Día 149 | Jueves, 28 de Mayo | 2009

Everyone Has Something to Hide Except Bryan and his Monkey...

Today was another exciting day of fun and exploration.  We saw Capuchin monkeys, boa constrictors, turtles, wooly monkeys, all sorts of birds, and beyond.  

When we were hanging out with the monkeys (pictured above), one of the monkeys stole one of my program mate's glasses.  He took his glasses right off of his head and then climbed high in the tree.  There, the monkey seemed to be joking around -- he held up the glasses to his face (upside down) and appeared to be trying out the glasses for himself.  After about two minutes of this, it seems as if he decided the glasses were not very valuable to him and he proceeded to try and break them.  Lucky for Nick (the owner of the glasses), the monkey only bent them instead of breaking them, and Nick was able to lure the monkey down the tree with a hard-boiled egg.  

Later in the day, we learned about some of the local pottery-making processes and we drank some chicha.  Chicha is essentially fermented yuca plant.  It tasted just okay.

When we got back to Cotococha, I spent the remainder of the evening reading.

One of the relaxing parts of our day was that we had about 3 hours in total just cruising down the river on our canoe.  

Day 54 | Sunday, February 22 | 2009

Open Me Up!..

Here was a paper box that Leslie and I found on a library table on the first floor.  After we saw the mysterious box, we decided to open it up (just as it had indicated for us to do on its outside cover).  To our surprise, inside the box was a small note written on a magenta-colored piece of paper.  The writing appeared to be written by a female and, with a lot of flair, the writer of the note simply wrote the words Your Gay! on the paper.  

Leslie and I made two very acute observations about this paper.  (1) Point in fact, the writer of the note made a serious grammatical error in using the word Your instead of the word You're.  The second mistake, error number (2), was that the author ignored the context of the situation.  Whoever, by chance, would open the box would unlikely be homosexual.  In this case, neither Leslie nor I are homosexual -- therefore refuting the author's claim of our gayness.  

Anyway...

It was a nice day in general today :)  Slept in with Caitlin out at Lake Hope and then got a delicious breakfast at the Village Bakery and Café.  We then went to Perks and waited until the library opened at noon (me at least).  The rest of the day has been mostly work -- getting ready for a music theory midterm, Spanish class presentation, and also a presentation outlining postmodernism.  The postmodernism project is especially great; I am excited about what I am learning.  Here are a few quotes that stood out as particularly notable:

"A world view characterized by the belief that truth doesn't exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered.  Truth is created by specific culture and exists only in that culture.  Therefore, any system or statement that tries to communicate truth is a power play, an effort to dominate other cultures."

--Josh McDowel & Bob Hostetler

"What then is truth?  A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people:  truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are:  metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power:  coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins."

--Friedrich Nietzsche

"The world does not speak.  Only we do.  The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause to hold beliefs.  But it cannot propose a language for us to speak.  Only other human beings can do that...Languages are made rather than found, and...truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences."

--Richard Rorty

"To see -- to really see -- all that is right with the world.  Just as believers in a beneficent deity should be haunted by the problem of natural evil, so Gnostics, atheists, pessimists, and nihilists should be haunted by the problem of friendship, love, beauty, truth, humor, compassion, fun."

--John Horgan