Yesterday’s snow has turned, almost entirely, to slush. It’s incredible how fast it has all melted. Meaning everything is wet. The rain in the evening probably did not help. Because I was getting almost no work done in the apartment, I went to the library in the afternoon and got, well not a lot of work done. The book I’m trying to finish, Harri Englund’s “Prisoners of Freedom,” is somewhat uneven. As a result, some chapters take hours, some take fifteen minutes. A bit jarring, and the theory heavy sections make me drowsy.

Like last week’s book, this is a localized study combined with a grand theory. Both are actually pretty neat, but again, the connection is a bit difficult. Englund studies the role of ‘human rights’ and NGOs in Malawi. The paradoxical title is a reference to the idea that the ‘freedom’ that activists and NGOs have brought to Malawi, via the vehicle of human rights, have actually limited and in fact ‘imprisoned’ (at least discursively) the Malawians that it is supposedly helping.

The good news is that I finished in time, and Dad in fact make it home (with a full, one-day delay). The bad news is I’m dog tired and tomorrow morning is only 5 hours away.

So apparently, it snowed a lot in Washington today. By the evening, it was snowing a bit here too. This matters mainly because Dad’s return flight from Paris (where he’d stopped, on the way back from a business trip to India) stopped in Washington this afternoon, and the connection never left. Thank you, United.

I suddenly had the brilliant idea that I needed to start seeing about summer plans, which right now appear to be studying Arabic. Well, beginning a few weeks earlier would have good, it seems, since one of the best programs is now full, and another one of the good ones has its deadline this Thursday. Still, a few hours of research and I now have a rough idea what the world of intensive summer Arabic looks like. In fact, given the way it’s looking, I might simply just stay here. What I want to know is how is it that a 12 week program and an 8 week program both nominally cover the same amount of material, particularly since both meet 5 days a week, 5 hours a day?

In the evening, I read a neat little article on the creation of human rights. The author makes a convincing case that human rights were in many ways a compromise, and a way to avoid recognition of minority rights that had proven so troublesome prior to WWII. Indeed, he points out how Hitler made political use (indirectly) of minority rights, when it came to Germans in eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia and Poland). The problem is, of course, that if minorities have inalienable rights (particularly political ones) by virtue of their collective status, then all sorts of things become problematic (the Jim Crow South, Catholics in Northern Ireland, much of western Russia). Human rights by contrast relegates these problems to an individual level, and indeed, the UN’s Universal Declaration was very carefully crafted to prevent the creation of an enforcement regime.

It was cold this morning. And I do not mean cold as in 30-degrees-cold, I mean cold as in temperature-in-the-high-teens-with-gusts-of-wind cold. So my 15 block trip to Trader Joe’s reminded me what it’s like not to have ears. Yesterday’s haircut may not have helped either. Nearly as disturbing was the fact that when I got to Trader Joe’s around 15 minutes after opening, there was already a line half way around the store. Somehow, I just can’t win.

My second task of the day was to get a new phone. Yes, I know I only had the last one about 8 months. But I’ve decided to replace my cable internet with a ‘tethered’ cell-phone with data access, since the price isn’t too different (except for the phone itself). The phone in question, a Motorola RAZR V3xx is better in almost every way than the old one. Sound quality is better, startup time is better and of course, data access speed is 3G (so up to 1.8mbs, if Cingular ever gets their network up to spec). Only the size, and the ringtone options are not as good (I wanted something low-key and generic). I did in fact cancel the cable service after using the phone as a modem, with the help of a surprisingly pricey piece of software. So now wherever I have cell service, I have internet access.

In the evening, my friend E- came up from Philadelphia. Originally, it was to have been me, E-, Q- and another friend from Stanford all meeting up in NYC, but the last two bailed (Q- had an important meeting regarding funding for his research, the other friend was incredibly busy). So it was just me and E-, and tickets to a piano concert at Carnegie Hall by one Piotr Anderszewski. The music was great (Six Bagatelles by Beethoven, Metopy by a composer I’d not heard of previously called Szymanoswki, intermission, and then ’33 Variations on a Theme by Diabelli’ by Beethoven again), and it was fun to see Carnegie Hall again (hadn’t been there for quite a while). Afterwards, though, we had a dickens of a time finding a restaurant for dinner, finally settling for a Mexican place with incredibly annoying music (but also the virtue of being open after 11PM) near 59 St. and 7th Ave.

Helped out with a variety of chores in the morning, including changing a number of lightbulbs (Grandpa is actually a bit taller than me, but I suppose I’m a bit more limber when it comes to climbing on top of tables), getting printer paper and replacing the lost camera cable, and various other odds and ends. Oh, and I got a haircut too. I look almost conventional for a change, which is itself unconventional.

Right after lunch, Grandma dropped me off at the White Plains train station. I had exactly 1 minute at the station before the train arrived, depositing me at Grand Central barely 35 minutes later. From there, I caught the subway (again, almost no waiting), and wound up in my apartment exactly one hour after leaving the grandparents’ place in Westchester. If it was always this easy, maybe commuting wouldn’t be a bad idea…

I had a package on my desk when I got back (delayed, almost a week, by the previous week’s snow), so I had another go at disassembling the laptop and replacing its hard drive. Using the same guide as before (thanks, ifixit), but a somewhat better Philips screwdriver, I did in fact swap in the new larger drive. The great thing is that not only is it 200GB, but because it’s 4200RPM, the machine is really quiet now. Almost a little too quiet, since I have to stick my ear against the case now sometimes to tell if it actually asleep or not. And yes, I really do need the extra 80GB. The photos add up fast. Very fast.

The rest of the day was quiet, spent exploring the press in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1906-11) and the ideology of the Young Turk Revolution (1908). Good stuff. What was that quite I used to like so much? Oh, right: “There never was a good war or a bad revolution.” Edward Abbey. Certainly for a historian, the second part is true.

After my usual morning of Arabic (the typical study/finish homework, followed by class, today with the added bonus that we discussed vacations), Grandma and Grandpa came down for lunch. We went to the same Indian restaurant we’d gone to weeks before. Still unbelievably cheap. I’m always amazed that one can find parking on 1st Ave. without too much difficulty. It seems odd to say, but thank heavens for meters!

Then, Grandma went to the weekly physics colloquium, and Grandpa and I drove back to Westchester. Figured it was time to pay them a visit. We had a quiet afternoon, and I discovered something odd about my laptop: it will only connect once to my wireless router, and then I have to reboot if it gets disconnected, because despite full signal strength, it won’t connect again. Though the range on the thing (a D-Link DI-524 for the record) is so pitiful that my initial purpose of internet access from the living room of my grandparent’s place is itself unachievable.

So I read some, we bemoaned the state of the world, and had a generally quiet evening. I showed off a number of my photo albums as well, which was fun, except that when Grandma tried to print them, we discovered she was using paper for a color laser printer. Results from her HP inkjet were thus, ermm… suboptimal.

I am in a Menckenesque mood today. I had the inestimable good fortune of attending a seminar today in which instead of spending the second half of the session in a discussion, our student presenter gave us a 45 minute lecture which was not merely repetitive, unorganized, and often lacking in substance (as we have all, theoretically, read the works in question, an exhaustive summary seems rather superfluous), but full to the gills of unsupported opinions. Whew, glad to get that out of my system.

What’s interesting is that the two Islamic reform movements we examined were, in their day of rather limited importance and reach. Muhammad Abduh’s “Islamic Modernism” (as we call it, he himself would undoubtedly have used different terms) does not appear to have ever spread beyond a certain, smallish intellectual elite. Ideologically, it may be interesting, but historically, it seems pretty minor. Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s theology meanwhile remained confined to a minor region of central Arabia until well into the 20th century.

Meanwhile, during this period, we have a rash of new Islamic sects and movements, from Sufi orders in North Africa, like the Sanusiyya, to the Babis and later the Bahais in Iran, to the Mahdists in the Sudan (who, it may be remembered, disposed of Chinese Gordon in Khartoum in 1885). Smaller local movements abounded as well. All of these are in fact Islamic responses to modernity, and they seem to make for a much more textured approach than simply a juxtaposition of Wahhabism and Islamic Modernism.

I am almost, but not quite, sick today, with a major headache and sore throat, hopefully due only to the dry air. This afternoon’s anthropology discussion was challenging, not least because we seemed, as usual, to be mostly playing with abstractions. We’d read the previously mentioned “Markets of Dispossession” by Julia Elyachar. Simply put, the book is a study of the cultural practices of markets and people in a quarter in Cairo created to contain workshops. The author deals in special detail with the role played by NGOs promoting international development.

The major problem with the piece so far as I was concerned is that while the findings on the el-Hirafiyeen quarter of Cairo are fascinating and indeed compelling, the larger claims are too sweeping and general to be effectively demonstrated by one particular case study. This is a case, yes, where the development project is deeply flawed, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate that the project itself is self-defeating in all instances, that its attempts to appropriate and financialize functioning local market practices are actually effective in dispossessing the locals, materially and ideologically.

All of which is a rather long-winded way for me to say that today’s discussion largely missed what were to me all the most interesting parts (the particular market practices, the particulars of the NGOs’ intervention), in favor of unanswered and likely unanswerable questions. There is areason why I majored in history, not philosophy, and this was not it.

I should say something nice about President’s Day. Well, I could (and did) use the rest. Slept late. Admired the continuing presence of snow from almost a week ago (black snow is a pretty sight).

My more useful hours were spent at the library where I finally got ahold of an article I’d been trying to get for almost a week. It was a bit of a disappointment in that regard, as it seemed a rather straightforward biography of Muhammad Abduh (whom I’ve seen other, better written, pieces on). Reading the translation of one of his key works was, on the other hand, not only interesting at the level of content, but a curious commentary on style. Here was, after all, a fellow trying to make a case, mostly to traditional clergy, about how they could and should modernize religious practice.

In attempting to undercut the traditional practices, Abduh is forced to use their forms of reasoning and argumentation. It is a curiously constraining situation, made somewhat obvious by the fact that both the old and new traditions he is arguing over are slightly alien to the reader. Still, one can see why in more contemporary instances, structural critiques can be so difficult: dismissing a system of thought often requires one to partially accept it in order to make the argumentation intelligible. This in turn can only weaken the argument being made.

Everybody up relatively early for breakfast. F- has an excellent waffle maker, which she made ample use of. My kitchen seems significantly understocked and underdeveloped by comparison (not to mention undersized). I guess that’s our difference in philosophy. I’ve tried to stick with minimalism, they’re living comfortably. I always thought it would be really nice to be able to live out of 3 suitcases, and be to leave for anywhere or anything at a moment’s notice. This does however cut down on certain niceties (to be fair, I don’t think I could fit all my stuff in three suitcases now either, the printer’s too big, as is the kitchenware).

So yes, we ate breakfast, chatted a bit, said goodbye, and I was off. Indeed, I was so lucky with the subway and finding my way back to the bus terminal, that I had to wait almost half an hour just to board the bus. 11AM Sunday is a lot more popular than 7AM Friday. En route, we actually had a substantial amount of light snow going through Connecticut. Once again, we had a stop about midway through. Now that the weather was gloomy and I’d been down the route once already, the scenery was a lot less interesting, so I dozed, listened to music, and avoided finishing the class readings I’d dragged all the way up with me. Once again, ambition met reality.

Reality became particularly annoying coming over the Brooklyn bridge into Manhattan. We admired the back of the same semi-truck for almost half an hour as we inched across that bridge. I was back at my apartment at 4PM, happy to discover my hard drive upgrade for my laptop had arrived, but that the tools necessary for it had not. I wound up walking around lower Manhattan in search of a hardware store and a T6 torx screwdriver for a good while.

While upgrading the RAM on a MacBook Pro is easy, upgrading the hard drive on an MBP is not. You have to not only take out the battery, RAM cover and RAM, but also about 20 screws in order to remove the upper case. The upper case was not especially cooperative, and it took a great deal of fiddling and cajoling to open it up. Worse, there was one screw holding the old hard drive in place (ironically, a philips) that I absolutely could not remove. Defeated, I put the laptop back together (and shockingly, did not lose any of the screws in the process) and moved on to the more productive pursuits of catalog the trip’s photographs (not as many as I’d planned on taking), answering some outstanding e-mail, and finally starting some of the reading packets I’d dragged up to Boston with me.

Chinchillas are, as I was unambiguously reminded last night, nocturnal animals. I slept well, but not deeply enough that I didn’t wonder, on more than one occasion, whether one of the Chinchillas had succeeded in upending his/her cage. The guinea pig (loose) who liked to site and bark under my bed was by way of comparison only a minor distraction. As I was the first awake (aside from the still active rodents), I had a few hours to quietly manipulate camera settings and read Arabic.
Around 10AM, I left to meet up with another friend (Q-) at Harvard. This being my first time actually in Boston, let alone at close proximity to the definitive ivory tower, I suggested we just walk around the area. Fortunately my 4 or so layers, my gloves and the periodic sun meant that our rambling through Cambridge and the Harvard campus could occur at a leisurely rate (aside from occasional rapid acceleration and deceleration courtesy unshoveled sidewalks). Certainly, by the end, I had a proper appreciation for the fact that but for the weather, Cambridge has Palo Alto beat in just about every significant metric (save dot-com yuppy density). A very nice town, complete with all sorts of random hole-in-the-wall type establishments (like the little yellow cafe we had lunch in). As for Harvard itself, we had a good time launching snowballs near the Semitic Museum and watching kids ice-skate by one of the cafeterias.

I headed back to Z-‘s in the afternoon, where everybody, including the chinchillas were having a relaxed time of it, especially when they got to have a dust bath. Z- and F- were also in the process of planning for the arrival of no. 15, as well as a chin show, to be held out in Pennsylvania in April. For dinner, I saw Q- and this time N- as well (before today, I hadn’t seen either since graduation, last June) out at a Malaysian restaurant, where I ordered something good, exotic, and puzzlingly expensive. Everybody seems to be getting along nicely (should I have gone to Cambridge too last fall? Hmm…). Was tired enough to call it a night shortly thereafter.