feelings growing

Today I was struck with great magnitude a sense of pressure - not yet urgency - to accomplish that yet unaccomplished during my stay here. The irony. I fell out of myself during class and the voices became mere background as I wandered previous roads, feeling the waves and wind, floating through the smoke, rolling down the cheeks with the tears of sadness, heating the air with the fiery rage.. all towards the path to heighten my senses for my last days here. I have invested much of myself here, put forth my cards first to open myself up for something glorious. But that which I have put forth will not come back with me, it is rooted here and will remain. It is only in this time and place that this...This which I am, and around, and know, will be. After the end it all becomes different. And what is it which I return to? References name it Home, but is it? At this fork, is there anything that I will know, am I leaving what I only know? When the movie pauses and the feelings and thoughts of that moment emerge, what will they bring?

Must the show must go on?

Love and Dancing

Sharm el Sheikh? Check. Before I begin, let me conclude with a statement a friend said to me 3 seconds ago: "I don't know, but Sharm is the kind of place you just kind of go to say you've been there."
My sentiments exactly. I got no street cred if I can't say I've been to Sharm, and well, Sharm has been to. It is basically just as everyone describes it: big party town, lots of foreigners, open handles of Absolut in the street (ok, i added that one), and five times more expensive than any other place in the country. This is not to say I didn't have a good time. A superb time was had. We were able to hook up with some guys (excellent padres) who had some hook-ups, so Mix was able to roll a VIP table in Pacha at a much reduced expense. The other guys like good alcohol, so not only was I rocking Scotch on the rocks, but later on introduced a little Mixology with some after party Caucasians, including the necessary "I used to make these with Everclear" comment.
I am proud to be part of the exclusive community of folks who can say they went to Sharm and never made it snorkeling. I think I was either sleeping or drinking. Or both. As with any place, the memory was made by the company. Juan displayed his super powers and Kaitlin helped to narrate our movie-life. The three Canadians provided for much entertainment and amusing dialogue and the other high rollers kept 'em coming.
I had a great time, but I'll remain a Dahab fan. The excellence of the site-decision for nomadfest: egypt has been comfirmed.

PS Juan extended his ticket two days. Sucker.

a friendship so pure

Juan gets here from Turkey in 54 hours.
There's lots of crap on my plate at this point, so give me a sec. I'll be back in no time.

chillin

I am sitting here in a cafe watching Real Madrid play Barcelona, nursing a shisha and pondering how our party last night nearly reached rager status. My food is here, so I will conclude. The hidden outlets inside the trees and wireless internet make this place totally ninja.

cooking

Two burners on our oven work. One of them, the front one, gives a smaller flame that, when placing a pot of water over it, takes its time in producing the sweet, succulent chaos that is boiling liquid. You migth say it's a bit more subtle. It creeps up and falls back, makes you question the existence and passage of time. But once you look away...
The back flame roars with in-your-face heat and relentlessly drives your liquid gold, whatever it may be, to that precious state of boil. Overtly it rallies all behind it and charges straight forth to lick and dance beneath the smooth steel curvatures.
Both flames reach the goal. It's merely a difference of time.

help me

I can't find any sort of cheap flight out of this country. I have refurbished my search and/or plans to look like this:

Egypt - Europe anytime after jan 4
Europe - America anytime on or before jan 10

For the love of...

Correspondent: are you over there by yourself?
Mix: as far as what
Correspondent: like anyone from madison?
Correspondent: ok and this might be a dumb question but what language do they speak there?
Mix: arabic
Mix: i met a guy who goes to madison
Mix: but i met him here
Correspondent: are you a fluent arabic speaker?
Mix: i knew a few people who were coming to work here for the summer
Mix: ha
Mix: no
Mix: i wish
Correspondent: crazy
Correspondent: i cant even imagine being over there
Correspondent: do you wear robes and those crazy jesus sandals?
Correspondent: and those weird things on your head?
Mix: i wear much the same stuff i wear in madison
Correspondent: ok good
Correspondent: i was worried for a minute

Ire

Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry threatened legal action on Monday against comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, who wins laughs by portraying the central Asian state as a country populated by drunks who enjoy cow-punching as a sport...

more here

I once thought all decisions would be in the open

Adel is innocent. I don't mean he claims to be. I mean the military says so. It held a secret tribunal and ruled that he is not al Qaeda, not Taliban, not a terrorist. The whole thing was a mistake: The Pentagon paid $5,000 to a bounty hunter, and it got taken.

The military people reached this conclusion, and they wrote it down on a memo, and then they classified the memo and Adel went from the hearing room back to his prison cell. He is a prisoner today, eight months later. And these facts would still be a secret but for one thing: habeas corpus. (Washington Post)

Appendix

This goes right along with FSU Philosophy
From Seth Godin's blog.

How to Run a Useless Conference

I go to more conferences than you do.

I’m frequently amazed, but not particularly surprised, at what a bad job conferences do at their stated objective. What’s the problem? After all, these are expensive, professionally-run events that work hard to satisfy the typical attendee.

And that, of course, is the problem.

Facts don’t change people’s behavior.

Emotion changes people’s behavior.

Stories and irrational impulses are what change behavior. Not facts or bullet points.

If all we need is facts, then books alone would be sufficient.

When the Surgeon General announced that smoking was fatal, how many smokers quit right away?

Human beings are irrational. Change agents (like you) can fight that and obsess about presenting more and more facts, or we can embrace it and make change happen.

Conferences are designed to get average people to change their behavior. By “average”, I mean typical—the masses, the center of the bell curve. That’s a sensible objective. By definition, most people (in any given population) are in the middle of that bell curve. Change them and you’re golden.

If this group would learn, take action and make things happen with just a memo, you wouldn’t need to have a conference. But we end up being flown on average planes to average hotels to sit in average conference rooms and hear average speakers doing presentations filled with bullet points. And it’s all beyond reproach.

But it doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work when you’re on a sales call either. Your facts and your service and your prices can be the best, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get the sale. And it breaks down at an annual review and it even happens in a one-on-one encounter with a policeman or a teacher or a clerk.

People are irrational and they usually make decisions that have nothing to do with facts. And yet we spend most of our time improving our facts and very little concerned with the rest.

Think about the most powerful learning moments you’ve ever had. My guess is that they didn’t take place in a darkened meeting room.

Conference organizers (and more important, their clients) spend virtually all of their time and money doing one of two things:
1. Satisfying the center of the bell curve.
2. Avoiding failure

That’s why the typical conference is... typical.

That’s why the food and the setting and the venue and the location and the chairs and the layout and the schedule and the refreshment breaks are... typical.

If you want to run a meeting (a brainstorming meeting, a board meeting, a zoning commission meeting) that is likely to perform as well as your past meetings, then the best thing to do is to run it the way you’ve always been running it, right?

Here’s the challenge, then: figure out how to do the atypical. How to change the interactions that people have with each other. How to change what they talk about in the elevator. How to create an environment where people walk in ready to learn and change and challenge, as opposed to getting that, “hey we’re in the Bahamas let’s get drunk and then sit through a session with the CEO” glazed look.

Sure, it won't work on everyone. But that's better than working on no one.

Under the Auspice of legality and mass appeal

It is especially relevant for any institition with aims as great as making any change, significant or not, to maintain a thriving, diverse, and evolving leadership. I say this because too often it happens that a certain "school" or sect finds itself filling many or most positions of influence and thereby sees it as a divinly or self given mandate to maintain such thinking and ways of operation. The downside of this being the exclusion of other schools of thought, and the participants and powerplayers contained, from holding such positions of power and influence. Under the assumption that said sect maintaining power is in fact maximizing its attention to effectiveness and democracy and ability to Fuck Shit Up (FSU), and under the event that new positions become held by individuals from said sect, let it be said that it thus must also be under the event that said seats are held because the individuals were the best and not because they were from said sect.
In the opposite case, where individuals hold seats not because they were of the highest caliber, but because they hold membership to said school of thought, let it be known that the institution is headed for failure; its goals unattainable, mission unaccomplishable, nature unobservable. As members from excluded schools of thought spread out and look elsewhere, might it be that one should follow them, and not said institution, in the never ending plight to FSU?

A thought.

bummers

I can think of few things more disappointing than emailing a professor and not getting a response.

more

Billionaire impresario Richard Branson has announced the opening of a free “school of entrepreneurship” at CIDA City Campus in South Africa - already a shining example of educational creativity. (World Bank Blog)

via the wire

[I]f the United States is serious about getting out of Iraq, it will need to re-consider its defense spending and operations rather than leaving them to a combination of inertia, Rumsfeld-led plans for "transformation," and emergency stopgaps. It will need to spend money for interpreters.... It will need to make majors and colonels sit through language classes.... It will need to commit air, logistics, medical, and intelligence services to Iraq—-and understand that this is a commitment for years, not a temporary measure. It will need to decide that there are weapons systems it does not require and commitments it cannot afford if it is to support the ones that are crucial. And it will need to make these decisions in a matter of months, not years—-before it is too late. (DeLong Blog)

The roots of rhythm of Arthur's Last Stand

Most citizens of Egypt have a clear idea of how far I'd go to bag Ruby, a sweet pharoanic princess. In a sick twist of fate, Ruby was invited to a country house owned by the family of a girl I know. Now, not only does this girl have a real life picture of Ruby on her camera, but she's got her phone number in her phone.
I know a girl who has Ruby's phone number.
Lot's of things coming to light here, man.

On a similar note, the university atmosphere here is vastly different from home, one theoretically big reason being that most students still live at home. I realize the underlying reasons for this, but damn does it change things. Moving away from home and combining the academic rigor of school (of Madison) with the psychological rigor of most kids' first time's away from home creates an environment rife with freshness, challenges, and new beginnings. There is a much bigger preparatory factor for things to come, especially if one plans to fuck shit up. I think that is a good thing.

And now that you mention it, the other night was Arthur's final reign of terror. I spent each moment of the following day wishing I was horizontal. My weekends should be a whole lot more productive now sans his weekly visits for human interaction and the many hectic hours included. Good luck you sell out son of a bitch.

Holy City Batman

Wow. Israel is pretty damn sweet. With the coming of Eid, a few others and I found ourselves with a few free days on our hands and the intentions to make the most of them. When I got home at 7pm Tuesday, we still had no set plan on our hands and even less so when we found out about the Gaza border closure.
No matter.
After Ryan finished packing his tupperware we set out shortly after 9pm. Four hours, three taxis, three bus stations, and two metro rides later we were sitting in a microbus heading for Taba, the most southern Egyptian border town. Alas, no turning back.
We found luck that morning as the Taba bus station is a mere kilometer from the border and again as we passed through with no stamps marking our adventures.
This is where I notice the first difference. The Israeli border guard/customs agent force is 99% women... and beautiful. Not the last time I note the beauty of the women.
Our questioning at the passport check was more like a speed date than any sort of intelligence gathering. Skip ahead an hour and we're sitting pretty in Eilat with 3 tickets to Jerusalem.

With a population of 704,900, it is a richly heterogeneous city, representing a wide range of national, religious, and socioeconomic groups. The section called the "Old City" is surrounded by walls and consists of four quarters: Jewish, Christian, Armenian, and Muslim.

The status of the city is hotly disputed. The 1949 cease-fire line between Israel and Jordan, also known as the Green Line, cuts through the city. Since its victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel has controlled the entire city and claims sovereignty over it. According to a Basic Law of Israel enacted in 1980 (the Jerusalem Law) Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, and is the center of Jerusalem District; it serves as the country's seat of government and otherwise functions as a capital. (wikipedia)

And heterogenous it is. As a non-religous person, one can still feel the intense spirituality encompassed within the walls of the Old City. As a nexus of three major religions, it holds a religious diversity I've never experienced before. We met a muslim selling christian knick-knacks to tourists. Looking upon it from an overlook point, my hairs stood on end as I wandered the ages and deep history endured there.
With an atmosphere I can only compare with that of Europe, the city is very clean and well organized. Amazing English skills and exceptionally nice, approachable people made for some superb evenings in New City, where one finds the main strip of bars and "clubs." If partying is the main event, swing over to Tel Aviv (where the natives kept pointing us). On countless occasions I found myself talking to some nice dame, only to be disappointed by her age, or lack there of. Alas, your nice backpack isn't going to impress me. For whatever reason, the crowd we found was young.
The time was too short, but the taste was there. Departing Israel unmasked similar feelings to leaving Brasil. I will return. If only for the girl at that pastry shop.
Or the one in the wife beater at that club.

All Photos Here

PS It's no contest. They have the hottest military in the world.

Until I return..

Adventure awaits!

Yeah runnin’ down a dream
That never would come to me
Workin’ on a mystery, goin’ wherever it leads
I’m runnin’ down a dream

I felt so good, like anything was possible...