week 2: i'm knackered*

another week is almost gone, and i'm already behind on reading. welcome back to school...

the courses i'm taking are:
1) Foreign Policy Analysis
2) Public International Law
3) International Economics
4) East Asia and Imperialism, 1839-1945

jeanne, are you...... an IR major? i never would've guessed. so maybe i got carried away with the 'international' of it all. but it's justified; LSE -all of London, really - isn't anything if not international and ethnically diverse, students and faculty alike. one of my professors is english, another one's spanish, and another american. i haven't figured out where my law professor's from, though. he could either be australian, canadian, or english with a perpetual cold. my english accent, sadly, still needs a bit of work.

i was going to take Principles of Finance, but let's face it - am i really going to go into investment banking? i think i'd rather work for John McCain's administration (if he dies, i'm out.) plus, recent events would suggest i-banking's not the most secure career choice. after this, i think i'll finally have convinced my parents that i will be living out of a cardboard box after graduation. or i could apply to grad school and defer said residency in box for a few years. it's a good thing dear Mother and Father have two more where this came from.

an issue of a more immediate nature, however, is the absentee ballot that i have in my possession. weeks earlier, i was genuinely unsure of who to vote for. i thought watching the debates would help inform my decision, but i found very little in them that i didn't know already. if you've watched one, it's as if you watched them all. talking point after talking point after talking point (from both candidates); it just gets so redundant. campaign politics is just political theatre, anyway. people keep on saying that this is the most important election of their lifetimes, but is it really all that remarkable? don't candidates spar over taxes and health care and energy and the economy in every election?

for me, it simply came down to which candidate i was more ideologically aligned with. do i believe that health care and education are rights given to every human being, or commodities to be bought and sold on the market? do i believe that trickle-down economics is inevitably successful, or a bust? do i believe in small government at the expense of the disenfranchised, or big goverment at the expense of personal privacy and choice? when it comes to taxes, do i believe that fair it not always equal, or that equal is always fair? on foreign policy, do i believe that military might trumps diplomatic efforts, or vice versa? ...you get the idea. that's how i cast my ballot, and i voted for: 奥巴马。

now that that's all squared away, i supposed i should hit the books. all 3,000 of them.

peace love & ice cream,
JT

*knackered, a.k.a. cream-crackered = tired