Salutations from Yale

First of all, here are some pictures with explanations. The rest of the story comes after the photos!

Here's my doortag. It's the first time I've ever seen "Professor McKenzie" in print. I was excited. The weird animal is supposed to be a bulldog, Yale's mascot.

These are my luxurious accomodations. I get a living room and a bedroom that was built in the 1700s and creaks at night. I think it might be ghosts trying to haunt me for getting my PhD at a second-tier institution.

This is the view outside my front door. This area is completely enclosed so that students can study quietly without having to realize that there is a world outside.

This is my building, Davenport College. It looks nice, eh?

And here is the entrance to my building. The iron gate is really hard to open without a key. I tried. For a long time. When I got there, nobody was waiting for me so I had to try to pry it open until finally somebody saw me and told me to stop. Then he let me in.

Oh, hello there.

I've been at Yale now for a few days and it has been really great thus far. The atmosphere is really inspiring--you can walk down the street and actually hear people talk about philosophy! It's like a nerd's paradise! Libraries everywhere! Old buildings with old books! Hooray!

Anyway, so I've spent most of the time working on my dissertation. I plan to have a working draft finished by the time I leave. So that's taken up most of my time, but I did manage to squeeze in a few fun things.

First of all, I went to a little dive off campus called "Mamoun's Falafel Restaurant" and paid 4 bucks for some baba ghanouj and a soda. It was the greatest meal of my entire life. I almost licked the paper plate clean but the waitress took it away before I had the chance. Anyway, if you're ever in New Haven or New York City, Mamoun's is the place. Don't let the legions of homeless crowding the door scare you away!

Last night the faculty were treated to dinner at an expensive Italian Restaurant. We didn't have to pay, but I still felt silly eating 35 dollar rigatoni with corn and tomatoes. I just wished I was back at Mamoun's. I fortunately was able to leave before the faculty drank enough wine to lose their faculties and I headed down to campus. I went to a place called "Toad's" to watch the Alkaline Trio and The Fashion play a show. Apparently, "Toad" is an old guy who looks just like my dissertation advisor except that he sports a ghutra. Seemed like a nice guy. Anyway, I learned two things: 1) The Alkaline Trio still rock live (I last saw them in 1999) and 2) I'm waaaayyyy too old to go to concerts like that. I think the kids were worried I was going to die of old age right there on the floor.

So today I went to church and now I'm getting ready to scare the wits out of these kid geniuses. They're only in class until the 17th of July and they have 3 exams and a 15 page paper. These assignments are mandatory--if it were my choice, I'd let them off a lot easier. Just so you know, there are kids out there who will beg their parents to shell out 5000 dollars so they can take insanely difficult classes for an entire summer. I couldn't believe it either. When I was their age, I worked at the La Quinta fixing toilets long enough to buy a new skateboard and then hung around Taco John's all day...No wonder it's taking me so long to finish this dissertation.

That's all for now!