Kieran's Adventures in Slow Twitch

SUPERBOWL!!!!!!

2008-01-20T19:19:00.000-08:00

I cannot freakin believe that the Giants are going to the Super Bowl! That game was unreal.

The only thing more unbelievable is that my father is taking my sister to the game, and I'm not invited.

Oh well, off to look for Super Bowl tickets...

HK/Aussie trip: From Hong Kong to Perth.

2008-01-20T13:10:00.000-08:00

If Hong Kong was in all ways overwhelming, for sheer density of people and buildings and constant sensory stimulation, Perth was more like a ghost town. We showed up late on Friday night, and Saturday morning while running through the city to King's Park I saw fewer than ten other people in the city (there were some more in the park itself). Everything was so quiet that even in the middle of the city, I could hear my own footfall while running. What a weird constrast, to go from one of the busiest, densest cities in the world to the most sparsely populated and remote. That, more than any changes to do with language, made the Hong Kong part of the trip feel completely removed from the experiences that we were having in Perth. If I stop to consider the third week that we had in Sydney, it really feels as though we had three different weeklong trips to three totally different locations. I haven't traveled that way before so much -- either I've gone to one place and really spent time there, or I've gone to several places for just a couple of days each, so that in the end everything runs together in one big blur. This trip offered three strikingly different experiences, each for long enough that I was able to spend real time in every location.

I can't imagine what a week in Perth would have looked like if we hadn't been there for the wedding. Carlton and Sindy really put together an incredible range of activities for the week, so much so that our week in Perth actually feels like the most action-packed of the entire trip. I wish that we had had our acts together wrt hotel much sooner so that we could have found a nice place in Fremantle to stay near the beach, but even staying in the empty city, things worked out. With so many people having moved all over the world, this was really the first time in a very long while that all of this group of friends was in the same place at the same time; it's amazing how things didn't feel very different, even though we were in this corner of Western Australia rather than in Seattle, and even though Seattle isn't so big on Supa Golf or surfing or 100-degree heat. Or mosquitos! Man, the mosquitos in Perth were out of control.

I really liked Fremantle, and if I ever end up back in Perth -- which occasion is hard to imagine, but you never know -- that's where I'm going to stay. And not just because it was a pit stop on The Amazing Race and Jeff, Katherine, Chris, and I all bought sunhats there. It was just a really chill beach town with fun little cafes and bars and shops -- cafes and bars and shops that had actual people in them, in stark contrast to the city of Perth.

The running in Perth was fantastic. They take their public space pretty seriously there, and for a place where it gets so amazingly hot and dry in the summer, it's remarkable how green everything was. I saw tons of runners, walkers, and cyclists on the paths along the Swan River, and I found the overall vibe pretty enjoyable. As an area it was very pleasant and relaxing to spend time, and it almost feels like a place where I could live until I stop to think about how far away it is from everything. And I thought that moving from NYC-Philly to Seattle was moving to the middle of nowhere -- I had no idea.

HK/Aussie trip: Language and Christmas in Hong Kong.

2008-01-15T22:46:00.000-08:00

So one thing is for sure: You can make people study a second language from early childhood on, but you can't make them speak it at home or with their friends. And if they're not speaking it at home or with their friends, they're never really going to be native.

I don't think I heard a single Chinese person speaking English to another Chinese person in Hong Kong the entire time we were there. The British occupation may have created a tradition of afternoon tea at fancy Western hotels, but it sure didn't make people not want to speak Cantonese. Signs and menus in tourist areas are bilingual, and English is the official second language of Hong Kong. And it probably is used by default in international business contexts. But day to day, on both street-level Hong Kong and the elevated walkway super-upscale Hong Kong, Cantonese is the only linguistic currency that really matters.

It would be very interesting to look at some of the linguistic impact of the long-term language contact situation here, but I'm not aware of any work that has looked at English and Cantonese in Hong Kong. Be that as it may, the whole situation around language in the region started me thinking about other aspects of cultural change and how Western traditions have and have not been incorporated into the locale culture of Hong Kong life.

So Hong Kong celebrates Christmas. The whole city was decorated, from holiday lights on buildings and in streets to Santa Claus displays in malls and signs with reminders about last-minute gift shopping. For at least a couple of weeks, the whole city seems to mobilize around Christmas, whether or not people celebrate it as a religious holiday. Insofar as holiday traditions are manifested cosmetically, Hong Kong in late December might as well be London -- trees, lights, Santa, and all.

But beyond that, things start to get a little weird. Like the local school choir that comes to do Christmas carols at your hotel on Christmas Eve, which by the way there is little to make you feel more acutely aware of spending Christmas away from home than a group of adorable eight-year-olds coming to remind you of that fact, in your hotel lobby, as you sit in the adjacent piano bar and look on like the weird displaced old person that you are. So there is all the potential here for painful poignance. Until they start singing, when things shift from Lifetime original movie holiday edition to weird indie art film holiday edition. Because they're singing Christmas carols, but they aren't Christmas carols. They're singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but you don't understand the words. Are they singing in Chinese? You listen more closely. Hm, no, not Chinese. They just have the words all mixed up. It's like some bizarro Rudolph with a bizarro group of reindeer friends. On Dashund and Dancer and Printer and Vicki, on Comet and Cupid and Daddy and Blintzer! And half the songs you don't know at all, and while it's tempting to blame the musicianship of the eight-year-olds, you have to admit that their musicianship is really pretty solid, and the fundamental thing is that you're not familiar with the tonal systems of the Chinese instruments that are being used to play the music, and because some of the songs you don't know at all.

And then towards the end of all of this two even more adorable even littler kids come out and give you little roses and say Merry Christmas, and you just want to die with how adorable they are and how weirdly Christmasy and non-Christmasy it all makes you feel. Cue painful poignance.

And then the caroling is over and you head out with the rest of the eight million people plus tourists in Hong Kong to the harborfront to see all the lights. And you wander around for about 30 seconds before you come to realize that this isn't Christmas Eve; it's Mardi Gras without the boobs. It takes twenty minutes to walk even one block. The crush of people is so overwhelming such that a couple of the subway walkways are closed so that people won't die of suffocation. You have never seen people like this, not even in New York City in Times Square on New Year's. It is Hong Kong's usual evening crowd, which is already something, times about a zillion. It's a party, but it's not clear what we're all celebrating! We're just walking around a lot in cute dresses and boots! But whatever we're celebrating, this is definitely not the time for a quiet evening at home. There are lights to see! There are still presents to buy! There are people to crush in subways!

Christmas Day is even weirder. Other than banks, everything is open: grocery stores, restaurants, tourist attractions, hardware stores, dentist's offices, Prada outposts in train stations. Santa Claus is still at the mall, working very hard to assess the niceness and/or naughtiness of all the children who are still lined up twenty deep to see him. Wait a minute -- wasn't Santa supposed to come the night before Christmas? Yes, he was, but your parents weren't able to get to the mall to get photos until now. And in fact you'll have the chance to see Santa in the mall at least until December 28, which is the day you depart Hong Kong. (You can't speak for dates beyond that.)

During your trip you meet and make friends with several locals. One of them is someone you know from the US who is from Hong Kong, back visiting her family for the holidays. She tells you over lunch that Christmas in Seattle never really feels like Christmas to her, because it's so boring: everyone stays home with their families and nothing is open. This is an eye-opening comment that makes you realize the narrowness of your perspective, and yet you can't help it; this isn't Christmas.

You make friends with some other locals at a dim sum house on another day, and they are fortunately showing around some other friends visiting from Singapore too, so they not only order all kinds of good food for you that you are totally not aware of how to acquire (there's that Cantonese coming in handy again), but they also offer to take you along with their friends to Lantau Island for the day. Ken, Chris, Edwin, and Eva are about the nicest people you could possibly hope to have help you order pig stomach dumpings and chestnut cake and tell you all about Taoist temples and how they differ from Buddhist temples. It turns out that Chris has just finished a chem eng degree in the UK and has never been to the US but is obsessed with visiting the state of Oklahoma so she can see twisters up close and personal, and Ken is a mountain of knowledge on cognitive science and the visual representation of information, and Edwin is in the Singapore police force and manages to meet the stringent physical requirements while still smoking a couple of packs a day, and Eva, well, you don't know much about Eva because she's very quiet and nice to be tolerating all the English conversation when she would clearly be much more comfortable in Cantonese. And you come away wondering -- if you spoke Cantonese too, would you have more or fewer of these interactions? The more you fit in locally, the less you look like you need locals to help you.

HK/Aussie trip: Layers in Hong Kong.

2008-01-13T11:51:00.000-08:00

I have enough notes on this trip that I figured I'd better break stuff into different chunks that I can post over time. It feels like a good place to start is with my weird ambivalence about Hong Kong.

So to begin with, Hong Kong is totally overwhelming even on like a normal day. This was my first trip to Asia, and therefore my first trip to a big Asian city, and Hong Kong is a very special kind of big Asian city. There are over eight million people living and working on several islands the total area of which is one tenth the size of New Jersey, and after about 2 pm daily, it seems that every single one of them is out and about. The city is this weird combination of modern and ancient and the worlds bump into each other all over the place. Hong Kong has the skyline to end all skylines -- seriously, I cannot say enough about this skyline. We stayed in Kowloon, which is across the harbor from Hong Kong Island, and crossing the ferry across the harbor (which is a steal of a tourist deal -- it's less than 50 cents US per crossing) affords you great views of both sides. There is some really interesting architecture among several of the individual buildings, but it is the sheer density of skyscrapers as the skyline is viewed as a whole that struck me. The view from Victoria Peak, from which you can see the harbor and the rest of Hong Kong in every direction, is justifiably famous, but I preferred the skyline view from the harbor. Every night at 8pm -- like every night of the year -- the city sponsors a laser show across the harbor skylines, complete with music and light choreography that includes every major building on the harbor. It is totally bizarre and also totally reflective of the city's love of modernity and spectacle.

The areas surrounding the harbor on both the HK island and the Kowloon sides are meant for tourists. Rich tourists. There are times when the whole city feels like an upscale mall, when every transitway connecting buildings seems to include a Prada store and every subway station a Versace. If you want to spend money, Hong Kong lets you do it in a pretty spectacular fashion. The crowds in these areas, and indeed in every area, are unlike anything I've seen anywhere else. On a good afternoon it takes five minutes to walk a block. The streets are dense with people just as the skylines are dense with skyscrapers. Walking around Hong Kong is definitely a contact sport. The crowds, combined with the crappy air quality, may be the motivation behind the interconnected indoor walkways above street level that connect much of the city. You quickly learn that you don't get anywhere fast in Hong Kong, but if you need to try, you use the truly excellent subway system and the above-street walkways.

But buried among and behind the modern skyline and the super-efficient mass transit and the upscale malling that seems to be everywhere, there is another Hong Kong. Drop down to street level from the raised walkways with their Armanis and Miu Mius and you'll find hole-in-the-wall noodle shops and dim sum teahouses and storefronts shilling traditional Chinese medicine. Turn a corner and walk a couple of blocks away from the main thoroughfares and you're apt to find passageways spilling over with stands selling dried fish and flowers and stinky tofu, so narrow that you need to walk single file to pass through the alley. This is an old place, regardless of the layers of shiny new that have been built on top of it. And in its way, the old is as overwhelming as the new. This is a city where chaos flourishes amidst tightly constrained and deliberately architected infrastructure.

In light of that, the public parks in Hong Kong are a marvel. We visited Hong Kong Park, Kowloon Park, and Victoria Park, and every one of them offers a perfectly manicured respite from the city. They are green and blue and like the rest of Hong Kong, composed of several different landings connected by hills and stairs and interconnecting paths -- this is a hilly city, and the design of the streets and public spaces accomodates that. But the most remarkable thing about the parks is the way that they are an unabashed celebration of the artificial. Every color is Crayola. The waterfalls and ponds are heavily chlorinated and placed evenly among the pathways, which are themselves frequently symmetric over acres of land. There are miniaturized Olympic stadia and postcard-perfect wedding registration offices and exquisitely tended gardens with symmetric flower displays. And yet tucked among the perfectly crafted green space are hundreds of elderly residents doing their daily tai chi, anywhere they manage to find a spot that offers sufficient sanctuary. There are loud groups of teenagers and families having picnics that range from pork dumplings to KFC. We saw one group of about 15 teenage girls taking pictures of each other, singly and in clusters, with modelly poses on the steps of the miniaturized Olympic stadium in Hong Kong Park. In Victoria Park there was a big Chinese product fair set-up, kind of the Hong Kong equivalent of the Puyallup Fair. It cost $10US for entry and featured the expected mix of food vendors -- selling fried rice instead of hot dogs and dumpings instead of funnel cake -- and as-seen-on-TV hawkers, with automatic freeze-driers and vacuum cleaners and ancient herbal remedies.

Everywhere we went, it was impossible not to notice the deliberate crafting of the infrastructure of life: the sleek subway system; the perfectly crafted public parks; the above ground walkways; the choreography of the laser light show at 8pm nightly. And everywhere we went, it was also impossible not to notice the way chaos seeped not just through the cracks, but also spread itself out and made itself at home in total ignorance of the cracks even existing: every subway car packed people in like sardines, at any time of day; the hundreds of tai chi practicioners spread across the manicured park lawns, each moving at their own pace and in explicit and indifferent dissonance to the hundreds of other tai chiers around them; the hawkers trying to sell you copy watches and fake Prada bags and the religious missionaries trying to make you take green Jesus stickers in the above ground walkways; the pushing and shoving to get the best view of the laser show and the loud conversations and turned backs among people who ended up with the best positions. You can design a city to be neat and orderly, but eight million people in 2,000 square kilometers just can't be neat and orderly.

(And it turns out that you can take over a city and make everyone study English for over a century, but you can't really make them speak English. I went into Hong Kong expecting a truly bilingual city from everything I'd read. This isn't it. But more on that in another post.)

1,921.

2008-01-12T17:51:00.000-08:00

Final tally on running miles in 2007.

Ingredients to end a vacation.

2008-01-12T15:00:00.000-08:00

6am 1/11, Sydney time. Leave hotel for airport.
8:30am 1/11, Sydney time. Fly to Hong Kong. 10 hours.
Sit in Hong Kong airport for 9 hours.
12:05am 1/12, Hong Kong time. Fly to Vancouver. 12 hours.
8:30pm, 1/11, Vancouver time. Arrive in Vancouver and overnight.
11am 1/12, Vancouver time. Fly to Seattle. 1 hour.
1pm 1/12, Seattle time. Arrive home!

Whew, what a trip!

I have much to write. For a change I took detailed notes on basically everything when I traveled, all of which I intend to bloggify in the near future.

Happy new year!

1,860.

2007-12-16T10:28:00.000-08:00

That is how many miles I have run so far in 2007. Two weeks to go. Last year I ran 1,785. By the time the year is over it'll be about +150 miles from last year to this year.That's really just a few more miles per week. In my head I had run way more this year than I had last year, but I guess it is not really so.

I feel pretty crappy today. Cough, sore throat, the works. As long as I can beat the cold by just loafing around all day today so that I can cruise from work to vacation this week without issue. Blah.

Gingerbread vacation.

2007-12-09T18:21:00.000-08:00

Tonight is all about winter food. I am making cabbage and potato soup with blue cheese and toasts for dinner, and I am attempting the highest-maintenance gingerbread recipe ever. This, plus football, is what Sundays are all about. Though I should have read through the gingerbread recipe before starting so that I would have known about all the refrigeration and freezing phases that need to be traversed before actual baking starts. Whatever, it's gonna be tasty.

Less than two weeks until we head off for Hong Kong and Australia! I am getting all fired up and starting to think about packing. We're going to try to fit everything for the entire trip into one carry-on each. It's all about embracing the rewash and rewear. I cannot wait to hit the sunshine -- and the warmth. Whoo hoo! Summer in January! It's sort of weird to think about the fact that I am making gingerbread today, but on Christmas itself we're going to be having dim sum. Living out the age-old stereotype of Chinese food on Christmas. But in Hong Kong.

We're trying to lay out our upcoming travel plans for the next year, which seems to be something we do every time we travel. You get a little, you want a lot. Next year I'd like to take a longer trip to Europe, as well as some long weekends in Boston and San Francisco. And we're going to head to New Jersey at some point to see family. And I want to do a week of a trail running vacation. And once again I don't have enough vacation time to stuff all this travel into. Oh well, life is full of difficult choices.

It is so not supposed to snow in Seattle.

2007-12-01T13:18:00.000-08:00

And if it does, it should at least be on a weekday.

Okay, it's not snowing yet. But I believe the predictions and I think it's gonna. I could feel it in the air when I went running this morning.

I hate winter. The whole point of moving to the west coast was to get away from this stuff. Even though my first visit to Seattle took place in the middle of a snowstorm. I was told that it was the exception rather than the rule. Craziness!

Is it time for vacation yet?

Sunday is race day.

2007-11-25T17:40:00.000-08:00

What a nice weekend. I am so not ready to go back to work tomorrow. Chris actually has two more days off that his group gave them for shipping. I am totally jealous.

This morning was the Seattle half. According to my watch I finished in 1:54, but I still can't see where I placed in the field because the results site has been down all day. The time is solid (especially for the hilly Seattle course, though more on that below) but I was hoping for closer to 1:50. At least I have a goal for Mercer Island in March.

The half has always been my favorite and my least favorite distance. It holds all kinds of nostalgia: My first race ever was a half-marathon, the Philadelphia Distance Run, and I finished thrilled with my very slow time on a sweltering (95 degrees) early September morning. (Okay, my very slow time.) I've probably run more halfs than races of any other distance. It's long enough to feel like a real workout, but unlike the marathon it's not so long that recovery time is a killer. But despite all the practice, my finishing time in the half as represented relative to the pack is generally worse than I do at longer distances like the marathon and much worse than I do at shorter distances like the 5k. So I feel kind of ambivalent about the distance, drawn to it and yet frequently kind of disappointed with my performance in the end.

We definitely had a beautiful day today. It was pretty chilly this morning, but we had sunshine throughout. It's about as good as you could hope to get on a late November morning in Seattle. For the first time ever, I followed the race dressing strategy of bringing old shleppy clothes to the start line and discarded them as the race was beginning. I'm definitely going to do that in the future -- worked great for staying warm before the start. It's hard to believe that it's taken me hundreds of races to figure this out.

I like this course and also don't like this course. I've run it before and sworn that I'm never running it again because of that annoying stretch through the I-90 tunnels. But the rest of the course is beautiful -- through downtown and along Lake Washington and back up through my old stomping grounds in Capitol Hill. Mile 10-11 of this race is a stretch of road that I have run thousands of times since moving to Seattle. But I haven't run it at all since moving to Phinney Ridge, so that was a little nostalgic and nice -- and helpful to know just how long the hills are. But for as much as people talk about them, I've always thought the hills on this course are a little overrated. There are a couple of tough ones, especially the one coming up Madison. But I've never understood the real concern with the long windnig gradual up through Interlake -- it's really not that steep. It might be rough for people doing the Seattle full with 13 more miles on their legs at that point, but then again by that point in the race it's the downhills that are the enemy.

Anyway, all in all it was a pretty nice day. Chad wins the #1 friend award for staggering out of bed to see us go by as we ran past his house. Good thing Yaniv spotted him because Chad and I never would have seen each other -- I was oblivious and the crowd was totally thick even at that point in the race. They told us this morning that there were 16,000 people registered for the events at the race, which includes half and full, runners and walkers, but that well over 11,000 were half runners. That aspect of things was kind of annoying -- the pack never thinned, and some of that course is pretty narrow. Still, the long straight sections were pretty cool-looking, through they are few and far between on that course. As far as the eye could see in front and behind was this unending line of runners. Pretty amazing for 7:30am the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Books and stuff.

2007-11-24T14:20:00.000-08:00

This year's was a solid Thanksgiving. My two new recipes worked out pretty well. I'm almost done reading a fantastic book. I have the Seattle half tomorrow at an ungodly hour. I've had plenty of wine. I have an idea for a new project. I am mostly caught up on sleep. Things could be worse.

I need a new book discussion group. Not to replace my existing one, but to supplement it. I have a bunch of things that I've been reading that I want someone to talk with about, stuff like Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement and Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap. I know people who would happily join in, but they all live in Boston or Gettyburg or San Franciso or New York or Denver or Chicago and not so much in Seattle. Which is ridiculous. We toyed before with the idea of having an online book discussion group but it sort of fizzled before we really got it started. Why do my friends have to live all over the freakin world? Who's in Seattle who's going to read this stuff with me? I can find plenty of people who want to talk about software or technology more broadly, but so far very few who want to argue with me about other stuff that I want to argue about. Maybe it's an occupational hazard.

I don't regret studying linguistics at all, and I am pretty happy with my life and professional choices. But occasionally I do wonder whether I would have been more likely to stay in academia if I had studied something else. One weird thing that I'm discovering is that I am naturally much more an engineer than I ever thought I was. One other thing is that I value my autonomy much more than most careers will tolerate (in this sense, I have mostly been lucky). One other thing is that I'm pretty glad I didn't go to law school.

Four more weeks till vacation!

Of music and holidays.

2007-11-18T12:09:00.000-08:00

The Stars show was awesome! So was the meal at Campagne beforehand. On the way out of the show we happened to bump into one of the Campagne chefs and were honestly able to tell him that the meal was fantastic. Check another place off the Seattle classics list. I really want to go to Cafe Campagne for brunch sometime, maybe when the weather gets nicer, which is when football season ends, which is when Sunday brunch becomes a good option for me again.

But so the show: I've been meaning to see this band for a long time, but I missed them the last time they rolled through town. It definitely lived up to its billing. The set was definitely sort of recency-focused, but they also played the exact set of older stuff that I'd have asked for if I could have, including their "This Charming Man" cover. Besides the music, the show was noteworthy for two reasons: 1. There was a marriage proposal, and 2. Death Cab was there. I guess they're Stars fans too.

This should be a pretty good week. Most everyone is out of work for the holiday, which means I should be able to get more done in less time. We have people coming for Thanksgiving so we have a ton to do and I have the Seattle half next weekend, so it's gonna be busy. It just hit me that we don't really get Christmas this year. Not sure how I feel about that yet. It's either going to make the winter feel much longer or much shorter. I'm not sure which yet.

With apologies to Heather.

2007-11-15T23:38:00.000-08:00

The new Tullycraft album is a ton of fun. I just know that Heather would love it! Okay, she wouldn't, but I do.

I've also picked up some random stuff from Mosquitos and oh my god yes, the A*Teens. Because I am officially old and pretending not to be. Kind of like everyone that I have regained contact with via Facebook! See, it isn't just me. It's you guys too!

But I bet I won't be the oldest person at the Stars show tomorrow night, because jangly Canadian pop brings out all the aging hipsters. In related news, I am super-excited about this show. I've been waiting for years to see these guys play. Tomorrow at work I will be listening to the new album very loudly all day in order to prepare.

I've decided that the reason I haven't picked up the bass guitar is that I have fundamentally the wrong personality.

Everything you've ever said is brilliant.

2007-11-11T16:33:00.000-08:00

So I gave in and joined Facebook. I know, I know. It was cooler to be a holdout than it is to be a lame old person who's missed the boat forever and then rushes in several years too late. Whatever. Your actions are dictated by social imperatives too.

You know that old song "Crush Story" by Too Much Joy? At least one of you does. Pandora suggested it to me the other day and reminded me that I really liked that album, and since then I've had that whole album and that song in particular running through my head on more or less constant repeat. I was hearing it all through dinner with people last night. At least I avoided accidentally humming or something. Of course, that might be due to the persistent and loud live balalaika music that would have drowned me out anyway. Did you know that people in Seattle play the balalaika in 2007? I did not.

We're starting to gear up for Hong Kong and Australia. By which I mainly mean that we're thinking about gearing up. For the first time ever I won't have massive vacation surplus to roll over. It better be worth it. Why is it that I have way more trips that I want to take than vacation time that I have to take them? Why is this blog post so all over the place?

Open letter to 520 commuters.

2007-11-09T16:41:00.000-08:00

Dear Friday afternoon commuters on 520 westbound,

I hate you. Yes, you. I want to leave work soon and I looked at the traffic and I am filled with despair. It is not because of the colors on the traffic map. I drive with that color daily. It is because on Friday, all the crazy people come out. The people who prevent me from getting off the highway to take Rich's special ninja route down 24th back to the bridge. And also the people who drive solo in the HOV lane. We are not in New Jersey, people. Don't look at me that way. I can speak derisively about New Jersey because I am from New Jersey.

Love,
Kieran

Fall back.

2007-11-04T10:46:00.000-08:00

I usually hate turning the clocks back, but this year I'm ready for it. Darker, shorter days satsify my current inclinations pretty well. If that sounds bleak, it's not entirely. I think I'm just ready for a change in season.

And who am I to argue with an extra hour of sleep?

This has been a pretty good weekend. And from here it's more or less a sprint from weekend to weekend until we leave for vacation. Which means we'd better get our acts together to figure out where we're staying, how we're packing, how we're going to handle Christmas gifts since we're not going east this year, and a whole bunch of other stuff. In between now and then a bunch of other things happen, not least of which is Thanksgiving. To say nothing of the ongoing timesuck that is work, although I am starting to anticipate some change on the horizon in that area.

Unrelated aside. Resolved: Whenever anyone says, "People nowadays do X/don't do X anymore/are more X than before/are less X than before," they are pretty much always observing some area in which people nowadays are identical to people always.

Underneath.

2007-10-28T13:56:00.000-07:00

I'm having some work-related dilemmas these days. I just went to set up a lunch with someone I know to talk about it, someone generally very wise and helpful and all-around great. Well, it turns out that he's not where I thought he was. My usual rock, steady in all, happy in his job and his role and his management and in pretty much everything, has changed jobs. Completely. I guess the world is a little upside-down for everyone. You know who you are.

Call that one vote for change.

Newsflash.

2007-10-26T07:08:00.000-07:00

I need a vacation.

Nine is a limiting number.

2007-10-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, I lived in Philadelphia. I had two lives there. I started with the life I had in college. During the first two years I did more things in Philadelphia than most of my peers did, by which I mean that I walked around Center City a lot and every once in a while went to the Italian Market. During the third year I didn't live in Philadelphia because I was studying abroad, and during the fourth year I hung out at the White Dog pretty much every Friday night, figured out that I could run past Kelly Drive up to the Wissahickon, and went shopping at Reading Terminal. In that fourth year I started getting Philadelphia, in my small way.

The second life I had was the grad school life, which maybe sounds like it was another chapter in the same life but really it wasn't. In my second Philadelphia life I moved downtown, started making friends who weren't students, and bought bread every day at Metropolitan. I had less to do on a daily basis and more to do on a weekly and monthly basis than I had in life number one. I went to bars more and saw more bands. I watched more (than zero) TV, I discovered Northern Liberties, and I started eating meat. I spent more time trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

I didn't actually finish graduate school while I was living in Philadelphia. I finished it in the year following, after I had moved out to Seattle. And so that first year or two in Seattle kind of feel like their own kind of life -- still a grad student but less entrenched in weird procrastinatory grad student culture and more on my own to just get stuff done. Equal amounts of trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. But during that first year especially, I didn't think of Seattle as like a permanent thing. It was a for-now place until graduation took me wherever my life was going to take me.

And then in the end it took me exactly where I was, and I'm still in Seattle a couple of lives later. There was the post-grad-student life living in Capitol Hill, hanging out in a neighborhood -- and in fact an apartment building -- that contained a strange combination of work and life, since the people we lived among and spent weekends hanging out with were also the people we carpooled to work with. And there is the life after that, where we've moved to Phinney Ridge, going from very much the kind of place where people in their 20s live to an established neighborhood with people in their 30s, young couples and families who all shop at PCC.

It's kind of weird how it's easy to see all these distinct life phases after the fact, because when you're going through them it all feels like one smooth continuous progression. But maybe the choices we make are more discrete and defining than we realize at the time and it's only visible later, when one day you realize that you're in a different place than you were before.

Three days after Thanksgiving.

2007-10-15T18:12:00.000-07:00

I signed up to run the Seattle half this year. I would like to do the full, but I can't be ready in time to get the time I want. I know a few other people running it and I thought of figuring out some kind of brunch plans for afterwards. Let me know if you're interested.

The end of the weekend.

2007-10-14T16:52:00.000-07:00

Sunday during football season is the best day of the week. I pretty much split my day between sitting around all day watching football and trying new recipes. I have some zucchini bread cooling right now, and Chris is out at the grocery store buying stuff for me to try a new lentil soup recipe tonight. So what if there is laundry to be done? So what if tomorrow I have to go back to work? For the moment, I am enjoying a house where the Cowboys are losing and the baked goods smell delicious.

Sunday nights are a whole different story, though. I like my job, more or less, and once the work week has started I get pretty much into the zone -- probably too much into the zone, in fact. But the Sunday night pause before the work week begins, when we're eating whatever we've cooked for the day and feeling slightly restless from a day of lounging around in pajamas, is the lowest point of the week. A weekend well relaxed does not create a Sunday night where I want to go back to work, but rather a Sunday night where I wonder if I'm doing the right things with my life, and what I should be doing instead, if I should be doing something else instead, and why I didn't spend my weekend doing something virtuous like finishing the pile of laundry or something fun like take a trip away or something other than what I've done.

But for now it's not yet 5pm and I still have a few hours before the Sunday night malaise sets in. Time to enjoy the zucchini bread.

Caught in the net.

2007-10-07T20:00:00.000-07:00

Zzzzz. Any minute now I'm going to fall asleep. Just got back a little while ago from Puzzlehunt 11, Caught in the Net, hosted by SCRuBBers. All in all this was a great hunt, even though I am basically the least likely person ever to appreciate a Tron/video game theme. A few highlights and other stuff:

1. We finished the hunt! We finished in the top ten! Just barely and just barely, and in fact somehow they left our team (The Philadelphia Experiment) off the list of finishers in the closing ceremony. Still and all, finishing the final meta and cracking the top ten were our two big goals, since we'd never done either before, and we managed to do both. We snuck in at number ten, right in between Everyday Heroes and 196, finishing at 5:03pm tonight. And I think we tied for the highest number of overall puzzles solved and finished second for overall points. Granted that's because the top few teams finished the hunt at 7am and went home to sleep. But as for us, we only left two puzzles unsolved.

2. There were a lot -- a lot -- of puzzles. I need to go back and look at other hunts to be sure, but I feel like there were many more puzzles in this hunt than there have been in the last several hunts, and that the puzzles in this hunt required fewer steps to solve. On balance I preferred this, though I expect that opinion will be divided over this. The downside is that it really meant it would be easy to get overwhelmed if you hadn't worked out a good puzzle and answer tracking system. The upside is that more players got to experience more puzzles. They also made it harder than usual to backsolve, which in my book is a good thing but I expect that some will disagree.

3. I feel good about our team this year. I feel that I had my strongest individual performance and also that our team did. For me, I feel like I had breakthroughs on way more puzzles than previously and that the types of puzzles that I contributed to were more varied. For the team, I feel like we had very positive energy throughout the event -- no problem personalities this year at all -- and that we did a better job than previously of talking through our brainstorms out loud. Just talking through even seemingly disconnected ideas out loud definitely helped push us over the edge with a number of puzzles that I can think of. The team worked together very well. This year we had two new members, Phil and Peter, since their usual team disbanded this year because someone got married this weekend. I think it might become a bidding war to keep them!

4. We still need to figure out a better solution for lunch on Sundays. I feel like we need a team assistant or something to make sure that we eat properly.

Probably more comments to follow, but it was a great weekend. Thanks to SCRuBBers for a terrific event.

Five out of five.

2007-09-30T14:44:00.000-07:00

The five bands whose most recent albums are also the last five albums that I've bought are:

Maps
The National
Imperial Teen
The New Pornographers
Stars

What a great surprise Maps was. I am one of those customers, who went into Sonic Boom with no intention of buying anything, won over by the album playing in the store at the time. How good it is to be susceptible.

Nothing unanticipated with the Stars album (In Our Bedroom After the War), which I've been waiting for for months. I guess the album leaked online in an earlier stage, but I'd held off for the real release. Stars and the New Pornographers seem to be on a simultaneous release schedule. Last time, the Stars album was a clear winner for me; Set Yourself on Fire is in my top few albums ever, while Twin Cinema was merely very good. This time I think I'm giving the edge to the New Pornographers, but both are in pretty heavy rotation right now.

I'm in a music acquisition mode and I'm apparently all about what's happening right now -- anything else recent and great to recommend?

How do I love thee, Deborah Madison?

2007-09-24T20:39:00.000-07:00

Deborah Madison, you're a freakin genius. I've long been a fan of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which really is for everyone, vegetarian or not. I've given the big orange cookbook as a gift at least ten different times, and we use it every week or two in our house. The recipes are simple and as close to foolproof as I can imagine. And they're pretty darn tasty to boot.

But with this soup cookbook, you've outdone yourself. We bought it on a snowy day in our neighborhood last year and we've never looked back. And I'm sitting here right now eating the smoky tomato bisque and giving thanks to the cookbook gods that you're willing to share your recipes. You are a culinary hero!

Go get this cookbook, people. Seriously.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the border.

2007-09-23T18:42:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks have been about regional and personal exploration, from Vancouver and the Puyallup Fair to family relationships and job satisfaction. Some of these have been more fun than the others.

Dispensing with the clear highlight right off the bat: Everything that Chris told me about Mutton Bustin last year is true. It's like a rodeo, only with kids under six and sheep. It turns out that those sheep can really move! Well, you'd move too if you had a random unexpected kindergartener hanging on to your back for dear life. If you are or have a child under six years old and under 60 pounds, don't wait -- get to the fair next year before it's too late!

In other news, I kind of want to move to Vancouver. Until last weekend I'd only been there to run the marathon, which is a good way to see a lot of the city but not to really experience it. It feels a little like San Francisco to me, which is to say that it feels like a real city kind of city, with real pedestrian life, stuff open into the night, a large and populated downtown. And it's Canadian! And surrounded by beautiful things in the same way that Seattle is.

Travel aside, I'm feeling kind of generally burned out this week. So that probably means that I need more travel! Good thing we have Hong Kong and Australia coming up.

On your mark, get set, wait five seconds to cross the start line!

2007-09-09T16:24:00.000-07:00

I've been racing a lot lately. Two weeks ago I did Hood to Coast with a great group of people, none of whom had I met until the day before the race. This was my first year in Van 2, and I ran legs 7, 19, and 31. Wow the first two made me glad that I've still been hill training even since leaving Capitol Hill. Anyway the whole thing was a lot of fun, and my legs recovered a lot faster than they did the last couple of times.

So I was only too happy to sign up for the Iron Girl Seattle when one of my Hood to Coast teammates emailed me about it. I did the 5k event that took place at Green Lake this morning. What a great event! I wasn't sure how it was going to go -- there's nothing too special about running at Green Lake for me since I do a lot of my regular mileage there, plus this is a nationally sponsored race rather than a local one. (Ryka sponsors.) Well, it was great!

This is the first women's-only race that I've done, and this definitely made me want to do more. One thing that totally cracked me up was the dynamic in the start line. General race ettiquette asks that people line up approximately according to where they intend to finish, by their projected pace. In this way faster runners are supposed to be closer to the front, with walkers at the very back of the line. The goal is to get the race going smoothly and avoid congestion, so that faster runners don't spend the first mile passing and dodging strollers and slower athletes. In many races, this expectation is formalized by pace signs, so that for instance if you're planning to run 9 min/mi you should line up near the sign that says 9 min/mi. It's a good system, if people use it. It's a terrible system, if most people don't.

I've never been to a race where this really works, because people are always trying to squeeze as close to the front as possible, stretching for the extra couple of feet advantage. Never mind that in this day and age this kind of jockeying for position has no point, since all runners wear chips that gauge their start and finish times electronically anyway. As sure as there is a start line, there will be be slowpokes mixed in with the faster people right up against it.

Except... not today. In fact, the women in this race were so determined to line up appropriately that there were actually no women yes NO WOMEN lined up in front of the 7 min/mi sign. This left a gap of at least 20 yards between the actual start line and the first few runners. The commentator had to actually ask everyone to move forward to compress nearer to the start line. That's crazy! And also awesome. It made for a very smooth race. I didn't notice myself passing in builk or being passed in bulk at any point during the race, so at least from where I sat in the field, it worked really well.

And if you had asked me yesterday if I thought that such a thing were possible based on the approximately 100 races of various distances that I've run, I would have told you no way. And laughed at the question for good measure.

Next race is the Run for Children's on September 30, another 5k. I'm definitely going for speed in the next few months.

(I was happy with my finish time today also: 22:50, 7:24min/mi pace, finished 29th out of 775 overall.)

Welcome to paradise.

2007-09-03T09:32:00.000-07:00

It has been an eventful few weeks: a trip back east to see family, Hood to Coast, some other stuff, much of which really deserves blog posts. But the item that has brought me out of my blog-free lull is none of those. What is it? Why, it's the FOX Reality Labor Day marathon of Paradise Hotel!

The concept behind this show is right out of the reality playbook: Take a whole bunch of attractive men and women, put them in a tropical setting with access to limitless alcohol, make them pair off as roommates on a weekly basis, and send the one without a roommate home. But then... replace the poor roommateless sap with another person of the opposite sex! Repeat for weeks on end, sending contestants (or "guests") in search of some unspecified ULTIMATE PRIZE, with no clear idea of how the ULTIMATE PRIZE might be earned or attained. It's genius! Since there was no obvious end point to the game, no clear idea of what the ULTIMATE PRIZE was or how it might be earned, the formula allowed FOX to arbitrarily extend the show's run in the summer of 2003 by an additional several episodes because ratings were so good.

The best thing about the Labor Day marathon is that FOX has interspersed the old episodes with current-day interviews with America's favorite hote guests. Oh Zach and Amy, how I've missed your abusive, dysfunctional relationship! Oh Dave, you are even dorkier than I remember! And Toni! Oh, Toni. YAHTZEE! Game on!

If you're not TiVoing this, you really need to be. Don't worry that you've missed the first half of the marathon. We're still several episodes away from revealing the ULTIMATE PRIZE!

Trapper Keepers.

2007-08-12T12:46:00.000-07:00

Noelle turns 10 today. In honor of her birthday, I asked her if fifth graders these days are still using Trapper Keepers. It turns out that fifth graders these days have never heard of Trapper Keepers. I am officially an old person.

I've been thinking lately about school, and particularly about how school is portrayed in popular media. Idealized notions of the American high school experience pop up all over books, movies, and TV and have been since at least the 1950s; even post-modernist laments of teen angst are typically idealized in a way that real-life teen angst never is. I'll never forget seeing Welcome to the Dollhouse in the theater when it first came out. The audience was distributed in age, ranging from middle school kids up to people in their 40s and 50s. The movie is painful, funny, and painful again; everyone above 30 laughed throughout, but at some point everyone younger kind of stopped laughing.

Here's the thing I wonder about school-related media: Who is it meant for? I read an article once that claimed that on average high school students rated the movie Clueless a full two points lower out of ten than viewers above 30. Who is watching Laguna Beach oops Newport Harbor? Why do I even know that Laguna Beach has become Newport Harbor?

I didn't really like high school very much, but I had a great time in college. Maybe that's why I pay attention to idealized notions of high school in a way that I don't really care about similar representations of college life. The thing is that I know plenty of people who had totally different high school experiences than mine but who feel the same way. What is it about teenage life -- happy, sad, angsty, whatever -- that makes people pay attention?

Weekend snacks.

2007-08-11T17:56:00.000-07:00

We missed the farmer's market yesterday, so we headed downtown to Pike market this afternoon. It was a perfect day out -- the kind of day that draws throngs of tourists, but the kind of day where you don't even mind because you're one of them. Pierogies for lunch and cucumber and cherry tomatoes and peaches and zucchini and eight-grain bread to bring home... and tamales to steam for later! It was a good afternoon.

Sharks: A Family Affair.

2007-08-05T21:51:00.000-07:00

There are currently five shark-related shows on our TiVo:

Perfect Predators
Shark Feeding Frenzy
Shark Tribe
Sharkman
Sharks: A Family Affair

It is a great mystery that I fear that Chris can solve.

(This may be related to why TiVo is suggesting Killer Ants, Killer Squid, and Survivorman: "Lost At Sea.")

Sleep the clock around.

2007-07-29T10:05:00.000-07:00

Well, in the end yesterday, the run, the gardening, and the wedding were all good, successful in turning a grumpy kind of day into a day that was all about sunshine. This morning looks overcast again and I'm trying to decide if I should head to work before going to Jeff and Katherine's housewarming party later on. Once again I'm feeling more like staying on my couch than anything else.

With yesterday's nuptuals I think our wedding juggernaut is almost over. We're going to Carlton and Sindy's post-wedding-stravaganza in Australia in a few months and then to Brett and Jess's enormous wedding in Ohio in the middle of next year. And I think those are the last ones on the map for a while. It seems like we've hit the tipping point where we know many, many more married people than unmarried people. If this year's pregnancy and birth rates among our friends are any indication, then the wedding juggernaut is being replaced by a baby juggernaut at lightning speed.

I am (almost) ready for some football.

2007-07-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

High-level: There are two slots remaining in my fantasy football league. If you're interested, send me email and let me know. It's a free league with an open draft, and draft is in about a month.

Details: This summer hasn't felt like summer, for some reason. We've had some beautiful weeks, but also a few more cloudy days than we've had in previous summers since I've lived here. But I don't think it's about the weather. Somehow I'm just not feeling very summery this year. I can't really figure out why. Maybe it's all the time at work, or maybe it's the fact that as I type this, it's overcast and gloomy outside and I kind of feel like going back to bed instead of going out for a long run, gardening, and going to a wedding (which is what the day really has in store for me, starting in about 15 minutes).

Rather than dwell on it, I'm trying to get back into the spirit of summer as much as I can. But I'm kind of undermining that by also looking ahead to the things that I enjoy about fall. And one of the things that I enjoy about fall is football season. And one of the things that I enjoy about football season is fantasy football.

So if you want to join, let me know. Or if you think you can fix my summer blues, let me know that too.

On Big Love and blogs.

2007-07-21T00:46:00.000-07:00

Harry Potter and Tony Soprano both ending their significant storyline presence in the same year? Hardly seems fair.

Be that as it may, I am really enjoying this season of Big Love. If you're watching the show and you're not reading the Margene blog on the HBO site, you're really missing out. HBO started the blog during the hiatus between seasons, speaking through the voice of Margene the character to provide some interesting background on Margene herself and her introduction to the Henrickson family. The blog is now updated weekly after each episode airs. I think it's connected to how much butt Ginnifer Goodwin is kicking this season in how she's playing Margene's character; HBO has created a rich, textured back story for the character that surely must enrich the actor's tools for playing her. It's also a really clever way for HBO to get a regular sense of how fans are finding the season, not to mention an interesting read (via the blog comments section) to see the perspectives of the many different kinds of viewers come together (LDS vs. polygamist vs. none of the above, Utah vs. non-Utah, etc). I was thinking about whether HBO could use other characters from other shows to accomplish something similar. Maybe I'm not very imaginative, but I have a hard time seeing it working as well for most other cases. But for this show and this character, it's awesome.

Only a few hours until Harry Potter arrives!

Heirloom tomatoes = love.

2007-07-15T14:35:00.000-07:00

This past Friday we weren't able to get to the Phinney Ridge market before it closed, so this morning we head over to the market on Broadway in Capitol Hill. That market started right around the time we moved to Phinney Ridge, so we'd never been and didn't know what to expect. What a great market! We were expecting something pretty similar to the Phinney Ridge market, with most of the same vendors and farmers with stuff to sell. Well, although there was certainly some overlap, the Capitol Hill market had a much more comprehensive produce selection with many more farmers, while Phinney has a narrower range of produce farmers but a broader variety of vendors overall -- more cheese vendors, more bakeries, and more vendors selling food to eat on the spot (pizza, crepes, and Ethiopian food all being represented at the Phinney market).

So our haul this morning was much more dominated by fruits and vegetables -- and what a haul we got! We've already had a delicious lunch of Pugliese bread, garlic, good olive oil, heirloom tomatoes from the market, basil from our garden, and a little Parmesan cheese. I really like when we manage to create lunches like that from the market and our garden. We also ended up bringing home an obscene amount of berries, including marionberries and tayberries, the latter of which I haven't tried before but seem to be sort of midway between a raspberry and a blackberry but a little less sweet. We finished out our take with more heirloom tomatoes, baby bok choy, white flesh nectarines, a lemon cucumber, some pickles, zucchini, and a soft pretzel that was unlike Philly soft pretzels but was pretty tasty nonetheless.

Now we just need to figure out what to plant in the remaining space in our garden. I guess we'll need to take a trip to one of the nurseries to see what kinds of things we should be planting in July.

We were talking the other day about whoever it was who described Pacific Northwest cooking as a bunch of really great ingredients looking for a cuisine. That seems about right to me.

License to stamp.

2007-07-07T20:33:00.000-07:00

Today was Puzzle Safari 007: License to Stamp. Can you feel the dorkiness? Yes, I think that you can.

There were some slight rule changes this year, but the principle was the same: answers to puzzles are locations around the Microsoft main campus, so at some point during each two and a half hour round, each team of four people needs to send one person off with the logbook to all the locations the team has found in order to retrieve stamps. Only one person from each team can run at a time -- there's only one logbook per team -- and on my team, I am the runner. This means I spend the first hour and forty-five minutes or so solving puzzles with everyone else and the last hour and fifteen minutes running around campus to try to collect stamps before the time runs out.

In past years I have had theories about the distance that I actually cover during the event. I'm out for two and a half hours total, which is a long time, but there is a lot of starting and stopping to hunt for stamps and answer phone calls from teammates with new solutions. This year for the first time ever I wore a GPS device while running so I have some idea how far I actually went. Check out the map here: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/kml/episode.kml?episodePkValues=3240710

The route is crazy! Not my fastest time ever because of all the starting and stopping, and I lost signal inside pretty much every building, but my watch did a pretty good job capturing the distance anyway; I estimate from the corrections on the map that I ran about 1-2 additional miles beyond the 10.5 that my watch captured.

The whole event was a lot of fun, and I'm not just saying that because Chris is one of the organizers.

Summertime, and the living isn't as easy as it was.

2007-07-05T20:47:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a small town called Ringwood, about 30 miles northwest of New York City. It was close enough to the city that we had a lot of NYC transplants in the town -- and close enough that "the city" unambiguously refers -- and far enough away that we didn't have any traffic lights. Ringwood was a great place to grow up right up until you turned 15, when you were ready to leave but not yet old enough to have a driver's license.

Ringwood was the kind of town where people went into their houses in October and didn't come out again until late April, which may be why I find that almost all my memories of growing up that are anything like nostalgic take place in the summertime. Summer days were all the same and run together in my head into one big blur that is 14 years long, and yet I have enough individual memories of every-day activities that in reality they could not have all taken place every day. There are the Choctaw Trail memories -- running around outside with all the other kids on the block, playing all the games I mentioned in my previous blog post as well as several others; having sleepovers with my neighbor Colleen; running through the sprinkler on my front lawn -- and there are the Cupsaw Lake memories -- swimming lessons and volleyball lessons and arts and crafts and learning to twirl baton yes twirl baton and swimming out to the faraway docks after hours to play all the games that the lifeguards didn't allow during the day. I remember the year that Kool-Aid filmed a commercial at the lake and donated waterslides, I remember swim meets against other lakes, and I remember Paul, the hot lifeguard with a whistle-twirling problem.

So the thing that's totally weird about all this Ringwood stuff is that it formed my idea of what summer is supposed to be. I have occasional and fuzzy memories of other times of year, of individual events and stuff that happened in school, but it doesn't have the same sense of permanence in my memory. The school memories feel totally distinct from the memories of the place that I grew up, maybe because in my case they mostly were (since after the age of 12, I no longer went to school in Ringwood). But I always come back to the summer stuff like a junkie looking for a better fix; whatever summer is like now, it can't measure up.

Things that I have not blogged about.

2007-07-03T19:16:00.000-07:00

This is a list of stuff about me that you might not know. I figure that it is important to include this thing on a blog in order to faciliate smoother, more efficient identity theft.

I prefer sorbet to ice cream. Who doesn't like ice cream? Well, mostly I don't like ice cream. Ice cream makes me thirsty.
Three outdoor games I played a lot between the ages of 8 and 13 are ghost in the graveyard, kickball, and red rover. We also played something called Easter egg hunt that was sort of a cross between tag and... well, tag. Except you had to be able to come up with novel color terms to get access to base (you know, like periwinkle? crimson? aquamarine? and other stuff from the big Crayola box).
I wasn't allowed to watch sit-coms in primetime growing up (syndicated runs during the day were okay on sick days). We were more a private investigator show kind of household.
On the whole I did not like high school.
Growing up I played softball, field hockey, lacrosse, basketball, volleyball, and swimming. In college I proudly added inner tube water polo to this list.
My first slow dance was to "Throwing It All Away" by Genesis. I even remember who it was with, but I won't include his name here in case he vanity searches his own name and then discovers what a disproportionate sense of importance this dance had in my life.
I used to have a slam book. Twice.
I remember the names of every teacher I have ever had.
For most of my life until almost the age of 30, I knew exactly what I wanted to do when I grew up. Now that I am sort of grown up, I am doing something else.
I run with a watch that includes GPS functionality.
The two cats that we have now are the first pets that I have ever had. They are also the best pets that anyone has ever had in the history of the world.
I am introverted, but extra-social.
On the whole I would rather read about it than actually do it.
According to the Kolbe assessment, I am a theorist, which means that my conative creativity is in originating concepts, innovating systems, and initiating trends.

And probably some other stuff.

Life is easier with bullet points.

Extracurricular == curricular.

2007-07-01T09:49:00.000-07:00

In one sense it's kind of silly to regret that I don't have more time to spend on the things that I enjoy, because I own my time to a very great extent. I work a lot, but I could work less (and mostly I enjoy work). Like everyone else, I have some day-to-day errands and logistics that I need to take care of, but not so many. And so what it comes down to is that mostly I send my time doing the things that I choose to do... and yet I still find that I don't have enough time to do the things that I would choose to do if I had more time.

I run a lot. Outside of work, this is probably the biggest time investment that I make in a single activity week in and week out. But I wish I could run even more, spend more time seeking out new and interesting trails (of which there are many within an hour or two of where I live). Running is my main time outside and I cherish it.

I read a lot. But no matter how much time I spent reading, I have the feeling that I would find it inadequate.

I write some and wish I wrote more. And now we start getting into regrets about time. I feel this as a distinct lack. I feel it as an occupational gap to a medium-large extent. And yet I find it hard to make some of the choices about prioritization that I would need to make in order to address the gap.

I don't swim at all. Though I love it, though every time I travel I end up swimming and resolving that I need to run less and swim more, I nevertheless come back to my normal routines and never manage to change them in this regard. I think it's because, unlike running, where I can just put on my shoes first thing in the morning and go, swimming has a process built in. The barrier to entry is not high, but it is an inconvenience.

I hike occasionally, but not as much as I would like. Most of my outdoor time is running, and truth be told, I'd always rather trail run than hike. But Chris hikes and he doesn't trail run, so this is something that we can do together.

I used to watch movies voraciously, and now I do only sometimes. I'm not sure what happened here. There has been a switch in the last year. Before I worked as much, I had time for more reading and more movies. Now that I don't have as much time for both, I guess reading wins for me.

I cook often, and now that we have a nice farmers' market so close to our house, I have incentive to cook even more. But I cook the same things, over and over and over. I improvise but I improvise in the same ways and within the same boundaries.

I work with kids, but only during basketball season. I love coaching, and every year when the season ends, I think that I should find some other activity that lets me keep working with kids during the rest of the year. So far I have not done so.

There are probably several other things I could add to the list: making or seeing music, more time with friends, more time traveling. I guess it's a question of prioritization and really owning the choices that you make -- and finding a way to be fully engaged with whatever it is that you're choosing to do. And even still there won't be enough time.

Around the world by way of Pittsburgh.

2007-06-29T19:38:00.000-07:00

When I was in school, I expected people to move around. And they did. Towards the end of my time in Philadelphia, I had a pretty even mix of students and friends that I thought of as having normal jobs. Now, five years later, many of the normal job friends have stayed put, at least citywise, while most of the students have moved elsewhere. And now, five+ years later, many of the post-student friends are on their second or even third hop. (Readers, you know who you are!) This is normal and expected.

When I moved to Seattle, I made a couple of friends who were students but more friends who had normal jobs. So how has it happened that people are moving around anyway? In the last two years, we've had friends from Seattle move to:

Dublin
Maui
Aachen
Pittsburgh
Sydney
Melbourne
Charlottesville
Tokyo

Sucks to be the one in Charlottesville, though not as much as it sucks to be the one in Pittsburgh -- although never fear, that one is about to move again. ;)

Not one of these people was a student (although a couple were moving to become students, so I guess that kind of counts). So what's going on here? What is this trend that leaves me determined to make friends only with old-school Seattle fishing families in the future? And what prevents me from up and moving along with everyone else? Increasingly I am thinking about this question.

There's one trend I spot among everyone whose moves are captured in the above list: They are all either single people, or couples who agree to let their location be influenced by the career choices of one or the other of them without direct regard to the other. Which must mean something, somewhere, to this pattern.

A good reason to go to the farmers' market.

2007-06-28T18:01:00.000-07:00

The saying goes that man cannot live by bread alone, but my saying goes that I am willing to try. Anyone who has known me more than two minutes knows how I feel about the stuff. And though I appeciate bread in all its many-crumbed and -crusted varieties, I must admit that I have my favorites. And when it comes to artisanal bread in Seattle, there are some pretty good options. We have two breadmakers whose products are generally very good (Essential Bakery and Grand Central Bakery) and one whose products are generally excellent (Tall Grass Bakery). One of the best things about the new farmers' market in Phiney Ridge is that Tall Grass sells there.

You can't go wrong with one of these, my top five Seattle loaves:

Whole Wheat and Honey (Tall Grass)
Pumpernickel with Cherries (Tall Grass, seasonal)
Avery's Pumpernickel (Tall Grass)
Walnut (Essential)
Hominy (Tall Grass)

Runners-up include: Campagnolo (Grand Central); Pain au Levain (Tall Grass); Desem (Essential); Rye and Onion (Essential).

When I lived in Philadelphia, I used to frequent Metropolitan and LeBus, which also had some great choices (especially that LeBus multigrain mmmm!), but I don't think that either of those can compare to any of the three above bread bakers in Seattle. Maybe my next post about complex carbohydrates will be about soft pretzels, where Philadelphia has a clearer victory.

My life in bullets.

2007-06-24T09:01:00.000-07:00

Last month I ran the Vancouver Marathon. I didn't blog about it because I haven't been blogging about anything. So in a nutshell, here are some other things that I have done in between returning from Mexico and discovering conservapedia:

Finishing War and Peace. I liked this, but I liked Anna Karenina more. After 1000 pages of expository philosophy interwoven with the narrative, I did not feel that Toystoy had left a whole lot of room for ambiguity about the nature of his feelings regarding the role of the individual and free will vis a vis the making of history. Did I really need the extra hundred pages of expository philosophy at the end to recap?
Working like a gazillion hours. I have work-life balance issues. I'm working on it.
Loving the series finale of The Sopranos. No one seems to have been neutral about this. I'm kind of wondering if David Chase is a fan of the movie Limbo.
Having the annual clothes swap party. I picked up some really cool stuff this year, and got rid of over hal my wardrobe at the same time.
Thinking about buying tickets to Australia. We haven't pulled the trigger yet, but we plan to soon. We're going for part two of Carlton and Sindy's wedding. We're trying to figure out which place we ought to stop along the way/back.
Attending the new Phinney farmers' market. It is so awesome to have one of the markets happening so near our house. It is doubly awesome that the Tall Grass Bakery attends. And the most awesome thing of all is that it runs from 3-7pm on Fridays only, so it provides a very good reason for getting out of work at a reasonable time on Friday.
Seeing my sister graduate from law school. This has two benefits. First, she is now done with law school. Second, visiting Meredith now means going to LA instead of to St. Louis. Everybody wins!

Probably some other stuff too. But now I don't need to feel bad for loitering on everyone else's blogs without giving updates of my own.

Childlike, gentle, pretty, willowy, submissive.

2007-06-23T09:43:00.000-07:00

I am emerging briefly from hibernation to tell you about http://www.conservapedia.com, sort of like wikipedia for fundamentalist Christians. Some of my favorite entries:

minimum wage increase: "a controversial manoeuvre that increases the incentive for young people to drop out of school."

Hilary Rodham Clinton: "may suffer from a psychological condition that would raise questions about her fitness for office."

femininity: the quality of being "childlike, gentle, pretty, willowy, submissive."

pro-choice: "is the euphemism preferred by people or organizations who are in favor of permitting or promoting abortion, under some or all circumstances; some believe that a woman should have the right to terminate her pregnancy for any reason, including as a method of contraception, while others maintain that it should only be used in special cases.
Planned Parenthood performs nearly 200 abortions for every referral for adoption, making the term "pro-abortion" more appropriate than "pro-choice.""

Al Gore: "starred in a keynote presentation about the supposed climate crisis."

megachurch: "There is no page titled "megachurch"."

George W. Bush: "Though the liberal media continues to disparage Bush's handling of the economy, they often neglect to report the many aspects of the economy that Bush has improved. For example, during his term Exxon Mobil has posted the largest profit of any company in a single year, and executive salaries have greatly increased as well."

And my single biggest favorite so far:

premarital sex: "This page has been deleted and protected to prevent re-creation."

My love-hate relationship with the Yucatan.

2007-05-04T20:33:00.001-07:00

We recently returned from eight days in Mexico. Although it turns out that I am not supposed to call it Mexico, since people who live where we went seem to think of Mexico as a distinct place. We ran the gamut on this trip: lost bags and hacienda plantations and getting lost on rural roads and spectacular Mayan ruins and sopa de lima and colonial cities and beach towns and cooking classes and food poisoning. Um, I didn't mean to implicate any cause-effect relationship between those last two items.

To begin: Man oh man how I detest Alaska Airlines. With special reference to the baggage handlers in Los Angeles. In related news, spending a couple of days in the Yucatan without deodorant is not a vanguard travel experience that I would recommend. See also: having frustrating customer service conversations in Spanish when you're only a so-so speaker of Spanish on a good day. See also: having fifty of these conversations in one day. On the bright side, by the end of day five -- since that is how long it took for Chris's bag to arrive at last (mine showed up on day three) -- the staff of Air Mexicana in the Merida airport felt like close personal friends of ours. When we checked in for our flight home, the woman who checked us in for our flight told us that she felt like crying when his bag finally showed up. Then she marked our luggage priority for the trip home and checked us in without looking at our ID. In general, bad guys seem like they'd have a pretty easy time of things in the Merida airport, as long as they're not trying to retrieve lost luggage.

The trip home wasn't much better, including as it did a mile sprint through LAX with bags that we were afraid to check back into customs because we were sure that the bags would miss our tight connecting flight. And to the lady who felt like it was fine to cut in front of the entire immigration line in LAX, I hope that your every flight in the future lands twelve hours late. I wish that I could have planted some contraband fruits and vegetables on you such that you had been detained. In summary, I do not wish you well.

But I am jumping ahead. The night we landed in Merida with no luggage and mediocre Spanish language skills was chock-full of other travel-related delights. It is election season coming up in the Yucatan, and Yucatan residents, I have a recommendation. PRI, PAN, whatever you like; the important thing is that you stand up at the polls in favor of some freakin road signs. Seriously, people. The road signs that you have now are filled with helpful messages like: Drive with caution! And: Keep Yucatan clean! And, I kid you not: Do not vandalize the road signs! They are not so big on the actual giving of direction or labels of places. After a fifteen-hour day of planes and airports and lost bags, it was a delight to drive around a series of increasingly remote roads in the dark with a quarter-tank of gas. For three hours! Okay, so we bought gas, which is how we were fueled for three hours. But speaking of that, what car rental company rents a car with a quarter tank of gas? I tell you, Yucatan voters, demand some accountability from your politicians. Though in fairness, I did not see a single vandalized road sign our entire trip.

The hotel where we stayed for the first five days, once we succeeded in finding it, was awesome in some ways and not so awesome in others. The Hacienda Temozon is one of several hotels that have been restored on the grounds of former hacienda plantations. The grounds are exquisite, a perfect mix of decrepit and restored, the villages around the hotel were really interesting to see. They would have been even more interesting if they hadn't been kind of overrun with feral dogs. The reception area at the hotel had pictures up from a visit that Bill Clinton made during his presidency. Apparently Bush has been there even more recently, but there are no pictures up from that. Do your own math.

We used the hotel as a jumping off point for seeing a bunch of things in the area: the ruins of Uxmal and Chichen Itza, the beach town of Progreso (sort of like the Jersey shore for people who live in Merida, I think), Cenote Dzitnup, Valladolid, Izamal, and some other stuff in between. Hands down favorite for me was Izamal. One of the very cool things about the whole region is the continuity in city life; many modern cities developed over time from the Mayan cities that were located there hundreds of years ago. Izamal is a wonderful example of this, with many modern buildings actually the same exact buildings that existed in the original Mayan cities, and many more ruins interspersed throughout the town. No matter how you look at it, that's just cool. Cathedrals in particular are frequently old Mayan pyramids with the tops hacked off and the stones reconfigured a little bit, all across the region. The architectural continuity is fascinating.

After the initial five days we spent three days in the city of Merida. There is a lot to like about Merida, but I feel no special need to return. There are certainly some beautiful buildings, but I didn't love the city. One thing I did love is the cooking class that we took at Los Dos, which I would highly recommend if you're visiting the region. We began with an hour lecture on Mayan history and anthropology with a focus on food culture, which was great all on its own. We then went for a market tour, where we not only saw the market but also picked up ingredients for the cooking we would do in the afternoon. We made a number of Yucatecan specialties and just generally had a great time. And the food was awesome. I definitely came away from this trip with a much clearer sense of Yucatecan cuisine and the ways in which it is regionally special.

I will save the smart-ass comment about traveler's diarrhea for later.

Okay, no I won't.

Sometime in Merida we picked up this horrible bug. We haven't been able to pinpoint where or when, though we have some theories. It completely sidelined us the last 24 hours of our trip and made the travel home a bit of an ordeal. It is, in its own mysterious way, connected to why I currently have 720 pesos in my wallet. I will choose to leave it mysterious.

So in all: I'm glad we went to the region and I have recommendations for anyone else who might be going there. Though it is beautiful, though the ruins were awesome, and though the people we met were truly generous and kind and we really enjoyed dusting off our Spanish skills and successfully communicating with people, I feel no great desire to return. In fact, you might even say that I would go out of my way not to return. Maybe the food poisoning is too recent and I'll feel differently in a few months.

Sunday night supper.

2007-04-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

When I was in grad school I got into the habit of making soup on Sunday nights, huge pots of legumes and vegetables -- cheap, plentiful enough to provide leftovers for days, and perfectly calculated to fill my apartment with great aromas all afternoon. When I moved to Seattle, it was one of those habits from my east coast life that was worth keeping.

We've slowly been working our way through Deborah Madison's soup cookbook, which we picked up at the bookstore a few blocks from our house one day when we were snowed out of work. It was the perfect find on one of those rare winter days that shuts Seattle completely down.

Tonight I tried a new recipe from that book, a barley soup with corn, red beans, and sage. It's been getting warm here over the last few weeks, but today the temperature dropped fifteen degrees again. This soup was just what the day called for -- simple, flavorful, and nourishing -- and like the soups I used to make in grad school, we have leftovers for days.

A good Sunday night!

Bring on Vancouver!

2007-03-31T15:58:00.000-07:00

The Vancouver Marathon fast approaches. I'm feeling pretty good about it. The Mercer Island half went okay last weekend -- I finished in 1:50, which is only a passable time for me. But the big thing I'm happy about is the race recovery. I was running the next day again without any significant fatigue or soreness, and I've run every day since. Today I went out for a 20-miler, so tomorrow is going to be a day off. Today's run was great! I didn't feel even a little muscle fatigue until about mile 17.5. I think I did a better job with keeping my fuel level consistent than I have been in some of my earlier long training runs. A couple hours post-run, I'm feeling really good. I figure about one more really long one before the race and then taper. Race is in May 6.

Chris and I are going to the Yucatan for a little over a week a week before the race, so that should work pretty well for a taper.

Wikipedia and cars.

2007-03-17T21:18:00.000-07:00

Who edits wikipedia pages? Apparently my husband does (he admitted with sheepish embarrassment). I came home from a run this morning to catch him in the middle of updating the entry on elliptic curves. I married well!

In unrelated news, I finally bought a new car! Yep, we traded in the ol' Legacy and got an A3. It turns out that it's fun to drive a car that I pick out for myself. I don't know what's in the water these days -- Alex? Vilde? Jeff? Katherine?

Community centers.

2007-01-31T10:16:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while I'll discover a little corner of the internet that has some tight-knit community that I'm not a part of. These little communities can spring up from a variety of common interests, and they sometimes (but not always) consist of groups of people that form communities in real life: discussion forums for people interested in running, the television show Lost, sushi restaurants in Chicago, or all manner of other things; community center or church websites with discussion boards; baking-themed blogs with copious interlinking; the people who show up on Yahoo! games to play Literati between 1am and 3am every night. Pretty much if you're interested in it, someone else on the internet is interested in it too. And there's a whole wide array of possibilities for when and how you choose to connect, and you can start, join, or otherwise affiliate with as many as you have time for or interest in. What started with chatrooms and Usenet has really hit the bigtime.

For most of us, the little communities that we find on the internet are the ones of which we're naturally already members. I like restaurants and cooking, so I get to know people on egullet. I like running, so I read shoe review boards and occasionally post. I'm on linguistics distribution lists. You probably have your own versions -- and since you're reading this, maybe you and I even belong to some of the same online communities (especially if your blog is linked on the left!).

But every once in a while, I'll encounter some very close-tied community on the internet that I'm not a part of. You're all familiar with the lurker phenomenon, where you read distribution lists or discussion forums without really posting yourself. But most of the time the conversations you're eavesdropping on are conversations among people who at least to some extent would recognize you as someone with shared or overlapping interests. It's far rarer and more interesting, at least for me, to bump into some flourishing online community that's chatting up a storm where those people don't have any real-life connection to anything you're involved with. The people you observe become more like characters in a novel, or in a movie, or even on some trashy night-time drama on FOX. Who knows what will happen next? And you get to watch it all from the privacy of your own monitor.

Faster than a speeding satellite.

2007-01-28T15:28:00.000-08:00

I am planning to run the Vancouver marathon this year, so in preparation for that I've been slowly increasing my mileage over the last couple of months. I'm trying some new things in training for this one compared to how I prepared for my last one (which was Portland in 2003, so a while ago now). One thing I'm discovering is that my body is simply demanding more sleep. I mean I noticed this last time as well, but the last time I ramped my mileage up like this I was still in the just post-student phase of my life and didn't have a job as well, so getting enough sleep wasn't as much of a challenge. But this time I'm really feeling it -- I need a full hour more per night or so than I was getting by on a few months back.

One big change for me in training apart from the mileage and training plan itself is that since Christmas I've been running with the Garmin Forerunner 205 watch, uploading and analyzing my results at http://www.motionbased.com. It's the perfect intersection of athleticism and geekiness. The watch is of course only as good as the quality of the GPS satellites that it uses to track the course, and I've had one run so far where it lost signal and wasn't able to correct for it and that entry in my running log is way off in terms of mileage and time. But otherwise I've been really happy with this watch, and I've started using the site to track the running log that I used to keep in Excel. It's been interesting to track my actual times for runs against how fast I'm feeling. It's not always as I expect.

I think I will likely do the Mercer Island half in March for a benchmark race about midway between now and Vancouver. Any takers for either race, let me know (Mercer Island also has an 8K category, and Vancouver has a half as well as a marathon). There are a few of us on board for one or both at this point, so it should be a good time.

How three married couples with no kids spent Saturday night.

2007-01-21T12:57:00.000-08:00

We have declared 2007 the year of having people over for dinner. Since it's only January, we're doing pretty well, even though our inaugural event yesterday didn't have all the planning time associated with it that we had wanted for a variety of reasons. We ate good food and drank lots of wine and talked about babies. We remarked how we felt very fake-adult, but we continued talking about babies anyway.

Over the years we've done our share of invite-everyone parties, with too much food and too much drink and way too much cleanup afterwards. This year we're making a play to rediscover the small dinner party, with just the right number of people to have either one group conversation or a few small ones, which happens to be just the right number of people to fit around our dining room table. Most of my favorite events at other people's homes are exactly the ones that successfully capture the intimacy of a small group setting, so now we too are working on dinners that might interest Neil LaBute or some Dogme director.

Ask me again in May how we're doing.

Various and sundry.

2007-01-14T11:24:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time when I moved to Seattle I was very excited about the non-snowiness of the winters here. Those were the days! Gray January days in the 40s, oh how I miss you.

If this doesn't stop soon, I am moving to California. Is there any worse fate that nature could visit upon me?

I finished Hairstyles of the Damned for book club, which discussion I missed last night because Josh came over and we watched the Eagles lose. Whoo! It doesn't get much better than that. But anyway, this book -- not so much my thing. Though it did employ occasionally creative use of fonting, which might either delight or horrify my colleagues in the typography group at work. But the main good thing about this book is that now that I have finished it, I have started Reading Lolita in Tehran, which is turning out to be just what I wanted to it to be. Even though this woman who saw me reading it at the salon the other night told me that it was not at all what she wanted it to be. But I might as well admit this right now: I've read my fair share of Nabokov, but I've never read Lolita. And now I feel as though I ought to.

Speaking of the salon, I cut most of my hair off on Friday. Now I have less hair.

Post for Elsi.

2007-01-08T11:59:00.000-08:00

Last week Elsi complained that I am not blogging here enough. So in the spirit of Elsi, one of the best linguists I know, I'm posting my links to my LSA write-ups:

How I got into linguistics, and what I got out of it. Or: Reactions to the LSA. (Part one)
Blogging the LSA: Epilogue. (Part two)

Let it not be said that I don't listen to my readers.

Facts and opinions.

2006-12-31T10:43:00.000-08:00

2006 is ending just when I got used to writing it.

Favorite book, written and read in 2006: On Beauty, by Zadie Smith.
Favorite books, written before 2006 but I only got around to reading them now: 1776, by David McCullough; Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy.
Book that was the biggest surprise: Heavenly Flirtations and Other Dates, by Alexander McCall Smith. I picked this up because I wanted beach reading and it was on sale. I expected fluff; I got poignant and well-crafted stories about post-colonial Africa. This is a really good collection!

Favorite movie, made and seen in 2006: Quinceañera.
Favorite movies, made before 2006 but seen now: The Squid and the Whale; Tsotsi.
Biggest movie disappointment: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. The first in the series was surprisingly enjoyable. This was just sad.

Favorite TV show, new: Big Love.
Favorite TV show, continuing: The Sopranos; The Office.
Reality show worth watching: Project Runway.
TV show that I miss the most: Arrested Development.
Best continuing show but newly discovered by me early in the year: Battlestar Galactica. This show is better than it has any right to be.

Favorite album: Math and Physics Club, by Math and Physics Club
Favorite source of new music: KEXP
Best live music experience, of which there were fewer than usual in 2006: Belle and Sebastian/The New Pornographers

Miles run in 2006: 1,785
Favorite race: Hood to Coast relay
Running shoes of choice: Saucony Grid Tangents, original model. And now they've done a shoe upgrade and I'm scrambling to find them.

Biggest change: Buying a house. It turns out that it's kind of overwhelming.
Most surprisingly impactful change: Jake and Ella!
Best holiday experience: Thanksgiving.
Best/only vacation: Maui/Big Island.

Hope you all had a great year, and best wishes for the next one.

Near New York.

2006-12-28T21:03:00.000-08:00

Whenever anyone tells you he's from "near New York," then you know that he isn't from Connecticut. You know this because people from Connecticut say they're from Connecticut. No, if someone is from "near New York," what this really means is that he, like me, is from New Jersey. I know this because I have been telling people that I'm from near New York for ages now.

It's a weird thing about moving across the country. Where I live now isn't near New York at all. And every time I go east, which I just did to visit family for Christmas, I return to my adopted Seattle home even more vitally certain that I'll never move east again. After living in Philadelphia for almost ten years I really grew to like the place. Flame me if you will, but I wouldn't move back for anything. (Maybe it's something to do with living in a place where the streets don't smell like urine and people are actually pretty nice to each other, but I digress.)

And yet there's something about New Jersey.

It isn't because my family is there. My family doesn't even live in my hometown anymore, except for my grandmother. My husband's family is from the part of New Jersey that people evoke when they describe themselves as being from "near Philadelphia," miles and miles from where I grew up. (When people are from Delaware, they say they're from Delaware, I guess.) I fly back to New Jersey maybe once a year and each visit it takes me less and less time from the moment of stepping off the plane to the point where I'm agitated and annoyed for no very good reason that I can think of.

Maybe it's the Italian food that keeps me feeling nostalgic.

This year I saw more of my hometown than I had in a couple of years, because my grandmother wasn't home the first time we went by her house. My sister and I filled the time by showing my husband the state park that I grew up running and sledding in, and the baseball fields where we played softball games, and the road around the lake where we went swimming. It's all pretty much the same, still no traffic lights for Ringwood, all lakes and trees and convents and botanical gardens. Not so much the New Jersey of Newark Airport or the shore or the Sopranos (not even withstanding the episode where Ringwood got a shout-out).

It gives me this feeling like I can't get enough oxygen. Because on the one hand, it is sort of the travel version of mashed potatoes and down pillows, all kinds of comforting and familiar. There is the high diving board that I finally figured out how to do a flip from the summer I was nine, and the part of the lake club we called the island where all the kids who were cooler than I was hung out. We're passing the Dairy Queen where we went after hundreds of basketball and softball games, every kid and their parents, the whole town pretty much converging on that one place. Neighbohoody, friendly, and also no place else to go. There is the rock where everyone graffitis over everyone else's graffiti, now reading WELCOME BACK FROM IRAG, COLIN! It's the rock where my parents painted HAPPY BIRTHDAY KIERAN when I turned 18, which memory (of my parents being married and doing something like a normal shared domestic activity) is itself comforting and constricting at the same time.

Because with familiarity comes familiarity not just with comfort but with a fuller range of emotions. Wanting to leave. Going to school in other towns and being caught sort of in between friend groups. Listening to my parents argue. Wanting to leave and not being able to. It's still a nice small town, and it's suffocating, taking all the air out of anyone or anything a little different. Where getting a Chili's on the highway five miles away counts as innovation.

Whenever I come back west after a trip east, the air hunger, the feeling of not being able to take a breath deep enough, goes away. Maybe it's the better Seattle air.

How to make money fast!

2006-12-18T22:43:00.000-08:00

Today I received a Christmas card from my old prep school. It was addressed to "Dr. and Mr. Kieran M. Snyder."

I am totally giving them a donation this year.

So let's say I had this friend.

2006-12-18T22:39:00.000-08:00

So I admit it. I found a new blog to read. Only it's too shameful to post the link here, because although there's nothing shameful about it in and of itself -- it's really a pretty good blog -- there's something very shameful about it in the context of me. Because, dear reader, this isn't just any random blog I've happened upon. It wasn't linked by any friends of mine. No, this blog is connected to a long-ago ex-boyfriend, which boyfriend will remain nameless.

But it's not his blog, and oh yes, he does have a blog.

It's his sister's.

I am not in contact with either the ex-bf or his sister. And in fact I have nothing really in common with either of them at this point, especially not with his sister. I always thought she was a nice person, but I can't say that I really knew her that well or that I felt any great connection with the woman. And really, her life at this point and my life at this point come as close to having zero overlap as I think might be possible.

Well, except for where we both have blogs. Detail.

But the thing that I've discovered -- and yes, I discovered it by web-stalking my ex-bf, which I would feel embarrassed about except that I know yes KNOW that you've done it too -- is that my new web-friend is a pretty good writer. And so I've been reading her blog for months now. Occasionally I learn something about the ex-bf and his life, but mostly she writes about hers. And I have to say I'm regretting that I didn't know her better when I, well, knew her.

So what's the verdict? Am I stalker? I mean seriously, it's better than your average blog.

Go west, young man.

2006-12-03T12:26:00.000-08:00

It's not that I haven't been thinking about blogging. I have. Stuff will happen and I'll think, hey, now that would be a good topic for a blog post. But then I'll realize how long it's been since I've posted and I'll feel like whatever idea I have is simply not spectacular enough to justify the long hiatus. Like the first one back has to be awesome. And so I let all these totally reasonable topics pass by.

Well, no more. I've been reading books, going on vacations, seeing movies, and thinking about my job. Having Thanksgiving. Planning other trips. All totally bloggable things. So I'm going to enter back into the fray with something small.

Hawaii! About a month ago we went to visit Jake and Kara in Maui and then went on our own to the Big Island. Okay, the obligatory smack talk first: I really wanted Hawaii to be French Polynesia, and it wasn't. Now that's not an entirely fair expectation, because 1. I went to French Polynesia on my honeymoon, after years and years of wanting to, and 2. There is nowhere in the world like Bora Bora. But you know, in the interest of full disclosure, etc.

We started off on Maui for five days. Jake and Kara live in Kihei, so we used that as a jumping off point for anything we wanted to see in South and West Maui. It's kind of weird for me to imagine that people live all year that close to those beaches (and some of the beaches really are beautiful). In my head beaches are about vacation. I can see being richer than I am and liking to have a beach house, but I can't see having only a beach house and living there twelve months a year, year in and year out. My dad left California because he worried that he wouldn't get any meaningful work done if he stayed, and he wouldn't care. I guess I am my father's daughter. But all in all, South and West Maui felt like anywhere else in the US, but with a beach. It felt like Southen California, for all the goods and bads that that brings.

We spent the weekend on the east side of Maui, in Hana, which was more remote and also more beautiful. One of the really nice things about Maui are the many places you can hike a bit away from the road and find secluded pools for a swim, some salt and some fresh water. Although my favorite on the island was the Olivine Pools north of Lahaina, Hana also had some really nice spots. The Venus Pool isn't really a pool so much as it is a part of the ocean that is protected by some lava formations that break the surf, and although the water was a bit gunky with branches and leaves from the rain that had recently fallen, it was still a great place to hike and swim.

All in all I liked the Big Island more than I liked Maui. We spent five days on the Kohala coast, where I think the beaches are more spectacular than Maui's, and three days in Volcano National Park seeing lava and hiking and smelling a lot of sulfur. I preferred Kohala, but I'm glad we went to Volcano, because it was unlike anywhere else I've traveled.

The night hike through the lava field to see the molten lava pouring into the ocean was petty miserable for me. Hiking though fields of cooled lava resembles nothing so much as hiking through a parking lot that's been through an earthquake, with very unforgiving footing and sharp edges to cut yourself on if you fall. In the dark. Considering the ease with which I trip and fall walking around a city on lighted sidewalks, I find it surprising and lucky that I didn't fall down and lacerate myself on the lava. But I'm glad we went to the park, because we did go on some spectacular hikes, and it's kind of awe-inspiring to walk around on actually new land and to realize that this island is growing because new land is being created! Right now!

The biggest sour spot on the trip, and really the only one, happened when we tried to take a helicopter ride from Hilo, which we tried to do while we were driving through on the way back to Kohala from Volcano. We had reserved it a long time ahead, as it was the aspect of the trip that Chris was most looking forward to. Well, we took off, but the pilot thought the helicopter might have a mechanical problem, so we landed again right away. Props to the pilot for being vigilant, but everything about the followup experience with Blue Hawaiian (the company with whom we had contracted) has indicated a shady, unprofessional operation. They were unwilling to reschedule us for a tour from the other side of the island (where we due to arrive back that same afternoon), and then when we pointed out that we had booked far ahead of time, they offered to let us book from the other side of the island at a rate higher than even the standard intenet rate for a full-island tour. When we decided to get a refund instead, they became pretty pissy with us, and we're actually still waiting to get our money back almost a month later. All in all it left me cold.

In any case it was a good couple of weeks overall, with some really great beaches, nice hikes, and good food. I should proably do another post on the food, but I'll just say for now that I enjoyed one of my best dinners in recent memory at Merriman's in Waimea, and if I ever go back to the Big Island, I'll be sure to take time to go again.

It's only appropriate to blog about Hawaii when we in Seattle had completely atypical snow and ice storms for most of the last week. I moved west to get away from this crap!

Halloween, why hast thou forsaken me?

2006-10-31T20:00:00.000-08:00

Okay, so yeah, I have been remiss in blogging. But I need to check back in to lament the sorry state of American children's holidays. Halloween got off to a pretty good start on Saturday -- frankly, I'm not sure I've ever been part of a better collaborative costume, with Rich/Chris/Hilary/me joining forces for an Archie/Jughead/Betty/Veronica juggernaut. I should have known that after such an auspicious start it would have to go downhill.

But not immediately. While I was running this morning I saw what might be my favorite kid ever waiting for the bus. She was a pretty cool pirate. We had a conversation that went like this:

Me: I like your costume.
Coolest kid ever: ARRRRRR!!! Thankssssss!!!

But you know, from there on out, the day has sort of refused to live up to the hype. Both Chris and I came home early from work today, but so far we've only had two, yes two, trick or treaters. (One of them was a pirate, but a boy pirate.)

So after 5:30 we gave up for a while and went to the mall to buy a suitcase for our upcoming trip, on which more below. But the mall was positively swarming with kids trick or treating. Like, from store to store. At the Northgate Mall. I mean, I guess they had to be somewhere. And the mall is warm and dry. But, you know. The mall?

So we gave up and went for Korean barbecue for dinner and then came back and promptly got two trick or treaters who are holding the line on tradition and quality and freezing their toes off, marching steadfastly through the night for Snickers bars and Rice Krispies treats. I applaud you, boys.

Oh, yeah. So the trip. We're going to Hawaii in a couple of days, first to hang out with Jake and Kara in Maui and then on to the Big Island for some beach and volcano action. I have a new suitcase and everything. Hooray! Vacation.

I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to do especially cool long runs while we're away. This past weekend Sean and Yaniv and I went up to Cougar Mountain, which was slow and fun except for how I fell twice and now have some lovely multicolored bruises for the beach. Hawaiian runners, volunteer your suggestions!

Maybe I should bring our dish of candy over to the mall while I wait.

Odds and ends.

2006-10-08T11:51:00.000-07:00

I have been thoroughly chastised for not blogging. In point of fact I have been blogging; I just haven't been blogging here.

Some news:

If you're looking for a good way to waste time while convincing yourself that the procrastination is really okay because you're preventing the onset of Alzheimer's, you should check out the puzzle game here:

http://shygypsy.com/farm/p.cgi

This thing is way more addictive than it has any right to be. Chris and I almost have it finished. The end of this puzzle is going to leave a void in our lives.

This morning I race my first race since Hood to Coast, just a little 5k that I run every year:

http://www.runforchildrens.org.

I finished in 22:35, so my speedwork is actually paying off. Moreover, the sub-22 time I've been targeting is starting to feel achievable. I was pretty happy with the time.

Moving right along, we have finally booked our vacation. We're going to Maui (staying with Jake and Kara) and the Big Island. I am counting the days...

Manning a Manning

2006-09-10T10:17:00.000-07:00

Hooray! It is football season again. Let the months of sedentary Sundays begin. You heard it here first: This is totally my year for my fantasy team. Y'all are going down.

I'm looking forward to my dad's comments after the Giants-Colts game tonight. I can already hear them: If the Giants win, they're heading for the Super Bowl. If they lose, they're going 0-16.

Predictions? FOX likes Carolina...

Open letter to Bravo TV.

2006-09-01T10:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Bravo,

I love Project Runway. I also love reading Tim Gunn's blog after every episode. I heart Tim Gunn! However, I do not heart your website. In fact, your website more or less sucks. It is busy, it is slow, it is not optimized for any browser I have found, and frankly the design is appalling for a network whose most popular shows are about aesthetics. Please fix it so that I can go back to loving you completely.

Sincerely,
A Fan

Sleepy California.

2006-08-29T20:11:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to Her Space Holiday all day today. It is remarkably sad music. I'm not sure if it affects anyone else this way or if it's just me. I've been interspersing with the newest Asobi Seksu album and the EP by The Little Ones, both of which I am a bit late to acquire and both of which I like. But in the end I keep coming back to Her Space Holiday. I guess it's just that kind of day.

***

This past weekend was Hood to Coast, which was the opposite of sad! This was a very different experience from last time in a number of respects. For one thing, last time the only person I knew was Ben. This time I knew very many of the people on our team (and a few people on some other teams) ahead of time. This is mainly just a function of Ben having been our organizer this time around (and what an excellent job he did), but it started me thinking how long I've been in Seattle and just how many people I've come to know during that time. Even if one of our teammates was Erin, who traveled from Boston to run.

One thing that was not different from last time was my leg assignment, only this time my recovery time is way faster and my times were faster as well. It turns out I did my first 5.6 mile leg at a 7:23 pace. For me, that's flying. (Yeah, yeah, so I was coming down off Mount Hood. What of it?) My quads are just finally working out the lactic acid today, after a couple of light runs in the last two days. This race has convinced me that a sub-22 5k is within my grasp though, so I am now determined to accomplish that. Even if it means biting the bullet and doing speedwork and getting over my guilt at slowing people down so that I can run with people who are faster than I am. The one guy in our van who I did not know before the race -- Sean, who works with Chris -- does not yet know it, but I am going to take him up on his offer of occasional trail runs with me. I'm pretty sure it will kick my butt, but in a good way.

If you want to see some pictures of the race, Yaniv has some up on his site here: Hood To Coast.
If you want to read about the race, you can do so here: http://www.hoodtocoast.com

A long way down.

2006-08-20T13:12:00.000-07:00

Last night Chris and I went to our first discussion meeting for the book group we recently joined. The book was A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby. Every time I read one of his novels I am left pretty ambivalent. I'm not a fan of the self-consciously stylized pop culture references, the ones that say "I'm smarter than you" even though the references themselves aren't that smart. I'm really not a fan of the flat character perspective, which issue was all the more prevalent in this book because the story is told not just from one flat character's perspective but from four. Someone last night described this book as the reality show of books. I hadn't thought of it in those terms but I think that description is pretty apt. Maybe that's why I've read most of his stuff even though I don't think it's particularly good.

Ari Gold, superagent.

2006-08-07T10:08:00.000-07:00

I guess since I've created a work blog I've been posting here less. Even though tons of things have been going on, I haven't felt inspired. But last night I decided that I needed to write about Entourage, and that just isn't going to work on the work blog.

The first season of this show left me kind of lukewarm, interested enough to keep watching, but not interested enough to really care when the season ended. The show has been improving bit by bit ever since until at last it's developed into something really good. There are a few indicators I can point to, including the de-caricaturization of the main characters and the move away from unmitigated misogyny to, well, sort of mitigated misogyny. But it's occurred to me over the last few episodes that what has really happened is something much more transparent and easier to identify. What has happened is that Jeremy Piven has taken over the show.

He started off in a supporting role, giving background to the hot-guy Adrian-Grenier-and-his-cronies Cinderella story. But as the show has progressed, the really interesting storylines are all Ari Gold's. He's the only one of whom you can really say that if you removed him the show couldn't go on in the same form. Jeremy Piven has gone from supporting actor to the show's central, driving force.

Now I want to watch some of the old episodes to see exactly when that happened.

Time to brush up on the ol' Spanish.

2006-07-31T22:09:00.000-07:00

Uh oh:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4081592.html

Good thing we planned a vacation to Oaxaca in October.

FrivolousKieran, meet ProfessionalKieran.

2006-07-19T21:15:00.000-07:00

If you're coming here to read about linguistics, or internationaly things, you might be interested in the work blog I just started:

http://blogs.msdn.com/kierans

Yes, yes, finally.

More about cheese.

2006-07-15T15:33:00.000-07:00

I don't think I've had enough posts celebrating Dutch cheeses. My life would be sadder without edam, gouda, and leyden. There's just no way around it.

Now I have a post celebrating Dutch cheeses.

It was a dark and stormy night.

2006-07-10T22:11:00.000-07:00

I am tireder than I have any right to be. It's not just because of lack of sleep, since Saturday night after Puzzle Safari I slept for 10 hours at least, more than making up for the deficits of the week past. It's also not because I've been running like a lunatic, because yesterday I hardly moved from my sofa. Work? house? work? Some combination of all of the above.

Puzzle Safari was good though, even though we only finished 13th and we were hoping for top ten and even though we had a few wrong solutions in the mix that hurt us in the end. It did whet our appetites for Puzzlehunt, and rumors abound as to when the next one might be.

So right now, it's a little after 10 on Monday, Chris is not home yet, and I'm sitting here with Jake and Ella beside me looking precariously like they're about to launch into full-on kitty wrestling mode but now and then giving up as though it's not worth the energy. Maybe I'm contageous.

Two poles.

2006-07-06T19:18:00.000-07:00

This day started out strong and then took a sharp decline downhill. Now I'm sitting in my office practicing active work avoidance and listening to Magnetic Fields and blogging. If the best way to snap yourself out of a funk is to surround yourself by happy people and happy thoughts, I am not really doing that. Magnetic Fields, I tell you! Wtf is wrong with me?

I am reflecting on guilt as motivator. This is the kind of blog post that I already know that only I will read beyond this point, but I'm okay with that. I will read it tomorrow and think, Damn, that's exactly what I meant to say! And then again in a few months and think, What a twerp! The other day I peppered some meeting notes with smartass comments far down the notes and then sent the notes out like that. People replied to the whole thread in order to clarify contentful points in my email but no one commented on the smartass part. It is stuff like that that leaves me thinking I should go back to impoverished essay-writing fulltime. At least I knew that no one was going to read the essays.

But so guilt as motivator. I am guilty of having guilt as a motivator. I can be manipulated into doing most anything if you make me feel guilty enough that I am not doing it. It's sort of tragic, really. People call this vestigial Catholicism. It's more like vestigial self-awareness.

Wtf is wrong with Stephin Merritt? No, really. In high school in moods like this I listened to The Cure. Kind of hackneyed -- and by the way, three separate times today, people used the word hackneyed in conversations that I participated in or observed, which is sort of statistically anomalous and probably accounts for my current choice of vocabulary -- but it worked. When I was 17. I was saying to Vince the other night that I don't feel that different from the way I felt when I was 17, and in fact right now, both in specific and as a sort of general state, I feel a lot closer in my mind to my 17-year-old self than I do to my eventual 40-year-old self even though in reality my life now has a lot more in common with what it will look like when I'm 40 than it has with what my life was like when I was 17. But obviously I'm different because The Cure is not just hackneyed, but because The Cure feels hackneyed. Although if I'm being honest it kind of felt that way then too.

Seriously, I'm telling you, there are like three readers who are going to get this far. They probably all listened to The Cure in high school. Think about it. This is true. If you're still reading, you know that this is true, because you know that it is true of you.

I am italicizing like I'm still in high school. Hackneyed.

Anniversarium.

2006-07-03T10:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was our one year wedding anniversary. It's been a pretty good year, so we celebrated by going to Le Pichet for dinner on Saturday night -- good, but not great -- and hiking at Thunder Creek/4th of July pass in the Northern Cascades yesterday. 10.2 miles later we were a bit dehydrated, and coming down off the mountain is kind of brutal in terms of the steepness and the associated effects on the ol' knees, but it was a great day.

In the last year:

We got married.
We went to French Polynesia for a while.
We bought a house.
We got cats.

Plus the smaller day in and day out kinds of things that really make up a year.

Adventures in gardening, slowly.

2006-06-21T19:17:00.000-07:00

This morning I began breakfast with yogurt and fresh raspberries from my yard yes fresh raspberries from my yard. Are you jealous? Because you should be. It was delicious.

In general we have garden issues. On the one hand, gardens are delightful. Fresh raspberries and more! But on the other hand, we don't know anything about gardens, with the result that the barbecue we had a couple of weeks ago devolved at the end into a weeding party where everyone scolded us about our morning glories (but then the kvetchers pulled them out, so it worked out okay in the end). Well, this weekend, we're going to be unstoppable. We're taking on the first planting bed.

We're going to rip everything out. Everything. Don't panic, the raspberries are elsewhere. But if we clear out the planting bed with all the stuff that's intergrown and unusable, then we'll have free soil to plant stuff with a late summer or fall harvest. So what should we plant?

I can't wait to pull up some dandelions this weekend. I am so ready.

New things.

2006-06-17T15:35:00.000-07:00

I've been feeling pretty uninspired for blogging lately. Also exhausted. I am addressing the latter point by sitting around in pajamas all day today and the former by way of this post.

Last weekend we had a housewarming barbecue that we seem to have overstocked for by like an entire order of magnitude, with the result that we're grilling stuff pretty much every day now. Another consequence of getting stuff together for the party was the discovery of a clog in our plumbing that upon further investigation has been caused by roots in our pipes. Yay home ownership! Our first expensive home repair incoming. Hooray.

In the last couple of weeks we've also managed to secure three new residents in our home:

1. Megan
2. Jake
3. Ella

Megan is a human here for a monthlong rotation at Children's Hospital; Jake and Ella are felines and will hopefully wish to stay even when the month of June is over. I've never really had pets before, since my parents didn't get cats until they got divorced and were vying for my sister's attention and I was in college by then. There's something a little bizarre to me about the idea of animals and humans co-existing in the same space. Not bad bizarre, but bizarre.

Acadreamia.

2006-06-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

Oh, the good old days:

http://www.slate.com/id/2142489/?nav=fo

I remember the weird mixed feelings I had when I really truly made up my mind to leave academia. On the one hand, a career path that I was truly prepared for, with the right qualifications, training, and for a graduate student, publication record. On the other hand, employment?

The job market is not the only or even the main reason I left academia after finishing my PhD. It also wasn't the other classic reason that people leave: crash-and-burnout, exhaustion after years on the strong/fragile/strong ego treadmill and no real income to match it. The truth is that I left because I wanted to make something that people would actually use. The very best linguistics dissertations I can think of are read by maybe a couple hundred people over many years. Maybe it's different in other fields, but I doubt it. I consider myself very fortunate now: I have a job that I like, using my background but pushing me to learn new stuff all the time, and I make stuff that people will actually use. It's pretty cool.

But a few years ago, I wouldn't have read past the first four words of the above clause: I have a job. It would have been enough. And that's the unfortunate reality of the situation even for people who don't feel stifled by the fact that they aren't making stuff that people will really use. It's even more unfortunately the reality of the situation even for those rare academics who do find a way to make stuff that people will really use. There are a lot of smart, hard-working, and depressed graduate students who will never get academic jobs. And a troubling proportion of those students are not employable in any non-academic profession, making them smart, possibly hard-working, depressed ex-graduate students who can't get jobs. With no income and no marketable skills, no connections outside academia, and Everest-sized expectations for themselves. See also: strong/fragile/strong ego treadmills, etc, etc.

I wonder at the sense of civic responsibility graduate departments feel with respect to their students. In my department, there was some amount of lip service paid to alternative career paths. But the fact is that except for a very few students in a very few industries, graduates who leave the nest to make their way in industry don't improve department ratings. They don't have talented undergraduates who can in turn become talented graduates at the ol' alma mater. But most of all, they don't have mentorship. After all, they have professors who did end up with academic jobs.

One thing they do offer, however, and this is really underutilized by most graduate departments, is a contact in the Real World. An alumni network of PhDs who 1. made it through their programs and still chose to leave academia and 2. have jobs that are reasonably applicable to their graduate students can offer the kind of mentorship that most of us never had. They offer internships. They offer vision into alternative career choices. Most of all, they offer jobs for graduates, and jobs where those graduates might be reasonably happy, productive, and successful.

Booksmart.

2006-05-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure Alex is going to have a rough morning today, but that isn't the point of this post.

Alex and Vilde are moving soon. That's pretty sad, but from adversity come the best ideas: Vilde and I are thinking of starting a virtual book club. Maybe 5 or 6 people in different locations reading the same book every month or two and then having some electronic discussion thereof. I'm thinking of the way discussions like that work on http://www.slate.com, when they post email threads between a few discussants on whatever topic is relevant. But you know, such a thing could also easily work as a collaborative blog. We'll have to think about which format will work best, as I'm sure people are already doing this and some media probably work better than others. In every other respect I see this working as a normal book club, with participants taking turns selecting books and some range of interests and backgrounds among members so that we end up reading stuff that we might not otherwise have found. Suggestions/thoughts/ideas?

Item one: Update the TiVo.

2006-05-25T07:53:00.000-07:00

I have today and tomorrow off in addition to Monday, so I'm trying to decide what I'll do with my time other than the usual running and reading and loafing around. We only discovered we were getting the days off late Tuesday night, so there wasn't enough time to really plan to go anywhere, and Chris has to work today and tomorrow anyway. Even if I end up just powering through and finishing Anna Karenina, it will have been a good couple of days. I'm happy to have the break.

So, any great suggestions for stuff I should really do? You're not allowed to say unpacking. What do you do with your days off?

Grillable.

2006-05-21T21:08:00.000-07:00

You say mahi mahi, I say dinner. Sunday night is rapidly becoming grill night in our household, and tonight I wanted fish. It turns out that almost every night I want fish, so I'm not sure what that's worth, but last weekend's outdoor cooking debut is opening up a world of possibilities in grilled seafood (and corn, and asparagus, and who knows what else). Not sure how I'm ever going to go back to autumnal food.

It's Cameroon National Day, Charlie Brown!

2006-05-20T23:05:00.000-07:00

I read today that Axl Rose and Tommy Hilfiger got into a fistfight at some bar. No, I wasn't reading The Onion. I was reading the AP news wire.

Tonight we went to a Cameroon National Day celebration. It turns out that food and drumming from Cameroon are pretty ass-kickingly good. I could have done with less of the inaudible slideshow and more of that drumming, in fact. But it was fun. Who knew that the Renton Senior Activity Center was such a happening place to spend a Saturday night? I'm really glad we went, and not only for the fish.

Edam all up!

2006-05-10T19:05:00.000-07:00

This coming weekend is the Seattle Cheese Festival! I like cheese.

http://www.seattlecheesefestival.com/

Last year we tasted some really good stuff, lots of local cheeses from the Pacific Northwest among the selection. You can see the list of vendors on the website above. When we last went, we ended up buying a bunch and were well in cheese for some time to come. I hope for a repeat performance this year.

Any good cheese puns?

I don't want your money, honey, I want your love!

2006-05-07T10:33:00.000-07:00

Not sure if this is what Transvision Vamp had in mind:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002977636_women07.html

A study out of St. Andrews shows that as women earn more and develop their own careers, they are starting to value physical attractiveness over wealth as filtering factors in choosing a mate. The more a woman earns, the less she values her partner's wealth. Go figure! Having your own money makes you rely less on other people's.

But seriously for a minute. Our traditional cultural values of attractiveness have meant that in terms of desirability to the opposite sex, women peak around 30 -- forget the 22-year-old stereotypes for a minute and look at the actual ages where supermodels are most successful and actresses get their best roles -- and men peak closer to midlife, when they've had enough time to be successful in their careers. Is this all changing? It may become less common, but the reality is that there will always be some unattractive wealthy men and some superhot but impoverished women and there will always be a market for trophy wives. The real change is that now you might start seeing more trophy husbands too.

Is this progress or regress?

The life domestic.

2006-04-30T19:52:00.000-07:00

Tonight is going to be our first actual dinner in our house, only about a month after we moved in. We -- well, Chris -- cleared out the kitchen yesterday so that it is finally usable. Of course, all the extra kitchen appliances that were on the kitchen counters are now on the dining room table, so what we have gained in a usable kitchen we have lost in a dining room table. One of these days we'll find a rack for the corner of the kitchen and have the ability to store all this stuff in an appropriate location.

The stuff Chris is cooking tonight -- yes, he not only cleared the kitchen but is also cooking the first dinner, but don't feel too bad for him since in all likelihood I will cook most of the others, and anyway I've been doing laundry and pulling up weeds from the yard all day, and yes, I do feel defensive about this why do you ask? -- smells ridiculously good. Braised chard with onions, garlic, cilantro, and a healthy dose of smoked paprika, and red beans and rice. And now we learned what was underneath the cluster of huge leaves in the garden! We're having rhubarb compote for dessert.

***
Picked up the Essex Green and the Concretes albums at the advice of the thread below. You guys know how to pick them where my taste is concerned. Essex Green has been compared to Belle and Sebastian and the New Pornographers in many of the reviews that I've read, but I think I hear more Ladybug Transistor. And the Concretes are really similar to Ivy's first album. I'm happy. Next I think I'll get Jose Gonzales (besides what you've all said, I like what I've heard on KEXP) and the EP by the Little Ones.

Pretty good weekend all things considered.

Vacation therapy.

2006-04-22T11:23:00.000-07:00

What is wrong with you people? No one gave me a single music suggestion in my most desperate hour of need (although Josh did email me about it to ask if I could send him any music suggestions I happened to receive). I can see that I'm going to have to rely on my friends at http://www.threeimaginarygirls.com instead of you guys.

We need a vacation, so we have decided to take one. I think our current plan is to do a roadtrip to Redwood National Park by way of Crater Lake, with about 10 days for the trip overall. Filled with confidence after the music suggestions you all so lavishly provided, I am asking for yet more advice: What should we stop and see along the way? Where should we stay? How many days at Crater Lake? How many at Redwood? How many at points in the middle, and which points in the middle? We're planning to go in June.

Musicalia.

2006-04-18T20:11:00.000-07:00

I don't have an ounce of energy left, and yet I have more things to do than I can even track. The last couple of weeks have left me totally drained.

And what's the perfect antidote to that but new music purchases?

I've been woefully remiss in following up on KEXP playlists lately. I keep hearing stuff I like but then forgetting to check it out, since I'm not at my desk long enough during the workday to do more than log in, glance at email, and run to meetings. And by the time I get home I totally forget. And then I'm stuck with random dates and times in my head and I can't remember which dates go with which times and I'm randomly combing through playlists trying to make sense of them all.

Help me out here, people!

What's been released in the last few months that you're really liking? I want classic Kieranesque power pop and catchy melodies. I'll also settle for mellower stuff that might pull me back from the edge of nervous breakdown. Should the occasion arise.

Any suggestions?

Peep show.

2006-04-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

The Seattle Times held an art contest in honor of Easter. I think you'll like the results:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2002929035_peepsintro16.html

I especially like the Peep Mobile.

The four subjects of snowcloning.

2006-04-15T10:14:00.000-07:00

Over at http://www.languagelog.com, Mark Liberman and Roger Shuy have been blogging about the Four Subjects of Whatever (April 2006 archives). You know, stuff like the Four Subjects of of Kieran's Woefully Misunderstood Psyche:

1. No one understands me.
2. I don't understand anyone.
3. I understand everyone perfectly and frankly it's depressing.
4. Oh well, might as well have a bagel.

It started me thinking about how memes get started and propagated around the internet. If someone in some blog/radio show/literary journal/whatever proposes a meme, that doesn't mean it's going to catch on, even if the audience is large. But if Mark picks it up for Language Log, it's a pretty good bet that it's going to be all over the internet within a week. And it isn't just because Mark is one of the most intellectually compelling people I know (although that is true). It's because the readership of Language Log really wants to be intellectually compelled in just the sort of way that leads them to categorize, list, and taxonify in a slightly snarky way. And their audiences in turn are likely to be similarly scientizingly neurotic.

Not all audiences are similarly compelled.

An open invitation and rebuke.

2006-04-09T10:19:00.000-07:00

We moved this week. I am behind on life. Things we currently have include:

a rug
cable and internet

Things we currently do not have include:

furniture

But we're getting there. The house is awesome and we love the neighborhood. One thing I will not love is traffic on I-5 in the morning to get to 520. But hey, you can't have it all.

If I ever invite you over to my new house, you will do well not to thank me for the invite. Oh, you can thank me. But even die-hard descriptivists have their limits: this use of invite as a noun is an abomination. Don't give in to your baser instincts, people. Hold the line on reason.

No, seriously, the best band in the world.

2006-03-26T00:19:00.000-08:00

We just got back from seeing Belle and Sebastian and The New Pornographers; I'm pretty sure a better bill for me does not exist. First time for me seeing the Pornographers and I'd like to see them again in a smaller venue. This was at the Paramount and I think they'd do better in a place like the Showbox -- it's more the right feel for them.

Belle and Sebastian was, as always, fantastic. I know I've said this before and I know I've got all kinds of historical bias and nostalgia associated with this band, but seriously, this is the best group of musicians playing this kind of music anywhere in the world. Stuart Murdoch's musicianship is so hot that everything else about him oozes sex appeal too. But it's all of them, really -- so many instruments! so orchestrally ambitious! so much trading off! Even if you don't like their composition, and frankly I don't see how that's possible but there's no accounting for taste, I don't think there's a way to see this band and not walk away impressed with the pure musicianship.

I wonder if Isobel Campbell and Stuart David have any regrets.

Code-switching, Lost-style.

2006-03-23T11:49:00.000-08:00

No spoilers here.

Those of you who watch Lost know that two of the main characters are native speakers of Korean. Last night's episode featured several scenes between two bilingual speakers of Korean and English, in which the context ostensibly featured one of them tutoring the other in English. Throughout the scenes, there were several code switches from one language to another both within and between speakers.

Real code-switching situations are incredibly cool, because speakers manage to respect the phono-morpho-syntactic rules of both languages while moving from one to another. Code-switching provides one of the best arguments around for Universal Grammar. But there's this thing about code-switching on TV or in movies (and Lost happened to make me think about it, but it isn't the only example): Fictionalized media code-switching typically only presents a very restricted subset of real code-switching behavior.

Media code-switchers follow the same rules as real-life code-switchers, except that media code-switchers are far less impressive, because they only ever seem to code switch at full on sentence boundaries. Not even utterance boundaries most of the time, but really truly syntactic sentence boundaries. Compare against real life code-switchers making language switches at all kinds of linguistically meaningful transition points.

I'm interested in recent cases of media code-switching that depict the behavior in its full array, if anyone knows of any.

Dis/replacement.

2006-03-19T11:50:00.000-08:00

I love this time of year in Seattle. The second half of March begins one of my favorite seasons here -- we start getting stretches of nice days, sunny and near 60, to break up the winter gray. I first visited Seattle at this time of year and I stayed for a month, only to move back here for good a few weeks after heading back east to get my stuff. Maybe that's part of it: the nostalgia of a fresh start, a new beginning, actually coinciding with spring for a change. I can remember running all over Capitol Hill in all kinds of weather in between working on my dissertation and making dinners in Chris's 600 square foot apartment.

And now it's four years later -- have I been living here for four years, really? -- and it's a sunny Sunday and it's going to be 60 degrees out. We have the walk-through for our new house this afternoon; we're finally moving out of the apartment where we moved a couple of months after I moved to Seattle for real. In that time I've finished school and written a bunch of stuff and gotten a job and now we really live here. If we decide to have kids, they will be from Seattle.

Coming up for air.

2006-03-10T22:40:00.000-08:00

I owe some phone calls. Top on the list of phone calls that I owe is Vince. I hereby declare Sunday as the day for repaying all of my phone call debts. Or at least some of them.

Tomorrow is our end-of-season basketball party. I'll be sad to see it end and I'm really looking forward to coaching again next year -- Hilary and I had a lot of fun with this and we were fortunate to have really nice girls and families to work with. I just got email today from the woman in charge of the league (she runs all the community outreach programs for the YMCA in Capitol Hill) saying that she is changing jobs to something part-time that will better accomodate her grad school schedule. Too bad for us, because she was fantastic.

I'm wishing I had proficiency in some spring/summer sport so that I didn't have to wait another 9 months to coach again!

Another year.

2006-03-08T09:33:00.001-08:00

It is my birthday today. I am feeling decidedly unbirthdaylike.

What I mainly want for my birthday is a good night's sleep.

School days.

2006-03-07T22:23:00.000-08:00

A while ago I blogged that the best science education is pre-theoretic; instead of teaching that one or another theory is The Way Things Are, a good science education teaches students to assess whether any theory they encounter is a good theory, and how well it compares to competing theories. Is it falsifiable? How good is its empirical coverage? And so on.

One of the reasons I went into linguistics when I started college was because I didn't want to choose between language and math. Once I got over that, one of the reasons I went into linguistics for real when I started graduate school is because my real passion was in the philosophy of science. Linguistics is an old discipline but sort of a new science; it has not always been approached empirically, and as a relatively new science it's still sort of working out its methodology. For someone interested in math, language, and the philosophy of science -- and that describes a whole lot of the people who go into theoretical linguistics -- it's pretty much the optimal field.

Until the lack of established methodology gets kind of frustrating. And the physics-envy in the field of linguistics gets old. But I have physics-envy too. I am guilty.

But so the philosophy of science. One thing that the variety of linguistics that I was taught really excelled at, by which I mean the variety of linguistics that is associated with Penn and few other places, is that at heart it is pre-theoretic in just the way that science is supposed to be. Even where some theory or other is favored to explain some set of data, the heart of the field is more about how to evaluate competing theories than it is about any particular flavor of explanation.

And so to address a question from a recent lunch conversation I had, that is what I got out of school.

Sugar and spice and a tablespoon of bitterness.

2006-03-05T21:43:00.000-08:00

Today was our third or fourth annual dessert party, depending on whether you count the year that we skipped. A delicious time was had by all, even if my particular attempt at dessert this year was a resounding unsuccess. Chris's bread pudding with lemon sauce and chantilly cream was a showstopper. (Thanks, Chris! And Paul Prudhomme.) The really noteworthy thing this year, however, is that evite seems to have an invitation template for dessert parties. We are so ahead of our time.

As several dessert party veterans know, the dessert party typically migrates into the smaller pizza and Oscar party in the evening, salt and Hollywood shmaltz being the perfect antidote to all that sugar. Unfortunately this year, this is where events took a turn for the worse. Crash winning Best Picture? Wtf? This heavy-handed piece of crap didn't even deserve wide release, let alone a nomination, let alone the freakin' Best Picture award. Yep, we sure love subtlety, we American moviegoers.

Iterating on the already.

2006-02-26T20:35:00.000-08:00

I am feeling kind of scattered. I have too many topics in my head to keep track of: interesting problems at work, uninteresting problems at work, interesting but annoying problems at work, the end of our basketball season, getting ready to move, making my annual round of doctors' appointments. Plus other stuff, when I have a moment to remember what it is. So right now I'm feeling pulled in a lot of directions. By the time a particular issue has a chance to take central precedence, there are three more things in the queue demanding attention. It is making me alternately invigorated and cranky. The interesting stuff is great, the uninteresting is clutter, the interesting but annoying is somewhere in the middle.

Scattered.

1776.

2006-02-19T10:22:00.000-08:00

I finished reading 1776 (David McCullough) this morning. It has taken me frustratingly long to get through it because of everything else going on, but it was a great read.

My knowledge of history is weaker than I would like it to be -- it's one of those subjects that I was rarely taught well in school and about which I had only moderate motivation to pursue myself, and as a result I only know a fraction of the things I think I probably should. The big reason I liked this book is not only because I learned a lot of information I hadn't already known, but also that it was written in such a way that I think I am likely to remember it. I now have real stories to attach to the phrases I vaguely remember from school (e.g. guns of Ticonderoga), I know why and when Washington's army was encamped a mile or two from my high school, and I know what happened at the Siege of Boston.

The book is relevant to some of our current military conflicts as well. Like a lot of people we're fighting around the world, we as an army were untrained; had serious shortages of weapons and ammunition and often resorted to stuff made at home from whatever happened to be around (broom handles, rakes, etc.); were often wthout adequate clothing and shoes; used our greater knowledge of the landscape to our advantage; and most of all, had political and ideological motivation so strong that we managed to turn all our limitations into military advantage despite conventional wisdom about conflict and battle. Is it possible to overcome a force like that militarily?

A Valentine's Day reflection for nerds.

2006-02-14T21:18:00.000-08:00

Chris said to me this morning that he thinks linguists are fighting a losing battle.

I asked what he meant.

It turns out he was referring to a few recent posts on http://www.languagelog.com dedicated to discussing the minutiae of some overheard/seen-in-print construction, such as "I'm feeling all Olympic-y." His observation was that language users innovate faster than linguists' ability to track and classify the innovations. And you know, that's true. For every construction that someone happens to observe, how many more are there that people fail to notice? Amd multiply that over the world's languages and the problem gets very big very fast.

So this started me asking him what battle he thinks linguists are fighting. Because in fact linguistics isn't much different from physics, or chemistry, or any other science in this regard: the world of observable phenomena is bigger than scientists have the resources to observe. But that makes you wonder: is the point of science to observe everything that can be observed? I really don't think that it is.

I think the point of science is to take a consistent data set and explain it. You get new data, you change your explanation. But so as long as established principles are respected in the way some newly observed phenomenon behaves, that that newly observed piece of data really doesn't make a difference. Once it gets to a certain point, science looks for counterexamples, not for examples.

So if the battle of linguists is to explain the principles governing language structure and use, then it's perfectly okay that language changes faster than we can keep up with the changes. But so long as the principles guiding change consistently apply -- and unless we're talking on an evolutionary timescale here, I think the field has more or less decided that they do -- then no individual change matters.

Bouncing here and there and everywhere! High adventure that's beyond compare!

2006-02-12T08:26:00.000-08:00

I signed up for too much stuff this weekend. By which I mean that I'm racing this morning and I'm interviewing prospective Penn students this afternoon and I'm working after that. And yesterday we had a basketball game that wasn't, since the other team for some mysterious reason never bothered to show up, so we ended up scrimmaging for an hour. It was one of those practices where everything went right, which was nice for the girls since their parents were there to watch, and which was nice for Hilary and me because the last practice was as Hilary put it like an episode of The Gong Show. And then last night was Wayne and Darlene's housewarming party and suddenly whoosh! The weekend is pretty much full.

It was nice to go out last night. As I was getting dressed I was reflecting that it's been too long since I've properly gone out with my friends. Maybe my last several months of overworked antisocial attitudes are drawing to a close. But ask again next weekend.

The Godfathers had it right.

2006-02-09T08:50:00.000-08:00

It is not yet 9 in the morning and I have already had three meetings. One of these nights I will sleep. It just won't be tonight.

These days I am having fewer adventures in slow twitch than I would really like, except insofar as those adventures pertain to work. This weekend I somehow signed up to both race and interview kids for Penn. And the rest of this weekend has a pretty full social calendar as well. So one of these nights I will sleep, but it may not be this weekend.

But while we're on the topic of interviews: I need to think of fun questions for the wannabe Quakers. Something that won't have them reporting their GPA and the littany of extracurricular activities. Chris said maybe he ought to give them dev interview questions. On the bright side, if they do well we could just hire them instead of sending them off to college.

Ducks in a row.

2006-02-02T23:05:00.000-08:00

I have been remiss in posting. I have Oscar comments. I have 1776 comments. But mostly I have house-purchasing comments. Because yes, we have taken the plunge.

We are very excited. Closing is on March 31. Bring on the domesticity.

Open letter to the members of Stars.

2006-01-26T19:28:00.000-08:00

Dear Stars,

I hereby withdraw those comments I made on this blog about your album no longer being my favorite album of 2005, and I hereby reaffirm the previous comments I made on this blog about your album being by far and away the best album of 2005. I had my head momentarily turned by the Clap Your Hands, Say Yeah album, which though very enjoyable, and most especially The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth, which is really a phenomenal track, nevertheless lacks the staying power of your most excellent Set Yourself on Fire. I am sorry for giving in to my thirst for novelty, however briefly. I promise not to exercise this kind of infidelity in the future. Will you take me back?

Please?

Love,
Kieran

P.S. The Asobi Seksu is also quite good. Just saying.

On Saturdays.

2006-01-21T09:30:00.000-08:00

Every Saturday from now until we find a house we're going to be looking at houses. Every Saturday from now until March 4 the basketball team that I am coaching has a game. That means that every Saturday from now into the foreseeable future is going to be pretty busy. The over/under on finding a house is the end of our basketball season. Would you take that bet?

Bring, brang, brung.

2006-01-17T23:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I heard someone non-ironically say the word thunk. As in think, thank, thunk.

Now granted he wasn't a native speaker, and it's an easy mistake to overgeneralize your way right into if you're not a native speaker. But I'm definitely adding it to my list of non-native speakerisms. I'm starting to track patterns from non-native speakers of different linguistic backgrounds and I'm noticing some interesting stuff that surely has ramifications for ESL curricula and software. I'm undertaking a project of documenting what I'm finding right now, since I have some ideas for applications of the work.