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The one with Part II
Entry 12 of 38 | show all | print this entry |
Ok, so yesterday I said I would finish catching everyone up with the rest of my trip to Montevideo but now that its time to do so, it actually the last thing i really want to be doing...i think thats more a result of me being in the computer lab for about 2 hours rather than it being a bad trip, which it wasnt.
So quickly Montevideo:
as i said, it was fun, didnt like the city as much as buenos aires. its the southern most capital in South America so that means it was also a lot colder. that made walking around not so much fun. i signed up for a tour of the city with my friends on sunday morning but opted for sleep instead. i do not regret this. since it was a holiday long-weekend everyone and their mother was trying to get back to BsAs on monday, so we were forced to take a bus that left the city at 130am. this meant our Buquebus ferry back left at 430am. I was absolutely positively exhausted, which made me the worst travelling companion ever. I apologize to anyone who was with me who might be reading this. My seat on the bus was broken so I was cramped for about two hours with my knees smushed into the seat in front of me while the man ahead leaned back. customs was comically easy, and i got another stamp in my passport which was fun.
I was recently sick again, and I was/sort of still am covered in spots, it looks like chicken pox sort of but its only on my torso. thats been a fun 4 week long experience. when i first told my dad, im pretty sure he thought i was being a hypochondriac, but generally whenever i think i have something weird i do...like take vertigo, how many people my age (besides tina, apparently) have suffered from that too, or bronchitis for 5 months?...anyway
About my new family:
I live with a woman, Marisa, and her 17 yr-old son, Tomás. She has three other older children whom are all already married and moved out. Her youngest daughter is 22 it think. its weird to consider how different our lives are, shes already married and im worried with akid about getting full credits for all the study abroad classes. the appartment is old, but i mean in the sense that it has character and tall ceilings, and a pretty balcony that warps around the whole thing. and theres a dog. i think his name is something like ing-gwee (i have no idea how to spell it, but i tried to go phonetically on that one). hes big and fluffy and we´re friends. Marisa is so cute and nice. shes always talking to me and writing notes about where to have dinner and leaving them on my desk. she makes dinner every night. either ill eat with them or she´ll leave some for me to heat up when i get back from class. last night (aug 29) apparently its tradition for people in buenos aires to eat gnochi (ñochis) for dinner, so we did. marisa told me this but said that she had no idea why, it was just something people did. but it was really cute, even if extremely random, but we have some random customs too, i guess.
basically im much happier now, and having a comfortable living situation has spread a general contentedness into all areas of my life.
two things that are not related to my travels but i either received as emails or read today:
1. HELL EXPLAINED BY A CHEMISTRY STUDENT
The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington
chemistry mid term.
The answer by one student was so 'profound', that the professor shared it with his colleagues via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well:
Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?
Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.
One student, however, wrote the following:
First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.
This gives two possibilities:
1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls
enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase
until all Hell breaks loose.
2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.
So which is it?
If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year
that, 'It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,' and take
into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two
must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already
frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen
over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is
therefore, extinct......leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the
existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept
shouting 'Oh my God.'
THIS STUDENT RECEIVED AN A+.
2. This is from the Freakonomics blog, which was recently linked to the times website. I think this guy´s response to the question: What's your idea of a nightmare family vacation?, not only for its humorous approach, but also for his theory on our inability to spend more than 24 hours with the same person. I definitely agree with his idea, and I´m a bit of a pysch nerd...
Dan Gilbert, Harvard psychology professor and author of Stumbling on Happiness, which we've blogged about here and here:
To me, "family vacation" means parents and siblings and children and cousins and other assorted relatives. With that in mind, a "nightmare family vacation" is one that lasts more than 24 hours. I have long suspected that human beings are constitutionally incapable of being in the continuous presence of any human being for more than 24 hours without becoming irritated or bored or both.
The one exception to this rule is the person with whom one is having sexual relations. Sex allows us to experience a dopamine surge in the presence of another individual, and this "hit of ecstasy" resets our boredom-and-irritation meters for that individual to zero. I not only tolerate my wife, I positively crave her company and am happy to be in the same small space with her for weeks on end. I don't feel that way about anyone else, including people I love dearly.
It is possible that I feel this way about my wife because she is so uniquely suited for me, but it seems much more likely that it is the sexual aspect of our relationship that allows us to become re-enamored and re-attached before we grow irritated and bored. So my theory is that, unless you are sleeping with someone, they will get on your nerves in short order, which means that a good family vacation must either be brief or incestuous. I vote for brief.
ok Ciao!
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