Rarely Pure & Never Simple

I just bought a two plane tickets for my summer vacation.  On July 4th I will leave Quito on an overnight flight to Rio de Janeiro, where I will set off to explore Brazil for 3 weeks.   On July 25th I plan to be at Iguaçu National Park where I will cross into Argentina and then travel on to Buenos Aires and explore Argentina until August 17th.  I am so excited I cannot even begin to tell everybody about it.   I guess being a teacher has an upside.

For many of you this post will mean absolutely nothing, but I wanted to write about the change in appearance in the blog.   I was a devout user of Movable Type for quite a while.  It was a robust, complicated, and designed for a power blogger.   Something I am not.   I thought about it, realized, all I wanted to really do was write and decided to move.  I am no longer paying $70 a year for a hosted site, and now I am using wordpress.com with a domain redirect.   This only costs me $10, so I am saving money.

I do loose some abilities that I had always planned to use, but never did.   I no longer have subdomains for use with my Google Apps account.   My email still works with google apps, but now the URL http://calendar.joshferris.com, no longer goes to my hosted gcal, but redirects to my blog.    I am hoping that they have subdomain support in the future.

I wanted to point out that I am using a provided template, but the banner picture is a shot from  la montaña Illiniza Sur.  A mountain near Quito, that totally kicked my ass one Sunday.   But hey, that photo is not stock, totally the real thing!

I received my first flagrantly racist email forward the today concerning the election in the United  States.  I will not go into who sent it to me, but needless to say I was not very pleased.    I’ll do you the courtesy of not putting the photo up, but the context is that black American’s do not like to work.   Offensive indeed.

I deleted and went back to the project I was working on, but my thoughts kept coming back to the email.   Is this a common phenomenon in the U.S. right now?  Are the racist emails flying around about Barack Obama a common practice?  It made me think about how insulated my life is at times.   I generally surround myself with like minded people, who I enjoy having a conversation with, and this lends itself to keeping racists as far away from me as possible.

I do believe that the United States is an incredibly racist country that has a long way to go, before we can even believe to be mending race relations.  However, I was hoping we were a little further along than the email I received today. 

Have any of you received emails like this?  Any misogynistic emails about Hillary?   let me know.

Homoerotic Jesus causes Scandal

Did others read this?  Has anyone seen what this looks like?  

So I am considering a return to school in the fall of 2009.   I am looking at programs in demography and population studies.    Does anyone know anything about the tracts of wisdom?   My GRE’s are probably not considered outstanding, I do not have any contacts with my professors, and my GPA is below a 3.5.  I think the cards are stacked against me.

Advice or inspiration is needed.