life in the fast lane
If I've been remiss in maintaining my journal, it is because my supply of free time has dipped to an all time low. Between teaching my own classes and taking graduate level classes that require obscene amounts of work I find that often time the last thing I want to do with what little is left over is to sit in front of a screen and type. Nevertheless, I persevere. In addition to work, I've been attempting to cultivate new friendships. It is hard to do when so busy, but I can say I'm on friendly terms with many acquaintances even if I wouldn't say any of them are yet friends. A couple of other History grads and I have started a tradition of going out to a bar called Fagan's on Tuesday nights. They have an around the world beer tour where if you can drink every beer in their inventory you get your own stine and your name on the wall. We hope to manage it by years end. I visited one of my good friends in NYC a couple weeks back. Though the only thing significant we did was go to an anime film fest, it was fun just being around an old buddy and reminiscing of good times. The only negative life event to report is a run in with a loud, rude, beligerent beast of an east coast woman. She was irate because I accidently scratched her car in pulling out of my parking spot. She was not placaded either by my taking responsibility or by my offers to pay for it. I had heard of east coast confrontationalism, but in this encounter I witnessed it first hand. I wonder what people think they accomplish by being mean and uncivil towards eachother? I suspect the bill she subsequently submitted to me is an inflated measure of extortion, but in the interest of keeping it out of court and never having to deal with this person again I'm going to throw the money at her and hope she goes away. I have the day off today thanks to Yom Kipor, but I'll be busy preparing for my class tomorrow. For the first time, the Professor supervising my TAship is going to be attending my class to determine how affective my teaching style is. I'm a bit nervous, but the students have been getting more engaged recently so it should work out well. Well, that's about it for my life right now unless you wanted a 500 page analysis of all the academic work I've been doing (which I suspect nobody does). Ciau