FutureTed and PastChris

2 hours writing, 2 hours reading, 0.5 hours emailing / administrivia, page count = 134

Whew! Today's vocab word* is "cinchona bark," which is an agricultural export product to which Colombia briefly tied its economic hopes in the 19th century, the period on which I focused my reading and writing today. That chapter is coming along pretty well; I think I may have a first draft of the whole thing by the end of this week.

It's been interesting coming back to this project after three years of not focusing on it full-time. I've been playing guitar since high school; at this point, there are more songs that I've forgotten I know how to play than there are ones I remember I know how to play. In a similar fashion, I'm sometimes surprised by how much I've learned about Colombia over the years, because it's not necessarily right there at the front of my mind. But luckily, I'm a pack rat, so I've generally stored it away somewhere. Like today, I was writing about the role of factions in the party system, and I wanted to make the point that the stability of Liberals and Conservatives (kind of like Democrats and Republicans here) over more than a century was not about relentless discipline, but about a great deal of flexibility. The two-party system was a shell within which the real work could be done, of factional competition, bargaining, and coalition building. I wanted to provide some evidence for that point, and I vaguely recalled having made a table along those lines a while back. Sure enough, it appears that three and a half years ago, I went to the trouble of figuring out what faction each 19th-century president was from, and put it in a table in a paper I presented at a conference. Cut, paste, thank you. There's a line on my favorite show, How I Met Your Mother, that's a propos here. A guy, Ted, has to make a difficult decision. Rather than making the decision, he says, "Let's let FutureTed take care of that," and ignores it. Except in this case, it's PastChris, and he's already taken care of it. Much better!

* Why this word? Cinchona bark makes quinine, which makes tonic, which makes a gin and tonic. Salud a la cinchona!