Negotiations (Part 2)

This past weekend I did the second half of my two-weekend Negotiations Seminar. Though three 9-5 days (plus homework) over the weekend was taxing and difficult, the course itself was so good that I would do it again in a heartbeat. My role in the final negotiation simulation of the weekend was that of saboteur to a six-party multi-billion dollar deal. I got to gleefully pretend like I was engaging in principled negotiation tactics while in reality subverting the entire process. Though I didn't succeed in sinking the entire negotiation, I did manage to make two of the parties extremely angry at one another for absolutely no reason. Even after I explained that my job had been to derail the negotiations and that I had purposefully misled both of them against one another, they were still angry at each other. Negotiating is a very serious game.

My final project for this class is going to be a case negotiation that I will need to workshop, so I may bother some of you in the next month or so if you would like to help out.

I lost some time last week to a brief stomach virus. While I am 100% healthy and feeling great now, I had to spend last Tuesday in bed all day. At first I thought it was food poisoning and so I threw out everything that I had eaten that day, but then Kelsey and Josh got the same thing. It was a worse bug than I've had in a while. At one point, around 3AM, I recall being crouched over my trashcan whimpering "I have nothing left to give" to my body, in the hopes that it might cease its noble work of removing the perceived threat from my system by any means necessary. So that was fun.

Everything else about the week went very well. My students were half-overjoyed and half-dejected that I had shaved my mutton chops. Their attachment to the facial hair was unexpected.

Last night, Kels went to go see Twilight with Stephanie R., so Ben and Micah and I had a man-date. We went to the Beergartenhaus on H street and had liters of beer and many plates of delicious sauerkraut. Afterwards, Ben demonstrated his growing ability of drink mixing and created some remarkable cocktails with very uncommon ingredients.