Back from Spain

Hi all,
I got back from Spain around 15 hours ago, and slept for 12 of them. Shit, there's so much stuff that I could talk about that I'm probably not going to get to any of it. My head's swimming so rapidly that I can barely concentrate on writing coherent english phrases. Maybe that's because I've had to be so comprehensively trilingual recently that my brain's turned to tapioca.
Okay, for the record, hitchiking is not on the way out. You can still do it. Just don't stand on the side of an interstate. That's illegal almost everywhere, and dangerous to boot. Also, don't do it at night. But otherwise, if you've got a good face and you're clean, somebody will pick you up. There's all types of people. I managed to get myself from Montpellier, France, to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and back to San Sebastian, Pais Vasco, before I got too tired and took the train home. Go in pairs, a guy and a girl, if you can. That helps everything right along. Never solo as a woman.
My computer is broken irrevocably, expensively, and for good, I think. That means that this blog and the other will probably be a lot less complete in the time to come, either until I get a new computer, or a job, or whatever it takes to get reliable internet around here. Sorry. That sucks right now, because I have a lot to write, but I'm not willing to pay for the hours of internet cafe access that it takes to write it. Sorry. I'm really really pissed off about my really awesome computer not working, by the way.
Okay everybody. Start sending me letters or calls or something, because until further notice, my internet presence is going to be way low. Maybe it'll be a good experience for my soul. I doubt it. It'll probably just continue to piss me off.
But it'll be pissing me off in France.
love, Donald

Okay,
I'm packed. I leave tomorrow morning. Wish me luck.
-Donald

As in the other blog, it's been a while since I wrote anything. There's no real super-good reason for this, except for the fact that I probably have nothing interesting to say. Not that that's going to stop me today. Hold on tight.
Here's a bit of news: my good friend Paulo who lives in Brasil is now serving my music, as well as the musics of various other super-awesome totally independent to the max bands all over the world that everybody needs to know about, online. You should all go there and download everything. It might be a bit slow, apparently his ISP is "sticking it" to him. But it's worth the wait. I think you'll be able to figure out which stuff is mine :) Also, I now have a link on the sidebar (Seasac Records) where the Ugly By Now link used to be, because that's also where the Ugly By Now stuff resides these days. Much much music for free! And it's updated often often. I'm currently putting a track up every few days or so, but we'll see how long that lasts.
I was sick yesterday. So I figured out how to write graphical applications for Mac OS X. There's this thing called Cocoa, and it contains the power of white magic. Let me rephrase that. There are these things called Powerbooks. When you can get them to turn on, they are like God machines. Apple can quote me on that, provided that they give me another one that turns on consistently. Having to do a Cirque de Soleil balancing act, with a laptop poised on my fingertips, pressing various buttons, while I chant in tongues, in the park, every day, is hard on my social profile. Do you hear me, Steve Jobs? Are you out there? You want the French to like me, right? By the way, whiskey and soup and tea and Emergen-C take care of being sick. It's mostly the whiskey is our take on the matter here in Montpellier.
Being in the park with my laptop is like a social event.. Curious people ask me things like, "Does the internet come from the air?" or "Hey, is that WiFi (pronounced weefee in French)?" or "Where did the sleek-looking God machine come from?" or "Want some hash?" when I sit in the park with it on my lap, furtively stealing internet so as to download tracks by Miss Kittin and post blog entries. I answer yes yes yes. It feels good to be so positive. Although, I have to turn down the hash guys. Just not my thing.
I'm going on a hitchiking trip soon. I'm planning on getting around northern Spain and southern France. I'll probably not be updating the blog while I'm gone (like the last week of November), but with any luck, I'll have some good stories to write when I get back. You know, to keep everybody riveted to their seats, pressing "update" frantically in the hope that maybe I'll have posted one more, just one more, while you were reading the last.
Hasta entonces.

I'm reading a book of short stories by Jorge Borges, called Fictions (at least, that's what it's called in French). One of the stories in this book is called "The Library of Babel." It's funny how, a day or two after writing this post, I'd find that many of my thoughts and sentiments have been visited already by greater thinkers. Anyway, read that story, and consider these last couple of posts supplemental reading. The book is great, by the way, even for those of us who are reading the French translation, and who don't speak French very well. It's more entertaining than the biography of Adam Smith, the "father of economics." Trust me.

Addenum

This occurs to me a day after writing the other post, though I'm posting them both on the same day:
I mentioned before how, when dealing with complex issues, simple unambiguous statements and platitudes are simply not sufficient to gain an understanding, let alone a glimpse into the solution to, a problem. This is due to the fact that simple, single words cannot wrap themselves sufficiently around complex issues. This is part (a small part of a large whole) of the reason why I dislike George W. Bush, and his style of politics, so much. He tries to make issues that are unfathomably complex seem simple, by creating a world where his three words that he says about any particular issue are all there is to know about that issue. This is not the way I would go about solving anything more complicated than a simple algebra problem; it's not the way I would hold a relationship, and it's not the way I think the ruler of the United Three Countries of America should run them. Words like "terrorist" and "crusade" are so incredibly loaded and ambiguous that we should worry when they come out of the mouths of people in power.
Disheartening, that a majority of Americans are so fearful that they'll allow their lives to be run by such unproductive ambiguity. It's so much easier to tear things down than to build them up, and I'm sad right now, as I'm sure much of you (who've been able to wade this far into my dribble) are, that America is going to have to see so many more things go wrong before they can start to go right (left?) again.

Words

Ever wonder about words? It happens a lot learning a foreign language that you have this wonderful idea, but no words with which to express it. So you look for some other way to say what you want to say. Instead of "High Icelandic is spoken in falsetto," you might say something like, "In Iceland, they speak strangely in the court." Both of those are true statements, and they both sort of mean the same thing. Often, you'll leave a conversation wondering if you really communicated anything at all.
It happens a lot that my Spanish or French isn't enough. And, learning these languages, I notice that it happens a lot in English. You never think twice about it. Somebody doesn't understand what you say, so you try to say it in a different way. But have you ever left a conversation feeling as though you never really said what you meant, so what could the other person possibly be thinking about what you said? Almost as if you'd been speaking Spanish to a Portuguese speaker, only not so extreme?
Words are simply a medium of communication, much like music or art or holding hands or exchanging glances or sharing some sort of special hidden philotic link. It's common human nature to hold words as the ultimate in meaning, but this isn't true. How many times have you felt a feeling for which there was no expression, no single word that really sufficed?
The fact is, no word really suffices at all. Words are containers for ideas. Take a simple concept, like apple. Everybody agrees that an apple is an apple. Or do we? I think of a Red Delicious. Do you think of a Granny Smith? If you say pomme in French, are you talking about a potato, or an apple? If a concept as simple as a noun can be confusing and ambiguous, what about an emotion, like love? What about an adjective, like great? The fact is, no two people have exactly the same idea about what any word means, but we conduct our daily lives on the assumption that we all do.
Often times in the later stages of a budding relationship, I'll find myself arguing semantics over issues. I'll end up not actually arguing an issue, as in whether I did indeed leave the toilet seat down or forgot Valentine's Day. No, I'll be arguing what I mean when I say neglect, or something to that effect. Because at some point in a communicative relationship, you've got all of the easy problems solved, and you need a little more subtlety in your communications to simply understand the nature of the problem you're discussing, let alone the solution. Complicated problems require specific, focused solutions, and at a certain point single words or unambiguous phrases simply don't suffice to create understanding.
Talking to people is like an asymptotic curve in mathematics. You say something, and once it comes out of your mouth it's What You Think. From that point forward, each time you say it, you try out different word combinations and it becomes more and more What You Think, and less and less ambiguous for you. Eventually, you find the shortest combination of words to communicate what you feel is the essence of what you think. Approaching that asymptotic curve, as it were. Cutting the corners off of a square eventually makes a circle, if you do it enough. Thinking in this way is second nature when you're speaking a second language, but it's important to keep it in mind when you're speaking your first language, too.
-Donald

ugh.

Okay America,
I spent much of today carting my computer around Montpellier, trying to get some of that sweet sweet free wireless internet in the rain so that I could know about the election results. I couldn't ask French people; the answers I got varied from "I'm watching cartoons" to "I don't care about that." Some people did care, but they weren't of much help, so it's to the internet I turned.
My point is that I spent all of this effort just to find out that Bush won the election, and America hates gay people, among other things. What the fuck, America? It's like you want me to stay here. I might have to seek political asylum or something. Bush? Banning same-sex marriage? It turns out that America is indeed short-sighted (although only by a 3% margin), and that things are going to have to get much worse before they get better. But we all knew that already. Of course, y'all reading are the choir to whom I'm preaching. But what the fuck? That's all. I'm going to go drink some wine.

PS I thought the map with Republican states in red and democratic states in blue that they had on CNN really summed up the situation in America. "Yeah, I never would feel really comfortable in those red states," I thought to myself as I perused the chart. God Bless the Three United Countries of America.

Anna and I just got back from a week in Spain. The little French schoolchildren have their 1.5 week break for All-Saints Day, which coincides closely with Halloween. We would learn after our trip that French children are now prowling the neighborhoods in search of candy on the night of October 31st, much like their American counterparts. But I'm getting ahead of myself. My point was that after one week of teaching, Anna gets an almost two week break to do things like explore countries to the south of France.
This trip was important to me, because as most of you know, I lived in Spain around one and a half years ago. Our trip itinerary included (exclusively) Granada and Barcelona, both cities in which I'd spent considerable time, and cities of which I had very fond memories. So, the question is, are these towns going to be able to live up to my mental image of the way they used to be? Was I totally wrong about Spaniards being out so late, partying more, everything being cheaper in Spain, Barcelona being gorgeous, Granada being twisty and turny? Are these cities in reality just like Montpellier, France? Or are they boring after having seen a little bit more of the world? Kind of important to my internal sanity to establish some sort of answer to these questions.
To make a long story short, I was right. Spain is cheaper than France, and Barcelona is beautiful, and you can still get tapas for free in Granada, and the Alhambra really does kick ass, and the Sagrada Familia is still under construction, and a million other things that I remember still exist. My spanish came back, after a couple of awkward days of franglespañol being the only thing that would leave my mouth. I've not gone insane, and France really is a lot different from Spain, so I'm justified in being surprised by how my expectation of living here was so off base. That furthermore justifies why I had such a culture/life shock experience in the first (quite long) while here in France. This is good. It allows me to move on.
We took pictures. Go see them.