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

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

Which is the Chinese zodiac Year of the Bookworm?

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

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

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

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

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

Fiction Honorable Mentions

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, by Geoff Dyer

Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris

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

Non-Fiction Top 10

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain

Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

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

Manhood for Amateurs, by Michael Chabon

Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers

John Adams, by David McCullough

Non-Fiction Honorable Mentions

The Wisdom of Whores, by Elizabeth Pisani

The White Man’s Burden, by William Easterly

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

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Yeah, I Guess

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

Or do I secretly hate it?

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

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

When September Ends

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

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

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

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

Fragments, shored and otherwise

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

In some unspecified order of importance:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad:

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

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

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

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

Good:

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

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

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

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

Deny thy husband and refuse his name

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come, listen to a prophet's voice

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

Lorenzo Snow White served with seven very short apostles,

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

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

Brigham Young Frankenstein pronounced it Fronkensteen,

Joseph Smith & Wesson could protect himself from the mob,

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

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

Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turn and Face the Strange

This is a serious entry, guys.

(Well, aside from the David Bowie references.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diamonds Are Forever

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bless Me, Santa, For I Have Sinned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dylan in the Heart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say cheese

In our fridge right now we have:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sky was blue (whoa whoa whoa):


And we'll never be lonely anymore:

****

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

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

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


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

it had a wedding whale


a giant model of DNA


rock structures that can be shifted to replicate earthquake effects

cousins!

a stream that can be dammed up

and plenty of other fun toys.


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


a gamelan troupe


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


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

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


and dancing


and karate kicking


and hanging out with the cardboard cutout of my missionary brother


and being carried in chairs


and being tossed on a blanket.

***

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



[thanks to my cousin Margaret for the pictures]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

"I'm usually more charismatic than this."

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

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

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

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

29 days until the wedding

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

7 days until Mike gets back

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

19 days of coughing

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

In Mother Russia, liftoff has YOU

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.