Yesterday I ran around doing stupid errands and then went home and actually got some paying work done, which is a big accomplishment. Pretty important, since I'm pretty broke.
In the evening I went to spanish class at Dry River. First time I'd gone in a few weeks. I really should try to go more. It's a nice casual thing that Varo runs. He gets other native speakers to come and help teach too. We watched part of a little video by Guillermo Gomez-Pena called La Frontera es La Lenguaje that someone had brought, she'd found out about him in an art class. I mentioned I'd seen him perform twice, once in San Francisco and once in Portland. Sometimes it's really weird, to have so many different experiences, because of my age and all the places i've lived and different "careers" I've had, such that these things get brought up as extremely "out there" but I'm already really familiar with them. Sometimes I'm worried that by expressing my familiarity I'm sort of squashing the youthful enthusiasm for some newly-discovered bit of coolness that the other person has. I'm sorry to sound like such an aging hipster. Just trying to be honest about my experience.
After the class I went over to the Earth First! Journal office to help with the mailing of the new issue. They were pretty much done with everything but one task, which I helped with: hauling big boxes of copies to FedEx to ship to retailers. This issue of the journal was produced car-free. All the shopping for the office and the hauling of copies back from the printer and out to be mailed, was all pedal-powered. Very cool. I hitched a trailer to my bike and was one of 5 people who transported about 20 reams of copies in boxes a couple miles. It was fun. We cut through campus, and the big 2-person, 4-wheeled "bike car" that Jonathan and Shanti "drove" just barely fit through between the metal posts designed to keep regular cars out. But we made it.
The other special thing about this issue of the Journal is it has something written by me in it. They asked me to write a review of "The Snowbowl Effect" and I suggested I also review "Mauna Kea: Temple Under Siege" because it's about a similar issue and was made very recently too. They agreed to that and it was a good experience working with the editing collective. If you told me 2 years ago I'd have an article in the EFJ I would have probably smiled in disbelief. I just never expected it.
Posted by steev at Abril 19, 2006 07:34 AM