A new semester, a new chance to fully intend to blog more! As a start, let's list my classes.

7.23 Immunology
11.003 Methods of Policy Analysis
17.01 Justice
17.021 Philosophy of Law

I'm generally enjoying my classes--a lot more reading and a lot fewer problem sets than most terms! I am, however, having to put up with my classmates who strongly wish to share their Strong Opinions on a Variety of Important Issues. Some of them actually have useful things to say, of course, but there are two main breeds of conversationalist who are driving me up the wall. They are:
- The Stream-of-Consciousness Free Associator. This student knows that she is very intelligent, and therefore believes that thinking out loud is interesting to the rest of the class. Her comments go along the lines of "Well, the word justice reminds me of this one time I saw a newspaper article on a thing that didn't seem fair to me, and that was really unjust, so I think that justice is very important and we should care about it deeply..." She glanced over the words in the reading, but got too distracted by her thoughts on those words to bother figuring out what the author was trying to say.
- The Alternate Professor. This guy has been thinking extremely hard about these issues for years and years and years and has a comprehensive theory of things that he plans on sharing with the class in the 10-minute lecture he has prepared for his portion of the discussion. He will expound at great length on his theories of political philosophy. They will have very little to do with the discussion at hand, but it is clear that he cares deeply and will become extremely upset if interrupted for any reason.

Those of you who have ever met me may at this point be thinking that I have no grounds to criticize those who have Strong Opinions about a Variety of Important Issues. To this, I can only assert that I have in fact learned how to play well with others in conversation...

In other news, I have a man. He is delightful. He will be described more thoroughly in a future post.