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."

I went out to a trendy restaurant yesterday, the type of restaurant where maybe 200 pieces of silverware were suspended from ropes tied to the ceiling. I ordered an ahi tuna and pineapple sandwich and a ginger lemonade. A stand-out meal, really. While I was eating it I was thinking, maybe this is exactly what I want my life to be, going out to a stylish cafe and ordering odd food while discussing travel and jobs and movies with my most interesting friend. It does make one feel automatically trendy, even me in my ancient jeans and sandals and pulled-back hair.

No such experience today. I thought about going out but convinced myself otherwise. Laundry is done and the bathroom is clean, I made my own dinner. Funny how satisfied I am with the mundanity of it. Like there's nothing else I want, nothing I need from out there.

From a great interview with Toni Morrison in O Magazine:

Everything I saw or did was potentially data, a word or a sound or something for the book, and then I really realized that for me writing meant having something coherent in the world. And that feels like…not exactly what I was born for, it's more the thing that holds me in the world in healthy relationship, with language, with people, bits of everything filter down, and I can stay here. Everything I see or do, the weather and the water, buildings…everything actual is an advantage when I am writing. It is like a menu, or a giant tool box, and I can pick and choose what I want. When I am not writing, or more important, when I have nothing on my mind for a book, then I see chaos, confusion, disorder.

Some provocative posts in the past couple weeks on one of my new blog faves, Living El Paso. El Paso newcomer/blogger David's enthusiasm is infectious, and he offers up some great suggestions on how to improve the city. In this post, he brings up El Paso's isolation as both a good and a bad thing. "Isolation has actually benefited El Paso in a few ways. Since it acts as a buffer, our economy hasn’t suffered like cities on the West & East Coasts." Hmm...good point.

Comments for another post center around El Paso's "brain drain" problem. A commenter writes, "...The reality is that if you can find a job, the city can be very good, but I’m meeting way too many people who have been sitting here 1-2 years, living with their parents, looking for work, and when your student loan comes due, well- people start moving."

Writes David: "I guess you could compare El Paso to gambling. When you are winning, you are feeling great and anything is possible, however, a few bad hands and all you want to do is get up and leave." Well put.

Lucky me, I guess I drew a good hand. I haven't had problems finding jobs and I'm not saddled with debt, so my view of the city tends to be sunny. I like El Paso's relaxed feel and I don't want it to turn into a clone of Austin, Dallas, or San Antonio. But I know economic growth has to be a priority. For me the question is, how do you balance El Paso's easygoing attitude with creating more opportunities for people who grow up here and for talented people who might want to move here?

A little analysis to prod El Pasoans in the right direction is definitely worthwhile, especially from people who have lived in other cities. Hopefully Living El Paso will be around for awhile with more insightful posts.

I'm working this summer, so no more trying to occupy three vacant months for me, but the pace at work does seem slower these days. More people are gone for vacations, there are slightly fewer newsworthy incidents. Some space to breathe, finally.

My so-called social life has slowed to a crawl, too. Zero messages in my inbox, do I care? I feel like I'm at a point where I feel more lonely when I'm with people than I am actually being alone. Does that make any sense? I'd rather cocoon myself in my bedroom watching "In Treatment" or "The Wire" than make uncomfortable small talk with people I kinda know but not really.

Bitterness talking? Maybe, but I think summer is a time to lose people. For awhile at least, expecting you'll get them back later. Yeah, like school, knowing you'll have that first day when you get back to scope out who grew a few inches or got a new haircut or has a new boyfriend. In the meantime experience solitude, forget everyone, dig your toes in the dirt and wear ugly shorts and watch the sunset all by yourself.

The perfect summer song: "in your eyes/the light the heat/in your eyes/I am complete/in your eyes/I see the doorway to a thousand churches/in your eyes/the resolution of all the fruitless searches."

I think vacuuming is my new hobby.

No freakin' way, this is too awesome.

UK Holiday, Part 3

Actually, Part 2 was pretty much the end of my holiday. I mean vacation. It was another long plane ride back during which I watched “Marley and Me” and tried to explain to the English guy sitting next to me about the death penalty and why Texas executes so many people each year.

I don't think that after only a week you can really say you've really experienced another culture, especially if you pretty much just hung out with your sister and went to tourist sites on your own during the day. But I suppose the thing that stood out to me most in the UK was the sense of history and tradition. At the Tower of London I saw a group of young students there on a field trip, and I wonder what it’s like growing up with that long history of kings and queens and castles in your consciousness. And being surrounded by so many old buildings, how could you not constantly be thinking of what came before? In America, history starts in 1776 and you can go weeks without seeing a building that’s more than 30 years old.

It surprised me how relieved I felt being back on American soil. Getting off the plane at the Chicago airport where I had a connecting flight, a customs agent checked over my paperwork and then said in a bright Midwestern accent, "Welcome home." And Chicago isn't much at all like El Paso, but I did feel like I was home.

I don't know exactly how to explain the feeling of being back in the US after being in the UK. The word that comes to mind is spaciousness. The airports are bigger, the houses are bigger, the cars are bigger, in places like El Paso there’s empty land as far as you can see. The day after I came back I was driving on the highway in the desert heat and a Guns ‘n Roses song came on and I found myself appreciating just how American that moment was.

This trip was a big deal to me, even just proving to myself and everyone I could handle the planning and finances and getting from one place to another. Travel turns out to be a mix of luxury and personal edification and accomplishment. “You’ve been to Europe?” Yes. For months I held off on starting on new things until after I had done this. I wonder what's next. More new places, more meeting new people, more adventures, I hope.

The highlight of my day: trying Strawberried Peanut Butter M&Ms from the vending machine at work.

UK Holiday, Part 2

The next-to-last day of my journey I boarded a (short) flight from London to Manchester, then bought a ticket at the Manchester rail station for Liverpool. I had said good-bye to V. earlier that morning before she flew back to New York. I was now traveling solo. That scared me a little.

There were only about five people on the train when I boarded it. Maybe that was the first sign that I wasn’t in London anymore, that there wasn’t a huge crowd of people everywhere I went.

I began to get more nervous as the train got closer toward Liverpool. I put away the copy of the Guardian I had been reading and stared at the steep walls of rock near Lime Street. I tried to think of interesting topics of conversation to bring up. What do you say to a person whose blog you’ve been reading for six years? A person you know both everything and nothing about?

I got off the train and didn’t see him. Oh crap, he forgot. But I also remembered I hadn’t checked my e-mail in a week. I imagined the e-mail waiting there in my inbox, canceling the whole thing.

I walked around the terminal some more, looking for some place with Internet access, then saw a guy in a black sweater and jeans that I thought I recognized. “Stuart?” Luckily he looks just like his picture on Facebook.

He was taller than I expected and had a thicker accent than I expected. I think like a lot of Americans, I’m not too familiar with northern English accents.

A true gentleman, he took my bag so I could drop it off at the hotel I was staying at. Our agenda for the day was a tour of the city: Liverpool’s two cathedrals, Penny Lane, the Cavern Club, etc.

To be honest, I didn’t expect to be very awed by the cathedrals in Liverpool, not after what I had seen earlier that week. But the Catholic cathedral was amazing. I imagine this is what the Catholic Church had in mind in issuing Vatican II. It’s a very modern place of worship with its non-traditional stations of the cross and stained glass that seem out of an abstract painting.

Right afterward we went to the Anglican cathedral, which was much more traditional. I was more than happy to see some more Gothic architecture. Stu informed me it took 100 years to finish. 100 years? He said he used to have school performances there, and I couldn’t imagine that.


And then it was time to see some Beatles landmarks. It was a fairly long bus ride to see Penny Lane where the landmarks from the Beatles song are—the banker and the barbershop, the "shelter in the middle of the roundabout."

On a walk down the “real” Penny Lane, I saw the Penny Lane street signs all covered with graffiti that Stu said often get nicked (er, stolen in American).

I love landmarks that aren’t all tourist-ed out, and such was Penny Lane.

Then back to the city center to see the Cavern Club where the Beatles were discovered. The real club was demolished and is now replaced by a power substation, which I thought was funny. The “new” Cavern Club really does seem like a cavern given that it’s underground and very dark. Over glasses of Pepsi I remarked it was a lot smaller than I expected. A young folk rocker was playing on the tiny stage and an American singer was set to go next.

The weather had been really bright and sunny that day, “blue suburban skies”, but after the Cavern Club a downpour began and I didn’t think to bring an umbrella. My sweater got soaked as we headed to the Albert Dock. Stu assured me it was “Liverpool rain” and would be over fast. Fortunately he was right.
As we walked through the city, I got the feeling Liverpool would have been quite a different place had I visited even ten years ago. The Liverpool I saw was bright with upscale shops and restaurants that Stu readily noted were recent additions. It seems like the sort of city that’s always been a gem but only now is getting the polish it deserves. The European Capital of Culture 2008, woo hoo…

I found out what a Superlambanana is and saw the gate to Liverpool’s Chinatown. Liverpool has a Chinatown?

I have to say I really enjoyed the half-tourist, half-autobiographical tour. It seemed every block held a story (There’s the FACT Centre!…There’s where the Beatles used to go drinking…There’s where I went to secondary school).

Dinner was at the Everyman Bistro, which is attached to the Everyman Theatre playhouse. The underground bistro had gourmet food served cafeteria-style, something I hadn’t really seen before. I took a bowl of pasta with roasted vegetables, very tasty, especially since I hadn’t eaten all day.

We sat down and the inevitable conversation about blogging began (and later Twitter and Facebook and Spotify). The conversation meandered to writing and school and our respective futures. Stu told me I seemed like a laidback person, which I thought was funny since I tend to think of myself as the queen of anxiety.

But I think the day went by with a minimum of awkwardness. We reached my hotel and I thanked my host for the tour. “This is a very nice place,” I said. And I really meant it. There was definitely a cheerful vibe to Liverpool that wasn’t there in London. A different side of England and I liked it.

And, of course, meeting one of my blog heroes was pretty amazing, even though to be honest, it almost doesn’t seem real to me now. But there are my pictures and this, so I guess I can’t question it, just say it’s one of those rare moments in life I’m really glad to have experienced.

I'm slowly but surely working my way through weeks of old TIME magazines. "The Meaning of Michelle" was on the cover a few weeks ago. What a title. I doubt that Michelle Obama reads anything about herself in the media, but she seems like the kind of person who would laugh if she saw an article like that. Amid all the attempts to probe her psyche, there was one part that I especially liked:

So on a cool day in March, she dispatched a regiment of role models to schools across Washington, including singers Alicia Keys and Sheryl Crow, Ann Dunwoody, the first female four-star general, and Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to travel into space...

"There are so many kids like that," she observes, "who are living inches away from power and prestige and fame and fortune, and they don't even know that it exists."

Which is why that night, the women leaders reassembled at the White House for a dinner with more than 100 students from schools across the city to celebrate Women's History Month. Tonight is your night, Michelle told the girls. So don't be shy. "Poke and prod and figure out how [these women] got to be where they are and what you can do in your lives to get yourselves ready for that next step. Tonight we just want to say, Go for it! Don't hesitate. Don't act with fear. Just go for it." Because all the women in the room, she told the girls, see a little bit of ourselves in you.

"It's one of those events," she says looking back, "that stand out in my mind as, This is why I'm here."

Yes, we do have a very cool First Lady.

UK Holiday, Part 1

I imagine that if I were an English literature, history, soccer, Shakespeare, or Beatles fanatic, going to the UK would have felt sort of like going home. But I’m none of the above, the truth is I just wanted to go somewhere different and far away, and plane tickets to London were cheap and I knew it would be the perfect place for a vacation. I went to England not really knowing what I would find. It would be something new, a place to discover. Accompanying me on the journey was my younger sister V., the New Yorker.

A vacation is supposed to be relaxing, right, but in the weeks before I left vacation planning started to feel like a second job. I had never planned a trip before, much less an international one. My copy of Fodor’s was dog-eared by the time I got done. I spent hours combing through reviews of hotels and hostels. I bought a voltage adaptor. I memorized the approximate dollar-pound exchange rate and looked up train schedules and Tube fees and museum opening and closing times. I typed out itineraries and e-mailed them to V., what do you think? It was like I was back in school doing a complicated group project.

The day finally arrived. I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an apple in my car outside the airport. What the heck am I doing? What if something goes wrong?

The nine-hour plane ride was not nearly as fun as I expected. Sleeping in such cramped quarters was not easy and I ended up losing my headphones.

After getting off the plane V. and I stood in line for immigration.

“Where are you staying?” a dark-skinned woman with a British accent asked after she had scrutinized our passports and immigration cards.

I named the hostel we were staying at. She eyed us suspiciously. “What is the address?”

I stated the address on my reservation printout.

“What area of town is that in?”

Ummm…the South Bank? I really did not know exactly where this place was other than what I had read on Hostelworld.com. She probably thought my sister and I were running away from America with no place to stay. Oh no.

“How long are you staying?”

“A week,” I said.

Finally she stamped our passports and handed them back to us. We were in.

First impressions of London: busy and diverse. The racial diversity surprised me, even starting at Heathrow Airport. Workers at shops and hotels were more often than not Indian, African, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European, and tourists from America, Germany, Australia, Japan, China, France, etc. lined the streets. In America, racial diversity is kind of a given, but I was surprised that it is also the case in London.

It was a mob at the ticket line at the Tube station where we bought our all-important Oyster cards and we were off.

It was a 30-minute ride through the suburbs of London to where we were staying. A British woman’s voice announced the stops and reminded us to “mind the gap” between the train and the platform. People read tabloids and I stared out the window and was amazed at how vines grew on walls and wild flowers grew between the train tracks.

Our hostel was above a café on a street with lots of little shops and bars and restaurants that V. said reminded her of NYC. I thought so, too, except for a few unmistakably old and English buildings and the red double-decker buses that ran up and down the street. We checked in and lugged our suitcases up about five or six steep flights of wooden stairs into the girls dormitory.
My first thought was to collapse on the bed and go to sleep after the long international flight. The perils of jet lag. But sleep could wait. We were in London. I thought about how far away from home we were, the seemingly never-ending miles of ocean traversed on the plane. We were on the other side of the world.

We went for a walk on the London Bridge, walked through the financial district, saw about a million more red double-decker buses drive by.

Eventually, we encountered Millennium Park and the London Eye and had to take a ride. The Eye feels like you’re in space pod, but I suppose that’s the idea.

The next day was the Tower of London, which to me is THE haunted castle, complete with thick walls and dark chambers, narrow stone spiral staircases and history of executions, murders, and dungeon imprisonments. You can feel the ghosts even when it’s broad daylight outside. I think it would be a scary place to be at night.



In one area, a moving sidewalk takes you past the Crown Jewels, which are too opulent to be believed. The U.S. has no equivalent, which I have to say I’m glad for.

The grandest cathedral I’d been to before London was the cathedral at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, and I didn’t see how anything could be any grander, but of course St. Paul’s Cathedral trumps it. Princess Diana married Prince Charles there. John Donne is buried there. ("No man is an island, entire of itself..."). I ask myself now, how did I not get a picture of St. Paul's? Here's a good picture.

It was V.’s idea to see the National Portrait Gallery, Britain’s "Hall of Fame" where countless royals are immortalized. I loved it. I got misty-eyed in the 20th century portrait exhibit because it reminded me of me and my friends, the people I’d read E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce with. I thought about our conversations, our desires to achieve, our attempts to see the world differently. Would they ever amount to anything?

On Saturday V. and I decided to escape the crowds and go to a place called Blenheim Palace near Oxford. It was here where I felt like we could be at Mr. Darcy’s Pemberley in “Pride and Prejudice.” A very proper elderly man greeted us at the door, and I realized later his picture was also in the tourist pamphlet for the palace. I wonder how he must feel showing off his family home to busloads of tourists.


We bought sandwiches and sat outside overlooking the gardens. I tried to imagine living at a place like this but couldn’t. “Now do you feel like you’re in England and not New York?” I asked V. She nodded. I think she enjoyed that part of our trip the most.

Saturday night V. and I stayed in a real hotel rather than a hostel. I loved our hotel room, which was small but very continental with the most comfortable bed you can imagine. Thank God for a private bathroom. We ran out to a store and I bought pretzels claiming to be made with a “Genuine American” recipe (chuckles) and a 7-UP. Did you know that 7-UP tastes totally different in Britain? V. bought some yummy ginger cookies to bring back to the hotel. Once I figured out how to turn on the TV we watched part of a documentary about British music and watched a panel of comedians take apart the week in UK culture, which we laughed at despite our lack of cultural context. I decided I like the BBC.

On our cloudy last day in London we took in Westminster Abbey. It’s beyond majestic, everything I’d imagined it to be and more. I have a thing for Gothic architecture, which up to this point I’d only seen in history books and in movies.


The abbey is lined inside with chapels that contain tombs of notable people. It gave me goosebumps to see where Elizabeth I is buried. The coronation chair dating from 1300 is there. It looks old and wooden, somehow I was expecting something grander. The throngs of tourists with their audio guides kind of killed the reverential ambience, but I stayed a long while at Poets' Corner, where T.S. Eliot, Ben Jonson, John Milton, William Shakespeare, etc. are memorialized. Somehow I had always imagined Poets' Corner to be a real graveyard with gravestones and tufts of grass growing between them, but instead the poets are memorialized on tiles beneath your feet or with monuments on the walls inside the abbey.

A priest offered a prayer for world peace at the top of the hour. V. bought a coffee in the cloisters, the quietest part of the abbey.

Like at St. Paul’s, it struck me that Westminster Abbey was as much about power on this earth as reverence for God. Why so much effort into a building when there are poor people living to be helped? But it’s hard not to feel that God dwells among us in Westminster Abbey.


There was no changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace on Monday due to the Bank Holiday. Darn, my planning had failed.


But we did see Big Ben.


I decided we couldn’t leave London without seeing Trafalgar Square.


Near Trafalgar Square V. and I tried the obligatory fish and chips at 10 pounds a plate. Tasty, especially soaked in malt vinegar, but I kind of felt like we were at Applebee’s. I think the stereotypes about British food are true, unfortunately.

Our last stop in London was Kensington Gardens, where I promised a friend I’d take a picture of the Peter Pan statue.


Maybe I didn’t know much about London, but I know I expected it to be old and beautiful. Which it was. I loved all the antiquities among the new buildings, the bridges, the narrow staircases, the endless monuments, the grassy green squares where people lay out on blankets to enjoy the weekends.

What I didn’t expect was for London also to be hyper-charged, tough, and crowded. I think I spent as much time in the Tube as I did seeing the sights, the dark and dank Tube with its constant streams of people rushing in and out of the stations, the hardened faces in train cars where standing room only is the norm. Tourists just like us were everywhere. Traveling through the city exhausted me, and I know I could never live in a place like that. But it’s the beautiful London I’ll remember, the London that exists in my pictures.

It's been a long time with no update, I know. Since I last posted I've been across the Atlantic and back and turned another year older. Yeah, the past two weeks have been overwhelming, even if in a good way. But things are winding down, finally, and finding the time to blog seems like a possibility again, so yay for that because I really missed it.

At last I slept through the night without waking up. When I wake up at 3 a.m. it seems it's always for a different reason -- I'm too stressed, it's too hot in the upstairs of the house, my stomach hurts. I wake up and read about philosophy for an hour then I'm usually able to get back to sleep. Luckily I'm not required at work until 10 a.m.

It's only early May but it seems like summer has already arrived in El Paso. Ninety-nine degrees yesterday. I like the heat but it also makes me restless. For what, I don't know. Fun and adventure? New beginnings? Something.

It's no secret that I admire the President. In Barack Obama I see the best professors/pastors/bosses I've had, the kind of person who listens to your problem empathetically, writes it down and says "I'll look into it" and when you ask him about it three weeks later you find he actually did look into it. I treasure people like that. They are rare.

For me the most fascinating part of the Obama story is the years spent as a community organizer in Chicago. So many times in my own idealist mind I've floated ideas of roles I could take to make the world a better place--PeaceCorps, AmeriCorps, church volunteer, charity organizer, etc.--but somehow those ideas always remain just that. They always fizzle out when I remind myself of how difficult it is to change people, and convince myself that there is no way for one person to change society. Not to mention the fact that you are paid peanuts, if that, for the work. Why would anyone take such a thankless job?

Maybe it was less curiosity and more a need for a role model that got me to buy a copy of Dreams from My Father. No, role models aren't only for children. As a clueless twentysomething I wanted to see for myself the path of a person who truly cares and doesn't just say things people want to hear. Some excerpts:

Look at yourself before you pass judgment. Don't make someone else clean up your mess. It's not about you. They were such simple points, homilies I had hear a thousand times before, in all their variations, from TV sitcoms and philosophy books, from my grandparents and from my mother. I had stopped listening at a certain point. I now realized, so wrapped up had I been in my own perceived injuries, so eager was I to escape the imagined traps that white authority had set for me. To that white world, I had been willing to cede the values of my childhood, as if those values were somehow irreversibly soiled by the endless falsehoods that white spoke about black.
...
So Regina was right; it had been just about me. My fear. My needs. And now? I imagined Regina's grandmother somewhere, her back bent, the flesh of her arms shaking as she scrubbed an endless floor. Slowly, the old woman lifted her head to look straight at me, and in her sagging face I saw that what bound us together went beyond anger or despair or pity.

What was she asking of me, then? Determination, mostly. The determination to push against whatever power kept her stooped instead of standing straight. The determination to resist the easy or the expedient. You might be locked into a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsiblilities.
...
...[A]t night, lying in bed, I would let the slogans drift away, to be replaced with a series of images, romantic images, of a past I had never known.

They were of the civil rights movement, mostly, the grainy black-and-white footage that appears every February during Black History Month...Such images became a form of prayer for me, bolstering my spirits, channeling my emotions in a way that words never could. They told me...that I wasn't alone in my particular struggles, and that communities had been a given in this country, at least not for blacks. Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men--and in the civil rights movement those dreams had been large. In the sit-ins, the marches, the jailhouse songs, I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you'd been born or the house where you'd been raised. Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned--because this community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger American community, black, white, and brown, could somehow redefine itself--I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life.

That was my idea of organizing. It was a promise of redemption.

Instant '80s mix

Type in Tears for Fears into Pandora.

I once typed "jobs in Antarctica" into Google when I was bored on a Saturday night. Then I saw this and no, I definitely don't think a job in Antarctica is for me. I'm not quite that weird, lol. Part of the movie seems like it belongs on "2001: A Space Odyssey." The loner penguin walk is a little funny but ultimately sad.

My usual three-day weekend has been cut to two days. Can't complain, I guess, since I got four days off last week. So far productive -- I went out to lunch, cleaned the bathroom and did laundry so far today. I should go to the library since my books were apparently due last week. Darn, that always happens.

Lately I feel like my job is to think about the swine flu all day. I am always worried about catching illnesses, and now I'm even more paranoid. The truth is, I probably won't get sick. I do my best to avoid sick people and I am always washing my hands.

Pigs aren't evil. This wasn't their fault.

I haven't been sleeping well lately. When was the last time I really felt calm? When did the stress level get so high?

A rose for you

TIME magazine reports from Juarez. Not too much new here, but it's a good summary of what's gone on in the past six months or so. According to the article, new Juarez cops will be paid a starting annual salary of $9,000 and that's TWICE what a regular Mexican police officer gets. Is it any wonder there's so much corruption in the police force? Also, check out the photo gallery.

Dorothy was always my favorite on "The Golden Girls." So sad.

Is this thing still on? I had my lowest page views for the week ever this week. Too much stuff to do. I was in the ring for a bona fide media circus this week. Not to be written about, but believe me it was CRAZY.

The rest of my time was spent catching up with friends and my little sister. My baby sister, who treated me to a root beer float at Sonic this week. I'm proud of who my sister has become. It makes me proud of myself to think I had a little to do with it. I also saw a nature movie and attended a march honoring Cesar Chavez, which started here. Quite an interesting place.

Somehow I got Monday off of work. As good a time as any to take a step back and try to sort things out, perhaps even blog.

On Slate.com, parallels between Mexico's drug war and the war in Iraq:

The drug cartels are a vicious enemy of Mexican democracy and security; I don't mean to sound cavalier about that or to suggest that Calderón should have neglected the problem. But organized crime is a long-festering problem, not (to go back to the Iraq analogy) an imminent "ticking bomb" threat to the Mexican state that requires all-out war. By pretending that it was, Calderón violated the so-called Powell Doctrine, whereby a nation commits forces only when it can count on overwhelming superiority, an exit strategy, a definition of victory, and the full and lasting support of the people. Calderón never had the first three and may be losing the fourth.

Too long after La Brown Girl recommended it to me, I finally finished reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Pulitzer-worthy? Yeah. The book is definitely different from anything I've read. It brings together Dominican and American, Spanish and English, sci-fi and history, nerd and player. It's heavy but also fun to read. Somehow it works. I think Junot Diaz may have created a new genre. Check out this interview. Interesting stuff, especially the answers to the last few questions.

Welcome to spring in El Paso

Stumbled onto this as I walked out the door to get the newspaper Monday morning:



Gotta love a tumbleweed before breakfast.

In TIME, Obama and the science of change:

Which message would persuade homeowners to save electricity: a call to their environmental conscience, or an appeal to their wallet? Cialdini tested those approaches in a San Diego experiment, and the answer was neither. What worked was an appeal to conformity. Residents used less power when they were told their neighbors were using less power.
....
Social norms help explain the attraction of opt-out 401(k)s as well: it's not just that we're too lazy to check a box but also that we assume the default is the accepted thing to do. Obama's push to weatherize millions of homes — another stimulus bonanza — will require new norms. In Oregon, a countywide program to upgrade windows and insulation at almost no cost to homeowners got a tepid response. But after an intense mobilization campaign — through citizen councils, churches and Girl Scouts who went door-to-door asking residents why they hadn't weatherized yet — 85% of the county enrolled.

Interesting stuff. Maybe a little creepy to be manipulated like that, but I think it's great that this kind of research is being used to make Americans more responsible instead of just making us want to buy things.

Would NOT read this book, but the interview with the author is interesting.

Why so sad? What if you just feel like you're a human trapped in a robot body, made to function, not to feel? Sad but without a way to tell anyone about it?

Everyone fails me, but then, I fail them, too.

If I could just spell out to you in minute detail why I think everything is unfair, then I would feel so much better, you wouldn't believe it.

I went to a bar last night, ended up hanging out with four people I had barely met. It was hard to commiserate over the blaring music. Some guy accidentally bought me a glass of Coke.

I think about a friend who used to send me funny texts. I wish he would still send them.

The top story, all but forgotten one week later. That's just sad.

Enrique Krauze defends Mexico against its perception as a failed state:

The Mexican print media has not been entirely helpful either. Of course, freedom of press is essential for democracy. But our print media has gone beyond the necessary and legitimate communication of information by continually publishing photographs of the most atrocious aspects of the drug war, a practice that some feel verges on a pornography of violence. Press photos of horrors like decapitated heads provide free publicity for the drug cartels. This also helps advance their cause by making ordinary Mexicans feel that they are indeed part of a “failed state.”

While we bear responsibility for our problems, the caricature of Mexico being propagated in the United States only increases the despair on both sides of the Rio Grande. It is also profoundly hypocritical.

"The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork." -Psalm 19

My dad wants to get a dog, so I went out to the Humane Society today. It is a sad place. I guess it's not supposed to be sad, since at least these dogs are not getting euthanized, but to see those sad puppy dog eyes, just like my own precious dog's, saying "take me home," just killed me. I wanted to leave with two or three or them, but we ended up not taking any of them.

Getting a dog is a big decision. You want to give a dog a home, but if the dog isn't the right fit, then better not to get it. That's my practical mind speaking. But my heart aches seeing those poor animals in cages. I wish we could somehow mandate that everyone who can possibly get a dog should get one. After today it seems almost wrong NOT to have a dog, when you could be saving an animal from a life in a cage.

Blog scenery

So Stu has an interesting idea: adding street-view photos from Google Maps to accompany your old blog posts. Funny how I haven't written many blog posts relating to place lately. But I can think of a few notable places in my consciousness that I've written about:
My childhood home - This looks nothing the way it used to when I was living there. It used to be red brick and white with a bunch of cactuses in the front rocks. Note the palm trees in the back that were right behind our swimming pool.
My former place of employment - Somehow this area of Downtown looks brighter and more spruced up than it actually is. You can't see much of the Wells Fargo building in the background even if you rotate the view, but I absolutely loved that I worked so close by to it. It was cool to see at night.
My first (and last) apartment - I believe my room was the one with the middle second-floor window.
UTEP - I headed down this way many, many, MANY times in the eight years I went to school there. Always a pleasant walk. The sidewalks were bustling with people during the mornings, but it by afternoon you pretty much had them all to yourself.

Strangers

I got home from work Wednesday night to suitcases open on the living room floor. My mom was walking around in a rush with her arms full of clothes. I wracked my brain trying to remember what this was about........New Orleans. She had told me weeks ago she was going to New Orleans with a friend during spring break.

"When are you leaving?" I asked.

"Tomorrow," she said. Tomorrow? How could that possibly be? Somehow she hadn't said a word about it all week, and I had forgotten. Bad daughter guilt flooded down.

"What time?"

"5:00. I'm driving my car to the airport."

I felt even more guilty because I was so relieved at this, since it absolved me of any responsibility for dropping her off or picking her up.

"When are you coming back?"

"Monday at 5:00."

Wow...How could I be such a jerk? How could I care so little not to remember this?

But then I think of my daily routine and it's not really surprising how little I know about what Mom is doing. I want to feel independent, and my mom makes me feel like a child just for being who she is. On weekdays I spend less than an hour a day with her, and even then we are usually watching some reality TV like American Idol. Easier to talk about American Idol than what's really going on in either of our lives.

We live in such different spheres -- I think my tales of breaking news bore her, and her stories about the perils of standardized testing and misbehaving kids are not so interesting to me. When we do talk, I'm ashamed to say I only half-listen to what she has to say, just mumbling a "Yeah," or "Mmm-hmm" every once in a while, then retreating to the Internet or to a book.

But I think this situation shows just how ridiculous it has gotten. There's independence and then there's being a selfish ass. Why can't my "independent life" include being an adult daughter who really cares about her parents? No shame in that. I love my mother more than anything. I need to force myself to listen. I think we all do.

I like our President.

Hard to believe this was a year ago. Photos here.

NewMexiKen shuts down. But for how long?

Subject of an e-mail I got this week: "Conquer Information Overload. Find Out How in 30 Seconds!" *chuckles*

The dream

It was about two weeks ago that I opened up a book I had borrowed from one of my former professors. It was a book with a red cover she had pulled from the huge wall of books in her office. Her last name was written in gold lettering on the spine, since she had written it herself. The book sat on my bookshelf for six months, mostly forgotten, but upon picking it up again I remembered right away why I asked to borrow it. It was pure delight to see my prof's mind at work, ruminating on Eudora Welty's photography, the cartoons of Rose O'Neill, the humor of Emily Dickinson's poetry, and the lives of women photographers of the Southwest like Gertrude Kasebier and Laura Gilpin. So many ideas, so many lives I previously knew not much about. After reading a few chapters I was thoroughly enlightened and sorry for having put the book aside for so long.

And then I thought something else: Maybe I could write something like this, someday.

This happens to me fairly often after I finish reading books. It's the one dream I have for my life that doesn't go away. I want to tell a story worth telling and instead of reducing it to instant oatmeal, really do it justice. I want to say things that haven't been said before. I want to educate people, inspire them, risk offending them, and do it all in an entertaining way. Every time I think about that, I feel like an alarm goes off inside my head. That's IT. That's what I want to do.

And then the alarm goes quiet and I think about doing it for real, and it seems pretty impossible. I'm a blogger who sometimes writes some halfway decent stuff amid the posts about Filet-o-Fish commercials. I know how to construct a news article. I can write an essay. But a real Writer, the kind who writes books people buy, well, I don't know.

But once in a while it seems attainable, even for an amateur like me -- sit down and start writing, right? Last weekend I read an article in O magazine by Sandra Cisneros about how she started as a writer (article not available online, unfortunately). She writes about how at 26 she moved out of her parents' house against her father's wishes to live by herself in a tiny rundown apartment that she called her "office." She filled the office with things that inspired her to write. "Antique typewriters, alphabet blocks, asparagus ferns, bookshelves, ceramic figurines from Occupied Japan, wicker baskets, birdcages, handpainted photos."

The photo on the first page of the article is that of Cisneros as a curly-haired young woman, sitting in a chair with a typewriter to her right, resting her head on her left knuckles, her lips set in a flat line as she gazes at the camera. She looks serious and determined, certainly, but not as self-assured as she looks in the other photos with the article, where she is about 20 years older. In this photo, her eyes seem like they're searching for something; in the other photos it seems like she has already found it.

The writer's life sounds kind of romantic when Cisneros talks about her apartment and writer's workshops and late night tacos and day jobs. She talks about "creating a text that is as succinct and flexible as poetry" and writing sentences "pliant as branches."

Overall, it is quiet, privacy, and solitude that Cisneros sees as the lifeblood of a writer. These are so precious to her that she is willing to give up spending time with those she loves. Says Cisneros, "On the weekends, if I can sidestep guilt and avoid my father's demands to come home for Sunday dinner, I'm free to stay home and write. I feel like a bad daughter ignoring my father, but I feel worse when I don't write. Either way, I never feel completely happy."

This part I'm torn about. I'm not sure if Cisneros is just plain mean to ignore her family, or if she's right to claim time for herself even if it means shutting other people out. Occupational hazard?

I remember writing my master's thesis, sequestering myself at home for the better part of two months. I stopped going out on weekends so I could spend endless hours punching out these chapters that somehow never seemed good enough. Those weren't very happy months; I gained about 20 pounds, was grumpy all the time, and basically forgot how to hold a face-to-face conversation. On the other hand, at the end of those two months I held 100 pages printed out and bound together in my hands. I had people that I respect tell me what I did was important. I'm usually so critical of myself, but when I finished the thesis I was proud of what I had done.

Now I wonder what's next for me as far as the writing I really want to do. Forget sacrifice these days. When I'm not at work, I'm mostly spending time with family and friends. Or watching TV. Or checking e-mail. Hence my recent run of cut-and-paste blog posts.

I suppose if I really want to set the world on fire, that's not going to cut it. I'm close to the end of the magical age of 26, the age Cisneros said 'no' to her father and moved into the "office" so she could write. Funny how thoroughly I can appreciate the bravery of that decision, given my age and sex and that I come from a Hispanic family, too. It's something so simple, in a way, and yet so difficult. It's not so easy laying claim to a space, laying claim to your time, and tuning out the naysayers.

I wonder if I can be that brave. How can I force myself to say no to people? Do I even have any ideas worth writing about? And what about money? It all seems so bewildering, and yet what if I just started writing because it's what I really want to do? I think good things would follow.

Great post by Alex on negotiating technology:

In fact, I feel like all this technology and access has prevented us from doing more and instead made us monitor more. How much of your day is just catching up on what other people are (uselessly) doing? How much of your information intake is actually propelling you to a better life? How much is just a big time suck but you feel like you just have to keep up with your friends, comment on their status, read that popular blog post or contribute your own for fear of being irrelevant, seeming unhip or worse, out of touch.

TIME's Josh Tyrangiel pans U2's new album: "Melody — the most surprising effect of all — dodges in and out but rarely makes itself at home, and all we're left with is an increasingly dull series of tricks killing time where the tunes should be." Ouch. Still going to buy it, though.

Fuga is a totally cool band that had me dreaming about accordion music last night. Here's an article about them in El Paso magazine.

More mellow

- I laughed out loud the first time I heard this.
- The weather suddenly shifted from cold to hot in the past week or so. That's enough to make me smile more often. Though it makes staying inside an office all day that much harder.
- I'm listening to the sound of hammers and Mexican music outside my window. More houses going up the next block over.
- Three days off. That should be enough time to listen to some music, have a few long conversations, and read something for more than 15 minutes.

Dinner party

1:30 - I go shopping in preparation for a dinner party I'm having with a friend. I've never hosted a dinner party before. It's much more work, not to mention much more expensive, than I expected. I'm at Albertson's piling tomatoes, parmesan cheese, red bell peppers, parsley, lemons, bread, and some other ingredients into the cart. Technically, this is a potluck dinner, but as co-hostess I'm hoping to impress people with my cooking.

3:00 - I text everyone in my cell phone contacts list that I think has a shot in hell of making it to the party to remind them about it. Sadly this turns out to be a small number of people. A former classmate I haven't seen in over a year is probably a long shot, but you never know...

4:00 - I'm ironing my pink and black polka-dotted shirt that I'm planning to wear with a black skirt tonight. I actually want to look like a girl tonight rather than dressing in my more usual unisex attire. Ironing is the bane of my existence. I think the absolute worst part is thinking I've finished ironing something, and then inspecting it and finding a huge wrinkle in it.

5:00 - I start cooking. The party starts at 7:00. Two hours will be enough time to cook, I assume. Brownies first, since they take the longest to cook, right? Then a salad, which consists of lettuce, tomatoes, olives, mushrooms, cucumbers, onions, and sunflower seeds tossed with salt and pepper, lemon, and olive oil. Now this is a good salad. Try it and you'll see.

6:00 - Things are getting a little out of hand. How do you turn on the broiler? I run over to my mom and ask her the best way to cook chicken. How much parsley is in a handful? The brownies smell a little burned. I turn on a pot to boil water for pasta then turn it off because I realize I'm in no way ready for that yet. I plug in the food processor and put some garlic and olive oil in the microwave. The kitchen is getting hot. I'm going to be late to my own party. I imagine my guests sitting there bored and uncomfortable, wondering where I am. I'm just hoping to get through the hour without burning my hand or cutting a finger off with a knife.

6:30 - My co-worker calls -- he's coming to the party! Very cool.

6:45 - OK, I've successfully managed to put everything together in dishes with serving utensils. My fingers are intact and unburned. The kitchen is a mess, but I'll deal with that later. I run upstairs to throw on some make-up.

7:00 - I'm in my car with a bunch of glass and ceramic dishes. I call my friend to tell her I'll be late.

7:20 - I have arrived. I bring everything in to my friend C.'s amazingly cool old house. Only three people are there when I arrive, to my relief. The food our guests bring as they trickle in is awesome -- curry, chicken with cloves, spaghetti. C. even made sugar cookies with frosting. I have to say my fettuccine with chicken, red pepper sauce, and parmesan cheese looks and tastes good, too. And the brownies weren't burned after all.

8:00 - The night's entertainment involves sitting and talking, watching "The King and I" on TCM and at the same time listening to an iPod mix list that includes Johnny Cash's cover of "Personal Jesus" and the "Across the Universe" soundtrack. The music fits with the movie in an unexpectedly complementary way. The conversation is about travel and hypnosis and grad school classes. I like friends who can appreciate math jokes. I look around - about 80 percent of us wear glasses. I think it's a grad school thing.

9:30 - I'm in a tiny car with three other people and we're headed to a restaurant to go salsa dancing. The driver is a guy I went out with twice who didn't call me again after that. I'm trying to figure out why he came to the party. We pass the star on the mountain as I talk about my job and I feel like an interesting person for about two minutes. One girl says she likes Patty Griffin's music. Patty Griffin sounds interesting.

10:00 - The four of us are sitting at a table sipping water waiting for the dancing to start. The lights are going dark and the music is getting increasingly loud, making conversation harder to maintain. The Patty Griffin girl goes out to smoke. A few uncomfortable moments pass with the abovementioned guy. I ask him about church. What I really want to ask is why he didn't call me back.

11:30 - I'm dancing with a man I don't know. He's wearing a crisp white shirt with gray stripes and he smells faintly of cologne. Too bad I forgot how to salsa. The guy notices and he says something to me but the music is so loud I can't hear a word he's saying. By the second song we dance I remember. We're moving back and forward in rhythm, spinning around, bumping into other couples and stepping on their feet once in a while. This guy is holding me a little too closely but I don't back away. It's electric and I forget everything and exist in this dark, loud, intense bubble for a few moments.

12:00 - Everyone's yawning. "Do you want to go home?" C. yells in my ear. I nod my head.

12:20 - I grab my plates, which still contain a lot of leftover food, and pile them in my car. Was it a successful dinner party? Well, I'll admit I wish a few more people had been there. Is it just me or is it hard to get people together to do anything these days? But it's the dancing I'm thinking about as I drive home. The song from "Dirty Dancing" playing in the background, my feet easing into the right steps, my skirt spinning around me. The smell of that anonymous guy's cologne.

Fun? Yeah, it was fun.

Magical? A little.

Worth doing again? How could we not?

My watch stopped on Monday. I couldn't help but think it was a sign of something other than I needed a new watch battery, since it happens so infrequently. The end of an era?

It is weird for me not to wear a watch. Normally it's a constant habit to check the time. But there is a freedom associated with not having that weight on your wrist. This week was a pleasant reminder of the summer of last year, when I'd sometimes go days without wearing my watch. I'd forget to put it on. Hours and days blended into one another seamlessly. The exact time became irrelevant.

Did you know that you can buy a watch battery at Wal-Mart for $4, and employees will give you a tool to open the watch and give you instructions but won't actually install the battery themselves? I assume it's a liability issue. I didn't want to risk breaking my Guess watch so I took it to a store in the mall yesterday and spent $10 to have the sales guy replace it.

The steady tick was restored, just as I had gotten used to not checking the time every 15 minutes or so. After five days the cuff on my left wrist seems kind of foreign now. But it will remain since it is NOT the summer of last year, the hours and days do not blend into one another so easily, and time is money and therefore VERY relevant.

As seen on Facebook - 25 random things about me

1. I have a puffy birthmark below my right elbow.
2. I see my lack of discipline as one of my greatest weaknesses.
3. I’ve memorized all of “Dirty Dancing.”
4. I’ve only owned one cell phone ever, which I bought in 2005.
5. I almost deleted my Facebook last month.
6. I’m addicted to chocolate.
7. My best friend is a dog named Bootsie.
8. I started my first blog in 2001. It wasn’t very good but I had a lot of fun writing it.
9. I was a vegetarian from ages 10 to 19.
10. I miss watching “Saved by the Bell.”
11. I can’t stand it when women say they aren’t feminists.
12. I still want to live in a dome somewhere in the country like I did when I was a kid.
13. Ich spreche Deutsch. I took two years of German in high school.
14. I was bald as a baby.
15. I sometimes question the value of formal education.
16. I like to think of myself as a brave person. I don’t know if it’s true, though.
17. I’ve never donated blood.
18. I’ve never paid to download music online.
19. I would love to live Downtown.
20. I wish I wasn’t shy.
21. I liked teaching people to write. Too bad so many of them didn’t want to learn.
22. Men frustrate me.
23. I would give up a kidney if it meant I could magically wake up and know Spanish as well as I do English.
24. I want to write at least one book before I die.
25. I’ve gone to sleep with the same blanket for 12 years.

Another idea on how to save newspapers: charge for online content. A good idea in theory, but I think readership would go way down. There are about two newspapers I'd pay to read online. And I think the blogosphere would lose something important, i.e. I would hate to link to articles people would have to pay to read, and I would be a lot less likely to read articles linked to on blogs if I had to pay to do so.

Review: My Life with the Saints

It was a few months ago that I was looking for a winter book, that is, a book that I could curl up with on a comfy armchair for a few hours on cold winter nights. I was randomly browsing through the library bookshelves with that in mind when I spotted My Life with the Saints.

The reviews on the back of the book billed it as a "spiritual memoir." A spiritual memoir? What does that mean? Skimming the book summary, I saw that the book was about saints but was not so much a catalog of saints' lives as a meditation on how the saints' lives have touched author James Martin (a Jesuit priest who one reviewer described as a "cross between Holden Caulfield and Thomas Merton") at various points in his life.

Let me say upfront that I'm not Catholic, so praying to a saint for help is not something I would do. But, surprisingly, as I started reading I didn't find Martin's beliefs about saints too far from my own. While Martin does not dismiss the power of praying to saints, for him, it seems the power of the saints lies mainly in learning their life stories, which have important lessons for us in our lives today.

The life stories of 16 saints (well, technically more, since the Ugandan martyrs are all discussed in one chapter) are described in separate chapters. The saints Martin includes in the book are a diverse group in time and in personality. They range from Peter and Mary to Thomas Aquinas and Ignatius of Loyola, from Joan of Arc to Dorothy Day to Mother Teresa. The lives of these holy persons are (somewhat surprisingly to me) filled with conflict and spiritual struggles. Throughout the book, Martin reflects on how looking to the saints' lives helped him in his own spiritual journey -- of leaving a corporate job to join the Jesuits, in struggling to adapt to his vocation, and in performing mission work in Jamaica and Kenya.

Early on I tried to put my finger on the style of the chapters. The style seemed both familiar and strange to me at the same time. After Chapter 3 it dawned on me: the chapters are arranged in the style of sermons. Typically, it was the telling of the saint's life story mixed in with some personal storytelling and a bit of another text such as another biography or the Bible, all told in a very straightforward, gentle way. I suppose this shouldn't have come as a surprise given the author's vocation.

So maybe the book is a little formulaic style-wise, yet it is definitely not bland and boring. Neither is it a feel-good book with spiritual platitudes that are too easily arrived at. Like the best sermons I've heard, Martin offers some very nuanced yet powerful insights about Christian spirituality. He is strikingly honest about his own spiritual struggles, from feelings of inadequacy to the pros and cons of the celibate life. Likewise, he doesn't gloss over some of the darker details of the saints' lives -- Thomas Merton's guilt over his sinful past, Mother Teresa's "dark night of the soul," Pedro Arrupe's rift with the church near the end of his life. In fact, it is these deep struggles in the saints' lives that Martin seems to relate to the most.

The end result is a book that is a satisfying tapestry of intersecting lives. The very diversity of these lives supports Martin's final conclusion that each of is called to holiness in a unique way. No one path is for everyone, but we can learn much from the lives of those who came before, who Martin describes as our models, companions, and even friends.

I'm really glad I picked My Life with the Saints as my "winter book." A life told through saints seems like quite a task to pull off for a writer, something that could easily go awry, but Martin makes it look easy. But much more than that, the book is a superb spiritual guide that challenged the way I looked at God and the individual.

Nonprofit news?

NPR asks, should newspapers go nonprofit? I say yes.

The executive producer of 60 Minutes, Jeff Fager, says [nonprofit news organization] ProPublica is filling a real need. "There's a crisis in this country involving investigative reporting, and everybody's aware of it," Fager says. When strapped news organizations make cuts, they look to what's most costly, he says. "And that's what happens when you're investigating — doing real investigative reporting. It's expensive."

Finally the bar could be raised on what passes for news coverage: more could be covered, it could be covered in more depth, and there would be less of a tendency for sensationalism. I am SO ready for that to happen.

But, as NPR points out, government or philanthropist funding would come with its own baggage. PBS stations are always begging for money, and I know the same would be true of nonprofit newspapers. Plus, there are no promises that whatever entity funds the newspaper wouldn't impose its own interests as to what gets covered. Still, I think it's a better solution than what's going on now.

My thoughts on the Super Bowl

Pittsburgh is playing, right? Who are they playing again? And something about Jennifer Hudson...