Day 120 - Four Months Abroad
This week's update is going to be pretty uninteresting to everyone, as most of it was spent studying (and not studying) for my last final for Globalization and the Market. I endeavored to do a semester's worth of reading in a week, which was a bit of a suspect strategy, but there have been some serious motivation issues when you couple the lax conversion factor Michigan applies to grades here that already don't factor into my GPA.
Of course, before I got too heavily into reading, I decided to start up a new column on WCBN's Maize and Blog, to be found here. It mixes pop culture and sports, and while this isn't in any way groundbreaking, it's fun to do. I like that I'm the most musically adventurous of the WCBN Sports crew, and how this makes me the closest of anyone to the music side of the station, and it's fun to share my musical preferences with the group in the relatively light summer months.
Day 121 - Bob Dylan
Tuesday was Bob Dylan's 70th birthday, so I used it as an excuse to listen to some of the extensive Dylan catalogue. What an incredible talent. His earliest acoustic stuff is really nice to listen to and have playing in the background when studying, but it gets kind of hard when you just want to listen to the stories each song tells. I'm not a big fan of kids my age who are massive classic rock proponents and whatnot, but I'll make an exception for Dylan (and Neil Young and The Clash).
I finished Out of the Pits, a book on commodities futures trading in Chicago and digital markets in London. It was interesting but could have easily been condensed into a 30 page research paper - as it stands it's just a fluffed up book of redundancies. It tells us what we already know - everyone in the financial sector is an asshole.
Day 122 - More Studying
The new Arctic Monkeys album is really good. Maybe their second best album, after the debut. I can't stop listening to it, and it leaked on Wednesday. It has a horrible title ("Suck It and See") but there isn't a song I don't like. Stronger fourth album effort than the Strokes put out, that's for sure.
Turns out reading 2 books and 14 articles in one week is a pretty ridiculous task. I struggled through Ara Wilson's Intimate Economies, which featured an absurdly long and off-putting introduction that set the tone for the rest of my interest in what she had to say.
A new development is a compulsion to do pushups whenever possible. This can only be positive. Also, I can't believe it took me this long to start watching Louie, Louis C.K.'s show on FX. He's hilarious.
Day 123 - An Exercise in Group Study Futility
Met up with James and Baran to study for our final, with the gift from above of a study guide compiled by some classmates that included summaries of all the readings (though some were basically as long as the original articles). We got very little accomplished, as group study tends to go. The door to the room we were in was hilariously loud and Roj popped in and destroyed most of the already feeble energy we had for studying. It was nice to get out of the house proper, but the ride back to the Swamp in a storm was no fun. Dutch weather imitating Michigan weather, it sounds like.
Day 124 - Senior
The test was fair. I'm a fairly good exam-taker, and I'm feeling pretty confident about how it all turned out. I'm done with academics in Holland, and I'm done with junior year. Pretty ridiculous that I'm a senior in college now. Time for 5 weeks of relaxing and traveling in Europe until I go home July 1. Sounds a lot like the first 16 weeks.
I'm headed off to meet up with Alan in Amsterdam. This will be the third of the four housemates from home I'll see in Europe this year, and I'm really excited about it. I'll see Alan again in Barcelona with Adrian in a couple weeks.
One last note. Newly European Liz has a blog about her time in Madrid, which got underway yesterday. Read it here.
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