making (non)sense

readings and readers

2011-01-18T00:48:00.001-05:00

I went to a reading a few weeks ago at KGB Bar, and I was struck by how different the two readers were. The first read a short speech about how the recent US publication of his first published novel came about, and he then read the first two chapters of his novel. The second gave a short introduction (a sentence or two) and read two nonconsecutive chapters from her novel (also her first, I believe).

He was less expressive (though I overheard an audience member breathlessly tell him that his acting experience showed in his reading ability - gag me), almost monotone, and when he read the female characters' dialogue in his deep monotone voice, I nearly laughted out loud. The style of his writing was thesaurus-use-evident, the words overly expressive, overly explanatory in content, overly allusion-heavy, overly un-lyrical. Almost hard-boiled without the crime or the detection.

She was expressive leading toward the way people read to small children - but in the most enjoyable way possible. There were a lot of characters speaking in interesting ways. It was so funny and real, and I can't wait to buy her book.

I went to the reading at KGB last night too (really, any excuse to order Baltika 6), and it was such a pleasurable experience. Gary Lutz and Robert Lopez.

First Gary lutz. So funny. And sad and seriously human and whimsical and wonderful. Such unexpected word usage and phrasing. Read a story called "Divorcer" with a dozen or so segments, some in first person some in third, and I want to reread it so I can keep track of the points of view. And because it was so lovely and pleasurable. It's funny though, thinking about his reading style, which was unpolished but very comfortable. He knows that piece and he has practiced, has read it before, but his voice is a writer's voice, not a performer's.

Favorite line: "She moved to the devouring city, though it barely nibbled her." So beautiful.

Robert Lopez's book of stories, Asunder, just came out, and he read a few short pieces. He read also like a writer, but like a writer who is the only authority on how his fiction should sound. How it sounded when it came to him. When it hit the keys. Phrasing and emphasis that might not jump off the page at the reader. His reading added a layer in the most wonderful way. There was one place where it particularly delighted me: the way it came out: "there was spittle on his chin. And beard." As if there was beard on his chin and not spittle on his beard. I'm actually not sure which way it should be...

Favorite line: "She wants me to touch her places." With the emphasis on places.

Something also so human about Lopez's prose but in a more pointed way than Lutz's. More aggressive somehow. I want to read more of both of them. Really enjoyable evening.

There's more where that came from.

the game cheats

2011-01-09T19:31:00.000-05:00

This is long overdue, but when I was visiting my family at Thanksgiving, my sister and her husband and I were playing Carnival MiniGolf for the Wii (is it the Wii or just Wii? I don't even know these things), and we were taking turns playing to unlock something - at one point he would get the ball to bounce just right so it went into a hen house and then hand the controller to one of us to try catching the eggs and medallions, or something like that - it was a lot of fun - and then there was another part where you play against the character, and someone - I'm not sure who - decided that he was cheating. The character.

And I tried to explain that saying "the game cheats" is completely illogical, but I think it was completely lost on them, not because they couldn't grasp it but because they didn't care. To me, it was very important. (This is your brain while studying for the LSAT.)

The game can't cheat because the game is a set of rules. The game can't violate the rules because if it does (it can't, but let's just say), then that violation is one of the rules, in which case no rules have been violated and the game didn't cheat.

Actually what I have in my notes: "the game cheats" is a nonsensical statement because the game sets up its own rules and therefore can only abide by them. If it is "cheating" - i.e., benefiting from actions the (human) player is (highly) unlikely to be able to perform - it is still playing by the rules because by definition it can only play by the rules - meaning this ability to outperform the player is a rule and therefore cannot be construed as cheating.

I believe their exact response was, "No. It's cheating." Use your words.

still researching

2011-01-02T20:21:00.002-05:00

I was reading this article by Haruki Murakami, and where he writes, "In an age when reality is insufficiently real, how much reality can a fictional story possess?" I couldn't help but think of my research of apocalyptic fiction in the mid-twentieth century. I find myself wondering if this threshold crossing that he feels so acutely is a personal journey and not a global trend.

Or, perhaps more accurately, I'm wondering if this wasn't very similar to the way certain novelists felt in the years after World War II - Vonnegut comes immediately to mind - and it's just that another global/local tragedy was what did it for Mr. Murakami.

I have to admit here that I've never read his fiction. I've read a few of his essays. (The list just keeps getting longer, doesn't it?)

But, conversely, perhaps one of the reasons I've been interested in mid-twentieth century apocalyptic literature (and backshadowing and the representation of memory and all that) has to do with my own specific historical experience. Maybe the chaos I feel in my historical moment is what led me to the literature of that era. Who knows?

On a sort of tangentially related note: I watched Alejandro González Iñárritu's lastest, Biutiful,last night, and I wrote a little review for it on my magazine's blog. Good times.

literacy and efficiency

2011-01-01T15:49:00.002-05:00

On the train this afternoon, I was reading an article in the New Yorker about energy efficiency and the Jevons paradox, which is basically that greater energy efficiency will not lead to as much of a reduction in energy use as might be assumed because it will lead to greater demand and greater productivity.

Doing some reading around the internet when I got back home, I came across a review of Dennis Baron's book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, which examines the technological improvements in written communication over the last few thousand years.

And I really feel like the two have something in common, or at least that my opinion about the second can be expressed using the sentiment of the first. Yeah, there's a lot of noise out there. Yes, I spend far too much time on Facebook.* And yes, I am extremely fortunate to not only have my own computer, but two computers and an iphone, which means that I have access to the internet at virtually all minutes of the day, and there are a lot of people who don't have the kind of access I've become dependent on. But.

Computers allow us to write more, to write a lot more, to self-publish, to read more, to read a wider array of things - nonsense or otherwise - and all this reading and writing makes reading and writing more widely available because of the increase in productivity and the subsequent demand for more reading and writing. So arguing that digital media in some way impairs literacy doesn't really make any sense when you get down to it.

*I wish to point out here that most of what I'm doing on Facebook is reading the articles that my friends post, seeing if anyone's playing or reading or publishing or showing or whatever, and all the posts about your baby being sick or the laundry you are or are not doing, I don't care. I'm just kidding, I care deeply. And also I'm stalking you. And reading your blog.

Read my magazine.

having to prove it

2010-11-07T19:36:00.003-05:00

My friend J gave me the best advice the other night. "We all know you're smart," he said. "You don't have to go to law school to prove it."

Because, in one sense, that would be what I would be doing. I just hadn't thought about it that way. I think I would be really good at it. That's not the same thing as wanting to do it.

Because I don't actually want to be a lawyer. I already have a master's degree. ("How's that working out for you?") I'm already a hundred thousand dollars in debt. Research, analysis, argument? Totally my thing. Yes, please. But in a completely different setting. I have no qualms about not wanting to be a teacher or professor. So why have I been thinking about law school again so much?

(Re "again": Anyone remember when I decided at the very last minute not to take the LSATs a year and a half ago? I remember that moment very clearly.)

Because I've been feeling a little directionless. That's not actually accurate, but that's how it feels. I feel like I'm going in a few different directions and neglecting the one that means the most to me.

(So fix it. - It's not that simple.)

This is not a new feeling, it's sort of a constant tide that is flowing more than ebbing at the moment, and it's exacerbated by the fact of itself. The anxiety only makes me more anxious.

But it will fade. There are a lot of projects I'm working on, the magazine is off to a nice start, and work (while having nothing to do with my academic/artistic life) is going smashingly. I really do enjoy my job, and my colleagues are my best friends, and I do a better than good job, and I try to do a great job (although beginning the composition of this blog entry while behind the bar on a Saturday night might not support that statement).

So going back to J's statement, if this is partially about proving it, which of course it is, if only in the sense that success is proof of itself, then the only way to do that is to do the work and to not worry about it because worrying only means that it doesn't get done. So what that I'm reading (or not reading) like seven books at the moment and working on (or not working on) like ten pieces? I should start five more of each! Bring it on. It will all get taken care of.

(my) girls and (some) clothes; poetry

2010-10-12T01:29:00.003-04:00

A week or so ago I'd been reading an article in the New Yorker about the CEO of J. Crew ("The Merchant," Sept 20,2010), and a few paragraphs in I thought of emailing the article to my sister, as she has aspirations that include merchandising for a clothing company. A few days later I got to the fourth page - because I am only on the train for ten or fifteen minutes at a time these days as my commute is mostly walking and much shorter than it once was - and I happened on Brenda Shaunessy's lovely poem, "I wish I had more sisters." Instantly I decided I would tear out the article and send it to my sister instead, so she could share the poem with me (and our other sister) and also because I knew she would enjoy getting actual physical mail from me.

A few days later, still only halfway through the piece, our 92-yr-old grandmother died. Deep breath. So, long story short, I was able to give it to her in person. I was able to share it with both of my sisters at once, and also with my mother, who has two sisters as well. (And two brothers and sisters in law and cousins and nieces and nephews and an additional generation going to boot. We're a tight family.) But this poem is about sisters. But it's also about family and about close friends and it really meant a lot to me in this moment that happened just after the poem appeared in front of me. Serendipitous.

The J. Crew article I found more compelling at the beginning than toward the end - it was a long article. But I delighted in it at times, and I thoroughly enjoyed the article that followed it: "Tavi Says." It took me back to poring over Harper's Bazaar when I was thirteen, when I ironed my jeans at the prompting of a book about French women sensibility that I bought at Express when it was still what I thought of at the time as European, classic, and chic. (Wow, that seems long ago.)

The piece inspired me to actually go through with cleaning out my closet once and for all and doing a major thrift shopping therapy. It's a new season and I am settling into my new neighborhood. It's time. Am I going to start reading her blog? I don't even read my friends' fashion blogs - or literary blogs or political blogs for that matter. I have a feeling that this will in fact be changing. The creation of trans lit mag was intended to get myself to focus more on the literary world than I had let myself because of my other career in the restaurant business. "So I'll just have two careers!" I said to my father a few hours ago.

I have the feeling I've pushed a very large boulder over a cliff and just realized it's tied to my foot. Here we go.

First days of a new summer

2010-05-31T00:16:00.002-04:00

I was looking forward to blogging on the train earlier, about the fact that it officially felt like summer, and then I actually got on the train. It was full. On a Sunday at 7pm. Wtf? I wondered quietly. It was full of families on their way home from Coney Island. Which should have added to my cheerfullness but really just terrified me a little. So much energy. A friend of mine told me that she looked up how to deal with with living across the street from a school in and there wasn't one. This is the second home I've had in New York a block from a school and I can see why. So much energy. And it's beautiful and powerfully creative and in theory I sort of worship it. I just don't want to be around it. I need my solitude. However when a little boy touched my ring where my hand held the pole above his head and then looked at me, waiting for my reaction, I couldn't help but smile. Little moments.

I spent the better part of the rest of the evening preparing an elaborate pasta salad for tomorrow's festivities in Prospect Park. I mixed whole wheat and semolina fusilli pastas with tuna, capers, olives, tomatoes, some hard boiled egg, a little onion and garlic, and in the morning I'll stir in some chopped parsley, baby spinach, and arugula, and a shake of crushed red pepper for a little kick, a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Yum.

Normal

2010-02-28T15:17:00.002-05:00

What is a normal life? Is it a choice one makes or is it a series of decisions one is forced into? Having found oneself not with a normal life, can one elect to suddenly have one?

The definition of normal is "conforming to the standard or the common type; usual; not abnormal; regular; natural."

Let's look at that a bit. Conforming. To the standard. Common. Usual. Not abnormal. Regular. Natural.

Wow, that sounds boring.

And it always has to me. I've never been one of those people who naturally conforms to the standard, who either naturally or very carefully fits in -- or who longs to be like everyone else when I'm not.

But neither have I swung the other way, overtly rebelling or simply unable to fit in. I fit in just fine, but I wouldn't say I'm normal. Thank heavens.

Several things have prompted these musings. One: I watched a ridiculous number of episodes of Mad Men last night. (It totally counts as research.) Two: a very dear friend of mine wished for a normal life the other night. I believe my exact response was to wrinkle my nose. "Why?" I didn't ask. "What does that even mean?" I also didn't ask.

What it seems to mean, when someone wishes for a "normal" life, is that they feel their life is abnormal and therefore any difficulties they are experiencing are in large part due to a series of much larger decisions that they have made over time that have led them to their current (abnormal) state. But that seems to me a counterproductive way of thinking about things. Wishing for a "normal" life is the opposite of making decisions and choices in one's everyday life that will change the aspects of one's situation that one is unhappy with. Because if you would really have been happy with a "normal" life, then you would have "naturally" fallen into one.

And you'd be just like everyone else.

Ew.

Wordle

2009-12-30T21:53:00.002-05:00

I just wordled my thesis, and it felt really satisfying. Huh.

why I don't want to get published in 2010

2009-12-09T15:17:00.003-05:00

I am a writer. I'm not writing at the moment. (How nonsensical is that? That is the very thing I am doing.) I want to have the presence of mind to sit down and write. I want to sit down and let streams of (in)dependent clauses loop away from me without hoping I'm making sense. I want to be inspired and to be given the time and the support that allows for the fostering of that inspiration into what may one day be a work of art. I want the time to work. I want to create art. I want to write without an audience. I don't want my train of thought to be interrupted by thoughts of "I wonder who is going to or would want to read this, and what their lives are like, and what they will think and why and when, and if they will pay me." If I have deadlines, I want them to be self-imposed, and I don't want to send out a story before it's ready just because I'm supposed to be sending out stories. I don't want to send a story to 10, 100, 1000 publications hoping someone likes it. I don't want to pay to enter contests because entering contests gives you a better chance at getting published. I don't to pay someone else to read my stories. I want to workshop without discussing publication, or rules ("How to Write a Ten-Minute Play," "Perfect-length Short Stories According to Publication Type"). I want there to be no rules. I want the most pressing question someone has about my piece to be, "What's with all the bird imagery?" (Thanks, Rick Moody.)

Letters to the Editor

2009-10-07T15:31:00.001-04:00

The year 2009 has already been the deadliest year in Afghanistan for U.S troops. 867 Americans have died to date. And even more Afghan civilians have died as ‘collateral damage’ from US air bombardments as well from the sharp increase in suicide bombings. It’s no wonder that Afghan opposition to our presence is growing. Far from solving the problems, our aggressive military operations are part of the problem.

So what is the alternative? True security will not come through military means. It will come from a negotiation process involving all groups in Afghanistan, a regional diplomatic push, and a long term commitment by all to building up Afghan institutions.

We're now passing eight years of war in Afghanistan, one of our country's longest wars. War has had its day and failed. The war in Afghanistan is neither good nor necessary. Now give peace a chance.

*Thanks to the American Friends Service Committee for the above text.

Please rewatch Charlie Wilson's War.

And as Bill Van Auken recently wrote:

"The debacle confronting U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan is one of its own making. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are both the products of previous U.S. interventions in Afghanistan. Beginning in 1979, Washington funneled billions of dollars in arms and aid to Islamist guerrillas seeking to topple the country’s Soviet-backed government. It deliberately instigated a Soviet invasion and war that claimed over a million lives, turned another five million into refugees and wrecked the entire society."

Rebuilding can only happen when we put the guns down. We only have two hands.

writing about a photograph

2009-09-25T19:33:00.002-04:00

A friend of mine is a photographer studying at FIT, and she recently told me she was inviting people she knew to write responses to her photographs. I looked at her portfolio online this evening, and I really like what she's doing, and there is one picture in particular that I think I could write about.

Oak Grove by Erin Kennedy

I think what it immediately speaks to me is some reminder of my childhood, growing up in rural southeastern Pennsylvania, rolling hills and farmland and new lower middle class housing developments, state parks and small towns, factories and outlets. Getting lost in the woods or wanting to, the dry autumn grass crunching beneath our feet, already tread by so many others, or laying down because of habit rather than footsteps. Small branches left where fallen. Owls and deer and country roads. All those trees older than I ever was. And ultimately, a feeling of tranquility that can be destroyed in an instant when adolescent girls reference legends and fear. I remember wanting to feel at ease and being absolutely unable to. Because of the wind, because of the bare tree limbs, the unobstructed view of the sky, the moon, the snow covered ground. The sound that might have been footsteps crunching leaves under.

But in terms of writing about a photograph, I feel as though I know very little. Funny that the more I read, the more I write, the more I research and absorb, the less qualified I feel to make a statement about anything at all. I mean, really, what do I know?

So, very quickly because I'm supposed to be working on a short story, here are a few things I've found about writing about photography:

http://uwp.duke.edu/wstudio/documents/photography.pdf
http://www.brown.edu/Students/Watershed/images/stories/pdfs/watershedissue5.pdf
http://interactive.usc.edu/members/akratky/W13_Camera_Lucida.pdf
On Photography by Susan Sontag

A Dozen Truths Every Writer Needs to Know About PhotographyBy ERNEST H. ROBL
"Though writing and photography are the two processes that fill up the majority of the editorial space in publications, few journalists manage to be successful at both because the two processes are not only fundamentally different, but also place different, often conflicting, demands on the practitioner."
- That seems as though it deserves more time than I have to give it at the moment.

As does the topic in general, but it's a start.

bio

2009-09-17T21:22:00.002-04:00

I wrote a little bio blurb for a friend of mine for an email announcement tonight, and it's got me thinking about - well, writing little bio blurbs. How does one condense (summarize) the sum of one's experience into a paragraph (summary) or even a few paragraphs?

It all depends on audience, of course, but taking that for granted for a moment, there are a few assumptions we can make about writing a blurb about a person. 1. We will not get everything in there. 2. Things will be left out. 3. There are ways of saying things that allow a phrase to tell the whole story, because 4. Assumptions will be made based on those few short sentences. Or long sentences. Long complicated sentences with lots of clauses, the structure of which the author probably attempts to vary in order not to sound boring and in turn making the person being bio'ed sound boring.

So now I might wonder how I would summarize myself (the little about me to the right of this post is super out of date - I'm not really on my way to a PhD, so why not amend it?), but in my current state of mind I'm wondering more who my audience would be. As I just alluded, I've decided not to apply to PhD programs again this year. Maybe next year, but there would be no point now - I haven't done anything new. I'm barely even writing, let alone publishing.

That is not to suggest that I haven't had a lot of experiences in the last year that have been beneficial, but they're not exactly cv-worthy. And that's fine.

But I'm at this point where I am writing cover letters, and I'm really bad at it. I've never liked my statements of purpose either. Is it because I don't like trying to summarize myself? I just wrote a paragraph about my friend in less than half an hour. Is it that I don't think I have the proper qualifications (I know I don't), and in trying to sound like I might be able to do the job anyway I sound a little bit like a fraud? Hm. The thing is, I could be beginning a PhD program right now, and I could definitely do that. (I've already gotten a master's degree, so I can't help but thinking getting a second one would be easier. I'm sure the third through sixth years would be immeasurably more difficult.) I also think I could totally be a bar manager. I don't know everything I would like to, but I know a lot and I learn super fast. When I want to do something.

It's because I think I sound defensive.

"I know stuff. Really. Honest. No, I do. It doesn't look like it, but I know stuff. I can do it. Promise."

Would I hire me? Probably not.

And yet...

The thing about my job right now is that the chefs/owners have made it easy for me: we have amazing food and amazing wine, and the two go together really well. And I've tasted almost everything on the menu (minus a few of the pricier reds). But it does require selling - it's not a cuisine a lot of people (myself included) are familiar with. And I'm pretty successful at selling this food and wine.

And sometimes people just want to hear that it tastes good.

It's a last resort. There are a million more specific ways of describing a dish (sweet, spicy, crispy, peppery, unique, interesting, traditional, rich, light, etc.) or a bottle (earthy, spicy, fruit-forward, fresh berries, jammy, tannic, creamy, acidic, etc.), but sometimes, no matter how good something sounds, people want to hear that you like it. Which is why I know closeted vegetarians and vegans working at restaurants - people believe you more if they know you've tasted it. And if they believe you like it.

So does the same thing go for selling myself to prospective employers and admissions committees? Of course. I'm not so naive as to not already know that. And I've nailed some interviews, I've charmed some of the more resistant-looking, but I've also thought I nailed interviews and never heard from my prospective employer again.

I'm just feeling self-conscious about my resume. I moved the master's degree to the bottom for my bartending resume. I added a list of restaurants without dates because I have the experience, just not long-term experience, and I think that's important too. But none of them scream high-volume, and I remember that job that looks like it's not high-volume, and it was in fact as demanding as any other bar I've been to (if for a shorter time period, perhaps), and we had to be nice to people, cultivate regulars, have conversations. And I feel weird because I hated it and I miss it.

Oh, existential crises. Maybe I'll just run away to somewhere sunny. Work in a bar for tourists. Lay on the beach. Yeah, maybe I'll just give it all up and settle for that.

...After realizing that the bartending job she worked at to support herself through a BA in English and an MA in Humanities and Social Thought was the job she wanted to do - if not in the right city - Christina decided to... to what? To make it happen.

someone after my own heart

2009-09-11T19:06:00.002-04:00

This article makes me so so so so so so happy.

But what I'm chuckling about at the moment is the fact that when I read the title (The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition?), my initial reaction was that there was something some of us - the more successful, of course - knew that the rest of us didn't which kept a smaller number of people in the successful camp and the majority neatly excluded.

As if the world was full of business executives, entrepreneurs, celebrities, chefs, bosses, artists, movers and shakers, etc., who wouldn't be where they are today without knowing a thing or two about coin flipping.

deadlines

2009-09-10T19:12:00.004-04:00

I've been thinking about imposing deadlines on myself lately, or I suppose it would be more accurate to write that I've been thinking about delving into what deadlines mean and whether to impose a few on myself in the near future. Sort of the same thing.

According to the various sources represented on Dictionary.com, a deadline is a kind of time limit. The origin of the word, however, is the line a prisoner could not cross without risk of being shot - the dead line - and the use of the term as synonymous with time limit can be traced to American newspaper jargon in the 1920s. Oh, those newspaper men and their words.

According to Wikipedia, a time limit is related to a milestone. Although it seems to me, simply glancing at the words that make up the compound words involved (deadline - time limit - milestone), a milestone is more of a marker on the way to somewhere else, and a deadline is more finite. Also, one doesn't impose milestones, one achieves milestones, where one imposes a deadline, however one may reach a deadline, in the same way one imposes a time limit or is restricted by a time limit and one may reach the limit. In other words, they're only sort of related. Silly Wikipedia.

But what are the advantages and disadvantages of imposing a few deadlines on oneself? On myself, to be specific. I've been out of grad school for almost a year and four months, and the last deadline I had and stuck to, really, was April 14, 2008: the day I turned in my thesis to my advisor. Three days later than she and I had originally agreed upon. (It was due to the department on the 16th, and I have a master's degree to prove that my advisor read my final draft the day I gave it to her.) Well, no, actually the last deadline I had was for my PhD applications. But the thesis was way bigger, I can say now that I'm on the other side of both of them. And I know there will be other non-self-imposed deadlines in my future, but I've been wondering if I'm sort of craving a date and a project to strive for in a manner that feels more important than "I need to submit something that doesn't suck to my writing group in six weeks."

This doesn't answer the question. Should I give myself a few deadlines? Should I monitor my progress based on an arbitrarily chosen future date of completion?

Interesting blog on the topic from Thomas at Go College. He doesn't go into what would happen if there were no deadlines. Would he still be working at those undergraduate term papers? I bet the profs in question would remember him in that case...

renewed committment

2009-08-27T21:08:00.002-04:00

So I went to see Julie & Julia last night in Times Square after work (haven't been to the movies in ages, so glad my movie companion came up with the idea and chose the movie, had a great time), and without going into a review of it that would invariably respond to the review I read in the Times by A.O. Scott, I found it inspiring. This is not why I'm blogging about nothing this evening. It might be why I'm blogging this evening, but only in the sense that I have been thinking about blogging (that is, contributing to my own blog) lately and haven't because of various excuses.

Briefly responding to the movie and my experience of watching it:

1. I was starving by the end. I also hadn't eaten dinner yet. I was starving by the end, but I also knew that anything I ate at that point would be completely unsatisfying. I wanted a real meal. (It was almost 2 am.) But more than that, I wanted a real meal that I had cooked. I wanted my own kitchen, fully stocked with utensils and cookery and fresh produce.

2. I wanted to write. No, I wanted a big project, and the only thing that it makes sense for me to take on as a big project simply must involve writing. Sort of. I have other big project ideas, but the writing and the big project are overlapping desires. So then I started thinking maybe I wanted to document a big project of my own, but that would require starting another blog, about a topic which I have sort of already mentioned in the past. I was not thinking of documenting a project and then writing a memoir about the documentation process and then letting it be turned into a movie chronicling, not so much anything I had done, but the struggle for recognition of the person who had inspired me. (I have not been personally inspired is, I suppose, what I'm emphasizing here. Sorry, Julia and Julie.)

3. I wanted to go to the movies more often. The movie was very well done, we thought, and Meryl Streep was completely amazing. There was romance, there was laughter, there was at least one (but maybe only one) moment of real heartbreak. It was what going to the movies should be.

4. I wanted to go to Paris. And everywhere.

5. I wanted to keep doing research on the cold war. (I also happen to be reading The Magic Lantern by Timothy Garton Ash, which is wonderful.)

So. It's a start. :)

Thank you, Robin

2009-07-13T15:20:00.002-04:00

For reminding me why I did it and why I shouldn't regret it for a second.

(I don't 99.99% of the time, but there are those three minutes a month when I'm hitting submit on student loans that are the same as my rent.)

I'm not even going to read the New York Times debate. It shouldn't be about the money, but the decision to go to grad school and some of the feelings after having gone are consumed by the money issue, and that really sucks, but it's the reality of living in this situation. But what is just as if not infinitely more important is that further education and the increased ability to think critically and write effective arguments and integrate research and analysis in a meaningful way that has nothing to do with memorization for a test is the only thing that leads to real change, as much as we try to convince ourselves that the Conversation, in an academic sense, has nothing to do with some sort of Real World that really has nothing to do with some sort of intelligentsia who are just engrossed in philosophical mental masturbation. No, no, no!

The conversation matters.

To repeat the example of headscarves in Parisian schools: there is an argument that the headscarves defy the separation of church and state in public schools, but there are so many other sides to this debate. It has to do with the fact that the headscarves are being worn by women, by Muslims, by Muslim women, by a religious minority, by the women of a religious minority, by the women of a religious minority in a Western European state that sees itself as highly enlightened in feminist matters because of a long tradition of feminisms and feminists, etc. And a master's degree produces the kinds of scholars who are trained to sort out all of these interconnections in a way that doesn't reduce an issue to a conclusion where only one voice - especially if that voice is purporting to be representative of some kind of majority and claiming authority based on that - is heard above all others.

So maybe a debate can be about "freedom of choice," but it also needs to be about what "freedom of choice" means, and because of my master's degree I can never take catchphrases like "freedom of choice" at face value because "freedom of choice" never has a set meaning.

Because nothing has a set meaning.

Such is the nature of language, and my knowing that and being able to analyze a text, an argument, a work of art, an idle conversation across the bar, etc., is more meaningful to me, more important to me, more valuable to me, than a business degree, which would probably make me a lot more money, and it's fine if that's what another person's choice for their life is, but it wouldn't work for me. So my really expensive humanities degree is exactly what I want to have accomplished, which means I am exactly where I want to be, and being reminded of that in such an unexpected way (how could I have known that I would read this article today?) is very fulfilling.

And now I'm going to enjoy some of this sunshine.

Did I mention I'm also reading Nietzsche this week? What's on your summer reading list?

Turning 30

2009-06-24T16:38:00.003-04:00

I took a deep breath just before I started typing. Took it. I inhaled almost greedily and exhaled just as purposefully. It's a great feeling.

Birthdays, holidays, new years. They all make all of us take a moment to look at our lives, to measure ourselves against something, but not always in a real way, in a way beyond noticing that on certain days of the year we feel the need to take stock of ourselves. But what does this really mean? What are we measuring ourselves against?

It has always seemed to me that some people - maybe most people - have a sort of built-in checklist, imposed by society or not, that allows them to determine how successful they are. Common entries include but are not limited to: go to college, get married, buy a house, have babies, make shitloads of money, etc. And because I viewed these things as items on a checklist I was supposed to be using to keep track of my life, I think I've been trying to follow my own path, but the horrific checklist has always been in view, so maybe I've been just as bound by it as I was afraid to be, just in a different way than if I had been trying to check things off of a list...

On the other hand, even as I have avoided having a checklist, there are things that I have and haven't done that make me feel more or less successful - if I can still use that word - than I have wanted or expected to be. Perhaps one day I will be able to articulate these things without making them sound like items on a list.

(For example: I have a lot of really great friends, I have a good relationship with my parents and sisters, I have a beautiful nephew I never get to see, I have a master's degree, I am becoming a better writer even though I haven't published anything, I love being in the restaurant business, I want to open a bar, I have traveled a lot, I want to travel more, I want to write a novel I am proud of, I want to write respected essays, I have been in love, I have had my heart broken, I have had the mad passionate love affair I always wanted, and it is beautiful. I try to live responsibly, in terms of the planet and my fellow lifeforms, human or animal or vegetative or otherwise. I have 28 cents in my bank account, and I'm not sure where I'm going to live in five weeks, but I have had and am having some amazing experiences, and that is all that matters to me.)

And now I'm going to go have a drink at my job, and then meet friends for dinner, and then barhop around the east village, and that is exactly what I want to do on this, my thirtieth birthday, and Friday after work there will be partying until dawn, and next week I will write the story I've been cooking up while I've been celebrating this last week, and it will be brilliant. Cheers.

blogging

2009-05-06T16:21:00.004-04:00

Once a month is unacceptable, isn't it? I blogged on my other blog last week, but seriously what's the point of having two blogs if you're not writing in them? Part of the point, I suppose, not to answer my own question in such a ridiculously defensive way that it makes me feel a little schizophrenic, is that each blog has it's own theme. This blog is for making (non)sense - clearly. This is where I get to explore and analyze and make connections and question assumptions and all that yummy stuff. And sometimes I talk about food or books or whatever I want because blogging is inherently self-centered and self-important, even as it is generous and generative, an inlet and an outlet. The other blog, the newer of the two, is focused on travel, on my travel experiences and on travel more generally. That doesn't mean, of course, that I can't talk about traveling in this space or that the other will not sometimes look like nonsense.

So all of this got me wondering about blogs about blogging, particularly how one would go about googling that, and it's surprisingly easy (Google is so smart). On a side note, there seem to be several definitions (or assumed definitions) of metablog, which should technically mean a blog about blogs, but that's not the entry at Wikipedia and it's certainly not how this guy is using it. But for pointing me here, where I just read this: "the nesting hormones are so strong right now that the adrenaline rush I got from organizing our toothbrushes was not unlike snorting an entire eight ball of cocaine," = fabulousness and he can toy with linguistics a little bit.

And apparently there is a list of the Top 25 Blogs about Blogging, which would seem a bit excessive if I didn't think it was absolutely fabulous that the blog about blogs lists blogs about blogs and is on its own list at #5. But it seems that most of these metablogs are really about marketing and what other blogs are posting (like a news feed) or about how to blog than what I was more interested in, which is of course theory... Wow, this is really bad poetry. This one is pretty interesting and informative. But what I was really looking for were more academically-minded blogs about blogging, but I'm suddenly wondering if that is too narrow of a topic. I don't think so, but I don't have time to keep doing research today. (How did my friend put it? We decided the internet was a great/terrible medium for my scatteredness. And that blogging about a single topic - travel - was good for my focus.) But an example would be this article here, which I will finish reading later because how productive is it to blog about blogs about blogging when there's more writing to do.

stories and romance

2009-04-02T16:04:00.002-04:00

I don't know if it's the spring - the thaw, the sun, the rain - but I've felt very romantically-minded lately. Is love in the air? Who knows. Not any more than usual, I suppose, haha.

But staring out the window at work the other day, chatting with my friend, who is a very passionate, sensitive, romantically-minded woman as well, we got to talking about how much we both love the rain, and I was reminded of my first kiss in the rain, and how do we even speak of such things without sounding completely cliche and ridiculous? but it was probably still one of the best kisses of my life, even though I haven't seen that person in over ten years and he means nothing to me and he was a total jerk. The point is, it wasn't really him, even though it partly was. It was the rain. It was the night. It was the illicitness of the situation - we were young, he was my boss, my parents hated him - but more than anything else it was the rain. The rain is what keeps that kiss in my memory, the feel of wet staccato and skin sliding under fingertips, hair matted to cheeks.

And last night I heard two stories, one very similar to one I could tell but with so much more complication - and you think your life is complicated! - and the other so unlike anything I could know.

Imagine two kids, growing up in a small village in Peru. He says he wants to run away with her and one day she shows up at his place with a bag, ready. They're fourteen, but it's forever, so he packs a bag, throwing anything he can into a suitcase, and they head to Cuzco, no warning. Their families are freaking out, worried, they try to reassure them over telephone wire, it's forever. Things are tough, but eventually they are better, they're selling flowers in the plaza, and they live like this for ten years. And then she meets a Frenchman and he, heartbroken of course, moves first to LA and then to New York, the Peruvian in the funny hat. So romantic.

And me? I'm listening to Ely Guerra and pretending it's a rainy day so I can lounge around the house writing instead of enjoying one of the first lovely spring days in New York. Because I would rather be alone with my thoughts than alone in this beautiful weather. Hahaha, maybe. So dramatic.

Really it's because I'm working on a story about a woman who's just come back from a year abroad - a year of five-minute romances and books in cafes and bicycles on the Mediterranean coasts - and she comes back to all the things she left and is leaving, and she feels guilty about maybe feeling vaguely superior, and everything's the same and everything's different, old and new at the same time, and so is she, and it's so unfinished. It's so unfinished.

Writing Challenge

2009-03-13T18:04:00.002-04:00

More lists...

Writer's Digest - two competitions, several categories. Win a trip to New York City! Wait...
deadlines 5/1/09 and 5/15/09.
FreelanceWriting.com's list of contests.
Manuscript Editing's list.

Warning to writers about contests from Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

Free to Enter!
Wergle Flomp Humour Writing Contest from Winning Writers.

I sit here looking at the lists of contests that come up when you simply enter "writing contest" into Google, and other than being supremely discouraged by the often astronomical entry fees (a quick glance yields anything from $10 to $65 - no, I'm not kidding), all I keep thinking is that doing all this research, compiling all these lists, means that I'm not actually writing. Enough of that.

starting a business

2009-03-07T23:32:00.010-05:00

In the interest of research and compiling lists (which I love), I have decided to follow my curiosity concerning what it would take to start a business, for instance a bar. This is completely outside of my realm, of course, as I've never taken a single business or business-oriented class. However, not *completely* since I've been in the restaurant business for ten years and, let's face it, I can do anything.

http://www.ychange.com/ - Straight-forward in tone, the Business Articles section looks fairly useful, especially at the early stages of research, and contains several pdfs with lists (which I love). They also do startup consulting if their extensive website isn't enough. Interestingly, one of their points of advice is to have a site map on your business's website in order to facilitate customers finding what they're looking for, as well as getting your site to pop up on web searches, and I don't see a site map on the main ychange page. In fact, there seems to be no way of searching the site. Except, of course, Googling ychange and what you're looking for, but that might be more work than a potential customer wants to do. Just saying.

SCORE is "a nonprofit association dedicated to educating entrepreneurs and the formation, growth and success of small business nationwide." Not the best-written sentence I've ever seen, but what an incredible resource. There's a whole section on Starting Your Business with articles like a Six-Month Plan to Transitioning from Employee to Entrepreneur and a 60-Second Guide to Financing Your Startup Business. They also have a Template Gallery, which is especially useful to someone who isn't sure how to begin. And check out their women-specific site.

The U.S. Small Business Association is a good place to get started as well, with everything from Getting Ready, where you will find a useful FAQ section, to Getting Out, should the need or desire arise.

There is also an abundance of software designed to help you build a business plan, such as Bplans.com, where you can find 500+ sample business plans for businesses in places like Southern, Your State. Or Plan Magic. And don't forget about Wikipedia (as if that were possible).

Of course, anyone thinking of opening a bar had better be pretty familiar with their local liquor laws. So in New York I would check out the New York Liquor Authority, naturally, and there I would find, among other things, the instructions for applying for a liquor license. And say we're opening a bar that will serve food, we'll need an On-Premises Liquor license, which costs $4,352 for 2 years in New York County. Good to know.

Essential information from the NYC Health Dept (Food Service Establishment fee is $280 + $105 for the food protection certificate for whoever is in charge of food [possibly multiple people]). And from the New York State Taxation and Finance office regarding Starting or buying a business. And information on insurance. And the Business Certificate for Partners for New York. Check with the NYC Dept of Buildings.

Further reading:
--Entrepreneur.com has an article and ebook on opening a bar/club, and chapter 1 is available for download. Their books are available at the NYPL's SIBL branch on Madison and 34th.
--New York Mag's three-year-old article is pretty specific - just what we're looking for.
--According to this 2007 article in Forbes, a Micros system that does everything I would want it to ("three touch-screen workstations, printers, cash drawers and credit-card processing, as well as nifty software that can track inventory turnover rates, schedule employee shifts and process customer loyalty cards") would cost about $12k.

My mother always said I should have something to fall back on. To be continued...

Mega Millions

2009-03-03T19:11:00.002-05:00

With the jackpot currently estimated at $212 million and the next drawing tonight - and the economy being what it is - talk at work this afternoon once again touched on the lottery, and most importantly what would you do if you won? Would you go to work tomorrow?

One of my colleagues said he would run for president. I'll leave that alone.

He asked me what I would do, and it took me a second to think of anything because I haven't thought about it in a while. I haven't even played a scratch-off in almost three years, and other than a summer of manic Powerball playing, I had only bought a ticket a handful or two of times. Receiving a large sum of money changes everything, but hundreds of millions of dollars? It doesn't even make sense. I can barely imagine. Except the thing is that I can of course imagine. It is not unthinkable for a person to have that much money. In fact, according to a quick Wikipedia search, there are about 95,000 people with more than $30 million, and more than 1,000 with over a billion.

On the flip side, roughly a billion people live on less than $1/day...

So for a $212 million jackpot, the annual payout is somewhere around $7 million each year for 26 years or $137 million all at once. In other words, if I were to win the lottery (the odds of which are 1:175,711, 536), several million dollars would almost immediately be at my disposal. My first answer to my colleague's question was, "oh, I'd do a million things..." How vague is that? I would though. Then I started listing things, and the first thing I thought of was paying off my student loans and credit cards. How practical am I? How preoccupied with my current financial state am I?, is the more accurate question.

I would buy a really nice but not over the top apartment, maybe in Manhattan but more likely in Brooklyn, somewhere near the train and convenient to the city, Park Slope probably. I would most certainly quit my job, not because I don't like it but because I know my shifts would easily be covered. I would buy the perfect venue and open the perfect bar. But I would go somewhere sunny first - Oaxaca maybe, where it is currently 82 and clear. I would go shopping but not too much (the Gap has really cute spring sweaters and I discovered yesterday in the snow that my boots are no longer entirely waterproof). I would set up college funds for my nephew and every other child I know or who may come into existence in the near future. I would take dance lessons and pilates, I would finally learn to play my beautiful candy apple red Fender Squier Strat. I would relax a little, which means I would write more. I would travel. I would buy my parents a boat. I would donate to charities.

The point is that I would still work my ass of, I would still do the things I am planning on doing now, but it would make those things a lot easier. Okay, I'm not really planning on buying my parents a boat. So maybe I would do things a little more extravagantly, but I live well. It would be nice, but I don't need it. Unfortunately, a vast majority of the people that spend their hard-earned cash on lotto tickets really do need the money. And maybe one of them will get it tonight.

having been read

2009-02-16T17:55:00.002-05:00

I walked into work yesterday afternoon, and my boss said, "So, I read your blog..." Eek. My initial reaction was somewhere between embarrassment and mortification. (His response was that it was "nice.") This afternoon I kept wondering why I inwardly panicked at the prospect of having been read. That's the whole point, isn't it? The point of blogging, the point of being a writer, the point of writing. This is not my journal, there's nothing even superficially private about it, and there's not supposed to be. I have the url listed as my website on facebook, I've told people I have a blog, it's not a secret, not anonymous. So why the conflict?

I could write something like, 'I just don't think I have anything interesting to say or worth reading,' or similar, but that's clearly not true if I'm sitting here typing words onto the screen and planning to click the publish button. It's not true if I intend, as I do, to continue writing, not just today, but every day possible until the day I no longer have the mental capacity for it.

Is it fear of criticism? Probably a little. I don't want to be thought of as cute ("oh, that's cute, you have a blog."), but I don't want to be thought of as taking myself too seriously either. That's not meant to be as self-deprecatory as it sounds to me having just written it. I have been in the restaurant business for a long time, and I plan on staying in it for a long time, getting even more involved, in fact, but I know I don't have the necessary expertise to write a real review. What I can do, what I am good at, is analyzing someone else's review, of comparing several pieces of evidence at once, which is what I was attempting (casually) with my last post.

I'm tempted to mention the restaurant by name just so it shows up on my boss's google alerts again, but I think I'll refrain.

My point about the review in Time Out was primarily that it was wishy-washy. He writes that Alex has "tightened her focus," and that the food is "among the most solid Iberian fare in New York," but that the restaurant is "far less inspiring than the sleepers from which it sprang." Perhaps I am unclear about what he means by "sleepers." If her prior two restaurants were/are unexpected successes, saying that the new one is far less inspiring seems nonsensical to me in this context. I understand if one thing is less inspiring than a prior thing, and I understand the prior thing being an unexpected success, but how can something new be less inspiring than something unexpectedly successful? Does the word choice here highlight that the new thing has the potential to be successful but we may not immediately expect it to be so? Is he giving the restaurant the equivalent of crossed fingers? I am questioning his critique on the basis that it is not direct enough.

Anyway, enough about that. I have the urge to write down every word that comes into my head, but this is not the outlet for that. This is the outlet for making (non)sense. Clearly.

it's been a while

2009-02-12T18:56:00.002-05:00

Which means I could sit here rambling for a while, but instead I'm going to sum up. In the past two months, I completed PhD applications, decided to take the LSAT (moral support / what the hell), went to Argentina for two weeks with friends, decided at the last minute not to take the LSAT, and got a new job. That's not all, but it's enough.

So, I'm working at a fairly new restaurant, Txikito, cocina vasca, at 240 Ninth Ave b/t 24th and 25th in Chelsea. I have to say: I love it. It's small - way smaller than I'm used to, especially after Dos Caminos Third, which seats 600. The dining room seats 24 give or take, with an additional 10 or so at the bar, which is reserved for full dining when we're busy, which is just about every night from 7:30 to 9 or so. (No reservations necessary, however.) The sides and ceiling are planks from an old barn in New England, with light fixtures that resemble marshmallows and thumbtacks, and a cool bright blue rear wall that really opens up the space. Limestone bar with shiny red barstools. A recent reviewer in Time Out New York called the decor "spartan" and lacking in "snug warmth," but, though it could be regarded as minimalist, when the restaurant is full of people, wine or zurra, and some of "the most solid Iberian fare in New York," the weathered wood and slate gray of the tables and bar serve to highlight the colors that matter -- the focus is on the food, and the decor serves that very well.

Additionally, I wonder what the reviewer meant when he wrote that "The few stools at the bar are the most lively and sociable seats in the house." As communal seating areas, bars do tend to have a more intimate feel than adjacent tables do, but he seems to imply that guests in the dining room are missing out on something by enjoying the company they brought with them. This is not to suggest that those of us behind the bar are not fostering a fun atmosphere -- on the contrary: the whole restaurant is made to feel lively.

Most of the dishes are small plates, minitures of traditionally larger dishes, so that even a table of two can enjoy food the way the Basques intended: a little bit of everything on the table and lots of it. The menu is structured so that a table can and should order two or three things per person, including one or two of the larger options, like the lamb chops (Chuletillas), should they care to. What else he got wrong: the Pintxos ("pinch-os"), or canapes, are much larger than "one bite." The Itsas Mendi is, in fact, a txakoli, but it is not one of the effervescent ones on the menu (which are the Txomin and Ametzoi, the latter of which is served by the glass as well as the bottle). And the Copa de Chocolate is not a "dense bittersweet-chocolate pudding," but a whipped chocolate flan topped with sherry whipped cream. Which is completely amazing and wonderful and goes very nicely with a glass of Vina Salceda, by the way.

To sum up, I must agree with one of the review's commenters, who wrote: "What I don't get, is if you like the food so much, as we all seem to, why so grudging a review. Why not simply celebrate a terrific new restaurant, and a brilliant young chef and her equally brilliant husband/partner, going out on their own."

A few other reviews:
New York Magazine 6 Nov 08, 13 Nov 08, 14 Nov 08, 23 Nov 08, 29 Jan 09 (lunch menu!), and 8 Feb 09 (Valentine's specials).
Serious Eats New York ("The space is just as inviting as the food.").
And Gourmet on 11 Nov 09.

It's just such a pleasure to work in a restaurant where nearly every table audibly loves the food. Mms and Oh-my-god-this-is-amazing, have-you-tasted-this-yet?-you-have-to-try-this's are not rare, do not need to be asked for. "How is everything?" is more often than not answered before it is asked. I know where I'm going on my night off.

couldn't make this shit up

2008-12-15T14:08:00.002-05:00

Iraqi Journalist hurls Shoes - note the plural.

Shoe-Hurling Iraqi Becomes Folk Hero - can one become a folk hero after a day?

on or off the wagon

2008-12-03T14:24:00.004-05:00

In keeping with my view that everything is and should be contradictory, I'm not going to explain that. Let's just say that at a certain birthday party recently, we went to the Clover Club at 210 Smith St in Brooklyn, a speakeasy-style joint that serves concoctions and cocktails conceived before my grandmother was. I have the Leone: tequila, solerno, peychauds, and something else, martini-style with the peel of an orange bigger than the glass itself and a little side-car on ice to refill my glass. It was delicious and decadent, and only $11. Highly recommended.

These places are hot right now. My friend works at a place in Williamsburg, Hotel Delmano, which is almost identical (but better, of course! and they have Russian Standard Vodka - my favorite!). So today I decide to check out the New York Times, and there's an article on - you guessed it - mixologists and such. I love my job, and I know the servers where I work use their tequila and wine knowledge more than the bartenders get to, but I miss bartending. Maybe it's good that I'm not doing it anymore though. Time to focus on my other career. (One more application to go!)

On the menu tonight

2008-11-29T21:30:00.004-05:00

In honor of PhD applications (of which two have been submitted!!), I decided to cook myself up a little feast this evening. I had minestrone to start out with - organic, from a can, added parmesan cheese and a few slices of seasoned focaccia. Then I made enough pasta to serve a large family (leftovers for me!), which contained:

Orechiette Rigate (it means "little ears")
Four cheese tomato sauce
1 Eggplant
1 Zucchini
a small onion
a clove of garlic
basil
and a yellow Beefsteak Tomato (grown locally)

Delicious. And as an accompaniment, I made a little chopped salad of baby spinach, basil, yellow beefsteak tomato, cucumber, and fresh mozzarella with a ton of balsamic vinegar. So good. The salad was bigger than the plate of pasta.

But the most important thing, of course, is that I have submitted two of my six applications. One is six days before the deadline, the other 16! My supplementary materials are all on their way (except one, which is waiting for letters of recommendation to get back to me - why those can't also be online, I have no idea). I've been crazy stressed out the last month, and right now I'm wound tighter than a spring, as they say, but it's not actually that bad. It all comes together when you set your mind to it. This kind of pressure really makes me think. There have been some elements of my life that have been adding stress, perhaps unnecessarily so, if only in the sense that I certainly didn't need them, and there have been these great unexpected inspirational moments that I will never forget.

A few months ago, I went to dinner at Tao, and it was expensive and delicious - decadent! (not the service) - and with dessert (a giant fortune cookie filled with white and dark chocolate mousse and rimmed with sprinkles - highly recommended) they gave us giant fortunes. Mine reads "If you do not know where you are going, any road will do." I still have it hanging on my wall, sprawled across Russia on a small map of the world. At the time I thought it was kind of comforting, and of course it's supposed to be. But what's funny is that I've long had this theory that if you hold on to a fortune for too long, it's reverse becomes apparent. And I'd forgotten my childhood theory until just now, but the fortune had long since - the last few weeks at least - inspired the opposite feeling in me:

If you know where you're going, not any road will do.

That doesn't mean that only one road will do, I would never think that. But it does mean that, especially given as much as I travel, if you know where you're going, you probably know how to get there, or at least can find your way. Maybe that's more to the point: I am absolutely capable of finding my way. I've been on the journey the whole time. Maybe I just forget periodically where I'm going. No, I don't forget. I just get wrapped up in the journey sometimes. I can still enjoy it and stay focused. It's all about balance. Getting this accomplished tonight (this and other things), I haven't felt this balanced in a long time. Just one thing missing.

Update: five of six applications have been submitted. Awesome.

the end is near

2008-11-25T20:06:00.003-05:00

That sounds so ominous, jeez. I should retitle this post "the end is in sight" or "almost there" or "so close to the finish line I can taste it." Something like that. Tomorrow after work I'm going to send off five of my six supplementary packets to various departments or admissions offices. Thursday I'm going to rework my personal statement(s) so that I am happy with them. And Saturday I will hit submit six times. That's right: Saturday, November 29. Six days before my first deadline and two and a half weeks before the most important one.

The reworking of my personal statement is absolutely necessary. Right now, it sounds rushed. It sounds like I was trying to say a million things and I had to take out half of them. Which is an accurate portrayal of its writing so far. I barely mention grad school. I don't mention my trip to St Petersburg. And now, as of last Wednesday, I want to include something about my impending trip to Buenos Aires.

Little reward for all this application anxiety: two weeks in the BsAs neighborhood of Recoleta. Which means that after I hit that submit button six times, I have a lot of research to do. It's going to be a writing/researching trip primarily (for most of those involved), but it will definitely be a vacation as well, of course. And since I hadn't been planning on going there before a few weeks ago, I know nothing about the place. But I will.

Back to the s.o.p. I need to incorporate my travels as related to my research interests, and that means I have to be more specific about my research interests. I want to study Cold War-era literature in the context of migration, particularly writers who emigrated to or from Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and the West. How do these different migrations inform the worldview set forth by the authors' narratives? That seems particularly broad, but that's sort of my idea. I want to know what happens when we stop thinking in terms of the Cold War on one hand and postcolonialism on the other hand. That and I find "postcolonial" to be a problematic term for a variety of reasons. I also find the idea that the international situation was dominated by a staring match between two countries out of 190 or so reductive. I'm not denying the influence of these two schemas on the twentieth century (and twenty-first). On the contrary, I wish to explore what is generally accepted as "the way things are/were" because oversimplifying is dangerous business. Question everything. That's what I'm saying.

tmik, tliu

2008-11-24T16:50:00.002-05:00

If the abbrev fits...

I really feel like the application process is designed to make one feel completely inadequate. On the other hand, that may be because I am not qualified. I think I'm qualified for one program in particular, however. (No names. I don't want to jinx it, even though if you know me, you know which program I'm talking about. It's something to do with writing, maybe. If I write it, it will be real, and there's only so much hope - I mean confidence - I can muster.) I finished a personal statement, but at 1200 words, with two major topics to throw in, I realize I'm supposed to have 500 words. Talk about concise. I just wrote a 60-page argument, and now I'm supposed to sell myself to a committee in two pages? Well, plus the 20-page writing sample that is said 60-pager, but still.

Anyway, I was journaling just now and actually thought - as if I am used to thinking in proverbs - that the more I know the less I understand, and really my thinking of it is more of the song lyric (Don Henley, which I'm listening to right now, actually), but I couldn't think of Don Henley, so I googled it, and there were all these blurbs of people asking what it meant, so I wrote my version.

The more I know, the less I understand means that increased knowledge comes (by definition) with the knowledge that there is more beyond it, so it does not mean that the less, quantitatively, I understand, but on the contrary that the more understanding I gain, the more I understand that there is so much more to understand and that I will never understand.

But we try.

writer's block

2008-10-29T16:41:00.002-04:00

I haven't used this excuse in a while, but if the shoe fits. I am having the hardest time writing my personal statement for my PhD applications. And the more I think about it, the worse it gets. So I should not think about it at all, right? Wait, what? No, I really need to have it done. I need to have it done two weeks ago.

Lie.

That was my friend's advice last night. I need an arc, he said. I have no arc, I said. He said, Lie. There's a major flaw with this plan: I don't lie. Certainly not well, at any rate.

So beyond that, what do I say? I sit down to write this and I babble all of the things I don't want to write, things that one should never write in a personal statement, because I know what those things are. I like to read, I like to write, I want to go to school forever, please give me money. I have no teaching experience, I've never been published, and I've spent the last ten years working in the restaurant business. Which, as a creative writer, was useful for personal statements when I applied to MFA programs. Or maybe wasn't useful, because I didn't get in. And I'm so glad I didn't, don't get me wrong, but I'm reading the essay I sent to NYU and I'm thinking, how in the world did I expect to get in with this shit.

And I sent one of my recommenders an essay I wrote for her as an undergrad, so I read that and then immediately read the intro to my thesis, and I'm thinking, wow, this is actually kind of brainy. It was a good feeling. My writing has improved so vastly in the last two years.

So why can't I write this personal statement?

What's my arc? Travel?

Everything I think, I immediately think is lame. But it's not and I know it's not, I'm not trying to sound self-deprecating, but when I write about my travels, when I try to put it into words, the words fail to convey any of the experience, they can't measure up in the least, and it makes me feel like I'm cheapening the experience, and so I find it even more difficult to write about it, and it's this vicious cycle...

Can I tie where I've been to my research interests? Yes, but I've never been to the 1960s. Is that the problem? That's a silly problem to have. If I make writing this thing sound trivial, will it be easier to do? It's not trivial though. It makes a big difference when one is applying to such competitive programs.

But you know what. I'm going to do it, and it will be great, and I'm totally going to get in, and five years from now I will be even smarter, and I will scoff (because that's what academics do) at my younger self. It will be brilliant.

Labors of Love

2008-10-21T16:49:00.003-04:00

Last night I attended the launch party for the second issue of the St Petersburg Review on Macdougal. It was a big night. I think I'm still processing it and will have to write more later, but in the meantime, get your own: highly recommended.

Long story short: it was really great to spend time with friends and meet other like-minded people, to be able to talk about writing and literature and academia in a constructive way. It was a little like being in Russia only not - surly bartender and all. Vodka. Smoked salmon tartlets. Techno music. It was lovely.

We do these things without the promise of financial gain, barely allowing ourselves the distant hope of compensation, but we do it because we love it, because we have to, because our souls will accept no other sustenance. And thank heavens for that. Labors of love, indeed.

Speaking of: A quick reminder: the war in Iraq is costing American taxpayers $720 million each and every day, or a total of $1.4 trillion to date, according to the American Friends Service Committee. That's like saying (figuratively) that I spent $2.50 on the war today, or that each of us has paid $4600 (not including interest and future expenditures and repercussions and other war efforts - in Afghanistan, for example - and not taking into account proportions or actual mathematics, of course) over the last five years. That's a lot of money. The daily cost of the war is enough to pay for my rent for the next ... 80,000 years. I love my neighborhood and all, but that's a big commitment.

For actual researched, informed, and properly calculated statistics, you might try National Priorities.org or zFacts.com or any news organization, but you should definitely try. Peace is cheaper. (Two weeks to election day.)

on Equus

2008-10-17T20:56:00.003-04:00

I was reading the playbill today, and something came to mind that I hadn't thought as much about before: the levels of mediation in Equus. The story is told by Dr. Dysart, the whole story. All of the events in the story except for this act of telling the audience have already happened in the past. We then jump back to when the magistrate came to tell him about Alan - we hear him telling us that she told him of the crime.

The most heavily layered section, I think, is toward the end when we see Alan and Jill in the barn, and Jill's dialogue is all in scene, but Alan's is relaying what happened (or lying about it) while Dysart pushes him, even taking on the voice of Equus, all the while relaying the events to the audience.

I would have liked to see that end sequence a little better, which is probably why I want to see it again, from the front.

So what does all of this layering mean? How are we to read it? I'm thinking back to my thesis, of course, and to a class I took a year and a half ago, where we discussed Wuthering Heights in terms such as these - especially the scene where the maid tells Nelly something she overheard, and Nelly's telling Mr. Lockwood, and Lockwood is telling us... I'm not going to use the word reliability, I simply refuse to, because it implies there is a knowable, objective truth, and we all know that's ridiculous.

But what I'm thinking is: it matters whether the unreliability is intended (i.e., the speaker wishes to hide something from the listener) or unintended, who is being misled and who is misleading... In the case of Equus, for example, when Mrs. Strang comes to Dr. Dysart's office, she tells the doctor something behind her husband's back - the story of the picture on Alan's wall. What is she hiding from by not telling her husband that she's telling the psychiatrist something her husband knows? The real question, of course, is: what is the author revealing to us about the relationship between the couple, about Alan's character, his upbringing, about psychiatry, about attitudes toward psychiatry, et cetera? And then: what does this scene and the play as a whole tell us about what growing up means, about religion and sex and gender?

The female characters in this play are less well-developed than the men, but I think that's largely because the two main characters are male. They are the two characters we are told the most about. We don't know why, for instance, Mr. Strang goes to the pornographic theater, just that Alan caught him and suspects he has been going regularly.

I was wondering if identifying the layers of mediation, of where time has been represented out of order, is one of the ways we can expose what the work is saying about its realworld context, but I'm also wondering if we shouldn't consider, not just the ways we disorganize things by attempting to represent them, but also the ways we attempt to reconstruct something from this thing that has been disorganized - what "really" happened. We try to figure things out, to locate the hidden truth, and then we happily announce it, whatever it is, and the possibility of multiple meanings means that we can each have our very own interpretation, just like we each have our own iPods, our own personal computers, our own blogs. Our own audiences.

That's Dysart's demand: he speaks directly to the audience, and he's the only one to do so - unlike a play I saw a year and a half ago - has it been so long? - called A Very Common Procedure where all three characters tell their story to the audience simultaneously. I'm digressing, but to take that example, they each have their own story to tell, even though it's the same story, and the way the play is structured, they tell the story together. They tell it to each other at the same time they are telling it to the audience, in some scenes. I'm just wondering where all of this über-compartmentalizing will lead, because (unlike our representation of it) time is very much a progression, even if we are unable to fathom points A or B...

Um. Wow, downer. In other news, I'm going to another play next Wednesday. Exciting!

Can't believe I forgot

2008-10-15T02:28:00.004-04:00

The most wonderful thing happened to me the other night at work. I've been stressing about work being slow and about PhD applications lately. If it's slow I have time to think, and usually what I'm thinking is: what am I doing here? And with apps, I read descriptions of some of these programs, some of which I am completely not qualified for, and I get anxious, and it's scary, and with the two of these occurring at the same time, I start to think: maybe I should just run off somewhere cheap and write for a while. That would be nice, yes, and I think very highly of travel, but it's unrealistic right now (see above re: work being slow), and so then that gets me down more, and it's this huge ridiculous cycle.

So the other night, Saturday night, I got called in, and I had a totally rookie station (three four tops and a six), and it wasn't that busy, but it was okay, and my second table is a vip - not anyone famous or anything (Madge was in two weeks ago), but this guy has been there 46 times, so the company is very concerned with making sure he is happy. That's a lot of pressure, by the way, but I handled it beautifully, everything went fine.

So they've paid, and I'm clearing their dessert plates and the vip says, "What's your name? How have you not waited on me before? You're not new?" "Oh, no," I say, "I was here for five months last year, then I left to write my thesis, and now I've been back for about five, six months now." "Did you finish your thesis?" another gentleman asked. (There were four of them, three guys in their late thirties/early forties, I would guess, and one's teenage son.) "Yes," I say, "I now have a master's degree." "In what?" "Humanities and Social Thought." Various congratulations, and one of them asks what I'm going to do with that, and I say, "I'm applying to PhD programs," and we all chuckle and murmur because what else could I possibly do with a master's degree in Humanities and Social Thought for fuck's sake, and the vip says, "Don't worry, it's totally worth it, we've all been there," and I say, "Is it? I really need to hear that right now," and I do and I meant it, and I say something about the application process being sort of grueling, and he says, "no, I remember."

And then he quotes the Aeneid to me. In Latin. And then in English, but I don't remember the words only the sense because I am completely blown away and knocked off my feet, jaw on the floor, but it's something Aeneas says about the journey and what it comes down to is that it's all worth it.

And all I can say is, "That's awesome," quietly and almost to myself.

"So you're working here to pay bills?" he asks. With this smile that had less to do with the tequila and more to do with just knowing, just totally getting it.

"Yes I am," I say. And I tell them to have a great night and I walk to the back to put the tower of plates in my hands at the dish station in this daze. Because that was exactly what I needed exactly when I needed it and it came out of nowhere and holy cow.

So I have this renewed sense of purpose and am in love with life as usual, which is why I decided this afternoon to go to a Broadway show tonight, and it's so great to be on a path and have the journey so in my field of vision. I don't know what's coming, but I will wait for it, and I will be prepared, and it will be beautiful.

Equus

2008-10-15T01:59:00.002-04:00

was superb. I went to see it at the Broadhurst Theatre on W 44th St tonight, sort of spur of the moment. (I bought the ticket online this afternoon because of a student discount email type thing.) My seat was onstage, actually above and behind the stage, which was an unusual vantage point for me, I'm not sure I've ever been behind and looking down on the action before, not that I've been to that many plays. I'm not sure if I would do it again, but it was definitely interesting. Even though the behind-the-scenes stuff was still very much behind the scenes, sitting as I was, looking out at the audience with the actors, made me think of how little I know about theater, about what goes into it, about what it feels like to be a part of, whether one is acting, is on-stage, or one is an usher or in charge of lighting or whatever. At one point Daniel Radcliffe cracked the first two fingers of his right hand, just below me, while his back is to two other characters who are talking, and I half wondered if it was him or the character. Silly, I know, but I become more and more aware of my lack of knowledge about what it is to act.

Speaking of Daniel Radcliffe, his performance was absolutely amazing. Richard Griffiths was also great, the whole cast was, and maybe I don't have enough distance, haven't processed it enough to even write about it intelligently, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself. This going to the theater thing may become a habit with me.

PhD applications...

2008-10-10T18:23:00.003-04:00

Monday I emailed my potential recommenders about PhD applications, and by Tuesday I was starting to feel anxious about the whole thing, but Wednesday I started putting together some information and really researching programs and their various application processes, and yesterday I felt wound tighter than a spring, as they say. I feel as though everything has been thrown up in the air like so many feathers, but that's kind of silly because nothing has changed. If anything, I have a firmer grasp on things, in a way.

On the other hand, I'm daring to hope I'm qualified for Ivy League doctoral study, and holy cow. And what if I don't stay in New York...

I was also thinking, after talking with a friend Tuesday night who is in the MFA program at NYU and just got a job offer (or really, an offer of promotion, since she already works there) for when she graduates in May: What if I've wasted the last ten years of my life? Should I have been doing everything differently? ...Is this line of thinking a result of age and experience? I'm 29, I've just completed a major step, a definitive portion of time, and I'm preparing for another step, another deadline, another period of hard work and sacrifice with a huge reward at the end. Only, I'm wondering if these huge rewards ever feel more substantial. I don't want to wake up in six years and still be waiting tables. Which is why I'm thinking, do I want to wake up tomorrow and still be waiting tables?

And then I remember why I'm doing it, why I've been doing it so long, and that is this: it's flexible, it's good money, it's not work that can really take over my life (after a certain point), and it's fun for the most part. And for research purposes. And for networking purposes - seriously, I work with so many creative people, not just actors, but musicians, writers, performers, and other literary types; people who are interested in politics and philosophy and the economy and travel and what's going on in the world. It's a great environment to be in. And even though I feel like a little bit more of my soul is slowly and painfully sucked away each and every time I serve f-ing Patron Silver,* each time I smile when I don't want to, each time I wonder if I mean it, each time some corporate drone talks to me like I'm an uneducated worthless insignificant waste of space and I want to scream... I kind of love it.

*Patron is a brand name. Paul Mitchell designed a bottle, took it to Jalisco, and built himself a distillery. It's not bad. But it's not nearly the best. It's just well-marketed. But I digress.

The problem, of course, is that it's kind of slow at work this time of year, and with the economy, blah blah blah, but when I'm not busy, I have time to think about these things, and I start to question what it is exactly that I'm doing with my life, and I need to remind myself that I'm working towards some big goals and working at the restaurant is a part of that.

Now I just have to make that clear in my personal statement...

Henry James

2008-10-06T14:30:00.002-04:00

I recently started reading Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, and there's this quote I absolutely love in his Preface:

"Strangely fertilizing, in the long run, does a wasted effort of attention often prove."

When I read that it just felt so affirming. And perhaps in an it's okay that I'm not getting as much done as I'd like kind of way, and I know I could easily use it as an excuse, but I'm not going to. I'm not saying that writing doesn't require an immense amount of energy because it certainly does. I'm not one of those people who can whip out story after story in no time at all, and I'm not sure anyone really is, but Chekhov came pretty close (the guy wrote two hundred stories and only lived to age 44). But the phrase made me feel a little less guilt for experiencing the life that I'm living instead of sequestering myself somewhere quiet. However, some of this relief, no doubt, is because I have definitely been writing more lately. (I'm writing right now...) I'm working on two new short stories, one of which I started while in St Petersburg, and one I started two weeks ago.

But it's like some of us discussed while in Russia: some people were getting a lot of writing done while we were there. I think I wrote a total of two days, one of which was really creatively productive. Okay, not counting the little bits of poetry and journalling I did here and there. But still. Some people can't write in Russia, I think that's how one guy put it. And I totally get that. There's too much going on, there's too much to take in, to process, especially if one is hoping to work on a project that has nothing to do with the journey one is on at the time. And that's what James was talking about, specifically Venice. Next sentence:

"It all depends on how the attention has been cheated, has been squandered."

So I don't mind that I don't come home every night after work and force myself to write so many words or so many sentences or pages, a certain amount of time on a certain story. I'm glad for the great conversation, the whiskey and the wine (not to mention that bison grass infused vodka I had at Richardson's a few weeks ago: yummy!). There is a lot to take in, to process. And it's slowly coming out in words on a page. And sometimes it comes quickly. And someday I will be able to spend more of my time with this, and less waiting tables. But for now, for the long run, my effort of attention may be strangely fertilized and I may be slightly wasted.

The Cold War

2008-09-28T13:50:00.003-04:00

is apparently alive and kicking and being reported by the New York Times...

Battered By Storms, Cuba uses Ideological Zeal to Lift Spirits and Direct Anger

Oh, those silly Cubans, thinking not being able to buy materials to fix their damaged homes is a problem. What? All of your crops were destroyed and you want to buy more food? Sorry! trade embargo. (Need I even type that I've just rolled my eyes?) While "genocide" (see article) is a strong word, morally irresponsible and dehumanizing and, dare I say it, reeking of imperialism seem to be entirely appropriate.

what's in your water?

2008-07-23T17:07:00.002-04:00

The first chapter of Elizabeth Royte's Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, the June 15 review by Lisa Margonelli, and the Michiko Kakutani review from the other day.

Goes along with something I was reading yesterday or the day before in the Economist about water pollution in India: Up to their necks in it.

Then of course there's Hurricane Dolly.

FoxNews has funny wording in their take on the bottle wars, lest we be surprised. - "There was a time when brands like Evian and Perrier conjured up images of purity and luxury. That was before bottlers everwhere got their feet wet, and drinking bottled water became a very easy and healthy way to stay hydrated and refreshed." Um. What?

This deserves a moment's pause - but only a moment. Do we see how the "images of purity and luxury" are very highly valued in the first sentence? But then! something came along to interfere with our pure and luxurious (elitist) water... What was it? Oh! this great, "very easy and healthy way to stay hydrated and refreshed"! Um. It also calls "phasing out water bottles" - "thanks to the growing green movement" - "the latest fad." Interesting. Moving on.

This woman killed her kid with water, ew.

And in a perhaps cheerier light, have you seen the Waterfalls in NYC? (You should.) The pictures of other waterfalls in New York State at the bottom of the page make me want to travel, but that will have to wait.

for further analysis

2008-07-11T13:14:00.002-04:00

Too busy at the moment, of course (go figure), but there's an article in today's NYTimes that is interesting in light of an article I read the other day in the Atlantic. The latter is "Infectious Exuberance" by Robert J. Shiller, an economist at Yale, about the residential real estate "boom and bust" and contagious tendencies, and the former is "Fannie and Freddie Shares Fall by as Much as 50 Percent" by Michael M. Grynbaum, which is pretty self-explanatory. The end of the article reads:

"The officials involved in the discussions stressed that no action by the administration was imminent and that Fannie and Freddie are not considered to be in a crisis situation. But in recent days, enough concern has built among senior government officials over the health of the giant mortgage finance companies for them to hold a series of meetings and conference calls to discuss contingency plans."

Funny word: "health." Hm...

back in the swing

2008-07-08T17:06:00.004-04:00

Ah, St Petersburg. Was it all a dream? It felt dreamlike even at the time, so it should be no wonder that I'm having trouble focusing on it now.

I'm having trouble focusing on anything for more than a few seconds, actually. I blame the jetlag.

Back in the city. Getting back in the swing. Getting organized. Figuring it all out. Writing again. Reading as much as ever. So much more focused than I felt before this overwhelmingly grand adventure. The future is wide open, and that's wonderful and frightening and liberating and unfathomable. Another blank page for the taking. Lists to be made, schedules to keep, deadlines to impose on myself. Let's do it.

today's the day

2008-06-12T13:41:00.004-04:00

I have often felt over the years that I am watching my life unfold. Is this a side-effect of growing up with television? Maybe. My sort of stock-advice for unanswerable situations has always been, just wait and see what happens. That doesn't mean that sitting back and letting things happen as they do shouldn't be balanced with a healthy dose of active decision-making, don't get me wrong. You have to work really fucking hard to accumulate the luxury of being able to take a step back. ...This is skewing into a train of thought I hadn't intended, perhaps.

What I was really thinking when I decided to explore the idea of observing one's own life was that I can't believe I'm getting ready to get on a plane for Russia, first of all, and that I'm not sure how I'm ever going to write my Memoirs (I just read Sam Selvon's Moses Ascending and am saying "Memoirs" a bit sardonically), truth being stranger than fiction and all (so not true), life being as full of turns as it is. This is high drama. Exciting stuff. Full of intrigue. International travel. People come in and go out of your world. And back in, and back out. Secrets are revealed. Decisions must be made. Careers are built and destroyed. Hearts are broken. Vital information is miscommunicated. Family issues lay unresolved. And always there is the music.

In four hours I will be on a plane, and tomorrow I will be in Petersburg in time for lunch. Incredible.

penciling in a closer look

2008-06-11T13:15:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow's the big day, and I had decided not to blog this afternoon because I have so many other things to do that I don't even know what I have to accomplish in the next few hours before dinner and east village barhopping with friends later, but then I stole a quick glance at today's headlines, as I do, and this deserves a brief analysis.

Fictional Stars Get a 21st Century Facelift

Interesting. There are a lot of things I wish I had time to delve into further, like the intersection of culture and the economy, the whole advertising aspect, which I've been thinking a lot about lately, what with working at the restaurant again and being exposed to more pop culture via my coworkers, but the first things that struck me were the accompanying illustrations depicting the 1980s versions and the updated versions of Strawberry Shortcake and Angelina Ballerina (the latter of which I don't remember having seen before). I was born in 1979, I was a kid in the 80s, I had a Strawberry Shortcake doll (actually, "dolls," plural), I loved her. I loved her striped tights and her bloomers, her big floppy hat and her red hair, the little brown shoes that looked like she was spending all of her time in the garden, hanging out under shady trees and such. She had a pinafore, for fuck's sake. She was Raggedy Anne done ten times better because she was named after my favorite dessert.

I'm pretty sure I've seen the previous "updated" renditions of the Strawberry Shortcake gang (before I just looked them up on Wikipedia), and they're completely different. They're older, they're more realistic, whatever that means, the lines are smoother. Be that as it may, comparing the three creates a whole new spin on what I was going to say. My first thought was that the updated version is clearly sexier, more "feminine" in the sense that she looks like a young version of what a woman "should" look like, the long flowing hair, the form-fitting clothing (what form they're fitting being left up to debate), the matching shoes. The 80s SS holds her cat, looks shyly up with down-turned chin, self-conscious about her youthful imagination, perhaps, but not her wardrobe. The 2008 SS sits with legs together and to the side, leaning on one hand, with the other laid demurely against her body, hand on her ankle. The new new SS returns to her big floppy hat, loses the pink highlights for the whole do, and apparently "spend[s] her time chatting on a cellphone." But looking at the 2002 SS, even with her highlights and her short skirt, she doesn't seem coquettish so much as playful. (Dude, check out Holly Hobbie! Big difference from this. Why does Holly Hobbie have boobs, is what I want to know. What is going on in the world of children's toys?) She still looks like a kid, albeit a more stylish one, more like what actual kids are supposed to want to look like. The 80s SS wasn't cross-marketing. They were trying to sell SS toys, absolutely, but not skateboards and hats and clothing and sneakers. I said I loved her pinafore, not that I wanted one.

The main point I'm trying to make and not spending enough time to accomplish it is that I'm concerned with the gender and sexuality norms being portrayed, not only by the characters but by the article. I'm not saying the article is biased, but it does draw attention to the stereotypically-gay-image Ken and what a glaring failure it was as far as revamping a character's look. What's funny, or incredibly sad and indicative of small-minded mainstream corporate America, is that Earring Magic Ken was the best selling Ken doll ever, a fact that the New York Times article does not mention. In fact, the article seems entirely devoid of updated characters that have been successful, though it says they can be "incredibly lucrative" when "done correctly," whatever that means. But Mickey Mouse, the character mentioned directly after and so seemingly the example for a correctly-done revamp, has changed very little since his introduction in 1928. His head is a little rounder, he grew gloves in 1929, he apparently had green shoes in the 1930s for a hot sec, but he still has the shorts with the big buttons, the big perma-grin, the slightly squeaky voice. His limbs aren't quite so scrawny (he came out during the Depression, lets not forget), but his torso is just as rounded.

I want to return to how nostalgia is being defined here, to our "modern" sensibilities and our disposable culture, the disposability being advertised to us, by us, and for what? But right now I have to pack. :)

quickly

2008-06-04T18:42:00.002-04:00

Getting back into this whole writing world thing: Great article on Kinsley Amis and drinking in today's NYTimes. Another set added to the Must Read list. I love what he writes about the tequila-based Bloody Mary (otherwise known as the Bloody Maria): "a splendid pick-me-up, and throw-me-down, and jump-on-me. Strongly disrecommended for mornings after." Fabulous.

Sometime I will muse about the metaphysical aspects of being hungover - it seems I am always marking down projects for later - but right now I'm going to clean out my closet, which essentially means I'm going to try on clothes.

(In eight days, I will be on a plane!)

Rilke and Russia (no relation)

2008-06-03T16:52:00.002-04:00

I read Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations of Rainer Maria Rilke by John J.L. Mood a few summers ago, and there's a particular passage that has remained continuously in my mind. It is a sentiment that is eternally relevant, I think.

"I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation" ("Letters on Love" 27).

Now, I don't particularly care for the translations Mood uses, I think they are halting and lack poetry (I would say the same about Mood's translations of the poems as well), and I do not have the time to continue the search I just initiated for the original German, but from what I can gather from this passage, I think there are some very provocative suggestions being made.

Perhaps sometime soon I will muse further, but I've finally received my passport and Russian visa (the post office angers me to no end, but there was a saving grace among the others today, let me tell you), which means I am officially going to Russia in nine days - in nine days I will be getting ready to board a plane! - which means there are a million things I have to do to get everything (myself) prepared.

Evidently, one of those things is to breathe, because I just took the deepest breath (twice!), smiled, and felt an enormous sense of well-being (name that song). (Hint: And then I'm happy for the rest of the day, safe in the knowledge that there will always be a bit of my heart devoted to it.) It helps that it is an absolutely beautiful day in New York City, and I am relaxing, sitting comfortably in my living room with the window open, the traffic driving by, horns honking, motorcycle revving its engine... This is the life. I just had a lovely weekend out of town, visiting the family, and having the day off today has been marvelous. I may take a little afternoon nap to round things out. Finally, finally, I feel like I can breathe.

books

2008-05-16T23:20:00.003-04:00

Michiko Kakutani's review of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland makes me want to stroll the streets of this city that I love so much (not now, it's cold and rainy), though not necessarily in search of the kind of companion O'Neill's protagonist finds. I'd rather read about losing oneself in depression and finding oneself with unsavory characters and shady business ventures than actually experience it for myself, and perhaps reading about it is one way of staving off the temptation to slip into a world like that, because it is tempting, one thinks to oneself, reading the opening passages of the novel, identifying with the feeling of one's relationship with another person being misunderstood, with how tiresome it is to have to explain oneself, to put it into words. Even all the descriptions of cricket - a sport I know almost nothing about - seem, from the first few pages I was able to read, essential to understanding how the narrator feels about New York, about the Old World and the New, about community, about living in the city, about living in different cities. I'll add it to that indescribably long list of books I want to read.

A book which was recommended to me by a very dear friend recently, and which I read immediately, was The Boy in Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne. There were things I liked about the book and things I didn't particularly care for, some of which may be simply matters of personal taste, I suppose. Long story as short as I can make it (*spoilers abounding*), a nine-year-old German boy named Bruno moves with his family from Berlin to Oświęcim (Auschwitz) when his commandant father is transferred there by Hitler ("the Fury"), and in his naive boredom, Bruno goes exploring along a very long fence and meets another nine-year-old boy - the boy in striped pyjamas - named Shmuel on the other side of that fence. They meet almost every day for a year, and then Shmuel brings Bruno a set of striped pyjamas so he can disguise himself and help Shmuel look for his father in the camp. They get caught up in a march, the march goes into a room, "chaos" follows, and Bruno is never seen again.

I liked the plot, and I liked that the reader knows more than the protagonist. And obviously the book isn't aimed at me, it's aimed at a teenaged audience, but I thought the main character not knowing more than he did was a little over the top. But that may have been the point, I totally get that, that we're meant to feel really uncomfortable with the fact that he just never catches on despite repeated clues, but it made me wonder whether he wasn't immature for nine or not very bright. I get that he's sheltered and on the offensive's side (a victim would better know what was going on, perhaps?), but several of the things that are conspicuously omitted - like the word used by several adults to refer to the Jews, or the correct pronunciation of Auschwitz (although I did think "Out With" was clever at the beginning), or what he witnesses when the family's waiter spills something on a young lieutenant at dinner - made me feel less sympathetic toward him. I guess it made me judge him, probably more than I should have, though certainly not enough that the ending was acceptable, that he somehow deserved to die or anything. But it made me feel like he wasn't trying to understand what was going on around him, as one description of the book suggested.

Similarly, I wondered how Shmuel didn't know more than he did. How did he not know where the people were going when they went, that they were being killed? People were being shot out in the open, it's not like they were only going to the incinerator, and a nine-year-old in Auschwitz would have been a lot hipper to what was going on than a nine-year-old on the outside, certainly, I mean, just from what I remember of Survival in Auschwitz, it seems that a kid would have been a part of the whole bartering system that sprang up as a means of survival in the camps, would have had to get in on the game, to fend for themselves, even a child such as Shmuel who was with his father and grandfather. Also, style-wise, though I am ordinarily a fan of repetition, I didn't care for how Boyne uses repetition here. The whole "mouth in the shape of an O" thing was especially grating, and some of the Britishisms (though I don't have a problem with Britishisms in general, of course) seemed entirely out of place since the main characters are German.

I don't know, I can only imagine how difficult it is to write a holocaust book for kids, but I read Night by Elie Wiesel when I was twelve, in school, as did the entire class, and while Night is completely horrific (there are certain images I will never get out of my head), I think that it is impossible to not portray that time as horrific, and The Boy in Striped Pyjamas seemed to gloss over too many things for my taste. Honestly, I felt that it was unrealistic to the point of inaccuracy. The characters seemed kind of flat, even considering we're looking at them through Bruno's eyes - his sister goes from playing with dolls to fawning over the lieutenant (who paid a little too much attention to her, if you ask me, for such an age difference and the fact that he is a child playing a man's role, trying to be seen as older by the adults around him) to poring over the newspaper and keeping track of troop movements on a map, and I just didn't believe it.

So overall I didn't particularly care for it, but it did have its redeeming qualities, the doctor/waiter, the maid, the distance between what we know and what Bruno doesn't - but I think I would have liked a little more clarity at the end, even with Bruno and Shmuel being swept up into a march that leads them to the gas chamber, I wanted a clearer message, something other than the wry "nothing like that could ever happen again. Not in this day and age," that seemed like a cop-out to me. What exactly couldn't happen again? Or could? Or is? Children getting caught up in war? Children connecting despite being on opposite sides of a fence, metaphorical or otherwise? Senselessness and human stupidity? Okay, sure, but I just feel like the author is winking at me, and I don't feel like it's an appropriate topic to wink about. We're expected to have far more information than the book provides, and I think it invites us to backshadow (see Michael Andre Bernstein's Foregone Conclusions), to read the events as if they had to have happened or as if those involved should have known better, to judge the characters, and if it went a few steps further and tried to make the reader aware of the fact that they were judging when they shouldn't be, that would be entirely different, but I just don't think it gets to that point.

Currently I'm read Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, which is pretty fantastic, and next up is The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno. I should probably be reading more Russian lit in preparation for my trip to Petersburg, by I got sort of stuck on a particularly uninteresting Mandelstam selection in the anthology I was muddling my way through. Some of it is breathtaking, don't get me wrong, but some of it I just don't care for. Some of the poetry especially, I'm sure it is absolutely beautiful in Russian, but it loses something. And, of course, considering that I think I want to study translation, being continually reminded that something inherent to the art is lost when it is filtered into another tongue is disheartening, to say the very least. It also makes me want to keep studying languages, though, so there's that.

And this is completely random, but I'm listening to it at the moment, so I'll say that Claude Debussy's "Clair de lune" is one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard.

preparing

2008-05-13T12:51:00.002-04:00

I'm starting to really get excited about going to Petersburg. I got an email from the program yesterday and have since read the schedule of events, and I've been reading about the various places I'm going to go, the people that we'll be talking about. And I've come across this lovely article about the journal Kabinet and the Freud museum called: "Sigmund Freud's Cabinet of Dreams" in St. Petersburg - Heike Wegner (Vienna) and Victor Mazin (St. Petersburg) on the first Russian Freud Museum. Loveliness.

Okay, I've just learned something very cool: tonight the Empire State Building will be lit purple and white in honor of NYU's 2008 graduating class. And guess who that includes. Me. That's completely awesome. Several of my friends, too, of course, I don't mean to be selfish, but tonight the Empire State Building will be lit for us. This is why we come to New York.

preparing

2008-05-13T01:10:00.002-04:00

I'm starting to really get excited about going to Petersburg. I got an email from the program today and have read the schedule of events, and am reading about the various places I'm going to go, the people that we'll be talking about. And I've come across this lovely article about the journal Kabinet and the Freud museum called: "Sigmund Freud's Cabinet of Dreams" in St. Petersburg - Heike Wegner (Vienna) and Victor Mazin (St. Petersburg) on the first Russian Freud Museum.
Loveliness.

Iron Man

2008-05-12T16:38:00.003-04:00

The other night at work, some of my coworkers were talking about Iron Man - either how good it was or how badly they wanted to see it - and when they asked me if I had seen it yet, I said, "I don't even know what that is." They were horrified, naturally, but I never read comic books, so there is a whole (Marvel) universe out there that I know almost nothing about. I'm okay with that. I don't feel as if I've been missing out.

That being said, the next night I was invited to the movies, and as soon as I said yes, I was informed that I would not have a say in what we saw. That was also fine with me. It was even more fine after the movie because I really enjoyed it. It wasn't all that violent considering the genre, and it was critical of the killing of innocent people, but death is the fastest way to get rid of the bad guy(s), so what can ya do? I also liked the complication of who the good guys and the bad guys were, the ambiguous attitude the audience is supposed to have about the military.

When we were leaving the theater, we were wondering why so many people were staying for the credits (like 60% of the full theater), and of course we found out afterward. (I found the scene online very quickly just now, of course.) I like the idea that they are connecting several movies together, while clearly making a sequel or two. Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr were amazing, and I look forward to their next one.

Scotland pictures, etc.

2008-05-11T15:01:00.007-04:00

Whew. It's amazing how exhausted I've been the last few weeks. I feel completely outside of myself, or maybe too far inside myself, like I'm watching myself go about my daily life, wondering how to do things, how to talk to people, trying to keep everything straight. I feel like I've forgotten everything, how to do things, how to speak. I need to be learning a little Russian before my trip (32 days!) but I seem to have lost all of the very little Spanish, French, and German I have spent so much time studying - English is causing me problems. I'm assuming this feeling will go away, this being unable to form sentences. It kind of has to. I'll keep practicing.

So Scotland. Scotland was completely gorgeous. Words can't express (not that I know how to use them right now), and pictures cannot by any stretch of the imagination capture just how jaw-droppingly amazing, awe-inspiring, unbelievable... When I was in England a few years ago, we went to Stonehenge, and driving up to it, it was constructed in such a way that makes it appear even bigger than it already is, and it's so impressive, no matter how many pictures you've seen of it, no matter how many tourists visit it each year, no matter that it's fenced off - it's simply massive and impressive, and you can't help but feel the age of it, how long it's been there before you, how much longer it will last, this sense of history and unknowability. Take that feeling, but remove the human element. Stonehenge was built, nobody knows who by, but it was built. Driving through the highlands of Scotland, these mountains that used to be volcanoes, and lochs, and moorland, I was continuously struck by how old it all felt, you look at these snow-capped mountains and you can see where the melting snow has been cutting deep rifts for more time than I can possibly conceive of, and it's so beautiful, and it was like having the chance to glimpse a process that has nothing to do with me, this earth shaping itself over so many millions of years.

But of course you can't remove the human element, we're all over the place, and we were driving let's not forget, my pictures were taken from lay-bys, I was able to take pictures of this place, there were villages and farms all over, and I am not qualified to say anything about the impact of human activity on those very mountains that I felt existed independent of my regard, so please don't litter, do reduce waste, stop buying things you don't need, buy local seasonal produce, etc.

That being said, spring was everywhere, lambs frolicking in every field, and the weather was fantastic, big fluffy clouds. I'll post a few pictures, but - and I am completely serious about this - go yourself, people. These pictures mean more to me than they ever will to anyone else because I was there. And I'm totally going back.

This first one is a loch on the way to Isle of Skye from St Andrews.

2. near Kiltrock, Isle of Skye (Kiltrock is actually the cliffs in the background)
3. Loch Ness?

4, 5, 6. mountains near Fort William
7. St Andrews
I have a bunch more of St Andrews, mostly at night, so I have a lot of duplicate scenes taken using the various settings of my new camera - some of which are kind of frightening, the light being so completely unnatural. It's really a beautiful town, and yes the golf course is nice, but it's also home to the number four university in the UK, which is why I was there visiting my friend who is studying there.

So next on the agenda is Russia, but first I think I may escape the city once again to go visit the fam. Escape the city? What am I saying? I love this city! And it's a beautiful day to enjoy it. Happy mothers day!

uninvited guests

2008-05-05T13:20:00.003-04:00

I think instead of getting caught up, I'm putting myself farther and farther behind, but c'est la vie. I say that because I'm thinking that I still want to put up some pictures from Scotland, and I'd like to say something about going back to my job (which is weird!) and being done with my thesis (which is weirder!), but at the moment I feel the need to explore a rather unusual incident (for me) that occurred today. Keep in mind that I was still in my pajamas and that my pajama pants are patterned in purple martinis.

My roommate and I were chatting over headlines (mocking them) and emails and things, and the doorbell rang, but very quietly, so I asked if it had rung and then, after a moment or two, decided I should probably see if anyone was actually at the door because it might be a package or something. It was not. I open the door and a woman peaks around the corner and says, "Oh, I thought you weren't home," as if we're old friends, and she says something about the "problems" with gas and food lately, rice in particular, adding that we hear a lot of back and forth, and what are we to make of this, and finally she asks "what do you think the solution is?"

Here we pause for a moment.

"I have no idea," I say.

Another pause. Somehow my response has caught her off guard.

She then pulls a book from her side, unzips it, and tells me she is turning to Jeremiah, which she seems to do, and reads a verse or two, I'm not sure really, I had already stopped listening, I would rather read than be read to, and she concludes that the answer to the "problems" has been here all along, that the "problems" originated in people's independence from "God." People can't end war, she said, because people caused war and are trying to end it without God's help, she said. I smiled. "I'd like to give you a pamphlet," she says, opening her bag. "No, thank you," I say, adding a sincere "have a nice day," because I genuinely hope she does, and that she does so away from my front door. How did she get inside the building, I wonder.

I have several responses to this. I'll try to be brief. I have other things to do, after all. In no particular order: 1. wars are often grounded in religion; 2. I live in Brooklyn and don't drive; 3. I am well enough off that rising food prices affect me very, very little; 4. the ambiguity of language is such that her description of the political climate was even more nonsensical than the debate surrounding the issues itself; and 5. what was the goal of this visit?

Where do I begin? Considering time constraints, I'm just for the moment going to say that, as I sit here in my mass-produced, name brand loungewear, drinking my coffee with organic evaporated cane juice, typing on my brand new laptop which is connected to cheap and secure wireless internet, preparing to get ready for my job at a high-end restaurant in midtown Manhattan, which I will get to via safe and reliable public transportation, and after which I will have more cash in my pocket than a substantial percentage of the earth's population are paid in a month, and having recently completed a master's degree in humanities at a private university, I find it completely absurd that this woman comes to my door on a Monday afternoon to tell me that the answer to these problems with gas and rice - which have very little bearing on my day-to-day life because I live in an affluent area of the world - is and has been readily apparent if only I would read it on what I can only imagine to be completely disposable, nonrecycled, single sheet of trifolded paper with hokey illustrations and quotes suited for the interpretation the compiler wishes to invoke. No, thanks.

How about, instead, perhaps, we face up to the contradiction of a religion that simultaneously advocates tolerance of others and war against those dissimilar from ourselves, one that claims to be welcoming and is at the same time exclusionary (I have yet to find a religion that does not do these things). How about we realize that none of these concepts are inextricably linked, that belief in any one religious system does not end war or hunger, and that not subscribing to an organized religion does not necessarily create war or hunger, nor does it prevent the eradication of war or hunger. The solution to "the gas problem," Madam, cannot be found in your book for the simple reason that gasoline has only been manufactured for a little longer than a century and the passage you are reading was written over two millennia ago. The book of Jeremiah most certainly does not anticipate the modern dependence on a limited supply of combustible material that fuels SUVs, the trucks and other means of shipping mass produced luxury goods from one part of the world to another, and wars far enough away from us that we don't have to think about them every second of every day because they are not on our doorstep - you are. So, no, thank you, I do not want your pamphlet, and I will not agree with you, whatever it was that you were saying, because I will be reading and thinking for myself today, as usual, thank you very much.

taking a break

2008-05-03T10:59:00.002-04:00

One of these days I will have enough energy to get this thing back up and running, but at the moment I'm completely exhausted. I don't know if it's the jetlag, or a thesis hangover - it's certainly not a real hangover, I was in bed by 12:30 last night - but I feel like I could sleep for a year. But there are so many things to do! I have mental energy and no physical energy. What's up with that?

Maybe it's the weather. What happened to spring?

One of these days I will get caught up. Right?

that

2008-04-22T11:56:00.002-04:00

totally just hit me right now. I'm going to Scotland -- today! I will be there in like 16 hours!! I'm excited. Last night I wasn't really, for no particular reason, but today I totally am. Maybe because, before, everyone else was excited, so I didn't have to be, or something like that, but now? Now I'm definitely excited. And must go get ready. I still haven't packed! Okay, really, I haven't finished packing. I don't have that much else to do.

Packing for a week is so easy. Especially when you're going somewhere that is so similar to where you live. Every time I travel, I feel like I learn (the hard way) what exactly I didn't need to take with me. (I'm typing this to remind myself.) Here are some really great backpacking resources:

backpackeurope.com - this site just keeps getting better and better. I've been visiting it every now and then for years.

lonelyplanet.com - indispensable and fun to read.

Of course, this trip barely counts as backpacking. I think the only thing that does it is that I'm taking my backpack. Updates to follow. Promise!!

wow

2008-04-19T23:20:00.002-04:00

I have been slacking on the blog this week. I've been cutting loose. Here's the rundown:

Monday night I went to Cafeteria in Chelsea with a friend and then we met a bunch of people we know at Whiskey Town in the east village because we just found out our friend spins there Monday nights (which means I will probably be there this coming Monday as well).

Tuesday I went and picked up the new Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect, which is simply amazing, of course, and then I read in Central Park until it started to get chilly. And then I bought a bunch more books, including Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich, which was one of those books that I randomly picked up because the cover is cool, flipped to the middle of, read the first few words of a story (in this case, "My Mustache"), and immediately had to take home with me. It's incredible. If you like surrealism and/or surprising and surprisingly good fiction, go read it immediately. I will be reading it again as soon as I pass it to the three friends I told simply must read it now. Then my friend and I went to dinner at Curly's on 14th st by Second Ave, which was vegetarian yumminess (I had plantain chimichangas), and we got to sample a slice of spinach alfredo pizza from the new place next door, Artichoke, and it was the best pizza I've had in a while - not in a New York City slice kind of way, but in a yummy things baked onto dough kind of way. Very good.

Wednesday I turned in the final copy of my thesis (woohoo!), which my adviser had already signed off on, and then I met my roommate for a free screening of Forgetting Sarah Marshall. When I saw the trailer for it, I thought it looked funny but that I would probably not like the actual movie, but wow, it was really funny. I want to see it again in a room where I can rewind it a little if I'm laughing too hard to hear the next line, which happened a lot in the very crowded theater. Totally predictable plot, but that's not why we go. Then my roommate and I went to Via Della Pace on E 7th St, where I had the lobster ravioli in pink vodka sauce and a glass of sangiovese, and we split the bruschetta sampler and for dessert the white chocolate profiteroles, which were as amazing as they sound.

Thursday I spent the afternoon in Central Park (again!) with friends, some of whom also finished their theses this week, where we played Scrabble, and then we went to my favorite sushi restaurant in the city, Sushi Park (aka May's Place) on Second Ave just north of 7th St, and then to Yaffa for some more Scrabble. Their rioja and tiramisu were both delicious.

Friday I hopped on a train to Harrisburg, where I am spending the weekend. My grandmother turned 90 yesterday, and we had a big party for her, like 50 people, it was really pretty fantastic. I wish my sis and nephew (and her husband, of course) could have been there, but I'm sure I'll get down to see them soon. I certainly got to see lots of pictures, and I got to meet my cousin's new baby, who was born the day before my nephew - the first two great-grandchildren born the same week! How wild is that? And tomorrow I go home for a little less than 48 hours, and then I board a plane to Scotland. I'm exhausted just thinking about it. But I wouldn't change anything for the world. Am having a blast!

I guess

2008-04-14T17:43:00.003-04:00

I should not neglect my blog two days in a row, it could lead to falling out of the habit, and I don't want to do that. Even if

I FINISHED MY THESIS!!!

Now I just have to wait until they tell me whether or not it's approved. I can't imagine that it won't be, but maybe it really does just plain suck. Except that I know it doesn't. It's not the best that I'm capable of now, but it's the best thing I've ever done, if that makes sense. It's not horrible, but I know it could be so much better. But, evidently, it's as good as I could make it right now, and that's totally fine with me. (Which means it's not.)

So to celebrate, last night I went to dinner with two of my friends, who also just finished their theses, yea for them, at Fada, this little French bistro in Williamsburg, and then we went a few doors down to the Abbey, which was rather fun.

Omgomgomg!!! I just got an email from my adviser, and she said my "essay is wonderful"!!!!! I have to correct some typos and formatting things and take her a final copy on Wednesday morning, but this means I'm totally done!

And now I'm going to dinner and then out on the town.

I --

2008-04-11T22:01:00.005-04:00

have just realized that this has been one of the most bizarre weeks of my adult life. I have not had a drink since Monday, and then only two. I have not been to Manhattan, even on the subway - even out of my neighborhood! - since last Friday. I haven't seen my honey since Friday. I've barely spoken to my friends and family (for weeks). I haven't seen anyone I know except my roommate in seven whole days! I feel like I'm on house arrest. I feel like I'm on house arrest and my sentence has just been extended. It's just one more day. And if I stay up all night and get this thing done by morning, I will be able to get plenty of sleep in time to celebrate tomorrow night. And if i don't, if I'm sleeping instead of carousing, that will be fine too. Either way, this thing is happening.

Update: (I've been really lazy about starting new posts this week, haven't I? 15 posts in 11 days is plenty.) 3:19am - At 1, I decided that to set the wheels in motion I would input all of my "disjointed drafts" into a full draft with that which I had already polished so that I could essentially concentrate on polishing one document instead of rearranging, cutting and pasting, etc. Well, as a result I have a total of 85 pages including title page and bibliography. Um. I only need 50. Which means I have a lot of trimming to do, and the Cat's Cradle section is in dire need of attention (which means I'm putting it off), but I certainly don't have to worry about length. I already decided to reduce my discussion of the connection between med and ice-nine to a footnote, and I'm going to have to omit my analysis of what Jonah says constitutes his karass, but it's for the best. I need to keep in mind that my main focus is memory and writing - not things we can look at in an analysis of memory and writing. Which would be everything. Anyhoo, I'm up to page 20 and not looking back. Time for a snack. And maybe some coffee. It's not like it's past my bedtime... Monday I'm going back to being only moderately nocturnal, I swear. If I wasn't writing, I would go to bed right now, but I am so I'm making coffee. Almost there.

I do know

2008-04-11T08:42:00.003-04:00

that this is it. I also know that I will not have it perfect on time. I also know that if I didn't have a deadline in 8 hours and 18 minutes, I wouldn't have it where it's going to be by then, either. I really want to sleep, but it will just have to wait. I have some oj. Some coffee. A cat who is being rambunctious because he's attention starved...

Here's the plan: I'm going to work for three more hours - one hour on each section. I will then get ready and head into the city because that is where the free printing is and a shower will refresh me. The train ride, however, will most likely counteract that one, but I'll do my best. I may need lunch by then... How weird is it that I just used the word lunch to describe a meal around noon? I've been having breakfast at 4pm lately, what can I say?

Part of me wants to email my adviser and ask her if I can give her this thing Monday at 8am, but a much larger part of me knows I can pull this off and I don't want to have to look at this thing anymore, so I'm going to get it done. I finished my conclusion this morning, and I have things sort of organized (I have enough to write a book on this shit, I swear to god), and just need to prune and polish more than anything. That's the part that takes forever. Luckily, I don't have forever. You know how fish grow to fit the size of their tank? That's how I am with deadlines: I'll work until the last minute every time. This is the last time for a while though. Wow, my next real writing deadline will be my PhD apps in the fall. Other than the stories I write for the lit seminar in St Petersburg, Russia (Russia!), but that won't be nearly as stressful. It's been so long since I've written a story. After I wake up from sleeping the next few days...

8 hours left. 24 pages. Halfway there.

Update: I decided to ask my adviser if I could have another day because my brain was starting to ache from lack of sleep, so we're not done yet, but it means it'll be better than anything I would have turned in today. I feel bad. I know she's not happy and that I really didn't give her a choice, I mean what was she going to say? No, give me your not-quite-good-enough version?

So now I've gotten some sleep, and even though I have absolutely no desire to look at this thing anymore and was mentally prepared to have done with it by now, I'm going to keep plugging away and make it perfect like I said I would. (34 pages)

how awesome

2008-04-10T16:02:00.004-04:00

are my friends? That's a rhetorical question. There is only one possible answer: very. As B put it, "Home stretch, baby!" This is it. I also took a well-deserved (though rather short at 4 1/2 hrs or so) nap and got a spot-on pep talk from overseas, so here we go.

Things to remember today:
1. I am not writing my PhD dissertation.
2. I have a 38-page draft that needed mostly quotes inserted, quotes expanded, or transitional statements.
3. I am not starting from scratch.
4. I have less than 24 hours.
5. This is plenty of time.

6:39pm - Two and a half hours later, and I have completely rearranged the PF section so that it is in the order I want it, but I haven't been as successful at paring down as I need to be. I think I discarded two or three paragraphs and a footnote. Time for a quick break and then on to the other two sections.

11:19pm - Let's not even talk about it. I've decided that tracking my progress has become counterproductive and is only making me more aware of my impending doom - I mean, deadline.

One day, we will laugh about this. Hopefully tomorrow, but probably not.

this is

2008-04-09T19:12:00.007-04:00

going to be tedious, perhaps, but I want to keep track of my progress because I'm running out of time. Will this make me more or less stressed out? I don't know, we'll see. As of this moment, I have just under 45 hours until I turn this thing in, which has to include train time, printing time, and other necessities. I thought about switching back and forth between sections, an hour each in a rotation, but I don't want to mess up whatever flow I might get into, so we'll see.

5pm-7:30pm - I have the first four pages of the Pale Fire section how I want them. This might seem redundant because I had the first four pages of PF how I wanted them the other day, but I've rearranged a lot since then, so it needed some polishing. Cumulative page count: 14/50

10pm - Another cup of coffee, two pages of Cat's Cradle. Not horrific, but not fabulous. 43 hrs. 16/50 pages.

4am - wow, that's been six hours? There may have been a bit of a break in there, but I needed it. And I've been really focused (read: nit-picky) for at least the last hour and a half, getting the opening of the Castle section how I want it, and I think it's good to go, so there's another three pages. Which puts us at: 37 hrs. 19/50

Okay, I needed a snack, so I decided to peruse the NYTimes, and found this little fluff piece that totally made me chuckle. (Better than freaking out, right?) One tasty quote: "human beings are unconsciously drawn to people and things that remind us of ourselves." And then, what did I think of? I totally dated a guy who had the same initials as my mother for a minute. Trippy.

8:45am - At the suggestion of my wise friend across the pond, I'm going for a little walk. I also needed her to remind me that I am not writing a dissertation, which she did without asking. She read those 19 pages. She knows. I know what I need to do, I just need to do it. I'm making this way harder than it is. I should be cutting, not adding. I have over 100 pages of material. I can make this thing so tight in the next 24 hours. I can. I just need to do it.

What was I thinking?

2008-04-08T21:54:00.004-04:00

I'm very quickly running out of time, so I was thinking about not blogging today, but I'm eating dinner, so it's better to blog than to watch another episode of Weeds (seriously. addicted), and I purposely didn't do the little things I do to start my day - like read the comics (Get Fuzzy is essential) and at the very least the headlines on the New York Times - so that I would have little things to distract myself with when I needed a moment away from my thesis. Unfortunately, I don't have enough time to run into the city (even for groceries) or anywhere else that will keep me from my laptop for more than a few minutes, but fortunately, in 67 hours, I will be on my way to a bar with my friend (who is turning his in at the same time) and I will finally be able to breathe.

Man, I need a cigarette.

I don't usually think that, if I think anything I think, a cigarette would be nice right now, and not that I'm advocating smoking, it's horribly unhealthy and kind of gross, but I'm not quitting while I'm stressed out, that would just be silly. (Remember that op-ed I linked to about stretching one's willpower too thin?) (I'm putting a lot of thought into that article for someone who didn't really think it was that good. If anything the message we should take away from it is that willpower can be improved with practice, not what I'm projecting about not trying too hard. That's me cutting myself a little slack and making it look like I'm cutting myself a lot of slack...)

Anyway, back to it. Right now I have... well, I have everything spread out all over the place, so I have more and less than I think I do, but I have my introduction pretty nailed down (for better or worse), and a good first four pages for the Pale Fire section and a good first paragraph for Cat's Cradle. First paragraphs are very important, and very difficult. And I'm not good at deciding on the order of points I want to make, but it's getting there. More coffee and I'll be good to go.

Update: Um. Weirdness. This article in the Washington Post is a year old, yes, but still pertinent, perhaps. I mean, the guy is running for president and has a good chance of winning. (Here's hoping anyway.) Interestingly, the speech linked to has moved to here, but I'm marking this one to read for later, and there's one from the year in between here. Okay, back to work. 65 hours.

Update #2: It is now 7:25am. I would just post a new blog, but I'm too lazy to come up with a clever title. Tired. I'm too tired to come up with a clever title. I'm too lazy to rewrite what I've just written. I think having worked for most of the last 16 hours makes up for it. Am I going to be done by 5pm Friday? Absolutely.

I went to bed yesterday about this time and couldn't get to sleep because the rest of Brooklyn was waking up - including the person who lives above me and my loft bed, which is mere feet from my floor/their ceiling and their footsteps. So perhaps I will eke out another 30 minutes or so. A moment ago I was feeling wide awake, and now that it's getting even lighter, I just would rather be getting up now than going to sleep, but it's impossible for me to turn my brain off. That and I had a cup of coffee at like 4am, so there's that.

Just a nap, I like to tell myself. Maybe I'll get up at 9. No. Probably not. Maybe I'll just stay up until I can't keep my eyes open any more. But who can think without adequate sleep? No one. Que duermas con los angelitos.

I've written

2008-04-08T04:10:00.002-04:00

quite a bit in the last 12 hours, and I thought it was time for a well-deserved snack, so I whipped up a little Roasted Red Pepper Hummus, which is delicious, but I bought these multigrain tortilla chips at the deli this evening, and they're a little overpowering. I think it's the corn. I recommend good old fashioned pita squares if you try this one at home. I'm not a measurer, but I know I used about half the lemon juice called for (because I thought the hummus I made on St Pat's was really lemony, remember?) and probably more than 1/2 cup of roasted red pepper, lots of sea salt, and some white pepper. Pretty darn good.

Also, I'm not sure what I've gotten myself into, but I now have over 11k words for Cat's Cradle. I also have a lot of it organized (and will probably have it in some semblance of an order in the next few hours), so tomorrow will be whittling it away, doing the same for Castle, and keeping at it. 3 and 1/2 days. 84 hours and I have to be on that train, if not off of it, and on my way to the office. And then I'm going to have the biggest celebratory dinner and drinks. I need to start recruiting people...

so many

2008-04-07T16:20:00.004-04:00

other things I want to be doing as well, but time is running very short, so here's some more items I'll just have to read later:

Olympic Torch Run in Paris Halted as Protests Spread

How to Spark an Energy Quest

Chauffeur and Paparazzi Blamed in Diana's Death

In a New Generation of College Students, Many Opt for the Life Examined - about the rise in Philosophy majors, which I am all for. If I knew then what I know now, I would have taken a third minor at the very least.

French Theory in America - I like this trend today! The two of the top ten emailed articles at the moment are about Thought, for goodness sake.

That's enough for now. I'm really starting to freak about this thesis, but I can totally do this. I have not waited to the last minute, even though I could not turn it in right now of course. I have been working extremely hard on this thing, ridiculously long hours many days, I have the material, I just have to organize it and make it all bright and shiny. I can do that. First on today's agenda: continue organizing the material I have for Cat's Cradle, which at the moment totals 7700 words, which is more than enough - too much! in fact. Then I will do the same for Castle, which I have over 12,000 words for, and then Pale Fire, with 10k words, the first 1300 of which are quite lovely. Today is about organizing and trimming - getting rid of that which we don't need. Deep breaths. Lots of caffeine.

And the White Album. (This montage is making me hungry...)

Update: Kurt Vonnegut joke:
"One of his favorite jokes was about a guy who was smuggling wheelbarrows. Every day for years and years, a customs agent would carefully search through this guy's wheelbarrow.
Finally, when he was about to retire, the customs agent asked the guy, "We've become friends. I've searched your wheelbarrow every day for many years. What is it you're smuggling?"
"My friend, I am smuggling wheelbarrows."
--from Mark Vonnegut's Introduction to the newly released collection of heretofore unpublished short stories by his late father, entitled Armageddon in Retrospect, which I will be purchasing as soon as I turn in my thesis.

great sentences that I

2008-04-07T03:17:00.001-04:00

am running across today:

"My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur." - Cat's Cradle, 27. (Seemed to whom?) It's a horribly evocative image, but it's also very complicated in terms of assonance and alliteration, which makes it kind of spectacular.

(I have to interject here that I'm listening to the Cure today, and it's got me in such a fantastic mood!)

And check this out: Up Front, about Liz Phair. (I'm trying to verify a citation, I swear.)

"All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental." - Vonnegut. Fucking genius. I was doing a search to check if there was a misprint in Cat's Cradle, and came across this list from shortly after his death, which was almost a year ago, as my roommate reminded me tonight. Incidentally, there is not a misprint where I was sort of expecting, and now I don't know what to do with this. In the chapter on the nihilist who destroys his apartment and murders his cat, he writes, "I have not seen Krebbs since. Nonetheless, I sense that he was my karass" (59). Um. A karass is a team. Krebbs was the team? ...

great sentences that I

2008-04-06T18:17:00.003-04:00

thought about

2008-04-06T16:27:00.002-04:00

not blogging today, but it's habit-forming. Or a habit. Or... hm.

Postsecret was fantastic as always. I've recently become addicted to the Showtime series Weeds (I've only watched the first three episodes). And what's up with potentially removing checks and balances? It's a crazy world.

I'm officially panicking about this thesis, which is sort of good and sort of bad. It means I'm sitting in front of my laptop for hours on end (yesterday I got up at 9:30am, took an hour nap at 1:30, other breaks, and went to bed at 5am, which is approximately 15 hours of staring at this screen - I'm officially planning on taking all kinds of crazy vacations, mental and international, when this is over), and I'm not allowing myself to go out because I would just be thinking about the fact that I should be working and not having fun (the ambiguity in that clause has been retained for ambiguity's sake), but I'm also experiencing periods of near-paralysis, which is not good. I think I checked my myspace page 10 times yesterday. Not because I give a rat's ass, but because I need some sort of brainless distraction and I'm beginning to think there is no such thing. And I don't really want to not think anyway, so seeking out something brainless is counterproductive, essentially. I'm rambling because I need to get to work. The world can wait. Five days, 23 minutes til turn-in time...

saving them

2008-04-05T10:53:00.004-04:00

yesterday was a good idea for a number of reasons, but one was that it made me recall yesterday's headlines today as I glance at the New York Times, and the same stories are on top but the headlines are altered (and the articles themselves are different, obviously). Check it out:

Clintons Made $109 Million in Last 8 Years - as opposed to yesterday's front page: Clintons Income Topped $109 Million... which is not what the title on the actual article yesterday read either, which was Clintons Say They Earned $109 Million Since 2000.

And then there's: Democrats Call for New Aid Package as 80,000 Jobs Are Cut, a remarkably more intelligent title than yesterday's Unemployment Rate Rises After 80,000 Jobs Cut.

One has to wonder at the implications of today's headlines being more accurate and less ambiguous than yesterday's. Is it a Friday/Saturday thing?

Also, what's up with clubbing seals? Stop it! Send an email to Canada's Minister of International Trade David Emerson here. And thank you to the Humane Society for all that you do.

Oh, and remember that yummy Irish Beer Bread I made for St. Patrick's Day? Picture that, fresh from the oven, smeared with cream cheese. Wait, let me take a bite... Okay, saying anything further would just be bragging. I had to make two batches, though (horror of horrors!) because I bought the big bottle of Guiness and it's a bit early in the morning to drink the remaining 11 ounces. Now, if it was summer and/or I wasn't trying to finish a thesis, absolutely. But then again, if it was summer I probably wouldn't be baking.

On to thesis matters: I did in fact cut and paste for exactly 60 minutes. And then my doorbell rang (doorbuzzer buzzed, actually) and I spent the rest of the evening entertaining. It was the perfect break. Great surprise. Exactly what I wanted. But if I'm going to have this monster ready to email overseas this evening (especially if I want to get it some-semblance-of-done in time to go to my friend's gig - I don't even know what time it starts or where it is), I need to get cracking.

Update: Omg, there's an article by Liz Phair! I've been listening to her since I was 16, and just love her - despite her decidedly poppier recent stuff (also, I have not listened to Somebody's Miracle, I have to admit, just haven't gotten around to it). Frontman is a book review of Dean Wareham's Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance. I really want to read it (the article, I don't know about the book yet), but I am going to have to wait until later because I have finished my breakfast, and that was the time I allotted for perusing the paper.

to read later

2008-04-04T20:33:00.002-04:00

After Success, Problems for Microfinancing in Mexico

Unemployment Rate Rises After 80,000 Jobs Cut - ya don't say...

Clinton Income Topped $109 Million - if only because one of the sub-headings on the main page leads to an article called Clinton Calls for Cabinet Post on Poverty

Meet the Oboptimists - um. I have the feeling this deserves a lot of attention, but I'm going to refrain from reading it so I can get working on my thesis.

Stay in it to Win it - do we see a trend with these articles I'm marking for later?...

There Were Orders to Follow

Art With Baggage in Tow

Old Ways, New Pains for Farms in Poland

And yes, I usually do read this much of the paper. I can't get enough of it lately. It satisfies my increasingly short attention span. I thought of taking a book on the subway today and decided that what I really wanted was a magazine (I took a book anyway, but still). I think it has to do with the fact that I am putting so much energy into this one giant thing that is my thesis that I can't concentrate on anything else for more than a few minutes (or seconds) at a time.

Yesterday I read Some Good News on Food Prices, and the day before I spent a bunch of time catching up on the Dot Earth blog, which I just love.

And now I am thoroughly caffeinated and am going to force myself to spend the next 60 minutes cutting and pasting because I think when it comes down to it, I really have most of what I need for this rewrite and am just getting frustrated because I'm too close to the text, which is not helped by the fact that I've made the text size bigger in order not to hurt my eyes, so I'm having trouble viewing the big picture, as it were. That makes sense to me, but I'm not sure if I've effectively translated it from abstract thought to abstract language... Anyway. Yeah.

even though

2008-04-03T17:51:00.003-04:00

I am not as far along as I may have wanted, I'm pretty focused today. I was supposed to hang out with two of my fellow thesis-writers to critique each other's drafts, but I bailed on them to keep rewriting. I hope they email me their drafts though, I really do. It would not only be a good distraction (and good practice - I love editing), but I've never read a master's thesis before. That's kind of strange, isn't it? I've read dissertations and loads of journal articles and other scholarly publications, but I almost am unsure what's expected of me at this point. Maybe this is a good thing. Don't get me wrong, my adviser has been completely amazing and I think I have a pretty solid idea of what she expects for what I'm giving to her next week (yikes!), but reading at least one successful thesis would have been greatly appreciated. Perhaps I will mention that in my exit survey.

Okay, that's it, I need coffee. As per that op-ed I linked to the other day, I am not putting undue pressure on myself to not do all of those things I feel guilty about doing, like drinking too much coffee (with too much sugar) and the myriad of other unhealthy habits I have. One thing at a time. Chomp.

PS - my titling fun for the month is shaping up nicely, I think, especially since I have not in fact written a ready-made paragraph but am building backwards as I go. I was thinking maybe for May I'll start every blog with the same phrase, but I have to think of something flexible enough for the job. Shouldn't be too hard, it's language after all.

I don't want to, but

2008-04-03T03:46:00.003-04:00

I simply must. I don't know why I'm being so difficult. I feel like I'm outside of myself and I really want to just make myself behave, to shake me or something, wake myself up. I've been sitting in front of my computer since 1:30 this afternoon, and I've only added a little over a thousand words and two and a half paragraphs. I haven't gotten to the end of the introduction yet! Granted, I'm working on the last paragraph, and once I've banged it out, my introduction is pretty fucking fabulous, if I do say so myself. But still. An introduction does not a graduate thesis make. It helps, yes. And I've incorporated a lot more theory into the introduction, which is definitely good. I know where I'm going, I just have to get there. And it's four o'clock in the morning, and part of me just wants to crawl in bed and try to get up at a reasonable hour tomorrow, but I know perfectly well that I wouldn't be able to fall asleep and I will probably get up around 2pm (como siempre), and I want to do this, I want to write this. I have to admit here that I'm pretty impressed with myself, actually. But I sort of feel like this is contributing to my paralysis. That doesn't even remotely make sense. Except it does. Perhaps I will explore that at a later time. I have a thesis to write.

Update: It is now 5:30am, and I just realized that I have added five pages somehow. This is including the bibliography, but still. I've added four pages of text. Not bad. I just began reworking the Pale Fire section, but it's going to be a big job, so I'm going to put it away for the night. And tomorrow, I'm... well, we'll see what happens. No promises. Not making a promise saves me from breaking it. Down to the wire for real this time. Bed time. Lovely.

Apparently I was thinking

2008-04-02T15:44:00.002-04:00

wouldn't it be fun (oo, see what I did there?) to get completely wasted last night, because that may or may not be what I did. Sometimes I am a danger to myself and others, I swear to god. Mostly just myself. I had such a blast, though. It was my friend's birthday and we went to Identity on E 6th St between Avenues A and B. (PS - if you follow the link to the reviews on citysearch, you simply must read this one because it's fucking hilarious! Omg, the hot bartender refused to flirt with you?? Pardon me: was reluctant to flirt with you?? That's not part of the job description! Well, they're not allowed to ask us that in job interviews, at any rate, and they can't technically fire us for not flirting, but I have been asked by small-minded bar managers to wear lipstick...) Apparently the place is crazy on the weekends, but it was perfect for our purposes last night because we were able to take over the joint. The bartender Lawrence was fantastic. I asked him where he was from and he said "France." I said, "yes, I sort of picked up on that. Where in France?" He's from Normandy. I don't remember at the moment what his t-shirt said, just that it was a suitable response to that review, come to think of it: something witty about being a bartender. Man, I miss it...

Anyway, I've just made some coffee and need to get down to business, but this op-ed piece was pretty good today, and I rather enjoyed reading about the shenanigans Google got into yesterday, but sadly I missed them all because I got up and went straight to dinner at Zen Palate in Hell's Kitchen (pardon me, the Theatre District) and then straight to the bar.

And now I find myself wondering exactly what it is that all of my willpower is going to... Perhaps I'm simply that out of practice. Ew, scary.

Wouldn't it be fun

2008-04-01T02:18:00.002-04:00

if the titles of my blog all formed a little paragraph over there on the right hand side of the screen? I may have to make this one of my April goals. But do I write a paragraph and then make my blogs begin with the few words directly preceding the words I used for the title of the previous blog? Or do I keep it more spontaneous and make that my daily challenge, write it backwards, see what happens? I'll decide in the morning, is what it looks like right now.

More importantly, it is April Fool's Day, and I am just itching to razz somebody or everybody I know, but it's so difficult when stuck at this desk. Or is it? I've already sent a certain someone an ecard that is of the "I'm just kidding, but it's April fool's, so am I kidding?" variety, but I'm not anticipating a response, which is disappointing. All of the things I can think of to lie about would only last a second and since I'm not getting the satisfaction of the look of utter horror on the other person's face just before they realize... well, what fun is that? I could do something to my roommate, but he's already on to me. (Seriously, I am not a secret keeper unless I really want to be.) And I don't want to cause permanent psychological damage, so what I just thought of is out... It's a good thing I don't use my powers for evil, let me tell ya.

Around this time of night, sometimes before, I start to feel like I could use some coffee, but then I think, no, then I'll never get to sleep and I'll sleep all day again, but the thing is: I sleep all day anyway, and I've only been up for like 12 hours (not even!), so why shouldn't I make some coffee and stay up a bit?... Except I'm actually not that sleepy right now, so I should just focus and get some more work done and get on with it already. I'm almost done with the introduction (I didn't have that much to do to it), and I have already set myself up to rearrange several sections, so if I get through the draft at least once tonight, adding notes and rearranging, then I will be satisfied with my progress. Because it would be ridiculous if I couldn't at least do that much.

I am taking at least a week this summer and just sitting on a beach somewhere far, far away. All by myself. Maybe I won't even tell anyone where I'm going. Well, that wouldn't really be safe, and I would probably get really bored, let's face it, but I am taking advantage of my time off is what I'm really getting at. I don't know what any of that means, really, but what I wouldn't give for some sun and sand right about now. The temperatures are gradually slipping upward, the temperatures are gradually slipping upward, it can't be cold and rainy forever...

And speaking of play

2008-03-31T00:07:00.003-04:00

this video is pretty darn cool. I love when apparently ugly elements are put together to create something beautiful. Granted, the background music was decidedly prettier than the noise of the machines, I'm quite sure. But transforming clunkiness into grace is still a rather remarkable accomplishment.

And speaking of accomplishments: I've inputted almost all of my comments and my adviser's comments onto my thesis draft and will then be able to start building the next draft.

But, as you can see from the above link, I'm currently exploring I Blame the Sea at asofterworld.com, both of which are pretty fantastic. My roommate introduced me to the Overqualified letters the night before last, which are also pretty great.

When I said "play"

2008-03-30T18:30:00.003-04:00

perhaps I should have specified that we actually were going to see three one-act plays written by Ethan Coen entitled Almost an Evening and starring F. Murray Abraham, Johanna Day, Mark Linn-Baker of Perfect Strangers fame, Joey Slotnick who was absolutely amazing in the first play, and a bunch of other very talented people. We laughed almost the entire time. It was great. AND we had free tickets. But I would totally have paid the student ticket rate of $20, and if you can afford it, the full ticket price of $50 is well worth it. It's only money, after all, and this was incredibly good theatre, which is priceless.

I'm going to be writing this evening, which is probably why I've been procrastinating all afternoon. Why is it that the thought that if I get it done I will be done is not compelling me to action? I need caffeine.

Quick glance

2008-03-29T13:45:00.005-04:00

at today's headlines:

Sisters in Idiosyncrasy about a bicoastal creative class, which made me want to take greater advantage of living here. And then I reminded myself that I'm getting a master's degree and writing a thesis at the moment, so 'taking greater advantage' will have to wait a few months, which is fine.

Obama Communicates, Even Without Words about Obama's recent appearance on the View (which I have to admit I've only seen a few partial episodes of). The article sort of focuses on body language, but I have to point out that communicating "even without words" implies that it's surprising that he (a man) can handle being "surrounded by women" (which is how he put it, but he was referring specifically to his home life), which, lets face it, is - wait, what is it? This drives me crazy, this pervasive gender split, I was thinking about this last night as I walked past a window display at the Gap (whose spring line features classic slacks, button-downs, and cardigans for guys of all ages and "light and airy" pastel spring dresses for women of all ages). I don't think the split is so decisive, but advertisers (this will be my scapegoat today) seem to think so. Back to the article: notice that all of the women except Whoopi Goldberg are wearing skirts and heels and have their legs crossed towards Obama? Why is it still the "norm" for 'dressed-up' to mean 'in a dress'? Don't get me wrong: I like dresses as much as the next person. In the warmer months. (It's 42 degrees outside - I'm wearing jeans and boots, thanks. And knee socks and a sweater under my wool coat and scarf.)

It really upsets me that what passes for women's fashion isn't meant to keep us warm.

And hooray for science: Study Ties Genetic Variation to Schizophrenia. Although I have to admit that a small part of me is wary about what pseudo-science is capable of doing with this information...

And speaking of pseudo-science, what is up with the New York Times' headlines lately: Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More. Really? This seems a bit inflammatory given the content of the article, in which scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva scoff (that's right: scoff!) at two men - one of whom 'probably' lives in Barcelona? wtf?? - who are suing CERN because they think the collider may create a mini black hole that will swallow the earth and the solar system and the galaxy and, hell, maybe the universe. While I am inclined to view advances like this as potentially dangerous (the article does mention the atomic bomb), and even though I am reading all of this apocalyptic literary criticism and what have you, let's look at the opening of the article for just a sec:

"More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice. None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right." Really, Dennis Overbye? Is that really the part of the article we want people to read? Don't worry, kids, there are lots of fucked up things going on between people on this planet, but "none of this... will matter a bit," and you may as well not give two shits because a group of scientists somewhere may blow up the whole goddamned universe if these two guys (one of which doesn't even know where the other one is!!) just by chance might be right about something even the scientist whose work they cite on their website says they don't understand, but they filed a lawsuit (in a court which doesn't have jurisdiction over the project!), so maybe that means we should heed their warning of impending doom. *exhale*

Also, if you don't know about Earth Hour tonight, check it out.

Anyway, I am going to make myself a huge lunch and enjoy the sunshine, even if it's from this side of the blinds. I've started my day off with a little opera and some Earl Grey tea, and I might be going to a play later, and then we're celebrating my friend's birthday. Brilliant.

I don't know if

2008-03-28T17:19:00.002-04:00

it's the bag of green m&m's my sister sent me in my easter basket, but I feel completely energized today, totally ready to get to work. It also might be that my adviser just emailed me and said she's extending my deadline, but this means that what I will be giving her is a final perfect thesis. For whatever reason, this makes me feel like a weight has been lifted, like less constricted or something. Instead of having another version that's not-quite-done, I can just get down to business. Which is what I'm going to do. And quickly, before panic begins to set in again.

So, I get these

2008-03-27T14:58:00.002-04:00

daily Buddhist meditations on my google hompage, and the one for yesterday was really good: "If only I could throw away the urge to trace my patterns in your heart, I could really see you." - David Brandon (Zen in the Art of Helping). And it fits in with my thesis, oddly enough, not that I'm going to quote it or anything, it doesn't fit that well. But I think whether we take the "your heart" to be metaphorical or more (poetically speaking) literal, one of the messages seems to be that when you presuppose a pattern in the past or when you're looking for yourself in another person's actions, you close off the possibility of any 'real' knowledge, which is maybe why really knowing anything is impossible. If only...

Really interesting

2008-03-26T14:16:00.002-04:00

blog on Dot Earth the other day (which I've just read). Talk about recycling. It's always amazed me that we (globally) are not doing more with our waste, but I totally get the idea that it's taboo, and if it seems like taboos are something we have somehow gotten past or are too civilized for or something similarly elitist, just think about what you do with yours. (See: I can't even write that more clearly because I don't talk about things like that.)

Everything is connected. I'm thinking specifically of economics and environmental issues (like Norway considering itself carbon-neutral if it contributes to environmental projects abroad), how what makes sense on one hand (i.e., what can be mathematically shown to be more profitable in the long run) can still go unimplemented because greedy bastards don't want to wait that long - and they're already making money now.

And now I've guilt-tripped myself out of going thrift shopping, which I thought I might actually get to today. No matter. I don't need to spend the money.

What I need to do is keep working on this thesis, which I really think is coming along nicely. I've been working really hard, but sometimes I just get to a point where I can't form a coherent thought, let alone put it in words on a screen. And my back hurts from sitting at this desk all day, and I've been up for less than two hours. A little yoga sounds to be in order. Namaste.

I'm sure I've mentioned

2008-03-25T17:11:00.002-04:00

the heating issue in our apartment before. Sometimes it comes on like the tide, once every twelve hours for a half hour or so, so that it's a decent temperature in here for like three hours and then cold again. Sometimes it doesn't come on for days at a time (ok, two, but still). Sometimes it stays on for twenty-four hours at a stretch, making it unbearably hot in here. I had the window open the night before last, and I have it open an inch or two at the moment again, which makes it kind of nice - hot and cold at the same time. It's stuffy, but I've been craving warmer weather so much lately (I know I am not alone in this), and for whatever reason I've found myself inspired to brew iced tea. I can't wait for summer. Not least of all because I'm going to Russia. And I'll be done with my thesis and have a master's under my belt. And I'll be able to wear sandals and my skin will be all sun-kissed. Mmm...

Anyhoo. Back to work. I was good last night, I stayed up until 6am typing up quotes and noting them if not analyzing them and linking them to other passages. It was getting to be a little too much at the end there, but I had made myself a deal involving a glass of Côtes du Rhône and I intended to keep it. I think I'm almost ready to start piecing together my argument for We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but I'm not sure if I shouldn't go ahead and notate Cat's Cradle. "A work like this is never done." Yeah, Uncle Julian, I know that feeling.

Fortunately, a work like this is going to be done. Thank goodness for deadlines. My friends never had an editing party, which is fine because I haven't done any more writing yet, but I am still going to get a draft to my friend in time to revise it again for my adviser, I think. Also, I forgot to mention this before, but my adviser did not advise me to read Freud, thank all that is good in this world. However, I did print out Beyond the Pleasure Principle and will read it after I turn this monster in again, most likely, or over the summer. As one of my friends put it, I hate that Freud is so important, that so many scholars reference him, but it's a vicious cycle: he's important because he's so important which makes him important. Therefore, I don't have to mention him, but I do have to know what he said.

I asked my whatever he is if he wanted to go see Los Amigos Invisibles with me next week (they're playing at Bowery Ballroom April 5 at 9pm), and his response was, "How do you know Los Amigos Invisibles?" I said, "I listen to internet radio, I know a lot of things." And it's true. That's another good thing about having to be doing ten things at once and spending all of my time in front of my computer: I've been listening to a wide range of music in a wide range of languages, mostly Spanish and French though, and I've been looking up lyrics and bands and all kinds of crazy things. I was hearing a lot of music I wouldn't have heard when I was working at the restaurant, but it was more often than not songs that are popular on the radio and in clubs, and that's not exactly my style. Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike something purely on the basis that a lot of people listen to it or that it's getting a lot of airplay. That would be just as ridiculous as liking something because it was popular, just as indiscriminate. I like to put a little bit more thought into it. Or a little less. Whichever works. Anyway, my point is that my Spanish and French are improving a little more rapidly than if I wasn't listening to this music, which is good because I don't have a lot of time to devote to language study right now. Other than English, of course. I think I'm almost getting the hang of it.

Where to begin...

2008-03-24T15:48:00.002-04:00

I got a lot of work done yesterday, actually writing and analyzing. Of course, it's in unfiled notes in OneNote, so I have no idea how many words I got out or even have it in some kind of order. Which makes it easier to add to today.

Around 10pm last night, I started to run out of steam. I had two choices: jump right back in, head first, and force myself back into the groove; or be satisfied with what I had accomplished and go socialize. A friend called. Decision made. So I went to meet my friend at Sushisamba on Park Ave between 19th and 20th Sts. I didn't eat there, just had a glass of Cote du Rhone, but the atmosphere was quite nice (despite the metalwork that makes the ceiling look even lower than it already is - I get claustrophobic, but hey, it's New York), really lovely reds and dark colors, and the bartender was very nice and I had a wonderful time. My friend had a cucumber martini concoction which was delicious. It would make a great summer afternoon drink. Then I taxied uptown to Le Bateau Ivre to meet another friend. Absolutely love that place. It's so French. I highly recommend the Beaumes de Venise, which is a Southern Rhone (of course - my favorite), but they have over 250 varieties of wine by the glass and amazing food.

Then we hopped across town to the Mean Fiddler in Hell's Kitchen, which was this rowdy bar, complete with girls with no rhythm whatsoever dancing on the bar. Talk about a change of pace! It was fun though. Got to have decadent wine and cheese by candlelight and then belly dance to 80s music. Always good.

I've linked a fun article from the Times (A Guide to the French) above, but the first article I read today was about Darfur. What's going on there? we ask. There's no good way to answer that question, but if we have to ask it means we're not paying enough attention. Anyone who knows me at all knows that peace is a big issue for me. Which means I'm very concerned with how conflict is represented. Implications of futility are incredibly dangerous, I think.

I should probably admit, however, that while reading the article, which is only three pages long, I got up from my desk twice, looked something up on the internet, downloaded an album, and made a phone call. And then I read the article on living in Paris and wished I could go... I have a short attention span, yes, we all know this, and multitasking is more effective for me than trying to concentrate on one thing at a time (takes just as long as when I do ten things at once, I'm not kidding - sometimes longer), but I couldn't even read a single article on such a grave topic? For the record, I didn't read the French article all in one go either. Among other things, I looked up Sarkozy's response to a man who told him not to touch him, which is hilarious. ("Casse-toi," by the way, doesn't mean "get lost" so much as "piss off," which makes the whole phrase something like "piss off, poor bastard," or better yet "piss off, dumbass," but it's even funnier because Sarkozy's smiling the whole time, it's so lighthearted. Who tells the French president not to touch them in the middle of a crowd welcoming the president?)

Anyway, today I'm going to continue going through WHALITC for a bit, see where that gets me, maybe shift gears and go through the comments I and my adviser made on my draft, maybe read some more Derrida (Memoires for Paul de Man). I need to go do laundry and to go to the grocery store, but I can still sort of put both off until tomorrow, so we'll see what happens. Either way, I'm going to embrace my scatteredness because it's counterproductive not to.

But first I'm going to send some appropriately inappropriate ecards...

Have you seen this?

2008-03-23T05:01:00.002-04:00

It's awesome. Thank you to my glorious roommate for introducing me to the Asylum Street Spankers, which is how I found this video. Fucking phenomenal.

I didn't feel like

2008-03-22T18:38:00.003-04:00

blogging yesterday, I suppose. I don't really feel like it today either, but I will. Today is a writing day.

I forgot to mention that my thesis is totally more about writing and memory than I had realized. And it will only be even more so by the end of it.

After going through Castle twice - once for always and once for never - I finally realized that it would be much more efficient to track all the terms I wanted to trace at once with a spreadsheet, so that's what I did yesterday. It was still as tedious as it sounds, but it means that I've read the novel like four times in the last three days. And of course, I'm about sick of it, but I've also noticed some interesting trends that I want to talk about in my paper. I need to go back over the book for the occurrences of "might," though. And then I need to analyze the data. The sheer number of "would"s is as I expected. The other advantage of the spreadsheet is that I was able to track the words by page number, chapter, and total all at once.

I need a snack. I really need to go to the grocery store, and I definitely want to get out of my apartment (as always - I'm antsy), but it's chilly and I don't want to take my laptop into the city. Really I just want to run away to Mexico. Can I? Can I do that? Wouldn't that be nice? If you walkaway, I walkaway...

If I work for the next few hours, I can reward myself. That's vague. Mm, I have an easter basket full of chocolate from my sister sitting on my desk. A little sugar to start off the evening sounds fabulous.

It's supposed to be

2008-03-20T16:12:00.003-04:00

73 degrees in NC on Saturday, and we're supposed to have snow showers in NYC. Should I point out that it's officially spring as of 5:48am this morning? No. Best not to make it worse. I'm so ready for it to be warm! (I shout.) And, yes, I know that in a few months I will probably be complaining of the heat, or allergies, or bugs, or something, but right now I just want to be able to sit in the sun.

So, my sister is the coolest thing ever! She sent me an Easter basket loaded with chocolate, which is exactly what I need for getting through the next few weeks of rereading and rewriting. She also included this little motorized bunny that scared the bejesus out of my cat, which has already made it worth its weight in gold.

Also, for whatever reason, I decided to listen to Stone Temple Pilots while walking (meandering aimlessly) from the library to the subway last night, and when I got home I plugged their name into Last.fm and have been listening to great music ever since. It's making me all nostalgic and not at the same time. By that I mean, I know all these songs and haven't listened to them in forever (Mother Love Bone, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Temple of the Dog, Mudhoney, Alice in Chains, etc.), and they're making me miss my best friend and remember in a vague way us hanging out in high school, but they're not making me long for something I've lost. I've gained too much. I have too much to gain. This show is on the road. Moving on.

I tracked the repetition of "always" in Castle last night, which took forever, and I found something very interesting. I decided to keep track by chapter, and I'm glad I did, because it turns out that there is a definite curve to the trend. There are a total of 104 occurrences of "always" including the title, but a third of them (30) are in the first chapter and there are almost as many (24) in the second. (There are 10 chapters.) The word disappears in chapter 7 and only appears once in chapter 8, the pair of which constitute the day of the fire. This is where everything changes. Nothing is as it was. Merricat's narration does not portray a positive continuity here (when Charles is there), though the word begins to appear, as if tentatively, in the last two chapters. I'm very interested to track the use of "never" now, and I think I will do the same for "sometimes" because a big part of my argument is that the illusion of continuity is undermined precisely at the same time that it is constructed. Hence, making sense and nonsense at the same time. Hm...

I'm not sure why

2008-03-19T19:39:00.003-04:00

I don't really feel like blogging today. I'm not in a bad mood or anything, or feeling especially lazy, I don't know what it is.

I met with my adviser this afternoon, and I think it went really well. I feel very confident that I can accomplish this and, although I have a lot (and I mean, a lot) more work to do, I have a pretty decent foundation to build from. Main points from that meeting:

1. I need to incorporate more theory and criticism.
This is not a surprise to me. Well, actually I wasn't expecting her to encourage as adamantly as she did that I bring in more critics to argue against (which is what I would be doing - I don't agree with most of what I've read). The theory I was fully prepared to have to incorporate more of.

2. My transitions need work and I need to clarify a lot of things.
Again, when I went through my draft last night, I wrote on every single page "clarify," "explore," "extend," "elaborate," "better transition," "clumsy," so I was also prepared for her to say this as well.

3. I need to describe more banally what is going on in the texts.
Another good thing about taking a week and a half away from my paper is that I was getting too close to it to be able to contextualize what the hell I was saying in a way that would be clear to a reader who was not myself. Go figure.

4. And the sections on Cat's Cradle and Castle need to be expanded, more thoroughly explored, and completely reorganized.
In Cat's Cradle I'm going to go into the use of Bokononism as purposefully lying to oneself, the logic behind knowingly being illogical (that's the plan, anyway), and in Castle I'm going to further explore the use of "always" and "never," and verb tense, and how Merricat's portrayal of continuity is undermined by her own description of events.

5. I also need to bring out the historical context more explicitly.
Discussing Alan Nadel's Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (which I only mention briefly) will surely help, but I will probably bring in a few more of the critics that I've read, if only in footnotes.

Good things: she really liked my intro, which I wasn't sure about. She seems to like my ideas and encouraged me to throw in all the stuff I wasn't sure about throwing in, which would illustrate all of the work that I've done. And I only have two and a half weeks to turn in the next draft, so I don't have time to goof off too much.

A few of my fellow thesis-writers and I are having an editing party on Sunday, so I want to have something ready for that, and then I want to have another version ready the following week to show my favorite study-buddy (you know who you are), and then I have a week to have something bright and shiny for my adviser on April 5.

Maybe it's the wet and cold that has me all - whatever the words are for this feeling (even though we know we can't completely put feelings into words). I want to get out of the house, but it's gross outside, so I should prepare myself for a night in, but I really want to go out. I'm not sure why.

I've been trying

2008-03-19T03:00:00.003-04:00

to make sense of my draft and notes because I have a meeting with my adviser tomorrow, and I should really be in bed already, but I just had a breakthrough and have realized how freakin' glad I am that I took the last week off from looking at it or the novels or criticism related to the novels or anything really, because I obviously needed it. I've been sitting here at my desk for like six hours and some change, and I've been multitasking of course (of course, of course), and I really need to go to bed, but I've made so many notes and I really feel like I'm so much closer than I thought I was. It's not all nonsense. I think it really shows that I've been trying.

(How's them apples?)

I found the quote

2008-03-18T14:30:00.002-04:00

I was looking for last night before the party got under way. B is reading Cat's Cradle and read the line about writing being a miracle drug, and I recalled a line from Pale Fire that is also very writerly, but I couldn't find it. (Incidentally, I thought it was on the left hand side and at the end of a note, but it's in the middle of one and on the right!) Anyway:

"I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all" (207).

I also booked a flight to Scotland yesterday. !! How cool is that? I'm very excited.

Today I'm going to go print out a copy of my thesis draft to take with me tomorrow, when I'm meeting with my adviser (eek!). I will spend the evening making notes to myself on that.

It's so scary, all this. Writing is never easy, not even when you're writing for yourself, in your journal or wherever, not even when it's quote/unquote meaningless. Does that mean that we stop putting so much effort into _every_single_word_? Hell no.

I just realized that by beginning each entry in the title line I might possibly be challenging the whole 'the title isn't part of the text, it names the text' thing. But if we delve into this further, go up another level, we see that "making (non)sense" is the title above all entries within the blog, so there is still a title that is not part of the text. Perhaps I should challenge this with my next entry (to be continued...). If we want to really flip things around, though, I could repeat the title (for lack of another word) at the end of the entry. But that goes against the order of reading in terms of titles - we read from the beginning to the end, not the other way around. (Except for all you sneakies who read the last page of a novel first, which is just weird.) And by bookending the text in such a way, are we merely serving to perpetuate the illusion of the text as an enclosed space? Hm...

So I cooked for the party last night. To be more accurate, I should say I 'baked' and 'prepared food.' Some friends of mine are vegan, so I set myself the challenge of giving them some options, especially because I thought my roommate was going to prepare corned beef and cabbage or some such meaty monstrosity (which I'm sure would have been lovely, and I definitely would have tried it at the very least), and I think at our housewarming party the only vegan options were chips and salsa. No, I made guac too. (My roommate made stuffed mushrooms and gingerbread cupcakes - both with creamcheese among other things - and sausage/cheese muffin things.) Anyway, hooray for the internet. I made Hummus, Artichoke and Red Pepper Dip, Moroccan Carrot Hummus (which was quite interesting; a little spicier than I expected, but very good), and Irish Beer Bread (which was a huge hit). I added about a tablespoon and a half or so of olive oil to the hummus because it tasted a little too lemony to me. I also had about a cup of leftover chickpeas, so I mashed them up with a little roasted red pepper and some olive oil, a little sea salt, and ate that for my snack-while-cooking. Everything was really easy to make. Not at all Irish, of course, but tasty. We have a ton of leftovers. More for me!

Off to the computer lab with free printing. Do I make my thesis more about the act of writing? I've been thinking about that from the beginning, and now that I'm reading Of Grammatology, but I've been thinking about it even more since I found the quote.

I will not be

2008-03-17T13:37:00.002-04:00

blogging today (if that's not making nonsense, I don't know what is) because we are having a St Patty's Day party this evening and I need to clean the apartment. No one will do it for me. Where are the elves when you need them? ...Apparently, however, I can keep the brownies away with good housekeeping. Unless I like getting pinched in my sleep. Hm, no, I can't imagine that would be pleasant. My cat sometimes extends a claw too far against/into my skin, and I don't care for that while I'm dreaming of -- not telling. What is it with us Celts and pinching? Remember to wear green! Unless you like getting pinched. There's a someecard for that! I love it. Happy St Pat's, everyone.

A word about this article in the NY Times

2008-03-16T15:21:00.006-04:00

The title, first of all: Dalai Lama Won't Stop Tibet Protests. Keeping in mind, of course, that the title is not part of the text, it names the text, how do we read this? As the Dalai Lama himself points out, he doesn't have the power to stop the protests. "Asked if he could stop Tibetan protesters from flouting Beijing’s deadline to surrender by midnight on Monday, the Dalai Lama, 72, replied swiftly: “I have no such power.”" There is a vast difference between "could" and "won't." Granted, he does say that he won't ask them to stop, there is, again, a vast difference between asking and stopping.

There's another article here about the protests, and while it definitely sounds as though violence is coming from both sides, who started it (as if that is the issue) is not clear. It sounds like the government is the side with the guns...

The article seems to be a little judgmental about the Dalai Lama's advocacy for Tibetan freedom within China, as opposed to Tibetan independence from China. A block quote:

"The Dalai Lama, for his part, seemed unfazed about the dissent among Tibetans over full independence versus greater autonomy. Even his elder brother, he recalled, had admonished him many years ago for not advocating independence from China. “ ‘My dear younger brother, the Dalai Lama,’ ” his brother told him. “ ‘You sold out the Tibetan legitimate right. Like that.’ ”

The Dalai Lama described dissent as “a healthy sign of our commitment to democracy, open society.”"

While this passage can be read as an unbiased description, it uses language that casts doubts on the Dalai Lama's position. He "seemed unfazed" begs the question: 'why is he unfazed? should he be fazed? shouldn't he be fazed?' The repetition of "dissent," the probable explanation for his being "unfazed," is separated by a paragraph break, as well as his admission that "even" his brother had "admonished" (cautioned, advised, scolded) him about that position.

So. What to do? There are certainly economic advantages to being part of China (access to education and healthcare, one hopes), but do they outweigh the disadvantages of violent suppression?

The Dalai Lama goes on to say that "some kind of cultural genocide is taking place," which is so sad. I've heard a lot in recent years about loss of diversity as a result of globalization, a leveling out because everyone has access to the same cheaply produced things and all that, but while those sorts of issues adversely affect poorer regions because they can't (don't, won't, whatever) compete in global markets (and why should they have to?), this kind of cultural loss has to do with governmental policy of outlawing what it labels as "dissent," whatever it deems that may be. What happens when a government declares war, essentially, on a word? It means they can define that word however they want to, meaning they can fight against whatever they attach that word to, indefinitely.

It always comes back to this, doesn't it? How do we elect officials who do this to their own people? Oh, that's right, we didn't... Except we did. We live in the world we live in. Let's do something about it.

Go read this article immediately: George Speaks, Badly. Thank you, Gail, I needed that. What we have here is what I like to call Aw, Shucks Diplomacy. The man went to Yale and Harvard and can't form a coherent sentence. Scary. Not nearly as scary as knowing some people don't regret their voting for him and obviously don't understand that you can't run a country like this. Well. Evidently you *can* but everyone rolls their eyes at you. And then stops listening. And then you can say or do whatever you... Yikes. YIKES.

I had no idea

2008-03-15T16:06:00.002-04:00

that Dick Cavett has a blog on NYTimes.com. His installment from yesterday is hilarious, witty, insightful. Intelligent and just plain likable. And it led me to this story about how little American high school students know these days, which in turn led me to the Common Core website, which is interesting, and where I found a little quote from Obama, which led me to this website and this video. I'm inspired.

Which is good because, although it was definitely motivating, I was looking at Columbia's English and Comp Lit websites, and feeling a little discouraged, I must admit. But you know what? Just because something is a lot of work doesn't mean I can't do it. That is what I have to remind myself, constantly, every day. Perhaps I will elaborate at some point, but not right now. Later.

Coffee. Spivak. Derrida. Go.

Days of Rage

2008-03-15T00:00:00.002-04:00

was completely awesome last night. Resistance-minded hardcore punkrock. Amazing. Check out their MySpace page here. They're playing at Trash Bar in Brooklyn on April 10 at midnight (open bar 8-9 with $6 admission, according to the website, sweet), and their new album is coming out next month too. Cannot wait!

I sort of wasted today, but not really. I slept in after last night's festivities, of course. Oh! and congrats to my friend, who found out yesterday he got into Columbia! Hopefully I will be in his position in a year. Different department, but whatever. Anyway, today. I went to the post office to pick up a parcel (let's not get into it, it's a hellishly long story), then made lunch and watched Lost (as my roommate put it, 'they cheated'). I did a bunch of cleaning. But that's really about it. I should have made coffee straightaway, yes, I know this now. It's a bit late to do so now, though. I feel like I've sort of frittered away this week. Maybe I needed it, maybe I didn't.

We're having a St Patty's Day party, I'm so excited! Last year was awesome: I went to the parade (it had snowed and was bitterly cold), then to brunch, caught the tail-end of the tour at the Brooklyn Brewery, and then a bunch of us went and bought beer and snacks and spent like 10 hours on my friend's bed, chain-smoking and laughing. It was still winter. This year, it feels like it's almost spring. It is spring in other parts of the country, from what I hear. Lucky bastards. But, back to my point, since I did a bunch of cleaning tonight, I won't have to do it all Monday afternoon, which is when we'll be cooking and making sure we have enough whiskey. Maybe I should buy it tomorrow, wouldn't want the shelves to be empty. And I have to run to Kmart (I wish Target wasn't so freakin' far away). Which gives me mandatory subway reading time. Bar crawl tomorrow night in Williamsburg in honor of my friend's birthday, fabulous.

That's all I can manage tonight.

This is going to be brief

2008-03-13T11:41:00.003-04:00

because I have to get reading. You know when you start a project and think, maybe I should read that really important theorist's major texts. M-hm. Yeah. Because of course, I found the one I should have read months ago. I'm glad I did a lot of background reading about what critics were saying about literature and culture in the time period I'm looking at, and I have read a bunch of theory in the past, but I knew damn well the theory was where I needed to be and I kept pushing it off anyway. And I don't know why because I love it. I'm reading Gayatri Spivak's Translater's Preface to Of Grammatology at the moment, and it's completely amazing and exactly where I need to be. It's where I should have begun.

Thanks to my friend for posting this as a bulletin on MySpace: The $3 Trillion War in Iraq. I just don't get it. On what level does this war make sense to anyone who isn't getting rich off of it? My only beef with the article: what's the difference between "deaths" and "violent deaths" in the context of war? (There's no answer to that question.)

And on the homefront. Apparently an addiction to someecards.com ("when you care enough to hit send," I love it!) and forwarding funny pictures to one's friends/coworkers and friends/family, etc., can get one fired. "One" is misleading; at least three of them just got canned. Who knew? One more reason not to get involved in Corporate America. As if we needed that.

Live punk tonight. Awesome.

What a beautiful

2008-03-12T11:21:00.002-04:00

day! I've gotten up early (for me) (actually to be honest, I didn't sleep very well and was up at 4, 6, and 8, but whatevs), I've had a fantastic breakfast, and now I'm going to hop in the shower and head into the city. I'm just going to the library or the grad student lounge, but it was really nice getting away from my desk and apartment the last two evenings, and I need to get a substantial amount of reading done, so I think the best way to do that is succumb to my need for switching up locales and get out there.

But first: a look at the headlines. I love the New York Times, I do, but headlines like this beg being blogged about. Sex Infections Found in Quarter of Teenage Girls. First of all, I find it odd that this story is in the Science section and not the Health section, but whatever. The point is that - although I am certainly not disputing the findings and I applaud Cecile Richards's comment that “The national policy of promoting abstinence-only programs is a $1.5 billion failure,” especially since she is the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America - it is only women that are being held accountable. The word "men" is only used once in the entire article.

"Health officials recommend treatment for all sex partners of individuals diagnosed with curable sexually transmitted diseases. One promising approach to reach that goal is for doctors who treat infected women to provide or prescribe the same treatment for their partners, Dr. Douglas said. The goal is to encourage men who may not have a physician or who have no symptoms and may be reluctant to seek care to be treated without a doctor’s visit."

[Note the use of 'men' here. While the women are referred to as 'women' in the article itself, they are 'girls' in the headline, which names the text. The text about '(young) women' is about 'girls.']

Treatment: good. Making it really easy to continue to not go to a doctor: not so much. Let's not even get into the heteronormativity of the whole thing or the early emphasis (2nd paragraph) on the disparity between 'African-American' and 'white' girls, or the omission of economic class. Too bad healthcare is so ridiculously expensive - over 40 million American adults (!!) can't afford it (how many children?), according to a CDC report in December. Americans paid 15% of $2 trillion out of pocket in 2004 alone! That's $300,000,000,000 - three hundred billion dollars. In one year. That's insane to me. Let's not even talk about how much the unjust and inhumane war is costing this country or the one its being waged on. (Monetarily, the US is footing the bill, but 700,000 Iraqis have been killed [as many as 1 million according to the ORB] and 4 million displaced out of a population of about 27 million. Compare this to the 166k foreign troops [all but 10.5k American] and 531k Iraqi security forces [this includes 340k police].)

Absurdity.

What's really absurd is that I'm going to go take a hot shower and safely ride a pretty reliable train into the city and grab a cheap fancy coffee and go read literary theory in a library the size of a city block with 44 miles of books. And at the end of the day, I will curl up in my warm loft bed in Brooklyn, and if I can't sleep, it's not because of explosions outside my four walls or fear that more are coming. And I'm glad for that. But why are we paying to do that to so many other people? (And to turn the mood back around:) This is why we vote, this is why presidential terms are limited, this is why I'm going as far with my education as I possibly can and donating to charitable organizations like the Red Cross and Greenpeace and Heifers International, and this is why I'm writing, blogs or otherwise.

Another one for the check this out list

2008-03-11T16:05:00.002-04:00

Andrew C. Revkin's DotEarth blog on NYTimes.com http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/

Whenever I make plans

2008-03-11T15:40:00.002-04:00

and then admit that they are only plans, it not only means I'm open to them being changed, but that most likely I want them to change. I did do yoga, shower, and go eat, but instead of making dinner I went into the city for sushi and walked around for a while. Definitely what I needed. And I even got a bit of reading done.

I did not get up and go to the post office, as I had sort of planned (see note above), but it's so far away! And the only way to get there is to walk, and I love walking, yes, but it's through kind of a sketchy area and the post office is always crowded, and not overly friendly, and I've neglected picking up this package because of working on my thesis, so I'm pretty sure it's been sent back by now, which kind of sucks, but what can ya do? I do have to send my deposit to the St Petersburg thing, the literary seminar people.

And laundry, I almost forgot. I don't mind going to the laundromat because it gives me an hour or so to read without being able to look anything and everything up on the internet, but our laundromat plays these really horrible movies rather loudly, and I don't like having my iPod up that loud when I'm inside, but it's better than listening to - what was on the last time I was in there? - Firehouse Dog. I had to look that up, I did *not* know the title. I also don't really know what happens other than the obvious. There's a dog, and a firehouse, and a kid with floppy hair, and there's a fire. Wow. It's better than daytime television though, let me tell you. My last neighborhood, there was invariably Oprah or Montel on at midnight, which was when we did laundry there. A few times Seinfeld, that was lovely.

I need coffee.

fun, fun, fun

2008-03-10T18:34:00.003-04:00

It was so weird to take the weekend off. When I'm not procrastinating, I discovered, there's actually very little for me to do. (Btw - I'm procrastinating right now. It's been a busy day as far as that goes.) I get so much more done when I'm trying not to do anything. Or... something like that. Whatever, I had a good time doing nothing. I didn't go shopping yet. That might have to wait until after the final deadline. It will have started getting warm by that point (knock on wood), so there's very little sense in buying more winter clothes, right? *shrug* There's not much sense in buying anything, but that doesn't stop us, does it? I need to clean out my closet and drag all this stuff to the Salvation Army before I can justify getting new (to me) clothes. I haven't gone thrift shopping in so long though! It would be smarter to wait until I had an income, huh? Soon enough.

First things first. I hadn't really expected to hear from my adviser about whether or not she received my draft, but I was a little nervous about it. And then she emailed me today and said she was having trouble opening the document, which made me feel extremely guilty for not working all weekend long and turning something more fluid in, but let's be honest: I need to do a bunch more reading and focusing before it will be where it needs to be, and this is the perfect stage in its development to get feedback from the one who decides if it's good enough.

Weekend recap: Friday night I met some friends at Half Pint on W 3rd St. Service was decent, prices aren't bad. Clientele leaves something to be desired. I know, it was Friday: Amateur Night. But still. The line for the two unisex bathrooms was long and the crowd was unruly as a result. Someone cut in line in front of me - no kidding. That's just bad karma. Then the girl behind me kept whining, "I'm going to pee in my pants!" What are you, 5? This is your first time with liquids? It's right by NYU, what can ya do?

Saturday I met some friends at Peculier Pub on Bleecker - I'm not a fan of the service there, prices aren't bad, clientele is what you would expect. It was like a reunion - most of us haven't seen each other in a while, and one of our friends just arrived from a few months in Cali, so it was really great.

Then me and the guy (labels are tricky business) headed up to Taj in Flatiron. Great decor. Crowded, loud, expensive. It was a lot of fun. The music was weird though, like the dj had (or thought the crowd had) the shortest attention span ever. The songs themselves were great, very old-school hiphop. It was like being at a high school dance. But they only lasted 10-30 seconds each. I kept thinking the dj was mixing them or would go back and forth or something, but no. Just blended them into each other one after another, no looking back. It was disconcerting.

And then last night my friends had a party at their house, so I got to see my friends two nights in a row, which was fantastic! Yummy Cuban and Italian food, lots of beer, good music, and Dirty Dancing on in the background. What more could you want?

So tonight, as soon as I summon the energy, I'm going to do some yoga, shower, eat, and curl up with some literary theory. That's the plan anyway.

send

2008-03-07T16:35:00.002-05:00

That's always so nerve-racking, the hitting of the send button. I was going to take her a hard copy, but then I realized that I didn't even know if she was going to be in the office and what's the point of giving it to her today if she doesn't get it until Monday when I could have it more complete by then? It's 38 pages, 10k words. Not bad for throwing it together mostly yesterday and today, huh? It's still extremely rough, and I'm by no means going to stop working until I meet with her, I have a lot of reading to do still. But, sadly or otherwise, that's the longest single document I've ever turned in, creative or otherwise. Weird.

Food. Errands. Then out with the guys. Tomorrow: shopping!

13,500 words!

2008-03-07T09:51:00.002-05:00

And I slept a few hours and watched Lost. Not too shabby, right? It's still very rough, mostly notes-and-quotes, but it's organized into sections and the first sixteen pages are (still) pretty good, so that's something. The thing is, I know I need to incorporate more theory (I need to read more theory), and I spent a considerable amount of time reading criticism instead, which I think was also important too, but it just goes to show that there are always more books.

I was up until 4:30 last night, and I was so tired, but I set my alarm for 8am, and I actually woke up the first time at like 6:30 and almost got up, but I knew I needed to sleep, so I stayed in bed, and when my alarm went off I hit the snooze button for like an hour and a half, and to be completely honest, I almost decided to just turn it in like it is - not even bother polishing more, just give up. And then I got a text message asking if I was finished and I said no but I have enough words and 44 pages, and I realized how much better I will feel if it is at least legible, so here I am.

And I have coffee.

6900

2008-03-06T21:47:00.002-05:00

Yes, somehow I have 300 fewer words than I did six hours ago, but I have 16 pages highly readable and another 8 getting there. Perhaps I should break and throw together more notes... I keep thinking that might be a good idea, and then I get into polishing the PF material again. It's not where I want it to be, of course, but it's where I need it to be for tomorrow.

I have a habit of, instead of working from where I left off, starting from the beginning again, so that I write a then b, then go back to a through b to c, then a b c d, then a b c d e, and so on, which means that the beginning, even if it doesn't say exactly what I want it to or lead logically to the end of the paper, reads pretty well, is remarkably more polished than the end, which has basically fallen apart (or, rather, not been put together) in comparison. I think I may have side-stepped that this time, however, but I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing differently. I have nine documents open and am cutting and pasting and editing and moving things all over the place, what have you. And I'm still building in one document and moving it to the one that says "draft" as I go, but somehow I'm a bit more organized this time. I think it has to do with Microsoft OneNote, which has been a lifesaver on this project, as I think I've mentioned before. I wish I would have known about it before two months ago. I love anything that lets me be scattered and organized at the same time.

7100

2008-03-06T15:13:00.002-05:00

That's how many words I have right now, with 24 hours to go. That's over half, but that's only the intro and a rough sketch of what I want to write about in PF. I didn't even consult the post-it notes in the book itself. And I haven't gotten to the other two books. And I think I have a total of 2 Derrida quotes.

I'm so stressed I could throw up. I need to eat something. I'm afraid to take my fingers from the keys, though.

I took a little nap around noon, and - wait, I just put together 14 pages in an hour... - I had this dream that I was trying to make it look like I wasn't online because my adviser could see me and I had to come up with a brilliant excuse for not having my thesis done, but there was nothing I could do, she knew I was still connected. It was weird. And then when I woke myself up I was repeating 'I can do this,' over and over in my head, and then I thought, what if I can't do this? What if I'm not capable? That was a weird feeling.

And then I got up and threw 14 pages together in an hour. Because I can totally do this.

still drunk

2008-03-06T08:35:00.001-05:00

Let's not talk about it.

Idea!

2008-03-05T12:00:00.002-05:00

I know what I can do with my blog after I'm done with my thesis! I can't believe I didn't think of this before, and I also can't believe that I'm goofing off when I have roughly forty-eight hours to go. I have to admit that I think the music I was listening to was contributing to my scatterbrainedness (five syllables), so I've put on some classical and it's time to get this taken care of. It was good music, and it was motivating in its own way, but really it just made me want to go dancing with my favorite dance partner (he knows who he is).

I also have a friend I haven't heard from since Feb 18 when she sent me a brief article about a fire at the university she attends. Is she okay? Well, she was able to send me the article, so I guess so. Repeated attempts to ascertain whether or not something has befallen her since then have gone unanswered. --And I'm reading (analyzing) characters who are borderline paranoia cases, so needless to say, I'm just worried. I know she's busy. ...And now I'm feeling guilty about a certain friend that I haven't been calling back. I'm angry with her. Which makes me wonder if my missing friend is angry with me (paranoia, I told you!). I don't think I've done anything wrong. And now I'm questioning myself, and I'm trying to write a brilliant essay, so that's bad.

Okay. Let's do this.