Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.

Work, friends, and NASCA

During my half-hour lunch at Staples today, the general manager of the store told me about how he trained as an electrical engineer and how the choice to go into retail was a terrible one. He meant to do so only temporarily, but after five years found that he couldn’t get out of it. Learning this put a new spin on the mildly tragic story of the Staples managers, for whom those fluorescent aisles represent a big chunk of the future, rather than a nasty short-term hurdle.

Tonight, I am meeting Tristan for what will almost surely be the last time before his departure. I hope that he enjoys being a grad student at York. I am sure we will remain in contact, by various electronic means – just as I expect to remain part of the electronic diaspora of friends I have been developing. Along with Tristan, it looks as though I will be meeting Alison and possibly Meaghan Beattie as well.

Both during the time from now until I catch my bus and during the time after I hang out with friends, I will be working to finish the first real version of the NASCA report. Fernando and I put in a good five and a half hours of reviewing last night: over rounds of coffee at Tim Horton’s. Bits of the paper have been greatly expanded while others have been melded into more appropriate language. Overall, the project is becoming more exciting as the report takes on a form closer and closer to that which it will finally possess.

PS. To clarify briefly for those who want to know precisely what is going on with the blog at the moment: the nine hundred or so entries from the past few years are gone for the indefinite future. The present form of the blog might be an intermediary one between the demise of the old blog and the creation of a distinctive Oxford era blog, or I might just choose to carry on with this URL and layout once I get there.

Staples era ending

To be reconnected with a lost partner in valuable conversations is an excellent thing. It’s even more excellent when it happens by means of a blog whose value you’ve been questioning and becomes further sweetened when you learn, quite unexpectedly, that you share the same favourite novel.

At work today, in the space of one hour, I earned Staples almost two weeks worth of my wages in profits. It was a realization tinged with bitterness. Not many more than a dozen shifts can be awaiting me, before I will abandon my red-dyed synthetic shirt forever and move on to better things. Meeting with Fernando tonight to produce our combined draft version of the NASCA report should be a hint of that; for most of our purposes, it works well to have his diplomat’s sense of tact counterpoint my desire to be provocative. In the end, we should all have a document we will be proud to show people.

In the past few days, I have been frustrated by my inability to devote any tranquil time to reading Hazzard’s The Great Fire. Such has been my appreciation so far, and my dedication to unlearn my undergraduate’s speed-reading, that I have been reading each chapter twice over. It is a tribute to the prose that the practice has been more than worthwhile.

Renaming the blog – starting it over – creates the uncanny sensation of initiating a new era. An era whose beginning, while certainly prompted by events outside my control, does not have its roots in the many and dramatic orbits I have occupied around the women who have defined my adult life. Perhaps that feeling of empowerment can become a defining characteristic.

Birth of a sibilant intake of breath

There will always be times in life when circumstances force us to start anew. Such is the case today, with regards to my most candid form of online presence. While the hundreds of pages that constitute Night’s Sindark Nave are not lost to the universe, they are to be effectively lost from the internet for at least the immediate future – in increasingly thorough fashion as various caches are cleared. This is a circumstance that seems to me regrettable but not avoidable.

The forum that succeeds it shall necessarily be a more circumscribed and restricted place than its forbear: again, a circumstance that I lament on many levels but feel bound to accept. It was always an experiment that combined boldness with folly to be so forthright in so open a medium. The possibility remains that, when I have the time to actually pick my way back through that lengthy archive, some portion of it will be returned to a form that is properly publicly accessible. For now, I ask that any bits you happen to possess or find be retained in a private capacity and not advertised or distributed.

Between work, the report, and preparing for my departure, I really don’t have the time to either create anything new and extensive or go back and render safe that which has already been written. For the moment, just feel confident that my urge to write is not a weak or passing one. I shall find a way.