Summer travel plans I clearly missed my true calling in life as a travel agent, as I have successfully found plane tickets that get my ass from Boston to Seattle to Anchorage to St. Petersburg and back to Boston again, all for less than $2000, and all on MVP/mileage accumulating flights. That's about 18,000 miles, for those keeping track. Oh yes. I will make MVP my bitch this year. I might even make MVP gold my bitch this year, which includes among its considerable perks unlimited no-fee ticket changes. Although, knowing me and my somewhat devil-may-care attitude toward air travel, that could be a very, very dangerous perk.

St. Louis is great. This group of grad students is (for the most part) really sharp and interesting, and the Overlord Funders run a very tight and well-financed ship. St. Louis is pretty cool, too...our hotel is right by the arch, which is way more bitchin' than I expected, and the weather is gorgeous if a little sticky. I'm here through Sunday, then it's back to Boston to hurriedly move out of my apartment before the Mothership and Granny roll into town for our Vermont adventure. And then next stop (well, the next several stops, actually): the Great Frozen North! Woooo!  ¶ 2:59 PM

  A Short List of Things I Am Looking Forward to Doing This Week * Seeing the inside of my gym for the first time in, like, two months.
* Spending a day with my neighbor's puppy.
* Returning approximately fourteen thousand library books to the Harvard library system.
* Going to Walden.
* Cooking. Like, with vegetables and stuff.
* Cleaning my motherfucking house.
* Three plays in three days with Shawanda.
* Getting at least one massage. Okay, at least two massages.
* A few return trips to the awesomeness that is the Inman Square hot tub.
* The long-awaited public debut of Arsenic Taco. (If we can get our shit together!)
* Springtime in Boston, and truly wonderful friends, and a little bit of Profound Relaxation and serious Mojo Restoration.

Oh my god, people! Generals are oh-vah!! I don't think I actually believe it.  ¶ 10:39 AM

  "Oh, I think it's safe to say you're very verbal." I passed, bitches!  ¶ 12:39 PM

  Today's alarming generals distraction Russia's answer to Obama Girl:

  ¶ 10:30 AM

  There's a light at the end of the tunnel... ...and I'm pretty sure it's not an oncoming train. Chicken and I blew through the entire comparative canon in one fourteen-hour shot yesterday, which I think was a pretty awesome strategy in the end. It really forced us to take a very broad view of the whole field in all of its awesome, fearsome absurdity, and that was actually exactly what I needed, and I suspect also what this ridiculous exercise is really about. I'm closing in on finishing my focus field, too...by tonight I should be through most everything except the "global civil society" stuff, which, let's face it, is basically a footnote in the literature anyway. At some point I need to give myself a few hours to blitz extremely superficially through theory, and come up with a couple of random thoughts on the environmental justice/democratic citizenship-type questions that I anticipate being asked. And then...hope and pray that I don't embarrass myself too profoundly in front of three people I hope to have on my dissertation committee, one of whom has already hired me to teach in the fall (that means he can't fail me, right?)

For the moment, I'm off to refill my coffee mug, and then I'm quite looking forward to spending the afternoon settling in with a long-anticipated pile of the most interesting stuff from my focus field list--the stuff that actually makes it my focus field, and not just another lousy tour through Civil Society and Putnamia. But I'm just an asshole like that.  ¶ 11:30 AM

  Generals, in a nutshell. "We pretend to examine you, and you pretend to take it seriously."

That, and a simultaneously maddening and exhilarating process of mind-numbing repetition punctuated by moments of amazing clarity and discovery.

And too much time in the lab, and not enough beer.  ¶ 4:19 PM

  Be excellent to each other. Not only did I just realize I have two final paper presentations to give in classes tomorrow, but one of them is at 9-motherfucking-am, which means I actually have to finish the damn thing tonight, which means I probably need to start it pretty soon, hey?

I've been getting a lot of advice about generals lately that says, essentially, all you really need is one solid week of studying before the exam in order to ace the thing. Which is good, because that's pretty much what I'm going to give myself. I find out my committee on Wednesday, and then I am going to start pretentiously disappearing with my notes to Top Secret Hiding Places With No Intertubes that involve the Boston commuter rail and secluded gardens. Yes, yes I am really that much of an bourgeois asshole. But I know what works for me when the pressure is on, and hanging around and subjecting myself to the angsty, pointy vibes at the department (or, god forbid, at home with my insane and demanding roommate) ain't it. Getting the fuck out of Cambridge and communing with the bees for a few days will, I think, do the trick, or at least help a lot. (I saw the season's first big fat bumblebees just this morning, so they're on my mind. One of them was slowly hurling itself stupidly and repeatedly into a window at the department, the other was just chilling in the garden by the design school. Yay, bees!)

It is going to be a very interesting week. And I know I've said it before, but I really do love just immersing myself in this crap, because when it works and the poli sci mojo really begins to flow, everything starts to click together in a really amazing and coherent way, and my own work suddenly begins to seem like part of something bigger than itself; something relevant and cumulative and, if not important, at least worthwhile.  ¶ 12:29 PM