Bombos y platillos.

Wow. First post on the blog. Exciting, eh? (Thank you, Eilse :)

Hello, everyone. I hope you all are having great summers. Personally, I've been dodging bullets in downtown Bogotá and clogging up my lungs with the city's lukewarm, stagnant gray air. Oh my, I love the sweet funk of trash heaps.

Colombia is rather lonely and not nearly as cool as I made it sound before without you TASPers. That, and it's going to hell in a handbasket because of stupid neoliberal, intellectually castrated, morally numb, US comprador-, Bush-types in the administration.  

But all in all, however lonely, cold, and bored I might be, I'm making the most out of my summer. I found a  post-doc fellow from the National University who's just dying to get a research assistant, so I'll be researching Panamanian-Colombian fiscal relations in the nineteenth century, and the influence of speculative bubbles on imperialist intervention and the rise of Latin American Nationalism, until the end of the break. Hurrah for learning stuff.

Other than the economic history project, I spend my days lounging around the house, dealing with (er, avoiding) my family . I try to concentrate and read during the fragile, awkward armistices bewtween bouts of rabid yelling at one another (anyone who wants to hear a pathetic and long-winded whine about that, feel free to ask).

Hmm last two things: 1) in case anyone is interested in calling me (why you would want to subject yourselves to that is beyond me) you can have free conversations with CD-quality sound with me through MSN; and 2) Si te gustaría sentir los huesos de Neruda sacudiendose en su tumba, Rafa, avísame y te mando un par de fracasadísimos poemas que escribí ( vergonzosos de veras) y nos burlamos juntos de mis versos. Ay que dolor, que pena.

Hmmm. One would think that I'd have more to say after not hearing from or writing to most of you in ... a year, but one would be wrong, because I'm DULL -- and a shameless ingrate :) 

 
All I can think of saying, therefore, is that I love you all and miss you all,  Yes, I know that I'm a flowery-spoken, full-of-shit rhetoretician, and that the last thing you'd be tempted to do is to take a Colombian crook for his word,  but believe me when I say that those six weeks spent with y'all ( <--- Miriam's evil influence on my speech patterns:), and the continued friendhsip that you have given me, have been tremendously important in forging the person I am now.

 
Whew. As would be expected of me, here is another long-winded (and as of late, cynical and self-indulgent) rant.

Love and abrazotes,

Isa