I MEAN IT this time!

So I went over to the gym and ran 7.36 miles this evening, good for 1010 calories. Rawrgh. I gotta see if I can find some kind of widget thingy for the blog where I can post distance, time, kcal burned, etc. Even if none of y'all really want to know, it'll keep me honest.

How sad is it that internal motivation isn't enough for me? I have to place the locus of motivation outside myself in order to get things done. I wonder what that says...

Anyway, to answer CH-$'s question: MENA is shorthand in polisci, policy, history, soc. (you know, all those humanities courses...ick...:-P) for Middle East and North Africa. You can't really encapsulate everyone adequately if you just say "Middle East," because Morocco, Tunis, Algeria, Libya, and Egypt all have lots in common with the Middle East, at least as far as policymakers are concerned. I'm guessing it's a way to "subtly" refer to Dar al-Islam without having to say as much, but what do I know? I'm just a lowly grad student whose favorite class is an undergraduate language course. I MUST be in the wrong program here.

Before I head off to bed, I wanted to share a fun little NYT article with y'all: "The Great Forgetting," by David Brooks. A couple of salient excerpts:

Society is now riven between the memory haves and the memory have-nots. On the one side are these colossal Proustian memory bullies who get 1,800 pages of recollection out of a mere cookie-bite. They traipse around broadcasting their conspicuous displays of recall as if quoting Auden were the Hummer of conversational one-upmanship. On the other side are those of us suffering the normal effects of time, living in the hippocampically challenged community that is one step away from leaving the stove on all day.

. . .

Your only strategy is evasive vagueness, conversational rope-a-dope until you can figure out who this person is. You start talking in the tone of over-generalized blandness that suggests you have recently emerged from a coma.

Sensing your pain, your enemy pours it on mercilessly. “And how is Mary, and little Steven and Rob?” People who needlessly display their knowledge of your kids’ names are the lowest scum of the earth.