kiss my ass catolica

sorry ive been a lil out of commision, the chileans are trying to kill me...
between the 5 classes i am in hell. once again i have more to read than i can possibly accomplish, i have one class alone where weve got about a week and a half for each novel and a paper every time we finish two which is three papers so far then one huge in class essay today and school started march 6, i mean seriously now people, and thats just one fuckin class..
and that class sucks ass, the books are actually cool if i had enough time to read em but the teacher has this godawful nasal voice and nothing new or interesting to say and i always just ignore her or sit there hoping she wont say vinculo...por favor no no NO!!! not vinculo!!!

on the good news tip her ass is outty cause the next section of the class we got a new teacher who at the very least wont have such a horrible voice...

then theres my class where we had to read all this foundational fiction crap, weve finally moved on to the contemporary stuff like deep rivers, loved it in english, loved it in spanish, fuckin love los rios profundos...and in that class the supergringa team who jumped up to present about how much doña barbara sucked got a really good grade on the paper, and as a reward were given extra work = the people who got the highest grades had to do presentations on specific borges stories...not exactly my idea of a reward...but...
then again since i never read doña b and ripped it to shreds with the help of vargas llosa and carlos fuentes...
(semiunrelated tip, jen said i base too many opinions on what carlos fuentes thinks, this from a woman who says people are like parts of salad...im a green pepper in case yer wondering and i dont think its possible to base toooo many opinions on what carlos fuentes thinks...)
anyway so i prolly deserved the extra work.

but i was scared to read Borges, i mean so many people have said soooo much stuff i was scared i wouldnt understand it and really afraid i wouldnt like it especially since fer instance cortazar is completely based on borges and i mean it was interesting reading rayuela (again) but really by the end i was truly annoyed and just wanted homeboy to fuckin jump already and since i have to read more rayuela and am just starting to be mighty annoyed with the long windy im so fuckin smartiness that is sooooo much of the novel....well its like i appreciate it, it makes me think but its a far far far far far cry from one of my favorite things to read...its like how i feel about Huidobro, yer sooooo fuckin smart, ok i get it now shut the fuck up you pompous windbag and write some gotdam literature already...cause when they do i can get down, but like reading theory stuff by huidobro is hell where he goes on for like years about how fuckin brilliant and original he is and insults everybody including Walt Whitman which seriously you shouldnt ever ever ever do. but i actually love some of his poetry, like not just deal with but seriously me encanta a veces and i got the same thing with cortazar. if the fuckin book woulda ended like i dunno a hundred pages sooner i woulda been walkin around all starry eyes instead of like ok ok enough salta huevon! fuckin jump already!

then again fuentes and garcia marquez are also mightily influenced by borges and i love love love them...so

picked up my first ever book of short stories by borges aware that i had to fight my way through hella fuckin theory and come up with a presentation in spanish and fast...and i fell madly in love thats right my peeps que se me enamoré con borges...

hes brilliant and insane and funny and wierd and now that i know that cortazar is a fictional character whose book is prefigured by borges, hell, contained in a single story by borges, well he doesnt bug me so much anymore....

ok enough litgeek talk...
i have been when not studying, throwing a bachelorette party for lesh, cleaning my room hanging out with my new australian buddy K



that is when shes not busy riding horses in the foothills of the mofuckin andes...

snuggling with sal, eating, smoking, bussing and sleeping...speaking of which im a go study for my big quiz tommorow for my lit theory class,

signifier sign signified spanish shit shit shit...

in response to cheetaloo off the cuff..

what do you miss us or somethin?

i miss
san fran
the bay
baker beach
my stupid brother
my moms dumb jokes
cute mission hipsters
dyke culture
my best girls cheets and victoria
jeremias
my school
my classes
burritos
indian food
classes in english
muni. thats right i miss fuckin muni.
the fog
the marin headlands
music in english
multiculturalism
people of all kinds and colors
the hubbub of sf
the snotty coffee servers
the coffee
(no wonder they snotty thats some damn fine coffee)
my sf genderqueer identity
identity politics
the russian river
breakfast out
slices of pizza
political activity
left coast liberality
the wet smell in the air
the look of the place, dollhouses stacked random
the feeling of knowing ma o meno what the hell is going on

so the answer would be yes i miss the crap out of all of you who have helped me to get here notwithstanding my eternal gratitude for this opportunity and for all i have learned and appreciated and learned to appreciate about this place which has kindly acted as a second home, i miss my first language and my first home desperately and i cant wait to come back

a good time was had by all...but wtf with the petty thievery

we have recently had some parties up in casa thrown by new roomies, one brasileño and one supergringo from north carolina...both real friendly folks, perhaps a little too friendly...the crowds that flocked to both parties apparently consisted of an entire mountanismo class and who knows who else...
the point is that there was literally nobody i know at either of these parties, and lots of folks i didnt at both...
now chileans are a friendly bunch so its a good time just kicking it but one rotten apple...

two ipods vanished at some point during the first party, both of which somewhat thoughtlessly left in a more public part of the house..
thus attempts were made to secure the place for the second party, attempts which included sofas moved to block doors ect...

to no avail as during the second party an mp3 and a pendrive vanished without a trace...

i left with my roomie during this second party which was a little piola, we took off with some friends of hers to a party thrown by somebody at her school...so we were having a ball in typical chilean fashion, dancing in the car yelling out our random english phrase like yeah mothafucka in the middle of rants in spanish passing booze to the speeding whipping around corners driver etc...
(i know this isnt exactly safe...but it sure as hell is fun..)

so we get to this place and we just go nuts dancing and drinking more, i swear that somehow drinks just kept ending up in my hand...dunno where they came from...

until the point where i realized i needed to start on the water and get some air, i was accompanied onto the patio by a friend of my roomie, carola...said friend and i somehow or other ended up talking about politics and legalization of pot in cali, state vs federal gov and the like and elections in southamerica and lots of other intense crap before going back in to dance more...

well my sleepy ass wasnt cuttin no rug by 5am fadin fast and we decide to jet only to discover to my dismay that my bag and jacket, scratch that my favorite bag and my favorite jacket (bronze velveteen zipup that perfectly matches my favorite shoes plus made in brazil out of the material of a potato sack but with adjustable strap and zip close extra pocket in front purse) thats right my shit got jacked or accidentally taken even though this was a big house party so everyone had left they shit lying in piles and everyone but me apparently got theirs back...

in the menos mal category
no phone no id no wallet in the bag just my keys and some cash and a cute little blue and white fake leather change purse...

and as we all know very well this on a budget cant shop girl is always ready to take an excuse and run with it plus aint going on a trip this weekend like everyone else plus just got some extra cash in tax refund from the good ole us gubment...well if yall know me you know what comes next, this theft requires due to the matched my favorite shoes now have many outfits incomplete...this theft of jacket and bag requires that i go shopping for replacements...i have no choice, im just being tossed about by the winds of fate...

now i know some of you might say but hey ra didnt you just get that lovely green jacket and to you id say sure but do you think green and black matches the large number of things that matched to bronze???
no i didnt think so...
entonce, yo necesito un sueter o preferible una chaqueta mas...

i mean its cold outside folks...

simplistic dualistic and binary, or what vargas llosa thought

so my norteamericana ass was feelin particularly oppressed by the latest in a series of crappy books i have to read to understand latin american literary tradition...doña barbara was like martin rivas meets my fair lady with everybody kickin it on the plains in venezuela and the critical theory babbling not so critically about the clash between civilization and barbarism. yes here at catolica you can say civilizing the people without any irony at all...
...
the superconservative stance of the school was starting to get me down what with boring boring boring all lecture all the time...static dogmatic systematic old school pedagical structure meaning that the structural design of all of my classes is to transmit to me the correct answer which when tested i will spit back up like gerbers applesauce

i guess it wasnt as big a deal last semester, partly cause my main struggle was to figure out what the hell everone was talkin about...now i know more or less (ma o meno) but kinda wish i dint...even when we are dealing with interesting material there is such an emphasis on lecture that it just kinda puts me to sleep...i have one class thats much more interactive and its my fave even though the material isnt exactly page turner, its a linguistic class concerned with the evolution of the varying kinds of español de america...but the prof rocks and extracts the info from the class and keeps everyone involved instead of droning on and on and on about it...

many of the students in my prog are feeling tired and bored and wanna just finish this crap up and go home, and i am among them...tryin to remind myself theres a reason im here and even a good reason i took that class, now much clearer since finally finally finally we are reading the groovy stuff i signed up for, starting with deep rivers which rocked in english and promises to rock harder still in español

then theres the pollution/allergy/asthma/cold sitch which has been fucketyuped but getting better my brain has been foggy my energy super low while i fight for breath...have gotten a refill on the prescrip i got last time things got this bad when a chest x ray showed a viral infection of the lungs, apparently not so uncommon here...plus allergy pills and cold meds echinacea and the inhaler...the only good thing is it makes me really think about that next cigarrete, if i gotta puff the inhaler to breathe well enough to smoke well its enough to get me to cut way way way back...

so i been sicky sleepy headachy having asthma attacks tired all the time and skipped a lot of class last week which i am now paying the ultimate price as all by assignments fall on my head so that this week i found myself writing a paper with jen about a book we both hated/didnt finish/couldnt catchai..between 20s venezuelan colloqialisms and the wierd jolty transitions we got nothin except this book sucks...the critical theory confirmed that explaining how homeboy shows up on the range and fights barbarism in the form of doña barbara, barbaric because she is a powerful woman who rules the range without fences and has inherited as her mestiza heritage all kinda black magic from the superstitious indians...homeboy shows up from the ciudad, teaches her daughter how to speak proper spanish and eventually marries her, she prancing around cooking and ironing and all happy and shit, then homeskippy gets the law on his side to claim the land and puts up fences...and doña barbara basically dissapears..

sounded like some fucked up shit to me..homeboy is named santo luzardo and lives in this joint called altamira while barbara lives in el miedo...im not even kidding about that...

but the critical theory just went on and on about civilization vs barbarism and the novel as a founding fiction that exemplified the creation of a venezualan natl identity...the oh so obvious allegorical form followed to a fuckin t

its all the silence that just about breaks my head...like theres this big fucked up eurocentric rascist sexist classist elephant in the gotdam classroom and we all not sposed to say shit

so i just kept getting more and more annoyed and thats when jen shows up with some new theory she tracked down with some post marxist feminist structuralist perspectives and quotes from the good latin american authors who im sposed to understand as having learned thier trade from this crappy book all about just how cruddy it really is...so we write a big ass paper that is in a nutshell, carlos fuentes said this book sucks and heres why...

thats right, quotes from the masters, radical rereading of the novel plus some crap i hardly got about the meaning of meaning all barthes quoting whatev that lost me..

so we wrote a big ass paper ripping the book and the traditional theory to shreds and then presented to the class, which was nervewracking but not so bad, i only forgot the spanish word for hegemony...

i aint had that much fun in a long long time...

the funny part is i felt ok about the book and basically got its place in the trad once we had established all the many many ways in which the author was completely full of shit...

but i guess thats the notion of radical rereading eh? that once youve torn it apart and pointed out the shit thats tryin to pretend it aint even there you can appreciate the thing for what it is..