Loving the G8 coverage
Topic: Development
Suddenly everybody is interested in development! How exciting! I wonder what it says about my future career plans that the articles I like best are those that are critical of the development industry?

For instance, in Welcome to the aid business, Michael Holman takes Western NGOs to task for their relationships with governments and the media, and highlights the lack of accountability structures for NGOs operating in developing countries. Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie's article in the Times develops a point made in Holman's piece: that the governments of donor countries can and do use aid to gain influence over developing countries, while the gains to the recipient country (particularly its poorest), are often very small-scale.

Chikezie suggests that the G8 leaders would do well to listen to people from Africa, and Emily Wax's article in the Washington Post concurs. She highlights the issues of corruption and international trade and how they perpetuate a cycle of poverty in Africa.

Criticism of Western aid and development NGOs doesn't tell the whole story, of course. I'd hardly want to do the work if I thought it did. For one, if the alternative to NGOs and development agencies is to hand poverty relief over to multinational corporations, as George Monbiot alleges G8 leaders are doing, I'll take most NGOs any day. But I do think it's important to look at the dark side of development as well. Obviously, any time money and politics coincide, there's going to be more going on than what's apparent on the surface.

Update: From the Christian Science Monitor, a good story about what it takes for a family in Malawi to live on $1 per day

Courting trouble
Topic: Politics
I really liked this post on This Is Not Over about the significance of Sandra Day O'Connor's role in Supreme Court decisions, how one vote on the court can make a difference, and why it's important to be concerned about the person who will replace her. (See this article as well)

Also see Slate's article on potential nominees, and note that many of the candidates listed are in their late 40s or early 50s, which could very well mean that her replacement will have a long tenure on the Supreme Court. I know Supreme Court nominations don't usually make for exciting news, but this is a story worth following, and an issue worth being active on.

Update:
I thought that this story in the Nation on the potential importance of O'Connor's replacement was interesting: Court Fight: It's More Than Left vs. Right.

Two more lists of potential nominees have been published in the New York Times and Washington Post.

The Post also has an article about cases on the Supreme Court's fall docket in which O'Connor's swing vote likely would have been significant.

Reassurance
Topic: Uni
With less than a week to go until grades are announced, I've gotten two of my final essays back, and I've done quite well, which is a relief. Takes some of the edge off of waiting for the full results to be published. Although the two classes that I'm waiting on results for are the two for which the end of term essay was the sole basis for the class grade, so I'm still a bit anxious about them.

I really don't like having everything riding on one piece of work. Too much stress. Especially when I choke and run up against a massive case of writer's block, which happened twice at the end of the semester, and led to the first all-nighters I've pulled in over five years. Which did not lead to great essays, and which did lead to me sacking out on a friend's couch watching "Big Brother" after handing in said not-great essays. Anything that leads to a situation in which one does not have the energy to walk away from "Big Brother" is bad and should be avoided at all costs, if only for the sake of one's pride.

Update, 7 July: Results are in, and it was officially a good semester. Much better than I had hoped, actually.

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.