Musings of sleeplessness (and restlessness for that matter)

So today I finally hit that point when you procrastinate for an unduly long time and finally have to face the pressure of a very very pressing deadline. Of course, I am such a masterful procrastinator that I lackadaisically let about a dozen pressing deadlines converge at the same point, so I'm dealing with the consequences and trading sleep for a-slim-shot-at-all-night-productivity. That's just how I do.
Anyway, in the middle of completing what amounts to two complete online courses over the span of the last twelve hours, I got the impulse to write in my journal and what came out has a lot to do, I think, with the whole prospect of travel, of education, and what we're (or at least I'm) hoping to get out of it all:

I want something that makes my heart burst and pump with energy and passion and dedication and affirmative, resounding purpose and yes.

pump. yes. pump. yes. pump.

I want to live in such a way that with every beat my heart is pumping a steady flow of yes's through every inch of my body.

Can you picture that?

Can you imagine living a life so empowered and engaged that every breath replenishes your sense of purpose and every heartbeat releases a resounding yes into your bloodstream?

This is what I want.

I want to find and live my way into the something that makes this image real.

And then of course I drew a little picture of me with a giant red heart pumping a stream of yes's all the way out through my lips and the tips of my toes! I am just yearning for that kind of fully-present-vibrant-aliveness that school is so very good at stamping out. I don't know about you, but I get so restless with school and with academia and with all of the (for lack of a better term) bullshit that ensues. Still, what is keeping me going is the fragile hope that all of the bullshit will amount to something when I "get out there." And I'll be getting out there in only six friggin weeks (!!!). So I am cradling my hopes for Uganda ever-s0-gently. I am fiercely defending my optimism from all the external threats to its security. It is getting hard but I am trying my hardest to hold on to the little piece of trust that says yes, we're all going to be okay. Yes, every little thing is gonna be all right. Yes, I'll find my something. And hopefully I'll find it in Uganda.

So my wish for you all today is that you find your somethings too, wherever you are :) You deserve a life of yes's and passion and joy and adventure and don't ever let the tedium of school or the cynicism bred by "the way things are" make you think otherwise!

Why I'm not going to Thailand

Just kidding, but there might not be a way to land there! woah! When I have more time I'll see what more I can learn about this latest protest, but take a look at this New York Times article:

Thai Protesters Shut Down Bangkok Airport

November 26, 2008
Thai Protesters Shut Down Airport
By THOMAS FULLER

BANGKOK — Anti-government protesters swarmed into Bangkok’s main international airport late Tuesday, prompting officials to cancel all departing flights and bringing Thailand’s political stalemate to a crisis point.

As the protesters occupied the highway to the airport on the outskirts of the city, traffic to the airport slowed to a trickle. Separately, elsewhere in Bangkok, a group of demonstrators fired handguns and beat government supporters with metal rods in fierce clashes, injuring six people, according to video footage shown on Thai television. City emergency services officials put the number higher, saying at least 11 people were hurt, according to Reuters.

The incursion into Suvarnabhumi airport, as the capital’s new airport is known, represented a bold and serious challenge to the government, which in recent days has sought to placate the protestors and has tried to avoid confrontation with them.

Riot police were called into the airport complex late Tuesday and squared off with protestors in and around the terminal.

“For the safety of all passengers, I have to stop all the flight operations and close all exits in the passenger terminal until the situation returns to normal,” Sereerat Prasutanon, director of Suvarnabhumi airport, said.

“I’m very worried about the situation now,” Mr. Sereerat said. “I think it’s time that the army comes out and helps to take care of the situation.”

Suvarnabhumi airport is the world’s 18th largest in terms of passenger traffic, handling 41 million passengers last year. It is the main gateway for tourists and businesspeople arriving in Thailand and a major transit hub for Southeast Asia.

Earlier, protestors put razor wire across the entrance to the airport, leaving only one lane of the main highway open and causing severe congestion.

Throughout the day Tuesday, thousands of protestors kept the Thai government on the run, blocking the entrance to the government’s temporary offices at the old airport north of the city and massing in front of Army headquarters. In the violent clashes, one pro-government supporter was shown pleading for his life as protesters wielded long knives at his throat.

Tuesday was the second day of what the leaders of the long-running protest vowed would be their final push to unseat the government of Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat. On Monday, protestors forced the cancellation of an important session of Parliament and temporarily cut electricity supply to the police headquarters.

Many Thais have grown frustrated with the protests, which have been held on and off for about three years.

The Thai print media, which over the past three years has been generally critical of the government and supportive of the protests, has recently run articles skeptical of the daily street demonstrations.

One columnist in the Nation newspaper Tuesday called the protests a “never-ending saga that is futile and a drain on society.”

“A rethink has become an imperative to put an end to the political turmoil,” the columnist wrote. “It is time for all sides to stop the political melodrama.”

The People’s Alliance for Democracy, as the group leading the movement to unseat the government calls itself, still has a remarkably loyal following, mainly among middle- and upper-class Thais, students and some union members.

The alliance raided and took over the prime minister’s office compound in August, forcing the government to operate out of the VIP terminal of Don Muang airport, the capital’s older airport which is now used exclusively for domestic flights. On Monday, protestors blocked access to the government offices at Don Muang.

“You don’t have to doubt what we will do next,” Somsak Kosaisuk, a protest leader, said Tuesday from a temporary stage set up at Don Muang airport. “First, we will not let the cabinet use this place for their meetings anymore. Second, wherever they go for their meetings, we have our special troops that will follow them.”

Somchai Wongsawat, the prime minister, is scheduled to return late Wednesday from a trip to Peru, where he attended a summit meeting of Asia Pacific leaders. Protestors say they plan to disrupt a cabinet meeting that was initially planned for Wednesday but may be pushed back.

The underlying conflict in Thailand is over the question of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s role in Thai politics. Mr. Thaksin, deposed in a coup two years ago and convicted in absentia last month for abuse of power in a highly politicized trial, now reportedly says he is eager to return to Thailand.

“With me at the helm I can bring confidence quickly back to Thailand,” Mr. Thaksin was quoted saying in an interview with Arabian Business, a magazine based in the United Arab Emirates, where he is believed to be in exile. “We have to find a mechanism under which I can go back, that is why I must tell you that I will go back into politics.”

With Mr. Thaksin still abroad, protestors say their first goal is to remove the current government, which it accuses of being Mr. Thaksin’s proxy.

Yet as the Thai economy slows down amid the global financial crisis and as the stalemate between the government and the protestors deepens, an increasing number of people are hoping for an end to the incessant protests.

“How is it going to end?” said Bharavee Boonsongsap, a 34-year-old producer for MTV Thailand. “I keep asking people but they have no answer. Thais are fighting Thais. People have become aggressive, and even children have been taught to hate the opposite side.”

Janesara Fugal contributed reporting from Bangkok.

Why I'm going to Uganda

From "Upside Down" by Eduardo Galeano:

Power recalls the past not to remember but to sanctify, to justify the perpetuation of privilege by right of inheritance, absolving those who rule of their crimes and supplying their speeches with alibis. What schools and the media teach as the only possible way of remembering the past simply passes on the voices that repeat the boring litany of power's self-sacralization. Exoneration requires unremembering. There are successful countries and people and there are failed countries and people because the efficient deserve rewards and the useless deserve punishment. To turn infamies into feats, the memory of the North is divorced from the memory of the South, accumulation is detached from despoliation, opulence has nothing to do with plunder. Broken memory leads us to believe that wealth is innocent of poverty. Wealth and poverty emerge from eternity and toward eternity they march, and that's the way things are because God or custom prefers it that way.

I wrote in my application to my internship that at this point in my life, reading and discussing are no longer sound substitutes for witnessing and participating. And the more I read lately, the more I want to just go. I'll get so absorbed in the words and ideas of really brilliant people like Galeano and Frantz Fanon and Paul Farmer but then all of a sudden it'll hit me: these are not just words on a page. These things are happening in the world right now -- these things are happening in Uganda right now. These are people's lives we're forgetting about here. The "unremembering," the detachment, the processes by which we in West have indeed "divorced" our prosperity from the poverty of the rest are reason enough for me to stop relying upon the kind of learning that comes from a comfortable distance -- I need to be there where the ambiguous "poor" are living their lives entrenched in a system of inequity that doesn't have to be there.
Maybe I'm a little bitter because I got in an argument with Jose about capitalism last week -- sorry Jose not your fault!! you totally have a right to your opinions :) -- and I was confronted for the first time in a long while with the position that our economic domination in the world order is A-okay and that if you are a hard-working stakeholder in the American economy who makes a decent living and has all the nice things you need at any given moment then, hey, who cares that someone in El Salvador or Haiti or Vietnam or Cambodia or Uganda or insert-your-favorite-economically-oppressed-country-here is reaping what you sow? I'm definitely not one for moral universalism or sweeping claims of right-and-wrong, but if you believe in interconnectedness in any shape, way, or form or hold in your own moral standards that each of us on this planet has the same entitlement to a few basic human rights, I beg you to ask yourself why on earth you are alright with being complicit in the systematic, normalized oppression of other human beings that we as Americans are perpetuating.
So back to Uganda -- I am absolutely, overwhelmingly excited about the chance to meet, live with, and learn from people whose lives are completely different from mine and whose circumstances have been structured by the kind of global inequity about which I ranted above. Contrary to popular belief, I am not going with the goal of changing the world or saving lives or helping starving orphans. I am going to Uganda to see how power is viewed by the powerless. I am going to Uganda to learn from the devoted people in the Jinja, Uganda community who are forming earnest and proactive responses to the gnawing challenges of HIV/AIDS and the confounding socioeconomic barriers to positive health outcomes in the affected population. I am going to Uganda to be a part of a grassroots process and take up the actions through which I can be of greatest use to my organization's goals. I am going to Uganda to open up mind to a new reality and to hopefully develop a deep enough understanding of reality to align my future with a conscious, dedicated push for equity and social justice for the people we forget about -- or, to cite Galeano again, "the nobodies."
And, hey, who am I kidding? I am constantly flooded with wanderlust (as those of you who have been on roadtrips with me know), and the prospect of travel to a country far, far away from here is so magical and evocative and exciting and I purely, selfishly, cannot wait to explore!

Stuck in America

While you cool kids get to go to fabulous new and exotic places next semester, I will be keeping you posted on all the fun drama of good ol' Tempe.  But next summer, I'm contemplating a trip to DC with the Capitol Scholars program which will go from May to July next summer!  It's just a thought right now, and I have until January to apply.  But come next summer, I could be blogging from another corner of the country!  I will keep you posted.  

Good night, and good luck, Honorary YD World Ambassadors.  I will miss each of you dearly, but look forward to reading about your many adventures.  

And so it begins...

All joking aside, this is a blog about four friends on four corners of the world. One will be conquering the mean streets of Tempe, Arizona as the sole surviving member of the ASU Young Democrat Running Club. One will be reaching nirvana in the remote jungles of Thailand. One will be learning the fine art of the akadinda (the large and exclusive xylophone for the Kabaka) in Southeastern Uganda. One will be eating bagels in Bohemia in John McCain's favorite foreign ally, Czechloslovakia (or as we who keep up with world affairs know it, the Czech Republic). Together, these four friends will strive to make Patrick Hernandez proud as they embark on personal quests to fill the Patrick-shaped holes in their hearts. What will this excellent adventure bring their way? Only Patrick knows.

What I'm going to be learning in Thailand

When I first told my mom I wanted to go to Thailand, I showed her the yearbook (of sorts) of the program from 2 years ago.

The first thing in there is this piece by Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, a Zapatista leader. WTF, right? My mother immediately threatened to not let me go when she saw this.

It's pretty moving, actually, and the program is really about community organizing, not revolution, FYI.

Dignity cannot be studied, you live it or it dies

The indigenous peoples who support our just cause have decided to resist without surrender, without accepting the alms with which the supreme government hopes to buy them. And they have decided this because they have made theirs a word which is not understood with the head, which cannot be studied or memorized. It is a word which is lived with the heart, a word which is felt deep inside your chest and which makes men and women proud of belonging to the human race. This word is DIGNITY. Respect for ourselves, for our right to be better, or right to struggle for what we believe in, our right to live and die according to our ideals. Dignity cannot be studied, you live it or it dies, it aches inside you and teaches you how to walk. Dignity is that international homeland which we forget many times.

Our ideals are simple, and for that reason very large: we want, for all the men and women of this country, and of the entire world, three things which are fundamental for any human being: democracy, liberty, and justice. It can appear, and the powerful means of communication certainly help this appearance, that these three things are not the same thing for an indigenous person of the Mexican southeast as for a European. But it is about the same thing: the right to have a good government, the right to think and act with a freedom which does not imply the slavery of others, the right to give and receive what is just.

For these three values, for democracy, liberty and justice, we rose up in arms on January 1st of 1994. For these three values, we resist today without surrender. Both things, the war and resistance, means that these three values represent everything for us, represent a cause worth fighting for, worth dying for..so that living is worthy of us. Our cause we believe, is not only ours. It belongs to any honest man or woman in any part of the world. And this is why we aspire so that our voice can be heard in all the world and so that our struggle will be assumed by everyone in the world. Our cause is not the cause of war, or the cause of destruction, or the cause of death. Our cause is that of peace, but peace with justice; it is the cause of construction, but with equity and reason; it is the cause of life, but with dignity, and always new and better.

Today, we find ourselves in a very difficult situation. The war is dressed in its terrible suit of hunger and entire communities suffer in conditions below the minimum survival level. We willingly accept this not because we like martyrdom or sterile sacrifice. We accept it because we know that brothers and sisters the world over will know how to extend their hand to help us triumph in a cause which is theirs as well.

Like yesterday, we cover our faces in order to show the world the true face of the Mexico of the basement and after washing with our blood the mirror in which Mexicans can see their own dignity. Now we hide our face in order to escape the treachery and death which walks in the steps of those who say they govern the country. We are not fighting with our weapons. Our example and our dignity now fight for us.

In the peace talks the government delegates have confessed that they have studied in order to learn about dignity and that they have been unable to understand it. They ask the Zapatista delegates to explain what is dignity. The Zapatistas laugh, after months of pain they laugh. Their laughter echoes and escapes unto the high wall behind which arrogance hides its fear. The Zapatista delegates laugh even when the dialogue ends, and they are giving their report. Everyone who hears them laughs, and the laughter re-arranges faces which have been hardened by hunger and betrayal. The Zapatistas laugh in the mountains of the Mexican southeast and the sky cannot avoid infection by that laughter and the peals of laughter emerge. The laughter is so great that tears arise and it begins to rain as though the laughter were a gift for the dry land...

With so much laughter raining, who can lose? Who deserves to lose?

We were born to be alive
We were born to be alive

Born, born to be alive
(Won't you be alive)
You see you were born
Born, born
(Born to be alive)

People ask me why
I never find a place to stop
And settle down, down, down
But I never wanted all those things
People need to justify
Their lives, lives, lives

You see you were
Born, born, born to be alive
(Born to be alive)
You see you were
Born, born, born
(Born to be alive)
It's good to be alive
To be alive
To be alive

It's good to be alive
To be alive
To be alive

It's good to be alive

Time was on my side
When I was running down the street
It was so fine, fine, fine
A suitcase and an old guitar
And something new to occupy
My mind, mind, mind

You see you were born, born
Born to be alive
(Born to be alive)
You see you were born, born, born
(Born to be alive)
You see you were born, born
Born to be alive
(Born to be alive)
You see you were born, born, born
(Born to be alive)
You see you were born, born
Born to be alive
(Born to be alive)
You see you were born, born, born
(To be alive)
Born, born to be alive
(Born to be alive)
You see you were born, born, born
(Born to be alive)
Born, born to be alive