ennui
Laura suggested i update, probably because i've been filling her inbox (along with Silpa's and Evan's) with about 16 e-mails of articles, recipes, and my meaningless musings. Yeah, work at the News Office is just a little bit slow today.
Maybe i want to do communications instead of law or politics? I kinda like it here, when they give me real work, and there's a character in my book who writes for an expat paper in Budapest and it brings back my old dream of being a foreign correspondent. Eh...i dunno...i think i'll just run away to africa for a few years. oooh...there's something i can do with my time - Peace Corps app!
BUT...first a quick rundown of links to what's happening in Monica's head right now:
I want to buy several things from
here but shouldn't.
I want to see
The Aristocrats (and Must Love Dogs, but we won't talk about that).
Paul Krugman's
making a good point for once.
love y'all
maybe the world isn't going to hell after all
Look! Look!
Good News! wow...how often do you open the NYT website and find that in front of you!?
And i was treated to two seperate sweet and entirely unexpected acts of chivalry this morning.
And the book i'm reading (Prague, by Arthur Phillips) is turning out to be kind of amazing.
guess i'll move the knife blade a couple of inches away from my wrists.
love y'all
and another message from my favourite NY Times columnist
Thomas Friedman's getting so bad he's even infecting his copy-editors. "I thought people went to jail for that?" Declarative statement, my friends. In other news, rather unsurprisingly, this is the least focused column ever. Maybe if Friedman were writing another one of his (utterly inane) books, he could manage to address China, Ireland, CEO salaries, and the energy bill in one piece without sounding like a five year old on speed - in an op-ed, not so much. And that's not even addressing the goddamn sports analogy. Lance and his team "combine strength and strategy"? wow Tom, i'm pretty sure that's the ENTIRE POINT OF THE TOUR DE FRANCE AND ALMOST EVERY OTHER SPORT. And i don't think the terms playing offense or defense really apply to bicycle racing. But then, i guess when you're a confused new york liberal who has allowed your obsessions with Israel and the free market to completely insulate you from all logic or human intellect and who makes Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd look good, mixing metaphors is really the least of your problems.
love y'all
the mean reds
work is crazy, almost everyone i talk to is tired and stressed, the world and the people around me seem to be conspiring to lower my self-esteem, people keep committing horrible acts of destruction in the Sudan and Zimbabwe, launch.com is playing Dashboard Confessional. i can look out my window and see the top floors of the Hancock building shrouded in threatening grey clouds - i'd like to be in an apartment up there alone with my book and a well-stocked bar. i wish andrea wasn't at grief camp this week. i should call my mommy.
love y'all, i suppose.
it's tough being a girl...
This article at the Economist is really interesting. Through work at NAWL i'm discovering that this is true for the legal profession as well. We're hosting a "General Counsel Institute" in New York in November to try and educate women who work in corporate legal departments on how to rise to the top, because apparently there's a lack of women in lead counsel positions at major firms. And the upcoming issue of our journal is all about career advancement, and i was reading in one of the articles about how one of the things that holds young female law firm associates back is that male partners are reluctant to form the same kind of informal mentoring relationships with them that they would with young male associates, because of concern over perceptions or accusations of impropriety or sexual harassment. This all makes me sad. But i think it'll get better. I think women of each subsequent generation get more and more comfortable "playing with the boys," if you will, and less and less bound to prescribed gender roles. Of course, as Laura pointed out in a similar conversation we were having about female directors of non-profits, there's still going to be a substantial number of women who choose to sacrifice their careers for their family. But i still believe that society is evolving in such a way to make that choice a) less common and b) less necessary.
and to bring up another requirement that society imposes on women,
apparently all of my getting up early to exercise may be counter-productive. Grrr...you just can't win.
or can you?
At least we're finding ways to deal with hangovers. Now if only they could come up with an after cure instead of a before cure.
By the way, the last two clips were courtesy of the fact that i've spent HOURS looking at old news articles about UofC people to make sure that we've associated them with the right people on our website. And i'm getting back to it now. Sigh.
love y'all
It's not paranoia if they're really watching you...
In keeping with the above entry (or i guess actually the entry below) about the dangers of unregulated blogging, i'm just going to go ahead and directly copy what Jin had to say in
his xanga today:
"i was browsing the web today, and stumbled onto this one guy's site. now this guy researched the venture capital bankrolling every college student's favorite site these days--thefacebook.com. now one of the companies keeping the facebook afloat has ties to the cia. combine that with the facebook's disclaimer of not promising it won't release information to third parties, unbeknownst to the user, and we can speculate that the cia is doing a wonderful job of getting private information from the nation's 3-4 (?) million college students. and, of course, whichever government agency or security-affiliated corporation is collecting this information is probably immune to lawsuits thanks to our buddy the patriot act. i'll try to get the link to that site, but remember kids, be careful of what you put on your facebook profile and what groups you join."
hahaha. oh yeah, and just in case you missed it,
the House extended the Patriot Act yesterday. War is Peace and Freedom is Slavery, kids.
But you know what? i'm not actually going to worry about that right now. It's friday, and i'd rather worry about what i should wear to go hang out in an executive skybox at the Sox game tonight, and whether we should go to the 57th Street beach or the Point to swim and tan tomorrow, and whether i'll have time to see all the movies i want to see this weekend
love y'all - enjoy the 100-degree weather!
rejection
so i just found out that i'm not going to be an undergraduate fellow for the program on international security policy. this is not a huge shock. there are plenty of people in this school who are far more into IR theory than i am, (see comment about Robert Pape below). and i'm getting damn used to handling rejection letters. before i arrived at this school, i'd only received one in my life, and that was from Princeton. now, i could never give you an accurate count. in fact, i'm so used to reading them, i've even started helping one of my bosses write them, which is a form of catharsis, i suppose. but still, it hurts. just like i'm not at all surprised that a certain person hasn't answered my last e-mail, yet every once in awhile, when i hit the refresh button and come up with nothing, i get sad.
also, i'm a little pissed off because in asking for applications they requested an unnofficial transcript and "two paragraphs on why you want to be a fellow." so i wrote two semi-humourous and interesting paragraphs on my fascination with international politics. then in my rejection letter, they described the criteria candidates were evaluated with as including "security-related extra-curricular activities and future plans." maybe i'm being obtuse, but i feel like you should give candidates a clear picture of the criteria that they're going to be evaluated on BEFORE you evaluate them. I didn't include my MUNUC participation in my essay because i don't think it's really that relevant to WHY i wanted to be a fellow. but if i'd known that security-related extracurriculars were important, OF COURSE i would have stuck that in. in a way, this is also analogous to my love life. from what they tell you at the beginning, it seems like, to acheive romantic success, one just needs to look reasonably good, have good personal grooming habits, and be a nice/interesting person. but i think i do a decent job of all that, and i'm still sitting around every weekend begging my roommates and their boyfriends to let me tag along. will someone please send me a list of the criteria that's being used to reject me?
ok, i'm gonna get over myself now and go finish the NY Times crossword puzzle or something. check out
this site and for a little fun, zoom in all the way.
love y'all
i get way too bored over the summer...
...so i'm creating a new blog. Here it is. And in keeping with the theme,
here's a fun little article about blogging hahaha...i can't believe that. How can you be so dumb? This should be a huge warning to those of us who want to pursue political careers. I am fully confident that when i'm running for office 30 years from now, some one will pull up all the comments on this blog, and on my xanga, and drag them through the mud. Which is why i'm not going to mention the murders i've ordered...oops...
In other news, i didn't realize that despite having read his book and promoted the hell out of it, i didn't know what Robert Pape looked like. I discovered this when he was just hanging out by my desk for about the past 5 minutes and i didn't pay any attention until Larry (my boss, director of communications for the University) comes out and is like, "Hi Bob!!" Stupid Monica. I should know this man.
ok, time to see what i can do about the formatting of this site.
love y'all
