A long, long time ago I used to write for fun. It's amazing to think that such a thing ever occurred, but it did. Unfortunately, when I started to attend that strange place called St. Mary's, all inclination towards writing or reading disappeared abruptly. At the same time, all emails, blog postings, and Facebook messages began to take bulleted list form due to this forms convenience and lack of thought required. Why did this happen? Well, there is no time to write or read when you are assigned sixty plus pages of reading each night, or have to continuously work on twenty page papers. It just saps the life out of you.

Indeed, during autumn semester, I thought I was going to have a breakdown during the writing of my Historic Preservation lesson plan and my Cold War spy films paper. It got so bad that one day I panicked at the sight of thirty-odd books piled on my desk and almost drove home that night. Luckily, I managed to avoid any such episode during spring semester (although I did come close when I discovered that my entire thesis for my Econ Cultures paper was completely implausible) and was relieved when I handed in my Econ Cultures paper on the last day of finals. Normally, I would use the summer to relax and rebuild my relationship with reading and writing. Unfortunately, taking Macroeconomics and Microeconomics is preventing any such thing from happening. I have no idea if the month between ending Micro and going to Oxford will be enough to allow me to write clearly (or in a non-boring manner such as this) ever again.

Today was Independence Day (obviously) and so my father and I made the wise choice of going down to DC for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. This year's theme? NASA, Bhutan, and Texas. Yeah. Odd, right? Well, it turned out to be better than expected. Dad absolutely loved NASA (since he is a self-confessed science nerd) and I rather liked Bhutan. It's amazing to think that this small country is able to remain so isolated from the rest of the world. It will be interesting to see whether or not they will be able to continue to balance their traditions with globalization in the years to come. Perhaps the most interesting thing to me, however, is their policy of Gross National Happiness. (Wikipedia it.)

Ok, lost all motivation to even do this. Besides, I still have to read about 200 pages for my internship. Which is another problem entirely. Who even knows what is going to happen with that? I think that in taking chances I've managed to screw myself over completely.