dispatch from madison

I'm back from DC, but will be leaving soon for Bloomington for a few days. When I left there upon finishing graduate school, I vowed I would never return until the city had been crushed and salt plowed into the ground so that nothing would ever grow again.* But this will be my second trip back in the forty months or so since leaving. I've never been one for considerably longstanding resolve.

One observation from DC: I've long fancied the Henry Ward Beecher quote "Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?" I have now discovered the answer to that question: the gift store of The International Spy Museum. After being in there thirty seconds, I resolved that I had to set a $100 limit on myself. Within five minutes, I was already two dollars over the limit** because of Four Things I Had To Have: (1) this magnetic levitating globe; (2) these magnetic finger puppets of famous revolutionaries (Che Guevara, Gandhi, Mandela, and Trotsky); (3) a Rosetta Stone mousepad (already out of the plastic and on my desk here in the RV) and (4) a gift for a friend who sometimes reads the weblog (no, not you.)

On a different front today, word in my inbox is that Karen Lutfey and I just got our very-long-in-the-works ethnographic paper conditionally accepted by AJS. And just as we are starting to talk about inferences from ethnographic data in my graduate methods course.

My God, it is 5:30 AM.

* No offense, friends still in Bloomington, but you know that last stretch finishing the dissertation was kinda rough.

** I've never been good at short-term resolve.