Some Untidy Spot

Reading Roundup 2011

2012-01-23T17:58:00.001-08:00

I read far, far fewer books this year than last year. First of all, my commute changed (to become much shorter; hooray!), but second of all, my New Year's resolution for the year meant far less reading time than usual. (More on that later.)

So it's hard to write a "best books" post when I have only 88 books to choose from. I should change the rules to include New Yorker articles--I'm obsessive and read every article of every issue again this year--but that would require me to have a list somewhere of New Yorker articles. (I really liked the one about George RR Martin and how he took a really long time to finish the 5th book of his fantasy series. That was interesting. Oh, and the one about the virus hunter was really cool.)

Nonetheless, I spent part of a boring work meeting today looking at my book list and choosing my favorites for the year, so here we are. Another strange thing about this retrospective is how little fiction qualifies for my "best of" list--I did read and enjoy some novels this year, I swear, but apparently I spent more time on non-fiction. This must be the first time ever, because I've generally been a die-hard fiction fan. I must be growing up.

Fiction Top...Few
Room, by Emma Donoghue
Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
The Surrendered, by Chang-Rae Lee
The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco

Yeah, that's it. I read lots of other stuff I enjoyed, but it was mainly returning to my roots by reading authors I've long loved--Connie Willis, Sharon Kay Penman, A.S. Byatt--but I can't really call those books great fiction in the same sense as the above. I also listened to a number of classics--Portrait of a Lady, Ivanhoe, Sister Carrie--and enjoyed them far more than I thought I would.

Non-Fiction Top 10
American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, by Robert Putnam and David E. Campbell
The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner
The Emperor of Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Bossypants, by Tina Fey
Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden
A Singular Woman, by Janny Scott
A Midwife’s Tale, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
At Home, by Bill Bryson
Wild Swans, by Jung Chang

This is where it got at least a little competitive. Honorable mentions to The Price of Motherhood, by Ann Crittenden, Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Cinderella Ate My Daughter, by Peggy Orenstein--all three were flawed but thought-provoking.

I should do a companion list for the 10 worst books I read each year. I've got a small side gig as a book reviewer that would provide endless fodder.

I get all my life advice from pop songs

2011-12-15T19:10:00.001-08:00

Watching SNL over the weekend, I was exposed for the first time to Robyn and this song. Yes, I know, I live under a rock. A rock with a Radiohead-themed Pandora station. Watch the video if you want to see someone wearing what appears to be the shrunken pelt of Muppet dancing even worse than me, but I want to talk for a moment about the song. It's called "Call Your Girlfriend," and according to Pitchfork, it's a "soaringly tuneful electro-pop ballad" with Robyn "tell[ing] her boyfriend exactly how to break it off with the other woman to inflict the least emotional damage."

Sure. So I listened to the song several times after I first heard it, because apparently a soaringly tuneful electro-pop ballad really hits the spot right now. I was really enjoying the lyrics like "Call your girlfriend/It's time you had the talk/Give your reasons/Say it's not her fault," and it took me 3-4 listens before I realized the actual scenario was that Robyn was the new woman. Before that, I just heard it as a song full of helpful life advice, as if this particular Swedish pop star is just honestly invested in seeing other people end relationships with grace and maturity. I was so tickled by the idea of a Top 40 pop song about something other than the singer's own heartaches that I instantly started of thinking of other sorts of solid life advice that could make great songs in this genre of "pop music for responsible grown-ups":

Wash The Dishes (..."it's time you took your turn")
Stop Speeding ("...it's time to obey the law")
Stand Up Straight ("...it's time to see a chiropractor")
Pull Yourself Together ("...it's time you dealt with your issues")

And, of course, Call Your Mother ("it's time she heard from you").

I'm giving thanks I survived Thanksgiving

2011-11-29T18:56:00.001-08:00

We drove down to Southern California for Thanksgiving: a day and a half in Riverside, two days in Irvine, and a day in San Diego. It feels like we (okay, Mike) spent most of the vacation driving, but it was worth it: we hung out with family, ate impressive amounts of decadent food, and even did some hiking. Also, this was the first Thanksgiving I spent with my nuclear family since 2003, so that was lovely. All in all, it was good.

Except for when our muffler fell off.

It was midnight and we were driving away from my aunt's house when we heard a funny dragging noise and then, just a minute or two later, a loud thud. We all jumped out to investigate and I took a picture, of course. That's the muffler, rusted clean through.

We didn't feel like getting it fixed right then, so we did the drive back from San Diego with no muffler. The car had been noisy for a long time (that's the thing about a rusty muffler, you see), so that wasn't a problem. I was worried about the carbon monoxide issue, though--would it kill us and HOW WOULD WE KNOW?!?

(I know with most newer cars there's not really as big a risk, but my dad had a friend who died of carbon monoxide poisoning, many years ago, so I'm probably more paranoid than the average bear about this.)

So I'm sitting in the car, six hours into the drive back, and fretting more and more about carbon monoxide, so much so that I finally decide to look up the symptoms. Here's the list I find:

Irritability
Headache
Loss of focus
Nausea
Shortness of breath
Claustrophobia
Unexplained panic

I read the list of symptoms and realize I have every. single. one. of. them. I am going to die! Quick, quick, roll down the windows! And then I realize I was premenstrual (irritability), under-rested (headache), working on something really boring (loss of focus), eating only pretzels and Bugles (nausea), while sitting (shortness of breath) in a car (claustrophobia) that might be killing me silently (unexplained panic). Oh.

How clever of carbon monoxide, generated by a car, to mimic so precisely the exact symptoms of a road trip!

"Poker Face", the early drafts

2011-11-21T21:18:00.001-08:00

P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)

I won't tell you that I love you
Kiss or hug you
Cause I'm...

Shakin' with my bacon?
Doing kegels with my bagel?
Feeling awful about my waffle?
Wanting to boast about my toast?

Bluffin' with my muffin
I'm not lying I'm just stunnin' with my love-glue-gunning

And that's why you always leave a note

2011-11-05T19:45:00.000-07:00

I was just looking through the draft posts in my queue--I've started far more blog entries than I've finished, alas--when I came across one called "Note To Self." The entire draft was the following three lines:

Remember that time I set off the fire alarm in the HBLL?
Make up and out
Why should the hippo be denied the intimacy of the modern dental experience?

I can vaguely remember what each thing referred to--I accidentally set off the fire alarm in BYU's library once; "make up and out" is a great example of syllepsis, one of my favorite figures of speech; and the line about the hippo is something I once wrote down and then found, three years later, unable to figure out why--but I can't remember for the life of me what the connection between the three was, or why the draft was a "note to self." Man, I really wish I had finished that post.

Abyssinia, I'll be seein' ya

2011-10-30T18:52:00.000-07:00

What I've just read: The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, a novel about an Ethiopian immigrant in Washington, D.C., and Beneath the Lion's Gaze, a novel about an Ethiopian family during the political turmoil of the 1970s. Oh, and a series of long Wikipedia articles about Haile Selassie, the Derg, and Ge'ez.

What I'm reading right now: Eating the Flowers of Paradise, a travelogue about a trip through Ethiopia and Yemen in search of qat.

What I'm going to read next: Cutting for Stone, a novel set in India, Ethiopia and New York.

My grandma always said that pleasure has three parts: looking forward to it, experiencing it, and remembering it. From my recent reading habits, you can guess I've got a trip to Ethiopia coming up (in late December/early January, just in time for Orthodox Christmas). I don't know what the actual experience or the memories will be like, but I'm thoroughly enjoying the anticipation.

The Phony King of England

2011-10-24T08:58:00.001-07:00

These past few weeks I've been rediscovering some old loves--blogging, I guess, but also Modest Mouse and Sharon Kay Penman's historical fiction and cottage cheese. I could eat cottage cheese all day long. When I was little and my family went out to eat at Ruby Tuesday (we were high-class people, clearly), I would order the salad bar and then load a plate full of cherry tomatoes and cottage cheese. Yum.

The biggest rediscovery, though, is audiobooks, specifically a little site called Librivox: free audiobooks in the public domain, read by volunteers. It neatly combines my love of reading, multitasking, and free things, with a tiny dash of the ridiculous, since the volunteers are often trying to practice their English: with Librivox, I used to listen to The Portrait of a Lady read by someone with a heavy Chinese accent while I ran endless miles training for a half marathon. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it.

Fast forward to now. I have a whole shelf of books I've bought but never read, and since Mike is obsessed with seeing the "finished" stack grow, I've promised that I'll actually work on my shelf. (It needs no more description, in this house: "my shelf" is enough.) Since I haven't been reading as much this year due to a certain New Year's resolution, Librivox is a great way to catch up on my backlog and, little by little, clear the shelf.

So I'm listening to Ivanhoe, a book I bought at 13 and have been meaning to read ever since, and I have to say, I'm a little surprised at how entertaining it is, considering how many times I've started and rejected it in the past. The prose is pretty florid, but there's a decent adventure story under all the 19th century romanticism, and besides, who can resist a good Robin Hood reference? I didn't know before how many of the current Robin Hood legends came from Ivanhoe, and I was pleasantly surprised to suddenly be hearing the old stories about Prince John and King Richard the Lionheart and Robin of Locksley trouncing all challengers in a shooting contest. I found myself picturing the scenes in my mind's eye, more than I usually do: Prince John, wily and incompetent, with his crown falling down around his eyes; King Richard, big, bluff, blond, and lionlike; Robin Hood, a brilliant archer but somewhat wobbly on his long, spindly legs...

Wait. Spindly legs? Lions? Prince John's crown falling over his ears? As it turns out, all of my images of the Robin Hood story are taken straight from Disney. Not that that's a bad thing: Disney's version is a lot funnier than Sir Walter Scott's, and I have to admit to mild disappointment when Ivanhoe's tournament scene didn't end with rhino guards running wild. That scene always cracks me up.

(A note on the video, if you click through: it's in Danish. This is partly because it's the best version I could find, and partly because of a game that I got from my friend Alea, where you try to find clips from Disney in their "original" language. You know--The Jungle Book in the original Hindi. The Hunchback of Notre Dame in the original French. Hercules in Greek, Mulan in Chinese, Pocahontas in Algonquian. I couldn't find Robin Hood in Early Middle English, so Danish, being the original homeland of the Jutes, will have to suffice.)

So there I am, listening to Ivanhoe via Librivox and imagining one of my favorite childhood movies. It's like a smorgasbord of old loves! Next time I'll throw in some cottage cheese as a snack.

I'm not dead. I feel fine. I feel happy!

2011-10-17T17:42:00.002-07:00

I'm still alive, and I still, in some sense, have a blog, though I have to admit I was a little surprised when my Blogger login credentials worked.

(That is, until I remembered that I can just use my Google account. See how long it's been since I've blogged?)

It seems like every blog I check in on these days is dead or dying. Maybe that's the way of the world, but it makes me a little sad. Reading back through some of my old posts, I think--oh yeah, this was fun. So let's keep doing it, ok?

Outside my window right now is a neighbor shouting, "Where are you?" She repeated it several times, louder and slower each time, until she finally spelled it out: Where W-H-E-R-E are A-R-E you Y-O-U? I hope she learns where her interlocutor is, because I'd like to go to bed soon.

So where am I? We're living in North Oakland these days, not far from where I lived when I wrote this post. Unfortunately, we're on the wrong side of the tracks through an already transitional neighborhood, which means lots of noise. Noise and pot smoke. But hey, rent is cheap, and who doesn't love a contact high on a Saturday night?

I'm still at working at my unnamed Internet company, and it's still fantastic. Not just the perks and benefits, though those are pretty great, or even the people--awesome, every last one--but the work! I moved to a different role at the company about six months ago, and now I'm an internet payments fraud analyst. Doesn't that sound like a real job? It totally does, and so corporate, too. Who would have thought I'd enjoy any sort of corporate work? Not me. And yet I still wake up excited every morning for the problems I'm going to tackle that day. I'm like a recruiting informercial or something, but I swear I'm not joking. Clearly, I'm not leaving it for law school anytime soon.

I'm still married, and it's still fantastic. You know, just to make sure I don't rave about my job more than my marriage. Marriage has its own perks and benefits, I guess, though it's pretty hard to beat three gourmet meals a day.

Not much has really changed for me in the last, oh, year or so, and in general I just feel far more boring than I used to be. I still read a lot. I've convinced Mike that traveling is a good thing (we just went to Singapore and Indonesia, and we're planning a trip to Ethiopia this winter) and he's convinced me that I can tolerate backpacking. (The California coast is beautiful, so much so that it's almost--dare I say it?--worth hiking!) I'm not an early morning seminary teacher anymore, thank goodness, though my new calling comes with its own irritations. (Meetings, meetings, meetings! I'm definitely not corporate enough yet to enjoy endless meetings.)

So that's me. What about you?

All I Really Need to Know I Learned From "Clueless"

2011-06-11T21:04:00.002-07:00

Old people can be so sweet.
Don't date a man who dresses better than you. What would you bring to the relationship?
That Polonius guy, not Hamlet, said "To thine own self be true."
Sitting with your legs crossed towards someone is an unequivocal sex invite.
Street slang is an increasingly valid form of expression. Most of the feminine pronouns do have mocking but not necessarily misogynistic undertones.
Don't bother learning to park--everywhere you go has valet.
Anything you can do to draw attention to your mouth is good.
It is one thing to spark up a doobie and get laced at parties, but it is quite another to be fried all day.
It does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty.
'Tis a far far better thing doing stuff for other people.
Do a lap before you commit to a location.
As if!

Which is the Chinese zodiac Year of the Bookworm?

2011-02-23T20:25:00.008-08:00

Lots happened to me in 2010--I got a job, for one, though I think we've already been over that--but I'm pretty sure I will always remember it as the year of reading. I typically read about 120 books a year, so it's not like 2010 was the year I learned to read for fun or anything, but still, having a job did wonders for my reading time, and my 2 hour daily commute certainly didn't hurt. (I read new book every day for the first two months at my job, a reading pace that eventually had me looking around for new hobbies.)

After that introduction you're probably expecting some amazing stat about books completed, but really, I only finished 150 books in 2010, and I didn't even come close to completing my life goal of reading every novel that has ever won a Booker prize. (29 down, 15 to go.) I did, however, complete my goal of reading every single article in every single issue of my year's subscription to The New Yorker, which, frankly, was exhausting: it's a weekly magazine. Weekly!

(On the plus side, I can add "I read a New Yorker article about that once" to my list of most-spoken phrases; whenever I say it now, Mike just laughs and replies, "Of course you did.")

I can't name a favorite New Yorker article, besides "anything by Anthony Lane or Adam Gopnik," but since I keep a list of all the books I read, I thought it would be fun to look back at what I've read and play favorites; plus, I'm obsessed with end-of-year lists and wanted to clutter the internet with my own version...even if it doesn't happen until February. Without further ado, then, I give you the best books I read in 2010, with no particular order to the lists, as that would be too hard.

Fiction Top 10
Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell
Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth
A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan
Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann
The Lonely Polygamist, by Brady Udall
The Post-Birthday World, by Lionel Shriver
A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, by Robert Olen Butler
The Believers, by Zoe Heller
March, by Geraldine Brooks

Fiction Honorable Mentions

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, by Geoff Dyer

Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
Cloudsplitter, by Russell Banks

Non-Fiction Top 10

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain

Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine
Bonk, by Mary Roach
Complications, by Atul Gawande

Manhood for Amateurs, by Michael Chabon

Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers

John Adams, by David McCullough

Non-Fiction Honorable Mentions

The Wisdom of Whores, by Elizabeth Pisani

The White Man’s Burden, by William Easterly

How Women Got Their Curves, by David Barash and Judith Lipton

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Yeah, I Guess

2011-02-20T22:01:00.004-08:00

I secretly love it when the New York Times describes my life.

Or do I secretly hate it?

Either way, this article is clearly me, drifting off to Facebook. (In my defense, I have to keep myself in a job, right?)

My apologies, dear readers. Someday I will blog again, I swear.

When September Ends

2010-09-29T15:59:00.003-07:00

September has come and and, for the first time since I started preschool in 1987, it didn't mark the start of a school year for me.

Not that it really feels like fall here in the Bay Area, with 90-degree weather hitting us hard (remind me why we don’t have air-conditioning again?), but still, listening to so many of my friends talk about the start of school, you’d think I’d be feeling some small amount of nostalgia for the erstwhile meaning of September—homework! books! teachers’ dirty looks!--but the only thing I can bring myself to miss is the textbooks, and I’m trying devotedly to avoid thinking about that; I’ve already got a stack of books in our living room roughly the height of the Space Needle, so why would I want to add more books to fail to find time to read?

Instead of nostalgia, though, all I feel is…nothing. Nothing with a small side of relief, that is, which makes me think, phew, did I hate grad school that much? Yes and no: I don’t regret my time in grad school at all, and I still believe it was the right thing for me at the time, but it’s just so much nicer, right now, to have a job, especially when that job gives me free food, laundry, and transportation; a flexible schedule; and a workplace full of really smart, motivated, and totally kick-ass people. I was always told the real world was a drag, but I’m having a blast.

Is Silicon Valley not the real world? Is that the answer? In any case: goodbye, September. I'll see you again next year. Goodbye, school. I'll see you when I see you.

Fragments, shored and otherwise

2010-07-15T22:07:00.006-07:00

Let me, right away, express regret that my writing skills have regressed to bullet points only. I'm corporate now; what do you expect?

In some unspecified order of importance:

-I applied to law school (remember?) and got into Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley. I turned down Harvard and Stanford and chose Berkeley because that's the only place Mike was accepted, and yes, I fully intend to use "I turned down Harvard for you" as a fighting tactic for the rest of our lives. I think that's well worth the $75 application fee, don't you? In any case, I've deferred law school for another year to hang out and mooch free food and laundry services from work. (They ironed my jeans last week. Hilarious.)

-Mike finally, on his third try, got accepted to a Berkeley Ph.D. program. They initially rejected him, but after he won an award from Army (a three year fellowship, plus a seal for marksmanship), Berkeley was persuaded to take him on. (Apparently you really can get anything in this world for money.) He'll be in the Materials Science department, so if you ever want to know anything about tulle, gingham, or silk, you know who to ask.

- We're leaving next Tuesday night for an Epically Amazing Trip to the Middle East (EATME2010, since I love travel acronyms) and, as usual, I have woefully underplanned. Last year I left for a month in Vietnam without ever once opening a guidebook, and this year I'm only slightly better about details--I've skimmed a guidebook, at least, if not acted on any of the knowledge. Last year's trip was fine, though, aside from the arrest, so I'm comfortable adopting "winging it" as a travel strategy since I don't plan on doing any illegal research. We'll be in Turkey, Egypt, and Israel, and I fully expect to have that damn "Istanbul, Not Constantinople" song in my head for at least the first full week.

-On that note, in one of our many planning conversations that have led to few or no actions, we discussed the possibility of renting a car to explore Mount Nimrod in Turkey and I realized that of all the adult things I've done this year--getting married, getting a full-time job, having a subscription to The New Yorker--renting a car makes me feel the most grown-up. After all, the minimum age limits on those other things are much lower. We'll see how the car rental goes before I commit to giving up my "poor student" bus-oriented travel style.

-I always used to joke that since I already had short hair I was guaranteed not to be one of those girls who gets married and cuts all her hair off. Instead, I seem to be doing the opposite: I haven't cut my hair since the wedding and, even more frighteningly, neither has Mike. We--meaning mostly Mike's beard--are out of control. As it turns out, gaining weight is not the only way to let yourself go.

Yes, we are dressed as pirates. Pirates with hippie hair. Make love not warrrrrrrr.

-Since I seem to just be rehashing all my recent Facebook status updates in this post, I'll continue: I'm obsessed with Trivial Pursuit, even though I can't answer any of the sports questions; I've been reading a lot lately (93 books so far in 2010, plus every single New Yorker); I've been running barefoot and my feet are horribly cut up; I fell down the stairs a while ago and hurt my foot; I make terrible puns; and I felt gypped when we spent 4.5 hours at the San Francisco Opera's production of "Die Walkure" and didn't see a single fat lady in a horned helmet. Gosh, I'm boring on Facebook.

Opus 5:30 (Don't You Worry 'Bout Me)

2010-06-06T20:03:00.005-07:00

By 5.30 pm today, three coworkers had asked me why I was at the office so late. Clearly, I'm doing this whole "job" thing right.

I was at the office so late because I wanted to eat dinner at the office since there was no one waiting for me at home; Mike is out of town for work for the next few days. I have mixed feelings about this.

Bad:

He is hanging out at Tahoe (and, oh yeah, presenting at a conference) while I will be working nights and overtime every day.

He is not around to warm my absurdly and constantly cold feet at night. I have to wear socks instead. Socks! In June!

I had no one to laugh at me when I spent the night crawling around the apartment after falling down the stairs and twisting my ankle.

I was forced to watch movies while I worked alone. I hate watching movies alone, even when I'm only half paying attention. Well, okay, let's say a quarter paying attention, in case my manager reads this.

Good:

I can listen to my favorite songs over and over and over.

I spent several minutes racking my brain for a plus side besides dinner at the office, but it turns out that most of what I've done in the past few days I can do when Mike is around: read novels? Check. Clean the apartment? Check. Eat cold cereal? Check. Go to bed late? Check.

What it really comes down, to, then, where marriage really cramps my style, is how many times I can listen to "Love Child" on repeat. I have a very high tolerance for repetition, I know, but who can resist the sweet archaic strains of the 60s? Who doesn't want to hum "But no child of mine will be bearing/ the name of shame I've been wearing" all day long? Likewise, who can resist a good old-fashioned music video? Who is that random kid, anyway, and what is he doing on the Frankie Valli's lap? Is Frankie singing to the kid? Is that charming or just creepy?

I have good music cred too, I promise--I've seen Radiohead in concert twice, I read Pitchfork regularly, and on my own time I only listen to whiny indie bands--but for some reason my job takes me back to my childhood, when I was hooked on the oldies station (to the confusion of my parents, who surely wondered why their 10 year old was calling in to request the Beach Boys; "Good Vibrations," of course), and all I want to listen to as I respond to customer emails is my 60s-themed Pandora station. What can I say? Nothing else can keep me in the groove until--gasp!--5:30pm.

Deny thy husband and refuse his name

2010-05-02T19:47:00.007-07:00

Right after I got married, I flew out to Utah to present at a conference, where one of my old professors introduced me and my talk by saying, "This is a former student of mine, Hannah P...no, wait, I guess I don't know: what is your last name now, Hannah?"

I didn't realize it at the time, but after I told the audience that I hadn't taken my husband's name, they probably judged me as less caring, but more independent, more ambitious, more intelligent, and more competent than a woman who had changed her name; they probably also wanted to pay me $1,172.36 more.

I don't object to this characterization, especially, and certainly not to the extra pay, but they've got me all wrong here. I kept my own name at marriage, yes, but it's not a principled stand or statement of anything--except, perhaps, of confusion and indecision.

I've thought a lot about the name issue, in my life; this isn't a creepy-girl-obsessed-with-weddings thing but a creepy-girl-obsessed-with-names thing. (I kept a notebook, as a child, of good names for horses, should I ever suddenly come into a stable of thoroughbreds. And yes, I freely admit to a creepily-obsessed-with-horses thing.) I always basically came to the same conclusion: I wouldn't keep my own name on feminist principle. (My own name is originally my father's name, after all; as far as I can tell, it's patriarchy all the way down.) I also wouldn't automatically take my husband's name, though, but make my decisions on he basis of the name itself: anything starting with an H is out (no alliteration), vowels are similarly taboo (no homologous glottal stops), and nothing cutesy or rhyming. (This is an onomastics issue, not a feminist issue, I thought.)

So then we come to Mike's last name: it starts with an N (yes!), doesn't rhyme (yes!), and is, by all accounts, perfectly unobjectionable, apart from its presence on the list of 1000 most common surnames and, despite that, a worrisome tendency to be misspelled. (I'm looking at you, Mom.) I fully expected myself to take his name, right up to the day we went to the courthouse for our marriage license, when, suddenly, I couldn't do it. I had spent so much time thinking of the sounds of a new name that I had all but ignored the symbolism: could I really give up this person that I had been my whole life to become this new, mysterious Hannah N, especially in the midst of all my other life turmoil? Could I really deal with having such a common last name? And while I like the symbolism of a married couple having the same last name, why did I have to be the one to change? How could I balance my identity as an individual within the couple if I let my name be subsumed into his?

(Okay, so maybe it's a little bit a feminist issue.)

And so I followed the path of least resistance, keeping my own name; I figured that this was a decision and revision that a minute (and $320, in Alameda county) could reverse, but, frankly, I'm not inclined to pay the fee anytime soon: my own last name is more distinctive, which is useful, professionally speaking; I've been perfectly happy as Hannah P for 25 years; I kind of enjoy confusing people at church with our different last names; and I definitely enjoy telling people that I kept my own name because my husband's last name is "boring." (Mike's comeback: "She hasn't earned my name yet." Well played, Mr. N. Well played.)

Come, listen to a prophet's voice

2010-03-16T17:03:00.006-07:00

In another--much more interesting--LDS world:

Lorenzo Snow White served with seven very short apostles,

you'd bet your life, if Groucho Marx asked, that three wives are buried in Heber J. Grant's Tomb,

John Taylor Swift "Should've Said No" to his "Love Story" with polygamy,

Brigham Young Frankenstein pronounced it Fronkensteen,

Joseph Smith & Wesson could protect himself from the mob,

Ezra Taft Benson & Hedges had some Word of Wisdom problems,

and Howard W. Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Salt Lake City sold out at Deseret Book.

Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho

2010-02-23T17:21:00.011-08:00

I'm just starting my third week of work at the as-yet-unnamed-but-still-totally-obvious internet company, and the honeymoon period has definitely not ended. I'm in the "user operations" department, which is basically a fancy way to say "customer service," except with the twist of us also being responsible for user feedback, internationalization, harassment reports, site security, and enforcing the site's terms of use. This means that if you're bullying someone, maintaining multiple accounts, or posting child pornography, my colleagues and I will swoop down like avenging angels and bam! disable your account. More specifically, I've been put on the "site integrity" team, which means that I'm in charge of resolving problems with hacking Nigerians or ex-boyfriends, and occasionally even hacking Nigerian ex-boyfriends. You never know.

I enjoy the work, which it's just about as different from graduate school as I could get--lots of quick tasks, with an emphasis on efficiency rather than accuracy--and think each individual hacked account is like a tiny mystery to solve, figuring out who hacked who and when and how. That's right, I'm rapidly becoming the Angela Lansbury of social networking.

That's probably enough about my daily episodes of "Hacked, She Wrote"; I'm not sure what, exactly, the confidentiality agreements cover, so let me venture onto safer territory: the office. I think I mentioned the perks in my last post, but let me just reiterate: a cafeteria with delicious, free breakfast, lunch, and dinner. (Today's theme was "Mediterranean," and so I ate a spicy chickpea stew, spicy garlic-fried kale, Greek pasta salad, bulgur, and eggplant ratatouille. Yum.) Free snack stations everywhere, stocked with everything from drinks to organic dried apples to KitKats. A casual work environment, with everyone in jeans and sneakers. Smart, interesting, Stanford-educated 25-year-old colleagues. A chiropractor, paid for by my health insurance, who comes to the office. 21 paid holidays a year, plus unlimited sick days and 11 paid holidays. Free laundry service, twice a week. A free shuttle to and from San Francisco for commuters. A new laptop and wireless modem, the better to work on that commute.

Which is the major downside: commuting? I'm not used to that. As a student I always lived within a few miles of campus, and either walked or rode my bike, and suddenly I have to commute every day--every day!--from Berkeley to Palo Alto. For those that don't know the Bay Area, that's about 45 miles--45 traffic-congested miles, including a bridge across the bay. Ugh.

I would never dream of driving this--the thought of that much down time in a day just kills me, plus I can't drive our car, something I'll talk about in another post--so I do it on public transportation, which takes about an hour and a half each way: half an hour on BART, the metro, and an hour on the work-sponsored shuttle. This isn't so bad, really, as it gives me a chance to read, read, read my little heart out. I've read an entire book every work day since I started two weeks ago, and that shows no sign of stopping; in fact, since we're housesitting for Mike's sister in Marin County right now, which expands my commute to 2-3 hours each way, my reading rate has increased. Yesterday I read two books start to finish, and checked my email, and read parts of a New Yorker magazine.

So all in all, it's not so bad. I get to move closer to my goal of reading every decent book every published, plus a good portion of the terrible ones, and I get to join the real world in a big way; there's no better introduction to American adult life, after all, than shoving through crowds trying to catch a morning train into the city. (Well, maybe sitting in a car on a highway into the city, but even I can't read a book a day at stoplights alone.) And, in the end, if the commute is the price I have to pay for interesting work, a steady paycheck, and the daily frisson of pleasure I get from walking around the office with a badge on--I just feel so grown up!--then, hey, no worries: I've got a library card and I know how to use it.

Turn and Face the Strange

2010-02-09T19:54:00.002-08:00

This is a serious entry, guys.

(Well, aside from the David Bowie references.)

Two weeks ago, I withdrew from school. All the doors are still open for my eventual return, but, really, I don't intend to go back.

Maybe this isn't as serious to you all as it is to me, but, let me tell you, to me it's the end of the world. It's terrifying. I have been a student all my life. All. my. life.

What will I do without homework? What will I do without teachers? What will I do without constant validation of my memorization test-taking abilities?

(I'll take the LSAT and apply to law school, that's what.)

I had always thought that I wanted to get a Ph.D. and be a professor. I am a child of two Ph.D.s who learned to crawl up the steps of the MIT library; I agreed to go to BYU for undergrad because I knew I could go elsewhere for grad school; I always envisioned myself building a career of reading and thinking and, if I had to, writing. I didn't know anything different, I couldn't imagine anything different.

And yet, over the past two and a half years, I have grown steadily more unhappy in grad school--though there were some good times, there were more than enough bad times to balance them out, and, in general, a sense of unease, discontent and, eventually, boredom, lingered over my graduate school experience.

I know everybody hates grad school; that's the way it is. And yet, if I'm so unhappy at it now, how is the end result any different? Do I really want to suffer through another three or four years of this pressure-filled, stultifying environment only to get a $40,000/year job doing exactly the same things, only this time with tenure on the line? Do I really want to go to conferences and force myself to attend talks that bore me or talk with colleagues that irritate me? Do I really want to talk, think, eat, breathe linguistics, linguistics, linguistics all the time? Do I really want to spend my life in trivial arguments? Do I really want to publish or perish? And do I really want to work 16 hour days, to put my time, mental health, family life on the line, for language change? In sum, do I really believe my work is worth it?

I've been mulling over these questions for a long time now, almost a full year, and no matter how many variables I've toggled in my environment--fewer classes, no classes, teaching positions, research projects, whatever I can change--I find myself coming to the same answer: no.

I went to grad school for some of the right reasons and lots of the wrong ones, and, though I don't regret that decision--I got a free master's degree out of the deal, after all, plus a husband, a home, and, most importantly, the sure knowledge that academia isn't the right place right now--I would regret the decision if I stayed, if I let myself be dragged along by the system, writing each chapter of my dissertation just because it's there, or just because there's funding, or just because I'm trapped in the culture and can't think of anything else to do.

So I left. And here's where I consider myself very lucky, because I found something else to do. I got a job. A good job. I don't know if I'll love the work itself, but even if I don't, it's a job that pays well, or at least better than grad school, a job where I work with interesting, smart, dynamic people, a job that gives me unbelievable benefits and perks, and, of course, a job with pretty serious confidentiality agreements, so, uh, don't expect to see much discussion of it around here.

(Curious about where I work? Let's just say that it starts with F and ends with acebook.)

Sometimes when I think about how much my life has changed in the last year, my head spins and I want to reach through a time portal and shake my January 2009 self by the shoulders, just to warn her about the change that's about to come--brace yourself! Take some deep breaths! Hell, take a nap--in a year or so, you'll deserve it. At this time last year I was a single graduate student living in Oakland, riding a bicycle to school and dressing in jeans and T-shirts; this year I'm a married Facebook employee living in Berkeley and taking a work commuter shuttle to work and dressing in…well, okay, I can still wear jeans. At least I have something in my life that isn't ch-ch-ch-changing.

Diamonds Are Forever

2009-12-18T11:48:00.004-08:00

Back when I was at BYU, surrounded by the newly-engaged and happily-married, I made fun of those women who, after acquiring a diamond ring, couldn't stop staring at it, talking about it, or subtly (or not-so-subtly) flaunting it, women like the first responder in this question, who confused the size of their diamond with the size of their husband's love, who fell for the evil diamond industry's marketing ploys, who encouraged their fiances to blow their meager savings/sell their cars/go into debt all for the sake of something sparkly on their finger. I was above all that, and not shy about saying it: in my first-year German class, when all the other girls (freshmen, no less) could describe their perfect engagement ring in great detail (diamond, of course!), I announced, to the gasps of my classmates, that I didn't want an engagement ring at all, and I certainly didn't want a diamond: as I outlined in my answer to that question, diamond rings come with unnecessary costs, financial and otherwise, and I'd rather have something on my finger that didn't have me humming Kanye West (Though it's thousands of miles away/ Sierra Leone connect to what we go through today) and dreaming of armless children in mines.

Well, once again, I have to eat my words. (I sure have been doing a lot of this lately: I'm smart and majored in the humanities and don't really know what I want to do with my life, so I'm applying to law school. Helloooooo, stereotypes!) I held my ground on the engagement ring--a feminist point for me; since the man is not expected to wear one, an engagement ring feels to me like a symbol of possession--but, dear readers, I have a diamond wedding ring. And, even more shameful: I love it.

My ring is simple, as diamond affairs go, with six small rectangular-cut diamonds set into a white-gold band.
The band isn't as shiny as it should be--in some lights it looks less white gold and more gold gold--and the diamonds don't sparkle quite like they should, mostly because they're set crookedly. Most people who asked to see my ring smiled and made more-or-less tactful comments like "It's very you," or "That's a cute box it came in!", and they were right: it is very me. (And it came in a super-cute box, too.)

And where did we find this perfect ring with super-cute box? At a pawn shop in Reno. That's right: we were having trouble finding rings we liked--at one jewelry store, I tried on a diamond ring, grimaced, and asked, "Do you have anything less shiny?"--and so, just as we were wondering whether or not we'd have to get rings custom-made ("are we really such bitches?" I asked), Mike pointed out that we'd be visiting his grandmother in Reno two weeks before the wedding, and where, really, is there a larger selection of used wedding rings than Reno's main drag?

So we found parking near one of the main casinos, and walked down the street, which consisted mainly of pawn shops, casinos, and wedding chapels. We browsed four or five pawn shops, each of which held more wedding rings than I thought existed in the entire world, and tried to avoid looking at the handgun displays, which were often right next to the rings--just in case you've made a huge, tiny mistake, I guess? (Downtown Reno is seriously one-stop shopping: you can make some money, buy a ring, get married, get drunk, get divorced, and shoot your ex, all in one afternoon.) As we walked between pawn shops, we saw a couple fighting, loudly, with lots of swearing, about who was drunker, and surreptitiously checked out their rings. We also watched the police break up a violent fight outside a casino, the true Reno experience.

And that's why I really love my ring: not only is it pretty (at least to me), it was cheap (the best way to show love for me is by not spending money), and used (which means I don't have ethical worries about the diamonds), and its crooked and slightly chipped diamonds remind me of that afternoon slumming in Reno pawn shops, and, in turn, of how lucky I am to have found a man who matches me so perfectly it's kind of unbelievable, a man who shares my ideas about romance (he didn't propose, I arranged our honeymoon, and his idea of seduction is saying "I seduce thee"), compromise (rock-paper-scissors), adventure (camels across North Africa? sign me up!), crossword puzzles in bed (yes), traditional gender roles (no), and paying attention in church (maybe)--in short, a man who would buy his fiancee a wedding ring from a pawn shop in Reno. That, my friends, is well worth eating a word or two.

Bless Me, Santa, For I Have Sinned

2009-12-14T12:14:00.002-08:00

I have a confession to make: my mother-in-law sent us some Christmas gifts last week, with strict instructions not to open them until Christmas, and what did we do? We opened them.

(Confession #2: I still can't say "mother-in-law" without doing a tiny internal double-take. I mean, seriously, a mother-in-law? I'm not used to that.)

Back to the matter at hand: Christmas. I think most newlyweds, at least those with blogs, are supposed to be excited for their First Everything: Our First Thanksgiving Together, Our First Apartment, Our First Fight About the Dishes. And, sure, we've got some good firsts--Our First Kiss was pretty awesome, for instance--but neither of us are big holiday people. Our First Halloween was spent eating bags of candy corn and watching The Wire. Costumes? Parties? Please. Celebrations are for people who aren't hooked on the best show ever to have been on TV.

So it's not like anyone expected us to be Christmasy, right? We'll be traveling for the holiday itself, so we haven't bothered with a tree, and even though we have an entire box full of Christmas ornaments and decorations (thanks, Mom!), right now it just seems like too much work to put them up, especially if, come two weeks, we won't be around to enjoy them.

(Should I make another confession? It also seems weird to put up Christmas decorations when our apartment has no decorations at all. That's right: bare walls, baby. I've been in this apartment for four months now and the only thing I've hung is a calendar--a cheap calendar I got for free at a bookstore, no less. Clearly, I am a failure as a homemaker. But hey, my way means fewer ways to damage the walls of a rented apartment. Plus, fewer fights about whether to hang my batik cloth and schwa paintings or Mike's Despair.com posters. Everybody wins.)

Anyway, while it's like me to not get into the holiday spirit, it's not like me to open presents early; I was a child who never, never, went looking for Christmas presents, even though I knew perfectly well where they were hidden. I was a child who ate all the oat bits of Lucky Charms before the marshmallows. I was a child who saved Halloween candy for years. In other words, Delayed Gratification was my middle name.

But I'm married now, and so I have put away childish things in the name of marital harmony. When Mike suggested that we open the presents right away, I argued with him but eventually gave in. Or, okay, I eventually lost the 3rd round of rock-paper-scissors. (Should that be another confession? That we resolve disagreements with rock-paper-scissors instead of reasoned, intelligent discussions?)

In any case, maybe Mike was right: we had a great little pre-Christmas Christmas, which got us a little bit more in the holiday mood, and now we don't have to worry about traveling with too many. So I'll end with my final Christmas confession: I opened presents early and enjoyed it. How many Hail Rudolphs do I have to say for that?

Dylan in the Heart

2009-10-29T22:07:00.002-07:00

For those who haven't heard, let me be the first to break the news: Bob Dylan has put out a Christmas album. Yes, that Bob Dylan. Yes, Christmas songs.

Seriously, I'm not even kidding, and if you know what's good for you, you'll find some samples of this album to listen to--Dylan's death rattle doing Christmas classics like "The Little Drummer Boy" and "I'll Be Home For Christmas" is not to be missed, even if the latter sounds a bit more like a threat than a promise, and songs like "The First Noel" sound like a clear challenge to Tom Waits, the former king of singing-as-a-continuous-low-growl. Oh, oh, oh, and your life is not complete if you haven't heard him croaking through the Latin lyrics to "Adeste Fideles," sounding for all the world like a child fake-speaking a foreign language.

So, Mr. Dylan, congratulations, and a strong showing indeed. And for Dylan fans like myself, I've got some ideas of other territories he could explore:

He could make like a high school choir and try some madrigals! This album would feature songs like "My Bonnie Lass, She Ain't Goin' Nowhere" and, probably, would use the magic of recording technology to have Dylan sing the songs in full SATB parts: scratchy, amusical, tuneless, and bass.

Along the same lines, for those who want to expose their kids to Dylan early, there's always the possibility of Tangled Up In Red, Yellow, and Blue, on which Dylan covers every from Barney to Raffi, perhaps with a side trip through the ABC's and the primary colors. Haven't you always wanted to hear Dylan sing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" in a round with himself?

As CBS used to put it, "nobody sings Dylan like Dylan," to combat the Dylan covers which were all over the airwaves in the 60s. Well, it's time for Dylan to strike back and sing everyone else like Dylan! On Like the Rolling Stones, Dylan covers his favorite non-Dylan golden oldies, infusing them with his signature sandpaper vocals, leading to brilliant mash-ups like "A Hard Day's Night's A-Gonna Fall." Everyone will get satisfaction from these gems!

Broadway, Broadway, Broadway! On Positively 42nd Street, fans can get 525,600 minutes of Dylan, as he covers everything from "Memories" (can't you just hear him caterwauling now?) to "Seasons of Love." Dylan as Andrew Lloyd Webber has always wanted to hear him!

Remember that born-again phase in the 70s, when in songs like "Jokerman" and "Gotta Serve Somebody" Dylan seemed somewhat confused about whether he believed in Christ or had become Christ? Well, be confused no more: he believes in Christ, and so does the Mormon Tabernacle Choir! On their joint album, Just Like a Mormon, Brother Dylan drawls his way through "Come, Come Ye Saints," slower even than any church organist would take it, mumbles the words and butchers the to "Adam-ondi-Ahman," and gets "High on a Mountain Top," if you catch my drift. Though Dylan can hie to Kolob with the best of them, the real highlight of the album is their group rendition of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," because, really, why hasn't the MoTab recorded that already?

There you have it, folks: new Dylan albums to await. Pre-order them now, while supplies last, and remember: all proceeds go to charity!

Say cheese

2009-10-26T09:35:00.004-07:00

In our fridge right now we have:

1 block fresh mozzarella cheese
2 tins crumbled feta cheese
1 tin crumbled goat cheese
1 block pepper jack
1 block paneer
1 block halloumi

plus the usual assortment of fresh vegetables--broccoli, cabbage, bell peppers, eggplant, zucchini, and carrots.

When did I start eating so well? Apparently I am now both in Berkeley and of Berkeley. Pondering this, I feel a strong urge to stock up on peanut butter M&Ms or candy corn just to balance out the disgusting foodsnobbishness of our fridge.

"Why couldn't I get THAT day over and over and over?"

2009-10-21T09:21:00.006-07:00

I got married more than a month ago and I still have not posted any pictures. Clearly, I am a failure as a blogger. (Then again, I got arrested in Vietnam more than three months ago and I still have not posted any pictures of that either. I think that makes me a winner as a blogger.)

But wait no more! 9/19/09, to me, was just like that old song, you know, the one by the Dixie Cups: going to the chapel, and we're gonna get married...

By "chapel" I of course mean "temple."

The sky was blue (whoa whoa whoa):

And we'll never be lonely anymore:

****

There's not much to be said about the actual wedding ceremony--it was short and sweet, just us and our parents, we both remembered that the right answer is "yes" rather than "I do", and let's not go into how Mike giggled the whole time--so I'll move into the really good part, the reception. My mom was the wedding planner extraordinaire,

did I mention that I wore my mother's wedding dress?

and all I said I wanted from the party--this is true--is that I wanted to have fun. I've been to far too many weddings where the bride and groom stand in a receiving line, clearly not enjoying themselves, to want to repeat that for myself. And thank you, Mom, I had a blast. And how could I not? We held the party at a place that looks vaguely like the buildings on Tatooine:

It's a science museum, so in addition to having a great view

it had a wedding whale

a giant model of DNA

rock structures that can be shifted to replicate earthquake effects

cousins!

a stream that can be dammed up

and plenty of other fun toys.

And if that location weren't cool enough on its own, we added to it with flowers and saris

a gamelan troupe

tons of food, gathered from American, Korean, Indonesian, Arab, Indian, and Vietnamese restaurants, to represent the countries in which we've lived

and a dessert table that was almost buckling under its own weight.

And so we whiled away the afternoon, on that sunny September Saturday, singing

and dancing

and karate kicking

and hanging out with the cardboard cutout of my missionary brother

and being carried in chairs

and being tossed on a blanket.

***

Yes, friends, I had fun. To channel Bill Murray from Groundhog Day: That was a pretty good day.

[thanks to my cousin Margaret for the pictures]

That bwessed awangment, that dweam wifin a dweam...

2009-09-27T19:24:00.003-07:00

I have been married now for one week and one day:

Saturday we got married. (More on that later.)

Sunday we explored Gualala and watched 30 Rock. (It's our couple hobby.)

Monday we drove California Highway 1 and opened wedding presents. (Not at the same time.)

Tuesday I got sick and spent the day on the couch moaning to myself about a headache and a backache and a runny nose and, of course, that pesky cough. (Two months and counting.)

Wednesday was business as usual. (What is usual?)

Thursday I flew to Utah. (Ain't nothin' like Provo in the fall.)

Friday I gave a paper at a conference. (So the school would pay for me to hang out with my old professors and Annie and Alea and Chrish and ke.)

Saturday I took the LSAT and flew back home. (All the cool dropouts go to law school, right?)

Sunday we went to church in our brand new married-folk ward. (Babies everywhere!)

***

"How's married life?" everyone asks me. (Hey, it's conversation.)

Well? I have no idea. I did a double-take this morning at church when someone asked me about my husband, I can't stop staring in wonder and confusion at the ring on my finger, and I probably spent more time this week without Mike than with him. But we had some nice phone conversations while I was in Utah, and when I got back he was waiting to pick me up. Is that what married life means? Not having to take public transportation home from the airport? I can learn to live with that.

"I'm usually more charismatic than this."

2009-08-21T11:43:00.002-07:00

I've been telling myself, over the past few months, that a lot of the reason I wasn't blogging was that I didn't have much to say; all that was really going through my head, at any given time, was "I hate school I hate school" and "I love Mike I love Mike," and I figured neither of those were appropriate blogging topics, mostly in that they're so incredibly boring. (For the record, though: I hate school, but I love Mike. Also for the record, I've given up on finding a clever nickname for him; he may appear later as "Mister Whiskers," but for now his real name will do.) I told myself that after the Semester of Doom ended I would come up with witty repartee, interesting life events, or at least something other than SCHOOL MIKE SCHOOL MIKE SCHOOL MIKE.

So here we are, with the Semester of All Hell Breaking Loose safely behind us, and with only a Semester of Research Without Coursework ahead of us, and what do I have to say? WEDDING WEDDING WEDDING.

And that, my friends, is just not interesting. I'm not one of those brides consumed with details and The Perfect Wedding, Just This One Day For Me and Me Alone, and for the most part I've turned the planning over to my mother, who is doing a fabulous job, but there's still all these pesky little pre-wedding life tasks to be taken care of--we have to move to a shared apartment, for instance; we have to get marriage licenses and buy wedding bands and get special temple recommends and visit/meet his parents and book a hotel room for the honeymoon and buy him a suit and me a dress and figure out how on earth we're going to fit them into the tiny bedroom closet in our new apartment; we have to juggle work and school and wedding RSVPs and just plain spending time with each other, and, really, how do those Perfect Wedding brides handle it?

And so, instead of the interesting person I thought I'd become after all my papers were turned in, I've become, at the end of this summer, a counting machine, with all my thoughts focusing obsessively on various countdowns:

29 days until the wedding

Let me tell you about the honeymoon we almost planned: couch surfing. Hilarious, right? We also tossed around ideas like camping (too many pine needles), a human nest (too weird), and a yurt at a nudist colony (too many penises). We've settled on a cabin at a north coast resort, which sounds blessedly private, normal, and free of both pine needles and extraneous nude male bodies.

7 days until Mike gets back

Can you believe he's gone off backpacking with a month to go before the wedding? It was planned well before we got engaged, so the timing is just bad luck, but I suspect I might die without him, if not from missing him then from the stress of moving and furnishing our place by myself. I even had to buy our bed alone, which I secretly hope he hates, since that would be the perfect revenge. Mike, if you're reading this: an extra-soft mattress would be just what you deserve.

19 days of coughing

It's the freaking acoughalypse over here, as I've spent the last three weeks with a cough bad enough to keep me awake at night throwing up. I've drunk Robitussin by the gallon, kept cough drops in my mouth at all times, and even--this is big for me, since I distrust all medicines and medical professionals--visited a doctor. She listened to my cough, said, yup, that sounds nasty, and prescribed me an asthma inhaler. An inhaler! I'm not having trouble breathing, I'm having trouble breathing without coughing. The inhaler is, you may have guessed, not doing its job. I'm convinced and secretly hopeful that I picked up a case of tuberculosis while in Vietnam a few months ago, mostly because, come on, dying of consumption just before my wedding? Now that would be charismatic and interesting.

In Mother Russia, liftoff has YOU

2009-07-22T17:06:00.007-07:00

In my two-month blogging hiatus (oops), I've acquired lots to write about: my trip to Vietnam for research and an exciting run-in with the police; my trip to New Hampshire for my father's 50th birthday "Half Century of Excellence" celebration; and my trip back to Berkeley where I think I've decided once and for all that I hate grad school and don't want to be an academic after all, though that may just be the summer classes speaking.

We'll save all that for later, though; for now, I'd like to present a quick quiz. Is this a picture of:

a. an advertising model for REI's outdoor gear?
b. one of Berkeley's many homeless people?
c. a young actor gunning for a role in an upcoming Grizzly Man/Into the Wild-style nature film?
d. the man I've decided to marry?

***

I offer a very simple prize for guessing the correct answer: an invite to the wedding, this fall, here in the Bay Area. For those of you who are shocked and appalled that my I-don't-know-what-to-call-him-because-I-hate-the-word-fiancé* has not been mentioned before on this blog, I apologize for nothing! I tend to keep quiet about my romantic life, at least on the internet, since I follow what I've heard referred to as the Soviet space program approach to dating: tell no one until you're sure the launch is successful. Only then can you rub it into the face of the evil capitalist pig-dogs.

(My affianced¹ takes this philosophy even more seriously: his parents didn't even know I existed until he called to tell them we were engaged, and likewise with his older sister, who still isn't quite sure this isn't all a giant joke. Way to start me off right with the in-laws, dude.)

Not that I've had to keep silent for too long: I've only known him since the end of January, when we met cute in Sunday School. (Cue chorus: awwwww, how righteous!) A mutual friend introduced us by telling me that my intended^a had voted against Prop 8; this surprised me, because I had previously assumed, based on his Scandinavian-heritage coloring, baby face, and habit of writing in Korean during Institute class, that he was boring, younger than me, and hyper-Mormon. My response to this new information, ever so charmingly, was "Oh, so you're interesting, then? Looks like I'll have to start talking to you."

I did, and he is, and I've been pretty much smitten since the first time we hung out--to watch Monty Python's Flying Circus, which I would say is the perfect geek date except for the fact that our first actual date was to a British-style pub in San Jose to see some friends of his dress up like pirates and sing sea shanties--when, in the short space of a single evening, he vehemently decried patriarchy and then teased me for being incompetent with the TV remote. My betrothed^# has lived up to the potential of those first few interactions, never failing to be interesting and never failing to treat me with equal parts respect and mockery. We're an odd pairing in some ways--my spouse-to-be^!, in the words of another mutual friend, "is the outdoors," and he's stated, on more than one occasion, that his love for me is conditional, depending on my willingness to take up long-distance backpacking, and you all can probably guess how I feel about that--but in most ways, all the important ways, we work, and it's obvious, and we're happy, and it's obvious. So there you have it, internet: we have liftoff, and so I can finally talk about him on my blog. Phew.

Oh, and in case you're wondering: T-minus two months until the wedding, and I'm serious about those invites.

***

*I think it has to do with negative memories of giggly 19 year old newly-engaged girls at BYU who couldn't stop saying "my fiancé this" and "my fiancé that." Shoot me if I ever turn into one of them.
¹This one is only better if you nasalize the proper vowel and sneer slightly.
^aMy intended what?
^#Three syllables, please.
^!This is getting awkward: now I'm just one of them, but with a better vocabulary. Maybe I should just start referring to him as a fiancé.

My syntax brings all the boys to the yard

2009-05-19T16:13:00.002-07:00

I've written about this before, but May and December are the wackiest months of the year for a student, months that seem positively schizophrenic, as I spend the first half of the month frantically moving from paper to paper to paper, panicking all the while that I CAN’T FIND MY PEN I HAVEN’T EATEN IN SIXTEEN HOURS WHY CAN’T I GET THIS STUPID PAPER FINISHED I WILL NEVER FINISH IT AND I’LL BE FORCED TO DROP OUT AND LIVE ON THE STREETS AND DIIIIIIEEEEE, and then, suddenly, after clicking the last ‘print’ or ‘send’ button on the last paper, all the panic and stress drain out of me and I spend the rest of the month, I don't know, practicing my camera settings by stalking my mother’s dog (December), or going sailing, hiking, swimming, and picnicking (May).

(Though the post-semester relaxation may be a little harder to find this year, as I'm getting on a plane to Vietnam in precisely a week from today. Um, did I mention that I'm doing research in Vietnam this summer? It's going to be a total disaster. I can't wait.)

In any case, I just have one paper left to write until I am officially done with this rough beast of a semester is over, just one 25-page treatise on generative syntax standing between me and a master's degree. (That big, scary oral exam I was freaking out about? I passed, and, what's more, enjoyed it: I had so much fun that I actually asked for another question when my advisor said it was probably time to finish. Yes, I am a freak.)

I am currently delaying writing this paper, mostly because, after churning out three other 25-page papers in the last two weeks, mostly late at night/early in the morning, and sometimes in even odder situations, like on BART into the city so I could apply for a Vietnamese visa, or in a heavily air-conditioned Denny's in California's Central Valley, I have been reminded of the actual facts of my work style: I am, to put it succinctly, a procrastinatrix extraordinaire, and the panic about this paper that I need to motivate myself to write hasn't quite hit yet. Plus, I have hated this class so much, and suspect so deeply that the professor isn't reading my work, that I am tempted to write only a first page and a last page and fill the rest with 23 pages of open letters to my professor:

Dear L,

To be quite honest, I haven't understood a single part of this class since late January. To be even more honest, I'm not sure you have either.

Confusedly yours,

Hannah

or

Dear L,

You are such a bad teacher that you have made me disbelieve in your subfield. That's right, after taking your class, I don't even think syntax exists. Thanks a lot.

Nihilisticly yours,

Hannah

On the off chance that she will read or at least skim my paper, though, I'll refrain, and instead follow the pattern of the last three weeks, churning out rambly drivel in one long, panic-fueled session, typing terrible terrible introductions like "like Gaul, this paper has three parts," and "it is impossible to know," which, frankly, usually means "I don't feel like finding out." Plus, to fit the pattern I'll have to find some strange song to get hooked on: I wrote most of historical linguistics paper listening to the "Tabbouleh Song" on repeat, which means I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in there are the lines "No we don't need hip hop, house, or trance / Cuz this song about a salad gonna make you shake your pants." And I'm putting the Tabbouleh Song first in the hopes that no one will continue reading to discover that my addicting song during my field methods paper was Kelis's Milkshake. Seriously, how embarrassing is that?

Back to work. And for anyone wondering how I can concentrate with loud techno/hiphop/rap playing--today's song du jour is DAM's Min Irhabi--let me just say: I can teach you, but I'd have to charge. And hey, given the usefulness of a master's in linguistics, that's just about my best money-making option these days.

A Schutzian process of retypification? Drink!

2009-04-25T10:52:00.003-07:00

The end of the semester is inching towards me, which means that not only am I internally weeping with stress--less than a week until my master's exam! aaaah!--but also that I am so. incredibly. sick of all my classes. Frills, guys, sometimes I sit in my syntax class and wonder what would happen if I ran out of the room screaming in frustration and boredom.

This past week was perfect timing, then, for my invention of a new game, which I will call "how to survive a three-hour anthropology seminar."

(Catchy name, huh?)

The game is easy, and depends on only one prop, a (preferably caffeinated) beverage. Clutch it in your hand like you'd die without it, as you very well might; three hours of sleep a night is not enough.

The rules are simple: drink for academic anthropology stereotypes.

When someone uses ridiculous jargon? Drink! (Come on people, phenomenology? Ethological? Aboutness?)

When someone abuses English productive morphology? Drink! ("De-embeddedment"? Are we serious?)

When someone quibbles over definitions? Drink! (What does Silverstein really mean when he says "referential"?)

When the talkative dude with the goatee says something that might be deep, or might just be really obvious? Drink! ("Truly, my face belongs to you all, even though I consider it one of my most intimate possessions." How am I not myself? How...am I not...myself?)

When someone cites an idea as being FamousThinker-ian? Drink! Drink! Drink! (Levi-Straussian. Kantian. Saussurean. Boasian. Bourdieuian. Hegelian. Whorfian. Merleau-Pontyian. Voloshinovian. Chomskyan. Goffmanian. IN ONE THREE-HOUR CLASS PERIOD I AM NOT JOKING.)

When that chip-on-her-shoulder Indian girl across the table cuts in with, what else, a comment about colonialism and power dynamics? Sigh. Drink. You deserve it.

When someone calls into question the true agentivity of human actors? Drink! (Oh, wait, that was me. Two sips, then.)

When you realize that you've just gotten through an entire three-hour discussion in which not a single person has cited any actual data or examples? Finish your drink. You've got a syntax class to get through next.

You'd think I could have thought of one about Easter too

2009-04-07T08:28:00.005-07:00

My ward wants to celebrate Holi, that most fun of Hindu celebrations--no, wait, who are we kidding? Diwali is pretty fun too, at least when celebrated in a country with no restrictions on its fireworks--later this month. This was announced in church a few Sundays ago, and as my friends around me nodded--right on, man, that sounds like a good idea--I fumed silently: Holi was last month, people. If we're going to bastardize someone else's religious tradition for our own enjoyment, can't we at least do it accurately?

Apparently, I have no sense of fun at all. Just call me Holi-er than thou.

(Pause for groans.)

What can I say? I'm a Purimist about my religious holidays.

(Ba dum chh!)

At least we're not trying to replicate 'Eid al-Fitr; I'm the Rama-don of respect for Islam.

(Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all month.)

Want me to quit this? It'll Pentecost you!

(Or should I say "Puntecost"?)

More religious celebration puns? Seder it ain't so!

(I can never pass over the chance for a pun. Ha!)

Think I'll ever stop appreciating other religions? Nope! I'm reLentless!

(Get it? Get it? Lent, the forty days of fasting and punitence? Oh, I kill me.)

Get Back, Jojo. Go Home.

2009-04-06T10:24:00.003-07:00

The week before last--my, how time flies!--was my SPRING BREAK!, and so, in celebration of the fact that, unlike last year, I am now officially a California resident and therefore not trapped in California for the break, I went to Tucson.

Tucson, you say? Right: the visit was nominally for a conference, because, really, what graduate student thinks they could have an entirely school-free week?, but the conference was only an excuse to visit my cousin Margaret and spend a few days hanging out with these guys, all at the expense of the university. Rock on.

It's never too early to learn about jumping pictures.

Now there's a funny story around this conference, mostly that the abstract I submitted for it way back in December was a wild guess at a hypothesis, and, true procrastinator that I am, I basically hadn't worked on the project at all since submitting it. If my life were a touching ABC family special, I would have suffered public humiliation for my unpreparedness, but, as it is, I sailed through it all, despite having only thought of an analysis for my data on the plane on the way to the conference and having stayed up all night putting the presentation together. Plus there were technical issues and therefore no time for a question period. How much luckier could I possibly get?

The rest of the break was divided between transcription--sometimes I think I have nothing in my life but Ao or Kawaiisu transcriptions--and becoming Booker's new favorite non-parent adult, mostly by conducting covert theory of mind experiments on him and dangling him upside down by his ankles. If only seducing boys my own age were as easy.

Tucson was unexpectedly lovely, set in a desert straight from Central Casting, with tall saguaro cacti marking the skyline everywhere, growing in backyards and by the side of the highway. I couldn't have asked for better weather, a better place to stay, or better company as I transcribed. What a vacation!

(Thank you, Margaret and Clark, for your hospitality.)

The best part of vacations for me lately, though, is coming home: I got to my apartment alone in the early afternoon, and, to revel in my post-SPRING BREAK! Saturday freedom, I rode to the grocery store for fancy produce (mangoes! rosemary! chard!), stopping once briefly on my way there to observe a drum circle at the local flea market, and once on my home to visit a friend. It's finally sandal weather, I have a bike, an apartment, friends to see, and money to blow on mangoes. Gimme that California grass any day.

Are We Not All Left-Handed?

2009-03-21T14:42:00.003-07:00

All the jokes about 10 types of people aside, looking at the human species as a whole it's fairly obvious, even to the untrained observer, that there are fundamentally two types of people. For the sake of our discussion here, we will assign these types random variables: let's call them Type X and Type Y. (Some people claim there's a third type, who are biologically X but consider themselves Y, or vice versa, but we'll dismiss those claims offhand: these so-called "third types" are simply suffering from X/Y confusion.)

Biology affirms this simple division into Type X and Type Y on every level, from basic daily functions to certain cognitive, linguistic, and personality correlates of the divide. For example, Type X individuals tend to be more creative, and use both sides of the brain better, while Type Y individuals tend to rely more on the left side of the brain, home of logical, analytical thinking. Other differences are too numerous to list here, but, all in all, they affirm the unique natures of Types X and Y, and, moreover, how those types are different, distinctive, and complementary. It therefore follows that belonging to one of these types must be an essential pre-mortal characteristic, part of an individual's divine nature and destiny: God created us in his image, right-handed and left-handed.

Since the fall, human society has misinterpreted the true relationship between left-handers and right-handers, with the latter type unquestionably privileged: they have held all the power, made all the decisions, and designed all the manual implements, while left-handers have, for the most part, remained marginalized and powerless. Parents have actively hoped not to bear left-handed children, and this poor Type X has been seen as inherently less valuable or righteous, even in Christian societies. The Bible, for instance, focuses primarily on right-handed characters, consistently affirming God's love for and approval of them, whereas left-handed characters appear only infrequently and, as often as not, cast in a negative light. Through the ages, and across cultures, left-handed individuals have been closely associated with witchcraft and the devil, and there are instances of these individuals being burned at the stake simply due to the bad luck of having been born left-handed. These historical biases towards right-handed remain encoded in ordinary language, and even though we may strive to make our modern language use more sensitive and less handist, we may not even be aware of the histories of words like 'sinister' or 'gauche.'

In today's church, of course, we do not condone this cultural and historical baggage of the X/Y divide, but just the same, we do not condone entirely erasing the divide. The modern movements which claim that the virtue of equality requires a homogenization of all relationships are misguided. In the worldly philosophies of the equality of handedness, which encourages left-handers to abandon their traditional roles of sitting around helplessly and pursue such traditional right-handed pursuits as using scissors or running for president, our society has only found confusion, unhappiness, and the breakdown of all our most important institutions, like homogeneity of desk orientation in elementary school classrooms. Left-handers are equal, but they must stay separate.

Some argue that this emphasis on handed roles in the Church leads to functional inequity between the types, using as evidence the fact that the vast majority of Church leaders are right-handed, or that the Church has not only not repudiated scriptures like Matthew 25:33, which support the traditional association of right with righteousness and left with wickedness, but also incorporated the symbolism of these scriptures into sacred gospel ordinances, namely taking the sacrament. Those who argue this way are on the road to apostasy. Right-handers don't run the church just because of millennia of cultural and historical bias against left-handers, or because they are inherently more righteous or more beloved of God, despite what the scriptures seem to suggest, but because they are actually less righteous. Left-handers are not just equal to right-handers, they are superior! Left-handers can do what right-handers can never do, not in all eternity: their sacred ability to write Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, without getting their hands smudged with ink, is the greatest of all divine missions, a sacred stewardship that right-handers could never hope to aspire to. A proper understanding of the role of the left-handers, and the nobility to be found within it, will bring peace and purpose to the lives of all those who embrace it.

(Amen.)

Hannah and Her Scissors

2009-03-05T18:48:00.004-08:00

A very clever friend of mine once wrote a parody of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land that began "February is the shortest month." Hilarious as the parody was--if I remember correctly, some of the footnotes were in Swedish--I mostly think about it in the context of the February blues, and how grateful I am that it is the shortest month. I'm tough and all, but 28 days of that is about my limit.

Most years, the February blues hit with a general malaise, a sort of mid-winter blah, in which I want to, as another friend put it, declare life bankruptcy until...well, until April, frankly: the worst part of February is that the light at the end of the tunnel is March.

This February what I had was not so much malaise as mania, not so much a lack of sunshine and warmth as an outpour of it, in this unseasonably warm and dry winter, which I can't enjoy at all due to a life that is nothing but work work WORK. This February would be best experienced as a montage: no one wants to live those individual days of waking up before dawn to study; or of being in charge of a conference and so running from room to room to plug in electrical equipment, take out trash, unlock doors, and set out snacks; or of a long drive to Bakersfield for even longer sitting around chatting aimlessly when there's WORK to be done; or of days of eight hours of class in a row; or of, I don't know, all those other boring aspects of responsible adulthood: dishes, sweeping, grocery shopping, and trying desperately to get enough sleep to function.

I fight the February blues in the same way every year, and this year was no exception. One Thursday afternoon about two weeks ago, I couldn't take it anymore. I got up from my desk, packed up my stuff, jumped on my bike, and stopped at the first haircut place I found, which turned out to be a tiny, Vietnamese-run family shop down the street from my house. I sat down in the chair and described what I wanted ("short") to the lady, who nodded at everything and started cutting. As we made small talk, mostly me asking questions about Vietnam, it quickly became clear to me that she didn't understand my English, but was simply giving responses to what my questions might be: "My village is in northern Vietnam," to "do you live around here?" and "I started cutting hair when I was little" to "when did you come to America?"

If she doesn't understand those questions, I slowly realized, she certainly didn't understand my directions. I wondered, briefly, while watching her snip away, whether this should worry me, but then decided that, after my college years of cutting my hair myself, on a whim, using paper scissors and no mirror, I probably shouldn't care about what a professional decides.

The professional's decision was fine, even decently cute--though I did have to fix the back a little bit, again with my paper scissors--so now my hair is short short short again, vaguely Sound of Music, and I was, as usual, surprised at everyone else's surprise--didn't they know that this is my real hair, the haircut of my soul? Didn't they know that the shorter my hair is, the happier I am? And didn't they know it was February? They don't call it the shortest month for nothing.

The 'There' There

2009-02-03T22:35:00.002-08:00

(with no apologies to Gertrude Stein)

There is a face I look forward to seeing when I come home: that of my Eritrean--or maybe Ethiopean, her English isn't too good and I didn't quite understand the response--next-door neighbor, Adhanet. She often pokes her head out from behind her door as I walk down the hall towards my apartment to see what all that racket is. (It's just me, ma'am, just me and my bicycle.) She's old, a grandmotherly type, and has a pleasant face, with a big, gap-toothed smile and a blue cross tattooed on her forehead. She lives alone too, or at least there's only one bed in her apartment, but my favorite new hobby is trying to figure out how many people come and go from her apartment on a daily basis. There's a woman I think is her daughter and a man I know is that woman's boyfriend. There's a small Ethiopean (or Eritrean) man in a security guard uniform, and a tall woman, a classic Eritrean (or Ethiopian) beauty in a nurse's uniform. There's a man who's always talking on his cell phone, and, in the mornings, a steady stream of mothers dropping off small children for my neighbor to babysit. Sometimes, when Adhanet opens her door to say hi, three or four toddlers slip out from behind her and go sprinting down the hallway as fast as they can. We look at each other, laugh, and chat for a minute until the kids come running back. She may not have much English, but she's always eager to practice it: "Hello! How are you?" I tell her I'm fine and ask how she is. "Good! How are you?" I'm good, and how are the kids. "Good! How are you?" Bored with that conversation in English, I asked a classmate how to do it in Tigrinya, and now we alternate: Hello! Kemei aleki? Sometimes she invites me in for coffee and we play this game in an endless round of smiles and how-are-yous.

***

There was a street fair the first Saturday I lived in this neighborhood, with the entire ten-block stretch of my neighborhood blocked off to vehicle traffic so that folks could take in song and dance performances. Local businesses set up picnic tables outside, and a classmate and I sat in the sun, ate the fried chicken sandwiches my neighborhood is famous for, and talked about modern reflexes of the proto-Austronesian phoneme /q/.

***

There are four shelves of books in Spanish in my local public library--child's play, you say: everywhere has books in Spanish, these days. Next to it, though, is an entire shelf of books in Amharic, and, next to it, an entire shelf of books in Tigrinya. Oakland is the second most linguistically diverse city in the country, with over 150 languages spoken in the city. Some days I'm pretty sure I've heard all of them.

***

There was a worried look on the face of my former institute teacher as he drove me home a few weeks ago: "Are you sure you're safe here?" he asked. "This is a, um, transitional neighborhood." He meant that word negatively, I'm sure, worried by the people loitering on street corners and the proximity to a major metro station, but the transition is exactly what I find so fascinating about the streets surrounding mine: gentrification is on its way, it's clear, but it's only slowly diffusing, leaving the neighborhood a strange patchwork quilt of high-rent and low-rent. In the first two blocks of my bike ride to school, I pass a paint and hardware store, and then a tea shop with a children's play area in the back, perfect for overprotective yuppie parents. Next is a Korean community center, complete with internet cafe and karaoke place, and then another paint and hardware store. The next ten blocks continue the checkerboard pattern: an upscale sushi place and a downscale Ethiopian place. A salon offering haircuts for $10, next to a shop offering gourmet chocolates for $10. A hipster pizza place. A check cashing place. A thrift store. A "recycled materials" store. A Peet's coffee. A laundromat. You get the picture.

***

There is a black Baptist church on the corner of my street, which is all stained glass and silence on weekdays, but which explodes into gospel-singing hat-wearing worshipping fullness on the Sabbath. There is a dollar store on the other corner staffed by a very friendly Yemeni man who calls me--and, okay, all his customers--habibti, 'my darling,' and comments when I haven't stopped by in a while. There is a homeless guy who stands on my street, usually directly across from my apartment building, all the time; we raise our hands good morning to each other, and I feel safe when he's around. There is a homeless newspaper vendor outside of Walgreens named Kevin, who I greet happily every time I run in for cereal or deodorant or what-have-you. He knows that I'll buy a paper from him, and I know he'll give me his huge smile, and tell me to 'take care.' I feel like I am getting the better end of our bargain. And of course there is my apartment, a small white square studio that I love truly, madly, deeply, unreasonably, mostly for the thrill of seeing my last name on the buzzer outside and remembering that this place is mine and mine alone.

***

There is a smile on my face every morning as I bike to school, seeing the life of the neighborhood as I pass by. Say what you want, Ms. Stein, but right now, I don't want to live anywhere but here. So there.

Let the Sunshine In

2009-01-28T20:19:00.003-08:00

I drafted out a really whiny blog entry last night around 10 p.m, because I was feeling the stress of the semester already descending on me, because I was sure that this is the Semester From Hell, because I had too much syntax homework, because I was supposed to do 100 pages of reading on phenomenology and I don't even know what that is, because I was reminded, knowing that I was exhausted but still had several more hours of schoolwork to do, of my undergraduate years, when I worked far too hard for far too long, and spent far too many nights in the library testing how long I could go without eating. I even went to far as to quote a tidbit I read in Harper's magazine once, a heartbreaking suicide note from a Japanese fifteen-year-old: "because I am already tired."

I don't have the internet at home, though, so I couldn't publish my self-pitying reflections until the morning. And, because this is just the way things go, when I woke up in the morning the first thing I saw was the pattern that light filtering through trees outside my window creates on my wood floor, and by the time I had showered and eaten and dressed, I was awake and ready to tackle a little before-school syntax, and by the time I left it was eight o'clock and the sun was up and the fog was burning off and the bus was on time, and by the time I got to school I had thought of an elicitation topic for my afternoon session and decided how to coordinate volunteers for the conference, and by the time I got to class there were soft ginger cookies and a view of the entire East Bay from the window, with the sun sparkling on the unloading cranes in Oakland, and I felt positively Frostian in my change of mood.

It's still the Semester From Hell, sure, and on the one hand I'll never get to do anything but study without my internal guilt trigger going crazy with all the work I should be finishing, but on the other hand, sometimes the light streams in through the window and life, even phenomenology, just glows.

Like Hope, Only Different

2009-01-21T19:32:00.002-08:00

The inauguration, by all accounts, was a rousing success. Hearts were touched. Spirits were uplifted. Lives were changed.

Or so I hear. Yes, that's right: I ignored this particular National Moment, a fact that I'm sure my children and grandchildren will bemoan. After so many months with a crush on Obama, and an even bigger crush on Michelle, I'm all burned out on rhetoric. So, the morning of, I woke up at 7, read about syntax while eating breakfast, and biked to school in time for my 9.30 class, where I happily chatted with classmates, catching up after the break since it was the first day of school, waiting for our professor to show up.

And waiting, and waiting. After about ten minutes with no professor, one of my classmates pulled out his laptop and turned on the rest of the inauguration coverage, which, at that point, was adoringly documenting Barack's First Bill, with all the enthusiasm of first-time parents watching their child, their perfect, brilliant child, take its first steps. After thirty minutes with no professor, one of my classmates left: "call me if he shows up," he said as he walked down the hall to his office. After an hour with no professor, we were all still sitting there, watching the coverage of the inaugural lunch, staring off into space, and talking, or in my case FREAKING OUT about the conference we're holding and how nothing's going right in our preparations. (Seriously, it's going to be a disaster and it's going to be all. my. fault.) After an hour and fifteen minutes with no professor, a few people started to shift in their seats and mutter, "maybe he's not coming." The true believers reacted instantly: No! There's five minutes left! He could still show up and at least pass out a syllabus!

After an hour and twenty minutes with no professor, students from the next class started coming in. That was it, class was over, and we all shuffled out, a little disappointed--not even a syllabus?

I realize, now, that this blog entry is structured such that you all now think I have a lesson to teach here, something Godot-esque, something about the value, or maybe danger, of expectations, when really I just wanted to tell a funny story about how a room full of students quietly waited for their no-show professor for the entire class period. Maybe it's meaningless, maybe it's not, maybe it's all symbiosis, who knows? But there is this: we had a very pleasant morning together, united in our belief that someday our professor would come. So even though we never got that syllabus we so desperately wanted, where was the harm in our great expectations?

The Man knows my history

2009-01-14T10:47:00.016-08:00

The problem with starting a blog when I’m off on exotic foreign adventures is that now I feel like many, if not most, of my readers—yes, that’s you, hello! Welcome!—expect non-stop action from my blog, of the kind that only travel can provide: being stalked by a water buffalo, getting so sick I still can’t tell you how sick I got, being serenaded in Arabic by a tour guide. Even my trip this summer, which was tame in blog-fodder compared to Indonesia, provides plenty I could write about: trying to blend in as we stalked a group of Iranian pilgrims through Damascus,
getting dripped on by a giant medieval water wheel,
sleeping on a hostel’s rooftop with this view of Jerusalem,
conquering some medieval castles,
being conquered by other medieval castles,
jumping around medieval ruins,
failing to jump around ancient ruins,
posing with world-famous scenery,
being asked to pose, as if we were world-famous scenery,
surreptitiously trying to pose with Israeli soldiers, because, frankly, they are world-famous scenery,and, through it all, acquiring a pretty good Chacos tan, for someone as pale as me.

But now, most of the months of year, you all are forced to put up with whatever mundanities of American life I can come up with, and I’m afraid my blog must inevitably get dear-diary boring: dear diary, today I woke up. (10 am. It’s still winter break here.) Then I took a shower. Then I ate breakfast. (Apple-cinnamon oatmeal.) Then I spent a long time reading (From Ancient Cham to Modern Dialects: Two Thousand Years of Language Contact and Change, by Graham Thurgood). Then I emailed some people about the conference my classmates and I are organizing. (Dear so-and-so: Hi. I need something.) Then I transcribed some Yurok. Then I transcribed some Ao. Then I worked on a conference presentation. Then I talked with a friend, cleaned my apartment, cooked dinner, read some more (Women and Authority, edited by Maxine Hanks), and some more (In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith, by Todd Compton), and went to bed. Thrilling, I know: who really wants to hear all those details of personal history?

Even my weekends don’t make that much better blog material: I spent this weekend at the LSA's annual meeting, where, in addition to listening to a number of talks, some of which entertained me, some of which bored me, and some of which caused me to fall massively in academic love with a certain German typologist, I volunteered, in exchange for free registration, to be a perky registration desk volunteer and, later, to ignore my duties as a room monitor by falling asleep in the hallway. (Yes, at the largest and most important professional conference in my field. I have got to work on that.) And let’s see, what else? I finished Rough Stone Rolling, which felt like a major victory in our time; I saw a 5000-person protest downtown about the violence in Gaza; I watched a movie with one friend and spent an evening hanging out with another; I visited the singles ward in the city, where the girl I sat next to in Relief Society gasped, after only two or three minutes of conversation, “Oh, I've got someone you just have to meet!”; and I ate dinner with my Eritrean next-door neighbors, who barely speak English but who are, as far as I can tell, very nice. (Actually, these last two incidents made me feel like I was abroad again: possibly nothing encapsulates my experiences in foreign countries more than not understanding dinnertime conversation and being set up by strangers. If only I had also had a violent stomach illness, I would have felt right away from home.)

I’m not complaining about any of this: I like my life right now, especially the part where it's still winter break, but it doesn’t make for very interesting reading or writing. I have a post-it note on my computer with a whole list of other things to blog about—things that automatically make me cry (when they sing the Marseillaise in Casablanca; the scene where the baby is born in Children of Men; film strips of World War I), why I’m addicted to the New York Times’ wedding announcements section (anthropologically speaking, it’s a fascinating glimpse into the personal and professional lives of the nation’s elite. Plus I’m a romantic.), why I want to marry an immigrant so he can get a green card (why let my citizenship go to waste?), and what happened that one time my brothers and I rearranged all the furniture when our parents went out for the evening (they didn’t think it was as funny as we did)—but most of those things really merit no more than the passing mention I just gave them.

So where does that leave me, besides not blogging very regularly? I’m not sure. I could rehash more travel stories in entries like this one, thinly disguised as being relevant, but that fools no one. I could engage in more scholarly discussion about linguistics, but I do that so much already, or about religion, politics, or literature, but no one cares, and, plus, I don't have the time or energy. I could tell more jokes (what’s brown and sticky?), include more cute pictures of my mom's dog, beg my readers for post ideas (anyone?), post some of the innuendo-laden limericks I write (There once was a city called Sodom...), but those options are unoriginal, cliche, pitiful, and inappropriate--I mean, come on! My grandma reads this!

So I guess I am left with this: dear diary, today I woke up. Then I took a shower. Then I ate breakfast. Then I blogged. And now, internet, you know it all.

Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Winter

2009-01-07T12:43:00.003-08:00

I would say that the last three weeks of break were the laziest ever, what with all the decadent, hedonistic lounging and chocolate-eating I did--let me tell you, nothing beats a Christmas day lying on the couch eating Kit-Kats and reading Asterix comics--but since hours of watching DVRed episodes of Flight of the Conchords and or playing Rock Band with my brother were always punctuated by actual physical activity--running, cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, swimming, rock climbing, you name it--I suppose I have to concede that this break was only almost the laziest ever.

Judging by the amount of schoolwork I did, though, this break certainly claims the title: with a nightmare semester looming in front of me (four classes for credit, two research jobs, one independent research project, two conferences to attend and one to host, and orals in May), I chose to milk the Christmas holiday for all the relaxation it was worth instead of doing what I can to be ready for the academic maelstrom of the next four months. And so I lazed and lounged, spent entire days cooking (sugar cookies, key lime cookies, vanilla layer cake, pumpkin soup, honey green beans, roasted red pepper salad, salmon and saffron rice, squash chili, bean and beef chili, and four different failed-but-still-delicious attempts at my favorite Chinese restaurant dish, The Green Beans of Love and Happiness), and saw as many East Coast friends as I could, a goal that necessitated an impromptu trip to New York City to party--or, okay, to bond with takeout and chocolate chip cookies and an action movie and then party--on New Year's Eve with my cousin Guber, who needs to start blogging again. Guber, do you hear me? BLOG.

Not that I've been the best blogger ever, these past few weeks, but, sorry, hanging out with family and friends and Boston's dear old Citgo sign, all the while trying to stay warm in a frigid Boston December, takes all the time and energy I have. Now that I'm back home and enjoying a mild and sunny Berkeley January, though, maybe I'll stop being lazy and start writing again. Maybe. In any case, many happy returns of 2009 to one and all!

Time for you and time for me

2008-12-11T09:19:00.003-08:00

I was in the institute building's gym last night, happily stretched out on my stomach writing a paper about language use in terrorist texts, when the door swung open and a few of my graduate student friends marched in, single file, with the one in front carrying a pumpkin.

"Petra," they cried, "come join us! We're going to throw this pumpkin off the roof!"

I needed no more encouragement than that: I jumped up and fell in line, solemnly processing up the stairs to the roof, where we gathered around the edge as E. flung the pumpkin down with all his might. We quietly waited through the splat on the pavement, sighing with satisfaction, and then just as quietly shuffled back downstairs to our study spots.

My world goes a little crazy at the end of a semester: I've slept at the institute building two nights in a row now, curled up in chairs with my computer on my lap, trying to eke out just one or two more pages before sleep overtakes me. Normal functioning is forgotten: no dishes, no laundry, no errands, just research and just writing.

But somewhere in the middle of all that research and writing is time for craziness, time for staying up until 4 am talking, time for kicking a basketball around the gym pretending to be Pele, time for belting out Les Mis songs with other stressed-out grad students, time for testing whether men and women really do walk up stairs differently (yes!), time for giving blood and Christmas caroling and live nativities, and, of course, time for flinging pumpkins off the roof.

Secretly, I love the end of the semester: it's when everyone else is tired enough to indulge me in wackiness. If only I didn't have all these pesky papers to write, these would be good, good times.

Don't Cha Wish Your Visiting Teaching Supervisor Was Hot Like Me?

2008-12-03T19:39:00.004-08:00

I am my ward's visiting teaching supervisor, or at least was, until the bishop got so sick and tired of me lobbying for another teaching calling that I was called back! back by popular demand! into Sunday School. (Okay, so that's not exactly how it went down, but close, at least in that I was whiny.) In any case, in my very short tenure as visiting teaching supervisor I strove mightily to have my calling and release made sure, mostly by sending out very strange, very snarky emails each month asking companionships for their reports. Last month I titled my email "it's that time of the month again!" and threatened to release my hormonal rage on any companionships that didn't report quickly, and so you can imagine the pressure I felt this month: electronic PMS threats are a pretty high attention-getting bar to clear.

Pressure? No problem. Behold the (entire) text of this month's email:

Very critical to the life of a ward
Integral, too, to the plan of the Lord:
Sisters in spirit, sisters in love
In serving each other we serve Him up above.
Talking and teaching and getting to know
Is a time for all to learn and to grow.
No one should slack and no one should shirk
God has called us to this holy work.

Time for the straight talk, time for the truth
Even if saying it's somewhat uncouth:
A visit a month can be asking a ton
Church-assigned friendships are never much fun.
Hell if I learn and hell if I grow
I'm bonding instead with the one down below.
Now that you're listening, I proffer my plea:
Get me your numbers, A.S.A.P.!

I'll leave the question of which stanza to agree with as an exercise for the reader--after you've reported your home and visiting teaching statistics, that is.

Take That, Chomsky

2008-11-30T16:32:00.003-08:00

I half-awoke in the dark this morning and rolled over--bleary, confused, and still exhausted--to peek at my alarm: was it time to get up? When I saw the time, an hour before the alarm, my first and sincere thought was, "Oh no! Only an hour! I'd better sleep furiously or I'll be tired all day!"

An hour later I woke up laughing: even in my sleep, I giggle me.

Has anyone in this family ever even seen a chicken?

2008-11-27T10:29:00.003-08:00

I went to the grocery store the other day to do a little Thanksgiving feast shopping, and realized, standing in the produce aisle staring at my list, that I knew the Welsh word for leeks, knew why they're one of the national emblems of Wales, along with the daffodil, and could even remember part of the refrain of a Welsh-language song that mentions leeks, and yet had no idea what a leek actually looked like.

This year, I am thankful for the modern world, where even totally useless people like me can survive.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Vote Yes on No

2008-11-20T21:42:00.003-08:00

(Or is it Vote No on Yes? I can never remember.)

Since it's been almost a year since I posted anything snarktastic about recent Mormon happenings, and since, as a (now official!) resident of California, I have seen, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted nothing but Prop8aganda for the last few months, I feel I should say this: I'm listening, LDS Newsroom, when you tell me that "traditional marriage is essential to society as a whole", and I've decided to take you seriously--we should restrict marriage to the way it has always been. Of course! That's why I won't be dating anymore: instead, my parents will arrange a match for me. I'll also, of course, quit school and move back into my parents' house to practice the housewifely arts and add to my hope chest until someone takes me off the shelf.

That's cool with you, right, parents? Dad, we can talk dowry amounts over Christmas, and Mom, I know you've been dying for this for years, but no calling up that weird kid George from elementary school who you thought was so cute, okay?

Barack Obama Is My New Bicycle

2008-11-12T23:26:00.003-08:00

Way back in June 1999, Indonesia had its first "free and fair" parliamentary election, after forty years of sham democracy under Golkar and the Suharto regime. Jakarta, where we were living, pulsed with excitement that summer, with obvious political energy. The city was draped in colors: red for the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, gold for the People’s Working Party, green for the United Development Party, blue and white for the National Mandate Party. With forty-eight parties in the election, almost every color imaginable was in use, and we couldn't go anywhere without being caught up in a political demonstration of some kind. We kept flags for each of the major parties in our car, and I was never shy about joining in whatever rally I passed, shouting slogans with the best of them: Ingat! Perjuangan kita sudah bulat! Remember! Our struggle is already complete!

For election day itself, my family and I hung out in a small village in Lombok, watching as the paper ballots were, one by one, held up in front of the gathered crowd, who cheered or booed at every vote, or, in some cases, evaluated its validity: one voter had mistakenly punched the nail through the ballot card while it was folded, and four parties had been selected. “Buang! Buang!” the women shouted, “Throw it out!” and the men nodded their agreement. Small children played around at the feet of the adults, and those my age, like me, alternated between paying attention and clustering in small groups for idle chit-chat.

This scene stays with me in memory, and years afterwards, as a freshman in college, I wrote about it like this:

Every Indonesian was proud of an ink mark on their thumb, proof that they had voted. Every Indonesian was proud to declare that they had something to do with choosing the leader of their country. Every Indonesian was proud that they finally had a democracy.

And then one day, as supporters of the winning party poured out onto the streets for celebration, it hit me: democracy is something to be proud of! For the first time in the Indonesians’ lives, their opinions were worthwhile...I realized that America really has given the world a great gift, better even than our Old Navy castoffs. However, we cannot think that because we are such great benefactors we cannot receive a gift. Indonesia can’t give us the money we give to them...but they can give us enthusiasm. Our problem is not democracy itself, but rather our own apathetic attitudes towards it. Fewer and fewer young people vote in each election, and many of those who do view it as just a duty, an unpleasant task. In Lombok, even the children cheered. If all our young people could have seen the June 1999 elections in Indonesia, they would realize, as I did, that voting is not a duty but a wonderful privilege, that even if democracy doesn’t work all the time for every problem, the joy it can bring in some way compensates for the problems it can’t solve.

Young and irritating in many ways, I know, but this still rang true for me last week, when, for the first time in my memory, I saw an election bring joy, sheer joy, on the scale of Indonesia in 1999. Berkeley was a grand place to be on November 4: everyone, and I mean everyone, proudly displayed an "I Voted!" sticker, and when CNN called the election for Obama, people shouted and cheered and poured out into the streets to celebrate. This only echoed what CNN was showing: clips of the streets of Atlanta (everyone out in droves, dancing and cheering), Philadelphia (people marching down the streets shouting happily), and Washington, D.C., outside the gates of the White House (about a thousand people cheering "Obama!" and "Yes we can!"). The celebrations were still happening when I finally started biking home, around midnight; I passed at least four huge groups in the streets, shouting, cheering, dancing. One group had brought out a huge boom box and was having an impromptu dance party. Another group had crowded into the road and was slowing traffic down so they could give high fives to each passing car, and so, of course, we turned our bikes around and rode through the crowd giving high fives too. (As a mildly hilarious side note, apparently I can't give a high five and stay on a bicycle at the same time, and I have the scraped, swollen, and bruised knee to prove it; moreover, according to a friend of mine, there is somewhere local news footage to prove it!) And, even at midnight, there were about 500 people gathered on Telegraph, right near campus, climbing up on street signs and traffic lights, marching through the side streets, setting off fireworks, waving American flags, and, most amazingly to me, breaking into chants of "USA! USA! USA!" and singing the national anthem.

That's right: a crowd of students in Berkeley, California, spontaneously waving flags and singing the national anthem. This seems like a good time to use one of my recent favorite catchphrases: take that, mainstream America!

I don't even know how to finish this. I mean, it's obvious that I've drunk, and enjoyed, the Obama Kool-Aid, but, really, I'm not trying to just write another Gobama piece: I'm fully aware that our struggle isn't already complete, that this is barely the beginning, that Obama doesn't have much experience, and maybe he'll screw it all up, and that, in all likelihood, the president doesn't even matter that much. I tell you all about Indonesia, though, to express some of what last week meant to me: a return to enthusiasm, enthusiasm for the privilege of voting and the joy of democracy. That, my friends, is worth all the skinned knees in the world.

At first I was afraid, I was petrified

2008-10-29T10:47:00.003-07:00

The night before last, I had a very vivid, very terrifying dream in which I wandered into a bad area of town and was raped; I woke from the dream well before my alarm, in a cold sweat, with no desire to go back to sleep, and spent the rest of the day with that lingering creeped-out feeling that can come from nightmares. Pleasant, I know.

With that feeling hanging over me, I stopped by Walgreens on my way home to pick up some groceries, and, as I was locking up my bike, was approached by a man standing outside. "Hi, miss, can you help me with something?" he asked. "Wanna hang out?"

I'm approached outside of Walgreens every time I go, but this is not what I expected. He was serious: "Just for a few minutes, please? I'm really lonely. We could, I don't know, go back to my place and watch TV or something."

Normally I love to help when I can, but common sense plus dream feelings overrode basic pity--is this guy really so desperately lonely that he's hanging around outside Walgreens looking to make friends? That's heartbreaking!--and I made some (true) excuses about having last-minute reading to do, dodged his request for my phone number, and headed home to the safety of my apartment.

The supposed safety, that is: about an hour later, around 11.30, sitting around doing my last-minute reading, I heard a key in the locked door. It took me a few seconds to register the noises: wait a second, I live alone, who has a key? A man walked into the apartment, took a look around, saw me at my desk, staring at him open-mouthed, and said, in genuine apology, "Oops, sorry! Wrong apartment!" He then turned and left, with no explanation of who he was or why he had a key.

I feel like the universe is trying to tell me something, though I have no idea what: never sleep again, perhaps? Fear men? Call the landlady and get my locks changed NOW? I don't know about those first two--I slept just fine last night and had a lovely chat with a male classmate this morning, so clearly I will survive--but let me tell you, I'm changing my stupid locks.

mbatE2008 stories: part 3: palling around with Palmyrans

2008-10-27T19:49:00.002-07:00

We almost didn't go to Palmyra, arguably Syria's most famous tourist site, because it's just Roman ruins, and not to sound too blasé , but once you've seen one set of Roman ruins, you've seen them all--that was kind of the point of that whole empire thing, after all. And, having seen Jordan's ruins earlier in the summer, I had had enough of columns, carvings, and concrete.

Or basalt, in the case of Umm Qeis.

I forget why we decided to go; I think we just woke up in the morning and thought, ah, what the heck. So we hopped on a bus and headed out into the desert, a decision we wouldn't regret: Palmyra's ruins, and especially their setting, are pretty spectacular.

More spectacular, though, were the people we met: first, a Bedouin family that lived in a tent near the ruins; as we walked past, their kids ran out to beg for pens, and then invited us in for a drink and a chat. They spoke a dialect of Arabic unfamiliar to me, with the palatal affricates of Iraqi Arabic and the voiced uvular stops of Bedouin Arabic, but they were patient, and so with lots of repeating, we spent about an hour there, discussing everything from how much our shoes cost (too much) to how we remove leg hair (I shave, Amy waxes) to why we're not married (no good men). I think this last answer is where we really made friends: as it turns out, we were hanging out with a mother, her five children, and her beautiful-but-unmarried sister-in-law, who clicked her tongue in recognition at my answer. No good men, indeed.

Or maybe just a few good men: after touring the ruins, we stopped into a cafe in town for drinks and lunch. The owner was either super friendly or super bored, which means he fell in love with us instantly and insisted that we spend hours there, drinking water and talking about sex. Apparently, they don't call it Palmyra for nothing.

Before things got weird with the sex talk, this guy, unsurprisingly, offered us tea, and when we refused, said, surprisingly, "What, are you Mormon or something?"

My jaw dropped-- the Church practically doesn't exist in the Middle East, and no one all summer had had any idea what kind of crazy religion would forbid me tea. I asked how he know, and he gave some vague response about a large group of Mormons who had come through Palmyra a few years before. "They spoke Arabic, too," he said. "They had been studying in Egypt or something."

It didn't take much to put two and two together: a large group of Mormons studying in Egypt who had come through Palmyra a few years ago. "Do you remember their names?" I asked. "Was there a Kaitlyn? Maybe a Ken? Or a Stephen?"

And yes, indeed: this Palmyran restaurant owner had hosted my study abroad group back in 2004, when they traveled in Syria. He probably made them play dress-up with Bedouin robes too.

****

That was just the beginning of our random encounters with friends and friends-of-friends. We ran into someone I knew from Amman while walking towards the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem. We walked into a restaurant in Petra only to see Chris, an archaeologist and the director of the center that hosted my program in Amman. At one of the Sunday evening concerts hosted by BYU's Jerusalem Center, we met an old acquaintance of mine from BYU. An in perhaps the funniest coincidence, a taxi driver in Amman who wanted to tell us all about the Americans he knows--a common, if overly hopeful, practice--actually knew a friend of mine. I was getting all ready to give the "how could I possibly know all 300 million Americans" spiel when I realized, hey, wait, Jeremy P.? Who has blond hair? And glasses? And speaks Arabic? Uh oh. Don't think this is typical! We don't all know each other, I swear!

****

It was a good trip for people, I'd say, both the people I knew before and the people we got to know: the aforementioned Bedouin family; the ever-so-kind restaurant manager in Hama, delighted to meet and greet Americans unafraid of traveling in Syria; the ever-so-kind hotel manager in Amman, excited at sharing a birthday with Amy; the shop owners in Aleppo who attempted to seduce us with foul--yet hilarious!--language; the huge group of American pilots we hiked with in Petra; the Japanese couple we met in Palmyra, and bumped into again in Aleppo's Great Mosque and Damascus's Old City; the hotel manager in Damascus whose pro-Bush pro-war stance confused us until we learned he was Kurdish; the American backpacker we adopted briefly in Amman, finding him a taxi ride and hotel room; the Israeli Couch Surfer who put us up in Jerusalem for two nights for free; the friendly Iraqi tourists at Crac des Chevaliers and Damascus with whom we talked a little bit about the war ("Do you have any relatives in the military? No? Thank God!"); and the teenage boys in Hama who entertained us for an afternoon, throwing themselves off a bridge into a lake, running around to see the pictures Amy had taken, shouting "faxxam! Awesome!" and repeating. Awesome, indeed, kids. Awesome indeed.

Saturday Night in Toledo, OH

2008-10-19T22:37:00.003-07:00

John Denver fans among my readers--if there are any--might recognize the title of this entry and wonder whether I'm about to make some clever joke about letting sleeping dogs lie, or spending a week there one day, or whatever the other lyrics of the song are, so I'll just tell you up front: nope. I'm talking about a real Saturday night, in real Toledo, OH. No cleverness here. Just change. And hope.

I'm not quite sure how it happened either, but I ended up in Ohio last weekend, tracting for Obama, walking door to door in lower middle-class neighborhoods saying, "Hi! I'm a volunteer for the Obama campaign! May I ask if you're likely to vote in this year's election? I met all sorts of people, from a transvestite Obama supporter to a McCain supporter with a very large, and very fierce, dog, who managed to get its teeth on my arm just before its owner pulled it off. I got all sorts of answers, ranging from "Sorry, but my right to vote was revoked with my prison term" to "All that is disgusting! Get the hell off my porch!" I thought about referring that last person, a crochety old lady, to the missionaries--lady, I'm a Mormon, trust me, there are much more annoying reasons for me to be on your porch--but then refrained. What does it say about me that referring the missionaries is a form of vengeance?

The most interesting part about the weekend--well, besides seeing this glimpse of old industrial America, and besides getting to peek into every house on the block, and besides examining the inner workings of an Obama field office (hope! change! life-size cutouts of The Man himself!)--was the different reactions my dad and I got at our respective doors. He's 50ish, graying, and (comparatively) well-dressed, a Harvard economics professor who supports Obama partially as repentance for voting for Bush in 2000: when he shows up at your door with brochures, you listen. I'm 24 and look younger, dressed in jeans and Chacos, and fresh from California: when I show up at your door, you grumble about these darn kids and their Obamania. Or, in some cases, you spill your life story: the guy who was jumped in an alleyway, spent four months in a coma, and now can't hold a job because he still gets dizzy spells; the old black guy, a Greyhound employee for 27 years, who was told, after his five back surgeries and kidney surgery, that he wasn't eligible for Medicare; the woman who had just lost her job of 13 years the day before. What is to be done?

The best story, though, and the one that still makes me smile, took place in a mostly-white lower middle class neighborhood. Dad had just given an Obama sign to a guy whose 13 year old son was a big Obama supporter. A few minutes later, his neighbor, wearing torn jeans and a ratty T-shirt, with a broken-down truck on his front lawn, stuck his head out of his door and stared at the sign.

"Yo, Bill!" he shouted. "Do you really want a black guy to be president?"

The fellow with the sign was repairing his roof. He looked up. "Yup."

There was a long pause. Looooong.

"Me too," said the redneck. So we gave him a sign, placing it next to the truck.

I'll just finish by echoing him: me too.

Two Poems for Two Conversations about The Godfather in Two Days

2008-10-07T09:48:00.004-07:00

"On Not Enjoying The Godfather And Refusing To Watch Any of the Sequels"

Excessive machismo plus a complicated plot

Minus women characters or anybody hot

Plus too many gunfights and minus any jokes

Is the wrong formula for us feminine folk.

"Breakfast in Bed"

Good old Coppola one-upped Ichabod Crane,

In a way equestrians declared inhumane.

We await headless riders as a matter of course

But nobody expected that headless horse.

mbatE2008 stories: part 2: signs of the times

2008-09-26T15:31:00.012-07:00

Often, instead of taking pictures of exotic people and places, I take pictures of signs. What? They're funny.

This one's on the highway that runs along the Dead Sea. While the water is extremely salt, what I don't understand is why the sign must be on the highway --does salty water sometimes jump out at unsuspecting cars?

(ha HA, take THAT, car! Just watch what I'll do to your paint!)

At Petra (ha, Petra at Petra! Imagine that!), I was grateful for a sign that told me what I was seeing: a view. Oh, good. I wouldn't have figured that out otherwise.

Some Syrian sign-maker was having delusions of grandeur.

Most Syrians we met gave us a big thumbs-up when we told them we were American, but apparently not everyone feels like that.

Not all Israelis feel like that either.

If Jesus visited Jerusalem nowadays, he'd be casting out the souvenir shop owners. Seriously--selling the widow's mite?

If only it said "but call it Israel as you're trying to get across the border."

Pretty much as close as I want to get to the Golan Heights. (Note: this is not true. With a few more days, we would have gone.)

This one's my favorite sign picture of all, but it takes a little bit of explanation: like many children, I grew up playing Monopoly. Unlike many children, my family only owned Hebrew Monopoly, in which all the traditional properties (Boardwalk, Park Place, um, er, I don't know any of the other traditional properties--see that "my family only owned Hebrew Monopoly" thing above) were replaced with Israeli properties--the yellow, if I remember correctly, were streets in Tel Aviv, and other colors were streets in Eilat and Jerusalem. This means that as we walked around Jerusalem, I recognized street names, and was especially excited about Ben Yehuda Street, an outdoor shopping area in Jerusalem. Was that the Boardwalk of Hebrew Monopoly? Did I often try to get a monopoly on its color group? Or is my subconscious just enamored of the Hebrew language revivalist?

Who knows. But a picture was still necessary. Duh.

mbatE2008 stories: part 1: crazy talk

2008-09-19T13:53:00.007-07:00

blogger's note: the thought of having to sit down and write everything about the mbatE2008 makes. me. tired. So instead of doing grand travelogues like last year, I'm just going to tell my stories at random: what I want, when I want. And it's my blog, so there.

blogger's note, part 2: mbatE2008 stands for, in case you don't remember, most bitchingly awesome trip EVER 2008--that is, the two weeks I spent in Syria and Jordan and Israel with Amy, who has beat me to blogging some about the trip; see here or here.

****

We were tired, the last day of our trip, because the day before we had biked the 40-mile circumference of the Sea of Galilee. Let me emphasize: Israel. In August. During the day. 40 miles. Yeah, it was hot.

Biking in Jesus' footsteps. I'm glad my back sweat isn't visible in this picture.

We were also tired, of course, from two weeks spent traveling at our pace--no time for sleeping! no time for eating!--and so were happy to spend an afternoon, after having crossed from Israel back into Jordan, hanging around Amman sampling Arab desserts.

Kunafa. I'm for it.

As we were sitting there, a fight started brewing on the street--loud voices, lots of arm waving. That's not too unusual, so I didn't bother to listen at first, until I caught some of what one man was shouting:

"You never change! Americans can change--they change their president every four years! They're having an election right now! You Arabs, though, just sit around all day doing nothing!"

Interesting, I thought, so I tuned into the fight. From the looks on the faces of those watching, this was crazy-homeless-guy talk, not normal fight-on-the-street talk. The guy shouted some more along those lines, detailing the worthlessness of his listener, who, after a few minutes, lost patience and walked away, with the guy still shouting as his back, throwing out his final invective:

"What are you, an EYE doctor? Interested in EYE medicine?"

I made eye contact with another bystander and raised my eyebrows in a question: WTF? He shrugged at me: Who knows. Just ignore the crazy homeless guy.

Ignore I did, but the phrase has stuck with me: what a nice rhythm, what total lack of sense. And in the last few weeks, back to normal life, guess what runs through my head when someone bumps into me, cuts in line, opens their car door as I'm biking past, or tries to pay in pennies at the grocery store:

What are you, an EYE doctor? Interested in EYE medicine?

A Rental Car Named Desire

2008-09-15T07:11:00.014-07:00

A few months ago—sometime in mid-July—I took a day trip, along with some friends of mine from the program, to the various castles and fortresses in Jordan’s eastern desert; I would have written about it then—and indeed I drafted most of this entry then—except for a pact of silence we took, in effect until the end of the program, for reasons that will become clear in the next sentence. With that pact lifted, though, I’m now free to write about one of the best trips of my summer, in which, in a strange foreign twist on the classic American road trip saga—a sort of Arab On the Road, but with less drugs—I piled into a car with my friends and drove to Iraq.

We left unthinkably early in the morning, well before the sun rose, probably around four-thirty; instead of being an irritation, this seemed more a symptom of our excitement about the trip and our freedom in planning it: we rented a car—a Hyundai Sonata that we named Saleh, not Desire, after our favorite tutor, and apologized to profusely every time we hit a bump in the road, sand, or rocks over which we drove--and so could leave anytime we wanted. Imagine! After several trips with the entire 22-person group on a tour bus, trapped into tour-bus-like activities—long lunches, tour guides, stopping for souvenirs, ugh--we were delighted to have the freedom to wake up and depart before dawn. We also reveled, as the day went on, in the freedom to slam on the brakes wherever and whenever we wanted: to ask directions from shop people confused at why a carful of Americans would be this far out into the desert, to buy watermelons from random roadside stands, to take pictures of the, um, scenery, such as it was, and once, memorably, to pee, squatting behind the only shelter we could find, small piles of sand. I'm pretty sure that meant we were in full view of all the passing trucks carrying oil from Iraq. Hope they enjoyed it.

the license plate says "al-Anbar"

We spent most of the morning slamming on our brakes for castles, the ostensible purpose of our trip, and indeed they would have been worth a trip on their own: we know how I feel about castles—anyone who is my friend on Facebook might have noticed my status line over the summer about how I LOVE. CASTLES--and these were the coolest kind: standing in the middle of the desert. Let me just emphasize one more time, this was real desert, with nothing growing or living as far as the eye could see. The crazy thing is that these areas used to be oases, palaces for riotous easy living, hunting lodges and trader's inns and T.E. Lawrence's military bases. (That Lawrence guy sure got around.) It’s mostly because of centuries of desertification that bath houses covered with erotic paintings (erotic paintings! In the Middle East!) now stand surrounded by sand, and that trader’s inns seem to be located on no visible route, or, rather, no visible anything. We spent the morning at these places, scrambling over castle walls, and by that I mostly mean breaking in: we left so early in the morning that we arrived before they opened. No problem, we thought, ever the intrepid Americans, and climbed in the window.

Not that we had to break into all of the castles—at one of the larger ones, T.E. Lawrence’s former post, a guard demanded our entry tickets. “If you went to the others,” he said, “you must have a ticket.” Er—we looked at each other and tried to explain: yes, we visited them, no, we don’t have tickets. Fine, he said, then I’ll sell you tickets on a student discount, if you just show me your student I.D. cards. Er—once again we paused. No student IDs. The guard was exasperated: “Then how am I supposed to know that you’re students?” It was looking like we’d have to shell out the money—a whole, I don’t know, $3 each—when another guard stepped in: “Dude,” he told his friends, “they speak Arabic, don’t they? What more proof do you need?”

And so we got in for free, and, after our visit, sat with the guards drinking mint tea and talking about Lebanon. I think, actually, that could serve as a main theme for the day trip. Not Lebanon, that is, but hospitality; Arabs pride themselves on their famous hospitality, and, for the most part, rightfully so. I should have begun this story by declaring that, “I have always depended on the kindness of Arabs,” and then I could recount all the kindnesses we experienced: the people, on every corner of every town, who gave us directions; the guard to another castle, who gave us the key despite the castle being closed; the seventeen year old Bedouin kid, living alone tending his family’s sheep in the desert, who invited us into his tent, served us some dirty water, and told us about his life in the desert (“it’s normal”); the guy who, when we got lost upon entering Amman, drove all the way to our destination so we could follow him; the guards at the Iraqi border who didn’t, as we’ll see, arrest us on the spot.

We finished with all the castles of the eastern desert before noon, which then left us the entire afternoon to drive to Iraq, three hours away from the outermost castle: three hours on a very flat, very straight road, very empty road. Every so often someone—okay, me—would try a car game (“I spy, with my little eye, something brown”) which would inevitably fail (“EVERYTHING!”). You’d think this kind of driving would be easy—nothing to see, nothing to pass, nothing to hit—and you’d be right, during the day, but after nightfall was a different story: our trusty Saleh had no taillights, and his headlights only lit, oh, about a foot in front of us. I kid you not. Now imagine driving through this landscape—no street lights, no city lights, no passing cars, even—with only twelve inches of visibility. I came within inches of slamming into a pack of dogs eating some roadkill, and had to slam on the brakes and swerve into the shoulder, waking everyone up both with the car’s sudden motion, and my shouting, at the top of my lungs, “We’re okay! We’re okay!”

(At least we didn’t hit any crossing camels.)

We were okay, though, much as we were okay through several dust storms, and much as we were okay when we decided to take a detour and drive through eleven kilometers of rocks and sand to see a tree. Yeah, I know, a tree, right? Eleven kilometers of offroading in a Hyundai for a tree? But this was a special tree—Mohammed sat under it once, or something—and mostly we were intrigued by the idea of anything growing in this landscape. It was worth every kilometer.

When we finally arrived at the Iraqi border, at least the Jordanian side of it, sweaty and dusty and tired, we realized something critical: we had no plan. All we wanted was to set a foot over the border, just one foot, just to say we had ‘been’ to Iraq, but how best to persuade the border guards to let it happen? We figured, hey, why not be honest, and so my friend C and I, deemed the most friendly and, more importantly, Arabic-speaking, stepped out of the car and walked up to the gate, where we stood unnoticed for a minute before C coughed quietly to get the guard’s attention. “Excuse me,” he said, “Hi. Can we come in?” And we both smiled winningly.

One thing led to another, and in a few minutes later the appropriate supervisors had been called, and we were in the guard office, being questioned—in a friendly way, sure, but it was still more nerve-wracking than most speaking practice times are.

“I’m sorry,” the boss said, “Explain this to me one more time. Why are you here?”

“We’re tourists,” I said. “We wanted to see the border.”

“And maybe put one foot over it,” C added. “Just one foot!”

“I see,” the boss said thoughtfully. “Journalists, right?”

“No! No, no, no, no, no…not journalists. Tourists. We’re students, in Amman. All we wanted was to see the border!”

“And maybe put one foot over it—just one!”

This was a hard sell, clearly. “So, you’re intelligence, right?” the boss asked.

“Don’t you think the U.S. would send better intelligence agents than us?” C asked, and, working his charm to the utmost, exchanged some laughing high fives with the other guards.

The boss was less amused. “So, if you’re students, what are you studying? And why study Arabic?”

I am a shameless suck up who knows how to charm Arabs: “Because it’s a beautiful language, of course! We love the grammar, the words, and especially the poetry!”

“You like poetry?” the boss asked, warming up to us. “Then recite some!”

By this time the others waiting in the car had been called in, and so they, too, got to join in quoting some of the poetry we had just studied: "I yearn for my mother's bread/for my mother's coffee/for my mother's touch.". And when we were done with that, I added that we liked Arabic music too, and that started a second round of the strangest pop quiz in my life: singing Amr Diab lyrics to a room full of guards at the Iraqi border to prove that I was not an intelligence agent. “Darling, light of my eyes, I’ve loved you for years”—I’m sure the U.S. is sending better intelligence agents than me.

We waited at least an hour in that room, while various phone calls were made, all of them starting with, “So we’ve got this group of American tourists,” followed by laughter we could hear through the phone, and while we waited we tried our hardest to charm the guards: C kept up his jokes and high fives, T, with his endless knowledge of Nancy Ajram lyrics, kept singing, and the girls flirted shamelessly.

I asked one guard where he was from, and responded enthusiastically to his reply: “Oh, you’re from Irbid! I’m going there next week!”

“You should come see me,” he said. This is standard and I usually ignore it.

“Maybe, that would be fun.” I paused, and followed with the only question I could think of: “Are you married?”

“No,” he said, “are you offering?”

I pretended to think for a minute: “That depends. Are you going to let us into Iraq?”

Future suitors beware: I drive a hard bargain. Or a really easy one, I guess, if you happen to be a guard at the Iraqi border.

In the end, a decision was made: we could step out into, and walk around in, the no-man’s-land between Jordan and Iraq, but not actually cross into Iraq, still about a mile away; this our Jordanian guard friends deemed too dangerous: “We haven’t even been over there,” they said, “and we have guns.”

This just had to be untrue, but what we were going to do? They had our passports, and, as they so rightly pointed out, guns. So we wandered around in the in between for a few minutes, taking no pictures, by order of our friends the guards, and then shook hands with everyone, made a few more jokes and a few more promises to visit Irbid, and then piled back into our car, done and done. If we hadn't managed to get to the Iraq side, well, at least we had managed to see some cool desert castles, and a tree, without crashing, dying of dehydration, or, even more frighteningly, getting arrested or more seriously interrogated, and sometimes that's enough for a single day.

Close Encounters of the Diverse Kind

2008-09-09T22:21:00.004-07:00

I just devoted my whole summer to Arabic, day in and day out, working hard, with blood, sweat, tears, and everything in between. For all that work, I got a certificate in the mail, an evaluation of "advanced plus" from a third-party language tester, and that sweet, special feeling of being able to say "I speak Arabic."

So what do I do, upon getting back to Berkeley, to keep up my Arabic, to prevent the attrition that happened last time around? Enroll in an advanced Arabic class, right?

Wrong. I, on a whim, sign up for beginning Vietnamese. Commitment issues, anyone?

Vietnamese, though, is awesomely fun. The language, meh: I hate vowels, and suck at tones, so I just have to keep reminding myself that this is good for me, if only because I now know how to pronounce "pho."

The class, though, cracks me up, mostly because it is so. freaking. Asian. The teacher quietly and politely calls s tudents to the front of the class, where they quietly and politely read the assigned dialogue out loud, after which we quietly and politely applaud. Really, though, I find it so funny because the class roll looks something like this:

Kevin Nguyen
Lisa Nyugen
Michelle Nguyen
Steven Nguyen
Tiffany Nguyen
Hannah English Surname
Joseph Tran
Linda Tran
Phyllis Tran
etc
etc
etc

That's right: I am the only non-Asian student in the class. We did a speaking exercise the other day about our nationalities, and we went around the room answering, which sounded a bit like this: "I am Vietnamese-American." "I am Vietnamese-American." "I am Vietnamese-American." "I am Vietnamese-Cambodian-American." "I am Vietnamese-Indonesian-American." "I am Vietnamese-Chinese-American." "I am...American?" Good thing the word for "American" has a rising tone--if I sound underconfident, well, it's just the language.

You know that entry in Stuff White People Like about how white people like being the only white person around? (Now you do.) And about how ethnic restaurants are only judged to be good if they're full of non-white people? Well, maybe I should start judging my language class experience by the same criteria: it may not be the most effective teaching in the world, and I may be miles behind my classmates the heritage speakers, but at the very least I am having an authentic experience.

****

(Oh, and I'm going to write about my trip soon, I promise. Until then, I'll whet your appetite with this picture, taken in Bethlehem:

I think my new strategy for blogging about this trip might just be to, every post, promise that I will blog soon, and include a picture with the promise. It's not a bad strategy--if I post every, oh, few days or so, I could get through my pictures in only a few years!)

Hannah In Real Life

2008-09-06T18:39:00.004-07:00

I am back in Berkeley after my travel adventures, and have been thrown directly into the thick of things; let's not go over what I've been trying to do this week (compensate for a week of missed classes! get over jet lag! see friends! settle into my apartment! find a purpose in life!) except to say that I feel a bit like this:

Tiny. Inadequate. Taking on the impossible. In fact, I should just attach a Demotivator-type slogan to that picture and hang it above my desk: "GRAD SCHOOL. What Made You Think It Was a Good Idea?"

I promise an update soon--soon! really!--because I have lots of whos and whats and wheres to talk about: Syrian Bedouin, Iraqi border guards, hot Spanish tourists, Israeli soldiers, Jordanian taxi drivers; biking, walking, talking, photographing, laughing, sleeping, and definitely not eating; castles, churches, tents, mosques, markets, and dirty, dirty hostels. Give me time, though, to collect my thoughts (and my pictures!) and to get my real life a bit more in order.

And in that real life? You know, where I'm a mature, responsible adult and etc etc? Right now I have green paint on my shin, and purple on my elbow. My right arm is covered with splashed Otter Pop juice, and my left calf is smeared with bicycle grease. Oh, and I smell like chlorine. So I guess real life isn't so bad: grad school woes or not, this is my kind of Saturday.

Dance to the Beat, To the Rhythm of the Nile

2008-08-09T15:11:00.004-07:00

We officially finished the academic portions of our program this morning, with a final exam so ridiculously hard that...well, no, come to think of it, I've got nothing to say about it, as I hate talking about any test after the fact. It's over, it's done with, and so what if I didn't quite figure out that the article was about IMF reforms. Bah.

But I don't mind talking about the celebrations after the tests: I came home and right away devoted several hours cleaning my apartment for a girls-only afternoon party with our tutors, during which we sang and danced and ate snacks and gasp! took off our head scarves. Okay, that was them, not us, but still--exciting!

Even more exciting, though, was the evening's activity: an Amr Diab concert in Jerash, at the South Theater. Imagine 3,000 Jordanians packed into a Roman theater, screaming and clapping and chanting and singing and dancing with the biggest pop star in the Arab world right now, and then imagine me, screaming and clapping and chanting and singing and dancing right along with them. I couldn't quite follow the clapping--even the basic "clap-along" rhythms are far more complex than our Western 4/4 systems--but believe you me, I know all the words to all the songs, and could sing the lyrics with the best of them. (Granted, they're not all that hard: habibi, my darling, I love you, my darling, take me, my darling.) And, since we were at the very back, with an empty area right behind us, I could dance my little heart out, along with the Jordanian guys next to us, who were surprised and delighted to join me in some good old hip-shaking, hand-clapping fun. Good times, good times.

But speaking of good times, I'm heading off for some more, for three weeks or so: a few days on the beach in Aqaba, a Red Sea resort, and then to Petra, and then to Syria and Israel and Petra again. Expect radio silence, and don't worry too much--after all, I only have to coordinate an entire trip around the Middle East, including persuading Syrian officials that no, I would never dream of going to Israel (oh, sorry, "occupied Palestine"), and then persuade Israeli officials that no, that Syrian stamp on my passport doesn't mean a thing and I would never dream of studying Arabic! Honestly!

Let the good times roll.

Not Drowning But Wading

2008-08-05T08:08:00.006-07:00

I don't blog much about my daily life here in Jordan, mostly because there's not much to write about: the funniest thing that happens to me on class days is watching my classmates realize, mid-sentence, that when talking about women's issues in Arab society they're going to have to conjugate verbs for the feminine plural. And since I don't have any photos of the expression that says, "Oh, crap...can I reasonably pretend that at least one man wears the hijab or gets pregnant or becomes a victim of honor killings?", I suspect it is much funnier to me than to you.

It never ceases to surprise me that I'm living in a foreign country and not just bubbling over with odd incidents from day to day--Indonesia, after all, was a treasure trove, India not much worse, and if I had had a blog in Egypt, I could have written every day about things like competitive greetings, car accidents, dramatic illnesses, and pushy Muslim friends who wanted to take me to their neighborhood's Eid Al-Fitr celebration and teach me to pray. Jordanians, apparently, are not completely insane: in contrast with Egypt, where people lectured me every day about how Arab oil comes from the corpses of dead heroes, transformed by Allah as a reward for their faithfulness, Jordanians refrain from conspiracy theories and instead say perfectly reasonable things like "I hate George W. Bush" and "the U.S. presence in Iraq is causing problems" and "these rising oil prices are very hard on everyone." The craziest thing I've heard from someone yet is that I should say "Praise Allah" when I sneeze, because every time I do, Allah kills a dog in my place. That was from an Iraqi, though, so I'm not sure it counts.

So, basically, I go to class, go out to eat, wander around Amman, do my Arabic homework, buy pirated DVDs (Planet Earth for $5!), hang out shirtless with my roommates (hey, it's hot), visit Jordanian friends, attend prayers at a local mosque, and read lots of linguistics articles. It's quite the life--and I agree with the recent Jordan Times article, citing the king that 'Jordan is doing fine'--but it also means that there's nothing to see here, folks, move along. Or, rather, it means that all my blog entries inevitably focus less on the weekdays, and more on the weekends, when I do things like swim/wade up this river:

through this canyon:
to go skinny dipping under this waterfall:

Yup. Nothing to see here. Nothing at all. Move along.

Flirting for Fruit

2008-08-04T09:43:00.001-07:00

For my 24th birthday, I celebrated my youth by embarking, the day before, on a grand test of stamina: getting up at 6 AM, taking a public bus to Irbid, a town about two hours away, going to church, hiking up a two-mile hill to a crusader castle in Ajlun, visiting a Byzantine church and the supposed site of Elijah's ascension, hanging out at a farm in a river valley, navigating my way back to Amman on three separate public buses, eating dinner at the house of the branch president, chasing his young children around for at least an hour, and then having an impromptu midnight birthday party with my roommates and whoever of the 22 students on my program stopped by my apartment. Think that's not enough of an endurance test? Think again: I did most of that in Arabic, from chatting with bus drivers and old women pounding spices and overenthusiastic tour guides to praying in sacrament meeting, bearing my testimony, and translating the Young Women's lesson I attended. And it was 100 degrees out. And it was Fast Friday, and I, for once, remembered, which means I did all of that on an empty stomach and dry throat. Let it not be said that youth is wasted on the young: we enjoy it.

My hunger (or, more precisely, thirst) made me, luckily, not disposed to put up with any crap, which in this case means the attention of one of the bus drivers, who told me I had a "pretty body" and tried to kiss me, despite my effort to be fully covered so as not to look like a tramp. And here I thought long sleeves were a magic protective shield. Somehow, though, my creep-detecting instincts didn't kick in for the castle's tour guide, who, after taking me on an energetic and detailed tour of the castle, including the secret tunnels, announced that we would then continue our tour to Mar Elias, the aforementioned Byzantine church. "Wait," I wondered, "I thought he just belonged to the castle. Did I somehow agree to this without noticing? Well, he seems nice enough, I guess." So I jumped in his car and off we drove, just the two of us.

And that's how I ended up with an afternoon drive through a Jordanian nature reserve, with a 50-something Arab man inventing love songs to me, in grand classical style, with a low vibratro voice. Imagine Leonard Cohen, in Arabic, producing lines like "I would that I were a bird/so I could flutter near you forever, in any country, even America" and "the trees dance in the wind/only for your sake, O light of my eyes, O my blue-eyed darling." Every so often he'd pause in the song, just to make sure I understood the lyrics: "Flutter--you know? Like to fly around closely. So I could always be near you, see. Get it?" Yes. Yes, I got it. And yes, it made me uncomfortable--how, exactly, should one respond to such a serenade?

Not that I'm complaining too loudly: as the result of a little Arabic and a little flirting (or, okay, a little blue eyes/blue passport magic), I got a personalized tour not only of a crusader castle--and we all know how I feel about castles!!--but also of a beautiful old church site, complete with herds of grazing goats wandering through, and of a charming farm, where, get this, there were trees. And grass. Growing! Naturally! Maybe I've been in the desert too long, but that was the best part, that or the fact that my would-be suitor then plucked fresh figs and pomegranates and mint from those trees, thoughtfully arranging them for me in a box so that I could break my fast on them later, or, as the case was, share them with everyone who came to my impromptu birthday party. Wandering off into forests with strange foreign men is probably not a good habit--at least, my mother never sounds too happy about it--but how can I quit when I get such rewards?

Watch Where You're Going!

2008-07-28T10:41:00.002-07:00

Friday morning's sacrament meeting talk (yes, that's right, singular: church only meets for two hours here) began with a story about a man who wanted to get to Detroit but accidentally got on a bus to St. Louis, and so ended up lost and miles away from his destination. The speaker then, of course, analogized that to life and choices and consequences, etc, and spent a lot of his talk repeating this reminder: don't get on the wrong bus!

With that warning echoing in my ears, I headed out to the Friday market that I often frequent after church; I rarely buy anything, but just enjoy wandering the open-air market with vendors shouting at me as loud as they can: skirts, two dinars! Cucumbers, half a dinar a kilo! Pirated DVDs, one dinar! Now that's what I call a Sabbath.

This last Friday, though, I wasn't in the mood, and so began my trip home just a few minutes after arriving, stepping out into the street to look for, you guessed it, a bus. As I began my search for the right bus, one to the university, another bus passed, with Salt written on the front. On a whim, I thought, hey, I've heard good things about Salt, maybe I'll go. So I called out to the conductor, who nodded to confirm the destination, and dashed across several lanes of traffic to the door.

After I settled into my seat, the conductor came by and somewhat sheepishly admitted that the bus was coming from Salt, not going to it. Oops--what was that church talk about again? "But no worries," he said, "I can still get you there."

(Did I ever tell the story of the time in Yogyakarta when the bus conductor lied to me about whether the bus passed my stop, just to get my 10-cent fare? Boy, did he look embarrassed when I climbed back on his bus, going the opposite way this time, after having realized that he lied to me and my destination was nowhere nearby. At least I won the argument about whether I should pay again.)

Luckily, this conductor made good on his promise; after a harrowing ride through the city, with the conductor hanging out the open door, chatting with passengers and passers-by--"going to the market, eh? going to get some lunch, eh?"--and hurrying people off the bus, even into oncoming traffic--"downtown! downtown! Remember we're in the left lane! Quick, before the light changes!"--we arrived at the bus station, and the conductor very paternally delivered me personally to a bus to Salt, even going so far as to ask another passenger to give me his seat, as I otherwise would have had to sit next to a man. And co-ed seating, not surprisingly for a Muslim country, is just. not. done.

And so, despite getting on the "wrong" bus, I got to spend a lovely Friday afternoon in small-town Jordan, where I ate a delicious chicken lunch, chatting with the restaurant owner; walked through the streets, observing--a pre-teen girl wearing hiking her too-big abaya up to her knees; a young boy running down a steep alleyway with a bag of fresh pita bread; an old man in a kefiyyeh sitting on a park bench smoking a cigarette--and sat in the town square, surrounded by Ottoman architecture, reading a Tawfiq al-Hakim play for my literature class. (That's right, without a dictionary: take that, America-mockers!) That day, the wrong bus was the right choice.

Punctilious. Nimble. Globetrotter.1

2008-07-26T11:41:00.020-07:00

I haven't blogged much lately, partly because I've been devoting my time to vocabulary review and grammar tutorials, but mostly because I've been doing so much traveling. That sounds counterintuitive, but I always hesitate to blog about trips, for fear of becoming one of those bloggers--you know, the type whose posts are just pictures and exclamation points: "and then we saw this! And it was amazing! And then we saw that! It was amazing too!!! Look at my beautiful pictures²! And isn't my life just awesome³?!?!"

But I'm going to have to do just that, else the blog would be entirely about my classes (and I only have two hours a day, so there's not much to say⁴) or my roommates (and this blog is not just a quote board, funny as they are, since quote boards irritate me⁵) or my awkward wandering Amman, into mosques (awkward situation: "so when did you become a Muslim?"), souqs (awkward question: "Are you Iraqi?⁶"), and Palestinian refugee neighborhoods (awkward event: children throwing rocks at me⁷). Plus, I'll inevitably write about travel later in August, when Amy flies out to join me on the mbatE2008⁸, so I might as well start now. Get ready for pictures, exclamation points, and total, utter gloating.

****

Probably my favorite so far of all our group trips (sorry, Jerash and Umm Qais) was our camping trip to Wadi Rum, the southern desert landscape made famous, like everything else in this area, by Lawrence of Arabia⁹. About 20 of us piled into a bus for the four-hour drive south, during which our driver played the same song on repeat, loudly, the entire way. I kept falling asleep and waking up, only to wonder if I had slept at all, since the bus was still vibrating with the same boom dee-dee boom dee-dee BOOM. The fact that the scenery was persistently, stubbornly unchanging didn't help much with reorienting myself after a nap.

(Speaking of the scenery, can I take this moment to say that I'm convinced that Jordan is just a bizarro Utah? Desert canyons, sand, arches, polygamists. Oh, and the Dead Sea, the Middle East's answer to the Great Salt Lake. We visited a few weeks ago and had a blast floating effortlessly because of the salinity, and stinging terribly because of that same salinity: hangnails in water with a 30% salt content are not cool. Likewise for any other open sores or pores, which, strangely enough, makes it a good thing I hadn't shaved my legs before the trip¹⁰. Anyway, Jordan, if you need a new tourist slogan, I've got an idea: "Come on over to Jordan, southern Utah with camels!¹¹")

Confused, inadequate sleep, like mine on the bus, was a theme of the trip, though, as we spent the night there, after watching the beautiful sunset, staying up late stargazing, talking, and dancing by the fire to, I swear, the same song from the bus, over and over again. I'll never be able to hear that rhythm again without thinking of the tipsy, overweight Arab man who tried to teach me to belly dance--and when he said "belly," he meant it. Good times.

The next morning, we set off for aimless wandering through the desert, led by a very cranky Bedouin guide and his open-backed Toyota jeep so old that T.E. Lawrence himself would have opted for a newer model. At least we had the wind in our hair.

We wandered aimlessly past a desert fortress, a huge rock balanced on another rock¹², a slot canyon with ancient carvings, camels, and, of course, sand dunes, where we played happily for at least an hour. It turns out running up and down huge hills in 100-degree weather can actually be fun--at least until you realize you've been running up and down huge hills in 100-degree weather. I think heat does something to the brain.

It was no surprise to anyone, of course, when our jeep broke down. As we sat in the sun waiting for our now-even-crankier driver to figure out the problem (um, maybe that your jeep practically a geological formation itself?), one of the other jeep drivers cranked up his sound system to play, I swear, that same damn song. Emboldened by my lessons of the night before, and possibly also that pesky heat/brain combination, I stood up, shouted "DESERT DANCE PARTY," and jumped down into the sand. Others followed suit, and we spent a good half an hour getting down in the desert. What could be more fun than that?

Maybe, possibly, our trip back through the desert, in which we all--squished now into three jeeps instead of four, having given up on the Toyota--raced each other through the scrub and over sand dunes, with our drivers slightly, ahem, three kefiyyehs to the wind, if you know what I mean. Our driver had clearly drowned his grumpiness in something other than water, and spent the drive back imitating animal noises and telling a long story in very fast, very slurred Arabic, the only word of which we really understood was "Iskar! Iskar!"--get drunk! Get drunk! Yeah, buddy, I think you just did. Is that why they call it Wadi Rum?

****

But see, this is why I haven't blogged much: not only am I a jerk for being a picture-posting tourist type, I'm a jerk for having such an incredibly good life: my weekends involve tooling around the desert with tipsy Bedouin. I love this summer¹³.

****

¹See here. You won't regret it.
²Nobody wants to see your vacation slideshow. Unless you accidentally leave a picture of your infection-swollen testicle in it, like a guy I know did in his post-mission picture slideshow.
³I'm sorry if you're one of those people. But unless there's funny commentary, know that I'm skimming.
⁴That's right, two hours. Thank you, State Department.
⁵ If it were, though, I'd include the many quotes showing how my roommate is convinced I'm trying to convert her: "Is this Jell-O part of your sneaky Mormon plan?"
⁶My even more awkward answer: "No, the opposite: I'm American." The opposite? Smooth, Hannah, smooth.
⁷I kid you not.
⁸ Most Bitchingly Awesome Trip Ever 2008. As opposed to the mbatE 2007.
⁹That guy really got around.
¹⁰ Or, okay, at all this summer. Whatever: I have to stay covered all the time anyway.
¹¹Assuming, of course, that either southern Utah or camels are an attraction.
¹²This was as lame as it sounds: I'm not particularly impressed by balancing from rocks. Keeping still is what they do.
¹³Exclamation point!

You Know You're in the Middle East When...

2008-07-24T14:15:00.004-07:00

Actually, I could write any number of things here--when you spend Thursday nights listening to Qur'anic recitations at a local mosque, when you wear long sleeves and long pants even in 110-degree weather, when you eat nothing but falafel for three days, when you look at a camel and think, 'how pretty,' when you're not fazed by dirt or noise or chaos or navy showers or constant cigarette smoke or crazy taxi drivers or rich Khaliji men or their niqabi women, when you speak Arabic even to your American friends--but when you really know is this: when your roommate walks into the kitchen, twirls around for you to see what she's wearing, and asks, "Does this outfit make me look Shi'ite?"

Passport Panic: An Open Letter

2008-07-23T06:33:00.004-07:00

Dear UPS,

You know, when a person pays $40 to mail something overnight, it's probably best to mail it, don't you think? I mean, not to be picky or anything, but "we'll deliver it the next day" doesn't--or shouldn't--generally mean "we'll claim that we delivered it, and then, when called out on the lie, show up with the package a week late." People get stressed out, you know, when they mail their passports halfway across the world and then are told, oops, sorry, it's gone, we put it on your doorstep, it's not our fault, don't blame us! They get even more stressed out when that means they're stuck in the Middle East without a passport or visa. Yeah. Yeah, that makes them happy.

Okay, I'll cut out the sarcasm: I'm angry, UPS, angry that you refuse to deliver me books from Amazon without getting my signature but will supposedly leave my passport--MY PASSPORT, my beautiful, internationally-stamped, supplementary-paged passport, with my Jordanian residency stamp and my brand-new $150 Syrian visa--on the steps of a house with no delivery confirmation. Angry that you caused me that much panic, and even angrier that you caused my mom that much panic. And don't think that the fact that your 'tracking' function worked, and that you brought it by later, 6 days after the claimed arrival date, lets you off the hook. I've got my eye on you, UPS. And I'll be using FedEx from now on.

~~Love~~ Hate,

Petra the almost-passportless

Master of My (Semantic) Domain, part 2

2008-07-14T10:46:00.002-07:00

(part 1)

Sample sentences I understood today:

The national petrol investment company of the United Arab Emirates announced today that it, along with a Qatari investment commisison, would establish an investment fund exceeding one billion dollars, in order to undertake an operation of capturing the world investment stage.
Five judges in the high court of Iraq survived an assassination attempt when bombs exploded outside their homes east of the capital of Baghdad, in an incident anonymous sources described as a plot to terrorize the justice system.
An Israeli spokesman said to the Reuters news agency that the Palestinian journalist who accused Israeli soldiers of detaining and torturing him upon his return from Europe to the West Bank "met with fair treatment during his inspection" and "underwent a routine check because of his suspected involvement in terrorist organizations"; the spokesman added that the journalist lost consciousness and fainted during the check for unknown reasons.

Sample sentences I misunderstood today:

That'll be 50 piastres, please.
The bus station is up the road and to the left.
What do you think of Jordan?

No points for guessing where I get most of my Arabic language practice.

Just Another Mamluk Monday

2008-07-09T13:20:00.004-07:00

Since the institute where I'm studying doesn't like to give its students proper weekends--they say it decreases motivation or some other such educational blah blah blah--we have Mondays and Fridays off, Friday being the Muslim holy day and Monday being a totally random choice, a convenient day to have off. (That's right: Friday is the new Sunday and Monday is the new Saturday. Just try to imagine how much that confuses me.)

As a further aside, I should note that, since I only have two hours of class a day, every day feels like a weekend day; I spend my time going to the gym, meeting friendly Jordanians at the gym, and eating lunch with said people instead of working out at said gym; bargaining over vegetable prices at outdoor souqs; going to outdoor concerts of Palestinian protest hip-hop groups, watching documentaries about Palestinian protest hip-hop groups, and then listening to yet other Palestinian protest hip-hop groups conduct a Q&A session about their protests, their hip-hop, and their Palestine; and watching a Turkish soap opera dubbed into Arabic and then discussing it--can you believe he kidnapped her?--with everyone I know. And, of course, I still sit on the balcony every evening to watch the wedding fireworks over the city. (When the invasion comes, how will we know?) Homework, schmomework.

On Mondays, though, I get to blow off homework even more, and so, with my last Monday off, I rounded up a roommate and hopped on a bus to Karak, home of a 12th-century Crusader castle. We were prepared for too much adventure--my roommate woke up feeling sick, so we spent the morning joking about the possibility of projectile vomiting on a public bus--but, in the the end, got just enough, leaving us very proud of ourselves: we successfully found and rode a public bus, we understood a tour of the castle's underground tunnels given entirely in Arabic, we didn't die of heatstroke, we (okay, I) didn't succumb to panic attacks when it turned out that the "Desert Highway" was not, in fact, misnamed.

Plus, we had an awesome time. I love castles, so of course I was predisposed to enjoy myself, but the day exceeded even my expectations: we arrived just in time for the noon prayer, and so as we first stood on the walls of the castle, looking down over Wadi Karak and Wadi Mujib, river valleys cut into the desert landscape, seeing all the way to the Dead Sea and the possible site of Sodom and Gomorrah in one direction, we heard, from all the towns spread in the valley, and finally coming out of the wadis themselves, the call to prayer: Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!

And it only got better from there: after the magic of that moment, we spent a few hours exploring the interior of the castle, adding the word "crusader" to everything as we tried to figure out the castle's structure: Crusader kitchens, Crusader ovens, Crusader parapets, Crusader tunnels, Crusader barracks where Crusader soldiers slept on Crusader cots, my Crusader dumb idea to climb up a rocky Crusader wall to a Crusader window.

Until, of course, we found out, from our Arabic tour of the underground tunnels, that only some of the castle was built by Crusaders; the rest was built, after the departure of the Crusaders, by Mamluks.

Okay, fine--Mamluk tunnels, Mamluk garrisons, Mamluk keeps, Mamluk castles, Mamluk bottles of water to keep us going in the Mamluk midday heat. I can live with that, just like I can live with Mondays instead of Saturdays off. Anyone up for a trip to Ajlun next week?

Wadi Mouth

2008-07-04T07:19:00.000-07:00

I had forgotten, in my three years away from it, how much I enjoy Arabic: it's hard, what with the unfamiliar, hack-up-your-throat phonemes, complicated grammar, huge lexicon*, and diglossic sociolinguistic situation. Arabic's difficulty is what initially attracted me to it--I had a professor, my freshman year of college, who constantly complained about how hard it was, and so I registered for Arabic 101 to see what all the hype was--and its difficulty is what keeps me around. (Luckily, I have a clear distinction in my head between "grammar" and "dating.") There's just so much to love: weird number agreement rules, nominal cases, root-and-pattern morphology, and a dual. I mean, who doesn't love a good feminine dual now and then? (Grammar, people, not dating!)

One of my real favorite things about Arabic, though? The swearing. No, not the Arabic swearing--Arabs will never teach me swear words, a fact about being a woman in the Middle East that frustrates me even more than the excessive modesty requirements--but the English swearing, in Arabic: every other word, it seems, sounds like an English swear word. To wit:

(note: the "a" here is pronounced "uh" and the "q" is pronounced like a "k," but further back; see above, "hacking back-of-the-throat phonemes." All of the words are stressed on the first syllable, except for ittafaq, which is stressed on the last.)

fakkar: to think
fakka: small change
fakha: fruit
ittafaq: to agree
faqat: only
faqim: to be dangerous
faqd: loss

And those are just the f/k or q combinations; I haven't even gotten started on things like the Egyptian Arabic magabitsh, 'she didn't bring' or aashit, 'she lived.'

All this, of course, leads to the best story ever on this topic. Winter 2005, I was in an advanced Arabic literature class at BYU, in which we came across, in a short story, the word mufakk (keep in mind the pronunciation: moo-f*ck, basically). Someone asked the professor what it meant.

"Well," he said, "let's take it apart. What does that mu- mean? Right, it's the active participle marker. Okay, so a mufakk is a thing that fakks."

We are, by this point, trying to stifle our giggles as the professor continues. "So now we look at the meaning of the verb fakk. Does anyone know what fakk means?"

We smirk in silence. "No one? No one knows what fakk means?" Even the TA is laughing by this point--imagine! A BYU professor, swearing right there in class!--but nobody knows the meaning.

The professor sighs impatiently. "I can't believe nobody knows what fakk means. It means 'to screw'!"

The poor professor lost control of the class then for a good minute. The English/Arabic correspondence could not be more perfect: mufakk means 'screwdriver,' and so fakk means 'to screw in.' And so I will be forever loyal to Arabic for that alone--where else, after all, can a nice Mormon girl get some guilt-free swearing time?

*Ha! Look at me, perpetuating unfounded linguistic stereotypes! You** can't stop me!
**But I can stop me. Sigh. The idea of "number of words" in a language is pretty much meaningless, and so I can't really claim that Arabic has more words than English. I can claim, though, that Arabic writers love using as many synonyms as possible, which means a student's functional vocabulary must be, in a word, huge.

A Round of Applause

2008-07-01T11:51:00.003-07:00

In the past few days I have:

climbed a large hill to look over the Sea of Galilee into Israel, Syria, and Lebanon
gotten hit on by Ahmed the hot hot mounted policeman
listened to a bagpipe band play "Amazing Grace" in an ancient Roman theater
gotten hit on by Ahmed the cute taxi driver
been stripped naked and scrubbed with olive oil by a fat Turkish woman
gotten hit on by Ahmed the kindly bookstore owner
spent evenings on the balcony, enjoying the breeze and watching wedding fireworks over the city

Bravo to Jordan, I say. Is your summer this much fun? I. think. not.

Getting To Know You

2008-06-28T04:45:00.005-07:00

I have this conversation every day:

Arab: What's your name?
Me: Hannah.
Arab: That's an Arabic name!
Me: Yes.

Pause.

Arab: Are you Arab?
Me: Do I look Arab?
Arab: Oh.

Pause.

Arab: But you have an Arabic name! Is your mother Arab?
Me: Do I look like my mother is Arab?
Arab: Oh.

Pause.

Arab: But you have an Arabic name!

It's nice to have some constancy in my life, you know?

It's All Coming Back To Me Now

2008-06-24T02:44:00.003-07:00

I'm in Amman this summer courtesy of Uncle Sam; the U.S. government, quite reasonably, wants Americans who speak Arabic, and so is generously paying for folks like me--that is, 'advanced' Arabic students--to live in the Middle East and improve their language skills. (I'm serious about the "generous" part: my entire studio apartment in California could probably fit into my courtesy-of-your-tax-dollars kitchen here.) I feel very lucky to have stumbled into such a good deal--I mean, what could be better than getting paid to go to two hours a day of class and then spend the rest of the day bumming around the streets of the city, eating hummus and falafel and fuul and tabouleh and occasionally practicing my Arabic. (I'm getting pretty good at, "Excuse me, may I please have some more hummus?")

The catch? I am not, in fact, an advanced Arabic student. A few years ago I was--upon returning from Egypt I tested to the advanced-mid level by the Foreign Service Institute's scale, good enough to earn me 0.5 bonus points in the State Department's hiring process--but, given that, until a week ago, I hadn't spoken a word of Arabic in slightly over three years, and given that in that three years I've studied four other languages, nearly reaching fluency in one, you can imagine what my Arabic retention was like: nil. I could remember most of the grammar rules--that's the fun part!--but had absolutely no vocabulary, and therefore couldn't speak or understand even a simple sentence. (To illustrate, I found, a little while ago, a video of myself, speaking Arabic, in a documentary I was in a few years back. The freakish part? I couldn't understand myself.)

In the few days I've been here, though, I've been surprised at what I'm starting to remember: words bubble up from the depths of my memory, words I haven't thought of in three years, and I find myself confidently answering when someone asks, "How do you say 'trash'?"(zibaala) or "What's the plural of 'daftar'?" (dafaatir). It's a totally bizarre feeling, especially since remembering a vocabulary item often comes with remembering the context in which I learned said item, meaning that I'm constantly remembering things about Egypt I hadn't thought of for years. (The lady under the stairwell who used to narrate for me what was happening on TV: "They shot him. Now he is dead. Now they are burying the body." The giant sign near my school that said "Alexandria is a love wave on Egyptian land." The carriage ride I took where the driver insisted on telling me about the size of an, ahem, certain part of the horse's anatomy. The large fox/wolf/dog that terrorized the streets of Alexandria for a few weeks. How an Egyptian friend, who attended a military camp every summer, tried to persuade me that Pepsi stands for "Pay Every Penny for Saving Israel" and Coca-Cola, read backwards in Arabic, says "No Mohammed No Mecca." The hurricanes that blew through the city in November. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.)

Much as I'm freaked out by the way my brain is supplying me with Arabic words--randomly! never when I need them! but startlingly well!--I'm happy with it: my two years of Arabic in college were not a total waste, and I haven't lost all my Arabic, just misplaced it for a bit. So everyone can breathe a sigh of relief: I did not, in fact, totally mislead Uncle Sam because I just might possibly belong in an advanced Arabic program. If only that translated to an ability to do more than just ask for more hummus.

Getting in JORDAN a soccer game

2008-06-23T00:44:00.006-07:00

I wasn't looking forward to coming to Jordan this summer. My program was supposed to be in Yemen, which I was much more excited about, partly because nobody speaks English there, making it a better place to study Arabic, and partly because it has a reputation as the Wild West of the Arab world--one guidebook my roommate read summed up the country as suffering from "general lawlessness."

Unfortunately, what with mortar fire on the embassy compounds and all, the U.S. government recently decreed Yemen as far too unsafe a place to send a bunch of students, and so my program was moved to Jordan, which is considered safe.

(I told the Yemeni shopkeeper down the street that I couldn't go to Yemen because it wasn't safe and he said, "What?!? Of course Yemen is safe! Do you know why? Because everybody owns a gun. Hell, everybody owns three!" General lawlessness, indeed.)

So Jordan was a definite second choice, plus I was dreading the planned structure of the program: five hours of class in morning, plus three hours of optional tutoring, plus three hours of mandatory tutoring. That, frankly, sounds like a drag: why even bother to fly halfway around the world just to sit in a classroom all day?

On arriving, though, we learned that the program had been changed, and we now have two hours of class in the morning, and then are left, for the rest of the day, free to explore, adventure, study, and practice. This means that my life is, as far as I can tell, ideal: yesterday I went to class, went out to lunch, studied vocabulary in a hip cafe in downtown Amman, went to a soccer game, Jordan versus Turkmenistan, went out to dinner, and then stayed up late watching the European Cup Spain vs. Italy match at a trendy bar where all my friends smoked sheesha.

So life is good. I think, now, that the following picture best sums up how I feel right now about being in Jordan:

Yesssss!

No Sleep 'Til Berkeley

2008-06-21T07:52:00.004-07:00

I arrived in the Middle East seriously, seriously sleep-deprived, with six nights in a row of less than four hours of sleep: from last Thursday night when I stayed up late playing gambling games with California Indians to Saturday night when I neglected to sleep at all, being too busy packing and talking on the phone with mishkin27 to Tuesday and Wednesday, both nights spent curled up uncomfortably against the wall of a plane. This means that I spent most of the past week in a haze, alternating between a slightly manic social energy, used to get to know the (very cool) other students on my Arabic program as we oriented in DC and began our long trek to Jordan, and an exhausted stupor, leaving me barely able to move or think, plus prone to falling sleep on patches of grass by the river in Frankfurt, place of an agonizing 12-hour layover, where a group of German men entertained themselves by throwing coins at me, a fact I didn’t quite believe until I woke up to find myself surrounded by 28 cents, all in one- and two-Euro coins.

(Okay, people, for real, who does that? Why on earth would a group of grown men decide to throw coins off a bridge onto a sleeping tourist? Not that I'm complaining--I used the money on a lemon gelato in the town square--but still. Weird.)

I left Berkeley less than a week ago but already it seems like forever and a dream in the past. (Days are long, as it turns out, when you don’t sleep.) I was only in DC a day and two nights, which I spent listening to a series of rules for Jordan--no, none of this, and don't even think about that--hanging out with DC friends, like Leon and the SLO, touring the Natural History Museum before it opened ("Don't worry," our program coordinator told a concerned security guard. "They're not civilians."), and generally freaking out the eerie sense of déjà vu in the city of my childhood—I didn't recognize anything, per se, but felt that I knew it anyway.

And now I am in Amman, a city in which I do not experience any deja vu, eerie or not. Instead, I'm wandering around lost, given that, as far as I can tell--and maybe it's just the sleep deprivation talking--every building in the entire city looks the same: white, five stories, square.

But I've had a good few days here nonetheless, touring some of the city's historical sites--a Roman theater, a Roman temple, an Umayyad mosque--getting to know my new neighborhood, and starting Arabic classes again after a three-year break. And I think, now, that this summer could be good, provided that I, at some point, can get some sleep--that is, if every night were not interrupted by a very loud proclamation of ALLAHU AKBAR. I love the call to prayer, I really do--nothing is more beautiful to me than the sound of a city echoing with it from every block--but with jet lag? Not cool. I suppose I should just resign myself, now, to a very sleep-deprived summer. At the very least, I can hope that Jordanians won't throw coins at me.

Bicycle! Bicycle! Bicycle!

2008-06-11T23:46:00.002-07:00

I don't know where I acquired my deathly fear of biking, as I spent most of my childhood riding my bike around the streets of our suburban neighborhood, usually pretending it was a racehorse. My fear mostly pertains to biking in traffic, and I think, to some extent, that this is logical: bicycles require coordination, especially around cars, and I'm clumsy. This past week alone, I've randomly dropped the books I was carrying, spilled my classmate's coffee cup, fallen down a flight of stairs, and somehow gained nine (nine!) fairly substantial bruises on my shins and calves alone.

(I went to the doctor this morning, to complain about how my knees have been hurting for the last, oh, month. I offered, as evidence, the bruises surrounding each kneecap. "Mmmm-hmmm," the doctor said, skeptically, and we both looked at the bruises covering the rest of my legs. There was a long pause, and when I added, "then again, I bruise easily, so maybe the knee ones don't mean anything," the doctor was quick to agree.)

So maybe it's no wonder that I'm absolutely convinced that the instant I get on a bike I will fall into a pothole/be hit by a car/ride into an open car door/be struck by a meteor. Wonder or not, however, G.K. Chesterton's maxim that "no man should leave anything in the world of which he is afraid" has been a guiding principle of my life since I first read it in The Man Who Was Thursday; because of it, I've taken multivariable calculus, ridden a motorcycle, gone to parties where I barely knew anyone, crossed busy third-world streets even after getting hit by a car on one of them, and killed countless cockroaches. And now, because of it, and because I live too far to walk, I will be biking to school every day.

(Okay, so I haven't eliminated all things I'm afraid of from the world, but I'm working on it. Today bicycling in traffic, tomorrow Australia, brain damage, and the highway underpass near my apartment!)

Frankly, conquering this fear has been far easier than I expected: after a tense first few ride, where I spent the entire time muttering under my breath, "Please don't kill me please don't kill me please don't kill me!", and after a few embarrassing moments, like, as I've mentioned, falling off my bicycle at a red light--where, of course, both motorists and pedestrians are gathered to watch and mock; sometimes I think I need a "student biker" sign, or maybe some flashing yellow lights, which could notify everyone that I'm a danger to myself and others right now--I'm beginning to relax and, strangely enough, enjoy myself. I'm still thinking about death, but now it's a mental game: how will that car try to kill me and make it look like an accident? What about that car over there? I remember why I spent so much time on my bike as a child: it's fun! It doesn't hurt, of course, that I've completely fallen in love with my bicycle. I think it's beautiful, absolutely beautiful; it's my baby, my darling, my one true love, and I tell it so every day--multiple times a day, even. Actually, every time I return to it after hours apart, during which time I'm usually stressing about whether it will get stolen or damaged. (I'm pretty sure I would cry.) I also greet it when I come home, and apologize to it when we go over bumpy portions of the road, though perhaps I should be apologizing to my butt instead, because, wow am I sore.

So I'm a bicycle commuter now, I guess, and I should hurry up and resign myself to the fact that I will never again arrive somewhere with cute hair. I should also, of course, develop more of a system for doing practical tasks on a bicycle, as I've had some, er, interesting experiences with that. This past Sunday morning, I woke up several hours before church dying to make zucchini bread; realizing that I didn't have eggs or flour or sugar, I decided zucchini bread was an ox in the mire and headed off to the grocery store nearby, where I bought my ingredients and picked up some cereal that was on sale. So the I walked out of the grocery store to my bike and realized, uh oh, I didn't quite think this one through: here I was with two plastic bags full of cereal, sugar, flour, and eggs, and I have no backpack or basket on my bike.

It was a tricky situation, but I figured out how to loop the handles of the plastic bags around the (curved) handlebars of my bike, and began very carefully riding home, with, of course, the bags swinging around and, of course, bringing the front of the bike with them. I'm lucky it was 7.30 on a Sunday morning, because I was wobbling and veering all over the road; that would have been a really easy moment to kill me and make it look like an accident. As I serpentined, too, the bags with the sugar, flour, and eggs hit against the front wheel. I didn't pay much attention to it, all my concentration instead on incorporating the rhythm of the bag hitting into the rhythm of my steering, but was forced to notice when the bag hit against the wheel and bam! exploded into a giant one-pound pile of sugar, right there in the street. When I stopped to deal with it, I looked back and realized that every hit against the wheel had torn the bag a little more, and that I had left a trail of sugar behind me for the last, oh, half-mile. That's me: a modern-day, biking Gretel. I just wanted to make sure I could find Safeway again, you know?

(The best part of this story? The eggs made it home perfectly intact.)

Ridiculous rides like this are raising my confidence, though, and I'm gradually improving on the road. Someday, maybe, I'll even be able to ride to school without imagining every passing car swerving, ever so gently, to bump me off.

And she'll have fun fun fun

2008-06-10T17:04:00.003-07:00

It's summertime now, and the living is easy--or would be, if I were not the sort of person to make up a million complicated projects for myself the minute my life lacks structure. I can't deal with unorganized time, see: if I ever wake up to a day without tasks, I begin to invent them. My invented tasks, over the last few weeks, have included a trip to Boston, where I baked desserts (key lime pie, raspberry pretzel jello, honey cookies, and chocolate chip/peanut butter Rice Krispie treats, all in one morning), hung out with family, went to an amusement park (but only for one 155-second ride), ran around Fresh Pond and along the Charles, ate, ate, and, ate, and just generally enjoyed being done with school. Then The Duke flew back to the Bay Area with me, and we spent a week hefting everything I own (in Hefty bags--ha! Get it?) and transporting it to my new apartment. Oh, and we enjoyed ourselves a little bit on the side: we went biking on the San Francisco Bay Trail, which included a stop by the Albany Bulb to see the driftwood art; we went into the city to see (and laugh uncontrollably at, in my case) the sea lions at Pier 49, and then the buffalo in Golden Gate Park, and then, strangely, Nancy Pelosi at the Embarcadero; we went to the De Young museum, where we heard an interesting lecture, listened to a concert of Afghani music, saw San Francisco's Critical Mass, and, as a bonus, viewed art; we climed all over the ruins of the Sutro Baths, in the dark; we went bowling, we went to the horse races, we ate out, we cooked, we laughed, we cried.

Okay, not that last one, I don't think. But we did a lot.

Does it feel to you that all my blog entries lately are lists? It feels that way to me. I could continue listing all the things I've done this past week (cleaned and furnished an apartment, my first without a roommate; baked zucchini bread; ran a half marathon; bought a bicycle) but that will just make me tired, and I have to save up all my energy for the 14-hour days I'm putting into volunteering for a workshop my department is holding this week.

I promise a non-list entry soon, probably about my attempts to get around town on a bicycle, which have been, in a word, hilarious. Or maybe just "incompetent." I am getting better, though: despite the fact that I am not the most confident of bicyclists, I have only fallen off in the road once. So far. Keep your fingers crossed it doesn't happen again.

Grad Student's Lament

2008-05-14T22:31:00.002-07:00

Adam Gopnik has this bit about writing in his book, Paris to the Moon, that I absolutely love:

Writing isn't the transformation of stuff into things. It is just the transformation of symbols into other symbols, as if one reads recipes out loud for dinner changing the proportions ("I'm adding fifty goddam grams of butter!") for dramatic effect. You read out the recipe and the audience listens, and pretends to taste...Sometimes, if you change the proportions dramatically enough--nothing but butter! no butter at all!--people gasp, as though they really could taste it. (This is the way Burroughs and Bukowksi write.)...Writing is a business of saying things about stuff and saying things about things and then pretending that you have cooked one into the other.

And that's just it, this week: I've been sitting around, trying to finish (okay, fine, start) my papers, and thinking to myself, what am I doing with my life? I can spend an entire day--like today--working hard: reading Australian language grammars, writing long lists of Indonesian words on the whiteboard, staring at the wall while thinking about morphology, and then, fianlly, get to the end of the day and realize I have done nothing but say things about stuff ("privative suffixes are cool") and stuff about stuff ("Indonesian morphology is cool") and pretending that that was not a total waste of a day.

It was not a total waste of a day. Oh, wait: yes, it was. What am I doing with my life?!?

And I can't think anything, at the end of the semester, but how tired I am of thinking. I never thought I'd say that, but it's true: I can't wait for my papers to be finished (badly, but who cares?), turned in (without staples or the needed appendices, but who cares?), and forgotten (which is not supposed to happen in grad school, but who cares?). I can't wait because when my papers are done, I will not have to think; instead, I will get to do. I'll move apartments, go to Bakersfield, visit with The Dancing Newt, go to Boston, tour San Francisco with The Duke, work on a dictionary, run a half marathon, teach phonetics to California Indians, and go to Jordan.

Only one more paper stands between me and a glorious month of activity. I can do this. Yes. I. Can. But until then? I'm adding fifty grams of butter.

A Song of Experience

2008-05-06T23:00:00.003-07:00

Most days I know what to expect from the day: I think about it as I eat my morning oatmeal, making a list of everything I need to accomplish that day, organized into two columns, "school" (read, write, think, solve) and "other" (clean, cook, wash, email, call, tutor, run--you know, the basics). Most days go like the list, with a little bit more playing Facebook scrabble, a little bit more emailing friends, but for the most part just as I imagined over breakfast.

And then there are days like yesterday, days that always seem to fall just right at the end of the semester, when I'm convinced that I won't make it through, when I'm strung out on lack of sleep, catching three-hour chunks here and there, curled up on the floor of my bedroom or a couch at the institute building, when I'm realizing that there is just. no. way. I can actually finish my final papers by their due dates, when I am already, I think, stretched to my breaking point--those are the days that spin out of control further, and I suddenly find myself, instead of reading and writing in my sterile little ivory tower, spending most of my afternoon and evening calling emergency shelters in Berkeley and Oakland, trying to find a place that a scared 19-year-old can be safe from her violent boyfriend, who tracked her down to the friend's apartment (where I took her before).

The problem, I think, got solved: I offered her my own bed for the night (after persuading my non-religious roommate that this random stranger wouldn't rob us blind, based on the dual arguments "I prayed about it" and "I don't know what else I can do") but then, at the last minute, she found a shelter, and so all I had to do was walk the mile through downtown to give her money, food, a listening ear, lots of comforting hugs, and another promise of future help if she needs it.

As I was walking home after money/food/hug duty, shaking with exhaustion (having only slept three hours the night before), stress (having three papers due in the next week, and not having done anything on them all day), and hunger (having eaten, that day, a total of one bagel and four saltine crackers), I stopped into a store for food, where the guy in front of me in line ranted, loudly, about how his close friend was in JAIL for MURDER even though it was SELF DEFENSE and that frat boy started it and DESERVES to be DEAD, good riddance, may he rest in peace. And right outside the store was an old woman, bent and grey, staring into the window of a downtown restaurant, a scene right out of Dickens, and a block down was a wino getting himself drunk for the night, and just after that was a homeless man settling himself down into a cardboard box to sleep. I gave money to all of them and wished I could do more.

I didn't get anything done on my papers yesterday: by the time I got home and ate, it was 11 p.m., and I was $60 poorer, five times more exhausted, and 500 times more heartbroken. Basically, by the time I got home, phonology didn't seem to matter too much anymore.

Some days I check everything off the list; some days I wake, eat, think, read, write, solve, cook, clean, email, call, tutor, run, get, spend, talk, pray, sleep; some days I am stable; some days I am happy. Other days things fall apart and I throw out the list; other days I feel tears pricking behind my eyes all day and know I am about to lose it, any second, know I am about to feel my skin split with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly; other days I just want to curl up and cry for the world. Some days I know linguistics. Some days I know church. Some days I know my friends. Some days I know routine. Other days I know God.

Endorphins All the Way Down

2008-04-23T19:12:00.003-07:00

I was running the other night when, after about an hour, suddenly I felt so good, so incredibly good, that I found myself nearly shouting, out loud, to the empty dark around me, "I HAVE NEVER FELT THIS GOOD IN MY ENTIRE LIFE! THIS IS AMAZING!" And then, because I, in the words of one friend, "can't turn it off," I paused for just a moment before adding, still shouting, "I DON'T KNOW WHY THE EXISTENCE OF A RUNNER'S HIGH HAS BEEN SO HOTLY DEBATED IN THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY. THIS IS CLEARLY CHEMICAL. WHEEEEE!"

It's probably a good thing, come to think of it, that I was running alone at night: in the dark, no one can see you make an endorphin-fueled fool of yourself.

Memory Monday: Clothes-Minded

2008-04-14T21:22:00.013-07:00

(in the spirit--or, more accurately, imitation--of Amy's Flashback Fridays)

The SLO commented on my last post, based one of the pictures there, that my taste in clothing clearly hasn't changed since I was a kid. Now, that statement isn't entirely true--I'm slightly less likely to go out in bike shorts and an oversized T-shirt--but it's certainly more true than even the SLO could guess. I still love hand-me-downs. (The shirt I'm wearing right now used to belong to my cousin.) I still love bright colors. (It's neon green.) And I guess I have to admit to leggings. Sometimes. Rarely. (Hey, is it my fault they're back in style? At least they're not stirrup pants.) And that's just the start of it: I have the same short haircut as when I was four, the same squinting facial expression, and the same tendency to forget to cross my legs when wearing a skirt.

Look how cute Klement is!

More than all that, though, I don't just have the same taste in clothes--I have the same clothes. My favorite pair of pants date from a trip to California my freshman year of college. The skirt I wear for running was a Christmas present my freshman year of high school. The pajamas I wear in the summer are my seventh grade gym shorts and my fourth grade field day T-shirt. And, to top it all off, my favorite T-shirt, which I still wear regularly, was a gift from my aunt and uncle when I was eight. Yes, that's right, eight: this shirt and I have been together for fifteen years, with only one short hiatus of a few months when my mom tried to take it away from me and give it to Klement.

(My mom is always trying to kill my fashion buzz. First there were the turquoise shorts with the sunflowers on them, which I had to sneak out of the Goodwill pile at least once a month, then there all the days in high school she sent me back to change into different colors. Pink and orange totally match, Mom.)

This shirt and I won't have another fifteen years together, it's clear: it's fraying at the bottom edge, and developing holes around the collar. Any other person would have given it up long ago, but I'm attached now; how could I let go of an old friend? I get this way about all my clothes, of course--a certain pair of jeans springs to mind, a pair I threatened to wear until they "literally fell off my body," and then did, in fact, wear until they grew substantial holes in the hips, knees, and back pockets, and then grew holes through the patches I sewed on--but it's even more so for my Indonesia shirt. This one I will wear until it literally falls off my body. Let's just hope I'm wearing something underneath it at the time.

Easter 1992, in Utah, with Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Marie, The Duke, and cousins Guber and Minnie.

With Guber again, circa 2001/2002. I love that I have two pictures of me and Guber and the Indonesia T-Shirt. I also love that I have pictures of Guber's car at the time, in which we were known to cruise Boise's Main Street listening to Frank Sinatra. It was a very good year.

With Jen at our high school graduation party, 2002

With Margaret in LA, 2003

Asian photoboothing it up in Indonesian the Beautiful with the SLO, 2007

To The Duke On the Occasion of His 19th Birthday

2008-04-07T19:23:00.011-07:00

A few months ago, a young man knocked on my door selling newspaper subscriptions. It was a Sunday evening, and one of our lessons in church that day had been about charity--"true religion is this"--but had, I thought, come perilously close to justifying keeping wealth: the sort of lesson, then, that drives me crazy, because I want so badly to rail against the idea, or even hint of the idea, that God loves the rich or wants us to be rich, but, every time I open my mouth, I realize I am a total hypocrite, since, after all, when was the last time I sold what I have and gave to the poor?

So I was already, basically, a golden opportunity for this young man, practically itching to be a doer of the word and not a hearer only, but the boy would have persuaded me anyway: he was, he said, going door-to-door selling newspaper subscriptions to put himself through college. I'm still not quite sure I believe this story, but that didn't matter--"he must be about 18 or 19," I thought, "just my brother's age. Boy, this would be a hard way to pay for college. Poor thing." It took a minute for it all to add up: going door-to-door. Talking to, and being rejected by, strangers. 19ish years old. Pretty soon, The Duke will be on a mission, doing this exactly.

And so now I have a subscription to the San Francisco Chronicle, which I never ever read; the newspaper piles up in our front hallway, unopened, until someone remembers to take it downstairs to recycling.

***

The Duke at his high school graduation

***

We've been talking about The Duke's mission call, as a family, for a while now, starting at about the time, in my memory, that missionaries stopped seeming old and wise to me and started seeming like kids, much younger than me. I remember once in India, after we had the missionaries over for dinner, joking with The Duke about how that would be him soon, trying to eat tuna casserole with his hands and asking my father, "So, what place you from, Brother?" It was funny then to think about The Duke on a mission, eating with some other family, causing them to giggle at his strange foreign antics, because it was still all hypothetical--those days were ages away.

***

Riding bikes together through a bird park in Rajasthan. Check out his hair.

***

I called The Duke today, on his birthday. "Happy birthday!" I said. Without missing a beat, he replied, full of enthusiasm, "Thank you! You too!"

The Duke's sense of humor is one of his best traits: he's funny, much funnier than I am. He never calls attention to himself or his jokes, but if you're listening, he's always ready with a quip or off-the-cuff remark that not only reveals that hey, this kid is funny, but also hey, this kid is smart. One of my favorite Christmas presents of all time is a photocopied set of cartoons The Duke had been drawing in his spare time. They're offbeat little sketches, perfect reflections of the Duke's quirky humor, and looking at them never fails to make me smile.

***

One of my favorite cartoons.

***

His mission call came last week, and so we set up a family conference call, all of us on speakerphone. The Duke started reading the letter: "Dear Elder P********..."

And, just like that, my mom and I both started to cry. Elder P. Elder! How could they send him on a mission! Two years! He's just a child!

***

The Duke, Klement, and Petra, Easter Sunday, 1994

***

But he's not a child anymore. The Duke is a young man, and, what's more, a young man excited and ready for a mission. He's steady and mature, remarkably mature for someone his age; he spent the summer hanging out with me and my friends, all at least five years older than him, and never once reminded us, in his behavior, of his age. He's constantly thinking about and considerate of others. This isn't surprising, given his childhood self, a little boy who was kind to his younger brother, afraid of Old Maid cards, and tolerant towards the older sister he shared a room with, who woke him up every night, without fail, to play Twenty Questions. (The answer, for the record, was always Uncle Sam. I don't know why.) He's a fair and even thinker, not given, as I sometimes am, to angry tirades or fits of pique. He's intelligent, questioning, and genuinely curious about the world, and has spent his life building up an impressive array of diverse skills and talents: computer programming, physics, acting, fencing, rock climbing, drawing. He's naturally obedient, but certainly no mindless clone--he somehow manages, as with his "white Afro" in high school, to develop and maintain his own style quietly, unobtrusively, without ever making a fuss. Actually, that last bit may be the best descriptor of all: The Duke does not make a fuss. He does what needs to be done, and does it well, with no complaining and no boasting. And on top of all that, he's good company--easygoing, interesting, and, as I said, funny. I tell you the truth: some lucky missionaries, starting at the end of July, are going to have an excellent companion. And some lucky mission president is going to be thanking his lucky stars for Elder Duke.

***

The Duke and Obed, one of my 10th grade students in Indonesia

***

This is starting to sound like a eulogy, which it's not meant to be; he's not dying, I know, I'm just more emotional about this mission thing than I expected. I'll miss my brother. A lot. I can write him letters, and he'll be back before I know it, but what will I do without late-night emails from him pointing out funny things on the internet? Who else will message me on gchat to remind me about Biggus Dickus? Who will hang out with me on vacations, playing Go Fish over and over, or watching and re-watching our favorite Monty Python sketches? Plus, of course, I'm terrified for him--missions are hard.

That's not all, though. More than missing him, more than worrying about him, I'm excited for him, and, more than that, proud of him: my baby brother is all grown up and going on a mission.

***

Sailing down the Mekong

***

The Duke continues reading:

"You have been called to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in..."

We all hold our breath.

"...the India Bangalore mission."

Of course. It is perfect: he will have his old seminary classmates as companions. The Duke has lived in India, and now knows how to live there, how to balance the chaos, how to weigh beauty and tragedy, how to overlook, how to forgive, how to love--or, at the very least, he has a head start on knowing. He will be himself, always himself, and that self will be not too hot, and not too cold, but just right.

***

Family Christmas picture, 2004

***

Happy birthday, L.

Normal, Shmormal

2008-04-06T23:19:00.006-07:00

One of my major life goals, on entering grad school, was to work as hard in grad school as I wanted to work for the rest of my life; at this point, school is my job, paid and all--er, thank you, U.S. Department of Education--and so I might as well treat it like one. For people who sailed through their undergraduate days partying, that might mean amping up the work level, but for me, the sort of student who dedicated all her time and energy to the pursuit of As, that means learning to take nights and weekends off. I'm not perfect at it yet, at the very least, I no longer spend every Saturday working in the library, or thinking about working in the library, as I did as an undergraduate.

(I hesitate to admit that; what if my classmates should read it? Oh, the guilt! I am a terrible graduate student!)

When I described last weekend, the end of spring break, to my father--I made Moroccan food, I went to a movie, I helped a friend weed her backyard, I went running, I helped host a dinner party for ten people, I went to a baseball game, I read a book--my dad's comment was, "Wow, it's like a normal person's weekend!" I liked that--imagine, I could be a normal person!--and so, I set about making that my goal for this and future weekends.

And I was on a normal person roll this weekend. My biggest accomplishment was trying, and succeeding, at honey cookies, a recipe which I remember fondly from childhood visits to my great-grandmother's house. Unfortunately, she baked them from memory, and the most specific recipe we got from her before she died was elicited in a conversation something like this:

"First, you need some flour."

"How much flour?"

"Enough flour. And then you need some sugar."

"How much sugar?"

"Oh, as much as you need. And then you add the honey."

"How much honey?"

"It should sound like this: glug, glug, glu-"

So I spent some time on Sunday afternoon messing around with flour, sugar, and honey, constantly tasting and asking myself, and occasionally my roommate, "Is this anything?" until I decided that yes, it's something. And so now, for any of my relatives reading, I can make a decent approximation of Great-Grandma H's honey cookies.

Not that honey cookies were the only thing I accomplished this weekend. On Friday evening, I went to a baseball game--again, can you believe? I'm practically a fan now--where my friend Two* and I sang, danced, and generally made as much noise as we possibly could, which, trust me, is a lot. On Saturday, I cleaned my apartment, grocery shopped, read a book, talked on the phone, spent far too much on running shoes, went running in said shoes, only to find that they make my feet go numb, stood up, alone in front of my computer, as part of the solemn assembly, did some reading and homework (okay, so I'm not perfect at my goals yet), watched a movie with Two and The Onion, after which I slept on their couch rather than walking home, and spent a good chunk of the evening calling and driving around Oakland looking for a battered woman's shelter for a girl I met on the bus to Two's apartment. Sunday I listened to some of conference, began organizing the stack of books and papers next to my desk, fell asleep on my floor, music blaring, surrounded by unorganized books and papers, did dinner and games with some friends, and ended the day by donning a serious contender for the most ridiculous pajamas I've ever worn**, which is saying something for a girl who owns a Hello Kitty nightgown, three muumuus, and an endless supply of brightly-colored sarongs.

See? That's totally a normal person's weekend. And now, like any normal, weekend-enjoying person with any normal, weekend-free job, I can feel free to dread Mondays. At least I've got Great-Grandma's honey cookies to get me through.

_________________________________________________________

*There are two reasons for this nickname; Two will love one of them and hate the other. Then he will try to claim that he loves them both, just to prove that I cannot predict him. Two, if you're reading, I'm sorry; I'm a brat for even mentioning this, I know, but it's just so easy. Plus, you know how to avenge yourself.

**One of my favorite things about being single is that no one ever sees me in pajamas. This leaves me free to dress, as tonight, in skintight, ankle-length green leggings and an oversized, very oversized, green Obama T-shirt, which, in honor of St. Patrick's Day, actually says "O'Bama." I feel like I need to go politically organize some leprechauns. Maybe next weekend.

A Guest Appearance

2008-04-02T21:37:00.003-07:00

Despite having not one but three spring breaks last year, I wasn't prepared, this year, for the idea of a mid-semester vacation--what? there's no classes next week? really?--so I failed to make plans for any exciting trips to Cancun, or Miami, or Laguna Beach, or wherever the kids go to drink and take off their clothes nowadays.

(Me, I don't need to travel for that: a few weeks ago I could be found at a bar in Berkeley, at a friend's bachelor party, sipping ginger beer and playing strip pictionary, all the way down to my tank top. That's right: I lead a wild, wild life.)

Luckily, not everyone failed to make exciting travel plans for spring break, and so I got to play hostess, one of my very favorite pastimes in the whole world. I am serious: nothing makes me happier, with the possible exception of peanut butter M&Ms, than having house guests to take care of. First, the week before spring break, Hot Jeff, an old friend from Writing Fellows at BYU, came into town, on his way to Yosemite, and spent a few days with me, exploring the wonderful world of California weather, Berkeley institute classes, Vietnamese sandwiches, living rooms posing as bedrooms, Code Pink protests, and camping snacks from Trader Joe's. The visit wasn't all that eventful--especially considering that the last time we spent more than a few hours together was in India, touring around Delhi and Agra--but it was delightful nonetheless, especially considering it also included a visit from Sarah, my hero. Jeff, don't let's wait so long in between visits again, okay? You're welcome in California anytime.

I had no time at all to mourn my guestless loneliness, thank goodness, in between when Jeff left for Yosemite and when Tolkien Boy and Ginsberg descended on me, ostensibly for the PCA conference, but, in the end, mostly for general hanging out and San Francisco fun, as none of us ended up presenting at the conference. And so we spent several glorious days goofing off: exploring the city, watching a rugby game, eating Vietnamese sandwiches, celebrating Easter with a picnic, playing Anagrams, and holding a special meeting of FOB East Bay along with thmazing and Lady Steed.

(Full disclosure: I do not write. Ever. But I am not a total dead weight on the writing group, since, in my role as official FOB mascot, I provided breakfast and entertained the baby, while occasionally interjecting things like, "Wow, the grammar of that last sentence was very interesting!")

(Fuller disclosure: playing with the baby is not an official mascot duty, but a pleasure. How could I resist the cutest baby ever? This kid makes my uterus hungry. It's frightening.)

By the time my week playing hostess ended, I was too tired to invent last-minute big plans, and so I spent the rest of the break on another, less beloved game: playing adult. I went to jury duty, cleaned my apartment, did my taxes, went running, read articles about Australian languages, helped a friend weed her garden, did my laundry, did my Visiting Teaching, helped tutor members of the Chinese branch in English, ate Vietnamese sandwiches, and basically pretended to be competent and responsible. The most entertaining day of the latter half of my break was the day I rode BART back and forth, for no reason and with no destination, while doing my morphology reading. (I work well on public transportation, as it turns out, mainly because I have nothing to do but work. Well, that and chat with people like the Austrian retiree who sat next to me on the way to Fremont.)

And now I'm back in school, once again adding the role of "diligent student" to my successful run as "responsible adult." But what I really want to play, as always, is "enthusiastic hostess," so let me take this opportunity to encourage all and sundry to come visit me. The sun is always shining, there is always space for an air mattress, Vietnamese sandwiches are always delicious, and I will always be happy to see you, feed you, and spend lots of money on you. Think about it.

Part 196, In Which I Endorse a Candidate

2008-03-21T22:50:00.013-07:00

The weekend before last, in the midst of all my midterm stress, I slacked off for a minute to talk politics with my dad. We pretty much agree: Samantha Power wasn't far off about Hillary, and we've got a crush on Obama. Such a crush, in fact, that we've been giving money; I've been giving in small, I'd-still-like-to-buy-food amounts, but my dad, recently, has taken up giving real money. Real money, for which he got, last weekend, tickets to a fundraiser photo op with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner. He told me about these tickets, as we talked, and then utterly surprised me by saying, "I have an extra ticket, since Klement doesn't want to come. Do you want it?"

"Dad," I laughed, "have you forgotten that I live in California? I can't just randomly stop by for a party."

"Sure you can," he said. "I'll fly you out."

And so, because my mom wasn't around that weekend to say hey, wait a second guys, this is crazy, that's what actually happened. Last Monday I bought plane tickets online, and then last Thursday after classes I dashed home, threw some dirty laundry into a suitcase, and got on a plane to Boston, ready to party with the stars. Oh, sorry--pahty with the stahs. (It was in Boston, after all.)

Of course, it's absurd to think that either me or any of my immediate family members would actually enjoy a swanky fundraising party; on the contrary, my mom walked into the nightclub where it was held, took one look around at the other party guests, drinking wine and chatting, and said to me, not as sotto voce as she thought, "I'm pretty sure this is hell." So instead of staying and schmoozing, my parents and I did what we actually can do well: took unflattering photos with celebrities. I'm pretty sure, at this point, I could start a whole new blog solely documenting my failure to keep my eyes fully open when posing with famous people. I've got the first few posts right here.

He wasn't president when I met him, but that doesn't mean it wasn't cool.
After the picture, Margaret started squealing, "He touched me! Bono touched my cheek! I'm never going to wash it again!"

At least Jennifer Garner has red eyes too.

Ben Affleck looks so Bostonian.

The best part, I think, is how, while Jennifer Garner looks like a movie star, beautiful and photogenic, taking pictures with regular folks, we've dragged Ben Affleck down with us; all his practiced celebrity suavity went out the window when faced with my family's incredible ability, when taking photographs, to disagree on the location of the camera.

Cool as it was to meet Affleck and Garner, and cool as it was that my dad gave money to Obama--and yes, I know it's ridiculous that I'm about to downplay this, and yes, I know I'm spoiled--the better parts of the weekend were me just hanging out with my family: watching Slings and Arrows with my parents, cooking dinner for a neighbor with my mom, taking the dogs for a walk in the bird sanctuary/abandoned mental hospital with my dad, making and eating tortilla pizzas with Klement, admiring the beautiful purple walls of "my" bedroom, and wondering when, exactly, we became the type of family that has freshly cut flowers around the house. Oh, and of course it was wonderful to see The Dancing Newt, meet the newly engaged Pinto, and run into several other old acquaintances in the singles ward, and just as wonderful to see Boston again, even if it meant not seeing the sun all weekend. It was probably stupid and irresponsible of me to take off for an extended weekend in the crunch time just before spring break--I had to skip classes to do it, too--but, as with skiing, it was so, so worth it. Thanks, Dad, for the trip. It was a crazy idea, but so crazy it just might have worked.

Feed a cold, starve a fever, _____ midterms

2008-03-12T08:56:00.003-07:00

It's been a little crazy here in the Petraverse over the last week or so; all those papers and projects and presentations I was ignoring at the top of the mountain came crashing down on me when I returned. One night early last week, I made a list on a notecard of all the major tasks I had to do--excepting all my ordinary reading assignments, short problem sets, church activities, classes, etc--and posted it on the wall behind my computer, which means that every day I can look at it and count eleven major tasks--papers, presentations, project abstracts--due within fourteen days. Then I can understand where that pesky eye twitch is coming from.

I arrived home late Monday night and noticed the smell of my apartment. Not that it smelled bad, just that the smell, formerly so homey, was foreign to me again. Then I counted and realized I had spent a grand total of eleven hours at my apartment since Friday morning--11 out of 84 isn't bad, right? That mostly means I stayed at the institute building a lot--on Friday, after a late night studying there, I was simply too tired to walk home, and so fell asleep on the floor of the attic upstairs, and got a full night's sleep there, interrupted only when a freshman downstairs asked, very loudly, around 4 AM, "Did anyone see Hannah go home?" On Saturday, I hung around the building until afternoon until a friend came by; I should have stayed there to work more, but I suddenly couldn't resist the idea of lunch, and so was lured away to eat mashed potatoes visit a bookstore sale. On Sunday, I showed up to church with my laptop in tow, planning to write a paper that afternoon. Instead, I wrote a beautiful outline, and then spent several hours with friends, making dinner, eating dinner, and cleaning up dinner. This is me, after years of striving to be The Perfect Student--fun dutifully postponed until after work, every single homework assignment, regardless of how inane or trivial, compulsively done, every paper drafted weeks ahead of time and taken to the teacher for comments--flirting with irresponsibility. Or, rather, flirting with having a life outside of school. I like it. I'm interested.

Unfortunately, I still must have a life inside of school, and the balance is killing me. Sunday night was the closest I've ever come to pulling an all-nighter. (Can you believe that I got through four years of college taking 18 credits a semester, working two or sometimes three jobs, writing an honors thesis, and trying to have a social life without ever once staying up all night to finish a project? Neither can I.) After dinner, I holed myself up in the attic of the institute building again and started my paper. When I say started, I really mean it: I hadn't even collected the data I was writing on. So I got about an hour and a half of sleep that night, meaning that it wasn't a true all-nighter, but I still feel it should be commemorated in some sort of scrapbook of my life. Just imagine the page: "Baby's First All-Nighter," scripted in a cutesy font, complete with candid photos of the night, from me sprawled across the papasan chair in the corner, sleeping soundly, to me taking an hour-long break to chat with a friend who stopped by around midnight, to me deciding, at 4 am, that I desperately needed to find a video of Tammy Wynette singing "Stand By Your Man," to, finally, me doing a Walk of Shame--9 am Monday morning, walking home, still in my church dress, eager to shower and change and be back to campus for class by 10.

Oh, and top of all this schoolwork craziness of the past week, I did something to my foot while running, meaning that not only can I not run, my main source of relaxation and sanity, I can barely walk, my main source of transportation in all times. (That's another reason I didn't go home on Friday night: just the thought of walking on my foot was unbearable.) So I've been hobbling around town begging rides from all and sundry--including, one memorable evening, from a friend who has a bicycle, not a car--and since the diagnosis, now made official, as of yesterday's doctor visit, is plantar fasciitis, who knows when the limping will end. Or, more importantly, when the running will begin again. I may need to find myself a different sanity-preserver. Drugs, anyone?

But it's all almost over--spring break in two weeks!--and I'm beginning to breathe a bit easier, though that may just be because I'm too tired to hold my breath any longer. And, heck, maybe I'll convince myself to stop flirting with irresponsibility. I think it's time to quit being such a tease and just commit.

1, 2, Ski

2008-03-02T17:42:00.003-08:00

I went skiing yesterday, up to Tahoe with some folks from my ward. Not all the details of the day are pleasant--waking up at 5 am after a 1.30 am bedtime, carrying my boots and skis up the hill to the institute building, trying to find a comfortable way to sleep in the middle of the backseat of the car during the three-hour drive, waiting in an ages-long rental line just for poles--but this time the suffering:pleasure ratio of skiing worked in my favor; once I got on the mountain, all that suffering was forgotten. I think I'd count yesterday as one of my top 5 favorite skiing days of all time, also including in that count (a) a late-March day at Sundance that was so warm I skiied in a T-shirt and track pants and lay down in the snow to cool off, (b) July 2 (!) at Snowbird, (c) a lovely memory-blend of all the days I've spent at Alta, and (d) the snowy day in Austria when my mom and I drank hot chocolate and read novels in the lodge all afternoon instead of skiing. Come to think of it, seeing as how the day at Sundance ended with a trip to the emergency room for my friend, who cut his hand on the edges of his skis, the day at Snowbird ended with my eyes so badly sunburned that they swelled shut, causing me to miss the Fourth of July fireworks to lie in a darkened room with a cool washcloth on my eyes, the "day" at Alta doesn't, properly speaking, exist, and the day in Austria also involved such low visibility that we spent the entire morning skiing without ever finding the other lift, a mere twenty yards away, yesterday might be one of the few unblemished, absolutely-blissful-in-every-way ski days to live in my memory.

Which means, of course, that it won't live in my memory at all as a discrete day, but as a happy glow surrounding the idea of skiing, the sort of contented feeling that keeps me shelling out a month's worth of grocery money for a day on the slopes. It was perfect not for anything major but for everything minor working together: it was sunny and warm, only about 30 degrees, and the resort offered long, not-too-hard and not-too-easy black diamond runs, quick-moving lift lines, and incredible views of Lake Tahoe. I skiied by myself in the morning, listening to music down the slopes and reading up the lift, at least when I wasn't randomly sitting next to Indonesians, and then with my friends in the afternoon.

My memories of the day will fade as quickly as the mild soreness in, strangely, my shoulders, but, as is usual with skiing, I won't forget the concentrated joys of speeding down a slope, nor the excited peace of standing at the top of a mountain looking up at the blue sky, around at the vistas, and down at the run. Getting off a lift yesterday, I was struck by how relaxed I felt: thoughts of all my upcoming midterms and presentations and papers were far from my mind, which was taken up entirely by enjoyment of my surroundings. My dad always says that even the worst day skiing is better than the best day doing anything else, and though I don't agree I can feel why he says it. I know Mormons don't believe in a stagnant, all-pleasure-for-all-eternity sort of heaven, but sometimes I want to, if only so that I can look forward to many, many, many more days like yesterday. I suppose, instead, that I'll just have to keep skiing. Anyone free next weekend?

Woke Up, Got Out of Bed

2008-02-21T14:51:00.004-08:00

And now for something completely the same: a day in the life of a not-busy-enough grad student.

4.01 AM. My alarm goes off.

4.06 AM. Again.

4.11 AM. And again.

4.16 AM. Yet again. I'm awake, really, I'm just trying to pretend that I'm not. I don't usually get up this early, but I was too tired last night to write up the problem set that I spent about five hours solving. I drag myself the three feet across my bedroom to my computer, turn it on, and start writing: syllable structure in Chaha blah blah blah...

4.57 AM. My roommate, who has been working an early-morning shift at her retail job, stumbles out of her room to find me in the kitchen stirring cottage cheese into spaghetti. For some reason I am always starving when I wake up early, and oatmeal just won't cut it. "Good morning!" I say brightly. Once I'm out of bed, I'm a morning person. It's annoying.

5.36 AM. I'm only three pages into my writeup and am beginning to worry that it won't get done, so, of course, I take a break to reply to some emails. I'm trying to set up a Visiting Teaching appointment for later in the week, so my companion gets some bright-and-early scheduling details.

6.01 AM. I hate Chaha. Curse you, speakers of Ethio-Semitic languages! And I hate how frequently I'm using the word "generate." I check thesaurus.com and decide on "produce." Grad school kills prose style.

6.43 AM. I've already solved this problem; can't I just explain my solution to the professor orally? It would take five minutes, tops. I hate writing, and the sun hasn't even come up yet. I'd rather be somewhere, anywhere else.

6.44 AM. I find off-season plane tickets to Algiers for only $900. It's not like anything important will be going on in school in March anyway, right?

7.01 AM. On Thursday mornings I go running, and I won't let phonology stop me from that. I throw on some sneakers and head out. I can think of more synonyms for "generate" on my way. Effect. Cause. Induce. Engender.

7.29 AM. It was a short jog this morning, thanks to Chaha. I start writing again. Page five. I am a slow writer.

7.41 AM. A friend emails me, looking for dating advice. I reply. Why do people think I might have constructive advice about dating? I am a solid friend but terrible at romance.

8.03 AM. Marrakesh for $850!

8.56 AM. Panic! Panic! I have class at 9.40 and I still haven't showered or dressed or packed a lunch or packed up my school stuff. I put the finishing touches on my homework and jump in the shower.

9.26 AM. I'm leaving slightly later than I hoped, so I run. It's a rainy morning, not too cold, which I love, so I'm loping across downtown Berkeley with a huge grin on my face, my backpack bouncing up and down behind me. I don't pass any protests this morning, not even Code Pink, which is unusual. I guess that brouhaha has mostly died down, which is a pity, because I always enjoyed passing that intersection when someone was holding up a "Honk to Impeach Bush" sign. Nothing like every car horn in the area honking to get you ready for class.

9.46 AM. I am always late to class. I should have given up being late for Lent.

10.01 AM. Due to my fancy-schmancy graduate education, I now know the Yurok word for a Pacific lamprey. I totally love this class.

11.31 AM. In my next class, we get distracted from our discussion of case-marking in Australian languages as the professor tells a story about a six-foot long goanna charging at her. What's with the wildlife today? Not that I'm complaining.

1.07 PM. In my third class, my professor, who be administering the phonology section of our MA orals, says, very slowly and clearly, "You can't graduate with even an MA in linguistics without knowing that Finnish has transparent vowels." Finnish. Transparent vowels. Check.

2.00 PM. Classes are over for the day. I wander over to the student store to buy Kleenex, cough drops, and various Vitamin C tablets and lozenges and juices that, all told, constitute about 4000% of the recommended daily value. I'd really rather not get a cold right now. Or ever, for that matter. Bring on the Vitamin C!

2.11 PM. I check my email. Gmail is advertising tickets to Jakarta for only $810. I am tempted.

2.30 PM. I arrive at the Institute building, which is close to campus and boasts several comfortable study spots. I settle in to do some reading about nonconcatenative morphology. Isn't that fun to say? Nonconcatenative! Nonconcatenative!

4.51 PM. I am struck by guilt that I have all this time to sit around reading. I should be doing research or working or something, even if I have no idea what I want to research or where I could work. I just feel like a lazy underachiever.

5.01 PM. Speaking of which, I give up trying to fight the nap.

5.20 PM. My alarm goes off. I know not to hit snooze this time or I'll be late.

5.36 PM. I step on a bus heading north, wondering if this time I'll actually see the intersection or if I'll have another one of my get-off-the-bus-a-mile-too-late debacles. Last time I ended up having to run the extra mile, and I've had quite enough "I'm late" running today.

5:59 PM. Success! I am actually on time! I'm babysitting for some friends during stake temple night. They only have one kid, and he's ridiculously cute and good-natured. After his parents leave, I put him in his stroller, and we go out walking.

7.30 PM. This kid has a long attention span for sitting in his stroller, and I have a long attention span for walking around aimlessly. We're a good combination. I give him a bath, put him in bed, and sit down on the couch with some articles to read, amazed at how this was the easiest babysitting job ever.

9.30 PM. Home again, home again, jiggity jig. My apartment is, as usual, a mess, so I spend a few minutes washing dishes and folding clothes, glad I've only got one person to clean up after.

10.00 PM. I love wasting time on the internet. I reply to a few emails--if you're reading this, yours probably wasn't among them; I'm sorry--read some blogs, look up recipes for this week's Sunday dinner, continue winning at Facebook scrabble, chat with a friend, and find plane tickets to Australia for $1000. I want a six-foot goanna to charge at me!

11.15 PM. Time for bed, which really means time to brush my teeth, wash my face, floss, read my scriptures, and then read a novel for a half hour or until I conk out, whichever happens first. Lately it's been the latter, which explains why it's taking me so darn long to get through the 600-page novel a friend recommended. I should have saved it for spring break.

12.00 PM or thereabouts. I fall asleep thinking about living in a white house in Algiers, one of my ultimate life goals. I'd better start saving for those plane tickets.

Amazing Grace

2008-02-13T08:10:00.003-08:00

My friend came late to institute last night, just as we were dividing up into groups for an exercise, so I grabbed her a chair and dragged it over to where my group was forming. I then lifted up my own chair to move it and make room for hers, and managed, in the course of something so simple, to:

1. place my own chair directly on top of my plastic water cup, which broke in half with a satisfying (and loud) CRACK!

2. step directly onto a plate of olive oil and vinegar salad dressing

3. reel away from the plate, arms waving, and fall directly onto the chair I had just placed in my way.

All this in about five seconds. Every so often it crosses my mind that the name Hannah means "grace," and then I have to laugh. Parents, what were you thinking?

No Direction Home

2008-02-04T14:32:00.000-08:00

I'm a big believer in positive thinking, so I'll start with this: I'm good at many things. Like acquiring totally useless skills (coughBraillecough), or whistling loudly, or sleeping. Yes, that's right, sleeping. I'm an amazing sleeper--I can sleep anytime, anywhere, through anything. In the middle of the afternoon? Check. On my floor? Check. While my computer is blasting loud music at me? Check.

I clearly get sleeping skills from my father.

So does Klement.

Luckily, we don't get this from him.

But this isn't about sleeping, much as I would like it to be. This is about things I don't do well. So let's start with the biggest one of all: directions. I am functionally retarded at directions. Roughly half my personal anecdotes start with "so this one time I was really lost," and there's good reason for that. I can't tell left from right without looking at my hands, I can't visualize directions that people are giving to me (though I can read a map, for the record, if I rotate it enough), and I can't for the life of me remember paths I have taken before. It's like other people have in their heads a video of a certain route, where I only have a series of poorly-lit Polaroids, not necessarily ordered correctly, and not necessarily covering the entire route. This means I can remember what certain locations look like--usually based on the signs in the area, since I, as ever, am most drawn to words--but the connections between those locations are beyond me. My family used to make fun of me because one of my most commonly said phrases--besides, of course, "I've read a book about that"--was "hey, what is that doing here?"

I could go on forever about times I have been lost--the time I couldn't direct my grandmother to the library and my three-year-old brother could, the time I went running and ended up two towns away, the time I took a wrong highway exit three times in a row--but I'll spare you that. I will say, though, that my graduate department is housed in the world's most confusing building, period, and that that has caused me a lot of grief. Or, more specifically, a lot of being late to class. For those who went to BYU and remember the JKHB, let me tell you, it's got nothing on Dwinelle. It seems like two buildings stuck together, one of them with four floors, labeled 1-4, and lots of classrooms, labeled with two- and three-digit numbers, and one of the with seven floor, labeled A-G, and lots of offices, labeled with four-digit numbers. Of course, four floors and seven floors do not match up, so to get to floor 3 you have to take the elevator to either floor F and walk down a flight of stairs, or floor E and walk up a flight of stairs. What's more, both sections of the building are squares that only connect in one corner, so when you take the elevator to floor F, good luck finding the flight of stairs. Plus random hallways shoot off each side of the square, and they all look the same. Plus the building is set on a slope, so each entrance from the outside leads to a different inside level. Plus I deeply suspect that, like Hogwarts, rooms and staircases move around at night.

All this means that I spent much of last semester comically confused about where my classes were. I mostly just showed up in my department, whose outside door I finally managed to find, hidden behind the service truck unloading area, and waited for one of my classmates to walk through on their way to class. When nobody walked through, I was in trouble. In fact, I had two of my classes, each meeting once a week, in the same classroom, and I didn't realize it until about a month after school started. All classrooms look the same, you know, and I came at it each day from a different direction, and left each day through a different door, which I think excuses me. At least a little.

So you can imagine how things went the other day when an undergrad approached me in the hallway of my department and asked how to get to room 86. I knew enough to know that room was in the other half of the building, on another floor, and to know that I'd never be able to just tell her how to get there: after a few seconds of me going, "Um, I think you walk straight, and then maybe up some stairs? And then you turn? Left? Or maybe right?" I finally just said, "Let me take you." So we set off on a Dwinelle adventure, with me pretending to be confident and the undergrad sweetly following along, not getting annoyed when I, first, walked us right into the backstage of the theater; second, took us to a dead-end door leading into the courtyard; third, found a set of stairs that didn't lead to the level we wanted; fourth, walked us around the square of the French department, twice; and fifth, gave up.

"You want to know how I find my way around this building?" I asked. She nodded. "I find my way around this building," I said. So, together, we found the nearest exit, walked around the outside of the building, and entered through the door on the level she wanted. For future reference, I told her, she should just memorize that door and never enter through any other one. Or she should find an older grad student, or one with a sense of direction. I'd be much more useful, after all, if she needed someone to take an emergency nap.

The Year in Review: 2007

2008-01-21T21:49:00.000-08:00

I don't and have never faithfully kept a journal, besides, I suppose, this blog, but I have always been a fairly regular correspondent, and so nowadays I regard my email archives as my closest approximation to record-keeping. Thus, along those lines, I present here excerpts from emails, along with pictures, that each, in some way, represent something significant about that month. Here we have 2007.

January
1.29.07

This morning, I taught my students to ask "what can I do you for?" And last week I taught them to start conversations with "What's cookin', good-lookin'?" I am a bad English teacher. And, this month, I am a bad friend, co-worker, and even random stranger on the street; my culture shock has manifested itself recently in irrational rage at everyone and everything. I got into a shouting match on the street the other day with a public van driver who was trying to overcharge me...by a nickel. I should have just paid and gotten out of there, but I hate being taken advantage of all the time, and so I decided to go for the "terrible person" option of fighting about it. Luckily for me, Indonesia is, for the most part, a highly non-confrontational culture and, faced with a red-faced foreigner, competent in the language and actual prices, and willing to actually, gasp!, yell, the driver decided to just let it be. I gave the nickel to one of the many beggars who had gathered to watch the fight and walked home, still shaking with fury.

Public vans awaiting passengers

February
2.6.07

I'm wasted in the classroom here, and not even the fun drunk kind of wasted. One of the questions on our reading test today was, "How does Indonesia's population grow?" I first stifled a giggle at the dirty jokes I could make, and then invented some answers for them: a. rapidly, b. slowly, c. not at all, d. with silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row. And then I turned around and had to face an entire classroom of wide, confused, eyes, all wondering what weird thing Miss Hannah was doing now. Apparently nursery rhymes were never in their curriculum.

Some of my students at their morning ceremony

March
3.9.07

I went out with a group of friends this morning--when Indonesians say "let's hang out on Saturday, they mean, "Saturday morning at 8 AM"--and actually had a great time. This is rare. Generally, I don't understand what's going on because people are mixing Javanese into their Indonesian, and then I'm frustrated and bored and just want to go home, or the people have to speak pure Indonesian for me, and then they're frustrated and bored and just want to go home. For some reason, though, this morning's trip worked. One of the girls speaks Indonesian very clearly--she is Javanese, but doesn't have a strong accent--and one of the boys is from Jakarta, so doesn't speak Javanese at all, and speaks a remarkably clear and lovely version of Indonesian. We explored the old 18th-century administration building, which was full of bats and smelled of urine, and then went to the restaurant one of the girls owns. (She's 19, a college student, and owns her own restaurant. And her name is--get this--Liquid! Apparently, her mother suffered from dehydration during her pregnancy. In any case, she's amazing!) Then the boy gave me a ride home on his motorcycle--note to self, riding with girls is far less scary than riding with boys--and told me about his job working for the counter-terrorism police unit in Semarang. And maybe I'm just shallow, but hey, that's a pretty kickass job. That, plus the motorcycle, plus the clear accent, means I love him. That's how low my standards are nowadays.

Lawang Sewu, the building we visited. Do not disturb the bats.

April
4.25.07

I finally, less than a month before I am due to leave, got the uniform I was promised in September and, frankly, I'm no longer upset that I wasn't given it before. When I first showed up at school wearing it, half the teachers politely told me I looked beautiful and the other half giggled behind their hands. It's strangely boxy and the skirt is far too tight, forcing me to take tiny ladylike steps all over the place and to struggle climbing up onto the school bus every morning without entirely exposing myself to the middle schoolers. I look like a stewardess, and, what's more, a stewardess with a really poor sense of color: I have two versions of the uniform, a yellow one which my twelfth graders told me makes me look like a banana, and a pinkish version which is almost exactly the same color as my skin, creating a rather eerie the-emperor-has-no-clothes-or-maybe-just-no-body effect. The school principal suggested that I could take the uniforms back to America as a souvenir. Thanks, but no thanks.

My male colleagues don't seem to mind that I look like a stewardess/banana

May
5.22.07

I'm leaving in a few days, and so I'm feeling that end-of-an-experience, all-bets-are-off urge to do something wild and crazy. Last time I felt this urge I got a bikini wax, hence I was hoping, this time, to do something less painful. So the SLO and I hit up the local mall, where we took crazy pictures in a photobooth, complete with Asian teenage girl poses and cutesy captions, and then caused a scene by asking a pirated DVD shop to test out the film "1 Night in Paris" on their big-screen TV. (We just didn't believe that could honestly be the content of the DVD. It was. Talk about awkward.) Then we wandered through the mall and ended up asking if we could sit on the giant animatronic rhino and elephant that little children ride around the mall. (It's as weird as it sounds. Trust me.) The guy running the ride looked at us like we were insane, but foreigners get away with everything around here, including acting like four year olds, because, hey, maybe that's just what they all do in America.

Not much to say, it's all here in the beauty of the flowers.

June
6.17.07

The Duke and I spent a good portion of our time in Vietnam talking about what it would be like when we got back to America: we would blend in! We would speak the language! There would be no cats! The streets would be made of cheese! And then we landed in San Francisco and hopped on public transportation over to Oakland, only to look around, while waiting for the train, and realize that we were the only white people on the platform. Furthermore, we were the only non-Asians on the platform. And that no one else was speaking English. Oh well. At least there are no cats!

The Duke celebrating catless America

July
7.6.07

In my self-appointed role as social coordinator, I'm emailing you to tell you the plans for the next little while:

Tomorrow I'm going to a barbecue in Provo, to which you're invited. Saturday we'll be hitting up the Payson Scottish festival, mostly for the caber toss. Saturday night is as yet unplanned, but maybe we could find you some rocky mountain oysters? Sunday I think I'll probably be going to church in SLC to see the definitely-not-a-farewell farewell of a boy from my old ward in Belmont. If you're coming to bad movie night that night, can I get a ride back down with you? Monday will be hiking in American Fork canyon, and I think there might also be a bad movie night on Monday night too--I know, two in a row! Then next Saturday is Llama Fest, ca. 4 pm, and Melyngoch's farewell and post-party are Sunday at 11 am and 3pm, and then I think we might go to Annie's later that night for games. Oh, and a trip to a dinosaur museum will definitely also happen sometime. Please come.

I look strangely excited, for someone about to taste bull balls.

August
8.27.07

I went to dinner with my dad at the Indonesian restaurant around the corner, where I spoke Indonesian to the server and was told that there was a "smell of Java" about me. So apparently my Javanese accent is strong, strong enough to be obvious in a short conversation where I ask for the check and then apologize for not speaking Indonesian earlier. (Well, either that or I haven't showered since May. But I'm pretty sure the server meant it metaphorically.) In any case, I'm sure the server got a kick out of it: imagine a Chinese exchange student with a Brooklyn accent. I'd guess it's kind of like that.

San Francisco in August

September
9.25.07

And then, just when I was thinking, could this event be any more Berkeley, I overheard a nine year old say to her mother, "Is that goat cheese? I love goat cheese!" I'm sure that's a sign of apocalypse somewhere, tucked away in one of the more unreadable sections of Revelation or Isaiah: "And lo, when a babe, yea, even a suckling child, doth lust after the milk of a kid, then shall ye know that ye live in a foodie culture. Oh, and that the Second Coming is soon, the earth will be utterly wasted, etc, etc, I think you guys know the drill by now." Of course, one can hardly blame her: goat cheese is delicious.

A September parade: how Berkeley can you be?

October
10.24.07

I was sitting in my department lounge yesterday doing some reading, and two undergraduates were sitting near me talking. One of them said something about Cal's starting quarterback, and the other replied with, "he's Mormon, you know." There's this long pause following that, where they're both clearly thinking what to say next, and it's clearly going to be about Mormons, so I'm waiting, with interest, to hear what it will be. Having overheard several conversations recently about "there's no way I'm voting for that Mormon dude, because polygamy is just sick and wrong," I'm slightly nervous as to what kind of ignorance or soft bigotry I might encounter. Finally, the guy break the silence and says, "Mormons are really nice." The girl jumps in enthusiastically: "I know! I was just about to say that!" And then they have a long conversation about how all the Mormons they've known are so super nice and friendly and blah blah blah. It wasn't what I was expecting, but I'm not complaining: after all the Mormons-are-a-crazy-creepy-cult perspectives in the media lately, it's nice to hear some good press.

Two fun October activities: dressing up for the opera and learning to use the color effects in iPhoto. Purple, appropriately enough.

November
11.13.07

Someone left a bunch of fliers in one of my classes advertising jobs as a student lab assistant for, and this is the good part, the Pavement Research Center. With huge exclamation marks, the flier declared that assistants would learn to take asphalt samples and, best of all, learn to drive a forklift!!!! Great resume builder!!!!! So then of course we all had a good laugh at the idea of having forklift driving on your resume--just imagine the "skills" line: "proficient at Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, and driving a forklift." And then, abruptly, we fell silent, as we realized that someone with who can drive a forklift is probably more employable than someone with a higher degree in linguistics. Remind me again why I'm doing this?

Nice to know my degree is equivalent in uselessness to an MFA from Bennington

December
12.10.07

I spent the night at the church building the other night, totally by accident. I was just there doing homework, and chatting with people, and then all of a sudden (I swear time just flies when you're cramming for finals) it was 10 PM and dark out and pouring rain and I had to walk home alone. So I figured, hey, there's some blankets and couches here, I'll just stay. And the kitchen is fully stocked with food around finals time so I ate breakfast there and all. And I let myself get distracted from homework to play the piano and sit by the fire practicing my Braille on the books from the library downstairs. It was like a sleepover, minus the pajamas and giggling and talking about boys, and, well, other people, and it was AWESOME.

How I spent much of December: studying phonetics.

Who's on Romney's Side, Who?

2008-01-21T00:53:00.000-08:00

Now that Mitt has won a few states, I feel slightly less guilty about doing a little bit of gentle (I hope) teasing, in the form of a parody I wrote back in September. (Caution: some references may be so four months ago.)

(To the tune of "Who's on the Lord's Side, Who")

1. The Christian Right declares,
"Mormons are not like us,
With special underwear
And their strange married Jesus.

They believe they will be gods;
they have an extra book
They're all a bunch of frauds
Not worth a second look."

Chorus:
Who'll vote for Romney, who?
Iowa's the place to show,
From the primaries we'll know:
Who'll vote for Romney, who?

2. The godless Dems eschew
Those who put trust in Him
Especially if their views
Change on a weekly whim.

They say he flops and flips
On abortion and the gays.
His centrist mindset slips;
He takes up right-wing ways.

Chorus

3. The liberal media laughs
(NYT's loud and shrill)
At his embarrassing gaffes:
"Small varmints, if you will."

From his favorite sci-fi read,
To his tasteless Mormon jokes
And Castro's lines gloried,
Sometimes the guv just chokes.

Chorus

4. In college he sold stock
And spent two years in Franc e
Then entered--it's no shock--
the world of high finance.

The average Joe cannot
connect with our dear Mitt
From a squash court to a yacht,
He's got a rich man's kit.

Chorus

5. The Lord's own people choose
The Lord's own candidate.
We love his Mo values
There's no need for debate.

With cash and checks and coin,
With one heart and one mind,
We're girding up our loins
5 million strong combined.

Final Chorus:
We'll vote for Romney, we.
Utah to Mitt will go
From Primary we've known:
We'll vote for Romney, that's who!