The 'There' There

(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.

Barack Obama Is My New Bicycle

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

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.  

Bicycle! Bicycle! Bicycle!

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

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.

Woke Up, Got Out of Bed

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.

Here Comes Santa Claus

I finished my last paper of the semester mid-afternoon on Saturday, bringing my grand total of pages written over the course of this semester close to 160, single spaced of course, meaning that if all those pages had been on the same topic, I basically just wrote a book in four months. I mean, granted, it's a book no one wants to read--heck, I don't even want to read it--but, still, pondering that number of pages makes me feel just the tiniest bit proud. If only quantity and quality were the same thing.

Having emailed my paper to my professor, I gathered my books and left the public library, where I had been sitting on the floor for the last hour or so, having decided that shivering on a cold tile floor was, for some strange reason, more comfortable than sitting at a desk. As I walked towards the library door, I began to think about what I would do with my newfound Christmas break freedom: bake Christmas cookies! Decorate a Christmas tree! Shop for Christmas presents! Dress up like a Christmas gypsy! With schoolwork out of the way, I could finally think about the season.

The first thing I saw when I opened the library door was a guy dressed as Santa Claus. And behind him, a girl dressed as Santa Claus. And behind her, a whole group of people dressed as Santa Claus. As I rounded the corner into downtown, I realized everyone was dressed like Santa Claus: milling around on the main drag of downtown were about, oh, five hundred people dressed as Santa, pouring out of the metro station, flitting in and out of bars, and standing in the middle of the road. It was a Santa invasion, and it felt like the universe had conspired to show me not just a good time, but a wonderful time: the most wonderful time of the year.

I walked up to one of those imitation Santas and asked him what was going on; "SantaCon!" he said, slightly drunkenly and with his mouth full of pizza. I wish I could say that that explained everything for me, as that would imply I'm somewhat hip to counterculture--or pop culture, or flash mob culture, or maybe just culture, period--but of course I had to ask some more questions, learning that this was a group of people, dressed in cheap Santa costumes--including a Hanukkah Santa (all in blue and stars of David and carrying a Menorah), a bikini Santa, and a Santa Claus that was definitely not just kissing Mommy--that was moving across the East Bay, basically getting progressively noisier and drunker. There may have been some lists, and some double-checking of said lists, but I doubt it; this group was mostly into drunken singing, or, at the very least, drunken shouting "Santa loves you!"

I love Santa too, and that was pretty much the best welcome to the Christmas holiday ever, even if I did have to wonder whether the bikini Santa was a man or a woman. (Man. Mostly.) I must have been nice to deserve this sight, and, trust me, there won't be any crying or pouting this year, not from me.

In the Bleak Midwinter

I dashed around the corner to my local grocery store for some sustenance items, which here means "hot chocolate and cookies to keep me awake and happy during an all-night paper-writing spree." While paying, I briefly chatted with the man behind the counter, who commented on how delicious hot chocolate is, especially on a cold December night. I agreed with him, and noticed that the door to his store, which is usually wide open and welcoming, was closed tonight, presumably to keep out the cold, right? We complained about the weather for a few minutes together, discussing how much we were looking forward to curling up with a warm blanket and, in my case at least, cup of hot chocolate. I handed over my cash, saying "stay warm!" in lieu of "goodbye," and headed home, shivering the whole way.

The problem? It's 55 degrees out. We are so spoiled.

Fork It Over

As I was walking home from school yesterday evening, I thought I heard a homeless man ask for a spare.

I turned, and, taking out the headphones which were blasting an audiobook of "The Portrait of a Lady," asked, "A spare what?" I had just been to the laundromat for quarters, so I actually had change to give, but what if he wanted, I don't know, a spare tire? A spare cigarette? A spare bedroom?

He shook his head. "Not a spare, a spoon. Do you have a spoon?"

Who carries a spoon around with them? I thought to myself. "No, sorry, I don't," I said. "But I do have a fork."

He considered for a moment and said, "Okay, that will do. Can I have your fork?"

I pulled it out of my backpack, handed it to him, and turned to go.

"Wait!" he said. "This is a nice metal fork. I can't take this."

I told him it was no problem, but he insisted. "I live in a hospital, and if I come home with this they'll think I've stolen it."

Oh. So I stopped and waited while he ate the last few ice cream bites of his root beer float and told me all about how the neighborhood has really gone downhill. When he was done he thanked me nicely, handed back the fork, and ambled off to who-knows-where.

And that, friends, is why I like living in a city.

A Night At the Opera

One of the more obvious advantages to being a grad student, apart from the poverty-level income and institutionalized servitude, is the flexible schedule; working yourself into a blurry, caffeine-fueled, jargon-filled haze can be done at any time of the day or night. (Who am I kidding? Night. Night before it's due.) This means that when a friend emails mid-afternoon and says something along the lines of, hey, I'm free tonight, let's go to the opera, you can think, well, I was going to sit here in this chair all day transcribing Sundanese...so, sure, why don't I go into the city and buy some opera tickets? And then, in the space of an hour, you can throw on a fancy dress, pack up your laptop, hop on the train, and move the whole analyzing-Sundanese-front-vowels operation to another chair, this one in the San Francisco Public Library, to wait for the opera to start.

My friend Steve is the opera fanatic; I'm the one with a student ID card. Last Thursday, it was a match made in heaven: I wandered into the San Francisco opera house shortly after he emailed and wandered out with two tickets to that night's performance of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), in the 9th row of the orchestra section, for $25 each, thus saving us--well, him--$125 a ticket.

I was quite excited about the evening, partially because I got to wear my fancy black cleavage-baring dress, partially because I do love me a Stevening, and partially because I have always wanted to go to the opera. And, really, if you have to start someplace with opera, where better than Die Zauberflöte? This was especially true for me, since I spent a large portion of my childhood falling asleep to "Mozart's Magic Fantasy," a version of The Magic Flute adapted for children, which means that I entered the opera house with a knowledge of the plot, a love for the music, and a strange subconscious expectation that all the songs would be in English. (Childhood habits die hard, apparently.)

Not, of course, that a cursory knowledge of the plot helped me anyway--I spent about the first half of the opera thinking, huh? before I realized that it wasn't my fault: The Magic Flute is, as far as I can tell from reading about it later, trippy. Maybe it was partially the fault of the performance, which emphasized the bright and happy fairy tale aspects to the piece, at the expense of the moralistic good-and-evil tone that it acquires in the second half; while Papageno's comedy bits were spot on, by which I mean brilliant, and had the audience--at an opera!--laughing out loud--at an opera!--this tendency to laughter whenever Papageno was on stage made the meaning behind the tragic arias of the young lovers, and Sarastro's preachy bass solos slightly, well, risible.

This may be a pity, perhaps, if you go to the opera for your moral education. For the rest of us, though, and you may decide I'm a total Philistine for saying this, the entertainment and musical value of such a piece matters far more. The tragic arias, particularly Pamina's solo "Ach, ich fühl's, es ist verschwunden," were beautiful, and Sarastro's bass rumbled appropriately in songs like "O Isis und Osiris," accompanied by a chorus dressed in shiny golden robes and purple plastic wigs, like ancient Egypt as envisioned by the costume director for Star Trek. That may sound strange, and I know it does, but it was strangely beautiful, all that gold and purplish-blue floating about on stage. Also strangely beautiful were the gilded boat floating high above the stage and carrying the three young boys whose light young voices acted as a sort of chorus ex machina, preventing characters from suicide and despair; the enormous pyramid in the center of the stage, whose between-scene transformations set the stage, quite literally, for varying aspects of the plot and music; and the host of enchanted hybrid animals who appeared as Tamino played his magic flute, the crocoguin, and the giraffestich, and the whole pride of upright lions, prancing and swaying their way across the stage to the rhythm of the music. Strange, yes, but it was beautiful, all of it, and magical indeed.

And not strange at all, of course, was the beauty of the Queen of the Night's famous aria "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen." I know my love for this song probably marks me as shallow and inexperienced, but I will freely admit to being the sort of opera neophyte that is utterly blown away by a human voice singing notes that high. If the stage design was the magic, this aria is the flute; even while watching Erika Miklosa's diaphragm move during the coloratura passage, I could hardly believe it was her singing that. And during every single one of the many minutes since Thursday I've devoted to watching YouTube videos of the piece, I've thought the same thing: incredible. Simply incredible. I get chills every time.

Whatever else I could say about the performance--the acting was good, the pace maybe could have used a little work, the singer playing Pamina was upstaged in nearly every scene--let me end with this: I sat through the entire three hours without once being bored. Sure, the little grad student voice inside my head was whispering the whole time, "Sundanese! Sundanese! Why aren't you transcribing?" and the little Bruce Willis fan voice inside my head was whispering, "Why isn't she blue, à la The Fifth Element?" and the little linguistics grad student voice inside my head was whispering, most insistently of all, "Listen to those people mangle their palatal fricatives! Palatal, people, palatal! Not post-alveolar! Aaaargh!" but, really, what are a Protestant work ethic, a love for action movies, and a trained ear for fricatives when compared to Mozart? Nothing. The performance may not have been perfect in every way, but the opera is, and, in the end, my evening was. Thank goodness for a flexible schedule.

Dancing in the Dark

This past Monday, I spent some quality time with my visiting teacher, who we'll call Q, for reasons that will remain obscure. Now, Q is not your typical nice little Mormon girl: she's a vegan, she sews her own very unique clothes, she laughs at my jokes about the Folsom Street Fair, and every Monday night, after FHE, she goes dancing at a goth/industrial club in San Francisco--a fact she mentioned over the pulpit in sacrament meeting. Plus, she didn't bat an eyelash when I said I wanted to come with her. In case you couldn't guess from all the above, I think she is the coolest. visiting teacher. ever.

While getting ready, I rifled through my closet, looking for black, and finally had to admit to myself that nothing in my grad-student wardrobe of button-up shirts, cardigans, jeans, and sneakers could even approximate a goth/industrial look. Besides, even if I could magically produce a corset or fishnets, what are the chances that a blue-eyed blonde who doesn't own black eyeliner, or indeed any makeup at all, could avoid looking like a total fool wearing them? Yeah. I thought so. So I went in the jeans, pink shirt, and white lacy undershirt I had been wearing to school that day. Yes, I wore pink to a place called Death Guild. I'm like that.

We showed up at the club a little too early to be cool--who starts dancing at 10 pm? Puh-leeze!--but that gave me plenty of time to explore the club, raid the pretzels at the bar, and get hit on by an 18-year-old. I may be a bitter, dried-up old maid in the Mormon world, but the San Francisco goth scene, apparently, I've still got it...at least, to college freshmen. I'm crediting the fact that I was the only person in the club wearing a color.

I was, to be honest, slightly apprehensive about the dancing part. I have a tiny confession to those who have ever seen me dance: I wasn't joking. I typically put on a goofy grin and pretend I'm being ironic, but my dancing style really is that combination of weird white-girl Bollywood and Elaine Benes--yes, with the thumbs. So, understandably, though I love to dance, I don't usually do so in public, unless it's really dark.

I was, therefore, surprised and pleased to realize that, at this goth club, I needn't worry about my basic inability to follow a rhythm, even with the lights on: no one else could either. Looking around the room, seeing from the man in tights jumping from side to side, to the overweight woman swaying to no discernible tune, to the girl in a corset and bustle kicking up her heels, to the shirtless man humping a wall (I didn't want the mental image either, trust me), I quickly lost all traces of self-consciousness about my dancing.

I had nowhere near the stamina of even the corseted girls, though, embarrassingly enough, and by around 1 AM, I was feeling that, since the Spirit had clearly gone to bed, I should too. (Knowing that my grandma sometimes reads this blog, I won't elaborate on that whole Spirit thing, but let's just say that around midnight, Q leaned over to me and whispered, in heavily accented tones, "De-bau-che-ry!") Q still had the energy to dance, and so, reluctant to drag her away from her favorite hobby, I simply wandered upstairs, found a couch, and fell asleep, with Nine Inch Nails blaring. When security woke me up half an hour later--"No sleeping here, missy! Move along!"--I was groggy and confused, and so simply moved to a different couch and fell asleep again, sitting up this time. I'm pretty sure the security guard, after waking me again, didn't believe my protests that "it's just way past my bedtime!" He was quite obviously relieved to see that Q would be driving me home.

On that drive home, I told Q that if she gave me a spiritual thought, we could count this for visiting teaching in October. She thought for a minute, and then said, "Judge not, that ye be not judged." Amen, Q. A lot about that club, and that lifestyle, leaves a nasty taste in my mouth, but what I really want to take away is this: I have never felt so free and unjudged on a dance floor, or indeed anywhere, in my life. I clearly and obviously didn't fit in, and yet nobody, the whole night, looked askance at my pink shirt, or my obviously un-goth appearance, or my dry-heave-set-to-music dancing. I can't express how fun and free that feeling was--a little slice of heaven, in a highly unexpected place. Thanks, Q. Let's go again sometime.

A Roommateimony

I came home from an exhausting Wednesday a few weeks ago, and, while talking to Roommate about something or another, turned on a Talking Heads song. Suddenly, we were dancing around the apartment singing along, at the top of our lungs, to "fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa far better," and then experimenting with the best lighting to get only a silhouette of a dancing figure visible through the curtains between the living room and kitchen that are my fourth wall. (For the record: no lights in the living room, overhead lights in the kitchen.) The pictures we took didn't nearly do it justice, so you'll just have to trust me when I say that it was like an iPod commercial in my apartment.

My roommate has gone out of town, which means that for the next week I have our apartment to myself, leaving me free to play music loudly, dance around the apartment, and...well, actually, not that much will change. It blows my mind that I fell into a situation with a roommate as cool as mine, one who can not only dance to the Talking Heads with me, but then retreat quietly into her bedroom when we're done, as I retreat into mine--one who, basically, is smart and funny and kind and all that, but also, like me, an introvert. I'll miss her this week: silhouette dancing isn't nearly as fun with just one.

Good Will Toward Goodwill

I decided this morning that my room lacked something important. Well, something important besides a fourth wall, or a door: a chair. I have a chair at my computer desk, so there's a place to write, and I have my bed, so there's a place to sleep. Missing, though, is a place to read, which means that I've done the vast majority of my reading over past few weeks while walking to and from school. While that's all well and good, sometimes I like to read without having to worry about oncoming traffic. I needed a chair.

So I headed over to my local Goodwill, which is roughly a block away from me, and which I love: they're huge, well-stocked, and willing to bargain. (A few weeks ago, completely on accident, I bargained a pair of shoes down to $5.99 from $8.99; while that did save money, I do, believe it or not, have a few shards of dignity left, so I won't be repeating the experience.)

It only took me a few minutes in the store to find the perfect comfy chair, reasonably priced at $7.99. It took me a few minutes longer to try picking up the chair, realize it was too heavy, try pulling the chair, realize I couldn't grip it right, try pushing the chair, and realize that, without wheels, it wouldn't glide so smoothly on the sidewalk outside. Luckily for me, an aging black man in an employee vest walked past me just as I was standing next to the now-out-of-place armchair, considering how to get it home. He asked if I needed help, and, hearing my predicament, offered to lend me one of the store's dollies--"but only if you promise to bring it back," he said. I swore up and down that I would, and thus we had a deal.

He got the chair onto the dolly for me, and then I pushed it up to the register, practicing for my walk home. As I did, he walked behind me, announcing, loudly, "Look, everyone! She's pushing it herself! Isn't she just adorable?" Apparently there's something to be said for that helplessness thing after all--if, that is, you want men the age of your grandfather treating you like their granddaughter.

After I paid for the chair and started pushing it out, another employee came rushing after me to help me. It seemed like she was going to push the dolly the entire block back to my apartment, so I assured her I was fine on my own and that I would bring the dolly back.

"Scout's honor?" she asked. "Er, Girl Scout's honor?" I hesitated at that, and she began to laugh. "You were never a Girl Scout, were you? I'm taking that dolly back!"

"I was a Brownie!" I said. "And I swear I didn't leave for honor-related reasons! Cross my heart and hope to die!"

Laughing again, she let me go, and I pushed the dolly and chair up the hill to my apartment, singing as I walked, and walked, and walked. When, ten minutes later, I returned to Goodwill, dolly in tow, the store employee looked up from the register and grinned. "Hey everyone," she said, "check it out! It's Brownie girl! With the dolly! Looks like even Girl Scout dropouts can have honor."

So now I have a chair on my balcony (the only place it fits), and a nickname at Goodwill. What--besides, of course, a girlfriend with bows in her hair--could be better than that?

My Weekly Have-Done List

I've been rather silent in the blogosphere the last week or so, not because I haven't spent every waking hour of my day at or close to my computer--I have--but because so many of those hours were filled with transcribing Sundanese, waxing verbose on syntax assignments--as specifically instructed by one of my professors, who told us that verbosity was the secret to grad school; can you imagine how happy I was to hear that?--reading Indonesian literature, beating Alea at online Scrabble, and conspicuously not replying to emails.

During the few times I've stepped away from my computer in the past week, though, I have:

• stepped on, and cracked, my iPod. I should have learned two things from this--iPods purchased for $30 in Cambodia definitely aren't real and don't charge things on the floor-- but, since I already knew the first and am ignoring the second, I guess the masking tape holding my iPod together is a constant reminder of, well, nothing.
  
• spent Friday night huddled up in a movie theater chair, futilely trying to cover my eyes and my ears at the same time, to avoid the movie on screen, Resident Evil: Extinction. While I ordinarily wouldn't stand in line to see a movie based on a video game--oh, sorry, the third movie based on this particular video game--in the complex system of social rules in my head, I am obligated, as the new and mostly friendless girl in town, to accept any invitation I receive, especially when they come from people who have to move a bow and arrow from their backseat before there's room for me. Not even my girl-crush on Milla Jovovich could redeem the movie, but the fun company could and did redeem the evening.
  
• realized, as a direct result of the aforementioned movie, that when disaster strikes, I will be the first to die. My survival instinct, I'm pretty sure, is nowhere near as strong as my curse-God-and-die instinct.
  
• enjoyed the jokes of my fellow first-years; when I heard one of them, today, try to transcribe a sneeze ("Was that a nasal ejective?") instead of just saying "Gesundheit," I knew I had found heaven.
  
• added to the piles of books in my room, making it a grand total of 47 books I have checked out from the university's library and will probably never read, seeing as how I can only finish off a book every two days or so during my daily walks to and from school.
  
• gone grocery shopping, an experience which never fails to make me self-righteous about my poverty; lugging two weeks' worth of on-sale cans of green beans and tomato soup home in a backpack makes me want to stop into the upscale grocery store I pass on my way home and say to all those tax-hiking, goverment-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving left-wing freak shows in there, "you may be buying locally-made organic cookies, but I am walking home. Who loves the environment now, you old hippie?" (I could ride the bus, but, really, the grocery store is only a mile away, and both the exercise and the suffering are good for me.)
  

Oh, and I've also gone to institute, watched Casablanca on the big screen for the third time, gone to a barbecue with Indonesians, helped build a sukkah in the backyard of one of my professors, watched Shakespeare in the park, cooked dinner for four, gone to the temple, done my laundry for only the second time since I moved in a month and a half ago, and of course, faithfully studied for and attended my classes, which have quickly and without warning nearly doubled in number and time, because of various seminars plus colloquia plus invited speakers plus working groups plus study groups plus, I don't know, linguistics yoga groups or something. (I wouldn't put it past this place.)

Things are good, and if I could only add "went to bed on the same day I woke up" to the list, I might venture to say, with Tony the Tiger, that they're grrrrrrreat!

I Live Here

As I was walking to school this morning, a middle-aged woman stopped me to ask something in a quiet mumble.

"I'm sorry?" I said, not understanding.

"Did you see the hair of that guy in front of you?" she repeated.

"Um, no," I replied, still a bit confused, squinting at the Asian guy about fifteen feet ahead of me.

"It's all shaved on the sides," she told me, "and long in back."

"Oh," I said, "that's nice." Awkward pause.

"But he's Asian, so he's an asshole," she said, almost conversationally. "They're all assholes. But you know that--you live here!"

I didn't know that, actually, but I decided it wasn't best to argue, not there, not on the street, and, besides, I was late for a meeting with a very kind Asian who had agreed to help me with a class project. I eased the social awkwardness by giggling nervously and walking away slowly, with the woman shouting at my back, three or four more times:

"They're all assholes! You know that--you live here!"

I love this town.

Ambiguity in San Francisco

I walked past this sign in The Castro last night:


And I wondered--are they using "gay" as an adjective or as a noun? That is, do they mean "we'll clean in a gay way" or "we'll clean your gays"? I'm almost tempted to call and ask.

Terms of Address

I just went to see a movie with a guy from my ward here, a very nice, very tall Jamaican-descent Berkeleyite with some pretty rocking dreadlocks.

The usher taking our ticket smiled at my friend. "Wassup, brother?" he said. "The theater is #1, off to your left. Enjoy the show, man!"

Then he looked me up and down, pausing slightly, and said, "Good afternoon, ma'am."

I don't even know what to think.

Ubicada

Today was orientation day at Unnamed U, both the campus-wide "We welcome all 3,000 of our new grad students and want to make them get to know each other RIGHT NOW!!!!" and the much smaller, much saner department orientation, which was essentially the same thing, only with "3,000" replaced by "9, only 7 of whom are actually in attendance."

I had a very pleasant morning, if such a thing can be said, at the campus-wide orientation; in some ways, i.e. the part where we offered one factoid about ourselves for each M&M we ate, it smacked of freshman orientation at the Lord's Undergraduate Institution, or at least I suspect it did, given that on that day so many years ago I lasted through precisely thirty minutes of get-to-know-you games before I snuck off to the library to read Georgette Heyer novels.

In other ways, though, it was probably a good preparation for grad school in all its many glories: I had to sit through fifteen minutes worth of information that took two hours to present. I learned lots of new stuff: this year, Indian foreign students outnumbered Chinese foreign students for the first time. The incoming class has students from 49 states, all of them except Nebraska. I live next door to where Jack Kerouac used to live. (Literally. He was at ***3 and I'm at ***5.) Oh, and I met some interesting people, from a bearded white guy with an Indian accent, to a hyper-friendly electrical engineering fourth year who comes to new student orientation just for the buzz of meeting new people. And, of course, I suffered through the obligatory Northern California indoctrination: "If we can solve it in California, we can solve it for the world." Right. Maybe Unnamed U needs a new slogan: "Let there be misplaced idealism." Or maybe "A voice of one crying sustainable living in the wilderness." Or maybe just "Truth."

(Ha, ha.)

Most of all, though, the orientation, especially my department orientation, left me overwhelmed and, frankly, terrified. You can only take so many hours of grad students telling you their life as a first year was Study Hell before you start to feel nervous, with that sneaking, sinking sense of oh, wait, I'm going to be stressed out. And, just in case I wasn't worried enough, I'm the youngest and least experienced of my entering class, which consists mostly of foreign students (4/9), students who have already finished a master's degree (at least 3/9; I'm not sure about some of the others), and students who have spent years working; I'm the only one who's not a California resident, and one of the only ones who hasn't spent time at Berkeley before; the only Mormon, clearly, in a place where, when that comes up, people say, "yes, but you're not a practicing Mormon, right?"; and one of only two girls. Oh, and the one is a German girl who looks like a supermodel, and who is very nice to boot. And here I thought I could at least match the looks of the average Ph.D. student. Curse you, Germany! Quit ruining the average for the rest of us!

And, of course, I feel like everyone is vastly more prepared--or, at least, able to project that impression--and as I left the building, after getting a residency lecture from the graduate secretary, who was sure to emphasize that I should save EVERYTHING, every receipt and every piece of mail and every, I don't know, package of ramen, I was already practicing my deep breathing, thinking, what on earth have I gotten myself into? And so I rushed home, stopping only to buy massive amounts of sugary items, changed into a Hello Kitty nightgown, and curled up in bed with my favorite Georgette Heyer novel. (Yes, I'm the youngest of my cohort; what of it?) I think I'll stay here until school starts. It's much easier to be orientated when there's only a book to face.

This Is Not My Beautiful House!

Finding an apartment in Provo was never a big deal: I seemed to stumble into housing situations, or, more accurately, I seemed to rely on others to choose housing situations for me, and since I rarely notice things like low ceilings, ugly carpets, and broken dryers, and since I lived in the library anyway, that system worked, I thought, quite well. I still think fondly, and not without amusement, on January 2005, when I returned to Provo from Egypt and started classes with no winter clothes, no school supplies or textbooks, and no apartment. One afternoon after phonetics class, I called three apartments, walked two blocks to one of them, signed a lease, and moved in. That was that.

I should have known that the Berkeley housing market was not like the Provo one when the secretary of my new department sent around an email to all incoming graduate students warning us that “the biggest worry and nuisance facing you is probably housing.” This over, say, registering for classes, choosing an advisor, or financing a higher degree in a useless subject.

I, personally, would worry most about that whole where-is-my-next-meal-coming-from issue, but where-will-that-meal-be-cooked was also a pressing concern for me in my first weeks here, so I spent, as I’ve mentioned, entire days refreshing the Craigslist rentals page. I scrolled through what seemed like hundreds of ads for tiny, dark bedrooms in tiny, dark apartments, for which I would have to pay…well, a lot of money.

I was clearly not the only one willing to pay what seemed like the GDP of a small nation just for a 8’x8’ room; I very rarely got replies to my emails or phone calls, despite being, as far as I can tell, an ideal tenant. (I don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. I’m quiet. I’m responsible. I can wash a dish. I’m a grad student, an advantage in a town crawling with undergrads. I even have a scholarship, so I can afford to rent a room, though not an apartment.) Yet I count, now, 29 unanswered emails in my inbox, and my cell phone bill shows 15 or so unreturned calls. Thanks, housing market. You can sure make a girl feel good.

I investigated nearly every response I got. After nearly two weeks of emailing, calling, and visiting, though, my roommate options were still slim: an awkward guy who, after showing me the apartment, asked if he could keep my number and call me sometime; an old Jewish lady who wasn’t sure if she could live with a Mormon; and a lovely lesbian couple renting out their guest room to make money for a baby.

Needless to say, I decided to keep looking. The lesbians, who seemed like the best option, lived farther from campus than I’d like, and I suspected I’d always feel slightly out of place in their charming Crate and Barrel-furnished home. The old lady was conspicuously lonely, and the awkward guy—well, I don’t really have to explain that one.

In the end, though, I found an apartment that is, basically, exactly what I was looking for. It’s three blocks to campus and downtown and four blocks to church. It’s surrounded by thrift stores and Indian sari shops, kitty-corner from an Indonesian restaurant, and has sixteen(!) bookstores within a mile of it. The rent is cheap, for Berkeley, which means I’m only paying twice what I did in Provo, instead of three or four times. I’ve only got one roommate, a very funny, very nice late-twenties Staples employee, and we get along swimmingly, at least so far.

But yes, there is a catch: it’s a one-bedroom apartment. And I have a roommate. Though I’ve sworn I’m not going to share a room again until I get married—and, depending on how loud a future husband snores, maybe not even then—and so I have done the logical thing. I have moved into the living room.

That’s right—I’m paying all that money for three walls, not four. I can’t use the door-hanging mirror I inherited from a cousin because I don’t have a door. And my roommate now, instead of knocking, can just stand in the kitchen and say, “Hello?” because I can hear her. I have, in essence, 75% of a room.

My fourth "wall." Yes, that's me in the corner taking the picture.

It’s not so bad, though. Turns out, that's plenty, if I've got bookstores around. And now, after a week of daily trips to Ikea for furniture and floor-to-ceiling curtains, and after a few days of unpacking, I am finally, officially, moved in. And it doesn’t look so bad. I've got a bed, a desk, a couple of bookcases, and curtains pretending to be a wall. Oh, and because the rent is so low, I've got money for my next meal, which will probably be Indonesian food. What more could a poor grad student want?