Utah Journal

Angels in the Economist

2008-12-24T22:24:00.002-05:00

There's something quite apocalyptic about the fact that the Economist just printed a three-page article on angels. I found it an odd and interesting read. The article makes no mention of the financial crisis, which surprised me -- I think an article like this one can be written because of today's economy, and a sort of cultural longing for rescue. But the Economist's purported reason for the article? Modern science has a few explanations for angels, and in fact, it can even make the idea of angels more acceptable. One of the most interesting points:

Oddly enough, modern science—so antithetical to angels—has made the world a more receptive place for them. In the age of the internet, scientific and technical language evokes angels all the time. Invisible networks and the world wide web are their natural and eternal business; from Ancient Greece onwards they have had instant access, global reach and universal applications. (Their very name, from the Hebrew, means “one going”, continuous action.) As Aquinas put it in his “Summa Theologia”, “The angel is now here, now there, with no time-interval between…angels exist anywhere their powers are applied.” Indeed, as fast as bytes flash, angels will always go faster. It is sheer speed that makes them invisible.

...

The knowledge universe is therefore the ideal home of angels, and their natural place. Anyone who supposes that the potential of the human mind is scarcely yet tapped or appreciated, and that its operations may extend to levels far subtler and higher than the senses can grasp, is leaving space for an angelic realm. And where there are still gaps in the grand unified theory of the universe that scientists dream of, angels fill them, agents of motion and illumination otherwise unexplained.

No doubt, in the future, these agents will acquire some sub-sub atomic label; just as, presumably, whole classes of angels have been replaced by photons and quarks. In some mystical quarters, the vibrating strings that are now posited to make up the created universe are happily compared to angels’ harps or the motion of their wings. And the web of unseen, unknown material that scientists call dark matter, holding everything together, might as well have been spun by the angels until the Large Hadron Collider proves otherwise.

Finally, a bit on Proposition 8

2008-11-18T23:02:00.002-05:00

Ben told me that at a Proposition 8 rally, he saw a small group of people holding a sign that said something like, “Mormons in support of tolerance.” Presumably, these are people I know, as the Mormon community in Boston is relatively small and close-knit. He took a fuzzy picture of them with his camera phone, and I can’t wait to see it; I have a few guesses of who was in the group, and I want to find them and talk with them about the issue, and get insight into how they’ve reconciled their religious and political beliefs.

For the last few weeks, I’ve promised to post an insightful blog explaining my thoughts on Proposition 8 – and which side I take – but I’m feeling quite perfectionistic about it and I guess the only sentiment I have to share now is uncertainty and discomfort. The issue has brought to the surface the complexity that comes with being both a devout Mormon and a social liberal. When I first became Mormon at age 18, I didn't anticipate that my loyalty to God would ever come in conflict with either my loyalty to my friends or my intuitive sense of what is right. I also think that at age 27, living with contradiction is more troubling thing than it was at 18.

I envy Maria Shriver the freedom she felt to publicly declare that she was pro-choice – but not pro-abortion – and to explain that she was quite comfortable with this perspective as a Catholic. In a strict Catholic parish, such public support for abortion could get you excommunicated, and I believe John Kerry was denied communion following a similar statement. Although theologically Maria Shriver is on shaky ground, culturally she’s not in any trouble, and that’s quite interesting to me. I think it encapsulates a strong difference between the Catholic Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: while theologically both churches insist upon complete agreement from their members on moral and spiritual issues, culturally, Mormons enforce (or reinforce) these values much more strictly.

I’ve begun outlining some of my more specific views, but for now, I'll just leave you with the comforting words of Walt Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

New York, New Friends

2008-11-16T22:43:00.002-05:00

Within ten minutes of my arrival in New York, I was seated in a cafe in Little Italy, across the table from a friend I'd never met before, but who I knew quite well in the context of my college's alumni blogosphere. For ages, he's read me, I've read him, and we've occasionally one another messages. (That's a feature of the Amherst blog community that is different from livejournal or blogspot style: rather than posting 'comments' publicly, you have the option to send the blogger a private message or post a response on your own blog publicly with a link to blog you'd like to comment on; I've found this slightly different format to be important for the community feeling).

There is talk about this sort of "digital intimacy" and whether it is meaningful form of human interaction, or if it comes at the expense of real, in-person communities and friendships. But gosh! I've always enjoyed my interactions with this writer, and within ten minutes of getting off the bus I was swept into a wonderful, breathless conversation about writing; about regret at having ideas when you don't have a pen at hand to write them down; about our life stories, in summarized form, and how our blogs fit into them; about religion and finding fullness and completeness with and without it; about travel and having the bravery to be non-traditional about work and your career. I felt like I met an instant and lifelong friend. Life feels so exciting in an encounter like that -- meeting someone who, even before our meeting, was convinced that I was a worthwhile person who had good things to contribute to the world, and who wasn't disappointed by the reality of who I was in person, outside of my blog. And I felt the same way about him, too. Now we're real friends. :)

Later in the day I caught up with old Amherst friends -- one of whom I hadn't seen in five years. And on Sunday I met a second blog friend, and again, there was that same feeling of instant connectedness, mutual admiration, and goodwill. She had begun reading me at someone else's recommendation, and that was wonderfully exciting, too. To hear: he told me, oh, you'd love kleahey. Read her. It was interesting to feel that I had proved myself on my blog in a way that I feel unable to prove myself in person; to feel that I've won the respect and friendship of wonderful people I can't imagine equaling in any dimension other than writing. Or no -- that doesn't quite put the nail on it. It's just -- as a shy person who isn't a great conversationalist, it was exciting and refreshing to skip all of the awkwardness of getting to know someone, and just to move straight into the meat of a fantastic friendship.

Describing this makes me feel that I've entirely failed on blogspot. I guess I haven't felt been ambitious about building this blog out into a community, when I already have one through my college. Perhaps I need to put more work into this one, or start an outside-of-Amherst blog all over again?

On the Fung Wah Bus, 11/15

2008-11-16T22:09:00.005-05:00

Here I am en route to New York. I look forward to seeing and catching up with dear friends, but I've also been looking forward to the journey itself, and strangely, sitting on a bus for four hours. For three of the past five weekends, I've ferried myself down to New Haven, and there was something so peaceful and refreshing about spending two-and-a-half hours there by myself in the car, listening to music and weaving through traffic -- but mostly just thinking.

I realized that I don't really set aside time like that, just for reflection, and this is a time in my life where I've had more thinking than usual to do: about California and my imminent move; about Proposition 8 and what it means to be both a faithful Mormon and a social liberal; about career goals, personal goals, apartments, being 27, etc. Last week on the drive home I found myself wishing for a dictaphone, to talk through my thoughts aloud. Not to report any "aha!" lightbulb-style moments, but to capture small insights that I would otherwise forget, and to document the process of beginning with a vague question and making small conclusions about it. So here I am, thinking about thinking. I'll let you know if I reach any epiphanies, on the Fung Wah bus to New York.

Soy un votante democrata

2008-11-04T18:42:00.002-05:00

I just got back from knocking for Obama in New Hampshire. I went with Ben to one of the most despairing neighborhoods I've seen in New England: an impoverished part of Nashua full of dilapidated houses, children wandering the streets during school hours, children smoking cigarettes, children with children of their own, children who seemed to be thugs in training. It was a sad and wonderful day that reminded me very much of my time as a missionary in Texas.

An immigrant from Kenya (and a non-voter) insisted on inviting us in and wouldn't allow us to leave until she had served us large glasses of Sunny-D -- part of the tradition for hospitality in her country.

A McCain supporter rolled down her car window to tell us she was supporting McCain because he wouldn't kill our babies.

A Republican for life-until-now, also in his car, rolled down his window to tell us that he and his entire family were bailing on the Republicans for the first time ever -- after decades of party loyalty. He asked us for a two photos of Obama and then drove off.

A man missing teeth (there were so many of those today) told us absently that he didn't realize that today was election day, but that since we reminded him, he would go and vote. For Obama.

A woman told us she didn't realize she'd lived in New Hampshire long enough to vote (30 days residency is the minimum) and she didn't know you could register to vote on election day in New Hampshire (a shame you can't in other states!) and she also said she'd go vote for Obama, too.

We gave two people directions to their polling sites.

I wore the sticker: Soy un votante democrata! and had two conversations in Spanish, both with enthusiastic Obama supporters.

All in all, it was a much more exciting and gratifying experience than my canvassing in Londonderry a couple of weeks ago.

What was really wonderful about this volunteer experience was that the volunteers weren't all highly-educated, or white, or young, or middle-to-upper-class, or even US citizens eligible to vote. Well, a lot of them were, but there was a richer demographic representation than I expected. The Nashua campaign headquarters were delightfully frazzled and full of people: people talking on the phone in Spanish and in English, people making colorful campaign signs, people giving directions and instructions and taking care of paperwork, all in a barebones storefront with a few tables and chairs.

I'm off to an election-watching party now. I'm hoping good things for Obama. :)

Corporate etiquette and the kiss-kiss-kiss

2008-10-13T15:52:00.005-04:00

Last week I met a UK-based client in person for the first time, after working for him for a number of months. We greeted one another warmly, and then, after shaking hands, he leaned in for a kiss-kiss-kiss, which I was entirely unprepared for. I almost maintained my composure for cheek-kiss number one, but much to my chagrin, I was a bit dumbfounded for cheek kisses two and three. The client laughed and explained: that's how we do things in London. I've never been to UK, but I guess I'd always unknowingly thought of the cheek-kiss as more of a continental European thing, and unfortunately, I'd also assumed that such greetings were a social and not a business custom.

I take comfort in the fact that I'm not alone in needing guidance on the matter of cheek-kissing. In fact, the Wall Street Journal devoted an entire article to the topic earlier this year (Americans Learn the Global Art of the Cheek kiss). Interestingly, the article focuses on the Hispanic business culture as the primary site of cultural difference. And even more interestingly, the article cites the expertise of a "corporate etiquette consultant." That sounds like a tremendously interesting career path, and one that certainly intersects public relations.

Having lived in a predominantly Mexican-American community in Houston, I became accustomed to greeting friends with the beso (just one kiss on the cheek), though it always did feel a bit foreign to me. And then at family reunions for my dad's side of the family, there is always the cheek kiss, and it never occured to me to wonder if that was an Irish custom, or where it came from, since at other gatherings I haven't seen in it. But context aside, I'm decidedly a hand-shake person.

Fasting, a migraine, an obituary

2008-09-07T21:14:00.003-04:00

I fasted today, as you do in my church the first Sunday or every month, and which I don't usually observe because it sometimes gives me migraines. I had cranberry juice this morning, so it wasn't a complete fast, but I still got an awful migraine later in the day that would not be appeased by exedrin migraine. I no longer keep anything stronger on hand, and I quickly realized that the headache had gotten out of my control and I just had to wait.

I think of the time in a headache as dead time -- there is nothing you can do but wait for the time to pass, the only cure for headaches of that variety. I spent an hour sitting on the bathroom floor reading the Economist, and then watched "Martian Child" with my roommate and a plastic bag. I was urged to go lie down in the dark, which does ease the pain a little bit, but in the boredom of lying down, unable to sleep, my focus always turns undistractedly to the pain.

I helped my mother, today, with my grandfather's obituary. It described his education, his work, his family: he leaves his wife of 55 years, a son, Eric (who has never been called Eric a day in his life), a daughter, Meryl, and nine grandchildren. I have to admit that it made me think of W.H. Auden's poem, "The Unknown Citizen"; it could have described any number of boyscout-troop leading, Sunday School teaching, family man grandfathers.

If I had the chance to write an obituary, regardless of the likelihood it would be accepted by a local newspaper, it would have described a trip that my grandfather took me on in honor of my fifth birthday. He asked me what I wanted as a birthday gift, and I had something very specific in mind: a pink, gem-encrusted plastic snail, about eight inches tall, that was all the rage amongst my little friends. It had a shell that opened into a hiding place for the little treasures that only a five year-old has. I can't remember what those snails were called, but it was one of those eighties toys that was heavily marketed on television and which I desperately wanted.

My grandfather drove me to Toys 'R Us, and got a shopping cart, and we quickly found exactly what a wanted, much to my delight. We put the pink snail into the shopping cart, and then my grandfather surprised me by suggesting that we take a little walk through the store. I thought he was going to try to convince me that I may want another toy more, and I was entirely baffled when he led me down every aisle of the store, frequently picking things up and asking, "You know, this looks like a neat toy. Would you like to get this, too?" Even being five years old and having only the most rudimentary knowledge of the world, I was acutely aware of the extravagance of that trip, so much so that it made me feel shy. I don't remember everything we got that day -- we did get a "lite-brite," a my little pony, some small dolls whose hair changed color in the bathtub, a baseball bat, some gifts that my grandfather let me pick out for my other siblings. The cart was overflowing with toys by the time we left, and I truly felt like the luckiest girl in the world that night.

I wonder if he planned to get all of things that night, or if it was a spur-of-the-moment decision. When I was in college I wrote about that trip in a letter to my grandparents, and gosh, I'm so, so glad that I did. I wish I had written notes describing other fond memories, too: the memory of my grandfather pulling me out of knee-deep muddy water after I feel into a swamp in a hike that we took; my grandfather sneaking a doughnut to me after I had been sent to my room for misbehavior; my grandfather taking me and my siblings and my cousins to a frozen lake that was covered in six inches of snow, and playing the most fun game of tag that I think I've ever played.

Gosh. I just really want to value people the way the deserve to be valued, and to just show my appreciation more generously. I also feel my role in my family changing subtly, but in a real way. I felt this on my brother's birthday, which was the same day my grandfather died. My mother was in Florida and I ended up organizing a somber birthday celebration with my sister and my dad: we got the cake and candles, made the phone calls, organized the dinner, all things my mother would have done if she were in town. And I realized that I really don't do enough to help organize the time that I spend with my family. That sometimes my role in my family is too much just showing up, and that I can and should do so much more.

Any, goodnight. My headache seems to have gone, finally.

A bit of sadness and introspection

2008-09-04T22:22:00.002-04:00

My grandfather was put into hospice on Tuesday, and my mother just told me that it looks like he won't make it through the night. His decline has been quite fast, and despite his old age, unexpected; though his health hasn't been strong this year, he was only put in assisted living several weeks ago. I wavered over whether to fly down -- my mother and my uncle and one of my cousins are there -- but after talking with my grandmother, I decided that the best thing to do will be to make a longer visit sometime in the coming weeks, after the mourners have left. It sounds like my grandmother will be spending some time in Massachusetts (how disconcerting it is to plan things in advance of an anticipated death...) and I'm glad that for a while I will have her close by.

When I called my mother earlier in the day, she said she was at his bedside and that it was unclear whether or not he was conscious, or could hear anything. She offered that she could put the phone to his ear and if there was anything I wanted to say I could say it. I wished, right after she left the line, that we had set a time for exactly how long I would speak before she picked up the phone again, because I felt somehow embarrassed by the idea of her hearing any of what I said. I felt embarrassed, also, by my silences, as I thought of what to say. I wanted a constant stream of conversation -- or monologue, really -- just so my mother wouldn't pick up the phone and suppose I had nothing to say to my grandfather. Silly, I know. But there was a piece of it that felt like a performance. My mother told me when she did get on the phone that my grandfather tried to speak into the phone, but that he was too weak. She said she was sure he'd heard me.

When I was with my grandparents in February, at their retirement community, we saw a man collapse, having had a massive stroke, and the man died soon thereafter. If there is such a thing as a calm emergency, that's what it was: as the man lay lifeless on the ground, his wife sat next to him and held his hand, with a composure and quietness that seemed to belie the seriousness of the situation. It's stranger, perhaps, that it truly didn't occur to me then that that visit would be the last time I would see my grandfather. I do feel some of the same calmness of that woman, now. Even as my grandfather stayed relatively healthy, he has suffered a lot this year, health-wise. I'm most worried about my grandmother, and the fact that she remains so far away from the rest of us.

That's all for now -- more later.

Soul Train

2008-09-02T22:10:00.003-04:00

Tom, I actually did go through with the improv performance on the T(!), though until the last moment I didn't think I would be able to go through with it. What is even more surprising is that it was spectacularly fun, unexpectedly easy, and for the most part, positively received. Our group of five never told anyone we were acting, which, we agreed, would put too much pressure on us to perform something really successful. And though I'm sure plenty of people thought we were nuts, that didn't take away from their enjoyment of it, or ours. I think that people usually did pick up on the fact that something was up, or planned, or not quite real life, but again, that didn't mar the experience in the least.

The most successful scene was one that I was a spectator to: my friends Holly and Alice, pretending to be strangers, complimented one another on their handbags, and then one of them proposed an exchange of handbags. To the surprise of everyone on the train, the other agreed, and suddenly they were on their hands and knees in the train, each emptying her handbag of its contents, and putting them into the other woman's bag. Once they were packed up, they thanked one another, and got off at the next stop. It was hilarious to see, and people were in stitches, though they generally made an effort not to laugh outright, since again, there was some uncertainty as to whether the scenario were real or not. When you think about it, it's surprising that something so simple, and with no inherent humor, could be so funny. That's the beauty of improv -- you don't have to actually say anything that's funny, per se; often what people laugh at is entirely situational, and it elicits laughter because it is so unexpected, so out of the ordinary, and so different from what usually happens in real life.

There was also something incredibly exhilarating and gratifying about being the source of such pure laughter, and also in holding in my own laughter so often, sometimes unsuccessfully. I guess I sometimes feel like I'm made of all seriousness and the performance that night felt a bit like coming out of a shell for the first time, and being a person I've always wanted to be. I think the greatest pleasure, though, was from a feeling of -- well, I guess, understanding the hilarity and absurdity of life. It was as if with every movement I took or word I spoke, I was freed of all of the arbitrary conventions that normally make me feel inhibited. Or no, that doesn't get quite at the core of it. It just felt like living pure life for a little while.

In our last scene, Holly, our fearless leader, suggested doing some dancing on the train, and we ended up lightly beating rhythms on the chairs and poles with our hands. One passenger, upon entering the train, said that she chose to come to our part of the train because, "This is the happy part of the train." And an elderly man sitting nearby, who until that moment had looked stone-faced and disapproving, smiled and said, "Yes, this is the soul train." Of course, we all laughed. I'm not sure whether I'll do improv on the train again, or at all outside of Improv class, but gosh! I did have a good time that night. :)

Monadnock

2008-08-30T20:27:00.004-04:00

I just returned from a lovely trip to Mount Monadnock with a wonderful group of people: a friend from college, a friend from work, a wonderful friend of that friend, and a few friends from church. There were ten of us all together -- the perfect number for such a trip -- and there is something so exciting about having the chance to bring together friends from different contexts.

We ran into quite a few families on the trail, many with young children in tow, either in ridiculous hiker-style child-carriers or being coaxed along. I felt like I saw a lot of happy adult hikers and a lot of tired children who would have preferred to be at home playing video games. I climbed Monadnock many times as a child, and I think my enjoyment of the trips was shaped by the fact that my dad pulled me out of school for the occasion, and with the intent to spend quality time with me.

I enjoy hiking more now than I did as a child, but it occurred to me, today, that somehow children seem a much more natural part of the landscape at a place like Monadnock than they do in the city. In fact, whenever I pass a woman pushing a baby carriage in the city, the thought crosses my mind that I can't imagine an urban childhood. A city can have wonderful things for children, and for me, the museums of Boston were an important backdrop of many Saturday afternoons growing up. Nevertheless, when in the city as a kid, my parents were more guarded in their care of me -- there were more insistent (and justified) warnings to be careful in crossing the street, and keener attention to keeping everyone together.

To me, children just look out of place in the city. The bigger the city, the more out of place. New York, for example. I see a child alone in New York and involuntarily the thought comes to my mind: where is the adult to whom the child is attached? is she okay? When in surburbia I would be troubled with no such worry. Of course, at present I can't imagine not living the city. But that just seems like what you're supposed to do in your twenties. Live in a big city where there are lots of jobs and good companies and interesting people and cultural activities and such. So I guess I'm doing everything right. :)

Public Humiliation, 8/27/08

2008-08-20T17:21:00.006-04:00

This Wednesday will mark my debut as an improv performer. With my classmates from ImprovAsylum, I will be bringing comedy to the bowels of Boston in an impromptu performance on the T. Although the particulars are yet to be determined, I believe we will enter the train, and have an announcer alert riders to the fact we will be doing a quick performance; I think some clarification would be needed, since a T ride can be quite theatrical without the presence of actors, and it might serve us well to explain to people that we're not crazy and they might be less inclined to tell us to pipe down so they can focus on their sudoku.

You may ask: is this *really* Katherine's blog? Could it be possible that Katherine will perform in public, in a potentially disruptive and humiliating way? To that, I can only answer: I think I can do it, but we'll see.

You may also ask: where and when will this performance be? That, gentle reader, I must withhold from you. Improv class has changed me, but not to the extent that I think I could perform such a silly thing in front of people I knew. However, if this is a smashing success, perhaps you will be invited to a future performance. ;)

In other news, I just had dinner with my brother, who is currently visiting from Germany. He's writing a book on an interesting WW2 battle, the battle of Breslau, and I can't help feeling an envy for his life -- spending his days interviewing survivors in Germany and Poland and pouring over books and documents in the library. It sounds like such a literary life, and I wanted to know all of the details: how much he writes every day; how he broaches painful topics and asks people to recall traumatic experiences; who translates for him, Polish to German, or to English? J is also finding distant relatives in Germany, and there is something delicious about that as well. I was worried when he first announced that he was quitting his job and moving to Germany, but I see things quite differently now, eight months into it; he is really living life to the fullest and doing remarkable things. I will be the manuscript's first editor, and I'm excited about that as well. Having worked in the arcane world of textbook publishing, there is unfortunately little I know about publishing trade books, and I wish I had more insights for him. I need to find friends of friends who were in trade at Houghton Mifflin.

Welcome to San Francisco, Ms. Boston

2008-08-01T20:55:00.004-04:00

I have to admit that this vacation did not get off to an auspicious start, as my luggage was lost for a day, and this is spite of my decision to bring only a carry-on. I’d always supposed that a carry-on would be a much safer bet than checked luggage, but I’ve come to the sad conclusion now that you must keep a vigilant eye on your baggage, even when it is within feet of you. When the plane was deboarding, I was sitting in a window seat, so I had to wait a few minutes to get up and get my bag. When I finally had a chance to reach into the storage compartment for my bag, it was gone. I didn’t exclaim at this right away, because I supposed perhaps I was mistaken as to where my bag was, and I carefully scanned the surrounding compartments before saying anything – first gently telling the passengers around me that someone had taken my bag, and then with a bit more urgency alerting the flight attendant, and getting an announcement made over the loudspeaker. It didn’t occur to me that that moment of hesitation was critical. If I could go back to that moment, I would have run ahead, or behaved more frantically. But in the moment, I supposed that the mistaken person would realize her mistake, or that I would be able to catch up with her.

I spent most of the afternoon shopping for the necessaries of a few days in San Francisco, which would have been quite a burden if it weren’t for Rob’s endless patience and optimism. He was my constant advisor on the clothes front (I practically shouted, “We’re saved!” when I saw an H&M), but I have to admit that it is frustrating to have to buy clothes you don’t fit properly and that you don’t particularly like. I get most of my clothes online, where tall sizes are available, and I had to make more compromises than usual in my selections of today.

Anyway, the mistaken taker of my luggage appearred to be a J.K. of Boston, whose carry-on of a similar size and color was left in a nearby compartment. I've called her twice, but for over a day there was for a day no word on the whereabouts of the bag, or if, indeed, J.K. was involved at all. When I added up in my head the significance of everything in the bag, in expense and the difficulty of procurement, I felt a bit dismayed. And that dismay turned to slight nausea when I realized that, in fact, not everything in the bag was mine to start with. I just spoke to Bequis, whom I’m meeting for dinner, and she asked me, did I remember to bring her checkbook and her mail? And I said yes; but then remembered they were in the missing suitcase. There is also James's book, "The Perk of Being a Wallflower," which I looking forward to reading and above all planning to return to him!

All of this was forgotten in the evening, when Bequis and two other friends took me swing dancing, in shoes that weren't dance shoes (loafers!) or mine, but that I forgot about once I was on the floor. There they did a special lindy jam for people who are from out of town (myself and then someone from London) and a few people with birthdays. To those of you unfamiliar with a lindy jam, what happens is that the very, very best dancers all take turns dancing with the people being "jammed," and this involves cutting in on people in interesting and elegant ways. The music was perfect: they played a song about being in San Francisco -- and goodness, I've never danced the way I did in that lindy circle, in which I danced with the most talented and physically strong dancers I've ever had the privilege of dancing with. I was thrown into the air, pulled into almost neck-breaking dips and fast spins, and everyone who danced with me in the lindy jam said: welcome to San Francisco, Ms. Boston -- which was lovely. The swing dance scene here is *AWESOME*. I accumulated a small stack of business cards, with notes scribbled on them of where I should go dancing, of what I should see in SF, of well wishes that my dream of moving here will come true.

In other news, the concierge just brought me my missing suitcase! Crisis averted. JK called and apologized profusely. She was in a great hurry , she explained, and our bag were similar. No harm done. What a relief!

The perfect wedding/family diaspora

2008-07-26T23:27:00.004-04:00

I just got back from my cousin's wedding reception in Duxbury, which I think is the most beautiful town in Massachusetts: coastal, old, green, full of grand houses. It wasn't a real wedding -- the actual event happened in March in Arizona, and my mom attended -- but in its elegance and festiveness, the gathering felt very much the equivalent.

There was something about the day that made me feel nostalgic for the time when I saw my extended family more frequently; though even in the 80s we rarely gathered more than twice a year, it seems that in the last twenty years, my father's extended family has spread further and further apart, making gatherings difficult to arrange.

I feel a nostalgia, also, for the closeness that my father had with his extended family growing up, which is a degree closer than anything I ever knew. He lived within walking distance of cousins, grandparents, and relatives too distant to know the connection; he lived in a city where people had a context to place him in the social structure just through his last name. While the familiarity of a last name is perhaps quaint in a 21st century community (I lived in a rural town in Texas during my mission where it seemed that everyone was related to someone in one of six core families), I think that there was a sense of community that is inimitable in groups of people where a connection doesn't extend more than a generation.

There is something about the way that my dad enjoys events like that one -- and also from the way that *I* enjoyed the wedding -- that makes me feel that I'm missing something wonderful because of the diaspora of my family, both immediate and extended. I was introduced several times today as Bobby's daughter Kiki, and though neither my dad nor I have gone by those nicknames in years, there is a familiarity to the names that made me smile -- a delight that the charming, interesting people who were there claimed me as their own. I suppose that is what it is to have a clan, instead of just a family. Like in those mafioso movies.

I drove home with my dad afterward (as an interesting sidenote, my mom is in Florida caring for my grandfather, another geographical jump that would have been unnecessary just a few years ago, when my grandparents still lived in Massachusetts), and he admitted to me that he had fought at one point with my mother about what my wedding would be like (the origins of this conversation are a story for another day); my mother objected to the wanton expense of wedding, and my father argued for the value of an elegant affair. I suppose I feel conflicted on this, since I do think our cultural conception of what a wedding should be is driven by marketers and a culture that undervalues financial responsibility. But to my father, to diverge from the flavor of today's event would be a disservice to all of these people that he loves, a divergence from their traditions that go back endlessly. A break with what he has come to consider to be right. My parents are from two remarkably different families...

At the reception, in the many life updates I offered to relatives, I talked animately about the idea of moving to San Francisco, and my brother Rob spoke of his plans to move to San Francisco, and the bride and groom spoke about their return to Arizona -- though both of them are originally of Northeast stock. I suppose the little diaspora is continuing and will continue. My brother Justin is in Germany, forever, maybe, and I see him now primarily through video Skype. That is, I suppose, the globalization of the family. The pursuit of wonderful, wonderful opportunities, but at a cost.

Regret

2008-07-13T21:28:00.002-04:00

I've decided not to apply for the Boston Conservatory position. To be realistic, if I were teaching part time and working full-time, my plate would just be a little bit too full. My enthusiasm for the position, though, was itself exciting; it counteracted the regret I felt for having embarked on a graduate school program -- and by extension, a life path -- that didn't work out. It was a chance to remember the value of that year, that degree, and the fact that my heart really was in the right place when decided to go to graduate school.

Regret is an emotion (I haven't thought of it as an emotion in the past, but I think it really is one) that I think I've only begun to realized recently; it's been five years since I graduated from college, and those have been the first years I wasn't accountable to my parents or teachers or professors for my decisions -- I was responsible only (or primarily, at least) to myself. Incidentally, I just read about an Amherst alum from the class of 2007 who was killed in a tragic biking accident and I found myself finding solace in the fact that before her death she had a whole year to be her adult self, and to do whatever it was that she really wanted to do.

In looking over that job description, I feel a longing for the teaching life, but also a reminder of the difficulties that so many English PhDs face, having to cobble together a career by combining poorly-paid adjunct positions at multiple universities -- a fact that became quite real to me only once I was in my program. I suppose I would be in competition with those people anyway, in applying for such a position. (Feed: teaching, nevertheless, will figure in somehow. I do think that's a good fit for me ;)

I recently had a conversation with an older friend, who impressed upon me that one's twenties are a time of struggle, of second-guessing oneself. There are more than a handful of major life decisions I've made in the last few year -- on geography, relationships, career aspirations -- my first time taking a crack at decisions of their magnitude, and ones that perhaps, knowing what I know now, I might now make differently.

I think that now, at 26 going on 27, that I've reached a mostly happy place where regret oughtn't to have a place; I guess being content in the present is the greatest antidote to regret over the past, and I am happy about my work in a way I don't think I ever would have been had I stayed the course in graduate school; I am excited, also, about the possibility of San Francisco, a decision that I feel quite confident about (there, it is in writing, for my future self!). It's funny, though, that I need reminders like that job post -- to assure me that I've done the right thing and that I'm headed in the right direction.

A brilliant idea

2008-07-08T00:00:00.003-04:00

[[Oh dear! Most of my long, contemplative post got lost in a blogger.com error. sigh. Google just informed me that "Autosave" failed and my entry was lost. Enthusiasm abbreviated below.]]

I'm bursting with ideas right now! Because I've remained on my former department's grad student email list, I received an email announcing this:

The Boston Conservatory is looking for two Instructors to teach a Core
course on Modernist Literature in its cultural context. The two
sections are scheduled: Tue./Thurs. 5:00-6:20 and Tue./ Fri.
5:00-6:20. The compensation is $3,500.00 per semester. Course size is
limited to 15 students.

This is brilliantly exciting for the following reasons:

(1) It's modernist literature! I've read several books on the syllabus, and I absolutely loved Mrs Dalloway

(2) It's teaching! The world feels so good and different in front of a classroom. I discovered that in Shanghai in my ESL classes, when I was forced to always assume an air of confidence and competence and energy, even in the moments when I was terrified. There is something incredibly invigorating about that. My boss's girlfriend (she was Chinese, he was Irish), who met me at a party before taking my class, said her initial impression of me was that I was shy, a quality that was later belied, she said, by later performance in the classroom (and it was performance -- acting, really). It is nice to have your shyness taken away like that. ;)

(3) It's close to my current place of work, and with a bit of planning, it would hardly interrupt my day job. $3500 is a pittance for the amount of work it would require, but gosh! The pleasure also of teaching

(4) It was be a great way to spice up my resume, in a way that could be valuable down the road. If, say, I decided to move to Milan or Buenos Aires and teach at an international school there. For someone who deals poorly with transitions, I do have quite a bit of wanderlust.

(5) It's at the Boston Conservatory, where I've wanted for a a while now to take a music theory class. I almost wonder if I might be able to strike up some kind of deal : a literature class for several music classes and concert tickets. A non-degree music class is about $500, meaning that seven such classes equal teaching one class. Although I doubt, now, I will be in Boston long enough to establish a long and beautiful relationship relationship with the Boston conservatory.

More details:

Modernism refers to a period of cultural
transition and change in the late 19th and early 20th century in which
remarkable breaks were made from the past in areas of technology,
science, urban migration, capitalist expansion, and artistic
expression. These developments corresponded with a collective sense
that a shift had occurred in the way that we know ourselves and our
world, and an accompanying challenge of how to understand and express
these changes. The period of modernism marked a broad range of thought
and a wide variety of experimental movements in every field of
cultural expression. In this course we will examine a modernist
sensibility in several different areas: literature, film, art,
architecture, and psychology. At the end of this survey, we will
briefly consider how ?postmodernism,? engages modernist issues of
representation, reality, and knowledge, while questioning the limits
and stability of all truths. Course Goals: The overall goal of this
course is to examine the complex cultural changes that mark a move
away from some of the certainties and traditions of the Victorian
period, giving rise to new modes of perception, thought, and
representation that continue to this day. We will approach this goal
by working to do the following: * To consider the ways that
historical events such as WWI caused a distanced and disillusioned
reaction to traditional leadership and authority * To comprehend
the way that scientific discoveries such as Einstein?s theory of
relativity and Freud?s psychoanlysis contributed to a destabilized
view of identity, reality, and perception * To distinguish
between features of realistic representation and non-figurative
representation in literary and artistic texts and to understand the
aesthetic and ideological goals of each kind of representation
Required Texts (available at the Trident Bookstore) · Henry
James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction, Bantam Classic ·
Ridley Scott, Bladerunner (DVD) · Anthony Storr, Freud:
A Very Short Introduction, Oxford Univ. Press · Gertrude Stein
(Handout) · Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Harcourt, Inc. ·
Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House, Farrar Straus Giroux
(781) 767-4205

Small pleasures of today

2008-06-23T23:00:00.004-04:00

(1) A ridiculously large piece of north end pizza picked up on the way to improv class.

(2) Improv class.

(3) Reading Eat, Pray, Love on the T on the way home from Improv class -- a book I wasn't planning to like when I picked it up at hazard at a bookstore, but which has surprised me with its delightfulness. I missed my stop on the T because I was so rapt in it. It's one of those rare delicious books where you feel like you understand the author better than anyone ever possibly could and you would be best friends if you were in the same neighborhood. Of course, a book that's #1 on the New York Times bestseller list must make an awful lot of people feel like that.

(4) Instant musical gratification from iTunes, in the form of three Mozart sonatas. Despite overall having a pretty solid background in classical piano music, Mozart piano solos have always been left out of my repertoire and I'm catching up now. I've recently begun revisiting some of the piano books I had a teenager, which had more music than I could ever play then, but which my piano teacher went through with a pencil to mark pieces she thought I would enjoy playing someday. Right now I crave the idea of inviting myself over to her house for tea (she perpetually had a cup of what I suppose now must have been apple raspberry herbal tea) to talk about more music, since I'm beginning to exhaust the reservoir of music she gave me and she is now getting old.

(5) Going to bed, which I plan to do presently. Isn't it marvelous to have a daily pleasure like sleep? I'm staying up way too late, again, since I need to be at work early tomorrow. The one thing it seems that Elizabeth Gilbert seems to miss in her book is the importance of sleep. Really, it should be Eat, Sleep, Pray, Love. I don't think she could have possibly succeeded on her journey to self actualization without getting enough sleep. It really has been a matter of curiosity to me, how much sleep she got while taking a year off from ordinary life; I suppose that living in Italy and India and Indonesia, you wouldn't want to miss time by sleeping too much, but you would surely get more sleep that you would in the corporate world. The author was so indulgent in her eating and to sleep a lot would be natural co-indulgence. The emphasis so far in the book on eating -- and overeating after years of eating organic plain yogurt with wheat germ while doing yoga -- is a refreshing change to what I expected the eating aspect of the book to be about (I mean, the title is so yoga wheat germ maybe vegeratian organic. so that she subsists on gelato and italian pizza and pastries in the book's opening section is a delightful surprise.

summer school

2008-06-09T23:04:00.004-04:00

I just signed up for an improv comedy class that begins next week. To do such a thing is quite out of character for me (improvisation? comedy?), but it was suggested by a friend as a great way to improve one's ability to speak on one's feet -- something I could certainly stand to do -- and in a relatively fun atmosphere. I'm really looking forward to it, actually, especially because my sister is taking the class with me and we'll get to hang out, which we don't get to do often.

As it turns out, the class interferes with a writing class I wanted to take; my best intentions to get myself writing through my own initiative aren't working very well, and I think class is just what I need. Grub Street was recommended to me as the best place around for such a course, and though the classes seem to be more expensive than those elsewhere, there is a course that is perfectly tailored to what I need:

The Novel in Progress

First drafts of novels can be messy, amorphous and daunting. Some writers feel extensive critical feedback can be counterproductive before the first draft is finished, yet find themselves losing their focus without support and guidance. In this class, there will be no manuscripts to read and critique outside of class; all the work outside of the classroom will be devoted to one's own writing. In class, we will do exercises, discuss craft issues -- characterization, plot and outlining, point of view, voice, dialogue, setting -- and read scenes from each other's work aloud, providing guidance and feedback in an environment that recognizes the specific challenges of the novel in progress. In the last class, all writers will be invited to hand in the first 20 pages of their novels to receive a written critique from the instructor, with suggested strategies for finishing the manuscript. Please bring the first page (double-spaced) of your novel to the first class; or, if you haven't started writing yet, bring a one-page summary of the novel you'd like to write.

The truth is, I'm begun a somewhat serious writing project, but I suspect I will be unable to churn out much more material without some sort of intervention. It's so difficult to be goal-oriented about your writing without deadlines, or encouragement, or strategizing. This class seems particularly well suited to my goals and seems to address some of the challenges I've been facing.

Thinking about taking classes, there are a few others I would like to take in the next year or so:

Music theory: I was thinking this when I went to the symphony earlier this year with a friend, and we caught the second half of the pre-concert lecture.

Cooking: I would love to take a bunch of cooking classes, but I have to say that is the one type of coursework that really seems dramatically overpriced for what it is. I mean, $80 to learn how to cook a meal. I do really enjoy cooking, though, and I have been thinking of taking a course along the lines of this one:

Knife Skills
Do you get excited about a trip to the farmer's market, but dread chopping all those veggies and herbs? If the onions make you break into tears and you can't remember the last time you sharpened your knife, come to this hands-on class and learn to slice, dice, and mince in a casual and supportive environment. We'll go over which knives are used for which cuts, how to buy a good knife in any price range, as well as sharpening and caring for your knives. And what cooking class is complete without a sumptuous lunch? The meal we'll prepare out of all those veggies might include fennel orange salad, potato leek soup, tomato onion tart, and ratatouille. This class is vegetarian. Limited to 7 people.
One 3-hour session
$70 per person
Thur., June 5, 2008 6pm-9pm Waiting List
Tue., July 8, 2008 6pm-9pm Register
Thur., July 31, 2008 6pm-9pm Register

Again. Quite expensive (and to my mind, gratuitously so. I mean, you're learning to use a knife...?). However, I had a friend who took a course like this and called it life changing.

A financial advisor

2008-05-11T16:16:00.006-04:00

A nice day in Belmont is infinitely nicer than a nice day in Medford. Here it is so lush and green, and there, a sunny, beautiful day only makes the pavement bright and hot. What a difference five miles make! Soon I will go back outside to enjoy the day (and later, a trip to Middlesex Fells), but goodness, I have neglected my blog! Here's a brief update, and later I will jump into the conversation re: the utility of complex language.

One of my most interesting experiences in the last couple of weeks was a meeting with a financial advisor for a free consultation. There was something unexpectedly refreshing about being able to speak frankly with someone about my finances, and it occurred to me, as I sat across a table covered with documents detailing every aspect of my financial life, that there wasn't really anyone who had a picture of my financial health as clear as this advisor did in that moment. I think probably the only people I've talked with openly about money are my parents and my friend BQ, with whom I went through my taxes last year; I suppose they would be happy to look at the specifics of my finances if I asked them to, but the most part we speak in generalities. It's interesting that there's such a taboo in speaking about money, and how personal the specifics of earnings and spending habits are when (1) to some extent, you can gauge someone's financial situation from their external behaviors and (2) financial health is something incredibly important and many people are undereducated about how to make good financial decisions -- for this I need only cite the American epidemic of spending more than you earn.

Despite the value of the meeting, I've decided for the moment that I'm not going to work with a financial advisor, which is somewhat expensive (the annual retainer fee is 1% of your income). The meeting did bring up for me the idea that I really should start educating myself about personal finance strategies, and perhaps ultimately I will decide that I'm unwilling to put the work in myself to making educated money decisions. One percent of your income. Hmmm. The natural question, which I did ask the advisor, is,

(1) How likely is it that I'm going to recoup that directly as a result of the advice of the consultant? Basically, how can you assure me that starting out in the hole is a good financial idea when with my own discipline and research I could probably do better than I'm doing?

The advisor's answer: well, it depends on your willingness to follow recommendations, which requires some amount of work and discipline. Ron Lieber, New York Times finance columnist, was a bit better at selling the idea of paying for a financial advice:

"Most of us would rather avoid paying for help. Many financial planners charge 1 percent of a client’s assets annually for advice on anything and everything, including investing. So if you have $200,000 saved for retirement, that is $2,000 a year.

"The best defense I have ever heard for this level of compensation comes from Roger Streit, a financial planner at Key Financial Solutions in Roseland, N.J. He says that only 1 percent of us are wise enough and regimented enough to manage our own financial affairs. The other 99 percent, meanwhile, could almost certainly improve their investment performance at least 1 percent, thus justifying the annual fee.

"Sure, this sounds self-serving. But it is also probably true. For people without large portfolios or those who need help with something specific, planners affiliated with the Garrett Planning Network can help. All members are financial planners who agree to offer hourly rates."

Another, related question, is whether working with a financial advisor could be considered an educational experience that you can graduate from. So, question #2:

(2) Do people typically learn skills when working with a financial advisor that ultimately obviate the need for an advisor?

To this, the advisor said that a person's financial situation generally becomes more complicated over time (e.g., you buy property/get a mortgage, get married, have kids, inherit money, get divorced, have more savings to invest, want to save for college education, etc.). The advisor also said that she worked with her own financial advisor because she valued having a second set of eyes for everything, and a chance to relax a little bit on the research (I have to say that this point wasn't necessarily one that made her sound like a compelling investment for me).

So for now? I've come with a bit of a reading list on personal finance, and begun a virtual stock portfolio on www.updown.com. :)

Sound Bites

2008-05-10T17:10:00.005-04:00

Today I went to Sound Bites, the Ball Square breakfast restaurant that is as renowned for the impatience of its waitstaff as it is for its food. True to form, the server rushed us through our meal with unfortunate haste. First, he approached us very prematurely to ask, "Can I take these plates away for you?" Then, a few minutes after putting the check on the table, he circled back to ask, "Have I given you your check already?" The gesture that finally drove us out was when the waiter yelled across the room, "Maria, can you bring another chair to this table so we can get the party of three seated here?" At this cue, we took our Saturday morning across the street to True Grounds, a venue that is less restricted by the dimension of time.

Sounds Bites does have exceptional food, but also the mistaken impression that the pleasure of a meal is purely gustatory. I would gladly make concessions in the quality of the food for the chance to linger over a meal, undisturbed, and talk. In other words, I recommend the food but not the restaurant. Which means I can't really recommend the food. So if you're in Ball Square, True Grounds is the place to go.

The end.

Bundeskleingartengesetz

2008-05-03T11:09:00.003-04:00

One of the delightful things about German is its fondness for sticking several small words together to create one long one. Here we have Bundes-klein-garten-gesetz: federal-small-garden-law, a word that encapsulates my love for the German language and for the German cultural sensibility that longs for private gardens enough to consider them at length in national legislation.

The Bundeskleingartengesetz was a bill regulating the small garden plots that German city-dwellers can rent at the outskirts of virtually any German city. When I lived in Mannheim, I encountered a few pockets of these gardens: they are small plots of land, ranging from the size of a small bedroom to a large livingroom -- which are usually separated usually by mesh fencing. But more than a garden, these spaces are often homes away from home -- and some have compact, elaborate sheds with amenities for spending the night, preparing a meal, or hosting a small garden party. The degree of ownership and attachment people feel for these small pieces of land was moving, and goodness, I wish we had something comparable in Somerville!

Along the bikepath, there is a Somerville community garden project, but it is, in my estimation, a failure by comparison. The gardens are poorly maintained; the owners seem to have little actual ownership over the space -- anyone can gain access to the gardens, while the German gardens are under lock and key, preventing flower and vegetable thieves; and because of their location on along a thoroughfare for walkers and bikers, I can't imagine it would be a pleasant backdrop for weeding and planting.

I'm currently trying to grow a cilantro plant in my bedroom window now -- I started it from seed about a month ago -- and it seems, more than anything, like an exercise in desperation. As a counterpoint to the pleasure of watching a plant successfully grow is the moroseness you feel in watching a fledging plant grow taller without being able to hold itself up; growing a pale, whitish green instead of the robust shade of healthy plants.

Our small backyard, here, is paved in asphalt, and indeed, it is too small to justify a lawn and therefore a lawnmower, but I can't help longing for a little bit of land to play with...

Cubicle culture

2008-05-01T21:37:00.002-04:00

For a while I've wanted to contemplate cubicles on my blog, and what finally prompts me to do so now is an interesting snippet that someone from work shared with me: the current recession has spawned a new generation of interior designers who can remodel an office space to make it less apparent that only 50 people are working in an office that was originally designed to accommodate 100 people. Reworking mazes of cubicles is the chief art of this: when an office space becomes peppered with too many abandoned cubes, the morale of the remaining workers tends to flag and affect productivity. But viola! Step in an artiste who tears down unneeded cubicles and creates a lounge area with bean bags and plants, and heck, maybe even rock sculpture with a waterfall. Even an extravagance like that is minor compared to the cost of payroll plus benefits for the last six people you laid off...

While there is something hopeful about this entrepreneurial ingenuity -- those people really are making lemons into lemonade -- the very existence of such a job is itself dreary. Have you sensed, this week, a new and disconcerting grimness about the economy? Reading the newspaper today made me want to darn my old socks and revert to eating ramen. It never crossed my mind that food prices could become a real concern in the developed world.

The recession-era interior designer concept also struck a chord with me for a different reason. When I worked at HM, there were at least 600 cubes on my floor, and though I hesitate to estimate how many of them were empty during my tenure there, my particular neighborhood had more than its share of empty workspaces. For the better part of a year, the cubicle across from me was unoccupied, and after weeks of vaguely supposing it would be filled any day, I put my raincoat in it to dry; then it began to house my commuter shoes, and soon I realized that the stapler on the desk was nicer than the one on mine. That cube eventually became an extension of my own space, enough so that if someone had occupied it, I would have felt it an infringement upon my territory.

Perhaps because that was my first job, I wasn't as sensitive to fact that the empty row of cubicles next to me signified something ominous. In what was certainly the most difficult course in my graduate program, we spent time considering the meaning of emptiness in philosophy; and how "emptiness" could never *be* empty because it was, in fact, full of meaning. In that class I felt I was always on the cusp of understanding something exciting and life changing but the epiphany was always slightly out of my reach. The students and the professor would talk about these abstractions as if they were the most important things in the world and I felt like it would be the greatest thing in the world to have the kind of mind that could process all of those things that at once wonderful and incomprehensible.

The recession makes me think of the empty cubicles makes me think of my graduate school program makes me think of my intellectual failings. And now, it is time to go to bed. I spent months contemplating sentences like this:

“The universal is an empty place, a void which can be filled only by the particular, but which, through its very emptiness, produces a series of crucial effects in the structuration/destructuration of social relationships.”

At once exciting and incomprehensible. How, precisely, do people study philosophy?

A day in Amherst

2008-04-27T18:22:00.002-04:00

What a pleasant, languorous day. I went to Amherst for the first time in ages, and though the purport of the trip was to see my brother's band concert at UMass, in my mind the trip focuses around our brief, whirlwind tour of Amherst College, my alma mater. In the ride there and back, I alternated between sleeping and reading, and then during the two-hour band concert, with the lights off, I cozied up in my chair and closed my eyes. I couldn't see very well today, since I was wearing my glasses (with an out-of-date prescription) and it was something of a relief to sit there and just listen in the darkness.

On Amherst, which I hadn't visited in nearly two years: the speed with which college campuses evolve is remarkable, and I found Amherst much changed. Most notably, two dorms on the main quad had been razed and replaced with buildings that leave you confused as to whether they're old buildings that have been newly renovated or new ones that have been purposely antiquated. I was impressed by how fluidly the new buildings fit the character of the campus, and in particular, I enjoyed the appearance of structures that are built to last -- something rarified by today's architectural standards.

The controversy over tearing those dorms down dates back to the time I was a student. One of my favorite professors from the art history department vehemently protested the decision to raze the dorms, which others argued would be impractical to renovate, and they weren't architectural gems anyway. You can't just go knocking buildings down, my professor said, because you're erasing history. In an impassioned presentation, he showed photographs of Amherst's storied gothic-style library that was torn down in the sixties to make way for a modernist, comparatively sterile building that better suited the needs of a modern research facility.

My one regret of the day was that I wasn't able to go climb Mount Holyoke or go to Flayvor's, an area creamery that makes its own ice cream. It was lovely, though, to see Jonny and to get a glimpse of his life in college.

Cultural literacy (and in defense of multiple choice tests)

2008-04-17T21:56:00.006-04:00

You bring up fantastic points, Tom! I agree that the degree to which our education system is shaped around multiple choice questions is unfortunate, but I'm not ready to set aside that history test -- or even multiple choice-style tests in general -- because I'm not sure what the alternatives are for either large-scale assessment or (and this becomes a bit more complicated) ensuring that students learn important facts and ideas. Well, let me qualify that by saying that in my charter school, there wouldn't be many multiple choice tests, because I think that assuring a high quality education is manageable on a small scale without them; when you're working on quality assurance for a vast number of students -- at, say, the state or national level -- I have much less confidence that students will learn what needs to be learned if there aren't corresponding tests that they have to prepare for.

Although I share your objection that multiple choice questions rely too heavily on skills that don't have other useful applications, they do help us begin to gauge what our education system is teaching in a quantitative, inexpensive, and relatively easy way. The more serious question you bring up – whether preparing for multiple choice tests can promote meaningful learning (is that fair?) - is again quite valid, but it again begs the question, what is the alternative? Whether or not you have meaningful themes and ideas attached to facts (and ideally you *would* establish relevance by linking ideas and themes), I would argue that having a collective set of knowledge is itself valuable.

This is a related issue that I'm quite interested in: whether it is important to have a canon of knowledge (or a national canon of knowledge, as the history test from my last post presupposes is important). I'm a beginner when it comes to understanding the importance of building a canon of knowledge among people, but since I do have some degree of familiarity with the issue of establishing a literary canon, maybe I can use that as the backdrop for my thoughts. In the literature world, the idea of that there must be a "canon" is becoming increasingly unpopular for two reasons: (1) there is way too much good literature out there for everyone to read anything and (2) if you do make a list, it will inevitably make exclusions that can be regarded as racist, sexist, ethnocentric, homophobic, nationalistic, small-minded, etc.

Despite spending a year in an uber-liberal English department, I'm drawn to the idea that getting on without a canon is a bad idea. There is one education theorist, E.D. Hirsch, who argues in his book Cultural Literacy that there are profound economic, social, and cultural costs of having a nation that doesn't have some amount of collective knowledge. The idea is that people don't communicate as effectively when they don't have a core understanding of the world that is similar, and that ineffective communication equals disunity, less effective work, angst, etc. Hirsh's theory is, of course, controversial (and a dear friend pointed out to me that the ideas it espouses are uncharacteristically conservative for me to agree with. B, do you read this?).

To go ahead being completely contrary...In defense of multiple choice tests...In high school I remember feeling palpable relief when I found out a test was going to be multiple choice. The more progressive forms of assessment (essay questions, group projects) were more tedious and work-intensive, though often the rigor of preparing for them was often comparable. And yes, multiple choice tests do stress the importance of memorization, and although not every student is going to understand the relevance of everything they memorize, I would argue that memorization is rarely gratuitous (wow. i can't believe I just said that. maybe it's time for me to go to bed).

A closing thought ~ the caveat that my opinions here are based on subjective experience rather than empirical evidence and I feel quite open to suggestions and contrary views; I really have no business talking about education because I'm sadly uninformed on the topic. I should read a stack of books and get back to you.

American history

2008-04-13T22:51:00.002-04:00

I thought this was interesting. I got 80%. B-.

Commentary later...

For Susan

2008-03-28T22:03:00.002-04:00

This post is for Susan, my coworker in California who expressed interest in my conversion to Mormonism. It occurred to me that I could share the text of an article I wrote on this topic for one of my college's monthly magazines in 2002. Susan's a brilliant writer(!), which made me want to clean this up a little bit. So here's truncated and slightly edited version of the original piece:

Diverging from a Catholic Upbringing
How an Amherst student found redemption in converting to Mormonism

I grew up in a family of seasonal Catholics. That meant that Mass was compulsory for me and my siblings every Sunday morning in fall, winter, and spring, and that our church was too old to have air-conditioning in the summer. Ever year we had a season's vacation from God, to sleep in on Sundays and recuperate from nine months of religious devotion.

My father was a seasonal Catholic, and my mother wasn't Catholic at all; she'd grown up in a family of year-round Congregationalists and was shopping for a new church when I was a kid. If you've never done it, shopping for a church is like shopping for a car: you choose a dealership, take a short test drive, and then let yourself be courted by the dealer. In this fashion, my mother tried out several churches of the Protestant persuasion, occasionally with me or the other children in tow. Her only lasting flirtation was with an Episcopal church, because the paster there often quoted T.S. Eliot and my mother liked that. I also grew fond of this church, principally on the strength of upbeat songs like "I've got the joy joy joy joy down in my heart" and a fantastic nativity play. But when Mr. T.S. Eliot packed up and moved to Virginia, no amount of pleading could prevent her from returning to her church shopping.

Despite my mother's waverings, my siblings and I were cultivated into casual Catholics, with a routine that was generally the same: we went to mass with our father, knelt when we were supposed to kneel, stood when we were supposed to stand, and put quarters into the collection basket when dollars would have been preferred.
By the time I was eight, my mother had found the town's mormon church, which she considered joining, and which we occasionally attended with her. To a young critic of religions, the choice of Mormonism was a terrible error in judgment. Not only did the church service last two hours longer than the Catholic one, it also didn't have coffee and doughnuts afterward. To me, such considerations were the chief selling points of any church; the doctrinal differences often ran together in a haze. In the religion of my childhood, I believed in Santa Claus, but Jesus was a vague, contradictory figure.

By my sophomore year of high school, when I was supposed to be confirmed into the Catholic church, I knew that I lived in a house where the Gods of my parents were irreconcilably different. I grew up in a house of many religions, and it was paradoxical to me that somehow my parents expected that I would become Catholic. When I told my father that I couldn't be confirmed, I hid behind my parents' religious difference, feigning confusion when what I really wanted was to step back from religion entirely.

I'm not sure why, but that year, as I doubted the existence of God, I began to pray. That's one thing you learn to do when you visit all kinds of churches as a kid: you learn to pray kneeling, sitting, sitting; hands folded or clutching a rosary; eyes open or closed; extempore or memorized. I was an expert in prayer without having ever prayed myself in any genuine sense. I obediently and emptily joined in the recited prayers that were required in Catholic CCD, but in private and of my own volition, I never prayed. Prayers sounded unnatural and insincere in my voice. My father told me he prayed all the time, but I doubted the truth of that without ever inquiring quite what he meant. I had never heard my father pray, except standing beside him in mass.

On the other hand, as I entered high school I began to hear my mother pray at least once a day. She'd pray that we would be safe driving in the snow, that my brother's sniffles would get better, that I would be able to remember everything I sudied when I took my Latin test the next day. She prayed about everything, and no matter how trivial the thoughts expressed, the prayers sounded reverent and genuine. As an experiment, I started to pray the way my mother prayed. I prayed, and I asked for things: grades, babysitting jobs, college admissions offers.

My prayers soon became more complex. I prayed about things I was thankful for and discovered that I really appreciated my family, my piano, my teachers. I prayed that I would know if there was a God, and if there was a church I should go to.

I found my faith that year, accidentally, even unwillingly; I decided to become Mormon, knowing that for myself no more church shopping was needed. A religious conversion is an elusive process, and for me it happened in glimmers. It was the summation of many individual moments over several months -- moments in prayer, in study, and in talking with people about faith -- that made Mormonism feel right. The sensation in these moments is like the one I get now when I'm struggling with a paper at two in the morning and all of a sudden a great idea comes to me: a sensation of excitement, relief, peace. I got this feeling sometimes when I prayed, when I read the Bible or the Book of Mormon, when I went to church. I think of these moments as musical: they evoke the feeling that runs through my body when I play my favorite Chopin nocturnes on the piano. Perhaps something resonates within you when you perceive truth -- in music, in literature, in religion -- a kind of emotional and physiological response. I followed my instinct and joined a church that I had once regarded as strange, but that had become a powerful source of guidance for how to live my life most happily.

Right before leaving for college, I was baptized a Mormon. It was a turbulent decision that meant I wouldn't be like my father, and that I would no longer stand next to him in Mass and listen to him recite prayers. I regret my father's disappointment, but I've come to appreciate the lessons learned from growing up in a house of many religions. My home was a gentle preparation for the world, with its religious discord and many Gods.

Exhilaration

2008-03-25T20:39:00.003-04:00

I realized, today, in a moment between tasks, that I had a wonderful feeling of content with my job: an exhilaration for its fast-pace, an excitement for the news and the trends I'm learning about, and the sense, also, that I'm starting to make a meaningful contribution to my company's work and to our clients' work. This is the first time I've quite felt this in the working world; honestly, my experiences in publishing and research and academia made me worried, one after the other, that I would never find complete fulfillment in a career, and that extra-professional activities would always have to be a more important dimension of my life, as a kind of compensation. When I taught ESL in Shanghai, I did have moments that were full of joy in that wonderful, inimitable way: when I explained something well, or engaged the class effectively, or offered encouragement to a student; but that job also a high number of frustrating moments -- dealing with difficult students, making photocopies, spending long hours in the evening preparing lessons.

But this job! It gives me a renewed appreciation for what work is, and for the feminist movement, and its idea that women should not be held back from this unparalleled feeling of accomplishment and confidence and value in the world order. I know I will not always feel like this about work; I think that in PR there is always going to be a fine line between feeling busy in a pleasant, worker-bee kind of way, and feeling overworked and stressed out. My workload at the moment is just right, but on the edge of being too heavy, with deadlines bunched closely together.

Today I piped in during a client call, and queued up my first press release, and wrote and wrote and wrote, and sent out an enormous amount of emails, and listened in on a fascinating webinar and distributed notes to my company, and made checklists on my white board for what to do tomorrow. And I got an email from a reporter from Forbes who wants to talk to me about one of clients. That felt kind of like scoring a three-pointer in the last second of a basketball game. I did so much today! It was a good, happy day. :)

In other news, we just got a census letter to fill out, and apparently the United States keeps track of which households have dogs and how many. We have no dogs here. But dogs?

a belated response

2008-03-18T22:25:00.005-04:00

Thanks for the comments to my last post, y'all. Matt, I didn't know you read my blog! It was great to get the social science perspective. Riva, I liked your point about socio-economic class and aggression -- I've never given that much thought. And Tom, for you, I have a brief response to Obama's speech.

I lingered on this paragraph in particular:

"...the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."

There are two points that grabbed me:

(1) We don't have to view white racism as endemic -- which is an interesting answer to my last post. It feels like there must be something at stake if we take this view-- as if we were enabling racism by understating it or denying its existence. The idea is liberating and refreshing; at the same time, it's also one that had to originate from someone who's not white.

(2) The middle east conflict is rooted primarily in the "perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam," not the actions of Israel. The US-Israel relationship is far more complicated than Obama implies here, and his use of the term "stalwart ally" felt uncritical to me; nevertheless, my objection is mainly rhetorical, and I think Obama's point is an interesting one. It's my tendency to put an unfair burden for the problems in the middle east on Israel policy and I ought to reexamine the issue a bit.

The pretend democracy of girls' basketball

2008-03-15T16:50:00.002-04:00

Yesterday the father of one of my basketball players asked me in broken English who had separated the hispanic girls from the white girls in the teams, and why. I didn't understand him at first, and I was tempted for a moment to speak to him in Spanish, but sensing that he was upset and worried about having someone speak heatedly to me in a language that I didn't completely understand, I hid on my side of the language barrier. His question brought to the surface a tension that has simmered in the last five weeks of my church's basketball program for young women, which I co-chair with my roommate.

To briefly explain: the teams competing in the tournament represented girls from different congregations in eastern Mass and southern New Hampshire. Our stake (like a diocese, consisting of several congregations) was asked to send two teams from our area to the tournament, representing girls from discreet congregations, unless there were too few girls from one congregation, in which case we could combine congregations. Unfortunately, given the tournament guidelines, we ended up having to send two teams that differed in seemingly every possible dimension: preferred language (spanish and english), income level (most evident in the basketball shoes), race (hispanic and white) and curiously, level of skill in basketball -- our hispanic players were better than our white players, almost without exception.

In the weeks leading up to the tournament, we mixed the girls up according to skill level, which worked out quite well. The hispanic parents in attendance for the most part recognized the disparity in skill level between their daughters and the others, as evidenced by shouts from the sidelines like, "Passe a las ninitas!" (Pass to the little [white] girls); their aggression was also sometimes protested with shouts of "Suave!" and "Calmate!" The girls knew that at the tournament they would be divided by congregations, and our hispanic girls -- knowing that they would be an all-star team together, seemed to look forward to this with eager anticipation.

In a couple of our scrimmages leading up to the tournament, I was a referee, and I found myself agonizing over how to make calls equitably across racial lines. I read about a study conducted several years ago that concluded that refs tend to favor white players in their calls, regardless of the ref's race. What do you do, though, when the players of one race objectively are making more violations than the other players? This was very much the case in our scrimmages. For the white girls, the calls were usually for innocuous things like double-dribbling or travel; for the hispanic girls, it was invariably a foul of some sort. The kinds of fouls they were making were the kind that are important to call, where the game can become dangerous and nasty. And how do you repeatedly call fouls for one group of girls and not another? I felt somewhat vindicated when one of the hispanic players fouled out of the game on Saturday -- as if it were an acknowledgment that my basketball eyes were right. As much as I want to believe that race is a social construct that doesn't objectively exist, it certainly didn't seem that way this weekend.

I think we assuaged the angry father; someone with more responsibility for the tournament came over and talked him through it and said that maybe next year they would do things differently. And I think when his daughters' team won, the fact of their separation seemed less relevant. Our hispanic team won, so those girls will be advancing in the tournament; the white girls lost (interestingly, to another exclusively hispanic team).

(And I just found myself rereading this post, scanning it for anything that might be construed as racist. I took a course last year on racism in American literature and it is stunning to examine the covert racism in the writing of people who didn't think they were racist. One of the dangers of studying literature is the discovery that everything has symbolism and multiple layers of meaning and you can "mean" things you don't mean except subconsciously and I fear this post will be considered racist for perpetuating the categorization of people by race, whether or not you think race is a real thing. There is a class of people who "bleed white guilt" and I suppose I am one of them and this analysis is beginning to wear on me. Okay. Please don't be offended. The end.)

Semicolons

2008-02-26T17:13:00.004-05:00

I must belatedly comment on the nytimes article on semicolons. I guess if I'm ever going to enter conversations about such articles, I need to be more timely in my responses; however, the topic is important enough to me to consider it even out of any context.

I wasn't surprised to hear the semicolon characterized as a dying punctuation mark; as an editor and a reader, I have repeatedly seen the comma used incorrectly in its place. I also feel that in my own education, the semicolon was presented in a manner that suggested I might *see* it in my reading, but would be unlikely to *use* it in my writing. I believe it was in a sixth grade language arts class that I first had any serious encounter with the semicolon. The half-comma, half-colon typographic mark seemed to signify not only a mid-sentence pause, but also a mark of pedantry or sophistication that was entirely inappropriate to the writing of a middle-schooler. The semicolon made me feel embarrassed, then.

It was on my own and much later that I discovered in the semicolon a gesture that was gentler and more continuous than a period, but that also had the power to signal order and organization, politely promising the reader the next idea is connected to the previous one, but that it needs its own stage. My fondness for semicolons leads me to overuse them grievously, and at this moment I feel quite self-conscious about this predilection.

Just now I looked up the definition of a colon, which William Safire described as "a grammatical discontinuity more prolonged than that marked by a semicolon but not as complete as that indicated by a period." Which indeed, it is, but the difference between a colon and a semicolon is more nuanced than that in my mind. A colon leads you from one piece to the next with a bit of drama; a semi-colon is quieter, and suggests that the connection between parts is more subtle.

I feel tempted to issue a plea to English teachers of the world to rescue this expressive, precious tool for writers from obscurity. I think the most compelling way to learn about the power of grammar is to read the works of good writers; in my high school English classes I read much fiction and poetry, but very little in the way of analytical or essay-style writing that would be more instructive in type of writing we were being taught. Reading short op-ed columns does wonders for writers, and keeps you abreast of interesting issues at the same time!

As a side note, it is only now that the name "language arts class" has any meaning to me. I remember being confused by the title at the time, and perhaps my confusion wasn't a sign of immaturity, but of perspicacity. In the class, language was not presented as art by any measure of success. I mean, we weren't even encouraged to experiment with semicolons...I would like to also write about the exclamation point, which I have strong feelings for as well, but I want to let the semicolon be the star of this post.

;)

2008-02-25T21:24:00.002-05:00

Scattered thoughts:

(1) I'm considering moving away from blogspot, or at the very least, to a different URL on blogspot, as "utahthoughts" was a temporary title that does nothing to capture what my blog is about now (well, what is it about now?). In consideration are livejournal, wordpress, and typepad. Ultimately, I think it would be great to have a blog with my own domain name so other people can track the site metrics, but I think that to generate enough popularity to justify that I would have to either become more thematic and frequent in my posts or unduly expose myself.

(2) I think it may be worthwhile to have a conversation with one of the senior people here about blogging recreationally (and on my own time) about work and industry-related issues. I guess I'd like to get a sense of how much is okay to reveal about my line of work, my company and its identity, what comes up in meetings, etc., assuming, of course, that everything I wrote was professional and in good taste. I had always thought this type of writing would be entirely off limits, but I've discovered that two people at the company have personal/professional blogs where they are quite transparent about their professional lives, and part of the purpose of the blogs is, in fact, professional. I've become used to regarding blogging as presenting innumerable dangers to the professional world; I have to site the famous case of the google employee who was fired after posting complaints about the company on his blog. I have a friend who was fired after a blog scandal, too.

(3) I'm considering trying Twitter, mostly on the strength of the fact that it is a popular communications tool that I have little familiarity with. I only know a handful of people, though, who use it, which diminishes my excitement. But we'll see.

(4) There is a name for the pain I experience on my eyes during a migraine, which until now I've only been able to describe as pressure from every individual particle of air that touched my eye every time I moved, even slowly or minutely: tactile allodynia. Allodynia is an exaggerated response to otherwise non-noxious stimuli. Who knew that clean air could be described as noxious?

New job

2008-02-19T19:06:00.003-05:00

Goodness! There is so much to write. Today was my first day at my new job, and I'm exhausted but happy. I've discovered that two people in my office are relatively serious bloggers, and that both the blogosphere and social networking websites are regarded by the company as important vehicles for communication. I was even urged not to feel shy about logging into facebook while at work, as that is part of being in touch with the media culture that we're working with. Soon my coworkers and I will be friends on facebook (that is compulsory, I think) and my blog will be discovered, though I doubt it will hold much interest for my coworkers, who write cultural commentaries with much more universal appeal. I wonder if it's time for me to remove the link to my blog from facebook, or if, perhaps, I should be more discreet entirely.

I've broken my rule about not writing about work on my blog, and I should probably clam up on that front now, but I can't help offering a few more details about my day. The company put so much attention into making me feel welcome, and just thinking about it makes me smile. Having wet my feet in the corporate world, I know that most HR offices are eager to greet new employees and make a warm first impression, but today's efforts just felt so genuine. Everyone was remarkably nice, and my favorite detail was what awaited me at my desk: when I was shown to my workspace, there was a pink gift bag on the desk full on chocolates and granola bars and snacks, and also a welcome letter and an arrangement of diet coke bottles. It's funny how something so simple like that can feel so nice.

Today was wonderful, but I have to admit privately (well, nestled into the middle of a lengthy blog entry, at which point I'm sure I've lost a few readers) that it was also overwhelming. I guess the first day at new job is always overwhelming, with meeting a dizzying amount of people and learning new passwords and discovering the lay of a new office. What was most overwhelming, though, was a feeling of doubt that I would be able to master what seem to be a complex set of skills, and an accompanying dread for the inevitable moments in the coming weeks when I will make mistakes, or need help with things that are basic to anyone who's been at the company for a little while. I guess that is a temporary, forgivable incompetence that is allowed as you adjust to a new job, but goodness...It makes me envy people who spend most of their adult lives at one company -- I envy them for the joy of finding a place they like to work, but also for the comfort of not having to undergo a transition like this one. I think day two will feel better, and then day three and day four...Baby steps.

In other news, today I also received this email from a college classmate, soliciting news in the following manner for the alumni magazine:

Classmates:

For those of you who have waited four years and nine months since leaving Amherst to truly blossom, now is the time to send in your Class Notes updates. Please let me know of any news which might interest the rest of us or make us deeply, deeply jealous. The deadline for updates is Tuesday, February 26th. And please don't forget that reunion sign-up is available online at XXX and that reunion is just around the corner.

Thanks,

XXX

I haven't sent any updates at all for the class notes, for a combination of reasons: indifference, worry that I don't have anything sufficiently interesting to report, satisfaction with the amount of contact I have with classmates through my college blog. Nevertheless, I always read the updates of others in the class notes with some degree of interest, even updates that don't say more than "so-and-so ran into so-and-so in New York." There is my job to write about now, I guess, but I don't suppose I'll submit anything.

my first 9-1-1 call

2008-02-16T22:58:00.002-05:00

Yesterday was my first 9-1-1 call; it was on behalf of an 84-year-old man who had collapsed just outside of a concert hall where I was going with my grandparents. I arrived on the scene after the man had fallen, and from a distance, it appeared that he had just lost his balance or tripped; on closer inspection, though, it turned out that he was unconscious and his wife was very calmly trying to awaken him. In that moment of crisis my thoughts quickly wandered away from the well-being of the man on the ground and into the risks of making a fool of myself by misjudging the severity of the situation and calling 9-1-1. Even when the man didn't respond, I couldn't help longing for permission, or longing for the idea to come from someone else; I asked aloud: Should I call 9-1-1? When I did call, I was quickly apprized by the operative that I *was* incompetent. I couldn't answer any of her questions: what had happened, how old the man was, if he was breathing, if he had a pulse.

The next question was if anyone on the scene knew CPR, and goodness! How inadequate I felt in the moment. I've seen CPR administered on TV and in first-aid simulations, but I'm not CPR certified and the question made me feel horribly remiss and a bit queasy. When the question was raised to the crowd of seven of so people, a man who must have been at least 75 volunteered that he knew CPR, and the paramedic instructed him over the line what to do, to refresh his memory. How awful I felt in that moment, to see a frail old man who struggled to bend down to his knees worrying about the CPR, and trying to balance the cell phone at the same time, while I, the only one in the crowd under the age of 75, was unable to help.

A few minutes later, a nurse from the retirement community hospital arrived on the scene, asked the same questions the paramedic had asked, but added to the list: Is he DNR? The unconscious man's wife looked up at her, confused, and the nurse explained, a bit gruffly I thought, "Do not resuscitate." And the man's wife said yes, and the nurse asked, again a bit brusquely: "Is the order written, and on file?" And the nurse knelt down to feel the man's pulse, and indicated that she wouldn't resuscitate him. It seemed that they were going to let the man die, right there, and at that point, a retirement community administrator had arrived and was instructing everyone but the man's family to leave the scene.

My grandmother, who knows the couple, found out the next day that the man didn't die right there; when the paramedics arrived, they found enough of a pulse to justify CPR (I guess the deal with the do not resuscitate order is that if there's *no* pulse, that's when you don't do CPR). The man had a stroke, and died at the hospital shortly thereafter.

I have so many thoughts about this whole experience: first, I *must* take a CPR class. I could probably do to have a repeat lesson on the heimlich maneuver and other first aid techniques, as well. And my second thought: how horrible for the wife...I do think that do-not-resuscitate orders are an important consideration for people who are quite elderly and in poor health -- for the individual as much as for the spouse -- but I've never envisioned a wrenching situation where the spouse was asked so directly and urgently if her husband should be allowed to die. How horrible for that woman. How awful to get that old. How odd to live in a retirement community, where such occurrences are ordinary.

Super Tuesday

2008-02-05T11:37:00.000-05:00

I went to my polling place planning to vote for Obama, but when I got the ballot I just couldn't do it. There were so many reasons that Obama made sense, but I couldn't bear the idea of being disloyal to Hillary, whom I've supported for a while now. The ballot said "presidential preference" and throwing Hillary-haters to the wind, she is my preference.

Even though polls say that Hillary is a few percentage points ahead of Obama in
Massachusetts, I still felt like I was voting for the underdog. I don't personally know a single person voting for Hillary in Massachusetts, and my area seems to be plastered with Obama endorsements. If Hillary or Obama wins by one vote, I think I'll feel guilty either way. The truth is that I really like both of them -- just Hillary a bit more. I love her intelligence, her competence, her hard-work ethic; I agree with her views on health care, the environment, and education; I think she has a better understanding of what it means to work with Republicans than Obama does, and that she has learned over time how to make concessions to good goals to make them realistic; I love that she is a woman who is going after what she wants, professionally, and I disagree with feminists who content she isn't a good representative for feminists. And besides, her campaign hasn't bombarded me with emails the way Obama's has -- I've been surprised and slightly turned off by the tone and persistence of the Obama campaign emails.

I also like to agree with a friend who reassured me that Hillary's polarizing effect has been overstated, and she'll do better than Obama in swing states. Hmmm...

Thoughts of a migraineur

2008-02-01T15:45:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I had my first serious migraine in over two years. It's remarkable to me that I haven't had one in so long, even a minor one; for as long as I can remember, migraines have been my regular visitors. I recently saw a family video taken when I would have been quite young -- nine or ten -- and as my father interviewed everyone, he asked, where's Katherine? And the answer quickly came that I had gone to bed with a headache, which was regarded by the group as an ordinary occurrence. My recent headache escalated far too quickly for me to take anything to treat it, and in the throes of it, I had several hours with nothing to do but to think. I always feel incredibly introspective when I get a headache; there is the sensation that in any given moment, no one knows me and my experience the way I do, and an inimitable feeling of self-protectiveness -- the feeling that I truly am the only person who can take care of myself, that my mind is taking care of my body in an odd, otherworldly way...

Even though I would characterize my headaches as of no more significance than a nuisance, it does seem that one the narratives of my life has been the quest to understand them and treat them, and that somehow without them I would be a little bit less myself. The story of them begins when I was quite young, perhaps six, and I remember an inexplicable pain beginning in my eyes, and asking my mother for eyedrops of some kind, supposing the source of the pain to be some external irritation. The pain came back, and over the next few years there were a series of theories presented by pediatricians: that the headaches were caused by low blood sugar and would be cured with mid-afternoon snacks, or that I would feel better after lying in a dark room for twenty minutes with my eyes closed. It wasn't until I was 14 or 15 that I began taking anything, and then it was advil, a singularly ineffective course, but one that I persisted in for several years because it was comforting to have the illusion of doing something.

In my teenage years I a saw a neurologist, an ophthamologist, an acupuncturist; I read an Oliver Sachs book on headaches; I was examined for brain tumors, for bad posture, for an off-balance chi; at least annually I would begin a headache journal at the prompting of a doctor, and promptly abandon it after the entries became identical -- dull pain in my left eye at four o'clock, spread to the right side of my head by five o'clock, felt a bit better after two or three advils, no unusual foods, no unusual stress.

My migraine regimen became more sophisticated in college: I got my first migraine prescriptions, imitrex and then amitriptaline. I spent several months my freshman year with a minor addiction to imitrex and a constant low-grade headache. I met another migraineur, someone who truly understood, who one night came to my dorm room crying in pain and asked for an amitriptaline pill, and later terrified me by sleeping for 12 hours straight, missing her comprehensive exam. I learned tai chi.

I think that three factors have contributed to my happy sabbatical from life as a migraineur: first, I've been lucky -- sometimes headache patterns lessen in intensity after young adulthood; second, I discovered exedrin migraine, which seems to prevent full-blown headaches if I take it early enough into a headache; and third, I've learned a little bit about what triggers my migraines, and made the appropriate lifestyle changes -- if I get enough sleep, exercise, and eat healthfully, I mostly avoid them.

I just got a new headache prescription, zomig, which felt quite similar to imitrex. Prescription-strength migraine medicines are at once remarkable and disappointing: they save you from the severest pain, and shorten the course of a headache that otherwise would last several days; but they leave their own brand of malaise: a drug-induced feeling of tingliness, of being in a dream, of being exhausted but wide awake at the same time. One of my college professors, who got much more disabling headaches than mine, confided in me that her oddest fiction writing came out of a migraine-drug-induced haze.

That is all, for now. Except to say that perhaps Emily Dickinson knew what it is like. Her poem, I felt a funeral in my brain:

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And being, but an ear,
And I and Silence some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here.

Symphony Hall, Boston

2008-01-18T21:10:00.000-05:00

After going to the symphony last night, I need to rhapsodize a little bit about classical music, which I realized all over again is positively sublime! I got the tickets as a Christmas gift, which meant that I had a few weeks prior to the concert to get recordings of the pieces that were played -- Mozart's Linz symphony, Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23, and Schubert's 2nd symphony, all of which were new to me. I have been to the symphony before, but it was never like this: I'd never prepared beforehand by listening to the music, I'd never dressed up, I'd never been for an evening concert, and I think I'd never approached the possibility of two hours of classical music without a hint of impatience -- I generally prefer music in smaller doses.

The evening left me in an unexpected awe of not just the music, but the whole experience: the hall, the ushers, the women in furs, the people who came to the concert alone just for the pleasure of the music, the little asian-american children whose parents made an exception of the usual bedtime hour for the sake of cultivating musical genius...I attended the event with a friend who impressed upon me that the design of Symphony Hall truly is singular: in addition to its beauty, it is perfectly crafted for acoustics and is regarded as one of the best spaces in the world for musical performances. Apparently the hall managers are terrified of changing even the slightest detail -- a task as simple as dusting the light fixtures presents the crisis of altering the acoustics. Every piece of the hall is regarded with reverence: the nails in the floorboards, the upholstery on the chairs, the fibers in the carpet -- nothing can be changed. It is like a temple.

I left in the concert with a fixation on a new piece of music -- the adagio movement of the piano concerto -- and with lofty, exciting ideas about the music I am going to listen to and discover. I want to systematically go through the great symphonies, and masses, and string quartets, something I've never thought about doing. For someone who's always enjoyed classical music, I know so little, and there are so many treasures to be found. So last night was a pretty spectacular night!

Boxing day

2007-12-24T14:56:00.000-05:00

I just had a lovely visit at a boxing day party, where I caught up with old friends from grade school and their parents and generally made merry. There is an inimitable comfort in seeing friends from childhood -- people who knew you before you'd made any decisions or mistakes or realized what you were good at or what you wanted to do with your life. It is tempting to stay here in Belmont this week to be with them, in lieu of my journey to Philadelphia for a reunion with college friends. I have to admit feeling exhausted by the idea of a six-hour train ride, alone, or alone with a book, I guess. My father got me a fantastic book for Christmas: Musicophilia
by Oliver Sacks, which I began reading yesterday and look forward to continuing.

In other news, I have one New Year's resolution that I think is achievable and interesting and worth a bit of effort: I would like to make of practice of turning down plastic bags when I make purchases at grocery stores, drug stores, or other venues. I think accepting an occasional plastic bag will be acceptable within this exercise -- I will allow for unexpected purchases and contradiction of self, and also acknowledge that I cannot save the world through personal virtue. This seems like a relatively easy contribution to the world order and generally a good idea. And conveniently, I just got two free canvas bags from Cardullos, courtesy of speakers at our recent conference who didn't want to carry their gift bags onto return flights as carry-ons.

Zizek

2007-12-24T11:15:00.000-05:00

Here is a delightful op-ed written by a philosopher I've always considered to be a bit incomprehensible. Actually, I must give Slavoj Zizek partial credit for my decision that I just wasn't meant to be a literary theorist. Reading "Contigency, Hegemony, Universality," the book he cowrote with Ernesto Laclau and Judith Butler, reduced me to tears of frustration at least once and quite probably more than once.

If Zizek could write his books the way he writes his op-eds, I think he and I could be friends. Here is something lighter, and written on the subject of a piece of music I consider to be absolutely sublime:

‘Ode to Joy,’ Followed by Chaos and Despair

By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Published: December 24, 2007

London

LAST week, European Union leaders put an end to a decade of diplomatic wrangling and signed the Treaty of Lisbon, which outlined a complete overhaul of the organization, including the creation of a permanent post of European Union president to represent Europe on the world stage. During the ceremony at Lisbon’s grandiose Jerónimos Monastery, a choir performed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the background. While the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, first performed in 1824, may seem an innocuous choice for the official anthem of the European Union (it was declared such in 1972), it actually tells much more than one would expect about Europe’s predicament today.

The “Ode to Joy” is more than just a universally popular piece of classical music that has become something of a cliché during the holiday season (especially, oddly, in Japan, where it has achieved cult status). It has also been, for more than a century, what literary theorists call an “empty signifier” — a symbol that can stand for anything.

In early 20th-century France, the Nobel laureate Romain Rolland declared it to be the great humanist ode to the brotherhood of all people, and it came to be called “the Marseillaise of humanity.” In 1938, it was performed as the high point of the Reichsmusiktage, the Nazi music festival, and was later used to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. In China during the Cultural Revolution, in an atmosphere of total rejection of European classics, it was redeemed by some as a piece of progressive class struggle.

In the 1950s and ’60s, when the West German and East German Olympic squads were forced to compete as a single team, gold medals were handed out to the strains of the “Ode to Joy” in lieu of a national anthem. It served as the anthem, too, for the Rhodesian white supremacist regime of Ian Smith. One can imagine a fictional performance at which all sworn enemies — Hitler and Stalin, Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush — for a moment forget their adversities and participate in the same magic moment of ecstatic musical brotherhood.

There is, however, a weird imbalance in this piece of music. In the middle of the movement, after we hear the main melody (the “joy” theme) in three orchestral and three vocal variations, something unexpected happens that has bothered critics for the last 180 years: at Bar 331, the tone changes totally, and, instead of the solemn hymnic progression, the same “joy” theme is repeated in the “marcia turca” ( or Turkish march) style, a conceit borrowed from military music for wind and percussion instruments that 18th-century European armies adopted from the Turkish janissaries.

The mode then becomes one of a carnivalesque parade, a mocking spectacle — critics have even compared the sounds of the bassoons and bass drum that accompany the beginning of the marcia turca to flatulence. After this point, such critics feel, everything goes wrong, the simple solemn dignity of the first part of the movement is never recovered.

But what if these critics are only partly correct — what if things do not go wrong only with the entrance of the marcia turca? What if they go wrong from the very beginning? Perhaps one should accept that there is something of an insipid fake in the very “Ode to Joy,” so that the chaos that enters after Bar 331 is a kind of the “return of the repressed,” a symptom of what was errant from the beginning.

If this is the case, we should thus shift the entire perspective and perceive the marcia as a return to normality that cuts short the display of preposterous portentousness of what precedes it — it is the moment the music brings us back to earth, as if saying: “You want to celebrate the brotherhood of men? Here they are, the real humanity ...”

And does the same not hold for Europe today? The second stanza of Friedrich Schiller’s poem that is set to the music in “Ode to Joy,” coming on the heels of a chorus that invites the world’s “millions” to “be embraced,” ominously ends: “But he who cannot rejoice, let him steal weeping away.” With this in mind, one recent paradox of the marcia turca is difficult to miss: as Europe makes the final adjustments to its continental solidarity in Lisbon, the Turks, despite their hopes, are outside the embrace.

So, when in the forthcoming days we hear again and again the “Ode to Joy,” it would be appropriate to remember what comes after this triumphant melody. Before succumbing to the warm sentiment of how we are all one big family, I think my fellow Europeans should spare a thought for all those who cannot rejoice with us, all those who are forced to “steal weeping away.” It is, perhaps, the only way we’ll put an end to the rioting and car burnings and other forms of the Turkish march we now see in our very own cities.

Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, is the author, most recently, of “The Parallax View.”

It's a wonderful life

2007-12-19T22:11:00.000-05:00

Goodness! I'm in such an exciting chapter of my life, and my mind is wrestling over how much is prudent to describe here, on the internet, the information highway. I'm in a position now to take a tremendous risk that has the potential for great rewards...It's job related, and a move that would have seemed entirely out of the question a year ago, to a more cautious version of myself. Most psychologists agree that one's personality constantly evolves, and that principle feels so true to me in this moment: I feel braver and more optimistic about life now than I think I ever have been. Gosh! I wish I could write more. I have already exceeded the bounds of discretion and will probably redact this tomorrow. If I can pull this plan off, I will describe it later. Otherwise, I will save it for my fiction writing.

My enthusiasm for life today was also inspired by a holiday card I received from a college friend, someone I have seen only twice in the last four years but who I will always feel close to. To whom I will always feel close? Hmmm. No way to say that that is both grammatically and stylistically sound. Anyway: my friend told me that I deserved good things and expressed her conviction that they would come to me and wished me a merry christmas. And I know she meant all of those things so deeply and it made me grin ear to ear and miss her so much. What a lovely card.

I hereby resolve to send out holiday cards next year. I did buy a box of cards this year, but I only sent out three of them -- one to my grandparents, and two to old mission friends. I think I will postmark two more tomorrow, inspired by K. It is so delightful to get a snail-mail card with a snail-mail stamp and a hand-written message. On the rare occasions that I travel, I always, always send postcards because I appreciate getting a postcard so much...But the holiday card operation, I need to do that.

Snowbound

2007-12-16T10:21:00.001-05:00

Inspired by the weather, here is a poem for my dad, by Robert Hayden.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

On food

2007-12-09T01:20:00.001-05:00

You know, maybe I should start one of those foodie blogs. My cooking and eating adventures happen in spurts, though, punctuated by long periods of eating only chili and peanut butter sandwiches and cereal. One of things that has surprised me about adulthood is the amount of thought goes into what one eats, regardless of whether one cooks. There are always logistics to deal with when it comes to food -- where to buy it, how long it will stay fresh, how to eat healthfully, how to coordinate schedules with someone else for a meal. Even if you have a personal chef, I suppose there would be some amount of thinking involved in all of this. I vacillate between resenting that this silly body of mine needs nourishment at all and enjoying cookbooks, meals, and new tastes.

But ah, the gustatory and culinary pleasures of this weekend! Last night I went to Tacos Lupita just outside of Porter Square -- the Ecuadoran hole-in-the-wall that makes its own corn tortillas. It's a typical taqueria with nothing particularly healthy on the menu -- burritos, tacos, gorditas, and tortas and remarkably low prices. But their tortillas! Even the higher-end Mexican restaurants in the area don't make their own tortillas, and I don't think I've had a homemade tortilla since I was in Houston. Muy delicioso! I can't believe I've never been there before, and I will certainly be visiting again.

Last night's wonderful meal was followed up with an evening of cooking tonight. Our menu from tonight, with commentary:

- Salmon broiled with a mix of minced shallots, diced tomatoes, and herbs, sprinkled with goat cheese. My two emendations for future use of this recipe: substitute fresh tomatoes for canned ones (note bene: the cookbook we drew this from was entitled "the fifteen-minute gourmet"); add goat cheese post-cooking instead of pre-cooking.
- Garlic mashed potatoes! This required a few steps I don't normally put into mashed potatoes: blending the potatoes in a blender, which really has a different effect that using a potato masher; boiling the garlic and then blending it in a blender, and adding a raw egg yolk to the hot potatoes. The recipe called for a mixer and food processor, but G didn't have either; in fact, the potato-peeler that we bought at Market Basket was a revelation to him. He made a good sou chef, nevertheless. I also edited out the heavy cream, since the recipe was already on the unhealthy side with four tablespoons of butter, and since only five tablespoons of the stuff would be needed and what would I do with the remainder of a pint of heavy cream? Our substitutions and omissions were quite successful, I think. I will probably leave out the raw egg yolk next time because of food safety concerns. Does an egg yolk really cook when it is added to hot potatoes? Hmmm. I feel like Julia Lukin wouldn't lead me astray, but you never know with these fancy chefs.
- Steamed spinach with salt and pepper (we were too tired for anything fancier, and truth be told, the spinach was frozen. but it was still good. :)
- Chevre spread on dried apricot halves; an invention because we were hungry while we cooked. G asked: are you sure they go to together? but then conceded that the idea was genius.

I wish I had time to report, also, on my MFA visit of today! But goodness, I should go to bed.

Dancing, Amherst/Williams animosity, the infallible GPS unit, Afghani food

2007-11-27T22:48:00.000-05:00

This entry contains the scattered notes I've been jotting down over the course of the week. I should just do shorter posts more often! Here are my observations from this week:

On Tuesday I went contra dancing with Aliza, one of my dear friends from Amherst. We were biking buddies in college, and it's funny to me that since then our interests have independently gravitated toward dancing, which neither of us did in college. Our tastes in dancing are different -- I'm partial to swing, and Aliza is a Morris dancer -- but our mutual enjoyment of the occasional contra event marks another peculiar convergence in our hobbies. I guess we really do have a lot in common, Aliza! It also was delightful to have Cherie along; there is something so rejuvenating about spending an evening with close friends.

At the dance, we met a Williams alum, and a friendly conversation ensued. To those of you unschooled in Amherst/Williams history, let me apprize you that the rivarly between the schools was not invented by revelers at football games for the enjoyment of the fans. In fact, Amherst was founded in part by a cohort of Williams faculty and students who packed up their belongings, divested the college of half its library, and abandoned Williamstown for the less secluded town of Amherst. That's the entirely unsubstantiated version of the story I've heard, but regardless of its truth, that is the lore.

Since graduating, I've discovered two things in my interactions with Williams alums. First, it's quite impossible to engage in a conversation with an "Eph" without some acknowledgement of this deep-seated animosity. My friend Kristin even encountered this is in a job interview, and she was able to quip that she couldn't entirely hate Williams, as she married a Williams alum. Second, I realize that despite this required repartee (and in strange way, because of it), I have more in common with Williams alums than I do with most people, barring my own classmates, of course. There is something special about the experience of attending a small liberal arts college, something that is difficult to pin down exactly or articulate. My father, who went to a large university, tried to impress this upon me as I applied to colleges; I think he was drawn by the sense of community that existed at a school of Amherst's size and character, but I believe that the wonderfulness (!) of a school like Amherst is more complex and rarified than just that.

Gosh...The people I encountered at Amherst were so influential as I shaped my values, my political views, my life goals, and as I identified what I enjoyed most about friendships, conversations, books, the outdoors, exercise. It wasn't the institution that was my perfect match, but the people -- and whatever it was about the backdrop that attracted us to the place like bees to honey. My time at Amherst wasn't perfect; I will always remember the pain experienced by a friend who didn't pass her department's comprehensive examination, the nights I felt overwhelmed by work, the professor I liked who was nixed in the rigorous tenure-conferring process. But Amherst was pretty awesome, and I think that someone from Williams can understand that, even if she won't admit it.

Sorry for the digression. Anyway, we went through the motions with our new Williams acquaintance, agreeing that we may be able to dance together, but that we certainly couldn't be friends. That statement, though, was part of the required, almost rehearsed Amherst/Williams act. In fact, I think we will be friends, even if we must enemies at the core. :)

In other news, I'm impressed by the ingenuity of GPS units, even as I begin to notice their limitations. Last night, en route to Brookline, our friendly GPS unit misdirected us twice. The first error was the instruction to go the wrong way down an obscure one-way street in my neighborhood -- easily correctible and quite forgivable because of the admitted insignificance of my neighborhood. The second error was more surprising, since it occurred at a major intersection -- the intersection of Somerville Ave. and Mass Ave, where you can't turn left, but GPS wanted us to anyway. Because of the complicated grid of the neighborhood, this was an error that wasn't easy to correct for, even as the unit recalculated.

The second error, though, turned out to be a propitious one: it sent us quite directly to the Afghani restaurant on Mass Ave (Ali Baba Tandoor, I think it's called?), where we ended up detouring for dinner. We had planned to stop someplace along the way, and when we saw this one, I knew it was pretty phenomenal despite the spider-web crack in its glass door. I've been to Ali Baba twice before, and each time I've been entirely wowed. At Ali Baba, you are served two complimentary appetizers when you arrive: a cup of warm homemade spiced lentil soup (much appreciated on such a cold day) and Afghani bread served with three sauces made with fresh herbs. I'm not enough of a foodie to know if mango lassis are genuine Afghani fare, but that mango lassis tasted like the elixir of life and complemented the meal quite nicely.

Okay. I need to go to bed! More later...

Our Thanksgiving pot of cider!

2007-11-19T14:42:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite details about Thanksgiving at my parents' house is the pot of apple cider that sits on the stove, perpetually warm and full in the days we are all together. I have begun to think of that pot as more than an accoutrement to the turkey; Thanksgiving just wouldn't be the same without it! What a wonderful refreshment to have at hand, ready to offer to unexpected guest, or to warm you up after raking leaves in the yard, or as an accompaniment to a game of settlers. In the early modern England, it was traditional to have a spiced (hard) cider on the stove for the entire month after the birth of a child. That was one of the delightful things I read about in graduate school -- the immediate post-childbirth month, in which women wrested power in the household and celebrated with hard cider. I know lots of interesting tidbits about this, if anyone is ever interested.

Something strangely enjoyable this holiday week has been a freelance editing project on a political science book. I've been hesitant in recent months to take on freelance work because it cuts into my free time, but this project was small. I've also vaguely considered leaving my current job and doing freelance work for a while, and this would be a good test for me. Since my last project, "webpage" has become an acceptable alternative for "website" in the house style.

The pleasures of fall, and why I'm not a socialist

2007-11-17T12:45:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I went to my parents' house and spent a couple of hours raking leaves in their yard. There's something so soothing about raking leaves: the pleasure of being outside, the exercise, the beauty of the colors. There is also the meditation of it -- you rake, and rake, and rake -- while breathing fresh air that isn't yet winter cold. I really look forward to having my own yard some day: mowing the lawn, raking leaves, shoveling snow, gardening. For now my parents are endlessly grateful for my bursts of yardwork, and yesterday's six bags of yard refuse.

Below I'm posting a short article from the Economist that fascinated me: it describes an initiative recently launched in Chile to distribute free books to low-income families, with the goal of improving access to literature. Apparently a literature commission was designed for this purpose, and the scholars involved selected 49 titles for mass distribution.

Having so recently left a graduate program in literature, I'm fascinated by the decisions that are involved in creating a canon; making one at all is a controversial act in the eyes of many contemporary critics. The Economist only listed a handful of titles that got onto the list (among them Catcher in the Rye and something by Isabel Allende) and my attempts to get a complete copy of the list online were unsuccessful. Of the titles mentioned in the article, one really surprised me: Kafka's Metamorphosis. I've read that work twice, once in high school and once in college, and both times I thought it was a challenging read, and not one I would have undertaken in my leisure time. I think that even I, a lover of German literature, might let a Kafka book collect dust if the government gave me a free copy.

As a matter of public policy, I uninformedly object to this literature plan. There are so many other possible uses for that money: why not build libraries, or increase spending on education? Why not accept the more modest goal of fostering a literate public, rather than attempt to create a society with a sophisticated literary taste? (Did that sound elitist? Sigh). I think a better use of the money would have a different goal entirely -- to increase access to technology in low-income communities. Computers are a more universally accepted as a means of entertainment than literature, and learning to use them has more immediate economic utility than reading a Kafka novella -- so I suspect that people would have greater incentive to actively participate in a computer literacy program than to read some challenging literature. And I think it's time for bed.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Let them eat Kafka
Oct 25th 2007 | SANTIAGO
From The Economist print edition

The president enlists the literary critics

ASK Chileans what they are reading and the answer will probably be Isabel Allende's “La Suma de los Días”, a memoir by their country's best-known living writer. If, that is, they read anything at all: in a recent survey, 45% said they never read books and 34% did so only occasionally.

Michelle Bachelet, Chile's president, wants to change that. To do so, she has come up with a scheme to give 400,000 of the poorest families a maletín literario or box of up to nine books each. After much pencil-chewing, a jury of literati this month selected a list of 49 works, from which officials will then choose those books they think appropriate for each family (each will get an encyclopaedia and/or a dictionary).

The list comprises fiction and poetry for both adults and children. It ranges from Chile's Ms Allende and Pablo Neruda to J.D. Salinger's “The Catcher in the Rye” and Franz Kafka's “Metamorphosis”. This is unexceptionable fare. But is the book box the best way to achieve Ms Bachelet's laudable aim?

It could help. While some older Chileans lack functional literacy or were alienated by a rigid school syllabus, younger ones may be deterred from buying books by their price. This averages $14, higher than the Latin American average and the equivalent of two weeks of bus fares to and from work in Santiago. If books were cheaper, more Chileans would read them: pirated copies sell on pavements, while a lending library that operates on the Santiago metro has been a big success. With massive orders, the government could force big discounts from publishers.

But critics see the book box as a populist gesture. “It's like dropping bank notes out of the sky,” complains Verónica Abud of La Fuente, a charity that promotes reading. “Who says that a plumber in a poor district of Santiago will actually want to read Kafka?” For less than the estimated $11m cost of the book box, La Fuente has set up 60 libraries in schools and neighbourhoods. Since only 7% of Chileans belong to a library, there is scope for plenty more.

And we're on the air!

2007-11-13T23:13:00.001-05:00

Okay, back to public! p.merman, you can link to me now, and tom, you can do the RSS feed thing.

I've censored yesterday's blog in the style of Valerie Plame's memoir, which, I hear, is a terrific waste of paper -- occasional text punctuated by copious blank pages with the words "redacted" printed across them, marking the portions that the CIA didn't approve for publication. Salon.com had an interesting review of the book, which criticized Plame for her refusal to rewrite and rework the passages rejected by the CIA; this allowed Plame to create the impression that the CIA owned very personal aspects of her life to which her CIA job could only have been a backdrop. In fact, everything from the early stages of her courtship with her husband to the birth of her twins seven years later is apparently unaccounted for. Besides leaving the book quite disjointed, this omission leaves out a portion of her life story that would be most relevent to an audience interested in her life and her career; without it, there's isn't much point to writing the memoir at all. This, of course, is also an incredibly interesting commentary on the CIA and government secrecy, but saying that doesn't mean that the book doesn't sound terrible. This is precisely the book that I'd rather read *about* in a review rather than actually reading. Like I said, book reviews are growing on me!

Micromanaged.

2007-11-07T23:08:00.000-05:00

My poor, fledgling blog! I realize, now, that creating a blog that flourishes in a forum like this one requires a bit of effort and some concessions to privacy; I'm not used to that, after blogging for my college site for so long. It's effortless, almost, to generate a readership among classmates -- and there is a remarkable sense of cameraderie in it. In an odd way, it really is a community. Just yesterday I met one of my Amherst blog readers for the first time, a '99 who has my dream job and who agreed to talk with me about her career path. We've been reading each other regularly for about a year, and our first in-person meeting felt like a reunion of old friends. I love the Amherst blog!

[REDACTED]

A present to myself

2007-11-03T23:20:00.000-04:00

I've begun to walk to work, listening to my mp3 player (an iPobre, according to Noah -- isn't that a great name?!), and I realized that I was in dire need of an mp3 player upgrade. My current device is filled to the max with pop songs for running, and I crave something quite different on my walks. Do you know what I mean? My musical cravings affected me such that I ordered an iPod earlier this week, on the internet, with a credit card. What an era we live in! Sometimes I think I wouldn't last a day in the 19th century. In one of my favorite Victorian novels, Adam Bede, it is an ordinary occurance for a character to walk ten or fifteen miles to visit a relative, buy a tool, or go to a fair; if I remember correctly, there is even a thirty-mile walk in there somewhere. Such a long walk -- unaccompanied by man, beast, or iPod -- is so ordinary in George Eliot's world that its mention merits no more than a dependent clause. The dearth of music and of images in that era would become maddening to me very quickly, I think. I remember my brother once telling me that the average denizen of the Renaissance would see over the course of his lifetime an amount of images equal to what an average 21th-century American sees in twenty minutes.

An interesting aside about iPods is that they became popular during my mission, and I was mostly oblivious to their emergence. Though I heard the name, I never saw one, and I assumed that they must be computers of some sort, since they were associated with the Macintosh platform. The phenomenon seemed to pass over the low-income communities where I served, though that was not the case with cellphones. Incidentally, when I left for my mission, only a handful of my friends had cell phones, and none of them used one as a primary phone; when I returned, none of my friends had landlines. A mission really is a cultural vaccuum or sorts!

I also signed up for iTunes, and already I've bought several songs. My first purchase was "Massachusetts," a jazz song that's a popular at swing dancing events. This led to "Yes, yes, honey," by the same band, and then an eclectic mix, both in genre and in their associations for me. Oh dear. I could really go nuts on iTunes! Here's a list of this weekend's purchases:

1) The prologue to Jellical Cats, which I sang in a performance in elementary school. Upbeat broadway music is fun sometimes, though I'm not sure this will make it onto a playlist.

2) Lauridson's O Magnum Mysterium, which the concert choir at Amherst performed. I didn't sing with the group, but I thought the piece sounded absolutely sublime and I would love to put together an SATB group someday to perform it. Or no -- just to sing through it in someone's living room.

3) A couple of songs from the Pride and Prejudice soundtrack, which were written for the movie, but very successfully imitate the style of early-nineteenth century classical music. The music is at once wonderful and anachronistic -- classical music very clearly written for a film. To create this music was an expensive choice, since era-authentic music itself would be free.

4) "One Fine Day" by the Chiffons, which I heard on the radio recently. I think this is also a swing song, or *could* be a swing song.

5) "Seasons of Love" from Rent, a favorite of my freshman roommate at Amherst that I remember hearing her sing to on more than one occasion.

Jimmies, gazebos

2007-10-28T20:46:00.000-04:00

Today I was sadly disabused of the notion that "jimmies" is a charming New England word. I ordered jimmies with my ice cream and my sister commented: how racist! I asked why, having no idea even then that she wasn't joking; she explained that jimmies signified Jim Crow, and pointed out that jimmies are brown and rainbow sprinkles are entirely unrelated, something that I'd always known but that had never occurred to me as having any meaning. I am just as disappointed to know this now as I am that I did not know it before now. Goodness! I have always had a fondness for the word "jimmies"; there are so few locutions that are distinct to New England, and furthermore, jimmies is a childhood word, a word that is wonderful to a six-year-old in the summertime. I suppose I can't say it anymore, though the substitution of "chocolate sprinkles" feels so deliberate and awkward. Perhaps it is time to delve into other ice cream toppings.

Another wonderful and yet unspoiled word is "gazebo." On Saturday I went for a drive with a car that included two students from Taiwan who had just learned the word. The purpose of our six-hour journey was to find gazebos and beautiful leaves in central Massachusetts and northern New Hampshire. We drove down route 2 until we got to the rotary by the state correctional facility, and then our driver drove around twice while we tried to decide, spontaneously, which direction to go. I think that's what Ferris Bueller would have done! When the MP3 player that was providing our music broke, my companions got out their tools and started cutting wires MIT-fashion and using everything from their teeth to a bottle of Ibuprofen, the music was restored. I think the most delightful gazebo was in the town green in Townsend, Massachusetts, a tiny town north of Worcester that borders New Hampshire. There is much that could be said about gazebos: I would venture that they represent a different era in American life, when communities really were communities, and people got together for events that really genuinely required gazebos in public parks. Has anyone written a book about that?

And more on words: check out this website: http://www.freerice.com/. I wish that was around when I was preparing for the GREs.

Books reviews, Obama rally

2007-10-24T21:53:00.000-04:00

My company just finished a two-day conference, which entailed two days of long but pleasant hours. It was refreshing to be out of the office, amongst different people, and to have the job of being helpful. That was my job during the conference -- to be helpful -- and it really can be a gratifying job. There were lulls during the day when I had time to read, and among other things, I read the first book review I've read in a long time: the Economist's review of The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. Let me show it to you! For the first two paragraphs, you wouldn't even know if was about a book:

ONE of Russia's most popular television shows is "Wait For Me", a true-life tear-jerker that finds and reunites separated couples and families. Sometimes the stories it tells are run-of-the-mill melodramas that could have happened anywhere. But often they are tragically Russian, combining huge distances, lavish and indiscriminate cruelty and impenetrable bureaucracy: siblings separated 70 years ago when their parents were executed; lovers who lost one another in prison camps.

"Wait For Me" takes its name from the most famous Russian poem from the Soviet Union's war with Germany. Konstantin Simonov, its author, was part of the first generation to grow up with the Soviet system's mock classroom trials, playground games of "search and requisition", and the "cult of struggle" inherited from the civil war. His aristocratic family was wrecked by the revolution; but like many children of undesirables, he disguised his background, transmuting the values he inherited into devout Stalinism.

Are you hooked? I had decided after reading only that that I wanted to read the book, so I guess I'm really not a good candidate for book reviews. But what a gripping topic! I don't know much about life in Soviet Russia, other than tidbits from a Russian friend: that he wanted to learn to play the piano but there was no music to be had anywhere; that there wasn't much meat in anyone's diet and that most of a day's calories would come from bread; that no one minded a two-hour commute to work because, quite simply, there was nothing better to do than sit on a train for a fourth of your waking hours. The review was positive overall, and I think I'm going to get it eventually. It's $35 (sheesh! how did books get so expensive?) so I think I'll probably wait for some used copies to pop up on Amazon.com.

These are my next reading ideas:

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Hardcover) by Daniel J. Levitin. Or perhaps the counter-recommendation Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination by Robert Jourdain. We'll see.

Foods to Fight Cancer by Richard Beliveau (Paperback). My boss bought copies of this for everyone on our company's board of directors. Despite the mixed results of clinical studies linking diet and cancer, eating healthfully is such a lovely idea, and I do think that healthy foods are efficaceous. I think this would be a lying-around book rather than a read-in-earnest kind of book, but I like the idea of flipping through it and lending it to interested parties.

Maybe I should also read Obama's book, as an effort to keep abreast of politics. He's a fascinating and charismatic person, and I think it would behoove me to become a better informed citizen and read up on him as the elections draw closer. Last night I went with Ben and 9,500 other people to the Obama rally. There are so many caveats to put in here: that I haven't decided who I'm supporting in the election; that I'm not as well-informed as I ought to be; that I don't know, even, what to support sometimes. I think active citizenship is an important principle, but it's one that I've never been good at.

Ben and I were far enough away that we could only see Barack's silhouette (Barack! what a name!), but it was exciting to hear a speech in person, amid the masses. Although he spoke mostly in generalities, I did feel roused by a few things he said. He said that as president he would close down Guantanamo, one of many points that ellicited cheers from the crowd. That statement made me feel happy, but also quite remiss: I realized that I didn't know, really, what the other candidates were saying about Guantanomo. I brought this question to Ben, who explained that each of the Republican candidates wants to keep Guantanamo -- and that Romney has even said that he wants to double its size, something I wasn't aware of. How do people keep track of all of this?

Music on the Brain

2007-10-16T22:31:00.000-04:00

I just realized that in my last post I broke the cardinal rule of blogging: I wrote something ungenerous about my boss, and I have gone back and rectified that. I have to admit that I often want to share my most candid thoughts about work, since that is the place where I spend most of my waking hours and where I make most of the day's observations. It is regrettable that such an important dimension of my life feels out of bounds in this forum. There are plenty of pleasant things I could say about work, but the view I would present would have to be incomplete, and I wonder if sharing even harmless anecdotes would intrude upon the privacy that is due an employer. I'm sure Emily Post and any good career counselor would say yes, and I will stick with that for now. But who knows? Maybe one of these days I will not be able to restrain myself from telling a story.

Today I want to write not about Utah, but about music. I've resolved that the next book on my reading list will be "Music on the Brain," which my father just recommended to me not based on his own experience with it, but based on a review he read. (A short digression: I'm not sure why I can't make myself read book reviews. It's funny that I love to read good books and yet I have little patience for reviews. Perhaps should give them another try, and maybe I will discover that like butternut squash, my childhood aversion for them has transformed into a mature appreciation).

What a remarkable influence music has on the brain! Maybe I will read an insightful explanation of what that influence is and how it works, but for now I can only inarticulately say that music can make me feel ecstatically good even under the worst of circumstances. It's remarkable what a consolation it can be to play the piano; it seems that almost every time I play, no matter how briefly or badly, there is a moment where I think that if I don't get the things in life that I think I want, that life would still be utterly satisfying if I could just have a piano, and if it wasn’t too much, a small garden.

These thoughts come to mind because I've recently begun to play the piano again, and I'm discovering all over again how amazing music is. In college I spent many happy hours in piano practice rooms, dabbling in music I liked, but it's not since high school that I've approached a piece with any kind of seriousness. I recently began working on Beethoven’s Waldstein sonata, which I can listen to again and again (here's a clip of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztIT9RLuhD4 – isn’t it wonderful?). I've gotten far enough into my work on the first movement to realize that this music is really above a difficulty level that I should attempt. It feels irresponsible to take on a piece with such a fast rhythm and so many trills, which my fingers just can’t do well; I'm sure a true connoisseur of Beethoven would cringe at my rendering of the piece, but I can't help really enjoying the playing of it anyway. Playing it even badly is a pleasure! Music on the brain...I'll let you know if this book has any interesting explanations for this phenomenon.

Tom, your observation about the costs and benefits of allowing water to continue to leak from our public water supply is a good one. Both the Economist article and a more recent op-ed in the New York Times implied that water leakage is bad news, but both articles avoid the question of why it is bad and how bad it is. I'm inclined to agree with you, but I also feel uninformed on the matter. I've done a google search for books on the history of the public water supply, and so far I haven't come up with anything to read. Maybe this is my book to write!

Reading on my flights

2007-10-14T23:49:00.001-04:00

I wonder if I will ever finish this log. Much of what is here is transcription from my pen-and-paper journal, but still so much is unaccounted for, either because it is yet unwritten or because I feel too shy to include it here. One other portion of my trip that deserves comment is the act of traveling itself; the experience of being at the airport and in an airplane is often a reflective time for someone traveling solo. My trip home was my first red-eye flight, which involved taking Exedrin PM (from Novartis! I'm much more cognizant, now, of pharmaceutical companies), wrapping a neck pillow around my neck, wearing an eye mask and ear plugs, and not sleeping at all. After my flight, I went to work and generally felt good the whole day. So perhaps I did sleep on the plane and didn't realize it.

On my flight to Utah, I spent most of the day catching up on reading: I brought with me "A Distant Mirror" by Barbara Tuchman, a few copies of the Economist, a Smithsonian, and (confession) a People magazine. I don't often write about my reading, but I want to here, as part of my blogging experiment -- becoming a commentator.

My favorite article, I think, was an Economist article about the human genome project, which predicted the end of privitized health insurance because of the end of our ability to randomly pool risk. The writer of the article predicted that the health insurance industry would completely collapse within the next century, and that it would serve us well to construct a one-payer system in advance of that collapse. For a long time I've been bemused by the complexity of health-care policy, and I feel like I need to develop an opinion about it before the next election. So this article was a helpful little piece for me.

Article two: Most of our country's water infrastructure was constructed a century ago, and the system is in desperate need of major repair. Millions of cubic tons of water leak through aging pipes daily, especially in post-Katrina New Orleans and other areas that have faced natural disasters. (Oh dear! I have become a blogger who uses unsubstantiated statistics that I vaguely remember from my reading. Sorry everyone. As I said, this is experimental. I think it was millions of cubic tons of water. Is water even measured in cubic tons? Hmmm.)

I have two commentaries on that articles: I would be interested to hear what the sources were on the water infrastructure comment; I trust the Economist to have scrupulous fact checkers, but that statement is fraught with generalizations -- when, precisely, was a century ago? Can a country as large as the United States have built a water infrastructure in a time frame narrow enough to be able to be summarized as "a century ago"? The statement also provokes questions of historical curiosity: what engineers and policymakers spearheaded the creation of a modern public water system?

My second comment is on the Economist's bleak view of the United States. Another recent issue suggested that America's interstate highway system in particular and its roads in general were in dire need of repair. We are a leaky nation with bad roads. In addition, yet another article characterized our economy as precarious and suggested that if the Fed just let us have a "healthy recession," it would help us relearn how to save money and invest wisely, and weed out inefficient companies, freeing capital to invest in new innovation.

The issue of how to administer a public water supply is endlessly intersting, and it really is a shame I never exhibited a knack for engineering-type skills because it would be wonderful to be a water-supply engineer. Is that a real job? The NYT touched on a completely different aspect of water policy in a recent editorial that argued that we shouldn't treat bottled water as the golden standard for drinking water. Doing so is a bad idea for a few reasons: there are environmental reasons (the ecological cost of producing and disposing of plastic bottles, and transporting water above ground in trucks); economic reasons (a year's worth of drinking water costs about 49 cents from the tap, or over $1000 in bottled form); and practical reasons (it may eventually affect the quality of our tap water -- if we don't demand high quality tap water for the purpose of drinking it, we won't get it. Right now, though, our tap water is eminently drinkable). It was an interesting, commonsensical article on a topic I'd never thought much about.

As the counterpoint to all of this, there was People magazine, which cost $3.99. $3.99! Should I admit to that? I was thrown into a reverie of reflection when I read that Lindsay Lohan was in Utah at the same time I was, for stint in rehab. It occurred to me, in glancing through the article, that it would be nice to spend a month at a chic rehab facility. By saying that I don't want to trivialize the painful process of recovering from an addition, or romanticize what it means to need an intervention of that kind; however, the idea of taking a break from ordinary life to heal from whatever it is that ails you is a concept that doesn't easily yield to any other analogy. I suppose a sabbatical is a related idea without the prerequisite of intense suffering. And I think that vacation often doesn't serve that purpose because most people don't get much of it -- the going rate for me right now is ten days per calendar year. My boss had actually encouraged me to shorten my Utah vacation and change my plane tickets because he worried that he couldn't spare me for quite so long right before our fall conference. Is a vacation a vacation under such circumstances? I even brought my cell phone and answered about ten work-related questions over the course of my trip.

I think that people don't usually take a real, substantial break from the routine of life without the impetus provided by an actual or imminent breakdown. Even contemplating this need for rejuvenation is a privilege of life in the developed world, but be is also a result of the developed world we've created. Suman pointed out to me that one of Harvard's experts on the psychology of happiness found that having too many choices tends to make people unhappy, and our world is fraught with choices, from what cereal to buy to what career to pursue, and these wonderful choices can also be overwhelming.

Oh dear -- I've carried on and it's getting late. I will continue this thought later...

Day Two: Overstock.com Headquarters

2007-10-11T23:08:00.001-04:00

I wanted this to be the day that I waltzed into Overstock.com, unannounced, and charismatically asked for a job. Their headquarters are in Salt Lake City, and in the weeks prior to my trip, I had applied for a job there in a spate of applications. My Salt Lake City job search was half-hearted at best, since I hadn't decided whether I really wanted to move there; this job, though, seemed perfect for me, and seemed worth the difficulty and effort of relocating for. It was a technical writing job at a company that already had my business. I love Overstock.com! I got no response after submitting my application, and since I don't know anyone who knows anyone at the company, I figured that my only shot was to impress someone there in person.

Before I left to drive there, Tina asked me: if they offered you a job, would you take it and move to Utah? The question dumbfounded me; that eventuality seemed so far out of the realm of the realistic that I hadn't considered it. Right now I do think that the job would be fantastic and worth moving for, but that seems to be a moot point, since indeed there was no job offer.

En route to what I wanted to be the charismatic moment of my life, I got terribly lost, and what should have been a forty-five minute drive ended up taking an hour and a half. After asking for directions from three people, I arrived in the company's parking lot feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. I sat in the car for a few minutes, knowing I had to appear confident and ambitious and enthusiastic and not feeling at all up to the task. I do feel like the impression I left was a good one; I was able to summon up the social skills and charm that I can only muster occasionally, and I ended up speaking to two people -- a receptionist and then an office administrator. I told them each the same thing: I know this is unorthodox...I'm only in town for a few days...I wanted to see if there was any chance I could speak with someone in the communications department about this position... I didn't more than set my foot in the door. The person who was hiring for the position was out of the office, but the office manager promised to pass along my card, and gave me the contact's email address. I sent an email, and never got a response. The end. I think that should be the end; I suspect that any further action would cross the line between laudable persistence and annoying pushiness.

That was a big step for me, anyway. Somehow this unsuccessful ten-minute encounter feels like accomplishment, at least for a shy girl like me. Afterwards I met Carri and we went for a lovely drive through Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons. Carri explained to me the geology behind canyons and I was quite fascinated and resolved to read something about canyons later. Perhaps I will start with wikipedia.

Day Five: Provo

2007-10-10T16:35:00.000-04:00

Today I'm going to write about day five, my trip to BYU, since a few people have expressed curiosity about my impressions of the school. I will jump back and cover the other days later, in piecemeal fashion.

I've always regarded BYU with a little bit of suspicion: to an east coast girl, its many rules seemed outlandishly stringent, and as a student of literature, I worried that the conservatism of the university would limit the curriculum. I hope that doesn't sound offensive, because I certainly don't mean for it to -- I have always held BYU in high regard, and I only imagined it as a school that I would have a bit of personality conflict with. I think my assumptions about BYU were influenced by an opinion piece written in the student newspaper in the late nineties, described to me by a BYU alum. In it a young man proposed that women on campus should stop carrying messenger-style bags that had a strap extending across the chest; he insisted that was immodest. I never actually read the article, and certainly any campus will have the occasional wacky editorial -- but that something like that could be published at all left me concerned about the way women were perceived and treated at BYU. The young man's proposal sounded to me like a slippery slope toward dressing women in burqas. If I had been on campus when that was published, goodness! Who knows what I would have done.

Approaching BYU with this prejudice, I was surprised by how much I liked the university. I began the day by attending a religion class with Jared -- Book of Mormon for return missionaries -- and I'm so glad I got to do that, not only for the things I learned, but also for the experience of attending a BYU class. The class began with a prayer, and I was surprised by how much I appreciated this feature. I guess any institute class would have started the same way, but this class was for credit, which made the feel a bit different. The prayer made me reflect on my experience at Amherst, where the atmosphere in class was sometimes cutthroat in its competitiveness; I think prayer might have brought a spirit of cooperation that was sometimes missing in my college experience. Amherst was such an important place for me, and I would never change my decision to go there, but it was also a place where you sometimes understood why academia has a reputation for coldness. In one seminar I took, the boy who sat next to me would read every line of my notes and occasionally whisper in my ear to dispute what I had written. In my notes! Even my notebook wasn't safe from scrutiny at Amherst. Thinking of moments like that, starting class with a prayer occurs to me as such a wonderful thing. I've cast Amherst in a bad light here, I'm afraid! I'll have to redeem my dear Amherst in a later post.

After class, I met Maria for my first jaunt around campus. I was impressed by the grounds and the quality and upkeep of the buildings. The campus was beautiful, and I'm ashamed to admit that I was anticipating something much more modest and utilitarian. I had assumed that the affordable tuition meant that there would be concessions in campus beautification. And if the true test of a university's quality is its library, BYU also did very well in that regard. I was impressed by the size of the building, the amount of computers, the number of staff members. I couldn't help wondering what books weren't there, and I'd venture to guess that a number of the literary theory books I read last year wouldn't pass muster on a conservative campus. It occurs to me, though, that those were books that I wouldn't have missed. I really felt like I shared the values that I saw at BYU, and I guess the university just felt like a good place.

I know that my warm impression of BYU had a lot to do with the wonderful people I spent time with while I was there, people from several different chapters of my life. It's funny to me that I know so many people in Provo without having ever been there myself. My goodness, BYU has a lot of wonderful students! Before leaving, I bought a BYU t-shirt, which I didn't plan to do. So that counts as a change of heart, right?

Preface

2007-10-09T14:58:00.000-04:00

This blog is my experiment as I consider whether or not to create a public blog. I wanted to use my Utah trip in particular as backdrop for this experiment because there are so many wonderful people I've seen over the course of my trip that I want to share my thoughts with. I'm still being overly cautious about privacy -- this is a read-by-invitation blog -- but I'm expanding my readership to include people outside of my college community for the first time.

I'm much more guarded in my writing here than I am in my college alumni blog. Perhaps it is silly to feel like I can record my most personal thoughts in one venue and not in another when in the end, both sites are on the internet, and the postings are indelibly there whether or not people have easy access to them. Nevertheless, the idea of knowingly allowing the entire internet to read my blog leaves me tongue-tied and shy. I don't think I would be capable of insightful, introspective writing if I knew that anyone could read my blog. I enjoy writing for the sake of performance, but only to a point when the subject matter is my life and my thoughts.

I guess I've exposed myself here as one prone to overanalyze things. I hope you like my experimental blog, and I'll let you know if I keep up with it.

Day One

2007-10-09T13:54:00.000-04:00

Two years ago today, I was in Berlin. And now I'm in Salt Lake City, Utah, for what is a counterpoint vacation in an entirely antithetical city.

My first impression, on arriving in Utah, was a feeling of intense loneliness. This was my third time in Utah, and my first with no one to greet me at the airport. I had decided to rent a car for the sake of convenience; arranging for rides would have required a great deal of planning since I wanted to see so many people, and I was excited, anyway, to have a car for a few days, since I don't have one in Boston. I had printed out a few important maps of directions from google maps, but as soon as I got in the car I realized that would be a bit stressful to navigate through an entirely unfamiliar city. Getting out of the airport itself was a maze, and the freedom and excitement of having my own car were quickly diminished by my anxiety for getting lost.

My initial overwhelmment (that should be a word! is there any word that could possibly be its equivalent for conciseness and expressiveness?) was quickly relieved when I met up with Kristina (a mission friend) in temple square. I picked her up and she was my navigator as we drove to Farmington to visit Tina, my first mission companion. I spent the afternoon with the two of them and Tina's precious nine-month-old baby, Kaden, and the nine-month-old baby of one of Tina's friends. What a wonderful afternoon we had! It's been a while since I held a baby, and it felt so good; the one I held was particularly good-natured and plump and content to rest in my lap while I talked with my old friends. It all felt so idyllic! It has been a while, too, since I've spent time with people whose friendship runs so deep and who love me so unconditionally. I can'tbelieve I went for three years, almost, without seeing these wonderful friends. I knewthem under circumstances that were much more difficult -- being a missionary, although it was a wonderful experience, was often stressful -- and it was such a nice change to see them in adifferent, relaxed setting, and to realize how deeply I cared about them.

I've tried to notice everything about the home I stayed in -- the home of Tina and her husband and their little nine-month-old baby. They're in their mid-twenties and they have a veritable house with a garden, something unimaginable to a girl from the Massachusetts real estate market. There are three bedrooms - the master bedroom, the baby's room, and the guest room. There are grapes and tomatoes growing in the yard, and Tina and James love each other so much. (I love the idiosyncratic pairing of the last sentence -- does that drive you crazy? Writing makes me so happy and it's been a long time since I've done some fun casual writing like this). We watched their wedding video, in which the two of them describe falling in love and their first kiss and how deeply they love each other and goodness! Life here just seems honey sweet.

My mission reunion, which I attended that night, evoked the same emotions -- there were about forty people there, and I don't think I've ever been around a group of people outside of my family whom I've felt so close to. The most notable part of the evening was my discovery that one of the missionaries I served with had struggled with leukemia for the duration of his mission, unbeknownst to me. Despite his illness, he really wanted to be a missionary, and I imagine he was assigned to Houston in part because of its great cancer center, where he went for treatments. It is remarkable to me that he could work so hard and care so much about his work as missionary when he was going through such a difficult experience. It made me a little bit sad to discover he had gone through something so painful and that I knew nothing about it; I deeply respect his decision to keep it private, and I don't know that I could have done anything to have made the experience easier, but I consider him to be a dear friend -- he was district leader for a while -- it makes me sad that he went through something so painful and I knew nothing about it; I really had no idea.

I served with him during the hottest part of the Houston summer and he lived in the slummiest part of the city and he was always so happy to be there and to be serving other people. I admire him so much for his hard work, and learning a bit more about his life was a chance for me to continue to learn from my mission. I want to be like that elder, and put my heart into serving other people even when I am going through trials. This story was also a reminder to me that it is so, so important to treat people with kindness. My first thought when I heard about his leukemia was: was I nice to him? And I wished that I had tried harder and done more in all my interactions with him. I guess you never know what heartaches and challenges people are going through.