joined on 08/08/07
last updated 10/20/07
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so much beauty and tragedy swirling around...
(blog entry)
Last week I spent two days at the Climate Action Convergence outside of Eugene. It was everything I've been looking for that I've never found at festivals: community, ritual, and spirituality interwoven with the kind of cynicism that drives a des...
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sublet my room for June
( housing » roommates ) I'm leaving Portland for all of June and would love to have someone subl...
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listing posted Mon, May 12, 2008 - 6:32 PM
foreign smiles
(blog entry)
The last two weeks have been dangerous. Dangerous because I've started to feel settled in to being abroad just as my trip is about to come to an end. Xela is a beautiful city where beautiful people stop to study for awhile. Some people get stuc...
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Tikal
(blog entry)
I try to imagine the limestone ruins, now 70 m high and white, painted blue and red and orange. I try to see the second growth jungle gone, wildness held back by stone bricks and stelas with gods carved by flinstone. Peel away the grass that ...
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xela
(blog entry)
I'm staying with a Mayan family in Quetzaltanango, Guatemala, all of whom I tower above. They are a family of four, Esperanza y Gorge, los padres, and two brothers who are a couple years younger than me. They are K{iche Maya, but only the grandm...
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Last week I spent two days at the Climate Action Convergence outside of Eugene. It was everything I've been looking for that I've never found at festivals: community, ritual, and spirituality interwoven with the kind of cynicism that drives a desire to change the fucked up shit that's been going on in our world. The first night I participated in a grieving ritual: first staring into a partner's eyes, then talking, then crying my guts out, surrounded by hands and drums and chanting until 1 i...
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The last two weeks have been dangerous. Dangerous because I've started to feel settled in to being abroad just as my trip is about to come to an end. Xela is a beautiful city where beautiful people stop to study for awhile. Some people get stuck here for months, or even years, disregarding previous intentions to travel further south. Others buy a one way ticket with no intention of going home, working at the local hotspot student hangouts like coffee shops and dance clubs and bars. The s...
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I try to imagine the limestone ruins, now 70 m high and white, painted blue and red and orange. I try to see the second growth jungle gone, wildness held back by stone bricks and stelas with gods carved by flinstone. Peel away the grass that covers 85% of the buildings, using as a guide the 15% archealogists have spent the last 20 years uncovering. Erase the trees, whose roots drape down mounds of buildings like long curling dreadlocks. I try to imagine truly believing in gods, Chack t...
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I'm staying with a Mayan family in Quetzaltanango, Guatemala, all of whom I tower above. They are a family of four, Esperanza y Gorge, los padres, and two brothers who are a couple years younger than me. They are K{iche Maya, but only the grandma, la abuelita, still speaks the language. 'Es dificil,' Jason says, who is studying to become a doctor. Still, Esperanza dresses in traditional clothing, bright stripes and flowered dresses, like the workers we see in the fields and the tiendas ar...
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The state next door is flooded. Worse than Katrina they told us yesterday. The news was given by two cowboys, both named Manuel, who´d invited all the volunteers at Arca de Oca to dinner at their ranch next door. Ive been living without electricity for the past two weeks, so it takes words of mouth to get news like this. Im two hours away, and it happened last week. 70 percent of the state flooded, people moving in to the fifth stories of department stores, hotels being turned into hospi...
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