a sense of joy and then a panic

Teddy Roosevelt follows me EVEN INTO ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE: 

"In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt culminated seven years of federal reservation by proclaiming the one million-acre area as the Superior National Forest."

OH TR. 

The dilemma is that the policymakers cannot kill two birds with one stone, or more precisely they cannot achieve two policy targets with one policy instrument, or in what is perhaps a better metaphor, it is difficult to pick off a target if it is standing next to another one that one wants to leave untouched and the weapon is a shotgun rather than a rifle.

- Kindleberger and Aliber's Manias, Panics, and Crashes, p. 103

I hate econ.

I have some happy news to report...

* I won the Political Science Quarterly prize!  This is what I'm most proud of.  That essay meant a lot to me, as it was marginally about my father, the student protester. 

* I was elected (?) into Phi Beta Kappa.  Ha ha ha, kap-pas.  I can't say that word without a Japanese accent now.  If that is indeed what it is - it might just be my Japanese Monsters professor's bizarre intonation.  I don't really know what this means because it's so OMG SECRET.  I hope it's like Skull and Bones.  I hope the initiation requires blood rites on the quad lawn.  I really, really hope so.  

* Nossa Morte took my story, "And When She Was Bad."  Named after my favorite nursery rhyme.  It was inspired by a paper I had to do for my Japanese Monsters class, so that's one good thing that damn class has done for me, I guess.  I think it'll be out Feb. 2009.

On the down side, House is dissecting a dead cat.  :(  Poor kitty.

You Are a Cat (Well, Duh I Am)

You are very independent and reclusive. No one really understands you, and you like it that way! You are quite clever and ingenious. You can get yourself out of any sticky situation. You are confident and cool tempered. You know you have many advantages and resources to draw from. No matter what life throws at you, things always seem to work out your way.

I've been listening to a lot of Alanis Morissette lately - when I'm alone, so as not to scare Lucia - and like, screaming along to it in my terrible soprano voice. Ha ha ha. But it feels really good. We discussed the legitimacy of "Oughta Know" and Hole as legitimizing female anger as an acceptable emotion. But singing along to Alanis Morissette really just calms me down - it's like singing in mantras - esp. "Jagged Little Pill." Although I've always also really liked "What Goes Around", too. I get the same thing from singing along to Audioslave, weirdly enough.

Doing peer reviews of other people's theses... is stressful. If anyone has any suggestions for getting through peer reviews, please let me know, because I feel like I've been trying to sum up this girl's thesis for the past 3 hours.

"A market economy was an improbable child to be fathered by men who held their position by the assertion of will backed when the need arose by personal victory in combat."

If you say so, E. L. Jones. IF YOU SAY SO.

Yay, David Cook.  I should have had faith in America, but I was too scared after last night to actually watch the end of the finale, so I'm watching it now on YouTube.  Instead I watched Top Chef.  Bad decision, I guess.

Boo, Top Chef for cutting Dale.  Boo. 

But yay, David Cook!  And it wasn't even close.

Etc.

This is concurrent with my belief that if you have good luck you get bad luck immediately after, and vice versa, to balance everything out.  Karma, man.  Like, my colloquium professor nominated me for the Political Science Quarterly prize, and I immediately managed to overwrite that essay with a different essay (it involved the flash drive virus that has been haunting my electronics for the past week, and my stupidity as to naming all my papers "paper.doc"), so I as of now have no copy of the thing on my computer. 

the most overrated "crisis" ever.

"Students complain about lack of sleep, stomach pain and headaches, but doctors and educators also worry that stress tied to academic achievement can lead to depression, eating disorders and other mental health problems."  Good.  Who the fuck cares about, you know, arsenic in the freaking drinking water?  Here's the real health crisis of our times. 

Either go on medication (what I did) and/or suck it up, or don't apply to Harvard.  Having taken most of my classes at Columbia this semester I have become increasingly sure that there is pretty much no difference between the kid that gets into the Ivy League school and the kid that doesn't.

I have some hella dumb classmates, and I was rejected from their school.  Prestige is all B.S.  Even at Barnard, prestige is B.S.  I was at the Torchbearers reception sitting at a table with a filthy-rich alumna (and by filthy-rich I mean, filthy-rich off her husband and parents) who was talking about how great her sons' prep academy is - Dalton School, part of the Ivy Preparatory League, also known as the Children's University School, whose alumni include such "notable" people as Chevy Chase, Anderson Cooper, Claire Danes, Christian Slater, and Sean Lennon (shameful really.  Horace Mann's got Ira Levin and Elliot Spitzer, Trinity's got the McEnroes, and Fieldston's got Sofia Coppola, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Stephen Sondheim.  Dalton's the black sheep by comparison!).  Why, the teachers there are so wonderful, all the kids pool together money when they graduate (and by pool together money I mean, their parents drop off limo-loads at the front doors) and give a gift to the school, which is not by any stretch of the imagination lacking in funds.  But you know, said this Barnard alumna, quality should be rewarded with monies.

And as soon as she said the name of the school, Dalton, I immediately thought of this biographical story I read in a book called 33 Things Every Girl Should Know.  Cliched title for a book, sounds like it came from the American Girl Company, but those stories, told by adult women, seriously are 33 Things Every Girl Should Know.  I got that book when I was about 11 - it came from my uncle (!) - and I think it really influenced how I grew up and the beliefs I adopted.  That and People, by Peter Spier, which is hands down the best book I have ever read.

The story in question was called... well, I don't remember.  Follow Your Passion, I think.  It's not important.  But it was about this girl whose mother really wanted her to go to Dalton School, because it was such a good school, and they're at the interview, and the girl is thinking about the girls she's seen in the classes, the perfect pretty girls with jelly shoes, and when the interviewer asks her why she wants to go to Dalton she snaps her chewing gum and says, "Lady, I don't.  I wanna go to public school with my friends."  Her mother is horrified and clearly she doesn't get into Dalton.  Fast-forward twenty years and she's gotten herself to a prestigious college of some sort (Yale?  I think...) and is constantly having to tell the people she meets that she went to some prep school she made up so she isn't socially ostracized, when really all she wants to say is, "Lady!  I was a Dalton reject!"

Instead of listening to JS talk about Hungarian-Transylvanians living in Romania and how Hungary did not encourage them to pursue ethnic conflict in order to make its transition into the EU smooth, I started thinking about ReBoot.  Not really thinking about it, just remembering it, quotes from it ("Does that kid remind you of anyone?" "Not really").  It occurs to me now that I may fail the midterm because I have not been paying very good attention to all his Yugoslavia stories, that is if the midterm is example-driven rather than theory-driven.  Oh well.  I already know what I think causes ethnic conflict and this class has not changed my mind.  Further I think I agree with JS. 

One thing I will say for realists, though.  They are very good at giving names to their ideas.  Nothing clunky like "constructivism" (although I give Smith some credit for making up pretentious, exotic-sounding words: ethnie, mythomoteur): they have Stag Hunts and Zero-Sum and Prisoner's Dilemma and Realpolitik and Tragedy of the (Freaking) Anticommons.  I mean, for being cold computers who believe people "can be reduced to basic mechanical parts" (Grendel: "New Flesh"), they are damn cool.  It's almost like they were made to be Magneto-esque villains, the kind that the audience secretly roots for because the good guys, the constructivists (or worse, the liberalists!  now they are truly dorks in spandex) are such losers who don't even have cool names for their attacks.

I don't want to study for anything.  I'd rather just wing everything and listen to Grendel: 1 2 3 4.  All day. 

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.