solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and (thankfully) short

Damn Hobbes and his Leviathan. Clearly he and other related political thinkers have been pervading my mind.

Yup, it's that time of the year my friends. And nope, I'm not talking about holidays. I'm talking about the dreaded time that comes right before then...exam season. Dun, dun, dun! The past week has been absolute madness and this week will be even worse with two papers and three finals to write. So right now, I've been in my own little bubble dealing with matters of sovereignty, NGOs, IOs, MNCs, inequality, globalization, Hobbes, Locke, Marx, Veblen, Nietzsche, Weber, ICTs, dadadada the list never seems to end. I've been living in cafes all week and I've seriously considered moving into one and living there for the time being. It's been brutal, I tell you. So brutal that in the past week I've had to line up to get into a library. A library. That's when you know you've reached the peak of your cool. And I know that this struggle of mine is a plight shared by many others. Makes me question whether Hobbes was actually talking more about studentkind than all of mankind when he said that life was solitary, poor (oh so very, very poor!), nasty, brutish, and (thankfully!) short.


So for all of my fellow students out there finding themselves sleep-deprived, overly-caffeinated, and losing your mind, I feel your pain. Just gotta keep on keepin' on and I'll see you all on the flip side!

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#Tweetsgiving: Social Media for Social Good

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Last week my fellow blogUT writer, Julia, wrote a great piece dispelling the alleged evils of social media. This week, I'm continuing that thought.

As Julia mentioned, social media has given us all the opportunity to keep in touch with our friends, reconnect with lost ones, and even share relevant (and well, sometimes not so relevant) information with each other with a simple 140 character tweet. More than anything else, Twitter and other social media tools lets us "learn about and interact with the world in real time, and in a way we never imagined".

I'd like to take this one step further. Not only has social media given us this chance to connect with each other on a one-on-one basis, but it has also opened the way for a much more far-reaching and collective purpose. Case in point? Tweetsgiving. Never heard of it? Let me give you the low down.

Read more on blogUT.