New Semester of Collapsing Hair

I’ve had one of those afternoon/evenings in which I come home and look in the mir­ror to find that my hair has fallen from its pre­vi­ously Spectacularly Styled Coif of Curls and Red-Ribbon-That-Matches-Red-Shoes and is now in an oddly strag­g­ley mess. I am left to pon­der how long it was in said strag­g­ley mess, only to deter­mine that it was prob­a­bly the moment I left the house and has there­fore been in said strag­g­ley mess for the past six hours of errand run­ning and social­iz­ing. The worst bit is when I take it down and real­ize that the tan­gled mess looks bet­ter than the fallen coif:

and now I will write so as to delay hav­ing to brush through the mess.

Classes!

Public Administration: P.A. is just a nice way of say­ing bureau­cracy. The pro­fes­sor announced on the first day that his goal was to teach us to be bet­ter bureau­crats. Insert skep­ti­cal look here.  On the sec­ond day, today, he said the fol­low­ing: “Now, I real­ize that as polit­i­cal sci­ence majors you’re all going to tend to look upon gov­ern­ment, par­tic­u­larly large gov­ern­ment, favor­ably.” I nei­ther laughed nor choked, which I con­sider an accom­plish­ment of my mea­ger sources of tact.

Approaches to Political Analysis: No papers, for which I am grate­ful. The pro­fes­sor sounds like a Muppet and kinda looks like one. I will enjoy his lec­tures. The topic is bet­ter than what I expected — one lec­ture will be on the topic of pub­lic choice the­ory, of which I’d very much like to take an entire course.

Inquisition:  Chuchiak, so it’s inter­est­ing. I will, for the first time in my aca­d­e­mic life, delib­er­ately choose an easy topic in this class. I can’t han­dle some­thing cre­ative. A biog­ra­phy. Those are easy. um. Galileo! Yes! Galileo and the Inquisition. I stud­ied him a bit for the Rennaisance Biographies course. I’d enjoy doing Galileo research. Will write that paper soon.

Independent Reading: I can­not describe my pure joy and sheer ter­ror of this class. It’s with a brill prof, and the sub­ject is
pre­cisely what I want to spend my life research­ing — Early American Constitutional History. I’ll get teary if I think about how fab it is. Meanwhile, it’s 8 tough books and a huge amount of legal pri­mary sources, and the prof is tough. and I haven’t met with him yet this week. Haven’t heard from him. Am I sup­posed to email him? I sent the last email. I don’t want to seem like I’m nag­ging — he’s let­ting me take this tuto­r­ial with him as an unusual thing, and as direc­tor of the grad pro­gram, I’m sure his sched­ule is insane. I’m prob­a­bly sup­posed to email him. I feel awful, though; I did not do any­where near as much work on this project as I wanted to do over the sum­mer. Priorities, priorities.

This semes­ter, my last full-time semes­ter, with the elec­tion and my papers, and mov­ing to Bolivia for a lit­tle while, and every­thing else… Tuesday I was so deeply depressed by the work­load that it was pathetic. I am putting together a sched­ule that I will need to keep very dili­gently in order to accom­plish what must be accom­plished this semes­ter. Scary, scary.

I will love the his­tory inde­pen­dent tuto­r­ial. The elec­tion is fas­ci­nat­ing. I can­not wait to be in Bolivia, away from the tedi­ums of under­grad. I can­not wait to be back in the States, with intern­ships and projects, and grad school and life.

Must. Write. Papers.