January 2012
30 posts
tomorrow, the past tense!
i suppose this is what it’s like to be excited about class
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public transit: sube card mania
(the saga continues; aka, i get more chances to figure out what’s going on)
sube cards, which are issued by the government free of charge, look generally like any other plastic credit card or key card. they can be loaded and reloaded with money and quickly tapped for payment at sensors when entering both buses and subway terminals in buenos aires. without them, one must frequently buy...
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painful conversation
some day soon, i will have the highly anticipated and celebrated pleasure of learning the most basic conjugation of verbs in the past tense. with this knowledge, i will get to stop saying “yo (infinitivo) en el pasado.”
it will be. so great. perhaps there will even be moments here and there when i do not feel completely and hopelessly incomprehensible while speaking.
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politics
tonight, cristina kirchner gave a speech of sorts that we watched together during dinner. admittedly, i can only ever understand so much of what’s going on in the news each day, and it’s not nearly as much as i’d like it to be. my best guess, however, is that the speech had something to do with cristina’s return since having her thyroid gland surgically removed in early...
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so. much. protein.
in case there were any small concerns about the protein content of last night’s dinner of boiled rice and potatoes, i wanted to report to anyone interested that tonight, i was presented with (and politely consumed) an entire plateful of lentils and hard boiled eggs.
and when i say “plateful,” i very much mean an enormous, heaping mountain of eggs and lentils.
after that,...
allergies
wouldn’t it be great if the body had some sort of conscious override system in place, whereby you could communicate with your involuntary systemic responses to tell them things like,
“no, body, the trees in this city are not going to kill you.”
and they would listen?
i think yes.
the prospect of sleeping on my floor seems increasingly attractive
if only there were some sort of magical, soft, bed-like surface that also retained coolness
that would be the best
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i never would have imagined i’d be writing anything close to this in the middle of january
“This book gives me more information about penguins than I care to have.”
– In 1944 a children’s book club sent a volume about penguins to a 10-year-old girl, enclosing a card seeking her opinion.
She wrote, “This book gives me more information about penguins than I care to have.”
American diplomat Hugh Gibson called it the finest piece of literary criticism he had ever...
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“Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery. How does one...”
– -stephen nachmanovitch, free play
this is going to be a tough book not to quote in its entirety
every night is a new, sometimes unusual salad here.
tonight: lettuce, tomato, beets, bread and butter pickles, and balsamic. this is a combination i admittedly hope not to see again, but will nonetheless eat if it appears.
i can’t help but wonder if these combinations are new for my hosts as well.
i need to find some musicians in this city, quickly
but i need to learn spanish more quickly
if left suddenly without any digital means to share and reflect upon our personal experiences, and likewise to connect with one another, how would this generation cope?
would we quickly and easily find new ways? perhaps even find greater joy and richness in them? or would we feel completely lost and alone?
it does seem, often, that this realm has become essential to our social identity. why...
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“We have a sane part of our minds and an insane part. We negotiate between those...”
– Haruki Murakami (via theparisreview)
This is probably at the root of all of humankind’s sublime achievements and horrific failures.
(via publicradiointernational)
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new stories
the past few days have been more than a little overwhelming, so i quickly got off track from my daily buenos aires story goal. but, here are some new ones. with sound!
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stories →
each day, i will try to put some short story about buenos aires on this site.
this means that i will have to try to take at least one picture every day, and hopefully also start catching some pieces of sound to include. i’m a little nervous about this challenge, as i don’t typically like to hold a camera up to most anything, but i think it shall be more good than bad.
we shall...
“ehhh, hmmm. okay. you know, like, sharks and blood? yes? that’s how...”
– ana, an isa coordinator, endeavoring to appropriately characterize male-female relations
humorous but seemingly overstated at the same time. especially when included in 3 straight days of similar ideas.
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dear swahili,
you do nothing for me here. if you could, please stop trying to be a part of conversation. maybe, even, you would be kind enough to stay hidden in my mind, but somehow preserved and accessible for sometime later on. that’s not asking too much, is it? please think it over. thanks.
bridget
December 2011
33 posts
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cowbird →
i am so excited to be a part of this community
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Watchsince the non-linear equations used to define the lorenz attractor actually produce a three-dimensional graph (rather than a flat image), here’s a model created by geoff milburn to help visualize the phenomenon. he explains:
“This is a rendering of the long journey of a single point in Lorenz’s creation, a path consisting of three million iterations developed in Processing that...
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kim jong-il has died →
that is all. it is important to know.
my life is about to become radically different from what it has been for a very long time, and i am woefully unprepared. sometimes, i make lists of things i should be considering, when i realize that i should be considering things other than the immediate present. promptly, i lose or ignore these lists. this is how it always goes. apparently, it works alright.
“Officials have directed that no-one should be allowed to visit the pigeon, which...”
– Last year Indian police held a pigeon under armed guard, because it was allegedly spying for Pakistan. (Via The Express Tribune)
“I am glad Obama is doing this and I think it’s important to make sure human...”
– gethustle
a very valuable addendum to thoughts on the prior rick perry quote