Gearing Up for the Coming Semester
I hope you've had a good winter break and a happy new year. I don't know about you, but I'm still in holiday mode, particularly because Puerto Rican holidays are not officially over until the octavitas on January 8th. I plan on celebrating el dia de los reyes magos on the 6th and going to Albuquerque for the weekend to the Pokemon City Championships there. I'm gearing up for classes and working on the final paper for QT; so far, I have 9 pages, so I am hoping to finish it without problems tomorrow.
The break was very good for me. I got to see some friends, develop some ideas, and piece together better the feelings I've had this past semester. Writing Frank's paper helped me a lot with that, actually. I argued there that just as there is a particular way of depression that is marred in the hegemonic, and particularly white while appearing as a universal mode of feelings (to follow Munoz's idea), there is a particularly white and middle-class principle of "professionalism" that permeates the academy and makes it cold and sanitized. People of color, queers, disabled people, working class people and others are welcome to the life of the academician as long as they are willing to fit into these models of respectability. Well, I've decided to make it my project to _not_ follow those conventions. I will admit that there's always been the fear of getting kicked out of grad school if I wasn't docile or complacent enough; that fear is gone. Not the fear that getting kicked out is not a possibility but rather the fear that getting kicked out would be such a terrible thing. I've decided I want to invest in this and I want to make spaces for me and people like me regardless of the costs-even if that means expulsion. So expect to see me being as crazy and as jovial as I was before I got so marred into the situations here.
The other thing is that my talks with Hikari have help me think about how I think of race-if that makes sense? Part of the reason I am so uneasy in the department is that racial politics are being primarily spearheaded by a white person-someone who, in my opinion, crosses the line of "speaking with" into "speaking for". And I cannot feel comfortable with that, my friends. Would you? I am not going to concern myself with the workings of the department anymore, but it does leave a bitter taste that race is so poisonous that I don't even want to get close to it. I will, but I will engage with it on my own terms, and the results will hopefully help me open the spaces I need and maybe even bring a bit of fresh air to the place.
As a random note, I will be out of town Jan 25-31st for an anime convention in Ohio. I also found a decently priced ticket to Tokyo mid-may to early june. I SOOOOO wanna do it! I'll need to tighten my belt and work on those spending habits!