Valya’s Blog

Mexico drug cartel arrest with swine flu masks on (April 2009, Daily Maily)

I know this is an old story, but I saw something about drug cartels in Mexico on the news again tonight and it reminded me of an image like this I saw earlier this summer – just about the time when both the cartels and the swine flu were making big time news and overshadowing the economy from worldwide news coverage. Interesting – both of these problems are still very much with us, but now healthcare reform in the United States, the economy again, and the North Korean trip of Bill Clinton to help free the journalists is all the buzz. Sometimes I wish the media didn’t have such a one-two story overload. Why not try to keep hitting all the important stories all the time (like Hillary Clinton’s trip to Africa, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the three U.S. civilians captured in Iran, etc., etc., etc.)?

To borrow a clever metaphor from a good book, how is it possible that modern-day Republicans do not vanish in a puff of logic… or rather, a puff of oxymoronic statements: Pro life (read: women don’t have the right to choose abortion) and No government healthcare (read: the government has no business interfereing in you and your doctor’s decisons). Hmm… I can come up with so many examples, but this one just rang crisp when I was scanning this.

I saw Nick News with Linda Ellerbee for the first time tonight, didn’t really know what it was, but just stopped on the Nickelodeon channel and there it was.  The show’s theme was on race relations, the recent election and inauguraiton of President Barack Obama and I was amazed at the intelligent, insightful and thoughtful comments the children in the different news segements had to share. It really gives me hope to hear middle and high school students sound so hopeful and focused on the future, but also determined to learn, act and follow through. I am happy that the new president has managed to stir up the youngest generations to action, respect, and determination to accomplish greatness through hard work and persistency.

The Real Bill Ayers

By WILLIAM AYERS
Published: December 5, 2008

The New York Times

Where did this guy go? This McCain was around just before and somewhat through the Republican primary season but has been running (or rather losing control) if his campaign, letting it spiral into negativity especially so in the last few months.

If Sarah Palin has more executive experience than Sen. Obama and Sen. Biden combined, then she certainly has more executive experience than Sen. McCain. If that’s so important, then someone explain to me why she isn’t at the top of the Republican ticket?

I thought I stared death in the face today. It was my grandmother. She gave us a big scare. It was incredibly difficult to go through. It is amazing what thoughts and emotions can keep flying through your mind when you are on the verge of losing a most important person. You think you know yourself until you experience one of these moments and then you are reminded of how you really react in situations of life and death.

I was saddened by the amount of blame pushing I tried to do in light of my overwhelming fear of loss and my constant guilt of putting her in a potentially jeopardizing situation when I should know better.

How fragile life is. How precious. I guess I am keeping this note purposly vague because it is only intended to help me cope.

It’s a muggy Portland evening. I love it! It reminds me of my home city, Varna, where the summertime is so hot and humid that you can sit outside at a cafe downtown at midnight in nothing but jeans and a T-shirt and be sweating.

There are Capoeira dancers on the lawn in the middle of the PCC campus and I am thoroughly enjoying the beat of their tambourine. I can’t help but think that one day, when I don’t live here anymore, I will miss Portland. I will cherish the memories and probably over-talk-it-up to anyone and everyone who wants to (and doesn’t want to) listen. I can’t help it. It is one of those places in the world (similar to some parts of Australia, in particular Brisbane), that I feel are an incredibly successful mix of U.S. and European lifestyle. It has been a good year and a half.

A story on NPR today talk about how disconnect people are nowadays, how we have fewer confidants and friends, and the author of the book (the interviewee) attributed it to the fact that today we (U.S. folks) move so often throughout our lives that we do not develop a deeply rooted community network. How true. Even just traveling to different places around the world or living somewhere for a few months or a couple of years, I have noticed how attached I can become to a place while remaining miserably lonely from a people perspective. Always wishing for the friends “back home” even though there is no “back home” the way that friends and family are scattered nowadays. Even purchasing a home doesn’t seem to be a lock-in for settling down. It’s all rather unsettling.

But I suppose I take away the charm of all of these different places (and the memories, though that sounds cliche) and that enriches my life as a whole.

My mom mentioned today she spoke with a friend of hers in Buglaria who is a nurse and who has a daughter who became a doctor. Well, this woman apparently has always thought tons of me because she asks my mom about me every time they talk and apparently thinks I’m so smart, I’ll be president one day.

A former undergraduate professor of mine wrote me back an e-mail today saying his wife, who ran a CNN bureau in Seattle when interned with her a couple of years ago, still wants to make me a CNN producer.

It’s nice to hear things like that. They help lift me up, just like the Wikinomics co-author speech I heard last week at InnoTech and the successful visit I had at my alma matter the week before that – participating in an alumni panel and speaking at a PR session.

The trick is – how do I use these things as fuel to propel me to the next level – graduate school – and avoid being burned or getting pushed up too high on the ego-trampoline just to crash and find myself at a dead end? Very thin balance line.

It’s been so cold and stubbornly gray lately that it makes you wonder if spring as we used to know it will ever grace the northwest with its presence this year. Last year there was a bitter, crazy winter. Seattle is known for rainfall, but that’s only the reputation it gets, in reality it’s sort of sprinkling all the time. I don’t know anyone who lives in the Puget Sound area who owns an umbrella – it’s just not necessary… you can’t really quite get wet enough to justify such a purchase. But last winter there were snow storms that left the city hills littered with four-wheel drive trucks and SUVs whose drivers thought they knew how to muscle their way through sleet and slipper thin layers of white powder. Then there was the rain – flooding the streets, cars floating at intersections. The electricity was out for days in some places during one of these storms, though I’m not sure which – I think the snow. Neither was anything tremendous, but it definitely reminded of some of the reports you see on TV of those places that are know for flooding or heavy winters. There were people who harmed themselves during the power outage by bringing generators or coal-fired barbecues indoors to try to heat their homes – a warning was printed on the front page of The Seattle Times in several languages to ward immigrants, who might not know how generators work, from inhaling poisonous amounts of CO2.

I know, it’s silly to think that these are the tell-tale signs of global warming, but it’s definitely tempting to think so and I’ve voiced that often… only half-joking.

This year we’ve had unusually persistent rain and snow mixes, sleet and something less definable, throughout March – snow, then sunshine, then rain, then sunshine, then sleet, etc. The weekend before last the weather went so far in the other extreme that it was practically summer on Saturday – 75 degrees Fahrenheit. I wore a summer dress and sandals and was still too warm walking around some of the shadier Portland neighborhoods where the beer gardens and restaurants had spilled onto the sidewalks, with dogs and their humans breathing heavily and dousing themselves in cold beverages – the dogs lapping at water from portable, foldable bowls, their bipedal companions imbibing on cold beer, because it was too hot for wine.

And it is perhaps the thirst for the belated spring that has made me hypersensitive lately to these simple pleasures in life – a dog panting under the table a quaint street, under the shade of a tree, while the people read or converse leisurely, taking in the afternoon and relaxation.

I’m antsy for the weather to get nice enough for me to start eating my lunch in the park outside our office again. I miss that, the liveliness. There was a day, some weeks ago, almost warm enough for a sandwich on a bench. I tried it but my fingers froze by the time I was finished with my meal. Not yet.

Another day there was a mom with her two kids, walking away from the kindergarten that’s across the street from the kids’ playground in the park. A little girl and her younger brother made a toy out of a street sign pole instead – they spun around it, leaning away from it, their small hands gripping the dirty stem, both yelling “Merry-Go-Round! Merry-Go-Round!” Their mom smiled apologetically as I squeezed by the spinners to cross the street. Then she asked them “Want to go to OMSI?” By the time they broke their play to answer her, I was out of earshot.

On a different, but also promisingly sunny and disappointingly cold, morning I saw a serviced dog, a young black lab, and its trainer by a flower stand, crossing the street in front of the MAX back and forth with rewards every time the dog stopped its person at the curb when the pedestrian signal was red.