Your Mom. No, Wait, Mine.

Those who know me, but not my mom, in real life probably have a very skewed picture on what it means to be Petra's Mother. They've probably heard detailed stories about her sex life like "how she celebrated graduation from BYU ¹," "why Mormon men get addicted to pornography ²," and "my grandmother's sex advice³." If they've heard other stories, they probably have formed a mental image of my mother as a sex-crazed, Valium-abusing, ditzy redhead oozing excess maternal energy towards not only her small, white, yappy, fluffy dog but also towards all the stray animals in Delhi, from dogs to donkeys.

They'd be wrong in this vision, of course. Her appearances in my personal narrative repetoire aside, my mother is actually brilliant and capable--enough, in fact, to earn one BA, one MA, and one Ph.D. and then, on top of all that, to face returning to school at 40 to earn yet another BA.

That's not funny, though, so I hide the stories about, you know, the time she earned a Ph.D. despite having two kids and tell the stories about, say, the time she multiplied 5 by 6 and got 80.

In any case, the border between these two sides of her character seems to grow thinner and thinner as I age, and this thin line of transition constantly startles me. Once, in a high school seminary class, we watched a video about evil, or sin, or pride, or extra piercings, or, I don't know, one of those other things we should avoid. The video featured a man lecturing sternly about how rock music is of the devil--specifically, he claimed that Mick Jagger was the devil incarnate. He had all sorts of evidence: he hired Hell's Angels (coincidence? I think not!), claimed the devil inspired their music (it's true!) and even openly sympathized with the devil (you can look it up!).

This might have affected teenagers in 1968, but for a much more jaded 2001 crowd, it was laughable. I regaled all my non-Mormon friends at school that day with that paticular piece of seminary craziness, and when I got home I was eager to share the laughs with my mom. I told her all about the video, playing up this man's complete craziness--honestly, where do people get such strange ideas?

"That is silly," she said, chuckling. "Mick Jagger as the devil? I've never heard anything so ridiculous in my whole life." She stopped laughing suddenly and looked directly at me. "Clearly, it's Keith Richards."

Here's to my mom, a character I don't even have to exaggerate.



¹Sex in the SWKT bathroom.
²Their wives aren't adventurous enough in bed. "Dress up! Take pictures!"
³Practice the butterfly stroke.

How I Spend My Time

What I read in the course of 13 days of vacation:

Adverbs, Daniel Handler
You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon
Word Freak, Stefan Fatsis
The Truth, Terry Pratchett
A Basque History of the World, Mark Kurlansky
Pompeii, Richard Harris
The Grass Harp, Truman Capote
The Best American Essays (College Edition), ed. Robert Atwan
The Broker, John Grisham
44 Scotland St., Alexander McCall Smith
Letters to a Young Mathematician, Ian Stewart
Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
Rhinoceros and other plays, Eugene Ionesco
Why Girls Can't Throw, Mitchell Symons
A House in Sicily, Daphne Phelps
Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey

What else did I do? I played countless games of capitalism, poker, solitaire, sudoku, and the perfect card game. Spare time? Yeah, I've got that.

(Oh, right, and I toured Italy.)

What if it's me?

I made a comment at Institute last night.

I'll pause while you all reel from shock. Yes, I know this presupposes that I went to Institute. Yes, I know this is out of character, but my roommate wanted to go, and I wanted to spend time with her, so there we are. (It's out of character for my roommate, too, but you'll have to ask her about that, not me.)

Usually, though, I've stayed firmly in character by letting my mind wander during our undeservedly-praised lessons. (Everyone seems to think the teacher is "just wonderful!" I wonder, would they admit it if she weren't? How much can a recommendation from the stake institute leader be trusted?) During our first institute class, my roommate (who has no online moniker) leaned over to me roughly five minutes into the lesson and said, "Tell me your entire romantic history." With that, neither of us listened to the teacher again. (It was no big loss. She was talking about how hard Isaiah is, an attitude I detest.)

During our second class, my roommate whispered with Kaneeneenie, who--also out of character!--had decided to join us for the night. Left in the lurch, I spent the class period formulating a simple alphabetic substitution code based on the International Phonetic Alphabet. (It's not too bad, I think--there's a few little twists that make it difficult to deciper, yet still easy to encode.)

Last night was the third class. I spent most of the period working on my honors thesis--a task I'm diligently avoiding right now, with only 14 hours left in which I could possibly work on it--but managed to zone into the lesson for just long enough to start experiencing some inner Sturm und Drang at the divisive, judgmental, utterly stupid "us vs. them" mentality that seemed to be general all over the class. (Name that allusion, Tolkien Boy!)

So I made my comment. I meant to stir up a bit of trouble, but the teacher misinterpreted what I was saying into a much milder point, and, alas, no brouhaha ensued.

I'm following in a grand family tradition of riling up church lessons, though, and now I can get to my actual point, my favorite of many family stories which feature my dad in one of his favorite roles, "Sunday School Provocateur."

This was in the Boston area, roughly 20 years ago. (I give you a place and time because if you ever run in to anyone who was there, they'll remember this.) The topic in Sunday School that day was the Antichrist, and the discussion, as such discussions often do, had degenerated into speculation about who the Antichrist might be--Hitler, the Pope, the Secretary General of the U.N., insert your least favorite public figure here--and my dad got frustrated and raised his hand.

"This is all well and good," he said, "but I think the real question is this: what if it's me?"

Now, he had a valid doctrinal point here: the word, after all, can be applied to anyone who fights against Christ. We are all in danger of becoming an antichrist, and so we must all constantly watch ourselves, our thoughts, and our words to prevent it.

My dad had been in this ward for a while, though, and had a reputation. The way my mom tells the story, about half the people in the room pondered the actual doctrinal implications, while the other half, she could tell, were thinking, "Yeah! What if it is him?"

So I leave you to ponder that question: what if my father is the Antichrist?

I Am Petra's Upset Stomach

I spent this weekend sick as a dog. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration: "sick as a relatively healthy dog" might be a better way of putting it.

In any case, those who are squeamish about stomach ailments may want to stop reading this post sometime about now. In fact, you may want to stop reading my blog for good, since I anticipate many more stomach-centered posts come the end of the summer, when I go to Indonesia.

Stomach ailments have been par for the course for me my entire life. "Par for the course" means, roughly, once a week. I've always been convinced that I picked up a nasty little parasite of some kind in Indonesia, and that, in addition to the hereditary gift of carrying stress in my stomach, has left me with perpetual stomach-related episodes. I can tell any number of amusing and completely disgusting stories: throwing up on the platform at a train station in Cairo, sneaking up and down the aisles of an airplane late at night to collect extra barf bags, spending forty-five minutes in the bathroom at the Taj Mahal, each and every time I've eaten Indian or Thai food--at this point, nearly anything can trigger a story beginning, "so this one time, I was really sick..."

(My mom has a story that can destroy all comers, though--an incident that literally knocked her socks off. And trust me when I tell you that I know the difference between "literally" and "figuratively.")

In any case, this weekend's episode--Season 21, Episode 138, "Petra vs. Pasta"--was worse than expected, and I decided to take action, in the form of a little detective work. Narrowing down the list of ingredients in the pasta, curry, and taco salad that have most recently emptied my intenstines, I have reached this conclusion: it's a food allergy.

So I'll open it up for a vote. Get your mouse-clicking fingers ready, kids: am I allergic to onions, or am I allergic to garlic?

Thoughts, Alone On Campus At Midnight

Never adopt the old-lady habit of turning your headlights on at daylight. You will forget them when you turn off the car, guaranteed. Also, Petra, you are stupid.

Why was it necessary to drive to campus, anyway? Doesn’t the idea of walking sound so much more appealing?

Thank heaven for cell phones.

Hi there, Tolkien Boy. Hi there, Optimistic. Hi there, Roommate’s Boyfriend. Hi there, Roommate’s Fiance. Hi there, Friend From Old Ward. Does no one have jumper cables?

What could the University Police possibly be doing right now that they can't help me?

Never be caught anywhere without a book. Drat.

Why, oh why, won’t the internet work? Oh, please, technological powers that be, smile upon me!

iFilm is one cool program.

Actually, Macs are just cool in general. I’m a fan.

Desert climates get rather chilly in the evening. I should have brought a sweater.

Be polite to the police, even when they make you wait for forty-five minutes in the middle of the night. All can be forgiven, as long as they come bearing jumper cables and a working car as a peace offering.

Mister Cream

So, while I was in Egypt last year my roommates and I walked to school every day through downtown Alexandria. On our way, we passed a park, where every morning without fail the Egyptian gardener greeted us.

Greetings are a big deal in Egypt. The standard morning greeting in Egypt is "sabah ilxiir," or "good morning." It is then standard for the other person to respond with "sabah innur," or "morning of light." The two participants then, if time and mood oblige, engage in a friendly battle of greetings. The aim is to think up good things--jasmine flowers, the sun, cream; anything pretty and, preferably, white will do--and wish the other person a morning full of them.

This old man tried to do this with us every single morning we passed, and most mornings we failed miserably. Our vocabulary just wasn't that good, after all, and we couldn't get much further than "light" or, at best, "jasmine." He would typically chuckle at our ineptitude and wave us on our merry way.

One morning, though, I bested him, completely unexpectedly.

"Good morning," he called.

"Morning of light!" I responded.

"Morning of roses!"

"Morning of jasmine!"

"Morning of cream!" He was grinning, sure that this would be his triumph. He was almost right: I was at a loss for words, but, determined to say something, I said the first freely-associated phrase I could think of:

"Morning of Mister Cream!" I countered. For those who don't speak Arabic, "Mister Cream," or "sa'eed ishta," is the slangy Egyptian colloquial Arabic word for "hippopotamus." (The Modern Standard Arabic term, as one would expect, translates literally to "river horse.")

Yes, that's right: I wished him a morning full of happy hippos, and he reacted just like you might think: his mouth hung open in pure confusion for a few minutes, and then started to laugh. And laugh. And laugh. He nearly sprayed himself with the hose he was holding, and then he actually had to sit down, he was laughing so hard.

I won that one for sure. Every morning thereafter, he watched for my approach with a twinkle in his eye, and skipped through all the standard ceremony to greet me with a cheery, "Morning of the hippopotamus!"

Miss Pronunciation

So. It's time to confess a rather embarrassing linguistic habit. (Other than, of course, my habit of starting nearly all my sentences with "so.") For the necessary background, let me state this: I'm usually quite good with language. I'm a marvelous English speaker, actually--what a good vocabulary! Without a strong accent! And so fluent! It's almost like I've been speaking it all my life or something.

The problem, though, is that I learn nearly all my new words from books. I read quite a bit, and often encounter words in print that I've never heard before. This leads, of course, to me knowing a giant corpus of erudite and impressive words...without the faintest idea how to pronounce them. What with the vagaries of English spelling and all, I sometimes--frequently--miss the mark.

This tends to fluster even the strongest of my friends; expecting my facility with language to carry over into the basics of English pronunciation, they goggle in shock and, sometimes, slight panic when I flub even a syllable. This habit noticeably bothered Optimistic while we were playing Trivial Pursuit the other night. Although at first he gently corrected me, after 5 or 6 such errors I could see him getting frustrated: "Did you just say a-MIC-a-ble? Everyone knows it's A-mic-a-ble! What's the matter with you?"

So, in honor of Optimistic's recent frustration, I present to you the Top 5 Petra Pronunciation Errors.

(One small warning: despite my linguistics undergrad, I'm almost as bad with phonetic transcription as with pronunciation. Sorry if you can't read it, and sorry if you think it's wrong. They're all based on the OED's system, though, not always the IPA, so if you try to argue with me, I'll just tell you that I do, in fact, pronounce it like the BBC.)

5. /lvsks/ Yes, that's right: "lascivious" pronounced like "viscous" with a "la" on the front. I misread it once when I was a kid and it stuck. This one's pretty normal, actually, in that there's a genuine reason for it. I was shocked, at 17, to learn the actual pronunciation, although I admit that, while there's a certain charm to my own--I always imagined a slow-moving, gelatinous sort of lust--the correct pronunciation matches the word's meaning much better.

4. /'kæpri/ Like the pants, or the sunny juice drink. I put the em'phasis on the wrong sy'llable. I'm not sure where I picked this up--but now I stick to it with my habitual tenacity. Every time I compliment someone's pedal pushers, or offer them a delicious CapriSonne, I make sure to emphasize that first syllable, awkward as can be. It gets a few raised eyebrows, sure, but it also lends me a certain distinguished air, or so I tell myself. Since I also claim that I picked up this pronunciation in Indonesia, my strange pronunciation has a faint aura of the exotic about it.

(I also, if you hadn't noticed, insist on spelling the drink name CapriSonne. I first encountered CapriSonnes in Jakarta, where they were all imported from Germany, or made in Indonesia by a German company, or something. That too will never change; don't bother trying to persuade me otherwise.)

3. /k'rktr/ Again, the emphasis in the wrong place. I made fun a friend once during my freshman year for her strange Utah accent, which caused her to say that word differently from me. She dragged me to an online dictionary to prove to me that her way was, in fact, correct. Abashed and slightly confused, I called my parents, guessing that maybe they were to blame.

"Dad, how do you say the word that describes those really exaggerated drawings of people?"

"/'kærktr/, of course." Hm. Not him.

I asked my mom next. She took a minute to think, and then said, satisfied with herself for passing whatever strange test this was, "/k'rktr/. Definitely."

So, that's it, you see. This be the verse: I blame my mother for all my articulatory failings.

2. Let's start this one off with another confession: I heard of David Bowie for the first time when I was 15. Yes, yes, I have my head in the sand. Now, of course, my first encounter with his name was in print. One day in my junior year of high school, I let slip some comment about Mr. Bowie to a friend, who has still not stopped laughing at this incident. I pronounced his name /'buwi/, like to rhyme with "kablooey" or "hooey." In my defense, this is the way "Bowie Knife" is often pronounced, at least in Bob Dylan's song "I Shall Be Free No. 10." If you can't trust Bob Dylan, who can you trust?

Apparently, though, this didn't matter to my friend. I'm sure that someone, somewhere, has mentioned "Ziggy Stardust" to her and been slightly taken aback when she bursts into a fit of the giggles.

1. Finally, the number one mispronunciation of my whole entire life. When I was a kid, I had a box of crayons with a bunch of fancy colors--cerulean, periwinkle, cerise, and other such--and one of the crayon names, a dark pink, really stymied me. One fateful evening, while my parents were having a dinner party with some friends from church, I lost that crayon and wandered all over the house looking for it, including into the dining room, where our guests sat chatting.

"Mom," I whined, "have you seen my fuchsia crayon?"

Except I didn't say it /'fju/. My preferred pronunciation at the time was something more like /'fk/, rhyming nicely with "ducksha" or "lucksha," which was probably--judging by the stifled gasps I got--not a good way to say it. I learned the right way to say that color fast.

Thank you, Crayola.

Mr. Mechanic, Will You Marry Me?

I am in love with a mechanic. Head over high heels, I fell for a balding middle-aged man this morning, and, in the midst of this burning passion, I wish to shout my good news from the rooftops. (Or, you know, post it on the internet. Same thing.)

There's a reason for this, of course. In the aftermath of finals, my car, that wonderful white warrior, has been acting up. By "acting up," I really mean "squealing like a stuck pig whenever it moves." This has been going on for a while--maybe, oh, a month?--but only in small, quiet doses; in the last few days, though, its noise knows no bounds. I think it's reacting to my neglect of our relationship during the last few weeks of the semester, and, like a deprived child, misbehaving in the hope of attention.

Well, it's getting attention, let me tell you, and not just from me. Other drivers eye me suspiciously, as if my car's own impending doom threatens their own. Pedestrians turn and stare, mouths agape. Tolkien Boy, after following my car in his own for a quick 5-minute drive the other day, announced upon stepping out, "When my car made that noise, the mechanic said there was about 15 minutes of driving between me and death."

I guess, when I think about it, that they're right to stare. After all, it's not every day you hear a car squeak like mine. It screeches when I apply the brakes in drive, and it growls when I apply the breaks in reverse. Sometimes, it even shrieks when I'm not applying the brakes, as if it's just warming up for the big league, when I'm ready to slow down again. People, I'm serious. It's bad. It's like dolphins singing opera. I come to a stoplight: "Siegfriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiied!!!! EEE EEE EEE!" I shift into reverse: "Brünnhiiiiiiiiiiilde! OOO OOO OOO!" I drive a straight road, and it's all the Rhinemaidens together: "Whistle! Whistle, click, chirp! Götterdämmeruuuuuuuuuuuuung!"

Clearly, it was time to visit a mechanic. The problem, though, is that I try to avoid practical matters at all costs. Fearless and active as I am in intellectual domains, the moment I have to complete reality-based, world-savvy, part-of-normal-adult-life-in-this-modern-world errands--making phone calls, paying taxes, visiting doctors, dealing with insurance companies--I freeze with panic. I tend to adopt a more passive approach to these tasks; indeed, I close my eyes and think of the Empire, hoping that if I lie quietly, it will all be over quickly. In general, this means that I faithfully write these tasks on my to-do list and opt to do homework instead. In one notable case, a task of this sort remained undone for slightly over two years.

Auto mechanics are even worse than doctors, insurance agents, or customer service representatives. I know nothing about cars--I originally wrote "next to nothing," and was forced to revise--and I'm convinced that I'll betray that within the first five seconds of our interaction. In my waking nightmares on the subject, the mechanic asks me what's wrong with the car, and I can't even describe the symptoms. "It...makes noise," I'll say, fluttering my hands in feminine helplessness. Or "It just...feels wrong." Those who know me should see the problem here: I am not typically a victim of feminine helplessness. I do not typically ascribe problems to "feeling." And I do not--do not--"flutter." If asked to diagnose the problem, I'm sure I'd be even worse, and would end up looking like a total fool: "Maybe it's the muffler...belt?"

Nonetheless, this morning, I girded up my loins, gathered my courage, gritted my teeth, insert your own idiom here,* and drove over to the mechanic, my car practicing its high-pitched vowel sounds the whole way. ("AAAAEEEEEIIIIIIOOOOOUUUUU!") Reminding myself that muffler belts do not exist, I pulled into the auto shop's parking lot--screeeeeeeeech!--and idled for a moment, looking for a likely place to deposit my car before humbly approaching the mechanic, as a devotee to an idol.

I was startled out of my reverie by a tap on the window. It was the mechanic, bald, fortyish, overweight, henceforth to be called my One True Love. I rolled down my window, cringing in anticipation--thousands of dollars on repairs, maybe, or a long lecture chastising me for even daring to defile his workshop with my ignorance. Or was I about to park illegally?

"Your brake pads are shot," he said. "I could hear it as you drove in. $120. I'm not open today, but if you bring your car back next week I'll fix it. " My OTL walked away. I never even had to get out of the car.

The light broke through the clouds, and angel choirs harmonized with the dolphin sopranos in my brake pads. In my rear view mirror, the mechanic's bald pate shone like a nimbus of celestial glory. He was beautiful. The music was beautiful. Provo was beautiful. Life was beautiful.

Hélas. It won't last, I know. He's probably already married. I mean, how could a man like that not be snatched up like the last Green Power Ranger on the Toys 'R Us shelf? And, as it turns out, I particularly don't care; I'll indulge myself in the joy of the moment instead of pondering our future together. I'm more the mistress type anyway.

*Sometimes a pre-emptive strike is justified: I girded your mom's loins last night.** I gathered your mom's courage last night. I gritted your mom's teeth last night. And yes, of course, I inserted your mom's own idiom here last night.

**Mom, if you're reading this, I'm sorry. I mean no disrespect to mothers worldwide, I promise.

Spounce Away

Well, folks, it's finals week, beginning in exactly 1 hour and 13 minutes. (I considered providing you the exact seconds, as we all know how important precision is, but really: a line must be drawn.) In that hour and 13 minutes, I should grade 9 more student homework assignments, at roughly 20 minutes each. In that hour and 13 minutes, I should also finish 3 take-home essay prompts due tomorrow by 10 AM. (All right, I confess: when I say "finish," I really mean "start." And when I say "start," I really mean "read the questions.")

So what does the advent of finals mean for us "diligent student" types? Right when I should be putting my nose to the grindstone, pedal to the medal, my shoulder to the wheel, or what have you, what am I doing instead?

Why, creating a blog, of course. No longer am I on the outside of all that is Cool with a capital C in the early twenty-first century. No longer will I wallow and despair in my Luddite tendencies. No longer will I be denied the privileges of saying things like, "Something funny happened to me yesterday. You should read about it on my blog." (This, in my mind, is nearly the embodiment of modern hauteur, surpassed only by phrases like, "Have your people call my people." Ah, I aspire to the day when I can say--and mean--such a pretentious thing. Alas, with a Ph.D. in linguistics as the plan, this day is far from likely.) Yes, that's right, dear reader: I will now officially break into the ranks of the technocrati, and my new-blossoming blog can be the blog created this second. (That's the average rate of new blogs created. Were you aware?)

Of course, this Finals Week Procrastination (capitalized in the most magnificently Teutonic way, of course, as if such orthographic conventions might count as studying for my German final) is nothing new. During finals week last semester, Optimistic and I crafted the best Board response ever. During finals week the semester before that, I started and finished Les Miserables, a thick tome of a book. During finals week the semester before that, I started rereading the Old Testament, and got halfway into Numbers within three days.

So, essentially, I am obligated to start this blog, if only to maintain my own long-standing tradition of wasting time in fantastically obvious ways. This is no mere spouncing*, friends; this is squandering.

You all may resume your normal activities now. If your normal activites happen to involve squandering, or even just spouncing, I know a great game. If you're actually trying to get work done, you'll kill me for even mentioning the name, so I'll just hint at it: it starts with Sn-, and rhymes with "brood," and it's not "Snyood."

*spounce, v. To waste time in small amounts by doing various activities, none of them significant in themselves, like playing "just one more" game of Minesweeper, writing "just one more" email, or reading "just one more" blog entry. Etymology: semantic extension from "spouncer," a small craft tool, or "innovative stenciling sponge on a handle." (See above image.)

One Yell Is Not Enough

My "teaching" job was pretty much a joke this week. One of the physics teachers was taking the students on a mini field trip to the Marina, for a morning of games and activities, and he invited me along as one of the supervising teachers. This means that instead of sitting in a classroom desperately trying to speak slowly enough for the students to understand, I sat on a bench by the Java Sea and desperately tried to speak slowly enough for the students to understand.

The activity was that each group had to invent a group cheer of some kind--coordinated cheer routines, or "yel-yel," being a popular pastime among the students and teachers both, for some strange reason--and then I had to give them a task to complete, in English.

The physics teacher wanted me to force the students to be creative and funny, so I simply told them to make me laugh. There was only one rule, I said: they had to speak English. (Upon hearing this, one of the boys' eyes lit up. "So we can tickle you?" he asked. I quickly added another rule.)

I have a healthy sense of humor, so the students were mostly successful at their task. I heard some Indonesian jokes, translated into broken English with my help, I saw some funny dances, and I even watched a silent skit. (This, in my mind, violated the "must speak English" rule, but since these poor girls took about 30 minutes to invent the skit, I decided not to mention it. The fact that it wasn't at all funny was another problem I overlooked on that basis.)

In any case, the best part of the morning was definitely watching the students perform their cheer routine. I don't know about you, but, in the past, when I've been assigned to create any sort of creative cheer expressing esprit-de-corps, it has always ended badly. Either the best minds of my team could only invent something lame--"Go yellow group, go! Yay."--or, at best, one girl sang something cute and well thought-out, while the rest of us stood in the background and tried to clap rhythmically. (And, in my case, mostly failed.)

Not so with these students. Each group, including a group made up entirely of 17 year old boys, had long, involved routines—songs with different verses sucking up to each of the supervising teachers, including a verse in English for me, to the tune of James Brown's "I Feel Good"; long chants about how "physics is hard but we know we can do it"; and complicated dance steps perfectly memorized by each member of the group. I was amazed at each of these routines and the ease, and cheer, with which the students performed them. I mean, not only can I not imagine a group of American high school seniors doing this with such creativity, I definitely cannot imagine any American high school senior boy shimmying--in broad daylight, completely sober, and in front of a teacher!--with a smile on his face.

Lucky me, I guess, getting to see it. Too bad I couldn't get a picture.