new year's eve chez baby

For a few years during college and at the beginning of grad school, I wandered out of my parents' home to New Year's Eve parties: I invariably got buzzed, was on the phone with my mom at midnight wishing her a feliz año nuevo, and then hooked up with (different) friends of friends. I felt pretty lame doing anything other than going out into the night looking for the party of my life, but after 3 or so years, I realized that I felt pretty lame going out into the night looking for the party of my life. So, now I stay home and cram every single Latin American superstition, ahem tradition, into my new year's eve. It is a very elaborate procedure, so you'd best believe I need all of the 30th to get my business together.

If you don't have elaborate new year's plans, let me recommend the Peruvian superstition train:

Early Preparations:
1) Procure yellow underwear.
Yellow is the overall "good luck for the upcoming year" color. Red for love and green for money, but rarely do people want to limit their options that way.

2) Buy lots of grapes.
Red or green, it really doesn't matter--either will cost the earth round these parts--these parts being North America. Seedless is probably best as you'll need to pop them in public at a rapid clip at midnight.

3) Buy lots of food for a lovely spread + champagne/some bubbly liquid.
This year I'm making pot roast in the dutch oven I got for my birthday. And we always have Humboldt Fog cheese with toasts as a pre-dinner treat.

4) Find a pail or bucket or large pot that you will not need for cooking.

5) Write your list of resolutions: you need 10 to make un decalogo--the list of resolutions. They can be anything, things you want to do, things that you want to make happen, things that you hope happen without any interference on your part, whatever. You might want to write them down in two places, one you can refer to throughout the year and one on a small index card to burn at midnight.

6) Put some suitcases or duffel bags in an accessible place near the front door.

The Night Of:
1) Put on your yellow (or red or green, whatever your priorities) panties!
(or boxies for the mens)
I know some people who wear them inside out for extra luck, but that, for my money, is optional.

2) Have a really nice dinner but make sure it's timed so that dinner winds up around 11, so you have time to get ready for the midnight activities without feeling rushed.

3) Fill the bucket with water and place it near a window or door; wash and put out the grapes in the bowl; get out the bubbly; bring out your decalogo and get some matches and a ceramic/fireproof bowl;

At Midnight:
1) Right at midnight, toast and kiss people around you and take a swig of bubbly--quickly.

2) For every stroke of midnight, eat a grape, making a wish with each grape (12 in all). You may have to gobble a few to catch up what with the toasting and kissing and whatnot.

3) Then burn up your decalogo while thinking intently of what you've written.
Mom says you don't have to burn them, but i think it makes it more dramatic.

4) Go to wherever your bucket o water is located and throw it out of whatever--the door, the window. This throws the bad spirits of the old year out of your house and out of your life.

5) Go get your easily accessible (empty) suitcase and walk around the block with it.
This is to ensure that you will travel in the upcoming year. I should add to the preparatory activities that you may have to cajole your loved one into this activity. After much wheedling last year, I was able to convince Michael to go with me sporting a small backpack--not the same.

Happy 2008, y'all!

after macy's and bloomies and nordy's

Cold and shoe-hungry after being shown the ugly and stumpy and the weather-inappropriate peep-toe and sling-back, after having our hopes dashed by the absence of a gorgeous sigerson morrison in the right size, we arrived to the small, but precious shoe display at barney's coop, the home of the perfectly pointy (but not elfin) pump to stamp around mla.


The talk is tightening up, the prep for the interview is coming along--two tasks which need to be finished over the coming days. However, upon finding these shoes, I feel ready.

christmas presents

This afternoon, I took a break from chopping down the talk--which is not only making it shorter, but also making it more cohesive, fiouf!--in order to go run a thousand errands, all of which happened to be resolvable within a two-block radius: rite-aid, post office, dry cleaners, whole foods, and cafe. Fabulous! This afternoon, I got my parents' christmas presents finished and sent off to them, and I think they're good ones for once. My dad's was simple, he's quite the walker (the man walks about 3 miles a day just getting from place to place when he gets tired of waiting for the bus) and he lost his pedometer, so I got him a new one. Not too inspiring, but I know he'll appreciate it.

I'm much prouder of the gift I got for my mom. I am not much of a DIYer, but I do make my own day-by-day calendars because I know exactly what I need and no stationary companies seem to cater to my quixotic desires in this regard. Anyway, my mom shares my passion for all things paper and whenever I whip out my little calendar in her presence reaches for it, flips through it, and caresses it with wistful chubby fingers. So I made her one of her own.

Tada! This is what it looks like closed.

This is what it looks like open. You can see the hand-made quality where the stitches get a little crooked.

I profited from the odd asymmetries of the postcartwork to create a kind of ying yang effect. It's not traditionally pretty when you look at it up close, but I know my mom will appreciate how it straddles the ugly/beautiful line. We're both into that.


I'm sure they'll like both of the presents--if only because I'm an only child and they dig pretty much everything I do--and I know they need both of them. She shoots, she scores! And she goes back to deleting clauses.

will the manic mouse never learn?

The day following a manic day is always a sluggish day.

That's just how it is.

Yesterday I was a veritable whirlwind of activity. I cleaned up my closet, picked up the whole house, filed and shredded all the detritus sitting on my empty bookshelves that I need to sell before Michael moves into this shoebox in February (yay!) and otherwise tidied. I also did a fair amount of work: I reduced 7 pages to 4 for the mla talk and planned the second half. Then Friday, I stared at the page for a good long while, a last minute--and I mean last minute, it was due that day--application for a summer institute fell on my head and I wrote that up, and then we trekked up and down sunset running errands and to watch the Golden Compass. I'm sad that it bombed so badly, I would have liked to see the sequels. And I loved the daemons, although unlike faux ice bear king Ragnar who wants a daemon, I actually want to be an adorable daemon with cute paws and a keen sense of self-preservation. Anyway.

But today, today has been quite a wash. I have now read through 5 sets of blogged archives of academic blogs. I don't know why I am so obsessed with reading academic blogs in lieu of doing my own work. Maybe I'm lamenting that I will never be one of them because I will never get a job that will allow me to exercise my researching and teaching skills? Or maybe it just elaborate procrastinatory mechanism. On of my mentors writes "ya gotta keep going." Another told me that the market "es una puta" (I think he might have been tipsy). Everyone has been gentle and realistic, simultaneously, which is difficult to do. But I just want to fastforward to a time when my efforts won't be in vain, whether at this or anything else.

Ugh. Where did my amnesia go? If it doesn't come back, this blog is going to turn into a constant sobfest.

Restau
Mistral
We were taken out to dinner by older friends of Michael's to dinner here. They come here often and so we were often interrupted by waitstaff and managers who came by to chat to the other couple. I'm really not a fan, not because I'm snobby but because I never have the slightest notion of how to respond. Michael and I split a roasted beet salad, which was good but since when are beets not good, come on! and I had the lamb shank which was fine, but very very rich with nothing on the plate to offset it. I had to pack half of it home and had the rest for lunch/dinner today when it was all the gamier. However, the chocolate soufflé was fantastic. I could not get enough of the heavy coldness of the cream with the light almost scalding heat of the chocolate. Yum.

picker

If I could wish for a superpower, it would be to stop the goddamn picking.

Behold my middle finger.

Can you see the slimy mass of Neosporin coating the sides, do you spot the blood seeping through it? It's not your fault if you can't, it's a very blurry pic. But take it from me if you must, this is the result of picking.



I like to think of this as something that is out of my control because my mom tells a story about how when I was a baby, in the cradle no less! she had to cover my hands with mittens because I would otherwise scratch up my baby face with my baby nails. A story she does not like to tell quite as much is how when I was in around 5th grade,* she took me to a psychologist because I would not stop picking at my cuticles or any available scabs: she wanted the psychologist to help me figure out what the hell was wrong with me so that I would stop with the self-destruction. Instead I presented my most articulate and balanced self and the psych ended up grilling my poor mom about her control issues. I found that delightful at the time but maybe if the psych had done her job and figured out what the hell is wrong with me I wouldn't be in this jam now: I have to report that the picking is absolutely out of control. I and my crack team of nail clippers, tweezers, and a small tack are currently destroying:

a) scab on top of my head which will probably result in a charming bald spot
b) my lower lip
c) two former zits now transformed into middling scabs on my nose and chin
d) left thumb (which is permanently fucked because I destroyed the nailbed a few years ago)
e) right middle finger
f) right knee scab
g) both big toes

It's been a rough few months, one in which I've felt um, how shall we say? not personally empowered and not professionally desirable, but I'd like to have something left of my physical self with which to embark on the road to recovery. Come on body, work with me.

*It really could have been any time shortly before or at the outset of middle school as I think I've reconfigured the narrative of my youth so that all important things happened in the 3rd and 5th grades.

moving forward

I have been thinking that I need to get a new prescription for my glasses, as occasionally I get eye strain and I have a harder time seeing things from far away. But it does create some valuable hallucinations. The other day at the café, I was staring out of the window onto the apartment building across the street--as I so often do, instead of reading--and in the second floor window, I saw what looked like a coiled sheet maybe, swirling in a continuous, perpetual motion. Then, after more squinting and staring I saw it was not a solid rolled up sheet, but two arms joined with the palms pressed together, as if they were a ritual, or maybe as if I were seeing the arms of two people dancing together, arms circling symmetrically to the beat of the song playing in the café--a bangra song, the one everyone knows, the one Jay-Z sampled.

I giggled at that coincidence until, after more squinting and staring, I saw a flash of white in the joined hands and realized it was a rag, circling as it cleaned the mirror on the mantlepiece, with a man rubbing the rag against the mirror.

See? As the vision clarifies, it becomes much less interesting.

Netflixed
Everything is Illuminated
Perhaps it's a bit early to give this movie a glowing review, as I have seen only about 10 minutes of it, but I love it. I find the "translatese" to be an endlessly hysterical gimmick: "officious seeing eye bitch" for seeing eye dog.
Update: it turned out to be very sad and beautiful without being maudlin.

active learning vs. passive self-preservation

Well, the wiki has been marching along, diminishing the number of possibilities available to me. And I find myself with two competing responses: first, to want to know whyyyyyyyy? what did I do wrooooooooong? I want to know what I did so that I can correct the mistakes next time around. Was my writing sample too primitive? Was my cover letter too packed and incomprehensible? Is it the ABD thing? What? What?

Realistically though, there's no way to know and I've been told over and over that I can't take the results of this process too personally or to try to over-analyze them. Which leads us to approach number two, to put my narrative of the job hunt process into the passive voice: "it just didn't work out." Note, not my fault, no one to blame, simply that something occurred. I'm totally pleased with this approach--when I can pull it off, that is. It enables me to just move on with things as if I had never actually done tried my hand at it. I do wish no one had known that I was on the market--no one at all. That way I could be truly amnesiac about it.

Last night I saw two more terrible movies, one in the theaters, one from the netflixy.
Love in the Time of Cholera
It's bad, people. There's no question, Colombia looks beautiful and the languid pacing of the movie does convey the sense of temporality in hot humid climes. But the philosophy of love that is proposed--in accented English, can someone explain this to me? Either have the movie in Spanish, or if it's going to be in English, why not just have them speak as if they were comfortable with their means of expression--is pretty inscrutable. Why people continue loving and stop loving is not believable, in part because the lead actress is so terrible. She has one mode of reaction, dead fish-eyed look and trembling lip and seizure-like shoulder shaking. Javier Bardem is fine, but otherwise the whole thing is a wash. Too bad.

Netflixed
Paris, je t'aime
I often love the conceit of interconnected vignettes, and the idea behind this film, how various directors each evoke Paris, is very attractive to me. But it is difficult to understand what links each of these vignettes to Paris in any way, and more importantly, it is virtually impossible to have any sort of connection to the characters, who are presented in snippets that are much too short. The best of the bunch: Walter Salles's was well-done but very obvious; the worst: Gus Van Sant absolutely shit the bed on this one, sorry to say.

Restau 99
M Cafe de Chaya
Macrobiotic food. Hip, communal tables. I had a tofu bibimbap. It was fine, but the sauce was overwhelming and it was sad to have only the pickled sides instead of all the yummyness.

batshit at tjs

After my lovely birthday dinner at Pinot Grill and a lovely birthday opera of the unbeatably fast-paced Puccini, I discovered the evil wiki. This wiki is where people write in to report on any contact they've had with the schools they've sent apps out to. Over the past few days, I've found out that out of the 14 schools I sent cover letters to, I did not make an interview/more materials cut to 5 of them. So, as you might imagine, this made it very very difficult to motivate and do the work of preparing for the mock interview I had today. So yesterday was quite miserable really: I was irritated while at the writing center and I came home and absolutely refused to grade my students revised compos...bad ms. baby. And I was in a fully foul mood today, but I pulled it together, made some jokes, and had a good experience with it. I was surprised at how very short it was.

So at this point, I'm ready to put the job search thing behind me. I don't want to think about it anymore, I've dedicated too too much time to it. That's not to say it wasn't useful because having to concisely articulate what is really at the core of the project will absolutely guide my revisions and so forth. But I'm so done with the rest of it.

To celebrate the end of classes and feeling ready to embark on a new set of tasks, I went to Trader Joe's and went absolutely batshit. I'm feeling superambitious and I'm embarking on an energy-driven new kind of life for the next two weeks. Isn't it lucky that I've already been having my little blah time that usually comes at the end of the term?

30!

The other day, I took a personality test (because both new kid and dr. crazy had it on their homepages) and it gave me truly the nicest response I could have hoped for. Seriously, I must have gamed this quiz hard because it told me I was an advocating creator, characterized by such lovely traits as: having a strong interest in what is new and exciting—and that includes forging ahead with new ideas, not simply discovering what is already out there; that my eagerness to seek new and varied experiences leads me into many different situations; that I'm not set on one way of doing things, and I am creative when it comes to finding novel solutions to complex problems; that my sensitivity towards others' plights contributes to an understanding—both intellectual and emotional—of many different perspectives. Among many other fabulous traits!



So, it is with great fanfare that I announce that I'm feeling fiiiine about turning the thirty years of age.

my car is dead, long live my car

I am entering into a new era in my Los Angeles dwelling: the carless era. However, this will differ from my first time around, when I was locked in Westwood. Now, I'm in a nice central location where I can walk about, on a busline that is currently quite efficient (knock on the lucky wood, people) and access to Michael's car occasionally. The first borrowing took place this past sunday when I had to go down to Santa Monica for a little gathering at a professor's house: even after adjusting the seat, the mirrors and all, I was seriously white-knuckling it all the way there. I'm not accustomed to how the Taurus handles and it has this nasty little habit of bucking and kicking like an unruly pony when you jam on the accelerator. So I think I'll also be looking into a Flexcar membership to occasionally scoot around.

Otherwise, things are fine. I'm having much difficulty trying to translate my project synopsis, or even write one that differs from my cover letters, and since I have not heard a peep from the marketing powers that be, I'm not very inclined too motivated to do so.

I did go through a blogreading extravaganza the other day: I tend to read an entire blog in a go, which is not the best plan because you start to hear the same complaints about the desire for weight loss and lack of productivity. This is not meant as a viable criticism of the writers of these blogs because they're wonderful and thoughtful, but more as a commentary on the appropriate ways to read blogs. In any case, the academic blogs, they are a mountain of insecurities and a goldmine of helpful teaching advice:

A teaching carnival hosted by new kid, some of the links no longer work but much of it is still up, i should really put it into a more permanent form, in case more of the links disappear.
http://newkidonthehallway.typepad.com/new_kid_on_the_hallway/
2006/11/another_damned_.html

Some lit teaching group work strategies.
http://reassignedtime.blogspot.com/2006/03/we-interrupt-your-
scheduled-boy.html

And for much much later in my potential career. Ah what the hell, even if academia doesn't work out, being a good adviser is like being a good mentor, useful in other careers, no?
http://bardiac.blogspot.com/2005/11/trying-to-be-better-advisor-
part-i.html

Netflixed
James and the Giant Peach

Cute movie with stop-action animation, musical numbers, and a rather large and bountiful fruit. I used to be obsessed with Roald Dahl books. Their mixed tones seem now like a precursor to the Lemony Snickets genre. It was a nice way to spend the time while grading exams.

a bizarre form of entertainment

Mr. Baby went to his first opera the other night: I thought Mozart would be a lovely introduction to the genre, and the timing worked out to go to Don Giovanni.

It was an uncomfortable occasion for a couple of reasons, the first being that we went with an old friend of his, who as his former teacher and mentor, usually treats. Which is alright with me--I do like my treats--however, he purchased $160 tickets (that would be $160 each. For three of us). I realize that opera is not cheap, but there are cheaper seats and I could have gotten us student tix if it had just been me and Michael. So that was a bit blush-worthy. Moreover, the production had received a gruesome review in the latimes and so then, I felt all the guiltier for having suggested going to this show. It's odd, I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but when people do not enjoy the restaurants or shows I suggest, I feel like I've cooked the food or staged the play myself! and disappointed all and sundry personally! It's a weird phenomenon.

In any case, the staging was a bit chaotic and slightly incomprehensible, like it was being odd for the sake of edgy rather than any representational value. Michael was also surprised at the how much like Broadway type musical theater it was in that the audience would respond overtly after every aria and would go nuts over certain performers and reserve only polite golf claps after others. I've only been to operas in SF, where this is much less the case, but yes, the culture of gossip and evaluation is very much part of opera. And it is strange to be a part of.

His final word was that he would go with me to operas again but that, on the basis of this first dip into it, he would define an opera as a bad play, drawn out too long and poofed out by the singing parts--all an all, a bizarre form of entertainment.

Anyway, since then, I've gotten out a couple of not-too-tight, not-too-catchy postdocs. The work progresses if bumpily and without much enthusiasm.

I have a heap of work to do over the weekend: must read late Heidegger essays and prep a presentation (fri night and sat afternoon), read a set of poems by Cesar Zapata and get ready for a luncheon with him (sat evening), grade my students' revised compositions (sunday morning), and do a close reading of Chamoiseau (sat morning). Heaps!

Netflixed
Hot Fuzz
The movie takes an eternity to set up the main point--I'll back up, the hero is an overachieving british police officer who gets banished to the countryside because he's making his superiors in London look bad, and it turns out this country village is run by a loony tunes cult who want their village to be the perfect place on earth, that's the main discovery--but it is a brilliant example of artwork that is something and simultaneously consciously and overtly mocks it. Hot Fuzz does that with the "buddy movie" genre. Pina Bausch's show influenced by Japanese dance did the same thing: it borrowed the aesthetics of a foreign culture pretty superficially and clearly relished in that surface attraction, but also mocked it with great efficiency and class.

return to the business

I am home from the last thanksgiving with my family. My dad's family is really held together by my grandmother. She has a huge tumor in her innards. We've known for a while that she was ill, but it's the first time that I've seen her that she looks frail and slow and green. I don't know that I'll see her again since I'm not going home for Christmas. That is a very anxious feeling: I don't have anything particular to say to my grandmother, but it is very troubling and distracting that I will likely not have the opportunity to do so again. I have never enjoyed hanging out with my dad's family, but it's been part of my life for thirty years. And really, I think I will probably never do more than exchange emails with some of my cousins for the rest of my life--and given my track record, it will probably be less even than that. The trip up was hard, mostly because I thought I wouldn't feel much at all at this end of an era--if anything that I'd be relieved to be unburdened of this obligation--and instead I feel like it is an awkward sort of loss.

Now that I'm back, the november relaxation is fully over. It is now time to return to the business: the business of busting a move through a whole set of postdocs that I didn't really look at this whole month while I was out and about, enjoying the city. I have to finish the first by friday. However, there is no time in the week: the nights will be long and late, which will make the mornings shorter or more unbearable.

Meanwhile, rather than consider a new postdoc project and how to write a "letter of application," I am currently watching another unbearable Michael Henecke film, Code Unknown. It's really beautiful, even though it has a kind of pulp fiction/crashy set up: strangers whose lives intersect through a series of vignettes. Of course, since it's Henecke, it absolutely avoids the failure of those movies by making truly no attempt to turn the fragments into an overarching narrative with a meaning that is greater than the accumulation of fragments. Netflixed.

hiatus

My rash of good books and laughable movies continues: I saw The Prestige last night. It is in my netflix queue, but I picked it up from the library as I had no netflixies at home. So the movie is filled with puzzles and the narrative structure of gotchas is very pleasing: both competitive magicians are reading the "secret diary" of the other, which is actually meant for the readership of his opponent, as is revealed in the end, to the open-mouthed astonishment (Christian Bale) or clenched-mouthed frustration (Hugh Jackson) of the other. However, when the secret is revealed at the end, it's beyond annoyingly pathetically ridiculous: after all this palaver about how people want the mystery and the secret itself is very pedestrian, the movie recreates this pedestrian quality at the end. Why didn't they follow the script's advice and keep the secret, which SPOILER resorts to the identical twin scenario so beloved of out-of-ideas soap opera writers. Jeez Louise.

I have The Lives of Others coming to me though, so, if all reports are true, this should turn around my bad run of movies.

I finally ready Junot Díaz's novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and it is wonderful. It does feel, towards the end, like there are a few too many codas, but generally, the emotional pacing between laughter and pathos is really engaging. I'm looking forward to teaching it in the spring, I think it will be the last book we read as I think it will require the the course as foundational knowledge for making the most of it: it's very dense with references and although the footnotes provide a kind of running historical narrative to clarify and expand on the familial narrative, it will definitely benefit from cultural and historical background.

This morning, I finally turned my attention back to dissertating, after the long hiatus of app-writing and sending. I had thought my fourth chapter was going to need severe and extensive reworking--particularly in terms of my use of Agamben. I am having a small dispute with one of my committee members who thinks that I'm mishmashing the idea of the neighbor (with its concept of adjacency) and the actor (as substitute). I took up Agamben this morning to find that he refers to the neighbor as "radical substitutability." I feel relieved. Also somewhat amused to recognize that I don't exactly read Agamben, I more consult it the ways spiritualists turn to the Bible for guidance: close my eyes, let the book fall open and place my finger on the page then read what is there and consider its meaning.

In between sending off the last batch on Monday and this morning of work, these few days have felt like vacation: I get home early from school and after taking a walk in the canyon, lay in bed reading and watching movies and eating left-over stirfry. The breathing room of the open schedule makes me feel like a cowboy of time, riding freely wherever I may roam. Love it.

if you needed encouragement

to refill the birth control, the movie Private Property is just the thing.

the mistakes

So, when you have 15 chances, slim long-shots though they may be, how can you make a mistake? When you've heard the stories of search committees smirking in embarrassment for the wretched candidate who they tossed onto the reject pile for spelling errors in their cover letters, how, how can you send off a cover letter to a school you feel is really right for you, feel it in your body, as if you had a connection, a cover letter where each word vibrates with the desire to create this connection, including a sentence that you repeat. One right after the other. The same sentence. Vibrating ever more dimly in its repetition.

Michael says that mistakes happen and it's just a mistake, not a referendum on who I am as a person.

I, nonetheless, feel real bad right now. very despondent and very much wondering whether continuing on this quest is really worthwhile if I can't seem to get the things that need to be gotten right, right.

all at once

Well, there's nothing like logistical nightmares to drive out the angst.

The day after I posted my ruminations on feeling unfocused and as if my life purpose was potentially not a purpose and more of a severe craving for an ego-massage, I had a series of disasters which sent me scrambling.

Wednesday morning, I spent a solid and inspired six hours fixing my spanish writing sample. I was very much under the gun as I hoped to have my writing partners see it that evening. I was scooting around, getting ready for school, saving the doc to my jump drive, and when I came back to the computer expecting the computer to be ready for me to eject the jumpy and go on with my life, I noticed it was just sitting there, pretending to save the doc, with that little colorwheel whirling away. I restart the computer, and up pops a blue screen that won't let me login.

Dead hard drive.

I'm breathing, I'm checking online to see if there are maybe any quick fixes to this blue screen issue and sites entitled "The Blue Screen of Death" keep popping up. Still breathing but pretty scared, I pack it up and head into school where I had an adrenaline-fun 50 minutes with my students, despite my severe lack of preparation. After class, I called the dude at Mac Enthusiasts (on Pico and Manning) and when he informed me that data recovery was $400, I moved from scared to feeling helpless and hella angry. It was in this mode of bemoaning and raging against time-wasting logistics that I apparently blew right through a stop sign at LaGrange and Overland. How do I know? Because a block later after a siren went off, I realized that there was a cop trying to get me to pull over.

Moving violation.

After we all pull off in our separate directions, I start crying and not little tears trailing decorously down my adorably pink cheeks, no, but face-contorting wails ripping out of my throat. Loud. Snotty. Unhelpful.

I get to Mac Enthusiasts and wipe off my face and stump in there. Am totally uncommunicative with Matthew, front desk dude. He's pretty sure it's a hardware issue which will run me $350 to $500. We discuss the data recovery issue some more, I insist that there's nothing on this computer except one doc I really do want, he asks its name, just in case. I drive off and call babe, and while telling him that I'm going to go home, make a cup of tea and then try to reconstitute that morning's work, Matthew calls and tells me that he has my doc!

And he didn't charge me $400. Seriously, I think Matthew from Mac Enthusiasts is now one of my favoritest people of all time. If you problems with your mac, you should go there. They really are very sweet and efficient.

From there, although I had left semi-hysterical phone messages to my writing partners, one of whom I'm most certainly not close enough to justify dumping that level of incomprehensible ramblings on, I was able to meet with Neetu, have a good dinner, calm my ass down and have a productive night. But it was really too much emotional brouhaha for a single day.

Since then, it's been pretty day by day, trying to meet deadlines. I've already found some mistakes in things I've sent out. Pretty depressing. But there's really not enough time to wallow. Mental health days and nights have certainly happened, but mostly it's scoot scoot scoot scoot scoot.

Netflixed
Black Book
I thought only Hollywood movies were this obvious. Our heroine Ellis/Rachel is a creature of coincidences to the extent that I began to think of this as the Forrest Gump of Nazi/Holocaust movies. I'll back up: it's about Holland during WWII and follows one woman who loses her family because of a lawyer who was colluding with a Gestapo officer and how she survives and becomes part of the resistance, becoming a spy who falls in love with her Nazi mark who, after the Liberation, is executed according to Article 163 which allows the defeated German military to continue to enforce military law on their officers and a particularly reptilian Hauptofficer had hated her lover and wanted to personally issue the firing squad order. Meanwhile, she slowly realizes that the resistance had been infiltrated, which explains why the Nazis were always on the scene so fast but not the bumbling ragtaggery of the resistance members. Long story short (and I'm leaving out several subplots), the movie ends with her at a Kibbutz built with the loot salvaged from the Gestapo officer who had robbed the bodies of the Jews he had mowed down and bombs falling during the Six Days War.

Mostly Martha and now this. Apparently, my netflixing choices in the germanic realm are definitely not top notch. Suggestions for improvement welcome.

crisis of ugly consciousness

I'm auditing a German philosophy class focused on Wittgenstein and Heidegger: it is full of a) people--or rather one individual--who have no filter between brain and mouth and dominates the class and b) fabulous insights. Today, for example, we were discussing portions of Being and Time and spent a while on H's concept of the Entscheidung: that is, because our entire lives are spent honing in on death, the realization of our finitude forces us to make certain actively committed choices and to live out that commitment resolutely. (This, according to my professor has totalitarian overtones when the commitment is a social phenomenon, but for my purposes, that's a sidebar, hence the parenthetical.)

Although graduate school may not seem like a good use of time when considering death as impending, this does mark the thinking that led me to graduate school: I recognized that I couldn't dither forever and picked a career--one albeit that allowed to dither for almost a decade.

However, what the being on the job market insecurities have revealed to me are the mechanisms by which I made that choice. And it's not pretty.

Yes. I love my work.
But partially, I love my work because I'm good at it. And it feels good to be good at things.
How do I know I'm good? Cuz people tell me so. People I respect. Institutions give me further validation by picking me to receive their financial proof of confidence.
So, now that it's fully likely that I will not get a job for a goodly time, thus stripping from me the ego-boosting aspect of my initial choice, what am I left with? The work itself feels a little empty and difficult to motivate for when it is no longer guaranteed to transfer praise to me.

A fine thing to realize seven years into a degree: that seven years in therapy might have been a better investment.

fancy restaurant manners

When the solicitous waiter in a fancy special occasion restaurant where you are having the chef's menu no less asks you how your last course was, are you supposed to automatically chirp "great!" or are you supposed to weigh in with a foodie critique? If the former, then why the charade of interaction?

I remember someone telling me once that the most annoying thing about being a potsmoker was that part of the transaction of buying it was to smoke a bowl with your dealer, when you truly have no desire to create anything other than an economic relationship with this person.

I supposed that having the chef twirling around the dining room is part of the customer service by which fancy restaurants distinguish themselves from other types of dining establishments. It's not one that I value, mostly because I'm confused about what role I'm supposed to play in this particular scenario.

At Ortolan the other night, we mixed it up: for the most part, I did the requisite chirping and mr. babe remained silent rather than overly-honestly express his true feelings about the heirloom tomato five-ways. But what do you want from someone who hates tomatoes, on principle? In any case, I only expressed displeasure over the caviar and cream and runny egg cooked in the shell in ash which was interesting at the top with the thick sweetness of the cream and the sharp salty tang of the caviar, but by the end of the egg was too too salty, grossly so in the sense of fully unrefined and overwhelmingly salty.

However, when I said I loved various courses, I meant it. All the courses were small--thank god, because we were full and trying to strategize how to pace ourselves after three--and different and surprising. The trend seems to be a conjunction of two things: to derail the expectations of common ingredients and to put different tastes together. That is, few dishes did not have some combination of delicately sweet and slightly bitter, such as the duck which was paired with a slice of peach and a peach glaze with the verbena emulsion.

Here is the full chef's menu. http://ortolanrestaurant.com/showmenu.php?id=1

It was wonderful to have our anniversary there: the ambiance creates the feeling of luxuriating in comfort and thoughtfulness--a lovely reflection of what being with Michael is most often like.

and on the sixth day

God made the shower with a drain pipe that didn't just dump water all over the VW Passat in the garage. And it was good.

Of course, one problem solved in the world of construction usually means another problem created. In an effort to get at the pipe without ripping out the shower tile, they chipped out a rather large hole in the garage ceiling. I have been hiding from my building manager all week.

In any case, the past ten days of non-blogging have been difficult. It's been a week of rough realism. I met with my adviser and we were both so very unidealistic about the job market situation. I've now looked over the list and I think I'll send out cover letters to around 10 Research 1 schools. I feel totally unprepared for this process--really, comparative literature produces mutts who can't compete at the big dawg shows.

The writing has also been very weighed down. I've produced a decent proposal and abstract but it's such pedestrian writing. I say pedestrian, the adviser says clear.


Netflixed
Henry Fool

Monsieur Ibrahim (et les fleurs du Coran)
I loved this movie. The ending is beyond the cheese and back, but mostly, the portrayal of the abandoned boy's life and how he develops the relationship with the old Omar Sharif hits just the right mix of sympathy and humor. And I was inspired to buy the Bobby Hebb song "Sunny," which I very much recommend.

Hardboiled

Restau 99
The Hungry Cat
After going to Hungry Cat,we saw one of the last performances of Culture Clash's run of Zorro in Hell at the Ricardo Montalban theater. It was a really fun show. The timing is perfectly paced and as agit-prop, it always seems in conversation with topical political issues, but without feeling like a stilted turn away from the show's own trajectory. However, I have to agree with Nikki's assessment that the way homosexuality functions as the site of fear is pretty problematic: sodomy as the punishment for not yet understanding the central importance of Zorro and how to inhabit his resistant legacy.

Dominick's
My dad loved this place. It's a good Italian place, we had manicotti and tender-tender hanger steak. The terrace area is beautifully pleasant.

Caioti Pizza Cafe
4346 Tujunga Ave, Studio City, CA 91604.818.761.3588
Finally! Yummy pizza we can both agree upon.
And a fantastic goat cheese and beet salad.

Mimosa
8009 Beverly Blvd. LA, CA 90048. 323.655.8895
Frances and I went over on Tuesday night. We had a lovely evening together: my choices off the menu were my favorites: I had a pistou soup and a chicken au jus with a fabulous succotash that I think would work with most anything: corn, olives, red bell peppers, rapini. But bring a sweater--the air con in there is out of control.

itchy

Yesterday, my writing partners and I were noting this moment where you want to get through your work so badly that you start itching. And not in the clichéd idiomatic sense of "itching to do something." No, where your skin starts spazzing out as a corporeal reflection of your emotive drive.

Tuesday, I scratched the itch all afternoon.

Behold the site of hallucinatorily confident writing:

This is the new computer that I inherited from my mother--a pristine handmedown early birthday present that is so thrilling to me.
Here, the statement of purpose has been well-revised, as has the first chunk of c3: both ready for advisor's perusal.

Now, I just have to scratch away again and again.

The Lists

This was the list 2 weeks ago. I did do it all and then revised it all--it just took me two weeks instead of the wished-for 1.
TO DO WORK:
Thurs: Analyze dvd for c4 and write Ricoeur section. Half done.
Fri: Ricoeur section. Half-assedly done.
Sat: Analyze dvd for c4 and do my own theory section. Rewrite Marx section. Rewrite future and performance section. Overambitious much? Answer: yes. I sat and stewed for most of the day, then went to yoga, and came home and fiddled around with argument writing.
Sun: Revise c3 first section.
Mon: Write first Cham close reading for c3.

And here's the current list:
Wed: Convo w/advisor3. Evening with babe.
Thurs: Write proposal.
Fri: Plan writing samples(10page and 30page). Meeting w/advisor1.
Sat: Write teaching philosophy.
Sun: Revise proposal.
Mon: Pull together writing samples.

scared

It's a pretty sad state of affairs when you have to listen to the soundtrack to the sisterhood of the traveling pants for inspiration.

feel the rain on your skin

Maybe I should take a shower to get that feeling. Have a fresh start in the midst of this day that is getting, has gotten away from me.

staring at the blank page before you

I haven't been staring much actually. I brainstormed decently, but allowed the mundane difficulties of daily life send me into a little rage. Since then, I have been laying on beddinge watching the hills on my computer and wondering at how easy it is to enter into a meta-cycle of boredom: I stare at people who have nothing to say to one another. They are stilted and so clearly have no chemistry together as friends that it's somewhat surprising. It's like watching a dropped cell phone call.

let the sun illuminate the words that you cannot find

Alright. I'm going to rewrite my statement of research. That I can do.

dmv

I spent the morning at the dmv waiting to change over the title of my dying car. And I spent the entirety of my purgatory in the waiting room eavesdropping on the mother-daughter dyad next to me: the mother was classically "long-suffering," the girl, youngish, but too old to be acting the way she was. Over the course of their discussion, her mother would lower her voice, embarrassed, and the closer she would get to whispering, the louder the girl would talk. I consider that whining is something primarily communicated in pitch variations, but she managed to be incredibly petulant and incredibly monotone simultaneously. There were no pauses or rhythmical changes--both also staples in my expression of complaint. Her whine characteristics were a high nasal quality and every syllable sounded spit out. Most of her gripes were some variation on the theme of:
"I don't have time for this I'm running five websites"
or
"my eyes won't hold the makeup" (it's true, in my open gawking, I could tell that there was no trace of makeup on her eyes)
and
"what do I need an ID for I'm going to be dead in a few years anyway so what I need an ID so they can ID my dead body and write my name on my grave"
The DMV seems a pretty appropriate place for nihilism, but impending death seems a kind of crazed rationale to avoid spending time there. But it wasn't a joke--the mother's mouth dropping slightly open made that clear, whereas the deep lines marking her forehead might indicate that such comments weren't infrequent. Moreover, it struck me as a really hard-core awful thing to say to probably the only person in the world who values your life more than her own.

I have to admit though, I do remember yelling at my mother that I would laugh at her grave when she was dead. It was one of those arguments where you lash out and try to hurt as hard as you can. But I was fourteen. Oh, and my mom just shrugged.

The Lists

TO DO WORK:
Mon: Analyze dvd for c4 and write Agamben section: DONE!
Tues: Write politics intro for c3 and clarify the first section. So not at all done. Read Prospecti and comment. DONE!
Wed: Day off. But actually, I put together a booklet for this do-it-yourself prospectus workshop I'm running...does it count as work if I was watching the us open at the same time?
Thurs: Analyze dvd for c4 and write Ricoeur section. Half done.
Fri: Analyze dvd for c4 and do my own theory section.
Sat: Write first Cham close reading for c3.
Somewhere in there: Write a first draft of research statement. DONE--first draft to guilan on tues.

Netflixed

Blissfully Yours
Well, I'm feeling somewhat like a critical Goldilocks: I mock Shortbus for being overly explicit with its symbolism and then I spurn this film for being overly obscure. This film comes from the Thai director who created Tropical Malady and shares the same technique of occasionally overlaying drawings on the screen. Only this time, they didn't translate the Thai writing that accompanies the doodles, so I was pretty lost. I know there was something about immigrancy as connected with disease, and suspicion of authority. Other than than, lost-ness. It reminded me a little bit of Brown Bunny, what with the long long long seemingly real-time long driving scenes that were beautiful but made me want to watch it sped up by 16x.

happy divorce yourself from capitalist debt slavery day!

Saturday night, after spending some time reading at Café Om, instead of coming home and almost certainly passing out, I decided to extend my working time by changing locales and getting something to eat. I've lately been hearing very good things about Fatburger--a southland fastfood burger chain I have mocked every time that most unfortunate name intruded upon my consciousness. Since it is sort of on the way home from Om, I decided to stop in and try it. And I loved it! I can't believe I've been eating craptastic In-N-Out with their sorry little flat gray patties once every few months when I could have been having a plump tasty Baby Fat (only as big as my fist and fully fulfilling) instead! Anyway, after nibbling down the Baby, I spent the next two hours at Fatburger fending off the sounds of Christina Aguilera and reading Casarino's work around Marx and Agamben and Negri. And I loved it too! I very much appreciated his reminder of how very prescient Marx and Deleuze were of our present socio-economic system. Take a gander:

"In a world ruled by [the time = money equation], we are always kept waiting because money is always already waiting for itself. It is a short leap form here to arguing--as Marx does argue--that such a process of circulation leads to a society ruled by debt and to a definition of the human as always already indebted (Grundrisse, 366-367). These pages are not far from that remarkable essay in which Deleuze uses Foucault as a springboard to dive into and articulate the passage from modern disciplinary society to a postmodern control society in which 'a man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt.' (Gilles Deleuze (Trans. Martin Joughin). "Postscript on Control Societies," in Negotiations (NY: Columbia UP, 1995): 179)."
-Cesare Casarino, "Time Matters: Marx, Negri, Agamben, and the Corporeal," Strategies 16.2(2003): 198.

People: Wake up and smell the credit cards!

I was all fired up about this, to the extent that when I talked to Michael on my walk home from Fatburger, I suggested excitedly that we give up all of our possessions to take up residence in a van, live simply and off the land (or dumpsters, given that we are urban mice), and shower at the beach.

Michael's supportive response: "I don't really think you've thought this through very well."
My convincing rejoinder: "I haven't! But Marx has! And that's good enough for me."

One night: two conversions.


The Lists

TO DO WORK:
Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon: Analyze dvd for c4 and reconfigure c4.
Somewhere in there: Write a first draft of research statement.
Done: Backwards outline of c4. Read Casarino. Ran into some difficulties reading Agamben, sort of worked through them--although I'm sure I'll have to expand and de-crypticize. Slowly writing through draft 1 section 1, c4.

TO DO LIFE: Pay down debt (currently $680.41). Procure dog. Buy suit. Read Therí's paper. Go to dmv for title and registration. Figure out car insurance. Return boxes to the container store. Assemble bathroom furniture. Sell file cabinet. Track down fridge. Figure out how to take care of bamboo floors. Return shower caddy to Bed Bath and Beyond.
DONE! did the dishes and tidied up the house. $700 later, my car has passed its smog test. attempted to assemble the shower caddy and found it had several broken pieces. Bed Bath and Beyond: any more such episodes and my love affair with you will fade quickly.

TO DO BLITZ: sarah, marilyn, giulia, irmary, mariana, dar, nv, sf, marzena, thérèse, toño, jerven, magdalena, staceymo.
TO DO CALL: hen, lauryn.
Lauryn called! Jerven called! Yay for other people making efforts to communicate!

Netflixed

Shortbus
This is a relatively explicit movie about sex. At its most profound, it reveals how psychological barriers and problems manifest themselves in sexual relationships. At its least profound...it's just laughable. The descriptions people give of experiencing orgasms: "everything was light and there was this incredible energy and there there was no more war." Is he sending this up? Partially, but there is no other definition or representation that the movie offers up in its stead. My most laugh-tastic moment is the trope of symbolizing one woman's quest to achieve an orgasm (and she's a sex therapist! how very ironical!) with having all the lights kind of buzz and threaten to go out when she's close and then a total blackout when does have the big o. It's like Carrie, only the unleashing of natural disaster is the result of pleasure rather than pain.

Restau 99

Marouch
Armenian Lebanese. 4905 Santa Monica (cross-street Edgemont). LA. 323.662.9325. lunch and dinner tues-sun. $
What a yummy dinner! What a mistake it was to order an appetizer of stuffed grape leaves! Instead of regular bread to tide you over until your main arrives, they bring you warm pita and a plate of cold pickled items: radishes, olives, hot peppers, mint and green onion. I had lamb shwarma with a yogurty-garlic sauce. The rice and grilled tomatoes and onions help make the dish. Michael had a similar set-up, only with chicken kabobs instead of lamb and pureed garlic unadulterated by yogurt. I have to say, his chicken was perfectly tender and moist, whereas a few pieces of my lamb were a little dry. The flavor though, gamey with a little sweetness of the herbs. Lovely place.
I do wonder when I'll stop tasting reruns of garlic though.

response and neglect

I am repurposing this blog entry I wrote in October of last year when I was blogging on Myspace. I turned in a revised draft to my adviser last night and I am feeling this nagging anticipation in a big way:

i really do wish that i had more than tom's friendship here...much as i value his perfunctory welcome, i have a question that i doubt he will answer: how do you cope with neglect? i find if i've sent out a draft of my half chapter to my advisor (which i did this morning, yes!) i have a little piece of my mind that is in despair, waiting for a response. no matter how short or long the wait, i am in an abyss of proliferating worst case scenarios. likewise, when i call or email michael in the morning and the day goes by (in yesterday's case, with many busy, happy moments and lots of warm feelings stemming from the knowledge of good work done) without a peep of acknowledgment, i feel dismissed and rejected. i suspect that at the crux of this problem is that "waiting time" really has its own temporality: when i want a response, time slows down, my concentration focuses on that passage of time that goes by every so slowly while the other person blithely goes about her and his day, respectively, without realizing that i'm drowning, waiting for a response. is this psychotic? whether it is or not, it takes the sweetness out of my days and makes my steps heavy with worry and paranoid sadness.

The Lists

TO DO WORK:
Sun & Mon : Revise first GCI part of c3. DONE! Write chamoiseau close reading for c3. Not Done.
Tues: Finish revising c2 (intro/signposting, performance of identity tie-in for both close readings, coda). DONE!
Wed: Proofread c2 and send to fl. DONE! at 1:44 in the am, but done nonetheless. Now am fixated on getting a response.
Thurs: Day off.
Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon: Analyze dvd for c4 and send to Harmony.
Somewhere in there: Write a first draft of research statement.
Also done: Looked through the list of post-docs, will only apply for 2, maybe only 1.

TO DO LIFE: Pay down debt (currently $680.41). Procure dog. Buy suit. Read Therí's paper. Go to dmv and figure out car insurance: call insurer, make appointment. Get Tanya's present. Return boxes to the container store. Assemble bathroom furniture. Sell file cabinet. Track down fridge. Take car into the mechanic for smog test.
DONE! Ordered present for Tanya, conf # 36543732. Did the monthly bills--am terrified over possible cost of car repair, but if the damage there is not too terrible, I should be alright until I get paid in November. Transferred one third of my ipod files onto my external hard drive which also has the entire contents of my computer drive, yay for back up! I did take my car in yesterday, and it is gruesome. It did not pass the smog test and needs quite a bit done to it ($500) just to get it legal and then, what with the oil leak, even taking care of half of it would be another $500. So, what I'm looking at is $600, with registration, for a car that may not last through the year.

TO DO BLITZ: sarah, marilyn, giulia, irmary, mariana, dar, nv, sf, marzena, thérèse, toño, jerven, magdalena, staceymo.
new subset: TO DO CALL: hen, lauryn.
I've been feeling very reclusive--or lazy--of late, thus haven't contacted a soul.

Netflixed

Memoirs of a Geisha
I have say, I like it fine. Mostly, I like Michelle Yeow a lot. The whole premise is pretty disturbing, particularly the insistence that geisha means beauty and it doesn't mean prostitution, and no seeming appreciation of the disconnect between that idea and the tradition that you become a full geisha after you've sold your virginity to the highest bidder. I mean, really. So the unseen narrator irked me no end, but I liked it all the same.

Restau 99

Michael's
1147 Third Street, Santa Monica, CA 90403. 310.451.0843. Cali Contemporary, $$$$.
On the last day of the Pellegrino DineOut deal, we went to Michael's: it is a really beautiful spot, very lush garden, perfect temp. They make the most of la as a setting. And the food was excellent, we slightly overate, but not by too much. The first was a seasonal summer soup--chilled, creamy, with a dominant combination of chives and pistashios. Neither of us could figure out what the operative base vegetable was. I had a nice salad, again overdressed imo, but I will have to rememer the stilton, candied pecans and grapefruit for myself. Then the mains: Michael had the chicken au jus which was perfectly tender that came with sides of white corn grits and haricots verts. The grits were startlingly sweet and creamy--startling good, I thought, startling frowny face in Michael's estimation. My main was even better: the hanger steak in a bordelaise with yukon gold potato mash and wilty spinach. The meat was really a pleasure to eat. The desserts were alright: I had a berry shortcake, Michael had the decadent chocolate sampler, but both had overly enthusiastic dollops of cream all over everything. Thanks San Pellegrino, I would definitely go back to Michael's for a special occasion meal--although I still have about 50 restaurants to cover on the list before that's even an option.

setback, reset

Yesterday was absolutely gruesome. I sometimes feel like my actions are somehow outside of my control: like it's outside of my control that I read "Dear Prudie" columns on slate.com back from 1998 onwards. Or that it's outside of my control to sprawl out on beddinge melting in my own sweat but not get up to turn the fan towards myself. And most of all, I become almost hysterical over the fact that I read Dear Prudie for hours at a stretch, while melting in my own sweat--simultaneously! instead of revising what little (s)crap(s) I have of c3. I was on the verge of tears and maniacal self-hatred last night about this: I was so angry at my incapacity to motivate myself, trying to analyze where this sense of helplessness over my own actions derives from, and felt absolutely desperate at the fact that Friday had slipped out of my incompetent grasp and I had only the weekend--a weekend I had planned would be full of fun--to pump something out before meeting with my writing partners on Monday.

I wouldn't exactly say that I've turned myself around today and am now on fire or anything, but changing locales seems to have helped--I am in Michael's air-conditioned room where there's no need to ration cold water--and I'm at least thinking and tapping away. Tap tap tap, delete, pause while staring off into space for indefinite periods of time, tap tap, check email, tap tap tap tap, pause, switch documents, tap, switch back to the previous document, tap tap, delete.

The Lists

TO DO WORK: Rewrite first part of c3. Write chamoiseau close reading for c3. Write a first draft of research statement. Analyze dvd for c4. Finish revising c2 (intro/signposting, performance of identity tie-in for both close readings, coda)
DONE! Wrote an intro section to c3.

TO DO LIFE: Pay down debt (currently $1,031.09). Procure dog. Buy suit. Read Therí's paper. Go to dmv and figure out car insurance: call insurer, make appointment. Get Tanya's present. Return boxes to the container store. Assemble bathroom furniture. Paint the bathroom. Sell file cabinet. Track down fridge.
DONE! Dad got on the horn about the misplacement of my new fridge, calling the delivery company, "quality express," a total misnomer. Dad's funny. Per usual, I haven't really reduced the "to do: life" list in any substantial way. I did make my little calendar for the upcoming academic year. Google calendar is great, but I find it's a good idea to have several copies of schedules, otherwise you do things like forget it's your friend Melissa's going away party last night. Except for the fact that I wouldn't have known anyone there except her, a major faux-pas.

TO DO BLITZ: sarah, marilyn, giulia, irmary, mariana, dar, nv, sf, marzena, thérèse, toño, jerven, magdalena, staceymo.
new subset: TO DO CALL: hen, lauryn.
DONE! called diane, thanks gchat!

Netflixed

5X2
One of Ozon's truly depressing portraits of the essential incompatibility of people and the relationships in which they find themselves. 5X2 starts with a couple divorcing and works its way backwards through key events in their lives: when the husband, Gilles, can't bring himself to be present at his wife's, Marion's, difficult birth; when Marion has sex with a rando American on the night of her wedding to Gilles; when they seem to have nothing in common when they first get together. At moments, various characters seem to suggest that it is possible to be committed to another person even while your genitalia wanders astray--an argument I guess I buy but am quite certain I would be unable to live with--but it seems evident to me that Marion and Gilles were unfaithful and unsupportive partners in the most fundamental ways. Their betrayals weren't just sexual, it's more like they used sex--and the withholding of sex--to manifest their disgust with one another.

A interesting strain of sexual representation in French movies that I'm noticing is that French directors seem very keen to explore the ambiguities of sexual desire. Coming from a "no means no" background, it is always confusing and disconcerting to me to see the articulation of "no" as not meaning "no I don't want to have sex with you" but meaning "no I shouldn't want to have sex with you but I do want to and if you insist, I will and I'll enjoy it, even though my struggling and yelling no makes this look to a third wave U.S. feminist like a clear instance of rape." Maybe this is what Katie Roiphe, in her clumsy mainstream-media-pandering, feminism-backlash-bandwagon-riding fashion, was trying to get at. I can see that it may be a more nuanced and honest portrayal of the complications of the decision-making process re sex as happening on too many physical, emotional, and mental levels, but I still am massively uncomfortable with it. And with its filmic representation.

Restau 99

Lucques
Does it count if I've already been to Lucques? I've had mixed experiences at Lucques, but always excellent food. This week, we'll be going to two high-end restaurants in LA, thanks to the San Pellegrino Dine Out program: $25 prix fixe 3-course menu. How precisely we're contributing to resolving world hunger by being forced to drink salty bubbly water is unclear to me, but I am excited about the deals. My carrot soup was excellent--Michael's salad was seriously over-dressed. But then again, we are folk who prefer to encounter very little dressing or condiments whatsoever. His BLTA was quite yummy, but on day 2 is again suffering from the serious overdressing, my albacore was ok, severely marred for me by a heap o mayo in the center--the corn and greens beneath it were far preferable. The dessert was stellar--I had this ice cream butternut toffee chocolate sauce extravaganza that tasted like liquid brownie, and Michael had the sorbets. I'm disappointed in Lucques, I have to say: what's with the slathering and over-greaserness? However, it was a nice experience. It does feel good to be out at a special occasion place, all pretty and bright and an excess of cutlery.

grace

The New York Times wrote an obit for Grace Paley today. I knew she hadn't been well for a while but it still caught me by surprise. I really admire and love this woman, first as a writer. Her stories always have so much compassion for her characters, who she writes as being harried and uneventful, but very very honest with and interested in one another. Her spot-on dialogue always seem able to represent multiple generational or social perspectives. But within all this openness and effort to understand the motivations and situations of others, she also communicated very clear moral stances: there is one story where she discusses being in a segregationist context, on a bus, and she is holding a black baby boy and a white man tells her: "I wouldn't touch that thing with a meathook." And in the context where this violent and dehumanizing statement represents the status quo, all she can do is hold the baby closer to her. So even her protest manifests itself as an act of love and protection: love as a fierce rejection of articulations of hatred.

I love her work, but as I think about her, I realize that I model myself after her: I think she was the first truly elderly woman that I knew who could glory in being silly and childish and I didn't think she should act her age and I didn't lose any respect for her. I think admiring her and loving her as much as you can love someone who hardly knows you and whose life you are not a significant part of gave me a kind of permission to be silly and crazy and enjoy those aspects of my person without worrying that these outbursts would make me a less Serious Person.

The Lists

TO DO WORK: Write chamoiseau close reading for c3. Write a first draft of research statement. Analyze dvd for c4. Finish revising c2 (intro/signposting, performance of identity tie-in for both close readings, coda)
DONE! Revised half of c2, still have to do tie-in for Pepin and the coda. Totally aborted attempt to rewrite the first parts of c3.

TO DO LIFE: Pay down debt (currently $1,031.09). Procure dog. Buy suit. Read Therí's paper. Go to dmv and figure out car insurance. Get Tanya's present. Return boxes to the container store. Paint the bathroom. Resend Siff letter. Sell file cabinet.
DONE! Didn't need to send Siff letter--they found it! Bought more items for the bathroom, a shower caddy that stands alone and a shelf structure for above the toilet. Now I have to put them together. A setback: I cannot resurrect my suspension shower curtain, so I am left sans shower until the door gets installed. When? Who knows. More setbacks: my fridge seems to be irretrievably lost. The soonest I'll be able to get it will be next friday, I believe. Totally unacceptable.

TO DO BLITZ: sarah, marilyn, giulia, irmary, mariana, dar, nv, sf, marzena, thérèse, toño, jerven, magdalena, staceymo.
new subset: TO DO CALL: hen, lauryn.
DONE! sent packages to Rafe and my cousin Cindy, blitzed Marianne.

Netflixed

The Iron Giant
I knew nothing of this movie other than it was Brad Bird's first (despite the kind of elitist ideological leanings of his movies, I totes admire and enjoy The Incredibles and Ratatouille). This one is hand-animated, forcibly creating a very different feel: it's mostly in the timing I think. Whereas the characters in pixar films have very malleable facial expression, shifting between nuances of a singular emotion very quickly, here, emotional change moves evidently frame by slower frame. It's not quite as fluid, and as a result, not quite as subtle. But anyway, The Iron Giant still does beautifully what animation does best, to my mind: to endow objects and animals with sentience and take seriously the emotional lives of non-human beings.
Moreover, I cried myself a boatload of tears at the end of the movie, translation: two thumbs up!

time time time time

See this phone? It's a fine phone, is it not? I liked it especially because it was so black and sleek and understated. However, I probably spend about 15 minutes a day hunting around for it in my bag because it is so very unobtrusive that I can never spot it and so smooth that it slides around my bags and away from my desperate grasps. I am beginning to understand the impulse to bedazzle phones with those tacky crystals: easy attainability.

Although it's hard not to feel irritated at all the time I waste with stupid shit like the above, I do feel energized and hopeful. Neetu and I have set up some weekly goals and I went for a run and I'm looking forward to some early morning writing sessions.

The Lists

TO DO WORK: Write chamoiseau close reading for c3. Write a first draft of research statement. Transcribe dvd. Analyze dvd for c4. Finish revising c2 (intro/signposting, performance of identity tie-in for both close readings, coda)
DONE! Read Ricoeur. Transcribed dvd. Finished Lesson planning for gwc.

TO DO LIFE: Pay down debt (currently $1,031.09). Procure dog. Go running. Buy suit. Read Therí's paper. Go to dmv and figure out car insurance. Get Tanya's present. Return boxes to the container store. Paint the bathroom. Resend Siff letter. Sell file cabinet.
DONE! Wrote letter to the board. Got scripts. Went for a run--so slow I was probably but a good start.

TO DO BLITZ: sarah, marilyn, giulia, irmary, mariana, dar, nv, sf, marzena, thérèse, toño, jerven, magdalena, staceymo, lara, guilan.
new subset: TO DO CALL: katie, hen, lauryn.
DONE! katie called me, does that count? I left lauryn a message: A for effort, Z for accomplishment. Blitzed guilan, lara, anak.

Netflixed

The Larry Sanders Show
I did, at times, laugh out loud while watching the first dvd in the series--mostly at rip torn--but overall, larry sanders in the dvd and gary shandling compiling it were both too similar, in their squirm-inducing failures, and dissimilar, in gary shandling's decrepitude and fragility, to watch so many shows in close succession. This is the major flaw of shows on dvd for me: rather than have the week's span to forget about certain annoying patterns in the show's template or have my suspense heightened, I get weighed down by having different variations on the premise shoved down my throat simultaneously. But since I'm the one doing the shoving, I can hardly ascribe these problems to the quality of the show, it's just the hazard of mixed media.

ready, set

Before








After









So the floors are done and I'm unpacked (still sans fridge) and back from my grandma's "bon voyage" party. It would not have been my choice to have such a party and I thought it a bit morbid, but it was actually nice to reconnect with some of my cousins and it was a beautiful day out in Marin. Gram was happy and it may be the last time I see her, so I'm glad I was able to be part of the visible accumulation of progeny. It was a very quick trip up, but it's a distraction that now is no longer. So, I'm ready to re-embark on my working life. Nothing stopping me now. Except my own procrastinations.

The Lists

TO DO WORK: Write the first section on ecstatic memory in c3. Write a first draft of research statement.
DONE! have done nothing, but have big plans involving multi-tasking and reading ricoeur.

TO DO LIFE: Pay down debt (currently $1,031.09). Procure dog. Go running. Buy suit. Read Therí's paper. Go to dmv and figure out car insurance. Get Tanya's present. Unpack the house.
DONE! Unpacked the house. Put together a dinner party for Peter and Natalie.

TO DO BLITZ: sarah, marilyn, giulia, irmary, mariana, dar, nv, sf, marzena, thérèse, toño, pk, jerven, magdalena, staceymo, lara, guilan.
new subset: TO DO CALL: katie, hen, lauryn.
DONE! oy! i keep adding people i need to email...interminable task, this communication thing.

Netflixed

Tropical Malady
From a Thai director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose new movie is getting raves from le masque et la plume, this radio show podcast from france inter that I listen to and trust. There was almost no dialogue. Beautiful movie--lots of rainstorms in jungles as the protagonist tracked the tiger, but conversation is something I never knew I would miss quite so much until it was gone.

shao qi bai

In the end, this is what the shower now looks like. I still love the look of the hotmop effect, but this is so light and inviting and smooth: I am very happy with the results of all the work, but am more than ever preoccupied with the moral aspects of construction. It is my understanding that no matter what contractor you work with, there will be illegal immigrants at some point working on the job--if not doing the bulk of the work. And far be it for me to be against employing non-citizens, but it does usually indicate that there is exploitation. Shao qi bai is the name of a chinese man who was sub-sub-contracted to install the floors of my studio. Wiry, buzz cut to hide his thinning hair, wore one of those weight-lifter belts all the time, except for the smoking breaks. I had thought, jokingly, that he was the monica seles of floor installers--giving long, musical grunts with every push on the boards and sweep of the bostic glue. He fell ill on monday in the afternoon, unable to stand, holding his arm tight across his stomach, moaning. I couldn't do more than stare, while he grasped at the hands of one of his co-workers and the foreman argued with him. I speak no Chinese at all. I have no idea what his pain relates to. I know that no one seemed to want an ambulance called, but they did take him off to Kaiser's emergency services. I think. From the foreman's attitude, it would not surprise me if they dumped him on the nearest streetcorner, except that they returned 3 hours later.

This is how the responsibility gets evacuated: I hire a contractor with whom I have clear(ish) dealings, he sub-contracts out to foremen: I don't know what the terms of their arrangement are, exploitative or fair. Then the foreman employs men whose legal status and terms of employment are even more removed from me. All these layers are so that I don't have to know and can't be held accountable for whatever abuses might be committed in the production of my new floor. I know this is how the system works and I don't know how to change it in my own interactions, so I just pawn the dirty work off on my mother and try to close my eyes. Weak.

The Lists

TO DO WORK: Write the first section on ecstatic memory in c3. Write a first draft of research statement. Write the mask section of c2. Make handouts and lesson plan for gwc session 3.
DONE! wrote the mask section of c2. wrote an outline of the research statement. cut and pasted a first section of c3. Made handouts and lesson plan for gwc session 3.

TO DO LIFE: Pay down debt (currently $1,031.09). Procure dog. Go running. Buy suit. Read Therí's paper. Go to dmv and figure out car insurance. Move clothes around. Get Tanya's present. Make airline resas. Make Ashe appt. Pack up remaining kitchen stuff as well as the file cabinet.
DONE! Moved clothes from the closet. Made airline resas. Made Ashe appt. Packed everything up.

TO DO BLITZ: sarah, marilyn, giulia, irmary, mariana, dar, nv, sf, marzena, thérèse, toño, pk, jerven, magdalena, staceymo.
new subset: TO DO CALL: katie, hen, lauryn.
DONE! pk, lauryn, wrote to jerven--it didn't go through.

Netflixed

Sophie Scholl: The Last Days
A very sad movie about a couple of kids who are executed for having put out oppositional leaflets in munich in the 40s. What was so heartbreaking in watching it is their certainty and desire for their ideas to resonate, and the movie just leaves it utterly uncertain as to whether their ideas and rhetoric and passion is making any impace on their interlocutors: particularly at the court, the audience is totally unreadable--are they sympathetic and afraid to show it or indifferent? Moreover, what emerged for me as much as the monumentality of the sacrifice of the members of the white rose was the totally extreme punishment on the part of the regime.

Dreamgirls
I really enjoyed this movie. Ever since I was a little kid and I had a set of tapes of 50s and 60s hits that fit into a two miniature plastic jukeboxes, hot pink and turquoise. I love motown and I thought the songs crafted for the movie were generally nowhere near as good. but the montages of plot development during the musical numbers worked brilliantly. That is, the song and video are intercut with images of the context around the production of the song and its effects on the artists who are either involved or iced out.

writing the argument

"Throw away the lights, the definitions
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names."

-Wallace Stevens
"The Man with the Blue Guitar"

I am embarking on trying to write a first draft of a statement of research, which will serve as a template for cover letters and postdoc apps. I am trying to follow Stevens' advice, which I have repurposed for this situation to mean: don't use jargon, don't use phrases and words that you've heard and repeated so many times that they don't excite the brain and the tongue off of which they thud to the ground. But, sitting here with sweat forming on my upper lip, listening to the sharp buzz of tiles being cut, it is hard to perform such reimaginations. Much easier to tinker with the font of my cv.

Shakespeare in the Park
We saw Richard II this past Saturday. My parents opted not to come with: as we'd been driving about all day, they were pretty exhausted and just wanted to stay home (and watch my Netflix). So we got there and laid about in the damp night-grass. The play is long and the tension really doesn't break at all. It starts with scandal and the machinations of the king and moves from duel to banishment to death to regime change. Very corking. I like the histories a lot. I wonder why they don't get performed more?

However, I think this will be the last time I go to Shakespeare in the Park. Last year, we saw Hamlet there and found it quite good. We were especially interested in the choice by the lead actor to play Hamlet in a somewhat sardonic, mocking manner--quite a contrast to the melodrama that character is usually imbued with. And the same actor was the lead in Richard II. Which he played in a somewhat sardonic, mocking manner. So that interesting choice: a shtick. What worked for Hamlet, a young, insecure prince trying to find his way, did not for Richard II, who came off as a fop with nothing to lose, despite the many speeches re "my cares." None of the craven scheming and power-hunger reflected in this portrayal. Too bad.

The Lists

TO DO WORK: Outline the chapter. Write the first section on ecstatic memory. Write a first draft of research statement. Write the mask section of c2.
DONE! updated cv. cleaned up computer desktop

TO DO LIFE: Pay down debt (currently $1,031.09). Procure dog. Go running. Buy suit. Read Therí's paper. Send siff letter. Go to dmv and figure out car insurance. Move clothes around. Cover books.
done: Figured out where my missing contacts had gone off to. Asked tiler to please tear out two pieces and redo them: turns out there was no need for all my last night's dramz. he said: you want me to tear those out? no problem. I hope to god they're being slightly more careful with cutting today so I don't have to make that request again. Sent siff letter.

TO DO BLITZ: sarah, marilyn, giulia, irmary, mariana, dar, nv, sf, marzena, thérèse, toño, pk.
new subset: TO DO CALL: katie, hen, lauryn.

Restau 99

Lou
Cali Contemporary. 724 N. Vine St. Hollywood. 323.962.6369. dinner mon-sat. $
We went to Lou after our downtown adventure last thursday. We trolled around Little Tokyo for hours then saw a free concert in the First and Central series at the Japanese American National Museum with Destiny Wolf (cheesy lite jazz singer) and Máquina Loca, which was fun. Lots of bopping about in my chair and huggling with Michael. Anyway! I find the decor at Lou hipster-hideous, the only mercy is that hiphid requires a darkness that makes almost everything else invisible. The kitchen at Lou is operational until 11, they don't take resas, we got a table right away, and the food was excellent. We split everything, the garlic bread, the frisée salad with roasted goat cheese the savory zucchini tart and the flat-iron beef with fingerling potatoes. Pleasantly full, pockets undrained.

Village Idiot
Gastropub/English. 7383 Melrose. LA. 323.655.3331. lunch and dinner everyday (open until 2 am). $
Yum. We got there after Shakespeare in the Park ended, right before eleven and so had to choose from the reduced bar menu. Michael had spicy sausages and mashed potatoes (which I want to call "bangers and mash" but really, i have no idea) and I had the leek and goat cheese tart. Both quite good, but not exquisite. The dessert seemed utterly uninspired.

Casa Bianca
Italian (pizza). 1650 Colorado. Eagle Rock. 323.256.9617. dinner tues-sat. $
Do you think maybe pepperoni and sun-dried tomatoes are not the best combo? We did take-out from there last night and it was just not at all terrific. I think I don't like think-crust as much as Michael and everyone else in the universe who genuflects over it. Estimation of Casa Bianca: downright bad. Oh Jonathan Gold, I follow you like a trusting lamb and you can mislead me so!

I have to say, I am becoming dubious of this list: neither Village Idiot or Casa Bianca seem to me to belong on a list of the 99 best restaurants in la.

what are the odds

of hearing "play that funky music white boy" twice in one day? I don't know that I've heard it in years, and yet, once on the oldies station while coming home this morning and once this afternoon on the tile man's jack fm radio. I was happy for the twang of the song the first time and happy for the coincidence of it the second.

The tile man has been here since 10:30 in the morning. It's now 7:30. Tile work is not nearly as impressive as hotmopping, and sadly, the polished, bubbly quality of the tar has been coated in gray layers of mortar dust: it's as if the shiny hot mop had never worked its magic. Moreover, I have been sleepy and starving all day long. It's important for me to be here, even though I don't even pop into their area to check out the work because if there are complications with the building manager, I have to step up. But the "if" factor makes for a dull day: this is how security officers must feel, constantly patrolling and having to be alert for something that is not occurring.

Perhaps what I should have been patrolling was the work itself. After they left, I looked around and found that I really hated the way two of the tiles fit together: they weren't quite cut right and they don't look good. I'm very much in knots about it, how to tell people that I'm not pleased with part of the job: will I be insulting their craftsmanship? And will it cost them an inordinate amount of money? I know I have to protect my space and make sure the job gets done right, and I know I have to be straightforward about this, but I find it really difficult to handle.

THE LISTS:

to do work: Outline the chapter. Write the first section on ecstatic memory. Write a first draft of research statement. Write the mask section of c2.
done! wrote two paragraphs of the ecstatic memory section. Read 3 pretty useless articles.

to do life: Pay down debt (currently $1,031.09). Procure dog. Send siff letter. Go to dmv. Go running.
done: wrote draft of siff letter.

to do blitz: sarah, marilyn, giulia, irmary, mariana, dar, nv, sf, marzena, thérèse, hen.

hot mop

We are in the midst of a hard-core renovation: bathroom destruction and bamboo floor installation. The process has been a pretty mysterious one for us, including 48 hour notification rules popping up like weeds at my building. But the most amusing mystery has been the process of hotmopping the shower. What could a hot mop be? Mom thought it was actually "hard mop," Dad thought it sounded most like a lame last-minute Christmas gift, like a chia pet. I started setting hop mop to 50s jingles. But anyway: because we've taken out a truly ancient and disgusting tub and decided to put in a tile wall and floor with a glass door to create a shower instead of replacing the tub, there has to be a protective barrier between the water and the walls: this is created by the hot mop process which we finally discovered consists of first a cement frame, then a layer of black paper that kind of looks like sandpaper, then layer after layer of tar, spread on the surface by dipping a mop into a bucket of tar and mopping around. Once seen in action, it was all so clear--a mop literally coated with bubbling tar. If only my condo's regulations would ever make such sense.


THE LISTS:

to do work: Outline the chapter. Write the first section on ecstatic memory. Write a first draft of research statement. Write the mask section of c2.

to do life: Pay down debt (currently $1,031.09). Procure dog. Send siff letter. Go to dmv. Go running.

to do blitz: sarah, marilyn, giulia, irmary, mariana, dar, nv, sf, marzena, thérèse, hen.

broken bed

Or rather, the bed frame is broken. It's been a long time coming, with some evidently poor temporary solutions like just putting a book under the broken half frame for 6 months so as to muffle the vigorous clanking sounds it would make when shaken about, but we are only now getting around to trying to rehab beddinge. It's a rather enormous pain, not to have a bed or a couch. After finding a machinist to push the screw through each of the pieces of the frames (to whom I gave an inordinately long and incomprehensible description of the problem), and trekking over to Ikea for new screws, beddinge is good as new. I think. Both Michael and I declared that this was the last time we would be Ikea customers as their furniture is pretty shoddy stuff, but the catalog came today, and I can't help but think that a few of those products will be helpful around the house--I'm a bad boycotter--always giving in to those consumerist desires for familiarity, even if it has only made me familiar with trash so far.

THE LISTS:

to do work: Make new CR doc for Cham. Reread GCI for new CR doc. Finish day 2 gwc handouts. Read a ton. Comment h's doc. Take notes and copy Jones and Caribe 2000.
done! Made close reading docs for GCI and Cham. Made handouts. Took notes on Jones and Caribe 2000. Peer edited h's doc. Read Boym.

to do life: Pay down debt (currently $1,031.09). Procure dog. Send siff letter. Call kombucha makers re bottle recyclying. Read Theri's paper. Fix beddinge with new screw. Purchase external hard drive to back up my computer files.
done! Did the bills. Fixed beddinge. Bought hard drive--now, must transfer files. Called kombucha makers and they don't take bottles back, so I recycled them the normal, inefficient way (glass is very energy consuming to recycle, don'tchaknow).

to do blitz: sarah, marilyn, giulia, irmary, mariana, dar, nv, sf, marzena, thérèse, hen.
done! ek

Netflixed
The Queen
Is it possible that I really can't be engrossed in movies where I don't understand or connect with the culture? I really do not want that to be the case, but first Cars, which didn't really interest me that much, and now the queen, where really, the question of British modernization and the monarchy strikes me as faintly ridiculous. Moreover, I don't see a character as so restrained as to be almost a cipher to be all that priaseworthy.

Inch'Allah Dimanche. Yamina Benguigui makes some interesting choices in this movie on family reunificaton and immigration in France: there are some absurdist sequences that work really well, and very saturated color, but then again, the protagonist has many 5 lines of dialogue in the whole movie--which does make it kind of hard to connect or to understand why so many of her new neighbors feel compelled to help her.