[Izulde]

I have a thesis advisor now. I asked the person I thought would be the best option for me personally, and they said yes, so that's super awesome.

I've actually found some time to do leisure reading at night in the bath. Been plowing through James Clavell's Shogun, which is quite marvelous in a lot of ways, flawed in a few, but oh so gripping and intriguing a narrative.

I have no intention of trying anything involving Japan, though. Spain will be a very tempting locale to set a story or two in, based on experiences in Granada and my leaning towards the Basque region this summer.

I'm a bit conflicted, though. Part of me wants to go to a whole new country/continent rather than back to Spain or even Western Europe. Another part of me says since I'll be there only a month or two at most, that the time it would take to pick up survival level of an entirely new language would essentially rob me of the fullest possible enjoyment. A third part notes that Basque society and culture will be entirely different from the rest of Spain and also offers comparatively easy travel access to the Galician and Catalan regions.

I won't lie - I'd love to go to Japan and thought a lot about the JET program, but that would have meant delaying graduation a semester and frankly, I'm tired of Las Vegas in a lot of ways. I no longer hate it like I did when I was a kid, but I'm really ready to go somewhere else at this point, and I've a whole year to go yet. The other half of the equation is that you're expect to have a basic grasp of Japanese characters, etc. before you even get there, and as my experience with Russian demonstrates, I don't do well at all with non-Latin alphabet based languages. That's just how I'm wired.

South America would be awesome, too, except the thought of winter does not appeal to me at all, which is when I would be there. Africa I won't ever go back to. Morocco was fun but I just have no interest in the actual continent itself, although I do enjoy some of the literary traditions.

In what will be the most interesting news to FOFC, I'm putting together a themed freshman comp course on something like Sports and American Society (bland title I know, but it's just a working one). If my proposal is successful, I'll be able to teach it next fall, which ties in to my post-graduation goals.