Friday, 2/6/04 - 20:52
It's been long enough since I've written a journal entry that it's getting hard to figure out what to write. There seem to be lots of pages of notes at the end of diary4.doc, but are any of them even close to being coherent, finished entries? No they are not. Lots of fragments like "Theme Ingredient: Eggplant: We have recently come into a great number of eggplants" -- which must have been written over the summer -- and the question "Are penises wrinkly enough to be infinitely long? Probably not, because skin cells --"
But here are a couple items I wrote over winter break. If memory serves me right, there are two main reasons this hasn't been posted until now: I wanted to write about how wonderful both our families were at Christmas, not to mention Chicago at New Years, and I kept meaning to write something about the research I was doing last quarter. That's one of the epistemological hazards of my journal: if I'm in the mood to write about the cool stuff I'm working on, then I'm just going to work on it, not write.
#1 PSA: You can now order Gambrinus, the King of Beers, online. This is a very good beer. Bunj can testify that it’s good.
#2 Theme of the quarter: labor disputes. Since the grocery workers’ strike began, we’ve been shopping at the Big Nasty (Costco), the tiny Asian market, the tiny Mexican market, the organic farm, and occasionally Trader Joe’s. I continue to be amazed that we've gone months without going to the grocery store. Secondly, being a TA means I’m a member -- dig -- of the United Auto Workers. We were going to strike during finals week, until the university caved. At least that’s what the union says. Since they wouldn’t give us full information about what they were bargaining for, I have no way of knowing which points we lost. What surprised me about the whole process was how stressful it was to spend a week not knowing whether or not I'd be teaching the next day.
#4 The Monday before Christmas, in our quest to find a place in LA that brews chai from scratch as opposed to powder, we ended up at a hip new green tea bar with our friend Andrew. All they serve is green tea, ice cream, and crepes, but the crepe machine was broken. (as broken as the hip of that Frau who came in looking for coffee)
#5 A long time ago this fall we got our own scuba gear and went diving with sea lions in a kelp forest. We watched them play and they were curious enough about us to follow us along for a while as we headed back to the boat. For weeks afterwards my emotional equilibrium was almost unshakeable, because how bad can anything be once you’ve been diving with sea lions? It was a Sunday, so I missed preparing for my section the next day, but that didn’t matter, either. What struck me about diving was the overwhelming certainty that there was nothing more worthwhile that I could have been doing with my time, and I wondered why swimming with sea lions should seem so worthwhile and when that sense of worth had departed from my day-to-day life. The second question I can answer anyway -- I think it was when I started T.A.ing and started feeling like half the work I did, the stuff I had to put in front of my own work since it's always due right now, was pretty much wasting the time of everyone involved. What makes teaching particularly painful is that I'd really like to be good at it and I'm too diligent to blow it off.
#6 New pet peeve: Students who complain about their grades because they can’t do math.
#7 Realized later in the quarter that I'm still completely in love with writing papers, despite everything that I technically know is wrong with the academy, and I sing this little love song to them:
I lit my love and watched it burn
Asking nothing in return
But the lessons I would learn
Holding crazy faith.
I've been touched by that bright fire
Down to the root of my desire
While the smoke, it rises higher
Glowing crazy faith
which comes from the Alison Krauss and Union Station CD I was listening to on continuous repeat while I was writing.
#8 Mom-sub-B is a kick-ass baker. A Week in Detroit:
1. Tuesday morning: Crack sugar cookies.
2. Tuesday evening: Birthday cake, which is another way of saying chocolate cake with white frosting and odd blue hieroglyphics. My brother likes computers, so last year Mom drew a mouse that looked like a sperm. This year she drew a computer monitor while I cackled, Bring me the snowman's head in a box!
3. Thursday morning: Money cake, which is our traditional Christmas breakfast. It’s a tasty pound cake with over $40 of real American money hidden in it!
4. Thursday evening: Pecan pie
5. Saturday morning: Ginger cookies, particularly delicious
6. Saturday evening: Almond cheesecake
7. Sunday afternoon: Rosie cookies (traditional for Christmas)
8. Monday evening: Peanut butter pie
9. Tuesday evening: Mint chocolate torte from the Swiss Colony, which was long my and my brother's favorite Advent food. We called the green filling bat barf and reminisced about our early childhood band, the Butt Benders, authors and performers of such hit songs such as "Pee and BMs are Gross! (that's why we love them so)."
10. Wednesday morning: Cheesecake bars -- good, if not ideal for a road trip
Then on the car ride to Chicago, Mom was complaining that she hadn't had enough chances to bake things while we were there. Every time I go home, I wonder why I left Detroit.
#9 Via the simple expedient of not eating, I'm at the lowest weight I've been since high school. (This stopped being true for the brief aforementioned time in Detroit -- now it's true again.) Lately my appetite's disappeared, maybe because of all the caffeine, and I'm a little bit worried because appreciating food is who I am and because I'm fairly sure that my body's not supposed to just stop wanting food. On the other hand, I'm enough of a contemporary American woman to think that losing five to seven pounds ("without hunger or cravings! I eat whatever I want whenever I want!") isn't completely bad.
#10 Gave a lecture on Las Vegas to a class while my advisor was away.
#11 Met new grad students through the science fiction club, and watched while the rest of our gaming group fell headlong into their proposed Shadowrun game. Goddam. I am not interested in 5 hour battles. But I don't have enough time to game at all right now, so I guess that's okay.
#12 Saw Derrida. He’s not as cool as Taussig, who’s the sexy new theorist that every grad student I know is in love with.
#13 Did you know that it was really common for popular press articles on Vegas in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s to describe the city using religious imagery? Would you like to know more? Actually I'm presenting a paper on this at a regional conference in April, since the Queen of Wands was wise and kind enough to organize a panel.
#14 Attempted to organize the Americanists in our department to have dinner twice a quarter. Good thought, but the organizing process has been impeded my inability to think more than a week ahead in time.
#15 I've interviewed 12 people on the street about Las Vegas. It could've been more if not for that snafu regarding supposedly vital paperwork that my advisor never mentioned.
#16 Gave up a sweet T.A.ship for Winter Quarter and exchanged it for a sucky one because it was the right thing to do.
#17 In the past 3 days (ha, just guess which days I'm actually referring to when I say that), I’ve read Tim Powers’ Dinner at Deviant’s Palace, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the first and third of J. K. Rowlings' Harry Potter books. It's been so long since I've done that kind of reading for fun. Even so, I can hardly say how boring and despicable I find quidditch and the jocks who play it, and so I don't intend to read any more about Harry Potter. I would much prefer books about Hermione. Did I ever tell you about the time in high school when I took more classes than there were hours in the school day?
Long live Diaryland!
The five most recent entries:
More Naval Gazing - Saturday, 8/13/05
Anniversary Diving - Friday, 8/12/05
Academic Tip of the Week - Tuesday, May. 17, 2005
How to tell a Midwesterner - Sunday, 4/24/05
Academic Feelings - Thursday, 4/21/05
Ted's most recent entry:
Monday, May 12