Heteronormative

I was in the plane coming back and my traveling companion was reading a short story in the New Yorker that contained the word heteronormative. She asked me what it meant and could barely believe me that this word was of common usage in my academic circles, for more than twenty years at that. The story had a lot of very pretentious vocabulary.

Cancún

In Cancún we were offered about $150 to listen to a fractional ownership sales pitch for two hours. It was excruciating to me, of course. We were shown some luxurious hotel suites and we could buy a partial ownership in them. Of course, we would never actually use them, as the sales people admitted, but instead we could use our "equity" to stay in hotel rooms from big chains anywhere else in the world. So why did we need to be shown those suites in the first place? Why would I want to borrow money at 14% from a Mexican bank to pay thousands of dollars in advance for hotel rooms for the rest of my life that I may not ever use? Of course I pocketed the cash and did not buy in.

Unemployment rate of college graduates?

look here.

Guitar

I was playing guitar, something I cannot do when not dreaming. It seemed very clear to me suddenly: a finger on a particular fret on each string would produce a note. You just had to know where those notes were and play one at a time. In my dream I seemed to already know where the notes were and was playing beautiful notes.

Musso

In a casa particular in Cuba I picked up a German translation of a novel by French best-seller Guillaume Musso that had been left behind by another tourist. I don't know German, but I could follow the plot ok. It was absolutely the most execrable thing you could imagine. I didn't know who Musso was but now I do, unfortunately.

C**a

So I went to a certain nation to the South of us. All the clichés were in evidence. The 1950s Chevys, the Buena Vista Social Club, the decayed infrastructure & European tourists, the revolutionary murals. I had no contact with the literary or academic world. Instead, I was pure tourist. At every restaurant we were serenaded with Bésame mucho, Quizás, Quizás, Quizás, Guantanamera, and Compay Seguro's "Chan Chan." We hated that song about three days into the trip.

The bookstores only featured books about Fidel and Che. Museums chronicled the history of the Island until about 1964. The people and landscape were extraordinary, but it was tough living as a clearly privileged person just because I carried the tourist currency. It is rare for an American to speak Spanish there. People often thought I must have had C****n parents, since I spoke Spanish with a more or less C****n accent when I was there.

The tourist dollar is worth 24 times the national currency. A person on a salary might earn 50-$200 a month in the national currency, but a taxi driver could net that much in equivalent tourist money with a few trips a week.

Back

I'm back from my summer vacation. I am continuing to refine my life-style. I need to make fundamental changes in many aspects in order to stop getting in my own way. I have eliminated a lot of idle web surfing and binge watching. I am going to follow more rigorous schedules and make the best of everything that is in my power.

Being in a third-world (technically a second world, I guess) country for a few weeks changed my perspective. I realized that my obstacles are largely self-created. I have enough money and time, I just need to manage them better.