Is this shoplifting?

This was a test posting. I need to download some pics.

I took this one in a little silver mining town in the Sierra Madre Mountains when I was in Mexico last October. I can't remember the name of the town, but it was a former ghost town slowly making a comeback. I mean slowly. We saw maybe ten people in the whole town. I know I didn't really post about the trip. I loved Mexico and would go back in a second, but my family and I were so overcome with the begging and poverty there. Especially in this area.

We were there as part of a day trip during our stop in Mazatlan. Our tour stopped here for lunch (prearranged by the cruiseline) at a little family owned place. The food was fantastic and the beer was so welcome. This donkey in the picture, though, belonged to a little boy who would go up to people in these tour groups that stop here on their way further up the mountain and ask, in very broken English, if they wanted to take his picture on the donkey. After people said yes and took his picture, he would then follow them around for the remainder of the tour in this town demanding two dollars.

It really made me think twice about coming back home and buying jewelry from a specific silver company when I saw the exact bracelet I had bought from them for $40 in this mining town being sold for $3... by the family that crafted it. It made me wonder, is it Americans taking advantage of these miners? Or is it other Mexicans?

Like I said, the cruiseline had prearranged all of our day excursions and stops and more than once I felt these people's poverty was being commercialized and put on display for us. And I do mean poverty in some cases (not just differences in economics or lifestyles).

Enough. I now know how to post more pictures.

Chao-chou's Bridge

I'm sorry to hear about the ill-fated coin toss. While I struggled to find comforting words, one of my favorite Zen quotations came to mind. I got it from my 2003 Zen desk calendar (Johnny may recognize it, I believe he had the same one)... there's something so commercially wrong with that. But anyways, it's insightful, and profound, and worthy of mention at a time like this.

A monk asked Chao-chou: "I've been hearing about Chao-chou's bridge for a long time, but now that I am here all I see is a log."

Chao-chou said: "You see the log, but you don't see the stone bridge."

The monk asked: "What is the stone bridge?"

Chao-chou said: "It lets donkeys cross; it lets horses cross."

- Zen Mondo

Wireless in the park.

In New York there's free wireless outside. I am sitting in City Hall Park with my laptop. The long endurance test of a road trip, in which my resolute absentent-mindedness directed at the singular accomplishment of the city to which I am now tapping at my computer. I am staying at the Harlem YMCA in a room so small that I have to stand sidways to pass between my bed and wardrode (though the fact that I actually have a wardrobe in my private room should give me less reason to complain). For anyone who is not familiar with Manhattan, Harlem is very, very black, and, for anyone who is not familiar with me, I am very, very white. I stick out a little. If you look at Satelite images of Harlem and you notice a small white speck floating through a sea of dark skinned ladies and gentlemen then you can say, "Hey that's that guy on the blog collective whose posts I try to avoid."

I would be moving into a new apartment in Queens had it not been for the whims of chance. I had seen the apartment the day before yesterday and was unsure, gave it a night to think about it (knowing full well the incredible perils of hesitation in situations like this), and finally I fully resolved on it early the next morning after checking into my room in that black-culture mecca. I call the landlady and she tells me that she is going to be showing the place to someone else and that if I come down there and am in earnest that she will hand the keys over to me and have me sign the lease. Unfortunately, she does not tell this other girl at that point that the apartment is taken, either not trusting that I was in earnest or assuming that the other girl would not be able to make an immediate decision to take it. I get there as fast as I can, fully prepared to pay all in full, but (as fate is a wily tramp) the other girl has fully decided that she too wants the apartment. She is a lanky, short-haired black girl from Florida with high-cheekbones, a small featured face, chocolatey skin and an English accent who is going to NYU to get a masters in film. The landlady, though, does not want to make a decision and hopes that the two of us can decide between us. We compare trials (akin, though not quite tantamount too the Seinfeld episode in which George compares his woes with an older gentleman who had once survived a sinking ship): she is only here for the weekend to find a room and has a flight back to Florida in two and a half hours and will be returning in a week to begin classes; I have classes starting in two days and am living in a hostel with a fraction of my stuff while the rests sits in storage while I try to find a room. It is possible that great moralists have pondered long over situations like this and have reached logical, elequently argued solutions that would satisfy all parties involved (except, of course, the person who doesn't get the room), but I decided to leave the decision to fate (that whorish vixen) and let it be decided on a coin toss. The landlady pulled from her purse a Israeli coin on one side of which was a ten and on the other was a menorah. I decided to put my faith not in that symbol of god's benevolence and perseverance, but in that indifferent number 10. That was my fatal error. I was allowed to be the one to flip the coin, and I raised into the air that spinning disc that was to be the determinant (and detriment) of my entire future. And as it sank to the earth with an unwavering thud I could see even from my height the candles looking up at me. It was over. I conceded. I walked away. Went back to my room in Harlem to cry silently. And now, this morning I am back on the internet to seek out more rooms (and occasionally to procrastinate by writing long, overdone descriptions of what I've endured).

Jenna-isms.

That used to be the name of my made-up religion (back when I was in denial about my Catholicism... not so long ago? Still?).

Anyways, here are the 5 idiosyncrasies about myself that first came to mind:

1.) I count silently when I run. But only when I'm running on a track. And only double-digit numbers, usually starting in the twenties or thirties and counting on-beat with my footsteps. This started in my high school track days. Not sure why.

2.) I obsessively pick at my beer bottles' lables until they are folding up on both sides... and usually come off altogether.

3.) My darling boyfriend would tell you that I sit with my hands or fingers positioned over my lips when I'm trying to avoid a subject of conversation. But then I would tell you that he picks at his right eyebrow when he is deep in thought.

4.) Whenever I wear long sleeves I pull them down over my hands.

5.) I go through a roll of papertowels easily when I cook.

It's so much easier coming up with other people's little indiosyncrasies!

Anyways, not much new going on here. Law school starts Monday. New job starts the week after that! That will be cool. No more two hour commute up to class at night. My new job is less than 5 miles away from my school (Suffolk U in Boston).

Oh! And my MOTHER was stung by a bee during a road race that we ran last weekend and almost DIED!!! She and I have always been very sensitive to stings, but never knew it could develop into a fullblown allergy. It wasn't fun. It was also her 49th birthday. She woke up the following morning with a bunch of white hairs (I kid you not... and this is a woman who has a full head of dark brown hair!). So I've been very, very thankful to those scientists who created the lifesaving epipen they gave her at the medical tent before whisking her to the hospital via ambulance. The doc said if they hadn't have given it to her, she wouldn't be here.

You should all call your mothers tonight. How's that for an after school special?

I love the pencil sharpener picture, by the way. I'm going to try to post some before the weekend is over.

Happy Birthday, Rach!

I hear tell that it's Rach's birthday today.
Happy birthday, Rach!

Joe on the road

I'm posting now because my imminent trip is too close to postpone a post any further and all those last minute preparations are pouring in. Most of you're probably not aware (partly because I simply haven't told you) that I am going to be driving on my journey from California to the city of New York. For reasons that sum up to, most of my few posessions are actually still with my old residence in Santa Fe and it's better to fly, I fly to Santa Fe and only have to drive from there to New York, but don't think this eliminates much from a daunting and tiresome (even if your the whole time comfortably reclined) trial of of crossing much of this gigantic continent. I was just watching the movie The Motorcycle Diaries, which bears absolutely no resemblence to my what my trek will be except that a lot of ground will be covered. There isn't the slightest possibility that someone will someday make a movie out of my particular cross-country road trip - partly because mine will be so incredibly boring and partly because driving a large truck full of stuff to a new home so that I can further immerse myself in the rather conservative and generally more backward looking world of academia is not going to help foment revolutionary ideas and lead me toward the spiritual crisis that will help bring about my desire to help the neglected and downtrodden. Though maybe it will convince me of the not quite so inspiring and uplifting (but possibly equally important) lesson that, despite the limits of my possessions I quite possibly may still have too much stuff, which I guess, in some circuitous way could lead me to some pivotal revelation that all men and women should abandon the blind passion for accumulation, throw aside their shallow middle class values and minimize their possessions and thereby minimize the hours of labor devoted to accumating money for the purpose of accumulating possessions, time that could be better employed cultivating the body and the mind and the soul. And I could actualize the spirit of these revolutionary ideas by breaking into middle class houses and burning their faux-leather couches, and cheap knick-knacks, graffitiing their walls and stealing clothes from their overstuffed closets. But even if I somehow go down this incredibly unexpected path in my life (since most likely I'll myself settle into a middle-class house, accumulate stuff and waste my life writing tired, boring articles), I think the most that any movie of my revolutionary proclivities would possibly cover of this journey would be a shot of me stepping into this truck with the suff already packed and waving goodbye to some extras followed by a shot of the truck speeding by on a highway towards the sunset on a generic, middle-america farm plane, because this trip will be the most boring trip there can be.

Actually I think I just spent a whole lot of words saying what was simply stated in the last clause of that last sentence "this trip will be the most boring trip there can be" which would of course lead the reader who is reading this to assume that I should have gone back and deleted all of that rambling (and I would banter, "you could've just skipped over it"). But it's too late. I'm speaking in real time and my words can't be taken back once they've left my mouth. I'll see you all on the other side, barring the chance that I find some free hot spot on the way and can find the free time to say something endearing or am compelled by an unfathomable desire to torture you by describing my trip (probably with the simple words: "I was right. Nothing has happened. Call Jose Rivera. I've decided the screenplay's canceled.")