holy smokes! new post!

Hi friends,

12 days and counting (down) until I head back to the Land of the Free and the Brave for an indefinite amount of time. At this precise moment, I'm at the edge of my seat waiting to go back, feeling extra-homesick (something I thankfully haven't been experiencing most of the term) and ready to see where new things lead. It's been hard to concentrate lately, saying goodbye to friends who are slowly leaving L'Abri, and contemplating where I'll be in a couple of months. It doesn't help that it's a foggy and wet day, of course.

Community life does have its downsides, some of which are
1) saying goodbye to people, and
2) barely ever having privacy.

If you know me than you know that I'm the kind of person that loves having at least three hours by myself a day, and that's been pared back to almost nothing (excluding bathroom time) here in Bellevue. I suppose it's been good for me; I know I can be stingy with my alone time (and other things) so this helps me get over some of those issues, but the consequences are that I'm more tired than usual.

Anyway, I'm intending to do a post on the different books I've gotten really excited about this term, but there's quite a long list so I'll just start with two, and give you a kind of shoddy blurb about them.

The first is Freakonomics, the revised edition, which I bought in a bookstore in Geneva over the break. Freakonomics is a lot of fun to read, and for those of us who have never been introduced to the exciting side of economics before, the first couple of chapters give you a quick primer on how to think about things like incentives and causation vs. indication in stats and polls. I know, I should've understood that kind of thing from statistics my senior year of high school, but I was leaning on the brains of Dave and Shannon throughout that class and it's a wonder I came out alive.

Okay, the other is Suburban Nation, which I avoided for a long time because I didn't want to read a whiny treatise on how boring America is. But it's not like that; it's a book written by a team of architects and city-planners advocating for wise city development (instead of pretending that "no development" is a viable possibly). The book does an excellent job pointing out connections between city planning and social phenomena, such as the separation of classes and the fact that Americans live in their cars. Noting that the servant (cars) have become our masters (building cities around highway design, instead of the other way around), the authors of this book call for a return to traditional neighborhood planning model, where communities of people have meaningful places to meet and assemble in. I love it!

Okay, that's all for now. More later!