one month later

And hopefully this time I'll stick around. I've been busy with life in general: going out to bars and clubs and dance parties (and throwing a few myself), attending amazing performances (such as one last week exploring the relationships between food, personal identity, and power/politics), and getting myself into (and out of, thankfully!) some sticky situations with relationships (lesson of the summer: extreme attractiveness does not surmount personal issues/craziness. Really. It's not a fair tradeoff at all, and one should not be tempted by one's lust/poor decision making abilities/inability to draw boundaries slash say no to justify such a tradeoff. It's bad news, kids).

After a weeklong visit from my friend T and the accompanying flurry of events and meet-ups with other friends in the area, I'm now happy to say that I am settled in my apartment and ready to return to my hermit-y (and academically productive!) ways. On the list: get through my readings for one of my classes (and write summaries for each of the readings, yes I've decided to be ridiculously anal like that) and continue making time for my "just for fun/personal interests" books. I'm currently working my way through The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse, which explores the ways in which space is transformed (socially produced and reproduced) into place through particular discourses, or more specifically, the ways in which the "East" or "Orient" is constructed through discourses of gender and sexuality. I'm only on the second chapter, but I find the book incredibly interesting and relatively not dense (all things considering) and would definitely recommend it to anyone with the time and/or interest.

In other news, I've been pretty productive (in an unproductive way) today, and so far, I've managed to:
1) Request to be added to the mailing lists of the postcolonial lit and gender/sexuality reading groups of my program

2) Ask for the syllabus of this amaaazing graduate anthropology course that explores agency, temporality, and sovereignty in relation to travel and migration (and which I can't audit because I have another class at the same time, TEARS)

3) Request an audit in another course which is supposed to be a critical examination of contemporary theories in cultural and social anthropology

4) Make a (required) appointment with my department chair during the first two weeks of classes (which start in early September, EEK!)

...

Ok, so maybe all of those things took about 30 minutes to accomplish (minus the researching of graduate anthropology courses, aka me poring over course descriptions and drooling like an extremely dorky kid in an extremely dorky candy store). And possibly came after about 3-4 hours of watching Olympics highlights/reruns online (what can I say, I like gymnastics and diving!)

Alright, no more procrastination from me. Off to the summary writing and reading!