Choices.

Tonight, at J&M's new apartment:

Michelle: Would you rather have unlimited ice cream or unlimited Alan Alda?
Jeff: Shit!

Diplomacy, Round Three.

Spring 1906:
Keith: Can I have Norway?
Ryan: Um, no.
Keith: Okay!

Spring 1907:
Keith: So I'm taking Norway and Sweden.
Ryan: ... Yeah.

Staff t-shirt.

I just realized that I haven't updated this in about forever, so I'll just post to say that I started my job last Wednesday by meeting staff, all of whom I have come to greatly respect and admire; they're good people doing good work. We actually didn't pick kids up until Sunday, which I'll get to in a moment. We've had 14 hours of class already in the last two days (two of those hours was myself alone with the kids during evening session, which is anarchy but in a fun way). I came up with a great idea for said evening sessions that the students are already enjoying. And this is the first night I've spent at home since Wednesday evening, because I've either been at a dorm hanging out with staff, volunteering to help with a group of kids, or at KCI.

Why KCI, you might be asking? Because I spent nine damn hours there Sunday picking up kids at the airport. I was assigned to drive a group of other teaching assistants over there at noon so that we could all meet the kids at the plane and watch over them until the bus came at 3pm. So we get there at 11:45am and we're rounding up kids and trying to figure out lunch arrangements and desperately wishing for the bus to get there, which it finally did around 4pm. But my day wasn't finished like it should've been, as I was supposed to pick up excess luggage and follow the bus back. There was no luggage, but a couple of kids still hadn't arrived; it turns out that two flights coming in had to be diverted when a monsoon hit Kansas City and we ended up not leaving the airport until about 8:30, and didn't get back to the dorm until 9:45pm. Yeah.

On the plus side I do have the entire layout of KCI airport memorized, considering I drove around the damn thing six times during the course of the day (second lane from the left to 'Return to Terminals'). Parking staff knew me by sight in Terminals A & C, even though I did try to hit different booths on the way out each time; I probably picked up about fourteen parking slip things all totaled.

But we got every student that came into the airport, and that's no small feat since apparently a kid got left behind at the airport both terms last summer, so in short: Keith, James, and I rock. I still haven't gotten my gold star, but Lee (my instructor for Politics & Economics, who also rocks) did take us out for pints last night to celebrate the first day of class. Yay for instructional staff and our "academic planning"!

Alright, I'm currently reading A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (at Michelle's request; I'm trusting her judgment on everything so far and it is sooooo paying off. She rocks too.) So I'm gonna do some reading on that, then go to bed for a full night of sleep before possibly running at 6am. Cause I'm all about breakfast in the dorm cafeteria at 7:30am. Oh hell yes.

Palenque.

I meant to blog on this a few weeks ago when I read Eduardo Galeano's Upside Down in the course of two days and two nights during Finals Week, but the crush of other things prevented it until I remembered my favorite passage tonight. The entire book overall is definitely a must-read; it is a profoundly tragic, if ultimately uplifting, tale of the pitfalls and contradictions of imperialism and globalism as regards Latin America, and by extension the non-industrial world. Anyway, there are a series of sidenotes throughout the book, and one of them regarded the people of the Palenque in Columbia, and I thought I'd share the choice paragraph here.

Years have gone by, centuries, and Palenque survives. The people of Palenque continue to believe that the earth, their earth, is a body made of fields, jungles, wind, people, that it breathes through trees and cries through streams. They continue to believe that those who have enjoyed life will be rewarded in paradise and those who haven't will burn in hell, in the eternal fire reserved for the cold women and men who disobeyed the sacred voices that command us to live life with pleasure and passion.

I like that, a lot. I was once asked by a girl back home if I believed in God and I said 'I'm not sure.'* She said 'Do you think you'll go to Heaven?' And I responded 'Oh sure.' She goes 'How can you possibly believe that?' I said 'Because when I'm up to stamp my ticket, I will have lived my life sincerely and without judgement for anybody else. Hypocrisy is the worst sin of them all.'

I put the asterisk there because I wanted to expound on that a little more: I still don't know what I believe on that, if only because it never really crosses my mind. People say 'Oh you're an agnostic' and I go 'But that figures that I've thought about it and concluded that I didn't know whether God exists; I just haven't thought about it at all.' I do think about it though, and if I've concluded anything it's that I definitely don't believe in a God who micromanages, whether through deliberately picking every animal that stalks the earth, or smoting federal judges, or raining hellfire on the good people of Massachusetts. While the people who protest on behalf of a vengeful God are certainly within their rights, I just wonder why they want to believe in a deity that would frankly care about the morality of Africans using condoms when millions of people on that continent are dying from a disease we could stop. "For fear of seeming intolerant or uncertain, or just for lack of thinking, they talk about a God too small to be God," in the words of Killing the Buddha. If he is truly an awesome God, than He is beyond our capacity to see or imagine; perhaps then we should lower our eyes a bit more towards the earth, and our fellow men, and this life.

And this is a hell of a way to spend a Saturday evening. The lights are flickering, so I'm gonna shut this down and go read some Hemingway (by candlelight if necessary) and listen to KJHK until the tornadoes come.

Now I have to buy the damn album.

They just played another Sleater-Kinney song, this time 'What's Mine is Yours', and again it had very distinct tones of Jefferson Airplane, only not, you know, so out of control. This is starting to get like when I had collected three songs from the Decemberists' new album and finally got it after feeling as if I had been left out on the biggest and most brilliant secret known to man. Which was, in fact, the case.

Things I Love, #71.

I was listening to 'Wilderness' by Sleater-Kinney tonight on KJHK, only I thought that I was listening was some lost, obscure track by Jefferson Airplane with Grace Slick's searing vocals. When I realized it was instead this band that I've been seeing on damn near every music magazine cover over the past month, I was surprised, intrigued, then inspired. There is hope for music yet.