It’s been a while since I’ve sat down to write a serious blog post, and I have, on more than one occasion, pondered whether this blog has run its course. That I’m assigned hundreds of pages of reading each week for my coursework (this semester I’m averaging between three and four hundred pages per week), with various reading/writing/assignment tasks have led to a dramatic decrease in interest in talking about myself. Who wants to read jokes about Habermas and the public sphere? Who would understand jokes about Habermas and the public sphere? Do I understand jokes about Habermas and the public sphere?  (Answer: no, not really.)

Then I found myself at IKEA yesterday shopping for various supplies and some of the old snark came trickling back. Partly because I specifically chose to go to IKEA on the afternoon of the Super Bowl because I expected no one to be there and found the place overrun with people who had the same idea.  And partly because of the reason I was there.

You see, my partner of eleven and a half years and I recently decided to end our romantic relationship. In other places–certainly not the Lone Star State–this would be termed “divorce.” I’ve been using the more benign sounding “separation” but it is, in essence, the same result: we have, after several months of agonizing, come to the conclusion that, while we are good friends, we are not good as a romantic couple, and that it was time for us to admit that and move on.

Hence the trip to IKEA. The issue is that I’ve played it out a number of different ways in my head, and there’s no way I can move out of the house before the semester ends (beginning of May) without committing academic suicide. So, for now, I’m making the guest bedroom more comfortable, and trying to make it “my” space.

This is probably why Habermas keeps coming into my head. I only vaguely remember him from last semester as the public sphere guy (we didn’t read him, we read a critique of him–is this the same thing? Is it different? News at 11), but this first weekend following my move into the other bedroom kept describing itself in my head in heavily academic terms: Renegotiating the private and shared in formerly communal living space. Renegotiating roles and expectations.  Winning a post-apocalyptic paintball war.  (No, wait, that may have been from the numerous episodes of Community I’ve been watching lately).

So, maybe I’m not done with this blog yet.  There’s a few life changes ahead of me … or in progress, I suppose … and perhaps we’ll try to turn the engine over and see if she still has any juice left in her.  Or if there’s anyone out there still reading.

*taps.  Is this thing on?

I’m plagiarizing myself here just a bit, since I actually wrote this for another venue, but it’s not actually on the Web anywhere, so … here goes.

I spent more time over the winter holiday than I probably should have playing Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception on the PS3 (I actually forbade my partner from taking the PS3 with him when he went to visit his family so that I could keep going).  If you’re not a gamer, you might just want to skip this post. Unless you’re a history geek like me.

Kill the bad guys, but stop blowing up the historical treasures!

This third installment in the Uncharted series, an Indiana Jones-style series of adventure games that follows anti-hero Nathan Drake and his companions as they venture off to the far corners of the globe in search of lost treasure, has earned stellar reviews and several awards, including the top spot on several “Best of 2011″ lists.

Drake’s Deception puts players on a trek to find the real lost city of Ubar—believed to be Iraam of the Pillars of antiquity, mentioned in the Qur’an and 1001 Nights–deep in the Empty Quarter (Rub’ al-Khali) in Saudi Arabia.  On the way, the story takes a surprisingly accurate voyage through a few Middle Eastern locations.  And, being the history nerd and Middle Eastern-ist that I am, I thought to myself, “Wow, someone should put together a resource guide to all the stuff in this game.”

And then I realized that I’m probably one of the best qualified nerds for the job.

Making allowances for the fact that this is a video game and that the action has to move forward in a suspenseful manner–not every dark alley in Sana’a leads to a secret chamber of secrets waiting to be discovered–the overall plot outline incorporates an impressive corpus of research on topics near and dear to the Middle East historians’ hearts: Players read through excerpts from T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and learn about his career for British intelligence in World War I; explore nearly every inch of a crusader castle in Syria (clearly based on the Crac des Chevaliers near Homs); chase bad guys across rooftops in an painstakingly accurate digital re-creation of a Yemeni souq (complete with locals who engage you in Arabic); solve puzzles that incorporate old Sabaean script and pre-Islamic South Arabian civilizations; and finally find themselves on a sun-baked trek across the sands of eastern Arabia before finally landing in what is the least accurate part of the game for the climax: the lost city of Ubar itself (fortunately, this most fantastical part of the plot resolves itself somewhat satisfactorily for the nit-picky among us, but I won’t spoil it).

Below, I’ve compiled some resources to offer up for anyone else whose curiosity about the people and places visited may have been piqued over the course of game play.  Naturally, this effort came entirely out of my dedication to research <he says, looking innocent>.

This isn’t an actual walkthrough — there are plenty of those out there if you just Google it.
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Hey, look, it’s Christmas!

It’s been ages since I posted anything of substance. As I suspected, being in school all of the fall semester seriously put a dent in my desire to spend more time being creative and writing anything, what with all of the non-creative reading that goes along with that.

So, the fall went pretty well. I took six hours worth of courses (that’s two graduate seminars), which impressed the graduate coordinator in the History department; she had been expecting me to do the coursework one at a time. If I can keep this up, I’ll be able to get the courses done in another two years, at which point the real work begins, but we’ll focus on that later.

It was weird being back in school, not least because I feel like a dinosaur among my history cohort; several of them were born the year I entered high school for God’s sake! They’re a pretty affable group, though. Class didn’t really get started each week until someone pronounced the readings “bullshit,” or we had an extended argument about whether it was possible for someone to be racist in the 15th century when the modern concept of racism wasn’t invented until the 19th. (Yes. My answer, and I’m sticking to it, dammit.)

The other class I took was a classical Arabic course, that reduced me to tears a few times at the beginning of the semester when I had to read through some 10th century poetic verses, and not because the poetry was so beautiful. All in all it came out well, but at the end of the day, what I learned in the class was to try to avoid reading poetry when and where possible. I kind of saw this coming, though — I mean, I’m not a huge fan of poetry in English.

And so.

Tomorrow, the parents and I are going to Puerto Rico for a few days – just long enough to get away from the unseasonably cold weather, then zip back here for New Year’s Eve … and back to work. And then the next semester begins.

I may need a few more days off.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I had an interesting realization not too long ago that I have, inadvertently, been keeping a secret on this blog. It’s not that it’s an actual secret, you see, it’s just that most of it came to fruition during a hiatus from blogging that started in September and lasted until the Egyptian Revolution. Since I hadn’t been to Tunisia at that point, the Tunisian revolution wasn’t of much interest to me — as I confessed from the heights of the Atlas Mountains, I actually went back and re-read a book I’d bought on the Arab Spring because the first time around I just skipped all the parts dealing with Tunisia.

None of this is neither here nor there, but the reason I’m bringing it up is that it’s about to become a huge theme in these pages, either because I’ll be referring to it frequently, or actively trying not to.

I am starting graduate school next week. Again.

I made a vague reference some months ago to submitting an application to a doctoral program, but I seem to have never actually mentioned that it was successful and that I’m one of about twenty five students (out of an applicant pool of around three hundred) who have been accepted to the graduate program in the History department. I don’t plan to quit my job — in fact, the staff educational benefit pays for three credit hours per semester, and I don’t think I can realistically enroll for more than six hours in any given semester while working forty hours a week.

The orientation started yesterday. One of the lighter moments involved a young man whose name I don’t remember (most people know that I’m absolutely terrible with names — I’m good with faces, but not names. I have, given my office’s location outside the reading room in my own department, had genial conversations with people I’ve seen every day for six months and I have no idea what their name is).  We had been asked to introduce ourselves to the group, say where we’re from (I decided that after thirteen years I’m allowed to say I’m from Austin), and what we’re interested in.

“Well,” he said, “I’m not a nudist, but I’m interested in 19th century German social movements like nudism.”

I can already tell that he will be known as The Nudist for the rest of his time here.  The things people say!

Yesterday, after three hours of orientation, I came back to my office and thought to myself, “What the frak am I doing?”  Even as a full time student, it would probably take me at least five years (six or seven, more realistically) to finish this degree all the way to fruition. Theres goes my evenings and weekends. So long, free time! And then, of course, were the nagging little doubts as I watched the graduate adviser and coordinator talk: “Can I really do this? I don’t know …”

This morning, during a roundtable of grad students in the program, one of them said that for three years she suffered from what she called “imposter syndrome.”  “Basically, I spent the entire time thinking, ‘What am I doing? Can I really do this? I don’t think I can do this … ‘ Then I finally said something, and it turned out that everyone else in the program was having the same thoughts!”

So, at least I’m all set there. But it’s a little weird being all the way back at square one and starting something from scratch…again.

So … posts may get a little scarcer…er…than they’ve been, but I’m still plugging along.  See you soon … or in December, once the semester ends!

I haven’t blogged since I got back from North Africa — this isn’t news to either of my remaining readers, I’m sure!  Needless to say, I did get back from North Africa, relatively successfully (the only ceramic casualty occurred on a flight from Tunis to Casablanca; ironically the flight from Casa back to New York was Royal Air Maroc’s only on-time venture the entire trip…then it turned out that JetBlue was having a bad day and I didn’t get back to Austin until 1:30 in the morning).

After a weekend of “rest,” I promptly moved into the vortex that I knew would be waiting for me on my return. Two days after I got back to the office, I gave probably one of the most rambling talks I’ve ever delivered (it wasn’t quite as bad as the Tina Fey version of Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric, but it wasn’t much more focused. And also.)  Then there was a workshop that I was responsible for co-running (kinda; others had to do all the work since I wasn’t around for the organizational phase), that … well, I’m not actually sure I could tell you what we did. Others were responsible for delivering the actual content and it was pretty unfocused. Made me feel better about that earlier talk, let me tell you.

I’ve gotten through the first pass on the photos from the summer–I have more (a lot more), but this will suffice for now.

Other than that, I sit at my computer and stare at it.  The orientation for my doctoral program starts a week from tomorrow — and I won’t lie, I do keep having those thoughts of “what the hell am I doing?” So much for summer!

At any rate, I’ll try to be a better blogger and post more soon…