sweet merciful crap There is so much really important stuff to write about right now--Turkey and the EU and France's genocide vote, Russia's ever-metastasizing fucked-up-ness, elections in Venezuela, the toxic sludge dump in Côte D'Ivoire, goddamn North Korea and the "China question"...it just goes on and on. But, as it turns out, I have something close to less than zero time to read or write about anything that isn't directly class-related. We've figured out in the cohort that the problem sets for the stats class, which we typically receive on Thursday (although we're supposed to have a full week to do them) take about 15 hours on average to complete. I, of course, am on the higher end of that average since I don't know a goddamn thing about Arrr, the command-line statistics language that they are forcing us to use. Most academic programs that require any kind of stats prefer software packages like Stata or SPSS, which do the same things that Arrr does but are kind enough to hide the raw code from you and let you interact with your data more visually and intuitively (the analogy here would be producing a website in Dreamweaver as opposed to writing it up in raw html code). Arrr, on the other hand, forces you to justify everything with perfectly structured arguments and will spit out an error and dig in its heels if you, say, leave off a closing quotation mark or misuse a capital letter. Or even better, since you're manipulating the data at the level of the data, and not just importing it and making pretty pictures with it, Arrr makes it exceptionally easy to do horrible, irrecoverable things--like last week, when I was trying to isolate the "Southern" cases in my dataset and wound up coding EVERY PIECE OF DATA as "Southern" because I wrote "South=TRUE" instead of "South==TRUE."

Right. Anyway.

Today is Friday, which means I can actually take a breath and, like, read the newspaper for once before launching into my piles of reading for the week ahead. Fortunately the theme in the comparative seminar this week is "regime change and democratization," which we all know is right up my alley. There's even a good amount of post-Soviet stuff in the reading, so hopefully that paper will write itself. Africa should be good, too--post-colonial state formation and specifically party development--all fascinating stuff, as far as I'm concerned. Now if I can just get through it all. I've always considered myself to be a pretty fast reader, but apparently I'm not nearly fast enough.

Kristin, a good and wise Older Student in the Program Who has Actually Passed the Mysterious Threshold of General Exams, assured me during the first week that this semester of taking both the field seminar and the horrible stats class will be by far the longest, hardest slog of the entire program (with the possible exception of that little dissertation thing), and that at least the rest of my Master's program will seem very easy after this semester. That seems about right; after this, the classes that I'll take will look more like the Africa class than the other two--that is, they will be final-project based, not weekly-output based. So there will be an ugly week or two after the semester ends while final papers are written, but not this weekly cycle of intense stress and evil. And that ugly week or two won't actually coincide with any other obligations, because it will either be in January during the "reading period" or after classes end in the summer.

The worst part? I'm totally developing an immunity to caffeine. My morning cup still wakes me up, but the afternoon pick-me-up does nothing. Nothing! However, there is hope: Shauna introduced me to this place, which, oh my god. They serve up a cup of dark hot chocolate that costs something like $3 for 6 ounces or something, but is PURE MOLTEN LOVE. I can't even explain. I guess gaining approximately 200 pounds is a small price to pay for a hot dark chocolate survival mechanism.  ¶ 6:14 AM