But those were his glory days.

Now he shared his story with other fallen stars who had been celebrities as children and lost their grip on reality almost immediately. Now, here he was, in his dirty apartment, hungover, late for work, and slowly rubbing his temples as he wondered why he couldn’t have just slept forever.

He would find out later that day in the cold cereal aisle at Safeway.

Had he not needed to use the bathroom, he would have stayed in bed longer. With much effort he got up and shuffled toward the toilet where he sat a while, thinking foul, useless thoughts. He remembered hearing about a Kansas woman whose skin had grown around a toilet seat she had been sitting on for two years straight. Better to be safe than sorry. Slowly, very slowly he stood up, making sure that his butt cheeks gently unstuck themselves from the toilet seat. Success.

Here, in San Francisco, there are no such children: there is no innocence here.

No, what drops in on you are loud, ugly toothless homeless men who don’t go away until you recognize they’re human, too- some of them.

But such is the sad music of the street here, where nostalgia is but a gift.

–

Unos pájaros grises y curiosos salieron de la nada y se me acercaron como los niños de la calle en México, con esperanzas persistentes de que les diera algo, lo que fuera, aunque fuera por descuido.

Aquí, en San Francisco, no hay tales niños- aquí no hay inocencia.

No, aquí se te aparecen hombres ruidosos, feos y chimuelos que no se te despegan hasta que se les reconocen como seres humanos- algunos, pues.

Pero tal es la música triste de estas calles, donde la nostalgia es un regalo.

It feels unsafe.

At the very least, it’s not a comforting feeling: as if the firmament upon which one stands will suddenly break under the weight of distant and transient, but very present, giants.

And still, people carry on as if this were normal, and I’m distracted by the revelatory details of a sago palm planted in a concrete planter here in this San Francisco shopping mall.

You do a girl tolerable poor, but you might fool men, maybe.  Bless you, child, when you set out to thread a needle don’t hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it; hold the needle still and poke the thread at it; that’s the way a woman most always does, but a man always does t’other way.  And when you throw at a rat or anything, hitch yourself up a tiptoe and fetch your hand up over your head as awkward as you can, and miss your rat about six or seven foot. Throw stiff-armed from the shoulder, like there was a pivot there for it to turn on, like a girl; not from the wrist and elbow, with your arm out to one side, like a boy.  And, mind you, when a girl tries to catch anything in her lap she throws her knees apart; she don’t clap them together, the way you did when you catched the lump of lead.  Why, I spotted you for a boy when you was threading the needle; and I contrived the other things just to make certain.

- Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Un poco de contexto para este pasaje: el protagonista, Huckleberry, se vistió como niña y trató de engañar a una mujer para solicitarle información acerca de él (que supuestamente se había muerto) y del esclavo fugitivo Jim.

Europeans recognized the painted records’s function to the extent that those drafted for leaders were valid in legal proceedings. However, the Europeans were ambivalent about is as it really didn’t conform to the European idea of writing. For example, Acosta ranks Aztec writing and Inca knot records just below Chinese ideograms. The ambivalence continues to this day with the classification of Aztec writing as pictography.

Ignace Gello defines writing as a “system of human intercommunication by means of conventional, visible marks”. But pictography is placed as a “forerunner of writing” in the evolution of writing, leading to alphabetized and phonetically representative visual communication systems. It helps to remember that writing is a cultural construct that has been used to distinguish literates from pre-literates, people with history from those without, and civilized people from barbarians or primitives. Now, the working definition of writing is given by Sampson as the communication of relatively specific ideas in a conventional manner by means of permanent, visible marks.

(Jon enters kitchen. Julie and Ashley are writing what looks like a mind map on a napkin. )

Jon: Hey, what’re you guys up to?

Julie: We’re playing six degrees of kevin bacon. Wanna play?

Jon: Sure… but I don’t really know any movies Kevin Bacon has been in.

Julie: The only movies we could come up with are Footloose and Flatliners.

Ashley: This is a waste of my time.

(Ashley leaves kitchen and finds something better to do)

As you can see, I’ve redesigned the blog. I liked the original colors, chocolate and tan, because they symbolized humanity and Mexican-ness, but I felt the blog in general was a bit dull in terms of design. I rounded the header and gave it a shadow, and later experimented with @font-face, but I had trouble porting my fonts across different browsers. Finally, I decided to scrap the original colors and the header. The result? A new logo. It’s blood red to signify the blood that flows through all our collective bodies, and it is handwritten scrawl, similar to those found in the ancient Mexican codices. The logo successfully reunites humanity and Mexican-ness and breathes new life into the blog.

w00t!

Hatuey fue condenado a la hoguera, castigo reservado a los más viles criminales. Pero cuando estaba a punto de ser quemado, al ser preguntado si quería convertirse en cristiano para subir al cielo preguntó: “¿y esos hombres blancos también van al cielo?” y al recibir una afirmación dijo “entonces yo no quiero ir a donde esos hombres vayan”.

-de la Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias. Fray Bartolomé de las Casas

Me cae bien Hatuey, el cacique que fue expulsado de su isla (ahora la República Dominicana y Haití) y que les avisó lo siguiente a los habitantes indígenas de Cuba:

Este es el Dios de los españoles adoran. Por estos pelean y matan; por estos es que nos persiguen y es por ello que tenemos que tirarlos al mar… Nos dicen, estos tiranos, que adoran a un Dios de paz e igualdad, pero usurpan nuestras tierras y nos hacen sus esclavos. Ellos nos hablan de un alma inmortal y de sus recompensas y castigos eternos, pero roban nuestras pertenencias, seducen a nuestras mujeres, violan a nuestras hijas. Incapaces de igualarnos en valor, estos cobardes se cubren con hierro que nuestras armas no pueden romper.

De acuerdo a este reporte interno de Citigroup, los grandes mueven la economía mundial y de sus paises y consideran que la población, específicamente los trabajadores, actuando en sus propios intereses, es su mayor amenaza. Qué bueno. Que nos tengan miedo. ¡A ejercer el voto y la huelga!

Here’s a few examples:

GE 1:3-5 On the first day, God created light, then separated light and darkness.
GE 1:14-19 The sun (which separates night and day) wasn’t created until the fourth day.

PR 8:13, 16:6 It is the fear of God that keeps men from evil.
1JN 4:18 There is no fear in love. Perfect love drives out fear.
1JN 5:2, 2JN 1:6 Those who love God keep his commandments.

And so on. Here’s more if you’re interested. 

Anyway, maybe the whole point of the bible is that all the conflicting teachings come together in one book to teach us a message. The details aren’t THAT important. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you interpret it literally. It’s the general idea that matters most.
It’s like a metaphor for the world. People believe all sorts of different things, but if they are good people and they do good in the world, then the differences are negligible.