Californication meets Tranpacificism

I’ll keep this brief since I never wrote it (Yet).. There was this great philosophy that was oft witnessed during my time in the CCC, and it was embodied by the phrase: “Each one teach one.”  During our monthly banquets would be great times to share a new skill or other type of knowledge, but it happened everyday, especially when new people came to your crew.

People that I think of as amazing can generally be thought of with the term ‘activists,’ and .. wow, this semester I’ve been meeting so many amazing activists, notably ones involved with Accion Zapatista (on campus, kinda).  It’s been REALLY awesome, I’m like, in love with them or something, or at least, way enchanted.  :)  And I’d love to tell you more about them, but.. no time for that now.
When I first got to HSU, I stopped by the Arcata Co-Op and met someone tabling for the local Earth First! chapter.  I took this as kind of a sign then, and took their flyer intending to participate in one of their nonviolence training workshops, but never talked to them or otherwise involved.  I would have been interested in doing the training, and ideally supporting a treesit in some way, but, didn’t happen.  Maybe just keeping the thoughts and ideas in ones’ mind is value in and of itself though?
(more…)

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

(yet another entry written way after the fact and so pre-dated!)
Well, our story probably starts off during the 2005-2006 school year, when.. through luck of email? i decided that i needed to get in contact with the CRP (and also CCAT) webmaster. As always with my emails, there’s a lot of “unnecessary” or “extraneous” tidbits of information in there, so, in addition to what i intended to communicate, somehow, i ended up making my best email friend ever, KJ Coop! This isn’t quite a story of that, so I’ll make it brief by saying that, though KJ is way rad, we definitely don’t agree on all things (or see them the same), and since one of those points of difference is our opinion on school, I was sad to not see KJ continuing on at HSU this calendar year. Instead, now she’s up near Portland. Woa, that’s far! So, i think at some point she invited me to visit. (more…)

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

So! I probably got ripped off on the taxi to the airport (he said meter, I asked for an approximate price, he showed me a card that said 380 RMB. I had just exchanged 40$ and gotten about 275 RMB back, so I was like.. what! Too much! Forget it.. I got him down to 250, but seriously.. that’s pretty expensive for 30km, IMHO!), but I got to the hostel, the
Near East Hostel Add: No.98 TieShuXieJie XuanWu District.
Unfortunately I had (almost) no cash to pay him or the key deposit, but he took American Express (The new card I’m trying out, has a lower foreign currency penalty/fee), so it was alright. Now I need cash so I can get breakfast though! And I didn’t pick up my next ticket when I was at the airport, I was so distracted by the taxi drivers, they worked a spell on me, methinks..
I thought it was kind of funny, when I was filling out my paperwork, I just wrote
6/6/6 for the date on everything. I mean, you know, that doesn’t really happen.. it’s like, been a whole century since anyone might have done that! We’re 15 hours ahead, if you’re curious. I’m going to visit Ryan Townsend when I get to X’ian, we were in the CCC together. Uhh.. all for now, hasta luego! -@

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

So, once upon a time I wrote an entry about being sick in Mexico, at which time my whole class and teachers headed off to the capital of Coahuila, Saltillo. That actually wasn’t the weekend that they went to the ‘Zone of Silence,’ it was Cuatrociénegas and I was well enough to go with them. I always kind of felt like they had a pretty/really good time, and like I missed something by missing the Saltillo trip, and so I decided that I should go there after the program ended. After that, I met 2 people who lived in Saltillo and said I could live with them, one thanks to Armeda for inviting me to her “mom’s” birthday party, and the other on the actual way to the Zone of Silence, a Tejano named David.
At the last day of class, we had a big lunch with all of us HSU’ers, some UTC students and professors, and all our Mexican families. At that point Carlos, the infamous videographer, whipped out a bit (~10 min?) of all the videos he had been taken that summer, and it looked kinda cool too. (Little bit of graphics to make it “cool”er.) There was also a picture of all of us on the CD itself which was kinda cool. However, there was one thing missing from the video and CD Cover: ME! EEK!! It was confirmed, by missing Saltillo, I missed the whole program (as that was what one may consider the CD as representative of–our experience(s).) I dunno how I missed the shots he took at school, but whatever. All the more determined to visit Saltillo the next day, I was. Though that night was the big coronation ceremony for the Queen of the Grape Festival, and I still had work to do on the project. (So I skipped the former, which wasn’t so bad because due to rain even mi familia did too, and worked on the latter.. d’oh, on a friday night!)
I was also glad that I had long-planned this Saltillo journey because it gave me a deadline to be done with _ALL_ things school-related, the project write-up and website being notable among those. Having a final deadline for those made it possible for me to truly enjoy my week off, so I guess I am learning a couple of things in life? Sometimes..! So how was it?
(more…)

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

So it’s one of my birthday of one of my friend’s today (Agnes), so I thought that instead of being overly traditional (card/email with happy birthday song/etc..) I should do what’s appropriate for here. My birthday was a month ago (6/8, Gemini!), and I had Las Mananitas sang to me by a cool folk singer dude. This is a popular Spanish song in Mexico for people’s birthdays, so I goog’d it. First, I found a Flash version of it. Aye! I wanted the lyrics written though, so I couldn’t searching. I got confused about whether there was more than one song by this name, seeing the word cumpleanos (spanish for birthday) nowhere in the flash, I got worried. Ends up it is the right song, and I found a nice site with the Lyrics, along with a translation. Trying to keep entries smaller, so the actual song’s below..!

(more…)

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...