Well, when I was in Peru this summer, single handedly responsible for these people's surival...

Today we went to this art museum called The Capilla Del Hombre In most museums you find yourself walking through, you are lucky if you encounter two or three paintings filled with direct, powerful, raw emotion in a two hour tour. That is not to say that paintings of more soft, rounded, refined styles lack the ability to arouse our emotions, or are of a lesser quality, it is just to point out the difference in the two.


These raw, direct images do not rely on subtle symbolism or traditional aesthetic beauty to engage their viewer, rather they bombard them with bold, powerful, stomach wrenching images of naked emotion.

Imagine walking into a museum, and seeing Guernica’s in every direction you looked. Its like seeing a 20-ton semi truck of excruciating agony bear down on you with its headlights flashing and horn blaring. It is the Capilla Del Hombre.

For me personally, it is a lot like watching a violent summer storm from the safety of your home. You see all the torrential pain, the violent suffering, and tears raining down. You know full well how powerful it is. But in the end there are four walls and a roof separating you from being truly immersed in it. There is no way I could ever comprehend or fully relate to the suffering depicted in this paintings, not with the life I have had.

Anyway, I would also like to take this opportunity to do a fair bit of ranting about the other kids in my program, god forbid any of them or their friends ever see this.

I am quite sad to say that over the first week or so of interacting with them, I have found them to be of the most odiously annoying type of people: The self-centered elitist pseudo-intellectual. You know, the infuriating kids who feel the need to begin every sentence by mentioning their latest humanitarian exploit.


Now you might say I’m being a wee bit judgmental here. Fair play, that is a (remote) possibility (verrrrrry remote)….(Did I mention it’s not likely?) However, I doubt a single one of you read that sentence without experiencing some sort of flashback or feeling of recognition. That being said, you can always tell the phonies and the genuine ones apart. The genuine ones speak about their experiences sparingly, and always with unequivocally genuine emotion. The phonies speak about it every chance they get, in painfully obvious attempts to attract praise and admiration from their peers. The experience itself was not enough for them. They did not do it because of some genuine, intrinsic motivation, but so that everyone else would know they did it; would know that they were an upstanding, compassionate humanitarian, would know that they were a better person than everyone else. This, in my eyes, is the epitome of shallow. It is similar, in a way, to how political regimes, like those of Joseph Stalin or Fidel Castro, try so ferociously to be so extremely left, they end up on the right; Those who try to force themselves to be profound, are in truth, shallow. No matter how many indigenous villages they visit, or street urchins they teach to read, they will never feel fulfilled. As long as these experiences are founded on shallow desires, they will act like grains of sand sifting through your hand, or, more deliciously, cotton candy dissolving infuriatingly into nothingness inside your mouth.

Just my 2 cents, which I know you all loveeeee to hear almost as much as I love to give it. I also thought up this neat little proverb-sounding….proverb?
“ A boring and shallow person who does exciting and profound things is still boring and shallow.”

Now. I’m not going to make you all refer to me as Confucius from hence forth, but if you want to, I can’t say I blame you.