Friday, June 12, 2009

Send me some love, or some money

Everything continues down here, it is still hot, I still wash my clothes with my hands, and everything else is just a little more labor intensive than it has to be. Unique though, for this past week, has been the departure of three more volunteers from my batch. Two of whom were quite close to me, both in location and as friends, so that was a little difficult and continues to be difficult to deal with. I can’t really disclose too much about why they left and other various things. What I can say though, is that I enjoyed their company and it will be weird readjusting my weekends without their visits.

The unique happening was my first relatively serious medical condition. I thought I had stubbed my toes a couple of weeks ago as a few of them were swollen, so I took some IBprofen and what not. The swelling went down pretty slow, and then kind of blistered, when I popped the blister, black liquid came out. At this point I do have to mention that there were black dots in the middle of the wounds. In any case, the swelling continued to go down, but I still had the black dots. An acquaintance of mine asked about them, and asked how I got them, I said I wasn’t sure, and that I thought I stubbed my toe. She said that they were fleas. I asked around and asked the Cuban doctors who I know here and sure enough they said fleas too. So, last night I took tweezers and just kinda dug them out. After more black liquid and white puss stuff, I had three sizeable holes. I’m keeping them clean and bandaged to prevent any infection. Never thought I’d get fleas though, the local name is “jiggies”.

There’s really nothing more out of the ordinary than these two shorts blips. But I will also include a book list as I have been asked by a few people now if I wanted things shipped down.


Book list

Authors

Neal Stephenson (minus Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon)
John R. Searle
Ray Kurzweil
Anthony Bourdain (minus Kitchen Confidential and a collection of essays, I forget the name, I’m not even sure he’s published more)
Peter Hessler (minus Between two rivers)
Hunter S. Thompson (minus Hell’s Angels)
Oliver Sacks

Topics

Whittling
Chess
Savants
Philosophy of Math
Any Peace Corps Memoirs
Harmonica book
Travel Literature (especially S. America)

Books

Mind and Cognition (published by Blackwell I think, it’s a anthology of essays, I think the latest one is 2007 or 2008)
Any Magazines, I kind of love them down here, there my connection to the States
Musicophilia

Misc.

Spices
Coffee
Toiletries

I should be writing some more stuff soon, I have just made some moves, which I can't disclose just yet, but if they turn out successful I should have something to write about in a week or two.