I'd been sort of toying with the idea of politics, but between the Bush administration and living in Philadelphia, I've come to see that voting, while necessary, is not sufficient. The situation in Philadelphia is rotten. Same with the state. Power got entrenched here and threw up institutional blocks to any challenger. Reform is enormously difficult. The end result of so much bad politics is bad governance. In practical terms it means that what should be a vibrant and beautiful city is actually a complete shambles. There's some hope in that we just elected a committed reformer as mayor who'd been sitting long enough in city council to know how rotten things had gotten.

Politics is weird though. I've participated a little by going to city council and county board meetings in the past. Unless specific policies have really hit people where they live, the politics is not so divisive at the local level. But, going up to national, ideology really comes into play and people just get into these ossified positions.

The wife's studying Parasites for her PhD and I just finished a Master's in Library and Information Science. I'm toying with the idea of a PhD in something like Computational Sociology or Systems Science(Sociocybernetics).