Adventures of Isabel

Still in California, Still Alive.
There’s just something about grad school that kills my urge to write.

But I’ll be traveling a lot in the upcoming months. A research trip to DC in November, a short family visit to Utah in early December, and then an indefinite relocation to Southeast Asia. So here’s hoping life gets [...]

I haven’t been posting lately, largely because I’ve been holed up working on the tax collectors project.
Here’s one clip from the project, which shows tax strike leader Abdel Qader Nada explaining some of the conditions that pushed real estate tax collectors to launch a (successful!) strike last year.
This video, along with about a dozen others, [...]

File this under “apologizing for not posting more.”
I’ve recovered from being ill, but I’m still scrambling to get caught up on work.  (I’m running around so much I’ve started referring to my apartment as my “alleged home.”)

Still from an audio slideshow about Jack London Aquatic Center’s crew team for Oakland girls.

I’m working on a JSchool [...]

Kicking it old-school with Dr. Cullinane in the VIP lounge at Cebu-Mactan airport.
Sadly, here in Manila, where I’m waiting for my flight to Jakarta, the accommodations are a bit more basic. But I can’t win every time.
It’s been a short & sweet visit to Manila. Catching up with friends, visiting archives and libraries here, [...]

I tend to be a lot better about updating this thing while I’m traveling and actually have anything of interest to report, but in just a few days I’ll be heading to a part of the world where internet access can often be tricky. Internet cafes (and sometimes even cafes with WiFi) are easy [...]

These past few weeks have been incredibly busy. On top of all the usual nonsense, I have to get ready for my trip to Southeast Asia, I’m going to be presenting a paper at a grad student conference at Cornell in March, and I’m spending a lot of time trying to persuade people to [...]

“Like many people, I started blogging out of an urgent need to procrastinate” –Alex Ross, in the New Yorker, Oct. 22

While I’ve been distracted by other things:
The Glorietta blast has been ruled, officially now, an accident. I’m still not sure what to think. And I also can’t quite help being suspicious about the [...]

Oh, I am so bad.Looks like I’m back to posting about how I don’t ever post.School seems to do this to me.What can I say? By and large, I find what I’m doing in school interesting. Which is why I’m here. But it doesn’t make for great narrative. As in — I actually [...]

So, the reason I haven’t been doing this lately, apart from the usual reasons, is that blogger now requires you to sign up for an account with Google to sign in. I finally did it, just now, and it took about ten seconds, but that proved to be enough of a barrier to keep me [...]

I’m really trying to avoid starting every post with an excuse about why I don’t post more often, but don’t seem to be making a very good job of it. I always sort of assume that nobody actually reads this anyways, until I get a surprise complaint about how I haven’t written anything in weeks. [...]