just made a cute music page on my neocities that is literally just a bunch of albums with spinning cds and links to the youtube videos. woman in stem (it took me forever)
KIROKAZE

titsay

Origami Around
Peter Solarz
Game of Thrones Daily
d e v o n

oozey mess
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
art blog(derogatory)
trying on a metaphor
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Claire Keane

ellievsbear
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
AnasAbdin
NASA

Discoholic 🪩
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i don't do bad sauce passes

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@ramosotero
just made a cute music page on my neocities that is literally just a bunch of albums with spinning cds and links to the youtube videos. woman in stem (it took me forever)
people who know the uk: is bristol a nice city to visit?
working on the activities for the class im teaching while i watch the new pokemon anime in french :)
currently working on a neocities site and am basically using it to compile interesting links on languages, language learning, grad school and the like, if anyone has anything interesting to check out please send it my way!!
got the basics of the site working bc i am a # woman in stem. if you wanna check it out its https://jangueo.neocities.org/ , and if you have any reading recs send them my way! (ps some links dont work yet bc i havent created the pages, will do so tonight)
j a n g u e o
currently working on a neocities site and am basically using it to compile interesting links on languages, language learning, grad school and the like, if anyone has anything interesting to check out please send it my way!!
so i've been asked to give a 7 week intro the spanish course (1 credit, meets once a week, the idea is to get people interested in the language but also to give them basic knowledge for travel) and im in charge of designing everything. which is both fun and terrifying
decided last minute to send an abstract in for a conference. today is the deadline. wish me luck
if someone (me) were to hypothetically start learning mandarin where would they start?
Greetings! do you have any suggestions for how to best use a fellowship year? Reflections on how your year went/what you would do differently next time/definitely will do again? So far the only advice I have gotten from my colleagues is you will hate coming back...
anon it’s me, i absolutely always have thoughts. it’s nice to have a reason to reflect tho; my thoughts are almost always forward-facing!!
I have one very important truth that deserves a spot right at the top here. whether you have 2 or 12 hours of “work time” a day, the human brain can only do focused, mentally-draining work for 3-4 hours, maximum. like, scientifically speaking, that’s the range. I came into this year like, wow, I can get so much work done. and I did! I got way more writing & research accomplished this year than I could have ever managed if I’d been working as usual. however. academia’s subliminal (sometimes not so subliminal tbh) message of it’s never enough can feel particularly pernicious when you have this Magical Year of Research. for me, it actually made me anxious—like, I have no excuse for not being groundbreakingly productive this year; there’s nothing else competing for my attention. remembering that 3-4 hours is the biological limit for deep brain work helps me feel less frustrated about the fact that I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to (an amount which is frankly stupid and unattainable anyway; academic labor expectations are  insatiable). it also makes me think about the other kinds of accomplishments that I made happen this year, outside the Deep Brain-Work category!! which is important to do, i think.
what would I do differently?
focus on my own work. I spent my first semester finishing up solicited work instead. If I could do this again, I would have started saying “no” a little earlier, so all of those solicited pieces were cleared off my desk by the time I started the fellowship year and I could prioritize the thing that needed to be prioritized, right from the jump.
plan a bit more intensely at the start—I didn’t get really serious about establishing (flexible!) timelines for different projects until February, maybe? and then i got really really serious over the summer. things were fine but I think I would have been more efficient and intentional about how I worked, if I’d been more on top of that.
what would I absolutely do again?
set up a routine. if you’re used to teaching, regular committee meetings, or other firm schedule obligations, the thing that feels craziest about starting a research fellowship is how much wide-open, unstructured time stretches out in front of you. I know that I work best with more time constraints than with fewer, so I built out my own weekly schedule where I made perfectly negotiable activities (gym! coffee shop! dog walk! office time!) non-negotiable scheduled commitments. I adjusted as I went, but treating them like Real Events made sure that I never felt adrift even in a new place with new people and very few required appearances.
take advantage of the chance for a new community. this depends on the nature of your fellowship and also the vibe of whichever institution is running it, but especially in Wisconsin, the vibe was super friendly and supportive. plenty of people were essentially ghosts (which is fine! I assume they got a ton of work done) but others, including me, made a concerted effort to show up for things. making it a priority to spend time, either at institutional events or just hanging out, was so, so rewarding, both professionally (invaluable conversations abt work, academia, etc.! mentorship opportunities, in both directions!) and personally (new friends!!!)
figure out what the fellowship affords that your regular job doesn't. if you’re at an archive using rare materials, that can be obvious. In Wisconsin, it was library access—my home institution’s library is a sort of distressing nightmare, tbh, and it was a total gamechanger to be able to ILL a book and have it ready for pick-up 24 hours later… and I rarely had to ILL, because their collection was so good, especially in history of medicine. it might also mean people (who’s working there that you can grab coffee with?) or geographical proximity (what’s around the area that might be helpful to you?). you might also think about personal stuff too!
the one warning that I got from a friend before I left last year was that I would come back feeling like a totally different person. I remember feeling doubtful about that but good lord… she was right lmao. I’m gonna return to my department with a really different energy than I left with, and I think that’s a good thing!! that said, I also don’t hate having to go back to “normal” life—it’s been such a good year, so beautiful and full of growth in so many different ways, and I’m really pleased with how I’ve done and grateful that I could do it! but I’m also ready to be boring as hell for a while. catch me saying “no” like a champ this year.
working on my readings for the week, and also took a chance and enrolled in a french class, so let's see how it goes :)
first day of classes, excited to meet my new students (and see old ones!)
quick life update: back home from brazil, stopped in argentina and chile on the way home, have a ton of books to read for my thesis, classes start monday and i'm feeling pretty good about it! this semester i have some personal goals on top of all the academic ones to promote some sort of work-life balance so i hope it works but honestly i'm just excited to be on campus again
i ended up buying like 15 new books while in puerto rico, most of them for my thesis - here are the three i'm most excited about! i had already planned on buying the ramos otero collection and the book of refranes beforehand, but the middle book was a surprise, it's about a postapocalyptic puerto rico, so i hope i enjoy it!! (also, ignore the books to the right hahaha i already had those)
lately i've been wanting to be more active on here but can't find the actual motivation to post things :(
just got back from pr, now i'm leaving for brazil in a week!! if anyone here knows rio well please send your recs of things to do (and also things that arent really worth it - would love to know) <3
yesterday i did my qualifying exams!! so glad to be done with them and relieved to have a bit of free time. now i have to decide what to do before i go to puerto rico and brazil :)
just saw one of my boyfriend's cousins write yerna instead of nuera on facebook, which i'd never heard before - turns out its something said in pr (and maybe the rest of the caribbean?), you learn something new every day
just confirmed: yerna is the only word he would recognize as daughter in law, he told me nuera is something he learned when he met spanish speakers from other countries
fun fact: you can say yerna in informal situations but nuera is the correct term for daughter in law. at least in latam!
i think what's interesting here is that nuera may not necessarily be the "correct" option in the context of puerto rican speech, with yerna even appearing in contexts we would understand to be formal, like the news. here's a note from my beloved tesoro lexicográfico on it:
... El medio de la citada palabra no se reduce a las gentes campesinas. Para muchos puertorriqueños el vocablo nuera pertenece al léxico de los libros y de las escuelas.
this sort of does suggest that 'yerna' exists mainly as an informal word or at least a word limited to speech but even then, this quote is from the middle of the 20th century, so the presence today of the word 'yerna' in more formal contexts might indicate that it's more normalized / not purely understood as formal (which makes sense based on the anecdote from the original post - my boyfriend (sample size 1 lol) wouldn't recognize nuera as something that belongs to his dialect. let's look at some of the examples from puerto rican news sites (warning that some of these examples are from articles about violent crime):
from el vocero:
De acuerdo con Ramos, las tres personas que resultaron heridas son el vecino, el hijo y la yerna de Torres Canales. (source)
Wilda Correa Gracia relató que llegó desde Canóvanas a buscar a su yerna a quien le dieron de alta, a pesar de estar en su séptimo mes de embarazo con una condición que le requiere estar hospitalizada. (source)
Al momento de su deceso, se encontraba acompañada por su yerna, Lucy Medina. (source)
from primera hora:
A travĂ©s de la página oficial de Facebook del cantante Tony Vega, su hijo Javier y su yerna Karem, compartieron una foto del salsero en compañĂa de su familia durante su convalesencia tras la operaciĂłn de corazĂłn a la que fue sometido de emergencia a principios de la semana pasada. (source)
La occisa fue identificada en la escena por una yerna. (source)
interestingly enough i have to presume there are zero results for 'yerna' on el nuevo dĂa, because every time i search it i get this error message that doesn't come up when i search 'nuera' #yernagate exposed
i searched 'nuera' on all three sites and there are for sure results, but a lot of them are from articles from news syndicates, aka not written by puerto rican speakers, so i avoided these articles. that isn't to say 'nuera' never appears used by puerto rican journalists, because it does, but i think it could indicate a difference in perception of formality - as we can see in example 3 from el vocero and example 2 from primera hora, 'yerna' coexists with words we'd adscribe to a more formal register, like 'deceso' and 'occisa'.
example 1 from primera hora is also super interesting because in the opening text under the headline 'nuera' is used, while the example is the first sentence of the article
anyway thanks for your comment, this was super fun to look into! i'm doing a whatsapp survey right now to get more opinions bc i'm interested in popular perceptions of it so as soon as i get some more answers i'll reassess :)