I’m right now getting breakfast at the Artisan Cafe in Trumasburg, the best french bakery I’ve discovered outside of Hyde Park Chicago, and trying to recover from the last twelve hours or so. Yesterday I attended an excellent (and slightly mindbending) anthro colloquium at Cornell. After it I was cohost of this year’s first grad student run potluck dinner (a Cornell Anthro tradition). After watching the debates and cleaning after the shin-dig, I had a second wind and hopped into my car for a trip back to Rochester.

So far, so good…

Or so I thought. Then my clutch died in the middle of nowhere on Route 89. At midnight. In a zone with no cell reception. At all.

I did the smart thing, and stayed with the car. And a sheriff finally came by. At 6am. Oy.

So I’m a bit bleary eye’d. Thankfully, the coffee is helping tremendously.

Today was the type of day that makes the past few years of theory worthwhile.

Before I go any further, a brief digression: I’m not good with philosophy. Not in the “I don’t see the value of it” way. Nah, I’m at the more fundimental “I don’t understand it” way. I wasn’t trained to read it. And stuff like Marx’s “negation of the negation” stuff just causes my eyes to glaze over. It’s not for lack of trying mind you. But its been a stuggle since I dove into the social sciences.

Digression completed, my exciting news is that I think I finally “get” Hagel’s dialectic — the key to unlocking a lot of stuff. After an excellent lecture in my Professional Seminar class, it’s making a lot more sense. My professor, Dominic Boyer, gave an amazing lecture that really connected a number of dots for me (not the least of which was getting me beyond “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” to “becoming, negation, sublimation”).

Have a lot more to write about this, but I need to cut it off here so I can hopefully get in a proposal for Siggraph 2009.

Since this is Friday, it means I’ve made it through the first week of PhD studies and my shifted role at RIT. So far things are going well. I really appreciate the “breathing room” that the semester system is giving me to study. At this point at RIT or Chicago I’d be thinking “oh crap, we’re already 10% of the way through the class!” 1/15 doesn’t seem anywhere as bad (also because I know there are days off in there).

I’m in the process of preparing to meet with this week’s colloquium presenter — Adam Reed of St. Andrews University. He’s published two good articles on blogging and, reading them, I realized that I haven’t posted since school began.

Um… so… that’s about it. Things are going well. I’m starting to get the rhythm of this down. Which is good.