my san francisco home

Took a month to get everything all organized and decorated.

Another month to get the pictures up.

Just in case anyone out there still reads personal blogs, here's a peek into my teeny tiny studio in the city. It's about 250 square feet, less than half the size of my beloved home of 18 months in Palo Alto, but it's all the space I need, plus a 25-minute walk from the nephews and around the corner from great restaurants & parks, my SF surrogate parents, and all the mass transit vehicles I could ever want. Oh, and there's a huge avocado tree in the backyard. For reals.

Special credits go to: Ikea (furniture), Brady (moving incl. furniture dissembling & rebuilding), Claire (that awesome painting hanging on the wall), Blik (wall decals), Hortica (my very first houseplant), The Container Store (everything else. You should have seen me coming home on the Muni with my burden of 2 ginormous bags full of boxes, crates, drawer organizers, hanging shelves, and all manner of other, uh, containers).

Who wants to come visit? If I move my bike into the hall closet, there's totally enough floor space for my air mattress, I swear.

fine twined linens

My mother has given me many things, including:

                       these legs                                      and good taste in textile design

also,                 these sweet Pumas                         and this gorgeous new duvet cover

which were exactly what I wanted for my birthday.

Plus, she threw in the matching shams and coordinating sheets, AND two surprises:

How adorable is that?

Not to mention a plethora of throw pillows (she made the black&white covers herself).

Thanks, Mom!

(Now it's about time for me to crawl into that stylish bed. 'Night!)

hold on just a second don't tell me this one you know i know this one i know this song i know this one i know this song

So. I'm currently floating on the aftereffects of one of the best weekends of my entire life. Seriously. It was like a non-stop party. And not the kind that makes me claustrophobic and sends me dissolving into a corner. It was, however, the kind with many much musics (not to be confused with many much moosen).

Friday night was populated with salsa, cumbia, bachata, and my personal favorite merengue. Lesson 1: always say yes to a night at the salsa club even though you went to bed at 4am the night before. Lesson 2: sometimes it may be best to keep your mouth shut and not let on that you speak Spanish. Lesson 3: eventually the inebriated Nicaraguan who wants your phone number will settle for your hotmail address, and everyone goes home safe and happy.

Saturday night saw epic performances by Ra Ra Riot, Andrew Bird, and Death Cab. As you can probably imagine, I went mostly for Andrew Bird. And he did not disappoint. Nothing short of phenomenal, in fact. Since none of the little video that I got is good enough (i.e., I was too impatient to hold up the camera for more than 30 seconds and/or the microphone picked up my neighbors' chatter better than the music) to bother uploading it, you'll just have to trust me on the amazingness factor. Or go see him for yourself. I highly recommend the latter.

Just say the word, Andrew, and I will run away with you and your sock monkey and your victrola.

We sang happy birthday to him. While he was on stage, we got a wee bit of rain. Then this happened:

And then there was Death Cab. And they were awesome. I've never listened to them particularly obsessively (as I have with many others), but I found myself singing along to most of the songs they played. Tons of fun. (There's a good deal of video from the show already up on youtube; just search for "death cab july 11 berkeley" or some such similar string, if you so desire.)

After the concert we watched this wonderful documentary called Young at Heart. Cackle-and-guffaw-out-loud funny, and beautiful in so many ways.

Here's a taste:

You should watch it, too.

Then there was Sunday, highlighted by barbecued goodness, a new friend, a special visit from an old friend, and a motorcycle ride. Not to mention the freakin' gorgeous Palo Alto weather.

Plus, I got to talk on the phone to Claire, Joseph, Mom, Dad, and Vanessa.

Can life get better? I submit that it cannot!

two reasons why i love california in the summer

1. Outdoor yoga.

Once a week I end the work day with yoga class, on a shady spot of lawn outside tile-roofed, arcade-lined building with a Spanish name on a peaceful, idyllic campus. Bliss. Then when I come home I feel like dancing. And I usually do. Like an idiot. But you'll have to take my word for it, since there are as of yet no witnesses to this phenomenon.

2. Fresh apricots.

When I was growing up—wait. I'm still doing that. Let's try that again: when I was a kid in Maryland, we always had dried apricots in the pantry. Always. Many a school lunch included a little sandwich bag (or snack bag, once they became available—remember how great they were?) full of dried apricots. Though I never grew to flat-out dislike them, I often tired of them. Every once in a while I wondered why other kids seemed not to come from environments so heavily saturated with dried apricots.

At the time of year when fresh apricots became available in the stores, Mom would always bring some home. But she was never satisfied. They were never as good as her memories of the fresh apricots of her California youth. I never understood what the fuss was about. I mean, I've always loved fresh fruit. Even in the days (and they were many—sorry Mom&Dad) when my I-will-eat-this list contained about fifteen specific items, fruit was always acceptable. But fresh apricots never impressed me. The ones I tried at home in Maryland were for the most part bland, mealy, or worse: both. I didn't see the point, but Mom kept buying them, kept trying and hoping that they would live up to her expectations of the apricot in its most exalted form.

Well. Mom: my apologies. Now I understand.

PS: if in the course of your grocery shopping you happen to see angelcots, get them. They are called Saintly with good reason.

the objective observer

At the Sunstone West conference in Cupertino on Saturday, I felt like a bit of an outsider. 

It was my first time attending a Sunstone event, and unlike any number of the other people there, I am neither a scholar of church history nor a Mormon artist nor a particularly vocal dissident nor a visible participant in the Bloggernacle. While FoxyJ and Th. happily got to meet the people behind some of the big names in the Mormon blogosphere (who were in turn delighted to meet them), I watched from the sidelines.

That's not to say that I felt out of place. I felt comfortable in the company of intelligent and inquisitive people representing a wide range of wavelengths on the spectrum of Mormon-ness. I walked away from the conference with the sense that there is room in the church for heterodoxy in an infinite number of iterations: there is a place for everyone.

While I was a bit disheartened by the fact that many participants are no longer active Mormons (some never were but are just interested in the curiosities of Mormon history & doctrine), I was however put at ease by the fact that I witnessed no hostility. As far as I could tell, everyone there was very respectful, there for no malicious purpose but rather for personal enrichment and to exchange ideas and connect with other people (which, if you've been here before, you'll know is a pet theme of mine): unique individuals with beautiful minds, sharing and comparing the elements mined from our common ground. And then I was all the more encouraged to find active Mormons who have not only successfully reconciled their membership in the church with unconventional views and interests in other traditions, but have managed to integrate them in sort of spectacular ways.

When I briefed my mom on the conference, she said she imagined that talks by non-Mormons would probably be more interesting because the presenters ought to be disinterested personally. I think what she meant is that their views would likely be more objective than those of people formally affiliated with the church, which may or may not be true. I'm inclined to say that a purely objective point of view does not exist. Anyway, I've found that the more obviously "subjective" presentations are indeed more interesting precisely because they have personal implications. Theory and history and math and science are necessary, but as far as I'm/we're concerned, they are missing something until they are applied and understood in the context of the human condition.

Highlights from the day include a panel on personal spiritual journeys (away from, back to, parallel to, and interweaving with Mormonism), Th.'s "Saturday's Werewolf" paper (which I thoroughly enjoyed even though I've neither read the Twilight books nor watched Saturday's Warrior), House of Falafel falafel, a series of NPR-inspired "This I Believe" segments, and the excellent documentary film The Constant Process (read here the article that appeared in February on the front page of the LA Times).

In Saturday morning's discussion of neuroplasticity and quantum dynamics (with the intention being to explain how people can change their behavior), the presenters cited the observer effect as it relates to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Don't ask me to explain it (at least not at 4 a.m.), but their point was that the observer's desire can determine the outcome of the experiment—he will find what he wants to observe. I think it's not really as simple and mystifying as they made it sound, and in that sense I don't really buy it (i.e., it may have more to do with measurement technique than anything else, and I'm not a quantum physicist so I don't really get it). But still, it raises the question: is it possible to remove that desire for a particular outcome, becoming a truly objective observer? When I go to church with a bad attitude (though not so bad that it kept me at home altogether), does that become self-fulfilling prophecy, my experience confirming my doubts and sending me off after sacrament meeting because I "wasn't really feeling it" (from the moment I arrived, or even before)? Can I ever be entirely stripped of self-interest in my interactions with the world and the people around me? 

Yesterday I rode my bike to church and sat alone in the corner. Some days I might be more willing to break out of my shell and participate more actively, but yesterday was one of those when I wanted only to watch and listen, to observe unobserved. Also, to render a sketch inspired by a scene from the previous night/morning's dreams.

On my way home, my skirt got caught in the spokes of my back wheel. My white skirt. Lessons learned: (1) flowy fabrics and spinning wheels should be mingled with great care, (2) stain remover is my friend, (3) bike shorts may be a smart addition to my wardrobe, and (4) had I actually crashed, I'd be grateful to find several friendly Palo Altans out for a two-wheeled spin on a sunny-Sunday afternoon who, far from being cold objective observers, would, I believe, be happy to help me up, ask me if I were okay, call a medic, and/or laugh with me at my humiliating stupidity, as appropriate. 

17: hot soup

Life is heating up.

Nearing its boiling point. 

And when you boil it down, it's all about making connections.

Connections between:

man and woman, woman and man

man and man, woman and woman

parent and child, child and parent

man and nature

life and death

rhythm and melody

harmony and discord

mutually resonant worldviews

opposing philosophies

the human and the divine

the individual and the universe

teacher and pupil

pupil and teacher

the vagabond and the painstaking traveler

the lost and the found

(the widows in paradise and the fatherless in ypsilanti) 

brother and sister, brother and brother, sister and sister

neighbors

ex-strangers

friends

These are, in essence, all human connections. 

(Indeed, since our point of view is by default the human one.)

And when you stop to think about them, you'll see that they're really quite miraculous.

11: wordbook

I got to hang out with my mom and dad over the weekend, and we reminisced about some early instances of my verbophilia. 

For my fifth birthday my parents gave me a dictionary. A hefty hardcover collegiate dictionary. Now, before you go wondering what on Earth my parents were thinking, I would encourage you to shift your focus to the fact that I asked for a dictionary. Yes, hello! I'm the weird one here. We had a dictionary in the house, of course, but I wanted one of my own that I could keep by my bedside in case I needed to look up a word while reading under the covers at night.

And what did I do when I got that dictionary? I examined the preliminary pages and decided that it would be fun to memorize the Greek alphabet that was listed there. So I did. And it was. And then I took to reciting it backwards. Just for the heck of it. So, you see, in this context, it isn't terribly odd that I used to spend many an evening helping Claire study for her ancient Greek classes. Not only that, but I enjoyed it.

But I digress (is that word of Greek or Latin origin?) Some time before I graduated to that serious dictionary , my mother surprised me with a copy of Richard Scarry's Best Picture Dictionary Ever. When Mom told me what a dictionary was and that she had one for me, my eyes lit up (or so the story goes) and I exclaimed, "You mean there's a whole book with nothing but words in it?!?" This is a ridiculous question, of course, since most books in fact consist entirely of words, but just go with me on this. I was really excited by this dictionary concept. 

I had just gotten out of the bath. Normally, getting dressed immediately follows bathing. But that day there was something far more important to tend to. Wrapped in my bath towel, I crawled into bed and spent all morning and part of the afternoon reading the dictionary. There. I said it.

The German word for dictionary is Wörterbuch: wordbook (Wörter, words, plural of Wort; Buch, book). One of the things I love about German is its generous allowance for compound words, which results in some really elegant and often intuitive combinations. Like Wörterbuch, for instance. Or the word for vocabulary: Wortschatz (Schatz=treasure). Airplane? Flugzeug, flying stuff.

There I go again. And that's barely the start of it. Linguistic curiosities are the kinds of things I find entertaining. Sometimes I seek them out; sometimes they find me. Either way, language has always enjoyed a state of hyperpresence in my world. It is becoming increasingly apparent that I was, in a sense, born for language.

08: pacific union

For the past week or so, Union Pacific locomotive 9734 has been waiting patiently in the background on my computer screen.

I took this photo about a year ago, when I still lived in a place that sees snow in February. The weathered golden beauties frequent the trainyards at the southern edge of Provo, Utah, and I used to go wander around the area just to soak in the oddly stirring desolation of the place.

You may already know that I like trains. A lot. Incidentally, my nephew loves trains (and especially "up-downs"). Also, I find industrial wastelands extremely appealing, both aesthetically and emotionally. That's weird, I know. But it should help explain my impulse to explore trainyards.

One Saturday afternoon last spring, I journeyed down to the south Provo tracks, looked around for a few minutes, then sat down on the edge of the road just outside the fence. I could hear the low hum of an engine motor and the occasional mechanical click or clank that told me that a train was getting ready to go. It seems it was only getting ready to get ready, maybe loading up for a freight haul. I don't know, really, because I couldn't see what was going on down the track. It didn't matter, anyway, because it was a sunny afternoon and I had no plans, so I made it my plan to sit right there and absorb the atmosphere while waiting for the train to roll out. I alternated between reading from Neruda's Odas Elementales and jotting little blurbs in my notebook, pausing every so often to look over at the tracks for signs of any movement.

All the while I was conscious of the deep rumbling of the running motor. I could hear it, but mostly I felt it. It ran through the rails like an electric current, seeped into the ground where the earth met its voice with is own and together they resonated in arrhythmic pulsating harmonious humming. Concentrated latent energy was making itself known to me, like something fantastic was about to happen. I waited, listened, felt, and marveled at the communion of this monstrous child of the man-made industrial age with this terrestrial child of the ageless universe.

The engineer waved as the groaning steel caterpillar crawled along the rails, leaving the station for the open country of the west, wild and limitless. I smiled, and waved back.

07: liquid collisions

Yesterday was cold and rainy, which made today's warmth and sunshine all the more delectable for the contrast.

Late Friday afternoon, I sat in my office mulling over the week's interactions. Misdirected messages and confusion; apprehension and disappointed expectations; impossible requests and bizarre phonecalls.

I had just spent the previous half hour or more talking and laughing (laughing really hard at some moments, indeed to the point of tears) with my coworkers, and then I turned back to my desk, intent on crossing a few more items off my list before day's end.

The rain was pouring outside my window, talking at me in its lively percussive dialect with just a touch of melancholic tone. I looked out into the purplish-grayness and watched with mesmerized eyes the multitude of micro-explosions glinting in the late blue light, as post-invisible droplets ricocheted off the shining black pavement and shattered into oblivion. 

The sweetwater puddles quavered in concentric circles, and I was momentarily transported to my childhood home, where I gazed at the stream in the backyard, flooded in a downpour and rippling continuously at the impact of millions of raindrops. Each one, when it hit the surface, expanded outward in an ephemeral series of infinite rings, and I studied them, attaching the image to the name—concentric circles—that Mom or Dad had just taught me, a six-year-old at most.

There is something at once cozy and romantic, challenging and primeval, about the rain. I am learning to appreciate it more, and to feel less hostility towards it, than I used to. 

Still, today's return to this kind of eternal-spring weather was an idyllic treat, and it made showing my parents around town, partially on foot, much more pleasant than it might have been in splashier conditions. I won't mind too much when the rain comes back another day, though. 

(photo credit: rhettmaxwell)

02: synecdochal attraction

It started when I decided to get a bike.

Once I had accepted the bicycle's potential to enrich my everyday existence and to open up new and wonderful opportunities, I suddenly noticed the two-wheeled beauties all around me. They were there before, of course; I just hadn't really seen them. I brushed them off as symbols of a sociomobile category that I did not belong to and that therefore did not concern me, or, even more coolly, as a mass of meaningless objects... stuff... clutter. No, come to think of it, I wasn't that cruel. I couldn't have been. Really, at the time I didn't give them much thought. I mean, I was aware of their existence, but I didn't sit around and contemplate the question of their immortality.

Soon after I determined to allow the bicycle concept to materialize as a real, living, breathing, moving thing, I found myself gawking at fine specimens like

(photo credit: antiguadailyphoto.com)

and

(photo credit: moriza)

and

(photo credit: PixelAndInk)

(See also: Bianchi Milano, Trek Portland, Trek vintage, Gary Fisher Simple City)

The intensity and frequency of my making eyes at the lovelies have held steady, if not increased, since I actually got a bike. The one I have is a good pal, reliable and comfortable, in excellent shape and pretty good looking, easy to get along with even though I'd been living without a bike for a decade and a half before we met. It's just a loaner, though, from my wonderful and generous sister, so sooner or later I'll give it back and invest in one of my own.

Ask: how could I have been so blind to these pretty, peace-loving beings with whom I had crossed paths so many times before? Well, it seems that in this, as in many contexts, it took an individual to open my eyes to the beauty of the group. With that introduction, I was then freed to discover the admirable qualities of other individuals. Now the difficulty lies in committing to just one.

a year ago today

I was in Arizona. I stood in the glorious desert sunshine outside the temple, and from within its doors emerged the newlyweds. My best friend and her husband were positively radiant. It was a joyous occasion for them and for the many people who love them. It was also a moment of catharsis for me. I can't really explain it—or at least, I don't want to here—but needless to say, I was more than a wee bit emotional. All I have to say is that it's a good thing my mascara was waterproof.

A year later, she has finished her master's degree and he is halfway through his; together they have survived a Chicago winter and now they are braving the season in Toronto. (I guess love keeps you warm.) And I miss them terribly.

Happy Anniversary, Claire and Joseph. May you share infinitely more happinesses in the years to come.

Love,
me

without major incident

...but not without a minor one, today for the first time I biked to work. There was a bit of stumbling while crossing the six lanes of El Camino (notice how I make myself feel better by using passive voice?) but overall it worked out very nicely. In fact, it felt great. I haven't quite figured out how all the different speeds work, but at least I can feel cool saying that I have twenty-one of them. And while three and a half miles sounds like very little, I'm pretty sure I'll be worn out by the time I finish the second three-and-a-half home tonight. A healthy, keeping-the-air-clean, making-my-muscles-work, i'm-ready-for-bed-now sort of worn out.

And now, it's flashback time: for me, back to my college German classes when one of my favorite teachers introduced me to Die Prinzen; for some of you, perhaps, back to the early nineties when you secretly wanted to be a groupie for this punked-out German a cappella group. Come on, admit it.

Die Prinzen: "Mein Fahrrad" (My Bicycle)

And by the way, my sister is awesome. This is true for many reasons, but here I point out particularly the fact that mein Fahrrad is actually hers, on super-extended loan until I figure out what I want and save up the cash to buy it. Cool, right?

settling in

Maybe you wouldn’t know it by the looks of the place, what with the stacks of still unpacked shoeboxes of miscellaneous trinkets and supplies, and the still very blank walls all around, but it has been six weeks since I moved into my new home. It really was a great find, a charming studio in an old (1930s-ish) yellow stucco building right in downtown Palo Alto.



It’s lovely to have my own space that I don’t have to share with anyone (besides a troop of little ants that snuck in to join me for a couple of days a few weeks ago): no coordinating shower schedules, no fussing over other people’s messes, no dress code, no worries about suiting another’s taste with what I watch or listen to… you get the idea. Little things, really, but still something of a revelation when it’s the first time you’re really on your own. There will probably be days when I get lonely, but so far it hasn’t been an issue, since I am too (happily!) busy settling into my new town, my new job, my new life.

My mom and dad, in their overwhelming generosity, flew out from Maryland to move all my boxes of stuff from my grandmother’s house in Sacramento to my new place in Palo Alto and to get me all set up with new Ikea furniture. My dad was nice and let me try to help assemble things, but then he and I both realized that I am rather power-tool-challenged, so he took over and I stuck with pieces that needed only to be popped or twisted into place. Kind of sad, I know. I did stain my wooden kitchen cart last Saturday, and it turned out quite nicely, if I do say so myself.



I think the trick is that if a given home improvement project can be done by hand, I can probably handle it. If it involves an electrical source of power that is in magnitude far greater than what is natural, then there are conflicts. I mean, power tools essentially do traditionally manual tasks, only faster; so what’s the rush? Time doesn’t exist, anyway.

I am always reaching toward home, though the specific reference point for that concept may differ depending on the city or the year or the state of mind that I am in. There are many facets to the act of making a home out of a mere crashpad and junk locker. Two of those are to give everything a special place where it belongs, and to maximize the aesthetic appeal of the walls which hold up the roof over your head. So, today I am tackling the tasks of organizing my kitchen and decorating the walls. Overdue, perhaps, but it doesn’t matter. I’m doing it now. Watch this space for before-and-after photos. Maybe. Or maybe you’ll just have to come to California and see it for yourself!

alias

I saw this on a couple of friends' blogs, and it looked like fun. And since I am somewhat frenetically trying to make up for a long dearth of verbal blog posts, it seems fitting to throw it into the mix now:

1. Rock Star name: Cleo* Marguerite** (first pet + current car)
2. Gangster name: Dulce de Leche Snickerdoodle (favorite ice cream + favorite cookie)***
3. Detective name: Green Golondrina (favorite color + favorite animal)
4. Soap Opera name: Ann Columbia (middle name + city where you were born)
5. Star Wars name: Davem (first 3 letters of your last name + first 2 letters of your first)
6. Superhero name: The Orange Tamarindo**** ("The" + 2nd favorite color + favorite drink)
7. Nascar name: Huck Rex (grandfathers' first names)
8. TV Weatherman name: Sheer Shanghai (5th grade teacher's last name + major city starting with the same letter)
9. Spy Name: Spring Daffodil (favorite season/holiday + favorite flower)
10. Cartoon Name: Blackberry Scarfie (favorite fruit, article of clothing you’re wearing right now + “ie” or “y”)
9. Hippie name: Granola Bar Redwood (what you ate for breakfast + favorite tree)
10. Rock band name: The Wandering Blizzard ("The" + favorite hobby + favorite weather element)

*my neighbor's cat when I was little. I've never had any pets of my own.
**actually the Stanford shuttle bus, named after Leland Stanford's favorite horse
***in my opinion, this is seriously flawed gangster name methodology
****okay so maybe this is my second-favorite drink, but the orange hot chocolate just didn't have a very nice ring to it

etxerantz sanfransiskon

It has been a week since I left Provo for good.

Last Wednesday I flew from Salt Lake to Oakland and then drove from Oakland to Elk Grove (near Sacramento). Okay so really my dad drove. Minor details. In Elk Grove we unpacked an embarassing number of suitcases and packed their contents in boxes which we then left in a storage facility, also known as the spare closet in my grandmother's house. On Friday we put the (mostly) empty suitcases in the car and drove back to the Oakland airport, where we returned the car, took the AirBART shuttle to the BART station, and rode the train into San Francisco, all the while lugging five large suitcases. Like I said, most of them were empty, but most of them were also of nearly identical size, so they weren't exactly convenient in the way that seven Russian nesting dolls conveniently combine into just one. Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that we stopped at Vacaville on the way back to Oakland, for two very worthy causes: a Banana Republic outlet and an In-N-Out burger.

We arrived in SF and were greeted by my sister, her husband, and the cutest kid ever, also known as Jack. We dined lavishly at La Taquería (not that it's fancy, but oh so tasty), and from Mission Pie across the street we picked up dessert to take home: peach-blackberry pie and plum frangipane tarts. Yum!

I have been pretty busy this week with job interviews (hooray!) so that's my excuse for not having posted a single blog entry until now. There will be more to come soon, I promise. For now, enjoy the views...


...from the road between Sacramento & Oakland, near Vallejo/Benicia.
An oil refinery of sorts, I suppose, but it's more fun to use your imagination.
I like the shapes.

...from my window in San Francisco.

...from the back deck.

...of Mission Dolores with pink clouds at sunset.
This is the same building that you can see glimpses of in the view from my window.

...of Mission Dolores with lights at dusk.

on the eve of departure

things I will miss about this apartment:

• my beloved cottonwood trees!
  
• en-suite half-bath
• living at the end of a cul-de-sac
• living within walking distance of Albertsons & Cafe Rio
• birdwatching on the balcony, even though the railing isn't super stable and the couch is probably thirty years old and the new flooring still smells a little like glue ten months later...

things I will not miss about this apartment:

• the unfathomable shower setup
  
• the ugly dark blue carpet and the ugly textured walls
• seasonal ant infestation
• bent window screens that let flying bugs in
• the crappy, er, vintage kitchen: hole in the roof of the microwave, crooked burner on the stove, weak garbage disposal that gets clogged way too easily, fridge without a light, ugly linoleum floor...
• having to buy all new light fixtures because the ones provided were miserably inadequate
• scary electrical outlets that work only if the plug is hanging at a certain angle (not a normal right angle)

things I will miss about Provo:

• carefree midnight walks
• Wasatch mountains as backdrop
• Costa Azul turned Costa Vida, affectionately known simply as Costa
• giant sycamores in the "downtown" area
• Harold B. Lee Library
• wandering near the trainyards, again, without feeling threatened
• hearing train whistles at all hours of the night
• free New York Times on campus
• being able to walk to church
• four distinct seasons, even is autumn is brief and spring is schizophrenic
• low humidity - oh, how I prefer a Utah summer to a Maryland summer
• low cost of living (minuscule compared to SF bay)
• intellectual perks of being in a university community
• El Gallo Giro & Delipan - but the Mission District should make up for it. Taquería, here I come!

things I will not miss about Provo:

• it takes two hours on public transit to get to a decent-sized city
• infrequent and untimely buses (though they could be worse)
• minimal architectural interest
• singles stake leaders who think it's their job to make sure we don't leave Provo without getting married first
• the smell of Fast Food Row (Bulldog Blvd) on my walk to/from campus
• the electric fireworks at "The Corner"
• hearing or overhearing that so-and-so got married and whats-her-bucket got engaged, half a dozen times a day if out and about on campus
• no curbside recycling! to be fair, it is available for a mere $5/month, but not at the apartments I've lived in because of the way they are managed. it's sort of a pain to collect recyclables and cart them down to the dropoff site in south Provo. not that it's not worth it. recycling makes me feel happy.

things about San Francisco that I'm looking forward to:

• exploring the city
• seeing sights like these
• living near this guy
• SFMOMA and other major museums
• architecture
• convenient public transit
• La Taquería (best tacos north of the border)
• and the rest of the Mission/Little Mexico
• the hills
• views of the bay and the ocean
• plastic bag & bottled water bans (hooray!)
• liberal politics and plenty of treehuggers (okay maybe that's a stereotype but I hope it holds true!)
• artsy atmosphere
• did I mention the Mexican food? and Thai, and Indian, and Vietnamese...
• the prospect of meeting a cute, smart Stanford boy. hey, my sister did. and we all know that the only reason I'm going to California is to get married, right?
• um, it's San Francisco. duh.
• oh, and it's not Utah Valley. finally!

things about San Francisco that I'm not looking forward to:

• high cost of living (and no job yet!)
• no more midnight walks
• the hills (walking up them)
• hmm, yep, that's all I can think of.
  

California, Californiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, here we coooooooooooommme!
(that's for you, BreeAnn, Claire, Anna-Lisa)

the c-city tour

Hi. It's been a while. The last few days have been occupied primarily by running amok, and before that I was doing some traveling. The major stops on my journey, incidentally, all begin with the letter C.

I arrived in Chicago on Friday the 20th. Claire picked me up from the airport (where they have installed, on both sides of the escalator rails, new tv screens letting you know that Mayor Daley welcomes you to Chicago, as if there weren't enough signs already), and then we went to Costco. By coincidence, it has become something of a tradition to go directly from the airport to Costco whenever I fly somewhere to see Claire (April in Chicago, preceded by last December in Phoenix). Claire and I spent the weekend packing up her stuff and moving it into a storage closet downtown. We got to see lots of the more "savory" parts of town as we ran errands to drop off things at Goodwill and Comcast. Claire took me out to dinner for my birfday, and then we got to deep-clean her apartment. The last time we did that was at G-5, when we topped off the all-night cleaning marathon with a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts. Yum. In Chicago we took a break from cleaning with tacos from Pepe's. The guy who took my order asked me if I had Mexican relatives. Sure, isn't it obvious?

On Tuesday the 24th we left Chicago and drove to Cleveland. That meant several hours along the Indiana and Ohio toll roads through the flat and lovely midwest farmlands. The Indiana toll road runs east-west near the northern border with Michigan. At one point I mistakenly told Claire that we could stop for gas and food at the Middlebury exit (near Shipshewana, which is really fun to say, try it. I annoyed Claire by reading it aloud every time I saw it on a sign). We found a gas station, but other than that there was pretty much nothing there. We looked. We drove down the road into Michigan (near Mottville) for a few minutes looking for somewhere to eat, and we found no such place. However, on the corner where we turned around there was a hand-painted campaign sign staked in the ground. Unfortunately I wasn't ready with my camera, but I did take a good mental image so that I could draw up this representation:


Just imagine a sheriff with a name like that! I wouldn't mess with him.

Anyway we got back on the toll road and eventually made it to Cleveland. Claire's brother and sister-in-law and cute cute nephew live there. It was a quick visit, but a nice one. We ate lots of yummy pizza at Dewey's (not to be confused with this other Dewey's) and we saw a really great tv show on the kids' channel. No kidding. It's funny. Watch it.

The next day we flew to BWI, just a few minutes away from our final destination of Columbia, my tree-covered curved-street hometown. We came here for my sister's wedding, which my mother decided to plan and cater almost single-handedly. The days leading up to the big one (yesterday) were rather chaotic and stressful, but it all worked out and everything was beautiful and delicious, accordingly. But boy was it hot outside. Oh, the humidity! when it's summer on the east coast.

From our base in Columbia we'll spend the next week exploring the area, visiting my favorite museums on the mall, checking out the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and maybe catching some fireworks on Friday. Cheers for now, and may you be well wherever you are, from Cincinatti to Casa Grande, from Colorado Springs to Córdoba.

freedom hangs like heaven over everyone

I have known for several months now that I need to get out of this place. Not that it is an inherently bad place. Provo has been good to me for several years, and never have I regretted the decision to come here to go to school (even though I would have actually made money just by studying at the U of Maryland). I just don't belong here anymore. Now that I have finished with school (for a while, at least) nothing remains to keep me here. Nothing, indeed, besides a low cost of living and a guaranteed place to live with a contract through mid-August. And the fact that I have no idea where I ought to go, coupled with and primarily resulting from the absolute absence of any promising job leads. (Applications to date: 23, and counting.)

I just don't know how this all is supposed to work (or even whether it is supposed to?) So far I have password-protected accounts with ten online application systems and/or recruiting networks. Monster.com sends me daily emails with recommended job listings, I search idealist.org regularly, and I have fourteen craigslist sites bookmarked which I check daily for promising listings. Not to mention at least a dozen publishers' websites listing job openings, plus a handful of other sites like the treehugger.com job board and the usajobs database. And then there are the dozens of miscellaneous postings and informational sites/articles that my mom emails me daily (I didn't even have to set up a new account for that service!) It all just seems so tedious, and even with all this I am sure that I am still missing so much. I mean I figure I must be, since what I am doing has as yet garnered no results.

I know that I should (and possibly could) be more patient about things. But I really want to go get a life. It's not here, that's for sure. So clearly I need to go out and find it. It would just be nice to have some direction, that's all. Some encouragement from the people who read (skim? glance at the title of? receive results of an automated computerized extraction of keywords from?) my resume would be nice for a start.

I'm caught in limbo between school and the real world, if that's what you want to call it. I personally am not so sure that it is real at all, since I have not gotten there yet. I'll get back to you with a more educated judgment of its reality or irreality once (if) I get in. For the moment, I'm stuck, stagnating. And I hate it.


[This post's title, in case you were wondering, is not original. It comes from a song by Iron and Wine.]

drove to chicago, all things go, all things go

Okay, so I didn't really drive (though I did see Mayor Daley's name plastered everywhere). I flew instead. You didn't know I could fly, did you? Oh. Well, I can't. Not without some help, anyway.

I made the trip to Chicago last weekend in celebration of three things:

one: Passover
two: Having finished my thesis
three: Claireness

That's right, Claireness. You probably know that my bestest friend Claire moved to Chicago last August, and boy do I miss having her around. I felt a particularly acute lack of Claireness during the last month and a half, when my many all-night thesis-writing parties would have been both more accurately named and more enjoyable with Claire's company, like in the old days. Speaking of the old days, we used to eat a lot of Costa salads. I still do; in fact, after a long thesis-afternoon at the library, when I hadn't eaten since noon and I would probably be working until five or six in the morning, a stop at Costa on the way home was a frequent occurrence. Claire, unfortunately, lives far from any Costa restaurant, and, as she was lamenting this, I agreed to take her a Costa salad when I went to Chicago. So Vanessa and I stopped for lunch on the way to the airport, and I took the two salads (I didn't get to finish mine because I was running late--shocking, I know) in their lidded takeout containers, slipped each into a gallon-size ziploc bag, tied them both inside a plastic grocery bag for good measure, and put the bundle into a little backpack, one of my pieces of checked luggage. I knew that the dressing wouldn't make it through security, and I didn't want to risk the salads themselves, and besides, they would stay nice and cool in the cargo bin. I am pleased to report that they arrived intact (not, however, in one piece, as I mistakenly said to Claire) and delicious, though their aluminum pie-tin-like containers took a beating and the ziploc bags were a smart precaution.

Claire and her husband Joseph live in Hyde Park, near the University in south Chicago. The weather turned out to be gorgeous (not cold and rainy as was forecasted) while I was there, so we took many strolls around the beautiful neighborhood. The streets are lined with a plethora of blue mailboxes (whose scarcity in Provo I lament, especially in my current apartment where we have no outgoing mailbox), big and lovely shade trees that remind me of home, and beautiful old mansions. One afternoon while Claire stayed home thesising, Joseph and I visited the University's Oriental Institute Museum, where we saw, among other things, an enormous bull-man (weighing 40 tons) and an exhibit on the looting of Iraqi cultural artifacts. What boggles my mind is that we have good-quality photographs of looters at archaeological sites, and detailed data about how many looters visit which sites how often, and yet nobody seems to be able to stop them. Oh, and some of that loot falls into the hands of independent American collectors, who often donate items to American museums in exchange for a tax break.

We also stopped in a couple of used book stores, one rather dusty and confusing, the other more well-lit, more organized, and somewhat less dusty. A real highlight, though, was shopping at the wonderful little Hyde Park Produce store just around the corner from Claire & Joseph's apartment building. Avocados for 65 cents each, heirloom tomatoes, a wide selection of other fruits and vegetables, some of which I had never seen before, everything bright and fresh and inexpensive. Plus a full-service deli and a few aisles of basic to gourmet packaged and refrigerated items, and on weekends the nuns set up a table in a corner of the store where they sell homemade tarts and other pastries. If I lived near a store like that, I would cook far more often and I would eat much healthier. Just one of the reasons it's time for me to move to the city.

While I'm on the topic of food, I should mention the delectable bacon-blue-cheese burger that I devoured at Medici café (a favorite frequented by Claire, Joseph, and, they say, Obama). We also enjoyed a number of yummy homemade breakfasts (french toast, popovers, hootenanny/german pancake), as well as a do-it-yourself version of Taco Bell's Crunchwrap Supreme, which I tried to replicate last night with slightly less success. The biggest tortillas I could find were still not big enough to wrap around a loaded tostada, so I had to be creative. The result was a bit less elegant, but still very yummy.

An account of my Chicago weekend would not be complete without a note on the Passover seder. Four years ago, I attended a Passover seder service organized by a professor of religion at BYU. That experience gave me some background in the traditions, but suffice it to say that a Passover seder with a bunch of Mormons differs significantly from one with a big Jewish family. For one thing, the former was far quieter, and more sober, in both senses of the word. Sharing the long table with a few dozen members of my brother-in-law Doug's extended family, I tried to follow in my copy of the Family Haggadah (which, on the pages opposite the actual service, suggests games and activities to get the whole family involved) what was being read by Doug's father at the other end of the table, but it seemed that the little kids were the only ones really paying attention. The adults were excited to see each other: only a few branches of the family live near Chicago, and the rest had come to town from Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, or California. So, many of them see each other only once a year at Passover. Noisy might be an understatement. Uncle Marty and Uncle Randy sang and danced and shouted at random intervals; Doug and Matt kept asking me what page we were on; Amy was busy chasing one-year-old Jack, who, still on west-coast time, was tired but happy; Uncle Dave chatted non-stop; Aunt Sharon was getting irritated at the noise and lack of cooperation; and eighty-year-old Aunt Edith was oblivious, no more confused by all this than by anything else. And for a delightfully bizarre touch, Maria had brought a set of finger puppets, each representing one of the ten plagues: a frog, a locust, a little guy with boils all over his face, an amorphous red blob with the label "blood," and you get the idea. I don't know who would have imagined that such a product would sell, but I must admit it was pretty amusing.

I think that some of the family thought it was a little strange that I wanted to attend their Passover seder and that I came all the way from Utah for it. Maybe that's partly because the event is normal to them: as Doug said, it's sort of like Thanksgiving, where the whole family gets together once a year to talk and laugh and eat. As an outsider, anyway, I thought it was great. The trip was totally worth it. Especially since I got to enjoy several days of Claireness, too.

It was a wonderful way to recover from a month and a half of sleepless thesis-writing before my defense on Wednesday (which I passed! yippee!), a much-needed escape from Utah valley and a very pleasant and relaxing weekend.

reasons why i have not been blogging

1) I escaped for a few days to California for Jack's first birthday.
2) Shortly after recovering from my first cold of the season, which lasted about three weeks, I caught another one.
3) I have been spending too much time following the presidential campaigns and primary elections. No, seriously.
4) I finally decided that it was about time to start studying for my master's exam. I crammed for a couple of weeks, and everything that I read during that time blurred together. A few days before the exam, I realized how much of the reading list remained neglected, and I became ill and sleepless from anxiety. The day of the exam, I re-read old exams from my courses, and I reviewed Bécquer's Rimas during the 12-minute bus ride to campus, where, I was nearly convinced, I would face my doom. Then I read the questions and I laughed. I realized that the word "comprehensive", as it is used to describe the specialty exam, is pretty much a big joke. I breathed a little sigh of relief and began writing. Four hours later, I was done. Now there's just this little thing called a thesis to worry about.
5) I have been reading this bizarre book called The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. I bought it at a yard sale in Chicago mostly because I was drawn to the absurdity of the title.
6) I have been wandering around south Provo with my camera. I think I'll post a few pictures soon.