We got back Sunday and my mom left Monday and after not studying or having class for a week, I realized I have a lot of work to do! There are only two weeks left in the semester. One week of normal class, and another week of mainly test-taking, although with a normal class schedule. Not exactly like "Dead Week" and "Finals Week" at MSU but I am feeling just as much pressure!
First of all, I have to do a final project for my Argentine Culture class that is due this Tuesday. It can be in any form and about anything, but I am choosing to do mine in paper format, so it has to be 10 pages long. In Spanish. Sounds terrible, I know, why did I choose to write a paper? My saving grace is that I'm including pictures. I'm already four pages in, so I'm feeling pretty good about it. But as with any project, I'm a little nervous about it because I didn't get a chance to talk to my professor about it, and I chose to write it about the impact on Argentina's culture of the Argentine desaparecidos (disappeared people) during the military dictatorship of 1976-1982, but with repercussions starting in 1969 until 1983. My idea was inspired by the Parque de la Memoria, if you're interested you should read into it.
Secondly, I have to write a 5-7 page paper for my Latin American Literature class. It's not due until the last week of class, two Mondays from now, and frankly I have no idea what I am going to write it about. It, too, can be about anything I want, basically anything we've read in class or another work (or other works) by the same authors we've read, or something by another Latin American author we haven't read anything by, with the teacher's approval. It's basically your standard literature class term paper, and it needs to be supplemented by two articles of literary criticism about the book/short story/poem/whatever the paper is about. Which I can't tell you, because I don't know. I haven't finished reading the last book we were assigned for that class yet, but I plan on finishing it this weekend and if I'm really ambitious I might decide to write my final paper on that. It's called "Nocturno de Chile" by Roberto Bolaño. It's a pretty confusing book to read; it has no chapters or even paragraphs, it's basically one big monologue narrated by an old man with a fever laying in bed reflecting on his life and feeling guilty about something. It supposedly has to do with the conflict in Chile during the dictatorship of Pinochet, who was Chile's dictator between 1973-1990 and was supported by the United States for either our own selfish reasons or our ignorance of what was going on while no other country in the world supported him.
The more I am here, the more I realize how little I know about the history of other countries in the world.
I am happy that now my reading comprehension in Spanish is good enough that I can read such a complex book, even though it's definitely slow reading and I have to re-read pretty much every page. But I think that is more due to the complex nature of the book than my reading comprehension.
So if I don't update for a couple of weeks, you know what I'm doing.
Happy semester!
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