So on top of some general reshuffling, cleanup, memorizing odd Arabic words and writing overdue letters, my odyssey with the printer ended in success. A few weeks back, I’d tried to print out some photos from my shiny new laptop. The prints were alas far from shiny and new-looking: they were disturbingly grainy and blurred. Playing with innumerable printer configuration settings accomplished nothing. Today I had the inspired idea to downgrade from Photoshop CS 3 beta to CS 2. And lo and behold, my prints no longer stink (or rather, they look as good/bad as they did before the new computer. Guess I shouldn’t be using beta software to print out stuff I care about?

Rather than spell out in painful detail (and after the fact) the happenings of the week, let me just mention a few highlights.

Monday 2/5: Cold and gloomy. That’s me, not the weather.

Tuesday 2/6: Nominally introduced the Anthropology discussion, but in practice, received a rather convoluted education into the construction (and potential deconstruction) of human rights.

Wednesday 2/7: Tackled 19th century Iran in the history class. Interesting to compare to the Ottoman Empire.

Thursday 2/8: Went out to lunch with Uncle H- and grandparents before his return to LA. For once, Indian food without indigestion.

Friday 2/9: Catch up. On course readings. On Arabic. On sleep. On this neglected blog. Lots of catch up.

Sunday was the sort of day that just sort of happened. It all centered around a rather haphazard lunch that several members of the party rather vociferously objected to. Nothing could be done, however, and so there was a giant trip to the grocery store for enormous quantities of food that didn’t get eaten, followed by a lunch gather mixing relatives and neighbors. As Cousin H- was intent upon affixing balloons to everybody throughout, I was rather distracted.

The remainder of the afternoon was pretty quiet, until it was suggested that perhaps we should go see a movie. One mad rush later, we were in a theater in Elmsford, tickets in hand for Babel. I wasn’t really all that impressed, although the bits of Arabic were of some interest. It was the sort of movie that would have been affecting, had it not been so heavy-handed.

Regardless, the reality of morning classes meant that as soon as we returned and Grandpa attended to his presents, I left for the train station. A quick ride to White Plains got me to an express train. Entertainment riding back alone was limited. I also made the mistake of taking the express subway line at Grand Central. Walking to my apartment from 14th St. shouldn’t have been a big deal, but the mid-teens temperature and roaring wind going down Broadway left me feeling just about as cold as I can remember. After a can of soup to warm up, I checked the web: temperature of 14 degrees, or -3 with wind chill. Brr…

Today’s narrative begins with me, groggy and with a slight headache, getting up at 7AM. This allowed me almost two hours to do a number of errands. Send off, via post, one of the last eBayed Kanga parts (an extra ethernet board and a 64MB RAM module, no less). Return a book to the library that I’d now bought. Eat a light breakfast. Try and dress warmly.

At a quarter past 9 came the buzz by the doorman to indicate Dad had arrived. Considering his overnight flight, and lack of sleep, I suppose the 20 degree weather in which he had walked from Penn Station down to my place was in a sense useful. We took a quick jaunt around Washington Square before deciding to give the outdoors a miss and stop at yuppieish restaurant/bakery called Le Pain Quotidien. There we not only drank tea and had a light breakfast, but managed to meet Cousin K- who I had not seen in almost 3 months (despite his being at NYU for much of that time), and watched a very large SUV get towed from a red-zone.

We took a tour of the library (to my surprise, they let Dad in without complaint) before encountering prolonged blasts of icy air on the way to the quay by the Hudson. This exceedingly clear view of Manhattan, New Jersey, and a good deal more (lady liberty herself was a sizable smudge on the horizon) was marred considerably by gusts that reduced us to almost complete numbness. After leaving K-, who had work to do, Dad and I took the subway down to the former site of the World Trade Center. Or rather, we overshot it, as the trade-center’s collapse had closed the relevant station. The site itself was the scene of a great deal of construction equipment and workers, though it is as yet only a big hole.

Next to the WTC site is the WFC, the World Financial Center which seems to be part of a general revitalization project for lower Manhattan. This huge, heated, and oddly open building offered lunch opportunities and the vocals of a goodly number of Gospel choirs, vying in some sort of competition. Returning from the WFC to the subway brought us past a building billowing smoke that seemed to have attracted most of the FDNY. Perhaps Saturday afternoon is a slow period?

In quick succession, we picked up card, present and luggage and grabbed the subway up to Grand Central, whence we took the train in to Hartsdale. Waiting at the other end, having also just arrived from California, were Uncle J-, Aunt I- and Cousin H-. We thus arrived at the grandparents house, unannounced and unexpected. Both Grandma and Grandpa were suitably surprised.

The actual birthday part of the evening (well, this whole thing was for Grandpa’s 90th birthday, you see) was almost anti-climactic by comparison. We reveled briefly in togetherness, had a light dinner (Chinese take-out) and once jet lag finally kicked in, everybody went to bed. And I do mean everyone.

Today was pretty grey outside, which matches my disposition pretty closely. Attempts to engage with next week’s course readings dovetailed with my visit to midtown to pick up computerish stuff: a case to replace the one that doesn’t quite fit (which I returned) and a USB hub to so I can finally stop juggling cables. It’s impressive really: I regularly need 5 USB ports (printer, headphones, keyboard/mouse, hard drive and cell-phone charger). I feel a bit ashamed given how much they cost, but assuming I keep them as long as I plan on keeping the machine, it seems justifiable. The store, conveniently located right by the New York Public Library, claimed to be the biggest computer store in Manhattan. Guess I’m kinda starting to miss Fry’s Electronics.

One of the articles I read for next week was a fascinating discussion of the experience of Cambodian refugees in the American healthcare system. On one side, the system was clearly designed to assimilate the immigrants into western medicine, and force them into a certain kind of relationship with the state. And yet the immigrants, while not openly fighting back, effectively subverted the system at many junctures. In one case, they claimed symptoms in order to gain state-support, while avoiding the medicine which they did not approve of. Passive-resistance if you will, and surprisingly effective.

In other news, I tried making a new kind of pasta today. See, my life really is exciting sometimes!

The substantive part of the day centered around Arabic. This was followed by lunch with the grandparents, who were down in the area for yet more medical tests.

In the afternoon, the red plastic case I’d ordered for my MacBook Pro finally arrived. It’s supposed to keep the case from getting scratched or banged up. While this appears likely, the cutouts for the ports on the right side of mine don’t match up right. This despite having explicitly advertised compatibility with the latest model MacBook Pros. Oh well. At least it’s pretty (I had a choice between transparent and red, and red seemed more appropriate.

The rest of the day was devoted to dropping by the post office, getting groceries, doing some bank stuff, and helping my roommate upgrade the memory in his laptop. Happily the laptop still works fine, although the performance increase from the new memory (upgraded from 256MB to 768MB was less noticeable than hoped for). Meanwhile my own laptop has been demonstrating a bit of instability. I ran a memory test, but it didn’t show anything. Hope I don’t have a partially defective machine.

Finally, some sad news today: Molly Ivins, one of the best columnists in the country, died yesterday as a result of breast cancer, at the age of 63. Ivins had the rare gift of being able to be both incredibly funny and deeply serious at the same time. She was a constant reminder that Texas has produced far more than merely bible-thumpers and smog.

Today was rather sketchy. And by sketchy I mean blurry.

The morning was mostly occupied by Arabic. But I also had to finalize my fellowship application, which meant crafting that statement of purpose. What I really hate about writing a statement of purpose is that it makes me sound as if I bragging. Despite what many people no doubt think of me, I really have always preferred understatement to overstatement, and yet this is a case where understatement doesn’t work. At least not any more (the transcript isn’t quite what it was back in the halcyon days of high school). Nonetheless, I did pull together something, and turned in all the requisite materials to the office, on time.

An unfortunate side-effect of this was, however, that not only did I not start out writing my presentation until late, but I cleverly managed to quite without saving. So I spent the first half of the history seminar nervously trying to compose my thoughts and an outline as the professor detailed the transformations wrought by colonial powers in Algeria and Egypt during the 19th century. These, not coincidentally, were exactly the same examples my adviser used in a course I took almost 2 years ago in Paris. The presentation itself was reasonably smooth and clear, if not exactly polished and engrossing. The ensuing discussion actually worked pretty well: we remained within the realm of hard facts, avoiding meta-level digressions.

Feeling I had earned some sort of reward, I spent the evening musing about MacBook Pro expansion options (mainly storage related) and eating a large chunk of pie.

Today’s anthropology discussion was kept veering off into dangerously abstract territory. I think I made one useful point the whole time. Granted, I thought it was a pretty good one, but it hardly suffice for an entire 2 1/2 hour discussion. I have discovered that our section is divided, more or less, into 3 categories of people. We have the contrarians, who will find basically find anything examined unconvincing. Their skepticism strikes me as partly a lack of imagination: if the author didn’t include persuasive backing for each point made, their point cannot possibly be accepted. The accomodationists on the other side attempt to forge common ground and linkages between everything. While nice, this will often lead to making claims that are very hard to see in the author’s original work. Finally, there are the folks who aren’t really too sure, and vacillate back and forth, like myself.

The other main item of the day was preparing a presentation for the history class tomorrow on reform in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. It was a group thing, and so me and my partner had a short meeting to hash out the details. What fascinated me is that while my partner was quite well prepared (vastly better than me), she was also substantially less sure of herself. Leaving aside why that is (unanswerable by me), I was particularly surprised that she seemed slightly intimidated by last week’s presentation, as beyond her grasp (which she took to be her fault). From what I gathered, the presentation was mainly notable for its lack of clarity and poor organization. That is to say, what my partner took for profundity, I took as sloppiness. I could, of course, have completely missed the point altogether. Maybe. But I do begin to suspect that a lot of what passes for sophistication, intricacy and brilliance may simply be stuff that isn’t being explained well. There are undoubtedly bona fide complex ideas, but more often than not, I’d say fancy ideas are really just simple ones explained badly. That message from our in-house reductionist.

Once again, rather deal mostly with my decidedly conventional day (study, Arabic, lunch, procrastinate, read, dinner, more procrastination, write a response paper), I’ll focus on one of the ‘exciting’ news items of the day: Windows Vista is officially out.

I gather I should be feeling excited, but in my case it’s more of a sort of listless boredom. None of the features Vista offers promise me anything. The new security architecture could be useful, but to date, I haven’t had my Windows box compromised. And since it’s a VMWare virtual machine, even if it were compromised, it’s pretty easy to restore directly from backup. Vista’s eye candy is surely of no use to me. Rather, I’m irritated that they decided to move or rearrange everything. This leaves people like me having to relearn various normal tasks. I’ll be the first to admit Windows XP has many flaws. However, gratuitously rewriting its GUI hardly strikes me as a productive way of dealing with these. So hello Vista. I hope we won’t have to meet again for a while.

I would like to talk about the fascinating day I had, the exciting things I did and so forth. It would be fun. No doubt somebody had a day like that. Unfortunately it wasn’t me. My day was spent in the library unsuccessfully trying to decipher the core of Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, and Agamben’s revision thereof. Slightly more successful were my efforts at reviving parts of somewhat neglected Arabic vocabulary. Still, when all was said and done, today was kind of a bust.

Indeed the highlight of the day came from a web-bulletin: namely the news that Tennis player Roger Federer triumphed (in straight sets) at the Australian Open. Whether or not he’ll win the French Open this year is anybody’s guess, but at his rate, Sampras’s record is not going to stand for very long. In contrast, yesterday’s women’s final seems to have been an error filled match in which an out-of-condition Serena Williams crushed an even more off-kilter Maria Sharapova.