Julio 11, 2005

The Usual

I feel like I have 2 different readerships of this blog. There are my family and friends, who are interested in following what is happening in my life, for whom the blog is sort of a surrogate for actually seeing me every day and asking "hey, what're you up to today?" Then there's others who read it because they are colleagues in some way, from the activist world, the videography world, the art world. They are interested in what I write that has a direct bearing on those worlds - my thoughts on current politics, a link to an interesting art project, etc. The first group though is probably just as happy to see me mention little mundane things I do each day.

Yesterday I was thinking about blogging about the fact that I made a really good omlette for lunch. I thought about how silly that was but then thought how there must be hundreds or thousands of blogs filled with nothing but mundane, banal details of daily life. One can be contemptuous of this or not. Nevertheless, one possible project linked to this fact that I thought of is to make a sort of agregator/searchengine that looked for all the blogs each day that mention doing the same thing you mention doing that day. So in my example it would go find all the other people that blogged about making an omlette too. That would be an interesting experiment and perhaps an excellent demonstration of the common ground shared by so many people. Of course some activities you would rather feel are unique. If I blog about working on my Juarez documentary I would want the search engine to not come up with very many others who did that as well. (In a selfish sense, at least. Idealistically, it would be great if there were 20 people all working on using the medium of video to raise awareness of the femicides in Juarez.)

A good friend I got to know well when I lived in San Francisco has recently moved to Spain, and I've been enjoying his blog, which he started at about the same time that he moved. It's a way to keep up on his everyday life, his adventures in his new country, and also to practice my spanish (he's been blogging about half in english and half in spanish), and also to read his political and philosophical insights. He's one of the smartest people I know.

Today he blogged about his family history and his visit to the town in Spain where his mother's father and grandfather are from, which they left to emigrate to Cuba long ago.

I was happy that I only had to look up about 4 words:

  • bisabuelo - great grandfather
  • malagueña - native of Malaga (another place in Spain)
  • plazo - time period
  • antepasados - ancestors

    Other things I did yesterday:
  • helped my father mow the lawn.
  • wrote a long email in english and spanish that was intended for indymedia activists in the u.s. and bolivia. I haven't sent it yet. I'm waiting to find out some crucial information before I decide whether it has to be sent.
  • finished Charles Bowden's new book, "A Shadow in the City." It's an incredible read. And it makes me want to read "Man's Search for Meaning," which is a book by holocaust survivor Victor Frankl and is an important learning experience for Joey O'Shay, the subject of Bowden's book.
  • listened to some "old time" radio shows, which my father is really into; bob hope, "the shadow," etc.

    Posted by steev at Julio 11, 2005 06:29 AM
    • Comments
    If you do a lot of online reading in Spanish I have found useful a software program by Oxford Dictionary that allows me to double click on a word that results in a pop-up box with the translation. Much faster than a paper dictionary. Posted by: jon at Julio 11, 2005 11:25 PM