It’s Valentine’s Day- a Saturday, at that- and I am alone in the library, writing this entry. It’s up to the fine reader to connect the dots on how sad this mental image really is; I just felt that this needed to be put out there in order to set the tone of the entry.
 The campus has entered the academic doldrums. It’s midway through February, midterms aren’t quite here, and summer vacation seems a distant dream. (Correction, it is a distant dream.)
 On the bright side, I am really enjoying my history course on the War of 1898.  (Coincidentally my favorite war of the 1890s. Take that, Greco- Turkish War of 1897!) The instructor is a visiting professor from Panama who has previously tought at UCLA. He really brings some interesting cultural analysis to the course.  (Alas, he is only here until the end of this semester.)
 Well, it’s getting towards late afternoon here in the basement of the library, and it’s looking more and more like an Edward Hopper painting down here… Well, except for the computers… Yikes, really just not my week. Â
 After an initially promising opening salvo my relations with the Spanish language have soured.
 I blame geography for my current predicament. (Not really- I’m a firm advocate of personal responsibility, but bear with me.) I love these United States, but the double-edged sword that is the vastness of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans has ensured that many of us have never had to acquire the multilingual know-how of most other citizens of the globe. And when we do happen to venture out beyond our linguistic ramparts, we find a world where most everyone speaks English (if only to keep us from butchering their native tongues- ask me about my trip to France sometime).
 So there’s my alibi for why I’m having a rough time in Spanish; now for the moral of the story.  UR has a large amount of international students, many of whom I’ve become close friends with. Hanging out with them these past months has really opened my eyes to the possibilities availiable for acquiring new languages and cultural knowledge. Many international students speak three, four, even five languages. This ability to navigate between worlds impressed from the moment I arrived at school, and for me it is one of the joys of attending UR.Â
 Thus, through social osmosis, they’ve given me a bit of inspiriation to hop back on the Spanish horse and keep giving it the old college try. I recovered my textbook from my introductory Spanish course from first semester- which I had fortunately refrained from setting alight- and began a refresher course.  Once more into the breach.Â
