light blogging?

hello there, friends. i have learned an awful lot in the last year (it's been a year, now, that i've been in new haven.) one of the things i am still working on is the ability to understand which sort of bite is more than i can chew. one of the other things i am still working on is the ability to say no when i understand that i have bitten off more than i can chew.

which is to say: i have been deep in the mire of sexual violence research for the last week. last night, ten hours after hitting the ninety-hours-total that were allotted to me on my prof's project, i called a halt to my work, turned in a half-complete marathon of asshattery, and slunk home to bed. to my credit, i had written fifty pages or so in three days, and twenty-odd of those fifty pages belonged to a paper that i actually finished. even more to my credit, those fifty pages were based on more than a few thousand pages of reading.

i am still paying attention to the rest of the world. i swear. or at least, to a few corners of the rest of the world. as proof i point you to two feel-good posts: here and here. it is interesting, although i don't have the brainpower to figure out why it is interesting to me, that both of these posts are related in one way or another to the american working class. we had a brief conversation in the study room this morning about barbara ehrenreich's awesome book nickel and dimed, and the problems we not-so-much-working-class people have with analyzing politics as they affect the working class.

tomorrow i am off to massachusetts for what we have black-humor-ly termed the "sexual violence sleepover." prof is hosting all five of us research assistants for an afternoon and evening of beer + beach + good food, then putting us up for the night; the next morning we will get up and talk to each other about sexual violence during war for eight or so hours. the men in the department are saying joking things like "why can't i come?" and "why is it all girls?" to which i answer, "you can't come, and it's all girls, because not a single male graduate student showed up for even a single session of the class libby offered last fall."

anyway, post-mini-conference, i will be back in new haven, cramming for the comparative politics field exam, for which i am woefully and possibly disastrously behind on my preparations, and then i will be writing a paper to finish off an incomplete from spring, and then i will be in philadelphia, and then i will be at APSA. i'm just sayin': might be a few days between posts for the next three weeks.