In Mother Russia, liftoff has YOU

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

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


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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

My syntax brings all the boys to the yard

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

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

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

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

Dear L,

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

Confusedly yours,

Hannah

or

Dear L,

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

Nihilisticly yours,

Hannah

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

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

A Schutzian process of retypification? Drink!

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

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

(Catchy name, huh?)

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

The rules are simple: drink for academic anthropology stereotypes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Pause for groans.)

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

(Ba dum chh!)

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

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

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

(Or should I say "Puntecost"?)

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

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

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

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

Get Back, Jojo. Go Home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are We Not All Left-Handed?

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

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

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

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

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

(Amen.)

Hannah and Her Scissors

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 'There' There

(with no apologies to Gertrude Stein)

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

Let the Sunshine In

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

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

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

Like Hope, Only Different

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

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

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

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

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

The Man knows my history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Winter

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

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

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

Time for you and time for me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take That, Chomsky

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

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

Has anyone in this family ever even seen a chicken?

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

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

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Vote Yes on No

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

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

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

Barack Obama Is My New Bicycle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At first I was afraid, I was petrified

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

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

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

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

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

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

mbatE2008 stories: part 3: palling around with Palmyrans

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

Or basalt, in the case of Umm Qeis.

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



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


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

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

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

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

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

****

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

****

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