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mouseworks at 08:13pm on 12/04/2010
mouseworks at 08:13pm on 12/04/2010Got taxes done yesterday and got all the passport business done today, plus found that Penn Camera was looking for new help. I put Adam's check in the bank, and bought the Lonely Planet Guide to Nicaragua, which I'm going to recommend to the friend who may be going with me on the exploratory trip sometime after I get my new passport. I went through the drag queen photos I took with my Coolpix P50 yesterday, and posted some of them to Facebook and some to my Photo.net page. And sometime, I've got to renew library books, do the weekly unemployment thing, and go over to REI with my dividend credit and get some comfortable shoes.
I think there's something more I need to do, also, but for now, I think that's it. I also bought a Latin American Spanish phrase book and a CD and book learning Spanish package. My subconscious has been throwing out Spanish words and phrases for the last couple of days -- obviously wanting to be helpful. It's also throwing out a few Russian phrases, too. Foreign languages must seem all alike to it. My accent seems to be reasonably good, perhaps not as good as my Russian accent which one of my Ukrainian students told me was really good (I must sound retarded in Russian, good accent, terrible range of vocabulary).
The alternative is to get into something completely different like selling cameras, which could be worse than editing other people's writing (either as a teacher or as a technical "writer"), but which would at least be terrible in a new and different way.
So, I shall see what Penn has been thinking of their customer of the last 18 months.
Given what I've read about Nicaragua so far, the sexism there is more overt than the sexism here, but some of the women who got political jobs during the Sandinista era have decided that they don't need Nicaraguan men anyway. I'd heard from Indian students that women in India were more likely to vote for other women, more sense that really serious things needed to be done. Don't know how true that would be in Nicaragua, but Matagalpa has a women's collective that runs a weekend bar. I'm ready to be political again in my old age.
I didn't pay for an expedited passport as the woman at the PO said that they took four to six weeks without expedition payments, and I can't imagine being ready to fly down and check things out before I get my Federal tax refund.
If it sucks to be there, it will be in different ways than living in the suburbs. And if the friend who says she's willing to go with me on the exploration trip decides she would retire there, too, that would be even better. She's one of my oldest friends ever. We've both taken different paths through our experiences of being unwed mothers in the 1960s. She kept and raised her child; I put mine up for adoption. Her concern about being a rich American in a very poor country was finding things to get involved in to help people. I suspect that the most good we can do is not buying land with our American incomes, but renting and spending money in Nicaragua rather than trying to make money there. Making money in the US and spending it locally and buying from local farmers would probably be more genuinely useful than trying to do good and doing for free things locals would want to be paid for doing. Displacing local teachers is not a good thing to do. Maybe even raising my own food would be less than helpful.
I think there's something more I need to do, also, but for now, I think that's it. I also bought a Latin American Spanish phrase book and a CD and book learning Spanish package. My subconscious has been throwing out Spanish words and phrases for the last couple of days -- obviously wanting to be helpful. It's also throwing out a few Russian phrases, too. Foreign languages must seem all alike to it. My accent seems to be reasonably good, perhaps not as good as my Russian accent which one of my Ukrainian students told me was really good (I must sound retarded in Russian, good accent, terrible range of vocabulary).
The alternative is to get into something completely different like selling cameras, which could be worse than editing other people's writing (either as a teacher or as a technical "writer"), but which would at least be terrible in a new and different way.
So, I shall see what Penn has been thinking of their customer of the last 18 months.
Given what I've read about Nicaragua so far, the sexism there is more overt than the sexism here, but some of the women who got political jobs during the Sandinista era have decided that they don't need Nicaraguan men anyway. I'd heard from Indian students that women in India were more likely to vote for other women, more sense that really serious things needed to be done. Don't know how true that would be in Nicaragua, but Matagalpa has a women's collective that runs a weekend bar. I'm ready to be political again in my old age.
I didn't pay for an expedited passport as the woman at the PO said that they took four to six weeks without expedition payments, and I can't imagine being ready to fly down and check things out before I get my Federal tax refund.
If it sucks to be there, it will be in different ways than living in the suburbs. And if the friend who says she's willing to go with me on the exploration trip decides she would retire there, too, that would be even better. She's one of my oldest friends ever. We've both taken different paths through our experiences of being unwed mothers in the 1960s. She kept and raised her child; I put mine up for adoption. Her concern about being a rich American in a very poor country was finding things to get involved in to help people. I suspect that the most good we can do is not buying land with our American incomes, but renting and spending money in Nicaragua rather than trying to make money there. Making money in the US and spending it locally and buying from local farmers would probably be more genuinely useful than trying to do good and doing for free things locals would want to be paid for doing. Displacing local teachers is not a good thing to do. Maybe even raising my own food would be less than helpful.
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