...I just have to get the whole "Journeying" part down...

Went to the Physical Therapist today, who confirmed that even though my wrists ARE to some extent effed up, I can still head to the Swamp and punch things, as long as I'm careful and pay attention to the pain (which I tend to ignore, REALLY bad idea, it's there for a reason) and modify whatever I'm doing in such a way that it doesn't hurt any more. Plus she gave me a set of exercises to do that will strengthen my tendons, and hopefully get me to the point where I don't have to modify anything.

This also means that I can work out on Tuesdays and Thursdays with Aaron and Judd, and not feel like a wuss about not doing push-ups. It was pathetic...last time I worked out with Judd a week or two ago, I could only do 9 in a row before doing them on my knees. BAH. I used to do 4 sets of 25, dammit. Gotta get back into that...

In other news, I've got an Econ prelim on Monday that will be really difficult. Really got to buckle down and study intensely for this one. Econ is one of those subjects that just doesn't stick in my brain-- individual little concepts I understand, but when it comes to seeing the entire system as a whole I get confused. BLARGH. We'll see.

Currently I'm working on a theory paper for my privatization class...I really like the prof, but I'm a little scared because I have a feeling she's a tough grader...and I'm really not sure what her expectations are. Fascinating material, though...I've been dreaming about it (how exactly you dream about privatization policy, I'm really not sure, but I know I wake up with lists and connections and concepts whirling in my head...) so it's been percolating in m'brain for the past week or so. Heh...at least in my subconscious mind. Let's see if my conscious mind can actually DO something coherent with it.

The NYC Dept. of Homeless Services contract out 55 of their 57 Single Adult shelters to non-profit service providers. Between Family Services and Single Adult Services, DHS dontracts to over 150 different non-profits. There is a vast continuum of service delivery quality, ranging from places that are nicer than my apartment here in Ithaca that offer clients free aromatherapy, to places that are extremely violent and drug-ridden (we had two clients in one shelter shoot each other the day before I left), to places that may be health hazards.

How do you monitor a service that serves a population that, honestly, most people don't really care about? In effect, one of the main reasons that the Department of Homeless Services was created was because of the large-scale deinstitutionalization from mental hospitals during the 1960's, which flushed a large number of mentally ill folks onto the streets. Seeing homeless people everywhere started to make the rest of the city residents very uncomfortable, so DHS was created to somehow "manage" the population so that the rest of us didn't have to deal with seeing them any more. The whole reason the department was created was, in some ways, due to NIMBYism.

With this in mind, how can democratic participation help improve service delivery in this situation, or in situations such as welfare services, particularly when they're contracted out to private providers?

And on the governmental supervisory side, how do you achieve a certain quality of service in human services when trying to balance the directives of the local government with the lack of adequate budget?

How can redundant competition occur when there's scant motivation for quality service in the first place?

Should services such as these, that serve the most underpriveleged folks in a locale, be entrusted to contracts, rather than being directly under the government in a "command and control"-type organizational structure?

Also-- how does all of this relate to the lack of voter turnout in this country?

Had a much better day today than the past few-- wasn't dead tired, and my motivation was back. Rock on. Set up the router in our house so that Judd and I can be online at *gasp* the SAME TIME! Very nice...futzed about with my desk, made it an actual workspace. Good stuff. AND, Judd and I are FINALLY beginning our workout routine tomorrow. Kick-ass.

For some bizarre reason, while searching for a job on the student jobs/internships page, I applied for this job as a tutor/mentor a 15 year old girl. I really don't know why-- I've never really worked with teenaged girls...very weird, don't know why I did it. This girl's dad writes back, replying to all thirty people who applied for the job. He gives some details on the kid, and then says to write back if we're still interested. So I did...and then today, he writes me back asking if I want to set up an appointment/interview next week to meet him and his kid. Apparently I went to elementary, middle and high school with his next door neighbor's kid, and she vouched for me (which was very kind of her, considering I haven't seen her in about fifteen years). Damn. Never thought I'd ever be in the position to be anyone's mentor...

So now I'm kind of nervous. I think I could do a good job with this, depending on the kid...I'm going to meet her and her parents this Tuesday. We'll see.

In other news, today I visited the website of the company that produces the comics my sister and I grew up on as children-- all about Indian history, mythology, folk tales...they were so precious, especially growing up as diasporic kids. More on that later, but check it out: www.amarchitrakatha.com

Felt like crap after classes today, tried to go to the library and do work, kept nodding off...eventually came back home and slept from 4 till 8:30pm. Not good.

Now I'm annoyed because I should be doing homework now, but I haven't set my desk up. For some reason my brain is steadfastly opposed to doing the intelligent thing: cleaning up my desk, hooking up the router I bought from Jonesy and just GETTING TO IT.

I could be cleaning up the place or arranging stuff in the bedroom...but I'm not. I'm just overwhelmed by this restless-yet-nonproductive bullcrap. I feel like a slug. I'm restless but I feel physically drained. Dammit.

I wish there was someplace downtown (besides State Street and Manos) that was open late. Surprising that there's nowhere really open past 8pm or so to go and get a cup of coffee and do work. Going to be doing homework with Julie tomorrow, which rocks. She's kind of the perfect study buddy-- doesn't get distracted by conversation and stays focused.

Where did my focus go? It's disappeared the past couple of days. I've also been smoking too much, I think...and every time I light one up lately, it's been entirely unsatisfying. My lungs feel heavy. I need to slow down on the cigs for a while, I'm sure it's not contributing to my current mental/physical state. It's disturbing how easy it is to roll a cigarette, light it up and then realize that I didn't really even want it in the first place.

Blargh.

We had the most amazing speaker at my program's weekly colloquium lecture today: Professor Stuart Hart, from (surprisingly) the Johnson School of Management.

Basically, he's created a template for corporate re-structuring (mental as well as operational) that can address social issues such as poverty and waste reduction in such a way that it REDUCES THE FIRMS' COSTS. And he has multiple examples of companies who have done so, and reduced their costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars. He's making it PROFITABLE for corporations to do GOOD THINGS. Who'd've thunk it?!

Good lord, he was super inspirational.

Shit. Now I REALLY have NO idea what to write my thesis on. At first I was thinking something to do with welfare policy...my advisor wants me to do something on homelessness, because of my work this summer, but honestly, I'm really not that jazzed about that. I mean, it would be convenient, because of my connections, but...I dunno.

I've got some background in what Hart spoke on today, in terms of bottom-up rather than top-down managerial organization...I did an awesome independent study on democratizing research with Davydd Greenwood, one of my most favorite professors ever, who I'm pretty sure is involved in the center that Hart founded at CU (the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise).

Dammit, why do I have to be interested in too many things??!!

...what would be the one thing in your laboratory that would be absolutely vital, that you just couldn't do without?

My friend JJ came to my Government, Economy and Public Policy class with me today. I was glad he came with me for three reasons:
1) He's hella smart.
2) Because I don't know anyone else in the class, so it was nice to have company! :)
3) Because I had somebody to talk about this stuff with who was coming at it from a completely different perspective from mine.

My friendship with JJ is one that I cherish, particularly because we have such vastly different world-views and upbringings. Rock. I hope he gets to attend this class with me on a regular basis this semester...although parking on campus is a bitch. We'll see.

My Book-Rating Scale:

Compulsive: Late for work because I couldn’t stop reading it.
Great: Intense, interesting and excellent…but not compulsive.
Good: I’d recommend it—it was good.
Brain Candy: Fun summer read.
Eh...: It held my interest enough that I finished the book.
Never again: This book is poop.


Books I read this summer:

Sunshine, Robin McKinley________________________________Brain Candy
Daughter of Fortune, Isabelle Allende___________________Eh...
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeannette Winterson_____Great
The Scar, China Mieville________________________________Compulsive
The Sparrow (re-read)___________________________________Compulsive
The Princess Bride (re-read)____________________________Brain Candy
Small Wonder, Barbara Kingsolver________________________Good
Friend of the Earth, T.C. Boyle_________________________Good
Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons______________________________Good
Geek Love, Katherine Dunn_______________________________Compulsive
Fury, Salman Rushdie____________________________________Good
The Wild Party, Art Spiegelman__________________________Great
Fight Club (re-read), Chuck Palahniuk___________________Brain Candy
Harry Potter 6: The Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling_____Compulsive
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami_____________Good (I liked "A Wild Sheep Chase" better.)
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg____Great
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee_______________________Great

Currently Reading: an anthology that Judd got out of the library, "Women of Wonder, The Classic Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s," edited by Pamela Sargent-- so far so good, some classics by Vonda N. McIntyre, MZB and Anne McCaffrey that I'd read before, but a bunch by authors whom I'd never heard of. Kick-ass.


Want to Read:

The Iron Council, China Mieville
Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie
Re-read all of "A Song of Ice and Fire" by GRRM, as I've forgotten most of it...I want to be able to read the new one as soon as it comes out, but with school in the way, that might not be too realistic.


Any recommendations?

Back in Ithaca, and I sure appreciate the air around here. I'm not a city person, I think...although now I know I could live there for a while, should career demands dictate.

Classes are interesting-- I'm getting a good dose of economics, which is going to kick my ass, but it's good because my econ background is severely lacking.

Pardon me while I geek out. I'm taking:

Devolution, Privatization and the New Public Management: this class is particularly relevant since I dealt with the whole government-agency-contracting-out-to-a-private-service-provider issue this summer at DHS. It'll be neat to learn what sort of situations privatization works best in...and what sort of managerial conditions are necessary for it to succeed. Plus, my prof's current research is about how to take the administrative/planning system we have for government departments such as, for example, the department of transportation, and see how/whether she can tweak that framework into creating services such as child care...so that RULES.

Government, the Economy and Public Policy: I could listen to this professor read recipes all day. He's the best lecturer EVER. Interesting guy-- describes himself as a "Southern Jewish boy raised in the Baptist tradition". His pet peeve is the "corruption" of language: i.e., he blames our generation for "ruining his personal life", because we use profanity so often that "nothing is dirty or taboo any more." Lots of readings about theories of social control. He also wiggles his butt when he gets excited and wants to emphasize something!
Soundbites:
"Dale Carnegie raised hypocrisy to a *insert butt-wiggle* SCIENCE!!"
"The major function of casinos in the U.S. economy is to launder criminal money. And steal a bit of yours along the way."
"In the social sciences, the plural of 'anecdote' is 'data'."
Anyway-- so far, can't say enough good things about the guy.

Ethics, Public Policy and American Society: A seminar taught by my advisor, a very sweet and extremely learned man who is an emeritus professor here. This class basically runs through the eternal argument of: where does policy/government stand on the spectrum between religion and law? Or, does it have anything to do with religion, and simply with power relations? Lots of good arguments...we're reading Machiavelli's The Prince, and The Crucible and some other literary works in this class as well. Some excerpts from the Bible, the Koran. This'll be low-stress and fun.

Public Finance, the Microeconomics of Government: Ew. Gross. Although, my prof seems cool...but it'll be a struggle. I just barely pulled a B in my intermediate microeconomics class last semester...so we'll see. I just don't seem to retain this shit.

And now...onward, to read about the "Economic Transformation of America."