twilight zone

I was selected by the State Department for an internship.  I really don't know what to think.  I don't know my assignment yet - I anxiously await it, and cross my fingers - but at least it begins the optional route of Foreign Service Officer.  Wow, that sounds so weird.  Especially after contemplating going straight to grad school after this.  I really need to have a talk with certain people. 

And get myself to a police station to be fingerprinted.  So ends what little privacy I thought I had.

Now if only I could get published.  Ha.  My life would be complete. 

Edit:  on the downside, I may be out of a job.  And a research position!  What a day.

wow, it's really no wonder I'm a poli-sci major.

I think the first lyrics I knew - before even the Spice Girls - were to Les Miserables and Evita.  I think both were my dad's purchases.  He was strangely into political musicals.  We went to see Madonna's Evita movie as a family when I was about ten, and my mother and I cried during "You Must Love Me" - we asked my dad why he didn't cry, and he said that he had already cried by himself years ago when he saw it on Broadway in London.  And of course, there was his obsession with The Return of Martin Guerre.  Oddly I think my mother is more an expert on things like the Mahabharata (her summary: "everyone dies"), as she's danced that. 

He was strange.  It's the most random things I remember.  Most of it my mother's second-hand memories, stories she's told me, like him getting lost on one of those loopy highways in his VW Beetle. 

The first CD I asked my father to buy for me was the soundtrack to The Lion King. 

Sometimes listening to these soundtracks soothes me.  Les Miserables reminds me of what I believe in.  When my mother first met my father and learned he was a political scientist, she was skeptical, and asked about his views.  He said, "saya demokrat sejati," which means, roughly, "I am a sincere, honest-to-God believer in democracy."  Sejati means something incomparable in English - it implies a noble loyalty to an idea or a cause.  It's comparable to semper fi. 

"The answer to that question [how the Vietnam War transpired] begins with a basic intellectual approach which views foreign policy as a lifeless, bloodless set of abstractions.  "Nations," "interests," "influence," "prestige" - all are disembodied and dehumanized terms which encourage easy inattention to the real people whose lives our decisions affect or even end."
- Anthony Lake (someone I really look up to) and Roger Morris; "The Human Reality of Realpolitik"

I got it from this article: "Bystanders to Genocide", by Samantha Power.  You should really read it.

( eva's final broadcast: lines most pertaining to my father )

( les miserables lyrics that have stuck with me over the years )