Hey, that last one was fun, wasn't it? 'Cause I don't spend nearly enough time bouncing around blogs as it is.

**Updated to add: Questions now scooting their merry way to Rana, ADM, and Scrivener.

Now another, via the fabulous OneBrightStar.

Here’s how it works - If you'd like to be asked questions, post a comment here and I'll email 5 of them to you. You then respond to the questions on your blog and offer to ask other people 5 questions. (An excellent late-summer meme for those of us who are back from vacation and getting back into the swing of things, but don’t yet have anything interesting going on to write about.)

Here are my cool questions from B*:

1. At what point in your life did you discover that you were interested in Spain / Spanish culture?

Oo, that’s a good one, because for as much as I love Spain and feel deeply connected to it by now, that connection is largely coincidental. I’ve always liked studying different languages & literatures, because they give such interesting insight into the different ways people have of viewing/experiencing the world. So I started out with languages as soon as I could in junior high, and the Spanish teacher was much cooler than the French teacher, so I took Spanish, and on through high school and college it just made sense to keep taking Spanish. Then I took my first history course and thought – hey! here’s a whole new way of seeing the different ways people have of viewing the world, and I was hooked. My favorite class (mostly because of the prof) was in French history, and I started to get all excited about the possibility of doing graduate work in French history, when my adviser asked me how good my French was. Oh, yeah… I guess I’d need French. Since I had Spanish, I figured I could work on Spanish history while I was learning more French, and then I got hooked on the history, and then I got even more hooked on the country, and then I met Mr. P/H, and that pretty much settled it.

2. What was your first thought upon waking up this morning?

Two more or less simultaneous thoughts: I adore Scott Simon (I always wake up to NPR, and weekends are my favorite) and I am so going to kick Mr. P/H’s butt around the tennis court today. (Mine is usually the butt that gets kicked, and today was no exception, but I like to get off to an optimistic start.)

3. What are you most looking forward to about the upcoming school year and why?

Pretty much everything. It’ll be nice to get back into the routine and feel useful - for as much as I enjoy lounging around, I’m generally happier when I’m working. There are lots of colleagues I’ll enjoy seeing again, and I have a new survey course set up that I think will work out well. I’m sending in the final typescript of the book in a few days (it passed the final read with flying colors, so just needs to be proofed now), so that will be out of my hair. I feel like things are a lot more under control this fall than they have been, and I’m going to enjoy the heck out of that.

4. What are you least looking forward to about the upcoming school year and why?

I’ll be teaching a graduate course, and I was really excited about the content, but so far only two students are signed up, and I don’t much like either one of them. This is only the second graduate course I’ve taught, and the first one had one of those magic combinations of students that generated so much interest and enthusiasm and great discussion that they and I both loved the whole semester. I’m fairly sure this one isn’t going to go that way, and I’m fairly sure I’m going to be cranky about it. (and that attitude really needs to change, or the course is guaranteed to be miserable!) A lot of our grad students sign up at the last minute, so there’s some hope this will change.

5. What television show do you absolutely not miss every week and why? If you don't have one, why not?

I don’t like that sensation of not wanting to miss something on TV – it just shouldn’t have priority over other things in my life. Several years ago, one of my best friends from college came to visit me for a week, and it was the first time she’d been away from her husband (they’d only been married a few months). We had the greatest time, just talking for hours and hours about everything, particularly our relationships, and at one point she decided to give her husband a quick call just to say how much she loved him. He picked up the phone, said hello, and asked her to call back later because he was watching one of his favorite shows. I’ll never forget the look on her face. And I promised myself then I’d never, ever value television more than a human being. Shows I look forward to, though, are Lost, The 4400, and the Tick. I don’t really watch anything else.