An Insomniac's Musings

1/23/2012

2012-01-23T14:51:00.002-06:00

Walking along the lake.

1/21/2012

2012-01-21T16:57:00.002-06:00

We had a bit of a snow storm. Apparently even Lake Michigan gets cold in the winter.

Lake Mich post-snow post-blizzard

Lake Mich post-snow but pre-blizzard

1/18/2012

2012-01-19T00:35:00.001-06:00

Chicago Water Tower

1/17/2012

2012-01-17T23:30:00.003-06:00

Hung out on Michigan Ave tonight. It was a chilly but dry night and the crunch beneath my boots was salt, not snow. The sparkling lights of the city made me wish I lived downtown.

1/16/2012

2012-01-16T23:37:00.000-06:00

To be honest, this one's a bit disappointing. No refinement in the detail. Sigh.

I was walking on campus the other day and saw what I thought were ice sculptures: a stallion, a phoenix, and some other avian species lightly dusted with snow in the middle of a plaza. It couldn't be, I thought to myself, it's a recession! But, alas, I was not in Berkeley anymore. At private schools, recession begets not larger class sizes or staff furloughs, but lovely little unnecessary ice sculptures.

1/15/2012

2012-01-16T01:56:00.003-06:00

Printer's Row, downtown Chicago

1/14/2012

2012-01-14T22:06:00.001-06:00

I think the cloud formations are created by airplanes as they take off from Midway Airport.

I haven't seen much outside of my apartment and the library these days. I took both of these shots from inside my apartment.

1/12/2012

2012-01-12T20:46:00.004-06:00

Sometimes it's nice going to school at Hogwarts

We got hit with our first snowstorm today! I wore my snowboots! Oh man, if I could take a picture of the crunch of my boots in fresh snow, I would!

1/11/2012

2012-01-11T23:44:00.002-06:00

Downtown Chi-town by the lake

1/10/2012

2012-01-10T17:51:00.000-06:00

Here are three more...

South African vuvuzela; another Instagram picture.

1/8/2012 was the 100th anniversary of the ANC, South Africa's ruling party.

Another fire escape picture, this time with the L train as it whizzes by my apartment.

1/7/2012

2012-01-07T20:06:00.004-06:00

Mural inside a Ronald McDonald House. The McDonald's on the right side is a depiction of the "Rock and Roll McDonald's" in Chicago.

I spent the morning making breakfast at a Ronald McDonald House.

1/6/2012

2012-01-06T23:29:00.000-06:00

Leaving the law school at sunset

1/5/2012

2012-01-05T20:09:00.000-06:00

My room overlooks the fire escape. I stepped out on it for the first time today with the intention of taking a picture of the sunset. But the way the escape seemed to lord over the condos below seemed like a more interesting picture. Chicago comprises a strange mix of urban brownstones and suburban residences.

1/4/2012

2012-01-05T00:06:00.000-06:00

Walking back from the library. Photo altered with Instagram.

You know that mohawk car from yesterday? Well apparently it is a mohawk on the roof. I walked by it again today and it was covered with ads for hair gel written in Spanish.

1/3/2012

2012-01-03T20:08:00.000-06:00

This appears to be either a car with a mohawk, or a car with a giant paintbrush on its roof.

Yup, I officially broke my new year's resolution on January 2nd. Oh well, here are two to make up for yesterday. It's pretty cold here (cold enough for the pond to freeze) but still little snow has fallen. The child in me wanted to poke at the ice or throw a stone in it to see how thick it was, but since people were walking by I refrained.

New Year's Resolution

2012-01-02T02:55:00.000-06:00

I haven't written here in a while and I've missed it, so in an attempt to get me writing more, I decided to take up the 365 photo challenge. I'll take and upload a photo each day for the next year, and hopefully that'll give me fodder for a quick blog post each day. This is a picture of my luggage after I returned to Chicago today. As I spent the last two weeks in Northern California, I realized how, each time I go back, I feel more and more like a visitor. It has been over two years since I lived there, and much has changed since then. I no longer know the streets and highways as I once did, a fact that throws me off balance when I drive around, and yet I am far more observant now. The diversity of the area, in the people, the geography, the languages spoken, and the restaurants and shops is practically unmatched by other cities I've been to.

I discovered Korea town in Santa Clara. Among dozens of Korean restaurants, there was a Korean shopping mall, which had shops, cafes, and bakeries that I'd only seen before in Seoul. I ate at a Paris Baguette and perused the products of The Face Shop. I ate at a restaurant where every other person in it was Korean and the walls were covered in signs written entirely in Korean. It felt oddly comforting.

A Midwestern Girl?

2011-11-21T00:54:00.001-06:00

Law school is a strange beast: a 3-year program where you get your post-graduation job at the beginning of your second year.* The process is ridiculous and involves dozens of interviews in a week or two, followed by "call back" interviews where firms fly you out and put you up in a fancy hotel for the night, just to tease you into thinking you might one day live the high life.** After the second interview, which is a half or full day of interviews followed by lunch and sometimes dinner, there's more waiting until you get the offer, or more likely, the rejection. The whole thing is indigestion-inducing, and since most people do not get jobs via this method, a big waste of time.

At any rate, I managed to secure employment for the summer. The way it's supposed to work is that you work for the firm during the summer following your second year (you're called a "summer associate") and then at the end of the summer, if they like you, they make you a permanent offer. A big Chicago firm offered me a summer associate position and I plan to accept. It should be a great experience and the pay isn't too bad either. If they do make me a permanent offer, I'd have to think seriously about staying in Chicago long-term.*** The legal market isn't great and this would be a fantastic opportunity, so I'd feel a fool turning it down. I also liked the firm from what I saw during my interview.*** According to one of the associates, it had a nerdy quirky atmosphere to it. Sounded just right for me.

* These days, only if you're lucky.
** My friend was put up in the Ritz for a call back with a New York firm.
*** Where I can get delicious waffles 24 hours a day from this place.
**** They took me to a swanky restaurant.

Grad School, or Adulthood

2011-06-10T19:10:00.000-06:00

Now that I've finished a year of graduate school, I feel like I can come to some conclusions (misguided) about it.

1. At some point, most people will get married and have children. I know this because most of the oldies (30+) are married and many of them have small children.

2. Old people (30+) can party pretty hard.

3. Undergrad was easy.

4. Once you turn 30, get married, and have kids, you put on weight pretty quickly.

5. There is no relation between age, work experience, or familial status and maturity (see 2).

6. Grad school is neither as easy as it seems nor as hard as some make it out to be.

7. Despite being well into adulthood, some people, even oldies (30+) act like children. They throw temper tantrums, complain about stupid stuff, and make dumb comments in front of their colleagues-to-be (see 5).

I guess this turned out to be more about adulthood than grad school. Mainly I've realized that it is a state of mind, and one many have chosen not to accept (myself included).

Preconceived Notions

2011-05-16T05:36:00.000-06:00

"The problem was not the ignorance, it was the preconceived notions."

I've been disappointed with people's reactions to my upcoming trip to South Africa. "What will you eat?" "Where will you live?" "Do you need to get shots?" "Be careful." These responses aren't entirely unwarranted but I think they reflect an incorrect assumption about the world today. Africa, we've been taught, is a place where people are poor, hungry, and sick. Africans live in shacks and fight in civil wars. While this description may be accurate for many parts of Africa, it is not representative for all of it. Africa is not one big country. It is made up of many nations, large and small, rich and poor, war-torn and peaceful. South Africa has had a tumultuous history; I have heard that racism and homophobia are still rampant and that poverty is common. However, it is also a member of the G-20 and a founding member of the United Nations. It ranks 25th in the world for GDP.

South Africa is also the most progressive country in Africa and perhaps in the world. In 2005, the Supreme Court of South Africa declared it unconstitutional to deny gay people the right to marry. In 2006, "South Africa became the fifth country, the first in Africa, the second outside Europe, and the first republic to legalize same-sex marriage."*

Hans Rosling, a stastician and doctor has given a few TED presentations about poverty and development in the world. He says that the idea that there still exists a dichotomy between what he calls "We" and "them" or the Western world and the third world "a stupid concept of developing countries." He has some fascinating data (shown in pretty graphics) here: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

He presents a follow-up here: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_South_Africa

Employed

2011-04-04T02:34:00.000-06:00

Yup, I did it, I went and got a job. Sure, it's just for the summer and technically a "research grant" isn't the same thing as getting paid, but I'm super excited nonetheless. I will be a fellow* in the International Human Rights Program at my school. They are sending me to the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa for the summer to do research. What will I be researching? When do I start? How will I get there? Trivialities!**

I don't know a whole lot about Jo-burg, but I do know that it is winter there. Am I disappointed? Sure, but at least I know that nothing could be worse than winter in Chicago.

*Lady fellow? Fella? Fellowette?
**I have no clue yet.

Fooooodings

2011-04-01T18:34:00.000-06:00

I haven't blogged in a while and in an effort to think of something to write about my mind was naturally drawn to food. One thing Chicago has in abundance is good food and I have been fortunate enough to experience some of it. Here are some of the places my taste buds and I have visited:

BIG and little's: Cajun-style fast food. They apparently have the best soft shell crab po' boys in the city, and although I can't attest to this (I had the shrimp po' bo), I can say that the truffle fries were delicious. I think the city's devotion to deliciousness can be summed up by one review on Yelp for this place: "Best truffle fries in the city." That's right, there are enough restaurants in Chicago serving truffle fries that one of them can be dubbed "the best."

Seoul Corea: Korean food. I have to say, for Korean in Hyde Park, this place is pretty darn good. Nothing can compare to my beloved Food Box, the local Korean fast-food place near my apartment in PyeongChon, but this comes close. They do a great ojingo-dap-bap, or sauteed squid in spicy sauce, my favorite Korean dish. The couple who own it and the pictures of Seoul lining the walls add to the ambiance and make me yearn for my former home.

Chicago deep dish: I've tried a few places and while I haven't yet been to Uno's, a Chicago original, I must say that the pizza is quite delicious. Personally, I prefer thin crust to deep dish, but that doesn't stop me from eating the cheesy, greasy, crusty goodness that is Chicago-style pizza from time to time.

The University of Chicago Booth School of Business Cafeteria: Variety. This may sound crazy (and might be in part due to Hyde Park's lack of quality food), but the B-school has some pretty darn good cafeteria food. I know it's definitely not the ordinary dining commons food I had as an undergrad and it definitely kicks the butt of the Law School's cafeteria. They have a rotating menu that usually includes pizza/calzone, Mexican or Asian, fish, made-to-order burgers, paninis*, sandwiches, and a rocking salad bar. It is pretty expensive (I don't usually leave spending less than $10) but the poblano chile burritos and toasted panini** are delicious and if you spend more than $6 you get a free dollop of frozen yogurt.

*I know the plural is "panini" but I didn't want to sound pretentious so I included the optional "s." Although now that I've explained it, I still feel a little pretentious.
**In case you prefer it this way.

the little things

2011-02-23T17:07:00.000-06:00

Life as a law student sorta sucks. How could anyone dislike the warm and friendly atmosphere, light workload, sunny Chicago days, and brilliant, yet modest classmates (and not to mention the great price)? I don't know. Let's just say that I do. Sure, the mimosas-for-memos program helps, but cheap alcohol and free coffee just isn't it cutting it anymore. After 6 months of being in a constant cycle of caffeinated alertness and intoxicated semi-consciousness, patience has begun to dissipate. It takes a lot to get this disgruntled 23-year-old with mild carpal tunnel to smile these days.

So when I grinned widely and even gave a gentle applause in my morning criminal law class, I knew it was going to be a good day. It might have been because, for the first time in a long time, I got more than 3 hours of sleep. Indeed, it was probably that. But another reason had to do with the law school musical and a couple of awesome professors.

Every year, the law students put on a musical. I was not in it for obvious reasons, but my friend, B, was and gave me the inside scoop on the goings-on behind the curtain. Apparently, it's written each year by 2Ls and 3Ls, but anyone can be in it and I think many of the major parts went to 1Ls. The script is very clever and involved law-related spoofs of Bad Romance by Lady Gaga (Bad Students), Bohemian Rhapsody, and other songs. The bulk of the play went toward making fun of professors and deans. Two of the professors at our school, McAdams, my criminal law professor, and Ginsburg, an international law professor, are perhaps the only two professors who are difficult to make fun of. Unlike most of the faculty, they have no visible neuroses, they seem perfectly comfortable standing in front of large classes, and I've heard that they even have law experience (imagine that!) The musical decided to poke fun at their lack of defining characteristics by pointing out that they looked similar and were just normal guys. In the musical, they switched classes and their students didn't notice. (Ginsburg has a goatee which he 'took off' and handed to McAdams.)

It was a mildly funny joke, but sort of forgettable compared to the rest of the musical, so when my classmates and I were sitting in criminal law awaiting Professor McAdams, none of us had any idea what we were in store for. Over the weekend, Professor Ginsburg shaved his goatee and when he stepped in to teach the class, it took everyone a few minutes to realize he wasn't our professor. He even called on a student, acting as if everything were normal. After the student struggled to answer the question over justifiable puzzlement, Ginsburg said, "And how does that relate to international law?" It was pretty good and McAdams arrived a few minutes later.

All right, back to work.

Story of the Week

2011-02-09T02:33:00.000-06:00

D and P sat outside of a cafe eating stale bread and drinking tea. The waiter was nowhere to be seen.
"D," said P, "you and I agree on a lot of things." D knew this meant P was about to disagree with him about something. "But I cannot agree that they are right for us right now." D sipped his tea and looked inside the cafe, where a few patrons sat at wooden tables, cracked and rotting. Broken table legs and chairs were propped up against the windows like weapons. They waited there patiently in case they needed to be used as such again.

"I don't think they are the best," said D, slowly. "But I think right now they're the best we've got."

"We should not rush into this or we'll just have again what we've always had," responded P quickly, as if he already knew what D would say. "No. Now is the time to restart." He thrust his index finger down on the table and it wobbled dumbly, appearing to nod in agreement. "We must do this right." D looked down at his bread and peeled off the parts that were too tough to eat. His stomach grumbled angrily, perhaps wondering how he could possibly waste food when he had barely eaten for days.

"Maybe you are right," D whispered. He was feeling very tired and hadn't the energy for an argument. One week ago, he would have stood and spoken passionately about the need for compromise. About the need for radical change. Now instead, he felt at his arm, and peeled back the bandage. It was not healing well. Instead of seeking treatment for the cut, he'd gone on fighting. Two days after sustaining the wound, it had been crudely bandaged without a thorough cleaning. Now it was infected. D felt ambivalence about it. It no longer hurt, at least not in comparison to his head and his stomach. "P, what is the next step?"

"If they get their way, sham meetings followed by sham elections followed by another sham government."

"I don't believe the elections will be a sham. People will vote for them...because they'll be the only ones on the ballot," said D sarcastically. P smirked and shook his head. Five teenage boys walked by, laughing and telling jokes. Their bodies were covered in bandages. One boy was still bleeding from his head. It was a calm day, but D did not feel calm inside. He felt more anxiety now than he'd felt in the last week. The violence had quelled and now it was time to see if it had all been worth it.

It's been a week

2011-02-03T22:56:00.000-06:00

Last Thursday I said I'd write one short story per week until mid-February. So it's been a week and I didn't really write anything, so I thought I'd show you what I do when I can't think of anything to write. It's sort of a post-modernist meta-story...yeah, that's what it is.

Enjoy!

SD* trudged through the snow because she liked the way it felt under her boots. It felt like sand. She also liked the sound it made. Crunch. She walked through the snow even though the sidewalks were clear. Stomping parallel to everyone else, sometimes she saw them glance at her briefly before passing. She took her time because she had nowhere to go.

No, maybe I'll go farther away. I want to go somewhere else, somewhere where it is calm all around, where stimuli are hard to come by. A garden with a lake, where I can describe things**.

Maybe SD is trudging but there are none to see her trudge. She is alone in a garden in a city. That city could be Tokyo. Maybe there are cats. Where do they go in the winter?

When SD first came to this park, it was covered in cats. The cat were not doing anything special. Cats lounge very well***. It was a warm day and the cat lay in the shelter of shade. She joined them and they gave her little more than a stare and a whisker spasm.

What if I wrote about Timbuktu. A woman who used to have a bustling life in Timbuktu****.

Now I shall distract you with pictures of snow.

*The vast majority of the time I spent writing this "story" went to deciding the main character's initials. I thought about "MD" but those are the initials of a doctor. "MS" is a debilitating disease and a master of science degree. "PS" means post script...
**Note that I wrote this and then went on to talk about cats.
***Indeed.
****Maybe I have ADD?

Da Blues

2011-01-27T17:10:00.000-06:00

I don't know if it's the lack of sunshine, the overwhelming amount of work, my so-far unsuccessful summer job hunt, being in the Midwest, or what but I've been feeling a little down in the dumpster lately (it probably helps that my apartment faces a dumpster). In the past, three things have helped me get out of funks: food*, new music, and writing. Food is hard to come by here in the wilderness of south Hyde Park, but I bought some ice cream yesterday so I'm hoping that helps. I'm also in the process of buying new music and welcome suggestions**.

This brings me to writing. I certainly can't say I miss writing, but all the writing I do these days is analytical and I feel like I'm neglecting one side of my brain. In fact, I think all three of my funk-evading solutions are creative pursuits. So I've decided to add one more thing to infinite list of to-dos for the remaining month of January and for at least part of February. I'm going to try to produce one short story per week. I'm not setting a length requirement, but each new story must have a story arc and at least one good*** character. I'm not setting a requirement for "good" either.

I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to accomplish this ridiculous goal, but I'm already feeling a little uplifted at its prospect. This is one endeavor that won't be graded on a curve.

*I'm including beverages in this category.
**Uplifting music preferable.
***Good in the sense of realism, not morality.

Winter in the Suburbs

2010-12-08T20:07:00.000-06:00

It's been a while since I've written. School took a hectic turn with exams (the first one is tomorrow!) and job applications being sent out. The weather has since turned frigid, school has given out copious amounts of free food and booze, and I've spent an entire day, from 9 in the morning until 5:30 in the afternoon, in the library for the first time.

Cool stuff
1. Breakfast for dinner: the law school served us pancakes, eggs, bacon and sausages. I guess there's nothing better for sedentary law students than carbs and fat.
2. Snow!
3. The ice skating rink across the street from the law school opened: cheesy music and all. I went this afternoon after studying and only fell once.
4. A few classmates and I had breakfast with one of my professors
5. My law school friends took me to the most awesome-tastic dessert place in the city. 6 types of hot chocolate with homemade marshmallows. Brioche donuts dipped in fudge. Banana and butterscotch bread pudding.

We've only got 2 exams this quarter, one that apparently isn't even a "real" law school exam, whatever that means, so I suppose this exam season isn't so bad. Nonetheless, I've been studying a lot and my brain has turned a little mushy. I haven't even started applying for jobs yet, even while a friend of mine sent out over a hundred resumes and cover letters on December 1st. I'm definitely looking forward to winter break.

Winter means that I have the opportunity to bust out my new snow boots, which are awesome but cause my feet to majorly sweat indoors so I have to keep a pair of sneakers in my locker. Since I have them, sometimes I intentionally trudge through the snow (even though the sidewalks have been salted for my convenience) and locals stare at me like I'm crazy. Also, the high for Monday is supposed to be 9 degrees.

I've got my first exam tomorrow and my second is an 8-hour take-home exam next Monday. I head home a few days later. Unfortunately, I don't think this winter break is going to be a real break. I've got to apply for summer jobs and start outlining for next quarter. Hopefully I'll get a little fun in too.

Fall in the Suburbs

2010-11-11T22:47:00.000-06:00

Penn's Woods

2010-10-30T18:33:00.000-06:00

I had the fortune to spend my autumn break in Pennsylvania, home of Hershey, the Liberty Bell and Penn State football. I flew into Philadelphia and, after a fairly scenic car ride, ended up in West Chester County. It's called the suburbs, but it was closer to what I would call rural. Fields with horses and goats appeared on either side of the road. Lots of fall colors everywhere. It was very pretty.

For the most part we just napped and watched movies and ate. On Saturday we went to this English pub called The Whip, which was kind of out in the middle of nowhere. We passed by the ranch where a lot of Kentucky Derby winners were bred. The pub looked traditional and had a whole menu of delicious pubby treats. We shared a Welsh rarebit, and then I had the fish and chips. It was even served with malt vinegar.

On Sunday, we headed into the big city for some ice cream and beer. First up was the Franklin Fountain, an old timey ice cream shoppe. I'd heard about the Mt Vesuvius and was eager to try it. Apparently, this place had been featured on the Travel Channel or Food Network or something.

After filling up on some quality dairy, we went to a Belgian bar that featured over 300 types of beer. The menu was enormous. I tried out the local Victory Golden Monkey, and then had two other ones whose names I can't remember. The bar also had real Belgian frites, but I think I must have been distracted by the beer because I didn't get any.

I left Pennsylvania feeling very bloated and with a goodie bag full of leftover pie, strudel, and some home made pumpkin squares. Overall I'd say it was a pretty grand weekend.

Zip

2010-10-30T03:11:00.000-06:00

Chicago has excellent public transportation, from the El to the Metra and city buses. Unfortunately, I am able to use very little of it. The borough of Chicago in which I live is not super accessible. The school has shuttles and buses that take students to heavily frequented places, but the buses stop running at 6 and the shuttles just circulate around campus. This makes running errands tricky. Plus, sometimes I want to buy a lot of stuff (yes, food) or heavy stuff (like food in bulk), which makes even taking the bus kind of annoying.

So, I decided to look into ZipCar, a car-sharing service where you pay a small annual fee and then rent a car for $7 an hour for the cheapest car. I figured if it allowed me the freedom to do some serious errands, or if I could get some friends to get in on it with me, it would be worth it. There are a number of ZipCar parking lots all around campus, including one just two blocks from the law school. I applied for my membership, got my Zipcard in the mail, and then reserved my car. On the website you can see which car you're reserving. This particular Zip-trip was solo and just going to be to the grocery store so I rented a svelt Smart Car.

After class I headed down to the parking lot. I was a little nervous because I hadn't driven in almost a year (thank you, excellent Korean public transportation), it was not my car, and it was a Smart Car, which the website noted was a little bit different from a normal car. I found the parking lot, swiped my card on the windshield card-swipey thing and the door magically opened. The site said that the keys would be chained to the dashboard somewhere. I found them, started it up, and drove along. The car was not super smooth (and neither was my driving) but we made it to the store OK and I parked. Since I'm not used to such a tiny car, I parked really close to the edge of the parking spot*.

I did my shopping and went to put the bags in the "trunk." They just barely fit with one on the passenger seat. That was when I realized the car could hold about as much as I could. I made a mental note to reserve a normal-sized car for next time. By the time I left, I didn't have enough time to swing by my apartment and drop off my bags so I just had to go back to the parking lot. I carried the bags the five blocks back to my place, realizing that if I had just taken the bus I could have been dropped off much closer to my apartment. It was dark, getting cold, and I had decided to walk on the scary side of the street.

Mission not so successful, but I haven't given up on ZipCars just yet. Plus, I have the membership for a year.

*The result being that it was well-hidden behind all of the other cars at the parking lot and I had a mini panic attack convinced someone had stolen the car.

Soaking in some culture

2010-10-17T01:19:00.000-06:00

Another week gone, another weekend approached. I decided to do something social this time around. The Chicago Symphony has a fantastic discount for students and someone asked if I'd be interested in going. As a friend of mine once said, "Say yes to everything." I'd never been to a symphony before so I was unsure of what to wear, whose music would be playing, and basically what it would even look like.

Since I didn't want to seem uncultured or give the impression of a total symphony noob, I did some googling before going out. I found out the composer was Mahler and they would be performing his 7th symphony. He was Austrian, strongly influenced by Wagner and composed during the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. A quick check of the Chicago Symphony website told me that the director was an Italian guy named Muti, but unfortunately he was very sick with gastric problems and would not be performing tonight.

Armed with information, I left my apartment. We grabbed some dinner in HP before heading downtown. I haven't yet had much opportunity to see the real city and was amazed at how clean it was. It was also a very mild night. Apparently it's been unseasonably warm so far this season (thank you, global warming). The symphony is right on Michigan Avenue (nicknamed "The Muti Mile," according to the sign outside*). There was an enormous poster of him on the exterior of the building, but alas, I told my friends, he was out sick. They had no idea. I felt so informed. Then, they asked what music was being played. Someone mentioned Mahler and the rest of the group was dumbfounded. Then I realized I wasn't actually uncultured and was a much bigger dork than I thought. I filled them in about Mahler and Muti and my obsession with Wikipedia and we went in.

It was pretty packed, with the orchestra up on a stage and the audience sort of below it. There were also balcony seats for the people who paid full-price for their tickets. Actually though, our seats were pretty awesome. About three rows out from the stage and to the left by the violinists. I was blown away by the music. It was dramatic and fast-moving. I don't know much about classical music or the relevant adjectives for it, but I can see that at times it did remind me of Star Wars.

One thing I wondered about and something that has always bothered me is the number of instrumentalists. There were probably 20 violinists, 10 violists, and a small handful of tuba-players, cellists, and flutes. I believe there was a lone tampani, piccolo, guitar, mandolin, triangle, tambourine, set of cymbals, and but one cowbell-player. So I was wondering: how do they decide how many of each instrument they'll have? I mean, 20 violins seems a bit much. How much does it add to the sound to have that many? How different would it be from, say, 10? Or 5?And there were two harpists. Two. Completely necessary?

Now back to the cowbell. They had a whole set of cowbells, from small ones to big ones. I never knew they came in sizes and had never seen a real musician** play them, so I was really looking forward to seeing them played. Since classical musicians always play their instruments with the utmost care, treating them like their children, I imagined the cowbellist would similarly play his "instrument." I imagined some sort of cowbell stick, sort of like a xylophone stick, that he would subtly tap each bell with. As usual, I was way off. Right at the end of the production, he just banged at them randomly, smashing them together, beating at them haphazardly. It was all sort of barbaric, and extremely noisy. At least one thing I couldn't ask for was more cowbell. All in all though, it sounded fantastic. I got lost in the music a few times and watching the director at work (though not Muti this time) was fascinating.

As we left the symphony, we ran into a few other law students who were there and heading to a birthday party at a club. We went down to the club, a huge 3-story place, but found it all a little too clubby for us. Instead we ran across the street for some deep dish (I've met my people!) and talked nerdy law-talk.

I think I might have my Halloween costume, though it's not settled yet. There is an upcoming costume party I need to get ready for. Advice is welcome.

*Probably only by symphony nerds.
**Sorry, Will Ferrell.

To Nano or not to Nano

2010-10-10T18:18:00.000-06:00

November is fast approaching, which for the last 6 years has meant setting out to write a novel of 50,000 words. For the last 3 years I've been successful (success measured entirely quantitatively) and it's something I look forward to every October. The organization that...er...organizes it is an excellent galvanizer of creativity and acerbic wit and for a month I'm surrounded by fellow dreamers, united in an unreasonable quest whose success gains us no prize except pride. Plus it gives me an excuse to sit around in coffee shops and shirk my other responsibilities.

Unfortunately, with a new school year and way more homework than I've ever had before, NaNoWriMo is looking unlikely. One possibility is to go for 25,000 words instead of the more winnerly 50,000.

I highly suggest to anyone not currently in school or with an undemanding job to try it out this year. It's a lot of fun, free, and at the end you're left with an enormous Word document filled with a month's worth of creativity. You can't really lose (and if you do fail to write 50,000 words, you'll be in great company).

Back to school

2010-10-09T19:46:00.000-06:00

It's been a while, but with a new adventure comes a new string of blog posts. I'm officially set up in Hyde Park. My apartment is a university-owned, fully furnished studio south of campus. I've got everything I need here from a large desk to a huge walk-in closet to a futon. Since it's a studio, I have one big room that acts as living room-dining room-office-bedroom. In order to make my apartment feel a little bigger*, I fold the futon up into a couch during the day and use the kitchen-side of the table for eating meals. After dinner, I retire to the futon bed and use the bed-side of the table. It might sound crazy, but there you go.

The kitchen is pretty small and there's no room for a microwave so I'm considering not buying one (you'd be surprised at how easy it is not to have a microwave, when I was in Korea I didn't have one and I was fine) or putting it in a cabinet. I'm not sure how the latter idea would play out so I'm putting it off for now. Actually, I think the only appliance I really need but don't have is a toaster. There's just something about toast that I soft bread can't satisfy.

The main reason I don't need a microwave, or groceries much at all, is because my school feeds me almost every day. There are talks, club meetings, and receptions almost every day where free lunch and sometimes dinner are provided. In addition, free or heavily subsidized booze is very common. I'm not sure why, but for some reason they feel very strongly about having us buzzed all the time.

Law school isn't as bad as I'd expected (it could help that I'm buzzed all the time). The homework is consistently 1-4 hours of reading per day and I have 2-4 hours of class today. So it's kind of like a job, but I have plenty of down time. I also don't have the distractions of a big city.

Hyde Park is pretty slow. There are no grocery stores, convenience stores, bars, or restaurants anywhere near my apartment. Campus has quite a few options, including a Subway and a smattering of coffeeshops, but sometimes I crave something (anything) else. The school has 3 buses that take me from the law school to a shopping area (and by shopping area I mean a square that has a Whole Foods-type grocery store, an Office Depot, and a Walgreens) but the buses stop running at 6, so you know, it could be better.

Downtown Chicago is awesome. I've only really been there twice. But today being a lovely day I decided to head into the city. I grabbed an express bus instead of the El (elevated train) because my nearest El is in a kind of a sketchy neighborhood. The bus took forever to get down there because of the traffic. There was a USA-Poland soccer match, the Chicago marathon, a country music festival, and perhaps other stuff going on too. So it took a while, but once I got there I really enjoyed it. I started at Millenium Park, which has these awesome face fountains (I'll upload pictures) and this cool bean sculpture (it'll make sense when you see it). The park was packed and I overheard some people talking about the Culture Center across the street. I went to check it out and it was really beautiful on the inside. It has the largest Tiffany dome in the country (no, I don't know what that means either, but it was pretty).

Next I walked down the "Magnificent Mile" (what they call Michigan Avenue, kind of like the main street of the city) all the way to Lake Michigan. I have to admit, I thought I'd really miss being close to the ocean and had no idea how enormous the lake is. It's huge. You can't see across it and they have beaches, so it's a lot like having an ocean close by. I sat on the beach for a while and enjoyed the weather while it lasts (I hear it gets bad here).

I wanted to head back before it got dark and I went in search of the bus in the opposite direction. I assumed I could just cross the street from where I originally got off and there would be a bus stop there. Well, there was a bus stop, but the bus I needed did not stop there. I walked and walked in search of it but never found it. In the end, I just took the El. The stop closest to my apartment was only 3 blocks away.

Here's my law school schedule:

Civ Pro = Civil Procedures; Crim Law = Criminal Law; Elem of Law = Elements of the Law; Contracts = Contracts; LRW = Legal Research and Writing

So far I love all of my professors. They're brilliant, personable and funny. I think Professor McAdams is my favorite. After going over the old definition of a vagrant (which included jugglers, people who frequent liquor houses, and those who can support themselves but choose instead to rely upon their wives) he actually juggled**. All of the professors rely pretty heavily on the Socratic Method, or "cold-calling," but it's actually not too bad. For the most part, no one sounds stupid.

Name dropping: My contracts professor, Eric Posner is the son of a famous former lawyer and current professor also at my school, Judge Richard Posner. Former professors Obama and Kagan met here many years ago. And Supreme Court justices Scalia and Stevens also both taught here.

The undergraduate campus (about a block north of my apartment and the law school) is beautiful. It features gothic architecture, beautiful and surprisingly enormous cathedrals, the Frank Lloyd Wright "Robie House" and a really interesting glass dome, which apparently will be part of the library. It's a relatively small campus, so I'm only occasionally lost. There's a building called the Reynolds Club which is sort of a common area for all the students. It has some dining options, a cafe, theater, a few lounges, and an awesome dining area that I swear looks like the dining hall in Hogwarts (but with smaller tables). Portraits of former deans and presidents of the school line the walls. Oh private schools.

All right, more to come at a later date. Happy Autumn.

*Fool myself. Not so hard, really.
**Not 100% what the lesson was there.

Cadbury Plain

2010-04-12T22:14:00.000-06:00

Cadbury Plain*

They say there' a link between food and memories

which makes sense to me

when "mm" is in the word "memory"

marshmallows on yams for Thanksgiving

a Christmas ham in December

ice cream on a humid summery morning

mustard on an autumnal hot dog

for me, it was always chocolate:

creamy

milky

smooth

held patiently between my tongue and the roof of my mouth the way my mother taught me

nuts and fruit were for others

crunchy

chewy

too much work

caramel too

too sweet

I like dark now, but as a kid

too bitter

But milk chocolate

"mm"

*Based on a poetry prompt from Robert Lee Brewer's blog

Seoul Seeking

2009-12-07T00:04:00.001-06:00

Sorry, I'll try to keep the puns to a minimum. Since I'll be abroad, I thought I'd start a blog specifically for my adventures as a teacher in Seoul. It is located here.

Words of the Week*

2009-11-19T02:36:00.000-06:00

or, Similar Words, Very Different Origins
*Compliments of the OED

ginger |ˈjinjər|
noun
1) a hot fragrant spice made from the rhizome of a plant. It is chopped or powdered for cooking, preserved in syrup, or candied.
2) a Southeast Asian plant, which resembles bamboo in appearance, from which this rhizome is taken. • Zingiber officinale, family Zingiberaceae.
3) a light reddish-yellow color.
adjective
(chiefly of hair or fur) of a light reddish-yellow color.

ORIGIN late Old English gingifer, conflated in Middle English with Old French gingimbre, from medieval Latin gingiber, from Greek zingiberis, from Pali siṅgivera, of Dravidian origin.

gingerly |ˈjinjərlē|
adverb
in a careful or cautious manner : Jackson sat down very gingerly.
adjective
showing great care or caution : with strangers the preliminaries are taken at a gingerly pace.

ORIGIN early 16th cent.(in the sense [daintily, mincingly] ): perhaps from Old French gensor ‘delicate,’ comparative of gent ‘graceful,’ from Latin genitus ‘well-born.’

An Encounter

2009-11-18T00:54:00.000-06:00

[I'm tired of my NaNoWriMo story already and so procrastinating. This is the first paragraph of an old NaNo novel, heavily edited.]

Arnold’s intention had been not to step on the lowly leaf, but to avoid the left front paw of a shaggy, black-and-white Australian shepherd, who had strayed from her owner. The dog looked up at Arnold with clear, blue eyes as if to ask for directions, yet the animal’s gaze pierced the human’s soul as if to prove to both that they were not such distant relatives. The dog’s owner, a woman in her twenties of medium height and a thin, yet awkward frame, walked sternly with the indignation of a parent whose teenager had just defied her. She moved her arms briskly but made no extra effort with her legs and the effect was, thought Arnold, probably not far off from that of a windmill, although the purpose and placement of windmills always eluded Arnold. “Lily!” shouted the woman, her voice loud yet restrained. The dog looked over at its owner, and then back at Arnold, pleadingly. Arnold didn’t budge, temporarily taking guardianship of the dog, though he had the keen foresight to know that the woman’s ire was probably to befall upon both parties. And so it was. “Excuse me, sir, that’s my dog,” said the woman possessively, avoiding Arnold’s eyes. She was three inches shorter than him, and although that was rather tall for a woman, Arnold noticed that she had a rather shorter than average torso. Her hair was up in a ponytail and she was wearing Converse sneakers with blue jeans and a purple long-sleeved shirt. She had a brown purse over one shoulder, throwing her entire lanky body slightly off-balance. “I was just making sure she didn’t stray,” he said with a smile. She looked up at him. She did not smile. A few strands of hair fell in front of her face and she quickly put them in their place, just behind her right ear. “Thanks,” she mentioned quickly and then said, “Lily, come.” The dog suddenly remembered which of the two was the master and left her foster parent without even a goodbye, trotting off happily into the descending late afternoon sunset.

My favorite local musician is releasing his second album

2009-11-17T05:34:00.001-06:00

Want to preserve the sanctity of marriage? Ban divorce.

2009-11-14T00:53:00.000-06:00

[Edit: It appears that someone else has considered this...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_banning_divorce]

sanctity |ˈsa ng (k)titē|
noun ( pl. -ties)

the state or quality of being holy, sacred, or saintly : the site of the tomb was a place of sanctity for the ancient Egyptians.
• ultimate importance and inviolability : the sanctity of human life.
ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense [saintliness] ): from Old French sainctite, reinforced by Latin sanctitas, from sanctus ‘holy.’

So this gay marriage debate/debacle has me thinking. Personally, I don't get marriage. I think it's one of those silly social things that people do simply because that's what people do. I'm sure we all know the history of marriage as an economic contract and have come to our own conclusions about its evolution for humans and blah blah blah...but I'm not going to sit here and talk about why I think marriage is stupid. Because even though I think it's a stupid social convention, I think it's a stupid social convention everyone should be allowed to follow if they please.

Most secular folks who are cool with gay people also seem to be cool with gay marriage. My guess is that for those of us who do not affiliate with a religion, a "civil union" and a marriage are synonymous, and if gay people can have civil unions, then why can't they have marriages? But there are many religious folks who are cool with gay people and not cool with gay marriage, because of this one little word: sanctity. There is, according to them, a special feature to marriage that can only exist if there is one man and one woman present.

It's strange that there's this idea that if gay people could get married, it would disrupt the sanctity of straight people's marriages. Now, I'm willing to accept that for some people a gay marriage will never truly be holy or official, but how does this affect others' marriages? I dunno, maybe someone can enlightenment me about this. In addition, you'd think that people who love marriage enough to donate to the preservation of its sanctity would want there to be more marriages, not less. Spread the marriage around, man.

My bigger problem with this anti-gay marriage nonsense, however, is that some people seem to think that the opposite of a holy marriage is a gay marriage. I disagree. I believe that the opposite of a holy marriage is a divorce, and I'm surprised that more religious groups don't see it this way too. I mean, the Church, that great and holy institution, was vehemently against divorce for many, many years (I believe Henry VIII had a small debate with them over this). Marriage is supposed to be "for better or for worse" right? So why do so many marriages end? It would seem to me that even the notion that a marriage could end in divorce (for example, arrangements of the pre-nuptial kind) should itself be enough to ruin the sanctity of it.

So then, where is the anti-divorce brigade? This would surely preserve the sanctity of marriage by dissuading people who rush into it without thinking seriously, or those who do it for tax or citizenship reasons, and then eventually get divorced. And, of course, it wouldn't just be straight people who would be discouraged from rushing into marriages, but a good number of gay people too would re-consider their desire for marriage if they knew that divorce was not an option. Marriage as a sacred institution, as a lifelong contract between two consenting, loving partners, would therefore be preserved.

My conclusion: I call for a Proposition 8a, a ban on divorce (and a reversal on the ban on gay marriage).

SD, AFT: part 3

2009-11-11T14:00:00.000-06:00

On my final day in San Diego I met up with E, C and A. E drove down from Walnut and while C and A, who were driving up (west?) from El Centro, got a flat tire, E and I caught up. We commiserated about moving back home and dealing with parents on a daily basis for the first time in four years.

The four of us headed to Old Town and got lunch at this great Mexican place. I had a burrito bigger than my head, C got some green flautas, and A was chastised by the waiter for drinking too much water. Our bellies full, we went for a walk around this mission-type place to burn a few of the many thousands of calories we'd ingested. As we were looking around an old stable, we were suddenly hit with a conundrum. It was an age old question that had confounded Americans for generations. What was the capital of Kentucky? Seriously, we discussed this for a while, ignoring the lovely exhibits and wax horses and instead racking our geeky brains for the answer. After a little while we came to the consensus that the answer was Louisville. A quick iPhone check told us we were wrong.

It was a perfect day, not too hot, not too cool, and a light breeze ushered us along.

Next we headed to the beach for a stroll (in reality it wasn't so much a stroll as an epic trek that spanned hours and culminated in a much needed IHOP pit stop for various types of lemonade and more water for A). As the four of us walked along the soft sandy beach, we giggled. It was just one of those days. But before long we realized that it was getting very difficult to lift our feet in the sand. It was a workout and although the sidewalk was just feet away, we had an unspoken agreement that the four of us would make it to the other end of the beach in the sand. We did come across an astonishing sand castle, which was a nice distraction, but by the time we reached the end we were exhausted, sweaty, and in need of the aforementioned lemonades (in case you're wondering, I had a cherry lemonade, E had an Arnold Palmer, and C insisted that she have a strawberry lemonade even though IHOP doesn't technically have strawberry lemonades (apparently they put the strawberry goo from the Rooty Tooty Fresh N' Fruity in a regular lemonade which sounds questionable to me, but that's what she wanted and, frankly, what are you gonna do?)). While we sat at our table, giggling, discussing what "guay" meant in Uruguay and Paraguay, and alerting each other of our demises (E "accidentally" said I had died), we also cleaned out our shoes on the floor. And so we left a little part of ourselves as we walked out the door, four small sand mounds just under the table.

In need of caffeine and something chocolatey we decided we'd head to a patisserie or chocolaterie. Indeed. I remembered that N had mentioned a fantastic dessert place called Extraordinary Desserts so a quick Yelp check later and we had an address. We got there and couldn't believe our eyes. I decided right there on the spot that "extraordinary" was apt for once. First of all, the front door was huge and it was a little spectacle watching C march right up and open it by herself. Inside, the most wonderful array of sugary, chocolatey, fruity delights awaited us. It was a sit-down dessert restaurant, I'll have you know, complete with a waitress and beverages. I had the cafe viennese while I marveled at their sugar (crystalline, rather than granular). The four of us shared two pricey slices of cake. They were both chocolate but that didn't bother any of us. We dug in and had no mercy; two empty plates, four empty mugs, and the show was done.

Goodbyes are weird so I'll just say that it was nice to see E, C, and A again, and even nicer to finally visit N in her San Diego. One citrus mint hookah and a Japanese beer later, and I was back in San Jose, where the past three days felt like nothing more than a passing dream.

MIAAF IX

2009-11-10T04:10:00.001-06:00

Chapter 9: The Main Event

It was a three day weekend and beginning at 8 AM sharp on Saturday morning, about five hundred people gathered in San Francisco (and thousands more around the world online) to participate in the one and only NovNov Write-a-thon. Staff had been there the night before to set up tables, extension cords, snackies, and energy drinks for the writers. There was a wrist masseuse to evade carpal tunnel, caffeine to stave off exhaustion, and inspirational cards (not, like, cards with affirmations or biblical passages, but little slips of paper with random ideas such as, “Suddenly one of your characters loses a limb, write the next scene” or “Incorporate a British alligator into your story” which the interns came up with before the event) to repel even the most dire cases of writer’s block. Tickets cost $200 and included meals for all three days.

The stage was set, Jack and Alycia had written short speeches to inspire the writers, and then they were off. Before long the quiet din of writers conjuring characters from the clack of their keyboards filled the air. Interns were allowed to bring laptops to participate while they weren’t needed keeping a watchful eye on the writers. Most of these generous and creative individuals were not exactly the type that got out much. In fact, for some of them, this was the party of the year; they greeted one another by their screen names, often citing their word counts as part of their opening lines. And occasionally, the NovNov Write-a-thon became a matchmaking event, with likeminded couples meeting and falling for each other over their shared passion of writing, caffeine, and alien werewolves.

All-in-all it was a quiet and orderly 16 hours. Hushed conversations at the snack table were the only times writers left the bubbles of their own worlds, and made for a fascinating character study. Usually I enjoy people-watching, but with writers it’s more like people-listening. A few overheard conversations at the write-a-thon:

-So what’s your genre?

-Historical erotica.

-So you write erotic stories…that happened in the past?

-No, of course not, It’s a subset of historical fiction. I write erotica that’s set during the American Revolution.

-Oh cool, I’m writing historical fiction too.

-Yeah? What about?

-It’s kind of like my family history. Like a Joy Luck Club but with my mom and grandmother.

-Nice, how’s it going?

-Pretty well, I just wrote a rape scene.

And the two of them went on happily discussing their stories and offering up writerly advice.

-I need a name for my antagonist’s cat.

-How about Fluffy?

-Hmm. No, something less catty.

-Mellifluous?

-No, I already have a character with that name.

-Victor?

-Perfect!

He quickly added his new character name to his “Dramatis Personae” and carried on writing.

-When fighting zombies, do you think it’s better to use a gun or a sword?

-Sword, easy.

-No way, are you kidding? A shotgun would take care of those zombies in an instant, and from a distance.

-Yeah but you’d need a lot of ammo, and ammo is heavy.

-Well, you could flee to a roof and snipe.

-But still, what are the odds that you have enough ammo on you?

-I mean, sure, I’d keep a sword on hand for backup, but the shotgun would be my first grab.

While I kept an ear out for the writers, I wrote my own novel. It was a noir told from the perspective of the femme fatale. Intriguing, I know. Actually, it turned out to be an awful idea. Turns out, when your protagonist is someone you don’t like, you’re not very motivated to keep the story going. Or keep them alive. (On the other hand, the great thing about fiction is that you can just kill off people you don’t like).

It was getting later and as the grey sky turned orange, a chill made its way through the ballroom. The coffee was almost out and the writers were getting ornery. It was only six o’clock so Alycia sent me out to pick up another urn from a local coffee shop. While I was out, I realized that when you’ve spent ten hours in a room with people doing nothing but writing, you forget that out in the real world people have other things to do. I had an odd conversation with a barista who was convinced I was hosting an art show and wanted to be invited. When I attempted to explain the noveling event, he assumed I meant some sort of publishing house was releasing a book and tried to get invited to that. The perils of living in a literati city, I suppose.

Back at the event, things were starting to wind down and people were getting tired. Some were heading home after the first evening was done and people were massaging their hands and necks. We cleaned up the room and got things ready for the next day. Apparently day two was always when the fun really started.

NaNoWriMo

2009-10-30T19:33:00.000-06:00

Partly because I've got writer's block and partly because it's time to pay credit where it's due, I thought I'd explain where "NovNov" came from. It's based on a 30-day writing event called National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) where people all over the world write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. The Office of Letters and Light, the non-profit organization that puts it on, is not and has no affiliation with a publisher, so these NaNo novels are purely for the entertainment of their writers.

There are many reasons why NaNoWriMo is cool, but I think the most important is that it brings people together to do what is almost always a solitary activity. They are an extraordinarily motivated and optimistic people who spend at least 3 hours a day for 30 straight days to accomplish something that really has no prize except a feeling of accomplishment.

[In order to "win" NaNoWriMo, you must write 50,000 words of original fiction. As a 4-time participant (2-time loser, 2-time winner), I can tell you that it's a fantastic use of one's time for a month, winner or not. ]

MIAAF VIII

2009-10-19T01:01:00.000-06:00

Chapter 8: Writing

Optimism returned to me and I realized that I essentially had steps one and two down and it was time to seriously work toward step three. One day, while at NovNov, I heard, “Ok everybody, we’ve got to write down our word count goals for this weekend.” The big fundraising event was the upcoming weekend, something I had completely forgotten about. Per office tradition everyone had to write down how many words they were shooting for, earning one gold star for every ten percent they achieved. Most people wrote down the average: 30,000 words in three days. It was a brutal marathon, but once a year people all over the world banded together for a weekend of creativity….Or so said our website. In fact, it was true that the event had become international and that it really did seem to spark creative ingenuity in people of all ages. So I shot for the moon and wrote down 30,000. Now this was a goal I could wrap my head around. And if I failed, so what? I’d be surrounded by fellow failures.

Writing, writing, writing. It seemed to be all I had time to do lately. Academic papers, NovNov practice sprints (writing as much as I could for three minutes, in preparation for the big weekend), creative stuff I’d do on the side that I would never show anyone ever even though I had secret dreams of mailing it off to some big publishing industry somewhere to their immediate and intense delight, and then it would be shown to the public and I would be famous. But for now, my fiction would remain locked up and hidden even from my desktop, as if they were entries in a diary. The funny thing about writing is that it is the thing I most want to do when I’m not doing it, and what I least want to do while I have to. And of course, while I’m writing an English essay, I’d prefer to be doing something more creative, and while I’m writing fiction I’d prefer the structure of something analytical. I was starting to understand why writers were so often depressed.

Speaking of college papers, I had realized after three years that there really were no dependable guidelines with which to write them. They tell you in high school not to use “I” in your written work, and yet when you get to college you’re told to use it to avoid sounding pretentious. You spend countless hours learning fancy new words and their Latin roots just to hear that you should not use big words when small ones suffice. And don’t even get me started on organization; they tell you at once to write an “organized paper with a clear introduction and concise conclusion” and then not to write a five-paragraph paper, have too short or too long of an introduction and a conclusion that neither repeats what was already said nor introduces any new material. The grading standards are, I believe, the most complicated and random process in all of academia. What works for some grad students and readers never works for others, and what some think is excellent work, others balk at. Why not just ask a grad student what he or she wants, you ask? Because they’re weird and sometimes they don’t shower. OK, I know that’s not a good enough reason, and don’t get me wrong, I have been to office hours and I’ve sat down to speak with a GSI (graduate student instructor) to try to understand what they want in a paper, but I am almost always met with vague advice to write about what I’m interested in, as long as it has never been done before and doesn’t sound cliche. But frankly, I’m not interested in exploring homosexuality in Shakespeare, GSI Matt, mainly because I don’t think it’s really there. I think Professor Gilbert just made it up so he could get published. Of course, I can’t say that so I just nod and say OK and go home more confused than ever.

The good news was that for one weekend all my insecurities and paranoia about my inferior writing skills would be pushed to the wayside, and quantity would be the only thing that mattered. Thirty thousand was a number, unambiguous and absolute. I finally had a simple goal.

SD, AFT: part 2

2009-10-18T02:54:00.000-06:00

The next day we dragged ourselves out of bed by noon and headed to this lighthouse/tidepool preserve somewhere in or around San Diego (I wasn't fully awake by that point). It was another lovely clear day and the ocean was miraculously blue.

We got pretty lost but made our way down this winding road to some tidepools. The rocks had been worn down in interesting ways by the waves. It was awesome and my friend pointed out that it would have been very romantic to be there with someone other than me.

We hadn't given up on looking for the lighthouse so we drove back up that winding road and followed some other cars to a large parking lot. We still couldn't find the large white house sitting on top of a hill with a huge light on top despite the fact that there were dozens of people heading up that way so we wandered around the visitor's center a bit.

Finally, we followed the multitudes of people and found the lighthouse. Apparently Mr. and Mrs. Lighthouse (err...I can't remember their names) and their three children had lived inside it. It was so narrow and tiny and the rooms so short I was feeling a bit claustrophobic just thinking about anyone actually living there.

Next we headed back to PB, the Berkeley-esque place, for some sushi. I ordered the "PB sushi" and my friend got this deep-fried spicy mess. Next headed over to Trader Joe's for some mochi and peach Lambic and then went back to N's for a nap.

Later that evening, we went over to N's friends' (J and K) apartment to play some Rockband. J and K, being the college dudes that they were, had set up a projector and the video game took up the whole living room wall. We played for a while and at some point they mentioned this Mexican place J loved called Cotixan (I believe pronounced "koh-dee-kan"). I got a huge taco and three of us split a plate of nachos. J was also kind enough to let me mess with his guitar, which he tried unsuccessfully to teach me how to play.

We got home around 0200 again and this time I fell asleep with an enormously distended tummy. Another good day.

San Diego, a foodie tour: part 1

2009-10-14T18:39:00.000-06:00

I made a trip down to San Diego to visit my friend N who goes to UCSD, and my friends E and C who each live about an hour and a half outside the city. N was nice enough to host me at her swanky apartment in UTC (University Town Center, I think), which is where all the UCSD students who aren't in the dorms live.

N picked me up from the airport at around 1400 and we went for a drive. We crossed this enormous bridge where water surrounded us on both sides and then my friend got lost and we ended up on a naval base somewhere. I didn't mind though, it was really nice to see clear, blue water everywhere I looked.

After turning around and getting off the base, we went to UCSD for a quick campus tour. I'd been there four years ago when I was looking at colleges, but all I could remember was a UFO, talking trees, and something about a beans-for-notes exchange.

The first thing that stood out to me about the campus was how different it was from Cal. It's absolutely sprawling, with a large vet hospital on campus, numerous small dorms, and what seems like endless space between buildings. Shuttles carry the students around campus, and those who don't live in the dorms need cars to get to school. Fortunately, there was ample parking.

My friend showed me the "dungeons" which are the computer labs where she often spends entire days. It looked miserable. She also took me to the quad, which was pretty damn sweet. I often forget that other schools have chain restaurants, cafes and other cool stuff to make campus convenient and whatnot. There was a huge sushi place with a pool hall in the back, an actual movie theater, and countless lounges. We went to the top of the UFO-looking library named for Dr. Seuss (how awesome is that) and saw a view of San Diego that convinced me that no one studying up there could ever get any work done.

I was starting to get hungry and N had told me about this amazing burger place called Big Kahuna's so we headed out to PB (Pacific Beach, perhaps), which is the less trendy, more grungy part of town, or as my friend described it, the "Berkeley" of San Diego.

She was right about the burger, it was huge and delicious and we also had this appetizer called Big Kahuna's Balls that were pretty amazing.

We waddled back to the car and my friend drove to the top of some hill that reminded me a lot of Grizzly Peak and we had a lovely view of San Diego by night.

After the pleasant drive, we went back to her apartment, a huge, new, clean, two-bedroom, two-bathroom place with a balcony and an elevator in the building that she shared with one other person. College living? I don't think so. My friend and I got dressed up, I borrowed some shoes and then headed to the Gaslamp part of downtown San Diego.

I have to admit, I never knew SD was so happening. The Gaslamp was a four-block by two-block area of clubs, bars, pubs, and great restaurants. It was a Saturday night and it was packed. As N circled the area looking for parking, I people-watched in amazement. There was the 21+ crowd dressed up for a night of clubbing, but also numerous families, perhaps just leaving after dinner at one of the amazing eateries. There were rickshaws carrying high-heeled customers from wherever they parked their cars to their place of choice, and plenty of very nice-looking cars, limos included.

We finally found a parking lot and headed to a pool hall we'd found on Yelp. After playing for a couple of hours, we went to an Irish bar called Patrick's II (what happened to Patrick's I, I didn't ask) where there was a live blues band playing. It was an odd joint but we enjoyed the atmosphere. A rather large saxophone player jumped off the stage and wandered around the pub playing for tips. Later, an older German gentleman offered us some of his nuts. Peanuts are supposed to bring out the flavor of beer, he said.

We were home by 0200 and finally got to bed by 0300. I sank into N's very comfortable leather couch and fell into a deep sleep.

Sometimes people ask me which Korea I'm going to...

2009-09-26T02:18:00.000-06:00

...so I decided to make a compare/contrast list to help distinguish the two.

Technology

South Korea: Dubbed "the most wired country in the world" South Koreans enjoy their internet at four times the speed than that of the United States.

North Korea: Unlike other oppressive regimes which ban certain websites they don't approve of (I'm looking at you, China), North Korea simply doesn't get internet. According to the New York Times North Korea's domain suffix .kp remains unused.

Electricity

The top half of this picture is North Korea at night, the bottom half is South Korea.

Communication

South Korea: 90% of South Koreans own a cell phone, which they use to watch TV, buy stuff, and play those nerdy online videogames. South Korean companies Samsung and LG are two of three largest cell phone companies in the world.

North Korea: Cell phone were banned in North Korea until 2004. In 2008 a mobile phone service was launched but hardly anyone in North Korea can afford a cell phone anyway.

Transportation

South Korea: A fast, efficient subway system in each major city transports the busy population around; the Seoul Metropolitan Subway is one of the most used subway systems in the world. Signs in the cosmopolitan SK subways are written in Korea, English and sometimes Chinese. South Korea is the world's fifth largest automotive manufacture.

North Korea: Cars are a luxury in North Korea, with only around 20,000 cars in the entire country (less than 1 per 1,000 people). In fact, bikes are luxury in North Korea.

Government

South Korea: Full democracy with three branches of government not unlike our own.

North Korea: Oh boy. Officially led by the "Korean Worker's Party," North Korea is actually run by (Dear Leader) Kim Jong-il, son of the Eternal President Kim Il-sung. He can apparently control the weather with his mood.

Tourism

South Korea: With the best airport in the world just outside capital city Seoul, South Korea welcomes around six million tourists a year. Popular spots include historic Geongju,

tropical Jeju Island

and urban Seoul.

North Korea: The North Korean government recently imprisoned journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee for accidentally crossing the border into the country. Tours are available for people who want to visit North Korea, excluding South Koreans. This is actually a really interesting firsthand experience of the guided tour at the DMZ (demilitarized zone).

Stuff they have in common:

They both speak Korean (albeit very different dialects).

They both qualified for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

So in summary: South Korea is a technologically advanced, first-world nation which welcomes tourists and has a healthy relationship not only with fellow Asian countries, but with the UN and the Western World alike. North Korea is a totalitarian regime that imprisons people in labor camps who happen to step across its border.

Can you guess which Korea I'll be going to?

MIAAF VII

2009-09-18T04:30:00.000-06:00

[I'm getting to the end of what I'd already written for MIAAF so the chapters will come out more slowly now. Also, unlike the other characters, Eloise isn't based on anyone real.]

Chapter 7: In the Thick of Things

We had a new temporary intern at the office one fine Monday afternoon who was there to help Alycia handle some of the creative decisions in the Young Novelists Program. Her name was Eloise. Well, it wasn’t really Eloise, it was Hannah Eloise Smith, but she liked the sound of Eloise so she went by Eloise instead. Like the majority of the office, she had been a lit major, Contemporary French Literature to be exact (Mi-sook was a comp. literature major, “Tanya” and I both English, Alycia had a creative writing degree, the shipping staff had both been lit, while Jack got his bachelors and masters in, oddly enough, sociology). Eloise was one of a particular type of people. Intense is the word that comes to mind when one first meets her. She was the type of person to faithfully laugh at a joke but to stop laughing and in fact, smiling altogether, as soon as etiquette allowed. Her face was angular and came to a point at the tip of her narrow nose. Her eyes were a hawkish blue, and she was always well-coiffed. In fact, the only thing to compete with her perfect hair was her Martha Stewart-esque pronunciation. In French as well as in English. The two of us had a lot in common so she was naturally drawn to me more than the others in the beginning, but my soft-spoken introversion and my inability to hold eye contact quickly belied my self-conscious nature. She easily spotted out the hierarchy of personality strength in the office and I was, for better or for worse, rock bottom. This didn’t bother me at first. Mi-sook, who instantly disliked her, must have registered on Eloise’s intensity radar because Eloise seemed naturally drawn to her, if only to ask her questions about grades and future ambitions, etc. I think it must have been a competition thing. One day, however, it was my turn to feel the pressure of Eloise. She came in and, as usual, asked everyone how their days went while she mentally went over why she was better than the rest of us (or so I assumed). After everyone in the office had responded except for me (I didn’t count and no one waited for me to answer anyway) she said that she had checked out Mi-sook’s, “Tanya’s” and my Facebook accounts. She went on to ask questions about funny pictures, quotes, etc. OK, not too weird. It wasn’t until later when we were talking about our choice of majors and why (“I just love literature” followed by agreement), when writing came up. Eloise went around asking people what they liked to write to a gamut of answers (YA, science fiction, literary fiction, fanfic) when she then turned to me. Now, this whole writing thing just started up in my life and while I kept a blog where I wrote little fiction snippets, I knew that no one read them. “Do you like to write too?” she asked me, uncharacteristically acknowledging my presence. “Yeah,” I muttered noncommittally. She turned to me, paused, then narrowed her eyes so that we were locked in a sort of staring contest and blinking was a sign of weakness, and then said with a smirk, “I bet you’d be a good writer.” There was a link to my blog on my Facebook page.

While I tried to shake off the confidence blaster at work, my GSIs and readers were doing everything in their power to make sure my self-esteem was left in tiny, shattered pieces. At Ivy Leagues and other smaller private schools it’s in the schools’ best interest to advise and nurture the student along their journey. They want the student to enroll, do well, and then graduate with a degree and go on to do great things. This ensures four (or maybe even five) years of tuition, powerful alumni, and a bottomless endowment. They help out even the most challenged of students with what the call the “Gentlemen’s B.” At most public schools and community colleges, which are funded by the state to help local low-income students get an education so that they do not become adults who rely on the welfare system with no healthcare, it is likewise in the schools’ best interest to guide the student along the difficult journey so that they arrive at the end holding a degree and become good tax-paying citizens. There is another group of schools that does not fit into either of these two categories however, and that is the group of highly competitive public schools. They are the ones that are funded by the government but rely on their powerful alumni and large (if not bottomless) endowments to keep them competitive. At these schools, where the government is required to provide the majority of the funding, the high-achieving, low-income students still require scholarship money, paid for by the endowments, to attend. They are the schools who lose faculty positions to small private schools at alarming rates and who are pressured to transfer funding from humanities departments to athletic programs in order to make more of a profit. It is not in the interest of these schools to guide the students along a peaceful journey to arrive at a degree in four or five years. Instead, they weed out the weak students, both to ease the burden of funding spent on scholarships and to ensure that their statistics of students being accepted into graduate schools are better, thus it is most profitable when weak and mediocre students drop out, both for the state who loses money on every residential student and for the school who can boast higher grad school acceptance percentages. My point is that I had to deal with extra-departmental pressure from people asking me why I had chosen such a useless major and inter-departmental pressure to do better or drop out. My mediocre English grades and my recent adoption of a lack of career path were costly not just to my parents and me, but to the school and state too. The guilt was eating me up inside.

Beach Day Haiku

2009-09-16T02:05:00.000-06:00

Warm day on the beach.
Can this be San Francisco?
I guess summer's here.

A towel, a sandwich,
And I brought a big dog too.
Well, I got a bite.

A dead pelican.
People wonder how it died.
But I think something:

Death, here by the sea,
With these waves as one’s last sight,
Doesn’t seem so bad.

London

2009-08-31T01:46:00.000-06:00

The ground is wet, it smells like exhaust, and although it looks cold it doesn’t feel too bad. It’s humid. Ben strikes a few times, but I don’t keep count. It’s quiet but the squeaky breaks of a double-decker remind you that this city takes cat naps at night.

London doesn’t really rhyme. You can walk around late at night safely, and people do. The whole place seems to heat up after the sun sets, especially over summer, with late walks along the embankment. But pubs close at midnight. Maybe those things are connected somehow.

The tube is cool. It’s fast and efficient and people take it. There are strikes but not as often as France and it’s a little pricey but not as bad as America. It’s nice when a smaller tube stop looks all old-fashioned with cracked tiles and whatnot. The Baker St stop is a little like that. And the voice on the intercom just can’t be beat. “This is the Bakerloo line.” “Mind the gap.”

“Queues” are what they call them. The tidy alternation of vowels speaks to what they are. Whether it’s waiting at a bus stop or on an underground platform, Londoners are always civilized.

Except when it comes to football. That’s right “football,” the sport you play with your feet. Conflicting loyalties make men crazy. London has three top football teams (Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham). And that’s not to mention the overflow of Manchester United fans in the city, or the people (arseholes) who follow teams based on something like talent or consistency and choose to root for Barcelona or Real Madrid.

The best thing to do after watching a match at the pub is to get fish and chips, with a gherkin. They give it to you with vinegar on top, but you gotta pour a little more on and add salt before you even try them. You eat them while walking.

You might stop at a park. They have great parks, real nicely manicured. Londoners don’t really litter and there aren’t a whole lot of dogs, so the problems that plague American and French public spaces don’t affect London. It’s never really warm enough during the day to have a picnic in comfort, but a walk through the park is always nice. You could even stop by Speaker’s Corner and hear the crazies go on about Imperialism.

Their money is worth more than anyone else’s in the world. They reject the euro because they can. One coin in London is worth about two bucks.

London is not, though it seems like it, in the middle of Britain. It’s actually a little left of center and pretty far south, so it doesn’t snow in the winter.

Britain may not be known for its cuisine but the ethnic stuff in London is the best in the world. “Chinatown” (and I put it in quotes because it’s more like a little plaza they set up so that London could have a “Chinatown” like many large American cities) has this restaurant called “Won Kee’s” which is like three stories and always packed with people. They’re famous for having extremely rude waitstaff. “Upstairs! Upstairs!” they yell at you when you walk in. And sometimes when you get to the top floor they scream “Downstairs, downstairs!”

They eat this thing in Chinese restaurants in Britain called “seaweed” that’s actually fried cabbage with sugar sprinkled on top. It’s pretty good. They practically invented Indian food in London and curry after a crazy night is like the thing to do. Actually, some fish and chip shops have this spicy curry sauce you can pour over the chips that’s so weird but good.

MIAAF VI

2009-08-29T23:01:00.000-06:00

Chapter 6: Getting things moving

Back at NovNov things were really starting to heat up. The big annual fundraiser was just around the corner and the stress was starting to get to Alycia. “Hey, I’m so glad you’re here,” she said one afternoon, “I have a couple of projects for you.” She put her hand on my back to usher me in and then suddenly rushed by me on her way to Rachel whom she talked to feverishly for a few minutes. Next, she walked over to the water cooler, stopped for a second, and then turned to me and said, “There you are! I’ve been looking for you.” I hadn’t moved from the spot where she’d left me. She gave me three extra projects to do on top of my usual translation duties, so I got right to work. By the time I looked up from my laptop, my day was over.

I got home and realized I’d missed a call. It was my dad; he was going to be in town and wanted to have lunch with me the following day. I texted him (that’s right, he’s hip) and told him where we could meet. As much as I had been putting it off, I knew it was time to ‘fess up. I got out my trusty flashcards and planned out how to break it to him that I was no longer planning to go to law school.

I wrote “Why” on one side of a flashcard and on the other, I wrote:

I’ve been doing some research into the life of a lawyer and have decided that the profession just doesn’t agree with me. For instance, the long hours I’ll have to work just to pay off the enormous debt (it wasn’t time to give up the “debt” angle yet) and the fact that I’ll be working for corrupt corporations.

“When did you decide this?”

I’ve been giving it a lot of thought over the course of the last two semesters.

“What do you want to do instead?

What could I say that I’d rather do? I want to sit around all day long? I figured I’d just make it up on the spot, that always worked out so well for me.

I met my dad at noon the next day. It was slightly earlier than I usually liked to wake up so my eyes burnt from the bitter morning air. His humor was likewise acerbic as I was greeted with a hearty “Good morning.” We met at a café across from campus. It was, as usual, buzzing with grads, undergrads, post-grads, and post post-grads making the cafe intellectually stuffy and a little too light on conviviality. To counter this I got extra whipped cream on my hot chocolate while my dad went with a lowly latte. We sat outside where the sun was beginning to melt the students who had been there since it opened. To our right were the pre-meds, looking over a textbook and whispering maniacally. Portside were the philosophy majors, sitting back with their black coffees discussing the state of the world, which didn’t sound too good. My eyes darted as my dad sipped his coffee. We discussed the weather first, then politics, then the health and well-being of common acquaintances (grandma, aunts, etc.) “So, where’s a good place to eat,” he asked me. The best thing about having lunch with a parent is that it’s a free meal and you can go somewhere that would be slightly out of your price range. I told him about an Italian restaurant that served brunch on the weekends. We started walking there and he asked me about classes. It really was a lovely day and as we walked farther away from campus, the trees that lined the sidewalk became fuller and leafier. A biting breeze swept by my hands which rubbed against each other mechanically as if their nervous owner, deep in thought, plotted something sinister against the vicious zephyr. My dad and I were mostly silent along the fifteen minute walk.

“How are your internships going,” he asked me once our pancakes had arrived. I stuffed my mouth full of strawberry goo and reached for my glass of water. He looked down at his own plate, he had opted for blueberry, and said, “You know, companies these days are really looking for creative employees.”
“Cool,” I said.
“Still writing?” I hadn’t talked about writing for years, what was with the ESP today?
“Yeah,” I said noncommittally.
“Good. It’s good practice. You should join a writing club or something.”
“Well, yeah, I’d like to but I’m busy with, you know, getting ready for law school.”
“Law school,” he sighed. “Well, you’ll make money, but you know what they say, ‘Do what you love and the money will come.’” He continued eating his pancakes while I let my artificial fruit fall from my fork.

We made awkward goodbyes and I promised I’d call soon. When I got back to the apartment, I found my unused flashcards and discarded them. I thought about what he’d told me and wondered if it was true. I envisioned Van Gogh, Poe, and friends gathered in my apartment telling me that law school was probably a safer choice, but I shooed away my fellow bohemians and allowed myself to bask in the possibility for a few seconds. Then I sat down and wrote.

On the Arts and the Sciences

2009-08-28T22:55:00.000-06:00

"Science provides an understanding of a universal experience and art provides a universal understanding of a personal experience." -Mae Jemison

Astronaut (and dancer) Mae Jemison has this great Ted talk (and if you don't know what Ted is by now, please begin watching immediately*) about how the arts and sciences are more similar than people (both artists and scientists) are willing to admit, and as such, should be taught together in schools. I really enjoyed this talk, not because she provided any kind of solution to the art/science dichotomy (one minor flaw to her speech) but because it comes from someone with both exceptional analytical skill and artistic talent. She explains that both analytical and creative skills are manifested in scientific and artistic disciplines and that to denigrate one or the other is to ignore the fact that humans both use and need both to function.

I think one reason I felt so drawn to this video is because it is a rebuttal to what I hear all too often now: that students should pursue math and engineering and, if not intelligent enough, they should go to trade school. Perhaps it is just my math/economics/computer science-heavy family, but it does seem that the arts (which includes, in my mind, the social sciences, politics, languages and others) are being quickly thrown to the wayside. I think this is a huge mistake (and not just because I recently graduated with a degree in the liberal arts). In an age where computers and brilliant Chinese and Indian students can outsmart us and do everything we do cheaper and more efficiently, we will need to harness the creativity that us dumb art majors have in order to stay afloat in the next century.

In fact, many people are now saying that it will be right-brained thinkers that lead us into the next generation. Dan Pink, Al Gore's former speechwriter, has a book called A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brained Thinkers Will Rule the Future where he argues that "inventiveness" and "empathy" will be the qualities needed for future success. Pink also has a great Ted talk, which he begins by sheepishly admitting that he went to Yale Law School, a huge mistake in his mind (and something that hit a little too close to home for me).

I think artsy, creative people can rejoice. Not only are they beginning to get a little respect, but this economy is the perfect opportunity to have creative pursuits. In an age where many are unemployed and a college degree, even in something useful, no longer entitles its bearer, the opportunity cost is lower than it has been in a long time (OK, thank you econ). So I say, go for it. Funemployment here we come.

*Ted! Start with the "Most Favorited of all Time" (particularly Jill Bolte Taylor, Hans Rosling, and Malcolm Gladwell), then try out the unconventional "talks" by Rives, David Gallo, Arthur Benjamin, and Jennifer Lin. They'll blow your freaking mind.

Love Letters to No one

2009-08-28T22:24:00.000-06:00

Dear vast abyss known as the Internet,

How are you? It's been far too long since you've written.

I was watching a movie yesterday about a historical figure many of the details of which depended on the historical figure's letters she wrote to a friend. And for a second I lamented the fact that people don't write letters anymore (no thanks to the postal service) but then I realized that something had taken the place of letter writing: blogs. Are blogs the new letters? And if so, who are they addressed to? Have we become such a self-obsessed culture that instead of writing letters to real people, we simply write letters to...no one?

Perhaps, but much like the letters in the movie I watched, blogs play an interesting role in recording history. No longer can history be written solely from the perspective of one (Western) historian. Instead, the thousands of blogs (and perhaps Twitter tweets) from around the world comprise an interesting and multi-faceted view of the world we live in.

But there are so goddamn many of them, you say, how can blogs (1) be trusted, (2) be consolidated into one story? I suppose they can't and won't be. Maybe we're simply entering into an era of subjective history, where we each choose to believe what happened based on what other people tell us (not that that's so different from how it works now). Liberals can read the the Huffington Post, Conservatives can follow The Weekly Standard, while I'd probably choose something like McSweeney's.

And what of those individuals who write only for the sake of writing, those who know few if any actually read their blogs, who contribute very little to recorded history? Well, I guess we'll just wait and see. Maybe one day the internet will write back.

MIAAF V

2009-08-28T14:32:00.000-06:00

Chapter 5: Amassing Wealth or How Not To Hemorrhage Money

One night when my roommates and I had important tests and papers due the following morning, the three of us had a brilliant idea. We were going to start a company that baked and sold brownies to college students late at night. We really got into it, even coming up with a name for our company, a logo, and a motto. We looked into the cost of boxes to pack them in (we decided those Chinese take-away boxes would be cute) and large quantities of flour, sugar, and chocolate chips. We even found out how much it would cost us to have a website. Of course, we never started this company and we didn’t do terribly well on our tests and papers. The problem with college is that undergrads have so many brilliant ideas and few outlets in which to express them. OK, that’s not true. What I mean to say is that we’re constantly coming up with innovative ideas that don’t fit into the realm of academia and that most of us, academic animals since we could turn a page, don’t know how to turn that creativity into profit. If this sounds like a big excuse about why I didn’t get a paid job, that’s because it is one. I was busy anyway. How does one make money without a job, time, or a brilliant brownie idea? Allow me to introduce you to the world of experiments.

One of the greatest things about being on a college campus is that information is at your fingertips wherever you turn. Campus is at once a giant wireless internet hub and a humongous flier. I know that you usually just ignore fliers, but every once in a while something should catch your eye. It’ll probably first be the dollar signs and then the strips of paper that have been cut at the bottom of the page. These are experiments. Take a little strip of paper, it won’t bite!∗ Professors and grad students are on campus to do research and one of the easiest ways for them to do so is to ask colleges students to come to their department office, hook electrodes to their brains, flip a switch, and then give them ten bucks for their time and trouble. Awesome, no?

I arrived at the linguistics department one Wednesday afternoon to take part in one of these experiments. It was relatively painless and at the end of forty-five minutes I received my ten bucks. I was basically making ten bucks an hour, the problem was that it was just an hour per week. I could usually find at least one linguistics experiment every week, but I was always afraid of doing any other experiments. Psychology department? Forget it. Optometry often had stuff going on but I didn’t wear glasses or contacts so that ruled me out. Honestly, the best way to make lots of money fast for a woman is to either sell eggs or offer to use jellies and creams in places you usually wouldn’t put them without an assurance that they’re safe to use. For a man I suppose donating sperm is the best way. Lucky bastards.

Experiments were something I was willing to do but I pretty much drew the line there so I wasn’t amassing a great deal of wealth. Babysitting is typically a good avenue for those who don’t mind dealing with other people’s kids for a few hours a day. That’s probably what I should have done, but I do mind dealing with other people’s brats. I really do. I tried to get a job at the library but all that was left by the time I looked were jobs that involved knowing languages and alphabets I had never heard of, which was especially sad considering I was a linguistics minor. There were plenty of places with Help Wanted signs outside but I just couldn’t be bothered to go inside and ask. I didn’t end get a paying job, so it was time for plan B: saving money. If I couldn’t make it, I could at least save by cutting a corner here and there.

Anyone who has ever been a college student; heck, anyone who has ever seen a college student knows the meaning of a budget. It’s all about mooching and making the most of that jar of peanut butter. My biggest expenditure was food so I stopped going out and if I did, I wouldn’t spend more than $5 on food and no more than three times per week. I would only allow myself one grocery shopping trip per month and then I tried to spend less than $30 when I did. That meant I was spending approximately $90 per month on food, which seems like a lot now that I think about it. Why was I going to the gym? Just a waste of calories. Well, I had my spending down for now, but I knew that when I was out on my own post-graduation I would have to do better than that. Next up was getting living costs down. I couldn’t control my rent but I could do something about the exorbitant cable bill. I gathered my roommates together for a meeting.

Living with all girls has its perks—the place is relatively clean, there are clothes to be borrowed and there’s always someone to gossip with about one’s coworkers. The bad thing about living with all girls is that there is rarely a moment of calm in which one may discuss living expenses. “Fuck!” I heard as I settled myself on the living room futon. “What’s up?” I asked. It was Annie. She came out of her bedroom holding two socks. They were both argyle, but that’s about all they had in common: one looked like a knee-high and the other was an ankle sock. I had never seen an argyle ankle sock before. “This one shrunk,” she said, “but this one didn’t.” Annie wasn’t a superficial girl. In fact, I rarely heard her talk about clothes. “These were for my sister,” she said. I understood. Annie was very close to her eleven year-old sister, who idolized her. They shared a love of kittens, argyle and socialism. “What happened?” I asked. She told me that she had been forced to wear them the previous day when she ran out of socks and quarters at the same time in a twilight zone-esque bout of bad luck. She planned to wash them and then give them to her sister for her birthday. It sounds cheap, but remember what I said about college students and budgets? Annie was always loyal to her budget, which generally repaid her fidelity by getting smaller every week. She worked at the library five days a week and rarely ate out, but for some reason her financial aid package shrunk like one argyle sock. In a bout of selfish optimism I realized this was the perfect time to bring up the Comcast bill. She plopped herself down on the futon next to me and turned on the TV. Fortunately nothing was on except the usual Food Network shows so turned her attention back to me. “What did you want to talk about?” I told her we should probably wait for Mi-sook who was groaning about something. If Annie preferred fascism to fashion, then Mi-sook's collection of Vogues from around the world only began to explain her obsession with it. “You guys, I don’t want to write my paper,” she whined.
    “When’s it due again?” I asked.
    “Tomorrow.”
    “Oh.”
    “Yeah, I don’t know what I want to write about yet.” It was definitely the right time to bring this up—it would give Mi-sook a chance to procrastinate a bit more and Annie could think about something slightly less shitty than her sock situation. “So you guys, I was thinking” I started, “We spend a lot of money on cable and we rarely watch it. Plus, it would be better for us without it, since it would force us to do more productive things with our time.” They nodded in agreement, Mi-sook staring at her Shakespeare book and Annie at her feet.   “OK” they muttered as they arose and floated back to their rooms. It was just one of those days.

∗ Disclaimer: the flier itself won’t bite but I can’t make any promises about the experiment.

Schadenfreude

2009-08-15T15:37:00.000-06:00

schadenfreude |ˈ sh ädənˌfroidə| (also Schadenfreude)
noun
pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune.
ORIGIN German, from Schaden ‘harm’ + Freude ‘joy.’

I’m thinking about these raucous health care forums and the anger and distrust of those against national health care. It’s a shame because I doubt that these people are dumb or ignorant or uncivilized, though they are portrayed that way on TV. They are, however and unfortunately, being needlessly provoked by political pundits who disagree with Obama’s politics. I’ll be the first to admit that this probably isn’t so different from the way anti-war liberals approached Bush and the republicans when we went into Iraq. We all remember the innumerable protests, the calls to action by liberal pundits, and the anger and name-calling by protestors, even as Bush was inaugurated for the second time. I suppose, in a way, being anti-war is sexy while being anti-health care is…well, I don’t think anything health care-related can ever be sexy.

So I wonder why people like Sarah Palin are trying their best to delay and obstruct the progress of this health care bill. Each day wasted on dispelling untrue rumors is merely an added expense. And the longer this draws out, the further away from Obama’s original plan we get. No one wants an expensive, ineffective national health plan.

What does this have to do with the German word schadenfreude? Well, I’m struck by how certain republicans are hoping that Obama’s plan fails (and not just in health care, I’m reminded of the Fox news guest who said he hoped that the United States got attacked by terrorists so that Obama would get serious about national security).

No one, not even us godless liberals, went into the Iraq War hoping for it to fail. No one wanted the war to drag out, for it to cost billions of dollars, or for thousands of Americans to die. Anti-war may be sexy, but pro-failure never is.

I think the key word in the definition of schadenfreude is “other” (well, it’s hidden in “another person” but you know what I mean). These national health care opponents are approaching this from the perspective of the other, as if we are not one country. They seem to think that if the national health care plan fails, then they somehow win. As if billions of wasted dollars can ever be considered a win. They should keep in mind that a failed national health care plan hurts us all (and a successful one helps us all). So how could anyone wish for their country to fail? (Perhaps the answer lies in the opposite of schadenfreude, envy…) Why don’t they propose an alternative health plan if this one is so bad? Our current health care system is broken, inefficient, and hurts those who need it most. Ignoring the problem certainly doesn’t do anything.

When Obama was elected he stated boldly that "we are not a collection of Red states and Blue states, we are the United States of America.” I just hope that those who disagree with his politics can at least agree with his words. We need a unified front against an unjust system, not a war of ideals that helps no one. It boggles the mind that Americans can take pleasure at the pain of their own government.

I like to think that a nation’s culture is reflected in its language, and that the lack of an English word for schadenfreude perhaps means that the sentiment doesn’t exist in our country. I hope I’m right.

Courtesy of ICHC

2009-08-12T20:59:00.001-06:00

MIAFF IV

2009-08-12T18:32:00.000-06:00

Chapter 4: Avoiding Conflict

Stuff was going “eh”, so cue my parents. “How’s the hunt for the perfect law school going?” my dad asked one day. “I hear the average starting salary for a lawyer right out of law school is more than that of a doctor these days. It’s six figures, and that’s just the entry-level position!”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Sounds pretty good.”
“Well, you only if you work for a top ten company. And you can probably only do that at a top five or ten law school.” Great. Next was Mom. “Hey honey, I’ve been looking at houses you can buy me when you’re a rich lawyer.” Yeah, right.
“I’ll finally be able to pay off the mortgage on this house.” Not if I’m still relying on you to pay for my freelance lifestyle.

Here’s a tip. Don’t do what I did if you’re trying to break the news to your parents that you don’t want to go to law school anymore. Or that you have no chance of going to a top school. And probably little hope of making six figures at your first job. But hope springs eternal and optimism is contagious and misery loves company and all that. After hearing them I would always tell myself that I could still do it. So, the first step of step two is to stop talking to your parents or any other relatives who have stake in your choice of profession. Any lawyers in the family? Then definitely stay away from them. They’ll argue you back into it. If you must speak with your parents, then bring up the enormous cost of law school every time you see them. “I’ll be working 60 hours a week for like twenty years to pay it off” and “grad school loans on top of my current student loans will be a nightmare” are good starting-off points. Your parents will probably tell you that it’ll be worth it, but fret not failures, perseverance pays off in the end, even if it’s only to depress you about your future debt.

New-ish job, new-ish camera

2009-08-06T21:58:00.001-06:00

The view from LHS.

MIAAF III

2009-08-03T18:30:00.000-06:00

Chapter 3: The Internship

Step one down, two to go. If, like me, you made the mistake of fulfilling the first step by essentially blocking any chance for step three, don’t worry about that. I’ll get to that. For now, just worry about the fine print under step one (didn’t see it, did you? well it’s too late now, don’t bother going back and checking.) The fine print says the following: do well at said internship to get some good references for the future. It was time to make an effort.

I’m a bit of a nervous person, so firsts of anything, the first day of class, the first pickle in the jar, the first day of the week all get me riled up. I was afraid Jack and Alycia would find me boring or inept. I practiced smiling and saying things enthusiastically but it was hard when I didn’t know what to say.

Classes were going ‘eh’ so I was really ready to kick some ass at my job. I got there early again and I was afraid they were going to think I was a bit of a kiss ass, so I loitered for a bit again, but my loitering was brought to a halt when I saw Jack outside talking on his cell phone. Another dilemma. Do I walk past him and give him a wave, or do I sneak in and hope that he didn’t see me loitering? I snuck. Alycia greeted me with the energy of a small child watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (“turtles in a half-shell, turtle power!”) for the twenty-eighth time. “Hey!” she said. “Hey!” I responded.
“How’s it going?!” she said. By this time I was a bit worn out by all the excitement so I just said, “Pretty well, how are you?”
“You must have just missed Jack.” I mumbled something noncommittally and she showed me where I could sit. She oriented me a bit and I got to work. Jack walked in a few minutes later with a, “Hey! You must have snuck in when I wasn’t looking!”
“Yeah!” I said. (Not really, I think I giggled and said something about not seeing him or whatever.)
“So,” he said, suddenly looking very serious, “What kind of music do you like?” There are a few questions that I couldn’t answer to save my life. ‘What do you want to do when you grow up’ is one, ‘What do you like in your tea’ is another, but none vex me so much as ‘What kind of music do you like.’ For whatever reason, the first thing I always think of whenever someone asks me about my musical taste is Eagle Eye Cherry, who’s a singer, and who I don’t even like that much anyway. I only know that one song by him. I looked around the room for some inspiration, but the building was brick and it made me think of the song “Brick House” of which I don’t even know the genre (is it hip-hop? funk?) I was out of time so I said the first thing I could think of: “Do you know…” I said, fumbling around, “jazz?”

He had, in fact, heard of jazz and we listened to a couple of songs before he changed it to some indie rock band I had never heard of. They were pretty cool people, a little too cool for me, and to be honest I was a smidge intimidated. I made up my mind to buy some obscure indie music so that I could keep up.

Back at my apartment, I was fitting in well with my new roommates. We basically had “diversity” covered. Mi-sook was an agnostic Korean studying comparative literature and Spanish, Annie was a Catholic Ecuadorean doing Latin American politics, and I was me, a contradiction enshrouded in an enigma, or so I liked to think. Our upstairs neighbors were not the nightmare shoe-stomping neighbors you hear about, but instead the cleanest people in the world. They vacuumed at least six times a day, from around 7 in the morning until about midnight. Next door we had neighbors who chose to leave all their trash right outside their door (until it built up so that it was outside our door) until trash day, when one of them would take it all to the apartment trash, located about 100 meters away from their front door. Other than, we never saw them. So between the three of us, our clean friends upstairs and our filthy friends next door, I thought we were a fairly well-rounded bunch. The manager of the apartment building was pleasantly absent most of the time, which meant that we never got in trouble about noise and that Senora Spider (that’s what I named her after I saw her scuttling over the salsa splatter on the wall) and her two thousand spider children were free to practice their web-making skills at will. The exterior of the apartment building definitely suffered from the manager’s absence and when describing the place to visiting friends and relatives, I often employed “crack house”. Sometimes it was lovingly referred to as “the building next to the pretty apartment building” or “across from the building that doesn’t look frequented by drug dealers and prostitutes.” At least the place was cheap and close to campus. We had all the amenities that college students need: wifi, cable TV, and a coffeemaker. I couldn’t really complain.

Meanwhile, more staff had been hired at NovNov. Jack and Alycia had needed help with shipping, and receiving and cataloguing donations, so they hired two shipping people to whom they paid a pittance. They were Tom and Jennifer. Tom had recently moved to California after leaving his hometown somewhere in Kansas or Kentucky or something. Jennifer had moved up from Southern California after working as an editorial assistant at a newspaper. They were also in to indie rock. The other two interns were Charlotte, a grad of two years who had been surviving on a healthy trust fund but was ready to look for something more substantial, and Rachel, a chipper young freshman already taking a creative fiction class (something I was still afraid to apply for) and was just “so happy to be there.” Charlotte was good with the computer so she did a lot of IT stuff and Rachel was great with people so she made donation confirmations on the phone, while I contacted translators and sent them pages that needed to be translated for the website. While everyone was working away on their respective project, Jack came up with some fun games to keep it interesting. There was Office Charts, which meant that everyone, including the cartographers, would write down the name of a song, someone would make a playlist of all the songs (mostly indie rock), shuffle it, and then iTunes would play the playlist and whosever song was played last would win a hypothetical prize. I never won, but from what I heard the prize was the same as the intern annual salary. It didn’t really matter though, it was all in good fun. One of my favorite games wasn’t really a game, it was called “free burrito lunch day”.

School wasn’t going quite as well as work, however. I was officially lost in Linguistics, dumb in French, and asleep in English. I guess OBS syndrome has lingering side effects, like drowsiness (when Shakespeare is mentioned,) two lazy eyes (whenever a certain professor of phonetics is speaking,) and hearing deficiency (when any romance languages are spoken.) At least my film class was going well. I wondered whether law schools instinctively knew that film classes were easy.

Words of the Week

2009-08-01T01:13:00.000-06:00

swash |swô sh; swä sh |
verb [ intrans. ]archaic (of a person) flamboyantly swagger about or wield a sword : he swashed about self-confidently.

ORIGIN mid 16th cent.(in the sense [make a noise like swords clashing or beating on shields] ): imitative.

buckler |ˈbək(ə)lər|
noun historical
a small, round shield held by a handle or worn on the forearm.

-Oxford American Dictionary

Why I love Live Music

2009-07-28T21:02:00.000-06:00

I went to a concert recently and saw three bands I'm quite fond of. Of the three, the headliners were mediocre, the second opener was spectacular as always, and the first band to perform, the youngest and most inexperienced of the three, was the one that reminded me why I love live music.

This is a band that has only one CD and whom, pre-concert, I would have described simply as "Vampire Weekend-esque." Their performance was nothing out of the ordinary, they were fairly casual and being the first band to perform didn't have the audience's full attention. No matter though, there were other things that made them stand out. The first was group cohesion. They were from Syracuse, and while I don't know much about Syrcause, I can say with certainty that the sockless loafers, boots with skinny jeans, and all-around bohemian hipster look is the one popular there right now.

The lead singer was in his own bubble, as lead singers tend to be. When he sang, he grasped the mike firmly with both hands as if clutching it were like squeezing a stress ball, and tilted his head to sing to the blue sky above. Like most indie performers, he couldn't dance, but instead moved back and forth in a rhythmic pace, following the cadence of his own voice. To his left (my right) was the violinist, who played eyes closed and with the seeming love for her instrument only violinists have. To his right (my left) were the guitarist and cellist, who played to each other as if in a world apart from the stage, as if unwatched. (The drummer drummed as drummers drum).

The actual set sounded identical to the CD, which is usually disappointing, but I gleaned something from seeing them perform. Now when I listen to the CD, I don't just think of Vampire Weekend. Instead, I see them perform in my mind and I think, when the violin solo comes on, about the shut eyes of the violinist. When I hear the cello and guitar working in harmony I think of them facing each other instead of the audience, playing for themselves in a private symphony. And the lead singer's sweet cords take me to a mild beach day in Syracuse with sockless loafers.

How to Run for lazy people

2009-07-21T23:59:00.000-06:00

1. Ipod. Get one.

2. Don't think in terms of miles. I find a mile to be a daunting distance, so instead I listen to music while I run and think in terms of songs. How long can I run without stopping? One song? Two? If I can run three songs without stopping, I've run approximately one mile (3 minutes/song-->9 minute mile).

3. Run when you really don't want to. That way, when you do want to it will be even more fun.

4. Buy a new CD and then don't let yourself listen to it until you go running.

5. If you're having a hard time setting a pace, find someone else who's running and run behind them, using them as a pacesetter. (Helpful hint: don't run too close or they might get creeped out). Try to stay a certain number of seconds behind them, or if they're running too fast, try to keep them in your line of sight. If they slow down or stop, run past them and keep running as long as you can, while telling yourself that you just beat them in the marathon. Or something like that.

6. Don't worry if you're slow or can't run far, I can't either. As my old track coach used to say, "As long as you're out there..."

MIAAF II

2009-07-15T19:16:00.000-06:00

Chapter 2: First

I scoured my college career center website for jobs that fit my description and came across two local publishing companies looking for college students to filter through the scores of manuscripts they received everyday to find the diamond in the rough, or, more likely they wanted college students to get coffee and make copies. Didn’t matter much to me so I sent in my resume and a cover letter. The third job I found was for a company called Novels for Novelists, or NovNov for short. They were a non-profit organization that gave out novels to people who liked to write but couldn’t afford to buy novels. Every year they held a big writing event on Labor Day weekend where people could come out and write for 3 straight days. At the end, anyone who could afford to was encouraged to donate money, which the organization then used to buy novels. Throughout the year they donated the novels to people who needed them: children’s libraries, homeless shelters, and republicans. They needed college students to “do stuff around the office.” It was exactly what I had been looking for—it was distantly related to writing, it had a job description that sounded like bitch work, and there was sure to be an interesting work environment. I sent out my specs and was about to get going when something caught my eye. Something funny happens as soon as I make a decision. It’s kind of like when you’re wearing new pants and you’ve left the tag on—you think you’re ready to go but something’s still nagging you and keeping you behind. You realize it when it catches on the side of a table or some other sharp edge and you get jerked back and fall on your ass in front of everyone who then sees that not only are you a klutz, but an idiot. As I was command-q-ing Firefox, I noticed the following in the corner of my eye: Student Assistant to the Attorney General’s Office, Department of Justice. No friggin way. If there’s one way to impress a law school after OBS syndrome, a stellar internship is it. I sent out for it, half expecting them to email back with “ha ha, yeah right” and closed up shop for the day.

Within a day I had two emails: one from NovNov and one, surprisingly enough from a Ms. Marlene Boresmith at the Attorney General’s Office:

I’d like to interview you tomorrow at 3:00 PM at the Department of Justice.

Ms. Marlene Boresmith
Attorney General’s Office
Department of Justice
San Francisco, CA

NovNov went like this:

Hey!

We really liked your resume, when can you come in for an interview?

Alycia
Novels for Novelists
Young Novelists Program

I emailed both back confirming the interviews and I let Alycia know that I could come in two days. I was dead nervous for the Dept of Justice interview, so I got out some index cards and started practicing:

“Why are you interested in working at the attorney general’s office?”

Well, I’ve always been interested in law…and order, and things that are legal and just. And I’d like to get some experience working in the field before I go to law school, where I’m definitely going because I’m just so interested in law and all.

“What about law interests you?”

Well, I just really like the legal industry and what it’s done for justice these days. I think I’d be interested in being a DA because I love prosecuting people.

“What skills could you bring to this job?”

I’m a fast learner, I’m passionate about law and the legal field and I have experience with administrative duties (this was true—I had recently learned how to make coffee, although I was no expert.)

Then I practiced shaking an imaginary hand and smiling and sitting up straight and the more I did it, the more nervous I became. What if Ms. Boresmith had more questions for me? What if she knew I was lying? I was so nervous I didn’t have any time at all to think about NovNov. I got on the train to San Francisco, and all the way I practiced my interview techniques while my stomach did flipsies and turnsies.

It is always interesting to watch where people chose to sit on the train. The layout is four seats facing each other, two on a side, so people inevitably have to stare at each other. There is always a collective holding of breath whenever someone new walks in. If they’re good looking, everyone tries to make eye contact and smile in a way that says
friend, not stalker. If someone who looks smelly, sweaty, or just strange, like the guy who always twitched, it was the opposite. Some people walk in with confidence, looking everyone in the eye and taking the first available seat that is both convenient and provides a good view, whether that be scenery or people. Others, mainly tourists, stagger in like Tom Cruise on the top of the train in the first Mission Impossible. They scan every seat, weighing their options and analyzing the looks they are being given from seasoned passengers. There are two exceptions to this dichotomy: the first being angry people. They just walk in and sit, no looks, no thoughts, no nothing. The second, and the more popular and unfortunate, are people on cell phones. Who knows what goes through a person's mind when they are both holding a conversation and attempting to choose a place to seat themselves for the next hour or so. Anyways, I walked in with what I hoped appeared to be confidence. I returned stern looks to those who seemed less than thrilled by my young, preppy look. No smiles today though, so I sat next to the twitchy guy.

I got off the train and did some breathing exercises, which made me a bit of a spectacle for the tourists, and walked to the department of justice building. Talk about intimidating! I was to go to the thirteenth floor, about half the height of the building, and which had not one but two security lines. I went through, aided by the nice security guy who showed me where the elevator that went to the thirteenth floor was, and I got on it with a few other people. No suits people, surprisingly, just your ordinary “people” people. I got off last and turned the wrong way. After becoming thoroughly lost and late, I realized I was on the wrong floor, Ms. Boresmith’s office was actually on the fourteenth floor. I got there five minutes late and let the secretary know I was there. There were two offices to the right of the waiting area, one of which was open and housed an older white woman wearing chunky black shoes, pants a grade lower than slacks and an ill-fitting red shirt. I sat on the couch, by this time my nerves completely gone and wondering how I would explain my tardiness. Finally, Chunky Shoes came out and looked at me puzzlingly. “Are you here to see me?” she asked. I told her that I was there for an interview, to which she replied, “Oh, that’s right, I completely forgot!” We walked into her office and she called her colleague, who was slightly younger and marginally better dressed. I firmly put out my hand to shake Boresmith’s who viewed my outstretched hand as I assume she would a stylish pair of shoes. She looked away as she placed her limp hand in the vicinity of my own. I gave it a good shaking and then went on to shake the other woman’s hand, which was a bit more alive. “I honestly don’t have any questions for you,” Boresmith told me, “do you?” she turned to her fellow department worker who too shook her head. “Well, do you have questions for us?”

“Umm, approximately how many hours a week would it be?”

“It’s up to you. I see that you go to school [somewhere about an hour away by train], that’s quite a commute.”

“Well, yes, but I am interested in doing law.”

“Oh! This would be a great job for you then!” Her colleague agreed.

I left with Boresmith’s assurance that she would email me with her decision by the end of the week.

The next day was NovNov. I had no idea what to expect from the interview and suspected that I’d be meeting with a couple of young recent grads who still had some optimism about the future of our country’s literacy. From the email, my interviewer seemed pretty cool so I didn’t worry too much about it. I got there forty-five minutes early and loitered outside the building in the scorching heat for a while. I walked into the renovated YMCA fifteen minutes early to quite a sight. I later found out they called it “Reggae Hour” in the NovNov office, which consisted of the two people who ran the organization and the [cartographers] with whom they shared the office space. The five of them were dancing along to reggae music. “Hey!” said the woman I later found out was Alycia. “Have a seat and I’ll be right there!” I took a seat at the futuristic steel table. She came and sat down across from me, still panting from dancing and shook my hand vigorously. She organized a small stack of papers in front of her.

“Did you drive here?” she asked me.

“Uh, yes.” Was this the first question of the interview? Was there a right answer? ‘Shit,’ I thought, ‘maybe they’re hippies and they won’t hire me because of my giant carbon footprint.’

“Oh, there’s absolutely no need to drive, the train station is just four blocks away.”

“OK,” I responded. Was I supposed to add anything? Show my personality? Get up and do a jig or something? I hadn’t brought my dancing shoes so I smiled and commented on how convenient it would be from my school.

“So, I see here on your resumé that you’re fluent in French. That will come in useful for when we need things translated. Would you feel comfortable doing translations?”

“Yep, absolutely” Why did I say that? No.

“Great, and I see that you’re studying Linguistics, how did you get into that?”
“Well, I took a class on it…” I talked about how I got into it and relaxed a bit, she was nice. She asked me a bit about my work experience and then a tall, lanky man walked in with his bicycle. He looked at me with a puzzled expression on his face and said, “Is this…?”

“Yes, she came early, so we started without you.”

“No problem. Oh man! Did I miss reggae hour too?”

“It’s OK, we can have it again later in the afternoon.”

“Cool. So hi, I’m Jack,” he said, taking my hand and giving it a gentle shaking. This guy turned out to be the boss.

“What did you guys talk about while I was gone?” She filled him in and told me about what they expected from their interns—normal stuff for the most part. “It’s a pretty casual environment, as you can see, but we do need people who can work independently.” I nodded vigorously. “Yes, I can definitely do that.”

“So, umm, are you interested in becoming a novelist?” he said as he looked down at my resume.
“I like to write, yes, but I’m actually thinking about doing law.”

“And what about law interests you?” Where the hell are my cue cards? Law and legal business, justice or something.

“It’s analytical but also creative,” I told to a nodding Alycia and a suddenly very excited Jack. What the hell did I just say? ‘It’s one thing but it’s also the very opposite,’ and they’re buying it? Cool.

“Yeah, totally!” he said. “My friend is a lawyer and he told me that it’s a bit like editing, like he has these laser eyes and he reads through contracts and figures out better ways to word stuff.”

“Yeah,” I nodded, “That’s the kind of stuff I’d like to do.”

“Whoa!” said Alycia, “Laser vision must be dangerous around paper. Sounds like a fire hazard!”

I left the interview feeling content. It had been a relatively painless experience and I had a chance to actually see what it would be like if I were to work there.

Before long, I had two emails in my inbox: Student Internship and Editorial Internship. I clicked on the first one and saw this:

I have decided to give you the job. Your internship will start Monday. Attached is a list of duties as an intern and your pay rate. Please contact [so-and-so] for fingerprinting.

Ms. Marlene Boresmith
Attorney General’s Office
Department of Justice
San Francisco, CA

OK then. And the other:

Hey!

Jack and I decided that you’ll make a great part of our team! Your background in Linguistics will be perfect for the position of Translation Coordinator. Let us know when you can start.

Alycia
Novels for Novelists
Young Novelists Program

A bit of a dilemma isn’t it? It also throws my 3-point plan for a bit of a loop, but fear not fellow failures, I made a pro/con list.

NovNov

pros
fun
good experience and good title:
Translation Coordinator
convenient for school

cons
no pay
nothing to do with law

Dept of Justice

pros
paid
fancy title: Student Assistant to the Attorney General
law-related

cons
boring
far from school
duties: filing, working with secretaries to file, no actual contact with lawyers
not paid that well
do I really want to do law? still?

I don’t regret the decision I made; I started at NovNov the first day of the semester.

MIAAF

2009-07-13T19:58:00.000-06:00

I started writing this pseudo-memoir when I was freaking out about life junior year. I called it "Making it as a Failure" and, as the name suggests, it was a comedy. Seeing the difficulties everyone's going through post-graduation, I thought I'd share what I wrote. (I can't promise it's any good...)

Making it as a Failure

Introduction

In this day and age, success is implicit, ambition ingrained, and failure inevitable. We’re all told to (1) do what we do well, (2) make money doing it, and (3) have fun all the while. It’s damn hard that. What I realized along my journey of doing things well and making (well, some) money with a big, fat fake smile on my face is that it’s a lot easier to fail miserably, and that my cheeks hurt. Slipping into the realm of what today’s society calls “failure” isn’t hard. Violate one of the three rules of success and that’s it, you’re done for. In college, the successes and the failures are split into two groups: pre-something, computer science, and engineering majors on one side and everyone who’s having fun on the other. Ok, that’s not really fair. Business majors (pre-MBA) aren’t likely to be successful either. Those of us who choose to have fun and happily tell their Bible-studying pre-MD friends that we don’t know what we’ll do with our lives and that doesn’t bother us, eventually have to face facts: we’re screwed. That’s where my 3-step program comes in. I have a simple way to “make it as a failure.” Unfortunately, this only applies to current college students and (very) recent grads. The rest of you failures will have to wait for the sequel. I’ll explain my problem in the format of a somewhat true autobiography so simply replace “I” with “you”, “law” with whatever your dream was, “writing” with whatever your new dream is, and you have a How-to to rival all others.

Chapter 1: Failing

I hadn’t always wanted to go to law school. It wasn’t a childhood dream or anything, surely no one in my family was a lawyer, but between the “no experience necessary” attitude of law school and the “really hard classes followed by ten more years of school” rule of medical school, I opted for the former. It was a spur of the moment choice that happened after I declared my useless humanities major and right before I was supposed to take the LSAT. I had the GPA and I knew I could squeeze out a pretty good test score, so all I needed were the recommendations. That posed a problem—I rarely talked in class, and even when I did, I felt too shy to contact my GSIs and professors to ask them for letters of rec. I was sailing along smoothly telling myself that I had one last semester to get them when I was struck by OBS syndrome: One Bad Semester. You know the one—you’re no longer a lower division student so you move out of the dorms into an apartment, get a job or two, and sign up for all the upper div electives you can. Well, that proved to be too much for me. I tried to mitigate the damages by changing one of my classes to pass/not pass but even that didn’t help and my law school aspirations were gone. It’s amazing what five months can do to your future. Oh well, I had only wanted to be a lawyer for the money anyway, and there were plenty of ways to make lots of money and be happy too. My options were: Join the Peace Corps and get a job as a journalist for the BBC, take as many econ classes as possible and beg a consulting company to employ me and send me to fun and exciting places, or eke it out as a (freelance) writer. I knew which I wanted to be, the problem was a lack of talent. The campus newspaper rejected me for both the positions of writer and editor—I guess they really didn’t like me, so I hadn’t written since. I had neither the talent nor the practice; no problem.

First: I had to get a job or an unpaid internship with an organization that had something to do with writing. It didn’t have to be a direct link--getting coffee for someone who writes, chalking for a political cause, and waiting tables and occasionally writing the menus could all become “editorial assistant” positions. Don’t worry about bitch work either, everyone knows that an intern’s job consists of making copies and brewing coffee.

Second: Convince my parents and other family that I hadn’t given up on being a lawyer, something they were all very happy especially after considering my choice of majors, because of bad grades. No, I was too good for such an immoral business and I was to follow my passions and do something noble…or something like that.

Third: Make as much money as possible so that I’m not living on the streets when I graduate. I had a year and a half to amass all the cash I could so that when the shit hit the fan, aka graduation day, I was ready to hit the ground running.

So that’s the three-step process I like to call “Making it as a Failure.” The three steps do not need to be in that order, nor do they have to happen independently of each other. If, for instance, you have an uncle who owns a falafel shop, by all means let him know that you have chosen to follow in his footsteps, giving up your dream of becoming an accountant, and would love some experience before venturing out into the food business on your own.

I'll post the next chapter tomorrow.

The gift that keeps on giving

2009-07-12T23:26:00.000-06:00

I think the summer heat is melting my brain:

Seen in a campus building: "This lobby space given as a gift by Mr. and Mrs. Phil Ann Thropist.

Wondered silently: "How does one give a lobby?"

"Happy birthday, I got you....a lobby!"
"Thanks...uh...I don't have anywhere to put it."
"How 'bout here?"
"Hmm, I was hoping to get a living room for Christmas, and I was gonna put that here."

The Coldest Winter

2009-06-24T18:42:00.000-06:00

Fog stumbled in over the hills today...

Haha just kidding. Although it did, and it made me wonder about this Berkeley that has such breezy springs, mild autumns and dry winters. So why the sad summers?

So, uh...Why South Korea?

2009-06-22T15:41:00.001-06:00

1. The threat of nuclear attack excites me.
2. I'm actually half-Korean.
3. I love pickled cabbage like nobody's business.

Actually, number 3 is pretty true.

I've been asked the "Why South Korea" question a lot lately so I thought I'd address it here. For those of you who don't know, I'm going to teach English in Seoul, South Korea for a year. I like to travel and have never been to Asia so I started looking into teaching gigs in the East. What I found was interesting: there are tons of jobs for inexperienced college grads in Korea.

While many people flock to Japan to teach in their JET program, Korea has steadily built up its EPIK (and GEPIK) programs for teaching in public schools, and recruitment agencies have sprung up everywhere hiring for private schools (called hagwons). Because there is such high demand for English-speaking teachers and because of the relative popularity of the JET program, Korean teaching jobs (1) pay more, (2) cover round-trip airfare and sometimes housing, and (3) accept a very high percentage of applicants.

So I applied to a couple of recruitment agencies and was accepted. The next thing I know, I'm being offered a job teaching at a hagwon. I might blog more about the differences between public schools and hagwons later (or at least what I've heard about them) but for now I'll just say that my hours are pretty sweet (4-10:30 pm) and my vacation time is pretty awful (7 days, unpaid).

I know what you're thinking: "Whaaaa? 7 days unpaid vacation in a year? I'd kill myself!" But wait, it gets worse...Not only is it 7 days, but they must all be taken consecutively which means that it's really 5 weekdays and 2 weekend days I'd already be getting off. Sounds pretty awful, no? AAAnd I can't take any vacation until after the first 6 months. Sucks. So to battle moderate clinical depression I came up with an ingenious (read: sketchy) plan to make it better. And it is this plan that makes me giddy with excitement about my 12-month adventure to Korea.

2009-06-07T11:28:00.001-06:00

(Today college ended. FML)

Oenology and Oh-no-logy

2009-05-22T03:45:00.000-06:00

I went wine tasting today with a couple of friends and was amused, as always, by the descriptions of the wines provided by the vineyard:

Luna Vineyard 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon
"The deep blackberry color carries through on the nose, mingled with cedar and tea leaves. On the palate, there are more black fruits and graphite combined with excellent intensity..."

Mmm graphite.... Then I figured, I can write that! Here goes...

2006 Pinot Grigio
Deep euchre with a few streaks of chartreuse, this wine looks like a Middle Eastern sunrise in the springtime. With the scent of a newborn golden retriever puppy, it approaches the tongue tentatively, tantalizing the tip with three or possibly four types of cherry, before dominating the palate with creme de cacao and cinnamon. It has a strong, dusty finish that leaves the mouth feeling both dehydrated and extremely satisfied. This wine peaked like two years ago and should no longer be consumed.

2007 Cabernet Sauvignon
With the somber carmine color of gingivitis-ravaged gums, this wine approaches the nose with verve and anticipation. It leaps into your nostrils with the scent of powdery old people and then softens into the chalky nostalgia of childhood. Upon the tongue it is a creamy rendition of eggnog gently mixed with crunchy under-ripe papaya. It ends on sour gummy bears and tears. Thirty seconds later, it restarts with a chewy coda of caramel and cotton candy, before once again descending into the bitter taste of despair. This wine continues to age despite its overstay and should peak around 2050 when you've forgotten you even have it.

2004 Merlot
Although deceptively quiet, when given a brisk swirl this wine has the legs of a Las Vegas showgirl. Its rich infrared color and thick syrupy texture make for a curious contradiction only matched by the juxtaposition of the scent of blueberry nectar and the stings of honeybees. The tongue appreciates this wine best with pie, especially rhubarb pie.

my favorite local band

2009-02-17T04:11:00.000-06:00

When I was in high school I went to shows instead of going to see movies. My (only) three friends and I fell in love with this one-man band called Dave Smallen (later a real band called Street to Nowhere that got signed by Capitol Records and then broke up to become, once again, Dave Smallen.) We pretty much followed him around the bay watching him perform. So, in high school I wrote what I now know is called "flash fiction" (a short story usually fewer than 700 words.) Here goes:

You’d walk into the club and it’s stuffy and crowded and loud and Who’s playing right now? and What? and Let’s go to the back and They’re really good, you wanna check out their merch? Everyone would be bumping into each other and pushing and looking at the people pushing and bumping and Hey he’s cute and What? and Nevermind. Then the band you came to see would go on stage and the atmosphere would change. Expectation. Did he cut his hair? and Is the bass player new? and then More on the monitors, less on the violin and Check, check, cheeeeeeeck just to see what it sounds like while he’s singing. And then the he’d talk and say Hello and Thank you for coming out and the music would start and everyone would kinda mumble the words and then they’d say them louder and then, at the climax, One, two, three, one, two, three, Yeah! And for the first time, just for a moment, while everyone is jumping and singing at the top of their lungs and its hot and everyone’s bumping into each other and pushing and What? he’d open his eyes, just the once, just to take it all in and you’d see him open his eyes, only you’d notice and for that one moment you felt like you knew him.

Galway

2008-11-06T03:08:00.000-06:00

I'm taking two poetry classes and, after over two months, I think I've finally cracked under the pressure. I'm officially in touch with my feelings and I want to write gushy romantic poems under trees while drinking black coffee and supporting socialism. Here's the first:

(Revised 12/10/10)

Galway

Fog stumbled in over the hills today.
I welcomed its chilly presence
because it reminded me of Galway,
whose weather had always been so immense.

For Galway couldn’t but be beautiful,
The sky is always grey,
The clouds are always full,
The sun beats but a ray,
And yet, the rain reminded me to be careful
of the area nearest a quay.

For it was there that I came upon a goose
and it was there that I heard the sweet songs
of a person on the street whose words were so damn loose
and beautiful and real and strong
that I couldn’t help but keep listening
and imagining myself in those songs
until the rain, the rain came glistening
and it had been too long,
and it was time, time to keep moving,
time to forget about those songs.

But Galway couldn’t but be beautiful
Its sky is always grey,
The clouds are always full,
The sun beats but a ray,
And yet, the rain reminded me to be careful
of that city by a bay.

For it was there that I walked beside the sands.
It was there I saw a woman with her dog.
And I saw a soccer game with no fans,
for it was being played, by locals, near the bay, in the fog.
And I kept walking, walking, and just by chance

I saw a convent, there, beyond a wall.
I wanted to reach it, to see it, to snap it, like such,
but I was afraid, afraid that I would fall,
and the height of the wall is too, too much.
So instead, I took a picture from where I stood tall
and as you can see, it’s just out of touch.

Yet Galway couldn’t but be beautiful.
Its sky is always grey,
The clouds are always full,
The sun beats but a ray,
And yet, the rain reminded me to be careful
of the darkness that comes at the end of the day.

We went into a pub when the evening was done,
where warmth overcame us. We sat at the bar,
and the bodies around us moved as if one
for a rugby game united the air.
The locals sang and they shouted, and enjoyed their beer.
We drank and we watched but we didn’t dare
join in, lest we muffle their great Irish cheer.

So back to the hostel, my friends and I
returned that evening, full heavy and tired.
But just outside, up in the strong Galway sky
the pregnant clouds released their great prize
and below, the one being that yet remained dry
was enveloped by this sorrowful cry.
The crowds leaked out and laughed in reply,
for they were no strangers to this moody goodbye
but when I looked up, a drop in my eye
led me to think, and then think, and then only to sigh:

That Galway couldn’t but be beautiful
Its sky is always grey,
The clouds are always full,
The sun beats but a ray,
And yet, the rain reminded me to be careful
of finding a city but losing my way.

Don't make fun of me. It's a work in progress.

Oh the people you'll meet

2008-05-18T09:49:00.001-06:00

Now that my semester abroad is coming to an end, I've been reflecting back on the last 5 months. Since I have little else to do, the weather is crap, and I have half an hour before the old man re-opens his boulangerie, the revelations have been flooding in, one epiphanous moment at a time.

Epiphany #1: Living abroad is hard. Living abroad in France is harder.

Abroad: the euro
France: the euro plus 20% tax on everything that goes toward subsidies for farmers, national healthcare, cheap education, and other stuff that foreign students don't benefit from

Abroad: no peanut butter
France: no peanut butter, chocolate chip cookies, Mexican food, Chinese food, Thai food...but McDonald's is everywhere

Abroad: snooty people
France: really snooty people

Abroad: things are closed on Sunday
France: things are closed Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, the occasional Tuesday and half a day on Friday

Abroad: everyday things are expensive, and there are no dryers
France: it costs 10 euros to do laundry.

There are, of course, some positive exceptions:

1. Berkeley means something, and it's impressive
2. Wine, bread, cheese
3. Really attractive people
4. Cheap, efficient, relatively reliable public transportation
5. The president is an idiot, but he's not Bush

Epiphany #2: You should say 'yes' to everything. OK, I stole this mantra from my boss at my last job, but it turned out to be true. Always say 'yes', to another shot, another scoop of gelato, or to Gaultier, the guy we met outside a bar who tried to get my friends and I to go over to his apartment.

Epiphany #3: People can be pretty cool. I know, I've fought against it for so long, resisting the urge to relate with others of my species, yet somehow in this state of selfish revelatory moments, I was struck by the realization that some people are pretty cool. And the type of person who studies abroad is really damn cool. That's not to say that I didn't meet people I didn't particularly like, but the most interesting, adventurous, and crazy people I've ever met were abroad. And I think I like those three qualities in a person. Moodiness aside, I had the most consistently social semester ever, and I don't think it's only due to the fact that I could legally buy alcohol.

I don't want to get too sentimental, or specific, but some of the cool people I met had the following peculiarities:

1. They cooked well, and sometimes fed me.
2. They didn't usually comment on the quantity or type of food I ate. (In fact, some of them disgustingly encouraged me.)
3. They were really funny, sometimes on purpose and sometimes not.
4. They drank. Frequently.
5. They went out with me, and stayed in with me.
6. They were wordly (a.k.a, read the New York Times and/or BBC, traveled with me even though they knew that I'm really grumpy in the morning, and spoke several languages.)
7. They were really smart.
8. They had a lot to say (usually about interesting stuff that I didn't even know existed.)
9. They said really inane things that actually turned about to be accurate or brilliant.
10. They put up with me (although this quality is debatable since they had nowhere to go, few others to speak English with, and some of them even had to live with me.)

I think I've really grown, inwardly and girth-wise. Well, it's 6:30, which means I can stop having revelations and eat dinner.

There once was a girl in Bordeaux...

2008-04-13T04:29:00.000-06:00

A few limericks I found while going through my old French notebooks. My friends Rachel, Becca and I went on a trip to Ireland, and since we were planning to make a quick stop in Limerick, we all decided to write down some limericks of our own to recite when we got there. We never made it to Limerick, but we were quite successful at creating beautiful, romantic Irish poetry. These were all written during class:

In Ireland I'll look for a redhead.
One who's cute, tall and well-fed.
I can explain no tale
For why I like them so pale,
But with one I'd quickly to bed.

Rachel really has to pee.
I'm kind of glad it isn't me.
She's hoping to take,
A five minute break
But she's not gonna get one, tee-hee.

It's time to go home today.
After all, it's Valentine's Day.
I've got nothing to wear
And I have too much hair.
But I have no date, it's OK.

Limericks are really great fun.
Without them, from lectures I'd run.
They're something to do
And when I'm all through
The boring professor is done.

There once were three girls in Nice.
(The flights were 1 centime a piece.)
In Dublin they'd drank
And now they were tanked,
They could sleep for 3 days at least.

I once had a puffy jacket
It made quite a racket.
At least it was warm
And hid my form
It'd been worse had I lacked it.

Ronsard est un poète etrange (Ronsard is a strange poet)
En fait il me dérange (Actually he bothers me)
Il aime Hélène (He loves Helen)
Elle semble putaine (She seems like a bitch)
Dans l'amour il faut qu'il change. (He needs to change with respect to love.)

They say that it's currently spring,
And yet rain is all that it brings.
I hate this day.
I'll run away.
And leave behind all of my things.

I feel really quite nauseous.
I should be rather cautious
Of not throwing up
All over my stuff
While of my classmates watches.

In class we're writing scenarios,
The purpose of which no one knows.
They're reading aloud.
The prof is not wowed.
But that seems to be how it goes.

I'm wearing bright colors today,
The French people say "pourquoi fait?"
The sun's at my back,
I'm tired of black,
And I just feel like it, OK?

I'm sitting in scenario class,
I'm hoping these four hours will pass.
I can't understand
The topic at hand,
I want to be in Ireland at last!

Wow, some of those are real gems ("I once had a puffy jacket" is one I'm particularly proud of.) I'm so glad I spent class time writing them instead of doing something else like taking notes or paying attention.

La Confiance

2008-02-06T10:44:00.000-06:00

When a non-native speaker asks a French person a question, the response is typically a pause, a smirk, and then a correction of the question with perfect and fully-confident pronunciation. Of course, they have something to be confident about; their language is relentless and they're masters of it, yet seems to be an inherently French thing. You rarely see an American feel so haughty about being able to speak their own language well...well, not a nice American. So where does this confidence come from?

The only place I can think of is from the depths of Hell: L'Université de Bordeaux (or any other French school.) Mais pourquoi? A little something they like to call "un zéro", or the lowest grade possible on their 20-point scale. In American schools, a completed assignment is likely to receive no lower than a B-, assuming it was turned in and not done by a rabbit. On a 20-point scale, that would be around a 16, or 80%. In French schools, a 10, or what they call "le moyen" is what students shoot for. Around half of them get this grade. And of the rest? A simple bell curve is incapable of drawing out the range typically doled out by professors. From stealing glances and hear-say, I'd conjecture that the vast majority of the rest of the students receive an 8 or a 9 with those fortunate enough to receive an 11 or 12 what we would call "curve-setters". Those who receive other grades are typically lower, often much lower. And what of "le zéro"? Well, I don't think it's given out much, but I have seen a 5, that's a mere 20%, and considering the entire assignment was completed, I thought a bit harsh. In fact, I had a professor say that as she could not give us foreign students less than a 1, because that would be cruel, so she opted to give us global grades, taking into consideration our inferior language skills. But what I think is more important even than the grade of 0 is the fact that the term can refer to the person who receives it. And boy do professors like to announce the grades out as they give them out. Each student has his or her grade stapled to their forehead while the professor tells them, in front of the class, what they did wrong.

So what does this have to do with confidence in oral communication skills? I think that the ruthless grading system in schools actually forces students, and as a result people, to shed their sensitivity about their shortcomings and to don thick skin. When they're right, they know it and are proud to show it. When they're wrong...well, they're so rarely wrong. The moral of this story? If you want confidence, you have to allow yourself to be cut down, demoralized, and humiliated in front of a classroom of your peers. Only then can you truly understand the thrilling sentiment of hearing an American butcher your language.

Vacation

2007-12-10T16:57:00.001-06:00

Oh man. I wish I could be on vacation right now. Somewhere warm preferably.

I'm on a conveyor belt waiting to be taken.
To an exam.
To an airport.
To a relative.
To a school.

But what about vacation?

It's approaching but I can't seem to see to it.
I could be in it right now.
I want to read. Ooh....sleep. That sounds good.

Eating Veggie Burgers in the Dark

2007-08-22T02:00:00.001-06:00

My aunt called me a couple days ago to let me know that she had had an epiphany: It’s better to eat veggie burgers in the dark. A hippie my aunt may be—she’s a vegetarian, she partakes of protests, and she believes that if the moon is in Sagittarius then you should light a candle by your money tree—she had taken logical steps to reach this particular conclusion. Veggie burgers, she noted, were messy and typically dripped and crumbled all over the eater and said eater’s surroundings. If one eats his or her veggie burger in the dark, therefore, one knows not the mess created. A logical person might argue that even if no one hears a mess fall, it still makes a sound…or am I confusing my proverbs? The point is that as soon as the lights are turned on, this methodology no longer makes sense, the crumbs are still present as are any condiments. Her point? I think what she was trying to say was that messiness happens and if I have to close my eyes while it does, so be it. I can always deal with the mess a little later, perhaps after an enjoyable meal.

Pirates and Priming

2007-08-13T18:36:00.000-06:00

I recently read an article about the mind and priming which stated that the human mind is extremely susceptible to subconscious influence. I had heard this before but had never actually experienced it until yesterday. As I was re-writing my 2006 NaNoWriMo novel (well, half-novel) I noticed a strange motif. Along with my plot lines that went nowhere and my overuse of pseudo-French names, I mentioned pirates in three unrelated scenes. And it wasn’t even like my half-novel had anything to do with pirates, instead, I remember writing the last reference and thinking to myself, “I have a genius idea, I’ll mention pirates for some texture!” Why I forgot my prior mentions eludes me to this day, but I did think (aside from worrying about my obvious obsession with naval marauders) that perhaps the power-hungry child hypnotists down at Disney had finally done it—they had brainwashed me with swashbuckling and witty pirates. Something about drunks who steal for a living and rarely bathe had become sexy and interesting. But this wasn’t the first movie (well it was the first trilogy) to exploit the mystère of pirates, so I started thinking that it wasn’t Disney, but some other, more devious (is it possible?) source who began to turn the negative connotations of stealing and ravaging into sizzling Johnny Depp. Was it, in fact, the human mind, in its never-ending quest to understand the unknown, that turned danger into something else. Was my mind trying to tell me something? Was my life (or my half-novel) so boring that I needed to inject it with cliché allusions to danger? Whatever the reason, I’ll be pay more attention to my mind's dirty little secrets when I try to write in the future.