Summer packing project

04.29.2003

I've been busy w/ so many side projects and interruptions.

Katia & Kevin are back from Poland. Katia is a political scientist and researched elite attitudes in Russia & Poland. Kevin is a historian; he focuses on medieval Russia. They just moved back to Stadium Drive Apartments and are now living right across from Moataz. I used to live in the same corner w/ all of them. It was quite nice; international children roamed the lawns along w/ a flock of Canadian geese that came by one November and never left.

I'm also trying to set up a plan for my trip to Bolivia. I don't mean the usual packing lists (I've used a master packing for years) or other travel arrangements. It's more than that.

I'll be living in Bolivia for almost a year. A year! I'll be doing research. The key problem here is — my books. Having a small political science library in my apartment is great; I can quickly look up a passage just by digging through my bookshelves. But. I can't take all my books w/ me when I go. Impossible. So. I've been developing an alternate plan. Here it is:

I'm gonna go through my books, one by one, and build an extensive bibliography list. Then. I'm gonna go through the most important ones and write brief summaries and pull out key passages — and type them up. I'll store them all inside Kaneda's innards and take a compact reference source w/ me to La Paz. Thanks to Sherlock, I can index a hard drive's partition by individual words — at the individual document level — for retrieval as needed.

So that's the plan. I'll start w/ my democratic theory stuff first, and work across the range of my dissertation's lit review as needed. Some books will come w/ me, of course. Mostly detailed books on methodology or key components of my canon (e.g. Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy). But I have to seriously streamline. I have four months to accomplish this project.

Similarly, I'll be transferring my music library to mp3 format, storing it (in Kaneda) w/ iTunes. Again, a few key pieces (e.g. The Pixies Surfer Rosa) will travel w/ me. When it's all said and done, Kaneda's 60 gigs will be bursting at the seams.

My plan is to fly to Bolivia, live there for a year, and carry no more than my maximum alloted weight in luggage. Keep in mind that this luggage will also have to carry a wide assortment of gifts from family in the US to friends & family in Bolivia. The race is on.

Posted by Miguel at 09:46 PM

Comments

people who are anonymous suck! they must be jealous that living in Michigan is so much fun they like staying here and not traveling. well packing does suck, i can never get it right. either i am missing my favorite pair of socks or i can't find a spot on the way home for that odd birdhouse i bought mom. oh well. there is always the mail.

Posted by: sam at April 30, 2003 11:22 AM