The Environment

I’m pretty away from green. I don’t have any practice that you could call “environment-friendly”. It is not really my subject, I think. But of course I try to do my part, by not throwing away my garbage on the streets, but I think that’s nothing, that’s not a real change because of two reasons: Firstly it is such a small action that do not change the wider reality (as the sociologist-to-be that I am, I don’t believe that individual actions are that important) and secondly I think that you don’t help the environment by throwing the stuff you don’t need in the garbage, you help it by recycling your garbage. And that’s the subject I prefer.

I personally don’t recycle much. I don’t know where to put my garbage in, and I don’t make the effort to know where to put it. The only things that I recycle are batteries, that’s because when I was in school, one time someone older than me gave a class about the environment and show to me and my class videos and pictures of the damages that causes one battery to the animals and to the location. But that’s the only thing that I do.

I would love to use a bike instead of public transportation, but I have bad luck with bikes, every bike that I had was stolen from me. It is just sad because it would keep me in better shape and it would be less harming to the environment, the problem is that some studies have said that people that transports their selves in bikes, across cities as polluted as Santiago put in danger their health because of the contamination.

About tree-huggers I think they are insane, because we all need wood for something, to light up fires, to build furniture, houses, and other things. I don’t believe that nature has feelings, and assume that it has I think is insane. It’s like vegetarians, I just don’t get it, I love meat and I could never give it in.

Books :)

I loved literature! Yes I said it in past tense, because of one thing: studying sociology has taken from me the interest on literature books. Now when I go to a bookstore I just focalized on the sociological books, not the poetry, historical or literature books. But in summertime this tendency changes, I read other kind of books depending of my interests in that time. For example last summer I read Latin American authors from the twentieth century (like Gabriel García Marquez, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Maria Luisa Bombal and Juan Rulfo). And the summer before that I read classical authors as Shakespeare, Chéjov, Tolstoi and Dostoievski. But that’s the only time of the year that I read literature books.

My mom tried to incentive my reading habits when I was a child, she used to take me and my brothers to the public library to look for a book to read. Since that time the books have had a special place in my life.

My favorite book from all times is “the perfume”. An art piece written by Patrick Süskind. I remember that I didn’t want to finish the book, I wanted to read it forever, but obviously that didn’t happened and I finished it and I got obsessed with the story, I started to smell things different, just like the principal character.

The Last book I read was ‘the kiss of the spiderwoman’ from Puig, it took me forever to finish it because the book got lost during the summer, I started to read it in December and in February I found it and finished it. The story is about two prisoners that share a cell together and tell each other stories, that way the time goes faster and they don’t lose their minds. Extremely recommended!

I think this summer I will meet Roberto Bolaño, I have received great comments about his books.

The Zesh Rehman Foundation

The article I’m going to tell you about consists in a foundation created by a famous football player named Zesh Rehman, he is the captain of Bradford City in England. He is 26 years old and is the only Asian man to play in all four divisions of the English game, including the Premier League.

His childhood was hard; the beginning of his football life wasn’t easy either. Because of the social limits that are imposed over the Asian boys that make nearly impossible to be a professional football player in Britain. Regardless of the hard obstacles he became the first and only Asian man that plays in the football league of Britain, all this because of his hard work and perseveration.

Now he's offering help to youngsters from similar backgrounds who might want to follow in his footholds by the creation of the ‘Zesh Rehman Foundation’. The aims of this foundation are in one hand: support the kids that have Asian heritage and in the other hand: wants to encourage football as a "pathway to community cohesion" between kids from different cultures. A sociological initiative that helps to overcome the fragmentation and discrimination of the Britain society.

You can read the whole article in :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/13/zesh-rehman-football-asian-community