| Haidresser on Fire |
[20 Oct 2008|12:51am] |
So I wanted to write an entry about this Raymond Carver book that my sister and I are re-reading, called “Could you please be Quiet Please?” But Carver’s writing usually makes me nostalgic. It is Sunday night, and a lot of my friends are having a gloomy day, and a lot of people I know are feeling nostalgic. Kate is moving out next month, and I’m going to need a new job, and I am feeling sort of sad too. So I might as well post a funny entry about myself and my bad haircuts, just to feel like I am mending things in a way, just to feel less gloomy.
So here is the picture story…
Last month I had this idea of parting my bangs in the middle. I don’t know why. But I also believed that if I cut my bangs through the center, I would be able to wear my bangs parted more easily.
This is what happened.
So Kate and Liz, my saviors, noticed that I had been looking like THAT all day. And suggested I wear my bangs to the side until they grew out again. This is how I’ve been wearing them for the past month.
But they’ve been growing back. So tonight, I asked Liz to cut my bangs again. Here I am in these pictures taken tonight, looking like a normal person who just got a haircut (instead of looking like a weirdo who irrationally makes decisions in the strangest hours of the night about her hair, and how it needs to be shorter, or look different etc. and ends up with a Mohawk, red hair, stupid bangs etc. etc.)
Also.
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| Good Bye Kissy |
[24 Aug 2008|12:33am] |
I got a call this afternoon from my sister, telling me that Kissy died. She fell asleep in a corner near our window in NYC, where she used to watch the birds and the ambulances, the Chinese strangers pass by, where she would eat the flowers from Mom's pots. She fell asleep and Diana found her dead. Kissy had a tumor as big as Mom's red flowers. But before the tumor she had a happy life and huge cat eyes, she used to sleep in boxes and on the foot of my bed, she traveled through different hemispheres. She stared at the brown river from our window when we lived in Buenos Aires, and breathed over the glass, frightened by the silence of the snow in CT. She liked to jump on people's laps and used to go out in the yard, those summers when we lived in Beaufort. She never scratched anybody. She was the kindest kitty. She would wait for me to come back home in the middle of the night when I was high school, and her meowing would always wake up my parents. She stared at my sister's pictures whenever she painted. She listened to the Christian radio with dad in the early mornings, and she slept. She slept a lot those last days and she was not herself anymore, and her tumor grew and she fell asleep this afternoon under the mid day sun of August, and my sister found her peacefully dead. I had Kissy since I was twelve and I had her when my childhood was glistening and when life was something I wanted to conquer. I have no cat anymore, no bird feathers, faded memories of a faded city, I have less and less time in my hands, less loved ones in my life, less trust. You will always live in my mind Kissy. I love you pluchis, please rest in peace.
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[23 Aug 2008|01:12am] |
Nunca tendras a quien regalarle un pajaro.
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| It's Called a Stereotype for a Reason |
[25 Jun 2008|12:51pm] |
Given that I should have graduated maybe two years ago, but haven’t due to various reasons, I can say that I am an expert at sitting in class and noticing the same patterns which re-appear every semester regarding my fellow classmates’ usual discourses.
Every major must have its stereotypical characters: Computer Science people have to live up to their geek status, Business people are also expected to be in sororities and fraternities, and I was assuming that for us Philosophy majors, it was the stigma of being a stoner hippie. Until I declared an English minor that is, and realized that this stereotype was more adequate for students in the English department, poets specially. What might be the stereotype of the Philosophy major then? I guess most would say that it’s the typical guy who talks about Sartre at parties with the ulterior motive of picking up chicks. But I decided to be more charitable and explore further stereotypical options within the Philosophy department, so these are some:
1) The Nihilist
This is the most common stereotype given to the Philosophy major and usually it corresponds to the anguished, black eye-liner, black leather wearing student who holds the “God is Dead” claim and thinks that whoever believes in any sort of religion is a moron. Also, alcoholism helps them get through life and they are usually musicians too. I am against this stereotype given that I love Camus and believe that Sartre’s ethics was humanistic to the point that it puts responsibility back into the hands of human beings. But I have to say, I have seen this stereotype embodied plenty of times, especially at hip parties, and those who advertise Nietzsche too much and too loudly have to bear the burden of getting laughed the most.
2) The Pragmatist
Common in the United States, students who have read any James Dewey, William James or Richard Rorty, tend to ignore whatever any Ancient, Medieval or Modern philosopher has to say to us about substance, essence, universals and grand narratives in general. Instead they argue that the quest for certainty has led us in the wrong path, and that whatever we think is essentially stable might always change, thus, Truth is only a social construction.
This is how they tend to argue:
I am sitting in my Modern Philosophy class and my professor is explaining Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. We get to the categories of the mind and one of my fellow classmates, also a Dewey fan raises his hand.
“I think that you can still have experience WITHOUT those categories. WHY ARE THERE CATEGORIES I DON’T BUY KANT’S CATEGORIES.”
Etc.
Pragmatism has always interested me for applied Ethics, but the fact that its metaphysics becomes frail and fallible scares a lot of thinkers. Because metaphysics would only be sustained either by “the pragmatic rule” which is what James defended, or based on its usefulness which was Dewey’s approach, it becomes unimportant and this brings consequences to philosophy in general, duh.
3) The Feminist
Female usually, who took plenty of women’s studies classes and tends to submit every western white male in the history of philosophy through the looking glass of feminist theory. This is not always an easy task, but once learnt, it has proved effective in achieving good grades specially when the teacher is a white male and has to respond well to the minority and diversity policies of the college. Example: I have done this a few times when pressed with deadlines. Instead of writing my paper on the different degrees of reality or substance posed by rationalists and empiricists thinkers in Modern Philosophy, I did a feminist reading of Kantian Ethics. Instead of writing a paper on Habermmas’ Universality Principle for my Contemporary Philosophy class, I switched it, asking: “Does Habermmas’ Universality Principle Coincide with Feminist Thought?” This, although extremely interesting can become monotonous when abused, and has kept me from investigating other issues in the history of Philosophy that might have been useful too.
Also, out of experience, and following the stereotype, students tend to assume that the feminist is also a lesbian, especially if she dresses somewhat conservative.
4) The Analytic Philosophy student against the Continental Philosophy student
To portray another stereotypical from of arguing between two stereotypes of students I will beforehand explain a few things.
Most of us know about the contemporary Heidegger/ Carnap controversy over here but I’ll still tell you about it. While one was a Continental philosopher, the other was an Analytic. Carnap’s analytic method of verification intended to eliminate metaphysics through the logical analysis of language. He took plenty of shots at Heidegger who supported a unique metaphysics, by stating that Heidegger’s system was convoluted with pseudo-statements, so it meant nothing mainly because it couldn’t be verified in the world etc. At the same time, Heidegger responded back by explaining how metaphysical terms such as his idea of Dasein reveal themselves to us only when we cease to think rationally and when we cease to impose out thinking on the world. This was obviously something Carnap instantly rejected, and none of them managed to find even a common ground to argue given that the method of logical analysis which Carnap defended was as unworthy to Heidegger as his metaphysics was meaningless to Carnap.
This is to say that although plenty of times I have heard how both the Continental and Analytic branches of Philosophy tend to coincide and meet at certain points (Pragmatism.) I haven’t seen it happen yet in class. The few times we students even know what side it is that we are taking, this is what happens:
When one classmate argues for something, the other will find a logical fallacy in their argument. When one makes a claim, the other makes sure this claim has a correspondence in reality. If it doesn’t then it is meaningless and the other argument is fallacious and wrong, etc.
Contemporary philosophers in my experience tend to be more interested in literature, aesthetics and ethics, while Analytic philosophers are amazing logicians, good at math, music etc. I am not taking sides, but being aware that there is something called poetry which is what Heidegger used to explain Dasein when he exceeded the limits of rationality, and that there is something called “metaphor” which is not supposed to be taken literally, might be good advice for analytic philosophers. Then again, if you cannot even tell a modus ponens from a modus tollens, or what a double negation is, then what are you doing in a philosophy program and, yes, how are you even planning to support your claim? (I am asking this to myself.)
5) The Stoner
Not as bad as English majors, but we have them too. I am not planning to describe this obvious stereotype except with a brief example:
I am sitting in my Modern Philosophy class as my professor finishes explaining Hume’s empiricism. He asks us what we think about it and stoner guy raises his hand.
“It’s cool. I think Hume was on grass when he wrote it. Huh. Ha.”
Another example:
“Spinoza must have been on LSD. Huh. Haaaa”
Etc.
6) The Marxist
To the Marxist, everything becomes part of the history of class struggles. Every thinker can be judged from a Marxist perspective and who ever isn’t a Marxist is an Imperialistic capitalistic jerk, basically. I am a Marxist, so I am probably a good example of the stereotype. The problem with the Marxist is that at some point they might have to find a job in an Insurance office or work as secretaries in corporate America, and they might need medical insurance which is not socialist at all in this country, so they might have to sell out a little only for these reasons while keeping up with the Marxist analysis in other areas of their life.
7) The English major who takes a Philosophy class
Here we have the student who reads philosophy as if it were literature. I still do this when I give up trying to understand Heidegger’s arguments and decide to read him like he were Proust. But certain essays by Quine, Davidson or Carnap to state a few are not meant to be read as literary masterpieces nor are they meant to be deconstructed or critiqued using literary approaches. Here, the English major who takes a philosophy class for the first time falls victim of the stereotype. Common responses to philosophy by English majors tend to go like this:
“This is really WELL written. But I don’t understand Rorty’s claim at all, but he does good comparisons between philosophers, and he’s a good writer, so he must be good.”
“I think Dewey’s style is very clear. It was easy to read. He is a good writer”
Etc.
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[11 Jan 2008|12:36am] |
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I found myself in the basement of a Catholic church this evening attending a meeting for people with bi polar disorder, my friend Tony sitting next to me as we listened to an older Lesbian telling us about her partner’s problem with depression. He owes me big time, especially for making me run into a life size statue of Christ in the hallway that we confused with a real person. Also, we couldn’t find the room and walked into a choir class by mistake. Also, some bi polar guy came up to me as Tony was getting a few pamphlets and abruptly asked me for my number like if it was my duty to give it out. I still have the folded piece of paper in my pocket, his name spelled in shaky handwriting and hopefully I won’t go back there again.
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[06 Jan 2008|03:06am] |
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I write this and the house is silent, and all my roommates have company. The party is over when there is nobody else to pour your heart out to I guess? But I had such a nice time this afternoon raking the leaves and making spirals in the ground with Cherie. Tonight I actually stayed past bedtime without regrets. We also got to meet Tony (everythingrises) who seems to like Charlotte even though he moved from NYC. But maybe it’s only because Cherie talked to him about literature the entire time and Liz served him wine in a glass. What else can I say? I can count all my New Year resolutions with my fingers and at some point there will be no more fingers left, and yet I need to do better. This year will be my time to become skeptical about love. Also, I am unemployed. Also, I was about to eat a slice of pizza until a guy accidentally threw cigarette ashes on it. Maybe tomorrow instead of putting all those leaves in bags I should just pour gasoline and burn them. I am kidding really. I have not reached that point of insanity yet and being crazy stopped feeling cool by the time I turned nineteen anyway.I love you all.
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| The New Year ( Circa 2002) |
[31 Dec 2007|09:31pm] |
I had many fun New Years but this one was my most bizarre and it happened almost six years ago when I was seventeen and my sister Diana was sixteen. We lived in a three-room apartment with my family in Buenos Aires, Argentina and it never snowed there but was always stuffy and loud. We would have dinner together and then mom and dad would go to sleep. My sister and I would usually take the bus to the centric area of town and celebrate in some basement party until the sunrise. But this was the year when I had started staying in my room with Diana every weekend, listening to The Cure and drinking Baileys we stole from our older sister. We had no intention of going out this New Year either and were still feeling funny from the champagne. Our friend Ira called a while later:
“ Hey.”
“ Hey.”
“ I don’t want to go down town and I don’t want to stay by myself in my room. Can I come over?”
“ Yeah.” I answered.
Ira had shaved her eyebrows at the time after one of her existential crisis’s and would paint her eyes with blue eye shadow and glitter. Her hair was sometimes black, sometimes bright pink and she liked singing Ramones songs on the bus with me whenever we traveled. I had never been in Love, at all, at that age, but what I knew was that I loved Ira, and my sister Diana and I loved my friend Jasmine whose picture hung on my wall, and that was enough. I needed no more than that.
Ira came over thirty minutes later and we all decided to go downstairs and sit on the steps of our apartment building, to get some fresh air. Most people would consider this a drag, but it was amazing what could happen after midnight in the city. Old ladies walking their dogs in leopard print tights and bathrobes, musicians skipping back home from band practice, cars honking their horns through the avenue, garbage collectors gathering cans they would later sell for a few dollars. That night we all talked about our day and about next year as the last of the fireworks died off, the city lights melting in the distance under the humidity of summer. And that’s when we saw the flashing light coming from a window, it was half a block away in the building in front of ours. Ira pointed this out and we all looked towards that window were a guy wearing a bathrobe held a flashlight and waved at us.
“ Is he waving at us?” I asked.
“ Let’s go back up and watch TV,” Diana said.
But Ira wasn’t paying attention to her: “ He definitely wants our attention, what a perv.”
That was the moment when it hit me: I knew this guy from the neighborhood and I also knew that he was a male stripper. The reason why I knew it is this:
I used to walk down to the river after school, usually by myself and lost in thought, while joggers ran past me. Once I arrived to the pier there were always the fisherman, so I never felt alone in their presence. But there was one guy, probably in his thirties, who would jog every evening with his dog, and I noticed him because he wore a blue cap and really short shorts that grossed me out. One evening I heard a voice calling my attention and there he was wearing the blue cap and holding his dog on a leash.
“ You dropped this.” He said, handing me a small, folded piece of paper.
This man looked pretty harmless, but also pretty desperate. I noticed that his legs were shaved and by making this observation I reacted too late. By the time I told him that I did not drop anything, and that he was wrong, the paper was in my hand and he was jogging past me.
“ Carlos Jimenez. Stripper ” It said
“ I can entertain your bachelorete party or birthday.” Underneath there was a phone number.
What a way to offer a service.
But it did not end there. Mr. Stripper also jogged behind me one week later, while I was riding my bike with my friend Jasmine as he kept repeating: “ Hey! You dropped this!” I knew better this time and pedaled faster, telling Jasmine to hurry her pace. Mr. Stripper jogged faster, that small piece of paper in his hand.
“ You dropped this!” he kept yelling.
“ No. I did not drop anything! Stop it.” I yelled back as I pedaled.
But it seemed that he wouldn’t give up. And there we were: me, my sister and Ira sitting downstairs as the fireworks of the new year died in the night. Staring at Mr. Stripper, who had caught our attention and was waving at us and doing stupid poses. The idea of any type of danger never hit us though and now that I reflect on it, this was just another one of those bizarre events you witnessed growing up in the city, and it was no better or worse than others we had gone through.
Mr. Stripper left the flashlight down and his figure dimmed. We could still see that he was holding a sign now, against his window. The first sign had the number seven printed on it, the next sign: a two, the next: a five and the sequence carried on until he had given us his phone number, again, but this time from the building half-block away. He was dancing stupidly now and maybe trying to look sexy.
Ira kept yelling at him: “ What are you doing! Stop!” I was laughing amazed and Diana was covering her eyes.
This is when he dropped his bathrobe.
Diana yelled “ Oh. No!”
I hid my face in Ira’s shoulder.
Ira must have known that this was coming the entire time, because she just laughed.
The show was over five minutes later, when we all hurried back inside our apartment. We walked in to the living room trying our best not to wake up mom and dad, the ashes of the old year scattered on the floor, our cats eating the leftovers on the table. From our open window I could see the river on one side, colored in silver from the light of the moon, and the avenue on the other side silent and still.
“ I saw it.” Ira commented, “ It was pretty big.”
“ I didn’t see it.” I answered.
“ Ew” Diana’s replied.
And that, was the highlight of our night.
All this time has passed and what I remember is not the confusion and stupidity of my teenage years, not the madness of Buenos Aires, but rather that New Year when we sat in the doorsteps with my best friends. Ira laughing as the glitter in her eyes fell to her face, and my sister’s frail hands holding my arm as she tried to protect me from such a sight. The truth being that Mr. Stripper was the first naked man we ever saw, all of us, years before we met anybody we actually cared about enough to want to see naked. And as much as we admit it or not, as much as this could have been avoided or not, at the moment all we could do was laugh, yell, and go hide back inside our room.
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[25 Dec 2007|09:29pm] |
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So Dad, my sister and I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood today, given that any type of tourism around NYC will have to be postponed until tomorrow, when the stores and subways open up again. There is not much to do in Flushing Queens, unless you are Chinese and enjoy Karaoke or having pineapple bubble drinks in winter. But exploring is always fun, so we walked through an Indian section of Flushing were Hindu temples stayed open, and ended up at the entrance of the Botanical Garden, which was beautiful, but pretty dead in the mists of winter’s wind. We stopped a lot to watch the squirrels and compare them to our cat Kissy, who stayed home sleeping, and on the way back I asked Dad the usual stupid philosophical question I ask everyone about Determinism vrs. Free will. It took him ten blocks to answer it and it took Diana one block to answer it, then we arrived home and ate Christmas leftovers with Mom. I don’t remember what the responses added up to, but I’ll keep asking. I love my family. I don’t care how much you must think that being in NYC and not doing anything glamorous in Manhattan is a waste of time, I love this crowded, uneventful, ugly, abandoned neighborhood so much and its only because we are here. Happy Holidays
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[18 Dec 2007|10:22pm] |
So here I am in NYC with my sister Diana, whom I haven’t seen in one year. But, it seems that little has changed between us, for example our incredibly photogenic appearances remain intact.
Here is a picture of us together when we lived in Beaufort, SC, two years ago.
Here is a picture of us, two years later, in Central Park!
But I think it runs in the family, our cat Kissy is even more photogenic. Look!
Anyway, the city is cold but I like where I’m living. I promise I will try to post pictures where we look somewhat better, maybe.
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| Midnight Rants |
[23 Sep 2007|03:36am] |
( Sorry if this is bitchy, I just got out of a ten hour shift.)
"I cannot stand middle class people pretending to be rich. At Dean and Deluca we have plenty of them. They spend half of their monthly salaries on Gucci sunglasses worn inside the store at 9 Pm and believe that ordering salmon with feta cheese will make them more sophisticated. Meanwhile Fox news is the only channel that helps them keep up with the world and they have never left the United States, not even in books.
We were selling prime rib today at the Hot Bar, the meat was uncooked and bloody, a sign of social status for those who are willing to pay forty dollars for it, and I kept wondering how much of it was about taste and how much of it was about being accepted into the obscene hierarchy of the vain. I kept asking myself how can you enjoy chewing on flesh that has uncooked blood all over it. Just like that rich Catholic lady who gets her lunch with us every afternoon: She came in one day to treat two foster kids to a “gourmet meal,” probably to meet her monthly charity requirements. The two little boys were wearing baseball caps and their eyes kept staring at the floor, I think the smaller one was frightened and appeared to be at the verges of tears. They were both probably wondering where the cheeseburgers were hidden, and the lady who was with them kept apologizing to us, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry it takes them so long to decide: they have never been exposed to gourmet meals before.” I thought of taking those two foster kids out with me one night, I kept staring at the strange Catholic lady and thinking: Yeah, how about exposing them to something else besides a piece of uncooked meat if you really wish to go to heaven one day. Because, how can you enjoy life when you are so worried about looking good on it?
And I know I am just as guilty. I could quit my job if it hurts me so much to work there. I could just go back to working at a bookstore until I graduate from college, but this job pays my rent, as simple and as justified as this may sound and I have a very flexible schedule that will let me finish school faster. I still have to say: Working at Dean and Deluca in South Charlotte, the cradle of upper class society has been harsh on me. I cannot help but wonder how did we ever get to these fierce stages of capitalism and consumerism in America, after so many revolutions (who cares if they failed)? Oh boy, what would Marx have said? I get so tired of you America.
And I don’t care what you think, I don’t care if your answer to me is, “Yes, but, well, Carolina, you are Mexican, you should be glad that we even let you into our country.” Because I am not buying that argument anymore, because I have heard it already and because you are working with stereotypes just like you have been all along. Because I’m not Mexican, if that helps. Because I pay taxes like you do, but even if I didn’t I would still need to have a voice. Because I have been to different hemispheres and I have talked to people from Cuba, Honduras, Salvador, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay in their language and because I know how the world works better than our prime rib-special customers do, and probably better than you do. And I know this entry sounds bitter and arrogant, I know that I sound very bitter and arrogant, but if you worked there maybe you would understand, if you ever had a job like mine you would understand. I have become bitter, I AM bitter. Cheers to that."
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| Transformer |
[09 Sep 2007|02:19am] |
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mood |
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music |
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Lou Reed, obviously: " Walk on the Wild Side" |
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At work there is a guy named Marcel who’s gay. There is a minor detail to this story and it’s that he’s not aware of it. I’m not going to spend time writing about the way he talks or the way he walks because I would mainly be describing a typical flamboyant gay guy and we all know about those. I will instead mention a few of his character traits. You see, Marcel gets hit on by older gay customers all the time at work; he also flirts back with them without realizing it. Like many gay guys, he surrounds himself with middle aged women who confide in him and cry on his shoulder, he has few male friends. Marcel also used to take Ballet when he was younger and his favorite singer is Joni Mitchell. He has unsuccessfully tried dating girls in the past and this is what we were talking about today, at break time.
Marcel: “Yeah, I don’t know like, I’ve not been in a relationship since I graduated from high school. I don’t know what it is.”
Me: “Well, maybe you just need to, hum, find yourself, you know?”
Marcel: “Yeah, like every girl I like, I just want her to take care of me and listen to me. But I always feel like I’m not good enough for them. My last girlfriend would beat me up, once she even threw a knife at me. It’s hard to find somebody you know?”
Me: “Yeah, well, you just need to find out WHO you like, and give yourself time to, hum, FIND YOURSELF, Marcel. You’ll be fine. I promise.”
And this situation reminds me of those times in Argentina, before my best friend Gabriel came out of the closet. I remember how we all knew that he was obviously gay but still granted him the benefit of the doubt; at least he would talk about liking women every once in a while. The problem was that all his girlfriends were usually Amazon looking women who were three heads taller than him and had coarse voices. Gabi’s last girlfriend, Paula is actually a Lesbian now, and I remember how once when we were all riding the public bus back from the city, Paula managed to grab a seat and had asked her boyfriend Gabi to sit on her lap. Seeing them was cute at the moment but who can blame us for not even raising one eyebrow that evening when we were all snaking at the table and Gabi decided to declare his new revelation to us:
“Carolina, Diana, Jasmine. I need to tell you something.”
“What Gabi”
“I think I’m gay.”
“Hey, can you pass me the cereal that’s next to you Gabs? Oh, so you’re gay, and the milk please, it’s over there. Thanks”
This is why my only wish for Marcel is that he can find himself soon. Because there is nothing as frustrating as lying awake in bed every night, staring at the ceiling and wondering for hours if you just might be gay. I have news, and the answer comes down to this: If you lay awake every night asking yourself if you just might be gay, then you probably are, time to come out of the closet.
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| Cocaine Blues |
[20 Aug 2007|02:21am] |
Maybe I haven’t mentioned this, but I work at a Deli in the south area of Charlotte now, were all the ridiculously rich people buy their ridiculously expensive sandwiches and salads every weekend. My co-workers tend to vary every month as people come and go in these types of jobs, but my favorites are two girls from Central America called Silvia and Susan who work with me in the afternoons, and two guys born and raised in North Carolina who have graduated from college and remain undecided about their careers, they are called Will and David and they help me in the evenings. As different as my co-workers are from one another, I seem to get along with all of them pretty well. I communicate in Spanish with the first set and in English with the other. Although Silvia and Susana think that Will and David are lazy, while David and Will believe Silvia and Susana are extremely annoying, they all seem to like me a lot. As hard as it is to believe, there IS something that unites them all despite their disparate lifestyles, and this is Religion (yes, how peculiar.)
Silvia and Susana were raised Catholic in Latin America, witch means that they go to church every Sunday to avoid sin and they mention God a lot. Will and David are Methodists for what I know, and they don’t go to church as much but they also mention God a lot, only that in a different way. I’ll give you an example of how God is a constant presence in Will’s life.
Two weeks ago Will gave Mike, a guy who used to work at the Deli with us, one hundred dollars so that Mike would get him cocaine.
We all know over here that these transactions are usually based on trust, given that there is no receipt one can print out for the purchase of a bag of coke, or no specific manager one can complain to if the coke the dealer got you was bad. So Will had trusted Mike with his one hundred dollars and had expected his coke pretty soon.
But it happened that Mike got a better job as a waiter last week and quit the Deli without telling anybody. He left a cell number that got disconnected three days ago and, according to Will, it is impossible to locate him. Tonight as I was sweeping the floor I asked Will,
“So, did Mike ever get you what you paid him for?”
“No. I am so upset Carolina. I trusted Mike you know. It’s not like I have all this spare money or anything. He’s such a piece of dirt, leaving with my hundred dollars and not even responding to my calls.”
“Yeah, well, doesn’t he wait tables at Upstream now? Just go talk to him personally when he gets out of work.”
Will looks at me calmly and answers, “Nah, I don’t have the time Carolina. And I’m not upset anymore you know, I’m a believer, and I know that God will make him pay for this somehow.”
“Oh. Ok.”
I am left somewhat speechless and decide to change to subject, sending Will off to get me more French baguettes from the bakery. God will punish somebody who ripped you off from your cocaine purchase? C’mon! What else will God do for you Will, hook you up with a chick? Pay your car insurance? Turn bread into cocaine for you? And I guess that for some people it all comes down to having tons and tons of inexplicable Faith. So cheers to that.
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| When Smart People do Dumb Things |
[07 Aug 2007|09:24pm] |
I am sitting at the reception of the Philosophy department, waiting for an appointment with Dr. Eldridge, my Ethics professor. His office door is open and I can hear his voice as it gets louder and louder in a debate with a student. This is when I begin to realize that I will probably have to wait for a long time given the nature of their discussion: Constructivist theory, but I am glad to be able to escape the heat of summer and I don’t mind killing some time under the air conditioner until the sun goes down. The department is small and one has to take into account that there are only thirty Philosophy majors in the entire school and no more than twelve Philosophy professors to teach us, so by one’s senior year it gets easy to know them all by name. Most of my former professors are hanging out in their offices this afternoon. Dr. Kelly who teaches Aesthetics is eating pineapple slices as he looks through the window, while Dr. Croy, my Logic professor, seems to be trying to fix the printer near the reception desk as Dr. Eldridge keeps on rambling from his office.
The receptionist, Jennifer, is a very sweet lady who takes care of these men’s bureaucratic matters, she is also the one who greeted me with a smile and asked me to take a seat. So I plan to spend at least thirty minutes of waiting time with my nose hidden inside a book, but after a few minutes, Dr. Croy’s complaints distract me:
“Jennifer, I can’t seem to get the printer to work! Do you think it is broken?”
“No Dr. Croy, you just have to hit the red button” answers Jennifer.
“The red button? and where is THAT?”
“To your left Dr. Croy, a red button”
I don’t think that Jennifer is willing to get up from her desk to help him, and I don’t think she should. Dr. Croy has a PhD. He has also published five books on Deductive Logic in the last two years and one would suppose that he is an intelligent man, so we both assume that he will eventually figure this problem out by himself, and find the red button. He keeps looking at the machine suspiciously though, and ten minutes later, Eureka!
“I just pressed the red button Jennifer, but nothing is happening, I think this printer is broken.”
Jennifer is smiling through her desk. “No, it’s not broken Dr. Croy, you just need to give it a minute because it needs to warm up.”
“Oh! Ok!”
A while later Dr. Croy finally made his photocopies. He kept staring at the machine and frowning at it though, his glasses moving up and down, like if this was his worst enemy. This incident brought me back to those evenings in class with Dr. Kelly, when he had to beg students to help him figure out how to use the remote control. Or to my mornings in class with Dr. Eldridge, who says that using markers instead of chalk on the board is the only technological advance he can handle. And I wonder how these men, so prestigious in Academia, manage to survive in the real world.
Smart people do very dumb things, you see. This is something I learned early in life. My mother has a Masters degree in Spanish but has to call my sister for help every time she accidentally logs out of the computer. My father got his Masters at UCLA but does not know how to change the oil of his car. Once, he even confused his parking lights with his brights and had been driving this way for months until my boyfriend noticed and pointed it out to him. My sister is a great artist, who cannot hold a job for more than two days due to her lack of people skills.
But I think that I am the dumbest of the family, I got electrocuted with our toaster once, after sticking a knife inside it to get my toast out faster. Three days later at breakfast, I stuck the knife again trying to get my toast out, and got electrocuted again. I think I was nineteen at the time, not eight.
I also got electrocuted once more, two years ago when I tried to cut a cable with a pair of scissors, except that the cable was plugged in to a switch. This incident made my sister start a series of studies regarding my IQ level which she titled: “Is My Sister Dummer than a Hamster?
Of course, at school I made straight A’s most of the time but that, honestly, said nothing to me about how smart I was when it came to practical matters.
Which is why I went to college I believe, same reason why Dr. Croy, Dr. Eldridge and Dr. Kelly seem to have gone to college: I was too dumb to do well in anything else which did not involve reading various texts or writing various papers about beautifully abstract matters. And the older I get, I come to understand that the reason why I would like to pursue a life in Academia and the reason why I enjoy to spend hours inside libraries, why sometimes I would rather read a book than be with people, is because I simply suck at doing everything else.
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[16 Jul 2007|01:00am] |
Middle of July and I come to realize how my entire summer was spent working at Dean and Deluca just as my winter was, at Allstate.
I get sick of being so poor and so darn pretentious sometimes.
Who do I think I am? wanting such an elitist piece of paper as a college degree, and even a Masters in Philosophy, when I have no savings and no place to fall dead on.
This weekend I spent so many unaccountable hours on my feet, serving others and letting my body run its own pace, like a warm machine, that I cannot see the logic of working anymore.
Sometimes I ask myself if this lifestyle is as productive as eight times eight being twenty seven, or madness, or a dog. I have to convince myself that all this effort will pay off one day.
I am such a stoic at heart.
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[24 May 2007|03:29pm] |
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So, given that activities such as: driving, eating, drinking, moving, distracting myself, seeing others, sleeping under a roof etc. usually involve money, which I am very scared of spending right now because I will not be making any until I find a new job, I will either have to make the Public Library my new entertainment arena or stay home watching movies on cable all day. Maybe this is exactly what I needed though, a new skin for the old ceremony.
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[19 May 2007|12:41am] |
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So, I am watching a Spanish movie directed by Almodovar, " All About my Mother." My Mom is by my side, and it is the second movie we have watched tonight, because there is nothing more to do in Beaufort, S.C, except maybe go to a bar but not with your Mom. In the movie an ex-hooker looses her seventeen year old son in an accident, she then decides to go in search for the father, who has gotten a sex change by now and who has recently gotten a young nun pregnant who, to top it off, finds out that she has aids and ends up getting help from the woman who lost her seventeen year old son. Oh, there is also a Lesbian couple in the movie, both of them addicted to crack. Great movie to watch along with your Mom on a Friday night, I strongly recommend it if you want to feel awkward for one hour and a half.
By the way, I am unemployed and ( crazy) and staying in Beaufort for a while. Things are changing really fast, but I'm fine, I haven't felt this good ( crazy) in a long time. I really love all of you. Good Night.
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[08 May 2007|05:10pm] |
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Yesterday one of my co-workers, who recently got breast implants, donated two bags worth of shirts for me, and all her clothes are so expensive looking! See? Buying clothes is unnecessary when you are Carolina, and have friends that get their boobs enlarged, or gain weight in winter, or have sex changes, and you get to keep all their hand me downs forever or until they change back into their original shape ( I am lying about my friends with sex changes.) I finished my last boring final exam this afternoon and only have one more Music final on Thursday. After this I was thinking that I will look for a new job and a new house too. My parents are moving to NYC, my life has moved two steps away from me this semester, and it is about time to get my act together. Also, I think it will rain tonight.
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mellow_georgia's journal
