It’s Been Awhile…

To my legions of loyal followers…my sincerest apologies for my absence over the last several weeks.  It turns out I’ve needed a bit of a restful sabbatical.  Who knew that producing such consistent, high-quality content could be so psychologically taxing?

Anyway, what have I been doing during my sabbatical?  Or…to put it more accurately…what haven’t I been doing?

-  First off, there’s been quite a bit of this…

-  While I’ve been trying to motivate myself to stay up on my school work…I’ve been something less than highly successful.  That being said, I did manage to read a couple of pretty solid books.  One that I would definitely recommend is Crossroads: The End of Wild Capitalism by one of my professors, the venerable Peter Nolan.  Excellent insight on the contradictions inherent in our increasingly globalized world…the opportunities and the dangers.  Also, I stumbled across a book called It could happen here: America on the brink by Bruce Judson at the Titusville Library.  Very interesting takes, but if you’re of the “America is perfect at everything except that there are too many liberals” persuasion…you might not want to read because you might have a heart attack from the utter blasphemy set forth by this egg head in his ivory tower.  What does he know anyway…he’s probably never even killed any humans in the name of country or anything…

-  I was fortunate enough to come down with my most favorite sickness, stomach virus, over the weekend. Don’t think I’ve had this bug since my college graduation.  Just like then, it seems to be Andrew-specific as no one else has caught it (luckily).  Hopefully I’ll be able to improve on my usual two week recovery time. On the plus side, the fever seemed to provide some pretty cool dreams.  One night, I wrote, staged, and filmed multiple entire sitcom episodes.  They were really good too (obviously).  Of course, I was, as always, infinitely lucky to have my beautiful wife to nurse me back to health.  Only problem was she kept wanting to check my uterus…oh well, a minor drawback.

-  While I was sick, I was also lucky enough to receive my notification letter from the US Government graduate fellowship program that I did not make the first cut for further consideration.  I was a bit perplexed at first, I didn’t really expect to end up getting a job, but I thought that my record would at least be good enough to get me through the first cut to the in-person interviews (I’m admittedly terrible at interviews, so I wasn’t expecting to get any further than that).  Then I had a look at the fellowship website and noticed that literally all the HR personnel were products of the military-industrial complex that continues to achieve hegemony over the government.  That explains a lot…as I realize I’ll never fit into an increasingly militarized government.  Of course, this does mean that I’m pretty much “all in” with my PhD proposal as my ultimate job prospects are something less than great at the moment.

-  On a more positive note, we’ve definitely enjoyed seeing family and friends since we’ve been back.  I now can’t decide if I’m looking forward to going back to England or not.  I change my mind pretty easily…

-  Oh yeah, and we have managed to catch up on pretty much all our TV shows from the fall season.  Modern Family was excellent and The Office is still great.  I did find it odd that The Office and Community, both sitcoms on NBC's Thursday line-up used the identical Lady Gaga, p-p-p-poker face joke in their Halloween episodes.  Wasn't quite sure what to make of that...putting aside the total awesomeness of course.