Welcome to HA-noi Main STA-tion

So, I don't know how the popularity of this blog is going to hold up, what with everyone on summer vacation (unless you're working, and, well, I'm sorry if you are) and the heat and my inability to write anything of value anymore, but I am going to keep trying and hopefully hit my crazy blog writing stride again soon.

Jeremy Gordon, Adam Mishler, and I just returned from Hanoi (Vietnam), Bangkok (The Oriental City), and Ko Samet (the place the Beach Boys dream of when they go to sleep at night) and, while extremely hot (we were sweaty beasts for two whole weeks), we had an authentically Southeast Asian experience (whatever that means).

Now I am preparing to go straight into insane amounts of rehearsal for next week's choir concert. Wooooo. Hopefully, we will collectively avoid being beaten to death by our insane/sadistic conductor (she makes all of her clothes out of tablecloths...how is that possible?) But...it's all worth it because our performance is going to be at the (now emasculated...basically they closed the doors on the statue of our favorite dictator...so...not really a memorial to him anymore...) Chiang Kai-shek Memorial.

Oh, and...I got to see the dead body of Ho Chi Minh which brings my viewing of dead Communist dictators count up to 2. I just have to see Stalin now and I will have a completely set. It's always good to have life goals.

And the rain, rain, rain came down, down, down, and the rain, rain, rain came down.

I think the title says it all.

Semi-tropical island, I shake my fist at thee!!!!!

Grad School Part II (The Journey Continues?)

So, today in the middle of a huge and immensely long thunder/rainstorm, I dragged jetlagged Adam and Jeremy down to Zhengzhi University where I had an interview at the Labor Research Department (Jeremy and Adam were very good sports about it and very well behaved).

During the course of the interview (which lasted five minutes although I had to wait about forty to finally see the head of the department) I was informed that, if the University itself had no problems with my application, the Labor Research Institute would be happy to accept me as a member of their cheerfully anti-capitalist family. Now the question of the hour: Can I complete two grad school programs simultaneously??

I know you probably think I am crazy, but the Labor Research Institute is badass in a socialist kind of way and the Literature program is badass in a crazy, ancestoral Chinese, 5,000 years of history kind of way. How can I pass up either one?? Maybe I'll stop sleeping.