one day at a time

I had my first course on Wednesday, "Public Culture in Africa". The good news is that I understood everything that was discussed during the class. The other good news is that there were a total of 8 people in the class, all of whom were female-including the course instructor. Come to find out, there aren't a lot of men in the Humanities, period. I find this to be odd because when I attended the African Studies conference in Chicago this fall, there were primarily older men in attendance, which leaves me to wonder if this is a generational issue. Either way, it won't matter who's in the class when I'm writing 2 giant research projects and the start of my dissertation this semester. 

My days of late have consisted of 8AM wake up calls from the neighbor's car alarm-or just very recently, birds have started to climb in through my window, perch on the interior sill, and sing. It's awful, and it scares me to death. I manage to get them out by "shooing". I spend the rest of the day going to different parts of town to check them out. I'm usually on a mission to buy school supplies or "wall art". I make sure to get back home by 5 or 6PM, this is when my flat-mates tend to get home from school. We all take turns making dinner for each other. They're teaching me how to cook with eggplant, the "me cooking" part is a small miracle in itself. This is the best part of the day. We eat dinner in the "lounge" and then end up talking until around 11PM when they go to bed. Although, there's been a couple of nights when we've had visitors, people our age that the girls know. I've met some good people and look forward to seeing more of them in the coming months. Nava's mother is still staying with us and I've taken marvelously to her Persian dishes. She's a wonderful cook. 

Mostly, I'm looking forward to getting some real work done. I feel like the vacation faze has passed, and for me to really believe that this is my new life, I've got to have some sort of purpose here. My only other course of the semester is tomorrow. It's called "Problematizing the study of Africa: Interrogating the Disciplines". I'm anticipating this to be the more difficult of the two courses, just from the sound of it.