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.