No one gets into the Foreign Service by themselves. I couldn't have done it without the moral and material support my family and friends gave me. I couldn't have done it without the time, patience and constructive criticism of my study group. And now at least 20 of my friends, family members, employers and professors are giving up some of their ( Read more... )

So Google Reader has a "like" button now, like Facebook. And you can follow people, like Twitter. Actually you could read your friends' shared items before, but I guess that wasn't catchy enough so they redid the interface a bit and renamed it. We are slowly moving toward a single massive RSSFeedFacebookTwitterEmailBlogIM social networking model, ( Read more... )

Tonight I am working on the SF-86, the form for the security clearance I will need for the Foreign Service, and which I am supposed to bring with me to the exam just in case I pass. It wasn't so bad, since a lot of my background info was already in there from my last clearance. I thought I was pretty much done until I got to the last section, which ( Read more... )

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Walk around with a tray of free cupcakes.

As you all know, I know find myself with great swaths of time, time that I fill on the internet. In order to fill all this time in a sufficiently amusing fashion, I need your help. My friends page has been pretty damn empty lately, and that makes me a sad panda. What follows is a list of you, my friends, and the dates of your last LJ posts. Perhaps ( Read more... )

I love my friends. This afternoon I went to a gingerbread house party, except that we used graham crackers because they were easier. We ended up with two or three of the classic winter wonderland cottages, a bedouin tent, a model of some castle in Tunisia, and a trailer home, complete with mullet snowman and satellite dish. But the most impressive ( Read more... )

After the hours upon hours of paper-writing and cramming for finals and then the action-packed days of semester break, the new semester seems kind of empty. My reading load is also much lighter than last term, so I'm not spending nearly as much time shackled to library books. I seem to have lots of time on my hands, and I'm not happy about it. I ( Read more... )

The lights are dim. It's just warm enough to be really warm without quite making it to hot. You settle back into the deep, soft couch. You relax as a heavy gold watch swings slowly back and forth in front of you and someone murmurs assurances into your ear. You are getting sleeeeeepy ( Read more... )

Kate and I have new neighbors. Last week Will, an Italian semiotics student and Mo, a bioengineering student from several places moved in next door to us. I hung out with them for a couple of hours last night and had a great time. They're both queer as three-dollar bills, but smart and very nice. It's going to be nice to have some people around I ( Read more... )