Crafty Every Day: January 1

So this is a little late, and I'll probably have to skip all the Christmas cards I made until next Christmas (at least in early January, I could have claimed it was still Christmas if I got them in before Twelfth Night), but I hope you'll be interested in my handworks anyway. Here we go!

I have an embarrassing amount of scrapbooking, papercraft and other art supplies.  It usually stays all neat and packed up, out of sight...and therefore out of mind.

This is a problem.

Yes, mostly because it doesn't get used.  But also because I forget what I have, and any time I step into a Michael's or a Paper Source or any of the excellent specialty stores (like the Peddler's Pack here in Oregon, and the sadly defunct Colorful Creations in Falmouth), I pick up something else.  Cute stickers, irresistible Japanese paper, a paper punch on sale, whatever.  Then I toss it into the box with the rest of the stuff, and out of mind it goes again.  Until I finally got around to unpacking it all on my aunt's huge craft table, and the sheer volume of it blows my mind.

I should point out that the brown roller bag isn't unpacked at all.

So much I couldn't get it all in one shot.  So here's the rest.

Yikes, right?  So I unpacked it all, got set up...and sat staring at it for a while trying to think of something to do with it all.  Finally I decided that I'd warm up by making some greeting cards with the premade cards and envelopes I'd bought years ago, and the stickers I bought in December with the express intention of making Christmas cards for this past Christmas (luckily we already had photo cards from our wedding ordered and ready to go, or else NO ONE would have gotten anything this year!)

So without further ado, here is the first product of the first day of new year:

$3.50, free shipping, let me know in the comments if you'd like to buy it!

Simple, clean, and seasonal.  I quite like it.  I hope you do too!

Updates! Part 1: 2006

Well, so much for my grand plans to have everything wrapped up and up-to-date ASAP, not to mention all the fun and mostly daily posts I had in mind! Thanks for your patience. It turns out re-creating your life over several years takes time AND energy! I confess I've been working on the other posts, the costume and craft posts, and also my blogging got interrupted by a trip to Baltimore to take care of my mom, who had foot surgery and needed help getting around and cheering up. But I'm back now, so here we go!

 We're going to shotgun our way through this, kids, so we can get to the good stuff (aka 2012, the year I can mostly remember without reading old e-mails or slogging through Facebook), and I'll slow down a little, maybe do a whole post for this past year.  A lot happened in it, after all.  But for now, we've got five years of my scintillating life to catch you up on!

February 2006: Went to New York to give a paper at an East Asian Studies conference at Columbia.  I felt very grown-up, very professional, even though it was just my undergrad thesis, brushed up and re-tooled a little.  I got bad billing: the second-to-last time-slot of the last day, so at least half of my audience consisted of my family.  Which was nice in some ways (especially since the paper dealt a little with filial piety and the importance of family in pre-modern Japan) and a little embarrassing in others.  But we had a marvelous time at brunch the day after, so I'm glad they were there after all.  And the snow!  The biggest storm New York had ever had, at least since they began keeping records.  Thigh-high drifts everywhere, beautiful, but deadly inconvenient, at least once I had to leave.  My flight sat on the tarmac for 5 hours before finally taking off and arriving at 5AM in Oakland.  A dear ballroom friend picked me up at this ungodly hour, and I caught a little sleep before getting right back up and heading to class.  A scholar's work is never done!

Me, in the snow, in Brooklyn.

March 2006: My birthday!  Right over spring break. I took myself to San Francisco for the day, lunched in North Beach with my cousin who works at Patagonia, and bought myself a pretty top with his employee discount. Upon returning home, I found out my ballroom teammates had whipped up a cake and a little party for me, so I went over to the ballroom house and had a very nice time. I do so love having friends. My grandmother's birthday is a few days before, and my cousin's a few days after, so my aunt had a little party for us in her backyard.

Spring birthdays are the best!

April 2006: It rained for 6 straight weeks here in Berkeley.  I wore my rain boots every day, the creek under Sather Gate was roaring like rapids, and you couldn't walk on any grass for fear of sinking ankle-deep in mud.  Everyone says it's very unusual.  The sun finally came out, and the Campanile played "I Can See Clearly Now the Rain is Gone".  Tee hee.  UCBD went to Stanford for their Cardinal Classic competition, and I did very well with my new partner.  It's amazing how much warmer and sunnier Palo Alto is, even though it's only something like 30 miles away.

May 2006: All my friends from my Japanese language class are graduating, so I went to the department ceremony (the big one in the stadium is too scary for me, plus I think you need tickets).  I also went to a graduation party a few nights later, even though I was tired and not interested much in going, and met a very intriguing young man...!  [FUTURE ME: Naturally, we're not speaking anymore, but we'll have to feign ignorance of the inevitable end--indeed, the inevitable ends of ALL the relationships but one, as I rehash this very old news].  For his privacy, let's call him...Ishmael.  Hee.

June 2006: After closing up my apartment for the summer (I'll be back for about five minutes in July, and I don't want it sublet because I don't have anywhere to stash all my stuff), I headed home for 3 weeks and to Woods Hole for one.  Woods Hole all by myself.  It was interesting.  I had no car, and it was pretty early in the season, so there weren't very many people and it was chilly--even rained a few times, and the wind off the Sound was so strong on my way home from the supermarket (and, I admit, from Christmas Tree Shops...), it nearly blew me off my bicycle. I got a lot of work done on my photo album from Japan, saw a few friends, and probably ate my weight in pastry from Pie in the Sky (there you go, Erik, a little free publicity!).  It was calm and quiet and I enjoyed it very much.  I think I would like to live there when I am old and possibly alone.

July 2006: I went to three parties in Berkeley while I was back there, for about 30 hours in between my return flight from the East Coast and my departure to Japan.  Ishmael went to Berkeley and lives in Oakland, so he still has a lot of friends in the area, as well as coworkers.  He's a big happy puppy of a guy, so I'm looking forward to joining his social circle as well as bringing him into mine.  He's also retooled his vacation so that he can visit me in Japan after his trip to Thailand!  I am a happy girl, made even happier by the random upgrade to business class on my JAL flight to Tokyo, which I think is probably like first class on most other airlines.  I can't imagine what first class is like.  I think it must be like Paradise.  For a more detailed description of my flight and my first day in Japan, please read From Tokyo with Love, Part 1.

August 2006:  From Tokyo with Love, Part 2 was my sop to my audience, since I got so caught up in the days of classes, homework, excursions, hanging out with my friends and my host family, and the heavy Tokyo humidity that I didn't really post anything about the rest of the trip except an album of Facebook photos (so if you're friends with me, check it out) and a picture of me holding a souvenir katana on this blog.  I had some great ideas for posts, too: one about the field trip we took to the local temple in town, which was to be entitled "Zen and the Art of Staying Awake"; another about the field trip we took to a sumo stable, which was to be entitled "Sumo and the Art of Staying Awake" (are we noticing a theme here?  I was EXHAUSTED most of the time, which was my own stupid fault; if I had just gone to bed at 10PM like an adult most nights, I would've been fine.  But Internet!  And chatting! And homework! Add to that the fact that my bladder never adjusted to the time difference and I was getting up and stumbling down a very steep flight of steps to the bathroom at 5AM, and I was lucky I managed to stay awake in class, never mind these extra events that required us to get up early or stay out late); and another about the INCREDIBLE food my host family keeps stuffing into me, despite my protests (oh, who are we kidding?  I'd sit up on my hind legs and beg if that would get them to feed me more).  See, my host father just quit his job right before I got to Japan [FUTURE ME: and got a new one a few weeks after I left!  Go Tatsuya-san!], and my host mother didn't work, so once they figured out that I would eat pretty much anything they put in front of me (I had already told them I didn't like squid, raisins, natto, and puru-puru-mono, which translates roughly to "wobbly things", like Jell-O), they spent a lot of time and energy (and probably money) to make all sorts of amazing deliciousness. And they took me to awesome tasty places too: the kushi-age place where my host father hung out in college, peach and grape picking in the mountains, and a restaurant that served only mushroom dishes, also in the mountains.  And then Ishmael came to visit, and it was super-fun and very romantic.  And then it was time to go home, and my host mother cried, and I cried a little too, but I was pretty happy to be back in the US when I got there (in my economy-class seat; no upgrades this time!).  And that's how I spent my summer vacation.

September 2006: I spent the first semester of my first year getting comfortable in my new home, learning the ropes in the department, and making friends, but I needed money by the end of it (a brief project of Not Buying Anything during the fall of 2005 worked okay, but I should have paid myself a small salary every month and stuck with it instead of just dipping into the principal every time I needed something), so I got a winter-break job working the phones at the Call Calling Center soliciting for donations, and, as described in my January 2006 post, I started as a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) the second semester.  I got another position as GSI, this one in the East Asian Language and Cultures department, teaching Buddhism 101.  It's pretty fun and the other GSI for the class actually likes me and we get along, as opposed to the terrible bitch who, by the end of the last course I taught, wouldn't make eye contact, speak to me directly, or take something from my hand.  I like my students and the discussions are interesting--well, I'm interested, anyway.  Ballroom has picked up and I have a new partner!

October 2006: So much dancing and teaching, as usual. I don't remember much about this part of the year. I was pretty happy, although I remember feeling kind of crummy on Halloween, so I went shopping at the Ross at Shattuck and Allston, and getting some cute things. A lot of my friends from my program graduated last year, so my social circle has shifted to Ishmael's and ballroom pretty exclusively. Wish I had more than that; even this new-fangled "Facebook" thing isn't yielding a lot of memories.

November 2006: Ishmael and I went to Rock Haven for Thanksgiving, and he met my mom. We had a nice time. I had to do a lot of homework and thesis prep, but Ish took one of the smaller guests out for an epic Nerf battle, which did wonders for everyone's mood. I'll take this month's space to mention the sewing/hangout/nerd circle that I started going to in the spring, at first just to have my ballroom gown altered, but now I'm friends with them all, and it's really, really nice, and I love them very much [still do!].

December 2006: I spent part of Christmas break with Ishmael's family, and went home on Christmas Day. I'd never been to his part of the country before, and it was a lot of fun. When I got to BWI, my mom had my stocking in the car for me to open while we drove home, which was great! Then I spent the break how I usually do, sleeping late, eating a lot of things, reading my new books, seeing my friends and going to movies. Then it was 2007.  I'm going to graduate this year!  Eeek!

Epiphany

(EDIT: I know it's not Epiphany anymore.  I'm a few days late.  Sue me.)

So, um, hi there.  It's been quite a while, hasn't it?  Like around, oh, seven years?  Yeah.  That's about right.

Lordy.

Well, let's catch up, shall we?

I graduated from Berkeley.  I moved.  A lot.  I danced.  A lot, also.  I dated people.  Several people.  I even married one of them!  I ate and drank and made merry.  I tried to visit my family when I could.  I went to weddings, a funeral, and countless parties.  I worked.  Did I mention I got married?  It was a big deal.  Then it all becomes "we".  We traveled.  We hung out.  We moved again.  More on that later. More on all of it later, actually -- I'll try to give mini-recaps of every month (and by mini, I mean a few lines at a time.  It occurred to me to do haiku, but that's a little precious, even for me!).  But I also have two other series to debut:  Crafty Every Day and Costume Quibbling!

Crafty Every Day is a brand-new resolution of mine for 2013, mostly to keep me sane.  I felt a little blue before the holidays because I wasn't getting much done in the crafty part of my life: no scrapbooking, no painting or drawing, only some desultory knitting while I watched TV.  However, at the moment I find myself with an totally obscene amount of free time as well as a huge and lovely craft table and some primo tools at my disposal (check the updates for the reasons why).  It would be criminal not to take advantage of them!  So I'll post my efforts, one a day (with a big wave to start with, to cover the first few days of this year) for your viewing pleasure.  Even better, some of the things I post, like note cards, knittings, and the like, will be FOR SALE TO YOU!  That's right, for an unlimited time, you can own a piece of my creativity, the product of my idle hands, for a low, low price (I'll quote it in the post) and my eternal gratitude!

Costume Quibbling will be a series on film and TV costuming with an eye towards character and plot analysis through the wardrobe choices.  Having dabbled in costuming myself many moons ago, I know that the best practitioners (I do not include myself!) express not just time and place, but personality, mood, and any number of other subtle cues through their costumes, whether they design and build them from scratch or pull them together from ready-made stock.  Watch enough of a TV series, or a movie several times over, and you'll see themes emerge in the dresses and suits.  Sometimes if a costumer is really superb at his or her job (Janie Bryant of Mad Men, I'm looking at you!), the costumes will tell you things about the characters that you'd never know otherwise from the dialog or exposition.  There won't be "quibbling", per se, as I don't think I'll have anyone to quibble with, and I'm certainly not going to take issue with how the pros do their jobs, but I liked the alliteration as well as the sense of "fussing over tiny details" that the word "quibble" evokes.

I'll be alternating update posts, craft posts, and costume posts (maybe not in that order) as often as I can until I'm all caught up, then I'll try to post one of each series a week.  We'll see how long that continues.

The title of the post might be misleading, not least because it's well past Twelfth Night as of post time, but also because I'm not sure I've had an epiphany of any kind, other than the impulse to revive my languishing electronic presence.  I am, however, bringing you three gifts: my updates, my craft series and my costume series.  I'll let you decide if they're better than gold, frankincense and myrrh.
 
Stay tuned, loyal readers!  And tell your friends to follow the Electrograph too!

OXOXO,
Ev

January 2006

Anyone who says winter doesn't exist in California is wrong, wrong, wrong. It might not be exactly what we're all used to in “Christmas in Connecticut”, with snowy fenceposts and bright biting days, but it's definitely cold and nasty here. Dreary, too. Lots of rain. Lots of fog. Some watery pale sunlight now and then. Occasionally a fleeting moment of warmth on the bricks at 3 PM. Mostly just cold.
But I have plenty to keep me occupied now that the semester's underway again. The first few weeks of the month dragged a little (lots of waking up late and mucking about without purpose, which can be surprisingly tiring and uninspiring). Then the semester started again, so there are classes and practices and parties, oh my.
But first, a spot of bad news: I have no dance partner. We went to dinner and he said he didn't want to be my partner anymore. Whether this is because of the screaming matches we started to have during practice, or the height/build disparity, or just lack of that ineffable thing called chemistry, the result is the same. This spelled disaster for the upcoming Winter Frolic until I put out feelers for a new partner and found someone whose partner can't compete that day. So we trained up for a few weeks together, and he's very sweet and fun to hang out with, so that softened the annoyance of not doing very well down in Palo Alto. I have given up on slicking my hair back, because it makes me look bullet-headed, and have instead opted for a slightly larger, more shellacked version of what my hair normally looks like. I wore my green gown this time instead of that awful skirt and top combo, now that we're dancing Silver, and horror of horrors, Novice (which went as well as you'd expect). I also have a much better regulation Latin costume, consisting of a poufy frilly black skirt and the ugliest top that Old Navy ever put out, but it's still better than the tube dress, which, now that I've seen the videos, makes my ass look like a TV screen. At least I have lovely new shoes (Christmas gift from Mom and Dad; along with cowboy boots, this was a shoe-y holiday!) so I don't look quite so frumpy in those big black boats like last semester.
Typical, I suppose, to start the post with all about Ballroom. I do have a scholarly life, too: my classes mostly hold intrigue: the second semester of Japanese at (thankfully) an hour later than last semester, the second Japanese linguistics class, and a wonderful seminar on Basho and other haiku poets. I love the professor; he's soft-spoken and seemingly easy-going but not really. He expects work from us and he's going to get it. I'm really beginning to love classical Japanese. Also, basically all of my Japanese-major friends are in it, including some grads, so it's party time every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon! The other two things I'm taking are stupid and boring: proseminar, AGAIN, and an Edo history class that is a complete waste and I can't bring myself to get excited about. The prof is about a million years old and a crashing bore, just narrates the readings. And I don't like the reader. [Editor's note: I'm not naming names, like I promised, 5but I'm glad for once for the two-year gap in time, because it means I can say things like this.]
And then, there's teaching. Yikes. I've been totally drained after each class. I hope it gets easier. We had a few meetings with Dr. Z to go over basics, and I had to do an all-day seminar on teaching and being a GSI, and I'm taking a seminar in pedagogical methods, which is required for getting the paycheck, but I still don't feel prepared for marching in and seeing those shining little faces every Tuesday and Wednesday. The Tuesday class is the harder one. Those kids are SMART. A good few of them are smarter than I am. And one or two are my age, which is also nerve-wracking. I scared them all but good the frist day thundering on about plagiarism, which I probably overdid. I just didn't know what to say, and I got a little carried away. Whoops. The Wednesday class seems nicer (read: a little more docile and a lot less likely to catch me with a question I can't answer), but also sleepier. I probably prefer that one because I already have my material down from the day before. So far, so good. We're starting with India, and beginning to wade into “The Home and the World”, which contains an embarrassing amount of allegory, so it's easy to work it over pretty thoroughly.
Next month: Travels in New York!

December 2005

I'm glad the competitions are over for the moment, because all my work is catching up to me. Thhe nostalgia of papers and exams and study sessions is flooding back to me in an sleep-deprived, ink-stained wave. The fixed-scheduled exam system, though, now, THAT'S a kick in the teeth. You mean I can't just waltz in and pick up the exam when *I* feel like it? I have to take it with everyone else? Barbaric. But they seem to have gone okay, and now I'm on blissful respite from all things academic, here in the gloom of a Berkeley winter. It's rainy and cold and bleak, and I spend a lot of time in front of my tiny gas heater, reading the books I've been assigned for my class next semester. For yes, friends, Romans, countrymen, next semester I shall join the hallowed ranks of the pedagogues, those noble bastions of higher learning: I am to become a GSI. Where heaven is high and the professor is far away, graduate student instructors are on the ground, in the academic trenches, with their raw, plucky foot soldier-scholars, and I can't wait to get in there. The call came while I was Christmas shopping (read: overspending) on Fourth Street, a few blocks of high-end little shops and tree-lined sidewalks that I wish the rest of the world looked like (and smelled like: the Italian restaurant halfway down has its own wood-burning oven that pumps out glorious, James-Fenimore-Cooper-worthy gouts of smoky delicious woodsmoke), from Professor Darren Zook in the PEIS department. He's teaching Asian Studies 10B (Modern Asia) next semester, and I interviewed a few days before, obviously favorably! I am excited to test my didactic mettle, to be earning some serious cash (go, union!) and to be learning more about the countries I know very little about. To that end I'm reading Ranbindranath Tagore's The Home and the World, and the other two books are Mo Yan's Big Breasts, Wide Hips (looking forward to that one) and Oe Kenzaburo's A Personal Matter. I know both the other GSIs, so I'm looking forward to it all!
Christmas is upon us! Mom sent an Advent calendar, I put up my wee tree and spent a few bucks on awful decorations at the dollar store. My room is now festooned along the molding with silver bead ropes and hung with plastic balls, toy drums and two truly tacky reindeer. I love it. I'm still a little homesick, though, and it still doesn't feel like Christmas proper.
But the closer it got, the more I bucked up. We went down to Grandma Polly's in Fresno, for the first time since I was a wee babe, although Mom and Dad did it a few years ago on their way to Japan. Mom came over to California first, and spent the night at my apartment. John was very sweet and picked us up from the airport, although I got my very long scarf caught momentarily in his trunk and scared Mom half to death (let the record show that the car wasn't even moving, and he noticed right away and I pulled it out without having to even open the trunk, so relax, for heaven's sake). I was delighted to show her the gallery exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum, which was Taisho-era transitional paintings, furniture, kimono and tableware. Then we had dinner with Sam at Le Bateau Ivre on Telegraph, and it was perfect: hot, cheesy, savory food and fire and stoneware pitchers all soothing and warming on a wet blustery night. It's not so cold here, but it certainly manages to feel what I imagine England is like in the winter, and it's not hospitable.
Next day we went to Kingpin Donuts for breakfast (I think Mom only pretended to exclaim over the best donuts ever—her loss), and then we headed for the train station. I love going to Fresno by train. The ride is lovely almost all the way down, with a long river view for the first hour, and then fields of every description—best in the spring when the almond trees are blooming, but surprisinly green in winter, which is when they actually get rain here.
Grandma's was calm and sociable for the first few days: we saw Memoirs of a Geisha at a huge sprawl-mall (verdict on the movie: gorgeous production values, crappy rendering of the story, watch it for the sets and props and costumes), ate at Dai Bai Dang, which is surprisingly good for franchised and large, and I saw Vince and we drove down to his little hovel in Merced, and I received an excellent gift from him, a wicked little blade concealed in a pen. A bride's knife! I fervently hope it is never required for defending my honor (I'm certainly not going to use it on myself, like you're supposed to), but it rides in my leather jacket pocket now, and I grin surreptitiously whenever I sign checks with it...
Christmas Day, however, was something else entirely. Being an only child with no living relatives within two hours after pubescence, Christmases are spent, are supposed to be spent, in tranquility, a leisurely plow through stockings and under the tree with pauses for coffee, hot chocolate, bacon, stollen (ick), and clementines. Presents are opened one by one, to make it last and to ensure proper attention is given to every gift and giver and receiver. Bathrobes are to be worn until at least 2 PM. Usually whatever movie was given to individual or family unit is put on in the afternoon, and we all read our books all day. Lately, we've been bestirring ourselves to haul over to the neighbors' across the street for Christmas Dinner, and then home to lie heavy in our beds and savor the week ahead.
But at Grandma's, you're up at 8 or earlier, to chop mushrooms and fold napkins and look lively or else. Fifty people show up in waves, most of whom have known Dad since he was in short pants, and the last time they saw me I was just a baby. Mom, in a moment of sympathy, allowed as how she'd rather be in her bathrobe drinking coffee too...but that wasn't how it was going to be this time, so suck it up. Moment over. Fold some more napkins. The highlights were my multitudinous second cousins, all identically dressed, swinging decorously at the pinata (which Dad cruelly hauled out of range EVERY single time!), and encouraging old Cal alumni to come see the next ballroom competition the next time they were in Berkeley.
If I had a less-than-ideal Christmas, however, New Year's Eve more than made up for it. One of the vintage waltz societies held a ball—a real ball!—at International House, so I gleefully donned my old prom dress and made my way up the hill. I felt like I was in a Dickens novel—or at least the set for a movie version of one. There were many repurposed gowns like mine, but quite a few authentic costumes—even a distinguished gentleman in hunting pinks! I learned the Congress of Vienna Waltz, the galop, and just how much fun a polka can be, weaving and dodging and spinning around like mad things. There was sparkling cider at midnight and I kissed one of the girls on the team (no, not like that) and went home delighted. 2006 holds promise, especially after being rung in with such earnest cheer.

November 2005

Oh. My. Goodness. Three competitions in three weeks. I'll be lucky if I have any feet left by the time I graduate, instead of just a pair of stumps. After the Berkeley Beginner's competition we went to San Jose State and did very well again, placing third a lot, and the next week back to San Jose (different part of it, though), to compete in the state championships. The floor was huge and cold and there were hundreds of seats all the way around. It wasn't nearly as crowded as I thought it would be, actually. I was amazed to think that all of them would be filled, but only the first few rows in the lower level were even close to being full. The United States Ballroom Dance Association has stricter rules on costumes than most of the college comps, so we couldn't wear anything with sparkly things on it. Boring! R and I danced very, very well, placing first (!) in the Newcomer level for Standard (waltz-quickstep). Okay, Newcomer isn't very exciting, but it's the first time I think I've been first in anything, and if I'm not mistaken, doesn't that make us state champions? I think it does. I think I'm going to continue to think that (and brag about it, where appropriate :-).
This was the first time I'd seen children competing, bar the one tiny couple at the Berkeley Beginner's comp. They're very, very good, but actually kind of disturbing. I can't imagine how much time they spend practicing, and between that and the skimpy costumes and the overly adult routines they perform, I think it might not be very good for them. This might be just sour grapes, though. They're better than I'll ever be simply by virtue of having starting earlier, and I've taken to muttering “therapy. YEARS of therapy. That's what awaits them” whenever I get fed up and envious...
In other news, I've joined a classical Japanese class in addition to my translation, linguistics and language courses. Most of my friends are in this one too, and the professor is just wonderful. He's taking us through Hojoki, or Account of my Ten-Foot Hut, and he manages to be funny and wise and informative and helpful, often all at once and always during every class. After some bureaucratic running around I've managed to get credit for it as a graduate course, if I write a paper on the translation, and also for the linguistics course. My fears about not being able to hack it in graduate school are abating, and I think I might actually do okay!
I just love the library here. It took me a little while to find the main stacks, but they are just awe-inspiring. Floor after floor after floor of books in all languages, and big beautiful study tables and carrels. The stacks themselves are underground but the upper floors are all marble and the great reading room soars over your head like a ship upside down, with coffered ceilings and huge windows. The study tables have beautiful bronze lanps on them. After Haverford's cozy but small library (and those awful chairs on the Boat), this feels like Alexandria. Best of all is the art installation in the atrium. There's a spiral staircase that winds all the way down to the lowest stack level, and an artist has taken books and strung them through wires, and then suspended the wires across and over and down the middle of the spiral. The effect is of books cascading down through the air, some open and fluttering, some closed and tumbling towards the floor. It feels like the scene in Big Fish where time stops and Ewan MacGregor is pushing through the hardened figures to his girl. I love studying there, or at the smaller, Victorian-style Asian Studies library. More marble, more bronze and hardwood, but in an infinitesmally smaller space that looks like a Belle Epoque drawing room.
Thanksgiving was spent in the mountains, at Rock Haven. Baby Kathleen is 4 months old now, big but still sort of compact. She screams when anyone other than Deirdre or Liz holds her for the most part, but there she has her cheerful moments, and she and I spent a quarter-hour gargling at each other by the fire. Mom was there, and patiently sat through my ballroom DVDs and asked me about my friends and dates while washing dishes. I saw Vince the night after Thanksgiving. We ate ribs, went up to Kaiser Pass while listening to Stephen Lynch, and saw a very bizarre cloud formation up there at 8000 feet. Aliens, methinks. It was blistering, bittering cold, so iwas very glad for the fire that was still alive when I got back. I even built it up a little before going to bed.
Now, with exams looming, I'm glad that the competitions are over until after break. I need study time!

October

I was utterly remiss in not closing my September post with the birth of my new baby cousin, Kathleen Elizabeth! She was born on September 30, and was a whopping 10 pounds, 4 ounces! Big girl! Everyone is doing fine. I went to see her and Deirdre in the hospital when I had a cold, so all the pictures of me holding her are marred by a big ugly mask, and my hands are raw from washing them so much, but she's just darling—all dark hair and little hands. Deirdre's mom is in town to help, and so is my grandmother, so we had a nice little baby-welcoming party with Whole Food and Celtic music. New cousin! So exciting!
In my world, I have friends now! Several people from my linguistics and translation classes have started inviting me to tea with them after class, and I've even been to parties! This is in addition to my teammates in ballroom, with whom I've spent a fair amount of non-dancing time. We went on a retreat early in October, to Chabot Park, and I'm astonished that such an enormous expanse of open nature is so close to civilization. We only drove about 40 minutes to get there, and there were houses almost all along the way until the very end. There were so many people there I didn't get to talk to or hang out with everyone. But we had a great time taking walks through the gorgeous scenery, playing frisbee and icebreaker games (please, stop asking about and referencing the damn circle game. I hate you all), and in the morning, laughing at Pamela and Marz and Darwin and Lyell, who slept outside and got all condensed on.
The weather continues glorious beautiful. I don't spend nearly enough time outside, but I'm saving a bundle on drying my clothes—I just hang them outside! I've noticed, though, that they don't dry nearly as fast I would expect them to given the temperature and breeze. There's something about the air around here that's moister even though it doesn't feel like it.
I went down to Fresno to see my grandmother and attend the annual banquet for the Lee Institute for Japanese Art which is incongruously in the middle of a walnut grove in the middle of nowhere. I wish I had a kimono for the event, but everything I have is mismatched and too old, and I can't dress myself and don't know anyone who can. So i just wore my red and white flowered dress and lavender pashmina for warmth. Fresno is even warmer than the Bay Area, so I barely needed it. The Lee Institute is huge and shockingly well-manicured for someplace so far out of the way. Their grounds are perfect, better even than some places I've seen in Japan. This time we got to go into the private gardens of the on-site residence, that are usually off-limits. Passed hors d'oeuvres and open bar, no one my age. I munched and sipped for a while and let Grandma introduce me around, trotted out a little rudimentary Japanese, and tried to be modest about my studies at Berkeley. At dinner, I was seated with a Japanese dignitary who turned out to be a ballroom dancer himself! We had a very nice conversation about that, but I didn't get any tips about it. Maybe I'm too much of a beginner to need it.
I already posted about my experience dancing with John, and I'm very grateful to him for helping me with ballroom so early on, because I didn't find a partner until three weeks before the first comeptition. R is just a little shorter than I am in my heels, but we're well-matched, I'm told, and we seem to be doing okay. The first competition was at the very end of October. I had a dark blue skirt, silver velvet shirt, and sparkly gray shrug for Standard, and a tube dress in burnt orange. I did my hair just as the intermediate and advanced girls said we should—gel it, spray it, blow-dry it, repeat. My hair felt like plastic all day. I kept touching it in fascination. We placed third in Waltz and Quickstep, third in Rumba, and not in Cha-cha. I was sort of surprised at how put out I felt that we didn't make the finals, even though we messed up badly enough not to deserve it at all. They say most competitions go well into the night, but this one ended around 4, and I crawled home, showered all the mess out of my hair, and dragged off to a party at the “ballroom house”. About six or seven dancers live together near my apartment, but I learned later that it's not official—they just liked each other and all happened to be looking for housing at the same time last year. I left early though, to go to dinner with Gabe and some of his friends in Milpitas at the best Chinese restaurant ever, according to Gabe. And how did it earn this lofty praise, you might ask?
It serves “fish-fragrant eggplant cakes”.
Don't you love it when you see a phrase in which none of the words actually make sense in reference to any others? Especially on a menu...they're pretty good, though. Got to see Gabe's digs, which are small and basementy but cozy. I like his room. We mucked about in Santa Cruz, got lunch, and then he drove me back home.
I sort of forgot about Halloween so I dove into Hot Topic, bought a pair of big white angel wings, and wore them over a white shirt and my petticoat skirt for a party on Northside with people from my Japanese classes. Yay, I'm an angel. Meh. There's a picture of my arm in said costume on Facebook, if you're interested.
Okay, Facebook. Weird, but also fun. I think I like it, especially because I can reconnect with people from as far back as high school, and I can put a lot of stuff on it that will satisfy my need to enumerate things without boring everyon in sight. I think it's classier than MySpace, which I REFUSE, CATEGORICALLY, to join. LiveJournal was bad enough.
Other things I like about Berkeley:
*The spicy-hempy smell of Telegraph Ave., and all the vendors on weekend afternoons.
*All the food! Yumyumyumyumyum...
*Especially Kingpin doughnuts. Oh my stars, I'm going to have dance more or less constantly to work off all of those maple- and chocolate- and sugar-glazed glories. There's NUTMEG in them. NUTMEG. Krispy Kreme and Dunkin' Donuts, I'm sorry, but it's just not going to work out. I hope we can still be friends, and maybe I'll drop by when I can't get anything better, but Kingpin has my heart. NUTMEG.
*Zooming down Bancroft Ave. on my bicycle, from I-House all the way to Shattuck. So very dangerous, and yet so very, very, deliciously exciting.
*Lovely misty mornings that haze over the hills and make them look like the Austrian, Swiss and German postcards from the 50s and 60's my mother has in the attic. Getting up sucks, but at least it's nice out a lot when I'm awake.
*Free bus rides, all the time. Wheee!

2,996 and counting

This is shocking. These kids, assuming they haven't been taken out back and shot somewhere, have managed to crack open the event of the century using nothing but footage and information in the public domain.
I wept as I watched it, just as I did my junior year in Japan as I watched a video on media manipulation, and I realized that our country sticks its fingers into matters all over the world, plying one side or the other for their own gains, which usually backfire.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5946593973848835726&q=loose+change

In memory of not only those who lost their lives, their loved ones, their friends and associates, but every soldier deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq and every family who sits on pins waiting for them to come home. For every peace protestor threatened by police, for every Iraqi whose life has been turned upside down, not just by our war, but by the despot WE put there 20 years ago. For every prisoner at Guantanamo, held illegally, transported to other countries for unspeakable torture, held so often without cause or reason. And now, I include everyone who will shudder at the idea that our government thinks it's not only ok, but imperative, that they engineer the deaths of innocent citizens in the short and long term, for ends they could achieve through compromise and compassion, and they don't even try.

That's a lot more than 2,996.

Intolerable Cruelty

http://www.glumbert.com/media/tonguetwister.html

Wow. Suddenly I'm not so sorry to be home.

(Safe for work, if work allows clips of men suffering the ultimate pain as punishment for misprounouncing tongue-twisters. Everyone is clothed, and of there are any naughty words or references to sex, they're in Japanese, so you're probably ok.)

The Batsh*t Boob Patrol...GREAT Name.

I've found something to slash my katana at!

This makes me. Very. Angry.

http://womenshealthnews.blogspot.com/2006/07/babytalk-magazine-cover-controversy.html
http://theogeo.blogspot.com/2006/07/boobs.html

You might have to copy and paste the links. Because I'm lazy. But it's worth it. People are IDIOTS.

love to all! Home in a week!

Katanaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggggg!

From Tokyo, with Love, Part 2

August. Amazing. I know I pledged to post once a week, but truly, this is the first free evening I've had all month. And all last month. This course is kicking my ass. Fortunately it's kicking everyone else's ass (as one seasoned ICU veteran said, "yes, well; the Japanese do tend to overdo things, don't they?"), so I don't feel too bad when my tests come back with grades so bad I can't even tell my parents. More on that later. For now, I'll try to recap events by week, one per post, and change things up a bit with other posts too.
For now, here's a picture of me about to kick ass with a crappy fake katana. Not the course's ass, unfortunately. Undefined ass. But still.

Shall We Dance?

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.

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.

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!

Broken Silence

Because I've been a wee bit busy for the past few months, I've missed posting. Yeah. Sorry. So in the 2 months remaining of my the summer, I will attempt to chronicle my 10 months here in Berkeley: graduate school, ballroom dance, the whole bit. But since I never really got into the habit of journaling or keeping track of it all, it's going to be hard to do this. Plus, I very much doubt that the vast majority of my loyal readers would appreciate the degree of excruciating detail my full account would entail. So , I'll attempt a monthly digest of events. I intended to post those weekly, but after doing the math, I discover that 9 weeks is almost more time than this summer allows, and since I'll almost certainly interrupt it for weekly posts while I'm in Japan, I'll probably post a few times a week, as I write them. You all know the rules: very few people will be named by name, and only in the most innocuous circumstances. No gossip, no drama, no matter how significant it might have been at the time. I know you're all crushed. Read it anyway.

WARNING: I was too lazy to actually write the August post, so it's just a couple of e-mails I sent to people. So it repeats itself. Much like I do, come to think of it. And yes, it's intentional.


August

trapped in the airport
trapped in the airport all night long
we steal blankets and pull chairs together
dad sleeps on the floor
like in “the terminal”
i should have known that shedding my old life would never be as easy as getting on a plane
shearing off the ground
landing only slightly wilted
i have to be stripped of all the trappings
almost forget how i used to be

Speaking of new homes, I've landed in mine. Sort of. I'm in Berkeley, after a hellish trip from Baltimore to Atlanta to Memphis to San Francisco (instead of Oakland), a VERY uncomfortable night on the floor of an airport (I forget which one. Atlanta, I think), and the (hopefully temporary) "misplacement" of every stitch of clothing and other article I own (at press time 2 of the 4 bags had been returned, and the other 2 located and on their way, I think). But Liz and Dierdre were very welcoming, and Dad is just as happy as a clam to be "home" back on the West Coast and in Berkeley. He was taking great lungfuls of air as we climbed out of the subway and exulting about it all.
Myself, I'm uncomfortably chilly most of the time, and mildly distressed about the seeming lack of consistent sunlight. Maybe if I thought of myself in England I'd cope better. But honestly, right now England would seem less foreign. The lay of the land is different, the people look different, even the squirrels are a different color. I can't shake the feeling that I'm not here permanently, despite spending most of yesterday afternoon apartment-searching as soon as we got here. Frankly, I'm probably a little behind on most of my university stuff, so I don't feel prepared. My aunt is pretty helpful, but she's in athletic administration, not academics, so her advice is pretty general.
As for the apartments, a lot of them are "lacking in charm", as Liz said. Cheap, to be sure, and I'm sure I'll find one I like, but. Yikes. I know it's only the first day, but my dad's leaving for the mountains tomorrow, and he's so helpful when it comes to apartment searching and inspection. It's the contractor in him, I think. And he always remembers the questions I forget :-) So I want to be installed before he leaves. Plus, Dierdre's having a baby, so I can't crash on their couch forever.
But this is my new home, so I'll get used to it and like it eventually. I always do. It's just that I've never been in a place I didn't know inside out already (Japan is an exception, but Japan was so crazy far away it doesn't count. Plus, I knew I would be walked through just about everything, whether I liked it or not). Even at Haverford, I never felt like I didn't belong, I was never homesick, and I already knew the campus from visiting during my dad's reunions.

It's chilly here.  It seems to be always this way.  I cannot shake the
feeling that this is only a temporary visit, not a semi-permanent move.
 I've moved 5 times not counting college and Japan, and this feels the least
like a move.  No boxes.  No fresh paint.  No posse of friends coming over 
to
drink beer and haul furniture and go out for Indian afterwards.  Just a new
laptop and a pile of suitcases, and my aunties and my father, each one
falling over the other to ask, ask, ask.  Have you seen this apartment, 
what
about that one, did you call the luggage tracking service, when do you sign
up for your courses, are you sure that place is too far away, hey, do you
have a cell phone yet?

Aren't you excited?

Well, no.   Unless you mean, excited in the sense that people who are
kidnapped and then dropped by the side of the road in some godforsaken spot
are said to be "excited".
I try to lose myself in the minutiae of packing and apartment searching to
disguise the fact that when we drive out somewhere and I imagine myself BY
myself, walking and studying and independent, my bowels loosen.  I've never
been somewhere I didn't already know inside and out (same school for 12
years, and I picked the college my dad went to, so I had already seen it
several times at reunions), with the exception of Japan.  But that was so
different I couldn't be faulted for my terror.  Here, everyone expects me 
to
be wild with joy at the prospect of at least six weeks of getting lost,
overpaying for things,  asking questions every five minutes, and buying
furniture off the side of the road.

I am adrift.
I don't have a bank account, a cell phone, a student ID, a real home. All of my things (my luggage was mercifully returned to me, in full, yesterday afternoon) are piled in bags and crates in my aunts' spare room, and it's all in different places and I can't find anything. Getting dressed and groomed requires rooting through just about every bag: underwear in this suitcase, pants in another, shirts in another, toothbrush and jewelry in yet another. The Cal bureaucracy is a typical one: huge, creaking, rapidly antiquating and staffed by underpaid, overworked drones who have seen everything and whose greatest wish is to see none of it again. I keep getting shunted from office to office clutching my forms and registration. It makes me homesick for Haverford's cute little system, with the offices no more than 5 minutes away, and secretaries who knew your name and fixed your problems before you knew you had them.
I am the world's most clueless graduate student.
Selah.
The apartment search is going. Not well, not poorly. I've visited a lot of fairly grim, drab boxlike apartments, some close to campus, some far, all for about the same price. The one I really want--a huge place, minutes from campus, all the amenities you could want, seemingly really nice people--is the only one whose tenants I can't get in touch with :-(

(the next day)
Now I'm 3 for 4 (bank account, cell phone, student ID—all acquired within 3 hours in and around Berkeley), I'm registered for courses, and the apartment search is looking up. After a parade of grim, drab little rooms and apartments--and, of course, Julian*--I seem to have found a pretty little room close to campus, cheapcheapcheap and generously sized for what it is. And they'll let me paint the walls.
Mustn't jinx it, though. It's in a "rooming house", which I guess is Cal-speak for what I would call a boarding house, and it's a little isolating. Most of the drawbacks of a dorm--shared bathroom, creaky old everything, kind of cramped--with few of the advantages, like camaraderie. Then again, I'm not sure I'll have much time for that.
But I just want to move in SOMEwhere. I still don't feel permanent(ly) here.
Tomorrow I won't have nearly as much to do as before, since all the business-y things are taken care of. So I'll write in my journal, maybe get a few posts up on the godforsaken blog, and walk around trying not to spend anything.


*Julian requires special mention. CraigsList is, of course, a student's best friend in finding apartments (and just about anything else, I suppose), and it was extra helpful to have my aunts around so I could yell out the street address for a prospective apartment (“Ward and Dana?” “MLK and Stuart?”) and have them give me the bullet on location, proximity to campus, general quality of the neighborhood, likelihood of things like drug busts or frat parties. When I discovered a dirt-cheap room in what sounded like a lovely condo on Northside, with an eloquent description and the possibility of sharing it with a “European artist”, as he described himself, I had to take a look. After receiving a slightly disturbing e-mail (he went on a little too long about the personalities of other Evelyns he had known), I took my long-suffering aunt along as backup and went out one evening to inspect the place. The building was indeed in a nice, quiet, woodsy part of town, set on a hill but close to campus (although, as it turned out, if I had taken it I would have been at least 20 minutes away from any of the buildings I would end up taking classes or practicing in), and I knocked on the door with only mild trepidation.
Which quickly turned into serious trepidation when the door opened and I was confronted by a short, hairy troll of a man wearing a black faux-snakeskin shirt of the kind available at Hot Topic and (I'm weeping as I type) beige denim hot pants. There's no other word for them. I must say, they showed off his abundant leg hair to great advantage. The hair on his head was lovely, long and black and curly and framing the face of a wizened, degenerate 50-year-old. Decorum prevented me from turning around and running back down the steps, although I did consider faking a seizure. Liz and I should have had a signal worked out. We were ushered in.
Liz says his little lizard eyes never left me, and he came down $100 on the asking price after seeing me. Also, he asked if I wanted to “model” and “help out” with his “art”. While going through the motions of asking about utilities and rent and inspecting the applianes (honestly, this was over the moment he opened the door. I'm sorry if it's lookist or something, but a girl can't take chances on this sort of thing), stole a glance at a few of his photographs, which seemed to feature naked women draped against rocks and looking either blissful or catatonic. And that's just what was on the walls. Tasteful, but not the sort of part-time job you can tell Grandma about with alacrity.
I think it was the pile of stuffed animals—big, fluffy, bizarre in their very presence and number—in the dining room that really did it. I rushed through the standard thanks-so-much-it's-lovely-I'm-looking-at-a-bunch-of-other-places-I'll-call-you-soon wrap-up, threw one last longing gaze at the porch with its gorgeous view of the city and the Bay (not worth it, not worth it, not worth it!), and left, with my aunt, who had been pretty quiet, in tow.
We made it down the steps, out the door, and into the car, which we locked. And lost it. We laughed and laughed and laughed until my sides hurt and Liz was crying. Somehow we made it home, where we told Dierdre and lost it all over again. I managed somehow to stay optimistic about the househunting after that, called Julian two days later with polite apologies and a lie about moving in with some friends, and signed the lease on my cozy little nest on Southside exactly two weeks to the day of arriving in Berkeley.

I'll See You in Hell

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Moderate
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Moderate
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Low
Level 7 (Violent)	Low
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Low

Take the Dante Inferno Hell Test

In the Beginning

Valentine's Day was uneventful as such; a regular, busy Tuesday, trying to catch up after my absence on Thursday and Friday to attend a conference in New York (more on that later), and cope with the horrendous sleep deficit caused by said conference and accompanying snowstorm that trapped me on a runway for five hours. But somewhere in between scrambling to get to class on time and handing out the worksheets in my seminar, I remembered that it was Valentine's Day 2005 that I received the acceptance e-mail to Berkeley (the letter followed), and my life changed. I started this blog, for instance. But seriously, the limbo that I had been laboring in for months was gone, suddenly, and my path was cleared for the next two years. This is a wonderful feeling. I can still remember plopping into my chair to check e-mail at the beginning of another workday, seeing the Berkeley address in the "Sender" column, thinking it was just a "please hold; we will consider your application in the order it was received. Thank you for your patience" notice, or a request for some other scrap of paperwork, and then opening it and grinning from ear to ear, calling everyone I knew, etc. And then spending three months trying to hide it from my boss, for fear he would can me posthaste in order to hire someone who actually knew what s/he was doing.
And then the ceremony of quitting (tossing ID badge in harbor, getting plastered at the Midtown Yacht Club), sailing, loafing at home with Mom while she recovered (swimmingly) from her foot surgery, trips to Woods Hole and New York, a lovely twinkly yummy funny crazy going-away party, one last swelter in the heat wave, and getting here and starting all over again.
I'll do my best to chronicle the past six months concisely, but some of you might wonder just why I'm here, studying Japanese and running up ghastly debt while doing so. So here's an excerpt from my personal statement on a financial aid application (apparently you can't just say, "give me money, you fools!" to the officials here, nor can you kick and scream and beg and plead and hold your breath and turn purple. Well, you could, I suppose. But it won't work. You have to be all articulate and stuff.

At first, Japan hovered on the edges, strokes in the backdrop of my upbringing. My maternal grandfather kept a small jade statue of Kannon in his study, and another one of tigereye next to his reading chair. I loved to walk around them, bending around (I was not allowed to touch, naturally) to watch light glow through the milky, melon-colored jade and set the caramel-colored ribbons in the tigereye rippling through the brown stone. In a woodlbock print of a Kabuki scene, frightening men with white faces and stretched, agonized expressions contorted grotesquely in their quiet dining room. This I stayed away from, but they danced in blue and red, catching my eye every time I went to the kitchen, until I was almost in high school.
My father, stained-glass artist, used bamboo brushes to paint on glass, and let me try them a few times. He had grown up in Fresno, taken judo as a boy from an old sensei. He kept books of kimono, paper patterns, basketweaving and marquetry in his studio to inspire the delicate tessellations of glass he set in lead for his window designs, and more recently, took careful photos of Japanese roofs and porches when I led him through Tokyo. A year later, he proudly showed me a glass portrait of St. Francis Xavier, part of a series of hagiographic church panels. Francis X went to Japan and started a painting school, and the window shows him standing on the veranda of a Japanese house, complete with tiles and sliding doors, gazing up at flame-colored momiji maple leaves.
That was all, when I was little. Colorful origami guides I could never quite master at Christmas. Whispers that the Japanese ate fish raw—why?!—and could kill you with their hands, when I was in middle school. Tidy, quiet Japanese ladies, wives of doctoral students at Hopkins, teaching one semester of Japanese to a sel`ect group of seniors (myself not among them), in high school. Growing up on the East Coast, the closest most of us ever came to Japan was a brother's video game and embarrassing Hello Kitty childhood toys.
Until I took a Japanese history class, taught by a vivacious art history doctoral student from Penn who led us through twelve centuries of Japanese history using mostly slides and an inexhaustible supply of praise for brushstrokes, bubbling glazes, and lacquer. Wandering on a beach the next summer, sorting through potential majors, Japanese came up again and again, for many reasons. I was already familiar with the exotic baubles of Japanese aesthetic culture, and now, more deeply, its history and character. I learned languages quickly and thoroughly, as sixteen years of French would prove, and taking an area-studies major more or less required a study abroad. I was in all the way.
Six years later, having plowed through a dozen textbooks and hundreds of kanji, partied with salarymen in Ueno Park in cherry-blossom season, woken to the scent of incense and the bonging and chanting of a Zen temple's morning prayers, translated a Tokugawa-period manual on wifely behavior, and endured two years of secretary grunt work to get back to graduate school, I still haven't had enough. There are always more kanji, more paintings, more proverbs and gitaigo and ki-idioms.
My current research focuses on the voice of Japanese-ness in Western literature. First of all, the voice of Japanese-ness in the context of naturalization vs. barbarization; more precisely, the choices made by the translators to produce an exotic, “Japanese” voice markedly different from that of a comparable writer in English. While Waley, in his translation of Genji Monogatari, deliberately strove to create a Japanese Camelot for his readers, I argue that it is possible for translators of Japanese classics to unconsciously slip into an overly and overtly exotic, foreignized tone which places the text above the reach of a modern reader. Secondly, the voice of Japanese-ness adopted by non-Japanese writers for their own fiction. Arthur Golden, of Memoirs of a Geisha fame, is the most famous contemporary example, but many others—Pico Iyer, Laura Joh Rowland, Liza Dalby—attempt to produce a Japanese voice in English. Do they succeed, i.e., does this “read” in Japanese, or is it simply an over-exoticized aping of a more delicate and subtle literary collective voice?
Currently, I am starting from the beginnings, taking courses in classical Japanese to plumb the depths of the origins of Japanese literary voice. Study of modern Japanese literature will follow, coupled with close readings of the above-mentioned authors to compare the style and voice. With my degree in linguistics, I have been continuing my study of the intricacies of Japanese language, including an in-depth examination of Haruki Murakami's stylistics, the linguistic analysis of style.
My career aspirations lie in art or writing: museum work or publishing, travel writing or a post at a newspaper or magazine, in Japan, Europe or the United States. I want to understand Japanese like I understand French: to the point where the chatter of children and the murmurings of grandmothers are intelligible, where I get jokes in bars, where the subtitles aren't the first thing I look at in the movies, where regional dialects are intriguing instead of frustrating. I miss Japan, with its narrow streets, rows of bicycles, its energy that flows along different channels than in the US but no less intensely.

The rest is mostly puppy-eyed pleading and flattery, but that ought to give y'all a sense of what I'm doing, why and how, and where I hope it goes.

Rainy Monday...not much else to say. I'm going to a sewing circle tonight to fix up the costumes I bought for my upcoming competition at Harvard. But that's another story entirely.

And here we are...President's Day at Cesar Chavez Park, with frisbees and kites. Good day.

My Best Friends' Weddings, Part Deux

So the last post was a melancholy meditation on the wedding of my oldest friend--not my friend who is the oldest, my friend whose friendship with me is the oldest--but the sharper-eyed of you may have noticed that the title is plural, and right you are. This second part is about my tribe, my posse, my apartment, the friends I made in college and lived with for two years. They are all getting married, and all to each other, it seems.
I went back and read the entry I made in April of this year, after going to the Haverford Corporation meeting, where I snivelled about how much I miss college and how rotten my life seemed in comparison, and came to the line where I bravely asserted that I was all down about it just because I wasn't doing what I really wanted to be doing (living independently, using my brain for more than avoiding obstacles in my path) and that as soon as I got out of the holding pattern I'd been in, the feeling would disappear.
Well, it did, for the most part, but yesterday Aron and Stu and Gabe came to town, and we ate sushi and played frisbee and talkedtalkedtalked, and while I haven't laughed that hard in quite a while, I would be struck in quiet moments with the knowledge that this is no substitute for the Way We Were, and we can't go back.

And then A told me Kingsley was getting married. And I literally dropped my chopsticks.

No kidding. I thought that sort of thing belonged with spit-takes under "Cheesy Movie Reactions to Shocking News", but when I heard that Chris KINGSLEY is getting MARRIED, for Christ's sake, honest to god my fingers just stopped working for a second.

Not that Chris is unfit for marriage, or that Maura, his choice of bride, isn't the right one. I'm sure he is, and I know she is. That's fine. It's just the thought of my friends getting married. Some of them already have: David (see last post), John Boyle way back (but he's older), a few other couples from college. But we saw those coming a mile off. What throws me is that when and if we manage to get everyone together again, those gold bands on some of those fingers will make it utterly impossible to be, or even to pretend, that we were The Way We Were. You can play at adolescence for years, like me, back in school and planning to travel and muck around for the forseeable future, and so when you hang with your college buddies, it's almost just like back in school. Not quite, but enough so you can pretend. But one by one (two by two, actually), my friends are passing over a threshold of adulthood, a real one that you can't undo or return from or come back through. They're on the other side of this divide, and good for them. We've all gotta cross it sometime. But their doing it is really unsettling, not least because my turn's coming up. Certainly not soon, but if they can do it, so can I. So should I.

Plus, I have NO idea what to get them.