Californication meets Tranpacificism

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EEK!! The time has come! For the Alexander von Humboldt Conference 2006!! Flight to Beijing on Monday, need to write paper, need to pack..
aiieeeeeeeee!
Once again a birthday out of the country, this time in Beijing on the 8th, that’s kind of wild!

Well, I just wanted to post a quick update since this is so neglected, more later! Hasta luego, -@ (I might put some more stuff on that wiki page, time will tell..)

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And that ends that chapter, of a not so pleasant of an [academic] year, living with a math major, whose colleagues described him as having “faulty logic”.. it’s .. more than ironic.

It’s weird.. such.. overconfidence.. such.. long-windedness, and cockiness.. and I wasn’t really sure how to deal with it. Zach wasn’t sure either, that was a pain in the butt for him (to put it mildly!), a time we will never forget, but not for the best of times, but for the worst of times.

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Hidy ho!
 Well, so I spent several a minute last semester, and during the past summer semester in México, debating whether I was better off being an Environmental Science (EnvS) major, or if I would be better off switching to Environmental Resources Engineering (ERE), both degree programs here at Humboldt State University (HSU). Kendra Cecil and Scott Harris both mentioned to me that it’d be a LOT of classes if I switched to ERE, which I had an idea about when the chair of the ERE Dept, Beth Eschenbach, first gave me the graduation requirements list, days before I had even started taking classes at HSU! And I looked up that same sheet again the first week of the Fall’05 semester, and Scott ended up being oh-so-right, I was looking at, at LEAST, 6 more semesters, possibly 8 if I didn’t take a heavy load each and every semester. 4 more years?! That’s like a full degree, so maybe, I think, uhh.. no! I have to say, that indicates that it’s not a very balanced degree program!! I figured I’d been in school long enough, and chalked up enough units that it wouldn’t be so bad, but how wrong I was. So despite the recommendation from Lonny Grafman (and Beth (And Dustin Poppendieck)) that I should switch to ERE, partially because I’m supposedly “smart enough,” I think I’ll have to decline this go-round in life! Maybe next round. That extended time thinking, pondering, did have bases.
I want to be effective in whatever job I end up going into, and if a degree in ERE would cause that, it was something I had to think more about. Maybe a more solid curriculum, the stamp of approval that I would get, from being a “certified Engineer,” would be worth a lot.
But I really liked my classes. (Not only the ones in the past at DeAnza College) Spring’05 was a really nice, _VERY_ interesting semester! I don’t think I’d want to trade those “social science” classes for anything! They’re worthwhile, and they’re helping me grow. Maybe Engineering provides growth, but .. aye, it seems so harsh of a process and a thing.
Plus, in taking that Engineering 115, wherein we talked about WasteWater treatment, and visited the Arcata Marsh, a natural WWTP, I started to think. I had misheared/understood the tour guide, thinking that he said that our poo gets sorted out by the Archimedes Screw and landfilled, which made me sad. So I was still wasting water in my many times a day of pooing, and contributing to landfills! Uh!
((continued..))
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Oh, and so it was! The end of a journey. (This is actually being written in December, but I’m trying to frame my mind back to mid-August
So.. yeah. Wow. I don’t remember exactly what I’ve said before, so maybe I’ll rehash a little bit. When I was taking “Spanish” in high school, Sr. McMurray (sp?) took a trip to Spain, and I thought that was cool. I’ve long had a dream of going to a Spanish-speaking country. Around the same time (’94), we took a trip to India and stopped off in France instead. I tried to convince my dad we should stop in Spain instead, but I could provide no greater justification than because I spoke some Spanish or some such, not a very convincing case, but it should have been. They were set on that anyways, probably with little or no knowledge of what’s going on in Spain. But they just had the Olympics in Barcelona two years prior, come on!! The language barrier ended up being an issue, since the French are apparently not very found of speaking English (like many of the students we encountered in Mexico!) And the trip ended up being not-so-great, but it was still kinda cool. Wow, it’s weird to think that all those pictures from the trip are in the house somewhere, not having been looked at in over 10 years.. Digital’s such a different world! Glad to meet ya, digital files!
So, the vision of visiting a Spanish-speaking nation persisted for some time.. I definitely wanted to improve my Spanish, and I couldn’t imagine a better way to do that than immersion, especially since book Spanish is different than real-world. One of the reasons new English speakers have so much trouble. When I thought about where I’d like to go, Spain was perenially on the list, and South American countries. Incidentally, the Spanish Club is planning a trip to Spain for July, but now I’m not interested in going! Partially for $, partially because that’s the same time I might be in China, among other reasons.. And Mexico? She was never very high on my travel list — Spanish-speaking or even the world travel list. Maybe partially because of the closeness of it, and because it just.. didn’t seem very interesting. Not sure why exactly, but maybe I viewed it as:
Poor — culturally and otherwise. And there are plenty of really poor nations to visit. In fact this was one that we had clearly dominated and taken much/most of its worth, leaving little left.. Both in the past with land takings, and recently with NAFTA. I remember friends in middle school making jokes about the worth of a Mexican peso, the big fiasco, I think it was a currently devaluation around the same time, NAFTA, etc.. things just didn’t look up for Mexico, it didn’t seem like a place of much worth in many of these ways.. I can’t fully explain or enumerate my reasons, or even know if these were the real reasons, but potentially, they were why I was uninterested in visiting Mexico.
[continued..]
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