Global Geek

When I first arrived in Spain I was excited to enjoy the freedom of being on my own in Europe, of travelling, of starting with a clean slate. Life tasted sweet where nobody knew my name. I hadn't been in school for over a month and I was looking forward to the relaxed, 'enjoy-life' lifestlye here. So I started drinking sangria at lunch time, spending my nights with tequila shots clubbing away on the dock, and staying out at the bars with mojitos until morning almost every single night. After a month, I just couldn't do it anymore. Being a cool, party girl was exhausting, especially when I had 9:30am class every day. Studious Me and Sangria Me just didn't mix. So I stayed where I felt comfortable: school.

But until I decided that it had been long enough since I checked up on what my friend Chris was up to, I had forgotten what it was like to actually think about things. I've written some small assignments here and there, one short paper and did two little presentations, but the material was often based on videos, a photocopied American textbook, or something easily researchable on Wikipedia. For the most part, being in school here has felt mechanical and hardly intellectual, so I was happy to read some of Chris' more academically themed posts (quite enjoyed the one about the movie 300 and Orientalism). I'm far from worshipping his brain, but I do think he's quite the intelligent guy, and it's pretty rad that one of his papers got accepted for the AOIR (Association of Internet Researchers) Conference being held in my favourite Canadian city - Vancouver! - this October.

I'll admit that I didn't make it all the way through Chris' abstract (sorry dear, videogames and hybrid scenes and music remix communities - wha? - aren't really my thing), but I did start to browse the other papers that had been accepted for the conference and was reminded of my keener self in first year university (can you believe I actually said I was worried about finding my "academic identity" to a professor? - dork! nerd!). Two caught my eye on the very first page, and suddenly my fingers had minds of their own as they clicked on article after article. I got all excited during the first half hour or so; I was reading abstracts about Facebook.com and Second Life and blogs and and and... and then I realized that there was just SO MUCH. The research just never ends and the hard part for me in appreciating all this work is knowing that real life, and certainly the internet, runs so much faster than academic research. By the time something gets published and out to the academic public, that online-something has changed or something else is new and people understand it far better than they did a year ago. A lot of the results and conclusions I found to be interesting, yet commonsense. Not to be a snot or anything - because I know I'm just a lowly undergrad who doesn't even have her BA in Sociology yet - but can anything new possibly be said about blogging and self-identity/(re)presentation of self?

What really struck me was that I stumbled upon papers that actually researched topics very similar to offhand comments I've made in the past. Like that one about Facebook and relationships, or that other one about Facebook and 'friends' (we get it: Facebook Facebook Facebook! it's the new hot potato, let's pass it around until it gets worn out like blog research), or that other paper about Second Life that got me so excited that I misread the word "microethnographic" to be "multi-ethnic" and thought it was about something else entirely - oh what, it's late and my eyes are tired. I wondered what things would be like now if I actually cared enough to seriously consider all the offhand comments I make about random things here and there, to follow up on them and research and see what I find. I mean, I've thought those things about blogging and Facebook too. Has anyone looked into ethnic identities on Second Life yet?

It sounds like I'm either ready for grad school or that I really want to get into grad school soon, but the reality is that I'm not and I don't. Post-grad studies seems so far away from me and my lifestlye right now. For the most part, I'm perfectly content making my offhand comments and reading up on what other people have written about them. But there is that other part of me that wonders what I'd be able to do given the right resources and enough time to just read and write about something really, really... neat. The closest I came was that twenty-some-odd page monstrosity from Fall term on sex-tourism, orientalism, post-colonialism and a whole bunch of other -isms that made my head hurt. But it was all really... neat. I have to admit that school here leaves something to be desired, and I've discovered that it's the 'neat'-ness factor I desire. Nothing is really all that interesting or thought-provoking at school here and I'm going to say this once and only once: I miss theory.

I've always had a rep for being the class nerd/dork/geek/dweeb, the teacher's pet, the brown-noser, the overachiever, the know-it-all, the harcore keener. I have yet to be known as the theory-lover. Ask any sociology major at my school what I was like in class and they'll probably respond with, "Well, let's just say she talked a lot...." This quote, by the way, was the result of an experiment I actually conducted. My flat-mate's best friend had a class with me back in Winter of '05, so I egged on my flat-mate to ask her what it was like to be in class with me. Her response was almost exactly that, and she wouldn't type anymore knowing that I was in the room eagerly waiting to hear what else she had to say. Of course, she felt awkward between her best friend and I, this other girl in her program who was suddenly living with her best friend in Spain, who wanted her to say more and more about what I was like in good old Sociology of Mass Communication. She didn't say anything else probably because she didn't want to be mean, or she thought that the truth would have hurt my feelings, but in reality, it really wouldn't have.

It doesn't take a lot to know that yes, I'm a bit of a geek and yes, I tend to talk a fair bit in class, especially if it's an intriguing topic - you can bet that I've hardly said a word here all semester. I'm that kind of student who's interested in what she studies and is interested in finding out more, so I don't hesitate to ask questions or engage in a conversation with my peers or my professor - gasp. And, indulge me in another major geek moment here: I got an email from my Environmental Economics professor that said,

By the way, I really enjoyed your presentation about "Sustainable Ecotourism in Antartica". Congratulations
Best regards
Roberto

I know, I'm getting congratulatory emails about my work (this isn't the first time either - *gloat*), so believe me, I KNOW. That girl could have said anything she wanted to about me and my nerd rep, but it wouldn't have been anything I hadn't heard before.

I'm far from going into grad school, so I'm back to where I've always been: academically fierce on a small scale, but mostly tame when it comes to grander academic pursuits. I've been going to those dull classes (well, sort of, if you don't count my month-long hiatus whilst in India), getting good grades, attending girls-only dinners, and getting dressed up in red stilettos once in a while for a nice night with friends. But really, it's almost 5:30am and I just spent hours browsing the AOIR Conference website and reading abstracts from papers all about the Internets. So, it's pretty clear: I'm a geek (in red stilettos)... what else is new? You can take the geek out of Canada, but she'll live on in Spain; you just simply cannot take the geek out of me.
12:33 am

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows

You know what's nice? Little black dresses that hide the fact that I woke up five minutes before I had to catch the bus, knowing a hairstyle that disguises greasy hair, scoring a solid 90 on a presentation about sustainable ecotourism in Antartica that I stayed up until 4am perfecting, teaching my MacBook to tell me a joke while a friend did the same to his PowerBook (albeit with an accent from the South of France), walking leisurely in the sun, going to the market just to browse, coming home to eat perfectly ripe, farm-fresh strawberries, and talking to your best bud for hours about, well, everything. Natural sugar and a natural high at it's best.

What's also pretty awesome is the fact that my boyfriend thought about me in the shower half-way across the world this morning. No, not in that way, but in a super-geeky way that even I could barely believe.

Adam says: I was in the shower this morning rinsing my hair to get it wet, and all of a sudden I said out loud, "Shirley says you don't need to wash your hair everyday. She's a bright girl and she has gorgeous hair. I'm NOT going to wash my hair today," and I moved out of the water and began to dry my hair haha

Me: lol - You did NOT!

Adam says: I thought the conversational nature of my comments were kinda funny. Considering I was standing alone in the shower.

...Aaaand that's an example of the kind of men I'm attracted to. The good kind. Can you tell I'm missing him now that he's gone?

Tomorrow I might go to the beach, I have to get some homework done, I might go to the museum and learn about things in Spanish and then I'll go to a pot-luck surprise birthday dinner for a very sweet Italian girl. Tomorrow also marks the first day of my one month countdown until I leave Alicante. At this point, one month seems like a long time, but I know that whatever is left of school will fly by and then I'll have about three weeks of vegetating to do. And researching and trip planning and bookings and packing and shipping things home, except for myself.

It's funny, it seems that all I've done since...well, a long time - January? December? Fall 2006? - is research destinations and plan trips and book flights and pack and move around. I've never been so nomadic before and while there's a sense of adventure to it, I think I might just be starting to miss home. Or maybe just Asian foods. For now, I've got it pretty wonderful and as long as I make it to a Chinese restaurant sometime next week, I'll be just fine.

8:07 pm

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

With A Side of Funk

A twenty-eight year old Swiss friend told twenty-three year old me that he thought I was mature over lunch today. I wonder what he'd think if he saw me procrastinating at the library - sitting at my trusted lappy and not writing that paper nor preparing that presentation on sustainable ecotourism in Antarctica (tell me I don't choose the coolest paper topics ever and I'll beat you), but instead jamming away with Renegades of Funk. There was full-out full-body motion on my part which I think inspired the guy sitting across from me to start gently bobbing his head to whatever music he's listening to. Next, get the whole library to start the Thriller dance routine.

My mood is up there with the temperature today, despite being indoors working away. "Working" - ha! Weather.com tells me that it's 82 degrees F outside and I'm both happy and sad. Firstly because I'm using the American weather.com and not the Canadian weather.ca - everything is in Fahrenheit and I have to convert it all into Celsius. For the love of goodness, go metric! The rest of the world has! Secondly, because while Adam was here we got a lot of rain and chilly winds - now that he's gone we're getting the Spanish sunshine we had hoped for. Alas.

Speaking of Spanish, mine is starting to suck now that I'm not in language class anymore. Also, Spanish women have the nicest legs I have ever seen. And I've seen a lot of legs.

I wrote my first exam yesterday - an open laptop exam. Yup. We were all permitted to bring in whatever materials we wanted, including our lappies with internet access. So you can bet your bottom dollar that I, along with a whackload of other Europeans, were eating up all the bandwidth on Wikipedia yesterday afternoon. Once I get this paper and presentation out of the way tomorrow morn, I've got two more exams and a month's worth of homework to catch up on (gee, thanks, India) before I'm done with my school term here! Then I've got three weeks to relax on the beach before Ash arrives and we set off for more adventures.

11:18 am

Monday, May 07, 2007

Be-Late-Ed

I turned twenty-three on Tuesday and the scariest part of that wasn't that I was getting older and that life is now a count-down, but it might have been that being Almost Mid-Twenties doesn't feel much different than being Early Twenties. I've wanted to be in my Mid-Twenties since I (e-)met Dawn and her LifeUncommon and she was twenty-seven (I think...). I've since realized that being twenty-seven is closer to Late Twenties and though I have no desire to leave two-three just yet, being two-seven must be pretty awesome. I'm still writing papers two days before they're due and pulling together PowerPoint presentations in three hours (and getting a 97% - w00t). Basically, you can be a bad student no matter how young or old you are. I hope to dear goodness that I'm no longer in a formal education system by the time two-seven rolls around.

The actual day of my birthday was spent a) rubbing Adam's back as he vomited into a Spanish toilet in a lovely little B&B in a village outside of Granada b) reading The Alchemist c) indoors or d) all of the above. It must sound worse than it was because I was perfectly content where I was, be it kneeling on the bathroom floor getting sympathy pains from watching my beloved throw up his innards, holding his hand on the bed/couch as he slept, or reading a book by a fire. The days afterwards were much better and this past week was quite nice overall despite the bad spell of stomach problems. Of course, as with all good things, the time flew by and before I knew it, I was back at the airport and tearing up and not wanting to let go. The scene we made at the arrivals gate was much more exciting and happy and holding on tight and mushing our faces together. For now, we tough out another four months while I'm here and he's there and we're both sleeping in our Team AdamShirley t-shirts.

1:45 pm