HOT

It is HOT here. Beautiful, but HOT. I had forgotten that I don't do so well in the heat. I guess it's good preparation for the Saint Paul summer. Ha.

Another meeting with M. today about my paper, which turned into a long debate over appelsap about American and Dutch politics, about the Dutch fear of "Islamicisation", about sex tourism. He is so interesting to talk to because he thinks in the same way that I do - all over the place, connecting everything that he perceives. He says he's not concerned about my mess of a paper because I'm scrupulous and I'm just psyching myself out right now and I'll pull it together in the end. But what I think he means is that he's not concerned because I think like him, which is sort of comforting and sort of not. It is nice to see such a similar mind in the academic world - it makes me feel better about my chances hacking it. On my way out, he noted that my skirt is "an homage to the Warhol gang" and dragged me to his partner's apartment downstairs to look at his extensive Warhol library. I left with "Edie," which I've been instructed to read right away.

It's super nice to feel like I have an intellectual community of sorts in this country, one that I've built with my own intellectual connections with people and not with the names or skills of my very literary, very intellectual parents. I think I'll always feel that in Buffalo, to a certain extent whatever intellectual acceptance I find will be on their coat-tails rather than on my own merits. Not by virtue of recommendation, exactly, but by virtue of access. Like if I hadn't been running around poetry readings and literary parties when I was 4, if I hadn't spent so much time at the bookstore schmoozing, would I have that access? Maybe, but I'm not sure. Permeability of intellectual community is an interesting concept.

We talked a bunch about the pitfalls and advantages of postmodernism. M described it as a sort of "deprogramming," a good thing for people who want to be creative and fresh thinkers to go through. But if you stick to the language of deprogramming rather than a more communicable language when trying to apply postmodern ideas to concrete things, you lose your ability to do so. It's funny because I had a similar conversation with L. the day before, when I went to her house to get the keys and meet her cat, Honore de Balzac (formerly Guillaume), who I'll be caring for for the next ten days or so. It's something that I'm preoccupied with and more and more interested in parsing through, because postmodernist theory was the catalyst for some very real, very concrete changes in my life, thought processes, introspective patterns, and ways of relating to other people. I credit it with much of the transformation I've been going through over the past several years, and with helping me to be a happier and more grounded person. In conversation, it often comes up that fellow peers or professors find it too abstract, too empty,not applicable to the "real world" - which has been the opposite of truth for me. Chela Sandoval and Jose Estaban Munoz, two theorists who changed my life,also have many examples of the very concrete power and applicability of highly abstract thought.

Anyway. I've been mulling that over. I move into L.'s apartment for my cat-sitting duties on Sunday, tomorrow I am going to Leiden to see Sarah's childhood hangouts, and other things (like the University). Today I am going to try to push through the heat and get things done, and maybe take a trip to the market. The RA, embarrassingly, has to help me cut Lupe loose from the rack under cover of darkness, because I was dumb and somehow lost my keys.