Wednesday, January 18, 2006 -- 2:36 PM

I had a late class yesterday, which gave me a lot of time in the morning to clean up my room, organize my papers, get caught up on readings and election coverage, and do some laundry, none of which I did. Instead, I watched Band of Brothers, which I got from my brothers for Christmas. I watched the one near the beginning where David Schwimmer plays an annoying drill sargeant. He's quite suited for the role, actually.

After not cleaning up or organizing or getting caught up on anything, I went to school. I'm taking a cultural anthropology course, which you might think is a total load of crock, but you'd actually be quite right. Despite this being the third or so week back to school since the Christmas break, this was my first time attending this particular class. The teacher was obviously new, which made it sometimes quite interesting and sometimes quite boring. For most of the lecture she talked about the vaious types of cultures based on how they attain food; hunting and gathering, horticulture, raising herd animals, and processed foods. Apparently they have a lot more leisure time, which they spend developing relationships with each other, and this leads to a much healthier and happier society. All of this was pretty boring, until one guy was like, "Um, actually, I've heard that the opposite is true; that those kinds of societies leave little leisure time of any sort because of the need to be constantly looking for food," and she jumped on that like a live grenade. "Well, thank you, actually, for bringing that up, because that reveals a common bias that we have as western capitalists against these supposedly lower societies." She then tried, starting about five times, to make some kind of semblance of a point, ending with some kind of obscure anecdote about potatoe-growing in New Guinea. While I did feel extremely bad for her as a new teacher, what she was saying was an absolute load of crock. Here I was sitting, in a classroom, listening to a teacher who is working for her tenure, telling everyone that it's just as cool to be living in an igloo, hunting walrus for dinner, and most likely going to end up killing yourself, since their suicide rates are through the roof. She didn't mention the suicide rates.


Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon, going to the candidates' debate. Laugh about it, shout about it, when you've got to choose, every way you look at it you lose.