I’d forgotten how awesome it felt to be completely engaged by an article.

My mind is running a million miles a minute. My brain is waking up.

Waiting to hear back on a few jobs. Been researching like mad to get my sample projects done.

Depending on what time I meet up with the Younger Wiser Sibling, I may go down to the lake later. Before the weather gets too frigid.

And then it is more reading.

I am eating cold Ramen noodles.

I have a rather long entry to write, for several reasons, but I don’t have time right now, and don’t know when the words will be there.

So Three Things. Real Quick.

I’ve condensed my Honors Research paper to 25 pages, and although it’s a bit rushed, I feel it’s strong enough to submit to University of Chicago. I’m finished with my Columbia SOP, and nearly done with my University of Texas one. I’ve revised my list of schools I’m applying to, started some online applications, and today, the process seems manageable.

So I’m applying for graduate school, blah blah blah, extremely competitive, blah blah blah I’m never going to get into graduate school.

Anyway, I’ve always been fairly certain I will get into Rutgers. Rutgers has a very good political science program that has consistently improved in the past five years. As important, if I’m accepted I’ll be fully funded, be giving a housing stipend, and in addition, get paid to be a TA or research assistant after the first year. All of this is fantastic, but I’ve been caught up in stigma of “it’s Rutgers”

Yeah, it’s Rutgers, and it’s always been a good school, growing up in suburban New Jersey just makes you a snob.

And yeah, it’s Rutgers, and political theory faculty has a Tocqueville scholar. A Tocqueville scholar! I’ve been toying with the idea of reading modern political thought (Hobbes, Tocqueville, etc) through a feminist framework, and the ways in which modern political theory is applicable to contemporary ideas of sovereignty. Much of my goal regarding reading Tocqueville through a feminist framework is to find a theoretical grounding for my qualms with much contemporary feminist theory.

And there’s a Tocqueville scholar at Rutgers. So how can I not go?

But then there’s this, that I’ve never been out of the Northeast, and thus I’ve never really been out of my comfort zone, and Thomas West is at U-Dallas, and, and, and.

And I adore Tocqueville, and Jersey, and being near my family and surrogate family alike, and, and, and

And “que sera, sera”

I’m going to just be a real fun person to be around when acceptance and rejection letters role in mid-March through mid-April. That’s already my “that time of year!”

Last night I went to the Hayek Memorial Lecture at NYU. Richard Epstein was speaking and it really was quite a good talk, and I was the only one there without a little law school name sticker, but I talked to a lot of people, and it was fun. It was yet another reminder of how much I miss school.

I’m applying to: NYU, Columbia, Rutgers, UTexas @ Austin, UDallas, UChicago, and UOregon. I started the SOP today. I’m tempted to write ”I changed a lot in college. I changed school. I changed my hair style. I changed political affiliations (but I won’t tell you from what to what). But, unlike the typical college student, what I never changed was my major” I have always been drawn to… blah blah blah.

I can do a statement of purpose. It’s just a matter of tweaking

At work, things are fabulous, and I might be up for a promotion, despite having only beeen there two months. Don’t want to jinx it. Will say no more.

I can’t really say much about my life without going into detail about comlex things, so I will say this, courtesy of my LJ stalker habits “I’m not ahead, but I”m not behind. I don’t want to get up, but I do, so I say that everything’s fine.”

I’m bored, but my new goal is to be the most well-read receptionist in history.

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BACHELOR OF ARTS
OK COMPLETE 120 HOURS AND THE SENIOR RESIDENCY
OK A CUM GPA OF 2.0 IN ALL SKIDMORE WORK IS REQUIRED
OK FOUNDATION REQUIREMENTS
OK INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY REQUIREMENT – Liberal Studies 1
OK INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY REQUIREMENT – Liberal Studies 2
OK ALL FOUR BREADTH REQUIREMENTS HAVE BEEN SATISFIED.
OK CULTURE-CENTERED INQUIRY REQUIREMENTS-PART 1:
Complete 1 FOREIGN LANGUAGE course.
OK CULTURE-CENTERED INQUIRY REQUIREMENTS-PART 2:
Complete either 1 NON-WESTERN CULTURE OR 1
CULTURAL DIVERSITY course.
OK LIBERAL ARTS REQUIREMENT
OK Complete 24 hrs at 300 level (Parts I and II below):
OK PART I: 12 OF THESE 24 HOURS MAY BE TAKEN ANYTIME AT
SKIDMORE (or be approved as Maturity Level credit from a
study abroad program).
OK PART II: 12 OF THESE 24 HOURS MUST BE TAKEN IN THE
SR. YEAR AT SKIDMORE (Senior Year begins after 90 hours
are completed)
OK MAJOR REQUIREMENTS FOR GOVERNMENT
OK MAJOR GPA FOR GOVERNMENT MUST BE A MINIMUM OF 2.000
This major GPA includes all Government courses and GH322
ADDITIONAL ELECTIVE COURSES
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
ALL REQUIREMENTS HAVE BEEN MET

I am officially, bureaucratically, no-give-backs, graduated.

Laura: I’m going to go to grad school only long enough to meet a husband. Then I’m going to get married and drop out
Me: Awesome, you’ll set the women’s movement back at least 50 years
Laura: That was my plan!
Me: It’s a good one. As a “conservative” woman my attitude is ‘Sure, I’m capable of taking care of myself, I just shouldn’t have to.’
Laura: It’s true.
Me: So, I’ll be a supportive, awesome wife, and in return I’d like some Mead Spiral notebooks

Laura: I’d say she was annoying. But I don’t really have any reason to think she’s annoying
Me: No, I think she’s annoying too! She just LOOKS annoying
Laura: Well, she is a sociology major.They think they have THE answer for everything.
Me: Right, them and the anthro department
Laura: I guess every major thinks that they have a claim to THE answer for everything. Some of them just have a more legitimate claim to it.
Me: Yeah. Like us.
Laura: Exactly
Drunken Trucker: C’mere baby. I’ll make it worth your while! C’mere. C’mon! I’ll make it worth your while!
Laura: Oh, he’s a winner. You can have him
Me: No, no you take him, I insist.

Resolved: Scotty’s is the only place we can walk into and have every man in the place stare at us.

Me: god i love nietzsche. he is my philosopher boyfriend. his writing is hot
Brent: That’s frightening. He’s anti-semitic and misanthropic
Me: And I’m attracted to both of the above qualities
Brent: I suppose, but Nietszche bothers me. He blames woman and Jews for all the worlds problems
Me: Yes. But he does so in a very appealing manner.

Other men competing for my affections:
Jon Stewart (especially Jon Stewart), Edward Norton circa Primal Fear, F.A. Hayek, and Billy Joel
I realize, my crush on Hank Rearden has dissipated some (but I haven’t read Atlas Shrugged in quite a while, because it will make me cry) but if he and Fransisco want to fight over me, I would be all for it. So long as they don’t invite John Galt.
And I’d say Paul Johnson, but he’s 70+. Which is somehow more bothersome then the fact that F.A Hayek and Nietzsche are dead, and Hank Rearden is a literary character

Me: I’m reading a 900 page book on German History from 1770-1866
Brent: Hot!

“I am so tired of that stupid cave”
~Brent on the Allegory of the Cave

Me: The exorcist wasn’t scary at all
Brent: That’s only because it didn’t play on your personal paranoia; the supernatural = impossible, a hockey-masked killer = possible
Me: Yes, exactly
Me: I never really worried about getting possessed
Brent: Right, because a demon would be rooting around inside you for a soul, find nothing, and leave the way he came in

Me: Well, Road to Serfdom & Failure of Socialism are both on my bookcase if you want to use them
Ben: I know, and Road to Serfdom is all highlited and margin noted. I want my own copy
~This makes me so proud! My younger, wiser sibling is going to go to UChicago and turn into a drunken Straussian.

I am left with extra time getting ready for work this afternoon, so I feel obligated to tell everyone that, looking at the books I have been reading lately, I have realized that my destiny is not, unfortunately, to become an insane empress who can peer owlishly at the Diet through a speech rolled up like a telescope.

I am going to be one of those insane old guys on the history channel, doing commentary on one of those documentaries. Except, you know, I’ll be a chick. I’ll be like the old women who are always on the Holocaust documentaries telling about their time in the concentration camp, except I’ll be slightly younger, hipper, and tattoo-less.

Yeah, that was tasteless.

First I need to get qualified for this job, because you can’t become an insane commentator on the history channel over night. I’ll probably have to go to grad school eventually and get my degree in some obscure historical specification. And then I will become a professor. But I’d be a cool professor, well, cool by my standards at least. I would find the one girl in every class who was just as loserly as I was at her age and bond with her, and if she was under 21, I would buy her alcohol, because that’s what a good professor does!

I would also marry someone who was really intellectual, but disagreed with me on stuff, like for example, someone who thought “appeasement was the right policy for Britain and France in 1939″ (it wasn’t, and i actually don’t think any intelligent person would really think this, but I’m just using it as an example). Anyway, that way we could get into petty fights about our disagreements, and if we had kids, we could put them in the middle of it. Like, my husband would take the kid out for ice cream and tell them all about how appeasement was the right policy, and then I’d get really mad and make him sleep on the couch and somehow make it to seem like that is what he wanted because it’s a form of appeasement.

I’m still working on the details.

Employee Appreciation Weekend at b&n is the best thing ever. Now I have lots of new books, and I have to brag.

I got Machiavelli’s Discourses because I loved “The Prince” and because ‘Machiavelli is right about everything’ and I got Nietzsche’s Basic Writings, because I think I should read some Nietzsche before I graduate. John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, because as anyone who took AP US History I at IHHS knows “it’s all about John Locke!” Oh! And The Edmund Burke Companion, because he is ‘the original traditional conservative’ and I talked about him so much in my honors research that I want to read more. I also could not resist Ayn Rand’s The Voice of Reason because I am a sucker for all things Rand. I bought another copy of The Virtue of Selfishness, because I don’t know where mine went, and I finally own The Early Ayn Rand, probably solely for the story “The Husband I Bought” which is one of my favorite short stories era. And I got Peter Lawler’s Aliens in America because it’s been recommended to me by so many people that I figured I should probably read it.

Than I got The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich because Brent speaks so highly of it. And The Rise of Fascism, because I am slightly obsessed with the fascist ideology.

And there were 4 books from the series The Birth of Civilization (or smtg) so I got Rousseau and Revolution, The Age of Napoleon, The Reformation, and The Age of Louis XIV, because I adore Modern European History. And Germany, America, and England – Foreign Policy From 1918-1938.

And I got The Grammar of Politics and Philosophy because I am obsessed with words, and speaking of which, I had an entire conversation on Saturday night with one of my co-workers on Edith Wharton’s use of syntax, because the way in which she phrases things is just perfectly Victorian and so effective and awesome, and I adore her, so I had to buy The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton because I love encyclopedic junk like that. Which is also why I bought The Oxford Companion to Philosophy because the decathlete in me likes to keep names and dates and basic ideas ordered in my mind.

For my mass-market side I purchased Stephen Kings Dark Tower V & VI, even though I never finished III, and never read IV. My brother will appreciate them until I can get through them. I also picked up some ‘beach reads’ stuff to read if I actually get to the shore this summer.

For my nostalgic side, I got Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, which is a slightly scandalous take on her and her daughter’s life. I have loved the Little House on the Prairie books since I was about 4, and I re-read them at least once a year, so I’m oddly fascinated by her, and her daughter, because Rose Wilder was actually a crazy libertarian pioneer and wrote The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority. (which I highly recommend, though it’s out of print and often expensive.) But speaking of Rose, I bought Old Home Town¸ by her, because I’ve never read any of her prose, and since she had such a big hand in editing the Little House books I’m curious to see how she writes.

I think that’s it. I got most of this stuff used; The Sale Annex + employee discount = BEST THING EVER. I am in geek-heaven.  

So Model EU was not what I expected, but in the end, it turned out okay. The Interior Ministers didn’t really have to tackle anything controversial, so my meetings were kind of unexciting. The guy next to me spent the time making up cheesy pick-up lines with EuroSim references., most of which were funny, but I don’t remember them. (My favorite: Hey baby, can I be the minister of your interior?)

There were also a lot of stupid people at Eurosim, all of them Americans. The European students there were so well prepared and knew the material so much better (granted, most of them were law students). Unfortunately, a lot of delegations were unprepared, and were representing their own opinions, rather then the real opinion of the country, and that was screwing a lot of things up.

The Slovakian delegation was particularly annoying. After doing a 25 page paper on Slovakia in 2 days and killing myself researching it, and being in a really bitchy mood about it, my opinion of Slovakia was already quite low. Now, because their delegation was annoying, I have decided we should definitely bomb Slovakia.

But yeah. This international relations stuff…this is really what I want to do with my life. Go to law school and get a dual degree (Juris Doctorate and MA in International Affairs), spend my time arguing with people from other countries. Europeans are so much better educated than Americans – they know all about our primaries and made fun of Homeland Security and hate George Bush. What do we know about any of their governments, really? It’s kind of depressing. But I met a lot of interesting people, and had more intelligent conversations in this past week then I’ve had in the past year, or more, probably. It’s really great to met people who are interested in the same areas that I am.

In addition, I went out to dinner with a bunch of people on Sunday night, and we all had completely different opinions about so many things, and yet we managed to have a very civilized and interested discussion on a variety of topics (abortion, the Iraq war, the EU, socialism, Republicans, presidents, Jon Stewart being hot). It was wonderful to be able to disagree with people and still feel like your opinion is respected – that is certainly not something you find at Skidmore.

I found the best way to get away with not participating in a class that I don’t like. I’m taking non-Western lit, because I have to, and I hate it. I always zone out in class, and I rarely do the reading, so I never have anything to say. So now, whenever I go in for my weekly conference (we have to meet with the professor weekly about papers and stuff) I act all shy and nervous and don’t make eye contact, and alter my voice to it sounds all breathy and shaky. Now he thinks I’m all shy, so I get away with not participating and I have an A as my midterm grade.