Good sweet jebus, people. Me: Dude, I dunno. What would Gary King say about making your case selections through your goddamn DREAMS, man? I mean, that just can't be good.

Meg: I think he would say it is awesome. It is totally methodologically sound.

Me: But what if subconsciously I'm still selecting on the dependent variable?

Meg: Do you actually know one goddamn thing about Tanzania? Also, do you even know what your dependent variable is?

Me: Well. When you put it that way. No.

Meg: Okay then.

So. That's the prospectus news, dubious and troubling as it may be. In other news, teaching my first real section today was awesome. An ice-breaking round of Sarah Palin jokes and anecdotes helped a lot, but they really were a wonderful group and we had a very rousing discussion about Russia, democratization and the "transition" paradigm, and--confidential to Brad--the "Normal Country" fallacy. One especially on-the-ball student hit the nail on the head when she said (admittedly after I sooooort of kind of maybe primed the group to come to exactly this conclusion): "but Russia doesn't actually want to be a 'normal' democracy, does it?" An observation that I don't have to tell you led to some seriously great discussion. But I'm biased like that.

Next up: THREE MORE SECTIONS. One more for Russian politics tomorrow, and both for CP on Thursday. Jebus help me. Oh, and my prospectus is due to the workshop tomorrow. Tanzania is in, motherfuckers! If only because it will be a hell of a lot of fun to write into the abstract. The Arctic, the tropics, and the desert meet in a bar...  ¶ 4:13 PM