Wadi Mouth

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

Grad Student's Lament

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

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

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

(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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?