Catching Up

Over the next month you might not be hearing too much from me. Jeff got here on Wednesday and will be staying until the 27th when my mom arrives. I will then spend a week here in Greece with her before we take off for a week in Italy. At the end of that week, Jeff will meet me in Italy for a few more days, and then together we'll head up to Sweden for a week. It's going to be a fun month. This evening Jeff and I are headed to Santorini which out to be a lot of fun. It's an island that was created by an exploding volcano, and it's supposedly extremely beautiful. I'll take lots of pictures. Speaking of pictures, I've taken quite a few that I'd like to post but the connection in our house is so bad that it takes years to upload even one picture. I'm still trying though and hopefully I'll succeed one of these days.

It seems that spring has finally arrived for good, and I'm loving it. The weather is beautiful. Sixties and sunshine. Plus there are wildflowers everywhere which are quite beautiful. A big change from the rest of the year. When I got here in September it didn't seem as if there was anything alive in this whole country. It's a strange place. Everything grows in the winter and dies in the summer. But it's great now so I'll enjoy it.

I think I've decided what I really want to study. This is the big question I ponder all of the time. For those of you who don't know, I decided a while ago that I'd like to go back to school in a year and get a master's in museum studies. Working in a historical museum really interests me. But that's not the end goal. I think I might want toget my PhD. In what though I haven't been quite certain. Not English. Not German. Maybe History I thought. Yet the other day while lying around outside in the sunshine it became perfectly clear to me what I should study. I want to study Memory. I don't really know how I go about this or what discipline it falls under, but I think that is the one thing that interests me most. I like history, not for facts and figures, but for what people remember about it and how those memories compare to the facts. I like museums because of how they influence what we remember. I like stories because many times they are simply mutated memories. I like language because it affects the way we think and remember. I wrote my thesis on the memory of the Second World War. It makes sense. I like a lot of things, but they are tied together by this common theme of memory. I think I'd like to do an interdisciplinary type of thing - science, history, literature, sociology. I want to know the scientific background of how we remember. I want the humanities background of what we do with our memories. And I want the sociological background of how memories affect us and the societies we build. If anyone has any ideas of who I should talk to or where I should look to figure out how to study this, let me know. I'm sure I'll figure it out somehow but a little advice never hurt.