Corey and I are getting to know our new neighborhood pretty well. In the past week we've biked to the Dollar store and to this awesome sale at REI--we arrived in the last hour at the former, just when the 30% off signs were being switched to 60% off. Pretty sweet. I finally got a rain jacket after four years of being wet and sniffly.
I turned down the job at the Boys & Girls Club because I didn't think I was the right person for it. I'm still looking... I mean, I've only been back in PDX for eleven days, for goodness sakes, so I should go a little easy on myself! I have an interview tomorrow morning to be an ESL teacher. It's such a pet peeve of mine when people don't get back to me or follow up to the applications I send them.
We went to the Milwaukie Farmer's market this morning. Surprisingly, there was no culinary mushroom stand in sight! So we talked to the market managers, and hopefully by Wednesday we'll hear back from them if they have a space available to rent us. They sure did seem excited about having a mushroom stand, so that was definitely a good sign. The idea of going into the mushroom-selling business still feels a little hard for my brain to wrap around. But very appealing. We found about 20 pounds of chanterelles and lobsters last Friday alone.
I have 54 seconds remaining on the public library computer, so I guess I'm going to have to go ahead and post this.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
BACK IN PDX!
I've been back in Portland for all of six days, which is almost a week, I guess. Corey's dad arrived from New Orleans to visit us in Portland exactly 12 hours after we arrived from Quito. It was an exceptionally long journey, complete with food poisoning in the Dallas airport, then arriving at the new house to discover that the keys didn't work. COLOMBIAN KEYMAKERS = FAIL. Laura and Cara (who picked us up) were absolute DEARS and drove us back downtown so that I could meet up with my brother, get his keys and then drive back. All this with cramping and nauseau!
I spent the next day completely wiped out. On Friday I rode 40284934928 buses in strange dark corners of SE Portland. I ended up in the Gateway Transit center TWICE by accident, because I got on the wrong bus heading the wrong direction. Julie's navigation skills = STILL A FAIL! So far, out of the three interviews I had, I have one yes, one no, and one I'm still waiting for. The 'yes' I don't want, the 'no' I wanted, and the 'waiting for,' I am ambivalent. Such is the post-graduate employment quest......
This morning Corey and I biked downtown to PSU so he could meet with his adviser about working in the lab this semester and I could work on job applications and try to figure out how to register for the GREs. I thought that you had to take them on October 25th, but it looks like this may not be the case? I guess you can take them.... whenever you want? Depending on what the respective universities you're applying to request? I also need to remember to stop by the Career Services office to photocopy/borrow their GRE practice tests. Because I am a broke mofo and $35 per book in Powells is a no-no.
Anyway, the bike ride downtown this morning took approximately an hour, which is not bad at all, especially considering my chunky belly from a summer of pollo and papitas. 12 miles, most of it along the beautiful Springwater Trail. When we got to PSU I was high and tingly all over. Bikes are pretty wonderful, what can I say. I'm excited about biking everywhere and getting mad buff.
Other things:
- Went mushroom hunting with Corey and his dad on the coast. We experienced a moment of horror when we thought the porcini were infected with this terrifying white-powdery mold, but then much to our relief Corey deduced that they were another species, Old Man something, which is good because first of all it is waaay too early for the porcini to be out and second of all they are so delicious, a mold that killed them all would be really sad.
I spent the next day completely wiped out. On Friday I rode 40284934928 buses in strange dark corners of SE Portland. I ended up in the Gateway Transit center TWICE by accident, because I got on the wrong bus heading the wrong direction. Julie's navigation skills = STILL A FAIL! So far, out of the three interviews I had, I have one yes, one no, and one I'm still waiting for. The 'yes' I don't want, the 'no' I wanted, and the 'waiting for,' I am ambivalent. Such is the post-graduate employment quest......
This morning Corey and I biked downtown to PSU so he could meet with his adviser about working in the lab this semester and I could work on job applications and try to figure out how to register for the GREs. I thought that you had to take them on October 25th, but it looks like this may not be the case? I guess you can take them.... whenever you want? Depending on what the respective universities you're applying to request? I also need to remember to stop by the Career Services office to photocopy/borrow their GRE practice tests. Because I am a broke mofo and $35 per book in Powells is a no-no.
Anyway, the bike ride downtown this morning took approximately an hour, which is not bad at all, especially considering my chunky belly from a summer of pollo and papitas. 12 miles, most of it along the beautiful Springwater Trail. When we got to PSU I was high and tingly all over. Bikes are pretty wonderful, what can I say. I'm excited about biking everywhere and getting mad buff.
Other things:
- Went mushroom hunting with Corey and his dad on the coast. We experienced a moment of horror when we thought the porcini were infected with this terrifying white-powdery mold, but then much to our relief Corey deduced that they were another species, Old Man something, which is good because first of all it is waaay too early for the porcini to be out and second of all they are so delicious, a mold that killed them all would be really sad.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
LAST DAY IN QUITO!
I just printed out 984389238402 maps in order to help myself figure out how to navigate around my strange new neighborhood of Milwaukie, especially to and from interview sites.
To-do today: turn in mushroom info poster/sheet to Jungal Tours, trip to market to pick up last minute gifts, and then maybe if we´re ambitious (probably not) a trip to the dentist. Home to pack up the stray things lying around the house, such as toothbrush, pajama pants, etc. Then we need to set the alarm for 4AM in order to be at the airport two hours in advance for our flight (6.45 AM = FAIL)
I´m afraid of going back to the States. I´m afraid of having no health care and media saturation. Well, we have a return ticket in January, I guess.
The thunderous African music orchestra playing on the screen behind me has had the extra effect of making me especially jumpy and jittery.
To-do today: turn in mushroom info poster/sheet to Jungal Tours, trip to market to pick up last minute gifts, and then maybe if we´re ambitious (probably not) a trip to the dentist. Home to pack up the stray things lying around the house, such as toothbrush, pajama pants, etc. Then we need to set the alarm for 4AM in order to be at the airport two hours in advance for our flight (6.45 AM = FAIL)
I´m afraid of going back to the States. I´m afraid of having no health care and media saturation. Well, we have a return ticket in January, I guess.
The thunderous African music orchestra playing on the screen behind me has had the extra effect of making me especially jumpy and jittery.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
More Books Read In Ecuador
Here are some more reviews of books I read in Ecuador.
Lies My Teacher Told Me (James W. Loewen)
This book seemed okay to me at the time when I read it, and then exceedingly less interesting after I read ¨A People´s History of the U.S.¨ The information in both books is basically the same! At least this book employed a copious amount of footnotes, making his claim of a plague that killed off the majority of the Indians before the Spanish got there decidedly less dubious. My eighth-grade self would have probably really liked it.
Rating: Don´t Bother
Intelligence in Nature
A very hippy-dippy book, donated to the house by one of the beloved tour members, who herself was somewhat hippy-dippy but also very cool (throughout the tour I kept thinking ¨wow, I want to be just like you when I grow up!¨, minus the Dead Head phase, I guess). Throughout this book I kept wishing that it had been written by a scientist instead of an anthropologist. Anthropology´s fine and dandy, it´s just that every time the author self-righteously asked one of his interviewees whether they thought it was moral to do experiments on butterflies and slime mold (!), the inner hippie-dippy hater in me cringed. However, it was an interesting enough book, very readable, an anthropologist´s attempt to answer the question ¨is there intelligence in nature?¨ which inevitably leads to all sorts of other questions, like ¨what is knowledge?¨ which I liked a lot, because it reminded me a lot of (WHAM!) my thesis.
There was one quote in the book that I liked enough to write down, in the last chapter, which was about nature´s constant tendency to transform itself: Now other species seem more human to me, and humans seem more natural. Recognizing that the capacity to know exists outside humanity leads to a richer, more adventurous, and more comfortable life. Instead of trampling blindly all over the planet, we see that life´s prodigious powers are housed in all its denizens.¨ I like the idea of the necessity for constant change. I guess I fear growing stagnant, stale, crusty and moldy over the edges. It´s been a long time since I´ve had a routine. Never mind, I guess going to classes is a routine of sorts. It´s really kind of ridiculous how thrown out-there you are into the world after college. Another adventure!
Rating: Maybe Read This, If It Seems Like Your Thing
The Prophet
Definitely one of my favorite books now. I´d started but never finished it a dozen times before, but on a quiet day that I meant to be deliberately meditative and introspective, this was the perfect book to read. I can´t really describe it… the closest fiction author I was reminded of was Calvino, minus the po-mo stylistics. Anyway, you should just own a copy of this book in your house, so that way, one day when you´re in the right mood (preferably after doing yoga and listening in full to Tori Amos´ Under the Pink, you can read it.
Rating: Read This Before You Die
A People´s History of the United States
Again, another book that took me all summer to read. Even now I´m still not sure if I technically read it ¨all,¨ since the majority of it was consumed at bus stops, with me flipping around to different sections, depending on what I felt like reading about at the time. There might be a part in there about early revolutionary America I never got around to. But yeah, I knew this was a famous, best-selling book, so I was surprised at the strong Socialist Rhetoric. I thought America hated socialists! Anyway, one thing I found completely, emphatically unforgivable about this book was the fact that HE DOESN´T USE FOOTNOTES. HOW CAN YOU CALL YOURSELF A PROPER HISTORIAN AND NOT USE FOOTNOTES? THE MIND BOOGLES. End caps lock. The lack of footnotes somewhat ruined this book for me, in a sense, because it meant that anything he said, I automatically questioned myself, ¨where´s the source for this? Is he just pulling this out of his butt?¨
Anyway, just so you know, the most interesting chapters of this book deal with the labor and union strikes of the early 20th century. Maybe I´m just biased, because that´s a period of history I know very little about (Corey said he preferred the Civil War and Reconstruction bits, which are good too, if a bit skimpy, perhaps unavoidable in a book this large). Also, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the chapters about Reagan and Clinton, again, another period of history I know very little about, even though Clinton was the president throughout my childhood. I was too young and out of it to care about politics, though, the most memorable things I remember thinking about the Clinton presidency is reading in the Scholastic newsletter in first grade that Clinton played the saxophone and thinking that was very exciting.
Rating: Read The Parts of This Book That Seem Interesting To You Personally
Collected Fictions (Borges)
This book is awesome, Borges is awesome, what more can I say. I can´t believe it took me this long in life to finally read Borges from cover to cover, as opposed to just the odd Borges tale in class and different compilations. I especially like how the book jacket in this edition includes ¨tigers¨ as one of Borges constant themes, among the more obvious: labyrinths, libraries, detectives, gauchos, and so on. Really, I´ll have to go away for a while and then come back before I can write eloquently about Borges. He makes me want to continue studying literature, and that´s saying something. ¨The South¨ with its amazing last sentence and ¨The Aleph¨ are two of my favorites.
Rating: Read This Book Before You Die
I also reread ¨American Gods¨, ¨Three Cups of Tea¨ and ¨The Trial.¨ All good, read-now-recommendable books. I have yet to finish ¨Open Veins of Latin America¨ and ¨Crude Chronicles,¨ both books I´ve started at least two other times during my college days, but alas, have never managed to get all the way through. I don´t know why. It´s just like with me and Virginia Woolf´s (whom I greatly admire) ¨To the Lighthouse¨: there are just some books you have in your life that you always, always begin but never, ever seem to be able to get through.
In other news:
- Our time in Ecuador is drawing to an end! Only three days left!
- Corey´s dad is coming to visit us on September 19th, exactly two days after we get back from Ecuador! He´s staying in the house with us! Hopefully we´ll rent a car and go mushroom hunting! Hopefully I won´t seem hopelessly burnt-out and strung-out in the classic Pachico way, and instead will be able to adopt some of the easy-going, chill nature that is the Way of the Guidrys.
- I have three interviews lined up, two afterschool teaching jobs and one at a Boys & Girls club.
- I decided not to apply for the Fulbright because 1) I´m too lazy to finish the application, 2) I don´t really want to do it, even in the rare chance that I actuall got it, and 3) our new housemate-roommate is a Fulbright scholar himself and a bit of a turd who wants to work for the F.B.I. and corporate America and dismissed the Fulbright as ¨something that´ll make my resume look good¨ as opposed to an opportunity to do something genuinely wicked cool and helpful and great and amazing. I know you´re not supposed to let one bad apple spoil the barrell, but still, the exchange left a sour taste in my mouth about the whole thing. I think I´d rather do cool stuff on my own, as opposed to on the federal government dollar, bearing the time when I actualyly *want* and *need* it, as opposed to just applying out of my half-assed tendency to want to apply for EVERYTHING.
- I´ve been doing a cleanse/juice fast, just because it felt like it was the right time for it. I never thought I would be full from just drinking maracuya juice, but there you go. This has been a good way for me to learn to 1) exercise my willpower and self-control, two things that definitely always need constant work, and 2) how to be hungry without being cranky and intolerable, as I usually am. We´ll see how I feel by the end of today. Will I feel high and detached in the best Zen sense, or merely... intolerable?
Lies My Teacher Told Me (James W. Loewen)
This book seemed okay to me at the time when I read it, and then exceedingly less interesting after I read ¨A People´s History of the U.S.¨ The information in both books is basically the same! At least this book employed a copious amount of footnotes, making his claim of a plague that killed off the majority of the Indians before the Spanish got there decidedly less dubious. My eighth-grade self would have probably really liked it.
Rating: Don´t Bother
Intelligence in Nature
A very hippy-dippy book, donated to the house by one of the beloved tour members, who herself was somewhat hippy-dippy but also very cool (throughout the tour I kept thinking ¨wow, I want to be just like you when I grow up!¨, minus the Dead Head phase, I guess). Throughout this book I kept wishing that it had been written by a scientist instead of an anthropologist. Anthropology´s fine and dandy, it´s just that every time the author self-righteously asked one of his interviewees whether they thought it was moral to do experiments on butterflies and slime mold (!), the inner hippie-dippy hater in me cringed. However, it was an interesting enough book, very readable, an anthropologist´s attempt to answer the question ¨is there intelligence in nature?¨ which inevitably leads to all sorts of other questions, like ¨what is knowledge?¨ which I liked a lot, because it reminded me a lot of (WHAM!) my thesis.
There was one quote in the book that I liked enough to write down, in the last chapter, which was about nature´s constant tendency to transform itself: Now other species seem more human to me, and humans seem more natural. Recognizing that the capacity to know exists outside humanity leads to a richer, more adventurous, and more comfortable life. Instead of trampling blindly all over the planet, we see that life´s prodigious powers are housed in all its denizens.¨ I like the idea of the necessity for constant change. I guess I fear growing stagnant, stale, crusty and moldy over the edges. It´s been a long time since I´ve had a routine. Never mind, I guess going to classes is a routine of sorts. It´s really kind of ridiculous how thrown out-there you are into the world after college. Another adventure!
Rating: Maybe Read This, If It Seems Like Your Thing
The Prophet
Definitely one of my favorite books now. I´d started but never finished it a dozen times before, but on a quiet day that I meant to be deliberately meditative and introspective, this was the perfect book to read. I can´t really describe it… the closest fiction author I was reminded of was Calvino, minus the po-mo stylistics. Anyway, you should just own a copy of this book in your house, so that way, one day when you´re in the right mood (preferably after doing yoga and listening in full to Tori Amos´ Under the Pink, you can read it.
Rating: Read This Before You Die
A People´s History of the United States
Again, another book that took me all summer to read. Even now I´m still not sure if I technically read it ¨all,¨ since the majority of it was consumed at bus stops, with me flipping around to different sections, depending on what I felt like reading about at the time. There might be a part in there about early revolutionary America I never got around to. But yeah, I knew this was a famous, best-selling book, so I was surprised at the strong Socialist Rhetoric. I thought America hated socialists! Anyway, one thing I found completely, emphatically unforgivable about this book was the fact that HE DOESN´T USE FOOTNOTES. HOW CAN YOU CALL YOURSELF A PROPER HISTORIAN AND NOT USE FOOTNOTES? THE MIND BOOGLES. End caps lock. The lack of footnotes somewhat ruined this book for me, in a sense, because it meant that anything he said, I automatically questioned myself, ¨where´s the source for this? Is he just pulling this out of his butt?¨
Anyway, just so you know, the most interesting chapters of this book deal with the labor and union strikes of the early 20th century. Maybe I´m just biased, because that´s a period of history I know very little about (Corey said he preferred the Civil War and Reconstruction bits, which are good too, if a bit skimpy, perhaps unavoidable in a book this large). Also, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the chapters about Reagan and Clinton, again, another period of history I know very little about, even though Clinton was the president throughout my childhood. I was too young and out of it to care about politics, though, the most memorable things I remember thinking about the Clinton presidency is reading in the Scholastic newsletter in first grade that Clinton played the saxophone and thinking that was very exciting.
Rating: Read The Parts of This Book That Seem Interesting To You Personally
Collected Fictions (Borges)
This book is awesome, Borges is awesome, what more can I say. I can´t believe it took me this long in life to finally read Borges from cover to cover, as opposed to just the odd Borges tale in class and different compilations. I especially like how the book jacket in this edition includes ¨tigers¨ as one of Borges constant themes, among the more obvious: labyrinths, libraries, detectives, gauchos, and so on. Really, I´ll have to go away for a while and then come back before I can write eloquently about Borges. He makes me want to continue studying literature, and that´s saying something. ¨The South¨ with its amazing last sentence and ¨The Aleph¨ are two of my favorites.
Rating: Read This Book Before You Die
I also reread ¨American Gods¨, ¨Three Cups of Tea¨ and ¨The Trial.¨ All good, read-now-recommendable books. I have yet to finish ¨Open Veins of Latin America¨ and ¨Crude Chronicles,¨ both books I´ve started at least two other times during my college days, but alas, have never managed to get all the way through. I don´t know why. It´s just like with me and Virginia Woolf´s (whom I greatly admire) ¨To the Lighthouse¨: there are just some books you have in your life that you always, always begin but never, ever seem to be able to get through.
In other news:
- Our time in Ecuador is drawing to an end! Only three days left!
- Corey´s dad is coming to visit us on September 19th, exactly two days after we get back from Ecuador! He´s staying in the house with us! Hopefully we´ll rent a car and go mushroom hunting! Hopefully I won´t seem hopelessly burnt-out and strung-out in the classic Pachico way, and instead will be able to adopt some of the easy-going, chill nature that is the Way of the Guidrys.
- I have three interviews lined up, two afterschool teaching jobs and one at a Boys & Girls club.
- I decided not to apply for the Fulbright because 1) I´m too lazy to finish the application, 2) I don´t really want to do it, even in the rare chance that I actuall got it, and 3) our new housemate-roommate is a Fulbright scholar himself and a bit of a turd who wants to work for the F.B.I. and corporate America and dismissed the Fulbright as ¨something that´ll make my resume look good¨ as opposed to an opportunity to do something genuinely wicked cool and helpful and great and amazing. I know you´re not supposed to let one bad apple spoil the barrell, but still, the exchange left a sour taste in my mouth about the whole thing. I think I´d rather do cool stuff on my own, as opposed to on the federal government dollar, bearing the time when I actualyly *want* and *need* it, as opposed to just applying out of my half-assed tendency to want to apply for EVERYTHING.
- I´ve been doing a cleanse/juice fast, just because it felt like it was the right time for it. I never thought I would be full from just drinking maracuya juice, but there you go. This has been a good way for me to learn to 1) exercise my willpower and self-control, two things that definitely always need constant work, and 2) how to be hungry without being cranky and intolerable, as I usually am. We´ll see how I feel by the end of today. Will I feel high and detached in the best Zen sense, or merely... intolerable?
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