Sunday, October 2

This morning, I finished my comprehensive read of this week's Economist, as well as a few more chapters from the slim but interminable Hollis and Smith book. I remember Tristan expressed some interest in Puerto Rico earlier, so he and others might be interested in reading this week's obituary of Filiberto Ojeda Ríos. While I doubt he will be sympathetic to its anti-revolutionary bias, it should at least provide a bit of background for examination of the issue of Puerto Rican independence.

The Oxford experience continues to be one that hangs at the cusp of the long drop into serious academic work. All the intellectual hubbub that surrounds courses is present: people reading and debating, current events being viewed through the prism of a discipline. At the same time, the treadmill itself has not started to rotate. That's especially awkward with both of my former projects still in limbo - the NASCA report stalled for lack of a letter from Allen Sens and the fish paper stillborn for lack of a journal willing to publish it. I hope that the sudden upturn of academic work here will somehow jostle both of those projects back onto the straight track to completion, an end that has seemed to be close at hand for a long while now.

The first in-college dinner, in the refectory, was an unanticipated throwback to my Totem Park days, though with worse food and more tightly packed undergraduates. In the last while, I've felt a diminishing desire to be in the company of large numbers of other people; it's the same kind of socialization fatigue that tends to set in three-quarters of the way through parties. In this circumstance, as in that one, the solution is a period of solitude, followed by one-on-one socialization with someone of whom I am quite fond. The first of those can be had relatively easily, by means of the library, a book, and my iPod. The second will be a bit more difficult to come across.

I made my first attempt to use SkypeOut this evening, and found the quality to be sorely lacking. The first person who I actually got through to (by reason of their being near the phone, not because Skype was unable to connect with others) was Meghan. Aside from the unavoidable lag-time of information traveling some thousands of kilometres, there were also plenty of cut-outs and a fair bit of distortion. Carrying on a normal conversation wasn't really possible. While the $0.017 per minute rate is quite appealing, I don't think VoIP of this quality will dislodge POTS anytime soon. Despite that, I think at least some of it was the result of problems with her connection, since talking to Greg Polakoff a few minutes later went much more smoothly. While the quality was markedly worse than a normal phone, at least the conversation was unceasingly smooth and comprehensible. Speaking with Katie Benjamin later was somewhere between the two, while speaking with my brother Sasha (the only call to a landline) was markedly better than any of the other calls, as far as clarity goes. In my preliminary assessment, SkypeOut gets seven out of ten. Still, given that I've made more than forty minutes worth of calls in total now (at a cost of 65 Euro cents), I can't really complain. Unlike computer-to-computer Skype - which generally sounds a bit better than the Plain Old Telephone System - when you use SkypeOut, headphones are not necessary for avoiding an unpleasant echo.

Anyhow, if you have a telephone and you don't mind a bit of irritation with regards to sound quality, pass on the number to me and I will try giving you a call.

Propped up on beanbag chairs and with a pair of lamps cross-illuminating the pages, I finished a few more chapters from Hollis and Smith tonight. As the book has progressed, it has moved into areas that seem more and more relevant to me. Most usefully, the progression has offered some solid material for rebutting the cruder realist and structural realist views of international relations. The commentary on game theory, particularly where it is and is not useful, is also quite valuable. At a couple of points, the book demonstrates quite startlingly how it was written prior to the end of the cold war, with all that implied for my myriad conceptions of international relations. Today involved so much reading that, by 9:00pm, it became worthwhile to put on my glasses for the first time in many months. I take my determination to push forward with it as comforting evidence that I will be able to handle the demands of the M.Phil programme.

Tonight, I took a relatively short walk with Nora, which took us across the Isis and eventually to an adventure playground of the sort that doesn't exist anymore in litigious North America. It reminded me a lot of the one that used to be on Grouse Mountain, back in the tender days of my childhood, which has long since been razed and replaced by a pond. Nora says that once the substantive portion of our time here begins tomorrow, she will no longer have the opportunity to devote time to random wanderings and conversations. I think the start of classes will just banish the lingering apprehension of these preliminary days, still leaving all the same basic needs for food and companionship intact. I think we've been preemptively socializing as we will once classes start, just doing more of it per day than will later be possible.

Sorry today's entry is so haphazard and generally all over the place. It was written in fits and starts and I don't feel properly composed to order it sensibly, with elegant transitions, at the moment.

PS. Glancing over my server logs, I noticed that someone at Harvard is reading the blog. My only guess as to whom is Utpal Sandesara, who I met at the Student Conference on United States Affairs as West Point, in November of 2004. If so, "Hello, and I hope life is going well." If not, the mystery persists.

Posted by Milan at 11:25 PM