SUBSTANTIARREORGANIZATION

In the library still, feeling a little peaked.

Got a sociology background paper back, and the A-minusness of it is really bothering me. I'm thinking I'm in way over my head with this Canadian banking industry thing. It's a sociology paper! I should've done something soft and fluffy and delicious, and instead I'm stuck in a quagmire of economic theory and the looming threat of statistical analyses of Canadian statistics I can't seem to find. Ok, so the theory part's pretty straightforward: Gary Becker (1957) posited that with increased competition (and decreased market concentration [Ashenfelter & Hannan, 1986] and increased deregulation [Black & Strahan, 2001]) the tendency of employers to discriminate against women at the point of hire will be mitigated or totally phased out by the exigencies of productivity and profit maximization. But causality issues can’t seem to help but rear their ugly heads and poop all over StatCan and its small reserve army of statistics; and there’s the issue of insignificant statistical variances in terms of gendered labour market segmentation and wage differentials. The latter I’m finding dubious, so it should be a matter of refining my research strategy and method. The former is more problematic, since most of the studies I’ve been looking at tend to focus on the U.S. and the EU. I honestly don’t know where I’m going with this, and come crunch-time, I predict a lot of blood lost and spilled on this marble slab of student ritual torture. Preliminary arguments are due next week, and I still have to set up an interview with my banker sort-of-contact. I should’ve done Filipino nurses or something, dammit.

All this grade-consciousness is not a little distressing. Grad school’s looking more and more necessary, and my GPA isn’t exactly panty-dropping stellar. I’m even thinking about law school (secretly, of course: if my dad even suspects I’m toying with the idea of considering law school, he’ll never let it die its unceremonious and inevitable death), which just goes to show how unprepared I am for graduation.

My life’s so boring. Even the small, contrived dramas that a certain person somehow pulled out of his ass can’t seem to motivate me into responsiveness. I just feel so detached from everything it’s disgusting. I’ve been told to just go carve out a few hours to go burrow and read a trashy book or stare at my ceiling while going tralala-la, but I can’t seem to do that. I no longer find trashy books pretty and shiny (mostly cloying and unintelligible), and staring at my ceiling only compels me to think dark and twisted thoughts about life and sex and school. Which partly explains why I’m still at the library on a Monday night, fretting over a paper and a stubborn pile of readings whose relevance is circumstantial and temporary at best.

But, whatev, blah blah blah. I went shopping yesterday, and that was fun. I watched Marie Antoinette, too; and while the prospect of some 2 hours of watching Kirsten Dunst running naked around Versailles (I’m kidding, this thankfully did not actually happen) was a little nauseating, I found the movie quite enjoyable, mostly because of the music and Jason Schwartzman (yum). We were supposed to watch Little Miss Sunshine, but we totally forgot about DST. :(

Ok. So that was me procrastinating.