back by popular demand

Well, I've just finished my paper for tomorrow on the federal budget as key to understanding real governmental priorities, and let me tell you, the budget is really interesting. The paper topic and limits (1000 words hard cap) meant that writing this baby sucked. I would have much preferred to write 5000 words and been able to get into real meaty rants about public and media misunderstanding--and governmental manipulation--of tax policy, but as it was I barely covered revenues, outlays and expenditures and a couple of recommendations for shrinking the deficit (another area I could have really sunk my teeth into) in the space allotted. Oh well.

Seems that some people are asking for a little update about school so far, so here goes. My classes are as follows:

ENGLISH 223 Intro to Creative Writing
ENVSTD 232 Intro to Oceanography
POLSCI 300 Contemporary Political Issues
POLSCI 357 History and Politics of India and South Asia
POLSCI 489 H & P of the European Right

So far, the first two have been satisfactory but kind of up and down. At least they've been easy. The Poli Sci classes, on the other hand, have been fantastic. CPI, for which I was writing until 15 minutes ago, is really basic but engaging all the same and also easy in terms of reading/work load. The India and European Right classes feature fascinating subjects and are taught by two high-powered and absolutely terrific professors, Ashutosh Varshney and Andy Markovits. I could (and do, often) go on and on about these two, but won't right now.

My apartment is big and beautiful, although we've had a few problems with leakage from the apartment upstairs and with our dishwasher, which is on wheels and supposedly hooks into the sink, but which doesn't, in fact, hook onto the sink. No really big deal there, we just have to do dishes by hand and they pile up sometimes.

Frisbee has been a little more stressful than sophomore year because they're shaking up the way the teams are organized and as a result there might not be space on either the A or B teams for an average-skilled, average-athletic player like me. We hosted a tournament last week, Best of the Midwest, which was really fun and led to me making the first cut down to about 70 guys (from close to 150). So now, really all there is to do is keep showing up and playing hard and hope not to be in the next 20 cut (there'll be about 25 on each final roster). I'd say my chances are about 50-50. But we'll see. Hopefully I get invited to the Glory Days tournament in Naperville in a couple of weeks, that would be a good sign, I think.

Things seem to be going pretty well on the family front, which is obviously great, and even more so because things have been a bit chaotic here. Okay, I've run out of energy to write for the time being and my eyes are starting to cross, so I think I'll close up shop here at the library and head home. Sorry for the abrupt ending. I'll try to post more frequently, but now that I'm back in the country the blogosphere has become a lot less important to me in general. As a final note, I feel compelled to announce that Blogger's own spell check doesn't recognize the word "blogosphere." And with that, good night.