As of 5pm on Friday, I'm officially done with my spring semester, and my first year of grad school.

It was grueling. My last paper, I worked on for 3 1/2 days straight - the whole exam period was a 3 1/2 week blur... whine whine whine.

Anyways, the end was a bit anticlimatic, as I was so worn out, I couldn't really thing straight.

So... what's next? Well, I'm in NYC right now - a New England tour being shortened to a long weekend in New York. Then it's back to DC to settle in and get a lot of stuff done that's been pushed off the last month. An internship is supposed to start at some time, but the start date is contingent upon my clearance coming in, a process that, by its nature, is ambiguous and uncertain. So, I may be back in Dallas for a week or so, I may go to Colorado for a wedding - I may be "unemployed" over the summer.

Anyways, in the present - Came out to NYC yesterday, on a beautiful day on a Chinatown bus driven like mad, but we managed to get here in 4 hours (a record, even compared to my own driving), while the sun was still up. Went out last night with Amy's best friend from college to K-town, ate Korean food (it's been a while), and had very overpriced coffee. Then we met up with Chris Yap, an old dallas peep. Today, it's off to hang out with Irvie, who's coming in from New Haven, and also Inok, who's in town.

My Friend Chris Lau has turned into a fob:
"And if you know Dan Hui, then you must know Heehorse, which inspire this site"
he recently wrote in his website. He might as well have writen, "Haro! Dan Hui, you site imspire my site!"

I've meant for a while to send a shoutout Chris. (now's a good time, since I have this paper to write - I'm taking a break, I swear!).

Chris is one of a small group of buddies I have from St. Marks, this snotty all-boys private school I went to for two years as a kid, the others in the group being Jason (aka. Manolo - don't ask), and Wendell. You can check out our crazy new years party 2001 in my album (too lazy to make link).

Chris has had quite a few adventures recently, and the latest one brought him to Hong Kong, via a job he got under false pretenses (i.e. being able to speak Mandarin). In anycase, as evidenced above, he's slowly turning into a fob. We'd better bring him back soon.

6pmish - Usually, when I'm writing a paper, I have one or two "killer" articles for where I get the bulk of my main idea / support / backup of my paper. I've been looking, but haven't found the "killer" source for this paper yet. It's frustrating. If anyone knows of any paper written that analyzes China's WTO entry from the standpoint of international trade theory... umm, email me?

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7pmish - I think I just found my killer paper, but it's all written in italics. Argh. Makes my head spin.

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9pm - When it rains... I've just stumbled on a wealth of information - now my problem is going through the heaps of articles and finding what's most helpful. Amy stopped by and suprised me in the library earlier. I was starting to lose the ability to focus my eyes, so it was a good time for a break - we walked around Dupont, on the other side of the circle. Some really cool residential streets. But my allergies started acting up...
Apparently the oceans are being severly overfished:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3028251.stm

When Amy and I were out visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium last summer, we got information about which fish was ecologically friendly to eat, and which were not.
Here's a link to that information - there's a link to a seafood chart for the West coast. Here's an East Coast version from a related organization.

I'm thinking maybe we should start using that.

My fear is that the world is so unstable, and people are so worried about the myriad of problems, that more fundamental things like the extinction of large predator fish will go unnoticed until there's no more sushi to eat.

On a brighter note, I'm getting some substantial work done on my paper.