Well this is sort of a disaster but I have a remarkable memory so let's review what happened on Tuesday:
Woke up, showered, and went to Middle East Politics, where we finished up the Arab Spring and started talking about ISIS, which was just really great. The last part of the Arab Spring was about Syria and the fact that the Hafez al Assad regime leveled the town of Hama in the early 1980's because it was sheltering members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who opposed his autocratic regime. Nobody knows exactly how many civilians died, and it's heartbreaking. We also talked about Hafez's son Bashir , who has allegedly used chemical weapons on his own people to quell dissent about his autocratic regime.
I get pretty riled up about chemical weapons, which isn't surprising because I'm a chemist in my spare time and it horrifies me when people use that beautiful power for evil. It's bullshit. Don't you dare weaponize science, especially science that I'm involved in. It just pisses me off, and it's awful that anyone would use something so fucking beautiful against humanity in general.
ISIS is another can of worms, and I'm pretty sure that they're more of a threat to the West not because of their extremist, apocalyptic perversion of Islam (I also get pretty riled up about that tbh) but because they present the greatest threat to the Westphalian state system in the modern age, and that fucking scares people. Then again, that's a fine line between geopolitics and religion, and I walk that line a lot more than I'm proud to say. It's frustrating. But I chose this, so I'll walk alone.
I then had a break and had some Chex Mix and a Twix bar to calm myself down.
After that, I headed to CWA again for my Norlin class, where we went to a panel called "Kickass Career Advice: Skills to Build NOW" because we talk a lot about professions and the constructions surrounding our fields and it's a good time. Whatever.
The panel was pretty fucking awful tbh, and was mostly a bunch of sexist and slightly misogynistic comments on the business world. It was a mess. Literally, one piece of advice was "marry rich or have a rich daddy if you want to pursue your passion," which really pissed me off and I was not a happy camper in the slightest leaving that session of CWA. *frustrated stamping*
I was pretty motivated, then, to end up meeting with Kim Lee and learning how to do data analysis on STATA, which is a beautiful stats program and I'm totally into it. Anyway. It's fun. Kim Lee put together the single greatest dataset I've ever seen, and I owe him literally like half of my stipend this semester because he's amazing and likes trade probably more than I do.
Yeah. Then I decided to take a break and reheated some pizza, and the Paige and I watched Thrones, which was S4E3 "Breaker of Chains," which I'm REALLY STILL NOT OK WITH LIKE REALLY I STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND THAT FUCKING SEPT SCENE. NOT COOL, GUYS. IT WAS RAPE. I'LL DEFEND CERSEI AND JAIME TO THE DAY I DIE AND THAT SCENE DOESN'T MAKE IT EASIER. FEEL MY NERD RAAAAGE.
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| NERD RAAAGE |
Then I spent five hours in the library because I'm really cool and I'm usually motivated by rage to do things. I deal with a lot of rage a lot of the time—rage about the political situations, rage about gender inequality, rage about the state of the third world, rage about chemical weapons, rage about the proliferation of ideology, rage about the use of science to kill people, rage about the treatment of Cersei Lannister in Season 4 and Catelyn Stark in Season 2, rage about my sister's disease, rage about my family's situation, rage about the fact that I'm too busy most of the time to enjoy the moments that I have with people that I like. I am very angry about a lot of things a lot of the time. I'm good at hiding it. It's like the top of a volcano—I present this image of this stoic ice peak, but underneath, there is magma, and it burns slowly and persistently. It is unlikely that I'll ever explode. But it's still there.
Rage is not pretty, but it makes me fucking productive, which is kind of ok to deal with.
Anyway. Walked home at midnight and ended up falling asleep watching 30 Rock, because I deserved it. I really did.
I hope to catch up on the blog soonish, but alas, it's Marg Night and I'm still in the library doing a presentation. We'll see how this goes.
Thanks for reading :)
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