In the end-of-term, off-to-Turkey busyness of earlier this spring, I wrote about my need for more sleep. Well, as it turns out, I did some major catching-up in Turkey. To wit, I fell asleep whenever and wherever I could. I regularly–like, every single time–fell asleep in the car. How could I not? We were invariably going somewhere with a longer-than-20-minute ride, after having eaten a big meal, sitting in the warm sun, with an almost-always sleepy baby on my lap. How could anyone not fall asleep under those conditions? Especially given my already sleep-deprived state?

Now that we are all back on East Coast time, we’ve settled into a much better sleep pattern. Fast Turtle is no longer waking us up at 5:30/6am. Now he sleeps until 6:30 or even 7:30am. Yay! Hurrah! The downside is that Baby Bug is regularly sleeping late enough that she’s not even awake before I leave for work. Boo!

Of course, new challenges in the form of an office move (mine) to a location 12 miles further away from home (but it’s a reverse commute! reverse commute, hah!) will doubtless throw a kink into our newly-organized routine. Isn’t that the way it always is? Particularly with little kids, a new pattern only lasts long enough for you to think tentatively, hmm, maybe THIS is the new normal, and then all the balls go flying in the air and you have to try to catch them all over again.

One of the smartest (education-related) reasons for supporting universal health care coverage came from Dean Dad’s recent post:

My proposal for long-term prosperity: combine an educated population with national health insurance (since going without health insurance is a colossal barrier to starting a new business) and a focus on providing the kinds of public goods that lead to all manner of positive externalities – basic research, mass transit, that sort of thing. If that sounds a bit Scandinavian, well, Norway and Sweden aren’t doing too badly these days. Iceland followed our model instead, and effectively collapsed. In places with plenty of smart people running around, where the cost of failure isn’t so awful, it’s not shocking that Nokias and Ericssons pop up. Here, we get Wal-Mart. We can train people to work at Wal-Mart, and there may be times when that’s the least-bad short-term option. But it’s not the same thing.

I thought this was interesting; I hadn’t thought about the implications of universal access to health care for people who stay in their jobs because of the benefits, such as health insurance, who might prefer to go out on their own and do something different. As the bringing-home-the-benefits spouse, I personally would love to have health care for my family that wasn’t tied to my job. Then maybe grad students like me wouldn’t need to work full-time on top of going to school full-time; or at least we’d have the option of taking a GRAship and maybe a little teaching on the side to make it through school.

Inspired by The Nuthouse…

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Your result for The Personality Defect Test …

Haughty Intellectual

You are 71% Rational, 43% Extroverted, 14% Brutal, and 86% Arrogant.

You are the Haughty Intellectual. You are a very rational person, emphasizing logic over emotion, and you are also rather arrogant and self-aggrandizing. You probably think of yourself as an intellectual, and you would like everyone to know it. Not only that, but you also tend to look down on others, thinking yourself better than them. You could possibly have an unhealthy obsession with yourself as well, thus causing everyone to hate you for being such an elitist twat. On top of all that, you are also introverted and gentle. This means that you are just a quiet thinker who wants fame and recognition, in all likelihood. Like so many countless pseudo-intellectuals swarming around vacuous internet forums to discuss worthless political issues, your kind is a scourge upon humanity, blathering and blathering on and on about all kinds of boring crap. If your personality could be sculpted, the resulting piece would be Rodin’s “The Thinker”–although I am absolutely positive that you are not nearly as muscular or naked as that statue. Rather lacking in emotion, introspective, gentle, and arrogant, you are most certainly a Haughty Intellectual! And, most likely, you will never achieve the recognition or fame you so desire! But no worries!

To put it less negatively:

1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive.

2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted.

3. You are more GENTLE than brutal.

4. You are more ARROGANT than humble.

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I have to admit, as far as personality tests goes, I think this one’s pretty hilariously spot-on. Obviously, it’s about seeing your personality in a negative light (see, that’s what makes it funny…moron.) and I don’t *really* think I’m an elitist twat. At least not always.

It’s been such a busy month since we left for Turkey that I hardly know where to begin…hopefully it goes without saying that we had a wonderful, fabulous time, and were all sad to have come back. I’d like, at some point, to do some more in-depth posts on Turkey, and perhaps later this summer after my summer class is finished and we’re not sick with the killer flu and I have time to breathe more time for reflection, I’ll be able to do that. For now, it will have to suffice to say that the trip was amazing and I fell in love with everything about Turkey.

Did I say killer flu? Ahh, yes, I did. Although not the non-swine swine flu (although, really, how do they know? none of our doctors asked to do a culture, or whatever it is they can do to identify viruses…) it nonetheless was an un-welcome home gift that I did not need after just being out for three weeks. So, if any of you are suddenly struck with a high fever, go straight to bed and be prepared to injest more fever reducers and ice pops than you ever thought you could. For at least the next week. Good times!