Resolved: Get Things Done

I made the mistake of going to Perkins tonight, drinking an entire pot of coffee, and reading Bronislaw Malinowski's "Crime and Custom in Savage Society" in one sitting. It's about the worst trip ever. A friend of mine from high school showed up just after I'd put down the book and moved on to June Nash's "We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us," and asked a question about relativism and I totally flipped out. When I fervently announced that I do believe in ethics and they can be a priori and to say otherwise is not only philosophically contradictory but also pragmatically akin to anarchy - ANARCHY! - he started to laugh and I was like, um, sorry about that, I just drank a pot of black coffee and I'm a little jacked. The moral of the story is that I probably should have caught up on reading and writing over this last weekend in Fargo, but instead, I spent it learning about the Global Gag Rule, nuclearism, the President's Malaria Initiative, family planning and Japanese soft power, water purification systems, conflicts in Angola, along the Nile, and in Sudan, partisanship and the Farm Bill, and the African Union, which is perhaps a pretty good trade-off for seven rounds of judging. I was going to say that judging debate is the only time I get paid to learn, but I guess that's also kind of true of my master's degree, which is feeling a little neglected right about now.