I woke up thinking the sheets were comfortable and the sun was out again, and that a week on the beach doing nothing was all I needed. I never have such excursions since the cost is that of a conference or a month in Mexico or a week visiting family, and seems utterly extravagant since I barely support myself as it is.
I decided I could go to the pool this afternoon and the woods tomorrow. I decided I could spend all the time I now spend in vague suffering doing things like this. I realized that this was exactly what Reeducation prohibited. Recreation and also professional achievement were “coping strategies” and ways of avoiding the pain one must really be in.
So those things had to be renounced. I keep saying I should take them back but I only manage in flashes, and I keep saying I will take them back full time but it seems to be something other than a decision that makes this possible.
I was looking at files again today — it is a sign of health that I can look at old files — and decided I should seriously read and organize them, work with them, they are my book. I remembered an evening early in Reeducation, when a friend asked, why are you depressed (when you have so much to be happy about)? Oh, because I have self-hatred, I said.
Perhaps the interest in my old files, the patience to look at them one by one and organize them, work with them, means this is lifting.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
My sister gave me an article from American Anthopologist, Vo. 107, issue 3, p. 432-445, 2005, which you might want to read. It’s called “How Spaniards Became Chumash and other Tales of Ethnogenesis.”
Fascinating.
I have found the abstract. Fascinating. Now have to go in through library to get article.
In the 1970s, a network of families from Santa Barbara, California, asserted local indigenous identities as “Chumash.” However, we demonstrate that these families have quite different social histories than either they or supportive scholars claim. Rather than dismissing these neo-Chumash as anomalous “fakes,” we place their claims to Chumash identity within their particular family social histories. We show that cultural identities in these family lines have changed a number of times over the past four centuries. These changes exhibit a range that is often not expected and render the emergence of neo-Chumash more comprehendible. The social history as a whole illustrates the ease and frequency with which cultural identities change and the contexts that foster change. In light of these data, scholars should question their ability to essentialize identity.
Oh, my God. I have it now, and have speed-read, and sent to some of my associates. It is mind-blowing. Unbelievable that we did not know all of this. That people are not constantly discussing it.
My sister has delved deeply into this. Some of our family names are Cordero, Pinto and Gutierrez. I knew you had to read this.
It makes me want to change my research field. I should have become a S.B. researcher long ago. Just think — I would have to go there to do fieldwork!