Week in Review

I know its been almost a week since I last posted, but there are good reasons for my drop in blog productivity.  It has been a really crazy week.

It all started on Monday night when I had a little medical issue that has since then required a lot of my time and energy to deal with.  Thankfully everything is OK, but it has been eating up my time, which is annoying.  Then on Tuesday I had to give a 45 minute presentation in my Caribbean Governance class on whether proposals for federating the West Indies were the product of a regional independence movement or motivated by British colonial expediency.  It took me roughly two weeks to do all the readings for this topic and put together a good presentation.  But my hard work paid off: I completely dominated the topic and "am a tough act to follow" according to my peers.  It felt good to give a public presentation confidently and see the audience follow the story I was laying out.

Since Tuesday I have been slowly but surely chipping away at a 12-16 page paper I have to write on the United States and NAFTA.  The paper is to be written from a comparative perspective, so I am supposed to explain how the U.S. political process, political culture, and institutions affect regional integration prospects in North America, using NAFTA as an example.  This is another hard assignment to complete because the amount of background material I need to absorb before I can really start writing is massive.  Not only do I have to learn the history and fine points of NAFTA, but I have to cover the key theories of regional integration and various concepts from comparative politics.  It's an exhausting task and one that is made harder by the fact that 90% of the reading I have to do for the paper is based on my computer, so I spend hours up hours upon hours staring at my laptop screen.  My eyes hate me.  Anyway, my goal is to be finished with this paper by the time Nora gets here next Sunday because I really don't want this monkey on my back while she is here.

Unfortunately work on my NAFTA paper is getting delayed by another minor assignment in Caribbean Governance.  Whenever a student presents on a topic (which is every week now), another student (or two) has to "peer review" him, meaning coming up with a two page list of things you think the student should cover in his presentation.  This week is my turn to peer review.  Writing wise this assignment isn't a big deal.  The problem is having to do allllllll the reading that is required for the presentation, which is always a buttload.  There is a tiny bit of overlap in terms of things I had to read for my presentation and pieces that are required for this presentation.  However, the majority are new and not accessible online.  Looks like I have another wonderful visit to the Library in my future!

The other big news from Barbados is that the Prime Minister died today from pancreatic cancer at the age of 48.  Everyone knew it was coming, but it is still obviously a huge deal.  This type of transition has never happened before in Barbados, so there is a lot of questions about how legitimate and capable the new PM will be.   In fact just earlier this week there was a coup within the opposition party, whereby the former PM replaced as leader of the opposition the very person he handpicked to succeed him when he lost the national election in 2008!  Most people are disgusted by the blatantly opportunistic nature of this maneuver (the former PM believes new elections could be called soon and that he might stand a chance of returning to power).  Needless to say, it is an interesting time to be in Barbados!

Alright, back to work I go!  Enjoy your weekend everybody.