just breathe.

I’m nearing the end of grad school and starting to get a bit nervous about finding a job.

I’m nearing the end of grad school and starting to get a bit nervous about finding a job. Google spreadsheets full of companies, NGOs and university research institutes — some hiring, more not — are constantly open in Firefox, Idealist is constantly being refreshed, networks are being tapped. There is an abundance of stress.

I was cleaning out a drawer yesterday and ran across a stack of index cards held together with a yellow binder clip. In the statistics class I help teach at SIPA, I ask my students to write down an interesting fact about themselves on the first day of class. It’s a fun way to get to know people, and sometimes it’s easier for me to remember who’s afraid of emus or whose favorite color is mauve than whose name is Greg or Jamie.

I shuffled through the cards before tossing them in the recycling bin and came across one I had forgotten, less “interesting fact” and more “dark confession”:

I was almost singlehandedly responsible for the near collapse of global capitalism in my former career.

You know? All things considered, my life could be much worse.

Bissell, debunked.

I’m not sure if I love Tom Bissell anymore.

I used to have this thing about this author. To wit:

I love Tom Bissell.

And also:

Bissell is like the mysterious older brother of your best friend — the one who graduated with a liberal arts degree and then joined the Peace Corps. He came back with giardia and uncut hair and a tan that was half sun and half dirt, carrying a thick, worn, dusty journal full of (articulate, beautiful, introspective) insights based on late nights listening to the tales of old men’s lives and conversations about everything from lemons to lynchings with street vendors and taxi drivers and other people whose stories never get told.

Three years and travel to a handful of new countries have taught me that these mysterious older brothers come back with a lot more than intestinal parasites and messy hair, including, apparently, vicious coke habits and Grand Theft Auto addictions:

Soon I was sleeping in my clothes. Soon my hair was stiff and fragrantly unclean. Soon I was doing lines before my Estonian class, staying up for days, curating prodigious nose bleeds and spontaneously vomiting from exhaustion. Soon my pillowcases bore rusty coins of nasal drippage. Soon the only thing I could smell was something like the inside of an empty bottle of prescription medicine. Soon my biweekly phone call to my cocaine dealer was a weekly phone call. Soon I was walking into the night, handing hundreds of dollars in cash to a Russian man whose name I did not even know, waiting in alleys for him to come back – which he always did, though I never fully expected him to – and retreating home, to my Xbox, to GTA IV, to the electrifying solitude of my mind at play in an anarchic digital world.

So glamorous! So exciting!

Ugandan GLBT activist in NY next week

Frank Mugisha, head of Ugandan GLBT activist group Sexual Minorities Uganda, is speaking in New York City March 22.

Frank Mugisha, head of Ugandan GLBT activist group Sexual Minorities Uganda, is speaking in New York City March 22 (details here).

Mugisha will be joined by the Rev. Kapya Kaoma, an Episcopalian Priest from Zambia and author of Globalizing the Culture Wars, a report on how Christian evangelicals in the US have influenced attitudes toward sexual minorities in Africa.

For more information on what Ugandan sexual minorities face, check out my posts on the issue or the blog GayUganda.

For more about Rev. Kaoma, read this review of Globalizing the Culture Wars by Ethan Zuckerman.

GV Uganda: Students riot, Kampala burns

Two separate tragedies struck Kampala, the capital of Uganda, on Tuesday: students at Makerere University rioted after the shooting death of two of their peers. And the Kasubi Tombs, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the burial location of the king of one of Uganda’s largest ethnic groups, burned to the ground.

Two separate tragedies struck Kampala, the capital of Uganda, on Tuesday: students at Makerere University rioted after the shooting death of two of their peers. And the Kasubi Tombs, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the burial location of the king of one of Uganda’s largest ethnic groups, burned to the ground.

Read the full post at Global Voices »

GV Transparency: Is ICT all it’s cracked up to be?

As part of the Global Voices Technology for Transparency Network, my fellow researchers and I will be blogging about ICT all over the world. My first post, on a failed ICT for governance project in Sudan and the implications for tech efforts during the upcoming elections, went up today.

As part of the Global Voices Technology for Transparency Network, my fellow researchers and I will be blogging about ICT all over the world. My first post, on a failed ICT for governance project in Sudan and the implications for tech efforts during the upcoming elections, went up today:

In a December 2009 Global Voices article titled “ICT4D: Past mistakes, future wisdom,” Aparna Ray points out that many technology for development projects have “started with a bang and later died with a whimper.” According to a recent article in the Financial Times, such is the fate of a multimillion dollar World Bank plan to supply Juba, the capital of Southern Sudan, with computers and Internet access.

Read the full article »

We’re hoping to get a discussion going over at Global Voices that not only highlights the tremendous power of the Internet and other digital tools, but also explores the challenges and difficulties of using these tools for political development and civic engagement. I welcome your comments here and on the original post.