Autumnal Update

I made a promise not to lose focus on my blog/reviews once school started, but obviously I haven’t kept that promise. There’s still two reviews I haven’t worked on (one for Babel by R. F. Kuang, and one for Elliot Page’s memoir). There’s also some poetry breaks that I’ve been meaning to post, and I’ll get around to those as well. 

Reacclimating myself into academia wasn’t as easy as I hoped. A lot has changed since my undergrad years. I’m forty now with a full time job and I’m a parent. These aren’t easy things to juggle so it’s obvious one thing had to suffer, and that is my free time reading what I want. That said, I worked my way through some of Ruan Willow’s The Mardi Gras Unmasking (where the word sloshing comes up more than once causing me to – as Booktok says – DNF it). I’m still (re)reading Innocents by Cathy Coote, and I’m wondering how I even managed to get through that novel the first time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not poorly written. It’s not even a bad story. And that’s what makes it so disturbing.

One thing that came from this time, however, is the Latinx discussion/essay (lyric essay?) that I started writing and hope to post on this blog in sections. That stemmed from a discussion in class over two pieces we had to read and I got a little passionate about the subject and how the argument for or against shouldn’t be made by people who aren’t truly affected by the label – in other words, when you’re a cisgender person, it’s hard not to center yourself when it comes to non-cis terminology (see: J. K. Rowling, every internet-”English major” crying about the plural used as singular). And I know this is ironic for me to even argue because I don’t identify as Latinx, but as Latine, nor do I consider myself trans in any sense (well, any sense of my own). 

There’s so much that is pouring through my head right now even as I mentioned that. But I need to focus on my homework and class readings. I honestly don’t know how I can even begin to imagine taking more than one (that’s right, one) class a semester with this semi-burnout brain. 

Here’s hoping.