Living deliberately

My neighbor had me over for coffee this morning, which was just so lovely. She's a really interesting, creative, generous person, a gardener and a baker, who thinks deeply about things and does lots of engaging activities, and is always a source of joy and light in my world. A recent retiree from Ford, she has a really different set of experiences from me, but a similar world view in many ways, and it's fascinating to talk with her. We talked about singing, about death and loss, about her involvement in the threshold choir, about the nature of leadership, and most of all about the inauguration. We shared pannetone and her homebaked ginger and coconut cookies over the coffee and I played with her cats. I could see this being a wonderful regular Friday occurrence when I'm hiding out in the cottage reading about Native American and Aboriginal Australian child policy for my social work prelims.

I have a new toy, which I love. I was inspired when I saw that my favorite aesthetician in Ann Arbor believed in it. Wow. My face has never before felt so soft and clean.

It continues to snow and snow. The icicles are giant out here.

I haven't the slightest idea how I can catch up, I am so behind from being away for a week so early in the semester. I guess I'll buckle down this weekend and see what I can do.

I just harvested all my remaining basil leaves from the plants in the garden and made a whole huge thing of pesto, a slight variation on this recipe. My house smells completely amazing.

I also have huge pots with my pineapple sage and lemon verbena, and also a little pot of cinnamon basil that I've just rescued from the garden in anticipation of our first freeze of the year.

I did some internet research on winterizing the herb garden and hope that I've prepared adequately with layers of cloth over many -- though not all -- of the plants. I'll see tomorrow how everything looks. Perhaps I should have clipped all the parsley too, but I'm hoping that a couple layers of cloth will be sufficient for the night.

I have discovered a couple quite nice low-sulfite wines they sell at Trader Joes now for under $6. Which is pretty awesome for someone with a sulfite sensitivity, because up until recently, the only drinkable bottles were $11-13, which meant that I didn't drink much wine. But tonight I brought a bottle over to my friend A.'s house after teaching and taking care of a few quick items of business at the university, and we visited for a bit, drank some wine, and ate some cheese before I came back to my cottage. We might make it a Friday routine. :)

Good news to report, I've been very productive in my work recently, and I'm finally getting back to being on top of things. After a very difficult year, that's a huge relief. Now I just need to get a handle on my dissertation project and get some grants written convincingly enough to get support for my research abroad . . . no small feat. (fingers crossed)

Fall has settled in here in Michigan, and it's stunningly beautiful. The air is crisp and fresh, and when the sun is shining it's glorious to be alive, with the leaves turning and the foliage thinning just enough to give an even more spectacular view of the river when you drive Huron River Drive. I transplanted most of the zinnias in my garden so I now have a charming and cheerful pathway lined with pink blooms and a profusion of mint that leads to my cottage. I ate the most tart, crisp, delicious local apple this morning while I took a break from gardening.

Somehow I don't even mind I have almost 30 papers to grade. It's nice that they're about literature . . . it's a welcome change to be thinking about Pushkin and Lermentov for a semester.

Today, I taught about the history of European colonialism in Africa to two African-American freshman athletes, taught about the nature of Athabaskan, American, and Nepali notions of reciprocity through a discussion of Velma Wallis's book Two Old Women with a group of Korean and Korean-American eleven- and twelve-year-olds, and searched the archives of a Pakistani newspaper for urban development articles in the early 1950s.

I got completely drenched in the rain cycling back and forth on my way to tutoring, and managed to get through the course by changing into my "Consent is Sexy" t-shirt I happened to have hiding in my pickup truck, which looks, without question, like there is a hobo living in it. Luckily I also had my wonderful kelly-green University of Bemidji hooded sweatshirt to wear over it so I didn't scandalize the poor kids.

Riding back home along Huron River Drive tonight, under the cool, green canopy of trees, I saw two pairs of deer and a muskrat or river otter (I was going too fast to tell for sure).

I had a simple supper of tomato soup, lush salad with walnuts, blue cheese, dried cherries and balsamic vinegarette on baby greens, and rotisserie Amish chicken, and then amused myself while reading my email afterwards with the knowledge that 9/10 of the secret anti-aging foods Martha Stewart recommends are things I eat nearly daily.

There's no doubt that this life, however crazy it is, is a full one.

Planting, Ranting

So, I've done a bunch of work in my garden that I can't wait to tell you about, even though the photos won't really do it justice until tomorrow. I was feeling headachey this afternoon and didn't feel like sleeping yet, so I went to the garden to work instead. I spent hours out there!

This first one, though blurry, gives the nicest sense of the color of the new plants, lovely bright native plants I found by the roadside and transplanted to this spot across the way, which up until yesterday was a mess of buckthorn plantain (Plantago lanceolata), crabgrass and other weeds.

Now, though, it's got butterfly weed, wild phlox (I think that's what that pink one is), black-eyed susan, echinacea (in the back toward the top, not blooming yet), lilies (some orange variety), and a variety of succulents I haven't identified. I also planted seeds for lupines and from some kind of deep bluish/purplish flowering plant Umlud and I came upon on a walk in one of the Ann Arbor parks, in the area between the echinacea and the other plants. We'll see what the mystery plant is eventually if the seeds take. Perhaps Caryopteris? I do love a good mystery.

I've been painstakingly transplanting the lilies from farther back on the garden plot, beneath a lilac tree, in an area so overrun with mosquitoes, it's impossible to be back there to enjoy them. They're not happy with the transition at this point, but I think I'll have beautiful blooms next year, once they've had a chance to settle into their new locale.

The succulents have been growing down my neighbor's rock garden on the other side, and creeping into the bed beneath, so I'm transplanting them from there and from where it's taking over chunks of the lawn. There are three different kinds, apart from the purslane (more on that below!)

I also planted morning glory along the chain-link fence a few days ago, along with sweet-pea. If I have my way, the whole place will be exploding with blooms pretty soon, and the exposed metal fence will be a distant memory. I already see the morning glory rising out of the earth and spreading its leaves like little green angel wings. Tomorrow I'll get some more shots of them, and the amazingly quickly growing zucchini plants, and the sweet-peas that are starting to pop up on the other side of the garden.

Below, with the terrible lighting of my camera flash, you can see the pattern of the rock garden with succulents that I've started, dangerously into the territory of the 40-foot area zoned for our subdivision's road, but probably safe unless two cars meet on our gravel road and are in too much of a hurry to take care. There's a margin of at least a couple feet between where the actually used road ends and the little rocks & plants start. But, folks around here in the country have a tendency to drive onto the edge of the lawn without a great deal of concern, when there's not room for the two SUVs on the small gravel roads. One of the oddities of this part of the country. Anyhoo, below, that's what I've got on the side.

And below, this is what I've done in the upper area, leading toward the chain-link fence.

Unfortunately that little wooden retaining wall is coming apart; I'll have to mention that to my landlords and see if they want to do anything about it. It's not holding back a lot of soil, so they may not be too concerned.

And, I've been doing a lot of thinking about weeds and weeding. So I wrote a dogmatic little piece tonight.

I have questions, I have answers.

What would I do without the internet? It's such an integral part of my life. I have so many questions. It has so many answers. Like this morning, in the midst of my preparations for a 3-week cleanse and my course planning for my tutoring job (one of the 4 jobs I've got now), my curiosity and work bring me these directions:

How do I make Turkish coffee? Why, by boiling water in an ibrik and following these simple directions, naturally. (Coffee with cardamom and a little brown sugar is so much nicer than plain when you're drinking it without any cream or milk, and I prefer to keep the spices out of my Moka [where I usually make my coffee] to avoid always having to drink flavored coffee.)*

What are The Chronicles of Prydain about, and would it be appropriate reading for my challenging literature & ESL class of 11-year-old Korean girls, once we've finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone? Hmm. Maybe, maybe not.

How can I teach that same class about the Vietnam War in a way they'll understand and get something out of it? They had many questions about it as I tried to explain "hippies" and the context for The Bridge to Terabithia. I'm sure Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried would be too sexually sophisticated, Michael Herr's Dispatches too full of vulgarities for this group, who titter at the word "damn" or the word "sex," even in the sense of the distinction between male and female. Yet they're SO BORED by almost everything I bring in, except Harry Potter. I came upon this wonderful article by Peter Filene from 1999 about teaching Vietnam to children of Vietnam war vets & protestors (unfortunately, available in full only through institutional access through JSTOR). But for 11-year-old girls raised with a foot in Korea and a foot in the United States, Filene's observation that for his students, "the war has very different meanings: it is both further away and closer" is true in rather a different sense. Maybe I can take a look at Wanda Miller's book, Teaching U.S. History Through Children's Literature: Post-World War II (Through Children's Literature) to find some more ideas. And maybe the book Teaching U.S. history as mystery by David Gerwin and Jack Zevin may help, too, since it sounds good and sounds like it's got a case-study on Vietnam. Of course, since I'm not paid for prep and this is far from being my primary job, the question remains too exactly how much I can put into this . . .

Could I teach Hesse's The Journey to the East to my group of soon-to-be 6th graders? Am I reaching too far in wanting to teach them Hesse and Thoreau in my anthropologically driven English literature course on nature and survival narratives? (So far we've read Jack London's "To Build a Fire", Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat", and Athabaskan (Alaska native) writer Velma Wallis's Two Old Women, and next up is Jon Krakauer's article "Death of an Innocent" [a shorter version of the story on which his book, and the recently released film "Into the Wild" is based] Maori writer Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider.)

Would a nectarine tree grow in my yard? Hmm, probably not to be hardy or fruiting from a stone of fruit from COSTCO grown who-knows-where. If I spent a bit on a tree, a special cultivar called "Flamin' Fury", probably so.

What should I do with my cabbage from the Howell farmer's market? Why, make raw sauerkraut and linguine with sauteed bacon, onion, cabbage, coarse sea salt, fresh-ground pepper and nutmeg, and garden-fresh tarragon and thyme, inspired by Katrina of Daily Unadventures in Cooking, of course. This is cheating a bit, because I actually found these recipes in the past and have been meaning to make them for some time. Now if only I had a 50-gallon barrel for sauerkraut, instead of the modest brown ceramic crock I found at a garage sale and bought for this purpose (but instead have been using for a year to hold my alliums and potatoes)!

Just when am I going to stop playing and start working on my archaeology paper? Oops, that's one the internet can't answer for me. Perhaps I should go explore the question off-line.

*By the way, though, that recipe above doesn't call for NEARLY enough coffee. Very weak for a Turkish coffee, and I don't think there was even a full cup of water in my pot, since my ibrik is very small, like this one. I think THIS RECIPE looks better; I'm going to try it now, since the food coma is setting in since I ate all the pasta. Mmmm. What a lovely lazy day at home.

Dancer in the Dark

Oh, the summer storms. There are some oak trees that have been ripped right out of the ground in some spots around the area. My power was still out when I went home yesterday, so we emptied my fridge of any perishables, did a little tidying, and collected some things so I could spend a few days away from home. Oh, bother.

Many local folks don't seem to know that you can look at a frequently updated map of the Detroit Edison power company service area that gives information about the extent of the power outages in your particular zip code. It doesn't give address by address information, although you can check the status of a previously reported power problem through their "Storm Center" on their website. But the map does at least give you some information, about whether there is an outage problem or not. They update it every half hour.

What I really wanted to do (since I can't book the next flight to Cali to be with my family) was hide out at home, clean my house, work in my garden, do a little swimming, and work on my archaeology paper. But we're going to hit some barbecues this afternoon, to celebrate our status as, in the words of the wonderful Miki, "the greatest democracy in the world." Luckily my friends have a sense of irony; drinking the afternoon away at a "4th of July Proud To Be An American Imperialist BBQ and Slip and Slide Party" sounds like something I can handle, I guess.

Well, Umlud and I are off for a bike ride around A2.

Grad student life in Michigan -- the highs, the lows.

There's a new yoga studio in the area. I was excited to see that, because up until then the only one I knew of around Livingston County was Yoga Center for Healthy Living in Brighton, which is a bit on the pricey side. Unfortunately, this new one in Pinckney doesn't offer that many classes, and no morning yoga. Boo.

Why isn't there full cooperation from the rest of the world for my dream life of weekend days of sun, yoga class and farmer's market in the morning followed by a smoothie and coffee while catching up on the news, whole grain baking and organic gardening, a little reading and writing, a little country bike ride, and a swim at sunset?

I did pretty well in realizing my vision today, though -- I biked in the snippet of sun after our downpour this morning, came home and made a blueberry/strawberry/nonfat milk/Vanilla protein smoothie and some coffee & milk, took care of a little personal business, and made another new version of quick rye bread, this time including buckwheat and quinoa flour, sesame and sunflower seeds, to complement the rye & molasses. I'll let you know how it turns out . . . it sure smells good in the oven, though. :)

The mosquitoes are really bumming me out -- I'd like to go back to the garden and do some more work, and I think I'll brave them anyway. But even covered from head to toe and hovering close to two citronella candles, I get divebombed without a mosquito net covering my face. And I don't have a mosquito net, unfortunately. I'm resisting DEET products, though I did order some Avon Skin-so-soft bug spray to see if that does the trick. Gwen's suggestion of vanilla was clever, but it didn't work for me, nor did citronella essential oil. I've been so itchy the past few days, I can hardly fathom exposing myself to more bites right now. . . never mind the diseases they can carry . . .

I'm thinking now about the rest of my day. Some house cleaning, I think, a closet reorganization operation, a bit of gardening, some work on an archaeology paper, and maybe a house party and some visiting with friends this evening. That is, if I get paid on Monday. I need to drive to Detroit first thing in the morning for a job interview, and my gas tank is (as usual, lately) running low, along with my bank account. If I can't buy gas on Monday morning, I actually can't afford to go anywhere at all between now and then. Oh, if only I could afford to buy a more fuel-efficient car. If only housing were more affordable in Ann Arbor. If only gas prices weren't so damned high.

I have several jobs potentially in the works, a few hours here, a few hours there. Three tutoring gigs, a research assistantship, and a research analyst position. (I've applied for others, but some didn't come through, and I gave up on the baking job when I heard that fifteen people had interviewed for that one full-time minimum wage position starting work at 5 am.) It's so confusing I've created a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. But if I get one or both of the ones I'm really hoping for, I'll be doing fine for the rest of the summer. Otherwise, I'm just going to have to turn to prostitution to fill in the gaps between tutoring gigs so I can make rent for August and September, until I start my next GSI position at U of M, and get my first paycheck at the very end of September. Just kidding. Mostly.

Oh! My bread is ready, and I'm already devouring it with ripe avocado. MMMMMmmmm.

Baking details HERE in the Kitchen Empress.

Garden mysteries on early lakeside morning

An early-morning shot of my new herb garden. More to come in evening, in brighter light, with a virtual tour of the varieties of herbs.

The benefits of waking up early are so numerous. Here it is, 10:40, and I've listened to BBC world service streaming for two hours, having already finished planting the mint borders in my garden, transplanted the oregano/marjoram (I still can't tell the difference) and thyme, prepared more than a quart of yogurt (which will incubate and be ready this afternoon), and put another big loaf of quick rye bread into the oven.

Yogurt, so very easy. Just heat the milk, cool it a bit, add a hint of yogurt culture, and cultivate it in containers.

The bread is also a breeze.


Here, a couple shots of the mint I've been planting as a border to the path to the cottage. I've been irritated by the ugly black PVC dividing the sod from the path since I moved in, so my concept is finally to cover it with mint. I hope the walkway will be a lot more attractive as it inevitably fills in.

. . . So now I am puzzling over one plant in my garden. It looks like it could be a variety of thyme, because the placement of the leaves, the color, and the stem formation look very much like thyme. But it doesn't taste like thyme, from the tiny bit I tasted, and the tiny, thin needles don't look much like the leaves of most thyme plants I know.

It also grows in a pattern that is unlike other types of thyme I know -- it grows a bit like a groundcover, very close to the ground, and spreading outward from its central root.

Anyone familiar with it? I'm wondering if it might be summer savory. Or, it may just be a big, hardy weed.

Summer on the lake. . .

A strange summer thus far. I'm trying to settle into it a bit more, now that my GSIship in Slavic has ended for the spring term. And, so, I'm madly looking for work, because I won't get another paycheck from U of M until the end of September. Rent still has to be paid, food still has to be purchased . . . It's a little scary, really. If I'd gone abroad this summer, I would have been able to get some funding from the university to support the research. But nobody ever wants you to include your expenses in Michigan in your budget, so where the money for rent ($850/month), cable internet/TV/phone ($70/month), car insurance ($40) and inevitable small utility bills, are supposed to come from remains mysterious.

I'm opting instead to stay in town to rest and work on some old papers, since I have some incomplete work leftover from past semesters when I felt pressured into taking on 5-7 classes at a time, knowing that it would be unworkable. But the financial situation isn't really any saner being in town.

Entertainment has to be the free or nearly free kind. And I'm trying to limit my trips back and forth from Ann Arbor, too, since the cost of gas has gotten so bloody high. I've been hanging out a lot with a friend in town, baking quite a bit, and watching lots of streaming internet TV (Bones is my new obsession, thanks to Ms Scrumptious.) Now that the water has warmed up, I'm about ready to start swimming the lake. Umlud was also kind enough to pump up my bike tires, and I'm also ready to take it out for a spin now and see if the rust on the gears is bad enough to need professional work, or if I can ride it as-is, so I can hit the road on the nice easy bike trails around here. And, hoping to generate some produce at the end of the summer and enjoy some flowers and herbs in the meantime, I am finally planting the lovely selection of perennials and herbs I got at the farm stand the other day. Gardening should be a fun diversion in the evenings, if I can find a way to keep the mosquitos at bay.

(A bit later. . .) My muscles are comfortably sore from hours of hard work today. I have effectively planted all the flowers and herbs; now it's just time to find space for the vegetables tomorrow. I opted to move my herb garden to the space right in front of the cottage instead of the plot across the way, since the hose isn't really long enough to comfortably water over there, and I get to enjoy the plants more when they're right outside my windows. Also, after my previous "gardener" debacle, I feel protective of my plants, and I feel irrationally that having them closer to the house will make them more likely to be preserved by the folks who come to work on the lawn.

The more demanding work, more than planting the new plants, was transplanting some of the old ones. I uprooted a sage plant and two hardy tarragon plants (straggly though they may look from being weedwacked by the supposedly more competent gardener) and brought them over to the other side. The hardest part, though, was my work to bring over the mint. I'm planting it all along the border of the path to the cottage, so that it will grow to fill in and mask the ugly black plastic piping along the sod line, as well as the artificial fibers of the fabric beneath the path itself. I'll finish up the job and show photos tomorrow! I plan to move my marjoram and thyme also, so I'll have the raised beds exclusively for veggies.

I'm going to do some internet research to find out if there are any deer- and rabbit-resistant plants I could plant around my herb garden, especially the parsley and cilantro, so I can keep them for my own harvesting. :)

Today turned out to be a beautiful day, with morning meditation after a bit of coffee, hours of gardening, and a successful job interview for a tutoring gig in Ann Arbor. I talked to my Mom on the phone, saw a stunning sunset over the lake, and had a coffee date with Umlud. Tomorrow I have two more job interviews, for another tutoring job and a full-time baker position. And more fun in the garden!

Canadian Goslings on Huron River Drive

There's a family of Canadian geese who've made their home beside Huron River Drive in Ann Arbor, and I get all giddy every time I drive by the little goslings, in all their cuteness. This drive-by cell phone camera photo doesn't really do them justice, but you get the idea.

Umlud initiated me into the delights of Sunday brunch at the Aut bar today. An outdoor patio space so peaceful and lovely with the dappled sunlight under green trees and the sounds of Billie Holiday crooning, I was reminded of lazy Sundays in Budapest. Lots of really darling kids out with their families, in honor of Father's Day. I was grinning despite my intense dislike of the holiday.

Ms Scrumptious has gone home after a delightful almost-week-long visit to Michigan. I always like the quiet self-collected feeling I have after time with a dear old friend. And though it's been rather a rough couple weeks, I mostly have great memories of the time, with my guardian angels K & J keeping me company out at the cottage last weekend, and Alice woven in here and there amidst her prelim craziness.

A lingering legacy of L's visit is a minor obsession with Bones, even despite its terrible science, and a delight in seeing an anthropologist depicted on TV. I wish season 2 were on Hulu, because the low quality of Surf the Channel and the Chinese subtitles there interfere with my viewing pleasure, and they only have the first season on DVD at the video store here. No hope for the library on this one, and it's not worth it to me to start up Netflix again just for this.

I bought lovely herbs, veggies, and perennials this afternoon at the Alexander Farm Market on Whitmore Lake Road, which I'll plant tomorrow after I finish this round of grading for the Central European cinema course. I'll take more photos and identify everything when I do. Below, though, you can spy some salvia, beans, and German chamomile.


It's positively beautiful weather out here, 80 degrees and no humidity, and the intermittent thunderstorms have been keeping the dust down. Stunning. I hope it's like this all summer. It's just about time to start swimming in the lake again, finally.


As I was getting back home today, the son of the older couple next door was clearing some dead needles out of the pine tree in their yard and the ladder broke a foot underneath him. The whole family was out there around him, and several other neighbors were out. We saw him fall almost as if in slow motion. Luckily it wasn't so far, and it was onto a relatively soft patch of grass. Nonetheless I'm concerned . . . They've been visiting all afternoon, though, so I guess he must be all right.

I feel a sense of accomplishment from having finally taken care of a little personal business and, especially, for having tackled the puzzling task of setting up my computer to sync with my Palm Treo 650. Vista doesn't seem to like the device very much, but I managed to get it to work with Bluetooth. Hooray! Now, if only Virgin Mobile or Tracfone would allow the SIM cards for their prepaid service to be used with an unlocked GSM device, I could start using it as a smartphone again, instead of as a Palm pilot and camera.

The fresh hope of spring is finally yielding to the lushness of summer. Not a moment too soon, I think.

Baking bread, breaking bread

Last night I baked my third yeasted loaf since I got out the Tassajara Bread Book again after years of it hiding in my boxes and/or cupboard. This time, since I was running low on almost all the flours, and need to restock, it was a weird hodgepodge of things: buckwheat, spelt, and regular (white) bread flour, 9-grain cereal, and cornmeal, with leftover sweetened condensed milk, a few eggs that needed using, a bit of leftover brown rice, a little lowfat milk, some almond oil, and of course sea salt, yeast, and filtered water, with raw sunflower seeds on top.

I was getting toward the end of the second rising when Katie and John arrived in the evening, so Katie helped me knead and shape a couple of the loaves. And then I baked it, while we sat back and chatted and enjoyed the smell of freshly baking bread. And it came out . . . brilliant! The uncooked cereal and cornmeal gave a great crunchiness throughout the loaf, but the overall texture was soft and delightfully chewy, with a lovely crust that was notably crusty without being "painful" like some crusty breads, as John pointed out. We ate almost a whole round loaf together, straight out of the oven, with organic butter and organic strawberry jam, me and my companions. . . :)

My camera batteries need replacing, but maybe I can get one more shot out of them to add here . . .

weekend fun

Waking hungover but happy at noon on Sunday after much fun and revelry this weekend (tally since Friday: four house parties, two visits to Cafe Habana, two sightings of K&J, two sightings of Alice, two coffee dates at Amer's with colleagues, one slightly-drunken stroll through the Pinckney Kroger wearing fishnets and a cleavage-bearing black chiffon dress with freakishly long sleeves, one 3am dining adventure at the Fleetwood, one quiet walk in a Metropark, one baking event.)

A lovely lazy Saturday spent soaking up as much vitamin D as possible (oh, blessed sun!) , doing a little GSI work, and acquiring green vegetables (broccoli and spinach, yum!) and gas and strolling through the aisles of clothes, wine and liquor, and fancy, sexy computers at COSTCO. . .

. . . led into an evening of baking adventures and a couple nice house parties. A quiet, intimate group including some wonderful friends, with an outstanding spread of food, and woeful soulful music at Jenay's place . . . a stop-off at Cafe Habana to pick up Alice and some of her law school friends, and then over to Jonathan and Dan's place for one of their characteristically wild parties, peopled with drunken, maudlin boys, snarky and hilarious architects and artists, and lots of GEO folks, with astonishingly good fresh salsa verde thanks to their Mexican roommate. Alice took me out to the Fleetwood afterwards, then we parted ways at about 4 am.

I'm tired and my head hurts, but I feel cleansed from the experience of being with good friends. It had been a long week, with the GEO picketing and all. I never knew what hard work it would be to be out there.

Time now to wander around the house for the afternoon in my super-soft pink bathrobe and slippers and drink lots and lots of coffee. And maybe eat even more bacon. Mmm.

Ooh, interesting reading. I just happened upon New Mandala -- New Perspectives on Southeast Asia, a blog written by a couple Australian academics -- an anthropologist and an international development doctoral student with a background in Asian Studies.

I found it because, slow to read my email, I finally looked at the American Anthropological Association homepage and found their open letter to Prime Minister Sundaravej, opposing Thailand's War on Drugs. I was looking to see if there's an online petition regarding this issue and happened upon Andrew Walker and Nicholas Farrelly's discussion of anthroplogy's potential contribution to this cause, "Anthropology goes to war".

I was pleased to see the AAA engaged in human rights issues, and also pleased to discover that there's now a AAA human rights blog.

Last night I met some of the new recruits to my programs at dinners sponsored by the departments. Yay for great students and free food. I also enjoyed a couple happy hour drinks at Cafe Habana with K&J. It was a wonderful day, with a talk with Eri, who was in the midst of nursing and burping her newborn baby girl, and positive tenure news about a beloved professor. And it was SUNNY. And I made a decision, for better or worse, that I'm not going to apply for any more summer funding to travel, because I think it would be better for me to stay in the States this summer, work on my existing papers and studies, and REST.

From Ann Arbor to Rajasthan to the Nile

Tonight I saw "In the Trail of the Ghawazee: Gypsy Dances from Rajasthan to the Nile" with Leila Haddad and the Ghawazee musicians of Luxor, thanks to a friend who got some extra tickets and kindly invited me. I was about ready to pass out because I'm so tired from grading and everything. (Okay, part of the effect is due to the fun of celebrating K&J's engagement last night!!) But the music and dancing were quite beautiful, and it was humanizing to be with friends doing something besides my everyday labor. I couldn't help but think of my friend and his research on the Gypsies of Rajasthan, though, and our informal interviewing of groupies in the audience at the Sziget a few years ago.

Yesterday I saw a lecture on the origins of domestic food production by the illustrious Kent Flannery, entitled: "The creation of agriculture: So easy a caveman could do it." Katie and I were both excited to learn about teocinte.

Contract negotiations continue for the University of Michigan graduate student instructors, via the Graduate Employees Organization. There's serious talk of a possible walk-out, depending how the conversation goes over the next couple of weeks. We've already extended our expired contract for a couple of weeks to allow for additional negotiations.

Meanwhile, there's a policy change called "continuous enrollment" being discussed at U of M's Rackham graduate school that has lots of us very concerned, to the point that the Dean met with the Graduate Student Forum today and there's another lunch meeting with the dean being scheduled for students by the GSF in another week or two. The arguments in favor of the change that were presented by the dean today centered primarily around (a) the data on degree completion from research that included both institutions that have such a policy and institutions that don't, and the apparent fact that the policy will, in fact, be revenue neutral, and (b) that the decrease in candidacy tuition will counterbalance the increase in semesters of enrollment while a candidate.

There are many issues being raised among students and faculty in disciplines that depend on extended field research in discussions that I don't want to go into here, but a couple of the things that puzzled me about what she said yesterday were the following: (1) she indicated that the cost of tuition is set by a different body than Rackham, who obviously would preside over this policy. So in principle the candidacy tuition could rise at a later date, making the argument b look rather less convincing. (2) While the dean indicated that data that include all disciplines in sciences and humanities indicate that the rate of completion of degree is higher when continuous enrollment policies are in place, when pressed by a student in the GSF with the question "Do institutions with continuous enrollment policies have greater degree completion rates than the University of Michigan?," she said that those data were unavailable, but that anecdotal evidence indicates that there are some that have better rates of completion and others that have far worse.

. . .

My neck pain is excruciating after grading my undergraduates' papers. I'm almost through all of the 75. I know I can't afford a massage, but I may need to find a way to pay for it anyway, because I can hardly turn my head. I wish there were affordable acupuncture in Ann Arbor.

I almost missed the most exciting news! My dear friend Eri just had her baby. I don't know exactly what time, or the stats or anything. But they both look positively radiant in the photos.

come join the youth and beauty brigade

Well, I came up with an interim solution, until I can find the guide to usher me out of my existential maelstrom. REBOUNDING!

Herr, lehre doch mich

I think I've finally figured out the correct metaphor for how I've been feeling.

It's as if there is an elephant sitting on top of my soul.

And though I'd benefit from talk therapy, physical therapy, massage therapy, grief counseling, and many other varieties of therapy, what I could probably most use is a shamanic healer.

Is this just another bump in the road in grad school? Is existential crisis part of the routine?

There are books staring at me from across the room. Can I open them? What am I so afraid of?

Hey remember that month when I only ate boxes of tangerines -- so cheap and juicy!

Mmmm. Well, for the record, walnut molasses hermits go very well with beer.

Especially after grading over 25 undergraduate papers, most of which are on exactly the same topic.

This is a lonely town, ours is a lonely life . . .

Crampy, moody, and intensely craving molasses. I am trying my hand at a variation on hermit cookies, which I'll post on the Kitchen Empress if it turns out good. (Edit: it's here!) My version of the old-fashioned spiced raisin bar includes walnuts, turbinado sugar, and molasses. Even though I shouldn't be eating the raw egg, I couldn't help but taste the batter, which tastes really good.

The sun peeked out for a few minutes this afternoon, and the sunset is another one of those lovely ones where the frozen surface of the lake turns a cool purplish shade of pale grey, and the horizon gets dappled with a gentle peachy yellow behind the bare treetops. It's beautiful, but I still am hoping for the spring soon.

I spent the day grading undergraduate papers for Anthro 101, trying to work my way through the stack of 75. Characteristically slowly. I need to get a move on, though, because I have to do some writing tomorrow.

I took a little break to talk to Ali, who just bought a blue Prius, and to watch the last episode of Felicity again, while eating a little lunch of roasted broccoli, sauteed grape tomatoes, and quesadillas.

It's a small world after all.

I love the small world of the internet. Today I happened to read an internet listserve message of a listserve I happened to find through another listserve, through a course that I found out about through . . . god, the world of coincidence is paved with other coincidences. And there I found that my old friend Sarah, whom I'd lost touch with, is writing for the blog of the Arete Youth Foundation in Bulgaria now. Now all I have to do is put fingers to keys and I'll be back in touch with her. :)

Otherwise, today wasn't such a spectacular day. I was doing a little stretching to try to ease the pain in my neck, which has given me pain fairly consistently for about a year now. (It goes back to a rainy day in the fall last year when a speeding car rammed an SUV into me after I had to stop suddenly in response to congestion ahead, and the impact of the fender-bender brought an immediate headache and then, a few months later, excruciating and puzzling neck pain.)

So, anyway, there I was, doing a forward bend in the grad lounge while chatting with a couple friends in the department about the vagaries and stresses of academic performance evaluation, when -- what is happening? I was there, all the way on the floor, and I had the sense: I shouldn't be sleeping here now. One friend said: "Did you do that on purpose?" And I had to ask: "Do what?"

When I realized I'd fainted, I tried to gather more information: how long had I been out? What had happened? I was confused and a bit upset. So, I spent the rest of the afternoon in the university health center instead of at home grading papers and writing, where I'd planned to be. A kind, dear friend walked me over to ensure I didn't fall over on my way there.

I went, prescription in hand, to the Kroger pharmacy after my UHS excitement (I lay under a white blanket in a quiet, private, white room for a couple hours, reading celebrity gossip rags and National Geographic, listening to Glenn Gould play the Goldberg variations on my iPod while waiting for the doctor to arrive), only to be told that my health coverage had been cancelled effective 12/31. I was offered the option of buying the drugs for over 100 dollars a pop, and I was less than enthusiastic about this option, so I'll have to wait until Monday when the benefits office opens and I can ask WHY THE ^&*()_ isn't my health insurance card active?

Last night, after a glorious reading from Gary Snyder, a lovely visit with Katie & John, who met up with me at Rackham auditorium to hear the fabulous reading, and a happy, serendipitous visit with my other friend John, who happened to be on his way back to write an abstract after an evening visit to the gym, I arrived to my truck only to discover that I had left my lights on when I moved from one lot to another between administering an exam and going to union contract bargaining, so I had to call AAA to get a jump start.

Thank goodness for weekends. I don't think I could face the world tomorrow if I tried. And tonight, I am hiding away in the comfort of the cottage, eating mac & cheese, internet chatting with friends, and watching Lost and Battlestar Galactica: Razor from the lazy softness of the couch and my own bed, contemplating baking hermit cookies and instead lazily licking sticky, thick blackstrap molasses straight from the spoon.

oh, look. more snow.

Between Isolt's tales of her adventures in San Francisco and the recent find of the People Reading (in San Francisco) blog, I'm feeling a bit homesick.

It's snowing again today here.

The only things I've "accomplished" during the break are surviving, avoiding spending money I don't have, improving the condition of my skin, clearing the pile of clothes and my un-unpacked suitcase from winter break off my bedroom floor and vacuuming, setting up my humidifier, cleaning my bathroom, doing some backend stuff on my blogs, and getting back into flossing, vitamin-taking, whole grain-eating, and neti pot-using habits.

. . . Well, it could be worse, I suppose.