finals

Sorry for my absence. I know you're all devastated when I don't post. =) The combination of having a lot of school work to do and not feeling particularly communicative were the causes of my little eight-day hiatus.

I'm in full end-of-semester mode, which isn't so bad when one is only taking two classes. I'm also experiencing an unusual level of motivation, coming primarily, I think, from my intense urge to just be done with everything. It's kind of odd. For example, we have one more problem set due in Applied Econometrics. We already took the quiz on the problem set material (endogeneity and instrumental variables...woo hoo...), and we're all totally focused on tweaking and testing our models for our thesis data, so the problem set seems very annoying. Normally when I'm dreading doing something, I put it off, but for some reason this morning I thought to myself, "I can't stand having this dumb problem set hanging over my head for another day." So I worked on it for a few hours and got about three-fourths of it done. Then I emailed it to H, M, and E (we do the problem sets in groups, and they are my group) and told them that they could finish it and that I never wanted to see it again. I've also been pretty good about staying on my paper-writing schedule. I have a 20-30 page paper due on Monday evening (the one on China's foreign currency reserves and current account surplus), and I'm aiming for it to be 20 pages of pure text, plus graphs and bibliography. I'm also aiming to finish it by Sunday afternoon, since in theory DWE gets back to town on Sunday night. My plan was to have written ten pages by today, and I've got eight, which is much closer than I normally come to goals of that sort. I've dedicated a lot of time to the paper, but a lot of it has been spent making graphs, combing the internet for random little bits of data that I need, and trying to decide on how to organize the sections. I've been worried that it's going to be too short, but I found another article tonight that directly counters one of the other articles that I'm using, which should significantly lengthen (and hopefully improve) the section in which I discuss whether it would be wise for China to revalue the yuan. Ideally I'd like to get up to 15 pages by tomorrow, but we'll see how it goes.

I'm kind of dull when I'm in end-of-semester mode, huh? I feel dull, anyway. I think I'm just tired. Which probably means I should go to bed, since it's nearly one a.m. My sleep schedule has been a bit more "normal" lately (except for last night, when S and I stayed up until 3 a.m. with each other on speakerphone, both working on our respective tasks while carrying on some vague, sporadic semblance of a conversation). I generally prefer getting up around 8 or 9 (yes I know that's very late for many of you), especially in the winter (if I wake up at noon I only get five hours of daylight).