Minesweeper

I can't say that I'm proud to be a minesweeper addict. When I think about it, I get depressed. There are literally countless hours I have wasted on a game that isn't even a good party trick. The only thing minesweeper actually does is let me procrastinate. Which I do a hell of a lot more than I would like to admit.

Oh, I'm good at looking busy, and can show on paper just how productive I have been so far with my life. Yet, when I think about how often I have played minesweeper at the slightest provocation, I am rather ashamed. Uh oh, here I go again.

...Back. In that game, I had tagged fifty-seven of the ninety-nine mines in a minute and twenty-three seconds, before I inadvertently activated a spot that I knew was a mine the moment after I pressed the mouse key. Those kinds of deaths are annoying, but ultimately my own fault so I don't mind all that much. No, what is really frustrating is when I have taged ninety-six of the ninety-nine mines, am about to break one of my records (or at least get on the top ten list again...on the computer I currently type from, every single one of the high scores is marked 'Niña Anita.' If I were a dog I would have run out of pee long ago.) and...voilá, it's down to a scenario where there is no logic involved, just luck. That's the horrible thing about minesweeper. More often than not, after a breathless two-and-a-half minutes, you come to a point where logic no longer holds. It is a matter of sheer luck. And it is rather insulting, after having spent so much time where the game was all about logic. Boo. Hiss.

But that does not stop me.

...Back again. This time, I tagged twenty-one mines in thirty-nine seconds before I mis-tagged one mine and therefore exploded on my next move.

I write much faster on a computer than I do longhand. A few months ago, I had extra time and not all that much to do. I would spend six or seven hours sitting in front of the computer, ostensibly writing. I churned about 25,000 words and an uncompleted (but clear in my mind where it was going) story in four weeks, more or less. Not so bad. But, when I think about that, it is my time spent playing minesweeper and trying to make myself write that rises to the crest of my brain, ready to be plucked as a memory. I probably spent more manpower hours exploding, and if minesweeper were real, I would have, long ago, been blown to my next life as a bloody pulp.

I have played three games since I finished the previous paragraph. The first one ended after I had tagged forty mines in one minute and thirteen seconds. The second ended after I had taged fifty-five mines in two minutes and eight seconds. The third (and fourth; I lied, I played four games. True confession of an addict.) I didn't even bother to look at the score. I was too ashamed that I compusively pressed the little smiley face on top of the screen.

Jesus Christ I need to un-install this game. This is ridiculous and pathetic. I am an adult. I have important things to be doing. Thinking. Or something. I need more discipline. I will never get anything done if I can look at the clock and an hour has unknowingly gone by, in two or three minute increments, punctuated by explosions. Winning is a sense of relief, feeling that the past x (where x = large) number of minutes have not been entirely in vain. No, I have won one! I have triumphed over logic and irrationality! I have survived all potential explosions.!

Unfortunately, this is the execption rather than the rule.

Thirty-nine mines tagged in fifty-two seconds. I think I need to bury my head in the sand, like an ostrich. It's dark down there, right? There's no way I'll be able to see the iridescent monitor?

Kindergarteners

My first full week of being a kindergarten teacher is over. I remember why I stopped babysitting. Although, honestly, teaching kindergarten is less boring than babysitting because you are not at the beck and call of one of two children who know that you have to entertain them in order to make mommy and daddy happy. No, instead, you have more than a handful of kids who get into fights as soon as your back is turned, or run over to play with toys, leaving their work behind, or poke their heads outside the door to helpfully yell to the administration that so-and-so poked them in the nose.

I have three groups of kids, and each group for a little less than two hours, consecutively. I was thinking about it, and when I was that age I was in school for about 3 hours per day. I don't know how these kids did it - 6 hours of class time, plus some of them hang out until 5pm because the parents are working and the school also has day care. It seems like an awful lot.

Also, I need to come up with ways to keep the kids busy because we're not allowed to use the books for the first couple of weeks which is seriously too long for "re-adjustment." They have a pretty good idea of what school entails at this point.

Back in Gto after an interlude back in the US to see my family and go to my cousin's wedding...and this time, I brought my laptop with me. I didn't bring it down in the first place because it's ridiculously and obscenely heavy, and I didn't realize that all the cafes in town have free wifi access. So, most likely blog posts will become more frequent as I will actually have an outlet if I want to say something.

Globalization at its Finest

I had a phone interview today with a nonprofit outsource of the US Department of State, focus on international education, Latin America HQ in Mexico City. The web site is very comprehensive - nice and shiny, with success stories and lots of smiling faces.

Over the course of the interview, it was revealed that what they will be focusing on this fall is information and resources regarding scholarships not for American universities, but rather for this university that is being built in Saudi Arabia, in the name of the king, that will have the 6th largest endowment in the world and therefore lots of money for international scholarships for people who really can't afford to study abroad. So basically the US state department will be pushing well qualified Mexicans to study in Saudi Arabia.

OK, it makes sense, but I'm really taken aback. I guess the Saudi government must be calling in favors. It could be really interesting, but I'm not sure I want to get personally involved. This could all be a bit premature, since they haven't offered me anything yet, but the interview went really well and I'd be surprised if they didn't want me to come.

Live from the GTO

Whenever I'm on a computer here for a long enough period of time, I'm tired and out of it and writing emails - and don't really know how to generalize how things are here.

It's an absolutely gorgeous town, with a conscientious self/UN-imposed mandate to keep it cultural and attractive. Contrast that to Leon, the nearest city, which is an industrial/commercial wasteland that could be anywhere in the Southwestern US...dusty and pollution ridden with wide streets and shopping and chain stores and nothing attractive what so ever. So, being in Guanajuato is an oasis in terms of aesthetics.

I've been meeting fantastic people, having a great time, and my Spanish is definitely improving. Definitely the most fun I've had since the graduation week of ridiculous last May. I haven't started to figure shit out so much yet, but I'm much more relaxed and it's OK that I'm chilling out, because all in all this is a completely unforgettable place, in so many different ways.

I Am John McCain, And So Can You!

I voted yesterday during Massachusetts' first-ever experience as a Super Tuesday state. Luckily for me, it was during the week I was at home. I leave for Mexico tomorrow, and am taking a break from not-packing to write this.

Something that really bothers me is the proliferation of students supporting Barack Obama wanting "change" but without a concrete idea of what that change may be or how to implement it. The Ogroupies, if you will, but also the assumption that all people of my age range with any globalized point of view also want this "change." Yesterday evening I was catching up with an acquaintance as the polling results were starting to come in, and she was annoyed that Hillary Clinton carried Massachusetts. I said "Well, that's not my fault," at which point she continued the conversation as though I had voted for Obama without actually asking.

No, not so much. I was very excited when I filled in my little bubble next to John McCain on the ballot.

~~~

Whatever rhetoric all candidates are currently spewing about how electing them will change the face of America as we know it - it won't. Whoever is elected in 2008 will have the unenviable role of mopping up Bush-induced diarrhea for at least the next four years. Whoever is elected will have to deal with the residue of a president with 30% approval ratings and a congress with 20% approval ratings who are at loggerheads and get virtually nothing accomplished as the economy hits an inevitable downturn and international opinion continues to be lukewarm at best.

There are two things that the next president will have to do, and they are also pretty much the only things s/he will be able to do. #1 is deal with the economy. #2 is make nice with the world - with Iran and Europe, with China, with the quagmire in Iraq, with all the environmental stuff. The most important skill for both of these issues is a pragmatic, bi/non-partisan approach to actually getting treaties and legislation passed and implemented. Of anybody running, John McCain is the person with the most experience actually working in this manner.

No matter how inspirational a speaker Barack Obama is, the fact remains that he is three years into his first term as a senator. Over the past Senate, he has missed more than 1/3 of the votes for which he should have been on the Senate floor. It's hard to have a platform with the votes to show you stick to your platform if you're not actually voting. He doesn't have the experience that even a full senate term would give him.

In the past week or so, there have been a lot of parallels drawn between Obama and John F Kennedy, since the entire Kennedy family has also hopped on the Obandwagon. If Barack Obama is elected, he will run into the exact same problems that caused Kennedy to be in over his head during his two and a half years in office, for the exact same reasons. International issues will come to the forefront (only it will be militant Islamists instead of communists with the nukes) and his similar lack of experience in these matters will cause major fuck-upages to ensue. People seem to forget that, if you look at what actually happened while he was in office, Kennedy was actually a fairly middling president before he was martyred.

~~~

I am a registered undeclared voter in Massachusetts - the same thing as an independent. Yes, I am lucky that Massachusetts is one of the states where independents can vote in primaries. I would have changed my affiliation (and then immediately changed it back to an independent) if you had to be registered with a party. Mitt Romney, as the last governor of a Republican legacy in Massachusetts, was painfully disassociated from Massachusetts as a whole while he was governor. It was obvious that the only reason he was a governor was to groom himself for a presidential run. Even if I didn't like McCain, I would have wanted to cast a vote against Mitt. So voting as a Democrat in the primary was never really an option.

There are many ways to use a vote other than just supporting a candidate of your choice.

~~~

Also, John McCain likes ABBA. I like ABBA. I hope that at his inaugural ball, John McCain can get ABBA to regroup and perform. That, my friends, would be beyond awesome.

A comment on an aspect of my recent travels: The one redeeming thing about Portland Oregon is that it has the best bookshop I've been to in my entire life. Three stories and a square city block, arranged in its own order that works really well...go Powell's. This visit occurred after re-visiting The Word, my favourite used bookshop in Montreal (conveniently located around the corner from my old apartment) and walking out with $20 worth of I-meant-to-read-that, and finding an all-the-good-bits abridged edition of Tale of Genji at The Barrow, a used bookshop in Concord, about 10 minutes from my mom's house.

So, today, while running errands, I remembered that I wanted to get Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, and was also looking out for Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, and wouldn't say no to After the Quake by Haruki Murakami and really did want to read The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing even though I didn't have time to read it after I took it out of the library and returned it unread. If I had a copy of it forever, I could read it whenever! Instead of going home, a-detouring I went, first to Willow Books.

Willow Books is Acton's answer to the Borders/Barnes & Noble megalopolis - a locally owned version therein; not quite as big with a small cafe. I went to the classics section fully expecting to see at least the best-known book by the first English language Nobel Laureate. AT LEAST. Nope, 6 titles by Jack Kerouac, then One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest, then straight on to the L's. I went to the information desk and asked if they had Kim by Rudyard Kipling, and the woman smiled as she told me if I hadn't found it there, she guessed they didn't!

Fine.

At that point I was too annoyed to look for other things I wanted at Willow Books, and figured I might as well drive to Concord since I didn't have anything pressing. I went into The Concord Bookshop before I went back to The Barrow. To put this bookshop in perspective - Lois Lowry had a book signing there when I was 12 or 13. They had a huge Harry Potter party every time a new one was released, that always made it into the Boston news broadcasts. With Concord's literary tradition and old money, they are a pretty classy establishment and certainly afford to have something classic sitting on the shelves for a few months before a random weirdo (i.e. me) comes in and asks for it. It's a local bookshop, to be sure, but it's always been fairly highbrow.

Kim? No. Three Murakami titles, all of which I'd read. No Slouching Towards Bethlehem. No The Good Terrorist.

To give them the benefit of the doubt, the lack of The Good Terrorist could well be because it's been flagged by the Patriot Act because of its title.

If bookshops that sell new books have lowered the standards for what they stock merely to what is new and bright and shiny and can be sold only to people who also just seek that, they deserve what's coming to them. They deserve to have potential sales usurped by Amazon, which does have anything you want if you are willing to wait. If these owners and managers stock crap, they are basically giving those who would be their repeat customers no other option than going somewhere else for their various and sundry needs - as good literature is wont to be.