on laws of attraction and other weird things No, not THAT kind of attraction. I'm talking about the more metaphysical, truly strange kind...the kind where you are thinking constantly of something--an ontological paradigm, an empirical puzzle, a particular way of reconciling oneself with the cruel, cruel world in which said ontological paradigm and/or empirical puzzle has for whatever reason acquired some degree of ascending hegemony, and suddenly there is All. This. Existential. Confirmation....and it's coming into your life from every possible direction. I mean, what the fuck, universe? It works for shitty paradigms and brilliant paradigms equally; it does not discriminate. If this past year has taught me any goddamn tiny thing it has taught me that. But how to shape the paradigm? How, in advanced cases, to even create the paradigm? Such obscure machinations are beyond the comprehension of my tiny pea brain. All I know is hot damn, and holy mother of crap. We really and truly do create our own reality. Asobase kotoba, indeed, bitches.

ANYWAY. Things are, shall we say, afoot. I feel more at home in political science than I have in years. Things are coming together in extremely strange and unpredictable ways. The trade has once again become the calling, after so much stagnation. Confidential to Chicken: mashallah!  ¶ 4:23 PM

  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

  eeeeevil! Welcome back to Cambridge, bitches:

  ¶ 11:43 AM

  update: desk done, also ridiculously huge It's hard to tell from the shitty photo, but the laptop and normal-sized door behind the desk should give a sense of scale. This thing is very, very big:



I'm very pleased with its absurd size, because I like a lot of space to have different projects going at once, and this desk even lets me change my view from time to time, so that works for me too. Here's a better look at the view out the window, as long as we're talking about it:



The perspective is a little different from the balcony, but basically the same. Those buildings are all about half a mile away, just on the other side of the river. It is extremely weird to have a view of the Pru right outside one's window like that, but it's pretty bitchin'. Very pretty at night, too. There's also a pretty good view of Logan's comings and goings without the noise. The street in general is amazingly quiet, except for random and occasionally obnoxious neighbor noise...but I don't think there are any other Harvard people in the building, and that is awesome.

Putting that damn thing together in this heat and humidity kind of sucked, but I feel quite accomplished. I think I need to get to Republik, and stat.  ¶ 2:19 PM

  back in boston! ...where the high is roughly the same as it is in Bombay: 90 and way humid. Blargh. Today I get to hang around the apartment waiting for a desk to be delivered, but that's cool because I'm excited about having a desk. I'm still sleeping on a yoga mat, but at least I'll have a desk, dammit! Other very important item on today's to-do list: have a pint of the Bastard at People's Republik (they reportedly also have some kind of beet beer currently on tap called the "Kerouac"--I'm not a huge fan of either Magic Hat or beets, and thus am very afraid and shall stay far away). Other than that, yeah, not much on the schedule today. Outlining some papers, sending emails to some professors, catching up with friends. It's a little weird--but very good!--to be back.  ¶ 6:09 AM

  travelin' again Really earning my mileage points this week....after already having been to Chicago and back, three whole days later I'm off to Boston. Regular classes don't start for a couple of weeks, but the law school (for some ungodly reason) is scheduled to creak to life tomorrow. I'm just beginning to recover from that whole massive crazy conference in Chicago thing, so rolling into Kitty's class tomorrow evening after a night of no sleep and a good dose of jet lag should be extremely interesting.  ¶ 10:51 AM