Che Guevara's Blog

The most serious weekly magazine for politics in Brazil is called Carta Capital. I've heard it described as being like the UK's Economist but leaning left. Each week they have a fake blog for a famous person. They're pretty hilarious. Here are three of the most recent ones:

Che Guevara (legal means cool)

Marx

Mother Teresa (gotta love the comment spam...)

Katie (my ex-girlfriend and current friend) has a post from when she was back in the U.S. after almost a year abroad listing the "Weirdest things so far." Many of the things that will be strange for me are on her list.

*Drinking fountains, with water you can drink out of

We can drink out of the ones at school but not elsewhere.

*You can drink the tap water

Yep. I've had a little bit, but it probably contributed to my mild digestive difficulties.

*Dollars are bills, not coins.

Yep. Single coins here as well. I read that if the U.S. managed to get us to adopt them we'd save a lot of money because the coins last much longer.

*Free refills

I guess. We don't have them but I hadn't really noticed. Today at Pizza Hut I noticed not being able to get free drinkable water.

*Cars that stay in their lanes

Hell yep.

*Cars that stop for pedestrians

H few do. We give them a thumbs up. Brazilians are all about giving each other the thumbs up. It rubs off.

*Driving for the first time in a year

Will probably be long enough to be a bit weird.

*Grocery stores

We have those.

*Even small children speak English

Yep.

*No one cares about football, of the soccer variety

Yep. Unless I run into a few grad students I know in History (and one in Comp Lit).

Though of course I'll have been gone for a much shorter period.

Good post from Sarah

Sarah's blog Between Chapel Hill and Timbuktu has been detailing her experiences in Syria..

In a post called Home Alone she discusses cultural differences about living alone or having stronger familial links:

Last weekend, we were invited to dinner at a restaurant outside the city. Our host brought along not only his wife and two young children, but also his mother, one of his nephews, his brother, sister-in-law, and their infant daughter. When I told his wife that my daughter Katie is in Istanbul working, she was surprised and sad. Isn’t she lonely? Intisar asked. I explained that in the US, children often leave their parents’ house when they finish high school. This idea seemed quite unacceptable. ‘We have close families here,’ she responded.

When Hala, my wonderful teacher, left Aleppo to go to the university in Latakia, she lived with her aunt. When she finished, she returned to her parents’ home. Young men and young women generally live with their parents until they marry. Our friend Victoria, an Armenian Syrian whose family has been in Aleppo for generations, is about to be married. She and her fiancé have just bought a house blocks away from her parents.

The whole post is really worth reading. I reflect on this thinking of how of my original nuclear family three of us live alone. I often like having the personal space, but that whole desire is very cultural.

where did all these people come from?

Went to yoga yesterday. Hardly recognized anybody and there were many more people than I'd ever seen. Maybe it'd been a long time since I'd been to a Sat. class. The room (which is big) was so full that a guy who came in late had to set up his mat on the raised instructor platform right next to the teacher.

Today we had a meeting at a coffee shop to coordinate our efforts on the comparative politics comprehensive exam. I figured I'd swing by the grocery store (the Carrboro Harris Teeter) on the way home. I drove around the parking lot for a while looking for a parking space but it was totally full with a good number of cars also looking for spaces. So I just went home. Maybe it's always that busy mid-day on Sunday and I'd always gone later in the day. But I feel almost like our population jumped a bunch in the time I was gone. Of course it did--students came back. Still, it almost feels busier than ever. Just further incentive to walk or bike to shop, which I normally do but I was trying to combine this with another trip.

Sorry if this is boring. My life isn't very interesting right now. For interesting blog posts check out Katie's blog about her travels and her mom's blog about living in Syria.

All done!

It's the last day of NaBloPoMo and I didn't miss a day. I guess it was good to do it, but I'm also glad to go back to just posting when I feel like it--that will hopefully mean better quality, too. Sometimes that's two posts in a day, sometimes two in a month. Next year I think I'll sit it out and just try to read some of the blogs and leave comments. A lot of it comes down to how much time one wants to spend online vs. other parts of life.

In any case, the next couple weeks are going to be very busy for me, so I'll be posting less.

Upgrades

Blogger just added support for Blogger Beta for blogs not hosted at blogspot.com, so I made the jump last night. About time they support categories (they call them "labels"). That was the main reason I went with WordPress for my more serious blogs. I actually have a bunch of reasons I like WordPress better for those blogs, but Blogger is fine for this one and it's fun to see what features they ad.

I finally added the side-bar thing with my most recent posts from my other blogs. Right now it's set at three posts. Is that too few?

My mom said she misses the link to Rulablog right at the top right-hand corner, so I'll add that back along with links to my other web projects, etc.

Back to my grant application. It's nice to have work I can do while listening to Back Porch Music (which you can stream online) instead of reading.

Only posting because I promised...

I'm not sure what I think of this one-a-day thing. I feel that in our society people often like to talk too much but are bad listeners. I struggle with this a lot. I wonder how much of blogging is people talking without having a conversation since we're more interested in saying what we have to say than reading what others have to say. And the pressure to post often--to have something to say--makes it worse. For Rulablog it's been a while since I've had/taken the time to read some of the other Latin American politics blogs and see what they have to say. So it's like there's this isolation even though it's supposed to the the web. As I write this it's reminding me of my reflections about how the debate team shaped people's communication styles, but that's a topic for some other time. I'm going to eat.

Blog Juggling

My post for today is merely to say please read my Urgent Nicaragua Stuff post from Rulablog. Sometimes when I post on one of my other blogs my post-of-the-day-for-November on this blog will pretty much just be to link to it. It's too late to call, but Ortega will most likely make it into the run-off (if he doesn't win in the 1st round) so we need to watch U.S. meddling.

I've often wished I had a way to post to several of my blogs at once. Like when one clicks categories, there'd be a place to click multiple blogs. That way when someone with multiple blogs needs to post something like "I'm going fishing for a week and will be totally unwired" s/he need only do it once. Off course I doubt there will ever be a way to do that with some blogs on Blogger and others on WordPress...

One thing I've been thinking about doing is putting together a feed digest of my blogs on the sidebar of this bar so people could see my most recent posts in once central place.

P.S. Others have commented on this, but will Blogger add the word "blog" to its spell-check already?

NaBloPoMo

For some reason I've decided to participate in this, where I commit to post at least once a day for the entire month of November... We'll see what I come up with.