El Gran Cocoroco dice: tu-cu-tú.

I don't feel much like writing a blog post, but I'm trying to become more regular about my posting, so hopefully this will help me get into the habit.

It's a lovely warm and sunny Monday here in Minneapolis! According to weather.com, it's currently 73 degrees, which makes today the warmest day we've had in six months! Supposedly it is going to rain this afternoon/evening, which is okay with me as long as I don't get stuck outside in it. I'm currently in the office trying to finish up some really boring reading before my 2:30 class. I won't get it all finished before class, but I at least would like to have a little more done than I do now. Sitting through a three-hour class without understanding what's going on makes for a long 180 minutes.

Tonight I have to teach at 5:30; I've been thinking that my supervisor was going to come observe me tonight, but she just saw me in the hall and told me that she might not be able to make it. That would definitely be okay with me, especially since it means that she wouldn't be able to observe me again until next fall. Mmmm.

I woke up this morning at 5:30 with lots on my mind (it's that time of the semester), so after lounging around for about 15 minutes I finally got up. I was at school by 7 and I've been here vacillating between working and not-quite-working ever since. All I really want to do is go home and sleep.

Tomorrow I don't have class or teaching, so I hope to have a productive day. End of semester, here I come!

Purple haze

At last, a day that feels like spring. We've had some sunny/warm-ish days over the past couple of weeks, but this is the first day I've really felt like the winter is over. Thank g-d. This past winter (my second in Minnesota) was definitely longer than the first. People told me last year that the winter was mild, and I didn't really believe them until I realized how nasty this year's winter was. Oh well. It's a thing of the past now.

Dora and I are in Common Roots trying to get some work done. Even though the nice weather is inspiring, it makes it hard to sit inside and work. At least there are big windows here that let the sunlight in.

Last night I absentmindedly left my debit card in the ATM after making a withdrawal. Or at least, I'm assuming that's what I did. All I know is that I had my card when I went to the ATM, and later that night when I went to pay for my dinner, I didn't have it. I called to cancel that card and order a new one, so this makes the second card I've lost in the past few weeks. Meh.

I want to get done with a decent chunk of work this afternoon so I can enjoy the rest of the day, and tonight relax and listen to "This American Life." The past couple of Sundays, I've been downloading the previous week's podcast and listening to it in the evening, so I hope to continue that tradition tonight. I'm always a week behind, but I never have free time when the program airs during the afternoon, so it works out I guess.

Back to work.

I've got your love to keep me warm.

Wow, what a lapse between my previous post and this one. That seems to be my way, though. I seem to be less-than-successful when it comes to blogging on a regular basis.

I just re-read my last post, and realized how much has happened since the middle of February. Then, I was talking about things like putting together the graduate symposium and organizing my parents' twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party. Now, all of that seems a bit like a distant memory.

Overall, I'd say the symposium, "(Re)membering, (Re)collecting, and (Re)creating: Memory, an Interdisciplinary Forum", was successful. Having the opportunity to meet and get to know Alicia Kozameh was amazing--I'll probably remember it as the highlight of this semester. Though I have only read one of her novels and a couple of her short stories, I know that going back to reading her work will be a completely new experience after having shared some time with her. I heard lots of compliments and good things about the symposium, so I'm most happy about that. The only thing I'm not that happy about is the lack of attendance. There was a surprising (perhaps not-so-surprising) lack of attendance, especially from my own department. After all the hard work that went into organizing the symposium, that came as a bit of a disappointment.

About my parents' anniversary party--I'm so happy the family had a chance to come together and celebrate. My parents were, to say the very least, surprised. They both seemed a little overwhelmed to me; I don't know if anyone has ever thrown a party in their honor or not. There were lots of smiles, tears, and hugs. It's hard for me to think that my parents were only about a year older than me when they got married. I can't imagine myself being prepared for that sort of commitment at this point in my life. Of course, their marriage was hastened by the fact that my mom was already pregnant with me.

I also had the fortune a couple of weeks ago to meet and share some time with Noni Benegas, a lesbian poet from Argentina now living in Spain. While we'd read some of her poems from Burning Cartography (Cartografia Ardiente) in one of my classes, I didn't really appreciate her work until having the chance to hear her speak and listening to her read her own poems. It's quite a different experience having a poet read her own work to you.

The end of the semester is only a few (three, maybe?) weeks away, and I have a significant amount of work to accomplish in that period of time. At least I'm feeling motivated, which is more than I can say for the state of my mood over the past semester/year. After two years of graduate school, I think I'm finally beginning to understand more about how I work, and how I have to be able to shape my work habits around my own personality. I'll finish my M.A. in the fall semester, and then immediately begin work on my Ph.D. My adviser suggested yesterday that I use the summer to begin thinking about dissertation topics. Wow. If all goes as planned, I'll be writing my dissertation in a couple of years. Scary much? I really don't know how to begin--I know the fields I want to incorporate (contemporary Latin American literature, feminist/queer theory, gender performance...), but I don't have any specific ideas. My first task in all that will be to familiarize myself with the bibliographies relating to those topics, and then I'll go from there.

For now, my focus is going to be on finishing the semester. That's seems like a sufficient challenge for the time being.