A 21st Century Rebel

An Extra Ordinary Rebel

I’m so far gone, I’m going blind,
Can’t see past the hate that’s on my mind,
But you say I’m just an ordinary rebel 
The type that turns out fine.

Have you seen the pain in my spine?
Broken so many times.
Have you seen my friends inside?
Hearts of darkness, hardly alive.

Armed by the ones who’ve died,
They’d cut you down before you take their rights,
They’ll come on the wave of a coup d’etat,
They’ll come (they come) to eat you up,
They’ll run with their forks and knives,
You better run for your fucking life!

And the reign of terror will seem like a pacifist’s dream,
The confusion alone will destroy all our homes,
The good boys will sing about killing disease,
The good girls will dance with my guns in their hands,
Screaming we won’t die without a fight!

The kids on the streets tonight
Are dying in the worst way,
The fire sweeps right by
And the numbers go up in flames.

The darkest light you see
Is the one you spot in me,
I gave up on letting go,
Waiting was too slow,
I light the fires at night,
Tipping the scales, I try.

I might go to hell, hell I might just as well,
I’m the coldest bastard there was
Below the slant of the damned Western sun,
The apathy inside burned out in time,
And tonight, my friend, is goodbye.

Wisdom Teeth Out (28 hours later)

 

Got my wisdom teeth out .. here are my chipmunk cheeks

Revolutionaries soon after

Since

I was born included
with too much freedom.
I wanted to find words
in this (my) reconstruction
to say that I was your friend,
your lover, your soldier,
your brother.

But I  was too free
and picked this up
and I did not look back.

I took up arms to 
fight (betrayal).
I took up reading again
not to write (betrayal).
Though I had shouted and
screamed, I did not
write my history.
And those that did
betrayed me.

I have lost more since
and paid twice and
twice again
the price of too much freedom.

All was atwitter

Wanderer

We are the wanderers, your tired and poor.
Filling desks unseen:
in the closed life,
agnostic aesthetics plan the plans.

The wanderers (I was once among them)
traverse across time, secret spillers.
Legion, playwright ballerinas,
so lost and disenfranchised,
they wander towards nothing, from nothing,
the makers of things made.

 

Swimmers

Swimming thoughts come to the surface for air,
Where they are seized, coveted and admired:
“I always thought this was extinct!”

 

Curious

I took it upon myself to be different today,
and so I wore a brightly colored hat.
Beneath that hat I became a man,
some charming fellow, no doubt,
but I was not him and have no recollections.
I suppose it was that yellow hat that
got me into this business with this monkey
and that girl, but such is the way things go,
I suppose,
When you start to grow old.

Two Kidnappings (Spanish-only)

Dos secuestros

Así empezó, sin duda y sin compromiso allí en la calle en donde la gente desaparecen. La señorita Leira Iturralde, quien trabajaba para la CIA en el división de narcotráfico, estaba caminando bajo la protección de dos agentes. Tenía solamente unos treinta años de edad y ya a cargo de la división, después de haber interceptado veinte toneladas de cocaína en un barco yendo a los Estados Unidos. Nació en Argentina y creció en los Estados Unidos desde cuando sus padres se mudaron en 1982. Era la hora de revolución, la hora de niños desaparecidos y de adultos desanimados.

Primero, yo encontré los cuerpos de los dos agentes, Jackson Trivers y Allison Hanning, quienes habían trabajado por cinco años juntos antes de conocer a Leira. Los dos cuerpos estaban en la calle a la vista, con un punto rojo en su frente. Era tarde pero las luces en la calle iluminaban el charco de sangre que manchaba sus camisas y que pintaba sus caras. Trivers y Hanning fueron importante, pero más que nada, teníamos que encontrar a Leira. Escrito en un papel que estaba en el bolsillo de Trivers era: ≪No las vas a encontrar. Ni en el cielo, ni en el mar.≫ Sí, la señorita Leira estaba caminando por estos calles y ya no.

Leira se despertó en una cama fría bajo una colcha sucia, lleno de lagrimas, tierra y manchas de sangre. Analizó su entorno. Medía todo que podía: el cuarto era 2.5 metros de altura por 4 de ancho y 5 de largo, la puerta estaba en la esquina 3 metros de su cama. No se oía ningún voz. La bombilla estaba colgada desde el centro de la habitación. Ella se sentía muy cansada. Pensaba que si no la hubieran matado entonces ella habría sido importante para mantener vivo. Los pensamientos que no vinieron de inmediato de su formación llegaron lentamente. Era probable que la habían drogado, creyó ella. Después de lo que pasaron unas horas se dio cuenta de que tenía hambre, y que no sabía cual grupo le secuestró, y si sabían donde estaba, y si …

Segundo, busque en los papeles que estaban sobre la mesa encontré mucho. Con el permiso del gobierno, miré los websitios donde andaba Leira antes del secuestro. Vi fotos y videos y correo electrónico. Todo pasó muy despacio y yo me preocupaba por su vida más y más. Yo seguía buscando en cada carpeta de la computadora. Tal vez fue un recuerdo de una cosa que me había dicho de su breve tiempo en Argentina o tal vez fue suerte. Abrí una carpeta titulado “Corrientes.” La carpeta tenía seguros muy avanzadas pero no impenetrables. La vida de Leira, siempre envuelto en el misterio, estaba a punto desenredarse.

El día siguiente, leí todas la información en la carpeta. Leira trabajaba con ambos lados en la guerra contra los narcotraficantes. En 2003, cuando había hecho su gran descubrimiento del cargo en el barco, ella había mandado un correo electrónico a Carlos Ramas, el cual es un sobrino de Pablo Escobar, para notificarle del descubrimiento. Ramas respondió, ≪Bueno. Los demás tienen azúcar. Asegúrese de que no analizan los paquetes marcados con una etiqueta amarillo. Ojala que asciendas con esto. Estamos tomando un gran riesgo contigo. No nos falle.≫

En el cuarto sucio, Leira esperaba ver sus secuestradores y amigos, Ramón y San Pedro. Todo salió más o menos conforme a sus planes. Tenía más hambre. El reloj en la pared de que ella no se había dado cuenta le dijo que eran las cuatro. No sabía si fuera de la mañana o de la noche. Entró un hombre al cuarto, mirando a ella. Leira no le conoció. Por primera vez empezó dudar que estos fueron sus amigos del FARC. El plan era permitirla desaparecer para usar su información de la CIA y para no estar viviendo como traicionera con la posibilidad de ir a la cárcel. Pero no deberían haberla drogado. El secuestro no iba ser cuando estaban presente Trivers y Hanning. Los hechos no tenían sentido. Cuando vino el hombre, no mostrando comida sino puntando un pistola en su cara, ella sabía que estos tipos no eran ni del FARC ni de la CIA. Se levantó con la agilidad de una mujer de veinte años. Ella sabía que sabía demasiado. Por eso no la mataron. La droga ya paró de afectarla. Sus pensamientos tenían claridad. Miró a su secuestrador, memorizando su rostro como si le pudiera parar de hacer lo inevitable. Miró al cielo, a tiempos pasados, a horas desapareciendo dentro de otras horas tras la espalda de un reloj antiguo en donde la gente se pueda escapar y en donde nunca le llega su hora. Empezaron las preguntas.

About the Author

http://www.kevinverbael.com

Nervousness in April

Bankers

Is it a crisis if you like it?
Can you believe we’re so old,
stealing bigger things,
on harder streets, knowing things,
tasting the experience imparted
by the world,
running the world,
in our oh-so-capable hands. And
they don’t like us,
never have,
never had
a chance.
Because we’re running the show now,
and the crisis is something you can believe in
because we’re the ones you have to trust,
and the ones you have to hate.

Spinning, faster

She knows where she’s going, it’s the getting that’s got here down,
The world spins too slowly at times, too fast at night,
Unable to get her hands to make the things she’s got to make,
Talks to herself, can’t  seem to get it right.

The television blinks hello, her computer hot from her knees,
Concerned with who she is, what it all means,
Clocks ring with the same song in her head,
She’s driving a car and missed her exit again.

It all spins too fast to grab a hold of anything you can hold on to,
Too fast to recognize the friends you used to have,
Too fast to pull the hair from your eyes,
Too fast to do anything but burn out or fly. 

Fifteen minutes and a heartbeat from falling in love,
Too distant to make amends, under a gray sky, a gray poem sings,
Where a rainbow peeks to break her concentration,
The waiting for the weekend is just a complication.

It all spins too fast to grab a hold of anything you can hold on to,
Too fast to recognize the friends you used to have,
Too fast to pull the hair from your eyes,
Too fast to remember who you were when you were alive.

She sails to Japan every night in her dreams,
Plays for twelve hours to make up for lost time,
So she has the energy to read until she wakes up asleep,
Where she counts down the hours till the morning creeps.

It all spins so fast you can’t see where she’s going
Too fast to lend a hand,
Too fast to recognize the friend you had.

The Rebirth of My Twitter.

I shall tweet on the intertweets @ twitter.com/kevinv

Lent without Caffeine. 12:01 am Easter: A Can of Coke.

And it was delicious.

ThesisTrack Word Cloud

Link to full-size image 776px x 367px, generated on Wordle.net

new kevinverbael.com

redesigned http://www.kevinverbael.com tonight.

New photos online!

54 photos online today: winter formal, trip to new york, trip home to california, birthday celebrations in california and boston, harvard, you know .. take a looksy!

http://flickr.com/photos/kevinv

For My Country

Some Tuesdays in this country.

A leaf falls waving,

            trailing, where rain

parts a day,

 

A new soul is

         born, it begins

a thought: stolen hope

        from a wicked witch

                    a bystander’s friction and betrayal.

Where these fractured roads split,

         is where the wheres run towards.

 

The sun spills, into the new dimension.

 

We, the oppressed

           hold a knife to our hearts

against we, the oppressors.

 

The America of tomorrow is a fiction.

Change and hope are just words.

The ground has shifted.

 

The cynics have had their say,

while spirits too frail were taken in

            and housed by the specter of the past.

Now, with joy

comes candor and diligent debate,

            colorless and insistent,

storied and statistical,

and meaning is kissed into words again.

 

The leaf falls to the ground.

Nothing is different.

The things that change can never be seen.

            They are believed,

                        made with weary hands,

                                    and they are listened to,

On a day like today.

This Week in Justice: Patriotism – vice or virtue?

Justice

Justice, as you may recall, is a large 850+ student course at the college that walks through various issues in moral philiosophy from a wide and established variety of approaches. Right now we’re studying communitarianism: (generally speaking) the idea that we are not self-owned as a liberal might argue (Locke, Friedman, Nozick, Rawls) but rather we are not so completely free because we have specific duties regarding our commmunity which has part-ownership in all of us.

Poll question

The poll question this week was: ”Patriotism is not a virtue but a vice, a prejudice in favor of one’s own kind that we should try to overcome.” Do you agree or disagree with this statement?

Answer for yourself then see the results below:

Stock trading simulator (website)

For computer science 50..

We had to make an online stock trading simulator where each registered user gets $10,000 in virtual cash to play the stock market. I spent a little extra time making the website look and feel nice. Please visit and have fun.

http://cloud.cs50.net/~kverbael/pset7/login.php

YES!

So happy I’m crying! CNN calls it for Obama!

 

Fin.

Second Thoughts

First Impressions

One of my nightmares is waking up on an island like this with no internet.

Sometimes, I wish Sandel would end his lectures like this

Monkeybread

the feeling of letting go

stolen from a thought in my mind I see you
slipping through a tree with your arms outstretched,
where are the mornings that I longed to kiss you,
by the banks of the ice river with our names etched

down in the study hall I write, between chairs
and the unworn ties
I watch a girl take eat her sandwich
while another boy catches my eye

cheated on the back of my hands
I take the test, where I am sent
to my parent’s high school
and left in a room with my finger clenched 

systems emerge like a corner
caught between two forced things
I find the rules where I meant to leave them
and I write things about the things I left

 

Hello, world! 

Life update: I am taking these classes:

1. Justice, a Moral Reasoning core course that focuses on issues of applied philosophy, in particular ethics and political philosophy. Right now we’re reading Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. It’s outstanding; a defense of the legalistic moral attitudes (what mom calls the clear black-and-white) through this notion of the categorical imperative (i.e. should the principle you act on be applied to everyone and would that be good?). Delicious!
2. Econometrics, a statistics course for Economics majors. We’re going over different methods to reduce omitted variable bias and, despite that this is the last required course for my Econ degree and I have a certain amount of disdain for strict requirements, I am enjoying this class. In particular, I feel more comfortable agreeing with the conclusions derived from Econ papers as I can attest to the reason behind their approach.
3. Economics tutorial, a junior seminar. This class was once about diving into the research of our professor, Sendhil Mullainathan, while writing our research paper. The focus has shifted to studying our class’ research, extending and learning from the various approaches developed in our classroom in Littauer. I’m writing a paper on library late fees discussing rational reasons why people turn their books in late (e.g. it’s worth the money to hold on to the book as I am maximizing my utility) and psychological reasons discussed in economic terms (e.g. I forget, and when I remember in my room, the cost-benefit analysis leads me to procrastinate the task).
4. Theories of Violence. Seriously, we take any theory of violence from parental abuse, drugs, psychiatric illness, biology, evolutionary psychology and study it from philosophical, literary, neurobiological, legal and historical perspectives. The broad approach is intended to answer the question: why does violence occur? So far, I’ve enjoyed studying the governmental abuses that occurred at Waco (emergent violence), Andrea Yates (psychiatrically ill), reading a transcript from Osama bin Laden and comparing it to the Battle of Jericho in the Old Testament (where the Israelites killed all the men, women and children in the city once they captured it as per God’s orders). I’m considering writing a paper on Dexter, the Showtime show about a serial killer who only kills other serial killers and the cultural significance although I’m interested in the question and might, should I come up with a good theory, try to answer it directly.
5. Computer Science 50, a rockin’ class on programming concepts that I’ve watched many of the lectures online over the summer but am enjoying diving into the course, working to robustly solve the problem sets. Currently, the work I’m doing now is writing a program that reads a formatted (i.e. “erased”) disk and searches through the 1’s and 0’s looking for deleted photos (.jpg) and recovers them. We then have to figure out where the photos were taken around campus.

PS The links are _all_ worth taking a look at.

Life update, part two:

I’m working on developing my political and moral philosophy, working out the kinks alongside my reasoning in Justice class. I would like to start writing but am waiting for a breath of air as I have been working non-stop all day with lectures, sections, homework, midterms, soccer practices and games (captaining/coaching the team’s 2-2 season, scored three goals last game, dribbling through all of Lowell House.

                At some point I need to start thinking about where I am going to work next summer, which for the moment only confuses me. I’m also thinking about plans more broadly and am considering taking time off after this year to write down the political philosophy, write a few economics papers (might work with some classmates on this soon), and write a senior thesis that combines computer science and economics. I am currently considering a joint-concentration in computer science.

                Strange; while I was free with loads of time three weeks ago, adding CS50 so late meant I had to work hard to catch up, meaning everything has been on quicker feet since. Funny story: I had thought about whether or not to take the class all weekend and come the Tuesday (Monday was off as it was Columbus Day), I decided in the 0th hour, 5pm, that I would take the class. The Resident Dean wouldn’t sign off unless I took it pass/fail but since I hadn’t gotten the professor’s approval on it, she would either have to let me take it for a grade or not at all. At that point I saw the reluctance in her face and said, “Come on coach, put me in. I can play, just put me in, I can win!” :)

                So, these things being said, I very much miss all my readers in California (and family and friends elsewhere). I am working very hard on my studies and with renewed dedication to making the most of my undergraduate experience. Oh, and I’ve taken to making comic strips. I shall put them up soon.

Childthoughts

WHAT CHILDREN DREAM

 

Last night I dreamed of an old

schoolroom. A wasteland,

and students edged into view

laughing and not laughing;

And one holds a bag

full of lily white powder.

A fight – a lunge – a yell.

I know what will happen.

The bag tears the room quiets.

I walk through and

I breathe it in.

And I know what it is.

 

I like it and I do not like it.

My mind clears. It is blue and

white, like orgasm and nirvana;

and it lies to me.

What is this feeling?

Even in my dream,

I question knowing this,

but I know what must happen

so that I can know this.

 

 

THOSE PEOPLE, 1.

 

People die everyday. They wither in their lowly graves as people whistle to music above them.

They like it and they like it.

 

 

THOSE PEOPLE, 2.

 

The dead care more for special interests:

Like being proud, burnt cloth and celebrating tyranny.

That is what wisdom death happened to afford them.

 

Me, I live, unwise and trampling atop these honorable graves. For I have yet to appreciate what pleasure there is in pain,

What freedom lives in the surrender of liberty.

The young in me vows never to learn.

The old know better.