Reflections...

Going back to Mexico always leaves me in a contemplative mood. There are memories, thoughts, nostalgia, regrets, changes, and observations to process. They whirl in my head without my even knowing it. Perhaps that is why I am feeling tired, almost exhausted.

I hope to get to them, but not now. I am not sure when...

Finally!

I made it to Mexico.

Here is proof:

I guess it really isn't proof because I could have stolen the picture from someone, so you are just going to have to trust me on this one.

There are many more pictures, but I am not sure whether to post them or not. I could also write a lot about the trip both in terms of my observations and my own emotional response to being back. I am not sure if I will do that either.

The trip back was uneventful as far as scheduling went. However the airline lost one of Sara's bags and they have yet to find it.

That's it for now.

Still Here & Going Nowhere Fast

Ice is forming on the tips of my wings
Unheeded warnings, I thought I thought of everything
No navigator to guide my way home
Unladened, empty and turned to stone

A soul in tension thats learning to fly
Condition grounded but determined to try
Cant keep my eyes from the circling skies
Tongue-tied and twisted just an earth-bound misfit, I

- "Learning to Fly" Pink Floyd

I woke up at 4:15 am this morning to get a 5:15 car to LaGuardia to catch my 8:00 am flight to Atlanta where I was to connect to my flight to Mexico City.

I was worried because the weather report called for heavy rain overnight into the morning. Looking out of my dark window, I saw there was no rain.

However, at 4:30 am I checked my flight status online only to find that my flight was canceled.

Crap.

So I called the airline to find out that I have been re-booked for tomorrow at 6:00 am. I try to get an earlier flight without any success.

I am awake with nowhere to go.

I try to look for a one-way ticket to Mexico just to see my options. I find a $500 ticket in first class. I am tempted to buy it, but I am not that rich.

The rain? It came, but it was a mix of light showers and drizzle.

Tomorrow I am up even earlier to try this for the third time.

Vacations are supposed to be relaxing, aren't they? At least that is what I hear...

So Much for Mexico

As I mentioned, I was supposed to leave for Mexico yesterday. I was hoping to get away from a rash of bad luck and stress.

But I am still in New York.

The gods (perhaps Zeus?) decided to keep me here by unleashing a massive storm on the city.



The obstacles created by said storm were too much for me to overcome.

I left for JFK (the NYC airport) at 7 am for a drive that normally takes between 35 minutes to an hour and a half depending on traffic.

My flight was at 10:35.



As I started making my way on the freeway, traffic got progressively slower and more congested.

Until it came to a complete stop.

I managed to get off the freeway and began to meander my way through side streets.

It quickly became apparent that this was not going to work either.

At some point I began to second guess myself and began thinking that I should have taken public transportation to the airport.









The radio soon let me know that I would have probably found myself in a worse predicament as most of the subway system shut down due to flooding.

This left people waiting or if you were lucky you were informed before you began to wait that you should just give up.


It was somewhere in between the stopped freeways and the congested and obstacle-ridden roads that I went from being stressed to being zenfully resigned.

The radio mentioned that there was a tornado near the airport and that there were massive flight delays.

So perhaps it would all work out. If not, there was not much I could do.

As I slowly progressed towards the airport, the the skies cleared and the sun came out as if to taunt me. How could I be so late in such a clear and sunny day?

I arrived at the airport at 10:50.

My flight was gone.

For once a flight left on time even when there was inclement weather.


As you can imagine, the airport was full of some very unhappy people. I was given the choice to re-book for today making three or more connections or for tomorrow with one connection (my flight yesterday was non-stop). I chose the latter.

Given the traffic chaos, the fact that I had already parked the car in an off-airport location, and that I am flying out of LaGuardia on Friday (but we are flying back to JFK) I decided to take the subway back home. The A train runs from JFK to where we live, but it is the whole line of the longest line in New York. Moreover, it usually runs express (skipping over many stations), but to add insult to injury, yesterday it ran local (making all the stops).

At least it was running (one of the few), it had a/c (the weather turned unbearably hot and muggy), and I had a safe home (with some very happy dogs) to return to.

Tomorrow I get to try again. The forecast is:

Showers and thundershowers likely.
High 74F.
Winds E at 10 to 15 mph.
Chance of rain 60%. Rainfall around a half an inch.

I am splurging on a private car (same cost as a taxi) and requested it for 5:15 am for my 8:00 am flight.

Let's see how that goes.

Photos from the New York Times website

Me Voy a México

I need a vacation and this trip will not really count. Why? That's a long complicated story for which I don't have time now.

Back in a week, hopefully with no intestinal visitors or other souvenirs.

Update

The cheating student's case has been referred to the vice-provost. I suspect that she will get a lecture and then the ultimate decision as what to do will land in my lap.

Fail the class?

Fail the exam?

I am leaning towards the first. We'll see.

My sister arrives tomorrow morning at 6:45 am - she is taking the red-eye from San Francisco. Like the good brother that I am I going to pick her up at Newark. I am excited to see her (and her boyfriend).

My mother and step-father arrive on Monday and then I leave for Mexico on Wednesday. I will be seeing my father and then meeting up with Sara who is there now studying Spanish.

Busy times.

Too Stupid to Cheat


Last Thursday was my last summer class. There is supposed to be a class scheduled for Tuesday, but instead of an in-class exam, I gave my students a take-home final with the option of emailing me the exam as an attachment.


Convenient for everyone involved.


© DavidJulian.com

I was already looking forward to my whole month "off" without having to teach. Of course, there is the whole issue of grading the exams that I was avoiding. Now if the students just do what they need to do, the whole process could be nearly painless.

The first exam trickled into my in-box today and with it my dreams for a quick start to my abbreviated summer break quickly disappeared. The essays in the exam contain blatant plagiarism. Now there are sophisticated programs I can use to check for academic dishonesty, but this exam only required me to open the document to see the damning evidence.

MS Word has the annoying tendency to lift links and insert them into documents when you clip and paste from websites. In this case, however, it immediately flagged the irregularity and led me straight to the wikipedia page where from it was lifted.

Common people - if you are going to cheat, do a better job of covering your tracks! How can you submit an electronic document with the hyperlinks to the site still in it? That is laziness and ineptitude to the greatest degree!

Better yet, read the syllabus and know that cheating is NOT an option and it will result in a lot of problems for you:

Students are expected to read and understand ______ College’s academic integrity policy, which can be found in the ______ College Catalog. Members of the _____ College community are expected to be honest and forthright in their academic endeavors. All the written assignments must reflect a student’s own work. If you use the material from other books, articles, and/or online sources, you must indicate it in footnotes, endnotes, or in-text citations. If you have questions about how to do this, let me know. Failure to make the distinction between your own thoughts and the insights of someone else constitutes plagiarism. Cheating and plagiarism will not be tolerated and will be subject to the College’s disciplinary procedures.

Moreover it irritates me because now I need to become involved in a bureaucratic process when I was looking forward to my brief month off.

Home Alone

Sara left for Mexico yesterday. She is doing an intensive Spanish program for two weeks - ya era hora!

I will be going down in about ten days to see my father and she will meet up with me. We will probably do some 'splorin' for a couple of days before coming back.

Things were really hectic around here before she left. I had the last days of my summer class, she was getting ready to go, and we had a minor dog emergency. Then two days before Sara was to leave, she got a call from DC. She had applied for a job there and she had an on-campus interview in June. The call was to offer her the position.

Talk about stress.

After much (and very quick) deliberation, she turned the position down. It was difficult for her because the job was good (although not yet tenure-track).

So I am alone now - with two needy dogs. They get that way when travel occurs - by anyone. It is hot and extremely steamy. I don't like this weather.

More to say, but I am just not really in the mood.

Do You Know Where Your Food Comes From?

We joined a CSA (Community Sustained Agriculture) Farm this year after Sara had finished reading Michael Pollans' Omnivore's Dilemma. We had been thinking of doing it before, but we had just never lived in one place long enough to actually do it.

The way it works is that you buy a share of the farm's seasonal production. Every week you go to the farm (some have collection sites away from the farm) and pick up that week's harvest. Our share started producing in mid-June and hopefully it will go long into the fall (probably mid- to end of October). After our first share, we realized the two of us could not consume everything we got in a week, so we split the share with a fellow anthropologist from the college where I work.

So far we have gotten a lot of lettuce and greens, a few peas (the fields got flooded in May and most of the planted peas got washed away), cucumbers, radishes, beets, basil, cilantro, parsley, carrots, and beans. It is fun seeing how the produce changes each week.

It is also nice chatting with the farmers and hearing what is doing well and what some of their struggles are.

For the most part, the veggies also taste great. There were a couple of radishes that where just to sharp and bitter for my liking.


Unfortunately, we are still very much tied into the large food production network. But I like mangos, avocados, coffee, spices, cheeses etc. too much to give up on it completely. I do try to get milk and yogurt from grass-fed and hormone/antibiotic-free cows. I think it is important to just be aware of where your food comes from, even if you can't or do not want to consume local, organic, and ethically produced food.

There have been omens about the breakdown or the poisoning of the food network recently. Sometime soon there will probably be a bigger emergency. I hope it doesn't come down my path.

With that I am off to munch on something that came from the field in the picture above.

Happy Birthday, Zephyr!


Thanks for putting up with us, giving us affection, and being a great all around dog.

[She turns 6 today - buffalo (as in the animal, not the style or the place - and yes, I do know it really is a bison) burgers to celebrate!]

2HT2BZ2WRT

Bleh, Phew, & Ugh...

Sorry, folks...

Encountering the Past

I met up with a friend from college today. I had not seen him since I graduated way back in the previous century. Fourteen years to be precise (to those of you who can do the math: congratulations!).

It is strange.

Reconnecting with someone whom you knew pretty well, but then just took different paths and fell out of touch.

The irony of it is that in college he was a music major and he now works at the UN, while I was an IR (international relations) major and I am not quite sure what I am doing.

I also studied abroad in Sweden a year before him. I convinced him to go the following year and to stay with the host family I had, which he did. Now he is still in touch with the family, while I have lost touch.

In a reminder of the passing of time, he updated that the host family's youngest daughter is now a medical doctor. She was 8 or so when I was there. Interacting with her was great because she did not speak English and it forced me to speak in Swedish. She would laugh at me all the time because as she put it, "I was a grown up that spoke like a two year old."

Back to my friend, it is a strange dynamic when you meet up again. So much has happened since we last saw each other, but there are clear memories that still linger: debating the virtues of Clinton, Tsongas, third party candidates, the Blue Jays World Series run (he's Canadian), and the wonders of Mongolian Bar-B-Q.

As I sit here writing, I wonder whether we will reconnect or whether it was a parenthetical encounter in our respective lives.

Friday Date

Friday was Sara's Birthday. To celebrate we went to visit some old woman.

We got to see all sides of her.

We also saw a nautical replica of one of our dogs.

There were some spooky moments.

Some close moments.

Some strange encounters.

And some very intimate views.




We also popped over to the place where some of our ancestors passed through.




And we looked back on where we had been.














And what would a visit and photo show be without a bird picture for Scott?

Simple Things that Still Leave me in Awe

Fireflies!

AKA - lightning bugs, glow worms, luciérnaga, lucciola, eldfluga, Leuchtkäfer

Amazingly there are some in our corner of New York City.

I had to take Sara out to see them.

She enjoyed them too as they don't have them in New Mexico.

Nature's firework show.

Why It isn't so Good to Live in NYC: Reason #381

Our lease is up for renewal and they are raising our rent by 10%.

Is my paycheck going up 10%?

I wish.

Censorship?

I guess Blogger didn't like my nudie pictures of bikers.

I will leave it up to your imagination then.

Yet Another Entry in the Bad Idea Book

Recently in Spain they had some kind of protest bicycle ride.

Their choice of attire - or rather lack of it - just doesn't seem like the smartest way to go.

Painful?


Um, yeah.

Especially when this happens:



I wonder if you need a special seat or something...

I would definitely think you would need to clean it off after a long ride.

I hope this isn't a fad that catches on.

Mall Chaos: The Holy Temple of Postmodernist Consumption

I take my students to one of the most obscene malls ever created for many of my classes. Anthropologically, it is a fascinating place. From a humanist perspective, however, it is tragic.

Request

I am going to be attending the Puerto Rican Day Parade on Sunday.

If any of you have any tips about a good place to go, something to see, or how to survive, please let me know.

Added Traffic Irritation

The other day as I was stuck in traffic trying to cross the George Washington Bridge, the sticker on the bumper of the Toyota Highlander Hybrid in front of me chastised me:

If you care about the environment, why aren't you driving a hybrid?

Now, I do care about the environment and I think people in general should care about how we are harming our little planet (ultimately, though, the planet will be fine, it is us humans who will lose out), but I don't like being preached at by ignorant and arrogant individuals speaking though their rear (bumpers).

Let me offer my rebuttal:

• My car, while not a hybrid, gets 35 mph on average while I commute to and from work.
• Your SUV hybrid officially gets 31 mph on the highway (we all know those numbers are elevated and from what I have read, it is closer to 24 mph). So who is doing more damage?
  
• You hybrid has a nickel based battery that when you decide to junk it, will also hurt the environment.
• I would in fact have bought a hybrid if they were more affordable and even available when I was buying a car. Unfortunately, most of us can't afford they hybrids that are available now.
• Last, if you cared about the environment so much, you would not be driving at all. Rather, you would be driving a hybrid with better mileage, in a bio-diesel, in a compact fuel-efficient car, or even better yet, on a bus or on a bike.

So please, peel that bumper sticker off and stop thinking you are more environmentally friendly than I am just because you are appeasing your conscience by thinking it is ok to drive an SUV if it is a hybrid.