i've been missing in action this week, sorry about that its been a busy busy week.

I talked to my best friend Alesha on tuesday night and her life always makes me very thankful of the life that i have now. Life is really very different when u dont go to school and u have a kid, and ur dating a dumbass who mistreats u, and u dont have a high school diploma because life basically screwed u over. the point is her life puts my life in perspective, and me going moho is really a priviledge, and something that i cant take very lightly.

lets see i bombed an italian quiz, mostly bc i skipped the 2 classes leading up to it, and felt like shit during class. i hate the passato remoto, i hate it. i hated it last yr, and i hate it this yr. its just so annoying and pointless, no one uses it in normal conversation and unless ur going to be reading old italian books ur not going to need it. and i for one am not planning on opening a boring italian book and reading it. its just not going to happen. ugh. but yea, i have 10 italian classes left this semester and i cannot wait until they are over. i hate waking up and getting to italian. which makes me scared of next semester having to be at umass at 9:30am. but at least i have friends taking the class with me, so i can deal with that with other ppl.

i've been reading really interesting stuff for my women's studies class, about the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, and what these women are managing to accomplish there. like its a very simple idea for a project, these women plant trees, well they give away seeds so that women can plant trees so that they have firewood, food, and shade. In Kenya bc of globalization and the stupid IMF structural adjustement programs, the traditional croops of Africa were replaced with nontraditional plants, such as coffee that were intended to be grown so that the country would have an export to sell to the world market. This is just bad economics basically, and i wont go into the whole reasoning behind it, but just know that its retarded and that the world has never worked like that and never will, although it is a very utopian and interesting theory. anyways the point is that these "cash crops" were farmed and as we all know u cant live off coffee, and so they wonder why children are malnutritioned and dying when an entire country is now being forced to import the foods that they need to eat. the land becomes erroded bc these plants cannot survive the summers in africa, and bad awful things happen as the result of bad economics. so this group encourages communities to plant indigiounous trees in order to be able to sustain the community. the point, is that reading this stuff is really encouraging bc very simple things like planting trees has huge ripple affects on every aspect of the community.

the other interesting point of my readings was that they mentioned this woman named Patsy Ruth Oliver, who is an amazing enviromental activist that emerged out of Texarkana. Now u have to understand that feeling that i got from doing my readings for class and realizing that they were talking about a place that i've been to. and i mean they talk about the valley and what goes on there, and i've visited but for some reason reading about texarkana was just so interesting for me. Like Terxarkana is a superfund site, which means that it is one of the most polluted places in the US. Like these families had creotin bubbling up in their sinks, and developed tumors and children died, etc. Which just made me think of Pasadena and the weird awful smell whole nasty place has, and how those ppl are probably dying too. (btw, they made the argument that these companies target the communties of minorities to dump their waste, which was interesting and made me want to force a law to go thru that they start dumping the awful chemical waste underneth the homes of the evil CEO's that run these companies, to see how much they liked to watch their children die of cancer) Its a weird feeling when u randomly read about ur homestate and its never about the good things that are going on there.

and i think i've figuared out what i want to write my thesis about, which is great bc if my advisor lets me do it that means that i can start like next semester and work thru the summer on that. which may be amazingly great for me. so much stuff running thru my head but i think i'm doing okay. my level of hygiene is a bit down, but my brain is in great condition, which is really all that matters. this weekend i will do work, lots of it.