Back After An Exhilarating Three Weeks

The past 21 days have been hectic for me, to say the least. I've probably learned more in that time than I ever have in my entire life. New ideas seem to be thrown at me every day, ones that make use of endless streams of prefixes and suffixes in a valiant but futile linguistic attempt to quantify what the mind thinks. Post-postmodernism. Militarized heteronormativity. Multisensorial transculturation. Syncretism.

But at the same time, I find myself not really buying into the language. Like the bad academic I am, I use the word "I" when I write. Often. And I use it when I speak. More often.

I gave my first ever conference presentation last Friday (basically what I had spent the last three weeks preparing for). Despite my extreme nervousness leading up to it, I was surprisingly calm and composed. Somewhere along the line I learned to slow down my speech delivery and become more mindful of the words I speak as I speak them - great assets when talking in front of a group. Coupled with my speech success was the chance I had to meet two of the giants in the field of Visual Culture - Nicholas Mirzoeff (NYU), a specialist in visual media, and Olu Oguibe (UConn), a leading artist, art historian, curator and critic of contemporary African art. Olu even signed my copy of his book (I've started a modest collection of academic books autographed by their authors). Then I got the thrill of driving him to an art exhibition, where we discussed problems with the academy and Latin American politics. For those of you who are Bulls fans, this is like playing 1-on-1 with Michael Jordan for me. No joke.

Now that my first real weekend of immersion into the academic experience is over, I feel surprisingly . . . confident. I think I have an idea of what I want to do, but more importantly, how I want to go about doing it. I've spent so much time in my life trying to break free of every constraint, I think I'm finally reaching the point where my mind can do what it wants without fear of consequence. Yay for that.

In less exciting but possibly more interesting news, I feel everyone should go see the film
Rabbit-Proof Fence. It's poignant, well-acted, and 100% historically accurate. I checked.

Last but not least, I think this is my all-time favorite commercial.

More updates to come (promise).