Terrible. Yes I have been terrible about upkeeping, grooming, managing this paltry site of mine. While in PR I am not too inclined to write entries given my chaotic moods and my imprisonment to endless errands that in my last week devolved into a vortex of mini-nightmares –> hours and hours at doctor’s offices, stolen keys, failed plumbing (almost leading to a total flood of the apartment), continuation of moldfest 2003, a mother’s grave silence… All in the course of 2 days actually and if I wrote about it, my entries would be a string of tepid complaints followed by some more complaints with a dash of whining with an occasionaly rumination about the despair of illness so it was best to have some silence instead.

But I made it out alive, my mother and I thankfully reconciled, and I have been taking it easy, excessively partaking in domesticity here in Chicago charging my internal batteries for a few days before making my foray into “more serious” writing and the outside world.

Roasting coffee with an air popcorn maker, making homemade almond and hazlenut milk and ginger lemonade, wathing movies, ordering raw milk cheese, and generally cleaning and tidying, and taking copious breaks on the couch (though unfortunately never falling asleep). It has been nice not to be beholden to anyone or anything but I have to say, it would get boring after a week or so. Homemade almond milk is exciting and yummy but not that exciting…

I am nearly over the flu so I don’t quite look like Mr monk fish below but I am still needing a lot of sleep. Being back in Puerto Rico I understand why 90% of the world’s population leaves by the coast. Being the by the beach is… good.

Otherwise life is life with a mom who has problems with sight and memory. I try not to get too bummed about it and honor what life has presented although when you are face to face with such things, it is hard not to. Life is pretty frustrating for her so it just seeps into the general atmosphere especially when little other little frustrating barriers that is life in PR pop up like massive traffic because every other road is being reconstructed or the lovely fact that you have to wait at least 2 hrs at every doctoro’s office. Anyway, I am just bitching now and I shouldn’t. It is good that I can take the time off and be with her and help her out now. I guess it just does make me in the most bloggish mood though so until the mood arises….

Felt a lot like that…. It was lousy.

They predicted that this was going to be a nasty flu season especially since the the last two were mild. If I am indicator of such a prognosis “they” are so dead on right, that it is sick-ening. Seriously, I can’t remember a time that I was so ill for days straight, the pain being unbearable the first day and now general aches, fever, chills, and a hacking cough that makes me cringe just to listen to it seem to stick onto me like dried jelly on a counter.

One of the worst episodes was last night. I went to bed with the chills and fell asleep with lots of anxiety which put me in a bad dream state. Of course, I had strange dreams that mixed the story line of a book I am currently reading, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut with my research on hackers and free speech. All of a sudden, hackers and free speech were part of the weird cosmic meaninglessness of life although they were trying hard in an epic battle to actually assert that life was not without substantive meaning. In fact, the fact that source code is free speech “proved” this and proved the fact that not all scientists are destructive chumps like Hoenikker. It might seem kinda amusing and benign but the contours of my dream were full of suspense, drama, and treason.

I woke up disturbed and shaking wondering why I was having such strange dreams… As soon as I took my temperature, I realized why. Anyway, I am miserable and I hope that this does not last too much longer or turn into some other nasty illness… My advice to flu sufferers, read or watch only “feel good stuff” just in case the dreaming fevers visit you at night.

I can’t believe it. I wrote a dissertation chapter. I went from none to one. And though there is a lot of suckage in there (I mean how good can 60 pages written over the course of three weeks when the AAAs were going on), I feel like what I want to sayis there and there are some parts that are decent.

Most Thanksgivings of recent memory have been spent writing. As an undergraduate I usually had some paper due, which was the same for graduate school and then when I stopped doing the whole class thing, there were grants to apply for. This year, I thought there would be no reason to be working during Thanskgiving except for my own maniacal drive which after a long hiatus has kicked into high gear. I remember why I applied to graduate school. Though I really think I have problems with the English language because of my Spanish upbringing (so now I don’t have a great command of either English or Spanish language but I get by), I do like writing. And one of my favorite parts is starting with so idea and then traveling with it with your words and then all of a sudden, there is new stuff to see and new things to write…

So yet again I had a strange dream. I won’t got into the details but basically I was on some highway overpass in Nebraska that hovered over this most beautiful crystal clear lake that at one point was just swarming with ducks, and ducks of all sizes. I mean there were little tadpole size ducks and large mama and papa sized ducks. This was all very exciting to me as I have always wanted a pet duck. And then, surprise, a two headed duck connected at the beak showed up, which floored me so I whipped out my camera, started to shoot some pictures but instead the 2 headed exploded and I had to go to the highway rest stop bathroom to clean it off me. Gross.

This morning I was a little distrubed again. But one of the things that I think are really cool about dreams is that they are in some ways a sort of Buddhist or postmodern meditation on the relativity of social forms and well life in general. Dreams are about the malleable, the creative, your being taking off to places that it could never imagine to do in waking consciousness. But dreams may be a spring board to cultivate that creative flexibility as you move through life awake. If you can enter into a domain of such creative flexibility, then it might exist as part of life more generally, so why not aspire to a dreaming life?

evil-wire the server home of all my web junk and mail was hacked bad, bad, bad last week and all of my stuff was targeted and deleted. Luckily there were backups and everything is back although I need to go back and “publish” blog entires from the last couple of months. More about this later but I have to say without access to my blog, I felt naked and lost. Strange, huh?

I woke up early from a partial nightmare. I had gleefuly jumped into a large ocean-pool (yes an ocean-pool) to get a closer look at Ganhdi’s religious ablution only to find out that I had lost my purse in the process. And while I should not have cared because those things like my wallet, phones, and keys, as Gahndi’s ways have shown, are JUST material, I was filled with anxiety because franlkly it is hard when you lose such things. And then I was also studying for some qualifying exam like the ones you take to enter PhD candidacy atlhough it was an exam for after fieldwork. It was double anxiety for me although in my dream I was coming up with some pretty productive material and alas my purse turned up. And the I woke up and was like “phew, I don’t need to take a test, I just need to write my dissertation” and then all of a sudden the dream did not seem all that bad. And then I looked out of the windows in my dad’s house in Vermont and big fat snowflakes were gliding down to the ground. Very dreamy indeed.

Have you ever wondered why airplane pilots all carry the same black, very square bag and what the contents are inside? Whenver I see a pilot totting one around, I wonder about this and finally last night as I got off a plane in Manchester, NH I asked.

The pilot seemed thrilled to show me the contents of his mysterious black bag and tell me why all pilots use them. They are not “forced” to own them nor are they given the bag when done with the air force academy or pilot school (or wherever else they learn to fly) which is what I thought, but it is mere custom and functionality which guides them all to have this very rugged looking balck bag of mystery. Basically it holds all these manuals and charts, which are handy I guess for piloting a plane (there were about 4 or 5 of them), and they are thick sqaure manuals that would not fit in an ordinary briefcase, but they fit pretty much perfectly in this bag. Indeed, he even offered to tell me where I could order such a bag (which I declined) although I thought it would be amsuing to have one while traveling through the major airports of America. Sort of as a means to catch the attention of pilots which seem to be so stoic, strong, tall, and composed compared to us mortals who have no idea how to pilot some large hunk of steel into the sky.

But simply asking him a question about the bag shot that image of the pilot right out of the roof and instantly revealed the nature of this great mystery (at least for me.)

I’ve made it… To Chicago and to the 30th year of my life. I am just glad that I am no longer… On the Road Again…