Emiratio

My dad'll be proud of me now!

A cool fact I learned recently:  I'm currently attending a university where Milton Friedman was educated!  Why wasn't I told when I was a prospective?!  (OK, I don't expect to have been told that fact when I was a prospective -- but there's a nearby, contextually salient fact . . .)

Anyway, my days are currently filled with packing stuff up (I have to move again, since the building I'm living in is being sold) and finishing some last-minute errands.  As soon as I'm done, I'll be hopping on a plane to the West coast, to hang out with the WWU profs (as early as this weekend, I'm hoping!).  Wish me luck getting over there soon!

What's so great about being unconscious, anyway?

Well, this is new.  I'm used to having difficulty getting to sleep -- and with all the ideas in the air here and at WWU, that's no wonder.  But I've always resisted insomnia before.  I know it's not healthy to go without sleep for large amounts of time.

Lately, though, I've become weak-willed.  I suspect it's due to the combination of seeing my summer slip by faster than I expected (there's a B-theoretic translation around here somewhere . . .) and knowing that making my day longer is as easy as keeping myself conscious and in front of the laptop.  So I've begun to sleep less frequently than I should (though, in my defence, the infrequency is partly counterbalanced by extended duration).

This has got to be common, right?  Summer comes, and the daily requirements that keep us students on a semi-normal schedule disappear.  And then it's only natural to take advantage of the large expanses of interruption-free time.

Still, I am feeling a bit more productive.  And I can also look forward to a return to semi-normalcy soon:  At the end of the month I'll be going to the BSPC, where though I'll go without much sleep for about a week, it'll be justified lack of sleep.  And then I'm off to Alaska for most of August, where everything is wholesome and lovely and good.

I suspect I won't be updating here much for the next couple months, so happy summer, everyone!

What's 'next'?

In the June 13th post, I said that the Rutgers Philosophy of Religion conference will take place next January.  I meant this January.  But this January is next January, isn't it?  Did I succeed in conveying what I wanted (without relying on a lot of charitable interpretation, or extra information)?

It's confusing to me, because people say, e.g., 'this Sunday' to refer to the temporally closest Sunday in the future direction, and 'next Sunday' to refer to the one after that.  I can understand using, e.g., 'this week' to refer to the week in progress at the time of the utterance, and 'next week' to refer to the one that follows it, but what's up with the Sunday-talk?  Am I just being misled by some anomalous data?