I destroyed a book today.

It was actually kind of fun. Though there was a little corner of my mind that kept screaming, Book! This is a book that you’re ripping apart with your exacto knife here! And it’s a nice book, hardcover and with color pictures, even if they’re that cheap kind of color pictures with the three-color ink that they use for magazines . . . You’re taking apart a BOOK! But I am going to put in back together (and I’m going to do a better job of it; I’m going to sew the book well enough that I don’t need two millimeters of glue coating the spine to hold the thing together . . .) And for those of you worried about my book karma, I also completed making two books today, so my net effect on the number of books extant in the world is positive, not negative. But I can’t deny that there was some internal cringing involved.

check-in and thoughts on an election overseas

First off:
I’m alive, I’m still here, things are fine but these past few days have been a little hectic (which is to say, hectic for Spain, which is comparatively not hectic, but more hectic than not-hectic in Spain. If you followed that). There seems to be only two flavors of homework in Spain: almost none and gobs. It occurred to me on Monday that the amount of things that needed to be done for today fell into the gobs category. If I had been planning ahead, it would not necessarily have been so, but I wasn’t, and it was. Hence, I’ve read a 210 page novel, watched the movie, studied for and taken a midterm, and gone to class and done all in the 46 hours between Monday classtime and class today. Also bought new pens, because I seem to be in the midst of a pen death blight (I don’t usually kill my pens, but I’ve gone through four of them in the past two or three weeks. And while people always give you loads of cheap ballpoint pens, I’m a pen snob and don’t like them).
And it was election day. Did I mention that? Of course, you probably knew that anyway.

I’ve heard it said that that the busiest people are the most on top of things and organized. And from where I am right now, I’m pretty sure that it’s true. When I’m at Smith, fencing three or four days a week, taking four decently hard classes, on the leadership boards for somewhere between four and six clubs, depending on how you count, I am a pretty put-together person. My room isn’t always clean, but I know what needs to be done and I find time to do it without shorting myself on too much sleep, and I look ahead in the syllabi and know when tests are coming up and large books need to be read by, and I still manage to find time to just be myself with my friends somewhere in there. Here, where’s there’s very little work most of the time, I can’t be bothered to remember that every three classes we have to read a literary text, and to remember that this one’s a novel, and have the foresight to figure out that if the last class on that book I didn’t like is a Monday, that means that the first class on the next book/movie will be a Wednesday, which means that I won’t have a weekend in which to do it.

I got it done, of course. But as I said, things have been a little hectic.
And, due to the afore-mentioned preponderance of free time, I’d decided to try to participate in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which started on Saturday. I should mention that I don’t know how well a 2000-words-a-day goal will mesh with a Spain blog, but I suspect the blog may suffer a bit. I’ll still try to keep posting something once or twice a week, but it may be shorter than usual (shorter than this one is turning out to be).
On the subject of Things Going On In My Life, we’re going to Granada Friday and Saturday. I’m excited.

Arqueología

I’ve been promising a post about my archeology class for ages. Here it is.

There are pictures. Most of them are of class stuff, but some of them are just of Córdoba.

Since the internet fails to entertain me, it seems that I must entertain the internet

Have Library Card, Will Travel, and other rambling

My library card arrived on Friday. I think I mentioned that in my last entry. Because I was in Málaga, and because Monday was a holiday (or rather, Sunday was a holiday, and here in Spain if a holiday falls on a weekend, they extend it to a weekday, too), I didn’t get a chance to use it until yesterday. And I successfully acquired a copy of Terry Pratchett’s Mascarada and an anthology of Spanish sci-fi. And I did it all by myself (besides asking where the library was). Well, that’s not entirely true. I did ask for help several times, but I asked Strangers, rather than people who are paid to interact with me – which, if you think about it, a lot of the people who I deal with are. Of course, if you really want to split hairs, the library staff are paid to interact with the library patrons, of which I technically am one, but we’re going to ignore that for the purposes of this argument. And unlike the time I tried to get a local library card at school, I did not need to go home at any point and get more identification; my passport was sufficient (though, mind you, I had about six other pieces if that wasn’t enough). And it was successfully delivered to my residence (when I applied, they asked for my domicilio. I have two addresses, the one where I receive mail and the one where I live, and since there were only two lines, and my receive-mail address is a lot longer than that, I gave them my where-I-live address. I later learned that they would send me the card through mail; if this had occurred to me I would probably have tried to fit my receive-mail address onto the two lines, because my name isn’t on the apartment mailbox, and I wasn’t actually sure that it would arrive. But it did. And I figured how to take out books (there is no browsing room for adult novels; you have to look them up on the online catalog and request them from the room behind the library desk with slips of paper. I would really have preferred a system where I could look at the books before taking them out, but a public library is a lot cheaper than bookstores here, so I won’t complain), and successfully managed to get the right two books (the librarian originally fetched me a sci-fi collection and La Mascara de la Revolucion, or something similar, which, while it looked somewhat interesting, was also giant; about three inches thick, and not actually the book I wanted). I’m still a little bit confused about the children’s section; there seemed to be a notice that only youth under 14 can take out books, but I only saw that after I gave the librarian a request for a book with an asignatura for a children’s book, and she told me that I could go upstairs and get it myself. But I didn’t see any books by that author at all. I’ll figure that out next time. Maybe I was accidentally searching the wrong part of the catalog.
As far as reading, the going is a bit slow, and I have the distinct impression that I’m not picking up on stuff, but I’m hopeful that this will get better.

Checking in

I turned 21 yesterday. Which makes me completely and utterly a legal adult. Like I’ve been for the past three weeks. A bit anticlimactic, that.

First off, I would like to say that the recent ETA attacks are far away and haven’t affected me.
I have not been inconvenienced by the torrential downpour, either, and while I’m told that the river is a bit of a mess, I personally have only seen a higher-than-usual number of puddles.

I have pictures to post, but I’m feeling lazy and am not going to mess with them today. I’ll add them later.

In other news, while I’m very glad that the cold I’ve picked up seems to consist of nothing worse than a runny-ish nose and a mildly sore throat, I’ve had it for a week now, am thoroughly sick of feeling like a large portion of the water in my body is exiting through my nose, and really wish that it would either hurry up and get worse and go away, or just go away.

And my class schedule is settled

I can take From Text to Film: Spanish and Latin American Cinema for to fulfill one of the major requirements.

Of course, I still need to attend all of the other classes and be sure that I actually like them, but I’m in control of those decisions, so that’s close enough to being settled.

Since I arrived in Córdoba . . .