O Tannenbaum

In point of comparison, I present to you the following:

a) The tree at Rockafeller Center, which JWR and I went and saw yesterday. It was the first time I'd seen it since an almost-failed attempt back when I lived in New York before:

So yeah, sure, it's majestic and extremely well lit and so on and so forth, but look at all those people. The "Rock" (as I am assured some people call it) was a good ten degrees warmer than the rest of the city just by virtue of all of the midwestern tourists crowding around.

b) The tree in my own living room, courtesy of JWR and our decorating ingenuity:

Now this tree, this tree is worthy of admiration. It came directly to us from the wilds of Maine, and JWR wrestled it into place while I was at work one night. This is a Christmas tree. New York City doesn't have anything on this.

We drink peppermint schnapps and water it twice a day--it's like a Christmas pet. We listen to Christmas songs and admire it from the couch. It stands there as a soothing reminder of what's to come now that the term is over and break is finally here.

And then, because we can't help ourselves, things like this happen:

And it becomes clear that Rockafeller Center could never be as awesome as two grown people dressing up for no other reason than to pose with a Christmas tree.
Right? Right. Right?

The most wonderful time of the year.

A miscellany, lacking in parallel sentence structure:

1) Peanuts Holiday Collection Box-Set: arrived.
2) The weather now necessitates a change in outerwear. Enter layering and fingerless gloves.
3) Amazing new scarf, courtesy of even more amazing fellow.
4) Silk has begun selling soy nog again.
5) About to have five-and-one-half days off in a row.

I may have more work than can be accomplished in the number of hours I have, but dagnabbit if life isn't just grand.

"The problem with philosophers is that because their jobs are so hard they drink a lot of coffee and thus use in their arguments an inordinate quantity of pots, mugs, and jugs--to which, sometimes, they might add the occasional rock"
                        - Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam: From Matters of Fact to
                           Matters of Concern"

The plight of the practitioner of humanities, ever circling around coffee and vessels with which to contain it.
Life is hard.

And eat it, too.

The other day I was told, based upon the contents of my spice cupboard, that I am a real person. A person with my adult priorities in order. A person with their proverbial shit kept neatly together.

In many ways, this is true. I accumulate real ingredients for use in food preparation, because my primary hobby when I'm not scooping out large portions of grey matter to make room for intellectual know-how° is cooking. It's easier and more economical than going to the City for any reason.

So last night, when JWR and I returned to my apartment after class, the unbearable urge for something sweet overtook us. After a brief discussion of baking options, we settled on chocolate cake because JWR wanted frosting.
We started throwing things together. Then, it became clear that I didn't have enough egg to make the thing, and we both stood there in my kitchen, flour everywhere and ingredients otherwise assembled--the room deflated in the exact same way it would if a kid waited in line for a donut, only to find they were all gone. But there wasn't really any turning back, at least not substantially, because we had a bowl of flour and cocoa and sugar that could hardly be converted into some other thing. We put it in the fridge.

Then we made the frosting.
Then we ate some frosting.

We ate it just like this, because we are essentially
hyperactive children in adult bodies.

That is to say, the story still had a happy ending. And tonight there will be cake.



Notes:
° The problem inherent in this image of developing both technê and epistêmê is kind maybe that the grey matter is supposed to hold the know-how, and that by removing it I'm sort of chopping off my own feet, or however the saying (there's probably no saying) goes. But you know what? It's just a bad metaphor, and I'm too lazy to change it. So there.

Thinking big, doing little

I have this plan, see, of coming back to this space to offer witty bon mots and interesting pictures of life in the Bronx, but frankly, frankly it's slow going.
I spend all of my time reading, avoiding reading, and cooking  (but rarely cleaning). That doesn't leave a lot of time for bon motting. But I promise someday I'll have something clever to say again, and boy howdy you'll see it first here.

In the meantime, an adorable baby meerkat:

In your FACE.
from flickr.com

Not for amateurs

G-Face did an experiment yesterday that may have long-term repercussions for us all. Or, well, the us that happened to be enclosed in the same space as her and all her little test-tubes last night.

We were minding our own business, drinking beer and talking about the things we talk about when we hang out,* when G-Face pulled out her equipment for O-Chem class. She was to combine dangerous chemicals to make delightful smelling things--she called it the "perfume lab."


Now, G-Face is a paragon of responsibility, so she made the living room a "well ventilated area" and goggled up.

True scientists are careful not to pour the
boiling beaker into their beer.

THIS IS SCIENCE. 

The living room promptly became drenched in an ever-changing miasma of terrible smells. It turns out that the process of making things smell nice in a lab is decidedly not nice smelling (and is unpleasant in stages), and the products (wintergreen, fake banana, and nail polish remover) do not really make up for wanting to vomit for 45 minutes while the lab is taking place.

She succeeded, of course, and the fog of the experiment drifted away. So did our headaches and nausea. Today, though, I keep getting whiffs of things that I'm pretty sure are impossible smells. The olfactory damage that my dear friend's O-Chem homework wrought on all of us has not yet reached its nadir. Perhaps it never will.


Notes:


* That is to say, we cracked wise at one another's expense.

Dogs gots the stares

I am back in Portland, after what was an unnecessarily harrowing trip down the freeway; two sections of I-5 were under construction, and Sexy Sadie was having none of it. Rather than putter along with the rest of the masses, she did the thing where she pretended she was going to break down, acting as though she were tired. I anthropomorphize my car not just because she has a name and I'm one of those people, but also because frankly she was acting like a spoiled teenager who just didn't want to be stuck in line.

Okay. Maybe I am one of those people.

Now I am back in G-Face's house, with the d-o-g-s representing for the hood, and staring me down like I have a pork chop in my pocket. It's only a matter of time before the farting starts. And when the farting starts, I will start remembering all the reasons I don't have pets. Most of them are smell related.

And now that I am back in Portland, it seems--oh Lord, may it more than seem--that summer is here to stay. Here's hoping.

Stay Tuned For Persian Hour

In Brief:

1) This sunny Sunday morning is occupied with NPR's Yiddish- and Persian-Hours, the latter of which is conducted entirely in Farsi and seems to be primarily a talk show.

2) This afternoon ought, by all rights, to belong to Trek In The Park, Portland's local outdoor theater reproduction of classic Star Trek Episodes. I have gone every year since it started, and let me tell you what: I think it's going to be the highlight of my week.

3) G-Face just asked me a question, and then offered the quote of the century: "Jesus. Portland is so wet that fungus grows on YOU." (Note: there is not any fungus growing on me. It was a general claim, for a general "you").

Chew on that for a while.

Nothing but Blue Skies...?

Traditionally, Portland has what I would term the Perfect Summer. With capitals and everything. Traditionally, this means sun, blue skies, temperatures in the 70s and 80s with temperate levels of humidity, and a general sense of well-being and ease that offsets the months of dismal and oppressive grey.*

Since arriving in Portland several days ago, I have yet to see a 70-degree day. It's apparently the shittiest summer in 42 years--and I'm pretty sure "shitty" is the meteorological term for it, too. Everyone has bouts of crankiness, no one is hanging out outside, we're all wearing sweaters. I hate sweaters. I hate sweaters like I hate umbrellas; they offend me deeply, and I find them incredibly irritating to wear and/or carry. This may be because my primary style aesthetic involves (and has always involved; ask my mother to see photographs of me at an early age) very short skirts or shorts paired with converse or combat boots. Sweaters don't jive with that.

In any case, though it's been getting me down, today I know it shouldn't. For one, the weathermen proclaims beautiful things are on the horizon, and that maybe Portland's summer will finally arrive. For two, it's over a hundred degrees in New York City. Eggs are being fried on sidewalks, people are suffering.  I am not suffering. So I'm going to shut up and go outside.




Notes:
* I love the dismal and oppressive grey; I'm a true child of the northwest, so it doesn't bother me in the least to have only known two seasons growing up: wet and dry. This has remained universally true, except for the month of February, which frankly sucks. 

Bear Republic, Conquered.

The first leg of my journey is, for all intents and purposes, complete.

Em and I arrived ahead of schedule in the Bay Area yesterday, and nearly without incident. Nearly. As we approached her intended residence (the home of an old friend similarly transplanted to Oakland), we realized that everyone who lived in the house had a job. And we didn't have a key. Cue to the panic of realizing that we had a dinner date with my resident Bay Area champion, Az, and that we had a car stuffed to bursting with a cat and a great deal of Em's most expensive belongings visible through the windows. The fact of this scenario had not occurred to us along the route; here, though, at the final destination, it suddenly became an acute problem. We had to get these things out of the car before we could relax. It was 4 pm. Our host wasn't to be home until 6:30.

We hemmed. We hawed. We searched around the house for storage spaces. We even tried to break into the house, using a trick my super taught me about certain generic types of front door keys. Then we gave up, and started scheming ways to make the process go faster. Unfortunately, Az was waiting--and hungry--and so we decided that I would go ahead and meet her in the Mission, and that Em would catch up once the things were secured.

Being a fairly competent resident of New York, and a girl who has used public transportation in multiple US states and multiple continents, this seemed a perfectly reasonable proposition. I would take BART to the appropriate stop, get off, and Az would meet me for pre-dinner snacks and cocktails.
I hadn't bargained on BART's particular brand of public transport computing system. I went to the station, walked up to the kiosk with its bright blue touch screen, and thought I was getting an MTA-like program.* I was actually getting an interface similar to that in War Games.¹ The machine was taunting me, and threatening to take 20 of my dollars, which seemed like an exorbitant rate for crossing a bridge into a city I only like because of its residents (who, to be fair, are a significant enough force to convince me that Siberia is awesome, if they so choose). After convincing it that I did not, in fact, want to play a game, or start World War Three, or pay 20 dollars, I sussed out what I was supposed to do. It involved a complicated amount of button pushing, but I made it into the city to meet Az and go to the Mexican place for peach margaritas.

Being the stellar thinker that I am, I did not take any pictures of me and my best friend. Nor did I take any pictures when one of my other best friends joined us. I took like, a thousand pictures of the road, and none of my loved ones in a relaxed setting. So don't ask.

And I didn't really take any pictures of my loved ones today, either, although I think Em is in some of the photos I took in the Ikea when we went there out of delirious boredom. It was a day of delirious, hysterical boredom, but we giggled like idiots and then were able to hang out, finally with Emily's host (of the absent keys), and FE02, who I hadn't seen since his departure from Portland in 2009. There were many hugs, and no photos.

Em and FE02 just dropped me off at the Oakland airport, a full 6 hours before my flight, so that no one had to wake up at 3:30 to get me here. This seemed like a genius plan when I thought I could check in and then nap until 5 or so. Unfortunately, my airline is in league with Satan, and has decided to entirely shut down. There is no one at the desk, and every self-check kiosk is closed until further notice.  I daren't sleep, because I couldn't check in in advance, and only want to get bumped on my own terms.²

An interesting fact about the airport in the middle of the night (and it should be noted that I love airports, especially when I travel alone, in every single circumstance): non-mainstream airlines take over. Right now, in my airline's terminal, no one is speaking English. All of the flights are direct to Mexico. It's like one of those really disorienting dreams where suddenly you're in a familiar place made totally unfamiliar by your own inability to communicate at all. I could reasonably ask where the bathroom is in Spanish, or inquire about the whereabouts of someone's brother, grandmother, or cat, or order a chicken dish with confidence. None of these things would get me any closer to being checked in at my gate, curled up around my backpack preparing to sleep or read The Savage Detectives. None of these things would garner me anything other than strange looks and, perhaps, a concern for my mental health.
So I sit, and I wait, for the kiosks to wake up or a person to arrive behind the counter of my airline. But once that has happened, I'll officially be en route to Seattle, where Summer part Deux will truly begin.³


Notes:
* Say what you will about New York--no really, do, because I will say worse--the MTA's system for providing customers with fare cards that get you where you need to go is straightforward, comprehensible, and almost entirely user-friendly. It's easier to figure out what to do on a New York subway than it is to ride the bus, local rail, or train in 90% of the cities I've been in.
¹ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/. Yeah, that's right. It's Matthew Broderick, and it's before I was born, but that doesn't mean I can't reference it. I'm a hipster. I'm all about nostalgia, especially for things I can only ironically be nostalgic about.
² Those terms involve a free flight voucher. It's worked before, and I won't settle for anything less ever again.
³ It may be Summer part Trois, honestly, if we consider my Summer part Un to be the phase in which I took three courses and rarely slept. I think technically that ought to count.

Surveying the Frontier.

13 July 2011. Wednesday. In the Bear Republic. 

It's the last day of driving. Em and I have made it to California whole and in good spirits.  We still remain several hours outside of the Bay Area, but the intervening miles will afford us the opportunity to eat at In-N-Out Burger, which has been a more firm item on our itinerary than most other things along the way.
One can only get In-N-Out in a few states. California is the first of those that we've graced with our presence this time around. But we've been in quite a few states.

It's a bit after-the-fact, but it seems appropriate to fill in the blanks of that itinerary.

Day 3: Oklahoma City to Albuquerque, NM. 543 miles.

We had originally planned to race across the plains to the far edge of New Mexico, but following a harrowing night of trying to find a hotel in Oklahoma City and the tip that Albuquerque is quite a sight to see, we decided to truncate day three and make room for relaxing. Oklahoma melted away, and I would describe the landscape but I really can't remember it. Texas, on the other hand, was stunning. The Texas Panhandle looks like an oil painting of itself; every color on the landscape and in the sky is somehow thicker than colors in other places. Color is nearly a tangible property in Texas.
We stopped only twice in Texas--once for gas, and once outside of Amarillo to hit up Cadillac Ranch, where in the center of acres and acres of cow pasture (the cattle had been rotated to another pasture so we were surrounded by arid sepia soil) there stand 10 old cadillacs half-buried in the earth. They were planted there in the 70's by an art collective, and ever since have been a favorite place for travelers to leave bold--and extraordinarily temporary--marks. We overheard a woman recount a story of the last time she had been to the ranch, several decades ago: She was there for a wedding, and the happy couple spray painted all of the cars bright white, save the one on which they painted their names and the date, and they were married right there.  That white layer was probably at least an eighth of an inch beneath the hodge-podge we witnessed.

insert traffic joke here. Or, better yet, "check out the suspension
on them things."

From Texas, we ventured onward to the "Land of Enchantment." New Mexico treated us well, and we rolled in to Albuquerque right around 6pm, checked into our hotel, and were sent to the bar to have four free drinks on the hotel's dime. I'd like to say that we did crazy, exciting things in the New Mexico night, but we really just went out to find New Mexican cuisine then fell asleep with the door to the balcony open.


Day 4: Albuquerque to Scottsdale, AZ. 407 miles.

Day four was a day of profound excitement and frequent disappointment. We set out first thing to find the Rio Grande. We found it, and some fancy wildlife to boot (have you ever seen a real roadrunner? We have), but all of the trails to any section of river more substantial then an estuary were blocked off.

The next stop was the Petroglyph National Monument, where Em and I discovered, quite promptly, that were we ever to be stranded in a desert for more than a half an hour, we'd both be goners. We bravely tried to climb the rocky steppes, looking for the traces of ancient civilizations, but were too weak to go much more than a quarter mile from the parking lot. To make Em feel better, I recounted the ending of Frank Norris' McTeague, wherein the hero finds himself hopelessly staring at the horizon in the middle of Death Valley, dead body and caged canary by his side.

I like to bring the mood up in situations of physical discomfort.

we would have died out here, had we not been 5 minutes from
the car.

Though we didn't make it far into the Monument Park, we were feeling fairly confident about our sightseeing abilities (if not our survival skills), and trekked on towards Arizona. We made it to the boundaries of the Petrified Forest before finding out that there is a rather exorbitant fee for our purposes--since our plan was to drive in, poke some fossilized trees, and drive out. Instead, we drove to the visitor's center, went to the bathroom, and drove on.

We drove on to yet another locale, and this time skirted the entrance so that we could view the cliff dwellings known, inexplicably, as Montezuma's Castle. As we stood at the base of the cliff, looking up 20 stories at the facade of the dwellings, several ravens started circling above us, making the kind of noises that indicated that they were quite perturbed that we hadn't just died already.

Our final stop in Arizona was Em's aunt's house in Scottsdale, where bank robberies are so common, any Johnny-on-the-street can earn cold hard cash rewards for turning in bank robbers. Via a service called banditrackers. We arrived (without having robbed or capturing robbers), were plied with blended cocktails, and then taken to the saltwater pool before we went to bed.

Day 5: Scottsdale to Los Angeles. 352 miles.

The drive from Sccotsdale to Los Angeles is part alien landscape, part California outdoor mall. There isn't much else about that to announce. What is notable, however, is that as soon as we turned on the radio in LA, "Tequila" came on. I can't say this is the first time this has happened to me, and I like that. I really, really do.
We rolled in to LA around 2pm, and spent the rest of the day with old friends (and their awesome, slobbery dogs). Old anecdotes were dug out. We went to the movies. If it hadn't been so very obvious that we were in southern California, it could easily have been an evening years ago in southeast Portland.


Day 6: Now. (1:55pm) 

It may be that our more relaxed pace has kept things from dipping into absurdity, but today's drive is uneventful. We'll be in San Francisco for dinner with my BFF Az by 7 or so, and we'll have all tomorrow to completely unwind.
Now all we really have to do is find that In-N-Out Burger.

Ooooooh-klahoma!

9:39 am. I-40  Westbound (Tennessee)

Em and I are on the road following bagels, coffee, and a rather dodgy night's sleep; although the 15 hours on the road left both of us exhausted, I was battling a really mild food poisoning that I can only assume came from the cuisine at Country Cookin', and a cough that made me sound like an old man with black lung. I slept fitfully until around 2:30 am when Emily woke up eeryone in the apartment with one of those bloodcurdling screams.* Our host's resident dog, Reynolds, had taken an interest in MJ the cat immediately upon our arrival, and waited until the middle of the night to make his move. We don't know what happened, exactly, because both animals were fine, but MJ apparently made a noise like she was dying.

In any case, we both found ourselves awake inexplicably early--before 7--and so now are headed joyfully towards Memphis.

When we made this trip in five days last summer, across the upper part of the nation, we really felt like we were booking it. Given the terminal velocity of the White Whale,¹ I think we were. But we're in a Honda right now, and we can easily cover several hundred miles more a day than was possible in the Whale. When I calculated our original route in terms of calendar days a little bit ago, I saw that our original plan would have us in the Bay Area by Tuesday. It's unlikely that we will press forward that fast, if only because there are places in this part of the country called "Loretta Lynn's Dude Ranch", and there are hotels with resident Ducks on Parade, and 60-foot tall neon soda bottles, and god only knows how many of the world's largest inanimate objects. There are entirely too many distractions to blast through this.


Notes:
* I learned last night why the term "bloodcurdling" is less of a cliche and more of a precise and cogent description of what happens when one wakes up in abject terror.
 ¹ May that beast be prospering, wherever it is right now.

11:40 pm. Oklahoma City, OK.

Today found us in Memphis, eating southern delicacies like fried green tomatoes and gator bites, drinking To-Go beers on Beale Street and being obviously from out of town as we debated whether it was acceptable to walk on other streets with open containers, and wandering the lobby of a hotel most famous for the ducks that  walk through the lobby every single day (see above).

Drinking beer in the open street? We're a little unsure.

It found us driving through Arkansas, which is one of the most boring states I've ever had the fortune to drive through--and that includes Wyoming, the land of nothingness and despair.*

Finally, it found us in Oklahoma City before 9pm, in high spirits and looking forward to a hotel room and some dinner.  An hour and a half later, we found the only hotel with any available rooms in the area: the Four Points Sheraton across the street from the Will Rogers International Airport.  Our harried faces¹ earned us a double discount from the front desk agent, and we are now living (or sleeping, at least) in the lap of luxury.
It turns out that our lesson of last summer, to never trust Tom Tom's navigational technology in tense situations, hadn't been fully learned, but definitely held true. After being turned away from several hotels along the highway, I turned to the GPS for aid, and it promptly directed us to the section of the city in which there only stood one thriving business per block, and only three types of businesses in total: fast food restaurants, pawn shops, and check cashing establishments. It made the Bronx look like a cultural metropolis.
We gave up, and used our wits rather than the little robot. That took us to the downtown area, where the architecture was oversized, and the hotels overpriced. They were also full.

But we have a room now, and are curled up in bed with The Nanny. Tomorrow, we'll do it all again, perhaps even better.


Notes:
* This claim applies only to parts of the mentioned states easily visible from the highway, of course. 
¹ And the fact that our agent may very well have been high as shit.

Day 1: White Plains, NY to Nashville, TN.
We hit the road, Jack. We hit the road to the tune of 980 miles in 15 hours, which means that from here on out the trip can be more leisurely and ease-filled, should we so desire. And it almost certainly will be, since yesterday was fraught with flash flooding all the way through the Appalachians, and since for several hours we lost the cat inside the car.

This is what the world looks like when Virginia's on the verge
of drowning.

When MJ reappeared, she threatened the borders.

Em and I managed fairly well in the circumstances; We stopped for a meal at a place called Country Cookin', which happened to be located in the saddest mall in America, and at which every meal came with endless salads and sides. We were the only people present who were under 65 and/or under 300 pounds.* They had great Sweet Tea, though.

As the day wore on, the weather started to break, along with our rather tenuous hold on reality. As Em marveled at the setting sun, we determined that heaven was leaking right into Nashville. We would not arrive in Nashville until 10 pm.

Somewhere around Knoxville, the heavens smiled at us.

Today, we head along highway 40, which by the time we hit Oklahoma will be largely intertwined with the former Route 66.




Notes:
* Although there was a young girl who doesn't currently meet this classification criteria, her chosen sides were 7 rolls with a plate each for butter, "honey mayo," and apple butter. Basically, she is on her way.

Country Roads, Take me Home

The open road is calling me today.

The sound of that call is a little distant, since I have to take a train to North White Plains and then make it through New Jersey, but then. Then. Then Em and I will be free to watch the miles melt away beneath the tires of her dear old Honda.

I'm going to choose to assume that I will have internet access at points along the way, and will thus be able to record our progress. But last year I also assumed that there would be cellular phone service in Wyoming, and that was just straight up untrue. Maybe the southern half of the U.S. won't let me down.

If Chuck Berry is any authority, I should be fine.

In other news, it is just before 7 am and I am already sweating.  I'm not able to say that I'm thrilled to be leaving New York this time around, but I can sure assert that a break from the New York summer is going to a a grand, grand thing.

I don't have any jokes this morning, or any interesting narratives to recount. But in less than two hours I'll be edging ever closer to Nashville. So here goes.

As American as Peach Crisp and German Potato Salad. Wait.

Let's loosen our definition belts for a moment and call what I just had an epic weekend. Or, you know, at the very least let's acknowledge that what I did this weekend was a superior example of my American-ness, and then, since it happened to be the Fourth of July, let's call me a patriot.

The narrative of America, as I see it in this context, is as follows: labor, indolence, excess, with a smattering of low quality lagers and a large amount of home cooked food.

The labor didn't happen this weekend, because damn it, I took three summer courses and felt entitled* to loaf about on my couch watching reality television in which I had no interest beyond the simple fact that it was on Hulu and you can set up continuous play, and that minimized the number of times I had to not be on my couch.
So labor was taken care of before all of this went down, which is, of course, basically the American Dream. It's like I was retiring to Florida, except instead of putting on Bermuda Shorts I put on no pants at all.¹

But indolence. Man, was I prepared for indolence. Friday I was indolent. I laid around, watching television, and took upwards of three naps. Three. I essentially got two nights worth of sleep between Thursday and Friday night.  And I picked up indolence again on the Fourth, when JWR and I spent the day eating, playing board games, and watching netflix. There was a point at which we went outside, and another point at which JWR leaned out the window to take a picture of the sunset because I was too lazy to get up and look at it myself.

Bronx, July 4. The sky ablaze before the sky went ablaze.

We ate like Americans, which is to say we ate food of low sophistication and high deliciousness in excess and accompanied by Pabst Blue Ribbon. There were hot dogs, which we cooked on my cast iron grill in the absence of a charcoal barbeque; peach and nectarine crisp; tortilla chips; and potato salad.

But not just any potato salad, because there was one day this weekend during which I both remained in the Bronx and moved more than between my couch and computer.  On Sunday, as I was watching more reality television, I had the urge to cook. And I had the urge to cook American food, which is where the crisp came from, as well. And I thought, potato salad is American. And then I thought, American potato salad is inferior to the potato salad of my childhood, which is a German style particular to some region that I've never been able to determine (because so many regions screw it up). So I called home, got advice from M&D, because M makes it and D has spent his life eating it (he makes it, too, but more important is that he knows how it should taste). And I made it. And this--this simple act of recreating potato salad--was the crowning achievement of my week.

The other day that saw me leave the Bronx, Saturday, also saw me ride the A train from one terminus to the other. I traveled every single stop on the southern branch of the A, from 207th Street in Inwood to Far Rockaway Beach. And there, I was also truly American. My friend Boyds and I donned our bathing suits and lounged in the sun, got sunburns, and swam in the Atlantic Ocean. Then, we went and ate deep fried seafood and fries and drank Coronas on a restaurant porch with the Empire State building in the distance.

From Point A to Point A (S). Public Transportation to the max.

Today, I am feeling indolent again, but will manage to putz around in preparation for my departure at the end of the week. It will be a slow putz, because the weather is said to be heading into the 90s today and my little fan, which has been on for close to 36 hours now, can only oscillate so far. Maybe I'll watch some reality TV.




Notes:
* Entitlement, particularly among the youth of today, is another symbol of American-ness. Once we reach the end of this post, and all of my achievements have been tallied, I will expect some sort of medal celebrating my commitment to this nation--but it should be mailed to me, because I shouldn't have to go get it.
¹ Because pants are for people who have to go to work or school.

School's out for summer

So, a while back when I noted that I was finished with my first year of the PhD, I neglected to mention that I was about to embark on summer school.

I took summer school. Three classes: Latin, German, and American Literary Naturalism. I had a good time with all of them, hardly ever slept, and yesterday, it all ended. We took the opportunity to invoke summer after class by having a picnic in Central Park that lasted 8 hours and included a bottle of scotch.

Nothing compares to a day like this, despite it being New York.

And now I have a week remaining in the city before I head West to live out my summer like a happy, unemployed itinerant. And head West I shall: after I clean my apartment, which has descended into a shamble, and organize my life, and see all the friends and loved ones I have scattered through the boroughs, I will be helping Em in much the same manner she helped me roundabout this time last summer. We're moving her to Oakland.

We won't have a White Whale, but we will have a couple extra days, and we will almost certainly make them count. If there's one thing we do well, it's hit the open road.

For now, I plan on limiting my vagrancy, and getting some shit done. Like, shit I want to do, rather than shit I have to do. This is an entirely new world, friends.

A long and winding road.

This is not a proper update, dear reader.

All this is is an announcement that, as of 25 minutes ago, I have completed the first year of my PhD.

And that feels pretty good.

Into the Wild.

There's something extra-special about living in the Bronx, and mostly it's that I never really know if I am facing threats to life and limb.

Don't get me wrong: my neighborhood feels very safe. I've never been followed or threatened,* and although the school occasionally sends out reports of people getting jumped by preteens, those reports seem to be limited to the sort of situations where a person is walking down the street with their headphones on and their iPad and iPhone somehow both visible simultaneously.

No, the beautiful thing about this borough is that if I'm going to die, it's going to be because of some bizarre occurrence that belongs in a cartoon, or someplace in the jungle. I wouldn't be surprised if, one day, a piano just fell on me. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if I got run over by the Ice Cream Truck.  But the extreme nature of my environment has become significantly more apparent in recent weeks.

And now, some Cases In Point.

It's Electrifying!
I returned home from my 'surprise' trip West for Spring Break (which, I must say, was quite wonderful in almost every way) late last Sunday night to find the ceiling in my kitchen swollen, distended, and leaking from a tiny hole near the light fixture.
Being the alarmist that I am, I assumed that there must be a pool of water collecting above my head, and that if I were to turn on the overhead light there would be explosions and, potentially, a fire that would destroy me in my sleep. I called my management company and proceeded to not turn on the lights, even for cooking, as I waited for the repairmen to arrive several days later.

When they came, they announced that what they could do for me was "scrape the ceiling" and replaster it. This seemed marginally better than having a stalactite of drywall tape and paint,° so I allowed them to do it, and then contacted my actual Superintendent before leaving town for the weekend (again, I will announce obliquely that my trip to Philadelphia was splendid, and provide no further details).

This morning, I went down to pick up some packages from the ravioli shop, and was told that there had been a problem in the "steam vents" on the top two floors of the building, and that they think they have them fixed.  How there came to be a problem in the steam vents, I do not know. What a steam vent is, I do not know. It seems as though steam should not be vented indoors, unless this is the 19th century and I live in a building with a coal-powered boiler in the basement.

In any case, the ceiling is dry, and should neither cave in nor cause an electrical fire in the near future.


Snakes. Not on a Plane.
This is national news by now, but it bears repeating.
I live near a large zoo. I have yet to visit said zoo, but am told that the animals are quite impressive.

One of them certainly is: the tale of the deadly Cobra who managed to disappear from the grounds is gaining a cultural cache. He even has his own twitter feed: http://twitter.com/#!/BronxZoosCobra .

What this means is that, at this very moment, it is actually possible that some innocent passer-by could get bitten (and potentially eaten!) by a venomous slithery creature, while just walking along the streets of the Bronx. Is it likely? No, of course not. He'd probably get run over by one of the renegade gypsy cab drivers before he ever made it to snacking on a person, but I am still living in an area where deadly animals go missing and very well could be roaming the streets.



The moral of this story, I suppose, is that...well, one can never be too careful. Or something. Maybe there is no moral. Maybe I'll just start wearing protective headgear and packing an emergency kit everywhere I go. Maybe I can play on that ridiculous "urban jungle" cliche in new and fascinating ways.



notes:
* Although there was that one time I was followed for several blocks by three men looking to get my phone number for their friend who could not speak English, and there is that one fellow who, if you make eye contact with him shouts, "Happy Turkey, GOBBLE GOBBLE!"
° Can you imagine how cool it would be to have stalactites on your ceiling for real? You know, if they could be certain to never fall on you.

This is what Hell Sounds Like.

On Progress, of a sort.

In which our hero remembers why she hates Spring term


Psychologically, I respond to Spring term (be it semester or quarter) with a poor attitude and an increase in malaise. It never fails. It may be that I feel tricked by the word "Spring," since all of the mytho-poetical associations with the season--warmth, the emergence of flowers and animals, a general lushness that sends the world a-pitter-pattering--are distinctly confounded by reality.

In Portland, things turned green and beautiful and were constantly wet in the Northwest way that made mold grow in all the crevices of cars and sidewalks. But there, because Spring was the deceptive "quarter," it didn't end until mid-June. Late June, when I was teaching and had to solemnly grade all the research papers long after my students had forgotten about the college.*

Here, it still feels like Winter, despite the calendar having quietly absolved itself of the Winter months. This strikes me as unfair. Cruel, even. April is not the cruelest month, Mr. Eliot. In April there at least exist Lilacs to mix memory and desire.
In March, though, the weather in the Bronx is still on par with the weather in Moscow, and we've barely reached mid-term. Really, we should be listening to Caesar, not Eliot.°

But I probably shouldn't use the weather as an excuse. The truth is, Spring term just makes me lazy. I just want to lay in the grass and re-engage with my annual Mojito fascination. There's not really a whole lot of grass here, and I don't know where to buy mint.

This term I'm attempting to combat my laziness. I've taken on two projects, am presenting at a conference, am spending a weekend in Philadelphia, and--presumably--am getting my homework done. There are a lot of opportunities for anxiety, and I am taking full advantage of them all.

Project 1: The Workshop.
I decided that I was interested in leading the first Writing Center workshop this term, which means that I am taking everyone else's good ideas and trying to organize them in a way that does justice to the hard work others have been doing, and that will work in a classroom. Luckily, if we succeed, we all succeed. If we fail, it's probably because I've done something wrong in the organizing.

Project 2: The Conference.
A bunch of us (my colleagues and classmates) went to a conference, and saw something nifty. I got it in my head to revise the idea for an English department setting. Now, I'm trying to get my friends and people I've never met to participate in a hare-brained scheme. I just had to send out an advertisement to the whole department, and felt the contents of my chest cavity drop into my stomach when I hit "send". Hopefully, only a marginal percentage of the student body will think I'm a moron.

The Conference:
This causes me no anxiety right now, because I'm going to present a paper I've already written at CUNY, which means no cost to me. But when that day comes, I'll be a gibbering idiot.

Philadelphia:
Em. The Mountain Goats. Road Trip.
Awesome.

Homework:
This term is really shaking my confidence as a scholar. I'm getting mixed signals, feel out of the loop, and am generally confused. The course in which I have the most solid footing is 19th Century American Poetry.

Let that sink in a moment.

I'm in two medieval courses, and German, and the thing I'm most comfortable doing right now is parsing Emily Dickinson. The world has gone topsy-turvy. There will be boy bishops and Lords of Misrule a-plenty come these May Games.¹


But you know what? The real Spring has to show up eventually. And when it does, I'm buying some mint and finding some grass.



Notes:
* This is meant to be hyperbolic and melodramatic. Of course they still remembered the college. It's where their grades came from. Well, technically, I was where there grades came from, and they weren't about to let me forget it.
° This prejudice might be somewhat amplified by my never having read "The Wasteland" in its entirety, and by the fact that I'm perpetually hoping for a moment in which I can proclaim "et tu, Brute?"
¹ And that kind of statement, dear reader, is what belies the appearance of a normal human being. I just made a reference to medieval folk custom. If I kept going, I'd probably start spouting Bakhtinian nonsense about the Carnivalesque and talking about this picture I saw once of a Morris Dancer.ª


Notes to Notes:
ª And this is why I'll never be fit for normal society.

Long Cold Winter

And now, mid-February, I encounter the usual late-Winter slump.

In Portland, I always ascribed this to the unshifting sheet of slate that is the Winter sky, and the fog that rises off the Willamette and the West Hills. It was the one time of the year I wished I didn't live in Portland.

Now, I know it's kind of just February; I'm tired of Winter. I want it to stick its hoary head back into the depths of the soil.  Here in the Bronx, the sun comes out often enough to remind me that Spring is coming, but the wind-chill is bitter and if it weren't for the fact that my apartment is still verging on having its own equatorial climate, I would be miserable all the time.

Proof of the Chill: The Ice Storm

Courses this term are...more time consuming than those of last term. They are also infinitely more frustrating, but that probably means I'm learning things.

What I look like when I'm learning. Or rather, what I look like
when I'm Latinizing. After taking this, I realized that I have
photographs of me doing this very thing that will soon be
10 years old. I have not learned nearly enough to justify a
decade of self-indulgent photography of my own "scholarship".

Do not yet fret, dear reader. I may have more work than a single human can accomplish. I may have had to set aside the personal academic project I've been working on. I may spend most of my time either planning how much time I have to spend working, or actually working, or pretending to work at the writing center. Despite all this, I also have more opportunities for fun than I know what to do with.

This weekend I will, in an unprecedented show of social activity, be out in the City with friends every night, and out here in the Bronx on Monday.

And among the many exciting things on my horizon is the following:

There's gonna be a party when the wolf comes home.

This horizon doesn't come until the end of March. But that's fine by me. I like having goals.

An Extended Brief Thought About the Person I'm Becoming.

So I woke up this morning, and made my coffee as usual, checked my email and my facebook, and confirmed that I know where class will be today.

Then, as I sat sipping on my Alka-Seltzer Cold and Flu Medicine,* I started thinking about how excited I am to be receiving my spirulina-based health food powders in the mail today, so that I can start consuming algae every day.  Then, I thought about how I wish, instead of the frosted oatmeal cookies I currently have, I had some vegan, gluten free cake donuts.  Then, I wondered if, when I finally make it out to Target, they will have soy- or coconut-milk yogurts with cultures in them so I can finally have some acidophilus in my life.  THEN (as if this train of thought wasn't bad enough) I wondered where I can buy flax seeds and nutritional yeast in bulk in the New York City area.

And now I don't know whether to be impressed with myself for thinking about my nutritional needs for the first time in my life, or horrified that Portland has managed to ingrain the hippie bullshit side of itself so deep into my consciousness that I'm excited about vegan food and healthy, powdered additives.

I know very awesome people who eat healthily, and exercise, and are generally good to themselves. They are the ones for whom this tonsillitis-cum-cold-cum-flu got knocked out before it fully fledged into tonsillitis, while I'm sitting here two weeks on with a vague deafness in my right ear from the cabin pressure on the flight I took.°

But honestly, "being good to myself" goes against every laissez-faire impulse in my body.

On the other hand, it's possible that I need to eat better for a while, if only to counteract the well-near two years I spent on a diet of bacon and taco bell, since that in itself could have knocked several years off my lifespan.

For now I'll be content with waiting for my supplements and drinking my coffee. We'll figure the rest out later.




Notes:
* Inexplicably labelled "Citrus Flavor" despite being an eerie shade of pink and tasting like a bit like Kim Chee.
° Four days ago.

Twenty-Seven.

With a Banjo on My Knee

What I did on my Winter Vacation:

1) Learned to hate JFK Airport even more.

I woke up at 6 am on the morning of my flight out of New York, because if there's one thing I've learned in the many, many times I've had to use public transportation to get to an airport in this city, it's that I need a lot of lag time to compensate. The only flight I have ever missed was out of LaGuardia, following 5 hours on the Q and various buses.  So I gave myself 5 hours.  It took two.  I thought I was in great shape, with 3 hours before my flight, and then I wasn't allowed to check in.
Some snafu in my itinerary led to a desk agent spending over two hours on the phone to corporate, while all the holiday traffic in the world bore their hate-filled gazes into the back of my hapless skull. After I had held up the line for the majority of the morning, they told me I would be unable to check my bag, which then made me the jerk with multiple carry-ons.

For the record, I hate the jerk with multiple carry-ons. I could tell everyone else does, as well.

I got sent to the security line, by now 100 people deep, with 30 minutes before my flight was to depart. I made it through security with 15 minutes to spare. Then I ran. With both of my bags and a severe lack of fitness.  They were calling final boarding when I got to the gate, gasping for air, starving and uncaffeinated. By Atlanta, I figured out how to gate check my bag for the second flight, and felt the world redeeming itself.

2) Saw the nicer side of Seattle.

Historically, I have disliked Seattle. This sentiment has often bordered on a virulent hatred. Thanks to dear old CHT, though, I had the opportunity to visit (without the responsibility of house-sitting) and eat a fancy meal in a semi-fancy hotel. I watched the sun set from Queen Anne, which is pretty enough to almost make a person forget that there's nothing to do once the sun goes down; I wandered the international district and ate more Dim Sum than was reasonable; I rode the Monorail for the first time; I played some pool and one of the finest poorly-strategized games of chess I've ever had the pleasure of encountering; I fell asleep during a heist movie; basically, I had a great time.

4) Reunited with Portland.

There are not enough words in the universe to tell you, dear reader, how happy this made me. I ate vegan grilled cheese, drank beer, slept in a study-dome in the home of G-face, tooled around town singing along to XM radio, and generally existed in bliss.

3) DANCED.

For New Years, we soul-danced (by "we," I am here referring to MG, MJR and I, since the Goodfoot hit capacity well before midnight and the rest of our party couldn't get in). I've never been dancing when the ball dropped, and it was splendid.  A week later, we hit up the 80s Video Dance Attack. G-Face and I spent a couple of hours getting as 80s as we could (in my case the options were limited since I was living out of a duffel bag), and then we met up with MG and MJR for several hours of awesome.

4) Got tonsillitis.

I'm still feeling this one, so I'll leave it at that.

5) Drove into a tree.

This probably seems like it should be higher up on the list, doesn't it?

Following an epic Scrabble battle (which I lost just as epically), I stepped out of the home of MJR, and onto a sheet of ice. Portland had been struck by an ice-storm, and the sidewalk and road had turned into the surface of a polar raceway from MarioKart.
Undaunted (though my being so was perhaps unwise, given Sadie's distaste for adverse weather conditions and inability to find traction on snow) by the fact that I nearly broke my nose getting to the car, I ventured forth onto the roads.
The roads in my friend's neighborhood were slick, and I slid across them like butter across a griddle, but the major roads were gravelled. At least, I thought they were. Most of them were. Holgate, the street to which my Portland life has most bearing, seemed to me to be a wise choice for navigation.

It wasn't.

I tapped my brakes coming down the hill at exactly the wrong moment, and began to twist across the incoming lane of traffic. I did not panic. Instead, I said to myself, "turn into the skid." Then I said, "No, turn away from the skid." Then I realized I had no practical idea of what either of those meant, and just tried something, very slowly and calmly.

What then occurred also happened very slowly and calmly.

I drifted, quietly and with slightly increased velocity thanks to my inability to stop fishtailing. I drifted quite matter-of-factly into a tree. Or rather, up onto a sidewalk whereon Portland's public works' department had planted a sapling. I bent the sapling over, and pulled its supportive poles from the earth.  Then, Sadie just stopped.

I got out of my car to survey the damage, and noticed that there was a little old woman standing not five feet away. The graceful glissade of my car across the road happened so smoothly and with such a lack of flair, that she hadn't noticed. She didn't even turn around until I opened my car door and that vengeful *bong* sounded that alerts the world to one's door being ajar.

Moments later, a toothless man and his girlfriend appeared in a large SUV, and helped me push the car back into the street--at which point, the sapling sprang back to life, neither uprooted nor seriously harmed. The worst damage I had inflicted was the tearing off of a little bark.

My car was fine. I was fine. I drove the rest of the way to my destination at a solid 25 miles per hour, but was otherwise wholly unshaken.  And then the next day, I got to tell everyone I hit a tree.

6) Got my hair cut.

On my last day of Portland-time, I finally made it down to my preferred barbershop. The place was nearly empty, and after a ten minute wait I was ushered to the barber's chair, where the sassy transvestite who was to be my stylist offered me a High Life and asked my pleasure. I cracked open the beer, and mumbled some words about being lazy, liking bangs, and having a lot of hair, then left it to her discretion.  As I drank my breakfast, the stylist cut a poodle's worth of hair onto the floor, and sent me on my way. She stamped my haircut card twice, too, putting me just that much closer to free service.

Yesterday, on the BX09 back to my apartment, a girl actually stopped me to find out where I'd gotten my hair cut, it was such a successful endeavor.

7) No Real Work.


I fully intended to be productive, but it didn't happen.

8) Chillaxed. To the Max.


With my folks, the inimitably fantastic M & D; with old Olympia friends (The Best Friend and others, though not nearly enough of them); with almost everyone I love in Portland.


Now, I'm back in the Bronx, and being trapped on the plane with my own illness has mutated the thing into a giant gross flu-like thing, but I managed to make 3 weeks really count, and am pretty much ready to get back to work.

So back to work it is.