Vacation-time Fun

We went to see the beautiful film "Atonement" this afternoon in Emeryville after a leisurely day with the family. Ba and Lolo called this morning at 10:00 to ask if we wanted to join them for Belgian waffles.

We went together down to the Grand Lake farmers' market and got a mess of delicious waffles from the Waffle Mania truck there. I teased the owner that I had high standards since I'd tried waffles on the streets of Bruxelles, but he didn't seem fazed and I wasn't disappointed. Apparently the authentic yeasted dough is shipped directly from Belgium.* The finished waffles have a crispiness, sweetness, and caramelization that make them unlike anything you've had in an American style waffle, even most of those that get called "Belgian waffles". If you're a Bay Area person, try them. If you're not, then you'd better just high-tail it to Oakland or Brussels, whichever works better for you.

(Photo borrowed without permission from a fellow blogger and waffle enthusiast in Marin.)

We washed down the waffles with some fine Hawaiian coffee. Then we came home and Mom made some more food, fried eggs and ham leftover from Christmas eve. By then it was about time to take a nap. Then we went down for the film, which was excellent, and went out to Yoshi's for delicious sushi and other Japanese specialties.

Tomorrow I head to Yosemite for New Years. We'll bring in the new year with hiking, snowshoeing, and cozy games with a friendly group in a hotel room in El Portal. And then, shortly after driving back to the Bay Area on the 1st, it'll be back to Michigan, lickety-split, to start the new semester.

Below is a taster of the beauty of Yosemite, borrowed from a fellow blogger. Yosemite falls is one of our favorite hikes in the area.


*For more press on Waffle Mania, see this article in the Marin Independent Journal.

Why don't you write about your family?

"Why don't you write about your family?" my mother asks. I've been home for a few days now, and it's clear that she's a bit hurt that I don't seem to deem it worthy of a few lines of type.

She doesn't seem to understand the nature of my blogging, the source from which this writing emerges.

Years ago, I started journaling when I was a junior high school kid in an English class where we were required to keep journals. The habit stuck, and I continued for years after that to maintain paper journals, writing at least every few days, sometimes including photographs, clippings, collages, rough drawings in pastel, and whatever fit at the time. But mostly just writing. Poems, snatches of essays, straight diary entries. Sometimes what I would now call ethnography, though I didn't have that language at the time. I loved to ride the train and bus into San Francisco, watching people, meeting people I never would have known except through the unusual social networking mechanisms I had discovered, and writing about what I saw and experienced. And, being an adolescent, and struggling like all American adolescents with the odd social situation of adolescents in relation to the categories of child and adult, the inherent incongruencies and tensions, as well as the particularities of my own personal family situation at the time, I wrote a lot about my parents, most of it not very flattering.

I've gone through several incarnations of my own journal-writing since then. I started blogging many years ago, but I struggled with the public-private divide, the notion of "writing for an audience" and the essential functions of synthesis, memory stimulation, and the forging of personal meaning that I accomplished through my own journal-writing, which I didn't want to relinquish completely in shifting to an electronic medium and a public forum. I've had various ways of finding that balance in blogging, none of them entirely satisfactory, but all of them geared more toward my own needs than toward writing a narrative that would be appreciated, understood, and valued by a broad audience.

Since I've started this journal, the impetus behind the writing has been, largely, to give my family and friends in faraway places some idea of what my daily life is like in Michigan, since most of them have never been there. The loneliness and alienation that come with living so far away and doing the inherently solitary work of a doctoral student are sometimes rather difficult to bear, and I thought that this link might help to bridge the distance. (Not to say that Ph.D. work isn't also intensely social, and dependent on many, many people . . . but that's a whole other conversation!) The bottom line is that it's fun to write sometimes, and engage in a conversation about whatever random connections I'm making between my studies and my conversations in everyday life and the deluge of media images and narratives that inundate us every day in our modern existence in the West. And particularly since I made my move to the country, I wanted to capture for myself something about the reconfiguration of life that I've been trying to engage in, to document the beauty of the world around me, and in the process, to remember something of what a spiritual life, a life of living deliberately, means for me.

To write about the people I know, in detail, to provide biographies and images, pushes the envelope for me in terms of where that balance between public and private ought to rest, and also, in my mind, violates in some way the autonomy of the actors in my life to choose the degree of privacy or publicity they wish to live in.
I never forget as I'm writing here that this is not only a space for my family, but also one viewable by anyone who happens to pass by here. And that has an impact on the ethics of representation, if the writing and images are not only for me and my inner circle.

It's only my dearest friends and family who understand the deep love and ambivalence with which I always approach my home in California. It's situated entirely in the context of experiences only they know. So that is one reason it just doesn't make much sense to write about my family in terms of the purpose of this journal.

But there's more, too. That image above is one I know my mother will hate. My loved ones never seem to love the images of them that have meaning for me. They always see the flaws, the awkwardness, the misplaced hairs. And I see the joy and love in the eyes, the downy softness of the rose-colored robe Mom is wearing when I hug her good morning, the coffee we share with no one else around, the pajamas just like the soft gray ones I wear on these intimate mornings with just the two of us.

The beloved image only I carry with me in my mind -- that is the only one I think is worth conveying, but it isn't necessarily the one to be published for an audience. So I'd rather stay silent, sometimes, than write something inauthentic for the masses. We live so much of our lives before a public. The version of ourselves that we are in the world that we mark for ourselves as private, and the tenor our lives take on in this context, are often the ones with the most meaning for us. I'd rather just live in that than try to reshape it for an audience.

In other words, Mom, I love you most especially the way you are with me.

No place like home for the holidays.

Let's come together

I found out about this advertisement for the EU arts subsidy program through a particularly funny Wait Wait Don't Tell Me this past weekend.

Lone walker on the lake

A shot from the lake shortly before I left Michigan.

I had thought all these shots got lost from my card; I was so delighted to find it was hiding out somewhere in the recesses.

Laura and I took Mancho out to Point Isabel today. It wasn't quite as stunning as usual given the overcast weather and the narrow path flanked by a chain-link fence protecting the newly seeded grass on one side and the caution tape preventing access to the polluted water on the other, due to the recent oil spill. It was the regular dog-fest, though, and we were particularly struck by a trio of incredibly massive dogs that probably came up to our bustlines, or perhaps just our waists. But anyway, they were the kind of dogs that sort of take your breath away. Two were silver-gray, one was brown. I don't know my breeds well enough to say what they were.

We talked about going dancing at Cocomo tonight, and I was planning on joining Brian in The City first and meeting his girlfriend Alison and joining them for a learning with the Mission Minion, but I think I'm in for the night. I picked up a bit of a cold in the chaos of the end of the semester and the travel and debauchery here, and now I just need to rest to get over my sore throat.

Family readers, I have posted new Christmas photos on Flickr. If you don't have an account, it's free and easy to create one so you can view them. Just write me a note so I know who you are :)

Home at last . . .

Merry Christmas, everybody.

It's a relief to be among friends and family and in the warmth of California. I slept for close to twelve hours today, and overate extraordinarily. A nice change from typical Michigan routine. I have a feeling this week is just what the doctor ordered. I've downloaded an offline blog editor that I'm experimenting with by the fireside in my mother's living room. I should be helping clean up some more, but instead I'm just sitting here, having finished a couple little glasses of Bailey's. From here I can hardly even see that the Christmas lights are decorating only the lower half of the tree. :) Dinner was scrumptious, roast beef and lots of vegetables rich from roasting in juices. Wishing you all joy and peace.

The eternally surprising discovery that is friendship.

All these years, I'd been misremembering a quote by Jean-Paul Sartre. I'd thought it was "Nous ne sommes riens qu'aux yeux des autres." But no.

« Nous ne sommes nous qu’aux yeux des autres, et c’est à partir du regard des autres que nous nous assumons comme nous » (see?)

(which is, approximately. . .) "We are not ourselves except in the eyes of others, and it's from the gaze of others that we assume the status of ourselves" (I'm a little unsure about this translation; "s'assumer comme quelquechose" is a turn of phrase that is so particular, I did some searching to see if anyone else had translated it, and ended up surfing to an academic article, not too surprisingly, about Simone de Beauvoir. And I found the wonderful passage:

"Now, what specifically defines the situation of woman is that she-a free and autonomous being like all human creatures-nevertheless discovers and chooses herself in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other.3 They propose to turn her into an object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is for ever to be transcended by another consciousness which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject-which always posits itself as essential-and the demands of a situation which constitutes her as inessential." (SS, 29; DSa, 31; TA)

Following this characteristically beautiful writing by Beauvoir, Toril Moi offers the following interpretation:

"This is perhaps the single most important passage in The Second Sex, above all because Beauvoir here poses a radically new theory of sexual difference. While we are all split and ambiguous, she argues, women are more split and ambiguous than men. For Simone de Beauvoir, then, women are fundamentally characterized by ambiguity and conflict. The
specific contradiction of women's situation is caused by the conflict between their status as free and autonomous human beings and the fact that they are socialized in a world in which men consistently cast them as Other to their One, as objects to their subjects. The effect is to produce women as subjects painfully torn between freedom and alienation, transcendence and
immanence, subject-being and object-being. This fundamental contradiction, or split, in which the general ontological ambiguity of human beings is repeated and reinforced by the social pressures brought to bear on women, is specific to women underpatriarchy. For Beauvoir, at least initially, there is nothing ahistorical about this: when oppressive power relations cease to
exist, women will be no more split and contradictory than men."

The idea here is deeply suggestive to me about the existential situation of any group facing structural alienation, not only women on the basis of sex in a patriarchy, but also, for instance, the oppressed group in a colonial context. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's leave aside Beauvoir and Moi for the moment. And back to Sartre, which is what I meant to talk about in the first place. And to my life, which was really the starting point for all of this talk in the first place.

Last night was a magical dance of three active minds in the playground of my little cottage in the country, that lasted until past five o'clock in the morning. Katie and John came over sometime around nine or ten, on their way back from Jackson. When I heard they were coming, I pulled myself together a little after feeling rather funky all day long, and put a chocolate sour milk cake in the oven and mulled wine on the stove, with green cardamom, white pepper, cloves, cinnamon, a bay leaf, turbinado sugar, Grand Marnier, and some thinly sliced, succulently ripe Valencia orange. And together, we talked, laughed, ate, drank, read poetry aloud, listened our way through any and every kind of music you could think of, played music on the accordion and the guitar, unearthed old travel photographs hidden away in the vintage suitcase behind my sewing machine, told stories, opened books of anthropologists, womens studies scholars, biographers, and journalists, and ate a 3 am snack of cream of tomato soup with spinach and rye bread with stinky brie. I introduced them to palinka and slivovic, we finished off the fig brandy from Croatia in the plastic bottle I carried back from someone's garage on the southern part of the island of Krk, and we found recesses of the mind and life that, well, at least in my case, hadn't been dusted off or looked at in years.

And so, this morning, seeing their little note of thanks and the neatly folded blankets on my big red couch in the living room, and the thin photographic evidence of this whole experience that we accumulated, I couldn't help but think of Sartre. Because no matter what you imagine yourself to be, whatever layers of experience you accumulate in a lifetime, it never seems to have any meaning until you are yourself with others, and they see you, and you become yourself. So it isn't just hell that is other people. It's also heaven.


For more on this:
Ambiguity and Alienation in The Second Sex by Toril Moi. boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 2, Feminism and Postmodernism (Summer, 1992), pp. 96-112. doi:10.2307/303535 Link through jstor if you have institutional access.