The Civilization and Culture exam that I took was really quite interesting. I had gotten into a bit of a discussion about the youth of spain (and the rest of the world) with my professor earlier in the semester,and I guess he wanted to hear more about it. So the exam was jjust an article photocopied from the newspaper about the newly found statistics about the youth. Stuff like the majority are against capital punishment, most don´t vote by party but rather by candidate etc… He just gave us this article and a sheet of paper and that was it. So i just wrote my response to it. I hope that´s what he wanted.
Mainly, I think that articles that are written about the youth that say things like ¨the youth is more apathetic then their parents¨ just causes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we think that we are apathetic, then it´s like, why should I even bother if I´m the only one who cares? Furthermore, The article noted that we have no motivating idols, that we are surrounded by trash tv and crappy music without meaning. I sort of agree in that I think we´re just sitting around waiting for some revolutionary to come along like MLK jr or John Lennon to motivate us. But I think that´s just silly because MLKjr and John Lennon were just normal people with the same 24 hours a day as everyone else. So why are we waiting around for some superhero to come rescue us? We need to rescue ourselves.
Being in spain has really made me realize that although I´m surrounded by a different culture, different language and a different history, things are still the same. The older generations are still bitching about the younger ones being disrespectful and unmotivated. The political science majors are the ones doing all the organizing, the psychology majors do all the analyzing and the hippies just look the part and smoke pot. Everyone´s a little apathetic, but I think all we really need is a good prod of reality and everything will be on its way. Once you get people talking, they´re really not so apathetic after all, it´s more that they feel helpless, and that helplessness is a terrible feeling. So to cure themselves of it, they just don´t want to know. It´s apathy, but its a normal reaction.
Dinner party, Belville trio, exams and the future
Amanda had a dinner party last night at her new apartment in the upper albayzin. The view from up there is incredible, it´s completely different than the rest of the city because it faces away from the city center. From her roof you can see the mountains, and a hill with a church on top, with cows, chickens and horses. Seriously. It´s about a twenty minute walk from my apartment, and all up hill but definitely worth it. Laney made this incredible couscous dish, Mike made some type of chicken and honey sauce and anna made pasta, that really got stuck to the bottom of the pot and took us forever to clean off!
Afterwards I went out with Laney and Sarah and Rob to see the Belville Trio. Honestly, was one of the best concerts I´ve seen in a while. i met a girl there from Mallorca, who was pretty emphatic about dancing even though the bar was incredibly packed. It´s strange how much I´ve recently come to realize how much music is an important role in my life. I´ve been going through some emotional troubles the past week and just hearing some familiar music made it all go away. This was especially incredible because both my ipod and my laptop are not functioning at the moment, and so I´ve been going without any familiar music for about a month now. Very tough.
This coming week I´ve got midterms, and so unfortunately i´m going to lock myself away in my apartment forever. Of course, that´s probably not really going to work, but that´s the plan. 5 exams in 3 days. yucky. And I have to write my thesis proposal for next sunday. I´m thinking I´m going to do it on culture shock, especially since I´ve got a pretty awesome contact with the psychologist here in granada.
I´ve been doing a lot of thinking about what I want to accomplish this summer, and i think my best bet is to go to mexico and work with CIDHAL, a feminist lobbyist group (www.cidhal.org). The womyn´s center at hamilton might fund me, which would be amazing. Jess went last year, and so I¨m hoping to just build off of what she did. We will see. All I know is i´m not ready to go back to the states just yet, and I don´t really want to get a crappy promotional modeling job. These times are just too valuable to waste doing something I don´t want to be doing just for money.
we will see.
Dragon Festival
So this past week was an adventure. I tried to get a group of kids together to drive up to valencia to see las fallas (basically, there´s a whole bunch of really massive paper mache statues, like the size of entire buildings, and at midnight they stick firecrackers in the base of the statues and light them on fire. Appparently, it´s like they blow up the whole city) But people bailed on me last minute and so instead I went to the Alpujarras with laney to see the dragon festival. The dragon festival was kind of this weird mix between a punk festival, a rave and woodstock. No joke. There was a section called ¨The Red Dragon¨which is were all the punks and ravers and other scary people were (the ravers were scarier than the punks because they were on more drugs). Never in my life have I ever seen such blatant dealing before. I hope to never see anything like that again. Then a little farther into the valley was a section called ¨The Green dragon¨which was filled with some really dippy hippies. I mean, european hippies look a whole lot like american hippies, except they´re without a purpose. All they want to do is smoke pot and talk about how messed up the world is. I had a marvelous conversation with a man from the UK named Tree (yeah, I know, and he actually looked like a tree too!) about respecting women as people with immense power and how everyone is connected as brother and sister and so we should treat everyone as if we were related and that we should share our wealth with eachother. And so at the end he pulls out this ridiculously expensive Sony Digital videocamera (i know it was expensive because I had looked at the same model before I left for spain) and starts taking videoshots of me. and I didn´t say anything, just smiled but on the inside I was really angry. How can this man say one thing and do the exact opposite! It´s like some people just like to dress up and play hippie, but when it comes down to it, they´re just the same as everyone else.
I did have a decent time though. Last night laney and I walked around the Red dragon for a bit. We saw a celtic violinist just chilling out and playing some music so I got up and danced to that, which was a lot of fun. We also saw this incredible punk band. THe bassist looked exactly like david bowie! and the lead singer was this older woman, she could´ve been someone´s grandma, but the things she was singing about were absolutely contradictory (one of the songs was called ¨are you fucked up, jenny?¨) It was a riot, but also really cool at the same time. All in all I´m glad I went because it was an experience. and now I know that I don´t have to go back there if I don´t want to. Which at this point, I really don´t want to.
Youth
Today in my civilization and culture class we talked about the social realities of the youth of spain. It´s funny how everywhere I go, the older generations always say the same things about my generation; that we´ve got so much intellectual potential, and yet we just waste it all on drinking and drugs. But it´s kind of amusing how little they understand about us. They think that we are apathetic because we don´t care, because we are lazy and because it´sjust too much work to have an opinion about things. And for some people they are right. But honestly, I think those people are a minority. I really honestly believe that the real problem with my generation is that we have this ridiculous sense of depersonalization, and it gets fed by all the older generations telling us that we´re lazy and apathetic. What I mean is that on an individual level, we do care and we want to make a lasting impression on the world. Who doesn´t want to be remembered for something? But what is happening is that no one is showing us how to do it.We have no visionaries, no leaders, no musical or cultural icons to point us in the right direction, or in any direction. We have nothing to speak out against, no great war to unite us. The war on terror doesn´t unite because it is a war based on fear and immobility. Instead of speaking out, we hide because we don´t want to stand out from the crowd. We don´t want to be accused of being terrorists and we don´t want to be targets for terrorism. In a time of fear, immobility is the natural response. It takes guts to stand up and speak out, and no one is going to do that, especially if there is the high risk of them being the only one to stand up and speak out.
The professor talked about the ¨cultura contra¨. A culture based on being counter, not fighting against but just being the exact opposite for the sake of being the opposite. It made me think about radicalism, and how much easier it is to be radical or apathetic, rather than to be in the center of it all, getting your hands dirty and actually thinking things through. Like it´s much easier to say ¨I don´t care about politics¨ or ¨I´m an anarchist¨ than to actually sit down and figure things out. Because on either side of the coin, you´re taking an extreme point of view, already planned out for you. You don´t have to do any work for either side, and therefore they´re equally useless in real discourse.
I had a similar conversation with my host brother about this stuff. It´s all very depressing because it seems like no one has any hope for the future. It´s like, ¨this is the reality and it´s the way things are and your generation is apathetic and sucks and blah blah blah¨ And I´m thinking to my self, ok, if we are so apathetic, then what happened to me? Surely there has to be more people out there like me, who want to make a difference, but maybe they´re just scared? It´s too easy to write an entire generation off as being lazy or stupid. It´s tempting to do so, I know because I´ve done it often. But I really do believe that if people see how an individual act can influence our lives drastically and permanently, people will want to change. It´s like with the Vietnam war– I don´t think the whole anti war movement started because that generation was particularly worldly or anti-american emperialism or anyting like that. I think it started because all the young men in the country were faced with the reality that they might be sent to fight a war that they know nothing about. And so when they did research, they realized that it wasn´t something that they personally were willing to give up their lives for. It was because they understood that the war affected them personally and that they either needed to stand up and speak out against it, or just go over there and kill people.
The professor for this class is kind of intimidating, and usually I just sit there and take notes, even if I disagree. But today I couldn´t really handle it, because what he was saying, while true, was not completely true. He thought we were apathetic to forget something, that we are weak and that we can´t handle the reality of the world. I told him that wasn´t it at all. Salimos para ser solo. We go to bars to get drunk, we go to clubs to dance, but we never have conversation amongst ourselves. It is not because we are afraid of anything, it is because we are lacking a sense of solidarity. And we fill the that emptiness inside of ourselves with things that don´t last. And this reality is sad, but there is always hope. Anyone, at any moment can just wake up from the daily humdrum life and realize their reality. And so there´s always hope of an awakening in our culture. It´s like all that commercialism and consumerism is just a blindfold. Underneath it all we´re still human and we´re still capable of intellectual thought. And I have seen trends form and develop and take over, and I know that it would be difficult to start a trend of awakening. But it´s possible to do. If a trash tv show like The OC can start a trend in music and cars and clothing, then it is possible to start a progressive trend in thought. It has to be possible. To think otherwise would be to sacrifice all intellectual thought and hope to the existential vacuum that we have created for ourselves.
I probably sound silly and idealistic. I know. But sometimes I think it´s neccessary to have hope for change. I think about all the things I have done at Hamilton, how many people I´ve helped register to vote, helped mobilize to marches in DC, people who I´ve gotten in contact with, who really want to change things, they just needed a way to do it. I think about how successful Drop Beats Not Bombs has been, and how I´m going to help out with The Human Initiative this summer (www.humanity.org)and to me, its sillier to give up because there´s so much potential already for change.
San Nicolas
Today I walked around the Albayzin and got coffee with one of my friends. We caught the sunset at Plaza de San Nicolas. The mountains and the Alhambra turned orange, then red, then purple. I felt like I had jumped into a postcard. Seeing things like that makes you realize that your problems really are so trivial. The mountains have been sitting and changing colors every day for eternity. We´re just a blip on the radar.
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