Aimee and I used to joke that any time a person finishes a sentence “per se…”, they more or less negate whatever they said right before that. Like, “He’s not unattractive… per se…” (“more like homely…”) or “I don’t hate my job… per se…” (“it freaking sucks”) – you get the picture. So to say that I haven’t been in hiding since I’ve been back in Spain, well, it’s neither true nor untrue, I guess.

After those three incredible weeks in Oregon/Washington/California, and then a whirlwind last couple of days in NYC, I found it excessively hard to re-adjust to my life in Spain, though I couldn’t for the life of me put my finger on exactly why.

For my first month here, I found that I’m just not very creative when it comes to free time. Which is to say, I had (have, actually) a LOT of free time — to the tune of 5-6 days a week when I’m not in class, and have no other obligations or commitments. I’d like to think that I’d be using that time to, I don’t know, write a novel? Find a job? Go to the gym obsessively? Un-pack my stuff and move back into my room? Read a book? Pick up singing again? Improve my abysmal knife skills while practicing cooking with world-class fresh ingredients? Meander and get lost in the nooks and crannies of old Barcelona? You get the picture.

Alas, no. Of course, I did a little bit of all of those things (except singing and writing a novel), but mostly? Mostly, I slept. And watched teevee on the interwebs. Or movies. You get the picture — a LOT of time in my bed, in my pajamas, being extremely angry at myself for not doing any of that other stuff, but still not finding the motivation to get out of bed. And all I could think was that I must be the MOST BORING person ever to have existed on this planet.

So how am I now? Still boring? Well, yeah, kind of. But not as extremely. At the beginning of this month, I went to Washington DC and Brooklyn for a week for a conference and 4 much-needed days with My Honey, and came back feeling mostly refreshed and ready to get my booty in gear. And then? I got said booty kicked by jet-lag, and found myself right where I left off — in my bed for many, many hours of the day.  It’s freaking humiliating. I joined the sexiest gym in all of Barcelona, with SUCH lofty “Make My Pants Fit” Goals, and can hardly stay awake for most of the day, let alone awake enough to drag myself to the gym that I now haven’t visited in three weeks. Ridiculous. And then? Then I went on the annual ski trip last weekend — seriously, some of the BEST skiing of my life, which was invigorating and great — and got back on Sunday night, only to totally, once again, fritter away most of yesterday and today. (I did manage to do laundry and make a kickass soup today, but really, that’s it. Oh, aside from sleeping until 1pm and then watching the most recent episode of House and a couple of Law and Orders, in my bed, in my pajamas, just for good measure. And right now, I should actually be doing what little schoolwork I have this week, but am SO not feeling it… Ergo, blog.)

Typically, my mom and My Honey and various other friends and family are full of theories to explain my current paralysis, and offer many ideas for remedies. Which is great. Honestly. They’re great ideas — that I totally haven’t been able to force myself to put into practice. And it’s not like I don’t totally know that I will KICK myself, months from now, for wasting all of this precious time. Of course I know that. I’ve always always always wanted to have this much free time, but now that I have it… I’m a sloth. A pathetic, frivolous, uncreative sloth.

So now I’m working on a checklist of things I need to do every day (um, apply to jobs??, go to bed before midnight, etc), and things I should do every other day (hit the gym, work on some short stories, etc). I’m hoping that if I post these lists in my room, where I have to look at them every day, I’ll feel a greater sense of urgency to, you know, get out of bed (for example) and maybe DO some of those things. I am, of course, very open to suggestions. What would YOU do with five free days every week in Barcelona? (Probably not stay in bed ALL DAY, I guarantee you that.)

Anyway, all this to say: I’m here. Back in Barcelona, and (sort of) back in school. I’d like to say that I’ll be better at being back on the blog, but that will totally hinge on my ability to conjure up some motivation and actually DO THINGS that I will later want to write about. Wish me luck.

This last weekend not only lived up to expectations. It crushed the living daylights out of them. Holy crap. I don’t know when I’ve ever had a better weekend. (And man, am I in a better mood now. Whew! Can you tell??)

Mary and Doug got here on Thursday, Rupert and Carol came in on Friday evening, Cathal showed up on Saturday afternoon, and yeah, it was pretty much nonstop eating, drinking, eating, drinking, taking in some sights (but not really) and then back to eating and drinking. I must say that I had a stroke of absolute inspiration and took Mary and Dough to a bar IN La Boqueria for lunch the day they got here, right after we threw back a quick pint of Guinness at Flaherty’s. (The only drag about that, and then subsequently the whole weekend, was that they learned that my 7-year-old cousin was in the hospital after having the first asthma attack of his life so far. How’s that for timing? Poor little dude! But no worries! He’s fine now!!) Anyway, trauma aside, they were sufficiently pleased with the Boqueria, and the meal was, in Doug’s terms, just ridiculous (fried artichoke hearts, jamon, chipirones, sardinas a la plancha, asparagus, grilled wild mushrooms, gambas al ajillo, etc — get excited, Becky, Ben, Sean, Laura, Kim and Martijn, because we’re SO going back when you come here!!). It was the beginning of a series of absolutely INSANE meals that we had, including the major highlight of the weekend, dinner at Commerc 24. The chef there apparently trained with el Bulli himself, and yeah, it was pretty much the tastiest meal I’ve ever had. (FOUR hours of nonstop eating waves of delicious tapas and drinking crazy-good wine and conversing, during which the bulk of the conversation went something like “oh my GOD that’s good…” “I know, have you tried the other one yet? just wait!”)

But you know what? All that delicious food and partying isn’t really even the best part. (Although, seriously, it was all totally spectacular. Hyperbole aside, I swear!) The best part was how much I enjoyed having my family here, as well as some of their best friends. What an amazing group of people. I think not altogether infrequently about how lucky I am to have been born into such an excellent family (on both sides!), and also how I seem to have been happily condemned to a life full of scores of wonderful friends, but it’s not often that I think about how awesome the friends of my family are. (Because, honestly, how often does that come up?) And I was sitting with them all at dinner on Saturday — Mary and Doug, Rupert and Carol, Cathal (who couldn’t bring his wife and baby, unfortunately, but apparently his wife was a relatively well-known punk-rock screamer in Zurich in the 80s–um, how cool is that??) — and it occurred to me, holy shit, these people are who I HOPE to be in 20-odd years. They are successful. They are cool. They are smart and knowledgeable and interesting, and share their interests with their cool, smart, knowledgeable and interesting kids. They take cool vacations. They read good books and see good movies. They’re all still damn attractive. They have cool friends who they fly to Barcelona for the weekend to see. They, in short, are kicking ass at being grown-ups. So of course, at said dinner, I might have made something of a speech (when Mary asked us all to go around and say what we’re excited about in our lives right now) and said to them that, for the love of Buddha, I hope you guys know just how damn cool and inspirational you are! Because I doubt, in the course of their insanely busy everyday lives, they often zoom out and think, hell ya, this is the life I created, and shit, isn’t it f***ing cool? To me, that’s just damn exciting.

All this to say, the weekend was incredible and provided quite a bit of the perspective I’ve been so effing desperate for lately. (Holy crap, have I been “cambiante” lately. Ooof, it’s exhausting to be so freaking all over the place!) Mary is always such a calming, reassuring, relentlessly positive and infinitely loving presence, and Doug does a great job of reminding me that stuff just doesn’t have to be a big deal. Plus, everything in life looks better over a delicious bottle of cava. Also: somehow, over the course of the weekend, I was nearly totally talked out of my interest in HR (at least, working in an HR department at a company, ugh…) and my interest in Africa was sparked all over again (totally Rupert, Carol and Cathal’s fault — a collective “why the hell wouldn’t you go to Africa??” sentiment was pretty much all I needed to tip the scale back toward Cape Town…). So there may be developments on that front, still — I’ll keep y’all posted, promise.

Of course, in a lot of ways, I’m even more confused than ever (what DOES it all mean???), but at least I had a kickass weekend with some of the bestest folks on the planet, and for a minute, I got to stop feeling dumb and incompetent, which feels freaking great.

Wow, I can’t believe how quickly these last couple of weeks have flown by. PLEASE forgive me for being such a delinquent blogger! Especially when I posed this question about Cape Town, and then failed to THANK everyone for their feedback OR fill you in on the result! Man! But it’s been a busy couple of weeks, between finishing finals, having Aimee here to visit, going to Dublin (it’s like Boston! only friendlier!), and then kicking back into gear with a week-long seminar on strategy (which has been excellent!) and now it’s finally weekend again. Whew!

First things first: Cape Town. Soooo, after lots and lots of deliberation, and lots and lots of talking to people, and lots and lots of sleeping on it… I surprised myself and decided NOT to go. I just couldn’t, ultimately, come up with any other reason to go there than “CAPE TOWN IS COOOOOOL!” I mean, I’m of course interested in development and emerging economies and whathaveyou, but I’m still not convinced that for that, it would be enough to justify giving up a possibly great internship opportunity (which I hope to hear more about this next week — I’ll keep you all posted), missing out on fall recruiting, giving up potential income in the fall, etc. Soooo, I REALLY wanted to go, but… I just couldn’t come up with enough good reasons why. And, as I was commenting to Laurent, it’s not like I’m going to school in Cleveland or something. I’m in BARCELONA, at one of Europe’s best business schools, sooooo… Looks like I’ll be here this fall. I think I still have a couple of days to have a change of heart, but I’m feeling okay about being here. I DO love this city, and my school, and it will be, well, super different to be here without a bunch of my friends, so I think it could actually be totally cool. Anyway, THANK YOU all for your input — believe me, this has been a difficult decision. I REALLY wanted to go, and had a hell of a time being practical and talking myself out of doing it just for the adventure.

And then there was Spring Break. It was a much mellower break than I anticipated, but that was nice, and I felt pretty rested and ready to go when school started again on Tuesday. Dublin was great, and I got to actually drink a pint of Guinness at the source!

And of course, Aimee and I had a lot of time to catch up, and hang out, and it was a totally lovely visit. She got to meet some of my friends here, and Ireland was beautiful, and overall, it was an excellent break. (Of course, I didn’t manage to meet my husband in Ireland, siiiiiiigh — which was, of course, in the plan — but whaddayagonnado?)

So now, back to reality. I have my make-up accounting exam on Tuesday, which of course I’m dreading, and regular classes start up again on Tuesday as well. Ugh. Luckily, I have awesome stuff to look forward to in the coming weeks: Mary and Doug and friends will be here in a few weeks, Becky and her new boyfriend are coming in May, Sean and Laura and Kim and Martijn will all be here in June, so that’s a lot to get excited about.

I now have to go and watch some of my friends play sports. It’s the Spring Fling weekend, which is an inter-business-school sporting event put on by the other b-school in BCN, and a bunch of my friends are playing, so I should probably get over there and, like, cheerlead or something. (I know, sometimes it is HARD to be a student…)

More because I feel like I need to remind myself, than anything else… (It’s only Monday, and I’m already ready for weekend again. Of course, this is largely due to the fact that the much-anticipated ski trip is this weekend, and I’m equally as excited to go as I am to be done with the freaking planning process. Planning a ski trip for 126 people? Um, no picnic, my friends, nooooo picnic…) But I digress.

Things I LOVE in BCN:

The sunshine. Ooooh, how I love the sunshine here. Today it was 64 and sunny, and oh so mild! Reminds me WHY I moved here…

Living 2 blocks from the Mediterranean ain’t bad.

Whimsy. LOTS and lots of whimsy. And I care for whimsy a great deal.

Urban spelunking in the Barrio Gotico. My neighborhood feels pretty infinite sometimes, because I’m always finding the most random and delightful places tucked away in corners and alleyways.

My apartment. SO worth the 95 stairs I have to hike up every day to get to it. I would love it even if not for my fabulous Blue Lady mural, but she’s definitely a bonus.

My roommates. Raul and Jorge (soon to be Raul and Al–we’re swapping out one Dane and another one in, apparently) totally rock.

Having an extended excuse to sharpen my Spanish which, I feel compelled to oh so humbly admit, kicks a** at the moment.

Cava. Wine club. Friday night dinners. Cafe con leche. Gelatto. Tapas.

I’ve never appreciated a cheese burger so much in my life. And paella’s not bad, either.

Family Guy dubbed in Spanish? Still freaking funny.

Bars are open until 3am–awesome AND dangerous.

Jamon: when it’s good, it’s SOOOO good. (The contrary is also true, of course…)

Passeo de Gracia. Gaudi. El Borne. Santa Maria del Mar. Gracia.

Pyrotechnics and love of fuego (or “foc,” in Catalan) in general. We walked through a plaza in Gracia on Saturday night that had THREE large bonfires raging. Not clear on why, exactly, but it was still pretty cool.

The metro. It comes every 2 minutes in the morning, which is definitely nice for this habitually tardy girl.

Clementines from Valencia. (Or “mandarinas.”) I’m addicted.

The fact that I can (and have) give directions to my house based on the performers on the Rambla. (After the Michael Jackson impersonator, when you see the guy with the two small dogs and the hand-crank organ music maker thing, usually playing “Fever,” turn left.)

My awesome friends. (Duh. They’re pretty far down the list, but only because it’s so effing obvious.)

Proximity to the rest of Europe. There’s talk of Munich in April and Paris in May, and we know how much I LOVED the trip to London in December. Good times.

Mango and Zara, even if I can’t really afford to shop there more than once every few months.

The Irish bar by my house. A waitress there told me that I inspired her to enroll in business school. Awww!

Okay, I think that’s a pretty good list for now. And remarkably, I do feel better. Hm. But if I missed anything on the List of Great Things about BCN, feel free to add!!

I know my post yesterday may have had a somewhat despondent tone (and I was, indeed, feeling pretty morose), but guess what happened today that made my whole world look just a little better? I’ll give you a hint: besides mac ‘n’ cheese (which I still haven’t found here) what’s one of my all time favorite comfort foods? Yep, you got it: eggs benedict! So what happened? We found a place here, IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD!, that makes BRUNCH!!! Imagine my delight when I saw eggs benny on the menu! Because, obviously, it is a Universally Accepted Truth that hollandaise sauce makes everything better (it’s a fact–it’s science), and this place managed to create a pretty mean hollandaise sauce (a little heavy on the mustard, to be honest, but I was far too excited to care). They also make a killer banana berry smoothie, so yeah, I was a pretty happy girl–my favorite breakfast in the world AND a delicious smoothie were exactly what the doctor ordered. I’m pretty sure that this place is about to become a favorite hangout for Sunday afternoons. Seriously, I’m so excited. (If you feel like my excitement is a little exaggerated, well, you probably either don’t share my love of poached eggs drowned in fatty delicious hollandaise sauce, or you just don’t know of my propensity to get disproportionately excited about seemingly small things.)

Of course, nothing about this weekend was good for any of the half-hearted new year’s resolutions I made three weeks ago (you know–cut calories, go to the gym, drink less alcohol, be more studious, no boys, yadda yadda yadda), but man, after such a frustrating week at school, that breakfast this afternoon, and the various fun activities of the weekend, were like medicine for my soul. And I guess maybe this week I should think about getting on top of those resolutions. Or something.

Well, it happened. Grades for last term came out. And pretty much, I’ve gotta say: ugh. Not only were my grades, on the whole, disappointing, but also, as I suspected, I failed Accounting. I more or less knew it, but it was still hard to see that “3″ staring at me from the “Contabilidad de Costes” line. The best news is that my Financial Analysis class (the one that I had SUCH a hard time with for most of the term) actually went really well. So that’s good. What’s NOT good is that I have now failed 2 courses in my short time in b-school, which, of course, totally validates all of my fears about truly belonging here. Also, I keep thinking this is FAR too expensive an endeavor to be failing classes. Suck. A fair amount of people will be repeating a class here and there, but I have yet to encounter anyone else who failed accounting. (Um, on the bright side, at least I wasn’t asked to leave, which was a relief.) Predictably, Dario and Arturo have offered to help me study, and maybe some more of their brilliance will rub off this time than it did last time. But of course, the low grades do absolutely nothing to help with my motivation, which was already in a post-vacation coma. My friend Jerome, who is in his 2nd year, warned me that motivation would be low this term, but man, he wasn’t kidding. This whole week has felt like running under water–really, really hard, and lots of resistance. At least I feel like my course load is manageable, for the most part. It’s going to be a LOT of reading, but some pretty interesting stuff, and nothing that makes me feel like I’ll obviously fail (ahem, yet).

In better news, it seems like the ski trip is going to be a RAGING success (I think we have close to 115 people coming, versus 60 who went last year–whoa). Also, we did Ben’s birthday dinner last night, which was great–Argentine steaks. SO good! Luckily, my pal Langdon was taking photos, because, let’s face it, I was WAY too excited about my steak to try to focus on taking photos.

Okay, I’m not going to name all of these people, but suffice it to say, it’s a pretty good cross section of the people I usually hang out with–mostly from the English section, except for Guille and Brian, who are front and center in the photo. (Brian is one of my heroes in the program, as he’s here with his wife and 2 young daughters. They sold their house in Chicago to move here for this adventure, which I happen to think is incredible, and more than a little bit inspirational. Plus, I love their kids, and have gotten to babysit for them a couple of times.)

Mmmmm, steak… Here in the Land of the Pig, it is HARD to come by a tasty, well-prepared steak. These guys pulled it off marvelously.

These are two of my buddies, with whom I regularly have Friday night dinner. In the front is Zev (who’s a genius–I think literally) and Dan, who SERIOUSLY knows how to make me laugh (bad puns and all…).

Me and my buddy, Guille, who effectively functions like my big brother and counselor here. He’s awesome. We’re doing HIS birthday dinner tonight.

Didn’t I say Tonni was gorgeous??? Beautiful AND brilliant–lethal.

Matty B and his wife Blanca–they’re from Fresno (blech). Blanca and I have the same taste is books, so it’s always awesome to be able to hang out with her and talk about something OTHER than school. And Matt? Matt’s going to be a millionaire. Just wait.

So this was last night, and these pictures reflect only the beginning of the night. I actually let myself go out last night, and ended up going to 2 clubs with a bunch of schoolmates, and being out until almost 5am. I can seriously only do that once in a while, because, really, I can’t usually deal with the club scene. It was pretty fun last night, but I really couldn’t do it every weekend.

Obviously, lots of ups and downs this week. I seriously hope I get over this whole feeling-dumb-all-the-time thing pretty quickly, because there is a LOT of work to do this term. But as much as I looked forward to Christmas last term, I can now look forward to Aimee’s spring break visit this term, which is good, because it’s a guarantee of something awesome in the relatively near future. I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that the grades thing had be a little depressed, but I’m sure it’ll pass. I’ll just have to find a way to make myself work harder this term, I guess, because, as hard as my classes were, I don’t feel like my grades at ALL reflect my potential (typical, I know). Aaaaanyway, as I keep saying, at least I have awesome friends here to keep me afloat. But this week? Yeah, not my favorite so far.

Oookay, I give–I DO like Barcelona, I DO like my school, and it IS good to be back. I got a couple of very good pieces of news this week which have made life look better: remember how I re-took my law exam? Well, I got my grade this week for the class, and it went from a 2 (ugh!) to a 9!!! I think I ended up with one of the best grades in the class!! Whew! Additionally, in a brief encounter with my Quantitative Models prof this week, he all but told me that I passed the class (by the skin of my teeth, but that’s how I figured it would be). So it just remains to be seen how I fared in Accounting–fingers crossed that I also scraped by in that class, but we shall see. I’m not all that optimistic, to be honest. But enough about school! How ’bout some pictures of some of my friends? (We went out for Cuban food Friday night, and then out for drinks after. I do love our Friday night ritual…)

Guillermo from Puerto Rico and Ben from Texas on the left, and then I think we all know the girl on the right, eh? Poor Ben was the only other English speaker in the group Friday night, but I’ve gotta say that kept up marvelously with all the Spanish. (I mean, everyone speaks English, but after a few drinks…? Not so much.) Oh, and my Spanish? I was worried that I would regress over the break, but have actually been able to just jump right back in, which is a total relief.

Look how much better looking Guille is when he’s not making a silly face! Anyway, on the left, that’s Guille, Diego from Chile (one of the funnier kids I’ve met here, and provides much needed comic relief in class), and moi. On the right, Mafer, wife of Dario who’s on her right, and Arturo (all from Mexico). Dario and Arturo helped me out a ton during accounting class, but I fear that even their brilliance won’t save me… (Not kidding about their brilliance though–they are some seriously sharp dudes.)

So tomorrow school starts f’real. The week-long Strategy course was pretty good, and my new group managed to get through all of the work relatively easily–whew! I think everyone was a little worried that they wouldn’t love their new teams, and it seems pretty clear that some teams will have more challenges than others, but I, for one, am PSYCHED about my group. We all got together to do work at Graciela’s house on Thursday night, and ended up finishing work and then just hanging out, drinking beers, and eating quesadillas. I think that’s a very good sign. (You can imagine my delight to have Graciela on my team, given that she’s already been a great friend so far this year. Oh, and she’s really sharp, and really good, and super sweet. And, being from Mexico, she’s already working on finding me a Mexican boyfriend. Hee. I’ll let y’all know how she does!) The rest of my team is comprised of 4 guys: one from Mexico, one from Colombia, one from Guatemala, and one from Spain–an excellent balance overall, I think. The guy from Guatemala, Christian, is already a buddy of mine, and has already invited everyone to visit in Guate. Having seen pictures of his houses (that’s right, plural), I’m definitely sold on the trip. When I’ll be able to afford it is anyone’s guess, but it definitely seems like a great idea to me.

Aaaaanyway, it’s Sunday afternoon, and I’ve promised myself that I’m going to do all kinds of stuff today (like clean my disaster of a bedroom, for one, and catch up on some other random to-dos), but so far all I’ve accomplished is eating a late breakfast and reading some Jane Austen. (Recreational reading: totally a hangover from vacation, and a habit I fear I’m going to have to drop again shortly, sadly.) Sooo, I guess I should go and do some stuff, or something, eh?

Well, even though Thanksgiving doesn’t exist here (sniff, sniff), it does seem that the third week of November is a universal benchmark for the beginning of the Christmas season–I mean, one month out, I guess that makes sense. This means that the city is completely decked out in lights, local businesses sport Christmas trees and red carpets, and yes, even here, there is already an abundance of cheesy Christmas programming on the tele. Today, I watched Elf in Spanish with Raul (turns out “ooooh, you’re an angry elf” is almost as funny in Spanish as it is in English!), and yesterday I watched some terrible, clearly made-for-TV movie about Santa being some kid’s neighbor. Awesome. D’you suppose I’ll be able to watch “A Christmas Story” here? And if so, can we assume that “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid” will have the same kind of resonance in Spanish that it does in English? Big life questions, I know.

Of course, now that it’s starting to feel like Christmas (not like in Boston, though–no snow here!), I’m discovering a whole new kind of homesickness. For instance, I just had my first Thanksgiving since 2001 without Mary and Doug and the kids, and man, there was a sort of dull ache in my chest ALL day. (That could also have been caused by the anxiety of trying to get my first summer internship application emailed off, though, and spending the majority of the day helping other people fix their cover letters rather than working on mine–good LORD am I an accomplished procrastinator…) And now I’m staring down the barrel of, arguably, the most challenging 3 weeks of my ENTIRE academic career, and what am I thinking about? Spritz cookies. And presents. And sleeping on the couch in the den while watching Discovery Channel with Maman. And the internships I hope to interview for in Portland. And being on the West Coast for the summer, if I can.

And all of this is making me wonder, really wonder, where I want to be after I finish grad school. I had sort of assumed (sorry, dad!) that I’d want to stay in Europe for a while after I finish my MBA. It’s actually sort of logical–most of the companies that come to recruit are looking for people for Europe, and the Euro is CRUSHING the dollar right now, and have I mentioned 24 paid vacation days off a year??? LOTS of advantages. And yet, and yet, aaaaaah, I find myself getting excited about the possibility of being on the West Coast for the summer, which makes me excited about maybe moving back after school, which makes me excited about being closer to my beloved family, which really, just makes me ready for CHRISTMAS!

Ooooh, man, but really really, I should be doing schoolwork. Big time. I’ve been engaged in a 2-day long battle with a case about the airplane manufacturing industry, and it seems to be winning. (Seriously, what is WRONG with me? All I had to do was read the damn thing, and write a summary for my group in Spanish. Two days later, I’m only 1/3 of the way through the freaking summary, have accomplished NONE of my other homework for the weekend, and it’s already about to be Monday again. Sheesh.)

But Christmas? 26 days, three major papers, three major presentations,  two minor presentations, four final exams, at least 10 summer internship applications, and counting…

Last year, I made a HUGE deal out of my birthday. I took two days off, one of which I spent at the spa with Becky (learning that there is almost nothing better in the universe than a hot stone massage!), one of which I spent being a delighted bum with MF, and the weekend of which was all about dinners and drinking with my favorite people in Boston. My 27th was a birthday bonanza. In retrospect, I wonder why I made such a big deal, but I suspect it had to do with the fact that I was negative excited about my life–work was going very very poorly, I had let myself get totally derailed with my b-school applications, and I was just feeling generally kind of stagnant.

This year: totally different story. I have more going on than I can handle, and there is NO lack of excitement about my life in general. So I’ve had a totally different attitude about my birthday, and it’s been, so far, one of my best ones ever! (I say “so far” because the official celebration is tonight at the Irish bar around the corner from my house, which is in no way a sub for the JJ, but I still care for it a good deal.) But seriously, given the week I’ve had, I could pretty easily do nothing tonight. My actual birthday was International Career Day at school, and I didn’t have to be at school until 11, so I went out for dinner Tuesday night with a bunch of the ladies from my class, who surprised me with a bunch of desserts at midnight, to kick of my birthday celebrations–how sweet! Wednesday, at school, everyone in the universe knew that it was my birthday (thank you, Facebook!), so I got about a million birthday kisses and pretty much felt like a total celebrity. Then, that night, Anthon and Jorge, the Danes (both of them are filmmakers, and Jorge is living in my apartment until the end of January, and they’re tons of fun), took me out for birthday mojitos. So nice! And of course, I can’t escape mentioning, again, the contribution of the Patricks, who have managed to perfectly bookend my birthday this year. I can definitely say this birthday has been completely excellent so far, and I hope it bodes well for the next year!

One thing I can’t fail to mention, though, is that I had one of the crazier BCN moments I’ve had so far this week. Raul told me that there was going to be a “performance” at our house this week, which meant, you guessed it, performance art (bleh!). If I had any doubt before that performance art is mostly weird, those doubts have been handily dispelled. Raul asked me to be in the apartment at 3 on Thursday, so that they could come and set up. Fine, no problem, I owe him about a million favors, so I said I’d do it. Of course, this is Spain, so they didn’t come until about 5 to set up for the performance, which was supposed to be at 6. And dude, it was a freaking entourage of people, the centerpiece being a little Chinese guy who, I understood, would essentially be hanging himself out of Raul’s bedroom window, while the crowd below watched. (What?) Let me also add, here, that the week has been COLD by Barcelona standards, and my apartment, well, doesn’t exactly have any kind of heating system. So the “artists,” if that’s what we can call them, show up, close themselves in Raul’s room with a ladder, lots of ropes, lots of lights, lots of cameras, lots of people, and of course, both of his floor-to-ceiling windows WIDE open. Oh, and they barely say hello to me (as I’m freezing my toosh off on the living room couch, doing my best impression of someone studying geopolitics, but really, just being cold). This goes on for HOURS, and finally, around 8, it seems like they’re going to start. By this time, there are a fair number of people in the street below, so I go downstairs with Anthon and Jorge (aforementioned Danes), and we stand there, in the chilly, chilly night air, as they throw down a rope to the crowd below. The rope goes all the way to Raul’s bedroom window, and the people in the street are all holding on to it. The little dude appeared in the window, with his back turned to the crowd, standing on top of something, with many ropes attached to him, a mighty wind ablowin’, and the other end of the rope that the people in the street were holding wound around his neck. At intervals, we would lean way back as though he were about to fall, and I could feel everyone in the crowd wondering what was going to happen–was he going to jump? crawl down? scale the side of the building? What was he going to do??? However, after about an HOUR of this, the crowd started to get restless–I, for one, was both bored AND cold, and more than ready to reclaim my now frozen apartment. So what did the little guy finally do? NOTHING! They threw the rope down to the street, thanked the crowd for their participation, and that was it! Oh, man, was I irritated–and deeply, deeply cold. I went directly upstairs, made myself a hot toddy (first one of the season!), and crawled in to bed with ALL of my clothes, coat, hat, and scarf still on. Anthon took this picture of me in my room (and now you can finally see my blue lady!):

Alright, I have work to do before my birthday celebrations begin, so I should get back to it. But I have to say that, even though the performance art crap was annoying, this week has been mostly great. Hurray for my 28th birthday, and thanks to everyone for the awesome birthday wishes!!!

 (I actually wrote this on Friday, but couldn’t convince the servers at school to let me post it…)

I saw the most incredible mullet on the way to school today. I’m not sure if I’ve commented on this previously, but there is a serious abundance of non-ironic mullets in these parts (not like the cool kids in Williamsburg who want to be ironic and hip but seem to fail to notice that, despite whatever trendy point they’re trying to make, it’s still a freaking mullet–possibly the ugliest haircut ever in the history of man). Will wisecracked to me recently that he’s going to come to visit me and I’ll have a mullet and wear wrestling boots–an apt observation of the fashion here which I nonetheless wholeheartedly reject. In any case, about this mullet: so, from the front, it was like a regular spiky teenage boy haircut. Not like layers or anything, just a normal, if somewhat dated, haircut. And in the back? Yeah, starting at, like, the crown of his head and falling behind his ears: a totally regular head of long brown hair, not layered or anything. It was the weirdest thing, and I wish I had a picture, because it was more like two haircuts in one than anything else, and it was laughably terrible. I find myself thinking, often, good LORD the people here make odd fashion choices–not that I’m any kind of fashion maven myself, but seriously people, mullets??? In particular, the teenagers all have the craziest half-shaved haircuts that are totally asymmetric and bizarre. On Halloween, I had more than one moment where I wondered to myself, is that a costume, or is that just the way that person dressed today? Hm. Anyway, this mullet was ridiculous and I had to comment.

One of the kids in my classes has decided to start a Club de la Cerveza on Friday afternoons here, which means, after we finish class at 12:30 on Friday, the people who feel like staying and drinking a beer all go to the cafe and sit outside and have a drink together. What an excellent way to kick off the weekend, right? It’s one of the many things that makes me appreciate being in the Spanish section, rather than the English section (I don’t see them organizing a weekly beer together to kick off the weekend, somehow–they’re very serious over there!). Anyway, when he sent out the email this morning to remind us, he attached this link, which I found immensely entertaining and thought I’d share (hurray, beer!): http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=3id22e-3nLM

Interestingly, while enjoying time with my peers today, I was graced with yet another insight about how American I am, and what it means to be an American, according to one local, at least. (I remain unclear about what it really means to be an American, but anyway…) Apparently, we’re a very closed, very conservative society (even those of us, ahem, who consider ourselves quite liberal and open), and above all, incredibly concerned with security (he said we’re all convinced that we’re going to be attacked). I pressed him about what all of those things mean, but he gave me very few details. Interesting. I always appreciate these little insights, because it’s so interesting to me to discover what the US looks like when you’re on the outside looking in.  I’m quite certain that we look as crazy to them as their crazy haircuts look to me. Luckily, none of this really bothers me (okay, it bothered me when my favorite Fascist told me I was being an imperialist). Mostly I just find it educational. But it’s incredible to me how much people like to generalize when they have very little information or evidence to back up their (sometimes very strong) beliefs.

Anyway, just a couple of cultural observations while I wait for my Consulting seminar to start. (Case interview practice, hurray!)