NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

I am currently working on an exciting comic project for a friend of mine. My brothers Jack and Jeremy are joining me in the project (and spearheading it), which will look at Guam's political status in a very new way, through the unlikely narrative of sports. To comic will follow the story of Roque Babauta, a Chamorro basketball player who gets wrapped up in national and international politics. As part of it, I wrote up a concept draft which outlined everything the way I was seeing it. Jeremy has gone on to shake things up and make flow better and add in more realism and details. Part of it is a sequence where a sports commentator is ruminating on the connection between politics and sports. Here is the first draft of it: Too often even we who love sports, dismiss it as a diversion, as an opiate for the masses, a distraction from the world. But sports is the world itself. It is not a diversion, but a reflection, a mirror image. The wars between na

Gi painge manegga' yu' huegon cricket gi entre India yan Pakistan. Gi i halacha na estoria, fihu umakontra este na dos nasion yan sesso lokkue' manakontra i taotaogues este na dos. Guaha na biahi na manggera este na dos. Ya este na klasin gera ti gaige ha' gi i fanhuegoyan ha'. Guaha nai manggera sih yan bomba yan paki. Gaige gi entre este na dos na nasion, un gos na'piniti na estoria. Estaba kada na umafana' este na dos, bula piligro. Sina guaha hinatme pat biolensia. Ya mientras manmumu i taotao gi i fanhuegoyan komo huego, sina manmumu i mane'egga' komo magahet na mimu. Mas ki un biyon na taotao giya Asia ma nanagga para i umafana' esta na dos. Gi todu i mundo, i inacha'igin este na dos i mas malago, i mas ma egga'. Put ayu na gi este na World Cup pa'go, annai umasodda' este na dos gi i Semi-Finals, sina ma alok na este na huego sina ha na'ketu un "continent." Gof maolek i huego gi painge. Ma sangan na i &

Every night when I get home from work and turn on my laptop I do two things. First, I go to GOMTV to see what is happening in the GSL, which is the biggest Starcraft 2 tournament in the world today. I don't have any cable and so my evening of television is usually watching professional Starcraft 2 players smash armies of pixels into each other and then watching (if it's the right night) an episode of The Daily Show. Earlier tonight there was a particularly exciting set of matches between two Starcraft: Brood War pro players who are trying to make marks for themselves in the sequel. The first is (Startale) July, changed the way zerg was played in Starcraft, especially in terms of muta control, and is known for being hyper-aggressive, almost relentless in his style. The second was (oGs) Nada, who is one of the most successful Starcraft players of all time, known as "the Genius Terran" and who once whitewashed July (3-0) in an OSL finals. To see two such legends of Starc

For several years cricket was my only way of wasting large amount of time watching some sort of professional sporting event. Well, unfortunately for me, being in both Guam and San Diego, the actual watching of cricket was regularly impossible, and so I had to settle for reading bulletins and watching written play by play commentary. In the past few months I've begun following Starcraft 2 as a new distraction, which I both play on my own time (although I am not very good), but I also follow as my new sporting waste of time. It might be surprising to some that video games have now reached the level where they no longer only have people who are good at them in the sense of being the best player of Street Fighter II in your family, but rather people who are good at a professional level, or people who are good at the global level. For a few games such as Starcraft 2, there are actual cash prizes for winning tournaments. As I've written about before on this blog I starting playing

This week for my column When the Moon Waxes in the Marianas Variety I wrote about video games. I wrote about how for most of my life I harbored a very secret dream, un gof mana'atok na guinife, that somehow, someday the cards of fate fall in place around me and I get the chance to make a living by playing video games that I enjoy. Although most people know me as an activist, an academic, an artist, most people don't know me as a video game geek. My brothers and I poured plenty of our lives long ago into games like Final Fantasy 3, The Secret of Mana, NBA Live 95 on the SNES. I later poured some more of my life into some Gamecube games like Eternal Darkness, Super Smash Brothers Melee and my first online game Phantasy Star Online. When I started grad school all of this video game playing stopped as I switched my spare time mode from hours staring at the TV screen with a controller in my hands, to hours spent reading books and searching through archives. The only real video gam

They say that whenever Australia loses a cricket match, an angel gets its wings. Ok, gi minagahet, maybe no one actually says that except for me, but its definitely the sentiment I feel. I just finished the large project that was taking up almost all my time this past week, and so I was taking a break tonight by following some international Test cricket on Cricinfo. I've never been a fan of Australian cricket, and so the past few years, as they have declined (eventually being dominated by India in a tour two years ago), my passion for seeing the sometimes arrogant smirks on their faces turn into woeful frowns has grown. They are currently a Test series against Pakistan, which as most would assume would be completely in Australia's favor. Pakistan cricket still hasn't recovered from the attacks on a visiting Sri Lankan team last year, and so they no longer have any home games and have to play all their matches on their people's grounds or on neutral terrain. Apart fr

Last night, I got to watch ( mismo read along with the commentary) as Sachin Tendulkar scored the first ever double century in an ODI match, when he made 200* against South Africa in Gwalior. It was an incredible feat, breaking the previous records of 194 and 194*, but even more so because of the fact that Tendulkar is almost 37 years old and has had a fantastic past year in both ODI and Test cricket. In the past 12 months he's collected 6 Test hundreds and 4 ODI hundreds. With last night's 200 not out, he is just seven shy of completing a century of international centuries (from Tests and ODIs combined). I watched a match a few weeks ago where Chris Coventry a Zimbabwe player challenged to surpass Saeed Anwar's record initial record of 194, but only ended up tying it. Witnessing Tendulkar's feat last night, and this coming when he has been on an incredible streak lately was very exciting to watch. I'm pasting some pictures and articles about this below. *******

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

I don't know much about Twitter yet. I've heard about it, and I hear jokes about it all the time, and I know that Matt Rector uses it, but other than that, taya' nai hu usa. A recent story on Cricinfo.com , where I get pretty much all my cricket related information however caught my eye and made me for the first time consider getting a Twitter account and follow the random thoughts of people who are bored in meetings, sitting in the bathroom, organizing protests, or just starved for attention. One of the openers for the Australian cricket Test team lost his spot in the XI for this year's Ashes , after some poor starts. The loss of his spot was made known to the rest of the world via Twitter. Put fin hu komprende sa' hafa meggai ya-niha este. Anggen hinassosso-mu na taiga'chong hao, pat hinassosso-mu na taibali i hinallom-mu siha, estague taimanu sina un na'huyong, ya na'mahungok pat na'mataitai i chinathinasso, i minagof gi lina'la'-mu!

I successfully defended my dissertation last month and even walked in my graduation ceremony a few weeks ago. But despite both of these dongkalu na gestures of closure to my life as a student, I still have at least one hurdle left before I can say that I've truly moved on and that hokkok umestudiante-ku. I've got some revisions to work on for my dissertation, they aren't alot, but I do have a few mental blocks that are keeping me from completing them. To sum up a much longer and more interesting story, my dissertation is, to put it kindly, unconventional, and so I have to go through a number of different steps in order to explain why this unconventional approach is both useful and necessary. So for instance, the usual way that you would talk about sovereignty, is to provide a history of the topic, and name a few famous theorists or scholars whose theories or versions of sovereignty you'll be using over the course of your dissertation. I don't do this, and I have m