Super Jellyfish

What’s vacation to you?

To be most satisfying, Prof. Godbey explains, leisure should resemble the best aspects of work: challenges, skills and important relationships. Leisure has its hierarchy. At the lowest level, it’s a search for diversion, higher up it’s a search for pleasure and, at the top, it’s a search for meaning. “It’s not that diversion is bad,” says the professor, “but in terms of human growth, it’s inferior to activities that are more pleasurable — and they’re inferior to activities that are more meaningful.”

Is this why I am in Latin America instead of touring around Europe or Asia?

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I just finished this book, The Confessions of Max Tivoli. The premise is that the main character, Max, was born looking like a 70-year old man, but in all other internal respects, he is actually a child. So as he ages, he looks younger and younger, but he is really growing older and older.

I was sort of disappointed in the book. Basically, the story is a love story — Max falls in love with this person named Alice, and he kind of obssessively follows her throughout his life. It’s annoying though, because, it’s not clear why exactly he is so in love with her. What about her is so special? I guess since we never are really able to “get inside her head” unfortunately, her character stays sort of flat and non-developed.

Max also has a best friend named, Hughie, who is able to accept Max even with his age-problem. Hughie himself is also “different.”

So the main them of the book is “We are each the love of someone’s life.” It’s sort of sad, I think.. Max just seems like such a shallow and selfish character! Maybe it’s important to like the characters in a story, so you can root for them and hope for their success?

Anyway, if you have other books to read, I would probably not recommend this one!

Yes! I am finally online.

After arriving here in Latin America, I’ve spent the last 3 days without Internet access in my hotel room! It was horrible!

The first night it worked… then, I moved into a bigger and better hotel room with kitchen and king size beds. Which was lovely, but the routers on the second floor wouldn’t connect to my computer! After trying three different wireless cards and considering that the issue might be MY lame Thinkpad, I experimented by going back to the third floor and YES! I could connect to the wireless access points up here.

So I requested yet another room change, back to a simple room with no kitchen, but I am finally connected to the world again! Sigh.

I guess between communication and food, I’d rather pick communication and information? What does this mean?