link after link

So there's been a string of links with blurbs for quite some time. For whatever reason, there's something oddly exposing about writing something more online. Somehow it's easier to express outrage about the world and cite the many examples compared to trying to convey something more complicated in an elegant way. Or post something benign regarding penguins.

I've cancelled my New York Times subscription, and I need to reconfigure AvantGo on my Palm, so I'm oddly disconnected from the intricacies of the world. I have no television, and I only spend the occasional half hour glazed over in the graduate lounge, so there's been kind of a removal from contemporary news and culture that is somewhat pleaseing. A scan of the NYT headlines online, the occasional in depth salon article, both managing to convey something about the world around, offer only the smallest slice.

I feel physically frenetic, and it manifests in chugging coffee, aggressive nailbiting, just not being able to sit still. I ran down the canal trail the other day when it was still perfectly beautiful, a "9" out of "10" for fitness according to weather.com. It was beautiful and peaceful around, and I managed to stomp out some of the intensity that's been churning about.

In a sense it's reasonable to feel like the world's an unsetting place. I'm in a policy/urban planning program, and it's clear that from a fairly objective standpoint, there are a lot of parts of our society that need a lot of work. And while there are arguably some nice aspects of Princeton including the aforementioned canal trail (used for to ship goods before the era of the train I learned in Planning Methods this past week), there's also the fact that it's an affluent suburb filled with some of the most privileged, entitled, and oblivious people in the world.

Sometimes writing things out helps clarify thoughts. Other times, it just looks like the same crap that we've all seen and thought before...