One Phone Call

if i were an ordinary indian citizen, with a muslim name, travelling to the u.s., and if i got held up at newark airport for secondary screening en route to chicago, and if i used my one phone call to call the indian consulate to help get me out of the airport as soon as possible -- would i succeed?

also, would i cause international headlines?

please, someone tell srk that, no matter how gorgeous his eyebrows, he's not above the law. and please, someone also tell the indian consulate in nyc that, if he has recourse to their emergency-vip-law-bending unit, we should all get to put their phone numbers in our phones, too -- and to use them when necessary.

It's Been A Month

not my longest absence -- but certainly an unpardonable one, given that i spent so many mornings and evenings in july sitting in front of my computer, staring at it or into the middle distance (grey's anatomy or gmail on the screen, so who cares? nothing was really *changing* or anything...)

now i'm back in philadelphia for the long haul, my hair pinned back in a sensible but odd-looking (because stunted) bun, in front of a different computer, thinking all the time thinking thinking. the to-do list grows longer shorter longer shorter. i should be in bed, but i am paralyzed by the fear that, once i go to bed, i will not want to wake up early in the morning and be productive. i am in a rut, the august rut that in school would have been the june rut: there's tons to get done, but i want so badly to deny that anything is actually important that in the end i get my way, and do facebook and livejournal and blogger, at the ridiculous and avoidable expense of more stress in the days to come.

no matter, i swam today. and someone outside -- maybe a member of the band i read lives across the street from me? but no, they were punk, or something -- is playing a trumpet or trombone or some other kind of wind instrument, alone, random, soothing. no matter.

the universe colludes: i have been thinking about monster books. tim carmody suggested erving goffmann's stigma. now i'm reading mel micir's old blog and i find this, as irrelevant to my life right now as bacon (the author, not the meat) but something i know i want to tuck away -- or put on display -- for inevitable future use:

"It is rare in 'natural' conversation that the best answer is provided on the spot, rare that witty repartee occurs. . . . Indeed, when during informal talk a reply is provided that is as good as the one that could be later thought up, then a memorable event has occurred." (Goffmann)

tuesday i will entertain in this apartment for the first time since the fall. who cares if the living room ceiling is dripping plaster everywhere!? i want more out of my graduate life, especially if this is to be my last year in philadelphia.

Groceries

for the last week and some, i've been eating out or eating gautam's cooking. the situation needed to be rectified, for the sake both of my independence and of my stomach (which is still not quite 100% after the bout of food poisoning i suffered in cuba).

there is nothing better, in my opinion, than a stocked kitchen just waiting to be raided.

bananas, grapes
chana, rajma
mushrooms, tomatoes, red/orange peppers
avocados, peas, asparagus, spinach
tofu (super firm, cubed)
onions, scallions, ginger
soup (mmmm, soup)
ciabatta rolls (to go with soup)
coconut milk
pre-chopped stir-fry vegetables (for thai curry)
empanadas, pierogies (mmmmmm!)
lipton teriyaki and thai sesame noodles

tomorrow's goal: edamame replenishment. shop 'n' bag needs to start stocking it, stat.

Bubbly

i just bought another gorgeous titan watch!

pick@flick[r]: <http://flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/3317092197>

it's the most delicate, petite thing i've worn on my wrists in a long time, but i like it a lot.

(see my post about my first purchase here: <http://simran.nomadlife.org/2007/05/pretty-pretty.aspx>)

***

update, sunday, march 1, 2009:

in case the post title doesn't make any sense, it's because the watch is supposed to look like a bottle of champagne, with the crystals representing bubbles. (also because new bling makes me happy, but that's secondary.)

Charting The Cost Of Living

erin was just blogging the other day (see <http://squishsquasher.blogspot.com/2008/10/living-beyond-your-means.html>) about one of the causes of the latest financial meltdown -- over-reliance on credit cards.

this old new york times article (admittedly, from 2002!) points out a bizarre cost correlation which it would make me smile to think of as a cause-effect relationship:

NYC; Beware The Price Of a Slice

By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: January 12, 2002

It was too early to pop open the Champagne, but ordering a celebratory slice at the local pizza parlor did not seem out of line. Giddiness over imminent good times faded, however, when a colleague pointed out that the price of pizza suggested that the subway and bus fare would be raised before too long.

Huh?

Beware the Pizza Connection, he said, and he wasn't talking about a drug ring. He had revived a forgotten variation on the interplay of markets, New York style.

Strange though it may seem, the cost of a subway ride has traditionally paralleled the price of a pizza slice. (We're talking here about a regular slice -- mozzarella and tomato sauce, with none of those fancy-shmancy toppings that muck around with one of civilization's great achievements.) Call it, if you will, the Fasel Corollary, named for George Fasel, a vice president at Bankers Trust who made the link in a 1985 article on this newspaper's Op-Ed page.

He got it right. In 1960, for example, the fare was 15 cents. So was a slice of pizza. ''I do believe there is some kind of historical correlation,'' said Gene Russianoff, a leader of the Straphangers Campaign, the subway-riders advocacy group. It wasn't difficult to get him waxing lyrical about his boyhood in the early 60's, when he could venture forth with a dollar in his pocket, take two subway rides, buy two pizza slices and a 10-cent soda, and still have 30 cents left.

In the early 1970's, the fare rose to 35 cents. So did pizza. Through the years, the increases went more or less in tandem. Just before the price of a subway token last went up, in 1995, it stood at $1.25, lagging behind the $1.35 typically charged for a slice. Obviously, it was time for a fare increase. Thus did the $1.50 token come to be.

It remains at $1.50. But pizza prices have not stayed put. In fact, the pizza-token gap is so large these days that it is hard to see how the subwaymeisters can hold out for long. The grease-ateria around the corner from home on the Upper West Side charges $1.75. In Midtown, pizza parlors routinely charge $1.90 and even $2.

With that kind of market pressure being brought to bear, how can the $1.50 fare survive much longer?

The problem is especially acute when you consider that New York City Transit expects an operating deficit this year of $255 million, in large measure because few New Yorkers actually pay $1.50. Far from it, said Albert O'Leary, spokesman for New York City Transit. With all the discounts created in recent years, he said, ''we realize $1.06 on the average fare.''

The Pizza Connection is not New Yorkers' only worry.

What if the Jets, who play today in the first round of football's post-season, go all the way to win the Super Bowl? That isn't very likely to happen. This is a team that has not even made it to the Super Bowl in 33 years.

But should Jet lightning strike, the stock market could be headed for trouble in 2002, despite its splendid run in those first five days. Historically, stocks have fallen in the year of a Super Bowl victory by a team from the old American Football League. Like the Jets. The advice here is to choose your rooting interests wisely.

Bear this in mind, too. After every World Series appearance by the Mets -- in 1969, 1973, 1986 and 2000 -- Wall Street fared poorly the next year. You think this is silly? Fine. But do you have another explanation for the Crash of '87?

The far more frequent presence of the Yankees in the World Series usually leads to rises in the Dow Jones industrial average. But the Dow has also tended to do even better when the Yankees lose the Series. So their defeat in November, however painful, may be another sign that Wall Street will sparkle this year.

With the subway fare, Gov. George E. Pataki has ruled out an increase in 2002. This is, remember, an election year.

Ah, but what about 2003? That's a bit far down the road for predictions. But the way things are going, the next governor, whether Mr. Pataki or his Democratic opponent, may see no choice but to raise the fare.

There is an obvious way out, though. The state could restore traditional parity by giving pizza makers subsidies to lower their prices. Anyway, it's something to chew on.

(see more of the same at other times in recent history: july 2002: <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B00E2DD1730F93AA35754C0A9649C8B63>, june 2005 <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/21/nyregion/21nyc.html> and july 2007 <http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/27/nyregion/27nyc.html>.)

except that nothing in this market is smile-worthy, really. i mean, my grad student stipend will still keep coming, but what about the rest of the world economy, which is on the down and down?

still -- facetiously speaking, and given that if pizza and the subway can be linked then everything financial is somehow linked -- if that this, too, is an election year, and if the base subway fare is now at $2 and not $1.50 as it was when this old article was published...

what might this mean for (a) pizza prices, which have been rising at searing rates the last few months (see <http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/mmm-pizza-a-slice-but-at-what-price/> for evidence of the meteoric increase!) and are now at close to $3? (b) -- in turn -- future subway fare increases (put off in the recent past due to much straphanger angst)? (c) -- in turn -- all those unemployed bankers who won't be taking cabs anymore?

Life Can't Be That Bad

the last few weeks, i've been having bad hair day after bad hair day.

a) my new shampoo + conditioner combo, while it smells great, has undetermined effects on the sheen and bounce of my hair -- i'm testing it one more time, and if i see negative after-effects i'm taking it back to CVS for a refund.
b) the stress of the 50 book exam has been making my hair fall out in large quantities. (yes, even now. what, you thought everything would go back to normal as soon as i walked out of the slaughterhouse?) as someone who has always had thick, thick hair, i'm disturbed.
c) i haven't been swimming as much, but the chlorine is doing terrible things to my hair, i just know it. i've started wetting my hair pre-pool, and have even gone back to using dabur hair oil (i smell just like i did in school -- brahmiaamlakeshtel types!) but i don't know how much of an effect that's having yet.

but today, as i was standing on the steps outside the gym waiting for the shuttle so that i could get home, a random, mildly cute indian guy changed his trajectory down the stairs just so that he could stop by me, look me right in the eye, and say, "you have lovely hair."

... and voilà, life is good again!

God Is In The Rain

for my first ten days in my new apartment, i couldn't open any of the windows in my living room, as they had been painted shut by my landlord's apparently-unconcerned maintenance folk.

a considerate maintenance person came by and knifed them open this morning, about an hour ago. i jumped at the chance to get some fresh air by opening them all, propping one up precariously with a bug screen (there's no chain on the window to keep it open -- evidently my apartment windows have long been neglected!)

then, five or ten minutes ago, it started to thunderstorm. the air is cool, electric as i sift through my email. my living room and i are refreshed. grey skies or not, it will be a good day!

In Anticipation Of A Normal Life, Resumed

in 2 weeks i'll have moved into a new apartment *and* finished my 50-book exam.

i've been reading for the exam since memorial day (minus the several weeks in july that i was on vacation and at rare book school in charlottesville), so i've been feeling rather studious/nerdy/exhausted for weeks now. but the packing just began today, at full speed -- and already there are about 8 boxes worth of books/kitchen stuff/sweaters/linens/random trinkets sitting in my living room, waiting to be joined by the other 8 (and the 4 suitcases of varying sizes) that will get packed over the next ten days.

i can't wait!

Ignominy

gautam tambay, you are a shady bugger.

that is all :P

Just Call Me "Stupid"

i haven't backed up my data since august '07. (this alone should tell you what's coming.)

said backup may or may not exist on another computer -- i can't remember whether or not i kept the master copy of all the stuff i took off my parents' computer at home. i also can't remember whether what i put on my brother's computer in september '07 is still there -- i think he deleted everything i'd put on there, with my approval, because i'd only put it there as a temporary measure until i got my new imac.

today, the hard drive on said imac failed. the thing is less than a year old.

many minutes of "the spinning wheel" and many conversations with mac support people later, i'm not yet sure what the future of my information is -- i know only that there is a "possibility" that i've lost my data, and that data recovery (if successful) will cost me $300.

i must admit, i am not attached beyond repair to all of the (a) mp3s (b) photos (c) 4 years of work from college (d) 1 year of work from grad school i had on my hard drive. so much of it is useless/outdated/sentimental electronic relics that i haven't looked at in years. so much of it is just music, which can be re-downloaded if need be, but which i also have on my ipod, and would only have to re-sync, not even rename (since itunes takes care of the back end). and so much of the most important stuff (like blog content, or email) is online nowadays, and never sees "soft copy" status on personal hard drives.

but even so: i have to say, suffering the remorse and self-reprimanding that i'm suffering now, that given a chance, i would rather rescue it all as a way to prevent having to learn the lesson than let it be lost just so i could learn the lesson.

i am sad.

and, like i said: stupid.

Childfree By Choice...

usually gets a "tsk, tsk" or denial or dirty glares or convoluted arguments about man's purpose on earth or "it's only a matter of time, you'll change your mind" or accusations of selfishness or "what'll you do in your old age?" or or or.

my mind stays made up. meanwhile, you, the disbelievers, please make room in your worldview for the hilarity of this, which i found floating around anonymously at <http://www.childfree.net/potpourri_annlanders.html>:

Ann Landers' famous "The Childless Couple"

There is nothing sadder than a childless couple. It breaks my heart to see them relaxing around swimming pools in Florida, sitting all suntanned and miserable on the decks of their boats -- trotting off to Europe like lonesome fools. It's an empty life. Nothing but money to spend, more time to enjoy and a whole lot less to worry about.

The poor childless couple are so wrapped up in themselves, you have to feel sorry for them. They don't fight over the child's discipline, don't blame each other for the child's most obnoxious characteristics, and they miss all the fun of doing without for the child's sake. They just go along, doing whatever they want, buying what they want and liking each other. It's a pretty pathetic picture.

Everyone should have children. No one should be allowed to escape the wonderful experience that accompanies each stage in the development of the young -- the happy memories of sleepless nights, coughing spells, tantrums, diaper rash, debts, "dipso" baby sitters, saturated mattresses, emergencies and never-ending crises.

How dismal is the peaceful home without the constant childish problems that make a well-rounded life and an early breakdown; the tender, thoughtful discussions when the report card reveals the progeny to be one step below a moron; the end-of-the-day reunions with all the joyful happenings recited like well-placed blows to the temples.

Children are worth it. Every moment of anxiety, every sacrifice, every complete collapse pays off as a fine, sturdy adolescent is reached. The feeling of reward the first time you took the boy hunting -- he didn't mean to shoot you, the lad was excited. Remember how he cried? How sorry he was? And how much better you felt after the blood transfusion? These are the times a man with a growing son treasures -- memories that are captured forever in the heart and the limp.

Think back to the night of romantic adventure when your budding daughter eloped with the village idiot. What childless couple ever shared in the stark realism of that drama? Aren't you a better man for having lived richly, fully, acquiring that tic in your left eye? Could a woman without children touch the strength and heroism of your wife as she tried to fling herself out of the bedroom window?

The childless couple live in a vacuum. They fill their lonely days with golf, vacation trips, dinner dates, civic affairs, tranquility, leisure and entertainment. There is a terrifying emptiness without children, but the childless couple are too comfortable to know it.

You just have to look at them to see what the years have done: He looks boyish, unlined and rested; she's slim, well-groomed and youthful. It isn't natural. If they had had kids, they'd look like the rest of us -- worn out, wrinkled and exhausted.

*$s

dear diary,

today i drank my very first hot caffeinated beverage of the academic year: a tall caramel macchiato.

i just wanted to say how ridiculous i think that is.

because today is may 23.

and school began on september 5 of last year.

this means i drank no coffee all year. what kind of english grad student am i!?

(admittedly, maybe it's not quite that ridiculous, because coffee costs $3 a cup at starbucks, so it's just as well. and coffee tends to make me jumpy and give me stomach cramps, so it's really just as well. and also, *cough*, i've been drinking red bull, instead...)

The Unthinkable

i'm no longer the kind of kid who's all anti-microsoft (being 25 means i don't have time for soapbox tirades -- and, cough, i now have a mac). but i was willing to give the free office substitute program a go, because it's, well, free.

but after neo-office shut down on me for the nth time, and i realized that my never-ending paper of doom (currently at 33 pages, without the 5 pages of images i need to stick in there) was going to be even longer and the formatting get all messed up when emily opened it with ms office, i decided it was time to succumb.

so: office 2008.

i never realized just how comfortable i am with word (as opposed to neo-office "writer"), even though it's the 2008 edition and i've hardly ever used it before. i also hadn't realized how much prettier it is than the no-frills, weird-buttons neo app.

*sigh of relaxation*

yes, dear readers, before you freak out, yes. yes. i sold my soul to the devil, and i'm ok with that. at least my headers (first page different) and my footnotes (all 40 of them, in times new roman 10 with superscript numbering and one space instead of one tab space between number and note) don't need to be individually formatted anymore.

Good Thing I Like Apartment-Hunting

(and craigslist)

funny how life is.

moral of the story from this past 48 hours: no-one's really ever your friend for life. roommates? even less so. i suppose in a strange way it's my own fault.

I Also Hate Grocery Shopping

normally i am a big fan of spending time at the grocery store, roaming the aisles looking for sales (aka procrastinating -- the more homework there is to be done, the more time i'm willing to spend picking out food) and buying new things to use in my culinary experiments.

today, my time was even more dedicated to the supermarket, because
a) there's practically zero food at home
b) my stupid roommate, who never buys food unless goaded to come along for the ride (and whose laxness in the way of food acquisitions often directly causes situation "a", above) has gone underground for the remainder of the semester, and will eventually eat through the twelve red kidney beans, six wheat thins and one moldy tomato that we do have left and then complain that there's no food at home
c) it was super-nice out and it's the weekend, which put me in the mood for stocking up on yummy things to eat!

so off i went into the aisles of supreme food market, on 43rd and walnut. i love supreme because it's cheap, close to home, and has just about everything i need plus free home delivery (the value of which one will only realize if one is used to lugging groceries home from distant locations, and if one knows that my grocery bill is usually about $80 -- which means about 6 heavy bags of stuff). i roamed the aisles at leisure, selecting pesto sauce and carrots and hummus and stocking up on grapefruit and chickpeas and premade waffles.

so far, so good. i was already contemplating what i'd cook for dinner tonight, and making small talk with the cashier lady who had the cool-looking tattoo behind her right ear after confirming that i could get all this stuff sent home... when the story turned nasty: mr. will, the delivery guy, sauntered by, and announced that there would be no home delivery tonight.

errrm....

thus it was that i stood on the street (my shopping cart loaded with $95.75 worth of excellent things to eat but unable to leave the supreme parking lot due to the closely-placed shopping-cart-theft-prevention bars), wondered what to do, and wished like hell i had a boyfriend who would go grocery shopping with me and carry all the stuff home afterwards (for a tip, of course).

i tried to flag down cab after cab, all the while hating on mr. will, who probably just wanted the night off to enjoy the awesome weather. no luck. having exhausted my patience, i called a cab company (olde city cab) just like the good corporate-in-disguise that i am. no response. then i called victory cab, the only company whose number i could remember offhand. no go: they said the wait would be between 5 and 30 minutes. (in philadelphia, complaining is futile. and the damn cabs aren't even cheap...)

finally, a benevolent cabbie (indian, but naturally!) zigzagged across three lanes to ask where i wanted to go. i told him i had a bunch of groceries to transport 5 blocks, and he hopped out to help. good samaritans do exist! our conversation during the short drive revealed that he had been on his way home at the end of his shift when he saw me looking distressed; that he's kashmiri (and apparently i'm from bollywood...); that olde city cab is older and far more reliable than other cab companies in philly, although crazily enough their headquarters are not in olde city; and that the best number to call to get through to aforementioned olde city cab is 215.AIRPORT (so smart!).

i guess the fact that i'm now at home typing this, ex post facto, might indicate to you, dear reader, that all's well that ends well. i guess it did, for the cabbie at at least, since i tipped him roughly, oh, 100% of the fare. but one disaster was yet to strike: while unloading the seemingly-dozens of bags and carrying them lock stock and barrel over to my doorstep, the man unwittingly dropped the one bag that had a bottle of kikkoman soy sauce in it. the bottle smashed, and now the two packets of mushrooms and the bottle of milk that shared that plastic bag -- not to mention my front stoop -- smell indelibly like soy sauce.

*sigh*

i think next time i'll starve, instead.

I Hate Taxes

i'm good at addition and subtraction, but sadly, 'rithmetic isn't really all that useful (beyond figuring out potential permutations and combinations of the various deductions i could take) when it comes to getting through the tension of the season of april 15.

you see, being an international non-immigrant resident alien is complicated... not to mention that my tax status has changed in some way every year for the last 3 years, so i feel like a moving target!... and i never seem to be able to find my old returns when i need them... and this year i live in a different state from the one i've always lived in... and apparently philadelphia requires people to file city taxes (in addition to state and federal)... and i didn't file my own taxes last year, so i don't know what was going on in that mess of papers!... and i didn't even get a W-2 this year...

upon thinking about all this, actually, i've come to the conclusion that perhaps the most useful tax skill i could acquire would be the ability to get off my ass about these sorts of things before april 10.

¿Qué He Hecho Yo Para Merecer Esto?

it's not even 9 a.m., and already i'm having the most horrible day i've had in weeks.

i got just 4 hours of sleep last night, i dropped my toothbrush down the toilet (what is up with me and doing that with important objects?), summer latin is looking like a vanishing possibility, and a friend just called me crying to tell me that his partner of 3+ years has been cheating on him and wants to break up to be with someone else.

in addition, my hair needs shampooing, my eyebrows need tweezing, i haven't been swimming in 5 days, my throat itches, and it's cold.

whine whine whine.

Request For Communal Expertise

if anyone's out there reading, i'd be grateful for:

(a) tips on what to do on a week-long trip to rome
(b) that-hallmark-holiday-in-february gift ideas for a gregarious, sporty, itinerant, preppy boy, from a girl who thinks the usual array of store-bought stuff (pens, ties, even hiking gear) for guys is totally boring. (if the boy in question is reading, and feels so inclined, he can make suggestions, too!)
(c) suggestions on how to file away stacks and stacks of printed-out articles/readings in an aesthetic yet useful fashion. i'd like to avoid filing cabinets, if at all possible, which is to say that hanging folders on a frame, magazine boxes, and the like would be much more up my alley.

email [simphonatic at gmail dot com] or leave comments.

Something Old, Something New...

happy 2008!

the last time i put up a picture of myself with a new haircut, it was june in boston and i had just gone super-short (see <http://simran.nomadlife.org/2006/06/new-haircut.aspx> for evidence)

this time, i tried ultra-feminine, and i think it works far better than anything i've done before.

pick@flick[r]: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/2157041999>

thank you, butterfly pond!

At This Rate

so far this finals period i have written:

7 pages for heather
17 pages for peter and zack
25 pages for david

i'm currently at 32 pages for ania, aiming for about 40ish.

plus umpteen emails and facebook wall posts, some even with creative bent (one specific person has taken responsibility for precisely 97.3% of my prolific email production -- but the facebook monster is a separate and formidable sinkhole for words words words).

all in less than 3 weeks.

at this rate, i could be done with a dissertation in 6 months. it'd be mad painful (think of the red bull cans i'd accumulate... and the jitters that would keep me bouncing at 4 am... and the amount of wheat thins i'd have to consume...), and it might not even be that good, and i'd keel over and die right after...

but hot damn, i'd be a doctor of awesome!

Nuclear Meltdown Alert

don't talk to me unless i talk to you.

seriously. just don't.

unless you are prepared for a barrage of some of the most disturbing and life-changing (yet profoundly eloquent, because i'm in graduate school after all) musings i've ever had.


(blog comments are still welcome.)

More Thoughts On Shopping

(god, i feel like a freak discussing this girly stuff on a regular basis! see <http://simran.nomadlife.org/2007/11/everything-thats-right-with-world.aspx>, <http://simran.nomadlife.org/2007/09/ring-of-truth.aspx>, and <http://simran.nomadlife.org/2007/06/i-am-shopping-fiend.aspx> for just a sampling of what i'm talking about.)

we all know that spending money is addictive, especially in new york, which seems to practically pull money out of one's wallet. just ask anyone who's indulged in serious retail therapy, like, ever. for me, this time, the wallet was precisely the issue: the zipper on my old faithful (read: boring) tri-fold black wallet broke last week.

so, the mission: to go out and get a new wallet which would allow me to carry change along with credit cards, cash, cvs coupons, business cards etc.

preemptive strikes: nothing tri-fold. nothing too thick. nothing in a non-basic colour.

and then guess what i found? a chartreuse-green faux croc bi-fold with a big silver g [for, yes, you got it, guess] on the buckle. definitely not black, but small, and super freaking awesome, and on sale, too.

pick@flick[r]: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/2142927266>

Love It!

gem from belle da costa greene, j. pierpont morgan's librarian and first director of the morgan library in nyc:

"Just because I am a librarian doesn't mean I have to dress like one."

some things never change!

i have already started working on my collection of blazers, cozy turtlenecks, and short skirts. i own both knee-high boots and mary janes. the librarian glasses are in place, and get regular lurrve from boys, academics, and random people on the street.

[now all that's left is the full-time job working for a manuscript-hungry bazillionaire with a vanity library building on the east side. yep, that would be the absolute perfect accessory ;-)]

From Indiana

whoever you are, thanks for this:

The movies lie in many ways, but in this one oh so cruelly. The girl doesn’t wait forever. Love alone is not enough. The ending is not always happy.

sounds like ideology critique to me -- the cynicism as concerns the simultaneous ubiquity and transparency of the dominant discourse, the accusation of the perpetuation of a system of similar cultural artifacts, the angry pessimism of horkheimer at work, that whole spiel -- and oh, of course it could be from my own head (if i had the time to think)...

except it's really a maudlin guest rumination from sex and the ivy: <http://sexandtheivy.com/2007/10/24/an-evolution-of-waiting-guest-post-by-indiana>.

if you haven't read elle yet, start now. she's quite a celebrity in the blogosphere, and in many ways she speaks my life.

In...

. . . the closet: my imac box, an air mattress that doesn't inflate, and laundry that needs to be folded (stat).
. . . my travels: a trip to new castle, a trip to new york, a trip to old boston, and a wending of my way home.
. . . my piggy bank: numerous quarters, a couple of stray nickels and pennies, and three checks, each for a significant amount of money, from rare book school that (due to complications and logistical irresponsibility) i haven't banked yet.
. . . my bad books: mousies.
. . . my head: derri-damn-he-just-won't-go-away! (and barbara johnson, the "flippin' genius" who clarified some of his key terms for me in her brilliant introduction to dissemination.) god help me if i become a deconstructionist instead of a formal literary historian.
. . . my heart: sandy, my awesome cohort (raf, ash, tekla, dave, rachel, chris, kara, claire, katie, jon, phil, beth, lucia), and my brother.
. . . my bag: library books, wallet, ipod, water bottle, pens/pencils, readings, and part of one of the tines of the plastic fork with which i ate lunch today.
. . . bigtime trouble: if i don't get the reading done for tomorrow.

(expanded from koo's meme, at <http://chapatikid.blogspot.com/2007/10/in.html>)

Who Are These Kids -- And Who Am I?

i discovered yesterday, while staring into the bathroom mirror and wondering whether i should shampoo my hair or not (answer: when you have to ask that question, you should probably just bust out the herbal essences already), that my normal quotient of two grey hairs has multiplied itself. i didn't stop to count how many i have now; i was too upset. i am 24, with a thick, rich mop of jet black hair on my head that i inherited from my gorgeous mother... and i am going grey.

(this is not to mention the bags under my eyes, the stress pimples, the lost weight...)

but is graduate school really to blame? or am i? the pressure i inflict upon myself may have more to do with my academic and personal intensity than any requirement from my professors! and then it strikes me, after a chat with ankita (who's going through teething pains at bryn mawr), and after reading this long but fascinating article from the NYT, that i may be 24 and stressed, but i don't have it quite as bad as the astounding 17-year-olds out there who are far more schooled and pretty and groomed and adult -- and yet far more prematurely pressured to perform and excel -- than i.

if you read one thing this week, take the time to read through this article. seriously.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/education/01girls.html>

For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too

April 1, 2007
By SARA RIMER

NEWTON, Mass., March 31 — To anyone who knows 17-year-old Esther Mobley, one of the best students at one of the best public high schools in the country, it is absurd to think she doesn’t measure up. But Esther herself is quick to set the record straight.

“First of all, I’m a terrible athlete,” she said over lunch one day.

“I run, I do, but not very quickly, and always exhaustedly,” she continued. “This is one of the things I’m most insecure about. You meet someone, especially on a college tour, adults ask you what you do. They say, ‘What sports do you play?’ I don’t play any sports. It’s awkward.”

Esther, a willowy, effervescent senior, turned to her friend Colby Kennedy. Colby, 17, is also a great student, a classical pianist, fluent in Spanish, and a three-season varsity runner and track captain. Did Colby worry, Esther asked, that she fell short in some way?

“Or,” said Esther, and now her tone was a touch sarcastic, “do you just have it all already?”

They both burst out laughing.

Esther and Colby are two of the amazing girls at Newton North High School here in this affluent suburb just outside Boston. “Amazing girls” translation: Girls by the dozen who are high achieving, ambitious and confident (if not immune to the usual adolescent insecurities and meltdowns). Girls who do everything: Varsity sports. Student government. Theater. Community service. Girls who have grown up learning they can do anything a boy can do, which is anything they want to do.

But being an amazing girl often doesn’t feel like enough these days when you’re competing with all the other amazing girls around the country who are applying to the same elite colleges that you have been encouraged to aspire to practically all your life.

An athlete, after all, is one of the few things Esther isn’t. A few of the things she is: a standout in Advanced Placement Latin and honors philosophy/literature who can expound on the beauty of the subjunctive mood in Catullus and on Kierkegaard’s existential choices. A writer whose junior thesis for Advanced Placement history won Newton North’s top prize. An actress. President of her church youth group.

To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see what a girl can be — what any young person can be — when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities.

It is also to see these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college — which doesn’t have to be in the Ivy League, or one of the other elites like Williams, Tufts or Bowdoin, but should be a “name” school.

The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.

And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.

You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther’s classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”

“Effortlessly hot,” Kat added.

If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything. What it comes down to, in this place and time, is that the eternal adolescent search for self is going on at the same time as the quest for the perfect résumé. For Esther, as for high school seniors everywhere, this is a big weekend for finding out how your résumé measured up: The college acceptances, and rejections, are rolling in.

“You want to achieve,” Esther said. “But how do you achieve and still be genuine?”

If it all seems overwhelming at times, then the multitasking adults in Newton have the answer: Balance. Strive for balance.

But balance is out the window when you’re a high-achieving senior in the home stretch of the race for which all the years of achieving and the disciplined focusing on the future have been preparing you. These students are aware that because more girls apply to college than boys, amid concerns about gender balance, boys may have an edge at some small selective colleges.

“You’re supposed to have all these extracurriculars, to play sports and do theater,” said another of Esther’s 17-year-old classmates, Julie Mhlaba, who aspires to medical school and juggles three Advanced Placement classes, gospel choir and a part-time job as a waitress. “You’re supposed to do well in your classes and still have time to go out.”

“You’re supposed to do all these things,” Julie said, “and not go insane.”

Stress Trumps Relaxation

Newton, which has a population of almost 84,000, is known for a liberal sensibility and a high concentration of professionals like doctors, lawyers and academics. Six miles west of Boston, with its heavily settled neighborhoods, bustling downtowns and high numbers of immigrants, Newton is a suburb with an urban feel.

The main shopping area, in Newton Centre, is a concrete manifestation of the conflicting messages Esther and the other girls are constantly struggling to decode. In one five-block stretch are two Starbucks and one Peets Coffee & Tea, several psychotherapists’ offices, three SAT test-prep services, two after-school math programs, and three yoga studios promising relaxation and inner peace.

Smack in the middle of all of this is Esther’s church, the 227-year-old First Baptist, which welcomes everyone regardless of race, sexual orientation or denomination, and where Esther puts in a lot of time.

The test-prep business is booming. Kaplan (“Be the ideal college applicant!”) is practically around the corner from Chyten (“Our average SAT II score across all subjects is 720!”), which is three blocks from Princeton Review (“We’re all about scoring more!”). My First Yoga (for children 3 and up), with its founder playing up her Harvard degree, is conveniently located above Chyten, which includes the SAT Cafe.

High-priced SAT prep has become almost routine at schools like Newton North. Not to hire the extra help is practically an act of rebellion.

“I think it’s unfair,” Esther said, explaining why she decided against an SAT tutor, though she worried about her score (ultimately getting, as she put it, “above 2000”). “Why do I deserve this leg up?”

Parents view Newton’s expensive real estate — the median house price in 2006 was $730,000 — and high taxes as the price of admission to the prized public schools. There are less affluent parents, small-business owners, carpenters, plumbers, social workers and high school guidance counselors, but many of these families arrived decades ago when it was possible to buy a nice two-story Colonial for $150,000 or less.

Newton North, one of two outstanding public high schools here, is known for its academic rigor, but also its vocational education, reflecting the wide range of its 1,967 students. Nearly 73 percent of them are white, 7.3 percent black, nearly 12 percent Asian and 7.5 percent Hispanic. Many of the black and Hispanic students live in the Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods of Boston, and are bused in under a 35-year-old voluntary integration program.

Newton North has a student theater, winning athletic teams and dozens of after-school clubs (ultimate Frisbee, mock trial, black leadership, Hispanic culture, Israeli dance). There is an emphasis on nonconformity — even if it is often conformity dressed up as nonconformity — and an absence of such high school conventions as, say, homecoming queens, valedictorians and class rankings.

‘Superhuman’ Resistance

Jennifer Price, the Newton North principal, said she and her faculty emphasized to students that they could win admission to many excellent colleges without organizing their entire lives around résumé building. By age 14, Ms. Price said, the school’s highest fliers are already worrying about marketing themselves to colleges: “You almost have to be superhuman to resist the pressure.”

If more students aren’t listening to the message that they can relax a bit, one reason may be that a lot of the people delivering the message went to the elite colleges. Ms. Price has an undergraduate degree from Princeton — she makes a point of saying that she got in because she was recruited to play varsity field hockey — and is a doctoral candidate at Harvard. Many of the teachers have degrees from the Ivy League and other elite schools.

But the message also tends to get drowned out when parents bump into each other at Whole Foods and share news about whose son or daughter just got accepted (or not) at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Penn or Stanford.

Or when the final edition of the award-winning student newspaper, the Newtonite, comes out every June, with its two-page spread listing all the seniors, and their colleges. For that entire week, Esther says, everyone pores over the names, obsessing about who is going where.

“In a lot of ways, it’s all about that one week,” she said.

There is something about the lives these girls lead — their jam-packed schedules, the amped-up multitasking, the focus on a narrow group of the nation’s most selective colleges — that speaks of a profound anxiety in the young people, but perhaps even more so in their parents, about the ability of the next generation to afford to raise their families in a place like Newton.

Admission to a brand-name college is viewed by many parents, and their children, as holding the best promise of professional success and economic well-being in an increasingly competitive world.

“It’s, like, a really big deal to go into a lucrative profession so that you can provide for your kids, and they can grow up in a place like the place where you grew up,” Kat said.

Esther, however, is aiming for a decidedly nonlucrative profession. Inspired by her father, Greg Mobley, who is a Biblical scholar, she wants to be a theologian.

She says she is interested in “Scripture, the Bible, the development of organized religion, thinking about all this, writing about all this, teaching about all this.” More than anything else, she wrote in an e-mail message, she wants to be a writer, “and religion is what I most like to write about.”

“I have such a strong sense of being supported by my faith,” she continued. “It gives me priorities. That’s why I’m not concerned about making money, because I know that there is so much more to living a rich life than having money.”

First Baptist Church counts on Esther. She organizes pancake suppers, tutors a young congregant and helps lead the youth group’s outreach to the poor.

On a springlike Sunday afternoon toward the end of winter, Esther could be found with her father, her two brothers and members of her youth group handing out food to homeless people on Boston Common. She had spent the morning in church.

About 2 p.m., a text message flashed across her cellphone from Gabe Gladstone, a co-captain of mock trial: “Where are you?” Esther, a key member of the group, was needed at a meeting.

Esther messaged back: “I’m feeding the homeless, I’ll come when God’s work is done.”

Fending Off ‘Anorexia of the Soul’

On a Saturday afternoon in late November, Esther and her mother, Page Kelley, sat at the dining room table talking about the contradictions and complexities of life in Newton. Esther’s father was with his sons, Gregory, 15, who plays varsity basketball for Newton North, and Tommy, 10, coaching Tommy’s basketball team.

Ms. Kelley, 47, an assistant federal public defender, and Mr. Mobley, 49, a professor at Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, grew up in Kentucky and came north for college. Ms. Kelley is a graduate of Smith College and Harvard Law School. Mr. Mobley has two graduate degrees from Harvard.

Amid all the competitiveness and consumerism, and the obsession with achievement in Newton, Ms. Kelley said, “You just hope your child doesn’t have anorexia of the soul.”

“It’s the idea that you end up with this strange drive,” she continued. “One of the great things about Esther is that she does have some kind of spiritual life. You just hope your kid has good priorities. We keep saying to her: ‘The name of the college you go to doesn’t matter. There are a lot of good colleges out there.’ ”

Esther said her mother is her role model. “I think the work she does is very noble,” she said.

“She has these impressive degrees,” Esther said, “and she chooses to do something where she’s not making as much money as she could.”

As close as mother and daughter are, there is one important generational divide. “My mother applied to one college,” Esther said. “She got in, she went.”

Back from basketball practice with his sons, Mr. Mobley joined the conversation. To Mr. Mobley, a formalized, competitive culture pervades everything from youth sports to getting into college. He pointed out to his wife that the lives of their three children were far more directed “than any of the aimless hours I spent in my youth daydreaming and meandering.”

Ms. Kelley asked, “Is that because of us?”

“Yes — and no,” he said. “It’s because of 2006 in America, and the Northeast.”

The bar for achievement keeps being raised for each generation, he said: “Our children start where we finished.”

As the afternoon turned into early evening, Esther went out to meet her best friend, Aliza Edelstein. The family dog, a Jack Russell terrier named Bandit, was underfoot, trolling for affection.

“I’m not worried about Esther because I know her,” Mr. Mobley said. “Esther’s character is sealed in some fundamental way.”

Ms. Kelley, however, wondered aloud: “Don’t you worry that she never rebelled? When I was growing up, you were supposed to rebel.”

But she acknowledged that she had sent her own mixed signals. “As I’m sitting here saying I don’t care what kind of grades she gets, I’m thinking, she comes home with a B, and I say: ‘What’d you get a B for? Who gave you a B? I’m going to talk to them.’

“You do want your child to do well.”

Mr. Mobley nodded. “We’re not above it,” he said. “It’s complicated.”

On a Fierce Mission to Shine

To sit in on classes with Esther in her vibrant high school where, between classes, the central corridor, called Main Street, is a bustling social hub, is to see why these students are genuinely excited about school.

Their teachers are pushing them to wrestle with big questions: What is truth? What does Virgil’s “Aeneid” tell us about destiny and individual happiness? How does DNA work? How is the global economy reshaping the world (subtext: you have to be fluid and highly educated to survive in the new economy)?

Esther’s ethics teacher, Joel Greifinger, spent considerable time this winter on moral theories. An examination of John Rawls’s theory of justice led to extensive discussions about American society and class inequality. Among the reading material Mr. Greifinger presented was research showing the correlation between income and SAT scores.

The class strengthened Esther’s earlier decision not to take private SAT prep.

In her honors philosophy/literature class, Esther has been reading Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, “Sophie’s Choice” and Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Amid a discussion of the strangely unsettling emptiness Frankl encountered upon his release from a Nazi concentration camp, Esther quoted Sartre: “You are condemned to freedom.”

Her honors teacher, Mike Fieleke, nodded. “That’s the existential idea. If we don’t awaken to that freedom, then we are slaves to our fate.”

A few weeks earlier, Esther, taking stock of her own life, wrote in an e-mail message: “I feel like I’m on the verge. I feel like I’m just about to get out of high school, to enter into adulthood, to reach some kind of state of independence and peacefulness and enlightenment.”

More immediately, she wrote, Mr. Fieleke had told her “he thought, from reading my papers and hearing me speak in class, that I was just on the verge of some really great idea.”

“I asked him if he thought that idea would come by next Wednesday, when our big Hamlet paper was due. He said I might feel this way all year long.”

The most intensely pressurized academic force field at school is the one surrounding the students on the Advanced Placement and honors track. About 145 of the 500 seniors are taking a combined total of three, four and five Advanced Placement and honors classes, with a few students even juggling six and seven.

Esther’s friend Colby takes four Advanced Placement and one honors class. “I’m living up to my own expectations,” Colby said. “It’s what I want to do. I want to do well for myself.”

Another of Esther’s friends, from student theater, Lee Gerstenhaber, 17, was juggling four Advanced Placement classes with intense late-night rehearsals for her starring role as Maggie, the seductive Southern belle in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” It was too much. About 4 a.m one day last fall, she was still fighting her way through Advanced Placement physics homework. She dissolved in tears.

“I had always been able to do it before,” Lee recalled later. “But I finally said to myself, ‘O.K., I’m not Superwoman.’ ”

She dropped physics — and was incandescent as Maggie.

Esther’s schedule includes two Advanced Placement and one honors class. Among certain of her classmates who are mindful that many elite colleges advise prospective applicants to pursue the most rigorous possible course of study, taking two Advanced Placement classes is viewed as “only two A.P.’s.” But Esther says she is simply taking the subjects she is most interested in.

She also shrugged off advice that it would look better on her résumé to take another science class instead of her passion, A.P. Latin. Like so many of her classmates, Esther started taking Latin in the seventh grade, when everyone was saying Latin would help them with the SAT. But now, except for Esther and a handful of other diehards who are devoted to Latin — and to their teacher, Robert Mitchell — everyone else has moved on.

“I like languages,” said Esther, who also takes Advanced Placement Spanish. “And I really like Latin.”

Who Needs a Boyfriend?

This year Esther has been trying life without a boyfriend. It was her mother’s idea. “She’d say, ‘I think it’s time for you to take a break and discover who you are,’ ” Esther said over lunch with Colby. “She was right. I feel better.”

Esther turned to Colby: she seems to pretty much always have a boyfriend.

“I never felt like having a boyfriend was a burden,” Colby said. “I enjoy just being comfortable with someone, being able to spend time together. I don’t think that means I wouldn’t feel comfortable or confident without one.”

Esther said: “I’m not trying to say that’s a bad thing. I’m like you. I never thought, ‘If I don’t have a boyfriend I’ll feel totally forlorn and lost.’ ”

But who needs a boyfriend? “My girlfriends have consistently been more important than my boyfriends,” Esther wrote in an e-mail message. “I mean, girlfriends last longer.”

Boyfriends or not, a deeper question for Esther and Colby is how they negotiate their identities as young women. They have grown up watching their mothers, and their friends’ mothers, juggle family and career. They take it for granted that they will be able to carve out similar paths, even if it doesn’t look easy from their vantage point.

They say they want to be both feminine and assertive, like their mothers. But Colby made the point at lunch that she would rather be considered too assertive and less conventionally feminine than “be totally passive and a bystander in my life.”

Esther agreed. She said she admired Cristina, the spunky resident on “Grey’s Anatomy,” one of her favorite TV shows.

“She really stands up for herself and knows who she is, which I aspire to,” Esther said.

Cristina is also “gorgeous,” Esther laughed. “And when she’s taking off her scrubs, she’s always wearing cute lingerie.”

Speaking of lingerie, part of being feminine is feeling good about how you look. Esther is not trying to be one of Newton North’s trendsetters, the girls who show up every day in Ugg boots, designer jeans — or equally cool jeans from the vintage store — and tight-fitting tank tops under the latest North Face jacket.

She never looks “scrubby,” to use the slang for being a slob, but sometimes comes to school in sweats and moccasins.

“I think sometimes I might be trying a little too hard not to conform,” Esther says.

She says she is one of the few girls in her circle who doesn’t have a credit card. But she is hardly immune to the pressure to be a good consumer.

During the discussion around the dining room table, Esther’s mother expressed her astonishment over her daughter’s expertise in designer jeans. They had been people-watching at the mall. Esther, as it turned out, knew the brand of every pair of jeans that went by.

So what were the coolest jeans at Newton North?

“The coolest jeans are True Religions,” Esther said.

“They look,” she said, and here she smiled sheepishly as she stood up to reveal her denim-clad legs, “like these.”

Aliza and several of Esther’s other friends chipped in to buy them for her 17th birthday, in November.

Encouraged to Ease Up a Little

The amazing boys say they admire girls like Esther and Colby.

“I hate it when girls dumb themselves down,” Gabe Gladstone, the co-captain of mock trial, was saying one morning to the other captain, Cameron Ferrey.

Cameron said he felt the same way.

One of Esther’s close friends is Dan Catomeris, a school theater star. “One of the most attractive things about Esther is how smart she is,” said Dan, whose mother is a professor at Harvard Business School. “There’s always been this intellectual tension between us. I see why she likes Kierkegaard — he’s existential, but still Christian. She really likes Descartes. I was not so into Descartes. I really like Hume, Nietzsche, the existentialist authors. The musician we’re most collectively into is Bob Dylan.”

Sometimes, though, everybody wants some of these hard-charging girls to chill out. Tom DePeter, an Advanced Placement English teacher, wants his students to loosen up so they can write original sentences. The theater director, Adam Brown, wants the girls to “let go” in auditions.

Peter Martin, the girls’ cross-country coach, says girls try so hard to please everyone — coaches, teachers, parents — that he bends over backward not to criticize them. “I tell them, ‘Just go out and run.’ ” His team wins consistently.

But how do you chill out and still get into a highly selective college?

One of Esther’s favorite rituals is to hang out at her house with Aliza, eating Ben and Jerry’s and watching a DVD of a favorite program like “The Office.” Their friendship helped Esther and Aliza keep going last fall, when there was hardly time to hang out. Esther recalled in an e-mail message how one night she had telephoned Aliza, who is also a top student, and a cross-country team captain, to say she was feeling overwhelmed.

“I said, ‘Aliza, this is crazy, I have so much homework to do, and I won’t be able to relax until I do it all. I haven’t gone out in weeks!’ And Aliza (who had also been staying in on Fridays and Saturdays to do homework) pointed out: ‘I’d rather get into college.’ ”

By Dec. 15, Newton North was in a frenzy over early admissions answers. Esther’s friend Phoebe Gardener had been accepted to Dartmouth. Her friend Dan Lurie was in at Brown. Harvard wanted Dan Catomeris.

Esther was in calculus class, the last period of the day when her cellphone rang. It was her father. The letter from Williams College — her ideal of the small, liberal arts school — had arrived.

Her father would be at her brother’s basketball game when she got home. Her mother would still be at the office. Esther did not want to be alone when she opened the letter.

“Dad, can you bring it to school?” she asked.

Ten minutes later, when her father arrived, Esther realized that he had somehow not registered the devastating thinness of the envelope. The admissions office was sorry. Williams had had a record number of highly qualified applicants for early admission this year. Esther had been rejected. Not deferred. Rejected.

Her father hugged her as she cried outside her classroom, and then he drove her home.

Esther said several days later: “Maybe it hurt me that I wasn’t an athlete.”

But she was already moving on. “I chose Williams,” she said, with a shrug. “They didn’t choose me back.”

About that thin envelope: Mr. Mobley, unschooled in such intricacies, said he hadn’t paid much attention to it. He had wanted so much for his daughter to get into Williams, he said, and believed so strongly in her, that it was as if he had wished the letter into being an acceptance.

“It was a setback,” Mr. Mobley said weeks later. “But it’s not a failure.”

And Then One Day, a Letter Arrives

Has this all been a temporary insanity?

Esther’s friend Colby learned in February that she had been accepted at the University of Southern California. Soon, more letters of acceptance rolled in: from the University of Miami, the University of Texas at Austin, Tulane. With the college-application pressure behind her, she can go back to being the pragmatic romantic who opened her journal last August and wrote her “life list,” with 35 goals and dreams, in pink ink.

She wants: To write a novel. Own a (red) Jeep Wrangler. Get into college. Name her firstborn daughter Carmen. Go to carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Learn to surf. Live in a Spanish-speaking country. Learn to play the doppio movimiento of Chopin’s Sonata in B Flat. Own a dog. Be a bridesmaid. Vote for president. Write a really good poem. Never get divorced.

In mid-January Esther was thrilled to receive an acceptance letter from Centre College, one of her fallback schools, in Kentucky. But she was still dreaming about her remaining top choices: Amherst, Middlebury, Davidson and Smith, her mother’s alma mater.

Esther’s application to Smith included a letter from her father. He wrote about how, when Esther was a baby, they had gone to his wife’s 10th college reunion. He described the alumni parade as an “angelic procession of women in white, decade by decade, at every stage in the course of human life.”

He wrote about seeing the young women, the middle-aged graduates and, finally, “the elderly women, some with the assistance of canes and wheelchairs, but with no diminution of the confidence that a great education brings.”

“I still remember holding Esther as we watched those saints go marching into the central campus for the commencement ceremony,” he wrote.

“Lord,” he concluded, and he could have been talking about any of the schools his daughter still has her heart set on, “I want Esther to be in that number.”

Epilogue: Esther learned last week that she had gotten into Smith. She learned on Saturday that she had been rejected by Amherst and Middlebury. She is still hoping for Davidson.

Full Text Searchability

anyone who thinks organizing information by keyword [ie, searchability] is counterintuitive has obviously never been in my brain.

because you only really know how important full-text search is when you've had to dig (swim?) through hundreds of pages of reading in the last week, all seemingly having lots to do with each other (amazing intertextuality -- hello, this is graduate school!), and you're trying to remember in what article it might have been that you might have seen (or were you dreaming?) a certain sentence -- or was it a phrase? or a clause? what's the difference, anyway? -- which might have been on the left hand side of the page, perhaps in the middle, and which might have been about the simple-mindedness of the peasantry.

god damn the complexity and frustration of the partially-impaired, very overwhelmed visual memory.

this is why, when google finally announced and implemented a search box for google reader <http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/find-needle-in-feedstack-with-google.html>, i was thrilled. anything -- anything! -- to make me feel less muddled right about now, seriously.

***

update, 4:07 pm:

omg it's absolutely amazing. you can search all posts, or search certain folders, or search just certain blogs. thank you, gods!

Preparing To Leave

is far more intense than leaving itself (which latter involves walking out the door, hugging rosy, letting the liftman handle your luggage, turning the music in the car way up, and not looking back).

this time around it has brought dinners, lunches, endless cab and bus rides, gmail chat and facebook and email ad infinitum, coffees, last-minute errands like new glasses and backing up data, switching phone lines in advance so that you're wired when you get there, constant to-do-listing, inevitable phone tag with people you want to talk to, a cough and cold of the deflating/debilitating sort you haven't had in years, not much reading, not much family time, not much rest. the constant checking of your ticket to make sure you're flying when you think you are. also: distancing yourself from the right people, and the unsettling feeling that whatever you're doing right now you're doing for the last time in a while.

in the more immediate sense, it means realizing you have way too much jewellery (and how the heck did you fit it all in when you came back last september?) because it takes 25 minutes to pack it all, and hunting frantically for the chess set you got for your birthday last year that sat on a shelf for months, boxed and waiting to be lovingly stared at again one day in good company, and now suddenly cannot be found.

i'll only sleep well on the plane now.

*ah-chhhhooo!!*

PersonalDNA

first there was visual dna (see mine here <http://simran.nomadlife.org/2007/03/visual-dna.aspx>).

now there's personaldna:

About You: You are a Visionary

• Your imagination, self-assuredness, and knowledge of the world combine to make you a VISIONARY.
• You have clear notions of how things could be, and the confidence to try to make them that way.
• You enjoy having a routine, and prefer comfort and familiarity to risk and adventure.
• Not needing others' approval to forge ahead, you are confident in your designs for the future.
• Your imagination allows you to envision the world as a better place.
• You're better at thinking of the big picture than you are with details, and you can see wonder in abstract things.
• Style and appearances are important to you, and you have a good eye for beauty.
• You are somewhat rigid in your beliefs, which comes from both confidence and an aversion to change.
• You are good at creating works of art in forms with which you're familiar.
• Your independent streak allows you to make decisions efficiently and to trust your instincts
• You much prefer to have time to plan for things, feeling better with a schedule than with keeping plans up in the air until the last minute. Your decisions are well thought out, and you're not the least bit impulsive.
• Generally, you believe that you control your life, and that external forces only play a limited role in determining what happens to you.
  

If you want to be different:

• Appreciate the earthly, functional elements of things.
• Your clarity of vision sometimes prevents you from being open to new ideas. Try expanding your horizon of experiences, and experimenting with novel ways of doing things.

How You Relate To Others: You are Free-Wheeling

• Your charismatic nature, liveliness, and independence make you FREE-WHEELING.
• You don't mind being in the spotlight, preferring social gatherings to quiet nights at home.
• You take a practical approach to people, not getting too involved in their feelings—or their business.
• At the same time, your acceptance of others leads you to be understanding of their life circumstances, even if you don't quite understand their emotional reactions to some things.
• Although you have a wide circle of friends, you're very discerning as to whom you can trust.
• You're not rigid in your beliefs about the world, and you don't want to impose your perspective on others, but at the same time, you know that plenty of people don't always act responsibly.
• Engaging with others is a large part of how you live in the world, and most importantly, it plays a role in how you see yourself—you tend to learn a lot about yourself in situations where you are with other people.
• You have an understanding of the complexities of situations, and you don't judge others too hastily.

If you want to be different:

• Your open-mindedness about the world gives you a great perspective on things, but your lack of trust in others limits how close you can get with them. Try opening up to people a bit more without losing your healthy skepticism.
• While being the life of the party will occasionally come naturally to you, be sure to reserve time for yourself—see what you can learn by spending some time observing the world rather than just by diving in.

... Who's Roger?!

"welcome back to the game."

also, and more importantly: the cave, who's on first, integrals, arcade fire/bjork/crowded house, tiny bubbles, c&o, the ugliest sofa in the world, popped collars, hello mr. presumptuous, martin luther, photo booth...

someone owes me some quiche, too.

(if this reads like gibberish, it's because the whole damn thing doesn't make any sense. and yet... so good!)

Acronym Of The Summer

posslq -- persons [of] opposite sex sharing living quarters

my posslq (pronounced poss-el-queue) is cute, sweet, intelligent, funny, a good listener, a total nerd/geek, and a snazzy dresser... and an ice cream fan just like me.

remind me again: why am i leaving virginia in a week?

Withdrawal

i will unashamedly admit to a recently-developed grey's anatomy addiction; for days on end, i'd get home from work, race through dinner, and sit down in front of the idiot box with a spoon, a tub of ben and jerry's, and a goofy grin on my face. laugh, all you disbelievers, laugh away. you're missing out on the good stuff. short story is that i was intimately involved with the cast of grey's... not only because they're fun, but also because they're more screwed up than your average fictional television characters, and that's a good thing, even if their scenarios and behaviour are beyond believable. [ain't nothing wrong with my occasional incredulous outbursts at said fictional characters, either, and don't you tell me there is!]

serious complications have arisen in the last few hours, however: i just spent this afternoon watching the ridiculously awesome season 2 finale (that apparently 22 million people watched when it first aired... where on earth was i?! being a tv snob, i bet!)

so what the hell am i going to do with my time and mental energy now?! season 3 is only out on dvd in early september! that's months away! i think i need to pay a visit to akhila's dvd guy when i get back to bombay, and see if something can't be done about advance viewings before season 4 goes on the air....

psst: on the eternal question of mcsteamy or mcdreamy, i say mcvet, all the way! chris o'donnell may not be matt damon, but finn is definitely cute, and smart, and sensitive, and committed, and a far better deal than smug, arrogant, irresistible but dangerous derek (patrick dempsey), with the beguilingly kind blue eyes and the somehow-hot russell crowe hairstyle and the inability to decide once and for all between his lovely redhead wife and the needy blonde intern waif who shares his dog. (what does this say about my choice in men in real life, i wonder? but then, who needs men when you have grey's?)

I Am A Shopping Fiend

in the last week -- because i have been on vacation -- i've sauntered in and out of dozens of stores of all kinds. these include h&m, the gap, lush, linens 'n' things, borders, payless shoe source, target, conway, marshalls, wal-mart, cvs, the yankee candle company, shoe mania, fortunoff, cliquer's herald square, dsw, best buy, old navy, the sony style store, macy's, urban outfitters, the apple store, strand, ann taylor loft, and random furniture stores (plus makeshift stalls on manhattan street corners). i actually bought stuff at many of these places; other visits were for pure diversion.

(needless to say, my credit card bills are... interesting. i feel insane. i've never shopped this much in my life!! hello, after-effects of blatant capitalism and shrewd marketing.)

to make matters worse, i am online at 3 am clicking through websites and daydreaming about accessorizing: <http://www.ikea.com>, <http://www.pier1.com>, <http://www.overstock.com>, <http://www.homegoods.com>, <http://www.bedbathandbeyond.com>, <http://www.target.com>, <http://www.fabindia.com>... oh god.

(ps, perhaps this selection of stores websites does not quite match your own tastes, and you think i must be a crappy dresser and decorator because of my choices. but i'll have you know i have a martha inside me, too; i am just a shopper on a budget with a pretty little apartment to decorate, and a unique dress sense. and since i am given to want many things at one time, i do better when i save while spending. so perhaps i am not a fiend who is given to ridiculous splurges, but i am a fiend nonetheless!)

A Cloud On The New York Skyline

well, actually, today there aren't any (literal clouds, that is) -- and i can attest to that authoritatively because i am sitting sealed in on the 32nd floor, capable of seeing over the roofs of pretty much every building for the next 10 or so blocks uptown and the next 5 or so cross-town.

but my new york landscape is changing more quickly than ever before, and it ain't never going to be the same again. see, mel-lo left years ago. luis and jackie have slowly faded into the background. xan i last saw after she broke up with dan (ancient history now, i imagine). but gaurang, kunal, udayan, diksha and gautam have left over the last year. soon bani and nishad will leave. rhea will presumably make a new home in the next six months. michael and tarini are here for the summer, but how long will that last? and amit and amrita, too, are in transition.

sure, caitlin might be here... but she's a part of my boston past now, i guess. tina and sushil are probably still here, but i haven't spoken to them in a long while. (sway will stay, as might devang -- but i hardly ever see them anyway!) and i still can't call jack.

but anoushka will move here in the fall. and lindsey, bethie and aditi will stay -- and i suspect they, along with daniel and the faithful LIRR and the suburbs (like stamford and paramus), will be fragmented consolation on increasingly-intermittent visits.

i will still love new york, but abhi, under the street but above the subway on 49th street, was right: life here is too damn fast.

Mars And Venus

i will confess to having stumbled upon this very cool series of photographs almost a month ago, but for some reason i didn't blog about it immediately, and it got lost in the depths of blogger's "edit posts" page (and my ridiculous social life).

however, in light of some recent profound conversations about marriage, men, brains and biology (names of participants redacted for the benefit of everyone's mental health), it now holds extra dimension as the most appropriate metaphor for... well, everything:

<http://saraheartbacon.com/pages_html/hands_page.html>

heartbreak lies in overthinking, but life is in the details. this is an inalienable truth.

(i've never seen anything quite like her work before. the fact that she is a seven sisters alum further warms the cockles of my heart.)

Pretty Pretty!

(twice, because it has two dials!)

i am now the owner of this beautiful object:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/522739219>

Behold The Great Indian Male Double Standard

(GIMDS for short. i would try for a more attractive short form, an acronym, even, but this is the best way to put it.)

warning: contains spoilers. do not read this post if you want to watch the movie it's about.

anurag basu's life in a... metro (which btw should win an award for the most poorly-named film of the year) is another indian director's attempt at a love actually-esque ensemble romance. this time, though, it's set in bombay rather than london or new york, and is supposed to be dark rather than k-jo-variety-cheesy. (oooh.)

ok, so you have to give the man credit for the requisite couple of genius moments -- the phone chain that erupts from rahul's trying to organize evenings at his (literally) pimpin' pad, the overhead of neha's slow but clearly disgusted retraction of her foot while ranjit is on the phone with his wife getting out of attending his own anniversary party, monty telling shruti ("shoottee") to let it all out on the roof, then her realization that she should "take the car out of the garage"...

most of the rest was, well, shallow and/or unreal. traffic jams galore i can understand. but not so much the obvious brokeback mountain reference to hidden homosexuality. a high-speed horse-taxi-auto chase ("rahooooooooooooooooooool!"). a large number of songs featuring middle-aged rockers standing on street corners/at elevations with guitars as pedestrians pass by, un-curious. tearful mulakaats at crowded train stations. motorbike rides around powai (that's not the real city, kthxbye.) dharmendra coyly biting his lip. cheesy dialogue about "pyaar ki khushboo" and glass-elevation-aided "mere baap ne yeh ghar banane ka sapna dekha tha lekin uska dum ghut gaya". slutbag red lights at some guy niruddh's house.

and why is everyone so close-knit? the sister-in-law lives with phenyl-glugging girlfriend who's having the affair with the dude who's married to the sister. dude who's in love with girlfriend who's having an affair with other dude happens to work for said other dude, and as a drum-it-in consequence misplaced cell phones cannot possibly be returned discreetly. uhhm, yeah, bombay is a village, but these were pretty blatantly elaborately-arranged coincidences.

what i really couldn't stand, though (and here we get to the point of this post, parenthetical basu-bashing done) was the feeble state of post-millennial women's lib. when flowy-skirt-wearing shikha brandishes the emasculatory facts at her husband in no uncertain terms -- that she gave up her career for her marriage, and that if she were to start working again, she would make more money than he currently did, and that he dare not ever talk to her like that again -- i thought: "yowzah. go, you." when she starts seeing this aakash guy, i raised an eyebrow at her waffling and hesitation. after all, as he says, she is a person -- and a person with an exquisite dress sense and perfectly-coiffed hair, plus no pit stains despite frequent train travel (also, no apparent childcare duties) plus a cheating, lying husband, to boot! she deserves happiness, too! of course she should... but no, there's the whole bharatiya nari guilt-trip "i have a family, main unke naam ka sindoor pehenti hoon" complex to deal with, so rather than collect her purse on her way out, she jumps out the window and hops in a cab to versova, skimpy sari blouse and all, never to see him again.

then comes the beyond-tragic climax: ranjit's paranoia about being tattled on by shruti (and a well-timed whine about "mummy kabse ro rahi hai" from their apparently-entirely-dispensable child) leads him to confess to shikha that he has been having an affair with neha for the last two years. he says it was a mistake, that it's in the past. he asks her if she will forgive him. she walks to the kitchen, her back to him. no response. then she tells him that shruti hadn't said anything. (i almost expected the asshole to say, "well, in that case, i was kidding! i didn't really have an affair with a girl with a lopsided smile and a giant pock mark on her face! hahahaha!" but that would have been too fantastic, even for a far-fetched hindi movie.)

then she confesses, for her part, in tears already, that she wasn't at the movies with shruti the other day. that she has been seeing this guy for 4-5 weeks now. that nothing happened. she collapses into his arms.

he says, "it's ok."

(i was surprised.)

and then, a 180: "tum uske saath soyi ho?"
"did he use my bedroom?"
"bacchi to meri hai?"
dishes are smashed to the floor. (ahh, there's the asshole that we knew lay underneath this calm front!)

more tears. guess which of the two is supposed to feel guilty for having committed adultery.

(she did, after all, say that she feels like a slut...)

[is this art imitating life, or life imitating art?]

next thing we know, ranjit has moved out and is ready to take up with neha. shikha keeps the apartment and the child. aakash writes to her to tell her that he is leaving the country and wants her to go with him (he therefore wants her to meet him at their usual spot at the railway station). shikha tells her ever-obedient daughter to do her homework, and is just headed out the door, purse in hand (ostensibly to make a happier life for herself, offspring be damned, the catholic maid's there, na?), when... there stands ranjit, who has been ditched at the last minute by his young assistant/nymphet, and has decided to crawl back home injured and pathetic.

too-young-to-get-that-her-father-is-pond-scum daughter shrieks, "papa!" or "day-deee!" or some such.

at that moment, it was game over. i already knew the contents of shikha's tearful "farewell forever, i have a dead marriage to continue" speech to aakash.

be it known to all the men in my future love life: i may be from bombay, but if you cheat on me, i am not so going to do a shilpa shetty.

The Blasted Housing Hunt

i'm currently in the throes of looking for 2BR places that have hardwood floors, decent kitchens, get a lot of light, and aren't grubby or très cher. it's hard enough to do it long distance, but it's also even more "hard enough" with just 1 other person's tastes and budget to keep in mind; i don't know how people can share space with 7 or 8 others!

i read this article in the NYT a few months ago, and it's stuck with me ever since. something to aspire to, or something to avoid like the plague?

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/realestate/10habi.html>

July 10, 2005

5 New Roommates Play 'Getting to Know You'

By PENELOPE GREEN

THE previous sublet tenants in this five-bedroom loft in Hell's Kitchen were a French recluse and a cameraman from MTV's "The Real World." It is this last fact that has the current five residents, Daniel Santangelo, 23, Sara Vigneault, 24, Luke Masselink, 27, Keren Davies, 33, and David Allyn, 36, convinced that there are cameras hidden everywhere, and that they are the unwitting subjects of a new quasi-reality series: perhaps "The Real World" meets "The Truman Show."

In any case, this experiment in communal living - defined by five complete strangers, united by Craigslist - is more than six months into its run and working quite nicely, thank you. Why this should be so is either due to serendipity or the group's decision to hire a weekly maid together or possibly because Ms. Vigneault, an education coordinator at Southern Wine & Spirits of New York, a distribution and brand management company, comes home with lots of free booze.

One recent stormy evening after work, Mr. Santangelo had designed something icy and aromatic made from Ms. Vigneault's Absolut Apeach and Absolut Vanilia vodka, fresh ginger, lime juice, coriander and brown sugar. The roommates drank his "bespoke cocktail," as he put it, or Diet Cokes, or ice water, according to preference, and teased out the details of their half-year union.

First, the setting: a 1,200-square-f00t loft near the Lincoln Tunnel. Its five bedrooms rent for $1,050 to $1,285 apiece, depending on size and number of windows. There is a large living area-cum-entrance-cum-kitchen, one bathroom and, finally, direct roof access by a vertiginous fire escape.

Put together, the rents total just under $6,000. And although each pays a reasonable rent, they were all driven by a social, not a budgetary, impulse to live communally.

Ms. Vigneault, Mr. Santangelo and Mr. Masselink arrived first, last October, after answering an ad on Craigslist posted by the actual tenant, who was living elsewhere.

Mr. Masselink, an actuary originally from Michigan, said he was looking for a broader social circle. Ms. Vigneault was moving from Connecticut to New York and wanted to make sure she made new friends. "I just thought it was a great opportunity to be able to meet people," she said.

Mr. Santangelo, who is from outside Toronto, had been offered a job with a bond dealer on a Monday, flown down on a Thursday and lived out of the Newark Hilton through that Saturday while studying for a securities exam. He found this apartment on the Sunday, the third one he'd looked at.

"The first was a suburban condo-type deal in Jersey City, and the other was a five-person share with four women in Williamsburg," Mr. Santangelo said. "After I saw that, I went to an Internet cafe in Union Square, saw this advertised on Craigslist and moved in. I had no worries. I thought it was cool to find a place in one day."

Mr. Masselink and Ms. Vigneault, by contrast, were queasy with nervousness.

Ms. Vigneault remembered, "I called my mom and said, 'I'm about to sign a lease and I'm moving in with three men' " - the cameraman was still there - " 'is there anything I should be worried about?' And she said, 'Better that than four women.' "

Ms. Davies, a development adviser for the Australian Mission to the United Nations (she is from Sydney), replaced the cameraman, who left for a job in Florida, in mid-December. "It was freezing," she said, "and I was as sick as a dog. Only Sara was here when I looked. I would never have moved in with three strangers if I hadn't felt so badly." She had seen nearly 10 apartments, she said, and just wanted put her head down.

Mr. Allyn, assistant director of communications and special projects at an educational nonprofit called New Jersey Seeds, arrived on Feb. 1. He'd been married (his daughter, Jordan, will be 7 next month), and then he lived alone in a rent-regulated apartment in Hoboken, N.J.

"It took me six years of living alone," he said, "to realize I really didn't like living alone." He was compelled by "the risk of moving in with people I didn't know," he said, "which somehow seemed less risky than moving in with just one other person."

Mr. Allyn said he was happy to move without meeting all his new roommates, but his work mates urged otherwise. "I figured that anyone moving into a coed loft in Hell's Kitchen would be cool with having a gay loftmate," he said, "but my colleagues at work insisted that I survey the group's comfort level ahead of time. To a person, Luke, Dan, Sara and Keren thought it was funny that I would be concerned. They do have plenty of opinions on the guys I bring home, however. Basically, anyone who wants to date me has to pass inspection by the crew."

Mr. Allyn, a bit older, seasoned in a career as an author and lecturer, seems like ballast to his new friends, who nonetheless tease him with obvious affection.

"When David came, he went all 'Queer Eye,' " Mr. Masselink said. "It was bare. It was a college apartment. I came home one day, and it was like night and day."

Quite literally, said Mr. Allyn, who swears there were no bulbs in the living room's spotlights when he arrived.

Mr. Masselink's room is decorated with a leather club chair and a mountain bike; Ms. Davies has colored paper lanterns and many pairs of shoes. Mr. Allyn's is gentlemanly and sophisticated; Ms. Vigneault is justifiably proud of her rather distinct curtain designs (squares of men's shirt fabric hung from metal pegs).

Mr. Santangelo's room is a symphony of minimalism, courtesy of Ikea: a sleek gray futon, galvanized cubes for storage and night tables, and three blond floating wood shelves, which are utterly empty. Mr. Santangelo hasn't decided what to put on them yet, he said. "Maybe they'll just be shelves qua shelves," he mused.

There are no house rules, and many open doors. Food in the fridge is communal, except when it's not. (The Chinese Food Incident looms large: Ms. Vigneault told a tale of missing spicy chicken with garlic sauce; Mr. Allyn buried his face in his hands.)

"It's better than I expected," Mr. Masselink said. "I think we are all very laid back, but also very unique, which is why it works."

Ms. Davies, cheerfully Australian, pointed out that she is, by culture, "very down to earth." In New York, she continued, "there are a lot of people who take themselves very seriously." She is delighted to be living with four who don't. "It's good that we are all at slightly different stages," Mr. Allyn said. "It's good to remember what life is like at 23 or what life is like at 27."

Living with others, his example suggests, keeps you limber.

(this is also the second, parenthetical article i mentioned wanting to find in my last post: <http://simran.nomadlife.org/2007/05/my-love-affair-with-internets.aspx>)

Medical/Tourism

i am headed out of town again tomorrow -- the 5th time i've packed and left bombay in 2007. i'm super excited, especially about dharamshala and the solitude.

after my last ridiculous 6-cities-in-15-days tour, though, my back isn't in the best of shape (sciatica, schmiatica), so i went to get x-rayed this evening, and will have pictures of my lumbar-sacral region in my possession in a few hours so i can figure out whether i'm ok to travel or not. that is indeed cutting it close, but i don't seem to have enough time for anything these days.

more impressively, though: where else in my known world could i have gotten 3 x-rays for the princely sum of ~$15 (which included an ugly purple kaftan to wear during, and a sweet maharashtrian girl to gently adjust me on the x-ray table)? nowhere. compare this to having to pay over $100 to see a doctor in manhattan for all of 11 minutes.

no wonder the government asks on landing cards whether you are coming in on a medical visa. this is incredible india's least-yammered-about big draw. who wants the beaches of goa and the dunes of rajasthan and the rhinos of kaziranga when you can have the smell of antiseptic for this cheap!? :P

(yes, i'm being facetious. i'll take the stupas of mcleodganj for the weekend, please.)

Beware The Ides Of March

(and the vernal equinox, while we're at it)

due warning to the wellesley college alumnae association and wee eff ess:

do not piss me off. it does not bode well for you. you will receive the death stare, and quite possibly a long e-mail to boot.

one such e-mail is in the works. another might be, if i can muster up the time to figure out how to reach the CEO of cafe coffee day.

i'm stylin'.

What Is It To You?

what would you do with rs. 830 (approximately $18.54)?

leave your response(s) in the comments section.

My, Do People Talk!

i don't even know how it got out there.

(that i'm engaged, that is.)

the "mashi net" works in mysterious ways.

I Have A Job

and it involved
-- no grovelling of any kind
-- a complete lack of obsession over cover letter wording and length
-- a short commute to the interview (although a bit of a wait before i was seen)
-- no ridiculous interview questions about where i see myself in five years
-- no sinking feelings about H-1 visas and associated travails
-- an immediate offer!

i don't even have a complete job description yet, but i must say that i already feel quite justified doing a little happy dance about it :)