Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Grace Cornell's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, January 20th, 2007
10:57 am	So, I'm finished with what I came here to do, more or less, which is a very strange feeling. Maybe it's just because when I've tried to similarly interview the authors of essays I was translating in Argentina, I've met with utter disaster twice in the past (lack of phone numbers, laptop being stolen, etc.) But this is a different scenario (i.e. I'm not living 2 hours outside of the city and working with an organization that doesn't have a freaking address book.) And I've done it. I've interviewed all of the poets. Even better, I've spent hours upon hours with all of them, almost going through sections of my translations word by word. I've gotten hours' worth of great interviews recorded, and it's been an amazing feeling to efficiently do something like that, to meet these amazing people, to flesh out a project that I really care about and that I started working on last March, to get to really engage with the poems and the universe of the poems, this Andean world that is so bizarrely foreign to me and so fascinating. In the end this project is part translation and part anthropology as I struggle to explain illnesses like "mal de susto" or "mal del viento" (when your soul leaves your body because you were frightened, or because it was robbed by the wind) or the messianic myth of the "Inkarri," a god who was ripped to peaces by the Spanish but who is slowly putting himself back together and who, when he is whole again, will restore the glory of the Inka empire. Let's just say that this is the most rewarding academic experience that I've had in college, and that I am so glad that I came here over break (though I had my doubts beforehand), because if I hadn't I would never have been able to finish this project. Also, all of the poets have expressed interest in having my translations published, two of them in a rather distant sort of way "hmmm... it would be nice if you could publish this... you should check into that..." and one of them has sworn (over several beers) that he will get my translations published both here and in the US, where he has a lot of professional connections. Rad. Speaking of poets and beer, yesterday I had what might be the second worst hangover of my life, after going out with said poet. First we went to this memorial concert for Jose Maria Arguedas, which was pretty damn cool given that two of his close friends performed (eeep! friends of Arguedas!) including this violinist who was so old he looked like he was going to fall apart and had PLAYED AT ARGUEDAS' FUNERAL because Arguedas specifically requested it in his will. And, even better, Arguedas dedicated to him "Zorro de Arriba, Zorro de Abajo" (his last book, but don't read it EVER, it will make you want to kill yourself, which is exactly what he did before he finished writing it). So I, in my extremely dorky way, was awestruck, and then acted really awkward in front of all the important peruvian writers that were also in attendance who Odi (the poet) introduced me to. We then went out in Barranco and had some really amazing conversations about bilingual education, the US, Peru, the fact that cities have souls, our families. And I drank too many pisco sours and we both ended up wasted and he hit on me in the most poetic was possible (actual quote: "I think that there are a few people left in the world, like you, who are actually archangels, and these archangels can only be loved by poets..." Eeeep! All in all I think that I handled the situation well. The truth is that he is a really amazing man, and I feel like we have a really strong connection, and he's brilliant for god's sake (he's won two national poetry prizes, which is a huge deal here), so I don't want to lose him as a friend. And I think I managed to explain the whole i'm in a relationship thing well, and we're going to these Inca ruins together tomorrow. So I think things are chill and that we're friends. Why do these sorts of things always happen to me? Last night was really nice, as well. It was two friend's birthdays (Alfredo, who I met last time I was in Lima, and Jimena, Rafael's girlfriend). So we sat around in Rafael's apartment for a few hours drinking straight pisco and making hundreds of toasts, of course looking each other straight in the eyes (to avoid seven years of bad (or no) sex), which is a superstition of unknown origin that resurfaces perennially and becomes very funny for a few hours and then fades into the background. But I was very proud of my translation to Spanish of the Brazilian saying "brindar sem olhar, sete anos sem transar" which becomes "brindar sin mirar, siete a~nos sin tirar." I got a round of applause for that one. Damn right. After a certain point everyone was drunk enough to start singing songs in Quechua (including me, very very briefly) and it made me very happy, given that all those present were 19 or 20 year old Anthropology students at the PUC here in Lima. They did all happen to be Cusquenos though, which explains a little bit. I almost miss Cusco, actually. Which hurts even to say. It's funny, with Odi after a while he started talking about how in the end he thinks he'll end back up in the Valley of Urubamba, after having lived in Lima, Washington D.C., New York. It makes sense. It's home for him. For Einar too. And there's this intense atavistic connection of some kind. It's sacred ground. But not for me. It's history is too complicated. I can't access it's magic. It has rejected me and will continue to reject me, I think. And so it hurts me when another man jokes, says I'm going to found a school and you can teach there. Haven't I already lost something because I can't live in Cusco. Places that sacred and that profaned, that violated, are dangerous. I don't know. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 15th, 2007
6:01 am	If I wanted a fucking taxi, I would be trying to flag down a taxi. Just because I´m blond and have blue eyes doesn´t mean I need a goddamn taxi. AAAHHHRRRGGG... (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 14th, 2007
1:56 pm	So, the stomach thing is way better. I would even say gone, but I don´t want to jinx it. Gotta love generic brand antibiotics that pharmacists give you without a prescription... I am... tired. Yesterday was a very odd day in some senses. For instance, walking out of the restaurant where I had lunch, this random man asked me if I was studying spanish and proceeded to tell me that he was a geologist and that he had just come back from 3 years in France. He invited me to coffee, and I said that I had to go home because me friends were waiting for me to go to the beach. He gave me his number and I left a little sketched out but relieved that I wouldn´t have to deal with that. Then the whole beach thing got cancelled, and hours later I went out to look for dinner. I ran into him again, and he proceeded to buy me ice-cream and then to buy me an entire dinner, and to talk to me about how racist dance clubs are in Cusco and how expensive hostels are in Europe, and then we said goodbye after dinner and I went off to use the internet, just like that. He didn´t even really hit on me. It was very odd. But hey, free dinner! I then spent most of the night at a bar and then wandering around Miraflores with Arturo, a friend of Roberto´s. We talked about a bunch of really odd things--Peruvian nationalism, relationships, his father´s attempt to sexually initiate him by taking him to a brothel when he was 14 years old--, but my favorite was his account of this shamanic ritual that people pay a ton of money to do in the mountains of the north of Peru. Apparently you have to ride a donkey up a dirt path for several hours, until you reach this mountain lake with all of these caves that the shamans supposedly live in. Inside are all sorts of statues of saints, skeletons, magical objects, etc. You have to strip totally naked in like 15 degree weather and then... get ready for this... they RUB A GUINEA PIG all over you. Literally. A live guinea pig. They rub a live guinea pig all over you. And then they kill it and cut it open, and because your energy has been transferred to the guinea pig, they can predict what`s wrong with you by looking at the guinea pig´s internal organs. I´m not joking. And you thought it was bad that they eat guinea pigs here... This country is just weird. Really really weird. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, January 12th, 2007
11:42 am	I would like to take a moment to pay homage to the bacteriological gods of Peru, whose powers never cease to astound me. Take pity on me. I lay myself at your feet. I am only a young girl who has come to do her thesis work. If I or my stomach have done anything to offend you, tell us, and we will rectify our errors! Have mercy! Tell us what offerings to make, and we will make them! We will burn incense! We will sing sacred songs! Tell us your bidding, and by my word it will be done. Amen. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
10:41 am	So, I´ve decided that this trip really was a good idea. Last night I met the first of the three poets and he was incredibly enthusiastic about the project. We had coffee, and then got dinner and went to a museum, and he sent me the revised versions of his poems and offered to spend a few days (like, whole days) working with me poem by poem on the translations. That alone makes this trip worthwhile. He also offered to show me around Lima and take me to lunch at the house of the widow of a famous Peruvian poet on the way to the ruins of a temple to the Incan god of the Earthquakes. I´m excited. Let´s hope things go well with the other two poets, who I need to get in contact with today. I´ve also seen Rafael, a friend from Cusco who lives in Lima, cousin of the notorious molesty Yuri of Aldea Yanapay. But Rafael is good people and I enjoyed wandering around Lima listening to his cynical, anthropological commentary about pretty much everything. I´m hanging out with him again tonight. And yesterday I met up with Roberto and a friend of his. Roberto became really good friends with all the SIT kids who were in Lima, and so they got me in contact with him. He´s pretty awesome and seems to have immense amounts of free time to hang out and show me around Lima--he just graduated and is working at a law firm, but he had to have foot surgery and they appear to be paying him to take an extended vacation. In about an hour I´m supposed to go with him to the Limeno version of El Molino (i.e. the blackmarket in Cusco where I bought the famous card-board belt and a friend bought the famous "Addibas" sandals). The Limeno version--Polvos Azules?--apparently is like El Molino but a hundred times bigger. The very thought of that strikes terror into my soul. What else. Aside from that I´m shocked and amazed by how ugly Lima really is. Just walking around I feel like I´m smoking cigarrettes, and this city has a poor excuse for a summer. I don´t actually think I´ve ever seen a sunny day here. But the temperature is nice, so I won´t complain. Plus, Ecuador was spectacular, so I´ve had my fill of natural beauty. I adored Quito. It had all of the Andean charm of Cusco without being nearly as hostile. It was small enough to navegate easily, and the second day I was there I fell into this hole of Ecuadorian love. I went up the TeleferiQo (these cable cars that take you up to about 14,000 feet), and ended up in the same car with these teenagers from Guayaquil. I ended up spending the whole day with them. We went to the Mitad del Mundo--the monument that marks the Equator--and their parents bought my lunch, and extended an invitation to stay with them in Guayaquil whenever I wanted. It was a lot of fun. On the way back to the hostel, my taxi driver virtually offered to adopt me. He was like "Next time you come to Quito, I´ll pick you up at the airport, and you can stay at my house, my wife will cook for you, and we can show you all around Ecuador!" Friendly country. Damn. The only downside was that from Quito to Lima by bus is an extremely intense experience. First I took a night bus to Cuenca and arrived in the morning. I spent the day peeking into cathedrals, going to museums full of indigenous artefacts, and seeing some rather minimal incan ruins. Apparently Cuenca--Tomebamba in Incan times--was being built as a replica of Cusco and was supposed to become an extremely powerful city, but it was razed during the war between Huascar Inca and Atahualpa, and by the time the Spanish got there there was hardly anything left. Quito, once an extremely important Incan city, and the birthplace of Atahualpa, was apparently destroyed by Ruminahui (which means "stone eyes" in Quechua... sinister, no?) who was Atahualpa´s war minister, also before the Spanish arrived. Apparently he took all of the treasure and hid it somewhere in the mountains, but no one has ever found it. That´s why there were few Incan ruins to be seen in the parts of Ecuador I visited. Okay, I´m done now. If anyone found that interesting, I´m impressed. I feel like I´ve spent so much time in this part of South America now that I can get really excited even about elaborate pre-Incan nose rings--"Wow, those are so much more detailed than the ones in Colombia!" I pity the poor girls who went with me to the museums in Quito. This is mostly Einar´s fault I think. From Cuenca, I took a bus at 7 am to the border with Peru, where the bus abandoned me and I discovered that the freaking computer system was down and no one could cross the border till it got back online. So I spent about 3 hours waiting around nervously, hoping it would start working again that day. In the interim I ate the sketchiest lunch ever. It just tasted like it would give me terrible diseases, and in truth my stomach has not quite been the same since. But there was nothing to be done. I was so hungry that it seemed like it would be worse not to eat. Finally the computer system got back online, and I could cross the border. I then had to take a taxi (fortunately with some nice Peruvian women who took pity on me and my confusion) to the Peruvian immigrations office, which is like 20 minutes away. It´s fucking bizarre. You leave Ecuador, and then drive through an entire Ecuadorian town, and then you have to take a taxi to the place where you enter Peru. And then you have to take another taxi to the nearest town in Peru, where you take the bus. And the whole time everyone is trying to rob you and change you money for false bills or at absurd rates. Awesome. I came out of that experience more stressed out than ever. It was actually worse than the border between Peru and Bolivia where you have to jump over a fence and run across a bridge, swerving indigenous street vendors and fake narco-police. At least there the bus waited for me, and there wasn´t like fifty miles between Peruvian and Bolivian immigration offices. What the fuck? So, what I want to know is what country you´re in in those fifty miles. From there though, things went smoothly. I slept for like 12 hours of the twenty hour bus-ride between Tumbes and Lima, and arrived in Lima to happily lodge myself in this gorgeous family-run hostel that looks like a greenhouse on the inside and which cut me a really good deal. About 13 dollars a night for my own room. Which is cheaper than pretty much anywhere else I´ve seen in Lima, which runs 20 to 30 dollars a night for a private room. Yay. So, this is like the longest entry I´ve ever written, but there´s pretty much no way I would have written all of that in my own journal. Oh well. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007
8:49 pm	This is crazy. I literally haven´t written in six months. Well... here I am in Quito, and honestly I´m having an excellent time. I am somewhat put out, however, that coca leaf tea is ILLEGAL here (how the fuck else do you deal with being at this altitude, christ...). I have also discovered the key to a mystery that has been plaguing me for years. So, does anyone remember the Sacagawea dollar coins that they printed, and how they were so pretty but then after you saw one or two you never saw any of them again? And if you´re like me, you wondered where they went. Did collectors hoard them? Did they discontinue them after only a few months? Where could all of those Sacagawea coins have gone?!? Well, children, I have an answer for you. They are *all* in Ecuador. Figure that out. I have also been getting some giant half dollars in change. You haven´t seen many of those around recently, have you? What frustrates me is that I didn´t know that Ecuador uses the American dollar for currency until like 5 hours before I got here, when I called the hostel to ask how much the taxi ride would be in sucres and the guy, clearly believing I was insane, told me that sucres hadn´t been the currency of Ecuador for at least 5 years. Whoops. Aside from that, this, my first day in Ecuador, has been very productive. I climbed to the top of a very tall hill and had very much trouble breathing (damn andes... I want my coca tea!) with two very nice girls from the US and UK who had never been to South America before and who I had to restrain from taking pictures of chickens in people´s back-yards. Then I saw pre-Incan gold artifacts, saw a church that was entirely guilded (like, with gold) on the inside, bought shampoo, bought duck-tape, saw some erotic artwork in a cultural center, found a family of little old people in a sewing shop who SEWED MY COMPLETELY TORN APART SUITCASE BACK TOGETHER FOR 2 DOLLARS (I don´t know what they did to it in the airport, but it was definitely not okay when I got it at the baggage claim), went to a mongolian grill exactly like the one in Seattle (?!?) only with 99 cent cocktails, and did thesis work in a cafe with a girl that I know from Brown who is here for similar reasons to mine. I like Quito a lot. It´s like Cusco but children with finger puppets don´t attack you in the street, which is a plus. Tomorrow by night I´m going to go to Cuenca, and then after that is the long haul to Lima, where I actually know people, which will be nice. I have absolutely no faith that anyone reads this thing anymore. If that isn´t true, inform me. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 15th, 2006
9:45 pm	It feels like a very long time since I've posted. I think it probably has been a rather long time. So I was supposed to leave for Providence at 3 pm, and it's now almost ten and we still haven't left. I'm excited about this whole cross-country road trip. I sort of want it to, like, start maybe, though. I'm ready to be back at school. I want some sort of semblance of a normal life. I want to have to go to class and work and to live somewhere stable. I'm sure I'll regret writing this in a few months. You know what I've been realizing just in the last week. I don't know if there is that essential of a difference between here and where I've been in South America recently, and by that perhaps I really mean between anywhere and anywhere else. I think I've been writing it off for a long time that certain things only happen in magical, far-away places. But just during this last week in Seattle I've had crazy men from Fargo try to dance with me, gotten offered rides home in limos, been chatted with amicably by baristas, been dragged across the street by a woman wearing a party dress yelling "It's time to be bad girls! Let's run against the light!," and even ridden a mechanical bull. I like how I started out talking about how I wanted a normal life and then went off about the limo and the mechanical bull. Nice. But I guess that's part of what I mean. I think I've been selling short the US in terms of quirkiness and, more importantly, openness. Or maybe I've been selling humans short on a global level by not acknowledging that there is a certain base line of insanity and of whimsy everywhere. But we don't pay as much attention when we're at home, or at least I don't. I just saw this French movie called "King of Hearts" about people who during World War I escape from an insane asylum and find their village abandoned, dress up as the townspeople, and proceed to deeply confuse the German soldiers that then invade. It was really moving and made me want to be the kind of crazy where you convince yourself that you are a duchess and tight-rope walk all day or ride on elephants that have escaped from the circus. There is something I'm trying to say, but I'm not seeming to formulate it well, so maybe I should leave it at you should all go rent that movie. I want to leave before the god-damn sun comes up. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 18th, 2006
6:49 pm	So, embarassingly enough, I'm posting to my live journal just to see if this userpic think works. This is the most amazingly self-indulgent picture that I have. I thought everyone should see it. I just got back from San Francisco, where I have definitively decided that I want to live at some point in the uncertain future. There I saw/ran into pretty much everyone from my distant or recent past who I could have conceivably seen. It was pretty awesome. My life has been overtaken by the Skype video-phone. It's great because I get to see Einar everyday, but less great because now I feel like I'm actually having a relationship with my laptop. But everything continues well. I'm so stupidly in love that I think I scare random strangers by blindly grinning in their direction in public places. I hope we can keep this up through the school year. It certainly could be a challenge. And back to translating things for my thesis... (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 7th, 2006
9:07 pm	Going to San Francisco tomorrow! Yay! I'm going to be there until next Saturday the 15th. Yay! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 5th, 2006
12:23 am	So I had a pretty interesting July 4th really. Think party at the house of republican plastic surgeons who spent 200 dollars on fireworks alone. I love this country. That actually wasn't sarcastic at all. I fell asleep last night on the phone with Einar, both of us just listening to each other breathing. I woke up and I felt like we had actually spent the night together, which is maybe why I miss him more today than usual. Things have changed a bit, actually. We had a few really difficult conversations and we decided that we needed to stay together, and he bought me a plane ticket to go to South America at the end of September for 8 or 9 days, and we will see each other in January and spend the month together in Rio and Buenos Aires, and then he promised that he will come to my graduation, meet my family, etc. Crazy. And then the plan is, if all goes well, to live together after I graduate in either Brazil or Argentina, in a place where we can both do things that we really care about. Yeah. It all sounds completely ridiculous and unrealistic and illogical to me, but it feels right and I'll stick with it as long as it continues to feel right. So, that's what's up with me. Happy 4th of July (or 5th, really...) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 28th, 2006
7:30 pm	So, I'm sorry for not having updated recently. This whole being home thing is making me lazy. I am back in Seattle, where the weather has suddenly become fantastic. I am not experiencing as much culture-shock as I was worried about, at least not at first. Slowly certain vague insatisfactions are creeping in. It's a little frustrating how reserved and polite people are, and I can't deal with cars giving me the right of way (it just isn't logical--they're bigger than me and made of metal, why should they stop for me?), and I can't throw the toilet paper in the toilet bowl (it doesn't seem right!) but these things will pass with time. Other than that, I'm doing very well: doing yoga, going to the gym, doing some translations for my theses, seeing people I haven't seen forever, soon I'll start trying to ride my bike and cook regularly. This whole not working this summer thing was the best idea ever. I do miss Einar. We've been having some pretty intense email/phone conversations about how we could live together after I graduate... I don't know. I know it's not very realistic, but people like him don't come along too often. We'll see what happens. I'm exhausted. I'm going to go lie down for a minute before I leave the house again. Oh, and for anyone who feels like calling, my cell is still 206-992-0044. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 10th, 2006
8:10 pm	I really appreciated all the worried comments. No no. When I said I felt like I might marry Einar, I was indeed joking. Although there are moments... So, now he´s here with me in Rio and for some reason since he got here the perpetually dreary winter weather has given way to beautiful days of sunshine. We´re staying in a little hotel, going out to see my friends, going to the beach, walking around in parks, eating lots of churros on the street, getting along still spectacularly... Shoot me, because I don´t know if I deserve this kind of blissful ridiculous tropical vacation and it hurts that it will end so soon. And I´m excited and scared about the possibility of having more chances to be with him in the future, which is something we´ve been talking about a lot in a very loose sort of sense. Oh, god, nobody wants to read this sort of drivel... Well, I´ll be home in 5 and a half days. Crazy, no? (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 6th, 2006
11:08 pm	Tomorrow I´m going to Sao Paulo to meet Einar at the bus station. About three days after our ridiculously tearful goodbye, he called me to tell me that he´d bought plane tickets to fly from Bolivia to Sao Paulo, bussing from Cusco to La Paz (11 hours) and then from Sao Paulo to Rio (6 hours). And that he´d discovered in my brief absense that he really loves me. I decided to do the last leg of the trip with him (hence me going to Sao Paulo in the morning and coming back at night,) and for the next 9 days we´ll be together here in Rio de Janeiro. Crazy, no? Stop me before I marry him... (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 2nd, 2006
12:04 pm	Safely in Rio! I´ll write more later. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 30th, 2006
7:36 pm	So... tomorrow I leave for Rio at 10 in the morning. I´m either far too at peace right now or in total denile about what´s going on. In spite of this vague sensation that my heart might break, I have this weird certainty that everything is okay, that somehow I am on the right path. Even if this can´t last it´s good to know that you can be loved, that you have been loved, and well, and that you can love. Even if it hurts to find exactly what your looking for in the wrong place. (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 28th, 2006
12:30 am	Man, this whole really caring about somebody/falling in love for the first time thing just sucks. Massively. I hate it. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 25th, 2006
7:49 pm	I had this moment this morning where I realized that I was drinking tea, sitting in front of a computer translating the newest book of an Argentine social movement, in the apartment that I live in in Cusco, Peru, looking out the balcony windows at the Andes, with my boyfriend in the next room listening to Brazilian music (and Shakira...) and working on his laptop. I wonder where I thought I would be at 21 years old. I think I hoped I would be right about here. That´s a pretty good feeling really. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 18th, 2006
1:47 pm	Oh wow... So, academically I`ve just wrapped up this year. I put a lot into my independent project and I`m really happy with how it turned out and I think it`s going to make an amazing start for a thesis. I just made a really crazy decision and I`m still reeling from it. I just changed my ticket to stay in Cusco for two more weeks and spend only 11 days in Rio. It hurt a lot to do that, but I think it would hurt even more to leave now. I guess we always fall in love at stupid times and in inconvinient places. I never never never thought I would voluntarily stay in Cusco... I miss home a lot too really. I think the shit is finally hitting the fan--that I`ve put my heart in too many places and people are starting to figure out that I will never really be able to be a permanent part of their lives. And it makes them angry. Well, it makes me angry too god damn it... But that`s life I guess. I`ll write more and be more coherent this weekend. And make some phone calls and write some emails that I really need to. I miss you all terribly. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 14th, 2006
10:18 am	I´m sorry I have fallen off the face of the earth, for those of you to who I have promised emails or phone calls. Next week things will be a bit easier I imagine. Today is bringing to a close probably my most intense week academically and emotionally of this year and maybe college. Tomorrow I leave Cusco in the morning for the tiny little Inca turist town of Ollantaytambo where we do our closing and evaluation session and present our projects. Five days with the group after having spent the last month in my own little Cusco world will be a bit of a shock. Einar is going to come visit me for two days in Ollantaytambo but today is our last real (sort of) normal day together--waking up, watching a movie in bed, eating tomato, cheese and avocado sandwiches. It hurts a lot to think about this whole leaving thing, and I don´t know if it helps or makes it worse that it´s something we don´t talk about. God damn it, I never liked Cusco to begin with! Why should it be hard to say goodbye? And I never fucking really liked Rio either or even Buenos Aires. How can we become so tied to places that hurt us so much? How is it so so easy to love and hate a place at the same time to about the same degree? Gah. I´ll write something more coherent later. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 11th, 2006
3:46 pm	Check on the paper... And we all know what comes next... (1 Comment |Comment on this)