This can make this blog, as a relatively unfiltered expression of what I'm thinking, seem like a bit of a downer. But despair not! Italy is getting better and better all the time, or more accurately I'm getting better and better at Italy every day. I have a cell phone so I can talk with the many friends I'm sure I'm only hours away from making here (and so I can call the landlord in case of future apartment issues - see below).
This afternoon was a great day in the archives. Earlier I was saying something about narrative not being a bad word, etc, and what I was meaning to say was that when I wasn't feeling good about this trip what I needed to do was to emplot the whole trip in a way that would make me feel better about what was happening instead of worse. Today's work in the archive is a perfect example: I was struggling this morning even to read the documents and wondering how it was possible that I could read the same piece of (scribbly) writing yesterday and not today. Then I went home for lunch. Things didn't get much better after lunch, actually, despite a couple of attempts to approach the documents a bit differently. And then! And then! I found a document I could read. And it was interesting. Very interesting! It was, in fact, exactly the kind of thing I came here hoping I would find (and hadn't seen directly so far). So you can imagine for yourself how I might tell the story of today's work in a way that will make me want to go back tomorrow instead of stay home and watch the following shows I have seen 10 to 30 seconds of in Italian:
Some anime show about an enormous dog
another anime show about giant robots fighting
How I Met Your Mother
Alias
CSI Miami
Cold Case
Knight Rider (just kidding - I wish!)
Also, I tried to tell my first joke in Italian yesterday. The punchline went, "Mamma mia!" Pretty good, no?
2.28.2008
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3 comments:
Whoa, that's awful that your apartment was robbed. What kind of neighborhood is it? Suburbia? Shantytown? Dogpatch-like?
Being around Beth for the last few years has made me appreciate the excitement of finding cool stuff in an archive -- it's awesome you've had this kind of success so early in the game.
Casey
tell us the joke!
You already know the joke. It starts, "Jesus Christ is walking through the countryside in Judea..." and ends (in English) "... Oh, mother PLEASE."
It hasn't been all successes - lots of trawling through terrible handwriting for little reward. But it's been good.
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