Wow, this week, my anthropology friends have just saved my butt or made my life so much infinitely richer, I must take a moment to thank them.

So, Joe of the Hankins family was kind enough to feed and satisfy a really strange obsession of mine, pens. I have this need to write with only pens I love and it was only recently that I found my true love, the uni-ball SIGNO, the nob being .5 thick. Of course this pen is impossible to find in America despite this supposed age of high globalization with the extreme fluid flows of people, financial instruments, goods. Well yeah, everything moves except for my favorite pen which comes in .7 nib but that is not my prefered size. So Joe, dear soul that he is, sent me a bunch from Japan-land as well as a packet of scary looking pickled pears. I am afraid if I eat then, I will die and never be able to use my sweet pens. So I will use the pens and keep the pears sealed in their well-sealed plastic, but thanks Joe!

Then there is my dissertation writing group, the I3. We met for the first time yesterday and I can’t believe how much of a life saver this little enterprise of ours i going to be. Their ideas and suggestions rocked. I mean Really Rocked and will mean improvements in leaps and bounds for my dissertation. Thanks you 2.

And then there is Yari, out in Gaudelope doing “fieldwork” (really at some level impossible on such a beautiful island)… Yari, a Puerto Rican anthropologist is also a TH, a True Hacker, and I don’t mean she hacks on perl (although she is always equipped with the latest and finest gadetry). I mean she is the master of social engineering always getting what she wants no matter how great or high the obstacle. For example most students at U of C don’t get office until they are POST-Field (as well as needing to accomplish like, some amazing feat). She on the other hand landed a prime office on campus as a pre-field student (and handed the torch on to me when she left). In Guadelope where she is studying union politics, she managed to move in the house of the main union boss, which is a huge ethnographhic score and just seems like a sweet pad… 1/2 of being a good ethnographer is being an adept social engineer, and since she is the master social engineer, I am sure she will rock her way through research.

Speaking of rock, since that seems to be the theme of my entry today, I want to thank Yari for she finally took my suggestion and saw some Jack Black and she, being a kindred soul, LOVED IT. Of course! So being that she is a full blooded Puerto Rican and I have some weird connection to la isla del borinquen, I went ahead and started the FIRST, Puerto Rican Jack Black Fan Club (PRJBFC). But as a matter of karma, I wanted to make sure we got Jacks approval so I wrote him a little letter explaining our club, gave him the coordinates of PR, a short history of our neocolonial status, a summary of our fine contribution to world culture (rum, dance, awesome parades), debriefed him on the Vieques affair, invited him to stay with our mommies whenever he so pleased, and explained our intention of pure goodness for the first Puerto Rican Jack Black Fan Club. Yari, my note rocked so much, he was thrilled. And as proof, to send to the world, he sent me a
photo of approval. Sweet, Puerto Rican’s Rock his WORLD! We got the green light, let’s go for the gold, my only requirment is that I am la presidente for at least the first year…