San Juan

Tracking back a couple months:

Spring break this year bore the traits of classic spring break. Tropical weather, beaches, palm trees, good food, sweat, some tromping in the rain forest, and complete removal from the daily grind. It was amazing. I love San Juan.



The old town was perhaps more picturesque than I even imagined it would be. Near to the center was this sort of drug-infested yet colorful neighborhood called, I believe, La Perla. We were about to descend into it when a very tall, very conscientious and possibly very high man muttered something about "only drugs down there" and we decided to change direction. It was quite lovely from afar, however.



It was bordered on one side by this extraordinarily pristine cemetery, in which I took many, many pictures. I've never seen a cemetery right on the sea like this, let alone one that sparkled with such marble and melancholy. Imagine stifling heat as you look at these, because it heightens the surreal quality of the scene.





The old town was very small, but we spent much time there. The people were friendly (and surprisingly good-looking! Seriously, there was an extraordinarily high percentage of attractive folks), the streets were sweet and enticing, and there were little squares and markets everywhere that made dawdling not only easy but practically necessary. However:



Yeesh! I don't think I've ever noticed how scary-big cruise ships are. They're like little cities on the water that could be disbursed to troubled islands in need but instead are full of masseuses and comedians and yoga teachers and I don't know what else. (I am referring, of course, to the ship on the right). I am serious about these ships going on rescue missions. Do they do that already and I have simply not noticed?

We spent some time outside of the city, as well, most notably on the eastern edge of the island. There we found a national park and even embarked on a fantastically magical nighttime kayak trip through a mangrove channel that ended in a lagoon full of bioluminescent water. The rain forest, true to its name, was rainy for much of the day, but it wasn't much of a deterrent.





It did, however, make the rocks a bit slippery.

I was quite unhappy to leave San Juan, honestly. I have been practicing my vacation state of mind in my more everyday and humdrum life, however, and it has been going swimmingly. Without the balmy and unscheduled days it's a bit of a strain, but I've averted quite a bit of stress just by willing it away, which has been somewhat miraculous. I highly recommend it.

Next up: my midwestern vacation!

Birthday

This is how I celebrate:



Friends from out of town, a momentary whim that caused me to take a bunch of jumping photos (thanks in part to this blog) and the trusty and fantastic camera that was given to me by my father a few years ago made for a perfectly lovely day hunting in vain for the tombstone of H.P. Lovecraft. Navigating by rare, unusual or otherwise notable trees, we found our way to his supposed location, to no avail. We did not let this bring us down.



It's as if that picture makes a sound, maybe of popping or of a spring being sprung. Weirdly, when I look at this, I am continuously afraid that he'll come crashing to the ground. I am fairly certain that that will not actually happen. I'll let you know if it does.

Speaking of spring: welcome to it. It's still a bit shy to emerge around here - it's currently about 29°F and we had a few snow showers in the last week - but winter is somehow, intangibly, definitely over. Maybe by the end of this next extra-fantastic-no-school-week, there will be some other flowers joining the sturdy little crocuses that are scattered about. I cannot wait for flora.
Until then, I'll enjoy my time off.



This is how I act my age.

South County

I guess I should say, however, "South County"; it's actually Washington County. Rhode Island has a whopping Five! Whole! Counties!, and the southernmost of those is most often referred to by its nickname. I don't know why.

(Other counties: Newport, Kent, Bristol, Providence. If I ever get picked up by Cash Cab, I hope this is one of the questions they ask me).

Geographical digression aside, there is some beautiful land in the southern part of the state. We went, specifically, to Arcadia Management Area, which holds the tallest waterfall in Rhode Island. The rain and swiftly melting snow made the waterfall swell, so it was quite monumental:



It is currently, apparently, twice the size that it was in summer. I can say, at least, that it sounded really big, and it was made a bit more exciting because of the snow and ice on the ground; the slight chance that the ground would give way to freezing, rushing water did give the experience an extra tinge of adventure. (Yes, of course, the location of the trees helped to indicate where the true banks were, but I played at adventure nevertheless). Thrill was totally superfluous, though. I mean really, check this out:



There was nobody else out there, and it was beautiful and silent except for the water, and despite the fact that I am beyond ready for winter to sink into spring, this was like a fairy tale landscape after the previous night's few inches of snow. Time-wise, I couldn't totally afford to take this hike; everything-else-wise, I couldn't afford not to. Five and a half miles took about two and a half hours, so we were moving at just over two miles an hour; with the snow a foot deep in some places, that's actually not so bad. I was sore and exhausted in the best way.



And today, though it's still very cold, the sun is shining and the snow is melting, and I actually caught the smell of grass and earth on the walk home. Spring officially begins in about three weeks, which reminds me: Brad says that once, in grade school, his teacher told the class that it was officially the first day of spring, so he asked her if that meant he should start wearing shorts. I laughed when I heard that story, but I am beginning to see some merit in it. Maybe if I start wearing springy clothes, spring will move in to accommodate me. Might as well give it a shot.

And a final unrelated note: every single teacher in Providence has been pink-slipped. Ultimately, the mayor expects only ("only") about forty percent of them will actually lose their jobs. "Only" = 800 teachers? So I guess approximately 24,000 students will have to fend for themselves from now on? File this under "Education: Who Needs It?"

Send luck. Until next time.

Whoops!

I have so far managed to stick to all the rest of my New Year's resolutions, but the resolution regarding blogging more has somehow eluded me. There are a few reasons for that, mostly too boring to mention, but the basic gist of it is: lots of catching up has made the first few weeks of this semester a bit more stressful than it ought to have been. I have only myself to blame.

Now that I have finally "caught up" (tentatively placed between quotation marks because of the extreme temporality of this state), I thought I would sit down and report back. And so:

I don't have much to report. Whoops again! All my talk about keeping an eye out for interesting things has also been backseated. Yes, I've had some delicious dinners with friends, played plenty with my hopelessly adolescent cats, and put a lot more active thought into eating (which, I should mention, has a lot to do with a part of my resolution with which I have been successful), but I have had practically no time for Actual Wandering. My one real jaunt during the month of February took me to Northampton for a concert, which was perhaps the first time I have seen live music in about, oh, two years or some similarly too-long amount of time. The train across Massachusetts whipped me by trees that convinced me that "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" was in fact based on real experiences of the Brothers Grimm:



I was, unfortunately, unable to get a decent picture of a phenomenon which I have not actually seen before, in which the sun was refracted through small bits of ice held to the crooks and ends of every branch of every tree, which gave the impression of trees with diamonds growing in place of leaves. Because of the growing heat of the sun, there was a very small window of time in which this combination was possible, and the trees, flashing, flashed past and were gone. You'll just have to take my word for it: it was extraordinary.

Northampton, too, was quite beautiful:



See how delightfully snow-covered everything is? No, really:



Maybe for the owner of that car, snow-covered does not equal delight. Similarly, the heavy, stubborn icicles hanging from roofs and eaves were most likely not entirely pleasing to the residents of the houses to which the roofs and eaves belonged. Structural damage was clearly occurring in a variety of ways; for instance: a particularly thick and angry sheet of ice was melting into the wall of the friend I went to visit. She was none too happy. We had, however, a lovely time.

As February deepened, however, and the snow refused to melt, winter began to seriously wear out its welcome. Here it is, almost March, and there is still snow on the ground, some of which has been there since the middle of December and is unbelievably filthy. I haven't been suffering from the same seasonable blahs as some others, but I am ready for the first blossom of spring, I'll tell ya. My California blood has grown tired of this.

I said it before and I'll say it again: I'll be back more often. This time, however, blank passing weeks will not prove me wrong. See you soon.

It Begins Again

In a couple short days, the semester commences. So ends the blissfully lazy days of the last few weeks, in which my brain was allowed to wander where it pleased and my hours were divided between Something and Nothing pretty evenly. Without a schedule, I lost, for a few days, the ability to structure my time, and I reveled in it. I'm sure it'll come back to me pretty quickly as soon as every hour is once again reserved for some task or another.

Of the Something: shoveling snow, and shoveling snow, and shoveling snow; various university-related tasks whose doing was neither unpleasant nor stressful; getting to know my environs a bit better, with the help of Actual Friends; cat-sitting for an old and persnickety but lovable and goofy old cat; and devising plans to instate my resolutions for the new year, which involves, of all things, a pedometer. I've never used one before, but apparently there are about 2000 steps in a mile, and so my goal to begin with is to walk a cumulative and approximate four miles a day, which may be difficult in the ice and snow that has been covering the ground for well over a month now. Some images of Something:





Similarly, images of Nothing:





Of the Nothing: it's hard to describe nothing. Reading and writing and thinking back, thinking forward; short trips and snow-filled shoes; cat naps, complete with cats; recounting and describing things in my head that I would at one point have recounted and described out loud; commiserating with friends on endless subjects, both personal and public; and wandering. Oh, the wandering. A semester's worth of hurrying makes the afternoons of wandering like an unattainable dream come to life, especially with the brisk winter air and the crunch of dehydrated snow underfoot (and yes, dehydrated snow seems like an oxymoron, but I'm sure you catch my meaning). The holidays were, once again, spent far from family, but at least this time we share a continent.

And so it all begins again. One of my resolutions this year is to allocate time for decompression, which means that my blog will not be quite so neglected, and I assure you, I have a good track record with resolutions, so this is not an empty promise. The fact that I will be around these parts more often means that I will have to constantly be on the lookout for new and interesting things to write about, which will probably also help me avoid the extreme tunnel-vision that is inadvertently appended to my academic program. I have high hopes and good boots, so I'm off on the right proverbial foot, excited for my two more days of Nothing.

January, 2011

I have just now decided that one of my New Year's resolutions is to write on my blog more often. I'm not sure that it will take, but I'll give it a shot. (I wonder how many people are making this same resolution right now, with the same wariness regarding its realization).

I am finally settling into having some time to be myself again. It occurred to me recently that the subversion of every aspect of the personality (except, of course, for coping behavior and survival skills) is one of the most traumatic elements of graduate school. I'm not knocking it - I knew what I was in for - but it's definitely a visible side effect.

Hence, it takes a little while to work back into the personality one uses during periods of relaxation. You know, the personality that listens to music, does things for fun, socializes, reads books without making notations. For instance: I am reading Günter Grass's Cat and Mouse right now (tr. Ralph Manheim), for absolutely no reason except that I feel like it. It was difficult at first, though. I took a lot of naps, watched an awful lot of movies, and walked face-first through a mini-blizzard over the last few weeks just to shake my brain out of its steady and high-pitched frequency.

(The movies I watched: Together by Lukas Moodysson, a beautiful and surprising film whether it's the first viewing or the fifth; Dolores Claiborne, a dark and lovely old nightmare in which Kathy Bates is seriously captivating; Dead Snow, a Norwegian slasher flick about Nazi zombies which was satisfactorily bloody but fairly flat; Rudo y Cursi, better the second time around; The Baader Meinhof Complex , which is about the Red Army Faction in West Germany in the 1970's and amazingly doesn't draw any heroes where there really weren't any; and some comfort-movies that only come out around the holidays, like Big and Moonstruck. Only joking! I'll watch Moonstruck anywhere, anytime).

Looking back, I see that I sort of abandoned my narrative of Petersburg in a cloud of discombobulation. I am soon going to pick it up, though it's long overdue, and I'll even wind my way up to the present. For now, though, Happy New Year to all y'all. Here's to a productive 2011.

Summer Number One

Lickety split: here I am again.

First Summer took place in St. Petersburg. A bizarre and disruptive paradox occurred, namely a heat wave that curdled every single person in the city, turning all of us into bleary, irritable dysfunctionates (which, yes, is not a word, but is most certainly a state of being). A strange phenomenon: that far north, the sun pretty much doesn't set for a month or so, which means that neither the earth nor the buildings have a chance to cool down after hours of unnaturally intense heat. An almost total lack of air-conditioned spaces aggravated the situation; my worry was mainly for the books in the libraries and the priceless works of art being exposed to a range of harmful elements. For instance:



On the banks of the Neva, windows wide open, wet sunlight everywhere; trauma for woodwork.

The improbable weather was inescapable and pervasive; to be honest, it coated everything I did during my time at GMT+3. I'll not mention it anymore, so just remember - it was there.

St. Petersburg is not much at all like Moscow. I spent a quick couple of nights in Petersburg in 2006, but this is the first time that I was actually able to get to know the city a little. I won't toss about the debits and credits of coolness in one city or another; they're just different. People have a tendency to take sides on the issue, and when it comes down to it, I don't feel qualified to judge. I have no empirical evidence that one is better and another worse, and my opinion is neither based on scientific method nor relevant. It's like comparing New York City to Portland; they're entirely different animals, philosophically and aesthetically.

Aesthetically:



OK, this type of crazy one-off design is common to both cities. Petersburg seemed to have an unusually high ratio of them, however; it began to get a little exhausting after a while, as if I simply couldn't take any more luxurious facades or opulent interiors. In fact, I originally thought that I would visit the Hermitage twice, maybe three times during my two months there, and I suffered from museum burnout and only ended up going once. I don't regret it; the crowds and the direct sunlight on, say, Caravaggio made it somewhat less savory than I'd hoped. A relief from that brand of amazing:



Pushkinskaya 10 is an art collective that occupies several flights of a staircase and a small number of flats; they seem to like the Beatles and they put on an incredible exhibition. Petersburg, in general, has a very laid-back type vibe, dismissively friendly and busy without being in an irritable hurry. I imagine my impression would have been very different had I been there in winter; maybe someday.

I was only there for two months, so with both temporal and financial restraints, I remained in the city pretty much the whole time. I took a couple excursions, sure, but nothing too monumental; I opted not, for instance, to take the overnight train to Moscow for the weekend, which, yes, I would have thoroughly enjoyed, but which did not and does not seem entirely necessarily. I did, however, go to Repino, to the homestead called Penaty, which belonged to the artist Ilya Repin. After the heat and grime of a canal-bound city, the proverbial fresh country air was unbelievable, as was Repin's house (which is not totally apparent in the picture; use your most fantastic imagination).



I went, also, to Pushkin, or Tsarskoe Selo, depending on who you ask. It was rather strange, actually. Catherine had a palace there, now aptly named the Catherine Palace, and Nicholas II had a palace there, called, of course, the Aleksandr Palace. The Palaces' interiors I skipped - I couldn't help it - but the Gardens were lovely. A question, though:



What's up with that? There was a distinctly faux-Asian motif going on in the Aleksandr Gardens, complete with some porcelain figures at the gate that are doomed to have tourists stand next to or below them, doing lighthearted yet racially suspicious gestures, throughout the foreseeable future.

I have to say: it seems like all of this is a world away, like I am only just skimming the surface. The experience of getting on a plane, crossing many time zones, and ending up somewhere that in all other cases is absolutely inaccessible, often seems to take on a dreamlike quality after any length of time has passed, like a figment of the imagination, a memory possibly completely made up. The combination of that with the fact that I have been up to the neck of a much taller person in work means that I have a disconnect with Summer Number One, which hopefully will pass as my brain processes the backlog of information and can simply relax again. I relish the expectation of that hypothetical day. And when it gets here, I'll let you know.

Working Backwards

From now until before:

The semester has begun; stress abounds. Let's begin on a more positive note, though, shall we?

The past month has been extremely productive; also: overwhelming, exhausting, trial by fire. I am, as they say, holding up. I am careful to focus on the big picture; if I don't, I will surely become confused by the unfinished projects floating in the foreground. Sorry; that was only slightly more positive.

With an almost total lack of free time, I decided to go camping in New Hampshire. The White Mountain National Forest, to be exact. On Russell Pond:



And then later:



I wanted a night away from asphalt and light pollution, and the White Mountains did not let me down. Superhot campfire whose scent caught a ride from me for several days; brave little chipmunks; a hike that took me by surprise and that I would love to repeat with more accurate expectations: overall, great success.

Just before the weekend in New Hampshire, I spent ten or so days in Washington: State, not District. It was a surprise trip. Not a "surprise!" trip, but a trip that I had hoped would not be necessary for quite some time. Suffice it to say, I'll not go into it. I will say that it redefined for me the hardest work that we as humans have to do. There was, however, this:



That sunflower (and several other things, such as kale, peppers, carrots) will be let to run wild.

Prior to the trip back west, a month passed in which I got to visit me at 29, at 27, at 22; friends came a-callin', and it was awesome. Sure, it was bookended by a little nervous exhaustion and a telephone call like a punch in the face, but otherwise it was splendid. Folks from all over darkened my doorway; maybe you'll be next.

It was a whole summer packed into a month and a half, and it followed another summer, somewhere else. The first summer I'll describe at another time; it deserves its own narrative. The second can be described like so:



Don't be fooled: I don't mean that Second Summer was the limbo stage before reaching our ultimate destination (though who are we kidding, really?), I only mean to show that I trolled up and down Rhode Island with visitors, seeing some things that I hadn't seen yet and finally feeling marginally at home at this coordinate. First Summer precluded any deeper exploration of my current environs, since it occurred approximately 4500 miles away. That's for next time, but here's a hint:


("Everything you know is a lie")

Done for now, but soon will continue. This is not the end of history.

What a Summer

There are many things that I've meant to write about over the last few months, such as finishing the first year of my PhD program, spending two months in St. Petersburg during the worst heat wave they've experienced in perhaps a thousand years, and the landscape of New England, with which I'm becoming a bit more familiar.

However.

The last couple months have been Real Life. That means that I've experienced the worst grief that I've ever had to come up against, thought as a result of that grief about my beliefs on human and earthly experience, and become completely backlogged with deadlines and duties, and my time has been used for everything but writing on this here blog. And so, my dear handful of readers, I'll have to just promise to return when I have the time, which I'm hoping will be sooner than later. I do indeed have much to share, so my stories will be worth the wait. Rest assured.

A few quick notes, however:
1) I have successfully kicked my internet addiction. I realize that by calling it an "addiction," I am blowing it out of proportion; many people spend their whole day on the interweb, and I am not that type, but my fascination with gossip/fashion/news blogs has been happily curbed, and I am much better for it. Spending the summer abroad and then being confronted with What's Really Important takes the credit for my new, improved, minimal-internet-use existence. (And yes, I realize that declaring that particular thing on a blog is somewhat ironic. It's unavoidable).
2) My love for the Pacific Northwest has been renewed with a vengeance. More on that later.
3) I have found my dissertation topic! Joy! Drinks on me! (I'll have seltzer water with lemon, please).
4) The White Mountain National Forest is beautiful. Good camping, good hiking; I plan on many future trips to New Hampshire to visit the forest and the variety of other state and regional parks up there. I will definitely take my camera along. And finally,
5) Boy, I have lots and lots of pictures to share with you. Mostly Russia, with a smattering of other things.

That's all for now. I plan on forcing myself to relax this weekend, so maybe I'll relax by whipping up a post or two. In the meantime, easy does it...

Summer/Heat/Rain/Time Off

Yes, technically it's still spring.

Nevermind that.

I am officially experiencing a summer break. It's pretty wonderful, I have to say. I have finished what needed finished, and now I am left with...

Hmm.

That's a problem. I am not good at free time. I used to be fantastic with free time, sometimes wrangling it and sometimes letting it float by unnoticed, and now I am so conscious of my excess of free time that I am almost unable to relax. I cannot do 'nothing'. It's a strange affliction. Here is how I treat it:


1. Spend time with friends who visit from out of town. Go to a museum that I have been meaning to visit for several months now; this is a good way to do 'nothing' while still doing 'something'.



2. Take said friends on a day trip. Show them historically significant monuments. This is not exactly 'nothing'. Well, it is neither passive nor idle, but it is not 'productive', and productivity is what I'm trying to shake (for a few days at least), so this is a good balance.



3. Take pictures of places I simply happen to be. This is a low-impact remedy.



4. Go places specifically to take pictures of things like birds, which I would not otherwise think to photograph. This is quite enjoyable and has the added benefit of sneakily feeling productive.

5. Listen to music. Music really gets shortchanged when I'm in the thick of it. A few minutes here and there, on the bus, walking, but no real quality time. There are a couple of things that I have been listening to frequently. One is a relatively new discovery, the other a re-energized familiar.

6. Write. I'm sorry; I have no proof so far. Unless you count this. Any good ideas for fun writing exercises to start this cold engine gladly accepted.

7. Read. The Country Where No One Ever Dies by Ornela Vorpsi, translated by Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck. It is: quiet; Albanian; delicate. Communities of Dissent, by Stephen J. Stein. Turns out Roger Williams was a pretty awesome guy.

8. Walk in the heat; walk in the rain. Appreciate the chance to set aside the laptop-tether.
8a. Wonder idly if we as a nation/species are being improved or eroded by excessive computer use.

9. Plan to revisit my blog more often. This is a directive for both me (me) and you (my reader); there will be more action here. I give you my word(s).

Now, back to 'nothing', which is full of possibility.

Modern Perceptions

I put this question to a bunch of people:

What do you think of when you think of Russia?

These are some of the answers I got, in no particular order:

Dostoevsky's jail cell, Nabokov's butterflies, the Bol'shoi Ballet, Peter and the Wolf, vodka, James Bond villains, hell, children's picture books and fairy tales, family, nuclear fear in the 80s, "tear down this wall", vodka, borsch, Tolstoy, xenophobia, skinheads, fur hats, confusing house music, Pushkin, the Disney movie Anastasia, cabbage, hard work, expressionless military men, beautiful women, vodka, the Beatles' "Back in the USSR", secrets, space exploration, Gogol, distance, the Metro, provincialism, Soviet war pins, gymnasts, angular architecture, 10 time zones*, Gorbachev and his birthmark, The Master and Margarita, sour cream, the death of reason, Solzhenitsyn, bent old women working fields of wheat, bad teeth, vodka, the Gulag, onion domes, matryoshka dolls, potatoes, tsars, propaganda posters, danger and drunkenness, Red Square, revolution after revolution...

It's a fuzzy picture: still bearing marks of the Soviet age, relying heavily on food and literature. Though neither overwhelmingly negative nor positive, the overall tone is closer to dark than light. Soon I'll pose the question about a different country and see what returns, to offer a point of comparison. I want to know about our current view of Russia, if it's been updated much since 1991 or the Putin presidency, but in order to come to any conclusion about that, I need to know if our perceptions of, say, France or Egypt or China or Cuba are based on today, ten years ago, WWII or the Bay of Pigs, Hollywood movies or commerce. Even then, I won't have any conclusions, per se; I'll only have a better grasp of how and how quickly our perceptions shift.

Better get back to work...

*As of March, 2010, there are officially nine time zones in Russia: eight contiguous, plus Kaliningrad.

Whoa, It's Been a Long Time

Three months since I've posted! Unbelievable. What have I been doing all this time? Oh, right...

Stressing out.

Academically, 2010 has been fairly brutal. I won't go into the gritty details, but I will say that up until now, I have not understood fully the hellish graduate school experience of myth. I can say with certainty that I now understand it. I could work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and still have unfinished business. Part of the crunch was due to the fact that I presented a paper at a conference for the very first time - it was a paper titled "Enlisting the Memory of Memory: Anna Akhmatova's Requiem," at the Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference, and it went fine (despite the horrible worst-case scenarios that were rolling around in my head beforehand). On top of that, I have been busily getting summer plans in order, saying goodbye to my expired (*sniffle*) California Driver's License, exchanging it for a (*gulp*) Rhode Island one, and also, finally, managing to find some time to relax (to the best of my abilities, that is). Resultingly, the last few months have been a revolving blur of deadlines and deep breaths.

My studies in a nutshell: Symbolism, negative aesthetics and the location of music, early 20th century Russian woodworking and the folk art revival, čeština, русский язык, creating communicative language tasks, etc. That is, of course, just a sampling. And thankfully, I'm generally enjoying it all*.

My time off has been gratifying as well. See?







(And thanks to Ken, for taking that lovely first picture up there).

Those photos came from a trip along Cape Cod; it was off-season, so we were practically the only people wandering around out there. The rain and wind actually suited the Cape, but it didn't treat Rhode Island very well - as you may have read, we had some pretty intense flooding around here, but our neighborhood went fairly unscathed; some soggy basements here and there, but that was about all.

The rest of the semester will be busy busy busy, so I can't promise that I'll write much in the next month, but my blog will be rolling again soon. In the meantime, keep yourself busy over here. 'Night, all.


*A sort of cross-section of things that I've enjoyed that I can share: Stilyagi, a Russian musical which may not be subtitled in English yet but is fairly fantastic, so keep an eye out; Degeneration, a hysterical but entertaining reaction to Decadence during the fin de siecle, by Max Nordau; Jan Svankmajer's Sílení (but beware! That one's a bit perverse); Vrubel'.

Ladies and Gentlemen, 2010

Well, here we are. Two thousand ten. Twenty ten? How to say it? And how to refer to the preceding years? The aughts? Is that too early-twentieth-century for the kids nowadays? I guess it remains to be seen.

We started the year off in Washington D.C., visiting friends and generally seeing our nation's capital. Despite the months that I spent driving around the United States when I was 19 (which now seems quite a long time ago because, ahem, it was), I have never been to D.C., which I attribute to a normal teenage rejection of patriotism and what not. As I recall, during that trip in 1998, we went from Baltimore, which is a mere hour or so north of the capital, straight west into West Virginia. It all works out in the end, though - visiting the actual Capitol building on the days surrounding New Year is ideal. Smaller crowds, less traffic, and generally less mayhem. At points, it felt that we were the only ones wandering through the cold to see the sights. A case in point: the Vietnam War Memorial.



I suspect that, had we visited in, say, July, there would have been throngs of people, and a picture as gray and serene as that would not have been possible. Likewise the Korean War Memorial:



This one, unlike the Vietnam Memorial, had etchings of soldiers on it, rather than names, and the shadowy figures seen in the background are reflections of a smattering of soldier's statues. It's quite lovely, actually.



We did basically all the proper tourist things to do - the White House, the Washington Monument, the Capitol, the Library of Congress, Georgetown - but we missed the museums. We can visit them next time, I guess, because though the drive from here to D.C. is quite irritating, it's not incredibly far. The interstate system around here is bizarre - so many turnpikes and parkways with their variously regulated toll systems that seem designed to frustrate both locals and out-of-towners alike.

And now - 2010. Any fantastic New Year's resolutions? I know, usually resolutions fall by the wayside in the first months of the year, but I'm resolving to get my life cleaned up; rid my cupboards and my diet of curious chemicals, etc. It'll take a little research, and a bit of adjustment to my routine, but I'm willing to take it on as a project, because it's the type of project that I can handle while in the grip of grad school. My general goal, I guess, is to make my life more *gulp* sustainable. My years in the Bay Area have made me leery of fuzzy hippie terminology, so I guess part of the goal is also to loosen up and embrace the concept, while not necessarily embracing the flakiness that I tend to associate with it. Wish me luck on that front - it might be the hardest part.

So, onward and upward. Happy New Year, folks. Make the most of it.

Holidays Upon Us

Happy Holidays, folks! After two years spent out of the country and away from family, it's fun to be back stateside to experience the all-encompassing blanket of holiday decorations and Christmas music that jams the airwaves through December. I'm a bit out of practice regarding the consumer frenzy and angry traffic jams that seem to grow exponentially in the days leading up to Christmas, but I've been greatly enjoying myself nonetheless. We've kept our shopping to a minimum - in fact, last week we ventured into the Providence Place Mall, which is, I suppose, a fairly impressive mall as malls go, and after wandering about for an hour or so, left empty-handed. I simply couldn't think of anything I wanted. Maybe it's because I'm just getting older and gifts are no longer the thrill that they used to be, but more likely it's due to the fact that, for a while now, we've gone out of our way not to acquire anything that couldn't easily fit into suitcases. Whatever the reason, it's difficult to think of anything to buy that isn't for the continuous furnishing of the house. Am I crazy, or are housewares unduly expensive? I think my concept of how much things are supposed to cost dates back to 1999 or something.

So, in lieu of buying things, I've just been cleaning and eating and basking in the rosy glow of being (mostly) done with my schoolwork for this semester. I've only got about one and a half projects to complete, both of them highly enjoyable, so I can finally breathe again after the intensive first term. (On a sidenote, at long last I found out the results of my MA program - graduation with distinction! Success!). I can finally enjoy relaxing without the nagging feeling of More To Do, just in time for the holidays.

Despite the fact that we don't know too many people in the area yet, we were able to go to a couple gatherings in the last few days, and the eating - oy, the eating. There were some intense spreads at both of the small parties that we attended. I've eaten, in no particular order, beef wellington, deep fried octopus, clams, oysters, brie baked in puff pastry, catfish dumplings, shrimp empanadas, crepes full of porcini mushrooms and pancetta and cream, and a whole array of debilitating desserts - chocolate ganache, pumpkin cheese cake, and rice pudding, to name just a few. Though I'll be making a resolution to myself at the beginning of the year to seriously minimize my meat and dairy consumption (no easy task, residing with a chef and all that), I figured I would allow myself this final week of gluttony. It's been delicious; it'll be difficult to part ways.

Also eventful - our first New England snow storm. It was, as they say, a real doozy.



I've never had to shovel my own driveway or front walk, but 18 inches of snow in a 24-hour period is a good time to start. Locals assure us that it isn't usually this extreme, which is good - though I like the look of the snow and I'm not particularly bothered by the cold, road conditions get pretty treacherous, even with the city doing their best to plow and salt the main thoroughfares. This is the sort of thing that I never gave much thought to in Oakland, or even in Berlin or Norwich, where we relied on public transportation to get around - backing out of a driveway on an inch-thick patch of ice is less than ideal. I basically beat the same path from my door to the campus every day; nevertheless, clear roads are fairly important.

That's all I have to report, for now. I'll be heading down to DC for New Year's, a city that I have incredibly never seen. I'm very excited, and I'm sure I'll return with a bunch of generic pictures of Washington landmarks, but I'll try to weed out the most interesting ones to share with you here. In the meantime, stay warm and well, and enjoy all the leftovers of any holiday feasts.

Last Week of Classes

Things have been somewhat hectic, folks. This first semester has been very intense, but incredibly gratifying, and the end is officially in sight. One more week of classes and then, thankfully, a break. I will, of course, still have some papers to write over the next few weeks (one on the Bolshevik thinker Aleksandr Bogdanov, one on Nabokov's translations of Blok, and one on Akhmatova's Poem Without a Hero, which brings me to tears nearly every time I read it - so that'll be a fun one to write, yeah?), but at least I won't have any pesky classes to distract from the matter/s at hand.

Thanksgiving provided a break, for sure. There was quite a feast here - ham and sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie from scratch, among other things; very American fare, to bask in our location. I took the chance to actually enjoy a couple days off, pushing down the feeling of guilt that I get when my attention turns to anything but schoolwork, and it was wonderful. Thanksgiving visitor invited sightseeing.



Downtown PVD. Rhode Island seems to be a state that's been plagued with more than its fair share of corruption (like most states, I guess), but it seems that things are slowly starting to shape up (despite the Crippling Unemployment and General Economic Malaise...). We've found a couple of excellent little movie theaters and some very delicious restaurants, and the central public library is fantastic. I need to get to know the area - I can't let the fact that I'll be here for a few years lull me into ignoring the surrounding cities and states.

In the meantime, though, our tree is up, I'm still hard at work, and we've acquired these little companions:



That's Lucy and Charlie. They're about 5 months old or so, and they're amazing. They're siblings - they were found abandoned by a friend of a friend, and we got them a couple of months ago. One of the major perks of moving back to the States was the ability to get animals.

Expect a little more out of me over the next month - despite all the work I have to do, there are some fun little travels planned for December and January, and I can't wait. Hope everyone's holiday season is well and warm...

California to Rhode Island: Five Days in August

After an incredibly truncated visit in California (less than two weeks to visit both Northern and Southern and umpteen friends and relatives), we set off for Rhode Island. I've driven cross-country before, in 1998, but at the time I had no schedule, no deadline, and no real destination - it was a sort of the-journey-is-the-destination-type trip. This time, however, there was a very definite deadline, and an equally definite destination. It was somewhat frustrating to have to hurry through the drive - with the exception of northern Nevada, which I would prefer to spend, oh, NO time in. I can't imagine how any pioneers managed to make it across that stretch without the help of at least an SPF 30 sunblock.

While the climate in Utah was just as hot and arid as the climate in Nevada, the landscape in Utah was a bit more interesting. I mean, have you seen this?





The Bonneville Salt Flats. I've been to Utah before, but I've never really seen the Salt Flats. It's like the surface of the moon or something (note: I've never seen the surface of the moon). Brad picked up some of the damp clumps of solidified salt, but I chose not to - it had a strange smell, and there was something very alien about it. It was desolate, but not in the same way that Nevada was desolate. In Utah, the land still had an air of life about it, an air of activity. Maybe that's why the Mormons chose it to be their promised land.

Speaking of Mormons:



There's the Temple! Salt Lake City is a very strange place. Here's a weird thing about SLC, for those that haven't been there. A couple blocks northwest of the temple, the street will be called something along the lines of West 300 North Street. Southwest of the temple, the street would be West 200 South Street. Southeast of the temple....but you get the idea. It makes navigation very easy and strangely creepy. And despite the startling cleanliness of the streets, there was a much larger homeless population than I thought there would be. The city, incidentally, has changed a lot since I was there in 1998. Mormonism has grown since then, though, so I guess growth in the city is to be expected. (The interweb tells me that in April 2008, there were about 13.5 million Mormons, up from 12.8 million the year before - and there were supposedly approximately 10 million Mormons when I visited there the last time. I actually thought the growth would have been greater, but maybe I just think that because Mormonism has been so much more noticeable lately, what with Mitt Romney and Big Love. That was a long digression).

We didn't stay in Utah for the night; we continued on to Wyoming for our first night on the road. I breathed a little easier as soon as we got over the WY line, and when we woke up just after dawn the next morning, we found that the land had gotten much more varied. Trees, hills, wind power; it was a nice change from the rock rock rock of Utah. Wyoming was actually a beautiful state to drive through, and there was this incredibly hilarious landmark that I'd never heard of:



There were signs for this all along I-80 in Wyoming; it was less impressive than I'd hoped it would be, but it was entertaining nonetheless.

Continuing along. I hate to say it, but we didn't take barely any pictures through Nebraska or Iowa (which was very strange, considering we stopped in Iowa to see two different sections of Brad's family. They took pictures, but we somehow didn't manage. Immediately upon leaving, I wondered how we did that...). I managed to take one picture that might've been Nebraska...or Iowa...or Illinois...or Indiana...or Ohio...oh, disgraceful. Sorry about that. But the picture is at least interesting:



That's how they transport turbines. There were lines of these dotted all along I-80 through the Midwest, and I have to say - those drivers were hauling ass. I was shocked at the way they were bombing down the highway, pushing past drivers already well over the speed limit. It's like an extremely gigantic shark's tooth.

We did stop at the Iowa capitol building in Des Moines, where Brad talked to me about the Iowa Caucasus or something like that. Caucus - Iowa Caucus. The Caucasus are the mountain range separating Russia from Georgia. Apparently the Iowa Caucus "decides everything." There are some qualifications on that statement, but you get the gist.



Despite the fact that I didn't take many pictures through the Midwest, it was actually very pretty. I do have one question, though: why so much corn? Corn corn corn. I was astounded at the corn. Who is eating all that corn? I know, corn syrup requires a lot of corn, and the corn-based ethanol uses up a lot of corn, but sheesh - I really like corn, but I don't eat it that often. Not often enough to devote about 125,000 square miles to corn, at least. Corn plants are sort of lovely, though - nice for movies and hiding from crop dusters, etc. It was calming. And I listened to the album Nebraska while we were driving through Nebraska at dusk; as cliche as it sounds, it really worked.

We pushed our way through Pennsylvania and upstate New York so that we could make it to New England by the evening of the 31st of August, and we actually met our goal. So here we are! The seat of the original 13 colonies! The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, officially, but there's some hubbub about that going on at the moment, apparently. When I get a break from my studies, I'll read up on the founding fathers and all that. It's not really my subject. B really loves this stuff, though. This was very exciting for him:



That's Newport. Rhode Island was actually the last state to ratify the Constitution, making it the 13th state, and this is where they did it. Rhode Island, however, despite being the last state to sign, was the first colony to declare independence from the British, so it's all swings and roundabouts, really.

So here we are in Providence! We've got a great flat, and my program is incredibly rigorous but wonderful. The leaves are changing, the air is getting crisper, and I'm sure we'll be appalled by the New England winter. It was nice for our first few weeks here, though.



And I think that you, dear reader, are all caught up. As things stand at this moment, I'm working on a presentation on Aleksandr Blok and his drama, and will soon dive into an (incredibly harsh) critique of Nabokov's translations of Blok. (I am against Nabokov. I am willing to take a stand on this). I love (most of) what I'm studying, so be prepared to hear about it in the future. Hope autumn is treating everyone well...