Apologies for my chihuahua's contributions to the program!

But I've already made it so much farther than somebody with my background should have. My inner critic has it exactly backwards: statistically, I am an overachiever, even if it may not look like it from the outside, with no knowledge of my life story.

I'm continuing to work on myself. I'm not where I want to be career-wise (to put it mildly), and I want to try to publish something to get my ideas out there. To achieve these goals I need to tackle some maladaptive cognitive tendencies and behavioral patterns that I've developed over the years.

So yes, I have self-sabotaging tendencies and maladaptive coping strategies. How could I not? But I've made huge progress in losing weight, kicking alcohol, bringing my blood pressure and cholesterol down to 'normal' levels, and taking fitness and nutrition seriously in the last few years.

...had serious mental health problems (borderline personality disorder). No statistical model would ever predict that I would have a college degree (much less a PhD), am able to hold down a full-time job, am in a very healthy marriage, and am sober.

Breathtakingly bad take. Unfortunately the lesson that most people in the foreign policy bubble learned from the Iraq War was 'those tribalistic fanatical Arabs aren't ready for democracy,' as if that's what the US actually tried to establish there.

Cool, looking forward to reading it!

Finally, we spoke about the continuities in material practices and discourses of development between settler and overseas colonies in US history. You can find the episode on Spotify and elsewhere under New Books in Critical Theory. You can also find links to the articles in the link above.

...in Turkey. We also spoke about conceiving of anti-colonialism as a multi-scalar endeavor involving more than just formal sovereignty, for example including reconstruction of the built environment (at the urban level) and freedom from colonial codes of behavior and dress at the scale of the body.

We spoke about how narratives that portray the rise of finance as a response to (or cause of) the decline of manufacturing overlook the constitutive interconnnections between finance, production, circulation, and consumption. Financialization narratives risk truncating the critique of capitalism.

*I'm trying...and struggling...to navigate post-academic life

*I have a couple of writing projects that I am struggling to bring to fruition

*beyond nerd stuff, I like European soccer, NBA, spy and mystery novels (esp historical and/or international), and pretending I don't watch too much tv

We spoke about how the focus on the growth of the financial sector leads to a truncated and politically limited critique of contemporary capitalism. The problem with finance is that it makes more capitalism possible, not that 'financialized' capitalism is somehow worse than what came before it.

Sounds really interesting, can't wait to read it!