woops

been 13 or so days since my last post. what has happened in this time? well, the A key on my keyboard gets stuck easily. That's annoying. I've been listening to a lot of andrew bird and of montreal, which puts me in a sort of pop groove I suppose. I've also been writing a ton of music, but I don't think it bears much surface resemblance to the poppy stuff I've been listening to. It's all shifty and energetic. I'm getting better at playing guitar as a result of often practicing hours a day.
I just realized that I know a lot more hebrew than I thought I did. Like, a lot more. I was watching some of Waltz with Bashir yesterday (in hebrew with english subs) and I basically understood the hebrew without the subtitles. That's impressive. I mean, I would have been a bit lost without them especially in the longer conversations, but I would have held my own. What does this mean? It means I need to go to Israel. When? well that's another question altogether. But it's gotta happen.

I'm excited at the prospect of family visits in the coming weeks. My birthday is in 4 days, too. 21 biguns. I also have a bunch of big projects due at the end of next week. I'm pretty sure I'll have just enough time to do them all well and without hurry if I spend an average of 2 or 3 hours a day, every day, until a week from friday when the last one is due. That actually doesn't sound like a lot at all, so let's break it down: That's 11 days * 2.5 hours = 27.5 and then / 4 classes = almost 7 hours per class. Some will take more than 7 hours (my compilers class project, I bet) and some will take less (my music civ essay, which is to be 4 pages double spaced about how plato, augustine, hildegard, and one other monk whose name I forget consider christian church music). But you can see that even in a period of relatively heavy work, if you start early enough, you have around 3 hours of class a day and 3 hours of homework a day. A 6 hour workday - piece of cake.

Well, the point of this post, in case you missed it, was about Israel. I don't know how I feel about the political situation there, but the language is beautiful (as are the beaches and babes).
Eli

a really good day

Today was great. I got up early, did computer homework for a few hours, went to a few hours of class, talked to lots of nice people, got home and decompressed for a bit, cooked a nice healthy dinner for me and my roomies, did some more coding and figured out a ton of important stuff for my homework and Standard ML (the language I'm learning) in general, and now I've been practicing guitar and I feel like I'm really conquering this new method of playing that I've been working on for a while, and to top it off I wrote two new verses of one of my songs.

back in hyde park

I've moved into my new place! I'll try to get some pictures up soon, although no guarantees. I really like it here; things are coming together quite nicely and I know this is going to be an even better living situation than last year.
Last night we had a nice dinner and I met my other roommate Allison, who's very nice. This morning I went out to the gym on my own. It's not too cold, and I'm thinking about taking my bike to get the tires filled.
Writing music is taking up a large portion of my free time right now, and pretty soon I'm going to start recording with my friend Ben (who's got a sweet setup).
Till later,
Eli

winding down

Last night I had a great going away party in my backyard. I invited most of the friends that I've made here in Chile. My buddy and neighbor Felipe helped me buy lots of meat and then we started barbequeing, and people began to show up from around 9:30 to 1:30. That is to say, they were still arriving at 1:30. It was good I didn't invite everybody I know, since around 30 or 40 people came. We grilled chicken and shishkabob and Felipe's girlfriend Kata made a really yummy noodle salad. Some columbian dude with a guitar and a harmonica played a lot of great music, and me and Doran had our guitars too. The party was a lot of fun - and I just spent the morning cleaning up :)
I have this one last weekend before I go home. Happily, or perhaps ironically, it's a weekend absolutely stuffed with great things to do. Ironically because I get the feeling that every weekend is going to be like this now that summer's here. I'm happy to go, but I've already had to start saying goodbye to some folks, and that's not fun. Twere almost better to forget the goodbyes altogether.

whew

I just took a 3.5 hour walk through the hills north of my house. I definitely didn't plan for it to be so long, though. Google maps distance calculator says I went 4.42 miles, but of course that only counts the horizontal. I was busy exploring back staircases cut into cliff sides.
At one point I had the strongest sensation that I was a character in a video game - I was climbing up a hill and I passed a man stamping papers from bus drivers (doing so, I'd assume, to later prove that they'd serviced the hill, since it was out of the way). I asked him if the stairs to his right emerged onto another street up above. Sure, he said. No problem. If you go up here, you can get to see the virgin. So I started climbing. A few stairs and turns later, right away the path split into three. I picked the one that was climbing steepest, on the left, because it had a railing and looked well-maintained. About another 40 steps up and I could see that the stairs didn't actually go anywhere. At the top was a house, gate open, 3 ferocious dogs barking me back down the stairs.
At the three-path split again, I asked a different guy, this one painting the side of his house. Sure, he said, you can see the virgin if you climb up this middle path. And what about this other one, I asked. Oh, yeah, that one goes too. They both go. So I climbed up the rightmost path, and, sure enough, after another hundred or so steps up (maybe more - that last climb was like 30 meters straight up), the virgin mary looms into view. ta-da! Game Over.

a long awaited update, 4am style

Heyo- I just got back from a fantastic show. A friend of mine named Camila plays violin as a guest in this band that plays a kind of "cumbia psycotropica" as they describe it, which is a mix between salsa and reggae and punk. I saw them play last night at a small party/concert in the music school campus patio of my university, but tonight was even cooler - they played a show in a place called "casa okupa". It's a humoungous chile-style house (which is to say, lots of strange big open spaces and long hallways with tiny rooms) that seems to be officially owned by the church, but there's a community that lives there now unoffically. The cool thing is that they govern themselves really well and the place is clean and beautiful (and amazingly bohemian).
First camilia and the band and some other friends came to my sweet backyard to hang out, and then we went to casa ocupa.
This show tonight had comedy, acrobatics, intensely funny + smart monologues, strange political music acts (a guy with weird hair and a bullhorn and a rope chaining together two girls dressed as witch/donkeys, all singing "no seas burro" [lit. don't be a donkey] and other, stranger songs), slide projection and tricks with an overhead projector, interpretive dance - and just when I thought it couldn't get any better, the band took over with a 2 or 3 hour set. Like the early success story of most 60s rock bands (see Led Zeppelin I think) these guys played every song they knew, and then they played them all over again only without stopping in between. More people kept coming, and we the crowd just couldn't get enough; they were on fire. We danced in this big basement space where the show took place until we just couldn't dance and more, and I met a lot of really high-energy lovely people. Whew. It was one of the best nights I've had in Chile, and I've had some great times here.
In other news, I passed one of my harder classes (the prehispanic chilean art history class) with a 5.6, a chilean B+ more or less. Woohoo! no other grades yet, but I'm done with 3/5 of my classes. Now I'm working on a project for graphics class, a rocket simulation. But right now I'm tiiiiired, so I'll try to post again soon.
~love!

fun weekend

In the last few days I have met three chilean women: maria, mariana, and mariel. They are all interesting, all very different, and range in age from 21 to 35. That's about as far as the coincidence goes.
Today I had a great day - worked on a new song (tentatively titled "rebirth" [I know, not the most inspired title]), went urban hiking (it was amazing! I climbed up a humongous hill, must have been climbing for 25 minutes straight, and the road ended and a dirt path begun, which led into the forest [at this point I was high high above the city] and thus began a series of trails that I'm definitely going to return to and explore. Next time, with camera.), and played soccer with some good friends. In a bit I'm going to go eat dinner at doran's house. And so life is really fun at the moment.
I'm reading Cortazar's Rayuela in spanish, which is amazing and fun and challenging and completely worth it. The book knocks me flat on my back constantly. It shakes my world, gives me great ideas, makes me feel good, makes me feel bad, and makes me crack up at the strangest moments.
Really I guess it's to be expected, but since I've been on my own a lot more now (= broke up) I've met so many people! there are a thousand people just waiting for you to walk up and say hi. Sometimes they become excellent friends.
And time is winding down here - officially less than a month till I'm off north. I will try to post more often again, there's been a bit of a drought here I know.
love
eli
ps. my spanish has been improving by leaps and bounds, inexplicably. Suddenly I find myself capable of improvised flights of poetry (in conversation) in another language. If I think too hard about it, it goes away though, so I'm treading carefully.