I’m going to indulge in a bit of protracted opinion here, because this is a topic that’s important to me. Unlike the general theme of this admittedly heretofore short blog, it has nothing to do with graduate school or French. Forgive me.

I was inspired tonight by this article on Ars Technica about NASA’s new budget. Go ahead and read it for details. My take on the issue is: okay, I admit it’s probably a good idea for NASA to get out of the putting-people-in-low-orbit game, because they don’t seem to have much direction for it. With that said, I don’t want to think that NASA is headed down a path where it lets private companies handle all of the heavy lifting. I’d rather not have Sony be the first entity to land a human being on Mars, for example. A government agency should be the ones to conquer that frontier for the first time, using money drawn from all of us. Furthermore, NASA has lost sight of its former grand vision, both from lack of funds and lack of political & national will.

A brief aside: I’ve been watching Mad Men a lot recently. I never realized how great a show it is before. It really transports you back to the 1960’s. You’re struck not only by the vastly different attitudes about nearly everything, but also by the lack of the technological comforts we take for granted - someone has a car crash in the middles of night and nowhere, and this is a very serious problem because she doesn’t have a cell phone.

Now, think about that time again, the 1960’s. There are no cell phones, no computers to speak of, not even any pocket calculators. And yet, a bunch of smart folks put a human being of the surface of the Moon. No one even appreciates what this means - 252,088 miles. The guys in those vehicles took 4 days to get there going at thousands of meters per second. All I can say is, I’ll buy any of them a beer any day of the week.

Why did we, and they, do it? Because we wanted to beat “the Reds?” Sure, but I’d like to think there was something else in American society that drove us. President Kennedy knew it, and he tapped it. I say that potential exists in human society, not just American society. We just have to let it show outside of a Cold War.

Conservatives will balk at this proposition; the idea that we use taxpayers’ money to get to Mars? Oh the horror. “For what reason, for what purpose, are we bankrolling a trip to Mars?” they’ll ask. I’m sure they asked it about the Moon then, and they’re right to ask it now. What benefit to us is a rock millions of miles from us?

To the conservatives’ pleasure, I’m sure, the immediate answer is admittedly “not much,” except of course to the scientists. Of course, their research inevitably brings improvements in our lives down the road - it usually has, over the course of history. There’s a greater issue, however, than our benefit from such things. Let me show you something:

The universe is incomprehensibly vast, and the happenings on one little speck such as this have no impact on that vast elsewhere around us. That’s not to say that human life is meaningless. Quite the contrary, we’re lucky enough to be among the matter in the universe arranged in such a way as to be capable of self-reflection. Planets, stars, rocks, water, dust, gas… most things in the universe can’t reflect on themselves. We have a gift. With that, and our speck, in mind, my question is simple. What are we doing here? If we have this gift of self-reflection that most matter doesn’t have, shouldn’t we be doing our best to have that mean as much as possible in the vastness?

Robert Zubrin, ambitious though he is in his proposed plans for Mars exploration, cites a human duty, and I agree with him. We have a duty to life itself to spread life, because most things in the universe are not alive and thinking, but rather are inert and cold. If we can make Mars a living world, followed by any number of planets, we should do it. We can’t destroy native ecosystems, if we find any, but evidence so far shows us that we won’t find them often - most planets are rocks & gas, and not much else.

So, I guess my concluding point is that while we could stay on our speck for the duration of our race, it seems as though our existence as human beings would mean a lot more if we reached out. We’ll never be able to physically explore the whole universe, but we can at least live up to the great gift that we have as a thinking race of people. Am I idealistic? Absolutely, but someone has to be.

I’m in the middle of literally the last task of the semester - 15 page behemoth.

It’s important to say that La Moustache by Emmanuel Carrère is a great book. Really thought-provoking use of narration and temporality. The film version also uses a piece by Philip Glass as the score to very striking effect.

Gotta clear up the fact that I like the work so that the interminable analysis of it doesn’t cut me down. That’s the whole key to grad school, really - realize that you like it even if it’s painful.

Don’t think too much about the masochistic implications of that.

Well, I’ve almost got one whole semester under my belt as a graduate student in French literature. I have to say, it has been a very wild ride, with a lot of different emotions and experiences coming at me. Here’s some things that I like about grad school:

• The peer support. Seriously, the friend cohort that the other new students and I have created is amazing, and I probably wouldn’t still be doing this if it wasn’t so supportive.
• The class that I teach. Teaching French 101 has been a great experience. I had never before appreciated how hard it is to be a good teacher. I’ll come up with activities that work great (students today told me that I had gotten better at making warm-ups!) and some that just do not work at all.
• Literary theory. This is the big surprise of the semester. I started out being turned off to literary theory, thinking that it was mostly pointless rambling. I see now how certain modes of thinking can really help one’s appreciation of a text. I have the funnest time reading Roland Barthes.

I get to teach 101 again next semester, so I’ll be able to reformulate some of the things that didn’t work the first time around. I also get to continue working with Dr. Sally Magnan, who’s basically the name amongst names as far as the formation of foreign language instructors is concerned.

There are a few things that I don’t like as well. Most notably, I do not like how unclear graduate work can be. In undergrad, the nature of the work was usually very clear and well defined. “Read this. Write a paper.” Here, the goal of a class (especially one with barely any grades) is harder to grasp. Oftentimes readings are not discussed at all, and there is a huge amount of them, all of which I want to read, but for all of which I do not have time. Things have gotten better over the course of the semester, however, as I’ve stuck with things.

Logistically, I’ve found a good set of tools to work with to get the work done as well. The netbook that I got in September really does wonders for graduate work and teaching. I do have to get into the groove of putting everything on my calendar again though, a habit from undergrad that I somehow lost in the transition to grad school.

I should close here. Time to finish a big project that I’m working on. Synthesizing everything here gave me a nice break from work. J'y reviens!

So, I figure that I should probably get some words down here about what I’ve been doing for the past couple of months.

The long and short of it is: much less than I wish I had been doing. The job market for folks with bachelor’s degree yet still want only summertime employment is sadly quite dry, especially now. My two brothers and I have been stuck at home all summer.

I’ve been trying to keep as busy as I can, but after nearly three months of little to do, I am beginning to go a little stir crazy. I know that some people would kill to have an extended period of downtime, but I’d honestly rather have a job and something longer term to do. Had I been able to stay in Milwaukee, it would probably have been different, but c'est la vie I guess.

In the meantime, I’ve gotten started on my master’s degree reading list. So far, I’ve read Corneille’s Le Cid, Descartes’ Discours de la méthod, and I’m almost finished with Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes. Being that the days are long and sleepy, I feel like I haven’t been reading fast enough.

I’ve neglected posting the second installment of my French video blog, because I quite frankly can’t think of a topic to center it around. Literature is a distinct possibility, but in that case I’m going to wait until my classes and teaching start before continuing. I still think that it’s a good idea - it just needs some refinement.

Amanda and I are moving to Madison this Saturday, so this long and tired summer will finally be nearing its end. I’m really excited to get to know my new hometown and new campus. We’ve gone shopping together and picked out a bunch of essentials for our new place, and I think we’re ready to finally move in.

On top of that, I’m really looking forward to getting started with teaching and continuing classes. The life of a graduate student makes me slightly nervous, since it’s a new thing, but I think I’m ready for life’s next step.

me: you should go get your camera amanda: i dont like leaving my laptop alone tho me: i’ll keep sending aim messages that say “dont touch this laptop, douche” amanda: lol k…ill brb me: k me: DON’T TOUCH THIS LAPTOP, DOUCHE me: I CAN SEE YOU amanda: hahahahahahahahahaha me: you’d better be amanda amanda: babe you are silly

I’ve been home for a week, and I’m miserably bored. I spent the first few days at home doing almost nothing other than missing my new friends from the trip. Then, I spent a couple of days doing things with people, many of whom I had known for years. Doing this both hurt and helped me. On the one hand, life as normal must absolutely continue, even following such an amazing experience. On the other, it made me feel distant and far away from everything that had just happened to me.

I know that the new friendships (and one of them is more than that) are not going away any time soon. It just feels like we were removed from each other so suddenly. Everything was going absolutely wonderfully at the time we all parted, and all of us, I think, are wishing that we had had more days with each other. It took six weeks for us to form a series of incredible relationships, some of which we never would have anticipated at the outset. We are all anxious to see where these relationships will go. As it stands, we have a week and a half left before we all converge in Minneapolis again.