change

I feel like hiding under my desk again. Plus ca change, plus c'est le meme. (The more things change, the more they stay the same). Why do we pretend it's any different?

more

Looking over this blog recently, it looks like I have been incredibly self-absorbed, which really is not true! I came to a school of politics and think I have blogged less about politics than any other time in my life. Perhaps because I finally realize that it is true, erase all names! erase all nations! Power is the same everywhere and everywhere has the same problems with it, and every side is the same side. The anarchist is the only principled one.

Other than that, I have been watching Sports Night (when in life-related doubt, watch Sorkin) and it is his first work and it is rawer than his other work but it still shows brilliance, sentiment of the best kind and intelligence and I'll take that these days in whatever form I can get!

But the problems of the world do concern me. It just seems, so overwhelming. We flit here from event to event from The Humanitarian Crisis in Darfur to The Role of Government in Capital Markets to Natalie Portman talking about Increasing Access to Microfinance (not kidding) to Celebrate Hillary's (the Clinton I mean) 60th Birthday to Renaming the Surge in Iraq. I know I sound stupid, but I have lost the ability to translate my horror and outrage at tyranny, war, poverty and disease and all I have at that thought is a bone-deep weariness.

The guy sleeping above me (I live on the first floor of a 3 storey house) snores really loud and I can hear it through my ceiling. He doesn't seem to be getting any more action though. Small mercies.

roses

I bought red red roses on sale, because they were dying. Showy large blooms, petals blackened with age, a dozen of them are sitting in a glass of water and they look wonderful, past their youth, one last hurrah. Am debating seriously a doctorate. Oh God.

w bankers

In a Q and A with the Guardian, Douglas Copeland is asked what makes you depressed, and his answer is Boring people who have money.

Here is my theory about bankers and consultants (and of course all my friends are excused here as am I, having been one of these people and contemplating returning to the profession).

These people have too much money and too little time. They are by definition risk-averse, and also less motivated by social causes. They also have few interests outside of work besides purchasing larger homes and more luxurious holidays. (In fact, all that bankers do besides talk about work is to talk about their holidays in which they sleep besides the pool in some exotic location). Finally, and worst of all, their thinking is limited, box-like because that is how they are trained to think. By rejoining these professions, I would be losing everything that is unique about myself, or that forms a self-identity.

Sigh. If only choices were as simple as the above. Went to a reception last night at the Massachussetts State House (yes, the building of the golden dome for those who have watched the Departed) and it was bland and boring, so I got drunk on the free wine. Thrashed out in a drunken state the night prior, a memo on private operators of public infrastructure, which was rather a decent effort.

Am flirting briefly with the idea of doing a doctorate in English. Please someone, hammer some sense into my head before I become TOTALLY un-employable.

choices

On the whole job nightmare, I was talking with H.
" So I want to work for a nonprofit, preferably Teachers without Borders but I can't afford to pay off my loans on a salary of X, and so my plan is to write a best selling novel by May, get a massive advance and do that. After all, B and D spent their summers writing their novels. D's book is a horror story with a moral overtone, and B's book is autobiographical. How hard can it be? Then I can go to Cuba and teach salsa dancing which is what I really want to do".

Ah. Choices.

teaching

Am bleary eyed after marking 113 finance problem sets. Its 2am and of course I left it until the last possible day before it was due. It was an interesting exercise, but if I ever mention that I ever wanted to go into teaching, somebody please do me (and the world) a favour and shoot me and leave me for dead. I NEVER want to repeat this. Having said that, there were a few bright moments. Bearing in mind that this was entirely a quantitative finance problem set, here were some smart (aleck) comments that students made and handed in! (Aside: its amazing how students get excited by tangency points i.e. every time there is a curve and a tangent to the curve, the tangency point must be the answer to every question!).

I tried but I do not understand at all what this question is talking about. Please go through this in class.

I am confused. Hence the question mark instead of an answer.

and my favourite

If only I can understand the English that is being used, I could at least make sense out of it. It sounds gibberish to me and I am not sure that I can begin to make sense of that sort of English. Thanks for your time.

the divine mr. northam

So after reading Possession and recalling that the image of Ash has become inevitably intertwined with the image of a rather ravishing Jeremy Northam playing the same in the film adaptation (particularly the description in the book of a 'feral male') I embarked upon an English period film watching phase, successively blowing through the Austen adaptations of Sense and Sensibility (rather good with the very British Emma Thompson executing repressed passion rather well) and then Emma with Paltrow (insipid and boring) and the divine Mr. Northam. (I was in a terrible Northam phase years ago after the release of the incredibly romantic sci-fi thriller Cypher and even hunted down the Golden Bowl which was ghastly. But in Emma, he is simply debonair, sweet, English and rather appealing in all the best senses of the word. If there is a classic cry of why is this actor so underused, then it is for him.

time

I shall snatch this day from the gods and damned be the consequences.

possessed

I went on strike yesterday and simply turned the alarm off and refused to go to school, cancelling at the last minute classes and meetings. It was simply imperative. I unpacked my newest sage green sheets, woven thick and warm, and unravelled my bed accordingly and when it was done, it looked like fields of rice. And I scrubbed the bathroom clean, hands and knees, and washed my hair and drowned myself in lotion and then lay on the bed and finished reading Possession, the American edition (of which must has been written about, but its true, Roland now has an "amused smile" that "arouses"- the character was deemed too unsexy for American readers and subsequently revised in the American edition). The rain pounded away, it was a dark night in Massachussetts all around and perfect for reading. Went to a party, came back drunk and continued reading. I baked brownies and the tray was left in the hall to be ravaged by passing hordes of graduate students. It was glorious (I even cleaned my shoes) though now, I am irrevocably behind.

HermitIsland, Maine

We went camping, the whole crew, C, M, B, H, A and I. S couldn't make it, but we wrote in the sand on the water against a sunset, Bite Me S and sent him the photo via my blackberry. Trekked on a trail along cliffsides and saw the sea, the Atlantic, churning against black rock and silica for two hours. Boiled lobsters on our campfire, wincing as we stuck them live and wriggling in the pot. We stood along the pot and gave them an elegy though. Then took the JD out to the sand, a few metres from our tents (I pitched a tent!) and under the moonlight, talked without agenda or burden. Slept in our tents as the Maine winds howled across the dunes. In the morning we rose to the dawn and made campfire bacon and eggs and potatoes, went shell-picking and prising barnacles off the rocks and watching them wince. Read poetry standing on top of the rocks far into the sea. And everything was right with the world. Then we piled into the car and drove back to Boston with the windows down and the song from the JC Penney Sweater Commercial on high and repeat. A brief moment, snatched from the jaws of time.