Some people ask me—often in the tone of aghast wonder reserved for Scientologists and people who live on wheatgrass—just what the appeal of competetive ballroom dance is. Someone even came to practice and asked me as part of a sociological study. All I can say is, judging by the attendance at the practices and competitions, I'm not alone in my madness. Partly it's the combination of exercise and socializing, and of course, dancing on a regular basis makes me happy. I knew that Berkeley would have an active social dance scene, so I didn't have to be sold on the team when I encountered the team table on Sproul. I signed right up.
The first meeting was at LaVal's on Northside, and I chatted with a lot of other people while waiting for the free pizza, feeling insecure. Information was handed out in dribs and drabs at first, as the team members circulated and gave quick answers to questions, then one pretty girl (our rookie coordinator Andrea, a soul of patience unparalled even in laid-back Berkeley) stood up, gave us all the bullet on the first practice and the various forms and requirements, and answered a few more queries from her mostly rapt audience between bites. I left feeling nonplussed. It seemed like pretty routine official stuff to me, so there was no indication about what kind of club it really was.
The first lesson was hugely crowded. 80 people or so crammed into a bright gym/dance studio, with our instructors. One of them looked so much like my old roommate that I kept pulling double takes all night. We learned a few waltz and rumba steps, got to know the people we partnered with, and exchanged hopes and concerns and interest in the superficial manner of people who might become quite close but aren't sure yet. We could barely move on the floor without bumping into someone else, stepping on feet, ducking errant elbows, but like judo, it was deceptively simple with the promise of infinite complexity, and I was hooked.
Lesson after lesson, practice after practice, week after week in the semester. We learned about form, frame, weight, carriage, styling, footwork, timing, body isolation. We learned turns and fans on top of the basics. Fewer and fewer people showed up for class each week. The more dedicated started staying at the Wednesday and Saturday practices longer. Most of them were pairing off, but I hadn't been lucky so far. I'm much taller than most of the boys, and some of them averred that they weren't as sold on it as I seemed to be. I eventually found a partner, and we went on to do very well for the first semester (see my monthly posts for details), but the real influence on me, the motivation for the passion that I believe has been crucial to my success, was John.
Around this time, an e-mail went out to the team from one of the more advanced leaders, requesting a partner for extra practice, rookies okay. “I cannot get enough of dancing. Sometimes my partner asks me for a 30-second break.” Good Lord. He included a picture of himself posed in a full split so we would know who he was. Good *Lord*. He was the slightly frightening Chinese guy I saw at Wednesday practice. Built like a greyhound, pale as milk, severe and unsmiling, dancing at practice before I arrived and staying after I left, he could have been championship level for all I knew. I learned later that he was trained extremely rigorously in ballet, had danced with several companies before an injury took him off the stage and into the ballroom. Had I known this I probably wouldn't have been able to do much but gabble and trip in his presence. But I had no partner, and I knew I'd never get better without one, so I replied, and we met in the corridor of Wheeler Hall one evening.
I was late, of course, and as clumsy as a drunken sailor. He had brought an iPod with a splicer for the earbuds, so we each had our own set for his music. But I was definitely not ready for practicing with music. We had to do it in silence. I only had a few steps for each dance anyway, but John was patient, stopping when I lost the beat, correcting my footwork when I stepped on his toes, giving tips on turns and form. It was like a 2-hour private lesson, and even though I sucked, it felt good. He was quiet, though, completely professional with no chitchat or pleasantries offered, no sense of who he was beyond the sure feet and perfect frame.
We met several times a week, for two hours or more, and it began to feel like those montages in sports or dance movies where the young novice, pushed by the weathered mentor, improves with each scene over the stirring music. Except the montage was hours and days and weeks and months long. The day I finished the waltz sequence that we had been working on for weeks without a single misstep, I could hear “Eye of the Tiger” back in some murky sentimental corner of my brain. By that time, John and I had started talking during our breaks, and I could make him laugh and get him to open up a little. And the improvement was really showing. At the end of October, after six weeks of practice almost 4 or 5 times a week (bear in mind, I had few friends at the time, so weekend nights were best taken up with something that didn't reinforce my general loser-ness), my partner and I placed 3rd in our standard events, waltz and quickstep. I hope all the grueling hours of running through basic figures with my two left feet helped John and Julia, his “real” partner, with their high placements all through the semester. He tells me, though, that he throws the ribbons away and puts the trophies where he can't see them. It isn't the competition that draws him; perhaps the performance is alluring, but for him, dance, to be sappy, is the purest expression of his soul. He's happy no matter what he's doing, be it taking a rookie through her basics, dancing Argentine tango with smelly men, running endless routines in preparation for comps, or throwing some poor girl around the club floor in a hustle. (I've seen him do all but the smelly tango, but he assures me that it's happened, and he's still happy.) He never gets tired, he never gets bored. He also never seems to eat or sleep.
John never lets me rest as much as I think I want to, just as much as I need to. Starting in September, he tried to get me down to a full split by my birthday in March (and failed miserably, but I think he has high hopes for next year). He ignores me when I whine about my stretches, pushing down harder on my back or shoulders to get that extra inch. “You won't die!”, he exclaims. “You won't die! It won't even hurt tomorrow!” To my annoyance, he's usually right. He will come up to me while I'm waiting in line for a heat, or even when I'm just standing around at a practice, grasp my shoulders, and pull them up and back so I'll stand up straight. “You are your mother's masterpiece!”, he tells me. “Make sure you always look like it.” He taught me West Coast Swing just for fun over winter break, as a vacation from the ten-dance routines for ballroom. We go to salsa dances at Metronome and Allegro, where everyone tells us how good we look and I claim no responsibility for it, admitting freely that it's all him. This past winter, he actually came and picked me up from the airport at 4 in the morning, keeping the promise he made when my flight was supposed to get in at 10 PM, even after I assured him repeatedly that he was off the hook once the plane had been grounded for five hours. Occasionally he fusses over me, trying to set my up with likely guys both on and off the dance floor (he's since stopped, thankfully), and in affectionate frustration I tell him he's as pesky as an older brother.
We don't practice as much these days; he's rising higher in the ranks and has ever more complicated routines and steps to work on, and I ran through a few temporary competition partners before finding a (hopefully) permanent one, so I had to practice a lot with them. These days he seems frailer to me, lighter, because he's not as big and sturdy as my regular partner. Of course I know to compensate for the difference in a partner's physique, but I worry I'll push too hard on him—he only outweighs me by 10 pounds—and he'll stagger or stumble. But, he promises he'll always catch me if he tries a dip or a hold, and I believe him, even when my hair, short as it is, brushes the floor.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Fron Tokyo, With Love: Part 1
I'm back in Japan! I can hardly believe it. Back in the land where ambulance drivers wear gloves and helmets but drive on the left, where grown men shove old ladies aside for seats on the trains, and the old ladies are happy to give them up, and buildings under construction are swathed in tarps and netting until they can be revealed in their new glory.
I know I'll fall behind in my journal-keeping, but I'm going to do my best with a weekly digest. Yeah I know you've all heard THAT before...but. Anyway. I wrote part of this on the plane, and the rest after I'd been here for a few days.
I'm well over the International Date Line at this point, so I guess I'm really gone. I'm already in tomorrow. I feel very far away.
We have an hour before we land, and it seems like it'll be earlier than it said on the ticket, so I don't know if my host family will be there when I arrive. I suppose customs will take some time.
But the flight's been great! Upgrades: awesome. Business class: awesome :-) The seats are huge and they recline to almost flat (I slept for 4 hours!), with a million controls for footrests, headrests, lumbar support, etc. I was swaddled in a huge blanket, 3 times the size of an economy class one, and a big ugly JAL sweater, and showered with free wine, earplugs, eye masks (I'm accumulating quite a collection of those), warm towels (they're called “oshibori” in Japanese, and you'll get one at every restaurant you go to, and they're wonderful when flying), slippers; and FED, fed until I could barely walk. I'm so used to the starvation diets on domestic American flights (and also wasn't expecting the upgrade), that I had a sandwich and picked up a few snackies before boarding. Needless to say, I haven't touched them. And after the meal had been served, when I thought my stomach couldn't hold another gram of food, they came trotting by with digestifs and truffles. If plans are cattle cars, I feel like Kobe beef...
The flight attendants are lovely, trim Japanese ladies with the cutest service aprons I've ever seen! I'm tempted to steal one: they have a light greyscale aerial view of some European city, probably Paris, as a background, and big colorful dirigibles and hot-air balloons all over them. Really, really good design. The movies were terrible, so I watched an NHK (Japanese public television) special on bears in Hokkaido, and was gratified that I could understand about half of the narration! Also, it was filmed in a national park that was the subject of a translation exercise I had last fall, so that was sort of interesting. There's some sort of Important Cultural Personage on board, or some such thing; an older Japanese man who gets a LOT of attention from the flight attendants. They're always offiering him something, or, in one case, listening to him for about half an hour, half-crouched near his seat. I wish I knew who he was!
When we landed, I stupidly waited at the wrong carousel for my luggage, and finally found it before it was loaded onto an unclaimed-luggage-pound cart (yikes!), but I got out into the receiving lobby, and there was my host family, with a cute little sign, waiting for me! Kumiko (my host mother) is petite and pretty, and Tatsuya (my host father) has a sort of boyish face, and a big grin. They have a big shiny black Toyota SUV, and we loaded up my luggage, and drove the two hours back to Tokyo. I'm not familiar with the Tokyo highways, so it was a while before I recognized anything, but it was still cool to see all the signs, and the cars full of real Japanese people—wow! (it isn't nice to say that they all look the same, but compared to the sea of American faces, it's sort of relaxing to see that everyone seems to have at least the same basic underlying facial structure). We chatted all the way through the ride home. Kumiko was very relieved that I could speak lots of Japanese and understand it too, since she doesn't speak any English. Tatsuya understands some English, but doesn't speak it much either. I'm glad; it means I won't be called upon to teach English or have to rely on it a lot.
They live in Mitaka, which is only about 15 minutes by bus from the university. They house is totally Western and modern, not a tatami mat in sight. It's European-style, with the living quarters on the second floor. Their son, Koichi, looks a lot like my friend's boyfriend, i.e., cute, and he's friendly and cheerful, not at all surly or teenager-ish, and he doesn't ignore me. I get his room (he's in the guest room downstairs, so that's all right). It's small but perfect for 6 weeks. We had a great dinner of temaki-zushi, which sort of make-your-own using presliced fish and vegetables. No sushi knife experience needed. Afterwards they went over the house rules, which all seem very reasonable (even the curfew, since it's flexible as long as I let them know in advance) and i'm happy to be the new “musume-san” (daughter). Tomorrow I have to get registered at school, so I took a bath (mmm, first Japanese bath in 4 years. Delicious!) and headed straight to bed. It's really hot and sticky here, but I set the timer for the fan for 30 minutes and was out cold (well, not really cold. I wish!) in 10.
I know I'll fall behind in my journal-keeping, but I'm going to do my best with a weekly digest. Yeah I know you've all heard THAT before...but. Anyway. I wrote part of this on the plane, and the rest after I'd been here for a few days.
I'm well over the International Date Line at this point, so I guess I'm really gone. I'm already in tomorrow. I feel very far away.
We have an hour before we land, and it seems like it'll be earlier than it said on the ticket, so I don't know if my host family will be there when I arrive. I suppose customs will take some time.
But the flight's been great! Upgrades: awesome. Business class: awesome :-) The seats are huge and they recline to almost flat (I slept for 4 hours!), with a million controls for footrests, headrests, lumbar support, etc. I was swaddled in a huge blanket, 3 times the size of an economy class one, and a big ugly JAL sweater, and showered with free wine, earplugs, eye masks (I'm accumulating quite a collection of those), warm towels (they're called “oshibori” in Japanese, and you'll get one at every restaurant you go to, and they're wonderful when flying), slippers; and FED, fed until I could barely walk. I'm so used to the starvation diets on domestic American flights (and also wasn't expecting the upgrade), that I had a sandwich and picked up a few snackies before boarding. Needless to say, I haven't touched them. And after the meal had been served, when I thought my stomach couldn't hold another gram of food, they came trotting by with digestifs and truffles. If plans are cattle cars, I feel like Kobe beef...
The flight attendants are lovely, trim Japanese ladies with the cutest service aprons I've ever seen! I'm tempted to steal one: they have a light greyscale aerial view of some European city, probably Paris, as a background, and big colorful dirigibles and hot-air balloons all over them. Really, really good design. The movies were terrible, so I watched an NHK (Japanese public television) special on bears in Hokkaido, and was gratified that I could understand about half of the narration! Also, it was filmed in a national park that was the subject of a translation exercise I had last fall, so that was sort of interesting. There's some sort of Important Cultural Personage on board, or some such thing; an older Japanese man who gets a LOT of attention from the flight attendants. They're always offiering him something, or, in one case, listening to him for about half an hour, half-crouched near his seat. I wish I knew who he was!
When we landed, I stupidly waited at the wrong carousel for my luggage, and finally found it before it was loaded onto an unclaimed-luggage-pound cart (yikes!), but I got out into the receiving lobby, and there was my host family, with a cute little sign, waiting for me! Kumiko (my host mother) is petite and pretty, and Tatsuya (my host father) has a sort of boyish face, and a big grin. They have a big shiny black Toyota SUV, and we loaded up my luggage, and drove the two hours back to Tokyo. I'm not familiar with the Tokyo highways, so it was a while before I recognized anything, but it was still cool to see all the signs, and the cars full of real Japanese people—wow! (it isn't nice to say that they all look the same, but compared to the sea of American faces, it's sort of relaxing to see that everyone seems to have at least the same basic underlying facial structure). We chatted all the way through the ride home. Kumiko was very relieved that I could speak lots of Japanese and understand it too, since she doesn't speak any English. Tatsuya understands some English, but doesn't speak it much either. I'm glad; it means I won't be called upon to teach English or have to rely on it a lot.
They live in Mitaka, which is only about 15 minutes by bus from the university. They house is totally Western and modern, not a tatami mat in sight. It's European-style, with the living quarters on the second floor. Their son, Koichi, looks a lot like my friend's boyfriend, i.e., cute, and he's friendly and cheerful, not at all surly or teenager-ish, and he doesn't ignore me. I get his room (he's in the guest room downstairs, so that's all right). It's small but perfect for 6 weeks. We had a great dinner of temaki-zushi, which sort of make-your-own using presliced fish and vegetables. No sushi knife experience needed. Afterwards they went over the house rules, which all seem very reasonable (even the curfew, since it's flexible as long as I let them know in advance) and i'm happy to be the new “musume-san” (daughter). Tomorrow I have to get registered at school, so I took a bath (mmm, first Japanese bath in 4 years. Delicious!) and headed straight to bed. It's really hot and sticky here, but I set the timer for the fan for 30 minutes and was out cold (well, not really cold. I wish!) in 10.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
September
September
Ok, the August post was long enough, so some of the stuff from that month is going here. Besides, I might not have enough material for the September post otherwise; once you're in school, the days sort of bleed into one another and become all the same.
When we last left our intrepid heroine, she had safely navigated the treacherous waters of Berkeley housing, and found a place to roost.
It's a room. Just a room. But it was perfect. (Still is. I signed the lease for another year!) I found an ad on CraigsList for a women's boarding house, in my price range, three blocks from the south part of campus. Sylvia, the landlady, agreed to see me the next day, and Dad and I pulled up in front of a chocolate-brown, sturdy Victorian (no gingerbread trim, alas, just a solid-looking box of a house with a brick porch). Sylvia is a lovely, motherly ex-hippie who reminds me of a mother deer, with her tawny hair and big eyes. She led us through a hall with an improbably ornate mirror and marble-topped bench, up some ratty, paint-chipped carpeted stairs, into a totally nondescript hall, and unlocked the door on the far left. And I knew I was home.
It's big, with a bank of north- and east-facing windows. The ceilings are 9 feet high or higher, curved above the crown molding, and the floors are the color of dark honey. Of course rooms look bigger when they're empty, and this one seemed to stretch away from me forever. Best of all, there's an alcove in which some former resident's father had built a closet frame, hung it with poles and racks, and draped a curtain over the whole thing to hide it. And while there's no private bathroom, there is a huge closet with a small sink. The walls with the windows are set back slightly from the rest of the walls, making a sort of square bay perfect for a bed. There's a huge tree outside that provides substantial cover for the street (not that I'm not scrupulous about keeping my blinds closed!). Also, a cute little back garden with fig trees—yummy!—and on-site laundry. It doesn't get better than this, at least in my price range. Dad found nothing wrong with it. He declared it “just shabby enough”, i.e., the slightly run-down entrance and bathroom. It'll keep me humble, I think, is the reasoning. I decided on it within minutes. I haven't regretted it yet.
After I signed the lease, I could begin the delightful (at least for me) process of assembling the trappings of domesticity, namely, furniture. I already had a dresser Dad found on the side of the road (nothing but the best for his little girl, no sir!); a cool old trunk that would probably sell at Anthropologie for $250 but which cost me $8 at the Magic Johnson AIDS Clinic Thrift Shop (“Out of the Closet”); and it was the work of an hour to pick out the quintessential student futon (black, hollow-tubing frame, unbleached cotton mattress). For the rest, I spent a very pleasant day at Urban Ore (highly recommended), and came away with a lovely Danish desk, a hutch for it, a round chair (I've always wanted one!), a comfy old easy chair, and a Mission-style pillar lamp with a gorgeous stained-glass shade. Plus, Sylvia told me I could paint the walls, so I picked out my favorite sky-blue turquoise for the ceiling, and a rich pink to be overlaid with a butter yellow wash on the walls. Aron came over the hill with his pickup to haul furniture, and Gabe came from Santa Cruz to help paint and, saint that he is, chauffeur me to various monuments to capitalism to collect the remaining bits and pieces of home life. It's awfully fun to sort of spend—wisely, of course—but freely. Gabe and I dined at the Scharffen Berger Cacao Cafe. Mmmmmmm. (makes yummy sounds). Sadly, it closed for dinner a few months ago, so I'm glad we went.
Mom and Dad sent a bunch of stuff through the mail, which didn't arrive until I had an actual address at a mail center a few weeks later (the mail system at Dana House consists of a dresser in the foyer on which mail is placed, and requires great faith on the part of the occupants in the two girls assigned to sort it and place it in everyone's designated slot. And there's no way to get a package safely into the house if no one opens the door for the delivery boy. I took one look at it and headed straight for Postal Annex. Worth every penny). So I was still getting packages of linens and other stuff well into the first few weeks of school, but I was basically moved in by the first day.
As for my housemates, unfortunately, I see very little of them. The downstairs apartments have two or three girls each in them, and I hear lots of parties down there on weekends. The rest of us upstairs keep mostly to ourselves. It's hard to socialize when the doors fall closed as soon as they're opened. Also, I never had to entertain someone in my bedroom in college, because I always had an apartment, and so it feels weird to have people step into my nest with all the laundry and unmade bedding in plain sight. I was lonely for several weeks, even though the girl next door and one upstairs and I made vague plans to hang out. I still feel a little lonely when I contemplate how nice having a roommate can be. But as the year went on, I got so busy I'm rarely bothered by it now, and I really need solitude to be truly happy. The product of an only childhood. No hard feelings, Mom and Dad. Promise!
I got a brief visit from Stu the second week of September. It was nice just to have someone around who already knew me, to whom I was not explaining about myself ad infinitum while hanging ou don't mind eating solo, but it also made me homesick in new and creative ways to be with someone who still had a life back East. So we went and saw _The Forty-Year-Old Virgin_ and wet our pants laughing at it and it was better.
Unfortunately, my bike was stolen out of the back garden over Labor Day weekend. Partly my fault for not locking it, and merely leaning it against a tree, and partly someone else's for leaving the gate open overnight after doing her laundry.
Back to school! I feel like a kid again, or at least an undergraduate. Orientation for the department was all right. Meeting my “colleagues” was more fun than touring all the buildings and services, but it made me a lot more comfortable and at home to know exactly where to go. The department advisor told us to study in a different library every time we want to study for a few weeks, until we can pick our favorite. I took her advice to heart; more on that later.
The classrooms are all the same. Classrooms are the same the world over. Same smell of chalk and floor cleaner and gum under desks. The hallways are always full of students, usually sprawled on the floor, waiting for their next class. In front of the big classrooms it can get dangerous, stepping over all those feet and bags. I took the placement test for Japanese a few days before the start of classes, and after handing back two tests (one of the professors, having taught on the East Coast, noted that Haverford was a very good schol, and tried to put me in fifth year. Not a chance. The fourth-year test was similarly over my head), and a conversation with a sweet-as-pie prof, I was placed in third-year. Which, privately, is where I knew I belonged, but knowing the Japanese love of procedure and empirical evidence as I do, I kept quiet and diligently filled out my kanji tables and sentence completion.
My other classes seem pretty typical high-level undergraduate stuff (we're encouraged to take that level of instruction our first semseter). Two classes—Japanese translation and Japanese linguistics—with the same professor, and a seminar that I thought was going to be a lot of work and isn't. So now I have a little too much time on my hands, basically an unfilled week. But there's ballroom! The stuff of my next post!
But for now...to finish out the month, Gabe and I went hiking at Point Reyes as soon as he was free from the shackles of qualifying exams. We went with my cousin Sam and his girlfriend, and my grandmother's dear friend Yvie, who knows the trails like her own street. It was a perfect day, blazing hot and sunny. Starting out, we stopped for the requisite coffee (for G, naturally. I still don't touch the stuff), and I left my wallet on top of his car. No kidding, it was still there when we pulled up at the bridge toll 20 minutes and 10 miles later. God protects fools and little children, indeed.
We arrived in Marin at Yvie's to find her enormous dining room table COVERED with food. Even though we had brought our own snacks and trail mix, we dug in gleefully and fueled up. Then we stopped at Bovine Bakery where we parked, for second breakfast (might have been third by that time...). The trail we picked was neither easy nor hard, in my opinion. I was certainly tired at the end, but aside from somewhat exhausted ankles from plowing through the sandy paths, I wasn't totally wiped out at the end. We got to see elk on the way, but no whales. The ocean views, and sounds, and smell more than made up for it, though. I love cliffs.
We went back to Yvie's to wash up, and off to Sushiko's for dinner. Yumyumyumyum...On the way back, Sam managed to lead us into a warehouse parking lot, or some such thing, and nearly killed himself in the process. Gabe has since extracted a promise from me that I won't get into a car with him. My own cousin...
but. Great way to end the month! I think I'm going to like it here!
Ok, the August post was long enough, so some of the stuff from that month is going here. Besides, I might not have enough material for the September post otherwise; once you're in school, the days sort of bleed into one another and become all the same.
When we last left our intrepid heroine, she had safely navigated the treacherous waters of Berkeley housing, and found a place to roost.
It's a room. Just a room. But it was perfect. (Still is. I signed the lease for another year!) I found an ad on CraigsList for a women's boarding house, in my price range, three blocks from the south part of campus. Sylvia, the landlady, agreed to see me the next day, and Dad and I pulled up in front of a chocolate-brown, sturdy Victorian (no gingerbread trim, alas, just a solid-looking box of a house with a brick porch). Sylvia is a lovely, motherly ex-hippie who reminds me of a mother deer, with her tawny hair and big eyes. She led us through a hall with an improbably ornate mirror and marble-topped bench, up some ratty, paint-chipped carpeted stairs, into a totally nondescript hall, and unlocked the door on the far left. And I knew I was home.
It's big, with a bank of north- and east-facing windows. The ceilings are 9 feet high or higher, curved above the crown molding, and the floors are the color of dark honey. Of course rooms look bigger when they're empty, and this one seemed to stretch away from me forever. Best of all, there's an alcove in which some former resident's father had built a closet frame, hung it with poles and racks, and draped a curtain over the whole thing to hide it. And while there's no private bathroom, there is a huge closet with a small sink. The walls with the windows are set back slightly from the rest of the walls, making a sort of square bay perfect for a bed. There's a huge tree outside that provides substantial cover for the street (not that I'm not scrupulous about keeping my blinds closed!). Also, a cute little back garden with fig trees—yummy!—and on-site laundry. It doesn't get better than this, at least in my price range. Dad found nothing wrong with it. He declared it “just shabby enough”, i.e., the slightly run-down entrance and bathroom. It'll keep me humble, I think, is the reasoning. I decided on it within minutes. I haven't regretted it yet.
After I signed the lease, I could begin the delightful (at least for me) process of assembling the trappings of domesticity, namely, furniture. I already had a dresser Dad found on the side of the road (nothing but the best for his little girl, no sir!); a cool old trunk that would probably sell at Anthropologie for $250 but which cost me $8 at the Magic Johnson AIDS Clinic Thrift Shop (“Out of the Closet”); and it was the work of an hour to pick out the quintessential student futon (black, hollow-tubing frame, unbleached cotton mattress). For the rest, I spent a very pleasant day at Urban Ore (highly recommended), and came away with a lovely Danish desk, a hutch for it, a round chair (I've always wanted one!), a comfy old easy chair, and a Mission-style pillar lamp with a gorgeous stained-glass shade. Plus, Sylvia told me I could paint the walls, so I picked out my favorite sky-blue turquoise for the ceiling, and a rich pink to be overlaid with a butter yellow wash on the walls. Aron came over the hill with his pickup to haul furniture, and Gabe came from Santa Cruz to help paint and, saint that he is, chauffeur me to various monuments to capitalism to collect the remaining bits and pieces of home life. It's awfully fun to sort of spend—wisely, of course—but freely. Gabe and I dined at the Scharffen Berger Cacao Cafe. Mmmmmmm. (makes yummy sounds). Sadly, it closed for dinner a few months ago, so I'm glad we went.
Mom and Dad sent a bunch of stuff through the mail, which didn't arrive until I had an actual address at a mail center a few weeks later (the mail system at Dana House consists of a dresser in the foyer on which mail is placed, and requires great faith on the part of the occupants in the two girls assigned to sort it and place it in everyone's designated slot. And there's no way to get a package safely into the house if no one opens the door for the delivery boy. I took one look at it and headed straight for Postal Annex. Worth every penny). So I was still getting packages of linens and other stuff well into the first few weeks of school, but I was basically moved in by the first day.
As for my housemates, unfortunately, I see very little of them. The downstairs apartments have two or three girls each in them, and I hear lots of parties down there on weekends. The rest of us upstairs keep mostly to ourselves. It's hard to socialize when the doors fall closed as soon as they're opened. Also, I never had to entertain someone in my bedroom in college, because I always had an apartment, and so it feels weird to have people step into my nest with all the laundry and unmade bedding in plain sight. I was lonely for several weeks, even though the girl next door and one upstairs and I made vague plans to hang out. I still feel a little lonely when I contemplate how nice having a roommate can be. But as the year went on, I got so busy I'm rarely bothered by it now, and I really need solitude to be truly happy. The product of an only childhood. No hard feelings, Mom and Dad. Promise!
I got a brief visit from Stu the second week of September. It was nice just to have someone around who already knew me, to whom I was not explaining about myself ad infinitum while hanging ou don't mind eating solo, but it also made me homesick in new and creative ways to be with someone who still had a life back East. So we went and saw _The Forty-Year-Old Virgin_ and wet our pants laughing at it and it was better.
Unfortunately, my bike was stolen out of the back garden over Labor Day weekend. Partly my fault for not locking it, and merely leaning it against a tree, and partly someone else's for leaving the gate open overnight after doing her laundry.
Back to school! I feel like a kid again, or at least an undergraduate. Orientation for the department was all right. Meeting my “colleagues” was more fun than touring all the buildings and services, but it made me a lot more comfortable and at home to know exactly where to go. The department advisor told us to study in a different library every time we want to study for a few weeks, until we can pick our favorite. I took her advice to heart; more on that later.
The classrooms are all the same. Classrooms are the same the world over. Same smell of chalk and floor cleaner and gum under desks. The hallways are always full of students, usually sprawled on the floor, waiting for their next class. In front of the big classrooms it can get dangerous, stepping over all those feet and bags. I took the placement test for Japanese a few days before the start of classes, and after handing back two tests (one of the professors, having taught on the East Coast, noted that Haverford was a very good schol, and tried to put me in fifth year. Not a chance. The fourth-year test was similarly over my head), and a conversation with a sweet-as-pie prof, I was placed in third-year. Which, privately, is where I knew I belonged, but knowing the Japanese love of procedure and empirical evidence as I do, I kept quiet and diligently filled out my kanji tables and sentence completion.
My other classes seem pretty typical high-level undergraduate stuff (we're encouraged to take that level of instruction our first semseter). Two classes—Japanese translation and Japanese linguistics—with the same professor, and a seminar that I thought was going to be a lot of work and isn't. So now I have a little too much time on my hands, basically an unfilled week. But there's ballroom! The stuff of my next post!
But for now...to finish out the month, Gabe and I went hiking at Point Reyes as soon as he was free from the shackles of qualifying exams. We went with my cousin Sam and his girlfriend, and my grandmother's dear friend Yvie, who knows the trails like her own street. It was a perfect day, blazing hot and sunny. Starting out, we stopped for the requisite coffee (for G, naturally. I still don't touch the stuff), and I left my wallet on top of his car. No kidding, it was still there when we pulled up at the bridge toll 20 minutes and 10 miles later. God protects fools and little children, indeed.
We arrived in Marin at Yvie's to find her enormous dining room table COVERED with food. Even though we had brought our own snacks and trail mix, we dug in gleefully and fueled up. Then we stopped at Bovine Bakery where we parked, for second breakfast (might have been third by that time...). The trail we picked was neither easy nor hard, in my opinion. I was certainly tired at the end, but aside from somewhat exhausted ankles from plowing through the sandy paths, I wasn't totally wiped out at the end. We got to see elk on the way, but no whales. The ocean views, and sounds, and smell more than made up for it, though. I love cliffs.
We went back to Yvie's to wash up, and off to Sushiko's for dinner. Yumyumyumyum...On the way back, Sam managed to lead us into a warehouse parking lot, or some such thing, and nearly killed himself in the process. Gabe has since extracted a promise from me that I won't get into a car with him. My own cousin...
but. Great way to end the month! I think I'm going to like it here!
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