“Many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist’s need for systematic reflection demands it.” -C. Wright Mills

So the family was here over the weekend. It was hectic, but surprisingly okay. Y2K cooked a great lunch, we went to the movies, and followed that up with a decent dinner at French Roast. Yesterday we went to my cousin’s kid’s christening and off to the new Churrascaria Plataforma in Tribeca. The most odd thing about the christening was just how otherworldly the ceremony was. I haven’t been to a church service in a long, long, long time. Though it was Episcopalian, it felt much like the Catholic ceremonies I grew up with. But all the ritual and religious magic felt so alien. I felt like I was in a Hindu temple where I could appreciate the religious passion but could not (and did not desire to) connect with underlying belief system. It was incomprehensible to me that people could engage the myth with such naivete. Ah, well, the natives will have their beliefs.

We went to see Memoirs of a Geisha with my folks on Saturday. The movie was lushly shot and pretty well done. I’m a sucker for those movies that depict suffering children struggling against all odds and overcoming them to achieve their dreams. And while Memoirs is a moderately interesting love story, one thing disturbs me about it. It’s really a pean to pedophilia. A man falls in love with a nine-year-old girl, buys her a ‘cherry’ ice, employs a geisha to train her to be a geisha so that he can have her later at fifteen-years-old, and then finally gets her love when he is two or three times his age. I suppose I understand: she was beautiful and clever. But shouldn’t we be a bit disturbed about this?

As to the last point, I’m in a perpetual crisis of confidence…as any regular reader will know. Facing my second and final comprehensive exam, I am maintaining a split personality. One the one hand, I have little worry that I’ll be able to pass the exam, but on the other, I feel like I’ll never pull the literature(s) together into a coherent understanding of development and society and the economy and further to make my mark. An amazing colleague here has job talks at fancy places and a book deal…all within 3.5 years of doctoral work. I’ll be lucky to get out in five! I’m loving it. I’m learning a lot. But knowledge is just too big for me to figure out how to fit it into a career!