being home, etc...

i sort of figured but never really thought much about how hard it would be to go from doing the amount of traveling and exploring and meeting new people and speaking another language all the time to being home in san diego where no one is out of school yet and i just as a general rule don't have much to do. thankfully now i am just starting my internships at unasd and the irc, going to the gym, getting back into the hang of hanging out with people, etc... but i have been so beyond bored in a kind of (okay, really) pathetic way.

i miss barcelona. i miss the freedom, i miss the momentum, i miss my spanish gym and the sights and smells and sounds of the city. i miss morning bakery runs and walking through born's windy sun-streaked streets. i know i complain(ed) a lot, but i had such a wonderful time abroad. entonces, bcn, gracias por todo. ojala que nos vemos pronto?

distant thoughts on catalunya

when we were in lisbon, the guys we met mentioned a dislike of barcelona (compared to madrid) that they said was linked to the city's "anarchist vibe." "you mean.. the catalan thing?" i asked, surprised by their reaction to what i was beginning to learn about the history of catalunya.

looking back, this "vibe," the catalan presence in barcelona, was one of my favorite things about the city. i think the history of catalan culture, so suppressed politically and linguistically under franco, plays a fascinating role in the way this city behaves. in my last few weeks in barcelona i kept thinking, i wonder what it means to speak this language that is not technically needed to communicate with anyone (i could be wrong, but i don't know that anyone only speaks catalan). what does it mean to speak and create in a language that exists for reasons other than use-value? to make the choice to communicate in catalan because it signifies a history is, i think, very important and very interesting. to resist what gloria anzaldua calls "linguistic terrorism" is very important, very interesting. this is a reason to study language and literature, there is a free-ing there.