accustomary

after spending much of the weekend in a car, [not-]driving back and forth between Bloomington and Chicago, i've decided to keep up the good American effort: now i spend my days walking back and forth from my house to the various gigantic stores whose "easy walking distance" is slightly confounded by a lack of sidewalks, whose parking lot spans cannot be run across in less than 6 minutes and a glorious thunderstorm.

when not out wandering the roads, i am studying That Language. it would be "with a vengeance" if it weren't so easy. i mean, really: five months ago, i was translating Andrić and swearing as i was elbowed in the ribs by someone intent on readying themselves for exiting the bus (5 minutes in advance of the event), so it's a little bit confining to be stuck in Dunja and Pero's conjugative throes. i have busied myself during these first few days of classes with stirring up political dissension and making bilingual jokes, all very much to the dismay of my super-gaijin classmates and my horrified professor.

speaking of which, i never mentioned my dismay—and the resulting series of remarkably uncharitable remarks—when i received a syllabus last week and noticed that the text had "Croatian" listed before "Serbian" in its title. for all my hedging collapse-into-egalitarian impulses and That Language-ing, before i knew it, i had pretty much run through all the slurs so common in the 1990s. that my motivation was, simply, a deep-seated scriptual fear (that we wouldn't do much in the way of cyrillic) somehow did not significantly amend anything.

turns out the professor is from Beograd (by way of Champaign-Urbana and Montréal). and starting in a week, we'll be doing our dictates alternately in latin and cyrillic (as they should be: just writing).

go figure. go Jugoslavija.