In deference to Caroline's instance that, "Wow" and "Neat" don't combine to be particularly informative, I'll try again.

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I don't have any classes today, so I slept in a bit. When I finally got up, I wandered over to the door, opened it, and registered (in this order) that it was a bit gray, that the temperature was about perfect, warm but not blasting hot and that it was raining pretty hard.

This is a very strange place.

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There are lizards everywhere in this city. Lizards crawling outside the windows, lizards scurrying past you as you walk down the street, little green critters about the size of a pencil...

OK, I actually kind of like them (and they have yet to get into the coffee), but it was a bit disconcerting to start seeing them right after I got into town. I haven't seen any around campus, but there are tons of them in the neighborhood on the edge of South Miami and Coral Gables where I live. They do in fact look remarkably like the rubber lizard toy that was the inspiration for "Sing, Goddess", and, while they don't have as many legs, they are about the size and color of the lizards described in the story.

Like I said, this is a very strange place.

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But I like it...and unlike the planet described in the story, the coffee is excellent. Cafe con leche, Cuban style, is God's gift to caffeine addicts, and a warm cup of that nicely complements going out into the warm wet Miami air in a way I don't entirely understand.

And, in point of fact, one of the small pleasures of moving has been how utterly unfamiliar all of the local fauna (and for that matter flora) is. Palm trees everywhere, but also lush tropical plants I can't begin to place.

And the fauna...gheesh. Weird little lizards are only the beginning. There is, for example, a canal running right outside the front lawn of the house we're renting that seems to be home to a family of what I would normally assume are ducks. Except, um, the color scheme is completely wrong for ducks. Maybe these are some strange sort of south Florida ducks? I have no idea.

And, of course, as previously noted (in March...I haven't seen any this week), campus differs from Michigan equivalents in the "parrots instead of squirrel" thing.


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So...what else?

I had my first day of classes yesterday. Good stuff.

Two of my three classes have met already (everything but Colin McGinn's "Structures of Reality" class.) Yesterday I had Seminar on Epistemology with Risto Hilpenin and Topics in Logic with Otavio Bueno.

The Risto and Otavio thing is another interesting difference--having a lot to do, I think, with self-selection and location--between here and Western Michigan, that both of those guys have accents indicating that they come from points south of the Rio Grande. Bueno in particular has the combination of looks, accent and persona that make certain female students pretty clearly all but swoon in their seats on ocassion.

Class was fun...I summarize one thread of class discussion in a separate post. I realize that most of y'all aren't terribly interested in analytic philosophy, so I don't want to make anyone scroll through it to get to the rest of this, hence the separation

In a fairly nerdy way, its also been fun to have one of my housemates also be a philosophy grad student, so every once in a while one or the other of us will knock on the others door to give the other some article they just found that has to do with what they were just asking about and get into a discussion about it for ten or fifteen minutes before going back to watching "Futurama" or whatever.

In any case, the way it worked out with the scheduling, I have, it must be admitted, the most decadent schedule of all time this semester. (Although, granted, I don't know what my TA'ing duties are for the fall yet, so that might change.) I have classes on, um, Tuesday and Wednesday. (Albeit five hours total on Wednesday, with only a two hour break in the middle. (-: ) If it paid just a little bit more, being a graduate assistant would be the best racket of all time.

(Dale Earnhart, Jr. summed it up the best when he was interviewed on the Daily Show, and said he was "too lazy to work and too scared to steal." Granted the many relevant differences between being a racecar driver and a philosophy graduate student, that comment resonated.)

Anyway, this does mean that it's going to be especially pathetic if I don't get any writing done over those five day weekends.

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Went to see "Miami Vice" on Saturday night.

If they went through South Miami or Coral Gables or the bits of Coconut Gorve and South Beach I've been to, I missed it--the only bit of scenery I recognized was the Atlantic Ocean--but it was fun. Formulaic, but entertaining. I also came out of it with an overwhelming desire to drink a mojito, what with all the superliminal advertising for mojitors in the film. At one point, the asian gangster chick even takes the undercover cop (sorry I don't remember any of these people's names) in a little speed boat from Miami to Cuba so he can try the mojitos at a jazz club in Havanah she liked.

Mmm...mojitos...

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The theatre where I saw "Vice" was pretty cool too, nestled in this outdoor shopping complex called "Sunset Place." It's just really nice to go out there and all and see how teeming with life the place is at 11 at night when the movie started....teenagers going into the vide arcade, people sitting in a little restaurant by the theater (tropical foliage spilling in through the open second stroy window) sipping cafe con leche, music thumping from the night club on the first floor. Really gives you a sense of being in a larger city.

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As of course does everything else. Going swimming in South Beach, where the water feels like stepping into a warm bath. Sitting with friends in an outdoor bar and enjoying drinks and warm ocean breezes at a time of night when bars in Lansing and Detroit would have been legally required to close hours ago. Engaging in various other degenerate pleasures of the Miami-specific variety.

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In general, what with being so warm and wet and all, south Florida is pretty much teeming with life of all kinds and in general. (An honest to God frog got into the house a few days ago. Doesn't happen where I'm from.) Of course, much of that life is poisonous or carniverous or crazy (moving up the great chain of being from plants to animals to people), but teeming with life nonetheless.

It does make things interesting. I had a conversation with a friend from Lansing a couple of months before leaving. When I said I was going to go to school in Miami, he said "wow, that's the last place I can imagine you being"...which, in a way, sort of sums up why I think this such a good move right now. Being in the same city, going to the same places and seeing the same people and doing the same things, its way too easy to get way too far inside your own head.

I think this came together for me a night or two after I moved into town last week. I ended up having a long IM conversation with a good friend wherein they listened with saintly patience while I whined about some frustrations of an interpersonal nature from the past (the details of which, obviously, are sublimely irrelevant and not bloggable.) Anyway, about ten minutes after I got off, with no particular plans for the evening other than walking around the canal and trying to write, I get a call from some people I'd met back in March when I visited, asking if I wanted to come hang out, and in ten minutes they've swung by and in twenty minutes I'm out at these seedy little dive in Coral Gables being bought welcome-back drinks and generally having a good time and all I could think was how much more emotionally healthy this evening was than it would have been back in East Lansing.

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I did (finally) finish a second draft of "Sing, Goddess" last Friday and sent it out to get its final critiques before I start submitting it around. Interzone's next e-reading period starts in a bit over a week, so I'll probably send it there first.

I also wrote the first 200 words of something new, extremely tentatively entitled "Darkness Threads Eternal." These are the first few lines:
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The target walked into the main hall. Her long, curly blonde hair was done up in a bun and she was wearing this slinky black dress, and all I could think was how she was so beautiful, it was a shame that she had to die.
Which was a dumb thing to think, with the clock ticking away and the heat needle burning a hole in my pocket. A job's a job, and this one was going to bring in a lot of desperately needed cash for me and my crew.
Plus, it wasn't as if the lady didn't need killing. The Nareens had shown me their file on her when they hired me, and I had a feeling that there were about ten thousand civilians down on the colony base who wouldn't care how cute she looked in that dress.
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...which sounds like the beginning of an interesting plot, nu?

Now, if I can just figure out exactly what that plot is in its specifics, I'll be good.