harvard-love Things are great around here, strangely enough. I love my apartment and all of its insanely oversized and inexpensive furnishings (coming soon: photos of the new beanbag chair, which just came the other day. It is...let's just say...larger than expected. And awesome). I love my schedule, which is still uncertain until I finish shopping this week, but is coming together quite nicely. I love the handful of faculty here who seem to really give a shit about me as a human being and a colleague. I'm loving Boston, which I manifestly ignored all of last year but now live about a 10 minute walk away from, and I've been getting across the river most days to wander around and enjoy the superb autumnal weather we are ever so fleetingly having here. I love the hippie-friendly co-op up the street that has that great B12 smell and an abundance of good beer and avocados and keeps good late hours. And the good friends who live in the area, some of whom have absolutely nothing to do with campus whatsoever--they're great too.

So, yeah, things are much improved. I feel ready to tackle generals, at least in an abstract kind of way, even though I probably won't have all of my requirements quite squared away by then (research-level fluency in a foreign language? Three journal-ready seminar papers? Har har har!!) I'm working on a paper for a conference in October, and getting abstracts in for various things in the spring. Various other things are cooking, too...I'm basically inventing a whole new subfield here, people!

Off to read several chapters of several books before class tomorrow...ah, grad school.  ¶ 1:40 PM