So in one of our newspapers this week this guy wrote a column about the emails that the Brazilian Studies program regularly sends out, bitching about them (they are only sent to the listserv, and i dont know how he got on it, but there you are.)

the article, if you are interested, is at:
"Keep Your Parakeet to Yourself"

I replied to him in a angry email because he was not very nice to my man Pedro in the Brazilian Studies dept (who is a very very nice person and doesnt deserved to be receiving nasty emails). Oh, hell, here's the email I wrote:

"Wow, you should really take a day off and relax-- go for a massage at yates or whale on the punching bag which i hear should be installed soon -- cause your last couple columns have sounded like you have a lot of tension you need to get rid of.

Anyway, I don't know how you got on the Brazilian Studies email list. And obviously you shouldn't have been on it. But guess what -- maybe this is hard for you to imagine -- most of the people who are on the list want to be there -- and we enjoy receiving the emails about the interesting events that the program puts on for us.
And there is not an "anonymous responder" behind the brazil@georgetown.edu email address, there is a hard-working, kind person who is right: you should not get upset about little things like accidentally getting on a listserv (or not capitalizing in an email, for christ's sake!). Hell, I've been trying to figure out how to get off the german listserv since freshman year!
If you are angry about "thoughtless emails," perhaps you should have thought a little about your own emails before writing in a rage back to someone who didn't deserve that. You don't know that person who works so hard to set up these events and inform those of us who are interested. Maybe you should go meet him.
By the way, enjoy your weekend.

~Mary Kennedy
mck7@georgetown.edu"

I expected to get a bitchy email back from him, so I was pleasantly surprised when he wrote me actually a pretty friendly one in response. He said his column was joking (well i dont actually believe that but I'll let it slide) and demonstrated his spanish abilities (ummm...i wish people would start believing that they really truly do speak portuguese in brazil!! it's not a made-up language!!)

Anyways, he told me to meet him at the punching bag (because I seem "feisty"), or alternatively, to just punch him if I felt like it. And he said he'd give me a shout out in his next column because he hasn't devoted enough space to his fan mail (I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing...) So I wrote him an email in response thanking him for being friendly instead of bitchy and saying since they havent actually put up the punching bag yet maybe we could just meet and duke it out face to face. And that although his spanish skills are admirable, does he...maybe...know...that...in brazil they speak portuguese?

Anyways that's my story. I just read a lot about rwanda and saw lots more pictures that i didn't really want to but i guess that's the world and we should see them. (last night we watched a film with extensive scenes of the aftermath, and even some (shot far away with a telephoto lens) of people actually getting hacked to death with machetes. so we watch that in africa class, also somalia footage, and really disturbing WWII footage too. the professor when i talked to him today said that he also has the film of when they forced president doe to eat his own ears before slicing off his genitals and killing him. but he has struggled over whether or not to show it to his class. It is reality, and should we see it because of that? Or is it disrespectful to the people it is showing? (ie part of the reason that they filmed this doe event in the first place was to humiliate him, stripping him to his underwear and making fun of him on camera while he could do nothing)

so I don't know the answers to those questions. Discuss.