreciate, above all else, your Freedom, all the more so if you're a young woman.

Anyway, in the end I think the less you know about this book, the more you'll enjoy it, because that's one of the things I really appreciated: having no idea where the story was going and being constantly thrilled and awed by the skillful writing and plot development. Damn Toni, you write like a motherfucker, and you put us all to shame. It's the kind of book you put down and stare into space for a while after turning the last page. Highly recommended.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die


By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño

A very memorable, powerful book that asks the very difficult but important question: what is the relevance (if any) of literature to Real Life, especially when said Real Life involves political turmoil? (Specifically a military coup when people are being tortured and killed in basements while literary salon-like parties of the intellectual elite are taking place upstairs.) Is it brave and wise to read Thucycides and Plato when a democratically elected president is being overthrown, or just hopelessly stupid and out-of-touch? With this novella, narrated by a Jesuit priest who gives classes in the history and aesthetics of Marxism to Pinochet after the coup, I can see why Bolaño liked "How I Became A Nun" after reading this book. Oh, Bolaño. You make my life so much better. More than anything else, Bolaño has shown me that truly great literature has a strong connection to the relevant, to what is going on the world.

Rating: Read This Book, Bolaño Fans



Last Evenings on Earth by Bolaño

Amazing. Simply amazing. A must-read. Bolaño makes me feel happy to be alive, and how can a book be anything other than amazing if it makes you feel that way? Bolaño's characters fuck, drink, swear, travel, smoke, live in exile, feel homeless and above all else readreadread and writewritewrite. Standout stories include the title one (a contemporary interpretation of Borges' "El sur" ), "Mauricio ('The Eye') Silva" (which reminded me of "The Ministry of Special Cases," in the way it serves as a eulogy for the victims of the "disappearences" in Chile and Argentina), "Enrique Martin" (scary and disturbing, and more than a little Phillip K. Dick-esque), "Anne Moore's Life" (one of the few Bolaño pieces where the main character is female), "Vagabond in France and Belgium" (I liked the ending: "But she doesn't hang up.") and "Dentist," which contains the closest manifesto of Bolaño-esque fiction that he has perhaps ever written, as well as the following extraordinary sentence: "We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain." Oh, it just makes me want to sigh happily and hug myself with blissful, satisfied, sated contentment.

(The NY Times book review of this book is particulary well-written and makes for a good introduction if you've never read any Bolaño before.)

Rating: Read This Before You Die, If You Know What's Good For You


Nazi Literature in the Americas by Bolaño

The kind of novel Borges would have written, had he written a novel. Basically, this novel is an encyclopedia of fictional fascist right-wing writers; mostly from Argentina, some from the U.S., Germany, and Chile. Apparently Bolano told an interviewer, "(Its) focus is on the world of the ultra right, but much of the time, in reality, I'm talking about the left.... When I'm talking about Nazi writers in the Americas, in reality I'm talking about the world, sometimes heroic but much more often despicable, of literature in general." A very interesting take. Overall, the book's "gimmick" got a little much for me after 150+ pages. All of author's names started to blur together in my mind. I was slightly confused when I realized that the last chapter is basically the same story as "Distant Star;" I'd be interested in knowing which one he wrote first (I assume this one, as it's much less fleshed out and detailed as DS). I'd recommend this only to Bolaño fans because I can see how it might be tough going for someone who isn't used or into this kind of intensely referential writing (think of the footnotes in "House of Leaves" times 190 pages). The NY Times has another really good, well-written review for both the Bolaño fan and novice; it makes the interesting point that had the Nazis won World War II, this book could very well be true, you know? History is all about the point of view; in the case of this novel, it's from the loser's, which creates poetic irony but also makes it a little disturbing when you consider how it could all so easily be true.

Rating: Read This Book, Bolaño Fans and Followers of Borges


First Stop in the New World by David Lida

I read this book in a day. I'm very impressed with myself (as well as slightly horrified by how much time I spend per day commuting). I heard of this book when Corey and I met the author on the plane back from New Orleans; he was very nice and I am very pleased to say that I enjoyed this book very much! It's the kind of book I wouldn't mind writing myself someday: a nice balance of tone, a journalism and literary hybrid. Man, it sure did make me miss Mexico... those sizzling street tacos, mmmm. This book is about as informative and in-the-know as you're gonna get about the D.F. Lida interviews politicians, the richest inhabitants of the city, glue-sniffing street kids, crack-smoking cab drivers, newspaper vendors, artists and more.

I liked how he made use of Octavio Paz's "The Labyrinth of Solitude" when discussing Mexican culture and Mexican behavior. The use of "masks", both personal and cultural, is pretty central in Paz's essay, and it makes me think of what masks I use in my life. In terms of my cultural/racial heritage, I'm mostly British and Portuguese, with some Irish and German thrown in there. I'm basically a child of Empire. I was inventing this theory with Corey on the Max about how maybe historical and cultural baggage can have a subconscious effect on your own self-perception. Maybe that's why Searching and Self-Absorption and Who-Am-I can be understood as Stuff White People Like: we're all carrying around this weighty historical guilt from facilitating or implementing imperialism and colonialism. This is a really badly articulated argument that was formed when I'd had a few beers, so apologies for that. Anyway, all this reminiscing about Mexico makes me all the more pscyhed to see Luis Alberto Urrea at Powell's books on June 3rd. (The Devil's Highway is a really powerful, great work of investigative journalism.)

Rating: Definitely Read This If You're Interested in Mexico City/Mexico

Oh, Ernesto

The person who wrote these notes died upon stepping once again onto Argentine soil; he who edits and polishes them, 'I' am not I; at least I am not the same I was before. That vagabonding through our 'America' has changed me more than I thought.

The whole month of May has been swallowed by the 750-page behemoth that is Jon Lee Anderson's biography of Che Guevara. I've been keeping Corey fully updated on the different stages of Che's life for the past three weeks: “Che's bumming around in Guatemala with not much idea of what to do with himself. God, it makes me feel so much better about my life!” “Che just arrived in the Congo. Things are not looking good.”

This whole month of May feels like it just got swallowed. I could write something about how it's been a year since I've graduated and so now I have this great manifesto... but I don't, so I won't.

My favorite part of the book was the first part, entitled “Unquiet Youth,” mainly because it dealt with what I was most interested in: what Ernesto was like as a young man and what drove him to pick his particular life path. This was my favorite part because it was what felt most relevant to me personally, as a young person still trying to figure out the best way to manage my freedom, my privilege and my choices. It was almost with a sense of relief that I read about Ernesto's lack of direction and pervasive sense of uncertainty following his graduation from medical school. I thought it was really interesting that even though Ernesto was surrounded by all these radical Communists, Socialists and Marxists in Mexico and Guatemela, it wasn't until after (as opposed to before, or during) the American intervention/CIA overthrow that he made the decision that he wanted to be more involved. As he wrote in a letter to his mother, “The bad thing is that at the same time I haven't taken the decisive attitude that I should have taken a long time ago, because deep down (and on the surface) I am a complete bum and I don't feel like having my career interrupted by an iron discipline.” (162-163) I almost felt like cheering when I read this: Ernesto gives a big stamp of approval on bumming around for a couple of years!

I thought it was fascinating to read about the gradual formation and changes of Ernesto's sense of self. It was really interesting to me reading about how your childhood can have such a monumental effect on you throughout your life: as a little kid, Ernesto was so constantly sick with asthma, he was babied a lot by his mother, but also developed this incredibly fierce iron will to compete (like in rugby) and be considered as “good” as the other kids. As the biographer describes it, his asthma also led to his sense of isolation and resulting craving for camaraderie, which the author sees as the main reason for Ernesto's fierce adoption of the Cuban cause and intense loyalty to Fidel Castro. Being a guerrilla made him feel like he was a part of a group, that he had friends, he had comrades. God, it makes me wonder how my childhood is affecting my current life. It also makes me wonder if life can really be seen as a narrative this convenient, that this straight lines can be drawn from our childhood right up to the present day. I guess it's helpful to think so.

When Ernesto adopts 'Che' as his name, I couldn't help but think of Into the Wild and Alexander Supertramp. “Call each thing by it's proper name,” he writes in his journal near the end of the movie, signing his death note with his birth name, Christopher. Man, how hard is that, trying to figure out what your proper name is! Talk about easy say, hard do. It's something that might take a lifetime to do.

At one point, one of Che's comrades says, “In spite of everything, you can't help admiring him. He knows what he wants better than we do. And he lives entirely for it.” I think this is an accurate reflection of my own feelings. I could never, ever live like Che Guevara—hell, very few of us could! It takes an incredible iron will to do so. At times, he was a hardcore maniac to the point of insanity, justifying the executions in Cuba as “justice at the service of future justice.” (458) I thought it was funny how he was particularly enraged by “individualistic” university students with “middle-class' mentalities: “perhaps in the students he saw his self-absorbed former self, and it rankled him. He had given up his self, his 'vocation' for the revolution; why couldn't they?” The answer, Che, is we're all different. We are all different people with different paths in life, and it's not helpful to say that one path is better than others or is the “right” path or whatever. Some of us are constantly seeking happiness and contentment, others find it pretty quickly and effortlessly. That's just the way it is. That's what makes us so valuable as human beings, right? Our individual, crazy, unique messed-up selves, these ridiculous consciousness we're carrying around in the mushy gray matter enveloped behind our thick skulls?

In the biography there are some parts that indicate that Che felt isolated at times, like he was living this double life, due to his commitment to the “revolutionary cause.” At one point he says to Alberto (his old travel companion from The Motorcyle Diaries) “I live like someone torn in two, twenty-four hours a day, completely torn in two, and I haven't got anybody to tell it to. Even if I did, they would never believe me.” (608) As he writes to his mother, “I am still the loner I used to be, looking for my path without personal help, but now I possess the sense of my historic duty. I have no home, no woman, no children [I'm sure his wife and daughter were a bit bummed to read this], nor parents, nor brothers nor sisters, my friends are my friends as long as they think politically like I do and yet I am content, I feel something in life, not just a powerful internal strength, which I always felt, but also the power to inject others, and an absolutely fatalistic sense of my mission which strips me of all fear.” (433-434) I don't know if I could throw my life in a similarly all-in fashion in pursuit of one single goal.

It makes me feel so young saying this, but I remember watching The Motorcycle Diaries with my freshman year boyfriend in theaters on our very first date together and being extraordinarily moved. I was particularly struck by the montage of black and white photos at the end of the different people that Alberto and Ernesto. Here's an excerpt from my personal journal that I wrote on March 19th, 2005, (Gaaaah!) shortly after I came back from the spring break service trip to Juarez:

These are some things that I cannot quite get my head around yet:

1) The difficulty between making a connection between what you think and what you do. This is something I was discussing with Ian the other day in the rhodadendron (god help me, I can never spell that word) gardens. It’s very easy to think that “I”m liberal” or “I’m creative” or “I’m a good person”, but if you don’t acutally DO anything physical in this world that serves as a concrete, physical testament to that belief, well then it just doesn’t sound very realistic to say it anymore, innit? This is something that I admire very greatly about Che Guevara upon reading “The Motorcycle Diaries”: say whatever you might like about him, but he was extremely effective at forming a connection between his ideas and his actions. The equal images of a clenched fist and a mouth streaming ideas, resting side by side... I think I’m going to have to check out some books from the library in order to learn more about him and Cuba from a more academic, scholarly point of view, because all I’m going on here is the adoring worship of the people that I’ve been surrounded by throughout my life. I think it’s creepy that “The Motorcycle Diaries” affected me much more than I ever thought it would. At the time I just thought it was a big deal because it was my first American date or whatever, but look at me, I don’t know how many months later and still thinking about it. I guess it must have resonated very deeply within me, and I have this picture of my soul being struck like a guitar string and still quivering back and forth, months later.

I went on to rant a little about how I was changing my major to General Literature or Spanish as opposed to English and Creative Writing, because I felt it would be more useful. I used an interesting phrase, about "learning to balance the Howard Roark and the mother in me." A struggle that still continues to this day. God, I'd forgotten how excruciating reading old journal entries can be. If nothing else, they serve as a reaffirming validation that yes, it is possible for people to change, and yes, I *have* changed since I was a freshman. Thank god. Anyway, I just thought it was funny, reading what I wrote all the way back then, in context of me in the process of finishing this enormous biography.

It was fun reading about Ernesto's early life because his writings were equally melodramatic. I think he brought a very good definition to being a traveler rather than a tourist: roughing it, being dirty (his lifelong nickname was “El Chancho” (the pig) from how infrequently he changed his clothes and how nasty he consequently smelled), being as open and receptive as possible. I've been thinking lately that I want to try to be more like a “tourist” in my everyday life; that is, to adopt the same mind frame that I aspire to have while I'm traveling here in what I consider my “static” period: working, living in Portland. My definition of being a good traveler is to be as open as possible to new experiences, to try to stay away from judgment. When you're having an experience, to not so much worry about quickly judging it or summarizing it as “good” or “bad,” but instead try to reflect that “oh, this is an experience that I'm having,” and just kind of try to be in the moment, and then reflect upon it in full later. I think this is a good way to avoid the kind of stress you inevitably run into while traveling: late buses, mean people, bad food. I mean, I run into that kind of stuff here in Portland as well, but to some degree it feels less heightened, less intense than it does when I'm in a different country... maybe because I've been living here for a while now.

Here's to being a good tourist in everyday life.


Lying introspectively like Jorge Malabia on his back: a common motif among young brooding men of the Rio Plata region.

April Books

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

A very well-written, readable and well-argued book. McKibben basically argues that we need to redefine our understanding of classic economics: namely that more doesn't always necessarily equal better, not just for sustainable reasons (we're running out of resources on our planet) but for personal reasons (more stuff, bigger businesses and expanding economies aren't making us happier). It's an interesting argument and he follows through with it pretty well with practical suggestions on how we can refocus our energies on building more local economies and communities. I really enjoyed McKibben's discussion of behavioral economics and the science of happiness, two topics I find really interesting and know very little about. There are a few moments that are a little too "oh god, you are such an environmentalist from Vermont," like when he suggests giving bus drivers your personal mix CDs to slap on the stereo. Also, McKibeen seems to be writing for an audience that he automatically assumes is anti neoliberal and free trade, so if you're not, that might be a problem for you. (Disclaimer: it wasn't for me, I'm just trying to be fair and balanced here.) However, overall McKibben does quite a good job of making practical suggestions for how to make the world a better place and how to be more hopeful in general, which is a nice change from the more general "oh-god-we're-all-doomed" feeling of recent months.

The one part of the book that I keep summarizing and quoting to all of my co-workers and friends is the section where McKibben talks about the science of happiness. He asks the very interesting question of what was the time in our lives when most of us would say that we were happiest. For most people, they would say volunteering, with family, with friends, etc.... being around others. Being *out* of yourself and your chatty little head, and instead feeling like you're a part of something bigger than yourself. That really hit the nail on the head for me, and put into words something I'd been struggling to articulate to myself for a while now: what has brought me some of the highest levels of joy in my life was when I felt like I was "out of myself," part of something larger, whether in the hugeness of nature or within a community of people (like Los Embajadores in Tijuana), not as this self-internalizing super efficient/proficient utility machine.

Whether my enjoyment of finally having this particular feeling put into words actually leads to me doing or deciding something concrete remains to be seen. I think of my advisor's advice to me of why not to go to graduate school, at least not for literature, and it really rings more and more true for me by the day. He was like "travel! Get out in the world! Work with kids!" This summer, I'm gonna garden.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die



Keep the Aspidistra Flying (George Orwell)

An enjoyable if not earth shattering read. Orwell is the master of succinct, perfect sentences. Along with watching "Revolutionary Road," this book definitely helped put me in a weird mindset about the whole settling down into a comfortable career and lifestyle deal, while thinking that you're this person who's "better" than everyone else around you. The happy ending feels a little forced; if Orwell had been truer to the tone of earlier parts of the book, the characters' fate would have been a lot darker. Orwell said in a letter that when he wrote it, "I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100," which explains a lot. All in all, a nice fictional companion to "Down and Out in Paris and London."

Rating: Read This If You're An Orwell Fan


El Juguete Rabioso / The Mad Toy (Roberto Arlt)

Another book about a character whose life is really affected by money (namely his lack of it). I would have really dug this book in high school, a lot, and probably would have had a little bit of a crush on Silvio, the main character.

The Mad Toy took me a long time to get through, despite its 142 pages. I don't really know why. I don't exactly know what to make of this book. I'm not sure what the title refers to, for one. I guess "the mad toy" is Silvio himself, and the title refers to the way in which he often finds himself inevitably being used as "a toy" by people in power and by the mentors he consistently keeps seeking (and failing) to find. The final chapter (ominously titled "Judas Iscariot"), in which Silvio deliberately betrays a mentor/friend, can be understood as Silvio's attempt to subvert this feeling of always feeling like a plaything to others whims, and instead claim some agency of his own (at the stake of his friend, which is troublesome).

The first chapter is about Silvio as a young boy and his adventures in inventing amateur weapons of war and his life of crime as a book thief, smuggling encyclopedias and Baudelaire out of the school library. I love the sentence that he uses to introduce an anecdote about one of his inventions, copying the language of the pirate and Dumas paperbacks he loves. "A resounding adventure was that of my cannon, and happy am I to recall it." I like to repeat this phrase quietly to myself. It adds so much, narrating the events in our lives with a deliberate aesthetic style!

Needless to say, it says a lot about Silvio that his first career is as a book thief. He goes on to try working as a bookstore assistant, an apprentice airplane mechanic for the military, and a paper salesman, without finding much satisfaction. However, what seems to keep him going is his ability to aesthetically narrate his life and his surroundings, infusing it with what he experiences as an inexplicable joy:

I'm not crazy, one thing is certain, though... I know that life will always be extraordinarily beautiful for me. I don't know whether other people will experience the force of life as I do, but inside me there is joy, a full, unconscious kind of joy. Everything surprises me. Sometimes I have the feeling that it's just an hour since I arrived on earth, and everything is flaming new, fresh, beautiful. (150)

Silvio's goals by the end of the book are to "see glaciers and mountains and clouds." That sounds pretty good to me. The last sentence of the book is "I tripped over a chair, and kept going." It reminded me a lot of the last sentence of Catch-22. You jump out of the way of the whore's knife, life tangles you up and catches you off guard, but you gotta keep going.

Silvio's final mentor figure is the policeman who receives his confession/ratting out his friend, but doesn't arrest him. The wisdom he imparts to Silvio is "we obey a brutal law that's inside us. That's it. We obey the law of the jungle." A very true thing it is, human brutality. And yet it's not the only true thing. We feel as human beings, profoundly and deeply. What is it that drives some people to not just see life as a drudgery and a chore, life as 9-5, as a series of steps: college, job, marriage, children, retirement death? What is it that drives some people to make the conscious choice to love life, to see it as sweet?

I'd like to keep joy inside me. I'd like to aesthetically narrate my life, my day-to-day.

Love, poetry, gratitude toward life, toward books, and toward the world would send an electrical charge through the blue sinews of my soul.
It wasn't me, but the god inside me, a god fashioned from pieces of mountain, forest, sky and memory. (123)

Rating: Read This Before You Die



When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chödrön

A self-help book written by a Buddhist Canadian nun. I first heard of this book when my yoga teacher read aloud a passage at the end of one class that really connected to me. I recognized a lot of her advice from stuff my counselor gave me to read way back in junior year. She talks a lot about loving compassion, the importance of breathing in and out, exercising non-judgment. It's not just all theoretical, there's a lot of practical advice in her. All in all, a very wise book by a very wise lady. Even if you're not in a time of your life where things are falling apart, there's definitely some stuff in here that you could use.

Rating: Read This Book Before You Die

In April I also read Phillip K. Dick's Flow My Tears the Policeman Said and Ubik, both good reads if you're a Dick fan (hee), but not necessarily vital. I also read Faulkner's The Wild Palms, which hopefully I'll be able to devote an entire post to this weekend. And that was my April.

What a lovely afternoon

So much has happened since the last time I updated that this entry is likely going to be a big splurgy mess, trying to summarize everything:

- I sprained my knee on the dance floor on Corey's birthday night out at the Crystal Ballroom, during 80's night. For a week I could barely walk. However, as of today I'm walking normally, and went to yoga class this morning, the first thing remotely resembling physical activity (other than walking or limping as fast as I could to the Max) that I've done in the past week. Hurting my knee has been a chronic injury since I first sprained it playing basketball in high school; this is at least the third time I can remember it popping out of its socket. I think I'm going to be fine. I'll do some strength-building exercises and continue taking my housemates joint power-building vitamins (he's a weightlifter).

- Corey and I spent four days in New Orleans for French Quarter festival. It was wonderful. I tried making a list of everything I ate but it was too long. Highlights included alligator sausage, turtle soup (delish), grilled oysters (or maybe they were clams? I dunno, but they were AMAZING), crawfish and goatcheese crepes, spicy gumbo, incredibly buttery BBQ shrimp, ("there's some shrimp in your butter!" Corey told the cook), beignets, and an enormous crawfish and crab boil that Corey's uncles dumped all over a table covered in newspapers (we diligently worked our way through it, occasionally sweeping the piles of carcasses we accumulated into a bucket on the floor). Basically the whole weekend belonged to thisiswhyyourefat.com. It was wonderful. I ate so much garlic it reeked through my pores for 24 hours.I forgot to pack the camera, but his mom sent Corey some photos, so maybe I'll post those on the long-neglected travel blog.

- I was offered the Kiva Fellow position after a lengthy application process. So it looks like for 10 weeks (maybe more) in the fall Corey and I will be somewhere in Central or South America and I'll have the chance to opportunity here. Hopefully I'll find out about my placement as soon as possible... it hasn't really sunk in at this point.

So here's what the rest of the year is staring to (tentatively) look like: I'll be leaving my current job before I journey with Corey to England for two weeks, from August 17th to September 2nd, in order to visit family for the first time in three years. From September 9th to the 20th I'm thinking about doing 10-day vipassana meditation retreat. From September 21st to the 25th I'll need to be in San Francisco for training, and I'm thinking maybe I can cram some time a couple of days afterwards to visit friends in California (Ana? Cara? Leah and Kyndall? At least Grandma, if nothing else)...

Then I'll need to depart for my placement any time between October 1st and the 15th (it's pretty flexible, thankfully so). If I end up placed in South America, Corey and I still have that return ticket to Ecuador that we never ended up using, so maybe we could fly to Quito and then just bus our way to wherever. It probably won't work out that way because our flight date will fall on a year after we bought it (September 17th '08), so they'll probably charge us a chazillion bucks to change it. Yuck. Well, we'll figure it out!

This week sees the arrival of many friends visiting from afar: Los Angeles, France, Connecticut... I think my brain and heart might self-implode from happiness. Today so far: went to yoga class and did some grocery shopping, ate a yummy spinach-lettuce salad with oranges and balsamic vinegar, had a cup of super Irish english breakfast tea, read blogs about babies (don't worry, I'm not getting any ideas, I just got trapped by how weird and alien and fascinating they were) and listened to Ani DiFranco's latest album online. Happiness. Now it's time for laundry...