Things are still going pretty well, but it’s a little more challenging now that deadlines are getting closer and closer. It’s not so much that there’s a lot of work left to do – it’s not like there was ever a ton of work for each of us individually to begin with – but just knowing that we need to be done in another week or so has created some slight anxious tension.
At this point, I think the hardest thing has definitely been keeping up with group meetings. For the first portion of the semester, our group was only meeting on Friday mornings, and that wasn’t all that bad; now, we’ve been meeting around twice a week and there’s a good chance we’ll be meeting more than that as we get into the last week. The meetings are helpful, so it’s not an issue of wasting time, but living over half an hour off campus has made meeting something of a challenge. Most of our meetings are in the morning and I have to account for at least 45 minutes of travel, sometimes more if I’m leaving during the morning work/school rush. Between late nights working on assignments for all of my classes and getting up really early to try and get to meetings on time, sleep has become a bit of a luxury and I really can’t wait for this all to be over.

via GIPHY
The good news is that we’ve made significant progress on our project in the last week or so. We’ve been working on drafts of our storymap points, and it’s been interesting to see how things are taking shape. I think each of our topics will mesh fairly well in the end – Teiji’s and Elise’s will probably work really well, and I’m sure we can find a way to fit my subtopic of gayness in Uyghur communities in there somewhere. If I had been able to find out more about drag queens in Xinjiang, it would be easier, but I suppose we have to work with what we have.
It’s unfortunate that we’ve hit such a large language barrier in our research. Had one of us been able to speak Chinese, we probably would have been able to pull together something even more cohesive. I’ve been thinking about talking to Zhihong about finding more sources that aren’t available in English, but with everything I have going on right now I don’t think I’ll be able to find any time.
–Nathan, 11/09