glowingfish

It is Wednesday and I am just writing about this now, but I spent my weekend in Liberia, Guanacaste Province, which is about 100 straight miles away, but is actually much further through the mountains and around the water.
It was different, much hotter, around 32-34C. Pretty tiring!
I am glad I went somewhere else, but I am also glad to be home.

I woke up an hour too early today. Tried to get back to sleep. And I couldn't, so on a day when I could have done so many things and got my house in order...I basically just kept hitting "refresh" on the intarwebs, hoping to get stimulation.

...and if you were to go back to my original Livejournal in 2002, you would probably read a lot of entries like that.

Anyway, they can't all be winners.

insane.

The entire idea that miles away, there is a big pool of water held back by concrete, and that physical pressure moves gigantic turbines, generating magnetism that turns into electricity that travels down wires until it enters a house and excites some gases...

It is pretty hard to comprehend, actually.

So I feel the same is true sometimes of social systems. Even when we objectively can understand that money isn't real and its value is set through a complicated process, that is very different from how we understand the money in our pocket.

And there are other social processes that happen even more intangibly, but that I more or less use when I think about how the world works. But if I use those explanation out of nowhere, it sounds like I am describing a turbine in a lake!

It took a long time to color in this map, county by county (and, chances are, I might have missed a space). Of course, it took a long time to visit all those spaces...even if I did start back in the 1980s! :)

In the United States, I have lived in Oregon (for 25+ years), in Washington (for over 10 years), in Montana (for 5 years) and in California for 1 year and in Vermont for 1 year. I think. Living in this variety of places has shaped my views on many things.

I have also lived in Chile for 3 years and in Costa Rica for almost a year.

I might post more about that coming up!

Yesterday I walked over Ochomogo Pass. Which might not make much sense with explanation.
The Ochomogo Pass is the main pass over the continental divide in Costa Rica, between the Pacific and Atlantic sides of the country. And if this sounds like a romantic mountain journey---well, there is actually just a big freeway that goes over the pass, and it is loud and probably a dumb thing to do to walk along the side of the freeway for an hour just to have bragging rights that I've walked over the pass.
But that is what I did with my Friday.
And now it is Saturday, and I am somewhat tired after all that exertion!

I should probably mention a few things about Costa Rica!

The first thing is that Costa Rica is a "middle income country", at least that is what I would call it.
But what does that mean?
Basically, for me, it means that I don't see a lot of extreme poverty, but that things are a little bit more cracked/jury-rigged than I am usually used to. But also, some of that is cultural.

There are a few "shantytowns" or "precarios" in Costa Rica, places built out of spare lumber and tin, but they are less common than homeless camps are in the United States, from what I have seen. There is also not anything like a problem with obvious malnutrition (and any malnutrition that does occur is probably due to fast food/junk food). There is also probably close to 100% literacy. There are schools and medical clinics everywhere.

The big difference that I've noticed is that a lot of the infrastructure is older. Bus lines, of which there are many, sometimes use old American school buses. Sidewalks disappear. Traffic has to alternative over one lane bridges. San Jose's passenger train network is based on a century year old freight railroad.

Some of the difference is cultural. I especially notice this with transportation: there aren't routes or schedules for the buses. The buses aren't operated by a central transit agency. If you want to figure out where to go, you just have to kind of...know. But this isn't due to a lack of technology or money, at least sometimes. I walked into a small grocery store in a little mountain town, and the cashier had a 30 inch flat panel monitor for her register. But the train stations don't even have a dot matrix display for arrival or departure time of trains. Part of the jury-rigging of infrastructure just seems to be a cultural thing.

I tried to walk across the continental divide today, on a road that didn't exist.
It started out as a gravel road, that got to a gate, and that then turned into a grass road that went up for about a half mile before dead ending in a gigantic pipe coming out of the ground...and a muddy trail that I thought might go somewhere but then disappeared in the rainforest.
I went up the trail, thinking that it might turn into a rough but passable trail, but no.
And the thing that is hard to describe, was how lost and scared I felt when I was really only 50-100 feet up that trail...only a half mile from a house, but with the sudden realization that if I slipped on the muddy trail and fell down a ledge, I was really really out there.
I am 45. Maybe tramping around roads that don't exist in the rain forest isn't the best planning on my part?
But sometimes it pays off.

Hello everyone---I have some new followers (still trying to figure out how to add back...)
I am hungover today. Which isn't something that happens often. Every once in a while I think "some alcohol will clear up some of the cruft in my head".
Also, I am in Costa Rica. So maybe it seems like drinking some beers would mean going down to the local neighborhood spot, a nice outdoor dining area on a tropical night, and getting pleasantly tipsy while a local band played some swinging Latin rhythms and a crew of locals warmly and emotionally talked---
Okay, maybe that does happen. Not for me. I do have one local restaurant I go to.
But for the most part, my life here is not very romantic. I don't know if it is me or my surroundings, but my life can be pretty basic!
So now I am hungover in my apartment and wondering what to do with my day.

Apparently, and no surprise, I was glowing-fish on there. But apparently, I created that account with my old aracnet email that has been lost, so I can't recover it.
Well, it was pretty sparse, anyway.

I think it was October of 2002 that I created my Livejournal. I also think that at some point I might have created a Dreamwidth account as well.
I have lots of thoughts about social media, the pros and cons of it, but most of that has already been said.
I am going to see if Dreamwidth can help me communicate with others. I might create a paid account at some point.
It has been a long week.