"AAAARRRGGGHHH!!!"

- Timothy W. Shaw

Following a tough couple of days recovering from near intestinal apocalypse, I bounced back and had a great time last weekend celebrating Halloween – please see the link to the new pictures on the right. I had been growing a beard for about 3 weeks prior (my girlfriend Sarah digs beards, which means that I get 10 extra minutes of sleep every morning – score!), so I needed a good costume to go with it. After considering dressing up as Paul Bunyan, a bearded lady, and an incarcerated Saddam Hussein, I rented a wonderfully crappy Pirate/Captain Hook costume that I found in a shop on the Right Bank. We had our school Halloween party on Thursday after class, which turned out to be surprisingly fun, even though it only consisted of our classmates and our program director going ballistic in the classroom where we spend all day every weekday. Everyone brought food or booze, and I cooked Jambalaya, although it didn’t turn out too well because I can’t figure out what anything is in the grocery store, especially spices (everything has curry in it, even the Cajun/Creole stuff). For the size of the group, we had a huge amount of alcohol, including some leftover cases of Sam Adams and Sam Adams Light which were donated along with some t-shirts by the Boston Brewing Company after they found out we were doing a case study on their marketing strategy. The French guys are all freaked out by light beer; you can’t find it over here, and they’re shocked that it’s so popular in America. “What eez zee point?!” they asked when we had an in-class taste test with Kronenbourg, Sam Adams and Sam Adams Light a couple of weeks ago. “Eet ees no good...I drink wine instead.” Anyway, we had music, decorations, and lots of hilarious costumes at the party that night; I unfortunately lost the costume/dance-off contest to a member of the Jackson 5 and a lap-dancing hippie. To add insult to injury, I split my rented pants right down the middle while dancing in a kickline to “New York, New York” on top of the desks at the end of the night. After there was nothing left to drink, everyone got out of their costumes, except for me, and we headed back to Birdland, where I learned that running around in a bar in a pirate costume when no one else is dressed up is pretty cool.

On Friday after our class full of collective groans, headaches and frequent trips to the restrooms, I did my best to sew up my rental trousers and headed out to the AUP Halloween party with Sarah and a bunch of her friends. It was a mess, of course, in the best possible way; apparently Halloween for most students at AUP equals a chance to dress up in very small, scandalous clothing, which I support whole-heartedly. Our group had some great costumes, including Sarah as a “sexy cop,” her friend Liz as a Playboy bunny, her roommate Sarah as a 1920’s flapper, and their friend Anna as Courtney Love, which we all got a huge kick out of, especially because she ended up incoherent at the end of the night, true to form. I lost yet another costume contest, though, this time to a sexy garden gnome (dammit!) but the party was a blast. I think I could have beaten her if I’d had some Bowlegs gear...

After recovering on Saturday and returning my costume, I went to the Champ de Mars (a huge park at the foot of the Eiffel Tower) and had a wine-and-extraordinarily-stinky-cheese picnic with Sarah and some friends on Sunday, which was fun until we got rained on. The weather here is tricky – since I’ve been here the temperature has been surprisingly nice, but rain seems to come out of nowhere all of the time. The same thing happened when I made the 45-minute, 3 a.m. walking trek home after I went out with some buddies from class on Monday night to Port d’Amsterdam, an insane Dutch bar where they compulsively feed you free Jaegermeister Bombs, which are only a good idea when free, and even when they’re free they’re a horrible idea.

We had this week off of class and Sarah was swamped with midterms, so I got some work done and had a chance to head out to the palace at Versailles for the day on Wednesday with Liz and Will and Anthony the “Stripping Hippie” from class. We toured the palace and made fun of all the creepy stuff that more than likely happened in each room of the joint, then rented a talking golf cart to tour the gardens, which was fun, and I ended up getting soaked yet again. Renting golf carts to Americans at a French national landmark is an awful idea, but the carts were extremely slow and actually stopped working and told us to turn around if we drove too far off course, so our hopes of getting airborne or putting our cart into a lake were dashed pretty early on. On Thursday night, Sarah and I went to the top of the Tour Montparnasse, or the Tower of Shadiness (no reason why, it was just a really weird place), and got some great views of Paris and its suburbs.

I’ve spent most of my week off working on a group project for Business Economics about a Brazilian beer conglomerate and a surprisingly tough assignment for Temple University’s graduate career services office. The career services office asked us to write a minimum 5-page paper about some personality test results, possible job options and a detailed roadmap of how we’re going to get into these careers. Since I still have no idea what I want to do, I’m having a very hard time getting this thing done, and it’s due on Sunday night. All I know right now is that I'd like to combine my law and business degrees as productively as possible, I’d like to work abroad (although it’s not a must), and I’m still terrible at math. In the past few days of digging, I’ve come up with a few possible job options, although the scope of my search is still far too broad: in-house counsel for a multinational corporation or international business-related non-governmental organization; management of a law firm with offices abroad and working with foreign attorneys on international transactions and mergers; Sarbanes-Oxley-related regulatory compliance for a US corporation or a foreign corporation doing business in the US; and working for the US, EU, or UN governing bodies on economic policy, free trade or international legal issues. The tough part is that most of these types of jobs require years of experience in some related work. Now comes my absolutely shameless plea for some help: I need to figure out what to do with the rest of my life! If anyone who reads this blog has ANY suggestions or comments whatsoever related to some fields, jobs or organizations I should possibly look into, your advice would be greatly appreciated. I’m sure I’ll be freaking out more about this later, but this week's assignment is the big wake-up call to tell me that I won’t be back in school this time next year...

In the meantime, I have to get back to work, as I just found out that our school is having a mandatory Intro to Finance class all day on SATURDAY! Commies...