NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

During this trip to California I am meeting up with people I haven't seen in years, in some cases, I haven't seen or heard from them in close to a decade. It is interesting to experience the memories that people have of you after a long stretch of time. Are you frozen in time to them? Have they imagined  future for you even if it matches nothing that you have done since you last saw them? Today I met up with someone who heard me read poetry a long time ago in San Diego, when I was attending grad school at UCSD. We had only met a couple of times, but for him it was an important meeting because I was the first person from Guam, he had met, who talked about Guam in a critical way. He had heard me read a poem on Chamorros being a footnote to the American Empire. It is something that struck and stuck with him ever since. For me, I cling to moments like this, and I thread them together to create my personal necklace of relevance. It is so easy sometimes to feel like nothing I do

Gof ya-hu este na tinige' ginnen i Guam Blog. Gof ya-hu i lepblo yan mubi Jurassic Park ya annai hu taitai este (ni' muna'yalaka i dos), chumalek yu', lao nina'hasso yu' lokkue'. I hinasson i DOD gi este na tiempo yan i hinasson i duenon Jurassic Park, kalang chumilong. Puru ha' somnak gi me'nan-niha. Taya' prublema yan taya' chathinasso. Achokka' ti matai Si Hammond gi i mubi, matai gui' gi i lepblo. Ya ayu i mita'-na para i binanidosu-na, i bachet-na. Hafa na parehu na pinadesi gaige gi me'na'-ta put i bachet yan binanidosun i DOD yan i manakhilo' guini? I’m still not clear on chaos? – Dr. Ellie Sattler. (Laura Dern), in the movie Jurassic Park. It simply deals with unpredictability in complex systems. Its only principle is the Butterfly Effect. A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking and in Central Park you get rain instead of sunshine. – Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). The U.S. planners running the Guam buildup

I’m feeling depressed this month. Tinemba yu’ gi este na mes. I spent the last year trying to get a permanent job at UOG and got nothing despite applying for several positions. Right now I’m teaching part time at UOG this month to get by, but come August, I won’t have a full-time job but will still have two kids to support, credit card debt to appease and a mountain of student loan debt that is always mahalang for my salape’. I’m spending the month of July trying to line up some full-time work for decent pay, but haven’t found anything certain yet. This is especially so when I’m watching a movie and some fantastic, but old pop or rock song comes on, and I’m tempted to start singing along with the soundtrack of the movie. I used to do that, but movies have a way of chopping up or rearranging a song to make it fit and so its really really embarrassing when you are the only person in a theater yelling along to a song and it cuts out, but you keep belting it out for a few embarrassing se

I just came home from watching The Dark Knight . I thoroughly enjoyed it. There were parts though that I felt were rushed. Where it seemed that a scene had been stripped to its bare minimum in order to keep things flowing and moving. So characters end up talking to each other in ways which are way too concise and compact, its as if (even if they are good actors) they nonetheless appear like robots speaking one after another. Its always a hurried mixture of surreality and unreality watching this sort of thing, because of the way it unintentionally might reveal that in our own lives, when we speak in ways which are perfectly witty, perfectly timed, is there some sort of matrix at work as well? Editing our lives to create that illusion of discourse moving smoothly along? Other than this sort of thing, which is understandable, since they were struggling to squeeze as many story elements from as many different Batman storylines as possible, and somehow make all of them fit into 2 1/2 hours.

Yesterday the prospective students for my department came by, and so naturally the discussions always inevitable in an Ethnic Studies Program took place. The origin of Ethnic Studies is a mixture of explicit politics and academics, and so the eternal struggle in any such department is how to balance the rigors of both life spheres. What are we to do with the divisions between the "abstract" world of academia and "concrete" world of real life? I should point here that my point here will not be that these divisions are false, but that how we position ourselves in relation to them is what makes all the difference on whether we will implicitly/explicitly accept them or transgress them. A crucial mistake that I see students make when posing philosophically these problems, is that rather than narrating a relationship to this particular division, which might in some way reveal its contingency, they instead narrate themselves into an interpassive state, whereby the divis