Snow is Falling

We were graced today with the lightest dusting of snow, about two hours after the sun slunk behind the alps. The ground looks like a weather-affected version of toast, when the butter melts and sinks into the bread, and the stairs to my penthouse have become slick enough to think twice about skipping the even ones. Two movie nights in a row have accented very long work days. Another two assignments today, to go along with an extremely long list of biographies for visiting schools, professors, and academics who will arrive in early January for ISP 29. I am also in charge of organizing some documents, reading through reviews of past sessions, assimilating the common data that the schools have reported on, and sifting it into an accessible document in order to improve the effective and efficiency of an upcoming ISP session. One of my on-going, probably interminable projects is to research past session lecturers and attendees, discern missing information in their biographies, verify and update contact information, professional progress, and publications made in the interim. The void in our record goes back about 40 years, so this project will be my Everest.

As a de facto timeline for my two-ish readers, I will be preparing for and facilitating the winter festival until the end of December, two International Student Panels in January, the Institute for Historic Justice and Reconciliation in February, and one final session in early March, just before I leave for Dublin.

One other bit of news that is worth noting: today at lunch, the topic of zombies came up. Apparently, there are no less than four people here, all male, who are pretty into zombies, both in pop-culture references and in classical mythology. We tossed around a few thoughts on the matter, and I mentioned to my colleague Daniel--a man who, by the way, had recently ordered ten books on zombies from Amazon, arrival pending shortly--that we might want to come up with some common identity traits that all zombies seem to share. I have assigned this set a preliminary name: the Unified Selenti Theory (thesis concerning all of the dead). He and I discussed many, many different variables, parameters, and pitfalls to this potential theory, including the ways in which it accesses present and past iterations of the zombie, verses other undead and otherwise horror field archetypes. It occurs to me that philosophy must somehow be connected to this subject, as it generally is to all things both critical and trivial, and for my part, I will do some work playing around with this connection. A website on the subject will be launched soon, as a way to pass our time creatively, and surprisingly, several various publication mediums, even this early in our thought process, are currently being pursued. This is a fantastic success for day two, and one certainly befitting the stirring minds that occupy the intern office at the SGS.

The Welcome Party

The pioneer post in this new catalog is fittingly dedicated to my arrival in Austria. The length of my stay, which will last until the middle of March, will be occupied by work as an intern for the Salzburg Global Seminar. I have only been here for a day, but the whirlwind has begun: there are a tremendous amount of people working for the Seminar, including my two officemates, Daniel and Adam. Daniel is a 27-year old masters student from Hamburg, who is working on a degree in political science; Adam is a 24-year old Missouri boy going after an MBA, and he is on the cusp of redheadedness, seen only in his traffic lane dash of facial hair. Both men are extremely pleasant and great to work with, have been quite helpful and thoroughly accomodating, and will unfortunately be in company for only a short while.

Today, I got the grand brushstrokes of my training session. As far as ISPs go, there is a fantastic amount of preparation that takes place revolving around each student who visits the Seminar. Most of my day was consumed by learning about the servers and databases that the Seminar features, and further, about how it is that I extract information from those manifests, crunch it down, and produce other documents (biographies and summaries, etc.) that will be used for the duration of the ISP sessions. I can see that there will be a fair amount of office work that will be requisite for all of the interesting matters to take place, so I've sort of resigned myself to getting as much done as quickly as possible so that I might enjoy the lectures and the like when they begin--this should be the first week of January. Until then, we are also preparing to host a winter festival, which will basically feature a huge amount of skiing, sleigh rides, and other more charming versions of the common Christmas in the bay area.

I get the impression that the non-session days here are much more loosely organized than my other jobs have been, which I love. In my limited experience, there is no boss hovering over me to make sure that my job is being completed; no one harasses me for things that they just assigned, nor do they offer constant correction and advice and reprimand; no one "checks in". Instead, I received an assignment yesterday, and I turned it in when I was done; two assignments today went the same way, and this style more properly befits my productivity. In general, the castle is very lovely, things are going smoothly (if quickly) and I am tremendously happy. And so ends the first and simple post.