So, I’m doing a ridiculous translating job for which I am severely underqualified, but am enjoying greatly. Every once in a while my Italian ex-boyfriend’s mom sends article to me via him that need proofreading in English. They’re scientific articles. And sometimes the translation is so odd I need to be able to look at the original.

Now, I don’t actually “speak” Italian. But my Spanish is great, my French is…in there somewhere… and I’ve picked up a bit of Italian here and there. In the past, I’ve had fun with these articles. They’re like brain teasers. Usually I can figure out how to clean things up but sometimes I get sent on a wild google chase to figure out what something means in Italian and what it is in English.

This time its insane! A 6000 word document on an ovarian syndrome. OMG! I spent 30 minutes – and an international chat to an italian -  just trying to figure out what a phrase was, only to find it meant those little plastic tubes that go up your nose for oxygen in the hospital  – nasal cannala, if you care (which you probably don’t). And there’s a blood transfusion term that is driving me completely bonkers!!

And yet, I’m happy. I’m sitting here with my opera on, trying out different ones to see which one I want to see at the Teatro Real. I started out with Rossini, you know, to put my mind in an Italian mode (maybe something will sink in by osmosis) but have moved on to Wagner (Inteeeeense!!). And it’s 12:30 and I’m totally not tired, or feeling burnt out (ok, I needed a little break which is why I’m writing this). I find it invigorating somehow.

Every time I do some translating work I think “maybe this is what I should try to do, like professionally”. I can’t explain it. There is something just so simply, well, fun about it for me. I feel like I’m really really exercising my brain, like this is just some great game or puzzle, and is so satisfying when you find the right piece! It’s just a very intense and focused kind of intellectual challenge, I guess exactly the kind I havent had very much of here in Spain, and the kind I hope to find by going back to school.

Anywho, just wanted to write about an activity that always surprises me with how much it makes me appreciate my brain. Thanks brain, you’re fun!

The panic is setting in.

Now that my escape from Madrid is nearly certain, I’m starting to think about everything I still haven’t done yet. It’s amazing the things you manage not to do when you live in a place. For example, in California you can see Alcatraz from the house I grew up in. I was 22 before I visited. (And it was crap, btw, a crumbling ugly building that would probably have been bulldozed had Al Capone not wasted away there with syphilis, yawn.)

So I’ve decided this would be a good place to start compiling a list of things to do before, oh mid-February-ish. They’re not going to be in any order of importance or priority, just in the order in which they occur to me. So here goes:

1. See an opera at The Opera – the Teatro Real.

I tried to take care of this one over the summer. I downloaded the libretto for Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and started piecing it together with my rudimentary Italian (which I can sort of read between my Spanish and rusty French), and got all excited to go see it at the Teatro Real! Waited too long to try to get tickets and the only ones left were over 200 euros. D’oh!

So now I’ve got to do a little more planning. Before I leave, there’s a Rossini (L’italiana in Algeri), a Handel (Agrippina), a Janacek (Janufa), a Wagner (The Flying Dutchman), and a Giordano (Andrea Chenier). I know next to nothing about opera, but I have been told Wagner is not for beginners (which of course makes me want to see that one, just cuz).  Any suggestions on what a neophyte might enjoy would be heartily appreciated!

2. Go to the Top of That Stupid Tower – the one in Moncloa that’s hideously ugly but everyone says there’s a great view at the top of.

3. Eat in Every Restaurant on Cava Baja That I Haven’t Eaten in Yet

So I live at the end of this crazy street crammed full of great bars/restaurants/cafes called Calle Cava Baja. Unfortunately I moved into this awesome barrio just as I became too poor to really enjoy that part of the neighborhood. I dreamed of being able to have the money to spend at one of the places every day, so it would become my local, and the people there would know me, and it would be like Cheers, only “Salud.” ‘Twas not to be. But at least before I leave I want to sample the restaurants I haven’t tried yet, which is almost all of them.

So, I’ve been under the weather fighting a nasty cold since Sunday but was feeling significantly better today. The sniffliness had turned into the wheeziness. Everything was progressing fine. So I went to teach my afternoon class in the middle of nowhere (ie. Rico-ville) with a darling 11-year-old girl who I tutor in math, while trying to keep her well-meaning but interfering little sister at bay. It’s fun. They’re cute.

But today, something went terribly wrong.

After about 30 minutes I started to get this dizzy feeling, then I started to feel warm, like I was breaking out in a sweat. I excused myself to go to the toilet. I burped. That was all. I returned to long division.

My student told me “You look really white.”  “No, no, don’t worry, I’m feeling better,” I lied. We continued on to rounding numbers. We had just determined how to round 312.895 to the tens place when she looked at me again “You look a little green,” she said, and to illustrate pointed to my avocado green hair clips with a little giggle. I couldn’t keep it up. I told her to go tell her mother I wouldn’t be able to finish class and I proceeded to wretch, embarrassingly loudly, my beautiful sundried tomato and goat’s cheese pasta lunch into their beautiful, immaculate and expensive toilet, in their beautiful immaculate and expensive bathroom.

Ah well. It got me a lift all the way to the metro station. So, bonus!

Not sure what happened, I am currently considering  two culprits: 1) my uberstrong cough medicine that makes me high as a kite or 2) the cheese sauce in my lunch. Cheese is always a suspect.

Either way, it was a pretty embarrassing situation. It’s difficult to maintain dignity while puking in your employer’s house. And what might they think? That I was hungover? Knocked up? Sigh.

Off to vegetate on the sofa.

UPDATE – It was my flatmate’s milk, of which i used a miniscule amount in my pasta sauce, which was the culprit. We discovered it to be well sour the next day. Boo

Here’s a buttload of links of things I’ve been perusing this week, and haven’t bee able to actually post about.

First US Official Resigns Over Afghanistan – “Not worth the effort.”

Stephen Fry’s Twitter Spat is News?!? The world is a sad place.

Parliament to Host first Gay Wedding! Yay!

US Terrorizing Aid to Somalia – aaaah the War on Terror

Thank Bolivia for you Lithium Batteries -let’s hope they can manage the industry wisely

Random nature links on Seahorse Sex and Humpback Whale Fights (I attribute these links to a recent bout of insomnia. That’s when I gravitate towards nature videos.)

Children Who Get Life in Prison Without Parole – the sad sad state of the US correctional system.

Camorra Boss Arrested in Naples – for those who don’t know about the situation, read Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra (one of the best books of 2007) and then go see the Cannes Grand Prix winning film made from the book. (trailer)

Karzai’s Opponent drops out and Robert Fisk says what I was thinking (but so so much better than I could)

The Case For Modesty in an Age of Arrogance – if Barack is so humble, shouldn’t he have refused the Nobel Prize?

One Reason You Shouldn’t Go To Afghanistan With Beard – interesting quick read

(via CrooksandLiars.com)

Dissent gets interesting!

From the Washington Post:

But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, [former Marina Corps Captain Matthew]Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.

“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”

The reaction to Hoh’s letter was immediate. Senior U.S. officials, concerned that they would lose an outstanding officer and perhaps gain a prominent critic, appealed to him to stay….

…”I’m not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love,” Hoh said. Although he said his time in Zabul was the “second-best job I’ve ever had,” his dominant experience is from the Marines, where many of his closest friends still serve.

“There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed,” he said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. “I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys.”

But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there — a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.

When the guy who talks about how much he loves “whacking” “dudes” says we’re out of line, let’s hope people start listening.

…you can always count on me for suggestions. I have too much to read!

Latest link list I want to get through is Project Censored’s list of the 25 most censored news stories of the past year.  You can buy it in book form here. I actually came across it in a little anarchist-y newspaper here in Madrid called Diagonal. I have checked it out in previous years, and its always good for some eye-opening.

And here they are:

• 1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
• 2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
• 3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
• 4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
• 5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products
• 6. Lobbyists Buy Congress
• 7. Obama’s Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past
• 8. Bailed out Banks and America’s Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions
• 9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza
• 10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
• 11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine
• 12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief
• 13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War
• 14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts
• 15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
• 16. US Repression of Haiti Continues
• 17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan
• 18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature
• 19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor
• 20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates
• 21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare
• 22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team
• 23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud
• 24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion
• 25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon

In case there’s anyone out there, here’s the nutshell explanation why nothing has appeared on this blog in aaaages.

I ended up in the hospital for gall stones. Got out of the habit of blogging what with the hospital stays, visiting mom,  preoccupations with losing work hours and lots of money, and then just decided to forget the blog for a while. I just didn’t want to think about it. It felt like this big guilt trip “I should be blogging this, I should be blogging this”. Bleh.  Had to sort out what was going to come next in life, since my papers had recently been denied, all my money was gone and I was not looking forward to teaching English (which I am doing once again).

So that’s that. Gonna try to ease back into this. Just posting whatever I come across, and talking about my plans – which are almost certainly to leave Spain in the fairly near future.

In the mean time, I want to encourage anyone who wants to to find me on facebook, where I tend to post a lot more links than I ever managed to put up here. Just include a message as to how you came to find me (ie- via the blog) so i know what list to add you to!

Thanks!

Nice. For the past week or so, I haven’t been able to access my blog! Nothing would load, I’d get repeated error messages after long attempts. Not even the support page for WordPress would load (though their homepage yes) so I couldn’t email anyone about it.

Anywho, had other things to be worried about but glad its back up, was getting worried, having nightmare thoughts about the entire blog being mysteriously lost to cyberspace. Gulp. Made me think about backing up!

So, as explained on Vimeo I meant to post this on Thursday before I left for Barcelona – just an informative thing – but logistics were against me, I was running late for the bus, so I didn’t get around to it till today. It’s not purty – wasn’t really supposed to be – just some news. (with of course, my own, obligatory literary digression)

[Sorry, BTW, to anyone who got to this and the video's not up yet - Vimeo tells me I've got another 100-something minutes to wait and I'm exhausted and its way past my bed time- so if it's not through the queue yet, come back in a bit - thanks]

...and some humor to balance it out...

I came across this after finishing that last rant. The blog is called “Stuff White People Like” and #105 is, oh you guessed it, Unpaid Internships. Have a chuckle:

In most of the world when a person works long hours without pay, it is referred to as “slavery” or “forced labor.” For white people this process is referred to as an internship and is considered an essential stage in white development.

The concept of working for little or no money underneath a superior has been around for centuries in the form of apprenticeship programs. Young people eager to learn a trade would spend time working under a master craftsman to learn a skill that would eventually lead to an increase in material wealth.

Using this logic you would assume that the most sought after internships would be in areas that lead to the greatest financial reward. Young White people, however, prefer internships that put them on the path for careers that will generally result in a DECREASE of the material wealth accumulated by their parents…

…White people view the internship as their foot into the door to such high-profile low-paying career fields as journalism, film, politics, art, non-profits, and anything associated with a museum. Any white person who takes an internship outside of these industries is either the wrong type of white person or a law student. There are no exceptions.

If all goes according to plan, an internship will end with an offer of a job that pays $24,000 per year and will consist entirely of the same tasks they were recently doing for free. In fact, the transition to full time status results in the addition of only one new responsibility: feeling superior to the new interns.