Thanksdrinking

Wow, its been almost a month since I last wrote - I guess the pace of change here is slowing down. I also feel a lot more comfortable, so I guess I have less need to reach out to you all. I've also been spending a lot of my spare time making mixes instead of writing this. If you haven't checked them out already, there are now three, all of which can be found at mixcloud.com. Its great to have an outlet for my tracks - I still haven't played any real gigs here, and I'm not meeting the right people to do so at the moment so I don't envisage playing any for a while.

So I mentioned that I'm feeling a lot more comfortable now, and a big part of that has to do with the fact that I now know that the future of my department is secure. For those of you that didn't know, there were rumours that nearly all the big probability professors were going to leave at the end of year and go there separate ways, leaving me up the proverbial creek without the proverbial paddle. However, I spoke to a professor about the future of the probability department and was told that 'rumours of the immanent demise of the berkeley probability department have been greatly exaggerated'. So it appears that the rumours were just rumours.

I have begun to do some reading for that professor - it's pretty scary - he wrote almost all the papers on this particular subject and is a giant in the field. Exciting too though. It's hard stuff, but that makes it remarkably interesting. The professor also has an awesome beard.

In addition to concerns about my particular subject area, everyone in Berkeley has had to deal with growing budgetary concerns. Berkeley and the University of California in general is at the moment mega fucked. The state government dropped their funding by hundreds of millions of dollars (maybe 700?) and as a result every department is facing a 15-30% permanent budget cut, with the arts departments being worst affected. Worse than that, student fees are being raised to over $10,000 a year. Only 6 years ago they were a third of that. There are serious protests - student occupied a building on campus and had to be ejected by riot police after a eight hour siege that made the front page of CNN - I stood around there for a while along with hundreds of other students that were forming a wall to protect the building - it was pretty crazy - true berkeley style. As a graduate student, all this doesn't effect me too much, but it does mean that money is very tight in the department and I can't expect there to be any cash bonuses, which is a shame as money is quite tight, although a proper spending review should fix that. And by a proper spending review I mean not buying drinks in bars. Yay home drinking.

On a different note, it was Thanksgiving yesterday - I had no idea it was such a big deal! It's like Christmas a month early; everybody goes back to their families, you get two days off work (making a super long four day weekend which I really need to catch up with my reading), and everybody eats turkey. I went to the house of a couple who are friends of Alex's and it was fantastic. They had an open bar and an open stash. All round good times.

That's probably enough for now. I plan to do a more anthropological and less personal entry next time (edit: turns out the next entry was all about me again. the one after will not be.)

Truk no keepon.

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