Law and Letters

Destroying Public Education in California

2009-08-06T15:58:00.001-07:00

So let's say you're in charge of one of the most successful university systems in the country. Your state is in a budget crisis, held hostage by a small but strategically vocal minority that are so against taxation (while their "free market" has caused the crisis) that they'd rather see the entire state go bankrupt than to actually do something to solve the problem. As a result, the state has cut funding to your university system by a record amount, thereby creating some serious economic issues that you have to manage.

So, how do you deal with this crisis? Do you:

a) Utilize your $5-6 billion in emergency reserves as a means by which to stay afloat during this rather tumultuous economic period.

b) Demand that the Regents act in their position to protect the university system as a public trust as dictated by your state's constitution, reject the governor's proposed budget and demand that the state's leaders provide the necessary funding to keep the education system intact.

c) Hire new high level administrators at a salary that is 27% higher than what their predecessors made (along with an $100,000 relocation fund), raise tuition by over 9% with the promise of an additional increase in January, furlough or lay-off staff and faculty (thereby causing students to pay more for less services), and give the state a $200 million loan to fund buildings on various campuses.

If you answered "c", please send your resumé to:

President Mark G. Yudof
University of California
1111 Franklin St
Oakland, CA 94607-5201
(510) 987-9029

For more information on the crisis in leadership affecting the University of California, visit http://www.option4.org

Finally back!

2009-06-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

I went to visit my parents for a week to attend my nephew's high school graduation and to be exploited for free child care. For some reason, the entire week I could not access Blogger. I could access blogspot blogs, but not the "create a new post" homepage. Weird. And frustrating. I did watch a lot of movies though, and I read a few books. It is really disturbing how I cannot remember anything I've read of a book I've read more than five years ago.

Visiting your dysfunctional family, no matter how cute the kids nor how favorite the nephew (people who say they don't have favorite kids lie), is always fraught with tension. I am glad to be back, although I always twinges with filial impiety guilt at the "when are you going to come home again" (not till the winter holidays if I can help it) and "why are you only visiting for so short a time" (to keep my sanity) and the "we miss you" (I miss you too, but not as much as I miss the freedom to come and go as I please and the other life I've built for myself). Maybe because all of these carry the attendant "when are you going to finally be done with school" and "why did you pick a career with such a limited job market that is geographically capricious" (because I never want to live in Orange County, within daily driving distance of my family again) and "why didn't you become a dentist or pharmacist, you could have been working for the past four years." AUGH. All of these are valid questions from your supportive (if dysfunctional) family, but I suspect that no one wants to hear them.

The whole village/enclave model of family that's omnipresent in Vietnam has been somehow replicated in America. There are family businesses, and most of the members of my family work for each other and with each other. My mother, even as she's mildly crippled by arthritis and a bad fall several months back, still cooks food for 2-3 households and she and my father deliver them in tupperwares. It's nice, especially if you're both working parents as my siblings are, but then again you've just given your nosy and judgmental father a key to your house and he, even as he comes bearing food, enters your house willy nilly. There's no such thing as privacy in my family, which is why I so jealously guard my physical privacy (even as I share stuff with you all). Aside from TD, I guard my time and space and make appointments. Even with each other and our standing every night dates, we coordinate schedules and respect each other's space and the professional and personal lives we lead independently of one another. While I sort of miss the informality of the comings and goings of my siblings and how they all see each other and each other's kids without much notice or formality, I'm glad that no one just drops by unnanounced (yes, TD announces himself usually). You know that show "Friends"? In which Joey and Chandler and Phoebe and Ross seem to camp out at Monica and Rachel's apartment and drop by unannounced all the time and eat food? That seems nice to have such a tight circle of friends. It also seems really annoying. But perhaps this is why I appear to have so few local friends and hangout buddies around here such that I can't even tell if I'm going deaf if TD is out of town. Absent my one "anytime" friend (TD), I'm pretty socially isolated. I am improving, however: my sociability watch/index is improving, and I have more regular hangout dates with friends in the area (while they're in the area) than I did before. I have a TV watching buddy, and a flaneur buddy.

Which reminds me, now that I'm back and free to come and go as I please (even if it's not in and out of a friend's apartment, unannounced), I should set up some city walk dates with my architect friend (always fun to be able to ask "what's that?!" to someone who can say "Art Deco details/coffered ceilings") and a Battlestar Galactica date with my TV friend and a power walk date with my other friend (power walk after I drop her off some soup, of course).

Things that make you feel old.

2009-06-15T11:08:00.000-07:00

My nephew is graduating from high school on Wednesday.

My relationship with illicit substances.

2009-06-11T08:53:00.000-07:00

I don't drink coffee every day. One cup can work if I'm not too exhausted (I have been known to drink it like warm milk and feel like a nap), two cups make me jittery but awake for a few hours, three cups give me arrhythmia and clammy hands and I can't sleep later that night. I can't drink caffeine after 3 pm. I also don't drink it every day so that when I do need it and do drink it, it works. But I so rarely drink it, and the sweet spot amount I need is so variable that I don't know what's working: the caffeine or the adrenaline of approaching a deadline. I usually drink 1-2 cups of tea per day, and occasionally have headaches that I've learned are not caffeine withdrawal headaches but are merely headaches, and so I actually take Tylenol now, rather than drink the coffee I thought I needed but didn't.

I also don't drink very often, so one drink will hit me hard, and possibly give me a hangover the next day, such that I will rue that one daquiri and curse my penchant for umbrella drinks. Certain red wines give me such a bad headache and hangover the next day, even for a one quarter or half glass, that I am thinking of avoiding untried varietals entirely and being one of those pfoufy women who only drinks white wine. Not white zinfadel, though. Nope, never.

I eat a lot of sugar though. Like a cookie a day. Because I'm no longer 18 years old, I don't eat a ton of candy like I used to, and I definitely feel sugar overload much easier. I used to be able to eat a large chunk of fudge in 15 minutes. Now I eat that more slowly, like over 2-3 days.

I also eat bacon every couple of weeks. Any more often and I'd feel like getting an angioplasty.

What are your vices, and how do you use them? How do you control your use? How often do you indulge? What do you avoid, and what do you crave? One of my old roommates used to speak of "craving" alcohol, and needing a drink every night. It was better for her to drink a little every day rather than try to sublimate the craving and binge drink later. I never really understood that, but I as an American woman do understand the perils of dieting, binge eating, and the illicit allure of cookies and snack foods. I don't have much moral compunction over caffeine, fat, sugar, or alcohol, but I have a physical awareness of my body's responses to these substances and really limit my use, but I know that control is as much psychological as it is physical. And the physical only gets you so far, and it's taken me years to figure out my limits and how little I want to exceed them, such that I give myself psychological license to step back rather than give in. Because it wouldn't be (except with the sugar and fat) giving in per se, since I don't crave the other substances, so I gain less pleasure from a drink. The closest I can come to feeling like a "need" is the caffeine, which is strange to think about, considering how little coffee I drink.

Note, none of this is code for drugs. I watched The Wire and marveled at all the drugs, since I have never really seen them. I actually am curious how most people consume the little vices and tasty/stimulating/tipsy-making vices.

Culture Clash

2009-06-11T08:48:00.000-07:00

One giant organization (The United States) attempts to reform the insular organizational culture of another (GM).:

But it will be up to the federal government, which will own a majority of General Motors when it emerges from bankruptcy, to tackle what is perhaps the most difficult challenge in Detroit: transforming G.M.’s insular culture — at times as bureaucratic as the government’s — to make the company more competitive.
If the effort fails, the Treasury may never recoup the $50 billion it has provided G.M.
“Addressing cultural issues is just as fundamental to our assignment as addressing the balance sheet or financing,” said Steven Rattner, the lead adviser to the White House on the automobile industry.
In just one example, whenever a top G.M. executive was called to appear before lawmakers in Washington, staff members would prepare a briefing binder as thick as a Manhattan phonebook and hold multiple meetings to strategize over five minutes of testimony (Fritz Henderson, the new chief executive, has told employees to stop doing that).
In a Senate hearing Wednesday, Ron Bloom, another adviser on the auto task force, also talked about the need for G.M. to break longstanding habits that have made the company, with its bloated structure, lose a step to more nimble competitors.
“General Motors has been kicking problems down the road for a long time,” Mr. Bloom said.
Mr. Rattner and other government officials have repeatedly said they have no interest in running the company day-to-day. But they are taking a keen interest in shaping the new leadership team.

Measuring any progress in changing the culture will take time. The results, after all, will be seen in the new vehicles that the company develops and produces — and whether they reflect world-class business practices that are required to win against the best of its global competitors.

Yet another addition to the strucure/agency/culture debates! And one that suggests organizational culture flows from the top down, as evidenced by attempts to shape the new leadership:

Stay away, Belle

2009-06-09T09:43:00.001-07:00

This is exactly like the type of movie that would have appealed to my 20 year old self, yet I have the vague feeling that I should stay away from its twee sense of superiority:

Verona’s question may or may not be disingenuous, but the answer provided by “Away We Go,” the slack little road comedy in which it arises, is unambiguous. Far from being screw-ups, Verona and Burt, played with passive-aggressive winsomeness by Maya Rudolph and Jon Krasinski, are manifestly superior to everyone else in the movie and, by implication, the world.

And even though they express themselves with a measure of diffidence, it’s clear that they are acutely, at times painfully, aware of their special status as uniquely sensitive, caring, smart and cool beings on a planet full of cretins and failures.
To observe that they inhabit no recognizable American social reality is only to say that this is a film by Sam Mendes, a literary tourist from Britain who has missed the point every time he has crossed the ocean. The vague, secondhand ideas about the blight of the suburbs that sloshed around “American Beauty” and “Revolutionary Road” are now complemented by an equally incoherent set of notions about the open road, the pioneer spirit, the idealism of youth.

Or something. Really, “Away We Go” is about the flight from adulthood, from engagement, from responsibility, even as it cleverly disguises itself as a search for all those things. But the dream of being left alone in a world of your own making, far from anything sad or icky or difficult, is a child’s fantasy. Not an unattractive or uncommon one, it must be said, and for that reason it is tempting to follow Burt and Verona into the precious, hermetic paradise that awaits them at the end of the road. You know they will be happy there. But you should also understand that you are not welcome. Does it sound as if I hate this movie? Don’t be silly. But don’t be fooled. This movie does not like you.

Hmmm. I'm also staying away from the new two-steps-away-from-snuff-porn Lars von Trier movie, because the older I get, the less I want to be viscerally disturbed and emotionally decimated from watching a movie, which in theory should be my leisure time. There's something to be said for art that is challenging and difficult, but something in me broke a few years ago. Whereas previously I sought these extreme emotions, because their source was more foreign than the tumult of family life, now I can't bear to be so affected, for hours or days on end, by a visual and emotional depiction of pain and suffering, when my life is generally less dramatic now. I sort of get the American complacency that lacks a critical, self-directed eye and avoids difficult art, except that I am perfectly willing to read sad, difficult and emotionally disturbing literature, and allow myself to be so moved through words and imagination. That kind of emotional artistic experience I still seek. It's the visual depiction I can't bear, that so emotionally drains me. I've noticed too, that I shy away from violence much more easily now than I did when younger. In theory, I should be more desensitized, by now. But it just gives me nightmares. No, not even in the name of art. No.

Joyce Carol Oates on Salinger's Love Letters

2009-06-08T00:02:00.000-07:00

And on intimacy in the public sphere, in general:

The Hawthornes' devotion to each other, and to the idealized image of each other they presented to the world, would seem to be a powerful rebuke of the debased and exploitative nature of intimacy in our time, in which lovers routinely betray each other in salacious ''memoirs'' (the most despicable of which must be James Hewitt's memoir of his love affair with Princess Diana, at a time when she was distraught over her failing marriage with Prince Charles) and by the peddling of intimate love letters (the most recent, 14 letters by J. D. Salinger, written in the 1970's to his much-younger lover Joyce Maynard, scheduled to be auctioned off by Sotheby's in June). No doubt, through the millennia lovers have betrayed one another, but the mass-marketing of such betrayals, at high prices, is a relatively new development in what we call civilization.

Romance is a turbulent surf that, withdrawing, leaves a tangle of debris in its wake. Without the shimmering aura of love, mere words can be . . . mere words, and embarrassing. Without the stratagems of art, which are rarely spontaneous and unmediated, even the most heartfelt utterances not only sound banal, but are banal.

It may have been that Nathaniel Hawthorne, the consummate artist, rereading his wife's ''maiden'' letters, decided to burn them as much for aesthetic as for personal reasons; for nothing leaves us more exposed and vulnerable, like a mollusk pried out of its shell, than heartfelt declarations, especially when examined by a neutral eye.

It's a rare love letter that transcends the ephemeral occasion of its composition and endures as art, like those brilliant letters dashed off by Virginia Woolf to her flamboyant lover Vita Sackville-West or those teasingly enigmatic little notes composed by Emily Dickinson for her more intimate friends, both female and male.

Usually, love letters are painful to read, especially after love has died; should we succumb to the temptation to read them, we are made guilty voyeurs. The collector who buys Salinger's letters will require, like all voyeurs, a convincing rationalization for his or her behavior. (Scholarly zeal, of course?)

Anyone who confides in any writer risks being transmogrified into art if he or she is sufficiently interesting; the best protection is to be dull, bland and predictable.
Conversely, anyone with a modicum of a public identity must know that he or she is continually at risk in behaving impulsively in this rapacious era of memoirs, taped conversations and wiretaps. To commit one's most intimate feelings to paper, in letters, is the height of naivete, or hope. Immanuel Kant's great moral imperative -- that we should behave at all times in such a way that our actions might constitute an imperative for all human beings -- might be modified as a warning: we should assume that any confidence made to anyone, verbally or in writing, no matter in what private, precious circumstances, will possibly be betrayed, if only inadvertently.

When personal letters of mine written to a former friend were first offered for sale, some years ago, I reacted with shock, hurt and disappointment. I was embarrassed that I seemed to have made a fool of myself, in writing openly and impulsively (and without revising!) to one who thought so little of me, and may have intended exploitation from the first. (These were not love letters.)

In time, however, I came to view such ''betrayals'' in a philosophical light. The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one's generosity? Why regret one's impulsiveness, one's misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you'd written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don't cherish us as we'd cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them.

I share plenty of personal stories on this blog, but I rarely regret this. I do, however, regret the many, many words I've written to former friends and lovers. I highly doubt that such letters will ever be "sold," though certainly I expect that intimacies have been betrayed. I also regret, more abstractly, wasting so many words on such people. So many feelings contained in those words. So much honesty, hopefulness, love and trust, that such words were not going to be thrown away to people who did not deserve them. Perhaps, in time, I will attain the philosophical perspective of Oates, and learn not to regret my "generosity, impulsiveness, misjudgment of others." It's hard to get there, though.

As I've gotten older, less naive, and less romantic in nature, I've learned to devalue the written word. But in a good way! I trust more in action, unspoken gesture, and subtle intimacy, over effulgent prose with so many failed promises. I trust more in the idea of things "feeling right" than in "saying the right things." Though I confess that occasionally, I do want to hear the right thing. There are a million idiosyncratic ways to express affection and reinforce intimacy. Declarative statements are but one vehicle, and I've learned to highly mistrust purple prose. I've also learned to be more restrained with my own words. While I will still verbally express affection and will go so far as to write such sentiments down, I've become less extravagant and more economical in how I express such sentiments. Less "I'd climb the highest mountain," and more "I'd hang out with you." It does feel more authentic and honest. I also share less

Somewhere, the 18 year old lit major inside me is dying. When I was 19, I complained about my too naive, too-romantic nature to a friend, who said that was what he liked best about me. At the time, it was the best compliment I'd ever received. Nowadays, I'm not so sure.

the ups and downs of married life

2009-06-07T21:47:00.000-07:00

If you didn't cry (or sob uncontrollably, in my case) at the wordless montage of a happy marriage punctuated by sadness and unfulfilled promises set to Michael Giacchino's song "Married Life" in Up, you sir/madam, have no heart.

I loved the movie and alternately laughed and cried and felt grateful for every day adventures.

sociability index

2009-06-05T11:56:00.000-07:00

Progress: last night I went to a dinner party hosted by a friend in which I made more friends. And it'll be a semi-regular thing, because she wants to start up a semi-weekly support group for her friends taking the bar. What a lovely idea. Since I'm not doing anything super stressful this summer (well, other than ongoing dissertation work, which is its own nightmare), I was glad to be invited. And on Sunday I'm going over to a friend's house to watch TV. That's right, watch TV. I no longer will attempt any moral righteousness over not connecting my physical TV, since I watch a lot of TV through Hulu and DVDs, and have now made a TV-date. Not brunch, not hiking, not farmer's market shopping, as is the typical Sunday activity among my kind in these parts, but TV watching. We're also ordering pizza.

Also, tips on how to be a good guest to a stressed-out hostess who's trying to do a nice thing for all of her other stressed-out friends: call in advance and ask if there's any help needed. Come over 40 minutes early and make empanadas and chop vegetables. Stay late and do the dishes. This way your hostess, who's also your very good friend, can fall asleep right away and wake up and study, rather than clean. I wanted to bring something, but I had a lemon bar FAIL. So I brought myself, and a bit of elbow grease. Next week I'm bringing chocolate chip cookies, which would be hard for me to mess up. Not impossible, but hard.

Cheapness Studies, the blog

2009-06-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

A new interdisciplinary blog by me, Miss Self-Important, and Phoebe Maltz! We all have introductory posts up. Because nothing conquers blog exhaustion like starting another blog.

Check it out!

I don't want to die watching baseball like that guy's mom did in A Prayer for Owen Meany.

2009-06-04T00:07:00.000-07:00

Why can't I ever remember that character's name, when this was my favorite book my sophomore year in high school (shut up)? Anyway, update on the muffled hearing/ringing tone/ear ache situation: I just have to wait it out, and this fluid in my ears should go away after a few...weeks. Until then, I will be saying "what?" a lot, and there will be plenty of private in-jokes about how we're just like one of those odd couple sitcoms/mixed race buddy movies in which every line is a funny misunderstanding that generates a laugh track. And TD comes back tonight (before I go away again on the 16th to visit my parents, so we at least have some together time between our many trips), so maybe I'll stop being emo.

On Friday we're going to a baseball game, and the forecast is for thunderstorms. I am planning on packing soup and tea, and hoping that it won't be completely rained out. I will also hope to not die in the pursuit of America's favorite past time:

It's weirdly moving, if not exactly consoling, to learn just how many of baseball's casualties made the play before expiring. There's the amateur shortstop who, in 1902, caught a bad hop in the throat and used his last moments to throw out the runner at first. The third baseman in an Indiana league who, in 1909, tagged out the runner plowing headfirst into his gut, then succumbed to the resulting internal injuries three days later. There's just something about baseball that inspires a kind of heroic resolve. John McSherry, the major league umpire who collapsed at Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium in 1996, had actually postponed treatment for the heart condition that felled him so he could call the game.* It was Opening Day.
All the old romantic baseball tropes turn up again and again in Death at the Ballpark. But the effect is haunting, since here each is mercilessly punctuated with a death. There's the aging minor leaguer, battling his way back to the majors after a couple of stints in the show—except that Millard Fillmore "Dixie" Howell, who played in the White Sox farm system in the '50s, never gets called up again and dies of a heart attack instead. A few incidents are such ruthless perversions of our shared baseball idylls that it's as if Roman Polanski had recut Field of Dreams. One July night in a backyard in Houston in 1950, a 7-year-old boy asks if he can throw his dad one more pitch before heading inside. The father says OK. The son pitches. Then the father swings and connects, inadvertently "striking his son over the heart." The son dies before they can make it to the hospital.
There's no underestimating baseball's versatile capacity for killing us. Late Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti famously wrote that baseball "is designed to break your heart," and the statement takes on new meaning reading Death at the Ballpark, particularly Gorman and Weeks' section on commotio cordis, or concussions of the heart. A commotio cordis can be brought about only by getting struck at a particular place in the chest at the exact moment between heartbeats. And yet it manages to dispatch several pages' worth of victims.

Then there's a story Gorman and Weeks had both heard versions of but always assumed was apocryphal until they ran down a local newspaper account confirming it: In Morristown, Ohio, in 1902, one man asks another if he can borrow his penknife so he can sharpen the pencil he's using to keep score. The second man hands his penknife to the guy seated between them, named Stanton Walker, and asks Walker to pass it on. At that exact moment, a foul ball whaps Walker on the wrist, and he stabs himself.
Still, in the end, you could choose to see something slightly uplifting about the sheer volume of these freak and incomprehensible accidents. Take it as an indicator of just how much time Americans have spent on and around baseball fields over the last century and a half—of what baseball means to us. We've managed to die on the diamond in so many crazy ways only because it's one of the places we've done the most living. We've all been shagging flies in that minefield together.

California's Crisis

2009-06-02T23:35:00.000-07:00

At the LSA, I attended the "Many Faces of Constitutionalism" panel, for which Sandy Levinson was the chair/discussant. Among his remarks about the short life of most constitutions (the average is 18 years, I believe, correct me in the comments) is that some constitutions render states ungovernable, and thus should be rebooted. He used California as such an example, as my home state requires 2/3 majority to pass a budget, and has (what I think, you may disagree) ridiculous recall/referendum provisions that make it insanely easy to pass stupid laws and amend the state constitition by popular vote. He said that not a single federal dollar should go to California until it holds a constitutional convention. In light of our budget crisis and the emergency election we just had, I'm inclined to agree.

So why is California so messed up? How did we get this way?

Louis Warren, a history professor at UC Davis and guest blogger at Edge of the American West, tells the story of my baffling, beleaguered state in two posts:

1. How we got here.

2. California's crisis and the collapse of the Republican party.

These are definitely worth reading.

I need more people to talk to so that I can tell whether I'm going deaf.

2009-06-02T23:04:00.000-07:00

I called the Advice Nurse about my left ear, which is the first step to obtaining health care at my school. She suggested taking decongestants, and if my hearing/feeling of stuffed-upness doesn't improve, to call for a same day appointment to see if it's not something more serious.

I've taken about three doses now, and for a while I couldn't tell if things were improving, mainly because without TD (who is currently out of town), I have no one to talk to, since I work from home at my sweet ergonomic set up, or very rarely, at one of the libraries (only if I'm reading). I tried listening to podcasts, but the sound is too "surround" coming from my cheap computer speakers, and so I can't really tell if my hearing is the same or improved. It works better when someone is trying to directly address me, since I can tell if the voice sounds muffled to one ear or the other, such that when they stand to my left I can't hear them as well. Headphones...you would think, but for some reason the companies, they do stereoscopic sound so that I am supposed to hear more poorly from just one earbud.

So since I have not many friends in town who are free to just meet up to test my hearing (the few friends I have are studying for the bar or are probably busy with work, their own lives, etc.), I tried to sing out loud to Lizzie West's "Chariot's Rise" and Sheryl Crow's "I Shall Believe" (I am teh emo when TD is gone) which makes me notice a sort of echo in my head, in which my own voice feeds back slightly muffled to my left ear. Sigh. I guess I should call for an appointment tomorrow.

So, I'm slightly perplexed by my stuffed up ear, slightly concerned that I am way too self-isolating working from home and not social enough, and even more concerned that should I move away for a short-term fellowship or clerkship, I would lose my main source of company and will probably feel devastatingly lonely. I mean, I would still apply and go if accepted, of course. But I am filled with premature ambivalence and emo-ness. For a permanent move, we plan to move together (operative word being plan, which as Robert Burns will tell you...), but for a short separation, we would go separate ways and "make it work." Of course, I guess I would just have to reach out more and make new friends, but the very idea fills me with anxiety and preemptive sadness (I am Super Emo Girl, indeed). It's a scary thing, putting all your eggs into one basket, even if you love the basket so much you would hug it to you until the wicker cracked (bad metaphor! can you imagine that visual!). Without TD around, I've just been eating cereal, toast, graham crackers, fruit, and I did make myself some bean soup just to actually eat protein. I can easily imagine how I'd devolve back to my lonely, don't talk to anyone all day and eat cereal by yourself as you read the NYT and then stay up all night insomniac self that I was for most of my young adult life. I can't recall what it was like when I last had a boyfriend, since I was young and stupid and it was mostly long distance.

But I do remember what it was like during law school and the year I lived at my parents' house, in which I was whether by intent or accident mostly keeping to my own company, and would go for a whole day without talking to someone. Well, when living with my parents, I did talk, but in Vietnamese, so I got disused to talking in English about things that interested me, and I would go to the store just to see if I could do small talk. Actually, that was when and why I started this blog, so that I could have people to at least write to and form a community of author to reader. And it worked! I broke through my intellectual isolation with this blog, and I even made blog friends. I became so very insecure about my social skills during this time, though, such that when I finally met my first blog friend in person, SEK, I prepped him with this fear, in case I talked way too fast and too spastically and gesticulated nervously, which I sometimes think, can scare people. Seriously, I might hit you in the eye if we meet and I'm nervous.

Ironically, it was because of this blog that I'm now much more confident in my social skills. I kept on meeting strangers because I would start epistolary friendships via the greater popularity of the Belle Lettre alter ego, and I even got used to meeting such blog friends in person if I happened to be traveling in their area. I got used to meeting so many professors and readers that I started getting confident enough in my social skills to start dating again. Yes, I actually did not really date between college and now. Maybe I had two isolated dates in the intervening period, and you can imagine how those went. I can count on less than two hands the number of real, not ambiguous dates I've been on in my life. Like, it would actually amost fit on one hand. So when I did start dating again, just two years ago, I was a nervous wreck, but at least confident that I could talk about anything with anyone, and I learned to control my hand gestures so that I would not sock my date in the eye. One of the great virtues of being an academic is that I've learned to control the pace of my speech (at least when I'm presenting), so that if I try to pretend that I'm giving a talk or lecture, I will consciously slow down. Of course, this is ridiculous when you're trying to be charming and even flirtatious (not that I'm good at that) on a date. So after a few botched first-and-last dates, I got the hang of non-academic didactic talking and non-talking about the blogs we both read conversation enough to somehow charm TD. And since then he's been my favorite conversational partner, and so this muffly silence is kind of like a preview of what it would be if we did ever move away from each other, even for a little while, which reminds me not only of that isolating year living with my parents, but also The Month of Emo, in which I barely ate, scarcely left my apartment except to go on hours long walks, and watched Buffy for 10 hours a day.

This isn't an advice seeking post (Comments will be moderated for not at all needed snarkiness, and if you are addressing me or commenting on my story, I'd prefer email. If you would like to share your own story or feelings, comment away.). I've done long-distance, and of course it can work. Of course your example of long distance not working or working is great anecdotal evidence of either. Of course I am socially adept enough to make new friends and of course I should just put more effort into my social life and diversify my stocks of friends and conversational partners. I am just complaining a little, is all. Indulge me my lapses into emo. This is just a bit of oversharing and introspection, kind of like the posts I used to write before law professors started reading me. And to those law professors: don't read if you don't want the emo and oversharing! And yes, I am definitely interested in your VAP or fellowship, in whichever state, however far away! There's always frequent flier miles. Part of the trouble of writing for a dual audience (some of you like the personal stuff; some of you come here for the decreasing amounts of law/academia related blogging) is never being able to please everyone. On the one hand, given my open secret status in the legal blogosphere, I could become more circumspect (as I have been for the past couple of years) and talk about nothing personal, and not be honest about my feelings of ambivalence and my struggles with things that come with the territory of being an academic. On the other, I could write what I just did, be honest about my limits and fears, and seriously consider deleting this post at the end of the week when I am less emo.

Things I learned at the LSA

2009-06-01T21:25:00.000-07:00

I'm back! I had a productive and overall good experience. I presented and got some good feedback, I attended panels and learned interesting things about new research projects and developments, I schmoozed a bit, talked to really nice people who are interested in my future, and explored a bit of the city. I maintain that Orly Lobel still has the best advice for how to have a successful LSA experience, but here are a few of my own tips for struggling, poor graduate students, and lessons learned the hard way.

Cheapness tips:

1. Don't stay at the conference hotel if you can't afford it.

With another friend, I split the cost of a cheap motel (the Ramada Inn) a good mile away in the grungier parts of Denver's downtown, at a rate that was at least $50-75 less per night than the conference hotel. True, it was a bit of a 20 minute walk, but the motel had free wireless, and a free shuttle service that dropped us off and picked us up wherever we wanted in downtown. The reviews were pretty bad, but I like the idea of gonzo academia (which this wasn't!) and I thought of the pervasive smell of smoke and '70s decor as part of the hotel's character. I actually liked the grungy neighborhood, which reminded me much of Liberal College City, except with restaurants actually open late with lots of young, happy and hip people inside of them drinking and cavorting. Denver is a cool city! Seriously, take TripAdvisor's reviews with a grain of salt. If you are not The Princess and the Pea, you will be fine. I am all bourgie and up in that with my 350 thread count sheets I got on sale and my Le Creuset dutch oven that I got for Hanukkah and love of brand named snack foods (generic Doritos != the same!), but I did just fine. I loved the neighborhood full of brick houses and dive bars and coffee shops, and the only "characters" I ran into were two nuns who tried to convert me.

2. GoogleMap your location to find grocery stores and reduce the amount you have to eat out.

I wanted to pack food, but I also wanted to not check in luggage. I compromised by hitting a grocery store (Whole Foods! Very bourgie!) 0.5 miles away when I arrived, picking up lots of non-perishable fruit, muffins (if our motel room had had a fridge, I would have bought cereal and milk and lunch meats and bread for lunch), nuts, and graham crackers. I spent maybe $25 for the two of us, and we had a healthy breakfast every day, and fruit snacks throughout the day. Conference people stopped me to ask where I got my apple, so starved were they for non-cookie nourishment. Even though I dislike shopping at expensive grocery stores for basic items, by buying Gala apples on sale for $1.99/lb (not my usual ethnic grocery store price of $0.79, but certainly better than the $2.99 they were asking for Fujis, my favorite apple) and bananas and $4.39 for four flax/apple muffins, I didn't spend too much for four breakfasts and four days of snacks for two people, and it was much cheaper than buying marked up muffins and coffee at a Starbucks. Because I don't eat much, I actually was able to avoid paying for anything more than dinner, so long as I supplemented all of this with a big glass of milk in the form of a latte. So I basically only spent $20 a day on food, max, what with a $3.50 latte, the aforementioned muffin and fruit, nuts and crackers, and a not expensive dinner.

3. Eat as much free food as possible.

We filled up at the receptions and drank the free coffee and took home the cocoa packets they had on the table. That also helped us work the room, saying hi to recognizable academics in our field, old professors, and new contacts, as we migrated from the sliders table to the salad bar to the pasta bar to the meat bar. Follow your stomach, and you too might make friends and influence future hiring chairs.

4. Get a law professor to take you out to dinner.

I am actually really loathe to let anyone pay for my dinner because I just feel awful about it, but real professors do get comped and so maybe I am not a terrible person. And I didn't order anything bigger than a $3 mac and cheese side (I had filled up too much on free food and my cheap muffins and apples), so I guess I shouldn't feel too bad, especially if the law prof in question is a friend and the nicest person in academia. And it lets you get to spend more time with academics and make friends and talk about your research, before you move onto more important things like talking about which HBO series is best.

5. Don't drink.

I am always glad that in academia, no one ever questions why you are not drinking and there's no peer pressure to drink and keep up. I just don't like drinking enough to begin with, and it's needlessly expensive. And since we were at high altitude, everything just affected me more--dehydration, caffeine, alcohol. I had maybe two drinks out of politeness and sociability, and I didn't finish either of them. Good thing they were cheap drinks.

Lessons learned the hard way:

1. Submit your drafts early, and consider workshopping the same paper at a smaller colloquium.

Most people don't submit until the last minute (ahem), so the feedback is of limited quality and utility, but I guess the point of the LSA is to meet and greet in the halls and receptions, and everyone generally acknowledges that the panels suck. There are too many of them, and so panelists often outnumber audience, and even if there is an audience, there is at most 10 minutes after the discussant/chair goes through the papers for there to be any commentary from your fellow panelists or the audience. I asked a couple of decent questions, but in general the panels I attended had limited participation, which is a bit frustrating compared to my very good experiences at smaller colloquia.

2. Belle is much more popular than The Real Life Alter Ego.

I should always introduce myself as Belle Lettre. I am much more popular than my RLAE. I introduced myself as _______ at the Prawfs/Co-Op happy hour, and got a polite nod and a few questions about myself. I re-introduced myself as Belle Lettre, and immediately got enthusiastic "I love your blogging!" and "when are you going on the market?" and "you should consider this fellowship!" responses, and much sustained chit chatting about law, life, and everything. Because I was not drinking, I was sharp and personable and perky and if I may say, charming. Some people need alcohol to be more charming. While I certainly laugh more and so you become more charming if I drink, I myself am slower and slurry speeched after drinking. I suggest staying sober, talking about the panels and about your own research, and asking the people there about any advice they might give you.

3. Be prepared for altitude sickness.

I didn't get it, but in general, you should remember to drink lots of water when you're a mile above sea level. I was constantly thirsty though, so I very fortunately did bring lots of water. They had free water, of course, but I made it even easier by saving my free water bottle and re-filling it so that I could bring water from panel to panel.

4. You could get a ruptured ear drum or ear infection.

My left ear has been feeling blocked, and my hearing has felt muffled and decreased, since last Wednesday. It may have to do with the change in pressure and elevation I've been experiencing because of flying and being in Mile High City. It hasn't improved, and TD says I could go deaf and whatever. So I am going to call the health center tomorrow. Sigh.

5. Get out and see the city.

It is so exhausting going to all the panels and running around with only 15 minutes in between each session. I took off a couple of the afternoon sessions to walk around and get a feel for the city. We took the entire Saturday afternoon off to go to the Denver Aquarium. We actually had fun at the LSA and were much more relaxed than we usually are at conferences. I strongly suggest doing this. I also suggest meeting up with a cool local blogger for dinner, which is such a welcome relief from the exhausting schmoozefest of the receptions. Blogging has certainly made my conference going more enjoyable, because I never lack for a dinner companion and local guide!

So that's it from me. I will say that it's good to be back, even though I had just one day with TD before he went off to a conference of his own. Conferences in general are a huge time and energy and money suck, and it's a lot of time away from family, but all things considered, this was one of my more enjoyable conference experiences. I wasn't stressed all the time, I had fun, I made friends and contacts, and I got to see the city. I wasn't nearly puking from nervousness or overwhelmed with loneliness in a motel room at 2 am like I was at my first conference. Part of that is experience, of course, but it's also because through blogging I've come to "know" more people, whether at the conference or just in the city, and that's made it a lot better. I've also learned how to be more "normal" when traveling, e.g. by buying groceries and eating healthier. I've forced myself to be more social and set up dinner dates and go to receptions. I've made it a point to try to keep walking or stay active during these jaunts too, which makes me feel better and hopefully counteracted some of the mac and cheese and buffalo meatloaf I ate. All in all, a good conference experience, which is as much as you can ask for!

LSA and Sotomayor

2009-05-27T08:56:00.000-07:00

I'm at the airport en route to the LSA. I'm stuck here for a couple of hours. Ah, free wi-fi and plugs in airports. I'm moderately excited about the conference and learning new things and seeing old friends, but I also have grown to hate traveling and I never was that comfortable with schmoozing. Ah well. This is what they call academic socialization: we not only do academic research, but we must also become academics. We are not yet, but we become. Blah blah.

Anyway, here's a few links about the Sotomayor nomination that I particularly like:

1. Paul Horwitz's post on the nomination game (best post I've read about the theater of the absurd of it all).

2. Kevin Drum keeps with the theme and compares it to kabuki political theater.

3. Kieran Healy looks at the same stage and sees a circus full of clowns.

I see Belle's Glee and raise her Petra Haden

2009-05-22T11:15:00.000-07:00

Because...

1) Petra Haden is all kinds of awesome
2) She is the daughter of Charlie Haden, who is ALSO all kinds of awesome
3) She is the sister-in-law of Jack Black, who is occasionally all kinds of awesome

And I am also partial to this Petra Haden cover as well.

It's like The Wire, but in real life!

2009-05-21T13:16:00.000-07:00

This guy sounds even more unscrupulous than Maury Levy (although I'm only done with Season 3, so who knows):

[Former prosecutor Paul Begrin] went on to become one of the state’s most prominent defense lawyers, representing clients as varied as Abu Ghraib defendants, the rap stars Lil’ Kim and Queen Latifah and members of Newark’s notorious street gangs.
But federal authorities charged Wednesday that the success their former colleague, Paul Bergrin, had in defending drug dealers and gang leaders was based on a brutal calculus that he had boiled down to a phrase he repeated like a slogan: No witnesses, no case.
In an indictment unsealed on Wednesday in United States District Court in Newark, prosecutors accused Mr. Bergrin, 53, of orchestrating the murder of a confidential witness by leaking his name to drug dealers who shot him in broad daylight on a Newark street corner; of traveling to Chicago to hire a murderer to kill a witness in another case; of coaching some eyewitnesses to lie; and of paying others to change their stories or leave town on the day they were to testify.
To prosecutors, the charges are the latest example of the deadly challenge they face protecting witnesses at a time when the criminal justice system has few resources to shield them and the prevailing street code in many cities urges civilians to “stop snitching.”

In late 2003, however, a wiretapped conversation between Mr. Bergrin and one of his clients led prosecutors to view him as not just a legal adversary but a potential defendant.
According to court records, the conversation captured him telling his client’s cousin, one of Newark’s most powerful drug lords, the identity of a confidential witness: Deshawn McCray, known as Kemo. A few days later, the authorities say, Mr. Bergrin met with his client’s cousin again and told him “No Kemo, no case.”
Mr. McCray was shot to death three months later in a brutal ambush, forcing prosecutors to drop the charges against Mr. Bergrin’s client, William Baskerville.
Although the authorities had testimony accusing Mr. Bergrin of providing both the inducement and identity that led to Mr. McCray’s killing, the case could not be prosecuted after a judge ruled — and the prosecutors acknowledged — that they mishandled the wiretap tapes, rendering them inadmissible as evidence.
But as they began examining Mr. Bergrin’s legal work, they now say, they noticed what appeared to be a pattern; in at least four other cases, his clients had been cleared after witnesses were either killed or changed their stories.
Law enforcement officials said that unlike many of the cases Mr. Bergrin is accused of trying to tamper with, which hinged on the testimony of a single witness, the charges against Mr. Bergrin and his four co-defendants were pieced together using a wide assortment of documents, recorded conversations and testimony from numerous witnesses.
“He liked to say ‘No witnesses, no case,’ but we have witnesses, we have evidence and we have a good case,” said Weysan Dun, special agent in charge of the New Jersey office of the F.B.I.

fill your heart with glee

2009-05-20T12:33:00.000-07:00

OMG, it's like they wrote this show especially for me. Bring it On meets Election meets Freaks and Geeks, with my favorite song as a finale:

random roundup with no commentary

2009-05-18T16:26:00.000-07:00

Gah, too busy, such that I'm eating Cheerios out of the box and pre-shredded mozzarella out of the bag (I am disgustingly grad student-y when I'm on my own and eating alone).

1. Kept from a partner's dying bedside.

2. Alec Baldwin on the Rise and Fall of Detroit.

3. Maria Farrell gives us TMI.

4. An MRI of love (don't try this at home).

5. How Obama is like Spock.

The NYT is full of cautionary tales

2009-05-17T10:08:00.000-07:00

1. Be careful of lead when you plant your urban garden.

2. Beware of DIY-madness! It can result in DISASTER. There's a reason I won't cut my own hair!

3. Don't play ridiculous Dada-esque "art sports" or else I will mock you. Okay, maybe that wasn't the point of this article. I hesitate to call this a hipster phenomenon, since there's no indication that the attempt at irony is disingenuous. At least arts sports are willfully surreal and ridiculous, rather than inadvertently so in the manner of adult kickball and dodgeball (and don't get me started on "Ultimate." There's a park in the middle of The City where people do all sorts of crazy things with balls on sticks. I cannot begin to comprehend.

I can't watch horror movies either

2009-05-16T09:34:00.000-07:00

I generally refuse to watch rape and/or torture scenes, or violent killings. At the very least, I will turn away and ask "is it over yet?" Occasionally, I will abstain from watching the movie/show at all, if the violence is prolonged and too much a part of the overall work. I'm not alone. Fortunately, I don't usually have to defend my choices. If you want to watch, fine by me, but I will probably be in another room, reading a book. I don't think I'm missing out on something that is aesthetically or culturally important. The same appreciation of the darkness of humanity can be obtained by reading the newspaper or some other fictionalized account. So I don't get why people feel like they have to foist their choices on another, especially if it creates such a negative effect. I don't care if Deliverance is a classic. I never, ever want to watch again that scene where that one of the guys is called a pig, has a knife put to his throat, and is threatened with sodomy.

a spirited defense of amateurism and in-group cliqueishness

2009-05-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

This negative review of Thomas Keller's restaurant Per Se by Ezra Klein was meant to invite the blog drama. My favorite comment, by a chef:

As for the dissing of the IFA, I must say that most of my hate wasn’t directed as Ezra. However, I do think that this isn’t a typical blog. Many of the writers are known for their work in other spheres, which gives them a certain influence that must be used carefully. It’s foolish to think that people who have no clue about food don’t read this blog even though they may read the IFA writers’ other blogs. Ben Miller and Amanda Mattos, for example, have posted utter nonsense, and are NOT good cooks. Yet the name of the blog, and the blogging cred of some of its contributors, pumps up the value of this blog in a dishonest way. As a chef, I know that uninformed bloggers can have a distorting effect that is bad for the food industry. People are fetishizing food and chefs instead of understanding the basic theories of cooking and the proper metrics by which to evaluate food. Blogs like this only increase this problem. When I read Ezra Klein saying oysters and pearls’ only value is in its outrageous luxury, it’s a little annoying to those of us that understand how brilliantly balanced and refined that dish is on so many levels. I’m not saying food isn’t for everyone. I just wish people would get some experience and really build a sound knowledge base before starting a blog.

Seriously. Stop the recipes. Stop posting so much. Take a step back. Learn from people who know how to cook. And focus on your other blogs, which are much more interesting. Don’t be like Noam Chomsky, who is a great linguist but a terrible political analyst.

Oh, and it’s spelled PALATE, not palette.

Well, I also like this zinger:

You all, while a step above average, are amateurs. You aren’t great cooks. You have posts deriding Per Se that don’t get Per Se. You have articles about how overrated ramps are. Another talks about making ricotta, but it isn’t about ricotta. The recipes are pedestrian. Your claim to fame seems to be an overuse of dried red pepper flakes.

Yet you write as if you know what you are talking about. You “almost” aren’t qualified to criticize Per Se? What remotely qualifies you to review any restaurant, let alone that restaurant, let alone after but one visit?

I am not saying you aren’t a true critic simply because you don’t like Per Se. You may life and love and hate as you wish. But you need to understand before you write about it.

This whole enterprise makes me question if you know what you are talking about in your day job’s blog. I sure hope so. For the record, I read several IFA author’s primary blogs and other writings and I love you guys. But while you might be into food, you aren’t real cooks or proper critics. Stick to what you [hopefully] know.

Kate Steadman, a fellow Internet Food Association blogger, offers this spirited defense:

So Ezra wrote a post about Per Se and obviously pushed some buttons. But these comments ripping the blog about being amateurish just completely miss the point of this endeavor.

The IFA was started because a close group of friends were getting increasingly obsessed with cooking and food. We thought it would be fun to work on a new blog — a place to write because “we are united by a shared recognition that all those things suck, and we’d much rather talk about food.”

Not a single contributor to this blog is a chef. This is the internet – you know, that wonderful place where we don’t have to be a professional to talk about what we love. I have an amazing day job — health policy is my proverbial bread and butter — but little compares to the creativity, satisfaction and generosity that’s part of being a home cook.

I’m young. I’ve only been cooking on my own for five years, and new disasters and revelations appear everyday. But it’s absolutely ridiculous to say: “the IFA, while amusing, is all very amateurish.” DUH.
This blog is about our love of food. It’s our thoughts on restaurants, ingredients. We never claimed to be chefs.

But that’s the point — most people aren’t chefs. Most people have the same experiences — they went to that crazy expensive restaurant and felt underwhelmed. They messed up meatballs. Protests of “you’re amateurs” are entertaining at best.

Also, you’ve never tasted anything Amanda Mattos and Ben Miller have made. They’re both amazing cooks, and more than that — they are each one of the most warm, kind, hilarious, creative and giving persons you could ever know. So back off.

Take that, you blogospheric bullies and meanies. And your mom, too! I admit, I was highly amused by these exchanges. But I am a bad person. Far be it from me to get on my high horse about writing about things on which you are not expert. I rarely blog about my actual areas of expertise, nowadays!

Occasionally, I like the IFA. Like this post, on how pretension is the enemy of the good, especially in food policy. I will refrain from making any comments about the expertise/amateurness of these self-proclaimed self-trained journalist "policy wonks," because that's a bit below the belt. Maybe they are! So maybe their other writings demonstrate a greater amount of expertise and thoughtfulness. But they themselves profess to have no expert knowledge about food or cooking, and so I'll leave it at that. What do you all think? Do you need to be an expert in order to express an intelligent opinion that can be accepted as a type of authority by another? What if you profess to have some measure of better than average knowledge such that you will impart such knowledge onto grateful readers, to "help you cook"? What if no matter what, you sound like a tool who thinks that cooking "should" be complicated, take a long time, and be competitive? Okay, that last bit was mean. No pejorative epithets in happy la la Law and Letters land. I just think it's funny. Then again, most of the recipes I post here are along the lines of "what to cook if you are busy working all day" and "use canned broth, it's faster."

Oprah Sucks

2009-05-15T00:03:00.000-07:00

And not just because her O magazine has her on every cover. That's just too much of anyone.

She sucks because she puts anti-vaccine, pro-hormone replacement therapy quacks on her show, and she's so influential that women will listen to her. And this is dangerous stuff!

Hormone replacement therapy is one of medicine's most controversial subjects. In 2002, after a period of prescribing HRT routinely to women to improve their energy, sex drive, heart health and bone strength, and to reduce the risk of certain cancers, doctors were forced to do an abrupt about-face. A study known as the Women's Health Initiative, which followed more than 150,000 postmenopausal women starting in 1991, concluded that prolonged HRT (more than two years) increased the risk of heart attacks, strokes and breast cancer. It wasn't what doctors or their patients had hoped for, but it was the scientific truth. Doctors have therefore been recommending that hormone replacement therapy be taken for short periods of time to mitigate those risks.
But what Somers was advocating was radically different from standards of medical care. She admitted to using mega-doses of bioidenticals continuously and aggressively. She started her regimen, she told Winfrey, by rubbing bioidentical estrogen and progesterone creams on her arms, injecting another hormone, estriol, vaginally every day, and topping herself off with 60 different oral supplements. Physicians who may have been watching the show surely winced, but Winfrey was not concerned. "Many people write Suzanne off as a quackadoo," she declared. "But she just might be a pioneer."

It's not the first time Winfrey's advice on health issues has raised concern. In the past, the media mogul has been criticized for promoting cosmetic therapies that were untested and later deemed dangerous. Her recent development deal with Jenny McCarthy, who now blogs on Oprah.com and has a television show in the works, drew criticism from children's advocates, as McCarthy and her autism advocacy group, Generation Rescue, have been leading an ideological, unscientific crusade against childhood vaccines. Add in Winfrey's endorsement of the snake-oil self-help book, "The Secret," and Dr. Phil, and you might be tempted to sue her for malpractice.

And here's a critique of her support of that quack Jenny McCarthy:

McCarthy's popularity has created a lot of anger and disbelief in that tiny sliver of society that believes in evidence-based medicine. One person who's feeling particularly frustrated is David T. Tayloe, president of the 60,000-member American Academy of Pediatricians. (Remember them? A pediatrician is a person with a medical degree who takes care of children. Some of them are said to trust science more than celebrities when it comes to health care.)
"I think show business crosses the line when they give contracts to people like Jenny McCarthy," Tayloe says. "If you give her a bully pulpit, McCarthy is going to make people hesitate to vaccinate their children. She has no medical or scientific credentials. It disturbs us that she's given all these opportunities to make her pitch about vaccines on Oprah or Larry King or U.S. News or whatever. We have to scramble to get equal time—and who wants to see a gray-haired pediatrician talking about a serious topic like childhood vaccines when she's out there blasting the academy and blasting the federal government?"

double x

2009-05-14T10:46:00.000-07:00

Slate's new feminist magazine is pretty good.

Favorite links:

Get your kid off your facebook profile picture.

The new language of feminism.

Make feminism work!

Feminism's problem with race.

Katha Pollit's "Still the Second Sex"

Linda Hirshman, being Linda Hirshman, on "The Problem With Jezebel." Smack your forehead, agree grudgingly with some points, disagree with others, question the overall tone if not the underlying argument.

A post-feminist opt-outer's critique of feminism's "responsibility" ethos gets a resoundingly cold, harsh, entirely appropriate dressing down for the callow writing: "If your future's that bright, maybe you need shades."

The unwitting subjects of the inane NYT Modern Love columns answer back!

And re the last link, there's a reason why I try not to write anything about my significant other that's more detailed or intimate than "we argue about whether or not to wear shoes in the house and we have intellectual disagreements about domestic policy" No drama is relayed, nor do I share any insights gleaned through adversity (which I probably lack, not writing Modern Love columns). Eeesh!:

What's true for immersion journalism is clearly not true for Modern Love. My ex's essay wasn't fictional enough to warrant changing gory details—the pet name "Froky" was plenty real, as is my little-used first name "Diana." Yet it wasn't factual enough to warrant fact-checking or objectivity; to mention that I was never consulted, warned, or interviewed about the piece is stating the obvious.

From my perspective the article uses a sprinkling of facts to decorate a work of fiction. The essay skews timelines and words, takes events out of context, and characterizes things in a way that could be described as...creative. The overall effect was a complete rewriting of our relationship as I had lived it.

I learned that baby talk had killed our relationship the same way everyone else did—by reading about it in the newspaper. You wouldn't know it from the essay, but my ex had never specifically mentioned this to me as a problem while we were together. The fact that he told the readers of the New York Times more about why we broke up than he had told me left me reeling. But I could hardly write to the Styles editor. Surely my objections would be dismissed as the rants of a scorned woman (a risk I obviously run by writing this article).

To truly attain peace, there was only one thing to do: Write the author. So just as he had done for thousands of strangers, I did just for us: I sat down and wrote my heart out. I revealed things I had never shared when we were together, and I paid homage our past love. I conveyed my shock at his decision to blindside me with the article and my opinion that he had not told the whole truth.

Surprisingly enough, my ex wrote back within the day. He was cool, civil, even kind. He addressed my concerns about the truth by admitting forthrightly: "Of course, my essay is not the truth. It's a version that is emotionally truthful for me...The essay isn't about you or me, and wasn't written for either of us, but only about how people struggle with these things."

As his smooth prose flowed on, it was almost enough to make me doubt my gut. But then I realized: He wasn't writing to me as a man to woman, but as a published writer to civilian reader. He was a professional now, with a nice clip from the New York Times to prove it. He had told his story, and his story had sold.

When the article was first published in 2005, Facebook was just for college kids, Twitter was a gleam in its founder's eye, and "I Bang the Worst Dudes" was a private lament, not a public blog. Today our online personas, blogs, tweets, videos, and Flickrs have made millions of us into semi-fictionalized stars of our own long-running docudramas. As a culture, we all have to reckon with how much is too intimate—and too fictional—to share about ourselves and our loved ones.

It would make a snappy ending to say I've built a fantastically mature relationship with an amazingly playful man. But the facts are messier than that. I thought my relationship with my writerly ex would give me a marriage. Instead, I got dueling essays, which at the time, felt emotionally devastating and now seems darkly hilarious. As much as I told myself I dodged a bullet by ending things with someone who would so brazenly make his private life public, his piece played on my deepest fear that I was so flawed as to be unlovable. And while I knew I never wanted to have the kind of relationship where I had to get my intimate romantic news from the newspaper again, it was hard to forgive myself for letting it get to that point in the first place.

Random Roundup

2009-05-13T11:27:00.000-07:00

1. The always brilliant New Kid on the Hallway on how academia and law school can negatively impact your personal relationship (academia is worse). It's vaguely comforting to read, because while it suggests things will be hard and get harder, it also says "we'll get through this together."

2. A bunch of spoiler-rich reviews of Star Trek, high on the enthusiasm, even higher on the critical contemplation of The Canon and continuity: Scott Eric Kaufman, Timothy Burke, Russell Arben Fox, Amber Taylor. The discussions are so awesome.

3. How the GOP is misplaying their anti-judicial empathy card. God, it's like they all are disciples of Herbert Weschler or something.

4. Not sure how expanding copyright protection to cover fashion design such that gutting the knockoff market will lead to "better, broader design", or how the vaguely defined "squint test" would actually work, but here's Jeannie Suk and Scott Hemphill on this. (Via Amber)

5. Locavores annoy me. And see, it's being turned on its own pointy head! I have still yet to write my "green exhaustion" blog post. Sanctimony and pretentiousness are poor drivers of any social movement.

Fidelity and betrayal

2009-05-12T10:41:00.000-07:00

There is hardly anything you can read about Elizabeth Edwards's book Resilience that will add any insight or value. Most of it, in fact, will be appallingly insensitive and just plain wrong (really, Randy Cohen? You can be bad if the execution is really good?). Maybe Edwards invited the scrutiny/scorn because of her book. Better is the critical but nuanced take of the women of XX Factor and Salon's Rebecca Traister: yes, Elizabeth Edwards has always been, if anything, too honest and revealing, but for that we admire her more than her duplicitous husband. Where she stops short of that revealing honesty is where we are most likely to criticize her, albeit gently (certainly I would not heap scorn upon her the way I would John Edwards), for betraying herself as much as us. Normally, I wouldn't care much about the sexual habits of politicians, except when they use their character as a central part of their platform, and when the prime example of that character they trumpet is their steadfast devotion to their cancer-stricken wife with whom they endured the greatest tragedy that can befall a parent. But John Edwards did. And his wife is in a more difficult position than I can fathom, so I hesitate to pass judgment or wonder why she did this and not that.

One thing that is heartbreaking to learn is that Elizabeth asked only one present of John on their wedding day (the day he could barely afford the motel in which they spent their honeymoon, or the slim gold bands that they exchanged): fidelity. It seems like such a simple gift, too obvious to ask for. But it's not so simple, and it's not so easy (those who don't think monogamy is a part of marriage or those inclined to think polyamory is the way to go: I respect your opinions, but in this present example, let's leave that debate aside). Betrayal of that sort is one of those things that is so easy to imagine, but too horrible to contemplate for very long. I will confess that one of the few movies that stayed with me long after I watched it was Adrian Lynne's Unfaithful. The guilt and delight that flittered across Diane Lane's face after her first betrayal was unnverving. I could understand both feelings: of course it must have felt simultaneously so good (the only way to describe her expression is "tickled") and so terrible that this was the way to get to feeling that good. The way the infidelity destroyed her life was shocking (of course, it doesn't always have to end in murder). But in considering, again, the example of the Edwardses, I feel the same level of horror and sympathy. It's hard to fathom in one way, and so easy in another. I guess you don't know till you get there.

Fortunately I'm racked with so much horror and preemptive guilt over anything approaching infidelity that it would take a lot for me to get to anywhere near. But part of that also is fearing such a betrayal at the hands of someone else. Again, with intimacy comes trust, and it requires a suspension of disbelief. Or at least the belief that even given the appalling failure rate and the propensity for human weakness, that your relationship will be different.

Knights Out

2009-05-11T15:27:00.000-07:00

From Salon:

On March 19, 1st Lt. Dan Choi, an infantry leader with the New York Army National Guard, appeared on "The Rachel Maddow Show" and stated, "I am gay." Choi is a West Point graduate, Iraq combat veteran, and Arabic language specialist. He is also a founding member of the independent organization Knights Out, a group of LGBT West Point alumni who, in openly declaring their sexuality, are actively fighting against the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.

Thursday night, Choi returned to Maddow's studio (video below) to explain the repercussions he's experienced since then. To no one's surprise, Choi has been asked to withdraw from the Army National Guard. Maddow showed pieces of the letter sent to Choi, which stated, "You admitted publicly that you are a homosexual, which constitutes homosexual conduct ... Your actions negatively affected the good order and discipline of the New York Army National Guard."
Choi explained that he can resign and receive honorable discharge or fight the action, which is what he intends to do.

I knew Daniel as a kid. He's an amazing person, and all the more so for serving our country and so bravely protesting against the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. Please support Daniel and his very worthy organization.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Star Trek, Reviewed (no spoilers)

2009-05-10T21:19:00.000-07:00

(Well, no spoilers except minor framing plot details that were already discussed by the NYT and Slate)

My initial reaction: IT WAS AWESOME.

My secondary reaction: Except for the parts that were not!

Yes, the action can be a little schlocky. An extended scene where Kirk has to be separated from the Enterprise to meet Old Spock seemed nonsensical and unnecessary and dude, writers, you could not figure out another way around this problem? The use of portentous opera music was heavy handed. The beginning Hamlet/Lion King-esque scene in which Kirk's birth is matched in time by the simultaneous death of his father so that he can grow up with a huge chip on his shoulder and the burden of destiny is just so...overdone. It has some gaping plot holes, and a central plot device is something that doesn't exist in the current understanding of physics and is not explained in the movie.

But it was AWESOME.

I was super excited by the movie and sat on the edge of my seat and got so worked up I had to take off my jacket and scarf (it was night, people, and air conditioning makes me cold). The time-travel plot device worked well. If a movie can't compare favorably to time-traveling episodes in Star Trek history (many of which were excellent: the one with Kirk and Joan Collins, the "All Good Things" series finale of TNG), then what's the point? Fear not, fans: the time travel plot worked really well. I was mildly disappointed by the gratuitously short mini skirts the female cadets and officers were forced to wear (seriously, WTF, IBTP). But I made up for that by turning my objectifying female gaze on Zachary Quinto, a smoking hot young Spock. Chris Pine as Kirk was appropriately boyish (with a very boyish voice), daredevilly, and sort of like a genius frat boy with too much to prove and too high a drinking limit. But he was very cute, so if illogical and brash is your thing, then more power to you. They are all very likable and empathetic characters, and you get to be on their side, and you totally otherize and demonize the evil and genocidal Romulans (who have tattos, making them easier to otherize, causing you to do an autoethnography at your own xenophobia). Oh, and that Novikov self-consistency rule/grandfather paradox of time travel is summarily dismissed, which is nice. Because it's super annoying, and serves only to stroke the beards of fan boys who fancy themselves armchair philosophers and allow the script writers to do two parallel plots as if they were getting paid by word.

This is not a useful review, I admit. I don't want to reveal any spoilers not already reported in national media reviews. I figure, if you're reading this, you know Star Trek, and can understand it when I say "not as good as Wrath of Khan." Well, a bit unfair to compare it to the old movies. Yes, I know it's based on the original series, but as a ploy to jumpstart a dying franchise, it would be best to compare it to the most recent Star Trek As An Action Movie type movies starring the cast of The Next Generation, or the crew of the NCC-1701D. So, it's wayyy better than Insurrection and Generations, a fair amount better than Insurrection, and comparable (if not better than, gasp) First Contact.

Again, sorry for the not-useful review. Go ahead and comment, with spoilers if you wish, more useful reviews. But I generally think that a review of any fan boy movie will be limited. The problem with things with a fan base (like Star Trek) is that the fans come in just different stripes of fervent--the purists too devoted to The Canon and thus likely to be too critical of any endeavor; or the grateful mildly obsessive fans (like me) who are generally so happy to see some new incarnation of their Most Favorite Thing Ever that they are way too forgiving of the flaws and thus express too much enthusiasm in the reviews to be useful. Hence, "it was awesome! except for the part that was not!" So it's hard to find a detached, objective, "useful" review from a fan. But the problem is, critics and mildly interested non-fans just don't get it. Those reviews are usually frustrating to me. I usually enjoy movie reviews as either good/bad exercises of criticism and analysis (although my favorite remains James Agee's review of You Were Meant For Me: "That's what you think"), but occasionally, when I'm reading a review of something I know and care about, I get into fits of irrational rage: "what do you mean, starting off this review stating that "you were never a fan" or "you never saw the original/don't know the canon"?! Then the review sounds ignorant to me and feels useless: I need comparisons to things that I know matter! "Is it better than The Wrath of Khan? How different is it from the original?" It's irrational, because I blithely read reviews of movies based on books and don't think it's necessary that the reviewer read the original work, for example.

Anyway, from one Star Trek fan to another, I would recommend it, with the reservation that: yes, it will have plot holes that make no sense and exaggerations that are eye-rolling, but ALL Star Trek episodes/movies have suffered from that, including stuff that defies the laws of physics. (Oh come on, like you know how inertial dampeners or Heisenberg converters would work.) What it does well, it does really, really well. The actors are competent, and believably expressive. The action-packed plot is really enjoyable. You will love seeing things blown up, and you will love the fight scenes. You will love seeing good looking people be awesome and good-looking (especially Harold/Sulu/John Cho and the aforementioned Zachary Quinto and the mini-skirted Zoe Saldana/Uhura). Simon Pegg/Scotty is delightful. You will want a sequel, and that's more than you can say about most things (cough Crank cough).

My only other disappointment is that I left my comm badge at my parents' house, and I forgot to wear my "live long and prosper" hand sign pin to the movie.

AUGH. I may as well have told that Nigerian prince my social security number when he asked me.

2009-05-08T15:56:00.000-07:00

Dear Associate of Your University,

We are writing to you because Your University's health
center recently learned that criminal computer hackers broke
into electronic databases containing personal information belonging to
some clients and their parents or spouses.

Although the investigation is still underway, we wanted to alert you
as soon as possible that some of your personal information, including
your Social Security number stored on those databases, was stolen,
which puts you at risk for identity theft. It is also possible that
your parents or guardian or spouse`s information was taken if you
waived enrollment in the student health insurance plan, and they were
the policy holder of your health coverage.

In addition, the criminals may have stolen information related to your
health insurance coverage and some of your non-treatment medical
information such as Hepatitis B immunization history, medical
record number, dates of visits or names of providers seen, or for
participants in the Education Abroad Program, certain information from
the self-reported health history. You will receive a second
notification letter from us if, in addition to your Social Security
number, this information was also stolen.

Please be assured that the electronic medical records, including
patient diagnoses, treatments and therapies, are stored in a separate
system and were not affected in this incident.

We sincerely regret and apologize for any difficulty that this theft
may create for you. We have alerted campus police detectives and the
FBI, and we are doing all that we can to investigate this crime. We
are also dedicated to assisting you with information about the
incident and services that can help prevent or minimize the impact
this theft may have on you.

Sigh. Bad things, they happen, and they may keep happening.

I hate clowns, but I like this song.

2009-05-08T11:11:00.000-07:00

So cute! So Belle!

Star Trek Fans, Unite!

2009-05-07T12:03:00.000-07:00

I am getting excited. Star Trek fans, show yourself in the comments.

I left my comm badge at my parent's house. And it's been years since I've been able to find my little plastic borg cube toy. I did find my "live long and prosper" hand sign pin though, and I'm contemplating wearing that to the movie just to embarrass TD. I can't find my "resistance is futile" key chain, though. I'd bring my label maker that looks like a phaser, but even I have my limits of geekitude, and as we'll probably see the movie in the slightly dodgier part of my high crime city (I live in the bourgie part), maybe best not to carry it around.

In which the NYT shoulders the great journalistic burden of defending the defenseless...models.

2009-05-06T00:11:00.000-07:00

I kid you not. I would not have posted except for the bizarre preponderance of reporting on models this week at the expense of The Crazy Women, ostensibly because there is some kind of museum exhibit. Quick! Someone tell all of the college kids to stop lighting candles and instead campaign for Met exhibits on Darfur, and someone tell all of the anti-war protesters to target curators! Oh wait, that might only work for shallow subjects of

Besides, if not them, who? The Model Anti-Defamation League:

1. "It's Official. Models Look Good." This is faint, left-handed under the knee praise for the voiceless silent stick figures known as models:

“The Model as Muse” seeks to examine the relationship, as Mr. Yohannan writes in the big glossy book that accompanies the exhibition, “between high fashion and the evolving ideals of beauty through the careers and personifications of iconic models who posed in the salons, walked the runways and exploded onto the pages of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and even Life and Time.”
Action verbs are one of the enduring tropisms of fashion-speak and so naturally models never “land” in either Vogue or our lives with a passive thump. Models are locomotives, to use an archaic Vreeland-era formulation. Models rocket. Models explode. Whether or not models are icons, they incontestably excite our attention and draw us in.
Are models perhaps the last silent film stars? A preview of “The Model as Muse” suggests they are. A model’s face on a magazine cover may sell fewer issues than that of the latest hot actress, but they are ultimately a lot more compelling to look at and this is because we hardly ever have to hear about their private lives or be burdened with their thoughts.
It cannot be accidental that Kate Moss, the most persuasive contemporary example of a model as an artistic catalyst, has assiduously guarded what she says throughout her career. Ms. Moss is no dummy. She knows that the basic requirement of her particular job is silence. A model is a muse to the precise extent that a model is mute.

2. One bite at the apple is not enough! Yet another article on "The Model as Muse" exhibit, this time a more critical review rather than a bizarrely fawning college freshman treatment of the metaphors of High Fashion:

What does not quite come across is how much these early models, although famous enough when they married an aristocrat and moved into high society, were still subsumed by the clothes. The magazines were showing what they wore, not emphasizing who they were.
The exhibition remains a glossy fairyland, with no hint of the sad end of models who lived fast and died young. Instead, we see only in their prime Penelope Tree, two-dimensional as an Andy Warhol “Factory” product, or the smoldering Janet Dickinson. Helmut Newton’s glamorous decadence captures a more edgy vision from the 1970s.
What would have transformed this show from being not just entertaining and interesting, but profound? By turning attention almost entirely on the models, it denies the reality of a model’s image as a collaborative construction, with editor, photographer and designer working together to mold a new “face.” But showing how the cocktail of beauty is concocted might have shed too much light on the ephemeral magic of the model and muse.

3. Sad to say, models are being replaced by actresses in our increasingly celebrity-driven culture:

NEW YORK — Have models lost their clout to celebrities? While the Metropolitan Museum is showing half a century of models on magazine covers, today’s issues are more likely to feature Hollywood stars.

“It’s a difficult time for models,” says Marc Jacobs, the chief sponsor of the Costume Institute exhibition. “The whole idea of supermodels came in a pop culture when actresses weren’t that interesting. Now Hollywood is filled with young actresses, and there is digital technology to make them look good.”
Anna Wintour, editor in chief of Vogue for two decades, admits that she is more likely to find star power in Hollywood than on the runway. “The public interest in models these last few years has not been as it was during the early ’90s when Naomi [Campbell] and Linda [Evangelista] caused so much excitement,” Ms. Wintour says. “And until models become celebrities again in their own right, I can’t see them selling as well on magazine covers as actresses.”
Ms. Wintour says that the scarcity of models fronting Vogue is because “the generation that followed the supermodels shied away from that sort of fabulosity and scrutiny.”

Since when did Anna Wintour, brittle queen of haute couture, start talking like Flava Fav and Kimora Lee Simmons? "Fabulosity"? Anyway, I think this is less a remark on how private models have become and more interesting starlet actresses have become than a remark on how our standards of "interesting" have fallen, and the low bar that is set for "celebrity" in our tabloid culture. Cough Paris Hilton cough. Being famous for being famous has replaced being famous for beauty, talent, intelligence....

4. "At Met Institute Gala, High Cheekbones and Higher Hemlines Rule". Ironically, the featured picture is of Jessica Biel, an actress of dubious talent and more famous for dating Justin Timberlake.

“Models are not just faces and bodies,” Ms. Versace said. “They have brains.”
This has been a rough decade for models, with accusations that their industry has been encouraging unhealthy behavior by promoting a stick-thin figure and underrepresenting models of color. Beverly Johnson, the first black model to appear on the cover of Vogue, in 1974, said the exhibition, which traces fashion history from Richard Avedon’s portraits of Dovima and Sunny Harnett in the 1950s through the supermodels of the 1980s, was a great acknowledgement of the contributions of models to fashion.

Asked how she felt about being a museum-worthy muse, Ms. Moss shrugged and pulled a big piece of gum out of her mouth.
“I’m amused,” she said. “I think it’s quite interesting for somebody to go outside of the box and think that a model actually has had some input into fashion. A lot of the time, the models don’t really get a say.”
But in recent years, since the end of the era of supermodels more than a decade ago, designers have increasingly sought to cast their fashion shows with models with blank faces and indistinguishable features, partly because the supermodels were getting more attention than their clothes. Besides Ms. Bundchen, there has not been a new supermodel in years, let alone one whose name is easily recognizable. And that was intentional.
“It was hard to sort of overcome the bigness of some of those personalities, or to bring those personalities sort of down, you know?” Mr. Jacobs said. “Now fashion is about looking at the clothes and not the girls.”

Poor models. I am not being wholly sarcastic here. They are genetic freaks of beauty, but they also face great pressures to stay unhealthily thin and some of the less successful ones I am sure get pressured into quid pro quo sexual harassment. I'd actually be interested in the latter, and the former makes me sad for the sake of the models and the teenage girls they'll influence. Still, reading all this is quite boring (and I only read them to write this post). Maybe models really are lacking in sufficient fabulosity. I tried to read Mary Gaitskill's Veronica. The prose was lovely, but I was unable to care at all about this run-down failed model and her friend. it was like a Bret Easton Ellis novel (albeit with better writing), and I can't bring myself care about the New York glitterati. I very often bring myself to mock them, however.

"Extremely dangerous to America"

2009-05-05T20:39:00.000-07:00

Along with Dahlia Lithwick and Hanna Rosin, I for one, would welcome a gay female Supreme Court of the United States justice. I never understood why gay people (or gay marriage) means the destruction of democracy, America, and "American values," but I do not listen to conservative media and I did not engage my family over their support of Prop 8 at Thanksgiving dinner.

At this early stage, no idea who will be picked, but I would hate to think that President Obama isn't seriously considering Solicitor General Kagan (the first gay SG? then why not the first gay SCOTUS justice?) or Professor Karlan for the post merely on the basis of their sexual orientation.

yet another tech problem

2009-05-05T16:58:00.000-07:00

My Firefox is broken or something. I open up the NYT homepage in Internet Explorer (which I never use). It looks normal. I open up the NYT homepage in Firefox (which I use all the time), and there is a big chunk of white space between the banner that says "The New York Times" and the main front page. It's like a big CSS error or something. I have no idea how to fix this. I have uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox. I have uninstalled every add-on. I am increasingly irritated at having to scroll down a whole page's worth just to read the news.

How can I fix this? What is wrong?

ETA: problem solved.

good and bad ways to save money

2009-05-05T10:53:00.000-07:00

(Goal: I will post 3-5 times a week, mostly on weekdays, even if it's crap. I didn't say this was a good goal)

In This Current Economic Climate, it behooves a not-so-young graduate student to scrimp and save. There are good and bad ways to do this, however. Rita's suggestion of washing one's hair every three days or other day to extend the life of a shampoo bottle would result in less shampoo used and probably healthier hair, but would annoy the frak out of me, because I have preternaturally greasy roots and look like the thing I fear the most, That Immigrant Kid I Used To Be. My forehead would break out, leading me to spend more on Clearasil and makeup. I would feel itchy, I would worry that my head smells musty and sebum + dead skin cells-y, and I would be annoyed at how my hair clumps together and looks gross and not like in the Pantene commercial. So, while this is a laudable thrifty goal that would lead to healthier, shinier hair without the use of $50 Kerastase conditioner (seriously, WTF), it comes at too great a psychic and social cost (the social cost being less good-smelling, and I want to attract a vampire). So, Rita's suggestion is out.

Then there's Phoebe's suggestion of cutting one's own hair. This would work on those with dextrous hands, curly hair (the curls spring irregularly anyway), and a fair amount of confidence. This would not work for me, who has fine, stick-straight hair, hands that are like big clumsy clown paws, and a complete lack of confidence in my ability to avoid stabbing myself with the scissors or else giving myself a That Immigrant Kid I Used To Be haircut.

So, here are my own "definitely for the faint-hearted" tips on saving money so that you can actually take yourself out to eat at the LSA:

1. Good Idea: Cancel Netflix and rent movies from the public library.

This is genius of me. I could never get around to watching 2-3 movies per week anyway, and so my Netflix account, even if set at "one at a time," would be wasted. Even if I couldn't watch one movie a week (and since I like to watch movies with my partner, finding time to watch them together is harder than you would think with long work days and working half weekends or otherwise trying to have a balanced lifestyle with outdoorsy activities and gasp! reading), it would be a $7 rental. So I cancelled my account, and now borrow whatever's available at the library. It's not bad, and it makes me consider old movies I never watched before, like "Trading Places" and "Wall Street." Problem: the library has very limited hours, and even I, the grad student, sometimes am unable to get there in that short window from 10 am to 5 pm if I'm trying to put in a full workday on campus. But in general, four-at-a-time for one week for FREE is a great way to get movies and TV shows, and if I don't watch it by the end of the week, I just return it and don't feel bad about wasting money.

2. Not-So-Good Idea: Buy the cheapest generic single-ply toilet paper so that you can get it for the fewest number of cents per square foot.

Not that I am such a princess that I have started buying brand name toilet paper like Charmin or heaven forbid, Ultra Charmin, but I regret to report that this isn't really worth saving $2 on. Two-ply, all the way. You probably use less paper anyway. Same goes with paper towels.

3. Possibly Bad Idea: Bring a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter to the LSA so that you can save money on breakfast and lunch.

This is great for saving money, but might cost you those networky meet-and-greet lunches. Maybe I will only do this for breakfast, and be satiated enough to only order an appetizer size salad for lunch, and whatever is cheapest for dinner.

4. Good idea: make your own pantry staples.

I like to make my own bread, which is ridiculously marked up per unit. I'd like start making my own granola and granola bars, since theya re also ridiculously expensive per pound or unit. I'd make my own bagels if I ate them often enough or had a large family, but for now I would be happy just making my own crackers and other such high-margin snack foods (this is partly why I never, ever buy cookies--just bake them!). I have yet to make my own jams and jellies, mainly because fruit is expensive and is most nutritious when it's eaten fresh. So unless someone has a tree and gives me free fruit, I won't make my own jam, a laborious undertaking that involves buying and sterilizing jars, cooking down fruit for hours, etc. Seems unlikely now though, given that almost everyone I know lives in an apartment. I have started making my own candy, though. I am thinking of making salted butter caramels. And TD expressed interest in these $20 for three gigantic dried apricots dipped in chocolate that we saw at that one bourgie food shop in that one bourgie artisanal food, so yesterday I spent all of 10 minutes chopping up and melting bittersweet chocolate ($3.99/lb at Trader Joe's) in a homemade double boiler (a metal bowl a top a pan of simmering water) and coating some dried apricots we got at the Chinese market for $2.99 for 12 oz. I put wrapped them up as a present for him, too. They were very tasty.

Conspiracy Theory: The NY media want you to think that women are crazy and stupid.

2009-05-04T13:02:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is the CREEPIEST Modern Love column EVER. Does she not know that you can block creepy stalking students from chatting with you on Gmail? Doesn't she come off as craving the attention and encouraging the crazy? This replaces this entry as proof that "Modern Love Exists to Perpetuate the Stereotype that Women are Batshit Insane".

This 22-year old baby crazy girl sounds really stupid, and yes, crazy. She's maybe four years older than those crazy teenagers in Massachusetts who think that babies will give their lives meaning and purpose, and it's all fun and games until reality sets in.

Who on earth shops like this?! Since when is something under $1,500 a deal, and something $500 a bargain? When I am over forty, I might actually start buying things full price on J. Crew or Banana Republic, but I probably won't. Not that cheap, poorly made, arguably disposable, probably produced in sweatshops clothing is the best, but somehow I cannot for the life of me stomach paying that much for clothing. Maybe on a suit or in a special occasion dress (like, wedding), but on a sweater, no. I think this article was supposed to be "sensitive to our current economic climate," but FAILED. This article is not so much The Women, They Are The Crazy, but it just sounds crazy to spend that much on clothes in This Economic Crisis, or in general, really.

Speaking of fashion, it has come to my attention that I have "let myself go." My everyday uniform of a fleece jacket or parka, jeans, and Keen hiking sneakers is not stylish, no. Nor do I have "fashion personas." Shopping with a friend in the Trendy Faux Hipster Neighborhood (the real hipsters apparently live in this other pretentious, gentrified, boutiquey neighborhood), I kept balking at the idea of buying and then wearing lacy lingerie (a bigger waste of money, I cannot fathom), insisted that wearing heels everyday would destroy my back and make it impossible to walk my 2-6 miles a day without giving myself deformed feet (and I've already had arch-correction surgeries) or broken ankles, and expressed greater delight at the clearance section of Old Navy (where I got a t-shirt, a pair of shorts, and two yoga camisoles for $16) than at this vintage/consignment boutique that was pretentiously called "The Wasteland." Ah well, maybe this week I will wear a skirt--if it's warm enough.

I am blessed with a partner who thinks I look equally good in jeans or pajamas or in my dressier "stylish business casual," but cursed with a streak of pragmatism. It is true that once upon a time (perhaps just two years ago), I delighted in dressing up for its own sake. But now, I prefer the ease of feeling like I'm myself, rather than myself in a costume. I think I felt I had more to prove back then. I don't know whether this is "letting myself go," or the product of being in a relationship and relaxing my standards. If anything, I think this change preceded the relationship, and it just happens to work in this relationship (if I look like I put in extra effort, it is remarked on favorably, but if I express insecurity over not looking nice enough for an occasion that does not compel a certain dress code--say, to a casual restaurant--I am asked "who are you trying to impress?" The answer, of course, is no one in particular and perhaps only myself, or everyone). I mean, I still like to wear dresses and put more effort into our dates out, just with flat shoes, and only if the dresses are comfortable. I am often encouraged to wear a pretty, lacy thing or a pair of heels "for myself," rather than for the sake of impressing a member of the opposite sex.

But for whom do we dress ourselves is as loaded a question as for whom do we wear cosmetics? I derive more personal pleasure and utility from the light use fo cosmetics, so I do indulge in that. I also like to wear earrings (although my magpie tendency to load up on the glittery bling has long since passed; I attribute that penchant to a need to add some lightness to the dark that was law school). But heels, uncomfortable undergarments, clothes for which I need a modern day corset--no, these are not things I would want to wear every day, for myself or for others.

I suppose I am Low Femme. Not High Femme, which I admire, but cannot fathom in my walk-everywhere, schlep everything lifestyle. And so while we may dress ourselves, we do not dress for only ourselves. But there seems to be some limit to the outward performativity of dress and cosmetics: at some point, the clothes or makeup wear you, and feel too costumey. Go too far for the sake of dressing to some ideal (or persona that doesn't fit your personality), and you lose any pleasure or utility in it.

Recharge

2009-05-03T15:46:00.001-07:00

Things that I need on occasion to recharge:

A nice dinner out.
A nice dinner in (tonight: pork medallions and orange-braised fennel)
Wilco's peppier music (I especially like California Stars and Outta Site (Outta Mind) and I Got You.
Non-academic fiction reading (currently, I'm reading The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, and it's really enjoyable. Long, but enjoyable.
A really long walk.
Eating outdoors. Thanks, Gary!
Fulfilling some city dweller guilt and Getting Out Into Nature. I especially like being near water.
Baking cookies (tonight: chocolate toffee cookies).

What are yours? Any suggestions?

I'm off for a walk and grocery shopping so that I can make dinner and bake cookies. Yes, this is my triumphant return to blogging. It's this or nothing, folks.

State of the Belle

2009-05-03T12:49:00.000-07:00

Since I've last blogged, nearly a month ago, these things have happened:

I'm still alive. No, really.
I discovered that I make really great pudding and custard, but do not how to work with gelatin. Panna cotta FAIL.
I baked challah and offered some to my Jewish friends, who politely informed me "thanks, but it's Passover." Consideration for Jewish people FAIL.
We bought a portable gas grill, which I have named "Gary." As in, Gary the Gas Grill. He has changed our lives, and we are really blessed to have Gary. Not so much healthier though. Instead of grilling vegetables and say, tofu, we grill sausages and steaks. Mmm.
I traveled out of town recently and had a lot of fun with bloggy friends.
I really hated that "Ghosts" episode of Dollhouse. Also, hate sex looks so terrible and violent and and creepy. Agent Ballard takes a dark turn.
I decided that 30 Rock is one of my favorite shows, and that I will repeat the funny lines as often as I can. Such as "Am I in a barn full of horses? Because all I'm hearing is naysaying. Wordplay!"

I experienced a crisis of dissonance and felt like a total housewife with the shopping and the cooking and the research on gender in the workplace and work/life balance and threw a fit and refused to cook.....for a day. We cooked together, which is what we do when he is not working 16 hour days. We had a nice dinner out. This is what it's like to date me. Occasionally I get fits of "what does it all mean" and "how can I be a feminist employment discrimination and organizations scholar if I do most of the housework and shop at Walmart" panic. Then we go out to dinner and I relax over a drink and some not local/seasonal/sustainable/fair trade food. Then I consider it a bit, and realize that my one person consumer boycott isn't that effective, and breaking that boycott to buy my beloved Gary the Gas Grill doesn't make me a bad person, and nor does my failure to be completely ethical in every consumer choice (I try. I don't try hard. I am okay with that.) Then I realize that equality for equality's sake doesn't mean much, if it makes us fight. The principle of the thing is not as important as getting the thing done, especially if it's something valuable, like having a nice, normal, no-argument dinner.
I decided that sweeping twice a day in my Neverending Battle Against Dust might be considered OCD, so I went all week this week without sweeping. Result: Grossed out, but sane.
My Neverending Battle Against Dust generally results in several discussions with TD about my disappointment in myself and the cleanliness of my apartment, and I asked him, as a person who grew up with shoes in the house, how it is that American babies survive and do not die. He says that the dust makes his people of hardier stock. We decided that a blog called Stuff White People Do That I Don't Get, with a picture of myself throwing up my hands in confusion, would probably be offensive. That's when he called me OCD and said that dirt is good for babies, so having a sterile baby inside a hermetically sealed bubble was out of the question. Knowing that if I posed such a debate to The Internet I would lose this argument, I decided not to blog about this.
I got really sick of blogging. Then I half-composed long essays in my head, and forgot to write down the ideas. Then I got overwhelmed by the idea of drafting long, 1,000-2,000 word posts about yuppie guilt, enviro-sanctimonialism and how it thwarts its own good goal, lobbying vs. social movements, fashion, friendship, love, why first generation Americans are more patriotic than fourth generation Americans (based on my limited study of N=2), etc. So I just didn't blog. I'm sorry. Maybe if I just blogged links to articles I found interesting, blogging would be easier and not so draining and taxing before I even set cripply fingers to keys. But then I would just be a link-dumping blog, which I find boring and antithetical to my typically verbose, moderately insightful self. But being verbose and trying to be insightful is what exhausts me about blogging, and so maybe I should give up that schtick anyway, or else give up blogging entirely. Maybe I should move my "article of interest"micro-blogging from Twitter (yes, I'm on Twitter) back to my blog.
I'm preparing for the Law and Society Annual Meeting at the end of May. You should email me if you're going and want to meet up.
I am now going to sweep my apartment and work on my paper.

on trust and intimacy

2009-04-13T21:51:00.000-07:00

The most recent episode of Dollhouse can only be described as "ZOMG." Many interesting themes explored in that episode, and lots of new plot developments. In the opening sequence, in what can only be described as the most pandering move EVER made by Joss Whedon to his geeky male fans, Echo (Eliza Dushku) is in a "dude, this is OK for primetime?!" dominatrix outfit and trying to explain to her handler Boyd (protector, I'm not using BDSM terminology to my knowledge) about how it's not about pain or domination, but absolute trust. She is programmed to implicitly trust Boyd, who is for the time being the moral compass of the show and the only guy you can trust (maybe because of his open ambivalence about the show), and so far, that trust has never been violated, and it is as close to a paternalistic relationship as possible in that show. I am slightly reminded of the creepy Mayor from Buffy and Faith, but without the evil giant snake (literal, not metaphorical).

Trust was more deeply explored in that episode than before, through the plot device of a security leak: you didn't know whom to trust, secret messages were smuggled into the personality imprints, and Agent Ballard found out that his sweet and lovely girlfriend was actually a "Sleeper Doll" made to spy on him and kill him if necessary, but otherwise act like the perfect girlfriend. The head of security turned out to be a mole in the organization, although not to bring it down, but rather to contain its technology. It turns out that the programmable people, the "Dolls," are the only ones you can trust completely, because you made them to order and their memories will be wiped after your encounter, so you can tell them anything and feign real intimacy. So the head of the organization secretly meets with her own Dream Doll Ken, and has brief respites of intimacy and trust.

I am not going to turn this into a bullshit post about sex and vulnerability and how romantic intimacy is ONLY possible where there is ultimate vulnerability. As much as the show demonstrates how the Dollhouse makes fake intimacy and "girlfriend type" prostitutes a reality for their sad sack clients while keeping sex transactional (and see also, for an example of this in real life), I refuse to adhere to such a high stakes model of sex that almost overrides personal agency. Part of what I like about the sexual revolution, and what it has done for feminism, is to undermine the absoluteness of the proposition that sex must always carry such great emotional and psychic investments and costs, to the utter abnegation of your agency and soul. This is not unlike the scary worldview that Twilight espouses. Someone once gave me the advice, during a breakup, that I had permission to engage in "carefree fucking" in order to get over the heartbreak. I did not take that advice at the time, but amen to that! Sex positive feminism is about agency against patriarchal double standards and constraints (though I don't think it's about the overshare.) If the Dolls actually had agency, I would care less about the sex, even if it is transactional. (My feeling of repugnance to the "sugar babies" in the NYT article has more to do with my horror at their lack of desire to pay for their own Jimmy Choos and to subsidize or lower their high falutin' lifestyle, not to the work itself per se, particularly for those women who really are putting themselves through school. My views on sex work are quite close to those expressed here.) Because they do not, it is tantamount to sex trafficking, and so discussions about intimacy (which is always going to be faked and forgotten) are neither here nor there.

That said, there's still something to be said about trust in the show. The Dolls are programmed to trust their handlers and the staff, who do not always merit that trust. Indeed, one of the most unsavory plotlines involved one Doll's Handler using that speech-activated programmable trust to repeatedly rape her. Agent Ballard put all of his trust into one woman, who turned out not only to be untrustworthy, but also working for the very organization he wants to take down, and so he is himself a pawn. She has no idea she is a sleeper doll though, and he must keep up the charade, and so he is violating her trust as well. No one can trust each other, even if they must pretend to in order to keep the organization working or to pretend that the few relationships they have are meaningful. Despite the sexual nature of most of the engagements, there is no need for trust between the clients and the Dolls--the clients are to be vetted by the Dollhouse, and so the trust that exists must be between the staff and their security, to ensure that the clients pass background checks and are not the crazy sociopaths who kill like in Episode 3. It is thus interesting that the very concept of trust is disaggregated from sex and almost incidental to the relationship between clients and their Dolls (except in DeWitt's case, where she programmed a trust-based relationship into her doll), but entirely central between an individual and his or her organization. The only relationships that matter, then, are the organizational/business ones--do you trust who you work with, the people you work for, etc. Trust seems incapable of existing between those with interpersonal relationships.

Happily, in real life, that is not usually the case. If anything, we trust our significant others, family, and friends more than we trust those whom we are associated with more formally and transactionally. A contract (for employment or services) may be more formal, but it is not inherently more "trustworthy." It is a good, if naive thing to believe more in your partner than you do in your employer. One can always get shafted by the organization, and one can easily get betrayed by a partner, but no one would have relationships if we didn't believe in that particular script of romance that compels our suspension of disbelief so that we can ignore the appallingly high failure rate of relationships and marriages and believe our own to be different and a non-statistic, and makes us trust our partner more than we would anyone else, despite there being not much statistical difference in the likelihood of one person to fail you over another.

I can name only a few people I am truly intimate with, and whom I trust implicitly to not leave my side in a time of crisis. But they're a fair few, and I've cut out the people I don't trust. I don't know if I'm as lucky as or luckier than most, but I feel pretty good about that.

do you choose your hobby, or does your hobby choose you?

2009-04-08T15:03:00.000-07:00

My hobbies:

Reading for fun, mostly fiction
Knitting, if poorly and slowly
Hiking/walking
Baking
Cooking
Blogging
Board games.

The reason for my choices: I don't read as much fiction (mainly because I don't read as much "for fun" anymore) as I used to, but I maybe read a novel or collection of short stories every two weeks to a month, and it this is reading that is "not work," and it's not mindless internet surfing. I had to take an extended break from knitting because of my hands, but I'm back to it after giving up on working with super fine yarn with a pattern for a while, and enjoying the ease of bulky weight yarn in a basic garter stitch and will hopefully finish at least one of the three projects I'm working on. I walk at least nine to twelve miles a week even though I don't have to, and I like to go for hikes when I can. I bake at least once a week, and I get pleasure from kneading dough from bread, making elaborate cakes and pies, and tossing together a basic cookie or brownie, and it's an activity I'd feel like I'm missing from my life if I go for more than a week without it. Cooking....here I hesitate, because I cook almost every day. A hobby should be a regular activity, but when it boils down to basic sustenance and is like just another daily task, is it really an avocation? TD convinced me that my approach to cooking was hobbyistic: I research recipes and compare them to come up with the best combination of techniques and ingredients, I often write my own recipes, I experiment and improve until I get "the best" recipe, and I like to host dinner parties. I'm constantly on the lookout for new things to make and new cuisines to try, and so it's never about just fueling the body, but making an experience that is both nourishing and social. Thus, I think that my approach to cooking is more hobby-like. Blogging...well, but of course!

I used to make paper crafts, but that was back when people seemed to like getting handmade cards and decoupaged boxes. I used to make mix tapes, but then I moved all of my music to external drives and forgot to aggregate them. Besides, after a few years, you realize that you're just flooding your friends' houses with junk. I used to run, but after a while my knees gave up and now I just walk 9-12 miles a week. Some hobbies just die after a good run (word play!). Sometimes you stop doing some activity with sufficient regularity. Sometimes you just realize it's just not for you.

What is a hobby?

Merriam Webster:

Main Entry:²hobby

Function: noun

Inflected Form(s): plural hobbies
Etymology: short for hobbyhorse
Date: 1816

: a pursuit outside one's regular occupation engaged in especially for relaxation

Now, I would link this word to an even older word, one that signifies, as hobby does, a distinction from one's occupation, or vocation, with its root in the Latin vocare:

av·o·ca·tion
Function: noun

Etymology: Latin avocation-, avocatio, from avocare to call away, from ab- + vocare to call, from voc-, vox voice — more at voice
Date: circa 1617

1archaic : diversion , distraction2: customary employment : vocation3: a subordinate occupation pursued in addition to one's vocation especially for enjoyment : hobby

So, I would distinguish a hobby as something that is not done for work, something that is done for enjoyment, and something that is some type of activity, such htat it can be called a "pursuit" or "subordinate occupation." That is to say, "napping" is not a hobby. Nor is "sitting in a chair." I would not necessarily put "watching television" as a hobby, even though it's how I spend my about 3 hours a week of my time. No, it must be some activity that is not passive. For instance, "getting massages" is not a hobby! It must be something you do, not something that is done to you.

Now, onto the italicized hobby...board games. Because I have a partner whose company I actively enjoy, I thought that a great addition to our repertoire of "hanging out" would be semi-structured activities that we can do together. Most of our hobbies are separate, which is great for independence, but it would be fun to share recreational hobbies. He sails competitively, whereas I sail half-assedly and often enjoy just sitting on the bow, being awesome (again, passive). He plays music, whereas I am growing to accept the idea of being a groupie. Most of my hobbies are solitary, save cooking, and while we enjoy cooking together and hiking on occasion, sometimes you want a rainy afternoon hobby that will stretch your mental muscles and be "interesting." Which is why I decided six months ago, to add board games to my/our list of hobbies ("my" because it's something I've wanted to do for a while, "our" because it is not as much fun playing alone).

Dude, what was I thinking? I never grew up playing games and don't have that competitive game playing streak nor gaming, strategic mind. My dad, unlike most Vietnamese men, hated gambling and would rage against any one of us if he found us with a deck of cards. I grew up in a limited English household, and did not have board games. I never played those games American children grow up playing (what is this thing called "Chutes and Ladders"?), and didn't play any games at all until high school, when the other Asian kids busted out the Tien Len. Eventually, when we had the first round of nephews, we loosened up and got Scrabble (which we used to teach English and build vocabulary, forgetting about scoring), Monopoly (which I find boring and excessively capitalist), and Taboo (which I love to this day).

I am just not good at playing games! We got Carcasonne, and after 4-5 attempts, we are still playing "practice games" because I am just not catching on quickly enough about the rules and how to lay the tiles strategically so as to advance my position and box TD into corners. He is insisting that it'll be more fun for the both of us (more competitive and evenly matched, less frustrating for me) if I let him play with a handicap (either an extra meeple or 10 point lead for me, or I get to refuse a tile and draw another). I feel, how to put this delicately, like an idiot. TD says that practice makes perfect, and that the reason I am not good--yet--is that we haven't been playing enough, and I haven't quite internalized the rules and strategy. I think that part of it also (besides the aforementioned reasons about how I may have been socially conditioned to lack game strategy) is that I have poor visual spatial skills, such that I have a hard time picturing the entire map of the terrain and how my tiles will best fit. He has a point though, that perhaps practice makes one a better player, and that at least with this game (which has an element of luck of draw), there is no inherent talent for it that makes improving an impossible goal. I don't need to win every time, I just need to improve and not be frustrated by the feeling that I don't know what I'm doing. I remember when I first did LSAT logic games, I was at 33% accuracy, and by the time I took the test, I scored nearly perfect (one wrong). So I guess that logical, strategic thinking can be learned and improved upon (even if I have forgotten how to do most of the logic games and even if I think that they're all kind of lame).

In any case, I'm going to stick with this hobby, for now. I just ordered Ticket to Ride, and I'm thinking of San Juan next. Playing tips for these games (and especially Carcasonne) are appreciated, as is general advice on how to think like a gamer.

undeclared blog hiatus is OVER

2009-04-08T14:57:00.000-07:00

I've been busy, blog weary, and my hands hurt. But I just got another round of shots and I am PUMPED! So I am back. Sorry for the long and undeclared absence and silence. I just figured that if I had nothing interesting to say, I shouldn't say anything at all. I mean, who wants another post on carpal tunnel?

the secret to asian cooking

2009-03-26T14:43:00.000-07:00

I have a recipe that calls for "Chinese Five Spice." Not knowing what that was, since I am not Chinese, I went out and bought it at a Chinese supermarket--it appears to be a mixture of star anise, fennel, cloves, cinnamon, pepper. I like all of these things, but I have never combined them. I open the jar, and take a whiff.

For crying out loud, this is the "secret" to my mother's excellent barbequed pork and spare ribs?! For all these years, this was the magical recipe?! For all these years, I've been totally paralyzed with fear about trying to replicate my mom's recipes or even attempt Asian--much less Vietnamese--cooking, for fear of being too inauthentic. It does feel shameful that my pork wonton recipe comes from About.com, and all of my recipes that are not learned from my mother or The Only Vietnamese Friend I Have are from whitey recipe sites. But they were not speaking the untruth! The white people, they can interpret an Asian recipe too without the mystical folklorish wisdom of "you just know when" and the imprecision of "a pinch or two of that." Tablespoons and teaspoons are nice guidelines! And even if you use Cooks Illustrated to make Szechuan food (why would an American born and raised Vietnamese American girl know how to cook in that style intuitively anyway, and aren't we against essentialism!), this does not make you a bad person. Sometimes, Cooks Illustrated knows the family recipe that your mother uses.

This is not unlike finding out your Great Aunt Rose's legendary pound cake is made from a box mix, and all this time you could have been making and eating your own legendary cake.

on difficult films

2009-03-23T22:57:00.000-07:00

The older I get, the more I want to be diverted and entertained by gaudy spectacles and improbable wish-fulfilling plots. Maybe it's the product of also feeling too old for drama in my own life, which may be mirrored in my aesthetic choices. I went through a major "bummer" phase in college, when I only liked sad, difficult cinema, and even better if it was in a foreign language. I am less into being depressed for depression's sake. That said, there's always a special place in my latent angsty psyche for such films and literature, because "the good" will always win over "the crappy"--no matter how happy or silly or wish-fulfilling that chick flick is, I will not watch it. I will happily watch films like "Wendy and Lucy" though, and "Frozen River." For more on the cinema verite of such realistic, depressing, neo-depression era films, read A.O. Scott's article in the Times:

WHAT KIND OF MOVIES do we need now? It’s a question that seems to arise almost automatically in times of crisis. It was repeatedly posed in the swirl of post-9/11 anxiety and confusion, and the consensus answer, at least among studio executives and the entertainment journalists who transcribe their insights, was that, in the wake of such unimaginable horror, we needed fantasy, comedy, heroism. In practice, the response turned out to be a little more complicated — some angry political documentaries and earnest wartime melodramas made it into movie theaters during the Bush years, and a lot of commercial spectacles arrived somber in mood and heavy with subtext— but such exceptions did little to dent the conventional wisdom.
And as a new set of worries and fears has crystallized in recent months — lost jobs and homes, corroded values and vanished credit — the dominant cultural oracles have come to pretty much the same conclusions. Remember the ’30s, when we danced through the Depression with Fred Astaire and Busby Berkeley and giggled amid the gloom with Lubitsch and the Marx Brothers? (Not many of us do, of course, which makes this kind of selective memory easier to promote.) Then as now, what we wanted most was to forget our troubles. In recession, as in war — and also, conveniently, in times of peace or prosperity — the movies we evidently need are the ones that offer us the possibility, however fanciful or temporary, of escape.
Maybe so. But what if, at least some of the time, we feel an urge to escape from escapism? For most of the past decade, magical thinking has been elevated from a diversion to an ideological principle. The benign faith that dreams will come true can be hard to distinguish from the more sinister seduction of believing in lies. To counter the tyranny of fantasy entrenched on Wall Street and in Washington as well as in Hollywood, it seems possible that engagement with the world as it is might reassert itself as an aesthetic strategy. Perhaps it would be worth considering that what we need from movies, in the face of a dismaying and confusing real world, is realism.

I don’t want to spoil any plots, but if you have read this far, it will hardly surprise you to learn that, in these movies, dreams generally do not come true. Antonio Ricci never did recover his bicycle.
“They all of them, in a way, can be connected to the myth of Sisyphus,” Rahmin Bahrani said to me, as our conversation ranged from his own films to those of his peers and precursors. “Because it’s like, that’s it: you will push the stone up to the top, and it will come back down again.” In contrast, Bahrani said, Hollywood wish-fulfillment tales — or the faux-independent dramas of adversity followed by third-act redemption — did not strike him as hopeful at all. “They just don’t make any sense,” he said. “They create massive confusion.” To which his own films (and films like “Ballast,” “Wendy and Lucy,” “Sugar” and “Treeless Mountain”) might serve, in their very different ways, as an antidote. Not because they offer grim counsels of despair or paint lurid tableaux of desperation but rather because they take what has always seemed seductively easy about moviemaking — the camera can show us the world — and make it look hard. Their characters undergo a painful process of disillusionment, and then keep going. The disappointment they encounter — the grit with which they face it, the grace with which it is conveyed — becomes, for the audience, a kind of exhilaration. What happens at the end of a dream? You wake up.

Cinema verite I get, understand the value of, and appreciate and will force myself to seek and watch. Stories of sadness and the multiplexity of the human condition are worth seeing, even if it disturbs the bubble of blithe unconcern. But there remains a class of "difficult" movies I cannot bring myself to watch though, even if it will be artistically speaking, "good for me": violent movies. I was trying to get through the first ten minutes of "A Clockwork Orange," and the second rape scene stopped me cold and I refused to see the rest. I couldn't get through "Deliverance" for the same reason. I just don't like violence, especially scenes of rape. This cuts out a whole bunch of movies that are artistically good and valuable, and rape is one of the ugliest human acts that should come to the foreground of discussion. But I can't bring myself to suffer through the bad parts of these movies, even if the ultimate lesson is worthwhile, such is my discomfort. Should I push myself more, in the name of difficult art? How much should we push ourselves and challenge our aesthetic limits in order to better understand the human condition?

Yet another reason to boycott Jezebel.

2009-03-20T09:57:00.000-07:00

My complaints against their faux feminism are many, but when one "feminist" sells out another victim of sexual assault for page views, it's the end of the line for me. Amber has the details.

Discrimination I don't get.

2009-03-19T09:11:00.000-07:00

Well, I don't get a lot of discrimination, even as I understand the cognitive shortcuts of availability heuristics that lead to discrimination, whether invidious or unconscious. But that's a conversation for another day.

I bring this up because of this rather affecting post by Helen about her experiences at Le Bernadin, a very nice restaurant in NYC. Helen is a food blogger for the MenuPages, a swell gal, and a big fan of Eric Ripert (the executive chef/owner), which made the experience all the more disappointing:

I raced home after work and changed from my usual cubicle attire of jeans and ratty t-shirt into a total slickness cocktail dress, high heels, teeny tiny clutch purse. Fancy, dig? So I walk in, Mr. B's not there yet, and present myself to the Maitre d'. "Hi, I'm a few minutes early for a 7:30 reservation." He looks me up and down, sneers, dismisses. "Yes. Well. You may check your coat." A flick of the hand in the general direction of the coat check and he turns back to his reservation book.

On my coat-checkward pivot, an older gentleman comes in, and presents an identical introduction. "Hi, I'm a few minutes early for a 7:30 reservation." It's like a parallel universe: "Of course, sir. May I take your coat? Please make yourself comfortable in the lounge. May I have the bartender make you a drink?

It didn't get better. When Mr. B arrived, we were led to a crappy table next to the kitchen door. Okay, overlookable, all restaurants have crappy tables and someone needs to sit in them. But then the captain comes over and hands us our menus, opened to the dinner menu, which he explains. Then he walks away.

So we call after him — actually, we explain, we were planning on ordering the tasting menu. Is that available? So yes, actually, it turns out it is, and he flips the page and shows it to us. "The tasting menus are $135 and $185 dollars," he takes care to note. Thanks, dude, the price is printed on the page. He starts to walk away again.

I have enough multi-course tasting menus at enough super-fancy restaurants (I know, pity me) to know that sometimes even the best service has an off-day, and I'm forgiving of it. But just as the maitre d' was welcoming and warm to the middle-aged man who walked in thirty seconds after I did, the service captain's back was always being hastily turned to us so that he could attend, friendly and with notable graciousness, to the table to our left. And in front of us. And diagonally to the right. It wasn't an off-day. We were, apparently, off-customers.

Look, I don't want to say that it was because we're young that we got such bad service, but oh my god, it was totally because we are young. I'm not really the type to march into a restaurant and declare "Hello, I am a former cookbook editor* who is now a food blogger, i.e. I know my shit, and my dining companion works in finance, i.e. we are not going to cheap out on you. Treat us accordingly." If I did that, I would be an asshole. Because there shouldn't be any "accordingly" treatment for a food pro and a rich dude.

Probably the Maitre d' has more accumulated experience about this, but I can't even understand the basis for his discrimination and/or cognitive laziness that he made such a snap judgment. Did he judge lovely Helen's shoes and bag to determine her ability to pay? (I am sure they were fab, much more so than my Naturalizer shoes.) In any case, why couldn't he assume that Helen and Mr. B were second year law firm associates or flush investment bankers ready to go to town with a tasting menu + wine? Ok, maybe now that there's a recession, there may be less of that, as everyone tightens their Prada belts and the financial services people are laid off left and right. But still, it seems to me illogical to assume that 20-somethings are unlikely to be able to afford a fine dining experience, and treating them badly ensures that they will not be repeat customers, even if they could afford to be. In fact, as age discrimination often skews the other direction in employment, I would expect older workers to be more affected by lay-offs (you have to pay them more for their experience), and given the reduction in defined contribution plans (no more pensions) and the abysmal savings rate and crashing housing market (many had their chief source of assets in the value of their house), it may well be likely that the 20-something has more income and earning potential than most middle aged Americans.

I'm not arguing for age discrimination against the middle-aged! I am merely saying that it seems wholly illogical and incomprehensible for nice restaurants to discriminate against 20-somethings! About as logical as discrimination in tipping. It would take a relatively cultured and knowledgeable diner to choose such an establishment, so why presume their inability to pay? Maybe it's my relaxed, go-with-the-flow geographical milieu, but TD and I have always had the nicest service 'round our parts. Even the super fancy "best restaurant in the world" was extremely gracious to us when they expressed their apologies that the waiting list was much longer than the date for which we wanted to dine. And you know what? One day we'll go to that restaurant. Nothing makes me more nervous than snooty people treating me rudely and judging me. I don't have as emotional a connection to a chef and his food as Helen does, so I feel doubly sorry for her for her bad experience.

In any case, Helen gets it exactly right--despite whatever presumptions, correct or incorrect, logical or illogical the Maitre d' may have had about her worthiness as a customer and her ability to pay, she deserved good service:

At a restaurant of the caliber and reputation of Le Bernardin there is one of two scenarios for a table: One, they're the kind of person for whom this isn't a break-the-bank experience. They're the "you know, I've really been craving that mackerel at Le B, let's go next week" table. They should get excellent service, because they're the backbone of the restuarant's business.

Two, they're not that type. They're tourists splurging on a special dinner. They're a young couple who've saved up for a couple months to spare no expense on a birthday celebration. Heck, they're a young couple who haven't saved up for a couple months, and will frugally and perhaps embarrassedly order the precisely cheapest things on the menu, because it is a special occasion and they have decided that, credit card debt be damned, they would like to spend that occassion at Le Bernardin. They should get excellent service, because they fucking deserve it.

Yet another thing I will never get: deplorable service from an industry that is based on the giving of service, such that they are called "the service industry." Dude, do your job. I also hate any and all professors who are demeaning to students on the basis of class, gender, or race, as if to impart the divine liquor of knowledge is beneath them, and only the most worthy may be supplicants. This all fills me with enormous class resentment and indignant rage.

I don't get the point of this happy blog

2009-03-16T21:40:00.000-07:00

The Happiness Project. Wha?

I'm working on a book, THE HAPPINESS PROJECT--a memoir about the year I spent test-driving every principle, tip, theory, and scientific study I could find, whether from Aristotle or St. Therese or Martin Seligman or Oprah. THE HAPPINESS PROJECT will gather these rules for living and report on what works and what doesn’t. On this daily blog, I recount some of my adventures and insights as I grapple with the challenge of being happier.

The author, Gretchen Rubin, is very smart and a very well trained...lawyer. (No, not going to insert joke here.) But really, what are her qualifications to tell you how to be happy? Why does she have a mirrored Slate blog?

I mean, I've read some interesting stuff that came out of the most recent "Happiness and Its Causes" conference in Australia (most of it is the usual stuff from psychologists on your affect and disposition; what affects (heh) your affect and disposition, biochemical realities/social constructs of happiness; how happiness can be measured, etc.). There's currently a call for papers for a conference on "The Pursuit of Happiness," about 19th century constructs of happiness. There's plenty of research out there showing that happiness is largely a biochemical reaction and a social construct. This stuff I get. This stuff is science and history. This stuff is interesting.

Rubin's stuff, however, is remarkably poorly written, shallow, and trivial (the parts that are not quoting from others) and I really distrust her methodology of "test-driving" the principles. It sounds like a gussied up version of "The Secret" or that woman who spent a year following Oprah's advice. Don't believe me? Here's Rubin's "happiness manifesto":

• To be happy, you need to consider feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, and an atmosphere of growth.
• One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy; One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.
• The days are long, but the years are short.
• You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy.
• Your body matters.
• Happiness is other people.
• Think about yourself so you can forget yourself.
• “It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” -- G. K. Chesterton
• What’s fun for other people may not be fun for you, and vice versa.
• Best is good, better is best.
• Outer order contributes to inner calm.
• Happiness comes not from having more, not from having less, but from wanting what you have.
• You can choose what you do, but you can’t choose what you like to do.
• You manage what you measure.
• “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” -- Robert Louis Stevenson

And here are her "twelve commandments":

And her "secrets of adulthood":

By doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished.
People don’t notice your mistakes and flaws as much as you think.
It's nice to have plenty of money.
Most decisions don't require extensive research.
Try not to let yourself get too hungry.
Even if you think they are fake holidays, it's nice to celebrate Mother's Day and Father's Day.
If you can't find something, clean up.
The days are long, but the years are short.
Someplace, keep an empty shelf.
Turning the computer on and off a few times often fixes a glitch.
It's okay to ask for help.
You can choose what you do; you can't choose what you LIKE to do.
Happiness doesn't always make you feel happy.
What you do EVERY DAY matters more than what you do ONCE IN A WHILE.
You don't have to be good at everything.
Soap and water removes most stains.
It's important to be nice to EVERYONE.
You know as much as most people.
Over-the-counter medicines are very effective.
Eat better, eat less, exercise more.
What's fun for other people may not be fun for you--and vice versa.
People actually prefer that you buy wedding gifts off their registry.
Houseplants and photo albums are a lot of trouble.
If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough.
No deposit, no return.

This is stuff you can get in any self-help book or the less judgmental pages of a women's magazine! "It's nice to have plenty of money"?! Truer words never spoken, also none more obvious, also none more borne of privilege. This is totally feel goody, New Agey stuff! I don't even know what she is prescribing with"your body matters"! I know that this is purely self-promotion and book hawking on the part of the author. So why is Slate giving her a venue? The Green Lantern, for however annoyingly moralistic it is, is at least useful if I cared how much energy my blog's bandwidth takes.

No one can tell you how to be happy, or how to get happy. I say this to you as a lapsed Buddhist who grew up learning The Four Noble Truths of Suffering (so if you learn them and act them you suffer less, which is supposed to get you to happier). I have even confessed to you my desire to cut negativity from my life (so much for that, given this critical post). But there's just some sort of huge disconnect between this general "improve your happiness quotient" advice and real life problems that would take more than "activate your inner self" kind of posturing.

If you have specific problems, you can get some advice on those, I think, if the advice/solutions are feasible and you have the wherewithal and means to solve them. You know, like if you are unhappy with your job, your partner, your family dynamic, you can talk to a psychologist and learn behavioral therapy techniques for coping with problems that you can't solve and for acting to improve situations you can change, or at least change your response to them. Obviously, unhappiness stemming from poverty/abuse/trauma/structural conditions are harder to "solve," and all the therapy in the world (if you can afford it) won't make the bills/cancer go away. If you have biochemical bases for not being happy, you can get medication for that if you can afford the health insurance and the pills. But I am rather annoyed at this branch of self-helpism that is more like "suggestions for the mild to moderate life enhancement and amelioration of the delicate concerns of the bourgeoisie." It is true that getting organized makes you feel better. Oh, if only my only concern were the cluttered state of my desk and home, rather than huge debt, fears of being unemployable, being totally behind in work, and how the current economic recession is affecting my most loved ones.

The nail in the coffin: Rubin finds Gwyneth Paltrow insightful.

dollhouse, reviewed

2009-03-13T00:46:00.000-07:00

This post is dedicated to Jason W., who wrote me a very excellent review of the show. If not for the fact that I watch it on Sundays through Hulu, he'd be an excellent IM buddy to watch the show live with. I owe him an email, and my own review. But I though I'd share the TV addiction.

Dollhouse was created by Joss Whedon. Need I say more? YES. Whedon is the reason I started watching the show. He is the only reason I am continuing to watch it. I am not saying that I am a huge TV snob. My taste for high brow, highly scripted TV shows notwithstanding (The Wire, Mad Men), I really love a good drama/comedy, and I have been known to watch those procedural shows with abandon (sign me up for a Law and Order: SVU marathon). I don't even make any pretensions about how I refuse to watch TV. I just refuse to buy another digital-ready TV, and I am lazy about getting an antenna for my 20 inch TV. But I watch a lot of TV on the internet and on DVD. So I know of what I speak.

Dollhouse is good TV. Entertaining, well-designed set, heart-pumping action-filled plots and lots of hot women doing hot things. It is not the best show though. Do not expect it to be nominated for an Emmy. I am waiting for the Whedon to kick in. According to the Onion's AV Club, the show will hit its stride in the sixth episode, as the first five episodes are designed to be stand-alone episodes to hook new viewers. Ok, I can wait for the incredibly complex, multilayered, and drawn out plots that all Whedon fans have grown to love. What I am also waiting for, though, is better dialogue, the completely lacking Whedonesque humor, better plots even if stand alone (some are really lame, like the one with the backup singer), and better acting. Because I am a person who greatly enjoys bad and cheesy movies (Center Stage, Pure Country starring George Strait), it is all the more disappointing when my minimum threshhold for acting is not met. Dang, Eliza Dushku. What is up with you. Why you gotta be like the same girl from Chico in the '90s, actin' like you all tough and shit (see, e.g. Bring it On, Buffy). What up with the lack of inflection, yo? I'm half expecting her to say "aiiight" or something in some episode.

Onto the substantive critique: the main premise of the show is that there's a big company that gets young women and men (so far, the show's focus is on the women) to sign up for a personality wipe so that they can become "actives" and be deployed by the agency as ANYTHING their clients want. Yes, the agency is one big pimp service. Many of the assignments are romantic (read: prostitute), and I swear in a brief camera swing I saw a girl dressed up like a geisha. Ewwwww. There are other assignments, some life-saving. Actives can be deployed as body guards, midwives, super criminals, etc. Dushku's character is named "Echo." It took me till the second episode to figure out that this corresponds to the military alphabet, and I only know that from decades watching Star Trek. Anyway, Echo is "special." She's better able to adapt than other actives. After every "engagement," the actives are wiped clean, and they in the "tabula rasa" state are like children, or severely mentally disabled adults. They are programmed to know how to eat, shower, and enjoy exercise (they gotta keep fit in order to save lives/have sex). But they aren't programmed with any identity other than recognition of their name, their handlers, and innate docility. Apparently, programming them with more leads to bloodshed, which is what happened with an active-gone-psycho named Alpha, who is obsesed with Echo. That is the plot to watch, and that's why I'm going to keep watching. This is the multi-episode Whedonoesque plot I'm talking about, and I'm hoping Alpha is as evil as Buffy's Caleb.

Why Echo is so special I'll never know. I wanted Carla Gugino for this role. Someone with emotional range. True, Echo doesn't need much--her blank state is pretty much like any vacant, vapid starlet, and in her other incarnations she is appropriately sexy and fun and kick-assy. So what kind of acting am I waiting for? I dunno. The other actors around Echo are much better. I love, love Harry Lennix as Echo's handler Boyd, and he has the sufficient gravitas and pathos to convey his moral ambiguity about the project. Also wonderful is Amy Acker, a doctor who was cut up by Alpha and expresses a more personally-rooted ambivalence about the project. Whereas Boyd's is borne of an inner sense of morality, the Doctor's stems from a betrayal of trust.

Two other favorite characters are Topher, an evil genius who does all the programming, and Ms Dewitt (Olivia Williams), who is a cold administrator of the agency and super cool. Jason W. hits the nail on the head by identifying Topher as similar to the Evil Trio from Buffy--because of his moral flexibility, he can't see the evil. He describes the organization as great humanitarians fulfilling people's dreams. He doesn't see what's so problematic about wiping people's personalities, which is tantamount to murder if we identify life as encompassing more than the corporeal body. Blah blah soul blah blah. Actually, I am uncomfortable with the murder metaphor, since I am pro-death. I believe in assisted suicide, for example. Yet this is not the same, and so I will refrain from making such a cautious argument for limiting the definition of life. Ok, this is like murder. What is particularly troublesome for me is the complete stripping of human agency. It's not so much that they're killing people by making them not exist and reinventing them. It's more that with every engagement, they're being forced again and again to do something that wouldn't be in their will to do.

It's the repeat violation of free will that I can't stand. Killing someone is just a one-time thing. In the show, Echo is shown as having "no choice" but to flee her life and start over with the agency, but Jason W. is sure (and I agree) that that lack of choice will be problematized. The rather unsettling premise of the show, that a corporation owns people to use as they see fit (often as sex slaves) is really off-putting, but no one in the agency is portrayed as sympathetic. In a way, at least it's honest. For all the debate about sex work as being work that some women choose, we must question whether such work is really a legitimate choice. Real-life prostitutes have more agency than any of the actives, to be sure. They "chose" to go into this line of work, sometimes they can choose their johns, etc. But is this all really a choice? Without completely denying all sex workers agency, aren't there socioeconomic and structural factors that led to this constrained "choice" between sex work and other work? Given a choice between sex work and other work, would prostitutes choose sex work? Or is all of sex work hard to distinguish from other forms of sex-trafficking, in which the coercive forces are more apparent? If anything, this show does highlight the problematic construction of choice in the modern age. We do make our own choices, for the most part. But our ability to choose and the choices we may choose from are constrained by forces beyond our control, and for some the constraints may be greater than for others. And clearly, in a world where nothing is your choice and you have a complete lack of agency, for however sexy and bad-ass you are, you are the most pitiful creature. So despite my annoyance at Dushku, I am rooting for Echo. Anything to keep Harry Lennix and Amy Acker employed! The guy who plays this FBI guy obsessed with exposing the Dollhouse is ok, too. I need to watch Battlestar Galactica. So far, Ballard seems one note.

Recommended if you like Brave New World + Eternal Sunshine + The Pretender + Buffy + hot chicks.

like a moth to a flame burned by the fire

2009-03-12T13:00:00.000-07:00

So one of my accidental New Year's resolutions (because the great reorganization project is still buried under piles of books and papers) was to cut out excessive negativity and anger from my life. This is not a Buddhist thing. I am a terrible meat-eating and greedy person. Just more a blood pressure thing. I just get too upset over stuff. And I tend to ruminate on it. And I tend to talk about it, and TD is sick of hearing about it too. Why get upset when I can avoid being upset? It's not even upset for a good reason, like say political mobilization. Mostly it's just being appalled at what jerks and idiots people can be. There's some social function in being appalled, because that means we feel some sort of norm violation or we reinforce some sense of ethics, like when I am appalled that people with herpes do not inform their partners and instead just go at it. But it's not like I can do anything about it. And continuing to read more of the same doesn't do much to benefit that social function, but rather just makes me really mad and upset about something and then I become negative too. And I am one of the smiliest, loveliest people you will ever meet! This is why I don't read that Roissy guy. Just don't feed the hate, and don't feed the attention these hateful bloggers thrive on.

So I Leechblocked a bunch of sites: blogs of people I can't stand to read (whether because of disagreement with everything they say, their narcissistic negativity, or both) and Jezebel and Jezebel bloggers. Unfortunately, other sites I read (like XX Factor) link to Jezebel. Or the bloggers I stopped reading seem to get into flame wars with the bloggers I do like to read. A flame war ensues, and I find myself in the curious in-between position, but clearly I am not one to be indecisive, and so I do choose sides, but because I don't want to get in a flame war, I don't say anything even though I'd like to. Sigh. Sometimes, there's just no getting away from it all. I suppose I could stop blogging or reading blogs. Sometimes, I think I should.

yet another front in the mommy wars

2009-03-12T11:57:00.000-07:00

Hanna Rosin has a great article called "The Case Against Breast Feeding" in this month's Atlantic. It's especially good read in conjunction with Jill Lepore's "If Breast is Best, Why are Women Bottling Their Milk?" article in the New Yorker.

The gist of both articles is not to posit La Leche or the American Pediatrics Society as a vast conspiracy to chain mothers to their babies, but that the statistics on the health benefits of breast-feeding are marginal (within statistical insignificance) at best, and so you're not feeding your baby this super vaccine and intelligence juice that will make them super smart and healthy super babies. And if you don't breastfeed, you need not worry that you are feeding your baby poison that will make them sickly and stupid. Formula babies can turn out quite healthy and smart, depending on how you raise them when you stop breast-feeding. And that there are real costs to breast-feeding as a working mother, in the form of lost hours of sleep (that your husband does not have to share the cost of) and lost productivity during the day as you take pump breaks, even if your employer accommodates you with a lactation room. As Rosin writes:

The debate about breast-feeding takes place without any reference to its actual context in women’s lives. Breast-feeding exclusively is not like taking a prenatal vitamin. It is a serious time commitment that pretty much guarantees that you will not work in any meaningful way. Let’s say a baby feeds seven times a day and then a couple more times at night. That’s nine times for about a half hour each, which adds up to more than half of a working day, every day, for at least six months. This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is “free,” I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.

I remain very ambivalent about all of this, since I am interested in caregiver discrimination and agree with Lepore that turning breast-feeding into a "women's rights issue" is yet another way we don't deal with the issue of adequate family leave polices. Yes, accommodating breast-feeding is important. But so is adequate leave. And what irks me the most is how the entire debate is posited as a responsiblity of only the mother, such that her failure to breastfeed is an example of her moral failure, and her selfishness. If the benefits of breast-feeding (apart from the bonding, which I am sure may be achieved in other ways) are marginal and cannot be disentangled from other confounders such as parental education and income level (which tends to produce smarter, healthier babies), then why demonize mothers who choose formula over breast? I haven't decided yet what I will do, but I would personally expel some moralizing "lactation expert" from my delivery room, and I will probably avoid all "mommy and me" groups. That there is even such a huge debate shows how this issue has been taken away from the individual parents to be some sort of banner for the many competing groups, who may agree on the policy recommendation, but for different reasons. And only few of these reasons may be your own, and quite possibly many of them don't consider the realities you will find yourself in as you reenter the workforce or struggle personally with issues of co-parenting.

They always end those public service public health ads with "talk to your doctor." Sure, I'd recommend that, as well as reading up on the literature yourself, especially if you can read statistics. But I'd also say to talk to yourself, and your partner. If this is all about the mother and her child (parents! their!), then why have the parents disappeared from the entire debate? "Find out what's best for you" is what they usually say, or used to.

Should Belle Watch "The Watchmen"?

2009-03-10T10:15:00.000-07:00

Pros: I really like graphic novels and comics, and I like Alan Moore's work. This is the movie I've been looking forward to.

Cons: Bad reviews. Really bad reviews (Anthony Lane doesn't like anything, but when he accuses a movie of misogyny, then...). Directed by Zack Snyder, who did the fatuous (but since I hadn't read the comic novel, at the time I saw it entertaining) 300. Almost gratuitously violent, and I don't like gratuitous violence. Like, I really don't like it and I am incapable of maintaining disbelief and so visual depictions of violence, even if fake, really bug me. I like enough to make a point, but all the reviews predict that I will do that annoying thing I do and grip TD's arm and bury my head in his shoulder at the grisly parts (say the rape scene, or the cleaver scene).

If the movie is good enough, I will try to stomach the violence and see a comic book ruined.

What say you all? Did any of you see the movie yet? What did you think?

greetings from someplace warmer than where you are

2009-03-06T13:44:00.001-08:00

Unless you're in Florida or something. I have escaped my cold and rainy climate for sunnier pastures. I am writing from a guest bedroom in the Los Angeles area, and oh yes, haterz, I am blogging poolside. 65 degrees is not exactly sunburn weather, but it is dry and warm here, with a cooling breeze. I always thought Brain Candy got it wrong--it shouldn't feel like 72 degrees in your head at all time, it should be somewhere in the 65-67 range.

I have a love-hate relationship with Los Angeles. Most of the people I love and am not related to and therefore love with free will live here. But I also have some unpleasant memories of this place that are tied specifically to living here and hating the traffic and congestion, and the rather high maintenance fakey glame. If you wonder why Orange County seems so plastic and high-lighted and spray tanned, it's because it's imitating Los Angeles. Still, as I'm in a suburb just outside of Los Angeles, I am so far immune from the stiletto-and-designer jeans-wearing crowd, and I am comfortably wearing my Patagonia fleece jacket that's been branded with TD's company logo. No judgment can reach me in my lovely guest bedroom with the queen sized bed dressed in robin's egg blue with the vase of fresh flowers next to it. Dude, everyone should vacation for cheap this way. I am helping out with the cooking for my dear hosts, and really, I am eating awesomely.

Although, if I could afford to/had need to go out for dinner, Los Angeles is the place to go. Other than NYC, I can't think of a place that has better (and a greater variety, and a greater number) of ethnic food choices. I'm outside of Los Angeles, but if I were in LA proper, there'd be any number of neighborhoods to drive through on Pico Blvd. and get awesome meals. The food (and live theatre and music scene) is almost enough to make you want to put up with the necessity of driving, unbearable traffic, and lip-glossy fake glamour. Almost. I will take my own cold/rainy climate, good bourgie but so-so ethnic food, excellent public transportation and comfortable non-glamourous fleece-wearing compatriots any day. They may be sanctimonious in that crunchy granola sense, but they never implicitly demand that I wear heels and flashy designer duds.

That said, it's a nice place to visit. I never focus on the place so much as the people I'm visiting though, so I highly recommend that you visit my friend The Teacher and stay with her.

random roundup

2009-03-03T10:44:00.000-08:00

1. A book club about Marbury v. Madison!

2. Freakonomics does a Q&A with Lawrence Lessig.

3. Climate change civil disobedience.

4. Pay students for grades!

5. Macro-to-macro causation.

Sorry for the light blogging lately. I've been working on figuring out my own meso-level theories, which makes me haz a sad about how hard it is to come up with a coherent model. I'm also flying out myself on Wednesday night to visit friends for a long weekend, and likely there will be more blogging than there has been, just because what else do you do when your friends work all day (besides work yourself, heh). I have also recommitted to Leechblock, and am considering livign in complete ignorance from 10 am to 7 pm every day by adding NYT and Slate to Blockset 1. But then how would I do random roundup? What if the recession deepens and I did not read about it at the moment it happened? Oh wait. Okay, I'll try to start adding more things to Leechblock.

Saturday Poet: Theodore Roethke

2009-02-28T15:30:00.001-08:00

We haven't done these for a while--mainly because sometimes it's a lot of work trying to find 2-3 poems from one poet that I like online so that I don't have to type them up, or else me typing up 2-3 poems from my limited library (I don't buy anthologies, usually).

Things I have been up to: I baked a monstrous lot of black forest cake that I gave away (post to come, it ain't pretty), and I redecorated my entire apartment for under $20 using fancy wrapping paper from Snow & Graham. I framed the paper in my heavy black frames on my white walls, and covered my formerly white paper lampshades. Result: cheerful! colorful! whimsical! feminine! A welcome change from my black and white photography, elegant as that was. I needed to brighten up my apartment, as it's been so dreary out. And there's nothing more eye-popping than magenta on a chartreuse background (it looks nice, I promise). Pictures to come. Remember A Room of One's Own and Vindication of the Rights of Women? I take this luxury for granted, and also under-utilize it--for so long as I live alone, in an uncompromising space, in which I both live and work, I can make this space whatever I want, and work well and live happily in my own home. Well, I can't paint my walls. But I can put up bright zinnia printed paper!

I am also writing and working, and deciding whether I am using more macro or micro theories, or if I am going to be labeled as meso-level. Argh. It would be better if I could package myself as macro or micro, I think. But we'll see what happens. And in the meantime, I have to still take breaks and shake my hands all about (hokey pokey!) as I wait for my second round of steroid shots on Monday. Grrr!

Onto the poetry:

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

I Knew a Woman

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin:
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing did we make.)

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

The Geranium

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,
She looked so limp and bedraggled,
So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,
Or a wizened aster in late September,
I brought her back in again
For a new routine--
Vitamins, water, and whatever
Sustenance seemed sensible
At the time: she'd lived
So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded carpet, the stale
Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.
(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)

The things she endured!--
The dumb dames shrieking half the night
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me--
And that was scary--
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Elegy for Jane
(My student, thrown by a horse)

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

random reviews of things

2009-02-25T00:05:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to reduce my levels consumption, but here are things I have particularly enjoyed:

My second (or third) time reading it, Pfeffer and Salancik's The External Control of Organizations remains awesome, useful, and so clearly written. It's super interesting and readable.
Trader Joe's fruit roll ups (or fruit leather, or dried fruit strips or whatever) are pretty tasty. Thick and dense, not unlike the dried fruit jerky you can buy at Indian grocery shops, and therefore far superior to that thin, cellophane-like fruit roll up of yesteryear. I like mango and passionfruit. At $0.49-59 per unit (some have extra fiber), I think that's a little pricey, but it's a good snack to tide one over on the walk back from the store.
The Lysol Conair steam mop isn't bad for the price, and I didn't want to use disposable Swiffers. Actually, I hate those. It beats scrubbing on my hands and knees, and it cleans with steam and/or all purpose cleanser. It has a swively head and can go around objects and into corners. But it's hard to push around and you have to wait for the water and steam to come out, and I'd recommend washing out the little cloth it comes with after each room. Otherwise, I don't see the point of how it gets things clean.
I like shell-shaped pasta more than any other pasta shape, just because it's fun to eat and holds more pesto or bechemel in its little inner chamber than penne.
Pantene "Always Smooth" works better than Pantene "Classic Care."
I like to use potato bread hamburger buns when making sandwiches to bring to campus, because they don't get all soggy like sandwich bread and stand up to the weight of my leftover fillings (lamb burgers, roast chicken/beef, etc.).

throwing in the (kitchen) towel

2009-02-24T18:46:00.000-08:00

Augh! And I haven't even made it yet! One of TD's requested desserts is something called "Black Forest Cake." I have never eaten such a thing and did not know it existed. I mean, I have eaten black forest ham (delicious). But not cake.

I'm a pretty decent baker, but I am terrible at cake decoration. I just don't spread things smoothly and don't have an eye for that thing. And I don't have any piping bags or decorative tips. And I'm not big on frosting. So I tend to bake simple things: cookies, frosting-free cakes and cupcakes, bar cookies, pies (with my own pastry crust, of course). Nothing fancy. I certainly don't bake tall layer cakes.

So, I am ready to throw in the towel with the very idea of this cake. Check out this four-part article series on the cake! I had to call B.W. just to make sure I was getting the right kind of cherries--and I still have to make a compote (and a ganache, and a cake, and a mousse). I'm still missing the kirsch, because I hate buying liquor (which is expensive) and never using it again. Maybe I can get an aiport sized bottle at the liqour store. This had better be worth the effort! I think I am going to go with a deconstructed Black Forest cake though, because I am lazy and a failure of a woman.

Usually I don't let complicated-ness or time-intensivity stand in the way of food, but I have to say, fancy layer cakes (especially those that require a fondant) are a pain in the butt. Maybe one day I will make a proper fancy layer cake.

Any white whale recipes out there for you? One day, just one day, I will make a layer cake.

you've made your bed and now you have to lie in it

2009-02-24T00:02:00.000-08:00

Phoebe remarks on the Obama family's efforts to maintain discipline and normalcy for their daughters by way of making them make their own beds and clean their own rooms:

While telling the housekeepers not to make the girls' beds in the morning seems reasonable, bed-making is something I've never understood altogether--why must a bed be made, except on the occasion of sheet-change/laundry day? Can't a person (child or adult) OK with a messy bed have it messy in the morning and return to it messy each night? I get how having a maid clean a room could spoil a kid, but I tend to think parents who make their children make their beds (as opposed to saying, your bed will be as you leave it) do so to make a point, a point that could just as easily be made by having children help out with chores that actually must get done, such as dishes, laundry, vacuuming, cooking, etc.

For the Obamas, whose goal is providing normalcy, I can understand why such a rule might make up, character-building-wise, for chores the kids simply wouldn't get a chance to do, it being the White House and all.

As a non-parent, I can only speculate, but maybe enforced bed-making is a way of telling your children that they don't make the rules, that this isn't their property, and that they must not only pull their weight around the house and lack grown-up privileges - both reasonable requests - but also submit to constant reminders of their inferior status. And I'm not sure I see the point of taking things that far.

So, I wouldn't normally impute such authoritarian motives on the Obamas, except that my parents definitely wanted to put me in my place. Half of the orders I had to comply with as a child were to reaffirm my inferior status, both as a female and as a child, so yes, that part of it sucks, although I am not sure I want to go so far as to not establish any authority over my future children. Plus, "good" habits like "tidiness" carry some sort of character-building, no?

Apart from the stacks of articles that are piled high on my desk and my totally messy desk tray (thank goodness for online automatic bill pay) that betrays my lack of paper organization and continual works-in-progress (no really, I need that book I took out a year ago for THIS project too), I'm pretty tidy. My workspace is what it is because that's the only way I can work--I need every book I might require around me. But I'm tidy otherwise. I like to keep my counters clean, and like to break out the 409 after each cooking/eating episode. Shoes are removed at the door, and still I sweep up every other day and mop every week (or at least every two weeks). The bathroom is cleaned just as frequently, and the laundry is sorted by colors in bins, done twice a month, and then neatly folded. There aren't piles of clothes (although there are piles of books and Buffy DVDs). I even fold my underwear into neat little squares and put them away by color in my dresser (okay, TMI, I admit). And yes, I make my bed. Every day, and it takes like 10 seconds to fluff the duvet and pillows and arrange them. Not just when company comes over, and certainly TD is not formal company, and he is...not as tidy as I am and would not care at all if the bed was unmade or if there were clothes on the floor. I am not saying I am a better person. But I'm tidier, and I care about my surroundings and the impression they give to others (not that I have many guests), and I feel calmer in a tidy environment (apart from the chaos of my desk, but at least the papers and books are organized by project/subject in neat stacks).

So I'm just saying, what's wrong with making little girls make their beds? Maybe part of it is telling them what to do and where their place in the family hierarchy is. But the fact remains that they are not the decision-makers of the family, and that they must learn the good habit of tidiness, and so there. Of course, this small issue is actually a much larger one--what would you require of your children? What is your fundamental child-rearing philosophy? TD is more laissez-faire. I find, to my horror, that mine is closer to my strict authoritarian parents than I'd like to admit. I never want to be like my parents to my own children. I mean, I want my children to respect me and listen to me and not do bad things, but I never want to instill that type of fear in my own children. I never want to yell at my children for the simplest thing as if it reflects a character flaw or failure to be a proper ____, such as leaving a sock in the dryer or failing to make a bed. So it's a really uncomfortable feeling to realize that I am not the liberated, liberal Westernized person I thought I was. I actually am as deferential to authority and later, willing to exercise authority as my crazy parents raised me to be!

Isn't there a balance between instilling "good" habits in children and being my psycho strict mean parents? TD was raised completely differently, and while less tidy than I am about clothes and dust, he's also free of all of this psycho baggage. I am sort of coming around to his way of thinking. 1/10 of my mental space is devoted every day to keeping things under control, including dust, objects, clothes, etc. I do not, I repeat, I do not, want this to extend to being a control freak. Right now, I live by myself, and I am not totally unbearable. But I am worried that I might be. I do not want to fight with my partner over who does which chore, and I do not want to get angry at my children for not being tidy. Tidiness is a virtue, yes, and I do like having a clean and well-organized house. But I also want a happy and healthy home. Perhaps just let the children do whatever they want to do, so long as they stay out of real trouble and get their work done and don't grow up to be too lazy and pampered.

Perhaps I wouldn't be so worried about balancing the two (it's not like you can't have both), were it not for the ingrained from birth propensity to control-freakiness and apoplectic rage over disorder. You know how alcoholics just have to eventually stay away from all parties to avoid even being near alcohol? It's sort of that way with this type of "red-flag" issue that could very well mean me becoming something I'm not. I avoid all sorts of things and people because I don't like the effect they have on me, that I become a different person I don't like. Avoid. I wish to avoid becoming a Strict Asian Parent.

So, ways to avoid the conflict between clean and too-strict: 1) Only be with people and later raise compliant people who are as tidy as I am. Hmm, that's not really an option, and not even a desirable option, given the peculiar attachment I have already formed and my desire to raise children who will become independent, autonomous people. 2) Chill the fuck out and relax a little bit, because dirt is good for babies and if I live far enough away, my parents won't be able to visit and remark on how I fail as a woman because of my untidy house or the tidy house that is due to the housekeeper I waste my money on because I am such a failure of a woman.

I think #2 is the one. I guess I have to get used to the idea of shoes in the house one day, and their attendant dustiness. Excuse me while I shower after shuddering at the very idea of dust.

why i read advice columns

2009-02-20T16:15:00.000-08:00

In keeping with Matt's urgings (it's like he's my sponsor), I've been better about kicking the Modern Love column habit, because it's usually such dreck and it makes me so mad. I am even thinking of kicking the Jezebel habit, because while it's a great link-referral service to things that are interesting/infuriating, it's terrible at its own "substantive commentary" and the comments are completely idiotic, making me despair for modern feminism.

But I still like reading advice columns and can't seem to stop (favorites are Dear Prudence and Since You Asked, although I hate the advice and prefer just reading the weird dilemmas), and according to Alex, this is why:

As a quick perusal online will make clear, people have a penchant for publicizing strange things about their lives. And within the forum of an advice column, they not only admit to certain eccentricities, but often sordid dramas about their friendships, marriages, and families that reveal intimate details about the people involved. And their hope, in all earnestness, is that a one-paragraph response from an imperious looking middle-aged woman (advice columns are written almost solely by women) will solve their problem. Why is it exactly that anyone would write to a stranger for advice on a meddling mother-in-law, when family and friends are probably better equipped to offer solutions, knowing, as they do, the people involved in the conflict?

And yet almost every major publication carries at least two or three advice forums by columnists who encourage readers to send them their relationship woes and mother-in-law traumas, subject line: please advise. Audiences lap it up, and with good reason. There is the voyeuristic thrill in learning about other people’s intimate problems, and having a passive, enjoyable vehicle to observe and comment on how other people choose to live their lives. They provide an opportunity to test your own savvy as an advice-giver: Is this the best advice to give, and is this how I would go about solving the problem? And there is the off-chance that a reader will pick up a nugget of wisdom that is applicable to his own life, or learn something that will save him from his own potentially embarrassing social misstep. (Note to self: Don’t crochet a custom doggy bag for first dates.) But the most appealing feature of advice columns is that they give us reassurance that there actually is a correct way to proceed in any given situation, that there are discernible norms that govern social behavior, and they can be pared down into a newspaper-length column in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step fashion.
That advice columns are so popular as venues for articulating the guidelines and parameters that govern social behavior is an indication of how necessary they are. Americans are socially and geographically mobile, always negotiating the democratic tension between hierarchy and equality. They constantly find themselves in ambiguous social situations, and the impulse to impose rules to make their relations clear and predictable has found one of its greatest outlets in the advice column. In effect, advice columnists are contextualizing and re-affirming traditions for successive generations of readers even as the surface of social life changes dramatically.

This is why the columns seem to repeatedly come back to the same topics: relationships, wedding planning, social invitations, work/life balance, domestic issues. These are the themes that dominate our lives, and they are at the same time the ones most impacted by economic forces, social mobility, and the pull of egalitarianism. The reader seeking advice is usually not demanding a return to more traditional social values, but he does believe that there actually is a way—a correct way—to navigate between the twin dangers of undermining social order and adapting to change, and that Ann Landers knows what it is.

I do like seeing how norms are produced, reinforced and disseminated through advice columns, but I usually find all of the advice so terrible that I can't imagine that being the primary functio of why we read these things. I admit that it's my prurient interest in all that is pathetic, sordid, and hapless about my fellow human beings. Not because I necessarily feel a sense of identification and commiseration with these problem-plagued people, but because it's so darn interesting to read how troubled people are by seemingly simple social dilemmas or their occasionally crazy-ass stories and problems that simply cannot be answered by some middle-aged woman with a column. Most of the advice is to seek other advice from legitimate and trained professionals like doctors and psychologists and psychiatrists.

Ah well, I suppose the advice they dole and the norm-producing function these columns fulfill beats Miss Lonelyhearts. And they are entertaining to read in a guilty, dirty, voyeuristic I-delight-in-the-problems-of-mankind way.

Sorry, Matt!

Belle's Macaroni and Cheese

2009-02-20T16:03:00.000-08:00

Pretty darn tasty, and pretty darn bad for you. This is a halved recipe, but I'd say it'd still feed four people really generously. Because we only got through very little of this and are eating it again tonight with the chicken piccata I'm going to make. Careful using a Microplane grater: I shredded my thumb, and that kind of was not awesome and blood-flecked cheese is gross. Next time I will experiment with different cheeses. I imagine gruyere would be nice.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons butter + 1 tablespoon butter
3 tablespoons flour
1/2 lb Vermont Sharp Cheddar cheese, grated.
1/2 lb Monterey Jack cheese, grated
3 cups whole milk
1/2-3/4 lb elbow macaroni or shell pasta
1 tsp. dry ground mustard
1/8 tsp. cayenne
1 tsp. salt
1 cup panko
7-8 fresh sage leaves, chopped finely
1/4 cup grated parmesan

Instructions:

1. Cook the pasta to tender (not al dente!i in salted water, drain, rinse with cold water to stop the cooking process, reserve. you can do this while you do everything else, of course.

2. Make a bechemel:

Melt the butter on medium high till foaming. Add flour, mustard powder, cayenne, stir and cook until fragrant and golden, about 1-2 minutes.

Slowly whisk in the milk. Turn heat till high, and whisking, bring the milk to boiling. When it reaches a full boil, turn heat down to medium, and constantly whisking, let it reduce at least 5 minutes.

Take it off the heat. Add cheeses and salt stir with a wooden spoon until melted. Add the reserved pasta.

3. Put pot back on medium and heat everything through, 6-8 minutes.

4. Pour mixture into a broil safe baking dish. I used an 8x8 glass Pyrex.

5. Melt remaining tablespoon of butter, again on medium high. Add panko and sage leaves, stir and toast until slightly golden (don't burn or toast too far). Mix with parmesan cheese, use as topping for your mac and cheese.

6. Broil on high until everything is golden and toasty, just a few minutes.

Eat!

Belle's Creamy Wild Mushroom Soup

2009-02-20T15:53:00.001-08:00

My own recipe! Super-delish, and was much enjoyed by The Dude, The Best Friend, and The Best Friend's Husband. You can puree it (or half of it) for a Campbell's can toothless consistency, or leave it chunky like I do.

Serves 4-6.

Ingredients:

8 oz. Shitake mushrooms, chopped
8 oz. Oyster mushrooms, chopped
8 oz. Enoki mushrooms, chopped
Two stalks King Oyster mushrooms, quartered lengthwise, then chopped
1 small yellow onion, finely diced
1/2 bunch fresh sage leaves (7-10), chopped
4-6 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
1/2 cup good red wine
4 cups beef broth
1/4-1/2 cup heavy whipping cream (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

1. Take half the butter, melt on medium high until foamy. Add the onion, sautee for 2 minutes until soft and golden. Add flour and sage, sautee 2-3 minutes more until flour is cooked up (so it doesn't taste pasty at the end).

2. Add remaining butter, and melt. Add mushrooms, and a pinch of salt sautee until soft. King oyster mushrooms will always be chewy, don't worry.

3. Add red wine, bring to a boil, until most of it evaporates. Add beef stock, bring to a boil again. Add cream, stir until you get the level of creaminess you want. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

This is a great starter for a beef entree. I was relatively happy with my braised beef ribs, but it really does matter where you get your beef. At $6.99/lb, I've never been disappointed with my local-and-no-longer-creepy butcher shop, but at $2.99/lb at Safeway, I was really disappointed with the stringiness of the beef, which probably has to do with how it's cut and the quality of it--it should be marbled with fat and not as dry as mine were. Also, it's a dish that requires you to throw out your mirepoix, which seems wasteful. Next time I'm making brisket.

New Kid on the legal job market vs. the academic job market

2009-02-19T01:39:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite bloggers, a Medieval-historian-turned-1L, has great insights into both:

I think I bring a warped perspective to discussions about the employment prospects in law.
(Disclaimer: I don't know much about the legal job market yet, not compared to the academic job market, so my comments here are just gut reactions, not reasoned arguments.)
This article talks about a reported employment rate among 2007 law grads of 92%.
Now, this is troublesome because schools are notorious for reporting ANY employment as employment - so if a law grad is working at Starbucks, hey! they're employed! Moreover, these percentages are based on students' self-reporting, and presumably those who are un- or under-employed are less likely to respond than those happily set with legal employment.
Nonetheless, the idea was floated at this other board that a 92% employment rate wasn't very good, and that, well, it made me laugh. Or cry. When you consider that most people I've seen now concede that maybe 50% of humanities Ph.D.s will get a tenure-track job (and I'd argue that number should probably be lower), 92% sounds like PERFECTION. 80% would sound like perfection. And 70% would sound pretty decent. I mean, maybe there really is 42% worth of wiggle room/exaggeration in the reporting of law grads' employment. But I'd be a little surprised if it were THAT high.
The other major issue with legal employment is an extreme bi-modality (is that a word?) of salaries. Associates - meaning new law grads - at the biggest of BigLaw firms do earn $160K+. (I'll pause while my academic compadres recover from that one.) Of course, firms offer a wide range of salaries, and only a very small number of people will reach such heights. Nonetheless, the article linked above states that the median salary for law grads working at firms is $108K.
The thing is, there are salaries clustered at the top of the scale, and salaries clustered at the bottom of the scale, but very little in the middle. And the same article warns that 38% of law grads are earning $55K or less.
And all I can think is, I would be willing to bet you that there are a LOT of assistant professors throughout this country who still start at less than $55K. (We won't even get into adjuncts, who are, after all, employed in the field for which they trained, and who would therefore be considered successfully employed by legal standards.)

The bottom line, according to New Kid, even taking into consideration how expensive law school is: "It still doesn't sound as bad as academia."

Having read several emails and reports from my own enormous and prestigious R1 university about hiring freezes and curtailing new faculty searches from 135 last year to 25 this year, I am inclined to agree, despite my general position that you should NOT go to law school. But now I just think you shouldn't go to grad school, either. So, one part of my American dream was that my own kids would be financially comfortable enough to study and do what they love. That still seems to be a luxury of those with serious family money. Knowing what I know now, which I didn't ten years ago when I was starting college and humanities Ph.D programs, I would strongly urge my kid to seriously think about job prospects and run the statistical probabilities. It's just so depressing to think about or talk about, but since I didn't make that choice I don't want to harp on it, lest my humanities grad student friends hate me. I played it relatively safe, and I am inclined to think that my kids should as well. TD listened to some family friend about learning a hard science and finance, and he is doing interesting work and feels just as fulfilled as I do (of course, I am a law school sellout, so maybe we are two peas in a pod).

Still, while I strongly resist the "trade school" model of academia, there must be a way to balance doing what you love with less scary job prospects and better pay. No grad student should incur debt, but many do anyway, because fellowships are competitive, and at the big universities, so are TA'ships--and that's how you're funded. And the stipends are pretty meager and may not cover all of your living expenses, and I know plenty who take out loans. MFA programs are especially pricey, considering that people are paying $25-35,000 a year to embrace the bohemian impoverished life of a writer or artist.

Yeah, really, perhaps it's another American dream deferred, but I think I would suggest to all my nieces and nephews and my own future children to really, really think about their major, school, and career choices. In this bad economy, probably lots of Nth generation Americans are still thinking quite pragmatically and practically about these things, so perhaps the second generation of the Lettres will do so as well, and it's not so bad, really. Why do I feel like apologizing for this, as if I am demonstrating a lack of commitment to ideals of education, the humanities, and the liberal arts? I really am still committed to such ideals, but ideals must be balanced by reality. So all I'm saying is double major. Is that such a terrible compromise?

Zoo Pictures: Da Bears (Ditka Reference, Not Slang)

2009-02-19T01:37:00.000-08:00

CUTE OVERLOAD!!

random roundup

2009-02-17T11:48:00.000-08:00

1. This makes me want to link to every Jones Day lawyer in America, except that I'm risk averse and don't want to be sued.

2. What it takes to be a liberal. I qualify!

3. Does this mean that I can't say "I drink my Haterade" anymore?

4. NYT discovers that college students have a sense of entitlement about grades, study finds that students correlate effort exerted with grade deserved. Clearly they haven't yet attended law school or some more rigorous university.

5. I have a Twitter account and occasionally micro-blog links, status updates, seek advice or give my 21 friends responses, but I remain unconvinced that Twitter is the wave of the future. It, like Facebook, is just pretty much no more than a time suck, and I think that most of what it does (get you an answer within 15 seconds, according to the article) can be done through Googling, emailing, or calling someone. I mean, please, David Pogue. Get a grip.

weekend report

2009-02-17T11:36:00.000-08:00

We eschewed the cheesy Valentine's day trappings (and crowded restaurants and pricey prix fixe) in favor of having friends come to visit for a really fun and relaxing weekend. I made many delicious three course things, and have many recipes to blog. Let me just say that wild creamy mushroom soup is like nothing out of a can. We hung out with The Best Friend and her husband, played board games, ate food, talked a lot, and watched funny things. We also went to the city zoo (first time ever for me going to a zoo, very cool) and the science center.

We also watched Slumdog Millionaire, which I loved and would watch again. Yes, I cried. Also, my new dream in life is to become part of a Bollywood dance crowd, or at least replicate some of these moves in a coordinated fashion with TD if we ever have to go to a dance club:

the principle of the thing, movie edition

2009-02-13T01:38:00.000-08:00

I never said that I was principled or consistent, but here goes:

Much as I like fashion and much as I have been known to shop on occasion and much as I like Isla Fischer, I refuse to see "Confessions of a Shopaholic," because it fills me with feminist rage and it makes me want to break stuff.
Much as I like Jennifer Connelly as an actress, I refuse to see "He's Just Not That Into You," because it fills me with feminist rage and it makes me want to break stuff and then set it on fire and toss it through your window.
Much as I love Joaquin Phoenix and much as the positive-ish review on the NYT makes me curious, I refuse to see "Two Lovers" because of my abiding hatred of Gwyneth Paltrow. This hatred excuses my youthful naivete for liking "Sliding Doors," and is proscriptive rather than retroactive and more because John Hannah quotes Monty Python. Ah well, Ms. Economically Tone Deaf would just say "fuck you, hater" to me anyway.
Much as I hated "Before Sunrise," I will see "Medicine for Melancholy," because it sounds smart, self-aware, and not totally oblivious to its own pretension and does not have the much-hated Whiny McEmo Ethan Hawke in it, a hatred that is indeed retroactive.
Much as this tepid review discourages me, I will watch "The International," because I love "travelogue thrillers" and I really love Clive Owen (ever since "Croupier") and Naomi Watts.
Much as this tepid review really, really distresses me, and much as I was annoyed by the straining-to-keep it-real "five by five" chica from Chino mannerisms of the Faith characer in Buffy, I will totally watch "Dollhouse," because I will watch anything Joss Whedon makes, even shadow puppets.

Torn like an old sheet?

2009-02-10T21:58:00.000-08:00

Belle,

Oh sweet JESUS, why did I read that Elle essay linked in the Traister piece? It makes cesareans sound like fun. My entire body is doubled over in sympathy. But isn't that sort of visceral reaction just what Purves was aiming for? The whole point of the female gross-out confessional is to puncture our composure and drill down into the fears and insecurities we mostly suppress.

Breslin's missing the point* when she asks whether "writing about the female body [can] go beyond the literal, transcend the body itself, make a point that exposes something more than the fact that bad things happen when you leave your tampon in for 10 days?" This sort of writing is only superficially about the body; it's about the masks we wear to avoid thinking about our bodies, about the social niceties that feed ignorance, about our own reactions to being confronted with the fundamental universality of being embodied in meat sacks. (Whether it's successful is a function of the writer's skill: no comment on the Jezzies.) The price of silence, as you note, is high. But you're not satisfied with the gross-out status quo:

I am glad to write about women's health issues and sexuality, but I really never want to write about my own body and I will never write about my personal sexuality.** But maybe I am behind the times, and not feminist enough. I mean, the personal is political, right? Perhaps I am antiquated in thinking that while the female body should be studied (most studies use male subjects) and discussed with honesty and openness, the personal body should remain wherever you want it to be, and in most cases is better kept private. Otherwise, we risk losing the individuality that comes with privacy, that while many experiences are shared, our personal relationship to our body is best experienced in private, shared selectively, and kept as our own rather than for public consumption. The body in public is dissected mercilessly and not always in ways that we wish it to be.

The fundamental premise that one could lose one's individuality without keeping these things private strikes me as questionable, especially with respect to discussions of the body. When we tell people that they are unique and special, it's not usually because we're thinking of how their genitals don't look, smell, and taste like anyone else's. We're thinking about what's inside. If self-disclosure is a threat to individuality, confessions about one's hopes, dreams, values, fears, and general emotional state are a far bigger threat. But we praise the ability of literature (fiction and non-fiction) to speak universal truths about the human experience. Moe and Tracie's experiences are still theirs, no less than your experiences of carpal tunnel are yours, despite being shared. Your body may be an rivalrous good, but your discussions about your body aren't. And their choice to open up and share about their bodies is nothing like being dissected by street harassers. They're performing a public service!***

Which gets to Eugene Volokh's post: It was odd, and doesn't really get at the value of the gross-out girl sharing; he postulated the existence of an in-group of menstruators that women might want to be part of, when really it's about breaking down the idea that there is an in-group for which these bodily functions go in some neat, smooth, prescribed way. People are bonding over the idea that there's this immense diversity, and that their own diversity of experience doesn't put them outside some hypothetical norm they derived from 7th grade health class and Summer's Eve commercials.

That's why your idea that we should discuss the female body with honesty and openness but keep the personal body private is problematic and unsatisfying. General statements or impressions about our bodies are often not viewed as trustworthy. If I ask whether it's okay for part of my body to look a certain way, you might tell me that everyone looks a little different and it's fine, but I might think you are patronizing me or trying to spare my feelings or just cutting off an awkward and norm-violatingly explicit line of conversation. The gross-out girl response that "yes, mine looks like that too/no, mine looks like [something else weird]" cuts through all those uncertainties and is immediately reassuring. Recourse to the personal is the one way we can be certain that someone's not bullshitting us, and there's perhaps no sphere of human experience more vulnerable to euphemistic bullshitting than sex.****

But enough bloviating from me on the deep social significance of oversharing. I sent you your convertible mittens. Happy Valentine's Day! I hope they fit over your splints, if need be.

Amber

* Questioning the tone of the Jezebel pieces and comparing it with Sontag's cool prose is likewise off; everything on Jezebel is written with that gonzo air. But anyway.

** You do write about your sexuality, what with the mentions of romance and your relationship values and TD.

*** If gross-out girl columns trickle down and prevent even one man from buying his girlfriend Depends instead of maxi pads then it will be worthwhile.

**** And this is mostly about sex; I doubt this discussion would be going on if the writers in question were just being frank about their IBS.

G.R.O.S.S. Girls

2009-02-10T00:03:00.000-08:00

Click to enlarge:

Amber,

What did you think of this column by Rebecca Traister on the cult of gross-out confessionalism among the writers at Jezebel?

Moe Tkacik wrote about the time she accidentally left a tampon in for 10 days. She described how, on the advice of her editor, she squatted on the floor and started rooting around for the source of the acrid discharge that had been plaguing her for days of sex and drugs and drunkenness. "It was far. I had never reached that far. It was gross-far, nearing the anus zone far."

There were certainly some grumblers in Jezebel's comments section, including one who wrote with anatomical exuberance that Tkacik's odyssey was so disgusting, "My vadge recoiled so hard that I could basically feel it slam into my duodenum." But there were many, many others, expressing sentiments like, "Moe I feel your pain. I was 16 and it was summertime ..." And "Um. This happened to me once. I never told anyone. But one day, after having sex, it just kind of slid out. I'd been wondering what that very strange odour was coming from my yoohoo ... I was very happy to read that I am not the only one this has happened to." One respondent offered, "Midway through, I almost threw up. And yet, kept on reading. At the end, I laughed my ass off. It def. sometimes sucks to be a chick, but at least we can all laugh about the nasty shit together."

Laughing about all the nasty shit -- or crying about it, kibitzing about it, whining about it, bragging about it, confessing it, writing about it, and most important, exposing it -- it's all the rage. Jezebel, the popular women's offshoot of the Gawker empire, has been the leader of the oversharing crusade, with vibrant, aromatic and really graphic posts about everything from lodged tampons to yeast infection remedies to bloody period sex to female ejaculation. (The last, in Tracie Egan's piece, "Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gush," also includes Egan's report that "I live my life perpetually suffering between either mild dehydration or a UTI, meaning that my piss is (ab)normally cloudy, stinky, and dark" ).
Oversharing is in. And for a lot of people who are doing the sharing, or experiencing it, it's not so much "too much information" as it is the next, necessary step in personal-is-political, enlightened honesty about the female body. It's a tack that has been taken in the past, by second-wavers who threw parties at which women were encouraged to take a gander at their cooters with hand mirrors, and by Riot Grrrls, whose zines and music teemed with expressions of female body anxiety. But all that communal celebration or shouted fervor for the female body and its effluvia was always a little too marginal, too embarrassing, reeking of moon-tides and red tents and creaky second-wave earnestness.

Today's version of these revelations can also be celebratory (see "My Little Red Book"), self-punishing (Tkacik and her tampon) and angry (the "Ring of Fire" essay). But it is also often funny and conversational, casual and exhibitionistic. Here are frank, explicit physical descriptions in glossy women's magazines, on a blog that also covers celebrity fashion, from teenagers who are allowing their period stories to be published in a book that everyone might read!

We have edged away from a time when talking openly about the female body was necessarily a brave political statement and into one in which it can be self-promotional, potty-mouthed and kind of sweet. It is the merging of a decades-old, well-intentioned but often embarrassing feminist health project with a liberated Internet age in which people have few qualms about airing their very dirty laundry to as wide an audience as possible, and in which women have immediate access to the experiences of their peers and elders, no matter what intimate abysses, emissions or embarrassments those stories entail.

This new graphic femininity creates a space in which women can tell their own funny or scary stories and provide tips, advice or cautionary tales for others who might harbor silent curiosities about their bodies and what can go wrong (and right) with them.
Whether or not you view female excretions as vile, or whether, like Nalebuff, you view menstruation as "cleansing impurities out of your body," there is no question that many women find the process of self-revelation, as Holmes said, cathartic. It's about breaking certain silences, yes. It's about letting loose with long pent-up questions and anecdotes and curiosities and fears. It's about laughing about things that might otherwise make you wail with shame or pain or fear.
And at the same time, it can be about getting attention, performing, flaunting and acting out your own vulnerabilities, getting noticed for your willingness to debase yourself or win a gross-out contest that once could have only been dominated by boys. It can be painfully self-punishing to read and self-objectifying to write. It can be liberating, and poignant, and it can also be irritating and crass. All at the same time!

I think Susanna Breslin's take is spot-on, that this thought-provoking (and only indirectly ew-provoking because of its quotes) column raises more questions than it answers. While I am all for de-mystifying the female body and its excretions and processes and getting honest answers to common questions that were heretofore shrouded in mystery and euphemism, I am usually pretty grossed out by these columns. More than the TMI, it's just excessive. Were its purposes limited to the clinical (like a Smokey Bear "only you can prevent or at least treat STIs") and commiserating (haha our bodies are gross, group hug!), I might have less of a problem with it. But the authors take on this "Pssst! Check me out! I am sooooo gross and I can write about viscous body fluids and I am sooooooo funny!" level of juvenility that's off-putting. Interestingly, the Jezzies have written more than once against celebrating the confessional for it's own sake. Confessions are not necessarily honest, brave, revelatory, insightful, or relatable. Relatability is a dumb index by which to judge anything, anyway. Sometimes they just reveal the author to be immature and batshit insane. I am increasingly disenchanted with the "confessional" writing at Jezebel, because they seem to be more like exercises in self-justification with very little self-reflection or contrition. Not that one has to apologize for one's bodily processes, but much like being flatulent in public, there's a sort of "erm, excuse me" kind of awareness of the body in public. The body in public is different than the body in private. Call me a prude, but I just do not walk around naked in public or talking about my bodily emissions with everyone.

Now, I do love Spanish picaresque literature, which can be really scatological. And talking about shit can be the fine art of literary criticism. And I do agree, of course that women's bodies have been long shrouded in suffocating veils of mystery and pseudoscience, to our detriment. How will we know how our bodies work without such open honesty (I would suggest taking a few science classes, talking to your doctor, and self-educating, but hey what do I know, since I don't read women's magazines)? How will we learn to receive and experience pleasure, at our hands our our partners? How much does silence make us suffer: between shameful, untreated infections (those odors and emissions signify something) that irritate us or may even lead to infertility, refusing to recognize the humanity behind the femininity (Hey Margaret, it's God. Yeah, being a woman sucks, and your body is going to do some weird shit on you, and it doesn't end after menopause and the research is controversial about hormone replacement therapy so you should talk to your doctor about everything. And, by the way, you will one day have to evacuate your bowels in the same building as your boyfriend), or suffering at the hands of inept lovers we can't bring ourselves to be honest with, boy, does silence seem to have a price.

But there has to be some middle ground between oppressive patriarchal silence and this glut of gross-outism as feminism, isn't there? I mean, I am glad to write about women's health issues and sexuality, but I really never want to write about my own body and I will never write about my personal sexuality. But maybe I am behind the times, and not feminist enough. I mean, the personal is political, right? Perhaps I am antiquated in thinking that while the female body should be studied (most studies use male subjects) and discussed with honesty and openness, the personal body should remain wherever you want it to be, and in most cases is better kept private. Otherwise, we risk losing the individuality that comes with privacy, that while many experiences are shared, our personal relationship to our body is best experienced in private, shared selectively, and kept as our own rather than for public consumption. The body in public is dissected mercilessly and not always in ways that we wish it to be. Street harassment bothers a lot of people, for example. I am not saying that women should stay home, and keep their bodies covered. But while I have never read "Our Bodies, Ourselves," I have always thought of my body as my own, and my experiences as my own, even if they are common to all women. I mean, remember the controversy that this post sparked (I appear to have commented on this here)? It seems like the Jezzies are proving Volokh right, that we women view menstruation as a great bonding experience that we would hate to be left out of if they approve a pill that ends this monthly ritual!

But perhaps I'm too retro in my thinking, because by keeping through privacy and discretion such a clinical, dissociative distance between my head and the rest of my body, maybe it could be said that I never really "claim" my body as my own. Maybe it's not my body, because it's just an example of a woman's body, rather than a personal experience of my body. Wait, how does that make sense, You Straw Woman I Am Making Up, because I still inhabit this form and experience it, even if I don't write about it or share it with others. Well, I mean, I did blog a lot about having carpal tunnel and how it affects work and the various treatments I'm getting for it, but haha, it's like these hands have a mind of their own! I just had to learn to stop worrying about them and learn to love them for what crippled, constantly-in-pain things they are. Haha, last week I dropped a pan of bread because it was too heavy for my hands, and a few days before I had to put down a pot because holding it sent a twinging spasm down the median nerve, and now my fine motor skills are finally returning but my hand strength is not. Oh, you know what's that like, haha. Hugs all around!

Anyway, what do you think? I also officially invite Phoebe to join us in this conversation.

Hugs,

Belle

what on earth is a "date" movie?!

2009-02-08T21:03:00.000-08:00

Amber,

Apart from finding mutually agreeable viewing fare, I don't get why "date movies" have to be any different from "movies you would like to see in general." In fact, marketed-as-date-movies are guaranteed to be craptastic, since they will be terrible romantic comedies. Cough How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days cough (I have never seen that movie, but it sounds terrible, and I was delighted to hear that some other pre-Belle girl had made TD see that movie with him, so he must now appreciate my good taste and anti-chickflickery). I thought Vicky Christina Barcelona was somewhat of a date movie, apart from it's rather honest and jaundiced view of love, just because it was smart and sexy. Most foreign movies are. Why do American romantic comedies suck so hard? Fie on the idea of a "date movie!" I mean, there are unsettling movies to watch as a couple (I'm thinking Adrian Lynne's "Unfaithful" or Neil Jordan's "The End of the Affair"), but otherwise, I think couples should hold the same aesthetic standards as they would individually. Who knows, maybe it's cathartic to watch movies about infidelity, although I think it may just be uncomfortable and a starting point to an awkward conversation that would begin "well _I_ would never do that", but then you would wonder why you had to say that--probably to hear it back, to be comforted after watching something so unsettling.

It's hard to find "sexy" movies to watch together anyhow, since "sexy" is so idiosyncratic and most movies containing sex (at least, good, non-porn ones) are too complex and will probably feature the more unsavory side of love, like jealousy and infidelity and anger (e.g. In the Mood for Love, possibly one of my favorites). One of our earliest dates was watching High Fidelity, and I was impressed and amused by his ability to recite all of the lines with perfect timing. In some cases, romantic comedies work, but only if you are two giant dorks. But I wouldn't call that movie sexy by any means. Nor was "A River Runs Through It," the last movie we saw, or before that, "The Hudsucker Proxy." I can't think of the last sexy movie we saw together. Do they still make any? I am far too one-track minded to combine both cinematic pleasure with sexual seduction: my one-track mind leads me to suggest things like "hey, let's watch Das Boot, it's awesome!" and think that I'll unsubtly try to bat my eyelashes without looking like I am having a seizure later, after the crew surfaces and goes home dispiritedly to La Rochelle. You know, one thing at a time. I can see how some movies are just anti-sexy (see, e.g., movies with extended torture scenes, lots of drug use, lots of drawn out killing rather than explosions, things featuring Pauly Shore or Carrot Top, etc. ), but in general, a movie that makes one happy or full of adrenaline (good comedies and action movies) should make one ready for anything. Does the mind need that much coaxing into changing tracks?

-Belle

You think you're chocolate when you're chewing gum?

2009-02-07T19:00:00.000-08:00

Belle,

Viewing love as something beyond your control, something inflicted upon you, does seem like a cop-out. Unless you believe in Cupid's arrow, or a Godfather-style "thunderbolt," or that inhaling pheromones has effects comparable to PCP or some other strong drug, love is something you create out of your perceptions of a person. (And those perceptions often trickle in over time---rarely are we presented with a five minute window in which someone evidences all the smart/cute/funny/sensitive/pick-your-cliche traits in quick succession.)

Maybe it's not always volitional, in the sense that one typically doesn't decide to fall in love. But who you love is a reflection of your choices about what to value. Maybe some of these values were ingrained in a youthful and malleable mind, but for those of us with a little introspective ability and the inclination for self-interrogation, we should be able to get to the heart of why we love who we love, and potentially to change it. (Through therapy, perhaps?) Otherwise you may fall into a pattern of doomed relationships in which you embrace certain values in the beloved that prove to be counterproductive to human flourishing, or at least your own happiness.

But assume that your values are sound, and that finding someone who embodied those values would bring you love and joy. How to determine whether a person actually is, for your purposes, virtuous? If the virtue itself, and consequent valuation of the individual, is the source of love (which it must be, unless the aforementioned "love at first sight" paradigm holds), then your chance of finding true love is a function of how good you are at judging people. It is always difficult to discover that one is bad at something. Of course, you may be excellent at assessing people but extremely poor at drawing accurate conclusions about their future behavior. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns, but it's probably more common in relationships to selectively disregard past (or present!) performance and think that, evidence to the contrary, things with you will be different.

A claim of being duped is fundamentally distinct(and has dissimilar implications for agency, as you note) than acknowledging that one has, through ordinary human weakness, convinced one's self of something that cannot be. Is it better to be a fool or to be weak? The weak man is everyone's potential victim, and so in a strange way retreat into the role of the fool, especially one fooled by someone particularly adept at nefarious evil, allows one to minimize one's fear of becoming a victim going forward. After all, you can always say that you won't be fooled again! (Until, of course, you're again bound by the volitionless animal spirit of love to another uniquely seductive yet destructive heartbreaker.)

But enough of this. Let's talk cinema. A friend recently inquired whether anyone actually likes
date movies for themselves, as opposed to seeing them because they are "guaranteed to be somewhat anodyne (and therefore minimally tolerable to most) and have a romantic subtext." Now that includes the generic rom-com, but the problem is that modern rom-coms are almost always chick flicks (of the worst sort: poorly scripted, emotionally manipulative, and rife with unflattering stereotypes), and why would you drag a fellow to a film that he is almost certain to not enjoy? If the purpose of a date movie is to facilitate the getting-to-know-you process in the early stages of a relationship, then maybe what you want is some kind of movie that 1) promotes conversation afterward, 2) promotes romantic feelings or arousal, to the degree that would not be awkward for the relationship stage, or both. It should also be something that is likely to be enjoyed by both sexes, so one party will not feel resentful later and spoil the mood.

So say you're taking a fellow out on a date: what sort of movie do you pick? It should be sexy, but not so sexy that you're going to be embarrassed. (Maybe not Lust, Caution, frex.) Both very high quality and very low quality pictures are fodder for post-film conversation, but deliberately going to see a bad movie, MST3K-style, may result in resentment, so it's dangerous. Foreign films are a standard go-to, but you may lose the plot if you kiss during the picture and can no longer follow the subtitles. Probably no Bruckheimer-style explosionfests: they get the blood pumping, but not the right way. Pure adrenaline is not conducive to seduction. Nothing with heavy, depressing themes: I saw The Reader tonight, and Holocaust pictures always make my limbs feel leaden, which is hardly a recipe for sassy banter and third-date hookups. Preferably there should be no relationship issues that could bleed over into real life. (This is why most chick flicks, with their dependence on engagements, marriages, and babies, are questionable. Do you really want to get into a spirited debate with a new beau about these types of weighty issues?)

Here are some lists of possibilities. Thoughts? (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind shows up practically everywhere, but it's not a good date movie, really---too much negativity focused on the main relationship. And incidentally, this is the worst date movie ever.)

take responsibility for your relationships!

2009-02-04T00:04:00.000-08:00

Amber,

To answer your last question: merely pathetic.

While I agree with the author that social relationships can be divided into levels of intimacy and cohesion, I completely disagree with the valuation process. It completely ignores the more complex realities of social interaction.

Weingott is right that we have different degrees of social interaction: strangers, acquaintances, intimate platonic friends, and romantic partners. There are more of course, but for the sake of the conversation, let's leave it at that without getting into the vagaries of different levels of sexual/romantic intimacy and commitment. Strangers are those with whom we lack social ties. Once we form ties, however, the tie strength is dependent on so many things that social network theorists are still fighting over how to operationalize this variable. Most agree that we tend to form ties with people who are like us: homophily on the basis of race, gender, class, education level, activities, shared social ties, etc. I may form a tie with someone who is "like me" on whatever basis, but the tie strength will change as the relationship matures. Once the link is formed, it is not static--I have met people through a shared interest in a certain activity, and the at-first casual relationship deepened and became more intimate with time, the sharing of experiences and confidences. So Weingott gets it completely wrong by trying to decouple the "instrumental" and "intrinsic" valuation processes of relationships. Relationships, whether platonic or romantic, are rarely either one or the other. In fact, it would be a rather unfulfilling relationship if it were one or the other. Not that you need to get every personal need from a romantic partner or close intimate friend, but the bases of such relationships are complex, multi-layered, and difficult to disentangle from each other.

I am not disputing your argument that romantic relationships are inherently valuable. Far from it. It's more that I'm wondering how such an idea is even being disputed. My best friend of fifteen years is someone whose character I value greatly and whom I regard highly, and from whom I get many instrumental benefits: emotional support, physical affection, conversation, company, etc. My partner, who is also my best friend, supplies all of the same instrumental benefits, and I also value him highly. The two relationships are not completely comparable of course, because while I have the same life-long commitment to both, in the latter relationship the stakes are different (I am loathe to say "higher") because it carries a level of intimacy that is greater, and thus more complicated, than mere tie strength. If anything, I would have expected someone to argue that romantic relationships have an even greater intrinsic value than friendship (also a fallacious argument), because of the extra layers of intimacy that distinguishes a romantic relationship from a merely platonic relationship. I do not only mean sexual intimacy and the possibility of taking a dyadic social relationship and expanding it to form a new family unit and integrating each other's social networks and families. I also mean that it's just a different type of love, one that compels a person to contemplate forming a life-long commitment to another that is monogamous in ways that friendship is not (I can have many friends, and I am not polyamorous), and intimate in physical and emotional ways that friendship is not.

Much as I love my best friend, she is not my only best friend, and I have "broken up" with a few close friends in my time. When friendships dissolve because of distance (emotional or physical), it's as sad as one of those relationships that are "near misses" but for timing, distance, maturity, etc. When friendships break up because of acrimony, it's as bad as any breakup, and no, you probably don't keep in touch with that person, much as you value them as a person or the experiences you shared with that person. Much ink has been spilled over the sadness of a friendship breakup. Thus, I was kind of perplexed that there was even an argument to be made that friendship relationships are more valuable than romantic relationships, when I find them to be pretty comparable. If anything, I wish that people would see romantic relationships as being friendships with a huge degree of formal and informal commitment, and friendships as being every bit as complicated and pleasurable or painful as a romantic relationship. Then maybe people would act more responsibly and sensitively in both.

I'll move on from the points you covered about instrumentality and then debated with Weingott, and I'll even pass over the debate about the inherent sexism of holding one type of relationship more valuable than the other. Besides, I sort of agree that it's because romantic relationships have depreciated in estimation in current pop culture. It has done so, I think, because of the general tendency to see things either/or, rather than as being extremely complicated, as if you had to choose between everlasting love or everlasting friendship (and why anyone would assume that either is everlasting without work is beyond me). Didn't Carrie get more mad at Miranda's betrayal than she did at Mr. Big's in the Sex and the City movie? Didnn't Seth Rogen's character have to grow up and move out of his buddies' house in order to man up enough to stay with Katherine Heigl's character in "Knocked Up"? Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I'll let that part of the argument end.

Rather, I'm more interested in the idea of being "duped." Meaning, that when relationships end, some people think that they have been utterly manipulated and duped into liking/loving someone who has no other apparent redeemable qualities, with whom they have nothing in common, and for whom they have lost all respect and no longer consider "virtuous." Man, these people must have bad taste in others. Either that, or in doing so they attempt to absolve themselves of responsibility in selecting partners for themselves, or any role they may have had in perpetuating the relationship. I've had plenty of relationships, platonic and romantic, end. I wouldn't blame the other person for my involvement. Sure, everyone tries to market themselves as agreeable and sane, but otherwise relationships are not unilateral contracts made by a party with completely unequal bargaining power. I find it rather distasteful that someone would enter into a relationship with another and upon its end, abdicate all responsibility for their own emotional involvement. In a normal, non-rape type of relationship, no one is forcing them to respond positively to the purported charms of another, or enter into a romantic and physical relationship with the other. Why then the accusation of being duped? Why date someone you had nothing in common with? Why absolve yourself of human agency, free will, and responsibility? It's just such a cowardly cop-out.

So more than accusations of sexism in either direction, I'm more upset about this culture of victimization. Not victim-blaming, but rather the idea that we are all pawns in the game of love, that we are all overrun by biochemical reactions and subject to the machinations of more sophisticated lovers with no other redeemable virtues, and that we're all jutst basically sexual instruments. Ew. That's just not healthy. I would prefer a more mature conception of human interaction, one that's more complex. Otherwise, it's like that old sociology trope that we're all bound by constraints (institutional, societal, etc.), without acknowledging that everyone has agency and independent motivation. I protest againt this! Mainly because all of my bad relationships, platonic or romantic, have caused me to grow as a person and recognize bad signals in others and bad behavioral traits in myself. I've learned, through the counsel of others, how to dissociate myself from negative people and from bad relationships. To blame others for everything that has ever happened to me would be to deny this potential for growth and independence. Nowadays I have mostly healthy relationships with people whom I admire and from whom I learn to grow as a person. The relationships are both instrumental and inherently valuable: I enjoy their company and I value them as people. My current romantic relationship is great because we have become each other's best friend and main support, but we also have a deeper commitment to one another than I have ever had with any other person, and with each day we acquire new shared experiences that bring us closer. Were any of these relationships to end, I would be really sad, but I would also be really grateful for the experience. I would certainly accept my own part in the relationship, and I would feel like I learned something--but not that I was duped.

'roid rage! grrr!

2009-02-02T17:19:00.000-08:00

I got steroid injections in both wrists today. Apparently, my doctor (who also helped to design this keyboard and this mouse!) thinks that hand therapy exercises are not useful for carpal tunnel syndrome. So I am getting three rounds of injections. So, we'll see if this works, or if it's surgery. Until then I'm still wearing splints most of the time and cursing my crippled hands.

Why romantic relationships are intrinsically valuable

2009-02-01T19:46:00.000-08:00

Belle,

At first I didn't have words to describe just how skin-crawlingly horrible I found this post to be.

The basic idea is that romantic relationships are only instrumentally valuable, whereas strong friendships are intrinsically valuable, where "intrinsically valuable things are those that make us happy (rather than happiness itself being the intrinsically valuable thing), and instrumentally valuable things are those that we only value insofar as they give us access to those things that in themselves make us happy." The author breaks relationships into categories:

First, we have acquaintanceships. Examples of people we share these with might be certain people you work with or share a class with; you talk to them and perhaps walk between classes with them, perhaps have lunch breaks together, but the association ends when the semester ends, or one of you resigns from the job or whatever. (Just think of people you were friendly with at high school but never talked to again once high school ended.)

You then have what I think Aristotle called pleasure friendships. This might be where you share an interest with a person such as fishing or music or something, so you hang out to do those things. Once the fishing season is over or your band breaks up, the friendship also ceases.

You then have strong friendships where two people are friends because they respect and admire each others’ virtues. They associate with each other purely because they like each other as people. There are no extrinsic conditions; the main basis for the friendship is the liking of each other as people, and they thus find association with each other valuable for its own sake.

Romantic relationships are not like this; they are a form of pleasure friendship. The participants have attraction and infatuation in common, and there is no need for this to be grounded in a real appreciation of the other person’s virtues. Perhaps we could say that what they have in common is the indulgence in intimacy for intimacy’s sake. Of course when we are in a relationship we see our partner as perfect and they can do no wrong (unless/until you’ve been together for a while). Every instance of agreement between the participants is evidence to them of their being soul-mates.

...

Now, there are exceptions to all of this. We usually meet our good friends at school or work or perhaps through some mutual hobby (how else?). Sometimes those in romantic relationships really do have much in common; these relationships are probably those which result in either happy marriage or successful post-romance friendships (I mean more than just the occasional “hi” or semi-annual coffee).

Then we get into the valuation:

The type of value a relationship has depends on what kind of relationship it is. ... [S]trong friendships are intrinsically valuable because you like the person’s character for its own sake. The friendship does not depend on an activity or proximity.

Romantic relationships, being a form of pleasure friendship, are, I would say, instrumentally valuable. When the romance ceases, so does association. ... The association in romantic relationships was never about the person them self; otherwise genuine post-romance friendships would be more common, and post-romance regret would be less common.

Perhaps I am some exceptional case, or fancy myself to be one, but this analysis does not represent the reality of romantic relationships as I see and have experienced them. Are people sometimes more in love with the idea of someone than with the person? Certainly, but this is typically based on the lover's opinion of the beloved's character or self. What is one attracted to and infatuated with, but the beloved's physical and mental selves? What is the value of intimacy without the accompanying knowledge that the beloved is worthy of such contact? Romances founder not because one somehow loses some targetless, floating "attraction," but because one's initial assessment of the beloved's balance of traits changes, either due to the inclusion of new information or revision of old information. The idea that romance, like needlepoint or fishing, is something that people get together to do for its own sake, regardless of the nature of their partners, is baffling in the extreme.

The author acknowledges this in a brief addendum:

I still think some kind of an argument can be made to say romantic relationships are intrinsically valuable, though. When you’re in a romantic relationship, you usually do think your partner is virtuous and respectable. It is only when the infatuation ends that you realise you were deluded. Perhaps this isn’t so different to a genuine or “strong” friendship ending upon learning that the friend you thought virtuous is really a sneak. Would we say here that the friendship was still genuine and thus intrinsically valuable? Perhaps it is about perception, rather than fact?

DING DING DING.

And what's so problematic about the original hypothesis, which the author does not appear to have rejected?

Contending that romantic relationships are not about the content of the partners' character allows the adherent to objectify potential partners. In the one type of relationship typically marked with the greatest level of intimacy, it presupposes an almost arms' length transaction, in which personal qualities are somehow irrelevant.

By elevating "strong friendships" (on average likely to be homosocial) over romantic relationships (on average likely to be opposite-sex), it contributes to the repellent, sexist "bros before hos" dynamic, in which the opposite sex is denigrated and depersonalized as being unworthy of true personal intimacy and value (perhaps in this case such a connection is merely unnecessary).

Plus, acceptance of this philosophy of relationships? Correlated with being a dick. Witness this, also from a recent post on the linked blog:

Who the hell uses the word ‘avant-garde’ with a straight face, anyway? It’s like dropping ‘postmodern’ during conversation. Anyone who does that is a prick.

The only time I’d ever welcome that would be in a girl. People like that are trying so hard to be open minded that they’ll buy any bullshit you offer.

Laydeez.

So, Weingott: Threat or menace?

Ledbetter Equal Pay Act Signed by President Obama

2009-01-29T09:33:00.000-08:00

Story here. Most awesome Whitehouse.gov blog report here, with President Obama's remarks:

Equal pay is by no means just a women's issue -- it's a family issue. It's about parents who find themselves with less money for tuition and child care; couples who wind up with less to retire on; households where one breadwinner is paid less than she deserves; that's the difference between affording the mortgage -- or not; between keeping the heat on, or paying the doctor bills -- or not. And in this economy, when so many folks are already working harder for less and struggling to get by, the last thing they can afford is losing part of each month's paycheck to simple and plain discrimination.

So signing this bill today is to send a clear message: that making our economy work means making sure it works for everybody; that there are no second-class citizens in our workplaces; and that it's not just unfair and illegal, it's bad for business to pay somebody less because of their gender or their age or their race or their ethnicity, religion or disability; and that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory, or footnote in a casebook. It's about how our laws affect the daily lives and the daily realities of people: their ability to make a living and care for their families and achieve their goals.

Ultimately, equal pay isn't just an economic issue for millions of Americans and their families, it's a question of who we are -- and whether we're truly living up to our fundamental ideals; whether we'll do our part, as generations before us, to ensure those words put on paper some 200 years ago really mean something -- to breathe new life into them with a more enlightened understanding that is appropriate for our time.

That is what Lilly Ledbetter challenged us to do. And today, I sign this bill not just in her honor, but in the honor of those who came before -- women like my grandmother, who worked in a bank all her life, and even after she hit that glass ceiling, kept getting up and giving her best every day, without complaint, because she wanted something better for me and my sister.

And I sign this bill for my daughters, and all those who will come after us, because I want them to grow up in a nation that values their contributions, where there are no limits to their dreams and they have opportunities their mothers and grandmothers never could have imagined.

More frequently than ever before, I have woken up to news that despite the current economic climate and ongoing wars make me feel like it's a great day to be an American.

trash talking my nerd injury

2009-01-28T21:42:00.000-08:00

This is what I look like with my hands in wrist-stabilizing splints:

This is the unsympathetic trash-talking I got from TD:

"You look like Edward Scissorhands...but less cool."

(upon discussing the ADA, my support of employer accommodation of disability, what is the statutory definition of a disability as some condition that substantially limits major life activities, and how carpal tunnel doesn't really count, or at least does not necessarily count):

"You should own your gimpitude. You know, like reclaim the word 'gimp.' Big gimpin'."

(in response to my nerd gloves):

"They're like bound feet for the modern age. Finally, you also claim your heritage."

(in response to my delicious spaghetti and meatballs, yes, made with cripply hands).

"Pretty good cooking....for a cripple."

Lest you take serious offense, reader, TD is progressive and believes in equal protection laws, has been really supportive, and is utterly sympathetic. He has been on my case to get treatment, and has been carrying things for me and opening jars for me. I feel vaguely pre-feminist, writing that. But really, they should make pop tops for everything.

I'm breaking out my big blue thing of a wrist support out at school to type in relative comfort, and wearing supportive gloves in public too. In elementary school, a more insecure Belle would have been mortified and too scared of judgment and may have suffered in pain. But by junior high school I gave up on being cool. Plus, at this level of education, everyone immediately recognizes that I have a repetitive stress injury and react sympathetically. They know the occupational hazards of our profession, the main two being bloviation and an RSI. There but for the grace of $300 in ergonomic tools go they. Plus, I am too old to care about this aspect of my external appearance, even when I sit with the undergrads who stare blankly at my wrists and big blue gel stick. Besides, I was dressed really nicely today in a dove gray dress, navy cardigan, tights, tall brown boots, brown trench, and purple-gray scarf. In case you're wondering.

Just in case though, here are alternate, non-nerdy reasons for my braces. Choose your favorite answer:

a). I am a falconer, but my falcon cannot hear me.
b). I am Michael Jackson, and it don't matter if you're black or white (no seriously, check out the gloves).
c). I am a female archer from the 1950s ready for some synchronized archery.
d). I am desperately seeking Susan.
e). I am going to beat the crap out of you in our next match.
f). I am a competitive bowler, and I bowl alone.

I also have a two inch scar on my abdomen from an appendectomy. I keep wondering if anyone will believe it if I tell them that it's from a bar fight, when this crazy bitch broke a beer bottle on the counter and sliced me and stole my money and I'm fucking lucky she didn't take my kidney, too.

what's up with that?

2009-01-27T09:34:00.000-08:00

I have frequently experienced that phenomenon of really loving a movie/musical artist/painting, and then, later, upon reflection, totally hating it and everything it stood for. This is not necessarily induced by reading external reviews by snarky critics--sometimes, it's just a creeping sensation of "I thought I liked this, but I was duped." Most frequently, it's sentimental, schlocky stuff. I am by no stretch of the imagination a sentimental, feeling, emotional person. In some ways, easily manipulated, until I have cognitive override and realize that I just reacted positively and sometimes violently to what is, artistically speaking, complete crap.

Sometimes it's not being duped--I loved, and still love, The Notebook. I cried and cried at the scenes with the older couple, especially seeing Gena Rowlands crippled with Alzheimers. Dude, if you don't at least feel for her, you are a meanie. I still like Capra movies. They're actually good for one thing, and they play with the emotions in a way that's sincere in that "well, it's plausible" way. I don't feel like I've been emotionally manipulated to a place where I wouldn't have wanted to go, and so I'm still satisfied in my emotional investment in James Stewart's fates in It's a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.

But the movies I'm talking about: Garden State and As Good As It Gets. Crappy movies that I emotionally reacted to, initially liked, and then later hated. They won acclaim and awards. They contorted my malleable heart into liking Zach Braff and believing his bullshit lines about home being someplace everyone imagines (pukey purple prose) and wanting him to stay with his manic pixie dream girl, Natalie Portman (who was really annoying!). They made me think Jack Nicholson's horrid character was a plausible match for Helen Hunt, and made me want them to like, be together. They made me ignore my reaction of "that's crappy hotel art" to Greg Kinnear's stupid paintings of Helen Hunt, as if he was the first to be inspired by a woman's back.

Manipulative schlocky movies, I'm onto you. Something tells me that Milk, a story of a real hero, and Slumdog Millionaire, whatever it's potential for being "poverty porn," are in the "actually good" camp rather than the "you'll hate it later" camp. Or at least, here's hoping. Trouble is finding the time to see these movies. Maybe we should stop having Top Chef marathons.

random roundup

2009-01-26T10:09:00.000-08:00

1. After a week of hardly typing at all and doing hand exercises all day, I am really behind in work but my hands only hurt when I am typing rather than constantly in a dull with flashes of nerve pain way. Improvement! Sort of. No pain = good, no work = bad. I have a prescription to a hand therapy center in the Big City a long haul away (bus + train + bus), and they're checking my insurance. I have an appointment with the school doctor today to get a diagnosis I already have for a prescription to the school's internal physical therapy services. So all told, probably a week before I get treatment, which should be twice a week for twelve weeks. Dude, it took me forever to get these appointments and prescriptions. I know I'm double-dipping in the health care, but hopefully one of these will work out. I am not excited about taking 2-3 hours twice a week to get therapy, but as TD points out, expense or time should not get in the way of me being able to get back such a necessary life function, and specialists are the way to go. If it doesn't work out though, then hopefully the school's stuff will work out.

2. I think my mom says that those born in the year of the Ox are doomed to a life of toiling away like a beast of burden. In any case, it doesn't look good this year. Then again, we Asian people are superstitious and I was told that if you took pictures in three, the middle person dies.

3. When I studied Art History AP in high school, I really responded to Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World. I was only 16 though. My art history teacher said that she thought he was more of an illustrator than an artist, and he never did really fit in with the moderns. But do I reject Wyeth from my own tastes and intuitions, or because I have been told that he does not belong in a class with or in the tradition of Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper? A year later, studying the woodcut prints and landscapes of Winslow Homer, I wondered why Homer is so much more revered by the critics. I myself love Winslow Homer even more, if only because his prints, used for Harper's, are the closest we have to a visual document of his times, and because his landscapes have so much more life and emotional energy than Wyeth's. I respond with even more emotion to Homer. This is perhaps the best image of war and this is the best image of homecoming and this is just too romantic for words. Anyway, the debate over Wyeth that continues after his death (artist or schill?) is related to the ongoing debate about Billy Joel. To which I will say that it is an inapt comparison to say that Billy Joel is the Andrew Wyeth of music. Andrew Wyeth sold an idea of American sentimentality he knew didn't exist as truth; Billy Joel is just plain sentimental and schlocky. But that's ok! If we evaluate Wyeth as a Rockwell type, we can enjoy Wyeth more, particularly his paintings of his neighbors as little processed American singles slices of a bygone Americana. If we evaluate Billy Joel not as a rock singer or artiste but as a pop singer, then we can enjoy "Uptown Girl." I mean people don't take Bruce Springsteen seriously--not even "The River," which broke a young Belle's heart the way Christina's World seemed hopelessly sad and ceaselessly searching to Young Belle. Why would critics or anyone of discerning musical sensibility take "Piano Man" or "New York State of Mind" as a true anthem of the art of the people? Neither Springsteen nor Joel are as good as Bob Dylan or Tom Waits, but that's ok. Bruce Springsteen has virtue as a soundtrack artist and inauguration singer, and Billy Joel is fun and catchy. Little wonder that his music has been used for a ballet musical.

4. On wrestling and catharsis.

5. Obama reverses the stereotype threat effect!

My hands hurt again. Will blog again in a few days, hopefully, in response to Amber and to show you the handsplints I'm getting.

Leopard print tunics to tulle skirts

2009-01-25T14:00:00.000-08:00

Dear Belle,

My extremely tardy response makes forgiving your arguable ball-dropping completely necessary---not that there was anything to forgive! Your poor hands are to be well-treated, even if that means a reduction in blogging. I was just playing catchup from the inauguration madness and whiling away the hours in good IRL company instead of writing.

Fashion, however, is plenty inspiring. Unlike some, I actually care about the messages I send with my choices in clothing (at least most of the time, and when I don't, it's a conscious choice to disregard, not scorn for the idea of conveying messages through dressing).

When I was in school . . . homemade clothes, oh yes. My double knit interchangeable ensemble in purple, purple leopard print, pink, and white leopard print (tunics, belts, and leggings!) was something to behold, I'm sure. I too rocked the Keds: white leather ones, which I diligently re-polished with the same stuff my mom had for her nursing shoes. There were also several shirts with puffy paint (Girl Scout projects, mostly) and some with pictures of horses that my frustrated painter aunt made on the weekends. It took eighth grade and the new Contempo Casuals in the mall to break me of these sartorial habits. I immediately adopted a quasi-goth look revolving around black stockings, Doc Martens, and miniskirts, which took me through high school and faded out only after I moved to California and chopped off my waist-length hair.

Even though I'm not the most stylish (or the least), and even though I'm older and stodgier now, I still am skeptical of the whole school uniform trend. Young people forming their own identities need room for individuation in expression. Sure, there are other ways to express yourself, but getting it out of your system by wearing something to school and finding your tribe is better than actually having to find a crowd to run with outside of school. There's only so much time for you to really go wild with experimenting with your appearance. I am still a little sad that I never dyed my hair blue. (Probably not office-appropriate at this point.)

Even working in a firm, I draw the line at the whole "older women must wear ___" bit, though. If you can rock the young styles, who cares how old you are? I had a makeover some time ago, but I've thrown out most of the advice from it, mostly because it wasn't me, and I don't like speaking with a different, blonder voice. At present I stick to cashmere sweaters with either trousers or pencil skirts with tall boots. Once summer comes, I will revert to my usual cool and pretty dress + cardi or blazer.

I didn't go to any of the inaugural balls, alas, but did get this lovely party dress for future evening occasions. It does break my new guideline for clothes, namely that I play up my callipygian qualities, but it was just too kicky and fun to resist, and I had just come off an all-nighter at work and wanted to treat myself. There will almost certainly be an evening wedding or something, and if not I will consider it economic stimulus.

Made anything tasty lately? I'm gearing up for another party and am looking for new recipes to go with old favorites. The more I cook, the more Texas brisket will be left for me.

Amber

state of the belle: pretty, patriotic, articulate, and in pain

2009-01-20T12:25:00.000-08:00

A very nice weekend: a romantic getaway on Saturday to Sunday to nearby scenic destination. On Saturday, at this delicious chain burger establishment, TD and I were discussing TARP and EESA and the stretching of the statutory language to re-label pretty much everything as a toxic asset and the proper role of government, etc. The guy at the table next to us remarked on how surprised he was that we were discussing the economy over lunch, and told TD that I was "lovely and so articulate. You are a lucky man, and you two make a handsome couple." I thought about chiming in "and I'm clean, too!" but I didn't. Instead I was gracious and thanked him, we wished him a good day, and afterwards were like WTF.

On Sunday we listened to some inauguration coverage and felt surges of elation coming from whence we knew not. It wasn't just listening to the snippets of grandiloquence, but also just a feeling of happiness and optimism. We just felt good. Monday we listened to Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech on the radio and I teared up a bit and felt both happy and serious. I told TD that I had always loved American history and politics and law, but not until I turned 18 did I feel really personally invested in the political system. That I had a stake in it, and almost felt a sense of ownership and responsibility. That sense was kind of bludgeoned to death in 2000 and further kicked lying down in 2004, but in November 2008, that invested citizenship was reawakened. I am sad to say that during times of repressed civil liberties and war I feel less invested in my country, when in fact I should feel more compelled and impelled to care and do something. So I listened to the speech and felt more motivated than I have before, because the commitment to service and country is best held aloft by hope and real potential for actual change. I wish I had felt this way eight years ago. But maybe the maturity of experience is better than the naivete of youthful idealism. Afterwards, we had a nice day with friends at some other nearby scenic destination and drank wine and ate food.

One of his friends was a plastic surgeon, and when he saw me weakly hold a pen, I told him I had carpal tunnel. He examined it. It is pretty bad. I have a loss in motor skills, flexibility, and pain, and he can see how my right hand has lost some muscle compared to my left. Which is also starting to hurt! I have been doing hand exercises, but he's going to refer me to a hand specialist for real hand therapy and splints, and if that doesn't help, it's surgery. Gah. Did you know that plastic surgeons do most of the surgeries? He says that there's no real turning back, that the nerve just progressively weakens and it's harder to fix when it gets really bad. Double Gah. I am typing this in spurts and taking breaks to do exercises and am on painkillers. Because I can't open bags of chips or use can openers or hold things and have flareups of pain, TD is telling me to stop punting and fix this ASAP.

So if I don't email you and don't blog more than 2-3 times a week, this is why. My productivity is really suffering, and so I apparently have to conserve hand strength.

I will say though, that I thought the inauguration speech was pretty great, with a great balance of economy of words, hopeful rhetoric, and appropriate solemnity. It's a great day for America.

that funny looking kid who smelled even funnier

2009-01-16T00:05:00.000-08:00

Dear Amber,

I totally dropped the ball on our epistolary blogging with end-of-year projects, the holidays, and now carpal tunnel. (Update: new $80 Microsoft Wireless Ergonomic 7000 is worth it, even if the keys are stiff, and I am thinking of getting those wrist splint things.)

Anyway, I have no idea what we were talking about. So I'm switching subjects. I was thinking of offering my own thoughts on "game," but then I realized I have nothing original to say and too little game/experience to offer any insight anyway. Also, wouldn't want to touch that with a ten foot pole.

Instead, today I talk to you about fashion, in contravention of our feminist ideals to disregard the beauty industrial complex and social constructions of feminity and beauty as created by the patriarchy (cough). I basically have a uniform of unbranded fleece jacket or peacoat, jeans, and whatever sneakers I feel like wearing that day. A few times a week I dress it up with dresses or skirts with tights (colored or herringbone knit) and riding boots or mary janes (I still walk to/from school). It's not that adventurous a wardrobe, and I'm limited by my lack of funds.

But I remember days of being more adventurous, and at least individual. Of course, that was because I was even poorer than I am now. When I was a kid, my mom shopped at K-Mart or made my clothes from cheap bolts of fabric. Girl, I had bright blue elastic-waisted pants that gathered at the ankles printed with ice cream cones. I also wore shoes with velcro strips until the age of nine. I remember getting a pair of much-coveted LA Gears or Keds and wearing them every day even when they got tight (such is my nostalgia that I have a pair each of "cool" redesigned LA Gears and Keds kicks). I wore shorts over tights in the winter. I wore discarded t-shirts from my brothers, and so would wear leggings (ugh, I was poor, what is Lindsay Lohan's excuse) with big t-shirts that said "Boston Sucks" in bright green. It took me a while to learn that was a reference to the Celtics. It was just a t-shirt to me. I am glad to be past these years, because no kid wants to wear ice cream pants or weird slogan t-shirts. It just screams poverty, and even then, I pined for the banality of Americana basics: khakis, t-shirts, cardigans. Instead I wore weird clothes, and wore them two days in a row (my mom said that they weren't dirty and so I wore clothes two days in a row before they went into the laundry) and bathed every other day (my mom said I would get sick if oftener). Man, I was the poor kid in funny clothes that repeated and I probably smelled weird. I am glad not to be there anymore. Things improved in junior high and high school, at least the bathing and clothes repeating thing (my hardy ability to survive baths and me getting a sense of independence and me doing my own laundry). But I was still odd. I was/am a small person who stopped growing at the age of 14 and 5'2", and so I was wearing Kids-R-Us well into high school--at the very least, sophomore year. This is why the early sexualization of little girls' clothing, and my nieces' low rise jeans, bewilder me.

Fast forward to college: things improved, at least I started shopping at Gap and Old Navy on sale (hell, I still do). My late bloominess in college made it difficult to keep on wearing kids clothes, although I still do have two mackintosh jackets from Gap Girls (the XL pants, alas, have given way to the womanly hips, and no way can I fit an XL or even XXL shirt now). Know what's great? Boys clothes. I have a sailing jacket from Old Navy and a fleece jacket from Gap Boys. I also, as a size 7 shoe woman, wear size 6 kids shoes.

And with that look I arrived at law school in one of the most looks-conscious, high-maintenance cities in the country. I wore wide-legged red pants, kids clothes, loved big brooches (I so was the trendsetter before Michelle Obama!) and tied scarves around my neck or as headbands (I so was the trendsetter before that show I never watch, Gossip Girl!). I wore chunky heeled mary janes and lots of jewelry. It took me till third year to grow out my hair, get some bootcut jeans, force myself to wear heels (dude, girls were wearing stilettos with their backpacks and Seven jeans), and limit myself to the ubitquitous big hoop earrings. I fit in, but I looked really boring, even if I looked "prettier."

So, my question to you my stylish and feminist friend: nevermind the question of who we dress for or for whom do we amp up the sex appeal--how do you balance individualism with fitting in? What do you think your exterior says about your interior? This is a fairly broad question, but fashion is as good an example as any. In my new city, fitting in is much less looks-conscious: a fleece, jeans, and sneakers and I'm just like the rest, and there's not even a brand-consciousness here (there's an entire culture of outdoorsiness, coming here is what made me learn about other brands from which to buy my performance gear). I stand out if I dress up. In my old city, I stood out because I looked weird. I like fitting in and not being asked here, whether I have a special date later, and there, not being asked "oh, you shop at Gap Kids?"

But I kind of miss being weird. I'm not talking about weird knitted hat and dreds different (not cool if you are white/Asian, people). Just the sparkly magpie bizarro joy I brought to my every day. RIght now I'm wearing a black sheath dress and a teal cardigan and my makeup is light and natural (no more retro red lips!), and I look great and womanly and adult. I also feel like a tool. But I guess I've decided, in my adulthood, that I'd rather fit in and look "normal" than to have yet another aspect of my identity (and really, are clothes so central) questioned. There's other ways I articulate my individualism. I am losing them, but I am sure they exist.

anyone lived in a pretty how town

2009-01-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

(poem here)

I love being back in my liberal college town with the bookstores and restaurants and little markets and my one bedroom apartment. And while we tried (unsuccessfully--no wind) to fly a kite last weekend, and may do some more outdoorsy things this weekend, it's been mostly staying at home and working from home. Cooking, baking, eating in, board games, watching TV through Hulu and Netflix Instant. I've done lots of shopping online and have bought (another) bookshelf, a mattress topper, and have browsed online for dresses that I'll never buy and cookware/bakeware that I'll buy one piece at a time. I got a bunch of academic texts online so as to save money and time, even if I am the cause of the death of the publishing industry. So, yeah, in theory I could do any of this anywhere. But I love it here.

I love the weather, I love that there are so many interesting (and cheap!) bookstores around if I want to go to them (one of my favorite dates--we buy a bunch of books and share them), I love that there's a wide variety of cuisines and high/low restaurants (we only go out on weekends, which feels like a treat), I love being a part of a huge university with lots of interesting lectures, talks, and a performance hall where big acts like Alvin Ailey come by. I like the combination of a college town with a real community (at least the city I live in). I like the liberal politics of this region, although I got by in Orange County anyway. I like that I can walk to all the places I need to go, and take the bus or train to most of the places I want to go, even though I was used to driving in traffic and stressful conditions in Southern California. I like that there's a city car share and casual carpool. I like that there's a couple great regional parks with good hiking trails and even lakes and stuff, even if I only go once a month. I like I don't care much about things being open 24 hours (since I usually pass out by midnight), and I don't like that much urban density, and I don't need a backyard right now. So these things, to me, make this place much more livable than any other place I've lived in. I know I can't stay here forever, and one day I'll have to adjust back to driving everywhere and buying everything online (like I do now, except that I enjoy the browsing and used bookstores).

What makes a place liveable to you? What do you take into consideration when choosing a place to live? I know some people who hate the suburbs so much and call anyplace that is not NYC "uncivilized," but that's really annoying. There's ways to make any place liveable, and the internet has helped greatly. But I will admit that there's much that I love that is specific about this region, which makes it more livable to me than any other place. But I imagine I may one day feel that way about some other city and state. Maybe. I hope so.

anton ego cooks!

2009-01-13T21:37:00.001-08:00

I really enjoyed Ratatouille. I love food and cooking, and I like talking animals (but I hate talking babies in the sense of Look Who's Talking or those weird advertisements). I secretly like French things, even though bad experiences with certain French international classmates make me publicly disavow this with militant Francophobia. I was super excited to see (and take a class in) the kitchens where the animation crew refined the cooking motions for their storyboards. In fact, I love all things Pixar. TD has a friend who works for Pixar and we stayed through the credits of Wall*E to see his name as a lighting engineer guy. My favorite movie is The Incredibles, although I have this huge love for Monster's Inc. and my nephew loooved Toy Story. One of my favorite bits, because I'm a big ol' softy who loves grandiloquent monologues (cough blogger narcissist cough), is the speech by Anton Ego, the crazy mean critic in Ratatouille:

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new; an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking, is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, "Anyone can cook". But I realize - only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.

I just eat up faux-populist stuff like that, man. This season's Top Chef is particularly enjoyable to me because I really liked the background story of Eugene, a tattooed tough Asian guy who started as a dishwasher and self-trained himself to become an executive chef. TD makes fun of me for liking the human interest stories, but really, aw.

Anyway, the real life Anton Ego is now cooking and himself being critiqued! It is like something out of a Disney movie! Or that line in High Fidelity, in which a professional critic tries his hand at actually creating something and putting something new out in the world. Except that this guy is getting skewered. Heh, skewered.

The glib, sanctimonious person in me would love a critic getting his comeuppance (especially one who is so scathing and self-satisfied and blindly in love with his own supposed talent as compared to the rubes he deigns to critique, a true Ego indeed), but I sorta feel bad for the guy.

I have no idea what this means though. Phoebe?:

“Those macaroons — they’re so hard they’re like stuffed Christians,” said Marc Beekenkamp, a Web designer, using an expression that means the dish is too heavy.

Stuffed Christians?! Also, don't they mean "macarons"?

Also, this much be a very French observation:

That point, at least, has never been in dispute. Mr. Simon prides himself on being an outsider and a provocateur. His columns describe not only a restaurant’s food, but also its service, décor and clientele, even down to the movement of the breasts of women around him.

Huh. Do the women in France not wear bras? Do they jog while eating? Why do their breasts move? Maybe they heave with emotion at the gastronomical delights, their bosoms quivering with anticipation or whatever.

This is a fun article to read, if only to remind casual and professional writers "not to overdo it." I try to refrain from purple prose if I can (cough), but my natural enthusiasm for everything makes me deem everything "the best ___ ever," and my tendency to become too emotionally invested in things makes me want to cry with disappointment. Like this Ritz cracker I'm eating right now after hours of not eating? The BEST cracker EVER. All buttery, crumbly delight.

random roundup

2009-01-12T20:01:00.000-08:00

My right hand still hurts, but I am improving by using my mouse with my left hand and typing like one of those people who can't touch type in the way the typing class in 7th grade taught us with your index fingers on the "F" and "J" and as if pecking the board didn't look stupid.

1. Rita has a plausible conspiracy theory about the New York Times and its Life and Styles section.

2. Relatedly, The Atlantic is the very first magazine to predict the untimely demise of the NYT.

3. TD and I started playing this board game this weekend. It is pretty fun! But yes, I'm looking up strategies so that I can totally dominate. I need to work on my trash-talking though.

4. We really like that 30 Rock show.

5. Great article on breast-feeding, work/life, and other fronts of the so-called "mommy wars."

you can't spell "carpal tunnel" without "crap"

2009-01-07T22:20:00.000-08:00

I do not want to type much these days. Ouch. I think I should use the school's physical therapy. You know how your hand cramps and it zings all the way to your elbow and it stiffens and you can hardly hold a pen? Yeah, like that. I'm also just feeling general blog exhaustion. I don't know why, because I'm not writing much these days and I'm not even reading much. Maybe if I make my peace with short, content-less posts, I will be able to keep blogging. If your hands hurt as much as mine does, I'd rather conserve movement for academic writing and knitting and cooking. Maybe I'll blog only a few times a week until this heals. It did the last time. Please heal.

I was going to weigh in on this debate, but it is exhausted and it exhausts me. Suffice it to say, I agree with Phoebe for reasons deriving from theoretical agreement and personal experience, notwithstanding my own complicated feelings towards the beauty industrial complex and my own body image.

Instead, I'll just say that I express my deepest sympathy to Miss Self-Important for her roommate woes. I always wonder about dudes like this. How do they survive? What did they expect would happen when they moved out of their parents' house? Were they raised by wolves or sickeningly indulgent mothers? I know plenty of people who grew up with housekeepers who still know how to cook and clean, and plenty of people who grew up lower-income who can't, so even class privilege or lack of necessity is no excuse. I grew up with three brothers. The youngest older brother is a total slob (ew, and we have but one bathroom upstairs), but at least he can cook. And he could clean, if he bothered to. My parents seem astounded at my cooking and baking abilities. I was not raised to cook or clean much (I was told to do homework instead and was thrown out of the kitchen and excused from many chores). I didn't really move out till 22, when I went to law school. My mom still tried to pack me food every weekend. Still, I learned how to cook and clean. What is this dude's excuse, other than male privilege? I just don't get it. I guess I am blessed with a partner like TD, who can cook, clean and fix stuff, like every person who does not live with their mother should be able to, and he cooks for me all the time.

Still, roommates. Even with my love-goggles I can say that there are more benefits to living alone than cohabitating too soon, with anyone (even/especially if you love them). I actually live in one of the highest rent cities in the country, which is why I never eat out. I mean, I live three miles from school in technically the gritty city next door to the liberal college town (just on the border though, so it's a couple miles away from actual bodies-in-the-lake part). Still, past roommate experiences have taught me that it is better to suffer the high rent alone in a tiny apartment (although my current apartment is quite spacious for one person) and trek it to school or work than to live with roommates you hate. Even if you don't hate your roommate, problems and awkwardness and boundary issues will necessarily ensue. I was really close friends with a girl until we moved in together. After we moved out a scant number of months later, I didn't see her or talk to her, and it was kind of both of our faults--we send occasional emails, we talk about coffee, but we have never actually met up--and we used to hang out really regularly, until we moved in together.

She would come into my bedroom and wake me up at midnight or 1 am to talk for hours about her boyfriend or general friend problems (I have insomnia and take sleep when I can get it and she didn't get why I was angry at being woken up), but would complain that I was encroaching on her life if I stayed at home when she had friends over, or when I became friends with her friends--originally at her insistence! She tried to set me up with a guy, which didn't work, but complained when the schedule of contrived group meetings for us to get to know one another became "too much" for her to deal with, since she didn't like to get too close to people and see them socially so often. I work from home, so things got so tense she would stay at school till midnight to avoid coming home. She was one of those enviro-sanctimonialists who would get so preachy about recycling and composting everything that I wanted to burn trashcans of paper on our porch. She talked openly in front of my boyfriend and me about her desire to keep her own boyfriend of 8 months at arms length to limit him to a schedule of once a week, after she had seen her other girl friends for a night of clubbing (so say Saturday late night till Sunday), and only one phone call a week (she got freaked out if he called more than that, and wondered what was wrong) yet she knew in her heart that she wanted to marry him and was upset if he didn't acknowledge their relationship to others. I could only hope that my boyfriend didn't think her view of relationships was what I wanted, which fortunately he didn't. Still, because of this, I am thinking that we should go have coffee and reconnect, but I wonder if the awkwardness of not having talked or seen each other since we've lived together will come up. It probably will. Ah, well.

she & him

2009-01-05T21:10:00.000-08:00

Karl introduced me to this awesome band, which consists of my girlcrush Zoeey Deschanel (I loved her in All the Real Girls...and probably no other movie) and M. Ward, chill indie dude singer.

Don't you just love the upbeat '60s sound and Mary Tyler Moore-ishness? I am somewhat tempted to cut bangs, but I am more lazy than I am stylish (high maintenance = not Belle), and moreover I am not an indie rock girl (see also Jenny Lewis, Cat Power, Leslie Feist, etc.)

In other news, I learn that "svarta vinbar" means "currants", not "lingon berries." Kind of an acquired taste, a little tangy and vaguely medicinal. Not going to make hamantaschen with this jar. I will stick to raspberry and peach jam.

anomie belle

2009-01-05T11:42:00.000-08:00

Anomie. Via Wicked Anomie, check out my evil and much cooler twin, Anomie Belle!:

About Anomie Belle
an·o·mie [an-uh-me] n social unrest or normlessness; malaise, alienation and purposelessness.

belle [bel] n a popular and charming woman; especially: a woman whose charm and beauty make her a favorite.

Sleeping Patterns wastes no time introducing Anomie Belle’s haunting voice, beautiful and lingering...it is bursting with sound (Sound Magazine).

Anomie Belle is the project of composer, producer, audio programmer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist, Toby Campbell. She makes dark social issues eerily lovely" (Doug Haire, KEXP). Originally a classical violinist and songwriter, she released multiple solo records before creating her own beats and making her way into electronic, experimental, trip-hop music. A Portland, Oregon native, Campbell has performed at top venues across the US, and has worked as a musician and producer in Madrid, Glasgow, Amsterdam, New York, Buenos Aires, and London. In 2006 she moved to Seattle to focus exclusively on Anomie Belle.

Bryan and Karl, I think you might both agree that I should buy the CD and a T-Shirt. I dig the music, in a nostalgic-for-the-trip-hop-of-my-making-out-music-college-days. Check out the cover of Otis!

Thanks, Wicked A!

In other news, I am back in my apartment and looking helplessly at piles of books and general mess, and trying to revise a paper. Yesterday was much nicer, with the whole pick up from airport and eating of Mexican food and watching 30 Rock and falling asleep reading The Atlantic (which is not that great these days).

orange county, yugoslavia

2009-01-03T01:37:00.000-08:00

Some places are described as having "no there, there." Well, there's none here either, and I'd still rather be there. My brain is addled by too much family time, too many movies (my parents put a plasma TV in my room to bribe me into coming home more often and for longer), too much sunlight, too many episodes of Spongebob and something terrible called "Drake and Josh." It's like Saved by the Bell. Yes, I said that. Yes, I am bad, and occasionally I let the TV babysit the kids for me so that I can read something. They're pretty good most of the time drawing and playing quietly, but after a few hours of that they start being loud again. It's easier now that they're older and more self-sufficient and yet still mostly good and obedient. I, not being their overly indulgent parents and a cool and fun and yet must-be-obeyed aunt, have achieved that Machiavellian perfection of being both loved and feared. I overdid it the other day though, trying to push two 40-50 lb children at once on the swings (it's like that arm press machine at the gym) and yesterday I was super sore and had to take many Advil. They kept wanting to go in and out of the kiddie swings, and I volunteered to help pick up and push another couple of kids whose grandmother had a bad back, which is like lifting and pushing 40 lbs for like many, many reps. Which in turn gave me a bad back. You try doing all those weight bearing exercises when you avoid the gym and do not do much cross-training. Ow.

So while I like the family and am pleasantly surprised at how they're becoming more open minded to the idea of non-Vietnamese people in the family, I will be glad to go home again on Sunday. Home! Where I can cook for myself and walk alone at night against my better judgment, and where bad judgment may be exercised on a daily basis! Yay! I'll be glad to be home and back with TD. You know what else I'm glad about? Not blowing $500 just to go AALS. The Gowder and I were supposed to go, but we both agreed that we would not pay such an unconscionable sum just to hang out in another Southern California suburb. We have been constantly complaining to each other about the lack of everything for the past two weeks (I can't tell who drinks more haterade). I am so going to run to the bookstore and cafe on Monday and this time I promise won't make fun of the college students and their neophyte awakening discoveries of bell hooks and Franz Fanon. I got nothing but love for them.

I know I seem to hate Orange County. I don't, really--I just disprefer it, and this dispreference is borne from experience. I am sure that one day I will live in just as boring a suburb, but I hopefully won't have as a provincial life ruled by conformity and conspicuous consumption.

No, I'm not making it up. See, e.g., Dean MacCannell's Empty Meeting Grounds, chapter 2, which is entitled "Orange County, Yugoslavia":

"The fundamental feature of the Orange County ethos is the difference and distance between public self-understanding and the barely repressed underlying passions. What is socially important in Orange County is not actual values, but the public expression of inflated values."

"it might be argued that Orange County "un-freedom," extending into one's own home and beliefs, cannot be compared to socialist central control, because in Orange County it is fully accepted and desired by everyone as contributing to the common good and is not, therefore, totalitarian in character. This is precisely the argument that loyal party members in East Germany or Yugoslavia gave for their regimes before they expressed themselves differently on the same matter."

"One recognizes the pattern immediately: it is socialism, a kind of international corporate central control and total economic dependence leading to mental incompetence; corruption; unearned privilege for the "party loyal"; blind acceptance of all prevailing values. Orange county was not my first expererience with totalitarianism. In the 1960s I visited Yugoslavia and saw immediately that any romantic ideals I might have held concerning socialism were clearly wrong. The roads of Yugoslavia were also filled with Mercedes-Benz and BMW sedans of party officials."

"For the average-person-in-general today the difference between capitalist and socialist modes of production is not a real one. It is felt mainly as the dominant form of ideological expression, a pure abstraction which is lived as a myth. If you live in Orange County you must be certain that under socialism you would be "unfree"; if you live under socialism you must be certain the capitalists exploit the working classes and use force to maintain their historical advantage. But in Orange County you learn ot live without freedom while pretending otherwise, and in Yugoslavia you learn to be a capitalist."

"One might ask how thinking subjects can live with this much contradiction. In the case of Orange County, the people seem to be sustained by a crude sensuality, perhaps also derived from their Bible Belt heritage, an equation of sex, dirt, and power. I observed two sun-tanned women, a mother and daughter with matched, platinum-tipped hair and nails, wearing designer outfits, driving a new Mercedes convertible, the one with the latest engine. They were the perfect embodiment of Orange County bourgeois respectability, but their personalized license plate revealed the aggressive crudeness that seems as basic to Orange County life as the contradiction itself. The plate read "WAY 2 GO" and beneath, on the custom frame, "Anything Else Sucks."

"it's ok to be smart"

2009-01-03T01:28:00.000-08:00

My niece got these as a present. I hate anti-intellectualism. Since when was it not OK to be smart?

darn you nick and matt

2009-01-01T00:33:00.000-08:00

What a thing to do on new year's eve (now the first day of the new year!). I read through an old box of letters before throwing them out (and then deciding that some of them can't be thrown away). All because Nick and Matt said that letters should be kept or at least re-read before chucking. Some are nostalgically sad because they're written with such affection that somehow seemed to fade with distance, some are just plain ol' drama sad because they chronicle the implosion of a decade's worth of friendship. Wow, your late teens and early twenties are hard. Wait, I can remember writing some really lame and dramatic letters and emails as recently as June 2007. Whev. Pre-TD. I now have a mostly drama-free life, which oddly dovetails with a letter-free life.

I used to write letters. I used to receive letters. I used to print out emails and keep them in a corporeal form. But now I find oddly comforting the ephemerality of the spoken word and the physical gesture. They are real, they are felt, they are kept as memories but otherwise released to time. These letters feel like heavy, heavy objects to carry around. I used to think that if I didn't document an experience or have tangible proof of something (yes, I feel your love, but will you write it down?) it didn't exist. Ok, so a part of that is being an excessively romantic English lit major obsessed with the correspondence of authors (Bishop and Lowell!) and epistolary romances. Part of it is being a sucker for lame romantic drama tropes and thinking that one day the letters will be like some chronicle of love between me and my husband, as if life were a movie starring Meryl Streep played in her younger years by Laura Linney and directed by Anthony Minghella to be appreciated by future generations.

And then I remember that part of the reason why I never want to run for public office or in any way become famous is that I do not at all want any personal correspondence read by anyone else (ironic that I have a blog, yes), because almost everything I write is banal and meaningless. Besides, because I actively do not want drama or hardship in my life, correspondence, even if we engaged in it, would be extremely banal given that TD and I are not separated by distance or torn asunder by war, and we do not suffer from delusions of third person grandeur such that we would voluntarily inject the drama into our normal, happy, I-see-you-every-day relationship. I really like our phone calls, and I like that we see each other. I like that the affection is expressed in non-dramatic ways. Actions mean more than words. I read some of the love letters. How painfully empty! I think of the pick-up at the airport on Sunday as being ten times that grandiloquent puffery. Words mean a lot, but they don't mean that much in the end, if you don't feel them and live them.

So I think I'll throw away most of the letters. Except the ones chronicling the friendship implosion. I don't know why I'm keeping the most painful of the lot, especially as they chronicle in part some crazy family drama involving my brother. I suppose I could send it along to my screenwriter friend, for safe-keeping, wondering if some part of it (a quip, a plot point) finds its way into some movie. I always tell her my craziest stories. She loves crazy stories and drama, just like me, especially when they happen to other people. She is the one who taught me to see humor in my father's crazy over-the-board apoplectic rage whenever I am careless bad-female enough to leave a sock in the dryer, threatening to throw all of my clothes out on the street to be run over by cars. The cartoon image of a steamroller running over your clothes, turning them into tents does come to mind, yes. So maybe I'll send them to her, so that the letters aren't discarded, but at least they're no longer these metaphorical skeletons that I keep in my literal cloest (in a decoupaged box! I was crafty once).

I was thisclose to writing up some of the letters and publishing poetry I wrote during those years that are like all emo and shit but one of which is well-regarded by an MFA firend. But I didn't.

obligatory blagojevich post, with questions

2009-01-01T00:12:00.000-08:00

Why on earth didn't Illinois call for a special election?! Republicans are blaming the Democrats for blocking this. True?

I was telling TD that the legal opinions appear to be all over the place on whether the Senate can refuse to confirm Burris. Volokh says no, some guy at some other school quoted in the NYT says no, Balkin, Tushnet and Amar say yes, and so now I don't know what's the right interpretation of Powell v. McCormack.

Predictions: a big ol' mess. Blagojevich is one sick, corrupt, Willie Stark like guy. Senate will vote not to confirm, Burris will sue, and a big ol' mess in the courts will ensue.

What do you think? Who's right about Powell? Even if the Senate is the "top court" for appointments as Amar says, if Burris sues, it would go to the SCOTUS, right, as it rests on the interpretation of Art. I Sec. 5 of the Constitution? I'm inclined to go with Balkin and Amar on this one, but I am not an expert in this type of law.

happy new year to you too

2008-12-31T22:17:00.001-08:00

Ok, that's it, next year I'm flying back early and having a real NYE, like the one I've never had, with TD at some party where I wear a hot dress (my fantasies are tacky and cliche and so the dress involves sequins) and kiss him at midnight just like in the movies. To heck with being a dutiful daughter and staying for a whole two weeks and spending the evening at home, in my room, reading Nan Lin's Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action with Survivor Man on in the background. This visit was two weeks because 1) I am a dutiful daughter and they expect me to come for as much time as possible, and 2) I didn't know when TD would be back from Mexico when I booked my flight. So anyway, I'm currently grumbly.

I feel awful--there is so much to be thankful for. I have good health, a becoming-less-dysfunctional-and-possibly-more-supportive family, someone I love who loves me back, and I'm doing interesting stuff that I genuinely enjoy at a great school in a great city. Most of the time, I feel these blessings acutely and am happy and easy to please because I am generally truly pleased, having known for years what true dysfunction, deprivation, and loneliness are like. But because I am a bad, petty person who never weathers even short separations well, I am feeling all lonely and party-poopy. So I was all grumbly on the phone with TD, and bit of a downer. Bad Belle.

It's unfair to begrudge him his good experiences, because what I really mean to say is that I wish I were sharing in them--the interesting adventures and vacations afar, the cliched parties, the NYE kiss (silly only in that it's a tradition, but kisses are always good). Every year, it's the same (remember traditional strict Asian parents, folks--I came home from the wedding on Saturday by 11:30 pm). I'm in my room reading and watching TV. My sister comes in at midnight (if she's still awake) and wishes me a happy new year. Because I have insomnia whenever I visit my parents, I continue to read until 3 am. I fall asleep. I know that this isn't an awful way to celebrate a new year. But it's always the same, and I've never had a proper new year, and as cheesy and cliche as it is, just once I would like one. TD tells me not to feel bad. Of course, he's at a friend's party right now, which sounds infinitely more fun. He's tired and didn't even want to go, but all I can think tonight is that I'd rather be with him, whether at home or out. Instead I'm reading about social networks that I lack and social ties when I am missing a really important tie.

So while I'm glad for the things I do have, and for 2008 ending as well as it started, right now I'm an ungrateful little bitch who can only focus on current boredom and loneliness. I resolve to be better next year. And organize my books and files. And do research. And waste less food. And go to some place outside of the U.S.

What are your resolutions? Happy new year, by the way.

how to cook and work at the same time

2008-12-30T22:58:00.000-08:00

(This is my kitchen. Note that the dining table right next to the stove can double as a desk, so you can work and watch the stove at the same time. Missing is my beautifully organized spice jar drawer.)

In response to Anna's comments in the previous post (this started off as a comment, but I wrote too much):

I read while I cook. Seriously. TD and I eat a lot of soups and roasts. So, I spend about 15 minutes doing prep--chopping, browning, etc, and the rest of the time, the oven or stove takes over and I read while it's cooking on low heat for 3-4 hours. I am getting pretty good at chopping things. I don't really do 30 minute meals as much as 15 minutes of prep + 3 hours of simmer or braising or roasting. It's great for the winter. Makes my apartment warm, saving on energy. I will write a post about my quickest cooking meals, although they are not necessarily my cheapest (pork tenderloins are $5-6 per 1 lb loin which lasts like 1.5 meals). In general, more time saves more money, because a pot of beans is $1 but takes like 3 hours to cook. I can't eat the same thing two days in a row, so I pack up leftovers into lunches for TD, I eat maybe 1-2 days of leftovers max, and I'm onto the new thing.

This of course, is useful if you work from home. So here's my work from home meals:

Braised beef short ribs
Beef bourguinon
Beef and barley soup
Chicken soup (I make my own stock, takes like 3 hours)
Pot o' pinto beans (or any beans)
Pernil al horno (adobo style slow roasted pork, 3 hours)
Lasagna (I don't know why, but it takes so long to assemble even with no-bake noodles)

But some times I don't get home until 7:00 or 7:30, and TD comes home at 8:30 or 9:00. So I have to cook at night just like people do, after work. Either I do prep work in the morning before I leave and have chopped up stuff in cling-wrapped bowls to come home to, or do all the prep work in the hour before dinner. We are blessed with no hungry children who do not need to be fed right away, or else I would be prepping the night before or the morning of every day and would totally give up my soup/stew/bean stuff except on weekends. So, meals that can be made in 30-60 minutes, after you've done your reading and writing:

Any type of pasta tossed with butter and cheese, served with some pan fried cutlet of meat of your choice, add some sauteed vegetables
Pizza made with Trader Joe's pre-made pizza dough ($1.29).
Pork tenderloin: quickly marinade in hoisin, honey, soy sauce, garlic and ginger, serve with rice.
A quick ragu: 1 lb. ground beef mixed with a can of diced tomatoes, diced onions, garlic, served with spaghetti or tagliatelle. Sort of like bolognese without the milk.
Fish fillets, pan fried, served with whatever
Frittatas or omelets with whatever vegetables or meat you want.
Dumpling soup if you have pre-made dumplings. I do mine all at once and freeze them and use batches, add bok choy and ramen and there it is.
Stir-frys.
Ramen, do not worry about making your own dashi.
Quickly baked pieces of chicken, you can buy quarters and serve with whatever starches or vegetables.
Roast chicken. Seriously. It takes 45-60 minutes to roast, but it can be pre-dressed in the morning with rosemary and lemon and garlic.

Yeah, quick is not as cheap. I hate buying meat pre-cut up, because it's so much more expensive. But it's also quicker, as is buying your vegetables pre-peeled and chopped. I never do that though, because I am a cheap bastard. I love my slow cooked meals though.

Baking is a joy and a hobby, something that is not as conducive to reading, because I am super careful and tend to bake in individual batches because my electric oven doesn't heat evenly. It is a disaster cooking two trays of cookies at once. So I can't tell you how to bake and work, because I really don't. It's my break. I walk to school and thus get exercise + commute, but I can't figure out how to combine delicate baking and work. I totally will never be able to knit and read at the same time, certainly. Some things are just time-intensive and require full attention, which is why they're so fun.

But cooking is fun too, and not necessarily too time draining. There's no need to go for expensive take-out or out to dinner (which takes up a lot of time, waiting for the meal to be cooked and served!), and fast-food is so bad for you. You save a lot of money cooking. Even my most bourgie, time-saving meal where I buy chops and cutlets and pre-cut vegetables are less than the price of one person's take-out order. I always think of going out to dinner as a date, but not a default. There's no official bargain on this, but on weekdays I cook and I pack him up lunches, and on the weekend, he takes me out to dinner at my favorite Mexican place where can split a fish ceviche for $3.75 and a carne asada burrito the size of a child's leg for $5.95, and I totally do not feel guilty for ordering an extra order of pork tamales, because we take the leftovers home. Mmm. Guess where I'm going to ask him to take me to dinner on Sunday when I get back. Oooh, and 2 liters fo agua fresca for $1.50.

to buy or not to buy

2008-12-30T19:57:00.000-08:00

The answer, most of the time, is "not buy." Spare yourself needless expense! Which comes in all forms, especially if you like being stylish and fashion forward! Still, I am pretty good at not spending much money, as I eat out only socially, pack lunches if I can choke down yet another sandwich (no public microwave at school), do not frequent cafes by making my own coffee in the morning and packing my own cans of Diet Coke to get caffeine jolts throughout the day, and vow never to buy anything I can make. I am really good at resisting buying baked goods, because I have that supercilious "I can bake better" attitude that is super annoying. I am weak when it comes to ice cream cones though, especially when it's gourmet ice cream like sage praline or candied walnut cardamom. I can make really good soup though, so I can't justify my $3.50 soup and cornbread at S.A's, except that it's the cheapest healthy lunch I have found (not that I don't love $3 hotdogs, $2.50 pizza slices, $1.50 bagels with cream cheese).

But there's a few things for The Great Organization/Life Rehaul 2009 that I am contemplating buying. After three years on my not-so-luxurious Ikea Sultan Fangebo foam mattress (5 7/8" thick, purchased in 2006 for $149), which resides in my Dalselv pine frame ($99), I have decided to upgrade it slightly by adding a Serta 4" memory foam mattress rejuvenator, along with a down-alternative cover. For the price of women's shoes, I am going to sleep more comfortably. I think that this is a reasonable investment, and I have a couple more years to enjoy it, so cost/night/nap should average out well.

Thus, not-purchased will be this dress, these shoes, this coat, or anything else that doesn't actively enhance my quality of life on a daily basis and of which I already have too many. Sigh. I am considering buying rain boots though, because they would improve my life on a daily basis for at least 3-4 months a year

Purchased was this bookshelf, because I ran out of shelf space half a year ago and my books in total disarray. This one came with free shipping (great for no car people) and pre-assembled (great for clutzy and busy people). I really like it. I may have to buy another one because I am continually buying books (which if academic and useful, are not counted as frivolous buying, and if fiction on sale/used, are budgeted the way coffee/ice cream cones are, 1-2 per week), which would mean not buying this dress. We never go on datey dates anymore anyway, and I cook better than most places that are not so expensive I choke on my amuse bouche of sweetbreads and flute of Roederer with guilt. But those dates are so fun. Before TD I never went on those kind of dates. Great way to celebrate an anniversary or birthday! But what makes them so fun is their rarity, and the fact that they signal really important occasions or special absconding from responsibility for an entire weekend. In general, I am super happy with going out once a week for a burrito or Chinese food or chicken and waffles.

But we're trying to improve my life on a daily basis, here, folks, and I eat in every weeknight and cook 2-3 times a week. I think that this recipe would go really far in doing that, and I would have leftovers for a couple of days, and I could use my new Le Creuset. I am looking forward to buying lots of ingredients for soups next week, and baking everything from cookies to scones to cake. Maybe I'll make candy too. So I resolve that if I buy stuff, it be for the purpose of eating and working better, and resting up so that I can eat and work some more.

This is almost a set-up for New Year's resolutions, except mine are extremely boring and aim really low.

random roundup

2008-12-29T00:03:00.000-08:00

1. Via OrgTheory, an incredibly interesting first-person account of the Madoff scam by one of its victims--who also happens to be a psychology professor and expert in trust and gullibility.

2. The comments thread to this Crooked Timber post on the responsibility of Western feminists to be careful to avoid adding xenophobic fire to Islamophobia when calling attention to human rights violations in non-Western countries is really fascinating. I come on the side of bringing attention to human rights violations. I would do the same with my own non-Western backround, despite occasionally coming off as a cultural difference apologist. But some things are too terrible not to decry, and the Pakistani Taliban threatening to kill all girls who go to school is exactly that sort of thing.

3. This Dada-esque sociology satire/hating-on/pie-throwing blog is completely incomprehensible and I never understand the point of anything they write. And I'm a fan of the theatre of the absurd! That they're obsessed with Scatterplot and Jeremy is very weird. I almost wish that there was a weird Dada-esque law satire/hating-on/pie-throwing blog, but then again so many out there are unintentionally self-parodying.

4. The wedding yesterday was super beautiful and really fun. I cried, seeing the girl I knew at 14 somehow transform in a day to this beautiful bride. It was a traditional Catholic ceremony followed by a Chinese banquet reception. But everything was really elegant and non-traditional. By non-traditional, I mean that the venue was completely lacking in red and pink, was not at Seafood World in Garden Grove, and instead of the bad Vietnamese cover band (Lipstick on Your Collar at my brother's first wedding, no joke) a jazz quartet led by a college friend. It was all so elegant and beautiful. I actually danced. I had the prettiest date at the wedding--The Journalist. TD is currently in Mexico (no, I'm not bitterly jealous). I cried. I ate. I danced. Good times. I still want the smallest and lowest key wedding possible though, like a small garden ceremony or City Hall, followed by some chill barbecue or catered whatever. I love big, beautiful weddings (and this was actually a small wedding), but you know, to attend. Big parties are great, but only when the attention is focused on someone who is not me, and too many people in one room is an incredibly enervating experience for an introvert. Supposedly weddings are not for the bride and groom though. When I get married, I want a short dress, a chuppah, that stepping on glass thing, and a chill party with food where I can actually talk to my friends.

5. I went to an engagement asking celebration today. This is a traditional Vietnamese ceremony, in which the groom's side formally asks the bride's family for permission, and both in-laws and the betrothed pray to the ancestors for permission. There's lots of little rituals, from the lighting of the candles on each side of the altar by both sides of the family to show that the families will be blended into one, to the presents the groom's family must bring to the bride's family (a roasted pig, sweet sticky rice, lotus candy, etc.) and the future mother-in-law gives the bride a gift of a bracelet and necklace, but it's a special kind that is like a stiff bangle and collar. They remind me of shackles. Needless to say, while I adore some traditions and occasionally kick it old school, I do not want this antiquated patriarchal ceremony.

6. All of this wedding and family stuff make me want to life-delay even longer. Ironic, no? Even as all of my friends are getting married and settling down, I'm kind of enjoying taking the time to catch up.

that time of life

2008-12-27T00:30:00.000-08:00

I'm at that age where I have a schedule of at least 2-3 weddings a year. Often more weddings than I can attend, especially if they're destination weddings. Today I'm going to a really good friend from high school's, just as we just passed the time for our ten year reunion (hell no I won't go). I can remember the day we met, at the age of 14. We are now 28 years old.

Tell me, does it get any easier? The progression from 14 to 28 should be described as "rocky," at best. Oddly though (and for this I blame the patriarchy) it feels as though the real adventures and milestones of life are just beginning to happen. No, seriously. Not even the graduations. Especially if you have been racking up degrees like I have. Only now are my friends and I getting settled into careers, partnering up, settling down, and contemplating starting families. It feels like the big adventures and undertakings are just starting.

I know that this is probably a perpetual student mindset. But for all the ups and downs and drama of the past ten years (and I have been through a fair amount, given the insanity that runs in my family), I feel like I'm just starting. This is actually a good feeling. I don't like the insanely painful and dramatic past. Certainly not enough to reminisce about it over some ridiculous occasion like a reunion. All of the people from my past that I want to carry over to the future are going with me. Today's wedding will feel like that--lifting the past into the present, to be borne into a new future. It's a great feeling--one tinged with the hope of the new while carrying the deep comfort of familiarity.

bourgie cooking/shopping advice, please

2008-12-27T00:08:00.000-08:00

I normally cook on a budget, which means lots of non-fancy soups and pastas and casseroles and roasts. Plain eatin', folks. Apart from my pastry creams and crepes, TD never wants me to bake anything too fancy. He loves chocolate chip cookies, and I aim to please. Every week. Not kidding.

But I cannot deny that I have occasional fits of foodie-ness. And I like to try to bake slightly complicated things, and I have this utter fondness for paella that I can't fulfill much because most of the time it comes with shrimp. Unfortunately, I do not want to spend much money, and therefore do not shop at Whole Foods.

Tell me, where can I buy vanilla beans, saffron threads (or even fake saffron strips), and heirloom beans (I like big white ones, but I don't know the name for that, so if you do, let me know)for cheap online with cheap shipping? OK, perhaps it is asking to much to find expensive things for cheap, but dude, the internet + free market = crazy delicious. I mean, I got my Nordicware commercial pots discounted like 70%. Why not saffron? Like this 1/2 pound of vanilla beans sounds like a good deal, but way more than I would need. Probably. I use vanilla extract a lot, but I get mine cheap-ish at Trader Joe's. I probably don't need 56 vanilla beans. So where can I buy some but not a lot and not for a lot?