Entries this day: Class Gin_in_Ribadeo Project night

Class

11:45am JST Friday 3 September 2004

只今日本語クラスは終わった。新しぶん書いてみたい。読んでみて下さい。 来週新しけかくをしたかったし、いぱい生徒いったし、日本語を勉強してみな かった。もしタイに行ったらぞうにのりてみたい。

ぞうの漢字はわからない。

のるの漢字もわからない。

Gin in Ribadeo

5:02pm JST Friday 3 September 2004

Hola Todo Mundo!

   I am back in Galicia again!  It feels like my birthday or a day in
my life that deserves a name.  A day for myself apart from the rest.
An "in-betweenie".  My best dutch girlfriend is getting married
today...now.  She understands why i am here and not there, she was a
trail guide in South Africa, in safari situations.  If anyone
understands that itch to take a crazy trail where you could run into
wild animals, it is her.  So...congratulations Yolanda and Aike!
  
   This is where i left off in the first week of november 2002.  It is
perfect weather today.  It is usually raining in Galicia.  Last night
on the bus passing through some of the towns that i walked through it
was hard to believe i was alone.  I had to think really hard about the
details of being alone, cause the only time i felt alone was when i
was being followed by strange men.  I have learned how to show them my
teeth, and it rarely happens anyway.  Yea, i could swear i was with
Ron or someone.  One thing is sure, i have held many of you in my
heart every step of the way.
  
   It was not a day after we left Pau that i found us heading along a
river back to the north west.  I try to keep walking in a
southwesterly direction.  So, what else, it was almost inevitable.  We
ditched the trail and headed south for the mountains.  From first
sight of the mountain range to the GR10, a most incredible foot path
through the high Pyrenees, it took us about a week to get there.
Thankfully, i had been preparing us since the first week.  The first
week of our "vacation", i informed Ron that we would not be in a town
with a provision store (mini-market) for 5 days.  It turned out that i
was correct.  Then again at the end of that week i looked at the map
and said the same thing.  So by the time we looked straight up at the
mountain and down at the map where there would surely be nothing for
days we were much stronger.  We had it worked out that Ron ca!  rried
the food and i the water.  We made an exception in the mountains and i
carried the first few days of food and water is not difficult to find
in the French Pyrenees.  To tell the truth, i did not know if Ron was
up to the mountains. Mountains are grueling, physically and mentally.
They test every tool in your bag. The thing is, that going in there is
only one way out.  It is very honing in a spiritual sense. Hardly a
relaxing vacation.  I felt that it was almost a cruel and selfish
request of mine, to go straight into the mountains.  He faired well
and will have the mountain inspiration to milk for a long time.  I
have heard on a few occasions that the Pyrenees are more difficult to
walk than the Alps.  That is because every mountain you walk up in the
Pyrenees, there is a down side to on the other side of the ridge.  In
the Alps, i can imagine, you walk up and up and up then the trails
mostly follow the side of the mountains, to go to the top you need
cravats and ropes and stuff.

   Walking toward the Pyrenees i got a burning feeling inside my head,
in side my chest cavity.  Like being kissed for the first time or
having a crush on someone that will never love me back.  I wonder
where all that comes from.  I definitely don't get that feeling every
year.  We worked our way into the deep valleys of the Pyrenees.
Compared to Ariege, it was extremely inhabited, and very well
tourist-ed.  I think that is because the mountains are not as tall and
the spans in the tall mountains is not as wide.  In Ariege, deep in
the mountains there are rarely roads.  In the Basque Country there
were roads everywhere.  People would pass us with carloads of people
and they were cheering us on!  Applause and cheers!  It is rare to see
a basque smile and wave to a non-basque stranger, but we figured out
that walking in very high places caught their attent! ion, tickled
their fancy and possibly reminded them of traditions long passed.  One
difference between the French Basque Country and the Spanish Basque
Country is the number of bars.  Yea, i am a bar pilgrim.  Every time i
would say, "ok, this is the last village (bar) on my trek all across
France"... i was wrong, there was another bar!  On top of the
mountains!  The higher the better.  I like that attitude. And to make
things more insane, we ran into the annual village festival in almost
every village we walked through!  It was nothing less that surreal.
And everyone spoke Basque, i felt more comfortable speaking French,
cause it is their second language as well. And the skulls!  The Basque
craniums are very large and cubic.  Even the babies have heads almost
twice the size of other babies. I am honored to have been in valleys
where all the basque children speak basque as their mother language.!
The Basque people hold a similar mysticism for me like indigenous
Americans or Tibetans.

  But i was very ready to be alone, no cars, no tourists no body
starring us down or cheering us on.  We did stop for a day at the top
to soak it all in.  The Pyrenees are not really wild like some
mountains.  Cows, sheep and horses are everywhere. My father had cows
and horses when i was a kid, and cow-pattie throwing is a sport in
Texas.  I don't really see the shit anymore.  Ron is from Rotterdam
and dog shit is the enemy.  I was made acutely aware of every pattie
around our tent or in our path. I thought it was mildly funny, but i
understand the dilemma.  He got somewhat used to it, and when
examining the camping-ability of a spot, counting patties and pellets
was added into the equation of rocks and slope-i-ness.  One night i
got out of the tent to go pee, and there was a wild pig right next to
our tent.  The pig screamed, i screamed and ronnie screamed.  I won!
der if the swine was laughing as hard as we were as she darted into
the woods.

   I was only a bad girl once.  Ok, it was a foggy week up there,
Ronnie reassured us a few times that it was not really raining.  There
were liquid drops, but i called them a mushroom mist.  Ok, bad
girl...  at one point the trail was not marked and i decided that it
looked like the map indicated that the trail went along the ridge of
the mountains.  The fog was very thick, no visibility.  Ronnie and i
decided more or less together that the trail along the ridge was worth
trying.  It was obviously a well traveled trail, over the millennia.
I just love those trails where the path is eroded into the ground, a
meter or more.  The earth in the Basque Country is red.  Green on red,
and in the mountains the shapes and entire atmosphere is dramatic.
The fog added an element of mystery.  We followed that trail to the
top and i wanted to start back down the other side.  Ron drew the
line.  I threw a small tantrum and within an hour or so we found the
real trail after we went back down to where we started from.  I
thanked him later for his reality check.  But if i had been there
alone i would have followed that strange and alluring trail to a high
precipice, possibly a cliff, but than again i am still convinced that
it was our trail, just an old fashioned way of getting there.

   It seems that a main theme of our walk was kindness and reflection
on why that is not a prevalent condition in the world.  We are
affected by the people on our island.  It is a cold and chilling
distance that people pretend to keep.  I say hello to almost everyone.
I get rare responses.  One in every 3 elderly persons stop to ask me
if they know me, like they are worried that they are looking their
minds.  "No you don't know me, i was just saying hello".  So, you are
allowed to say hello to neighbors and people you know.  It is the
country side!!!!  When i am riding my bike to town and i pass someone
not one meter from me, you would think cause there is no one within a
square kilometer of us that they would look at you at least.  NO!  ok,
sometimes.  When i am on my porch and someone walks by and looks in
our house or right at us, mostly nothing, and the small children as
we! ll.  I could break my arm waving and not even get a small grin
from most kids.  That hurts.  So Ron and i walked and contemplated how
people can come to that point, where they recognize nothing that is
not familiar to them.  It is always a memorable event to get the first
"hallo" out of someone that we have been saying "hallo" to for years.
And our little island is surely not the only place like that.  And why
is that recognition so important for us?  That simple encouragement in
our little existence, our little co-existence.  So, that is our
stride, to be strong and love them despite the fact they pretend not
to see us.  And to be proud in our ridiculous acts of greeting people.

   And now that i am walking alone, and i don't have a shell hanging
form my backpack that identifies me as a pilgrim, i search for that
same love to hold my head higher and look the folks in the eye and
experience their dreams and fears and judgments in those moments of
contact as i pass by. For all they know i am a "homeless person", and
that is also self-evident! This is really the "old world".  Many
people have praised the Camino de Santiago over the last 1000's of
years as being extremely important for Galicia. It is at least
influence form the outside.  When i was here 13 years ago it struck me
as the closest i had ever seen two ages happening simultaneously in
the same place.  Very old traditions and attitudes, yet with serious
levels of drug addictions, like the rest of the western world.

  My back pack has resumed it's swollen lead-heavy condition, in great
part due to my tent.  I could go the regular way, back into the hills
here, tucked into the pilgrims paths through towns where they see
100's of pilgrims a year.  But despite the fact i am on the oldest
tourist route in the world, i despise tourism, and even worse being a
tourist.  Ok, that is what i am, but if i steer myself into lesser
well known directions i can still cherish the feeling that i am
discovering something.  I can read all the books over the "principle
caminos" later.  So far, steering clear of the more popular routes to
Santiago, i feel i have missed nothing.  Yea, today for the first time
in years i am on my own.  I must say i cried like a baby when Ron
pulled out of the train station in Pamplona.  But now, it is back to
my path, no compromises.  I promised Yolanda that i would do s!
omething special today to celebrate her wedding.  My first stop back
on the camino, is the beach.  A good dunk in the cold waters of the
Cantabric Sea.  In celebration of her, of me, of us, of you and life
and of our freedom to choose.  Cheers everyone!  gin

Project

3:05pm JST Friday 3 September 2004

I got the first hints of losing steam on my project when I visited hotornot.com to see how they do things. They've logged 9 billion ratings and have 13 or 30 million pictures online. Damn.

I was like, "ugh; I can't do this [that]," when I turned back to my handwritten sheets of paper of screen layout ideas. I'm not sure how to convert my ideas into a coherent project; there are some question marks hindering the process and some technical aspects that I'm not sure how to handle. Like the way they handle their foo, fooo, foooo, etc cookies.

If the site becomes wildly popular and stuff, I've got a fear that I won't be able to handle user complaints.

One solution is to just say "fuck off," which is what I've basically written for the faq. Like the faq for mailinator.com.

That fear, plus the fear of being tied to something, plus the fear of it not being good enough, plus the fear of *me* not being good enough, are all playing into my desire to just blow it off.

But, come on, dawg; you can do it!

- - - -

I'm thinking that if I start to code a little bit, I can enthuse myself enough to keep going, and not get so bogged into the details that I fuck up the progress. Careful balance there.

I think during work today, I will lay out a coding game plan to get different discrete parts working and then begin fitting them together.

One trick is that I intend to use sford's userA code, which I don't 100% know how it works. I mostly know, but I don't totally know.

Gotta go. (Train doors will close me into the train soon. Well, in about 60 seconds.)

night

8:31am JST Saturday 4 September 2004

Hitomi and I met up with Jen, Olivia, Tetsuya, a couple other Nova droids at the DW in Motosumiyoshi. Morag and Shoko came a bit later and Morag sat by me (yay!) and told me about these karate dudes kicking through baseball bats with their shins!!! What is up with that? Crazy people! Wow!

I gotta get the next train.