Phrase of the day
Topic: Odds and ends
The phrase of the day is charismatic megafauna

Used in a sentence:
Although llamas might not be considered charismatic megafauna, they are most definitely comedy gold.

Trying not to forget that I've got this blog thing
Topic: Whatever
Because there's not much point having one if it's not going to be updated, is there? Problem is, I haven't been doing a whole lot lately. Mostly just a lot of reading that is in no way academic, which has been delightful. So there's been lots of reading, and many long walks to and from the library, and not much else of note going on. I'm looking for a job as well, but not having much luck at the moment.

I'm also trying to decide what classes I should take next semester. I know I want to take Gender and Colonialism, Social Impact Assessment, and Gender Globalization and Development, but there's a vacant fourth slot, and I can't decide between Gender Issues in Development and International Feminist Political Theory. Gender Issues in Development seems like it might be a good option for next year, since it's an intensive course that finishes early and would leave me more time at the end of the semester to work on my thesis. But it really depends on whether or not I want to take International Feminist Political Theory at all -- it sounds like it has the potential to be a really interesting class, but I'm not sure about the lecturer. I learned this past semester that classes live or die on the quality of the lecturer. My Understanding Development class started slipping away three weeks into the semester and never revived -- biggest waste of my time since my freshman year "Mathemenglish" class (if you don't know, you don't want to, believe me). Any thoughts -- besides "are any of these classes going to help you get a job that does not count salting french fries as a critical skill?" Because I know that thought crossed your mind.

Good intentions aren't good enough
Topic: Development
Tsunami aid 'went to the richest'

"The unprecedented international response to the tragedy means that the immediate humanitarian demands could be fully funded. Failure to deliver assistance effectively to the poorest, or to plan properly for the future, reveals fundamental weaknesses in the system."

The grad school experience
Topic: Uni
I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.

A roundabout route to a strange story
Topic: Politics
I'm still getting one of my favorite newsletters from Baltimore, the Mobtown Shank (moving 10,000 miles doesn't mean I love Baltimore or the Shank any less), and this week's Shank had a random link to PoliticsNJ.com, and you can take the girl out of Jersey, but . . . so of course I had to check it out.

One might think that the entire situation with McGreevey might have been enough weirdness for NJ politics for one year, but then a Republican gubernatorial candidate, Bret Schundler, got caught with a doctored photograph on his website. Someone thought it would be a good idea to turn a picture of Dean rally into one of a Schundler rally, apparently with the purpose of selling campaign gear. Schundler is no longer in the gubernatorial race, presumably for reasons of IDIOCY. But you know who is in the gubernatorial race? Ed "NJweedman" Forchion. State politics were never this entertaining when I was voting in Jersey.

Nostalgia
Now Playing: The Sneaker Pimps: Becoming X
Topic: Catching up
Posted Armenia dispatch today. I guess I'll try for at least one a day until they're all up. I'd almost forgotten how much I enjoyed that trip to Armenia, despite the cold. I don't think I've ever been so cold. But the people I met on that trip were fantastic.

I'm meeting lovely people here, too. (I know, I should stop re-hashing really old news and fill in the blanks of the last few months. Trouble is, I didn't write about the past few months, so dredging it all up from my memory is a bit of challenge) The Good Doctors and their family have been absolutely wonderful to me -- so welcoming and so helpful. And I adore their grandchildren, who are beautiful and bright and terrifically entertaining, and who I'm sure you'll hear much more about in the future.

I met a couple other American students through the Gender and Development program (which is heavily international at the moment), and that's who I've been hanging out with the most lately. I've found it hasn't exactly been easy to meet people through classes, which is kind of a shame, because you sort of see just enough of people to find them interesting, but not really enough to strike up much of a conversation outside of class. But there's a bit of a little group of international students forming, and we've been having fun hanging out. Or at least, we were until the end of term, when everyone went a little crazy with the stress.

Most of what I seem to remember about the semester is the stress. Going back to school was harder than I expected. I spent the first three weeks feeling like such an idiot. I didn't understand the reading, I felt like everything I said in class was stupid, I wondered whether I was going to spend the entire semester feeling like a moron. It got better after that -- my brain warmed up, or something, and things weren't as hard, but no sooner did I start feeling comfortable then the end of term essays rolled around, and it was flat-out panic for three weeks. Although I kind of did a lot of that to myself with the procrastination. I really didn't think I was procrastinating, or at least not that badly, but I found out I was wrong. I have to get better at planning, because panicking is not a good option. Particularly not when the entire grade for the class depends on writing a good essay, which was the case in two of my classes.

I'm waiting until grades come in to make a final decision about whether this was a good or bad semester, but everyone keeps telling me that the first one is the hardest, and it gets easier from here on out. And it's not like I think it was a waste or anything. Most of my classes were good, I liked the research I did for the final essays, and I did a whole lot of interesting reading. So if it gets better from here on out, next semester should be pretty good.

Blathering
Topic: Whatever
Okay, so I'm going to make a try at resurrecting the website. I'm feeling the need for a vanity project. Although, you'd think my vanity would extend toward not having such a crap site and blog design. Oh, the conflict! I'm embarrassed at the results of the lowest-common-denominator tools provided by Tripod, but too lazy and impoverished to invest in anything better at the moment. And much much too lazy to create proper pages for the really old dispatches, so they'll be going up as PDF files.

I've been doing some editing on the old dispatches as well, and am finding myself torn between wanting to basically keep them as they are, with a little editing (could I have used the word "beautiful" any more often?) and wanting to pretty much rewrite at least some of them entirely because, well, I was young and ignorant, and in a hurry when writing them, often as not, and in places some of them are a bit embarassing. But keeping them more or less the same will probably win out -- see references to "lazy", above. See also, suspicions that no one will bother to read stuff that's 3 to 5 years old at this point.

All the revising has made me miss Macedonia, though. What I wouldn't give right now for lunch at the "Turist" restaurant and an afternoon wandering through the Old Town in Skopje. It's the little things: fresh grilled bread, a greek salad without tomato (and the looks waiters gave me when I ordered it - they all thought I was crazy), a little glass of Turkish tea, and a long walk home along the Vardar. It was such a gorgeous way to spend a Saturday. My current routine of "roll out of bed at 11, scrape together something for brunch out of whatever is in the fridge, and mess around on line for a couple hours" leaves something to be desired, by comparison.

Four months and ten days later . . .
Now Playing: Soul Coughing: Lust in Phaze
Topic: Catching up
I had planned to start a blog shortly after arriving in Melbourne, because I had a feeling I wasn't going to be up to the miles-long e-mail missives I churned out while in Macedonia, and I thought this might be a better way to just sort of generally let everyone know how I'm doing on a more regular basis.

Obviously, that didn't work out. So, in keeping with the general theme of the site, I'm getting this off the ground late.

It wasn't entirely my fault, of course. My internet access was sort of intermittent for the first couple months. I didn't want to hog the computer while I was staying with The Good Doctors, and I didn't move into my apartment until the semester had already started. And then it took the phone company a grand total of a month to first even get me a functional phone line, and then to get my internet connection established. The phone company was the first thing I hated in Melbourne, and I hated it deeply.

It didn't help matters that I'd decided that I was going to try to live without a television, so for a month I was without TV or internet access at home, and I felt incredibly isolated. I was swiping newspapers out of recycling bins for the weather reports and major news. I worked my way through most of the book of crossword puzzles that my mom gave me for my birthday last year, just to have something to do that wasn't class work. I had very few distractions from my hatred for the phone company.

So by the time I got a connection at home, it was practically the mid-term break, and I had my first set of assignments due, and after that, found myself with little time or energy for much beyond school work. Honestly, the past four months have been something of a blur, and when I look back on it, I really can't believe that I haven't been here for at least a year. So before it gets even later, I'll try to fill in the blanks of the last four months.