12/7 Subwaying listening to an old tape and remembering my love for some kinds of guitar. Don Caballero, first album (For Respect). whew! you know when you know every bit of an album so well you can feel it? you can feel the next part coming, the changes, the melodies... Walking across the wet concrete towards my office, it's warm out, unseasonable, and smells like spring. the smell and feel of damp air blowing against my face calls up a sense memory of college, me walking somewhere, in a smaller world.

12/4 Yipee! Got very useful email, intelligently and nonjudgmentally taking me to task for some parts of my econ rants. while lovely expressions of rage, they contain some errors, upon rereading. my bad. A rewrite or three is in order. I'd been working on them already, but this email gives me some nice directions to go in.
The main thing that I should start with is that I am perpetually dancing back and forth between insider/outsider status in the field of economics. (Familiar sensation). So when i rant against "economics" I'm ranting against my encounters with something -i'm trying to pay attention to how economists (and writers about economic issues) construct the field they are writing from. My encounters are, first and foremost, particularly american. This was especially noticeable at the IAFFE conference (International Association For Feminist Economics) in Amsterdam in june. The americans (myself included) often compained about economics as a field in a way the europeans didn't, keeping it nearly synonymous with a particular kind of neoclassical theory. This is one of the main reasons I am looking to study outside of the US, because it really does seem like much of mainstream american economics is chugging merrily off in a direction quite separate from the rest of the world (and not incidentally, much of america's own economic history). And from the lessons one might gain from contact and context.

work is busy today so I'll stop there for now. suffice to stay, substantial renovation and rererepresentation is in order. with a side of mango chutney.

12/3 Ok been back. being back. A professor here accidentally walked off with my disk with last updates, and I haven't been able to figure out which. sabotage! naw, technophobia.
Got home Sunday night, met after customs by ex/not ex. After customs, where no less than FOUR customs officers descended on me simultaneously from all directions, calling "how long will you be visiting the US?" should i be flattered? thanks, I'm from here.

had a lovely welcome back to the land of the uninsured: while I was gone, ex/not ex was in a bike accident. uninsured bike courier - hit a (jaywalking) pedestrian, bounced off him into an armored truck (parked in a crosswalk). While bleeding on the ground, a cop tried to fine him 200 dollars for not wearing his license visibly. Couldn't afford an ambulance ride, but couldn't walk to get into a cab. so called ambulance. Once in hospital, where they knew he was uninsured, they left him on a stretcher for half an hour going into shock, until he demanded some attention and got a few wounds dressed. however his spine injury was still untended. 20 minutes later, he flags down an attendant and asks if he is getting an x-ray. "uh we're observing you right now." not until he DEMANDS an ex-ray for his injury to his spine does he get one.

all this makes me spitting mad. my econ prof said the other day that 23% of americans are uninsured. its obscene. single payer, single payer, single payer.

(he's doing better. a fractured vertebra -one of the bottom 7, so no brace necessary.)