NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

I remember many years ago hitting a wall in my learning of Chamorro. I had gotten the basics and could carry on conversations with people. I could express myself in a casual and sort of everyday way. The basic topics of how is this person doing, how is this going, weren't any problem at all. But when the conversation would become a little bit more complex, when the subject matter got more detailed or more sophisticated the Chamorro language would politely be set side and English would prevail. Chamorro would make cameo appearances afterwards, but never ever truly gain control over what was being said, until the "adios, esta agupa." For me this would happen because I was still learning the language and there were still plenty of thing I wasn't sure how you were supposed to talk about in the Chamorro language. But what depressed me was that sometimes it would be the other person, the one who was far more fluent than myself in the language, who would switch to Engl

One of the strangest things about this blog, is the people who read it or pass through each day. Although the focus of this blog is Chamorro and Guam issues, people searching for those topics and end up in my blog, count for only half of the people who read my blog. The rest arrive at my blog looking for random pop culture related images or posts, the most common of which is people who end up on my blog while searching for images and information on the character Kakashi Hatake from the ninja manga Naruto. Yesterday alone, people from Indonesia, Dennmark, Mexico and the US ended up on my blog looking for pictures and poems about Kakashi. As I've written about before on my blog, Kakashi is one of my favorite manga characters, and so I do have several posts about him, and for a while my profile picture was an image of him reading his favorite Make-Out Violence book. Last year, there was a major scare for Kakashi fans, as he (and many others) came close to dying during the "

The dreaded DEIS public comment period is finally over. I made the blog banner above (at the top of the page) to help highlight the importance of the past three months. For those of you who can't tell, the image is a drawing of Sumahi, while she is struggling to read through the many volumes of the DEIS, and sitting next to her is a timebomb, whose clock indicates that the amount of time left during which Sumahi has to defuse to bomb is simply "not enough." Annok na ti magof i mata-na, ya gi este na halacha na tiempo, dipotsi todu i manmata-ta (giya Guahan) taiguihi. The past few weeks and months have been crazy, literally too many things happening for me to keep up. As I've been writing about in my " Buildup/Breakdown " posts, the island has changed significantly since last November. The urgency of the deadlines for DEIS comments, generic fears over what sort of negative impacts the buildup would bring to Guam, and the everyday sentiments of colonial fr

If you asked me right now who my favorite fictional character is, I wouldn't say Kakashi from Naruto, Spock from Star Trek, or even Jacob Black from Twilight. If you asked me right now I would have to answer the antiwar Barack Obama. He is the coolest. He's interested in shrinking the military budget, he's for peace and not war, is not interested in establishing more permanent US bases around the world, and is willing to admit that America is sometimes wrong and is not perfect. He's like the president from a great movie or tv show, one who completely changes the country, who takes a massive risk and decides to turn the most powerful country in the world into a radical new direction. In my favorite episode of the Antiwar Obama show, he tracks Dick Cheney to his secret underground lair, where he hordes away all the billions of dollars lost by war profiteering in Iraq and Afghanistan. There, Antiwar Obama fights off hundreds of Halliburton and Blackwater employees who ar

For those of you who may not already know it, I'm a big fan of manga and anime. This doesn't mean I'm an otaku or anything (although normals sometimes call me one), but just that there are a handful of titles or franchises which I really read carefully and follow closely. For instance, in July I wrote a long post about how two of my favorite mangas to read, Gantz and Berserk were going on hiatus for a few months. My geek guts started showing when a simple post about how much I'll miss them ended up being a discussion about the aspects of killing God or Gods in the mangas, or the way in which the main characters seemed to be challenging the very order of things, and how exciting it was to try and see an author make that possible. (Este mina'hasso yu' na hu nisisita umespiha kao esta mana'fanhuyong i nuebu na issue Berserk. Esta maloffan dos meses gi iyo-na hiatus, pues sina esta makpo'.) For a few years now I've been translating manga, most notabl

The gof na'chalek lao gof na'triste lokkue' book Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut ends with the following paragraph. If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who. For those of you who don't know the book, you should read it, it is a tragic commentary on everything from religion, to colonialism, to the fallacy of objective science. At this point the whole world has been radically altered by a substance called ice-nine, which when is touched to water changes its composition so that it can be solid ice even at room temperature. The protagonist is stuck on the island of San Lorenzo, surrounded by the once ocean, which is now a world of tornadoes. He ha

Venusian : Hoplessly Positive/Habitually Negative Sometime Maybe : Toba Tek Singh Latitude 13 : We the Chamorro People Tasi Thoughts : The Place of My Birth: Guahan Forever Ka'ili : Have You Seen This Movie Yet? Sepia Mutiny : What's in a Name? Right New Blogology : What Happened on Saturday Guamology : Alex Munoz - Filmmaker Uranium Diaries : On Environmental Justice the maile vine : Today in Settler Colonialism From a Tongan Daughter : Pacific Eye Radio Debut the scent of green bananas : First Look: Meskla The Insular Empire : Adios, Tun Carlos! Flip Flopping Joy : trust Indigenous Studies Engages Ethnic Studies : Mission Statement Overseas Territories Review : The Unfinished Decolonisation Agenda for 2009 Peach Sand Beach : Boonie Crab, Coconut Dog Beautiful Women and Lanzones : on the writing process One-Eyed Copy Ninja : s-a-s Waiting for Wonderland : The Real Question and the Tragic

When I get a break from writing my dissertation, but still want to use my brain somehow, I usually end up translating songs from Chamorro to English or from English to Chamorro, or as I started doing last fall, from Japanese to English to Chamorro. I started the regular thread called Sakigake Chamorro, last year which is my quick, fun and sometimes ridiculous translations of songs from Japanese anime into Chamorro. I don't speak Japanese so I have to use other people's English translations. But these aren't meant to be perfect or well thought out, they are more for me to flex my brain and have a little bit of fun. So far I've made two Sakigake Chamorro, the first was from Sakigake! Cromartie High School and the second from FLCL . The one I'd like to share with you today, is a beautiful, J-poppy song from Naruto Shippuuden. Its song by the Japanese rock band Ikimono Gakari and is titled Bluebird. Here's the lyrics in Japanese: Artist: Ikimono Gakari

I've been working on my dissertation for about three years now, but have only spent the past year or so writing it. I could easily take another year to finish it, and sort of slowly and lazily work on it, but I'm in a hurry to get out of the graduate student phase of my life. Menha yu' ni' student debt, esta o'sun yu' nu i lina'la estudiante kolehu, ya guaha otro na malago bei cho'gue gi i lina'la'-hu. So I'm pushing myself to finish and have a tentative date for the first week of June to actually defend this damn thing. Right now I've written the first drafts of three chapters and am almost done with my fourth one. After that I've got one quick chapter left and then a conclusion and I have my sprawling, insane, crazily written first dissertation draft done. Este nai i guinife-hu, na bai hu (put fin) na'funhayan este na tinige', kosaki sina bai hu na'hanao mo'na i karrera-hu ta'lo. A few months ago one my frie