Eaten by Tapirs

In which I relate the details which no one else really wants to hear...

Well, the election's all done with, I almost kinda-sorta met Nobel Prize winner Oscar Arias, the vote's too close to call, and it'll be two weeks or so before this ship of state has a captain. It's time for me to get back to my schoolwork.

Having finished my fascinating three-week course on terrorism and the mass media, I've now moved on to Conflict Management, the year's flagship course and apparently a great primer on how to conduct peace negotiations. I'm looking forward to it, particularly since my first assignment is to head a simulation, in which I play the leader of a small Southeast Asian country deciding whether or not to get all snippy with the United States. Good times.

I've also been forced, by deadline more than common sense, to get my all-important thesis under way. After two or three topic changes, I seem to have settled on "The Evolutionary Psychology of Religious Violence", a slightly amateurish exploration of the ways a few universal evolutionary quirks can be manipulated in weird ways to produce a religious terrorist. Interesting stuff, though it grows more complicated every time I look at it and it's starting to hurt my noggin'.

More notably, the fact that I've started my thesis marks the just-past-halfway point in my year in Costa Rica. I've been here almost 6 months, and I'm done in another five or so. Still not a clue what the next step is, but if history guides me, something funky will come up.

posted by Paul @ 4:02 PM