very sad

Tonight, this is how I feel. Vale and I just had a really hard conversation about what we're doing and where we're going and I just miss her a whole lot. We decided to try and be "just friends," but the idea of giving up hope of seeing her again for a long time really hurts. I'm glad I found a little corner of the fishbowl because I really don't like the prospect of a bunch of strangers watching me cry to myself. I was going to do more work but I think I'll just go home instead. Do check out that link, though. Good night.

my concession to valentine's day

thumbs up!

This morning I got an email from Terry Provance, of Oikocredit, saying he'd like to interview me for the job opening there! He suggested that we talk by phone next week and then hopefully in person when I'm back in DC over spring break. Hurray! I mean, nothing's settled yet, but that job looks really cool. Plus I just figured out that Terry Provance is a UCC minister, which is what Dad's going for right now. Cool! The place is maybe a little more ecumenical than I first thought (well, okay, a lot more), but that's okay. It's based in the Netherlands and has branch offices in Costa Rica, Peru and Uruguay, not to mention Germany, several places in Africa, and India and the Philippines. So it's a widespread organization, although the US office appears to be, well, Mr. Provance's house.

On an unrelated note, the teaser for this opinion piece by Condi Rice and Robert Gates in the Post today is "On Iraq, Trust Us." Are they freaking kidding? Those fucking people have SO abused my trust that they will never, ever be able to earn it back and I will assume that they are either lying, wrong, just trying to cover their own asses, or a combination of the three, for the rest of time. I'd be laughing right now if I wasn't so disgusted. Okay, class time.

thumbs down

Got my first letter of rejection from a job app today, from Arabella. That's okay, because it was the group I was least interested in working for and, as they pointed out in their gentle, if concise and blunt, letter, seemed like the least comfortable fit for me. Still, not very nice to get rejected from anything. Oh well, time to get used to it, I suppose. Back to work.

That means emailing Oikocredit (today) and Partners of the Americas (on Thursday or Friday, if they haven't emailed by then) to follow up on those letters, and Jeff about hopefully coming in to see what CHF is all about over Spring Break. Also, it means going through the little list I compiled of other places of interest and banging out apps for them. Somebody, somewhere has got to hire me, right?

But right now, it means writing this blasted essay about pentecostals and faith healing.

And buying a ticket to see the DALAI LAMA AT CRISLER ARENA ON APRIL 19!!!!

scattered thoughts

This weekend went pretty well overall, except that it was horrifically cold and windy and that I got clocked in the face by a guy trying to huck as deep as he could. Totally a foul on my part, but there wasn't any doubt who got the worse of the exchange and I don't think I played the rest of that game, deciding instead to focus on the bleeding and the ring of pain that had exploded in a horizontal circle around my head, right around the base of the bridge of my nose. The good news is, I didn't break it and I'm not concussed. The better news is, we finished in third place, of 22 teams, and played okay as a team. It's a rare, and nice, feeling, for us to feel like we outclass most of the competition at a tournament. But we did, going 6-1 and losing only to a Marquette team that had the wind on its side and a really great handler who killed us with upwind swings and some great looks down field. And, it was a good team bonding experience, sleeping 8 to a room and freezing to death outside and playing well together.

Hugo Chavez, it seems to me from my vantage point up here in the great white north, is a pretty small man. Not physically, of course, but just in the sense that he's become nothing more than a clownish oil despot who aspires to be the grand opponent of the US in South America. Not that we don't need a grand opponent down there, someone to really lead the "Pink Tide" movement against the Washington Consensus. I just don't think he's that guy. He's too busy preening in his red shirt and bloviating about how he's building up a badass army to fight against Colombia and the US. What a peacock.

I have a paper due tomorrow on the rise of pentecostalism in Brazil and how it's connected to Andrew Chesnut's idea of "pathogens of poverty." It should be a fairly easy paper, only 1500 words, but I'm kind of adrift still about how to focus it. Well, it'll come to me. This class, by the way, is still kind of unfocused in general as far as I can tell.

Klein gave me a book, The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler. He wrote LA Confidential, which got turned into one of my favorite movies, so I'm excited to read it. Not sure when I'll have time, but that's okay. Other book notes: Development as Freedom is disappointing only in the sense that the writing is sometimes convoluted and unclear. Nothing like The Argumentative Indian, which is beautifully written. Come on, Amartya! Still, it's extremely interesting.

Vale and I talked last night, on Skype, which was nice except it's always a little weird when she has a camera and I don't, so I feel a little like I'm spying on her. But she seemed good, if a little sunburned and a little lonely. She works all day by herself in the office because Katty is doing other things and Isa left, then goes home to her single apartment. Some days she goes up to Cecilia and Rodrigo's house, which she likes, but still. Also, I miss her and, last night, found a job at OAS in DC that would be perfect for her, except that she doesn't have "excellent mastery" of English (the job requires Spanish, too, but she's obviously not lacking there). It's an HR job, requires a bachelor's in business administration, which she has, and at least a year of experience with human resources, which she definitely has. Oh well.

It's time for breakfast. Today, we must go to the grocery store.

i'm goin to disney world! i mean, cincinnati

This weekend is Arctic Vogue, in Cincinnati. The weather forecast is terrible. Saturday: high 45 with rain and snow in the morning tapering off into partly cloudy by the afternoon and winds 15-25 mph. Sunday: high 25 and partly cloudy with lots of wind. That could hardly be worse. Wind=sloppy play. Precipitation=sloppy fields. Below freezing temperatures+sloppy fields=pothole-filled, frozen fields. We're leaving around 4:30 this afternoon and coming back on Sunday probably early-evening-ish. We're also the second seed this weekend, which is a lot of pressure. The goal at any tournament is to break seed, so basically we have to win in order to call it a successful weekend. We can beat all of the teams that are coming; the only one we've ever gotten rolled by who's gonna be there is Bowling Green alumni. But we're a way better team now than we were then.

In other, also-sports-related news, I spent a little while yesterday looking through the Navy SEALs training book in Borders, where I was to spend the $50 gift card I got from being in some experiment or other. (More about the books I bought sometime later; one of them, A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid, I already finished and it was awesome. The other was Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen.) Anyhow, it got me inspired for this summer. Working out as consistently as I have been feels great, but still feels a little unstructured, like I could be getting more out of it with a concrete plan. So I'm going to keep on doing the team thing for the rest of this semester, and then this summer set myself up with a week-by-week, month-by-month workout plan. I can't wait. Right now, though, it's time to enter some data on German MPs. Yay! Wish us luck this weekend. And a break in the weather.

duke 89, unc 78

Boo ya.

political betting markets

I think it's safe to say that I've been following the betting markets (Slate keeps track of them here) for the presidential race more closely than most. That might not say very much, but I check them at least a couple of times a week and think they're very interesting. A couple of weeks ago, I talked about them with Vincent Hutchings, a professor here who studies electoral politics. He said that they're generally pretty accurate measures of how things are going for the candidates. If you go to the Slate page and click on "All Candidates," you'll see that John McCain has taken the lead, by a narrow margin, over Hillary and Obama. However, if you click on "Winning Presidential Party," the Dems are still big favorites. McCain is the prohibitive favorite now in the Republican race, and in the Democratic race, Obama has made up a ton of ground on Hillary.

The point is this: McCain would be a gigantic disaster. Hillary sucks. Obama also kind of sucks, but not as much as the other two. In other words, I'm pulling for Obama. If I were more important, I'd say I was endorsing him. As it is, I'm just (halfheartedly) rooting for him. Let's go, Great Logo.

Check out the Post's Super Tuesday coverage if you're bored enough by whatever else you're doing. And now, to the fishbowl to do some work, and then to the gym to do some working out (Navy Seals today, baby, WOO!) and then back home to eat dinner and watch CNN until I throw up all over Wolf Blitzer. I wish I were abroad, we'd at least get the BBC 24/7. Oh well.