Same time next year

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si_1mpmVECA


I have this distant memory of being a little girl and seeing this movie with my mom. I remember how she thought it was so lovely and I remember the female lead's blond hair. In many ways, this movie has always been with me. Not so long ago, maybe only a few months ago, I remembered and looked it up. Watching it felt like this thunderstorm of feelings I didn't really realize I felt.

Hearing the song, the little piano notes that serve as bridges for the scenes take me back to thinking about what love is. It reminds me that we never really know the part someone plays in our lives until much after. It also showed me that couples are not perfect, that fairy tales are not how they seem...

Hearing the song makes me miss a life I didn't have and makes me like the one I live. Weird.

Same as I've always been

Over the years, I've grown quite fond of finding patterns in the way I cope with things or continuity in the way I carry out my life and deal with what's important to me. Sometimes, these mechanisms are good and they have helped me get to where I am today. Sometimes, they are bad and have also helped me get to where I am today...

So today, my mom and I went through all her papers to try and find either my Guatemalan ID, or my Guatemalan birth certificate. We were unsuccessful in both accounts. However, we did find a lot of old and cool stuff. For example, I found out that as a little girl, I had terrible allergies that kept me from going to school a lot. That happened again when I was a little older, and starting high school. I didn't have allergies, but I stayed out of school most of eight grade because I was sick. I always thought I exaggerated to get to miss class, but I also discovered I didn't. Like when I was a little preschooler, I had legitimate reasons to be away from the classroom. I just downplayed them in my head so that most of the burden of missing school would fall on me, and not my health.

I also found a lot of my old report cards. I was very much surprised with the fact I had straight A's. Over the (very) many years I've been in school, I've always thought of my self as a more or less average student that just so happened to end up doing a PhD. I've never really considered myself very intelligent, although I freely admit I am not a complete moron. Tonight, as I went through the papers with my mom, I told her that I never realized that I kept getting good grades. I only recall not being as good as I thought I could be (something I still feel today).

As I hone in on my last year as a twenty-something, its nice to see some connecting dots to all that I've been doing: I was getting good grades and enjoying school, despite being sick and having problems coping with being back in Guatemala after our small stint abroad. My teachers described me (in my report cards) with many of the same character traits that I have today, and as I was going through my stuff I realized that I didn't stumble into school, I worked for it over the course of many years. A life project, if you will. And I was doing it without noticing that I was working so hard, or that I enjoyed it so much. I guess its those little tricks we play on ourselves...

Could it be I actually had a plan behind my madness? Your guess is as good as mine. For now though, I will just entertain myself with the memories of the very willful little girl that taught herself how to read so she could program the VCR to tape her cartoons :)

'Transferable skills': I cut Gerd's hair

One of the most important things that a PhD student has to remember is that we will eventually go back to the real world. Yes, after the PhD most of us won't be in a university anymore. We will have to do what normal adults do: live lives with schedules, actual business suits and other stuff.

To cope with this dramatic change of t-shirts and late mornings to heels and waking up early, we learn a set of the so-called 'transferable skills'. That means things that some of what we know how to do as researchers actually works in a 'real life' environment. To the best of my knowledge, I have none of those so far... well, had.

Last night, Gerd asked me to cut his hair. 'Are you scared to try? he said... to which I replied -no, are you?

I have to say I did a really good job. Even hair, client happy and I realized that I might have gotten an actual skill that's good for after my PhD -if that post-doc doesn't pan out, I mean

Draft-head

No one said doing a PhD was easy... and no one said writing was easy either. I knew this, but I threw caution to the wind and followed my dream of doing a PhD (which is inexorably tied to writing a thesis). I did fieldwork, I analyzed data and summed-up my findings. This semester, it was time for me to write paper number one.

I won't lie and say that it's been easy, but it's not a process I hate. These last few weeks have all been about working a puzzle: finding the corner pieces, doing the edges, putting different sections together hoping that everything will fit in the end. The difference between papers and puzzles is that the puzzle you know if you're doing it wrong. The paper, you need your advisers to tell you! -or help you along the way.

Last week was all about putting the sections together. I had written out most of the manuscript in different pre-papers and as I pieced them together, I had to make my discussion of my findings. I finished on Friday evening with a headache and a sense of accomplishment. I can't wait to know what my advisers think, what changes I still have to make and how much longer until I have a 'final draft'.

The problem now is that I can't find the headspace to work. I guess I overdid it last week and have a terrible case of draft-head. I've been thinking about how to explain what that is all weekend long, and I finally came up with the definition: tt's like having a hangover, but without the wine.

On being back home

It's been a full two and a half weeks since I came back, and I've managed to fit quite a bit into it. Jet lag posed the usual problems, but a weekend at the lake fixed them. Who knew early to bed, early to rise made your body adjust to the time changes better and faster?

And I got myself an intern, and no job. And my car broke down and got fixed -with no job. Can you tell that not having a job for the first time in over six years is starting to worry me? -and is also strangely relaxing.

And next week I plan on starting the meetings for my fieldwork, writing a proposal for workshops, asking for money and riding out June. Being home is great, and I like it... but I can't help but miss my bike, my korridor room and the things I've left behind in Umea.

'Summer glow' lotion... more like safety orange

I have very dry skin. Because of this I need a lot moisturizing lotion... which I ran out of this week. So I went to the supermarket and got me some Nivea 'Summer Beauty' lotion, guaranteed to gradually give you a 'summer glow'. Since those things hardly seem to work in Guatemala, and because it smelled really nice, I got it.

Three days later: I am very tanned, fake-tan tanned. Not only that but were the elastic of my gloves and socks go there are orange rings! Truth be told, I've never been this tanned... so maybe its not that bad. What really sucks is that it has some sort of sun block included... which I'm allergic to (I am allergic to all sun block). So not only am I orangy-skinned, but filled with little bumps from neck-to-toe.

Nice. I'm on my way to the supermarket now.

Sometimes, life boils down to a game of checkers

I think I was about five years old when my uncle Roberto taught me how to play checkers... and not very long after that, I got good at it. It didn't take that much for almost every adult in my family to lose a game to me (and most of the times, it wasn't intentional!).

Once, my uncle came for a visit and played with me. I won a few times and started to get cocky... and lost miserably. He told me that I lost not because I wasn't prepared or because my technique was not good. I lost because I had too much confidence and hence lost sight of the little slip-ups and I was making and missed opportunities from being oblivious to my opponents mistakes as well.

Throughout my life I've noticed that cockiness will do that to me every time. If you are over-confident in your abilities then you will loose sight of your goal and probably not attain it. This happened with work this week. I thought I was too good for what I was assigned to do and here I am, five days later and still working on the draft.

So I remembered my uncle Roberto and what he said. I told my friend Danny about it and all he had to say is that 'Sometimes, life boils down to a game of checkers'. And he's right, it does.