1. One of the double-edged swords of being at an institution like Princeton has been the frequency with which I have completely accidentally and sometimes unknowingly interacted with really famous academics. There was a day-long conference hosted here on the topic of "Historical Memory of Violence and Catastrophe," with a changing panel of speakers throughout the day. During the lunch break, a few classmates and I found ourselves at a table with a man we didn't recognize, but who volunteered that he was teaching at the Woodrow Wilson School as a guest for the year. So we chatted about trivialities, comparing our experiences with Princeton undergraduates. The conference resumed, and we discovered that we'd wasted 30 minutes talking about 18 year-old New Jersey residents with a man who had been a human rights lawyer in Chile during the years of Pinochet, who had risen to be Chile's Foreign Minister after that regime was brought to an end, and who has been instrumental in instituting reconciliation after that particular catastrophe of human rights, but also has assisted in the rebuilding of other societies after traumatic changes, notably post-apartheid South Africa. Lesson Learned, and I'll share it with you: when attending a conference, a quick google-image search of the participants is strongly recommended.
2. Reading something you never wanted to read to begin with on the couch is a bad idea:
3. You will not make it through the year without cracking and using the phrase "a useful heuristic" at least once. Don't fight it.
4. I'm starting to think that Foucault is infinitely more irritating and problematic than Marx. Or maybe he's the Marx for post-modern history. Usually, you can know everything you need to know about an author's argument if they cite Foucault in the first three pages of their introduction, or worse, (and this happens a lot), if they thank him or dedicate their book to him. I'm happy to debate the point, but for now, Foucault is the new Marx, and he needs to simmer down in the historiography.
5. My adviser wrote the following in a published essay, and it's only one of many reasons why he's awesome: "Retarded France turns out not to have been so retarded after all..."
6. Getting the flu sucks, but in keeping with the theme of sleeping on the couch, and in appreciation for the magic of NyQuil, I'll show you what I looked like for most of last week (also to counter what you've undoubtedly been told, the lie that sleep stops when you get into grad school):
