After packing my bag and drinking a pineapple smoothie, I took a colectivo (group taxi van) westward across the river to the slightly-larger city of Tuxtla, where I bought a ticket for an eastbound bus to the larger-than-Chiapa-de-Corzo-but-smaller-than-Tuxtla city of San Cristobal. The colectivo was slower than I anticipated, so I ended up having to wait at the bus station for about an hour, during which I called a friend and explored a nearby mall. I found a bookstore (coincidentally named after the greatest philosopher of all time) and also got some Chinese food for the first time since leaving Madison. Apparently, in Spanish, chow mien is just called ‘spaghetti’, which had me very confused.

The bus ride to San Cristobal took about an hour and a half, during which I slept and looked out the window. Upon arrival I checked into my hotel, then went back to an art gallery/used bookstore which I had passed on my walk from the bus terminal to the hotel (in total I ended today with six new books, all in Spanish*).

In the evening, I met up with a girl who I had been messaging on Tinder/WhatsApp and we walked around the city. San Cristobal is much more tourist-oriented than either Chiapas or Tuxtla, and there are many streets which are closed to traffic, full of performers, vendors, and restaurants. It reminded me a bit of Madison (this is also the coldest I have been while in Mexico; San Cristobal is high up in the mountains). It was fun to spend time with someone my age and practice some Spanish, but we didn’t have a ton of chemistry. There seems to be is a very specific type of girl I attract, and this one fit the pattern. She was very fun, but insecure. A bit crazy, and looking for someone who can bring stability and reassurance. (I’m realizing here that I don’t normally write about people [partly a privacy thing, partly because I don’t talk to many] and I don’t feel as comfortable doing so). I did have a good time so I might try to see her again, but not romantically, which seems to be her interest.

*The books are: Pedro Paramo, the Popol Vuh, Pedagogy and Imperatives of the Times, Imperialism and Universities in Latin America, Globalization and the End of History, and Political Migration and the Rights of the Migrants in Mexico (I also just realized I’ve been neglecting footnotes since my arrival. That ends today. Get ready for more and longer tangents).

No classes today, so I slept in late. I gave one placement exam around noon and tutored for a half-hour at 8pm. In the meantime, I started compiling data for the research project on media coverage (I spent a while looking into methodology and determined that I can probably do all the math in a spreadsheet without having to code anything, which is kind of a relief. I want to learn to code, but every time I start getting into it, the scope and scale of the field quickly becomes overwhelming). As soon as I have some preliminary results, I’ll run them past the professors for the class I’m in, and hopefully they can point me toward next steps. Ideally, I think it would be cool to publish a research paper (it would also look really good on a resume or school application) but first I would need to find something worth writing about, and tbh, it’s possible there are too many variables at play to prove anything significant without introducing much more complicated math than I am currently capable of.

My host family had their extended family over to celebrate tonight. I spent some time with the little boys (ages 5 and 7) who were very talkative despite the fact that I clearly couldn’t understand half of what they were saying. They also showed me how to make fart noises by blowing on your elbow, which is sort of a universal language. Their parents didn’t seem to find this as funny as I did, and in retrospect I may have sent the wrong message by laughing along.

I’m heading to San Cristobal tomorrow (for real this time; my hotel is booked), which means I’ll have to get up early.

Thanks to COVID-19, Independence Day celebrations were a bit lackluster this year. There were a couple of fireworks light night, but that was about it, as far as I can did. I also tried some traditional sweets my host mom made. I’m not really sure they were, but they tasted like a green pepper soaked in maple syrup. I had no Spanish classes this morning, so I was able to sleep in until noon, which was nice.

In my classes, I ask my students a lot of random shit, because sometimes my goal is just to keep them talking. Occasionally their answers surprise me. My beginner students have a strong preference for vanilla ice cream over any other flavor, and in my advanced students prefer math class to history class 5 to 6.

I am looking into next steps for turning my research proposal into real research. I’ll keep yall posted.

Today we had a breakfast class and made bean tacos at Sherrill’s apartment. Then I took a really long nap. Afternoon classes went well; I think this was the most success I’ve had with my beginner students. We learned some basic adjectives and described some houses.

I’m currently working through an online course called Foundations and Applications of Humanities Analytics. The class is an attempt to bring text-based data analysis to traditionally-less-data-driven fields. We are essentially learning how to use big data and computers to analyze huge amounts of text and answer questions that previous generations of humanities and social science scholars could only guess at. Here is a project proposal I just submitted. This was just a proposal for an assignment and I currently have no intentions of following through on the project, but I think it’s a cool look into the kind of questions we can now answer. Feel free to do the research and publish it yourself, just credit me on the paper.

Domestic reporting on foreign affairs is far from comprehensive; newspapers simply don’t have the space to report on every story that occurs abroad. As a result, implicit in every foreign affairs piece that gets published is the idea that this particular event is more important than a lot of other events which weren’t covered. I am interested in the factors that determine which countries get reported on, and which are ignored. By examining the power of various national statistics (I would probably start with population, GDP, distance from US, and presence of US military personal) to predict media mentions, we could make an argument about which qualities make a country ‘newsworthy’. We could use the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal archives to track how often various countries are mentioned over time, and then see how these numbers are predicted by the other statistics. For example, I am curious whether the frequency of a country’s appearance in US media correlates more closely with its GDP or its population. If, for a significant majority of countries, GDP is a better predictor of media mentions than population is, we could reasonably conclude that economic impact is considered more significant than the number of people impacted when papers decide which stories to run. If population is a better predictor, we could conclude the opposite. We might also find that neither GDP nor population has a strong predictive effect on media mentions (which I would be very surprised by), in which case, the ‘newsworthiness’ of a story might be more closely linked with a different variable (for example, I suspect that geographic proximity also plays a role). We could also use multi-variable analysis to examine more complex questions. For example, if, as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky put forward, the media serves primarily as a tool to manufacture consent on behalf of military and economic elites, we would anticipate more reporting is done on countries considered ‘enemies’ than countries which are considered ‘allies’. Along this line of thought, I would expect that, when media mentions are normalized for GDP, countries with low US military deployment, i.e. ‘enemies’ (the number of US military personal stationed in a country can be used as a quantifier for the strength of military alliance), would receive more media attention than counties with high deployment, i.e. ’allies’. 

Normal day. Classes in the morning. A long nap. Classes in the evening. Called home, then went to work planning classes for tomorrow. It feels like it never ends some days. I’m looking forward to the three-day weekend.

We read another depressing story in Spanish class today.

Tangent: I cannot prove it, but I believe that Americans have an excessively optimistic character when compared to other national cultures. I want to attribute this to a combination of leftover manifest destiny, sustained high levels of economic growth, and (perhaps most crucially) the fact that US (alongside Canada and Australia) is pretty much the only country that didn’t experience any wars or large-scale domestic violence in the past century. As a result, even when American authors write about depressing topics, there is usually a sort of ‘aw-shucks’ optimism (or, my personal pet peeve, compulsive calls-to-action, even when the author has no particular solution in mind) I think this is particularly true of White Americans.

I bring this up because Mexican literature is different. All of the stories I’ve read start with something depressing, then it gets worse, and then, in the end, the narrator or protagonist just accepts that life is worse now. In sum, “sucks to suck”. The only American I can think of who writes like this is Cormac McCarthy, but even his stories rely on the audience having optimistic expectations that he can subvert. For the most part, every living generation of Americans (aside from maybe the youngest ones) has seen their economic prospects improve greatly ever their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. We don’t really know violence; 9/11 is considered a national tragedy, but by the standards of the past century in pretty-much any other country, 3000 deaths is really not that many. Quick examples off the top of my head: between 100,000 and 300,000 people died in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti; conservatively, the war or terror killed 900,000 people in Iraq and Afghanistan (at least 400,000 of whom were civilians); World War 2 killed 27 million Soviet citizens. Our culture hasn’t really had to reckon with this scale of mass tragedy (again, mostly talking about White people here), and as a result, I think we have a somewhat-naive and deeply-ingrained cultural belief that things must always be getting better. It’s hard (and risks oversimplification) to define a culture from just the handful of books you’ve personally read, but the American literature of the 20th and 21st century seems to have a really distinctly-optimistic outlook. If you have a counterpoint, or a piece to add, leave a comment.

Slight tangent on the other tangent: On a related note, I don’t think our country is taking climate change seriously enough, in part because it’s just not nice to think about. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I’m fucking scared, and I don’t want to ruin anyone’s day by forcing you to think about it, but the outlook is almost certainly worse than you were thinking before: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/#SPM. Now, despair isn’t a very good problem-solving strategy, but neither is avoidance.

Another tangent: I think this optomism is also prt of the reason that even when 2000+ Americans were dying of COVID everyday, a sizable portion of the country insisted it wasn’t happening. Because bad things are unthinkable here.

Back to the main thread: Regardless, after class, I found out that my Spanish teacher writes short stories, so I’m hoping she will let me read some. Other than that, a pretty normal day.

About two weeks ago, my favorite restaurant (really more of a tent with chairs and a folding table) disappeared. I found it again today, about two hundred meters from where it had been, on the other side of a big field. That was a nice discovery. Hopefully it will still be there tomorrow. I finally found a barbershop that was open (there are lots of barbershops, but they are usually empty when I pass them. I guess Sunday at 7pm is a good time for a haircut) and got one of the best haircuts I’ve had in a while for about $2.50.

I also called my grandparents today, but other than that, I didn’t really do much, just slept and watched videos. It was a rather sluggish weekend. I will try to make this coming week better.

Across the street, a party. Mariachi music plays loudly, as it has been for hours

I spent the day planning lessons and writing things, some of which I might publish here later, once they have been completed and edited (I wanted to publish something about the other 9/11. Not the 2012 Benghazi attack, but the other, other 9/11: Chile, 1973; where the brave forces of the CIA and PepsiCo, under the steady hand of Richard ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon, overthrew the spooky, democratically-elected, socialist president of Chile and ushered in upon the world a new paradigm of liberty [a sort of ‘neo-liberalism’, if you will], where anyone would be free to choose between exploitation and homelessness. But such a topic requires nuance, so I need more time). Anyway, WordPress keeps track of how many consecutive days I post, and I want to keep my streak going, so here are a couple words. I hope you cherish them.

Didn’t get much done today. I woke up early but napped through most of the afternoon. After my three classes, I tutored for another forty minutes, and by the time that was all done, I felt too braindead to do much planning. Not sure if I will travel or not this weekend. Next Thursday is Independence Day so I only have to plan for four days next week (side note: contrary to popular American belief, Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s Independence Day. May 5th celebrates a victory over the French forces of Napoleon III in 1862. September 16 commemorates the Cry of Dolores in 1810, when the priest Miguel Hidalgo rang a big bell and announced the taking up of arms against the Spanish colonial government). I’m not sure how people will celebrate given the pandemic, but hopefully it will be fun.

A pretty normal day. Tayde, my Spanish teacher, had a scare with COVID this morning, but she was able to get test results back later today and is fine.

I finished the book Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta. It was a pretty interesting primer to Australian Aboriginal culture and philosophy. The book echoed a lot of work from complexity science (the study of systems which have greater properties than the sum of their parts) but packaged in the language of spirituality. This is a theme that interests me as it relates to climate change. The way we (as Americans? Westerners? Subjects of capital? I’m not sure who ‘we’ is precisely, but it includes both you and me) think about ourselves in relation to the world (and perhaps more importantly, how we have learned to feel without thinking) is fundamentally flawed and has been driving us toward a cliff for decades, if not centuries. It is my firm belief that building a sustainable future will require more than just a few tweaks to our consumption choices. Our world of atomized individuals, personal responsibility, freedom of consumption, and endless economic growth is built on a flawed understanding of the the world which views people as separate wholes, rather than inextricable parts of a global system. The economic restructuring necessary to keep this planet livable will not occur unless it is also accompanied by a spiritual awakening, a fundamental reassessment of our place in the world and our responsibilities to it. I don’t have all the answers yet, and neither does this book, but I think the author gestures in the right direction, or at least toward the right problems. Yunkaporta puts forward a philosophy where land and time are cyclical and inseparable. He roots the search for sustainable ways of being in the traditions of the people who have lived with the land for millennia, and contrasts this view with the drive toward expansion and domination which characterizes white-Australian culture and the Anglosphere at large. Plus, the book is often very funny. 7/10

FL Studio, the software I previously used to make music, has just released a version which runs on Apple, which is great because I upgraded my laptop about a month ago and haven’t been able to make music since, but it’s pretty much unusable without a mouse, so I’m right back where I began. I shouldn’t really be making music at all, because I previously gave myself tinnitus doing so, but everything in moderation.