recent tracks:

I have forgotten

some of what I was going to note here.

Thursday I read PennDOT updates to see whether a weekend trip to State College would be feasible. Friday I heeded multiple warnings and called PennDOT. I was informed that Interstate 80 had just been opened to traffic. Summer and I hopped in Big Red and sped away into the evening. Some hours later we found ourselves forced onto 380 in Pennsylvania, took the advice of a Wawa clerk, and headed north on 476. In Scranton, per advice, we did an about face and headed south on Rte. 11. Sights: streets too narrow to be plowed, streets just narrow enough to permit a plow headed right at us, a bus stuck diagonally across an intersection. At 2:00 we started looking for a place to stay the night. At 3:00 we found one. At 9:45 we hit the road again.

The visit was worth the drive. Featured: campus tour, Thai for dinner,

Devil's Playground, a documentary about Amish rumspringa and coming of age that prompts many highfalutin descriptors: fascinating, charming, as well as somewhat disturbing,

freshly baked muffins and bacon for breakfast, Penn's Cave, cooking Ethiopian food for dinner, trivial pursuit. Themes: friendship, families, fun, past & future, present(: perhaps comparison of student lives, perhaps recognition of colorfastness of certain relationships). Difficult to describe, hence the incomplete lists.

Monday was my birthday, so Summer drove home while I did my homework. We went out for a tasty dinner. I quite appreciated the many thoughts and kind words sent my way.

Then back into the routine. Class, class, sad to miss a good talk next week (Kozol). Interest in intersection of children & law growing?

The Last King of Scotland
Setting: (Cable Car Cinema, Tuesday night, 9:30 -> rows of empty couches, only two unknown companions) Scotland briefly, then Uganda.
Character: Idi Amin, brilliantly portrayed by Forest Whitaker, and Dr. Garrigan, his personal physician.
Plot: Garrigan seeks adventure working for a clinic in rural Uganda, instead finds Amin; we (who presumably know the history though I did not) see what Garrigan sees:
a popularly supported coups led by a charismatic man with a gregarious public face and lavish western lifestyle. Only gradually do we (and Garrigan) fully realize what we have perhaps suspected (or known) all along: that the public face of Amin masks a paranoid-psychotic despot.
Overall: I have heard mixed reviews of the movie as a whole, and unified praise of Whitaker's Amin. I found the whole thing to be fairly brilliant.

As always, more later? Not much detail here on anything save what I could dredge from my brain.

P.S. particular joy lately resulting from the gift of iPod, which is psychic (plays what I want it to on song shuffle mode as if by magic) and also is teaching me Spanish(?).