the hypothetical wren

Subjects of various conversations I had with various professors today:

• artichokes (how is it that people found out that they were edible, anyway?)
• The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society (about the new super-fancy uber-geek reissue)
• vegans (and why they, at least the ones that post messages on interner message boards, are often more scornful of garden-variety vegetarians than meat eaters)

Subjects of conversation left alone today:

• paper topic

How these things make me feel, respectively:

• good
• better

The first is because people in my department are friendly and do not seem to shy away from random conversations. The second is because I’m sick of thinking about my paper topic, and (insert dramatic pause here) I actually thought up a new topic. Which might be better. Which I don’t feel as if I have to explain too much, one which, on the surface, seems a little more straighforward and certainly less of a stretch when it comes to fitting it into the overall topic of the class. I still have yet to meet with the guy teaching the class to get his opinion, but I actually feel a lot better.

Things which feeling better led to:

• getting a haircut after seven months of avoiding it
• going to the thrift store

My hair is making me extremely happy. I got four inches cut off of it, so that comes to just below my ears. I really wasn’t meant to have long hair: my hair is very thick and heavy, so once it gets past a certain length, it becomes a burden. So now it actually looks non-dead, and it’s not in my face, and I’m sure it won’t depress me tomorrow morning like my hair has been every morning as of late.

Cutting it was kind of a risk, since I went to plain ol’ SuperCuts, and it’s Haircut Roulette every time that you go there. I always wonder, will I get someone who has hair close to mine, or will I get someone with the exact opposite: curly, or short, or thin, or whatnot, someone who does not sympathize with my hair issues? I’ve had the same basic haircut for so long that I can usually tell, right off the bat, whether they’re going to do a good job or not. Parting it in the middle is a good sign. Cutting it so that it curls under at the ends: even better. The woman I got today had nearly the same haircut I do, and she obviously knew how to cut it correctly. She also told me that hairstylists at cheap places tend to hate cutting hair in my style (basic bob) because it’s fairly precise, what with getting the weight line correct and making the hair the same length on each side. “People here like cutting layers,” she said.

At the thrift store, I found an excellent vintage coat. It’s probably from the mid- to late 1950s, black, 3/4-length sleeves, fake-fur collar. When I got home, I put it on and found some earrings in the pocket: big silver skull earrings. Since I don’t wear earrings anymore (most metals irritate my ears too much), I probably won’t ever do anything with them, but it’s good to know that my coat was previously in Goth hands.

Today is a mildly exciting day: it’s graduate-assistant payday! This will be more exciting to me in months to come, I’m sure, but since I just got another check a short time ago, I’m not as in need of this check as I will presumably be this time next month. So I should just enjoy this odd check apathy while I can.

Sorry I haven’t been updating as frequently as I’d like. I’m trying to come up with a viable topic for a paper I have to write this semester, and I’ve been doing a lot of preliminary work on it before I present it to my professor. The biggest obstacle I face here is the Who Cares? factor, or in other words, yes, you have a nice topic, it could be interesting, but, really, how is this actually important? I discussed my potential topic with some of the other students in the class yesterday and I got a small dose of Who Cares? from them, so I’m going to have to work on that part.

I set up my printer last night. It’s been sitting in its box since I ordered it last month, since I didn’t need to print anything off until now. Annoyingly, neither the printer or my computer came with a USB cable, which is what I needed to connect the two, so I had to go out and buy one late at night, which is exactly what I didn’t feel like doing. It seems odd that this crucial part would be missing, like making the power cable optional.

The students in the class I’m assisting (I keep using this sentence, over and over, so I should just come up with some sort of acronym for this phrase — TSITCIA [um, no] — or perhaps I should just call them The Students) are very, very concerned with the dates that things happened on. Most of the questions that they ask are about repeating some year that had previously come up in the lecture. This amuses me a lot, since I always have a hard time remembering the exact dates of lots of events, and yet, I have managed to get into graduate school. I always want to tell them (and, perhaps I will, eventually, when I have to run review sessions) that dates are the least important part of the information being imparted here. They should be taking notes on how did this thing happen? Why did it happen? How is this particular thing going to affect future events? If it is controversial, why so? Etc., etc. It makes me nuts to watch someone taking notes, when all they write down just the name of the event, the year it happened, and nothing else: the peril of sitting amongst The Students.

I am spending this Saturday evening reading documents for class, a bunch of PDFs of declassified documents from the 1940s and 1950s. Their huge size was no match for the slow dialup at home, so I had to flee for friendlier, free-wireless spots in order to get my work done. I don’t really like reading things on the screen: I can’t write on them as I go, and the strain of looking at them starts to annoy after a while. But since I don’t feel like printing out several forty-plus-page documents this evening, I’m stuck with the dry eyeballs.

Today, up until now, was particularly unproductive in the school sense. In the conspicuous-consumption sense, it was a busy day. I went thrift shopping this morning, at a few previously unknown stores along Juan Tabo. One was big, but depressing, like it was the thrift store that all of the other thrift stores gave their unwanted crap to. The other was much better. They actually had some decent vintage clothes — 1950s and 60s vintage, not polyester 70s stuff — yet, none of it quite fit. It could, given more exercise and fewer creme brulees, but I don’t really have room in my closet to store any “aspirational” clothing. I ended up buying only a drinking class.

Then I went to the mall, in search of something else, and ended up buying a skirt. A trip to the record store netted two new CDs: Sufjan Stevens’ Greeting from Michigan The Great Lakes State and Rare Wood by Sunburned Hand of the Man. I nearly swung by the used-book store, too, but I thought it best to wait, at least until I get my first stipend check next week. Besides, there is no room in my bookcase for even one more book: I know, because I bought one last week and could not wrangle it into the bookcase. Right now, it is sort of stuck in there by one corner, and protrudes out about six inches. It’s going to come down one day.

I spent last evening at a party given by some of the other graduate students. I was pretty tired before I went over there, enough so that I drove to the party, despite the fact that it was only seven blocks away (also, I didn’t feel like walking down Central while carrying a six-pack). Yet, I ended up staying five hours, talking and drinking and eating veggie burgers. The students in my department are extremely social, a nice change from my last school. There, the students were friendly, but it was pretty hard to get more than one or two of them to ever go do anything outside of class.

Despite last night’s lapse, I’ve been doing a lot of walking, from school to home and elsewhere and back again. My feet and shoes are conspiring against me, though, as I keep finding blisters in places where blisters seem wrong (tip of big toe, for example). The problem is compounded by the fact that I hate socks, and just wear most shoes without them.

The students in the class I am assisting seem awfully young. I sit amongst them during class, for lack of a better place to sit, and, because I am not as concerned as they about writing things down, I can watch them. I watch people who really need to write down more notes, people who sit with their mouths gaping open for the entire class, people who spend most of their class time examining their coffee cup. A lot of them make me wonder how it is that they got there, but, then again, I’m not entirely sure how I got here, so I guess we’re even. I can’t wait until they start coming and seeing me during office hours, though, and ask me if I can give them the answers.

News flash: people think too hard about their iPods (link via 42). It’s easy to do, I can see. I mean, you have to give the thing a name (mine is named Orangina), and it’s small, with friendly buttons, and it hides in your pocket. Why wouldn’t you want it to be able to read your thoughts? Anyway, mine works like the randomness generator it is when it is in shuffle mode, more than anything else. It does seem to be fond of playing “Peg and Awl” (off of the Anthology of American Folk Music) more than is absolutely necessary, though.

Today, I found the cheap Chinese restaurant that delivers in my neighborhood. Every neighborhood has to have one, you know. The sauce for their General Tso’s Chicken (yes, I am avoiding the authentic whenever possible today) is actually pretty good (the chicken pieces, though, were scrawny), although the hot-and-sour soup was just meh. They at least have a decent selection of vegetarian dishes, which the cheap Chinese restaurant that delivers in my old neighborhood did not: if you didn’t want the generic stir-fried vegetables, you could have the hot-and-spicy tofu, which had a nice-tasting sauce, but was made with the slimiest tofu possible. [1]

Speaking of the aforementioned lunch, here is what the descendents of General Tso think of this unknown-to-them dish.

I attended the first meeting of the third of my three classes last night. I am really in for a lot of work: the workload in this seminar is far greater than that of my other classes, and I have to speak in class and everything, something which always gives me the willies. In fact, I already have so much to do for this class that I shouldn’t even be writing this. It’s a bad sign that when faced with my first real batch of things to do in grad school, my first instincts are not to work, but rather to take a long bath with a glass of wine and the September issue of Vogue (as if it was portable enough to take into the bathtub). I’m trying to get over my initial impulses today.

[1] I love tofu, but it has to be non-slimy to earn my love. I usually coat the tofu pieces I use in recipes in cornstarch before they go in the pan, a trick I learned from the Vietnamese restaurant in GJ. Frying is good, too, but what’s not good fried?