on a lovely sunday night when we shared yet another grapefruit...

we also made the plan. the plan consists of the six weeks we have to acquire the intellectual capacity to kick-ass (not sure what exactly this means anymore, but still that's the objective...) we gave a week for every major school in IR, we marked our calendars, also added the papers that we need to write during those six weeks, as well as the classes/subjects we need to review, and the fellowship applications we'd like to make... decided what we're gonna read for the first week to be able to navigate in the dark waters of realist anarchy. and... boy, it looks scary!

so, according to the plan, this is the week of realism.
the memorable sentence of the day, of course comes from morgenthau: "politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature."
also, we have a beautiful table showing the different operationalizations of 'power' in variants of realism.
not much fun yet.. we're just waiting for the days when 'fear and insecurity will vary' and the cyclical history will repeat itself once more...

the day when it snowed like there is no tomorrow

when it snows so much, and the real world outside looks like a winter/wonderland it is kinda hard to work. besides, I'm still living in the vampire-like sleeping schedule, which leaves a very little time to do work if I decide to socialize during the time normal people live. So, the day when it snowed like there was no tomorrow wasn't a very productive day, but it was a fun day spent with a dear friend and two bottles of wine, (well, there were some bottles of beer, too, but i couldn't count all of them)
the highlight of the night was when i uttered the sentence: "don't you call me ever again a bourgeois" which entertained my friend so much, i don't know why :)
right now i'm trying to decide which one is worse: alcoholism or insomnia? I probably should stop treating alcohol as if it was sleeping pills.
s.

Day 1

S started with the 3-hour a day regimen. R is still only listening (and celebrating the end of an identity crisis). We have a table of theories of foreign policy, 12 downloaded articles, 4 interlibrary-loan requested articles, and call numbers for books S is assigned to read.

What we learned today: Anarchy in Neo/Classical Realism is murky and difficult to read.

Day 0

How we decided to kick ass...

We've had a number of days when we decided to kick ass, but we didn't (or couldn't). We ended up being ass-kicked. So, now we have a blog to write about it.

The last time we decided to kick-ass was yesterday, when our sharp insights and excellent breadth of the IR paradigms (even beyond the mainstream, for one of us) were rewarded with grades that clearly displayed a misperception of the distribution of our capabilities by the instructor. So instead of trying to balance power, we decided to be offensive realists, (which is all about change according to one of us who also managed to go beyond the mainstream), and to challenge the status-quo powers.
So, we're gonna kick-ass, again. this time for real. and write about it here (because we're lame, but ready to make fun of it)