No, you cannot.

Being here in Costa Rica has involved a lot of running around dealing with incompetent people, people who lie just to make life difficult, and trying not to lose patience. Immigrating into a foreign country can be hard enough when you have a job lined up and the company has a vested interest in hiring you. It is an entirely different beast when the comany could care less and it is I who is interested in working for the company.

People say it takes a year or two of difficult, depressing, frustrating, inconceivable bullshit before life starts to turn around. A year or two of beuarocracy, uncertainty, instability, and struggle. But then one day everything is finished and life can go on, uninterrupted and unburdened by the exhausting efforts of others trying to make life more difficult than it needs to be.

I am near the peak. For me, it has been 1 year and 10 months. I have been jobless, I have taught English in schools that went out of business and in schools that had me detained in immigration for hours, I have worked in a hostel for a warm bed to sleep in and a free breakfast in the morning, and I have lived off of $18 or less per week.

I found the University of Costa Rica, was hired as a research professor, and was given promises that were not kept. I did other peoples' jobs to ensure myself of my own and have spent my life's savings just trying to get by.

In all of this, the only person who knows anything is my advisor. When people at immigration do not know what forms I need to fill out or where to go, I talk to my advisor. When people in the phsyics department cannot give me a straight answer about my salary, contract, or future, I talk to my advisor. When people lie to me because they are too lazy to do their job or do not want to admit that they do not know, I talk to my advisor. Why? Because she had to go through all the bullshit too. She immigrated as a refugee with two kids and no money and had to deal with the same stuff. She has the answers that the others should have.

So, on the brink of being moneyless, homeless, jobless, and having to leave the country, I went to talk with her to see what else I could do. Unfortunately, when I entered her office, the life-slug was there. The life-slug is a creature that has attached herself to my advisor, agreeing with everything she says, doting over her, being obsessed with everything she does, and, essentially, draining the life out of her via ever-present exasperation.

Ignoring the presence of the life-slug, I embark upon my tale and the options that I have. Understanding, my advisor relates her story to mine, gives me advice, and tells me where I can go and who I can talk to. She says that I should think about everything extra hard because the fight is long and hard and is for less than what I can get somewhere else.

Then the life-slug chimes in. The 30 year old life-slug that lives at home with her parents, has no repsonsibilities, and has not had to worry about anything except getting more bottles for her bottle collection. She chimes in and says,

"The truth is, we both can relate."

One Windy Name

I have, at long last, begun reading The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss for the second time. Why at long last if it is my second time reading it? Well, first of all, I have had it on reserve for over a month, so that explains the long part. Secondly, and in regard to "last", the second book in the King Killer trilogy came out and the unprecedented spectacularness of the first demanded a re-read so as to not die from over-exposure to the brilliance that the second is sure to contain. Consider it a tolerance building exercise of sheer joy.

Reading the Name of the Wind for the first time was like eating an adventure wrapped in a refried bean spread wrapped in a tortilla. It was a wonder burrito that had me digesting and farting child-like enrapturement for days.

My life during that period was like a mix of Narnia and The Neverending Story. When I opened the book, I became an innkeeper in Newarre, performed in the traveling circus, Edema Ruh, lost my parents to the Chandrian, and studied at the University. My name was Kvothe and my hair was true-red (instead of silver-blonde). I was transfixed the way only a little boy can be transfixed, being the life of the book, frighted that with the turning of the next page my life would end.

When I read the book, I gasped, laughed, stammered, welled up with tears, and, when the suspense, tension, joy, or fear grew too great, my arm would weaken, casting the hand-clenched book down to my side, and I would stare inward, blank and breathless until I calmed down enough to read again.

Now, I have just finished chapter one on my second take and the anticipation of being part of such an intense, wonderful story has once again hightened my vigor to a vivacious extreme. I am reading via a book reader on my ipod, which can display about 100 words per page. Each passing page comes with a flick of my finger and an imagined whoosh sound as one slides of the screen and the other slides on. It feels like flying.

Cash & West and 5CC

My buddy, Question Everything, created a comic book for Christmas last year for his brother-in-law that starred his two sons. He is in the process of publishing it online here.

It stars Cash and Weston as two police detectives, and follows them as they try to unravel a mystery involving all their favorite cartoon characters! Check it out!

He also draws the comic 5 Color Control. It is about the card game Magic the Gathering and has a casts of real life people that do not-so-real-life things. However, if you visit Toys from the Attic, you my find yourself wondering which world you are actually in. Check it out!

Armpit of my Soul

It took awhile, but I finally found some one to finally call things like "lady bug", "chrysanthemum", and "Diana". Some one special... I mean cursingly special... so special that every time I see her I get slapped in the face...

...with love and life. It sort of hurts, but in a way that tickling sort of hurts. I laugh until I cry, smile until my face goes limp, and squirm and wiggle because her presence touches a part of my soul that had rarely been touched by carressing fingers before. It is the part of the soul that is easily forgotten or ignored until some one else finds it and starts poking around... and now she has built a summer-home in the armpit of my soul.

Re-do

So, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to organize my blog posts by topic, which you can read about here. You can save yourself some time, though, and just add the "Labels" widget to your blog's page and do the same thing (read more here).

I also spent a lot of time looking into free backup software and settled on Toucan. However, the generalness of Toucan sort of lost its appeal when I wanted to select some sub-folders within a folder and move them from on place to another. It was either move the whole folder and delete what I did not want or move the folders individually. So, I just backed everything up and forgot about it.

Also, the purpose of my blog keeps on a-changing and, even though the goal is still to blog about my projects, I have not been making what you would call "progress" on my projects for reasons tangentially related to them. Also, oublishing about my projects puts the actual, future publication at risk of being stolen and published first by some one more competent. Thus, it is time to expand, revamp, and oublish about whatever the hell I want.

So, delete, reset, pick a new background photo, and go, right?