Thursday, September 28, 2006
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Monday, September 25, 2006
What's new with you?
My life is rich. My office is heaped with books, CDs, boxes of alphabetized movies, work, work I love to do, and work I manage to avoid with a passion. (It's the same work.) I go swimming at the YMCA. I'm in the middle of two books (writing) and at least six books (reading). I make the most atrocious videos for YouTube, shots of the praying mantis in the garden and old home movies transferred to digital, plus lip synching extravaganzas to embarrass my family.
But I can't get Montevideo out of my mind. I've never been there, but I am ready to move, to become a citizen of Uruguay, to sleep in a shack near Punta del Este.
I want to leave the United States. I no longer want to be American. I've placed many, many calls to Latin American consulates in the U.S., trying to find out the requirements for expatriation. A maze of answering machines is all the further I can get.
It isn't just the shame of the war, the torture, the lies, the lip synching. It's has become actual fear.
See, I go to Colombia. I helped develop a sister church relationship with a small, extremely poor church there. I make frequent phone calls. I mail my friend Andres burned CDs (I worry about that, too). I let one poor family use my ATM card to withdraw money collected from our local church offering. I worry about the NSA confusing what I do with the efforts of terrorists and drug smugglers. They either laugh hysterically or quizzically scrunch their eyebrows, trying to decode the secret plans in our conversations.
I read about the Canadian who was confused with a terrorist, exported to Syria, tortured and imprisoned for ten months, with no apology from the U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales still denies it ever happened. I wonder about those people we never hear about, who never come back.
Last month, the FDA confiscated a benign prescription drug I ordered from Canada. It's not fun to find an official letter from Homeland Security in your mailbox. There went $100 bucks down the drain. My prostate enlargement prevention plan apparently will have to be abandoned. We don't have health insurance.
I applied to substitute teach in Urbana this fall. I subbed for years in the 1980s. I like it – the joys of teaching without the pain of staying up until midnight grading tests and making study plans. After I applied in August, I got a letter from the FBI informing me of an arrest for three marijuana cigarettes in 1968 in Chicago. They didn't have to discover this information. I had listed it on my application. Nevertheless, the Urbana School District has refused to allow me to teach. I got another tersely worded letter in the mail.
Ironically, that same day I saw footage on The Daily Show of the Governor of California smoking pot in his youth. I'll bet if Mr. Schwarzenegger showed up to talk to the Carrie Busey Middle School, they'd let him. But not me.
Here's where the Catch-22 comes in. I can't clear my name of this arrest. All court records have been destroyed years ago, burned in a fire. According to Chicago officials, there is no record of my arrest. I tried to find it back in 1979, using the Freedom of Information Act. At that time, after many months, the FBI issued me got another tersely worded statement saying, to my somewhat deflated ego, that no FBI record existed. It seems to have arisen from the ashes of 9/11. So my crime both exists and does not exist in the memory hole. Didn't some European named Kafka already tell this story?
If a life sentence for three sticks of pot left in my college dorm room while I attended philosophy class weren't enough, the IRS wrote me last month. I'm being audited for the year I went to Colombia to help feed displaced and impoverished people. "It's entirely random," the auditor said. He seems like a nice enough good-cop kind of guy. He says he refuses to listen to the news when he drives here from Indiana. He doesn't even listen to music. He just drives. So far he's spent several weeks going over every scrap of paper I could find in my basement about that fateful year. Gas receipts. Groceries. My DVD store rental tab. My indebtedness to Visa. He's coming back later next month. Maybe the audit will end someday in the distant future, even though my income is so small potatoes I barely have enough to make french fries, or freedom fries, whatever. Luckily, if the government intends to deplete my bank account, it's too late. I beat them to that punch long ago. I might have enough scraped away for a one-way ticket to Montevideo. I'm working on it.
But I can't get Montevideo out of my mind. I've never been there, but I am ready to move, to become a citizen of Uruguay, to sleep in a shack near Punta del Este.
I want to leave the United States. I no longer want to be American. I've placed many, many calls to Latin American consulates in the U.S., trying to find out the requirements for expatriation. A maze of answering machines is all the further I can get.
It isn't just the shame of the war, the torture, the lies, the lip synching. It's has become actual fear.
See, I go to Colombia. I helped develop a sister church relationship with a small, extremely poor church there. I make frequent phone calls. I mail my friend Andres burned CDs (I worry about that, too). I let one poor family use my ATM card to withdraw money collected from our local church offering. I worry about the NSA confusing what I do with the efforts of terrorists and drug smugglers. They either laugh hysterically or quizzically scrunch their eyebrows, trying to decode the secret plans in our conversations.
I read about the Canadian who was confused with a terrorist, exported to Syria, tortured and imprisoned for ten months, with no apology from the U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales still denies it ever happened. I wonder about those people we never hear about, who never come back.
Last month, the FDA confiscated a benign prescription drug I ordered from Canada. It's not fun to find an official letter from Homeland Security in your mailbox. There went $100 bucks down the drain. My prostate enlargement prevention plan apparently will have to be abandoned. We don't have health insurance.
I applied to substitute teach in Urbana this fall. I subbed for years in the 1980s. I like it – the joys of teaching without the pain of staying up until midnight grading tests and making study plans. After I applied in August, I got a letter from the FBI informing me of an arrest for three marijuana cigarettes in 1968 in Chicago. They didn't have to discover this information. I had listed it on my application. Nevertheless, the Urbana School District has refused to allow me to teach. I got another tersely worded letter in the mail.
Ironically, that same day I saw footage on The Daily Show of the Governor of California smoking pot in his youth. I'll bet if Mr. Schwarzenegger showed up to talk to the Carrie Busey Middle School, they'd let him. But not me.
Here's where the Catch-22 comes in. I can't clear my name of this arrest. All court records have been destroyed years ago, burned in a fire. According to Chicago officials, there is no record of my arrest. I tried to find it back in 1979, using the Freedom of Information Act. At that time, after many months, the FBI issued me got another tersely worded statement saying, to my somewhat deflated ego, that no FBI record existed. It seems to have arisen from the ashes of 9/11. So my crime both exists and does not exist in the memory hole. Didn't some European named Kafka already tell this story?
If a life sentence for three sticks of pot left in my college dorm room while I attended philosophy class weren't enough, the IRS wrote me last month. I'm being audited for the year I went to Colombia to help feed displaced and impoverished people. "It's entirely random," the auditor said. He seems like a nice enough good-cop kind of guy. He says he refuses to listen to the news when he drives here from Indiana. He doesn't even listen to music. He just drives. So far he's spent several weeks going over every scrap of paper I could find in my basement about that fateful year. Gas receipts. Groceries. My DVD store rental tab. My indebtedness to Visa. He's coming back later next month. Maybe the audit will end someday in the distant future, even though my income is so small potatoes I barely have enough to make french fries, or freedom fries, whatever. Luckily, if the government intends to deplete my bank account, it's too late. I beat them to that punch long ago. I might have enough scraped away for a one-way ticket to Montevideo. I'm working on it.
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Well, duh.
Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,'' it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
An opening section of the report, "Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement," cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.
The report "says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," said one American intelligence official.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
chat en alemania
8:41 AM Andres: hola
estas ay?
| 16 minutes |
8:58 AM me: todavia estas?
8:59 AM Andres: si
hola
me: guten tag
Andres: estaba escribiemdo los ultimos renglones para katherin
9:00 AM jaja, Guten tag,
me: no se mas que esto
Andres: wie geht es dir
me: lo que sea
Andres: como estas?
me: como son los habitaciones ?
Andres: me alegra hablar con tigo, pues aunno puedo chatear con alguien
9:01 AM super, todos son muy especiales
me: muy bien
Andres: si
aun que aun no entiendo todo pero si
todo es muy lindo.
9:02 AM las casas, los paisajes. todo todo diferentey todo muy lindo.
me: y la comida? creo que comen mucho la carne
vas a aprender mucho
9:03 AM disfrutelo
como fue el avion? paris?
9:04 AM Andres: huyyyyy
ese avion es grandisimo
9:05 AM yo pense que el avion de bucaramanga era grande y no.
el avion de bogota francia es grande
me: que bien
Andres: y el aeropuerto de francia es muy grande.
si.
9:06 AM me: fue dificil hallar sus dirrecciones en el aeropuerto?
te ayudan otros?
9:07 AM Andres: no
9:08 AM nada dificil.
me: eres un viajero professional ahora
Andres: en bogota fue facil, pues los mismos del aeropuerto nos iba guiando.
9:09 AM y en francia, nadie habla espa~nol, pero hay muchas se~nales que me guiaron.
perdon pero aqui aun no encuentro la (~n)
9:10 AM si me estas entendiendo.?
me: claro que si
Andres: a
listos.
9:11 AM el aeropuerto de francia es muy grande, pero tiene buenos letreros que lo informan a uno.
y aqui en hamburg. llege y deuna entre a la sona de llegada, y lla me estaban esperando.
9:12 AM y ellos me conosieron por mi foto.
ahora todos estamos aqui
y tratando de entendernos.
9:13 AM me: ja ja. seria un poco dificil, por seguro. pero no tienes sueño? del cambio de la hora?
Andres: esto me recuerda cuando tu fuiste a colombia y no entendias todo lo que te decian.
jaja
me: exacto
Andres: ya no.
me: entendia como la mitad
Andres: eso
yo un poco menos
9:14 AM y abeses la midad
me: asi es
Andres: y mua raras beses todo.
jajja, lo del suen~n. si aun
me: pero vivir en un lugar donde hablan la lengua es el mejor metodo de aprender
Andres : pero aller fue mas problema la comida.
9:15 AM por que todos con hambre y yo no.
y des pues todos sin hanbre y yo con mucha hambre.
jajaj, es chistoso
me: eres muy valiente por esta experiencia
Andres: si tienes toda la razon el mejor metodo es este.
9:16 AM jaja. gracias.
sabes contodo esto. me dieron ganas de ir donde tu vives y visitarte.
nose si te guste la idea.
me: me gustaria nada mas
9:17 AM algun dia
Andres: pero si puedo despues cuando buelba a colombia en un a~no. me gustaria visitarte.
me: eres muy bienvenido
Andres : gracias.
me : me necesita la mujer ahorita; que bueno que podemos charlar
9:18 AM quiero saber todo
Andres: jaja
listo.
9:19 AM llase como entrar a gmail.
saludos a lee
me: ok, ciao amigo
Andres: chao.
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