This makes me happy

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/04/25/arts/25hiph_CA0.ready.html

A funny quest

Santo Domingo, loving it, but this morning I wanted to get some work
done. Before going to bed I felt a mild twinge along the lines of "I
should charge my laptop in case the electricity's out tomorrow" which
has been happening a lot. I didn't, and the electricity was out today.

So I asked around about a good place to get electricity and wifi. I
tried a hotel down the street, but there wasn't a good place to sit
so they directed me to the university. After a short, chill bus ride
I enter through the gates of the Autonomous University of Santo
Domingo (UASD) which is apparently the first university in the
hemisphere, founded 15-something. Lots of big buildings, open
spaces, and Dominican girls in power outfits walking around under
parasols.

The "Sala Digital" right next to the entrance looks promising, but
they imply I'm not supposed to be there and direct me to the library
saying there's free wifi there. Fair enough. Some kids tell me
where it is, and I walk up the steps to a very large modern
building. I'm not sure I'll be able to enter without ID, but it
looks like people are walking in passed the security folks without
flashing anything. As I stroll up though, one of them comes towards
me with a hand out. Fair enough, I am obviously not a Dominican
college student student.

But Jigga?, that's not the problem; the problem is I'm wearing
shorts. Yep, no shorts allowed in the college library. "No me
diga!," laughing, partly because the word for shorts is "bermudas"
which a) sounds funny in Spanish b) is funny because it's a specific
word gone general in another language (what's the word for that?) and
c) because the shorts I'm wearing aren't quite bermuda shorts but
they are totally offensive from any non-wacky modern fashion
perspective. I think they're Ocean Pacific or Gotcha, and they're
hot pink with a yellow horizontal stripe across the crotch and butt.
The security guy's familiar "rules is rules" apologetic attitude is
definitely intermingled with a more judgmental "dude, what are you
wearing that for?"

Whatever, I'm in the Caribbean, dude. Except that's just background
for them. Flip flops are banned too, which I would have been wearing
except I lost one in Haiti.

Anyway, I chuckle my way through it and ask if they could make an
exception for a foreigner who didn't know and just needs to get some
writing done. One of the security guys actually goes and asks
somebody, and comes back in a few minutes with the OK From Higher
Up. Sweet! But in the meantime I'd already unattached myself from
the need for a successful outcome and switched to adventure mode,
which was a good thing.

I enter the library and Woo, it's chilly in here. The AC is maxxed
and I should have worn pants I guess. I walk up a huge central
staircase and on the fourth floor the AC is mellowed out by the sun
pouring in through big modern windows and the way gasses behave.
Find a chair with an outlet and plug in. Ouch, still no electricity,
all the outlets are decoys. This is a new building, and there's no
indication it's running on emergency power, though the computers in
the center of the room are all plugged into orange "I get electricity
from backup batteries please don't plug a vacuum into me" outlets. I
could plug in there, but there's no chairs and I didn't want to be
standing there with my pale legs appalling everybody. So I start
asking around about the electricity thing, and some people don't seem
to know, and others say that the outlets on the second floor. I
descend back down into the chillier levels, but still no luck.

Then I hear the subtle hissing sound which means anything from "nice
ass" to "hey mister". I figure my shorts are to blame and not
because they flatter my butt. Okay, yeah I know but I asked some
folks down there and they said it was cool. They didn't have the
proper authorization? No, but they actually went and asked their
boss. Lets go over and ask them. No? Okay, I'll come with you down
to the security office. This kid has to be 8 years younger than me
but apparently they teach officiousness in high school. In the
security office they have to go and ask somebody else, there are like
four people involved in the decision, none of them are sympathetic,
and the fashion judge comes back with a guilty verdict: no shorts.
Out I go back into the sun and the parasol twirling girls.

So I ask about electricity and get directed to a building across the
street. There's a power outlet right next to a chair, but then I
realize one of the outlets looks like it caught on fire at some point
and I don't even bother. I make my way upstairs and find an unused
room with an outlet in the corner that wouldn't look promising if it
there wasn't a wire running out the side to a switch that seemed to
power the lights. The room is entirely unfurnished except for a
highschool chair-desk who's desk is shoulder-leaning at like a 20%
angle from horizontal, and who's seat is delaminating and splintery.
There's another chair on the opposite side of the room but--no lie--
as I walk over to move it I realize its legs are cemented to the
floor. There's something charming about the desk though so I sit
down and get to work, with a petty compulsion to write about the
experience, which is basically little more than an American
complaining about the plumbing. Zero work done, and maybe if I was
wearing pants I wouldn't feel the plywood splinters poking me in the
butt.

Suddenly, a student walks in, tries to move the chair, then gives up
and sits in it. He asks me where I'm from, and eventually I tell him
the story of why I'm there. He explains that Dominican culture is
very formal. The library may be the only building where shorts are
banned, but you would never see anybody wearing shorts or flip flops
to class. It reflects a belief, for better or worse, that education
happens through polite behavior, he said. (Though the logic seemed to
rest mostly on the coincidence that the concepts "polite" and
"educated" in Spanish share a word.) I told him there was nothing
of the sort in the US, and he was shocked that you could walk into
the library at Harvard in flip flops. I told him girls sometimes
wore pajamas to classes, but I think that was too much to register.
I didn't even tell him about the clothing optional campuses. Another
funny thing was he thought the Alps were in the US, and it took me a
while to even understand what he was talking about.

More generally, there's definitely a lot of latent fascism here. At
the park last night there was a pack of young cops waving automatic
rifles around like they were drunk and stopping cars in a really
unprofessional way. There are bona fide police states (near here)
where the cops are more chill. And they just passed a law that
requires bars to close at 12:00 on weeknights. It's probably just a
hangover from US-backed authoritarian regimes, but I'm not sure.

Update

I'm back in Santo Domingo after some time in Haiti, and it is still
the best shit ever. I heard from the "Brigadoon" (my humorously
named boat) this afternoon, and they're about 100 miles away off the
coast of Haiti, without a motor. My guess is they'll be here in a
week, and then we go to Brazil.

A trailer

Tomorrow I'm leaving Haiti and going back to Santo Domingo. I have so
much to write about, and I'm thinking of abandoning the public blog in
favor of something more thorough and intimate given how serious some
of this stuff has been. Read about how I was a sugar daddy for 48
hours. Or about the guy I met from Baghdad today who's in Port au
Prince to chill out (!). Two of the best stories involve animals
(don't worry, the cute ones weren't ritually sacrificed). More news
as it happens.

Haiti

I spent the day reading about Haiti, filling in some gaping holes in
my understanding of the place.

http://wikitravel.org/en/Haiti

The US has been doing all kinds of meddling here (including ousting a
democratically elected president in 2004) to make sure progressive
democracy doesn't happen here.

In "Collapse", Jared Diamond uses Haiti as an example, linking social
breakdown to deforestation...everybody cooks with wood-derived
charcoal. We bought some today at the market, and it was pricey.

Posts I promise to write about Haiti

Rara http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rara

Seeing Christopher Columbus's anchor

Mangoes

Public Transportation

Haiti as a place

That out of the way, I hope I can pass along some crazy tings I've
stumbled across and convey some impression of what it's like here. I
will combat the nasal irritation seeping into my tone by renouncing
tone in favor of bullet points.

The word Haiti has something to do with "hilly" (it means land of the
hills?). The Dominican Republic has mountains, but no cities built on
mountains. Haiti is awesomer in this respect.

There's African music on the radio. One song (no idea who) drops out
of not sure what language into the chorus from Remix to Ignition.
Words and everything (not like that Akon song which just bites the
notes). No joke.

The most insane thing colonialism did here was bring so many people to
this hot, rocky island.

The walk to where I am staying is slippery, windy, and vertical.
There is a ton of that here.

The word for one form of currency here (there are two hatian
currencies) is "good". Which is funny, because you can say "I'm
money" or "I'm good" in English to mean roughly the same thing. This
only indicates how much I've been "woah, man" thinking about
languages, and how often I end up seeing intersections between them
that are neato enough to keep me looking.

The tipping forties to dead homies has its roots in an African
tradition which is still big here, where you pour your drink in 3
points on the ground before drinking it. My version of this is (water
is sold in pouches here which you open with your teeth) to humorously
squirt water all over my face and crotch before drinking, in a totally
"green" (or white) but still 100% refreshing way.

Haiti as a sensation

This shit is intense. Some kind of cold and/or allergies kicked in
last night and I was very uncomfortable today. This is not the place
where you want that to happen, and I wasn't a happy traveler in the
traditional sense today.

People cook with charcoal, they sell cheap dirty gas at 60 cents a
gallon and all the vehicles are old. Lots of diesel vehicles going up
hills and in stop and go traffic. I bought some claritin, and have
been doing pretty good for water and rest, so hopefully the thing will
resolve itself.

Of course I can cut through it intellectually, and I keep trying. On
the bus coming home I heard this very unique repeating squawk coming
from just behind my head as a person boarded the van, and thought it
was a cellphone. It was more a chicken than a cellphone, though.
Fuck allergies, I was not that chicken.

Every time my dominican traveling companion lit up a cigarette my nose
went crazy and I got really mad inside and then laughed at myself
(Grr, ha, whatever, ohh).

The food

The food here is really good. I hope I'm not being too cavalier about
what I'm throwing at my stomach / immune system. But it is really,
really cool stuff.

I had a mixture of cod and palm hearts today with bread that was
awesome. Lilah, you like palm hearts, right?

In haiti

We arrived in Haiti this morning after staying at a border town last
night. All of the public transport here (and many stores) bears
slogans like "Dieu seul maitre" or other religious statements in
French. They are also painted brilliant colors. I have pictures of
these which are probably redundant with others already on flickr.

We are staying with a friend of Johanna's friend who is active in the
following music and cultural association, and heads up a chapter here.
http://www.malakimakongo.net/

Haiti is tough on the senses. There's a lot of dust, exhaust, burning
trash, and generators here. Explained in terms of previous
experiences, it's like Sicily meets West Philly. That
characterization is lucky to be much closer to the truth than it
deserves to be, though of course from many points of view it's still
hogwash.

According to my companions here it's very very much like a lot of
places in Africa in a bunch of surprising ways. In some ways the
people are much more chill than in the Dominican Republic, though the
climate and the infrastructure differences make the totality of the
experience a lot harsher.

But right now I'm in a beautiful place, with wonderful people. I'm
learning some creole too, which is fun because it's not at all
inflected (no endings to worry about). The language learning
equivalent of a cool breeze for English speakers with highschool
French.

I have a camera but don't have a computer, so photos when I return.

Poverty w/o analytical frameworks

One thing that's started here is that I've been in poorer places than
I've ever been in before. The first or second day I was here, we
went to spend two days and a night out in an outlying area of Santo
Domingo. Earlier this week, I went into a barrio wedged into a
riverbank that was more central and more hectic.

The way I arrived in both situations could not have been more
different (in the first case with a host who has deep connections
with the place, in the second on a feel-good bandaid mission giving
out mosquito nets with a rich christer) but that's another story.

The thing that ran through it was how formless any feeling associated
with poverty was. You hear people say "people are really, really,
really poor" but those really's seem just stand-ins for general
anxiety about their own wealth and otherwise content-free. I read a
Nicholas Kristoff column the other day, and comparing the two
experiences now, I think that for a rich outsider reading Kristoff's
columns would be a more valuable experience (in terms of the poor
themselves) than a month or even a year working in a barrio here.

This was definitely true in the case of the christer, for example.
Context is essential, and very difficult to grasp and bring to bear.

Going to Haiti

I'm taking the bus(es) to Haiti for a few days with a friend of
Johanna. He seems like a very good person to travel to Haiti with.

Being in the DR has been great but leaving is too. I've descended
from highly self-sufficient camping to mom's house getting pampered.
This felt good to soak up for a few days, but it's taking a spiritual
toll, so it's good we're moving. I was also starting to get
preoccupied with the girls here, which was silly.

I'll be back here to meet the boat, so it's not goodbye yet.

The food, environment, and nuances of daily life here are so great
that I wish I could dedicate more time to getting into them. But
since most of you know me very well, and trust my recommendations,
just take this to heart: The DR has my total unqualified stamp of
approval as an excellent place to live for 3-12 months. Anybody who
goes south in the winter (T-dog), who telecommutes, or who wants to
learn Spanish should come here within 2 years. And talk Johanna into
coming with you.

My First Moo-vee

http://wstr.org/Videos/Culebra%20Campsite.m4v

Okay, so it's an m4v and that's kinda fucked. Whaddayagonnadoaboutit.

Are mild electric shocks bad for your health?

I ask because my laptop gives me them when I touch it. I think it
has something to do with grounding and electricity in the DR. Either
that or my power adapter is trying to kill me and doing a so so job.

Yow, really good upstream on this wifi

So I'm uploading some hott videos.

http://wstr.org/Videos

My gmail alterego's mom died

Okay, so this is kind of heavy.

I have a gmail alterego.  Her name is Hilary Wilson, and her gmail name is *not* "hwilson" because that's my name.  But sometimes I get emails that are written for her.  Like, for example, a couple days ago I got an email from J Crew and had to unsubscribe myself from their email list.

This time it was a little bit heavier, however.

###########################

Hilary,

   I just wanted to tell you that i think you are an amazing person.  During the service on Saturday when i was able to hear all about the wonderful and incredible person your mom was i realized that there is so much of her in you.  I mean I had never had the pleasure of meeting your mom but I feel that by knowing you I knew her.  I know that you said that you were so proud to be her daughter which of course you should be, but never forget that your mother was equally if not more grateful and proud to have you as her daughter.  You and your family are truly an inspiration to me and I wish you all the best in the future and I know that you will continue to do great things in your life.  I am privileged to know you.  I know that we don't know each other very well but I want you to know that if you ever need anything I am here.  You and your family are in my thoughts and prayers.

G_d Bless.

Love

Elena

#########################

The other thing is that today, I found out that this close friend of the guy I'm staying with in the DR lived in Binghamton, NY for 20 years, at one point *on the same street* that my dad was born on.  He knew my aunts.  Fuck, what a crazy coincidence.  I was so pumped for so long, I can't believe it.

Also, the adorable baby chihuaha that I filmed yesterday (video forthcoming) died this morning.  Lo siento, seriously.  The cute white rat as far as I know still lives.

The Domincan Republic

I think the Dominican Republic has more beautiful people per capita
than anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. I haven't been to Brazil
yet, so I'm holding off on calling the Southern Hemisphere for the
DR, but it pushes the limits of imagination to think that Brazil
could be much better.

And ladies, it's not like Italy where the girls look great but the
guys are kind of "International Male" (that catalog that sells
leopard print undies and pirate shirts); the guys here are gorgeous too.

I'm only here for another week, but everyone should know about this.
I can't believe it doesn't come up in casual conversation more often.