I want to go to England. Well, specifically Oxford--but I'm probably not such a hot contender for the Rhodes. (You know, the sports thing. Oh yeah, and the more-brilliant-than-other-people thing. :-) ) Spent a temporally short but emotionally rather long time (twenty minutes?) reading bios of this year's Rhodes winners before switching over to another painful quarter hour with the lucky recipients of the Marshalls for 2002. How do people get that accomplished? It's scary.

Well...I'm going to apply anyway, since I know I'll kick myself if I don't. For some reason, I feel like I have a slightly better chance at a Watson than at the other two, but that might be just because they're so famous and the Watson is...well, less so. I don't think fewer people apply, and there are approximately the same number of fellows as Rhodes or Marshall scholars. Maybe I just like the fact that only liberal-arts kids can apply.

So yeah. It's Oxford or [Essex and Sheffield] or [India and Sweden and South Africa] or...Portland? Simon tells me there's lots of heroin in Portland...but I think I could probably avoid it. Whatever I do, it can't be American grad school. I'm actually really thrilled to be so clear on that at this point, and yet still so excited about senior year. (I am! Kensharpe and Mathstat and yoga! Oh my!) Hopefully my perfect compartmentalization will hold out through another two semesters. I suspect nearly so. In any case, I'm having fun dreaming up my off-year(s?), whether it's actually off and living with cool women in a cool place or not-so-off-but-just-really-different. Today I wrote a draft of a Rhodes statement of intent, complete with references to Cecil Rhodes, modern political theory and my sophomore paper. Don't worry, I'm going to edit. Tomorrow includes, perhaps, more info about South Africa, where the speaker of the National Assembly is a woman who, as it turns out, just might take on random interns/shadows. We'll see.

Right. And as for real life...get back to me in a month.