the end is near

That sounds so ominous, jeez. I should retitle this post "the end is in sight" or "almost there" or "so close to the finish line I can taste it." Something like that. Tomorrow after work I'm going to send off five of my six supplementary packets to various departments or admissions offices. Thursday I'm going to rework my personal statement(s) so that I am happy with them. And Saturday I will hit submit six times. That's right: Saturday, November 29. Six days before my first deadline and two and a half weeks before the most important one.

The reworking of my personal statement is absolutely necessary. Right now, it sounds rushed. It sounds like I was trying to say a million things and I had to take out half of them. Which is an accurate portrayal of its writing so far. I barely mention grad school. I don't mention my trip to St Petersburg. And now, as of last Wednesday, I want to include something about my impending trip to Buenos Aires.

Little reward for all this application anxiety: two weeks in the BsAs neighborhood of Recoleta. Which means that after I hit that submit button six times, I have a lot of research to do. It's going to be a writing/researching trip primarily (for most of those involved), but it will definitely be a vacation as well, of course. And since I hadn't been planning on going there before a few weeks ago, I know nothing about the place. But I will.

Back to the s.o.p. I need to incorporate my travels as related to my research interests, and that means I have to be more specific about my research interests. I want to study Cold War-era literature in the context of migration, particularly writers who emigrated to or from Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and the West. How do these different migrations inform the worldview set forth by the authors' narratives? That seems particularly broad, but that's sort of my idea. I want to know what happens when we stop thinking in terms of the Cold War on one hand and postcolonialism on the other hand. That and I find "postcolonial" to be a problematic term for a variety of reasons. I also find the idea that the international situation was dominated by a staring match between two countries out of 190 or so reductive. I'm not denying the influence of these two schemas on the twentieth century (and twenty-first). On the contrary, I wish to explore what is generally accepted as "the way things are/were" because oversimplifying is dangerous business. Question everything. That's what I'm saying.