No

I didn't finish my paper. I took an incomplete instead. I know, pending disaster. Well, such is the nature of the mortgage. I took the draft off my blog and copied it onto a real back-up disk, like a normal person. Lest I lose my readership of 3.

I think I'm going to have to go to Michigan, which just about terrifies me. Who knew I could have a culture shock in my own country (not counting the south)? I definitely was NOT expecting it. Talk about Abercrombie attack! You'd think it were a myth, some made-up media fantasy about Germanic-flavored collegiate boys that play squash and hunt, oh I don't know, moose. But it's all, all too true. Meat and potatoes, corn-fed good nature, early-death diet; not a bean sprout or a hippie in sight. I think I'll feel lonely here and expatriated from my beautiful sun and my cool Pacific and those androgynous men, and ethnic people; and I'll miss my friends, as I never did before when I was in transitional moments, because I've come to depend on friends like I've always depended on family. That having been said, I do feel at home among the people in my academic program. Liberal, intellectual, down-to-earth, funny: it's the closest possible thing to what I have now, except better.

Prof. Ruth S told us a funny thing her brother said about Ann Arbor: "bourgeois paradise." He said this when he visited a state-subsidized water park that was frequented by everyone, from the most spoiled teenagers to the poorest street thugs. It was sqeaky clean in a surreal way, a la Disneyland, but because the admission rate was so cheap, there was also a populist vibe to the place. "Perfect for leftist academic types," remarked one professor.