meanderings of a sunny domingo

Today was beautiful and sunny. We could see the mountains again. Even though it hasn't really rained here at all in 2006... which is odd to me. I'm used to being places where it rains. And goodness knows that it rained here last year.

Congratulations to N! :-) You rock. Though I don't think you read this but still. Yay!

S and I saw the film Mi mejor enemigo, which is a Chilean film about an almost war between Chile and Argentina in Patagonia in 1978. It was an excellent film. It is definitely in my top 5 Chilean films category. Yes, I have a top 5 Chilean films list. Not in any particular order, they are: Mi mejor enemigo, Machuca, Subterra, Historias de fútbol, ... well OK I will leave it at 4 because I am having a hard time deciding what should be number 5. I can think of lots of movies that shouldn't be - most of which I have seen on Monday nights on TVN's Cine Chileno. Yeah. that.

Wedding planning goes. It's weird because S and I have things agreed too pretty clearly between the two of us - we know what we want. Explaining it to everyone else is the challenge. At least here, where the custom of having the religious and the civil separate is, well, the way you have to do it. The most important part is that S and I agree and in the end, we'll be married. That is what really matters.

bits and pieces

We saw the new X-men movie yesterday. If this computer weren't so slow I would put up a picture. We really enjoyed it. Dad has to see it.

We've almost completed Lego Star Wars. It is sort of sad. But we have been playing Battlefront also so it's OK.

Update: We beat it. Which was cool, but it's sort of anticlimactic, as well we go the part where you get to play A New Hope before we got all of the vehicles. Nothing happened when we got all of the vehicles. Sad. Melissa recommends that I start over. That's what S and I did with Battlefront...

social time with the in-laws

Oh, bureaucracy... in the end it all works out fine but the process is really frustrating.

I went to tía Mari's house on Saturday, and S came after his exam. I had a very nice time with them. Even with my 4 year old admirer Matías, who really adores me. Ja, ja. He's so cute. Matty loves Harry Potter; when I got there he was watching one of the movies and told me (with a "wand" in his hand) that HE is Harry Potter and that I can be Hermione. And that his mom is also Hermione. Adorable.

Sunday was nice, in the late afternoon I went down to the mall with my suegra. We had coffee, chatted, and window shopped. She's really a wonderful person. I had a great time.

Yesterday was more crazy bureaucracy... have I mentioned how much I like the new Metro line here? It's blue. Which of course helps. But I like the design of the stations better than some others, they have higher ceilings. I also like the cars a lot... everything is even more clean than the rest of the Metro, even though this is the line that goes into the peludo part of Puente Alto. Speaking of, the Metro doesn't make me motion sick, rather the micros do. So instead of a 20-30 minute micro ride to the Bellavista de la Florida station (line 5) to get to downtown or Providencia or Las Condes (another alternative - an hour to 2 hour micro ride...), I can take an 8 minute micro ride to the Hospital Sótero del Río station. Which is not in as nice an area as Bellavista... but it's closer to home. Less micro time is always good. That said, in the dark I see a lot more sketchy people hanging out around the metro station... yesterday the micro came right away, so no worries.

My cuñada made this mobile thing for her room yesterday, it's quite pretty. I'm impressed.

I also had an excellent chat with my sister today - B, you are great! :-)

And S brought Mi mejor enemigo to watch. I'm looking forward to it. Another Chilean film... TVN has a Cine Chileno thing on at 10 PM but they show movies that are... um... not things that I would want to show other people. Last night I watched part of one called Tuve un sueño contigo and it was just really odd. And way too much gratuitous nudity. The one last week had that too, and with a lot of unneeded bad language (it was El roto) but it is still interesting to see them. As I explain to my in-laws, I don't see these films in the US. But I also can't see the Brazilian teleserie A escrava Isaura in the US, either. Ja, ja.

¿and what day is it?

LEGO Star Wars is going well. S and I are pleased with our progress.

Tomorrow we might be going out. I know, it's exciting. S also tells me that it only got cold once I got here. So appropriate.

Hmmm I made pasta with oil and garlic yesterday. I love that. And I appear to be the only one in the house who does. Everyone else thinks it's missing something - sauce, mostly. Mish.

I love watching my teleserie on TV. It's so much better than watching it on the computer. The news here has been sort of random. A bad bus accident (half of the passengers are dead), high school students protesting (I'm not sure why...), etc, etc. I miss NPR. But now that I'm not sick I am enjoying myself much more.

Champions

While I am feeling better - I can truly enjoy bread now :-) - I lied about the smog bit. Even though it rained a bit again last night, the smog is disgusting. S and I went to pasear at the mall today and when we were down there we looked back up at the cerros and - wait for it... - you could barely see them. I have never seen it this bad before. Remember also that the air here in the outskirts on the side of a mountain is much better than in the centro. Uf.

We um sort of forgot that today was Wedneday. Which meant that the final of the Champions League was on. How did we know? Because all of the TV's in the mall were tuned to the game. Luckily for me (though not for S since he is at school right now), Chilevision is rebroadcasting the game. Yay.

A correction

And I thought that all I needed was sleep... ja, ja, ja.

It turns out that my body has horrible withdrawal from the motion sickness medicine. Meaning that while it keeps me from getting sick on the plane, once I'm not using it I feel worse than I would have getting sick on the plane. Not so cool. That has definitely cramped my activities here, among other things.

S and I watched Se arrienda last night, I thought it was a good film. Even S who normally doesn't like Chilean cinema enjoyed it. It's quite self-reverential in some ways (Note the characters and production of Las hormigas asesinas, which figured in Por favor, rebobinar) but interesting. It's different from the other Chilean films I've seen.

Well - it rained last night so the air is slightly cleaner, but on the morning shows they had a bit where they showed the marvelous views of Santiago and then went to show the cordillera - only to find that the mountains are already obscured again by smog. Yuck. At least we live far enough from the centro to really feel the smog.

La llegada

I have safely arrived, and much to my delight the motion sickness medicine worked wonderfully!

Sao Paulo was interesting. I can understand the Portuguese and the signs and all but when it comes time for me to say something, it totally came out in portuñol. It was entertaining, though. The flights weren't too bad, just long. I dozed a bit. It was also odd to me that everyone appeared to speak Portuguese and English. When they made flight announcements, they were in Portuguese and English. 1 out of 5 times they would have it in Spanish, too. It was sort of amusing.

Seba came to meet me at the airport which was great. What was not so great is that Santiago was under a pre-emergencia ambiental. Which meant that the air quality was so bad that there were restrictions on the cars that could be driven that day. And just our luck, the patente on the car Seba borrowed was one of the ones not allowed to drive beause of the environmental emergency. It was sick when we landed, it looked like fog until we got into it and it looked like what it was - smog. It's sunny today but the sky's not blue. Blech. Today is also a pre-emergencia ambiental. Just so you know.

I slept 12.5 hours yesterday. It was great and now I feel totally recovered from the trip. Unfortunately I fell asleep before everyone got home, but I will see them tonight. Yay!

Joy and Terror

My school work for this semester is so almost over! Just one more read through of the last paper and I'm done! Yay! Grades are turned in (the exam was super quick to grade) and everything else is ready. I still need to finish my syllabus for the summer class but that is more figuring out scheduling for the different topics I would like to do rather than anything else. Not too bad.

I nearly had a heart attack today. After my ride to the airport fell through last week I thought I had seen the worst. But no. The airline had changed the schedule and had in the process made my flights way more complicated - literally, impossible. I was supposed to get connecting flight #3 from SP to Santiago at 9 AM on Friday, but this new itinerary didn't have me arriving in SP until 8 PM Friday! Besides which I don't have the visa necessary for domestic travel in that country... Not cool. Luckily, my experience with Orbitz customer service was exponentially more positive than my experience with Travelocity customer service. So now I have a more direct flight which means I don't have to get to the airport city Wednesday night. I'm happy about that, even though I nearly had a heart attack. And they are still issuing me paper tickets so I am worried if they will get here in time... who needs paper tickets these days? This airline is weird. But it's cheaper. And I needed cheaper.

I need to clean. My weird obsessive can't-leave-house-dirty-when-I'm-not-here thing is totally happening. Last week I was toying with moving the furniture to vacuum and maybe rearrange... If I do that, though I am pretty sure I'll wait until I get back in June. If I do that. Which is a very big if.

whoosh...

I have the first draft of my paper completed. This is excellent. Unfortunately I have a tendency not to use English syntax - it's been ages since I've written a long paper in English - so the first half definitely needs some help in terms of style. But that is what tomorrow is for. Ja, ja.

I can't believe that this time next week I'll be in Chile. I'm so excited! Despite the fact that I still don't have a tan and am going to winter. That part sort of sucks, but I'll be in Chile! With S! I can watch my teleserie on TV as opposed to on my computer, I can drink tons of tea and eat it with toast, I can sleep all day... and play PS2. Yes, yes, I will be returning to Battlefront II. We haven't conquered the galaxy quite yet.

Not the liberal academic establishment!

Any time I might feel like the academy is a safe place for the open exchange of ideas, I have to find something likethis.

Some guy went through a bookstore criticizing textbooks. He especially dislikes textbooks talking about African-Americans, Hispanics, Women, Sex, Marriage... I think you get the idea. Just get a load of his conclusions:

Against all these liberal textbooks, we at the OBO challenge liberals to produce any examples of conservative textbook bias. In the entire TIS bookstore, we found only one book that might fairly be called contemporary conservative: Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Amusingly, this seems to be the only conservative work known to academic liberals, who often suggest I read it, once they get over the shock of encountering a conservative. The profound ignorance of our faculty probably explains their impoverished textbook selections.

Recall that this University is state-funded. Should taxpayers and parents support the wholesale indoctrination we’ve exposed here? We are not arguing for an all-conservative textbook selection. We demand balance: the kind of balanced education that liberals never receive, and that conservatives can achieve only by heavy independent reading. One day, we shall have it.

Balance. Fox News calls itself balanced. There is something called expanding your intellectual horizon, and that might actual entail reading something you don't agree with and that might provoke you to consider thinking in a different way.

By the way, I came by this site (one among many) via a Google search of textbook bias studies. I guess this particular individual might have issues with writers I might choose to assign one day, too. He doesn't have to take my class. If he believes that by second guessing the textbook selections of professors in disciplines that he most obviously despises (note his comment on Gender Studies) he will get an education, I am afraid he is missing out on a great deal more of higher education than that which he fears his liberal peers are missing.

the news junkie strikes again

I'm peeking out from paper-land to note a few thoughts that have been bugging me the past few days.

First off, I home Ollanta Humala doesn't win Peru's election. That would be one of the worst things that could happen to Peru. Not that Alan Garcia is much better, but all in all, Peru would be better off without a leader who I see as a Peruvian mini-Chavez.

Continuing in the Latin American news vein, people in this country need to pay attention to what is happening. Bolivia's president, Evo Morales (who I dislike for a lot of different reasons... I'll perhaps post more on that later), has decided to nationalize natural gas. He sent the military to "protect" the refinery installations, built and run mostly by foreign companies like Petrobras (Brazil's state-owned gas company). I think this was a mistake on Evo's fault. We'll see how things pan out.

On a positive note, Zacharias Moussaoui gets to live in prison rather than being killed by the state. I'm pleased with the outcome; how can we claim any tenable moral position when we kill our prisoners? Phew.

And I submerge...