five years on

hard to think that it has been five years since i was in chiapas for new year. i am struggling with the names of the two aussies who shared the new year with me, but the nights, locales and other details come rather easily.

i just returned a few days ago from nyc. spent new year's with some chilangos, desconocidos pero gente buena. it was rather strange that we even went out them, what with the doorman telling us we might need some sort of identification to get back to the street because of the times square madness and police closing off sections of the town. if not for that reminder, we would not have returned upstairs to 16e, not have told sophie and rodrigo that they needed some sort of proof of residency (which none of us had, obviously), and that it might be best if we all went out together. but we did. and then we found out they were both from d.f., both studied to be veterinarians at unam, both were interested in wildlife science, both would go the virginia wildlife center in the coming months, and both wanted to do grad work outside mexico.

i had fun chatting with rodrigo all night. there were definitely times when i felt limited by my shrinking spanish vocab, but it was great practice to be around other speakers and converse in spanish for 6 or 7 hours with someone other than karla--a different accent, vocab attends every one of us, so to hear them was great practice.

if you had told me five years ago that i was going to move to d.f. 6 months after that first post, i would have laughed. i had been through the airport there once, but i knew little else about the place. i am very glad i made the decision to go there; not only did i find a new profession, within the realm of sts, but i met la litas and learned to love football soccer, bull fights and city living. well, maybe i do not love city living, but after 2.5 years in blacksburg, every time i visit a city with museums and plenty of things to see and do, i become nostalgic for d.f. in particular, i loved walking through nyc and listening to the tens of other languages that surrounded me. it was rare to hear english and i must say i love that.

about five months ago, i was invited to join a review collective for an academic journal. i was extremely excited about the opportunity to write more and have the opportunity to publish my work. my excitement has abated somewhat, i think this is natural, but i am still pleased to be part of something like the collective. the reason for the waning interest in the collective is partly an offshoot of the process itself. i will explain a bit about what i am to do and what frustrates me about my own part in this process.

as with any collaborative work, a key factor is the ability to perform the job with others. one area i need to improve is, no surprise, my patience with the other writers. we all have different schedules, and it is quite difficult for us to motivate each other when we are spread out around the globe. that we have an online venue promises us a place to interact, what it does not deliver is the actual interaction. over the past month i have been working on a review of one book that i need to merge with the work of four others. we have all written our pieces, but we have not been so quick to edit our work. promoters of online collaboration proclaim that more people can contribute their parts to a larger whole. the problem of editing and perhaps more importantly the problem of direction remain unanswered. i have tried to set up for completion of our project, but those timelines have not been accepted by all the group. this leaves a thorny dilemma: should i endeavor to edit the work of my colleagues or push them to edit their own work? if i do the work, i feel a bit betrayed by their lack of motivation. i still see this project in terms of individuals coming together. it would be better if i accepted that each of us has done something and that now our contributions need to be completed by any means possible. if i do most of this editing, i will want my name put first on the published product. will this anger my fellows? will they accept that since one of us has done the larger, and perhaps harder task, of bringing the prose together that the one should have rights to listing his name first? i clearly think so, but maybe this is me unable to escape the type of individualist thinking that a collective requires.

another solution is to work with the one or two others who have a desire to complete this project now rather than later. this is certainly the avenue i should travel at this early stage because if i do not, then nothing will get done any time soon.

beyond the idea of collaboration is the task of performing it in writing. how in the world am i going to bring the 4000 words we have now down to 2500? i have struggled to reduce my own contribution from 1400 to 650. in general though, i see how each time i tackle what i have written, i am able to reduce. sure, something is lost, but perhaps the final product benefits from the cuts. the words and phrases i cut could be cut. the trick is not to lose the sense and meaning while reducing the unnecessary. i think this is just another part of the writing process that i need to improve upon here. should i try to convince the other writers to work like me? should i adapt to them more? i appear to harbor some feeling that what i have done in editing is something they could stand to do as well. is this vanity? perhaps.

the larger issue is why i have not finished my own contribution to the journal in a separate review essay. i need to do this and shut about it. further, though, i need to find other projects i want to do on my own. why am i not coming up with topics and articles that i could publish? my job is to write, and i am not completing my duties. bitching about it or wondering why i do not has not served me so far. it might be best just to start on something, and then i can continue it or abandon it later. if abandoned, i can publish it here (published in the loose sense), then come back to it later. i might try to blend it into a book or article later. i advised la litas recently that she needs to take more responsibility for her own work. as with the pants sketch, maybe i should try taking some of my own advice.

¡bienvenidos compitas! welcome all to the page. new year. new blog. new attitude? maybe.

the address should be easy to remember, waitingfortherevolution.blogspot.com.

i am still groggy from the travels and it does not feel normal to be sitting at my computer typing entries, preparing for classes, the same old same old. but at least all the other profs are in the same boat. no one really wants to be here right now; i can only imagine the students feel the same except much much more.

well, time to get to work. the title of this blog comes from one of the last posts on the other blog, when we waited five hours for the revolutionaries, the zapatistas to enter the city. as they were on foot and travelled who knows how far, i can understand. what a wild adventure. i will definitely write more about it this week.