i'm alive! and i have SO MANY SOURCES! OMG it is amazing how much more you can photocopy when you have a wonderful friend who travels with you. i found about 15 times more things than when i was at the bancroft, and a lot of those are newspapers from chiapas at the time of the revolution (which is good since most works on the revolution deal with villa in the north, mexico city, or zapata in morelos in that order). hottttttttt. yes, it needs that many t's. and the people were so much nicer in the benson - there were also windows which is probably the cause of that. and it was open from 9-5 instead of 1-5 which was so nice, not to mention that they are not under construction and i only had to wait 5 minutes for a box or folder from a collection as opposed to two days. i also got to look at (and photocopy from) a collection on the EZLN when they went on tour through mexico in 2001, AND that collection had six video tapes of the rallies they put on. i could only watch about 20 minutes of one because the cameraman was obviously in the crowd clapping (i got slightly seasick) but it was extremely interesting to watch, whether or not it was useful in the end. i am also now highly skilled with a microform, as i spent what probably adds up to one full day of research going through microfilms of newspapers. i wonder if i can put that on my resume? i'm sure that will be a useful skill somehow...

and most of the drive was nice. the trip from phoenix (where my friend's brother lives and where we crashed in the middle of our drive because he's fantastic and generally awesome) to austin turns out to be more like 18 hours, not the 15 mapquest says. yeah, big fat lie. and the time change wasn't in our favor going east. however, now i can say that i've driven through small town texas at 2 o'clock in the morning, and i wasn't even running from the sherrif. woot. the speed limit on the 10 through texas is 80 during the day and 65 at night, which is probably what slowed us down, along with traffic coming out of phoenix. not really a surprise since phoenix is los angeles without the beach. traffic is worse in l.a. though - they practically invented it.

texas, however, smells. several were so pungent we started making a list (along with a list of things the travel guides don't tell you about texas which will be posted at a later date). just to name a few: sulphur, onions, hay, beans, pie, and hot crayons. austin is full of tattoo shops. i think their motto is that you can't just get one tattoo because it will get lonely. i saw more people with tattoos in austin than i have anywhere else in the world, and i went to punk shows every weekend in high school. also there is orange everywhere you look, as it's one of the UT's colors. i didn't go into bars (tina, my friend who is the coolest person on the face of the planet and came with me, isn't 21) so i didn't have the chance to observe the local night life, but something tells me that since i'm only a recent beer drinker i'm not missing that much. perhaps another time.

unfortunately, due to the exhaustion from all the driving, i am sadly behind on my research. i'm still in the middle of the book i was supposed to have finished before i left, and the book i was supposed to have read this week hasn't come yet. ug. syllabus may have to be revamped a bit. maybe i'll shave a few things off... (i did give myself 12 weeks not including trips to archives). hopefully i'll have a lot of time to read in the next few days, but it's not looking like it. i'll probably end up staying up late reading and trying not to fall asleep.  ¶ 4:24 PM