Sigma Delta Pi, Ecuador reunion, and Diva Night

Today is the second-to-last Monday in April, which means it's the second-to-last Monday of classes for the semester. That is completely ridiculous and impossible. Two weeks of classes, a week of exams, and I'll be a senior in college, and one who is planning to go to grad school just to avoid the real world for a little bit longer but has yet to decide what to actually study in grad school. My mother almost had me convinced to get a master's in creative writing, but then on Saturday she said she thinks I should go for a master's in publishing or editing or something, which is also intriguing, but I have no idea whether or not any grad school would even accept me into such a program when the only English class I've taken as an undergrad was Latin American lit as part of the Seminar in Ecuador. I hate decisions.

And now I'll apologize, because I feel like I complain about my lack of time and my abundance of work every single time I blog. It's kind of on my mind all the time, though.

...Moving on...

This afternoon I was inducted into Sigma Delta Pi, the National Hispanic Studies Honorary, and I'm pretty proud of that. Several of my friends were also inducted. We were all kind of surprised at extreme formality of the ceremony, which began with all of us lining up in the hall and waiting for one of the professors to give a secret knock on the door to another professor on the other side before we were allowed into the classroom. I was waiting for someone to start chanting In Omnia Paratus or something (Gilmore Girls reference FTW!). The whole ceremony was in Spanish, of course, and at a couple of points we had to repeat a few lines after Dr. Cambria. She's hard to understand some times because she's very old and speaks with the traditional lisp of central Spain, so sometimes I had no idea what she had just said so I just tried to repeat it phonetically, but then once I was saying it I found I understood the words that were coming out of my mouth! That was rather odd.

On Saturday night I had the opportunity to reunite with almost everyone else who went to Ecuador at a fiesta at my friends Katy, Caitlyn, and Emily's house. We were only missing four students, and Professor Martin and Dr. Melampy, the trip leaders were there too, along with Nancy, Dr. Melampy's wife, and her friend, Suki, who joined us for the Amazon/Intag portion of the trip. We had a blast!! We had SO much food, Ecuadorian and American, and we looked at pictures from the trip, played lots of reggaetón music, and made a Facebook video for Antonia, who's currently back in Cuenca taking classes at the University of Azuay. We're all very jealous of her!!

As I promised previously, here's a little bit about Diva Night, the fabulous fundraiser for the Arts House that I went to a few weeks ago. The musical acts were not nearly as good as last year's (so I'm told; I couldn't go last year), but everyone looked totally glam in their get-ups, whether they were male or female for the evening. The winner was the one true standout, a girl from my acting class who sang a song from The Gospel According to Tammy Faye Baker, an original and as yet unproduced musical written by one of her friends. My friend Carolyn sang "Dance: Ten, Looks: Three" from A Chorus Line and did a fantastic job considering she learned the song in about three hours. My roommate, Jamie, and I decided that dressing up as boys was no fun, so we just went the obnoxiously-sparkly-pop-star route thanks to some old dance costumes of mine and my sister's. We did help Pat and R.J. with their outfits, and we all looked ridiculous and fabulous, if I do say so myself: