herro

the cool, drizzly weather this morning made me think of two things this morning. first off, i wish i were on the cape, or just on the ocean in general. i would love to just sit out wrapped in a blanket with some hot coffee and read a book.

secondly it made me think of one morning while at home when kasia, ben, (maybe chris) and i went to 'a taste of heaven' in andersonville for breakfast. i guess the weather was somewhat similar to today. i'm hoping we can have a repeat when i'm home (in a day and a month) for thanksgiving.

i've started to read a book for leisurely purposes entitled 'night train to lisbon'. the back cover review mentioned 'the shadow of the wind', a really great historical fiction mystery set in franco-era barcelona, so i thought i'd enjoy it. so far it is pretty good - a swiss philologist who teachers greek, latin, and hebrew at a lyceum randomly picks up and leaves his town after a chance encounter with a portuguese woman. he then picks up a book in portuguese and becomes obsessed with the language and heads to lisbon. that's where i'm at so far - it seems as though he's having a midlife crisis, but something deeper than that.

it makes me want to just pack up shop and move to Catalonia - I could support myself teaching English, rent a flat from some elderly Catalan woman, and get skinny from only consuming coffee. a wonderful life would i leave...

back to reality, i am pretending to re-immerse myself in grad school work. unfortunately the classes i am taking haven't really panned out to what i expected. 'linguistic structure of english', though good for my resume for fulbright hopes of teaching english, hasn't taught me much. it feels very elementary - i can't even describe it.

'comparative development of the romance languages' is in theory very interesting, but the professor has structured the class poorly and bounces back and forth from topic to topic and really i just have no idea what is going on. luckily for my final project i get to work alone on topic with catalan, so that may prove rewarding.

'early slavic linguistics and texts' is the only exception. though my most difficult class, it is really fascinating and i have actually acquired factual information about the structure, phonology, morphology, etc. of the language. i may take sanskrit after all, next semester. on va voir.

tonight i am hopefully seeing a movie with bobo, possibly 'quarantine', which looks reasonably frightening.