I’ve gotten to talk briefly with both Laura and Sebastian this week; so good to catch up with the Original Misanthropes. Both of them are applying to UChicago at some point (Sebastian this year) so I’ve been dispensing advice on that front, and since Sebastian will obviously get in here, he’ll probably be visiting in April, yay! Sebastian is the one of the smartest people I know and very awesome; he entered Skidmore on a full scholarship demanding he be pre-med. Then he met Political-Theory-Professor, joined our drunken reading group, and got a government major in addition to the pre-med thing. Now he’s ditching med school for the ivory tower and I cannot image a better future colleague.

I remember how to do stats-math. You know, I don’t think I’m a total idiot in math. I think having BAD teachers 6th and 7th grade combined with my general disinterest meant I never got into the subject, never paid attention, and never tried. But I’m looking over the curriculum for quantative methods and I don’t know what my advisor meant when he said I needed a calculus background. This stuff is straight out of senior year sped math. I’m assuming you COULD use calculus formulas/methods that I’m not aware of to solve some of these problems, but I’ve been getting the right answers on the practice tests so I’m obviously doing something right.

I can be pretty arrogant about my own intelligence (defense mechanism much?) but on the other hand, it is weird realizing I may not be as stupid as I thought.

And my final paper topic got approved in my Schmitt class, so I am 1/3 of the way towards having my thesis topic approved. Or maybe 1/4. I can’t decide.

The amount of coffee I have consumed in the past 48 hours is disturbing. I was up until 2 AM the past two nights just thinking about academic nonsense.

Michael gets here in a week, and than I will have some sanity.