Dear God, Why Am I Not Working Yet?

I think the best justification I can come up with for starting this blog is that it will serve as a shaming/commitment device: maybe other, similarly useless students will find my mumblings and write me scathing emails, and I will be jerked out of this pseudo-intellectual funk and into a super-creative 'flow'.

(My mother was an academic in the field of education, and 'the flow' is actually the technical term education specialist give to the state of 'high cognitition,' where everything just... er, flows. Mad props, of course, at this point must be given to UCT's Professor Janelidze for sharing with us his experiences - 'it is like the combination of a fantastic dream and an amazing state where your mind works at a very high level of precision,' a description which led the great young physicist Tom van Heerden to postulate that one of the worlds' foremost category theorists does his best work on acid.)

My real reason for writing this, though, is naturally my childish assumption that by copying everything that current economics PhD students have done - take lots of courses in analysis and topology, cream the GREs, blog - I will ensure myself a place at MIT or Berkeley or something, Matt Rabin will concede that I am his rightful heir as genius-come-hipster (but without the homosexuality), and finally my friends in the hard sciences will admit that maybe there are people in the social sciences who are not stupid. Watertight logic, guys, watertight.