NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

A close friend of mine who just started his Ph.D. program has been having trouble with balancing his personal life and academic life, and keeping up with the theoretical workload involved. I sent him some advice, just from my perspective about how to survive in an environment where you are reading so much each week and then expected to speak intelligently on the sheer amount of data and ideas you are expected to absorb. This naturally made me remember my own grad school days, in particular my days of reading multiple theoretical texts a week in my UCSD Ethnic Studies program. I had my own tricks in order to survive, but I was helped by the fact that I read pretty fast and also just loved reading. Not having kids at that time and living away from much of my extended family also helped. The reflection or analytical papers that I wrote in grad school are favorite mementos of mine. They represent a time when my brain was afire with ideas and I was writing and reading constantly. It is

I got an email the other day which featured the "purest" example of ideology I've seen in quite a while. It contained an email that had been sent to my friend (who I won’t name in case she wants her identity kept secret) from a “Marxist” professor which basically attacked her for not being Marxist enough. I only know some of the context, but she had just recently helped organize an Ethnic Studies summit in San Diego and so the listserv for the conference has been the site for a lot of pointless posturing, of which this purely ideological email is a perfect example. Reading the snarky, snippy Marxist email was both hysterical and depressing. It represented on the one hand something so hilarious in the way in which the author took himself and his orthodox defense of Marxist theory, thought and intellectualism so seriously. It was depressing because it made him look like someone so sublimely out of touch with reality and even the nature of the very theories he was shrou

Hegel once said that every great thing, whether it be a person, event or thing, will appear not just once, but twice. Karl Marx later added on to this notion, that every potentially revolution moment or figure, must emerge and then be exorcised, by agreeing with Hegel’s thesis, but augmenting it as follows: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” As Guam winds down to the end of the second term of Felix Camacho as governor, this philosophical notion has for some reason been heavily on my mind. In the United States last year, when George W. Bush was officially no longer the President of the United States, it signified the end of an era, since for close to an entire decade, the great ship of the American state, had him at its helm. You would have to be a fool not to look back at such a length of time, and either blur things to where they wer