Tahoe

Well, it's happened again. Almost two months have gone by without a post. I'm terrible. One of my goals before coming out here was to keep writing entries, no matter how busy I got. I guess I got pretty busy.

Another quarter has begun in the town that is Davis. It's weird how life is divided up into different segments that become so salient in different periods of one's life. Spring quarter 2006. Fall semester 1998. I noticed one time at St. Mary's (college) that when I was taking certain classes, I would often consistently write the wrong dates on my papers--homework, etc. When I was taking chemistry for example, I would mess up the date. I kept wondering why the date was from a particular time period, and then I realized that the dates I was writing were from the semester in high school when I took chemistry. Isn't that weird? Maybe it was just a coincidence. Anyway, yeah, quarters. It isn't even a quarter, really...more of a trimester. I guess they call them quarters because there are summer sessions. But summer is much longer than any of the quarters of the school year, and besides, the are two summer sessions. Shouldn't we be calling them quintiles or something?

I finally went skiing up at a ski resort near Lake Tahoe. The drive up there was absolutely stunning. Ozzie and I took the little white pickup truck that has become our salvation for access to anything remotely exciting, and drove up the mountain to an elevation of about 8,000 ft. There was the one particularly frightening road along the side of the mountain such that I could pretty much look out my passenger window and see straight down over the side of an enormous cliff. It reminded me of that old footage of the car speeding off the side of a mountain into a ravine. I swear Hollywood must have used that same clip for a thousand films. I wonder how many takes it took.

Skiing was blissful...the second day. The first day up I had a problem with my boot. It was just too tight or something and kept crushing my toes. On accident, Ozzie and I took a lift up to an area where there were only black diamond runs. That coupled with the fact that I hadn't skied in about a year and the boot fiasco lead to an interesting ride down the mountain. I basically fell the entire way, and by the time I got down, my feet were hurting so bad I couldn't continue. The next day was much better, though. I got a better pair of boots and ended up skiing for about 5 hours.

We spent one night up there with my friends Chris, Paul, Christin, and Else-Marie. Funnily enough, I had some of the best sushi of my life there in the mountains bordering Nevada. Afterwards, we took a stroll across the border to NV (about 5 blocks from our motel) and visited a few casinos, strategically placed not more than 6 inches from the border. I played a few rounds of blackjack, but in the end, the house just had better luck. Funny that.

I've been trying to follow the various protests around the world. I'm quite concerned about this anti-immigration legislation that the House has put forward, not only making it a felony for undocumented immigrants to be in the country, but criminalizing any attempts by social workers, doctors, nuns, etc. to help them. It's just insane. Various cities across the country have seen the largest ever demonstrations. I guess that's the good news. Hopefully the threat of a political fallout with the legal voting immigrant population will be enough to outweigh the racist, fear-filled, public support of such types of legislation.

And in France, things are really heating up over the proposed legislation to make it legal to fire anyone under the age of 26 within a two-year period of hire without any justification. The protests are becoming reminiscent of the 1968 student uprising in support of workers' rights. Ozzie makes an interesting point that the legislation is intended to decrease unemployment, particularly among young people, 20% of whom are unemployed, (not counting students, I believe) by providing incentive to employers to hire in the first place. He says that in terms of economic history, lessening the restrictions on employers for their hiring practices (increasing flexibility of firing) has indeed, increased employment, and that perhaps the students' protests are misdirected--they should really be protesting the flexibility given to multi-national corporations whose policies threaten the security of jobs by uprooting from countries whose labor laws cramp their style and make it more profitable to do business elsewhere. It's such a complicated issue, but my sense is that allowing a corporation to fire an employee at any point up to two years after hiring them is excessive and could lead to discriminatory firing practices for which there is no oversight or retribution. At this point, I feel myself quite in favor of the protests and I'm on the edge of my seat wondering what will be the ultimate outcome. If nothing else, the French certainly know how to strike. Des greves, they call it. I am all too familiar with the process--when i went there to study in 2002, my university went on strike for over two weeks, taking out all of the desks and chairs from the classroom and piling them from floor to ceiling in front of all the entrances to the buildings. I'll have to see if I can dig out a picture to post. It was great. Oh, that was over an increase in fees, I think, or threats of privatisation of the universities.