All you need to know about blogging

The fine folks at Penny Arcade have endeavored to offer us some poignant commentary about blogging, which can be found here.
In other news, my school scheduele from now until the 14th has become incredibly busy with the addition of yet another paper. So if I offer up disgruntled posts about "the institution" or how I am "at a breaking point" then that is why. I am already approaching the limit of the amount of school work I can stand, so hopefully I will get through this without a mental breakdown. I have had a real desire to take off recently, and I think that I will spend next summer travelling and eating up my savings. Last summer I took a course and worked fairly solidly. The summer before that I worked and took a full summer course load to make up for all the classes I had been forced to drop in first year. So it has been a while since I have had a good break (last christmas I guess). I don't think christmas break will be enough this year though, because it is not so much a rest I need, but rather I want to do something else for a bit. High on my list is doing some humanitarian work. Going to africa perhaps. Living somewhere where I don't have a computer to sit on. There is something about Africa that is so appealing, and I must admit that if I went to go do humanitarian work it would be primarily for selfish reasons. For a change of paradigm. And beyond Africa, to go travelling wherever I happen to end up. Wandering around until I can't afford to anymore. Try new things. In a sense, I think I want to make sure that academics is the right thing for me. I am not proposing to give up philosophy...but one can be a writer, or a philosopher without a PhD.