First night off

This is my first night off in a long time...
long time... since....well...
it feels... odd to be in my room alone. Ive been wanting alone time. ive been feeling overwhelmed for the whole month. but now that its almost 8pm and i have no where to go to and no one is here with me, it feels... odd... where am i suppose to be, what am i suppose to be doing? i have to say that all this stimulation has been great for doing my thesis. i know many would think the opposite, and definably it has been sometimes harmful to getting work done, but with all these emotions of our program ending, job searching, pressure, thesis work, more pressure and stress, its been necessary. its been a crazy month. really crazy. and stimulation keeps the stress going, the pressure on, and i accomplish more and more work on my thesis. my brain shuts down, my spanish has been bad lately and then really awesome. the movement of going through my day, does not allow my mind to wander. So i have been really happy not being able to analyze how crazy its been or my thoughts. Up.. go to coffee shop before i lose motivation, work on thesis intensely for three hours, eat (ive been eating out lately, poorly), break, 4pm study time, drink, party, party, bed. repeat.

Last night was a posada, my first! We had sparklers and asked for permission by singing to be able to come into the house.. like Joseph and Mary looking for a place to stay. We then hit the crap out of two  sponge bob pinatas... fun night, we ended early.. midnight.
The night before was wine with Jenael, then watching a movie with Damon and Cintia
The night before that was movie with Cintia and Damon
The night before that i was with cintia and damon and ekat, but headed home early
The night before that i got drunk off expensive whiskey at Dada with Ekat and Alesandro
The night before i got cheap beers with Cintia at Lupe and met up with group at Dada
The night before that I was at the guadalupe festival with ekat, alesandro....
The night before that was our CLTL goodbye dinner
The night before I hung out with charly for a bit then cintia and joshua., damon
the night before i took a night off since i was hungover
the night before i was up until 630am with charly partying
the night before i hung out with josh and then was at dada with ekat and alesandro and ana
the night before was an awesome chill party at a hostel with a bonfire
....movie, drank too much, hung out with josh, josh and i went to bar.. repeat for another two weeks.

The crazy thing is that the days were just as busy with interviews, workshops, thesis meetings, going to Tuxtla for events, EcoSur... and working really hard on my thesis. I am surprised honestly how stimulating my life is here and how i am able to keep up.

but the problem is nights like this one... and how to slow down.... how do i take a night off... how do i turn off my brain... how... to relax...

Stuff I wish I had room to put in my thesis

So I am having a hard time cutting back on the wonderful world of coffee rust, my notes, quotes and data, so I thought I would share this with the world here, instead of my paper, since I cant bear to part with it..

A wonderful book on the world of coffee: Uncommon Grounds. The History of Coffee and How it Transformed Our World. Mark Pendergrast. 1999

On page 43 “ it appears that the fungus thrives in moist environments. The real villain however is monoculture. Whenever man intervenes and creates an artificial wealth of a particular plant, nature eventually finds a way to take advantage of this abundant food supply. Plants containing mind-altering alkaloids such as caffeine and cocaine almost all grow in the tropics… the competition for existence is so fierce, there being no winter to provide a respite from the battle for survival. The caffeine content of coffee probably evolved as a natural pesticide to discourage predators".

Page 43 “Now it seems but a question of time for coffee to be as great a failure in Java as it has turned out to be in Ceylon”, wrote Edwin Arnold in 1886.

Page 44 ”That bastion of traditional coffee soon switched primarily to tea”.

“ This hardy strain of coffee [robusta] tasted harsh in the cup and contained twice the caffeine of Arabica. Nether less, it was destined to play an important role in the future”.

“In 1862 white explorers had observed Ugandan native use of robusta, but no one thought of using it commercially then. Members of the Baganda tribe separated two robusta beans from the same berry, smeared them with their blood and thereby declared blood brotherhood”. (footnote on page 153).

Page 153“unlike its more delicately flavored Arabica cousin, robusta- so named for its hardy growth-thrived anywhere from sea level to 3,000 feet and produced its small berries in far greater abundance.”