Nobody's ever said "ch-ch-ch-changes" before, right?

Not posting as much and definitely not journaling as I had been prior to the move.  Looking back, journaling served its purpose for me in restoring my ability to write concisely again and also in dealing with prolonged unemployment and family struggles, but with both of those things in the rear-view mirror, I need to stay away from writing until I can find a way to do so without recalling either or both of those.

(Fortunately, I have graduate school to attend to.)

A big surprise was not only being one of the few Americans in the program, but the sheer volume of people with engineering backgrounds.  Initially I thought of it as people looking to burnish technical skills with more business-strategy abilities, but in talking with a couple of students recently, it's even more pragmatic than that: Americans have long used India as a poster child for outsourced jobs, for people paid a fraction of what Americans were paid to do the same work.  But guess what?  The race to the bottom is never over in the modern era, as work that once would be outsourced to India is now finding workers even cheaper and hungrier in places like Thailand and Bangladesh.

I have a lot of work to do to keep pace, but I appreciate the energy it takes.  Besides, I wouldn't be in graduate school if I was simply paying $60,000 in tuition over two years to confirm things I already know.  I'd be more irritated if I *wasn't* getting enough work to do for that kind of money.

I think about my new life adjustment and contrast it to the current American political season and the bald-faced insanity just stupefies me.  Canadian news seems almost quaint by comparison, even with the Toronto mayoral election coming up at the end of October.  Nobody's freaking out about a mosque being built in NYC and there's no Sharron Angle or Carl Paladino or Christine O'Donnell to make people's heads spin; the candidates here just concerned with cutting costs and how to pay for things, and none of them have any real answers that I can detect.  Did I mention that September 11th came and went up here, and it was barely mentioned in the media, and discussed by none of my classmates?  I feel like I'm catching up on a lifetime of enforced ignorance, and it's not like I wasn't raised right or anything - I was raised to question and think, but sometimes you just have to get out of the petri dish to see it properly, no matter what the cost.

Back to catching up on my Financial Accounting reading, and hopefully off to another corn maize about an hour north of Toronto, a way to recap my engagement on 9/19/09 at Sever's.  Plus, it's Canadian Thanksgiving weekend and Jen is excited to make a pot roast tonight, for which we already have all the ingredients.

Life is different, and life is good!