the hypothetical wren

Okay, this whole not-updating thing around here is getting sort of ridiculous. It’s been a long-ass time since I’ve posted, and yes, I’m still working on some sort of write-up about my Belgium/England trip, which, at this point, feels like it took place two hundred years ago.

It would be one thing, of course, if I had a lot of exciting adventures to report on, to use as an excuse for not posting anything. But I don’t. My main reason for the radio silence is the fact that I’m studying for my Ph.D comprehensive exams right now — my exams start in just under a month, and so I’m juggling an unwieldy amount of pure, unfiltered data around in my brain. I’ve been “reading” a lot of books over the last month and a half, books suggested to/inflicted on me by my committee members, who quite possibly see this as their last chance to get me to read books on topics I have no real interest in (such as the role of the U.S. army in exploring the American west). It’s amazing, though, how quickly you can read when you need to: yesterday, I think my total page count was somewhere in the 350-400 page range. (How much of that I actually remember is another issue.)

Leisure activities I have not participated in lately: drinking beer (with other people), seeing movies, riding my bike anywhere other than to school and the grocery store and back, actually listening to music (as opposed to having it on as background music while I read boring books), going out to eat, taking interesting photographs.

To compensate for this complete lack of fun, I scheduled a brief vacation to San Francisco in May. This gives me something to look forward to. I also get to go to Boise next month for a few days (for a conference), which sounds a lot less stimulating. I’m starting to try to make plans for summer, as well — I’m hoping to spend at least two weeks to a month in Denver this summer, doing research for my dissertating prospectus as well as to finish up a paper I’m presenting this fall. Because I don’t want to pay a lot of money for this research, I’m beginning to dip my feet into the shallow pool of grants and other sorts of research funding. Of course, if I do that, it’s going to be near-impossible to get some sort of job this summer — oh well.

(The photo above is of a scrap of junk mail I found laying in the dirt near the ghetto Smith’s on Yale. Someone had torn up a bunch of letters and other mail and left it laying on the ground.)