SOTU

We had the State of the Union on in our living room last night, but we ended up just talking over it most of the time. The SOTU tends to be hard to stomach in the first place, and it was made more difficult by the fact that George Bush was giving it. His speaking style coupled with the dubious content makes it hard to sustain forced credulity. Can't say I paid much more attention to Kaine's Democratic response, though. Except that left eyebrow -- that was gripping. (He'd raise both emphatically, and then the left one would just fail to come down in a timely manner.)

I've now had all my classes except one (Implementation). They seem pretty good on the whole. This term stats is using a textbook scarily titled "Introductory Econometrics" -- it's the first time I've ever read the "What is [field]?" intro that every textbook has with the intent of finding out.

I've got 7 classes, which is a lot, but not so bad once you consider that the two at Public Health will end in March and "Mass Media Writing" is only one credit. That course promises to be pretty awesome, as it is taught by Joe Sterne, who was the editor of the Baltimore Sun editorial page for decades.

The first two days at my State Highway internship went well -- I'm glad to have it, both from an experience and financial perspective. One reason I know that I've chosen the right field is that I'm actually sort of excited to learn the arcane (yet consequential!) details about dusty corners of public policy that this sort of job brings me in contact with. And I know it's bad practice to blog about your job (especially since this blog now shows up when you Google me), but let me add that the calculator on my desk at work calls its "=" key the "Answer Bar," which is just funny enough to make me smile when I look at it.