I’m not expecting any extravagant gifts this year, but I just wanted to throw out that my Amazon wish list is up to date, that I am really excited about the Nintendo Wii, and that I have 48 jars of spices in boxes in my room, and that it might be nice to have them somehow organized in the kitchen. 
Monthly Archive for November, 2006
Google has recently improved their book search so that you can read more easily… dragging pages around, zooming in and out, and such. To try the new features out, I went to books.google.com and searched for “cuisine” and clicked the first book in the results.
Go ahead, click the link. Browse through a the first few pages. Keep going. Notice anything funny?
That’s right, someone’s nicely manicured thumb has been immortalized for the ages. 100 times. Helps you remember all the humanity that makes our technology hum along.
I am walking home from Chipotle tonight, belly distended and rather happy. As I dart around the bus stop on 5th and University, a muscular bald man who looks like he may have just been released from prison yells something unintelligible in my direction while crossing the street towards me.
I glance back and assume he was talking to someone else, but he responds to my glance with a “yeah, you.”
I stopp and look back at him. He slows down a little bit, looking slightly confused and then says “oh, I thought you were someone else…”
I start to turn away to start walking, and he continues “… you look just like a guy I just got out of jail with.”
Aha. I guess I wasn’t that far off on my assessment of his character. Not particularly interested in continuing a conversation with a convict, I grunt and keep walking, but he continues to address me. I can’t quite hear what he’s saying, but in my overactive imagination it sounds roughly like “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father prepare to die.”
“Huh?” I say.
“You’ve got a twin walking around here,” he says.
“Oh,” I meekly return, imagining my ex-con doppelganger and what a pleasure it will be to someday cross paths with him on the street. “Maybe I’ll meet him some day.” I continue hurriedly on my way.
As I walk away I look at my reflection in the windows of a vintage clothing shop.
Maybe it’s time for a shave.
Last week I posted a blog entry about what I felt was sexist language coming from our president. My friend Matt Henry recently posted a response suggesting that watching peoples’ choice of nouns and pronouns carefully is going overboard. If I understand correctly, he’s positing that the fact that Bush has at least one prominent woman in his cabinet suggests Bush is not, in fact, sexist.
First of all, Condoleeza Rice has nothing to do with the Bush quote I posted. If Bush didn’t have women in his cabinet, he would be flayed in the media, so he has no choice.
The question is: deep down inside, what kinds of roles does our President think are normal roles for men and women? Of course I cannot prove this, but I believe that when Bush closes his eyes and imagines a Secretary of Defense, he sees a man. And when he closes his eyes and imagines a judge, he sees a man. And when he closes his eyes and sees a senator, he sees a man.
And when he opens his eyes and sees women in those roles, he is smart enough to not looks surprised. However, he is not smart enough to hold back the impulse to give them backrubs.
Here’s another quote from Bush, made on November 8th, regarding the new Senate Majority Leader, Nancy Pelosi:
In my first act of bipartisan outreach since the election, I shared with her the names of some Republican interior decorators who can help her pick out the the new drapes for her new offices.
Granted, Bush had been making feeble jokes about democrats hanging drapes for weeks, and he probably was unaware how utterly patronizing this comment is in the context of the first woman majority leader, but that just means he’s ignorant of his sexism.
The fact is, Pelosi is the first woman majority leader in history and the first thing our president did after she was elected was make a crack about her designing her office. Do you think this is encouraging young girls to tackle serious issues? Do you think this is encouraging young boys to take their female peers seriously?
Language matters. The way we speak reflects the way we think, and I want to live in a country where all young people feel like their society is going to respect them, believe in them, and give them a fair shot.
I sit and class and listen to the “discussion”, which is really more like a set of interlaced speeches. One person gives a short speech, and then another chimes in on another subject, and then a third, and so it goes, for ten minutes, or fifty, until everyone has said their piece, is thoroughly confused, or we all realize the conversation has strayed ridiculously far from anything we’re talking about.
And I find myself sitting there, thinking “I want to say my little speech… I have such a good point to make!” while I simultaneously think “this is idiotic, we need to listen to each other and engage each other’s ideas. And I try to listen to whoever is talking at that moment; try to really hear their ideas, and try to find ways to respond that will help them understand and help me understand and help all of us understand the world.
But I know they aren’t ready to listen even to that. They’ll finish talking, and as I start to speak, they’re breathing an internal sigh of relief. “I hope my speech was good,” they’ll think, or maybe just “yeah, that was a good speech.” If I’m lucky they’ll be rested by the time I’m done trying to speak to them, and they’ll have the energy to respond. However, not having listened, they’ll just re-represent their original idea. Or, overjoyed to have the floor again, they’ll take the opportunity to present another little gem–in speech form.
And after an hour, we’ve all advanced our thinking a little, but there has been no conversation. It’s socially charged individual thinking. Not social thinking.
According to our president, “The secretary of defense must be a man of vision who can see threats still over the horizon and prepare our nation to meet them. Bob Gates is the right man to meet both of these critical challenges.”
It might not be his overt intention to disenfranchise women, but it’s obvious that when President Bush thinks about the prototypical secretary of defense, he thinks of a man. And I wonder, how does that kind of thinking affect Jenna and Barbara? How will it affect our children?
Sountrack for this entry: Jesus the Mexican Boy by Iron and Wine.
I think everyone enjoyed the party. I was really excited that a bunch of new Hillcrest friends (Brian, Elizabeth, and Grant) made it. Matthew from the Women’s Center was a no show, and I haven’t heard from him in a while, so I hope he’s OK. But the turnout was good, people had a great time making the lasagna. It was like craft night, rolling out long sheets of dough, cutting up tomatoes, and arranging layers of veggies, cheeses and everything. Group cooking is a great way to be social.
One of the things that’s getting clearer and clearer to me is that being happy in San Diego is not automatic. From what I’ve heard about cities like Boston and New York, pretty much everyone eventually finds a niche. But that doesn’t seem to be true here. The graduate population is struggling. They’re struggling to find a healthy lifestyle, and struggling to feel like they are free to do work that inspires them. And everything feels really fragmented up there. La Jolla seems more like a shopping mall than a community.
And so a lot of us down in the Greater Hillcrest area are sort of like refugees. But even if you get yourself down here it’s not easy to carve out a life for yourself. The great bars are sometimes tucked away, and there might be cool people living in an apartment next door but that doesn’t mean you’ll ever meet them.
So what this means to me is that having a healthy lifestyle here is WORK. Since there’s not a community you can jump right into, it means you have to build a community. And the message most grad students get when they start grad school is not “take some time to build a life for yourself,” it’s “here’s a disgustingly large pile of reading for you to do, get started”.
And because the people telling us to work, work, work are highly decorated academics, many of us believe them. But if you don’t build a life for yourself now, when will you? When you’re writing your dissertation? When you’re on the market? When you’re a freshman faculty member?
No, of course not. Our careers are getting harder to sideline, not easier. And if you don’t start learning how to make your happiness a priority NOW, it’s only going to get harder and harder. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a way to learn before it’s too late. If you’re unlucky you won’t learn to put yourself first until after you retire.
If that first track is done, here’s another Iron and Wine tune: Each Coming Night.
And the real kicker is that blindly struggling against the grad school workload may in fact PREVENT you from the kinds of breakthrough thinking that are necessary to do a remarkable dissertation. Yes, prolonged hard work is a critical ingredient of a PhD thesis, but prolonged hard work on ill-concieved research programs is a waste of time.
So, here are my dreams:
I want to love my body. I want to cook and eat and run and swim in the ocean and surf and dance and do yoga in communion with my body. I want to be part of a community of people who are doing the same.
I want to learn to be gentler with people. I want to be more tolerant and understanding of other people so I can learn more from them. Where I’ve been intimidating I want to be encouraging.
I want to be creative and spontaneous and be part of a community that supports each other’s creative and spontaneous endeavors.
I want my home to be a refuge for my friends and family.
I want to smile at strangers as often as humanly possible.
I want to make a real contribution to my field. I don’t just want to do good work, I want to do good work that is adopted and makes an impact.
I want to maintain ties to everyone I’ve ever loved. I think the human heart is infinite in its capacity to love, and I want all my relationships to continue to grow.
I want to push on my internal hesitations and phobias.
I want to build things that people love.
I want to do some high altitude camping, to go hang gliding, and to run an ultramarathon.
I want to be more supportive of my family.
…
The list goes on and on, but I really think these things are supremely important for a grad student to put energy into. On some level, I want to do all my reading in class and make my professors love me, but you know what? It’s really pretty low on my list of priorities. Us grad students tend to overvalue the adulations of faculty because we think they’re the key to career success. But look at things differently:
Spend your time pleasing others and you’ll be always searching for success. Do what you love, and success will find you.
I’m sitting on the couch I built (in the IKEA sense of the word) last night. It’s dusk, and the sky out the window is in that vague, calming state between blue and overcast. Nina Simone is singing on the radio… “What good does it do if I ain’t got you?” I’ve got some veggies in the oven–a new recipe. It goes like this:
Cut up all the tough winter vegetables you’ve got. I’ve got some butternut squash, a bunch of carrots, some zucchini. You don’t need to cut them into bite size, just cut them so they are mostly uniform size. I also tossed in a few onions because they provide that sweet sweetness.
Toss them in a pan with:
1 tablespoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cayenne (substitute paprika or other ground red pepper)
1 teaspoon curry powder
1 teaspoon anchur (mango powder)
1 teaspoon FRESH ground pepper
1/4 cup olive oil or so. Enough to coat.
Bake in the oven until veggies are soft and delicious, stirring every 15 mins or so. I’m guessing it’ll take about 45 minutes.
I’m about 30 minutes in, and it smells wonderful. I call it “Broiled Curry Vegetables”. Of course, I don’t know how it tastes, so what good is a recipe?
Nina says “You are young, gifted, and black, we must begin to tell our young.”
Last night, Alex, Kaya, David and Kensy came over. We had a few drinks on the new couch, walked to Nunu’s for anther drink, stumbled back and had quesadillas (with the heirloom tomato salsa fresca I made yesterday). It was a nice, relaxing night. I think my new living room is pretty calming. Tomorrow I’m having people over for lasagna, and I’m stressing a bit about it. I’m not sure why. I invited a bunch of people, and I want everyone to have a fun time.
Maybe it’s just because I invited some new people and I want them to like me. And I’m not sure how everyone will mix together. That’s probably it.
Anyway, if you’re in SD and you want to come, drop me an email or call.