I'm giving thanks I survived Thanksgiving

We drove down to Southern California for Thanksgiving: a day and a half in Riverside, two days in Irvine, and a day in San Diego. It feels like we (okay, Mike) spent most of the vacation driving, but it was worth it: we hung out with family, ate impressive amounts of decadent food, and even did some hiking. Also, this was the first Thanksgiving I spent with my nuclear family since 2003, so that was lovely. All in all, it was good.

Except for when our muffler fell off.

It was midnight and we were driving away from my aunt's house when we heard a funny dragging noise and then, just a minute or two later, a loud thud. We all jumped out to investigate and I took a picture, of course. That's the muffler, rusted clean through.

We didn't feel like getting it fixed right then, so we did the drive back from San Diego with no muffler. The car had been noisy for a long time (that's the thing about a rusty muffler, you see), so that wasn't a problem. I was worried about the carbon monoxide issue, though--would it kill us and HOW WOULD WE KNOW?!?

(I know with most newer cars there's not really as big a risk, but my dad had a friend who died of carbon monoxide poisoning, many years ago, so I'm probably more paranoid than the average bear about this.)

So I'm sitting in the car, six hours into the drive back, and fretting more and more about carbon monoxide, so much so that I finally decide to look up the symptoms. Here's the list I find:

• Irritability
• Headache 
• Loss of focus
• Nausea
• Shortness of breath
• Claustrophobia
• Unexplained panic

I read the list of symptoms and realize I have every. single. one. of. them. I am going to die! Quick, quick, roll down the windows! And then I realize I was premenstrual (irritability), under-rested (headache), working on something really boring (loss of focus), eating only pretzels and Bugles (nausea), while sitting (shortness of breath) in a car (claustrophobia) that might be killing me silently (unexplained panic). Oh.

How clever of carbon monoxide, generated by a car, to mimic so precisely the exact symptoms of a road trip!

"Poker Face", the early drafts

P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)

I won't tell you that I love you
Kiss or hug you
Cause I'm... 

Shakin' with my bacon?
Doing kegels with my bagel?
Feeling awful about my waffle?
Wanting to boast about my toast?

Bluffin' with my muffin
I'm not lying I'm just stunnin' with my love-glue-gunning

And that's why you always leave a note

I was just looking through the draft posts in my queue--I've started far more blog entries than I've finished, alas--when I came across one called "Note To Self."  The entire draft was the following three lines:

Remember that time I set off the fire alarm in the HBLL?
Make up and out
Why should the hippo be denied the intimacy of the modern dental experience?

I can vaguely remember what each thing referred to--I accidentally set off the fire alarm in BYU's library once; "make up and out" is a great example of syllepsis, one of my favorite figures of speech; and the line about the hippo is something I once wrote down and then found, three years later, unable to figure out why--but I can't remember for the life of me what the connection between the three was, or why the draft was a "note to self."  Man, I really wish I had finished that post.

Abyssinia, I'll be seein' ya

What I've just read: The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, a novel about an Ethiopian immigrant in Washington, D.C., and Beneath the Lion's Gaze, a novel about an Ethiopian family during the political turmoil of the 1970s. Oh, and a series of long Wikipedia articles about Haile Selassie, the Derg, and Ge'ez.

What I'm reading right now: Eating the Flowers of Paradise, a travelogue about a trip through Ethiopia and Yemen in search of qat.

What I'm going to read next: Cutting for Stone, a novel set in India, Ethiopia and New York.

My grandma always said that pleasure has three parts: looking forward to it, experiencing it, and remembering it. From my recent reading habits, you can guess I've got a trip to Ethiopia coming up (in late December/early January, just in time for Orthodox Christmas). I don't know what the actual experience or the memories will be like, but I'm thoroughly enjoying the anticipation.

The Phony King of England

These past few weeks I've been rediscovering some old loves--blogging, I guess, but also Modest Mouse and Sharon Kay Penman's historical fiction and cottage cheese. I could eat cottage cheese all day long. When I was little and my family went out to eat at Ruby Tuesday (we were high-class people, clearly), I would order the salad bar and then load a plate full of cherry tomatoes and cottage cheese. Yum.

The biggest rediscovery, though, is audiobooks, specifically a little site called Librivox: free audiobooks in the public domain, read by volunteers. It neatly combines my love of reading, multitasking, and free things, with a tiny dash of the ridiculous, since the volunteers are often trying to practice their English: with Librivox, I used to listen to The Portrait of a Lady read by someone with a heavy Chinese accent while I ran endless miles training for a half marathon. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it.

Fast forward to now. I have a whole shelf of books I've bought but never read, and since Mike is obsessed with seeing the "finished" stack grow, I've promised that I'll actually work on my shelf. (It needs no more description, in this house: "my shelf" is enough.) Since I haven't been reading as much this year due to a certain New Year's resolution, Librivox is a great way to catch up on my backlog and, little by little, clear the shelf.

So I'm listening to Ivanhoe, a book I bought at 13 and have been meaning to read ever since, and I have to say, I'm a little surprised at how entertaining it is, considering how many times I've started and rejected it in the past. The prose is pretty florid, but there's a decent adventure story under all the 19th century romanticism, and besides, who can resist a good Robin Hood reference? I didn't know before how many of the current Robin Hood legends came from Ivanhoe, and I was pleasantly surprised to suddenly be hearing the old stories about Prince John and King Richard the Lionheart and Robin of Locksley trouncing all challengers in a shooting contest. I found myself picturing the scenes in my mind's eye, more than I usually do: Prince John, wily and incompetent, with his crown falling down around his eyes; King Richard, big, bluff, blond, and lionlike; Robin Hood, a brilliant archer but somewhat wobbly on his long, spindly legs...

Wait. Spindly legs? Lions? Prince John's crown falling over his ears? As it turns out, all of my images of the Robin Hood story are taken straight from Disney.  Not that that's a bad thing: Disney's version is a lot funnier than Sir Walter Scott's, and I have to admit to mild disappointment when Ivanhoe's tournament scene didn't end with rhino guards running wild. That scene always cracks me up. 

(A note on the video, if you click through: it's in Danish. This is partly because it's the best version I could find, and partly because of a game that I got from my friend Alea, where you try to find clips from Disney in their "original" language. You know--The Jungle Book in the original Hindi.  The Hunchback of Notre Dame in the original French. Hercules in Greek, Mulan in Chinese, Pocahontas in Algonquian. I couldn't find Robin Hood in Early Middle English, so Danish, being the original homeland of the Jutes, will have to suffice.)

So there I am, listening to Ivanhoe via Librivox and imagining one of my favorite childhood movies. It's like a smorgasbord of old loves! Next time I'll throw in some cottage cheese as a snack.

I'm not dead. I feel fine. I feel happy!

I'm still alive, and I still, in some sense, have a blog, though I have to admit I was a little surprised when my Blogger login credentials worked.

(That is, until I remembered that I can just use my Google account. See how long it's been since I've blogged?)

It seems like every blog I check in on these days is dead or dying. Maybe that's the way of the world, but it makes me a little sad. Reading back through some of my old posts, I think--oh yeah, this was fun. So let's keep doing it, ok?

Outside my window right now is a neighbor shouting, "Where are you?" She repeated it several times, louder and slower each time, until she finally spelled it out: Where W-H-E-R-E are A-R-E you Y-O-U? I hope she learns where her interlocutor is, because I'd like to go to bed soon.

So where am I? We're living in North Oakland these days, not far from where I lived when I wrote this post. Unfortunately, we're on the wrong side of the tracks through an already transitional neighborhood, which means lots of noise. Noise and pot smoke. But hey, rent is cheap, and who doesn't love a contact high on a Saturday night?

I'm still at working at my unnamed Internet company, and it's still fantastic. Not just the perks and benefits, though those are pretty great, or even the people--awesome, every last one--but the work! I moved to a different role at the company about six months ago, and now I'm an internet payments fraud analyst. Doesn't that sound like a real job? It totally does, and so corporate, too. Who would have thought I'd enjoy any sort of corporate work? Not me. And yet I still wake up excited every morning for the problems I'm going to tackle that day. I'm like a recruiting informercial or something, but I swear I'm not joking. Clearly, I'm not leaving it for law school anytime soon.

I'm still married, and it's still fantastic. You know, just to make sure I don't rave about my job more than my marriage. Marriage has its own perks and benefits, I guess, though it's pretty hard to beat three gourmet meals a day.

Not much has really changed for me in the last, oh, year or so, and in general I just feel far more boring than I used to be. I still read a lot. I've convinced Mike that traveling is a good thing (we just went to Singapore and Indonesia, and we're planning a trip to Ethiopia this winter) and he's convinced me that I can tolerate backpacking. (The California coast is beautiful, so much so that it's almost--dare I say it?--worth hiking!) I'm not an early morning seminary teacher anymore, thank goodness, though my new calling comes with its own irritations. (Meetings, meetings, meetings! I'm definitely not corporate enough yet to enjoy endless meetings.)

So that's me. What about you?

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.