Category — Uncategorized

Time here in Namibia is an anomaly. Some days I feel like the day could not creep by any slower, yet the weeks seem to pass…somehow. It’s a strange feeling. When I was running, the days seemed to go back nicely, but it’s rainy season and it’s just either raining or still muddy. It’s mostly all sand where I live, so it’s not nice when it rains. And today, for some weird reason I felt very stressed out and ate too much. It was really bizarre and mindless. On a bad day you maybe eat some ice cream or a burger, not overeat beans and rice that don’t even taste good lol. Now I feel sick, and just shitty in general since I haven’t exercised in a week. It’s weird how you always “know” that exercise is a stress reliever, but how much you really realize it when you have no other way to relieve stress!

So, the hard day. Let me get into some of that. The roof in the house I live in has leaks everywhere. One right in my room. It’s been leaking for over a week, and it’s been raining everyday, off and on throughout the day and night. There’s carpet in my room. So, I was having to deal with not only a leaky roof, but a wet and stinky carpet. It was SO DISGUSTING. Not only is stepping in wet, squishy carpet disgusting, the smell was just horrendous! Words can’t even describe. Finally, my ‘host father’ or brother or whatever decided that it was inhuman and I had to move rooms. Really?? It’s been over a week my dear! But, I’m out of there now so I’m happy. But, also due to the rain, none of the doors in the house seem to close? It’s very bizarre. So I have some stuff in the room I’m sleeping in and still a lot of stuff in the room I was in. The door the room I’m sleeping in wouldn’t close and lock, and since there are workers that may be coming in and out, they want me to keep my stuff locked up. So….I toted shit back to my old room to lock it up in there. That door wouldn’t close all the way and lock. So I tried to open it and close it again, the door handle completely broke off! Also, the front door doesn’t close or lock. So here I am, with a broken door handle and no doors in my house that will lock. When it rains it pours! Here I’m using that as both literal and metaphorical lol. So the day just kind of sucked after that. The kids were bad today. And there’s a teacher at my school who I just seriously hate. He’s way too immature and the way he acts is just completely and utterly inappropriate! Seriously, you just don’t even know. He’s always trying to stand too close and touch EVERYONE. Today he asked me how I was going to go two years without sex? Excuse me? I don’t even know where to being to explain how fucking wrong this is. We’re at WORK mind you. WTF! If I come home early, know that I just couldn’t fucking stand him anymore!

Two years is suddenly seeming like a really, really long time! I know that I can make it, but yesterday I had a scary thought. Do I WANT to? First time I asked myself the want question. I do, it’s just hard to remember sometimes. I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere with the teaching, and sometimes I wonder if the kids even respect me. Which begs me to ask myself, why am I here? To help kids who don’t want my help and who aren’t getting any real benefit from me anyway? They warned us that the first three months of service are the hardest and the oscillations of highs are lows are both fast and drastic. Sometimes you just have to remind yourself why you are here, what made you come in the first place. Sometimes I even need to remind myself of the personal goals I had for myself when I came. Personal growth and all that shit. Anything to get through the hard times, because I know they come and go. I think also that I’m both glad and not glad that I know what one of the volunteers who just left this past December said. She said that “all” of the group going home were miserable….partly because they felt they were ineffective. Glad I know that so when I feel that way, I know I’m not the only one. I’d be really depressed if I thought I was ineffective and thought I was the only one. Not glad because it makes you wonder wtf you’re doing here! LOL. One thing is for sure though, I will be so much more appreciative of everything when I get back home. Seriously. Indoor flushing toilet, shower, washer and dryer, friends, family, electricity, movies theaters, coffee shops, food! The list can just go on forever. I never realized how much I loved my home until now. And by home, I mean the USA. You seriously appreciate things a lot more when you don’t have it anymore. And I don’t just mean material things and modernity. There are some cultural aspects about back home that I love and miss. This one is a bit more complicated to explain so perhaps I’ll leave that for another post (it’ll also include all the great and wonderful things I love about Africa and Namibia, I don’t want to give the wrong impression here). But yeah, indoor flushing toilet, heaven man. It’s weird how it’s like, when I have to pee, it’s sudden and with a vengence, it must be only cuz I have to go outside the homestead a few hundred yards lol. And um, yeah….can we say turtle head? It’s a good thing I don’t have to poop much lol. Funny thing though, I’m not nearly as germaphobic or bug-aphobic (haha, I know, made up word) as I use to be. I have a spider as a roommate. In the states, that would have been a big hell no, I even didn’t like daddy long legs. Here I’m like…wall spider? Eh, whatever. They stay away from people and eat bugs LOL. Germs. Psh. I will have a stomach made of steel when I get back, I will never get sick LOL.

Ok, I will have to stop this long and rambling post. If I post more often, I wouldn’t have to feel like I need to fit everything into one post huh? I hope to keep it up more often now.

So, I forgot my external hardrive so I can only post a few pictures today. Most of these pictures are at a squatters camp called 5 Rand.  Rand is monetary note of South Africa.  When this place was first being settled it cost 5 Rand.  I can’t load too many pictures at one time.  The internet is really slow and we’re not suppose to use up the bandwidth!  Hopefully I can post a little more later. Anyway….

Don’t know why I thought I could keep a blog.  I’v always sucked at it.  But I will try from now on!  I only get to come to town once a month though, so expect that I will only update that often.  I will be in town this Saturday though and will definitely post some pictures! Woo Hoo! Finally I know.  So much has happened (obviously, it’s been 2 months), but my host brother/father is coming to get me soon so I have to make this a quick post.  So yeah, this Saturday my friends were nice enough to want to come to town to celebrate my bday!  How sweet huh? LOL.  We will probably grab a couple of beers, it’s what we do on a normal basis!  I always knew I had a fairly low tolerance, but unless I’m crazy, it’s even lower now.  Who knew I could become even more of a light weight. 

So a few highlights before I sign off.  Yes, I’m happy.  Believe it or not.  Even when I have shitty days like today (woke up to find my ceiling leaked and a BUNCH of my shit was soaking ass wet, luckily nothing of too big of importance was damanged).  Oh, which reminds me, I’m at permanent site now (hence leaky roofs).  In a village out in the bush!  It’s beautifuly and quiet, lots of open space.  I started to jog again, which was scary a few times because I almost got lost a few times.  There’s no road, just tire tracks all over.  It’s somewhat hard to jog though, it’s all sand around where I live.  My camera is dead so I’m waiting on a transformer to get here to charge it, then I will take pictures of my homestead and school. 

Well, Tate is almost here.  (Tate = father, but you refer to any guy as Tate as a title of respect).  I better be ready to meet him since he was nice enough to pick me up on his way home from work.

Will be blogging next week.  Hopefully since I have time, it will be a good one haha.  But definitely will post pictures.

I have no TV and internet only at my old apartment.  The internet can only entertain you for so long.  Not having to go to work still rocks though!  I have some books lined up to read, but I still have a ton to do my last two weeks in Phoenix.  I’m so glad that I decided to quit my job early.  I would never have gone through my collection of crap otherwise.  I dropped of a load of clothes to charity today.  I have no idea why I was hanging on to most of it!  It’s weird how much pure junk I truly have.  I shredded so many papers and just did not understand why I even still had them.  I’m definitely a pack rat, but no more.  I see the light!  I still have so much stuff to sort through, it makes me tired just thinking about it.  I’ll probably have to do this once more when I start packing to go back to Alabama.  I can only keep what I can pack.  Some clothes that I want to keep, I’m going to have to say goodbye to.  Which is fine.  I need to purge lol.  I should make a new rule for myself.  If I go an entire month without wearing something (in season), it’s time to say goodbye to it.  I have clothes I’m clinging to that I haven’t worn in probably a year.  I’m keeping a pair of pajama pants that I COMPLETELY forgot about until I went through my closet, but decided to throw it in the ‘keep’ pile because they are so comfy!  Yeah, so comfy I never wear them.  Sigh.  I still want to keep them though.  I need professional help for goodness sakes.

I’m starting to wonder if I’m really going to make it out there in Africa.  I’ve gone without TV and only sporadic access to the internet for barely two days and I’m just seriously bored!  I still have DVD’s though (!!!), which is just sad commentary on how much I relied on mindless TV watching for entertainment in the past!  I foresee that I will be a vastly different person when I get back from Africa.  But of course, I was always kind of counting on that.  Let’s hope that I’m not a sugar addicted freak anymore when I get back too.

I obviously don’t have a readership (and may never), but for those of you who happen accross my blog I’m asking for a favor.

What are some of your favorite ’sad’ songs.  Songs are that are sad themselves or songs you listen to when you’re feeling down.

I’ll be hoping for a response lol.

Thanks.

*Warning..Spoilers-Do not read if you plan on reading the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer and have not done so yet. *

Disclaimer: I do not, nor will ever belong to the Mormon Church. I am not in anyway way pro or anti Mormon. I am not a religious person whatsoever and do not belong to any Christian denomination.

It was brought to my attention that Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez wrote a few blog posts claiming that Meyer’s Twilight Saga has some serious racist elements. Saying that the bad guy in the book was black. Before I read the book, I heard this accusation and laughed and was horrified at the same time, but I thought I could see that. It has been pointed out to me in the past some of the racist teachings that are in the Book of Mormon. After I read the first book, I told the person who brought the post to my attention (I still hadn’t read the blog post yet) that there wasn’t even a black character in the book, then got irritated with Valdes-Rodriguez because she obviously used the movie as part of her argument. Once I read the entire series, it was recommended to me that I read the posts. I was quite irate. The reason I was irate, is because I felt every point she made was erroneous. If I can quickly read through a book, without an analyzing eye, and counterpoint every point you make, then you obviously took these accusations flippantly and I don’t agree with going after someone’s ethics without evidence. This post may not make any sense to you if you haven’t read her post first, so you might want to read hers first here. Sorry I couldn’t link to her exact post, I don’t have access to it at the moment.

ETA:  Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez Post 1, Post 2, Post 3 on the Meyer Racism topic.

First and foremost I cannot agree with any notion of racism just because Bella chooses Edward (the white vampire) over Jacob (the brown werewolf). To come to this conclusion seems completely ludicrous to me. Should Meyer have changed her entire story so that she chose the “brown werewolf” for the sake of not seeming to be racist? I think that it’s pretty widespread knowledge that Meyer had a dream (this dream is basically chapter 13 of Twilight) and was so engrossed with this dream, she could not help but write it down, then she kept writing and writing, and then there was Twilight. What may not be as widespread, but certainly a fact that cannot be missed with just the easiest bit of research (which anyone should do before the go around assaulting someone’s character…just go to StephenieMeyer.com, like I said, EASY) is that she couldn’t stop writing about this story and ended up with a sequel (this sequel ended up being changed due to her editor’s preference to expand the high school years of Bella). The ending of the story has ALWAYS been that Bella marries Edward and has her daughter Renesmee. This story line was also well defined BEFORE Jacob was any sort of a main character. He was originally just a minor character of the story she had written. If you read Twilight, you will notice for yourself, that in this first book, Jacob is little more than a device in order to convey the legends of the Quileute tribe (Rodriguez wrongly said Jacob was from the Paiute reservation, she didn’t even bother getting the tribe correct in her post) so that Bella can figure out that Edward is a Vampire. Now, part of the legends of the Quileute are true, but she added the ‘cold ones’ into the legends for obvious reasons…the part about the Quileute legends that is true, is that the Quileute tribe was created from wolves by a supernatural transformer (see www.quileutenation.org). Which is where you can see the natural transition from Jacob’s story into becoming a werewolf. So now, because she did not change her entire story to make Bella chose Jacob, she is a racist? Where is the logic and reason here? Secondly, about the name Jacob, I cannot definitely claim where this name came from, but am unwilling to just agree that it came from the Book of Mormon simply because Vales-Rodriguez says that Jacob was a leader of the Laminites. What about the possibilities that the name Jacob came from the book of Genesis. Jacob was the son of Isaac, the grandson of Abraham. Jacob was given the name Israel by God, btw. Now, I cannot relate necessarily why this biblical story of Jacob to Jacob Black of Twilight, but let me tell you why I believe this Jacob of Genesis is more likely than the Jacob of the Book of Mormon. In Twilight, Jacob Black’s grandfather was Ephraim Black. Guess what Jacob grandson’s name in Genesis, the one whom he blessed instead of the older son of Joseph. Yup, Ephraim. Hmmm. Nothing racist about this Jacob from Genesis. Now, you could argue that it does mean she’s influenced by her faith, fine, but that does NOT mean her books have hidden racism.

ETA:  Upon further research, I found out through Borders Book Club with Stephenie Meyers that Meyer named her character Jacob Black after a Navajo boy she met when she was younger.  She says that’s when her love and interest in Native American culture started out.  See the video here.  It’s long so be patient about the part I cite.  This video was recorded before the release of her third book Eclipse.

I also deeply contest the idea that Jacob is in any way a sinful character. I would like to know where Valdes-Rodriguez got this impression because, if anything, I see Jacob as the truly GOOD character of the whole series. He is innocent, understanding, and ultimately the least selfish of them all. He stands up for what is RIGHT, even if that means a great sacrifice to himself. I was truly baffled that she called Jacob Black ‘sinful’ or bad in any way. She goes off on how she wanted Meyer to redeem Jacob in the last book. I never saw Jacob as needing to be redeemed. But, she did make him a more relate-able to me and got more understanding from me in the last book, where a huge portion of the book is from his POV. I’m really curious about Valdes-Rodriguez’s interpretation of Jacob. Valdes-Rodriguez somehow gets the notion that the werewolves in the story in general are bad, worse than the vampires. Huh? Did she read the same books that I did? First, the werewolves’ sole purpose is to protect human life, protect humans FROM the vampires. The Vampires in Meyer’s novel are not the ‘better’ of the two monsters. They are not portrayed as being the most benign of the ‘monsters’ or any such nonsense. Werewolves in Meyer’s world are unable to control their transformations in their first year of werewolf-dom. After that, they are able to figure out how to control the transformation and choose not transform into a wolf ever again. As wolves, they are in control of their behavior and they choose to save humans. On the flip side, Vampires are also very uncontrollable their first year as vampires. So much so, that the rest of Bella’s vampire family are afraid to allow her near her OWN daughter in fear that she might kill her. Vampires are very dangerous their first year, and some have a difficult time after their first year if they choose a non-human diet and some still ‘slip up’, they are more dangerous if they don’t choose a non-human diet, for obvious reasons. If anything, the werewolves are ‘better’ creatures than the vampires.

Valdes-Rodriguez also comes to the conclusion that because one of Bella’s unsuccessful suitor’s is named Mike NEWTON, that this is some dig against science. Hmm…What about all of Bella’s OTHER loser suitors? One’s last name is Yorkie, is this some hidden hateful thing against Yorkshire Terriers? If you are going to make the argument that she is anti-science, there was one GLARING example that Valdes-Rodriguez seemed to have missed (did she really read these books?). Edward seems to believe in Intelligent Design over evolution. Shocking, I know. Did this make my roll my eyes? Sure. But did she throw it down anyone’s throat? I didn’t think so. Bella asked Edward how Vampires came into existence, he gives possibility that they could have just evolved on a different track as humans, but favors some sort of intelligent design theory. Scary, I agree. But she didn’t attack the idea of separate evolution, at least she had Edward give that as a possibility. Edward says he doesn’t know exactly but clearly we know what Edward leans toward the one over the other. Still, nothing racist here.

The idea that you can use the movie version of Twilight as some sort of proof of racial undertones in the books is simply idiotic. I can tell you right now, that Meyer did not direct, cast, market, or even write the screenplay. In fact, this character that she’s going on about here as the bad vampire being black, was not even black in the book. He is “olive” skin toned, and take what you will of that, but he is only one of three ‘bad’ vampires in this book, and he’s not even ‘Evil’. In Twilight he refuses to help his two friends, the actual EVIL vampires, who, by the way, are WHITE in the book and movie, fight with the Cullens and goes up to Alaska to live with the other non human killing vampires because he is intrigued by their way of life. Now, he does come back in one of the later books to come after and kill Bella. Is he more or less evil than any other vampire though? Most vampires in Meyer’s world feed off of humans. He agrees to help the Evil female vampire find Bella, and decides she’s too delicious and will take her himself. So maybe he is ‘evil’ but I don’t think I’d say more than the other human hunting ones. I dunno, your call…either way, throughout the series, she mentions many vampires as having olive skin. Both good and bad…should we count them up and see how many are good and how many are bad? If there are more good than bad, do we say, ah yes, she can’t be racist? Or if they are more bad than good, do we say she is racist. Ridiculous, on both counts.

Valdes-Rodriguez’s last post on the racism and Meyer subject, she says she will be not only studying the Book of Mormon, as well as trying to get in contact with the Mormon church itself, but also will be reading the entire Twilight Saga again and taking detailed notes. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t know why it didn’t occur to her that she should have done better research before she attacked someone in the first place. If she comes back with better evidence of her accusation of racism in Twilight, then I will happily admit that she’s right. But I can NOT do so with the flimsy arguments she has put forth. To simply say that Meyer is admittedly a devout Mormon, and her being a Mormon influences her writing, is simply not proof to me that there are racist elements in the Twilight Saga. Sorry.  Nonetheless, I am anticipating Valdes-Rodriguez’s follow up post on this subject.

I handed in my two weeks notice yesterday morning.  I have been anticipating this day for a long time now.  I had been dreaming of the day I could barge into my manager’s office and proclaim that “I quit!”.  Of course, I knew it couldn’t go down that way but I had wild fantasies about it anyway.  It turns out, after all of that dreaming and anticipation, I was nervous and felt awkward about giving in my notice.  How do I go about it?  What will their reaction be?  Why I bothered to care about these things is beyond me.  But now it’s done and I feel relieved, relieved and happy.  Not all my experiences here have been bad, but recently, I’ve been in a not very good situation here that has made me fairly unhappy.  And I think that’s all I’m going to ever say about that.

Most people here have a surge of motivation to finish up the work they have been working on before they leave.  I’m working on a document.  So my motivational level is still fairly LOW.  There’s one thing about engineering, or at least, for electrical engineers.  Some of us may like test and integration, some of us love design work, some of us prefer FPGA work while others like software, but I have never met an electrical engineer that enjoyed writing documentation.  Some of them can barely spell!  I had a professor in college, smart Electromagnetics guy, wrote a big word on the board, which I don’t remember now, but wrote it down then asked the class if that was spelled right.  It was missing an entire syllable. Not just a missing letter or an erroneous letter, but one whole part of the word was missing from it.  For instance, if he had written Constitution, it would have read Constution.  Maybe Electromagnetic waves fried that part of his brain, who knows.  Anyway, that’s why us younger and newer engineers have the honor of writing these things, the senior guys don’t want to do it.  I did have one boss who wrote all of his documentation, but only because he was anal retentive, he was also the best boss I’ve ever had.  Not because he never made me write documentation, he did, on my own designs, but then, of course, that was the beauty.  He never gave me the task to write documentation on someone else’s design.  We got people here who try to convince you and themselves that if they make you write the documentation, you will learn so much about the design or project.  That’s crap, they don’t want to do it, plain and simple.  If they wanted for us to really learn about the design, they would have included us in on those tasks.  How would you feel if the your surgeon told you he learned how to do the surgery he’s performing on you by writing a document of someone else performing the surgery.  You would be horrified if that’s how doctors were expected to learn.  Because you know that it’s GARBAGE. But I digress.

This means that I have something to the tune of 6 weeks of unemployment bliss to look forward to before I set off for my peace corps adventure.  That’s A LOT.  Two weeks here, four weeks at my mothers house.  But it won’t all be staying up until 3am and sleeping in until noon (though, I can’t kid myself, that could very much well be how it turns out).  I will be helping my brother move, getting my things together, shipping things to my mom’s if necessary, setting up everything so that someone can look after all my financial accounts while I’m gone, and of course selling my car.  Then at my moms, I still have shopping to do and all the other stuff I need to get done and prepare for taking off to Africa.  I’m glad I decided for the extra no work time in Arizona.  I was going to work right up to my flight to Alabama, but now I feel like I don’t have to rush and I’ll have time to just hang out here in Phoenix.  I think I’ll miss this place.

I sat down last night to do a proper post of my wonderful trip to The City.  But I was just too tired and ended up just staring at my computer thinking about how my brain was too lazy to do a simple task such as blogging.  Anyway, instead of a proper post about my vacay, I’ll just post some random stuff about NYC.

Observations:

The big red hand of the pedestrian signal only has the meaning of look both ways before crossing the street.  It does NOT, in any form or fashion, mean wait at the corner until the little light man indicates walk.  But, if the little lighted walking man is indicated, it means cross the street without a care in the world, even if there’s a car stuck in the intersection blocking cross traffic.  This is why I <3 NY, pedestrian heaven baby.

Tourists suck.  For the native new yorkers, I understand your pain.  Toursists of NYC seem to lack common sense.  They do things such as stop in the middle of the sidewalk that is completely full of people WALKING, to gawk or look at their map.  HELLO! And I’m pretty convinced you can sell a NYC tourist ANYTHING.  They will also take pictures of everything and anything.  Like pictures in the museum, or them standing next to a painting in a museum.  Can you imagine being the friend or family back home who has to suffer through these photos?  ‘And this is me standing next to a Chagall…and me standing in front of the Andy Warhol Campbell’s peice….Oooh, and this is a statue of black bears on the east edge of Central Park near the Met.’

Only about 50% of the people you hear on the streets of NYC are speaking English.  It truly is an international city.  Now, how many of them are tourists, likely most (but ditto for the English speaking ones), but either way, it was so nice to be in that type of environment.  Behind English, the most common language that I heard (meaning I actually recognized) were Spanish, French and Chinese.  There seem to be a LOT of French speakers in NYC, I hadn’t figured out if the French speaking tourists were French or French Canadian. 

Chinatown is awesome.  Full of markets selling seafood and produce and other things I didn’t recognize.  Little Italy on the other hand, was just wall to wall italian restaurants.  Walking through little Italy, you will be continually asked by the hosts “Seat for (insert number of people it looks like your walking with in here)?”  I don’t know if I want to eat at a restaurant that has to solicit it’s customers.

Funny things that happened:

1. My brother and I were waiting to cross a busy street to get to Penn station when a guy looked at my bro and said, ‘Wow, you’re tall, how tall are you man?”

Bro: 6′4″

Guy: Wow

Guy: Can I have 75 Cents?

Bro: …

Bro: No.

2. In the elevator of our hotel room. 

Guy:  Are you guys from here?

3. At the bathroom at Barnes and Noble at Union Square this girl let me know that the reason the bathroom stunk like NO OTHER was because there was a bumb in the last stall.

4. The girl in line in front of me at H&M was completely and totally perplexed by the slide your own credit card machine thingy.  Then seemed genuinely impressed when after she swiped her card, it had worked.  She had what appeared to be an “American” accent…her friend let her know that the thingy “must be an American thing.”  Apparently Canada lacks technology.  Just kidding.

5.  In Times Square late one night, some oldish white man (though my bro said he looked ‘Armenian’) was cruising in his white convertable Rolls Royce blaring hip hop music on his radio, this caused multiple tourists to jump out into the street and take pictures of him and his car when it had come to a red light.

That’s all that’s coming to me now.  I’ll post some pictures soon.  I uploaded them to my computer at home last night, but that’s about it.  Laziness has a name, and I’m convinced it’s Amanda.

–

On a side note:  I’ve noticed a lot of traffic coming here having searched for peace corps motivational statement or peace corps cross cultural statement and so on and so forth.  Trust me, I feel terrible if you were directed to my sight only to be disappointed.  But seriously, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO EMAIL ME if you want to see these essays!  Just email me at arose81 at gmail dot com and put what you want to see in the subject line, nothing else if you are shy.  If you’re not shy, tell something about yourself.

That is the slogan for Frank C. Schmuck, who is running to represent District 20 of the Arizona House of Representatives.

I kid you not.