Off to the Patriot League basketball tournament. Zomberg will be there. Back on Sunday.

The latest "what are you?" quiz...
Are You Marty Or Zomberg?

It's really disconcerting when a person speaking in Spanish throws in "like" all the time the way she would in English. At least say "como."

I apologize to those of you who have never read "El Yaciyateré," by Horacio Quiroga. We were discussing the story in Spanish class and I had ideas about it that I wanted to get down before I forgot them.

The story is like this: The narrator and his friend are testing a new canoe that they built, which they think will be able to withstand anything. A storm comes along while they're on the river and shipwrecks them. They spend the night with a family whose youngest son is dying of meningitis. They do little to help him, because they have a superstition that he is under the power of a bird (which we hear but noone has ever seen) called the Yaciyateré. Four years later, the narrator returns to find the family gone, but the sick boy is still living -- albeit in a bestial state, starving and unable to speak.

I said that the three episodes seem to show a progression from reason (the firm cause and effect understandings of boat engineering), to superstition (the illogical cause and effect of the bird), to a complete lack of understanding (on the part of the boy). Prof. Luciani said that to him the canoe trip is much more surreal than the night with the family, and the starving boy at the end seems an example of a "harsh reality." I drew a little Levi-Strauss diagram juxtaposing the two ideas, and thought that perhaps that was the point -- that reliance on reason is self-delusional. But then, the narrator survives to the end and seems in good shape, while the superstitious family disappears and the irrational boy is starving. And the boy at the end is fascinated by the narrator's canoe.

I think the problem is that there's too much we don't know in this story. Some people raised the possibility that the boy at the end is a ghost -- which would suggest that the superstition was right -- or that he was a figment of the narrator's imagination -- which would be wishful thinking about the wrongness of the superstition. The story doesn't say for sure. The story doesn't say where the family might have gone -- are they dead? Did they abandon the boy (thinking he was a goner) and move away? Quiroga purposefully creates this situation by using first-person narration. The narrator is a person in the story, with the limited and situated perspective (as opposed to omniscience) that comes with it. There's nobody who knows what's "really" going on, who understands the entire situation.

I think the story ultimately raises a bunch of questions about how we understand the world and then says "I don't know, you don't know, and there's really no way of finding out for sure, because none of us have the necessary omniscient view."

I'm not sure if I should be worried that the Navy is searching for a lot of morticians.

Something Barbara said reminded me of a philosophical-type post I had wanted to do (and since I haven't done one of those in a while, here goes...)

We tend to put a lot of stock in choice. Things are bad if they're imposed on someone, but as long as they choose their situation, then they've found the best alternative. It came up a lot in Environmental Justice last year -- it sucks to have a nuclear waste disposal site in your village, but if the Goshute tribe thinks that the additional jobs are more important than the increased risk of cancer, who are we to say they're wrong? Any comparison between unlike things is inherently subjective, so it makes perfect sense that it can and should only be made by the person(s) being affected.

But then we combine that with the fact that, with a few exceptions, almost any situation is something you've chosen to be in. Even if you can't choose to leave (for example, people in jail), it was your choice (to commit the crime) that ultimately put you in that situation. You chose to accept the risks of playing paintball. You chose to work for less than minimum wage in an unsafe sweatshop instead of starving. You chose freely from the alternatives available to you, and that's all that matters.

All that's well and good. Except for the part about "the alternatives available to you." Because everyone does face only a limited set of options. Some people's options are really bad -- prostitution or starvation. Do we have any sort of a moral duty to give people a decent option? How do we define decent? Some people (probably far too many) are insatiable -- they can always think of a better option than what they have. We can't make anyone's choice for them, but are there some choices that people shouldn't have to make?

Canada Beats USA in Hockey
But the picture clearly shows the American team celebrating. Darn patriotic newspapers.

So, my last Colgate hockey games. If we get home ice for the playoffs I might be able to go to the first game before Beth and I head to Fredonia (provided she's not anti-hockey), but without the band there it won't really count. And it would be anticlimactic, because even if the team makes it to Lake Placid -- which I had been hoping for and looking forward to all season -- I won't be there. I'll be in LA at the Association of American Geographers' Annual Meeting. Which will be exciting in its own way, but it won't be Placid.

But they were good games. I finally got to play drums at the Clarkson game, which I had wanted to do just to see what it was like ever since we lost all our trained drummers sophomore year. And we got to use the "It's Saturday night, and you can't score!" cheer against SLU.

I can't help but look at grad school as if it's another go at undergrad. I know grad students aren't supposed to do extracurriculars and non-academic stuff the way undergrads do, but I find myself spending less time thinking about the classes and professors and more about whether Clark has a pep band and how quickly I can become an editor of their student newspaper.