So, my semester is over and I have almost four months before things pick up again in late August. I've been thinking about what I want to do in that period of time. Obviously, I'm going to be doing a lot of reading about Yemen, which is the topic of my thesis. I expect, however, that I'll still have a lot of additional time to spend when I'm not researching. So, here are some of my plans for the summer:
-Read for fun. One of the things that I love about breaks is the free time I have for reading. Within the last 24 hours, for example, I read almost 150 pages of Sarah Vowell's Unfamiliar Fishes, which I consequently finished.
-Write (which includes contributing to this blog). I really want to try to write more for fun. I'm planning some blog posts, including one on Unfamiliar Fishes. I also want to work on some more substantial stuff, such as a paper giving a psycho-dynamic analysis of the reaction to Osama bin Laden's death. And, of course, I'd like to write some creative stuff too.
-Work on foreign language skills. I'm going to try to improve my Arabic and French skills over the summer. Also, I might take a GLN course depending on what they're offering this summer.
-Lose weight. Two summers ago, I lost about thirty pounds without really trying. I'm hoping that if I actually made an effort, I might lose ten or maybe twenty more. Probably not, but I'm going to try.
