The Goings On
So, I have not been blogging because I have been, instead of living life and seeing the sun, writing my thesis and developing the most incredible ass-groove in a chair at Siraly, where Brigette, Stephen, Luc and I have permanently set up residence to kick this pig.
But here are a few small points of note to tide you over until I get my wee little life back
*Artyom used the word "harlot" in his thesis. There is no end to the hilarity that I find in this
*We bought our visas for Belarus. $125. wtf? We should be able to pick them up from the embassy tomorrow. Lord. I'm excited, but I plan on coming back friggin fluent. I won't have just gone to Belarus, I will have DONE Belarus.
*My camera got jacked by some sketchy Hungarian-Transylvanian dude who ended up at my house and made out with some chick on my couch after smoking in Monica's bedroom. Screw that guy. Screw that guy right in the ear. But, this means that I am on the market for a new one. I think I'm going to go for digital video
*Barring any impediments to the previous goal, Stephen, Brigette, Sasha, Marko and I are going to collaborate on "Belarus: The Movie"
*After Belarus, we are going to Croatia to mooch off of Marko's family and sleep in forests. While we are there, it will be Croatian Independance Day (Hooray! We're all still catholic! woo!). On independence day, it is meet for one to eat bear. With berries. Berry bear. Again, wtf?
*My thesis deadline is Monday, but I'm hoping to have it in by Friday. We'll see how it goes.
Labels: belarus, Brigette, CEU, croatia, food, grad school, Marko, Sasha, Stephen, travel
Two of My Favoritest Smart People
First of all, Kasia is totally hilarious. Check
this out.
Second, I had a very interesting afternoon today. It was the first day back to reality for my department. The rest of the school has been suffering through their own assortment s of deadlines and draft submissions and what not. The Soc/Anth kids, on the other hand, were released like the hounds to scramble all over the globe for our field work during the month of April, and had our first departmental meeting for thesis writing today, and all 21 of us were crammed back in that corner room on the 4th floor of the Zrinyi building again for the first time since March. After being away in Ukraine for nearly a month, the discomfort of it all felt reassuringly familiar.
Today was also a special day, because
Bruno Latour was a guest of the sociology department this weekend, and he presented a lecture on truth and objectivity in politics in the Monument Building this evening. I have been looking forward to his visit for months, since I have always admired his theoretical works, I have read and been totally confused by his writings since I began studying anthropology in college, and he's a crazy famous big shot.
He talked for a long time about creating sociology as an objective science, on that is bound by the thing that it studies. He said, that even if you are a shitty chemist, it is hard to write poor quality work, because you are so bound by your materials. If you mess up, your lab could explode. Whereas, you could talk circles of crap around cultural ideas. You could BS your way through entire books, and there may be few people to actually call you on it. Thought provoking sentiment--and terribly interesting considering that a large portion of this guys theoretical work has concerned the scientific production of knowledge. People cant BS about laboratory conditions? Its been a few years since I had my safety goggles on and my pipet in hand, but goodness, if there's anything that the natural sciences AREN'T, its exact and natural.
Labels: CEU, grad school, kasia, latour
New Toy
I got myself a new cellphone for my birthday. Its great. Its quad band, unlocked, and works everywhere, even here in Ukraine. (my old phone was a locked t-mobile phone - i never was able to get the code they gave me to unlock it to work right, and so once i left the t-mobile network in Hungary, i wasnt able to roam. at all.)
I got a red Motorola PEBL, and its a really sexy phone. I am already in love with it.
I bought it while I was here in Odessa because, just like the phones that you buy in Hungary have Hungarian programmed onto them (omg, have you ever tried to text with T9 in a language that has 4 different variations on the letter O? sweet mother of god...), the phones here operate in Russian and Ukrainian. And the other standards, like English, French, Spanish, and German. But the cool thing is that it supports these other alphabets, so I can send and receive text messages in which ever one I want. Plus the face plate looks like this, with both sets of characters on it, which makes me feel super cool:
Ok, actually, thats a picture of a Razr, but you get the point. My camera is all packed up and I'm not going to start digging for stuff now. I have a train to the Ukrainian border in about 4.5 hours. So long Odessa.
Labels: thin justification for my existace, travel, ukraine
