“personal”

This Thursday I went to my first Stereo Total concert and it was great.

This past 3day weekend I went to Vallarta with my family. Our main purpose was to see my paternal grandmother, who is in Parkinson’s terminal stages.

I revealed myself a klutz this morning with my very first eggy in the basket (yup, after V for Vendetta!). I followed this (incredibly simple) recipe and everything was looking pretty good

until it came to the turning:

...but I’m not. Let’s walk the biosphere while we still have it. I hear they’re gonna read Borges out loud tomorrow in the park. Yey!

The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.

You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I am American! I’ve been devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”

I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.

Today I acquired a newfound respect for journalists and a new reminder of just how easy it is to fool oneself. More details will follow but this note tonight is for me, I don’t want to forget this moment.

Today I had decided I was finally taking Caja Negra—a political web app of mine—online after so many failed attempts (I’m so sleep deprived now that I get dizzy, really dizzy, just looking at the screen). At first I thought it was a problem with Rake and so I started by reading it’s online documentation. It proved a dead end but it turns out Rake is a pretty interesting thing (and so are Rails migrations).

I decided to read some more on the Login Engine itself, and I read, much belatedly, that it is bloated and hard to modify. That has been precisely my experience—and yet, it was very useful to me and after some friendly fisticuffs we learned to get along. Many thanks to James Adam for it.

I finally decided to start the deployment all over again, from scratch, carefully checking the tiniest step. It all narrowed down to a simple command, “rake engine_migrate ENGINE=login”, that just wouldn’t run. I found some people with the same problem but no working solution.

So I kept reading and trying all sorts of different versions of the command once in a while, like a kid magician who just can’t pronounce the incantation correctly.

Along the way, I finally found out why my blog was dead a couple of days ago. It turns out TextDrive rolled out the new version of Rails (1.1) but it was incompatible with Typo and so they rolled it back. They now advise people to freeze (new word for me) your Typo to Rails 1.0 or update to the new, compatible version of the blogging engine. Even DHH apologized in the name of the core team for all the trouble the upgrade caused. TextDrive’s Justin French, on the other hand, was as diplomatic as usual when someone expressed the caring hope that people get notified about what they should do:

That crankiness is actually one of the reasons I enjoy TextDrive. Masochism, they call it.

Anyway, I was definitely getting nearer. I was now sure that what I needed was to freeze my web-app to Rails 1.1. Blessed yerejm gave some instructions for how to do just that here. But the simple conjuration, “rake rails:freeze:edge REVISION=4091”, wasn’t working. I stared hopelessly at the screen for some 20 minutes, thinking about what could be the problem. Then it hit me, probably out of some small passage that I must have read in the realms of documentation I skimmed today, that last colon should probably be an underscore for me. And it all worked.

Goddamned Rails-Engines!

...

mmm… Ok, Ok… I take that back. They’re indeed very helpful but installing them locally was a true nightmare and now that I was finally ready to deploy to TextDrive they refuse to cooperate. I’ve no idea what’s going wrong. I was counting on having my (political) web-app online tonight but it seems it’ll have to wait until tomorrow, my eyes are too bleary.

And the worst thing is that it’s almost 5AM. Which means one more day I miss my yoga class. Oh well… :(


(I just found out there’s a pretty good song from The Beatles with the same title as this post. Heh. A nice surprise.)

I’m sick (and oh-so-very-tired) of this clueless, absent-minded, bumbling persona of mine. I’m sick of knowing nothing about the rw (that’s the real word), of always getting lost, of always forgetting stuff, of never having my cell phone around, of people patronizing me, of stupid little mistakes like today’s. It’s time to start paying attention, to notice my surroundings, to stop forgetting in the shower whether I already shampooed my head or not. I’m becoming (to some degree at least) a worldly person as of this moment. This is my official skin shed of the silly-clumsy-absent-minded-professor-persona. So long.

Being childfree myself —well, I’m somewhat young to claim that title for myself but that’s the lifestyle I want to live and I’ve already considered sterilization— it was a nice surprise to find The rise of the ‘childfree’ in Reddit’s¹ homepage today. It was interesting to find out about Mariah, a Swedish girl who was sterilized at age 25; to read somewhere mainstream (The BBC) how much of a taboo the subject is; and to discover that there are actually groups lobbying for equality for people without children² (Kidding Aside is the name of one!). That said, the article itself is quite irregular, too short, and too focused on women (though I may as well be reflecting my own biases).

And I don’t quite agree with most of the reasons put forth in the article (specially not with “I can’t believe the amount of waste that children produce.”). My personal reason for shunning child-rearing is that it is usually a cop-out to the existence question. It’s an usually unthinking way to give meaning to your life, to feel like you’ve “done something”, to achieve transcendence. I respect if you consciously want your children to give meaning to your life and you want them to be your life’s achievement —me, I’d like to explore different answers. (That said, life span is so long these days that one may try to juggle several answers that were of yore mutually exclusive.)

¹ It’s interesting how snugly Reddit fits my demographics, some days ago they also had an article I found most interesting: ‘Grups’: Why do so many 40-year-olds still have 22-year-old lifestyles these days?.

² That’s one group of neurons I never thought would fire…