Santiago, Chile – There are many things mi mama taught me – many of which I wasn't prepared to learn until adulthood, but slowly the knowledge seeps into the roots.  One of the most important things she taught me is to be fluent in Spanish. We struggled over it. At school I spoke English, at home, it was only Spanish. She didn't ...

If you saw it coming, then why did you do it? Why did you wait? The four boxes of pizza fell from heaven, slipped right through your fingers while you pecked on your phone, it, too, tumbling to the ground along with your slice half-eaten, the grease making a profile against the brown bag crumpled at the top from your clutching. The whole thing ...

The irony isn't lost on me. I now do temporary work for a company that makes bridges. "Good afternoon, T.Y. Lin. One moment, I'll connect you." T.Y. Lin is a civil and structural engineering firm that did the engineering behind the Rio Dulce bridge, overseen by Chuck Simon who personally flew down to Guatemala when a crack was reported in the bridge. He was met with helicopters ...

We're getting closer to darkness. El Día de Los Muertos reminds us how close we are to that needlehead thinness between living and passing; the passed and the still yet suffering. Two years ago my friend Ellen died in her sleep, bled into herself after many struggles with cancer. I can't imagine her struggling because she smiled through anything. Even pain was a gift ...

The Evolving Internet: Driving Forces, Uncertainties and Four Scenarios to 2025 The Evolving Internet: Driving Forces, Uncertainties and Four Scenarios to with co-authors Enrique Rueda-Sabader, Cisco Systems; Don Derosby, Monitor GBN Monday, October 25th, 4:00pm South Hall, room 202 What will the Internet be like in 2025? How much bigger will it have grown from today's 2 billion users and $3 trillion market? Will it have ...

Liveblog of Patch Comes to Berkeley When: Tuesday, October 19, 12:00 PM Where: North Gate Hall Library A panel of five UC Berkeley J-School grads will talk about their experiences launching local community news sites in the Bay Area for AOL's Patch. Executives from Patch also will discuss opportunities for jobs, internships and freelancing at sites Patch is starting all over the country. Patch. Com, A panel of five UC Berkeley J-School grads will talk ...

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Our bedroom one year ago."][/caption] SF BAY AREA – Waking up in one's own bed after after being away for one year is as close as I'll get to waking up in a time capsule, buried amid the rubble, rain and weeds that grow around it like a rock. I stare at the red room we painted years ago and look around the partial emptiness from a night's worth of unpacking. My little shortwave radio I carry everywhere I roam ...

VENICE – This is as exclusive as it gets: boutique shops, macrobiotic protein-powdered food and women, new fast cars, manicured lawns, hair-sprayed dogs, six-pack torsos and accessories for the accessories. No two people are the same on the Venice Beach boardwalk where entire sections reek of medicinal marijuana stores and people ride their ...

NAVOJOA - The foothills hang on our left forming a striped silhouette of red, to orange, to yellow, blue, darker blue of entering dusk and impending night. We're in the desert and as we drive into the night headed north to Hermosillo we all settle into our cruise control, passing tractor trailers, and hanging in the right lane where random ...

Puebla _ We drove through the mountains of the spirits last night on the heels of tractor-trailers in their nightly journey through the dark winding roads that start outside Cordoba, Mexico. We were the only small car drifting among these giants of the midnight hour carrying double loads slowly in and out the mountain through the autopista to Puebla and Mexico City where we were pushing to arrive, exhausted, delirious and full of adrenaline. Unlike our first trip where we had our CB radio working (our magnetic antennae got stolen the first month in Guatemala) we were not tuned into their ...