Kente

In celebration of the first day of SUMMER I treated myself to revisiting my horse show days. I still had two papers to write, but the massive conference that I was taking part in, and that had been weighing on me for weeks, was over the day before! Neil was my cheering section at this tiny little schooling show. Shiloh was my piebald mount. The best part was cleaning her up over the couple days before the show – she’s a lesson horse that was neglected, as lesson horses tend to be, and with some polish is quite the pretty girl. I was surprised to find out that she’s quite the refuser on the jump course, too, since I was under the impression that she had been to shows a million times. Turns out this was her second!

When we got back from the show, after feasting at a Greektown restaurant, we managed to watch a movie even though we had gotten up at 5 AM, and then I slept for 13 hours and woke up sick. It’s the finale of a majorly intense school year: let it all out, body!

Check out more pictures by clicking here.

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Neil just posted some great pictures on his blog, of fall:

Political Crumbs – Fall in Chicago

and winter:

Political Crumbs – Winter in Chicago

Enjoy!

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…it feels like home now.  A little paint, a little stitchery, a little cleaning and greenery… Some before and after shots, of the living room, study, and bathroom:

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Neil and I romped our way through the frozen wintriness of Jackson Park, 600 wooded, ponded acres just on the south edge of Hyde Park (our neighborhood), to get in touch with the season. It’s crystalline and muffled in apparent stillness, subtle. Yet we found it conducive to plenty of antics – snowballs and tackles and whisper-ful tracking of woodpeckers. It was my first experience with an honest-to-goodness frozen pond, on which I jumped and stomped and rolled, unable to make a dent in it. This “real winter” business is, so far, quite the lovely experience:

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An interesting visual I came across displaying the relative size of the continent of Africa, which looms so much smaller in most American imaginations than many of these other countries. It also gives a little perspective on how problem-ridden ideas that treat it as one homogeneous place usually are.

More information: http://bigthink.com/ideas/21084

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Mmmmm.

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Um, yeah, U Chicago “won” that award. And to top it off, our “mascot” is the Gargoyle. There’s nothing much authentic about this campus, however, though gorgeous it certainly is. The entire thing is a neo-Gothic replica of Cambridge built only a century ago by Rockefeller when that was the “in” thing to do for absurdly wealthy gentlemen (aka Robber Barons). Think Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Carnegie  (of Carnegie-Mellon). Rockefeller also financed the college that bears his name.

Here’s a slide show of images from last week that make me feel silly for studying inside when all is so lovely out:

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What on Earth does that mean, you ask?

It’s a little chance to see what I’m up to these days. “Systems” is the quasi-mythic first-year grad-student class at U Chicago Anthro. It’s a “social theory boot camp” where reading is completely overwhelming in terms of both quality and quantity, a survey of all the “greatest books” ever written to think about the human condition. This is from philosophy to psychoanalysis, political economy to history…  Foucault and Freud, Hegel and Heidegger, Arendt and Agamben… This week alone we’re covering Smith and Marx, plus more contemporary commentaries on political economy. So, it’s fascinating, and I have no spare time whatsoever.

Anyway, we wrote our first paper, it’s short and sweet (6 pages), and you can peruse it by clicking here if you’re so inclined. I wrote on individualism using the work of a couple philosophers. Enjoy.

Yeah, they helped:

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Mayflower seemed lonely and mopey, so now she has a 4-month old pal, a spaz who loooooves to play. He is still awaiting the perfect name. Enjoy this onslaught of adorable cat pictures! (I promise to be less redundant in my themes soon…)

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