feliz día de los muertos

though we are already well into fall, this afternoon felt like early summer, the sun bright and beaming on the students and community members participating in the día de los muertos festivities. joseph and i stopped by to see the dancers and the altars that the students made for the event. the heat pushed us back to my office after only a short while.

this is the beginning of my second year as a professor here; the first was a blur of new classes and professional activity. the second promises to be less blur, more work and responsibility. our faculty has been busy developing a new Ph.D. program, which is exciting, but requires a lot of faculty meetings and also time apart to develop new graduate seminars. we're also conducting a search for a new faculty member, and, i volunteered to be on the committee (clearly, in some moment of delirium). also, this year i'm having my first review. fun times all around.

it feels like forever ago that i was a graduate student. in fact, it was two years ago today that i defended my dissertation. i thought that defending on día de los muertos might be some kind of omen. but really, i was just desperate to defend before my 30th birthday, which was just two days afterward. ultimately, it was good timing. those few days in 2005 between el día de los muertos and my birthday marked the end of one stage of my life and the beginning of another.

two years later, another day of the dead, another birthday, and i'm well into that other stage of life. it's not quite as i imagined it. after all those years i spent cultivating a life and an identity in graduate school, i'd forgotten what it meant to be in something new. i'd forgotten that new beginnings could be so difficult and so uncertain.

@>-->>---