Women's Arm Pit Hair While Traveling

April 12, 2008

I shaved my armpits finally. My armpit hair has grown wild for about 3 years now, and I had come to terms and accepted the bushes under my arms. I actually kind of liked it. If you can live with a hairy body, it makes life a lot easier on the road. No long showers, no embarrassing stubble, no need to worry. Less time in the bathroom, and more time for being out in the world.

I sometimes get some funny looks, but I think hairy armpits are a means to keep away unwanted male attention. No one is going to hit on my hairy legs. It helps to weed out incompatible people. If someone won’t talk to me because I have hairy legs, I probably wouldn’t want to talk to them anyway.

Yet, sometimes when you’re traveling, weird things happen to your body. You pick up things from god knows where, and parts of your skin start falling off, or strange animals live in your belly button, or fungus eats your flesh. Last summer I started to notice some sort of distorted growth in my armpit hair. It looked like it was coated in a blondish color, but the hair itself was mushroomed, instead of a sleek piece. This is gross, and I really don’t know how to explain it. At any rate it was not normal, and I did not like it.

I really didn’t know what was causing this phenomenon, so I didn’t worry too much. Today I worried. It has been there for almost a year now. I want it gone. I am afraid it may be a fungus, or hair cancer (can you get that?), or even something more weird that I can’t pronounce that has some proper medical name.

Today I had to say goodbye to the armpit hair. I couldn’t handle it anymore. After 3 years of going au natural I had almost forgotten how horrible it is to shave though. Running a sharp piece of metal across my skin to cut off hair is not my idea of a fun activity. It is especially awful when your armpit hair is thick and long. It took me a good 10 minute to de-grizzle myself.

Hopefully now the fungus or the whatever-you-call-it-with-the-long-technical-medical-term-name will go away. I do not want to make this shaving thing a regular activity. It is too gruesome.

Yet, now, I am having horrible nightmares about shaving every night. I dreamt that a politician saw my bushy leg hair as I was riding a mechanical bull. He then decided that it was gross and publicly said this at one of his speeches. This then set off a wave of my protests, speaking out about how leg hair is natural and the man is a chauvinist pig. I didn’t know hair was so meaningful for me. Scary.

Traveling Hippies

I guess hippies have decided that when they are out of their home countries it is ok to smoke pot anywhere. I guess they think everywhere that isn’t home is heaven and anything goes. Let me enunciate on the definition of hippie that I am using here. I am not talking about the hippies that the world experienced in the 60's and 70's. I am talking about all these little neo-hippies that are popularly popping up everywhere. These are the ones that fashionably do yoga and eat granola and grow dreadlocks and talk about the moon to be cool.
Hippies tend to act badly away from home. They do stupid things and make it difficult for the rest of us travelers. Hippies just want to smoke pot. Now every tout Joe on every street corner tries to sell me pot, thinking because I am young I am also a hippie. I am not a hippie. This is bothersome to deal with these peoples, touts and hippies I mean.



(A photo of the lounge chair under my open hotel room window)

This day I was sick. I was running a high fever, really unsure if I need to take medication or even go to the hospital or what. I opened the window to get some fresh air.

A dreaded, dirty hippie boy decided he needed to smoke pot right under my window. Obviously my window is open. The hippie saw me lying half dead on my bed when he sat down outside of my window. I look like crap. I can hardly move. I can't even crawl out of bed to close my window.
Why did the hippie decide to smoke right outside my window? Does this hippie have no common sense? Doesn’t he know all of the smoke is going to blow into my window? This is rude. My room is now filled with pot smoke. I don’t care if someone smokes pot, but just have some common courtesy for other people. You can smoke all the pot you want, but I don’t want to have to smoke your second hand skank weed. This hippie must have smoked away all of his brain cells.



(A photo of the hippie with dreadlocks)
Later on the hippie returned to my window. This time he was trying to pick up a piece-of-work kiwi girl. He was doing so, by first, talking about the moon. They were talking about the solar system, and actually saying some very insipid unintelligent stuff that I think the average 3rd grader would be able to correct them on. He then started talking about festivals. This is another major past time for the neo-hippie, traveling to go to festivals. Luckily Wade was around this time to close the window and shut out this hippie. I will say I was glad to see him leave the hotel the next day. This hippie was annoying and rude. Too bad they don't make hippie drugs to grow back braincells.

Baby Boomers Smoke Up

February 6, 2008

Baby boomers are now reaching the ripe ages between 40-60 when the risk of cardiovascular disease drastically jumps. This article suggests that these former hippies are in greater danger of heart attacks if they are marijuana users. Research for this study included interviews with almost 4,000 individuals aged 20 to 92 who recently suffered myocardial infarctions. The average marijuana smoker in this sampling was around 44 years old.

The independent variable is the use of marijuana and the dependent variable is the related heart attack. The external validity of this study is addressed by including many other possible independent variables that need to be examined before this study is proved conclusive. For example, the author proposes that the marijuana users were mostly men, obese and also smoke cigarettes. These three variables are all known causes of heart attacks as well. As marijuana consumption is not isolated as the only variable in a patient’s life that was able to cause a heart attack, it is difficult to conclude that it was the marijuana alone which triggered the attack.

Also, only 124 of the patients had smoked marijuana in the year before the heart attack, while only 9 of these had smoked within an hour of the attack. This sampling is rather small for any conclusive, diehard evidence to be drawn. Just because of the small numbers, the study needs more participants and research before it can be convincing.

This study will be difficult to research because of the vast number of variables that can influence a heart attack. The external validity due to the sheer number of possible independent variables is so extensive that isolation of marijuana smoking alone is nearly impossible. Clinical studies that inspect the exact effects of smoking marijuana in a controlled situation may be a more effective way to study its impact on heart attacks, rather than conducting interviews.



This is another paper written for my Junior Research class. The assignment was entitled making a stament and providing evidence. The information for this assignment was about Baby boomers smoking pot.

Derby Suave Costa Rican Cigarettes

January 31, 2008

Driving along the highway from San Jose to Heredia I noticed a huge billboard advertisement for Derby brand cigarettes. There was an image of a very attractive young woman dancing in what appeared to be a nightclub, party, or other situation that young people would typically enjoy. Behind her was a young man admiring the girl with a “wow” expression plastered across his face. Neither of these people was smoking and the only indication of an ad for cigarettes was the oversized, red and blue labeled package of Derby cigarettes in the bottom corner. What struck me as most unusual about the ad was the words of caution neatly printed along the bottom of the billboard; “Smoking is bad for you health.”

On a whole, the company was using a very simple advertising scheme, with roots as deep as our species; physical attraction. Males will look at the sign because it pictures a pretty girl. Females will look at it because it has a boy admiring a pretty girl, and most females want to feel “sexy” and be admired likewise by the opposite sex. Using intuitive knowledge and common sense, an average onlooker would come to the conclusion, “If it works for these two people portrayed in the advertisement it should work for me.” Can it really be so simple that one will have more fun and become more sexually desirable if they smoke Derby brand cigarettes?

I will state my opinion as no, placing distrust in the advertisers. The company is trying to sell their product, but at the same time is denouncing it for its potential health risks. These are obvious contradictory statements. Why would I trust a company that does not even trust itself? Why would I buy a product from a company that so observably is aware that it is physically harming its consumers?

Through some sort of traditional knowledge, i.e. cultural ideals, the media, and peer pressure, we are led to believe that smoking is “cool.” James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Danny from Grease, and countless other teenage American heartthrobs and role models of cool have asserted that smoking is attractive. Through advertising, this still appears to be the most weighted gravitational pull to entice smokers.

On the other hand, the “Smoking is bad for your health” statement is an authoritative projection of the experts. Through scientific research these experts have come to the conclusion that this knowledge is truth. Empirical evidence, systematic research, and quantitative data have proven that cigarette smoking is dangerous to the health of humans.

However, a century ago medical experts believed just the contrary. Cigarettes were widely thought to have beneficial health effects. Tobacco cigarettes were even prescribed as treatment for many pulmonary problems such as asthma and used by athletes to “open the lungs.”

Clearly, this advertisement for Derby cigarettes portrays an important aspect of information intake. It plainly illustrates that not all sources are trustworthy. Information should be scrutinized and sorted, rather than directly accepted as truth.


This is an essay written for my research class. The assignment was titled ¨What is research?¨ and asked the student to critically look into the information being presented in popular advertisements.

October or so after Many Long Bus Rides

Fever Induced Hallucinations in Jaipur.
One night here led to three nights due to illness. Wade is the prince and one day I will be a Buddha and only my nose ring will touch the ground.
I trust Jaisalmer water way more than Jaipur water. There’s a park across the street where I rested. It is too cliché to die in a hotel room so I rolled around in the grass, being watched by Indian men who rolled around in the grass all day too. I’m getting use to the stares, and sometimes I even show my shoulders to the sun again.
Allah man sings at least 5 times a day I think. Do Muslims really go to pray when they hear that awful voice? He wakes me up in the middle of the night. I can’t ever get back to sleep until he sings again around dawn, or the fan turns off. No electricity in the morning. Why? The fluorescent light flickers all night, like a horror movie.

October- Some Days Later: Wade's Eye Infection

I returned to the hotel in Jaisalmer after a few detour days of camel riding to find Wade walking out of the bathroom. His eye and the room are both a mess. Somehow his eye scabbed over, like some oozing, pussing zombie wound. He applied every kind of medicine known to Indian doctors (and the doctors all say he’s afflicted with a different ailment, but I still think I may have bangled him in his sleep). The tubes of ointment were strewn across the room and the blankets lay in a bundled up heap. Wade says, “I puked,” and moves the sheet to reveal a vile, orange stain that look disturbingly similar to the goop before it was ingested.