Nadir

Ugh. Still running around like a blue-arsed fly. Lessons to prepare, reading to do, copies to make and stuff to hand in to people, and it rarely goes like clockwork. It's been particularly bad these last couple of weeks; it should ease off a bit from now on. Fingers crossed, but predictions about workload have a horrible habit of going badly wrong.

Someone in our School of International and Public Affairs thought it would be a good idea to invite Iranian president Mahmound Ahmadinejad to come and give a speech at Columbia, seeing as he's in town anyway to posture along with his fellow loonies at the UN. As one can imagine, that idea, when revealed yesterday, went down like the proverbial lead balloon, especially considering CU's rather large Jewish presence. It was perhaps the only time the college Dems and Repubs have actually agreed with each other on something. As it happened, he did accept the invitation, but on two days' notice it wouldn't have been feasible to get the security arrangements in place. If you recall last year, John Ashcroft's visit brought out the NYPD riot squad, so Ahmadinejad would probably have needed several tank divisions and the 81st Airborne to be safe. No doubt CU are very happy to have a plausible excuse not to have him around campus. As an aside, I think they're wrong, and that the way to deal with "hate speech" is not to suppress it, but to show it to all as the ignorant rot it is. As they say, free speech makes it easier to spot the idiots.

K and I aren't in the best of shape. We went for dinner last night and it was just bad - we had nothing to say to each other, it was horribly awkward. We talked afterwards for a while about various things. I think we patched it up, but we both need to do some serious thinking about where we're going.