Hi. I'm Marco's sister. Those of you who don't know me can call me Pearl. When I was nineteen, I bit into a pearl in a fried oyster in some linoleum-floored crab shack on Cape Cod.
I'm a recovering graduate student, high school Spanish teacher, unrepentant history geek, and budding mystic. I've traveled to four of the seven continents. I always love to discuss politics, religion, history, and philosophy. In my other life, I'm also a wife with really poor housekeeping skills. But I can cook.
One day I won’t have to think in it primarily ever again.
I’ve noticed that my spelling in English has started to slip. I do so much more reading and writing in Spanish than I do in English anymore. It’s affecting my literacy skills in my own language!
“The identity issues facing middle-class black and Latino teenagers might be a clue as to why they don’t do as well academically as their white and Asian counterparts, some researchers and educators say. The teens often live in dual worlds: the suburban one they live in, and the rougher street life they see glorified in the media.
Known as the “minority achievement gap,” the lower average test scores, grades and college attendance by black and Latino students have long perplexed researchers. Many have focused on the values and attitudes of students and whether black students think doing well in school is “acting white.”“
Advert 1951. For the Language of Romance and Opportunity.
“Be ready if opportunity should take you to a Latin American country in the future”
Suppose it knocked a couple of weeks off the training camp in the Everglades.
una bicoca
‘Cause I’m always trying to find new ways to motivate my students :P
Poe and friend
(Getty photo by Omar Torres / October 30, 2009)
A representation of one of the stories by of writer Edgar Allan Poe is seen in an Altar of the Dead close to the library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. Mexicans celebrate the Day of the Dead on November 1 and 2 in connection with the Catholic holy days of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. Tradition includes building altars honoring their deceased relatives and this year, the UNAM dedicated the altars to Poe. (via Chicago Tribune)
Much Brazilian deforestation is connected to soybean cultivation. As much as 70 percent of areas newly cleared for agriculture in Mato Grosso State in Brazil is being used to grow soybeans. Over half of Brazil’s soy harvest is controlled by a handful of international agribusiness companies, which ship it all over the world for animal feed and food products, causing emissions in the process.
Meat and dairy eaters need not be part of this. Many smaller, traditional farms and ranches in the United States have scant connection to carbon dioxide emissions because they keep their animals outdoors on pasture and make little use of machinery. Moreover, those farmers generally use less soy than industrial operations do, and those who do often grow their own, so there are no emissions from long-distance transport and zero chance their farms contributed to deforestation in the developing world.
“According to Peter Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden and a renowned botanist, the wind doesn’t gently pull leaves off trees. Trees are more proactive than that. They throw their leaves off. Instead of calling this season “The Fall,” if trees could talk they’d call this the “Get Off Me” season.”
Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah
This is one of a very few songs that make it into my “beautiful music” playlist… Songs that take my breath away, even when I hear them for the 84th time, songs that lift my spirit, songs that make me feel closer to God and Creation, etc. In other words, songs that have a similar effect on me as when I visit the Cliffs of Moher or when I saw my first Rodin sculpture.
I feel happy just thinking about this song.
Lesbian couples stand in front of Argentina’s National Congress gathering signatures to support a possible law bill on gay marriage in Buenos Aires, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. Gay and lesbian activists think Argentina is ready to become Latin America’s first nation to legalize gay marriage and they’ve got a growing number of supporters in Congress, which opened debate Thursday on whether to change dozens of laws that define marriage as a union between a “man and woman.” The sign atop reads, in Spanish, “Marriage Law: The same rights with the same names.”
wow. This is huge. If a Latino country passes gay marriage before we do…
Spain already has. (One more reason to move there — hooray for a progressive society!)
“The red dot at the center of this image is the only light left over from the star that collapsed on itself when the universe was 600 million years old.”
