berkeley was fabulous. (which i guess is rather like saying, "berkeley was berkeley.") they told me things i wanted to hear, provided me with free alcohol, and offered to ramp up the finances a bit. also, it was 75 degrees and sunny, there were a million flowers in full, glorious bloom, and the swatties in the department are lovely. i mean, so is everyone else, but it certainly is nice to get to your first grad school visit and have a built-in social group waiting.

no one told me it was unfashionable to use american politics as a comparative case. folks agreed with me that there hasn't been much interesting work in electoral system design lately and that a new approach might be in order. everybody, even the quant people, were excited about using lots of different methodologies.

i hadn't expected to be so bold, but i walked up to the director of graduate studies at a wine and cheese event and (only a little apologetically) told him we needed to talk money if i was going to be serious about the possibility of coming to berkeley. and it worked! so now, headed to michigan (tomorrow) and yale (on the 28th) with this weekend under my belt, i will finally have some sort of perspective. thank goodness.

also, can i just say, with reference to the aforementioned wine and cheese event? drinking fancy wine out of plastic cups with famous academics in an open-air log cabin with dirty plank floors in the middle of a major research university after several days of not enough sleep? it doesn't get a whole lot weirder.