improving ... improving

I know, I know, I've been neglecting the old blog this week. But here you get another slightly tipsy, full-week update:

All in all, I'm happy again to be here. After my whiney-ass posts on Monday I realized that I was being dumb, and this week was pretty good. It probably helped that I had Tuesday off from school since our professor was out of town. I can't remember what I did though, other than the fact that I really should have worked more than I did. People in my masters are starting to grumble under the strain of 200 pages of extremely dense and complicated econ journal articles a week. I'm just glad they're all in English.

On Wednesday I had a meeting with the head of the masters to discuss what people think about the program. I'm the delegate of the whole masters, so it's my job to present peoples' grievances and whatnot. Everyone is pretty happy with the program, but there are plenty of small things that are pretty annoying. It was really weird to have two people hanging on my every word (or seeming to) and asking me to go into a more in-depth critique.

God, I can't even remember what I did this week. And no, it's not because it was all fun and alcohol, you know I'm not into that. Oh yeah, I went to see the new Harry Potter movie with Claire and was disappointed. I don't like the replacement they got for the head wizard guy (dumbledorf?) and the script had some unbelievably cheesey parts in it, way more than the last time. It's fun though that Voldemort is back, that should make for an interesting sequel (I know, I could just read the books, but I only read econ these dasy). On the other hand, it turns out that these child actors aren't real actors. You don't notice so much when they're still cute and innocent, but when their voices have changed and Hermione is growing breasts, you notice that they just suck at acting. Or maybe it was the fact that they had yet another director, and a crappy screenplay. I dunno. Oh, and Claire beat me at backgammon later.

Whatever, you can tell it's 3am when I start going off on Harry Potter. What else happened this week? Contributing to my positive attitude about schools was another guest arriving from UC Davis to present his paper on the latent effects of war on trade. It wasn't that I'm so into the topic, but it was just cool to watch an interesting social scientific debate. One of my profs was there, as was the American guest lecturer, and they kept poking at the guest's assumptions for his model and whatnot. I mean, it was scientific peer review going on right in front of me. Pretty cool for a nerd like me.

But the fun part of this week was tonight, when this English/French guy Tom had a bunch of his non-school friends over to his place. At one point there was this really weird conversation that took place in English, French, and Spanish, since I don't speak Spanish, the Mexican guy doesn't speak French, and his girlfriend (in my masters) refuses to speak English out of embarassment. Later on I was listening to these guys I know speak Italian and was delighted when I realized that I actually understood some of it. That was way cool.