Blogs

Inspired by Nick Bilton's NYTimes article Disruptions: Impulse Buys, Straight to a Screen, I decided to add up exactly how much money I sent to Amazon in 2012 for digital books.

Graduate school is a competitive, stressful and extremely demanding environment. We’re all continuously trying to live up to everybody’s expectations: our supervisors’ expectations, our perfectionism-induced expectations of ourselves, while trying to meet the demands of students, a family and friends. To stay sane in this pressure cooker, it’s important to come back to our senses regularly and regain focus.

Another overseas programs appears to be biting the dust. The University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) is not renewing its contract with the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT). This brings into question yet again why universities pursue these overseas ventures when they are rarely profitable and difficult to sustain.

I had been feeling achy and draggy for longer than I could remember. I had a chronic headache, too. I thought of these as flu-like symptoms, but not the flu, because I don't get the flu. I almost never even get a cold. I have what I sometimes refer to as "autoimmune surplus syndrome, or ASS": my system gobbles up every virus or germ that comes its way, and when it has nothing left to feast on, it turns on itself, like the Ouroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail. I worry about being devoured from within, but not about what is flying around in the air. I figured that feeling lousy was the price I had to pay for overloading myself with work, classes, and active vacations at my age.

Sometimes I just can't let things go. Sportswriter Rick Reilly's response to being "duped" by Lance Armstrong appears to be one of those things.

Reading between the lines for what's most important.

I was chatting with a friend and she asked what my New Year’s Resolution was. I paused and thought about how I do not really believe in these sorts of things, but then realized that my resolutions are formed in late August or September, prior to a new school term starting. Last year my resolution was to continue to make mentoring my mandate. This school year my resolution was for honesty.

It's a digital world, and I'm a digital girl. Well, sometimes. I use my Google calendar to remind me of every single event crammed into my days, my Dropbox account has all of my data and writing backed up so I can access it at any moment, I read off a Kindle before I go to sleep, and my phone pretty much runs my life from the moment the alarm goes off to the minute that I put it on silent for bedtime. Despite the fact that I tote my laptop with me everywhere and have thousands of PDFs and word documents for all my courses and research, I really like paper.