Things I would rather see on the live AmhCam

This is a video of the main quad of campus, where you can stalk anyone walking between the Chapel and my building, it looks like. Entertaining, but I'd rather see a live streaming video of:

• Parking spots still available around the quad.
• Students lurking outside my office.
• A scanning view of the lunch specials at the faculty dining hall and the salad bar situation.
• The inside of the classroom I'm about to enter, with the number of students who've shown up and their relative energy level (eye-level close-ups would do).
• The outside of my building and anyone who's standing there smoking.
• The workout room at the gym, including whether there's a line for the treadmills and which students or colleagues I'm going to run into there.
• My mailbox and its contents, so I know if I should bother to check it.
• The circulation desk at the library, to see if that woman who thought I was a student is working today (so I could either avoid her or find a pipe and a tweed jacket so she doesn't make the same mistake again).
• And also: the inside of the Red Room, just prior to any faculty meeting I must attend there, with a reading of the temperature inside the room on the bottom left-hand corner (so I can bundle up) and a best guess estimate countdown clock of how much longer the meeting's going to go on (so I can properly numb my mind in advance) in the bottom right-hand corner.
  

SJBloguary

January at my small liberal arts institution means nothing on the schedule: it's Interterm, and the students are off either being productive or sitting around their parents' houses watching 6 weeks worth of "My Sweet 16" on MTV (I presume). So what does the professorate do?

I can only speak for myself, but I'm pitched somewhere between the kind of procrastination and calculated idle that seems familiar, and doing a bunch of random things that were never, ever going to get done during the semester. To date I have:

• Thought about writing a book.
• Cross-country skied.
• Learned how to set the timer and record off Spanish Television on my office DVR.
• Driven golf balls. Twice!
  
• Joined Skype and videoconferenced.
• Played cribbage.
  
• Sifted through a semester's worth of memos, bills and desk detritus.
• Seen a colleague wander through our building in a T-shirt, red Wisconsin sweatpants, socks and flip-flops.
• Begun (and hope to finish) reading Sophie's Choice, working on knitting a pillow and organizing the stuff in my stuff closet.
• Gotten my two syllabi, course readers, streaming video requests, room assignments and book orders done for next semester. And written most of a paper I'm giving in March.
• Gone to two yoga classes, one of which actually did not make me want to throttle the new-agey instructor with a hemp rope.
  
• Made, participated in the making of, or participated in the eating of (or all of the above) jambalaya, tortilla española, minestrone soup, paella and carnitas.

And the month's not over!

A list of what those CDs + $14.73* got me in trade at Amoeba

• Wilco, A ghost is born -and- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot -- Stolen in the Great Burglary of 2005 and finally replaced.
• Beck, The Information -- Purchase inspired by my nephew, 3, who likes to say "One by one I'll knock you out!" as heard on Track 3.
• Fountains of Wayne, Fountains of Wayne -- So I can listen to "Radiation Vibe."
• Wilco, Summerteeth -- Ripped it onto my iPod but couldn't resist a used copy for $5.99
• "The Graduate" -- So I can watch Dustin Hoffman drive the wrong way over the Bay Bridge over and over again. And spot Moe's on Telegraph.
• An Amoeba postcard.^**
  

^* Full disclosure: I also sold four unopened "Best of Friends" DVDs I won at my high school reunion in 2004 and a promotional copy of "Monk" episodes, for your Emmy consideration, given to me by someone who considers things for Emmys.
** These are actually free.

A list of CDs I'm getting rid of and why

• Garbage, Version 2.0 -- I have some sentimental attachment to the debut Garbage album, but not this one.
• Peter Gabriel, US -- Ehh.
• Eurythmics, Greatest Hits -- All the songs I "need" from this album I have on my iPod.
• Soundtrack to "Dazed and Confused" -- Hanging on to this CD purely because I loved the movie would be wrong. Do I even like Nazareth and Foghat? No, I do not.
• Peter Gabriel, Secret World Live -- Eh.
• The London Suede, Sci-Fi Lullabies -- I'm keeping the other Suede album I have, but my Suede phase has passed, to be honest.
• The Hives, Veni Vidi Vicious -- Everytime a Hives song comes around on my iPod, I skip it. 'Nuf said.
• Eric Clapton, Timepieces -- I can hear "Layla" on any classic rock station or in the middle of a Fountains of Wayne concert whenever I want. Which isn't all that often.
• Edda, Myths from Medieval Iceland -- You only really need to listen to this CD once. Listening to it again would not make any of it any clearer to me.
  
• Jewel, Pieces of You -- I should have ditched this CD a long time ago. I'm not a Jewel person anymore.
• Moby, 18 -- We all loved Play, but, like the Garbage CDs, one Moby CD is all I need to get by.
• Eric Clapton, Unplugged -- Overuse of windchimes.

And also: goats are cute

HOOD RIVER, Or. -- A few things I learned this weekend while on my favorite family farm in the Willamette Valley:

• Chickens don't seem to mind it when you remove eggs from their nest, unless you try to do it while they're still in their nest, in which case they cluck at you menacingly.
  
• Farm-fresh eggs look like Easter eggs -- blue, striped, speckled -- and taste a million times better than what you can buy at the grocery store.
• 5 am on a chilly morning in April near Odell, OR sounds like Hanoi, 1972: the farmers turn on giant, helicopter-grade fans to keep the fruit trees from frosting.
  
• On even colder nights, they light "smudge pots" -- large ceramic vessels scattered around the orchard -- which are gas-powered, somewhat contentious, and emit a black smoke across the Valley that would make Al Gore weep.
• Berries that are blue, according to a somewhat unreliable Portland source, "generally won't kill you," but watch out for red berries. Unless they're raspberries.
  
• Real farmers don't wear flip-flops.
  

It's early January...

...and I have one more week before classes start and before the phone might start ringing again, and before I get an inch closer to knowing where I'll be next year. So, instead of working and waiting, what am I doing?

• Instead of reading about the political upheaval in 18th and 19th century Spain, I am making a very involved Marinated Lamb Tajin from my new Regional African Cookbook.
• Instead of getting ahead on my reading for this semester's class, I am erasing all the pencil marks out of the copy of "La deshumanización del arte" (Ortega y Gasset) that I got out of the library.
• Instead of fine-tuning my job talk, I am listening to this kick-ass CD mix of the best rock/pop/etc. from 2006 I was given and feeling very cool, indeed.
• Instead of looking at the evaluations my students from last semester wrote about me, I am running into one of my students from last summer in the citrus fruit aisle at the Berkeley Bowl and exchanging very pleasant pleasantries.
• Instead of re-reading my dissertation, I am watching Spanish movies (see photo) and Spike Lee documentaries and Veronica Mars episodes.
• Instead of starting one of those new Spanish novels I keep telling myself I should crack open, I am reading New Yorkers and The Secret Life of Bees and Amy Sedaris' warped hostess book.
• Instead of reading the Bible (how many times have I told myself I should read the Bible?!?), I am hanging a framed copy of my grandmother's cherry pie recipe on my kitchen wall, and knitting a scarf, and hiking from my front door to Tilden Park with Addison, and throwing out old T-shirts that I love but are three sizes too big for me.

Things I Can Do in Madison...

... that I can't do in Berkeley:

• Laundry! Without leaving the house, and as often as I want!
• Watch cable, both the vapid (endless E! celebrity year-in-reviews) and the witty (The Daily Show!).
  
• Celebrate the recent success of my 2-year-old nephew in "putting a poopy in the potty!"
• Theoretically: play in the snow. Actually: hope it drops below 32 degrees for Xmas because I can suffer through holiday rain in California, thank you very much.
• Drive a 2003 Volkswagon Passat! (ahem, theoretically...Dad...)
• Trade in my laptop and uncalloused hands to tromp off through a farm and saw down a tree (long time watcher, first time sawer) to a chorus of "timber!" Gratifying? You betcha!
• And, of course, say things like "pop," "you betcha" and "ya, sure, hey" without fear of ridicule. Instead, I get ridiculed for using "fortuitous" wrong or mentioning that in California it sometimes hits 70s degrees in December. Can't win.
  

Wedding Battle Scars

• Two skinned and bruised knees, obtained after slipping on my wrap while polka-ing with Mom to the Beer Barrel Polka. However, after said fall, I quickly regained my composure and continued to have a barrel of fun. (What means this "Zing! Boom! Ta-ra-rel!" anyway?)
• A persistent layer of permafrost hairspray and maybe a bobby pin embedded in my brain (end of night bobby pin count: 20).
• A newfound case of blog self-consciousness after having met (and electric slided) with at least half of my blog readership, one of whom became the second to demonstrate to me that among men over 60, Crocs are all the rage. I'm standing by my own opinion that they look ridiculous, however. (No offense to CBB or LAL)
  
• A wracking guilt after having forgotten to sign the wedding certificate at the reception. In my defense, I can't imagine I'm the only one out of the 200 guests to have forgotten this, and I did remember to contribute to the memory box, but this is what happens when there's an open bar and "Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)" to which to dance.
• Orange toenails.
• An enlarged ego, after killing with my reception toast. I also do bar mitzvahs and tailgate parties.
• An undoubtedly skewed perception that early October weekends in Madison are always 70 degrees and involve parking cars for the home football game, a fabulous wedding, brunch at Mickey's Dairy Bar and Marigold, lunch at Paisan's, excellent views of the sparkling waters of Lake Mendota, dinner at Tutto Pasta, drinks at Paul's Club, a harvest moon floating above the Capitol, the State Street Gallery Crawl, beers on the Terrace, trading zingers with high school pals, playing with Legos, and doing the chicken dance in a fancy dress. Same time next year, everyone?
  

First Week of the Last Year

A few first-week-of-school observations:

• Classrooms without windows should not exist. It is impossible to establish a jovial, 'let's all do some learnin', whaddaya say?' atmosphere when you feel like you're trapped in a dungeon.
• On a similar note, classroom designers should think long and hard about the placement of clocks: first of all, a clock is very, very important in this age of cellphones -- if you don't have a clock, you can't legitimately tell students to turn off their phones while in class as many of them use their phones as watches. Secondly, if you put the clock above my head at the front of the classroom, students don't seem to look you in the eye ever, and you yourself have to turn around to check it. Likewise, if the clock is behind the students, they do not hesitate to turn around every 5 minutes to look at it, which can really screw up an instructor's mojo. My preferred clock position is to the side, by the windows or the door, where it can be discretely checked by all.
• No matter how far I get from the days of Trapper-Keepers and #2 pencils, I still love buying new school supplies at the beginning of September.
• It is very strange to teach a class that you yourself attended only a few years before.
• Simple pleasures, like a new office with a computer, swively chairs and space to get up and pace (should one want to pace) can do wonders.
• I'm still not sure if wearing flip-flops while teaching a Medieval Literature class sets a "she's cool, she wears flip-flops" tone or a "who does she think she is? wearing flip-flops? what, is she 20?" tone. The jury's still out on that one. I think pretty soon I'll cave and wear jeans, though. I just wanted to look like the teacher for at least the first couple of weeks.
  

Two Recommendations and a Gripe

There is simply no excuse not to see the movie "An Inconvenient Truth." Here, go look up where it's playing in your town. The fact that Bush refuses to see it only confirms what the rest of us know: he is in denial about how much trouble the environment is in. The movie is, indeed, very frightening, but it's also not such a bitter pill to swallow. Al Gore makes a great impression. It's too bad he wasn't elected president. Oh wait, he was.
Anyway, you'll exit the theater angry and numb, especially if you live in one of the places that's going to be under water when Greenland melts. And a lot of us do. But that's no reason not to see the movie, and if you happen to know a Republican, bring 'em along, too.


This is the book I'm reading right now -- Zadie Smith's On Beauty -- and I highly recommend it. I wasn't as wild about White Teeth as the critics were, but this book lives up to the hype.

Cody's Books is a Berkeley institution, one of the finest independent bookstores in the country, I'd venture to say. Sadly, yesterday Cody's closed their flagship store on Telegraph Avenue (where, incidently, they allowed dogs, which is always a selling point for me). They're still open at their (anticeptic) 4th Street location, as well as the new Cody's in San Francisco, but I'm mourning the loss of my favorite place for new books, where there was room for both a shelf on Anarchist Spanish History and stacks of the latest Harry Potter. I know some of you are wedded to your Border's and your Barnes and Noble, but I say shop independent! -- so that bookstores like Cody's may live...

Jaeetjet?

I've had a few extra days back on the grid in Wisconsin, and, after a dozen years elsewhere, I've been picking up little idiosyncrasies unique (or weird) to my homeland, or just remembering stuff I'd forgotten about. Here's a list:

1) Tornado warnings.
2) The unironic usage of words like "dandy," as in: "That new leatherbound book you've got there is a real dandy."
3) Current road construction and conditions will enter into any conversation, for at least 25 minutes after they have been experienced or seen. On a similar note, Madison seems to destroy and rebuild its entire downtown once every 10 years.
4) My Dad liberally peppers discussions with fellow Midwesterners with classics like: "oh sure", "yeah hey" and "you betcha."
5) At the Farmer's Market in Madison, you can not only pick up fresh strawberries, but you can also put Tammy Baldwin on the ballot, ignore carolling Mormons and watch for the Orange Piccoloist: All conveniently downtown!
6) The man who owns the new "Ole's General Market" in Solon Springs will introduce himself as Claude, but we will all still call him Ole. However, we will refer to his store by its previous incarnations as the "Big Dollar" or the "Country Foods IGA" until someone else buys it and names it something else, at which point we will finally call it "Ole's."
7) Comments about California dairy production are taken very seriously. You've been warned.
8) Wildlife is among us. Last night I hit a raccoon (R.I.P.); the day before I almost biked over a large turtle, soon after scaring away two groundhogs; and, in a scene right out of "Twelve Monkeys," we were driven off the island by a black bear and her two cubs (full story to be posted soon, with accompanying blurry photos).
9) Lightening bugs.

The things I'm doing when I should be working

When I actually get down to the business of writing my dissertation, which is currently in its final stages (for those of you keeping score at home), I need lots of distraction. After every paragraph, I'm off surfing the Internet, reading blogs, watching random YouTube videos, you name it. Here are a few of my latest distractions:

5ives - These are hilarious and wierd lists of 5 things. You could read them for days...

Quakes! - Sometimes I'm sitting at my desk when I feel the earth move and I think: Was that an earthquake? Now that I've found this site, I can immediately check and usually confirm -- yes, that was an earthquake, centered in Walnut Creek and a measely 2.6 on the Richter scale. Back to work.

WERN - The Bay Area has a seriously sucky classical music station that plays top 40 Beethoven hits and then interrupts them every 5 minutes for 10 minutes of inane commercials (not even regular commercials -- they're always ads for diamond rings and timeshare condos). Madison, on the other hand, has a great classical music and NPR station, and now that I've finally figured out how to listen to it over the Internet, I'll be writing with a lovely soundtrack punctuated by weather reports from Wausau, Osseo and Superior.

Michellepedia - This woman who writes the Online Shopper column for the New York Times sometimes has crazy tips about hemming jeans or how to get her kids into college, and the stuff that doesn't fit in her column she puts in her blog. Hit or miss, but for some reason I keep reading it.

TV without Pity - First I read what all the nerds on the blog are saying about the latest "How I Met Your Mother" episode; then I delve into the Josh and Donna "West Wing" thread; then I read the snarky summary of the latest episode of "The O.C." (beats actually watching it); then it's an hour later and I really need to get back to work on my dissertation...

Yeesss! Disgraced High Five!!

This image of Tom Delay high-fiving his way out of office in today's New York Times has an eerie similarity to a photo taken of me in Seattle in February. But, let's see here, what are the differences between me and Tom?

• I don't take bribes from lobbyists, especially not moron lobbyists who send emails to each other about how awesome they are at swindling people.
• I don't feel the need to fraudulently redistrict my neighborhood so me and my friends can win elections.
• I haven't become a crazed warlord, reigning over my feeble adversaries with a combination of corruption, lies and threats of a "whoopin.'"
  
• If you look closely, you'll see the shame and disgrace of Congress and the Republicans on Delay's hand; I've got fudge on mine.

SJB in Busytown

Top ten accomplishments in the last week:

1. Ran 3 miles without the aid of infectious pop tunes on my iPod, instead listening to infectious conversation with SKB.
2. Finished Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (I liked Housekeeping better, but this novel was still good) and started John Irving's Cider House Rules, since I've pretty much forgotten the plot of the movie.
3. Gave these socks to SKB, and started a new knitting project, still top secret:














4. Learned what organza, cap sleeves, boat neck and French bustles are.
5. Watched "16 Candles" for about the 20th time, while still discovering fresh nuances in an old classic.
6. Decided that Dick Button is the singlemost obnoxious, sexist, xenophobic moron ever to provide commentary during Olympic figure skating events.
7. Made these strawberry confections:














8. Went to Seattle. Thought it was cool. Saw my high school buddies. Talked with one who has ditched the Midwestern accent in favor of a Pacific Northwest accent, inexplicably, after only 6 years there.
   
9. Got a job at SF State.
10. Decided not to take the job at SF State, thus making it almost certain that I will be in Berkeley for another year, and be able to provide you with more witty commentary on the academic job search on this blog. Win-win?
    

Curb Your Random Stuff

People put all kinds of wierd stuff on the curb around here, and gleefully watch it disappear. The curb is the place where things magically vanish, as though devoured by some Municipal Monster. Back in 'sconsin, when you had something you wanted to get rid of, you would either wait until Bulk Trash Pickup Day -- a scavanger's holiday -- or you would squirrel it away for use in the annual garage sale, where you could earn a cool nickel off it. In Berkeley, you can always find a steady supply of old printers, microwave ovens, chairs, magazines, kitchen supplies, you name it, on the curb.


Yesterday, I picked up a sweet cache of "Cooks Illustrated" magazines from 2002-2003. Yes! I happened to walk past the bathrobed former owner of these magazines this morning on my walk with the dog, and I thanked him. This kind of behavior is totally outside of curb etiquette: it's an anonymous endeavor, in which throwee and scavanger never come face-to-face, and there's no haggling, since it's implicitly free (although sometimes people put signs on the stuff on the curb that says "Free" just in case there was any doubt).

Things I have picked up off the curb:

• wicker basket
• Office Depot file boxes
• tennis balls (for Addison's habit)
  

Things I have gotten rid of curbside:

• record player (gone in under an hour)
  
• large poster frame (carted away by kid on skateboard within 10 minutes)
• broken tape deck (24 hours, although I almost divested myself of it after responding to a Craigslist ad -- "Wanted: broken tape deck")