Eaten by Tapirs

Six weeks later...

It's funny. Life here is pretty dang dull - temperate weather, agreeable daily routine, mdestly challenging schoolwork - and I'd convinced myself that I couldn't blog unless I had something interesting to say. Then I started skimming mine blogs of old this morning, and discovered that the absence of interesting opinions has never stopped me before. I guess I have no excuse, and had better start talking again.

It's been six weeks. I offer no excuses or apologies - at the end of each school day (usually 1PM) I'm sufficiently eager to flee from campus that the last thing on my mind is to sit down for twenty minutes and spew out a blog post. But somehow, I managed (more or less) to hold up my end of the internet while in Vancouver, Victoria, and Botswana, so I'm going to try to rediscipline myself and make regular (once or twice a week at least) posts.

For (uninteresting) starters, I've wrapped up my first semester of classes. I took courses in Conflict Management and Peace, Political Economy and Peace, and Sustainable Development and Peace, along with a few procedural time-killing short classes. Noticing a theme here? It's all about peace. But it sounds more constructive than it is.

Conflict Management and Peace was a quick and cursory look at the root structural factors behind civil war, things like ethnic discord and stealable resources. It sounds like a nifty area, and I guess it is, but in two weeks we couldn't do much more than scan a handful of lists and snark at each other.

Political Economy and Peace was run by a burned-out old British anarchist whose dry wit couldn't conceal his general contempt for all points of view. I don't just mean opposing points of view. I mean the man never liked capitalism, fell out of love with communism, and has even lost his infatuation with anarcho-syndicalism (don't ask). Now he just don't believe in nuthin' no more. This bitterness made the class more an exercise in sniping at The Man rather than an exploration of the way the world economy actually works.

Sustainable Development and Peace was provocative and occasionally even stimulating, but also supremely touchy-feely and profoundly devoid of specifics. By this point everybody was eager for more practical knowledge, which was sorely lacking.

I give the first semester a C-plus, which simply seems to be the way of things here. Semester 1 lays the theoretical groundwork for the much more practical Semester 2 to follow. My department head, who will be teaching us a course on terrorism and the mass media, just spent 6 weeks in Iraq chronicling the country's disintegration for the US State Department (I'm surprised she didn't get blacklisted for being French). She knows her stuff, and I'm looking forward to the class.

There's an upside to all this touchy-feeliness... I haven't spoken to anyone who's gotten less than an A in any class. I actually got an A-plus-plus-plus on one test, from an impressively enthusiastic teacher.

More interesting things to follow. Yeah, I know, you'll believe it when you see it.

P.S. I may be visiting China in March if I can raise the money.

posted by Paul @ 11:57 AM