Posts Tagged ‘reading’

Right now I’m procrastinating going to bed, which is somewhat of a bad idea, considering that I need to get up early to make it to the strangely prohibitive 8:30-11:30 am hours for the American Embassy tomorrow for their help planning my trip, but until I’m actually set to fall asleep, I figure now’s as good a time as any to update.

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I’m back from Argentina, which I will talk about in greater detail soon, but in the meantime please check out THIS ARTICLE that I wrote for AssociatedContent.com. AC, as the cool kids call it, collects stories from all around and pays its writers based on page views, so check it out, I says. This particular story netted me $1 upfront (woo!), and I hope to make a tiny bit more as people read it. Other than that I’ve apparently made 26¢ from page views, which is 26¢ more than I’ve made from the Santiago Times, though mostly what’s up there are my articles from the ST.

Speaking of which, I quit my job, basically. I’ve been having differences with the publisher, which I went into some detail about in a previous post. I told them I’ll still try to write a little about the election, but I’m basically over it. I told him it was because school is too time-consuming, which is partially true, but I’d rather just have the time to travel and do other writing, either for this blog or for other places more likely to turn into money, or my new favorite activity: reading in the park.

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Santiago is a different city in the spring, which it finally finally is. Sure, the temperature still varies wildly and the sky is known to occasionally open up with a 10-minute rain and hail downpour, but for the most part it simply varies from brisk to beautiful. The sun is out, the flowers are starting to bloom, the young horny couples are inappropriately touching each other in inappropriately public areas, it’s Spring!

On my part, I’ve been trying to make opportunities to walk as much as possible, something that seems to scare the hell out of most Chileans. “You’re going to walk home? From here?” my friend said incredulously. “But we’re right next to a Metro stop!” I attempted to go to a movie yesterday, but ended up stranded on the far end of Providencia, needing to get home (long story), the Metro just closing, and decided to walk home. I arrived about two hours later tired, but in a good way.

Today I went to Los Leones to check out the leather jacket shop I’d seen my first week in town (god a nice new leather jacket for about $42), and was on my way back when I decided to stop in to the Mundo a Mil (basically their version of a $1 store). I picked up a SUPER 3D PUZZLE of the USS Constellation CV-64, an aircraft carrier, and I was blown away by its amazing descriptions on the packaging. In its unedited glory:

Use hand and head — Training kid’s flexible for their proportion on the hands and eyes.Develop them imagination ability. Make a teaching fairyland.

Design munificent — It can be assemblaged detached over and over,and looks like vertiable.It needn’t any assist tools.

Perfect in workmanship — Materials are daintiness. Safety and slightly.Full of colour printing.

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I’ve been wondering recently about my relative lack of updating, and I think I’ve traced the issue. It’s certainly not for lack of things to  write about, rather I’m accumulating a laundry list of topics that I really should mention, to the point that it would take the rest of my Chilean experiment just to describe everything that’s happened so far. I’ve yet to describe Peru or its alpacas, or La Serena and it’s penguins, or any number of things in Santiago that are worth at least a second look, if not a third or fifth.

Still, I think that part of it is just that I didn’t have that itch, that nagging necessity to write, the “ganas de escribir,” if you will, that I had like crazy for the first few months of my trip, and I believe that I can blame that entirely on my iPod. That’s right, music and audiobooks. I’ve been listening like mad to everything I can find, from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, by Mark Twain, to The Conscience of a Liberal by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. My podcast subscriptions regularly provide me with hours upon hours of history lessons, political analysis, introspective storytelling, or side-splitting comedy. I love listening to things while I walk, but it blocks out my own thoughts, and I decided that it was time to take a break.

That said, the last few days have been some of the most interesting and fulfilling that I’ve had in Santiago, not because of crazy trips or new toys. Just ’cause.

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I realize I haven´t updated in a while, aside from random articles and essays I wrote long ago, so sorry about that. It´s not that I´ve been having fewer adventures, or that I have any less desire to write about them, or even that I´ve been more busy.

It just seems that whenever I finally get home and lie down in my bed, my computer at the ready, I always seem to instead crash and wake up 3 hours later, music playing randomly, a long line of lkjjjjjalksdjlkjlk on the page in front of me, my computer still perch precariously on my lap. And then I realize it´s just pointless. So here I am, before class, eyes mostly open, dedicated to writing.

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