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 [...]

Grad school insanity (in my case) and general Egyptian turmoil (in Hossam’s) have kept us from making much progress on the Tax Collectors’ strike project.  My spring break is coming up, though, so there’s reason to hope it’ll be finished by the end of the month.
In the meantime, a few more slideshows are subtitled and [...]

After days spent immersed in the arcane minutiae of municipal bond markets, it was nice to take a short day assignment that basically involved hanging out with kids in a neighborhood park.
(Of course, I do still have to write the bond piece.)

Continuing my series of desk portraits, here is the wreckage of my desk as I near the home stretch of a marathon last-minute paper revising session:

It may not be a system of organization that works for anyone else, but I seem to have done alright for myself with it so far.

Now, if I can [...]

Q: Who assigns a thousand pages of reading in the first 2 weeks? Excuse me, 994 pages. Wouldn’t want to get overdramatic here. A: One of my history professors, who shall go unnamed. Grad school is awesome.
On the other hand, I will no longer have the pressing problem of what to do with my [...]

So, I start grad school on Monday. Academically, I don’t expect it to be too big a jump, since I was taking mostly graduate level courses last year. But it still feels like a huge step to be taking, and the past few days haven’t been very reassuring.I’m in an odd position, because [...]

Writer’s block. A fancy word for procrastination?I just know that I’m having to rip every single word of the article I’m working on out of me like I’m pulling a tooth.I often wonder if everybody sometimes hates doing the things they love quite as much as I do.I spent some time this afternoon biking around, [...]

“If I look at the provisions of the antiterror law, I would not trust even the most upright government with them, much less a government which has actually a very questionable track record with respecting human rights and the civil liberties of its citizens.”Interview with Atty. Ibarra “Barry” Gutierrez, Director of the University of the [...]

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 [...]

The sky was so beautiful this evening that I almost fell flat on my face looking up at it. There was a crazy storm last night — thunder, lightening and hail — and it seems to have driven all the dirt and humidity out of the air. The horizon was an absolutely luminous cerulean, fading [...]