Whoa, It's Been a Long Time

Three months since I've posted! Unbelievable. What have I been doing all this time? Oh, right...

Stressing out.

Academically, 2010 has been fairly brutal. I won't go into the gritty details, but I will say that up until now, I have not understood fully the hellish graduate school experience of myth. I can say with certainty that I now understand it. I could work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and still have unfinished business. Part of the crunch was due to the fact that I presented a paper at a conference for the very first time - it was a paper titled "Enlisting the Memory of Memory: Anna Akhmatova's Requiem," at the Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference, and it went fine (despite the horrible worst-case scenarios that were rolling around in my head beforehand). On top of that, I have been busily getting summer plans in order, saying goodbye to my expired (*sniffle*) California Driver's License, exchanging it for a (*gulp*) Rhode Island one, and also, finally, managing to find some time to relax (to the best of my abilities, that is). Resultingly, the last few months have been a revolving blur of deadlines and deep breaths.

My studies in a nutshell: Symbolism, negative aesthetics and the location of music, early 20th century Russian woodworking and the folk art revival, čeština, русский язык, creating communicative language tasks, etc. That is, of course, just a sampling. And thankfully, I'm generally enjoying it all*.

My time off has been gratifying as well. See?







(And thanks to Ken, for taking that lovely first picture up there).

Those photos came from a trip along Cape Cod; it was off-season, so we were practically the only people wandering around out there. The rain and wind actually suited the Cape, but it didn't treat Rhode Island very well - as you may have read, we had some pretty intense flooding around here, but our neighborhood went fairly unscathed; some soggy basements here and there, but that was about all.

The rest of the semester will be busy busy busy, so I can't promise that I'll write much in the next month, but my blog will be rolling again soon. In the meantime, keep yourself busy over here. 'Night, all.


*A sort of cross-section of things that I've enjoyed that I can share: Stilyagi, a Russian musical which may not be subtitled in English yet but is fairly fantastic, so keep an eye out; Degeneration, a hysterical but entertaining reaction to Decadence during the fin de siecle, by Max Nordau; Jan Svankmajer's Sílení (but beware! That one's a bit perverse); Vrubel'.