So the Red Sox finally win a World Series after 86 year! What does that mean to me? It's a huge blow to that inferiority complex that has pervaded each of our lives. At the risk of inciting controversy, I hostestly believe that we desrved such a wait. Over the years, Bostonians have had much to atone for. Like the Israelites, they needed to suffer and fully understand what they did wrong before they reached the promised land.

African Americans have known Boston as the "Northernmost Southern City". It had one of the most resilient populations to integration in the north. The Red Sox and the Celtics were the last teams in their respective leagues to integrate racially. The Boston Archdiocese was the epicenter of the child molestation scandals and more importantly, the ensuing coverups.

During my 16 years in the Boston area, I took much issue with its puritanical and ethnocentric ways. In the past six years away from the city, I saw a vast transformation for the better. The city became much more embracing of its diversity - an attribute that has always existed within the city limits but never before acknowledged by the nepotistic self proclaimed cognoscenti of Boston. They began acknowledging their faults and mistakes, to say the least.

What the Red Sox have been through was not an extended and cruel exercise in existentialism. It was a microcosm of what is wrong in Boston. The organization has been plagued with many of the same problems the city has endured. I have seen too many boneheaded decisions made by the management of the Red Sox to resort to the silly, almost cliche, "woe is me, why can't we win one" bullshit. New owners came in. New management came in. They collectively addressed decades of poor decisions, fought a juggernaught of Bstonian conventional wisdom, and accomplished what many before them could not.

Alrighty, let's celebrate and move on.....

Capoeira - or Pervasive evidence of the Stupidity of White Folk

Warning - offensive material ahead, especially for you crackers out there. As an avid observer of history, I'm all for leveling the playing field culturally - anyone who knows my political views know this. While I think that affirmative action and all are good things to have, I think that the emphasis should be placed elsewhere. White supremists and ethnocentrists alike have been espousing the inferiority of other races for eons. Not only were they wrong, they didn't take into account the stupid acts they(white folk) commited. Context, people! Why aren't there academic scholars devoting their lives and research to Caucasians and the stupid things they've done? Why are they focusing on trying to convince us that the Hopi Indians are just as great as the Romans? Those in cultural studies need to reassess their values and priorities. I, for one, as a former anthorpology student will start off on this virtuous task We non-crackers have been shit on for far too long and I for one am about to shit back! (That didn't come out like I had intented and stop thinking what you're thinking).

Recently, I went to a capoeira demonstration. For those of you who don't know, capoeira is a form of Brazilian martial art/dance. Brazilian slaves devised an entire fighting system under the radar of their masters by masking the moves with song and dance. Now, I've always heard about it and have since been intrigued by the notion. Just the sheer fact that it survived attests to its success in transmitting this art covertly. I was much less impressed once I finally saw a demonstration of capoeira. Apparently, these slaves didn't try too hard in terms of masking their true intent. It's about as thinly veiled as the current administration's justifications for attacking Irag - No, we're not here for the oil.... It's just coincidence that right after the fall of Iraq, the first thing we secured were all things oil related. Sewage, crucial infrastructure needed for rebuilding Iraq? No, oil. That's enough of my political diatribe.

So, back to capoeira. Visualize this: A bunch of people are singing, playing big-ass instruments that look like an archery bow with a major goiter issue....so these guys are grooving to the music. Suddenly, people start pairing up and start air-punching and kicking each other! Between a few kicks and punches, they would shake their booties and such in order to remind everyone that they're just dancing. The more athletic ones would turn kicks into summersaults. Um, yeah like that's going to fool me but then again, MY PEOPLE DIDN'T OWN SLAVES! We're the ones who first came to understand basic truths like KARMA and knew better than to enslave others. The last time one of us tried that shit, they paid dearly (WWII Japan).

Let's Go, Cardinals!

Here's hoping for a Red Sox-Cardinals World Series. I can actually make it to Game 3 if that happens being that I am only 2 hours away from St. Louis.

Almost Carjacked....in Evanston, IL!!!!!

Yeah, you heard me. I spend the past five years in one of the most dangerous cities in the country never getting mugged or even harassed much. I spend a few moments in a really nice area in Evanston, for those of you who don't know is where Nowrthwestern University's beautiful campus is located, and whammo! I had to drop off a friend at someone's house. Since I had a three hour drive ahead of me which would get me home at an ungodly hour, they decided to brew some coffee for me. I decided to turn my engine off since I was running low on gas. My battery's been acting screwy so I turned my lights off, too. I see two stocky rednecks in my rearview mirror crossing the street behind my car. They suddenly notice me in my car with the lights and engine off. They hurry over to the direction of my car. Just as the two of them were about to reach either front door, I immediately turned the ignition on and sped off without even turning on my lights. I reacted none too soon - I figured out what was going on at the very last moment.

It was the culmination of a very strange day for my friend and I. The day revolved around getting profoundly lost in Chicago and getting terrible directions from the locals. This was my third time in Chicago and I couldn't believe how many times I got lost. Going home, I got stuck in the South Side of Chicago - not somewhere you'd want to get lost in at 1AM! I called the only person I could think of who might be able to get me back to Urbana from Chicago. He didn't know so we resorted to Mapquest. Since yahoo maps failed me earlier today, I didn't have much faith in anything at this point. My friend stayed on the phone with me until I got on the way.

On the drive home, many thoughts went through my head. Most notably, I was replaying the whole carjacking scenario over and over again. This brought up the other major fear in my life other than the afore-mentioned fear of sucking. I have a recurring fear of my ability to adequately trust my perception of reality. A major move to another continent along with several traumatic moments in my life reinforced this fear. It manifests itself as innocuously as feeling like the entire world disagrees with me on a certain issue to moments when I doubt some of the most unambiguous observations and experiences. Tonight, for example. I started doubting whether the actual event occur, whether I overreacted, and about how I'll ever know exactly what may or may not have happened. Sometimes, I even end up giving people the benefit of doubt even in instances where I know deep down inside that I'm right. I know that I'm not explaining this well - it's almost 6 in the morning and I still can't fall asleep. This is the reason why some of my favorite films have a surrealist element. Movies like 8 1/2, Being John Malkovich, Un Chien Andalou, and 2001 really speak to me. They make me feel that I am not the only one with this fear, no matter how irrational it may seem. Kevin Bacon's character in Diner asks his friend, "Do you ever get the feeling that there's something going on that we don't know about?" That's how I feel about life a lot and it's not about an abstract pursuit of knowledge thing - it's something more basic than that.

Hellish Week 2

I still haven't resolved the assistantship issue. This past week, my teacher left town after my lesson and I had to take over for him. This meant leading rehearsals in Mahler's 5th Symphony and Beethoven's 4th Symphony. I was basically shitting my pants for the Mahler even though I've been waiting for this day for a long time. It was fun at times. I also had two tests this past week that I ended up cramming for. I could not afford to yield any of my study time for those rehearsals in order to prepare for those exams. For my Italian class, I ended up coming late. The quiz was based on a lecture that my teacher happened to be wrapping up by the time I walked in. She wasn't too happy and due to my chronic tardiness, she refused to go back trhough everything just for me. Knowing how she lectures and the rampant stupidity in my class, I knew that she would repeat things over and over and that the summary she gave would be more than sufficient for me to do well. All the students in the class seemed to be worried for me, along with the teacher. She asked me if I had any questions. Just one and after that, I was ready to take the quiz. Out of sheer pride and arrogance, I made sure that I was the first one to finish and made my exit just conspicuous enough for everyone to know that.

Hellish Week 1

I haven't posted in a while because I've been so busy. My first crazy week involved seven nights of working in a row while being a full time student. I have to conduct at least twice a week and preparations for that takes up a bulk of my time. In addition, I have to prepare for a lesson that occurs once a week. On top of this, University of Illinois decided to try to become paperless in one fell swoop and so far is failing miserably. You have to remember that U of I is one of the biggest schools in the country(over 40,000 students) and that there are at least 3 other campuses. The program has already crashed several times. Whenever it does, it practically shuts the school down. It's U of I's version of the Iraq Invasion - a good idea in the abstract sense but one executed in poor timing and an even worse implementation. I have become one of the victims of it. The University still doesn't recognize my assistantship so, I haven't been paid in two monthes and I don't have my tuition waiver. Every fucking day, I have to run around campus and yell at people.