wednesday and thursday

I am out of money. Out. In other news, yesterday I got really sad and overwhelmed thinking about how long it's going to be before I see almost any of the people that I love and care about. MDLJ are coming in December, and Grandpa and Marinell next semester sometime, but other than that it's gonna be a good 8 or 9 months before I see anybody. So I sat on a park bench and stared at nothing in particular for a couple of hours, and wished I was lying down. I felt better after just sitting for a while, though. I want to start meditating again, I still miss it and it's nothing but good for me, so what's to lose? I'll try sitting for a little while tonight (maybe 20 minutes) and see how my back does, and go from there. Also I went to frisbee today, not to play but to talk to people and watch and maybe throw around a little, and about 15 minutes after I got there (I was about 20 minutes early, more on why in a minute) it started raining. Then it started raining harder. In the end, only four other people showed, and everyone left before a disc even left a bag. Also after a week of upper-70s, today the high was 63. Joyous. So the past couple of days have kind of been downers, but not totally...

In more positive news, I got my first paper back from Lenguaje Cinematográfico, and I got in the B to B+ range on it, which was great because I was afraid I'd done a lot worse. So that cheered me up. Also, last night I watched two movies that I really liked: The Bourne Identity, which I'd never seen, incredibly, and Lucky Number Slevin, which I thought was great. I might watch it again tonight, actually, although I'm pretty exhausted and might just call it a night. A bunch of people met up to eat whole-wheat empanadas and then go out, but I'm brokity-broke-broke-broke, so I'm housebound. Oh well. Another good thing that happened today was that one of the guys who came to play today lives in La Reina as well, and offered to split a cab with me and even spotted me for it because I was cashless after settling a medical bill at la Católica. His name's Sam and he went to/works at the same camp as Danny Cohen and goes to college with another kid from Gabby's high school. He's a super-nice guy and people being kind to me generally makes me feel better about life. In further good news, I finally saw the Alfredo Jaar exhibit at the Telefónica building. He's a Chilean artist who works a lot against the repression of people and things that otherwise wouldn't have a voice, such as poor Angolans and the 7 million original images that Bill Gates is burying under the ground in western PA. The exhibit wasn't particularly coherent (it's a compilation of work he's done over the past 20 years), as you might imagine from the examples I just gave, but each of the installations was very cool. I particularly liked one that consisted of a huge light table (maybe 9 or 10 feet long) in a dark room covered in a mountain of slides of the same image of a young Rwandan boy's eyes looking away from the camera. Thousands and thousands of identical pairs eyes just dumped unceremoniously on the table, and loups to look at them with. Another good one was from 1987, when he took over a big jumbotron in Manhattan and showed images of the United States with the slogan "This Is Not America" followed by our flag with "This Is Not The American Flag" superimposed on it. It's called "A New Logo for America." All in all, I'm feeling okay. I have a bit of a headache and I'm disappointed about ultimate today, but life is moving forward and tomorrow I'm leaving for the beautiful lakes district! Hurray, travel! 'Night.