Flying giraffes!

Too tired to accomplish any work, and too much work to take the time to nap (not that I'm a big fan of naps anyway). So I spent all morning on the Brunching board debating about the Pharisees. Gah.

My CD player wasn't cooperating, so I told it I would listen to WinAmp instead. So I put on a bunch of TMBG mp3s. But WinAmp is, as usual, skipping. Gah. I just can't win. I wonder if threatening to use RealPlayer would straighten them out ... nah, they'd never believe me.

I shouldn't have been nearly so relieved to be done with interviewing Monte Bennett for my anthropology paper. I'm supposed to be an anthropologist. I believe very strongly that archaeology shouldn't be about just intellectual curiosity -- there should be real engagement with real people. So I ought to be able to make a half-hour phone call to a fellow archaeologist. But I could feel myself reaching for any excuse to put off arranging it, and then to put off making the call. There was a definite nervousness when I read him the informed consent spiel. And then when it was over, it was a huge weight off me (since I was deliberately ignoring the fact that I still have to set up an interview with Dixie Henry).

This doesn't bode well for my Fulbright/Watson project, which is basically this paper going on for a year in New Zealand. Then again, chances are I won't get either of those fellowships.

I actually remembered to go to jazz band today. And then we didn't have practice. I had forgotten that Prof. Cashman was doing a concert for the Modernity classes today. Gregg showed up accidentally too. He interviewed me for half an hour for his sociology research project on musicians at Colgate. So it wasn't a total waste.

It's really great to come across a book for class that you really want to read. I'd been kind of looking forward to this book, James C. Scott's Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes To Improve The Human Condition Have Failed, ever since I bought it for my anthropology seminar. I realise it probably doesn't sound very exciting to most of you, but I'm not most of you.

Part of the problem is probably that I've been thinking of the reading for this class as being really bad. Looking at it rationally that's not true -- I liked Aihwa Ong's Flexible Citizenship, and in retrospect Sherry Ortner (Making Gender) had a lot of good ideas. I'm just biased by how much I hated Arjun Appadurai (of course, I'm citing that book in my geography seminar paper...).

Either way, I started reading Seeing Like A State last night, and it was great. It's not a page-turning literary style, though it is certainly on the accessible end of anthropology writing. But the subjects he was dealing with were really interesting. A central part of his argument is about the limits of human understanding -- how, in order to comprehend something, we have to simplify it into some sort of easy-to-remember pattern that leaves out a lot of complexity. A topic Amanda and I had been talking about just a few days before. He related that to the development of scientific forestry, and how it failed because forest planners couldn't take into account all the processes that keep a natural forest healthy.

Sometimes the best books aren't the ones that come up with something completely new. They're the ones that put clearly into words things you'd been suspecting for a while.

The other day, while I was in the shower, it occurred to me that the most commonly referenced date last year was the same as the most commonly referenced date this year. This year you can't turn around without hearing the phrase "September 11." I doubt this was true here in the US, but in Australia last year I was constantly hearing about "S11." It was the name of an anti-globalization protest scheduled for the World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne on September 11-13. There were S11 stickers all over uni, and it was constantly in the news.

Obviously it's just coincidence that these things happened a year apart, but it's still weird to think about.

I'm not a baseball fan by any stretch of the imagination, but I found this amusing: On the Washington Post's front page today, the top story was Despite Loss, Yankees Lift City. Underneath the picture and blurb for that story, there was a little link to Arizona Wins World Series. Looks like the Post has its priorities straight -- featurey analysis over the basic facts of the game.

After spending an hour digging through fun code on the Geography webpage (that I tried to post here as an example, but for some reason I couldn't get any paragraph breaks to show up when I published), I have decided to put FrontPage in the kiosk.