Collegiality and Other Excitements

The new semester and a variety of small but interesting events have prevented me from posting lately. I have some new students in the class (though most are continuing from last term) and they take up extra time. In teaching I have been alternating between being TOO lackadaisical and not doing such a good job, and over-preparing which does not always lead to things being successful either. Maybe because the material is more complicated, I have had a harder time finding interesting ways to teach it.

Meanwhile, I have been very inspired on my dissertation since trip back to grad school town. I met a first-year student in my field while I was there and we have been corresponding. It is great to exchange ideas with someone who is worrying about all the same problems I have worried about! I just hope he will think me interesting enough to be worth the e-mail time! I certainly think his work is promising. Anyway, I have been writing away, slowly but with a little more confidence.

Another development on the collegiality front is that I have joined a classical reading group put together by the Lama. We have only met once so far, and I was a little over-prepared, but enjoyed it. Again, it's fun and inspiring to talk to real people about this stuff rather than JUST sitting alone with my computer. When it comes to talking shop and career-related stuff, I surprise myself by being more brave than about other things. I would expect to be more anxious and scared because it matters so much. Well, it does matter, but for the most part I feel like I just about have the skills now to pull it off, to do stuff right, to end up having satisfying interactions. This bodes well!

Finally, Saturday was quite an amazingly full day. In the morning I went down to U of C for a symposium. I was mostly interested in the morning session, which was more or less related to my field. It was a presentation by four grad students from the department there. It was not all that well attended, but I thought what they were doing was interesting and worthwhile even if I could not always agree with it. While there I also ran into one of grad school classmates who has a job there. He introduced me to everyone after that talk, including the grad students and a scary U of C professor who I only knew by reputation. There were all surprisingly pleasant and welcoming, and the grad students even invited me to go to lunch with them! I went, and enjoyed it so much. I hope to be in touch with them soon. In fact, I must remember to write some follow-up e-mails... maybe tonight, if I can stay awake...

I stayed for a couple of afternoon talks, but didn't find it quite as worthwhile as the morning. Then I had to race home (and I was a long way from home, causing myself great CTA stress), because we were having the head of Pocket of Bolts' department and his partner (also in the department) over for dinner at our place! Fortunately PoB was a prince and had prepared most of the dinner and done most of the cleaning. So when I came home there was only a manageable amount of racing around and fussing left to be done. And I do think the dinner went well, though it wrecked havoc on our diet. Well, you can't serve guests diet food, after all! I ate a lot less than I would have otherwise, but still used many flex points... Among other things, got rather tipsy which, combined with the exhilaration of the day, made me uncharacteristically chatty. But PoB said I was fine, fun and bubbly.

Well, I must go. It's a school night and there's plenty still left to do. Sorry no pictures! My camera battery has been dead and I just haven't even had time to recharge it. Which shows how little time I've had; working out, among other things, is a surprisingly large time commitment, but nothing even comes near how much time I spend teaching...

The Truant Returns

Last Thursday and Friday I went back to grad school town to have a meeting with PhD adviser. Since I haven't been there in over a year and a half, needless to say it was a bit of a shock. Most of the people I had known were out of the country or on the job market. It was especially disturbing when I first arrived. The department secretary didn't recognize me, and I couldn't connect to the wireless. I went about like a lost soul, half regretting that I wasn't meeting up with anyone I knew and half dreading meeting anyone I knew--especially professors I had failed to particularly cultivate. Also, there were almost no unassigned carrels in the library, and all the people up there were strangers.

I did this that and the other for a while. Felt a lot better after naughtily wolfing down a substantial snack of sushi. For dinner, I went out with three of Pocket of Bolts' friends. It was a little awkward, given that PoB hadn't actually come with me, but they were all friendly and kind, and we did our best to make conversation. After dinner (I had a small beer; hadn't had one in ages because of they points and it was SO good!), I tagged along with DBake, with whom I was stay. DBake's girlfriend is going to be one of my bridesmaids, which is why I felt okay about crashing in their spare room. But she was out of town.... It was a little awkward, but not so awkward as to warrant a $200 hotel room...

Actually I got a lot of work done in their house, an exact copy of the house PoB and I used to live in. I felt so nostalgic, despite having become spoiled by the pleasures of proper heating and insulation. The place was COLD! I curled up under my coat and banged out several pages of dissertation, sitting in the old red velvet chair that PoB had bequeathed to DBake, as it had been bequeathed to him. The persistence of grad school furniture!

I slept in a sleeping bag on the futon in their study and had dreams about running away from bad guys, a standard thesis anxiety trope, don't ask me why.

The next morning, I slept in, had an incredibly decadent bagel for breakfast--with butter! (OMG, delicious) In the cafe, I did run into someone I knew, one of my younger classmates. She was very surprised to see me. I was surprised by how beautiful she had become! Truly, a flower in blossom. We agreed to meet for lunch, with a number of other people I knew slightly or not at all. Then I went on a bibliographic wild goose chase in the library.

The lunch was amazingly fun. More people kept arriving! I felt like the queen for a day, or the general reviewing the troops. I dispensed advice and reassurance about qualifying exams to someone who was about to start them, talked about China to the Chinese students, met the new ones, the first and second years. It filled me with great happiness. I MISS them, even the ones I don't know! It is my natural community. On a wave of good fellowship we all went to get tea at the department, and chattered away about everything. I felt quite sad to go, but of course I had the momentous meeting with adviser to prepare for.

The meeting went surprisingly well. The upshot of it was, keep doing what you're doing. You'll have to condense, and take out the sloppy bits, redoing them rigorously in the introduction. But don't worry about that now. Just keep on. Though we did discuss the problematic issues some. I felt very on, like I had worthwhile things to say, like I knew enough to have a substantial discussion. Adviser knew enough too. He's made progress in the last few years, an awful thing to say but true. In this field, the wholes in a person's knowledge are quite apparent, and in past years I had been especially critical of his. But he has been filling them in. Education is an unending pursuit, and that's a good thing about it.

Contrary to my fears, I left the meeting feeling encouraged about the work. The sun was going down and it was time for me to head to the airport. It's sad that a person can't be in two places at once, because I really wished I could work all day in at grad school and come home to PoB in Chicago at night. Grad school provides all kinds of small supports and encouragements that it's hard to even notice when you're in the middle of it, but when you don't have them anymore...

Well, nothing lasts forever. I will graduate eventually and be pushed all the way out into the mean old real world. The main thing is to write a good dissertation and get a job somewhere that has an actual department in what I do, colleagues to talk to, and try to get back some of that community feeling.

Last picture is the campus train station at dusk. Journey of a thousand miles...

Photos from the Holidays at Home

Just some pictures from Christmas break with the family. First, some food! My mom greeted my arrival at home with a gorgeous fancy soup and salad meal.


My bro and I made quiche for dinner on Christmas eve. We were quite willing and happy to make something all fancy, but quiche was what dad decided on, and we were all quite happy with how it turned out. I made the pattern on the top (it was a little more symmetrical before it went in the oven), with a lot of critique from my art professor bro. :D


Here we are in our various Christmas morning attitudes. Mom in her new Christmas shawl:


Me under my new Christmas coat:


My dad and bro putting together new Christmas toys:




For some reason it was an especially pleasant Christmas morning for me. I can't say exactly what about it. It was low-key and fun, not overly extravagant--we only got a few presents each--but very full of love and joy.

In the evening my sister and her two boys, and my niece and her two girls came and filled up the house with playing and chattering. My nephew Twintree is getting to be such a teenager! but somehow after shyness to start we always find something in common. This time around, he taught me how to make a Jacob's Ladder!


Here is a picture of Dad putting together a puzzle I got him from the Art Institute. It's Frank Lloyd Wright's Seguaro window, and was very different from your average puzzle. I thought it kind of easy, but Dad found it hard! It was definitely pretty.


The last big set of pictures I can't post here but let's just say that I finally found that expensive white dress I've been looking for--and NOT at David's Bridal, but at a really nice little shop that got driven out beyond the city limits when the David's Bridal came in. We went there by recommendation and found just the thing.

All in all it was a very happy holiday, and if it hadn't been for missing my dear husband to be so much, I would have been very sorry to leave. But the parents can't complain of my filiality this year, as I've enriched the airlines considerably with my jetting back and forth on wedding business.

New Year Stuff

Here I am in 2008. I won't say that Pocket of Bolts and I made New Years resolutions, per se, because those have kind of a bad name. New Years resolutions seem made to be broken. Let's just say we decided to makes some changes, starting on January 1. Probably the most dramatic change is a more concerted effort to lose some weight, or at least stop gaining so much. Neither of us had ever been on an actual diet before, probably for very similar reasons--the feeling of indignity, disgust with popular culture's obsession with them, and of course pure and joyful enjoyment of self-indulgent eating. But all good things come to an end, and I guess this years is the year we lose our dieting innocence and learn that a bagel is six times more fattening than a pita, and a serving of pork chop should be the size of our palm, etc. Self-indulgent eating had been starting to become a long slippery downhill slope.

Now we are one week and one day into it, and already I look upon a picture like this one with considerable nostalgia. We made these cookies (Pocket of Bolts' mother's family recipe) for a December cookie and cocktail party we went to, where we consumed probably 3000 joyfully sugary and alcoholish calories. Now I haven't had a cookie of eight days. It's not that I COULDN'T have one, but it doesn't seem worth it... Oh well, I still get to enjoy what I call Pocket of Bolts' Jude Law face, a hilarious mock-haughty supercilious look, ha ha. Actually in this particular picture he looks more like an angry butler, but take my word for it, sometimes he looks very much like Jude Law.

Here's me turning over a new leaf in the form of an enormous Asian pear. I actually bought this in East Lansing, at a little Asian grocery by the train station. The guy in the store said that the big ones are most sweet, but my dad said they're all water and don't have very much flavor. I'm not a very good judge right now, being that I'm so hungry everything I eat has a lot of flavor, even things I normally wouldn't touch like skim milk, cabbage, and (shudder) Splenda. Okay, I still think Splenda's incredibly gross, and hoard up my points so that at the end of the day I can have one little piece of real chocolate...

Photos From East Lansing

I really fell down on the job of finishing this post about my trip to East Lansing. The upshot of it was that Y and I went to the library and worked and talked a lot. It does not seem momentous, but it did somehow change things in my mental landscape. It made me feel worthwhile and appreciated.

At about mid-afternoon, Y went home to take care of her daughter. I stayed on at the library, working very hard. I did, however, seize my one opportunity to walk around and look at things. Below are pictures I took during a half-hour walking around break I decided to take. I was worried about getting lost in the town-sized campus, so I decided just to make a circuit around the library (clock-wise).

One of the most noticeable land-marks was a big tower:



Here is a picture of the library, which was spacious and new-feeling, and had pretty reflective windows:



As I went around the corner, my attention was immediately captured by a river that was flowing by behind the library. It was a good-sized river!



There was a bridge over it, whence I took this picture. On the other side of the bridge was a stadium I think.



Back to the back-side of the library, where there was an awesome botanical garden. It was all under snow of course, but it must be really gorgeous in the summer:



Two plants from the botanical garden, some winter-hardy collard-type green, and something with white fluff.





Finally, on the far side of the library from where I'd started, ornamental grasses:



And a dry fountain, in which the snow had been shaped (raked? stamped down? shoveled?) into an impressively clean spiral pattern. It was quite startling and very nice really, like a zen garden.



It was pretty cold, so after one circuit around the library I was quite happy to get back inside. I worked really hard, both that evening and the next morning. Y came to the hotel again, and we discussed some questions I had as well as chatting more generally about the field we are both in. And then the shuttle driver took me back to the train station.

The trip was really worthwhile, even if the hotel was a bit pricey. (It WAS very comfortable anyway, good place to work.) I came back feeling a lot more confident.

Morning in East Lansing

It's not so often that I see the sun rise anymore. When I first met Pocket of Bolts, our apartments both had east-facing views (we were practically neighbors!), so we saw the sunrise very often, nearly every morning. None of the places we've lived in since have been like that though.

East Lansing must be very far north, because I had showered and dressed and gone downstairs to an expensive "continental" breakfast in the hotel restaurant, and come back to my room--and only then was it rising. Lazybones winter sun, early to bed, late to rise.

Here's another picture of the sunrise, with me in it because of the reflection. Pity about the window frame, but oh well. Still it gives a sense of the colors involved.

I must say I'm quite fond of this little hotel room. Everything here seems very solid. The wood is actually wood. It feels solid, like it was built to last. The walls feel solid too, and the wallpaper is a tasteful fibrous sort of textured stuff that reminds me of expensive writing paper. I have yet to turn on the flat, wide-screen TV, but it certainly minimizes the amount of space the TV takes up.

Oh and I forgot to mention the shower thing--it worked a lot better than I would have expected. It turns out that a wrap-around shower-curtain pretty much keeps all the water it. A separated-off shower stall turns out to be an unnecessary luxury. Despite my trepidations, the process went pretty much as usual, without a hitch.

But of course what you really want to know about is Y, my friend and professor from Beijing whom I was here to meet. She came to my room sometime after nine. I was a little nervous, but as soon as I saw her again, we both were very warm and friendly. Fortunately, the room was tidy enough and we each perched on one the beds and had quite a long chat. I bit the bullet and described my dissertation project to her. She seemed to think it was interesting, though she remarked on what a departure it was from what we had been talking about before. But not in a bad way.

She described the way she feels here surrounded by an academic culture very different from her own. It's such a shock, she said, and makes her doubt the worth of her own work. How well I understood that feeling!! I had felt exactly the same way in Beijing. Having at least some sense of both sides, I talked with her for some time about just how those differences in academic culture played out, some of the ways I had found of conceptualizing them, and how she might reconcile what she's doing to "our" way of doing things. We talked about her current research (I thought it was fascinating, and totally beyond anything I'd be able to do in half a lifetime, probably!), and how she might present that to a Western audience.

Finally, we got to talking about the project at hand, the translation/book proposal I had come here to help her with. But here I must leave you for now, because I want to do put in some more work on it before I get too tired. I leave you with just this picture of me lounging around in the hotel room. Many more pictures and thoughts from this afternoon still to come in the next post.

I Go to East Lansing

Suddenly things came together for me to make a trip to East Lansing to meet with a professor I had known in Beijing. In general I am timid about arranging things, and deeply reluctant to disrupt my familiar routines. But suddenly I found myself taking the initiative, making all the arrangements, and hopping on an Amtrak, all within a 48 hour time frame. Sometimes you feel like the universe is pointing a finger at you and saying, Okay, now or never. Go to it!

I had given my final exam this morning, and left for the train straight from school (after a few hours of errand-running and general bustle). Here are some pictures I made out the train window. It was a dreary drizzly day, and got dark very early. Of course none of the pictures are entirely in focus, but there's always something wonderful about catching a tiny moment of landscape as it hurtles past.





It's like a story-book world. The photo quality isn't good, but somehow they seem to have more feeling and interest in them than photos of things that are still. No?

The hotel sent a little shuttle to come pick me up at the train station. The driver was very nice and told me things about MSU, such as that it is practically self-sufficient and like a town unto itself. I had forgotten that MSU is the gargantuan one! I hope things work out all right with meeting my professor tomorrow. Clearly there's no just "wandering over to the library" the way I had kind of envisioned. I mean I had downloaded a campus map. I just hadn't realized the scale...

Here is a picture of my little hotel room for Pocket of Bolts. It is not a very good picture, but I will try to take some more interesting ones tomorrow. It is a small room but comfortable. It has the feeling of being nice quality but spartan. I suppose that's appropriate given the mascot of MSU (the spartan, ha ha). There are two interesting things about it: it has a flat screen TV, and there is no bathtub. The shower is just a corner of the bathroom that has a drain in the floor, and divided off just by a curtain, not even by a glass wall. So everything in the bathroom is quite water-proof. But I'm not complaining. It's comfortable. The sheets are soft. There's a little desk and nice-smelling soap, and wireless of course.

I miss Pocket of Bolts! But aside from that, I am doing pretty well. My professor called me a while ago, and we arranged to meet here at 9 tomorrow, so I had better turn in. I didn't get much sleep last night, and I am quite weary!

But stay tuned for my further adventures.

Thanksgiving of Two Families

An Essay in Mostly Pictures

My parents' flight was canceled, and they had to be rerouted, and instead of having a relaxing afternoon with them and a pleasant dinner, I didn't get to see them until one in the morning, when they straggled in very weary and relieved to have arrived.

Pocket of Bolts' mom, however, arrived the next day and had no trouble with her flight. Here are the four of them bundled up to go out on our first night all together.

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We don't usually get the paper, but my dad likes reading it in the morning. As it turns out, Pocket of Bolts does too.

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The whole troupe came down to our school to see our offices and classrooms. Here is my mom and me at a restaurant I really like. Love this picture; wish it hadn't come out so blurry.

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Here is just a random picture of Pocket of Bolts looking very tall in our red living room. Mostly our high-ceilinged apartment makes us look dwarfish, but this must have been some funny trick of perspective. Doesn't he look jolly?

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We worked hard on this puzzle. It was a good ice-breaker. It was a thousand pieces, and depicted some kind of peaceable kingdom jungle scene in which the lion lay down with the lamb (but only the lion got a good night's sleep, as the saying goes). Pocket of Bolts and I found it particularly addictive. Mom and dad are old hands. PoB's mom didn't think she would enjoy it, but eventually she got into it too.

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It was a white Thanksgiving.

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In the middle of the day we all went for a walk down to the lake. The snow had mostly melted by then.

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Then we were tired. I crawled in under the futon on the floor (on which we'd been sleeping, having given all our beds to guests).

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Everyone else made themselves useful in the kitchen, and produced a magnificent feast. (I like how the picture of me standing next to the table makes me look like I was responsible for the feast! Actually, I hardly lifted a finger.)

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Pocket of Bolts' mom rolling up her sleeves to tackle the great mountain of dishes.

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The two moms sitting side by side, followed by my dad chatting with Pocket of Bolts' mom. Note that this was the first time our parents had met each other.

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My bro said this picture of me in my pjs made me look about fourteen. My Chinese friend said it made me look elegant and cultured. Different visual codes are so funny.

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Pocket of Bolts' mom left early on Friday morning. Also, it got cold and some water that had collected in our deck chairs froze, capturing a stray leaf.

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My parents stayed on, and while dad rested, mom and I went all over town trying on wedding dresses. One of the places we went was the Macy's bridal salon, which proved to be way too fancy for us. However, I did try on this dress which had an incredibly beautiful train. And also we saw the gorgeous ceiling of the old Marshall Fields building. We thought the Macy's very poorly laid out--bad signage, illogical arrangement. It was a frustrating place to get around in and I can see why Chicagoans are so resentful of its taking over from Marshall Fields.

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Well, that's my photo-essay on Thanksgiving. Sorry it is so belated! But the whole thing was grand and exhausting and came right before I had to start doing a lot of work for the end of the term... so I'm only now getting to it...