Thursday, March 24, 2011

Here we go!

This time tomorrow we will be on a plane to our staging event in Philadelphia. From there we will fly to Istanbul and then to Bishkek. We will spend a few days in Bishkek for training and will then proceed to a village near Kant City. Alex and I will then spend our first 3 months living with a host family and participating in professional and language training, after which we will be placed in our final location (TBD). Before we leave, I would like to share two things with all of you.

First, our mailing address for the first few months of our service will be...

Kyrgyzstan,
722140, Kant city
97 Lenina Street, RUPS
Mailbox # 22
Athena Parker/Alex Huss

The second thing is a poem of sorts. Last month we went to see Girl Talk in Philly with Jonathan and Emily. One the way in I took a nap. When I woke up we were right outside of the city and I had a silly poem in my head. Anyway, it seems mildly relevant now.

Driving through the city of zeppelins
as if being lifted by a puff of air
an airplane drifts gracefully upward.

Thus begins the journey.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Departing in 5...


We're leaving in 5 days, seriously--- this Friday. We've packed our suitcases and backpacks, wrestled with sleeping bags and compression sacks, and double checked lists. I now know more than I ever expected to about crazy science fabrics and ratings on sleeping bags.

Over the past month, Alex and I have been touring the East coast attempting to visit as many friends and family members as we could before we leave. It has been tiring and amazing. Our family cult now has a symbol and a saying---T-shirts are imminent. Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you to all of you for your support and for taking the time to hang out with us!

Talk to you all after we travel through space and time and arrive in Kyrgyzstan.

P.S. It's SPRING TIME---Go play in the dirt! This robin is...

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Dreams/Internet Battle Rap

I am looking forward to my impending journey. There are many reasons I feel that my sojourn from American culture will be very good for my overall well-being. Most recently, the growing cultural trend that I will be most glad to have some time away from is pervasive internet life. Recent externalized human brain developments, such as being able to carry your internet with you everywhere with great ease, creeps me out a bit.

It's strange though; I definitely don't resonate with a lot of the anti-internet jive nowadays either. The loss of information retention abilities... eh... what were we talking about again? The prospect of books going the way of vinyl becoming fetish properties I only find hilarious. I already have envisioned my little sister owning a adorable used bookstore when she started ranting about the tragic death of literature. She has punched me, but it did not hurt enough to become afraid of digitizing information. Finally, the digitocalypse: computers take over and create robots to kill the human race. I have a friend who is a computer programmer. He put my mind at ease the best by saying this.

“My job is telling robots what to do all day. Robots are dumb.”

Plus my mind periodically shifts its focus to geologic time, which makes all apocalypse scenarios seem silly. Human existence is the blink of an eye in the story of earth, and I'm cool with that.

I think what it really comes down to is that my dreaming mind, a representative of the collective unconscious of humanity, has a Nicki Minaj/Lil' Kim style beef with my computer--a representative of the internet. The internet is the new kid on the scene and the collective unconscious hasn't had a real hit since Jung's Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. The internet is a long way from summer jams like all mythology ever, and the collective unconscious still gets plenty of shout-outs (new age philosophy), exclusive club access (the academy), and free drugs (psychotherapy). But to quote Black Friday, “I mothered you hoes, I should claim you on my income taxes”, and to be fair the internet is essentially biting the collective unconscious if you want to get proprietary about it.

I imagine it's probably how gods first felt when humans invented writing. “Shit... transmitting cultural information intergenerationally? Now I'll never get any credit.” Sorry divine inspiration, Muses, etc. Now people are just going to say they got all their ideas from dead people who they read about in books. Even Chinese sages as soon as they were writing started referencing “the ancient sages” as their sources more than deities. Dream theory was maybe the first time since weirdos starting calling themselves scientists instead of philosophers that information perceived as being outside of human experience was given a cool new name that we could play with. It was called collective unconscious.

And then what did we do? In a nanosecond of geologic time we created the internet to effectively externalize all human knowledge of all cultures ever. Also we created a whole new language for talking about our insane ape brains, like we love to do so much. Now the brain is a processor of information. Impulses traveling from our brain are little ones and zeros scurrying around telling us to check our facebook, commit insurance fraud, and maybe breath occasionally. The internet became to the collective unconscious what writing was to muses... a total buzzkill.

I first started in on this strange psychic loop when I forgot the word cathartic. The song Italian Leather Sofa by Cake is totally awesome and I was thinking would have been an incredibly (insert blank here) song to write. It is a really cool word and I was really mad at myself for not remembering it. Being drunk and stubborn, I also refused to try and look it up on the internet. When I went to sleep I had a dream that I found the word cathartic, and then I woke up told all of my friends about it. Then I actually woke up. And told all my friends about it.

This weird crystallizing moment with my dreaming mind moved me to write blog post, to purge this information from the bowels of my brain. I feel like the process of digestion is the perfect epistemological language. It might be because I am really shitty at meditation, but defecation has always been a mystical experience for me. I guess this is what this blog is about for me mostly. Mystical bullshitting.

I am going to miss you guys. The way that I process information is by babbling incoherently with you. You have been a real trooper about it too, stopping me when my illogical leaps stretch too thin, letting me keep going when it's amusing enough, and being patient enough to recognize the difference. I haven't written consistently in a while, so constructive criticism is welcome. I can't stop being crazy though, so skip my posts if you don't like to hear rants about weird shit. If you don't have any patience for this kind of thing we are probably not friends, so I won't be offended. Athena's will be much more straightforward and informative. “These are cool pictures that I took of pretty things. This is what is happening in my life.” Mine will include these things also, but they will be couched in deluded stream-of-consciousness nonsense as well. Anyways, thanks for listening.