The Toughest Job You'll Ever Love

So I'm on campus today, finishing up all my end of semester work and enjoying the campus quiet. It's been, to say the least, an odd semester. And it's an odd feeling, too, going into winter break, not knowing when (and if) we'll be paid or what sort of situation we'll be coming back to.

Frankly, I've been in a bit of a funk. When I woke up this morning, I lay in bed staring at the clock long after I should have been up and on my way in to school. "I'm depressed," I realized, in an oddly narrative moment of clarity. "This whole thing is really depressing."

Anyway, so I got up and came to school, and spent a rewarding morning typing up a letter of reccomendation for one of my favorite students. Then, when she stopped by to pick it up, she gave me a present:



And if I didn't know it already, it's great to be reminded: teaching is the best job, ever. Um, I mean, best job ever, teaching is.

Course Reading Wednesday

"Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness."

A.N. Whitehead

Happy Christmas

In all the years we've lived in San Francisco, we've never had a tree. We always go home for Christmas, we've reasoned, so what's the point? But we've missed it, and home is sort of like an electron or whatever -- it's wherever it is when you notice it, but it could very well be someplace else simultaneously. Plus, this wee one's not even three feet tall, and was less than $20. How could we resist?

Happy Birthday to my Mother

When I was a kid, I used to love pulling my parents' old paperbacks, the ones they'd had since college, off the shelves. I loved the smell of them, the aura of brick halls and turtleneck sweaters, young love, and bright, adolescent intellectual endeavor. I read The Bald Soprano, the Odyssey, tried to read Freud and Kazantzakis and Ezra Pound. I wanted to be my parents' youthful promise, their love, the bright, ridiculously joyful smiles in their wedding photograph.

My mom and I both like Ezra Pound, my mom because she's smarter than I am, and gets the classical allusions and whatnots at some essential gut level, and me because I hope to be as smart as my mother someday. Because when I was eleven, his words held everything that was wonderful and hopeful about both the future and the past together in one small book.

And sometimes he's just pretty:

In a Station of the Metro
by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.



Anyway. Happy birthday, mom!

My Day in a Nutshell II: Electric Bugamoo

I spent the morning running around like crazy, finding some lost files and not finding others, dreadging information from long-forgotten data systems and generally behaving like a headless chicken unleashed on an unforgiving, flickering florescent-lit world.

Finally, at 3:00, I took lunch. I ordered some mushroom soup from a nearby deli, ran a series of errands, and rushed back to the office to proofread transcripts in preperation for a big-deal deadline tomorrow.

As I absentmindedly slurped my soup, I noticed that it tasted kind of strange. Something strong and unfamiliar. I poked at one of the mushrooms. It didn't look like a mushroom. Was that a piece of meat? Could there be meat in the mushroom soup? But they always have a veggie option at Bi Rite, and the mushroom couldn't have had meat in it, because the only other soup today had been.... crap. Beef and freakin' Barley. Beef! And Barley!

I've been a vegetarian since I was eight. My stomach is so not happy right now. Never mind the poor cow.

Not Dead Yet!

As I assured my mother this morning, I am really not all that sick, despite my ongoing blog-winge. That's a hazard of NaBloPoMo -- previously unbloggable events (i.e., "I lay on the couch all day and did nothing") become newsworthy. Moods that would normally keep one far away from the computer for fear of alarming loved ones are chronicled in excrutiating detail. Hurrah November!

Speaking of which, I don't know why, but NaBloPoMo never really clicked for me this year (I've been experiencing that with a lot of things, actually). I don't know if it's because of how busy I've been, or our new living situation (where every night is hang-out-with-the-housemates night), or the turmoil at work, but I haven't felt so creatively engaged lately. Looking back at last November, with all my talk of poets and poetry (and all my unblogged memories of reading and such), I can't help but wonder where my mind is these days.

Anyway. I'm off to an opening at The Lab with Brian and Hope (I can't seem to link directly to the Post Postcard show we're going to see, but it's on the front page tonight). Our freinds David Faulk and Michael Johnstone are both involved in the show, and I'm hoping things'll be cheap enough for me to to some Xmas shopping!

Voiceless

I woke up this morning with only the tiniest, raspiest of voices. It was hilarious. Brian and I chased each other around the house, Punch-and-Judy style. "Goose Trousers!" I squeaked at him, "Monkeybutt!"

If it weren't for the coughing and fever, this would be the awesomest thing ever.

Course Reading Wednesday

Rule a big country
the way you cook a small fish.

If you keep control by following the Way,
troubled spirits won't act up.
They won't lose their immaterial strength,
but they wont harm people with it,
nor will wise souls come to harm.
And so, neither harming the other,
these powers will come together in unity.

Did You Know

That you can download all of Kelly Link's Stranger than Fiction under a creative commons license? 'Cause, yeah. You can.

Monster Kitty is Angry

I really haven't left the house all day, except to go to Walgreens (and then take the long way home, to avoid the agressive panhandly lady), and to go meet Brian (and then I bought sequins! Because that's what you do when you're out in the world and high on Dayquil).

Super Secret

I can't tell you what I did today, because the 3.5% of it that wasn't spent snuffling on a coffee shop sofa with my plague dog boyfriend was filled with super secret, crafty projects. Super secret crafty Christmas projects. Secret!

Ugh

Is everyone sick? I slept the better part of the afternoon, but my legs ache like I've been doing deep knee bends.

Postpriandial Cat

We Gather Together

Lately I've been coming to terms with the fact that for all my free-wheeling, easy-going,live in San Francisco and own nothing more formal than office casual (well except for my prom dress collection) lifestyle, I'm really a bit of an uptight perfectionist. This comes out especially when I'm cooking -- every dish must be opulent, delicious, and done to perfection, all with an air of off-the-cuff insouciance.

All week, I've been planning on making the same stuffed pumpkin recipe I made two years ago:



It's yummy and delicious, and looks like something a fairy godmother Martha Stewart might make. Unfortunately, it also takes the better part of a day to make.


that's one big pumpkin

So, this morning, after spending a few hours agonizing over the fresh toasted breadcrumbs I needed to be toasting and the pumpkin flesh I really needed to start seasoning, I finally screwed my courage to the sticking post and asked Brian and Hope if they'd mind stuffed pumpkin for Saturday dinner, since we were already making salad and tofurkey and mashed white stuff and pork loin and beer bread and it's just the three of us and Jason, who'll be coming from another dinner. And they were all, "Duh, can we take a walk now?" And so we did.

Aaaaaand Scene.

Brian and I are walking down the street. A man walks by in stylized safari getup, including combat boots with the pant legs tucked in, and a wide-brimmed hat.

Me: Do you think he's a Man in the Yellow Hat fetishist?

B: What?

Me: That man (points exaggeratedly with eyes). Do you think he's a Man in the Yellow Hat fetishist.

B: Because he's got a hat, he's a man in hat fetishist?

Me: Man in the Yellow Hat. Didn't you ever read Curious George?

B: I'm familiar with the concept, but not really, no.

Me: Well, the Man in the Yellow Hat is his friend. He's an explorer. He finds him in the jungle.

B: Curious George finds the man, or the man finds George?

Me: They kind of find each other. And then the man takes George home and then he drinks ether and paints a jungle scene on his bedroom wall.

(beat)

B: So you think because he's a man in a yellow hat, he's a Man in the Yellow Hat fetishist? Does it work that way?

Me: If he was wearing leather chaps, we'd say he was a leather fetishist. Ergo, man in yellow hat, Man in the Yellow Hat Fetish.

B: But we wouldn't say the man in leather chaps was a Man in the Leather Chaps fetishist.

Me: (disgruntled silence)

Me: You're an obtuse dingbat fetishist.

B: (wraps his arms around me) Which is why I like you so much.

It's on!

My cousin Molly, her boyfriend, Steve, and I have been talking about doing a pub quiz one of these days. They're away for Thanksgiving this week, but once they get back, ooh, it's *so* on!

I've been researching our pub quiz options. Because really, what else am I going to do with my time? Stuff a pumpkin?

My Day in a Nutshell

My phone gently expired at some point in the midst of Beowulf's gut blasting shenanagins the other day. I'd been getting this blue screen of death-type thing intermittently when the thing was low on batteries, but this time, it lasted a whole day, and no amount of plugging it in or turning it on and off seemed to help. So this morning, Brian and I took it down to the Radio Shack where I'd bought it to see what they could do.

We waited in line for about an hour. One guy, the Not Phone Guy, was helping other customers. The other guy, the Phone Guy, was assisting this one customer who spent an eon and a half filling out cell phone paperwork, and then decided he wanted an iPod nano (and grinned back at us, as if to say "Look at how charmingly impulsive I am! Wheee!").

Anyway. Finally, The Not Phone Guy came over to see if he could help us. I showed him my phone, and explained that I'd bought it there less than a month ago. "Oh, he said. We can't do anything with that. You need to take it to the Cingular store downtown. They can repair it there." And then we asked Phone Guy, and he turned it on and off a few times, and then took the batterey out, and then said "Yeah, we can't fix that here. You need to go downtown." And they gave me directions, and that was that.

Anyway. Then I went to work and had a crappy day.

Finally, at about 6:30, I left the office and got on BART so that I could head downtown to the Cingular store. Ten minutes later, I find the store and walk in. About two seconds later the guy told me "Yeah, I can't fix that. You'll need to return that to the store where you bought it."

And then it took me about an hour to get home. And I forgot my freakin' book at work.

Is it too early to be listening to Christmas music?

'Cause I'm ready.


When I was a kid, I had all sorts of rules about how Christmas had to be (some completely my own, some family traditions. All clung to with OCD-like intensity). The tree is decorated on or after the 4th Sunday in advent (yes, even if that's Christmas eve). Christmas morning starts before sunrise (yeah, sorry about that guys). And Christmas music (including Handel's messiah) is to be listened to in the advent-to-epiphany window alone.

What a little tyrant I was! Time to get over that, stat!

P.S. Have you heard Low's Christmas album? Frakkin awesome!

Beowulf!

Yeah, so I didn't blog before midnight. But I saw Beowulf in 3-D, so, uh... yeah.

The movie left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, jeez that was gory -- and did we really need all the blood and spears and bile in our face (I mean that literally -- this was, after all, 3-D). And I often felt like the immersive sense that the 3-D glasses created mereley compensated for the overall flatness of the graphics. And don't get me started on the changes made in the storyline (mostly because I don't know what to do with 'em. I can see the reasoning behind the choices made overall, but... huh).

But still, Grendel? Was freaking creepy, man.

Tesla Wins!

The End of DC Current in NYC

"Despite the clear advantage of alternating current — it can be transmitted long distances far more economically than direct current — direct current has taken decades to phase out of Manhattan because the early backbone of New York’s electricity grid was built by Mr. Edison’s company, which had a running head start in the first decade before Mr. Tesla and Mr. Westinghouse demonstrated the potential of alternating current with the Niagara Falls power project. (Among the customers of Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street power plant on that first day was The New York Times, which observed that to turn on its lights in the building, “no matches were needed.”)

But direct current clearly became uneconomical, as the short distances that it could be transmitted would have required a power station every mile or less, according to Joe Cunningham, an engineering historian. Thus alternating current in New York began in the outskirts — Queens, Bronx, Upper Manhattan and the suburbs.

The direct current conversion in Lower Manhattan started in 1928, and an engineer then predicted that it would take 45 years, according to Mr. Cunningham. “An optimistic prediction since we still have it now,” he said.

The man who is cutting the link today at 10 East 40th Street is Fred Simms, a 52-year veteran of the company. Why him?

“He’s our closest link to Thomas Edison,” joked Bob McGee, a Con Ed spokesman."

via boing bong