of course, this all assumes that this will not just have been a one-off night of passionate scribbling, to be followed by weeks and months, perhaps years of silent fingers. the idea of being a writer is more appealing to me than the writing process, or at least i think that’s what i have told myself in the past. but tonight it felt alright, it felt like something i could do, and the work felt like something that could be enjoyable for itself. i have a little headache after all that mental exertion though, or maybe it’s a side effect of the surge of manic energy that i usually get whenever i start a project.

my life has seen its share of unfinished projects, so i guess we shouldn’t hold our collective breath on this one. but if it continues to be fun, who knows.

the rain (and honestly, the market) has kept me somewhat unmotivated over the last couple of months. i sat in the bedroom usually, drinking coffee in the mornings, water and tea at night, reading, strumming the guitar, playing world of warcraft sometimes, instant messaging friends, and otherwise hibernating in some form. it felt good to get out of the country last week, even if it was only thirty some odd miles away to panama.

yesterday, a partially sunny day got me out on the beach, and gave me a slight sunburn. today i got out in the yard and swung the machete, chopped up yellowed banana leaves and overgrown stalks of ginger, did some raking, and cleaned up the house. it feels like the stormy season will pass now, and we can move back into weather that makes every day seem like summer vacation. and with the promise of better weather comes the promise of pleasant days and lingering nights getting naked and sweaty.

although the pace of life at times seems unbearably slow here, when i look at the calendar and see how much change has occurred in my life over these past few months i realize that it’s something of an illusion. friendships and love affairs are compressed and intensified, and every week someone who has become a part of the social fabric pulls out their thread, moving onto whatever else they move onto. even before they are packed, their place is taken by someone else stepping off the bus in downtown puerto viejo, with a backpack full of dreams, wide-eyed idealism and plans to stay forever.

being on the internets for that amount of time, doing miscellaneous mundane tasks, you need occasional breaks. today i took one such interlude by posting in a thread about which cat or dog food is best. there were a lot of people on there talking about fancy expensive organic raw food diets (for pets!!!), and so i tossed off a quick defense of tough, purina eating, no-nonsense jungle (house) cats:

i just buy whatever ground-up-horsemeat kitty-factory-style dry food i can get at the store (i believe right now i have one choice, purina). cats here in costa rica are a dime a dozen, most of them are rail-thin, and they appreciate ANY kind of food you give them. they don’t have the option of being fussy, they have the option of eating what you give them, scrounging, or dying of hunger.

quite frankly, guapo, the cat i inherited from my girlfriend when she moved back to the united states, is probably the happiest, fittest cat i have known. i have a feeling he may be supplementing the dry food with live, wet gecko meat, but usually he just tosses them around until they die and then loses interest. he also likes papaya and yogurt, so he gets some of that occasionally. i think a big key to his health and wellbeing is that i don’t let him lounge around all day. i toss him out in the yard for some exercise if he is getting too snoozy. he also follows me around constantly, so when it is hack-at-the-hibiscus with a machete time, he is in another corner of the yard working over some endangered tropical reptile.

i started to do some googling about pet food a while ago when i accepted responsibility for the cat, and kinda gave up when i realized that guapo was going to be eating whatever was available, and didn’t have the luxury of picking a fancy-lad food. once again, the food in combination with his lifestyle seems to be treating him right.

Being rich used to get you into the leisure class. Money meant freedom — from work, money worries, household chores and screaming kids (via boarding school).

Now, however, the wealthy seem to be as besieged as ever. The leisure class has given way to what I call the workaholic wealthy — an elite of BlackBerry-crazed, network-obsessed, peripatetic travelers who have to keep scrambling to maintain their place in life.

According to research by Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist, quoted in an article in the Washington Post, “being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed.”

People who make less than $20,000 a year, for instance, spent more than a third of their time in passive leisure, like kicking back and watching TV. By contrast, those making more than $100,000 a year (I would call them affluent, not wealthy), spent less than a fifth of their time in passive leisure. “The richest people spent nearly twice as much time as the poorest people in leisure activities that were structured and often stressful — shopping, child care and exercise.”

A study by the Shelton Group, an advertising agency and market research company based in Knoxville, Tenn., that focuses on environmental products, showed that consumers surveyed in 2007 were between 22 and 55 percent less likely to buy a wide range of green products than in 2006. The slipping economy had an effect, but message overload appeared to be a major factor as well, said Suzanne C. Shelton, the company’s president.

in my opinion, a good simple start for environmentally responsible decision making is to ask yourself whether you really *need* to buy something. in general, the less you consume, the lower your impact on the environment.

i really liked it there and joked with everyone that i might move there from costa rica. actually, i am not sure that i was completely joking. for the moment though, i am still enjoying the puerto viejo – manzanillo corridor. today for example i ate fresh carob from the neighbor’s tree, small little finger-bananas from the botanical garden, drank some agua de pipa (water from a young coconut that fell nearby), and i am going to try some mysterious other fruit from the garden later on. i am pretty sure i would not have access to this rich a variety of homegrown stuff out on the islands. although if i did…

here is the water taxi queue at bastimento island, on the undeveloped windward side, a nice surf spot. i was told they shot “survivor” on this island, but since i haven’t seen or know anything about the show, it didn’t give me a point of reference. however, i pass the info on to you tubewatchers out there

In fact, podiatrists say that summer’s favorite footwear is responsible for more health problems than any other type of shoes, even high heels.

usually when absolutely meaningless stories like this are getting pumped, it means something else is going on. ahh right. the market is tanking because last month’s half-percentage point rise in seasonally adjusted unemployment was the biggest increase since january 1975.

A broader measure of unemployment that includes so-called discouraged workers rose to 9.7% in May from 9.2%.

oh, and oil spiked up 6% 7% at one point this morning after this hit the wire:

An Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites looks “unavoidable” given the apparent failure of sanctions to deny Tehran technology with bomb-making potential, one of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s deputies said on Friday.

“If Iran continues with its program for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective,” Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz told the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

“Attacking Iran, in order to stop its nuclear plans, will be unavoidable,” said the former army chief who has also been defense minister.

looks like it’s shaping up to be a good day to throw on the flipflops and head to the beach.

(i.e. i no longer have a 415 area code number).

The food price shock now roiling world markets is destabilizing governments, igniting street riots and threatening to send a new wave of hunger rippling through the world’s
poorest nations. It is outpacing even the Soviet grain emergency of 1972-75, when world food prices rose 78 percent. By comparison, from the beginning of 2005 to early 2008, prices leapt 80 percent, according to the United Nations‘ Food and Agriculture Organization.
Much of the increase is being absorbed by middle men — distributors, processors, even governments — but consumers worldwide are still feeling the pinch.

[...]

“If you didn’t have ethanol, you would not have the prices we have today,” said Bruce Babcock, a professor of economics and the director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University.
“It doesn’t mean it’s the sole driver. Prices would be higher than we saw earlier in this decade because world grain supplies are tighter now than earlier in the decade. But we’ve introduced a new demand into the market.”

i am going to make an effort to post more often about life here in puerto. i got chided a few times while i was in the states to blog more frequently, so i apologize for dropping the ball.

“I think it will surprise people that their laptops are subject to search without any level of suspicion when they get to a border checkpoint,” added Jennifer Chacon, a law professor at the University of California, Davis.

“I think it may change the way people travel,” she said.

“When I was Secretary of the Treasury I was not supposed to say anything but `strong dollar, strong dollar,”’ O’Neill said today. “I argued then and would argue now that the idea of a strong dollar policy is a vacuous notion.”

The U.S. currency today fell to a record low against the euro, and has declined 15 percent against its European counterpart in the past year.

“The markets actually have control over those relationships. When people say strong dollar, if they don’t mean that `we believe intervention can work and we’re prepared to intervene,’ then `strong dollar’ is ridiculous.”

(via big picture)

warning: searching google trends can be a little addictive.

according to a nyt article today, philosophy is enjoying a resurgence of popularity on US campuses. i was a philosophy major in school, and i have been saying a lot of the things mentioned in the article in defense of what is often regarded as, in the charitable terms of the writer, “a luxury major”. some of my favorite bits below (i have bolded particularly relevant points):

But Ms. Onejeme, now a senior applying to law school, ended up changing her major to philosophy, which she thinks has armed her with the skills to be successful. “My mother was like, what are you going to do with that?” said Ms. Onejeme, 22. “She wanted me to be a pharmacy major, but I persuaded her with my argumentative skills.” [...]

Once scoffed at as a luxury major, philosophy is being embraced at Rutgers and other universities by a new generation of college students who are drawing modern-day lessons from the age-old discipline as they try to make sense of their world, from the morality of the war in Iraq to the latest political scandal. The economic downturn has done little, if anything, to dampen this enthusiasm among students, who say that what they learn in class can translate into practical skills and careers. On many campuses, debate over modern issues like war and technology is emphasized over the study of classic ancient texts. [...] “If I were to start again as an undergraduate, I would major in philosophy,” said Matthew Goldstein, the CUNY chancellor, who majored in mathematics and statistics. “I think that subject is really at the core of just about everything we do. If you study humanities or political systems or sciences in general, philosophy is really the mother ship from which all of these disciplines grow.” [...] David E. Schrader, executive director of the American Philosophical Association, a professional organization with 11,000 members, said that in an era in which people change careers frequently, philosophy makes sense. “It’s a major that helps them become quick learners and gives them strong skills in writing, analysis and critical thinking,” he said. [...] “The discipline as we see it from the time of Socrates starts with people face to face, putting their positions on the table,” he said. [...] Barry Loewer, the department chairman, said that Rutgers started building its philosophy program in the late 1980s, when the field was branching into new research areas like cognitive science and becoming more interdisciplinary. He said that many students have double-majored in philosophy and, say, psychology or economics, in recent years, and go on to become doctors, lawyers, writers, investment bankers and even commodities traders. As the approach has changed, philosophy has attracted students with little interest in contemplating the classical texts, or what is known as armchair philosophy. Some, like Ms. Onejeme, the pre-med-student-turned-philosopher, who is double majoring in political science, see it as a pre-law track because it emphasizes the verbal and logic skills prized by law schools — something the Rutgers department encourages by pointing out that their majors score high on the LSAT. Other students said that studying philosophy, with its emphasis on the big questions and alternative points of view, provided good training for looking at larger societal questions, like globalization and technology. “All of these things make the world a smaller place and force us to look beyond the bubble we grow up in,” said Christine Bullman, 20, a junior, who said art majors and others routinely took philosophy classes. “I think philosophy is a good base to look at a lot of issues.” Frances Egan, a Rutgers philosophy professor who advises undergraduates, said that as it has become harder for students to predict what specialties might be in demand in an uncertain economy, some may be more apt to choose their major based simply on what they find interesting. “Philosophy is a lot of fun,” said Professor Egan, who graduated with a philosophy degree in the tough economic times of the 1970s. “A lot of students are in it because they find it intellectually rewarding.” Max Bialek, 22, was majoring in math until his senior year, when he discovered philosophy. He decided to stay an extra year to complete the major (his parents needed reassurance, he said, but were supportive). “I thought: Why weren’t all my other classes like that one?” he said, explaining that philosophy had taught him a way of studying that could be applied to any subject and enriched his life in unexpected ways. “You can talk about almost anything as long as you do it well.” Jenna Schaal-O’Connor, a 20-year-old sophomore who is majoring in cognitive science and linguistics, said philosophy had other perks. She said she found many male philosophy majors interesting and sensitive. “That whole deep existential torment,” she said. “It’s good for getting girlfriends.”

and robert reich:

Listen to this morning’s “Meet the Press” if you want an example. Tim Russert, one of the smartest guys on television, interviewed four political consultants – Carville and Matalin, Bob Schrum, and Michael Murphy. Political consultants are paid huge sums to help politicians spin words and avoid real talk. They’re part of the problem. And what do Russert and these four consultants talk about? The potential damage to Barack Obama from saying that lots of people in Pennsylvania are bitter that the economy has left them behind; about HRC’s spin on Obama’s words (he’s an “elitist,” she said); and John McCain’s similarly puerile attack.

Does Russert really believe he’s doing the nation a service for this parade of spin doctors talking about potential spins and the spin-offs from the words Obama used to state what everyone knows is true? Or is Russert merely in the business of selling TV airtime for a network that doesn’t give a hoot about its supposed commitment to the public interest but wants to up its ratings by pandering to the nation’s ongoing desire for gladiator entertainment instead of real talk about real problems.

We’re heading into the worst economic crisis in a half century or more. Many of the Americans who have been getting nowhere for decades are in even deeper trouble. Large numbers of people in Pennsylvania and across the nation are losing their homes and losing their jobs, and the situation is likely to grow worse. Consumers are at the end of their ropes, fuel and food costs are skyrocketing, they can’t go deeper into debt, they can’t pay their bills. They aren’t buying, which means every business from the auto industry to housing to even giant GE is hurting. Which means they’ll begin laying off more people, and as they do, we will experience an even more dangerous downward spiral.

Bitter? You ain’t seen nothing yet. And as much as people like Russert, Carville, Matalin, Schrum, and Murphy want to divert our attention from what’s really happening; as much as HRC and McCain seek to make political hay out of choices of words that can be spun cynically by the mindless spinners of the old politics; as much as demagogues on the right and left continue to try to channel the cumulative frustrations of Americans into a politics of resentment – all these attempts will, I hope, prove futile. Eighty percent of Americans know the nation is on the wrong track. The old politics, and the old media that feeds it, are irrelevant now.