Weekly Update: Brain dead edition

It's that point in the semester (I'm sure all students and former-students will identify) at which the end of term seems both impossibly far away and alarmingly at hand. Projects develop glitches. The panic-o-meters on everyone around you start to rise and your own barometer cranks it up in response. "Many college students stressed out, study finds", the Boston Globe reported this week, in a classic "No duh! Don't we know this already?" headline. What is always amazing to me is how normalized and individualized the state of being stressed out--physically and emotionally--is. We expect to spend our educational careers overworked and frazzled, and inability to get things done is always seen as a personal failure, not as a systemic problem of a social system that requires students to work part- and full-time as well as attending school in order to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, we haven't entirely lost our sense of humor. Here's a little something that's been circulating on the internet for all my political-junkie friends out there. My friend and colleague Laura Cutter forwarded it to a bunch of us after our history class last night:

The George W Bush Presidential Library is now in the planning stages.

The Library will include:

• The Hurricane Katrina Room , which is still under construction.
• The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you can't remember anything.
• The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don't have to even show up.
• The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don't let you in.
• The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don't let you out.
• The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room (Which no one has been able to find).
• The Iraq War Room. After you complete your first tour, they make you to go back for second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth tours.
• The Dick Cheney Room, in the famous undisclosed location, complete with shooting gallery.
• Plans also include: The K-Street Project Gift Shop - Where you can buy (or just steal) an election.
• The Airport Men's Room, where you can meet some of your favorite Republican Senators.
• Last, but not least, there will be an entire floor devoted to a 7/8-scale model of the President's ego.

To highlight the President's accomplishments, the museum will have an electron microscope to help you locate them. When asked, President Bush said that he didn't care so much about the individual exhibits as long as his museum was better than his father's

Happy Spring Equinox to you all and hope this finds you all well. I always enjoy your emails and calls and correspondence (I actually still receive letters by post from a number of you!) and will be in touch when I can.