How to cook salmon

...without really trying, apparently.

A friend this afternoon asked me how I cook salmon; I sent her this "recipe" that I made the other day along with some basic facts about fish, which she'd never dealt with before. She replied, "Typical you - this is so unhelpful, I need real measurements!"

My mother never measures either, so at least I guess I come by it honestly. Anyway, for your entertainment and for my recollection later on:

Preheat broiler. Rinse, pat dry, and de-bone your fish. Remove skin if you feel adventurous. Place fish skin-side down on oiled, foil-lined broiler pan; lightly salt/pepper.

Mix together:
Almost-equal parts honey and Dijon mustard (lean towards more mustard than honey) - enough so it looks like it will cover all the fish
Garlic, minced (start with 1/2 clove per person - if you like more, use more, if you like less, scale it back)
A glug of vinegar - not balsamic, but red wine, white wine, champagne, cider, etc. would all do nicely
A squeeze of lemon
A pinch of salt
A few grinds of black pepper

Spread honey-mustard mixture on fish.

Broil fish until barely cooked through; start checking when the fat (that white stuff, yes fish does have fat) starts to come out of the fish. Steaks will take longer than filets. I like mine less done, as long as it's quality salmon, but cook it to your taste.

The honey makes a nice glaze when it cooks, and the mustard/garlic/vinegar keep it from being boring. I placed mine on a bed of wilted kale with some roasted carrots on the side, but this goes with anything - it'd be just as great on top of a salad with a mustard-balsamic vinaigrette.

Mmmm, fish.

I flip my latkes...

Happy December! It is the best month of the year, and not just because I was born in it.

Happy Hanukkah too, if that's your thing. Please allow me to direct your attention to one of the greatest things on YouTube, ever.

Why are you still reading this?

Error for the error

Presented to me as I tried to log in to my gmail today:



Thanks, Google.

I wonder if this will work

Today, I need to research and write at least seven of the required twelve pages of my phonology paper. The proper process is to do your research first and then write, but I have managed to mismanage my time and now I am unable to do that, so the researching must happen simultaneously with the writing. I post my progress here not because anybody else cares, but in the hopes that it will actually shame me into writing at a regular pace.

10:19 AM: 0 pages
11:35 AM: 1 page After trolling the internet for examples, I finally found one that would work. Too bad most of my page so far only includes tables of data, which conveniently take up lots of space. Oh well. Onward!
12:22 PM: 2 pages
1:54 PM: 3 pages I had to take a break for food. Now I need to finish this.
3:18 PM: 4 pages While I only got a page written, I'm feeling a little better about how this analysis is going. Also, I'm over halfway to my required page count before I can quit for the day. I'm optimistic.
4:15 PM: 4 pages A "brief break" turned into an hour. Argh.
4:58 PM: 5 pages
6:23 PM: 6 pages (almost) I need to take another break, ugh.

Regularly-scheduled programing

Apparently when I am sick, instead of using the down-time for productive ends, I find stupid articles on the New York Times and write ranty blog posts about them. Never fear; I am feeling better and was actually quite productive for the past two hours, so we now return to your regularly-scheduled "write three pithy sentences and a poem and call it a day" post.

I couldn't not post this poem after misappropriating a line for yesterday's post's title. It's one of my favorites of Eliot's, and it packs such a huge punch for being one of his shorter poems; the ending always, always kills me. Have at it.

(Apologies for the crappy formatting; I can't be bothered to make it look right. If you care, buy a book.)

The Hollow Men

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

Between the idea and the reality falls the Shadow

Stories like this, more than anything else, are why I think America needs a reality check of really epic proportions. "$200 million a day" is right up there with the death camps, the communism, the Kenyan birth certificates, the Hitler-frenzy, and all the other drivel that politicians, newscasters and ordinary people are agonizing over; looking back at that list (and it goes on and on and on), I am astonished and saddened by just how easy it is to manipulate and mislead the American public these days.

In general, I find the hatred, venom and oh-so-thinly-veiled racism that's spewed out into the airwaves to be offensive, hurtful and counterproductive. But what's worse is that so many people this country - everyone from the "ordinary Americans" to members of Congress - just sit there with their mouths open like baby birds and blindly swallow it all whole. I mean, honestly. If you bother to think logically even for five minutes (yes, I know it's hard), over half the shit you read on the internet and hear on television (often touted as the word of God Himself) seems patently ridiculous. Just because Sarah Palin tweeted it or Glenn Beck yelled about it or Jon Stewart mocked it or Arianna Huffington posted it (yes, it goes both ways, look at that) doesn't mean it's true. (I suspect that Stewart and Huffington have more reliable/competent handlers and fact checkers, and not because I agree with their politics but because of their track records.) The point is that these people are still as fallible as the rest of the human race - and they have an agenda on top of it.

I realize that shit like this goes hand in hand with freedom of speech. But you know what also should go hand in hand with freedom of speech? Freedom of thought. The realization that just because it's been "reported" on television doesn't make it true. Pull your heads out of the sand and spare two minutes for some critical thinking, please. There's no one policing the airwaves or the internet, so it's our job to police our minds and opinions, to make conscious decisions about which sources we trust and believe. All I'm left with is the question of how some people manage to live their entire lives without learning this simple lesson, and why these self-titled "government watchdogs" don't spend a little more time watching their facts and a little less time reciting incorrect ones. (The answer, by the way, is that no one calls them out on it - and when someone does, they're painted as the "liberal media" (which as far as I can tell means any news source not preceded by the word "Fox") and ignored.)

So watch Fox News, watch the Daily Show, read Drudge and the HuffPo and whatever else you want to read. But when their opinions start to become facts accepted on blind faith - when it transitions from "sometimes it's nice to hear other people who share your views" to "it's so much easier to let Sean Hannity think for me" - that's when we're in real trouble. As a country, we need to re-learn how to think for ourselves; we used to be good at it, but oh how the mighty have fallen.



"When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together. But the carnival barkers that so dominate our public debate today are not going away — and neither is the Internet. All you can hope is that more people will do what Cooper did — so when the next crazy lie races around the world, people’s first instinct will be to doubt it, not repeat it."
Thomas Friedman, November 16, 2010

Vodka Redbull, anyone?

It may be that I just don't care enough to actually decipher the science behind this whole debacle, but whenever I hear someone talking about the horrible, dangerous, must-be-dealt-with effects of combining alcohol and caffeine and how this poison should be banned, I always want to ask someone how, again, drinking a can of Four Loko is different than drinking an Irish coffee? Jack and Coke? Vodka Redbull? Hell, a double espresso after a couple of glasses of wine with dinner? Chemically, these combinations all put alcohol and caffeine together in your body. Now, if some scientists tell me that drinking alcohol and caffeine together is going to kill me, I'll probably believe them - but only after I get them to explain how the entire Irish civilization hasn't died out, and why nobody's sued Bailey's Irish Cream out of existence yet (come on, that stuff's designed to jack up coffee). Or if they tell me that some chemical combination found specifically in Four Loko is dangerous, that's another can of worms entirely. Ban the hell out of it, in that case.

But the argument that usually surfaces is just that mass over-consumption of caffeinated alcoholic beverages is dangerous and wrong. And there's no denying that binge drinking is stupid and unhealthy. Yes, people get hospitalized after abusing Four Loko - but they also get hospitalized after abusing any kind of alcohol, caffeinated or not. Shutting down drink companies like Four Loko because they happen to be popular among irresponsible high school and college kids seems useless and unproductive in the face of the larger problem: the prevalence of binge drinking in young people. So it's true that some dumbass frat boy isn't going to sit in a quiet bar with his Irish coffee and take his time with his drink - he's going to chug a can or three of Four Loko and be on his way. The context and culture of a caffeinated cocktail and a can of Four Loko are entirely different, and they influence both the consumer base and how it's consumed. But if you take away Four Loko, what's our dumb frat boy going to do? He's going to go back to his old stand-by, vodka Redbull - or he'll just do a few shots of whatever's in the freezer and pop a few caffeine pills, or something stronger. You've banned alcoholic caffeine (caffeinated alcohol?) but you can't ban caffeine, and people have been combining the two for centuries.

If an Irish coffee is to Four Loko what an expensive microbrew is to Coors Light, then the problem comes back around to the party, binge-drinking culture. Drink twelve servings of any of those drinks and you're in trouble.

I have no solution for the binge drinking problem. I have no solution for the horrifying statistics they throw at us (by "us" I mean the targeted "irresponsible dumbass" audience of people ages 15-25) about the consequences of binge drinking. I do have insights into the party culture, but that's another post. My point is that if caffeine and alcohol are safe to combine in measured, responsible amounts - just like alcohol and caffeine can be safely consumed separately, up to a point - we seem to be vilifying the wrong player here. Four Loko is involved in the problem, no doubt about that - but are they the cause? No, because people always have and always will combine alcohol and caffeine. They've made it easier and more convenient to get, but to me that just seems like good business. Is banning the drink the solution? No, see previous response. They're undoubtedly involved, because Four Loko is apparently the party version of an Irish coffee - but in general, this whole fiasco seems so short-sighted and silly to me. Fix the greater problem and the smaller one goes away too, and companies like Four Loko get to stay in business.

Now, who wants a drink?

Disclaimer: I have never drunk or purchased Four Loko, nor even been in an establishment where it was sold or served. To be honest I'm a little mystified by the whole thing - why buy caffeinated alcohol when you can make it yourself, to your own tastes? And as I said, the science escapes me. Maybe the combination specifically in Four Loko is bad. So at the end of the day, caffeine is a drug. Alcohol is a drug. Use them responsibly or don't use them at all.

More invented words

I am up late completing my phonology problem set, as usual on a Monday night. It's my last one, however - amazing how I managed to make it this far in the semester without figuring out how to properly manage my time so I could work on them without stressing out. Oh well, I guess it's one lesson I won't learn.

I will, however, miss writing sentences like these:

"For a few lexically marked words, Ident(length)-BR dominates NoGeminate, and instead of vowel lengthening a geminate coda consonant is inserted to create a heavy (bimoraic) syllable."

"Ikolano requires syllables to have onsets. However, when redpulicated, the epenthetic onset consonant is not copied, even to serve as the reduplicated coda consonant."

"Ilokano will occasionally resyllabify words to ensure that the reduplicant is a closed syllable. This behavior is only possible in words with initial C-glide clusters where the glide is underlyingly a vowel, as in (4)."

"RED=σ(μμ) can be satisfied either by lengthening the first underlying vowel in the reduplicant or by copying the surface glides. Which option a speaker chooses will depend on the ranking of Ident(F) and Ident(length)-BR."


There's a lot about linguistics writing that appeals to me - no mess, no fuss, the value placed on coherency and conciseness above all else, the organization, not to mention the awesome topics (my paper is called "Heavy Syllable Reduplication in Ilokano") - but sometimes I read back over what I write and wonder what the hell I'm even talking about. I find it fitting that linguists have invented their own language and alphabet to talk about language, but sometimes the levels of jargon are ridiculous.

We say it just 'cause we can

Made-up linguistics term: mora.
Its made-up plurals: moras or morae. (A hotly debated subject, of course - we're linguists, after all.)
The made-up adjective: moraic.
The made-up adverb: moraically.

Spellcheck has now underlined every other word in my document in red, because I am currently writing a paper fundamentally based on the idea of the mora. (I swear I'm not entirely making this up.)

This phenomenon is also related to the words: binarity, bimoraic, bimoraically, monomoraic, monomoracity.

There's a term for what has happened here but, ironically, I can't think of it.

Fall back

Every year, I am both extremely entertained and utterly mystified by the entire country's rather arbitrary decision to just add or subtract an hour. Especially when other countries may or may not also observe daylight savings... but even if they do, you can bet that they don't change their clocks on the same day. So there's that awkward window of time when, even though Paris is six hours ahead of New York, sometimes it's seven hours... and sometimes it's five. Baffling. I feel like this is how giant international misunderstandings escalate into global crises.

It also provides context for hilarious incidents like this blurb from the West Wing.

In conclusion: happy end of daylight savings, everyone. If you still have a timepiece that isn't plugged into the internet, set it back, because it now officially gets dark really early. Wonderful.

Unrelated: I'm now just 6/7 for my daily blog posts. Shame on me.

Eden

The Poems of Our Climate

I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations - one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Wallace Stevens

Fall semester 2.0

My classes this semester, reinterpreted:

Elementary German I
Or, Non-Romance Languages for Dummies
Introductory course in which students learn that just because Germany and France share a border doesn't mean the languages have similar grammars.

Origins of Astronomy
Or, Comparative Bright Lights and Other Distractingly Shiny Things
Differs from other introductory physics classes because lectures are accompanied by pretty pictures.

Phonology I
Or, Introductory Graduate School: Everything You Know Is Wrong
A first-year graduate seminar in which students learn to disregard everything they thought they knew about phonology because it is Very Wrong, and instead learn to work with theories that are, on the surface, much less intuitive than what is traditionally presented in a typical undergraduate course. Specific to phonology, but in theory applies to all sub-disciplines. (See: X-bar Theory, Syntax.)

The Indo-European Family
Or, The New York Times Crossword In Theory and Practice
Historical linguistics, no prerequisite. Majors sit in the back and obtain high levels of proficiency in the daily crossword, sudoku and kenken, while non-majors sit in the front and ask fundamental questions.

Is it May yet?

Rrrrrrreçois les chants qu'il offre

Tonight, my Argentinian choir director tried to teach us how to pronounce the French words in "La Cantique de Jean Racine" with his very distinctive Argentinian accent.

He was unable to stop rolling the letter r. I don't even.

Headdesk.

Tuesday morning

Three things from my Tuesday morning:

1. The San Francisco Giants blew everyone away with their superb games in the World Series. I am happy to say that I can now look my Texan friends (yes I still have them) in the eye. Good job, guys. BAY AREA!

2. Today is election day! I miss voting in person, I must say. Almost makes me want to register in New York... but not really, because Albany is just as bad as Sacramento, and colder. The two-state comparison has basically devolved into an awesome contest for whose candidates are more ridiculous, though... for me at least.
2a. As a primer for today's ballot and watching the results come in, here's the recent Gail Collins op-ed: Name That Candidate.
2b. Also, presented without comment: Jon Stewart, Autotuned.

3. They are jackhammering into the street directly outside our window, and have been doing so since about 7am. Why, New York. Why must you destroy everything, and so loudly?

It begins here

It's November!

November means many things for me: Thanksgiving, scarves, cranberries, the transition from fall to winter, knitting, mulled wine, root vegetables, fireplaces, winter coats, incessant and obnoxious Christmas music in stores. On the west coast, it means Peet's Holiday Blend; on the east coast, it means apple cider (and apple cider donuts). Everywhere, November means that the holidays are officially only one month away. It's the beginning of the Gluttony Period, that wonderful food-focused time of year that starts November 1 with the leftover Halloween candy, ramps up to peak at Thanksgiving, follows with a small refractory period of righteousness before the holiday baking craze kicks in, and truly finds its stride right around the middle of December. Guilt and contrition follow, mostly in the form of New Year's resolutions to join a gym or eat more salad. But really, November reminds you that since you can now swaddle yourself in layers and layers of coats and scarves, who cares if you get a little pudgy? It's not like you'll be wearing a bathing suit any time soon.

November 1 marks the beginning of the Gluttony Period. It also marks the start of two important month-long challenges: No-Shave November and National Novel Writing Month.

No-Shave November is self-explanatory: men don't shave their faces. What began, I think, as laziness with an excuse has sort of morphed into a competition. Mostly I like No-Shave November because it gives me prime mocking material when I see my brother at Thanksgiving and he looks like a lumberjack. It's also great to reveal who can actually grow a beard, and who cannot. (Usually, however, if a man can't grow a beard he doesn't do No-Shave November.) For the truly lazy, the next step is Decem-beard.

National Novel Writing Month (affectionately known as NaNoWriMo) is more relevant to me. Traditionally, the challenge is simple: write a 50,000-word novel by the end of the month. I do not currently have the time, discipline or inspiration to write a novel, so I am re-interpreting the challenge (as most people are wont to do). My challenge to myself is to write one blog post every day. They won't necessarily be awesome posts, but they will be posts. I will do my best to not hide behind the "...Uh, here, have a poem" heading too often. I figure that even if I'm not writing a novel, at least I'll be exercising my brain somewhat.

So there you have it. One post a day for thirty days. When you compare it with an entire novel it's mostly a cop-out, but at least it's something, right?

But who wants to go to Jersey?

"There will always be darkness, and sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn't the promised land. Sometimes it's just New Jersey. But we do it anyway, together."

Jon Stewart, 30 October 2010



Montage of awesome signs.

Good job, everyone.

Doctorate moctorate

Viral video that's been worming its way through the internet and the linguistics department:

So you want to get a PhD in the humanities

Scary because it's true.

"Wheeze," for example

One of the best and worst parts about linguistics is trying to type an assignment and watching spell check butcher your writing.

Gem of the day: my computer wants me to change "athematic verbs" to "asthmatic verbs."

Well, asthmatic verbs should have more sibilants and fricatives that regular thematic verbs, obviously...

Electronic intimacy (no, not Skype-sex)

For the past year I have worked as a freelance writer and editor for a New York-based news site that tracks specific elements of the financial market. I have been able to work from New York, from California and from Madrid thanks to the internet and my "virtual commute" - I receive assignments from and submit articles to my boss electronically. I edit other people's articles from my own computer and re-upload them, I track various online journals and newspapers, I read press releases and statements hosted on "official" websites, I upload my own writing to the site. Hell, my entire position is based on the internet, and my point is that everything they pay me to do is online and mostly email-based. The pros and cons of this setup, which are legion, are a different train of thought entirely. What I realized recently, however, is that however much this "global age of instance electronic communication" is decried for its "depersonalization" of human interaction, converting real people into a seemingly infinite string of ones and zeros stored somewhere in the ether, it also lends a strange sense of intimacy when the sole method of daily communication between you and another person is email.

When you email back and forth with someone multiple times a day, you get to "know" them very well. I can tell, for example, when my boss emails me from his BlackBerry or from his laptop, which tells me where he is. I can tell if he's rushed or tired or distracted, or if he's more upbeat or relaxed. If I worked with him in person every day I would be able to detect these things too, and probably more - but my point is that frequent virtual communication does not preclude basic familiarity with someone else. What the internet does even better, though, is assign an unambiguous "date and time" to everything - the timestamp. I know, for example, at what time during the day my boss gets most of his work done. I also know that he often works until very late at night, because his emails announce themselves as "Sent at: 2:07 AM." And it goes both ways - this man knows my sleeping patterns better than anyone except maybe my roommates, because I email him in the mornings right when I wake up, and submit most of my work late at night right before I go to bed. Occasionally we have an email "conversation" - that strange phenomenon in which you both know the other is online, and email back and forth dozens of times, almost in real time - long after midnight. Who interacts with their bosses or employees so late? Well we do, now - and it's all marked and documented for us, thanks to the timestamp on all our emails.

Another example. A recurring assignment for one of my classes this semester is to post a question/response to our weekly reading assignment. A post is due every Sunday at noon - which means, naturally, that most people in the class either post Saturday night or Sunday morning (down to the wire, as it were). When you post (and how coherent/developed your questions are) is determined both by your personality and by your plans for the evening before the deadline. (Aside: the goal is to avoid the Saturday Night Dilemma, in which you get home late and wonder whether you would rather do this assignment drunk tonight, or hungover tomorrow morning.) Last weekend I posted a question at 1:45 AM on Saturday night - or, I suppose, Sunday morning. I thought I would be the only one, because who is so uncool that they're doing their linguistics homework on a Saturday night, when they should either be going out or sleeping it off? Well, I was wrong. In a class of eight people, three of us posted our questions between the hours of midnight and 2:30 AM, and someone even responded to my post. (This is, actually, more of a statement about the social proclivities of linguistics PhD candidates than anything else.) Either way, though, when something like that happens you feel solidarity but, again, an incongruous intimacy - because while the traditional adage told you it was rude to call someone after 9 PM, we're currently breaking down all the old assumptions and constraints against communicating with the world at large from our own homes, late at night.

Good, bad, awkward, normal - I don't know if it's none or all of these things. What I really want to know, though, is why my interactions with my boss have been "depersonalized" because I simply email him twelve times a day instead of working next to him in an office.

Ninja linguists!

Never let someone use this phrase as a legitimate argument about language (click to enlarge):



Yourmometer

I wish this actually happened in real life.

My words are insufficient

In lieu of real content, have a poem.

Parts of Speech

Some stories don’t want to be told.
They walk away, carrying their suitcases
held together with grey string.
Look at their disappearing curved spines.
Hunchbacks. Harmed ones. Hold-alls.

Some stories refuse to be danced or mimed,
drop their scuffed canes
and clattering tap-shoes,
erase their traces in nursery rhymes
or ancient games like blindman’s bluff.

And at this stained place words
are scraped from resinous tongues,
wrung like washing, hung on the lines
of courtroom and confessional,
transposed into the dialect of record.

Why still believe stories can rise
with wings, on currents, as silver flares,
levitate unweighted by stones,
begin in pain and move towards grace,
aerating history with recovered breath?

Why still imagine whole words, whole worlds:
the flame splutter of consonants,
deep sea anemone vowels,
birth-cable syntax, rhymes that start in the heart,
and verbs, verbs that move mountains?

Ingrid de Kok

Overheard

Overheard on the streets of New York this evening (Park Avenue, somewhere between 20th and 30th):

Guy 1: ...but I don't know. I mean, is she unattractive?
Guy 2: No! She's like totally hot.
Guy 1: So what's the problem?
Guy 2: I dunno, man. She's like, super liberal. Like, Berkeley liberal.
Guy 1: Uh oh! Dude, that shit's intense. Does she have dreads? I bet she has dreads.

Berkeley liberal. I'm glad the East Coast-West Coast stereotypes are still alive and kicking (and mostly accurate). Teehee.

For a good time...

Google image search "tea cozy."

Some gems:
























THIS IS A GOLDMINE. My roommate and I just spent at least thirty minutes scrolling through these and just laughing. How are these things so ugly!?

Some assembly required

I'm sitting in the kitchen watching my roommate as she attempts to build a shoe rack. Instead of using a hammer, she's using her meat tenderizer to whack things into place (at least I'm assuming that's what she's doing).

Other construction substitutions that we've made over the past month, to varying degrees of success, because we're too cheap/lazy to purchase real tools:

Flat screwdriver: dime, penny, soda can tabs
Phillips screwdriver: two bobby pins, corkscrew
Wrench: rubber bands/towels covering fingers
Measuring tape: the length of our bodies/feet
Hammer: large book, wine bottle, meat tenderizer

I'll be amazed if everything we own doesn't one day just collapse to the floor in a pile of dust and improperly screwed-together rubble.

Y'all bring 2x4's and some nails, I've got a hammer

Tomorrow's forecast: "Tropical Rainstorm Nicole."



What happened to "partially cloudy," please!!? New York, you're killing me.

Creativity

This afternoon I was thinking about writing. Not considering doing it, obviously - because I write constantly, that isn't really even a question anymore - but about the craft itself. It's an odd thing, to assign so much personal value to an act that most people do without any appreciation for the art of it or for the collective corpus of the written word. After all, if it's written down, someone, somewhere, wrote it. And no matter how unimportant those words might be to us, wrapped up in our own little worlds, there's always a story, there.

I've thought of myself as a writer for a long time, but it's only recently that I've started saying it aloud, to other people, when they ask me what I do - for work or in my spare time - or even what I like to do, or what my dream job is. ("To be a writer," I say with a wry smile - quick, defuse the situation, distract them from my complete and utter lack of a plan for the rest of my life - and I'm mostly not serious because I'm not that naive, really. But honestly, what better job is there, in the end?)

And mostly people just look at me slightly askance when I tell them I'm a writer, and I feel how aspiring musicians or painters or dancers must constantly feel - as if I've been reduced to some silly cliche of a little girl who wants to hide in her ivory tower and write stories or paint pictures or compose music all day, but who in the end will have no real way of supporting herself later in life. I know that while most people's initial impression of me is probably a relatively self-assured, intelligent and collected (I flatter myself) twenty-something woman, after I tell them I'm a writer (not "I write," which is completely different - well, everybody writes, don't they, but nobody would say "I'm a walker" or "I'm a breather" like "I'm a writer") I become just as flighty as the rest of my generation. Another subset of people silently wonders, "What does that mean?" and then they spend the rest of the conversation trying to decide if I write murder mysteries or science fiction or period novels, or possibly erotic poetry or scathingly witty plays. (Messing with people's heads this way is a great pastime. Just as an aside.) Journalists say, "I'm a journalist. I'm a reporter." Published people say, "I'm an author. I'm a poet." Writers, though? What, really, does it mean to say you write? Is it a job, a pastime, an outlet, a drug, a dream? And they wonder how I choose, and how I can not choose.

But being a writer is none and all of these things. It's poetry shot through with stilted adverbs, it's subject-verb-object, it's harshness and cruelty softened with warm humor and and vice versa, it's raging when the words won't come and despairing when they won't stop coming, it's what you do when you can't do anything else, when you've run out of puzzles or sleep or drugs or other people. Writing is the scribbles on the back of your Spanish homework, the notes taken with a stranger's pencil on the blank pages of your calendar, it's inking characters and words and coherency onto feather-soft unlined paper with a fountain pen or violently banging out the latest drivel of an essay into your word processor. It's drafts and drafts of letters you won't send, edits that never make the cut, blog posts you never show the world, poems you don't finish but never throw out because, maybe... one day. We spend our lives chasing it all: the lucid dreams and hallucinations we aspire to record, the salvation of a perfectly metered and rhymed couplet, the beauty inherent in a string of whisperingly alliterative words - subtle, so it slides under your skin and lies in wait, building and curling until you're surprised by its power at the end, by the sensual brush of meaning that curves around phrases like parentheses, that slips into your mind like ellipses while you aren't looking. We chase the art, simultaneously creating it and finding it - because any fool can write (or so he thinks), but to be a writer is to be proud of something the rest of the world hates and, honestly, usually does very poorly.

There are precious few of us left, now, who appreciate the love and care that go into writing something truly important and beautiful. And it's a sad day when "I hate writing" is a sentence that doesn't even merit a raised eyebrow on a college campus. What are we coming to?

Leftovers breed necessity

Leftovers, the input:
Three red bell peppers, almost past their prime
One giant bunch of farmers' market parsley, starting to wilt in the fridge
Two cloves of garlic
Half a bottle of red wine
Half a can of diced tomatoes in juice
Half a sad-looking lemon
One pound whole-wheat penne pasta

Purchased, the input:
One sweet onion
Chicken broth
Walnuts
Parmesan cheese

Add the staples:
Olive oil
Red pepper flakes
Hot smoked Spanish paprika (imported by yours truly from the de la Vera region itself, of course)

Thrown together make:
Toasted penne pasta and diced peppers and onions, cooked risotto-style in a spicy tomato-wine sauce and brightened with a smear of parsley pesto and a generous shaving of Parmesan cheese - and enough food for the whole week.

Unless I eat it all tonight.

Settling in

This morning I woke up and thought that maybe I should update this! And post pictures of my new apartment, and tell funny stories of all the ridiculous things I've had to deal with in the past few weeks, and how happy I am that I am almost done with everything.

And then this happened. I don't even know, man.



Yep! That's my bathroom cabinet. It fell ON ME this morning as I was brushing my teeth. I've been picking shards of glass out of my hair for the whole day.



I swear, I couldn't make this up if I tried.

I promise to post real, nice pictures of my beautiful new apartment soon. Right after this bathroom disaster gets fixed.

Nine years

Sonnet 64

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

William Shakespeare

Send your thoughts downtown today.

Nostalgia

The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums

A book of T.S. Eliot's poetry is open on the counter in front of me; this sort of thing really isn't my fault.

As I draw closer and closer to September 1, I find myself struck more and more often by soft waves of nostalgia for Madrid. Not for New York, as I had expected, or at least not yet - I've spent nearly a year missing that city, and my returns there are always laced with the bitersweetness of leaving so much of what I love behind in California anyway. And my longing for Spain doesn't lurk, waiting to ambush me with a sharpness that leaves aches and bruises, the way I missed Paris so hard for so long in high school - and honestly, I still miss Paris that way. My nostalgia for Madrid is still fresh, after all; I can still picture the faces of my host family, can still call the subway map up in my mind and imagine the long, open streets gilded with flowers and edged with long shadows. And I don't know what, exactly, I miss. Just being there, I suppose.

Madrid is not romanticized the way Paris is in my mind - and, even with time, I don't think it will be. Nor is it something I constantly long for, the way I long for New York when I'm in California and for California when I'm in New York. It's an sharp fondness, really - Madrid's like that old friend you like to see occasionally even though you've grown apart, because you had some good times and share some stories that nobody else would understand, and you can laugh about the silliest things because sometimes the world just reminds you of Spain. Madrid is not a best friend, not a first love - like Paris - and not the immediate push-pull reality of two extremes on two coasts. Instead it's faded into something so far away that sometimes the strangest thing reminds me of my life there, and then I frantically gather up the scattered shards of my memories and slide them back in to their places once more. And each time I abandon a few, lost in between the cushions or swept under the rug, until everything, eventually, will just be hazy and blurred. But for now, I think mostly I miss Madrid because I'm afraid of forgetting it. And the soft little nudges of memories are the little mementos that I'm happy to carry around, still - for a while, at least.

It seems...

...she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear...



Tomorrow we go to Ashland to see Merchant of Venice, Hamlet and Throne of Blood, which is the Kurosawa adaptation of The Scottish Play.

How is it August?

Aliums!

Today while cooking, I broke the garlic press.

Mincing garlic is annoying.

Tomorrow, thank God, is Friday. I'm ready to sleep for twelve hours straight.

Still not dead

Hello, Blogland! I am, contrary to all other indications, not actually dead. I am, however, working full-time in San Francisco and also part-time at my internship ('Is that like time and a half?' I hear you ask - sadly, no, or at least the money isn't), and when I am not working I am doing all sorts of other important things like avoiding working on my thesis, cheering on Spain during the World Cup (joder, por fin España, ¡vamos! ¡Somos los campeones!!!!), witnessing crazy people do funny shit on Bart, eating a lot of fruit (why so many plums, tree, whyyyyy), stressing out about apartment-hunting in New York, watching the fifth season of The Wire, and being incredulous that it is, in fact, July. Ahh!

Today at work the thermostat was broken - or something - and was blasting cold air like none other right above my desk and the desk next to me. My neighbor and I spent the entire day wearing our jackets indoors. It was ridiculous.

Also today I have upped my credit limit to pay for stupidly expensive recording equipment that I will use once for my thesis and then hopefully re-sell to some sad Tisch student. I also dribbled tzatziki sauce all over my black jacket while eating a gyros for lunch. (Unrelateldy, my computer suggests I correct "tzatziki" to: ChatZilla, Kazantzakis, Tiertza, or TEirtza... and that last one is not a typo. Why does it know "ChatZilla" and not "tzatziki"? The other day I also had to teach it to spell "Obama" - that was a weird day.)

Thesis work is actually progressing. Marginally. I have made word lists and sentence tasks. Tonight I am purchasing ridiculous recorders and microphones, but it's okay, because my research grant is paying for it all! Great success.

And that is all.

Sweet home

Things I have done since returning to the States:

While on the ground floor in an elevator, pushed "1" to go one floor up

Referred to fish bones as "spines" and an avocado pit as a "bone" (from espina and hueso, respectively, which is what the Spanish call them - fish have spines, not bones, and stone fruit have bones, not pits)

Spent thirty minutes hunting for the Very Safe Place in my bedroom where I hid things like my extra credit cards, my bart ticket, my car keys, and my cellphone charger back in January

Responded, "...Uhhh..." when I dropped off my jackets to be dry-cleaned and the nice woman asked for a contact number

I have also eaten a lot of peanut butter, avocados, Mexican food and fresh fruit, drunk many cups of coffee, and generally avoided doing anything in particular.

However! Next week I start working (yes, a job!) full-time in San Francisco, so that'll be exciting and give me something to do (also an excuse to buy new clothes and shoes, not like I really need an excuse).

At the request of a few people and as a compromise for deleting my facebook (quite a process, I'll write about it later), I have decided to keep writing in this blog. Because yes, that's what the internet needs, yet another semi-anonymous blogger whining about and poking fun at politics, New York, California, current events, silly fads and trends, television shows (plug: Mad Men starts up next month!), how much our economy sucks, and the intermingling of all of the above. Now doesn't that make you want to keep reading?

Speaking of politics, sort of: if you can, make sure you vote tomorrow! Even if you don't particularly care about your Assistant-Deputy-District-school-board-member (not a real title, yes I know, but oh my god I really couldn't care less about the Police Chief Coroner)... at the very least, things like the Governorship of California are important.

Check back soon. I'm getting my wisdom teeth out on Thursday morning; my drug-fogged and pain-addled brain might think it's a good idea to post while on Vicodin. Could be fun.

The end of an era

Well, Madrid, it's been great.

En vez de "adios," te diré "hasta pronto."

Farewells

Things about this house I will miss:

- Pillowfights with the girls
- Watching Skins with Eva in the kitchen late at night
- Coming home in the late afternoons to coffee, chocolate, cookies and conversation with Olga
- Baking, Spanish-style: "Oh, just add some more olive oil, it'll be fine."
- The realization and subsequent amazement that I followed the entire conversation at dinner
- Explaining slang/pop culture references in the current Top 20 (the Most Perplexing Song Award goes to "Tik Tok" for containing "crunk", "Mick Jagger", etc.)
- Sharing clothes, makeup and fashion advice
- Helping Violeta with math homework (it is totally not the same in every language, but on the other hand now I know how to do simple math in Spanish)
- After-dinner walks around the neighborhood with the girls

It took a while for me to truly adapt to my role here, as sort-of-sister-sort-of-aunt to the girls and sort-of-daughter-sort-of-sister to Olga. At the beginning there was the inevitable over-politeness and tiptoeing around, on both my part and theirs - certainly not unfriendliness, just a cautious acknowledgment that the other has different ideas and preconceived notions of what a "home" is and the attempts to understand the unknown norms that seem foreign and utterly strange to you. In the past few months, however, the politeness has morphed into a teasing familiarity and the warm comfort of security. Even Eva - the oldest daughter and most reserved in the house - has opened up and no longer needs her sister as a buffer. They have all, at this point, told me independently that they don't want me to leave.

Goodbyes are always hard, in any language.

Edit: Completely unrelated, but if you have been following what's been going on in Britain for the past week at all, you'll find this pretty hilarious (or, at least, I did, but then I'm not actually British, so there you go).

I'm aware

In response to everyone and their uncle linking me to this article in the Times today, I would just like to state that yes, I have already read it, yes, I agree with it, and I will further link you to this terrifying infographic I stumbled upon yesterday.

And, unrelatedly, re-drawing Europe, which I find endlessly entertaining.

Stream of consciousness

So we had to write a "Reflection" on our time here in Madrid. Since I had other things to do (and it's not like this would be graded anyway) I just turned in a last-minute, stream-of-consciousness thing. I just re-read it, though, and although it's silly I thought some of you might enjoy it, and it saves me the trouble of having to write a "farewell to Madrid" blog entry.



“Keep in touch,” I was instructed. “I want to live vicariously through you, I want to know everything. Start a blog, write me postcards, keep a journal, tell me your stories!” Friends, family, family of friends, friends of family, strangers I barely knew - the people changed, but the requests didn’t. Share it with me. So I downloaded Skype, I quadrupled my Facebook use, I started running four chat programs simultaneously and updated my address book all with the intention of sharing this experience that, as I was promised over and over in countless iterations, would change my life and how I see the world forever.

And I wrote the emails, the blog entries and the postcards and I sent them out into the world, carrying snippets of a story here, unfinished adventures there, half-remembered and even less described. But I felt guilty clicking “post,” I rued the bland and unseasoned words I scrawled on the back of a picture of some nameless cathedral. My descriptions were inadequate - how to explain the echo of my footfalls through room after room full of cool marble and gilt mirrors, the dust and the dappled sun and the damp grass under the shade of an anonymous statue? How to convey the history that hides in every dark stairwell and through every gate, lurking in the corners of cathedrals and behind the frames of masterpieces? They follow you home - the whispers, the reminders and the nods to century upon century of history, of greatness and glory and war, the shivery brush of the ghosts of saints, crusaders and martyrs who slip through fences and out windows, chasing shadows and nipping at your heels. They’re benign but still dangerous, enticing and ever-present; they seep into your pores and tangle in your hair, and at this point I’m not sure if they’re something I can wash away with New York tap water or bleach out with California sunshine.

What I do know is that the stories I don’t tell are the ones I’ll jealously guard, years later, stories so everyday and commonplace they verge on unremarkable, not worth the energy it would take to write them down. They are non-stories, really: listening to a street performer in a dusky plaza with the fragile stem of a wineglass cool between my fingers and olive pits folded into my napkin, or standing at a corner as the sun sets and long shadows fall like distance markers across a crowded street, or eavesdropping on the one-sided conversation between two teenagers riding the night bus home from Bilbao, he cocky and laconic with too much hairgel and too little personality, she vibrantly edged with plastic jewelry and lacquered turquoise nails, eyes lined and lips painted. Among all the tapas and metro tickets and single-serving packets of sugar, what will I remember? Will I close my eyes and slip through time with a whiff of electrically-charged air, the feeling of lingering thunderheads damply suspended above me, heavy on the back of my neck - will I glide through and find my memories vibrant and unclouded, with a tangible weight and texture? Or will I sit and softly turn the whole experience over as a faded and blurry photograph? Will these memories be the ones that rest, quietly and neatly contained in a wooden frame, set upon a bookshelf to look at, occasionally, to talk about at dinner parties and dust off for family members, but ones I eventually let slide into the shadows?

When you travel, tripping up stairs and flirting with museums, you see the world; later, you take elements of what you see and you build on them, you update your blurry perceptions of reality into enhanced and overexposed snapshots until they’re vibrantly distracting and more real than the life you left back home. When you travel and then you stay, however, you lose little pieces of yourself, the parts you aren’t careful with or think you don’t care about. I abandoned my harried and frantic New York walk - head down, don’t look at the faces, dodge the cigarette, blend into these grey sidewalks and grey buildings punctuated with shots of graffiti, those rhythmic tattoos of harshly misted color - somewhere along the wide open Paseo del Prado; I left my Californian pseudo-vegetarianism perched on an empty barstool in Café Segre. Over these past four months I have peeled away layer upon thin layer of my New York shell and left it scattered and blown across this city, crinkly and translucent like fragile curls of onion skin, twisted and dry. I hadn’t thought it would be so easy, shedding my skin, leaving myself unnaturally open and defenseless, but Madrid is not as acridly harsh and does not require it.

I’m keeping the maps hidden in the palms of my hands, though, the life lines and heart lines that once traced Broadway, Avenue A, Houston, Amsterdam painted over by Alcalá, Jerónimo, Fuencarral, the concentric circles and spirals etched on my fingertips that stood for Madison Square, Battery Park, Turtle Pond now marking Recoletos, Santa Ana, Cibeles. I know that new skin will grow over these, in a thin film of reintegration at first, and then in thicker layers of time, blurry and clouded with new information and memories like frosted glass. I know that eventually Madrid will hide under my skin, buried within my palms next to Paris, Manhattan and San Francisco. For now, though, I hoard the soft, comforting gusts of security and familiarity that blow my way in this city as I wait for my bus to carry me down streets with names that are second nature to me, now, names that slide easily over on my tongue and linger like feathery pastry. It’s not something I can keep, or adequately convey across an ocean or even replicate in any other place, but for now it’s mine, it’s Madrid and it’s more real here than anything else.

Yes, it has gotten this bad

For my own personal reference, I guess.

Things I am going to consume immediately upon my arrival in the Bay Area (excluding the obvious, like fresh salads and fruits and grilled fish):

- Cold-brewed iced coffee from Peet's
- Shrimp tempura rolls, tekkamaki, California rolls with real crab, sashimi, miso soup and edamame from Serika
- Every single type of food I can get my hands on at the Oakland Greek Festival
- Some form of chocolate-coconut drink from Bittersweet
- Tamales, mole and horchata from Papalote
- Panini from A.G. Ferrari
- In-N-Out. Just, yes.
- Semifreddi's sourdough baguettes (sourdough bread in general, actually...)
- Stuffed Mediterranean pizza from Zachary's
- Chicken tikka masala from House of Curries/Naan and Curry
- Any salad from Mixt Greens
- Mochi from Trader Joe's
- Small-original-with-blueberries-and-strawberries from Pinkberry
- Pollo con mole rojo tacos from Cactus
- Boba from just about anywhere

And in New York:

- Falafel from Mamoun's
- Green shrimp curry from ThaiNY
- Portobello burger and onion rings from Shake Shack
- Coffee from the coffee cart guy who parks every day in front of Meyer
- Fried plantains prepared lovingly by my former suitemate Carla after I guilt her into it
- Lamb burger, lamingtons and a whinging pom from Sunburnt Cow on Avenue C, in a tradition we have kept up since freshman year (three+ years is totally a tradition, right?)
- Coffee from the Mud Truck in Astor Place
- Cheeseburger and fries from Five Guys in the West Village
- Brunch, in any form, from Hudson Diner (Blake Lively sightings optional, but only if your name isn't Roxanne)
- Moroccan hummus plate (balsamic pomegranate reduction!?) or the challah BLT from the Cornelia Street Cafe
- Aloo paratha and dal from any Indian place on Lexington between 26th and 30th
- Medium-black-daily-roast-and-an-orange-currant-scone-for-here-please from Think Coffee (my last two months in NY in December I noticed that for the past three weeks I had charged the exact same amount at Think every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday because that what I, without fail, ordered...)
- Gyros, spanakopita and baklava from Astoria
- Cheese pizza from 2 Bros in St. Mark's
- Any sandwich from Peanut Butter & Co. (except that one with bananas, or the one with marshmallow fluff)
- Country omelette or apple pancakes with coffee and home fries from Friend of a Farmer
- La Mulata arepas from Caracas Arepas
- Fries with pomegranate teriyaki sauce and Vietnamese pineapple sauce from Pommes Frites
- Gluten-free risotto from Risotteria on Bleecker
- Cajun or masala macaroni and cheese with breadcrumbs from S'mac

That list just grew from "hey, I miss sushi!" into a monster. I think I should just stop, now.

Random

I have hit a new slacking low. Instead of writing an original paper for my grammar class, I am translating and updating a paper that I wrote over three years ago.

The best part is that my original paper? Is not even in English. It's in French. We'll see how this French to Spanish translation process goes. On the other hand, the hardest part for me is getting my ideas out in the first place without getting distracted by Spanish verb tenses or vocabulary, so maybe it'll work out.

Also, today I asked my señora if she had stain remover that would remove the ink blot I managed to drip on my sweater the other day. "No," she said, "we should put milk on it instead." I thought I had heard her wrong, but no, she took a shallow bowl, put my sweater in it and poured whole milk all over the stain. I am supposed to let it sit overnight and then we'll see what happens.

Spain is sometimes a very strange place.

Not my day

Today:

1. I was in a bus crash on the way to the Marseille airport. (Unhurt, but it was quite scary.)

2. My flight from Marseille to Madrid was delayed five hours. Thank you, Ryanair.

3. Apparently someone tried to blow up Times Square. My god. (As an aside, I can now access the NY Times without a proxy server. Yay?)

I am not going to leave the house for the rest of the day.

More about Marseille later...

The Facebook Saga

So, instead of doing something productive like starting the two essays I have due on Tuesday, or packing for Marseille (I leave tomorrow, great excitement!), or even putting photos up on this blog (which is the only part that most of you care about anyway), I am going to bitch about Facebook. (Because that's what the internet needs, yet another blog post about Facebook. I'm only perpetuating the problem, aren't I.)

My relationship with Facebook can be characterized by a relatively simple outline.

I. Infatuation
This stage of the Facebook Problem begins with the creation of a Facebook account and generally continues for the duration of a user's time in high school. New users usually exhibit certain characteristic reactions to their first Facebook exposure, notably:
a. Wasting hours clicking through thousands of their friends' photos;
b. Agonizing over the perfect, pithy-yet-alternative quote for their profile;
c. Stalking the profiles of potential/former romantic interests;
d. Writing on their friends' walls just because they can and making an effort to sound clever, in the hope that all mutual friends will click on "See Wall-to-Wall" and realize how cool the user is;
e. Listing books they have never read and/or bands they have never heard of as their Favorites, in an attempt to sound cool;
f. Friending anyone who ever attended their high school, ever, to up their friend count;
g. Treating Facebook like a jacked-up Twitter account and posting hourly status updates;
h. Creating 7 different "Limited Profiles" to make sure they avoid any unpleasant situations when Mom and Dad finally decide to be Cool and create accounts;
i. Photoshopping their profile picture into strange color schemes.

During the Infatuation Stage, users generally check Facebook multiple times a day and exhibit signs of distress when prevented from doing so for more than six hours at a time, except while sleeping. Those in possession of Smart Phones (as opposed to Dumb Phones, obviously) download applications to allow them to access Facebook from their mobile phones, thus creating a constant, low-level exposure and furthering the dependence. Relatedly, users expect responses to all Facebook communications within hours, or there will be Drama.
Users are often irritable when interrupted by family members or friends who attempt to communicate with them through other media, including face-to-face discussions.
This stage of the Facebook Problem generally begins to fade as a user matures, exhausts all of his or her friends' photo albums, and re-learns how to properly use a telephone and write an email. Users gradually transition into:

II. Utility
During this stage of the Facebook Problem, users begin to use Facebook for activities other than stalking their friends [see Stage I part c]. Facebook also assumes its own role in the Pyramid of Remote Social Communication, described as follows:
a. Calling or texting: The most select method of communication, calling or texting occurs among family members, close friends, roommates, and people with whom a user interacts on a daily basis.
b. Email: Emails, generally written with a specific purpose, occur between acquaintances who are close enough to have exchanged email addresses but have not yet crossed the Line of Familiarity into exchanging phone numbers or text messages. [Note: during periods of travel or when use of a cell phone is impractical, email may surpass calling or texting.]
c. Private Facebook message: These messages, which are viewable only to the parties to whom the messages are sent [in theory; see Stage IV: Distrust], serve a function similar to email's, but generally occur among acquaintances who are Facebook Friends but have not exchanged emails. [Note: looking up an email address from a Facebook Profile may or may not be socially acceptable, depending on the context.]
d. Facebook wall post: Wall posts, viewable to all, are the lowest level of remote social communication and usually occur among users who are merely acquaintances about things like classwork.

[Note: this pyramid does not apply to communication that falls outside of social contexts; for example, professional and/or work environments and relationships do not follow the same structure. Also, the pyramid is drastically skewed towards the Facebook end during Stage I, and it is only after the progression into Stage II that it becomes a reliable gauge.]

III. Indifference
This third stage of the Facebook Problem also develops gradually. Users are no longer either infatuated by Facebook [see Stage I] or appreciative of its usefulness [see Stage II], having developed alternative and more efficient methods to accomplish what used to fall in the domain of Facebook. Facebook fades into the background to reside next to dozens of a user's other online habits (including at least three email accounts, daily webcomics, news media, and specific blogs checked on a daily basis). Users generally check Facebook once or twice a day to make sure they do not ignore any Wall Posts or messages, but otherwise exhibit none of the interest characteristic of the two previous stages.
In more severe cases of Stage III, a user's indifference towards Facebook may develop into annoyance at the added online responsibility, at which point users transition into Stage IV. If users have multiple friends who use Obnoxious (TM) Applications, including but not limited to FarmVille, Become a Ninja Assassin, or Personality Tests [e.g. "What color sparkly unicorn are you?"], or are constantly asked by friends to Become a Fan of [something completely unrelated to their interests], annoyance may develop more quickly.

IV. Distrust
This fourth and final stage of the Facebook Problem occurs years after first exposure. Usually prompted by various changes in Facebook's privacy policy, which come in intervals of about four to five months, users finally realize how little control they have over what is linked to their names on the internet. Fed up with the online responsibility, which at this point has ceased to benefit the user at all, and with the growing suspicion that Facebook does not have their best interests at heart, users begin to distrust Facebook.

At the end of Stage IV, a user will attempt to remove all personal information from Facebook and delete his or her account, ending the Facebook Problem. The subsequent realization that it is not possible to actually delete everything, including Wall Posts, Photos, private messages, networks, and other connections, will often produce nervousness, suspicion, irritation, and occasionally anger. Many technology-savvy users will attempt to run programs to purge their online Facebook profiles and delete the information Facebook has stored about them, only to realize that Facebook actively blocks these applications, petulantly holding on to all the information. Eventually, a user will give up on erasing the information and simply deactivate the account, leaving the information accessible to anyone who can access the inner workings of Facebook.



All tongue-in-cheek joking aside, however. I personally have progressed to Stage IV; after hovering comfortably in Stage III for the past two years, I temporarily regressed to Stage II after coming to Madrid but then jumped forward to Stage IV with the recent unveiling of Facebook's new privacy policies and my realization of how little information about yourself you actually have control over, once it's on Facebook.

And thus, my rant. I am deleting my Facebook as much as I can as soon as I get back to the States and no longer use it as a primary method of communication like I do here in Spain.

Final note: I grew up parallel to Facebook, just a few years younger than its target audience (I'm actually just a few years younger than its founder and now multi-kajillionaire Mark Zuckerberg, how's that to make one feel inadequate), and thus used it in its original form (anybody remember poking, or having to tailor all your statuses so they fit with "Linden is _____"?). My perceptions may be slightly skewed.

The internet is a weird place

For the past week I have been unable to access the New York Times from my computer, through either Firefox or Safari.

For about half a day I gave them the benefit of the doubt, thinking maybe there was increased traffic and their server had given up in despair. (Which didn't really make sense anyway, because I was always trying to access it at like 4am New York time.) But after a day, I decided that that was ridiculous, and I also wanted to read Roger Cohen's recent op-ed about the Middle East that everyone was talking about, and the Gail Collins one where she rips into both the Dems and the GOP, because that's always entertaining. (I'd link, but uh, yeah, it's broken.)

Then I tried a proxy server. It worked perfectly. I have now been reading the New York Times through a proxy server for the better part of this week. (This is funny because people mostly use these things to get around firewalls at work or privately look at porn. I'm using it to read the news - I feel like I'm in China, or perhaps Iran, or something.)

I have no idea what I did to block my computer (not just my browser, it's Firefox and Safari, and I very rarely use the latter) from accessing the New York Times website, and I have no idea how to undo it. And honestly, what a random website to be blocked from! But whatever, at least I have my news back.

Sometimes the internet is a strange place.

The good, the bad and the ugly

Bad news: I applied for a summer job on the east coast that paid a ridiculously large amount of money, but I didn't get it.

On the other hand, I'm spending the summer in California!

Good news: I did, however, receive funding for my linguistics thesis research this summer. I am officially a "Collegiate Research Scholar" with an "Undergraduate Research Grant."

Ugly news: I'm more and more ready to go home. Good thing summer's almost here.

Also, it is now really, really hot. Madrid skipped spring...

Fez

Our final stop in Morocco was Fez, which I absolutely loved.











Roaming the markets!





I just cannot get over how intricately beautiful this script is.



Yes, the burro is carrying empty coke bottles.







We spied on some artisans.



View of a tannery. It smelled great, let me tell you. They gave us mint sprigs to hold under our noses.



I was enlisted as a model for traditional Moroccan garb.





Performers at dinner one night.



Inside.





View from the roofs.







I think I take too many pictures of food.





I loved the colors of this city.

And thus concludes my Morocco trip. You know, a few weeks late. I've been busy.

"Do re mi" is the same in every language

So I may have mentioned previously that one of my host sisters, Violeta, plays the recorder occasionally.

Apparently it's required for her music class, which is an entire class period, just like science or English, in which they learn music history, music theory, an instrument, and how to read notes and rhythms. (This is a public school she goes to. It is also bilingual in Spanish and English. Every time I talk to any Spanish person about the education system in Spain or Europe in general, I want to throw up my hands and shout really, really loudly at my fellow Americans who bitch about how great things are right now, nobody needs to change anything, I want to keep my money and spend it on gas for my Hummer instead of giving this country's children a chance to learn about music, get your government and its taxes out of my backyard and sure, go ahead and cut out music, art, computer skills, and foreign languages out of our public schools, see if I care.)

Last night she was whining about her music homework. I offered to help her, and she looked at me skeptically but showed me her book. (I did decline her offer to play her recorder.)

She was suitably impressed with my ability to hum melodies, spit out solfege syllables and clap syncopated rhythms, but the entertaining part was when she began quizzing me about the composers she has to know. ("Bach," she would say, and I would respond "Johann Sebastian" and "Baroque," or "Bizet," and "Georges, Romantic.") While I'm sure my own butchering of German or Russian names was hilarious to her (and would make any native speaker's ears bleed), hearing the "Spanish" pronunciation of "Tchaikovsky" or "Beethoven" was ridiculously entertaining and endearing.

I am proud to say I knew every composer she threw at me. After fifteen years, I'm just glad to realize most of it actually sunk in.

Rabat and Meknes

On day two of my Morocco trip, we visited Rabat and Meknes.

Without further ado...











Welcome to Rabat.







The old part of the city. (No, I promise we didn't go to Greece no matter how much it looks like it.)



We had tea and cookies! (I didn't even try to eat the cookies. That tea is the most delicious stuff ever, however, and has enough sugar in it so it's basically like a dessert anyway.)






Ocean!







The Changing of the Guard, Morocco-style. (Apparently they color code the horses. Yes, really.)





I fell in love with the concept of making letters and words themselves the art. Astonishing.



Tomb.



If you've never had tagine before, go to a legitimate Moroccan restaurant and order it. It's world-changing. This is chicken with almonds and preserved lemon.



And this is some sort of chili paste (yes, it's as hot as it looks) that I delightfully smeared all over my chicken and then relished the sensation of my lips burning for half an hour after. Spices!!!!!



This dessert is more my style. Oranges covered in powdered sugar, cinnamon, mint and orange flower oil. (No almond paste required!)









And then we drove to Meknes! (Yes, that was only half of one day.)











Mosque.





No shoes, of course.

Coming soon: Fez! (My favorite part.)