Tina's wanderings around the world

Just a few notes here. In the midst of an abundant amount of free time, in an effort to be productive and continue building on my acquisition of higher education, I signed up for a free, online university class through Coursera . There's a huge variety of classes available for those so inclined to expand their knowledge base and the first that really caught my eye was a class entitled "How to Change the World" being lead by the President of Wesleyan University, Michael Roth. The class is based on this awesome-looking event that was held last year called the Social Good Summit that joined a massive list of impressive, do-gooder speakers. Right up my alley. I signed up straight away. The first week was less of an overview of the course, but giving a sort of context in which to think about the proceeding week's themes. It was based on the topic of "social goods", what social goods are, how they're governed, how they should be governed and why this is imp...

We're now in our second month of US living, rapidly approaching month three. Although there's a certain sense of normalcy to life these days, normal is a relative term. At this time last year, normal was going to work then being bored and trying to figure out what to do while on the summer holiday from grad school. A few months later, it was driving to the university early in the morning, studying for a few hours, going to work, going to class, then going to work again and returning home around 10pm. Then for three months, normal was wandering around southeast Asia, sight seeing, testing street food, riding in various modes of rickety transportation and walking, walking, walking. Now normal is some other version of a routine that will also change soon. Wake up, maybe go for a run, spend hours on the computer job searching, furniture searching, reading the news, ordering books and CDs from the library (I heart the Seattle Public Library system), and all of the other ways I manag...