A very long entry, (almost) entirely about food.
I don't know why nothing except dinners and classes has happened to me since last Thursday. For the record, last week's film (the last of the quarter) was Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (or something similar), and like three of the five Yugoslav/post-Yugoslav movies I've seen, it kinda sucks. Tito i Ya is genuinely funny, No Man's Land is, as we say when the plot is horrifying enough to drown out any concerns for acting or what-have-you, powerful... but Dolly Bell and WR and the one about the switchboard operator are mostly nudity and crime and grungy intensity. Still, Yugoslav male leads are less agressively eyeshadowed-dinner-theater-Hamlet over-the-top than some Polish actors I've been exposed to. That's a lot of adjectives, but I'm not saying much. Communism did not have a uniformly improving effect on Eastern European cinema.
Nina was in town this weekend, visiting her old haunts and delaying her voyage home, where her mother sits like Shelob, hungry for facts and personal information. She stayed with someone whose couch is comfier than mine (and whose apartment is more centrally located), but we had dinner on Saturday and Sunday: both of them fun occasions deserving of description here. Also, between her suggestions and my Monday nights out with the Early Modern Europe crew, I am gaining restaurant knowledge, so if you come to visit we don't have to eat at Taco Bell.
Saturday we met in Greektown, or planned to; as it happened, we caught up with one another around Fullerton, and rode down together. It was early yet, so we walked around Michigan for a while (i.e. we bee-lined to a bookstore and admired the wares), and then re-trained and went down to Roditys. I had lamb with spinach, she had lamb with rosamarina, and we had a conversation that probably horrified anyone who could hear us. Which is to say, Nina mentioned her life, which involves a large amount of dissection and (at that point) PG-13 content. But we were holed up in a corner, and I doubt anyone noticed. I had never been to Greektown (or anywhere on the Blue Line south of the Loop), but now I have. So there.
Incidentally, on the train down (before getting off to catch up with Nina) two older women were talking about musical theater; evidently they are music teachers or some such. I noticed them both for their unusual conversation and for one's extremely inappropriate hair. I suspect they were both 40-50, and the brunette looked like a perfectly trim and composed adult. The (yellow) blonde, however, had bangs and longish hair that was piled rather elaborately on her head and secured with little sparkly clips. No, my friends. It is too late. At any rate, they were both somehow on my return train, too; I saw the hair first (in the reflection) and then they started talking about musicals again. Eventually I think they recognized me, too, but I couldn't prove that. The brunette had somehow never heard of The Who's "Tommy" and while the other woman's explanation wasn't exactly thorough, I'm still surprised it didn't trigger any memories. Surely most people my age have heard of "RENT", whether they've seen it or not. Also, in an e-mail quiz Virginia once claimed that the song that makes her think of me is "Pinball Wizard," which is ridiculous but right on topic at this moment.
Sunday we arranged to meet in Chinatown at 7. Chinatown is south of the Loop, and when my mind considers that, it immediately budgets two hours of travel time. Of course, as Nina pointed out later, Chinatown is exactly one stop below the Loop, so I arrived about 5:50. I did what anyone would do (well, no): walk up and down the main street, because it was a balmy 53 degrees out, and then sit on a bench and call Virginia. We talked about the life-threatening incidents plaguing her turnaround efforts (upshot: very heavy objects nearly falling on trapped people) and how grateful she is to be waking up at 4:30 and crawling around in a crowded reactor tube, because at least she isn't working on her much-reviled Masters. I admire that.
Then Nina and I hit Triple Crown, where we filled the role of token white people (although there were plenty of Asian-looking English speakers) and ate soup made of fish guts, and tofu and scallops and so on. Shrimp balls - big wads of shrimp coated in rice noodles and deep-fried - are exactly as good as you think they are. Moreover, Nina outdid herself with a truly R-rated conversation (epic battle scenes, etc.) that had me looking somewhat askance at neighboring tables. But all was well, because afterwards we went to a bakery. I have to recommend Chinatown bakeries to everyone, right here, right now, because I have never gotten anything less than awesome, no matter how little concept I had of what I was buying. This time the big winners were coconut sweet tops and walnut and bean paste bars, which are essentially Chinese newtons. Anyway, it raised the question of why we had bothered eating dinner.
Two bakery runs later (Nina wanted gift-pastries for her hostess, and also some pork balls for herself), we opted to grab all our grub and stroll, because, you know, great weather. The cool thing about friends is if you've got 'em, it's okay to walk around Chicago at night; as everyone knows, no criminal in his right mind would attack me and my most diminutive friend. We sat under the Lincoln statue in (go figure) Lincoln Park and ate more pastries, and then walked... around. I'd have to do it again before I could really integrate it with known geography, but the basic idea was that we walked up Lincoln from the park to Fullerton, and then embarked on our respective trains.
All was well for me until I got to Howard (the transfer from Red to Purple) circa 12:30. There were plenty of other people there (including station workers; I got to watch them disconnect some cars, which was cool), so no worries, exactly, but I somehow became the target of a random train-sleeper's interest. I was leaning against a pillar, as one does, and he began shouting (not yelling) excerpts from a disjointed story about driving a double-cab Isuzu pickup truck (his brother's?) from the Mississippi Delta up to Memphis "seventyfiveeighty ninety milesanhour",1 passing some white boys in their own identical truck, etc. Needless to say I was avoiding eye contact to a strenuous degree, and actually he delivered most of his speech standing behind me. Eventually another Red train pulled in, and being rather discombobulated (to say the least) he got on it (end of the Red line, remember) and tried to go back to sleep. Being rather immediately re-rousted by the station workers put him in an angrier mood, but hey. Other people. I admit to walking past him to get deliberately onto another car, and to being rather distressed when I saw him walking past my window, shouting something that seemed (inside the train, and to my disturbed mind) to be, "Where's the girl?" He didn't get on, though, and at 12:58 I was home, pastries and extra fish-gut soup and such in hand.
Then it was this morning. Last week's China class was rescheduled, first from Wednesday to Thursday, and then from Thursday to today, for a combination of reasons involving Elise's pneumonia and some late-rising conflict on Carroll's part, which presumably was the reason he showed up Thursday (before we voted to adjourn) looking like a stubbly, cadaverous version of himself. So we met today at noon, and things went well enough. I find that no matter who responds first (Elise or I), he always seems to expect me to speak last. And yet I can't abandon volunteering sometimes, because that would mean long pauses and generally looking like a slacker. I wind up talking quite a bit, or so it feels. Also, Skrmetti, I have pinpointed the issue: all young China scholars have mind-bogglingly flamboyant taste in shirts. I'm curious if any other disciplines are this metrosexual/gay. Wednesday will be our last meeting, and that class has no final paper. w00t!
EME was at three, as always. I stopped in the reference department to read the day's book review, and on my way out ran into Brit, who was one of the presenters on the main book, Shapin's A Social History of Truth (which I enjoyed). She looked a bit stressed, and I admit I felt a great deal better about myself and things in general when I was able to leave her smiling. Her presentation went well, and I spoke perhaps twice, which is a record. Not enough to spare me from a B for poor participation, but the point is I had something to say, which is not always the case. Alas, Darcy, Jane, and Shannon had to leave early to attend a lecture, and therefore missed out on our final dinner of the quarter.
We went to Mt. Everest for Nepalese, and ate naan and lamb curry and vegetable things and generally had fun. Two notes: first, Lonnie comes with us sometimes, and often his wife and baby daughter join him. Tonight before calling them he expressed concern that his wife wouldn't be able to find anything to eat, and when Brit & co. looked surprised, he said she's a very picky eater. "Wow, I would never have guessed," said someone, and heads were nodded. I don't know if that was a polite social fiction or what, but come on. I could have told you that the first time I met her! She is not a mean person, but she is obviously and incredibly finicky. I'm sure the exclamation points seem like overkill; however when you're as socially unaware as I am, and then your (presumably more adept) peers make a mistake of that magnitude... maybe I'm on an entirely different frequency. The one where it's obvious who always interrogates the waiter and expresses multiple reservations before ordering. Weird.
Two: Erin-Marie was persuaded (various people knew various elements of the story, and coaxed her into telling us all the whole thing) to share a story about her ex-boyfriend, who called her recently in a panic that he had gotten his current girlfriend pregnant. Not that Erin-Marie probably needed to know that. Point being, said couple has never had sex. Have they engaged in activities which ill-informed middle-schoolers might believe could lead to pregnancy? Yes, evidently. But as he holds a PhD, I believe we can conclude he is not a middle-school student at all. Of course she was not pregnant. But just last week he called again, same problem! I suggested that from now on he do all his making out with a Hefty bag cinched around his neck, just to be sure.
So I have one last book to read for China, and 1-1/2 reviews to write. Then I need to assemble an essay for EME by next Tuesday, read a book for last quarter's JH course so that I can rewrite that paper to not suck (it's a short book, mercifully), and probably return a whole lot of library books to their respective homes. On Wednesday EM and I are meeting with Yohanan to try to arrange a reading class for next quarter, on 19th-century Russia (her minor); I hope I can work a bunch of useful 570 books onto the syllabus, thereby forcing myself to read them and reducing my overall workload. And I see from hotmail that my psuedo-advisor is back in-country, and presumably wants to talk to me about said project. Funny how I always want/need help on big projects like this, and yet it is always already too late to ask for it openly. What I can do is force myself to rush for the smaller deadlines of intermittent meetings, rather than the final one; for now, that's close enough to incremental progress to satisfy me.
1. Nina: I just realized I now have my very own "I gotta boat goes ninety miles an hour" story. I am a Spartan!
Nina was in town this weekend, visiting her old haunts and delaying her voyage home, where her mother sits like Shelob, hungry for facts and personal information. She stayed with someone whose couch is comfier than mine (and whose apartment is more centrally located), but we had dinner on Saturday and Sunday: both of them fun occasions deserving of description here. Also, between her suggestions and my Monday nights out with the Early Modern Europe crew, I am gaining restaurant knowledge, so if you come to visit we don't have to eat at Taco Bell.
Saturday we met in Greektown, or planned to; as it happened, we caught up with one another around Fullerton, and rode down together. It was early yet, so we walked around Michigan for a while (i.e. we bee-lined to a bookstore and admired the wares), and then re-trained and went down to Roditys. I had lamb with spinach, she had lamb with rosamarina, and we had a conversation that probably horrified anyone who could hear us. Which is to say, Nina mentioned her life, which involves a large amount of dissection and (at that point) PG-13 content. But we were holed up in a corner, and I doubt anyone noticed. I had never been to Greektown (or anywhere on the Blue Line south of the Loop), but now I have. So there.
Incidentally, on the train down (before getting off to catch up with Nina) two older women were talking about musical theater; evidently they are music teachers or some such. I noticed them both for their unusual conversation and for one's extremely inappropriate hair. I suspect they were both 40-50, and the brunette looked like a perfectly trim and composed adult. The (yellow) blonde, however, had bangs and longish hair that was piled rather elaborately on her head and secured with little sparkly clips. No, my friends. It is too late. At any rate, they were both somehow on my return train, too; I saw the hair first (in the reflection) and then they started talking about musicals again. Eventually I think they recognized me, too, but I couldn't prove that. The brunette had somehow never heard of The Who's "Tommy" and while the other woman's explanation wasn't exactly thorough, I'm still surprised it didn't trigger any memories. Surely most people my age have heard of "RENT", whether they've seen it or not. Also, in an e-mail quiz Virginia once claimed that the song that makes her think of me is "Pinball Wizard," which is ridiculous but right on topic at this moment.
Sunday we arranged to meet in Chinatown at 7. Chinatown is south of the Loop, and when my mind considers that, it immediately budgets two hours of travel time. Of course, as Nina pointed out later, Chinatown is exactly one stop below the Loop, so I arrived about 5:50. I did what anyone would do (well, no): walk up and down the main street, because it was a balmy 53 degrees out, and then sit on a bench and call Virginia. We talked about the life-threatening incidents plaguing her turnaround efforts (upshot: very heavy objects nearly falling on trapped people) and how grateful she is to be waking up at 4:30 and crawling around in a crowded reactor tube, because at least she isn't working on her much-reviled Masters. I admire that.
Then Nina and I hit Triple Crown, where we filled the role of token white people (although there were plenty of Asian-looking English speakers) and ate soup made of fish guts, and tofu and scallops and so on. Shrimp balls - big wads of shrimp coated in rice noodles and deep-fried - are exactly as good as you think they are. Moreover, Nina outdid herself with a truly R-rated conversation (epic battle scenes, etc.) that had me looking somewhat askance at neighboring tables. But all was well, because afterwards we went to a bakery. I have to recommend Chinatown bakeries to everyone, right here, right now, because I have never gotten anything less than awesome, no matter how little concept I had of what I was buying. This time the big winners were coconut sweet tops and walnut and bean paste bars, which are essentially Chinese newtons. Anyway, it raised the question of why we had bothered eating dinner.
Two bakery runs later (Nina wanted gift-pastries for her hostess, and also some pork balls for herself), we opted to grab all our grub and stroll, because, you know, great weather. The cool thing about friends is if you've got 'em, it's okay to walk around Chicago at night; as everyone knows, no criminal in his right mind would attack me and my most diminutive friend. We sat under the Lincoln statue in (go figure) Lincoln Park and ate more pastries, and then walked... around. I'd have to do it again before I could really integrate it with known geography, but the basic idea was that we walked up Lincoln from the park to Fullerton, and then embarked on our respective trains.
All was well for me until I got to Howard (the transfer from Red to Purple) circa 12:30. There were plenty of other people there (including station workers; I got to watch them disconnect some cars, which was cool), so no worries, exactly, but I somehow became the target of a random train-sleeper's interest. I was leaning against a pillar, as one does, and he began shouting (not yelling) excerpts from a disjointed story about driving a double-cab Isuzu pickup truck (his brother's?) from the Mississippi Delta up to Memphis "seventyfiveeighty ninety milesanhour",1 passing some white boys in their own identical truck, etc. Needless to say I was avoiding eye contact to a strenuous degree, and actually he delivered most of his speech standing behind me. Eventually another Red train pulled in, and being rather discombobulated (to say the least) he got on it (end of the Red line, remember) and tried to go back to sleep. Being rather immediately re-rousted by the station workers put him in an angrier mood, but hey. Other people. I admit to walking past him to get deliberately onto another car, and to being rather distressed when I saw him walking past my window, shouting something that seemed (inside the train, and to my disturbed mind) to be, "Where's the girl?" He didn't get on, though, and at 12:58 I was home, pastries and extra fish-gut soup and such in hand.
Then it was this morning. Last week's China class was rescheduled, first from Wednesday to Thursday, and then from Thursday to today, for a combination of reasons involving Elise's pneumonia and some late-rising conflict on Carroll's part, which presumably was the reason he showed up Thursday (before we voted to adjourn) looking like a stubbly, cadaverous version of himself. So we met today at noon, and things went well enough. I find that no matter who responds first (Elise or I), he always seems to expect me to speak last. And yet I can't abandon volunteering sometimes, because that would mean long pauses and generally looking like a slacker. I wind up talking quite a bit, or so it feels. Also, Skrmetti, I have pinpointed the issue: all young China scholars have mind-bogglingly flamboyant taste in shirts. I'm curious if any other disciplines are this metrosexual/gay. Wednesday will be our last meeting, and that class has no final paper. w00t!
EME was at three, as always. I stopped in the reference department to read the day's book review, and on my way out ran into Brit, who was one of the presenters on the main book, Shapin's A Social History of Truth (which I enjoyed). She looked a bit stressed, and I admit I felt a great deal better about myself and things in general when I was able to leave her smiling. Her presentation went well, and I spoke perhaps twice, which is a record. Not enough to spare me from a B for poor participation, but the point is I had something to say, which is not always the case. Alas, Darcy, Jane, and Shannon had to leave early to attend a lecture, and therefore missed out on our final dinner of the quarter.
We went to Mt. Everest for Nepalese, and ate naan and lamb curry and vegetable things and generally had fun. Two notes: first, Lonnie comes with us sometimes, and often his wife and baby daughter join him. Tonight before calling them he expressed concern that his wife wouldn't be able to find anything to eat, and when Brit & co. looked surprised, he said she's a very picky eater. "Wow, I would never have guessed," said someone, and heads were nodded. I don't know if that was a polite social fiction or what, but come on. I could have told you that the first time I met her! She is not a mean person, but she is obviously and incredibly finicky. I'm sure the exclamation points seem like overkill; however when you're as socially unaware as I am, and then your (presumably more adept) peers make a mistake of that magnitude... maybe I'm on an entirely different frequency. The one where it's obvious who always interrogates the waiter and expresses multiple reservations before ordering. Weird.
Two: Erin-Marie was persuaded (various people knew various elements of the story, and coaxed her into telling us all the whole thing) to share a story about her ex-boyfriend, who called her recently in a panic that he had gotten his current girlfriend pregnant. Not that Erin-Marie probably needed to know that. Point being, said couple has never had sex. Have they engaged in activities which ill-informed middle-schoolers might believe could lead to pregnancy? Yes, evidently. But as he holds a PhD, I believe we can conclude he is not a middle-school student at all. Of course she was not pregnant. But just last week he called again, same problem! I suggested that from now on he do all his making out with a Hefty bag cinched around his neck, just to be sure.
So I have one last book to read for China, and 1-1/2 reviews to write. Then I need to assemble an essay for EME by next Tuesday, read a book for last quarter's JH course so that I can rewrite that paper to not suck (it's a short book, mercifully), and probably return a whole lot of library books to their respective homes. On Wednesday EM and I are meeting with Yohanan to try to arrange a reading class for next quarter, on 19th-century Russia (her minor); I hope I can work a bunch of useful 570 books onto the syllabus, thereby forcing myself to read them and reducing my overall workload. And I see from hotmail that my psuedo-advisor is back in-country, and presumably wants to talk to me about said project. Funny how I always want/need help on big projects like this, and yet it is always already too late to ask for it openly. What I can do is force myself to rush for the smaller deadlines of intermittent meetings, rather than the final one; for now, that's close enough to incremental progress to satisfy me.
1. Nina: I just realized I now have my very own "I gotta boat goes ninety miles an hour" story. I am a Spartan!