Living in the Library

Ho hum :-) So it's 12:30 am and I'm still in the library. What fun! I'm practically living here at the moment. For one of my classes - History of Economic Thought to be exact - we have a 'take home test' to do. It sounds cool in theory but when you consider the fact that it involves writing 4 3pg typed essays it's not so much fun! I've been working on it since Monday and it's still not done. The problem is that I'm really enjoying doing the research and reading about all these dead Economists so I want my essays to be really good. They were supposed to be due today but we got an extension until Monday so guess where I'm going to be all weekend?

I also have a a whole lot of work to do for my other classes too. This semester I'm taking the 2 core classes - Econometrics and Game Theory and then Labour Economics and History of Economic Thought as my electives. Generally people only take one elective but they looked interesting and last semester wasn't that hectic so I decided to do both. I'm glad I did - they're both really interesting. In Labour we're going through some really high level papers which have different ideas to the classic labour economics theory which I'm finding fascinating.

History of Economic Thought is great too. There are only 6 of us in the class so we sit around a conference table and have more of a discussion than a lecture. The Professor knows so much so we get all the economic theory as well as the gossip. Today we were talking about the American Institutionalist school of Economics and one of the gentleman who never used to clean his teeth and taught at a great number of prestigious American universities because he kept getting fired for sleeping with the wives of the Universitys' Presidents' or with his (female) students. Or there's Thomas Robert Malthus who was a priest and lectured about the dangers of an increasing population but had 8 kids (the majority with his multiple mistresses). In general it seems like great economists are either socially inept or highly promiscuous!

Like I said, I'm in the University library. It closes every morning at 1am but the Reserved Book room which has a separate entrance is open 24 hours a day. At 12:30am and 12:45am someone alway announces on the library intercom that the library is about to close then at 1am there's a final message. It normally just goes something along the lines of "The library is now closed. The reserved book room will remain open to SDSU students. Please have you id card out for easy verification". The clown who did the announcement tonight added something from Shakespeare (the 3rd act of Henry V to be exact) about the necessity of being prepared and then said he hoped we all have a good night and an even better day tomorrow. This was all said in a very deep and serious voice and when he was finished the entire library collapsed laughing and started applauding! I guess that's what you'd call 'One o'clock in the morning humour'!