Time Warp

"Responsible adulthood" is an odd concept. Sometimes I feel like one (a responsible adult, I mean), but plenty of times I don't--and when I go back to hometown, the feelings just compound themselves. Being home for five days made returning to my Big Girl Apartment very hard. Which seems problematic--I can navigate airports by myself, but living by myself (and cooking for myself) is sometimes too hard? Why? Why?

Cases in point:
--I seem to have acquired a cold or a flu somewhere between the Erie airport and my apartment and all I want is for my mom to apparate here and give me some robitussin and a ginger ale. I HAVE ginger ale. But the thought of getting it out of my closet and putting it in the fridge seems like too much work. I am boiling Mrs Grass soup as we speak, and I would give some non-essential toes for someone to just do it for me. I stared at the pot for awhile, hoping it would just fill itself with water. This is ridiculous. I suspect that deep down inside I am not very good at taking care of myself. AND, the only reason I have Mrs Grass soup and ginger ale in the first place is because when my parents moved me out here my mom insisted I get some for when I inevitably got sick. And she was right.

--I went to the grocery store with two of my friends after class and we all just kept staring at things we couldn't afford. "When I was home my dad made steak," one said wistfully, "and two kinds of potatoes, and wine that didn't come out of a box." I have been longingly thinking of my dad's chili all chilly afternoon. I have had dinner parties with these two friends, and I know that all of us can cook. Granted, none of it involved meat, but we're not hopeless. So why does it seem like we are? We were discussing it and decided that you revert back to yourself, but your high school self, when you go home--the self whose parents cooked for them. It's hard to snap out of that and back to "responsible adulthood."

--My friends from my hometown all have Big Girl jobs and one is engaged and I feel like I'm in some other weird plane, where I read 10000 pages from books that no one has heard of, about things that are so esoteric that even I have trouble sometimes explaining them. We all still get along wonderfully, of course, but it does make the dynamic slightly odd. They can talk about office romance, while I can talk about...Titian?

--Oh, and lest you were curious, I am now eating the Mrs Grass soup and didn't let it simmer enough (why why why??) and the noodles are not soft. I can't even boil soup. Even with the overly al dente noodles though, it's hittin' the spot. Mostly what I ate today was cough drops. Lots of them.

So I miss my bed in my blue bedroom at home, and I miss the lap cat who decided my lap WAS worthy enough to sit on over break (usually he ignores me mostly because I'm not the one who feeds him.) I miss my fam and my friends and my old familiar, but at the same time, it's nice to be back.

And in less whiny news, my flight was delayed in Detroit yesterday and everyone was SUPER NICE. The people working, the people in line, everyone. I like it when that happens.

The Mighty Sweet Potato

Thanksgiving is arguably my favorite holiday. And this year I am really, really, really (reallyreallyreally) excited for it. Last year I didn't get to go home, and it was still wonderful since my parents and sister came out to my aunt's and grammy's and most of my extended family was there, and I learned how to make gravy (kinda). This year my extended family will be on one side of the state, and we'll be on the other, but they have promised to make us a video of them singing and other related shenanigans. If I can't sit at the "kids table" (so-called even though we're mostly in our 20s now), at least there will be some hilarious footage of it! So it may be a low-key Thanksgiving, but I get to go home. Home! For the first time since August! (I know, I know, it's not that long. But it's long enough.)

What I like about Thanksgiving is that at its core, it's not about stuff. It's about, well, giving thanks! For my family, this ranges from the silly, to wishing for peace, to lambasting the pilgrim fathers (and a lot of other people) for being so awful to the Native Americans, to listening to "Alice's Restaurant". If we were sensible like the Canadians, we'd celebrate Thanksgiving earlier in the season, so that it could also be more about harvest and bounty, as it should be. It's about cooking and eating with those you love--who don't necessarily have to be your family. I was talking to someone tonight who said she always has a "friendsgiving" instead, and those are equally fun. We had a potluck tonight, and I am full of lovely food. Although, it is the point of the semester when people are stress-cases (yo, included) and occasionally snap at one another (yo, not included). The conversation too soon degenerated into how we are excited that Vasari is now searchable online. I mean, really. I will be excited to not be here for a few days.

Anyway, the real point of this post is how much I love sweet potatoes. You can make them sweet, you can make them savory, mash them, put them in soups, make fries--all genuinely delicious. I had two varieties tonight (mashed with cranberries, and roasted with sage or tarragon or something). Earlier this week I made sweet potato quesadillas (rock on, Moosewood!) which were tasty. My grandmother makes a really good variety with orange juice--sweet, but not cloyingly like the marshmallow ones sometimes are.

Sweet potatoes are versatile and they are amazing in chip form and dipped in honey mustard. I like them with brown sugar. I like them roasted with cumin with black beans and rice on the side (this was my quick Brooklyn dinner sooo many times). I feel the same way about butternut squash, although I usually can't be fussed to cook a whole one of those, and then have to eat it for days. And if you have any favorite sweet potato recipes, pass them along!

I might not have another post before I have to catch a shuttle to the Indianapolis Airport at, ahem, 5 am on Tuesday, so if I don't talk to you before Thanksgiving--I hope you all have a nice day, wherever you may be and whomever you may be with. And in the immortal words of Adam Sandler in his immortal Thanksgiving Song: "Turkey for the girls and turkey for the boys, my favorite kind of pants are corduroys."

The Writing's on the (Toilet) Wall

I have a fondness for graffiti, I think from living in Brooklyn. It seems to suggest spontaneous artistic creation, and that is cool (although I know a lot of graffiti is very planned out). Anyway, by extension I really enjoy it when people write on bathroom stalls. Not a common occurrence in my undergrad institution, or maybe they were just fastidious about it getting washed away, but bathroom graffiti is rampant here, especially in the building where I have Italian class.

A few weeks ago, I was in the bathroom before class, and happened to choose the Holy Grail of bathroom stalls. So I got out a notebook, and wrote some things down. (Sidenote: yes, this is what this blog is turning me into--someone who copies things out of bathroom stalls!)

Some highlights:
In a block script, above the toilet roll holder: "Minds are like Parachutes: they only work when they're open"

In squiggly cursive: "The Sun is out, the sky is blue, it's beautiful, and so are you"

Taking up almost all of one of the walls: "We are, all of us, in the gutter. But some of us are looking at the stars. ~Oscar Wilde"

"Be the Change"

"My ex-boyfriend" with an unflattering picture. Someone else had written underneath, "hey, looks like my ex-boyfriend too! haha!"

"Quite frankly, I'm just excited that we've begun writing on bathroom stalls again."

This engendered a lot of comment: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it". Which morphed into a discussion about the merits of President Obama (socialism, high taxes, etc.) versus President Bush II (war, big business, hurricanes, etc.)

Also generating a lot of comment: "Twilight sucks. Harry Potter pwns Twilight." (response ranged from "frick yes" to "TEAM HARRY" to "Vampires suck. Zing!")

And for all you HP fans out there, this is the crown jewel: "The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the heir beware." Now, if you haven't read HP, I'm not going to explain the awesome placement of this sentence in a bathroom--let's just say that it is the crux of the second book, and was written on a bathroom wall at Hogwarts.

There were some "for a good time call" things and "so and so slept with my boyfriend", etc., but by and the large the comments were pretty positive. (Another sidenote: The Buffalo Amtrak station has the dirtiest graffiti I have ever seen.) One of my friends went to the same bathroom but got a different stall, with quite a different message. She came to class looking troubled, and said in her stall someone had written:

"I'm gay and I want to come out to my parents but they are going to hate me and I don't know what to do. What do I do?"

The responses to this were both lovely and so sad: "I thought my parents would be really angry too, but when I came out they still loved me. I hope yours do too." "If they don't like it, they aren't worth it. You are perfect how you are." "Sometimes we have to create our own families with people who accept us." "Parents are surprising sometimes. I think you should go for it." "I am keeping you in my thoughts." "Best of luck!"

It's weird to have such a personal response to someone who you probably don't know, and who you would probably never meet. Perhaps that is the appeal of writing on a bathroom wall--the anonymity. I've never sought advice by literally writing on a wall, but figuratively? Ah. Blogging feels a bit like writing on a wall, addressing the unknown reader. So, thanks for reading my scribblings on the stall wall of the internet.

Focus On: Mucha Lithographs

I haven't done Art of the Week in awhile, so I'll be restart it with a bang, with this lithograph from the IU Art Museum:Alphonse Mucha, advertisement for Monaco, Monte-Carlo, 1897

I have a soft spot for lithography, as my undergraduate institution has a nifty collection (for more on that, check out here.) As they do once a month, the IUAM's print curator pulls a variety of works and opens the viewing rooms for a few hours for people to come and look around. The lithographs she had out were a nice variety--one of my favorites was one from a Berliner Succession art show that had been reused for a few years, so the date had been pasted over. You could see the thumbtack marks where it had actually been hung up. But this Mucha lithograph was what really caught my eye.

I love the stylized nature and clean lines of Art Nouveau prints and posters, and this was no exception. There is a lot going on, but (to me, at least) it doesn't feel fussy. I'm not sure what the spinning floral roundels have to do with Monaco, exactly, but the pretty lady is key to the majority of Mucha's works. Come to Monte-Carlo, he suggests, and this is what you'll see. Who would turn that down? Mucha was Czechoslovakian but did much of his training and work in Paris, which is what we usually think of when we think of Art Nouveau. What is really striking about this work when viewed in person is the richness of the colors (that blue sea in particular) and the gilded aspects--many of the flowers are traced in glittering metallic silver. Lithography, as near as I understand it, is printing using a stone, or more recently, a metal sheet. You don't etch the image onto the surface, but draw it with a waxy or oily substance, and then water is somehow involved, which repels the ink, and then you print it. (Yeah, that was technical, I know.) Anyway, you have to print each color separately onto the work, so you have to be really really really precise. I would imagine that a work of this intricacy would be hard to pull off.

And to show my bias towards Monte-Carlo, here is a bonus art of the week: my kitchen.
Admittedly, I chose that poster because the gent in it looks Lord Peter Wimsey, whom I have a literary crush on.

Veteran's Day

Today is Veteran's Day. Ever since I can remember, my sister and I would go outside with my dad and we would take a shot at 11:11. We started with shots of orange juice and then moved up to Fuzzy Navel and harder spirits. Today I had a shot for my dad, and also for my grandfathers and my dad's good friend Dave, who is a sweet teddy-bear of a man (he makes a mean fruit salad, and also does a killer Beverly Sills impression.) It's a strange "holiday" as such, one that doesn't get much play in this country, other than as a day off from school. Three years ago I was in England for Remembrance Day/Armistice Day, and it is a MUCH different affair there.

My parents and godmothers were visiting me, and we just happened to pick the Saturday before Remembrance Day as the day we'd go to Westminster Cathedral. We thought it was slightly odd that there were metal detectors up, and that everyone else was pretty elderly, but they let us through to the courtyard, where we saw this:

"Plots" for every branch of military service, nurses, drivers, etc. Everyone kept saying, "get to your plot" and of course we had no idea what was going on, having been let through in the first place only because we were wearing red poppies in our lapels, as was everyone else. (note: this starts in late October and runs 'til Remembrance Day. As my American Foreign Policy tutor, the legendary Andy Patmore, told me, "I wear the poppy for everyone who has died in war, not just the bloody British.) So we ended up hanging out with Ken the Veteran from Birmingham, and a passel of old women, who explained to us that this was the big Remembrance Day service, and that usually the Queen comes, but "her back was playing up" so it would be Prince Phillip this year. There was a procession from the church with trumpets and be-robed people, and at 11 they recited part of the For the Fallen poem by Laurence Binyon. Everyone (except the Wayward Americans) said the last part in unison,

"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them."

It totally sent chills down my spine. Just to see all the people who were there, and eavesdrop on their stories, was amazing, and the fact that everything stops at 11--even traffic--while people observe a moment of silence. It's much more potent there for many reasons. When we returned to Norwich, there was a Remembrance Day parade and there was another service at the Norwich Cathedral, as you can see from these pictures:


Most of my meaningful military experiences seem to start in England, oddly enough, and here is what happened on the Thanksgiving that I was there. A friend and I had gone out for waffles and chocolate mousse to console ourselves for being so far away from our families, and afterwards she headed to the shops and I headed to the market (Norwich has a HUGE open air market). There were lots of people milling about, so I stayed to see what was happening. It was the returning home parade for the East Anglian Regiment from Afghanistan, so we were standing there, and they processed down the road with bagpipes and bands, and the guy behind me yelled, "there's my son!" and everyone around me cheered. You could tell the soldiers were supposed to be serious, but they kept sneakily smiling and were so happy to be home, safe. Even though I was 20 at the time, they looked even younger than me.

The old woman next to me (we had been chatting about how short we were before the parade started) turned to me at one point, and lightly touched my arm, saying, "ach, my dear, they are barely more than boys." I burst into tears. I was trying to be quiet about it, because the Brits are, by and large, not big on the emotional displays. It was a combination of things that set me off--the youth of the soldiers, the happiness of their relatives, the fact that it was Thanksgiving and I missed home, the fact that so many people, in so many countries were fighting each other and not returning home, and on and on. The old man in front of me turned around and said, "you should be able to see better, young lady. Come in front of me." I tried to protest, but he was having none of it. So I moved up, and he smiled at me. "It's all better now," he said. "They're alright now."

This post, it turns out, has nothing to do with Indiana. I spent today doing 3 loads of laundry, cleaning my apartment, and translating part of a simplified version of The Decameron. And as this post has instead turned into "Anna's Greatest Hits England Stories" and needs to be wrapped up, I will end with two recommendations:
1. if you are interested in the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, do check out Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War (2004) by Evan Wright. My cousin and I both read it after watching the miniseries (of the same name) on HBO. The miniseries is great too. Both are powerful, crazy, funny, moving, and horrifying.
2. As a creature of ritual, I have of late been listening to Masters of War by Bob Dylan and Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie on Veteran's Day. Both sum up a lot of what I feel about fighting in general.

And I'll close with a line from M*A*S*H: You've gotta understand. I'm not working on sick people here. I'm working on hurt young people, with essentially healthy bodies that have been insulted by ammunition. -- BJ

Anatomy of a Saturday

8:00 am: Wake up. Am annoyed because set alarm for 7:00 to write paper, a paper which I present in class on Monday. Curse alarm for technological deficiencies. Check alarm and see that I have set it for 7:00 pm. Curse self for brain deficiencies.
8:05-8:45 am: Shower, eat cold piece of pizza, check email.
8:45-9:15 am: Waste time on internet creating paper-playlist and reading Stephen Fry's blog.
9:15-10:15 am: Outline Velazquez section and start writing. Do not accomplish much.
10:15 am: put on multiple layers of clothing, plus a hat and gloves, and get picked up by two friends.
10:20-11:00 am: go to Starbucks, get hot chocolate, return to friends apartment where we put Baileys in the hot chocolate. Resuit up with multiple layers.
11:00-11:45 am: Walk to football field, partially through a field and partially on the road. Am feeling quite warm again. Take off some layers.
11:45-12:05 am: Buy tickets, wave enthusiastically at some people we know in the band, meet up with two other friends, get seats by the band. Prepare for Iowa-Indiana game.
12:05-2:00 pm: First half. Indiana was ahead, of all things (Iowa is ranked either number 1, or very close. IU is..not.) Also, in other hilarity, the two guys in front of us looked like noisy frat boys, but both of them had brought reading to do. We were slightly more raucous:


(some classy art historians do a touchdown dance)


(marching hundred rocks out "Livin' on a Prayer")

2:00-3:30 pm: Second half. We lost. It involved an intercepted pass with 25 seconds left. It was kind of a bummer.
3:30-3:50 pm: Band post-show. More interesting than the game. As one of my friend's said, "the band always wins!"
3:50-4:30 pm: Walk home. Sing a variety of walking songs as we are on the road--Hit the Road Jack, Highway to Hell, On the Road Again, etc.
4:30-5:00 pm: stare at computer. Curse Velazquez. Curse self for spending most of the day outdoors, and for having face hurting with both sunburn and windburn.
5:00-5:30 pm: On the phone.
7:30 pm: Velazquez section complete!
7:30-8:30 pm: Dinner break. Eat more cold pizza. Watch an episode of Jeeves and Wooster. Wonder for the 3,000th time why I do not live a life more like Bertie Wooster. Must make more friends named "Gussie Finknottle."
8:45 pm: Start Gentileschi section. Try to make sense of 6 pages of typed Gentileschi notes.

(desk/kitchen counter/sunglasses repository)
9:30 pm: Catch self singing along to Dolly Parton's Jolene and staring aimlessly at wall. Change music to Bach.
9:34 pm: My sister texts me from Bob Dylan concert. Have a Jealousy Moment.
10:30 pm: Go to mailbox in my pajamas. No mail.
11:45 pm: Trip over Mary Garrard's 900 pound divine Gentileschi textbook. Curse Mary Garrard for her divinity and gigantic book.
12:00 am: Walk around apartment, punching air and saying, "go to the mattresses!"
1:45 am: Final paragraph. Put on Eye of the Tiger for motivation.
1:57 am: Paper finished! Paper is eighteen pages long and for this presentation should be ten-ish. Which means tomorrow will be spent hacking chunks out, but eighteen pages is almost as long as it needs to be for the final, so that is pretty cool.
2:00/1:00 am: Ring in Daylight Savings Time. Hello, extra hour of sleep!!
2:25 am: finishing blog post. Emailing paper to self. Going to bed.

Grrl Power

I've had three random cultural experiences lately that involve female empowerment in varied ways; some positive, and some not. Here are my thoughts on them:

1. Legally Blonde: The Musical
Now, before you scoff, I should say that I really like Legally Blonde the movie. (Not as much as Spiceworld, but not everything can be Spiceworld, I suppose.) It's funny and cute and Elle Woods is a smiley role model who makes it through Harvard Law and takes on her sexually harassing professor and wins her court case and gets her man! So when one of my friends suggested we go to the musical version to blow off some academic related steam, I said sure.

The first thing we noticed was that the audience was about 98% female and about 95% blonde. After we sat down in our balcony nosebleeds, my friend said she'd never smelled so much perfume in her life, and I would agree. Elle is a sorority girl, and these, I can hazard a guess without overgeneralizing, were her people. And they were excited to be there! Sorority culture is pretty foreign to me, as my undergrad didn't have them, nor, admittedly, would I have probably joined one if they did. But, apart from the (alleged?) cattiness and (alleged?) superficiality, I think anything that promotes female solidarity and sisterhood is probably a good thing.

Okay, so Legally Blonde is not amazing, musically, but so help me, some of those songs are CATCHY. It has numbers titled, for example, "Omigod You Guys", with lines like "they're just like that couple in Titanic/except no one dies." Aaand, that was stuck in my head for way longer than I care to admit. "Bend and Snap" lived up to it's expectations, and "Ireland" was actually pretty lovely. Plus, Paulette is the best.(Yeah, that's a lotta pink. Thanks to alkpop for the image!)

2. A graphic novel about Isadora Duncan
This was the weirdest thing I've ever checked out of a library, I think. I was there to get another graphic novel, which wasn't there, so I just grabbed this graphic novel instead. I'd like to say that I liked it, but I didn't. So much of it was Duncan saying, "no one understands my art! I believe in truth and beauty! I'm so misunderstood!" Which was, I'm sure, true, but a little bit preachy. I did learn a lot, as the only thing I knew about Duncan before this was her untimely death, and she was actually a pretty cool lady. She was uncorseted at a time when women didn't do that, and she had multiple relationships and children with different fathers, and she didn't really care what people had to say about her. And she formed a school, which is still in existence. Duncan had success and lived in some amazing places (Paris, the French countryside, Moscow, Munich, Athens, New York, Chicago) but her story ultimately just made me feel vaguely depressed. The underlying message of this retelling of her story was that history was not kind to unconventional women. But oh my, could she dance.

(Thanks to Duncan Dancers for the images!)

3. Little Women: The Opera
I have, oddly enough, seen this opera twice. The first time was at Chautauqua, and mainly what I remember is that it was 9000 degrees in the balcony, and at one point my sister leaned over to me and whispered, "if Beth doesn't hurry up and DIE soon, I am going to get onstage and KILL HER MYSELF." Which kind of sums it up. The musicality of the Little Women I saw this past weekend was very good--especially Professor Bhaer, who had a nice aria about Goethe. So the singing was delightful, but I am not fond of the music itself, which meant that I couldn't really enjoy the opera as much. This is going to make me sound very stuck in my ways, but modern operas don't do it for me. This was composed in 1998, and it's too choppy for my tastes, although for that reason, the one aria that was a telegram actually worked pretty well.

At its core, Little Women is about sisterhood, about the four March sisters, and especially Jo, who doesn't want things to change. The point being, of course, that things must change, which eventually Jo realizes too (although it takes a LONG time, and a lot of whinging on her part..) I would imagine that it's physically a hard opera to sing. "Write Soon" was, to me, the best ensemble bit, and I did enjoy that.

Jo is a proto-feminist, a smart, savvy, independent writer. I don't remember if this is in the book (having last read it/had it read to me when I was about eight years old), but in the opera at least, Aunt March gives Jo her house in her will. And Jo turns it down, because there is more to life than "being surrounded by books and living in a house of stone" I would heartily agree, but as my life, currently, is being surrounded by books, it was a definite buzzkill on my mood.(I thought Jo was my favorite, but it might be Meg. Thanks to Book Group Buzz for the image!)

And to close with the immortal movie, Spiceworld: "They're hot, Chief! They've got fire in their eyes, hunger in their bellies... and great big shoes on their feet!" Something, indeed, that Elle Woods could get behind.