Cultural...Similarities?

Until this week, I have never felt so fulfilled by eating cheese.

For awhile, when people asked me what I wanted from the US, I said 'peanut butter' because, while not impossible to find here, it can be difficult and it is invariably more expensive than at home, and often all you can find are jars of Skippy (filled with hydrogenated oils) or cans--cans--of the stuff. Peanut butter in a can must be undead. Or similarly horrible.

Peanut butter is one of the classic American foods here.

But recently I discovered that there is a food I love (I didn't even know this until I was absent from it) that one simply cannot find in Paris, save peut-être at British or American specialty stores. This godly nectar is known in English-speaking countries as "cheddar", and lately, I cannot get enough of it. I recently brought back from London an extra extra strong (No. 7) variant that was quite good...

I've watched Virginia crave and get a lot of satisfaction out of buying and devouring slabs of the strange soft or goopy, slightly malodorous cheeses that one finds here, and intellectually, I've understood that she grew up eating it, she likes it a lot, and sometimes she just wants it. (I've heard other people describe cheese as a 'bonheur'.) But now I think I have a real, experiential appreciation for the French love of cheese.

Good God, does it hit the spot!

Not Married

Just to clarify, nope, I'm not married. V and I got a PACS, as I mentioned earlier, but we're not married. When we do get married (and no, we're not engaged yet, but we have talked quite a bit about it), even if we decide to have a private ceremony, I'll tell everyone in advance. You're my friends and family. (Well, those of you who are, at any rate.)

The PACS is really just an agreement to live together. Anyone can do it except family members, and all it says is "we live together, please give us a small tax break". Lots of friends do it, for instance. However, it is also an option for gay/lesbian couples as a form of marriage. The contract part of it is really flexible, so you can, if you want to, make it more of a commitment.

As it is, for us it's a way to get a tax advantage and help me secure my place in this country and V's right to follow me to other countries without losing her job, among other things. There's also, I suppose, an element of romantic commitment, but not nearly as much as you might expect from a marriage or a civil union (if you expect such things). Basically, the whole dreamy process consisted of getting birth certificates (officially translated, in my case) and proof of address, submitting these with application forms in order to get an appointment, and then, at the appointment, getting an official stamp on the papers before being dismissed from the office. Ordinary administrative transaction, no fanfare, nothing. And if we want to end it, we go down to the Mairie (the town hall) and say "We want to end our PACS" and it's done. That's it.

Return to Paris

As usual, it has been awhile since I've posted. First I went to the US for visa reasons, then we went to India for vacation and the wedding of two friends, and now we've been back a month and I've begun two jobs and my PhD, plus I'm once again taking my writing projects more seriously (good timing, right?)--so there's a lot of news. We'll take it one part at a time.

The visa applications went more easily than expected, given the effort required to arrange appointments, gather paperwork, and even get information. The tourist visa for India took one day to get, and that was only because I missed the morning deadline for same-day processing. The French long-stay student visa took all of thirty-five minutes, of which twenty were spent waiting to be called to present my paperwork and only fifteen were spent processing my dossier and producing the visa. W00t for efficient administration! (I've written a more detailed description of the process, but I am considering creating a separate blog for my foreign PhD experiences so that I can offer help and entertainment for others interested in the situation or hoping to pursue the same sort of path.)

India was a crazy experience, about which I wrote daily journal entries while there. I'll be posting revisions of these in the days to come.

Having returned to Paris, V has begun work at UPMC (Paris VI) again, this time as a tenured, full-time teacher. (Last year, she was a temporary, full-time teacher.) I got my carte de sejour (another story), which allows me to live and work in France, and I began work as a sort of adjunct teacher of English (language) at UPMC. I teach one class a week, and will get paid sometime early next year. I've also begun working for a company called YES (Your English Solution), which teaches English to businesses in the Paris area.

Additionally, my classes have started up. I'm taking my advisor's poetry and poetics course, which so far is interesting, and a short translation course he's teaching as well, so I can practice my French.

V had Lasik eye surgery at the beginning of September, which means that now she can see pretty much as well without glasses as she once could with glasses. There are some small side effects, some of which seem to have faded, but she and I both wish the doctor had informed us more about them, as they may have influenced the decision. (On the plus side, she's very happy to be able to snuggle without removing and protecting her glasses.)

V and I got a PACS (Pacte Civil de Solidarit&eaccute;, or French civil union) on the 2nd of September, so now we're officially living together and supporting each other. Pretty cool. It's such a potentially small thing (the document needs only contain one line about how the two of you agree to support each other, but can have more) that we weren't going to do anything for it, but our friends wanted to have a party, so we threw a small fête and got lots of wine. We don't drink much at all, so typically this means we hold onto bottles for weeks or months, until we have guests over.

I've also found a dojo that teaches Ki Aikido, and I had begun going, but our finances were low this month and last due to India+French admin fees+Lasik, so I'm holding off for now. But once things get underway a bit more and I get my paycheck, it's back on the mat for me!

I'm also learning how to better organize myself so that I can do everything I want to. I've made myself very busy, which is fun, and now I'm learning how to manage it all. I'm also teaching myself a bit of Ashtanga Yoga.

That's pretty much the update for now.

All the World's a Stage

Something that we've been working on for a long time, but that I have neglected to post about (FAIL) is the play that just finished its performance run last night. V and the rest of the cast have been working on it since last September or October; I've been involved since I came over mid-November. So really I should have written something about it. Sorry.

Anyway, the play we've been working on is Kindly Leave the Stage by John Chapman. Cast/characters:

RUPERT played by Micky Filhol
MADGE played by Marie Dubois
CHARLES played by Yann Fuchs
SARAH [CULLEN] played by Maëva Vincensini
DOROTHY CULLEN played by Amandine who has a last name somewhere
EDWARD CULLEN/FROBISHER played by me
NURSE played by Barbara LeLan
ANGELA played by Virginia Fumagalli

We're almost all pretty much rank amateurs; only Virginia has acted and directed quite a bit, and otherwise Yann has done one play (with Virginia), Barbara has done a little bit of improv, I've taken one general acting and one improv course, and everyone else just started this year. And everyone has done remarkably! Okay, I can't speak for myself really, but at the very least I've had fun and people seem entertained by my part; and everyone else has made huge acting strides, which is amazing and wonderful, and it seems like, by and large, our audiences have all been pleased with our performances. We still have a lot to learn--at the moment, we still perform best if we do a run-through before each show--a trait that, ideally, wouldn't exist--and we need to work on loosening up a bit, finding our characters more quickly, punching up the energy of our acting, following on the ends of each others' lines, stuff like that. But these are all things that will go away with practice. And the bottom line is that we pulled it off, and pulled it off well!

In fact, in order to secure our performance dates, we had to form an official association, "Hark Who's Talking", so we're a theatre troupe, or perhaps a club, now. And we're looking forward to our next year--now that we have had some small success with a few places, it'll be easier to secure those venues again for other performances. And we seem to have impressed enough of our friends and families that they'll spread word a bit and we might get a bigger audience. We don't do this for profit (we might pass the chapeau in the future to help recuperate the production costs), but we'd still like to get as much of an audience as we can.

I posted pictures of backstage at our last show online. Check 'em out.

New Apartment

As recent posts sort of imply (and the one before that blatantly states), V and I have been searching for apartments with a friend. We've found a really nice one and will be moving into it on the 1st of July. It's located near the Buttes Chaumont, which is a lovely park that completely bucks the French tradition of neatly trimmed, flat, geometrically arranged gardens with small bushes, tiny flowers, square trees, too many statues, and grass that you can't walk on. (This is much to my relief--French gardens are pretty, but I prefer some wildness in my caged nature.) It was built over an old quarry and includes some bluffs (topped by pavilion), a small lake/large pond and a waterfall, hills, winding paths, grass that you can (gasp!) sit on, and many many trees.

The apartment is furnished (pictures here), and is well-situated for all of us. For Marie and V, it's near metro lines that go quickly to their workplaces. For me, there is ki aikido (Ki Federation, not Ki Society, but same thing, really) not far away. For all of us there is the park down the street and right next door to us a pool. For V and I, a rock gym. Plus a nearby organic cafe, a fruit/veggie open-air market, and plenty of other neat things. All told, yay! We're excited to move in!

A Lot Like Love (Very Late Post)

Last night (*ahem* February 1--ed.) Mehdi & Nusha came over for dinner (read: Nusha used our kitchen to cook for everyone) as they often do, and afterwards we watched a movie we had rented, a romantic comedy starring Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet called A Lot Like Love. Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a rotten rating (41%), and some French paper quoted on the back of the movie case gave it three stars, which Mehdi says means the same thing as the obligatory "Two thumbs up!" that some no-name critic has to stamp on practically every film that comes out in America just to sell it.

However, we rather enjoyed it. It began as a quirky and cute piece about chance meetings between two people trying to find themselves. The dialogue was well written, witty, and fairly subtle, with quite a few things left nicely unspoken. There were nice symmetries throughout the film (the exchange of photography and guitar stuff, the breakups, etc.). And the characters were relatively normal people with normalish lives (yeah, middle class, but still normal) containing successes and failures. Also, surprisingly, Mr. Kutcher and Ms. Peet did decent acting work, showing characters that matured well over time and had believable subtle oddities. And their friendship deepened nicely.

The parts I thought didn't work so well were not large enough to make the film rotten, I felt. The soundtrack was for the most part poorly chosen, and felt like a sampling of Greatest Hits of the 1990s radio. Almost none of the music seemed to match the mood, tone, or present events of the film. The sound on the DVD itself was poorly done, so that we had to turn the volume way up to hear the dialogue and way down to avoid deafening the neighbors with soundtrack music. And though the film started and progressed for awhile as a quirky and somewhat unconventional romantic comedy, by the end, it seemed to get impatient with its characters, and so forced them into a standard romantic ending, complete with stupid chance misunderstandings and silly reveals.

Roger Ebert has a somewhat harsher view of the film.

Bubble Tea Chez Nous

V and I recently discovered we can make one of my favorite drinks at home (fortunate because there seems to be only one store in Paris that sells it). Tapioca pearls, however, are difficult to cook right, and we've found very little good advice online about it.

That said, through trial, error, and "painstaking" research, we've found a method that seems to work well:

1. Bring lots of water (anywhere from 4 to 8 times the volume of tapioca pearls you wish to cook) to a boil in a saucepan.


2. Pour in tapioca pearls. Cover and turn heat to low.


3. Simmer for 1.5 hours, adding hot or boiling water periodically to keep the tapioca well-saturated.


4. Check tapioca pearls: they should be full and round, and if you used uncolored pearls, they should have turned clear and there should be next to no white powder visible at the center. A few pearls with white centers are okay. More than a few and you should continue cooking a bit.


5. Turn off the heat but leave the tapioca pearls covered and on the stove. Let them sit in the warm water for another half hour.


6. Drain liquid from the pearls and rinse them in cold water. Serve, or for short-term storage, cover them in a sugar syrup made of 1 part each brown and white sugars and 2 parts water brought to a boil and then cooled. (This is also used to sweeten the tea for the drink.) I hear also that tapioca pearls freewe well, but we haven't tried it.

Create a Miracle in Your Life: Increase Your Pen!s

That's exactly what I did today. With Virginia. (She increased her pen!s too.) We went to the store and bought some study supplies, including two new pen!s for me and one new pen!s for her. They're now sitting in bags on the bed, waiting to be added to our collection. So today, truthfully, we have increased our pen!s stock size.

And lo, on returning home, I found in my inbox a very prescient message exhorting me to do exactly what the title of this post says. I have to say the experience was quite miraculous. I'm not sure I've had as large a pen!s stack before.

Tangentially, did you know that Thesaurus.com lists "cock" as a synonym for "stack" and "pile"?

Quoi

Adding "quoi" ("what" en anglais, and usually interrogative) at the end of a sentence as a sort of rhetorical flourish is pretty common in spoken French. Virginia has been trying to get me to say it and other "French" things so I sound less like a barbaric American (my words, not hers) and more like a fluent francophone. Things like using "quoi" properly are hard to get--it's basically colloquial language and doesn't correspond exactly to the meaning of the word that I learned in school. I've been using "oui?" instead, which Virginia says marks me immediately as foreign. She said something to the effect of "It makes one wonder whether you're Belgian. Or weird."

Since my parents will probably vouch against the former, I guess we're left with the latter. I hope the French will still accept me, quoi.

Thanksgiving in Paris

The first big thing V and I have done since I moved over to Paris eleven days ago was to plan a Thanksgiving dinner for our (read: chiefly her but also becoming my) friends. In theory, it seemed kind of complicated to me: I had in my mind visions of Sinister House galas, twenty-five people spread out across living room and kitchen happily devouring a plethora of pot-luck meals, and I didn't really know how we could equal that glory, especially in our smaller dining space (which is not small by Parisian standards, but is easily dwarfed by the SH kitchen, which dwarfs many things, including elephants). Thankfully, V insisted a week before I moved over that if we were to do it at all, we needed to plan it now.

So Thanksgiving it was going to be. I felt that we couldn't fit many people in the house (the dining table only holds 6 to 8) and imagined an intimate dinner with 5 or 6 close friends chatting face to face across the table. But the guest list expanded as we created it and we discovered that there were no less than 14 people we couldn't not invite. So be it--we could figure out space later.

Initially, too, we tried to arrange for a pot-luck affair in order to divvy up the cost and labor of foodmaking, but since many of our friends don't get out of work until at least 7pm and for some reason the French government hasn't set aside holiday time for Thanksgiving, this didn't work out. In the end, our friend Nusha, a pastry chef in training, made the desserts (wow, did she ever!) and V and I planned and cooked the main meal with a bit of later help from Nusha and Marie.

To sum up so far: the initial idea, a small potluck dinner for 6 doubles in size and becomes a feast for 13 (1 couldn't make it) cooked by 2 with dessert by a 3rd.

Now, I know my stepmother frequently manages large gourmet meals for family and guests completely on her own, but she's a very practiced and dedicated amateur chef. I love cooking, but I do not have her experience or skill. So what surprised me tremendously, after researching recipes (thanks, AllRecipes.com!), was how amazingly doable a Thanksgiving feast is (given, of course, time).

Granted, desserts would have required a good deal of additional planning, and perhaps another day of preparation, but in the end, the process wasn't bad. I made the cranberry sauce (actually, sauce aux airelles because we couldn't find cranberries) the night before because it was easy and needed chilling. I also cut up some baguettes for stuffing and laid them out to air-dry a bit. Thursday, while Virginia was at work, I made the rest of the stuffing (celery, onion, herbs & spices, chicken stock) and began to prep the mashed potatoes. When V got home, she set about making corn bread and I seasoned the turkey and set it in the oven. Then she finished the potatoes while I cleaned. Nusha came over and made a salad and then I made gravy.

By this time, most of the guests had arrived and were getting hungry so we let the turkey out of the oven to play with some carving knives before serving everything. Along with the several bottles of wine that showed up with the invitees, we had a pretty savory meal. Thirteen people crowded around two tables stretched between dining and cooking areas, the room filled with banter and conversation.

Chef's Review
As I noted above, most of the recipes came from AllRecipes.com, and practically all of them were both good and fairly uncomplicated.

Cranberry sauce is pretty much just cranberry sauce--the recipe I found didn't differ significantly from the one printed on the backs of Ocean Spray cranberry packs, and we only added orange zest at the end because we could and to account for the slightly sweeter taste of the airelles. (I added a little extra sugar at first because V found a source on the Web that suggested airelles were a bit sourer than cranberries. In retrospect, I think this wasn't necessary. Also in retrospect, more flavor might be pulled from the orange zest if it's added before cooking the cranberries.)

The mashed potatoes were excellent: light, fluffy, and full of flavor. Virginia got amazing compliments on them and many questions about what went into them.

The homemade stuffing turned out well, but possibly could have used some more salt or broth to flavor it. Maybe if we had found space inside the turkeys....

The turkey was probably the best Thanksgiving turkey I've ever had. Due to issues of availability and oven size, we used two 3kg birds, frozen and prestuffed with some sort of giblet-and-chestnut mixture. They thawed easily and cooked simultaneously in 1h40m. I think their small size helped them cook well without losing too much moisture; the herb and oil rub specified by the recipe became a sauce that we used to baste the birds, and probably also contributed a lot to their moistness. And the flavors...wow.

The gravy was also good, but it started off very liquidy and reducing it took a long time. We shortened the process by adding in a "dry roux" (thanks, Nusha!), basically a tablespoon or so of butter and the same of flour mixed together, moistened with a few spoonfuls of the gravy, and then mixed in. I used chicken stock instead of turkey, but added pan drippings from the turkey for extra flavor.

Only the cornbread disappointed me and V, though no one else offered complaint. It was a decent recipe but not spectacular, just slightly too salty and powdery, not sweet enough for me and too sweet for Virginia. We chose the recipe because we couldn't find vegetable shortening in the stores here.

Even with 13 people, we still have leftovers, though by now they're down to some remaining stuffing and a little bit of turkey. Last night we took care of most of the meat by making a delicious turkey pot pie. (That's your cue to get jealous.)

Flip!

My first post from England (shameful: I got here 2 months ago) and it's to say I'm leaving. Decided to move in with Virginia in Paris; now I'm plotting logistics. She'll be out late Tuesday night, we'll go up Wednesday to stay with Julia and Angus in Gloucester, return to London on Sunday, stay the night so that she can get out early in the morning (she'll take a small bag of our stuff with her). Then I'll go back up to stay with J & A for the week, take half of my things over to Paris on the weekend, return on Sunday in time to meet up with my old friend Richard in London Monday and/or Tuesday and/or Wednesday. Then I'll retrieve the rest of my stuff from Gloucester or Reading (wherever it happens to be) and head over to Paris later in the week.

At least, I hope that's how it'll work ;-). Planned events often take unexpected twist. But really, all should be okay--the biggest trouble, I think, is transporting my belongings, which seem to have grown since I came over. Damn.

Journey

I'm flying to London today to spend a long-awaited two weeks with Virginia. I'll also be visiting some family friends and Julia and her counterpart, Angus.

I'm flying Air India, and finalizing my packing now, before leaving for work. (Crap. Where did my car keys go?)

I'll talk to you all in August when I return!

Heroes

*SPOILER WARNING* This post contains many many spoilers about the TV show Heroes. If you are interested in watching but have not seen it, do not read this post.

Virginia has led me to watch the NBC drama Heroes, which follows the emergence of a bunch of individuals with superpowers around the world (well, chiefly the United States and Japan). I just finished the first (and thus far only) season last night; my overall opinion: decent show, decent story, some interesting characters and very interesting powers, but major plot and character development flaws. I really wonder how the writers missed so many of them. For instance:

1) Claire Bennet should not have been alive in the future. By surviving, she ruins the whole "Save the cheerleader, save the world" bit, which is huge in the early story and big in the end as well. My logic: Sylar eats heroes' brains to gain their powers. Claire can regenerate from any injury. If Sylar gains her power, he becomes invulnerable and when Hiro runs him through with a katana, he does not collapse, and thus survives the final confrontation and manages to force Peter Petrelli to blow up New York. However, he has to kill her to gain her power. When everyone thinks she's dead, this works, but as soon as we find her in hiding somewhere, we know that Sylar didn't kill her and therefore didn't gain the ability to regenerate and should have been killed in the showdown in New York. (It is possible that, with Sylar's escape at end of season, he is still on the loose as he was in the Future, and thus can still cause some of the trouble that happened in the Future--but since there has been no explosion in New York, the Future we saw will not come to pass in the same way, so this argument doesn't fly very far without further support, and anyway it becomes, as one of my teachers likes to put it, "a case of intelligent people making good guesses," which means that there isn't really enough information presented in the work itself to draw useful conclusions.
2) Peter Petrelli should probably have begun exhibiting a bunch of random powers, and definitely should have randomly stopped time/teleported. He absorbs the powers of others around him, and he met Future Hiro early on, before he had any control of his abilities, so he probably should have randomly expressed Hiro's powers, just as he did with others he met.
3) There was a fourth (and fifth and sixth) way to solve the "Do I blow up New York" problem. Nathan did not have to die. Peter knows how to fly, and despite his apparent whining, can actually deliberately control his powers, and knows it--he flies to save Claude Raines, he turns invisible at will, he learns to use telekinesis and even perhaps stop time (when attacked by Bennet and the Haitian), and he can regenerate at will now. He has learned the key to mastering his powers. He may not completely have it, but certain ones he knows well already. So even if he can't figure out how to control the radiation power he absorbed from Ted, and I don't buy that he can't, but even if, he can fly under his own power and he can teleport. The latter is a risky option because he has never tried it and doesn't know how to control it, but he has flown under his own will several times, and could easily fly high into the sky, explode, regenerate, and return to earth. And speaking of regeneration, we should remember that he, Claire, and Nathan all know Peter can regenerate like Claire now. Claire, in fact, has regenerated from mortal injuries several times, including one in which an object punctured her brain. She remained dead until the object was removed, at which point, she recovered. Same happened to Peter with the shard of glass. So a little bullet? Shouldn't cause any problem. All three characters in this crucial scene know this fact. Claire can easily shoot Peter to stop his power, then remove the bullet and let him recover, once again calm. Or, to be extra safe, Nathan can fly Peter somewhere far away and safe, or high into the sky, remove the bullet, and leave. Then, if Peter still can't control his radiation power, he can explode safely, away from a major population center.
4) Candace. Future Sylar says that he "met a girl named Candace who allowed him to become president," meaning that he found Candace, killed her, ate her brain, absorbed her power, and can create illusions at will. He also says that he made everyone think that he was the cause of the explosion in New York City by using her powers. The implication is that he covered the fact that Peter exploded, made himself look like Nathan Petrelli or made himself invisible, and then turned that to his advantage. Thus, he has to have met Candace before in order to kill her, and time-wise this seems to have to fall into the space before his battle at the Plaza. But he never meets with Candace, there's no opportunity, and D.L. and Nikki/Jessica take her out almost immediately before they enter the battle. If they hadn't been there, Candace's job was still to guard Micah on the 42nd floor of Linderman's office building, so she wouldn't have left and would likely not have met Sylar. Yes, it is possible that events could happen in another way, but this is a probable unwinding of them.
6) Peter Petrelli, nice guy with cool powers, is not handled well. His power is to mimic the powers of those around him, and to be able (eventually) to recall these powers at will. He first exhibits this power in a very uncontrolled fashion, flying w/o meaning to while his brother is present, regenerating when Claire is around, reading minds next to Matt Parker, but being unable to restrain or direct any of these abilities, or even recall them consciously later. (This power is a very nice mirror to Sylar's absorbing power--Sylar's is violent and predatory; Peter's is symbiotic, or at the least commensalistic.) Initially, Peter cannot choose whose powers to absorb, and cannot choose how or when to express those powers. Throughout the series, it is stated that "heroes" are emerging all over the place, and implied that many are keeping themselves secret due to fear of prejudice or scrutiny or danger. Conceivably, Peter could wind up near to one or several such people without realizing it, and absorb powers from some unknown source, rather than simply absorbing plot-relevant powers from plot-relevant characters. Why doesn't he? Also, Peter learns awfully quickly to control his powers somewhat, but then, in the final showdown, he seems to feel that he cannot handle himself. From a character standpoint, I understand some of this--he has always been the little brother, always relied on his older brother and his parents' support. But if you show him growing out of that successfully, as is done with Peter after he meets Claude Raines, you cannot suddenly take it back when it is convenient for a plot climax, as was done with the season showdown.

Execution:
Sylar should not have lived. He was done as a character, in my opinion. And he was stabbed through the stomach and then sliced open across the belly. And we know he's vulnerable now that he has not had access to Claire's abilities. & Why didn't Hero finish the job?

Of Dwarves and Toilets

This weekend I'm visiting my mom, who lives in Maryland, and my sister and her boyfriend, who live in Arizona and are visiting Mom. I meant to leave this morning after renewing my driver's license, but due to delays at the DMV and delays at home (I forgot about a parking ticket and several other things that had to be dealt with before I left), I didn't get on the road until about 3:30 this afternoon, and finally made it down to Mom's house at 10:30 this evening. I hit traffic over the George Washington Bridge, which isn't unusual but is often slow, and I hit traffic going onto the New Jersey Turnpike (toll booth) and traffic leaving the toll booth (merging and construction). Plus I got tired a couple times. So a 5-hour drive became a 7-hour drive, and on the way I had some nice mundane adventures on the john. (Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you about my bowel movements.)

Really, what it was is that I sat down on the toilet in one of the stalls at the Vince Lombardi Rest Stop (yes, New Jersey names their rest stops--there's one named for Walt Whitman, who probably convulsed in his grave on hearing about it--or, really, given that it's Walt, thought it was fine because life's pretty wonderful)--I sat down on the toilet to mind my business, and after a short while the toilet flushed. "Oh!" I thought, startled. "I hadn't noticed this was an automatic toilet." I adjusted myself a bit for comfort and the toilet flushed again, as if to say "Yup, that's me. Automatic Toilet." I looked over my shoulder at the infrared sensor. No expression. I looked back ahead of me and the toilet flushed again. And again. And again. Then it waited a few minutes and flushed again. And waited. And flushed. And waited. And flushed. All told, it must have drained itself at least 7 or 8 times while I was sitting there--initially an annoying experience, but eventually pretty funny. Now, though, as I think about it, I'm pretty sure the toilet was out to get me.

After I made it to my mom's and had spent ample time hugging people--Auds, who I hadn't seen in a year (:'-(), Santiago (her boyfriend), Grady (mom's close friend and current housemate, and someone who has known Auds and I since we were pre-adolescents), and Mom herself--all of us except Grady were hangin' out in Mom's room and we realized that we had been missing a few of the names of the Seven Dwarves. (Don't ask where that topic came from; I don't remember.) So we remembered a bunch of them. Here a few of the ones we recalled (first, the heightened vocab originals):

Somnolent
Infuriated
Medicinal
Medicated
Prozac
Flaccid (the Dwarf who can't get it up)
Viagra
Vicodin
Froggy (an inside joke referring to a dance Auds & Santiago made up called Froggy on the Moon, which is really quite hilarious if you're me or Audrey or Santiago or Mom or Dad or probably Virginia or Bret, but outside of that group may just seem weird)
Schleppy
Schmo

And on that note, my friends, I am going to write my love a note to tell her I arrived safely and then I am going to bed.

Birthday Opera

A few weeks ago (3/28/07), Virginia took me out to dinner and the opera for my birthday (which was 3/26/07). Neither of us had been before, so it was a new evening for both of us. We ate at a very nice Chinese/Japanese restaurant near Lincoln Center called Empire something-or-other. Delicious food! We shared shrimp shiu mai and a honeydew bubble tea that tasted like it was made with fresh honeydew melon. (Mmmm!) We each ordered a different entree. Mine was a chicken dish with slices of mango and a mango sauce; Virginia's was (I think) some sort of Empire or Imperial chicken or maybe Phoenix something; both were delicious.

Afterward, we walked four blocks to Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera House, the architecture of which is stunning. (One thing I must say in New York's favor is that it is filled with beautiful, modern architecture. I don't put those two descriptors together lightly, either--usually, I am very turned off by what passes for architecture these days. But this city, being one supposed center of everything, seems to get the good architects at their best, so that even if there are boring skyscrapers and ugly buildings, they fade into the background behind the structures that surround them.) The Met is, I think, five stories tall at least, and its exterior sides and roof (except for the front) are constructed of pale gray stone. The front of the building is clear glass supported by several evenly spaced black posts or frames (probably metal) that run from ground to roof. The first floor has a ceiling, mostly, except for part that is open to two large grand staircases that ascend to the second floor. The second floor and above are open--without ceiling at the front half or so. The third, fourth, and fifth floors do not stretch to the front of the building, but rather gracefully hug the walls and the area outside the auditorium. The whole thing is lit by many glass chandeliers designed to look like three-dimensional snowflakes or crystals and glass wall lamps of somewhat similar look. At night from the outside, one can look in and see the whole beautifully lit space beckoning. The opera house installs artwork of various sorts--often translucent or of a shape that makes an interesting silhouette--on the second floor near the front glass wall.

The opera auditorium itself is equally beautiful, with level upon level of comfortable velvet-lined seating and railings that look down over a large stage and orchestra pit. V and I estimated (by rough count) that perhaps 800-900 people could sit on most levels, and that the first could probably hold more. So verging on 5000 people can fit in the auditorium/theatre. The walls of the house are lined with angled wood (?) panels that reflect sound toward the farthest reaches of seating, so that even sitting on the topmost level, as we were, you can hear the performers with amazing clarity--even when they sing from backstage.

The opera we saw performed was La Traviata, a Romantic piece with music by Giuseppe Verdi and libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, and based on the novel La dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas, fils (Alexandre Dumas, Jr., the son of the Alexandre Dumas who wrote The Three Musketeers). The plot, as V will tell you also, is rather silly: a courtesan and party girl named Violetta Valéry comes home with a crowd of her 30 best friends to dance away what's left of the night. She has fainting spells due to her early-stage tuberculosis, and so her friends leave her alone for a bit; they go dance in the other room. One of her guests, Alfredo Germont, stays behind to confess his love to her. She denies her ability to love, but warms quickly to him, and suddenly (Act II), they've been living together for a few months in a country house outside of Paris, shunning Violetta's old life. However, she's been selling her belongings to support them, and when Alfredo discovers this, he races off to Paris to set things right, presumably by burning through his own fortune. This leaves an opening for Alfredo's disapproving father to appear and sell Violetta a crock, saying that her relationship with Alfredo has destroyed the fortunes of Alfredo's sister. (?!) Daddy leaves, Alfredo returns, and Violetta steals away, sacrificing her love for her love's family. Alfredo decides she has left him for another man, pursues, wins a small fortune from the man in a gambling match, and still doesn't get Violetta back. Then, some months later (Act III), Violetta is dying alone (save for her servants) in her original home. Alfredo returns to her, having been told about her sacrifice by his father. Her hope renews, she feels like living again. Alfredo's father returns, apologizes, and welcomes her as his daughter; Violetta and Alfredo confess their love again, and then she dies. Everyone is sad.

The music is lovely, however. The orchestra at the Met is excellent, and the singers are phenomenal! Apparently, too, many performers practice one part in particular and perform it all over the world, rehearsing for many operas at once. Principals are often booked years in advance. Pretty amazing.

We managed to sit next to two lovely people, Leonda and Arnold Finke. They were very kind and generous, explained much about opera to us (they've been going for 25 years at least). We managed to chat more in the lobby during one of the intermissions; Leonda sculpts and does all sorts of art (she's very good, too--we looked up her work later), and Arnold is immensely proud of her. (He told us privately about the awards and recognition she has received; it was really cute and sweet!)

So really, we had a wonderful evening, and I'm tremendously lucky to have the love of a woman like Virginia who is amazing in her own right and goes out of her way to set up things like this for me. Thank you, Virginia! I love you!

The Job Search Goes...Romantically?

From a Gmail chat we had this morning:

Virginia: you going to ACD thingy at 1?
me: yesh
Virginia: ok see you there then!
hugsss
me: actually, see you a bit sooner maybe. Gotta come to library to print/scan
Virginia: ok
me: now I'm done w/phone stuff.
me: & will have more stuff to add to my resume.
Virginia: smooch
smooch
me: :-D may I add those to my resume?
Virginia: sure thing
Virginia: they can call me to verify :p

Surprise...Ice!

After an unseasonably warm and not-snowy debut, winter finally coughed and sputtered to a start here about three weeks ago. It turned cold suddenly, cold enough that I found myself actually hoping for the heating to work in its usual ridiculous overtime way so that I would be warm enough under my down comforter. (That's a slight exaggeration.) And generally, it stayed fairly cold--not as cold as Boston, and definitely not as cold as Michigan or Canada or other cold places, but for a state in the lower Northeastern United States, not bad.

Still, it refused to snow until about a week and a half ago, when the clouds decided to shake their shaggy heads a little and let down a few tiny flakes. This has mostly been the situation since: cold weather, occasional snow flurries, occasional dusting of white stuff on the colder pieces of ground. From time to time, a thin blanket (more like a cotton sheet)over lawn and street and car.

Last night, the only difference was that it was warmer out, slightly above freezing, so the big flakes that fell melted into a fine slush on the pavement when they landed. The grass looked nice and pretty, as if some magical baker had come by with his bag of flour and lightly dusted the green places of the city. But otherwise, the ground was merely wet.

This morning, I woke up groggy, and after talking to Virginia on the phone a bit, decided I was going to surprise her by meeting her for a kiss before she went into the city to study at the New York Public Library. After gathering myself enough to be dressed and reasonably insulated against the cold, and bearing my car key in one hand and a bottle of mango nectar in the other, I stepped out the door...and onto a patch of ice that had formed from the slush of the previous evening.

This was the fun part: falling happened very slowly. I felt my foot slide and tried to stop it the way one usually does when one slips. But my foot kept sliding. I dropped the juice and tried to catch myself on the outer glass door, or the railing to my right, or the brick corner post but missed, I think. I twisted and my feet kept falling, began to move down steps. I slapped my right hand on the other railing, but it was covered in ice and my mittens slid and my keys disappeared from my grasp. My body extended fully, my torso turned downward to face the stairs, I landed and continued to slide. My left hand gripped the top step. My feet stretched out down the stairs, my hip bounced on the corner of one of the slate steps, my right hand came off the railing and grabbed for another step. I stopped. Ouch.

The less fun part was figuring out how to get up. I took stock of myself. (Bruised hip, scraped fingers, sore wrist and thumb. Okay.) I took stock of the stairs, which were almost completely covered in ice, and the railing nearest me, which was as well. My bottle of juice lay calmly on its side at the top of the steps. My keys had vanished; I suspected they had ventured into the bushes to my right. I pushed myself up, grabbed both railings, steadied my feet, and gingerly climbed the stairs. I re-collected my juice and went back inside to regroup and strategize. Something would have to be done, and quickly, if I were to make it to see my baby.

In the end I ventured outside cautiously and realized that a filament of bare concrete lay exposed on one side of the stairs, thanks to the notorious warming effect of sunlight. I made it down the steps, and after rooting around in the bushes for a bit, found my car keys down by the sidewalk. I hopped in the car, drove off, and, happy ending, got to surprise and kiss Virginia! So she was all smiley and happy when she got a ride into the city, and I was all smiley and happy as I drove to the store to get rock salt so that I might do battle with my icy nemesis. And a good time was had by all.

About Virginia

Virginia sweeps me off my feet regularly. She is sweet, sexy, intelligent, creative, kooky, passionate, focused, compassionate, driven, beautiful. She'll probably want to hide after reading this, too. (She's amazing, that's all I wanted to say, and I love her.)

She's 24, Swiss-born (a citizen of both Switzerland and Paris), trilingual (French, Italian, English), and a graduate student studying English linguistics at the Sorbonne. Currently she's working on her DEA (diplôme d'études approfondies) while working as a French assistant at Sarah Lawrence. We met training Aikido; she has trained Iwama style for about three years, and at the beginning of the school year, she walked into my first Aikido class of the semester and asked me if I minded if she put on her gi top. Since then, we've been finishing each other's sentences and generally anticipating each other's thoughts and actions. (Okay, there was a bit of turbulence and some obstacles before we actually got romantically involved, but...)

Beginning Again

As of late November, my previous Web site and its associated blog (Lexivore.net) ceased to exist because, well, I stopped paying for them. Since then I've been trying to decide what my first post should be on the new (free!) blog, which means, basically, that I've done nothing in the way of writing anything for it. Seeing as this was my usual modus operandi with Lexivore.net, perhaps I should turn over a new leaf and worry less about creating the ideal inaugural blog post.

So here's what's been going on in my life: I spent the summer working, first as catering wait staff in the city (NYC) and then as a counselor/teaching assistant for the Summer Institute for the Gifted (Bryn Mawr sessions), which was a debacle of a summer camp. The hours were ridiculous, the company offered classes that it refused to support (hard to teach graphic design without access to graphic design software, for instance), and the counselors were expected to uphold rules for behavior of the kids that sometimes made no sense. Also, when some of the rules mattered most (i.e., rules enforcing non-violent behavior among the students), they were not swiftly followed by the administration. Oy.

At the end of the summer, I got back to Yonkers, drove with my mom to Brattleboro, VT, and then to Newton, MA to meet with my dad. He and I then packed up the belongings still at the house he and my stepmother own and we drove back to NY in a rental van and dropped off the stuff. (My dad was generous enough to drive the van back to Boston and return it for me.)

After my return, Clare and I broke up, driven by her desire to soul-search and answer some pressing personal questions. This left me single for the start of the school year, and surprisingly sure of myself. (I realized, for one, that I didn't need to feel lonely or pine for a relationship, that I could get one if I wanted, and that I knew enough about my desires that I didn't need to leap at every opportunity I saw--I could simply enjoy the start of my third semester and date when I felt like doing so.) I did end up missing Clare at the beginning, but only because I liked her company and was used to having her around. It was a sensation distinct from lacking and desperately wanting a relationship.

So I entered the school year confident and excited. I began to work on my Masters thesis--a poetry manuscript that I hope will lead into my first book--with Kate Knapp Johnson, who is very very good at making students feel comfortable--working with her, I feel like we're collaborating to figure out how to solve a draft's problems, and not that I am listening to her dispense with advice. I leave conferences with her newly excited about my poetry.

I took a workshop with Stephen Dobyns, who is very sharp and very matter-of-fact in class and in conference. He has a subtle, dry wit, too, that can sometimes slip under your radar. He challenged me in many ways, and I feel my poetry grew a lot under his guidance and Kate's.

I participated in a teaching internship at SUNY Purchase, which meant I drove half an hour north-northeast on Thursdays for a class called Teaching Good Prose, and then again on Friday mornings to assist in a freshman-level College Writing course.

I also began to meet people again, though (deliberately) fewer than I did last year. One of the people I met was a gorgeous woman who walked into my first Aikido class of the year asking about wearing a gi. By the end of the class, we were chatting and hitting it off nicely, flirting a bit (okay, more than a bit) and finishing each other's sentences. Over the following weekend, I thought about her a lot. Those who are fairly familiar with my Aikido training and practice will understand what I mean when I talk about ki going or not going in a direction. With Virginia--whom I couldn't stop thinking about, and who clearly liked me--ki didn't go at first. It hit a brick wall. Turned out she had a (recently added) boyfriend in Paris. (She's Swiss-French and lives in Paris ordinarily.) For a few months, this proved to be a problem, as we were ridiculously attracted to each other. But in the end, she and he decided at the same time that long-distance wasn't working out for them, and, long story short, I'm in love and she loves me too!

The two of us have been working part-time in Sarah Lawrence's Academic Computing Department (ACD), through which we know Gary and Ali. Gary works in ACD and is enrolled in the MFA Theatre program at SLC. Ali works for an animal rights non-profit and is enrolled in the MFA Fiction program. I've roped them and a few other people into my Aikido P.E. class at the college, and now I have a small but growing group of regular students! I love the class, but wish I could teach some of the more complicated or unusual ki and throwing techniques. The quarter-based structure of the SLC P.E. system, stymies truly continuous teaching, however, because even with more and more regular students, I have to reset halfway through the semester and teach several classes of "the basics" to new students. Sadly, I only teach six classes in a quarter. (SLC students are, apparently, even less willing to take P.E. classes than Reedies. I don't know how that's possible.) I love teaching intro classes, but I feel a little stuck in that I can't teach my older students a lot of the really fun and neat stuff without first presenting the very basics (the four basic principles of mind/body coordination, the five basic principles of Shin Shin Toitsu Aikido, how to roll, etc.), and I can't do that (yet?) in fewer than two or three lessons. I think I need to improve the way I teach. And I imagine Erik must have similar frustrations at Reed.

Right now I'm on winter break preparing to enter my final semester at Sarah Lawrence (for now, I suppose). I just got back from visiting my father and stepmother in Newton, MA and my mother and a couple of old friends (hi Bret!) in Sandy Spring, MD. Virginia is getting in from a jaunt to Argentina today, and taking off for two weeks in Paris tomorrow, so I'm going to go shower, eat, and run off to pick her up. We've been talking on the phone daily since she left, and I can't wait to see her in person. I suspect once we get home this afternoon (after visiting with her friend Kristen) we won't be leaving the house much till tomorrow evening.