School Days: Terror Of The C's

This year I am a B+ student. I will do better. In hopes of beginning this process, I went to a Hallowe'en party (but was home before 1 a.m., which is the new midnight) and then went to see CATS on Sunday night with Jen and Kristen. It was quite good if you are open to spending two hours on plotless, leotarded extravagance. Which I am, obviously. It was great!

But I am doomed schoolwise, oh my brothers. Skip this section if you are easily bored by people talking to themselves about term papers. Don't worry, I'll tell you when to start reading again. This political science paper is going to be the easiest thing to write, because anybody who has laid in a sufficient supply of acid and 'ludes can write international relations theory. Anyway I have a funny feeling it's going to wind up being about the dangers of yucky squishy moral relativism compared with uncritical fundamentalist certainty. For those interested in my future academic career, I will reveal only that my current draft includes the phrase "bomb some of these motherf*ckers". This will be excised before submission. Probably.

My thesis has gone nowhere so far. I've been doing some reading which will be quite useful for public affairs class, as we're talking about environmental matters in Canadian foreign policy this week, but as to what I'm actually thesisising about, no progress has been made. This clever use of passive voice was engineered to avoid saying that I have made no progress. At least I have some ideas of theoretical works that could be useful, so that's good, I just have no idea what I'm applying them to.

Geopolitics remains terrifying. My paper needs at the least a lot more research, at most a complete topic change, and frankly I'm leaning toward the second option because, frankly, the topic I was working on is a media studies topic and nothing to do with environmental geopolitics as she is studied.

But! There is a ray of light in all this badness: public affairs is actually going non-disastrously. Even the group project is going well so far. My individual presentation is next week and not only have I done a decent amount of research, I've also found a cool PowerPoint template to use. Hooray. And Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang have helpfully published The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar, which contains almost exactly the kind of background information I need.

Now there will be no more term paper talk, gentle readers. Matt just called from his Outpost o'Isolation in northern BC. Being a junior guy at an engineering firm sucks because you get sent off to the middle of nowhere all the time. And once you're there you only get fifteen minutes on the phone to call a girl, thousands of kilometers away, who is all cranky due to a sinus headache and academic pressures. So basically it's a penal colony with good pay, I guess? And one where they let you do core samples? It is probably much more fun than that. I hope.

This all sounds like I'm in a terrible mood, but aside from an occasional stab of "Oh holy mother of God" terror, things are actually going pretty well. For instance, I made forty-eight cupcakes yesterday, and all of them were adorable. Not coincidentally, yesterday was Katherine's birthday, so happy birthday to her. And Colleen's coming this weekend, so I am very excited about that. And on that cheery note, I'm going to go become unconscious.