Currently Listening All Is Dream By Mercury Rev see related

I feel like I update this site so infrequently that it's become a chore, when in reality it's the only real weblog I have. I think the reason it's so difficult is that everything I write has to be filtered through the knowledge that everyone in the universe with internet access can read it. For that reason, I'm hesitant to mention every single aspect of my daily life that everyone will undoubtedly find captivating.

I'm in a Northern Ireland Conflict class at PSU, and I've just been assigned to be Tony Blair for our role-play negotiation. My first reaction was "ok, I'm the out-bound British Prime Minister who will basically make a lot of noise and blow hot air towards the dissenting N.I. parties". In reality, I have the modest responsibility of facilitating the entire process. In other words, none of the Irish parties are going to move a finger until I push them around and stand firm on the November 24 (actual real-life date) deadline for devolved government. I'm excited about this, because it looks like an opportunity to use some of the things I learned in a negotiation class last year.

I'm also taking Farsi (Iran's national language), which is massively easier to pick up than Arabic, though they share a similar alphabet. Not that memorizing 40 words between each class comes easily to me, but Farsi is structured grammatically like a western, rather than a semitic, language.

Allegedly, yesterday was Columbus day. The only reason I'm aware of this colossal celebratory benchmark is that I didn't get any mail. It just seems so...pathetic - the fact that we have a technical holiday, but the lowest and least dramatized for a guy who revisionist history has all but turned into a greedy barbarian. So we name our country after Vespucci, but we carve out a pithy monday for Columbus. We live in a strange country.