The rest of the world

I am doing some work with one of my professors. We are looking at incorporating intercultural understanding into foreign language learning. As a result, I have been thinking about the cultural assumptions that I had of the rest of the world when I was growing up. When I was very young my parents had Greek friends. I was jealous of their frilly toilet seat covers and it made me feet special to know them and the fancy names for the casseroles they made. For me, culture was delicious food. But, things got more complicated in grade school. There was one hispanic girl in our class. She was nice and also a Jehova’s witness. This distinction between ethnicity and religion was lost on the 9 year old me. I thought all hispanics had to leave the classroom whenever someone brought cupcakes for their birthday. I middle school I quickly realized this was not the case.

However, I think my first real insight into foreign culture was the winter olympics in Albertville, France. It was 1992 and my parents had just ended our family's tv abstinence program and I stayed up late and watched the opening ceremonies on a 12 inch screen in the corner of our living room. I was in awe of the bizarre costumes, bungy acrobats and dichordant melodies. Anyone who dared be that unconventional would be ridiculed out of my midsized American city. Shortly thereafter I started wearing birkenstocks, because European equalled cool, and it was all downhill from there. Four years later, to the dismay of my teachers who warned that I was throwing away my future, I went to Spain as an exchange student. Over the past 14 years I have only managed to live in the US for whopping 3.5 years. I have often talked of moving back, and am ever curious about how that might go.

Writing up a storm

Academic writing is a calculated yet magical process. Yesterday one of my classmates asked me about my writing process and I couldn’t really articulate it. I do all the typical things; make notes, outline. Then I cut and paste the notes into the outline and try to shape paragraphs. And somewhere along the line a synthesis occurs. Ideas start to bloom and arguments wind through the string of references, ‘howevers’ and ‘moreovers’.

Lately, after the crafty cohesion of ideas occur, I like to deconstruct the whole thing into a word cloud. Its punishment really to see the carefully constructed style evaporate as the most frequent words are stacked against each other in the color scheme of my choice. I always wonder if someone could just guess what I was after just by looking at the word cloud? Can you? Here is the latest one.