Week 1: Bring on the Classes!

So I'm sitting here Monday afternoon after my first class, waiting to get ready to tutor and give a few classes tonight.  My first Spanish-language, three-hour seminar went pretty well... for those of you who know me at Pitt, I like to participate in class.  In Spanish, it's no different, just with a little bit of a language barrier.  However, as the topic was public policy, the professor pointed to me a couple times to explain how our system is a little different from the Colombian one.

Beyond that, I had to do some errands today.  One fun thing about Colombia is that apparently the visa isn't enough to be able to stay here more than three months:  in fact, you have to obtain an alien resident card (cédula de extranjería).  Fortunately, the international coordinators at UniAndes gave us a neat little list of things to pick up in order to facilitate the process, so I spent a good chunk of the afternoon moving back and forth between Chapinero to get what I needed.  On top of a pretty hefty money order, I had to get new passport pictures done and practically my whole passport relative to Colombia photocopied.  After it was all said and done, I lost a good chunk of change; however, if that's the most I have to spend here, I'll take it.

Today was an absolutely beautiful day here... upper-60's, partly cloudy, and a slight breeze as I walked to class this morning.  Once I'm totally accustomed to the air, this should be a pretty nice weekly routine.  I've been up since about 5:10 this morning, as I had a 7:00am class, so it was an early ride on the Transmilenio.  Though I didn't board at any "peak hour," I found myself crammed on a J bus on the way to school.  From about Calle 26 to the school (Calle 17), I thought for sure I was going to lose my backpack, as I had it low on my body and in my hand, crammed between at least two people.  Fortunately, however, nothing happened, and I made it to class about 10 minutes early.

Tomorrow I don't have class.  My schedule works out that I have two morning classes (Monday and Thursday, 7:00am) and one evening class (Wednesday, 5:00pm). Therefore, after getting my cédula, which I hope doesn't take long, I should have nothing to do.  I'm gonna have to try to find a laundry place, as I'm running low on clean clothes.  Apparently I missed the people who take the entire apartment's laundry and cleans it.  At any rate, I should be fine.  As long as I get my clothes back by Thursday, heck... I might even hike it up to the UniAndes gym after my Thursday class!  That's it for today:  talk to you all later!

Two Days of Orientation, One to Go!

Hello again!  I have a nice big window from my apartment, so I decided to snap a picture with my phone yesterday morning.  During the past couple days, I have been at orientation for UniAndes.  The ride to La Candelaria isn't terrible from Chapinero, but it is a long one, and you have to make a connection in between.  Fortunately, I have a couple helpful friends, and one printed off a trip plan for me to get back and forth.  Arriving at UniAndes, one can't help but notice that it's built on a hill - Pittsburgh, you've struck back, you little devil...

This is a bird's eye view of the campus (near) and downtown, from one of the higher points on the UniAndes campus.  Fortunately, like Pittsburgh, it's got a series of pathways and stairwells that make the campus navigable.  There are over 80 buildings at UniAndes, and I believe most of my classes are in the same area, which saves dozens of awkward questions to German Shepherd-wielding policemen on campus.  That's the other thing:  UniAndes has a lot of security guards.  I know the neighborhood UniAndes is in isn't the best in terms of crime, but I'm glad to see that almost everywhere you look, there's a policeman or private security guard watching.

I've also had the chance to get to know the group better.  I am one of two Americans among the ranks of exchange students this semester, and at least 1/3 of our group is French.  We have a few Australians, as well as at least one from Brazil.  It seems quite common, after a couple days here, to grab a beer after class, so I've had the chance to meet more people along the way.  Aside from another doctoral student, I'm the only one I know of in the political science track, but I'm sure that will change once I sit in classes and see other foreign students.  

Other than that, I don't really have much to comment on today.  I saw rain for the first time, albeit a small sprinkle.  I'm told to watch out more for that as the semester goes on.  I'll try to post something tomorrow as well; hopefully I have the chance to enjoy the afternoon with friends and good food!  We'll see.  Have a good night, everyone!

A New Chapter, A New Country, A New Blog

Hi, everyone!  A warm Good Morning from beautiful, Bogotá, Colombia (adjectives interchangeable)!  It's my second morning here, and I've really got nothing to do until an afternoon orientation session, so I figured I would update you all on how it's going so far.  It was a heck of a day trip to get down here - roughly 7:00am to 11:00pm Monday night I moved between three airports - picking up nuggets of wisdom along the way.  I learned off the bat, quite bluntly, never to travel internationally using United.  Five months of my life simply wasn't going to fit in a fifty pound checked bag, a backpack, and a newly purchased duffel bag to transfer important clothing that put my checked bag over the limit.  Where I would have been ready with virtually all my toiletries and a couple granola bars to hold me over before visiting a grocery store [thanks, Mama Hill!  A shame it had to go to waste :( ], I now have to buy a lot of it down here.

One bittersweet highlight, however, of flying United is that you have access to in-flight DirecTV.  I practically saw the entire Duke/Virginia game Monday night in crystal-clear, 6" screen fashion.  The catch:  it's $7, and the DirecTV leaves you hanging after you leave U.S. airspace, forcing you to put up with whatever movies the airline throws at you.  I personally settled for "We're the Millers," not a bad choice until you realize that little kids behind you can at one point see a half-naked Jennifer Aniston.  I still got a couple good laughs out of the plot, and I didn't have to hear the kids pester their parents all evening for snacks.  On balance, I'm not looking forward to the flying experience in June.

But let's get more into Colombia.  My friend Harrys picked me up from the airport within 10 minutes of arrival, so I didn't have to feel the urge to punch the guy who approached me for the third time asking if I'd like to take his "executive" taxi to my location.  Staying overnight in Harrys' family's apartment, I found out very quickly how weather in Bogotá is.  I will start by saying it's been beautiful for the 36 hours I've been here; however, mornings are quite cold.  It heats up during the late mornings, but I could not help but reach for my sneakers and sweatpants after rolling out of bed at 6:30.  I don't want to jinx it, but I have yet to see rain, another nice touch to the city.  I'm sure it will come.

Harrys helped me out a lot the first day.  We got my apartment all situated:  it was a bit of a chunk of change to start, but hey, I'm here, and in a pretty nice neighborhood, Chapinero.  I would upload pictures, but alas, I've forgotten my USB cord, made specifically for Olympus cameras.  Basically, I'll use it to take a bunch of pictures through the five months here, but ultimately the real-time ones are going to come from... wait for it... a prepaid cheapie smartphone.  That's right, I have moved into the 21st century and purchased a smartphone.  I still have to add a little bit of prepaid coverage, but I can still access Facebook and places with wifi for the time being.  He also showed me important parts of the neighborhood, which helped me to get a survey of the area.  Over the next couple days I will do a little bit more exploring, as I have to figure out how to get to the university efficiently using the Transmilenio bus system.

After I said goodbye to Harrys in the afternoon, I got ready to meet my friends Diana and Gustavo at the Transmilenio again.  We went to a shopping mall over in what I believe was the western part of the city and watched some fountain displays and talked more about the city.  I'm glad that I have some people already in the area who can help me with little questions and concerns as I go.  I returned home about 9:00pm.

Some initial reactions to Bogotá:

1)  Bogotá has a lot more access to American goods than anywhere I ever visited in Brazil.  Also, it is cheaper.  I've spent quite a bit of money here so far getting situated, but I was impressed last night walking through the mall and this morning at a Bogotá grocery store.  My apartment isn't the best situation for cooking/preparing meals for myself, but at least I have some bread, ham and cheese for sandwiches if I get hungry, all of which were easy to find and resembled what I would buy at IGA in Oakland/Pittsburgh.  I also found fresh fruit and a reasonably-priced bottle of store-brand, natural orange juice.  We'll see later how the stuff tastes.

2)  Transmilenio is a pretty good bus system, even at its peak hours.  Now I know, I haven't been crammed into a bus like sardines yet... but Transmilenio has been a really cheap and efficient way to get around the city.  These buses definitely go faster than anything I've ever been on in the States.  I have to figure out the schedules better, though, if I want to get back and forth to school at a reasonable hour.

3)  The people are a little more serious than I had expected.  It's not necessarily a bad thing - heck, I consider myself a serious person - but people in the stores and in the restaurants do not seem to be in a good mood most of the time.  Maybe I just need to see more of the city, but I'm guessing that life here is more businesslike than in São Luís or Florianópolis. I'm still excited, nonetheless, to meet my classmates and other Colombian students and get their perspective on life here!  I'm sure there are tons of restaurants that I need to try, plenty of people to meet, and tons of culture that shows off the happiness of the Colombian people.

Anyways, these are just some preliminary thoughts.  I'll try to update on a regular basis, and if you don't find my pictures here, you'll find some on my Facebook.  Have a good day, everyone!

Tough Love: Accepting Failure(s)

"You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take." –Wayne Gretzky

Ideally, you want to hit 100% of the shots that you take in life.  It's that moment when you know you've put your entire heart and soul into something.  Courage takes over.  Your palms are sweating a little bit, but you know that it is the right thing to do.  God has guided you to this very opportunity.  The pencil is in hand.  The time to train, the time to analyze has concluded.  Be careful not to misstep.  Don't think about mistakes.  You can't imagine failing or her saying "no."  Get the thought of failure out of your head.  Now you can't stop thinking about it.  The time comes to perform, and...

It's a complete wash.  She told you "no" after you worked up the courage to ask her on a date.  You didn't use the right form to push a 275 pound barbell off of your body.  The test you just took might as well have been in Arabic, and you would have understood just as much of it.  You started to stutter during the presentation, and you lost your nerve.  Everything starts to crash upon you, and no one is around to help.  You walk briskly to your apartment, sit down on your bed or couch, close your eyes, and...

You don't cry.  Crying hasn't been part of your game since Little League.  You sit down and think a moment.  Maybe you stand up and pace around.  Failure isn't an everyday occurrence for you, and most times it isn't an option.  You don't call anyone:  no one understands you right now.  Suddenly, deep in thought, you encounter all of the ways that it could have gone wrong, and you find your faults.  Was it just that you were inadequate?  Did something go wrong with implementation?  Was it just bad luck?  Maybe bad timing?  Maybe now it's time to talk to someone.  But to whom...?  Who will understand...?

I really hate failure.  Always have, always will.  I've gotten so far in my life up to this point, and it's hard to talk about the times when I made a decision that didn't pan out well.  Some of the greatest pictures, experiences and sensations of my life came from the time right before the moment of failure. Do I expect to succeed every time?  No, but I want to succeed where I've put forth the most effort, and am not fazed by failure in the places where I haven't.  The worst is when I think I've got it in the bag, and something comes along and pulls the rug out from under me.  Spontaneity is not a favorite of mine, and the frequent curve balls of life today add gray hair quicker to my head than the first 23 years combined.  

But if we hate failure so much, what makes us get back up on the horse and try again?  Is it because we are compelled by our peers, or because we really think we have a chance?  Do we actually learn from failure?  If so, what are its lessons?  What happens if we don't learn from these lessons?  To what extent should we insure a decision that we think might fail?  

We try to do things that sometimes seem out of reach because we can't bear the thought of not having tried.  I can't bear the thought of skipping class even though I'm already late, because I will spend the entire day thinking "what if?"  I can't imagine not trying to bench press some weight that I might fail at because then I won't really know what my maximum is, and where I could go to further my progress.  I ask the girl out because a "no" is still better than beating myself up over someone I really wanted who could have been a "yes."  Why, then, do we accept the failure and move on?  

Failure isn't the end; rather, it's a beginning.  It's a beginning of the understanding of our limitations.  From there, we find ways to make progress.  This is where I meet "The Great One" and his philosophy on trying:  yes, I didn't score a goal this time around, and there are probably myriad reasons why I failed.  But there is no in quitting where our hearts are set.  Our hearts will heal if it wasn't meant to be, but only we are the ones who can find that out.  Never let anyone tell you that you will fail, and then believe them.  Eleanor Roosevelt once said:  "No one can make me feel inferior without my own consent."  Consent to fail, and there's no beginning.  There is only despair.

For tomorrow, think of a time in your life when you failed.  Take five minutes of your day and really think about that failure.  Ask yourself questions from this blog, or something that you made up yourself.  Don't take it as a time to beat yourself up, especially if you've already resolved it and moved on.  Rather, if that failure is resolved, what did you learn from it?  Do you know someone else who is going through the same thing?  Share it with that person.  Use the "feel, felt, found, find" method:

• I understand how you feel (after, obviously, listening to them)
• Here is how I felt in a similar situation (hardest part; make sure you've truly internalized the other person's problem)
• This is what I found (you overcame your failure; now it's your turn to help someone overcome theirs)
• Here's what I think you will find (not assuming too much about this person; rather, show them that there's hope in their life)

Use your acceptance of failure to provide a brick or two of your life to help someone else repair of theirs.  Take care, everyone.

Leaving It All Out on the Field

"When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say, I used everything you gave me."  -Erma Bombeck

Erma Bombeck's words strongly resonate in my mind as a way that I would like to conduct my life as a productive adult.  My story starts in the past:  as many of you know, I played American football when I was in high school.  For six years (grades 7-12), I played for teams that enjoyed a wide arrays of results, from one-win seasons to appearances in the PIAA state semifinals.  Football was a release back in those days:  it helped me to get out any aggressive streaks that I had as a teenager while doing something productive.  I was always a big guy, and playing football for me was a way to use the talents and advantages that being naturally big carried.  I had two major goals by the time I reached high school:  1) to gain a starting position on the varsity team, and 2) to reach a championship that my high school had never reached.

In the end, I achieved both of them.  By sophomore year, I started on the defensive line; and by senior year, my team made it to the PIAA semifinals.  The journey was never easy, for sure:  we spent afternoon after afternoon in the weight room and on the track after school in the off-season, breaking records and missing targets.  I remember at one point, I had to run nearly a mile and a half after training after doing squats and sprints the previous two hours. Waking up in the summer to go to work in the morning took a full breakfast and at least two Advil tablets to dull the aches.  With all of the time and energy that I had invested in this sport, there was no way I was going to graduate high school without achieving something significant.  Therefore, that final season I made a promise:  no matter the outcome, I was going to leave everything out on the field.  If I wasn't exhausted after a game, I didn't work hard enough.

Throughout my university and graduate school life, I have tried to push this same tenet on the different activities that I undertake.  If I am going to succeed at something, I need to give all of the expertise and diligence that I have now; otherwise, I will leave from that opportunity with regrets.  If I know that there was one thing I could have done to help myself get a better grade or gain a leadership position which I now don't have, it's a tough pill to swallow.  Life stretches everyone thin, but we must look at demanding times of life more as opportunities to achieve great things, and less as times of great burden.

My advice for today, readers, is this:  Take inventory of all the outstanding commitments and promises that you have made to this date.  Put them out on the table, on the board, anywhere you feel that you can organize them.  Decide for yourself which ones are the most important, and which ones you need to accomplish the soonest.  Then go out and seek to finish them, limiting your distractions.  If you have to turn off your cell phone for an hour, do so.  If you have to give up Facebook for 48 hours, do so.  These things are extremely useful, but they carry a key trade-off:  they are very useful distractions.  We commit ourselves to so many different things in a given day, and even those who exercise good time management skills need to figure out how much energy they must devote to a given task.  My personal challenge is to take the example of my high school football career and use it to finish out the work I have to complete for this semester.  I have to understand that I embraced all of my goals for a particular reason, and constant reminder of those ideals is what is going to propel me to realize them.

Take the time to watch this speech from the movie Friday Night Lights.  In his halftime speech during the Texas AAAAA state championship, Coach Gary Gaines alludes to leaving everything out on the field.  At the end of the day, we must be able to look our friends, family, colleagues and clients in the eye and let them know that we gave them everything we possibly could to achieve our goals.  If we can give everything we have, then win or lose, we have gained our dignity, and no one can take our pride.

The Thrill of Victory... over What?

"A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."  -Ayn Rand

The 20th century philosopher and intellectual giant Ayn Rand and I do not agree often in terms of how we view the world, but I found this quote to be powerful, in the spirit of resurrecting my blog.  Think about the last time you made a goal.  What was the payoff to achieving it?  Did you believe for one moment that it would make you better relative to someone else, or better overall?  Do you find more satisfaction in beating others in competition, or in simply bettering yourself relative to yesterday?

Tonight (~1:30 in the morning) I reflect on this very idea.  Why did I start this blog back in August?  What caused me to lose focus and practically abandon it?  At this point in mid-November, have I really made myself into a "better man?"  If so, relative to what?  

To answer this question, I looked at why (again) I really wanted to undertake this project.  I stopped making judgments over my progress in early October, largely because I had convinced myself that I was too busy to write or take better care of myself.  Reminding myself of the goals tonight, however, made me feel ashamed.  These are legitimate goals:  for instance, dropping 25 pounds and running a few times per week is essential to making a smooth transition to living in Bogotá because it is easier to adjust to higher altitudes when in shape.  I'm also trying to control my weight for the sake of my joints in the long run, as well as my back.  It's going to be a lot easier to get up in the morning at 200 pounds than 225.  

Spiritually speaking, I'm still looking for that renaissance.  Though I've been going to church on Sundays, I'm still looking for the key to deepening my personal spirituality.  Books and stories are great, but they wear off over time.  Routines get stale.  My goal for the month of November is to make it back to confession, something I did last September.  A good penance sorts out my mind, as long as I don't do it too often.  If anyone has any recommendations for books I can read (gradually), feel free to drop a comment on my post.  

Over the next week, I'm going to continue to focus on inspirational quotes and philosophers.  Each one will come with an idea that I either agree or disagree with, and I will try to relate them to my pursuit to become a "better man."  Per Rand, I gained from this quote the concept that a victory is not going to come from doing better for someone else.  I don't try to get good grades because I want to do better than my colleagues:  the point is to do better than I did last semester.  The point of getting into shape isn't to be better-looking or in better shape than people around me:  it's to make myself better off in the long run.  Spiritually, I will always acknowledge that I am among the worst of sinners, and that each step I take in the right direction is but one of a thousand that I should be taking.  Ms. Rand is right in this regard:  we should be focused on achievement, not beating the person next to us.  Take that thought into consideration as you push for something great this week.  Have a look at the video from Brian Tracy below if you (like me) are in the market to develop good habits once again.  Take care!

Getting Back to Basics

It's October 7, and it's been two weeks since I've written an entry.  I had a great start to my semester:  I was losing weight, getting back to faith and truly expanding my knowledge while pursuing a grueling career in graduate school.  However, attention towards becoming a "better man" dropped off, and I found myself playing catch-up for the past two weeks.  I made a couple decisions that weren't too smart in terms of time management and leisure, and now I find myself working hard when I could be relaxing and easing back into a difficult week.

This week will be the week of turning in outlines, making presentations and taking exams, so I find myself always preparing for something else after I've completed something.  It's one of those weeks where I find that I'm already looking forward to the end of it, when I can drive home and be with my family.  Looking at the list of things I have to do, however, just increases the distance.  Tomorrow I don't have much to do, but I have to prepare for a presentation on Wednesday.  After that, I have to prepare a paper proposal for my Thursday class, then prepare for an exam on Friday.  Alongside my classes, I'm teaching 25 hours this week, as well as completing a course on Coursera.  Once I turn in the final project for that course, I think I will post it here (preview:  I'm writing a mock business strategic analysis on the Heinz Corporation for my final deliverable).

In the end, I'm just trying to start this week off right, but I don't really have much of an inspiration for today.  My inspiration is more or less that I got back up off my feet and began to write again.  Convince yourself to not lose focus on the big goals in life, and remember that it's better late than never to get back on track.  Let's have a good week and take care of those goals.