This academic year that goes by

This commentary is a brief review of my current school year. Starting this academic year was, certainly, a challenge itself. Firstly, the course's structure causes that, during the first two years, a common cycle takes effect, so I have to attend irrelevant subject classes on a major or lesser basis to my future specific choice, subjects on which, mainly, I'm not an expert (actually I'm pretty inexperienced). And the performance that I show in both semesters was measured in that way.
First semester: It was a balanced semester academically. There were varied subject and content. To course Anthropology 3 was truly a challenge and by judging the opinion of the author and the various classmates, it deserves the category of "a whole semester for itself". In that course, was tested all of our capacity of analysis and composition of complex judgments, but nothing far-fetched or absurd, to the service of the materialistic anthropology. Personally, I had plenty of troubles with the teaching way of the Professor Aedo, the excessive criticism that he showed on every aspect of our learning. With time I understood how useful it was, and, reluctantly and secretly, I thanked him for his emphasis on our thoroughness.
Second semester: The only way that I can use to describe the subjects of this term without use swear words, would be defining them as a bunch of very similar subjects... All of them, excluding the Subject of Elaboration of Projects in social investigation, in charge of the Professor Patricio Tudela. This professor is very exigent and is usually making criticisms to our projects, but this subject is one of those pieces of knowledge that will be absolutely useful for us along the exercise of our career, whichever is the specialty that we pick.
In brief, the current academic year has been a year to make efforts, to stop of make illusions to ourselves about the image that we had of Anthropology as a discipline that uses to make depictions and lacks of formality. This year has been a year to learn how to survive by our own ways in this jungle of specialists, geniuses, selfish people, and mad scientists that inhabit in the faculty, and the anthropology division. My vision of my own academic performance is that could have been better, I could have made mayor efforts to get good marks, I could have made better a lot of things, but personally I’m satisfied because I finished every single subject with dignity, whithout delay and I don’t have subjects unfinished. Now I just have to wait for the next academic year, and the beginning of a new evaluation about it.

anthropology: what the dreams are made of.

I think it’s a fact that no one can survive by doing only what he or she loves the most (or that means you are the luckiest guy on earth, which is quite improbable) so we always have to choose between being extremely happy by doing what we want or make something that we don’t love that much but that will provide us enough money to survive.
Such is the case when you choose to study and work in anthropology. There’s not much work field in this country for anthropologists and archaeologists, basically because we have to be honest: nobody knows what the hell we are doing.
That makes quite hard to find a work as an anthropologist or archaeologist, and basically has to do with the fact that there’s not a preoccupation for teach, at the university, what make anthropologists special between the rest of social scientists (by the way, that thing that make us special is to consider the cultural factor when explaining social behavior and practices), so when an anthropology student is searching for a work, he or she doesn’t know how to explain what makes them a good acquisition.
In my personal experience, I had plenty of certainty that I wasn’t going to make any money by being archaeologist (the main reason why I decided to sign in the degree) and that my only chance to find a work was in a University-related project (if I was lucky and had enough determination to not to quite the degree at first year) or if I was even more lucky, hoping that the architects that my mother works with would recruit me to work in issues environmental-impact-related with their building projects.
Now is quite different because there’s a third option at the degree: Physical anthropology or biological anthropology. I didn’t like its field very much, basically because I thought it was very mathematics-related. But this term I’ve been working at the physical anthropology laboratory and I really like what they do there, especially the phylogenetic study. The best of this new (new for me) option to considerate is that I even could have a good payment by working in specific fields like forensic anthropology. Nevertheless I think that I would study archaeology no matter how hard it would be (which proves that I’m quite stubborn).
That’s all for this post. Be good and take care.

about my university

I’m not really sure about the administrative situation in my university, basically because the most of the time I’m here, I’m studying, playing in my NDS, looking for the texts I have to read or working at the biological anthropology laboratory.
I guess that’s for this reason that the things I think that need improvement, are things related with the laboratory and the way that we have to work in [because is the university instance where I participate with other people the most]. For example, there are neither labels nor materials to label the boxes at the underground storage, and the collections are in a complete mess because of that, including boxes that disappeared forever or that suddenly are empty in the middle of the corridor.
The first step to deal with the situation is to recognize that there’s a problem and in this case is a priority to save the bones’ collection, and the artifacts’ collection from getting rotten or suffer any kind of damage. Unfortunately only the people that face the problem directly every day [like the people from the laboratory or even the students] know how serious this is. The real benefits of improve this situation are pretty obvious:
- I t would be easier identify some specific pieces of bone material amongst the whole register.
- It would be easier to localize specific pieces to analysis and research.
- There would be a better register of how many materials to work with we have.
- There could be more publications about researches that are made in a well conserved material.
About the next step? I don’t know, but first we have to start by organizing everything.
See ya.

A song that you lol

Hello everybody, today’s post will be about music. Although I really like the subject of the post [I even voted for it], I don’t know from where to start writing about, so I guess I will make an exception in my habits and will follow the suggested order of questions-answers.
I have a really assorted set list of music that I like, from Hard Rock to electronic Japanese remixes from indie videogames, including tango, Tchaikovsky and some songs just for joking with my friends [such as Samwell and Günter’s stuff… or Chocolate rain that gives me lots of laugh when I listen to] so I only can think about a criteria to pick what not to listen to: I don’t like tropical music, or reggaeton [I’m not really sure how to write it, anyway], and boleros, I hate boleros with all my heart.

As my tastes are really assorted, I really haven’t a single favorite band or singer, so I’ll try to write about a few choices from East and West.

- Guns N’ Roses: My favorite rock n’ roll band ever. I know every single song they released, every single solo project they tried to do and I guess you get the concept of how much I love them. I love how much strength they used to put in all of their concerts, songs and statements. I can’t think about only one favorite song, but I guess that the one I listen to the most is Locomotive.

- Miyavi: Also known as MYV or Ore-sama [Lord]. My Japanese deity. I like how elegant and original he is in every aspect of his music. He uses to say that there’re no cannons to make styles of music and that it’s okay if we put together rock, kabuki and rap at the same time. My favorite song of him: Kimi ni negai wo [When I wish upon you]

- Aerosmith: My second favorite band, and I guess that’s the only rock n’ roll band that I like and that still alive now on. I love the exotic mixtures they do in their songs, and the awesome Steven Tyler’s voice. I love Get a Grip.

- IOSYS: Is a Japanese music ensemble, they basically make independent music remixes for several games, such as Touhou [my favorite game, by the way]. I love how they can put together the artistic sense of music with tons of inner jokes about the subject of the game. My favorite song of them: Fragance of Oriental Sunflower

And I exceeded the amount of words for this post, so adieu~~.

Huge pizza is huge

Hello everybody! Today we had to pick one topic to write about, and the chosen one is as follows: “Good Food”
To pick a favorite food it’s kinda a hard task for me, not because I like too much kinds of food, but basically because I usually don’t notice that much what I’m eating (I mean, you can give me a dish full of spaghetti and worms and I would never notice the difference), especially if I’m hungry (like when I wake up or after a marathon of Harvest Moon in my DS lite, or after take care of my two nephews).
But there’s a dish that’s particularly tasty for me, in every combination of ingredients: That’s pizza. It’s easy to cook, easy to buy, easy to eat and is an awesome way to make a break when I’m playing videogames with Za Girudu (“The Guild”, also known as my group of friends). For that reason, eating pizza is also a motive of reunion and share with friends and beloved ones. In one opportunity, one of our friends (Rosa) came to my house at 3:00 a.m. from her work at a restaurant and brought a huge pizza (huge pizza is huge, bleargh) full of stew, cheese, onions, tomatoes, and even more cheese.
Nevertheless I can cook, and I’m not as fail as you can think after you know about my silly taste with spaghetti. When I was about 12 years and my father was living with us, he taught me how to make simple meals to our big family. These are not master pieces but I can help my mom if it’s necessary, or feed to my lazy friends that really don’t even have idea how to peel tomatoes.
Geez, I think that’s almost all I have to say about pizza as my favorite meal or something like that, so now I'm gonna choose an awesome 3 course meal tehehe:

-As starter, I'd like miso soup.

-As main course I want avocado rolls (basically your sushi of always, but with avocado)

-As dessert, I want cherry pie (i think)

Ok, that was quite simple, but consider that I like pizza.

Bye bee~

Addictions

This week I have to write about addictions, specifically, my addictions. I’ve been addicted to many things along my life, but what has remained until the present days is my addiction for videogames. Everything started when I was seven years and arrived to Chile pokemon. I always was left in home alone, because my parents worked and I always was bored, never had pretty much to do, so I really liked to role, being someone with an excitant life, having adventures, fighting and wining.

Gradually I was more and more interested in playing and less interested in have friends in real life (although I never had too much friends). Then I became bored with pokemon and started to play strategy games, such as Age of Empires (In order to play this kind of games, when I was thirteen I had to learn some basic concepts about how to improve my computer) Certainly I learnt much about World History at this rate hahaha.

As I never had any problems at school, and my marks were always high, my parents didn’t notice I had a sort of “problem”.

When I was fifteen I knew I had a problem and didn’t play anything for almost one year. But I knew that the issue was to control the addiction and not just to run away, especially if wanted to have a friend sometime (?) so I decided to have certain times to play as a reward after to share time with real people (for example, here, at the university) although I still haven’t get used to this half life. Nevertheless I’ve met really good friends through online videogames, even my current boyfriend, and in real life they give me even more support than other people would do.

Transantiago =__=

I’ve always studied far from my house, so I’ve always got to move through the entire city in order to arrive to school.

First we had the “yellow buses transport system”. Its main problem was the buses’ conditions: They often got stuck at the half of the road and then you had to wait for another bus which could arrive almost 30 minutes after. Besides, they used to smell like something was in flames.

Then the government decided to change this system for the current one: Transantiago. Everybody expected for a better public transport system and not to have to travel like cattle. At the beginning it seemed it was the same system that we had, the same uncomfortable way to travel big distances but now with larger buses so there could be even more people stuck at the same time. The same occurred at the subway in the morning and the afternoon. Everybody complained, but gradually we started to get used again to the lack of enough buses, to have to cross big distances in the same bus (the so called “buses troncales” or main buses) or even to have only one number of bus that takes you home.

I personally think that all the money the public transport system busyness men use to improve their own life style could be used to improve something that’s everyone’s property.