Wisdom teeth gone

I had my wisdom teeth extracted today. I've put off doing it for years, but I couldn't ignore them any longer. One was jutting crooked into my lower left molar, causing my front teeth to crowd in an unsightly way. I do not want to be known as that woman with bad teeth. And then I was horrified when about two weeks ago I noticed my upper left wisdom tooth breaking through the gumline. Something I've always wondered -- how are teeth programmed to come up or fall out? Why at age 27 is there an urgent need for these teeth to appear? It's like an invasion.

Anyway, I went in at 7:45 and the surgery took about an hour. I got an IV with anesthesia so I don't remember anything about it. I remember the dentist putting in the IV then asking me, "Do you feel anything right now?" And I said no. And he said, "You will very soon." Then nothing. I don't remember nodding off or feeling woozy then going to sleep or anything like that. The next thing I remember is waking up and leaving the dentist chair. It was like getting up from a good night's sleep. I thought it was strange that I felt so fully awake and not detached or disoriented after being so soundly asleep.

My mom drove me home, where I promptly lay down on the couch and slept for a few hours longer. So I guess I wasn't as awake as I thought. The lower half of my face was numb for about eight hours after I got home and I had to keep changing gauze pads out of my mouth to soak up the blood.

But really, the pain hasn't been bad even after the numbness wore off. I took some Motrin, that helps. My jaw feels like it's bruised in places and I can feel large gaps in my gums where the teeth were removed.

I think the worst part of all this will be not eating the foods I'm used to eating. Yesterday I ate a spicy chicken burrito just because I knew I wouldn't be able to for a while. Some staples of my diet like salad, fruits, gum and crunchy cereal will be out for another couple of weeks *sigh*. I like to eat and yogurt and pudding for dinner just don't do it for me. I can move on to soups and noodles tomorrow, according to the dentist. Whoo, exciting. I'll be very glad when my jaw and teeth function normally again.

Moby writes about insomnia:
"insomnia is so odd, as it's so self-destructive, but yet solely the product of the self. it's only the self. the self at war with itself. the brain deciding it somehow knows best, even though it's crippled by delusion."

It has been another intense week in which every day I get home from work and don't have the will to do anything besides watch a few hours of TV. I am now a fan of Castle, Top Chef, and Project Runway and a sort-of fan of Dancing with the Stars. I also watched Jay Leno's show a couple times this week. I don't think it's as funny as it was in late night but I still like it better than Conan's.

I feel a little guilty about my TV habit. I like to think of myself as the sort of person who would rather read than watch TV in her off-hours. I have the best intentions of doing work for my Spanish lessons after work. And blogging, of course. But somehow none of those things happens on a weeknight as a numbness of mind sets in.

Has work turned my non-working self into a zombie? I guess that's what weekends are for, to snap out of the work-TV haze.

Sunrise

It's a rare day that I'm actually out of bed to watch the sun rise.

- Forget violent video games, I think piñatas at kids' birthday parties are really able to bring out children's violent tendencies. I just watched one particularly brutal beating where the kids went about ten rounds before the thing was finally torn apart. The youngest kids in line were three years old! But I'm not so PC that if I had kids I wouldn't allow them to have one.

- Last night I watched the season 3 finale of "Mad Men" on DV-R. Of course it was amazing and reminded me why I watch the show, for its un-nostalgic portrayal of the '60s. Here's an interview with the show's creator where he talks about the finale. I was close to tears by the closing song. That, my friends, is art.

Technological genius

This whole week there wasn't a dial tone on any of the phones in the house. I finally called the cable company on my cell yesterday to find out what the problem was with the digital phone line. After getting through the voice recognition answering system and not one but two customer service representatives, we finally got to the bottom of the problem: the line was plugged into the wrong phone jack on the back of the modem. Nothing mechanically wrong with the line, it was merely plugged into Line 2 instead of Line 1, which I inadvertently switched when I unplugged the modem and then plugged everything back in. If I had thought about the problem for more than a minute I probably could have figured out the answer. D'oh.

I bet it gets pretty annoying to answer dumb calls like that all day. But in fairness, I think it's an easy mistake to make based on the design of the modem. The Line 1 jack is actually below the Line 2 jack. This problem is probably right there on their FAQs list.

I just hope there weren't any important calls I missed during the week. Fortunately, the "land line" isn't the number I typically give out for important stuff.

Love when they play moody British rock on the radio in the mornings:

I just bought another box of Claritin. The 12-hour kind, not the 24-hour kind, since it freaks me out to think of being on any drug 24/7. I don't know what the deal is with my allergies. It's been over three weeks since I first felt all this throat congestion, and if I go off the allergy medicine it seems to come back right away.

It's strange, I wonder what has changed. I was living and working at the same places last year and I didn't have this problem. Is this how it's going to be from now on, the boxes of Claritin and tissues, the stuffy nose, the coughing, etc.?

Picture taken yesterday morning from the balcony. Snow in October, it's hard to believe.

I wrote my fingers off today, wrote until I had to stop to make sure the words I was writing still made sense to anyone besides me. Sometimes I find myself typing phrases into Google to see whether people actually ever use it or if I'm making up a new grammatically incorrect phrase. It's kind of hard to know what's "correct" in writing a lot of times, because sometimes there is no correct or incorrect, only smooth or awkward, and the line between those gets blurred sometimes.

When I talk in Spanish and say something unfamiliar to me, I'll ask my teacher, is this common? If it's not then I don't want to say it. I think with languages, that's all you can go by, really, what's common and what's not.

Whatever the standards of correctness, it's funny how writing still makes me happy. Finding out the right information, smoothing out the transitions, correcting the spelling and punctuation until it's all clear and strong and powerful. I smile inside at that.

I think I've reached the point in the year where I get home and immediately wrap myself in a blanket. It's frigid outside. I'm also wearing my flannel pajama bottoms with cute little sheep on them. Why does winter have to come around every year?

- It's genuinely cold in El Paso this week, not merely a little chilly in the mornings. I turned on the heat last night and I'm wrapped in a blanket writing this post. I don't like cold weather. But it is the last week of October, so we've had a pretty long spell of warmth. I should be grateful for that.

- I went to the dentist yesterday for a consultation on getting my wisdom teeth out. The dentist did a good job of explaining all the risks and benefits of the surgery. Mostly I am concerned about all my front teeth turning crooked, which I noticed has been happening more in the past six months. The surgery is scheduled for Nov. 20. *sighs* I'm not scared but I'm not exactly looking forward to it.

I must give a plug to Movies in the Canyon. I went to see "Back to the Future" last night as part of the outdoor movie series in McKelligon Canyon and it was really amazing. The quality of the picture was great, the amphitheatre itself is beautiful in the mountains where you can see all the stars so clearly (even a couple of shooting stars), the ushers kept the audience orderly (well, with the small exception of a couple dumping popcorn on each other in the row in front us), and the admission was free. The weather was surprisingly not too chilly even at 9:30 on a late October night. And really, who gets tired of seeing Marty McFly and Doc Brown and hearing "Power of Love" even after the millionth time? It was a great time, so kudos to whoever thought up Movies in the Canyon.

Good column by Judith Warner on the "Female Happiness Conundrum":

Life for women has not come together...Our workforce and education system is still sex-segregated, operating along generations-old stereotypes that steer most women into low-paid, low-status, low-security professions. Women pay more for health insurance than men, have more extensive health needs than men, and suffer unique forms of discrimination in their coverage...Regardless of the number of hours they work, they continue to do far more caretaking and housekeeping work at home than do their husbands.

Today I had another drive home on a rainy night, the kind of drive I'm so fond of writing about. At one point the windshield wipers were on maximum speed and I was driving at a crawl. On the radio, "Sweet Child of Mine" then a program in Spanish where two women were discussing the health benefits of eggs. I stopped paying attention when it got too rainy. When I got home I put a plastic bag on my head and made a run for the door.

Now it keeps raining off and on. I don't dislike rain, I just wish it would rain for a short time then stop and not rain again for another month or so.

Can't say I disagree.

Another weekend where I didn't go out much. My illness, which I still suspect is not a flu or cold but just a bad case of allergies, cleared up some but I still sound hoarse and still have regular coughing fits. So I'm not the best company these days.

It was actually really nice to have an excuse to catch up on my magazines: America Ferrera interviewed in Latina (what does she say about her alleged feud with Lindsey Lohan?), how bacteria communicate in Discover (gross), the state of the American woman in TIME (should give men more credit, they seem to accept women in power OK), the kidnapping fixer in The Atlantic (saw it on kottke, yes, it's worth reading).

Also finished American Wife (as I thought, more of a study of a woman's life, albeit a woman who is quite similar to a certain First Lady, than political satire). Curtis Sittenfeld may be my new author hero.

Funny how much I don't miss going out. I think my natural inclination is to be to be a shut-in. Which is exactly why I don't let every weekend to turn into read-a-pile-of-magazines weekend.

The New York Times reports from Juarez again, this time about how Mexican law enforcement investigates crimes:

The federal government refused to provide statistics on how many arrests had resulted in convictions, how many suspects were still under investigation or how many arrests had proved to be mistakes. But independent reviews by scholars suggest that only about a quarter of crimes in Mexico are ever reported and that only a small fraction ever result in convictions.

Compounding matters is the sheer number of crimes, especially murders. On a single September night in Ciudad Juárez, 18 men were shot to death in a drug treatment center near the border, more than the number of killings all year long in El Paso, just across the Texas border.

This video is also worth watching, if gruesome.

I don't know why I'm so stubborn about not staying home from work when I feel sick. I know some people are much less so. Midway through the afternoon, I was coughing up a storm and my co-worker literally touched my forehead and said "a little warm, are you OK?" My throat was burning and my head throbbed. I was exhausted, too -- I hadn't slept well two nights in a row since I kept waking up coughing. If I were being honest, I would have said, "No, I feel like crap, but I'm staying here until 7 regardless." But instead, I said, "Yeah, I'm OK." Just so I wouldn't have to explain.

Me and my stupid principles. Is it really so bad to stay home if you're merely sick, not deathly ill? I think it makes me brave or stoic or something to not stay home at the first sign of sickness. But after a certain point it just makes me sicker and makes everyone else sick, too. I think I reached that point today.

Oh well, I made it through my allotted work week, now I finally feel free to rest and get better.

The end of the experiment

So my little experiment of posting to this blog at least once a day for 30 days is at an end. From a ratings point of view, this seems like a failure. Here are my page views in the last month. As you can see they haven't shown a clear increase since I started the experiment. Twelve views in one day was the high point. Not what I was hoping for.



And here are the page views over the past year:



Nothing much happening there, except a continuing slight decline. Though to be fair, I didn't start until nearly halfway through September and October isn't over yet. I continue to have only one "follower" on Blogger. I guess people could be reading through newsreaders and I wouldn't know about it. I've had a few more comments, which is good, though I don't know how much that says about readership.

I sometimes wonder why I keep this blog. My blog is a contradictory thing, since I both want people to read it and want to keep it a secret. I suppose some people keep blogs so their friends can keep up with them. But that's never been what this has been about. I don't advertise the blog to people I know. It's more for random strangers to stumble across and be fascinated with and come back and become regular readers. But the days of that happening on a regular basis seem over, as indicated by my stats. This past month it has been more like something I do for myself, something to prove I still have something to say as a blogger with my writing, photos, and links.

It has been interesting to be reminded of why I was drawn to blogging in the first place. I had forgotten what it was like to constantly think "I should blog about this" when something happens. Andrew Sullivan once wrote that blogging was like jazz in that it's improvisational. It's not high art, generally not stuff you would publish in a book. It's on the fly, conversational. It's also personal. For me, I've always seen a blog as like a confessional. Sort of like what they used to do (still do?) on the "Real World," where you go into that little room with the camera and say what you really think about your roommates. You say things you wouldn't say to people in real life, but somehow posting it to the Internet is OK. That instant intimacy can get you into trouble, but it's also what makes blogs fun to read. Some of my secrets have come out in the course of these 30 days, and I think that's fine.

This has also been an exercise in forced creativity. It has been good to try to coax a little creativity out of myself. Some days I can't think of anything to post, but there is always *something* to write about, even if it's just some random musing about work or being tired or a link. The idea of applying principles of work to your hobby is a little foreign to me, I'll confess. But the end result can be worth it. Forget the ratings, I made it through 30 days of posts! *pats self on back*

Will I continue to post every day? I don't think so. Better to shut up when you don't have anything to say and save the words for when you do. Let me come home from work and not feel obligated to get on the computer, ah, that will be nice. But I think the reward for putting more work into my hobby is proving that yes, I still have a voice and yes, I can force myself to be creative day after day. And it's made me more energized about blogging. Maybe I won't neglect my blog so much in the future, and maybe I'll be more motivated to put some work into it and produce some decent posts.

One final thing: if you're reading this, would you drop me a line in the comments section? I'd appreciate it.

After looking it up on WebMD, I don't think I have a cold, pneumonia, TB, strep throat, the regular flu or swine flu. As far as I can tell I just have allergies. No fever and three days since it started I don't feel better or worse.

I'm giving myself a break from tonight's blog post for medical reasons: I have a runny nose and a cough and I'm really tired. Hopefully I'll feel better tomorrow.

Chick lit weekend

I skipped the bars this weekend and caught up on my chick lit instead. I watched all three hours of "Lost in Austen" plus the behind-the-scenes featurette. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit how incredibly entertaining I found this mini-series. The star Jemima Rooper is like your favorite fun-loving female friend, and it was really fresh to see the characters of "Pride and Prejudice" in a new plot with new clever dialogue to recite. Plus I'm even fonder of the palaces and countryside of England now that I've seen them in person.

Keeping with the chick lit theme, I'm also reading "American Wife." Halfway through I'm still trying to figure out if it's a serious study of a woman's life or a political satire. I almost hesitate to call this chick lit, since it seems too high-brow and chick lit seems to denote more of a guilty pleasure, but on the other hand, I really can't imagine a man reading this book and getting the same enjoyment out of it.

Yay for chick lit, eating pastries in bed, and not going out.

Reasons NOT to be a writer

- Newspapers are going down the tubes.

- So are magazines.

- Good luck getting a book published if you're not a celebrity, Stephanie Meyer, or Eckhart Tolle.

- User manuals aren't fun to write.

- Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, text messaging, e-mail, and blogs have made it so that everyone's a "writer" now. (This link is seriously funny, you should click on it.)

- You have to give away your secrets.

- You might get carpal tunnel syndrome.

- Words don't always come easily.

I learned the following in Spanish today:

zapatos de tacón high heels

al revés upside down

en ves de instead of

pecera fish bowl

My original plan was to speed through the textbook in record time, but I'm going much more slowly than expected because I ask my teacher to explain every little thing I don't understand. It's kind of frustrating to be going so slowly, but I realize focusing on the little details is exactly what I haven't done that I should be doing as far as learning Spanish. It's classic me to get the general idea of something but not ingest all the details. Maybe learning something slowly but thoroughly is the better way to go.

Yet another reason I *heart* President Obama: He won the Nobel Peace Prize! And gave a fantastic inspiring speech afterwards:

We can't allow the differences between peoples to define the way that we see one another, and that's why we must pursue a new beginning among people of different faiths and races and religions; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect.

And we must all do our part to resolve those conflicts that have caused so much pain and hardship over so many years, and that effort must include an unwavering commitment that finally realizes that the rights of all Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace and security in nations of their own.

We can't accept a world in which more people are denied opportunity and dignity that all people yearn for -- the ability to get an education and make a decent living; the security that you won't have to live in fear of disease or violence without hope for the future.

I'm "good tired" tonight, that is, super tired but not caring that I am, resolved to stay up as much as I possibly can, fit in as much as I can because why should you sleep your life away anyway? It's kind of exciting going through life fighting sleep. On the other hand, being tired means I'm not very coherent, so no long-winded blog post tonight. Will resume tomorrow.

By the way, here's a video to go with yesterday's song lyrics. Who makes these YouTube videos? So bizarre. At least you can hear the song.

Song lyrics from this morning on the radio:

I'm waiting for a friend to come, to help me off the ground
Better come sooner than later, can't stop feeling down
Scattered memories drifting back from my stereo
Of how we dream this could be and how we let it go

If you're thinking of me, you've got to let me know
'Cause loneliness seems such a waste, I can't stop feeling low

Tonight I called a friend I haven't called in months. I called her once after she moved away in June, then tried to call her a few weeks after that but she never called me back. I also wrote her a letter (responding to one she sent me) but didn't hear back. So I stopped trying these past few months.

But I felt bad about the whole thing, wondered if we were ever going to talk again, if we were still friends even, so I finally tried again. She picked up the phone and we talked and it was like nothing ever happened. Things like that happen all the time with me. I take things hard, I take them as signs of rejection, I wonder if I'm turning myself into a pest and figure I should just quit being so abnormally needy. Maybe I'm too sensitive. Actually, I think it's called "being shy."

One of my best memories with this particular friend involves a moonlit walk one night around this time of year with her, her husband and my sister. She let me borrow her jacket, which was way too big for me. We walked on the dark roads among the trees and falling leaves, talking and laughing. I remember we cut across a field at one point, and I had no idea where we were. I'm usually afraid to walk around outside at night, and I hate the cold, but there was no sense of fear this time, and I didn't mind the cool weather. A good memory. Memories like those make being so far away that much harder. Hearing her voice on the phone was nice, but it's not seeing her face or borrowing her coat or talking under a moonlit night sky.

Why can't people stay put?

Another day. I was about to write "just a boring, generic day," but that's not true. With my job, every day is its own crazy mix of adventures. Like shaking up a kaleidoscope, you never know what you'll end up with. I sometimes think I could remember each day of my job individually. If you just say, remember the day when x, y and z happened? And it will come to me, oh yeah. Xday, X the Xth.

Michael Jackson died on a Thursday. The tsunami happened on a Tuesday. We found out about the guy found dead in Juarez on a Wednesday. (OK, so I just had to look up the dates of those events, so I proved myself wrong. But I do tend to remember when things happen at the beginning, middle, or end of the week.) And the narratives of the events themselves are sharp and bright in my mind like they are in a kaleidoscope. They're part of my consciousness now. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing.

More about the Chamizal from the National Park Service:

"In 1968, Congress established Chamizal National Memorial to commemorate the Chamizal Convention (treaty) of 1963. The Chamizal treaty finally ended a long-standing border dispute between the U.S. and Mexico

...The memorial fosters goodwill and understanding between the people of the United States and Mexico and provides a center to present activities that celebrate cultural exchange."

Will have to go back sometime when it's not dark.

A night for Chopin

I attended the Chopin Music Festival tonight at the Chamizal National Memorial theatre. It was a rainy, overcast evening, the perfect night to stay inside and hear some romantic piano music.


Actually, I think the pianist really shined playing Mussorgsky rather than Chopin. But she was wonderful on all the pieces, of course. At so many points, the performance seemed like a magic trick. My eyes couldn't keep up with the pianist's hands flying over the keys and producing the intricate melodies.

Did you know the Chopin Music Festival is blessed by the Pope? According to the festival website, "His holiness the Pope sends prayerful good wishes for the El Paso Chopin Music Festival and he invokes God's abundant blessings upon you and upon all taking part."

You need to read this: "Polanski, rape, and the myth of Not Like Us."

Nothing like National Geographic Traveler magazine to reignite my dreams of traveling the world. Last month I was longing to go to Sardinia. This month it's their 50 Places of a Lifetime. I like the magazine but the articles are frustratingly short. How can you describe places like these in one photo and five paragraphs? Maybe the articles are only good to spark your interest so you can experience the place for yourself.

And the Olympics go to...Rio? Chicago didn't even make it to the second round. I'm genuinely disappointed after all the hype. But I suppose it's only fair that a South American city can finally host an Olympics...

Interesting article about hybrid books that mix in video and web features with the regular book text. I was just thinking about this when watching "Food, Inc." I started but never finished the book "The Omnivore's Dilemma," which covers a lot of the same ground. I remember reading Michael Pollan's pages-long description of the avalanche of corn produced in America but seeing the mountain of corn on video was still much more striking. If only that were in the book...

Hybrid novels don't sound nearly as appealing, though. The article mentions adding video clips to romance novels, which I think is stupid. If you're going to do that, why not just watch a movie instead? But I think it would be cool if a novel mentions music to include that with the text, i.e. a music-enhanced version of "High Fidelity."

"I'm late to the sunset" is what I found myself thinking earlier today and I found it odd. How can you be late to the sunset? Late to a meeting. Late to a movie. But late to a sunset?

I don't get to see the sunset very often. I'm usually occupied indoors, and even if I get a few glimpses of the rays I don't pay much attention to it. But I was walking back from getting the mail and my curiosity to see it overtook me so I walked over nearer to the desert. The mountains looked positively volcanic under the red rays of the sunset. At that point I was right on time, the height of beauty.

I hoped the vision would stay while I ran back to the house to grab my camera, but sadly no. Yes, it is very possible to be late to a sunset. This is what I did get after going back with my camera, the tail end of the daily drama.

Not the very best of what I saw, but it is something. I love watching the clouds on the horizon like that. The vastness of the sky seemingly headed toward that one point, and somehow YOU are headed there with it.

And the moon there to greet me on the walk back. I have yet to take a good picture of the moon. It would require a better camera. But there it is, seemingly so small. Somehow it reminds me of the marshmallow moons in Lucky Charms.

Those photos will have to suffice until the next time the sun sets and I am there to pay attention. Next time I'll try to be punctual and get the "wow" shot.

7:45ish - Wake up.
7:45-8:30 - Internet stuff. E-mail, Facebook, blogs, etc.
8:30-9:40 - Get ready for work.
9:40-10:00 - Commute.
10:00-7:45 - Work. Spend about 80 percent of that time on the computer.
7:45-8:00 - Commute.
8:00-9:00 - Eat dinner then wash dishes.
9:00-10:00 - Internet stuff. E-mail, Facebook, blogs, etc.
10:00-11:00 - Watch the news and read a book before going to sleep.

TOO MUCH INTERNET.

Random photos

Flowers from the weekend:



I love this window. Very mod. You can only see the sky and clouds if you lay your head at the foot of my bed:



The landscape of my bedroom ceiling:



Bootsie patiently awaits her morning walk:

Spotted the first Halloween lawn decorations I've seen this year on a walk this morning. Can it *really* be that time again?

- Saw a horror movie last night called Food, Inc. OK, it's actually a documentary about how food is produced in America. It's truly astonishing how much power the food companies wield. It's not too gross as far as showing animal abuse but it is frightening.

- Article in TIME about getting paid to tweet. Reminds me of when it was the new thing to put ads on your blog. Says one woman interviewed for the article: "'I do understand the arguments against Sponsored Tweets,' says Dance, the Tennessee blogger, who plans to take fuller advantage of the service (she won't disclose her price). 'But ... there's nothing subversive about it. It's just a little payback for the four years of my life I've invested in my blog.'" I would have to disagree...

Review: Lost in Translation

I finished a book called Lost in Translation: A Life in A New Language by Eva Hoffman. The book is a memoir about Hoffman’s emigration from Cracow, Poland, to Vancouver, Canada, in the late 1950s and her struggle to adapt to a new culture and language.

Hoffman writes lovingly about her childhood in the first part of the book, which she names “Paradise.” She details playing in the countryside with her friend Marek, burrowing into haystacks and standing under waterfalls. She learns to play the piano from various teachers and eventually goes to music school to train to become a professional pianist.

It’s the little moments she describes that stand out to me. I think it’s only in childhood that you have those moments that are so overcome with feeling, that are completely new and as a child you are incapable of describing, and I’m glad she does take the time to go back and try to capture them in words:

The Planty are another space of happiness, and one day something strange and wonderful happens there. It is a sunny fall afternoon and I’m engaged in one of my favorite pastimes—picking chestnuts. I’m playing alone under the spreading, leafy, protective tree. My mother is sitting on a bench nearby, rocking the buggy in which my sister is asleep. The city, beyond the lacy wall of trees, is humming with gentle noises. The sun has just passed its highest point and is warming me with intense, oblique rays. I pick up a reddish brown chestnut, and suddenly, through its warm skin, I feel the beat as if of a heart. But the beat is also in everything around me, and everything pulsates and shimmers as it were coursing with the blood of life. Stooping under the tree, I’m holding life in my hand, and I am in the center of a harmonious, vibrating transparency. For that moment, I know everything there is to know. I have stumbled into the very center of plenitude, and I hold myself still with fulfillment, before the knowledge of my knowledge escapes me.

But Hoffman’s childhood wasn’t altogether easy, and her account is quite dark in places as she writes about her war survivor parents, and the increasing influence of the Soviet Union in Poland and oppression of Jews, which leads to her family’s emigration to Canada.

I suppose I’ve never really grasped what an intensely painful experience it must be to lose your language and culture and be forced to learn entirely new ones. The next section of the book is called “Exile,” and clearly the teenage Hoffman is not happy to be in North America, where her family goes from a middle-class existence to struggling to make a living, and she feels extremely alienated from her peers at school. Even the houses seem to offend her Polish sensibilities:

The spaces are so plain, low-ceilinged, obvious; there are no curves, niches, odd angles, nooks or crannies—nothing that gathers a house into itself, giving it a sense of privacy, or of depth—of interiority. There’s no solid wood here, no accretion either of age or dust. There is only the open sincerity of the simple spaces, open right out to the street.

But it’s the loss of a language that hits her the hardest:

The worst losses come at night. As I lie down in a strange bed in a strange house—my mother is a sort of housekeeper here, to the aging Jewish man who has taken us in in return for her services—I wait for that spontaneous flow of inner language which used to be my nighttime talk with myself, my way of informing the ego where the id had been. Nothing comes. Polish, in a short time, has atrophied, shriveled from sheer uselessness. Its words don’t apply to my new experiences; they’re not coeval with any of the objects, or faces, or the very air I breathe in the daytime. In English, words have not penetrated to those layers of my psyche from which a private conversation could proceed. This interval before sleep used to be the time when my mind became both receptive and alert, when images and words rose up to consciousness, reiterating what had happened during the day, adding the day’s experiences to those already stored there, spinning out the thread of my personal story.

Now, this picture-and-word show is gone; the thread has been snapped. I have no interior languages—those images through which we assimilate the external world, through which we take it in, love it, make it our own—become blurred too.

In the last part of the book, named “The New World,” Hoffman writes about her life as an adult, navigating through Rice and Harvard and forming a professional life as an author and “New York intellectual.” Years after she arrives in America, cultural barriers still stand between her and her “American Friends.” According to Hoffman, we’re a young and too open culture that is continuously “trying to reinvent the wheel.”

My American Friends and I are forced to engage in an experiment that is relatively rare; we want to enter into the very textures, the motions and flavors of each other’s vastly different subjectivities—and that requires feats of sympathy and even imagination in excess of either benign indifference or a remote respect.
...I have to translate myself. But if I’m to achieve this without becoming assimilated—that is, absorbed—by my new world, the translation has to be careful, the turns of the psyche unforced. To mouth foreign terms without incorporating their meanings is to risk becoming bowdlerized. A true translation proceeds by the motions of understanding and sympathy; it happens by slow increments, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase.

I didn’t like this section as well as the earlier two. Perhaps the struggle to find your way in American culture is all too familiar to me. By this time Hoffman has taken the American psyche into her own, along with its neuroses. Stylistically, I thought this section was too weighted down with words, too academic, like she’s trying to form a complicated diagnosis of American culture. The cloud of words does eventually work in getting Hoffman’s point across, but it’s a bit much.

Hoffman returns to Poland as an adult, but she realizes that there can be no alternate self, no person she would have been had she stayed.

“Of course, your life is so much more interesting there,” she says.
“No, that’s not it,” I say, and truly, I don’t know how to compare the interest of our lives. “It’s just that it happens to be the life I happen to have lived.”
“Ach, darling,” Danuta says ruefully. Of course, she understands—the poignancy, and the inevitability of having only one, peculiar version of a life, and living it within the confines of the first-person singular.

I suppose I was particularly interested in Lost in Translation because it is very much about language. As was hammered into me in grad school, language forms our reality. After reading this book, I realize that having to relearn something so fundamental as the way you express yourself, even the way you talk to yourself in your mind, is basically like having to relearn who you are as a person. Hoffman succeeds in bringing us with her on that difficult journey.

Jon Stewart interviews Rod Blagojevich. Not what I expected--Stewart actually wonders whether Blagojevich could be the next Richard Jewel. Hmm...

Is it such a great thing to be human? Some people glorify the "human experience." But I think I'd give it up if given a choice.

My dog seems so much happier than I am, wouldn't it be better to experience life like that? Or it might be nice to be some sort of sophisticated robot that could only think beautiful, amazing thoughts but not feel. Or to be a supernatural being, an angel, maybe, where there is no choice but to do God's will. (Or is there? I've never really understand about fallen angels).

But instead, muddling through a soup of feelings, thoughts, and desires is the plight of the human. No choices offered. I can't help wishing it were different. I wish life made sense, I wish it made sense all the time, not only some of the time, and even then only partway. I wish it wasn't up, then back down, then back up, then back down yet again. Sometimes I wish there was only one way to see things and one way to go.

Uninspired

So I'm a little out of inspiration. I was going to only link to this story from the Today show since I thought it was cute (Wow, you and I do look a lot alike. Wait a minute, are you adopted?). But I'm not sure I could post it without sarcasm.

Then it occurred to me to find something interesting on YouTube, but that turns out to be as easy as finding a needle in a haystack. It might take me all night to find just the right thing.

I read a bunch of news stories today at work, but none of those will work. Too serious.

When did I become so picky with what I post on my blog? I think hardly anyone clicks on the links, anyway. So therefore it really doesn't matter what I post, right? Once I posted a clip of Presidential Jeopardy from the old Tonight Show and I got lots of referrals from Google searches that week. Maybe I should post something like that everyday.

No, I think there is an art to linking. It has to be something that interests me, but not only me. It can't be the straight news, because, well, who needs a blog to point that out? And something with a nice juicy quote in it is always good.

Posting every day is turning out not to be easy.

The Onion is funny.

Five things I am grateful for today:
1. I got to sleep in until past 8:00.
2. Warm, sunny weather.
3. Turkey, Swiss cheese, and spinach sandwich with Dijon mustard on Italian bread.
4. "Dancing with the Stars" followed by "Castle."
5. Crickets chirping on the upstairs balcony.

More newspapers are going to start charging for online content, according to the AP: "Separately, more than 1,000 newspapers and magazines have signed nonbinding letters of intent to join an Internet fee system being assembled by Journalism Online LLC. It intends to begin collecting money on behalf of publishers before winter."

I also find this very interesting: "Preserving the value of their print franchises is one of the main reasons for publishers to charge for Web access. That's because newspapers still get most of their money from print ads, which accounted for $35 billion of the industry's revenue last year. Newspaper print ads are on pace to fall below $30 billion this year. Online ads, in contrast, contributed just $3.1 billion in revenue last year."

Mistaken for a daughter-in-law

Something that happened this week that I forgot to write about:

I walk into work one morning and the receptionist tells me, "Your mother-in-law left this for you."

It's a rectangular block wrapped in Saran Wrap and on top is a burrito wrapped in foil and a plastic bag. She puts it on the counter and answers the phone and holds up her hand to "Wait" before I can try to explain that this must be a mistake.

Could my own mother have dropped this off? My mom hasn't dropped off my lunch for me since I was in the ninth grade. I remember sitting in the Math Lab one morning (which, of course, was where all the cool kids hung out before school) and my mom walked in with my bag lunch, which I had forgotten at home. I admit I was much more embarrassed than grateful at the time.

But my mom wouldn't do that now, especially considering that she leaves for work about three hours earlier than I do.

I take another glance at the food. I'm sure whatever is inside the Saran Wrap is tasty and homemade, and I haven't had a burrito in a while...

"I don't think you have the right person," I told the receptionist when she hung up the phone.

"Are you sure? She came by just right now and said, 'Soy la mama de su esposo'," she said.

"Well, see, I'm not married, so it can't be me."

"Oh, um, OK."

I go further into the office to clock in, leaving the food behind on the counter with regret. What a sweet mother-in-law. I hope whoever the food did belong to realizes how lucky she is to have a mother-in-law like that.

Rivalry game

My enjoyment of football tends to range from "slight disgust" to "tolerance" to "moderate enjoyment." But even though I'm not a huge football fan, every year it's a tradition to go to the UTEP-New Mexico State game.

I'm a proud UTEP graduate. My dad is a proud NMSU graduate. It definitely makes things more interesting when one of us is guaranteed to end up gloating at the end of the night, the other one guaranteed to end up disgusted and a little sad and forced to endure some good-natured ribbing.

The EP Times makes it out to be a "do or die" game this year. All I can say is the Miners better not lose. I really don't want to see that smug smile on my dad's face at the end of the night, as has happened the past two years.

Game starts at 6:30 p.m. in Las Cruces. I'll update the blog with the results.

UPDATE: So the game went something like this: We get there, and the stadum is packed. The game starts (at 6, not 6:30, oops), and shortly thereafter UTEP scores a touchdown. Go Miners! This is going to be awesome!

However, the dark clouds in the background of the stadium are looming closer, though there is no rain, only lightning. With about 12 minutes left in the first quarter, a lightning delay is called.

Then a few minutes later it starts pouring down rain and it will not stop. To make a long story short, the game resumes at 9:10 p.m., about three hours later. I spend most of the delay in the women's restroom of Aggie Memorial Stadium. Not fun. But, hey, I'm taking one for the team, right?

Finally, the game starts again. At this point there are now only a scattering of people left, the bleachers are soaked, the air is cold and damp. But at least the Miners are on top of their game and score touchdown after touchdown. Woo hoo.

A few minutes after this picture was taken in the fourth quarter, the score is 37-6 favoring UTEP. Tired of the damp night and satisfied that the Miners have it wrapped up, I ask, "Are you ready to go?"

"I was ready to leave about 20 points ago," says my dad. Poor Dad. It has been a wet, miserable night AND he doesn't have the consolation of his team winning. UTEP wins the game with a final score of 38-12, but I don't have the heart to give him any grief about his team losing. Still, I'm ecstatic the Miners did so well. Their first win of the season, against their arch-rival. Yay, yay UTEP.

My blog friend Stu (who I met) has an excellent post about storytelling and, well, life.

A productive day as far as my Fridays typically go. I got a hair cut at a "salon and spa." Nothing too wild, just about three inches shorter than it was. I don't do colors or bangs:

I sent some e-mails and warmed up some leftover soup for lunch before going to my Spanish class. Yes, I'm back in Spanish classes. My teacher was impressed with my vocabulary. I can name all the body parts in Spanish: la cabeza, la mano, los pies, las piernas, las rodillas, el cuello, los brazos, el estomago, etc., etc. Vocabulary is my strong point. Having an actual conversation is not.

Fridays off definitely make life easier.

I'm wondering if other human beings feel as insecure as I do on a daily basis. I wonder if anyone out there just wakes up and thinks they are great and doesn't worry at all that they are failing in life and doesn't worry about people liking or not liking them.


Is life a test? I think it is. I think it's a hard test, and that we all will have to answer for our choices one day or other. Somehow I think sitting in front of the computer eating chocolate bars is not going to make the grade.

But what will? Feeding poor children? Working extra hard at my job? Being kind to others?

Happy 16 de Septiembre

Happy Mexican Independence Day! Kind of unfortunate that it's not a holiday I ever celebrated, even growing up in a Mexican American family on the border. I didn't even know what "El Grito" was until yesterday. From Wikipedia:

Just before midnight on September 15, 1810, [Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo y Castilla] ordered the church bells to be rung and gathered his congregation. Flanked by Ignacio Allende and Juan Aldama, he addressed the people in front of his church, encouraging them to revolt. The exact words of the speech are lost; however, a variety of "reconstructed versions" have been published. Hidalgo is believed to have cried: "Long live Our Lady of Guadalupe [a symbol of the Amerindians' faith], death to bad government, and death to the Spaniards!"

The celebrations looked like a lot of fun. Here's more on the Mexican War for Independence, which I confess I am also woefully ignorant about.

Yet another reminder of how cruel cancer is. The release of "Dirty Dancing" coincided with the rise of the VCR as a new technology, and I ended up watching our VHS copy of "Dirty Dancing" over and over (and over) again as a kid. Patrick Swayze is the reason I'll always dream about finding a man who can teach me to dance.

The girls

I have a fondness for movies and TV shows about families of women. "Mermaids", "The Upside of Anger", "Gilmore Girls", "Little Women", and even "The Facts of Life" remind me how I grew up as a teenager, with the template of the world-weary mom and the fun-loving, wise-cracking daughters seeking their independence but also guidance and support.

It's inevitable that a mother's authority becomes diminished when her children reach adolescence, but I think it was even more so living in a house with three teenage girls. Mom became less of a mom and more like one of us. As my sisters had their first boyfriends, my mom was making her way back into the dating scene after her divorce. I'll admit we had a pretty good time poking fun at some of her dates who took themselves a little too seriously (i.e. Jim the Corvette guy). But I didn't feel too bad since my mom would laugh along with us.

Our house became one of pretty, feminine things. My mom's bedroom was her sanctuary alone, so clean and neat with a brown lace comforter on the bed and delicate antique furniture, and not a man to be found among the pictures on the wall. Going into the bathrooms you'd find make-up bags and hair straighteners and long strands of brown hair covering the floor, no more of my dad's shaving stuff or deodorant or strong soap. Even the backyard was small and filled with flowers, perfect for a single mom.

Looking back, our family bond wasn't exactly that of the March sisters or Lorelai and Rory. My sisters and I became more and more separate over those years, especially when we got cars and could come and go as we pleased. We got our first real jobs, places like Wal-Mart and Village Inn that would work you into the ground. We sometimes ate and sometimes didn't eat Mom's quick, microwaved dinners featuring canned vegetables, the only kind she made since she was always working, trying to keep the family afloat financially. My mother couldn't do everything, couldn't be everywhere, and so I'd fill in for her sometimes, and I became sort of a second mother to my youngest sister. I drove my sister to school and work and would generally keep tabs on how her life was going. Women, admittedly, can be emotional, and you could feel the angst in the air many times. My sisters fought each other like cats and dogs, with me the neutral one.

I think those years were more drama than comedy, more "Mermaids" than "Facts of Life." But it wasn't always tense. When we all did spend time together we could always make each other laugh (if all else failed, just bring up Jim's Corvette). Mom (who is nothing like Cher, really) made responsible choices when it came to our family, and we respected her for it. And there was always the unquestioned knowledge that we would be there for each other when we needed it.

Out of those years four smart, independent, beautiful, achieving women have emerged, which is what you see in the picture. It's been seven years since we've all officially lived under the same roof, though both my sisters have come home to live for periods of time since they graduated from high school. I think it's been good for our family to live our separate lives. Rather than tearing us apart, living apart has lessened the tension and allowed our bond to shine through more brightly.

Experiment

For the next 30 days, I'm going to post at least one item per day to the blog. The blog could use a little more creative juice these days. Links are great, but don't I have anything to say for myself? I'm curious to find out if giving myself a daily requirement will by itself result in more readers and better quality of posts. Maybe I'll find that more posting isn't necessarily better posting, but I think more posts, at least some of them interesting, will be better than the few mostly unoriginal posts I come up with most weekends. The experiment begins tomorrow...

I'm liking the Regina Spektor album I bought. "It's like forgetting the words to your favorite song..."

So I have my first silver tooth filling. I've had a couple of small fillings before, but the dentist said this one was deep. He even took an X-ray to make sure I didn't need a root canal. A root canal?! Oh no. I also needed another, smaller filling on the adjacent tooth.

There's nothing like the sound of that dentist drill and seeing little bits of tooth come flying out of your mouth. It's pretty horrifying, even if the right side of my mouth was fully numb and I didn't feel a thing. The dentist put some metallic stuff onto the teeth and I waited for about ten minutes and it was all over. I rinsed in the sink and saw the right side of my face drooping down in the mirror, and that really scared me, too. Is that how it would look if I had a stroke?

My tooth doesn't look silver. The inside of the back of the tooth with the big filling actually just looks black. I ate hot food and drank cold soda and it didn't feel too bad. The cold felt kind of strange, I guess.

I tend to see cavities as personal failures, as in why didn't I floss more? But today it occurred to me it's something else: it's yet another sign that I'm getting older. No one's teeth improve with age. I think of my parents with their multiple root canals, my grandparents with their dentures, and it is not a pretty dental future. Not pretty but something I will have to deal with, one procedure at a time.

Another reason why I love our President:

Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.
...
You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

What a great idea. I really can't understand why anyone is criticizing this speech rather than applauding it when we so desperately need students to take more responsibility for their education in this country.

This week's TIME cover story points out the multiple ironies of NBC's decision to put Jay Leno in primetime. It's also a good snapshot of the TV business as it is today:

But the difference between Conan's and Jay's Tonight is not just about personal style; it's about two different philosophies of TV.

The idea behind giving Conan Tonight is that there are no more Johnny Carsons. No one is going to unite a mass audience of all ages and persuasions and from all walks of life every night.
...
And yet few entertainers are more antithetical to this idea of niche programming than Leno, Mr. Big Tent...

Leno grew up when mass media were mass. He recalls how "comforting" it was to watch Eric Sevareid with his parents, before kids had TVs in their rooms and a different network for every stage of childhood.

After reading the article, I don't find the decision too surprising, more like, why didn't they do this years ago? And I'm really glad Jay Leno is going to be back on TV. Somehow Conan just doesn't do it for me.

Christopher Rosen on the hiring of Diane Sawyer to anchor ABC's "World News":
"The hiring of Ms. Sawyer is a nice story — two of the three broadcasts being anchored by women is nothing to sneeze at — but in the grand scheme of things, it amounts to the adjusting of an armoire in a stateroom on the Titanic."

Gmail Quote of the Day

"Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are." - Kurt Cobain

Should teachers let students pick the books they read in middle school English classes? YES.

I just finished the last disc of "In Treatment" Season 1. I saw it was the last disc, so I rushed to add Season 2 to Netflix, but it hasn't been released. No!

I wasn't too familiar with Gabriel Byrne before this, but now I can't even imagine that he could be different from his therapist character Paul Weston, he's that good of an actor. I like how the series doesn't just stay on personal intrigues a la "Grey's Anatomy" but seriously explores some philosophical topics, like what is the real value of therapy, or can you really know a person just by talking to them. One character even compares therapy to prostitution, in that you are paying a person for intimacy.

Watching the series play out, it's not always clear what the creators want you to think. Sometimes it seems like there is a moment of unbelievable insight into these characters, that Paul really nailed down why the teenager tried to kill herself, or why the couple can't make their marriage work. But other times, you're thinking, this is just a bunch of therapist BS, they should stop talking and get their money back because it's not doing any good. And then therapist Paul can't even handle his own emotional life and goes to another therapist, casting even more doubt on the value of analysis. At its root the show is about how human behavior defies explanation, even for a so-called professional.

I successfully made it to my dentist appointment yesterday. Too bad I have two cavities that need to be filled :-(. Time to banish the soda and candy from my diet.

Leaving

So C. is leaving.

"By the way, I'm moving next week," she told me last Saturday over lunch at a Middle Eastern restaurant.

By the way, I'm moving? If I was moving, I'd tell people months in advance. I'd have a job lined up and money saved, and even then I'd still be freaking out about it. But I know that's not her style.

I always knew El Paso couldn't hold her, not someone who has lived in Abu Dhabi and visited Paris twice and wants to make films for a living.

I'll miss our adventures. "I'm up for anything," she once said, and it was definitely true. Film festivals, salsa dancing, trendy restaurants, protest marches, we turned this town upside down and did a lot of amazing things together.

But there's another side to C. besides the cosmopolitan adventurer. This is the same girl who doesn't read the paper and makes a perfect Jell-O salad, and who would invite a nerd like me to parties with her other cool friends. There's a lack of cynicism in her deep green eyes, a Midwestern innocence that I hope she never loses.

Yeah, I know it wouldn't be right for her to stay here, but the selfish kid in me wants to beg her to stay, because I am going to miss her terribly.

"Saving the World's Women" is this week's topic in the NY Times Magazine:

Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism.

...

Why do microfinance organizations usually focus their assistance on women? And why does everyone benefit when women enter the work force and bring home regular pay checks? One reason involves the dirty little secret of global poverty: some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes but also by unwise spending by the poor — especially by men. Surprisingly frequently, we’ve come across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a $5 mosquito bed net; the mother says that the family couldn’t afford a bed net and she means it, but then we find the father at a nearby bar. He goes three evenings a week to the bar, spending $5 each week.

Here's the full article.

Update: I realized after posting yesterday that my dentist appointment is actually for next Thursday, so I didn't miss it. Yay. But I think not missing it actually proves me more absentminded, not less, since I both mixed up the date AND forgot what I thought was the right time for the appointment.

- I completely forgot about my dentist appointment yesterday despite writing it on my calendar and thinking about it several times earlier in the week. Can memory loss start at 27? How is it going to be 20 or 30 years from now?

- I bought two new CDs off Amazon today. It has been so long since I've bought any real new music (as opposed to old albums I buy used). I have no idea what's popular, which is scary. I consider myself a Moby fan but didn't even know he released a new album earlier this year. And ever since hearing a piece on NPR about Regina Spektor I've been meaning to order her newest album. I finally got around to it. I am so old-fashioned when it comes to music technology. I still have my old CD player that is at least 10 years old, and I don't do MP3 downloads or iPods or anything like that. Perhaps that should change. Maybe when I start making more money.

Saw this short film last night. It was great to see a project filmed entirely in El Paso and Juarez. It was also really refreshing to see a movie about the border that's not about illegal immigration and/or drug smuggling.

Yet spending on health care, by families and by the government, is crowding out spending on almost everything else. As a nation, we now spend almost 18 percent of our GDP on health care. In 1966, Medicare and Medicaid made up 1 percent of total government spending; now that figure is 20 percent, and quickly rising. Already, the federal government spends eight times as much on health care as it does on education, 12 times what it spends on food aid to children and families, 30 times what it spends on law enforcement, 78 times what it spends on land management and conservation, 87 times the spending on water supply, and 830 times the spending on energy conservation. Education, public safety, environment, infrastructure—all other public priorities are being slowly devoured by the health-care beast.

From "How American Health Care Killed My Father" in The Atlantic's September issue. Worthwhile reading as the issue of health care reform comes to the forefront.

It was a bummer of a Friday night. I debated for a long time whether to go out or not. I woke up around 5 a.m. that morning and stayed awake for an hour and a half before finally falling back asleep. I was tired all day at work thinking about car wrecks and executions. But my friend texted me. "I'll be at the Plaza around 8:30 if you want to meet me." OK. "Rocky Horror Picture Show" at the Plaza or sit alone in my bedroom and watch "In Treatment"? Tough call, but might as well DO something, right?

As I headed out to Downtown I was kind of pumped up seeing the last remants of the sunset. It was beautiful, as always, and the creeping darkness promised excitement. By the time I parked in the underground garage it was dark. I drove around and around the garage trying to find a parking space. Garages have a way of making one claustrophobic. Finally I parked in the last row.

I crossed the street, looking at the groups of people going by. When did I become so much older than college-age? Hipsters, ugh. I stood on the outskirts of the melee. Some overweight people in portable lawn chairs. A guy break-dancing to an oldies/funk band. He was pretty good. Some people who sounded like they were from Austin. Do they stage a lot of these events in Austin? Probably. It seems like outdoor movies are exactly what progressive cities are supposed to do. I thought I saw my social butterfly (though unusual) cousin with her friend (boyfriend?) but I lost them in the crowd before I could say hi.

I saw a girl I recognized. "Lisa?" (Her name isn't really Lisa.)

"Oh hi."

"I'm here waiting for C."

"Oh, yeah, she said she'd be here."

She said something I couldn't hear.

"Good turnout, don't you think?" I said. Was there a more pointless thing that I could have said?

"I'm going to get a beer, you know always gotta have my beer," she said, turning away and then speedwalked away from me before I could follow her.

I think I'm better about rejection these days, but yeah, it hurts not to be liked.

So it was Alone for some more, watching the screen slowly get set up, a couple moved in beside me, the guy surrounding the girl with his arms (gross), some guy talking about getting spam e-mail from a musician (must be annoying).

I have mixed feelings about going to events Alone. I don't usually do it because people tend to think it's socially unacceptable, so I do the socially acceptable thing and go with another person. But I don't feel that uncomfortable about it. Especially at an event like this, I didn't feel that out of place just people watching, soaking up the ambience, enjoying the warm night. A shy person gets used to these things. Most of my freshman year of high school, I spent lunches eating outside in the courtyard, then going to the library, and I wasn't really sad about it. I liked the sunshine and the books.

Still. I feel like I try so hard. Try to meet people, try to make conversation, try not to be such a loner, but here I am yet again, alone on a Friday night.

My friend texts me: "FYI won't be there until about 9:30."

At this point I'm finding it hard to find a reason to stay here. My feet are tired from standing. I'm tired. I realize "Rocky Horror Picture Show" is not a movie you watch alone, and it sounds crude and offensive anyway. The operator presses the DVD to start the movie. A huge cheer erupts from the crowd. Meanwhile, I start walking back to my car. Fine, I was upset and near tears at that point. I'm disappointed the night didn't turn out the way I wanted it to.

"I'm tired and going home," I text to my friend. I don't feel too bad about it since I know "Lisa" is still there.

So that's how I ended up back home at 10 p.m. I guess social life has its ups and downs and not all experiences can be positive. I remind myself that I've had a lot of good experiences, too. Still, last night makes me want to spend more nights watching "In Treatment."

Three days off from work and I feel rested and ready to go back to work the next day. Four days off and I forget all about work and go into summer vacation mode. I think I can feel the crease lifting from between my eyebrows. I feel ready to watch some daytime TV and then take an afternoon nap.

It's just after 3 a.m. and I just finished watching Stu on the One & Other project in Trafalgar Square. You stand on a platform in Trafalgar Square in London and do, well, pretty much whatever you want for an hour, and it's broadcast live on the Internet. Much more engaging than I thought it was going to be, a combo of art and live blogging and confessional reality TV. Stu read a blog post about clay figures and also a post I remembered as the mud story which I really liked, and even read aloud a blog post he penned in a notepad on the spot. Also waved to the crowd a lot and talked about his latest haircut and how he lost his phone in the cinema. Yes, the microphone most definitely was on. Anyway, it was an interesting hour. I'm glad I stayed up for it (and definitely glad I don't have to get up for work tomorrow). You can watch happened for yourself here. UPDATE: Here is what Stu had to say about the experience.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but I think being up there has a lot of parallels to blogging -- one part seriousness and another part confessional mundane stuff about things like backpacks and lost cell phones, and you're both trying to connect with strangers passing through and saying hi to the friends who stop by, which can get weird. In both situations, above all, the person on exhibit, a not quite natural position to be in.

Taken yesterday at White Sands National Monument, New Mexico

A Nun's Life's Sister Julie writes about celibacy. Hmm...

No lightning this week, just the kind of lull that makes you think it's about time to start something new. I wrote for over an hour last night in an attempt to analyze myself, my behavior, my motivations. Funny how definite patterns emerge. It can be hard to try to look at your own behavior from a distance, but it's worth the effort, even if you can never really understand why you do what you do.

Lately I've been realizing how idiotic it is to just crave people's attention and acceptance all the time and use that as some kind of measuring stick. So much better to set a course, any kind of goal, even if it is something simple. I challenged myself not to eat a chocolate bar for the whole month of July, and I have actually done it. I haven't touched the vending machines at work, and I finally stopped prowling the candy aisles at Wal-Mart. Mastery over chocolate, it's quite an accomplishment for me. I've been working out with weights twice a week, and I notice my arms getting stronger, and I can't help but get a boost of pride from it. I spend time reading the Bible and about physics, instead of checking my e-mail incessantly or reading women's magazines, and I feel smarter for it. These micro-accomplishments make me think, what else could I do, if I just set my mind to do it? It's gratification via accomplishment, versus other things like food or people's attention. It's the feeling of control.

I officially call this July "the month I finally stopped being an idiot and got a life."

Article about how to outsmart Facebook (via kottke.org). I loathe Facebook but I still use it because I feel like I have to. Actually, I think I am averse to all social networking sites. I don't think Blogger counts.

More than ever.

Lightning storm

It's rare that a storm really scares me. Even as a child I was never scared of thunder. Only when I'm out driving and the road is covered in two feet of water, and the windshield wipers can't move fast enough to keep up with the rain, OK, then I get anxious. But this week I was like a scared kid.

It was the thunder, not the rain or lightning, that woke me up early Wednesday morning. The thunder was so loud I knew I'd never get back to sleep. When I opened my eyes I saw white lightning zoom through the air in a circular motion, spirit-like, maybe 20 feet away from my bedroom window. Then the angriest thunder I've ever heard ripped through the night not a second after the light disappeared. The smoke alarm in the upstairs hallway went off for a few long seconds, further scaring the hell out of me. I had never been in the middle of an electric cloud before, and I had no idea what was going to happen next. My thoughts ran to God and death. In my dopey, half-asleep state, I thought, this is it, God's wrath unleashed, the power that has come to take me home. I wondered if the next lightning bolt would set the house on fire. The rain pounded furiously and I imagined water could come pouring through the roof any second. I imagined all the household appliances being rendered useless. But of course, there I was still lying in bed in my pajamas. Way to prepare for a crisis, I know.

The thunder and lightning continued like that a few more times, though not quite as bad as the first I saw. It still seemed close, but the thunder wasn't as loud. Gradually, there was a space of a few seconds between the lightning and the thunder, which means the storm is moving away. I stayed awake until I was sure the storm was far away and not coming back.

The house held up, nothing was set on fire, the power didn't even go out. We were lucky. But the display stunned me, and the powers greater than you or I made their point about who's really in control. One electrified moment and we're done for. I got it.

Excellent article in Mother Jones about a Mexican journalist seeking political asylum from the Mexican military in the U.S. Mother Jones lives up to its promise of "smart, fearless journalism":

There are two Mexicos.

There is the one reported by the US press, a place where the Mexican president is fighting a valiant war on drugs, aided by the Mexican Army and the Mérida Initiative, the $1.4 billion in aid the United States has committed to the cause. This Mexico has newspapers, courts, laws, and is seen by the United States government as a sister republic.

It does not exist.

There is a second Mexico where the war is for drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share of drug profits, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between the government and the drug world has never existed.

Thanks to Intersections for the link.

As a side note, I attended the press conference at UTEP mentioned here and heard from Emilio Gutiérrez Soto in person. At the time I didn't know what to make of the accusations. I thought it was strange for journalists to be fleeing the military rather than the cartels. This article sheds some light.

Vocabulary

sedulous - diligent in application or pursuit

Dictionary.com's Word of the Day, three days ago, according to Gmail

- Parties are exhausting. Is that how it is for most people, or is it just me?
- I missed the Plaza Classic Film Festival last year, but I am going to have to go this year. I saw the schedule for it yesterday in the newspaper and thought, I want to see ALL of these.
- I went outside before 8 a.m. and it was already hot. Another sweltering day. I'm ready for some relief.

I was invited to three parties this weekend. When did I become such a socialite?

15 books meme

Not tagged with this meme per se, but decided to answer it anyway. Fifteen books that have have been memorable for you or have impacted you in some way:

Cosmos Carl Sagan
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers
Into the Wild Jon Krakauer
Traveling Mercies Anne Lamott
A Solitary Blue Cynthia Voigt
Jacob Have I Loved Katherine Patterson
The Bible (especially Ecclesisastes, Psalms, Romans)
A History of God Karen Armstrong
On the Road Jack Kerouac
Shyness: A Bold New Approach Bernardo Carducci
Little Women Louisa May Alcott
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix J.K. Rowling
A Grief Observed C.S. Lewis
One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Blue Highways William Least Heat-Moon

It was tough to narrow it down. To decide, I asked myself, would the book be worth reading again?

If you're reading this, I hereby tag you with the meme.

A couple of good interviews on Film in Focus: Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida on writing the screenplay for "Away We Go" and Cary Fukunaga on the making of "Sin Nombre".

Caitlin Flanagan on the future of American marriage:

The fundamental question we must ask ourselves at the beginning of the century is this: What is the purpose of marriage? Is it — given the game-changing realities of birth control, female equality and the fact that motherhood outside of marriage is no longer stigmatized — simply an institution that has the capacity to increase the pleasure of the adults who enter into it?
...
Or is marriage an institution that still hews to its old intention and function — to raise the next generation, to protect and teach it, to instill in it the habits of conduct and character that will ensure the generation's own safe passage into adulthood? Think of it this way: the current generation of children, the one watching commitments between adults snap like dry twigs and observing parents who simply can't be bothered to marry each other and who hence drift in and out of their children's lives — that's the generation who will be taking care of us when we are old.

I consider myself pretty liberal in most respects, but I tend to agree with her traditionalist argument. Probably because I saw my own parents' divorce up close. For the other side, see this column in The Atlantic.

Argument Starter from Reader's Digest: "Having a husband creates an extra seven hours a week of housework for women … A wife saves men from about an hour of housework a week. Source: University of Michigan"

Sounds plausible to me. Seven other Argument Starters are included on the slide show.

More thoughts on the value of an M.A.:

When I think back on the things I used to mull over on a daily basis in graduate school -- the future of education, the definition of writing, postmodern philosophy, literature, feminism, class issues, race issues -- I'm delightfully shocked that at one point my occupation was to think about those things. I'm very jealous of my former self. A little over a year ago, my whole world was writing paper after paper, the prof hands out the assignment sheet and the paper's due in one month, start thinking about it now. Decide on a fabulous topic and read 10 books from the library, write your notes into Microsoft Word and cut and paste and delete and expound until you were sure you'd get an A.

I like to think that I'm still that idealistic person that questioned the status quo in paper after paper. I was going to change the way students learn to write, and set the academic world on fire with my theory on feminism and technology, and form my own resistance movement against hegemonic forces. I would like to believe the notion that an education stays with you, that it forms your mind forever and shapes all your future work. But the truth is, none of the things I studied tends to be on my mind on a daily basis right now.

Ugh, the real world. It is SO different from my life back then. My world is now a world of lists. Every day I make lists and check the items off one by one. The working world seems to reward doing over thinking, so "doing" has become my specialty and thinking gets left by the side of the road. My motivation is statistics, a measure of whether what I'm doing is effective, and underlying that, of course, is money. Money, ugh.

Where did my education go? I feel like I locked it away in the back of a closet in my mind, just like all my school notebooks are now sitting next to my shoes in my bedroom closet, most likely never to be looked at again. Did I forget everything? Who has time for the revolution these days?

But once in a while I'll take a deep breath and take a step back from my work, the clouds will part and it will come through clearly, oh, this is an example of what I learned in school. This is exactly how technology is changing how we communicate. That is how women are still being objectified. That Foucault guy was totally right about a lot of things. The things I learned during my M.A. don't help much with the lists, and that's frustrating, but once in a while I'll think about things in a "meta-level" way and see that the theories are based in reality.

It begs the question, What is the point of an education anyway? At the most basic level, the point of school is that you're supposed to get out of it eventually and apply what you learned. Sure, you hope school can help you with the day-to-day grind, but can't it also include those meta-level moments, so you don't just see exactly what is in front of you and nothing beyond that?

On reflection, the price was steep for it. Not so much the tuition money itself (though it was not cheap) but two and a half years of my life, isn't that a bit much time to have spent in the library reading about philosophy of language? Wouldn't it have been better to have started on a career earlier? I have four years less experience than most people my age.

I wish I could end all this with a triumphant conclusion that *of course* an M.A. was worth getting but I don't know if I can say that. Maybe the biggest problem was my mindset, not taking school more seriously, not having a goal with it, which made it not as useful as it could be. I approached my M.A. the same way I did piano lessons -- nice to know how to do, I put in a decent effort but didn't go all out, knowing I wasn't exactly going to be playing a Chopin concert anytime soon. Maybe it was an impractical thing to do, something that shouldn't have been Number One on the life to-do list if I really wanted to get ahead. But does everything have to lead up to a predetermined goal? The listmaker in me says yes, but the student revolutionary doesn't seem to think so, and well, you know which one has my heart.

Sometimes I think my biggest problem is that I think about things too much. Other times I think the problem is I don't think about them enough.

The NY Times asks, "What is a Master's Degree Worth?" I'm asking myself the same question. In monetary value, the consensus seems to be an M.A. is not worth much :-<.

I tend to agree with the third writer's take, though:
"Earning an M.A. degree can be fun; it can provide knowledge; and can stretch the imagination. A cynic might conclude that the M.A. degree is the stepchild of the university community, is increasingly a commodity offered by universities in order to earn tuition dollars devoted to the Ph.D. programs. But in the marketplace, it adds to one’s personal narrative. It makes one more interesting."