The following is an excerpt from a response I wrote to an individual in the Peace Corps Boston office, requesting answers to some generic questions about life as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Education sector. I spent like three hours writing it so I figured it would be good to share it here, whether or not Boston decides to use it for anything.
I got a response from the School of Business Administration at the University of Vermont yesterday, to my inquiry about my “advanced standing” in their MBA program. It turns out that what this means, is that I could skip all of the core requirements and jump straight into the advanced coursework. Here are the details.
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Yes, I’m setting myself (and you, gentle reader) to experience random posts. These posts will cover something, or nothing, or anything in between. Generally, they’ll contain blurbs of stuffs-going-on that are interesting but don’t really necessitate an entire post of their own. That said, shall we begin?
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I love ‘em. Especially the kind that make you contort images in your head, find patterns in things that seemingly have none, and basically figure out just what all that stuff in your skull is made of.
On the other side of the fence, right? Apparently so. I just spoke with a new friend of mine from Morocco, newly acquired this last weekend while I was vacationing in Florida. Her name is Nadia, and she works in the Morocco section of Epcot at Disney World (logically). We ended up talking for a while and, well, we sorta hit it off.
Okay, it’s a bit outdated, but still check this out. This is, from what I understand, the best-guess model of a home computer, 50 years in the future – from the year 1954. Makes you wonder a bit: what do we currently think things will be like in 50 years? How far off are we?
I go on binges. No, not the alcoholic kind, I had my fill of that back in college and I learned real fast just how not fun those can be. No, I’m talking about intellectual binges, the kind where your mind grapples around some topic and doesn’t let go until it’s had its fill.
I never know when they’re going to hit, and I never know just what they’re going to be. All I know is that when they hit, I become so absorbed in whatever it is I’m binging on that lots of other things that really ought to warrant a degree of my attention get pushed to the wayside until I’m through. Then, after I’ve had my fill, I may not think about what it was I was binging on again for weeks, or even months.
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Rome was at one time the Top Dog, the Big Cheese, the sociocultural epicenter of the civilized world. Yet in 476 A.D., it is accepted that Rome fell from power (although some theories state that Rome did not so much fall as it did slide over a period of several centuries). Why did this happen, and what can America learn from it? America is what Rome was – are we doomed to repeat history?
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I think that in our culture, there’s not enough focus on balance. Our society places a high value on extreme practices, and I think that it’s been a cause of many of our problems. Working 80 hour weeks. Enrolling our kids into countless extracurricular activities that they don’t have time to play and be silly as kids are supposed to do. The perceived need to earn $100,000 a year, or own a yacht, or have a really large house and expensive cars. Television programs like “Fear Factor.” All extreme; all unnecessary.
I believe much of this extremism is facilitated by our society’s highly competitive culture; at a familiar neighborhood level, the need to “keep up with the Joneses.” We all want to be successful – there’s nothing wrong with that. I want to be successful, too. However, this barometer by which we’re taught to gauge success is not perfect: it lacks balance.
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