A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Hi there, Constant Reader. It’s 2:45 p.m. EST in Miami, and the current temperature is 70 degrees Fahrenheit under sunny skies. With humidity at 30% and the wind blowing at 9 mph from the northwest, the feels-like temperature is 74 degrees Fahrenheit. All in all, it’s a beautiful late winter day in South Florida. I am to a slow start today with my writing. To be honest, I don’t really feel like writing much; I have not thought about any topics for an Examiner article, not even a movie or book review. And yet, I know in my heart that I must write something. It doesn’t have to be anything spectacular, mind you. It can be something sublime, profane, or even mundane. The writing gods are not as picky as your garden-variety English composition teacher. The literary deities are as content with a well-written article as they are with a relatively insignificant blog entry.  They don’t care what I write about. It could be my shopping list for Winn Dixie – as long as I write. As I s...

My Apartment in Sevilla It wasn't exactly my apartment per se because I had to share Apartamento 2E at No. 1 Virgen de Robledo with two Spanish roommates.  When I arrived in Spain on September 21, 1988 I had it all to myself for about a week and a half; Juan Carlos, who was 18 and hailed from Jerez de los Caballeros in Extremadura, was the first to arrive; Demetrio, 31, was from  Madrid and he rented a room in that apartment every fall. Apartamento 2E was owned by a middle-aged couple and was one of the many such lodgings used by the College Consortium for International Studies  to house American participants in its Semester in Spain program.  In my group, most of us lived in these residencias or in private homes with host families.  If memory serves, a few students opted to rent their own places without having to deal with Spanish roommates or host families; these, however, were a tiny subgroup in our 42-member CCIS Fall Term class. Even though you...