NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

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

In December of last year I started a new feature on this blog titled "Learning Chamorro With Sumahi and Youtube," where I would pick a favorite video of i hagga-hu Sumahi from Youtube, and then list the Chamorro words which she usually uses to narrate the video as she watches it. In recent months my time has become very scarce because of work and family obligations and so I don't get to spend as much time with Sumahi as I'd like. There isn't much time to go to the beach or take a walk in a park or do any sort of normal bonding activities, and so often times, late at night, watching Youtube videos as our way of connecting. She usually sits on my lap, bouncing up and down as she gets excited at what she sees on my laptop screen. Its hysterical, because some videos she's already watched probably hundreds of times, and so even whens he watches it time #101, she'll still laugh and scream at the exact same moment. Unfortuantely, Sumahi's love of Youtube me

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 am a geek and I am a geek about a lot of different things, comics, movies, manga, anime, video games. But the biggest thing that I am a geek about is Chamorro stuff. I love using the Chamorro language, writing in it, singing in it. I love learning all I can about Chamorro things, reading about them, writing about them. So I am un gof dongkalu na geek Chamoru. But as a big fat Chamorro geek, I often find myself frustrated. Although there are plenty of young Chamorros out there that I can speak to about my geek loves, there is practically no one out there who I can speak to about these things in the Chamorro language. I can speak to my grand parents and plenty of older relatives in Chamorro about some things. For instance I can talk to them about the things they regularly discuss, such as the war (World War II), their childhoods, family stuff, or even The Young and the Restless. But if I want to have a discussion about which is the best Star Trek movie, or which English voice actor do

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

I am a video game geek. And you can tell this not just by how many times your wallet or bank account is drained because of the deep, craving need to own a certain video game or system, but also by how many time your schedule gets completely thrown out of whack because your mind got lost in playing a video game, or even though you knew you were running late, you convinced yourself that one more level or now in the case of games like Rock Star Band or Guitar Hero , one more song. Since I returned to Guam to start working on my dissertation, there have been many moments where my schedule has gone awry because of the fact that video games are such a tempting distraction. Another way in which you can identify if you are a video game geek is if you use video game metaphors or references to describe the world, sometimes even to non-video game adept audiences. There are some ways in which once arcane video game geek knowledge or fanservice has wormed its way into popular culture. I remember

Haven't posted one of my Chamorro translations or Chamorro songs lately. I've been so busy writing other things, I just haven't gotten around to much. I wrote this one recently though while I was flying to Guam for Sumahi's first birthday. I first heard the song "Wave of Mutilation" by the Pixies from the game Rock (Star) Band . The way the song is sung, with several words being dragged or drawn out when sung, made it a little interesting trying to find Chamorro words which would sound good along with that style. I like what I came up with, although for Chamorro it is a bit abstract or "dreamy," with phrases like "I've kissed stars." If you don't know the song, then you might be wondering why I chose it in the first place. Well, I've been intrigued by the song ever since I first listened closely to the lyrics, and heard the line "find my way to Mariana(s)." And realized that the singer could actually be talking about t