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Singing My Girl in Viejo San Juan
One of the most in tune with life I’ve felt in the past few years was ad-libbing an interpolation of My Girl with a friend from college as we walked along the coastline of outer Viejo San Juan. We were almost precisely 6 years out of undergrad and on the cusp of financial security. Our peers were beginning to marry. We were in Viejo San Juan’s outer suburbs, interspersed with federal and industrial buildings like military, storage and electrical facilities, walking back to a rental car in order to return it and fly our separate ways back to the continental United States. It was about a twenty minute walk through…
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A musing on long distance amorous relationships
I wondered today whether I, living in a long distance relationship with my partner (¿ligados al infinito?), who lives across the ocean, en el ultramar, was living naively. Do I really know whom I’m in a relationship with? It is not the first time I have wondered this, even in close-distance relationships. But the ultramar highlighted the profile of this conundrum. Really, the conundrum arose after climaxing. I had been imagining her (she has given me permission to do so at my leisure). Whom was I just imagining? This was especially prudent to wonder because my fantasy had been a few years in the future, the sacred moment when we…
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Breaking Point?
I dreamed, first person, that I was on a stage behind two presenters in an opulent classical theater. The spotlight was on the presenters seated at a desk and facing the audience. The audience was only dimly lit, perhaps at most reflection of the stage lights; it was hard for me to see because the brilliant spotlights obstructed my vision. No one acknowledged my presence. As if I was a first-person-limited floating camera, my point of view would shift around just like cuts in a video production. The show on stage was like a news or news commentary show with a live audience. The two presenters were bantering about about…
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Personal Auras Strong as Coffee, Complex as Cajun
I think we forget how strong is the aura of a person. That is all, thanks. I’ll be philosophizing here all week. Seriously, what I mean is that we spend our whole lives practicing how we present ourselves to others. We want to attract relationships of some kinds and not others. We forget that this practice creates a strong “giving off” of “vibes” whenever we are around someone. Some of us are sensitive to others’ treatment of us, especially those close to us. If someone doesn’t want to be around us, sometimes it hurts, even if only a little. But we should remember just how powerful of an experience it…
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Is ‘being emotional’ irrational?
Cue Mariah Carey’s Emotions On the one hand, emotions are often present when irrationality is, too. Children get angry and hit their siblings or peers. That rarely, if ever, accomplishes what they really should have wanted–paradigmatic irrationality. Anger and irrationality correlated. We feel lonely and seek the company of our exes, even though we’re fairly confident that we cannot have a healthy long term relationship with them, thus investing time in something we know will not return much for the investment. But was our irrationality caused by the emotion or something else? All kinds of examples of coupled emotion and irrationality abound. But that does not mean that the emotions…
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The point is / my point is :: La cuestión es / mi cuestión es
I have often said “mi punto es” in Spanish and people seem to understand, even those unfamiliar with English. Still, as we were driving down the rather uncongested M-30 towards either (if my memory serves me well) Fuente del Berro or Goya in downtown Madrid for a lunch and sobremesa, and discussing the then recent retirada of the American military from Afghanistan (I will discuss that more in a moment), my partner and her father said that the expression “mi punto es” is not really used. They insisted that they understood what I meant by it and that I should continue but I made a point to stop and discuss…
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Stargazing
Our eyes glisten with wonder. Who are we? Who do we want to be? Is it worth the effort?Should I have tried harder to keep her?Less hard?Have my sacrifices been worth it?Will my current ones pay off?After a while, the stars are aesthetically pleasing but stop conferring meaning to what’s going on down here. Even if we knew exactly how the stars operated, could they bestow love or justice or fulfillment?To see the parallax of the stars behind the silhouette of my girlfriend as she ascends a set of stairs to a patio is much more fulfilling.The stars as a context or backdrop is much more fitting. Nature’s Christmas lights…
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On Climate Justice
I will discuss herein my beliefs about climate justice without thoroughly justifying them. I will justify them in future posts. Justice is a synchronic condition that society either meets or doesn’t at a given moment in time. That is to say: either society synchronizes in the correct way or it is not a just society. The correct way is simply the society’s being the way it ought to be. The definition of a just society, then, is a society that is the way it ought to be. That sounds vague but it shows us a surprising lot about what a just society would be like and what we ought to…
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Face of the earth: Faz de la tierra
As he was walking down the street and looking around at the overgrown yards, dusty windows, weeds protruding through the cracks in asphalt. The playful does trotting through the onboarding ramp to the highway, the overhead metro trains fallen off the tracks; a feeling hit him: he might be the last man on the face of the Earth. / Mientras estuvo caminando en la calle y mirando los jardínes descuidados, ventanas polvorientas, maleza saliendo del asfalto quebrado. Las venadas trotando alegres en la rampa de entrada a la carretera, los trenes de metro elevado caídos de los carriles; sintió de súbito: puede ser el último hombre en la faz de…
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Is the face the surface of the self? If there is a self, where is it?
I don’t know which came first here, the chicken or the egg. Either the word surface comes from the anatomical use of the word face or the anatomical use of face comes from surface, in the sense of “outermost boundary of an object.” However, we ought to wonder, since it is the outermost boundary of an object, what is the object that our faces are the outermost boundary of? This paragraph is going to be a bit silly and pedantic but please bear with me because the pedantry will be worth it. I think quibbling about whether I’m applying the wrong definition of “face” to the anatomical feature is the…
