Done!

Hah! Done at last! Nothing remains but to print out the papers at the computer lab tomorrow morning & hand them over to their respective professors.

I'm going to bed, but really, it's too fantastic of a moment not to celebrate!

daydreaming of the weekend

As I continue to wrestle with the Jane Austen paper (three more paragraphs, I think, and then a good editing pass in the lab between classes tonight), I am relieving tension by daydreaming in spare moments about what I'm going to do with this, my first 100% paper-free weekend since the September trip to London.

There are, of course, some obvious necessities; I need to catch up on all the reading I should be doing right now, as well as accomplish the reading for the following week. I should, perhaps, do some laundry, as my kiss and a promise loads every Friday are not really making a substantial dent in the pile -- and as my husband & I are leaving for Orycon in Portland on Friday week, it would behoove me to have created a lot of clean clothing before then.

But that's all the necesities, and daydreaming about those is rather counter-productive. The real question is: what shall I do to enjoy myself? I am considering a wide variety of options; for instance, I could bake cookies (peanut butter, perhaps, or buttermilk, or chocolate chip, or something unexpected out of the nifty reprint of a 1960s Betty Crocker cookbook my mother-in-law bought me a few years back). Or take a trip to dim sum with friends on Saturday morning -- certainly luxurious, but perhaps not as satisfying to my lingering creative itch. Or I could finally get down to business with my baby blanket and weave in the ends so that it can be put through a washing machine and blocked if necessary and photographed for Ravelry and then finally handed off to the baby of choice before he graduates to toddling.

Or all three! The glory of daydreaming is that it doesn't have to take into account the limitations of time and energy, the need to run to the grocery for buttermilk, the fact of my husband being out very late Friday night (with the possible resultant difficulties in arranging dim sum the next morning), nor the time committment we already have on Sunday evening.

I am very fond of daydreaming, but alas, duty calls -- I must drive to campus and attend classes and finish up this paper in the spaces between.

the other half of the paper-writing picture

When describing in my last post how papers fill up the vast majority of my time, I concentrated on my writing process to the exclusion of the vital other half of the formula: reading the assigned texts in the first place! Which I do, always; I'm not the sort of person who could write a paper about something from online summaries or a quick skim of the opening and closing chapters. (Whether or not I read the texts I don't have to write upon is a different story entirely, of course, depending greatly on whether or not they seem interesting. Usually they do, since I'm picky about my classes.)

So what have I read recently? Mansfield Park for my Austen class, which class is to my joy going in chronological order. It's one of the two Austen novels I hadn't read any of before (the other being Emma, which I'm slogging through now), and I was absolutely delighted with it. Fanny and Edmund, Mary and Henry, the terrible Maria and even worse Mrs. Norris... I should really like to see a crisp, clear movie of it, without all the political implications spelled out for modern audiences. Just people in old-fashioned clothes speaking meaningfully to one another, letting the beautiful weight of the story propel itself forward. I wonder if the 1983 BBC version is at all satisfying? It looks like my local library has a DVD re-release of it...

For my women in 20th century literature class I just read Virginia Woolf's Orlando, which was also a delight and a treasure -- so much so that I'm planning to write my long paper on it, although I'm a little afraid that I'll end up sick of the book in the process. But how can one end up sick of "a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds"? I think the real danger is that I'll dive into the beauty of the language and never remember to come up for air. As it turns out, the professor for my Austen class is teaching Woolf next semester, and I'm going to take it, unless his reaction to this midterm I'm even now working on demonstrates him to have unbearable grading twitches.

My counselling class, bless its practical little heart, has no required reading, so next we turn to Shakespeare, in which I have recently read "Measure for Measure" and am about (tomorrow) to read "Othello." While I'm sure the latter has some merits I have not discovered through reading ample criticism of it, I doubt it can compare to the utter strangeness of the former, in which after many manipulations on the part of various characters everyone's punished for their flaws by... being forced into marriage. I see why those who like to categorise things call it a problem play; I found it pretty fascinating.

Finally we come to Literature and Psychology, in which the last few texts have been movies, so there hasn't been any reading for me to do. (We shall leave aside, for the moment, whether or not I actually watched said movies.) The lack of books is about to change, however, with a Henry James short story and a Ralph Ellision essay both on the table for this Thursday. Unfortunately, what with the two papers due Thursday morning, I'm not going to have a chance to start on these until Thursday afternoon. I anticipate some hours of quick reading over Chinese food (mmm, eggplant and brown rice) in the student union.

Other books on the horizon (aside from the aforementioned Austen) include The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, plays by Terence McNally and Caryl Churchill, a piece by Gertrude Stein that I may just pretend isn't on the agenda, and Shakespeare's "The Tempest". Not to mention two ten page papers, two five page papers, and the final counselling project -- all of which will be wrapped up by 19 December or so, and then I can settle into lovely holiday baking, knitting, cooking, cleaning, reading (if my brain permits) and game-playing while building up my stamina for the next set of classes. I'm very seriously thinking of taking a class on Wordsworth and Keats during the winter session; an entire 3-hour class in 12 4-hour days is awfully frightening, but I've heard good things about the professor, and it would mean that I only have to take 12 hours during my final semester, which seems a blessing.

Austen paper is progressing nicely! Time for bed, so I can get in a few more hours before I go to campus tomorrow for my counselling extravaganza.

last two papers of the month!

As the subject line suggests, I'm working on my last two papers for this month -- well, the last two due this month, but still, that's something! I'm not counting my final counselling project (even though it's due 11/28), because it doesn't have to have a thesis.

Why, then, am I posting here? Because, gentle reader, my earlier theory (from the days of the Lamentable Midterm) has proven to be true; when I am attempting to compose my thoughts to write about my personal life, suddenly the logic necessary to compare Jane Austen novels comes easily to my fingertips and I find myself writing paragraphs of academic prose without a hitch, while here I struggle for half an hour to find the proper description for how I'm writing over there. I'd rather have a writing muse that didn't require these bait-and-switch techniques to get going on the necessary work, but for the moment I am going to take what I can get.

While not bewailing the difficulty of enticing my muse to apply herself, things here have been quite pleasant. I had a lovely birthday, a few weeks back, with chocolate mousse and other wonderful things to eat, and just this past weekend I went for tapas with some friends and consumed (amongst many other things still delicious but not quite as memorable):

• vast quantities of devilled dates, which are dates stuffed with mild chorizo, then wrapped in bacon -- sweet and savory all in one bite


• vinegared smelt filets, clean in flavour and pleasantly chewy


• little pieces of octopus, covered in paprika and eaten on top of slices of boiled potato


• tiny meat balls in a sweet, slightly thick sauce of saffron and onions and perhaps sherry


• meltingly soft scallop sashimi in a squid ink vinegarette


• tiny half-bites of crab mixed with something velvety and then breaded and fried; I had been going to call them crab cakes, but that conjures up entirely the wrong impression, although I do love traditional crab cakes as well.

I also had a lovely, lovely dessert of figs stuffed with chocolate and nuts, drizzled with a port wine reduction, as well as bites of the amazing chocolate-studded bread pudding my husband got. All in all, a very successful visit; as this was the 2nd year that C. and I held a mutual birthday dinner there it's well on its way to becoming a tradition, and I certainly intend to arrange for us to go back next year.

Aside from that brief excursion into the realm of gastronomy, life has really been 95% composed of papers -- the writing of them, the waiting to receive grades, and the constant low-level anxiety of knowing that more papers are imminent. I do manage moments -- even entire days -- of non-paper related activities, usually after having just turned one in, but they're constrained by my post-writing exhaustion and the haunting knowledge that I really ought to get to work on the next one.

Does this make me sound miserable? Am I miserable? I don't think so, really. When the writing is going well (as it still is in the other window, knock on wood) I enjoy it immensely. I love learning, real learning, the sudden realisation that I know something that I didn't know before, the chance to take my own ideas and check them against the texts and then put them through the slow process of detailed development and revision until I have an argument that stands up to examination. What I'm finding so painful is the need to do it constantly; I am such a slow writer, and I need so much time to accrete my ideas, and with so many deadlines in rapid succession I'm not always happy with the work I'm turning in. But deadlines must be met, so the papers are turned in even if I know that I could have done more, and only time will tell how they've been received.

Wonderful smells are coming from the other end of the apartment, so I will break here to go have dinner, and doubtless return afterwards to confuse my muse once again so that I can finish the Austen paper tonight.

Sunday afternoon

It isn't quite a lazy Sunday afternoon, as I am busily working on a handout for the presentation I must give to my Shakespeare class Wednesday night, but Sunday is Sunday regardless of how busy I am, and so there's a slight aura of laziness around the apartment. The cats are certainly promoting a relaxation strategy; Aime has once again taken over the green kittybed (which C. originally made for Jinian, the big tabby cat) and is sleeping soundly in it, and Jinian is off in the living room, probably sideways and asleep on the old yellow chair.

Last weekend passed in a blur of meals with in-laws, a good night of amateur theatre (a production of Sondheim's Assassins, very enjoyable although mildly flawed in execution), and then some frantic gerbil-like wheel-spinning as I tried to catch up on all the reading I'd been letting slide because of the terrifying midterm. As the week progressed I calmed down, and managed to finish both Pride and Prejudice and Their Eyes Were Watching God in good order.

I had meant to write about the lovely trip to the farmer's market this morning, but afternoon has become evening as I focused on my presentation materials instead of on this post, and now friends have arrived for dinner and gaming. Perhaps I will return tomorrow afternoon, to season the short essay I need to finish with more personal meanderings.

a sleepy Friday night...

Yesterday I finished my paper (in the nick of time) and turned it in! I am giddy with relief.

I am not usually up this late, but I went out to a very nice dinner with my in-laws (husband's parents, sister, and her boyfriend), and then when I got home I still had some writing to do. Which writing I have just sent off to my editor (by which I mean my generous friend who makes me commit to sending her writing every week, without which committment I simply don't write), so now I am taking stock. Should I go lie in bed and read something I won't have to write a paper on afterwards? Or should I play a bit of a computer game? A difficult decision, made more difficult by not knowing what I would read: I finished the last Sarah Caudwell novel (The Sybil in Her Grave) this morning, and am thus poised delightedly above my piles of books, musing over which one to swoop down upon and devour next.

Today I slept quite late, and then went out to coffee with a friend, trading stories from our recent travels (his to Tokyo, mine to London) and discussing manga and theoretical politics and phatic novels. After I got home I saw my husband doing dishes, and leapt in to take over while he took the trash down. The dishwasher ran while we were at dinner, so after breakfast tomorrow I'll be in a fine place to begin my morning dish-doing routine.

And oof, I'm sleepy; I think I should just declare tiredness the better part of it being after midnight, or something else incoherent, and toddle off to bed. Good night, gentle reader; I hope your dreams are pleasant and your waking even more so.

the home stretch

I am in the home stretch of my paper; one and a half paragraphs of near-final draft left to go, and then as much editing as I can manage before I need to go to sleep. Tomorrow on campus, between my entertaining 11-12.15 class and the 15.30 due date, I will sit in a lab and do a final editing pass, spurred on by the knowledge of almost, almost being done -- which thought reminds me that unless I want to take seven books with me to campus tomorrow, it would behoove me to do my Works Cited page tonight, and to double-check all my citations before I go to sleep.

This paper being done, I will spend the weekend whipping up the tidy little one page paper on Nella Larsen's Quicksand, which ought to be a pleasure; I seem to like doing limited, in-depth writing much more than sprawling surveys of material. I also need to start researching for my two Shakespeare projects; I am doing a presentation on the treatment of Shakespeare in China & Japan, and a paper that is going to have something to do with Shylock and Malvolio. Both of these will need a great deal of research, but I have fine web access to all sorts of exciting sources, so I ought to be able to curl up with tea and enjoy the process of assembling my materials.

Academic work aside, I am thinking once again about how very, very messy my house is, and how difficult it seems to make any headway on this point, despite an extremely helpful and hard-working husband. At the beginning of the year I had been planning to do the dishes every evening after dinner, but that has quickly fallen by the wayside; when I'm in school I often need that time to study, and when not in school I don't want to spend the first half-hour of my time with my husband cleaning. Also, several evenings a week we have to zoom off to someone's house as soon as we're done with dinner, or otherwise we're having people over and I ought to be interacting with them instead of in the kitchen cleaning. So, what to do? The obvious solution seems to be to make post-breakfast the dishes time, with byes on the two mornings I have to leave immediately for class. There will certainly be the occasional morning (such as, she says with mild bitterness, every morning in the last week) in which I must start typing on a paper the second breakfast is over, but if I am sensible with my time otherwise those mornings will be rare. And now that I have shared this plan with you, gentle reader, perhaps my determination to see it through will be increased sufficiently that not even laziness will stand in my way.

This afternoon I drank far too many cups of vanilla jasmine tea (a gift from C. I am finally taking proper advantage of), for which I am now becoming profoundly grateful, as the hours creep on and still I am not yet too tired to think clearly. Caffeine can be the bane of my sleep schedule, and thus I rarely indulge in it after the morning, but tonight I think it was a wise (albeit unplanned) choice.

It rained this morning, and the streets are still just damp enough that the cars swish as they drive by. I love that sound -- especially when I'm lying in bed, warm and cozy, and don't have to get up for a while. I'm looking forward to falling asleep tonight with that sound in my ears.

the Lamentable Midterm, round 2

Once upon a time, when I was in group therapy, my therapist said to me that I had a very interesting therapeutic style; I would work intensely on a topic for 5 or 10 minutes and during that time get an immense amount done, more than some people got done in several sessions. And then -- I would stop, exhausted, and float along lightly on the surface until the next period of intense work came around.

I bring this to light, gentle reader, because I feel that is exactly my pattern in working on academic tasks (such as the Lamentable Midterm that I have once again skipped classes to deal with), and I am not so sure that it is a good pattern. To have worked very hard this morning for 3 and 1/2 hours straight through is commendable, certainly, but the afternoon seems to be frittering away in approaches that don't quite pan out, leavened with a sense of general bitterness that I have spent so much time on this paper and am not yet finished. Which bitterness does no good, I might add, for it just makes me less inclined to do the work and more inclined to throw up my hands in dismay and go read the last Sarah Caudwell novel. (Perceptive readers may be able to detect traces of Caudwell's distinctive style in my own prose at the moment; I stayed up a little too late finishing The Sirens Sang of Murder last night.)

I tangent briefly to note that perhaps writing here does do me some good, after all, for when I was stuck trying to find the descriptive term for Caudwell's prose I automatically flipped over to the other writing space to work on something 'easier' -- and that space was my midterm. Clearly my midterm writing strategy at this point should be to try to describe something extremely difficult here in my blog, so that my brain flees back to the midterm as a simpler task. Oh, I wish I knew if I was being ironic!

But where was I? Ah, yes -- fretting about how I am a very slow writer, and how I have been working on this midterm for six days now and am not yet finished. This is, I speculate, not only because I naturally work in the method described above, but also because I accrete text much as an oyster creates a pearl. Each paragraph must be close to correct before the next paragraph can proceed -- and so right now, for instance, I am five paragraphs from the end, but that doesn't mean I have a rough draft I could just shrug my shoulders & turn in, because the second of those five paragraphs can't come into existence until the first is right. Not perfect, but right. As one might imagine, this is a real problem in classes in which one has to turn in a rough draft for peer review; I don't have rough drafts of my academic writing. I have my process, and then close-to-final drafts. (Oddly, fiction writing seems to work a bit differently -- perhaps because there's no logical argument, I can put in entirely wrong paragraphs as placeholders until I've got more clarity.)

However, I say to myself, it is the last year of my BA, and my process does produce papers which receive excellent grades, so I should perhaps just resign myself to doing things this way for the next seven months -- but when I put it like that it sounds like such a long time. Regardless, I am not about to change my process until I finish with this paper, so I must go pay attention to it again. Only 4 paragraphs to go!

a brief (personal) history of knitting

I learned to knit on New Year's Eve of last year, at the wonderful warm house of my friends C & E. C being a knitter, I had been watching her work for months, marvelling at the lovely things which sprang from her hands while being certain that I could never do such a thing myself. I have always had stubborn fingers, fingers which will only learn such tasks as suit them; I type 120 words per minute, but when I tried (a decade back) to learn to crochet they rebelled and I gave up in disgust. Repeatedly.

So when C greeted me not only with hot tea and yummy snacks, but also with circular bamboo needles, some bright yellow yarn, and a selection of knitting books, I was dubious at best. Yet there I was, curled up on the couch in her living room, and my husband was chatting with other people, and there seemed absolutely no reason not to give it a try -- and by the end of the evening I was clumsily knitting away, absolutely amazed that my fingers believed this complicated maneuver with yarn and needles was something they ought to be doing.

The next day, of course, was New Year's Day, and although I was rather exhausted and heavy-eyed from the previous evening (there had been some wine to go with that knitting, and great quantities of excellent cheese and chocolate fondue, and champagne, of course), I had promised to attend a brunch at the home of the Z's. So attend I did, and enthused to passers-by about my new knitting talent, and in the course of conversation decided that since things had been going so well, I might as well learn to purl.

And thus, gentle reader, I can accurately say that I learned to knit on New Year's Eve, and to purl on New Year's Day -- a formulation which still makes me giggle.

Since then I have bought much yarn (mostly from Knitpicks) and many needles (ditto), and I am right now a single row away from being done with my first project, a baby blanket made with old acrylic yarn that I'd bought back in my crochet days in the hopes of making something for my then unborn nephew. The blanket's pattern is so simple that it was a perfect first project for me, and I had the chance to make a thousand beginner mistakes, learn to identify them (with much assistance from kind knitting friends), and eventually to repair them myself instead of handing them off for someone else to fix. I also learned that it really is okay to start over -- and over again -- and over again when things just aren't working out. The final blanket is much smaller than the pattern intends, since both my yarn and my needles were thinner than recommended, but I've been told that it's the perfect size for a carseat blanket, so I'm satisfied. Once I have finished this horrifying midterm (the one I ought to be working on right now) I think I'll carve out the time to finish the blanket and photograph it and then see about gifting it to the small child who has expressed interest by putting it into his mouth repeatedly.

perhaps perhaps perhaps

I am not certain where my desire to share the little details of my life has gone off to, but it seems to have taken a permanent vacation. What a change from ten years ago, when I wrote a webjournal almost daily using bare-bones HTML out of an intense need to share myself with the world.

Is it just that I've become such a more private person now that I am so satisfied with the big picture of my life and so aware that the small details will work themselves out? Or is it that I have such excellent friends now that my desire to share myself is satisfied over afternoons at my favourite coffee shop, and the occasional evening in someone's living room with a cup of tea? Some of both, I think; I am certainly more private and less impelled to tell the world everything now that I realise that there are people in arm's reach who will be delighted to hear.

All of which is a complicated way of saying that I have more real connection with other people than I used to, and that I appreciate the interaction and engagement more than simple broadcasting. Oh, yes, I do realise that if I wrote here regularly I might have regular readers, and then there would be interaction and engagement -- but in a way that's part of why I'm reluctant to do so. I would worry about whether I was being read, and wonder who my readers were, and feel bad if I failed to update, and that -- all of that -- sounds so unpleasant, so much like added stress rather than spreading my wings in the world of the web.

So, you may ask -- at the very least I may ask myself six months from now -- why am I even writing this post? Well, I was playing around on Ravelry and through one link and another rediscovered Yarnstorm which is a lovely blog written by someone I might enjoy growing up to be. And there, gentle reader, is the gist of all this; I read someone else's description of their life, and I am inspired in tiny ways to change my own life, to make it more beautiful, more graceful, and above all, I suppose, to make myself more aware of the great beauty and grace that I already have. And in these moments of inspiration I think that it would be lovely to write my own blog, where I would describe all the joys (and no doubt some of the frustrations) of my life in such a way that I can see in my experience some of the qualities I find reading about the experiences of others. I frame my life through my own stories, and if I tell my life through my blog as a story of grace and kindness, understanding and real emotional connection, and turn my haphazard attempts to create warmth & beauty through knitting and cooking into a story other people can read, surely then I'll believe it all more myself?

That may seem disingenuous, but I do really mean it. I know that my own satisfaction with my life is to some extent based on how I understand it, and I think that my understanding is shaped by how I share it with other people. Couldn't I tell the story of my life here in a way that helps me be the person I really want to be, and to value the things I really want to value? Wouldn't it help me avoid being bogged down in the things which don't particularly matter?

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But while I think all of this over, I must also go write a midterm about Freud as a writer and the influence of his psychological theories on literature. I anticipate one or two more posts here as the day (and the midterm) progresses, however, since my urge to write does also seem intimately connected to approaching academic deadlines.

partly cloudy with occasional precision

April, month of green leaves, fluffy white clouds, and surprisingly little rain.

Seeing S. must inspire me to write, because I saw her for the first time in six weeks this past Friday (she'd been out of the country), and now here I am, neglecting the homework I should be doing to type into this little window. It was good seeing her; we were both a little awkward at first, but as the afternoon went on we loosened up and start laughing and teasing one another over coffee and a slice of slightly sour peach pie. Every time I take on of these breaks from studying Japanese my fingers forget how to form the characters, but it came back surprisingly quickly. My vocabulary did, too, and S. complimented me on that, which felt nice.

Four weeks from today I will be entirely done with classes (I'm trying to get my undergraduate degree in English Literature) until August, which means I'll have almost three entire months to cultivate myself in whatever way I choose. There are many things I'd like to read, many things I'd like to write, and quite a few things I would like to do. The challenge for me is always to structure my time so that it doesn't vanish in sleep and lazy afternoons of half-heartedly playing computer games. There is nothing wrong with either sleep or games, but I want to do them with intention, because they are the things that my body or mind or heart want and not because I fall into them without meaning to and can't figure out how to escape. I waste too much time in the true sense of wasting it, doing things I don't want or need to do because I cannot figure out what I do want or need. Every vacation has been getting better, more focused, more satisfying; I hope this summer will be better still. Perhaps in this space I'll brainstorm some about things I'd like to do, or might like to do, and see what schemes for arranging my time I can imagine.

One definite scheme: to photograph things (with my newly functional digital camera) and post the photographs here. I bought the cable my camera needed, so now all the pictures from my honeymoon & other travelling are on the computer. I could share them, if I wanted to. Do I? Another thing to muse on.

nihon no hana

Last week S. and I went for a walk downtown and looked at all the flowers. It was warm, in the low 70s, and a lovely day for a walk. We had fun discussing the various flowers, matching S's Japanese names with my English names. I recognise a lot of the flowers from where I grew up, but not many around here.

The tree to the right (taken at random from the Flickr photostream of lithoglyphic, who I know nothing of other than that she takes lovely pictures) is a mokuren, which in English is a saucer magnolia. They're everywhere right now, budding and blooming, shedding thick, waxy petals onto sidewalks and lawns. S. said that they have a beautiful fragrance, but the one we found downtown was too tall for us to sniff -- despite jumping a few times to try to reach the lowest flowers.

Searching the web this evening, I found a wonderful page of photos of Japanese flowers. Now I know what Japanese peach blossoms look like, and the boke (quince) blossoms are lovely.

Maybe by next week I'll have made my camera functional again, and can take some photos before the wind blows all the petals away. There's a white sakura by the church downtown that's so perfect it could be a painting.

why a blog?

I'm really not sure. Maybe it's just a side effect of early spring (here in Northern California it's already starting) -- the sakura are blooming, so are the plum trees, and there are yellow daffodils by the library and white-and-gold ones in front of the houses downtown. There are pink magnolias, too -- I think they're technically called saucer magnolias, but S, my friend from Japan, calls them 'mokuren,' which is a beautiful name. I always feel a lot of energy at this time of the year, the desire to do and make things, even when (like now) I'm so busy with classes that I don't really have any time to make an effort in other areas.

A blog is a nice way to create and express, and a way to be ... public isn't exactly the right word. It's just that there's a difference between expressing myself privately, in a journal, or semi-privately, with my husband and our friends, and trying to describe my life and thoughts and feelings to a wider & unknown audience. Even if nobody reads this (and of course I hope that people will), the feeling behind putting it here is a different one, and seems to satisfy my springtime restlessness, at least a little.

naniiro desu ka?

A first post is rarely a very interesting thing (unless, of course, one spends a lot of time on it), but it has to happen sometime, and is a good way to decide if one likes one's template and so forth.

Expect this space to contain thoughts about books, knitting, cats, marriage, academia, tea, food, coffee, the Japanese language, anime and manga, music, Asian dramas, more books, the seasons, and many other things which I'm not thinking about right now.

I'm not a very pink person, really, but right now I'm waffling between the scribe template (which is a nice parchment colour) and 'Thisaway Rose,' which as one might expect is fairly pink. By the time you read this, you'll probably know which one I picked.