Sunday, December 14, 2008, 12:01 AM (3)

[...It's funny. The (3) in the title represents the number of days until I go home for Christmas. When I was writing letters to/"dating" Kim (yes, we've dropped the anonymous names. Please mourn appropriately) I always put the number of days until we got to see each other in parenthesis. In a way, it represented a countdown to when we could be happy again. The last letter I sent her had a (94) on it. How time flies when you aren't waiting for something, right?...]

Much has happened lately. I've quit the speech team (took up too much time), aced two finals (at least I think I did) and now have a six page paper to write, a foreign language to learn, and the profiles of Rhodes scholars to go over, all by the end of Tuesday. Last night I stayed up talking to Sushma until something like 4:30 AM, slept until 3:00 PM, messed around online, ate dinner, came back to the dorms, took a nap (although I don't know if I ever actually fell asleep), more online stuff (nothing finals related) and now, here I am, with the ability to probably stay awake another eight-ten hours if I wanted. My roommate (who I've seen for a total of ten minutes since Wednesday) actually asked when the funeral for the campus is, since it's completely dead around here. I have no one to see, nothing to do (except study, which I'm going full out on today), and nowhere to be. And yet, strangely, I'm fine with all of this.

My life is becoming more stable. I've spent a lot of time during the past week concocting various plans for my life, and I've come across my latest scheme. Seton Hall has a program whereby students can spend five years (and two summers) getting both a BS in International Relations and a MA. However, if I take 18 credits a semester instead of 15, it is entirely possibly that I could manage to pull off this 5 year program in 4.5, meaning that I'd be getting a Master's degree in December 2012 (just in time for the world to end). This would get me out of college with a Masters, almost if not completely debt free, 18 months sooner than most poor saps are able to. From here, if I have a kickass job, I can just work at it and start my "real" life at age 23 and two months, or I could go study in Russia for a while, go into a PhD program... there are really a plethora of possibilities here. I've always sort of assumed I'd be getting at least a Masters, if not a Doctorate, and this allows me the opportunity to fulfill the first of those two degrees really quickly. If I decide to go for the Doctorate I'll have, hopefully, some good work experience behind me so I can get into an amazing school (Harvard, Seton Hall ain't).

I'm sure Seton Hall has some good things about it... I just haven't managed to find them yet. I take that back, the teaching here has, honestly, been pretty incredible. While certain professors are better than others, I've yet to find a professor I really disliked as far as teaching style is concerned (been less than thrilled with? yes. Disagreed with at times? Absolutely. But they're all incredibly competent, though I'm sure that will change as I go along). I'm sure most of this is because they're introductory courses, but it seems like the classes I've been in so far have been taught to the lowest common denominator, rather than really pushing me (the one class I'm glad about this? Russian). To that end I've decided to push myself (see above paragraph), but what's really shocking to me is that I can't find more people that seem to have an idea of what they're doing here. Maybe everybody's just shy (not a good quality for diplomats), but so many people here haven't heard of Fareed Zakaria, or Henry Kissinger, or realclearpolitics.com. It's like they woke up one day and decided, hey, instead of going to film school I'm going to go work for the state department (this sentence actually, literally, describes one of my relatively good friends here. I'm not even kidding. At least she's fluent in French). While I didn't expect everybody to sit around in soft chairs (not allowed in dorms, fire hazard) smoking pipes (ditto) and discussing US Grand Strategy after the Cold War (thanks for the book recommendation in Vegas, Nick Ramsey... though you don't know this blog exists), I'm still somewhat saddened that everything seems to be about getting drunk, going to frat parties, and getting laid (and if you're from New Jersey, going home on weekends). I'd even be more accepting if everybody was getting laid and could talk merits for war with Iran. Sadly, not so much (this was a rather long paragraph with a lot of parenthetical asides).

So what to do since I haven't found somebody I "click" with intellectually? Branch out more! I'm taking a bunch of different classes next semester (really Dan? I thought you'd take the same classes...); a few that I'm actually excited about include two sophomore level classes, one taught by somebody with a PhD from MIT, and a junior level class about International Law taught by somebody with a JD from UCLA and a PhD from Tufts. Furthermore, I'm actually going to start going to College Republicans meetings, and History Club meetings, and other fun "hey, let's talk about something we have in common!" types of events. After all, Seton Hall is, for all intents and purposes, my home for the foreseeable future, and I've decided I can't live my life with parenthesis and numbers after the date and time.