Edited to add: This didn’t hurt. Like if you’ve ever had braces; getting your braces tightened hurts way worse than a tattoo.

So Em, Kate, and I got tattoos yesterday. This is mine. It’s very me for several reasons. First the little symbol in the “s” symbol in the runic alphabet. In Germanic languages, it stands for strength, battle, and victory. It was briefly appropriated by the fascists which makes it all the more appropriate considering my thesis. The quote surrounding it is from one of my most favorite Dar Williams lyric. The full quote is “I build my peace through strength/That’s the best weapon you’ve got,” but that’s a bit long for a tattoo. This is probably one of the lamest tattoos ever, but I really love mine, and we had fun getting them together.

Also, last day, omg. 

Also, I have an ear infection.

CK explained to me today that he thinks that no woman in the world would have a reason not to be attracted to him. He clarified that this does not mean he thinks every woman he encounters is attracted to him; just that they have no reason NOT to be. This segued into a rant that he thinks he is oftentimes screwed over by the universe, because he is obviously great, and God doesn’t mean the competition. There was also some stuff about winning the war not being important, and it being all about the battle

Clearly, CK is on drugs this afternoon, but it’s an interesting theory. So all the sucky rejection and stuff that happened in February actually happened because I am all brilliant, totally hot, and awesome and the universe is afraid that it might have to deal with some competition from me, so it has to keep me humble. Well watch out universe! This is not over!

It’s already March. That is crazy to me.

I know I am tired, but the waves of exhaustion have not yet hit me, and when they do it will be unfun, because I was up WAY past my bedtime last night. But overall, I feel better. Not that I was feeling intensely awful to begin with, but it’s like “Why hello perspective, you seem to be making a good number of guest appearances lately!” 

But that is another entry, and I don’t feel like writing anything that isn’t stream of consciousness right now, because I am hyper, because I had coffee, and
I haven’t really had coffee that much lately, so it actually affects me.

This morning, I walked out the 49th street exit of the subway, and there’s a little newstand there and there were many magazine covers of “Nick and Jessica” so now I have that fucking theme song in my head again. Oh poor, poor Nick Lachey. I always felt so bad for him on Newlyweds. And now he’s getting divorced and no matter what he does he looks like an asshole for going after what is legally his. He is a sad, sad man. And it is sad, sad, sad that I cannot get “This I Swear” out of my head. Luckily, this song is great for singing, complete with overdramatic gestures, in fits of overtiredness. The Publishing Boys better watch their backs.

Speaking of dramatically singing teenybopper songs, Jon and I used to sing this Boyz II Men song to each other (complete with overdramatic gestures) and my-boyfriend-at-the-time would get really, really mad, not because I was making a fool out of myself (which, I don’t need permission to do, thank you very much) but because he took it as we were singing the lyrics to each other seriously. I did not even try to address the stupidity of that idea, nor did Jon and I stop singing. I am not going to tell you what song it was, because that information is a little too embarassing. Then, last week when Jon and I were out for cheap Thai food in my neighborhood, the place we were at played ALL boy-band music. It was a hilarious lunch.

The best description I’ve ever head of “boy bands”: “They just walk around pretending to look all sad”

Like puppy dogs! Kickable puppy dogs!

Good lord, it is going to be a looooooooooooooooooooong day.

Well. It’s almost 2006. I have survived a full year in the real world, and six months in the City. That right there is pretty damn good. This year is kind of a blur in a way 2004 wasn’t, because so much happened, but it doesn’t feel like it. Because I feel as if it’s been this way forever, and I say that in an entirely neutral way.

Anyway, I’m not big on New Year’s Eve, nor do I believe in New Year’s Resolutions, but these are things that I would like to commit to or work on or whatever. It is more of a “To Do” list then anything else, but it is purposeful. Starting January 3rd, I will re-dedicate myself to self-improvement. Or smtg.

-Drink less.

-Figure out the living situation by January 15

-Finish my grad school applications by January 15

-Commit to the 50 Books a Year thing and be hardcore about it. I’m already doing the “Three Books a Month: One serious non-fiction, one serious fiction, fiction/non-serious non-fiction.” I definitely read 50 Books a Year, but this is if you count things like re-reading The Little House on the Prairie box set and mass market chick-lit. Some book bloggers say these would count, but some don’t so I don’t know if they should be included in the total. Wow, I’m really neurotic. Maybe I should try and do 100 books? I don’t know. I want to read everything. Whenever I go to The Strand and look at the tables full of cheap Oxford World classics I think that I should read them all. Like, I think I should go to The Strand after work and purchase several of them. Which I won’t do, because I’m moving and the last thing I need is MORE books to move. But then I want the entire history section in my living room. And then I have this fear of not being well-read or educated enough for grad school, because I’ve still never read The Republic all the way through. But now I have the Bloom translation. So I have to read it. And continue to refer to one of the speakers as “That Thrashy guy”

-Stop going on rants about reading books and intellectual insecurity because I will be fine in grad school because I’m going to get a fully-funded ride at Rutgers, and study with a Tocqueville scholar and write about the ways in which women in an aristocracy were better off than women in democracies. Sebastian will get credit, since he gave me the idea last December at the Parting Glass gathering.

-Read the Economist more often.  Each one of those should count as a book. There are so many words! You couldn’t get away with that in an American magazine. Oh the Brits!

-Commit to doing more stuff in The City. This month it’s the Museum of Natural History. I’m going on Sunday. Anyone who wants to join is welcome.

-Eat actual meals, maybe even meals with Nutritional Value. Doritos are not a meal. Salsa is a condiment, not a food.

And that’s all I can think of right now. And I get out of work in twenty minutes anyway. So Happy New Year and all that nonsense.

After reading Race and Culture last month I decided that my original assessment of Thomas Sowell had been wrong. A Conflict of Visions was dreadful, but he’s redeemed himself in my eyes. Race and Culture addressed complex problems without stooping to BLAME WHITE PEOPLE, which sociological texts on race so often do. The book should technically be called “Ethnicity and Culture” but regardless, he addressed a lot of relatively apolitical issues very logically, and it was a compelling read. (Like the tradition of Jews eating Chinese food on Xmas probably started because high concentrations of Jews and Chinese lived together on the Lower East Side. Immigrant business owners tend to keep their businesses open longer hours in order to be of convenience to the masses.)

And thus I move on to Vision of the Anointed.

Lest anyone think that I am overly pretentious, for the record, I am also reading The Long Winter (Book 6 of the Little House on the Prairie series) for about the one-billionth time and I was reading tabloid-y magazines at B&N on Friday. I simply have to know the details of Nick and Jessica’s break-up!!! Well, not really, but I was briefly addicted to the show ‘Newlyweds’ in Fall 2003, because it made me realize that no matter how annoying a girlfriend I am, I would never be as bad as Jessica Simpson.

I have a red sweater on today and people keep coming in and being like “Oh, you look so CHRISMAS-y!” If I wore blue and white would I look Chanukah-y? Or would I need to wear my Star of David necklace for that?

These are the important questions in life, obviously.

Ben got into Yale, Columbia, UChicago, and Princeton. Princeton! No one gets into Princeton! And UChicago, home of the young, drunken Straussians and Hayek worshippers is throwing money at him. Oh and he got into Tufts and Brandeis too, but no one cares about that because Brandeis is full of Jews and Tufts is all liberal and into cultural diversity requirements.

So I get to brag about my younger, wiser sibling, because I taught him everything he knows.

Certain people feel the need to harass me about how I am no longer very educated on current events and get most of my news from the Daily Show and why this makes me a bad person.

(Background: After being a political animal most of my life, last March I decided I no longer wanted to ever be involved in politics, stopped reading various political blogs, and no longer even check CNN.com or watch Headline News. The sad thing is I am probably still more well informed than a good percentage of the population).

I just can’t get myself motivated to follow anything current. Today, while browsing various history communities on LJ, I came across this “Someone asks you a question about current events, and you reply, “I don’t know, ask me in 30 years.”

So, as a future, history and/or political theory PhD candidate, ask me anything about Machiavelli, the Sumerians, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Hobbes, or Russian history. But I really don’t want to talk about the current Iraqi elections, social security, or … (tries to think of some other big news story…fails miserably)

I’m not sure if this is wrong or not. I didn’t even watch the State of the Union. I felt like a very bad former government major.

Tocqueville tormented me for seven days. But I love him anyway.
How typical (insert appropriate AIM face)

Whenever I think that my zen-like-ness has transferred me from a political animal

(and speaking of political animals, thank you perfect memory for being able to discuss what Aristotle meant by political animal based on reading from GO 103, two years ago in Modern on Wednesday, because it made me look smarter than I really am.)

into a calm, resigned, apolitical, voter-for-Badnarik, person, I’ll read something that will remind me how much I hate George W. Bush, and how angry he can make me, and I remember why I doubt the intelligence of people who would actually want to vote for him, even though that is technically judgemental and wrong.

That was quite a long sentence, and I am Stephen King-like (Bachman reference! which book was this in?) in my use of parenthesis. Speaking of Stephen King, I saw the newest and last Dark Tower
(why the hell did Stephen King decide to write all three and then release them within a few months of each other. My dad and my brother have been bitching about the Dark Towers not being out for years. Why couldn’t he just have released 5 when it was done, and then written 6, etc, etc, because who has the time to read a million pages of creepy, sociopathic-ish writing all at once)
at B&N yesterday, and the cover is freaky. And they are remaking “IT”, and telling it from Beverly’s point of view, and it will possibly suck even more than the first movie, because it’s hard to make a movie out of a book that 1100 pages, and shut up everyone, because the ending DOES make sense. And “Derry- The Last Interlude”; so,so,so,so sad.

And “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”? Advice recieved on this movie: “Ug, don’t watch that movie. It’s the type of movie that makes you want to get back together with your ex-boyfriends, and makes you glorify the good parts of every stupid fling you ever had”
Heh.
The movie is quite decent, and Kate Winslet if gorgeous, and it’s the first ‘Jim-Carrey-as-a-dramatic-actor’ movie I’ve seen. Except I cried so hard I think I scared my housemates. Yes.

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.  

Oh, so last night, I went on a coffee run with him and we discussed pro-Israeliness and I’m going off on one of my usual rants, and he was said “You feed my radicalism.” And I said “You feed MY radical sentiments.” And it was cute.

Yes, I know.

Friday night, I was lucky enough to have a EuroSim reunion with some of the coolest Model EU people ever. Like plenary sessions, I kept track of all the brilliance.

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oh billy joel, i love you, even if you are engaged to a 23 year old in your extended mid-life crisis.

Me: Billy Joel must have more money then I thought.

Ryan: Why?

Me: He’s engaged to a 23 year old!

Ryan: But wouldn’t you marry Billy Joel.

Me: Thats true.

Actually, I think I would marry Jon Stewart before Billy Joel. Jon Stewart is only 40 and is a much more attractive Jew. Maybe we could get married, and live in New York (with all the other Jews) next door to Billy Joel, and he could come over and sing and I could be like “Christie Brinkley was such a bitch!” and he’d be like “Yes, I have realized that Jews should never date blonds.”

Yay, classes started today. Being on campus when there’s no class is just boring, plus its freezing and no one wants to leave their overheated dorm rooms.
But before work picks up and I actually have to do a lot of work, here, as promised (albeit delayed) are

“Conclusions from Model EU Plenary Sessions

1) Blue whale beaching themselves is really funny, according to my LS1 professor (and Model EU faculty advisor)

2) Josh is Jewish, because he gets Chanukah cards
2a) How this conclusion was reached
Josh: (telling a story) …and when I get Chanukah cards…
Me: (2 minutes later) Wait, Josh, are you Jewish?
Josh: No, I just get Chanukah cards for no reason…
2b) And use the “Hanukkah” spelling, because its less retarded

3) Adam is Jewish too!

4) Josh asks dumb questions

5) Group dynamics suck

6) Rachel (me) has really nice handwriting
(commentary: I’ve always been told I have bad handwriting so go figure)

7) Today’s plenary session has 3 parts!

This guy has an ungood fake Italian accent.
(but he’s kind of cute) ((he is???))

9) You can time travel!

10) Josh needs new ties and not “awful gay liberal” ones

11) Shut up Turkey, no one cares about your country, go home to your prostitutes

12) Corruption is not neccesarily a bad thing

13) De-facto is a cool word (re: Interior Minister meeting)

14) “Unanimously” is a difficult word to say

15) Portugal and Hungary should form an alliance and bomb Slovakia! (also re: Interior Minister meeting)

16) Men can be sexually exploited too!

17) Interior Ministers are unimportant
17a) Yeah, but that means we have to do less work                                                          17b) And it lends itself to the joke “Hey baby, can I be Minister of your Interior?”

18) We are all losers, so there can be other excuses or explanations

19)The Dutch drink a lot, because it is always damp and chilly in the Netherlands, and they need alcohol to a) keep them warm and b) keep them sane because its always raining!

20) Why aren’t these meetings over yet? (every day…)

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’m back from Eurosim (Model EU) and Amsterdam and lots to tell and rant about, because I met a lot of interesting people and had intelligent conversations with others who are into international relations. It was very dorky, and fun. I lived in a Bungalow for a few days, with goats and roosters right outdoors. I am too out of it to write it all down right now, because it is deserving of much time or something.

So for now, just two conclusions
1) I was right about Slovakia when I was writing my Eastern Europe paper; it is a stupid country! We should bomb them!
2) There is something about putting a bunch of kids on a bus, and going some place semi educational (in this case, NATO, in Brussels) that makes you feel like you’re on a middle school feild trip. Except instead of bringing lots of candy for the bus ride, you bring wine. I like feild trips with wine a lot better