January, 30 2002 - I just got through listening to Faith No More. They were cool. I like it when I hear certain music that gives me memories of the time it came out. I get that feeling with Faith No More, but I also get that feeling with Cafe Tacuba, NWA, Journey, and Cindy Lauper. It makes me think of listening to the radio in the car on the way to school, borrowing a friend's tape to hear the newest thing everyone's talking about, or being in studio class in high school with my headphones on while working on those crazy little white boxes.

I guess that means I'm getting old when I start having memories like that. My parents used to ask us why we liked "oldies" music and classic rock. She said she though it was weird because whe she listenes to it, she has memories associated with it. I told her that becuase to us, it's new music that doesn't sound like the stuff they play on the top 40's-type of radio. Not only that, but they're also like relics to us. They're like windows into the past or something.

January, 27 2002 - Last night was fun. We went to take my car for repairs, but they said I would have to go back Monday, so they said they would give me a free rental car for the day. After not having to be at the mechanic all day, me and Sarah left and had a good lunch at Luby's and went to look at computer stuff. We went to the Compaq Factory outlet, but there was nothing good in my price range, so we went to Fry's Electronics next door. It was a crazy, ultra-consumer-oriented place, but there was so much to see and shop for. I had been needing a monitor, so we got one. It took forever because the place was so packed that I couldn't find a sales person to help me out. But I finally got it and we got a few more small things and left relatively satisfied.

Then we went out with Lordy so that he could try out his new cue stick. We ate dinner, first, at Correli's. We had some good wine and the food was pretty good. Then we went to Slick Willie's to play pool. Me and Lordy got some beers and all three of us played lots of games of nine-ball. There was some kinda crazy guy on an intercom inside the pool hall announcing specials and crazy door prizes or something. There was also this server that came around to everyone's table offereing two-dollar shots. Lordy and Sarah convinced me to get one, and Lordy needed no convincing. I got a "silk panties" (they picked it out for me), which was vodka and peach schnopps. It was damn good. so we played some more pool and had some more beers and then went to drop off Lordy at home. We got down at Lordy's house and talked for a little while. Then Lordy offered some beer he had at his house... Sarah said she was cool if I did, so I drank some beer with him. We listened to music and talked some more, until finally, it was too late and we fely like going home. Sarah didn't drink but a wine at dinner, so she drove home. I hadn't realized how many beers I had until the next morning. But it was worth it. It's always fun when we get to hang out with Lordy. It's also always so expensive, but always worth it.

January, 25 2002 - HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MIKEY !!

January, 20 2002 - Anyone have an opinion of Enron? How about the new LULAC/NAACP partnership? The split Hispanic vote in Houston? lemme know what you think. comments

January, 17 2002 - Does anyone know when the democratic primaries for the governer's race will be? I can't seem to find out anywhere. Lemme know, huh?

January, 14 2002 - Eradicating our current grade system in public schools is a good idea, but I beleive it's a little too idealistic. Not that it's bad, only very ambitious. Everything seems to revolve around grades as a system of measurement. We try to use grades and standardize tests to hold administrators and educators accountable. If we removed the system of grades and began to actually teach our children and actually give emphasis on learning, then we wouldn't have a broad, beaurocratic, inefficient, and unecessarily ethnocentric way of measuring our child's progress. The school board would have no way of keeping tabs on which school to keep down by refusing funds to it, and which principals to award with new cars and cash raises becuase they happened to inherit a school that already had good parent participation and a student body that conforms to the "all-american" standard so all they had to do is maintain the status quo in order to keep getting those test scores becuase the students that don't get the right scores can be sent to worse, underfunded schools, keeping the already priveliged class untainted.

I know that was a bit sarcastic and cynical, but I have real issues with the public education system. I believe that everyone deserves equal access to a good education which can lead to opportunites. It's a hard thing, though, to provide education for the sake of education. Right now, education is only really provided to the public in order to train a defualt workforce, indoctrinate children in the policies that the oldr, law-making generation want them to learn, and is still used to force the beginnnings of assimilation into the idea of the American "Melting Pot", which is actually just an idea that hopes to assimalte non-anglo-americans into the anglo-american society, which is actually just brain-washing rahter that "melting". Okay, so I have issues with that too.

This is why I think we should have good public schools available to everyone (the indoctrination is inevitable), but without the prevelent idea that only the best students can go to college and that college is just a place to go to get a better job. Just getting a job is okay, but I think there also should be more emphasis on owning a business (especially in lower-icome areas) and having a love for learning, and your love learning being your real reason for going on to higher education. You get more out of school if you're going to learn, anyway, rather than just going to rack up grades. Yes, I think all three ideas; business ownership, career advancement, AND a love of learning should be emphasized, and I think that different students will pickup on different ways of approaching their education. This, I think, can reform public education in a small way, and in a good way.

January, 10 2002 - While we were in San Francisco, Sarah and I were talking about the way we find SF compared to what we think of Houston. I told her that I liked SF's urban clutter much better than Houston's urban sprawl. I liked the way houses were build, with living space above a garage or business, instead of a house with a yard and detached garage in a very urban area. I also liked the way the city seems to have been planned; very orderly compared to Houston's seemingly haphazard, unzoned developement that continues to be abandonned by the upper class for the next further developement into the rurual areas.

We talked about the inevitable regentrification of the neighborhoods araound downtown Houston. Sarah said she heard that someone wants to make Fulton a very big commercial street. Which sounds good to me, if it were filled with neighborhood businesses, butI know that's not waht they're talking about. They (you know, "they") want to build a nice commercial "zone" - which is probably going to be the "la zona rosa" idea that they tried a few years back that never panned out. The purpose will be to get some middle class business into the neighborhood so that more middle class people will move in, try to renovate old houses or build new developemnets on demolished property, raise property taxes to drive out the poorest residents, so that they can regentrify the neighborhood for a middle-class work force that will be employed in nearby downtown, thus giving fuel to Bob Lanier's downtown renovation dream. It's not just Northside, but first ward, sixth ward are under the same pressure. It's no gonna be nice for the consumer-working-class when all the construction is done and all the neighborhoods are zoned and reconstructed, but I can't reconcile the fact that the lower working class will have to be displaced during the process.

Sarah asked me how I think I could make it better. All I could say was that I'd like to see all classes of people having equal access to education and job opprtunity, which I don't believe exists right now. I want everyone to have the opportunity to start a business if they need to and have the education to know how to go about getting a loan and then having equal access to low-interest loans for poor people starting out. I don't believe that poor people are poor by their own fault, but I do believe that you can work your way out of poverty. But I also believe that some classes of society are systematically denied acces to the basic necessities of life, making it twice as hard for those people to work themselves up. My solution would be to remove those barriers. The big problem is identifying them and then figuring out how to remove them once you find them.

January, 8 2002 - We're back from vacation and everything is good. Man, San Franciso is a nice, niiiice place. I like the way the city looks with the hills and the cable cars running through blocks of buildings that have commercial or garage space on the bottom and living space on top. It's such an easy city to move around in. That's compared to Houston, though. In Houston, you really need a car. You could do without one if you're lucky and live near enough to or on a bus route to where you work, but if you wanna go anywhere else with any kind of ease, you can't do it without a car. But with San Fransico, I could see how you could live in that city and never need a car. I could be wrong, though. It just semed like there was so much more pedestrian traffic throughout the whole city, and that made it easier for businesses becuase you could have more stop-in customers and you wouldn't need to lease a huge piece of land that includes a fifty-car parking lot. Most of the restaurants we went to had no more than about ten tables and still seemed to able to accomodate everyone without a long wait-line. I was so impressed with it. I could live there.

We didn't just stay in the city, though. We ventured out, one day, through Sausalito to the Muir Woods Redwood Preserve. It was beautiful. We felt so small compared to those trees. They had a couple of long hiking trails to go down. We went down the Ben Johnson trail - actually, I shoud say we went UP the trail. It went up hill for miles, it seemed. After about an hour of walking, I couldn't take anymore, and we had to turn back. I was kinda sad cause I had punked out on Sarah like that. But I still had a little bit of a cold and she understood that anymore would be too much for me. After that we went to Stinson Beach and walked around even though it was cold. There are Hills everywhere in that part of California. There were even a few cliffs by the beach. I couldn't imagine what life must be like there in those little towns. I can't imagine living so close to such a nice beach (not dirtry like Galveston) and among so much three-dimensional land with all those hills (not flat like Houston). Not even Austin and the Hill country could compare to it. I feel like I came back home to a desolate desert-prarie. It was also so depressing on the way home because we went through The airport in SF and it was all nice and bright, with coffee shops and restaurants and moving walkways and flat-screen monitors at all the counters to tell you what flight you're on and what the weather is like at your destination. Then we got off at Bush IAH, and it was such a nasty airport in comparision. Everything looked at least twenty years old and was dirty and faded and all the employees looked either apatheitic, or over-stressed. There were only a few food counters that looked like pitiful ballpark concession stands at the Astrodome, complete with raoches crawling on the bins of sugar and coffe-creamer. It was like going to the Galleria, and ending up at Northline Mall.

But then we finally got home, saw all our family, slept in our own, soft, warm bed, and it was worth coming home. I'll try to get the pictures up soon.