This post is kind of boring (ie, There's no Pictures): School, the Underdevelopment Complex, and a delay in Return Date

There’s lots of self-righteous rambling in this post. Beware.

There is a complex. I'm going to call it the “underdeveloped” complex. At the University it seems common: as they are lecturing to you they make subtle but clearly pained reference to the fact that Mexico is “subdesarrollado,” or “underdeveloped.” The scientists hate it. They want expensive equipment and new plant varieties and all that jazz. I have been asked on more than one occasion why I chose to come to a country “less advanced” than my own. What the hell do you say to that? “Advancement” wasn't really what I was thinking of when I came to Mexico; it's not like I'm wondering where the transmogrifier and the flux capacitor are. My stated reason for wanting to come here was that Mexico has the precious resources of diversity and antiquity that my country lacks. Ever since we slaughtered all those native people who actually knew all about the land and what lived on it, we've been shooting ourselves in the foot, land-wise. “Yeah, let's plow the prairie, just like we plowed stuff in Europe!” Hello, Dust Bowl. And today, hello scary rates of soil erosion. That's just one example, but I mean come ON, advancement is just another word for short-term, rapid exploitation resulting ultimately and inevitably in the exhaustion of resources and an import-economy at best, and mass malnutrition or starvation at worst. I was interested in not “going back in time” but seeing how other people have figured things out. Okay, I'll admit I had way more of an image of traditionality than I could ever have found at a university, of course, and I should have seen that coming. I'm really hoping I'll get the chance to go hang out at an autonomous germplasm repository or an indigenous university just to see what's up. I think that new perspectives on what it means to “develop” a society are what we need, not just the further prattling of privileged people who fancy themselves experts. That said! That said, I need to also acknowledge that a position of privilege does not invalidate one's opinion. I think there's a role for everyone here on Spaceship Earth. I just think that there's been a monopoly on “advancement” for way too long and things have got to change and that it's only going to happen if we start shutting up and opening our ears to people who have historically been on the margins. I don't think I even like what “advancement” has entailed up till now. We need to redefine which way is “forward”.

So here's my thing: people think that there's one way and it's called ADVANCEMENT. I think we often put our blinders on... the options for the future are infinite from any point in history. Furthermore, with so many free agents roaming around the planet (there's six billion of us now) we can see a lot of different proceedings into various kinds of futures. I'm really over the SOCIETY mentality that says that all of humanity moves in a giant blob toward one sole future. In a way it's true because we're all sharing the planet, but in another sense that limits our personal and community-scale agency just by believing it: if I'm just a brick in the wall why would I try and create a path or a perspective? I'll just get employed and follow a prevailing logic. Gross.

Something has to change in the collective consciousness such that whatever remnant mental diversity we can scratch out gets cultured and let to grow and talk amongst itself. Don't you think? How else are we going to get out of this sinking ship? TECHNOLOGY is not a single entity either, so if technology holds solutions we need to set out to develop a variety of options from multiple perspectives to actually find solutions that fit individual contexts. One kind of snake oil is not going to fix the ailment.

That`s my trip. But basically when people ask me that, I just say, ‘It isn’t really like that…’ and leave it there.

Enough with that then...

Last week my gang and I went to a sort of underground bar thing after school—major sketchball—they call it the Hotel, because ostensibly the place is a “hotel” and the bar (which is just a big room with a bar behind which are giant boxes of chelas) is ostensibly the “dining room”. Clever. It's run by the family who owns the spot, and it's sort of weird to go to the bathroom because it makes me uncomfortably aware of the fact that this is their house (there's their shampoo, and their soap and toothpaste all in there...). It's pretty funky. In any case, we mixed beer with veggie juice along the lines of “V-8” (sounds weird, tastes good, especially since I don't like most Mexican beers too much). Peter says he likes Indio, and I guess Indio is pretty good. It's nobody's Boont, though. To its credit, it is incredibly cheap, but only because it's so dilute...

Though this weekend I went out with another friend and I think Leon is pretty good. Do they even sell it in the States?

The FESC campus reminds me of a TV high school, lots of low brick buildings and grassy patches with trees; fliers on the walls, courtyards where the students wait around for their perpetually late profs to show up.

I figured out my schedule once and for all today. I dropped my soil science class (in which I was the only student) so I could keep my other six clases (mother of god! It's still a lot now that I say it out-loud-on-paper-on-the-internet). I know you are anxiously awaiting my list of classes, so here it is: Entomology, Advanced Fruit Production, Agriculture in Tropical Zones, Plant Pathology, Genetics, and Field Practicum 4. What's that? You want to know all the boring details of my academic life? Why yes, I will tell you all about it. Entomology is saving me from the hazy ignorance and confusion I acquired in Intro to Biological Control (DON'T take that class, Davisites, unless you already know entomology pretty well. They just make you memorize things that don't make a lot of sense if you aren't already an entomologist). The professor is muy buena onda, very charismatic, perpetually late, and generally appealing and friendly. He relates well with his students and cracks a lot of jokes. But the surprising moment was when he quoted “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” in perfect English: “Assumption, my dear, is the mother of all fuckups.” It was funny twice over because I was the only person in the class who understood. Most classes here at the FESC are divided between practicum and theory; we spend one session a week in the field and one in the classroom. So yesterday we went out collecting bugs. The whole thing started like this: he tells us we have to form groups by Monday. One of the kids from class, who's also one of the four students in my genetics class, asked if I wanted to join his group. The new kid does not say no to invitations. So we get together and have to figure out how to divvy up the prep work: making a net, getting jars and alcohol. I should mention that all the kids in this class are in their fifth semester, so all younger. My group is a bunch of boys and me. Oy vey. But anyway, we wind up with a net made from a mop handle, the reinforced top-three-inches of a five-gallon bucket, steel wire, and some tulle. It's pretty impressive. But here is the point: here the students are expected to be resourceful, which I think is really cool. It clearly fits in the culture... and I really feel comfortable with that—except that I don't know how to be resourceful yet, as I just got here... So at times I feel sort of useless (exhibit A, not doing a damn thing to make the net), but still I like the system. We caught a ton of cool looking bugs; I learned how to kill a butterfly; I got to peel apart a bunch of corn plants looking for beetles, and best of all we called it Science. So that's entomology. My fruit production professor is this tall (by Mexican standards—I am such a freak here) skinny, cigarette-smoking wrinkled, five-o'clock-shadowed guy who reminds me in his personality of one of those sheep-herding dogs with their eyes all different colors, and they're kind of slinky and a little bit crazy and sometimes they run around all fast and then just stop for no apparent reason and look around like something just happened... that's what he's like. He's a fruit guru, what do you want? I like his class a lot. He's really into weather monitoring and “agrometeorology” which at Davis doesn't exist but here it does. He has three weather monitoring systems in the brand new FESC orchard, one of which was developed at UCD. He also arrives perpetually late to class. But his lectures are really good and it's worth the wait. He cares SO MUCH about fruit production, and has a ton of stories and such that he throws out there from time to time. It's also an itty bitty class: me and a girl who is serious and very smart and broke her foot at football practice (yes, this school has football-- and for women!), and two other girls. I offered to help the professor out in the orchard since he manages it all alone, with whatever help he can scrape out of the students, so that`s where I`ll be on Thursday mornings. So that's fruit. Tropical Zones is way cool. The prof is this short round little lady who's very energetic and, like all my other professors (who appear generally of the same age range, 40-50), herself graduated from FESC. She talks super fast but she's always checking in with me to see if I get it. This is another tiny class: we're 6. That's the tropics. Genetics is tiny too, we're five, and it's too dull for detail work, but Plant Path deserves a blurb. There are two professors, one for practicum and one for theory. I sense that there is some kind of conflict going on among the two of them, which is sort of awkward, though it's appeared to have died down; they were double-booked for teaching the class, so there was some kind of spat about that, but there was pretext that never got explained too well. It's usually best not to ask about politics. You don't want to know. Anyway it seems like it will be a lot of work, but we get to do cool stuff in the lab, so that's fun.

Can I just say how much I like this education system? I like it an awful lot. Why doesn't Davis do this? When you start off, you choose your major and they tell you which courses you're going to take every semester, with very limited wiggle room. At some point you choose an orientation within your major, and later, a specialty within that orientation. It's a cohort system. I think it makes the University able to direct your learning so that it's cohesive and makes sense, and you have a community of students with the same experiences to help you out. Everyone knows all the professors, and the classes aren't ever bigger than 20 or so. It's a good education. Furthermore, they get you out in the world. Every year the whole class goes on a mass field trip for their Practicum class, and they all have to not only visit all these places, but each team gets deposited for a few days in a spot of their choosing (resulting from a semester's worth of research) to work on a project, which they summarize and present at the end of the trip. So the practicum that I'm taking is the last in the series, and they take you to Tabasco, Chiapas, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo, for 19 days in January.

Which leads me to my next point: it looks like I can graduate here. Ha. How nuts. Last semester of my college career. I was pretty sure it was never going to end. So since I'm going on this field trip I'm going to be coming home a little later than advertised, likely in late January. I might come visit for Christmas though, because I would probably be the only person on my own in an extremely Catholic country. Just so you know. Maya, I'm still down to be your roommate as of February. We could go live in the Bay too if you want.

NOTICE: to all Spanish speaking people who may be reading this blog: is there a word in Spanish for “sketch,” as in “sketchy” or “sketchball”? I keep wanting to call stuff sketchy but don't know the word. “Creepy” is another important one.

Next time, a short history of the FESC.