Last day of class

Today is the last day of class and I have to say I am relieved. The course has not been all I was hop­ing. It is sort of over­whelm­ing and dis­or­ga­nized, so I am feel­ing my burn out from the spring semes­ter just seep into my sum­mer. I think that this intro­duc­tion to Rio will be very use­ful in the future, but at present I am hav­ing a hard time mak­ing sense of it or focus­ing on what to work on. As much as I want a break, the unfor­giv­ing worka­holic in me won’t allow for it. humph.…

I still want to get my ars to capoeira. And I am think­ing it would be a bet­ter idea to hang out with the kids at Nos do Cin­ema for my last two weeks here. This project is a spin off of the crew that put together City of God, now teach­ing film mak­ing and ani­ma­tion to young peo­ple from favela com­mu­ni­ties, giv­ing them tools to boost their self-esteem and crit­i­cally exam­ine issues they face. I think tag­ging along with ener­getic, cre­ative teenagers will get my spir­its up. I was talk­ing to Leon, another class mate, about ideas I have for work­ing with the youth home­less orga­ni­za­tions in NYC around media pol­icy and media mak­ing. He said that he likes work­ing with peo­ple my age and younger because there is a cer­tain flu­idar­ity and adapt­abil­ity, espe­cially among the queer kids (who make up as much as 40% of the home­less youth in NYC). This gets lost when the queer kids grow up, and loy­al­ties and class stan­dards set in. This is exactly why I appre­ci­ated the crowd at the drop in cen­ter I pho­tographed at a bit in the spring. (I think I am hav­ing a Peter Pan moment)

Shoot, time to go to class again. I have no patience for blog­ging in the evening, so these entries end up abruptly cut off.

Tchau!