tl;dr: dizzy, cold, having a grand old time Since when is it...February…?! Hard to believe it’s been almost two months since my last update here. Happy 2019, if I missed the chance to wish you one earlier!! I hope your holidays & initial weeks of the year were cozy and cuddly. My hot water bottles and I wish you warmth and wellness. <3 I’m writing this with my fourth week of classes under my belt, fully settled back into Amman after a spat of travels over the holiday break. I thought about doing a separate blog post to sum up my time in South Asia, but I decided against it because that trip was so many things all at once — not really a “sum up” kind of experience. Suffice to say that if I was going to do Christmas abroad, I really couldn’t have asked for better company than my love Geetha (check out her Fulbright blog here) and (non)resident co-adventurer in chief Shoshana. If you’re curious, you can check out pictures from my trip at this link. Also happy to answer any questions, as always. But forget December: now, I’m back in Amman for stint #2 of my academic year. Whole new ball game. This semester is for "tailoring to our content specializations," aka I get to study the things that I care most about (but in Arabic, of course). The courses I'm in are: Introduction to Translation, Grammar, Gender in Jordan, Advanced Jordanian Colloquial Dialect, Levantine Cinema, and Arab Leftist Political Thought. Basically I'm taking on the kinds of subjects that used to give me headaches in undergrad, only now with the added excitement of an ~80% likelihood I’m going to mispronounce something when I make a seminar comment! Whee! I’m 1000% submerged in Arabic due to the bonkers amount of prep work for each class, so much so that I feel distinctly weird during the week when I break the flow and start chatting in English. So if I sound like I’m drunk when I’m texting you, that’s why. (Frankly, beer here is far too expensive for it to be the other possibility.) I will definitely throw up some more posts later that talk about how my worldview is shifting in these classes alongside my language, so keep an eye out, and feel free to ask questions about any of the above topics. Other fellowship news is that I just started a volunteer position with a legal advocacy organization, which I’ll also share some reflections about soon. For now I'll just say that every day I am increasingly in awe of the resilience that refugees must embody to move through the world...also, the more I learn about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the angrier I become.
Other than academics & volunteering...honestly, if you want a sense of how exciting my day-to-day life is, the biggest news outside of my fellowship is that I recently figured out how to get library books on my Kindle, which -- no overstatement -- rocked my world. Friday nights are (candle) lit. Hope you’re staying warm through the winter blues, wherever you are, and please don’t hesitate to reach out if we’re overdue for a Skype catch-up! Next post, I’ll share my favorite concepts, factoids, and memes thus far from Gender in Jordan. Hugs & cheers, Jackie P.S. I'm a liar! I wrote this whole post and failed to mention the other exciting development -- I've convinced four talented (& gullible?) fools to get on a stage with me and sing a couple jazz sets later this week. Eek! If you want, check out our page here for updates & videos.
1 Comment
2/16/2019 11:19:24 am
Yes, music-making! Love you from afar and so proud of you and happy for these adventures. You are *living*. And learning!
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