Western Pennsylvania...

is very scenic. No really, it is. I've flown over the state of Pennsylvania a few times before and always thought that it looked so quaint and pretty from the air, and indeed it is. Noting that because I traveled outside of Pittsburgh today for the first time since arriving here back in early August, and the trip was to a small town a tad over an hour north of PGH (for the Allies retreat which was was good, met a few new folks.)

A few other random thoughts (I do love that format...):

• It is sort of sad that I have more experience with "true" winter weather than many of the students in my program (a majority of which are foreign students, primarily from China and, mainly, India.) Many of them have never even seen snow; to date, the coldest temperature that I have ever felt was 17 degrees, wind chill about 8 degrees, in Kentucky during an unseasonably/unreasonably cold and snowy Thanksgiving a few years ago. Was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. But my highly relative level of "experience" gives me a bit more confidence that I can survive an entire week (or two, or three...) of high's in the 20's...oh, I'm soooo going to need a summer in South Florida to defrost after this one...
  
• I have still taken a significant pay cut over what I could have made at ExxonMobil. Significant. And I have rarely been prouder of any decision in my life. It is not enough for those of us in business to preach that life gravitates around more than money; we have to actively demonstrate this through our actions, as opposed to following the route of fiscal expedience (part of this means embedding business decisions in a social and ecological context; part of it simply means thinking in a long-term, sustainable framework instead of this maddening focus on quarterly profits that seems to drive the entire American business world. Which is again part of why I identify as technologist first, business person second...)
• Tomorrow I plan on writing a piece on my take on minority issues - while hardly mentioning race. Yes, that is possible.
  
• If Florida passes Amendment 2 - effectively engraining anti-gay discrimination into the state's highest laws - I openly admit that I will start to (even more) strongly consider living in California (either Los Angeles or the Bay Area.) As my values and urban preferences have developed, I have increasingly realized that South Florida truly is the only part of the state that represents me - but it represents me extremely well.
• 90's music had a certain distinctness about it - think of songs like Jumper and Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind, All Star and Walkin' on the Sun by Smash Mouth, Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer, Under the Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers, 1979 by the Smashing Pumpkins, Barely Breathing by Duncan Sheik, No Scrubs by TLC, not to mention all of the boy bands near the end of the decade. All of that music is distinctly of the 1990's; even when I hear songs similar to them that I have not heard before, I can instinctly say "that's a 90's song." Is it just me, or does it seem like there has been no such notable trend this decade? I'm not necessarily saying that music today is categorically worse - though that is true in a wide array of examples - but I think the music industry has truly become super-proficient at producing "garbage pop" music dominated by one-hit wonders. Sort of hard for a distinct "sound" to coalesce around such a discordant array of pop blunders.
• Excess goes both ways. Beyond a doubt, the University of Florida is dominated by a culture that places an excessive emphasis on partying and sports, particularly football. The utter lack of interest in sports here at Carnegie Mellon has been a breath of fresh air, but on the other hand, the culture here places an excessive emphasis on work and studying - to the (quite evident!) detriment of social interaction and having fun. If UF students didn't take studying and academics nearly seriously enough, Carnegie Mellon students fail to understand that the library is not meant to be a place of permanent habitation. Isn't there a happy medium somewhere? At times, I feel like I've moved from one pole of the academic globe to another - and I've found that neither model suits my personality at all. I was clearly never a typical UF student - I never even attended a home football game - but the rather severe differences between myself and the average CMU student have become quite obvious during my 1.5 months here.
  
• This is my first time having digital cable - I've always had normal analog service up to now - and I don't think I could do without it again! I'm hardly a videophile, though, and have yet to be bitten by the HDTV bug. (I'm actually not an audiophile, either; massive surround sound systems have never particularly interested me.)
• I am terrified - terrified - by the prospect of the erosion of my French skills, as I am no longer actively enrolled in French courses (for the first time since I was 14 years old!) There are plenty of French speakers back in South Florida, but the overwhelming hegemony of Spanish as the foreign language there is irrefutable. I plan on starting to address those issues this week by watching the French news on Monday and Friday; reading a French newspaper and Sunday and Wednesday; and making sure that I am always reading a French book in addition to my regular English reading list. I'll probably even throw in some grammar and phonetics exercises to make sure I don't get rusty on those areas from time to time. More work, but it has to be done; I've invested far, far too much effort in my French studies to simply abandon them, and besides, France is too cool of a country. Probably will join the Miami/South Florida Alliance Francaise upon my return there.